skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I 100% agree that each persons situation is the critical aspect. If it wasn't review sites (since they are usually general) would be able to fill this niche.

The idea behind the slider on the Home page wasn't to make people think there is 1 question they should look at, but rather let them see all the questions other people have asked about that item (laptop). Maybe it would be better to have "clicks" on the slider to take the user to the "Ask a Question" page.
Sounds interesting, and I was about to sign up for a free account to give it a whirl until I saw that the basic (and even some paid) accounts have no security.

I know that some well-known companies get away with this, but to me it says that you believe security for my personal information is something to be bartered for. As soon as I have to start wondering under exactly which circumstances your company is going to try to protect my data, you've lost my trust.

Of course this is only my personal opinion, but for what it's worth I won't do business with anyone who treats my security as an option.
As a long time Mac OS X user I recall the general feeling was that the Mac OS X window controls where a big step back from Mac OS 9. Most felt that they put all 3 controls on the same side (rather than put the dangerous close button on the opposite side) for purely aesthetic reasons i.e. so they could use the traffic light metaphor. Which is a bit cheesy when you think about it.
I'm not really sure how you'd thoroughly fix this but clearing your cookies lets you vote multiple times.
Yes the issue is Netflix's liability. The reason it can be de-anomized is because people reveal more info in some other database (for example idbm) - if people willingly reveal more info in some other db, is that netflix's fault?
I think that's ambiguous enough that it's probably not infringing on their trademark. That doesn't prevent them from saying it does though.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer!
One Kindle per child? Non-profit takes Amazon e-reader global
Facebook and Lala have done this. We added this to the Posterous Manage page, and it reduces page load times and makes that part of the site feel faster, especially when a user is exploring what's there and trying to find a particular setting or tool.

The key is to use the URL hash to drive page changes in JS, so back button, browser history, and bookmarks all still work.
Young men survive physical trauma better than any other demographic. The same crash that will kill a man of 40, let alone a man of 70, might leave a man of 19 or 20 badly injured. So I don't think fatality rates tell us much here. If we had a measure of damage to the car, correlated to age, that would help.
I'm assuming you mean given name - why would this be included in the data set in the first place? Is there some significant correlation between names and movie preferences?
I think they should take their tagline (What's Happening Now) to the extreme and start to mine the content being shared through The Platform, present it in interesting ways, and sell ads on those pages. Like a crowd-sourced Yahoo.

Another way to make money could be to sell hyper-local ads on their search engine, which should have a high conversion rate if they know your geolocation at the time of search.
It feels suspicious to me that this article is now up to 18 points?

The suspicion? Some users up-vote a headline before reading the article.
This leads to a nice summary that may also interest the same audience (posted by fogus, seems to be slipping away ...):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1187148
A potential stopgap to this would be a standardized barcode on printed receipts, which you can scan with your phone and upload to your bank account, import into Mint, Quicken, etc.
About 80% of the income comes from books, 20% from things like ads and affiliate links (reply to grandparent).

Actually though, I was hoping to accomplish something different than "drop everything for your pie in sky, because it'll be great, trust me."

This is more:

1) Pay attention to the simple opportunities you have around you

2) Be prepared to work for quite a while before seeing any real return

3) Don't get stuck in the "I just need to pay the bills" trap. Get something--anything--out in the wild, and then iterate.

Those were my major roadblocks, and I thought they might be blocking someone else also, which is why I wrote this. That having been said it's an anchor piece for the writing I have outlined for the future, which will get much more specific.

Although, I'm not really interested in getting too deeply involved in the making money online blog niche with my personal site. I just think people like reading tangible case studies, so I'll oblige.
Coral Cache was invented for just that.

http://www.coralcdn.org/
MySpace to sell user data in bulk
PyPy 1.2 released
I guess I always thought retired meant that if all your sources of income disappeared tomorrow, you could live off of your savings for the rest of your life. Don't get me wrong, I find owning a business where you can pay your own salary impressive as well, but retiring seems a bit misleading (unless there is some detail I'm missing).
+1 for wants to know more. Revenue is way more important than being stamped for approval by YC.
Formspring prank story plagues Twitter
This bothered me for a while because I'm not sure what you mean. I can take it three ways.

1. Negative means data that contradicts the popular hypothesis. This is frequently reported very prestigiously, though sometimes care has to be taken depending on just how deeply held the refuted belief is.

2. Negative means data that is highly inconclusive. This data is often non-reported since people continue experiments until they have a story or just drop inquiry. It should still (in some cases) be reported along with the final, telling data but probably isn't.

3. Negative means data that supports already "known" beliefs. Totally "uninteresting" results which just serve to give us the tiniest greater justification to believe what we do. Rarely reported.

I can see (2) but mostly (3) being suitable targets, but you might have a different idea in mind for what negative data is. In the end it sounds like a need to make big advances in meta-analysis in order to have data reported against a more quantified context.

Global, public, and automatic meta-analysis of the state of scientific belief is a hard problem I would love to see solved.
It seems there are enough engineers, or at least there are enough to reverse the anonymization and reveal details that customers rightly considered private.

"Difficult" to de-anonymize is not enough. It must be impossible, and the burden of risk must be on Netflix, not the customer. We're sympathetic in this case because the contest is innovative and interesting. Imagine a slightly different story. In this one, the FBI asks Netflix for "anonymized" information, then de-anonymizes it and starts wiretapping people considered "suspicious." I think we would be rightly appalled at the idea of the government monitoring the movies we watch, and we would criticize anyone handing over the information they need to do it without asking or notifying us.

It's the same thing here, and Netflix should ensure opt-in with full disclosure of the potential for de-anonymization for the same reasons.

When I sign up for a service, I don't expect the vendor to publish data of my transactions to the entire world, even if they claim it is anonymized.
Disease hunting with whole genome sequences: good news and bad news
We use Formspring for our business so when we saw this story floating around on Twitter we got worried until we noticed the telltale signs of the prank. This was the only story I could find on Google News about it.
It breaks simple random sampling meaning that you're optimizing purely for some unknown subset. That becomes a problem when someone someone realizes that Netflix is spending millions of dollars to have a recommendation engine that ends up being racist.
I use Facebook everyday and they're quite slow and buggy. Sometime pressing back button doesn't work. Sometime even pressing the "previous" or "next" image icon takes a while or failed to load.

Especially in their image section: press "next" and use the back button immediately (but not too fast), you'll see some "oops"
Without numbers this isn't very useful.

This reminds me of when I was at WestPoint (US Military Academy). Everyone would talk about how once you graduated you were "set for life" (after your five year commitment). They would leave it at that, and not mention any numbers to back up the statement. I still remember I asked an officer what "big money" was. And he replied, "Oh, big money!! Like 65,000" Which is less than every single one of my friends and I made after quitting westpoint and getting jobs out of school.
Personally I think an opt out page should have an are you sure you want to opt out incase the person accidentally unsubscribed. But yes it should be an easy yes or no button.
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/paul/netflixs-impendin...

This post, which is linked from the ARS article states a given birthdate, gender, and zip code can uniquely identify most Americans. So, while the parent should probably specify birthdate instead of age, a name is definitely not needed.
I agree. (although Id still rather see more engineering and less lawyering). Netflix does need to get people to opt-in.
The only thing that is proven with these numbers, is that the elderly are getting into more accidents because of the acceleration problem.

No, what is shown is that elderly are in more accidents attributed to the acceleration problem. How much of it is really the acceleration problem and how much not is precisely the question this article is asking.

To really answer it, we need a little more information, such as the proportion of drivers of the affected Toyotas that are older.
On the Spot with Kim Jong-il
Medieval Iceland and the Absence of Government
Plastic Logic Postponed, Thanks to the IPAD
They could immigrate to Canada - unlike America, Canada welcomes people with open arms.

If you look at the "wait time" for your application (provided you managed to meet all the requirements, which are not trivial, BTW), on average it is about 1.5-2 years. What do you think will happen to these guys' startup/idea if they had to wait for a couple of years before they could start the business in Canada?
If I understand correctly you can get a visa if you invest $100,000 usd and employ 5 american residents. Isn't that a good fit for the start up founders?
NYC Startup Career Fair: April 9th
Good point, was at a loss for the right word when I commented.

This kind of behavior by lawyers is just like patent trolling and I couldn't pinpoint a word for that. Maybe privacy trolling? The lawyers are the same ones that sued Facebook for Beacon.
Yes, it's netflix's fault unless they clearly obtain permission from people to share information that their customers could naturally assume was private.

As stated elsewhere Netflix should just have a clear opt-in for sharing the data and we can continue on.
"I tinker around the edges of the business, but I don’t have to. It’s on autopilot, and if I don’t do anything to it at all, it’ll keep earning. It’s as secure as any investment vehicle, and if I want to, I can make it grow at any time."

We have different definitions of "retire". It sounds like you're still running your business.

Also, the idea that it's "as secure as any investment vehicle" is misguided. I'd trade my content site, which has been generating consistent income since 1999, for T-bills generating the same income any day of the week.
Not only is this a violation of Fitt's law- it's practically the canonical example of how to violate it. That is, when an application is maximized the exact upper corners of the screen become incredibly valuable because a user can get there without aiming but just by flicking the mouse in the general direction. Flick it to the upper left and click for all window controls, flick it to the upper right and click to close.

I remember when Microsoft made it so that you had to go to the corner but then pull it back several pixels, thus destroying forcing you to aim the mouse cursor. It may sound like a silly little thing, but I thought at the time that it was a good metaphor for how they could get something to _look_ similar (to, say, a mac) and yet still get it completely wrong. When I switched to linux around the same time I thought it was so refreshing that the UIs of the time (minus some skins people had made) didn't violate this example of Fitt's law, and also that if anyone were dumb enough to change that in the future, we could all just fix it.

I usually disregard comments about linux desktops copying window's mistakes, but this is just very irritating to me, mostly because it's elective- it's like you actually have to _try_ to get it wrong.
Collis & Cyan from Envato are an awesome and successful married founder team.

An interview with them is here: http://psd.tutsplus.com/articles/news/birthday-interview-wit...
Netflix Prize 3: How to create a meaningful database that is impossible to de-anonymize.
Practice a little bit of patience? Most things drop off the HN front page soon enough. At least those stories will be about startups. There have been worse trends on HN before.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1187327
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1187446
Most users care more about looks than functionality, and not even much about that. People still use Windows XP and are perfectly happy, right?

I also like how people invent mysterious "other people" and "average users" to use as arguments when they don't like something. The average user also thinks that technique is suspect. Why not just say, "I wish they didn't change this" instead of saying, "the average user is too clumsy to use this".
Make sure to be careful with fonts. Currently there are many different colors and fonts. I would try to reduce that. The monospaced typewriter font looks very bad to me, it has that nervous jitter. Makes it look a bit unprofessional to me. Warmer colors would help. I wish I was a designer and able to help, but I can only give this criticism. Take it if it has a use, ignore if you think it does not!
But who cares that treatment for children is being hindered by repetetive bureacracy, at least it's protecting children, right? Oh, wait...

Well, that's just a stupid implementation. You evidently should only be cleared once for any NHS facility and anyway, screening a paediatrician is not that useful because (a) they don't typically have uncontrolled access to children and (b) if you are a paedophile, putting yourself through med school just to have access to children is really beyond unlikely.

I think the fact that there is a media hysteria is blinding people to the actual issue - that's just like saying "PETA is nuts, let's all have battery-farmed chicken". Many people correctly assume that paedophilia is rare (it is). Also, not many people have unsupervised access to children (in fact only childcare workers, educators and priests typically do). So people put two and two together and say "a childcarer who is a paedophile is a very rare event". But that assumes that the chance of being a paedophile and the chance of having access to children are statistically independent events. They are not - as this well publicised case shows:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8284192.stm

Moreover, the "leverage" of the event is quite high. This is the same problem with plane crashes; they are rare, but when they happen, 300 people die.

You would be amazed how many professions in the UK require background checks. Did you know you need a background check to work at the Meteorological Office?

And many, many people on HN are working the US on immigrant visas. Frankly if you have been able to get a job without a background check or a drug test or a work permit, you're pretty lucky.

How much do you spend on rare event insurance? You read HN so it's a fair bet you earn living from computing, so you'll have particular insurance against losing or damaging your hands, yes?

Well losing my hands is just a sub-class of {unable to work for any reason} so no, I don't have specific insurance against that (though for example, more than one famous violinist or pianist does - because their lifetime earning loss is much greater). But when I was pregnant I got screened for cystic fibrosis. That's pretty damn rare. You'd be amazed if you thought about it, how many rare events you insure against. For example, the chance of your house burning down is actually very small. Yet most homeowners have fire insurance.
If I am your bank and I make a "good faith" effort to protect your money from robbery, how am I liable if I am robbed of your money?

For certain types of agreements, good faith is not enough. Netflix chooses to go into a business where it is privy to private information about its customers. The onus is on Netflix to protect that information.

I would say the same thing had hackers cracked their security and made off with the data. Good faith efforts that fail to secure the data are not enough, they must succeed in protecting the privacy of their customers.
Boy, do I know some managers who need to read that...
I'm not exactly sure what makes it easier to immigrate here, it just seems easier if you have certain education.

It's actually not easier, in 80% of the cases it takes 64 months for the visa to process.

http://www.canadavisa.com/federal-business-immigration-entre...
I suppose I'm a minority opinion, especially with the high YC concentration of developers, but I feel pretty personally gratified by Apple's policies. I don't own an iPhone, but I'm more interested in purchasing one who's App Store is full of quality, innovative applications.

You can call it stifling free speech or alienating developers, but I feel like there's at least an attempt internally at Apple to follow the rules they set plus the one, unwritten one of "improve our brand, we worked really hard to make it the way it is". I'm not going to agree with every ridiculous decision that's happened so far, but I will say that the removal of crude sexy apps and cookie cutter RSS feeds makes me more interested in poring through the App Store someday.

It's, to me, equivalent to pruning out spammy advertisements. I never mind paying, in attention or money, for craft.
Quite the opposite, I try hard to keep my brain working while dozing off and while waking up .. and as much as possible when I am drifting in and out from consciousness, because sometimes that's how I find a solution to a problem that I have been banging my head against the wall for. I think there was some research done before about the upside of some truth behind "I'll sleep on it".
It's already been fixed!

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/03/worried-ubuntu-1004-will-...
Ahh crap. You just turned one of my minor annoyances into "who the thought this was a good idea?" I thought I was misclicking somewhere or accidentally hitting a keycombo. I have come to accept people's mistakes, but when they put some thought into it before pulling the trigger--arrgh!
Page 70 of this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Senator-Ten-Years-Ted-Kennedy/dp/03123...
I think when you say “how far removed it is from present day society”, what I hear is rather “how rich, subtle, and believable its characters and societies are”. Because real societies are rich and textured, full of contradictions and moral ambiguities, characters with complex motivations.

Snow Crash has a bitmap pattern that can hack into programmers’ brains and knock them unconscious and the complete collapse of nation-states and The Diamond Age has pervasive nanotechnology. Dune has gigantic sand worms and psycho telepaths. China Miéville’s books have giant mutant bird-people. Speaker for the Dead includes aliens, artificial superintelligence, faster-than-light communication. &c. &c. &c.

“Real literature” (any way you define it) has many of the same building-blocks: gods (The Illiad), fairies (Twelfth Night), voyages through the underworld (Dante’s Inferno), characters who hop from one body to another (Death in Venice), interesting new interpretations of language and cognition and radically different cultural/social customs, etc. etc.

But works (including those set in space) that oversimplify and preach at us, or just serve as fantasies for us to insert ourselves into as passive escapism are little better than Horatio Alger novels, or, say, the trashiest kinds of romances. They can be fun, but ultimately they don't have quite so much staying power.
The home page doesn't really tell me what it does. It's all marketing style corporate speak that I don't really understand.

You should really change your tagline to be more of a description of your service than a marketing phrase. "Since cold leads don't fit in the microwave" tells me nothing about your service.

"LeadNuke is the missing link in your existing sales pipeline; it helps you kick-start the sales process."

That doesn't really tell me anything either.

"LeadNuke is a streamlined process that helps you find, track, and follow-through with news articles, blog posts, and RSS feeds from your industry, turning them into meaningful sales leads. LeadNuke helps you generate qualified leads and initiate a dialog with prospects who actually need your product or service."

This also doesn't really tell me much.

I looked down your home page further and I'm guessing this is some sort of email marketing service. You should definitely use the word email in your descriptions so people know that's what it is.
Maybe its somewhere in Netflix's terms of service that data on users movie preferences will be collected, however this information will be kept anonymous (as best as can be done by netflix).
I get "Forbidden" for both those links. Are there any other links to those papers? I hadn't heard of this result and I'm very curious.
Is that just a one time amount or yearly? I know of people that have been in the marines for 20 years and then have a retirement that pays him yearly and also has a job that pays well.
Here we got one: http://boardlite.com/topic/how-can-one-manage-to-keep-the-go...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=629011
i'd be interested in what the HN community thinks of my current co / hack that's trying to deal 100% with this issue. use "SXEDCRF310" for your invite..
and that would be: http://wwww.getabine.com
:)
You mean 'inquiry'
I knew this would be a Declan McCullagh article before I clicked through.

To be fair, McCullagh isn't writing this piece as propaganda for Google. He has strong, pre-existing, libertarian/pro-corporate beliefs, including the one that government privacy regulations are right up there with genocide and mandatory abortions for everyone. He has never written an article where he saw benefit in "privacy", nor will he ever.

So, yes, he's distorting the picture and propagandizing about the death of privacy. But he's doing it to push his own beliefs, and not Google's.
People still use windows controls?
>>If I am your bank and I make a "good faith" effort to protect your money from robbery, how am I liable if I am robbed of your money?

Banks take the precautions ahead of time (deposit insurance) against robbery-thats part of the "good faith" of protecting a users money. Nice try.
PlayStation Move bests Nintendo Wii in content, precision, Sony says