skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
His error was to assume that people who would give up a small secret would also give up a larger one. That's not at all a given.
The Mac store does not preclude developers from distributing they product independent of the mac store. While I do think it is strange that demos and trials are unavailable via the app store, they are still available from the developers own distribution channel.
Case in Point: http://twitter.com/#!/tferriss/status/23166933377486848
I think her compliance is simpler than that. If I believe something for a long time, and finally someone admits it, I cut them some slack, partly because it's funny.
> He's actually sworn off of creating another game creation system ever again, because dealing with the communities surrounding them and their maintenance requests is more trouble for less money than cranking out a good RPG every year.

Not entirely accurate. Vogel did end up releasing a second game creation system based on his isometric RPG engine -- Blades of Avernum (http://www.avernum.com/blades/). It was even less profitable for him than BoE had been, which was already a loss.

The source code to BoE was released a few years ago. Unfortunately, the code was old and messy enough that little progress has been made in modernizing it.
We have got a lot of similar feedback. However, after a great deal of thought we have decided not to give names of people, for the following reasons:

(a) We are not a prosecuting agency on behalf of citizens. They can also directly go to regulatory and vigilance authorities such as the Lokayukta and Central Vigilance Commission.
(b) It distracts us from the main task of putting pressure on the government for systemic improvement
(c) We do not want to open the floodgates of claims and counterclaims. We want the website to retain its focus on being a positive mover in the larger endeavour of eliminating corruption.
(d) Elimination of corruption is better achieved by simplification of systems, transparency and other similar reforms. By targeting corrupt people without tackling such changes, we cannot achieve much.
I liked this comment:

"We partner with them closely, really innovating around how you bring social and search together. So the partnership, particularly with Bing and Facebook, is really--we're really doing innovative things to help you when you go look for something"

Search on Facebook is so unbelievable bad that it makes me wonder just how full of it Ballmer is. I am constantly annoyed when I try to search for a friend or message: half my results are completely irrelevant Bing items and the other half seems like a SELECT random FROM facebookdb.random.
Uniformity vs. Individuality in Mac UI Design
Follower Count Doesn't Matter - But List Count Does
judging from my own behavior, I think the bigger effect is quitting after a long string of losses, but YMMV
Hi, I'm the author. Someone alerted me that this showed up on HN, so I figured I should come by to clarify.

I believe my statement might be clear. What I mean by that is "it's [everyone's] job to say no-hire," as opposed to anyone feeling like "well, I'm not sure about this candidate, but I'll let someone else reject them because I don't want to be perceived as mean." One problem with hiring is that everyone must be willing to uphold the standard - if you have too many people who are never willing to be the one to say no-hire, the standard will fall - everyone has to be willing to take the responsibility for saying no.

That said, systemic bias is an orthogonal (and real) issue. Being "not sure" should be applied to "does this candidate measure up" not "is this candidate a lot like me?"
can anyone explain what bayes and mfa mean? I picked the site http://www.basemetals.com/ (bayes (spam 8.6 > 5.3)) at random, and although it won't win any design awards I can't see what the problem with it is. Am I missing something?
Do you really think most of the people doctors without borders helped suffered as much as he did?
Why is http://www.deadmau5.com/ marked as spam?? Its obviously not.
Hi, I'm the author.

This comment is correct. My intention is not to prioritize tools over thinking about anything else. If you read the essay linked from it, I said "your most talented engineers should be working on your tools." So when I say "highest priority," I mean development priority, i.e. you shouldn't have your best people working on features and your second-tier people doing tool work, like many organizations do.
NPR CEO Resigns Because of Firing Juan Williams
Microblogging sites in China are thriving, much better than SNS sites (IMHO). I often come to wonder why FB is worth so much more than twitter. Could this actually be one of the cases when copycats win over the original?
Nhung diem nhan 2010 va du bao kinh te 2011
Năm 2010 Việt Nam vừa phải gồng mình tiếp tục đối phó với hệ quả của cuộc khủng hoảng kinh tế - tài chính toàn cầu, vừa liên tiếp đương đầu với nhiều trận thiên tai khắc nghiệt. Tuy nhiên, bức tranh kinh tế vẫn có gam màu sáng chủ đạo.
It isn't for the secret-listener to decide what is worthwhile to hold in confidence. A small secret shouldn't be disclosed just because the person that heard it thinks that it isn't worth keeping secret.

Besides, I don't think contemporary community standards would consider coming out as gay as being a small secret.

Generalizing further, it really isn't fair for me to classify any of these as big or small. One person may consider coming out as gay as no big deal and hide past sexual abuse, while another may consider disclosing past sexual abuse as no big deal and not disclose sexual orientation. It isn't for me to decide which is bigger than the other.
Do something completly different which empties out your mind. For me that is going for a run, others play the guitar, just try and get away from the computer for a good while before trying to sleep.

And I second the note about discipline. Define your working hours and stick to them. If you can't do it, get yourself a faimily: they'll do it for you :)
For some people that 'one person' is themselves. And those people aren't necessarily abused people with deep, dark secrets. To say that everyone has that person is a fallacy. The world rarely deals in absolutes.
Treatment for liposuction at Beverly hills
There were some recent news a few days ago on their financing round:
http://deals-n-discounts.com/live-video-sharing-company-qik-...
http://www.sandhill.com/finance/detail_vc.php?id=4653
I just saw 2 pics and they were definitely not erotic.
Maybe that explains the failure.
Well, that's pretty obvious. If it involves an infinite sum, but you only have n people, you don't quite get to that infinity-th guy ;)
Memex 1.1 » Blog Archive » Facebook: the Gold(man) rush
You can do free light versions, and non-free pro versions, and that sort of thing.

Autodesk SketchBook Express is free, SketchBook Pro is $30 or thereabouts.
JohnnyBrown:

You're not missing anything. As jolan said, it's basically the twitter version of "The Million Dollar Homepage"... minus the million dollars. :p

I'm also not saying this is a good idea or that I would like everyone to start putting things like this live.

The whole point of this post (which I suppose I understated) is that I generally have ideas that are much more interesting and complex, but their complexity causes even more doubt and I never launch.

In this case, I stopped over-thinking it and launched a very simple idea with a layout and model that I wasn't very happy with. For this, I was rewarded by getting money in my account right away and now I am watching the trends of actual paying customer and can tweak the site to meet their needs.

I know that we've all heard "Launch Early, Launch Often" and "If you're not embarrassed by your first version you're waiting too long" but it took me pushing out a really simple idea to actually get a feel for it.

The hope is that I learn my lesson and launch my real ideas faster.

Rest of Hacker News:

Do any of you have similar stories or some insight that you'd like to share?
I guess Bayes refers to running a Bayes-based classifier[1] on a certain site in order to infer the probability that it is a "bad"/spam one.

On the other hand, I have no idea what mfa means.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_spam_filtering
Sorry but this is lame and derivative. Good for you that you made some money but posting it to drive traffic to your site is even worse. I hope that somebody who has powers to do so downvotes you.
Two big problems with automated spam blocking are: false positives and changing domain names.

For the second one, how often do you revise your blocked links? what if it changed owner and the new one doesn't provide spam.

For the first one, is even one false positive tolerable? Will you deny someone presence in your index because you failed? And if so, how do you handle challenges?
I think he might not actually know the definition of the word... maybe he thinks evil == inconvenient to him.
Awesome. That's ingenious really. Using another idea, an old idea, and making it 'new' again, by using a 'new' service.
mfa = Made for Adsense. That means we believe that the domain seems designed more to show ads than to provide content.

bayes = our Baysian analysis gizmo thinks bad things about this site's content. Too much Viagra, not enough content. Like all artificially-intelligent things, it can sometimes be hard to see why it's upset.
Wow, the search results are terrible on blekko. I think someone's gone crazy with the ban hammer.

My suggestion to blekko: look for signals of relevance to determine serps, instead of flagging every other website as spam.
What value are you giving me? Sure I get to post my picture on a web page, but I already have plenty of web pages where I have my picture posted, why yours?

Overall I find it interesting that people are willing to throw their money away at something so completely useless.
பெண் எஸ்.ஐ.,தற்கொலை
The sproutcore 60-60 days for 60 devs to train for 60 hours to write one book
Yeah, developing applications with ruby and rails is a lot of fun. It's easy to pick up the language, and once you know the basics of rails, building complex web apps becomes incredibly easy.
nice. if I had to guess, in a couple years, google will attempt to acquire blekko to integrate with their webspam team.
It looks like they have a considerable number of false positives. Another site, jet2.com is the website of a low cost airline; wp-plugins.net is hosting Wordpress plugins.
> Besides, I don't think contemporary community standards
> would consider coming out as gay as being a small secret.

Well, I agree that coming out shouldn't be viewed as a small secret. Though I feel in the minds of a lot of people "something that are you are" is more likely to be fair game for rumor and ridicule than "something (especially a trauma) that has happened to you." I.e. confiding a tragedy/trauma to someone will more universally be perceived as 'serious' and 'a big deal' in terms of keeping confidences.
Objective-C code on Big Bang Theory
I think you assume the wrong motivation.
That is true, it certainly is possible. I can't actually prove the absolute case.

But I do believe that it is much more probable that everyone has a personal outlet with whom they speak. Life is hard. (Can I even say that absolutely? Although completely foreign to me, I suppose there are people out there that don't have hardships in life.) People need to vent to someone, share some close or special with someone, and make a connection.

Without that people explode. This is one way people without that outlet explode.
There are quite a few false positives on that list. Also titling sites with nocrawl as spam is pretty lame. dshield.org is listed as mfa, but there isn't an adsense ad on it.
What's unfinished about it? Mind going into the technology behind it?
So if you bought the whole company at a $50b valuation, and assume that this $355m/yr profit rate for first 9 months held constant and therefore turned into $473m total by end of year, and then that rate held constant each year on forward, and that all profits were always and evenly distributed to all shareholders, then you'd recoup your investment (merely break even, anyway) after 105 years.

Add in an unpredictable future growth rate. Add in the fact that they're probably approaching a hard cap on users in the next year or so. Add in bubble-ishness. Add in a big unknown as to whether they find ways to better monetize their users. And all this adds up to telling me either this is a bad investment, or, maybe just maybe it will at least break even within your lifetime. Can't say. But from this data I think it is not clear that this is a slam dunk buy at all. Either bad or meh.
Ways three days with shaky service? Does anyone know a good alternative to github?
What about the 'non-geeks' learning how to hack :D? I'm finally at a point where I can make a functional page with PHP and ZEND!

Also - on ilovecomputers' point, I've organized a TEDx event and I'm helping with another right now; I'd be happy to help organizing online resources or anything else!
Ah, sorry, that should have been two lines, fat fingered the leading two spaces, those should have been

+foof things i will not
bsi +lnk scada
Why should they accept new signups for a service that they plan to close, in the coming months? Its a pretty straightforward logic to me.
anecdotally i was able to get 2/3 of porn and around 60% non-porn over 60 rounds...not statistically significant in itself, but piques my interest in this line of thought

pie-in-the-sky thinking: is there some 'quantum immortality'-style argument that can be made for this sort of effect? quantum immortality is a somewhat fringe many-worlds-quantum-physics argument that an observer can never experience death and thus will always find him/herself in a universe in which they are alive (e.g. schrodinger's cat will always find itself in a universe where the atom did not decay). that is, in certain situations, a random event (e.g. decay of atom) would seemingly cease to be random (e.g. from the POV of schrodinger's cat) due to its consequences in the future (cat death by fumigation).

also, if this arousal-esp-effect actually is real (obviously exceedingly unlikely due to how bizarre its implications would be) i wonder if the human choice element would even matter; i'd like to see a similar experiment where everything is the same but there is no human choice and the curtains are just randomly chosen. the effect (if it actually did exist) might be due not to somehow arousal traveling backwards informing our consciousness but somehow arousal traveling backwards to influence what universe we find ourselves in.
The new age of Mac applications
Really ? All my enterprise DB systems are going to be obsoleted by a cell phone that can do facebook?

I remember 10 years ago when the web was going to make big iron irrelevent, and 20years ago when PCs were going to replace mainframes
are you looking for a product that you can integrate with your site now? or you want an algorithm?
That depends on the market, I think. AFAIK most of the dissatisfaction with Atom is due to its power consumption rather than its performance, so an ARM with comparable computing power and lower power consumption would be quite satisfactory for most users when teamed up with a solid GPU.
Thanks for the feedback jayzee.

I didn't post this to drive traffic to the site, although I am aware that it would be a side effect. The only reason I included the URL is so that the first comments wouldn't all be "what was the site?"

Lame and Derivative: As I mentioned in my previous comment, I don't think it's an amazing idea... it's just an idea. As for derivative, isn't innovation the art of taking old things and reworking them into something new?
Thanks Veb :)
The processes section intrigues. As the "CTO" in a 4-person startup, I'm constantly juggling between getting $hit done and documenting what the heck I did to get $hit done. Seems to be a fine balance.
There's bitbucket.org. But they're not so hot on reliability either. You can also try Unfuddle, if you don't care much for the "social" part of github.
The answer suggested that even the expected value is never going to be 1/2 but instead something similar to 1/2-1/(4k) for k families which stop having children after the first boy. So, it's a bit more sophisticated than that involving situations where you test the average percentage of an infinite number of islands with k families each.
Oh God. I just laughed so hard. Snorted even. I think I woke up the neighbours, and we have thick walls.
I think we need a definition of what's a PC. A lot of people use a laptop as their main machine but it seems this is about fixed machines.

Even then, I have a closet server and used to have a machine hooked to the TV. are these PCs too?
For a machine in the living room, I'd love kinect like voice recognition 100times over a keyboard(google or youtube shouldn't need more).

On a tablet or laptop, apart from programming or serious work, I'd prefer handwriting recognition if it was acurate enough, and I'm sure a lot of people who don't type daily on a keyboard would too.If mobile devices continue to grow, 20 years to get something usable on the desktop seems realistic to me.

I guess keyboards will still be around, but for most daily uses I expect other input forms to be privileged.
So ubiquitous, no.
I don't think Goldman's investment can necessarily be taken as a sign of their confidence in facebook's financials, or its future ability to justify its $50B valuation. Rather, it should be taken as a sign of Goldman's confidence in their own ability to profit from the deal, both from the private $1.5B sale of stock, as well as its favoured position come facebook's inevitable IPO.
Basically it's resource management, both human and materials. I'll leave the human side out, but recommend Gene Kranz book Failure Is Not an Option for more info on why ground controllers are important.

It costs a huge amount of money (in fuel) to lift anything up, even just a kilo or two. You're better off lifting only a telemetry system and putting all the processing, display and engineering on the ground. That means having ground controllers to manage it.

Of course, in the early days, you couldn't physically fit computers in the capsule. Now we can, but it is still more economical to have most of it on the ground and just use radio to let the systems communicate.
Saying "no hire" can be hard for some people, but becomes easier if your team adopts the attitude that "maybe means no". It's probably better for the team to miss out hiring some promising "maybe" candidates than later trying to fire a bad one.
of course he did. He is just copying the idea and advertising here.
Location-based Services and Density
Good point distinguishing between rumor mill and personal trauma.

I think that might only affect the number of people that are told, though. Rumor mill will spread like wildfire. Trauma will be told to one other person, and the one other person will probably keep it to himself.

It is possible that the first person won't disclose further. Bill seems to have made a general social commentary about finding that person is very difficult. He couldn't trust his family. He tried friends and that didn't work. Counselors wouldn't work.

How many people do you have to try? Many people say try until you die of natural causes. Others say this was enough.
SO provides their database content for free under creative commons license. efreedom is not doing anything illegal.
For better or worse, I think he is right. Non-uniformity has been the norm in Apple's apps for a while, Garageband, Aperture, every iTunes release, among others.
I believe the majority of third party mac developers used to be pre OS X developers, and because of that they had and incredible amount of respect for the HIG, but now, the (problematic) apps in the Mac App Store are coming from iOS developers, who didn't grow up with the guidelines. A different UI has given them an edge in the iOS App Store, and the are gonna try the same on the mac.
it is a world to look for greater fools.
I don't think that's accurate.

The instruction decoders on x86 processors consume a lot of silicon. x86's instruction retirement also imposes additional overhead due to book-keeping on the scheduler. Eliminating the x87 stack-based FPU is been a gradual process involving an evolving SIMD instruction set that started as a hack.

In reality, resources trumps ISA. x86 has the advantage of hand-optimized logic combined with the best high-performance VLSI manufacturing in the industry.

In spite of that, Itanium blows the doors off of every x86 processor built on the same fabrication technology -- notice that so far, the Itanium and x86 contemporaries are built on fab processes that have been two generations apart, with the high-volume part using the newest process.
I knew it. The government is run by idiots.
Thanks! I'll look at both of these
Wait a sec, on the site it says 46 sold.

46 * $15 = $690

Where'd the other $250 come from?
From my point of view, there are a number of things that are "unfinished" about the site and they don't all have to do with technology. Here are a few.

1) Figuring out the right price to charge for the squares is something that probably would benefit from some more thought.

2) There buying process is pretty rough and there is very little text to reassure the customer as they are going through the checkout process.

3) The incentive structure is very rudimentary. People have to get it in order for them to see the value, and that takes a bit of imagination. The initial sweep of squares seem to be purchased from either the "it would be neat if this takes off" or the "i have some extra money in my paypal account" people. I could spend a lot more time working out this part of the site.

4) The design is, heh, rough.

As for the technology, I'm happy to go into it in more details but I'll summarize here for brevity:

- Ruby on Rails 3, hosted on the free Heroku cloud stack (Ruby, PGSQL)
- Paypal handles the payment processing and invoicing
- Basic REST Twitter API for pulling down the twitter account details
- Twitter OAuth is used to handle the optional account signup
- Twitter's S3 account serves up the avatars, although I'll probably have to change that
- Each purchased square is assigned a bit.ly URL that I use for tracking clicks and surfacing statistics to the owner of the square
- Google Analytics for the tracking
- Page caching is used for each of the pages to minimize server load

Total Cost: $0
That was sort of the point of the study. That even in a very affluent school district that different populations views of parental vs school involvement were primarily responsible for the large gap in student achievement.
I like convinceme.net
but the traffic on compete.com is horrible. I hope it could do better and I think it deserves better attentions.

I personally don't get the quora hype, but I would understand if Convinceme get more popular
no you can dislike the player too. nobody forced the so-called player to do that.
I perceive the earnestness in your remarks, and I appreciate that. I mistook your earlier comments as more judgmental than they actually were. Sorry about that.

When I was in college a girl who was a close friend of a close friend killed herself, and I remember experiencing the same kinds of regrets that you are expressing. Wasn't there anything else she could have done? Didn't she know how much people cared about her?

Since then I've experienced things that have given me a different perspective, namely how a person's mind can be a prison of pain that all the external love in the world is a weak opponent against. I feel like Bill captured that when he described how even a relationship with a wonderful person whom he liked very much was sabotaged by his "darkness."

Maybe there is a drug that could have given Bill peace in life, but reading his note I feel almost certain that nothing anyone could say or do would have soothed his torment.
Hard to believe he made $1000, eh?