skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The guy who cuts my hair owns the salon. A 1/4 page ad in the Cleveland-area Yellow pages could be negotiated down to $500/month by a knowledgeable business owner. To justify these prices, the phone company offered to provide a special phone number just for the ad upon which it would keep statistics. He ended up paying a company to send out a fancy, wedding-like invitation for salon services to new homeowners in affluent areas around his business -- $6/pop. Then, he used his $15K salon software to track lifetime customer value so he could figure out if spending $700/month was worth it.

Perhaps Google ought to link Google Voice accounts with adwords to provide better end-to-end conversion statistics. Perhaps the business owner could be provided with a speech-to-text transcription of these calls so he could somehow link his ad spend to eventual conversion.

I don't know much about conversion tracking across advertising methods. It would be cool to build a system for, say, a pizza shop owner (85-ish % of pizzas are sold w/ a coupon) to track conversions across phone, walk-in, and net-based ordering. When a small business like that spends a couple thousand a month (if not more) on advertising, it doesn't take a very big improvement in efficiency to justify a $100/mo SaaS fee.
Like how your logo implies a complex network is not just a 2D graph, it has a 3rd intangible dimension.
Games.net - Gaming Community
Most gamers, I know pick the best 100$ CPU they can on price performance because CPU's are just not that important. Granted if your building a 3,000$ system you might want to look at the CPU, but why pay more so you can have extra cores doing nothing all day.
I like the Stack Overflow system. The "Ask Question" form submit a search when you're finished typing out your question. It's helped me find answers to questions before asking them that didn't appear at the top of Google's Search Results.
Directed Edge + Shopify = Easy
http://www.porsche.com/germany/sportandevents/motorsport/his...

http://www.ausmotive.com/2009/03/20/porsche-917-celebrates-4...

You would not find that Porsche 917 from 1970 awesome?

http://www.ausmotive.com/images/Porsche-917-01.jpg
Delicious Library. Took Shipley over four years to ship version 2, and it was rewritten at least once, and possibly twice, before it ever saw the light of day.
Title is "8 Million requests for law enforcement data". Hmmm, sounds like data points to me. They were individual pings btw.
Thanks. You're right. I guess I'm just not sure yet and want to leave my options open. No such thing as a general-purpose recruiter, eh?
no it's not. It's a good read, but not as seminal or breath taking as Guns, Germs and Steel, a true modern classic.
Is it real or a agame
Just stopping in to let you know about Online Revolution see http://www.usofearth.com/2011-obamas-coup-fails.php: I discovered a network of people involved in the push to protect our Constitutional rights and to swear allegiance to our country and its citizens. Is it real or a game?
This is the truth. A well written blog post, with good supporting materials, can easily take a day to write, and then a day to deal with the "response."
United States of Earth
Just stopping in to let you know about Online Revolution see http://www.usofearth.com/2011-obamas-coup-fails.php: I discovered a network of people involved in the push to protect our Constitutional rights and to swear allegiance to our country and its citizens. Is it real or a game?
Reminds me of independence day: http://www.takoma.com/ssthenagain/Alien%20Ship.jpg
In other words, not only has advertising on Google has become much more expensive over the past several years (the market at work), it's become so complex that a typical small business owner can't be expected to manage their own campaign without relying on outside consultants.
If Google wants its employees to experience the point of view of its customers, it should stake them with meaningful amounts of Google monopoly money, have them actually attempt to achieve business goals with it, and put half of their salary on the line based on their CPC performance.

Every so often, something should go wrong -- subtly or otherwise -- and then the employee should have to go through seven redirects on the AdWords interface to locate the form to send a message to a representative. The message should, with 30% probability, never be read by anyone. If it is read, it will be read by someone in a call center in India, who does not know the customer is a Google employee, and has only a cursory knowledge of Google's own policies and none of the algorithms. Escalation should be nearly impossible to achieve, but if it happens, it should go to someone in Mountain View who is as unhelpful as possible to avoid giving the customer any incentive to ever call back.

For the fully authentic experience, if the employee doesn't like this state of affairs, they should be encouraged to either a) blog about it and pray that it ends up in Matt Cutt's feedreader or b) make a lateral move to Microsoft, for an instantaneous 90% reduction in salary.

Google employees who did this for a few weeks would have a much better sense of where AdWords advertisers are coming from than somebody who is playing with a toy account. (The Google employee experiences < 1% CTR and one click a day? Good, you may succeed in identifying where the buttons are in the AdWords interface. You have no idea what the actual use of the platform is like.)
One thing worth considering is that parts of Intel may not so thrilled about the Atom. It's a really low-margin chip and it's being manufactured at TSMC, both of which are somewhat out-of-character for Intel.

When Craig Barrett left as chairman of Intel's board last year, they didn't follow the usual plan of having the CEO take over as chairman and a new guy taking over as CEO. Instead, Barrett just left with Otellini staying as CEO. It's tempting to speculate that Barrett, who rose up through the manufacturing arm of Intel, was unhappy about the commoditizing and outsourcing going on. Maybe other parts of Intel are unhappy too. See this: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2009/01/27/45340/c... .

It's difficult to see what alternative Intel has though. For consumers Windows is dying and the x86 lock-in is dying with it, so if they don't compete on price, ARM will eat their business from below. But a market-leading company like Intel really hates it when their main product gets commoditized.
There is also Rich's "Are we there yet?" talk - HN Discussion here [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=938564] that acts as a nice supplement to this.
>If you were sitting in a dark room, you would notice a flash of bright light a lot shorter than 1/100 of a second.

You can see cosmic rays that last a lot shorter than even that. The real test isn't a single flash of light, but how quickly we can distinguish two separate flashes covering more or less the same spot on the retina. i.e. how high do you have to turn up a strobe light before it starts being perceived like an ordinary light? Since old school fluorescent lights (in good working order) had only slight visible flicker at the edges of peripheral vision, I'd say it is around 120hz.
k-nearest neighbors is a simple approach for prediction in machine learning. The objective is to predict the value of a function at some point for which we don't have an observation in the training set. In the Netflix Prize, this means predicting the rating a user U would give to some unrated movie M. The kNN approach is: 1. Identify the k users most similar to U. This is called the "neighborhood". 2. Have these k neighbors vote on the rating that U should assign to M.

The premise behind the above scheme is that similar users will assign approximately the same rating to a particular movie. To actually implement the kNN scheme requires a notion of "similarity" for step 1 and "voting" for step 2. The linked article is using Pearson Correlation as the similarity function (aka the "distance metric"), and some kind of weighted average as the voting function (as mentioned in http://dmnewbie.blogspot.com/2007/09/greater-collaborative-f... )

I don't think this would work very well on the Netflix dataset because the training set is super sparse. I deliberately glossed over this above, but users in U's neighborhood who haven't rated the movie M are useless when voting on the value that U should assign to M! So you have to make a call about how you form the neighborhood: do you just find the k nearest users and only average over the <= k users who actually rated M? Or do you find the k nearest users who actually assigned a rating to M (ignoring U's neighbors who haven't rated M)? Either way, with a dataset that's as sparse as the Netflix data, you're going to have a hard time forming useful neighborhoods since either you're going to have neighborhoods where there's very little information to go off of, or the "k most similar" users are actually really not very similar to U at all, leading to inaccurate prediction.

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-nearest_neighbor_algorithm

Chapter two of the excellent and free book "Elements of Statistical Learning" has a better exposition of this idea. http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/download.ht...
I find a lot of cars awesome. Because they ALL have the SAME qualities that I like: excellent design, fantastic engineering, etc.

Sure, there might be cars with less fantastic engineering, those I might not find awesome. But it says nothing about that there is only a single thing of a certain type that I can find awesome or that other things are less or more awesome. 'Just awesome' stands for it alone.

No, I don't find the Veyron awesome. That's just butt ugly.

These are awesome cars:

http://www.ausmotive.com/images/Porsche-917-01.jpg

Especially the one in the front.
I wasn't suggesting that we should route the power to the US from the third world. I was saying third-world nations should build these plants, and the US should build other kinds.
On (organizational) life span and legacies
It looks like you put a lot of work and thought and iterations into your app. An app that is a better way to use Bugzilla (which does not look to have good UX). Fast interface, offline mode! Unfortunately, the iTunes AppStore landing page can't tell the customer that (yet).

A $20 app isn't an impulse try purchase. Perhaps a free or cheaper Bugzilla lite that only allows reading, not updating. Or better, a 17+ mature rated Free app that is hardcoded to connect (IP+ user/pw) to a demo public Bugzilla db instance that is refreshed to a pristine state daily - this would allow more evaluators easily. I'm not totally sure Apple allows this. Or if not demo, a Bugzilla for only major open source projects (pay for access to your own).

The limited space and screenshots Apple gives you to promote your app does not seem to be enough to click the Buy button. (I don't use Bugzilla but if this were for Jira, I'd evaluate it). Videos could nicely showcase the sexiness and speed of the UI. And testimonials (from your rockstar users)!

I'd put more of a benefits page on your main website. The offline mode is tremendous - that deserves to be treated with spotlights and tasteful CSS.

How am I going to do my daily workflow? Perhaps you can go through mini use cases of how a mobile Bugzilla client will help. And try to give away licenses to more, less rockstar Bugzilla community members.

The satellite bugs in your screenshots are cute but you might consider something more serious, as a manager might check out the iTunes link themselves prior to ok'ing an expense for the app.
The lawsuit's main weakness is that the masses aren't familiar with a cult movie called Blade Runner, and even less of them know of Philip K. Dick and his literary works even though a lot of his books have been turned into smash box office movies.

There is no confusion.

In my eyes, Google if anything used the name to pay homage to Philip K Dick, much like Apple tried to name a computer after Sagan.
PushButton Tutorial Series - Keyboard Input
MIT-based team wins DARPA's Red Balloon Challenge
Extrapolating from 1 click per day is also really funny.

For any kind of statistical relevance there ought to be a substantially larger number of impressions and clicks.

The price per click is interesting information though, now it would be nice to know how much the publisher received of that $.88 (assuming it got paid out at all).
Perhaps Google ought to link Google Voice accounts with adwords

This is a brilliant idea, and I would be shocked if Google doesn't have plans to do so.
minor nitpick - you probably want to change the HTML title to something other than "Home Page"
Motion blur really is the reason film gets away with smaller framerates. A movie played on a computer's LCD screen (not interlaced) at 24fps simply doesn't look as choppy as a game at 24 fps on the same same screen. This is also the reason CG movies (e.g. Pixar) use motion blur.
In 1994, Apple Computer began developing the Power Macintosh 7100. They chose the internal code name "Carl Sagan", the reference being that the mid-range PowerMac 7100 should make Apple "billions and billions."Though the internal project name was never used in public marketing, it did come up in Usenet postings and news of the name grew from there. When Sagan learned of this he sued Apple Computer to force the use of a different project name. Other models released conjointly had code names such as "Cold fusion" and "Piltdown Man", and Sagan was displeased at being associated with what he considered pseudoscience. (He was at the time writing a book discrediting pseudoscience.) Though Sagan lost the lawsuit Apple engineers complied with his demands anyway and renamed the project "BHA" (for Butt-Head Astronomer). Sagan promptly sued Apple for libel over the new name, claiming that it subjected him to contempt and ridicule, but he lost this lawsuit as well. Still, the 7100 saw another name change: it was finally referred to internally as "LAW" (Lawyers Are Wimps).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan
Apple stole apple name, says McIntosh family.
Never knew the guy was in to Lisp either.
I'm not really into what Google Voice can do, but I've been wishing for so long that SIM cards could just aggregate n phone numbers, each one being like a separate inbox. And then you could just apply filters to turn off certain phone numbers based on day or hour...

If google voice does that... it would be nice.
it's become so complex that a typical small business owner can't be expected to manage their own campaign without relying on outside consultants

Absolutely. I can't say AdWords has ever been user friendly, but the average business owner has little chance of turning a profit with AdWords (without training/consultation). Its not rocket science, but there is a definite learning curve.
To signup for the Shopify app, it would cost minimum $9/mo for the app + $9/mo for the DirectedEdge account?
Google Phone - The "F You iPhone" phone
Hi HN, I submitted this article because it has sat in my bookmarks for a while and I've referenced it quite a number of times over the past few months. I thought it may be helpful to some of you who work on similar problems.

I like it because when most people think of "giant datasets" they think they need some special tool to process it. Infact, there are such tools and I use them everyday (namely Hadoop), but this article is a reminder that with the proper forethought and consideration for the data structures in question, it is quite possible to wrestle a large dataset on a single machine.

Also, people always wonder how to better optimize their code. I think this is one of the few examples I've seen where the author went through a series of steps to obtain the optimization they had in mind and documented their strategy well. It serves a practical purpose too.

If you want to try your hand out at this problem you can obtain the dataset here:
http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Netflix+Prize

and follow the forums here:
http://www.netflixprize.com/community/
The blogger is completely right. I think games should always, always favor frame rates over better graphics. A game isn't a picture, a game is something that's alive, something that moves.
Add screenshots to your web page.
They're still a helluva lot more expensive than coal-powered plants, which is what the third world is actually building.
And a Protoss probe factory.

And a place Malcolm McDowell really wants to get to.
This is not an exaggeration (even though it's funny).

I have had Google reps literally run out on me. IE, stop answering emails, supplying phone numbers that go nowhere etc. When I finally did get someone back on the phone to talk to, they acknowledged that they had stuffed up with their suggested "campaign optimisation" & that they must restore the old campaign. They promised to call back within 20 minutes once a person with more authority was located. I haven't heard back since, had to try & restore things myself.

Even with this terrible service, this account still sent almost $1m to Google this year. In fact, we haven't even been able to get reasonable payment methods from Google & they still follow their hide, acknowledge then disappear CRM. This comes up a lot since credit cards don't always work well when you try to charge $2k every 5 hours. Adwords has all sorts of bugs that appear when the banks get suspicious about these.
The descriptions are on the right..
Done - thanks. I didn't notice that since this is only the splash page while we're in private beta.
CMake/CPack/CTest/CDash : Google Tech Talk
That's why Google is rolling out flat rate click pricing in many local verticals. They take the conversion data from advertisers using website optimizer and use it to help less sophisticated businesses compete against them.
Disabling Javascript on Adobe Acrobat
Microsoft at International Consumer Electronics Show 2010
Should be able to easily apply to both YC and IO; their application page is definitely inspired by the YC application. http://ventures.io/apply
That had me puzzled for a bit until I realized he meant a square array of n x n elements.

I thought he meant a single dimension array when I first saw the title and a part of the post.
Network with fellow Hacker LinkedIn Users
What the Study of Chess Experts Teaches Us About Building a Remarkable Life
Ephemerisle Documentary. Neal Stephenson's Raft meets Burning Man.
Nope -- you don't need a separate Directed Edge account. It's a totally frictionless thing where all of the billing for the DE + Shopify stuff is handled on the Shopify side. It's our first experiment on a reseller model where the app has access to our admin API which can create accounts automatically.
Music recommendation by real people on Songza
Which is where carbon-trading comes in. We give third-world nations extra money so they can build these instead of coal plants. They give us their carbon credit so we can continue to drive stretch Hummers. Win-win!

Except for the polar bears.
I've signed up for postling, which offers some similar features, but it hasn't really "wowed" me yet. Your service sounds a little more ambitious in some ways... and it hits a particular pain point of mine (managing Facebook pages). I filled out your form, but forgot to explicitly express interest in being a beta tester... please count me in.
Is that a joke, or does any source actually suggest that? If so, links?
I've just spent the last 5 hours use Songza's new 'curated' setlists and have to say I absolutely love them. I'm a huge Pandora fan, but this is a great source of not only similar music, but often culturally significant music. Short writeups for each song tell a tale about the people behind the song and the music itself. Really great stuff.
I think you must assume it's not secure on most sites and use a "public" and "important" password.
Ephemerisle festival is an event from the Seasteading Institute, designed as a first step to help learn about and promote creating floating communities. The Seasteading Institute is a non profit with the goal of promoting autonomous ocean communities as a means to new social and political structures.
Construction Crew Severs Secret ‘Black Line’ (2009/2000)
the thing that pisses me off most is... I sign up for some website and a few minutes later I get some email - hey welcome to site X your username is Y and your password is Z... WHAT THE FUCK
EGYPT: Is it the Virgin Mary or just a curious flash of light?
The standard response on posting non-hn political or entertainment stuff seems to be that X,Y or Z is a hacker of sorts, so I guess the fact that this is posted implies our Iranian head-of-state must be a hacker too.

HN being rather lisp centric I figure that must be the reason ;)

Think of it as my roundabout way of saying that I think this is not hacker news in any way that I can understand.

See this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1035952 for a prime example.
Good idea. Maybe it would be helpful to have a Linked In HN group?
Anyone know the scientific explanation for this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOCQeYECWU0
You should have told him not to take a hike then.
PKD also stands for Polycystic Kidney Disease which was my first thought.
What's your take on the save mysql?
Guaranteed Credit Cards Canada | canadaimmigrant.org
There's already a big one http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/2877/30950504D0B7 via OnStartups (posted on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=165455)
There is a moderated Hacker News LinkedIn group which would make it far easier (and be a better filter) - though I'm not sure if it's active: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=86116 run by http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=wheels
I'm not a member, but this looks promising:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=86116&trk=anetsrch_na...
The unique thing about k5 was that all the content was written by the users. Every other community on the web is just a link-n-blurb site with a discussion forum bolted on: Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, HN, MetaFilter, and on down the line. Only at k5 do you have long form, decently well-written pieces on any variety of subjects.
Does he consider Blink 182 to be more "mainstream" than Vampire Weekend?
A bit of context for folks who don't know the back story: Netcan is (or works for) a fairly significant AdWords spender. (He has a few comments about AdWords on HN which are worth reading.) I spent about $6k on them in 2009, and they're directly responsible for about 40% of my revenue and 1/3 of my profits.

My comment above which on second reading appears to be sarcastic and exaggerated is a literally accurate account of what I went through last August.

See generally http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=790800 or http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=791003 and the blog post linked from the second comment.

Full disclosure: I am a case study for how effective AdWords is. http://www.google.com/adwords/conversionoptimizer/bingocard....

(And I'll say this: despite having worse customer service than the Japanese immigration authorities -- whose three part mission statement includes the words "Forcibly expelling undesirable foreigners from our nation"　-- AdWords was and is the best advertising option that has ever been invented for small businesses.)

Edit to add: On review of the posts I remembered, I realized that I appear to have mentally conflated netcan with a HN member named netsp. My apologies for my memory being dyslexic.
Rusty no longer wanted to have to deal with dupe hordes gaming the system, crapflooding, griefing, harassing, and so on. The $5 killed user growth, but it also killed 99% of the admin workload. The tradeoff worked for rusty, even though it didn't work for the 'community.' Rusty's favorite site is MeFi anyway...
Now that the location of this black line is revealed to the world, do they need to bury a new one? Or, since fibre is so hard to tap into (and presumably communications are super-duper-securely encrypted), is that not a problem?
The CIA disagrees with you:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

You may not like them (I certainly don't) but they're a sovereign nation as much as any other.