skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree most strongly. It absolutely does make it appropriate to question your intentions because you were behaving in a manner which went against the long-established norms of this site.

I imagine that anti-war activists probably aren't very welcome on your military cadet site. If I appeared and talked about how the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is illegal and US troops keep shooting civilians and their allies, it wouldn't be very popular.

People might question my intentions, publicly, on a site that is set up for a specific purposes. They might read back over other comments I'd made that were more borderline and read them with a new context, where they were simply being ignored before.

Ultimately, you behaved inappropriately and don't seem to want to acknowledge that. You created this issue and have fanned the flames to make it worse.

Perhaps this is a really important lesson to learn for your business too: when you screw up, own the mistake. Don't try and weasel your way around it, admit it fully and completely and talk about how you can improve to ensure it doesn't happen again.

If you can't even do that on a discussion site, I wouldn't want to trust that you'd do it when you make a mistake in your business.
Asking people if they would pay for something is a very ineffective way of actually determining inclination to buy. Conjoint analysis is the right tool to use, but is probably heavy-handed for the quick answer you are looking for. Creating a quick prototype, showing it to a few people, and asking for written, non-binding commitments to buy is very effective. And I don't mean that this HN poll is going to be slightly ineffective; I mean it is going to be 100% useless.
Thought for a few minutes and I honestly can't think of anything lacking. Surprising.
This is pointed out in the followup comments: If a contract has been marked up - then it is merely a counteroffer. However, it also means that there is no basis for a lawsuit, as there was never a valid contract.
Your post looked like it was trying to assess that privacy isn't such a big deal, period. One of its arguments was an appeal to popularity: the extremely low percentage of people who use special privacy tools. Appeal to popularity can be valid, but I say that it doesn't work here, because the extremely low popularity of privacy tools is fully explained by the fact that nearly everyone doesn't have a clue, and therefore no opinion worth listening to. (When seeking truth, at least. Studying uninformed opinions has other uses.)

> BS

Ah, that is a meaningful disagreement. Well, you've just treated me of an OCD afflicted control freak, along with Eben Moglen. :-) By the way, the majority of the web site I go to (mostly from HN), work like charms, and I don't often have to enable Javascript. Tor doesn't work, true, and that's why I intend to run an exit node very soon. It'll be a drop in the ocean, but we gotta start somewhere. I liked Adblock while I used it, but animated ads stopped bothering me since NoScript.
Random.org can help
Why would psuedorandomness be insufficient? Don't try to hack the JS and the effect should be the same.
Coding on the spot might seem surprising to those outside of the software industry, but it’s standard practice.

Sounds like wishful thinking to me. At least I wish it were true. I've been involved in a lot of interviews at my company, and I'm the only one who ever asks anyone to write code.
First, An ordinary thumb drive wouldn't enough for such a system. Encryption doesn't telepathy. You copy data from Bob. You and Bob show up at the bank with the same data. What is the bank supposed to do? Encryption-based money systems require either a smart card or a central repository.

But even more, just assume that a "wealth transfer system" could be created by a bunch of random individuals who create N unduplicable units of value. Why should I accept particular units of value. I'd be better off doing the same thing myself - then it would be mine.

I think the lack of understanding of money-dynamics in these schemes comes from people reacting morally to it rather than rationally.
Chrome is 95% Chromium, and Chromium is open source as Firefox is! This is why I like them both! ;D

http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-projects
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)
Awesome - someone should expand this idea into a book!
Wow, I totally had the same experience with FreeBSD about 15 years ago. I have no idea if it persists on modern hardware, though.

Does anyone have a good explanation for this?
I know that the iPhones are notoriously bad at securing data when the device is on, but what about the remote wipe option? It's my understanding that 3GS and 4 phones have encrypted HDDs, with the remote wipe clearing the keys. I'm no expert, but wouldn't that be equivalent to any other disk encryption technique (which, to my knowledge, is practically unbreakable if keys are unavailable)?
Yes. A contract doesn't even need to be written. You can have implied contracts that are still binding. For instance, there's no written contract when you get your hair cut, but if you tried to refuse payment, you'd have breached your contract. http://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=905

The employer is still free to fire you (employers can almost always fire someone for any non-protected reason) if they discover and don't like the changes. But even the erasure is indication that you didn't accept the offer as they originally formulated it.

People REALLY need to remember that the law is (or tries to be) pragmatic. "Magic bullets" rarely/never exist. You couldn't sneak in a clause saying "I get a 100% pay increase annually" -- in this case, they're the party being bound so would need some indication of assent beyond just a paycheck.
The Decline Effect and Why Scientific 'Truth' So Often Turns Out Wrong
This post title should be: "Firefox overtakes IE in Europe (thank you Chrome!)"
If you're going to use highly subjective frequentist statistics at all, p < 0.001 should be the minimum gold standard for extraordinary claims. If the phenomenon is real, and not bad statistics, it only requires two and a half times as many subjects to get p < 0.001 instead of p < 0.05. Physicists, who don't want to have to put up with this crap, use p < 0.0001. p < 0.05 is asking for trouble.
i did computer science in undergrad and did a summer with an investment bank. it made me want to shoot myself in the face. so i went to law school to get out of tech. now i'm trying to do startups, which probably would've been nice to do all along.
Thanks, I didn't realize that. I've been using godaddy for eons and have looked for this feature on their confusing site before. I'll look again.
Sean - I always ask the following two questions first: "who told you they would pay money for this?" - which is a good place to start to figure out the types of companies interested in your offering. And then "why would they pay money for this?" - which helps flesh out the value perception of your offering for those types of companies.

The thing is, if you can't accurately answer those questions, you should go back and try to. That might mean seeking out potential customers and talking to them. There is a whole movement around this - Customer Development - which is all about product development that is aligned with customer needs. Turns out it applies to pricing, too.

You might find that you will have different types of companies with different value perceptions. This is where Market Segmentation will come into play and you could - as some of the other comments said - end up with pricing plans for different segments that are themselves quite different. Nothing wrong with that. However, as a small startup that might be taking on too much, which means you'll have to make that very difficult decision of whether or not to focus on a single market segment and dominate. Not easy - but nothing worthwhile is, right?

The problem with talking to potential customers is that you can't just ask them what they'd pay! You have to figure out what problem they have, how they want to fix that problem, how you can help them fix it, what value they see in having the problem fixed, how they'll buy (to the point of others here), etc. All of that goes into determining a price for your offering. Remember, Pricing is Marketing.

So what Yammer charges, or how 37Signals priced Basecamp is not relevant here until you fully understand who your customer is, what their value perception of your offering will be, and how & when they'll buy. Using those companies as a reference point is really only useful to see what others are doing out there, but what they are doing may - or may not - work for you.

That said, I Googled you (awkward, I know) to see if I could find what you're working on....ScoopBase is what I found. Based on your tag line "Your team has questions, give them answers" it would seem that there might be a need for some "super users" to answer questions / edit responses and perhaps unlimited "view-only" users. Perhaps you would price based on how many “super users” there are, or maybe based on the other features of your offering. Perhaps some companies – large or small – would rather pay based on certain features and the number of users should be irrelevant. Or not. Those are questions you need to get answered from your potential users. Pricing - no matter what - comes down to the willingness to pay of the customer. The metrics you use to build your pricing must be valuable enough to the customer for them to pay.

Good luck to you on your new venture!
Hypothesis #1:

53% in an experiment that has 36 trials? Really? 50% is 18/36, but 19/36 is 52.7%, and 19/35 is 54.3%. Depending on experimental design, if it just so happens that near the end of the 20 minutes, the subject has a tendency stop on one of the last erotic pictures they're like to guess and let the time run out.

Hypothesis #2:
Depending on how the computer's random number generator was seeded (and they might have a relatively short repeating sequence), subjects may have, however unconsciously, "learned" to predict the randomness, something they would have insufficient motivation to do in the other set of pictures. [We can test for this by seeing if they were getting better at it over the course of a session.]
Bad example. You just never get 100 heads in a row on a fair coin, period.
I've done this with just about every employment agreement I've ever signed, and never had a problem. One time, the company I worked for was acquired by IBM and I refused to sign their intellectual property agreement. The HR guy said if I didn't sign it, I wouldn't get paid. I told him that if they didn't pay me, I wouldn't do any work. The next day they came back with a more reasonable agreement, but it was too late. I had already found another job.
Them paying you after your modifications is sufficient (in most cases) to constitute agreement. "Meeting of the minds" is not really a legal practice today. The employer was objectively given notification of the modifications and objectively paid the employee, constituting acceptance of the agreement. Obviously no such case is open-and-close, but the modifications are probably on fairly solid ground.
sounds like he's trying to implement something similar to a 'dbm' (tokyo/kyoto as current/modern implementations) which are k/v caches that seem to intelligently write to disk.

Presumably the keyset can still be in ram (so that [star]foo[star]bar[star]1 searches on keys can work?), but the dbm model is a fairly efficient key/val implementation, and tokyo/kyoto is fast, and fairly smart about writing to disk, although I haven't explicitly testing their limitations as you approach ram limits in production.

Not sure what tradeoffs are in mind, but atleast a feature/perf comparison to kyoto compared with diskstore as an internal back for redis would be interesting

[1](doesnt seem i can escape an *)
>Will you quit arguing over such petty differences?! Jesus Christ! People view the world differently

Off topic but WRT your response - "people see the world differently" but apparently my fixation on truth isn't allowed?

On topic, why argue? He says that he's not discriminating but he describes discrimination. I simply wanted to point out that apparent contradiction.

Discrimination is some sort of bete noire of corporate society but I find it quite silly to suggest that we should not discriminate for people because of the peculiarities of their personal situations. If you find that robotic I find your response curious but I suspect you won't meet an enquiry about it well so feel free to move on to one of the other 10 million or so comment threads of the day.

>of course they'll apply different meanings to the same words, and even to the same concepts

If you use the same words to mean something else then we need to converse more to establish that which you are trying to communicate.
I have don't have any interest in the subject of ESP, but you are completely incorrect. Statistical significance isn't hard to calculate and the number of data points here is fairly large, so there is a measurable effect by reasonable standards. The actual statistics and calculations are right there in the paper.

The idea that the effect could be the result of a programming error or a small amount of light leaking through/around the screen is completely plausible. Or it could be dumb luck as you suggest, but it's extraordinarily unlikely.
Not yet, as the Chrome Web Store doesn't allow authors to sell extensions, only apps.
I am making the point that if you blindly optimise for certain outcomes (e.g. ad clicks) you may not actually be getting the desired behaviour you want (users clicking ads they are interested in with the possibility of completing a transaction)

If the CTR is too high or completion rate is too low, you are likely to be banned, no matter what the Adsense TOS say. See this thread for comparison: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2049105
If you actually look really closely, a lot of what iOS does with animations are about giving the illusion of responsiveness and smoothness.

I'm not saying things aren't incredibly responsive, but some of the animation techniques are used brilliantly to disguise lag.

Three examples:

1. Mobile Safari doesn't wait to render what it hasn't downloaded/formated before responding to touch gestures. You swipe and the page scrolls. It might display a checkerboard before it catches up with rendering, but the swipe command takes precendent.

2. Those wizzy transitions when double-tapping the home screen, or returning to the spring-board. They start immediately and actually mask what's going on behind the scenes with regard to processing a request. They're the ultimate illusionist progress-bar. And they need to be tuned finely to present the illusion or else it becomes obvious that they're masking tactics.

When people complain about the performance of new iOS versions on older devices such as the 3G, what they're really noticing is the illusion has been broken as Apple is optimising and fine-tuning the illusions for the latest hardware.

3. Those screengrabbed snapshots of apps that have been completely closed and display when an app is restarted. If the load time is short enough, the illusion of instantly re-entering an app is maintained, even if all you're seeing is a stale image of the app your closed earlier.

I'm not sure if Android employ any of these tricks, but they demonstrate the focus and undocumented nature of Apple's drive to create the illusion of perceived GUI 'smoothness'.
> People are afraid to miss the next Google, Microsoft, etc

Yup, and they don't realize that it's not a winning strategy. Of course I would love to get in on the "ground floor" of the next Microsoft or Intel. Unfortunately it's like trying to get rich by buying enough lottery tickets. Sure one of them is going to be a big winner but the EV of your investment is negative.
I'd go paid from the get-go. In my experience, once users associate something with "free," it's much harder to get them to pay anything for a similar product.
The weird thing is that it shouldn't be hard to create a thread out of an arbitrary number of @tags. I have to think it already exists somewhere.
Found this incredibly interesting: xx let’s look at the very widely circulated “15 Google Interview Questions that will make you feel stupid” list. You want to believe these are real questions, given that Business Insider feels like such a reputable source. Except that they didn’t get this list from a direct source. They borrowed their questions from some blogger (I won’t link back here) who was posting fake questions. Now, I don’t know that said blogger was intentionally lying – he probably borrowed them from someone else. Whatever the original source is, these questions are fake. Fake fake fake. xx
Not really.

If you toss 100,000,000 == 2 ^ 27, you should only expect around 30 in a row. To have a good chance of getting 100 in a row, you need about a billion squared times more.

And the problem is MUCH worse than described above: Let's say you test 1000 wrong hypothesises with p=0.05; 50 of those will be accepted as true, even though all are wrong. If you test 980 wrong hypothesises and 20 right ones, more than half of those that pass the p=0.05 "golden" significance test will in fact be wrong.

Now, when you see a medical journal with 20 articles using p=0.05, which do you think is more probable - that 19 are right and one is wrong, or 19 are wrong and one is right? The latter has a much higher likelihood.
Things never said about restaurant websites.
Meet the AK-47 of the Cell-Phone World
The weird thing is that it shouldn't be hard to create an eminently readable thread out of an arbitrary number of @tags. I have to think it already exists somewhere.
So, as a non-Redis user, am I correct in my understanding that an admin may define a maximum delay before write-behind persistence must be attempted? For applications which can afford to lose a few seconds of data in the case of a failure, this seems like a great way to improve latency.

More generally, why are there no MySQL (or whatever) engines which offer similar capabilities? Wouldn't it be possible for DB clients to "commit" transactions to memory and then have them flushed to disk asynchronously with all other ACI(d) properties maintained? There are many applications which can survive a few seconds of data loss but need transactional properties to avoid data corruption.
Yes, but you can't (assuming you use the Chrome Web Store, which would have the largest target audience). Google only allows you to sell apps, not extensions.
The paper says they used an Araneus Alea I (hardware) RNG. See http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf page 12.
Worm Planted in Fake Microsoft Security Update
Attacks on Package Managers
Cassandra is just an awesome piece of software. I hope that anyone who has not at least played with .7 to go to http://cassandra.apache.org right now, download it, and follow the quick start guide.
Guide to Angel Investor Organizations and Groups
I could see these things getting subpoenoed for divorce hearings... (from the mistress' account of course). Interesting moral thought... I wonder if the creators of this site allow you to have share videos with more than one person?? AKA is it intended for couples (married or otherwise), or is it the next big swinger's tool?
I thought their last UI was bad, but their latest UI, with all the spinning and zooming boxes, is even worse.
Good point. I shouldn't have blamed the researcher -- I read the paper and it seems straight forward enough with a number of controls in place. (For example, running a second experiment using only random number generators that showed no such results.)

Instead, I should have focused on science journalists, who should be extra diligent when reporting these sorts of stories to point out the possibility that this is a false positive.
I wanted to know if hard work paid off so I worked from 10am to 12am

While I agree that an internship can be a great motivator (or an early de-motivator for people that chose the wrong career), I don't think this kind of extreme behavior should be encouraged. I'm not beneath doing extreme hours for a project, a few weeks ago I didn't leave the office for almost 72 hours to finish up some polishing of a product because of a sudden client imposed deadline. I did it knowing that I would then take a few days off and that it was an extreme measure to a extremely retarded requirement. It shouldn't be the rule since it can easily lead to tired and unhappy employees, and of course disgruntled employees who think they are being undervalued because they don't stay the same time the over-worker does.

If you have a very motivated employee, by all means let him do his overtime if he really wants to, but there has to be a line where you say "stop, go home". In any case, have some good luck looking for great interns. I'm pretty sure you can do wonders for all the new kids that're just starting out.
Goldman’s Real Facebook Exit Strategy
Every interview I've gone through that lasted more than about fifteen minutes involved writing out code. <shrug>
Show HN - Cricket Analytics: Track your cricket game with statistics & charts
They could actually weight it based off the number of gps "check-ins" that road sees.
"Through evolution, we've adapted to molecules present in the environment"

Flows both ways, though. Through evolution, our biological enemies have come up with the nastiest chemicals they can.

Natural vs. "man made chemicals" people often forget that on the whole, Nature is out to kill you. The most potent known toxin is called Botulinum toxin and is named after the bacteria that produces it (or vice versa).
How do you deal with that? I always get mildly annoyed when my 4yo daughter does that, but I feel that is not the right way to go about this.
Yes, please do call every programmer in the Valley a "rockstar" or "ninja."
So why would people want to be Facebook users? What value are they getting besides targeted ads?

I find it amusing to see people trying to imagine theoretical ways Facebook could earn income to justify their insane valuation. It is essentially the very definition of speculation. A prudent investor wouldn't touch that shit with a ten foot pole.
While the dictionary itself is mutable the data in it, both keys and values, is immutable like all data in Erlang. It is the same with ETS tables which behave more or less like processes, the data in them is also immutable.
>It took me a moment to understand the important difference between exploratory and confirmatory experiments - that you can find patterns in anything if you look hard enough, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything until you repeat the process but look for the specific pattern you noticed previously

It's when the hypothesis predicts a pattern that you haven't noticed yet and the pattern is confirmed by experiment, that's when you know you have something [a theory].
This comment does a better job of explaining things than the article i think:

http://www.technologywoman.com/2010/05/17/debunking-the-goog...
agree, this looks like the app to advertise their company.
i can create the mac GUI flavor without cappucino suction
This is kinda what mongodb[0] does now and is a question of durability[1]. Current rdbms systems that lay claim to consistency must flush to disk to ensure ACID[2] compliance. Redis does not claim such compliance and I am of the opinion that it should not.

[0]http://www.mongodb.org/

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durability_(database_systems)

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID