skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do you not stay awake at night worrying about the effect that hybrid ad/content has on your ability to produce content honestly? In my preferred world, writers would never have any knowledge of which companies are paying the bills.
It's probably something like this:

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/adsense/42980-how-...

Which was discussed on HN here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511935
You forgot to sign with "peace and love". Although maybe that's because it's been ringing hollow lately... might I suggest that you also add "xoxo" to your signature? Maybe that'll win people over.
article implies that QC is being used in limited practice right now. i kinda doubt this. for example, this IARPA solicitation implies that they're doing baby steps with very small data. of course, if they had it practically working, it would be classified.. http://www.iarpa.gov/solicitations_mqco.html
Eventually they won't have anything left from Sun to sell...
Startup consideration – when is a patent useful?
The Sum of Our Google Fears
Ooh, interesting question. First number I was able to grab: Citigroup lost $7.8B in 2009. In 2007, their CEO's $24.8M in compensation from the previous year ($1.2M salary, $13.2M bonus, $10.4M stock grant) was denounced as scandalous.

Edit: slightly more apples-to-apples: their 2007 profit was $3.6B. Their 2006 profit was $21.5B.
The dot-com craze peaked 10 years ago
If I do not have S3, what would be the total effective cost?
Ars (and most other nerd-centric sites) probably has a much higher percentage of users with AdBlock installed than the Internet as a whole.

Then again, it also probably has a larger percentage of people that wouldn't pay any attention to the ads even if they were visible. From Ars' point of view it would be great if these people shut of their ad blockers, but the advertisers would probably be getting the short end of the stick, in that case, which would (over the long term) drive advertising prices down, etc. Ars would pick up some profits in the meantime, but solely at the expense of the advertisers, who are now getting screwed by paying for eyeballs that are worth less on average than the ones when people weren't shutting their ad blockers down. I'd certainly pay less for per-impression ads on a site that wouldn't show content to people with an ad blocker, for this very reason.

It's a grand circle of life, and frankly, it's hard to say what second order effects any of these actions might have. It very well may be that the presence of ad blockers raises the average value of the eyeballs that do see the ads enough that advertising prices end up higher and Ars does better overall. It's equally possible that they're correct, the ad market hasn't adjusted to the presence of ad blockers yet, and they're still getting paid too little per-eyeball. I'm not sure. Neither are they.

But in theory, at least, over the long term, if people with ad blockers really aren't paying any attention to ads anyways, the market should correct for this and the results for both advertisers and the sites providing ad space should approach the true value.
"Google is a company on steroids" -- Andy Grove

Pretty awesome quotes in 2 minutes and 46 seconds, even though this is somewhat of an "alarmist" video
I've talked with Larry about Pugs. He knows Haskell.
I can't imagine being too old to get used to a new control scheme. It's like being too old to switch to standard instead of automatic.
True; nobody can be an expert in every field. Our job in that case is to make the tools/resources necessary to be proficient easier to access (done, thanks internet!) and to spread the knowledge that computers are really hard to break permanently. Hopefully the next generation grows up without this particular fear!
I'd second not buying links this way. There's a ton of free ways you can personally market your app already. Since you mentioned the sites that solicited have relatively low page rank, it's not worth the time/risk/money.
You're probably (hopefully?) right. It was on my list, but maybe I'll move it to the top of my list.
If playing Meteor Blitz is any indication, the iPhone/iPod Touch can make a very nice game controller. (You'd probably want all of the CPU and other resources devoted to just controlling.) It might be worth Apple's while to hire 2 or 3 devs and have them cranking out iPhone interfaces to Steam games.
My advice:

1. Content is king, obviously, but get inbound links through guest posts

2. The rest is details

The details:
1. Use alt img text to describe images

2. Use hyperlinks with solid naming conventions: http://www.localseoguide.com/yelp-seo-analysis-part-one/

and not

http://www.localseoguide.com/p=188270

3. Use rel=nofollow for links that you don't want the search engine to pick up.

For instance, if you're an amazon affiliate, your links should look like:

<a href="http://amazon.com/product/affiliateid=blahblah rel="nofollow">name of amazon product</a>

4. Pick a title tag that you think people will search (e.g. "How to Lose Weight," not your post title, "Amazing thing that I did last month")

6. Add certain pages to your robot.txt file that you don't want to get picked up (i.e. your privacy policy or terms).

7. Ensure that there are no broken links within your site (internal broken links)

8. Have keywords and a metadescription on each page
Senators are very responsive to small issues like this. The elected official will listen to polls or their own values on the big issues like healthcare or abortion. On the little issues that are extremely important to a small group of people but largely unimportant to the rest, the senator will hop onboard with the vocal minority very quickly. 99% of the state might prefer the tax but it doesn't real change their vote, and 1% might vehemently oppose it and it will change their vote, the official will almost always go with the 1%.

I've been part of that vocal minority and had elected officials intervene in tiny issues. You'd be very surprised by what can be accomplished by 20-100 angry people.
MongoDB is quite amazing, give it a spin if you haven't already.
If you want a lot of people to hate your language, name it "somethingLisp". The CL people will hate you because it's not CL, the Scheme people will hate you because it's not Scheme, and everyone else will hate you because it has parentheses.
There's no need to rely on search engines to find pages full of useful information. I do broad topical research, and I've managed to find pretty decent concentrated sources on most topics online. There are many fine specialist websites, and blogs, done by knowledgeable human beings.

It takes time to find them and organize them (I use a custom database rather than bookmarks). SE's are fine for quick, one-off searches that -aren't important- ... otherwise, human expertise is far preferable, and always will be.
Bit of a tangent: awful usability on the screenshots on the homepage. It's really hard to get to the middle two since mousing over the outer pictures cause them to inflate over the top.

I currently use LaunchBar on the Mac (excellent) and Launchy on the PC (good but not brilliant). LaunchBar fits my needs perfectly so I can't see any reason to move away from it (kind of like how I wouldn't buy any other MP3 player apart from an iPod).
It doesn't work without an S3 account. The total cost is $29 (one time) plus monthly S3 charges. For example, 33GB backed up at S3 would cost $4.95/month in storage charges, plus some (relatively small) transmission and transaction charges. Upload transmission to S3 is free through June 2010.
Are people really this stupid?
Does this mean PC games on Mac? Pardon my ignorance.
the current steam beta ui has been ported from ie to webkit (which was a hint that they were going to introduce mac support)
how do you walk backward?
Couldn't we do this?

r' f (x:xs) | xs == [] = (f x):[] | otherwise = (f x):(r' f xs)

or:

[(f a) | a <- myList]

- another edit -

r' f (x:xs) | xs == [] = x | otherwise = f x (r' f xs)
If you view the transaction as a Colorodo affiliate selling in Colorado, it's not interstate commerce, and Colorado can tax it. Amazon fired Colorado affiliates to avoid being taken to court.
It's all about perceived user quality. Google has guidelines, but if you read closely they qualify them with we can do whatever we want. They keep making the call that keeping Mahalo in is better for whatever reason, perhaps because they think it will bad PR (censorship?), or they'll get a lot of complaints (where is mahalo.com?) or maybe just because they don't see data that it is bad for users now (site metrics).

I think what angers people legitimately is two fold. First, Mahalo seems to be doing stuff that gets other people banned. Second, they're seemingly being really sketchy about it.

Personally, I think they are on the whole useless pages and am happy to block them. There are certainly a subset of useful pages, and I'd consider doing a tighter integration where I could promote just those pages in our Zero-click Info boxes. Same goes for something like Yahoo! Answers. Most of their pages are useless, but they have a subset that are really useful.

To your latter point, I couldn't agree more. I'm much more aggressive at de-listing what I deem to be "useless" sites. Google can't do this because they'd get too much flack for it, e.g. censorship.
So in 2006 they paid their CEO about 0.1% of their total profit? That doesn't seem like a lot.

But more important, how much does it cost to find someone who can run a company like that competently? I work for a lot cheaper, but I'm also not capable of managing all of Citigroup. And conversely, if I were someone who had proven that I could do that, I'd likely have enough money to retire; you'd have to pay me quite a lot to convince me to subject myself to that kind of stress rather than sipping pina coladas on the beach.
BuddyTV Founder on What One Question He'd Ask the God of Business
Good thing somebody brought up the problem of encryption with other backup providers (like Backblaze).

Still, problem is that if you want to back up a lot of data, S3 quickly becomes rather expensive. In my case, storage costs alone for around 550GB that I currently store on Backblaze would run me $82.50 a month. Not exactly small change.
I'm like this, basically frustrating to someone who is standing next to me when I'm trying to fix a problem or just being the one at the keyboard at work or something. Have a tenancy to dive in and click through skimming dialogs, most of the time it works just fine.
I think that their target audience is already educated, and there's no way of generating trust from those who do not wish to pay.

For many - myself included in my high school years - Linux is all about free as in beer.
Sounds nice. Just too bad the contents of my NAS would cost $700 a month to keep on s3.
I don't entirely disagree, but it should be presented as commentary instead of news. I guess I was just a little ticked that Wired didn't even link to the official announcement.
That's map, not reduce.
There you go. Thanks for the thoughtful reply, your responding to comments here really makes me think better of your site and I'm sure people are more likely to subscribe as a result of your engagement.

Actually I'm not too surprised that people turned off their adblockers when you asked them. That's what I'm saying - engage with people and if you get on their wavelength they'll respond positively.

I wasn't sure how you'd take my comment, but I'm encouraged by your response. Some comments by Ars in the original DOI thread were offensive ("f*ing Wladimir Palant"), your reply restores my faith.

When I surf the internet, most sites I visit I don't build up a particular relationship with. I'll just read an article here or there. I won't read through all the terms and conditions or turn off adblockers for every site I visit, life's too short. But if it turns out Ars provides a useful service in the future, I just might if you guys ask nicely like this. I still question the sustainability of this strategy, but then again I don't run a successful web site, so who am I to say.

Thanks again for the positive response, and good luck.
I think it's a mistake to think of large corporations as singular entities in these sorts of cases. Given what I know about big-company politics, I am positive that there are people inside Google who support banning Mahalo and others who do not. Political battles like these are not resolved quickly, and an ongoing visible public backlash is the best weapon those who support banning him have.
Totally agree. But we should remember that back in 2006, the search bar for Facebook was on the left sidebar similar to the iA design.
Who actually uses Itanium based computers?
I always see the Itanium version for any programmer tool I download from microsoft.

However it seems that Microsoft only provides Windows Server 2008 for it, which is not cheap.

Why would anyone use it, considering the considerable disadvantages of price and 32 bit performance?
SEO can be expensive and time consuming, and a single update to Google's algorithm can send you back to the drawing board.

My advice: take all of the time and money and, instead of SEO, focus on making your product great or creating great site content.

If you have a site worth visiting, the quality linking and SEO will eventually take care of itself. People will blog about your site and link to it without you having to do anything other than being the best at what you do.
If mahalo is 'borderline' or even 'ok' to a large faction inside Google they have real problems.
There is a sense in which there's justified fear of "trying things" on a computer. While it's fairly hard to permanently break one, it's fairly easy to lose the document you've been writing for the past hour. I remember this being a major issue for my mom back in the early 1980s.
I would be excited for this, but I have finals on the same day :/ I would love to hear if you do something like this again though!
Yes and no. Valve is porting some of its existing PC/Xbox game titles to run natively on the Mac platform, and most (or all?) of their new titles will be released simultaneously on PC, Mac, and XBox 360.
QC is used for key exchange. Private-key ciphers can be more secure than public-key ciphers, the problem is how to distribute keys securely. You just need to send about 1k of data (the key), and you only need to send it once. After that, the two parties use the key to encrypt their messages and send them using classical channels.
Water consumption in Edmonton during the Olympic gold medal hockey game
If a business makes a profit by serving its customers, I'm ok with that. At this point, given how messed up the health care system is (law, super expensive EOL care, high entry cost for doctors and nurses, poor non-emergency care situation), can you really do the right things. Given the failure of Indian Health Service in serving its customers (to the point of pinning a note that says "we won't pay" on a person transferring to a hospital), I know the government can't even on a loss / non-profit basis.

I almost think the government should start with tuition incentives / loan relief for doctors and nurses, and create a government cataclysmic insurance fund that covers stuff over a $100K (think flood insurance).
Fred Wilson seems to be the top ranking individual.
I'm quite surprised that GigaOM, CNET, Mashable and Engadget are less popular than him.
According to a link in an uncle post, the system doesn't require an internet connection because it assumes that a user should be allowed to install or play the game unless it can verify that said user should not. To prove that the user doesn't have a legitimate copy requires an internet connection, so in the absence of an internet connection, it lets you play without verification, but when the game is able to contact their keyserver, it will only let you play if it can verify that yours is a legitimate copy(with the key and password combination that you entered on install).
I might be...
AppEnginePeople.net (clone of DjangoPeople for App Engine devs)
> To someone in the know, they can be sure that any state in the FSM they go to was intended to be visited in that manner, and they can surely get back to the state they came from by simply exploring.

Sadly this is not always the case; I once broke the xfce version of Ubuntu within 10 minutes of installing it by playing around with the configuration options.
I mainly use spotlight, .. other than web searches are there any other main differences.
Wouldn't this look much cooler if turned 28.9 to the east (so avenues are fully vertical + streets fully horizontal)?
HOLY SHIT! That is quite impressive. Let the technology cover up our flaws.
"Or don't use DRM at all."

It's too late for that. DRM was invented as a result of rampant piracy. You should be blaming the pirates rather than the company using it.

"Instead of relying on a single instance of a product making money for years to come, focus more on new games or in-game content sales."

Now I know you have never tried to sell software. No product anyone sells works like that. There is support, bug fixes, updates, and features. If you don't keep this up, you will sell less and be forced to make changes. This is how the market works.

I LOLd at the part where you said they should concentrate on "new games". If their old games are getting pirated and making it difficult to support legitimate customers, how would making a new game be any different?

"Better yet, focus more on positive features and bugfixes/polish for present games than on ways to defeat crackers. Knowing your limitations, try social solutions for social problems. Make your brand the trusted good source for awesome games of your niche."

This doesn't work. No matter how hard you focus on new features, if you are losing customers left and right because they are downloading it for free (or because the people downloading it for free are making it increasingly difficult to support your existing customers and they leave), you will go out of business.

"In other words, the system is about trust, and if your brand matches or exceeds its customers' expectations, you will earn and maintain their trust and their loyalty. Sure, some people may be cheap, but at the same time, they can be bought with a certain amount of guarantee of security. People are concerned about their things."

If something is free, it can be found easily with little or no risk, people will find a reason to download it over spending their hard-earned cash.
DevOps – You’re Doing IT Wrong
If they could figure out how to get rid of their sick customers they could increase their margins. I wonder if they've thought of that.
That's filter, not reduce. :)
Google testing TV search, setting stage for future viewing habits
Still, all the same, it's nice to have a high end windows box just for gaming. I also use mine for testing web sites (so it's a valid company purchase :)
The types of campaigns we run would benefit from more eyeballs. Advertisers don't expect everyone to see or care about their campaigns. Branding campaigns in particular are really just designed to get your company in front of as many people as possible and hope a few of them notice. They're simultaneously valuable and notoriously hard to measure the value of. Our job (as far as advertisers are concerned) is to get the ads in front of whoever we can.

My gut feeling is that people who block ads globally but see them on Ars would actually notice/respond to them better than people who are just generally banner blind. If the majority of the people who've emailed us are to be believed, they don't see anything else on the page except ads when they have ads enabled. I bet advertisers would kill for that. ;)

The biggest problem is that there's no chance someone blocking ads is going to see an ad, and there's a real (but maybe tiny) chance that same person would respond to an ad. There's an even better chance that they'd respond to a really nice campaign that "spoke" to them.
Perhaps they want to retain the possibility of selling the app (or some souped-up version).

Also, opened source probably would get in the way of something so early in its development cycle.
"entangled triplets of photons, so-called qutrits"

Actually, a qutrit is just a single tri-state qubit. The term describes superposition, not entanglement.
When I was deciding for Django, this...
Yes, but either the comments wouldn't be visible in low-resolution clients or facebook would have to provide a completely different layout (e.g. with inline comments) for them.
Well, if we're going to do apples-to-apples, given the recent statements on their ledger, we should ask "How much does it cost to find someone who will run us damn near into the ground and require a government bailout"? :)

Obviously it's more complicated than that, but the "we have to pay for the best and brightest!" meme starts to sound a lot more like self-dealing when it turns out the best and brightest do approximately the same quality job as one of those dipper things that replaced Homer Simpson at the nuclear plant for a week once.
No one running an Itanium cares about 32-bit code. I have mostly seen them in HP shops that converted from PA-RISC.
Is Employment the Best Model for Creative Work?
The Casimir Effect
Executive pay may be small compared to the corporate balance sheet, but the level it's at allows for and encourages bad behavior.

1. The extreme disparity between CEO pay and other vital executives encourages people to backstab in order to ascend the hierarchy. So "work" for those who are in line to be CEOs is more about jockeying for position and trading favors than about building a company.

2. In addition to (1), such disparities are bad for morale, especially when the CEO is a "hired gun" instead of someone who has been part of the company for a long time.

Except in athletics, where talent is objectively measurable, the "star system" tends to piss off everyone but the stars, and let's be realistic: non-stars are 99% of people, and probably 3/4 of those who would be considered objectively the most competent.

3. When the CEO makes $500,000/year, he's drawing a good salary but still has the incentive to build a legitimately strong company for the long-term. When he has a "performance bonus" that will give him fuck-you money in 12 months if he plays his cards right, his incentives are in the short term.

4. When there are massive discrepancies in pay between the bosses and the people they are managing, the social class and lifestyle disconnects become problematic and can damage morale. This is why the best CEOs try to appear middle-class in terms of dress and work habits.

CEO pay is at such a level that it actually brings lower quality of management. This is what's truly alarming. Decades ago, when CEO pay was much lower, American companies were well-managed and produced great products like (imagine this for a second) cars that people actually wanted to buy. Now, big-company CEOs command stratospheric salaries and generally such ass. This is because executive pay is so high that it has pushed these people completely out of touch with reality.
Why Ambassador, With This Perimeter You Are Really Spoiling Us
I am interested. And would like more information. My email is in my profile.
+1 on this. Any decent NAS software (FreeNAS, OpenSolaris, etc) with an iscsi target will work great with the (free) GlobalSAN initiator and Time Machine.
Newegg sold counterfeit Intel Core i7 CPUs
A supper club from brooklyn that I cook with, ( Arazorashinyknife.com) is doing a dinner in Austin on Sunday the 14th. Definitely shoot me an email and I'll forward you the information, tell your friends! My email is in my profile
To clarify for the downmods: Gapminder, which this is clearly based on, used to be 100% Flash. This new site uses HTML for browsing, but still uses Flash for rendering visuals. I think this is a step in the right direction as it makes the data more accessible to a wider audience.