skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He glossed over it, but this code does include URL-free posts dropping off faster. See the stuff dealing with "nourl-factor*". I don't know arc at all, but it appears that having no URL multiplies your final score by a factor of .4, meaning that it's ranked almost 3x lower than it otherwise would be. That surprises me; I've noticed that Ask HN get rated lower, but it doesn't seem that extreme.

So is Hacker News is a fork of news.arc, rather than straight news.arc? I figured it was, but never heard that officially (since people refer to news.arc as the HN "source code").

Edit: Also, the "lightweight" thing is interesting. There's something in place that sees if the post is a "rallying cry" or is mostly made of images. Additionally, if you link directly to an image file, or to some list of domains that have been deemed lightweight, that'll get marked as lightweight as well. Lightweight posts have a .3 factor, meaning that they're even more deflated than URL-free posts.
The book is on Lulu [1] and there is an Information Week article [2] on the issue. I would be pretty ticked if Google (a web search company) stomped on my work. It just seems like a really cruddy thing to do. It's in the logic / agent group of languages and I have run across the article a couple of times but it is my no means famous. It is not like Google's Go is super well known either, so picking a new name that could be googled would probably be the kind thing to do.

[1] http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/lets-go/705004

[2] http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/web_services/sh...
"Right now government prevents parents from trying to toughen up their 13 year old child by making him work in a coal mine. Parents who want to do such a thing are being prevented from making this bad decision by government.
It would be a bad decision on my part if I knowingly made unsafe products and sold them to people. Government does its best to prevent me from making this bad decision."

Well both of your examples are ones where one person is harming another. I mean if you wanted to argue that government prevents people from "harming" themselves, like assisted suicide or drug use, you might have an argument, but I think you will find the libertarian position to be rather consistent on those matters. (And also very tolerant of individuals stepping in to help each other out).
The current HN algorithm probably follows the same basic idea, but the implementation is more complex because of spammers.

I did a fast test of how placements would look like with the vanilla HN algorithm using the current frontpage: http://paste.plurk.com/show/316811/

The code to generate the new sorting: http://paste.plurk.com/show/316812/

As you can see the rankings are not the same, but very similar...
Bill Gates Announces $20 Million Program to Expand Educational Technology
File uploads are terrible.

I was looking for the single textbox where you could paste an URL and the generator would then crawl either that page (or the page and all its subpages) and produce a montage of all images found, along with the corresponding CSS.

Now that would have been not only possible but really simple!
New video delivery startup launched.
Playtform lets you publish your videos/audios only once, in any settings you chose, and use one universal link to deliver it all media-capable devices, using streaming, re-streaming or progressive download.
the categorical assumption there is that spending, no matter how responsible, is a good thing.
>Status: Unfortunate

That's cold, Google.
Here is the direct link to the video:

http://www.1938media.com/windows-mobile-will-be-a-fail/

More time is spent talking about Twitter never being profitable than Windows Phone 7 being a failure. I do actually agree with both of his points of view. I don't think Windows Phone 7 will restore Microsoft to mobile glory and I don't think Twitter will ever make any money.
Adding opt-in on every account would be a good way to do this.

Failing that, I reserve the right to mark your email as spam and/or report you to spamhaus.
There are some great language names for search, but go isn't one of them. Perl and PHP seem to work really well. Ruby and Python sure don't.
Lightcrest is a complex managed hosting provider that works with clients to ensure HIPAA compliance. We build fully managed environments (servers, storage, network, physical security) and work with application developers and management on a variety of compliance issues.

http://www.lightcrest.com
Customer Experience Should Be King
There's nothing to stop you from submitting a story titled "$foo is hiring $language/framework developer!" with a description of the job or linking to the post.

And FWIW, Flurry's analytics library has an option to check for if the app is cracked or not. I haven't used it, but it is there. Its just a matter of turning it on, if you're already using them for analytics.
My name is David Hauser (@dh) and I am a founder at Chargify as well as the Grasshopper Group where I have spent the last 7 years serving hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs and helping them to succeed. I want to respond directly here and invite anyone to reach out to me personally on Twitter or email to talk about this or anything else.

We made a mistake with how we implemented and communicated a massive price increase and in doing so totally ignored our loyal and amazing customers that spent the time to integrate with Chargify. After starting many companies with NO outside capital I understand the struggles of a bootstraping company or lean startup so we should have done better with this.

Listening to the feedback here and via many other channels this was very clear and we wanted to make a quick change. We have released a $39/month plan that supports 100 customers for anyone that has signed up for an account, does not matter if you never used or have not started to integrate. Some important points.

- Only active customers are ever counted in your customer count

- $39/month plan will be available for anyone that has a Chargify account now. Do not worry that you will miss signing up, it will be available for you

- Offering the type of support that we want to is not cheap, and it is how we do business

- PCI Level 1 is both expensive and valuable and we want to provide that to our customers

While we firmly believe that Chargify and many competitors provide great value to a company that wants to do recurring billing we realize the mistake that was made. We will not go back to free as it will not allow us to support our customers the way we want to. There will always be a "cheap" or cheaper competitor out there but we are not that one.
A problem (IMHO) with the HN ranking algorithm is that once a post fails to get traction (perhaps because things were busy at the time it was submitted), it won't really be able to get traction later, even if it's re-discovered 6 hours or 2 days later. Seems to me like velocity ought to be taken into account a little more for items that have otherwise languished.
Anyone can submit such a post, though I don't know if job offers are frowned upon, or even upvoted. Adding a fun puzzle/challenge will probably help though ;)

There are also the monthly "who's hiring" posts.
Gates Foundation Announces $20 Million Fund to Improve Education with Tech
> Riak means "ripple" in Indonesian.

It's also more commonly used as a root meaning "yell".
Selling shovels to Android gold miners
The original bug submitter's language, originally called Go, is now called Go!: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_(programming_language)
You are right.

According to Wikipedia, SAT 1600 (post-1995) is 99.93 percentile, so about 1 in 1429 (3.4 standard deviations).

Given that there are millions of people taking SAT, in absolute numbers there should be plenty of people hitting the test ceiling.

Interestingly, pre-1995 apparently had much higher ceiling, with only 1 in 142,857 getting score above 1580 (4.6 standard deviations).

Which BTW means Microsoft was founded by some really crazy dudes.
No doubt, you are okay in that scenario. But people spending more than 70% on Stuff (i.e. people marginally poorer than you) are still screwed, and furthermore, the poorer they are relative to you the more screwed they will be.
too bad doesn't help people who were planning to use them but never sign up (we left the billing system at last)
Some weaknesses of this algorithm are:

(1) Wall-clock hours penalize an article even if no one is reading (overnight, for example). A time denominated in ticks of actual activity (such as views of the 'new' page, or even upvotes-to-all-submissions) might address this.

(2) An article that misses its audience first time through -- perhaps due to (1) or a bad headline -- may never recover, even with a later flurry of votes far beyond what new submissions are getting.

Without checking the exact numbers, consider a contrived example: Article A is submitted at midnight and 3 votes trickle in until 8am. Then at 8am article B is submitted. Over the next hour, B gets 6 votes and A gets 9 votes. (Perhaps many of those are duplicate-submissions that get turned into upvotes.) A has double the total votes, and 50% more votes even in the shared hour, but still may never rank above B, because of the drag of its first 8 hours.

(I think you'd need to timestamp each vote for an improved decay function.)
I should have explained further: when I say "that says a lot about the failure of AI", I mean that from a language whose target is AI, you would expect some kick-ass solutions to common issues. Common Lisp is good to solve hard problems, but then - after more than 50 years - you have to fight to install a library, when "lesser" languages make it a breeze. With direct words: I think AI failed because it tackled hard problems instead of everyday ones.

Obligatory Xkcd quote: http://xkcd.com/224/
Yes, we are hoping to be able to expand to support other online retailers in the future.
Nice post.
Do you know what is the algorithm for the ranking of comments? I think this would be interesting to write about that too.
> Walled-gardens are the way of the past. One of the reasons Apple is killing it [...]

Wait, what‽
Spying on people is rude, but you do know that there are at least 4 intelligence agencies from various countries between you and your recipient right?
In Perl's case that was quite intentional.

Larry Wall used grep over a Usenet feed to be sure that he would catch all references to Perl. (He did this before Kibo popularized the technique.) He therefore wanted a name that (among other things) would have very few false positives.
What cock-up? Businesses are allowed to raise their prices. What did they do wrong?

(Apart from claiming that PCI was a benefit).
This is a good place to post and critique these sorts of ideas: http://www.halfbakery.com/
Feedback on a Business Idea
A little while ago, someone here posted how they used Mechanical Turk to get feedback on their business idea. I thought it was a great idea.

So, I'd like to ask for feedback on an idea I've thinking about:

An application where you can enter and store your business ideas and then request feedback on your ideas from Mechanical Turk. This process would be automated (enter a couple of fields and submit) where you would set your price and enter your questions.

The answers would be stored in the application's database, parsed and analyzed, so the user can see them.

If the user is pleased with their results and would like to continue further testing of their idea, they can then create a landing page for a description and signup for when their product releases. The user could choose from either some pre-made designs or upload their own html/css/images for a more customized landing page.

Analytics would be gathered for the landing pages as well as the storing of email addresses for signups. A short URL will be provided and an opportunity to share the URL through various social media outlets.

I had thought about maybe adding a custom form builder so the user could create a survey for their landing page, if they so desired.

Would love to get feedback on the idea. If it sucks, tell me it sucks. If you have something to add, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks!!
It looks like a lot of your bottom links are staying on the tv. subdomain, but don't resolve to anything there. (i.e. tv.airbnb/jobs 404s, the links should probably go to www.
Almost what i expected. I got a 34k offer (same industry) with good benefits but am unsure if its worth the move. Main problem seems to be the rent which is ridiculous if you want to minimze commute time to the centre.
Yeah, i didn't understand that one at all. Lame.
"Either Come to the Valley or Stay Home and Play with the Losers"
It's an interesting map, but I would've preferred some alternate weighting scheme, such as by calories consumed or tonnage produced. While I like olives and dates, do they get produced in significantly greater quantities than barley and wheat (which appear much smaller)?

As it is, this seems to put an undue weight on the Old World staples.
Would like to know more. Email sent.
I am wondering, at what point does it make sense to own your own servers (and switches, routers, whatever) as opposed to rent them monthly through a VPS service?

When your cost of capital is less than the hosting company's cost of capital plus the hosting company's markup.

New startups have a very high cost of capital -- because there's a high risk of them not paying money back, investors demand high rates of return -- so for a young startup renting is generally better than buying. Large well-established companies have a very low cost of capital -- banks will happily loan them money at 5% interest -- so for them it's worth buying hardware.

Figure out where you are on the spectrum and do the math.
Feel free to get in touch. My email address is in profile.
There are two other big contributors for Harmony project: Intel(provided JVM called DRLVM) and Google, who is using it's classes in Android.

It's nice seeing IBM working on OpenJDK, it would be great if they would share some of their J9 tech like Oracle is doing now with JRockit.
Imperative vs Declarative scenarios in user stories
is it fixed now? i just changed up the theme.
And I thought "WONTFIX" was harsh.
I see this as a sort of a trademark issue, even though both probably dont have a Go trademark. The guy may have been the first to "take" the name, but what he did not do is to be successful enough with it to earn a de facto trademark. Basically nobody knows his Go, so there is no trademark. And without a trademark, legal or de facto, you cant claim exclusive rights to a name.

A trademark (again, legal or de facto) violation would have occured here if google knowingly took the name Go to gain an advantage from the (non-existing) good reputation this guy built around his Go. But they didnt, since their Go, by the virtue of Googles impact alone, probably got more brand awareness in the first hour of the first presentation, than this guy's Go in 10 years.

Does this mean that the "big guys" can simply take over names from the small guys? Yes and no. Yes, because if you want to protect a name, protect it legally, as everybody else does. Theres a legal mechanism for that. And No, because the guy still can keep his name, Google didnt trademark it and then sued him. The world is large enough for 2 (and more) Go's. Just being the first to take a name for some obscure personal mini-project nobody else cares about _should_ not mean that now nobody can use the same name, worldwide, ever again.
This has been the case with my bootstrapping post. It has been revived a few times thanks to tweets and other references since its initial publication to HN, but it has never risen back to where it was, even though it has twice as many points as it did 11 days ago.
Stem cells used to treat spinal-cord patient
http://www.lowendbox.com/ has a lot of listings, many cheaper than 36/year, depending on whether you prefer Xen or OpenVZ. I'm not hosting a site on it; I don't need much.
Profile of Saptarshi Guha, creator of RHIPE (R+Hadoop integration)
Asking how much you should pay to develop a game is pretty much like asking how much does a car cost.

I think the old adage that it takes money to make money is mostly true and applies here as well. Trying to put an app, especially a game, together on the cheap typically results in product that the customer doesn't have an interest in. Getting the right technical and creative resources together is critical.

Sometimes you can strike gold but if you follow this plan you might need to be ready for several failures before experiencing any success.
perhaps rogerclark is referring to this comic alone; it indeed seems to offer a technical reference as the sole point of humor, at least in the final frame.

Although I do enjoy frame 3 on its own merits.
CherryPy, in combination with oursql (+DBUtils to make it multithread safe because libmysql.so isn't). Caching is done by memcached (plus, I must look into Varnish). Templating by HTMLTemplate. I made two small patches to CherryPy to make it more agreeable for a site which serves 900 domain names (using the VirtualHost dispatcher).
some reliable self-hosted alternatives for people who need to jump quickly. rails: http://github.com/maccman/saasy rails: http://railskits.com/saas/ php: http://www.opengateway.net/
You have addressed neither of my concerns:

1. How does a government official become wiser and less susceptible to manipulation or being duped? How is it that's he's got an edge over my decision-making skills?

2. If government is acting as a nanny, how can we prevent that from becoming an obstacle toward innovation (which is just another word for "risky behavior")?

Trite and silly replies don't make these concerns go away.
Change the contract in midstream without any notice whatsoever?

That's inexcusable for a service provider.
I hardly think this qualifies as stomping on his work.

Not to mention that a lot of people would have never heard of his language if Google didn't come out with their own Go.
Do you think they have janitors on their payroll on full time basis?

All of them? Probably not. Some of them? I'd be shocked if they didn't - our much smaller urban school system certainly does, and they are up to the eyeballs in cleaning up messes. I'd presume that NYC's janitorial staff would be that much busier.

Could you please find the breakdown for me?

Here you go: https://www.nycenet.edu/offices/d_chanc_oper/budget/exp01/y2...

And about WH Initiative, [..] Where does the other 60% go?

The other line items - "Strengthening Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian-serving Institutions," "Strengthening Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-serving Institutions," "Strengthening Native American-serving nontribal institutions," etc (summing up all those line items gives you $588.9 million)

Who approved it?

Presumably Congress.

And if certain colleges were 'historically' black, why do we have to spend 240 million in 2009 to strengthen them?

Huh?

And here's my biggest concern: How do you evaluate if you are getting worth for your 538 millions?

Having been on the ass-end of an FAR audit, I can guarantee they've found some metric to evaluate the results of the spending.
FWIW, my yahoo mail account with default settings passes that just fine.
Encryption on disk/tape and CORBA endpoints to z/OS legacy.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/z/os/zos/tools/java/products/j...
Funnels for Web Startup Pirates
Dave McClure from Founders Fund gave a presentation September 2009 on Startup Metrics for Pirates during the the London Seedcamp.

He defined important point like the AARRR! model (Acquisition: users come to site from various channels, Activation: users enjoy 1st visit: "happy” experience, Retention: users come back, visit site multiple times, Referral: users like product enough to refer others, Revenue: users conduct some monetization behavior AARRR!) Using this model it became clear to me that alle the tools we offer are a product of a hypothesis and analyzing a funnel. The Customer Lifecycle starts with site visitors and has the goal of user retention.

Based on this and feedback from our beta testers Reedge is now extended with a funnel tool. You can easily build advanced funnels by user metrics we store or copy actions in your pages that trigger funnel steps.

If you installed Reedge already on your site you can now get funnels that are build on historical data. Reedge calculates conversion rates of the entire funnel and shows you how every step imact the next. We also find users that skipped a step and will add those in future steps.

As all other features in Reedge: behavioral targeting, personalization, a/b testing, multivariate testing, geotargeting, segmentation also funnels is free to use for all beta users.

See original article on http://blog.reedge.com/funnels-for-web-startup-pirates.html
Because the government is not productive, (in the marxist sense). To be sure, there are state-owned corporations that are producing real, consumable goods, or infrastructural improvements. In those cases the stimulus may be real, but it raises the question of whether or not (in the case of, say highway spending where there's a clear government imperative) government could be doing the spending in a more measured (and non-panicky) way that correctly responds to need and demand - or (in the case of say, veteran's healthcare, education, public service pensions) whether or not having unlimited balance sheets promotes bureaucratic inefficiency.
'The Simpsons' needs more coverage?
Oh. Ouch. Thanks for clarifying.
I empathize with you're sentiments, but I ran a split test for a SaaS based business and it turns out "packages" convert better, at least for their target market (law firms). It would be nice if everything was just a continuous curve, but people are more sold on "plans".
they certainly stimulate discussion!

Zing.
Flags are the main factor that you've missed I'm not quite sure how to measure them reliably but from what I've seen in terms of 'jumps' downward on a heavily flagged post it looked like 6 flags will take you off the homepage on to page two when you have about 20 upvotes. Maybe that will allow you to model it.
How about some historical data on this ratio?

Historical data may not be of much use given how much schools have changed in the last 20-30 years with mainlining, foreign-student integration, increases in poverty, ADA, etc.

IT is supposed to reduce the number of people needed

Heh. IME I've always seen the opposite - computers were supposed to reduce the number of people needed for a task but small business need to hire an IT guy to take care of the system, thereby increasing the payroll.

the others should be flat

Only if you assume that all else stayed the same, and things clearly haven't.
I would have just used WORKSFORME.
I find this to be an incredibly elitist statement.
Why you should go to Rails Camp
Right, that's my point. Once you're in America, it's knowledge you'll need.
also, its my understanding that PCI is required for anyone who 'transmits' card data, i.e anyone who uses the chargify API. If you dont have your game tight you are not PCI compliant and liable for any card data losses, regardless of chargify being compliant.
Ah yes, you're right, the 'nourl' is there, it's in the arc bit, but I couldn't find that in the graphs or in the python code.
This is popular misconception. It sounds good, but it just isn't true.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~shapiro/TaxRebates.pdf