skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I brought it up because people actually believe it. As you noticed both resolution and time are important limitations. You don't get to arbitrarily examine things at any resolution or for any length of time. Stick a AI up to a webcam at 648x480 @ 30 cycles per second pointed at a brick wall and it's not going to be able to say comment on politics in the middle east.

Or in a more down to earth example, if we stop building ever higher energy particle accelerators there are things we simply don't get to know.
Ask HN: How should I improve my landing page?
Hello,

I am a co-founder of a free marketplace, Lifemall.com.

I've looked at the recent Ask HN thread regarding simplifying sign-ups and log-ins - "Techniques To Simplify Sign-Ups and Log-Ins" and will shortly implement some of these recommendations. (Not sure about Facebook or Twitter integration yet)

However, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on our landing page and how else we could improve it.
I don't really think they're running scared either but I think that's the problem for me.

The more I think about this the more I think it's a perception thing. I mean, Apple announces similar unverifiable numbers at almost every event. But it never seems like Apple is trying to defend itself against claims of the company being in danger. Because no one would claim Apple is in danger at this point.

The problem with Disqus is there are those claims floating around. So while Disqus is doing the same thing Apple does it comes across differently. It comes across like a response to the doom claims. Even if it's not.

So upon further thought I just think, from a strategic perspective, these posts aren't wise for companies that might be perceived as in danger. Because they seem to validate the claim.
No, the last sentence of the first quote from the judge's order says Oracle can't use any of those claims for existing products. As soon as Oracle comes up with a new product those claims are possible again.
Ruby Mendicant: Progress Report 1
> I did the exact opposite. ... My clients loved me.

Yes.

> We'd probably all be a lot better off using softer sales tactics.

That doesn't follow.

Suppose that 10% of the population responds best to soft sales tactics and that the other 100 sales folk are using hard tactics. You got that 10% to yourself while the other 100 folks are sharing 90% of the sales. Your numbers will be better despite using the "wrong" technique for the majority of the population.

The correct strategy is to find an underserved subpopulation. If enough "everyone else" is using a given strategy, the exact opposite is likely to work well. If a mix of strategies are being used, you need more information.
Something tells me the very question is wrong. If you think avoiding failure = avoiding bad ideas, then that tell me something about you: you place too much an importance on the idea. If you're already thinking this way, eh, I can't help but feel you're already starting on the wrong path.

The better question would perhaps be about a list of common reasons for failed startups. I don't think "having a bad startup idea" would be anywhere on the top of that list. Or for that matter, even "repeating a failed idea" wouldn't occur on the list.
Principles Behind Hiring Employee #1 | TK's Weblog
Amazon's Jeff Bezos Backs Nuclear Startup General Fusion
Lily 1.0 - a data repository on top of HBase and Solr is released
As I said below I'm not doubting the numbers I'm just trying to draw attention to the perception those numbers create and saying it might not be what Disqus intended

Though for the record I don't see how those numbers confirm or deny anything in the source post. In fact those numbers seem to invalidate Disqus claims (though measurement of the type Quantcast provides doesn't provide precise numbers so again we're back to "unverifiable but not necessarily untrue")
Judge Alsup also ruled in the recent case where Edge Games was trolling EA. Sharp guy, and clearly a low tolerance for BS. http://boingboing.net/2010/10/05/judge-rules-against.html
Note that the order is only that the other claims be permanently abandoned against this one product. Suppose Google loses, and ends up having to pay royalties to Oracle for their current incarnation of Android.

At some point, Google then releases a new version of Android, where they have changed the parts that were found to infringe so as to not infringe in their opinion, and stop paying royalties.

Is that a new product?

My guess is that for purposes of this kind of order, it would be.
Ruby, Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, Forth, Perl... Nearly anything that's not a descendant of C or Basic lets you write in terms of expressions.
An interesting QR code
Entrepreneur Rick Marini Takes on LinkedIn - and Facebook
tl;dr: site seems to be mostly about <meta name="robots" content="noarchive">, its alternatives and background. (I guess it may not be obvious from submission's title.)
Technology Business Contest 
Win Lenovo All-In-One m90z PC!
Join the Technology Business Contest !!!
Check out rubinius, the bytecode seems to perform considerably faster than interpreted source: http://rubini.us/
There are 802.11 USB adapters in the same form factor:

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-deta...

It should be possible to power this thing with power over ethernet.
I programmed industrial touchscreens a long time ago (my first job) and implemented scrolling more-or-less like that. Not really a big deal.
Then why does Skype do it for every out-going phone call? I have to select US from the drop down list every time I make a call even though my Skype number is US based.
> BUT for the record the post was made AFTER they raised $10m dollars so your point isn't really valid.

Don't you think people writing a $10mm check did way more due diligence than anyone reading this blog post could? They had to believe everything that was (going to be) in this blog post and much, much more.
http://blog.chromium.org/2011/05/updating-javascript-benchma...
You're right. I initially took the problem to be "given this (specific) compiler output, determine the corresponding compiler input." That seems like a reasonable interpretation of "decompiling". If the problem is instead "determine whether this chunk of machine code could have come from this compiler", then my proposed algorithm obviously doesn't work.
The tighter the loop of whatever you're doing, and the more consistently it is run over time, the slower your application will be, just generally speaking. This is because the miniscule differences between individual operations add up asymptotically to make a difference. If it's a matter of, say, performing a square root exactly once, you will not notice a difference. If, on the other hand, you are running a search algorithm over a lot of text, you may (probably will?) see significant slowdown.

Good news is, you can make (e.g.) a C-hook, that lets you write you app in Ruby, and your "search" code in C (or something like that). I don't know what you're doing specifically, so that may be an answer. I will say that if you're interfacing heavily with the database in this search, it is very likely that Rails is not the answer -- Rails tries to handle DB work transparently to the user, and going against that problem is not just hard, but also REALLY labor intensive. I'm told this is why twitter dropped Rails.

As far as speed goes, Ruby is about as fast as PHP at this point, although rails runs a bit slower.

Hope that helps! Feel free to ask follow-up questions.
These are all great suggestions. Smashingmagazine is a great resource for developers.

I'm not quite sure about a checkbox to confirm password...maybe I need to see it actually implemented somewhere to know if I like it.
Connect to Twitter Securely, Like a Boss
I think it's to say "hey did you know we are fricking huge!!" - that's why I like to say our numbers, it's an accomplishment and something to be proud of.

It also gives comfort to bigger users / potential users ... you're not going to be worried about using Disqus on your site with 100s of thousands of daily users when you know they eat that number for breakfast.
Ver la reina del amor capitulo 45
ver la reina del amor capitulo 45
THEREFORE, encourage us to try to see every episode.I just wanted to remind you that La Reina del Sur Chapter 45 will be released on May 4, 2011. So, you should mark your calendar so you do not miss it. You have to search online.
I've been following you since the last post you had, it was a very enjoyable read - I'm one of the two guys behind http://bushi.do/

I'd definitely love to speak with you - s@bushi.do, lemme know if you have a chance to chat.
Heres my input on these sort of questions:

To determine what language to use, ask yourself the following question:

a) How many devs will or you want to support your application.

b) Approximately (ballpark) how many users will be sending simultaneous requests? If there are going to be 20 people logged in total, performance is not an issue.

c) How much time you have.

d) How much hardware will you be using?

e) Do you realize that doing queries from a table of 10 or 1000000 records are equivalent to the application if you return 2 rows to it? The work is in the database and will remain unchanged.

Now, many places chose RoR/PHP (and some good frameworks) as a front-end, while using a "fast" language like java or erlang for the back-end. Facebook is one such example. They use erlang to handle comet requests and php to render the front end, and I think java to do back-end messaging and so on. The front-end code just queries it.

If its a simple data application (show page, get input, query/update db, show page) then RoR is easy to make/maintain. If there are 10,000 users logged in at once, I'd think about this further. If you are a sole maintainer, RoR is nice since it makes writing and maintaining simple granted you know what you are doing.
General Electric...General Fusion...oh, I get it:)
Google Decides That NFC Is Cooler Than QR
Self-modifying code doesn't change my argument (see my response to kenjackson for my understanding of the problem) so long as it was produced by the compiler.
A) The layout is nice and clear.

B) Center the page in the centre of the page, it will be much more balanced.

C) Use colors and graphics. Now it looks dull. I could expand a lot on this, but it may be easier if you just look at the Facebook login page, because it's similar to yours. Pay attention to the use of colors.

This is very general feedback, but you should decide on the specifics like color choice.
I suspect most Australians probably just follow their preferred candidates preferences

Do they really? I never have, and I've never understood the mindset that would. Maybe I will vote for you, Mr Candidate, but I'm not gonna take your advice on the numbers I stick in everybody else's boxes... especially since those numbers probably indicate whatever deals you've made rather than some actual order of preferability based on competence or ideology. For this reason I've always thought that the whole preference-deal thing was a complete waste of time, but hey, maybe there's a lot of people out there genuinely following the how-to-vote card.

It hardly matters anyway. There's very few electorates with more than two viable candidates, so all that really matters is whether you put "Liberal" before "Labor" or vice versa.
The checkbox isn't the confirm your password...it's to make the actual characters show up so you can see that you've typed the right thing.

Not sure I love the idea, because there will be certain situations when a user can't use it, but it's worth considering...
For Entrepreneurs, there's a fine line between good and bad
throw away account...

I work at a small hedge fund in London, started on £28k (actually might have been less, I literally can't remember now), after 4 years I am up to £40k, with around £5k bonus each year.

I have basically been doing CRUD of various flavours the whole time under a bullying atmosphere, utterly soul-destroying and it's got me stuck in the Stockholm syndrome scenario, my skills ground down to the point where I literally can't get another job to get out of it. Am working very hard to counter it, but it's a big job, probably another year of work to stand a chance of getting a decent software job (I'm not going to try for another internal finance job, if that sucks as much it'll be pretty impossible to bear).

So yeah, I don't recommend it, though it might just me having bad luck here.

I think very few internal jobs, finance included, are even vaguely bearable for hackers - I heard the idea that finance likes to hire overqualified people for monotonous/trivial jobs to make sure they're done right, so you have to be really careful.

[1]:http://www.chadfowler.com/2010/12/30/dead-end-jobs-are-you-s...
You're right. In fact, the number one lesson I've learned designing websites is that any time you're sure that users will understand what you mean, they absolutely will not. That's the one tip from this article that I completely disagree with.
Novell Just Won Appeal Allowing It To Sue Microsoft Over WordPerfect
I live in Old City, Philly, where we have Indy Hall. (http://indyhall.com/) A lot of people like it, but I really don't want to work around people who, plus or minus, are just like me. (I believe the word for us is "nerds.")

My favorite co-working space is a coffee shop because it tends to be a lot more diverse than the intentionally created spaces I've seen. That said, I think I would very much enjoy working out of Paragraph, a writing space in Manhattan. (http://www.paragraphny.com/)
Great event. Fun times!
It leads to this picture: http://imgur.com/s0rzv which is of Airwolf.
I also use the three-finger swipe on scrollbars, regularly. Not all windows scroll properly. Still, the notion of clicking and dragging to scroll is really odd now.
Not just that - the scrollbar also lets you scroll at any speed you want (just grab and drag), and lets you instantly jump to an arbitrary point in the document you are looking at. "Shuffling" through content is nice if you are reading top to bottom, but it's hard to beat a scrollbar if you're jumping around.
Votes say that this is one of the ones that is not MOST.

Naah, the "flag" button exists because offtopic stuff does get voted up despite being offtopic. In the case of political stories (some) people tend to vote things up because they agree with the sentiment rather than due to a dispassionate evaluation of the benefits of the article (see also reddit.com/r/politics).

Voting systems are on-topic, but this is obviously political campaigning.
Here at HP in Corvallis there are still a lot of engineers that worked on the 12c and other calculators and some of the spirit remains, despite the trials and tribulations we've gone through.
We typically reserve the term "undecidable" for the case where there is a mathematical function we are interested in, but it isn't computable by any algorithm. Inverting a many-to-one function is just impossible.
Can you give some examples?

Also, have you read the guidelines at http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ?

Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something
(e.g. to ask us questions about Y Combinator, or to
ask or complain about moderation). If you want to say
something to us, please send it to info@ycombinator.com.
I though this problem was with Digg, but I've experienced same with my submissions. It's funny that people judge content by headlines, we need a better way.
I have seen some non-technical people that use the scrollbar all the time. Some even use those little arrows at the upper and lower ends of the scrollbar.

I guess they were taught that way, and it works for them (for the few times a day they use a computer). And they just don't see the need of learning a new way to move up and down a document.
The Old Facebook Groups To New Groups Format Q&A & Tips
Their error page includes a telephone number. That's pretty awesome – shows respect for the customer by not hiding behind cryptic errors or elaborate, shrugging downtime notices.
I can't understand why they bother with this one-alternative thing though. If you're gonna mark two preferences, why not mark 'em all?
Scott Adams: War and Truth
You missed an important part of that:

"Facebook’s closest competitor is Yahoo’s network of sites, which claimed 10.1% of the market. Google, which is still relatively new to the display business, had 2.5%."
Thank you for your feedback.

Centering the page is something I'll try for sure.

I agree with your third point - would you suggest using a stock image, perhaps related to our service e.g a marketplace, or products?
My skype defaults to the country listed in my profile. Maybe yours does too?
I know at least one such website:

http://epiclaunch.com
If you cannot load the site, here's an instapaper link to the article: http://www.instapaper.com/go/159728600/text
Funny that I actually managed to get the maths wrong. 4000 TeraJoules is 4 PetaJoules, i.e. 10g of antimatter is actually a 0.25 Megaton nuke. Still packs some serious punch, but I totally fail at arithmetic, it seems.
They should offer a "listen in on a conference" mode. I don't have many questions to ask, but it would be nice to be in like a Q-A type of situation with this.
I would have been pursuaded to vote Yes by the "Vote No" adverts, such as http://i.imgur.com/yCyLv.jpg*

That's a pretty dumb ad. I was indeed wondering what the best argument of the "No" campaign would be, and if that's it then that's not much of a campaign.

Still, I gotta wonder -- have they really* budgeted two hundred and fifty million pounds for a new voting system, or is this a made-up number? Because where the hell does that money go?
++! "Scientists" are people, having all the same flaws, biases, and impure motivations found in the greater population. I certainly don't unquestioningly trust as 100% truth anything following "Scientists say...". Certainly not about how the climate is going to be in 10 years (awful!) unless we let the government (or the UN) control and tax what goes in and out of every bodily orifice, and every movement we make outside our home.

Science by itself; ok, I'm willing to listen and pay attention with an open mind. "Science" in league with _government_ (the only agency which can legally point a gun at my head and demand my compliance to ANYTHING)? I have EXTREME skepticism in this situation. Because such alliances can easily lead to totalitarianism in the name of science. Power-hungry bureaucrats and do-gooders see "scientists" as the key to getting the population at large to give up freedoms (to have a "safer" future). And few "scientists" will walk away from millions of dollars in grant money dangled in front of their noses. And if they want to get the next grant (what else are they going to do?), don't you suppose there's just a little bias injected into the activities sponsored by the current grant? It strains credulity to think that such biases don't exist. Most commenters on HN seem to think that such biases only arise in situations where "science" is funded by private business, but I see the potential for trouble as being much higher when "science" and governments join forces. You can almost always ignore or dodge something a corporation does, but dodging the government is basically impossible. The entirely miserable track record of "scientists" who've predicted "the world will end unless we all ..." over the past century reinforces my comfort in holding a skeptical position.

Basically, the (US) government today is in the business of controlling the behavior of citizens. The more ways they can control citizen behavior, the more bureaucracies there will be, and the bigger the existing bureaucracies will get. The ultimate expression of this will be "single payer" (a.k.a. 100% government controlled) health care. This will be the justification for total in-detail control of individual/personal behavior.

Think I'm paranoid? Let's just see what happens...
"If they just had function overloading, we could keep dozens of old, unmaintained functions around forever! Think how amazing documentation will be!"
Your argument only really stands if basically every single one of those programmers is Mark Zuckerberg, able to create a $50b company... I don't think that's a reasonable assumption.
Rather than wording myself, here's a quote from the BBC's FAQ:

"The No campaign has said the poll will cost about £90m to stage and that an extra £156m will be incurred in switching to AV. The Yes campaign has accused its rivals of "lies", saying the claims are largely based on the alleged cost of introducing electronic counting machines and that these are not required for AV elections. The government has said holding the referendum on the same day as other elections around the UK will save about £17m."
From a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2392830

And before that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2391971
First off, congrats on getting something out there.

You asked for advice on improving your landing page. Your landing page has a clear objective (nice!), to get visitors to create an account. The problem is you don't give them concise and compelling reasons to do so.

The headline should contain your best benefit. Your current headline, "Lifemall is a marketplace and community of people like you" does not state who should be using it, or why they should bother. Most people would read your headline, not see any benefit, and press the back button then and there.

The rest of your copy also could use a lot of improvement. It provokes more unanswered questions in a visitor's head:

Are they new vs used?
What kind of stuff is on the site now?
Are these knock offs?
What's different from this site than craigslist/ebay/amazon/costco?
Why do I need to create an account before I see anything?
What do they need my email for?
This is a huge block of text, where are the images?
How can I trust this site?
I'm late to the discussion, but want to add a few things.

First, is there really a large group of people who think that teachers a.) are whom to blame for the state of American education; and b.) are paid too much? The only time I hear about people making such arguments is in op-eds like this one that try to refute them. I think such op-eds are battling straw men.

That said:

1. If you look at total compensation broken down by per-hour-worked (which I think is a fair metric), teachers are paid within the norms for their level of education, etc. There is a reasonable write up on this here: http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/hate-the-deception-not-the-te...

2. I think a growing number of people are outraged at Teachers Unions, and Teachers Unions try to associate themselves back to just being "teachers". It's a dirty trick. People don't want employment contracts dictating how their kids are taught. They want teachers to be able to work longer hours if they're inclined to, try creative strategies, etc. They want to attract and keep the best teachers by paying them more than less effective teachers. Many (most?) union contracts dictate terms that disallow this kind of stuff. People are upset at the obstacles the union is putting up, not with the teachers that often are forced to have to join that union.

3. I am upset that we, as a country, continue to spend more and more per-pupil on education and have stagnant-at-best results. Something like only 40 cents per dollar spent on education actually make it into the classroom ("citation needed", I know). I'd like to see education spending done more effectively. If this means moving dollars spent on bureaucratic waste into higher teacher salaries, I'd welcome that change.
I don't think the idea is to indicate whether or not the username is correct. No matter what the user enters for the username, when you spit back "username or password incorrect," fill the username with what they typed. A brute force attacker gets no more information than he would with an empty username field because what comes out is identically what he put in, but a real user who mistyped his password knows this immediately by checking the username field and verifying it's correct.