skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Business owners need to keep this in perspective. Most people have never heard of Yelp. I had not before I read this. The more you react to what somebody posts in an anonymous forum, the more you call attention to it.
Except that the normal equations are rarely a good way to compute the action of the pseudoinverse (though explicitly computing it would be even worse). QR is the workhorse for under- and over-determined dense systems, with SVD as a fallback for especially nasty ones.
Semantics. The effect of the incentive rules quoted in the article is that by taking the higher-paying job, the woman will end up with 20% more money while working twice as hard.

I see the same thing in Norway: If you are able to hold a great-paying job (equivalent to 200,000 USD a year, for instance, typical for a hard-working oil industry consultant), the marginal tax greatly reduces the value you get from your extra effort. (Typical numbers here are 35% tax on everything up to 50000 USD, increasing to 55% for everything above 130000 USD). Given that you invariably work your ass off in jobs like these, the prospect doesn't seem very tempting. Why work twice as hard when you only get 50% more money? You can't even work hard one year and slack the next, because it doesn't pay.

The problem is that you want as many people as possible to do the best work they can do. The effect of tax/incentive rules such as these is that the government is telling people capable of holding high-paying jobs to start slacking. This is bad on many levels.
Please let me know if you have any issues. It's on a bit of a small slice right now, which could change depending on how things go. Also let me know if you find any glaring mentions of reddit.com that I might have missed while skinning. Thanks!
Probably has something to do with getting paid more money the longer you do it and loving the people you work with.
The asymptotics are completely different for sparse and banded matrices. And NR really isn't a good reference unless you are looking for a mildly flawed 30 year old analysis.
millions of people.

The goal of a landing page is to optimize to users' interests. Therefore, it shows advertising for the most suited (ctrppc) advertiser. It is quite an effective mechanism to direct traffic to the person most willing to pay for it. It's that brilliance and scale which I personally think is the end of the domaining industry (won't explain, will write a long article... soon).

So back to your argument of 'doing better': that is a VERY slippery slope. When you start to say one use is more* legitimate than another you are essentially censoring free speech. If I own cars.com and just want to picture of my dog who is called Car, is that wrong? What if I only use the domain for email and redirect all the traffic because I don't want to do anything. The minute you say you can 'do better' you are taking your own beliefs and subjecting everyone else to them.
As a small business owner who could find himself on Yelp, I can somewhat sympathize with some of the owners (although not the woman in the article, she just seemed nuts. A much more appropriate thing would be to contact the negative reviewers and try to learn how to make her store better).

The problem with Yelp is probably the search rankings. Chances are, Yelp has higher PageRank than some local company, and when someone search for "company name" on Google and Yelp reviews come up, it could harm their reputation.

While most people haven't heard of Yelp, they could easily find unfair negative reviews of your company easily.
I can help you with finding an alternate domain.

I've had the exact same problem very often and always ended up with something more imaginative, and practically better each time, once I start brainstorming.

Try combining two short normal words.
Would you mind sharing the resources that your using for problem sets?
The article being linked to in this HN discussion is actually a response to the CEO's response (which you've linked to).
I'm very interested in the state of audio -> MIDI... right now I'm using Max/MSP (the fiddle~ object) for pitch analysis, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

Eventide makes some great pitch related tools and the PitchFactor stomp box seems to be much more quick and accurate than anything else out there... unfortunately it doesn't have MIDI out, AFAIK.

How quick and accurate is the Nord Modular for pitch analysis?
Haiti before-and-after images from Google Earth
How Zynga's Strategy Is Just Like Microsoft's: Copy, Crush
Is there any intended difference between this and Markenomics?
That's exactly the thing I am trying to inform people is wrong. I understand it's not a very popular industry, I've been in it for many, and I don't blame anyone for hating it. However, a squatter infringes trademarks, they are breaking intellectual property laws. Simply buying a lot of names doesn't make someone a squatter, hence it's a very touchy subject to be painted with the same brush. I hope you understand.
Matlab's backslash is the GPL'd Umfpack (relicensed from the author). The most important thing to know about iterative solvers is that the Krylov method is a minor component, preconditioning is the hard part.
Works for me with JS disabled - maybe you're not looking for the right effect / not impressed?
Freaky Fast Food
Obviously what's needed here is for more publishing industry executives to move into top roles in government organizations that oversee these "libraries". Then they can work to sabotage and choke this piracy from within. It worked for the energy industry; I can't see why it wouldn't work here.
I have the same experience. It seems strange in the age of address bars with searchable history and automatic search that people are still going out of their way to go to a URL they already know.
To be safe, you really need to view it from a machine/IP you've never logged in from before...
Software Firms Fear Hackers Who Leave No Trace
Yeah, I'm not seriously recommending you reprogram your bank card... Maybe you could strap an alternative magnetic strip to the card, which you'd only take off if you really need the real strip.
Well, the tax/finaid structures here also place the decision in the hands of each individual, they just tilt the incentives.

So does a mugger's threat, somewhat more starkly.
When I working on l1-minimize problem, I wrote a very simple cg solver here and it can solve for a sparse matrix of A (Ax=B where x and B are dense) (c with cxcore from opencv):

http://github.com/liuliu/l1qc/tree/master/src/
Nuclear Winter Easier to Trigger Than Previously Thought
Who Should Facebook Acquire Next? Mark Zuckerberg Wants To Know
If we use the real definition, it doesn't matter, if you break trademark law, you break trademark law.
This reminds me of the AppStore. You write an App. You publish it. A few weeks later somebody make the first "review": 1/5 stars + a comment "Total crap" without any explanations...

You have no possibility to contact this person, no way to delete the review. Sales are down. You can forget the app.

Ce la vie.
Rail stats belie claims of economic recovery
Elizabeth Warren: America Without a Middle Class
Max Chafkin is a little bit late to the party on this one. Here's an LA Times story with most of the same details:

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/11/business/fi-lazarus1...

I read it when JWZ pointed to it from his "I Hate Yelp" post:

http://jwz.livejournal.com/1002269.html

JWZ runs the DNA Lounge in San Francisco, and is "pretty sure" that he was in fact given a pay-to-play pitch for Yelp placement and review management.

For some very specific kinds of businesses --- the kinds unlikely to attract a constant stream of casual reviews --- Yelp has been useful to me. For restaurants and bars, it's less than worthless; "reviewers" clearly do make up random stories ("Publican serves O-Reida fries! Violet Hour serves well-liquor!").

In Chicago, we have LTH Forum. It is the polar opposite of Yelp. It is a PHPBB named after a specific Chicago Chinese restaurant that has completely owned up all the reputable food reviews in Chicago. It has no salespeople, makes no profit, is aggressively NOT SEO'd (LTH is never going to be the first hit for anything), appears to be layed out in PHPBB's default template, and is better than any other source of reviews in any city in the US. Every year it gives out awards (the LTH "Great Neighborhood Restaurants"), which --- again, this is a PHPBB site --- are hung in the windows of every restaurant that has received them.

You could never post a half-assed troll review on LTH and get anywhere with it. 15 people who'd been there and talked with the chef would write counter-reviews, and the moderator would probably strike your post. Someone needs to figure out how to scale this model.
What? I need a driver to have a wife?
The company was, literally, conceived over lunch and funded -- to the tune of $1 million -- by dinnertime.

Interesting. There's more on page 3 in case you didn't read that far.
Google postpones China mobiles after censorship row
That was a nice one :-))
What can you offer me that any of the many subreddits on the same niche can't?
Now imagine that Apple threw regular parties for the people who wrote those troll reviews, and you have Yelp.
If I use this:

http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/18798-ti...

which warms up the function, averages over repetitions and tries to account for various overheads, the ratio states about the same (1:1.5 ish). I would normally use timeit(), but for a quick post, I was being sloppy.
The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real
They offer a bunch of tools. and they've gotten a lot better at being sensitive to business onwers. Owners can respond to negative reviews, either publiclly or privately. (Later in the story, I talk about a hair salon that has done a really awesome job managing its Yelp reviews by being fanatical about responding.) The difficult issue is that the interests of business owners and those of Yelp will never align perfectly. If they did then Yelp would essentially be useless to its readers. (The tension is similar to how some companies feel about GetSatisfaction.)
My sentiments exactly. Thank you for expressing it so well. If I could upvote your comment more than once I would.
The primary barrier to entry for me in almost all programing languages were not the language constructs, but the libraries.

Considering you can use any java class in Scala or Clojure, I find them fairly easy to migrate to (though clojure is much more challenging due to the syntax and more pure functional nature).
Since NewMogul, these are the other forums:

http://Newsley.com/

http://www.markenomics.com/

http://www.viewsflow.com/
Why don't you get happy with yourself for finding this information, instead?
Ten Things the US Can and Should Do for Haiti
He's using the background-attachment property:

http://www.w3schools.com/Css/pr_background-attachment.asp

Using it in a div like that is a fairly spiffy effect.
This may be an ignorant question, but there are over a billion Chinese people, so what does it take to get those people to revolt against their hyper-oppressive government?
"I am not a crook." -- Richard M. Nixon
Is there an app for easily tracking a lost or stolen iPhone?
Segway reminds us that even the best get it wrong sometimes
Dissatisfaction with becoming the next great economic superpower.
No idea why this is confusing to you:
1) http://ajaxwhois.com/
2) Type something in the big box, say "wtf"
3) Hit enter

Expected:
Big box returns search results on ajaxwhois

Actual:
Redirect to godaddy.com w/ query results for my search. Hey, wtfsite.com is available for only $11!
Two groups - one spends 4 hours per day watching TV and the other spends 2-4 hours per day doing something more active. Did it really take research to highlight which was more beneficial to life expectancy?
Perhaps it's just the way I work, but generally if I'm adjusting CSS in the browser, I'm previewing how some potential changes will work. I already know what the affected class is (since I'm editing it inline), and I've already targeted the CSS I'm about to modify, so once I'm done previewing it's a simple matter to go back to the Sass and change things around.
Why Tumblr Is Kicking Posterous's Ass
The source of the negative sentiment may boil down to the cold calling. It seems to be one of those things that just hits a nerve, and I wouldn't be surprised if you could trace the anti-Yelp movement to this business practice. The other thing people complain about a lot is that their reviews aren't counted (presumably because of the anti-spam filter). If Yelp fixes those two major problems, it will be in much better shape.
Articles with a certain number of points (10 by default in news.arc) can no longer be removed automatically by flagging. There may have been other changes too; I don't know.
Who cares if IE is patched soon?
Landing pages are for people that don't know how or want to use Google or some other search engine - I'm talking about those moronic pages that look like a whole page of ad-sense links have been inserted: landing pages are not websites really: it's the same backend code and server applied to one's whole portfolio, right, changed on a domain-by-domain basis according to the type-in?

Keyword landing pages are a scourge, not some great expression of free-speech. They stifle economic growth.

Have you got a portfolio of ghost patents too?
US Patent #7,650,331: System & method for efficient large-scale data processing
Thanks for the comment. And sorry if it seemed late--that's one of the drawbacks of a monthly mag.

But it's also advantage since we have time to sift through these claims. I talked to a lot of business owners for this story and I was unable to find a single verifable instance of pay to play. All of these stories end up being hearsay. As I tried to convey in the story, the problems that Yelp creates for business owners are more complicated and more subtle. Like Google, Yelp is based on an algorithm that can make or break businesses and that is ever-changing and hard to understand. That's what is at the heart of most business owners' complaints.
Same discussion as Patent squatters (or land/copyright/or many more).

They take over a resource that can produce value and prevent that value to be passed to people. All in the hopes of monetizing on it.

I can only hope that in the future, holding a resource hostage without exploiting it, will cause it to be revoked.
Tell HN: I mixed Yelp with Craigslist and got this.
Gelatin transforms plain text files to XML, JSON, or YAML
Can you explain why this doesn't quality as extortion?
We're a django shop and that's essentially what we do. We already use the django template engine in our javascript/css files (primarily for URL generation, but it's grown to be several other things). We plugged in Sass and it's been great.

The development servers passes CSS files through the django template engine and Sass every time it's served. In production we do it just during deployment. Thus what sits on our CDN is the end result. From a developers pesrpective your always editing the 'source' file not the 'compiled' version.

It's seamless and works great.
Ask HN: Are splash pages history or preference?
So a design debate came up when I was with friends regarding the design and creation of someone's personal brand website, basically: To splash page or not to splash page.

Of course the argument didn't stay course and became more about whether splash pages should be put in the past or are still worthy to be included in new design.

I'd rather keep the focus on the origin of this discussion regarding the person the site is being created for.

Simplest client facts
- Creating new web presence
- They will be blogging (both on topic and off)
- They are an author
- They are a consultant

With just this little information, what do you think is the best way for them to represent?
1. A splash page with a link to the blog, works, etc.
2. Straight to the blog and either create links somewhere on the page to their works, etc. or stuff it in the about?

Update based on comment

What I meant by splash page was a pretty page with links to the various destinations that would contain the information, etc. E.g. their blog, consultancy, about, their work...
I'm happy with Markenomics for now and I hope others decide the same thing because being split up like this hurts the collective effort.
Numerical Recipes has both sound theory exposition and working code (yes, with some bugs here and there). This blog post has neither. Nor, to my knowledge, does any other single reference out there. It's easily the best "how to think about numerics work" text I know; if you have a better one please point me there.

It's easy for a wonk to flame about something as pedestrian as a how-to text for working scientists, but it's really not helpful.
Don't be Evil. Indeed. Well, you know, someone needs to keep IBM from a C&D against Hadoop.
HN was about a year and four months old when I created an account (finally figured it was worth posting a comment), but I'd been skimming headlines occasionally almost since it launched.
https://www.mobiledefense.com/ makes tracking a stolen Android phone trivial. I installed it last night and it is pretty cool.
Last time I checked, there weren't any studies showing the superiority of the Dvorak layout that Dvorak himself wasn't involved with.

What's the story on the "KEYTIME" study alluded to in the response above?
MobileMe will show you a map of where your iPhone is.
Heh. Someone didn't finish reading the article (including at least 5 others who thought this comment was insightful).
Bone Cancer Causes
What is a Bone Cancer?
Bone Cancer is a primary tumor which is relatively rare in comparison to that of the secondary tumors or metastatic tumors.
This seems more likely to incite a flamewar than a useful discussion.
An empty, undeveloped website? Why should we care?
Perhaps more direct incentives might be in order then. Estonia pays mommies a stipend to say home for a year or so, and the amount is based somewhat proportionally on the woman's income pre-baby.
Nothing, except that this is likely to become a hangout for Princeton Economics PhD students given my history and friends. They usually find some pretty interesting stuff and make good comments.
What do you mean by splash page? Do you mean a page that shows a pretty picture or video with a link that says "Enter here" or do you mean a pretty page with links to various destinations and maybe some recent news? If the former, never for any reason create such a page. If the latter, it's fine.
A really tricky dice problem is calculating Risk odds, once an attack needs to go through several countries, potentially from multiple starting points. The whole distribution of possible outcomes must be considered, to best figure out the trade-offs in attacking. :-)
Same here. The problem is not more upvotes, but upvotes spread out over a larger set of comments.

Perhaps we need a study of comments in the different percentiles now vs a year ago vs 2 years ago. Filter out comments that don't tell you something new. How does the remainder look?
There's not an "app" per se.

If you use Mobile Me and register your iphone with it you can track your iphone as well as make it play a noise for 2 minutes and show an alert.

As someone who recently had to replace an iPhone at full price (unwilling to sign up for another two years on AT&T's horrible service in SF). I recommend looking into using this _before_ you lose/have stolen your iPhone.
I own a Stratasys 3D printer, the uPrint to be exact. They are amazing machines and have saved me ten of thousands of dollars in just a few months. We run our printer nearly non stop during the day without a problem. The highend Stratasys models are even more impressive in terms of speed and finish. I just hope Stratasys doesn't do anything to lessen their quality for HP.
I wish that there was a reviews co-operative that didn't have draconian terms-of-use.

Maybe you even get a share of the advertising profit based on the helpfulness of the reviews you write?
Could S Corp Owners Be A Tax Target?
New GAO report, health bill, suggest more might be wrung from them.
There appear to be bugs in it. I tried:

(cdr '(ddd a xxx))

And it said:

Error: The expression is not balanced. Remove -1 parentheses.

I tried adding a parenthesis (which I assume is the same as removing -1 of them), without success.
If you ask them in writing to stop calling, they are legally obligated to comply. Of course, you have to do that for each agency...
there are multiple economies: dollars, political status, social status, personal happiness etc. people often trade benefits in one for benefits in another. myself and other free market advocates tend to think things should be worked out in dollars (explicit contracts) because it is the most transparent. but we can't lose sight of the fact that everything is a means to an end. that end being personal welfare followed by overall welfare.

I agree with almost everything that anarcho-capitalists say...but many of them don't seem to realize that under such a diaspora many (most) people will continue to live within semi-coercive organizations, because not everyone has the same preference for personal freedoms that they do. so yes, some will actively choose decreased economic output in favor of other things that they desire.
I agree that Apple's attention detail in design is excellent. I would say, however, that they tend to fail miserably in terms of ergonomics. A few examples:

[1]All Apple mice. The latest, Magic Mouse, is like instant carpal tunnel.

[2]All Apple displays. They tilt, but you can't adjust the height...seems absurd to me.

[3]The unibody Macbooks. Sharp edges are extremely uncomfortable for wrists (odd for a company so committed to rounded corners).

Apple often sacrifices ergonomics in favor of aesthetics. That said, most consumers probably don't use the devices enough to notice the ergonomic shortcomings.
Programming is a left-brain endeavor, designing utilizes the right side of the brain. Enjoying one of these tasks does not mean you enjoy the other, and certainly not that you're any good at it.

The reality is that most designers aren't also proficient programmers. And most programmers aren't also proficient designers. This is the cold hard truth that your Sass-pushing zealotry cannot overcome.

Most designers simply aren't keen to learn to program, because the two things are drastically different things.
It was a well-written article. I enjoyed reading it. Thanks for clarifying on the "pay-to-play" thing.

I'm with the shopkeepers. Yelp is evil.
According to her "things didn't get very far" and she "wasn't leaning one way or the other". Oh, and he's "nice". That doesn't sound like attraction, that sounds like she's trying to put him in the friend zone without hurting him. As a permanent resident of the zone, I can recognize the signs...

Now she feels obligated to make much more of a commitment than she's comfortable with, and I wouldn't expect a fairytale ending.
Ah, nice - that does the trick. :)

No, I have no particular taste for CSV, though some people like it because you can open the files in Excel without any conversion. Personally I usually use data in code instead, and JSON is better there.

You might consider putting a link to these files in the page, unless you think it might become a big resource drain.
Site Got Hacked. Want to know how. Ideas?
A site I work on got hacked this morning. a small snippet of code (html, css, javascript) was appended to a number of pages of an ad system (PHP) we use.

How does this happen? How do they get write access to these pages (which have permissions of 755 as does the containing dir). They are not pages that are editable through the ad system so as near as I can tell you need to have admin access via ssh to edit these. Is that correct?

Any info is appreciated as I want to get a handle on how this happened.
Summary of first page:

* Woman encounters a problem.

* She reacts angrily instead of intelligently.

* She is surprised when the problem gets worse instead of better.

* Yelp is bad.
Flagged. An important article for another site.