skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The editorialized headline is a bit misleading. Virality -as a metric- may be overrated, but the article clearly supports tracking retention as a good way to increase virality.
Dive into python must die
How Reading and Other Activities Might Look if Facebook Continues to Spread
I'm not surprised. A few weeks ago I found that around 60% of my University's bandwidth as tracked as going through porn sites. What have I been missing by not going to lectures??
It's difficult to justify that perfectly good businesses can go out of business over Yelp (at least outside of huge cities). I haven't ever typed "yelp" into my browser (or found it through google search) and yet I'm a technology-oriented guy. Maybe it's where I live?

Whatever it is, I think word-of-mouth is not a case for suing unless it is artificially created. I don't know how many salespeople at Yelp carried the "extortion" sales pitch, but if it was more than a few individuals I think they do have grounds to sue. Comparing this to "mafia" is ridiculous though and truly shouldn't be publicized by any news outlet.
Even if Yelp is still a net positive on the world at large, it in no way justifies extortionist behavior like the ones alleged.

Your argument sounds like "but he's such a great guy, so what if he murders a few people now and again?"
Windows Phone 7: Microsoft’s third failed attempt to be Apple
Google adds fair use defense to YouTube takedowns
Now that's a PR stunt if I ever saw one...blogging!
Partial Reinforcement: Why People Play At Casinos (And Lotteries)
You don't have to use the iframe, that's there for the people who don't want to use the fbml markup and javascript in their own pages.
Yes, yequalsx, I agree with you completely! Check the thread lineage -- I was responding to bokonist's comment, not yours. (Admittedly snarkily, but that kind of revisionist crap annoys me.)
The health department of the stae of New York considers 23andMe’s genome scan to be a medical test that must be approved by regulators and ordered by a doctor.

A competing company, Navigenics, successfully applied to have its test licensed in New York. It has essentially put aside marketing to consumers, aiming instead at doctors. It is also courting corporations that might use the test as part of their employee wellness programs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/20/business/20consumergenebar...
The tech bubble is a comin' back around...
This reminds me a lot of the disease models[1] I studied in grad school. Say you have a population consisting of individuals who are either Susceptible, Infected, or Removed (dead or immune). The goal is to find the percentage of the population that will be infected over time.

The peak of the infection, as well as the length of time it's around in large numbers, depends on the ratio of two key parameters: the rate of infection and the rate of recovery -- or, phrased as the article did, "virality" and "retention" ( =1-recovery ). If you're relying on a viral product for revenue, then, tracking both of these factors is tremendously important.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemi...
PCLinuxOS 2010 Enlightenment Screenshots
Mech E here also. Spent two years as a design engineer until I made the jump for web programming. I didn't leverage any domain knowledge though. Light bulb design doesn't have much to do with fantasy football :)
As someone who lives in Tokyo, I beg to differ at this point in time. Last year, there were not many people holding iPhones on trains. Now, it's quite widespread.
You are lame
So just a question is this legal? Taking something that is free and charging for it on the app store. Just a question, because I like it and want to use something like this on my android(going to try http://mhm.gd/hn)
* Someone finds a small isolated mistake,
assumes the absolute worst
* Rumor, misunderstanding, exaggeration, sensationalism
* Opinion, how could they be so stupid, it's *so* simple!
* Over-reactionary moralistic boycots start
"Well I for one won't stand for this, who's with me!"
* One-upmanship starts "Well I for one want the CEO to apologise"
"I think the only decent thing is for them to cease trading".
"Lets start an anti-<company> website!". This is war.
* Sheep all join in and circlejerk for a while.
* News that the original premise was in fact wildly exaggerated
or just plain incorrect, gets lost in all the noise.

Sadly it's the way of the internet... Just look at most posts on Reddit these days... Just a shame it seems to have come
to HN.
i like this. there's a really simple free version for the android platform and i would collaborate to improve it if it was a opensource project. Including readability to it is very important.
If you're on a Mac, the demo doesn't work in latest Chrome or Safari, but does work on Firefox 3.6. Just to save you the frustration.
They changed their post. I specifically searched for the words "sorry" and "apologize" / "apol" before commenting.
You know it's funny all this comes out just as the SEC go after Goldman.

Not to condone porn-surfing, or supporting prostitution, but look what happened to Elliot Spitzer when he went after Wall Street fraud.

Take a step back, and a hard look, before piling on to this stuff. You may be being manipulated, in the easiest way possible.
Here’s the irony. In a previous thread I debated with people about Gizmodo revealing this man’s name. My point was that journalists have a responsibility not to filter the news because their profession needs to hold truth as its highest value and not censor details based on their own subjective judgment of what is relevant.

(I got downvoted as far as each comment could go during that debate thank you very much)

But this offer makes me realize an important point I didn’t make in that debate: If he is fired this guy’s best chance at getting a new job is BECAUSE Gizmodo revealed his name. Just like with this beer offer sympathy for him actually creates benefits. Had Gizmodo not revealed his name he’d just be a guy who was fired for incompetence which doesn’t look good on the resume. Now at least his story has been told.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not arguing that the good will outweigh the bad for him because I simply don’t know. What I am arguing is that it’s a reporters job to report the truth and the reason they shouldn’t start censoring details based on their own preferences is because they can’t foresee what the consequences of such an action would be (good or bad)
Running map/reduce on an array or on a petabyte data set does not change the fundamental method at all.

It very much changes the fundamental method. It takes something that was once impossible given all existing techniques and technologies, and makes it possible. The new techniques and technologies are at the core of the patent.

any competent programmer could extend the original concept of map/reduce to that level.

Patently false. At the very least, you need a decent sized team of very competent programmers, DBAs, and system administrators to architect and build the system, and another programming test team to ensure that it is reliable. And then you'd only have a working prototype. This isn't nearly as trivial as you make it out to be. Hadoop is evidence of that, it's going on 4 years and four thousand changesets, with changes by over 50 people from Apache, Yahoo! and the general public. Its source directory (for only the common project, not including the HDFS) clocks in at 328 KLOC.

MapReduce wasn't some little side project hack-job.

But then again, you could probably code up Stack Overflow in a weekend, couldn't you?
Most open source developers work on platforms that don't suffer from the same level of malware abuse. There isn't pain to make someone care enough to write one.

Besides, AV is addressing the symptoms and not the actual problem: The MS operating system is completely broken from a security model. It won't improve until it's scrapped and redesigned. There is no patch for all those decades of broken and boneheaded.
You can actually see the beam incoming if you turn 90 degrees right or left from the starting point and looking as far up as possible. It's one of those lattice-style ones (four pipes in a cylindrical formation with diagonal pipes holding them all together)

edit: spelling
I run an emacs --daemon on a powerful server and connect to it from my netbook. Best of both worlds. Just need constant WiFi which I can almost always find.
Get a Feedback Loop and Listen - on Playtesting
Program to reduce energy consumption persuaded some Republicans to consume more
Most of his complaints are related to UI and how it communicates errors to users (read: not well at all). I don't see switching to Linux solving it at all.
Just got done rewriting our companies stats server, that was processing logfiles with ruby...bleh. Now using Resque and a few awk scripts I cut a 2 day job down to an hour. The code was written when our logs were small now we need something faster, and just happened to be alot less code.
This probably sounds strange, but for me it would be as from the moment the sandwiches aren't free anymore.

Let me clarify: I don't think it's something measurable, it's when you start noticing small things like, for example, sandwiches aren't free anymore or drinks after work with the whole team are cancelled because the founders have to go to meetings with clients/investors for the 4th time in a row. It's just small things...
This does the reverse. It doesn't put a dollar amount on your internet reputation. It develops an internet reputation based on your dollar amounts.

Then they will monetize by giving it to the only people who really care how much you spend at Starbucks: Starbucks (and competitors).
This just in: at almost every company with an internet connection, workers spent hours on porn sites instead of doing their job.
> Dryad is not MapReduce. M/R is just a very simple case of what Dryad can do.

That's irrelevant ... if it touches on the claims of the Map-Reduce patent, then it infringes.

Being a company that releases stuff in the open sure is a disadvantage.
Who owns the most servers?
I'm personally getting the feeling that downplaying it was more of a trip up on their part. They wake up, find they are suddenly being viewed as the devil, and for some strange reason want people to believe that things are not as bad as they look. The problem, though, is they should never have said that directly. They should have given us every reason to believe that things are not as bad as they look and have us come to that conclusion for ourselves. They should also get some PR people on pay; they probably need them more than the added security.
This has nothing to do with the SEC in specific, but with workplace internet policies in general. It amazes me how many people have no idea that their internet usage at work is being tracked.
I don't think that's entirely fair. Twitter has some purposes other than sheer vanity. Sharing links, 1 to many communication, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I don't care for Twitter myself. I don't use it, and I do find most of it to be trite and little more than navel gazing. But I can see some useful signal on Twitter, I just cannot see how it could not get buried under an avalanche of noise.

Blippy seems totally vacuous.
I suggest you take a look at the 2.6 release notes (http://docs.python.org/whatsnew/2.6.html), the number of items on here that constitute simple syntax transformations is dwarfed by the number that require active work in the VM.
8.75 Pieces of Highly Pragmatic Startup Start'n Gold
name.com is probably the best.
- free private registratoin
- free google hosting
- free dns managemnt
- easy interface
Where is my milk from - determination location from product code
It looks like Google deleted the card numbers from these. Even if this affected 4 people TOTAL (assuming they are not test numbers), this is not an epidemic - banks expose more than this a week I'd bet.

I find it difficult for me to swallow the title of the article and makes me want to flag it.
Tweet real gifts with Twitgift
http://blippy.com/business/+1310-6645810epoc-04-02-card-7096...

are we still seeing the cc number?
I take it that was a rhetorical question?

In case it wasn't, the answer is 'yes', but I'd be somewhat surprised to learn that the recipient went through the trouble of retrieving my DNA from it, stores it in a database and sells the contents of that database, along with any personal information that I have voluntarily shared with them.
http://blippy.com/business/+1310-6645810epoc-04-02-card-7096...
In this particular case, I believe "everyone is doing it" is a legitimate argument for participating in the patent system as-is. It's not the role of the patentee to decide what is patentable (or what should be patentable), it's the role of the legislative and judicial branch. Given a certain set of patentable concepts, it is the right and almost duty of those who come up with inventions by those definitions to participate in the patent process.

The most appropriate, ethical, behavior is to pursue patents within the current system while simultaneously working towards a better system whereby those patents would be deemed invalid. After all, this puts you in the position to give away the patents you've been granted for free, as Google has, if you truly feel they should not have been given to you in the first place.
More like the oh so public beta.
Duh? Do we really need an article about this?
Better late than never, Google shuts down voice search in India
If you are really concerned about the privacy issues, grab the code and run it yourself somewhere, which wouldn't be a bad idea anyhow; if you're that concerned about privacy you shouldn't be relying on any external email service.
Really???

I'm not really sure what you're referring to. I haven't assumed anything, publishing credit card numbers is about the worst thing you can do when dealing with people's financial credentials. Maybe you don't think it's a big deal, but I'm sure you're not one of the people who's card information was being plastered on the internet.

Additionally, I don't think I was being sensationalist - when this posting first went up there was no apology, just a long explanation of why this wasn't a big deal.

I wasn't being moralistic, made no demands, nor did I exaggerate anything.

I've been here just as long as you have (longer, actually; but who's counting, right?) so you can save the reddit comments.
Too busy to think about life
While some of the points he makes are good, I'm not so sure about the complaints that the first programs are too horrendously complicated. I mean, yes they are, but presumably that's the philosophy of the book (which I admit I haven't read).

I can see some value in the idea that someone beginning Python should start off by being exposed to some of the more esoteric but long-term useful features of the language (exceptions etc) which would otherwise be shoved into a late chapter in the book which most readers would never actually bother to read.
Excellent. Just bought six for myself, parents, etc.
Lost iPhone prototype spurs police probe
I suggest you try spending money with Google, then ask for some sort of customer support.

You might trust them a lot less after that.
These articles are always silly, as they assume you cannot work on both simultaneously, or take turns. You can though, and you should.

In my experience you start out with a decent amount of low hanging fruit in both areas, so you pick it, probably with a focus on virality in the beginning just so you can get your new users numbers up to help make engagement testing achieve significance faster. (You can't do an a/b test to determine whether people quit your app in 2 weeks or 3 if you're only getting 100 new signups a day, at least not in any reasonable timeframe).

So first you knock the easy virality stuff out. Do my users have good reasons to invite friends? Is it easy enough to do so, and is the invite messaging sufficiently attractive? Can I squeeze some more wall posts in here somewhere, and make the ones I have more attractive to non-users?

Then move on to the easy engagement stuff. Do I have solid daily return incentives? Do my users feel like they'd be missing something if they didn't log on tomorrow, and if not, how can I change that? Will they still have new and exciting things to do a week from now, with clear goals to get them there? What about a month? How about 3?

By the time you've picked that low hanging fruit, if you're making a Facebook app you're probably into some serious revenue. Then the hard work starts, as the low hanging fruit is gone, and you put 10x the work into getting .1x the performance improvements (which is still high enough ROI to justify it due to scale).
The point of the complaints, and the lawsuit, is that you as a consumer are not receiving a fair picture of reviews. The allegation is that businesses that don't pay lose positive reviews and gain negatives, by yelp's manipulation.

If the allegations are true, then what yelp may have helped you do is frequent businesses that knuckled under and paid the extortion.
You're still a few layers above the truly fundamental issue.

Python's sin is that it has statements at all.
So do you think all MS earnings announcement are suitable for hacker news?

I have no issues with links to cool research going on in MS or a new release. But I just can't seem to understand regular earnings being posted here.
Hmm... so this is why Facebook asked me to change my password due to a failed attempt from a "computer" ostensibly in the "United Kingdom" and I thought it was just a jealous ex-girlfriend... :-)
It's in the comments on one of the other pictures in that Flickr set.
the part number is U061H, it's just an "international keyboard" in their system. you may have to order it directly by contacting dell (either their web sales chat thing, or calling) and just asking for the specific part number.

the back of it is the top one here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/symmetricalism/3466501746/sizes...
Can you explain what you mean by this please?
Esperanto tried it and failed. Languages are a way of identity.

And it's not a matter of "third world countries". I'm from Mexiko and started learning german at the age of 4, spanish (at school) at 7, english at 11, and french at 16. Thanks to that I could study Informatics at Germany. I think learning languages gives you another perspective of the world, helps you to communicate with others in different ways (not only in theri native language), helps you to "understand" their logic, etc. Sadly my english is bad and my french worst. But I'm able to read/speak three languages and has helped me in my labor life.
Why stop there. They should capture the Bluetooth MAC addresses too. That way they can follow individuals.

Harder to to with the more limited range of bluetooth.

http://www.indy.com/posts/stealth-09-indy-airport-study-trac...
Squeak 4.1 released
Erlang for Java developers presentation (video)
Certain companies (like Braintree) offer a service where the credit card data is POSTed directly to their server, relieving you of most aspects of PCI compliance.
The only one that's up there for me is Mozilla. The implementation of the Weave platform so far puts user privacy way above Mozilla's business interests. The dedication to open development and management is higher than Google's.
Art Can Never Be Videogames
Quick, mass-suicide -> suicidemachine.org and let people make some real friends. :)
Wow!
I mean, I work remotely, using my own laptop, and once in a while I'll look at porn while I should be working, and I always feel guilty about it. It's certainly not often, but I can't imagine how brazen one has to be to do this while at an office, on a company computer.
Wow!
The cost of customer acquisition is sky high. Now, if I can pull a series A out before I get a customer, this might be fine. However, the pipeline is long, and nothing is guaranteed.

Here's a personal example. The company I just finished a contract with was looking to purchase a product that will cost in the low 5 digits. The company spent two months on due diligence in between dozens of fires to fight. Even after selecting the company, it may be two to three more months before they actually buy the product.

So, that's four to five months between initial contact and sale for a product in the low 5 digits. When I worked on products for governments, we had people specially working on RFPs and they would put man-months into these, and an answer could be up to a year away.

Now, it's possible to get into the business without this, but you have to have an in for your first client.
> I'm tempted to believe that companies that prefer long term employment are the ones that need to train employees for their specific needs.
Great point!
an employee tried hundreds of times to access pornographic sites and was denied access. When he used a flash drive, he successfully bypassed the filter to visit a "significant number" of porn sites.

Huh? How does plugging in a flash drive bypass web filters?
It's legal for the reason that there isn't any law that would make it illegal. But it also isn't charging for something that's free. The charge is for the app's features, not for access to HN.
Everyone and every company makes mistakes, so it's not a matter of whether or not you screw up (because you will), but rather how will you deal with it when it happens. I think Blippy dealt with it pretty well.

Having said that: I think Blippy was a dumb idea to begin with, and this dumb mistake may have been the final nail in the $11-million-Series-A-funded coffin.
Which is why you go for big continental languages. Spanish will get you most of Latin America, English will cover you fairly well over most of Europe, North America, India, and Australia, Arabic will cover the Middle East, and then probably the biggest languages left are Russian and Mandarin. I don't know what languages would help in Africa, but French seems like another big colonial language.
A quick elaboration on the CEO thing, because I didn't want to give the impression I'm grinding anybody's nose in it: Tactically I think it is a good idea because it demonstrates that the company has no higher priority than the users' security and their trust. (And if your business is publishing folks' info, that is probably true. Heck, everybody on the Internet who takes credit cards, in any capacity, has a built-in "Are they going to scam me?" objection to address.)

Culturally, in Japan, the title for the CEO (often) literally means "Person With The Highest Responsibility." (最高責任者 -- all the other CXOs are "Person with the Highest Responsibility For [Information, etc]") Within the company, I'm sure some junior engineer is going to get a royal chewout today, but to the rest of the world, the company is an impenetrable mass. When an employee screws up, the company has screwed up, and when the company screws up, the CEO (or division chief or whomever) apologizes because his job is managing the business such that it does not screw up.

When done well, I think this is one of the most emulation-worthy bits of the Japanese corporate culture. It sends a message internally that you will always back your people come what may, and externally that you're worthy of the trust your customers, shareholders, and business partners place in you.
Ask HN: Are some sites rated lower than others?
Look at this, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1289186, 9 points in 30 minutes on the second page, yet this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1288955 with 5 points in an hour is on the front page. What is the explanation?
Man put on ‘no-fly list’ while in air to NYC