skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't find the post to be very useful, but this part is worth the read:

>I believe (conjecture, yes) that the figure we are missing is Books-Per-Person.

>If you have a Kindle, as I do, how many books did you buy in the first week or two? How many unread books do you have on your Kindle? Unlike with print books, you don’t have to look at a stack of unread material like undone homework. Ergo, you purchase more digital books than you would ever purchase in print. If Amazon is selling 180 Kindle books for every 100 print books, I wouldn’t be surprised if 10-20 people are responsible for the former, whereas 80-100 people are responsible for the latter. This reflects that Kindle owners are buying more books per capita, not that paper purchasers are buying fewer.
Open Library - A page for every book
Well I never understood the phrase "normal people", that's sort of like "the real world", but given that "most people"(choose your study and scary high percentage) can't identify which century the civil was fought it and believe the president is a muslim, it wouldn't surprise me that normal people would think that an organization dedicated to protected their constitutional and civil rights was a joke.
I want to buy an Android phone, because I detest the iPhone's iTunes requirement, but I have two issues with Android:

1. It doesn't look the same everywhere. Companies are modding the interface, and in my opinion, that is wrong. I should know what to expect, UI-wise, from an Android phone without even looking at the box.

2. Updates depend on the company who makes the phone. In my opinion, when an update to Android becomes available, everyone should have access to it.
Ask HN: What is your repeatable marketing process?
I'm curious about what repeatable marketing process startups are using to reach out to and acquire customers. Is it AdWords, affiliate marketing, social media marketing, blogging, PR, etc.?
Inside the Secret World of Trader Joe's
Totally agree. I want to get away from it, and it would be basically like starting completely from scratch without almost any relevant experience. It's a big step, and without having specific inspiration in what to do next, I continue to burnout with the only relief being that I can at least try to focus on getting out.
Secret voting was brought in pretty much as a direct response to widespread coercion and purchasing of votes in many different places.

It reduced the problem significantly by making it impossible (or at least significantly harder) to verify that you vote the way you promised.

The UUID suggestion is worse than the way it used to be, as in the past you generally required people at the polling place to oversee the voting to ensure your people voted the way they were told/paid to do, while with a receipt available, you can monitor more people with fewer people of your own.
I'm going to come back to this because I think it's an interesting point. Without "rules," how do you identify an example as belonging to a set? Rules for inclusion and/or exclusion must exist for the set to be defined. "I know it when I see it" is only really acceptable if you're a supreme court judge :-)

Specifically, we're talking not just about "music" here - which has an absurdly broad definition - but "metal," which falls under the category of western vocal-led performance. There are rules to this, and while breaking them might leave you with something that is ostensibly "music," it may well not leave you with "metal," "singing," a "song," or a "performance."
> This application, bogus or not, is targeted to the possibility that you steal your own phone.

Uh... how? And what sense does that even make? How can you steal what you already own exactly?
No, wallstreet died before this could end up in a real bubble.

But there is always next time.
Different Ways of using the C# Null Coalescing Operator
How to Deal With a Hostile Audience
I agree with patio11.

Just build the app with whatever technology stack you are comfortable with (or want to do with). Keep the scalability problems for later. Get your customers first.

I usually (done it just twice) launch with sqlite. Makes it easier to move around the db or even the site. But beware of sqlite. Caution: Migrating from sqlite to postgresql might be a bit of a 'solvable' problem.
I'm unsure whether access to 'apps' on an iMac would be a good or bad thing. It would have to be implemented properly for it not to feel like a douche commercialization gimmick.

Also if iMac apps couldn't include Flash it would turn Apple into a laughing stock.
Sifflet: a visual functional language
Oops. Missed it.
Nice link. I have to admit to being a Bash person myself, mainly because it was my initial shell experience. I even have Bash installed on my OpenBSD box, even though Ksh seems nice.
Linked versions of the URLs:

http://su.pr/2YVHpt
http://geomium.com
http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/

The last couple of meetups have been great. Hope to see you there!
My view on this is that the first internet wave came too early. In the late 90s, society was not ready for the changes the internet were bringing (disintermediation, killing of distribution channels, ...). The tech was oversold by eager business people to an audience that was not asking for it & oftentimes did not understand it. Now at least people 'get' the internet. Sometimes I feel we're only now fulfilling the promises we made ten years ago.
There is a lot of money in "Internet marketing"/"Make Money Online", mostly in taking rubes to the cleaners. Affiliate CPAs reach into the several hundred dollar range (sell someone someone else's $500 course guaranteed to make you into the next parrot ebook king, take 75% commission).

At the risk of stating the obvious, returns followed a zipf distribution (the overwhelming majority make nothing, a few make small amounts, some smaller number do about what I'm doing with BCC, and a few make huge businesses out of it).

This is far from the only seedy sector which is awash in greenbacks, incidentally.
New site: links.scripting.com
Thanks. I already have been doing that. Have taken vacation, and I spend as much time with the family as possible. I have also been trying to exercise more frequently, etc.

In fact, a big part of the reason that I took the job I have now was for work-life balance. But my current job just sucks. The only motivation I have for going into work everyday is to help take care of my family. I love my family, and I want to provide for them the best I can.

I've worked for small, medium, and large businesses/organizations. I know that I'm the opposite of the career large business worker.

I want to be responsible for a business. While I don't believe my business would be perfect, I would like to decide what work I do for others. I want to somehow make this work so that I can achieve a good work-life balance. I know I can do this but I'm having trouble finding inspiration for exactly what I could be doing.
Website Traffic | Search Engine Optimization | Internet traffic expert.
Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities, featuring free classified advertisements. You can find great deals with products on Craigslist.
Previously submitted:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629083

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1628534 <- This one has comments
Here's a recent Planetary Society podcast interview with the Kepler principal investigator, Bill Borucki: http://planetary.org/radio/show/00000400/

He talks about the discovery of those hundreds of candidate planets.
I want to hate Tim Ferris for his persona and frequent exaggerations of the truth, but grits teeth he writes good stuff sometimes.
Normalize until it hurts, denormalize until it works.

Build your database tier using everything they taught you in the classroom. Normalization is your friend here. Why? When you've effectively normalized your database, you can monitor the results of queries and eventually introduce the optimizations that you need to make things run faster.

The problems that sites like highscalability.com deal with are far beyond the scale of most endeavors. If you run into massive scale problems, be very happy because it means you're building something that people want and you can afford to throw some money at the problem ;)

I know people who have production databases with 30+ terabytes that is sitting in a relational database. If you design well, you shouldn't have any problems reaching those goals.
This was kind of fun the last time I went but I feel that putting it on Meetup may have been a mistake/premature.

About half the people I met hadn't even heard of HN, let alone read/comment on stories here.

Maybe I was just hanging out in the wrong part of the room. :)

Edit to add: Those people were definitely there for the HN meetup. They'd been notified via Meetup of a new group and decided to turn up.
Metropolitan Police outlines IT strategy
This went through HN recently and it's a great article actually. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1610540
> Sure we have fun and all but sometimes I feel the need to be understood. My cofounder does, perhaps that's enough?

Yes. Life becomes a whole lot easier once you realize that girlfriends, by and large, are not into math, computer science, politics, or abstraction.

They're into concrete things like making sure you're well fed and clothed and that you've gotten enough sleep. That's really important, and your cofounder sure isn't going to do that for you. :)
He's saying that a junior employee, who isn't experienced with corporate politics will take your advice to heart and that'll be the end of it. With the executive team, they're much more likely to use that advice as political ammunition, so you should be careful with what you tell them when they ask for more responsibility.
Interesting point about homelessness especially for people around this site, if you can use your skills to make money online without relying on any single source you are at a much lower risk of becoming homeless through a set of bad circumstances than someone who can only really convert their skills to a decent income through a more permanent employer.
That's the whole point of Gmail's Contextual Gadgets. For example, we created a gadget that's tied to our homegrown Helpdesk system so recipients of tickets can manipulate them directly within email rather than logging into the Helpdesk app.

It wouldn't surprise me if Google nudged Rapportive in the direction of contextual gadgets for this reason, but since GAPE domains already allow disabling of ads it isn't like Rapportive is causing Google any pain & suffering. On the consumer side, like others have said, it's all client side so besides having to deal with Gmail's funkalicious obfuscated js I don't risk see much risk.
Until you see an obvious reason to convince you to upgrade your code, don't. I'm starting a couple of longer-term Rails projects for clients right now, happily using 3.0. But I'll be waiting a while longer before upgrading my existing sites. Amid all the hype about 3.0 let's not forget 2.3 isn't half bad either.
That's how the EFF is choosing to spin it. A more reasonable person might view it as another opt-in security feature similar to Find my iPhone/Remote Wipe. The biometrics stuff is similar to Nike+ -- I'd love to see that built in and available to third party applications with my permission.

It's one thing to educate people to the risks once a technology/feature is out there but to take a pre-emptive stand based on nothing but paranoid fantasy is dangerous. They might as well be advocating against TCP/IP since it's potentially a major privacy violation. Forget that it could be useful or facilitate new applications that people choose to use.

The EFF has apparently turned into just another scummy political organization. I'd love to see a detailed audit of their donations/expenses. Something isn't quite right over there.
Los-Angeles Mailing  Lists and  Email Lists.
Online Publishing Services can supply Mailing, Email & Telemarketing Data for Direct Marketing & Email Campaigns. The data are fresh, accurate & cost effective. The data contains Name, Title, Company, Address, State, Country, Zip Code, Phone No, Email Address, SIC Cod and Fax Number if required by the client.
www.skyscanner.com includes Ryanair and other cheap airlines. At least at some point they did :)
Leap seconds could be cut from UTC time
Code Reads: StringScanner, a CommonJS module for tokenizing strings.
It definitely sounds like you were in the wrong part of the room :)

A problem people have mentioned before is actually finding all of the HNers amongst the other drinkers, so you're not alone. Because of this we started looking for an alternative venue but we couldn't find anything suitable in time.

If you've got any suggestions it'd be great if you could let us know, either here or via the Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/hn-london/browse_thread/threa...

For the event this Thursday we'll put up a sign, which should at least help you find the right area of the bar.
From the patent description:

"Many [..] electronic devices are used frequently by
their owners, and the electronic devices may contain
personal or sensitive information stored within them. [..]
Accordingly, if the electronic device is lost or stolen,
the loss of the electronic device can be exceedingly
disruptive to the owner's peace of mind and security.
Thus, the owner may desire to find out where the lost
electronic device is located or who may have gained
possession of or stolen the electronic device."

Note the use of the word "owner", not "Evil Empire". What is being described here is a service called "Find my iPhone", which is part of Apple's MobileMe subscription service. (What, you didn't think Apple would be spying on you for free, did you? $99 a year, baby!)
MORE Second Acts: When Millions Aren’t Enough
IIRC the Gini coefficient among authors in the UK is something like 0.7. The income stratification is insane.

Tim Ferris's figures match my experience. What he doesn't make explicit is that "publishing" is about fourteen different vertically integrated businesses flying in loose formation -- genre fiction publishing, for example (my stomping ground) is utterly different from business publishing or academic publishing, although the products are sometimes sold via the same retail channels -- and the prospects for a successful career vary drastically between fields. Nor does success in one field imply a track record transferable sideways into another publishing field.

I'd also pick a nit: in my experience, ebook sales (and Amazon Kindle store sales in particular) are dwarfed by hardcover sales -- by a 50:1 ratio, in fact. Amazon are almost certainly cherry-picking if they can come up with books where Kindle sales outstrip hardcover. However, that's looking backwards -- it's fairly clear that ebooks are a rapidly growing sector and in another 2-5 years they'll definitively overtake hardcover sales by volume, if not by revenue. (Hardcovers net roughly $16 after discount, of which 10-15% goes to the author; Kindle store books net $7-10, of which Amazon takes a 30% cut before 5-10% of the remainder goes to the author.)
Very true.

To build on this:

-They define any business under 1 year old as a "startup". Is a new gas station a startup? A new cleaning business? A new home healthcare franchise? These are all new businesses run by entrepreneurs, but they are not "startups" in the way we generally refer to them on HN. I know several family members that have these kinds of franchise businesses and they never refer to themselves as owners of startups, but as owners of small businesses. Small distinction but lest the VCs and hackers say they create all the jobs, realize that the companies doing "established business" they so look down on are counted amongst startups in this data.

2) Common sense defeats their numbers. Who starts a startup with less than a year runway? That would be ridiculous. If they change their numbers to count startups up to age 3, what would this look like?
There are still some leaks in the advice given. One, it might well be that an employee's skill set has suddenly increased in market value, or that the employee has essential knowledge but genuinely has a better offer from a competitor. Telling her to "wait three months until the next review process" will probably lose that employee.

Two, the general tone of the advice is "plan things well in advance" (compensation, structural adjustment etc.). The fact is that you can never plan everything well enough in advance, especially things like structural adjustment. The article doesn't address what to do when your plans inevitably "collapse in the presence of the enemy".

Three, it is a fact that you can't simply fire an executive just because it is obvious to the wiser people in the company that he's incompetent. He will have plenty of friends and will be sure to raise hell for it. This is a sure way to get lots and lots of politics, and of the most unpleasant sort too. Oftentimes, the only reasonable solution is a "structural adjustment" - create a sinecure for the guy where he has few responsibilities and can safely slide into irrelevance.
Zurich gets record £2.3m fine for massive customer data loss
Hackers See Opportunities in The Cloud According to DEF CON Survey
It looks like you have to be a master in politics to minimize the politics in your company.

Keep your guard up at all times. Any attempt at being nice may be interpreted as permission for god knows what. It read a bit like "The Prince" by Machiavelli.
Sensationalistic headline from EFF.
Then again, they need to raise some awareness, even though I am not always siding with them. I still do support the EFF.
If Apple doesn't agree with you that you own the software on the phone, then jailbreaking your phone is "stealing" the software from them...
SHOW PROCESSLIST in mysql should show running queries. A useful way to see which queries are taking up time and where you need to add indexes.
Why that Lightbox is a bad idea
Drinking two cups of water before a meal will help dieting.
If I were a shareholder I'd feel better that someone is making GOOG properties more valuable to end-users.
A friend of mine settled on that and no one he's mentioned the term to, including myself, didn't know what he's referring to.
A quick and dirty guide to the WHOIS protocol
I'm not sure how to "think lean" when I have no inspiration on what to do. I know going back to university wouldn't be lean, so I've crossed that off the list. I know I can't head into something that requires too much initial experience, so I'll cross that out as well. I'll definitely read "The four steps to Epiphany" and see what I can learn about myself. Thanks!
This kind of study provides all sorts of opportunities for shell games, since the classification of "startup" vs "established", or "new" vs "old" or "big" vs "small" often obscures the real issues.

Just to take an example, imagine the person who cleans the lobby of a Fortune 500 headquarters lobby. This person could be a W2 employee of the big co, or could be an independent contractor, or could be an employee of a small firm (say 5-10 people) that does the cleaning, or could be an individual or small firm that owns a franchise for a cleaning services business -- and thus be something that's some kind of symbiotic association of a big co and a little co.

The work that gets done is substantially the same, and it's done for the same reason, but the benefits, tax consequences and how it shows up in economic statistics is entirely different.
By removing their Restrictions Management software.
How about bringing some stickers for people to write their name / HN username on for easy recognition?
OTOH, it keeps my $120 a year flowing.
I think the point was, if you're a tech geek (as most TechCrunch readers are), you'll have an IPad and can invite people to play with you.
On the happy (and perhaps naive, this being the Internet and all) assumption that you are a certain writer of awesomeness, hailing from Scotland, here's a very topical question: how about co-launching a book both in hardcover and trade paperback, at the same (high) pricepoint?

For me personally, I don't want books in hardcover, ever. I always hold out for the trade paperback. It's quite annoying that, from the authors' point of view, my preference works out to me being a cheapskate who gives them less royalty. But I just don't want hardcovers, they're not at all attractive.

There's been many occasions when I've been at my SF book store of choice, realizing some author I like has released a new book, and then my next thought is "okay, so in 3-6 months or whatever I can get this". :|

I guess I could move to e-books, if the price/royalty/release date data is better there, but I really like physical pocket books, still.
Scalable content creation for organic SEO. I'm a two trick pony for customer acquisition, and this is my better trick. (#2 is AdWords.)

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/07/17/seo-for-software-compani...

Repeatability is a core, baked-in element of the strategy.
Danish inventors produce first amateur rocket designed to send humans into space
They couldn't ship Larrabee to hit it's market window (i.e. to compete with the GPUs when it would/might have been ready). They haven't given up yet and in the meantime they're shipping it for HPC experimentation and the like.

You're right about the "haphazardly designed ISA" but they've still made it run very fast by throwing a lot of engineering effort at it.

As for McAfee, I don't know what they bleep they're trying to do there, but I suspect they can afford it (especially since AMD didn't keep their eye on the ball for so long). Their previous failed communications and media ventures didn't seem to materially hinder their bread and butter CPU/chipset business.
none

it's bullshit...that's $60-$120 million profit a year from a single book. These numbers just don't exist.

If most of his sales are from affiliates, who typically get 75% per sale...that means the book would need to sell close to $200 million.

If the book costs $1,000, that's 200,000 sales.

If the book costs $500 that's 400,000 sales

If the book costs $250 that's 800,000 sales

If the book costs $125 that's 1,600,000 sales.

If the book costs $50 that's 4,000,000 sales

Then you need to take into account conversion rates. If the book sells at 1:200(average more or less)...

@$1000 that's 40 million uniques a year

@$500 that's 80 million uniques a year

@$250 that's 160 million uniques per year

@$125 that's 320 million uniques per year

@$50 that's 800 million uniques per year

And as far as I know the #1 site in the world is Facebook, not makemoniezonline.com
Yieldable Threads (Part 1)
REI has the best return policy of all - you can return any item at any time for any reason.
Computer Forensics Evidence Collection : reddit.com
Blow Things Up
If your definition of Compiler is broad enough, there's no difference.
German scientist hands Putin frosty climate rebuke
Things I've Learned from Traveling Around the World for Three Years
He mentioned in passing that writing a typical README requires just the right amount of planning upfront

"just the right amount of planning upfront" is exactly what Scrum should do. It's not full-circle at all, it's another approach to current good practices.
Hi, I agree that it's a great article, but PR seems to be a one-time (or few-time) thing that cannot really be translated into a repeatable process that I can do day in and day out.
The suspense is going to kill me. I'm thinking it has to be either a sister-like system, or have a green/blue planet. My money is on the former.
There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
Magic Technology