skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have to call BS. This argument that third parties split the vote is nonsense.

Me voting for a third-party candidate is does not imply that I would have voted for any other candidate had they not been on the ballot. Had that candidate not been on the ballot, I would have abstained from that particular position.

It's like the BSA argument that people who steal software (yes it's stealing) would have normally bought the software. No, they wouldn't have.
> don't force anything on him.

This is absolutely true. One of the risks that you take when you have a child is that he'll turn out totally different than you. My father was a farmer, and so we're from basically two different worlds. He could never understand why I wanted to be on the computer on the time, I couldn't understand why he wanted to be outside all the time. But since neither of us tried to force each other on the issue, we got along just fine.

> It's not necessary to go through Pascal or BASIC before you can get to the good stuff:

http://hackety-hack.com/

</blatant-self-promotion>
The Flash side was unexpectedly slow, and comments on this same article on Reddit indicate that it is because they are doing a lot of JavaScript-to-Flash communication, which is unusual for a game, as well as enabling "wmode=transparent", which allows DOM elements to be positioned on top of Flash content, slows down Flash content, and is apparently unnecessary for this page.
Cool and easy to use. We actually worked on something similar where we ask your position on causes and show the grades according to policies: http://www.votereports.org
You are the exception, not the rule. I choose a product first by it's merits and second by what people have said about the product on their reviews or comments. Social proof can be of extreme benefit because of this.
Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used
I've sought high and low for a way to do this on Vimperator, but I can't for the life of me figure it out. Forgive me for asking, but how do you exclude urls in it?
Working on the who FAQ and Help Center, will add those questions in there.

1) Right now, not an actual "800" number unless you port it over.

2) Same here, we can search for vanity numbers and help you find them, and then use them with the service.

3) Visa, MasterCard, American Express, or Discover!
I agree with weego that the place to start with user experience designs is with THE USER. Describe these (assumed) primary and secondary players that support whatever business and marketing efforts you've got.

Simple persona style might be:

-- Jim is 32, an accountant, online 4-5 hours a day, has an iPhone, 2 toddlers, and no time for anything except his fantasy football league and the occasional game of Angry Birds while on the metro each morning. --

By getting my team or clients onboard with Jim right out of the gates, I've found that I can say "Seriously, 'Jim' doesn't care about button colors or sharing this on Facebook," when projects typically might otherwise get distracted, and the development cycle then stays more uniformly focused on the user (our ultimate goal, usability wise).

Then, I complement this user development with MEANING creation. What does "Jim" really care about? What core aspect of our app makes his life easier, means more to him, or is /the/ most entertaining way to engage his attention?

From there, I'd build (ugly) only that feature/interaction with great content that provides necessary cues, then go find a few Jims. Test, re-test, evolve, and FINALLY layer in the pretty (and additional features essential to bolstering usability... not just for the purpose of adding stuff).

Rinse and repeat for all target audiences. Well, repeat anyway. :)
Speech Codes and Universities
Thanks for that. I abandoned Ubuntu and went back to Debian (desktop) for some of the same reasons - I don't like Ubuntu's take on Gnome.

I think Ubuntu should have versions/spins like Fedora. I think it's confusing for the end user with their odd branding Kubuntu etc. How about Ubuntu - Education Edition, Ubuntu - Lightweight Edition, Ubuntu - Netbook Edition - something like that instead.
The problem with uninformed voters self-selecting to not vote is that the people who decide not to vote because they are not sufficiently informed tend to be in the middle range of informedness. There are many more people who are even less well-informed and have put less thought into their voting decisions who will vote.
Thanks, and good luck!
You'll definitely be getting 3$/mo from me. I've assumed there was such a service but hadn't found it yet. I probably have domains registered in 5 different places and definitely need a single way to manage them.

2 bits of advice:

Put the "Get Started" button on the homepage. Probably help converstion alot to have a call-to-action there.

Let people register without a credit card, give them their 30 days, and then tell them the account will be shut down in 2 weeks if they don't activate it. Moving/setting up DNS is not something people want to do often so if they like your product they'll gladly activate it. Is there a reason why/how people could abuse the service that is driving the credit card requirement?
While you will see any and all expenses before you are able to transfer (since you have to select a hosted DNS plan before you can transfer) I agree that I should make it a bit more obvious. I've added a note to the promotional page indicating that you will need to subscribe as well, with plans starting at $3 per month.

Regarding free domains, if I ever get to the point where I can sell domains as a loss-leader then I'd consider it, but almost every domain has a base cost, including ICANN fees and then markup from accredited registrars who offer reselling, and giving away something for nothing just doesn't make much sense to me unless there is a massive upside.
Not everyone.

Plus who knows how each side was coded. I make games for a living and more times than not, jerkiness/glitches are an indication of bad programming than the platform it was written in. Pong is an ultra-simple game but you'd be surprised even on a game as basic as that the issues that can crop up that require elegant coding. Collision in particular -- the simplest, most obvious way in pong to check when the ball collides is to check the intersection of a point and a line, or a point and polygon/rectangle, the point being the edge of the ball (top/bottom of it for the walls, left/right of it for the paddles) versus the edge of the paddle or the whole paddle. More precise, but more math used and thus a less common way of writing the game, is to check the intersection of a circle and a line segment/polygon.

For example in flash, there are some built-in methods that everyone tends to use but don't get "pixel perfect collision" -- if you google that phrase you can see where people have tried to come up with perfect collision and how complicated all the math is for it.

I know for a fact just from playing this flash/html5 pong that it wasn't coded perfectly because it glitches when the ball gets to too high of a speed, either getting stuck in the wall and bouncing along it but not away from it, or going right through the paddle.

So this is really apples and oranges, unless both halves were coded with the exact same algorithms for everything (and just different syntax for the languages) -- very unlikely -- and, as evidenced by the other commenters also completely dependent on the environment/browser implementations of html5 and the flash plugins.

However, way cool on the link-bait worthiness :) I shoulda thought of this =P
I think there are lots of ways to go about startups and only some subset qualify as the yegg's "startup career path." Which is to say, there are a fair number of things that are startups and can be done with a couple coders and some ramen over a couple months -- often not evening needing a "marketing" guru -- while there are lots of other problems which require more specialized domain knowledge (either with respect to technology, market, or both).

In this case, what you need to succeed depends largely on having the right set of skills to succeed within your specific domain, assuming you have one. I'm generally of the opinion that there is much lower risk in these areas (assuming you know your market well) since presumably all you have to do is match an existing need with a product, the primary barrier being your competence.

How do you acquire the skills necessary? This too depends on which side of the ball you are on. Larger startups need people in different roles. Rather than getting in on a little startup and being part-time coder, part-time cleaner, part-time ramen cook, get out in the would and be the most excellent in whatever facet you excel in. Heck, you may decide that making the world a better place in whatever capacity you are best at (usually also what you enjoy) you is better than attempting getting superrich and retiring at 30.

In other words, my advice to all "startup" people out there is do what makes you tick, do it as best as you can, and let your startup, if it arises meet a need that you know is real. This may be a problem that people don't realize is a problem (like limited and often unintuitive course management software) or it may be something bigger and better that only a few people will understand (e.g. a cure for Multiple Sclerosis).

Anyways, I've nothing against serial entrepreneurs if that's what makes you tick. More important though is do what you love.
no joke. that is lame.

i forget, do things get auto-killed with the flag? or does it require an admin's hand? if things get auto-killed, perhaps the algorithm needs changing?
A degree is only as meaningful as its scarcity [2008]
Calling them Gremlins is actually a reference to the British Royal Air Force in WWII. The airmen would blame 'gremlins' for mechanical issues or even problems during flight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gremlin#Origins

Famous children's author Roald Dahl popularized them after he left the RAF to become a writer. If you get a chance, read a biography of Roald Dahl. He truely was the most interesting man in the world. (WWII Ace Fighter Pilot, British Secret Agent, invented a brain-heart valve, married an Academy Award winning actress, pioneered a stroke recovery program and sold over 100 million books.)
I'd love to see the Flash source. It flags for me, but I don't think it should have to.
I was _just_ wondering this myself.

This is why I keep showdead on, actually. Sometimes seeing the shadow world is pretty interesting.
It is better mathematically to pay off debt than to save (since debt is usually costing you more than the opportunity cost of not saving).

Still, from a practical standpoint, you shouldn't put ALL of your disposable income towards debt, as you will want some sort of emergency fund to keep you afloat when your car breaks down. Otherwise, you go rely on more debt. Spending saved money is cheaper than spending borrowed money.
3 Charts That Prove We Are Living In The Biggest Debt Bubble In History
Definitely focus on revenue. That way you work towards building a profitable business from day one. If you focus on 'money later' you are in effect first building a user base and then trying to monetise it. Just because you succeed at the first stage does not mean the second will be a breeze.

Also, keep in mind that a startup is really an experiment. Every day you should be learning something new and tweaking your business accordingly. By focussing on revenue you start learning how to make money from the beginning. If your initial focus is on a wide userbase, then you learn nothing about the money-making side which is likely to be very different from just getting users.
Samsung Galaxy S Tricks Tips | Tricks Window
Crossing off a chunk on your grid does not reduce the number of nasty letters and phone calls you get from creditors.
There are other options. Most of the distributed version control systems are good. What's better seems to be a matter of taste now.
This is true, though to my knowledge if we agree to an embargo (as in, you ask, I actually say "Yes" as opposed to you just blasting a press release to my inbox) then we don't generally break them. At least that's my policy.
Since you just graduated, GO FOR IT!

We only live once.

Whining version - there's no kids and family to support now, no house to pay, no car to pay, etc.

You know you can always get a job later on if things dun work out.
One thing I don't like about the moral «obligation» to vote is that to many people, casting a ballot is all the political action they can consider. Politics seems reduced to elect one of the two big parties. It seems that the alternative is, either to vote or to not make any political action.

The truth is that many people are politically active independently of wether they vote or not.
HTML5 does all of that out of the box without any flags, so it's a fair comparison.
Dynamo and Oracle. A match made in hell...
Although I like the CLI interface to some of these tools, I think to get people using them you need nice GUI tools and sadly these are lacking - or rather they were when I last looked.
Just flipped back to live, it looks like. Hopefully it was just a mistake...
Thanks for the feedback, you make some good points. I'll reconsider some of the selling points that I am currently making and see if I can improve it for my target audience.

Also, I like the term "de-dumbing-down". :-)
Probably because this was a newly-registered account.

Registered 5 days ago, no other comments or contributions to HN.
Google is going to have a really tough time marketing this. It's a bold idea, which, one way or another, is probably the correct direction for personal computing. But the timing is just too soon. And I doubt people are willing to hand a golden key to all their data, documents, photos, passwords, everything to a single company.

Also I wonder if Google even realizes that the iPad has pretty much nuked the entire netbook market. Nobody really wanted these machines anyways, they wanted touchscreen tablets.
It seems to me that the delta thing has made updates slower, not faster. I have a reasonably fast network connection and a P4 CPU; maybe with a slow connection and a fast CPU the equation works out better with deltas. But I imagine the real advantage of using deltas is server-side, not client-side.

Deltas or no deltas, apt feels significantly faster, but yum isn't slow enough to be a real problem for me.
Probably software autokilled because the account is new and it passed some threshold of speed of votes / comments. Now this thread should die :)
Looks good overall.

Here's my thoughts:

1) A Small inconsistency (well maybe not so small)

"All accounts include $10.00 in free credit! That's up to 30 days for free! Signup now →"

"We're changing the way your business handles calls – all for a mere $5/month per number."

Is it $10/Month? or $5/Month?

2) The Features page

a) It's really wordy. TLDNR

b) Make the get started with a 30 day trial bigger and more prominent (maybe center it). That's your call to action so make it pop.

c) The footer is slightly confusing. If you're going for non-tech savvy people, don't have things like "@voicendo" as the link to twitter. Just say Twitter. People who don't use twitter will be confused. Also, the popover box for twitter loaded noticeably slowly the first time. I'm not sure it's necessary in the first place and I would get rid of it and just link straight to your account in a new window.

3) The pricing / signup page

a) get rid of the cancel button. It's working against you and really does nothing that's not already on the page.

b) Ohhhhhh this page explains the problem I was having where $10 = 1 month but $5 also = one month. That needs to definitely be re-worded. While I just figured it out from your text, it's still not hitting me in the face.

4) Knowledge base

a) I recommend you seed this with anticipated questions.

5) The front page

a) the grey text is hard to read. It's very close to the background color.

b) Again, Too wordy. I almost think you don't need descriptions. Your headings are pretty self explanatory for the most part (maybe).

Good Luck!
Not saying you lie about honoring them (I can personally say you never have lied to me about it), just that a public "we don't honor embargoes" stance isn't always a valid indictment.
For one data point, http://ourdoings.com/ got the "too much text" criticism from Paras, but that ugly wall of sentence fragments actually increased conversions relative to the few carefully crafted sentences that were there before.

For more data points, the post that prompted me to uglify my front page in this manner was Don Norman's: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659020

That said, I'm grateful to Paras. A couple of the feedback items are ones I expect to be very helpful, though I haven't tested them yet.
"A thousand or a million people using [product X] to do their 'INDIVIDUAL' thing is not at all impressive.

What would be impressive would be a thousand or a million people using [product X] to work collaboratively together toward accomplishing something beneficial for everyone in the group.

From this perspective [company Y] has utterly failed us even as it has succeeded spectacularly for the people who work at [company Y] and who have [company Y] shares to sell to others who hope to be able to sell those shares to yet others for a greater amount of money."

It seems that by these measures you would be disappointed with any combination of product X and company Y producing it. 'Cars' and 'Ford', 'Android Phones' and 'Google', etc.. So, what was your point again?
1. No, it is not immoral to vote by dice.

2. Imho, the act of voting in and of itself encompass a conscious decision to act. To act requires thought. Who are we to judge the beliefs or thought process that leads a citizen to vote?

Even if the voter was "reacting emotionally to propaganda", so what? I find it interesting that you use three very loaded words within a span of four.

Reacting. You paint this voter as reptilian. Incapable of thought and merely reacting to various primal instincts.

Emotionally. You impugn this voters ability to remain uncompromised and imply a certain level of deficit.

Propaganda. You concern yourself with the message the
citizen receives and pass judgment as to whether or not it
meets your standards of information.

[edit]
Allow me to elaborate on your first question. You either have the right to vote or you do not. If I chose to vote based on which side of the bed I woke up on then so be it. To say otherwise is to assert your opinion over my right.

You, Sir, are emotionally compromised on this issue.
"Tablets" use pens as input: the iPad is a "pad". Some may claim that "tablet" is a generic term for this form factor of device, but the correct term would be "slate". Please note that Apple never uses the term "tablet" to describe this device: not because they are being "different", but because they really don't sell a "tablet".
We hire remote workers. If you're curious what we do, I just put together a slideshow on how we're using JRuby and Rails to replace our old Java infrastructure piecemeal: http://portal.sliderocket.com/AIMWD/Replacing-Java-Increment...
At one point the ball was going so fast I couldn't see it.
Agile programming 10 years on: Did it deliver? - Computerworld
well neither of the above, in standard python, but the pypy project has _a lot_ of interesting stuff
http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/extradoc.html
As I recall, high-flag low-upvote submissions get auto-killed. This is pretty much necessary to keep spam at bay.

But perhaps an "unkill" button would be useful.
tl;dr: Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. (Rob Pike).
Gatorade is the thirst quencher
I'm relatively new to the linux world. I started using Ubuntu about 3 years ago. I moved to Fedora just to experiment, and it was one of the best choices I made. They do well to encourage their community to contribute, and they make it so easy to do.

It got me involved from the start, and had me starting to dabble in python and learn how to make desktop widgets. Also, having all the dev tools needed available in meta-packages is a huge plus. As well as starting me on the path of coding and learning how to contribute to a project, Fedora may very well be the reason I am back in school for CSIS. That's something other OS's may have never offered me. I have a lot to thank these guys for, hopefully one day I'll be able to.

I'd say it's totally worth trying out. There's a lot of young and innovative minds out there that are googling "how to be a hacker" as I write this, and I hope that they come across the Fedora project while searching.
ooh one other comment in addition to what I said below, use the questions people are asking here to seed the FAQ
Doh! Thank you, I've just pushed the fix.
The only one drawback of git I know is not so good support of windows OSes. What are the other issues?
Obviously, there are lots of reasons why one should fold on a startup, but I'm not sure that the reasons this person gives are that good.

1. completion is usually a goal in itself. You can't succeed with this step, regardless of whether you do succeed after it's complete.

2. The author seems to have simply accepted that there is no room in the market for this site. It's not clear that that's true. There may be niche-markets to pursue, or there may be the standard 'better implementation' options.

3. Giving up before releasing, but grinding out the last bit of code seems unlikely to result in a great product. From an armchair psychologist perspective, it smacks of 'giving up before you can get beaten'.

Kudos to the author for sharing the site, regardless of their low opinion of it.
Yeah in the old days it performed quite bad. Nowadays with the newer distro's like suse 11, (k)ubuntu and a couple of others I really havent found any more glitches than on any regular windows machine running flash..
Thanks Jon, noted!
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. -Churchill
Want to build an app on top of CouchDB? Here's how...
perhaps a higher threshold on non-link submissions?
"moot" is the screenname of the founder of 4chan, who have a tendency to spoil online polls. For example: http://www.buzzfeed.com/reddit/also-the-work-of-4chan-pic
Thanks a bunch, I missed that somehow. The funny thing is that since someone upvoted this topic I just reached the new karma threshold. Hah take that PG :)
I love JSON because it's a strict subset of YAML.
Stairs kill 12 thousand people per year in the US. That's about 4x the lives lost from 911 -- every single year.
Just got it, too. Had a short conversation via IM with it, and I'm already 100% faster. I agree with you on the spacing issue - I wish that you had to tap without a gesture on the center point to insert a spacebar instead of automatically inserting one. That way I could consult between letters.

Eventually muscle memory will kick in.

I'm forcing myself to use it for a week, and will compare typing speeds then...
It's an idea for sure, but kinda out of the target product at the moment! So, at the moment, no :(.
Silverlight : Stop Blaming Microsoft For Your Stupidity
I wrote a blog post about this a few months ago, the cloud or the ladder:

http://blog.opportunitycloud.com/2010/05/07/the-cloud-or-the...

"Cloud" in this context is an opportunity cloud, the sum total of all the positive things that can happen to you at one particular moment. It is what happens when you position yourself to be in a spot where good things happen, not knowing exactly what.

This is a different strategy than the "ladder" strategy which basically is about climbing a corporate career ladder.

When you're in "startup mode" you constantly try to expand your opportunity cloud but you don't always know the direction. It's a completely different way of thinking compared to the ladder.
I remember that building, I spent some time at the ATG offices in early 2001-3. Those offices were unreal. They had their own Starbucks in the break room. I was always a little surprised they stuck it out.