skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just to share a related experience:

We recently set up a free diet program that also involved behavioral change. The conversion rate on the site in terms of signups were great (about 70% actually). We were also tracking a couple of products that were integral with the diet that we referred our customers to and the sales weren't quite close to matching the numbers we were seeing.

Long story short, we tried asking for phone numbers, and those who provided were given calls a couple of days after signing up, and the response rate has shot up exponentially, including sales of the products. The people didn't mind the calls either, even after we asked if we could call them once a week to follow up on progress.

Of course, these were personal calls, not automated ones.

Email reminders are also automated, yet you are more likely to miss it because we're not glued to our monitors 24/7. A phonecall however is more likely to get your attention. There's been many times I've missed or forgotten something that could have been prevented with a short call or text message.
Off the top of my head: internals, neat optimization tricks, updates on development, how to hack.
There's lots of great coffee, food and nightlife in the Mission, but, as I said that's potentially a distraction from your startup.

Check out Ritual Roasters and Four Barrel Coffee if you like coffee.

For food, you have to try the crepes at Ti Couz, the pastries at Tartine, and everything at Mission Beach Cafe.
I have a similar problem, when I try to migrate torrents from Windows desktop to a MacBook it doesn't work. You have to start at 0% all over again. It would be great if it were possible to do this, as I could leave my MacBook outside my room and download throughout the night (my desktop is in my room, too noisy overnight ;-) ).
Things You Didn't Know About Facebook
I'd like to see if / how many of my unit tests pass using Rubinius, but does it currently support 1.9-specific code?

Also, RVM installs RC2, not the 1.0 release. Maybe someone can give them a poke...

UPDATE: Nevermind, http://rubini.us clearly states that 1.9 compatibility will happen post-1.0. Can't wait, even if it's just to know that my code is compatible with what may be a very real option in the years to come.

AND: I should probably run "rvm update" first, to get the 1.0 release...
I can't speak for ya'all, but my email stays stored on my IMAP server on my personal box. If somebody wants my email, they'll have to get it from me. All of my mail filtering rules work on the server side, and I get a consistent view of my inbox and folders from all of my IMAP clients.

The thought that software is groveling my email in order to send targeted advertisements to me I find repugnant. Perhaps it's because I formed my ideas about how the Internet should work before it was commercialized.
I've been using JS on the server for over a year and let me tell you, it rocks. It is easy, really easy to do stuff with it. You should give it a try to understand how easy it is.

- Get data from SQL backends, easy.
- Templates, easy.
- MVC, easy.
- Curl, Ajax, easy.
- JSON, XML, easy.
- Files, sockets, easy.

You name it, I assure you it is easier than any other language you've used before.

I say, it is just a matter of ONE year to finally mature the most interesting projects out there, Node.JS and V8CGI

If you want to get your feet wet, go grab V8CGI and play with it, really easy. If you need to play with the geekiest stuff, get Node.JS then.

I guarantee you, you'll never look back. But please, give it a try before judging it.

http://code.google.com/p/v8cgi/

http://nodejs.org/

I don't recommend rhino, ringo, or narwhal, just because I don't like to run on top of java. You may try spidermonkey or flusspferd if you like C++ more.

Whatever your flavor, give it a try, then come back and share your experiences.

Yes, I am a JS advocate.
If you cross $39,999/month with your biz you'll have to give a detailed breakdown for us here too. ;)
I think more startups should be willing to take on junior level programmers and interns.

For instance, there's not much of a jumping off point for smart people who are just starting out in programming. I know a few people who understand basic php and mysql but would happily learn more in depth programming and best practices if given the chance.
They used to. Yahoo! used to be a great company for an engineer to work for. Given what they have been doing lately, it seems the focus has changed from being a tech company to a media company. In fact, it all probably changed when Terry was brought in to run the company and he wanted to focus on digital media.

There's a lot of small intangible things that go in to making a huge successful company. The core employees "wanting" to work at the company (as compared to just collecting a paycheck) is one of the most imporant ones.
I would also consider the idea of having some kind of 'export' feature - export to an HTML file and a folder of images, upload to an FTP server, create HTML snippets, etc.

I know a lot of people that would use something like this for a knowledgebase app for their companies, but would run it on their corporate intranet and wouldn't want to have to go to the outside world to fetch data (or, for that matter, have screenshots of their internal applications floating around on the internet).

Perhaps this could be an enterprise version, an internally-hosted service, or some other pricing model (e.g. purchase a corporate license for a higher price, free upgrades for life).

Once a corporate user makes the purchase, that's a lump sum in your pocket, and since they're using their internal systems to manage everything (rather than using your S3 account), there's little further cost to you (other than support, which should be minimal).

What this gets you is larger one-time income (until the next paid upgrade), but lower costs. There would be no real change to your workflow, other than that you'd occasionally get big cheques from people you'd never hear from again.
If you worked in Ruby you'd definitely know that Rubinius is one of the next-gen Ruby VMs. Since you don't work in Ruby, the whole project matters a lot less to you.
How to read Linux’s /proc/diskstats easily
Are frameworks allowed? I thought they banned anything third party.
> It would be nice if there was a good visual layout tool available... but oh well.

Titanium doesn't have a visual designer but I wonder what would happen overnight if Google bought Appcelerator.
And when the first sentence of the blog entry, the basis for all that follows, is so wrong... shouldn't the correction/retraction for that be at the top, not at the bottom?

"Aliens attack.... because of that something else... something more still... Ok, it wasn't really aliens and there wasn't an attack, but a lot of that other stuff is maybe still true." Just seems weaselly to me.
Just updated rvm and can confirm 1.0.0 it's there.
Unique Sharing and Search Bar for websites (javascript?)
I'm not saying that Google Voice isn't useful to students. I'm saying that students could have pretty much gotten an invite within a day even before this program just because the invite lag is pretty short. But it's easier to get people to blog, post to hacker news, etc. about a "special" program, so they more-or-less invented one.
>I'm tired of the implications that users are dumb

>There are tons of stupid users

What is your opinion on consistency?
Haskell and Erlang.
Ubuntu 10.04/FF 3.6 the buttons dont do anything on clicking. So nothing works. Are you based in India?
I'm fiddling with a FB privacy thing. Would you mind if I used this example as an anti-testimonial?

Edited as follows:
"
[M]y realtor checked my background with Facebook. I only knew about this because [he] turned out to have gone to high school with my boss, and my boss told me.

[T]he only thing i do in [F]acebook is add friends[.] [I]t already affected me to just have an account there.
"

OK to attribute, or no?
Squaring Up A Market
If you're a loyal T-Mobile customer you get to pay a loyalty tax if you want a Nexus One compared to if you are not a T-Mobile customer.
They could have also sold to more countries then just the US and the UK. What's the point of having a web accessable store front when you only sell to a couple of countries?
I've become more skeptical of this supposed Hacker/Manager dichotomy as of late. Not only is there "variety among humans"... there is variety within humans. In particular, in my experience most GOOD managers ARE hackers. Most great hackers are concerned with the broader implications of what they are working on.
Meet Facebook's (Soon-To-Be) Billionaires
Oh... I've been meaning to quit but I'm afraid of logging in and seeing what my profile looks like ;p Guess I'll support the movement on May 31st
iPhone is my main phone. I'm using the droid to learn more about the android platform and do development on it.
They are only sending out invites to american residents then?

I signed up a couple of months ago from outside the US and still didn't receive an invite. Time to try using a proxy!
Things have gotten worse, though, it seems; when I signed up it took about a month before I got the invitation, and I know others who've been waiting ~two months now and still haven't gotten it.
I do not at all agree that Facebook wants to bring the Web within its borders in the way AOL did. Facebook pages are nothing more than streams of messages and links about a business, and Facebook is actually moving away from canvas-type Facebook apps (where the experience is contained within Facebook). What they want to do is be plugged into the existing websites outside of Facebook (see Yelp). As for email, I will concede that they are making a play for that as well.
Also a pretty big opportunity for him if he can pull it off.
true, but who actually owns the data?
Is this just sleight of hand? Facebook finds themselves in the midst of a security-related storm, so they blur the question and provide an unrelated answer.

The real controversy is over privacy, one aspect of security. This new feature is over user authentication, a wholly unrelated aspect of security.
Pro Javascript Techniques(Resig), Good parts(Crockford) and a book on haskell/erlang or some other good functional language will help you juice js better.
Am I reading that correctly?

Did this guy previously write and direct a Superbowl ad (the "Doritos" link on that page)? And he still had to resort to this kind of trick to get an interview? It's a clever trick, but how many people have something like that on their resume?

Perhaps that ad didn't really run on the Superbowl broadcast but just a concept? Production values are lower in that video than most Superbowl ads.
Gamblers' Brains See 'Near Misses' as Wins
"I still don't know if Facebook has a successful plan for monetizing its use by non-doofuses who refuse to read ads or play time-wasting games." Why do they need that, when there are millions of "doofuses" to profit off of?
Correct. Google drastically overpriced the phone. As others have pointed out, signing up for a multi year contract in exchange isn't really a bad deal unless you wanted out of the contract sooner (and even then it's not too bad).

I had expected Google to sell the phone over the web for $99 with no contract. That would have been the sort of bold, gutsy move that Google needs to do to change the mobile phone market.

It seems that Google is actually looking to get a piece of the existing pie and doesn't care about changing the way phones are sold.
Until a decentralized platform can give me a stream of what all my friends are up to and the ability to see what any individual friend is up to, it won't be anywhere near adequate.
Just wondering, is voyager going at the maximum speed we could we realistically go today or would a newer craft be able to exit the solar system faster? would that even be useful to science?
When someone books an appointment for Monday and then later reschedules it for Friday, a Monday booking is lost. Every time that happens you give up a booking for free.
What's the major difference between eTacts and Xobni, or are they more or less competitors?
Patio writes: "So here’s a trick I’ve learned in Japan: there are a million ways to tell people 'no'."

Man, is that ever true, and something we Americans could learn from.
Apple's Way - Why publishers should beware the App Store.
A Good Read
Facebook is just another place where I have 'contacts'. I rarely comment on anyone's picture, status etc., I never post anything, never initiate conversation unless the person I know is only available via Facebook.

I do not need any graph to see how FB screwed up its privacy policies over the years. I have been there and seen all that. Call me a security freak, but doing all of the above has saved me so far.

And above all, my wife has already deleted the account. :)
Hmm. I'm having trouble putting my finger on anything really concrete right now. More than anything else I'd say that it's just a general impression from how well in touch he seems to be with current events.
Do we expect too much from our data? - John Allen Paulos
"Don't post it if you don't want it to be public" surely implies that email is a public broadcasting medium. Technically this is true, but that's not how most people think of email, including businesses and legal entities.
[bingo cards] is also surprisingly competitive. The trick is, he's not going to go for [appointment reminder]. He's going to go for hundreds of variants of the term.

I'm really interested in hearing what the content marketing angle is for appointments though. Bingo cards had a natural content fit.
I won't quit because I can't take my data with me and use it elsewhere. If I could do those, then yes I'd leave tomorrow.
"... but surely there should be a way for us to post thoughts/content to friends with an expectation that only they will ever be able to see it?"

Eliminating the for-profit middleman seems like a good first step, this is what Diaspora is all about. Of course not everyone is going to have the technical acumen to host their own node, but there should be a number of node providers to choose from.
Nine Tips On How To Actually Get Things Done ~ Aaron Dragushan
Mega creepy ads may work for selling certain products and services, but nobody wants to trust a creepy lawyer
Amongst all my friends Facebook is almost entirely the only communication tool save for cell phones. Any good alternatives which won't have the problems that Facebook does that I can work on switching them all to?

Right now I'm waiting for one of the open network projects to mature.
That's when you go: "Nurse, I need to make a phone call, please."
Principles Of Minimalist Web Design
Untidy beds may keep us healthy
Would love to see a big fat link on the front page that says "Help make the best Ruby implementation ever. Join us!" with a link to the google group. Clear call to action.

Blog wise: Bubble up some of the great activity going on behind the scenes. Design decisions, great implementation debates, calls for help on hard/easy problems, new releases, beta releases, testing calls, etc. The posts don't have to be more than a paragraph or two. Just enough so we can see where you guys are steering the ship and if there's something we can do to help.

I'm sure there are more than a handful of potential up and coming language implementers that Rubinius could help inspire and recruit. All it takes is an easy to find/read active conversation to get them engaged.

Also, I'm sure you're thinking about a 'the long road to 1.0' post. That would be great first post to talk about all the decisions and direction changes that lead up to the current design.
I'd need to dig in order to find it, but it is, indeed, possible to make the brakes act MUCH different than the driver intended, once you have patched the ECU firmware. I'm not 100% certain you can completely shut off the brakes (as in, driver puts two feet on the pedal and it sinks to the floor without engaging any brake pads at all) however it may be possible to disable ABS or possibly to bias all braking to only the left wheels, for example.
If I have a contract with the clerk at the grocery store, I would trust him. If he broke the contract, changed the terms, added new sections, etc, then I would have a reason not to trust him/her.

That's literally like telling me I shouldn't trust my employers with my direct deposit info and my social security. Or that I shouldn't trust the insurance company with the same information, etc.

How is a privacy policy, changed behind users backs, with blatantly offensive auto-opt-in/out features not a violation of a reasonable expectation?
if you don't delete your account, use this to check that you have locked down all your Facebook info: http://www.rabidgremlin.com/fbprivacy/
Give people the choice between a free phone and $60 a month or the same contract for $30 a month and no free phone, and I see no reason why many people wouldn't choose the second option. Personally I prefer to optimize my finances to minimize my monthly bills, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I wish they would concentrate on their second chance with desktop users of Flash as well... We're suffering from Flash's crappy behavior too!
The implication from the end of the article is that anyone who is outraged is dumb for not taking their privacy into their own hands. I grant that many users fall into that category.

More important though, are diligent users like me, who still managed to have private data shared with third parties against my will with absolutely no notification that it would be occurring.
Gizmodo editor Brian Lam's email to Steve Jobs
That's called retargeting. Not sure if the Facebook Ads platform offers any kind of retargeting options (besides targeting based on Liking something), but many ad networks do. For instance, I spent some time looking at Photoshop on Adobe's site. Ever since, I've seen a ton of ads for Photoshop. It's a really effective tactic, since you've already prequalified the user's interest from an earlier online action.
Ding ding ding! I do the exact same thing, though my mail filtering server side was more of a side effect of Android's mail clients not being able to do filtering and me being tired of my phone buzzing every 30 seconds alerting me of new spam.
If we expect around 10 tons of people we would be talking somewhere over 100 people.
For 20 years, I was an IT person's worst nightmare.
I'm not sure what was used here, but I've used Voices.com before to source voice overs and have been really happy with it. Worth a look if you need something like that.
This Is MySpace’s Moment To Shine, But That Obviously Isn’t Going To Happen
Who searches from google.com anymore? Searching from in-browser is so much faster/efficient.

Although, I did see a lot of Google Ads for the Nexus One.
Was going to say the same thing. Just looked through the site trying to find exactly what it is, and all I got is:

1. It's a Ruby implementation.

2. It's mostly compatible w/ Ruby & its components (Rails, gems, etc.) but not completely.

3. ... ?

An About page would be nice - answer these questions, among others:

1. What is Rubinious?

2. What differentiates it from Ruby?

3. What problems does it solve?

4. Why would Ruby programmers want to use it?

5. Why would non-Ruby programmers want to use it?
Ah, so it's not the process, just the fact that a rescheduling happens at all. That sounds like a problem that technology can't fix.
Sierra (High level C) beta open to testing
IPhone Apps I Can't Have
I think one thing to think about is how, unlike Apple, Google does not want to upset the "apple" cart (yes, I am a literary genius). To them, removing friction in carriers and device manufacturers from adopting Android is critical. Given this caused some stir in the ecosystem, it makes sense to remove the offering so they are seen as more conformist, rather than a change agent. While change agents are good for you and me, well entrenched companies do not really like them. Status quo is very much a preferred state of affairs!
Maybe you are looking for this article (generate RSA/RSA GPG key):

http://ekaia.org/blog/2009/05/10/creating-new-gpgkey/
Same, but a long time ago (before it was cool to do so)
Sure, I rent and pay utilities. That doesn't affect my credit rating, which I checked the other day and is still "no record found".
A 4 year degree doesn't guarantee success and no degree doesn't mean you can't be successful. But, having a 4 year degree makes it easier to be successful.
Megan McArdle, the author of this article, has a very active and interesting blog on economic issues:

http://www.theatlantic.com/megan-mcardle

Its usually the first thing I go for when I check my RSS feed.
They're tolerated, until they're not.

Realistically, though, as long as a million script kiddies don't start using it to flood the App Store submissions with crapware, you'll be OK. Thankfully, this one is targeted at serious developers, since it's for people coding in Objective C, so it's not much of a risk.

Also, there's a huge difference between distributing an Objective C framework, which is a packaged bundle of obj-c code that a developer has full access to, and wrapping that framework with a limited scripting language front end that developers can't even touch, like Adobe Flash CS5. If anything, the standardization of Obj-C frameworks improves general application quality for people writing native apps the Right Way(TM), as bugs are minimized.
I can second the commonsware books mentioned previously. They are very helpful because you can download the source and run the apps to see how they work. Also check out the AppDemos that come with the sdk for examples.

The http://android.git.kernel.org/ site has the source for lots of the bundled apps too. Especially useful to see how they put their layouts together.
Ha, maybe that'll be it. Although the Zed Shaw Celebutant License was better.
Ah, fair enough. I like PG Wodehouse too, which is why I asked. I can't claim to have read all the books though; I'm trying to space them out over a decade or so of long plane journeys.
You may be interested in the Data Portability project: http://dataportability.org/
[Edit: I just realized the Pricing page says that only on the Enterprise version is HIPAA compliance guaranteed. How can you get away with that? When you deal with personally-identifiable health information (using a person's cell phone number is personally identifiable), HIPAA compliance is not a suggestion, it's a regulation enforced by the Office for Civil Rights. How are the non-Enterprise level subscriptions even legal? ]

I actually built an application like this (but it was as a sub-contractor, so I feel no obligation to promote it here).

The application I built allowed users to set their appointment reminder settings to text and/or call their phone with an automated reminder message. I also made it so that if you hit 3 on the message (there were a few options, but 3 was my favorite), it would give you voice directions to your appointment.

Also, is your appointment reminder application HIPAA compliant? It definitely should be (http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/) since it deals with potentially sensitive health information.