skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recall we discussed this a couple weeks ago.

The vulnerability is Facebook's social contract with non-technical users, user trust based on mental models of how it should work. For users of privacy settings, trust matters.

A user knows things they are sharing can be used by those they share with. But when they delete something, in their mental model it's been deleted, and they become (with fair reason) upset if they learn it's not.

If users delete a Facebook post or change its privacy setting, it's gone or inaccessible. If they delete a photo, it's still there and still accessible. That's unexpected behavior.

There's no good non-technical reason text content and image content shouldn't be equally carefully managed by Facebook.
You are right of course, but I suspect the vast majority of HN users are not only in the USA but specifically in California. So even though people are using the site around the clock, there is probably a lot more traffic during the "awake hours" of California.
I find it akin to how if you know a photo's URL you can view it regardless of rights. That makes perfect sense if you know how web servers work and that there is enough randomness in the URL that it really is secure, but to a lot of people it feels wrong. I know 90% of my friends would be shocked that I could post a public link to their beach photos.
"Highly Secure Data Center Environment", but no SAS70 certification... hmm.
Interesting "pre-ad". They'll need to show off more of the features before the phones actually hit the stores.
I wonder if this virus has been able to effectively spread to Madagascar.

To put it another way: I wonder if "Free Public Wifi" was the surviving ad-hoc phantom in countries where the primary language isn't English.
StartupDigest is a great example of this. They started with an internal listserv of 12 people and have, over the last year or so, grown to a global audience of over 68,000 people.

It seems that side projects give us the ability to stretch our creativity where our '9 to 5' lives don't allow us. My advice would be to have fun and pursue your side projects and make the leap to full-time once you have some traction and cashflow.
In what way is it innovative?
The home page algorithm seems to have changed recently, but the RSS feed hasn't and is much noisier. It would be nice to see the RSS feed updated to reflect the home page changes (or confirmation that I'm just perceiving a difference that doesn't actually exist).
Fate as in, if Mozilla came up with a Windows-killer OS and all the Windows user moved to the new Mozilla OS. Than people will be stuck with FF 3.6, even after 10 years from now.
Gap to Return to Old Logo
After a well crafted media campaign, there's no place like home.
What the...? Is he serious?
"Walled-gardens are the way of the past. One of the reasons Apple is killing it is they make it easy for every man, woman, and yes, child, to create an app and offer it through their store for their phones. Why haven’t Blackberry and Android been as successful with their application marketplaces to date? Because it’s not nearly as developer-friendly..."
>It's also interesting, but not nearly as incredible as a literal new society in russia that is living with bronze age technology.

I don't think too many people read it that way.
My experience (albeit using screen mostly for horizontal and vertical screen splitting) is that:

screen < tmux < SizeUp (on a Mac)
In one case, users can use the first-class well-documented features of their browsers to violate Facebook users' mental model of how much control they have over their photos.

In the other case, users can use less well-documented features of their browsers to violate Facebook users' mental model of how much control they have over their photos.

The fact that Facebook could address the latter problem but hasn't doesn't upset me, because it's mooted by the former problem.

I acknowledge the PR problem they have blundered into by accepting this otherwise insignificant risk, though: bored tech journalists can use it to gin up sensational stories that further the narrative about Facebook's cavalier attitude towards privacy. I'm not suggesting that it was a good call on Facebook's part to do this.
Facebook Groups Give Rise to Social Nicheworking
What's the most mind-blowing fact you heard/read in your life?
I listen to podcasts, at a low volume, while lying in bed, lights off.
A word of caution - many of the items in the reddit story come without sources and there will certainly be a number of factually incorrect comments.
'Evapotranspiration' taking unexpected turn
Venture-Backed CEOs Expect Higher Salaries
Rumors of Iran Executing Nuclear Facility Workers Over Stuxnet
What investors can learn from TPG’s “adventures” in Russia
Since the site doesn't look very polished, my first concern as a consumer would be whether or not your service is legitimate. Is what you're doing within Amazon's ToS? (I'm not suggesting that it's not, but that would be a question I'd ask.)

Also, where are you getting your data for behavioral targeting? Your explanation doesn't really say.
This would be interesting if it meant that Microsoft was positioning Phone - As - Peripheral against Apple's Phone - As - Platform. But they aren't; look at their marketing material and they're triangulating and trying to have it both ways, getting you "in and out" when you want to be "in and out" but being "immersive" when that's what you want.

Telling: this ad doesn't really show the product.
Windows Phone 7 seems pretty good for a first version. Ease of development and some exclusive games from the XBox franchise can make it better.
It's a completely unfair expectation. Yes, in some users' mental model, when they delete something it's gone for good. That mental model is objectively wrong. If you share something on the Internet, it is fundamentally impossible to ensure that it is deleted.
Is this a joke? New Service, AdKeeper, Lets Consumers "Click to Save" Online Ads
Counting the jumps down the home page. Would be nice if PG could confirm this either way (right or wrong), but I'm fairly sure that's what it is. It wouldn't make sense any other way (it was this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1759548 ) it got to the first spot on the homepage very quickly and then dropped in six steps off the homepage.

19 points, six steps, that's averaging 3 points per step, so it's like a single flag counts for 3 'downvotes' on an article or something close to that.

That's all guesswork of course.
There is more meat. Such as that you can't focus for extended periods of time. It is important to schedule time to work, preferably in the morning. It is useful to have a study partner around your level, but generally not useful to have a large study group. Get started early.

Those are all important points.
I did, although I didn't believe it.
The reliability of that data is somewhat questionable, given that studies since then have taken issue with these findings, both in relation to the 2008 tax rebates (1) and later analysis of rebates paid in 2001 (2).

1. http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/1541

2. http://www.nber.org/papers/w10784

Whichever interpretation one places on it, it strikes me that the arguments for against payments are fundamentally identical to those regarding tax cuts.
> The ideal configuration for a problem set is a single partner who is at roughly your ability and is willing to meet earlier in the week.

I agree with everything he said, but in my experience, the part I've quoted is at least an order of magnitude more important than the rest. And don't forget the "roughly at your ability" part - if you work with someone much smarter, you may just get more confused and you certainly won't feel like you're contributing much; if you work with someone much less smart, it's a waste of time (which is not to say that helping people isn't a nice thing to do - it just won't help you complete the problem set).
The first level presented really should be one you can just press gas and watch as you fly around, not one that requires you figure out how to lean.
Researchers discover new class of objects encoded within the genome
Hmm. I can understand that. But I don't think it applies here, since the distinct plans would still be there for customers with more than 500 users.

The per user $x pricing would only change things for customers with less than 100/x users, which let's face it, they're not going to be making any money off now.
Open note to Google: As currently designed, this feature is a bug.
I refuse to pay full price for a digital edition you don't own and can't resell or lend.

Most of my best books are in the hands of friends and family or given away to somebody who would use them. If the electronic version had a reduced price I wouldn't mind. Even if it was for a limited time, like renting the book. But full price? You got to be kidding.

Also the authors are still getting scammed by the industry and only see a tiny fraction of what the buyer pays. This is not it.
Rethinking JavaScript for-loops
Build a Twilio app using your favorite non-traditional language or framework
WP7 seems really nice. However, since you have no native C++ support games can't be ported from iPhone/Android. Basically you have to start from scratch in XNA. Somehow I don't all that many games will be released on this platform.
I don't believe it is quite that simple. I think chargify did not do this on purpose, but rather was confronted with a large amount of hidden costs that they did not factor in to their planning. Instead of saying 'sorry, we goofed, how about this' in concert with their users they chose to see if there was enough stretch.

But some things are just 'not done', rearranging a deal after the fact is very bad for business, especially if you are in finance, where trust is everything.

After all, you are literally dealing with your customers money and their trust is the most important single resource you've got.
Why? Milk is more expensive than it used to be. Songs on iTunes are $1.29 now. I don't see any reason whatsoever that a company can't increase rates. Inflation and rising costs are facts of life. Even if they weren't, if a company realizes they can make more by charging more, then why shouldn't they?

They shouldn't have made such a massive price hike, and they should have given more notice, and I think that's the real issue.
I'm in California, usually, but have often observed HN through the California night -- either because of my own odd online hours, or trips to distant time-zones.

It's true there's never total quiescence, but the pace of actions changes by a noticeable factor. (Without going to the data, I'd guess 5X from trough to peak over a day's cycle, and a somewhat smaller weekend-to-weekday difference. Holidays and nice bay area weather also play a factor.)
I'm guessing anigbrowl has never seen Line Rider.
There's a subtlety that's missing here. For someone to save and reupload a picture, it has to be sufficiently interesting to warrant that attention. But this use case could be more simple. Suppose I directly link to an image while chatting on IM. The owner of the photo deletes it. A year later I can still reference the same URL.
I once "won" SimCity 2000 by having my hundreds of launch arcologies all take off. Unfortunately I was dealing with the plumbing at the time and so I missed it all. I just saw several squares crumble one after the other and couldn't switch modes until the show was over.
I wish Google would have come up with a new name, and I feel bad for this guy, but it's just way too common a name to figure you'll have it all to yourself. I'd feel the same way if the language was called "Do" or "Run".
Well if it isn't Mister Galt :) Nice to hear from you again!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Galt
I wouldn't to argue that there's no failure mode here, only that it's minimal. The URL you're talking about here is never promoted by the Facebook interface; you're more likely to click on the image, end up on the pretty landing page FB generates, and copy-paste the URL bar.
Go Ogle IT:

http://www.googleit.com/
Fully deleting the photo at least reduces the user's attack surface.
I'd agree simple is better.

Of the two suggestions, replacing hours with artificial ticks adds very little complexity: it's the same formula, with one value replaced, and the accompanying factor adjusted. (The ticks might be submission-count, upvote-count, visit-count, or anything else trivially tallied -- it may not make much difference, except that over time greater activity could require adjusting the tick-deflator-factor.)
Because milk won't go up from $.99 to $99 per month in one day.

Of course inflation and rising costs are a fact of life. But the economies of scale in a business like this lead to lower prices, not higher ones and the main excuse chargify seems to have for raising their prices is the fact that they are successful at the 'free' tier.

Which is something they should have factored in from day one, not come up with after a whole bunch of people have tied in their lot with them. This is a black eye for the whole third-party processing business, not just for chargify.

You don't remind your customers how much you have them by the short & curlies if you can help it, you make course changes nice and slow so you don't rock the boat. And if you mess up your planning you can either open your books and work it out in tandem or you can eat the loss and charge it to your education fund.
I wish this could be done server-side.

In Rails maybe you could put all of your images in one directory, as an initializer or on demand it would create a sprite image, and it could automatically handle the rest as well.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but if companies only issue stock that isn't transferable, why not simply issue options? Issuing non-transferable stock seems like two things that accomplish the same goal, namely: to express "incentive interest in a future liquidity event of the company".
Unless it's changed since I last did this sort of thing:

Every quarter you need to file and pay estimated taxes.

Every year you need to file your individual tax form, with your freelancing income minus allowable expenses (be careful here!) in a Schedule C and you'll also need to pay your self-employment tax in a Schedule SE (this is both parts (employer and employee, as the fiction goes) of your FICA (Social Security and Medicare) taxes).
What is worse is that the user id's of the poster of the photos is encoded into the image urls which makes it extremely easy to identify the owner.
I wonder what the CDN costs look like for storing all these "deleted" images? Can't be cheap.
Rudyard Kipling wrote an entertaining story, "The Janeites." The characters in the story, for what it's worth, are not girls but rather officers and men of British battery at the front in 1917 or so.
A Much-Needed Lesson in Facebook History
Facebook. It’s in our cell phones, it’s mentioned in our television shows, it’s featured in our Hollywood movies, and it’s all over the Web. It’s everywhere! In fact, Facebook could be considered one of the great, if not greatest, social innovations since the creation of the Internet. However, would you believe it if I said that this was Mark Zuckerberg’s plan all along?
What domain name would you use though?
Imagine a web application with an SQL Injection flaw. There's a zillion things the application can do to "reduce its attack surface" without fixing the flaw; for instance, it can log you out and lock out your account if you ever cause a SQL syntax error. Of course, virtually of these things are dumb.

Facebook could reduce its attack surface meaningfully by eliminating the static-file CDN. But this isn't a reasonable step to take; it generates minimal (infinitessimal!) privacy advantages for users while drastically complicating their service.
Textmate uses Paypal.
They do issue options. However, for tax reasons (and I'm sure other reasons), employee stock options have to expire within a set number of months after termination.
Thanks! Is there anything similar to sales taxes that are charged to the customer and then paid to the state?
Heh, looks like we might be past the point where somebody can remake a game in <canvas> and call it innovative. 10/11/2010, save the date.
CollegeHumour has a mirror: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1942324
This is usually how I share images: right-click, copy image address, paste in IM or email.

To your point, yes, these URLs remain in email archives and IM logs.

This is why Flickr changes an image's URL if you change its privacy settings.
Yep - we're aware of all that, and we can handle the various app-level changes... we just don't want to be in the "ongoing server maintenance" business.
I think (from other comments) you're implying that ISO/ESO options are contractually non-transferable (and can't be executed by non-employees), but that no similar contract governs actual restricted shares. Not convinced this is the case; with restricted stock, your shareholder's agreement probably allows the company to keep you from selling your shares.
Hey David,

I suggest a massive course correction, switch back to the old plan today, inform your users, open up your books and work out a plan together with your users. I know that that may be very difficult for you at this point but you are literally killing the chargify brand with how you go about this.

Go back to where you were 24 hours ago, then make very careful moves forward in concert with your userbase. You can still do it, wait a bit longer and the window of opportunity will close. As soon as people start to throw their dreams in to the garbage and notify their end users because of changes you have made chargify might as well close up shop. Ocean liners do not turn on a dime, they'll break and sink.

If the goal of all this is to shake out the 'free' tier remember that each and every business starts at zero.

The best thing you could probably do is to find a way to put a sunset clause on the free deal in concert with your users, reasonable terms all around and then to create a limited time free offer which will automatically convert in a model that covers your costs. If they grow over that you will recoup the loss of the initial free signups.

The data you have amassed on your customers profiles will need to be brought in on figuring out what kind of model will work best for both you and your customers. My bet would be that the model that matches the chargify demographic best would be one that cuts a merchant 180 days of slack to get going, after which they enter several tiered schemes where the cost per transaction goes down as the volume goes up.

Users don't care how you want to serve them, they care that they will be served in a way that works for them, and to tack on a fixed fee where there was none before is a way that does not work for lots of your users. If you think that only the small ones will be affected you can bet that if you don't work this out in a good way that the big ones will be looking to bail as fast as they can as well.

You made a mistake, the fix compounded the mistake (I know that from your perspective it looks like meeting them more than halfway but it really doesn't, $40, at 10 sales per month works out to $4 per sale, at 20 sales it is still $2 per sale and at 40 sales you are getting in to 'reasonable' territory.

If the support costs are what is killing you then work on reducing them further, excellent guides and a team of super users to help out the newbies.

Freemium does not mean 'yesterday you were all free, today you're all premium'.

good luck!
Do you have any basis for a belief that the government will make better decisions than the people?

One potential reason this might be true (which I point out more to observe than to advocate) is that the rules and proceedings of regulatory agencies are systematic, and tend to outlast individuals' terms of office. Agency rules generally require prior public consultation, are subject to the scrutiny of judicial review, and so forth. This rulemaking process exists to bring some objectivity to the subject of policy.

Of course, it fails frequently or we'd never have any bad policies to worry about. The process has inherent shortcomings; but then again, so do all the alternatives. There are many examples of business disregarding externalities leading to entirely avoidable tragedies of the commons.
The book is also on Google Books[1], and peering into the table of contents, the language is named "Go!" Perhaps someone is bitter. +1

[1]http://books.google.com/books?id=jyIrfDokmKgC&lpg=PR11&#...
If Google hadn't named their language "Go" I probably never would have heard of his language to begin with.

Personally "Go!" and "Google Go" are different enough to me that I wouldn't have trouble differentiating. I don't have trouble differentiating Digital Mars D and Dtrace D, either.
TechCrunch has become even more of a link bait generator of late.
check out the google webfonts http://code.google.com/webfonts
Ex C++ coder seeks young & vibrant web language for adventures and good times
My background spans a legal career, computer programming and server ops/management. Combining these fields I have an idea for a web services that I'd like to develop. My question is, what language or framework should I use?

My programming experience is mainly with C++ (Visual C++ & under linux) and scripting with BASH and perl. I recently built a website with ExpressionEngine which was good but I felt restricted (eg passing variables required odd syntax and didn't work in all cases) and hated having to edit via their back-end. I'm happy to learn a new language but want to learn the "right one" and also have reservations about starting a project while still being new to a language.

Finally, the choice is quite overwhelming (Python, PHP, Drupal, Plone, Java, GAE, ruby.. and then there's the frontend!) so I would be grateful for some pointers from some of the web hackers out there on possible languages, how to easily migrate given a mainly C++ background, and how to go about creating a new web app while still learning a language.
I've got floppy disks and zip drives and old, dead hard drives full of stuff which I can't run or read.

And that's for files that I created on hardware I own.

Amazon as a company is only 15 years old - will it be around in 50 years? Any given Kindle will only last for a few years - will I always be able to afford to buy a new one? Will they always be available to buy?

It is a big issue for me that I can't buy an ebook and have a reasonable expectation that the ebook will be mine for the rest of my life, and can be given to my kids to read.

It makes me think of ebooks as disposable - I can't build up a library. It's more like borrowing someone else's books where they can demand the book back.

But, like this guy, I still use them for convenience...
I don't think you can expect these services to lower pricing any time soon. Why? It's clear now that Chargify and Recurly, who have both tried a very friendly freemium model, vastly underestimated the costs and problems associated with the businesses they are building. In both cases, it's a good bet that they needed to either raise prices or go out of business.

Pricing only goes down once the business model is clearly established across multiple competitors. This space simply isn't clearly defined yet.
Did anyone really think Google was going to respond in any other way? I read Issue 9 when it came out along with some of the comments on it. I knew then Google would just close the ticket and do nothing.
I think it really depends on the idea. Sometimes it is good to write it over the weekend, release it, and see what up. Now if you are building a more interesting service, I would go for the two months. Sorry, but if I don't know the app, I cant tell!
Well it was the use of Canvas that I thought was innovative - but I didn't think to see if LR has been reimplemented in HTML5.

I must admit I posted partly because I was sure this would have found its way to HN already and wanted a lazy way to find an existing thread about it!
Starting up against an incumbent
WizardRSS Coverts Any Partial RSS Feed to a Full Feed