skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was unaware that the general public's working definition of "children" was "unable to vote". I guess that means that the severely mentally disabled, felons, and visiting foreigners are all children?
The picture style is my preferred method. I give my audience something prettier than me to look at that doesn't take much concentration, that should be reserved for listening and thinking. I've seen far too many where the slides are for the speaker's benefit: to remind them what to talk about next. You too must have experienced someone turning to the next slide and they have already covered the material on it.
Thanks for the feedback.

On #1 and #2 on the landing page... I agree with both. Those line drawings looked way worse with teeth, so our relative perception is that these are better, but we shall revisit it.

On the more critical things with the product...

#1. Too much whitespace.

This has been a hard fight for us, that single issue, as the vast majority of forums set the font far too small (10px) but information density is high. We've used vBulletin and phpBB as our compare point and we show 8 items per page where the default theme from those would show 10, but ours are far more readable. We think our defaults are fairly good, but want much more active sites so that we can create meaningful A/B tests on the front sizes and white space. It's definitely one of the more frequent pieces of feedback.

#2. Started and Replied are extremely critical.

Remove them and engagement drops off. Started helps people choose, from the newer items, which ones they want to read and reply to, based on who started it. Replied is extraordinary, remove it and people do not go into the item and make their own reply, they stop engaging with it. People tend to hit the page of items, scan for who made the last reply and when, and then make the decision to go into it. The ones who make the most comments navigate by the engagement of others, not by the topics and subject of the items.

We experimented with that, and even the absence of the last author's name on the list of forums continues to generate feedback. We think we can just about get away with that one, but the numbers are strongly against removing them from the item list.

#3. Agree wholeheartedly, a number of designs are possible but our defaults today are equivalent to Twitter customisation.

We plan 3 levels of theming and customisation and they are all effectively supported already but not yet available for a number of dull reasons.

The first: Twitter customisation: Logo, background colour/image, font colour. We support this today.

The second: Upload your own CSS (with some security restrictions), or pick from a theme gallery.

The third: Fork https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb , put it on Heroku, and fundamentally change all HTML, CSS, UX, everything.

Today we only expose #1, and anyone can go do #3 already. #2 is designed for, but we haven't yet built the security bit.

We do have some far more attractive examples of forum than the ones I've shared, but they're currently testing their communities and it would not be right for me to make them public before they are ready. We will definitely update the linked examples of forums once some of the really good looking ones go public.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll definitely put the vertical height A/B test back on the urgent todo list for when the numbers will make it meaningful.
As yet another individual who is hampered by copying down the lecture I'd like to provide some more anecdotal evidence.

> There's evidence for note taking, as I previously said. The main difference may have been that you had a good grounding in the subject, so taking basic notes would have been a waste of time.

I guess we are talking about different kind of lectures. My experience comes from 5 years of mathematical courses with very dense material. Just taking "basic notes" doesn't cut it there, because only an approximation of a definition is mostly worthless. And regarding proofs, if I understand the subject good enough that I can boil down the essential steps of a proof while seeing it for the first time then I don't really need to take notes at all. So I'm actually always forced to copy everything from the blackboard (if there are no official lecture notes).

And in these situations my brain is blocked with drawing characters instead of processing what is actually happening behind those characters. Yet, I do have friends that copy everything down, even if there are official lecture notes, because according to them it helps them processing the content. Whether a classification in auditory, etc. types is reasonable or not I don't know, but from this experience alone I find it obvious that people learn in different ways.
People who are being presented to know when they are and aren't absorbing the material being presented. Its rather easy give your opinion on the cases where it doesn't work. It would be far more helpful if you had suggested specific alternatives..
You hire all three and use them to replace HR - it just cannot get any worse than that, so improvement is guaranteed.
Seeing as there have been a couple of SR-71 stories on Hacker News right now I thought I'd share my favourite: http://oppositelock.jalopnik.com/favorite-sr-71-story-107912...
Location Value Covenants
My favorite plane is the [A-Z]+\-[0-9]+
> The improvements of using HTTP pipelining can be quite dramatic over high-latency connections – which is what you have when your iPhone is not on Wi-Fi. In fact, there’s been some research that suggests that there’s no additional performance benefit to using SPDY over HTTP pipelining on mobile networks

Excellent summary but i think pipeline has been oversimplified. HTTP pipelining is a FIFO queue. The responses have to be delivered in the same order as the requests. So if the first(or an early) response took longer to generate, all other requests in the pipeline have to wait. Something that SPDY is not susceptible to.
Given that you have only 5 to 15 minutes, I think you have to decide whether you would rather a) give an overview of the field, which is now overwhelmingly huge or b) give a specific usable case study

I'd go with b), the specific, usable example. I teach R and basic machine learning (and/or how one would use either with trading strategies, etc; depends on the person's interests) over Skype + TeamViewer and what I find is that doing something together on the command line is most engaging. For example, "Here's a CSV of super market sales and clearly, column 4, amount spent by the customer, seems to be predictable based on the time of the day. Let's see a couple of ways we can figure out how!", and dive in. (I use randomForest and talk about variable importance and classification vs. regression. The fact that they can now actually use this ML technique right away on real data, thanks to the robustness of randomForest, is exciting!

These are one-on-one sessions that I am referring to, but I suspect it would scale equally well to a 1:30 classroom situation, too.
Hey jeswin,

Thanks for catching that.

We actually put our legals under source control to help find flaws, answer questions about them, resolve issues and to make it easier to see changes over time.

https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal/

I hadn't seen that particular clause and agree with you. I'm fine with you or anyone else, who is working on anything else, accessing and using the service even if you are a competitor.

It's an error on my part as the lawyers have included that as a default phrase and I do not agree with it either. We've even open-sourced the frontend under a license that would conflict with this clause: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/microweb

I'm speaking to the lawyers again on Monday, and will raise a Github issue for it to ensure it's resolved.

It will be dealt with, that is not how I want our terms to be, and my apologies for not catching that specific clause when I reviewed the documents.

David

PS: The issue: https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal/issues/1
Certainly something different than the daily "my framework foobar is the next successor to angular"-kind of posts. I'm actually happy for a bit of... rather unusual content.

As for the article: it's a pity. The US could fly to the moon with less computer power than a dumbphone, put people in things like the SR71 (how did they actually put enough processing power for all the flight computers in a plane back then?!)... and now?

Space Shuttle's been retired, no near-time replacement. No SR71 (or anything that can be seen as a replacement), and stupid Republican teabaggers caring more about their pockets instead of the population. Seriously, America what's wrong with you?

We Germans needed the Marshall plan after WW2, maybe it's needed the other way round this time...
Actually, Apple Should Buy Nintendo
Take a look at something called Project Ivory (http://pivory.com) for excellent spacing and font size defaults. Yours are indeed aimed at people reading on very large monitors while leaning back in their chairs.
More evidence of news that claims to be "in the public interest" will trump the right to privacy of an individual.

If this posting does not get removed by the OP (as has previous articles about this) or is reported by members (as I suspect may have been done previously to others) - it's interesting to me that now the news item itself has become a news item - quite meta. Controversy about the controversy.

I'd suggest that however tasteless and insensitive journalism could be (and I think that they have been here) that we guard against censoring ourselves on this internet forum.
A GoPro falling from the height he was flying would certainly hurt and possibly maim a person or damage property.

I'm sure he would take responsibility, but when people are taking risks around me I'm happier if I am assured they will be made to take responsibility.
these sites are being done _incorrectly_ at present...
(and yes, this incorrect implementation is very sucky.)

but there are tweaks that can improve them considerably,
where you get the best of two worlds, whichever you like.

i'll be writing up my research in the very near future.
(it's wordy to justify the recommendation i've come to,
but it's one which is actually very easy to implement.)

-bowerbird
I wonder: is EC2 secure enough for this type of credit card store? What if the management layer running the underlying hosts is vulnerable or a XEN zero-day vulnerability shows up?

I'm sure Amazon does a lot on securing its infrastructure, but for credit card data wouldn't a physical, fenced off server be more secure?
I've met an 'architect' who didn't know either. Apparently Java world is governed by a different set of rules.
I believe it really depends on your userbase. I just released Hakka News, a client for HN and I would never consider putting ads in an app gear towards this crowd.

In fact, I believe people on HN are more likely to just buy the app so I didn't bother with freemium or in-app purchase. HN people mostly understand how much effort it takes to develop quality software and they're not poor either.

Now, for something like a reddit client, I would still expect them to be intolerant of ads, so in-app purchase would probably work better here. Reddit userbase, I expect, are less likely to purchase the app.

Then, there are apps geared towards the common people, a much much bigger crowd. Mctube is good example. They used to free with iap, no ads in both version.
Then afterward, the dev switched to free completely and with ads. I suspect they're maybe a lot more money with the latter.
> the instructor is not required to make your life easier to earn your attention.

On the other hand I find it kind of disrespectful to waste my time writing down the official notes instead of using that time to understand what the lecturer is trying to teach me, when those notes exist digitally or could be just scanned from a master copy. For some people at least copying and listening to the lecture are mutually exclusive.
The news about Satoshi emotionally affects a substantial number of readers on HN. Whilst it could be argued to be interesting and relevant, the news item is considered to be tasteless and infringing on the privacy of a member of a technology community.

In the wider world, news about a tech personality would be interesting and "in the public interest". Here - it's too close to the bone. Thus I have seen two posts being removed by the OP who posted it, and I imagine that other posts have become flagged.

In short whilst I agree that this news item is probably the worst kind of journalism, HN is self censoring, which I find more interesting, as do you OP!
Making a Mint
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XB-70_Valkyrie
You've raised some good points.

We're already changing the account dashboard as it's likely that most people will only run 1 or 2 forums, so a list is not ideal. We're going to take you straight to editing the forum colours and logo, rather than to the list of sites. And if we keep a list it will only appear when a second site has been created.

Agree on the bad interchangeable use of forum and site.

Persona is a strange one... every technical person raises it as an issue and some get confused by part of the process, but no users have. We've got 70 year old cyclists excited that it's the first time they've ever joined a community and engaged with it, and 16 year olds equally joyous at just being somewhere others who share their interest are. None raise Persona as an issue, but it does keep coming up from technical people.

Given that Persona feels like it's in flux (recent HN item on it), we may re-visit this to ensure that even the tech people are happy.
As you embark on this project, I'd like to point out the relationship between spreadsheets and Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) : each cell with a formula is what one could call purely functional (referentially transparent) in FP, and their chaining together is basically functions depending on other functions.

When you use Excel's "Trace Dependents" functionality, you're basically asking for a Call Graph!

In this sense, a spreadsheet is a tangible functional programming system. @see Conal Elliot's Eros : http://conal.net/papers/Eros/eros.pdf

I get the feeling there is a GREAT idea in this space waiting to happen, so by all means, go ahead and rock it! :-)
Singorama review learn to sing like a super star
The flightaware track for flights in the area doesn't tell much because apparently ground radar is relatively limited, unfortunately.
Often you have no other choice then to frantically writing it down. jjoonathan argued that point nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7363493
What's inside the top of the antenna-spire?

In the documentation video I saw some strobe lights: http://time.com/10672/making-the-world-trade-center-panorama...

And a MacBook notebook, as someone pointed out. But what else is behind the glass?
They bother me as much as 1000px high headers. Which is incredibly high.
Thanks for the reply. Yes, we are not making any money right now and have nothing to lose.

We surely want to give it a try with the right person. The main point that we are still not sure about is what kind of questions we should ask him to make sure that he is a good fit for this. If this was a developer position, I would know how to evaluate him, but I have no idea about what it takes to be a good marketer. I guess we will need to let him try and then see how it goes.
I had a realization in around 3rd year of my first degree that when I was copying down notes I wasn't actually hearing anything the lecturer said.

I basically got a page of text, but I had no idea what it meant - worse for mathematics.

Since I'm back at uni again, I've been trying various lecturer absorption styles, and trying to keep detailed notes still has the same problem - I can't actually follow what's being said. To an extent I don't even hear it.
40% of our use is already mobile devices (15% of the total are tablets, 25% smartphones).

Font-sizing in our defaults prefers relaxed readability over information density.

It sounds like (from your comment and the grandparent) we should create a second theme specifically focused on information density.
I agree. But what can you do? You're a student and want to be a high school history teacher. You might not have what it takes to be a PhD Historian. You might not get a teaching job. Still probably want to get a degree.
Windows Phone on the Rise
Yeah, most people use it badly, and the default templates are awful, but its zooming-in-out style is excellent for mind/knowledge-map based presentation.

You can start with a mind-map and then use it to actually tell a story, and have a glimpse at the mind map as an outline every time you "walk" the map. With links between "map regions" you can also more-easily have a non-linear flow that the speaker can improvise "on the spot" instead of having to follow a linear structure.

Yeah, the speaker needs to be a good story teller, not to just go from slide to slide like a mindless robot, but all good story tellers have "maps" in their heads, not "slides", so you have a tool that is much closer to the mental model of the speaker. The "visual detail" of how Prezi can move from slide to slide means a lot to visual thinkers.

...now I guess my answer is that most people doing business presentations just don't think very visually at all, they are mostly "words persons", and instead of a map in their heads, they have a list of bullet points that they need to sell in their heads :(
The last time I read a news title like this (where they use words like Flight Vanishes) was in 2009 about the Air France Flight 447 from Brazil to France.

I still find this story extremely puzzling for many reasons:

1-Boeing 777 is one of the most technologically advanced and safe planes.

2- Malaysian Airlines are one of the best airline companies in the world.

3- The weather seemed to be clear with no storms or strong wind (unlike the case with the French flight)

4- communication was lost completely with the aircraft.
I'm not an airline expert, but shouldn't be there at least a fallback for the communication protocol being used e.g: radio/satellite/GSM etc .. ?
Lenovo A850 Smart Phone
Can't really imagine how are the relatives of all these innocent people feeling.

And also can't imagine that in 2014 we are not really sure where an airplane is..
I'm surprised and happy to learn that non-techies don't mind Persona. Sorry for going on about it.
Well it could have been so that they just lost their radio due to malfunction.

And after 5 hours i imagine the fuel would be about out so after that one can with a very high accuracy say that it was worse that just a radio glitch.

It would not look good to say that the plane crashed and then one hour or so later it lands on some remote runway.
What other tool can be used to build the types of mind-walking-and-zooming-in-out easily presentations? I tried once forcing powerpoint to do it and just give up, I'd rather code something myself that try more, or just use very high rez pic and manually pan/zoom.
There's also octonions and sedenions. I prefer the blanket term onion-algebras.
(I learned some of these from trading on the stock markets; not fun)

a) Take a survey. If most people feel it's a bubble, Buy : the bubble is just starting. This is a momentum trade.

b) Take a survey. If people have started feeling that "this is a new paradigm, things will ALWAYS go up, didn't you get the memo", with a particular zombie-like proselytizing look in their eyes, Sell. It must be "obvious" to them. For example, the exact High in Apple was hit when the article about this lady who put all her savings in Apple "because Apple only goes up, right?" was published.

c) Collect transaction data. Learn to identify Euphoria by jointly considering both price and volume patterns. Sell if Euphoric Highs have been hit.

d) The keep-it-simple approach : Buy if you want a home and the mortgage is not much more (or even lower) than the rent you would pay and you believe that you have a good chance of paying it off (no ideas of doing startups without a salary, for example!)
On your pricing page, every plan except the cheapest one shows up as "Cheapest plan". And the $99/month (per site!) plan doesn't have half the benefits the $10/month plan has.
In my previous post's numbers, I counted all airplane accidents as fatal. That is, I set the likelihood of surviving a plane accident to 0. I only used the death numbers from car accidents though, so the likelihood of dying in a car accident is the actual likelihood as observed in the past.

The number of cars and number of planes does not matter in the above calculation, because the numbers are normalized to miles/person. More planes in the air is not likely to increase those normalized numbers by any significant measure.

Now, (1) is a fair point and I must concede on that. (2) is already accounted within the numbers above. (3)'s casualties are also counted in the plane case, but not in the Starbucks case, so this actually detracts from your point.

Auto-piloted vehicles would be a huge safety measure in a not-so-distant future. However, there are lots of ethical/political issues that we need to overcome to require people to use their autopilots (e.g. who is liable when the autopilot screws up?)

The living-in-space comparison is way out of line. On the one hand, you don't fly to work: you fly occasionally when you need to do long distance travels. If you foresee any problems (you are sick, have heart problems, whatever) you just don't fly. On the other hand, your safest bet would be to not travel at all, yet you take the risk because you gain something from it. Now, if you decide that you do want to travel from the west to the east coast, the risk is simply lower if you do it by plane than by car. At least that's what the numbers say...
I'm French, so if you want I can help you to understand the website you're interested in.
Smart Labels
That's sounds like an interesting hack! Do you mean hacking the physics engine for KSP?
Not to me, but my perspective is far from the definition of normal ;)
Cassowary.js
Malaysia Airlines has a reasonable safety record. The 777 has a very good safety record. This specific plane apparently had damage to the wingtip from a previous on-ground incident/collision. It's a big mystery.
Tldr; Persona is dead
I thought with radar we could track every plane on earth at all times? By bouncing it off the ionosphere or something?
Yup, I understand where you are coming from. You can look at someone's job history if they are not too young to have a "track record" (job hopping would be a counter-indicator while promotions would be a positive).

I was lucky enough to have been a mentor for a pre-accelerator start-up last year alongside someone who proved over a few months to be an effective marketeer and manager. That start-up foundered for all sorts of reasons but the marketing person is now a key part of the team for my current start-up.

I suppose I am saying - the only way to find out is to give them a try. If someone is genuinely enthusiastic about the product and has some positive ideas and the cultural fit feels right then why not?
Each day about ~100.000 people lose their life in road accidents...
I had the same impression as well :

http://www.flightradar24.com/
This is nice – I visualised something like this in my head, but never knew somebody already implemented it :)
"Learning is simply better when you have to write things down. You're engaging your eyes, your ears and your brain...and you're well aware when you're goofing off."

Where does it say "frantically writing" is good? Sorry, I have no idea what you think you're replying to.
It's cerainly as sane as sane defaults come, but I agree that if the philosophy is 'everything-as-a-plugin' (another excellent choice for this kind of tool) then everything should be a plugin :)

Now to build something with this, I can see a 'dual write' plugin in my immediate future...
Shit happens. The probability of an event like this isn't 0. I hope the best for the rescue teams.
Sounds like you really don't know how to read. I didn't mention ads once.