skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think one of the things to really note here is what kind of service you are after. Most SEO clients are not "the website is the company" businesses.

Type One

The client is a plumbing company. Their website gets 300 visits per month resulting in about a call a day. An SEO company can come in, get them to make some changes. Make sure Google can index all the pages, add meta tags, get some more content written, sort out local business listings, get a few links and bring that up to 900 visits and 3 calls a day. I would (and do) call that success. For comparison, the difference in cost between a Yellow pages ad that gets a plumber 1 call a day and one that gets them 3 calls a day would be (very roughly) $10k-$100k where I live.

There are lots of companies that can and do achieve this kind of success with decent predictability. They can usually do this without too much reliance on the client for input. Sceptics will point out that you coud get SEO for dummies and do this yourself. SEOs point out that most plumbers don't. Anyway, this is most of the SEO "market."

Type Two

There are also the kind of SEO companies that advise bigger companies on their SEO strategies. They work with IT/Web on creating more SE friendly designs. They work with content writers on selecting topics that get searches. They run training sessions on metatags and giving your page an "on page SEO score." These companies' expertise is mostly consulting expertise. There is some specific knowledge they bring to the table, but not rocket surgery and not really more than the other type of company, usually. I reckon you could train "SEO Consultants" in weeks. What they do do well (if they are good) is they are able to get these companies to change the way they do things a little. These probably have as much in common with "occupational safety consultants" as they do with the former type. If I was hiring for these businesses, that is the background I would be looking for. These projects probably have a higher rate of failure since they require changing the way an organisation does things.

The kind of people that write blog posts about SEO companies however are very rarely in these categories giving the whole "industry" a warped public perception.
Humanity.
How I Became the Robert Scoble of Buzz
Just curious, how do you collect the hours from the businesses you are displaying? Do you use an API to consume this data, or is it manually entered?

I bet an algorithm could be built (assuming enough data is flowing) where it automatically adjusts the hours based on when people are checking in. To go along with that, it would show the busiest times, or the "rush hours" based on the density of check-ins at any given time. That's pretty far out there, but with enough traffic flow, you could make predictions and you wouldn't rely on anyone else for that data. You could go further to say "There's a good chance this business is closed because nobody checked in today, and usually there are check-ins."

If you plugged in a calendar, your phone could recommend where to go and when to go to avoid lines. It's like you don't even need to think anymore at that point, just obey the orders your phone gives you.
Well there's nothing really special about the "next" part. It's just that you can't check the accuracy ("truth" is a dirty word, apparently) of your model against the data you used to construct it. It's why there's stuff like cross validation in machine learning.

Anyway a model is not really useful either when there's only a finite amount of data. I hear astronomy's starting to hit against this problem.
I would appreciate if you posted some links on home schooling.

I'll post this quick and dirty reply to respond to your kind question, feeling I'll need to add more on this subject later.

http://learninfreedom.org/sidlifgetstarted.html

The referenced webpage is one I would like to update sometime, and that is on my do-list queue.
Fog has declined in past century along California's redwood coast
I didn't know that... still humorous, though.

... You've also apparently misunderstood the post. I don't think the users are stupid.

I think that the statement "Google and developers are stupid and/or have failed for allowing events like this to happen" is incorrect. That's the whole point of the post.
Artificial foot recycles energy for easier walking
And yet, when we find another car in the lot in which we were almost positive we'd parked, we do not call the car manufacturers complaining that our car has spontaneously transformed, do we?
Ha, totally missed the name and just read it as fava, doh, brain surgeon to aisle 3 please.
"Third, its on the web. Safari, firefox and chrome start pages are in your local browser, but we dont all use the same machine everyday do we? I switch between 2 or 3 as I'm at work, then at home or at a friends."

Except that it uses cookies. So, no.
Yes, I've usually represented the range with (low, size) instead of (low, high) (and then the high-low part never comes up).

So when this article first came out I was all "Aren't you bagging on Bentley too much? He published pseudocode, and of course you have to take care about things like overflow when converting it to C." But then I saw Bentley saying somewhere that no, he really hadn't considered this problem. (IIRC)
check out apppush.com My best friend is the cofounder and the tech behind it is beautiful. They're currently privately beta testing. if you want in, just email me and ill gladly make the intro: j@jasonlbaptiste.com
if people are tripping over your "power chords" you ain't playing them right!
Don't let it get to you. You have lots of fan here and it's well deserved. Keep up the good work.
Did people use Hamachi to keep their data safe or to ease NAT/firewall traversal?
This was a cute idea in the seventies, and we've been through this debate on ethics in the nineties and the consensus is that no, we're not hiring burglars to fix the locks anymore. There are other people who can fix locks and we don't have to reward anti-social behavior.
It's hard to tell if this is authentic or not. It's easy to confirm (e.g. by Google Book Search) that it was published in Reader's Digest by Jerome Weidman in 1955. What's not clear is whether the incident ever happened or to what extent Weidman embellished it. I wouldn't hold the style of the piece against it; everything in Reader's Digest is like that, or used to be, and 1955 was probably a good year for smarm. On the other hand, "it appeared in Reader's Digest" isn't much evidence of anything.
Google Gives $2 Million to Wikipedia’s Foundation
Clearly, it has not occurred to you that what Dropbox does is easier said than done.

What Dropbox does may not be awe-inspiring when considered in isolation, but the sheer number of failed predecessors who couldn't solve this conceptually simple problem is very impressive.
I really like the idea behind Square, but are customers really going to trust a dongle hanging out the end of someone's phone? Whats to stop someone reverse engineering the dongle and creating a spoofed client that just records the data instead of performing a charge?
If the behavior is according to the language spec, it's not an implementation thing. Perhaps you meant language spec instead of implementation, but even in that case it seems like a poor idea to require all arithmetic to be arbitrary-precision, no?
I've long thought of the Turing Test not as an argument against the impossibility of AI, but rather an argument against the impossibility of a machine that thinks. Certainly, as an actual practical test of AI, it seems pretty poor to me - people doing real-world Turing Tests seem to me to be missing the point.

There are a lot of people, especially religious people, who try to argue against thinking machines by saying that the ghost, the soul, the existentialist bit, is missing. The Turing Test is an argument against that; that if you can't tell the difference between the machine and a human when the "interface" is something as simple as a terminal rather than the obvious differences between machine and flesh, then you don't have good grounds to still say that machines cannot think - because it exposes you to the accusation that you're just pre-judging based on appearances.
Looks nice, and would probably be a great recommendation to relatives or friends.

On a site such as "hacker news", where the majority of users would be fast-typing power users, I think we would prefer to stick to our blank homepage and type what we need in the address bar.

Personally, I use the bookmarks toolbar in forefox / ie for my top 4 links.
It's strange that people treat this as a moral question: "It's okay to expect them to learn how to use the internet". As if you have some sort of obligation to serve everyone.

If you do "expect them to learn how to use the internet', then you will exclude some percentage of users, which may or may not be a good idea depending on what you are trying to do. But moral exhortations like "users should learn the internet" or "developers should make their software easier to use" are worthless.
Cool number sharing!

They're keeping the salary book nice and light, though. 60% of £500k is £300k and they have 17 employees.. so an average of £17647 ($28200) each - and that's not taking into account employer NICs which, when deducted, would take the average down into £15k territory. I guess many are part time or the founders aren't taking salaries.. :-)
That's my understanding. We frequently build websites for clients on Wordpress, and certainly aren't intending to release them under GPL, although I don't think it would make a huge difference in practice.

The fact that Wordpress delivers the content to the theme is basically irrelevant in my eyes. All the work goes into the design, HTML, CSS and Javascript, and the end product is an original work.
> What happens when you have an array with more elements than can be expressed by an int?

You probably couldn't have an array that big and even if you could, it's likely this function would accept it at compile time. The problem here is that you're passing it an array that it is advertised to handle, yet it fails.
Any definition of 'music industry' should refer to the set of musical activity done for profit. This extends far beyond the sign->record->license model that those four chase.

Think of live music activity done as business (orchestras, stage works, live bands, professional church musicians), self-publishing musicians, sheet music, bespoke composition, and all the music work done around advertising.

Even that barrier is artificial. If it weren't for copyright a lot of the barriers between music, dance, acting and other creative pursuits would evaporate. People could publish innovations without threats of legal attack or stifling paperwork overhead.
Well, I guess I want to use a different random number generator than the TSA does.
See also Memphis-area startup http://www.MarksMenus.com. This one came out of Startup Weekend in 2009. It does menus and per-dish reviews with user comments and reviews.

I'm not affiliated but I did meet the founders at SUWMem.
Thing is, nuanced emotion and irrationality is often actually rational - not in the sense that the human brain thought logically through the situation and decided rationally to act irrationally, but in the game theoretic sense of producing a superior outcome.

For example, if you get angry you can lose control and do things you'd regret later (seemingly irrational). That forms a powerful argument to avoid angering someone, because you know that they might react badly even if it's not in their best interests. Thus, evolution can engineer in a defense against e.g. cheaters of various kinds, even when punishing any one cheater would be counter-productive for the one doing the punishing.

(It strikes me now that there's an argument in here about banking, bailouts, the angry public and avoiding collapse of the economy, but I'm not going to pursue it.)
Twitter’s hiring binge brings it to 140 employees | VentureBeat
Yeah, I think you've got great stuff. I started just by reading the transcripts of the interviews, but I now try to set aside time to watch the full videos. Keep it up!
The official announcement / press release is actually available, via the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-Febru...
Where To Find Better Than Temp Jobs In London
If you work temp jobs in London like I did, chances are you’ve found the market for viable employment getting tougher in recent months. Unfortunately, this is a problem that we have all had to deal with in this tough economy. Recently I found a way to earn a steady paycheck doing the exact same work that I have been doing in temp jobs for years, and wanted to write this article to share my experiences with other people who may be looking for a way to get out of the temporary employment rat race.
When the user says he isn't using the URL anymore, and tells people not to use it... that's pretty definitive in my mind.
The 6 degree Fahrenheit drop in the coast vs inland temperature gradient has resulted in a 33% reduction in coastal fog drip.

This is definitely not good for our Coastal Redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains, given their reliance on high fog density. Such a reduction in fog will result in smaller trees and a reduced growth rate. As a result, the more aggressive tanoak and douglas fir species will proliferate and dominate the limited Redwood forests.

It sounds far off, but this is definitely news worth considering if you are planning a timber harvesting operation. Given that these trees take between 20-50 years to grow back, such logging operations could drastically change the surrounding ecosystem.

I believe that the Redwood forests are one of northern California's most amazing gifts, and I would be extremely sad to see them go.
The formal announcement is actually semi-officially available already: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-Febru...
If they can't be bothered to run the PDF through a program to translate it to HTML, and then post a link to the PDF version, I don't want to do business with them.

If their menu is so fancy that it can't be easily translated into HTML, they're missing the point entirely.
'SolidSX is an application that gives insight in large software systems'
It seems to me that this "fix" just pushes the bug off by a factor of 2. What happens when you have an array with more elements than can be expressed by an int?

I don't think you can do that in Java. In the more general case, you're right, but I think you can solve it by just using a long long or whatever your language has instead of an int for the appropriate calculations.
The parent link is to a data visualization blog entry, actual product page: http://www.solidsourceit.com/products/SolidSX-source-code-de...
"For just $1, anybody can have the functionality of a full blown credit card reader on their phone."

This will not end well.
How Secret London Switched a Facebook Group to a StartUp
grr, i cant find the company/post, but a long while back sergey brin invested in a startup that basically listed information for a business' operating hours.
"When you know that by faith - simply believing ... "

Here's the thing: That, to me, is about a far from "knowing" as one can get.

And there seems to be a serious matter of self-reference, that one needs to first have faith that faith is worth embracing, and faith that the key documents spousing the value of faith are correct.

My empirical experience with believing in, and acting on, things for which is no evidence tells me otherwise.
I agree--- to a large extent the consolidation of useful information on almost any topic Foo at Wikipedia has compensated for what'd otherwise be an overall decrease in the quality of Google's results for Foo over the past few years. If you look at what you get back for many general topics excluding the Wikipedia result, it's a morass of SEO'd blogs, referral bait, and other such not-really-content content.
Here's an exception - http://evergreen-chinese.com

All HTML and CSS, hours, phone #, and address all on the front page. Menu is in HTML and kept up to date.
we scraped a huge amount of data, then hired people to clean it up. it does scale better down in south america where wages are quite a bit cheaper but it doesn't scale enough. i would say the difference is i can hire someone here to do some data gathering and quality control on-site whereas i'd have to outsource to mturk and get lower quality if we were based in the states.

however, since we're converging on a model that's slightly further toward the 'curated' side of the spectrum than a loopt/gowalla/nextstop, i think we're OK with doing some manual editing of things like open hours, and leaving the rest to the community - all of our community editing pieces aren't out yet (we all still have full-time jobs and/or ambitious clients)...

I love the check-in statistical analysis concept for data generation or at least quality control. very cool for higher volume locations.
I'm sure by sending a DMCA takedown request he could get this done.
The payment idea is interesting, but it creates an incentive to look suspicious.
I can make a similar argument about floating-point numbers not modelling reals, and the hysteria over the lack of reflexivity of equality in IEEE 754 is a little overblown.
"Am I now dangerous because I've just admitting to knowing both of those words (by virtue of using them in this comment)?"

In the current political climate: Yes.
So, when Google buys a company, it creates a market?
I'm not sure you "got" it, based on the horrific flash nav menu, and the ridiculously small window all the info is displayed in (I have more than 300 or so vertical pixels!).
Knuth also said: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
Silly article. Everyone knows you can't have strong AF without using ternary computers.
let me guess... one of your projects.
Skype First big mobile move with Verizon
Thank you for your responses. I have a couple friends who have worked at high-end restaurants and they admit to being addicted to the mix of chaos and orchestration and frenetic precision.

> Daily P&Ls are already built into the reporting functions of the POSs I've seen so far

I finally found the NYTimes article that made me wonder if there is better software to track costs.

"“A few years ago, at Cafe Boulud, we couldn’t figure out why margins were so bad month after month,” says Lili Lynton, one of Mr. Boulud’s two partners. “Even the chef was baffled. We looked at everything and we finally realized — it was this reduction sauce, a really expensive reduction sauce, with truffles and mushrooms, which was in a bunch of dishes. Who would have thought? We figured it was the fish or the chicken or the meat. It was like a game of Clue, and the culprit was the gravy.” [1]

If Daniel Boulud with his team of accountants has trouble uncovering hidden, multiplying costs - presuming they have best-in-class software, is the software good enough?

Answer: Maybe Avero has found that niche. Or that niche is still open (despite Avero's elite client base - Danny Meyer)

"Avero’s software gets you the 411 by downloading POS reports and morphing that raw data into valuable information you can use to improve and act on every aspect of the operation of a restaurant from menu planning—like how many lobster rolls did you sell for the last four years on Thursday nights when it was over 90 degrees out, what did Moms order most on Mother’s Day, or how many vegans are eating out on Friday nights in winter—to server performance and pinpointing the server who’s, say, strongest in cocktail sales but weakest in wine sales...

10,000 food and beverage professionals in 1100+ restaurants—guys like Danny Meyer and Steve Hanson—use his software. And thanks to Avero, his clients have realized an incremental $100 million in profits." [2]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/business/17boulud.html?pag...

[2] http://thestrongbuzz.com/potluck/details.php?item_id=15
Do a http://namechk.com
I'm in the midst of designing a restaurant website right now. They initially asked for Flash, but I showed them a jQuery\html\css design instead. They really liked it and it wasn't a problem. Also using Django as a CMS for mailing list and menu items.
Computers Craze
Many of us love computers because they have encroached all aspects of our life. From the time we wake up to the time we go to bed, we use them in multiple ways in various places. It is hard to think of a life without computers for many of us. Computers and the internet have taken over our life. Computers are not just a mere area of interest for many of us but they have become our life's passion.
Sequestration without first bringing production to zero is a Sisyphean endeavor.
> Each computer has a unique internet protocol number, or IP address, which identifies the specific computer and its geographic whereabouts whenever it is used to access the internet.

I'm surprised nobody here has responded to this complete falsehood in the article. Did this paragraph bother anybody else?
Why? Anyone can already type in credit card number,ccv,etc by hand for zero dollars - surely it's not a disaster?
And some great pics from the previous event last October:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hannahbabble/sets/7215762251965...
I have never really liked the charity model for OSS. My OSS isn't charity any more than the free trial of my software is charity: it is a marketing strategy that I can employ in parallel with and in support of my other business activities.

Incidentally, I think you may underestimate the percentage of OSS which is done by hackers on the payrolls of big companies. My day job has "donated" the equivalent of millions in OSS development, and all the surveys I've seen of OSS participation list "I am doing this on the explicit instructions of my bosses" and "I am doing this at work without the explicit instructions of my bosses" as very prominent numerically.
A valid concern, but a dishonest merchant can easily enough skim your credit card already. Ever since the proliferation of camera phones, it's not been hard for a bad employee to instantly and stealthily copy your card's information.

To step back a bit: I love how elegantly Square has adapted the market's current de facto e-payment option, but I have to wonder if that's really the way forward. If Square is really in it for the long haul, they'll probably do a Netflix: build a solid business on applying good UX to the current technology, then use that leverage to pioneer in the next paradigm.