skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: what is the future for browser extensions that personalize the web?
i'm in a position where i can launch personalization on 30,000 browsers. but i havent - because i'm not sure what the equation with websites, my monetization options, and my users could be.

so i thought i'd ask the community, with the example of a few cases & existing scenarios:

[1] GetGlue provides a check-in mechanism for pages you visit. They basically augment the website with toolbars,links, 'like' buttons, badges & so on & even referral links to 3rd parties

[2] webmynd adds personalization to google

[3] rapportive adds links,and even third party raplets into gmail

Conduit[4] has a toolbar, that triggers personalization within webapges and is in the top 100 websites visited in the world today

my question :
1. will they alienate themselves from content destinations ( their 'hosts' )
2. will they be able to sell advertising on a space owned by the host

here in india, a comparable scenario would be when popular dailies occasionally had a pamphlet that the delivery boy would fill and make some money out of. but guess what. the newspaper sued the advertiser - not the 'enabler'.

that said, there are content/personalization cases where the line is more blurry and tilting towards what the user decides to do.

eg: skype extension[5] that takes numbers on a page and turns them into 'call via skype' buttons.

or more recently google's highlight extension [6] that let's you double click/select random phrases on any page, and it displays a google logo with a search button right there. does this account for monetizing 3rd party content? essentially users of this plugin could be on a yahoo or bing page, select a word and a google search would show up. it's kind of a tricky case of accountability IMHO.

if my users want a site personalized, does that justify my plugin personalizing content/websites?

Or perhaps Cooliris [7] & Facebook's [8] form of bizdev driven personalizaton offer a half way path. I think wibiya [9] has reached great scale and are in a position to offer a non-extension,publisher-controlled personalization experience.

thoughts ?

PS: great thoughts on my question to firefox extensions traction here btw
http://www.quora.com/Why-havent-we-seen-browser-extensions-take-off-like-Facebook-Apps

~B
The privacy group EPIC is leading the litigation against these abusive scanners. You can learn more and support their efforts with donation:

http://epic.org/privacy/airtravel/backscatter/
How is it better than using a hosts file like this one?
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
I've used Python for about 4 years and am just starting to use Clojure, so I'll just add a few comments that others haven't mentioned. I'm not trying to offer a definitive comparison.

Clojure's data structures seem a lot like Python's but are a bit more elegant and avoid many of the little python headaches that come up often like d['k'] vs d.k vs d('k'). In clojure it would be (d :k) or (:k d) and both work. If you need memoization there are functions to help you. In clojure there definitely seems to be an attempt to make all the core data structures as compatible as possible (even having a formal abstraction (iSeq) for all of them)

Culturally, Python seems to care more about a minimal core language. Clojure.core has probably 3-4 times as many built-ins as Python. Many of the clojure functions are supporting features Python doesn't have or handles with syntax, like macros and conditional expressions, but there are also clojure functions like even?, that probably won't ever be a Python built-in.

Especially for predicates, functions like even?, every?, ffirst,
Dude you from jamacia?
I also think that private social networks have a bright future, especially networks targeted to close friends, family, basically smaller groups (instead of FB approach where the notion of "friend" == anyone you meet in a bar). I would definitely switch to such a network, the thing is it will take a few years before I'm able to convince my friends. I think a YC combinator company is working on something like that, I can't remember which one. Some features I would love is such a site:

* No info is available to the outside world, not even the names, not even some kind of id.
* No apps, only "core" apps useful to connecting with friends (photos, videos, chat, event planner, etc).
* Simple, clean.
* Ability to download my data and back it up locally
* Ability to delete any photo with me in it

Anyhow, those are not new ideas, but still in my mind it's obvious that such a site will eventually succeed. At some point, I believe many people will trust another source for their personal info.
This reminds me of an assignment we had in one of my CpE classes. We had to implement a whole bunch of interesting operations using a limited set of operators and in as few operations as possible. Favorites:

Absolute value of a signed it:

a= x >> 32

return (a + x)^a

Swap values of two ints without a temporary int:

a^=b

b^=a

a^=b

! operator (boolean not) without any boolean operators:

int a = x | (~x +1);

int b = a >> 31;

return b + 1;

There were a ton of interesting problems. Made for a great assignment.
I really like it. One suggestion: changing the "How to" section to radios so I don't select two at once. As far as I can tell, any two "How to"s result in zero result.
Perfectly understandable. However I need something to hack on in haskell to polish my skills so I figure I can just use emacs while I work to make Yi useable for everyday.
We use the paypal donate function for a registered 501(c)3 and haven't had any real problems but I must say the majority of donations (in quantity, and higher amounts) still come in through checks in the mail.
That might not be a wise path in certain circumstances.
The first is having a separate bank account specifically for use with paypal.

IMHO, this is crucial. Years ago some friends started an online business selling trinkets and they asked me about paypal. The advice I gave them and still give is to open a completely separate account for your paypal deposits. As as soon as paypal pays you, move that money into your real business account. This will not prevent paypal holding your money hostage, but it will stop them from taking money back out of your account.

If you only need to use paypal to purchase things you can use the method above, but it's easier to just hook it up to a credit card.
If you are not willing to risk anything for your beliefs, you do not deserve the benefit of your beliefs.
I remember that I took into account the amount of storage and the hard drive capacity and the power consumption, etc.

Here's a new calculation: assume your e-mail server has user/server ratio of 1000/1. Assume the server uses 500 watts power (server + UPS + cooling + lighting). Assume each user has 10,000 e-mails stored on this server.

We get 500W/1000 users/10,000 emails per user = 0.00005 Watts/email.

0.00005 Watts/email * 365 * 24 = 0.438 W*hours/email.

Small but significant over your 10,000 emails.

[edit]: fixed my glaring mistakes. That's what happens when you rush.
Poll: HN'ners vote on prop 19
Given how close SF and the Valley are to Oakland, CA - headquarters of the 'Yes on 19' campaign and the fact that such an issue will directly affect the lives of millions of California residents, especially those in the north where the industry is based, I'm wondering where HN'ners stand on prop 19 - the ballot initiative to fully legalize marijuana in the state of CA.
Wow. This was our PR firm. They took the liberty of getting involved in the discussion.

Sorry, this is totally inappropriate and lame.
>> Anyway, the fact that pilot is in full command of the plane doesn't mean that he should be able to bring onboard whatever he desires, does it?

Do you take whatever you desire to work? No, because you don't want to lose your job because you brought in a playmate of the month calendar and a gun.

Its a job to them same as anyone else.
Improving the ROI of SIEM, logging and security monitoring
I'm with Slicehost as well and agree. I did have on major downtime though - a incorrectly configured RAID wiped my entire slice. Luckily, I only had a couple smaller sites on it at the time... but what impressed me was they gave me a year's worth of credit and did so without me even saying/asking anything, it was right in the email they sent explaining what happened. Mistakes happen, and they responded in a great way with it and because of that I have recommended them to many.

That said... I am looking at Linode now just b/c of pricing. I know you get what you pay for, but I've only heard good things from Linode as well.
Heh, one time the company sent round a template signature that we all had to use, and everyone cut and pasted it without reading. So we all had the job title Top Brand Chief.
The combinations work, although not as much as I'd like

For instance, here's the list of books about how to tell people about your business and run a killer startup, for folks who already know a bit:

http://hn-books.com/#1=Q1V1&10=Q10V0&11=Q11V0&12...
Complaining loudly and often is only effective if it's likely to create a different outcome. PayPal isn't going to change their business practices (people have been complaining about them for years, hence my fatigue over it); there has been an opportunity in this market for at least this long; and authorize.net and other similar services are available to anyone that wants to spend a little bit of effort integrating their API.

That's the last I'll say about this topic, because it's a waste of time.
I find it hard to maintain large-ish python codebase - it tends to wire up itself into a mess (in my case). It's probably due to my inability to do so, but I don't have same problems with C code.
Those are not the most evil words - "if you have nothing to hide, why are you against..." are. "I am just doing my job" can easily be countered with "Yep, thats what Eichman/other nazi said too; he was hung too" or if you don't care about the person to whom you are speaking "Yep ,thats what Eichman/other nazi said too. I look forward to seing you on the gallows".
I used money bookers (http://www.moneybookers.com) once and it was OK. A bit expensive but exactly what I needed.

I considered using PayPal but every time I read the contract it scares me away. I am required to allow them to get money out of my bank account. There is no way I'll ever do that. Money bookers works differently and it is more trustworthy.
Might be quite off-topic, but I want you to know that for international stuff Paypal has more value to me than Google checkout, as I don't have a credit card and Paypal works with my European bank account. It might be similar in several other countries, so that can be a reason for lower conversions with Google Checkout. Paypal in a lot of cases is my only online currency, alongside IDeal in the Netherlands (that works with my bank account as well).
I totally agree with this. I had to make a three hour drive last night, and just a half hour into it I was feeling very tired. I pulled off at the first rest stop, put the seat back, and just laid there relaxing for about ten minutes. I didn't even fall asleep. I then got out of the car, moved around a bit to get the blood pumping, and made the rest of the drive without feeling tired at all.
It can be a good way for people to be targeted on what they are about to do if they are targeted in the appropriate way. A company called bluekai sells this kind of data but it is really alot of junk from what I have seen. There are ways though to know when someone has already completed an action or has the intent to complete an action. You might also know that someone will be in a specific city that is not their home, where ads can be targeted.

But I do agree that in the past and to this day there are many ads that lack the appropriate context to be retargeting you on ad networks.
Ditto, on nginx. Before Passenger -- when one waded through a morass of complex and fragile recipes for Ruby web deployments -- I had to think much more carefully before implementing things in Sinatra or Rails.

Some helpful new options here too -- I'm particularly glad to be able to turn off passenger_friendly_error_pages for non-HTML-serving web apps.
I can't quite understand how they made $129 per 1000 page views unless this is direct advertising.
No experience with them but the only problem I've read about was with WikiLeaks.
PromoteJS, Sustainability in Computer Science, and Deep Honesty
If your language doesn't have Lisp syntax (or more precisely, a lack of syntax entirely) writing macros will be very unpleasant. How are you going to logically think about manipulating the structure of a program that looks like C# or Perl? Macros are already difficult enough to get right as is, without introducing the problem of syntax. Those languages don't have macros any more than Python has a lambda.
I'm guessing & and - are much quicker than log. & is a single instruction, - is a single instruction.
The == are single compare instructions. I'm not sure about the && , but otherwise this is simple enough to write in ~20 lines of assembly.
Yeah sure, just drop me a line.

"('--`good !$#&/?^ luck with your spam {$database}|)"@example.com

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322
I agree for the most part. The main times that naps have been refreshing were when I was hungover and tired from the previous night's activities.
While Guido is not keen on reduce, I don't think he has any desire to eliminate list comprehensions (which are equivalent to map/filter).
They managed to test and train on different periods of time.

February 28, 2008 to November 28, 2008 is
chosen as the longest possible training period while
Dec 1 to Dec 19, 2008 was chosen as the test period

That said, their split exhibits enormous bias:

Dec 1 to Dec 19, 2008 was chosen as the test period
because it was characterized by stabilization of DJIA
values after considerable volatility in previous months
and the absence of any unusual or signiﬁcant socio
cultural events

I don't understand why they would think this is okay.
In the end I know I might not make Freedom 45. There are a lot of things that could go wrong between now and the next decade when I get there. The market may crash

Have some optimism! Given the current state of the economy, it's entirely likely (even probable) that we'll see an economic boom during the next 13 years that could accelerate his plan. These seem to come in 10 year cycles: a boom in the 80's then the crash of '87 and recession until '92; the internet boom of the late 90's and bust in 2001; the real estate bubble of 2002-2006 and the financial crisis of 2008.
Isn't that the best solution for them (putting people to sleep for the flight)? I'm still waiting to see what will happen when someone plays a terrorist by:

- using broken glass bottle (can be bought in the duty-free area)

- breaking one-time shaving razor you can buy on the airport and making a DIY knife

- stealing kitchen utensils from bars at the airport

- putting lighter gas into a small perfume container which you can take onboard, making spark from a normal battery, using some flamable spray to get more fuel

- disassembling some on board electric device (even stuff like lights) and warning to short it (that should cause some serious panic even if it's pretty safe in reality... who's actually aware of separate circuits?)

etc. at some point, people will start to realise that there are so many dangerous items on the airport itself, you don't need to bring anything with you. What will the TSA limit then?
>>> isPower2(231)
False

Floating point gets you approximate answers.
Zuckerberg goes to Startup School [video]
The whole point of this is to self regulate. If they don't put forms of regulation like this out on the internet then their will be many people who are very angry with them for not making this available so they are jumping the gun and trying to regulate themselves.

But really the people who will opt out are going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the masses that have no clue that this is even there.

(EDIT)If you want to see what data they actually know about you visit this site. http://tags.bluekai.com/registry
My partner works for a medical communications company (doing events for product launches) and it's a well known secret that the term "sundry transport costs" in their cost sheets for shipping materials abroad is the amount to bribe customs to release their stuff in time to host the event, otherwise it tends to clear customs the day after the stands need to go up. Argentina is especially bad.
Good comment.

> If your goal is to use the airport for its intended use and you do not really care about your civil rights or you trust the government wholeheartedly then the above makes sense.

I'm a big civil liberties guy myself, but I really think this is pretty low on the list of things going wrong in America. If you wanted to take a stand on any of the 20 worst civil liberties violations in America, does airport scanners really come in on that list? I'm much more worried about the rampant corruption and favoritism of giving money to some banks, some activist groups, some states, according to party lines and individual favors. Then you've got companies writing regulation, and the Vice President openly calling for more internet censorship and government control over the net. No one understands the tax codes, which are ridden with loopholes and confusion and bureaucracy. There's no transparency in legislation, and new bills are frequently 10,000 pages long - that's not hyperbole. There's no way citizens can understand what's actually inside one of those bills.

The airports need some security. It's a little too showy right now (liquids and taking shoes off are somewhat ridiculous, in my opinion). But the installation of scanners has got to be pretty low on the list of things that are wrong with the American government. I'm all for drawing lines and holding ground and fighting for civil liberties, but I'm hard pressed to see airport scanners as where to draw the line and fight.
Remember that Bell had the advantage of the mother of all monopolies. When Bell Lab's was at its height, nothing could touch Bell. They had a monopoly that made Microsoft in the late 90s/early 00s look flimsy. I mean, they pretty much ran out of room for growth (beyond scaling with the overall growth of America).
That was supposed to say

>>> isPower2(2**31)
False

mutter why no preview button on HN mutter
If they deleted the cookie then they would not be able to tell that you opted out they need to set a new cookie so that the next time they see you on their network they can specifically know that you are someone who doesn't want to be a part of their targeting.
I think that might be assuming that a random official in Uganda has any idea what those things are and that they provide any qualification for him training.
I was expecting this to be about editing your hosts file or subscribing to an alt dns service. Fail.
Once again the YC community surprises me in both it's depth and it's breadth. From someone who has found your (and Russell's) text invaluable, I say - thank you, sir.

And thank you PG/YC for giving me the opportunity to do so.
It does, however, have an edit option for a few minutes after you post.
How do I view this and other Justin.TV videos on iPhone? I have the app but can't figure out how to get it to open this video.
I read a lot about these stories with PayPal freezing accounts. Usually, it's with few grands in it.

Did anyone try small claims courts for it? From reading internet seems small claims courts have small fixed fee and if defendad (PayPal) will not appear, they automatically loose.

Probably, it's possible alternative to spending days on phone/email with PayPal, or paying lawyer tons of money?
I remember hearing some apocryphal story about a tech being frustrated that the numpad on your keyboard doesn't have a-f or ':' keys. Another way in which it doesn't fit with the way we do things in v4.

More to your point, I think this illustrates two things -- the need to use DNS more instead of static numbering in v6, and to number your infrastructure in the lowest /48 or /64 subnet of your allocation so that you can enjoy the benefit of omission of leading zeros for things you might actually need to type in by hand (e.g. 2001:db8:1f70::1)
It isn't necessarily an evil thing to want to be out from under those regulations. A lot of them are what conspire to make your banking experience terrible. For example, why can't you transfer from your savings account all you want? Regulations. Why do banks have such onerous process for signing up for a new account? Regulations.

Which is not to say that PayPal isn't sleazy-as-all-hell. The whole point of PayPal was to find a way around the regulations so that they could make a ton of money by gaming your financial transactions in their favor, and cutting out the credit card middle man. Have you ever paid attention to how ardently PayPal tries to stop you from using a credit card to pay?

The really sad part is that PayPal had the chance to become the Next Big Financial Thing. Their core ideas—if you separate away all the evil, that is—are not bad ones. “Make online payment easier and more secure.” Unfortunately, they seem to have dropped the second part and just settled on “Make online payment”. They took the short-term road to profit and missed a much, much larger play.
Incorporation Basics
Money bookers use the email address as identifier (at least some years ago when I used it). http://www.moneybookers.com
What One Does - one startup founder's story
Define confrontation.

Because I would argue that the end of the legal limits on the price you could charge on things in most of Europe was just such an event.
All social software are inherently socio-technical systems
My answer is Woot.com... they sell the products of others in a very unique method. Additionally, they sell the attention of their audience with advertisements.

Interesting stuff!
I think those kind of checks are country-specific... I always received money here in Uruguay (from Austria and Canada) and nobody called the senders (family members or friends of family).

Still, you're right... Wikipedia says: "Western Union advises its customers not to send money to someone that they have never met in person."
For a second I thought that robots would finally start to fight for their rights.
True, but the syntax for all three of these is pretty hairy.

Lisps might not be the only languages with macros, but they're the only ones with elegant and easy to use macro systems.

You could argue of course this is a moot point, since even Lispers only write macros infrequently. So who cares if it's hard to write one on the rare occasion you need to?
I think you meant "repels", unless you meant "refudiates", though perhaps your finger stumbled in the middle of "repls".
Hoover Dam Bridge, under construction. Timelapse.
http://wensing.tumblr.com - what I'm learning about life and business through the act of starting up Stormpulse
Not really - make all pilots have their badge authenticated at the security point with a computer fetching the image from a database and comparing it with:

1) the pilot
2) the picture of the id

Done.
This is very interesting. I think that the more failure you had in the past, the more likely you will have success in the future. I also had some previous side-projects experiences which did not work but I learnt so many things from these projects!
With Fedex there is a material cost to get your things sooner. It's 24-hours by air instead of 7-14 days on a truck.

How much money does it cost to move a passport application from the bottom of the pile to the top?

I wasn't implying that passport office is corrupt (okay, I was being a little facetious). They've got a written policy stating that, "paying us money gets you faster service" so its more at an institutional level that doesn't benefit the reviewer at all.