skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> people evaluate their actual value and see that it probably is not enough to make it worth their while approaching this person.

Cost: Awkwardness, potential for embarrassing rejection.

Benefit: Possible relationship, either short-term or long-term, with the subject of your admiration.

So in my mind, if you can get over the fear of rejection, there's no reason not to at least try. Coffee with a CEO is better than nothing, and may potentially be useful down the road. (Can I have a job? Remember when we had coffee that one time?) Likewise, a date with a beautiful model, even one, is better than eating ramen alone. Well, usually. :)

Also, while I agree with what you said about having "true value to offer", there are many types of value. When developing a relationship with someone like a CEO, you may not be able to offer them direct monetary value, but you might be able to give technical insight, an outsider's point of view or a perspective from a different industry, or even just a like-minded person to talk about basketball with.

My advice is to look hard for the value you can offer. Knowledge that you may take for granted is often quite valuable to others, or at least interesting enough for them to keep you around and ask your opinion.
These are all great sentiments, but as interview questions, they're largely useless. By definition, the manager gives as much time for unit testing as is reasonable, given the deadlines, work to do, and importance he or she attaches to unit testing. So "Do you give enough time for unit testing?" is a tautology.

I used to ask questions like this, both when interviewing managers and when I was looking for a job. But I've stopped, since they seem to have no correlation with the information I'm looking for.
> De Morgan's law. The union of two properties is the intersection of the sets of people who have those properties. (And vice versa.)

De Morgan's Law!!!!!!! I first learned about this in a Moore-method point-set topology class in 1995, and I have been trying to remember the name of this property since. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Yes. It is expensive even for a single installation.. Now, if the cost were $50 to install a seatbelt, then the magnitude of the issue of "costs of installing seat belts" wouldnt be so big and instead people would be judging the "need for seat belts" based on merits. Does it really improve the net safety for children.

No, I dont think each seat belt would need to cost 150-250 bucks especially when these are installed in bulk contracts.
Microsoft BASIC on a 128k Macintosh. Learned some toolbox the hard way by looking through the source for a breakout/pong-type game that think was programmed by someone at Jet Propulsion Lab.
I started at a very basic level when I was 5, with Logo and BASIC on the C64.

I wrote programs that generated colorful pictures in Logo, and the barest beginnings of a text adventure game (to which my only exposure was Logo Adventure) that revolved around my stuffed animals in BASIC.

By the time I was 8 or 9, I really wanted to write something like Zork or other text adventures, but I had not the faintest idea how to make a parser for that, and nobody was really helping me, unfortunately.

Then in my early teens, I worked a bit with ARexx, AmigaVision and AmigaShell and I really, really wish we had bought Borland C because I really wanted it back then...

Then, I didn't really do anything programming-wise for 15 years until I picked up PHP a few years ago. Oops! I did a lot of interesting things in between, but I wish I'd picked up serious programming skills a lot earlier in life.
The author of the article had a win-win situation in mind

That may be what he has in mind, but experience shows that isn't what happens. Instead you get a situation where people with no interest whatsoever in purchasing anything click the link just to help out the website they are interested in. Just because the traffic comes from the targeted demographic doesn't mean it's actually serious.

I'm not saying that Google did an excellent job of handling this situation. It amazes me that they think it's appropriate to revoke thousands of dollars in earnings without (usually) providing someone to talk to. That said, asking people to click links on your site is bound to invite well-meaning individuals to click on ads they have no intent of following, which is practically the definition of click-fraud.
Perhaps I did not read carefully enough, but I didn't read anything that made it seem like he directly or indirectly asked anything. He simply makes a point of being 100% transparent in how he runs his business; part of that was explaining that ad clicks improve his revenue. Did Google expect him to lie?
He's certainly not the only one to profit from this particular move. There's other investors I'm sure. This is pretty sad, though.
I can't believe I never thought to check if there was a Boston subreddit, thanks for mentioning it!
That's kind of my point. The title means nothing. The abstract means almost nothing. The figures mean almost nothing. Have a look here for a brief guide to reading a patent, written for nonlawyers. http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2010/09/how-to-read-a-patent-...
Putting my tinfoil hat on an Android injunction next year would do wonders to help Windows Phone 7 gain market share.
The claims really are not particularly vague.
Take a look at Philips Henium 9@9 series.
http://www.asia.philips.com/promos/xenium/en/phone_other.htm...
Commodore 64, which I got when I was in elementary school. I still remember a bunch of the POKE codes you would use to change the colors in Commodore 64 BASIC.
SyncPad: your whiteboard everywhere
I know what vigorous biking means. I don't see the point of doing anything else while you are at the gym, unless you are just there to enjoy the sight of yoga girls. And I don't think it's implausible that an elliptical on high intensity (which works both upper and lower body) can burn something comparable to a bike.

As for my interval times, it corresponds to 1 minute rounds, 30 seconds rest. I could jack up the intensity more if I wanted to do 30/90, but in the ring that would correspond to 30 seconds dishing it out, 30 seconds getting killed.

By the way, could you explain the rationale behind [3]?
Writing a Generalized Web Crawler to map all the URLs on web sites?
I want to crawl web sites to find all all the pages on each site (domain). My simplistic attempts were quickly foiled by weird URL structures of sites. Many sites add dynamic query parameters to URLs (session ID, refering page, etc) effectively creating millions of unique URLs.

Is there a good strategy to find every page without getting caught in accidental tarpits like this?

Ideally I'd love to find some existing code that solves the problem of crawling web sites in a generalized way. Second best would be finding some great texts on the subject that I can work from while creating my own code.

Thanks in advance for any help.
Looks like TypePad is a mainstream one: http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/17/typepad-dives-into-micro-bl...

"...TypePad considers the new Micro product be fit in between what people do on Twitter, and what they do on regular blogs"
There's a difference between AdSense scheme and a sponsor or advertiser if they pay a fixed sponsorship fee or fixed fee for the ad.

In that scenario, every additional click, even if of decreasing marginal utility, is a win for the advertiser and the publisher is making them a favor by sending as much traffic as they can.

For Google AdSense and other programs based on pay-per-click scheme, advertiser pays for each click so worthless clicks do cost them money and benefit the publisher. That's why it's fraud. There is a strong incentive for one side (publisher) to take advantage of the other side (advertiser) and if allowed to exist on scale, would harm the whole marketplace.

The phrasing you used suggest fixed scheme. If it is used in the context of pay-per-click scheme, then yes, it does violate the agreement and I doubt there's any pay-per-click scheme that doesn't ban such behavior.
Textbook Goliaths: You're Dancing on Thin Ice
Web visitors do not exhibit that type of behavior of their own accord if unsolicited.

Yes, they do.

That sounds almost like a wink-wink to me.

I didn't read it as a wink-wink; I read it as a clear and honest explanation of his views: "If my users are going to click on ads because they want to help me instead of because they want to buy things, I hope they at least click on ads that interest them, so there's a CHANCE they'll buy."
rofl at random trolls who says 'Oh google is so evil.. poor man etc..'

he broke the rules, his acc was disabled and thats all..
this is not the first time this stuff happens with Adsense...they are Very very strict..
you must be very careful.. those rules are tricky..
I replaced mine w/ a battery from fast mac and it worked out well for me.

http://fastmac.com/
This is absolutely fantastic. Does anyone know of anything as high quality for Django?
"Actually, I’ve found that the more successful and accomplished people are, typically, it seems like the more humble and friendly they are. Additionally, they tend to appreciate the value of networking and make an effort to meet new people."

Nope! This is non-evidence. Successful people who are arrogant and antisocial are by nature less likely to run into you, so you should expect your observed pool of people-you-know to be heavily skewed towards the friendliest people.

A similar phenomenon occurs in social network rankings: For any given person with a reasonable number of Facebook friends, their friends will be, on average, more popular than the original person (popularity defined by number of friends). Almost everyone is one of the least popular people in their own social network.
It's not about storage space, is about loading time. When I read it through the connection I have at work, it took about 2 minutes to load.
Nikola Tesla lived in 19th and 20th century, implementing among other things the wireless remote control in 19th century and apparently also just for this purposes the equvalents of "and" and "or" circuits!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ins/lab_remotec.html

His originality attracted a lot of unbalanced writing though, and calling him such names is in my opinion unbalanced.
I honestly sympathize. It's a horrible thing to be blindsided by something like this when it's a main source of income. The approach Google took was cold and heartless, that goes without saying.
All that being said, I can understand why things like this happen, and I don't necessarily fault Google. When a particular placement generates a lot of traffic that doesn't convert, Google has an obligation to take action on behalf of their paying advertisers.
All the momentum is with jQuery. By far it's the #1 at this point. More users, plugins, tutorials, etc.

If there are two roughly equal (in a technical sense) technologies it usually makes sense to go with the one that has the big advantage in momentum.
It depends a lot on how you want to implement advertising on your site. I think running affiliate links via CJ is a much better way to go, especially if you have the ability to incorporate them into your site tactically so that they are value adds and not distractions. Keep your eye out for lead gen programs as well, they often pay on sign ups as well as sales meaning they can have significant returns.
There's also Moncai.com and the author frequents this site
Those look good just glancing over them. To move beyond simple comparative advantage (if you're interested) I would recommend looking into the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem as well. It expands upon comparative advantage adding another level of complexity and more insight. Empirically the theorem has been mostly proven, something that not all economic theories are able to pass.

The Wikipedia page looks like a good overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckscher%E2%80%93Ohlin_model

Most insights into the benefits of trade can be seen in the Ricadrian comparative advantage model (see post above).
Of all the options listed in those two articles Kontera is the only one I have seen generate a decent return.
I agree. I can see that the fonts in Yinzcam and meesocial don't work, but I can't see why, for example, Crowdrise is worse than Boxee.
>>Once a girl passes a certain degree of hotness, the amount of guys hitting on her drops dramatically.

When a girl starts to become a hot babe then tons of guys hit on her -- its annoying and time consuming to ward off losers so she develops a "bitch shield". This defense mechanism tells guys that she is too good for them and not to bother, from this point on only the cocky guys approach who are not intimidated by the "bitch shield" (these guys look like assholes to "nice guys") - then the "nice guys" whine about how they can't get any girls. As lowlife as the PUA guides are, I still found them informative.
By "straightforward replicate the functionality" you mean hire a team of 20 and spend 3 years building your own platform fabric? I wouldn't trivialize work product or the capabilities of the Heroku team. Building multi-tenant infrastructure is quite a bit more difficult than it sounds.
It is against the rules that are both obvious if you think
about them and spelled clearly in AdSense agreement

Laws are also both obvious and spelled clearly. Nevertheless we need judges to interpret them according to each situation. Even with those judges in place, we still accept that some people will be punished for moral behavior, while others will walk free for immoral behavior, because a law cannot possibly cover every situation under which it will apply.

In this case, it seems to be the regrettable situation where someone is being punished for moral behavior. Regrettable, but perhaps unavoidable. However, that's as far as you should be willing to go. Trying to justify Google's actions by accusing the one that was punished of immoral behavior is not necessary and not warranted.
Ironically (given the recent hubbub), I think that's how 4chan does it.
Do you think this sort of thing (that programmers would have to concern themselves with reading patents beyond their description) is acceptable?
Google Targets Small Businesses With $100 Million Worth Of AdWords Credits
Can you elaborate on your theory of why Wired is justified in withholding the chat logs? What about the matter of not disclosing all ties to their sources -- do you think there is an ethical reason for that? Why counter-attack Greenwald if they know his accusations are justified, from the public perspective?
http://duostack.com/

Ruby and Node.js.

Also, Rubyists have the fog gem to work with, no need to only support EC2.
I think game theory applies here, similar to the situation played in Beautiful Mind http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5jrNoNNtrE and conciously or not, many choose not to get involved, fearing too much competition and bigger chances of loss/rejection.

Same as in business - the bigger the jackpot, less chance of hitting it. Picking up hot girls and doing risky business need a lot of self-esteem. Difference is, in business you often have a lot to lose, while being rejected by a girl doesn't really hurt much.
He knows what he did was wrong. He admits as much in his magnum opus. Just not wrong enough to be banned from AdSense.

I know he's wrong and I know exactly what he did wrong: he enticed visitors to his website to click on ads so that he makes more money at the expense of advertisers. You cannot do it for reasons that are both obvious and clearly speelled in AdSense agreement.

He is unwilling to correct the problem. He's even unwilling to admit there is a problem - his whole argument to favor theory of cruel and unusual treatment from Google is based on his fundamental belief that he really did nothing wrong. Plus irrelevant personal details designed to trigger sympathy for him, as a person, and detract attention away from the facts of what he did.
My favorite example of Perl helping a relationship: http://hop.perl.plover.com/cover.html

"I wish all my programs achieved their design goals so spectacularly."
Swimming across the Sahara in pursuit of fish
Facebook  Google in 2010 in visits. wow.
Skype explains recent outage
Paul Allen is taking advantage of the law. There is nothing really wrong with that. If you think the law is wrong, then let's work to try to change it. I personally find these intellectual property monopolies to be more menace than good. Especially the 17-year-long patents for SOFTWARE!
Fat Free CRM: For the People by the People
Michael Dvorkin, the creator of Fat Free CRM, talks about lessons learned in Silicon Valley, how he got involved with Ruby on Rails, and the intent behind Fat Free CRM.
> the chance of us having a nice chat with the CEO of
> Goldman is fair, but the chance of him maintaining
> contact with us and being a friend or mentor is pretty
> low

I've had something very similar go well. Putting yourself into surroundings where you have positive interaction with successful people is a good strategy.

> You don't have the money to hang with him, you don't
> have the opportunities to share with him and so on.

Interests might crossover. Re my story - I worked for a small vendor that nobody cared about, but was drinking seriously with a customer. We were talking about exercise. I was a not-very-serious middle-distance runner. After a bottle and a half of red each he convinces me to promise to one day do an ironman triathlon with him. I couldn't swim at the time.

Six months later, I'm into training, and interviewing at another firm. The place I'm interviewing at has several people who are nuts about triathlon.

The job's great, but that aside, so is the new interest. I did Olympic distance this year, signed up for half ironman in 2011. I still swap emails with the guy.

Some people with lots of money don't care about it. If they do, they'll filter you and save you the hassle. People who are capable of helping you are the most likely to be interested in helping you. You're their canvas.
US immigration policy isn't perfect, but it's far more liberal than most countries I know of. And I haven't looked at the numbers to verify this, but my general sense of the world would lead me to believe that the US gets a lot more applicants than any other single country, which makes its situation more difficult than theirs.
Except in that particular case that's not what happened. He admits he was enticing users to click ads which is clearly against AdSense rules.

I'm sure the fraud detection system is not perfect but in this case it actually worked as designed. Yay for Google, boo for people who try to take advantage of the system.
That sounds too complicated.
Your script should be able to accept a list of parameters to exclude, and then you can use regular expressions to strip them out. For example, if the urls look like www.example.com/pages/category?section=tutorials&sessionID=12345&refID=home, you could exclude (sessionID, refID) while retaining other parameters (e.g. "section" in this example).

If these pages were created using canonical URLs, you could find and extract that and add that to your index.
As more people start using browsers that support searching from the address bar (e.g., Firefox, Chrome), this should not come as a surprise in my opinion.
Why did ListAndPlay voluntarily close after receiving music industry approval?
Even if they were not vague. Even if he described in intricate detail exactly how a newsfeed works, or a search engine works in 1990, say. And you look at the patent and go WOW, HE TOTALLY DESCRIBED WHAT GOOGLE DOES. If he didn't build any technology to implement it, if he didn't struggle with the development, with scaling, attracting users, building a market, then do you think it's fair for Google to just pay him for merely describing something to the US Patent Office and then keeping it secret? This hampers competition. This is not good.

It's not Paul Allen we should be complaining about. After all, the patent law makes Intellectual Ventures and Interval Licensing very good ideas as companies. Their business plan is exactly that -- describe some things, then wait a few years, and go litigate.
EngineYard
About Windows and administrator privileges: it wasn't even the user' fault! I tried to run Windows XP as an ordinary user and it was really annoying: things would fail without error messages (let alone asking for admin privileges) all the time. Windows 7 is fine though: it feels like Ubuntu to me: I can run it as an ordinary user and it prompts for an admin password when necessary (and the occasions when it is needed make more sense: in the XP era I often wasn't convinced programs really needed the privileges they asked for).
I don't think anyone really believes the Swedes and the Brits are acting independently of the US on this one. But it all seems beside the point, since none of this has to do with business.
My Startup Story-In a Magazine
Do I think it's acceptable that adults are required to have some understanding of how the world around them works? Yes, I do.
It can work. But there is a cost - you may annoy the guy. See, if you fail, then the guy will remember you negatively. If you succeed, but cannot offer value, you lose also. I believe that's what people try to avoid.
I agree with you, but I think your appeals to 'the obvious' and 'the simple reality' are weak.
I considered that. It seems like the only solution (to me). When the <meta> tag for a canonical tag is available it seems pretty easy to solve that way.

I'm really curious how Google (and other search engines) solve this problem.

Do they maintain a massive list of query parameters to ignore? JSESSIONID and the like are easy enough, but there are many others.

Many pages don't define a canonical URL with a <meta> tag either.
those chinese bastards
He should say to his readers/viewers:

'Buy from these ads.'

End of story.

(except that Adsense makes a huge percentage that he could be getting if he could contact the advertisers himself).
Eddie Murphy Died –delirious - Death Or This Re - Kwzz
Ask HN: Is there an easy way to do shareware?
I've made something that some people will find very useful and would buy. (This is also a very desktop-oriented thing, not at all possible on the web/SaaS)

But it's a small project, I'm not quitting my day job or anything. Basically, I'm not sure coding-in some type of shareware trial is worth my time. But how else can I make a bit of money off this?

Is it worth it to spend the time implementing a "30-day trial" type function? I'm expecting this to kinda be a lot of work, as I've never done anything like it before. Also, I'd need to provide good support, send keys, stuff like that. Again, keeping my day job.

Is there any service that helps with this kinda thing? I'm developing for Windows at the moment.

The only other option I can think of is a "donate" button on the website and/or app. Do these actually work?

Basically rolling my own trial download has all this overhead that I really don't want to deal with. But on the other hand I'm not sure a "donate" button with a free download will make any money.

Is there an easy way to do shareware?
Thats just a question about raising the punishment - which schools seems to have no problem with.
I totally agree. straightforward != easy. That's why I'm not chomping at the bits to do it myself :-). But the opportunity and potential is there, there should be some investors and star developers who should take it.
Thanks. OK - yeah you did say "unless you have true value to offer".

Still, you might be psyching yourself out. In your original post you wrote 'hot top model' whereas the original article wrote 'hot girl'. Not the same thing.
Yes, they do.

You're telling me multiple site visitors, who feel no emotional connection to a site, will click "loads of ads" then comment and send emails about it of their own accord? I don't think so.

It's not up to him only to suggest how his visitors interact with the ads. There are two other parties with a financial interest in the AdSense actions, one actually paying the bills.