skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was my first thought and you're totally right but lets not miss the point here. Let's just assume the author didn't know this about the Star Wars franchise and let it go. I'm glad people brought it up though because I'm a huge Star Wars fan and I couldn't let it go either.

Despite this mistake I'm the post his point still stands. People learn all these skills but fail to understand when to properly use them. A lot of visual design tools like Photoshop have the ability to let you create incredibly complex, technically challenging works but just because you can doesn't mean you should.

This seems like a newbie mistake. Newbie learns cool new thing and them uses it everywhere because he can. Usually the cool new thing is more difficult and complex than other things newbie knows and somehow people begin to think harder is better.

We're essentially talking about how to use tools. As you fill your toolbox with new tools it's important to remember that every tool has its place and just because you've added a more powerful tool to your box it doesn't mean that from now on that tool should be used in lew of the others. If that were the case then you'd only need one tool. Each time you got a new more powerful tool you'd throw away your old ones and that's exactly what happens a lot of times.

I think that phase passes for most of us though and I don't think it's taste that makes people do this too. Rather than taste being the issue I believe it's a matter of skill. Learning how to use more complex and powerful tools is a good skill but an often overlooked skill is learning how all those tools work in concert and knowing when to use which combination. People who work in design especially usually have good taste to begin with, so it isn't taste that's lacking. Instead they're just so enamoured with their growth that they lose the forest for the trees whenever they level up.
True, but that would be talking about script and character development rather than design.
A couple of years ago, my wife, who is relatively computer savvy (not compared to HN users, just to the general public) tried to buy a Miley Cyrus album for a young acquaintance. Instead she got a Miles Cyrus album, which was a guy singing bad covers (though they could be a lot worse) of Miley Cyrus songs.

I still find that highly amusing, but it's also a huge failure on Amazon's part. There's no way that was the album anyone was looking for.
A video pops up with the candidate cast as a character in an old-school video game, with 8-bit Legend of Zelda-esque music in the background. A bunch of French scrolls by on the screen, with the gist (from what I can tell) being "the final battle approaches, insert vote to continue".
I'm confused as to how they got him to say "Coachella". Had he performed there in his lifetime or did they have to create that word from old voice recordings?
The code I was using is here:

var random = [];

var i = 10;

while(i) {

random.push(Math.floor(Math.random() * 2));
i--;

}

console.log(random.join());

I was just manually doing the insertions. It lost five out of five times, though the last time only by a very small amount.
Attention Internet Marketers: What do Ergonomics Have to Do With Productivity?
Cool as it is, I actually feel put off by this site. The Konami Code on websites has always been an easter egg, with some cute-but-meaningless result. This just feels manufactured. It's kind of like seeing someone use a meme in real life; it's just wrong.
The yayQuery Soundtrack
Interesting point, and I do hope that no one ever takes one of my opinions as an objective truth. That said, I do feel strongly that if the only benefit you can name about writing code in one particular manner is that it is aesthetically pleasing to you, then that is hardly a benefit at all.

When it comes to this particular case, I've heard a few different arguments for why the syntax they use is poor, including the following:

1. The syntax relies on parsing behavior that is expected to change in the future.

2. The syntax they use does not work in one of the major minifiers used throughout the community (the crux of the whole issue to begin with, but certainly a drawback in and of itself)

I have yet to hear any benefit to NOT including a semi-colon to resolve this issue beyond aesthetics, and aesthetics alone is just not a rationalization that I can get behind.
if you think book knockoffs are amazon's biggest problem, try to buy anything else!

it's like browsing dealextreme.com

101% of the non-book products are either:

a) not the real brand
b) appears on the listing as $3.00 with $17.99 shipping
You all should read my new book, "Grieg, Erdős, Breugel"
Sincerely Yours,
Hoff Dougstadtler
Last time: 18:58:52 (PDT)
> With the way things are going, it's almost guaranteed that religious power will be a thing of the past as soon as we can prove other life/civilizations exist besides the one here on Earth.

I'm not so sure about that. Buddhism in particular goes to great length to emphasize it's teachings apply to all sentient beings in all universes past and present. We may be hard pressed to escape it's presumption.

I believe most faiths take a similar approach even if they aren't quite as explicit about it.
I like your design better, much cleaner. I was not a fan of the exec redesign you did however this one is a big Improvement. Good job.
hum, that's why you avoid clicking wired.com links

they all are like that. It's basically TED in print. With expensive watch ads.
Taste doesn't matter if you lack skill and knowledge.

The linked post is a fine example of a tasteful message falling completely flat because it was argued without skill or sufficient knowledge. i.e. It was pretty much undone by the use of a stupendously and hilariously wrong example: Lucas' love for (and homage to) Hollywood-serial era transitions.
Commercial publishers, though not as blatant about it, are nearly as bad in their own way. A financially successful book is guaranteed to spawn hordes of imitations from "respectable" publishing houses.

I was in a physical Barnes & Noble store not long ago and noted that they now have an entire section labeled "Teen Paranormal Romance".
Naive Bayes is a linear classifier, and it makes much stronger assumptions than other linear classifiers.
I think there are essentially two "deep" understandings of ML prevalent today. The first is more common: the ability to do the calculus, algebra, and probability derivations required to design complex ML algorithms combined with the CS knowledge to find/design a good algorithm and the software design skill to actually implement it on real, "big" data.

No doubt this is a difficult position to master and those who perform well are able to tackle lots of mathematical and computational challenges. They also are model builders who (have tendency to) relentlessly seek complex models in order to solve complex problems.

The other, rarer side is the learning theorist who may or may not understand the model building, algorithmic, and computational tools but understands well the theories which allow us to have reasonable expectations that the tools of the first group will work at all. These guys have a funny story in that they were the old statisticians who got a major egg-on-the-face after proclaiming that essentially all of ML was impossible. Turns out the first group managed to redefine the problem slightly and make major headway (and money).

---

The thing I want to bring to light however is that the second group knows the math that bounds the capacities of ML algorithms. This isn't easy. It's one thing to say you recognize that the curse of dimensionality exists, but it's another to have felt it's mathematical curves and to build an intuition for what forces are sufficient to cause disruption.

The more experience you have with the learning maths, the more likely you are, I feel, to apply very simple algorithms, to be scared of "little x's" (real data) enough to treat it with great care, and to attempt to explore the problem space with confidence for what steps will lead you to folly.

---

It's a fine line between the two, though. Stray too far to the first group and you'll spend a month building an algorithm that does a millionth of a percentage point better than Fisher's LDA. Spend too much time in the second camp and you'll confidently state that no algorithm exists that does better than a millionth of a percentage point over Fisher LDA... and then lose purely by never trying.
Hmm, I really don't see how this could possibly work. Phones will have to be in communication with each other to see if you hit another player and GPS isn't that accurate. Cool concept tho.
He died three years before the first Coachella. So no, he had never performed there.
I've been pretty consistently disappointed with how EFF has been portraying this bill

The ACLU has had a much more measured response

Say what? http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security-technology-and-li... Sounds to me like they're singing from the same hymnal (and the ACLU page specifically says that they're joining the EFF, among others, in opposing CISPA).

It's another thing entirely to attempt to twist every meaningless, do-nothing piece of legislation to come out of Washington as an attempt to rewire the Internet in favor of the MPAA, which is exactly what the EFF appears to be doing here.

Say what? The linked page specifically acknowledges a proposed amendment to remove "intellectual property" from the relevant spot in the text -- while reminding us that said amendment has not yet been voted on. If CISPA were to pass with that phrase "intellectual property" intact, of course content owners would do their best to use it for their purposes. How far they might get, I don't know, but I think we can all agree that the amendment, once accepted, will be a valuable clarification.

Basically your argument seems to be that CISPA isn't a big deal because it's not much worse than ECPA. This is an important point, I agree. But if the goal is to improve online privacy generally, it seems to me that further steps in the wrong direction need to be opposed successfully before there can be any hope of positive movement.

If the arguments against CISPA are ultimately arguments for revising ECPA and PATRIOT, those arguments need to gain currency. People need to be sensitized to them and to think about them. That's going to take time and many battles. You seem to think we should skip this battle and save our powder. I am more inclined to the view that even if this is not the most important battle, every victory helps and this is not the time to concede anything.
Unlike most of the other facelifts, I'd say that the inPulse web site is definitely in need of a refresh. So this was interesting to see.
Star Command dev shares realities of costs after Kickstarter funding
Isn't this really just an ad homeniem?

Would the author have the same reaction if it was made by Brewster Kahle, founder of the non-profit Internet Archive (www.archive.org)?

After all, the same points can easily be made in regard to non-profit information archiving as for profit-seeking information indexing.
ToS agreements are long, convoluted, and full of confusing legal verbiage. Sentences like "Contains violence, sexual innuendo, and some nudity" are short, direct, and easy to read, if a bit vague. That's a pretty big practical difference.
Intel Win8 10" tablet specs thinner than iPad, 11" version with keyboard
Chartbeat Raises $9.5M, Launches Engagement-Focused Redesign
I had this too when I bought an iPad Smart Cover. The price is really the only way you could know it was a knock-off product:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004TEPN8M/ref=oh_o00_s00...

Fortunately I just needed something cheap for a single journey I was making using the company's device, but the fact it says the word Apple, uses their part number & is one of the top-selling items in the category, I can see how many would be fooled.

I read the comments and assumed it to be fake (it very clearly is), but I can imagine most people would not get that far and happily stump up the cash - e.g. those who don't realise that Amazon allows 3rd party sellers.
You should start accepting requests, I know so many startups that could use a big redesign.
Same as ig1: last time: 7:01 PM PDT
It gets worse:

"But civil rights campaigners are worried about several clauses in the London Olympic Games and Games Act 2006. Section 19(4) could cover protest placards, they said, as it read: "The regulations may apply in respect of advertising of any kind including in particular – (a) advertising of a non-commercial nature, and (b) announcements or notices of any kind."

Section 22 allows a "constable or enforcement officer" to "enter land or premises" where they believe such an advert is being shown or produced. It allows for materials to be destroyed, and for the use of "reasonable force". The power to force entry requires a court warrant. Causing still further concern is a section granting the powers to an enforcement officer appointed by Olympic Delivery Authority.

Anita Coles, policy officer for Liberty, said: "This goes much further than protecting the Olympic logo for commercial use. Regulations could ban signs urging boycotts of sponsors with sweat shops. Then private contractors designated by the Olympic authority could enter homes and other premises in the vicinity, seizing or destroying private property."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/jul/21/olympics2012-civil-...
This is a really interesting phenomenon but arguably happening before Amazon markets became a thing. For example, in the mid-90s, knock-off band Los del Mar got on the charts with a largely indistinguishable cover of "Macarena" by Los del Rio.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macarena_(song)#Los_Del_Mar_ver...
As was discussed last round [1], they usually arrive at 8PM CDT, 6PM PDT.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3179780
I thought discussion of other submissions of this same story suggested that the whole story is an April Fools hoax.

See

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3830019

(no comments, 4 days ago)

http://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/physicist-claims-vict...

(no comments, 3 days ago)

and

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842033

(99 comments, yesterday, with key comment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3842179

perhaps not sufficiently noticed)

for previous submissions of this story.
By this logic, all employers are exploiting their workers. Most employers make much more money on the work that their employees are completing.

However, they are going to this company by choice. They can choose to leave. They also agree to the wage. In addition to all of this, it's not easy being an independent worker. If anything, the small company is preventing them from getting exploited (they don't have to worry about chasing down a paycheck from each individual client, marketing, etc).

Finding clients is just as time consuming as the actual work itself. I know, I've done it myself as a freelancer.
Reminds me of Ira Glass on taste and work:

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn't have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I've ever met. It's gonna take awhile. It's normal to take awhile. You've just gotta fight your way through."
Coming at this fresh, I have absolutely no idea what a facelift is in this context, and you don't give any. Have you redesigned their web site? The product? What's the relevance of biosensing?

Confusing.
Patent Absurdity: Apple tries to patent existing tool
You're right. Also, I think lack of international exchange feeds back into lack of cultural acceptance. When everyone you know speaks the same language, follows the same cultural norms, etc., there is little incentive to consider the possibility that people who radically differ from you might offer great ideas and alternative lifestyles. A walled garden limits people's imaginations.

Unfortunately, many Japanese seem to regard foreigners not as potential colleagues and a reservoir of ideas, but as mere cash cows for exporters to milk, and as "Gaijin" who somehow deserve less respect than the Japanese. The same happens in South Korea. There's an incredible amount of contempt for foreigners and foreign things, mostly among demographics that do not interact regularly with outside cultures.

By contrast, in America, YC founders come from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds. It's common to see names that are obviously not English in origin. Diversity is one of the major strengths of a country like America, and one which relatively homogeneous countries like Japan cannot easily replicate. When your CTO is from Poland and your CFO is from India, you are kinda forced to think on a global scale.
FWIW, Seamless.com is .net
If you have the funding, "rent" one. There are lots and lots (and lots) of decent designers to choose from, and one person's Rockstar is another person's decent. Designers should be much, much easier to find on-sight than good developers. You have a whole world of their work in front of you. You only have to contact them directly and tell them that you are impressed with their work in (insert some site, etc. here) and wondered if they would be willing to consider being competitively reimbursed for a small amount of their time. Then try to close the deal by stating your problem (what you want them to design) briefly without flowery language or sales-gibberish, spelling out what you need their work to accomplish (e.g. Our product/service is X. Our target markets are Y and Z. The different types of users using our site are A and B. A needs to do C, D, and E and B needs to do F, G, and login to do H, and I. And the best way to do this is by hiring a good designer to talk with them to find out what they would want to hear from a startup looking to hire a designer for temporary work. After you get the designer hooked for the work, keep using them and try to get them to come on full-time. If they don't, you at least have a design to attract other designers.
The "consumers hate us because of homosexuality in our games" is a PR move from EA to cover the fact they were voted worst company in America for reasons that have nothing to do with sexuality.

They were voted worst company because of their spyware distribution service, anti-consumer DLC practices, and ruining otherwise great developers by buying them and forcing out lackluster sequels designed for profit over all other considerations. I'm not saying that's wrong for a company to do, I'm just saying that's why online communities are upset.

But as long as they keep claiming the people who don't like their company are homophobic, they draw attention from these things in the media.
All things being equal, I give the job to the guy in the suit vs the guy in jeans.
right. You're one of those left-wing, the government should force "equality" people.
No offense but this looks like a generic template with content filled in. A clean and simple design like this needs to demonstrate excellent typography and spacing, neither of which I see here.

If you wanted to let the product speak for itself, I would have drawn inspiration from Flipboard or Path. Both of these sites heavily rely a clean design coupled with custom typography and a well integrated video.
In case anyone clicks his link to Variational Methods and is confused to find an article on quantum mechanics, as inspirational and arguably related as it may be, I think he actually meant to link to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variational_Bayesian_methods
I have a good friend who runs his bootstrapped startup (http://www.georiot.com/) on Mono/Linux (http://mono-project.com/ASP.NET). Utilizing some OSS helps to keep the cost down.
I'd rather have crawable content searchable thru Google with relevant ads on the side than the shitty advertising Facebook or YouTube throws in my face, for instance. People complain (me too) but the fact is Google (search engine, not company) is the only one in position to deliver relevant advertising that doesn't bother the user. It's a win-win.
> I can't imagine Best buy accepting a return on a book a year after it was purchased.

An legendarily liberal returns policy works for Costco (though they did have to tone down the electronics policy after abuse). Books have been written about Nordstrom's supposedly accepting someone returning a tire. Walmart gives 90 days. Home Depot gives 6 months. Amazon is competing with them, not with you.

A safe shopping experience and excellent customer service are why Amazon's shoppers are there. You want to sell there because it has shoppers. For that, you take their policies that built that audience for you, and you love them.

Otherwise, go back to eBay or start your own store.
Wow! That's an amazing description! It didn't occur to me they were reusing the sprites.

In any case, it shouldn't be that hard just to draw a bunch of black pixels on the waistline before the beam reaches the waistline and erase the line if a player moves.
That ACLU blog post is from today; I hadn't seen it, and was citing a much more measured policy statement from several months ago. I find today's blog post equally as disappointing as EFF's coverage.

I fundamentally disagree with the argument that we should pick sides and strive towards victory for victory's sake. That's a bad policy mechanism, but more pragmatically, it also creates fatigue, attenuates opposition to real issues, and generates a deficit of goodwill. While I don't think the legislative sponsorship of CISPA is done in good faith, I think its industry backers genuinely do feel like something needs to be done about online attacks.

Though you clearly disagree with me, I think you've done a good job of summarizing my points. I'd only add this: my problem is less with opposition to the bill (I think it's a bad bill) and more with the way it's been covered by EFF, Demand Progress and Boing Boing.
Iota and Jot: the simplest languages?
A few months ago I was about to buy a 80s compilation album in MP3 format from Amazon based on nothing more than the names of the songs, when I noticed one of the reviews (not even the top one) was complaining about how these were not the original artists. Sure enough I played a few of the samples and I realized that while the songs (and lyrics) were generally the same, not only the pitch was all wrong on some of them, but the voices and instruments were all kind of "off". Needless to say I ended up not buying the album.

I think Amazon needs to allow these things on their catalog but at the same time they need to be more clear about the fact that these are either not originals or (in the case of the books) that they're really rip-offs of popular media. It's fairly obvious that these are little more than scams, but the no-returns-allowed electronic format itself and the fact that the amounts involved are small probably plays a part in preventing people from complaining too much once they realize that they've fallen for it.
How our addiction to computers is helping keep the world quiet & peaceful
Qatrix, a high performance client-side framework
Rachel Marone's stalker (and mine) makes a personal appearance in the comments section of this article: http://www.dailydot.com/business/kickstarter-cyberstalker-vi...