skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a nice looking strawman you've got there.

A better approach would be "hire a professional designer, and generate some significant ideas, and then take an engineering approach to testing those ideas."

In other words: who should come up with the B's for those A/B tests-- engineers, or designers? (Or both?)
The theme of the blog makes it completely unreadable.
Derek Sivers explains in a 3 min TED talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_you..., that by keeping your goals to yourself, you become more motivated to achieve them (because you haven't made them part of your "social reality"). In the very early stages I suspect that might be the biggest benefit of stealth mode..
Unfortunately every single transaction in either direction incurs both fixed and variable fees, so issuing all those multiple refunds per customer would take a lot of money out of the producer/consumer system, handing it over to banks and payment processors.

A single statement from my merchant account includes 26 different types of credit card processing fees. And this is my third processor, the most transparent so far, which prices me only by a fixed percentage markup over the fees they're charged by Visa/MC.
I've visited reddit a fair number of times and haven't found much use for it over other sites. The comments on reddit are typically about as valuable as those on 4chan with the modification that they are on average less entertaining and also contain fewer pictures of genitalia (on average).
Technical measures are great. But as you already point out it's also a human problem. Having the 'right' kind of humans on board makes life a lot easier in this respect, and the kind of people that google hires at their scale apparently need more of those tools.

That does not mean that a good sysadmin should even try to gain access to user data, whatever technical obstacles are placed in their way to keep them on the straight and narrow.

Sysadmins are a technical equivalent of other powerful entities like the police. There is a strong emphasis on not hiring crooks as the cops because of the power they wield, and that's why there is both a screening and loyalty based component to this and a technical component.

Google failed in the technical part on this, they should have spotted this guy long before some outsider alerted them to it after protracted abuse. But the guy utterly failed in what I would consider to be desirable properties to have as a sysadmin with that level of access.
Upvoted for the link to the manual, not for the copycat site. ;)
PHP save session handler that saves unpacked values into Redis
OAuth 2.0 (without Signatures) is Bad for the Web
Anyone got tips on payment gateways & merchant accounts outside of the US. I'd love to use chargify.com but getting a merchant account seems to be a PITA in Europe and I absolutely refuse to do any more business with PayPal.
This is just very different mentality between thinking as a designer vs thinking as an engineer.

Google in particular is a data driven company. Most decisions are made by results from experiments. Google is able to do this because the economies of scale. They have tons of data. As a matter of fact, the "experimental traffic" is higher than 100%, indicating multiple levels of experiments are conducted in every search (on average). I remember the quote from a session "A/B testing is for marketers. Engineers run multivariate experiments."

In terms of traditional designers: their process is more of an art than science. They think, and trust their instincts. They traditionally operate in a setting that can't afford this kind of experiments.

The reality is people are weird and unpredictable. It's statistics and hard science when it's backed by data.

The challenge, of course, is that it is easy to iterate incrementally using measurement data. But for disruptive changes, although you could measure it, the change itself (the alternatives) is often not obvious.
The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature
HTC working on Android 3.0 tablet due in Q1?
"has your G-mail or Google Reader gotten any easier to use, or less stressful on your eyes? ... No. Just look at the music listings in new, redesigned iTunes."

Actually, yes I do find gmail and reader easier to use - actually quote preferable. In contrast, iTunes is one of the most confusing pieces of software I have to use on a daily basis - second only to Lotus Notes. All that is Apple is not great.
I lost interest in Digg a few years ago, most of the posts seem to be lists or funny images or just totally banal.

Also there's some bizarre political movements that seem to move throughout Digg, that largely seems to sit on the right wing side of the spectrum
Modnique.com - All Sales Events - Porsche Design Accessories
Why is that advantageous?

Trading is a zero-sum game, right? So how does having an alliance with a competitor help out much?
Why Designers and Developers Should Care About Internet Explorer 9
Ironically, the type of sweeping changes made to News are exactly the kind of "brilliant design solutions convert people over time" that this article is proposing.

If your assertion that "you'd be challenged to find a single person on the internet who prefers the new Google News" is true, than more testing is exactly the right approach - which again is the opposite of the advice in this article.
Bing to Get a Major HTML5 Makeover
Good advice, except for the part about letting his wife meet them.

If they are possibly "crazy, drug-addicts, or ex-convicts", then letting his pregnant wife meet them seems like a needlessly risky thing to do - who knows what they could be capable of doing if things don't go their way?
Adobe releases 64-bit Flash preview for Windows, Mac & Linux
I think the big difference is usability.

Other than a few techies, no one understands or uses RSS. In fact, even among most of my techie friends, I'm one of the few who actively reads RSS. It just doesn't work right now in terms of "normal" people being able to use it.

And anyway, saying "we already have the web, why do we need Twitter" is wrong. That's like saying "we already have cellphones, why do we need SMS". Different kinds of information tend to have their own strengths and weaknesses.
PayPal and Authorize.net's CIM (in front of a merchant account). CIM (Customer Information Manager) lets you store customers' payment information on Authorizenet's servers, and charge it by reference at any time. A daily cron job checks which accounts have not been billed in over 30 days and issues the charges through the CIM API. It's not terribly complicated, and a lot easier than the type of setup you need to store credit card numbers yourself while complying with PCIDSS.

If you ever look at the "subscription management as a service" companies, avoid Recurly. Chargify and Spreedly seem alright, but having implemented recurring billing with CIM and PayPal a few times already, they don't save me anything worth paying for.
I am very impressed.

Do you have any plans to make it possible to use an orb for blogging?

One very simple way to turn a wiki into a blog is to add shortcut for "todays page". The shortcut should open page "/blog/yyyy/mm/dd" for editing. It is a killer feature for me in Zim desktop wiki (http://zim-wiki.org/).

You will probably have to add some sort of pages-listing-child-pages, but it shouldn't be very hard. I know, because I have tried it myself for a wiki I have been developing ;-)
Why I'm not happy about IE9
For sure it isn't a scam.

But it is somewhat reminiscent of a capo getting absolution for his sins in return for a gift to the church.
>dded to the fact that the "openness" of Android ironically allows the operators to lock it down

Why would this be ironic? It's very obvious that the more open you are the more people can do exactly what they want, and that includes locking down.
A former cow-orker had in her .sig, next time you release untested, why not release undeveloped too?
They make more money in one day sat there than the bloke who work,s all day just think about where you have seen them straight across from a nice hotel ,there are many of there own kind living here who can put a roof over there head
I'd like to upvote you, but I can't. Your post relies on them actually being homeless, which I strongly doubt.

This is only anecdotal evidence, but it's mine, so I weigh it heavily. I walk to work through a touristy part of Philadelphia, and I pass the same beggars every day. I never give anything more than a smile and conversation, and through that I've come to learn that they generally fall into three camps--the hustlers, the lifers, and the scammers. The hustlers don't bother me because at least they're trying to participate in commerce, usually by selling weed, oils, incense, or CDs. The lifers are generally unemployable or will not ever seek out employment again. They're easy to spot because they generally don't bother with a big spiel--"a little help on the way out?" is about as complex as it gets.

The worst group is the scammers. These are generally people with jobs, and always people with a place to stay. They're the ones whose boss left them in the city with no way to get home, whose car broke down or ran out of gas, who got off at the wrong stop and need 60 cents for a bus transfer, got stranded at the greyhound station, etc etc. They're the 21 year olds with a well fed dog and a fresh Starbucks cup but dirty clothes, dirty hair, and an ironic sign. They're never around for more than a week.

The couple you described falls squarely in the last category. They're going to hit you up for money and favors in a surprisingly escalating way. Twenty quid for a hostel leads to 60 quid for a prepaid cell phone to "apply for jobs." That turns into a new suit, etc. Meanwhile all that money goes straight to drugs or liquor.
> then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history
He is the richest man in history.

Exactly. If you're a multi-billionaire it's very easy to be a philanthropist. Now instead be somebody making say $30k a year with a net worth of say $10k, and if that person is a philanthropist, I'm much more impressed by that person's character.
I agree more with nl who posted above. Run ads on all sites by default, no rev split then charge users to remove ads.

A former company of mine did this. Many users hate ads on their personal sites and will gladly pay a reasonable amount to have them removed. Many also have no interest in making money off their sites. Besides doing a rev share complicates things a lot more.
Is it just me but isn't it a bit too early to say Twitter is trying to wall itself in? Are they taking down the APIs?

From what I can see here they just want Twitter.com to be a viable (and profitable) business. Why wouldn't anyone want that? In fact, I think it's about time Twitter finally stepped up to define just what kind of a service Twitter really is about. If anything it would be a nice stepping stone to introduce to people who don't yet get it's structure to try it out.

Yes, there are third-party developers who have created their own platforms and in a sense helped define the medium. There are many such choices, but really many of the functions they provide overlap. Do we really need that many different Twitter clients with minute differences? If Twitter were to provide the basic functions itself, then I'd say that this is a good time for third-party developers to think up new ways to diversify themselves. Wasn't there just not so long ago someone posted a HTML5 tower defense game up here that has a Twitter scoreboard? Why not expand on that?
Twisted shape of the Mississippi River
Some people can write all the test cases in the world but not get their Sudoku Solver functionally working.

Should you really be looking for people who enjoy using testing frameworks? Testing is a necessary part of development, sure. Enjoyable? No.
Trust me; this will not stop someone from using it.

And they will be the same person that complains really loudly when it goes wrong :)
Totally agree, this author is missing a critical point: shaving a second of a search doesn't just mean that Google feels faster - it also means that everything else suddenly feels slower in comparison.
Is it possible to use this software? I only see a screenshot.
As far as taxes are concerned, I understand that a single-person LLC is really no different than a sole proprietorship. The income from the LLC is passed through on your taxes (LLC isn't recognized by the IRS) and taxed the same as extra income plus self-employment tax.

After doing research, I decided against forming an LLC for my side-business (software) since it's just me and I don't expect to have any liability issues.

It's much more important to form a legal entity when you have a partner that you need to split profits with. In this case, I'm leaning toward S-Corp as it allows a lot more flexibility than LLC and doesn't require that you pay self-employment tax on disbursements as long as you take a reasonable salary.
The Bug in Firefox That Forced Releasing of 3.6.10
Read the article, he never said that.
I gave a homeless guy accommodation once. People at the time thought that I was stupid and that he was manipulating me. However, nothing bad happened and I look back on it as one of the more useful things I have done in my life.

He left about a week later (my landlord found him and threw him out). I lost touch a while after that but eventually I heard that he had committed suicide.

At the moment I am in Germany, trying to learn German in a class with immigrants from all corners the world. In my opinion, immigrants are some of the most interesting people you could meet (they have a drive to take risks for something better) and suffer a lot from loneliness and put up with frequent racism - especially from the systems put up to help them.
> Windows, Linux, OSX, who cares?

Because they're different. Craftsmen like to learn and make distinctions and use the best tool for the job.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1696396
I don't know if 75+ instances over 18 months is large enough to count as quantitative data, but we've never lost a large instance (they've had temporary failures). All four of the permanent vanishing-acts were smalls.
IAdd For iPhone/iPad Now Syncs With Dropbox
The green dots are bigger.
Don't believe them. Check their story. If it fits, give them a low-cost ticket to Romania where they have their natural safety net (family and friends).
EBS is pretty solid in my experience; I've never lost an EBS volume (on the contrary, I seem to have stacks of them lying around from boxes I killed without killing the EBS... need to do some housekeeping...).
I have been recommending to self-employed people here in the UK to set up a limited company if they can, as taxes on dividends in this country are much lower than those on pay.

If you reduce your salary to a small (but not unreasonable) amount and withdraw extra money form the company in dividends, is a legal and perfectly reasonable way of saving on your taxes. However I do not know if this strategy would provide any benefit in the US tax system. I guess it depends on the state you live in.
It's an interesting problem that needs solving, it got me thinking, so I guess it is appealing to the intellectual in me. What about an AirBnB-style service for the homeless, it'd need to be low tech & there'd need to be safety checks though.
In that chart, there's a dip below zero for one of the nations (Japan). How does someone give negative aid? They asked for money back?
Looks ok, not as good as I was hoping (though I realise they are working on back end stuff).

Fancy front end things, though, are just overkill at this point. Next they must nail the interface or people will not use it. Random example; "all aspects" needs to change to something else (or they need to aggressively teach people what an aspect is).
Also check out R-Node, a Web front-end to R with Protovis. It's still alpha but worth taking a look.

http://www.squirelove.net/r-node/

http://gitorious.org/r-node

http://www.r-statistics.com/2010/04/r-node-a-web-front-end-t...
A few things about the BD-J platform
I guess I'm in the minority, but I totally agree w/ the OP. I think instant works for me about half the time, the other half it's just confusing and messy.

I'm hoping that future iterations of instant can bring some polish to the UX, because right now it seems messy and unnecessary. If I was to continue to work as rapidly as it does now I want some more context to the results it's spitting out, like in the 1st design iteration they show....

I feel like they could have hit it out of the park with some real magic, but instead they (b)punted and put out the ugly untested beta.

This is the search design for the people who use google to get to their facebook login, and not for those who are truly searching for information.
Ultimately Twitter is a business that needs to generate ROI for its investors.

The open API gave them plenty of ideas for functionality and "holes" in their system, and Twitter has made it clear that they need to fill those holes.

The multiple points of entry also showed them that they needed a seamless user experience, which is why they launched their own native Blackberry app and acquired Tweetie, launched an iPad app and now relaunched their web interface.

Many of the twitter.com upgrades were built by someone else on some other site first, but it is in Twitter's own interest to use those ideas to get more traffic to twitter.com and ultimately use the traffic to generate revenue.

It is sad to think that Twitter fostered its ecosystem only to strong arm it and chop it down when it was ready to figure out its monetization strategy. But those are the perils of building a business off of someone else's platform.

As a Twitter application developer myself I knew this was a risk, but I have become painfully aware of it over the past few months. I think their current trajectory will eventually kill off a good part of the ecosystem that helped them get to this point.
It's up to you to make a judgment call on this. There is always a risk to helping others. If no one takes risks life is more unpleasant. But if you do take risks there is more ... risk.

If you end up bringing them home it can really help to have someone experienced with drug counseling to be able to check in and make sure that hard drugs are not an issue. Someone experienced with drug users will be able to tell at a glance, and if that is the case, don't get too closely involved, but refer to an agency instead.

I have helped out homeless people various times, including finding them jobs and housing. Contrary to popular opinion, a lot of homeless people would really like to get off the street, and are not any more 'mentally ill' than anyone else would be in that situation. To get off the street though you need housing, for housing you need a job, to get a job you need a house. It's surprisingly easy to help someone break that cycle by putting them in a place with a phone for a couple months. What you need from the homeless person is someone willing to work even a lousy job if needed. If unwilling to work or picky about jobs then you just have a pet to feed.
Use apt-get behind proxy server (Ubuntu/Debian) | Latest Cool Tricks Tips Window
> that deserve attention.

Why do they deserve attention?

Every article about diaspora I see this being trotted out, a bunch of other projects that are claiming that they somehow deserve attention and probably more than the diaspora guys.

If they want that attention then they should do a better job of marketing themselves! That does not mean using articles about diaspora to claim their share of the eyeballs, but to independently create events and stuff worthy of mentioning in the press.

Most of these projects are old enough that they should be able to stand on their own legs by now instead of trying to piggy back on related PR like this.

Diaspora has a bunch of things going for it, and one of their major assets is that they seem to understand marketing and playing the press and the public much better than their counterparts, no matter how far along. So copy a leaf from that book instead of claiming those projects 'deserve attention'.
>I see that as just as evil as what a lot of the carriers were doing beforehand.

Seeing Apple's behavior as evil is just not rational. It is a simple, obvious trade off. By having the control they do they can control the iPhone experience and make sure as few people as possible have a bad experience (and since they're selling phones they want to make sure no uninformed user can blame the phone for a bad experience. The only way to do that is try to make sure they can't download misbehaving apps). The cost are: people can do every possible thing they would want to and may not like that, developers have to wait for their app to be on the store, it may get rejected, etc.

Android chose the opposite, an app marketplace that's almost completely open (I'm assuming they don't allow obvious malicious software). This is not more or less evil, it is simply a different trade off. The costs are: people can do anything they want and will sometimes do bad things (accidentally or on purpose), etc.

People need to take the emotion out of the argument. The iPhone isn't becoming a legislated requirement or anything, there is no reason to get emotional about it.
Ask HN: CMS or Framework for a new project?
I'm looking to build a online store. However, the first question, past the idea of the store, is the platform. I've previously worked with Java and PHP and am quite comfortable with PHP. So my first considerations were Drupal or maybe CodeIgniter (which I have heard lots of good things about)

On discussions with friends, they suggested Django. But I have no experience with Python or Django.

So my question is, is CI better or Drupal? And further, if not either of them, is Django better in terms of ease of development and extensibility?

Request you to not make this a php vs python battle as I'm looking for advice here. Thanks

PS. Cross-Posted to SO so apologies in advance to those who are there as well
Hi Jacques, useful information, but what's an IPSP?
soon, but right now its just standard interactive R console via the web ( with interactive graphics).
Internet payment service provider, the party between you and the card companies. You can go it alone in this respect but it's not worth your time and the trouble, until you reach a very large scale.

Fraud control and compliance are the major problem areas in that respect.

Oh, I completely forgot to add: keep an eye on your tax obligations, especially VAT / Sales tax, it can make a huge difference where your corporation is located, the golden rule is do not incorporate in your target market or you'll likely be liable for a lot of sales tax.
Most people don't need or want what you're describing. I use iTunes (on OSX) and I like it. I prefer it to manually laying out folders of music. Folders don't make sense for music anyway because how the songs should be organized depends on what mood I'm in at the time. Tags would be much better. Which is what you can do with iTunes.
Netflix keeps your data, probably, because it helps with their recommendation algorithms.

If they presented to you that they had fully deleted your data, they'd have to remove the data from the collaborative filtering graph. Ultimately they can do that if you explicitly ask, but as a routine matter of course why would they make their graph less smart off the back of you leaving the service?

Keep data when account is closed:
If the removal of the closed customer's data would render your system less smart and you are not in the EU.

Remove data upon account close:
If it doesn't impact the overall level of 'smart' of your service, if the user explicitly asks or if your servers are in the EU (data protection rules).