skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is the potential for him to make a lot more money and to be much better known as lead of his own venture than as an employee at Facebook.
For those of you participating in Movember, it offers an easy way to track the growth of your via photos from your mobile phone.

Also, I think it is clear that I need some design help. So anyone with some good ideas please don't hesitate to offer some suggestions or a mockup.

I'm not planning on taking any profits from this site... Even with the ads I figure I may lose money if traffic gets out of hand. But if there happen to be any, then I'll donate them back to Movember.com
This is the OP here. Let me say first that this is all great advice. I used to work at an advertising agency, and I don't necessarily agree with your statement of a "profound misalignment of incentives" considering that my colleagues at the agency and others under the parent company umbrella did look for performance in their campaigns so it did have a positive result on what they were looking for.

Some more color into our situation:

- we've successfully put in place the core metrics for PPC and set up conversion tracking

- we're utilizing the Analytics API to track custom goals, in our case, things like email signups or purchases

- we've tested different landing pages, choosing one that had 300x better conversion rate but I feel there's still more room to improve

- we've run Facebook Ads, AdWords and Display on Google's Content Network and search has been the most effective at getting what we need (emails)

From my POV: I've done it myself and can continue to teach myself, but there are too many moving parts (from what I can see) for me to successfully lower our CPA and manage on a day to day basis while running the company effectively and efficiently
You should write up your tips. Sounds like you've had a great time via OKC.
We've done it in house, got the core metrics, improved upon the CPA and now need to take it to the next level - particularly, around your point of "profitable ROI" on our advertising spend.

I couldn't find your email address in your profile. Mind connecting off HN? My email is HN handle at gmail dot com
no place to point out a referral source
Something I notice in common about many of these stories is how much people cite Zuckerberg in particular as a reason for joining/liking Facebook. I don't see anything like it for Larry or Sergey at Google.

My guess is that Zuckerberg has his own "Reality Distortion Field", albeit of a very different style than the original (Steven Jobs'), and this is a major factor in the recent migratory wave.
I would argue --- and I think I'll win this argument --- that these words written against the amendment are far more misleading. There is nothing "scary" about this proposal; it is in fact the way most other states handle noncompetes, and it makes sense.

If you want to oppose noncompetes, fine. I'm on the fence. But be honest about it.
> But once again, that presupposes flying in an airplane a fundamental human right.

No.

Thought experiment: Where in the constitution does it say that it's a fundamental human right to use laptops? Now, what do you think the supreme court would have to say about congress deciding you have to deposit an unencrypted copy of your hard drive every week with the Laptop Safety Agency?

Just like Congress can regulate laptops in the interest of public safely, they can regulate air travel in the interest of public safety. But in neither of those situation can they subject citizens to unreasonable searches, no matter if the constitution mentions neither laptops or airplanes.
You don't know the seriousness of the illness unless you get to that stage. Losing a leg isn't as easy as it seems. Human has a very strong relation with its' organs and he is very prudent/fearful about his health when he is ill.
I would take a pass on adding his information -

Stuxnet was first detected in June by a security firm
based in Belarus, but may have been circulating since
2009.

Unlike most viruses, the worm targets systems that are
traditionally not connected to the internet for security
reasons.

Instead it infects Windows machines via USB keys -
commonly used to move files around - infected with
malware.
Where/how can I find these folks?

We're in direct discussion every week with our dedicated account team at Google but it's very hands off.
"I think if you were to ask me two or three years ago if Facebook was going to be this big, I wouldn't have picked it."

Hahahaha, (let me catch my breath) bwhaahhaahaha...

You really didn't see that one coming?
Agree with the do-it-yourself sentiment. I spent a couple of years responsible for about $2 million in annual search spend. Started off inheriting an agency relationship. They were sloppy, so I did an RFP for a new agency to take over the account.

New agency was better, but ultimately didn't offer enough improvement. So I started managing one segment of the business internally, proved to my company that it wasn't any Olympian task, and the whole thing came in house. As far as I know, four years later, they've grown the internal team and still do it in house.

THe SEM products give you a decent amount of sophistication for planning and controlling your campaign. Agency people may have an additional software layer to use on top of that but you can easily beat the results they offer just by giving a damn about your business. Your rep at an agency Will have many other clients to worry about and can't provide the same commitment as you or an employee.

You might even find this is doable on a part-time basis early on, once you have the campaign dialed in and need to focus on other things. However you sort it out, there are many better approaches than using an agency.
also, ciw which I use far more often than cw (don't need to be on beginning of word to change the whole thing). I like how all the ci commands always elicit a "whoa, what did you just do?" from people watching me edit.
US space shuttle programme faces its final countdown
I do not think his posting should be considered negative. It pointed out very valid concerns.

One way you might make your offer more attractive without paying more or compromising quality might be lifting the restriction to PHP 4.
but be sure to choose something you won't mind typing in regular non-vim contexts as well, as you'll eventually pick up a habit of hitting your <esc> equivalent pretty much whenever you stop to think. <ctrl-w> would be a horrible choice :)
This is exactly what I have been saying. I don't really understand why no one thinks this is a problem. I remember asking my mother as a kid why they were allowed to do that (having learned my Bill of Rights). She's a prosecutor, so I figured she knows the law. she said (and still does) that it is all there for our protection. If I was going to blow something up, I'd use a bus, train, or even the security line at the airport. Why bother with getting through security?

I'm not sure about international travel, but searches for domestic flights are unconstitutional.

Now, how do we effectively fight that?
That's really nothing but a standard technical fellowship job description. It exists at many, if not most, large-scale tech companies, although it's not the sort of position that shows up in classified ads.
> Don't send all your traffic to your home page. Specific targeting for segments of your customer base will do much better than general messages that don't speak directly to anyone.

Can't vote this up enough. We had dramatic conversion success by creating specially targeted landing pages with a lead form embedded. Tying your keywords to specific, targeted content is essential to making the most of your campaign. The less a user has to hunt around to satisfy their search intent, the more easily you can make the most of their attention.
utility * scarcity
From the article Lars says that facebook has changed the world. I don't see this being the case. So a lot of people like to see what their friends are doing and play games that challenge the average sheep's IQ, but what does facebook do that is world changing? Aside from keeping an enormous number people 'busy' for hours a day that might otherwise have been spent studying, working or actually doing things? I am skeptical about facebook's benefit to the world as anything more that entertainment du jour. Maybe Lars was just interested in giving wave another try under the facebook brand instead. It certainly might make more sense in a social connectivity company. I'm not arguing that facebook isn't very popular, just with point that it's world changing. Regardless, I wish him all the best in his new job.
I've kept an eye on this thread trying to think of how I think of code.

This is the best explanation I have -- I don't think in/visualize code at all.

I think of the individual parts that make up what I am trying to build.

This starts in the broadest sense (application requirements) to the more in depth needs (specifically what function ideas (what is going in, what is coming out) and in what order they will need to be in).

By the time I finish this architecture layout in my head, actually coding everything becomes very straightforward.
The sign was just about screening procedures in general, and didn't state the method of finding them. Of course with firearms, a traditional x-ray + meter detector would pick that up easily.
In your opinion, is there anything a company can do to keep or improve the average level of employees as the company grows, or is it just inevitable?
IANAL, but based on many conversations on the topic and a few close friends' personal legal experiences, WA generally doesn't uphold non-competes unless they're very specific (in geographic area and in time).

If someone is encumbered a geographical non-compete and they're leaving another state where they signed a non-compete, I'm willing to bet that the court battle will actually be in the original state, so CA law wouldn't apply. But again, IANAL.

I'm anti-non-competes unless a truly specific case warrants it (for commissioned sales teams, for example... I think it's reasonable that your new salesperson can't come in, print off your leads and go off on his own the next day).
Yes. Check out this video: http://vimeo.com/10514466
Because not doing the dishes is even more unpleasant.
It's the word "unreasonable".

Regular x-rays and metal detectors can be shown to have stopped a very large proportion of items immediately threatening to passenger safety, and are thus to be considered reasonable. Backscatter have no such advantage (in fact, it seems unlikely they could even have stopped 9/11) and are therefore considered unreasonable.

YMMV, but I don't consider myself "played" for subjecting myself to the less intrusive searches. I do feel like an idiot having to pull out my laptop and toothpaste and having to throw out any drinks.
I went through one of these machines for the first time last week, and I was really surprised how much it bothered me. I think the machines are excessive and all, but I'm not particularly shy. It was quite dehumanizing.

I wasn't expecting that type of machine. You have to take everything out of your pockets, and unfortunately, I had a tampon in mine. They made me hold the tampon, and hold my hands over my head, during the scan. Which is already a somewhat sexualized position for women, but I was wearing a shortish t-shirt that rode up a little.

I guess in the future I'll know to make sure my pockets are totally empty and to wear a longer shirt, and it won't be as awful. But it's still too invasive.
For maximum use I think PHP4 is the sweet spot, it's more than enough to build a relatively simple project as this and it would help to not require people to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of PHP if they happen to have a slightly older installation.

Personally I can't stand it when for a simple module I have to go and make changes to a system that is already working, and I can imagine that people would want to take this and integrate it as a module in their own website.

If there are really urgent reasons why PHP5 would be the only acceptable platform for something like this then I'm open to that but current+previous major release seem to be a good place to be in terms of installed base.
Ask HN: How to validate an idea that involves both users and businesses?
When you have an idea that is consumer oriented, there are several well-known ways in which you can validate it to see if people are interested before building the whole thing (e.g. put up a simple wordpress landing page, etc)

What happens when you have an idea for selling a service to companies but also requires lots of users to sign up to make it valuable to the companies you are selling to?

It seems like a chicken-and-egg problem. Users won't sign up unless many companies use this service and companies won't sign on unless many users sign up.

Are there any good strategies for attacking this problem, besides just talking to companies and gauging their interest if you had users, and having some incentives for early-adopters to sign up to beef up the population of users?
He's been there and done that. Presumably, between the acquisition of Google Earth and the fact that that acquisition was for pre-IPO Google stock, he's probably set for life financially. And he's already pretty well-known as the lead for Maps and Wave.

Personally, the major reason I'm still interested in startups is because I haven't yet succeeded at one. It's the challenge that's the thrill. There's a whole lot of bullshit that goes along with that, though, and if I already had a major success under my belt, I'd be more than happy to go work for the hot flavor-of-the-decade company where I can spend my time innovating and let someone else deal with the bullshit.
> This in turn means that I should not respond to replies to my comments, as they rarely get to 8+.

To me this is the biggest negative. A useful but non-controversial threadlet between members towards the end of a submission's life is IMO beneficial to the community overall but will be worse for average karma for participants.

I'll live with the lower average karma if it means still benefitting from the community in a way average-karma-targeting replies don't.
I'm not a supporter of the TSA by any means, but if you're going to enforce the ninth amendment completely literally, you can just come up with more and more ridiculous examples of things that we're doing now that are completely unconstitutional.

What specifically enumerated power allows the federal government to create the FDA, robbing me of my right to sell food with ground glass in it, or to sell pills that give you cancer?

What specifically enumerated power allows them to rob me of my right to pour radioactive sludge into a river that's on my property?

If you want to take the Super-libertarian Ron Paul approach, and say they shouldn't be doing these things, that's fine. But that strict interpretation of the Ninth Amendment isn't in practice today.
I personally just remap capslock to ESC directly. I'm in vim a large majority of the time that I'm working, so it's a very big jump in productivity for me.
It looks like Nokia now expects [1] most MeeGo apps to be written using Qt Quick:

http://qt.nokia.com/products/qt-quick/

Qt Quick is a very high-level toolkit for touchscreen UI design. Instead of native C++ code, Qt Quick apps are written in JavaScript and QML, a declarative UI language.

This solves the problem of supporting multiple architectures without needing a recompile -- at least for those apps which are simple enough to not require a C++ component.

QML is actually pretty cool. IMHO it's lightyears ahead of the clunky XML widget declaration specifications like the one used by Android, for instance.

--

[1] Nokia recently announced that Qt Quick is going to be their preferred toolkit for both internal development and 3rd parties, on both Symbian and MeeGo. (They were heading for some seriously silly internal fragmentation by having incompatible Qt-based toolkits on the two platforms, so standardizing on Qt Quick is a relief.)
Ask HN: How to write a Top Grad School Personal Statement
I'm in the process of applying to grad school. Are there any specific sites or resources you'd recommend for how to write a top grad school essay?

Also any tips from the community would be appreciated.
Just signed up on the Wufoo form Matthew.

Looking forward to trying it out, as I've hit all the points in your comment. I'll see if this works for us.
Loudness Wars: Maximum Control?
You don't think the LSA would violate the first ammendment?
My reaction to the above link is "lolwut". The page talks about the fact that the digital sums ("horizontal addition") of the powers of 2 form a repeating sequence (1,2,4,8,7,5), and proceeds to call this "the MATHEMATICAL FINGERPRINT OF GOD".

I can sympathize with people who look at the whole beautiful structure of mathematics and see the touch of God, but the premise of that page seems to be that this particular phenomenon--by itself--is huge and revolutionary and supernatural. In fact, a student of modular arithmetic would see it as fairly trivial. Two observations suffice to explain it:

1. The digital sum of a decimal integer is just that integer mod 9. (This gives us, as a special case, the divisibility rule for 9: N is divisible by 9 iff its digits add to a multiple of 9.) To illustrate with five digits, the number N = abcde (base 10) is equal to:

N = a * 10^4 + b * 10^3 + c * 10^2 + d * 10^1 + e

and since 10 ≡ 1 (mod 9), this reduces to

N ≡ a * 1^4 + b * 1^3 + c * 1^2 + d * 1^1 + e (mod 9)
≡ a + b + c + d + e (mod 9).

If a+b+c+d+e < 10, then clearly that is the digital sum, and it's also N mod 9. If a+b+c+d+e ≥ 10, then we take the digital sum of that, which will again be the same as taking it mod 9. For a quick concrete example, the number 758 -> 7+5+8 = 20 -> 2+0 = 2, and 758 = 2 + 9 * 84, so it is 2 mod 9. Or we could say that 758 = 7 * 100 + 5 * 10 + 8 = 7 * 1 + 5 * 1 + 8 = 7+5+8, which is clearly the same number we got while taking the digital sum.

2. The powers of 2 mod 9 are periodic. (In general, the powers of N mod M are periodic, for any integers N and M.) Specifically, they are: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 ≡ 7 (mod 9), 14 ≡ 5 (mod 9), 10 ≡ 1 (mod 9), and we are back at 1. This is exactly the "1,2,4,8,7,5" sequence that page talks about.

So, the above page talks about an elementary result of modular arithmetic as though it, by itself, were some logic-defying mystery. Seems pretty dishonest to me. Maybe it's a joke site. I saw a donation link, so maybe these guys are successful trolls.

I'm a bit curious as to the motives of the parent commenter. You seem to be a long-time member of HN (account is more than 2 years old). Was it a joke, or did you suspect something fishy but didn't know what it was and posted it here hoping someone would explain it for you, or did you actually take the author at his word, or what?
There are less than a thousand engineers (I think about 4 or 5 hundred).
The cynical side of me imagines all these people are joining FB for its inevitable blockbuster IPO. But then another part of me wonders if FB is coming out with something completely revolutionary. Something so amazing that all these smart folks cant wait to work on it.
Without Facebook, I would have quite a bit of trouble connecting with my friends and families around the world.
This made me realize that USB keys are not only dangerous because of Windows auto-run.

They could also emulate USB HUB with keyboard/mouse to send input required to run exploit off the drive and click through all UAC warnings.
Who thinks losing a leg is easy? It doesn't seem easy to me at all, it seems absolutely terrible.
I think you can still just read Google's cached version for those results. The actual content is below the placeholder content.
Does this really need to be said to someone that wants to manage a lot of money on PPC spending?
PHP4 end of life was at the end of 2007. I don't think you'd lose many users for requiring php5. (sorry couldn't reply to the correct nested comment)
Ask HN: please critique my personal statement
Highly motivated to put Wall Street's criminal class in jail and strip them of their assets. The technical apparatus I'm building involves parsing through subpoenaed documents and records with a HadoopDB MapReduce cluster with RHIPE on each node for the statistical analysis of large data collections, among other specialized tools to detect widespread, systemic fraud. I have access to world-class experts in pattern recognition and logic. I'm fearless in the face of complexity and cannot be deterred.
For better or worse, they do change the world.

I communicate with my high-school friends more often than the days of ICQ, MSN, and Friendster joined together.

Keep in mind that me and my friends have passed university and are working and have our own life. Oh, by the way, we live in different continents of the world.
Or for Firefox - vimperator. http://vimperator.org/vimperator
I would disagree that the TSA is unconstitutional under the 10th Amendment as you assert, because of the power to regulate interstate commerce (which certainly includes at least air travel crossing state and US borders) is an explicitly enumerated power of the federal government in the Constitution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause.
Get it launched, get users, get making money. ASAP.
Typically, someone wants work done, finds someone to do it, and they agree on what's getting done and how much is going to be paid. In this case, 100% of the risk is with the developer. Maybe someone else builds it first; maybe you don't like what the finished product looks like; etc. There is no risk to you here. It seems like a very one-sided approach to getting something done.

As an aside, doesn't this belong on a job board or contractor site?
Ctrl-c and ctrl-[ are not the same. There are times when latter completes the insert session (same as esc) while the former aborts it, e.g. visual block insertion with (ctrl-v jjjj I)

Also, the happy haacking keyboard already puts control in its proper place and puts esc where ~ normally is, which is close enough that you don't really need to remap it. Best vim keyboard ever.
That's a good argument, I thought it was still a supported version. Thank you, I will amend the article.
Setting aside your personal judgments on how other people spend their time, do you actually not think that facebook has had a large impact on how (primarily younger) people socialize, understand each other, and think about their relationships?
http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/vlc-devel/2010-Novembe... is a longer analysis
Interesting question. I think it's possible to maintain and even improve the average level of intelligence of employees, but past a certain size it's so ridiculously difficult as to be infeasible, practically speaking. Also, I'm not convinced that it's in the company's best interests, but I guess that depends on what the goal of the company is. If, like most companies, it is to make money, then having too many smart people could be a liability; after a certain point you want to hire people for reliability and teamwork rather than individual intelligence. Even if the company has some other goal, I would say it's probably easier to try to keep the company small and automate as much work as possible than it is to keep hiring really smart people.
What terrible examples.

The FDA, as discussed in the Boat Captain thread, is entirely unnecessary. One potential option, as mentioned, was tort liability for all things not disclosed when the pills were sold.

Clearly defined water rights would more than properly solve number two.

Learn something about other political views before making ridiculous statements. There's no need to write it off by citing some Christian quasi-libertarian who for some reason liberals have adopted as the poster child of libertarianism. Probably just to defame it in the minds of mindless liberal voters.
Are you opposed to a lightweight framework? Or a templating tool like Smarty? Ideally, a good framework would make a cleaner, more coherent codebase. If you restrict frameworks, I have a feeling most devs will just roll their own.