skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
groan

We're going to see more and more of this. Many scientists are getting further and further away from the nitty gritty technicalities of their fields, and it's starting to bite them.

Can't help feeling sorry for them though. It sucks to be bitten by a calibration error. And the referees should have picked that one up.
Actually I'd like a discussion on this. Are you kidding? I personally think fb usability is terrible as well. The thing is, I can see how thats likely intentional. It is obvious fb wants you to do certain things like share all your crap with friends all the time everywhere and anywhere. So everything that has to do with updates, pics, and the wall, well thats beautifully and easily within reach. But anything else....good luck.

To be clear, I don't use fb, but I opened an account so that I can learn the api and make some page apps. The documentation is old, sporadic, a pain to find, and ...broken. Locating simple things like where my pages are seems to take me forever!! I just have a hard time finding anything on fb that doesn't have to do with status updates and "the wall".

Course I am hardly an "average user" and half a billion people seem to think its good, right? right?

Any thoughts on this?
I'm there now! Email me if you want to meet up. </old_school_loopt>
I used to read The Hindu, which wasn't really too bad. Indian Express wasn't bad either. You're probably thinking Times of India, which is quite horrid and panders to a lot of page3 crowd, but not really scary :)

And when it comes to TV news, most of them are so ludicrous, it's difficult to take them seriously. If you can read hindi, this will be the funniest thing you'll read this week - http://stupidindiatv.blogspot.com/2008/09/save-your-cows-the...
Can't you find interns to help you with stability? Even I would help for free just to get some experience with a very large site.
I'm a member of Berkeley Coworking, at Ashby & Shattuck. It's a good place for meetings. There'd be no need to buy coffee, but cafes nearby if you wanted to.
Berkeley! This sounds great.
By end of the school year he meant that school usually goes from August/September to May/June for the US and other countries, so the results should be similar if that is the case.

However it is also a possibility that Facebook has grown large enough that the amount of new users is dwindling because it has already signed up the majority of willing users.
Open, extensible object models
did you get one? message me (@daleharvey) if you still want one
I thought for a while that the word being used was "bellicose," like they were being confrontational by bulging out.
So the Eagles' billion-dollar, 40-year run is starting to falter? Cry me a river. Ditto for the Limp Bizkit reunion tour, and Liz Phair. Those veins were played out 10 years ago. Their fans are older, and don't have the time or money to go out and see these acts.

But that's alright. The great thing about music is there are always talented upstarts willing to do the work on the ground floor in terms of songwriting and touring. Some of them will have no trouble bypassing the stadiums and Ticketmaster, and will sell out smaller clubs and connect with their fans in other ways, including online. They may not make a million bucks, but at least they're making good music.
My mom runs a facebook page not for her self but for an organization and she didn't know how to stop getting email notifications , she was reporting them as spam to no avail, and it was as simple as her not seeing the notification tab in options.

Then after I had shown her that she had about 100 tick boxes to un tick. That is just a recent example of usability problems, to be honest these problems only are apparent in uncommon uses of facebook and for the simple part (messages and pictures and such) it is fine.

Edit: I don't use facebook btw so I may be wrong from my troubleshooting experiences
Databases for a Concurrent World
Canada Immigration Law Changed, Skilled Worker List Reduces to 29
Honestly, any regulatory scheme over subdomains would be even worse than this "abuse".
That was very clever and a pretty eye opening way of judging the market before you start hardcore development work. Thanks for sharing.

It seems kind of like how some food places will advertise in a market a year or more before they build their first place and gauge response by website visits and phone calls from the area.
copy-on-write doesn't write back to the original process, which may be desired. there are situations where a single process space are preferred (multiple threads sharing a file descriptor, etc) so "just use processes" isn't always the right answer. it can be done, but it's not always the nicest solution.
Yes, my country has a complex system of government which does not allow individual people to rule by whim.

Sure, there are elites with disproportionate influence.

The government cannot remotely be compared however to the roman empire, a feudal society, a fascist dictatorship, etc.

In other words, there are immense social and governmental problems, but it remains fundamentally a republic nonetheless.
"If you’re tired of hearing the same arguments again and again for 10 years, from completely different people, there’s a pretty good chance that there’s an actual issue with your project, and your users are trying in their way to contribute and interact with you in the hope that it might get fixed."

I completely disagree. The design of complex software involves tradeoffs, and even if you make very good decisions, there will always be disadvantages to your approach that will get pointed out over and over. You can never make everyone happy.
I assume they mean like an in-person auction. People increasingly bid until their max and when there are no more bids, the auction ends.
I don't see any problem with it. URL or URI should be opaque to their users by definition. in a properly designed and implemented REST interface you are never required to construct urls, you are just supposed to extract them from responses. As long as URL uniquely identifies a particular "resource" and as long as you properly use the HTTP verb and 'accept hearer' semantics, how the actual urls look like doesn't matter at all
SquirrelMail Folders with Outlook
This is basically the entire concept of smbc.
Hanging around = doing absolutely nothing, sitting in memory that is unused.

The paradox is that people using task killers often force the system to keep restarting apps it wouldn't have had to restart. This is the same nonsensical behavior that has people clearing their file system cache because it's "leaking memory".

My other post has been modded down, so I'll save the niceties: Most of the people who swear by ATK do so because they are ignorant, either knowingly or because they've been misled by others.
I completely agree with ya! Started with Digg.. moved to Reddit.. and now I spend the majority of my time on HN.
people have not thought very hard about the problems of running a society

It depends on what type of society you are trying to run. Are you trying to run a society full of social benefits (handouts) or a society of individual accomplishments?

My "argument" is

What is your argument? The following sentence is simply a description of how we arrive at where we are and not why.
Doesn't surprise me that Twitter is very popular at the moment, I think when the site branches out a picks up more users outside of the tech/ startup crowd then that will shift more back to facebook. Anecdotally from what I've seen, not many people I know use Twitter but most of everyone I have met in tech/startups do.
I've had experience successfully monetizing all sorts of low-quality traffic, and I can tell you that it's possible to get decent CPM from any type of users, even users like redditors who don't click on ads as much.
You should be able to easily pull at least $2 CPM from general/frontpage reddit traffic, and probably closer to $10 CPM from specific subreddits. At 280M pageviews, that's over $500K a month in revenue you're missing out on.

If I had to monetize reddit right now, I would throw up some CPM ads from a premium display network, and then begin aggressively going after big brand advertisers and media buyers. This might mean spending money and hiring at least one ad sales person- but the investment will recoup itself many times over when media buys from big brands start coming in.

Right now, reddit is doing a TERRIBLE job of managing ad inventory, particularly remnant inventory. It also doesn't look easy for advertisers to place ads on reddit. I see a contact form for more information about advertising, but where is your media kit? User demographics?
Not all ads are bad, only untargeted ones are. Why aren't there ads for Newegg, or Snorg tees, or collegehumor, etc on reddit? You're in a position to demand premium CPM from advertisers and you're squandering the opportunity.

Right now the ad I see on the front page is "advertise on reddit". This is a terribly wasteful use of remnant impressions, as 99% of your users won't be interested in buying ads, and there is no reason to show them this ad. It will take a few minutes to fill that remnant inventory with a reputable brand ad from a display network.

I understand that you don't want to piss off your users with ads, but Digg manages to generate revenue with strategically placed banner ads without any outcry from users.

I think this problem isn't unique to reddit- it seems like a lot of startups run exclusively by engineers have trouble monetizing intelligently, even when they get significant traffic.

My email is my profile if you want to chat about this further, I can send some links to the kinds of offers redditors might respond to or help you reach out to media buyers who might be interested in doing large buys on sites like reddit.
You know it's serious when the American Enterprise Institute and Paul Krugman are saying the same thing.
You're too lazy to actually seek answers and participate. Conversation done ;)
The music industry has got to be the largest industry I can think of which seems to be full of people that just fundamentally don't seem to understand the issues of supply and demand. And I don't mean the musicians, since that's not really what they are there for, I'm talking the management.

When demand drops, you have to have some combination of lowering the price, lowering the supply (smaller venues), or having excess production (in this case, empty seats). It doesn't matter if you blame the customers (really stupid), blame the economy, or blame the moon, some combination of those three things is going to happen. The laws of economics demand it. Most industries have money people that seem to actually understand this.

(The natural hurr hurr response is to claim this is because they are used to just lobbying for things from the government, but it goes beyond that, just as in this article in which they appear mystified about what to do with empty seats and someone has to actually suggest that maybe the price needs to be dropped. Maybe if they hired an economics sophomore as an intern next year they could get this earthshakingly-brilliant idea before a news story is written.)
The way to approach Conde is to present a concrete business plan for monetization and ask separate budget for it. What you have in place now is operational budget, just to keep the site up. If you ask them for more money to expand server capacity to support more page view, they will roll their eyes saying, great, sinking more good money into the operation hole. Business people see operation cost as something to cut, unless it brings in additional revenue.

Tell them your priority has shifted from gaining market share (page views) to bigger margin (profit=revenue-cost). Business people like increasing margin. And tell them you need to do a number of experiments to figure out what work, which cost additional money. Tell them there are two options: 1. give a new budget for monetization while keeping the existing operational budget, which is already thin in keeping the current site SLA. 2. Cut the operational budget in half, reduce site SLA, and divert the other half to monetization. Reducing SLA means having less servers, less operational staff, slower site, more crash, less visitors coming in, and some unpopular moves to increase conversion. But that's ok since as part of the plan you've stopped seeking for market share.

Be bold and ask more for a new budget. Say you need 20 more racks initially, 9 sales, 2 marketing, 2 biz dev, 4 more engr, and 3 managers. And need 20 more backend servers for the new initiative; dealing with merchants aren't cheap. You need the sales guys to sign up merchants, the marketing guys to figure out what work and manage ad campaigns, the biz dev guys to recruit big merchants like Dell or Amazon and managing ad inventory, and the engineers to build up the merchant facing infrastructure.

Excite them by painting huge upside monetization potential, which is true. Targeted CPC can be very lucrative, like minting money. Online merchants typically will budget 10%-15% on marketing, which is what pays CPC. Think how big the online ecommerce is and take 10% of that. That's why those merchant specific subreddits, deal/coupon, whatnot are so important because the redditers clicking out from those links are very qualified leads for the merchants who are willing to pay dear money for them.

If Conde is still unwilling to invest, then that's just life. Stop investing in increasing operational capacity. Accept the fact that site will run slower and have less visitors. That's fine. That's the max capacity of the site given the budget. Just enjoy the ride. And wait until Conde sells it to someone else who's willing to take it to the next level.
Interesting to see that they use two different db systems. I'm a bit worried about this. I believe it is just postponing an important decision. In the future they will have to choose for one db system. With the growth of Twitter wouldn't it be better to make a decision now and focus all resources on optimizing one system?
Right now it seems I'm the only person besides the creator signed up for the AVC meetup http://www.meetup.com/AVC/11502/.
Seems like merging changes and dealing with conflicts is the much harder half.
Well the community there has adapted to that particular comment layout. They also favor long and rich comments since they are a community of writers, which reflects the comment layouts, if I'm not mistaken.
Something is seriously odd, here. I used to see $25 a month or so from an art-related site that got very little traffic in comparison. Unless you were just exaggerating for effect?
I haven't used an android phone, but the iPhone can use the cloud features of Google Accounts as well (maybe not as slick though?). Using Google Sync works pretty well on the iPhone for the calendar, contacts, and mail.
I would definitely like to join. What about some night next week?
Last year I measured ~65% of visitors from Reddit had adblock.

http://www.codexon.com/posts/the-percentage-of-people-using-...
Certain details of our (legacy) image system made the batch resize necessary. The explanation would probably be tedious, but maybe Mike will cover it when he rewrites the damn thing.
There are plenty of guys who go out and evangelize the MS platform for startups and small businesses. I know a bunch of them, contact me if you want to meet them.
Often used for phishing. "Login to your account: http://google.com.adsfjk.asdf.asdfpuiasdf/soasdf.html blah blah."
Meh. Many, many applications have at least two database systems: a caching layer, such as memcached; and a persistance layer, such as PostgreSQL. Twitter's basically just using Cassandra in place of memcached. This doesn't strike mas a dangerous or bizarre architecture.
The point of contention here is that you think cheating will always catch up to you.

I'm saying that the world is not so liquid and ideal. Someone cheating, assuming they do it right (and don't over do it), will probably get more than they deserve (in an idea world) before they die, if they did everything 100% by the book. Simple karmic forces (the cause-effect force) dictate that if you cheat constantly, you will increase your chances of being caught and punished. However people don't live forever, so it's highly possible they will get more than they deserve in their lifetime if they cheat.

I think if you look at it from afar, you may not notice the inequity caused by cheating. I really can't really say how much cheating impacts society, but I definitely disagree with you on your claim that cheating is always (or at least to a point of insignificancy) caught/punished accordingly.
Ask HN: Should I bother reserving .cc for my domain?
Is there any chance in the future that someone might type it in by accident, like some do today with .net/.com (albeit rare) ? I have no need for it as I have the .com for my domain, just wondering how defensive to be and if it's worth the money?
You'd think that, wouldn't you? But you'd be wrong. Don't feel bad - I was pretty surprised as I learned more about the subject too (IANAL but am planning on a law career, and already having an interest in this I figured I might as well learn it properly). The law and administration of immigration have been patched and reorganized so many times that the subject is an elective on most law school courses.

Unlike most other branches of law, the scope and administration of which are constitutionally limited, immigration is plenary law - an area in which the government has absolute power and its actions are not subject to judicial review unless otherwise stated (going back to the Supreme court's decision in the Chinese Exclusion Case in 1889, holding that where aliens are concerned, only property rights are constitutionally protected and others may be revoked as the government sees fit). So the ability of the courts to entertain petitions for Habeas Corpus in immigration cases is quite limited (and defined by statute), and other kinds of legal action (eg certification of class action suits) are off-limits altogether.

In cases where the jurisdiction of federal courts is at issue, the government often argues that the terms of a visa or similar document an agreement or bargain (but not a contract) between the US and the alien, formed outside the US for legal purposes. It is thus asserted to be a private matter between the government and the individual, outside the scope of judicial review. The Attorney General or the Director of Homeland Security has more or less absolute discretion in such cases.

This leads to some odd outcomes. For example, if someone sneaks across the border and is later arrested and tried, they have full constitutional rights. If at any point they are handed over to DHS, they have the right to a hearing in front of an immigration judge (part of the DoJ) to determine their legal status, and can appeal any decisions to either a special immigration appeals court in DC and/or the federal courts (depending on exactly what the situation is). The same is approximately true of someone who overstays or commits a crime violating the terms of their visa. On the other hand, some 30 million people visit the US every year without a visa as tourists. If a DHS officer determines such a person has violated their conditions of entry they can be arrested and deported or detained pretty much at will, with no opportunity for a hearing at all (unless they claim asylum, which of course happens all the time as a result). The government's current view is that such persons have no constitutionally protected liberty interest, putting them outside Habeas Corpus altogether.
> Are you trying to run a society full of social benefits (handouts) or a society of individual accomplishments?

Neither is a good characterization (both are shrill bullshit buzzwords intended in this context to limit discussion).

Trying to run a society with reasonable physical infrastructure (transportation, public utilities, public health, etc.), a functioning economy, a low unemployment rate, a decent standard of living, a lack of structural violence, a support for individual freedoms, protections against fraud and abuse of information asymmetries, a legal framework under which to peacefully resolve disputes, an ability to respond to disasters and foreign invasions, a government which is responsive to the changing needs and circumstances of its citizens and responsive at a local level to local differences, etc.

* * *

The why is in my opinion best described in Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Madison/Hamilton/Jefferson’s Federalist Papers (and you might look at Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, etc. too if you’re feeling extra ambitious). The complexities are somewhat longer and more involved than is appropriate for this venue.

If you haven’t read it, Tocqueville’s book is truly fantastic, highly recommended to anyone interested in democracy or American government, and just about as relevant today as anything written since.
Excellent set of answers, this was my first foray into Quora, btw; if other answers are half as good, it's a great resource.

Among other key decisions they got right (and some lucking out), the one thing they got absolutely right is the culture. Not just perks, food, etc. because during the boom almost all cool startups had these (or better), it's much more than that. The culture components ones that I think were most influential were the 20% time and committee decision making (with actual engineers, not suits).

Having the right culture is not sufficient for success, but without it, I think, all most certainly will be lost.
There's no shortage. You just can't hire the ones you want at the price you want. Economics lesson: Lower your standards or raise your price.
Why do they have to choose 1 database system? I never understand this reasoning. Pick the best tool for the job!

I for one whole-heartedly agree with their decision. Considering the issues they've had recently with their internal networks, it would be insanity to move the majority of their stack to a new technology.

MySQL scales just fine, provided you are good at partitioning and at least it's a known quantity.
There's no reason they have to use the same DB for everything; you use what's right for the task.

Look at GitHub: they're running MySQL (or maybe PostgreSQL), Redis, and MongoDB.

Facebook uses MySQL for most stuff, but also uses Hive and Casandra.
tomorrow (Sat, 10:30AM) i'll be at Eastbay ruby meetup at UC-B:

http://www.meetup.com/EBRuby/calendar/13618932/?a=nr1p_grp&#...
This is Bret Taylor, CTO of Facebook.

The goal of Facebook for login is to improve signup conversion rates for your sites and make it easier for users (so they don't need to re-enter all the same information and re-find their friends on every site they use). This thread is really interesting for me and the rest of the Platform team at Facebook because it illustrates how far we have to go. Please keep the feedback coming, however harsh :)

I get the brand perception and trust issues - it is something we care a lot about and are actively working on.

Beyond that issue, we have internally been talking a lot about ways of making the user experience smoother, more familiar, and less intimidating. If all of you running startups have practical suggestions about how the experience of a user using Facebook for login could be improved to help out your site, we would be really eager to hear it. It is a great time to get the feedback, as we are actively iterating on ideas internally.
As others point out, this is a typical case of an idea that looks good on paper but in practice is quite useless, since there's no reservation feature. The most annoying thing would be to go to a spot shown as empty and finding it already full. That would result in more gas consumption than today's ad hoc method of finding a space.
I made a Google Group to coordinate http://groups.google.com/group/east-bay-hacker-news
The majority of the harm, as I see it, stems from the government attempting to regulate the market and the unintended consequences of that regulation.
Not speaking personally, but I'm sure spammers would LOVE to pay $5/mo to spam.