skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You definitely need to randomly decide the order of the videos if you want this at all to be a "fair" poll. Most people are going to pick the first one they watch because since they already know what the content is going to be, and already have the image of the product "branded" in their mind, the second video will be both boring and dissonant [1]. They won't be able to wait for it to just get to the point, and they won't be as comfortable with the different image of it. For even better accuracy, you could try showing people only 1 video, and having them rate it from 1-10 on a just a few questions, then compare the results.

My personal preference was for #2, which I happened to watch first. I liked the music, and every frame got me more and more interested in the next. The theme of "the world has you up against a wall... no here's the solution" resonated very well with me, and I think it's just the right approach to take with writers. It was entertaining, the music was catchy, and after it thoroughly explained the problem, it showed the glorious solution of test99. The flow of it was really awesome, it was well-scripted, cute, funny, just great. Really, I actually enjoyed it. It explains the problem brilliantly, even if you're not familiar with the domain of publishing, and explains how test99 is a great solutions. The attitude is generally pretty "kick-ass". I think it would work well with VCs.

The second video I watched (video #1), I found to be boring, and extremely trite. It seemed like a poorly done and unimpressive Apple commercial. I just couldn't stomach it after awhile. I quit a few seconds after seeing "step 1 -- start an account" and the user going really, really slow. I understood where it was going from there: "Here's how you use this, step by step, you fool! We'll go extra slow so you can follow." I could see the appeal of this video for people who want to be feel "comforted" with a product and have a slow attention span, as opposed to people who have drive and ambition and want to break ranks quickly and fairly (that is completely video #2). Which would you classify aspiring writers as?

Video #1 isn't as terrible as I make it out to be. Both videos get the product pitch across quite nicely. But, I'd have to go with #2, all the way. It explains the problem (possibly for too long), makes me believe the problem is really a huge problem that is unfair and that needs to be corrected, then shows your product at the climax, and gives a brief enough description of it for me to want to try immediately.

Either way, I strongly suggest doing this in a more controlled manner if you plan to make a decision from the polls. And, great work so far. This product seems awesome, and I'm quite excited for you.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
> They don't give me the same warm, fuzzy feeling as compiling to native code and running directly on the OS.

What if the the OS's native code is bytecode? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)
Guys, you should follow #jsconf on twitter to get some background on this awesome lib. :-)
I graduated from high school in 1989, at the very apex of 80's butt-rock heavy metal. My school had probably 200 guys with ratted out long hair, most of whom owned a guitar and dreamed of being a rock star.

Of that group, probably 50 played well enough to do a creditable "Eruption" solo, and there were half a dozen guys who could get on stage at an assembly and keep the entire school entertained for 10 minutes.

Lots of those guys, when asked what they planned to do after school would look you in the eye and tell you they were going to be a rock star. Lots of them tried, forgoing college to form bands and live the dream. At the time, there were so many stories of starving bands rising out of the LA club scene to land million dollar contracts that it seemed like all you had to do was show up. It was a lot like reading the tech press today about the Bay Area.

Anybody care to guess how many of the guys from my school actually became rock stars?

So here we are, 20 years later, seeing exactly the same pattern. We hear about the Twitters of the world, getting zillions of dollars for some trivial idea, and figure we can do that too. And just like the kid from my youth with the Judas Priest t-shirt, we ignore the overwhelming amount of evidence we see every day that there's pretty much zero chance of that happening.

Here's an idea for a reality check. Do a quick search for "Ask HN: Rate my startup" here. Count(*), then Count(millionaires). That's what you're up against.

If I were in school, I'd stick it out just to hedge my bet.
You are asking two questions. The first 'is this UX?' one, has the answer "yes". The second one "is this representative of what the average startup goes through when designing a user experience?" also has a "yes" answer, but startups typically cut quite some corners. Good startups cut the corners they can get away with, and only as far as possible.

You should also keep in mind that all these are methods and not goals. You do not need personas/card sort/whatever to build a product, but they can help prevent or solve a problem. Startups often wait to the 'solve a problem' phase before they invest in these methods. That is fine, as long as you a) can detect your problem early, and b) once you have identified your problem, do not waste time doing stuff that does not help solve it. For these, you have to know what methods exist and what kind of problems they are useful for. That is what you should take away from this class.
Bomsabado
stumbled upon this link, it is saying that facebook may also get affected with this worm

http://bomsabado.com
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You're asking after 'experimental validation' but vague on detail. It's a difficult topic. Economics is not a sandbox. For macroeconomic topics, you can't create a cluster of equal samples and then test them.

And where you have tools to predict what will happen, you may be changing the future due to the feedback loop. If somebody writes a paper demonstrating that a market will go up over a certain period, they may influence readers and cause the market to go up sooner.

Soros discusses this feedback loop at length in _ The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What it Means_, which is a book about his philosophy dressed up to sell copies in the wake of the crisis.

The issue of scientific approaches to testing economic theories is a major fault-line within economics.

Me, I doubt that the unfettered free market economy
can deliver what is promised.

What promise, and by whom?

The alternative to a free market is the various degrees of intervention that are making it not-free. Often, this means government interference. Tariffs and other forms of pork-barreling.

It was a major achievement for humans to reach a point where we could isolate power structures from trade. We've since moved a long way from it. The free market is cheap to maintain, simple, scalable, transparent and - by definition - free of political interference. It is not a system, it is an absence of system. It doesn't make promises.

Without better understanding, we will continue to fly
blind, waste resources, and make sub-optimal decisions.

This will always happen. You can't predict the future reliably, and where you do, you may change it.

It's a dud goal to want to create super-hacker economists who knowingly steer the economy. The best we can do is to create simple, well-understood circumstances that everyone knows, and where everyone is subject to the same rules.
You mentioned the evidence that it made things worse, by obama's own numbers, the unemployment rates are much higher than he claimed they would be if we DIDN'T pass the bill.

The "stimulus" destroyed jobs, as all government spending does, and it made the economy worse.

Further, it is deficit spending that is killing us, as we are incurring unprecedented deficits.

Finally, borrowing is already becomming a problem with indications that the FED is printing money to participate in the auctions (using a major bank of convenience, of course) in order to keep auction rates low... this means that the treasury auctions have already started to fail. Further, the auctions for the last 2 years have shown a sharp shift towards shorter term notes, which means the amount that has to be rolled over at each auction is snowballing.
WOW! As per this guys logic, US should be focused on reducing the deficit right now rather than growth and jobs. With one of the deepest recession we ever faced hardly over and unemployment still so high, not sure how more jobs could have been created without help from govt stimulus(since consumer spending is down and so is pvt sector profits as well as hiring). With the kind of hole we were in and still are in, the biggest worry should be jobs and growth which are not going to come back just simply by waiting on consumer spending to pick up by itself(consumers are not going to spend, if there are no jobs).
Bad analogy. Here's a better one: When a patient is dying of blood loss, you don't continue to put more leeches on and make charts showing how his cheeks will be rosy if only we add more leeches.

The "stimulus" destroys jobs, it is a leech on the economy.
Fortunately, free market economists, such as the Austrian School and the Chicago School are so marginalized by the dominant neo-Keynsians that you can't make the claim that they have had enough influence to make their predictions into self fulfilling prophecies!

Wait, no, that's unfortunate, actually. Considering all the lives that have been destroyed as result.
Wikileaks answer:

"Spiegel report Schmitt resigned which is misleading. Schmitt was suspended a month ago."

https://twitter.com/wikileaks/statuses/25487043751
It's open source. Go nuts with your defunct platforms.
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In an inflationary environment, the US Stock market will likely go up due simply to the value of each dollar going down, meaning that a given amount of economic value delivered results in more dollar profits and more dollars in the stock price.

So, you could have a losing investment economically even though the prices went up!

Imagine what the last 10 years of S&P 500 would be indexed to growth in your favorite money supply index.
BBC Life documentary always had an "On Location" at the end. Here are two examples.

One involves a lot of fake, they searched for a spot outside to observe and then rebuild the whole set indoor in order to be able to film growing of the plants [1].

In the other one they follow a dragon hunting a buffalo around for a long time trying best not to interfere [2].

But there is more, for one episode a cameramen built a shelter to hide himself from a bird. He had to improve it and stay for a long time to finally catch his footage. (Couldn't find it, sorry)

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrDnCLczYA4

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2-mTbv8gYo
And get Coke to sponsor it ;)
We used to play this game at school. We just did it ourselves though (without a website). I think your page is a bit confusing, and it doesn't leave me with any idea of where to start.

I'd simplify the page, and make it obvious! Good luck.
I voted you up, even though I don't know that I agree with your coming predictions.

But I've been thinking about a similar topic tonight, as I read columnists and reporters talking about how complex financial instruments are these days and how no one really understands them. Because the basics of them aren't all that complicated. CDOs, CDSs. ETFs, whatever. None of them are particularly complex concepts. Anyone with a CS degree has mastered concepts many times more complex. I accept that the details get tricky, but the details of lots of things get tricky, and a lot of people make solid livings being responsible in managing tricky concepts. None of these financial instruments are magic. I'm a curious layman, I get the gist of all of it.

And then there's people who claim their variable rate mortgage was too complicated to understand. Come now.

So I was thinking that it's really just in everyone's interest to pretend this stuff is hard to understand, that it's complicated, that it's magic.

Because then no one is responsible.

And then, as the saying goes, was I enlightened.

The housing bubble was easy to see. Everyone saw it. Many, perhaps most, ignored it. Because they wanted to. It let them gamble and not be responsible. From Joe Homebuyer to James J. Investmentbanker IV.

Some things are complicated, sovereign bonds and currencies among them. There are many reasons that nearly all the powers that exist want to keep that music going, and they have many tools at their disposal. I honestly don't know what will happen there, which is why I'm not sure I agree with your predictions in those areas. There's real magic at work there, and it's one of the few areas where make-believe becomes reality. The US has a very strong hold on centrality in the global economy, and I can't see how it's cleanly broken without severely damaging anyone who has the power to break it. That's the magic part.
I'm not going to touch on the health aspects, as they are very thoroughly covered. You need to keep yourself healthy, yes.

I will say that if you're not getting pretty stressed out on a regular basis, then you're doing something wrong. Your start-up should be consuming your thoughts for most of the time. I find the stress caused by thinking about my start-up less stressful than the stress caused by not thinking about my start-up. The stress is a signal that my start-up is something that is important to me, and that I'm still passionate about it. I fear the day where I no longer am stressed out about it.

On the other end of things, your start-up should not be your whole life. Don't put yourself in a life or death situation, realize it is not a life or death situation, and you should keep your hair.
Your analysis of the situation is incomplete because it does not consider the source of the resources used in the government stimulus. The resources need to come from someplace in economy. For the stimulus to be a net positive, the government's allocation of resources must be more efficient than where the resources were taken from.
That's interesting; I didn't know the origin of "Lombard". Justinian's attempt to conquer Italy was one of the bloodiest periods of European history.
You mentioned the evidence that it made things worse, by obama's own numbers, the unemployment rates are much higher than he claimed they would be if we DIDN'T pass the bill.

How is that evidence it made things worse? It could be evidence that job losses were far more severe than anyone anticipated, but with the stimulus they were still lower than without.

Your following two statements are basically soundbites with no reasoning, or basis in economic theory.
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Just from experience, I'd really suggest getting a pro voiceover done. Text on these kind of videos should be minimal, the same advice people give for powerpoints. People just dont read or pay attention. Get a pro voiceover for less that $100, it really makes a difference. I make these videos so am kind of speaking from experience. examples of my work http://vimeo.com/7982259 http://vimeo.com/3313085 http://vimeo.com/9131485
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Ask HN: How a non-tech can start a tech startup
I recently learned that Alibaba.com founder Jack Ma couldn't code a single line yet he managed to started a billion dollar web empire. I'm also quite sure there are many other highly successful tech entrepreneurs who knew nothing about technology. How did they do it?

I just finished my business degree and want to get into tech start-ups. Though I know some programming basics and can read codes, I don't have the technical skills to make my idea a reality. Yes I could spend the next 12-24 months to learn coding but we know in the start-up world it's all about speed to market. On the other hand finding a good technical co-founder requires a heck of a lot of luck!

So what are some of my options? I'm particularly interested to hear from people with similar background and broke into the tech startup world.

Cheers!
Submitted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1727098
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Taleb's criticism of methodology in economics echoes Austrian criticism of economic engineering and the various mainstream economic models.

For example, in the Black Swan, Taleb mentions Hayek, the Nobel Prize winning Austrian school economist.

When asked about a Feyerband comparison (by reporter Felix Salmon, Taleb emailed "to say he considers himself closer to Hayek than to Feyerabend"

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/07/21/taleb-and-f...
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Yes, you were (in hindsight) right in standing fast against correcting these problems in RSS 2.0, no-one would have been satisfied with the result.

Atom started around the discussion of "An Anatomy of a Well Formed Blog Entry", not any specification text. We didn't start with a copy of RSS 2.0 and XML/RPC and rewrite bits and pieces until it became Atom. The Atom community went further back than that, we examined how RSS was being used at that time, and considered how it might be used in the future, and defined several use cases or problem statements, and built up a specification format based on that. As far as I remember, we never started with the RSS 2.0 spec text.

The Atom Syndication fomat (the XML part) and the Atom Publishing format (the REST part) started as one and then later ran separately in parallel. Both fed requirements into each other.

In RSS2.0 the item element was always inside a channel, so there was always a parent context of it's meaning beyond it's namespaced definition. With Atom publishing format, we have blog entries as stand alone documents outside of a feed (so they can be created, retrieved, and updated as a single document). In that context, a top-level element name of entry is an improvement over item. And it was important to us to use the same vocabulary across both the syndication and publishing formats so the element became entry on both.

Atom started from a clean slate, as you point out, there was going to be no way of fixing those problems with the RSS2.0 specification without significantly breaking existing implementations and backwards compatibility, and if somehow these were avoided, the RSS2.0 specification would probably have ended up in an absolute mess.
The down vote was me. It was accidental but as you know, I couldn't reverse it and I thought it would correct itself so I didn't bother responding.

I actually don't disagree with the advice. It's a method I plan to use on an MVP that I'm working on soon. I think it can be effective if not done in a spam-like way.
Yeah, the Good Will Hunting fantasy about how you don't need a good education, just natural intelligence and motivation. Maybe that's true for some people, but to say that a good liberal arts school is worth the same as a community college is completely absurd. And it's more true, not less true, for a class such as "Western Civ".
How about this:

When a blind fat man gets depressed, you console him first. You don't immediately put him in a go-kart with a fistful of antidepressants,a bottle of gin and a sword in order to combat the lack of euphoria that caused the depression.
If you do the same thing everyone else is doing, you will fail.

If you work really hard, you will perhaps fail to a lesser degree than everybody else.

But the only way to win is to play your own game.
No, your analogy is bad because it ignores timing and that's what it's all about. Shifting debt around to buy time can make sense. It's what we do when we refinance expensive credit card debt replacing it with a cheaper bank loan.

The government can borrow at 2.5% for 10 years. It can buy time that indivuals or banks cannot buy. If that time is used to let the economy recover a little and then make structural reforms to reduce debt, the idea can work.
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It might be that there is a simple and straightforward model, but there are incentives for politicians, academics and other actors in the system to reject this model. For example, politicians will prefer models that defer pain to the future over models that take the pain now. If the simple and straightforward model says that we should take the pain now, then politicians will prefer a different model.
I'm not sure how to say this without coming off as a smart-ass, but isn't "used at Microsoft for UX design" more of an example of what not to do? Last time I tried to use a Windows machine, I ended up shutting it down by accident (was trying to switch users). And don't get me started on Phone 7.

The best UX design, in my experience, is simply done by a smart imaginative person who uses the product in a way similar to the users. Everything else is padding for syllabi/books/industry workshops.
when selling a site, do you clean up code, or comment ? Also do you have to provide any kind of support ?
I think that's good advice. Either get a lawyer involved or avoid incorporation and complex legal documents entirely.

One thing that you absolutely do not want to mess up is the IRS' 83(b) election rule: http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/2008/02/15/what-is-an-83...
care to explain the difference between "shouldn't be favoring" and "should accommodate"?
Indeed. Spain has it right.

Pamplona would get up to 100 degrees in the summer, but it was still cool and breezy in the streets. Everything's made of thick stone, which takes a lot to heat up. Streets are narrow and shady so they never get enough sunlight to heat the stone. Balconies have shutters to completely block out the sun for the few hours a day it's directly on you.

We didn't have AC, and it was pleasantly cool even in the heat of the summer.
I said "practice in keeping your code terse". Actually trying to golf production code would just be insane.

Programmers commonly put in completely unnecessary abstractions "just in case", and a golfing mindset will help you avoid a lot of these.
Play your own game, but stack the deck in your favor. It's no great feat to bootstrap a software business from within a company paying you $100k fresh out of school.
I'm struggling to understand how the hell this is done. Is the whole thing generated in code (as in the imagery/graphics) or are they external elements that are loaded into the application and manipulated in the code?
“If we distract people with the lure of easy money... we’re going to wind up derailing the thing that has been driving our economy”

It seems to me that if one were sincerely worried about this, the concern would be better directed at Wall Street, where many of the world's best minds go to be wasted on creating the next CDO or HFT/computerized-frontrunning technique while contributing nothing back to the world.
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