skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wish, instead of spraying their pants about Google Suggest and cribbing the social media mechanism of the moment, Google would focus on what matters and make their core product work as well as it used to.

I'm sure they are, but in the presence of increasing numbers of spammers and content mills that's an AI-complete problem.
Feed readers and sites like Hacker News are two solutions to the same problem: content aggregation. Is it dumb for Hacker News to collect stories from hundreds of different sites? If no, then why is it dumb for a feed reader to do the same? If yes, then why are you here?
Why Write the Essay Online?
Various universities provide students with the facility of submitting their academic papers online. This provides a certain amount of freedom for the students. However, there are advantages and disadvantages to this and students will be benefited by knowing them well.
I think the opposite. Not many people know about WinMo, and by putting "7" right there in the name they're making the link as obvious as possible.
I thought I had made it pretty clear what my estimate was based on (observing new projects pop up nearly daily over the course of the last year) and that it was merely my personal estimate, not some peer-reviewed fact as you are supposing.

I'm in the unique position to know the figures best, knowing roughly how many projects I haven't added to the project list at Unlicense.org. I have to say I'm at a loss to understand why you would think hundreds of projects implausible given that even simply googling for the uniquely-worded first line of the Unlicense returns 9,440 hits at present:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22This+is+free+and+unencumbe...

If we merely added the projects of the people listed at http://twitter.com/bendiken/unlicensed to the project list, the list would certainly already be at 100+ projects; this can be easily and quickly verified even just by eyeballing the GitHub, Bitbucket, Google Code, SourceForge, etc. accounts of the people involved. And those people are just a subset of all the developers currently using the Unlicense.

To put this in proper perspective, even I just by myself have more Unlicense-using projects hosted on GitHub than there are total projects listed on Unlicense.org. (I have tended to not add my projects to the list so as to make room for others.)

Even lacking other information than all the previous, it's hardly a stretch to estimate hundreds of projects. And, I of course actually have further information, having been uniquely positioned to observe this ecosystem grow during the last year.

I didn't keep notes on every new project, and have no intention of doing so in the future, as we who maintain Unlicense.org feel no need to grow the project list there to anything all that much longer than it already is (it clearly states "a sample", and is arguably already too long as it stands today; it needs curation for quality, not expansion for quantity).

As I said before, if we, or someone else, wished to provide a comprehensive catalogue of projects who've adopted the Unlicense, that would already at this point need to be a tagged/categorized database to be useful to anyone. By next year, that, too, probably couldn't keep up, so what's the point?
Understanding PDF password protection
>So long as the phone is available on the AT&T GSM band. No Nexus S for me.

Are there actually people for whom being on AT&T is a necessity, let alone desirable?
Actually the trick isn't going for common search words, its going for specific long-tail search phrases. "How do I make tacos with ground beef" instead of "tacos beef howto". Currently google will rank a near-exact long-phrase-string match above a less exact more bunch-of-keywords one with more inbound links.

Tech people, sysadmins in particular, have been living with this in the form of Experts Exchange for a long time. However since they're usually the second or third link among a pile of mailinglists and forums you just learned to skip them. The popular fad in "Q&A" sites (stackoverflow, answers.com, yahoo answers, quora) exists specifically to exploit this revenue/traffic opportunity.

But thats for tech stuff/people. When it comes to general consumer searches the real 800lbs gorilla is Demand Media. If you want to really wrap your brain around how silly this has gotten, read this: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_demandmedia/

In a way this is all backhandedly from the success of google. We all got so used to it being so good at finding what we wanted, we learned to just "talk" to it, but writing into the search box pretty much exactly what we'd say out loud.
The solution, Mr. Ozmint and others say, is to simply jam cellphone signals in prisons.

That may solve that one problem, however the article glosses over a much larger problem -- the inmate bought his phone from a prison guard. There is evidently corruption inside the system and as a result there's no telling what else that guard (or guards) are transporting into the prison for inmates.
Hmm, one of us is off by an order of magnitude, I get 0.24 mm.

For Al foil thickness I'm seeing conflicting numbers from 0.2 to 1.1 mm. If my cheap digital micrometer hadn't died I'd measure some.

If my skin depth is right then the attentuation probably won't be complete, if yours is then it might nearly be. Of course that's only the case if the receiver and/or transmitter is completely wrapped. Although at low frequencies like that you could probably tolerate quite a large gap.
As does Google Reader's "Sort by magic" (under "View settings").
I'm not talking about just the operating system, I'm talking about the platform and the necessary services you'd need on a server. Configuring a windows server, setting up IIS, mail server, etc, are different from version to version. Linux is much more consistent, editing a few text files in /etc. Sure, you can jump into cmd and execute many of the commands that always worked on windows, but that's a very small set of commands compared to Linux.

I made the switch to Linux a few years ago for servers, only months ago for my primary workstation, and I'd never go back to Windows; though Windows with cygwin is close enough to Linux to make a very nice workstation.
Speculation: the calendar in the clock app is week oriented. It would make sense to store one-time events as (day of week, week number, year).

January 1 and 2 of 2011 are actually part of week 52 of 2010. So, an event for January 2 2011 would be stored as (7, 52, 2010).

Now all it takes is somewhere else for someone to accidentally use the year of the current date instead of the year of the current week when checking to see if an event is due.

On January 3, which is the first day of the first week of 2011, the year of the date and the year of the week again match, so all us well until January 1 2012. In 2012, the bug will only last for 1 day, as week 1 of 2012 starts on Monday the 2nd.
This is a rather long-winded way to say: "by making HTTP requests from a Cocoa Touch app to your web server".
> doubt that an italian law degree will give a job.

That’s the same for an American law degree. There’s simply too many lawyers right now. I provide web services to lawyers, and about a third of my co-workers are qualified for the bar in multiple states, but working where I do.
How to Survive a Slashdotting on a Small Apache Server
Agreed. No one cares about whether you used lisp or C++.

What are the products that failed, not because they weren't popular or solved problems, but because they had a poor architecture or codebase?

I'm hard pressed to think of any.

Twitter had terrible scaling issues early on, but they solved it and are still successful.

I've heard that Flash's coded base is a steaming pile of unmaintainable C++ [citation needed]. But most of the backlash from Flash comes from the fact that it's proprietary and only partly from the fact that it runs poorly on non-Windows platforms.

Most products that fail because of poor technology choices do so before they ever get released so it's hard to judge whether or not the product would have ever been successful at all.
The MIT Pokerbots Competition
As much as I cringed when I saw the "Now what?".
I loved that post. So motivational. Mainstreet and Tout are simple but brillant ideas.
Keep up the good work man.
I'm not quite seeing how that's causing the problems that people are complaining about. If I was looking for dishwasher reviews I would just type "dishwasher reviews" and you'd think that legitimate review sites would have those keywords as well as lots of incoming links. So they should beat out dynamically generated sites.
and yet... I see you can't help but read them
Meh. Pay at the beginning or pay 10 times over if you're forced to re-architect.
What you have just described is exactly how the Jack-the-ripper password cracker program works. It starts with a set of "words" and then creates even more test words by doing just that, adding a character, deleting a character, etc. Not a problem for a computer.
I heard it said once that "You can get anything on the inside that you can get on the outside -- except a woman". (This was in an article/interview about rampant drug use inside prisons.)
Does anyone even bother to shoot on location anymore?
But, keep in mind that if you are using someone else's computer, then you are totally at the mercy of their security or lack thereof. If they happen to have a trojan key-logger on their system, then you've just been owned. If they happen to have installed a key-logger for the purpose of obtaining your password, you've just been owned.
I strongly second Muir Woods, if you have any interest in wilderness at all. I also hear that the coast is beautiful in that area, e.g.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Point_Rey...

so you might visit Point Reyes National Seashore.

You probably can't ski in July, but some ski slopes will rent you mountain bikes and carry you up on the lifts, which I've heard is great fun.

The submarine USS Pampanito in SF bay might also be interesting to visit. If you're in New York, the USS Intrepid is also worth seeing.

In Florida, you can rent sub-machine guns, which might be fun.

Some of the state parks along the Florida coast are also pretty nice. You might rent a boat and sail out to the more remote ones.

Unfortunately most of my favourite places (Glacier, Canyonlands, Zion) are nowhere near any major Universities. It just depends on your willingness to travel a whole lot more than necessary.
Matt, thanks for responding. I guess I'm not exactly sure where to end this back and forth, but your latest response does open up a few questions of mine.

I've never argued that running Adsense helps a site rank higher, I know that it doesn't. But I do believe that sites like eHow, who presumably make Google millions of dollars a year, are given a free pass to pursue content spam like I posted in my previous comment without any sort of repercussions that we can see. They're leveraging their domain authority and producing very low quality articles to target obscure long tail variations of keywords to keep getting that traffic.

What concerns me is "If you can’t algorithmically identify a content farm, is it still ok to take action and remove a site"...is the issue that the algorithms aren't sophisticated enough to catch these content mills from spitting out article after article of low quality, long-tail targeted traffic, or that you guys have thrown in the towel and believe that if the algos aren't throwing flags, then the sites are fine?

I posted up an example of a content mill type situation in my last response. To most people, a manual review should throw up a warning flag if the goal was to identify people targeting keywords rather than trying to help people. The top 5 rankings for each of those pages shows that neither algorithmic nor manual measures are in place to deal with such a situation.

I have 10+ content sites targeting random niches. I know how the SEO game works. I know dozens of internet marketers who have dozens of their own sites each who know how to game the algo to rank high with low quality content sites like these. It's obvious people are taking advantage of the algorithm, but it doesn't appear to be drastically improving anytime soon.

I do appreciate the time and effort you have put into your responses. If you'd like to talk privately, I would love to. I'll try and watch the video you suggested tonight.
I just finished pushing out an application to Heroku. I plan on the traffic ramping up sharply along with a couple of slashdottings, HN's and reddits along the way. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling when I realize I can just "Crank up the dynos" and go have a beer.
The worst statement in your comment (other than your use of "worse" in place of "worst") is:

anyone who does use RSS, and anyone in the future who learns to use it, won't be put off using it by the loss of that button

What about those who use RSS and use that button (like myself)? Won't they be "put off" by the loss of the button?

I think you miss the author's main point which is that the usage of the button is low not because users don't want that feature but because the UI is crappy all around. Removing the button only makes the UI worse.
Apparently touch responsiveness is improved in 2.3. However this article doesn't really explain what's wrong with it. I've been doing latency benchmarks for touch recently, and the highest latency I've seen for touch delivery is 10ms. Now 10ms is pretty terrible for what should be a very straightforward thing, but on the other hand it's only 2/3 of a frame, at 60 FPS.

The argument in favour of a GPU-accellerated GUI which is not mentioned here is battery life. I haven't been testing this side of things, but just because a CPU can do a 60 FPS GUI doesn't mean it should. Deferring it to the GPU would certainly reduce power consumption while navigating a UI. Whether this is non-negligible in terms of overall battery life, I'm not sure.
I would guess that all scientists would rather their work be distributed for free. Certainly all that I know feel this way. The problem, as usual, comes down to money. To publish in an open access journal, it can cost over a thousand dollars for just a single article.

With grant money being tight, and university administration pushing for meaningless metrics such as "number of papers published" to rank professors, publishing in open access journals can add up. Furthermore, many areas of study do not yet have good open access options.

Putting up content on a public website may sound great, but is not an option. Despite the problems with peer review, it remains the best and only way to both vet published work as well as uphold some level of quality.

The public does not help with the financial aspects either. While the public feels that managers in successful companies fully deserve outrageously high salaries, and that those companies themselves deserve incredible profit margins, the same sentiments do not apply to academic research.

It seems that public sentiment is that academics deserve to live in squalor while working for free. Graduate students, who do the bulk of the grunt work of science, already get paid barely above the poverty line. Of course, to the public, these are lazy students with too much free time. In short, the public always wants more from science while paying less. You may argue that it is this way because people don't have a choice in the matter, they must pay taxes. Fair enough, but if science was funded by industry, instead of journals with pay walls, the public would have absolutely no access to research for any amount of money. I, for one, feel that is a much worse outcome.
The Adwords Content Network needs the content farms
Wouldn't that also block the employee's cell phones?
Wait, I thought your point was that the 20 cals (10, whatever, a small number) was a straw man and it's 7 strips of bacon that causes overweight.

My point is you're misinterpreting Taubes, because he is saying 1) the mainstream believes such as small number of calories matters, and 2) that is absurd.

Do you agree with #1 now?

When I said precision, I don't mean 20 cals leads to 40 pounds. I mean the precision of someone eating an average calorie count with a margin of error so small. Consider the other side of that - for me to have maintained my own weight for the last 20 years, I would have to have been extremely precise in my eating, which I'm sure I wasn't.
It's not that hard, actually. You even have tools like SEnuke or Xrumer to automate the process. Get a few backlinks from .edu, .gov domains and then post some spammy articles/comments all over and you're good to go. If you are going after a competitive keyword, then you can setup linkfarms using Wordpress.com, Blogspot and a lot of free blog hosting services. Again, this can be automated or outsourced for pennies.
One of the factors that created this market is the unreasonable phone systems currently in place at correctional facilities. They are excessively overpriced and that cost is largely passed on to friends/family on the outside. In the long run it's actually cheaper to buy one of these expensive contraband cell phones and add money to them as needed.

Some people complain that inmates shouldn't be allowed to call anyone, but it's by maintaining these social connections to the outside world that gives them a greater chance of rehabilitation. You keep chipping away at their threads of humanity and you will create some very broken men; who will eventually share that street with you one day.
Are those 10ms with a realistic app/usage scenario ? I wouldn't think users would complain about 10ms, isn't that below the threshold of perception ?
I agree with this, and sense some conflation between the terms 'concept' and 'idea' in this argument -- at least so far as it applies to the execution vs. ideas debate. Some seem to believe that the role of ideas in the process of a start-up is limited to the initial concept. But this is like saying that the ideas in a screenplay are limited to those contained in the two sentence 'high concept' that spurred the project, with the execution being the writer's typing and grammar.

However, it's not altogether clear just what execution means if it is necessarily divorced from ideas. Aren't all new features, enhancements and marketing campaigns driven by ideas and then carried out by technicians? Or can successful execution be attributed simply to coders writing code? By this view (which, granted, is an exaggeration) success can be achieved by simply filling a room full of contractors and assuming they will work something out.

Rather than being at odds, ideas and execution seem more like mutual components of the division of labor: one cannot work without the other, and both are participants of every stage of the process. However, it doesn't follow from this fact that ideas and execution are equally responsible for success. I view a venture's success primarily as a function of consistently applied creativity, imagination and discipline. Luck is a necessary too, but certainly cannot be executed.

While I recognize the importance of ideas and technical execution, I would argue that vision and imagination are scarcer, more valuable resources than technical proficiency and practical know how. After all, development needs can be fulfilled by contractors in a pinch, but the same cannot be said for the role of a visionary -- a fact may explain why Apple continues to compensate Jonathan Ives so handsomely when his pay could be used alternatively to hire dozens of young hacker savants and electrical engineers.
The real lesson here is "balance". You won't be successful if you have a kickass architecture and no users. You also won't be successful if you have users that are always frustrated because your site is slow or unavailable.
>"Are there actually people for whom being on AT&T is a necessity"

iPhone users.
It would be a challenge to find a spot on the North side that wasn't near a Dunkin Donuts. That being said, I think this is a reasonable thing to look for if you aren't sure. I personally don't go to DD, but if you enjoy going there on a regular basis, it can improve your quality of day-to-day life. I've had the same thought regarding living near a Borders/Barnes & Noble.

To the OP and anyone else interested in the North Side of Chicago: I don't think you can go wrong anyplace near the lake between Downtown and Irving Park Rd. It's all beautiful; plenty of grocery stores and Dunkin Donuts'.
IPhone = Mac 2.0
This is the US military we're talking about - they're in the business of blowing things up on behalf of US economic interests.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket
Twitter Engineering: Introducing FlockDB
Projects going over schedule are, uh, not exactly an uncommon occurrence. In fact if you've been honest with your manager about your level of skill (as you said in another comment) and assuming you've been keeping him up to date with progress and he hasn't done anything to get the project back on track (like getting you a mentor to work with), then it's really more his responsibility than yours if you don't finish. (That's not to say he's doing it wrong - this may be a deliberate strategy on his part; it's obviously not a life-or-death project.)

On the other hand, if you wait until the last day before announcing that you're only 60% done, that is your responsibility. Don't be that guy. You should be talking to your manager now about how far along you are and what is an achievable state to leave the project in for somebody else to pick up (actually you should have started this some time back if you haven't already). e.g. you mentioned a lot of work went into gathering requirements - if you are not going to finish the project then that work probably needs to be captured.

Communication is the key, and that's got nothing to do with whether you're doing coding or marketing. Nobody is going to make any inferences about your marketing abilities from your coding abilities or vice-versa, but if you prove yourself incapable of communicating with your team in either placement then, well, that would be the time to start getting worried.

Failure is not always bad, but trying to cover up failure always leads to very, very bad things and it never, ever works. Remember that and you'll be fine.
I'd like to offer a correction/clarification. My intention isn't to point out that you were wrong, but to prevent someone else from getting the wrong idea.

You said that you decided to form this corporation as a not-for-profit [assuming this was a 501(c)(3)] because: "a project of this sort could only generate so much revenue," and "since it was my first major project, it only made sense to start somewhere small and make the organization non-profit."

The revenue generating capability of an organization is not something you consider when you decide to go not-for-profit. There are non-profit organizations that receive hundreds of millions of dollars a year in income. Non-profit organizations can make a little or a lot, it doesn't really matter.

The size of a corporation also has little or nothing to do with whether or not you should structure your company as a not-for-profit. Examples of some large non-profits are:

Org (2010 revenue)
Mayo Clinic ($7.9 billion)
United Way ($3.84 billion)
American Cancer Society ($926 million)
National Red Cross ($3.21 billion)

Not-for-profit organizations have many strict limitations on their method of operation. Everything from funding to salaries are limited in some fashion. You typically opt to form a not-for-profit corporation when you are forming a charity that you want to protect from becoming a profit motivated enterprise once you've moved on.
I don't know, but that's how reddit got started.
The mistake is thinking that '90% of an app' is actually 90% of an app.
Or never launch because you're always worrying about the millions of users you'll never get because you're too busy trying to learn NOSQL instead of just using MySQL for the first iteration.
I would love to find the set of pictures in hi-res.