skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a publisher, couldn't you do some sort of A/B testing with another ad provider? Something like 10% of page views using another set of ads? Or, maybe setup some kind of onclick tracking to verify ad clicks?

I don't know what could be done as verification for the advertiser, but the publisher should be able to do something, right?
We are a small startup working on a video based learning platform http://woople.com/. It is currently in a private beta and we are hoping to have a more public marketing website/launch by June 2010. It is definitely not the traditional LMS though.

LMS is a crutch a lot of organizations use to avoid having to truly train and educate their employees and instead stick them in front of a machine. If you are looking for merely compliance training, woople definitely isn't the right tool. That said, feel free to reach out to me: cameron (at) woople.com, I'd love to see the format of your courseware and determine if it would make sense to work together.
per month, not per year.
As a matter of fact, I think Google represents the ideal business model: one which should work even in a patents-free, copyright-free world.
An application for which you have no source or distributable code and can only use through a dumb terminal while it runs on somebody else's computer is about as far from "open" as you can get.
Optimizing Offer Pages
Who is going to want to watch a "long and painful development process" as a movie?

I know you gave an example in your post, but it doesn't hold water. You recommend obscuring all the detail/content, and instead think people will want to watch 300 hours of someone huddled over a computer screen typing away? Or sitting in a 2 hour long product management meeting?
You're not likely to get any hard answers over and beyond what articles like this give you, if someone is successful in selling their application through the app store they're going to keep it quiet for fear of engendering a large amount of competition, if they're failing then they will want to keep it quiet to avoid soiling their reputation.
Inter Milan
A site dedicated to the fans of FC Inter Milan. Read all the latest news, interviews, statistics and everything else about F.C. Internazionale Milano
Pondus 0.7.0 su Ubunut 9.10 Karmic e Debian Lenny
High taxation eventually reaches communism, if there's benefits like healthcare 'refunded' to the citizen and if there isn't then that ends up being a kleptocracy. Low taxation eventually reaches anarchy as the government is no longer in control.

Increasing birth rates enables economies to grow without becoming stagnant and old, placing undue demand due to pensions. An exceptionally high birth rate creates food production problems, housing problems, and generally the 'sardine can' effect. Low birthrates create a stagnant civilization that will eventually reach a tipping point when taxes get so high to pay for pensions that the younger generations will protest.

Market freedom to the extreme leads to monopolies taking advantage, 'gentlemen's agreements' between companies to price fix and many other problems that rules and regulations try to control. Equally a controlled market develops problems in and of itself as it's unable to respond naturally to market fluctuations, and quickly becomes unruly and unstable, and as many of the countries who have held long-term controlled markets are testaments to, they develop massive black-market economies to deal with these.

The zealous burning of fossil fuels, aside from global warming concerns, can expel vast quantities of radioactive materials, sulfurous emissions and a long list of things we've accepted in western society as being more harmful than smoking to the wide populations health, but rules and regulations on air quality increasingly get more lax (at least they have been where I live). With zero fossil fuel production, however, our civilization would collapse (at least with an immediate stop to production), and I'm not just talking the halting of transportation vehicles, I'm talking the stop in production of the advanced polymers used in virtually all aspects of our lives. The majority of people wouldn't have clothes on their back . . . my wardrobe would certainly be a lot cheaper if my clothes were all genuine cotton and wool. Oh and farewell cheap elasticated sweatpants.

Every good idea taken to its extreme is a bad idea and will create monumental problems in its wake. Electric vehicles are amazing, however a pure-electric is a ridiculous prospect in winter when the capacity hits below 60% of room-temperature, suddenly your vehicle can't get you to work and back on a single charge. Zero integration of hybrids is, as everyone knows, damaging to the environment but also an extreme waste of entropy. A 1 tonne vehicle at 100km/h is a massive store of energy, and allowing that to be wasted is criminal, the amount of energy humanity has wasted on braking at highway speeds would likely run the entire human civilization for over a year.
Building Homes for Families with a Personal Touch
D & M Homes provides Kansas City area families with quality homes and excellent value
Ask HN: Review my webapp (objective ratings for photos)
Site: www.elograde.com

Hi all, long time lurker and a YC interviewee reject here looking for some help =)

I believe I have come up with a way to objectively rate photos so that the rating is consistent and accurate and where different ratings have meaningful distances between them.

The general idea is to rate others' so that yours will be rated, but instead of actually rating, you compare photos against each other instead, and then win/losses are treated like games using the Elo rating system (like chess ratings or WoW arena ratings and so on) Then based on the ratings theres an additional tiered rank (trying for like a blackbelt or grandmaster type feel).

I would appreciate any feedback on the app, thanks
For Google, The Meaning Of Open Is When It’s Convenient For Them
For many this will be their first real-world test of their MBA skills: how do we market and sell something that provides little value to the customer?
You say that now but if they provided that transparency then the amount of fraudulent activity would skyrocket. Knowing the details of the algorithms involved does nothing to help you as an advertiser or searcher. Googles extreme impartiality in search and ads is their greatest strength and open sourcing the algorithms involved would do nothing to increase that strength and contribute to a great deal less useful ads and search results on average.
Ask HN: a good web (ajax) based chat platform
Hello HN,

I've been overhauling ww.com (NNSFW) from one end to the other, we now do 640x480 video with a full-screen option, audio and a whole slew of other improvements.

The area where we are still seriously lacking is on the chat front, I'm in the market for a web (ajax) based chat solution but the number of choices is absolutely overwhelming.

Do any of you have experience with web based chat solutions and if so which one would you recommend ?

NNSFW=not necessarily safe for work, we do our best but there are more cams than we can keep an eye on at all times.
Clickable: http://www.elograde.com/
It seems like you're saying, once you've gone through 90% of the effort to learn a language, you've only got 10% left (as opposed to 10% for basics then 90% to master).
What a misleading title this one has anyway, as no one is talking about "a single bottle".
It's easy to talk around missing concepts. Language learners do it all the time, figuring out how to talk around concepts that they don't know the words for. It's a bit harder to learn all the subtle and idiomatic ways people have of expressing things that they have a concept of but which aren't grammatically encoded in their language, but that's only necessary for fluency. It's much harder to constantly be aware of things that a language forces you to always know, but which you are used to thinking about only if there is a special reason they are relevant, such as direction in Kuuk Thaayorre, source of knowledge in Tuyuca, and fine degrees of hierarchy and intimacy in Japanese and some other Asian languages.

Studying Japanese, I often resented the need to be aware of social hierarchy. By contrast, I would love to develop my directional awareness, and I think I would appreciate the discipline imposed by Kuuk Thaayorre! I naturally mentally lay places out on a grid which is much straighter in my mind than in reality. I "know" a place when my mind automatically fixes the mismatch between grid orientation and reality.

By the way, is anybody besides me ridiculously linguistically impressionable? The latest thing for me is getting my singulars and plurals mixed up, and spitting out tiny sentence fragments that can be completed from context but which sound childish in English, all because of the influence of my Korean girlfriend. I got an 800 on my verbal SATs, and this is horribly embarrassing and traumatic for me.
Open Source is Mainstream. Now What?
Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when (video)
Very Chromish. I'm glad they're not too proud to borrow good ideas when they see them. Now if they can just improve stability and speed I may switch back from Chromium.
Students are banding together to help each other more than ever before as they navigate one of the most dismal MBA job markets in years.

Dismal or corrective?

The high MBA entry level salaries of just a few years ago never really made sense to me and I have a feeling we may never see them again. These people don't bring much technical or domain-specfic expertise to the table. Just a lot of theory that is becoming increasingly suspect.

The most important thing I ever learned from a business professor when I earned my MBA was, "A degree in business is a degree in nothing." Sadly a lot of recent MBAs are now learning this, their most important lesson.
> Googles extreme impartiality in search and ads is their greatest strength

Without proof that is nothing but handwaving, if they are as impartial as you suggest they are they've got nothing to lose by letting you know what their take is and how big a portion of their clicks are confirmed fraud.
Early Present (Prosper hits version 0.7)
I have to disagree. I would say that anything that helps get to a testable solution faster helps make one a better coder. This could be by saving time having to look up syntax, but it could also literally be just typing twice as fast as somebody and being able to iterate through solutions twice as fast as the next guy.
Interesting. His description of Manhattan for advertising firms back then sounds like Silicon Valley for startups today.
I believe that Communism is largely an economic system with politics being aside effect of the economic model. For example, the opposite of Communism isn't democracy, it's capitalism. And actually, in the purest sense, Communism is completely about decision making. According to that bastion of scholarly thought Wikipedia:

"Pure communism" in the Marxian sense refers to a classless, stateless and
oppression-free society where decisions on what to produce and what policies
to pursue are made democratically, allowing every member of society to
participate in the decision-making process in both the political and economic
spheres of life.

But that's one of those theory and practice things... great in theory, horrible in practice.
This makes me very, very happy. I use Chrome on my netbook for two reasons: it's faster, and it takes up significantly less screen space. It's nice to see Firefox beginning to compete in at least one of those two areas.
This post manages to completely miss the point of the Google letter on openness.

As some have incorrectly asserted, Google's latest post is not about "everything open", it is an internal memo to product managers that it occurred to them would be fit for public consumption.

The central thesis of the letter is that "open" is hard to define (and defined differently by different people) and yet crucially important. Because it is hard to define, many people misuse it (OpenDNS comes to mind), and no one can call them on it because it is a vague term.

Internally, Google employees argue about what open means, and the purpose of this letter was to clarify what open means to Google. They lay it out in extremely clear terms, and it is well structured.

This response essay by Dixon misses all that completely - he unilaterally defines "open" to mean "open source", and then asks for Google to give away their software, claiming that if they don't, they're hypocrites.

Going back to Google's definition of "open" (which is complex), one significant aspect they emphasize is the notion of "lock-in", i.e. locking in users, and locking out competitors. This is one area where Google puts their money where their mouth is; they let users leave. You can get at your email, export your Google Reader content, download all your Google Docs, archive your Picasa pictures, and export all your contacts. That means if a competitor comes along with something better, you can start using it. Try that with Facebook.

Dixon acting like that is worthless because it isn't the "open-source" form of "open" is patently absurd. If this is confusing, I highly recommend reading Simon Phipps essays on open source to understand what kind of software makes a good candidate for a business to open source (operating systems, browsers, compilers...the basics that we all use to compete) and what does not (grid/cloud computing algorithms, specialized software, and other types of software that are differentiators). Essentially, the business model is to pool our collective resources in areas in which we don't want to compete (web server software, operating systems) and to spend time innovating in areas we do wish to compete (search algorithms, voice recognition, image analysis, etc.) Over time, as those specialized areas become more mainstream, they become better candidates for open-sourcing.
I'm still trying to work out how two people can bring the same passion and direction to a project. I can find people with similar worldviews and complimentary skillsets but with cofounders having the same goal and the same energy seems the most critical point.

OT but I like how this blog gives a clear link and description to their product (something which annoys me on other product blogs where all links point back to the blog itself). I actually clicked through and am interested in using their product thanks to this good post and the easy link + description. I still need to investigate further but the reasonable price to take the hassle of subscriptions off my mind sounds good.
Predictions for SEO in 2010
I guess I'm dense (or uninformed), but I never picked up on that in Hero.
You may as well treat this as a single application, albeit spread out over multiple versions and content releases (a la The Sims).
Introducing the New Cybersecurity Coordinator (Howard Schmidt)
50/50 is the worst ratio in business.
I don't think of 'like' and 'agree' as synonyms -- in fact to me 'like' more closely means 'informative contribution that should be highlighted' than 'agree'. So I support the idea of 1-click expressions but think they need to be labeled/presented carefully to encourage desired meanings.
So... a food critic or mattress tester?
Nokia N900 and the case of the best unboxing ever
Incidentally there is incorrectly styled example code in this post that breaks out of the bounds of the page.
Hi, Peter! I'd fix my Hacker News headline but the edit link has expired. (Changing the title it to emphasize exploration rather than speed would have been nice too, since it seems like a lot of people are arguing against points you didn't make.)
Lessons from disappointing tech stories of 2009
The only thing I seem to worry about is making sure that the total amount of work on my 'list' is smaller when I quit the day than when I begin it. Most days I seem to be losing that battle.
I wish this lesson was pounded into my brain at an earlier age. I spent too much of my younger years waiting for that AHA! moment where I'd realize my calling in life. It just doesn't work that way for a good chunk of civilization. Finding out what you love takes work because we don't know ourselves as well as we think we do...
I'm just linking this for the first few minutes of the video (the rest is a pretty standard unboxing with a few little surprises).
According to this, it's Linux: http://www.top500.org/system/10042
Some of the sample back/forward button mockups are quite nice and subtle but the one they use in the final 4.0/3.5 comparison image is terribly chunky.
I generally recommend HTML Dog (http://htmldog.com/) to people learning HTML and CSS. It's fairly comprehensive (from what I remember it covers just about everything mentioned in the article), teaches good practices, and has helpful examples.
Reading the post again, it seems to me it isn't about raw speed in producing a finished product; it's about the ability to explore a problem space by writing small throw-away trials, before you know how the result should look. Physical speed is just one part of this; I'd say it's really about fluency. Do you use code as a medium for thought and expression, or do you have a separate step where you translate your ideas into code from some other form?

This is a real distinction I see even in experienced developers, and in that case I think it's more a matter of habit and practice, rather than skill. Some of my co-workers have an ingrained habit of sitting down at a REPL and trying out several ways of doing things, whenever they're thinking about a problem. Others have apparently never tried this way of working, even though they are probably quite capable of it.
What makes you say this? Do you feel co-founders are analogous to a marriage?
Neither the report your boss wants, nor the descriptions of activities for the family reunion, are contrived.

Again, we disagree. The content itself may not contrived[1], but the writing assignment, the form, is contrived.

Your pleasure is not the final word on the value of an activity.

No disagreement here. However, pleasure[2] is the first word, and, for my philosophy, the most significant in decision making.

Contrived exercises are useful for improving your skills in many different fields.

No disagreement here, either. However, we do, perhaps, disagree in the relative usefulness of exercises versus learn-by-doing. Moreover, if the field in question is not of ultimate interest, either method of learning has its usefulness devalued.

They give you safety

This appears to imply a false dichotomy. Safety isn't an absolute. My philosophy, especially wrt reputation, has become much less risk-averse with experience. This is what has drawn me to the startups more and more.

If you refuse to write that boring report for your boss, you might lose your job. If you refuse to write the paper for class, you might fail the class, and not get to take the classes you are more interested in

...and good riddance. Despite the appearance of flippancy, it is exactly the early acceptance of such consequences that I have found to be the valuable skill.

Perhaps there is a converse to the "do what you love" meme: don't do what you hate.

Sometimes the trade-off between the temporary pain of boring work and the reward it brings is worth the pain.

We likely only disagree on how often "sometimes" is. For my own experience, it has been close enough to "never" that I prefer to err on that side.

Substitute "difficult" for "boring," and my conclusion reverses.

[1] In the case of the boss, it can easily become so.

[2] Perhaps "satisfaction" or "mental stimulation" would be a better description, since I don't believe we're talking about hedonism.
JsLaTeX: A jQuery plugin to directly embed LaTeX into your website or blog
True Match: Going undercover in Match.com
On a Mac book pro and Opera 10.10, I got: 5260.6ms +/- 0.7% I'll try with the new version and report back.
Fitbit’s Motivator: A Virtual Flower - An example of "Captology"
Whoah. CSS Reset Styles make perfect sense, and I can totally see why people use them... And yet, I'd never thought of that, and certainly never seen the nice comprehensive one he posted (no, not the one-liner :-)

Apparently I need to start doing that. Like, yesterday.
The Titanic didn't fail because of bad welding either, so I think the analogy holds. It set sail auspiciously enough but never made it to port, and hubris and bad management certainly played a role in both cases.

Someone with a better knowledge of nautical history could probably come up with a better example. Or aviation - the Spruce Goose maybe?
Is there any way to try this out without registering?

If not, do you have a demo account we could use?
Why doesn't someone just make: "A PC that doesn't suck"? Give me a beautiful PC in a small form factor with the parts I've requested and with a nice big monitor. Also give me support that feels personal. Install Windows clean with the OEM version. That's it.

As far as apps? Partner with base shield or just make an online app store where people can download what they want.

PCs are a commodity item now. Shoes are a commodity item. Do to the PC Market what Zappos did to shoes. Good service and a clean experience.
Do you remember in the comics of chrome, they said they were doing it to help other browsers. They also said they'd really like to have their ideas borrowed to make the web a better place.
so sad that this is the case, but it is :( adblock seems to have a record (for my personal use at least) as almost never having a false positive. privoxy on the other hand seems to block all sorts during actual use that aren't really ads, especially flash.
The #2 option is a little absurd. Last time I looked up the numbers (for an essay I wrote in 2003) only 3% of Americans had Masters degrees. So you are talking about a very small elite. Roughly 50% of Americans never go to college.
I took four years of Latin in high school, and by far the hardest part compared to other languages I studied was the sheer number of things to memorize. Five noun declensions by five cases (more than that, really, but only five to memorize) by two numbers made fifty noun endings. Verbs were even more complex: four verb conjugations, four principal parts to memorize for each verb, three moods (that I can remember), plus the active/passive distinction. That's a hell of a lot of charts to memorize. There are patterns in these charts, but lots of exceptions to the patterns. Plus all the various ways the various moods and cases can be used. Here's a nice list of the ways the ablative case can be used: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablative_case#Latin

Compared to all this memorization, getting the feel of the language, even though it was very alien to my mind, seemed easy.
Given that even after several studies, linguists can't even seem to agree whether or not the language has the concept of one and two, saying it's "easy to talk around missing concepts" is glossing over just how hard this language really is to understand.
They forgot to mention the 'crunchpad'.
Write LaTeX Anywhere on The Web, Even in Google Chat
In many other fields (Math, CS, Physics, History, Etc) college students are willing to major and even get advanced degrees because they love the field first, worrying about the job they will get only secondarily.

But I doubt that describes a large number of MBA students. Given that the primary purpose of that degree is to get a high paying job and it seems to have little secondary value beyond that, I would suspect there will be a lot fewer MBA students ove the next couple of years.
If you need to maximize usable window space, try vimperator for Firefox. Works wonders on my netbook.