skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
HCFA issued a bulletin (as it often does) about its upcoming file layout changes but no one bothered to read it. They changed one line code from "SA" to "SK" or something like that. The change took effect, but since no one applied the mod, the money stopped. Three months later, I was brought in to fix it. I just read the bulletin, changed the hard code, and promoted it. I still can't believe they were that incompetent (and one of the many reasons I'll have nothing to do with health care any more.)
Web page assignment leads to cease and desist letter.
> But it's not made of people who spend 6 hours a night watching tv.

Where's the difference to all the YouTube junkies who spend hours watching YT?
I don't think it's a coincidence that Dropbox took off just as smartphones became popular. People use a service like Dropbox because they're juggling more than one device. Dropbox has the advantage of being available on every platform and integrated into a ton of apps. Even if they weren't awesome on their own, Dropbox is the only service that makes sense now because none of their competitors has anywhere near the same network effects. Apps are their best marketing now.
In general, I think government waste is a red herring. It's such a vanishingly small percentage of the overall budget that it often is a stalking horse for a desire to have the government deregulate industries, for example.

Now let's talk about waste in military spending. I would also count the off-the-books (as in, not part of the official budget) spending as wasteful military spending, almost by definition. So now we're talking a very large fraction of the federal budget. Note, however, that arguments to "get the government out" of various affairs rarely include the military.

People who complain about "pork" in government spending: if you were really serious about cutting spending, you'd include the military (like the UK government recently did). But they never do.
I met the best woman ever on OkCupid. Three years on and it's better than ever.

Product wise, it's much better than Match.com to be sure. It's the nicest, cleanest, most fun user experience on the web for meeting new people.

Pro-tip: Skip sending messages and hit up your prospects via the site's built-in IM. Realtime interaction gives you more opportunities to stand out and express yourself.
The code I wrote sucks. The code I am writing is cool. The code I am going to write rocks!
How and Why to Sniff Smartphone Network Traffic
As all of the "they are taking my hard-earned money and giving to those unproductive masses" like to point out, there are far more of them then there are of you. Eventually you would run out of bullets and end up decorating your precious property as a wall-hanging or drinking mug.
Part of what's problematic about this interviewing approach is that while your (secret) internal mindset may be "I'll accept pretty much any viable answer", the full-court-press interviewing style effects the exact opposite impression on the candidate -- they're left thinking, "gosh, I have to get this right, dammit, no room for slack, can't leave out any details AT ALL or it's back to another month of ramen and job boards trolling."

So yes, with your interviewing technique (orthogonal to the technical content of the question itself) you've succeeded in conveying a stance and mindset that is quite literally the opposite of what you intended.
I, for one, appreciate your effort to help improve the efficiency of joke delivery.

Makes me want to post to rec.humor.funny from vim, just for the thrill of it.
The first Dirk Gently is pretty incomprehensible to the mass market. You need at least a passing knowledge of Coleridge to understand it.

The second Dirk Gently is pretty weak, plot-wise. Dirk wanders around for a bit, figures out that the Gods of Asgard are walking the Earth, and barely plays a role in the actual story at all.

Given the mess that was the HHGG movie, I'm happy to leave Dirk Gently in the book where he belongs.
It'd be unethical if they were canceled subscriptions, but these are active subscriptions the customer never canceled... how is it unethical to continue billing the customer as promised? Do you want your utility company to keep track of your credit card expiration date and turn off your power when that date arrives even though you haven't called to ask them to? I think the common case is that when your card expires, you are issued another one with the same number and a later expiration date, there's not even anything to update with companies that stored your card for a subscription.
The Google experience devices are developed hand in hand with Google, whereas most other devices are developed after the respective OS sources have been released.
Adobe Demos Flash to HTML5 Conversion Tool
Urgent Update for Firefox
The State of Social in Social Games
Go to 4 interviews and tell those bastards you plan to leave before Christmas.
Presumably quite negatively if you use them to build everything. But there are valid places, the obvious one being whenever you'd construct a complicated HTML fragment manually using JavaScript strings.

I'm currently using knockout.js with jquery templates to generate a 'feed' component that has unique content for each user. The content also changes very rapidly so there is little point in a search engine trying to index any single version of the page. I was quite hesitant to go with the JavaScript templating approach at first (ie would normally have gone with generating the content on the server), but it has made quite a few things significantly easier.

As long as you're mindful that search engines won't be able to index any javascript-generated content, you should be able to consider the use of all these new client-side templating tools.
I remember some enterprise java cache systems running into problems with an all-to-all communication model. It is a problem you can solve with hardware (second network as you mentioned), but can be a limiting factor for sure.

4,096 nodes means 8,386,560 connections between them, and the associated bandwidth caused by the nodes checking up on each other.
Ask HN: Flipboard was launched with great fan-fare-How is it doing now?
Any numbers available - size of user base/ traffic ?
A combination of private charity and vigorous markets have provided quality universal food and entertainment.

I can't think of a single country where there is no government food assistance and no one starving to death. Where are you thinking of?
Some of My Favorite Books about Programming | Viget Extend
Offer HN: Free subscriptions to TestPlanManagement.com
I'll also offer free subscriptions to TestPlanManagement.com. What does it do?

TestPlanManagement helps you be more consistent while testing.

All those interested should email me at jeff at <myusername>.com
Block Facebook Likes, Connect and Tracking Across the Web
Oh, you must be referring to this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1811500

I work primarily on software that's being used pretty heavily in business. There are opportunities everywhere, if you only bother to look. To me, "hacking the business" is even more fun that "hacking the code".
Coming soon....http://pro.embed.ly/
> so throwing in $1000 every 2-3 years would make this type of quick-replace plan non-cost effective.

$1000 every two years is less than $50 month.

I'd happily pay $50/month for all my electricity.
A more ethical alternative would be to write a CRM in your own time, quit then offer to migrate them to your new one on the cheap in exchange for a case study.

That way you bootstrap a startup, get a paying customer, they get dedicated development (initially) centred around them and you don't have to work for $5/hr.
I worked for a bank long ago. Realtime authorization requests and responses went through an IBM Series/1 box--at the time a stack of computing power in a 6-foot cabinet. It locked up occasionally, choking off communications to/from our auths system. Back then computers lived in a secured super-cooled room and we programmers were forbidden to touch anything but the keyboard. SOP was to call in a tech to "fix" it, meanwhile Visa and MasterCard would "stand in" on our auths, at great expense and greatly increased fraud exposure. After a few late-night emergencies I realized that the tech couldn't even do diagnostics without rebooting the Series/1. And he never found a problem after rebooting. That was at least an hour of stand-in time down the drain, mainly spent waiting for the tech to get in there at 2:00 AM. So I developed the revolutionary technique of hitting the forbidden Blue Button myself instead of reporting an outage. Worked every time, and we almost never went into stand-in after that. Management thought a firmware upgrade had fixed the S/1, when it was just the ol' finger on the kill switch.
Beautiful Diamonds Rings
how far it gets its going to be related to how people are finding your site, and how much room you have to grow.

if everyone is coming in from search, it depends how many people are searching.

I have a few content sites that drive about $10CPM, but even with #1 organic ranking, I'm limited to about 1500 visitors a month. 95% of my traffic is from search. 99% of my revenue is from people that found my site from search.

generally, as far as adsense goes, the common wisdom is that repeat users do not drive advertising revenue. it's the search hoppers that are the ones that often click on the ads. making the site sticky doesn't necessarily mean more adsense revenue, and here is probably where other advertising mechanisms that require high number of impressions would start to come into play.

affiliate marketing might be something to look into as a supplemental as well, although i'm not sure what that is in your market.
For what it's worth, Engadget's original article about the Samsung press event suspected that it would announce the Samsung "Continuum" - a Galaxy S branded phone with two OLED displays. Considering the stock tickers in the background of the press image, and the fact that the secondary OLED display on the Continuum is called the "Ticker", I think this makes the most sense: http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/25/samsung-to-unveil-new-and...
I'm betting it's just that new Verizon phone with the useless second LCD. I spoke with someone months ago at Google who said they were working on a "Nexus Two" device, but he could have been referring to the G2 for all I know.

Here's what I've been waiting for in an Android phone since they started pumping them out: thin, no keyboard, responsive touchscreen, iPhone4-quality camera, accurate GPS and stock Android or easily rootable. Pretty much, I don't want any compromises, and no one seems to want to do it. Every single model skimps somewhere. If it's got a nice camera, the GPS doesn't work. Otherwise, the camera is crap or it's 3/4 of an inch thick with a keyboard I won't use. The Nexus One is so close, but the touchscreen sucks and the camera is beyond terrible.
I'm not embarrassed that I'm no longer a salaryman or a technical translator or a teacher or an order entry operator or a lab attendant or a toothbrush-wielding oil pipe cleaner or a paperboy. If I'm not embarrassed about switching entire careers, why would I worry about not continuing with all side projects?
Despite the -1 rank of the comment, I do appreciate the feedback.

The things we build aren't always about what the internet needs, but maybe there's some value in starting small and building it into something great.

I'm not trying to dominate the universe of flash game websites - but I I am utterly fascinated by the idea of earning my living and being completely in control of my own destiny.

In my background I've worked for a mega-corporation (Nortel Networks, they're like Cisco systems, only bankrupt) and I've worked as a public employee (high school teacher). Nowadays I work for a smaller 40 person company ... but I'm still not my own boss.

This is an entirely new concept to me. I can create value and sell it directly and I can do it according to my own rules...

I 100% appreciate that this is "just another half assed flash site". I just built it to see if I could. But it made $0.50 on day one and $1.01 on day two.

So maybe there's something here.

If this does fizzle, at least I'll have learned something. Whatever I do pick up from this experience, I will be able to take to my next project. If this one doesn't "take" then maybe my next one will.

Or maybe by sharing the experience with HN we'll all learn something. Maybe I'll make a contact with someone who's similarly minded and we'll team up to make a project that ends up being better than either of us could have done on our own.

Who knows?

You're 100% right though - i mean it - the internet does not need "yet another crappy flash games site" ... it's a hell of a lot better than a page-park though http://thegames.com/
what makes you think it would be focused on europe? the event is in NYC.
I wouldn't bet any money that the Tea Party-endorsed candidates will vote any differently than Republicans have, once elected.

It takes a lot of money to get elected in the US. And you don't get re-elected if you then vote against the interests of your donors. And they certainly aren't donating money so that you'll cut off government spending.
They've stated that they consider themselves a competitor to paypal so i can only imagine that eventually they will start to offer services like this in the future. They are only just getting started.
The Ultimate Case Study
Chrome Web Store Delayed Until December
I have no idea. I doubt anyone else does either, but "$600K > 6 man weeks" is something anyone can understand, especially management.
It seems so simple. Yet I'm sure a lot of Marketing dudes get caught up in the hype that ends up being the "wrong community."

Say my customer is a bit of a laggard, What would you recommend doing to break through the traditional PR clutter in a very web 2.0 world? Is there a way to connect the two that makes sense and might provide value/ROI?

Thanks Noah.
Arguably, Singapore/Ireland/other small, developed, low tax nations can only exist given the presence of high tax countries like the US, UK, etc.
Please review our personal finance Web App - Can I Afford It?

Clickable link:
http://www.caniafforditnow.com
Similar. I got 16/20 and 3 of my misses were in the first 4.
Yes. I am now in lockdown mode. No Twitter, Facebook, Quora till Monday.

Checking HN only once in 2 hrs.
Google Reader only once a day.

Let's see how this experiment goes. :)
ycombinator may be a good temporary boost of traffic while you're on the frontpage of HN but you'll need to look at a more sustainable way of generating traffic - this is where I struggle the most. I run an ecommerce company that does a moderate bit of traffic (around 70k uniques a month) - 70% of my traffic is PPC (Google, Yahoo/Bing) and the rest is done through organic optimization. My business has a very low repeat customer ratio due to our market (sorry can't explain this bit i don't want to share my company publicly). Here is what i've learned:

I fucking hate SEO. I've spent well over 100k hiring and firing contractors from around the world. I've worked with some of the biggest names in SEO down to the most unknown people in India. We spend a lot of time trying to manipulate search engines to work the way we want them and it's all a game. If i were in your position i'd focus around creating content people WANT to use and leverage communities like this to help figure out how to improve them so WE market the product for you (this isn't easy though - you have to be EXCEPTIONAL). General SEO/SEM tactics are good to know and practice, but i really believe the best/most sustainable approach to a successful site is creating something people actually want and are willing to tell their friends about. Don't let this bit of discourage you, create something great!
Check out this slidedeck from Flickr, see slide 108 and further:

http://www.slideshare.net/jallspaw/operational-efficiency-ha...
Yeah those were basically my thoughts as well. Thanks
During summers in college, I worked for a small web dev company that had a private line into a client company's network (a microwave link between the buildings, encrypted and with firewalls on both ends.)

One day, we completely lost the ability to log in from our building, and therefore, to do billable work for that client (though they had space for 2-3 of our employees to work in one of their offices.) The other company insisted they hadn't changed anything on their end, so it must've been something I did. I did research, packet logging, analysis, and so on, and couldn't find anything. This went on for days. Eventually I walked over to their server room, and found the screens said "Windows 2000" where they had previously said "Windows NT". Apparently they hadn't changed anything except for the operating system on the servers handling logins, which was clearly unimportant and not worth mentioning. Another five minutes of research and I discovered Win2K server used an additional service (triggered from their end) to log in, which was being blocked by their firewall and therefore never appeared in my logs.

I opened one port on my end, their firewall guy opened one on their end, and a problem that was costing us half of our revenue was solved.
App seems pretty neat. Ask other peoples opinion of things. I def can understand how business may want to know how much people pay. For 48 hours it seems decent.
After Iraq, we should probably go ahead and invade Google, because your methodology shows that they trained about 1,080,000 terrorists.
At best developing exclusively for bleeding-edge platforms is a niche-market. Is there enough interest now to hire a few developers to build HTML 5/CSS 3/etc.-only experiences? Absolutely. Is this a tenable position for anything more than a minor fraction of the web development market? No.

Companies like making money (naturally). iOS provides a clear path for them: They build an app, it goes on the app store, out to millions of people, and the money comes in. That is undisputed - you can absolutely make a nice living targeting exclusively iOS devices (by extension, WebKit-only platforms).

However this is conflating the problem space of "building mobile web applications" with "building mobile apps that use web tech". Buiding web-tech mobile apps is, functionality-wise, a sub-set of building mobile web applications. Any functionality that you would need to build a mobile web app you would also need to build a mobile app (albeit you can skim far more off the file size and functionality by targeting just apps - as Zepto has done).

jQuery is targeted at supporting "building web applications" and "building mobile web applications" - the two harder problems in the space. When you compare Zepto (designed to make it easy to build mobile apps targeted at a single platform) to jQuery (designed to make it easy to build mobile web applications targeted at many platforms) the difference is night and day.

This is the disingenuous part of this discussion: Zepto is, apparently, exclusively positioning itself against jQuery - even though they are completely dissimilar. However to the lay user that distinction is completely muddled when the API of one is directly compared to the other - when, in fact, they are nothing alike.

A better comparison would be comparing Zepto to XUI: http://xuijs.com/ XUI also targets the best-of-breed mobile platforms and makes it easy to build mobile apps.
Woman Kills Baby... OVER FARMVILLE... really?
They're not expired accounts--they're active subscriptions with valid payment information where the expiration date on the card used to subscribe has passed. Such cards are often still 'good'.

Members can easily cancel the service any time, but they have to actually cancel. If we cancelled everyone with an old card we'd be hassling a lot more people than we'd be helping.
this just warmed my heart a little. thank you :')
For most of us, paying $5 for a solar cell to replace a $0.50 battery in a calculator. However, that doesn't imply we can afford the same sort of tradeoff when real money is involved.
Why did you build a new product in a saturated market? If it was because none were the right fit for you, might you be able to find the other like-you users in one place to approach? It happens on HN all the time with Review My Site requests...

But the real question is whether you are looking for strategic feedback on the app from these early users or if you are concerned that it is buggy and won't be charge-worthy initially. Can you elaborate?
Maybe he thought he was making a joke, but the point is that it comes off "Ha, ha, only serious":

http://sunsite.ualberta.ca/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html
Ask HN: website security app (sanity check)
Hey HNers, I've received less than excited responses from friends about what I'm building and need a sanity check from you guys.

I've been working on some automated security testing software that would crawl and scan sites for open web exploites (sql inject, xss, xsrf etc..).

Initially I'd offer free scans to HNer sites and the bigger goal is to create a paid service.

Would you use this service?
Would you pay for it?
Do you have your security covered (ie don't need a 3rd party audit)?
Any tools that you currently use that are good enough for your needs?

Thanks guys!
"The notion that there is an independent, absolute concept of wealth or money or cash apart from the laws and government"

I'd be willing to bet humans had the concept of wealth long before the concept of government.
Exactly the same story here. I knew one of the OkCupid employees from IRC and they encouraged me to sign up to check out their matching algorithm work, and two years later I am still with a girl I met on there and very happy.
Dont make 100 websites. Optimize this one. SEO and compelling content. There are plenty sites that can help you with SEO if you Google for them. There was even someone in the community offering services pro-bono. But do also make your website more compelling/attractive. Integrate some value added service if they give you your email. Like a high scores page or newsletter. See if you can't make the games multiplayer and get some competition going.
Congratulations and thank you for building the site. It is beautiful and works well. You probably should have posted this instead of your first comment (that first comment is of a type that tends to get down-voted very quickly around here).

ps. That said, there is a HN rule that states, roughly, "thou shalt not ask why you were down-voted."
> In the types of questions this guy is asking, you have to basically guess what they're looking for

Don't guess, ask. Having asked questions like this before, I can assure you that a reasonable interviewer will actually be pleased that you understand the alternatives.

(And, of course, if you get an unreasonable interviewer, you probably don't want to work there anyway.)