skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it's unacceptable.. but are you just going to buy a ticket on Nov 15 and let your seat stay empty?

Or are you going to let them do something unacceptable to you?
I consider what you're describing to the equivalent of not voting anyway. There isn't a candidate in my state who I could feel good about voting for. I consider not voting to be a louder act of protest than voting for someone I half or quarter like.
How about this: Of the topics being voted on that people have gone out of their way to promote, or that the media have covered, none of them struck my curiosity to the point where I feel compelled to dig further into them.

I asked here, on the off chance that somebody has one that they think the HN audience might care about.
They don't really care about the companies name or if it's a company credit card.
Search and Social Media Fails by California's Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown
A drawing by my brother that I keep an eye on when things get complicated. It makes me laugh and help me move on, maybe you'll appreciate it too while working on your stuff.
I'm hoping that if enough people refuse to pay attention they'll just go away on their own.
Did you mean to post a link to the site to allow us to help you figure out which language it is in?
A little over the top, no? I agree that having developers commit to production code day 1 isn't right for all companies, but having systems sufficiently automated that you can set up a dev workstation and actually commit code in, say, 90 minutes should definitely be a goal for all companies.
Wasn't planning on it.
Media Tycoon Alexander Lebedev: profile
It should be enough for me to say "I'm not making that assumption." Rather than call me a liar, you could assume that either you misunderstood, or I misspoke and decided correcting it wasn't worth spending text on.

Maybe I just assume too much of people. Was this little diversion really necessary?
No move can be made away from hard currency without preserving a means for private, anonymous transactions.
Oh great. Hundreds of issues touting airships as the Next Big Thing.
1. Be clear about the problem you're solving.

2. Watch (in person) real people using your website trying to solve this problem. Many times. Fix the most glaring problems.

This is the best book to learn usability testing, and the only one I would recommend: http://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Surgery-Made-Easy--Yourself/dp/...
If people keep writing test cases, eventually we might know what HTML5 is!
Virus breakthrough raises hope over ending common cold
It's not so much the people you describe voting for candidates for reasons as silly as their hair, it's the candidates attempting to appeal to these people which I feel is the biggest issue.

In the recent Australian election by election day each party had summarized there policies/ attacks into a few dot points which they had talked about over and over again hoping I guess to impart at least a few dot points on people before they vote.
Heh heh. thanks for sharing.
Two important notes: current stable version of Chrome 7 so beta of IE9 should be compared with Chrome 8. Say it takes 6 months for IE9 to go gold, in that time Chrome stable will have had two more releases bringing it up to 9 which will probably contain a number of enhancements to close the gape if not over take IE9.
Who the fuck are you to tell me what my rights are? I can complain all I want, regardless of my voting activities.
This was just killed a few minutes ago, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1860118
I voted on Saturday, too. Some of the more enlightened states in the US allow voting by mail.
Opposite of Google's?

I don't know... Recently, Google's been doing a lot of evil things like... collecting WiFi data "by mistake"
Google’s New Places API
In Washington and Oregon (soon California) this is done by mail.
Looks like it keeps getting killed so I'll delete it myself. Thanks for the heads up.
Building high-throughput data pipelines with Google App Engine
Instead of reading books, why not organize weekly Friday user afternoons: invite three users to use your product. Or a competing product if yours is not ready. Every freaking Friday. Invite the team, too, with pizza and beers.

Better than any book.
Nevada has an explicit "none of the above" on the ballot.
What they should do is a randomized control trial in which they either keep the field and make its meaning more explicit or get rid of the field at all.

Then they should look at the differences in sales by comparing the two groups.

Nothing wrong with being a bit academic..
No, but there should be some way or another that those who create large, international websites should know that their websites are going to be used by non native english speakers :-)

Still there is lots of web forms with a Country field and a State field. And in the state field you'll only find American states.
I haven't lifted weights in probably 15 years, so you'll need to modify that number to something that makes sense.

In Climbing, I know that when I'm on form I can generally get a route graded 7b+ after a couple hours of working it and a few redpoint attempts. The few 7c routes I've done each took about a dozen days of work spread out over the course of a month.

The route I did on one of my pre-cold days was rated 8a+ (though it was likely a bit overgraded), and I got it second go. Like I said, I came back a week later, and I couldn't even do the single hardest move in isolation.

So, that far out of the ordinary.
Pre-orders Open for Boxee Box, November 10 Launch
Hi
haker
I have spoken to a lot of companies who have A/B testing somewhere on their radar, but some combination of "That's nobody's job, so we haven't actually started doing it", (sometimes) organizational infighting (marketing wants to start, engineering has higher priorities and refuses to allocate resources to "twiddling text", etc), and uncertainty about outcomes means they don't start it yet.

One of my big tasks at some consulting clients is convincing people to buy into A/B testing. The easy way is to show them how their website is leaking staggering sums of money, and present A/B testing as the cheap, reliable solution to that problem in the future.

These are smart software companies who transact most of their business online, by the way. The broader economy which isn't primarily web-focused has many, many, many opportunities to improve their execution.
You can get a job at a startup, but it has to match your skillset. If you haven't built anything yourself, then just saying "I'm smart and want to work for you" isn't going to be enough - your training needs to add some critical value.

There probably aren't a huge number of startup directly related to psychology (excepting dating websites), but I suspect it might not be a huge stretch to get into an education related startup.

Take some short courses on instructional design and pedagogy, then look for non-coding jobs where your training can add value. For example, the "November 2010 Who's Hiring" thread has this:

Education Start Up - just raised a large series A from NEA.
We're looking for all sorts of people - from product managers to front designers to back end engineers, we're hiring across the board. Also open to internships.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1856026

If not education, then there may be some other hot field that's closely related to what you study. Don't say "social software", though, because everyone's an expert there. (OTOH, if you bring serious data analytics skills then maybe you'd have a chance there)
The McGurk Effect (How Vision Affects Sound)
Cut text; reduce choices; only offer one CTA button.

It's fascinating how an Occam's Razor-type force pervades successful web design.
I think we're clear on what you're saying. And I still think it's a bad thing.

Vote on a case-by-case basis, without bias from your group or political party. Or please don't vote.
Funny, I can't bring myself to vote because I can't find participating and legitimizing this morally acceptable.
I wonder about the Mondays. Wouldn't it be more likely that people break up over weekend but only update their status on Monday?

Update: not that they claim otherwise, but the point is that this data is tainted by internet usage patterns and other things that affect Facebook use.
> there are no stable ideas that can be used to found a sustainable business

I didn't mention 'stable'!

What I think is that there are ideas that, at the right point in time, allow people who can execute on them well to do really well. And I think some of those ideas, at least, can be done well by a reasonable number of people. For instance, something like eBay was likely to pop up at that point in time. So for a little while, prior to its inception, it would have been a valuable idea.

However... no, I don't think a market for ideas can be stable due to the non-exclusivity of ideas! Once one is out there, its value drops quite a bit. It's similar to markets for some kinds of information, like knowing the closing price of the DJIA on the 3rd of November. If I knew that today, it'd be worth a lot of money. Next week, it'll be worth nothing.
I'll admit that I shamelessly stole this from Reddit. However, I thought it was really cool and thought people here would be interested in a 'optical illusion' that you can't understand.

I was also hoping to get a non joke answer to my serious question: Would people who speak different languages (with possibly different base sounds) not have this problem?
why does this get to stay but this gets killed?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1860118
Yup, it's shocking. However, is this more of a problem with A/B testing or just bad user experience/design? I suppose an A/B test would've been to remove the Company field from the payment process and see how things have performed.

I think companies are more concerned with more obvious A/B tests (button color, page headings) than with testing large changes to their site or testing more in depth things like user experience.
Exactly, which is why review and testing is so important.
Meeks doesn't work for Oracle (he worked for Novell, last time I checked). I suspect this is also true of most of the other people on the list.

Edit: still Novell, Michael's blog is at http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/
Actually, map is still faster:

In [24]: timeit ''.join(map(chr, ll))
100000 loops, best of 3: 3.91 us per loop

In [25]: timeit ''.join([chr(i) for i in ll])
100000 loops, best of 3: 5.85 us per loop

In [26]: timeit ''.join(chr(i) for i in ll)
100000 loops, best of 3: 7.79 us per loop
Uneducated voters who vote just because people tell them to piss me off more than people who just plain don't vote.

Politicians in our country are worse than salesmen. That's why we have such little voter turnout, not because people don't feel obligated.
Dreamy First Night with MacBook Air
Problem is, that this field is question is actually useful for some subset of clients. Making the intent of both "Company" and "billing address" fields is probably most meaningful way to go, possibly hiding the "Company" field behind checkbox like "Bill my employer".
Talk to your partner and ask him what he coded it in, then start learning it. Also have a talk with him about management issues. It sounds like it's your project but it's not going according to an agreed-upon plan. Having a serious chat with him about it is probably a better place to start than just pulling the project from him.
What would you say if you knew it was your last chance?
You may want to rethink this strategy, because this is not what's going to happen.
Local elections are very democratic. It's winner take all. None of this electoral college non-sense. The best opportunity an individual has to influence elections is to vote in the primaries but few people bother to show up. You'll have the choice of a dozen candidates or more -- most of whom have a very legitimate shot at getting the nomination. It's common for primaries to be decided by only a couple hundred votes because so few people show up to vote. For the general election you have less choices but, at the local level, it's still winner takes all democracy. There are always third parties and/or write-ins if you don't want to vote for the two major parties. In many places we have referendums or propositions on the ballot which offer the most direct form of democracy

The argument people make about their votes 'not counting' is like an individual choosing not to join the basketball team because they might not hit the winning shot. Every point counts. I don't understand the extreme egotism that people would opt not to participate unless they get to cast the deciding vote. Talk about un-democratic? Some people want their votes to be more than equal apparently. It goes back to people complaining about the two party system and doing absolutely nothing to help third parties.
The descriptions of the books are pretty useless, just very short marketing blurbs. You will get much better information by going to the Amazon homepage, searching on Arduino, and reading the customer reviews.
There are several (paying) posts in the team mentioned being advertised at http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/ (one of which specifically mentions Open Office). They're in the 'Ubuntu platform' section.
As always, test. I'm broadly supportive of this advice, but I know people who do long-form copy and see conversion rates slip when they switch to short form, and (while it isn't long-form) the BCC home page historically performs better with lots of text than with little.
A/B anything (testing or dual projects at once etc) is seen in some places as a "lack of skills, otherwise you would know beforehand".

(which I don't agree with, in case someone doubts!)
I keep being tempted to move to something other than Ubuntu. Got my start on Linux way back when it was still called "Fedora Core" so I think I'm going to wind up installing this to see how it looks these days.

Anyone use Fedora regularly?
I reread rrc's comment, which seems could be interpreted as both ways; either to advocate requirement of positive identification to vote, or to require voters to take an exam to be licensed as a voter, which is what I believe what was meant.

regardless, literacy tests were done before, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws for a background of our (shameful) past.
UV wave generation requires significantly more energy consumption than microwaves. Plus, UV radiation is highly absorbed in the atmosphere, leading to low signal to noise ratio.
Compulsory voting is a needless encroachment on people's freedom to do as they please. People can't be bribed to vote when they're required to vote? :)

It may seem weird, but there are families so destitute that they may have better things to do than vote.

The voter turnout will be just fine without compulsory voting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout#International_dif....

Looking at the comments again, tjogin summed it up pretty well.
I think it's honest of him to say that.

I'm not sure what your political views are, but if you are left-leaning, how much Fox News do you watch? If you tend towards the right then do you read The Guardian and/or HuffPost?
Admission: this is my first laptop ever.

In early comparisons this 2.13Ghz, 4Gbyte ram paper weight is an adequate replacement for my monster dual core 3Ghz, 4Gbyte ram Dell desktop running Ubuntu (appropriately named Juggernaut).

I don't do heavy animations with Adobe. My standard fair is light gaming and web scripting front/back end. I'd like to push 3D JavaScript graphics with HTML5 but don't yet have a need.
Yes, one example of those kinds of pages are the never ending sales pitch pages (e.g. selling parrot training). So, text _per se_ is not a bad thing on a page. But you have to provide proper flow and layout to generate interest and then seduce visitor to that prominent 'Add to Cart' button.
is the "too much text" really a problem? if too much text didn't work, none of those "buy my crappy ebook and make billions like me" sales pages would work.

regarding the designer, if you are just starting out and can't afford one...borrow concepts from your competitors. If you are selling shoes, borrow the design from zappos. Why? Because you know that they've optimized every single thing, since even .5% can cost them millions.

I'm pretty sure that quote is from pg.

And if you want to be a real jackass, you can add an exit pop to your site.

The call to action thing is very important. Most users are very uncertain, if you give them too many options, they'll get confused and won't do anything.

As far as social proof, yes I agree, but it's not that hard to fake the social proof. Nothing is stopping you from adding a Techcrunch image to your site. And if techcrunch bitches...just point them to that completely unrelated comment you made with a link to your site.

overall good post, since I find that pretty much every website will have one of those missing.
Or 5 digit "zip" codes.

// I wonder how many Internet residents live in 90210? I know I do in a couple of places.
Regarding the "your greatest enemy is the back button" quote-- the earliest citations on HN are http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1136272 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1136272, attributing it to "one of the founders of BackType".

Personally, I think Patio11 put a nice twist on it here, though: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1686784
Father Bed: desperate times call for desperate measures
The biggest problem with voting not being mandatory is that a lot of people don't have the opportunity because they can't get off work. If you made voting mandatory (or at least made election day a paid holiday), this impediment might be alleviated.

That just sounds like a lazy excuse to me. I don't know how long it takes to vote in the US, but where I live in Canada, we just finished our municiple elections. It was one of the longest ballots I can remember, yet the entire process, including walking from my house to the polling station and back, took about 20 minutes after work.

I have to say, I just don't understand this voter apathy or this sentiment that if none of the candidates are any good then don't vote. I really do think it is your duty as a citizen.
Actually it's the opposite. When you pass String.fromCharCode directly, then you're passing reference (not name) to that particular implementation, and it can't change.

When you pass anonymous function, then every execution of that function needs to look up `String.fromCharCode` (anonymous functions save scope, not references).

I'm surprised by the benchmark as well. I suspect it may be because calls to native functions are handled differently from calls to JS functions, and JS engine is able to optimize call inside anonymous function (create trace/JIT and inline it), but not when calling by reference (and perhaps keeps calling it by some expensive proxy object).
Yes "too much text" may be a problem is if it unstructured. Also, if you don't have a designer you can buy one nice-looking template from http://themeforest.net

I would personally never "fake" social proof as (apart from ethical concerns) it may have legal liabilities which a startup cannot afford.

EDIT: Typo in link
This is the kind of summary that complements "Offer HN" posts so well. I totally missed your original thread, something I would have taken advantage of if I saw it. By the time I might have seen it, the service would be long gone. Even in that case where I missed the opportunity to get a custom assessment, here is a summary that I or thousands of future visitors can reach. The result is persistent value rather than a one off. I hope future "Offer HN" services do the same.
Sadly we will all still be held back in using HTML5 by Microsoft's previous attempts at a browser.
> Mandatory voting is disagreeable for the same reason mandatory anything is: it uses force to make people do what they don't want to do, which reeks of tyranny.

I very much disagree with this statement, which smacks of hyperbole. A citizen has certain responsibilities. It is not tyranny to expect that citizen to perform their responsibility. One of the responsibilities is jury duty and, I would argue, voting is another.
Please, do vote if you understand the issues, and where the candidates stand.

But otherwise, please DO NOT VOTE. Just because an idea makes you feel warm and fuzzy doesn't make it right. There are plenty of things in this world that are counter-intuitive, and if you're relying only on your beliefs, there's a good chance you'll get it wrong.

If you've never taken a class or read a book on economics, please don't vote. (I recommend Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlett [1])

If you've never taken a class or read a book on political philosophy, please don't vote. If you don't know the difference between natural law and utilitarianism, please don't vote. (I recommend reading J S Mill [2], or Locke [3], or Mises [4], or Hayek [5])

And if you don't believe me, then you should also read The Myth of the Rational Voter, by Bryan Caplan [6]. He discusses not only why voters do vote irrationally, but also why it's rational for them to do so.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Economics_in_...

[2] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/John_Stuart_M...

[3] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/John_locke

[4] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Ludwig_von_Mi...

[5] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Friedrich_Hay...

[6] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Myth_of_t...
Common practice. When I was involved in doing RFPs for hardware, you were allowed to say "We need a computer. It needs to be 32 bit. It needs to have such-and-such amount of memory, be able to run Unix, and ..." You could even say what color it had to be.

Then they'd print a bunch of copies of these several hundred page documents up and mail them to IBM, Honeywell, Wang, DG and DEC and so forth for bids.

The guy at (say) DG would get this, see that the Govt wanted a Vax, and toss the RFP. IBM might try a bid, but usually the "Unix" bit would cause them trouble. [This was well before any serious IBM effort in Unix].
I personally thought PG made it but couldn't find a citation.
Funny how chrome gets 100 on the acid3 and ie9 gets a 95.

http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/benchmarks/Acid3/Default.h...
A Bed With Zippers
A large group of very angry, not especially thoughtful people influenced by demagogues and rabble-rousers like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

As a political cynic who doesn't invest much thought in political issues, I consider them the same as any other populist movement: until they start rioting or shooting people, they're not really interesting enough to look up from my code to take notice of.
The modern tech CEO: Barefoot and 21
It might. I can imagine using some online conferencing tools like LiveMeeting (the one I know most about) or even sending code and doing Skype conversations. You'd be surprised at how few high schools teach programming BTW. Very sad.
Australia's system of democracy sounds rather... authoritarian.
That dude is way too jaded. I'm voting for him.
porn has much, much less value then a lot of information. Supply and demand, and the supply of porn is seemingly endless.
Yup, I'm a developer.

Red Hat (where I work) has a large team of people dedicated entirely to virtualization, so for that use, particularly higher-end server virt, it's getting very good.
The CrankySwami - Don't buy any more *stuff* until you've had a consult
> I would argue, voting is another [responsibility].

What is your argument?
It could be, but I couldn't find it either.

Or, I should say, Google couldn't find it.
The results table is also extremely misleading. There are many tests with no results for a particular browser, and in some cases the table gives a 0% score for no results in a category, and in other cases 100% for, say, two passes plus a bunch of "no results". At this point, you should probably treat the percentages as random numbers, not meaningful metrics of anything.

See here and followups for discussion:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-testsuite/20...