skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The standard operating procedure for working on the FB platform is "do as much as you can get away with". The FB compliance team seems to enforce their rules pretty unevenly and with varying aggressiveness, which makes breaking their rules pretty profitable.

They've done a decent job getting rid of the absolute worst offenders, mainly the display ad networks, but when there's people grossing $100k/day on IQ quiz scams it's hard to find people who WONT look to make an easy buck. I know of at least handful of people who have become millionaires tricking (admittedly rather dumb) teens into signing up for these offers.

I don't know any specifics about what LOLApps was doing, but I would assume they're just the most visible offender of whatever scammy tactic was being employed.
this seemed very scammy and "customer hating / clueless corporate like". the opposite of the clue train. and when i see this kind of shit for real it pisses me off. sure if you want idiot customers who are tricked by simple psycology and you dont mind insulting eveyones intelligence, but really you should / could be better.
Assuming of course that each connection is bidirectional, and if you are modelling the network like a graph then you may not have bidirectional links in order to capture some asymmetric edge weighting for routing purposes :)
can wensing edit the choices with a link to the corresponding video ?
I am entertained by the implication that the room, presumably filled by an audience listening to a lecture, was not silent prior to the outburst.
The characters you listed are defined in latin-1. They really don't serve as a good example for the urgent need to use unicode.
Ask HN: Would you mind giving me your feedback on one of my main sideproject?
Dear Hackers, I'm sbout to go public beta with my sideproject http://www.mcsquare.me and I'm looking for some feedback to improve the public beta 1 of the service and the roadmap. I'm looking for any kind of feedback, regarding the design, the readability and of course the features of the site, and whatever you think should be improve. thanks
I'm curious how he expects people to study "how to cure aging" without first becoming "knowledgeable in biology". Scientific breakthroughs are rarely made by people who aren't familiar with the existing state of the science they work in ("past knowledge").

There's definitely ways besides university courses that you can pick up that past knowledge (Einstein spent about 10 years studying physics in a sort of unofficial study group before he set off in his own radically new direction). But surely you have to pick up at least the equivalent of an undergrad science degree worth of past knowledge somehow. Thiel sounds sort of like a messianic-futurist religious figure if he really thinks otherwise.

It's possible it'll work anyway, because presumably his grants don't actually require people who receive them to refrain from studying past knowledge. ;-)

edit: It looks like that quote is actually from William Andregg, not Peter Thiel. Andregg doesn't seem to take it too literally, though, because his own company's job openings have pretty detailed past-knowledge requirements ("The chemist should have a deep theoretical as well as practical familiarity with essential analytical techniques such as NMR, LCMS, elemental analysis, UV-Vis, and others. An understanding of surface chemistry/analysis, and experience working with nucleic acids in monomer, oligo, long, single stranded, and double stranded forms would also be valuable.").
Thanks! So he'd prefer slower execution but with less chance of accidentally losing the least significant bits? Protecting the programmer from himself? Or just having bignums for... what actually? Playing with new crypto algorithms? Why does that have to be in the core language?

It's still the question of the engineering trade-off, certainly not so clear as he presents it. In the light of the trend of always bigger importance of small devices, the best direction to take is probably the one that will most often use less of battery power, no matter what programmer's ideals can be.
A number of us are going to meet up around Heyzap around 11 if you'd like to go with others.

Here's the event on FB (login required, sorry) http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=160825147275565
Android’s Takeover Visualized [Infographic]
Two issues:

1. There is no quantifiable data to backup the assertions. Does anyone have A/B test data to back any of the author's assumptions?

2. There is no discussion on how to structure pricing that scales on a specific metric e.g. users, storage space, number of uses etc.

The common approach is to lump all the plans into 3-4 buckets with the last bucket being an "unlimited" plan. Suffice to say, this approach may not be ideal in cases where users have widely differing requirements.

For example, imagine pricing a product based on impressions/page views. Buckets simply don't make sense.

I'm currently experimenting with a pricing table that allows buyers to CUSTOMIZE their plan from a traditional 3-4 plan table.

See http://www.trafficspaces.com/plans/ for how I've done it. What do you think?
Oracle Asks OpenOffice Community Members To Leave
Ioprofile: lsof + strace
If I ask a physicist to sketch out a solution to a problem, I'll be willing to accept that they may need to look up some constants or formulas along the way, because knowing how to attack the problem and memorizing a bunch of numbers are two very different things; the latter is useful from time to time, but it's the former that I care about if I'm interviewing you.

Why, then, do so many interview processes assume that the ability to, essentially, vomit rote-memorized bits of syntax, argument orders, etc. onto a whiteboard is so important that any "real programmer" should be able to do it on command?
I don't really think that's how to look at Mondrian. I doubt if he was as concerned about the minutiae of how his work was composed, in the same way. Though the details are interesting, it would be more insightful to try to consider his mindset when creating a piece than the exact technical steps for how he made a certain line.
Q: What if Google does it?
right so in your model you're not addressing the moral impact of strategy decisions, because it doesn't make sense for an org, but the reason it's not addressed in discourse related to people is that it's inferred. any entity that's described in any terms has a responsibility to not be against people.
BT leaks email addresses of hundreds of customers
Care to mention which point you have a gripe with?

Short of not being backed by hard data, I don't think they were all bad. Definitely not "customer hating" or "clueless"

:)
I attended a facebook developer garage in my place recently, where a representative from a big social game developer confessed that very few social game developers are actually making money. Monetising social games is just hard. its a numbers game.
I never said anything to the contrary. I said that it's a false dichotomy; just because you don't spend time doing something doesn't mean you don't like it, just that you may not like doing it as much as other activities.

I love playing games, but never do because I like other things (learning mainly) far better. I also love kayaking, but would much prefer to go to the gym because of convenience. That doesn't mean I don't like playing games or kayaking; I really enjoy doing both. Get it?
In my opinion, it needs to be in the core.

Imagine you need to go through a library every time your string includes or might include the letter "s" or "v". Basically you'd need to use this library for all your strings. But then you lose compatibility with 'normal' string type and need to be constantly aware of the difference. You might want to use some other library that doesn't support this Unicode library at all, etc. It quickly becomes a very painful world to live in.

As you might imagine, just having support for Unicode baked in the language is very nice. Defaulting to Unicode for all text is even better.

I can understand why Lua in particular doesn't come with Unicode support out of the box, being so small. My comment was written in response to the more general claim that Unicode support is a strange thing to consider essential in a programming language.

(According to http://www.bckelk.ukfsn.org/words/etaoin.html, s/ä and v/ö are comparable in frequency.)
It's romantic to imagine you can make breakthroughs without a solid grounding, so the image is promoted, and occasionally you get people like this with a handle on a lot of money who subscribe to the image.
This looks like a really cool challenge. Reminds me a bit of the knapsack problem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpack_problem)

But something tells me the solution is going to be a lot less simple though.
Why? I'm toying with idea of applying, but why is it cargo culting?

I would love it if someone allowed me the time and the intellectual freedom to make things instead of filling in tiny, dark circles on a piece of paper as proof that I'm worthy enough of a future as judged by some vague overlord.

I want to learn and understand things thoroughly, but I will not learn anything to pass some exam. So, for someone like me, but smarter and more driven, this might actually be a net win. I fail to understand how this might be a cargo cult.
I fear this shift means non-interoperable siloed apps which happen to be written in JavaScript and deployed via HTTP. The open web of repurposable semantic markup that lives at a permanent URL is eroding.
How would you explain that there are (or were) cultures completely or almost completely free of cancer - with it becoming more common when they adopted the western lifestyle?

In Cancer, Disease of Civilization (1960), Wilhjalmur Stefansson mentions a few cultures besides the Inuit in which large-scale searches never turned up cancer. Dr. Albert Schweitzer examined over 10,000 traditionally-living natives in Gabon (West Africa) in 1913 and did not find cancer. Later, it became common in the same population as they began "living more and more after the manner of the whites."

In Cancer, its Nature, Cause and Cure (1957), Dr. Alexander Berglas describes the search for cancer among natives in Brazil and Ecuador by Dr. Eugene Payne. He examined approximately 60,000 people over 25 years and found no evidence of cancer.

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer-in-othe...
They are not in ASCII, and that is the problem. You wouldn't believe how many times I've tripped over Python 2.x's UnicodeDecodeError for example.

Moreover, I wasn't searching for the best example -- merely using something I have personal experience of.
Please support Saeed - Web Dev facing death sentence in Iran
My friend Saeed disappeared 2 years ago while he visited Iran. He is now facing false charges with deadly consequences. The court and government responsible for making this decision are actively hostile towards the internet. I know our HN community values freedom and technology, and if you can share the links below with your friends, or do anything to support Saeed.

"While working as developer in Canada, Saeed designed a program that would allow his clients to upload pictures, and as is a common courtesy in programming, included his name and info in the file.
This program, Saeed’s wife – Dr. Fatimeh Eftekhari – explains, was used in an adult content website WITHOUT Saeed’s knowledge or approval. “The only recognizable name in the program was Saeed’s,” she continued, “which led to his arrest” and to the accusations claiming that Saeed was responsible for the development and administration of the website." from http://united4iran.org/2010/10/the-case-of-saeed-malekpour-web-developer-jailed-since-2008/

Please send letters of support for Saeed: http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/6160/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=4449

Thank-you
> There's definitely ways besides university courses that you can pick up that past knowledge

And the amount of damage done by universities is now so severe that I've switched from telling people "Don't try following in my footsteps" to telling them "Okay, maybe you should get the hell out of school."
What's more, without modern medicine (and sanitation and nutrition) people with cancer would tend to die earlier, or perhaps of secondary factors. If you're some occasionally malnourished farm hand (read: the vast majority of all individuals who lived in pre-industrial times) and you get, say, leukemia you are going to die of whatever the fuck disease happens to be going around, and it's going to happen quick. The result is that there may be less evidence of cancer in, say, ancient bones but not due to decreased incidence of cancer per se.
Relativity Still Holds Up: 5 Recent Tests That Prove Einstein Right
I'm not saying it wouldn't be better.

I'm thinking of the situation when you would buy something like this. I'm guessing most individuals would not buy one, and any corporation or other institution would have some kind of purchasing policy that would affect a purchase of this size.

An institution would probably not want a non-shareable Kindle copy - rather than buy each individual a Kindle copy, they would buy the hardcopy and stick it on the shelf.

Institutions that I am familiar with, anyway.
I would expect any programmer would be able to write a program on paper.

I wouldn't expect it to be perfect or even compilable, just the same as a widget or schematic. Physicists and mathematicians have an advantage in producing 'perfect' things on paper, because they 'solve' where the other examples you gave 'develop'. They work in the other direction; the mathematical pursuits analyze systems whereas you have asked the other pursuits to create systems, which is much more difficult on a piece of paper.

Now, if you had the designers working forwards- analyzing code or schematics or widgets- then I would expect an accurate answer (with a little fuzz for basic mistakes, same as I'd give a mathematician slack for accidentally dropping a minus sign)
The SOP is definitely to get away with anything until you get caught but everyone was looking at what everyone else was doing as an example of what could be done. I worked (past tense) for a much smaller FB game company. The two compliance warnings we got were both on Friday afternoons, which is kinda interesting. It always seemed like they were that kind of 24/7 startup, and you had to be too just to keep up. Anyway, LOLApps was one of the companies that a lot of the smaller guys seemed to look up to, so this sends some kind of message. I'm just not sure what it is yet. :)
When there are many more Androids out there than iPhones, iPhone dev is gonna be a tough sell.

What do you think the ratio of Android-to-iOS installed base is going to have to be before the median Android developer is making as much money as the median iOS developer? To get to that point, how many significantly different Android devices is an Android developer going to be expected to target?

Looking at this market through the context of the PC wars of the 90s is a mistake, as is assuming that developer allegiance is a function of handset sales.
I'd never have expected so much technophobia from a NYT article...
I think it's a really stupid idea to link a grant to dropping out of school. If an idea is worth a $100000 grant, why does it stop being worth that money as soon as someone turns 21 or has a degree?

I did drop out of school and I don't regret it. Many dropouts are very successful, many more are not. And to be honest, I would sue that guy if my kids dropped out of a computational biology program to go write some social picture upload site in PHP.

The odds of some web startup working are non zero. But the odds of doing something more interesting later with that degree are also non zero. Computational biologists can create social picture upload sites as well, even when they're over 20 believe it or not.
Great talk, Kyle. Also, the video turned out remarkably well given the camera it came from.
I guess I haven't found much outright damage myself, though maybe I got lucky. Whether it was the best or most cost-effective way to learn stuff (not counting the employability value of the degree) is another question, but my comp. sci. degree imo was a reasonably useful way of learning some CS basics. Some of the choice of topics was arbitrary and would've been different at another school, but it's all stuff I should eventually have learned anyway.
What if your kids didn't really enjoy computational biology but were passionate about building web products?
There is a delicious irony in New Scientist, of all publications, complaining about sloppy and sensationalized science reporting in the media. Sloppy and sensationalized science reporting seems to be pretty much New Scientist's reason for existing.
Then they drop out of school, as I did, and don't need to be bribed to do so.
View source on the home page is interesting too.
I'm 30, and I've worked at various corporations, both small and large, for 5 years. I've never once been told "I can't do things". Not once. Rather the opposite - I've worked with people who went on to found start-ups, and I've learned a great deal from my colleagues.

The larger question is: should a person in a position of power be encouraging young people to drop out of school? It strikes me as irresponsible.
20 is arbitrary, I don't understand why they would choose 20, especially since some of the people mentioned in the article have degrees or started after 20. Also, I'd like to know when they got funded, it seems many of the [other] companies that Thiel has invested in had founders over 20.

Elon Musk dropped out at age 24 - started Zip2.

Scott Banister started ListBot at age 20.

Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook at age 20 dropped out at 20.

William Andregg no info.

Peter Thiel himself graduated (J.D. from Stanford in 1992)

Add info or submit corrections.
What if someone has a good mentor in a field that helps them along to way in selecting what to study? For the most part someone who isn't a graduate should be able to access the same papers as people doing post grad, given enough motivation and a bit of guidance I don't see why they couldn't get to the top for their field.
You should apply. Out of curiosity, what's your age? Have you dropped out?
>>>And to be honest, I would sue that guy if my kids dropped out of a computational biology program to go write some social picture upload site in PHP.<<<

That's precisely the problem. Writing a social picture upload site in :gasp: PHP has become a well trodden path of sorts. A supposedly sure shot guarantee for something vague and undefined. I think that the problem with trends is that the minute something becomes a trend. It stops being something worthwhile 15 minutes before that.

What's so shocking and wrong to walk off the well worn path? If they actually choose to use the $100,000 to work on something meaningful then the world might actually be a better place.

Of course, you say they don't know the basics yet! That's the interesting thing. When you learn something in the heat of passion then you burn through the same material at a rate faster than you could have ever dream of. You learn through trial and error. Understand things at a deeper level to make stuff work. Why is that so wrong?

Instead of some dumb exam your trial now lies in your creation. It either works. Or, it doesn't. Period.

Wasn't this the entire point of having an education in the first place?
We've done A/B testing at Rypple on our Pricing page, and found most of the principles suggested by UXMovement to be true.

http://rypple.com/pricing

You've done some interesting things with your pricing page. Couple comments:
- I'd reduce the complexity of the page by removing the drop down boxes for impressions and just changing the pricing buckets to up to the maximum impressions offered by that bucket. The way you've got it now means there's effectively 13 plans.
- I've found that listing the features in order from those included in all plans to those included in the fewest plans to work the best.
How many companies sell suits vs how many companies sell barefoot running shoes? I mean, if you had to write an article on this subject, who else would you mention? I guess you could say "Nike, Adidas, ASICS, and Reebok don't offer any serious products for this market yet" but that's a bit like mentioning that Microsoft, Palm, and RIM didn't offer a serious competitor in the market of touchscreen smartphones right after the iPhone came out.
I'm not sure what could be interpreted as disingenuous about my comment.

Openness is not a tactic of any particular war. It is simply the best thing for consumers and developers. The notion that openness doesn't matter in this "war" just because the devices look different and the battleground is the web, is nonsensical. I would argue that openness matters even more now than it did in the late 80s and early 90s, because the form factors are more widely varied, and the number of people who can directly participate is dramatically higher.

Regardless of Apple fanboyism and arguments about the war being "different this time", Android is already winning. There are more Android phones shipping than iPhones.
18. I'm yet to enter college as I took this year off to figure stuff out and work on something...

On the other hand, I doubt that I will apply. I just don't think that I'm good enough for such programs, and why add more noise?
Some high quality product and/or packaging photographs would help make my mouth water more when visiting your website. :)
I don't need to be convinced that learning can be much much more intense than it usually is in school.
I think one of the problems (and it is not just localized to HN) is people mistake the downvote for, "I don't agree with you". I get downvoted all the time for my position on full client side browser apps. Which to me is the silliest thing to downvote someone for and it seem to be the big one. Not my position in general, but technical dogma in general. It is a form of group think and I think at a certain level it is inescapable.

For example, guy (A) like Apple guy (b) does not. Each provide their reasons and both are valid points as to why each holds their position, but many times that exchange will result in a third party that agrees with one downvoting the other. I don't understand why people equate "i don't agree" with "I need to downvote" but it happens and it leads to group think.

Given that, similar post receive higher scores while opposing views get suppressed, by the would be poster out of fear of reprisal or from downvoting. There are some key ones that are pretty common obviously Apple is a big one. NoSQL vs Relational is another. Anyway, this does make individuals second guess expressing there real opinion on a subject for fear of being downvoted.

If a system could be designed to identify someones bias and make the weight of their down votes and up votes count less for items they show a bias for, I think you could kill some of the group think and fear of reprisal. Also I think downvotes from a users page should be track with particular interest. I do not think it is rampent but I have seen instances where one user is targeting another user with downvotes by visiting their profile and downvoting their threads. I had it happen to me on two occasions one of them I pinpointed who it was because only the posts that the user had not replied to me had been downvoted, given that you can not downvote a post you replied to it was pretty obvious who had done it. Anyway, I think there are some ways that a system could be built to identify downmoderation abuse and weaken or remove those privileges.

For myself personally, I say what I think if it gets downvotes then so be it. If I get downvoted to oblivion guess what? The community just validated that it is not the right community for me and it is time to move on. Either there is too much group think or I just have nothing valuable to provide to that community, either way why would I want to hang around. So far most of you guys like me and I am thankful for that as I like HN and yes my real info is my profile and my user name is my initials.