skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TSA isn't just protecting the passengers on one flight from dying, they're protecting the entire airline industry and a large part of the US economy.

If a plane goes down due to a terrorist attack those unfortunate people end up dying. If you just calculate the cost of saving those people by implementing tough security measures you can argue that it's not cost effective.

BUT you can't just figure the lives of the people on the plane into your calculations. You have to figure the impact to the airline industry if people become afraid of flying and what will happen to the US economy when another successful attack comes.

All three (lives on plane, airline industry and economy) are worth having tough security measures in place.
"If your browser is equipped with the latest 'Shockwave' plugin, you'll see the game below"[1]. On Chrome I see nothing. I guess the latest versions of Flash dropped Shockwave support.

[1] http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/bball/shoot.ht...
You know that comments that are not upvoted act against the upvotes the item gets?
Is it just me, or would Xmarks and Delicious make a good match? Both live in the same realm, and both have large and interesting data sets. I know Xmarks has been purchased, but would a match like this make sense?
are you sure I have the misunderstanding? Which Monad do you think people use for side effects in haskell? Do you think STM in Haskell is not handled by the STM monad?
http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/tunes/soundtra...

I tried calling the number and ordering the soundtrack on cassette for $8.99:

"Hello, J & R Music World"

Me: "Hi, I'd like to order the Space Jam soundtrack on cassette."

Them: "What?"

Me: "I'd like to order the Space Jam soundtrack on cassette."

Them: "On cassette?"

Me: "Yes, on cassette."

Them: "Uhh...we don't do cassettes anymore!"

I guess I will have to settle for the RealAudio 2.0 previews.
Shockwave is a separate format, not part of Flash. Nobody uses it anymore, which is why you do not have the plugin.

http://get.adobe.com/shockwave/ if you are curious, but I strongly recommend not installing that.
Hacking Google AdWords: How I Increased My Click-Thru Rate 441%
In this post I show you the exact step-by-step system I've used to increase my Google AdWords click-thru rate by up to 441%. That’s not a misprint – I've increased my click-thru rate by up to 4.41x which not only means more traffic but a lower CPC (Cost Per Click) and higher QS (Quality Score) which means I get more clicks for every dollar I spend on Google AdWords.
Who did they think they were writing the copy for? It's a kids film right? Check this paragraph out:

"You've made it: Jam Central Station, the central depository for all things Space
Jam. From the best seats in the house, you can peruse the production notes, find
out about the filmmakers , check out the theatrical trailer , and look at a bunch of
photos from the film."
Just saw this post today actually: http://www.ginktage.com/2010/12/top-2-google-adsense-alterna...

This is what they recommend:

1. Lakequincy.com - Lake Quincy Media provides a network of publishers targeted exclusively to Microsoft developers.
It represents some community sites like EggHeadCafe, Microsoft ASP.NET and ASPAlliance.com.

2. TheLoungeNet - TheLoungeNet hosted by Zerk Media is another Advertising Network focussed on Microsoft Technologies.
Brain dead or maimed completely doesn't count as dead. So the number should be higher. A lot of school buses have short low seats with metal frames, those seats should be replaced with the high back 4 inch foam seats.
Fyi, Shockwave is still installed on roughly 50% of net connected pcs. most bought in last 2 years wont have it installed by default, but more do than dont:

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/shockwaveplayer/...
The XPM Story
I don't know about "Criminal Fraud" (that seems rather harsh), but it is in violation of the Amazon Program Participation requirements:

"14. You will not offer any person or entity any consideration or incentive (including any money, rebate, discount, points, donation to charity or other organization, or other benefit) for using Special Links (e.g., by implementing any “rewards” or loyalty program that incentivizes persons or entities to visit the Amazon Site via your Special Links). "

This guy really managed to find a lot of ways to shoot himself in the foot.
How about a memorable saying... like, "Lose the extra 'o', let loose with one."
I would also add that after you develop your "cockiness shield" - though a sword would be a better analogy - it needs to be maintained, kept sharp. For some reason this particular skill fades very quickly (in months) if you stop exercising it, so it's not like swimming or riding a bike.

There's another bit of bitter irony about this situation. After you become "hard" enough to attract a girl who was previously out of your league, it's not in your best interest to grow "soft" again. On the contrary, it makes the girl likely to leave you, because she didn't sign up for your weaknesses when she entered the relationship :-) Yeah, some girls will be okay with that, but in my experience they are rare.
If you object to software patents, then it's a good thing - but only when it's over.

During Patent Armageddon, software is going to suck. There will be injunctions on the import and sale of all sorts of products (read: you won't be able to buy shiny new technology, or perhaps even old technology), technological progress will slow down, and being a start up will suck because it will be incredibly beneficial for companies to sue start-ups to build up precedent for their patents. (Note that if this doesn't happen - if there isn't an epic battle over patents - it isn't Armageddon, it's just an apocalypse, being the wide-spread revelation that software patents are horrible things).

Yes, there will be reform, probably large-scale reform. However, it won't come until things get rather bad.
I hope the onslaught of good e-book readers and tablets will have a huge effect on Goliaths of the textbook industry. The things they currently get away with are nuts. If the industry doesn't go in that direction on their own then schools should try and lead them that way.
One implication of this story is that simple "click spam" can kill off some Google products, censor a small business, etc. The product Google is offering is inherently vulnerable to low-cost, high-price attack.
Whacky.

Anders Sandberg (a Swedish ethicist and futurist) hasn't updated his old web site at http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa since 1997. Chunks of it that were moved to other sites are missing.

I can't think of any older examples - all the other pages I hit circa 1994/95 are simply gone. As much as we want URLs to last forever or be properly redirected, stuff doesn't seem to stay up forever.
Pedantically, it's not untouched; it has been modified as recently as 2007, according to <http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www2.warnerbros.com/spac...;

The sorta changes made are interesting in their own ways. Things like
the removal of a html comment "Temporary Placeholder. Netgravity is functioning correctly if you can see this." Netgravity was a circa 1996 advert server.

Overall impression is that it's been bit rotting in a CMS in interesting ways since 1996.
Thanks for sharing another point of view.
The destructive force of kids, and their love to create traps and make pranks is something that I really like.
The life of non-human parasites or microbes is at least amazing, I am with you in that.
My point was that destruction is the most obvious form of expression, for these reason we see it every time in kids.
Personally I find it boring(since it is obvious and in a sense natural)- I can not change that.
Of course somebody could tell me how come I do not complain about people that make sophisticated weapons for example. This is a whole different discussion.
My view is that pair-programming is a tool which only really works for stuff dealing with tactical decision making, logic/fact checking, teaching or debugging.

Higher level abstract stuff which involves creativity (design) or strategic decisions won't work because there is no process for these activities. You can't synchronize (communicate) where you are on your way to the "eureka" moment. Discussing with others certainly helps but there nothing pair-programming specific about it.

Also, don't forget that most, if not all, of the assumed benefits of pair-programming can be gained using a more flexible common sense approach:

Reducing defects?
Code-reviews.

Over engineering?
Design documents.

New hires? People switching projects?
Assign a mentor for a week or so and have them pair-program.

Faster debugging?
Understand that it is OK to ask a colleague for help.
No ads doesn't mean Youtube may not generate goodwill or promote other videos from what is legally his content. i.e. someone may click on "Recommended videos" or "Similar videos" and those would have advertising.
This one is also a gem:
"Bugs Bunny, the linchpin of the Looney Tunes, has been called everything from "classic" to "perennial" to "an American institution" to "one of our national heroes"--and "wascally wabbit," "long-eared galoot," and a lot of other things besides! But most of us just like to call him Bugs."
I don't have much AdSense experience, but what is there to protect folks from click fraud fraud?

Example: A blog/app/whatever is targeted by anonymous/botnet/whatever and intentionally drives the CTR to an insane amount for a sustained period.
Also, 'Jam Central' has a feature to download "full-size, full-color, internet-quality stills".

The thumbnails are 72px × 43px. When clicked, it loads a separate page with an 360px × 216px image. Huge!

http://www2.warnerbros.com/spacejam/movie/cmp/jamcentral/pho...
<!-- Badda Bing, Badda Boom -->
RedmineApp – Redmine for iPhone.
I have websites with VCS repos that go back to September 1994. If you ran into Shaksperean insult generators or Escher art galleries back then, I probably still have the original web pages you saw. Some of the data is currently offline pending expiration of copyrights. (As if that'll ever happen..)
Cartier
Money of IE users doesn't differ from the money of people using modern browsers.
Most kids weren't using the Internet in 1996.
I stopped using Delicious when i found Firebox bookmark synchronisation extensions (Google Browser Sync was it?) and now Chrome does that (and more) out-of-the-box. Google is on a good position to tackle that "market", perhaps better than Yahoo. Besides (about on the link sharing part), i [personally] already find lots of interesting links on HN, Twitter and the likes, which i store on the browser bookmarks and Google stores in the clawd
:) The browser icon page tells you how to use ResEdit to hack your copy of Netscape on Mac to have a basketball throbber. Brilliant!
There are plenty of good things to say about SoftLayer (and I'll say that they're the best dedicated host by a huge margin) -- including awesome hardware, great prices if you talk to sales, great network, and unrivalled automation in the portal.

As per SimpleCDN, see http://twitter.com/#!/SoftLayer/status/15059240414609408

I think there's more to that story than any of the other parties are letting on.

Edit: But I agree with you that the TP merger has not been without issues. It's like things have ground to a halt over there, which is a real shame. Hopefully it's just a transient thing.
I think the best point you made was this: "..they are a de-facto monopoly."

Once you have a monopoly on the market, the rules change as to what is acceptable behavior. Microsoft learned that lesson the hard way.
I'm hoping that we'll see more of a shift towards individuals writing about more niche subjects. For example, those learning biology will learn from smaller books, or, more likely, ebooks that cover specific things, like "photosynthesis." These smaller books, in theory, would be written by better writers focusing on very specific things, which means each section or thing students learn about is a better experience, and written by people passionate about a smaller subject. These will be cheaper, though the big downside is organizing all these smaller texts into a "class," though I think the experience with the books would overall be better.

Big textbooks are just so... drab and generalized. The self-publishing revolution is coming, and I'm hoping a lot of passionate experts take advantage of it and write smaller textbooks that teachers can use and students can buy (for a lot less).
"There aren’t enough women in software development so I hope this kind of thing spreads beyond Helsinki!"

I'm thinking that if you want to attract women, you should refer to them as "women", not "girls."
I challenge you to come up with a punishment that would work not just to keep kids in their seats, but also to get them to buckle their belts. At six kids per year I'm against punishing kids for being kids. I imagine there is some other program imaginable that will save more children's lives per dollar than seatbelts in school busses. It isn't like the government has the money to spare.
Well, I would have no problems with a nice lisp variant, either. Given enough supporting libraries.

Anyone that ignores warning messages will suffer. :-)

Note that Perl 6 is a scripting language which can declare types.

The '=='/'eq' thing is common among scripting languages. It is a detail, you find things like this in all complex packages of rules.

Most scripting languages will get (some) problems with typing, especially in function parameters for the external APIs in libraries. If you use strict, you get away from some classical problems, e.g. variable name misspellings.

With Moose (or other CPAN stuff), you can have powerful typing handling etc.

>>It all goes back to the preference in the end ;)

Let me note -- that is not where you started a few comments ago. :-)
Also, nothing changes.
Interactions with Google go something like this:

GOOG: Dear $Client: our automated algorithm says you are engaged in click fraud. We are reversing payments made to you and confiscating what is in "your" account. Thanks.

$Client: Whaaa? (Furious form filling).

GOOG: Dear $Client: Based on the same information, our automated algorithm $still says you are engaged in click fraud. We are $still reversing payments made to you and confiscating what is in "your" account. All your comments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Thanks.

I haven't experienced anything with ad sense (never used it), but I have experienced the sorry excuse for customer service their automated systems produce.

A few years ago I did the web site for a small retail store, and set up the Google advertising for it. The average bill, per month, was around $500. After about a year, the credit card on the account expired, and a new one was needed. Something went wrong during the update process and the account stayed locked out, even though new credit card information had been entered. This was a situation that needed a human to look at it, for about 60 seconds, to fix the problem. Eventually that happened.

It took over six weeks, and dozens of pointless, automated message exchanges. That $500 a month we had been paying to Google wasn't worth even a _minute_ of a human being's time. For a small retail business that absolutely relies on Google advertising to bring in business (it's a highly researched, rare purchase), being cut off Google is a kiss of death. The phone will go from ringing 20 times a day, to ringing once a day.

For certain types of businesses, there's simply no alternative to Google. You're either there or you're dead. In terms of revenue/ad$, it was by far the best. The day the ads reactivated, the phones started ringing again. Looking back, I can't believe that I thought that the messages I was receiving from customer service actually meant they were looking at the problem. Knowing what I know now, I'd have a completely separate backup account ready to go at all times, with the same sets of keywords and bids, on the off chance that the main account was deactivated.

If this is how they treat people who are trying to _give_ them money, I can't begin to imagine how frustrating it must be to get money _out_ of them!

If I were participating in the AdSense program, Google could terminate me for writing this message, according to 5.(xi) of the US terms and conditions, which classifies as prohibited use "any action or practice that reflects poorly on Google or otherwise disparages or devalues Google’s reputation or goodwill".
This is a product recall by Google.

Google has customers (ad buyers) and suppliers (publishers). The product Google sells is ad clicks.

Google determined that the supplier delivered a contaminated product. Google issued a recall that also affected (presumably) non-contaminated product (clicks) delivered by the same supplier. Google also has a zero-tolerance policy to prevent any further contamination.

It's harsh. It probably is overly broad in this particular case.

But Google makes a lot more by protecting its customers (ad buyers) from tainted products (clicks) than by protecting its suppliers (publishers) from overly broad recalls.

The only way this will change is if suppliers (publishers) become significantly more rare.

kb
My favorite:

"Don't jam your computer -- download this screen saver, and never again will you need to suffer the indignity of burnt phospor."

That's some truly awful copy.
Not sure I get what you mean by 'homepage domains'
Cool urls? Cool sites?
Try www.iwantmyname.com for good urls, its where I get om.gd and whi.im
MS is sitting on a few tens of billions of dollars in cash. How cynical do you need to be to think this pile is off limits for patent trolls?
My own experienceL My school bus when I was young hit into the side of a van and sent it physically flying and rolling. We barely felt it in the back.
Slightly off-topic, but forcing me to download an image preview when I could quite as easily view it in my browser drives me insane, now I have a file I don't want that I didn't expect and have to delete it! Silly.
Nice, neat, simple equations and math, at the Macro level.

To put this in hacker terms, these simple rules are about as simple as the http protocol. Now imagine the software that implements this simple protocol. Think of all the different ways to exploit it. Now imagine all the complex systems that can be created using these simple rules. Now add hackers, DDOS, government censorship, wikileaks, peering disputes, etc.

Economists would have us believe that these simple rules are "how it is". Now imagine the millions of people it takes to actually implement these simple rules. Imagine what it takes to actually make wine in Portugal. Now add that these people want pensions. Now include that these simple rules assume currency equivalence, or something like the gold standard to mediate production disparities. Now add the governments on top of this "protocol".

To believe this "proven economic theory" you have to live in a virtual machine.
That is exactly the opposite definition of fraud.

From Merriam-Webster:
a : deceit, trickery; specifically : intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right

b : an act of deceiving or misrepresenting : trick

Where was he deceiving or misrepresenting the situation? The fact is that there is no tractable way for Google to separate people who are interested in supporting an ad-driven business from those who really are creating false ad traffic for financial gain.
It's not that simple. Real cheaters will react, and devise counter strategies to whatever you are tying to do.

I can understand that Google is strict about this, that's their core business, CPC and conversion rate are what makes them the best advertising platform in the world. They have to protect that fiercely, even if some unfortunate users are thrown under the bus along the way.

Is it possible in the AdSense scheme to set up multiple accounts? It seems if he'd had an account for the YouTube site, and another one for his sailing stuff, he'd at least have kept his money maker.
and this is how software patent ended.
Is the best result we could expect from this.
Google Naming conventions:

Indexing Systems: Caffeine, Percolator

Database Systems: Spanner, Sawzall, Dremel

Mobile: Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Haggis
Clickable link: http://rockieweb.com/popread/
I hate pair programming. I find a lot of the times my partners are distracting me with a forgotten semicolon while I have already added that to my queue while my fingers are racing along.

On the other hand having to justify an idea to someone else (provided they are non-contentious, but really trying to analyze things) is worth its weight in gold.

In short. pair programming only works for me if I am surrounded by "yes men".
I mentioned the target audience because customers with different needs will have quite different buying patterns. When I want a software product or service, I tend to look at the offerings and make a purchase/signup decision soon after I find what I want unless price is a major factor (ie high). For someone into sailing, one might be interested in consuming content and considering advertisers' offerings year-round, but only make purchases a few times a year, at the beginning of the sailing season or in advance of a trip. Just looking at website analytics without considering market-specific purchase behavior or seasonality can be misleading.

You are right that Patrick didn't say anything about him not being hard working, but using the word 'creative' to imply click-farming seemed inappropriate, considering the OP is someone working in the arts. As someone in the same field, I suppose I took it a bit personally - but how would you feel if this story involved a webapp and I said "here's how I feel about web 'programming' that just moves money from my bank account into someone else's..."? It kind of denigrates the primary skill of the business person.

You are right too that new advertising systems like adwords have and deserve their popularity because they provide much better feedback and value than traditional forms of advertising. But I bring up the contrast because those traditional forms remain highly necessary for larger businesses, and part of a business's success rides on being able to accept the changing risk/reward payoff as the business grows. The farther away that a publisher or retailer is from the median, the less reliable the quality of the CTR analytics, and the more hesitant Google ought to be in applying them rigidly. When you get down to a extremely specialist market and where the spikes are measured in a few hundreds, as in this case, statistics can be more misleading than usual.
This isn't a random patent troll, this is Paul Allen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen , co-founder of Microsoft.

If you're still feeling cynical, you can think of it this way: MS has enough dirt on Allen from his years there to bring him down if he threatens them :-)
There was something like this on Reddit today. I'm surprised I'm only now seeing this sort of thing.
I'm trying to set up a LAMP server so it's totally anonymous, any suggestions?
"Emotion can trump facts". I think the guy's point is, emotion should sometimes trump facts. No Google human was involved. A big chunk of the internet economy is controlled by a heartless robot who can't tell the difference between a middle ages sailor guy going a little over the line, and dedicated click fraud. Shit, even the IRS lets you explain to a human and maybe get a second chance.
"If it failed then, there's no reason to think we can't make it fail now." -- Colin Benson, in the IMPP working group, circa 2000
HTTP Last-Modified: Thu, 06 Oct 2005 15:10:18 GMT
In this case, though, the pair was limited to the abilities of the weaker member.