skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think it's as simple as all that. If craigslist itself was under a serious legal assault, or its managers facing criminal charges, I'd be right there with you. It seems to me, however, that craigslist's opponents would be happy to leave it at "don't run ads for the sex trade".

I simply don't believe that's an unreasonable position.
Many of these are probably not electives, but here's the list of stuff that I'm glad I took or wish I had taken while getting my CS degree:

* compilers. Seriously. It's hard, but it's the single class I look back on as having made me a better engineer

* at least one "weirdo" math class. Non-Euclidian geometry, or group and set theory stuff, or whatever else you see that is off the beaten path and possibly taught by a well-liked professor. You will learn to solve problems better using non-standard techniques, and it may be just plain fun.

* One of the two or three classes in the philosophy department that deal with logic, puzzles, paradoxes, and such. You may be surprised at first that about a third of the people in those classes are in your CS classes, too. Figuring out what is computable and what is true isn't all done in your discreet math classes.

* A basic science class unrelated to your engineering field. Astronomy is a good one. Learn about your world, and possibly meet your future spouse.

* The most popular class on campus. Every school has that cool class taught by the famous professor that everyone attends. There's a reason for that. It's probably in the psycology, english, or history departments. Your spouse may also be in this one.

* Introduction to Civil Engineering. Knowing a bit about static forces, failures, and materials helps you when you need to build or fix stuff. These guys also have been engineers a lot longer than there have been software engineers. They teach you how to fail properly, perform repeatable tasks to ensure quality, and other engineering practices.

* Law for business students. Your business school offers an intro class to the law. It's like the first year of law school smashed into a single semester class for business students. It covers contracts, torts, agencies, and other things that will keep you out of trouble.

Yeah, most of these classes aren't in the CS department. Don't miss your opportunity to see the folks on the other side of the campus in that other quad.
mec.ca online store has something like this.

You rate the fit on several sliding scales (too long/too short etc) then buyers can estimate = I should buy brand X a size larger/smaller.
Oracle 1994: Patents aren't good for our industry where innovation occur rapidly
I'd pay for an embeddable/skinnable version of your editor. Great interface -- nice work
The guy with the OpenVPN zero day probably isn't getting slowed down by your stealth configuration. At least, that's how my threat model works.

If you believe in stuff like this, then do it right: require the attacker to know a secret algorithm (like "AES with 3 extra rounds") to talk to you.
So ? - it's wiki, edit it.
Full quote from http://www.bustpatents.com/articles/oracle.htm

Oracle Corporation opposes the patentability of software. The Company
believes that existing copyright law and available trade secret protections,
as opposed to patent law, are better suited to protecting computer software
developments.

Patent law provides to inventors an exclusive right to new technology
in return for publication of the technology. This is not appropriate for
industries such as software development in which innovations occur rapidly,
can be made without a substantial capital investment, and tend to be creative
combinations of previously-known techniques.

Even if patent law were appropriate for protection of software, due to the
large volume of recently-granted software patents and the rising number of new
applications, the current patent process would continue to be troublesome for
the software industry. Software patent examinations are hindered by the
limited capability of searching prior art, by the turnover rate among
examiners in the Patent and Trademark Office, and by the confusion surrounding
novelty and innovation in the software arena. The problem is exacerbated by
varying international patent laws, which both raise the cost and confuse the
issue of patent protection.

Unfortunately, as a defensive strategy, Oracle has been forced to protect
itself by selectively applying for patents which will present the best
opportunities for cross-licensing between Oracle and other companies who may
allege patent infringement.
Google Instant - Search Results as you type the query
Apparently the men's measurement in US standard clothing size corresponds to chest size in inches, so the waist measurement was intended to be smaller than the listed size.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_standard_clothing_size#Men
Using Anchors in WordPress
This simple tutorial describes how to place anchors in your WordPress pages, so that you can to link a specific section, chapter or question within a post or page
I say this mostly because we sold literally 20x less of the exact same app on the Android market vs. the iPhone market (the apps were marketed the exact same way). This is in spite of the fact that the Android phone sales are apparently equal the number of iPhones phone sales...

iPhone users buy more apps.
Similar situation: my customers typically use the product once to twice a year (or lifetime), and if 5% of the country needed it at any given time I'd have kittens. The thing that has worked best for me is organic SEO.

Does your customer, when they're momentarily in the 5% of the population who needs your service, know they need your service? If so, they're searching for it on Google, using a mix of [the most obvious possible two or three word phrase a layperson would use to describe your service] and a long, long tail of various questions, concerns, and whatnot. If you are in a high money niche, and if dentists or insurance were good examples you mostly certainly are, it will be very difficult for you to attack the head of the query distribution like, e.g., "$TYPE insurance".

Is there a scalable content creation strategy in your market? Can you make one? You can leverage your mainstream attention to increase the returns on content creation targeted at more niche concerns within the niche. (You can put your earned NYT logo on a page about something much, much more specific than the NYT will ever publish about itself.)
They probably do something like: if a search term returns a high density of SafeSearch-flagged top results, then don't autocomplete.
Interesting--- salary based on need, while contributions presumably are based on strengths of each founder. I've heard that compensation strategy somewhere else... ;-)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abil...)
Actually, the site doesn't cover grants... just focused on challenges / contests for now.
If the goal of black and latino OKC members is to attract members of the opposite sex within their race (which is most likely the case), then it would make sense that they would communicate in their own vernacular.

That is, a black person who is otherwise educated might use a phrase that makes perfect sense to other black people (e.g. "where dey do dat at?"; often used to express confusion at someone's ridiculous behavior) but that isn't clear to the mainstream. Latinos may pepper their profiles with Spanish words.

Asians might do this too if there wasn't so much ethnic/linguistic diversity among the Asian American population. As such, they likely use "safe" mainstream wording.

All this is to say that there are reasons that have nothing to do with intelligence that could have caused this sort of result.
I'd be tempted to move them below the fold - let the user read that memobuild will give them drag and drop page organisation and collaborative document creation before they click through and start wondering what your app's connection with biometric testing in Australia is

A "sample built using memobuild" bar at the top with a link to the home page would seem pretty essential too for exactly the same reason.
Let's see: 6 years in 9to5, 4 years in small business, 5 months in consulting (and these overlap). I really enjoy consulting for the intellectual challenge, and the money is lovely, but hands down working on my products makes me happiest. The quality of life improvement versus 9to5 (or, ahem, 10to27) is impossible to overstate.
First they came for Craiglist's adult section where some member submitted content were objectionable. Next they come for the gun forum where some member submitted content are objectionable. Next they come for Reddit where some member submitted pictures are objectionable. Next they come for Hacker News because someone posts detail in hacking into DOD.

Craiglist has broken no law. The politicians are going on a moral crusade for their benefit. They pick on the geeks because well back in school they were the easy targets.
Marissa Mayer apparently said: "Sometime in the next few months this is something that will be activated in the browsers"

via: http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/08/google-instant-chrome/
I've read that, in the UK, unscrupulous dealers have been spraying their dried bud with sugared water to add weight. They've also been selling something FAR more dangerous called "grit weed", which has been impregnated with glass dust or microbeads that resemble Cannabis terpines or "crystals" and also add considerable weight, but is basically fiberglass when inhaled.
From Comcast to XFINITY?
Some people seem to agree with you, but I much prefer it the way it is: if I want a new window, I shift-click; if I want a new tab, I cntl-click; if I want to keep it in the same window, I just click.

This seems like the sanest choice to me, since everyone can have it work how they want, even if their preferences change from time to time. Or is it possible for everyone to get their desired behaviour even with "target = new"?

http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_16_not_opening_new_wind...
I imagine this:

-DOWNLOAD HN pages locally OR to another site

This is to make a permanent copy of the site and its discussions locally, so you'll have the knowledge of the articles and discussion forever.

Either download the linked site itself, or just the link, folowed by comments. Automatically grab comment updates once a day for a week, or whenever discussion statistically tapers off.

In other words, here are the options:

-Submission titles, dates, and links to HN page

This is to provide a searchable database for HN links, and perhaps (if this were done on a separate website) you could implement a "favorites" system for people to login and bookmark those topics of discussion they liked most, ala Server Fault.

Downside: I don't know how long HN articles persist. If they disappear, this is largely useless.

-Linked sites themselves, URL to HN page, and comments

Much more permanent; a complete mirror of source sites and HN discussions, searchable. Similar login/favorites iface could be put in place.

Downside: More information is cached, more complicated scraping (source sites and HN).
Not exactly. If you look a bit closer, you'll see that this isn't just a strict child, otherwise they might have managed by swapping a foreign key or something.
In a graph db, you'd still have to reconnect dangling edges that no longer make sense, like for comments and users. Also, the transaction rollback issue.
Which is to say: tanstaafl.
I've wondered about this. I've worn a 34"-34" pant for the last 20 years, and I know my waist has expanded over that time. It just didn't add up.

On fixing the meaning of the sizing, I'm reminded of someone I knew who took a sewing class in highschool. They started with patterns from the 1950s, and despite the teacher warning the students how different the sizings would be, virtually nobody managed to make clothing that they could squeeze into.

Personally I think the best solution is to make it a matter of law that the sizing be accurate. Everyone would hear that the sizing changed dramatically, there would be a brief transition, and we'd soon get used to accurate sizes. Drawing it out gradually would force people to keep on relearning their size, and overall would be more disruptive.
That graph is seriously misleading! At first glance I was tempted to conclude that Old Navy was selling pants twice as big as advertised (instead of merely 14%).

I'll forgive the gaudiness, but it's important to note the human tendency to compare ratios of sizes and so to always include 0 in bar graphs.
Your own perception of why you switched may be partially in error.

Google has done a lot of research to show that speed matters quite a lot to users. When results appear in less than 250ms the user is much more satisfied than even 500ms. Anything less than a quarter of a second is thought of as "instantaneous" and the user starts thinking of it very differently.

Here, they are taking it down to less than 100ms, which is now operating faster than the user can even perceive (for that matter, it's faster than many users can type). So the real effect is that they have now eliminated the need to click on "Search". So now Google is even more interwoven into your thought processes, and other search engines are going to seem unbearably slow pretty soon.
Keyboardr just searches for the letters you've already typed in, not the words it thinks you will type.
No problem, let me know how it goes, my email is in my profile. You question peaked my interest in building such a service on top of GAE with just basic API access and billing for usage. As long as you cover the hosting cost Google charges you, it'd seem to be relatively straightforward. I'm just not sure if there is enough control built in to determine what bandwidth went where.
I have to disagree.

The "micro-sites" you are talking about, and the long-tail SEO people are complaining about, are nothing new at all. It's been common for SEOs to build and rank sites like that for at least 5+ years.

The difference is Google made a big change to it's search algo back in April and in my opinion it was for the worse.

It actually ranked bigger sites (bigger than micro-sites but not necessarily the biggest ones) higher for less relevant long tail searches, presumably to weed out the micro-sites.

So the difference between now and 2 years ago is you are getting a less relevant result list, not that you are getting an SEOd micro-site.

I have a medium-sized website which relies mostly on long tail SE traffic,

Contrary to what many are posting here about this hurting sites that rely on long tail-- my traffic is above normal today. I'm not seeing a decline due to this search change.

I also would not see it in Google's interest to have less long tail searches, since those tend to earn it more money.
> quality/UX standards were relaxed somewhat

Yow.
"Most astonishing to Rhee was how easily the contract was finally approved. “The entire time the union was fighting us, they said, ‘Our members are never gonna accept this’—then it passed by an 80 to 20 percent vote!” she exclaims."

Hah, never assume that the interests of the teachers and their union representatives (or any other set of elected officials) always coincide. Specifically, proposals to decrease the number of workers but raise their pay (and/or give large amounts of money to those layed off) often bring workers and unions into conflict.
It's really simple.

The increase in potency strongly correlates with the increase in inflation.

He is probably holding quality as a fixed constant, so the real price goes down as the products relative inferiority increases, and the increase in nominal price due to inflation cancels it out.

edit: (man)
Is there a natural middle-man you should be dealing with instead of the "consumer"?

For example: if your app was about "going to the dentist", I'd suggest trying to sell to Dentists (to re-brand and sell on to their clients).

Is there an analogue in your industry?
You probably have to be an American to win - but not participate on the site. Each country has it's own laws governing contests, and there's no way (for a large organization) to open a contest to "everyone in the world" without getting lawyers from each country in the world to make amendments to the language.

It's a shame.

I ran a contest a few years ago and just ignored getting lawyers, so it was open to anyone. Had I known then what I know now, I probably wouldn't have run the contest. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
i have a bias against outside investment so i can maximize simplicitity and control, minimize risk of somebody fucking me over, and so i can choose my own pay.
RE: Soul Food, one of the comments on the OKC site mentioned that Soul Food applies not only to a style of cuisine, but also to a movie and subsequent spin-off series on HBO.

The reason it pops up so frequently is because the movie is hailed within the black community as one of the few Hollywood productions that presents black people as multi-dimensional humans that deal with a number of problems related to race, class, and life in general. It's a classic.
Agreed. Instead of getting users to better results and having them click through to the site, Google Instant seems to want the user to keep asking different questions until the answer is available in page title and abstract that Google presents.
How can you have irreperable harm in these sorts of business matters? No one is going to get killed or lose an arm. They can fix the issue with money.
Interesting, I was thinking the exact opposite, since those bars are all super annoying.
Ask HN: just sold software app for $60k, now what?
Long time HNer, this is a temp account.

I just sold a piece of software for ~$60k and am wondering what to do next and how best to use the proceeds?

I've setup an LLC to house this project (and any others) and setup a small business account (cash in in there now). What's next? Advisement on tax obligations and any other IRSy stuff is much appreciated.

As for the proceeds: I was planning on rolling much of it back into other project's development and perhaps upgrading some of my trade tools (computer / software). Are there other things to focus on or think about?

Thanks.
Can anyone with Comcast/XFINITY service comment on any changes that have taken place in service/support since the rebranding?
I've just measured all my pairs of 34" jeans and they are consistently 36". I only buy Paul Smith these days because I've come to know that they will fit me well without having to shop around.

Last time I was measured for a suit I came out at almost exactly 34", but then the fitting for suit trousers is much more snug than those for jeans. I wear a belt with my jeans whereas I'd expect trousers to hold themselves up.

So on that basis, I'm not too surprised that jeans made to fit a 34" waist are an inch or two larger, but more than that seems a little crazy.
Learning from XAuth: Cross-domain localStorage
$64k per calendar year in NYC, equivalent to a salary of $85k/year. (I'm not even touching the value of tenure and pensions.)

http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/72DE1FF1-EDFC-40D7-9D61-...

That's not bad for a liberal arts grad 5 years out of college, even by NYC standards.

Market rate is "how little can we pay them before we can't fill our open positions". I see no reason to believe we are anywhere near that point, Teach For America still rejects what, 2/3 of the people who apply?
Consider yourself lucky. My waist size is 26. There are only a couple of pants that are wearable without a belt (I hate belts). I have found the stores sizes to be pretty consistent and accurate. Here's a tip: try on the kids pants. They are often a bit too short, but the waist size is much better. The worse thing is t-shirts. They often fit like dresses as opposed to t-shirts.
Other submissions on the same subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672391 <- This has lots of comments

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672388 <- This is an explanation

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1672346 <- First

... and more by the minute.
Does it come with a EULA that clearly specifies what I can build without being sued?
What did you sell...????
This isn't the first time I've said this, but "CEO" sounds like a pretentious title for the head of a <= 30 person company.
FYI... Rails Rumble is the same weekend at Startup School, Oct 16,17.
The Great Divergence: A visual guide to income inequality.
What about writing about the history of histography?

Would that be histography-histography or histography-histography-histography?
Or you could say it's a ripoff of zippily.com which I did four years ago over the weekend after Google released their Ajax Search API.

Except that live search was already something that was happening on lots of sites back then. By now it's hard to see that instant searching is even novel, much less a ripoff of any other interface.

Google putting their completion together with their instant search (an opportunity not available to API users, of course) is pretty neat, though.
The Original Egg-Bot
Would you like to have Napoleon/Wellington's thoughts of Waterloo minute-by-minute during the battle. Or only memoirs written 20-years later?
I strongly recommend not relying on the VPN written in C that nobody's heard of that uses a hand-rolled custom RSA authentication algorithm to authenticate connections for your perimeter security.
The most interesting part is the discussion in the first part of the comments:

"There seems to be a strange belief amongst the open source community that just because you can make a change to the source code, and no one pays you to do so, that the change was free. "-Eric Lippert
I think this is Google's way of training the average user to search like a pro. Many people don't understand that sometimes it takes multiple queries to find what you need. This seems like an extremely effective way to communicate that and encourage users to fiddle with their queries.
To be stealth or not to be stealth with your startup
This change may be helpful for users, but will be even more for Google advertisement programs. Basically, they can show more advertisements for each user visit.

For example: user starts typing a long tail keyword search and an unrelated result is displayed. Even though the user was not looking for that specific keyword combination, he will see the results (and the ads) for that keyword.
Microsoft showcases co-authoring capabilities of Office 2011 for Mac