skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Awful Marketing Campaign from Forbes
I don't get the "natural" part of the argument. If I carve a spear out of wood and put it through your heart, it will still kill you, even though it is all natural. Clearly it is what you do with it that matters...

I think earth has been terraformed by organisms several times, like there used to be not so much oxygen floating around? But I think the organisms that released the oxygen died after the terraforming. The same could happen to us... Not saying it will, just warning against some sort of Gaia theory that nature will fix everything to our benefit. Nature doesn't really care about us.
check out mine at http://blogs.jobdig.com/wwds
Hank, I agree with you overall on this issue, and I liked your article, but your argument in this comment is terrible. You are appealing to your own authority and you're not provably right in any sense.
Stratify: A Post-Bubble Success Story
It's weird that MS are blundering so badly with Vista. Server 2008 is shaping up to be a solid (if rather late) product. There's even a command-line only version (Server Core Edition).

The question MS are struggling with is "what does this do that that didn't", something Apple have been quite good at, e.g. '10.5 has Time Machine!".
Let me add to the chorus: the density option in preferences saved it for me. I was absolutely dreading the beta.reddit.com because of all the whitespace and when it went live I was sad. Then I found about the compress option and now I'm much much happier. With that option turned on, it's much nicer then before (both before the update, and before enabling the option :P).
Mozilla makes Firefox 3.0 bug-fix decision
The thing is, if (and it's a big if) Trusted Computing meant an end to virii etc, it would be worth it for many people. But as you say, it's a bit of a one-way street.
I can down-vote some people but not others.
That's very cool, and quite twisted.
Ask YC & PG: Can I use Artwork on my websites?
Hi,

I was wondering how can I use images of paintings by Picasso, Bruegel, Robert Rauschenberg and etc on my website? Can I display them on my website? I mean I've seen such images on Wikipedia and even on http://www.bugbear.com. Can I use them on my website? If no, then how do I go about acquiring some images? What is the correct and legitimate way to use images of an artwork? Please enlighten me.

Thanks in advance.
Dell Found Guilty of Fraud, Deceptive Business Practices | Tech Jaws
EC2 charges only for the time you use, rounded to the next hour. A small instance running for 6.1 hours costs $0.70 + bandwidth.

http://www.amazon.com/FAQ-EC2-AWS/b?ie=UTF8&node=2015910...
"Amazing Resources for Startups, includes list of Angels & VCs"
I think that it is impossible for someone to troll his own blog.

I think that is is especially impossible to be a "troll" when someone else is posting entries from your own blog to a social news service. No, I don't think that qualifies.
I'm not convinced at all that this strategy (immediate sign up form) is not yielding more registrations than if they pursued the author's strategy (describe it in a page and then have you click through to the sign up form).

From experience, curiosity is a major emotional driver. And if already there, a good % of average people will probably fill out the form. Now certainly the average Hacker News reader would not. So the question is then whether the average blogger is more like the average person or the average Hacker News reader? It is an empirical test (splash page vs sign up page) that they may or may not have run. Of course, there are other options too: combine both pages into one, varying levels of program description (down to one sentence), etc.
It's too bad this article is such a troll. I'm sure there are intelligent and useful things to be said about vista; but this article is not where they can be found.

Vista strikes me as a reasonably good OS crippled by the need to support the entire win32 legacy. It's too bad that Microsoft can't take 2000 of their best programmers and turn them loose on building a new OS that supports .NET and nothing before; as it might be quite worthwhile.

However; Microsoft the company seems to be slipping into the senility phase, thinking that their spot at the top of the pile is a god given right and that they should stay there forever. They seem to have forgotten that it's capitalism, it's dog eat dog; and it's their turn to be a dog's breakfast.
A lot of people left West Berlin when the city was divided and a lot of people left East Berlin right after reunification. The massive housing surplus that resulted caused housing costs to sink and cheap housing made the city a mecca for alternative culture. Cost of living probably doesn't even hit a quarter of Paris or London.

Here's an article from 6 years ago that's somewhat dated, but still gives you a feel for things good and bad:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_23/b3786132....
Ahhh landing pages, why so difficult? The problem is that they designed their site and then created the ad. Then, they tried to figure out the best possible landing page.

Then they thought "if we land them on the home page, they get more info. But if we land them right on the sign up form, there are fewer clicks to get to the action page".

Landing pages should be one of the top priorities when design both a site and ad campaign. This post is a pretty good lesson in what to do right through an example of failure.

Of course, in defense of Forbes, perhaps they were testing different pages? But still, bit of a wasted test with a landing page that bad.
There is no right way to do something this stupid.
"MS died and stopped being relevent to anything much a long while ago"

Is this 2020? It must be the future because MS has not died and is still very relevant.

"Now you can buy PCs without an OS,"

How many non geeks do you know that bought one of these? I know 0.

"The operating system is becoming irrelevent"

Again this must be 2020 because the OS is still essential to almost 100% of computer users.

"IE is nose diving in usage"

Any stats to back up this claim? I'm not seeing it, in fact IE7 usage is now higher than Firefox on hundreds of my managed websites.

I'm sorry but you live in fantasy tech-geek world where Linux and browser based operating systems are the norm. Do me favor and do some work for real "users" and then re-evaluate your opinions about where MS is and is heading.
I'm pretty convinced that they need something that tells you for what you are signing up.
I agree that my suggestion might not be the optimal solution (only practice can tell you which is ideal), but I can't imagine any way anyone would fill in all those detailed form fields out of curiosity. Even if some people do, they'll be a tiny, tiny proportion.

I mean, there's 19 fields on that form!

(can be found at https://app.adify.com/Register.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fMemberPages... )
I wouldn't be so sure. I've run that test before and it has come out the other way.
I have no advice, but this worries me:

"The product [...], has zero features other than what we consider the one, basic, bare minimum feature of the product space."

That sounds like a well targeted product to me, however you feel about it. Could you produce an economy version of your existing application that only had that feature? Then you would be in a good position to upsell later on. Even if the time scales make it impractical for this bid, it might be useful if you come up against this guy again later.
Agreed, their form is way too long. They do not need all this info up front, and would certainly increase registration if they shortened it.

That being said, now looking at the form, there is another emotional incentive to finish (without knowing what it is): chance of getting money. The one message they convey with this is that you may make money off of it. As Charlie Munger has pointed out (http://vinvesting.com/docs/munger/human_misjudgement.html), when you start combining multiple strong emotional drivers, you can get some startling results.

In any case, I don't think it would be a tiny, tiny proportion. You are making assumptions about the average person based on your beliefs. Again, only empirical results would be useful here. Every case is different.
Vista DOESN'T search inside files, or if it does, it does so very very badly. I spent half an hour trying to do a very simple search for one keyword in a folder with php files, and trying various tricks from the net when it became obvious I can't do it on my own, with no luck.

That was probably the first major flaw in Vista I've run into.
For browser statistics
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
IE 7 is less than Firefox.

I found last year when I worked an Ajax project that when I replace DOM that contains images, IE 6/7 will load images twice. While Safari, Firefox and Opera all just load those images once. So if your managed servers have any program that replaces DOM on the fly that contains images, IE's usage in server log will be higher because IE wastes the bandwidth twice.
Vista's failure is most evident once you've used Ubuntu, which contains wheelbarrows full of innovation not incorporated into MS's effort, which is ironic because that's the software you're actually paying for.
Matt Maroon: I disagree with the rest of the world, and here's why.
Using Amazon EC2
Hi everyone,
We are currently using PHP as our server scripting language and MySQL as our database backend.

We have read about the benefits of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. I was wondering if anyone in this forum has used this service? What are your thoughts on switching from a shared hosting plan to this service? Any resources explaining how it all works (e.g: is there MySQL support, how do you communicate with one database if you are running many instances etc?)

Thanks
As a very active social bookmark user I don't need 'help' bookmarking your site, I already have browser plugins, toolbar links and plenty if incentive to bookmark if I find your article/site/page useful.
Along with the "US govt. red tape", there are US subsidies for plant construction (read the article linked to above), and US law limits the liability of nuclear-plant operators in case of accident.

The governments of those other countries provide even more subsidies to their nuclear industries.
The Arctic monkeys gave away their music in the form of the Myspace player. I think your view of success in music is very narrow indeed hence where our disagreement comes from. For you a band is only successful when it sells a lot of records. Well by that standard of course the removal of the record industry will make you think no band can be successful but thats not the only measure of success.
Why Tru2Way won't kill Apple TV or Netflix streaming boxes
It's a site with web development tutorials. Of course Firefox has a strong presence.

Try stats from a less focused source:

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/
Are you a TJ?
What is a TJ? My friends and me are used to use this abbr for "technique jockey". Isn't this new way to combine techniques, programming patterns, programming languages, APIs to useful Mashups a way of art?

What do you think about it?
Also from their wiki page(and sourced).

With a limited number of CDs available, fans began to rip the music back onto their computers and share it amongst themselves. The group did not mind, saying "we never made those demos to make money or anything. We were giving them away free anyway — that was a better way for people to hear them. And it made the gigs better, because people knew the words and came and sang along."
We have the default set at 10% (but people can slide it back to 0 if they want). Right now we're seeing a tip back percentage of 4.3 percent.
"I can meet their price with little margin, and it's not a big deal, we'll still make money on the up-front but we'll make a lot less than usual on ongoing (not a problem)"

Industries with a high enough profit margin that they can still make good money even with discounting heavily are doomed for extinction, and replacement by someone smaller, younger and hungrier. Good luck and enjoy your success while it lasts.
Labels don't create demand, they might want you to believe that since it makes them sound important but they don't not anymore anyhow.

I have actually gone to lots of concerts where I had no clue who the band was as have many people I know. Most cities have a pretty active live music scene with lots of people who will go to just about any show they can, and those people start spreading the news.

Also getting rid of the labels removes nothing at all except for mass commercial cd distribution. Even then I doubt the online music stores would disappear since a lot of people will pay for the convenience.
I would highly recommend Biostatistical Analysis, 4th Edition by Jerrold H. Zar (http://www.amazon.com/Biostatistical-Analysis-4th-Jerrold-Za...). Don't let title mislead you. This book does does an excellent job presenting the background, development and fundamentals of a wide variety of statistical methods. The treatment is very thorough; if you can work through the entire book, you would certainly possess a good understanding of the topic. What I appreciate most is the comprehensive treatment of the limits of each method/test, allowing you to apply them (or not) with confidence.

Another classic is The Use and Abuse of Statistics by W.J. Reichmann. The treatment is not nearly as formal, but it is still a worthwhile read.
I'm using Heroku, which runs on Amazon. Since I'm not using Amazon service directly, this might actually be a more fair comparison (AWS by itself is lower level than Heroku and GAE). I don't plan to switch because I've been having a good experience with Heroku, I happen to know Rails and my project is already well underway.

What I would like to see is a functional language supported by a Heroku-type service or on GAE so that I could take the same in-cloud dev approach and learn a new language paradigm at the same time. I'm impulsive, so right now I'm interested in ErlyWeb. Python isn't different enough to warrant the jump, so unless I magically hit the level where I will benefit from Big Table (and I don't just use SimpleDB or Heroku doesn't pick up a doc-DB in the meantime), I'm fine where I am.

I am very glad they lifted the user limit, however, because I would like to see what the non-early-adopters start to produce.
Hey Alexis, I had to kill the "Customize your reddit" frame and the submit/create windows on the right as they are serious real-estate hogs on my 5:4 monitor at work. If you guys could add this to the preferences it would probably help out some users like me who are not willing to play with greasemonkey.
OR, the smaller competitor will deliver a much smaller and simpler product for less money and build a solid reputation as a high value low cost provider who's not over pricing their software just because they're working for the "government" which is known to have deep pockets and understand little about what they're buying.
The most effective landing page? The words "Sigh up now!" in bold across the top followed by a sign up form below.

Sure frugal people would want to know what they're signing up for, but we're no after frugal people are we?
Students Fail -- and Professor Loses Job
California home prices fell 32% from April '07 to April '08
You are right. But sometimes authority and experience are relevant. I cant help that I really do know what I am talking about on this matter. I guess I could go out and interview some other people about how this part of the industry works so that I would be relying on someone else's authority and not mine, but we don't all have equivalent knowledge on everything. I have been involved in music for a long time and know how this part of the business works.

I am not sure how, other than expressing that, that I can explain this. This is not really a judgment issue but about explaining the dynamics of an existing market. If you would prefer to believe that I don't know what I am talking about that is fine. But at minimum I would suggest, if you are really interested in how artists today become successful that you do a little independent (and therefore not tainted by my bias) investigation from people that are really in the biz. The funny part is that there really is nothing to argue about here. No one in music will tell you that concert promoters create demand for artists. It feels a little surreal to even be arguing the point.
That is pretty awesome. I was just about to write the social bookmarking code for my new blog engine... this is excellent.
It will be interesting to see what happens the next time Apple needs to drastically overhaul their language and how gracefully it gets handled. I think they did a decent job in handling "classic" applications.

Why can't Microsoft do the same thing? Abstract out support for old versions and build something concrete that can be expanded. OSX has been around since 2001 with steady improvements with each upgraded version. A lot has changed on the outside as well as under the hood but the same core architecture is still in place. Why? Because it works very well, is modular, and can be improved without a massive overhaul.
I'm sure they're trying, pragmatically, to solve the problem of providing the self-contained .NET development experience to the effort of creating web animation and RIA. Market share is part of it, but they've always succeeded in having a committed developer base by providing fairly comprehensive tools that make everything feel somewhat like Visual Basic (which they do remarkably well).

I would argue that such an approach is what makes me very queasy around ASP.NET, but that's another story.
"What if this account turned Jesus' betrayal on its head, and in it the villain became a hero?"

It's a Nick Cage movie.
Yes. You are absolutely right. I view everything through the lens of economics. My view of success is making money. I don't think anyone has yet been able to make money without first selling records. That may come, but it has not yet.
Sydney is real estate, through and through.

London: "You should have been here 150 years ago" is essentially "you should be more aristocratic". I think that signal is strong in London. I have been at dinner with friends who started arguing about how far they had to commute on the tube (as a proxy for social class.) The English pretend to the world that it doesn't matter but it seems to matter deeply to them. This seems to be an English hidden rule; that is how the discussion started.
I heard a great interview on C-SPAN yesterday morning (I can't find a reference, sadly) with an economist preparing to testify to Congress that the chief problem with prices is that they are not currently based on supply and demand.

His argument is that pricing is being driven by largely unregulated speculation via the "Enron loophole" providing unsupervised markets in which to buy and sell between speculators for the primary purpose of artificially increasing the value of the asset.

If this is true, then Friedman would be repeating the supply problem as the chief factor in increases when that might only be part of it and might not be the biggest part. The economist also claims that increasing supply will have a disproportionately small impact on the cost because the cost is not being principally set by supply vs. demand and therefore it would just provider larger hordes of strategic assets for the companies engaged in this practice who are hedging their positions against the dollar decline.

Is anyone smarter (and sexier!) than me able to bolster or refute that claim?
What Problem is Silverlight Trying to Solve?

It's trying to solve the "someone else's product is more popular than ours" problem.
If you read what I said I never said concert promoters were the people that create demand, just that labels aren't the only way to create demand and the disappearance of labels will not cause the disappearance of promoters or live music either.
I use Disqus in my poetry web app and realized that it doesn't address auto-discovery for the comments on a poem (which is a blog post for all intents and purposes). The Disqus component on the page does include an RSS link, but it's not picked up by the browsers.

I ended up writing some DOM javascript to append the link element to the head tag after the page renders. It works in Safari and Firefox (haven't tested IE or Opera yet). It's a little bit grisly and I'd like to see a more integrated solution down the road but it does the job.

http://pastie.caboo.se/204707
I think that it is impossible for someone to troll his own blog.

It's possible. Instead of a comment trolling on a site, a blog is trolling on the Internet (or blogosphere, if you like that word).
It's not even that because you can be economically successful as a band without selling a single record.

Plenty of bands make a decent wage just by touring lots. To say no one does implies that you think of the music industry as only the top 0.01% of megabands. Unless you're a megaband negotiating an awesome contact odds are you will make most of your money from touring not CDs.
Although I use S3 I don't currently use EC2 and the limited research I've done on it may mean that some of what I'm about to say is incorrect. Hopefully others with more experience can jump in and correct any errors.

Firstly, when you talk about a shared hosting plan I assume you don't need to set up the server, you just drop your files in the htdocs folder and your site is ready to go. EC2 instances are analogous to a vps system. You're responsible for setting up the operating system, installing apache, php and mysql. There are 'images' (not sure that's the correct term) set up with everything ready to go but that still leaves you responsible for a lot more of your site than you may be currently.

My understanding is that MySQL is problematic. Currently each instance is given a certain amount of hard drive space but if that instance crashes for any reason all the data is lost. The intention is that S3 is used for your permanent storage but it isn't suitable for running a database on. Permanent drives have been announced but they will only be available later in the year. Until then you are left with work-a-rounds, frequent backups to S3, mirroring drives across instances in the hopes that you'll only ever lose one instance.

Connecting multiple web servers to a single backend database server is handled in the same way it would be with any other vps service or indeed dedicated servers.
I wish i could click on the arrows and jump to the page. But that would probably not recreate the frustration of accidentally flipping to the wrong page and being completely confused.
Is Amazon S3 a Good CDN of Choice?
Is Amazon S3 a Good CDN of Choice in comparison to other services offered by Limelight, Panther, or Akamai?
AWS has been working great for us. The new persistent storage feature is the best thing since sliced bread (I'm in the alpha). I definitely don't see us leaving EC2 for AppEngine anytime soon.

AFAIK, Google doesn't offer anything compelling enough for most people to switch.
If you're coming from Windows it's a pretty long learning curve. Seek out the videos on the site, they're buried but worth searching out. Finding someone with Linux experience to help you is recommended as well.

But AWS is pretty amazing and in my case it was worth the journey. Still struggling with re-architecting apps into SOA but the scaling dividends should be worthwhile.
I develop in a Windows environment currently. I currently use S3 as a storage solution so I am somewhat familiar with Amazon's web service offerings. EC2 seems really compelling but I am still not really sure how it all works (how the MySQL database can be stored in S3, how databases can be replicated across instances so that there is data consistency etc).
The new persistent storage feature is game changing for MySQL. It is definitely the missing piece to the puzzle. Backing up MySQL is just a matter of calling 1 api command now. Plus, you'll be able to have pretty much unlimited storage mounted to an instance.