skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally think your installation demo would lead directly to a no sale.
There are a few reasons.
In your demo video
1) The first thing you show is an error. I understand why you do this, but saying to somebody 'here's the error that comes up when you first start' isn't a great experience.
2) I suspect that the installation looks overly complicated to anybody who is not already familiar with how to set-up a website and sql, and you even go on to show them how they can change their settings in text if they need to. If you made it so simple, why do they need that info. You also take the viewer to a command prompt, and look at their database tables. Non of this spells 'Unprecedented Ease' to me.
3) You don't show what making an actual web-page is like. I suspect that is going to be the most important thing for most people. They can probably get through the install (though I suspect you should be able to make it an better experience), but I want to know what it looks like to build a site.

Looking at your documentation on 'creating a page'
1) you say that a user entering a field in to a form must put the '_' character between words. If this is so simple, you should be doing that for the user. Don't let the user make a mistake, you're supposed to be taking care of them.
2) 'Now for the really interesting part' you say. Put this code in the form??? wait, if you're making this so easy for me, why do I need to know code? Plus this is now code that I would need to learn, so I am going to need to learn how you think it is best to implement.

Basically, similar to apsurd, I think you've gone middle of the road here. You've taken out some of the work for programmers who probably don't mind writing the code, and you haven't made it simple enough for non-coders, and you're forcing them to learn too much stuff.
It seems like a good image to me. What should life be if not a string of uncertain journeys? I'd be more worried if I knew where I was going.
This is par for the course from ESR.
Yeah, I took this article as a great case study on how different people can look at the exact same data and draw totally opposite conclusions. Almost exactly the same example is used in The Bell Curve to argue that intelligence is innate, because Ashkenazi Jews and Asian-Americans tend to have higher IQs than whites, while West Indians tend to have higher IQs than Africans.
A Harsh CSS Environment for Testing Widgets
You're right, Sam. I am struck by the fact that the guntoter did much the opposite of what this entry's title suggests.

Essentially, it's a post about trollishly winning an argument on IRC by bleeting like a sheep.

A cautionary tale: people utterly convinced of their ideas will stoop to the level of beasts to avoid sensibly answering criticism.
The article itself is intellectual garbage: a hodge-podge of guesses, social fables and random facts assembled on a web page.

He far overestimates parents' influence on children. Judith Rich Harris' work has proven that (for normal families, where parents don't traumatise their children) the peer group is far more important than parents in the child's development.
Depending on what you have to do, it's not, but I have to edit documents that live in a sharepoint server a couple times a week and I never quite figured out how to do that without a Windows box. That and exchange managing our e-mail makes moving my corporate-issued computer out of Windows somewhat risky career-wise.

Believe-me, I have meditated on this more than once.
It's a huge pain to fire an employee - there're dozens of potential "wrongful termination" lawsuit hitches, and if you run into any of them, you've just cost the company more in legal bills than you'll ever save in that employee's salary. For that reason, companies usually will keep full-timers even if they aren't quite as efficient as consultants or new hires, because the costs of getting it wrong and inviting a lawsuit don't outweigh the marginal benefits. Unless the employee is grossly incompetent, in which case you both save more in lost productivity, and there's a lower chance of a successful lawsuit...
I thought the most interesting point was the one about what happens when you bring in a big, flat-screen TV -- you are introducing a highly culturally influential meme-blaster into your environment. I think it's debatable whether to call it pollution, but I have noticed that not having a TV leaves me naive to all sorts of time wasting thoughts.

I also liked the point about trying to be "chosen". I think there is some truth to it. But isn't pretty much any job about being chosen -- entrepreneurs get chosen by VCs and customers, new lawyers by the partners, mcdonalds employees by the regional manager, etc.
Your web site as an ASCII art
I think that by definition, a rational argument cannot be won with appeals to emotion.

The only exception I can think of is revealing to a person that their perceived utility function is different from their actual utility function. (E.g., how happy does owning diamond necklace actually make you?) But in that case, appealing to emotion is more about revealing new information (about emotions) than overriding rational thought.
I cannot believe why so many people are so enamored with Seth Goldin's grossly glorified common sense.

* Word spreads.

No shit. Word of mouth, that is really important.

* Needs are similar.

Wow you need to pick a market with multiple customers. Brilliant!!!

* Budgets exist.

Make sure your Customers have money! Don't know if you guys know this, if your customers don't have money, they cannot pay you!

* Barriers exist.

Who has not heard of barriers to entry? Well IMHO, barrier to entry from the technology standpoint is not that important. There are many programmer than can make twitter, youtube, wordpress clones...etc. Execution is more crucial
I agree on both points. It's a weakness to think of art, or craft, or work as self-expression in the first place. It blocks flow. This is not widely understood in our society.
"The dull ones, mostly."

This is what PG described as "Microsoft is dead".
The author writes about success. His statement is: with more work you can achieve the same success than another person with a higher IQ.
==> Work irons out ones inferior IQ.

Actually mastering a field or craft, or having success simply requires a lot of work.
I don't mean to pick on you personally, but the fact that you responded to that rather profound comment with a borderline racial slur is indicative of what's wrong with this thread and this entire class of conversation and article. It makes me want to walk on the other side of the street.

Edit: I guess I should be more careful in putting this. I like frankness and don't believe in imposing ideological rules on discourse. But I also observe that discussions around this stuff tend to be of low quality. Your comment struck me as a nice example because the first sentence seemed nasty and jarring and the rest of the comment was just fine.
Yes. To have all my beliefs challenged by every piece of news I read would be exhausting. Most of the time I want to read news written by someone who shares my basic worldview.

In fact, the perfect news item is one that is indistinguishable from the one that would have been written by me, had I been there. That's the perspective I want.

That's not to say I don't welcome learning about opposing viewpoints, but for something that challenges me deep, I'd prefer to read a book, than a bunch of news items.
Google vs. Yahoo vs. Bing. Most results are virtually identical.
Was hoping it would also convert the images...nope.
Those who want to understand other people's behaviour.
Neat idea -- and here I thought it was just going to redirect to http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/ D:
How Do You Spot an Emerging Leader?
"the peer group is far more important than parents in the child's development."

That's during the school years. I'm only talking about kids younger than four. Also, I'm talking about the cognitive development of structures which become relatively fixed after age five. (Like extraversion and executive function.) The peer group is more important than parenting, but only for predicting the trajectory of further academic achievement, which is completely different from the ways in which parenting styles affect cognitive, emotional, and physiological development.

EDIT: Also, speaking of peer groups, one of the reasons good parenting is critical is because schools sort children into different tracks as early as age six. In principle, track placement is temporary. In practice, it is quite permanent. To quote one researcher, “We found that first-grade ability-group placement can have
persistent effects on children’s achievement in school over a period of several years and may shape the expectations of children’s performance held by significant others, such as parents and teachers. Whether these effects are instructional, social, or institutional, they are real, and they have implications for children’s future schooling trajectories. […] Instructional grouping may have the
unintended effect of increasing inequalities in educational outcomes, largely by creating inequalities in educational resources and rewards.”

(This comes from Equality and Achievement, and also from Pallas et al. “Ability Group Effects: Instructional, Social, or Institutional?” Sociology of Education 67 (1994).)
Failure is OK, I guess ... but why not just get it right the first time? ;)
I was hoping it would pipe screenshots (e.g. snap.com's snapshots) through aalib and/or an OCR engine (e.g. http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/).
Yeah, I have to agree. It does a wonderful job of doing very loving mini expositions on a whole slew of topics, and doing so at regular intervals!
From the blind test site:

Google: 45%, Bing: 33%, Yahoo: 22% | 9,496 votes

While they're all the same order of magnitude, I wouldn't call that "virtually identical"...
Good point, and I think it makes sense for any contract negotiation.
I wonder if Kindle adoption would increase if Amazon offered people the option of exchanging physical books and electronic ones? I don't own a Kindle but I have some books which I would rather have in electronic form (particularly ones given as gifts which mainly take up room on my shelf). I'd also be much more inclined to buy electronic books if I knew it wouldn't cost me much if I changed my mind and wanted a physical copy.
New Django Admin Actions
Not quite. I wasn't clear enough. These operations are purely UI manipulations. They don't operate on lists of values or even need to know what they are. What they care about are things like: should I set a width property or a height property? To which you might reply: fine, just pass the dimension around and have a set-size function that knows whether to set width or height depending on the dimension, and so on. I say: yeah, you can do it that way, but it takes more code and is harder to read, because now you have to write it in a dimension-agnostic way, which is not how humans (or I at least) like to think about these things. It's easier to write or read the concrete version for one dimension and then say "the other dimension is just like this only transposed", which is exactly what the macro does for us.

Do you need macros to make such a program work? No. Can you use them to make the program shorter, clearer, and more generalizable? Yes.
"Richard Nisbett cites each of these groups in his superb recent book, “Intelligence and How to Get It.” Dr. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, argues that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable and owes little or nothing to genetics."

Stephen Pinker argued very persuasively in The Blank Slate that this is not the case. Brains are malleable to some degree, but genetics are still very important. One of the more convincing pieces of evidence is the similarities in the abilities of twins raised in separate families. He recounted case studies in which identical twins who had never even met each other both had the same proffession, favorite hobby and even shared odd habits, such as wearing a rubber band around their wrists

More bluntly, if intelligence "owes little or nothing to genetics", why is it that children acquire an understand of the language spoken in their home while house pets do not?

As Chomsky's discovery of universal grammar implies, humans already have a great deal of what we need for language processing built into our brains from birth.
Similarly, there is no indication they have adjusted the results for IQ. According to some estimates "each IQ point raises worker productivity 1.76-2.38%" where I take "worker productivity" to mean lifetime earnings.
http://www.ehponline.org/members/2002/110p563-569grosse/gros...
> This showed that some 80 percent of Twitter accounts have fewer than 10 follower

I think this distribution is a sign that more normal (mainstream) people are joining Twitter. From a brief scan of the public trend line, it looks like more people are just talking about their life with their friends than trying too hard to tweet(*) something of significance.

Why is it on Twitter that some celebrities try to come across as normal people and some normal people (in the guise of social media experts) try to come across as experts/gurus?

http://tweetingtoohard.com
After the 1929 stock market crash, did investors really jump out of windows?
> a sober look at its empirical basis suggests that it is an inverted pyramid, a lot of conclusions perched on flimsy premises

Der Spiegel examines the US vs Europe in a large number of dimensions and finds that the US differs far less than one might expect. For example, the white murder rate is less than that of Britain. Or that we are doing pretty well in the pollution department. Even the majority-minority tensions in the US are starting to appear in Europe because of immegration from poorer regions.
EndNote maker's lawsuit over open-source Zotero dismissed
I'm actually surprised - my guess would be something like <10% for yahoo and almost equal results for google and bing.

On the other hand the test can't take one important feature into account - profiled results. After 2-3 searches for anything programming related on someone else's browser I feel there's something wrong with the results... yep - I'm not logged in. Even if it doesn't make a huge difference, it is noticeable. I'd really like to check the stats while being logged in into my google account.
Ask HN: Rate my friend's Facebook App: http://apps.facebook.com/diditzapp/
Hi fellow Hackers. My friend has started an app called Diditz. Kindly rate it, and leave your comments. Thanks in advance!
There isn't an 'emotional argument masquerading as logic' anywhere in the article or the comments. Unless the suggestion is that every argument is an attempt at logic, in which case 'logical argument' is a tautology.

From the article:
I think, now, that gun owners need to be replying more often to hoplophobes simply by echoing their “Baaa! Baaa! Baaaa!” back at them. Because only that reaches the actual fundamentals of the thinly-rationalized anti-firearms prejudice we so often encounter.

Yeah, because your assumption that those with an anti-firearms stance are by definition 'hoplophobe' and 'prejudiced' isn't a close-minded, arrogant, emotional position at all. The 'fear' argument is easily turned around: you only think you need a gun, because you are afraid of what could happend if you didn't have one.

The proper response to the presented 'arguments' are:

Q: “Why do you guys think you need firearms?”

A: That's not an argument

Q: “Criminals will just take them from you and use them against you.”

A: Criminals have their own guns and don't need ours. There is no evidence that the risk you name outweighs the benefits of owning a gun.

Q: “They’re useless for anything but killing.”

A: Umm, that's the point: they can be used to kill people before they kill you.

Q: “You can’t seriously think they’re a deterrent against overreaching governments, the cops will just come for you you first.”

A: If almost everyone has a gun, the cops can't come for 'you' first.

Not only does he present stupid arguments, he is also incapable of defusing these stupid arguments and has to resort to imitating sheep. And this is supposed to be a hacker guru, someone worth imitating. God help us all...
In my observation, the causation usually runs the other way. People enjoy things that give them a good effort->reward loop. If something is too hard, it is frustrating and not fun. Too easy, and it is boring. I enjoy programming because it is constant puzzle solving at exactly the right level of challenge for my brain. But other people simply do not have the programming gene and thus they never enjoy it.

I also disagree that competition is a bad thing. Competition is often fun and exhilarating. It has stimulated humanity's greatest achievements. The bad kind of competition tends to be competition over artificial goals (such as grades). But competition over real goals - getting to the moon, setting a world record in sprinting, building the world's best search engine - can be a tremendous driving force.
There are equivalents for nearly everything.

The word MIT, Stanford and Ivy League are simply in your words Oxford and Cambridge. That's your issue.
Project Natal – a real breakthrough? Or the real monocracy?
Yeah, and most people will appreciate the fact that you are making an effort and they will help you out in continuing the conversation. Not that hard really...
1. This was created by a Microsoft employee (a "Microsoft Developer Evangelist"). Maybe this doesn't matter to you, but considering the $100m marketing budget and the widespread use of astroturfing, it seems a little dishonest to me (certainly treading in a grey area) that there isn't full disclosure. YMMV

2. As someone who cares deeply about research methods, I'd argue that there is little to no value in superficial, subjective and contextless comparisons like this.

Edit: He has now added a statement that he works for microsoft. It was not there before I posted this comment
That does not follow. Although it may take many failures to climb the mountain of excellence, once you're there, and are still regularly failing, you have a problem.
"But isn't pretty much any job about being chosen -- entrepreneurs get chosen by VCs and customers, new lawyers by the partners, mcdonalds employees by the regional manager, etc."

Well for an entrepreneur it's your product or service that's being chosen, not you yourself. It's pretty clear when you talk with entrepreneurs that they see the world very differently because of this.

At the end of the day there are two economies, the economy of those who do and the economy of those who do what they're told. And both the children of white-collar and blue-collar workers are largely ending up in the latter economy. My point was that this isn't happening only because of the worldview that parents are transmitting, but rather because the way parents are raising kids is causing irreversible cognitive damage that puts kids at a huge handicap regardless of what worldviews they're later exposed to. I didn't bother to go into the statistics about how ECE stuff affects later outcomes like adult literacy and such because I thought it would be excessive. But it's all there if you're looking for it.
Neurotic indeed. The author was born in 1964 (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Deresiewicz), which makes him the same age as me. Thus we probably attended Yale as undergraduates at the same time. Yet I recognize absolutely none of the dynamics that he describes. It is never quite clear what he is narrating from his own remembered student experience versus what he is surmising from observing Lit students around him.

Now, I didn't attend an elite prep school (quite the converse), nor did I remain in the academy after graduating (no loss for the academy, given my GPA...). So perhaps I received a subtherapeutic dose of whatever has saddled him with such despair. But I have no problem communicating with my fellow rural firefighters, a merry mix of garbagemen, carpenters, surveyors, innkeepers, pastors, snowplow repairmen, and the occasional stray programmer. I can take commands from an irrigation pipe salesman or a backhoe operator. They can do things I can't do, while I can do things they can't do; there is mutual respect. Occasionally they tease me for employing a sixty-four dollar word when a ninety-eight cent word would do, but we maintain communication, and we value our differences.

Certainly, my experience as as member of the pampered elite must have been very different from his. Am I the outlier, or is he?
In the works of Pynchon, a predominant concept is the distinction between creation and destruction. Derrida uses the term ‘realism’ to denote the paradigm, and subsequent futility, of postcultural truth. In a sense, subdialectic textual theory holds that the task of the writer is significant form.

“Society is part of the paradigm of narrativity,” says Debord; however, according to Dietrich[9] , it is not so much society that is part of the paradigm of narrativity, but rather the genre, and some would say the dialectic, of society. Foucault uses the term ‘realism’ to denote the role of the poet as artist. However, Parry[10] states that we have to choose between dialectic objectivism and precapitalist deappropriation.

Any number of situationisms concerning capitalist discourse may be discovered. But the example of subdialectic textual theory intrinsic to Joyce’s Dubliners is also evident in Ulysses, although in a more mythopoetical sense.

Lacan uses the term ‘capitalist discourse’ to denote the common ground between reality and sexual identity. Thus, Lyotard’s essay on subdialectic textual theory implies that the law is capable of truth.

Baudrillard promotes the use of textual narrative to deconstruct hierarchy. In a sense, several materialisms concerning the futility, and eventually the paradigm, of subdialectic culture exist.

The characteristic theme of the works of Joyce is the role of the reader as observer. However, in Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce deconstructs realism; in Ulysses, although, he analyses capitalist discourse.
Well if you question the methods, you can always open bing/google/yahoo and check to make sure the column labels are correct
Roger Federer
This just in, the sky is blue!
it would be cooler if it didn't discard my stylesheet
Because the launch of a new phone, Techcrunch (Arrington) and Leo Laporte (nice guy but still marketing) don't have anything in common with a PR campaign or marketing campaign at all. Maybe Leo isn't guilty but Arrington does try to get controversy going. Nothing wrong with that in the PR business that he is in, TC does it well.

Judging by the reaction to this event and the response to my saying there is a probability of a PR stunt, I would say stuff like this is easier to pull off than you think.
Has been submitted 4 times previously: http://searchyc.com/submissions/jquery+tools
Search results are important, but they aren't the _only_ thing that matters here.

Which one is faster?
Which has a better UX?
Which should trust with my data?
Which integrates with other products I like?
Which one works best on my phone?
...
I didn't say, hint or imply that it was listing inaccurate results. I stated that it's superficial, subjective and devoid of context. Frankly, it means nothing.

For example, someone searches for "bongo". The forth results are a radio station, a page about the animal and an email/calendaring system. Given those results, someone votes for one. Why? We don't know. They might barely now. One thing we do know: it was a one-off search anyway, not something that was part of someone's normal workflow.
The title is kind of misleading. It's not about scanning books, only scanning barcodes.
My experience with Chinese college students this last month has given me essentially the same impression. The interesting part though is that, widely, they are very self aware and frustrated by this.

It's hard not to draw a line directly between exam-based curricula and these sorts of techniques.