skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Out of context that one can be misleading.

The context was that our first instinct in a specific situation was to solve a much bigger problem than we needed to. Had we followed that instinct we'd have gone down the wrong road. What was better was to challenge that initial instinct and ask "What's the real problem here? How can we solve the most important part of that real problem as quickly and simply as possible? Maybe that'll be all we need to do." It turned out that was exactly what we needed to do.

First instincts often see big huge pictures. We've found that challenging that initial instinct helps us find the little piece of the big pie that is really in need of a solution.
I think it's really inconclusive what happened, seems like questionable reporting?
Interpol call for arrest of Julian Assange (WikiLeaks) for alleged sex crimes
Except that that is the main point of the app.
SMBs love Cloud Apps Like Teens love Mobile Apps
The news prints what people want to read about. It's a supply/demand industry.

However what in the leaks demand that people call for the overthrow of the US government? Thus far it has been entirely predictable, tame, boring cables from individual offices and subjective interpretations. BFD. Seriously, BFD. It's like reading a diary, and that's what's interesting, but there has been nothing that is unexpected.
So any raw figures on conversion rate changes?
Nevermind all that. My comment was purely targetted at the text I quoted.

I just meant that saying "my online system sucks and you shouldn't care (or should be complacent) because its just a hack on top of some legacy system" isn't an excuse you should accept.

Just because you do not feel its worthwhile to replace the underlying system (and I'm not arguing over whether it is or isn't), doesn't make it alright that the end result is bad and certainly does not mean people should accept that reason as an excuse.
Pardon my ignorance but is there really nothing that can be done to escape DDOS attacks other than simply buying more bandwidth? What stops a criminal entity or government with enough resources from upping the size of the attack even more and prolonging it for months or even years?
Especially if NASA suddenly starts selling The Beatles.

Now, if they discovered an arsenic-eating, microbial alien life form which could play Beatles tunes, that would be a day I'd never forget. The day the universe jumped the shark.
Ask HN: Pic of an MD5(?) tattoo, time to decode it
They started as white guys, besides Oprah of course.

EDIT: Perhaps I should have been clearer. Given the average age, they were significantly advantaged by the color of their skin and patriarchal state of society, so they didn't start with "nothing." They took advantage of the many opportunities afforded to white males at the time. I'm not saying they were lazy or don't deserve their wealth, but Bloomberg seems to be painting them in the best possible light.
> First, I'm very surprised that you were not aware of the policy that if you don't take the first part of an itinerary, you won't be able to catch up half-way.

Why are you surprised at this? The airline itself specifically told him he could do this: he got the early-check-in email saying his flight was okay. It seems reasonable for him to believe that his flight was okay.
My take on Android and Fragmentation: It's a problem, but not the way you think
If you want to go the XMPP route, ejabberd's mod_pubsub. Written in erlang, newer versions can be either Mnesia or db-backed
(throw away account...)

Full disclosure: I wrote one of these systems (AMA)

1. You'd probably be surprised what we can figure out from this. You'd also be surprised that there isn't much you can do to stop it from happening b/c we've been able to find ways to get information that is actually outside the browser.

2. You'd probably be surprised to see how embedded this is already. I'm guessing most people have had their browser fingerprinted at least once...for some reason. Knowing who used the services I wrote, I can tell you that they are everywhere...and given that I know our competitors also have this technology and who they work with...well...

3. There are legitimate uses to this tech besides spam. Its just that the money is in spam. I'm near 100% certain that most people will use this for spam in the next year or two.
Not to condone anything, but I see another part of the cycle: the "we fucked up" post that makes everything all better. It seems the mob responds very well to these kinds of admissions of guilt. The problem with some companies is that they don't have to say sorry because they have monopolies and don't give a shit about you as a customer.

I think in some ways the Mob just wants to see a more friendly business atmosphere that respects them as customers, and they use the power they have to try to achieve those ends.
Interesting idea, Noah. But there are two questions in my mind:

a) How are you going to monetize this? (You say on website it is free for companies using it, but you must have thought of some monetization strategy)

b) You incentivizing users signup for a service just to get that exclusive offer under the signup box. Aren't those users going to be no better than "no-users"? I mean, if the only (or part-of) reason for a user signing up for a service is because he wanted to get that exclusive offer, chances of him becoming a long term customer are pretty low. Right?
The Droid marketing has been a bit off-putting. Some kind of post-apocalyptic world controlled by robots, not unlike the future envisioned in The Terminator. I guess it appeals to some guys, I just think it looks overly complicated.
"Hire me or eat sh*t": accusations fly over DIY P2P defense kits
If its a tool for discovery than I still say its not usable.

If I went looking for list of articles, linking CS + Music, this doesn't help me. I'd want to click CS, click music, and then receive a list of articles matching that correlation. Instead I have to hover over each dot, and scrub through years to even see titles for things. Sure, I get the "excitement" of not knowing what I'm looking for, but that is not a usable tool for discovering articles.
Via an email thread at work:

"My little brother (23 yrs old) recently got a code tattooed on his forearm (picture attached). He’s framing this tattoo to everyone in a very mysterious way, to the point of being arrogant. He hasn’t told anyone what it means and has challenged his Facebook friends to try to figure it out.

As an older brother, I’m obligated to rain on his parade.

$25 gift card (wherever you like) to the first person to figure it out."

The string, for your convenience: ce881618a0393cc3d6eba8d0e0fe9621
Even though you jest, I have to agree. I really wish Google would buy out Yelp or would enter into direct competition. They would bring a level of credibility to an even playing fields for all parties involved. There are no many companies that carry around the kind of credibility needed to asway all concerns that people are not buying there way out of reviews.
Oh, for a second there I thought Stanford made all their dissertations available online. On second thought why doesn't universities do this and instead try to sell access? I've heard of people who put in a $20 bill in the copy of their dissertations in the university library and finding it intact years later.
Tasty Labs is hiring engineers in Palo Alto/Mountain View
The place to warn about this would be before he missed his flight (or at initial booking, but it would annoy frequent travelers to be presented information like this every single time they book; it's in the rules of carriage).

I've flown on some airlines where they send mail encouraging online checkin which also includes "miss your flight" information. And, I've flown others where if you miss you flight, they call or email or SMS you and try to work with you on rebooking to a later flight (either standby for free or a small fee, or rebooking for $50-150), plus any difference in fare. This would still support price discrimination and market segmentation.

The vast majority of people who miss their outbound leg are still wanting travel on the outbound leg at a later time, not to burn the outbound leg and take the return leg. That is the failure mode to try to optimize, not the return leg.
see edit. HN trims the apostrophe from "World's".

and thanks for putting in the effort to comment, but not search for the page that DOES exist.
I think TBH that's my main problem with these. They're all out of context, and so fairly useless without the back story.
Well, when you get bumped they put you on another flight, and often offer free flights to the people who volunteer to get bumped...

So it's not really fraud. They don't just strand you at the airport.
In flash? C'mon!
Quantum teleportation finds a place in quantum computers
Google alerts, Reputation Defender, etc.
Getting Setup for Ruby on Rails development
A Spotlight-like search for your web apps
I understand your company wants coverage and exposure, but the marketing for a death site is always going to come across as creepy and exploitative unless you're in a funeral home.
We've seen .2% up to 30% increase. Varies by website and still a bit early as we are adding more rewards to the system.
I wonder what the feasibility would be of developing a web client for BlackBerry, with long-polling or websockets for the notifications.

http://us.blackberry.com/developers/browserdev/

The key viral feature was using the addressbook to populate the contact list, and you'd lose that, but still be able to implement a bunch of the other stuff. I can't tell from that browserdev page how much of the "widget API" is stuff that you'd need to get bundled up and signed, and how much is just available in the browser.

Either way, this is a pretty developer-hostile move on RIM's part. That's okay, though; all indications are that RIM is capable of developing a large selection of beautiful, compelling, worthwhile first-party apps for the Playbook. A third-party developer ecosystem would really just weigh the platform down.
This is true, but only to a point, and only when compared with a founder's other alternatives.

Seed-stage fundraising has never favored the entrepreneur more. In this climate, founders can get a higher valuation for their company from a high-quality set of angels, so 'ouch' seems pretty appropriate to me.
I am looking for people interested in working on one, or a combination, of the following:

- Making a commercial RepRap machine and selling it.

- Running a coworking office for startups/freelancers/hackers.

- Running a hackerspace with lots of cool tools (such as 3D printers) open to both paid members and the public.

- Running a small fab-lab for on-demand rapid prototyping and fabrication services.

###

I am located in Europe. You should also be located in Europe, or able to work here. I am open to suggestions, so if you want to do something outside the EU, feel free to contact me anyway.

You can reach me at: http://disattention.com/contact/

Please indicate which of the four ideas you like most, your location, any relevant experience, etc. I've also posted this on a previous HN thread and received a couple responses, so I'll try to put together a group chat next week to discuss all our ideas.
I'm a little annoyed that they used the phrase "topic distance" but it looks like they're using something which is in some cases very asymmetric (the 'distance' between CS and EE is not the same as between EE and CS). As a visualization, it's not meaningful because they don't explain what it means for two topics to be 'close'.

I'm guessing they're using something like a KL divergence between the distributions over words (smoothed?) given each topic, but that could be way off.
I did my PhD in Computer and Systems Engineering (in the EE department of my school), an my thesis involved use of Computer Vision and AI in the analysis of microscope images of human cells, so I did a lot of work with MD's and Biologists. I thought it would be interesting to see which theses overlapped cell biology and Electrical Engineering.

The browser showed two overlaps: "Low-Power dynamic amplifiers for pipelined A/D conversion" and "Precision clock synthesis using direct modulation of front end multiplexers/demultiplexers in high speed serial link transceivers"

The first of these mentioned "cell phones" in the abstract. There was no evidence of any cell biology link in the second.

The visualization may be interesting, but I'm not so confident in the quality of the data.
Wow. I feel like Jane McGonigal would hate this. Especially her video being used to promote it. Jane has said publicly that she wants to design games that change the world, not just "pointify" current products. I highly recommend watching Jesse Schell's talk on the Gamepocalypse (a vivid vision of the dystopic result of gamification). In fact, I believe Jane and Jesse are debating it at a conference later this year. Would be interesting to hear their thoughts on this.
I personally think flying SFO-LAX is absurd; I drive SFO-LAX, SFO-PDX, SFO-LAS, SFO-SAN, and usually SFO-SEA vs. fly. And I fly Virgin America or Alaska instead of United when possible because I'm very familiar with United's quality of service and product.
how is the battery life?
Amazon Pulls Hosting Services For WikiLeaks
Cambridge, MA

HubSpot is developing an Inbound Marketing platform to help businesses do transform the way they do marketing. We have some of the best large scale distributed web apps using cutting edge technology. Projects we have built include a Hadoop processing cluster for a web-scale analytics system; a Solr-backed entity search tool; and a realtime social media monitoring system processing over 5 million messages a day.

We need brilliant engineers to join our growing team developing our SaaS product. We use Java, .NET and Python. We do not hire based on a specific technologies skill set, or a buzz-word compliant resume.

If this sounds like your kind of challenge please go here to apply:
http://www.hubspot.com/careers/?nl=1&jvi=oiAcVfwJ,Apply&...
No, they built a solid business on the experience and deep understanding that eventually led to these one-liners.

The one-liners are useless. The experience that led to them (which was, no doubt, shared at the "masterclass") is priceless.
agreed, they should do better at making sure you read this. but they shouldn't bury this somewhere EULA-style.

that's an aside. the point is: they told him to check-in. their system is flawed. they took the time to hire someone to program the ability to cancel the whole flight, but they ignored the part where they tell him to check-in. to make things worse, they treated him terribly when he tried to and didn't realize his "mistake."
I suspect it's the opposite. They built a solid, not spectacular business on clever marketing and craftsmanship. Then they extracted witty aphorisms from it, and became heroes.

It's a bunch of platitudes. Nothing straightforwardly false, but in such high doses? Smug and vacuous.
Ask HN: Outsourced SEM/SEO firms?
Just wondering if anyone has any recommendations for firms that handle SEM/SEO on an outsourced basis. A separate question would be "is this a good idea" - any thoughts appreciated.
Great questions Paras.

A) We make money on some of the rewards which will be paid. We are seeing good conversions on the "customers" (the people who opt-in to receive the rewards) we send to the companies. For the next few weeks we are giving tons of credit for people to add their companies / products as rewards.

B) Yea, it's hard to say whether the users are "good" customers or not. The data is showing they are.

We look it more as a bonus for the person to try out your service. Think of it as a free bonus that makes you more likely to try a product (ie. free toothpaste w/ toothbrush purchase)
That would be Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines, Qatar Airways, Etihad, or to a lesser extent, Emirates or Asiana. It's really just US flagged airlines that are incredibly bad (I've flown several million miles internationally, and aside from Royal Jordanian (which flies to Iraq), Ariana (the Afghan Airline) and Kam Air (the Southwest of Afghanistan), no one approaches US standards of quality. Some of the LCCs in Europe (Ryan Air) are kind of painful, but so cheap that it makes up for it. LCCs in Asia (Tiger, Jetstar, etc.) tend to be more like Virgin America or Southwest.
Scratch For Arduino
It's automated, but we have to wait 5 days for it? That's a deal breaker for me.
anyone know what the exact number of remaining IPs are in that 3%?
Situations like this are exactly why I'm really glad chargebacks exist.
Go somewhere you have never been, and eat something that makes you grossed out.
Right, it is not the site for it. It is nothing personal but the mantra for HN is serious discussion, allowing it contributes to the deterioration of the site away from it's stated goal and makes HN = !HN. That being said, I knocked it to 0, nothing personal, it just does not belong here.
I have been on the fence about getting a private account. I'm now officially sold.
... so it's a 30 day free trial?

I love GitHub (and am a happy micro plan subscriber), but this deal just seems... well... kinda yawn.
Yes Ryanair almost pride themselves on being rude. They customer service response is that you can coy someone else if you don't pike them. However they are ridiculously cheap. I was in a long distance relationship with someone in a different country 300km away. We saw each other almost every weekend or second weekend thanks to Ryanair. Return international flight frequently cost €30, sometimes less. I have more than once had a flight cost €0.01, including all taxes/charges.

Ryanair are rude and uncaring, but damn, they made flights cheap amd available.
EULAs are basically meaningless, so I skip them (unless I'm evaluating a large purchase).

Terms of Carriage/Fare Rules are actually quite important. I absolutely do check things like change fees, reroutability, fare class, etc. when I buy a ticket, and will often pay the 5% premium to get a more changeable ticket.

This is much more like reading the tech specs for a new laptop (does it have a linux-supported wifi chipset? discrete graphics?) than a EULA.

A useful fact you may not know: most "legacy" carriers will interline you onto another airline if they can't accommodate your scheduled travel -- for instance, if they cancel a flight, they will put you on another airline's flight if it will get your there faster. This is a VERY BIG DEAL internationally, where they don't always even have daily flights -- if a flight is canceled, it could be 2-3 days before the next flight with the same airline to your destination. Low cost carriers (e.g. Southwest) won't.
Honestly though, I doubt he is a loyal repeat customer of UAL, since he almost definitely would know about the "miss a segment, your itinerary is cancelled" rule if he was. IMO, US legacy airlines are relatively good to their valuable customers via frequent flyer programs and elite status.
Additionally, the larger elaborate data structure will almost certainly be slower.
If you asked someone to draw the screen of say http://godaddy.com from memory, they'd likely mainly remember the lovely lady wearing a 'godaddy' t-shirt. Is that the most important thing?

What we remember is different to what we want if we need it. "important" isn't specific enough. Who is it important to? In what context?

Should we also ask a hacker to write down the keyboard short cuts from emacs they remember and get rid of the rest of them?

I'm not going to get into an argument, but hopefully you can see why I made the comment.
The music "ecosystem" undergoes artificial selection by humans. By definition, there will exist more copies (legitimately manufactured or burned at home) of more popular albums. This is similar to the concept of a meme. (By the way, it would make more sense to ponder whether the information reproduces itself, rather than the physical disc.)

No one would say the albums reproduce themselves, but then again no one is saying the biological reproduction so crucial to natural selection requires the organism to deliberately reproduce or even be aware of the reproduction.

All living organisms require something external to survive and reproduce—in the case of viruses, the requirement may be another living cell. The reproduction argument is insufficient to declare viruses non-living. I don't think biologists are trying to pass judgement on viruses, rather I believe the definition of life is less important to them than, say, the cell. Viruses aren't cells, and I think that's why textbooks waste time on the "are viruses living" debate.
Two points:

Groupon should want to get out of this market, it's a race to the bottom, the days of skimming 50% off the top are going away as services like LivingSocial, GiltCity, and a billion other knock offs drive profit margins lower and lower.

Groupon recently launched their Merchant Center ( http://www.groupon.com/merchants/welcome ), which seems right up Google's alley. This kind of self-service, low-margin, high-volume, set-up is the kind of thing that Google has the scale to completely dominate. I think Groupon's brand + Google's Scale could equal profit, and if Big G is looking at that this deal might make sense after all.
And very heavy, 3-pager tl;dr pdfs at that.
OK, maybe I'm biased against Europeans, I don't know the landscape, etc. etc. But just compare and contrast their web page with YC's. YC's is succinct, to the point and no-nonsense. It carries the air of someone who doesn't have to prove anything.

A look at this website, though turns you off, with the wannabe photos and titles like X Geek. And trying to get 27% by pushing around the tired notion of "Europe is different" in this age and time, where bootstrapping is so common and many incubators like YC are multinational? That's insane. Wasn't there a post from a YC applicant from Greece on HN just a couple of days ago?

I'm originally from Europe and looking at examples like this makes me really pessimistic. Instead of hiding behind "it's different" excuses, the founders should have made "We're gonna be 10x better than YC" their motto.

And one last thing: Just as all free Google services funnel users to their search where they make money, YC has HN as the breeding ground of ideas and startups. Everybody knows that this is what makes YC so successful. You probably should try to start a similar environment.
There is a significant increase in evil-ness between the two IMHO.

Banning them from the store/crippling their existing installs is basically: "we don't like you competing with our first party offerings, so get the hell off our platform"

Suing them now, given that Kik is still active on other platforms, is basically: "we don't like you competing with our offerings, so we're going to prevent you from operating anywhere, even on platforms we don't own or have any control over"

I don't know about you, but the second seems a bit more evil than the first.
Seattle, WA & San Francisco, CA; remote is possible.

Informed Biometry (a.k.a. pictureofhealth.com) -- semi-stealthy description: we make tools that help people take care of people. The company is self-funded but well-funded (the best way to be!), with two experienced founders looking for help.

We need great developers and great designers. We're building on the Rails stack right now, so we'd like experienced Rails folks, but general-purpose abilities are important.

Our work environment doesn't exist yet, so you get to help define it! If you care about fancy computers, unlimited books, good coffee, etc., sure, we got it. Also, the freedom to figure out the right way to do something and go get it done.

Contact me at walter@infbio.com, or http://www.pictureofhealth.com/jobs.
A life without PDF readers
I would imagine they're hearing earfuls from developers. They're really talking to us alot. As in, I've personally talked to them for about it for 90 minutes.
The right response to Firesheep