skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm confused by the suggestion that "social media marketing can't be measured" (and equally perplexed by the suggestion that banner ad effectiveness couldn't be monitored).

Social networks are more popular with marketers not because of their novelty (they've been around in different guises since before the web...) but because they are increasingly centralised on platforms with real names and relationship networks, which offer far more quantitative data on reactions to your product whose relationship to actual sales can be analysed.

And even if you're half-hearted it's a more efficient way to spam with the good old-fashioned coupon code as a measure of how many people that saw your messages circulating on social media networks chose to buy

Just because companies sometimes look at the wrong metrics doesn't mean they aren't there to be observed, or that the benefits aren't there just because "likes" turn out to be only loosely correlated with purchases. The only real losers in the social game are people building networks for people that won't come or won't buy.
There are things that are easier to achieve in a big company than in a small one. Working on products used by almost everyone means that even small incremental improvements will have a larger effect than the whole product of an average startup has. Even a smaller Google property is probably on a much larger scale than the successful main product of a startup. There's better infrastructure and more machines to throw at problems than elsewhere, making it easier to solve really hard problems.

I'm sure that at some point Google will go the way of any large company and become an organization of middle managers shuffling paper around with nothing getting done, the rot hasn't set in yet. There's a big cultural difference to a standard big corp. (No, I don't mean the food or any other shiny baubles).

And while nobody is going to get fabulously rich from Google stock options/grants any more, I have absolutely no complaints about my total compensation.
And, I know she's using the term loosely, but in general steganography does not require a loss of information. "Always look on the bright side of life" conveys much less information than "I just broke up with my bf".
There's a pretty clear difference between wanting to sleep with someone, and being forced to sleep with someone by a trafficker.
Not really :

"Greene began investing in real estate while in business school, and continued to build a successful real estate business. Greene went from being a bus boy at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach to being one of the most successful businessmen in the world. [8]

In mid-2006, Greene, worried about the possible collapse of the real estate market, spoke with John Paulson, a fellow investor who discussed with Greene his investing strategy. They agreed that the real estate market was unstable and a bubble might be forming in housing. After the meeting, Greene engaged in a similar investing strategy to that of Paulson, which involved a series of unconventional investments trading credit default swaps. The return on Greene’s investments ultimately saved his business, and even put him on the Forbes 400 list."
His modus operandi is to build a model and feed it data as it becomes available. So when polling of a race is inconsistent and infrequent until right before the election, you shouldn't imply that it is at all improper behavior or Nate Silver's fault if his model and thus his prediction change drastically right before an election.

As for the early, subjective post about the odds, that was posted on 27 August 2009, just days after Ted Kennedy died, long before there was any concrete information about who would run even for the primaries, and before there was any concrete information about the electoral influence of the tea party movement. And Nate Silver was still probably right that Romney wouldn't have been able to take Kennedy's seat, since Romney wouldn't have attracted as many of the Tea Party voters.
It depends on what you mean by fail. I've had a few bootstrapped business ventures not work out, but I wouldn't consider any of them failures because of the things I learned, the connections I made, and the fun I had. As long as you can pick yourself up again and learn from your mistakes, it is not a failure.
Ten Summer Songs From Around the Globe
I'm not sure what you mean.

If one out of ten average startups fail, and you're average, you have nine failures ahead of you before you succeed.

So each idea you put aside to work on something else is just another necessary step towards succeeding, right? Why call this putting-aside process a failure?

It's like dating when you are a teenager. The first girlfriend who breaks up with you, it's the end of the world. But after a while, after you have dated for a while, breakups still hurt yet you understand that breakups are part of the dating process. Why would startups be any different? You wouldn't ask somebody after one bad relationship if they would give up on dating, would you? It's a very similar situation.

You should work as hard as you can on your startup, and it's not good when things don't pan out. But it's not necessary to have so much drama at the end of an idea -- in fact it's probably very counter-productive for everybody involved.
emacs picture-mode would be handy, otherwise it's difficult to maintain fixed-width. In practice, I have a lot of trouble with it. I think huge maps (those 10x10 ones) could be a problem, simply due to size; paint programs have zoom as standard, and of course the natural size for a pixel is pixel-size. Though I'm certain emacs has arbitrary zoom-mode.

At least he was using a data-driven approach. There's a lot to be said for that (as opposed to coding it), provided you can find a good representation. As Brooks ~ said "show me your flowcharts and I will continue to be mystified; but show me your tables and all will be clear." He's talking about communicating it to another, but a (appropriate...) data-driven approach is also more flexible, simpler and easier to reason about, because it embodies an abstraction and isomorphism of the solution space. Of course, if it turns out insufficiently rich, you'll wish it was code (or at least that it can be supplemented with code.)
Not many businesses come close to the nyc dmv
Full disclosure: I'll be presenting my iPhone App, Routesy, at this event. Open bar, lots of cool people to network with, and it's free! Hope to see some HN folks there. :)
In my experience, "Fun once, fun always" is the real key to a game that continues to be fun (and therefore keeps players). In a game about shooting virtual guns or driving virtual cars or building virtual cities, those basic actions had better continue to be enjoyable; no amount of rewards layered on top will fix a game with a poor basic mechanic.

(As a side note, my first thought when reading "Rolling physical goods" was "Donkey Kong".)
If this holds for more situations, I guess the conclusion I would draw is that spilt testing should be done as far down the funnel as possible to generate the most return.
But what are the bad things for a high-end escort? They wrote about how she felt like she couldn't communicate about her career. They also wrote that a lot of the safety issues that plague low end prostitutes weren't issues for Allie. The main bad thing that they didn't speak about were health concerns.
I should have said philosophy instead of religion in my comment. You're right, there isn't a perfect line between physics and philosophy (cf. the whole debate on whether string theory is science). When theories about the universe are no longer testable (pure mathematical speculation), there's not much to distinguish physics from philosophy-with-equations. But all of our theories about the universe up to the limit of reasonable certainty I would consider physics.
http://www.quantter.com we are not live yet (should be very soon for alpha and beta in sept.). One of our visualizations will be "dontbreakthechain".

We have exactly what you describe in mind (does not mean we will be the best app to nail it, so please let us know what you think critics etc. so that we can iterate & improve).

Tags: Seinfeldprodsecret; 10000hoursrule; deliberatepractice; QuantifiedSelf; selftracking; dailyroutine
http://blog.quantter.com/

At the moment just use a microsyntax on twitter for instance like this: #guitar:30mn or #newjoke:1 or #letter:1 (those are what we call quantts=atom of human activity)
http://blog.quantter.com/syntax

You will have a profile page eg http://quantter.com/Goosey
with a calendar to visualize your Quantts with a regularity index number (to tell how regular you are in breaking or not your chain).

Depending on where you are based you may also want to participate in QuantifiedSelf meetups? http://quantified-self.meetup.com/
The software looks cool, and I totally get the demo scenario. I'm having trouble coming up with situations in which i would be useful to me, though. Do any of you all see other uses for it?
found that it was unacceptable

That has been my experience as well. Not only is pdf rendering slow on the Kindle, but it doesn't have high enough resolution to display a paper legibly in the common two column format that most journals use. You can jump through some hoops and in some cases reflow the paper. I didn't try it, but it looked like a hassle.

The iPad has much better rendering speed, but it also lacks the resolution to legibly display a two column article, as one would see it on paper.

It would be wonderful if I could carry around my entire collection of journal articles on a tablet, but the display technology just doesn't seem to be quite there yet.
If you have gotten it working I have yet to find a decent walk through that works for 1.2 and would love some help getting things set up myself. I had hoped I could just use old-fashioned inferior-lisp with slime and clojure.main but that isn't working for me now either.
Sleazy Celebs Inspire Brilliant New Marketing Strategy -- "Unbranding"
You can also check http://www.Goalmafia.com. The developer from GoalTribes work together with @curiousjordy on Goalmafia
I've heard too little about Google 'games' to know if I even care. I don't need access to flash games (Kongregate/New Grounds is plenty and Facebook serves the rest), I don't need access to purchasable games (GameStop or Amazon fills this, depending on whether I want to get off my ass, Steam does the rest for me).

Unless Google is actually developing new games I see little use for Google 'games'. Even great implementation is worth shit. Kongregate has great implementation, well developed achievements system and a great chat system built in. How is google going to top that when Buzz failed? Right now all I see is Google Games being a failure by producing no new games and providing no innovation.
It really depends. For example, you could have an average developer who has a huge amount of domain knowledge. Their coding skills may be sub-par but that doesn't mean they are not valuable. They may also have strengths in UI, sysadmin,
etc.

On the other hand a developer could be average due to lack of experience, which is something that can be remedied by time and training - code reviews can help, as well as a reading list etc. We all have to start somewhere. Give those that show promise - but lack experience - some guidance.

It also depends a lot on where you are in the development cycle. Are you mainly doing maintenance work, bug fixes, minor feature additions ? An average team should do fine.

Where you don't want mediocre developers is in the early stages of a big project - bad design decisions and poor programming practices can make later development a nightmare.

I'm working on such a project right now and it's highly demoralizing - every day I find a new WTF and I just don't have the time to refactor everything - my recommendation at this point is to scrap the lot and start over, but that's not likely to happen. That's the result of mediocre developers in over their heads without a clue, and it can have a huge negative impact on your company's productivity and bottom line.
Meh, if the traffic only lasts a couple of hours before the attacker gives up, the VPS provider could still make a tidy profit - it's not like the VPS would do much for the rest of the month...
The attacker has limited resources too, if only because they could be attacking other hosts that drop more easily.
I'm in Australia and have access.
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=38614
Cute video but it does a terrible job of selling the idea to me.

Chat on it's own doesn't appeal much but including photo and video would change things. Being able to open my phone and see all the photos from the party so far would provide more fuel for real world interaction, not less.

Normally our party photos are lost on someones hard drive because noone cares about uploading them a week later when they remember.
Pentagon delays missile-zapping laser test for fourth time
To be fair, he did get to somewhere around a half a billion before he started doing the credit default swaps. I can live with that :)
This is true, but no matter how much he wants to a 5'5 guy is not going to be the heavyweight champion of the world. Hard work can certainly get people beyond their limits, but people born with a special talent in one area can push that boundary even farther just by working as hard as everyone else.
Here's a story:

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/buy-a-car-off-the-internet/

I know Aaron from Motorphilia and he's been hustling away at it for a few years now. He makes a killing leveraging social media.
If they're average, not terrible, I'd agree with 37signals - there is no such thing as rockstar people, just rockstar environments.

If you're not sure you've built an inspiring, learning environment where everybody feels driven to do their best, are you sure a) it's them, not you? b) anyone you'll hire will do any better?

The way you've worded it though, it sounds like they are a bit rubbish. Maybe it's the kindest thing, it's painful all round if they're trying and failing.
Satisfactory to most destinations, speaking as a phreaker with sensitive ears. I strongly recommend them.
Ah, it's a rhetorical question. I was ready to read a rant; well played, sir. If you're short on time, check out the last graph, it's gold.
I'd love to talk further if you're game. mail@ryanwaggoner.com
Robots vs People: Or why Android device marketing is just weird.
"If you want to build a business predicated largely on finding, getting and keeping quality employees to succeed, you should understand that premise will be your greatest risk. Finding a market and profitably selling to it (usually the greatest risks) will take a back seat. Better yet, pursue a business that needs some reasonable percentage of employees to be really good."

I'm having trouble parsing that. What option is the last sentence better than?
> There needs to be a Godwin-esque term for "takes one data point and extrapolates it to the entire world".

"Gladwelled"
Hmm.....

I had some rethoughts about the above analysis and think there is so much more to it than what I have put up there. In spite of me rambling against generalization, I might have done exactly just that up there.

---------

If there is enough funding, facilities and ideas, what is it that would be a bottleneck for research?

Large numbers of people qualified at the PhD level

--------

If there is enough funding What would be a bottleneck for the creation of a large number of PhDs?

Lack of a large numbers of people qualified at the Master's level

or / and

Giving the Master's level people enough motivation not to move to the PhD level, such as well paying jobs. Putting the supply - demand principle to use here, the lesser the number of Master's level people compared to demand, relatively, higher is the salary and their motivation to stick to that level.

--------

What would be a bottleneck for the creation of a large number of people qualified at the Master's level.

Lack of a large numbers of people qualified at the Bachelor's level

--------

What would be a bottleneck for the creation of a large number of people qualified at the bachelor's level?

1) Lack of enough students to fill up the openings in universities

a) for not being qualified enough or not 'upto it' (this is what I assumed in the previous analysis)

b) inability to bear the expenses

c) inability to meet the commitment requirements (for some, if they can't visualize the benefits, 4 years of struggling life can be a huge commitment)

2) Lack of enough openings in the universities for even qualified students. (Somehow I don't think, at least most, universities are finding it difficult to fill at the bachelor's level)

3) Lack of enough support and encouragement (at workplace) for incremental addition of qualifications over time towards bachelor level qualifications ( hmm, would I be right in thinking the Unions of yore are partly to blame here, by demanding pay structures that take away the attraction of incremental addition of qualifications, at least in the mechanical/manufacturing fields?)

---------

I think, 1a, 1b, 1c, 2, 3 and the other causes mentioned in the prior analysis, all of them, contribute to this situation, to different extent in different parts of the country, of not having a strong enough supply of people qualified at the Bachelors.

hmm, I wonder how load balancing can be put to work here, so that the incidence of #2 happens less and the throughput is high?
Paying Too Much For Free Shipping
I think that's a good point. The increase should be compared to the increase in GDP, the increase in the workforce (women working) and a number of other variables. I'm swamped as it is, maybe you want to do those calculations? ;)
No, but he could be excellent in his weight class.
I have never been told to put down my book or magazine during takeoff or landing, or ever heard an attendant ask anyone else to.
> Since Android is kind of an embedded device, I want the compiler to catch most of the silly mistakes before running the app on it.

Sorry, but what do the two clauses in this sentence have to do with each other? Do you mean as opposed to writing all the apps in Python?
I'm interested in how you think an attacker would find your address - at least, presuming you have a web-only [1] host on a competently-run [2] network that drops anything but requests from the proxies [3].

Of course, there are (D)DoS attacks that don't consist of sending lots of bits/packets at a host, and this does assume you're hiring a dedicated server or somesuch.

Of course, they could try to sniff network traffic at one of the providers/on the backbone/..., but that's a lot harder to carry out than a basic DDoS attack.

[1] E.g. don't try to receive e-mail at this host while it's being attacked; you'll need to point an MX record at it, which pretty much defeats the purpose.
[2] IP spoofing will break the next defense; if the entire provider can be taken down, you have serious problems.
[3] If you accept all traffic, nmap/curl will easily find the host, after which the attack resumes. For bonus points, serve up an uninteresting-looking page.
The mechanics are ordered alphabetically.
I think you have to ask yourself the difficult question: if VCs and angels with lots of money to spend aren't willing to fund it, why would developers etc fund it with their time?

If you don't have any cash, you can't have employees :) Find some co-founders!
"Uh…" what? You didn't actually remember to make a statement, I think.
Secrets to Making Fast and Easy Money over the Internet
Timeouts would presumably be taken care of when setting up the proxies. Major DNS providers are used to getting DDoS'ed, and will typically be fine (not always, but it's a lot harder to drop them than to drop any random server).

I agree that there's probably a way to break things; but an attacker would need to actually do some work for most of them (e.g. create lots of accounts?)
I can't comment as freely on this as I'd like, but here goes my best shot:

The conventional wisdom that "insiders" make up the majority of threats has been challenged for a few years now. I know our sales people used to love touting about it to prospective clients, but what data exists (and it's far from perfect) doesn't seem to hold that up.

In fact, the Verizon Data Breach Report for at least the last few years has shown the overwhelming number of attacks to be external. You can view it here: http://www.verizonbusiness.com/resources/reports/rp_2010-dat...

While that report isn't gospel (as an industry we still struggle with sharing data, even anonymized data), it's better than nothing.

My own personal experience in the industry isn't helpful, as although a good 95% of the forensic cases I've worked were insider-issues, they are a self-selecting sample (clients decision to pursue a forensics investigation is in many cases dependent on if the attack was insider vs. outsider).

Protecting from an internal threat is significantly more difficult than an external one, it's towards the top of Mazelow's Hierarchy when it comes to an organizations security posture.

The most famous case I worked on involved a group of accountants who embezzled around 10 million dollars from their company, which they were able to do by having one individual make the transaction and the other approve it (because the client has implemented a system which required stock purchases to be audited by an outside group).

Trust is a prickly thing, your internal security controls can only do so much.

I've spent the last ten years breaking web applications for customers, and the general expectation has been to work from the position of an outside attacker. That's what the client is generally worried about. Whether that's logical is up for debate, but it's been my experience.
He also gets access to their data sources
I was thinking about this same thing. But instead of connecting people simply based on proximity I choose to connect them based on proximity and intent (http://spotted.at). I think that adds much more relevance to the connection. I don't want to sound like a hater but I really just don't get this chatparty.com thing. Even as far as chat apps go its really just not very good.
I don't know for sure, but one theory is that if they carpet bomb at the seed stage only some of those companies will be series A fundable, which means many will be cut off. The negative signaling to other investors when a startup isn't supported at the series A would be significant, so VCs know if they carpet bomb eventually they will get a bad rep.

Ancesotally, more super angel funds are saying they will participate in later rounds, and since some of them are doing lots of broad seed investing they are the canary in the coal mine on how this will turn out.
When it comes to your personal life, it's probably very limited. That's because most personal decisions involve preferences, and it's completely normal for you to be subjective when making such decisions. The point of ACH is to help you think objectively about objective facts, not keep you from thinking subjectively about things that are inherently subjective.
Apple's attention to detail
yeah, I can't be bothered either.