skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It wasn't really an uphill battle at all.

Due to the way dealers are compensated (i.e. on volume for the most part), their first priority is simply to sell a car (irrespective of how much margin they make). Thus, a highly-qualified CarWoo! buyer on their doorstep is a very attractive prospect.

Further, we don't cut into dealers' margins as much as you'd think. Not all buyers' first priority is price. A lot of the time it's fit (i.e. the car has the right options, color, etc.) and a good relationship with the dealer. Buyers can use CarWoo! to play hardball if they want, but, for example, the vast majority never even use the counter-offer tool.

The pitch to the dealer is pretty simple: "We've got a buyer in your area who's looking for <car description>. She's paid us 50 bucks to help her through the car-buying process so you know that she's highly qualified. She wants to buy a car in the next week. Would you be interested in making her an offer through our website? It's completely free for you to sign up, it's free to make her an offer, and we won't even charge you if you sell her a car!"

How could you say no to that? :)
A few years ago I taught a short game programming class. Just for kicks we had a quizz where the students had to look at 10 small downloadable games and estimate how much effort had gone into each of them. PopCap's Bejeweled 2 stuck in my mind.

The estimates ranged from 'a weekend' to 'maybe a month'. The truth: pre-production with 3 senior people for 2 months, post-production and polish with a team of 10 for a year. There were a lot of little gem games at the time. There still is. But Bejeweled was the one that sold over 50 million units.

Polish, polish, polish.
You might try this: From the Finder, Cmd-Shift-A, which opens the Applications folder, then your first few characters, then Cmd-Down to open.

It seems like a lot of keystrokes, I know, and you have to switch to the Finder and it only works on initial characters (e.g. LIghtroom, not LightRoom) -- but since there's no search involved it "feels" extremely fast, which is often the thing that trumps all else.
I don't understand people using a CMS thinking that Google Website Optimizer (GWO) for A/B tests is hard

I got myself a plugin for WordPress that lets you insert in any page the GWO javascripts
I created a variation page on WordPress, identified the original one and the conversion page.
On the site i created the test, started it and it's just working.

But even if you're not using a CMS, copy/paste some code at the beginning and end of a HTML page? how is that so hard?

Edit: clarified
Just remember, 1/2 of the world gets by with an IQ under 100.
Holy cow, "Bing" appears in there 13 times (including the image), once even starting and ending the same sentence. 14 if you include the title of the page.

Are they being paid by the instance?
To sell a product, that takes months to integrate, and change the pricing structure completely without warning is basically insane business practice. At LEAST provide a per user rate for the little guy, and change the t+c to assure customers there will be fair warning and 'not more than x% per annum increase'. A price change for a product like that should be given 6months notice and an incentive to grow into the new structure (ie grow to over 100 customers before we change the price and you'll get 10% off for another 6months.
Google Apps Premier Gmail not getting additional storage...
How would skipping across the atmosphere give you more energy than you started with?
Okay now I wonder what they spend that time on, because I would never have guessed it took that long. Is it because it takes so long to get anything done in Objective C? Most IOS apps don't have that many features.
I agree. There is no field of human endeavor (except war) where you can spend so much and have so little to show for it, as the enterprise software business.
Code Like A Pirate – The #rstats Appliance (Cutlass Optional) – RC1 Available
Do you have a background in econometrics or regression analysis? You might be able to develop a model to predict winning horses.
I'd reckon that most of them are FOSS weenies and/or security paranoid. At least, that's the common thread among my peers who disable JS as a matter of principle. They are proud of it, and they are happy to find a reason (like requiring JS) to snub your web app.

Then there are the NoScript people, who are willing to whitelist your site to allow JS if they think there is value in it. These people skew the numbers but are pretty reasonable when it comes to turning JS on.
Oh, that's easy: The USA didn't release the information, because they did not want the Soviets to retaliate by revealing that the Americans had never been on the moon.

(You can always rescue a conspiracy theory from the facts.)
Mobile developer here: Most definitely android is costlier to produce feature for feature than iOS.
Sure, but the 10/GUI is managing the windows though. It's a different way of doing window management, but that's still what is it. I'm curious to know if ary had something else in mind.
What level of granularity are you using in your estimates? Are you just calculating a number for the whole (eg "I think that will take 120 hours") or are you also breaking that down as much as possible? I've found that if I can get an estimate broken down into tasks of <10 hrs/ea then it actually turns out to be pretty close.

That being said, the larger the project is, the greater the probability of underestimatitis. As soon as you hit 250+ hours, I've found estimates to become increasingly less accurate.
The reason package management works better on Linux is not because there's a better package manager program. Rather, it's because there are hundreds of developers for Debian, Fedora, et al who put serious time into making sure the packages themselves work well. Few OS X users really care about Unixy packages, and even fewer actually work on one of the package managers, so bugs just don't get ironed out enough.

I don't see much Apple is likely to do to help. They could bless a package manager as official, include it in OS X, and pay for build-boxen and for people to work on it; but you'd still need a lot of community involvement, and that's not Apple's cup o' tea.

Apple could also just make a few things easier about building nix packages:
Currently the OS X linker will automagically look for libraries in /usr/lib and /usr/local/lib by default, this should become easier to turn off so that packages don't end up with hidden dependencies on stuff the user threw in /usr/local.
* A lot of libraries that are extremely common on other nix aren't included in OS X, eg: readline, iconv, gettext. But many of these are GPL3, so don't count on Apple being helpful.
Universal, backwards-compatible binaries are currently a PITA to build from the command-line. You need to specify the SDK, DEPLOYMENT_TARGET, and compiler separately; and then if you ended up using different SDKs for different architectures, you need to use lipo to combine the results. Some way to specify all this stuff at once, and use sensible defaults would be great: 'gcc --sdk=ppc/gcc-4.0/10.4 --sdk=x86_64/clang/10.6 ...'
I have a Sony Vaio VGN-SR520G. Everything Ubuntu-wise works perfectly.
I grew up in Vancouver, Canada - home of EA's largest office, and knew many people who worked for them.

They deliver code because the number of glory-seekers is basically infinite. They can afford to burn people out and abuse them to no end because there are a hojillion more lined up outside the door, just begging for someone to get burned out and leave so they can get in. I also knew some testers, and heard about the horrific hours that they voluntarily put themselves through on the vague promises by management that exemplary performance in testing could be a path to development. This rarely actually happened, but it happened enough that the testers would basically pummel themselves with work for that off chance.

At this point I'm unconvinced that the majority of CS grads will realize what a shithole the games industry is in terms of sane employment. It seems to take some first-hand experience (I've also known people who interned with EA and then ran away screaming) for people to realize that making games is a completely different beast than playing them.
Ask HN: I need a complicated optimization algorithm created. Where to find help?
We have a rewards company where, on login, the user is presented with several different offers they can choose to complete.

Offers pay different amounts and have different conversion rates, and since offers on the top of the pile get clicked more, it makes sense to optimize the offer ordering based on their performance.

We have a pretty rudimentary system in place now based mostly off of CPC, but it's not nearly as efficient as it could be and it's not good at creating a score for new offers and getting them properly integrated into the system.

Getting this done the right way is over our heads. Any suggestions on where we can find some expert help?
It's another of those situations where duplicating a polished application like that could indeed take 160 hours. It's downright easy when it's in front of you. You could probably do it in that time frame while learning a new language and a new framework to implement it in.

Discovering what constitutes "polish" for your application takes enormous amounts of time, iterations, failures, and attentive and intelligent developers / designers.
That fish is terrifying..
Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for the reply.

So basically this is for those folks who are making real "web applications" -- meaning applications where a lot is happening on the client side, typically more of a "single URL/page", with dialog boxes and whatnot as opposed to a bunch of pages in the more traditional "web site" sense.

I have often considered trying out Cappuccino, but for some reason none of the websites I build end up being "web applications" in this sense. But I can't help but wonder if that's because they aren't, or if it's because I'm not thinking about them the right way.

It's outside the scope of this topic, but I can't help but ask: "How do you know when a website becomes a web application"? Is it the scope of the problem (trying to do "one thing", e.g. edit a photo, vs. presenting an entire web site full of information?) Or is it truly just a preference thing? I can only think that as projects like Node.js gain prominence, the lines will continue to be blurred...
lol... why is that? the eyes?
Negativity is Contagious
"Behavior econometrics shows us that in some areas, our economic behavior is not what rationality would suggest. ... we expect upward movement of wages, and won't tolerate nominal decreases, even when buying power is increasing so that real wages are increasing."

I won't dispute that some effect along these lines might have been measured. But please realize this is a reaction (irrational or not) to the state of affairs at the time the reaction had.

In a deflationary environment, the reaction may well be quite different. And in fact, I expect it would.

What you've identified is a reaction to inflation-- that is, people knowing they need to keep getting more money to keep even-- that isn't irrational at all.

But it doesn't justify inflation, or show that inflation is good.

In a deflationary environment, I'm pretty sure this effect would not be there.
I'm trying to get some attention from Google about this (potential) privacy issue. How can I be sure that "google.com" is my own Google account? Why does the authorization get automatically renewed after I revoke it, and without my consent? Why does a Google service require an additional authorization to access my account, and why doesn't Google provide any information about it? Worse, I have no way to confirm that it isn't someone else's account that have full access to my data. If it's the case, someone may have read my private calendars for months, and the only way to stop this would be to delete my whole Google accounts and the 80+ services associated with it.

This issue has reported 4 months ago here http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=44a4a... and here http://blogoscoped.com/forum/173175.html (and I submitted a report at http://www.google.com/support/accounts/bin/request.py?contac...), but I haven't heard of any Google employee about it.

I'm 99.9% sure there's no privacy breach but I find troubling that they haven't reacted yet...
> I think it's safe to say that what comes next will be fairly big.

My feeling is that this unlikely because it doesn't seem like they've had enough time or resources to dedicate to something big. It's been one year since the release of Snow Leopard and since that year they've released an OS on a new hardware platform and a heavily updated iOS for the iPhone.

I think it's far more likely that this is an incremental release focused on user concerns with perhaps some other new software.
I'm not naive enough to think that Google is looking out for the little guy in the privacy arena, but I assume this isn't the default (opt-out) behavior. Anyone have an authoritative link on this topic?
This is a great question!

The inspiration for Optimizely came from my experience during the Obama campaign where I was the Director of Analytics. We used Google Website Optimizer extensively and even tried Omniture Test & Target.

The biggest pain point for us was setup time & implementation. We were all pretty technical guys but we only had so many hours in the day. Having to go back to the code base and remove add noscript blocks everywhere was a huge tax on our resources. Omniture has a similar pain called "mBox hell" caused by having to keep going back to your CMS or code base to make changes every time you want to run a new experiment.

We probably only had the opportunity to run 10% of the experiments we wanted to during the campaign. In the end it meant an incremental $60 million we were able to raise but I'm convinced that if we had Optimizely during the campaign that number would have been a lot bigger.

Google Website Optimizer is a great product but if you are short on time and don't want to muck with your code give Optimizely a try. Certainly let us know if you disagree!
I can't seem to add more than 3 bookmarks.

Also you should have a short url that I can tweet/email to someone else that will load up the bookmarks I saved. This would be helpful if I was trying to help someone find information.
5% in many companies is a ton of money. I would definitely take that deal in several companies I know.
I can't speak to Android SDK's maturity, but I can say that the foundation of the iOS SDK has been around a long time. All our Foundation classes are still prefixed with NS. Almost all of the most basic stuff, and even a lot of higher level stuff as well, has come over from MacOS X and NextStep before that.
How many degrees of separation are they allowed?
Your face book page links to the eff = rejected?
A friend of yours links to eff, a friend of a friend ^ 6 links to eff?

Also AFAIK you don't put a social security number on facebook. Do they just look up John Doe, assume thats you and base their decision on that person?
I was just talking to an old school journalist last night about the same topic. A perhaps apocryphal story (it's not on Google, so it can't be true, can it?) but good nonetheless:

Years ago, well before even Murdoch ownership, the NY Post was knicking sports scores from the New York Daily News. Competition being what it was, the Daily News went so far as to not only falsify some scores, but to falsify some schools, making up new institutes of education throughout the 5 boroughs.

I can only imagine the page one headlines once the Post was outed.
Just off the top of my head, I'd say it's pretty much useless without a betting strategy. I'd recommend starting with "Dr. Z's Beat the Racetrack". It's out of print, but you should be able to find a copy.
It's very difficult to give an average price on a car since there is so much variation and there are so many nuances to each car.

What I can say is that, on average, we save buyers over $3000 off the sticker price of the car. The range of savings is $-6101 to $16,205 (for a car that was very difficult to find and one that the dealer clearly wanted to move, respectively).

I can't knowledgeably comment on pricing by location right now, but we'll be releasing some cool data around that in the near future.
With follow-ups "Polecat" and "Meerkat" for, say, whatever the fork of iOS that ends up powering the descendants of AppleTV become ...

(Sorry, excessive whimsy. Won't let it happen again.)
Wow, another Windows feature!
Hack an email account
I like the idea of Finder handling multiple types of filesystems. Seems like an elegant solution to this problem to me -- move device management out of applications and into the operating system, where that should be.

The elegance of that solution seems too much for Apple to ignore.

I wonder if this could prompt Apple to adopt Fuse as a means of filesystem abstraction in Finder?
It took me 60 seconds or so of blind clicking around before I even realised what the site did, and this was after reading the description on this post.

Maybe include some information on the front page describing how the service works. If you want to go all out link to a video demonstration of it working or a quick walk through.
An entity who uses violence to extract wealth from people is not corrupted by other entities bribing them for relief.

The very essence of government is corruption. It is simply the mafia with an indoctrination program that teaches kids to believe that it isn't evil.
Make them follow the mouse for extra creepiness! Especially if it's a subtle, slow change.

I don't actually have an issue with it, I just think that could make it "terrifying". Nightmare-worthy, maybe.
Anecdote: I know I'm not a very big target, but disabling password authentication and using fail2ban has kept all of my servers and home machines safe and hacker free for multiple years now. Even during the Debian SSH key fiasco, fail2ban would lock out would-be brute-forcers early enough that they weren't able to exploit my weak SSH key before I could get home from vacation, regenerate my key, and distribute it to all my machines.
I first heard the expression in an article about resolving writer's block [1]. While that particular article is specific to role-playing games, the idea has more general application and I've heard other writers refer to it.

The basic idea is that you can't always be creating. You're never as original as you think you are; your output depends on your input. If you are a storywriter, you need to remember to read for pleasure. Seek new experiences, consume the things that are innovative or interesting or just plain cool in your field of choice. If you keep your muse well-fed on interesting ideas, she'll be ready to provide you with new ideas when you need them.

It applies even in a technical context. Even if you are forced to work in Java or Ada or on a horrific enterprise application, you should be playing in Haskell during your free time, reading papers on interesting algorithms, doing recreational mathematics, that sort of thing. The ideas that will come to you when facing your work are much improved by play.

My own creativity-killing bad habit is to starve my muse. Either to drown myself so completely in the act of creation that I run out of ideas, or to intellectually consume crap rather than good stuff.

[1] http://www.geocities.com/blackhatmatt/tickling_the_muse.htm
I'm well aware of what UNIX 03 means. Are you? The core of it is IEEE Std 1003.1. Here's a quote from the Rationale section of the rename(2) page from IEEE Std 1003.1, 2004 edition:

"This rename() function is equivalent for regular files to that defined by the ISO C standard. Its inclusion here expands that definition to include actions on directories and specifies behavior when the new parameter names a file that already exists. That specification requires that the action of the function be atomic."

So to comply with the Single Unix specification, rename(2) must be atomic. The rename(2) function on OS X has been empirically shown to not be atomic. What reasonable conclusions can be drawn here?
ok i will change that.

they are being added, but they don't show on main page. if you click more results you can see them. and you can see them on the blog.
We only do new cars right now, we'll be getting to used in the near future, including private-party in all likelihood.
Once you can distinguish person X from person Y, showing something different is the easiest thing.

And yes, it is of course possible to do what you want, once you can figure out who is visiting your site: X or Y? That's the harder part.
This is a company of really smart and talented people. I have had limited experience with the beta, but have been following the project with much interest. I expect great things from Optimizely.
This looks extremely slick and well executed. Hats off, my feeling is you guys will be quite wealthy in short order.
I'm more predisposed to believe the economic factor too. Much of OSS contribution is fair-weather stuff. And the weather just ain't fair.

Further, I have a pet theory that OSS is largely a cultural/generational thing. That is: OSS might have picked up steam simply as the only logical approach to creating software under the long shadow of Redmond. (If you kept the source and make a product, MS buys or buries you. So why not open it up?)

For many OSS projects, their purpose was to compete with stagnant lackluster industry standards and force them to move ahead.

But today's young geeks have no context for that. They haven't seen software monopoly stifle innovation. They take the current competitive atmosphere for granted.
The line is as blurry as you'd like to make it. A great example of this is Google Instant. Old Google.com was a web page -- and Google Instant is now a web application, the page doesn't refresh, and sends down JSON data which is rendered into your search results by JavaScript...
You don't tell the media about it. Or ask them not to write about it. Launch is a loaded word nowadays. To be very specific, it was a product launch, not a media launch.