skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"One of many places, on or in but near the Earth's surface, generally accessible to human beings and constituting areas in which human activity is desirable or profitable, which are significantly more deadly (insert desired measure of "deadliness" and desired deviation from mean) to exposed/unprotected human beings, over short or extended periods of time, than the mean deadliness of such locations considered as a whole."

Would that make you happier, little pedant? Or maybe you could've just flagged it and moved the fuck on?
Micropayments have been implemented many times in the past but to date nobody has really made a go of it.

There are several reasons for this:

Micropayment services tend to be wallet oriented, pre-paid and therefore there exists no direct relationship between the merchant and the customer. This relationship is a very important component for the merchant.

Micropayment services tend to suffer from a chicken-and-the-egg issue, if not enough sites use a common system then why would a consumer put their money in to that particular wallet.

To date, in spite of many 10's of millions of investment money sunk in micropayment systems there has never been a clear winner, the minimum charge seems to be stuck at roughly $.80 which is way too high to qualify as a micropayment, and a merchant would only see a very small fraction of that.

To really function a micropayment system would have to be able to seamlessly charge sub-cent amounts and put the majority of that in to the hands of the merchant within two weeks of incurring the charge.
Because you are working to put the competition out of business?
We gave them the option to lock in their account or to wait for expiry of their card and then get charged the new amount.

Most chose to lock in, and a very small number of them still have that rate even 3 years later.

We have fewer members now but that is due to other reasons.

Cancellations for the locked in accounts went down because those people thought they were getting a very good rate and knew that if they canceled and would sign up again it would be at the new rate.

At the time our retention was 3 months, so within 3 months the larger portion of the accounts were being charged at the new rate.
Contrarian Investor Sees Economic Crash in China
You should use probabilities, actually. And while step 4 is not a logical consequence, it may have substantial probability, per Bayes' theorem:

P(C | A) = P(A | C) * P(C) / P(A)
Any modern/developed nation anywhere on Earth, and many other places besides. The number of minor, almost-never-enforced-but-still-on-the-books offenses you end up committing over the course of a given (insert time period) in your home country would likely startle you no matter how much better than America you think your country is.
> I am a web developer and over the years I have suffered a lot and wasted a lot of time just because the different IE releases did not conform to the existing web standards.

But the linked paper has absolutely nothing to do with standards. It deals with the speeds of different JavaScript engines and how representative speed benchmarks are of real web sites.

> It just doesn't feel right when MS try to convince the JavaScript community about something

As I said, it's best to look at MSR as a separate company. I spent a few weeks there a month ago, and the atmosphere is much more that of a university research lab than a software company.
He is updating twice a month! most people on Twitter update a lot more than that - I don't think he is keeping up with the trend.
This is going a bit off topic, but AdWords is the world's best micropayment solution, and probably killed the need for all others:

+ It is economical as low as 3 cents an action.

+ It solved the "Customers hate to make micropurchasing decisions" by moving the payment from the end-user to a business which gets to automate the micropurchasing.

+ The micropurchases are actually billed macro-scale, so it works on top of our existing payment infrastructure without too many hassles.

+ You can deploy it anywhere in the world for trivial levels of integration work. (That won't maximize income by a long shot, but you'll start accruing earnings with a quick copy/paste.)

+ It is almost totally resistant to "steal the content and repost to avoid the pay wall"... well, when it doesn't pay for people to steal the content, but that is another discussion altogether...
C++ is far, far worse.
Webfetti | Free Layouts, Graphics for MySpace, Zwinky, Hi5, eBay, more
No, the opposite, they made sure that their credit cards were updated well in time for fear of losing the good rates.

The really interesting thing about the whole affair I think is that our retention became much better, and that's the hardest figure to tune in any online service.

If you give me your daily signups and your charge rate I can basically tell you what your annual turnover will be when I have the first week of statistics. It's scary how predictable that is.

Say n is your number of signups per day, your retention is 'industry average' (3 months or so for most consumer stuff, 12 months for b2b) and you charge 22.95, then for a consumer product you will make roughly (say 10 signups / day average across a month) 10 * 90 * 22.95 / month after 3 months of ramping up, for a b2b product you'll make 10 * 365 * 22.95 per month after 12 months of ramping up.

The retention is very important because it determines how far you can grow, a 1 month increase in retention in the above (b2c) scheme is 33% more turnover, but retention is the hardest of all the variables to get under control.

It is related to customer satisfaction, card expiry, product life cycle and so on, the signup rate is only affected by the quality of your marketing and your presentation.

edit:

When people launch a for-pay service and they see their first stats they usually think that the income is going to grow unbounded, but every product has a life-cycle and you really need to factor that in to get any realistic amounts.

This mistake is also present in the business plans of many start-ups, you have to assume some upper limit to the life cycle of a customer to get realistic figures.

It is usually a safe bet to plug the industry averages (3, respective 12 months for b2c or b2b) in, you may be a bit better but usually not much unless you have a very addictive/compelling product.

It is also good practice to over-deliver by a bit compared to your plans, if you have investors it keeps them happy.
video also here http://www.ucsd.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=16717
This is exactly what I have in mind when I say that instead of a Startup Visa program I'd like to see a Visas For Sale program. It keeps everything on the up and up and reduces administration costs.
I'm a somewhat european computer scientist, and I would love to work for 2 or 3 years in the U.S. just for fun and getting a better english, but with such immigration laws I prefer to stay in Europe.

By the way, you highly skilled americans are welcome to work and live here ;-)
That's a really interesting viewpoint, I have never seen that articulated before, thank you.

You are probably right that adwords / adsense obviates the need for many micropayments, but to truly become a micropayment worthy system there would have to be a much larger degree of transparency.

Basically right now you have to assume the middle man isn't taking advantage of your not knowing how much is being paid for your inventory and that is a thing that people are not happy about in general.
Depends on your status, methinks. The guys in Adwords customer support aren't having so much fun.
His statements indicate they are ignoring the fact that the social norms of bloggers and the social norms of friends connecting on a website and sharing information are not the same. Assuming that Facebook's users think they are publishing in public, versus publishing to a specific list of friends that they control is ludicrous.

The fact that this is being ignored is very disturbing. This move is clearly being driven by business decisions without the consideration of its users and their privacy.
I think Alex just described someone who should start their own startup.

Founder: A motivated workhorse, eager to please the manager; of course, the manager being the customer.
People pay what Facebook asks of them, i.e. nothing except ads. It was on those grounds people accepted as their social network. By contributing my content to Facebook I help make it a place for my friends to come to often and for Facebook to sell ads.

If Facebook don't like the price the sell their product for, the like any company, have the freedom to change the price.

That's why people feel entitled.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, Survivor of 2 Atomic Blasts, Dies at 93
Why Google and Apple Win
I have read about him before, but only came across the news of his death today by accident.

Let this never happen again.
I'm not so sure that "users are not their customers".

I was thinking about this yesterday when I talked to my father-in-law (probably the only person I know without Internet or a computer) about a rapidly growing Facebook group opposed to the suspension of parliament in Canada. He asked me to add him to the list, but I told him he'd have to be on Facebook for that to happen. He replied, "oh, so only customers of Facebook can join?"

I thought his use of the word "customers" was odd, because I was thinking that "users" would be more appropriate.

But then I got to thinking. Yes, advertisers are clearly customers of Facebook: they pay money in return for a service. But these advertisers wouldn't pay a dime were it not for Facebook's users, who represent to advertisers either existing or potential customers. In that sense, users are very clearly customers, though not necessarily customers of Facebook.

However, time is money, and users of Facebook are spending a lot of it on Facebook ("spending time" on Facebook: the connection between time and money is clear). Furthermore, the time they spend on Facebook is crucial to Facebook's ability to attract and retain advertisers.

This makes them very much like customers, I think: they are purchasing a service from Facebook with something valuable (their time), and if they did not do so, the company would fail.
"wtf are all those semicolons at the end of every line? etc" - that is exactly what i thought (in greek :-P) when i moved from GW-Basic to Turbo Pascal :-). Then i moved from TP to QBasic because it was faster to run stuff directly from memory than via the compile->link->run route in my PC/XT :-P.

Btw there is a ready-to-use language in modern (Windows) systems too: VBScript. Just create a new file in Notepad, use the .vbs extension, save it, double click on it and you're set :-). About four years ago I wrote an article on a Greek magazine about introduction to programming and used VBScript for the concepts (i mostly wrote about the general idea of programming, but i needed something people could actually use and see in their computers). A few days ago someone told me that he got interested into programming by reading this article and after messing a bit with VBScript, he went to learn Pascal and C :-).
This is a duplicate.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038606
we may need a NEW really-Private sort-of-Facebook => anyone? It should be :
- 1) open-source
- 2) ...
That's more frequently than I update mine.
We need a NEW really-Private sort-of-Facebook = 
anyone?

It should be :
- 1) open-source
- 2) ...
We need a distributed facebook, where users keep control of their data, like a giant webring (ok, web-graph) system.
Eric's been hitting all the high notes lately. I'm waiting for his pronouncement on climate change.
My top blog content during 2009
I'm committing the sin of not reading the fine article, but if you've spent any time around an uncontrolled (i.e. unmedicated) schizophrenic you realize their thinking is fundamentally broken. They are in a sense "thoroughly broken and permanently abnormal" in a way that only medicine can treat. Cognitive Behavioral therapy can help and sometimes fix a lot of things like standard depression, but there's absolutely no substitute for antipsychotics for the schizophrenic and mood stabilizers for the bipolar (which hopefully TFA pointed out).

My mom became an RN at a fascinating time in the '50s: she did 3 months of her residency in a psych ward, and then a few years later she was amazed to see one of the "hopeless" cases from there working at her hospital in a service role. That was after the first antipsychotics came out, and they truly are wonder drugs.

All that said, the thesis might be correct, although I seriously wonder if the layman's view of the mentally ill is that nuanced. A lot of people don't want to have anything to do with the "mentally ill", full stop....
I'm not sure what you mean; is it "correct" in that what I described happens? Yes, it is. Not every time of course, but I've seen it happen quite a lot; probably more often than not.

If you mean, is it "correct" in that "Is this the way things should happen?" Then I would submit, no.

But, reality always wins.
Why do you think that?
Nope.
Delete it here: https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_a...
What if you replaced the keyboard with an ergonomic one?
Kids with far too much free time and far too little parenting.

My kids would be so grounded after even trying something like this...

As for the IT folks who managed the site... Well... I think they will have a really nasty Monday tomorrow.
Steve Rambam said it, too, but I still don't believe it.
Recently I was at a meeting with our company's marketing director and the channel director of partnerships for a multinational corporation.

We were meeting due to a specific skill set we're developing and the corporation's strategic decision not to pursue the same skill - they still have clients they need to service who require the skill set, so we'd potentially be their go-to people in these instances.

We were specifically, but gently, asked on whether or not we would also do other tangentially related things for them, to which we answered "no - our focus is this one thing."

That was the right answer.
Ford’s Bet: It’s a Small World After All
That's right play the game, don't let the game play you.
Brainteaser questions have a lot of problems, I've found.

One is that (IMO, anyway) it's the very, very rare individual who can actually get through them by thinking their way through them. The interviewee either knows the answer outright, or they don't. So the interview becomes more, "how many of these brainteasers have you seen before?" Yeah, you can gauge a LITTLE bit about a person by seeing how far you have to lead them to the answer before they get it, but not much.

Another is that the interviewer is not trained in whatever black art it is that can "get an idea about the candidate's thought process". And then, what if you can? What does that matter? Can the guy do the job, or not?

All these questions do is waste time, attempt to give the interviewee a false sense of the company's cool factor or exclusivity, and find out how many brainteaser or "I interviewed at <company>..." blogs he's read.
Uhm, the definition of a linear function is that f(a+b)=f(a)+f(b) and f(n·a)=n·f(a) (i.e. additivity and homogeneity).

Maybe you are thinking by a first-degree polynomial, which is a straight line when graphed?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_function
I don't think that it is strange that your letter to the Queen got as much traffic as it did, that got some major play outside of the technology press.
Eventually. Eventually, we'll all be dead. Meanwhile, I'm still getting pptx files from professors that are meant for MS Office 2007 and work only very badly in open office. And hardware compatibility is still a problem.

Don't overgeneralize your experiences. If you work for Red Hat or a similar employer, obviously you're not going to have to use corporate or educational crapware that many others do.
Like Michael Scott in The Office?
Lean Analytics For Startups
Have you seen incarceration rates for the US lately? The amount of people locked up is insane (760 per 100k, in Europe it’s between 70 and 200 per 100k). And crime rates aren’t any lower than those in Europe.

Could you give some more details on the Japanese judical system? Their incarceration rate is crazy low (63 per 100k – that’s lower than even the lowest European country), so they pretty much can’t have the same system as the US. They must be doing something different.
Or do we? I'm not convinced we need Facebook for anything beyond getting a fix to Facebook addiction. See my rant: http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relation...
> Kids with far too much free time and far too little parenting.

You are underestimating the propaganda value of this.

> I think they will have a really nasty Monday tomorrow.

And that's exactly why that will happen.

Plastering this all over the news isn't helping the poor sods that were in charge of that box on monday either, I figure if you're a sysadmin with some skills configuring and securing:

Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
MicrosoftOfficeWebServer: 5.0_Pub

Then you are almost guaranteed an interview on Tuesday morning.
That's actually his "fan" page. His FB profile page is here:

http://www.facebook.com/zuck

... and I'm surprised to see it seems to be mostly open.
If You Hate How I Write, Why Comment Like Me?
I'm using Linux Mint 8 on my Lenovo SL300. The SL300 is a bit of a strange beast, the BIOS is some hybrid of an IdeaPad & Thinkpad. Fedora 12 kernel panics on boot. OpenSUSE 11.2 does not provide any brightness adjustment. Linux Mint is the best I've found for this particular laptop but there are still some issues with power management, etc.

As much as I like Linux I would still rather be using a Mac. Macs just work - my other computer at home is a 2-year old iMac. The thing just works - it has never caused ANY problem, EVER, as far as I can remember.

Cheers
I guess I didn't mean my entry as a way to do better in an interview, but just to become a better programmer by trying to solve small problems quickly.

Kind of like doing a http://projecteuler.net/ (Project Euler) problem in your head while taking a shower.
Nice, but the big news to me in that article is that Apple seems to once again go their own way with the LightPeak one-connector-to-rule-them-all alternative.
Weight loss tips and tricks
Weight loss tips and tricks
This blog starts with instructions about various kind of fat. It explains the difference between two sort of main body fat. It is all based on the scientific research not blindly written with assumption and you of course lose your fat with funny exercises. With a diet food , you will burn your fat .
Um, would you mind explaining how this program would fill the need for a startup visa? I don't know how many people applying to the startup school have $500k -$1M to fork over before even starting to work on their startup, but I doubt it'll be a resounding success...
Trend of the decade: Decentralized process
If you have £100k of equity/capital in your house then on average (long term historical index investment) you would have made £864k investing over 20 years vs a historical average of £165k in a property.

(Here's a source for the 12% figure - http://www.finfacts.ie/stockperf.htm )

The money your borrow from a bank can (depending on relative cost) close or open the gap. If average return is 5% and the average cost of borrowing is 2% (over 20 years) then you would make an additional £80k per hundred thousand borrowed. However if the average mortgage rate is 8% then you would lose an additional £80k per hundred thousand borrowed. Capital growth will also add something - over the last 20 years it was about 100k per 100k invested/borrowed.

2% and 8% are both well within the historical mortgage rate trends. Renting helps reduce your exposure to this, whilst increasing your exposure elsewhere.

All calculations are pre-inflation.
> Have you seen incarceration rates for the US lately? The amount of people locked up is insane (760 per 100k, in Europe it’s between 70 and 200 per 100k).

Yes. This means that the system isn’t an effective deterrent. What changed in the US justice system the past 60 years?

> And crime rates aren’t any lower than those in Europe.

It is difficult to compare crime rates with different countries. Each country has a different population and economic issues. The USA has much more illegal immigrants, minorities and drug users.

> Could you give some more details on the Japanese judical system?

Japan has a very high conviction rate and they retain the death penalty.

Singapore is better example – they have an efficient justice system with stiff penalties (they retain both corporal punishment and capital punishment) which results in extremely low levels of crime.
It's actually really strange they decided to do that and I think they may be overplaying their hand a bit here.

The original iMac is one of the reasons that USB became as popular as it did, abandoning it for a non-backwards compatible link seems like a risky maneuver. Manufacturers of devices will have to decide which to support, and apple may well lose out, they've grown quite a bit in the last couple of years but not enough to become the top priority for a hardware manufacturer just yet, so apple support of devices would be done after the usb 3.0 support is done.

I hope they'll stick a few regular USB ports on there, there is enough trouble already with Mac display connectors to last you a lifetime.
RSI mostly depends on the position of the wrists. Ergonomic keyboards work by making it easier to hold your arms and hands in a natural/relaxed angle. Having an ergonomic keyboard at a sharp angle from your forearms might actually be even worse than a standard keyboard, since in that case all the ergonomic keyboards I have seen would make you reach even more awkwardly to reach the keys.
I'm not overgeneralizing my experiences, but rather, observing past history. Nobody ever thought Lotus Notes would disappear either, but it did.

Most large corporates still have a lot of desktop crapware, but they're also deploying more webapps as they notice the time wasted maintaining client software. My past experiences at Red Hat were cited because I was once very interested in Linux desktops. I currently work at a conservative investment bank who's nevertheless busy deploying every new app via the browser.

PS. Re: OpenOffice opening OpenXML files, if Google Docs or Zoho don't solve your issue, you can access Microsoft Office 2010 web version from Firefox or Safari.
What were the canaries?
I don't think you're familiar with crime and punishment in the United States.

First off, prison labor hasn't been phased-out in the United States, quite the contrary; it's at an all-time high. For example, Microsoft's boxed software is assembled by prison labor in the United States. The primary reason why State governments were reluctant to permit prison labor wasn't fear from the left: it was fear from unskilled labor voters who didn't want their jobs taken from them by prisoners. It wasn't until our workforce became better educated that prison labor began to be accepted, as it was no longer seen as something that was taking jobs away from law-abiding citizens. This is also why labor is used in many privately operated prisons: they don't have to answer to voters.

Secondly, three-strikes laws have proven to be completely effete at combating non-violent crime. Drug possession charges, which have seen the widest adoption of three-strike laws, have tripled since 1982. Meanwhile, violent crime has dropped steadily and is currently at the lowest rate we've seen since the 1960s (this despite the fact that the death penalty is applied less and less).

Regardless, three-strike laws are unsustainable long-term, as State governments will be forced to pour far too much cash into prisons, putting them in a position to either raise taxes, or cut services - two very dangerous political propositions.