skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A wider funnel isn't always better. The thing that should be optimised is volume multiplied by some measure of "lead quality" (and total money spent is probably a good approximation for a business to use).

For example, would you rather have 1000 people through the funnel with a 1% average likelihood of purchasing (for an expected 10 sales) or 100 people through the funnel with a 50% average likelihood of purchasing (for an expected 50 sales).

It may well be that you can get more people through the funnel but it doesn't make it a good optimisation if the people you are enticing are unlikely to buy anything from you.

Real world example: Apple products. Apple specifically target the top end of consumers (narrow funnel) who are happy to pay a little bit more, whereas other producers go for the mass market (wider funnel) sales at a lower margin.
From the article > "Mint 12 will be running Gnome 3"
Greek News | Greek news in Greek | News in Greece
TaaS: Tea as a Service - We've launched a monthly tea subscription service
My friend and I are launching teapeat.com. Please let me know what you think.

We've used Stripe for the recurring payments and it's made things a lot easier than past attempts with other gateway APIs.

We'll be A/B testing different copy, images, and buttons, so expect a blog post soon with those results.
Lauren Ipsum: how to draw a circle
This is why we created : http://ConvertMyFlash.com

In case you weren't aware, Flash sites :

- Do not work on 250 MILLION iPhones & iPads.
- They are unusable to 1 BILLION SmartPhone Users.
- Don't fully show up on Google Search.
- Content is Not Shareable on Facebook & Twitter.
- Are not naturally SEO Optimized.
I would like to see the quantified evidence of an Internet band making it through full ascension without ever touching one of the big 4/3. It is REALLY hard to find.

It's a great time to be a recording artist and be self sufficient. If you want to be the next U2 (or if you are U2) it's rather difficult and will remain so.

People speak about disruption. This industry is ripe for it, but it won't happen until a lot of the past is weeded out through attrition and better players take hold. It'll take an inversion in corporate structures.

Right now its too easy to never sign a band and just mine catalog for a long, long time. Hence the value in publishing assets, and the value in mechanical for catalog.
Google chrome starts with Mint's custom search engine as well. And every time you update Chrome, the search engine gets defaulted to google custom search.

The problem isn't so much Google. I like Google, but the custom search is not as good as vanilla Google. Currency conversion doesn't work, the calculator doesn't work, google maps doesn't return it's places on top of the results... non of Google's enhanced features are functional.

There's a quick search from the start menu which uses custom search as well, and this seems impossible to change.
I spend most of my time in a terminal and I thought Gnome 2 was a mess and was never totally happy with it. I don't think 11.10 has been a nightmare at all, I have found it to be an improvement on 11.04, where most of the 'removals' you cite actually occurred.

I originally started using Ubuntu for the driver support (after a while you want to work rather than compiling everything and editing files in /etc, which means you either roll your own de facto distro or you switch to something which has an 'out of the box' workability).
Piracy is actually lower now on the list of how people get music for free. Number 1 is YouTube. Ad supported streaming and radio are also up there.

Piracy has been falling as a primary mover of free music for quite a while now.

The shifting of the market to branding and merch has been going on as long as I've been in the industry. I was a big part of it at Warner for a while, in our direct-to-fan initiatives.

The problem is where money in these companies is invested. They need to be technology oriented entities, but don't want to be. Apple cleaned the clock on that, and they let them.
Yeah, that stood out to me too. Consolidation like this is one less to deal with, and it gets rid collusion between parties that should be independent, but fewer parties means less competition and fewer choices of vendor.
Made me smile... or would have, if I wasn't a German Very Serious Person. ;)

I don't think "drill" is such a good translation though. Höhlen comes from "Höhle", meaning "cave". Maybe a better translation:

Steady water hollows the stone.

And you got to admit that the "German assumption of hardness" is actually pretty accurate when it comes to stones! (Except those in Brazil, presumably.)
I badly want to hear a recording of this.
When I was a kid, I took apart an old VHS deck. One of the huge ones, from when they first came out. Not sure what I thought I was doing, but I proceeded to attach the output of the transformer into the transmitting portion of an old rotary phone I had also disassembled. Our phone line went dead. According to our neighbors, our subdivision's entire phone network went down too. Not sure if that's true or not, but I am definitely surprised I didn't burn down the house that day.
Why some people hate Java
how are we still talking about this? for over a year i was a proponent for "let's call things what they are". html5 should be html5. css3 and javascript should be css3 and javascript. this is why things have names after all.

that said, i realized my efforts were futile when w3 themselves said that html5 should be a term used to encompass all these technologies. not that i disagree with mozilla on principle of course, but unless w3 has changed their mind again i think moz is incorrect here.

i can't find the source, but i trust i'm not recalling the article incorrectly as i was quite bothered by it (and hn's complacent response).
Link's broken, yo.
Invisibility NanoTechnology Discovered at University of Texas
Becoming Healthy and well balanced Starting from The Inside Out
Rhino?

http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/
I had a really nice config runnig Gnome2 + XMonad.
I tried for hours to get this config running again
nicely with Ubuntu 11.10, without much luck.

Then I stepped back and thought for what I'm needing
or want a desktop: automounting + wifi.

For automounting I'm now starting 'thunar --daemon &'
in my '.xsession', and for wifi and it's config I'm using
'wicd' and otherwise just XMonad.
" near-perfect scalability of the Big Bang benchmark on a simulated 128-core SPARC"

http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-July/06029...

Also, sounds similar to grant to Scala team, Jan 11

http://www.scala-lang.org/node/8579
So what? Exactly what does ADA do that gives them a competitive advantage that will hold over the next 10 or even 5 years? Their expertise at merchandising? Because really, isn't ADA's core value proposition "getting CDs into the racks at Best Buy"? Who gives a shit what's in the racks at Best Buy? We really think people are going to be buying music at Best Buy 5 years from now? No they won't.
Agreed. I'd say most regular folk will just get used to it and enjoy it like they do any other system they use.

For the rest of us (power users and coders) we're fortunate enough to know how to replace Unity or improve it. Canonical has a plan and they're sticking to it. They probably know that the value these changes will make in the future are worth disappointing the people complaining. You have to make choices as a developer and sometimes it's better to make a chunk of people unhappy than to bend to their will and dilute the value of your product's future. If they didn't stand strong on this they may very well end up stuck working on these little complaints instead of focusing on the bigger picture and making the system far better, far faster.
Couldn't find it either, but after looking around, it appears to me that the research discussed in the posted article is not so ground-breaking as the writer suggests (of course, it hardly ever is, y'know). Papers about liquid-liquid phase transitions in water go back a number of years.

For example, here is a paper from 1997 that speculates about such a phase transition.

http://iopscience.iop.org/0295-5075/42/2/161

And here is a recent paper about such a phase transition found in a computer model (which seems to be what the posted article is talking about). This paper is not by Kumar & Stanley, but it cites a number of papers of theirs.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.5295
Not nearly as much, from what I've seen.
Right. And all of their billions of dollars of assets will blow away like dust in the wind I suppose?
Not sure how the startup atmosphere in India is but the ability to "relocate to any amazon office after 18 months" sounds like a really really great opportunity for personal growth.
Because the list is so long, and a bunch of the cons mention cost, I'm going to flog my friend's company, Cloudability (http://cloudability.com). They help you track and control your cloud spending and they're an AWS solutions provider.

There are only three of us at Stayhound (http://stayhound.com), so our list is pretty short:

Mockflow for creating and sharing flows and wireframes

MailChimp

Google docs & calendar

Gmail IM

Google+ hangouts for team video conferencing

Trello for task management

Capsule CMS

Github

Google AppEngine

And we're in the process of considering a move to AWS.
If you have a readable copy of the license, please send a pull request. The copy I have is high-ascii garbage.
I am capable of installing and uninstalling packages with apt-get, so I am not heavily dependent on Ubuntu to determine the UI for me. And I have no problem changing UIs (I used to use Enlightenment from DR13 or so)

So when a default changes away from something designed to look like Windows XP, I do not get emotionally scarred. I gather this is unusual, however, and Ubuntu's user base consists mostly of people who are terrified of package managers and can't abide anything except an XP ripoff GUI.

Maybe someone should start a new distribution which is premised on providing Ubuntu 8.04 in perpetuity.
Neat. I bet some tennis players would want a scaled up model to pick up balls.
When IT Ops is a victim of its own competence
MibianLib: Open Source Python Options Pricing Library
I totally agree. Even Microsoft is going to follow suit[1].

[1]http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/windows-8-app-store-will-...

I dread a world in which every app have to be approved by Microsoft/Apple. In the end customer is going to lose.
"The desktop seems crowded, and yet on a large monitor there’s so much real estate to get to that left menu that it’s a chore; multi-monitor just never felt right either. To make matters worse, Canonical seemed to ignore all protest, which made users feel alienated and not cared about."

When I use OS X, I do miss the NeXTSTEP menu bar. I do wonder how much research is going into large screen UIs these days. It seems like we need someone to concentrate on the workstation again.
I use awesome wm on my debian laptop, but I prefer Unity and Gnome Shell to the old gnome 2 or kde or xfce. They are really starting to come together as coherent interfaces instead of having mismatched UIs.

Some tweaking tools are around anyway and more will come with time. Gnome shell extensions are pretty good and they'll mature with time.
Something is always happening.  Somewhere.
No, ADA also ships to indie retail world wide, manages relationships with about 70 DSP's, plus the rights of those relationships (i.e., some get the full record, some have to bundle, some only take AIFF files, etc).

TuneCore or The Orchard or CD Baby sort of do the same thing, but without international reach and without all the DSP relationships.

Stuff doesn't just magically show up on iTunes, Spotify, Rdio, MOG and god knows how many other places (including promos to radio, etc). It also doesn't automagically show up with cutouts and exclusive tracks depending on the retailer.

Also who do you think manages publishing catalogs for bands like Radiohead (Warner) or Arcade Fire (EMI)?

Best Buy will likely eliminate music from their planograms by next year. So will Target and Wallmart at some point. They mostly have. That doesn't mean that an upstart can disrupt the space. There are huge market barriers to entry.
New users aren't going to switch to ubuntu because there's a start(or applications) menu.

Perhaps, but one of the traditional excuses new users have given for not switching, or switching back after trying, is that Linux desktops are too different, even though they've traditionally not been all that different. Creating something unique, compared to tools users have used in the past, like Windows, isn't going to make people immediately productive. And being immediately productive is how the desktop UI/UX enters the background and becomes a facilitator rather than something that the user struggles with.
All that being said; you can install gnome in ubuntu 11.10. You don't have to use unity.

Or, even more simply, we can install Mint. :)
> Search engines who do not share the income generated by our users, are removed from Linux Mint and might get their ads blocked.

Wow, that is insane... With that sort of mentality, the next logical step is to gain market monopoly, pre-install a version of adblock with custom filters, and start charging the entire Internet to show ads.
"One thought. Develop your own, if you can. But that puts you into the radar of Curious Goverments."

I know this tone is discouraged on Hacker News, but if anything deserves it, this does.

You have no clue what you're saying. I know shit all about cryptography, but knowing shit all is a far cry better than thinking it's even remotely possible to be secure when you design your own crypto-sytem. That doesn't put you on the radar of Curious Governments. It puts you in the sight of script-kiddies.
Oracle announced Nashorn recently that is not yet open sourced, but should be released for Java 8 and compile to bytecode (w/ the help of invokedynamic)
Any idea what happens if you don't meet their requirements? (Eg, no university diploma) - can you get acquired but not hired?
Someone has managed to necro a two-year old argument. What we said two years ago may not be the same as what we say now.
Web pages are still terrible for rich content. For the web to really work you need something that is A) stable B) ridiculousness cross platform C) Fast both to load AND run D) degrades gracefully on limited Hardware, interfaces, AND network connectivity. HTML has always been a compromise and Adobe was incapable of maintaining and expanding Flash.

An opensource solution might be able to bridge the gap, but until then App's have significant advantages for users and developers alike.
Show HN: Simple Spam Scoring
Win Samsung Galaxy Nexus Phone with Google’s Photography Contest
Gnome fallback is supposed to be a temporary feature of Ubuntu. Sorry - I can't easily find where I read that.
Or Fedora. Or if you like tweaking things, Arch or Gentoo. Or to become more knowledgeable, a BSD.

I think part of what is happening here is that some number of people who got started in Ubuntu, as their first non-Windows OS, take it for granted (thus get outraged at change) but now feel the 'growing pains' of someone who wants to get more technical. Since their heads aren't where they were when they started with Ubuntu, it isn't as suitable for them any more.
Many times at notting hill carnival I have stood in front of a 20 foot tall wall of speakers and had my vision go blurry due to the 30Hz bass tone at 125db making my eyeballs oscillate in my skull.

Ahhh, notting hill...
Brandon, FL man killed when struck by Publix truck in Seffner, FL
Clickable: http://teapeat.com/
Because slavery is the most immoral thing in the world. Dead people don't care that they are dead, slaves care that they are slaves.
Facebook says India users will soon surpass U.S. user base
Authoritative Review of Social Computing by Tom Erickson, IBM Watson Research
Joke, based on the iName.
I felt that Mint's defaults were the problem rather than the solution, but personal tastes do vary.

Is it really that hard to run 'sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop'? Am I missing something here?
In my experience, HR reps will tell you anything to get you to take a job they are having trouble filling. They have nothing to lose, and everything to gain by telling you what you want to hear. 18 months from now, that HR rep won't be there, and no one will remember promising you the chance to move to another office or better position. In the end, you'll quit and they'll make that same promise to another sucker. Don't take the QA job now if that's not what you want.
Nope. They're all cluttered.

http://www.rakuten.co.jp/

http://www.bk1.jp/

http://www.goodwill.jp/

http://www.matsuzakaya.co.jp/

https://www.apita.co.jp/

http://www.minimini.co.jp/

http://www.nrt.co.jp/
The comment was in response to "Why switch to XFCE? Can't you just install Gnome?".

GNOME 3 most definitely "pulls the UI rug" with massive, controversial changes from previous versions. XFCE has yet to do anything like this.
Ask HN: How would you improve this simple web app?
FormBakery is a tool to create super simple forms for those of us who are less code-savvy. Its currently at: http://formbakery.com/beta/

The title says it all, how would you improve this application or the code it generates? What features would you like to see in FormBakery?

If you actually use FormBakery to bake a form, we would love to hear what you have to say. You can contact us at hello@formbakery.com
Distributed optimisation is interesting.

Remember that you can take node failure, as long as you have a copy of your state stored somewhere that you can restart from when required. The overall product isn't particularly effected from that.

0mq is probably what you want if you're implementing this the way i'm expecting you to. ie, some variation on: take current state, multicast that to all of the machines doing the optimisation take results, unicast back to a machine to determine the best state to seed the next round, repeat.

0mq over infiniband will iirc use the native infiniband multicast groups which is very efficient.

Keep snapshots of each iteration, and all should be good.

But like all things, it depends entirely on the specifics of what you're trying to do. Send me an email, you seem to have an interesting problem.
Financial squeeze causes couples to ponder their future
"So not being sexist makes an industry boring?"

No, but being self-important and all-too-cautious and "professional" makes it.
Helicopter crashed in Hawaii………..
Why is this even being debated?

How is the chef, or any other employee, any different from an early stage investor?
That's my setup too
Since it was just posted, the xv6 ANSI C Unix source is nice and fairly compact. They even provide a nice PDF for you to take it with you:

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2011/xv6/xv6-rev6.pdf

Also the low-level GLib core library is good:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/glib/tree/glib
I don't particularly care for either argument, it just seems like pointless pandering to different fan bases. Applications will evolve towards any platform as necessary
Wedding Hairstyles and Makeup Ideas from the Runways Spring 2012
So, this is version 3? Wouldn't that make it 50% more flingy?

I love the ball pick-up technique, but I'm not sold on the new throwing style. It seemed closer to spiking the ball into the ground - absolutely devastating to any small paper models of enemy combatants, but not much else.
Profitable Niches, Killer Sales Pages & Marketing Tips with Rob Walling
I actually interpreted the title as having the exact opposite emotion - the frustration that there are only three oligarchs in this entire business now.
Have you tried Ubuntu 11.10? Where are those 2 clicks?
That diagram is particularly cool.
If you choose to buy a Rolex you would be probably already one of that kind of people who buy their shirts with extra short sleeves...
Unregulated markets do lead to monopoly. Why? Because it is the very nature of competition. There will be a winner (or a few) and most will either be acquired or they will die out. With monopoly comes political power and this leads to crony capitalism. Then the monopoly can now dictate prices and influence both legislation and government regulation. The idea that companies will compete in perpetuity and benefit consumers as a result is flawed. Competition will not last, someone will win.
Show HN: My simple project for Remembrance Day
"As Steve Jobs put it: “Flash was designed for PCs using mice”—which is true. When Flash was created back in the 90′s, the target platform that it was designed for, was the PC. Flash was designed for desktop computers, computers with a fast CPU and a power-cable. This is the root cause of all the hardships Adobe has had with mobile."

read the rest of the article here - http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/09/why-adobe-failed/

explains everything super well!
Smartphone Rumours: The HTC Edge in 2012?
Lubuntu is also a great option and lighter weight than xubuntu. I just switched from ubuntu to lubuntu and am happy with the switch.
Any application that works with media, e.g. audio, video, needs really good access to the filesystem. I can't see Avid Media Composer for example ever conforming to the sandbox idea. What is Apple going to do about that in the long term? Give up on their platform for professional use?
Am I the only one who went through the "hate" to find out if there is something substantial worth considering? :)
How about requiring the word "bankruptcy" to appear somewhere in the privacy policy before you put the word "bankruptcy" in big red letters next to the name of somebody else's website?

Err on the side of caution when you've got somebody else's reputation in your hands.
OK...? The ancestors are talking about running Xubuntu and XFCE.
Define runs well.

My macbook is silent until I visit a site with a flash banner at which point the cpu fan comes on. That tells me that flash does something computationally intensive even when displaying what looks like a 4 frame movie with a button that prompts me to click to the next destination. The time between loading a page and hearing the CPU fan come on depends on how ad-laden the page is. While my machine doesn't lag and Chrome Canary will occasionally lag a little when scrolling those pages the first time, I'd have to say that translates to high cpu utilization which would kill a phone's battery pretty quickly.

The other problem was focus - most flash games used the mouse pointer for directional control. The mouse pointer doesn't exist on a phone and a tap would correspond to a mouse click. Redesigning Flash to deal with those issues on web pages where HTML5 solves many of those issues convinced Adobe to concentrate on Air, and leave webapps to HTML5.

Flash won't disappear overnight, but, new development ceased. Whether they make it support GPUs before relegating it to a 'security release only' update policy is hard to say.

Personally, I have removed flash from my macbook and only Chrome/Chrome Canary(my primary browser) can even see Flash enabled pages/sites. Months ago it was very irritating when the version of flash bundled with Canary would crash on one page and violate the sandbox causing google.com/music to crash as well.

*still amazed at the irony of using Flash for google.com/music :)
Sorry for the brevity. Another commenter pretty much summed up what I intended to convey: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3225388