skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
most car dealers force you to haggle. they won't let you know that you are being forced to haggle until seconds before it's time to sign the contract. then, suddenly, there are all these options that you absolutely must have, new financing terms, etc etc etc.

if you do the right thing, e.g., get up and walk out, they will let you do it. then when you get to the parking lot, they'll run you down and try to convince you to start the process again.

it's really, really nuts.
It's their job to sell it. Push, not pull.

I know Matt knows this, but you can't expect anyone to care unless you make them care.

Being located in Florida is a liability for VCs and angels, regardless.

You're right that their product has a great "problem slide" built right into the deck: a picture of a tree crushing a house.
After checking a few of them, I came to the conclusion that Flash has nothing to fear for the time being
1993: if

1998: "if" too slow; use "case".

2002: "case" too slow; use Boolean algebra.

2006: Boolean algebra too slow, use arrays & pointers.

2010: Who wrote this shit and what does it do? Rewritten to use "if".
The point of my comment was to reply to his comment which was questioning why he was downvoted. I downvoted neither of his comments.
The question is actually difficult because an organism can be an microorganism or an animal with organs, so it's impossible to say which ones bigger. Also i'd say if you don't know that the earth is bigger than the sun than you most likely don't know how gravity works, and not that the earth is a satellite of the Sun.
You could fill pages with things that can be improved on Android Market (most of which are available on the App Store). Most shortcoming are well documented - things that I would like to see personally:

- ability to publish what changed in an update

- track number of users who upgraded vs new users

- ability to search for apps and see reviews on http://www.android.com/market/ (that website is practically useless)
An increase from 2.8% to 4.7% seems like a big increase to me, if true it represents hundreds of thousands of phones.
Rate my Splash page
Financial sector in london typically goes from about 30k (entry level grad) upto about 100k. Or if you're contracting day rate is normally in the £500-£800/day range.
I recently went through the song and dance of job searching, and I'll soon be happily employed with a great company in SF. My resume isn't spectacular, but it's good (decent GPA at a good school). To my surprise, some amazing companies granted me interviews, and I believe it had a lot to do with my cover letters (like I said, not a spectacular resume).

Understand that my opinion is that of a junior engineer (1 year of experience).

A strong cover letter ought to be engaging, to the point, clear, and genuine. My general strategy leveraged casual language, an honest portrayal of myself and my desires, and dollop of self-deprecating humor. I got some friends to review my cover letters, and made sure that they laughed. I figured, if the recruiter enjoys my cover letter, my application won't get dumped immediately.

YMMV. This might be awful advice, but it worked for me. Good luck!
Maybe because I'm a mathematician my idea of "intuitive sense" is warped, but intuitively speaking, either John is in Paris or London exclusively. (This isn't given in the statement, but it holds intuitively.) Therefore, in the conclusion, we can assume that at least one of the antecedents "If John is in Paris..." or "If John is in London..." is false, and therefore at least one of the implications in the conclusion is true.
Topix Idiots flock to flame me
Feedback is appreciated.
A dentist is the closest thing most of us get to a cosmetic surgeon. They can have a large effect on our appearance and have procedures that will probably cause us the most pain out of anything the normal person has done to them. Plus, they hold up an x-ray and say "This is..." not "This might be...". You really owe it to yourself to get a good look at who is doing the work.

As an example, as a child I was under government health care (Indian Health Service in the US) and "had to have" a root canal done. The dentist did the work (come to find out it is generally someone else who does this). I think nothing of it other than the extreme pain. This is when I was in 6th grade.

1st year of college and I get this incredible pain in my mouth. I go to a dentist (not IHS) and get my mouth checked. Come to find out the original dentist left some infected material in there and I am in a world of hurt. Antibiotics and Percodan for two weeks and then oral surgery. The oral surgeon had some not-so-kind remarks about the person who originally did the root canal.
-1 blogspam; this has been in the NY Times and everyplace else...
Angel Profiling (2): Global Directory of Blogging Angels
One step at a time. Learning to do each skill is confounded using "teamwork" when that simply means one guy does all the work.
I'm amazed that a scammer can post something inflamatory and incorrect and that so many people will believe them.
The worst part is that I have reported the posts to the Topix staff and they haven't responded.
Congratulations Michael!
There seems to be a massive disparity in techniques and tools, too, though I am reporting only anecdotally. I recently got dental insurance again after a long time, and for better or worse started going to a dentist again. I picked him via "since I have no other metric to use I might as well pick the closest that takes my insurance". Somehow I stumbled onto an older guy with a lot of experience but who has also kept up with the latest technology.

He doesn't use X-Rays to find cavities, he's got this laser thing that directly measures the tooth density and makes little werping noises when it is low. He found a couple of things (which I had no reason to suspect weren't problems as they were highlighted as problem areas by another guy ten years ago, and one of the other problem areas he said still isn't enough of a problem to be worth doing). It seems a much more objective system than poking at things or looking at X-Rays. I got a couple of filling done via laser drill, which I didn't need anesthetic of any kind for. (Those with low pain tolerances might, it wasn't pain free, but it was OK and I preferred it to a droopy drooly mouth for most of the rest of the day.)

I figured I'd just been out of the game for a decade and a lot has changed but I've mentioned this to my coworkers and few of them recognized any of that stuff. Your anecdotes solicited.
Some executives interviewed for the study worried that this bias would hurt their business

I'm sure they did.

The fact that it was multi-nationals doing the hiring is I think an important factor. "Foreigners" are often expected to behave eccentrically, and if they are hiring women managers, oh well. I think a native company doing the same thing would face a more uphill battle.

Still, very heartening, and perhaps enough to start a snowball effect in some countries.
You weren't kidding about being bad at promoting your startup: you didn't even mention it here! Seriously, this post is great, and is likely to attract some attention. Add a link to your startup.
Are you suggesting that basic customer lifecycle management is an issue for them? That's not exactly reassuring.

When you determine pricing, you figure this out. Every business has customer acquisition costs.
10 foolproof ways to promote your app in the App Store
When I worked in the US, I had $1500/year in dental insurance and a new dentist. The x-ray turned up exactly $1500-(2x cost of regular checkups) in cavities. (All of which turned out to be JPEG artifacts & shadows)
+1. I find CC to be very confusing, and I'm the kind of person that can tell you the differences between the MIT, BSD3, BSD4, GPL2, and GPL3 licenses. To a "normal person" it must be incomprehensible.

I think this must be because the culture of sharing has been around longer in the software community. In the music (and photography) world, it seems like this is uncharted territory, and when CC was making the licenses they asked the artists what they wanted. Nobody could agree, so every possibility became "creative commons" -- but only some of those are actually Free. Others are as proprietary as licenses get, providing the same restrictions that copyright law already adds.

I'm glad I don't produce podcasts for a living.
Why did Google bet $1 million on Shweeb?
I think this version much more usable: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616
I find the raw canvas API to be a little bit clunky and unwieldy. The syntactic sugar makes it a lot more likely that I'll use canvas without a second thought.

Making something more pleasant, even just a little bit, can lower the barrier enough to get a lot of people going.
The Djen of Django - Our in progress book about Django.
Build a local deals engine a la groupon.

Yah this is obvious, but the reason that this works so well for newspapers:

a) Newspapers have a built in sales force to sell local merchants on the concept.

b) Newspapers attract a hyper-local audience and building a list of people interested in local deals is a money printing asset.

c) Newspaper execs, consumers, and merchants are familiar with the model so it's not a hard sell to anybody.
* Be Honest. Show what you are.
* Provide links to your work which you think are Best.
* Don't write crap, they can easily make it out. They were also student once.
* Don't make grammatical mistakes.
* Keep it short and to the point.
For your pleasure:

http://tools.ietf.org/rfcmarkup?rfc=2616

Type in any RFC number for similar results:

http://tools.ietf.org/rfcmarkup
Write an article system that allows for multivariate A/B testing, performs multivariate regression and "decides" upon the version of the article that converts best. Then use that data for subsequent articles to suggest changes that convert better.

eg.
{Wall Street Lays an Egg|Stock Market Crash 1928}

Today, {Chief Economist|Fed Chief|Money Czar} decided...

The system would randomly pick changes to the article and as it had more data it would more often pick the options that convert better. So lets say it found that "Wall Street lays an egg" and "Money Czar" converts best, then in the future when it sees Chief Economist the software could suggest that using Money Czar converts better and automatically add it as an option.

eg. Chief Economist -> {Chief Economist|Money Czar}

If you can get demographic information, lets say from facebook, then you're really golden as you can offer a service that will tailor an article to a demographic, or conversion goal. eg. articles that convert for car ads, or articles that convert for teenagers. With 5 million uniques you would probably have enough facebook connect users to get decent demographic data. Heck, if you had the facebook data you could tailor the article to the demographic profile of the user, so the system would use the general profile for unknown users and once demographic info was available would re-tailor the content. Put an API on the service and then charge a cent per milli "tailorized" articles.
CPUs are fast but the ratio of latency of random access vs. maximum bandwidth is getting worse.

In nanoseconds, approximately:

10^7 Disk seek
10^4 2KB over 1Gbps
10^2 RAM uncached reference
10^1 L2/L3 cache reference
10^0 L1 cache reference

That's why systems don't feel fast lately. In particular for big data or bloated software that can't fit well within the caches or shared systems doing a lot of frequent switches (VMs in particular.)

Many classic assumptions for algorithms are outdated. Like avoiding full sequential scans. Those are fast for simple operations.
Statically typed code is only type-safe as long as you don't use any meta programming techniques. But that means you have to write and test much more code. More code means more errors. Also, being forced to test more may cause dynamically typed code to be more reliable at the end of the day. But that's all speculation. I don't think we have any empirical evidence on that and hence I disagree with the general claim that dynamically typed languages are less reliable.

I write mostly statically typed code and I do appreciate what the compiler does for me. Also, I find statically typed code more readable and self-explanatory sometimes. It's ultimately faster as well. It's a tradeoff though, and since JavaScript is already present on mobiles anyway, I don't see the advantage of adding yet another VM.
However the license isn't valid in a case like this unless it passes the TCK, right? And as we saw with Harmony, Sun and now Oracle is quite willing to withhold the TCK and therefore refuse a license.

How this plays out with OpenJDK and its derivatives I don't know; I'd assume they couldn't do anything for Java 6 (and I don't want to borrow trouble), but couldn't they e.g. in theory refuse access to the Java 7 TCK, resulting in a freezing of the GPLed version?

Anyway, my point here is that their GPL license of their technology is a much more restricted use of the license than we're used to.
Awesome. Thanks for the discount!
Many, many startups would disagree with you. If cost is a factor, we're starting a program for startups. Feel free to ping me for more info.

Thanks for the reply. Admittedly, my statement is better qualified by "early" and "web scale."

Cost is very much a factor, as $500/mo buys a lot of ramen, and, even for a slightly larger company, is still a noticeable expense, for something where the value is unknown[1] ahead of time.

Even just the nomenclature "enterprise" implies pricing that's optimized to pay for the sales process or other hand-holding, rather than something technical. Such inference is further bolstered by the fact that a full price list isn't published.

If cost is a factor, we're starting a program for startups. Feel free to ping me for more info.

The companies I work for, in general, have neither the free time nor the inclination to pay for such a sales process. The program I'd want to see is one where I can order online with a credit card.

Time is a portion of cost, not just cash.

[1] Perhaps even unknowable, since, if the output isn't consumed, it's all potential value.
Thanks. The online game is at:
http://www.tengaged.com
I agree completely.

I think these posts will help them tremendously - engaging HN usually leads to good things and having the community help to sharpen the pitch is a great first step.

It's a shame that this post wound up on the second page of HN - probably too many of Matt's fans hitting it early triggering some kind of HN algorithm . . .
He vieja! Yo también!! Vamo Marado :)
Poor People Should Probably Gamble More
Полезные утилиты для сайта
You beat me by a minute :)

I think the best thing about this is that it doesn't cannibalize their classified ads in the way that many of the obvious things to do with 5M local hits would. Also, a newspaper lends credibility that a pure web play wouldn't have with merchants.
Even if you show up with a bag full of cash, point right at the car you want, and agree to the sticker price, there is a shocking amount of paper work that needs to be completed. The guy on the lot, the guy sitting at the desk to watch you fill in the paper work, and the guy who knows how to make copies of the paper work are all different. At every step you will be asked a question you had no idea would need deciding.

As soon as financing or insurance come into the game, it gets really ridiculous.
Upvoted especially for his list of suggested reading at the end of the article.
Yes.

It's like they think the cover letter is supposed to be a writing sample to prove they speak English, rather than an introduction.
how I reduced my bounce rate 94% with cloudflare?
Did you see that article on the Varnish site about second-guessing Virtual Memory? "2006 programmng" I think it was.
I'm all for thinking out of the box but this elevated pedal system would be brought to a grinding halt if someone decided to stop and hold up traffic, or if a pedal car broke down and got stuck...
so what is the real world % of people who think the Earth is larger than the Sun? surely OKCupid has some selection bias?
Yes, he's the principle developer of Google Chrome Frame and works on the Chrome team at Google.

His most recent post is worth reading, as it expands on his position: http://infrequently.org/2010/10/story-time/
I wonder if this has any bearing on the force field that 3M accidentally created in one of their factories.

http://amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.html
No.

Do you know why? Facebook acts as if it were completely incapable of knowing when far is too far. Whenever something new rolls out, it always comes off like outsourced peer-pressure. 'HEY LOOK AT WHAT EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING BUT YOU!!'

No thank you, sir.
What if other companies discriminate against you for hiring women at very high levels? Or if sexist men within a company react badly to having women promoted above them? Then there really is a gap in worker value, but only due to sexism.
Congrats Michael! I've been using your tutorials as my primary learning resource for a few weeks now. It's the most succinct one out there and shows a newbie everything s/he needs to know to get up and running.
Or, what is even more likely, is that women believe that men are attracted to women who say they have had sex with other women and enjoyed it.
I think that's actually the point of the article, that D while theoretically a nice language is in practice crippled by being terrible to actually work with.
Would you mind defining conversion?
Grats with such hardwork. Your tutorial opened world of RoR for me.
I have used AWS on 2 projects now.

On the first project, we used 2 small instances as web servers, 1 small instance as a database master, and another as a slave. The slave machine handled backup of db and uploaded files by zipping everything up and throwing it onto s3. There was no EBS or RDS at this time. The main problem we had was sharing user uploaded files between instances. We used Gluster (http://www.gluster.org/) for this, but it was complicated and gave us problems. In general this setup worked fine and we could add webserver instances to handle traffic spikes. Even this limited setup took a bit of effort to maintain and I often wondered if we could have just handled the whole thing with one large or extra large instance. Does anyone know if there is some bottleneck that comes from vertically scaling like this?

Sadly, on the second project we haven't really needed to scale at all, so we just use one small instance for everything and have our mysql files and user uploaded files in an EBS volume. I haven't really figured out backup and restore from snapshots yet, so I just zip up the contents of the EBS and transfer it to S3. We are using cloudfront to serve static files and it seems to work fine.
When you look at the situation in the United States, and try to take all the factors into account to figure out whether or not women are being discriminated against...

... you'll come away with your head spinning because there's just too damned many factors.

Consider the factor of giving generous paid maternity leave. Obviously a benefit. Except that a company won't want to hire or pay someone that may disappear like that. Except they are legally obligated to. Except these things can't really be legally obligated because there's always a way around it. And of course a certain percentage of women really do of their own free will choose not to come back, which is hard to put an economic value on for any interested party, but if you can't put a reasonably concrete objective value on both the value of having that choice, and the values of exercising that choice, how can you tell whether women are being shortchanged? Being guaranteed that you can return to your job after X months is still some sort of economic value, even if most of the X months is itself unpaid.

It isn't even necessarily that hard to find women getting paid more than men by some metrics now: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.... Note, I'm explicitly calling your attention to the various caveats and logic in the article, because this is an example of my real point about the complexity of the topic, not that one article proves anything about the "real question"; my point is exactly that nailing down the "real question" is very, very complicated, well beyond simply totalling up who makes what and looking at which number is larger.

At this point, given the very market forces that this article talks about, I am unconvinced there is a major systematic problem that comes from human bias; I think the variance caused by the non-zero-but-small-in-practice effect is dominated by the other various concerns that cause disparities. I'm sure there's sexism afoot but I suspect it's been pushed below the noise threshold. But I can't prove it.
Generally harsh criticism from people with some power over me. No matter how boring the subject matter, this makes me more likely to work at it & to seek their approval.
>Actually I would probably conclude that having a diverse culture makes better decisions than a monoculture.

I am not sure culture counts matter as long as it is a good culture. Sure a mediocre multiculture is better than a bad monoculture but that just means mediocre is better than bad not multi better than mono.
Anyone who sends me a cover letter or resume typeset with LaTeX moves to the head of the line.
Exactly, and their numbers even justify to me why this warranty is unnecessary.

Repairs on an iPhone 4 for non-warranted issues like damage are $200, unless you break it into multiple pieces [1].

Unless SquareTrade's numbers show you have a >50% chance of destroying your phone accidentally within 2 years of ownership (they don't), why would you buy a $99 warranty from them? I'd rather save $99 now and risk a 15-20% chance of having to pay $200 a year and a half from now.

A lot of credit cards double the manufacturer warranty on purchases, so for actual failure of the device you can still be covered for the length of your 2 year contract.

[1] http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/service/faq/#warranty7
Indeed it's simple and obvious but it's amazing how many people miss this. They want to build something for the sake of building it.

Many a times they miss this point and start working in wrong direction and assume wrong people to be their competitor.

Eg:
Some people wear watches to tell time.
Others for fashion or style.

A cell phone is competitor of first not second because of the problem it's solving. You gotta know what problem you are solving to know thyslef.
Hey Government, Get Out of Silicon Valley
I'm going to have a freeware app to pull sports scores down from one location, with alerts for finished games, betting tracking, etc, should be damn spiffy when it's done: linux, mac, command line, pc, android, and iphone compatible. I'll be looking to contract a graphic designer for the iphone, pc and android ports
Implementing Gentry's Fully-Homomorphic Encryption Scheme
I will stick with OmniAuth as I want to use one of the existing auth libraries (devise/authlogic). I don't think integrating OmniAuth is difficult enough to warrant another gem.

With devise,you get so much more functionality and also allow you to offer a native login/password if you so desire.
The United States is about 5% of the World's population, and produces about 25% of the World's economic output. This has been true for about the last 60 years. The USA and Western Europe have had the most expensive labor, focusing on high-quality products and services that require more education, but justify the higher labor cost.
so cities will only have to find hundreds of millions of dollars to build this over existing routes, and then convince riders to squeeze their fat asses into a claustrophobic little box, permeated by the sweat-stench of so many previous riders. this idea sounds perfect.