skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It also creates serious social issues and I believe it is a root cause of a lot of the hostility that "gifted" people received generally from society.

When a child, no matter how smart, is asked to take on a particular role (like teaching others in a hierarchical social system), they draw some general conclusions, like "If I have similar responsibilities as the adult teacher, I should have similar authority and power". This leads to the smart kid inevitably getting their chops busted for being "uppity" by the very teacher who gave them responsibility but then denies them authority or power and punishes them for presuming those things went together. However, the other students also draw the same conclusion as the gifted "peer tutor" and resent the perceived power of this child and also resent what they believe is "teacher's pet" status. So the peer tutor is getting hostility from all sides. Meanwhile, their own intellectual need for new information and new learning is being ignored and neglected. This is a great recipe for creating trouble, what with idle hands being the devil's workshop.

Ultimate result: A tortuously bored student getting hostility from the teacher they are trying to help and also from the other students they are trying to help. Should this kid grow up into a "socially awkward geek", no one ever stops and wonders how much of a role negative social experiences played in making them that way. It just becomes one more reason to attack and criticize the smart folks.
I skipped some pre-reqs by taking the final exam in an exam proctor's office, but this can only be done with the blessing of the course facilitator or the department head. For me, it worked best for computer classes (I quizzed out of Intro to DOS [ya rly] to take Intro to Telecommunication a.k.a. play with modems and the campus BBS Fun Time) and not-so-great for science and sociology classes. The math department had an assessment test that would try to accurately put you where you were most likely supposed to be. Regardless, Ripping through a bachelor's degree in 3 years just isn't feasible in many schools. You'll almost always run into schedule conflicts due to some classes only being offered at certain times or every other semester.
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-drivers-responsibl...

NVidia caused 30% of Vista crashes in the early Vista days.
yea 10% seems pretty high, I think it might have to do with saying the 1st month is free and you can cancel any time.

Therefore, the 10% rate isn't really a 10% sales rate but more of a 10% willing to try your demo. But 10% is still pretty good for that I think.
Well. I don’t agree. At least for search this is a useful approach much of the time. Especially in cases where there is some non-transparent (e.g. not newest first or something like that) ordering of the results and if there are many of them.

So this has its applications and calling it a “loathsome […] UI sin” is more than a bit over the top.
My oldest son was talking about some interesting articles. I asked him to send me the links to a couple of things. They were articles written by PG. I read his stuff for many weeks, aware from comments he made that HN existed but I had no reason to think it was my cup of tea. Somewhere along the way I decided I need to learn a programming language and joined HN to ask some questions.
There is an ocean of difference between 14% of visitors committing their email address to something, and that same figure actually pulling out their credit card.

A more prudent assumption would be 10% of that 14% will actually pay for your product when it is launched.

I learned this first hand. Your mileage may vary of course, but it's incredibly easy to drive traffic and stimulate interest, enough that people will give you their email address or whatever other personal information you want. The moment you ask them to pay though, you're in another world in terms of conversions :) This MVP-type google ad testing doesn't really translate that well into real world data like purchase conversions. I don't think that's the point anyway.

It's good for seeing what people might be interested in, which is often something that startups aren't sure of :)
Their response to this news will be: "Evolutionists have realized that life could not have naturally started on Earth. So their 'logical' explanation is that it started somewhere else! Ha ha! Stupid evolutionists. Lack of evidence is not evidence!"
Why Posterous Is a Smart Tool For Informal Government Blogging
Actually yes. Our internal postgres database is hosted on it. It's rather nice. We use it for the zfs solaris stuff.
Dunno why you replied to me, but I agree. In single app usage, in a well controlled and well defined situation, it's probably "okay" and you can get away from it. There are some environments like this. But I agree that in the general sense, especially with lots of apps banging on the same set of data, it's bad form.
Sometimes your mind comes up with solutions to problems you don't know that you have yet, so the thought may not seem particularly relevant at the time. Later on, that information is sometimes hard to reconstruct intentionally. Sometimes what I do is to go back and repeat whatever it was that I was doing when I had the thought to see if I can re-trigger it. I'd love to have something that I could use to manually re-trigger a train of thought somehow. Something like that could allow you to follow convoluted branches of thought more easily also.
Your argument seems to hinge on the idea that nobody knows about fractional reserve banking. The fact is, not only is it well-known and fully regulated that banks use fractional reserves, but there is even FDIC insurance and similar programs to guarantee the safety of deposits.

Now, if there was a legally regulated system where you could do fractional reserve banking of gold, complete with a government insurance program, then it would be perfectly fine and not fraudulent at all. As it turns out, no countries have a gold standard anymore.

Comparing some guy with a warehouse of gold who doesn't tell you what he's doing with a publicly insured and regulated system with published reserve ratios is not a particularly honest or fair argument.
I know, right? Like when we know there was no rational answer for the weather so we said gods did it. Silly scientists not realizing we haven't learned anything in the last five thousand years. They refuse to admit that it's impossible to find new answers to questions.
I love watching Feynman in action, but refuse to install evil MS plugins.
I was assuming they wouldn't read the article :)
Email addresses don't covert on a 1 to 1 basis to sales. (If. Only.)

After the autoresponder runs out (6 days in my case) they've only got only a moderately higher chance of conversion than my average trial user. (~5% vs. 2.8%)

I really, really don't like the Put Up Fake AdWords Ad, See Who Gets Suckered minimum viable product. Aside from misleading customers and hurting the AdWords ecosystem (they don't actually get offered what they clicked to get offered, which Google will come down on you like a ton of bricks for if they detect, incidentally), it doesn't test your product. It tests your ability to write AdWords copy.

I could get 14% conversion to stabbing toothpicks under your fingernails, but what does that tell you? The world has weird people in it, and I'm good at qualifying non-weird people out with my ad text and keyword selection? Whee?

Similarly, if I delivered an AdWords campaign that was awful (low CTRs, low conversions), would that tell you the product is awful? Because I've done that before, too -- the first draft of my AdWords campaign for Bingo Card Creator was terrible. It took me almost a year before I figured out how to write AdWords decently. That was not an indication that the product was terrible (I sell it quite successfully), it was just an indication that I needed to adjust to a new way of copywriting.

If it can't tell you if an idea is good, and you can't trust it if it says the idea is bad -- what is the point, again?
I am not selling the product yet. I will definately post about my conversion rate once I do.
This PDF has been the most helpful reference for me while learning R this last year.
Where's "here" ?
That's an interesting thought experiment that frankly has almost nothing to do with reality. There is no "independent of sexism" here--sexism is the issue.
Do you know how many "smaller well run banks" also got bailed out?
Could you port it to Cappuccino / Atlas - then its online.
I agree with you. Maybe a good idea would be to ask for a credit card, but not to charge it. I think this borders on being illegal though.

I am still pretty happy with 10%, since this was my cut-off for going ahead and building the product.
If that's all you got out of it, you seriously need to read the article again. These flippant non-responses to Apple related problems are useless and displace actual useful contributions. As someone who enjoys useful contributions... I disapprove!
I didn't say it was discrimination, and I've never felt like it was. But I'd feel uncomfortable if I went to a conference that was basically held in a strip club. I even felt a little uncomfortable at Google's Christmas party in 2004 when they had scantily clad Go Go dancers on tables everywhere.

But working often with people that have exceedingly poor social skills around women is something that has affected my job satisfaction. I'm sure men have other things that affect them that I haven't had to experience though.
Where is the pre-event party?
I agree that 1st month free and cancel anytime might have something to do with it. If I do a test like this again, I will probably leave that out.

I will have these terms in my live product though...
You've just given the most concise and accurate description of my fourth grade year I've ever heard. Unsurprisingly, leaving the public schools after sixth grade was the best thing to happen in the development of my social skills.
Barbara Ehrenreich questions positive thinking
I imagined a blood-sampler for foolproof biometric authentication.

I had a couple HP desktops in the late 80's that required blood to be shed in order for them to let a technician open their cases. Except for that, they were really fine computers.
It seems to me that if they are self-made billionaires, they must have some very good rubrics for making judgement calls about such things to have gotten there to begin with and so might do better just because that's the kind of skills that made them that kind of money to begin with. If they all inherited it or won it in the lottery, laws of statistical averages might apply.

There's a great inspirational video called 212 degrees (that I assume most folks here have seen): http://www.just212.com/video/index.aspx
It lists some of the very small margins of difference between first place and second place -- or even first place and no standing -- and the huge differences in payoff. I think billionaires are likely people who know how to fairly consistently make those small differences that pay off big.
I'm getting to SJC at 1PM on Friday and leaving at 6AM Sunday morning, but I'll see you guys Friday night and Saturday.

Let me know if you want to get a late lunch Friday afternoon.
Those are really good points. Is there another type of market testing you recommend?
I pulled my sons out of public school and homeschooled them when they were in 3rd and 6th grades. My oldest son was an extremely poor fit for public school. I have sometimes said that I homeschooled to prevent "the next Columbine". (He was having fantasies of plowing through the school in a tank and his career-military father had keys to a military motor pool at the time.) For that and other reasons, I've had lots of opportunity to think about such things.
This is a huge step forward if true - as far as I know, how a complex molecule like DNA initially evolved has been one of the great unanswered questions in biology for quite some time.
Not always. In Australia, it's available on all the major carriers - Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and 3 plus some virtual carriers who resell service from the majors.
but sometimes even the really good authentic places do poorly because of location. I'm not sure how it would apply to internet startups. I have a friend who owns an authentic chinese restaurant in south beach florida. He says he makes most of his money selling fried rice by the 5-gallon bucket and lipton hot tea. There weren't enough residents in the area to appreciate high quality authentic chinese food (they don't normally serve kung pao chicken)
Bean bags are way more furniture than I have. I bet you also have a bed (or at least a sleeping bag) too. Um, too much stuff for me. (No, I'm not neurotic. I'm highly motivated. :-D )
+1 to Tom on this.

I had the pleasure of attending Open Hack Day NYC and it was an amazing event. Mad Kudos to Yahoo! to put something like this together.
Part of the argument is that this is sexist. Part is that it's unprofessional. If there were also male strippers the event would no longer be sexist, only unprofessional. Would it still deserve moral outrage? Would it still be counter-productive?

I'm just exploring permutations here. I think half-naked dancing girls would make it hard to get any hacking done. But that doesn't necessarily make it a bad event (aside from sexism). A bad event to hack at, maybe.
Geez, his readers are downright hostile.

Question: why so much hostility towards MBAs (especially from top schools) in non-MBA-heavy industries, but so much love for them in MBA-heavy industries? One would assume that industry has found them useful, as they continue to hire them.

Bonus question: if you have a startup and someone applies for a job as a product manager and they have the right background, experience, passion, etc, would the fact that they got an MBA from Harvard or Stanford make you more or less likely to hire them?
I don't think it's every C coder's responsibility to know how to make and ship good makefiles. It's certainly is helpful if she does, but it seems silly to say that's a responsibility, just as it isn't the responsibility of an artist to know the laws governing international sales of her artwork.
Entertaining and something that may be popular at first, but unfortunately something like this isn't scalable (the novelty would wear off, not to mention cost needs to be taken into account).

The concept that fun encourages more participation is sound, but just like tourist traps it will only encourage first time use and not much after, IMHO.
"Don't tell me they are being exploited, because for example cheer-leading seems to be highly desirable to middle class high school girls (judging from movies and MTV documentaries"

I'm sad that I don't think you're trolling...

a) The issue here is that objectifying women, at a tech-corporate-sponsored event, is damaging and embarrassing for those of us who want the community to be more welcoming to women. Not about whether dancers are being exploited.

b) Cheerleading is not lap dancing any more than ice skating or swimming is.

c) Stop judging entire groups of people based on what you see on MTV.
LoseThos is a desktop operating system with new ideas. http://www.losethos.com
Ask HN: Review my startup (vivapixel.com) part 2
Hey folks, after reading this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=890382 I thought that I would ask you to review my site again. Last time i asked was quite a while ago and since then there have been several improvements and enhancements to the site.

Key changes:

-Better UI design/color/layout

-Added photo bookmarking

-Many other changes (low level stuff to make the site faster and safer)

I look forward to your feedback.
thanks
Enough people will be outraged at the sexism that I don't need to be.
I agree with you on that. It doesn't make sense to turn down an App for "stupid reasons." Its just that Apples concept of a valid reason for turning down an app is obviously much broader than most people like.

However, I have to wonder if it was perhaps the other way around whether we would have people complaining about how trashy the app store was and how their decent app was buried under loads of other spammy/trashy apps.

I personally think Apple is a little bit too strict, but I don't want too much lenience either.
But what do you consider a short-cut? How much testing is enough? Doesn't the situation dictate what is enough and what is really a short-cut? What needs to be tested at a startup IS NOT the same as what should be tested inside a large corporation.

And what "risk" are you referring to? As I've stated, I decided to side with "more features" than "100% test coverage". Sure there is "risk" that there are bugs, but a) there are bugs regardless of how much testing you do and b) I've decided I'd lose users because I don't have features that stand out above the competition rather than because a minority of those features have minor bugs. So to me, the bigger risk is not developing more features.
I think this is the first thing I've voted up and also flagged :-)
Yes. It's useless when people that are not affected get offended about something even when people that maybe should be offenced don't.

I think it shows a patronizing attitude which is a real offence and not just some cultural quirk.
The mexican place I was talking about is certainly not "authentic", but it's near a university, and serve delicious food (but not really mexican). I don't think slavish attention to old-world detail is the path to a successful restaurant, so much as just making something good and accessible. Think of it as usability. Sure their potato burrito isn't really very mexican at all (really, not at all), but it's good, adjustable spice level, and an easy word-of-mouth sales instrument.
For internet startups: Bad location = bad url?
I'm arguing against fractional reserve banking, and the continued bailout by the government of banks - FDIC is bankrupt and will need tax dollars or new dollars (inflation). Also, I wasn't using gold because I'm advocating a gold standard (even though I do), I used it because it can be used as substitute for dollars in the example.

The problem we were discussing was one of the points from the article: "requiring higher capital ratios on larger banks to ensure the firms’ safety" I was advocating that instead of tinkering with this system, we should fix it.

Just because the something is legal and "well regulated" doesn't mean that it is not fraudulent.
The Internet has created a generation of great writers
> However, it's foolish to judge a conference in a far-off land by our system of morals.

I strongly disagree.

The country where I live (Canada) is the fourth in my life (after Portugal, Angola and Brazil). I also visited more than a dozen other.

The system of morals that people embrace in Canada is one of the main reasons I choosed to live here. And I believe that I have enough multicultural experience to say that no, it isn't foolish.

Same cultures are better than others. How do you know? Because there is an absolute in morals: don't do to others what you wouldn't want they did to you. You can derive a lot of judgements from there.
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No it doesn't, and anyone who would draw a conclusion about an entire profession from the actions of a handful (positive or negative) can, in my opinion, go fuck off.
Apple's 10% market share is actually a financial advantage now that application support isn't such a big issue. Whereas it would be hard for Microsoft to grow beyond the overall market for PCs, Apple has plenty of room to grow.
While this is a good overview of the css float property, I just hate that they specify its usage for the 3-column layout; that's not what it was intended for.

Almost every time someone calls css 'terrible for layout' it's because they are trying to emulate the old table or print style layouts, these however have the ability to make a very serious assumption, that they will be put on a fixed size medium.

On the web however, there is no fixed medium, that 'holy grail' 3 column layout fails in this respect, if you for example decrease the browser width, it will squash everything inside the elements rather than do what a float was supposed to solve, ie. as an element is too wide for its container, float underneath.

Take the HN header for example. It is a table, which means that as you decrease the width of the browser, the login/username on the right squashes the menu buttons.

With good float design, ie. float right the username, float left the menu buttons and the logo, then these would all float under each other in an easier to follow layout.
I think it's because MBAs often make decisions that are unpopular -- this business unit isn't function profitably, we can shut it down and sell it's assets to focus on other priorities. Also, they do make a lot of money so people might not like that either.
There are many examples of things in Taiwan accepted by society in general that make me cringe or feel embarrassed about about or induce even stronger feelings.

The thing about the Taiwanese though that I think makes Taiwan very different from many other places is their agility and willingness to adapt. I believe the most rapidly changing attitudes come due to commercial and business links - Taiwan is completely dependent on its export market.

Attitudes such as racism as sexism ARE changing in Taiwan, but there is an incredibly strong cultural influence that may impede that, but I think it's mostly coming from a healthy interaction with other countries that have established those ideas or enshrined them in their own laws.

There is a small, but growing groundswell of appreciation for all kinds of humanitarian rights based on gender, culture, race and other subjects but these things do take time. Shaping other peoples culture and attitudes is a very sensitive topic.
you mean like this?
http://jimy.posterous.com/seriously-313
Twitter encourages conciseness, blogging encourages depth and gives continual feedback, and fanfiction teaches us what not to do. Yeah, the internet's been great for writers.
Here's a clickable link http://www.vivapixel.com
Perhaps a little over the top, but I stand by my assertion that search is not an excuse for having no intuitive way to reach into the past on a timeline.
Any tips on installing Vista on my Alpha?
This would have been more compelling if speaking like a human didn't involve putting the words "bullshit", "douchey", "dumbass" and "hold me" into a press release, and if his press release actually contained the keywords (CRM, HRM, KM) the original used to catch the filters of the trade press, which is, you know, the target of a press release.

By the time I got to "Here's the thing", I was looking for the rounded corners and the Flash intro, because this thing was clearly reading like the front page of a stealth-mode video sharing startup from 2003.

It's one thing --- a good thing --- to eliminate the passive voice. It's another to straightjacket everyone's communications strategy into Zappos PR-speak, or, worse still, to misunderstand why Zappos works and talk down to the audience as if they were (a) kindergartners or (b) people for whom the words "auto-followed on Twitter by a celebrity publicist" had as much meaning as "Customer Relations Management".
I think the reason most people (including myself) found it hard to understand was the different colors - most tetris-like games involve matching similar colors. Once I understood that the colors represented size and nothing else, I got it almost instantly. I'd consider a slight redesign that removes color as a factor - or maybe make them all start out the same color.
A Thin Line Separates Insider Trading and Legal Research
Amazon, Facebook, and Google back FCC on Net neutrality
Per fookyang, the conversion is just 1.4%.
Although IBM started in mechanical office automation - e.g. cash registers and type writers.