skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree that everyone in India pays a bribe for a passport. A handful of my friends applied for their passport while in college and none of them paid, neither did I. In fact my passport got stolen while I was in US and it was kind of urgent that I get a replacement, but I managed to get one without bribing. It took time though.

I think sometimes we hastily assume that a bribe is needed and are proactive about it. But I have to say that it still tickles me no end to think about the policeman who had come to our college for the express purpose of collecting bribes from us. He had come all the way from Lucknow to Kanpur a good 3 hour journey expecting to make a killing.

Just the look on his face when my friends refused...priceless !!

But a lot of the lack of transparency that you mention can now be tackled thanks to instruments like RTI (the Indian analogue of FOIA).
Dating sites done right are FAR more profitable than porn sites.

That seems odd to me because if the dating site works people will not be coming back.
Those are adorable. I know when I first went to fly by myself in my teenage years my parents were positively neurotic about pick-pockets.
http://srv349.rackco.com/showthread.php?t=119198

This company promises 1:300 rate. subscriptions. 1 out of 300 unique visitors will join. I had 1200 unique visitors and no joiners.

http://www.upiu.com/articles/pornography-business-is-booming

She the conversion rate from viewers to paying members is about one in 200
Probably the best idea is to create a personal data policy wherein you document a standard practice to delete unnecessary electronic data at specified intervals and change your PIN at other intervals. Given the amount of identity theft it's a very prudent practice that prevents criminals and other unauthorized parties from accessing your data.
Do Technologists Care About Education?
Well we're talking about Intel and AMD and I thought we should also remember there are more chip makers out there that would have an interest in decoding encrypted content.
Also um what is karma: 54"?
Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2011?
Both probable and far fetched things/trends that you think are going to happen.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The classic 5% (or even 0.1%) statistical threshold is sometimes not enough. See here for an easy-to-understand example of why that is the case:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_...

In other news, capital punishment has been installed for science journalists publishing articles that contain a question in the title that can be succinctly answered with "No."
Duff Beer Spotted in Local Off Licence now on Instagram
Don't forget Microsoft. If you weren't convinced already, Breaking Windows makes it fairly clear that the company was a projection of Bill Gates.
"E-Personation" Bill Could Be Used to Undermine 1st Amendment Parody Protections
As lifespans increase, accidents and/or violence will become the leading cause of death. It's not certain if such a society would become incredibly paranoid, or if it would cultivate a philosophy to counteract these tendencies.
He's said (maybe at Davos?) that the main reason is because Facebook has a lot of stuff they want to launch that is high risk and might not be acceptable to see come from a public company. (For example, could you imagine what would have happened the stock when Beacon came out?)
The Challenge In Delivering Open-Source GPU Drivers
Perhaps NPR celebrates inverse April Fool's Day (1/4)?
I was under the impression that there is no law in the US that requires me to surrender my password. Has there been any court decisions requiring people to surrender passwords?
> How many other OSS projects have an exhaustive list on their website of everyone who is allowed to make contributions?

That is a way of thanking contributors.

If the question is, "How many other OSS projects require filing a CA before patches will be accepted?", then the answer is "many". viz. Many run by Oracle now (e.g. http://openjdk.java.net/contribute/), all apache projects AFAIK (http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt), django (http://www.djangoproject.com/foundation/cla/faq/), etc. etc.

So...what "spirit" are you talking about here?
So far the best line in this paper is:
"Returning to Laplace’s Principle, we should obviously assign our prior belief in precognition
a number very close to zero, perhaps slightly larger than the probability of, say,
goldfish being able to talk"
A static site generator like http://nanoc.stoneship.org/ would work too.
That'd be funnier than the simple reduction of "The answer to science article titles phrased as questions is 'No'."
Andrew here from the Press-Enterprise. A few notes here on Groupon, websites and our success:

-we have a Groupon 'clone' program that is moderately successful.
-we approached Groupon in 2009 and proposed a partnership to tackle the local market. Various issues came up and we could not reach an agreement that would take us beyond standard affiliate. Groupon is okay and is getting a ton of exposure, but I am interested in their ability to support local advertisers. I here good things from buyers, but not always from merchants...

-Newspapers, from my brief experience here, generally face 2 issues with partners like seeing interactive:
1) Historical tendency to pay too much for hosted solutions that actually take customers away.
2) Print mentality that change is very slow, but often dramatic (new front page or sports section) instead of rapidly iterating in increments at a target experience.

Biased as it may sound, Seeing Interactive eliminated both of these concerns as they continue to iterate and improve the product and help the Press Enterprise keep customers.
Fraser Speirs' iPad 1:1 deployment odyssey at a private elementary school has been fascinating to watch:

http://speirs.org/blog/2010/9/23/the-ipad-project-how-its-go...

At this point, all I can give you are some practical anecdotes which, I hope, will give you a flavour of the change.

I picked up a ream of printer paper yesterday. It had dust on top of it.
Primary 2 pupils have now memorised their passwords. That's not something that happens when they get 40 minutes a week on computers.
Last week, we couldn't get the Primary 3 pupils to stop doing maths and go for lunch.
My daughter April asked me if I could install the educational apps from school on my iPad so she could use them at home.
We're seeing a reduction in the amount of homework forgotten or not done.
"Forgetting your folder" for a subject is now a thing of the past.

tl;dr: iPads are an epic, epic win in education – if you can afford them.
I do but I can't give you the exact figures, that's not my decision to make.

The big problem is probably defining what people call 'conversion rate', typically that's 'virgin traffic' divided by actual sales.

The problem with that particular definition is to track accurately how many people have never seen your site before.

For a site that is growing steadily the number of 'new' visitors that will eventually convert over the life cycle of their account is a number that always relates all of todays 'new' traffic to the total sales of today, but the sales of today were not typically caused just by people that visited today for the first time.

So accurately tracking conversion rate is not as simple as it may seem at first glance.

Also, and this is a completely different issue, conversion rate is not the most important figure at all, and I find the thread we're discussing this in amusing because even though the first poster in the thread accurately identifies recurring billing as an excellent revenue driver it completely misses out on the life-cycle aspect of an account, and typically accounts do not last forever.

Industry standard is 3 months, so if your subscription site has a 1% conversion of free traffic to paying members then you will still only make 3 times your monthly charge on them.

To do better than that you'd have to work really hard on tweaking that 3 month figure, retention is almost as important (if not more important) as initial sign-ups.

That's where the real money is.
Facebook Users Upload Record-Breaking 750M Photos Over New Year’s Weekend
Interesting. I haven't heard about that. Wikipedia has a nice simple overview:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrageenan#Health_concerns
If you use the SIM cards SMS storage (on a GSM phone) it's not that trivial to obtain the PIN. However, it's very likely that your mobile provider is able to gain access to the card (e.g., by using the PUK code to reset your PIN code).

Other means would be to use an application such as TextSecure (for Android) that uses public key encryption to immediately enrypt all incoming SMS and that requires a password to unlock the private key needed to decrypt the SMS.

In the long-term what I'm waiting for is some open-source Android fork that provides full-root encryption using LUKS. This should suffice in preventing others from reading your messages.
They treat their employees quite well, for the most part. It's the customers who suffer from this.
Needs more:

- Rounded corners

- Shadows

- Animations on hover

A poorly-designed site doesn't instill much confidence in your product when your target audience is designers.
>OpenCourseware might have been investigating a pay-wall ...
So that would've made it 'courseware'. Even though the material is worth a modest fee, I am glad to find out that it will remain free. Not for my own pockets well being, but for others who don't have even those few bucks to spare.
you might be interested in the underlying scraper project we run @ http://openstates.sunlightlabs.com - this is the first step to getting all of the data so it can be used by OpenGovernment and other sites
Great! I'm genuinely happy for you :)

The reason why I keep asking about adsense TOS compliance is that if you get banned for click fraud, you don't get to keep all of your earnings to date - Google can and will not pay you for anything that isn't in your bank account, trust me on this ;)
This is a gross exaggeration. The petty corruption that permeates is surprisingly easy to resist if you can put up with some delays and other inconveniences. If your comment was about going up against bigger fish like the mafia, then I don't think even that will help much.
You have a fifth amendment right not to say anything that might incriminate you.

Police can’t force you to reveal your accomplices, what bank deposit box you hid the cash in, or where you dumped the body.

The smartest thing to say to police is “I want my lawyer present.”
This seems quite dangerous, as we push more and more data into the cloud and use cell phones as the a way to access it. Does this mean when you are arrested, they can read all your emails, get your bank information, amazon shopping history, etc as long as the access is on your phone? If you have a laptop can they do the same thing?
AT&T You Will Ads From 1993 - Amazingly accurate predictions
Thanks. I have to warn you though, The List is pretty long.
The effects of Information Deprivation Disorder
The 3 types of developers you will find in Africa .
The future of Facebook is not targeting you on 'a social network', its opening up an ad-sense competitor and targeting you on any website - with your personal information. The like and connect buttons are just the first step.

With that in mind it sounds like a good deal to me.
No, there haven't been. There is always unencrypted evidence, so nobody really cares.
There is plenty of discontent documented on the web, in blogs, on Etsy's forums (which are difficult to penetrate, since the search and navigation features are poor), on the forums of other marketplace sites, on Twitter, and so on.

They have a knack for turning away people who should be their biggest supporters. I can think of many successful shop owners have left after 2-3 years, disappointed by the way the site is administrated.
Home - Vote
Anybody that promises you a guaranteed subscription rate is not above board in one way or another.

How traffic converts from one site to another is a matter governed by a very large number of factors, typically if you sell balsa wood aircraft advertising on a site for knitting supplies is not going to net you a lot of customers.

I've been 'helping out' a fellow HN'er with a bunch of traffic and to date we've yet to see a single conversion. That doesn't mean that his product is bad or that the traffic is lousy, it simply means there is an impedance mismatch.

So you can only determine what works and what doesn't by trying it. But once you are spending money on clicks then that 1% is a good ballpark figure because that's what you'll need to make money on your traffic buys unless there is a scam involved.

On 'junk' traffic (exit consoles and other bad tricks) conversion rates can be as low as 0.01% or worse, on good or great (matching) traffic it can be substantially in excess of that 1%. Audience match is key, and that goes for any form of traffic buying, adult or non-adult makes no difference, if the user lands in something they didn't expect on the 'far' side of that click it had better be a positive surprise or you've just effectively made your precious domain worth less.
Dress Up Games
Zdressup.net . We have tons of fun dress up games for girls and kids to play for free
Kind of dupe http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2065416
Microbot: A game about fighting infection with missiles
ahaha look again at stats.. this happened because Chrome took from IE share.. Firefox just was sitting on the same place ( in fact this year it decreased )
Also, if LEOs are required to obtain a court order to read these from the network provider's archives and logs, why should that not also be true for your phone?
It's not about the operating system. His point was that Apple doesn't address these types of issues. My counter point to him was that someone with Android could address the issues if Apple didn't.

So the issue wasn't the OS it was Apple's willingness and I was responding to him based on the premise he put forth
I knew this comment would be up-voted before I wrote it.
This is an old article (2008) and some things might have changed with Akka for Scala (http://akka.io/) which tries to give Scala much of the functionality of Erlang. I personally haven't tried Akka but I have a good friend prototyping with it right now.

The sad thing is that this same friend just built a huge system with Erlang for another company and loved it. It did the job wonderfully and performed under pressure like a champ. However the new gig for him wouldn't let him use a 'non-java' programming language. Scala is even a stretch.

Given my experience with Erlang, I can wholeheartedly recommend it to someone looking to build a system in Erlang's sweetspot.
Europe’s toiling masses sometimes go on strike, leaving streets unswept and commuters stranded. Chinese expats find this shocking. Though there are stoppages in some factories in China, no one strikes in public services there

As an American, I find the public service strikes in Europe pretty disconcerting as well. I don't know if there are major legal differences in the US, but it's much less common here.
You are completely right. There are a lot of times when the best tools are the tools you have at hand. But at some point (when technique has surpassed the tools), you have to get the best, or at least the best for the moment and for your level.

I enjoy a lot taking pictures, and loved my Canon Ixus 30 (small point and click), but I wanted a little more control. Buying a full blown reflex camera was out of option, I wanted something small. And I bought a Canon Powershot S90, which was the best tool after I wanted to do more things than my old camera (which I still own and carry around for quick pictures around the city) could not do.
But I mean, I can buy it at the normal "cheap" grocery store. Stores like Whole Foods have even more options.
Y8 Online Games
Y8onlineGames.Net is a directory of Y8 Best New Free Online Flash Games,y8 cooking,y8 dress up,y8 love,y8 car,y8 2 players games from y8.com,y3.com,pog.com
I agree. Years go by in between occasions when I go to a concert, yet I listen to (and pay for) recorded music regularly. I might go to more concerts if there were more concerts that interested me around where I live, but even so, for me, music isn't something that I go to hear a one-time performance of; it is integrated into my life. I listen to music while working, reading, driving, whatever, and I'm not likely to have a live band playing a concert next to my desk or in the back seat of my car.
Microsoft Launches Modular 'Tractor Shed' Data Center
Krulwich also co-hosts Radiolab (.org), which is incredible.
+1 Thanks for digging up on this. It is something that I have interest in.
The only people what can make money on Facebook stock, is Chinese government officials. All they need to do, is to accumulate $FCBK stock and then allow Facebook.com to be used in China. Number of Facebook users will jump from 0.5B to 1.5B, same with the valuation from $50B to $150B ;)
Just reading it now -- seems like a very thorough takedown of the whole thing, in fairly non-technical language.

It makes the very good point that this paper makes lots of statistical tests, and then bases big claims on the small minority that showed a significant effect. This is in no way restricted to psychology, drugs companies for example do this all the time. It's cheating, whether you realize it or not.

Statistical significance only tells you that a result is unlikely to be a fluke -- not that it definitely isn't a fluke -- but the more tests you do, the sooner you'll see a fluke on average.
Troy babb
DIY 3D printing in 2010 - Where will 2011 take us?
I'm salaried as well but I'm also expected to be at work 40 hours a week. We have a simple time tracker which I'm referring to as the "clock" but I've honestly never heard of a company that doesn't have at least some form of time tracking if only for HR (vacation, etc).
Well, what did you expect would happen? It's the same buddies sitting at the Fed, the SEC, Goldman Sachs. There's no real oversight. Why wouldn't they abuse it? There's a ton of money to be stolen, and nobody is watching.
Quora splashing into normal people's radars. Won't be Twitter's rise but definitely something to watch.
Art of Prolonged Smiling (APS)
SASS (Compass), Less support (via .js variants ?)
Control: I'm talking about control in the classroom. Being able to stop a kid from browsing the Internet while you are giving a lecture.

Power: If you think an iPad will last all day while constantly in use you haven't tried it. In my test it ran for 6 hours and change which isn't enough to get a kid through a whole day of classes plus make it through the ride home.

Kids Content: Parental Control won't survive a hard reset and kids aren't stupid.

Finally there are plenty of ways tablets can be used in the classroom but that wasn't the premise of the article being discussed. The premise of the article being discussed was giving each kid a laptop in place of textbooks
I don't have anything specific in the adult industry to base my assumption on but it's based on looking at the conversion rate of many sites in many different industries. 1% seems to be the low-end of what a site can convert at if you do the basics right. But I'll admit it's an assumption that needs to get tested.
Actually, I was agreeing with you. Despite the fact that I'm learning Cocoa and I like the iOS platform best, we really need to avoid the pedagogical mindset of teaching the "inevitable" platform, much how many school computer labs only use Windows, since it's what's used in the "real world."

Not to mention that Android will allow schools the flexibility to employ custom software, or even a sort of hypercard stack that allows for the teachers to create applications for their students.
Swallowing the academic "red pill"
You might like the book "A Lodging of Wayfaring Men."
I assume you haven't spent much time using mesh radio solutions - they have their uses for sure but their performance and reliability are very poor compared to traditional solutions. And even then most of them rely on backending on wired plant for longhaul.
I'll admit that when I was arrested I had notice but I'll tell you what I brought with me on my person.

A piece of ID (so I didnt get held longer while they 'established' my identity), and enough cash for a pack of smokes and a cab for when I got out.

I didn't even bring a number for a lawyer as my friends were going to take care of it. My blackberry, cell phone, other electronic records, keys to my car, my ATM card, credit card, etc, were left with friends.

When they arrested me I gave them my ID confirmed my self as being the person on the ID and remained silent. Even the guy in my cell who was 'charged' with something errily similar I said nothing to in regards to what I was doing there. He kept asking me for advice of what I would do in his situation and all I could tell him was remain silent and speak to a lawyer. I think he was a cop as I never saw him again, where as most of the other people I ran into I saw the next morning, and I was never formally interrogated.

If you think the police should be able to search 80000 of your SMS records then by all means bring them to your arrest. If you don't then take the steps you feel are appropriate to prevent this from happening.

There is no law requiring the average person to retain their SMS records for police inspection upon arrest.
What a great idea which really ought to be in a spreadsheet!
If I understand the question correctly, you are asking what's to stop someone from changing the UID, etc when the user is redirected from auth.com to coolstuff.com?

From my understanding of OAuth, when the uid, first_name and last_name are sent by auth.com it also sends a cryptographic hash of everything. So if you change the uid, you would also have to change the hash and you can't change the hash without knowing the shared secret that the auth.com and coolstuff.com have decided on prior to your request.
Update 2

Derek and I had a good talk on the phone and some things I brought up are that if the domain usadotgov.net does get hijacked and the person does fiddle with things it could cause some issues if you are using a non-verifying DNSSEC resolver (not only this but .net domains can’t be signed at the registry yet) but the question becomes does the resolver go to the root or the .net for the information for a.usadotgov.net and do all resolvers work the same. What he was trying to convey is that since the records are signed and the government uses verfying resolvers there should be no issues.

I also brought up the fact that a country could send back spoofed records from the root servers as has happened before. If I can spoof a.usadotgov.net and look like I’m answering from l.root-servers.net then what happens. Hopefully this will all go away as DNSSEC is more widely deployed.

Update 3

I asked Paul Vixie the question below as I didn’t want to keep going back and forth on the issue.

“I guess my question is what happens to .org is usadotgov.net is hijacked, what damage can truly be done.”

His reply:

Such a hijacker could make any .gov name say anything they wanted it to say, as long as the software looking up the bad data wasn’t dnssec-aware.
Yep, it's an assumption that would need to be tested and considered.
GoodGuide Rolls Out New Social Features
(Incidentally, does anyone know if one needs to do anything special to post these threads to the 'ask' section?)
Exploring JavaScript for-in loops
Agreed. Retention is key to any subscription based business.