skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Please critique my start-up landing page
www.UpgradeAvenue.com

I'm struggling with the text on my landing page. Any feedback and suggestions would be greatly appreciated. You can be brutal.. what would you do differently?

Thanks.
Warning: I was redirected to a spam site for weight loss pills when clicking on the above URL.
A proper (classical) education is generally widely accepted to have a dramatic positive influence on ones vocabulary.
40,300 and I am astounded that there were words I hadn't seen before.

Funambulism is my new favourite word.
I find it telling that even though the entire article focuses on outlining a way to spend ~1 week to learn 'core python,' the only two comments so far focus on his choice of Python over Ruby, which is ~2-3 sentences in the entire article (and said in a very 'this is my opinion, ymmv' way).
Is that really the case though? There have been plenty of cases where the subsequent generations have let the wealth crumble (or at least pieces of it, like historic mansions, etc).
Your account is probably blocking you from responding because of some flamewar prevention feature Paul put in a while ago that makes it difficult for commenters to have nested discussions with one another--the deeper the discussion, the longer you have to wait before making a reply to a user who just replied to you.
Yet, are rather cromulent

ObScore: 36000, 32yo male US-english native speaker. There were a few more I'd seen but wasn't really sure enough to define. I maxed out the SAT verbal section (and got 1 wrong on math, which was enough to drop to 780/800) back in the 1990s.
check out these guys.

http://www.faxage.com/pricing.php
I like what I see here. Will try to use it in my next project.
I'm guessing they selected words from a large corpus of written English based on their relative frequency.

It isn't surprising that there isn't any technical vocabulary. Most technical vocabulary falls into one of the following categories:
a) Acronyms
b) Overloading of existing non-technical words
c) Names and other proper nouns
d) Phrases longer than one word

There's actually an argument for excluding highly specific vocabulary (some corpuses explicitly exclude textbooks for this reason) because knowledge of them doesn't correlate as well with overall vocabulary.
I know I am nitpicking, but is there a reason that a huge semi-transparent dark box is in the middle of my screen, informing me that:

Notice

JavaScript for Mobile Safari is currently turned off.

Turn it on in Settings > Safari
to view this website

I do not quite see any content that requires the use of JavaScript, nor does the noscript handler identify my browser, Firefox 5, correctly.
I am sorry, but I have to disagree strongly with the assertion that Indian Muslims have suffered under "majority" rule.

First of all: 3 of the first 11 presidents in India were Muslim. Muslims continue to do well in many spheres of life: all of the top Bollywood actors are Muslim. At one time, the richest Indian was a Muslim (he's come down a few notches because of the Ambani brothers), and he rose up through entrepreneurship and hard work.

I believe this fabrication (that Indian Muslims are worse off today) is parroted too often in Pakistan, because it reinforces the belief that creation of Pakistan was the right thing to do. Pakistani textbooks are full of such distortions, as reported in a Pakistani paper recently: http://tribune.com.pk/story/149448/our-textbooks-and-the-lie... . And here's a report [PDF] by a Pakistani NGO which goes into great detail about the anti-Hindu bias in Pakistani K-12 tectbooks: http://sdpi.org/sdpi-old/whats_new/reporton/State%20of%20Cur...

I grew up in India. And while I'll admit that there was some animosity towards Muslims, there was similar animosity towards other large groups too. This is to be expected in any poor society where people are competing for scant resources. There was no systemic bias against Muslims just because they're Muslims.
While I would agree (and some would make the point) that Microsoft does this to benefit mostly Microsoft, it's still GPL'ed code that is now part of the greater Linux kernel codebase, so good on them and everyone else.
22,300 as an American 22 year-old. I write and read slightly moreso than most people too (though nothing too formal or high-academia).

I also thought I had an unfair advantage early on because I knew a lot of words from playing Blizzard games all my life. Sorely disappointed :(.
Open source is most effective when multiple parties find their self-interest overlaps.
Don't be upset, I got 19,700.

Using big words make a good communicator not. The point of using a language is to communicate. Using esoteric words only a fraction of the population knows defeats this purpose.

If anything, given the same amount of practice but with a smaller vocabulary will make you a better communicator, IMHO.
Hi Spyrosk,
the videos will be available shortly. If you want to get updated, send me an email (you find the contacts on my Twitter page, @simon).

Best,

Simone
What Apple Could Learn From Google+
India's original name was 'Bharata'. It still is one of the legal names of the country as per the constitution. The name India has it's roots in Latin and not in Sanskrit, the original language of Bharata.

Details here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_India
It could be only either very below average and very above average people are interested in self-quizzes, too, so equal numbers alone won't be enough.
I don't think this is very accurate. I scored 95+% on both SAT and GRE verbal, and I only got a 27,400. I imagine there are quite a few test takers who are not completely honest with themselves.
Duplicate story, many comments already.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767428
And yet not a slythy tove in sight, gyring or otherwise.

The thing that always surprises me with this sort of test is how many words I half-know: I recognise the word, I have a (correct) general sense of what it means, but either I couldn't articulate an accurate definition or the definition I would give is an uncommon usage and I hadn't come across the more common meaning(s).

Following the rules strictly (so I didn't tick the half-known words), I came in slightly below average for my age, assuming the trend continues beyond the 32 years that their table currently gives.

For comparison, if I also included the words I half-knew, I gained nearly 4,000 new words and went up about 20%.
Watch USA vs Japan Soccer Final Live Online Women’s World Cup 2011
We are in a final moment of 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup Final.This most anticipated and desired match will be played between USA and Japan.Watch Japan vs USA live stream of 2011 Final match on your pc,iPad,iPhone.Watch this high voltage match live & grab the real pleasure.Watch USA vs Japan 2011 WWC Final match live free online stream. Watch FIFA 2011 live hd streaming of USA vs Japan match, Japan vs USA World Cup 2011. » Watch USA vs Japan Live.

The USA play Japan for the 2011 Women's World Cup Final.

FIFA Women's World Cup Final will take place on Sunday at 2:45PM EST LIVE from Germany.
> Microsoft does this to benefit mostly Microsoft

Well, of course. I would wager all the corporate contributions, and a good chunk of the independent contributions are contributing to add features they need.

I agree, though, good on them for contributing, and even better for making a substantial contribution, instead of a token gesture.

The irony is, there is a benefit to Microsoft for working with open source: if dosbox and wine become good enough to support their legacy software, they can end-of-life a large portion of their compatability codebase that they drag along with each version, and keep the compatability effort to a stable, free platform written for that purpose.
Aamir Khan Up Coming Movie Dhoom 3 Wallpapers, Photos
Bollywood Movie Dhoom comeback with new title Dhoom 3 with new story, action, entertainment and with new bollywood celebrity Aamir Khan, Shahrukh Khan, Abhishek Bachchan, Uday Chopra. For this Dhoom 3 movie actress still not finalized like Katrina Kaif, Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra, Sonam Kapoor and Kangana Ranaut.
Top Most Expensive Mobile Phones in the World
Here is the list of world's top 10 most expensive mobile phones. This list contains the finest in luxury and style, with mobile phones dripping in diamonds, rubies, emeralds, gold and platinum. These cell phones are very expensive because of the high quality accessories. But today buying expensive phone is not everyone's interest. So let’s just take a look at these most expensive cell phone in the world.
Air conditioners and automobiles--isolating Americans from each other.
I'd be really interested in the percentiles of the non-native speakers. With an alarmingly low 10.700 words, there is not even a percentile for me... And I know that my fluency of English is at least above the median around here (edit: here = where I live).

This also shows how extremely time-consuming it is to learn a second language. I started in school, 10 years old, am moderately well educated (some college drop-out), and use English on a daily basis. I also watch most movies in English (very seldom for people in a German speaking country to do), read some English novels, and also most non-fiction books I have are in English. Internet use is nearly English only.

Still, I probably have the vocabulary of an average 12 year old native speaker. After 17 years of learning and using the language, and at least 10 years of that using it _daily_.

Ouch.
I realise that the ego-stroking scoring is the driver behind this site's popularity , but I would also like to see definitions of words that I missed. It's pretty daunting to spend hours copying and pasting words into Google (well, ahem, maybe it is for some of us!)
To be clear, this was an attacking jest at republicans.
At one point, the sun was generally widely accepted to revolve around the earth.

It's likely that education improves one's vocabulary, however there are a lot of variables there. People who go to good schools likely come from families where learning is important in any case, are wealthier, etc...
Who is working on Etherpad V2? Smart documents?
I was just looking at the "An incomplete list of HN collaborative Google Docs/Spreadsheets" thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2772398). Is it me or it just feels like Google Docs not a good tool for collaborating with a large group of people.

I am thinking on the lines of the simplicity of Etherpad and some of the powers of git/github. I really like how you can see the network of forks and how some forks take off.

Few problems.

- It's hard to see what has changed over time.

- How do I see the power contributors?

- Easy to consume different types of documents. Spreadsheets vs graphs vs text only.

- Smarter documents. Right now all documents are fairly dumb. What if I want to add something like smart sections? For example: Incomplete areas/Need more work sections in a document. I should be able to tag different areas in a document and quickly see all the incomplete areas in one without having to do any extra work. It also makes it easier pick out information from large documents.

Thoughts?
And do they also appear in google+?
google+ doesn't have ads yet.
i understand why i can't read Alexia Tsotsis articles on Techcrunch without a dictionary, with my shameful 8,560 vocab
> probably have the vocabulary of an average 12 year old native speaker

I very clearly remember my first time in Italy, when I saw a family at a restaurant and realized their 5/6 year old spoke much better Italian than I did. Kind of humbling.
0 deg F is a t-shirt jog here in Minnesota during the winter. Cold is -20 to -40 range. And within the last few weeks, we've had several days 90+ and 100+ deg F. There's a reason lots of the old people migrate with the ducks down south for winter.
Absolute Victory
Code is here:

https://github.com/AndrewVos/developerloremipsum
Great write-up, and nice to see another's experiences. Obviously these are all just tips and don't all have to be followed, so I do want to point out that I disagree with the idea of paying for an instructor–at least initially.

One of the nice things about the open-source community and having a great ecosystem around <insert language> is that you can hop on IRC (http://www.python.org/community/irc/) or find your way to the mailing lists and there will be at least a few very smart people overjoyed to help you learn–as long as you put in the initial effort, try the problem yourself first, and then ask for help (and be willing to listen to their advice).

Then, if you go through all of that and try really, really hard, be patient, ask for help, and still find yourself lost, maybe seeking an instructor is a good idea. I'm just saying to beginners that I wouldn't jump to that right away.

Overall, nice writeup, and thanks Mark for sharing your experiences and being willing to push your own boundaries and learn more! Yay for not falling into the abyss of managerial stagnation!
Mustang - A Ruby interface to V8
14,000; though English isn't my vernacular. Reading more English fiction seem to be a recurring suggestion, guess I should!
I see several good things on the list of new features. The rc-based boot process is definitely a good idea. I haven't had the issues with the fossil filesystem that some have, so I don't know about cwfs as the main on-disk fileserver, but I'm looking forward to trying it out. A lot of the contributors have been doing good things in the Plan 9 world for quite awhile now. A list of some of the new features is at http://code.google.com/p/plan9front/wiki/features
> your choice in email host is a reflection on you

Actually my choice to use hotmail is a reflection of me X years ago when I created the account. It is also a reflection of the state of free web based providers X years ago. You don't know the value of X, which makes it difficult to draw any conclusions from my email address.

I guess it's also a reflection of the current me in that I don't see the point of going through the hassle of ditching an email address just to have something slightly more trendy (and slightly more usable).
Fox News "explains" News Of The World hacking scandal
(Just over 30,000.) Personally, I learned far more of those words from reading George R.R. Martin or Guy Gavriel Kay than anything in my liberal arts education.
I am in a similar situation and my estimated vocabulary size is 10100 words. Doh! :D
Hard work alone is often not sufficient. The real solution is to work hard but also to work smart. You need to find a balance between slogging just to get things done and innovating to reduce the slog required in the future. This applies not apply to physical tasks but also to learning. When learning a new skill/subject it's easy to expend a lot of effort reading whole books and articles without taking the leap of getting your hands dirty and applying your learning, but without doing so you can't build the neural connections required to learn.
At the risk of introducing another level, I will mention that these comments are very Meta :)
I'm certain they did, and any serious discussion must proceed from the points you mentioned. At the end of the day, the problem is one of better education or tool-making, because those are what will allow the unskilled to do something worth paying for.

Startups excel at tool-making. Building better mousetraps is often seen as purely destructive to jobs, but it also creates jobs like crazy when a formerly-unavailable tool suddenly becomes available and lower-priced demand can be satisfied. The availability bias works against us here because although it's easy to see that robotic factories destroy textile-worker jobs, it's hard to realize that cheaper computer costs will mean companies won't mind hiring for data entry, as now they only have to pay $400 a box as opposed to $1 million for a mainframe.

In terms of creating jobs, the most saintly of tech people are probably the UX designers who can take something a layman normally couldn't grasp, and put it within their reach. Solar panels don't create jobs for the uneducated. Solar panels so easy to install that you can hire minimum wage workers to install them DO create jobs for the uneducated.

For whatever reasons, startups have not had similar success with education. But this will undoubtedly be a hot space for the next few years, because though the growing divide isn't the Valley's "fault," modern education is a real problem and needs addressing.

Startups, you want to create jobs while still making a killing? Take something hard and make it easy, or take clueless people and make them smart.
My background is roughly similar to yours (German, 9 1/2 years of English in school, been living in the US for 10 month) and I got 10.900 words.

Especially seeing the second and third page surprised me as I can't recall ever hearing most of these words. My girlfriend noted that many of them are older terms, but still I expected to have picked up some through movies or books.

On the other hand: studying and working in the US with just 11k words works quite well.
Yeah, some more words for that function would be nice.

Some suggestions: specific, designated, compiled, selected, verified, established, elected, exclusive, assorted
I would prefer a fluid grid. The fixed grid of Skeleton even overflows at certain device widths. I featured it on http://mediaqueri.es/ske/ a few months ago.
* Run
* Cycle
* Swim

Sometimes I combine all three in the reverse order.
to read your post i looked up the word 'vernacular' in the dictionary
43,300.
I strongly suspect learning Latin and Greek at school helped more than a little with this particular test.
The challenge is explaining the brain why exactly is making yourself a better and more respectable person a worthy goal. And then, how getting a degree would help you on that road (also not obvious, with lots of counterexamples and without a solid explanation of what does being a good person mean). Or maybe it's just my brain that doesn't understand enough about society.
> Hacker News is _very_ full of over-confident people, believe me.

Heh.
Sparkling Metallic Text Effect
The problem with Python community is, when comparing Python with Ruby, Pythonistas give almost no objective reasons to prefer Python but give many highly subjective (provoking) opinions, like the following:

1. Zen of Python. (since Ruby doesn't adhere to it, it's bad)

2. Python community is less arrogant compared to Ruby community. (painting millions of Ruby programmers with the same brush based on an IRC chat they had)

3. Google loves Python. (is that even a reason?)

4. Zed Shaw said so-and-so against Ruby/Rails which I want to believe/agree. (fan mentality)
Yes, funambulist, and sparge. 42K
The sweetest poem ive ever heard
my blog post related on my niche
I am Dutch, and the estimated vocabulary is 15,600 words. It's really humbling, but on the other side surprising that one can participate in scientific discussion with such a small vocabulary. But I bet the distribution is not very similar to an American kid with a vocabulary of that size ;).

It's easy to notice the difference in vocabulary in practice. Native speaker's speech is much more varied.

Also, it's maybe good for native speakers to realize that someone who may seem a bit rude or dumb on the Internet may be a non-native speaker who has difficulty expressing him/herself.
they could add some non-existent words! some people just check all checks i think! (and i was honest and got 8,560)
German, 26 Years, 8 Years of English in school.
Working for a US company, lived in the US for 3 months, American GF, lots of pirated american TV shows:

15,500 words
I stand corrected - I was skimming and didn't notice. The example is correct - I was wrong.
No arms No legs No worries - Nick Vujicic
Maybe a good way of freaking users out (and educating them at the same time) would be a notice saying "it will take n minutes/hours/millennia for someone to hack this password", rather than the "weak - strong" indicator you see on most sign up pages.
I am at 10.200 being studying Enlgish for 8 years and using it on a daily basis for social and professional life.
My level of English is above almost all my pears from I come from.
May be this helps http://blip.tv/pycon-us-videos-2009-2010-2011/pycon-2010-pyt...
I think there's a balance. While a lot of the work being done in advanced mathematics may never impact anyone's lives in any substantial way that's not always true. It took a lot of effort to reinvent mathematics and geometry from the ground up in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in many ways it could seem as if that work was purely abstract, but it has surely had a very profound impact on the entire modern world. The same goes for, say, Boolean algebra, Turing machines (which at one time were incredibly abstract and theoretical), and a lot of number theory. Yet today our computing systems and especially cryptography is based on what used to be very abstract mathematics. Do you think the wonks who worked on elliptic curve theory imagined that there would eventually be custom purpose micro-chips designed to perform elliptic curve math?

Sometimes it's impossible to know what lines of research will prove practical in the next decades and centuries, so it's smart to balance between some focused practical application research as well as blue-sky research.
Too much clicking.
awesome post Tristan. working for free makes perfect sense for a short period of time--you let cofounders get an opportunity to try you out risk-free. it's not "desperate" like some people think it is; it shows serious dedication and interest, and those are the type of people you want to attract. too many people feel entitled, where has the appreciation for hustle gone?
Some studies I have seen, showed that the average newspaper has a 6000-8000 word vocabulary.

Add another 2000 to cover technical/domain specific/slang words. And you should have no reason not to be able to communicate freely on day to day basis.

I got 26K (English is my 3rd language) and most of the 'strange' words are from reading too much science fiction as a kid.

+ on showing percentiles of non-native speakers tho
Putting in the hard work is a huge part of being successful, no doubt, but this article talks as if it is the ONLY important thing, which I disagree with.

You can easily end up working hard on the wrong thing. Writing an app or building a startup that sells something nobody wants for example. There are plenty of people working super hard on already doomed projects because they didn't do enough market research or listen to the right people.

You have to work hard AND get a lot of other stuff right as well to have any chance of success. There are plenty of things you can do e.g. automating tasks and outsourcing that don't require extra work but can improve your chances of success.

Forgive me if this seems obvious, it just bothered me how the article tried to sell hard work as a silver bullet. I don't think it's that simple.
Great intro to AWS.
At http://testyourvocab.com/details.php#which_sample they hint at omitting a lot of Latin words:

Quote:

No cognates or false-friends with Portuguese. This probably knocks out at least half the dictionary, since Romance languages have plenty in common with English. False friends need to be avoided as well, since a Brazilian beginner will see "pretend" and assume he knows it means pretender, which actually means "intend." Interestingly, the no-Portuguese rule leaves the test with a strongly pronounced short Anglo-Saxon flavor.