skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I graduated from Mechanical Turk to full timers about 2 years ago when our client load increased. Though SEO is a part of our work, the real money is in traffic. We achieve a better than 1/100th CPA cost with SMO as compared to PPC with Google.

Think about it. Someone who clicks through to your page from Twitter/Facebook/Linked In is a known quantity. What do you know about someone that clicks on a paid link in google. Nothing. What does it cost for that click? Only your monthly publishing cost per account divided by total clicks per month.

And when someone walks through the door from SMO, you got a @name, you can look up their bio, you got their thoughts in their tweets, and you know where they are from.

And it cost a fraction of the price you pay Google for an unqualified, anonymous click. And with Twitter you have zero click fraud.

I have cracked the code on CPA using Twitter and it begins with killer content. And I use staffing in the Philippines which cost 1/15th American dollars for same person, no taxation, no flooring cost, no legal issues.

If I were Google, I would definitely figure out how to buy Twitter before it eats their PPC lunch. There are a whole lot of us X-PPC guys who no longer pay ridiculous fees to the search engines.

As for the Turk, the cost is a little more than the PI and with your own staffing, you get the added bonus of continuity. You also get the benefits of knowing your staff, weekly quality review meetings, standardization of process, and a consistent quality that I found missing with Mechanical Turk.

I would still recommend MT though for anyone running a few sites who needs less than full time commitment for projects.
Is it just me, or does anyone else feel like it would have been much more worthwhile to use an example that actually might have been 'tampered' with, and not edited in post-production? Geeks and their VS--wonder what he did with the lingerie catalog...
I dunno, there's something special about one of the most evil men alive.
I wonder how many of the HN members who vote up highly technical articles like this actually read them.
I thought it was a good explanation of what happened, an expose on Russian corruption, and a great eulogy for his friend.
Polygraph replacement incoming?
Do you have a reply this redis list mail raising the limitations of client-side sharding?

http://groups.google.com/group/redis-db/browse_thread/thread...

(Basically, if the key space of a server is being altered, the server needs to know about it so as not to return false results.)
Usually code for affiliate/seo/ebook business.

I have a few friends making a killing doing this. It isn't as easy as it sounds. And it isn't as scammy as it sounds. When done right, it can make good money.
D'oh. Marc Andreesen who founded Ning spoke at YC Winter 08. I keep mixing this up, sorry for the confusion.
ATT to NYC: No iPhone for you...
Are Old Scientists Less Innovative?
My wife was trying to look at prices online today and noticed that the iPhone wasn't available for our zip. After trying a handful of zips in NYC, we gave up (figured it was a temporary glitch), and checked at an ATT store.

They're still selling them in stores here in the city, for what that's worth. Apparently, get them while they're hot...
Better. I still have some more comments though.

Since this article is pretty much dead, you can hit me up by email if you're interested. :-)
Wow, that's very insightful! Just knowing we've people here actually succeeding with twitter.

Do you have bunch of niche twitter accounts with a lot of followers that you built up which directs people to your content sites that bring in the dough? I'm trying to understand the general twitter flow.
> What can [publishers] offer to authors?

Funnily enough, I was talking to an author in the pub tonight. He was saying that he likes having a publisher because he doesn't have to do the editing, advertising, publicity, etc.
Well, I had injured my shoulder years ago in a car accident, and for some reason many of the techniques in Wing Tsung irritated it and messed it up. I eventually had to quit and even still I can't really turn my right arm like I used to.

So, I didn't get as much out of WT as I'd hoped. I would say that I learned quite a lot about soft-yet-powerful punching that can cause damage but take very little effort. I also think I learned about the idea of a punch and a block being the same thing, or that there just wasn't a need to have a difference between them.
You didn't really read it did you? Your last sentence pretty much proves it.
How to save the newspapers: (yet another) proposal
I'd say that concept is much more on becoming and expert. Actually, he reference "Novice To Expert" at the end of that which should be a good indicator.

But, don't ask me what becoming a master looks like.
In Las Vegas, Sports Books in a Pocket
for local development, i think its perfectly reasonable to assume a built-in development server can handle serving static content. in fact, if it didn't, i'd be a little sour -- it can serve dynamic content, so why not static?

and, not everyone wants to run apache or nginx or lighty on their dev machines.
Emacs + Snow Leopard Font Fanagling
Actually firing the teachers of high-potential students isn't just politically correct, it's economically advisable.

NCLB dictates that funding will be awarded based upon standardized testing performance. Because schools are rated not just on the score, but also on their ability to improve (regardless of their position), it's always advantageous for the administration to maximize test scores.

In this scenario, you have a small group of top performance students who are going to breeze through the state's dumbed-down tests, regardless of whether or not they participate in more advanced classes. So any money spent developing these students will not net you any additional NCLB score.

Whereas spending the money on struggling students provides the real possibility of raising your average score, thus guaranteeing more money- assuming you grow faster than other school's you're competing with.

Isn't competition great?
Are people more willing to pay for digital goods on mobile devices?
20. Adobe CS5 makes biggest splash in the “Objective-C
is hard, here’s another way to make iPhone applications”
space.

This can be pretty big. Specially if Apple releases the fabled iSlate with an iPhone-like OS (although I hope it's a touch based feline). All the little flash games and apps out there would suddenly become deployable in Apple hardware and Steve Jobs would all of a sudden get a gazilion more developers (for free) to help him push all of his lovely hardware.
You need a sound understanding of CSS, HTML and javascript. Although you may have been messing about with them a lot, try and get an in depth understanding of CSS selectors, what semantic HTML mark up is, and how to write quality code in javascript -- unobtrusive javascript is something to look up.

Javascript is really worth learning in depth. It has some quirks that will gently introduce to some useful topics such as JSON, closures, elements of functional programming, prototype based inheritance, and so on. Further, it will help you understand how to get more out of other dynamic languages too; python, ruby, etc. Douglas Crockford has some great videos on Javascript that are worth looking up.

You're not restricted to client-side programming with Javascript either. For instance, look up nodejs - a nascent server-side javascript framework that looks quite promising. It will really make you think if you've just been a PHP guy up to now!

Try and get a handle on PHP's more advanced aspects - many of which have only really arrived in recent versions. Classes, name spaces, closures and so on. Although I'd really suggest another dynamic language altogether; python is a good choice, but ruby is splendid too.

Once you're confident with that stuff you may want to go in a slightly different direction. Try Java, C, Clojure or Erlang. Try reading some more general computer science books.

I hope that helps. Good luck and all the best.
> Setup, configuration, and maintenance of BIND servers isn't simple.

FTFY
Seven Computer Science Game-Changers from the 2000’s, and Seven More to Come
It's a damn sight better than "the lawmakers, their pets, and their puppetmasters get to do whatever they want whenever they want" which is the usual alternative.
I used to be in the unpleasant situation of having to carry around an iPhone (personal phone and email) and a Blackberry (work phone, email, on-call pages).

One of the advantages of the Blackberry is that you can specify a filter for priority incoming email, and have a different set of notification preferences for high-priority email.

So I had my Blackberry make noise and blink if I had monitoring alerts, but not if I just got normal email. That was useful.
Just flew back into USA last night from a week in Cancun. I saw two differences in security:

1. Every carry-on bag was searched. Oddly, many people had those neck-pillow things, which were completely ignored. I bet you could pack a lot of semtex into one of those pillows.

2. The security guy at the entrance to the gates -- you know, where we routinely take off our shoes, empty pockets, etc., was holding a sign say NOT to take off shoes. This supports Schneier's theory that the TSA is only engaging in theater, making a show of defending against whatever the most recent threat was.
I'd be curious to see the age trends among grant committee members, as a bias factor.
~/work/fooN

Where fooN are svn (possibly other) working directories.

My personal (at home) is slightly different cause I have a lot more stuff than just code revision controlled.

~/work/art/
~/work/src/
~/work/sys/
~/work/web/
~/work/words/

"sys" is /etc and other system files from various machines. "web" hearkens to the days when websites were static html and images. Probably should merge that with "src" someday

In src I have some directories such as "hints", "icons", "perl", etc. into which to stuff bits of things that don't deserve their own VCS repository.
Public schools are, by design, redistributive. For that matter, the very bestest of the private schools are, by design (these days) redistributive. So, I don't think you can pin this one on misaligned government incentives to public schools - it's a deeply entrenched cultural value.

Personally, I think it's the right thing: rich or poor, the high-achieving students who breeze through are cheap and easy to educate. If the classroom isn't keeping them busy, it tends to be easy to find them extra-curricular opportunity. Meanwhile, many initially struggling students can be turned around and turned into huge cultural assets, education-wise. It's a good investment to try (in smart ways).

That said, the tenure system and lack of measurement of teacher performance is a huge problem. That's also true of both public and the best private schools.
I like this one:
Bonus: RSS faces death as filtered content recommendation systems on social services emerge. They, along with most real-time startups, struggle to find a revenue model (in 2010).
People almost get enjoyment out of claiming “RSS Is Dead”. The main problem with completely switching off RSS and on to Twitter is that there is a lot of noise – not to say that RSS isn’t noisy either, but it’s at least generally focused. The complete switch for me will occur when a service can leverage the vast amount of data collected by these social services and curate it in to a personalized feed just for me. Companies and investors are bullish on the real-time space, and I expect to see this service come to light this year. That being said, It is unclear to me that real-time content services have any significant revenue advantages over almost-real-time services. Accordingly, I don’t predict any services will figure out a way to monetize the added value of extreme recency in 2010.
There is definite theoretical argument that the poles have completely switched polarity in the past. The truth is that the magnetic poles are always changing and moving and we can never be sure if they might switch completely.

That would cause chaos as we would have to adjust to the new North being the old South.
My point of view, being mostly a lurker for 1.15 years: I'm a programmer, musician, comp sci graduate, neither a Windows user nor a Mac user, and generally an all around geek. I don't remember how I came across Hacker News, but it didn't take long for me to conclude for myself two things:

1) the proportion of interesting (to me) links was high;
2) the comments revealed a community of clear-thinking, logical, rational, articulate individuals.

That hasn't changed significantly since last year, though I admit that I get the sense that the community has grown lately.

I don't have a big problem with HN's current state. If it has deviated from its original goals or gone through some other metamorphosis, that doesn't bother me; I still like what it is today. In fact, if it were extremely focused on entrepreneurship and startups and such, I probably wouldn't be interested. What I get out of HN is great tech/geek links and insightful, intelligent commentary.

If the percentage of links that interested me eventually fell below some threshold, and if the comments started getting inane, irrational, nonsensical or just plain stupid, I'd probably just leave HN and find another community, or start my own.
Guy Steele: Types and Run-time Types
You have done a great job of laying out all the facts and points. I completely agree that the title is a little sensationalist. It doesn't seem like they are removing science from the curriculum completely, and indeed that would make no sense.
Thanks to the modern web browser: we'll get a second chance at re-inventing the fundamentals. As long as a machine can run webkit, even if it has to do so inside an x86 emulator, that machine is useful for most people. The problem is that to start from scratch requires a huuuuge stack of software, but you won't be able to build at all at once. Well, now you don't necessarily have to.
Honestly, wait for the google nexus and see if that might be a better choice, if you're just getting an iPhone now in NYC. With over 50-60% dropped calls, it's really the worst phone to have if you actually plan on calling people.
Foldit: new computer game enabling you to contribute to scientific research
AT&T website stops selling iPhones in New York City?
what sort of data would you want access to? the urls discovered by topic or more like the clicks/url (since thats available from Bitly)
If the Kindle succeeds on grabbing the e-book market then the leverage is all in Amazon's hands.

If we end with no other ways of handling the book to the reader, Amazon might get too close to a monopoly in the book market.
Sounds sort of like any business deal where you have to sell
yourself as part of the transaction. Coming in with a
better attitude might help, Think of the process as a non
contact boxing match instead of a show and tell.
Top Two Branding Secrets from Steve Jobs
The Performance of Lisp, or Why Bean Counters Need Bigger Bags of Beans
Reweighting a graph for faster shortest paths (A*)
~/dev -- projects I'm (semi-)actively hacking on
~/Repositories -- checkouts of dependencies and projects
I'm tracking but not hacking
~/arc -- same as dev but for work
Freeing Factor from gcc's embrace-and-extend C language extensions
This was used as an example in a short lecture about JPEG compression in one of my classes this term. Here are the slides if you're interested. They give a basic overview of perceptual coding and the 2D Discrete Cosine Transform.

http://web.mit.edu/6.02/www/currentsemester/handouts/lecture...
Adding Fees and Fences on Media Sites
I am looking into the cl-cookbook at sourceforge. It looks very interesting and worth investigating more. This specific benchmark seemingly would benefit from multiple threads on multiprocessors, if I could read its implementations correctly.
Olaf’s Guesthouse website - Cape Town
Six Uncomfortable Answers
Whoooo cares. Too subtle a visual to perceive at first glance
2010 New Arrivals Links london
from:

http://shrinkwrapped.blogs.com/blog/2009/12/how-paradigms-ch...

"Scientific paradigms change one death at a time."
Fido sensing elements are generally good for many hours of operation. The PaxPoint product is specifically intended for liquid screening in airports. The main limitation is that they need a focused target to work on. The holy grail is a walk-through chemical sensor, but the physics of that is challenging.
Bill Watterson on his art, life, and Calvin and Hobbes
IxEdit: On-the-fly Interaction Design Tool
The retailer and wholeseller of Nurse Fob watches
Brand new & portable
Addresses patient safety
There's still a number of factors this depends on before it becomes big.

I'm guessing how it will work is the iPhone apps will consist of an embedded (in the app) flash platform that just plays the native flash code. This will require Adobe to build a native flash player that doesn't suck

Flash devs have to be willing to get a Mac and pay Apple their $99

I'm guessing (again) that Flash based games won't be able to have the same performance as native ones. The Flash player need to be able to be fast enough for some decent games that people will be willing to pay for

The iPhone UI is quite different from kb + mouse based UI, so most things will require a bit of a rethink regarding how the user interacts
Admittedly, I have not read this book. However, from the synopsis, there is a lot left unspoken. While it is true that pure CAPM and ECMH has basically been written off, many economists still believe it is more than "loose fill". The basic formula remains the same but needs to be improved with a more robust set of risk factors, a more siginificant nod to behavioral analysis, and a more coherent way to do both. Nonetheless, I certainly don't agree with the contention that EMH is dead. Instead, I would contend that is an unfinished block of clay waiting for details to turn it into a workable model.

For a more modern take, see Andrew Lo's Adaptive Market Hypothesis.
ATT irritates. this only adds fuel to the fire.

how's the service in nyc (esp subways)? can't be any worse than in sf.
There are many people who I think qualify. Ken Thompson, Steve McConnell, Brian Fox, and Larry Wall would be just a few on my list.
I see this as a case of the fundamental problem with the international non-profit model: the money comes in at one place, the supposed value-creation is happening somewhere far away, and the non-profit group in between is the only entity in contact with both sides. In other words, the value that the 1st-world government or individual is getting for their donation is based largely on what they hear from the non-profit. Since the non-profit is incentivized to report success to keep the money flowing, it's unlikely to report an accurate picture of what is happening. With time, non-profits become very good at raising money with inspirational stories of intense human needs, project potential, supposed past achievements, and hip language (not to mention political connections). At the same time, since their actual effectiveness at achieving their goals is largely irrelevant to their business model, it almost certainly sucks. As OP indicates, transparency is the solution, and the internet should certainly enable that to a greater degree then currently happens.
Hanging out in YVR right now - the line that normally takes 15 minutes took 95 minutes today. It is the first time I've ever been told not to arrive so early for a flight. Apparently people showing up 3 1/2 hours early for a flight screws it up for other people somehow. Mea Culpa.

1. Every single person had their luggage opened and sorted through, item by item.

2. Every single person was being fully patted down. Including checking the soles of your (shoeless) feet.

The pat down was remarkably thorough - the seams of my pants were checked. The waistband, shirt cuffs, pants cuffs each carefully probed, hair was cautiously checked.

I was particularly impressed with what a good mood all of the screeners and passengers were in. Nobody was grumpy, and everyone was basically taking everything in a pretty good way, despite the inordinate delays.
In the linked article a commenter says that they were told by ATT support that the iPhone is unavailable in NYC due to "massive fraud".. Seems like the story people are getting is inconsistent.

Can any HN'ers shed some light on this?
Scientific Controversies and Hot-button Issues
Learn Scheme. I've been coding along with "The Little Schemer" over the break.

I feel like I need a fresh perspective before I can approach Clojure -- otw I'll just end up writing a bunch of Java with parens.
Uh, no one gets phone signal anywhere in the subways, on any carrier.
Freeze GridView Columns and Headers in ASP.Net CSS
Flexing the boundaries of flash memory
"Processor architecture??? Is that really to be taken seriously?"

Sure. You can get big speed-ups by exploiting the storage hierarchy, and by writing less-branchy code that does not bamboozle the branch predictor.

These can be studied from the top-level functional perspective. The low-level details can be ignored.
I've never been a fan of extended analogies as a way of explaining things. At some point you need to understand the subject for itself, and not in terms of something else.

That said I strongly second his point about the value of keeping designs simple. And I have an interesting piece of evidence in support of it.

I just read http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321117425?ie=UTF8&tag=... and one of the "facts" that Robert Glass brings up is that a 25% increase in requirements results in a 100% increase in software complexity.

I put "facts" in quotes because the claim is only supported by one study and I have lots of questions around how one would define key terms like "software complexity". However based on experience I am inclined towards believing that something like this is true. If you further believe (as I do), that the source of the requirements doesn't matter, then adding internal requirements about design is going to result in complications.

As a result I am inclined towards simple, clean designs. I gladly introduce polymorphism, abstraction layers, and so on fairly frequently. But only if I see a concrete benefit from doing so. If I am not convinced that this piece of abstraction produces a net win within the context of this software solution, I don't do it.

(For the record I am not a software master by any means. In Zed Shaw's terms I'd be an expert, although early mentoring with the right person kept me from ever suffering from the love of complexity that he pastes all experts with.)
Ghillie suit
Ghillie Suit Superstore has a large collection of Ghillie Suits, Paintball Ghillie Suits, Kids Ghillie Suit, Sniper Ghillie Suits. We offer FREE shipping on all our products and unconditional 30 days Money Back Guarantee.
Should've clarified. Meant with wi-fi
Who calls people? My iPhone is a wireless Internet device, which comes with a hugely inconvenient tax of 400 unused voice minutes every month.

I cannot WAIT until somebody releases a good phone with a data-only plan (maybe the Nexus?)
http://code.google.com/p/skia/

and the activex technology used in Chrome, forgot what's it called.
The BART in San Francisco provides some cell service through most of the city.

http://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2008/news20080721b.aspx
If it weren't for the eyes, I'd be more likely to believe it. The flash from a p&s just wouldn't be bright enough at that distance to generate the luminance in the eyes.
I just don't get this. My RSS reader automatically receives articles from sites I like, or subsections of sites I like, and in most cases the entire article is fed through to my browser/phone in a nice readable format. Perfect.

I don't see why it's broken and why we need to reinvent the wheel. Maybe I haven't subscribed to sufficiently noisy feeds. Can someone explain?