skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm glad you had a positive experience. Personally, I would prefer that my government did not infiltrate my social institutions, online or off, because it corrodes the trust people have for one another.

In 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy, Daniel Solove writes:

The problems caused by breaches of confidentiality do not merely consist of individual emotional distress; they involve a violation of trust within a relationship. There is a strong social value in ensuring that promises are kept and that trust is maintained in relationships. . .

In that quote Solove is referring to a business giving info to government despite its privacy policy. I think it is germane here because one doesn't expect something labeled "friend" to be an information gathering conduit for a 3rd party (such as governmental one or even a commercial one). The essay a good read for understanding some of the dimensions of privacy in contradiction to the "I've got nothing to hide" concept, which can be a convincing argument when you think you don't have anything to hide:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=998565
Marissa Mayer promoted to OC, focus on Location Based Services
it doesn't integrate with facebook, but people are able to vote on what they like in the results.
Disclaimer: I have watched the video but not tried the product, so some of these observations may not apply to the the product itself.

Overall, this looks like a great product. I know a number of people who find Google Website Optimizer complicated to use, and I would definitely recommend this to them as a simpler option. I love how slick the browser interface to edit pages is, and I think having the default 'engagement' metric so people can see results without having to set up a goal page is a brilliant idea.

There are a few things you have done which I would consider doing differently.

1. It looks like your mission is to make A/B testing really easy, but your pricing page at the moment doesn't really reflect that. Number of visitors tested is an easy metric, but one that it is hard for me to interpret without lots of knowledge of A/B testing. How many tests does this mean I can run how quickly?

I would also reconsider the additional features you offer in premium packages. Cross-browser testing sounds complex and makes me worry that your site edits will fail in IE6. I don't want to have to test it, I just want it to work. With uptime monitoring, what does this have to do with A/B testing? Bigger sites probably already have some form of monitoring already anyway, so it looks like they are going to pay for something they don't need. I think your core product is strong enough that you don't need to offer these.

2. Showing me the percentage significance level appeals to my inner stats nerd, but I suspect the sort of people I think will benefit most from Optimizely will have difficulty interpreting this number. What level is 'ok'? Having a rank out of 5 below doesn't really address this, is 4/5 ok or do I need 5/5? Google deal with this very well with their bars which turn red or green when they reach significance.

3. The 'select container' option to expand the selection seems non-obvious, and isn't how multi-select works in any other interface I've seen. Maybe allow people to select multiple components and then take their deepest common parent?

There are also some additional features I personally would like to see

1. It would be great if you gave an estimate for how long until my experiment will reach an appropriate significance level (obviously based on % change and traffic seen so far).

2. I would like to be able to choose my conversion action by clicking on a form button or link in your page editor.

3. It would be amazingly useful to have some automatic suggestions for how a page could be changed - on many occasions I've seen people resist A/B testing because the options are so wide and they don't know what to do. Doing this for some simple suggestions sounds possible - e.g. making key links bigger and moving them up the page. Doing anything more sophisticated could be a good challenge though :-)
I'm hoping OS XI is codenamed Def Leppard. "This one goes to 11!"
I don't like the emphasis these companies place on "forever". To me, the tragic part about death on the internet is how confusing and muddled the event of death is. We leave behind aliases and loose ends in several different communities. We die in the middle of a rapidly accelerating digital life process.

Facebook et al. will have to develop serious policies of death eventually. Someday a third of their users will be dead-- someday the majority of Facebook users may be dead. I think there's space for a web service that lets you compose your last words on these platforms, to be delivered programmatically through APIs and other means in the event of your death. Last emails, submissions, status updates, etc. A "Goodbye World" script, so to speak. To depart deliberately, gracefully (or maybe, explosively!) from our many virtual lives.
Great question. Even when it's just copying (and later removing) several javascript snippets on a page this can be a large hassle for several reasons:

1. For anyone who is non-technical, this can be daunting. Are the snippets in the right places? Was this deployed correctly? Have I set up my conversion goals correctly (GWO only allows for a single goal)? More often than not, tasks like this are passed from marketing onto IT, who are usually overworked as it is.

2. Even for technical folks, deploying and verifying a new version of one's site just to enable (and subsequently disable) a test can be a big hassle.

In our experience, it's often the marketers, inside sales, and product managers in an organization who have the strongest interest in A/B testing. We're trying to eliminate the burden (and subsequent pain) that testing places on IT/engineering, freeing those stakeholders to test to their hearts' content! :)
Bushido
Can't you just use your own layouts on the Mac, if something about the keyboard bugs you?

(I only tried using dvorak an the Macbook, and it works fine.)
I upvote questions if I've wondered the same thing myself, and it's already been answered. I only use favourite to follow the discussion.
i hear you, the flip side for me it reduces social anxiety. i can see what people are up to without having to interact with them directly...
Solar Power Blowing Up in the United States
Yes but I want people outside the company to see it.
Your idea realized in software.
Groundbreaking post 37signals has right here. Switching styles away from inflammatory trying to generate some traffic?
Hi Kevin, great to hear! I'm curious what felt buggy. Feel free to email us at support@optimizely.com and give us a heads up. We'd love to look into it!
it's a link to download the arcade fires new album, much more useful than the spam in google's results.
It depends how you approach the problem. I'm guessing here, from my own experience implementing social graph features, but here goes:

There are a couple of ways you can go about this, the first is the database: Join the network of people against the land of content and bring it back. This doesn't work (as an aside this is what people mean when they say web scale, it has nothing to do with web traffic, it's social graphs) your database will cry. All though not at first, in development it works fine, and you feel fine, and for a while you're ok, but you start growing....

Another way you can go about it is by denormalizing. In this world you store a pointer to each content item for each user. So anytime I do something all the people [following|watch|connected|friended] to me get a record indicating I did this. This works, but now you have lots of data (lots and lots of data!) spread all crazy around. You need some kind of system to push that data out to everybody. It's those last two that drive up your hardware usage, it's not necessarily web boxes, but it's boxes in the background broadcasting the events out to the world, and the datastores to hold it all. Depending on how your web code works you could also have a lot of overhead on the webservers putting all that stuff together.

My experience here comes from building the social features into toolbox.com. A good example is this page http://it.toolbox.com/people/george_krautzel/posts-connectio... That's all the posts from users connected to our CEO (all 750k of them). Getting that to return in near real time is super fun (and you can probably tell that I went down the DB join path before it all fell apart).
A good set of guidelines on how to run meetings effectively:

http://artofmanliness.com/2009/11/17/how-to-run-a-meeting/

(Not a joke, despite the whimsical domain name)
I think a lawyer has a bit more utility, in terms of avoiding massive potential liabilities, than telling me that amazing wisdom - until now unknown entirely to business people anywhere on earth and not to be found in any book on business - that "meetings are toxic".[1] Get real, and this isn't one-on-one it's going to be with many more people than most teachers consider optimal (20 or less), so $1000 is not cheap.

[1]http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php
This looks great. It looks like you are using google app engine, maybe a future post about how well it is working out for you.
I had a very similar experience and found this dentist (Ravi Sahdev) in Palo Alto to whom I've referred half a dozen or more people from my company to and everyone has loved him. He's so much better than any other dentist that I've gone to that it's hard to describe. And he's very up to date on all the latest advances in dental technology and tools. The website makes it sound like it's primarily for cosmetic dentistry but he does normal family work as well.

http://www.cosmeticdentistpaloalto.com/
Look in Knuth Vol 2, seminumericals. There's several different ways to do this.

Also, don't try to reinvent the wheel you'll only do a poor job.
A normal use case for a server would not be keeping quiet, but conserving energy is very much on server people's mind.
Hi Enjo, great question. I'm curious--how would you use an API to track a phone call? If you can describe the process as you'd implement it in your org, we might be able to suggest (or build!) a solution..
But why would I want to do all these things for the benefit of a toxic organization? That system feeds off people who try to do the right thing, then it chews them up and spits them out. In fact it relies on there being people who will do the right thing even tho' it means extra stress and no extra reward. Organizations like that deserve to collapse under their own weight.
> The only such meme that ever had success comparable to religion was nationalism, but it self-destructed in the world wars.

Sure, but why aren't their such memes? I can imagine all sorts of hypothetical cultures which don't feature judging gods but do feature a duty to have children.
Scared to Launch
So I'm just about ready to launch a public beta but I'm a little scared. I don't want any early bad reviews tainting things. Should I just launch a private beta 1st or just go for it.
The problem is that I will be travelling to startup school tomorrow and I don't want anything to go wrong when I'm at 40 thousand feet. Anyone experienced the same?
That’s a great article, thanks for that! The two guys behind the project really seem to be very thoughtful.
The parent cites a case (Feist v. Rural) where a judge ruled otherwise. Feist copied fictitious entries from Rural, but it was not considered copyright infringement.
From "inflammatory" to "so far beyond obvious that it ventures back into the patently false".
List.it (for Firefox)
Apple's 'anti-sexting' patent generating big buzz
I imagine it would be quite difficult to match up the phone call with what version of the website was being used. One idea: depending on how your incoming calls work you could try using different extensions on each version which would let you track it. A different phone number all together would work too, but might be confusing and bad for SEO.
This type of thing shows up in a lot of fiction books (always as an original idea). Check "Patriot Games" for an example.
Looking for underscore and found this interesting testing page: http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/test/test.html
If you read all the comments on this thread, you'll see that virtually all of the negative reactions to Chargify's move appeal to some form of "you need free customers to market your business". Sorry, I can see why you wouldn't enjoy reading this stuff, but insight about Chargify's business is exactly what this is.
Did Facebook "grow the beard" when they added Photos?
Securing this will be tough. I can't see how exposing SQL and the database schema on the client side, or running a dumb database driver layer on the server is a good idea.
I think there is a market for road-surveillance.

A camera that I hook to a telephone pole. Make it look like a bird house. It will log all license plates by my house.

I was actually thinking of building that solution but you have it!
> I think anyone who starts their own company doesnt have the time to get jaded.

Just beware the investors! The less you own, the less control you have.
According to Wikipedia, trap streets are not copyrightable:

In Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co., 796 F.Supp. 729, E.D.N.Y., 1992, a United States federal court found that copyright traps are not themselves protectable by copyright. There, the court stated: "[t]o treat 'false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright . . . . If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated." (Id. at 733)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street#Legal_issues
Asking already-demanding freemium users for donations (or charging a small fee) is like feeding mogwais after midnight.
That's how I meant it.
Apple granted patent on mobile multitouch
Ask HN: Liability insurance: pay before reading?
Should a liability insurance company make a startup pay a $1200 annual premium before letting you read the policy?

Background: I'm about to launch a bootstrapped startup, and the last big thing I have to do is get insurance.

I've been working with techinsurance.com. So far, they're the only broker that's even been willing to talk to a web startup with an unusual business model. They offered me a Beazley policy.

The problem is, they want me to fill out a couple "applications" and attach a check for the annual premium before they'll even let me read the policy. This means I've never seen a formal definition of my coverage. The applications specify a coverage limit in dollars, but that's only part of the story. If you've ever read an insurance policy, you know it's full of rules about what is and isn't covered, what circumstances would be excluded from coverage, and so on. That stuff really matters for a business. My business, in particular, has some unusual liabilities, and I'm concerned that they won't be covered by this policy I haven't seen.

In case you're wondering, the applications do not incorporate by reference any documents to which I have access. They refer to "the policy," but I've been told I'm not allowed to see the policy until I pay.

Forgive me for being a little naive about the insurance industry, but doesn't this seem backwards? I feel like I'm being asked to sign a contract I haven't read and buy a product I haven't seen.

Is this standard industry practice? Do I just have to bite the bullet and buy insurance without knowing what I'm really buying? Should I demand more disclosures? Or should I look for a different broker?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
I just used it to convert the HN RSS, and saw an item with this as the content: "Sorry, readability was unable to parse this page for content."
I just saw your pitch generated about 100 pageviews, do you see any traffic on your side?
So go with Lion, Mountain Lion, Lynx, Serval. Then it'll be 5-6 years from now and either the slang usage of "cougar" will fall out of use or at least the novelty will be gone and people will interpret it as an allusion to the cat itself.
Yeah, I remember talking to a friend who wanted to get into game development. I told him that the gaming industry has a bad reputation for making people work long hours for relatively low pay and a lot of stress.

His reply - "I don't care. I'll do whatever it takes."

I'm not into gaming so I don't really understand the drive. It seems to be very similar to the entertainment industry, except that employed game developers will never achieve the fame or riches of a well known actor or producer.

I'm all for being passionate about what you do as long as you know your value and don't let other people take advantage of it.
It's only really in certain areas that that happens, though, mainly webapps. If you want to be a popular provider of something else, free software is often still the way to go, even if you also want to make money.

Clojure, for example, could've adopted a freemium business model, say by allowing the free version to be used noncommercially but requiring a license to use it commercially. But it chose an OSS licensing model instead, I'm guessing at least partly because: 1) the main initial motivation was building an interesting language; and 2) non-free-software programming languages are a non-starter among many potential users.
I wonder how much this counted against an applicant.

In every substantial way, Google Maps was simply a better product than MapQuest from day one. Shockingly better. Would it be such an affront that MapQuest applicants should have a sense of taste?

Especially on the road to making their product better, if anything, using Google Maps should've been a bonus in an applicant's favor. Their sense of taste could move the organization forward.
Sorry, I should have said: I'm talking about the UK models.

The standard layout for UK keyboards has a dedicated # key right next to the return key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#United_Kingdom

Mac keyboards for the UK - all of them, not just the laptop keyboards - omit this. I have yet to figure out why, but it's an unfortunate choice.
How does StackOverflow need 5 servers while Digg needs 500?
I have also heard other accounts as well but yeah, it's probably bad to draw conclusions based on a couple people's accounts.

However, despite their size, large companies do generally seem to be quite uniform in their culture.
"A9 had the brilliant idea of daring oorza to write a high performance tracker in java..."

This can, in fact, be done. Pando's [X] managed, torrent-like p2p platform has a solid, fast, Java-based tracker component.

X http://www.pandonetworks.com
My understanding of the video is that the first one was 3D-printed, but they need the money so they can use injection molding, and your donation is a pre-order for the injection-molded batch they produce.
Even if your users have JavaScript enabled, they still need to download and run it before using your complex application.

Consider GMail. How awesome would it be if you didn't have to wait for its "Loading..." progress bar? It takes 2-4 seconds for that to go away on my computer. If you design for progressive enhancement, you can interact immediately and when JS is ready, it simply enhances what's already there. If done right, it's all the same interface.

If you don't mind waiting, your users may not agree: Google and Amazon both have noted significant losses in revenue at page delays much shorter than 2 seconds.
"Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, has been promoted to Google's Operating Committee, and will now focus on Location Based Services. "

Maybe it's just me, but that doesn't sound like a promotion...
I can't really say whether Android is harder, but I think Apple's tight design guidelines make the design easier if you're using the default built-in controls.
I agree with you and the posters below that you can't develop two versions. But I'd like to point out that "it doesn't work because JS is disabled" versus "it's not pretty because JS is disabled" are two different things, and they are not mutually exclusive. There are a slew of sites that work without JS even though they depend on it for "fancy" stuff. Plus you don't have to support two different sites in tandem, it's not exactly 100% more work. For example, instead of an AJAX call (which returns content), display the content in a new page, i.e. Slashdot's comment system -- when JS is turned off, clicking on a comment opens it up in a new page.
PLEDGE $50 OR MORE

Not only will you receive a new Glif when they are ready, but we will also mail you a 3D printed Glif immediately after funding ends.

347 BACKERS
The reasonable conclusion is that a bug exists where -- under certain circumstances -- rename(2) fails in a way that is not expected. It's a bug. It's not as if rename(2) is intentionally implemented in a way that is not atomic; it's that there is a bug. Should it be fixed? Yes. Does it mean that OS X is not Unix? No.
I'm a NoScript user and generally only whitelist JS on sites I use all the time and trust. I'm not overly paranoid about security, but the experience on the web with NoScript is far superior than without it in my opinion. What drives me absolutely insane is when a website is 100% useless unless JS is whitelisted. That instantly gets put on my list of sites to never ever go to again.
All our plans start with a 30-day free trial so anyone can start with Silver or Gold plan and at the end of the trial period switch plans.

We also offer 100% Money Back Satisfaction Guarantee so if at the end of any month you aren't satisfied for any reason (including not reaching statistical significance), we'd be happy to offer you a full refund for the month.
You can use simple iptables rules to block brute forcing, while still leaving things open for you on standard ports:

http://www.digitalsanctuary.com/tech-blog/debian/using-iptab...

Although now I've moved to CSF which does this and much much more.
Is this done in hardware, or would it be possible simply to change the keyboard layout to US?
Can someone explain what "THIS PROJECT WILL BE FUNDED ON TUESDAY NOV 2, 9:45PM EDT." means? Is it when, if funds keep accruing at the current rate, they'll have made their goal? Or is that when they'll get the money they've raised from Kickstarter?

I didn't see anything on the page explaining that bit of information.
Show HN: Share, organize and discover what your friends are seeing on the web
Hey HN,

My co-founders and I have been working on a project for the last month or so, and we'd like to get your input on it. We wanted to hear your thoughts on what we're doing - so check out our landing page, and let us know what you think/understand.

Does it sounds like something you guys would want to use?

http://www.thesharedweb.com/alpha/intro

We'll tell you guys more about exactly what we're doing as the conversation evolves, but we just wanted to see what the initial reaction is, and what you understand (i.e. are we describing it in a way that makes sense).

Really excited to hear your thoughts!

Cheers,
Nicolae, Kareem and Nav
One thing they can do is package-manage the Ruby/Python/Perl/Apache/vim/emacs/gcc/etc. that either comes built into Mac OS X or gets installed with the developer tools. Current package managers either have to work around that (Homebrew) or maintain an entirely separate repository (Macports).
I'm really looking forward to the advances that are being made in solar power. Just a few short years ago, it was still mostly an inefficient pipe dream. We're a long way off from being able to fully charge daily-used commuter vehicles with on-board solar panels (to reduce our dependence on coal and oil burned to charge the current wave of electric vehicles) but grid-connected solar farms are gaining a lot of traction. I like that.