skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/820758.stm

"... US firm Raytheon used information picked up from NSA snooping to secure a $1.4bn contract to supply a radar system to Brazil instead of France's Thomson-CSF.

"[...]

"But former CIA director James Woolsey, in an article in March for the Wall Street Journal, acknowledged that the US did conduct economic espionage against its European allies, though he did not specify if Echelon was involved."
gosh Aaron... you are attacking me for mistakes two companies ago! funny.

Actually, we didn't know were selling text ads to people selling page rank back in 2005... just like Tim O'Rielly didn't. We both turned those ads off when we found out.

so, we actually did the RIGHT THING and you're still trying to paint me as some evil spammer.

to this day Joystiq, Hackaday, Engadget, TechCrunch50, This Week in Tech, This Week in Startups, Open Angel Forum, Blippy, Gowalla, GDGT and dozens of other brands/projects I've been involved with/invested in are doing great work.

You're making me into this black hat who is trying to cheat... it's not how I operate. I true to make and support great products and improve them consistently.

A lot of folks I know like the brands I'm involved with and I'm very proud of those brands.

Have I made mistakes over the last 15 years of building brands? of course... but i'm always honest and engage folks who point them out. in fact, i thank them.... like i've done here.

your attacking me for what you think are my weakest points just gets my team focused on fixing them--and for that I thank you!

Honestly, thank you! if there are things we can do better we want to do them. We're in it for the long-haul. We want to make a great brand and we don't want to do it by cutting corners.

I know you were hurt when I said "seo is bullshit" a million years ago, but back then that is what i thought. I didn't know anything about SEO back then and I really don't know much about it now. i was wrong when i said it was bullshit and I have said that it was an off the cuff, uninformed statement many times.

what is it going to take to make you happy?
Yes, there is. Recruiting works the same as everywhere else, personal networks, user groups, campus recruiting or a wide variety of technical recruiters.

The bigger question is, are you closer to your eventual customers? How are you making money? NYC is great if you want to be closer to the advertisers and digital media people. SF is great if you want to be closer to the VCs and other tech related folks, but finding good engineers is equally hard (or easy) in both places.
Does pushing "buy local" work?
it's not really about points or traffic. Mostly it's just knowing that the people who asked me to do the article actually get to see it.

If it never makes it to the front page, where 99% of the people view the stories, then all that effort was for naught. And I might as well save my time.
Service Providers recommended by True Ventures
This article is about a FatWallet member named codename47. If you want to read a more complete discussion about the article you can at http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/finance/984518/
I'm not sure it's possible for people to imagine a different world that easily. The differences caused by software patents not existing are pervasive and cumulative. Like the surprising effects of compound interest, I think a world without the 20 years of software patents would be in many ways unpredictable or even inconceivable for those of us who lived through this reality.

The original question may make sense in a limited fashion, but it frames things poorly as it's asking for specific incidents to illustrate a systemic effect.
As you pointed out, the other Halos had an easy mode. Your argument seems tangential to the author's. You just think they made hard mode too easy (perhaps another level of difficulty would have been in order, since they presumably shifted all the difficulties down because of market research).
>One of the rules of this site is that you ought to write things that you would feel comfortable saying to someone's face. And often it's very practical because all sorts of people turn up to read stuff here. Including Jason, it appears.

You know, despite being a total noob here, I still thought I had that one checked off on my list of things to watch for...until of course Jason himself showed up on the board (assuming it's really him, of course). I really did not see that coming. But what can I do now other than apologize and hope he wasn't offended? Sorry, Jason. :) No real defamation intended, just wanted to open a discussion on the validity of the opinions you propagate.
not the intention... not thumbing my nose at Aaron. he's great ask Fisking someone and I'm willing to hear him out and do a better job if there is merit to his arguments.

I'm also willing to jump into this mud pit and get my ass kicked by you guys. :-)
the teacher had a large enough collection of notes and slides that they were able to make a rather cheap textbook available to students on campus for around 20 dollars

The original article links to Seth Godin's blog which advocates something very close to that.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/textbook-ran...
Either way, learning how memories are stored in the brain is the first step to learning how they are encoded.
A mistake is something you do where you try to make it right (at least if you acknowledge something as a mistake AND MEAN THAT YOU WANT TO MAKE IT RIGHT you should fix it).

Scraping 3rd party content (without permission) and then putting nofollow on the links is bogus.

But you keep avoiding that issue because you realize what you are doing, and your goal is to cash in on others content for as long as you possibly can.

Nice diversion attempt though!
Very interesting, is it possible to check quickly if the points follow Benford's law? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benfords_law as a first approximation to see if people are gaming HN?
So much for the accuracy of searchyc then.
Dear Media: Polling Basics
I think it's still quite possible to say negative things to/about people, but it really helps to imagine saying them directly to the person in question.
Is that how it Benfords law works ?

I thought that Benfords law would allow you to distinguish between a set of points that is made up and a real one, not between a real set made by real users and one by real users + users gaming the system.
Mike. Coming from London.

Infrastructure development - monitoring, reporting, creating config tools, glueware - for low latency trading environments (my background's in Linux).

During my time off, I work on Python Docx (the Word / OpenXML module), various django sites, and a project doing natural language analysis of a popular web forum.

At PyCon I'm looking forward to the NLTK talk - the OReilly book is very academic and I'm looking forward to a more human guide to some of the topics - and the Python payment talks.

I don't really know that much about Atlanta, would love to check out the local cuisine (whatever their specialty is - like deep pizza in Chicago).

I love American and Canadian microbrews too, so I'm hoping there's some good indie beer.
Getting you addicted: game mechanics
It's interesting to see how US people doesn't count Internet (and cyberwarfare) as a Political instrument. EDIT: Not only US people, EUs too.

You really think [USA, NATO, EU, ... ], doesn't make use of [massive] cyberwarfare? And that cases like Google's or Iran's doesn't make profit to Big Members of NATO?
"If the tool you have is a hammer, make the problem look like a nail."
Benford's law is not universal in the same sense that the Pareto and Gaussian distributions are not universal: blatantly, while at the same time people believe and treat them to be universal -- often several different universal distributions by the same people!
Number seven is really helpful:

Have an anchor call to action on all pages, for all states of the page.

Thinking of each & every page this way forces you to clearly define the behaviors (probably something that leads to money in your pocket) you are trying to facilitate and focuses your energy on how to accomplish that. A great way to cut the fat and iterate faster.
Why You Should Start a Company in Seattle
I intend to release all the data on HN that I've collected over the last few months, I still plan to write one more article about this (about trending topics) and then I will make all the data available for download as a mysql dump.
In Malcolm X's biography he tells stories of growing up in Harlem. A lot of prostitutes worked in his area of town and he befriended many. The prostitutes would tell him that most of their clients are middle-age, well-off men - many with highly prestigious jobs. They mention that many of their clients visited them because their wives were not very pleasant and would withhold sexual contact from them. For many clients, they didn't think the sex was the main reason for visiting. Many of the men just wanted to talk with a woman that wouldn't result in an argument.

I remember reading one prostitute telling him directly that if wives had sex with their husbands regularly, they would be out of a job.
I wrote a scrappy script to process your report and find the "best" domains to consistently get "first post" on by multiplying total submissions by average points received per submission (i.e. total karma benefit). I'll ignore any sites that got fewer than 300 submissions. Result:

techcrunch.com - 22229
nytimes.com - 10178
readwriteweb.com - 2482
thestandard.com - 1888
centernetworks.com - 1510
technologizer.com - 1470
alleyinsider.com - 1158
sfgate.com - 1081
treehugger.com - 708
itworld.com - 698
devcentral.f5.com - 658
markevanstech.com - 523
howtoforge.com - 487
news.com.com - 431

TechCrunch is by far in the lead. But why not? They publish good stuff (usually) that HN readers like to vote up. Same for all the others in the list too.
Async and Parallel Design Patterns in F#: Parallelizing CPU and I/O Computations
If I lost 50lb I would weigh about 95lb and look dangerously gaunt... either that or spend a lot more time eating and a lot less hacking.
What I'm getting at here is that you are trying to be pedantic know-it-all, yet you fail to know the details of free speech which you claim to be so knowledgeable about.

Just because I named 2 dubious uses of free speech, "slander" and "assasination", doesn't mean that the laws can't be twisted to clamp down on more legitimate issues: such as revealing corruption in the government which can be construed as libel in the US.

Overall, I am disappointed in the attitude of HN readers like you who take freedom of speech lightly.
"you are attacking me for mistakes two companies ago! funny."

Well I am still in the same company I was back when you call my industry scum (while you were selling links to shady casinos). As far as I am concerned your opportunistic jumps between companies are all part of the same general trend / strategy. You still have not changed as a person.

"i was wrong when i said it was bullshit and I have said that it was an off the cuff, uninformed statement many times."

Yes but the difference is you stand on a podium at conferences and yell to the press when you slag it off.

When you say it has value you do it on a twitter post or a quick blog post that does not even hit your homepage. You are not quite as loud in this case.

I would say to make it right you should probably need to (at a minimum)...

- Direct link out to the sites you are scraping content from. FIX THE ISSUE.

- Make an in-depth post on your blog highlighting how important SEO is to all web based businesses. Describe how you gamed social media sites and worked media and nepotistic angles to build links for Mahalo. Also describe the bait and switch public relations and attack bait angles you used to build links. Better yet...make this an in-depth case study!

- Make sure a copy of that post lands in the inboxes of your media email list and your Jason email list.

- Issue a press release announcing the above blog post.

If you do all of those then there is a pretty strong chance I will think your apology is sincere. Anything less and I will realize that this is once more another round of posturing.
I said it was simplistic :)

Think of this as a step in 'release early, release often', first approximation of something that with a lot of pushing and pulling might be used as a step towards a healthier set of tools around intellectual property.

I share your concerns regarding the actuarial effects of this, but the funny bit is if the licensing costs would be raised on the 'solid' patents then those patents would find no takers.

After all patents are to be granted for a reasonable fee, if that fee were to be exorbitantly high then you could make a good case against the licensor.
What's with the FedEx plug at the beginning of the video? Is it just to make it look "airporty"?
Thats fair. Theres no denying Jason is good at what he does and understands the web business better than most. I feel like this is an opportunity for those on HN to learn the way he rolls and manages his business.

Of the pages indexed in Google that are of this type of spam in nature, Mahalo accounts for less than .1% .. I think this is more Google's issue than Mahalo's.
Anyway to watch this outside of the US?

Edit: Found it on their website - http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1183761885&play=1
I see your point, it probably has more to do with culture than hiring. The employees (at all levels) do appear to have done what was required of them with a friendly tone.

Where I think this becomes a hiring problem is that I would expect that somewhere along the way that Barnes & Noble would have hired somebody who would actually do what they were hired to do - Customer Service. In my opinion, this issue was never resolved and therefore every representative who worked on this case did NOT actually do their job.

No representative (regardless of the process) should promise a call back if they don't actually intend to follow through. If Barnes & Noble had hired correctly, the system wouldn't have failed this miserably.
Maybe I'm not understanding how it should work, but I'm not getting a lot of results. For example try to enter something crazy / random in the beginning, like "kqxj" you get no results. Even for something like ending in "hedule" (since there seems to be a bug if you type in more than 5 characters) only a few entries are shown for domains that end in "schedule"... It's pretty fast though.
Exactly when China will overtake the US
Swedish researcher Rosling show an interactive projection of when exactly Asia will overtake the US and the West in terms of per capita income & life expectancy.
I never asked to be an expert... I just state my opinion and folks can respond to it. Sometimes i'm right, many times I'm wrong.

I'm not your biggest fan, but can everybody piling on here read this and take it to heart? The best thing about the Internet is that you can say anything whenever you want and learn as you go. Just because Jason's more famous than you are doesn't mean he expects his words to be taken as canon, so if he apologizes for saying something and backtracks it's probably less slimy than it is genuine people-not-being-perfectly-consistent-always.

I notice people are piling on the downvotes right now, which is a shitty way to handle a debate. Even if you disagree with people, vote based on whether they're contributing to the conversation. When the guy who made Mahalo comes in, he's contributing something rare and unique and if you pound it into the dirt you're making us all look like immature jerks.
I do like the idea of the PHP documentation style comments, high quality reviewed comments that add to the text.

Maybe the answer is open text books. Schools most of the time, especially in K-12 wouldn't think about writing there own text book, but the combined power of teachers all over the world could surely produce texts that are far better than what we have today and I think a lot of teachers would contribute if it was just some pages here and there on things they were passionate about and the school sponsored them.

Sure you could still do limited publishing runs of this resource for people who would rather have a physical copy but it would mainly live online.
Tactic could work too.
It's All Glue: Building a Desktop Application with Lua
I cannot help but feel that we deserve better than to be PR tools for large corporations. Is Apple's rumored tablet really worth the geekgasms that people are having about it? Google's PR machine has been far, far grander than the reality of it's products. I'm not really sure if they've had a killer app since Gmail, but everything else has been adeptly hyped to death through false scarcity and the rumor mill.
Related: I think that for software patents (if allowed at all) source code, build scripts, and a comprehensive test suite demonstrating functionality must be provided. This must be done in a non-obfuscated way, such that the patent officer(s) assigned to the patent application can build and demo the software.
Yes, but China thinks their claim yields sufficient evidence even in the cases in which a us citizen acted independently (aka blackhats).
Mahalo is monetized through Adsense(well some affiliate links too). + the fact that the result is usually incomplete, means people are more likely to hit an ad to find a better answer.

So it's most likely a big cash cow for Google.

Which do you think it's better for them to send a user to? Mahalo powered by Adsense or __________ powered by Tribal Fusion?

Oh and just to clarify I'm not saying Google is doing anything evil. They don't adjust their algos to help push Adsense sites higher. But when an adsense site reaches the #1 position, they do appreciate the extra revenue.
Hmm, I think this is an example of an unnecessary optimization. After gzipping, minifying a CSS file might cut your website from like 300k to 299k.

On the other hand, if this guy combined his CSS files into a single file, he would reduce several HTTP requests which would actually provide a noticeable difference.
I avoid Python philosophically due to language feature shenanigans like this: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196
And this: http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Python/comp.lang.python/...

Because of that, I've never tried django.
Maybe they're not universal, but each is a strong attractor of models given a relatively small number of commonly satisfied assumptions.

In particular: dimensioned measurements must represent the same relationships between data under many different scales thus leading to logarithmic sampling.

Without further information to give expectations to other trends, these laws great starts.
Besides the abstract "engagement" to shore up retention, more friends increases the ad surface without requiring an increase in users. An advertiser can target to more users, some of whom they might not normally be able to identify as interested.

For example, I am sometimes served ads for a breathing apparatus, for people who have things like sleep apnea. I have never seen an ad for such a device anywhere online. I have a FB friend who has a breathing issue and uses a device like this.

It seems like I would be a good target for an ad like this, because I have a Friend who might be interested in it, and I might point it out to her. It allows Facebook to charge more for ads, and makes advertisers more interested in advertising.
"I never asked to be an expert"

This is like Tiger Words claiming he desired privacy for his family deeds (after he had went outside his own family). if you want the public relations when you are hyping your own company and/or trashing other people's livelihoods then you accept the greater responsibility.

you can't just choose to take all the benefit and fall back on that <em>I am no expert</em> crap when you get caught in a lie.

"if he apologizes for saying something and backtracks"

That is the big problem. The apology is insincere.

He is not doing any real backtracking or shifting of strategy...just repeating a fake apology WITHOUT addressing the issues that were brought up.

MOST CRUCIALLY putting nofollow on the links to the sites he is "borrowing" content from.
Follow changes to sites without RSS feeds with GReader
Suppose I'm a tenured professor and I publish a blog with educational posts about computer science. I write blog entries during my working hours. The blog isn't a requirement of my job but it may help raise my academic profile. Am I free to use your CC-BY-SA 3.0 photo to illustrate my blog post?

What if, instead of a professor, I am a freelance programmer. There are no ads or other exchange of money directly related to the blog, but sometimes potential clients find me through my blog. But the blog is also a way for me to converse with a group of regular readers whom I already know. Is this blog primarily directed toward commercial advantage?

In either of the above scenarious, suppose the blog has ads but that I don't turn a profit on it (i.e. the ads defray but do not cover the hosting cost). How about now?

Or what if the revenue from the ads is more than the hosting cost, but much less than I could make through my professional activities. If the amount of money is tiny relative to the time I spend on the blog, could I argue that the blog is not primarily directed toward commercial advantage?

You may find each of these cases perfectly clear and obvious, but wherever you draw an "obvious" line, the above study probably shows that many Creative Commons members will think it should be somewhere else. Even the organization that drafted the license admits that it doesn't provide very explicit guidance for common cases like web sites that include (but don't rely on) advertising, or sites that do not involve exchange of money but may provide less-tangible commercial advantages for their owners.
The price is not that important. In a wealthy western nation, $100 for a textbook is quite reasonable, if you're spending any amount of time reading it. Compare that to the price of a lecture.

Ebooks mainly give incremental improvements. The one big improvement is searchability. I suppose search on Google books now suffices.

Even if we count that, the benefit of e-books is marginal. Getting incremental patches is nice in certain fields -- those that change a lot over a decade. The patching of errata is generally useful though. Having comments on textbooks would be, well, I don't know if that would be useful. That sort of thing tends to produce a lot of pedantic comments or other comments on stuff the reader shouldn't be distracted by. Consider the comments on the PHP documentation. So much of it is wrong. It's the sort of thing that would require moderation, so I suppose reader->author communication would be the path. But what author wants to spend time on that?

Also, it's better for communities to develop around a piece of subject matter than a particular ebook sold in a particular format -- these can include different textbooks at the same time, can include people who get dead-tree textbooks, and can include discussion that extends beyond what textbooks talk about. It doesn't really make sense for a textbook to come with a forum attached.

I think the trouble with all these ideas is that they all worsen the signal-to-noise ratio. The nicest part about e-book textbooks is the low price and open market. Looking back at my past, it seems the biggest inefficiency in my learning was in deciding what to learn, not how I learned it. I think that problem should be what we want to tackle the most (and $9.99 might help quite a bit there, since people can then get a cheap taste of the material).