skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
conversion rates depend on your traffic. You can get 1:50 or you can get 1:200...or you can buy some paid traffic and get 0:25,000

I'd like to see the product that you are getting 1:10 conversion rates on. Frankly that sounds like bullshit. And if you are really getting those numbers...then you wouldn't be saying you are "just an above average marketer".

The only way to get numbers like that is by pitching a product that has 0 competition(something like water bottle art making)....which usually means there is almost 0 traffic there.
The JVM is going strong and will stick around as a common platform for a variety of interesting languages for quite a while. Java the language is on the downward slope of the hype curve, but still has a huge base of existing installs so even though it is bleeding it will take a while for shock to set in. IMHO, the biggest future surprise will be how Java turns out to not be the COBOL of the future. COBOL is an antediluvian artifact that got the job done but lingers on in constant maintenance mode until enterprises bite the bullet and spend capital to do a wholesale replacement of the legacy mainframe system. The JVM is what will eliminate this refuge and last bastion for Java the language; the fact that other languages can run on the JVM and interface with old Java code means that incremental replacement is an option, and that option will be exercised more and more until the Java language becomes a distant memory.
> I will often upvote an article that I disagree with, but that still brings up interesting questions. Maybe others do this.

That's exactly what I like and hate about r/programming and r/netsec on reddit. People tends to upvote irrelevant submissions just to see insightful responses. But it's the exact kind of submission made those subreddits eternal septembered. Upbait is the new flamebait and trollbait.
Thanks for correcting the bits that I was wrong on. I hope the point I was trying to make was still meaningful in spite of the inaccuracies.
The New Campaign Monitor office
Universal negative is hard to prove, but this has a ring of at least partial truth.
I think you've missed the point of the article. The law prevents the CC companies from doing any statistical analysis to assess the higher costs to the greatest risks. That means that people who pose a lower default risk will have to pay just as much as those that pose a higher risk.

You might think it's great, but that's because somebody else is paying the cost of your default risk.
I'm no expert, but I've always understood that to be basically true - that our entire system depends on debt because debt is how money is created and our system depends on that process in order to avoid falling over itself. It's part of the magic of fiat money, I believe. If our money was based on a physical good (say, gold), then I don't think the same rules apply.

Edit: I'm doing my part in aiding the collapse of civilization by not carrying any debt. (Except for my house - but I wish I didn't even have that one hanging over my head.)
Heads up: A whole new class of zero-day Windows vulnerabilities looms
wow this article is so wrong that I wont even comment about issues with it.

Anyone who wants to read good research in nano tech can browse through this journal: http://pubs.acs.org/journal/nalefd

This is same as saying to someone working on EINACS and early computers that they are a laughing stock and nothing but huge calculators. Reminds me of an article by Scott Aaronson : "Whats taking so long Mr. Babbage" : http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=446
You just saw it - I am in Scandinavia.
You're right. What I meant to say was that biological forms are not the end goal of evolution, as opposed to engineered products which generally are the goal of human production.
Thank you all for your replies. I'll try to be more specific. I feel I need some technical guidance in how to get a moderately interactive site up and running. Google App Engine seems interesting, and what I have in mind is to build a simple database backend with some forms, just for practice, and especially motivation. I know some python, some html, less js, little css... but as I have a day job and a family I feel I will never deploy anything (even if it's just a hobby) if I try to learn each area well enough.

This is the kind of project kickoff that I mean: actual code for some "dumb", simple project. I'm guilty of course of spending too much time on single, specific topics that are not really necessary at this stage. (Say, how to make the forms look good, how to validate them with js, etc., even though the whole project is not there yet.)

Will get there someday! At least to a hobby-worthy level.

Thanks!
Ok, why is the speed of light a constant? The answer is that we say that light travels at constant speed because it’s an observation that works with all the currently excepted theories.

We are stuck saying that light travels at a constant speed because that’s an observation that fits in a coherent theory with all sorts of other detailed observations of diverse phenomena.

I am slowly coming to the point, which is hard to take in emotionally, that that’s all the justification we have for any scientific theory.
C500k in Action at Urban Airship
We're running HP-UX on PA-RISC and AIX on RS64. Don't know whether you can buy these architectures still, but these are real production machines in a datacentre.
> [techies explore & fiddle] Non-technical users aren’t so confident and won’t try things in the same way. In fact some of them seem to think that a wrong move could cause the computer to burst into flames.

This is the fundamental difference between a "technie" and a "non-techie". In fact the inclination to explore, to fiddle, to hack is largely how someone gains the knowledge, experience, and craft to become a "techie".
You might be surprised to see how much innovation goes into getting a slightly faster clock cycle.
I agree with your conclusion, but part of your logic is faulty. You seem to be assuming that all savings takes the form of holding debt from others, e.g., bonds. But that's only one possibility. You can also save by owning equity in others, e.g., stocks.

However, I don't want somebody else to own equity in my house, rather me having a normal mortgage.

At the very least, such a change would cause all kinds of liquidity problems, and would certainly cause the significant negative effects you predict.
So QR codes would have a number of advantages - a high data density, existing libraries for decoding etc - but we went for the Popcode design in the end:

- The Popcode identifiers are very easily decoded by our software - you just have to casually view the Popcode with the app for it to be scanned whereas you generally have to hold the phone very steady to scan QR codes.

- Popcodes encode a sufficient amount of data to identify content for the forseeable future (famous last words) but the scheme can be easily extended if need be.

- The "Popcode" as a brand directly identifies augmented reality content, giving users some expectation as to the type of experience that they will have if they scan one.

c
The Myth of 'Write a Mobile App, Make a Mint'
well you could argue that Theory of CS is same as Mathematics of Computation. or Biology is just Chemistry and Chemistry is just Physics.

Traditionally statistics is more geared towards hypothesis testing and analytics. While Machine Learning is about making prediction.
Is there a way to search Gmail, Evernote, and Google at the same time?
In my programming projects I have accumulated quite a bit of information in my Gmail account and in my Evenote account. So when I am looking for something I know I have seen before, I first have to search Evernote or Gmail, then the other, then finally move to Google when I can't find it. Is there a service out there that allows me to search all three at the same time so I can save time?
Just stumbled onto this comment by PG from a few years back:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=150565

"I use EasyDNS. They're expensive, but reliable and never do anything evil."

Figured I'd post it here, since EasyDNS has not been mentioned yet. Also, it looks like Y Combinator is still registered there.
If you talk to people who come from Asian countries, you'll find a completely different set of values as far as spending is concerned. Yes - I did NOT use to buy things I couldn't afford. I lived by saving and waiting to buy. This is how even the US was officially before 1940-50, but practically even as early as 1980s.

Where I come from (India), a decade ago, you could find people who had waited all there lives to use there savings to buying a new home. There was no concept of 30year mortgages - forget about credit cards. When credit cards were first introduced, they were used for the convenience of not having to carry cash not really for credit (at least from the customers point of view).
But things are changing now - its becoming the same as in the US.
One valid viewpoint may be It doesn't matter. The only thing there is is the effect of gravity. Whether you explain it one way or another way doesn't matter. What matters is the result. Two theories that predict exactly the same things in different ways are for all purposes equivalent and indistinguishable. Of course one theory might be easier to use.
i understand what summary is for. what i don't "understand" is why he chose as the target a book that's 24 years old in a fast moving field. actually i do understand: it was a strawman!

i agree with your assessment.
If you are Mac/Unix you can use cron every minute and screencapture/scrot...
Facebook | Faridh Noise
This isn't obvious, but it's true.

I pay off my cards every month (my wife is a fantastic money manager), so I don't pay credit card interest. But that's only the surface.

Retailers have to pay to the CC companies a fee (it varies by card type, your processor, and what level of detail you provide to the company), something on the order of 2.5%. Even if you pay 0% interest on your card, you're still paying higher prices at retail in order to cover those card fees.

I have a card that gives me 1% back. I wonder if that's enough to overcome the higher prices due to the card fee. I guess that depends on how many people are paying cash or PO, and my guess is that for most retailers that's a minority, so I'm probably paying more even in this case.
Am I the only person deeply shocked by this guy’s significant level of ignorance?
The first 70 to 80% of his article could essentially be surmised as ‘Hey, homelessness is easy as long as you put some thought into it.’

There is a reason homelessness is a vicious cycle and he didn’t even come close to discovering that. Fine, he met some truly decent, capable people living on the streets but the vast majority are there purely because they are stuck in said cycle. Be it alcohol, drugs, criminal convictions or a combination of the aforementioned, most people on the streets are there for a reason beyond their immediate control and not because they were simply the victim of bad luck.

Most "real" homeless people who have temporarily fallen on hard times rarely ask for money in any of these ways.

This summed it up for me. ‘real’ homeless people…that attitude actually hurts my brain.

I’ll give the guy credit for giving it a go but he has seriously missed the point.

SOURCE: 1st hand experience for just under a year of my life. Unquestionably the hardest year of my life.
I get a combination of wanting to laugh / heart break when I see my Mom/Grandfather writing down instructions on their note pads.
I agree with your post in general. However, the linked article missed the point of the key assumption of singularity: the current progress of computing power is 'only' doubling annually because of the limits of human intelligence. When machines reach human intelligence, they will take shorter and shorter time to improve themselves.

If H1, the human-equivalent generation of machines, takes one year to create H2, which doubles H1's speed and computing power, then H2 would take only 0.5 years to create H3, which would take 0.25 years to create H4, and so forth. The math series sum up to two or that the whole big bang would only take twice the amount of time for one doubling cycle (assuming that the delay caused by physical limits is negligible). IF this actually holds, then the progress when H1 is created will be way faster than the simple exponential illustrated in the article.
And ASM. All the cool kids write web apps in x86, except for the really cool 6502 kids in the corner.
Interesting perspective.

My only question is: you mentioned positive comments, negative comments and people who are conciliatory or funny. Apart from the trollish/provocative stuff that ends up downmodded, what have you left out?

Not sure if it's clear what I am asking. At first it seems like you pretty much included every possible comments. So I was wondering if you could be a little bit more specific. In particular what sort of comments do you _not_ see?
Luke Skywalker’s 6 Biggest FailS
The most interesting heroes in films are often relatively flawed and make their fair share of mistakes. Take a look.
They are allowed to do statistical analysis using such factors as credit score and amount of debt. The difference is that now they can't increase your rate on existing balances. They can still raise your rates, but only if you want to borrow more from them and don't opt to pay off the balance at the previous rate.

This seems much more transparent to me - you are selling a fixed-rate bond, rather than borrowing at a rate subject to their whim.
But how much value is there to the user?

I think Apple's biggest innovation is right there - that the checkbox mentality of marketing computers was in its heyday when Computer Shopper was 1500 pages every month, and has long passed.

Now people value

- quality of the experience

- having everything work the same

- user-centric software

- standards-driven software

I have 3 macs, but I also have 2 windows machines, and I much prefer the mac experience. I like that I have unix, and a apt-like package manager, rather than some windows "innovation." I like that I can print PDFs out of the box, rather than having to deal with some shareware. I basically feel like windows has now managed to require more "sysadmin-ing" than unix, somehow.

I keep the PCs for games. And that's about it.
My card rate is -2% since I got 2% rebate on every purchase, 3%-5% for certain things like gas.
This article is not comparing Intel with IBM and AMD though.
This isn't startup specific! I work on projects with long development cycles, and rapid prototyping outside of work is very therapeutic. You can amplify the healing power with the right tools: in my case, Python and Git. There's nothing more satisfying than creating something in a few days, or extending an existing project to do more. Be sure to let someone know you did something! Thankfully my girlfriend listens to me babble about my minor wins, even when they sound ridiculous or incomprehensible.
I think he'd be okay with multiple languages (he even mentions F#), as long as they share a common runtime. And as long as that runtime is the CLR.

I hope other .NET developers have a broader view and don't consider the CLR the sine qua non of programming.
There's a whole nuther article about "what users don't understand about your web app"

That network/DNS/router/etc issues aren't your fault and you can't fix them.

Everything regarding passwords and account security.

URLs, esp typo's and that The Google (esp it's search bar) != Internet.

HTTPS

Phishing, and a slew of other attacks. Also that punching the monkey is probably a bad idea.

Browsers, different browser versions, different browser manufacturers, cross browser incompatibility. Also that you did not create the browser and you can't fix it. Also why they have to download install new version of browser to use your software.

Why your webapp quits working when they aren't connected to The Google.
I'm an avid textmate user on my macbook. So, I decided to give e a shot on my desktop a few months ago. Initially I thought it was pretty cool that i could use all my bundles. but as I used it more I realized that there were too many quirks and missing features (like when you select a word it highlights all occurrences, auto brace completion, split view, etc)

I switched back to notepad++.
You can play his game from http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview...

172 people each wrote a complete game last weekend, and you can play all of them from http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview... .
VMware Server 2.0.2-x On Ubuntu Server 10.04 With VMware Remote Console Plug-in
Not really backwards but more like the wrong direction. For me HTML is all about displaying content. HTML then takes the form of an application when you can edit or interact with said content.

If we could start from scratch and build a set of tools for making web applications would they look like HTML and JavaScript? Probably not.

A lot of this looks great (new UI controls and css advancements in particular), but the multimedia elements seem very unpolished and as mentioned inefficient. The canvas demo even breaks the entire presentation if you scale the images larger than the canvas.

On simple internal projects for my company I often joke about 'post backs 4 life!' whenever someone mentions using Ajax or Flash for the UI. "Let's make it HTML5!" gives me that same sinking feeling.
Correction from Sue Moon's Twitter:

> "Virtual router smashes speed records" corrections: not virtual, just pc-based software; not gigabytes, but Gbps; our perf is w/ 64B packets

(source: http://twitter.com/sbmoon/status/21921061318)
Not always. Sometimes is something cultural. English people for example, they take a "Gap year" right after they finish high school and before they go to college. Most of the time they work during their last year of high school in stores, supermarkets, bars, etc. during the weekends to earn money so they can go on their "Gap Year" traveling to Africa, Asia or Latin America... where cost of living is much lower than in the UK and the money they have earned is enough to spend many months!
I'm not surprised -- I used to read all of Hannibal's reviews -- but it is innovation on the chip maker's part. Apple and HP are doing little more than plugging it into a socket.
Any demand for a meetup in Manchester?
Portal das Redes Sociais | tudo que você procura sobre mídias sociais
My gut feeling (and this is completely not scientific) is that Hacker News tends to have a large percentage of people who are contrarian... which kind of makes some sense since if you were just following the crowd then you'd probably not be on HN, or possibly not even a hacker.

But the end result is that people take a lot more pleasure in showing that they can debunk or argument against something. Saying: "I totally agree" may feel a bit like you are following someone else's thought, and most people here take pride in thinking differently.

I also think patio (HN values cleverness) is another important factor.
If anyone has questions about this stuff I can answer them.
This article had nothing to do with actually USING either a Mac or PC and at the points where to glance at user experience the statements are speculative at best. Their definition of innovation is numbers on the back of a box.
Can you break the google habit?
www.pugoob.com

It randomly brings up bing,google,ask for you to search with.. I have tried it but I am having to go back to google frequently.
Usability is a big problem with election systems. Making something anonymous, auditable, fraud resistant, affordable, etc and simultaneously make it usable more or less by everyone is tough.

They recently used a system called Scantegrity in Takoma Park, MD (Rivest also collaborated here). I've been meaning to look up the usability conclusions on this one, but I don't remember seeing much in the way of problems at the time.
It looks like he used livestream.com's Procaster to broadcast the 48hr marathon and then sped up the output later on. http://www.livestream.com/platform/procaster
Some years ago, a relative of my wife bought a new PC and gave her old one to the doorman in her building. She then asked my brother-in-law to "put the data back" in the new machine. She apparently hadn't realized that "the data" was now at the doorman's, inside her old machine.

I think my brother-in-law was able to get a hold of the old machine before it got re-installed.
> Has anyone used time-lapse screencap software they can suggest?

A LD48 regular created chronolapse for this purpose.

http://keeyai.com/projects-and-releases/chronolapse/
Which card is that? The best "cash-back" programs I could find only offer 1% on "every purchase".
It doesn't make sense to distinguish "technical" from "non-technical" users. Plenty of users with no interest in programming and no formal training in computing handle these tasks easily. Many users understand that a file exists in a physical location, that it can be copied from a hard drive to a flash drive, and copied from that flash drive to a different computer, and they understand the necessity for that. And they understand that when they use a web app that relieves them of that burden, that the data is now stored "out there" somewhere instead of locally.

From the other side, I had a boss with a Master's in Computer Science who had lots of trouble with normal desktop usability. He certainly never learned to guess which actions were reversible or not. My sister, who teaches history and is barely technically self-sufficient, could run rings about him on the Windows desktop, not to mention my friend the accountant who has never written a program but could be a passable professional programmer with six months' full-time training.

So instead of saying, "this is what non-technical users don't understand," it's better to say, "these misunderstandings are part of the normal spectrum of user savviness that you will have to deal with." Whether a user is technical or non-technical only allows you to make a rough guess about the mistakes they'll make.
Which card? I get nothing on mine :-(
Canadians travel, so you can't excuse the distance.

I think the problem is (I say this as a Canadian) that the US has a very insular streak to it's fabric that is manifested in ways such as this. This same streak that caused the US to join both world wars when they were half over.

My guess is that it stems from the individual nature of the founders, along with the split from England. This isn't as strong in Canada and Australia because those countries remained extensions of the Empire and thus were automatically and continuously connected to the larger world.

The US spent a better part of the 1800's focusing exclusively on North America.
Right from the top, the article is all about the reporter. "Hey, remember those ads on TV? Not that I watch it or anything, I'm too busy using (parentheses)."

And what a strange concept of "innovation": whether the maker ships each Intel CPU.
he has a multimonitor setup
True. But let's not make it sound like it's only a hackery community thing. Another example: Greenpeace (as opposed to other pro-enviornmental groups).

And depending on your world view, possibly Fox news. ;)
Oh, no question. Does hp make chips though? Apple's got the A4, i'm sure they struggled getting that up to 1G. It's probably not fair to expand the scope beyond laptops though.

It seems like apple got intel to dust off the atom chip for the air, and they pushed that ssd stuff for a while. maybe HP did some of that stuff first.

* I'm kind of a fan boy. much less enamored of apple due to the ios programming language restrictions.