skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would this have happened in ReadWriteWeb looked more like Daring Fireball?

One of the causes of this kind of mistaken identity problem is that users have become conditioned to a web full of irrelevance and distraction. RWW is typical of many sites: a huge amount of the content loaded for any article is stuff meant to distract you from the article itself. Not just advertising, but crap. How much of that singing, dancing circus is actually necessary? If it isn't necessary, why is it there?

Is it not ridiculous that RWW's message to these confused users is placed in bold black text in the article that they demonstrably did not come there to read and not anywhere amid the colorful parade of nonsense and not anywhere near the text "Sign in with Facebook". It's even below the fold on my system. Do people still want to blame user stupidity alone? Please.

Like all humans, when these users wind up somewhere unfamiliar, they reach for whatever is familiar. In this case, the article has not one, but two Facebook logos above the fold. One in the article text, reading "Facebook", immediately below the word "Facebook" in the headline. Why is this necessary? The other is in the header, and links to RWW on Facebook. But so does the huge Facebook sidebar widget a few scrolls down. Just in terms of pixels, Facebook has already carved out a nice chunk of the page, competitive with that of the body text. And then there's the text itself, the little Facebook logos on all of the user pictures of people who likewise thought this was somehow related to Facebook, and most damning of all, the text "Sign in with Facebook" right above the comment form.

A person who has just Googled for "facebook login" and who just saw a half dozen Facebook logos, and just saw dozens of other people who made the same mistake complaining, who then mistakes that username/password field as meaning "Sign in to Facebook" is not making an epic error in judgement. They are making a simple mistake based on a limited understanding of things they have never had a reason to understand. They aren't stupid, they're human.

I don't really mean to single out RWW, though. This is a web-wide problem. You will never be able to eliminate stupid mistakes or the "better fool", but you can stop gently assisting such confusion and illiteracy by thinking about why what you're doing isn't helping.
Educators in the US are mostly boorishly uneducated.

A Masters in Teaching is a professional degree (it exists to get the holder an automatic raise), and even by those low standards it's at the very bottom of the barrel, even lower than the average MBA. A doctorate in education is closer to a normal masters degree.
Facebook has no consistency to its navigation
Austrian Millionaire Gives Fortune Away
I've found that the single biggest impediment to computer literacy to the "ordinary" is the somehow ingrained belief that its impossible for them to understand anything about their own computers.

Learning to use a computer is not like neurosurgery, its more like driving a car. A little attention, a smidge of effort and just believing that its possible is all most people need. Geeks are partly to blame for this because they (the lesser ones especially) tend to "jargonize" and "magicalize" simple aspects of computer maintenance.

Once people realize that they can understand things about their computers, its like lighting little fires in their minds.
I disagree, I think it's simply that the VC's are incompetent. They don't use data to make their judgements, relying instead on gut feelings. They don't have a systematic procedure/checklist to make decisions, or even a systematic way for entrepreneurs to to see them. They don't even like to hire analysts as is common in the rest of banking. It's simply not a 'prefessional' industry yet.

It's not the fault of individuals in the vc (they have to run fast just to keep up), just the industry hasn't had enough academics/software telling them to how to more reliably run their business.
My uncle is an accomplished Orthopedic surgeon. He's smart, well read, well-respected (and deservingly so).

And it's almost painful watching him operate a computer sometimes. Basic tasks like moving around a Window to uncover another one needs to be explained. Some people are lousy drivers. Some people are just really bad with using a computer.

But: He would never leave the type of comment you see on the linked site.
Have you seen those? I'm not convinced that these are the same accomplished people that you and I are talking about.

There's no denying that a lot of people still get confused about websites and google and the internet as a whole. But if you're using facebook and using it enough to complain about the 'new login page' then you really should be held to higher standards.
That observation would be a lot more witty if so many people didn't know how to do basic market research. I most definitely include myself among them.
Of course, the original quote from Stewart Brand was:

“On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
Huh. I totally ignore buzzes in the way that I ignore tweets. I read them only when I have the time. I have no idea why buzz is generating so much Google hate.
Incidentally, I was talking to a fellow Japan-based HNer the other day, and we both independently talked about IMVU. You know why IMVU is the coolest technology company I've ever heard of even though they make a product which I couldn't care less about? Because if this happened to IMVU, the most junior engineer in the company could code up the above behavior and deploy it live in less time than it took to read the blog post describing the problem, in full confidence that the production site would not break.

The possibilities of that development model are staggering. (Want to know how you can run rings around more established competitors? If you're learning at that speed and they're learning at the "release every six months" speed you will bury them.)
You can remove inhibition by removing risk.

Money back guarantees, free trials, browsing existing sites, services that attract groups of people are all great for this.

Gridspy offers a 5 year back to base hardware warranty. I'd like to offer a "if you don't like it, send it back for a full refund any time in the first year" warranty.
Hmmm, maybe there should be a "driving test" before you're allowed on the internet.
There is nothing good about this at all, this is class warfare and culture warfare all wrapped up together, both very bad and both ripping America, among other places, apart right about....now.

You have absolutely no clue about this person and yet you are prejudiced against him, her, it. Is he/she/it 10 years old? You have no clue. You don't know background, you know nothing except that this person just feels that they got cheated, and they are not experienced enough to know that they are simply on the wrong page.

But hey, it's okay, because you admit it, huh?
If the processor doesn't have an FPU, there's not much of an extra disadvantage to compiling with int32s and then making reals just another data structure, implemented in terms of ints, with a library to manipulate them.
Well, my theory is that learning to use a car is easier because it's a physical thing that obeys the laws of physics, whereas in computer science we don't have to obey the laws of physics, which means we have much less constraints, more freedom, so we're basically free to just "make up stuff" as we go, so of course someone who isn't familiar with that world of ours are having a bit of a hard time keeping up.
And those that follow the general trend, just for fun or a sense of belonging or whatever else currently motivates them.
I've got kids myself, and I blogged recently about how having a family is forcing me to keep my fulltime job longer than I would like to:

Most startups seem to embrace 60-80 hour weeks, you keep reading about them and begin to believe that this is normal. After 12 hour marathon coding sessions ‘typical entrepreneurs’ walk 10 metres from desk to bed and collapse in their shared accommodations. Living in such lean conditions makes those crucial first months of business far cheaper. This work ethic and minimial living costs maximises the runway before the seed money runs out.

Paul Graham is one of my favourite bloggers, and his essay entitled The Other Road Ahead he paints a clear picture of how lean a start-up can be, stating "You can literally launch your product as three guys sitting in the living room of an apartment, and a server collocated at an ISP. We did."

No matter how much I’d love to take the lean ramen noodle approach it’s simply not practical for me. I’m a father of two, a husband of one, and an employee. I’ve got a beautiful family with young children, a modest house with a mortgage, and a full-time job to pay the bills. In short, I have a standard existence that I imagine many of my readers share. Living off noodles in a cheap apartment with my co-founders is not the only way that start-ups are built. I’ve taken an alternative route that involves just as much hard graft (harder maybe?) and allows me to remain employed full-time. The food sure is better!

Read more here:
http://blog.gridspy.co.nz/2010/02/part-time-entrepreneur.htm...
TANSTAAFL, this is a significant improvement but the process of converting water into a supply of Hydrogen sitting on a shelf somewhere or otherwise readily available for use includes other costs than just the energy to hydrolyze water (though that is a big one). For example, the costs of land, the cost of water, the cost of the equipment and its maintenance, and especially the cost of collecting Hydrogen and storing it (generally under pressure). This may be a revolutionary breakthrough but until it's put into practice and we can judge all of these factors it's probably too soon to tell exactly how much of an impact it will have.
It'd also be nice if there were no wars and if I had a pony.

Sorry, but to me that comes across as whining, and I'm most certainly not from the "rich circles" either.
That is a pretty good safety net right there.

Though in some ways it is great to "burn the boats", because having your back to the wall and being forced to make it work (even if that involves a week of cold calling) can be the difference between success and giving up.
In practice the interpretation of "related" that matters is the one done by a nervous VC or acquirer doing due diligence before a deal. Their definition tends to be broad.

On the other hand, what people worry about is source code, not ideas. If you can claim all your code was written after quitting, you're usually safe. Which means in the worst case you can just rewrite any app that seems promising enough that you'd be willing to quit your job to work on it.

Another option is to ask your employer for an explicit, written waiver of any IP rights in a specific side project. But many employers will only do this if you're prepared to quit otherwise.
The Internet, and Understanding Users
"I'm all about learning..."

... I just don't want other people to be doing it on my Internet, so I'm going to complain when I see others doing it.

Seriously, what do you think you're adding to this conversation? That there are people who think they don't need that there fancy book learnins' is not news.
Yep, you can pass them around, they do have values, in fact, they can have different values for the same type sometimes. This has been the case since well before Java even had reflection - having them around is fairly central to the Java dynamic loading and security model.
I've found it to be useful every few weeks in day-to-day situations. It's also useful if you ever design and/or run competitive games/events.

I'm not sure everyone needs to be able to prove the optimality of truthful bidding in Vickery auctions, but a basic understanding of Nash equilibria and imperfect information games is useful for anyone who's not a hermit.
Divvyshot (YC W09) launches (with HTML5 drag-and-drop support)
Too bad the good things rarely make the news. Even on Hacker News. A top story here seems to be as likely to be a huge controversy as something most here would agree was "good". Not to say there aren't "good" things here, just not as numerous as one might like.
Data Sorcery with Clojure & Incanter: Introduction to Datasets & Charts
Cool story, it is good to look back on your childhood and be proud of the decisions your parents made.

As a parent though, you have to remember that even basic play has a very high value to children. My little 2.75 yr old has dinosaurs in the bath and can count one, two, three, four, lots. He knows the lifecycle of the butterfly.

But I'd much rather that he did what some might consider "useless play" and mastered his social skills and self confidence than any curriculum ideas such as maths or reading. Those can wait until he is ready, though he is a very engaged and switched on little boy.

I think that forcing your children to do certain things that you expect from a 10yr old now is just ruining their childhood and can reduce their delight in learning new things.

So be careful whose advice you take, even mine.
Then the only other option is to go hell for leather on your start-up in your free time, even if that means you don't have a life. If it doesn't get you that fired up, perhaps you need to brainstorm a better opportunity.

I can't leave my cushy job yet either.
I think the key here is to avoid doing any work at all that is not your value proposition. If scripting languages are good enough and will benefit you, use them.

We use Python, Twisted, Django, Matplotlib, JQuery, Movable Type, Postgresql all for this reason. Even our firmware is built as much as possible on a 3rd party neworking library and high level hardware building blocks.
Sure does. Boys could do that to but are too busy demonstrating that Force = Mass * Acceleration.
Why not Yahoo Answers? I have used it and gotten pretty satisfactory answers thus far.
Infact, I posed your exact same question on Y A now and I already have an answer.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Au8X0fm5n8cpX9D...
Every feature you add makes the menu more complex.

There comes a point where removing a feature is itself a feature.
Charles Miller today commented on this:

http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2010/02/12/two_steps_forward_tw...

And mentioned his own anecdote:

http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2003/10/09/the_internet_and_und...

Choice quote:

URLs. Bookmarks. Changing your homepage. All of these things were voodoo.

As he points out, claims that people are more "savvy" today than they were then probably don't hold up; if anything, users back then probably were more knowledgeable on average, simply by virtue of even having Internet access.
'If you go to a Ruby mailing list and ask people "should I use Ruby for x?" the answer will mostly be a resounding "yes."'

Really? I don't think so. If it's for Web or desktop stuff, sure. For other things, there are a lot of "it depends".

Seriously, outside the heavy gravity of Planet Rails, Ruby devs are pretty open about what you can reasonably do with Ruby.
A Web UI Designer's Toolset
It's weird when you do it, but it works.

Many years ago I was involved in an expensive automotive hobby. I had an idea for a product that I needed and called one of the well known catalog suppliers and asked if they would carry my product if I built it. The owner was immediately excited since it was apparently something he had been asked for a few times before, but he didn't have a source. Same deal here: he told me what features it would need, what an approximate selling price would be, promised to feature it in his catalog as soon as I could build a few, etc...

Then my need for the product went away and I never built a single one. Sometimes wonder what would have happened if I did. I (obviously) didn't have the entrepreneurial mindset back then; now I'd jump on any idea like that!

Still, it's an amazing feeling when you get the "I knew I wasn't the only one thinking this" feedback.
it's a tool. do you "love" and "hate" hammers and screwdrivers? get over it already.
I can't create a single sentence in correctly written Chinese. Or Russian, or even French for that matter -- I can cough up some random French words on paper, but they will likely be misspelled and "just plain incomprehensible."

What "type" of person am I?

Written communication is a stunt that is mastered by a relative handful of people, and polite, formal written communication by even fewer. The others communicate by more traditional and universal means: Talk, music, dance, art, games, cooking, commerce.
Yes, but given the 20,000 employees at Google, how many $SUCCESSFUL_GOOGLE_PRODUCTs have you seen per employee?
I'm always surprised when people complain about the weight of a laptop. Even some of my 17" behemoths never bothered me.

It makes me think a better carrying case or a different kind might be more effective than anything else.
Why All Ning Designers Code
One interesting thing is that a very good programmer might look at those numbers and go "how am I going to beat 1,300,000 people to make the next facebook" whereas it is closer to "how am I going to join the 2,200 startups that make it big?"
Fixing security holes without introducing new bugs
That's a market that hasn't seen any consolidation but quite a lot of competition. It will be interesting to see what they can do and how they are going to approach it..
I've always liked Thinkpads, though recently they've become a bit pricey compared to Dell machines.

At the moment, I'm toting 3.6 pounds of happiness across South America, in the form of an old ebay'd Thinkpad X60. It was top of the line a few years back, with its 1.8ghz core duo. Now it's $350 off ebay, plus $100 total for a 320gb 7200rpm drive and 3GB ram to bring it up to the speed of the dev laptop that I was using just one year ago.

It took some getting used to to run the IDE in 1024x768 (12.1"), but at compile time the thing simply flies. And I know for a fact that my 17" Dell would have been monched a dozen times over on buses by now, assuming my back survived lugging the thing around for this long.

Give the X301 a few years to drop in price, and I'll pick one up as my next "disposable road machine."
That's a very valid point -- actually being able to see the state of the data it very important in knowing what's going on. As Brooks and Raymond put it: "Show me your code and conceal your data structures, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your data structures, and I won't usually need your code; it'll be obvious."

But can you do this in Smalltalk? OK, you have inspectors that show you a representation of your data, but the representation is incomplete. I haven't used Smalltalk in years, so I'll gave an example in Python to show what I mean:

>>> a = [1,2]
>>> b=[a,a]
>>> c=[[1,2],[1,2]]
>>> b
[[1, 2], [1, 2]]
>>> c
[[1, 2], [1, 2]]
>>> b[0][0]='x'
>>> b
[['x', 2], ['x', 2]]
>>> c[0][0]='x'
>>> c
[['x', 2], [1, 2]]

(b) and (c) initiallly have the same representation, but they behave differently. I don't like this, so I'm creating a language where the text representation of an object defines how it behaves: if two objects have the sdame representation, their internal structure is the same, and their behaviour will (with one exception) be the same. This representation format is used as a serialisation format, and is also used to write literals in the language. This means that it's possible to display precisely the value of any object, including all the sub-objects it contains.
That's true. If you look around you'll probably also notice that we don't provide a video ad engine. That's because our analytics provide quite a bit more value for applications that focus on tracking individual users and overall trends. Some good examples would be B2B applications, e-commerce, direct marketing, training, sales, etc.

That being said, we're always customer focused and will adopt to where people need us to go. You'll notice that as the volume of views goes up the price per play goes down. Given that you'd need a significant volume of anything to have an advertising play that makes good money the price-per-play should become more reasonable.
Do Stanford profs have tools to automatically check for copies? Or is it something the graders just notice.
Because the password to their homebanking account is the same.
Ask HN: Should I buy "The Art of Computer Programming"?
I'm a computer engineering grad student. Right now, it looks like I'll be working in OS and parallel computing research after school. With that in mind (i.e. I am not a startup type, nor do I write web pages), is TAOCP something I should buy?
Do we even know what pumping out all that water vapor will do to our environment? Sure, "it's just water," but won't that cause a shift in climate as well? Maybe not as severe as pumping out CO2 (since CO2 doesn't rain out of the atmosphere), but couldn't this affect local ecologies pretty severely in some areas (i.e. significant increases in rainfall)?

I don't pretend to be an expert on the subject, but I've never heard anyone really comment on this other than the anti-global warming pundits spouting catch-phrases like "water is a greenhouse gas too."
At my last company (that's still going, I've just sold out and moved on. . . ) I used Lua for the lion's share of our kiosk content distribution platform. It was perfect, especially considering how many times we had to dip down into C or C++ to get at devices. We built out a tiny host C program that dynamically loaded in modules and frameworks as needed on each kiosk. It was beautiful, FAST, and cross platform (XP/Linux/OS X). I'm back in the web world these days but I miss Lua quite a bit, it's a fantastic little language.

Really, if you're building desktop software I couldn't recommend it highly enough.
Yikes, why the attack? We're commenting on an article that somebody posted. I found it boring and said as much. That's all that has transpired here.
"If you go to a Ruby mailing list and ask people "should I use Ruby for x?" the answer will mostly be a resounding "yes.""

I went. That's not what I found. For example:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/browse_thread/...

In fact, while we're on the subject, here's an example of recommendations and praise of Lua on comp.lang.ruby (note: google groups displays it a bit out of order):

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/tree/browse_fr...
> table salt tastes like shit

What's the chemical difference? Doesn't the mined salt just come from old dried out seas?
One reason Daring Fireball doesn't have a comment system.
I'm reasonably sure the Eula states that you, quite specifically, cannot use Windows for things such as Nuclear Power Plants.

Likewise, if you were using it, wouldn't you be talking to Microsoft about specially hardened version of the software (or to a linux vendor who could provide the same)?.
Jessica Livingston - Authors @Google - Founders at Work (2007)
I think it's a mistake to generalize from those RWW commenters to "normal users." Of the millions of people who logged on to Facebook yesterday, many thousands probably got there via Google, and just a few hundred ended up commenting on various highly-ranked posts (though there were probably many more who clicked the posts but didn't comment). The commenters are not representative of normal Facebook users; they are a very aggressively filtered 99.99th percentile of the users who have the most trouble navigating the web.

[reposted from another thread, with corrections]
Yeah, but you typically need other user data to validate their banking. Obviously it's good that people aren't grabbing the data, but lets be honest here: there is still a class of people who don't really know how to protect themselves online etc. Therefore to capture this data is not that hard, you just need to be persistent - stalking their rubbish, having key info etc.