TravisLS

I think these are generally somewhat true, but with a lot of glaring counter-examples. As the companies that control these spaces get larger, there will always be room for smaller, disruptive competition, especially in more domain-specific areas.

I'm reminded of an article from HN earlier this year wherein a Harvard Professor admitted telling Mark Zuckerberg he was chasing his tail trying to create a social network. (Anyone have this link?)

In 2004, a plain old social network probably wouldn't have worked, but a Social Network of Ivy League colleges might.

Or just make sure you have an escape clause in your contract. Maybe the last designer actually was an idiot. I've found that if you behave like the doctor (in the article) it's often quite easy to steer the course of projects with even very difficult clients.

How do we know this is better than Quantcast? Does anyone know where the data comes from? Also, it seems to be missing some of the features.

For instance, it looks like the demographic data is absolute, instead of the percentages being relative to the totals for their data set, so it's hard to tell if my site is popular among people who earn over $100K, because they only make up about 1% of the audience.

Compare http://www.quantcast.com/yahoo.com

and https://www.google.com/adplanner/#siteDetails?identifier=yah...

Very nice - appropriate metaphor for what he's describing. If confidence is your torque, learning is your horsepower. But torque is what lets you accelerate.

Very true. As happy as I am to see all the great feature support in IE9, it's going to be a long time before we can write CSS like this for any kind of mass audience.

How long would it be before Google gets into this game as well?

And how long before fragmenting search results across multiple search engines leads to a thriving new market of news sources that don't sign exclusive distribution deals?

The problem is that they're "basically just cloning microsoft office". No good usability work comes from basically cloning.

Taking ideas / inspiration from Microsoft Office is great, it's a successful product. But basically cloning just means it works sort of like office, but different enough to be annoying, with no attention paid to designing the overall user experience. It's the same reason Gimp is such a nightmare for Photoshop users.

One of the biggest mistakes with Windows Vista was the product strategy. Most consumers probably recognize that the latest version has improvements that will make their experience faster, more secure, etc, but get bogged down when trying to make the purchase.

Since most people don't use the features of their operating system anyway, why would anyone need to compare "home basic" (reads: worse than what you have now), "home premium" (for better homes?), "business" (what kind of business? filmmaking or accounting?), and "ultimate" (320 bucks for windows?)

Can't I just pay you for the version that works like what I have now but better?

From the OP: The evidence for one side can still be a lot stronger than the evidence for the other.

Two things that would improve this tremendously: 1) More difficult questions sooner and 2) Force you to start over after N wrong answers so the score matters

Considering how much trouble people have navigating even the simplest computer interfaces, sometimes I wonder how anyone could possibly understand all of the laws that impact their daily lives.

No objection to the usability assertions, but there's a huge problem with this idea that Craigslist will now always control the classifieds market no matter what they charge. This meme has caught on recently and it's time for it to die. It's not Craigslist's responsibility to provide journalism or to use their large size to extract profit and solve the world's problems.

If Craigslist charged $1, users would immediately flee to any new competing sites that only charged for job and real estate listings, just like Craigslist does now. Then Seth Godin and Joel Spolsky could complain about those sites' margins instead, and those sites could take those complaints all the way to the bank.

This is really no surprise. I was just wondering the other day what pre-packaged, universally-accepted name would be given to the 9/11 attacks in history books.

Congratulations to jgrahamc on making this happen. This apology was long overdue and would not have happened without your effort.

What he says is very true, but let me take it one step further. Great marketers spend their time developing products/services/stories that don't drop off, but they also spend their time encouraging their first circle to talk to their second circle.

Maybe I'm missing something, but let's summarize the changes:

- De-emphasized search, which is probably the way that at least 50% of the users navigate the site.

- Added a customer testimonials banner that should and would be immediately overlooked by everyone who visits the site, but pushes the product categories down. You're right that the site should have a clear visual hierarchy, but the product categories in this case should be at the top of that hierarchy, not the bottom.

- Added a second brand navigation - I'm not sure why.

- Removed all of the quick links to most popular products, etc. People who scroll down this far on the page have not found what they were looking for in your main product nav, and don't believe they can find it in search. There's no reason to show them a bunch of brands here - rather, zappos' understated text links give them an alternative way to navigate that is clearly lower in the hierarchy. Additionally, i suspect SEO is of major importance to Zappos, so having a link to "wide shoes" on the home page is probably rather important.

- Expanded the section about culture. This would be nice on a site that sold services like an agency site or mailchimp or some such, but is unnecessary with zappos. Most people come to the site looking for a product, not looking to comparison shop retailers.

All that said, your design is more visually appealing. I just wish it had accompanied a post called "My Interesting Alternate Take On The Zappos Homepage" and not "You're Killing Me, Zappos".

I'm going to go ahead and predict this same problem: http://paulgraham.com/segway.html

There's another date formatting library if you're using Prototype, that I've used for a few things (although I have to say, I like the OP better). It was kind of hard to track down and doesn't seem to have any continuing support, but is used as part of this nice date picker:

http://home.jongsma.org/software/js/datepicker

This is the .js file:

http://home.jongsma.org/js/lib/prototype-date-extensions.js

This article begins with a false analogy in its comparison of the plights of railroads and newspapers. Newspapers are not in the "newsprint" business, as suggested here, but rather in the journalism business. The mechanism for distribution of the information is not especially relevant, nor does it impact the newspaper companies' core competencies as much as any of the sources of this article suggest.

I don't really think it's as much of a stretch to imagine newspaper companies expanding into other media as it is to imagine railroads expanding into airborne freight. The problem is that strictly online providers were able to provide comparable information in a more convenient medium years before anyone in newspapers saw the light.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's too late to embrace online as the medium of choice for journalism companies.

I would love an app that could keep an inventory of the food i have on hand in my aparment (based on what I've ordered in the past and my own inventory revisions), allow me to order more when I run out (from freshdirect.com or whatever the local equivalent is), and provide me with recipes that I can make with what I have on hand. Kind of complicated to orchestrate the whole thing, but would be obscenely valuable.

This is a representation of classic game theory. If all participants cooperate to drive as described, the traffic clears. If nobody else helps to open up space, however, you will personally arrive at your destination slower by driving passively, even though many others behind you will benefit. And since this type of driving requires some degree of altruism, you can pretty much rule it out as a realistic outcome without introducing another constraint (eg. as mentioned in the article, state troopers merging into traffic and forming a rolling barricade).

The fact that this is even a story is pretty distressing. As far as I can tell, the guy's gotten good results, which is much more than I can say for plenty of "qualified" people in Washington.

There was a post on HN some time back from former house speaker Newt Gingrich, who is a fairly outspoken advocate on this issue:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_45/b41070852...

Glad you liked it. Thanks for the shout-out on your blog / twitter.

I know, just what the world needs, another URL shortener. Still, I was tired of being confronted with links on twitter like: "Coolest thing ever - http://short.url/12345. So in order to add a little context to my links, I created my own shortener. Give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Exactly. I'd estimate approximately a 10-fold increase in productivity if I removed the HN RSS feed from the top of my iGoogle page. But...

Everyone here is probably fairly well aware of how easy it is to compromise accounts on these online services. I hope most HN users recognize that the appropriate course of action after hacking a service like this is to notify the account holder to help them improve their security before revealing the details.

If you really aren't doing this for profit, and you really don't want to hurt the victim of the attack, (as Hacker Croll claims) then don't disclose the information you stole to major press outlets. This attack is really in poor taste, and I think we all of us here at HN should recognize the difference between pointing out the dangers of the internet and being one of the dangers ourselves.

I don't really agree with this assessment. With the release of IE8, we also saw the browser upgrade coming through automatic windows updates. IE will eventually probably accept this as much as safari and firefox, thereby keeping most users up to speed.

For anyone who enjoyed this article, here's the holy grail of company name etymologies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_name_etymologie...

I suspect (with no evidence whatsoever) that the increase from linking "here" was because people felt clicking the link would complete the action rather than just take them to twitter.

I wonder what the effect would have been had you used: You should follow me on twitter.