skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think "our industry" refers to CPA style affiliates. Negative option is the same type of thing as the old book of the month club - they ship you something and charge you for it unless you stop it or send it back. What's going on is that there are (shady) setups designed basically to be a variable CPA. You rope the customer in, charge them whatever you can for the upfront product and then pass on their details to the negative option marketer. The 3rd party fulfills the first order for free (effectively the CPA charge) and then proceeds to bill you long term.

It would seem that the title is pretty inappropriate for HN, "our industry" certainly doesn't match any significant part of HN.
an IPO doesn't necessarily mean the valuation will go higher.
Just so you won't have to click through the calendar, the actual 30 Days of Persuasion series begins here: http://persuasiveweb.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/
Man, it is really hard to google for '-f-via-c.'

I believe that it has been deprecated now that the LLVM backend is more mature. I'm not 100% sure, though.

EDIT: found it! http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.1/html/users_guide/relea... (in the 1.5.6 section)

> The registerised via-C backend, and the -fvia-C flag, have been deprecated. The poor floating-point performance in the x86 native code generator has now been fixed, so we don't believe there is still any reason to use the via-C backend.
How to charm a VC into mentoring you
Single-Page Site with Parallax
37Signals Valuations Tops $100 Billion After Bold VC Investment
They really should discount presales...either mark up the prices for the door, or offer a 33-50% discount for booking online now before the full program is out. Personally $150 is above my price insensitivity, $50-75 would be below it, for a somewhat black box event five months off.

Although, I may not be representative, and decided to skip SXSW due to the $1050 ticket too, at least this year.
Joanna Wiebe (bloggergirl) and I wrote The 30 Days of Persuasion about 18 months ago, so the screenshots may appear dated in some cases, but the principles are sound. We spent a lot of time writing it, but never really promoted it. The blog covers:

Authority: We look to experts to show us the way
Commitment & Consistency: We want to act consistently with our commitments and values
Contrast: We notice and decide by the differences between two things, not absolute measures
Engagement & Emotion: We want to interact with things that make us feel
Likeability: The more we like people (and companies), the more we want to say yes to them
Reciprocity: We feel obligated to return favours performed for us
Scarcity: The less available something is, the more we want it
Social Proof: We look to what others do to guide our own decisions and behavior
Trust: Show your character and competence to help people feel confident in choosing to work with you

We were originally planning to turn the blog into a free e-book, but I gave up after trying a bunch of sub-optimal plug-ins for turning Wordpress blogs into PDFs.

Hope you find some inspiration in there to test out on your own sites and applications.
"All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection"

Looks like it works in finance, too. And a whole lot of other disciplines.
Sole props are the cheapest, simplest tax structure around.

I don't know why you think it costs "hundreds of dollars to file." Perhaps you're talking accountant's fees? My tax accountant does the Schedule C for about $75 extra as part of our personal taxes annually -- I just provide him with a P&L statement for the year. For previous businesses I did all the taxes myself: the IRS provides lots of easy to understand, free publications for small business. Hell, I did a few years of 1065 (Partnership) returns (stupid decision to form business as partnership!) myself and those are awful.
Compared to how many millions of people making money on the web, all of whom have an incentive to boost their own traffic regardless of whether that's the best thing for users?

Joy's Law comes into play here: "No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else." 23,000 employees sounds huge, until you compare it with the million+ people who make their living as full-time E-bay sellers, and the however many million people who make their living off AdSense.
The offer of a discount to past buyers would certainly make a tempting offer to your email list I imagine.

Send them an email a month after their purchase and offer the complete collection on a discount.

Good luck!
Personally, I don't think the domain matters. If a developer is required to provide security, either to protect a secret, maintain personal or company profits, or protect customer finances, and that developer fails by "int rand() {return 4;}", that developer should never work with technology again.
I've had this happen on my Evo a good number of times. Mainly clicking on a text message thread to reply to someone clicks on a different person who is 2-3 people below in the thread list. It is very annoying as I've sent text's to the wrong person before.
That's not actually what the IRS is saying.

The point of the business/hobby distinction is to prevent individual taxpayers from deducting losses for hobby activities. If the activity is profitable, the taxpayer gets taxed, so the IRS couldn't care less whether its a hobby or an actual business.

Attempts to generate profit by incorporated entities are, by definition, business activities. For pass-through entities like LLCs and S-Corps, this means that they are treated as business activities for purposes of taxing the managing/active investors.

The activities don't have to have a reasonable chance of being profitable; otherwise, speculative ventures would never be treated as businesses. The key test of whether something is a business activity is whether it generates revenue and whether the taxpayer puts effort into generating revenue. For example: painting is normally a hobby, unless the painter also puts effort into selling those paintings.
Did StumbleUpon just pass Facebook for social media traffic?
Twitter Displaying Expanded Short URLs Using 301 Lookup
I've found myself in the situation, a few times, where it was necessary to run `bundle update' to resolve dependency conflicts. You should, of course, always thoroughly test your application before deploying production code after a `bundle update', but I'd hardly tell people to not "ever" run the command, especially if you have git-based dependencies that need to be updated.
I'd recommend this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Build-Database-Driven-Using-MySQL/dp/0...

It assumes you are comfortable with basic HTML and text editing, and nothing more. In the process of building a basic CMS, you cover pretty much everything you need to know to build whatever you really want to build, as far as the language goes.
In my experience most traffic jams are caused by bad merging, not lack of capacity. A few years ago I regularly drove a stretch of road that went from 2 lanes to 3 for a few miles and then back again, without gaining a significant amount of traffic in between (I have no idea why the road was designed that way, maybe one of the side roads feeding into it got a lot of traffic at a different time of day or something). Every day there would be a traffic jam where the third lane ended. Someone waits too long to merge and traffic has to slow to let them in, or is nervous about moving over and has to be given space, or whatever, and it just compounds until traffic literally stops at that point. I see the same thing all the time at on/off ramps, turn lanes, etc.
> Why do you assume the price of energy (and solar panels, for that matter) would stay constant as investors flock to blanket the earth with them?

I don't; the energy price I used is about a third to a quarter of today's wholesale electrical price, and the solar-panel price is about a tenth of today's. I assume that those prices will drop rapidly. I think they will probably drop a lot further than that, but it's very difficult to imagine what will happen when some resource drops in cost by more than a factor of ten.

> I like your general logic - but I disagree strongly with your prediction that buying solar panels will generate 40% return on investment (in year 1!) in 2029.

I'd like to disclaim that prediction! It was a scenario, not a forecast.

It doesn't have to be solar panels specifically, but my point is that over time, we may develop capital goods whose internal rate of return is well over the 3% we've become accustomed to. (Solar panels are a plausible candidate because their production is already highly automated, they're made of dirt-cheap raw materials, and they produce energy.) If that happens, whether it's solar panels or automated moon factories, P/E ratios will drop --- at least until the new exponential takeoff hits some resource limit. In the case of solar panels, that will probably be land, until we construct a Dyson sphere.
I did, but, as it was my first contact with GAE, I found it too big of an abstraction to understand how GAE worked. Flask allowed me to develop while still grokking the entire system, so I went with that.

Plus I didn't like Tipfy's view classes, they feel too Java-y and unpythonic.
Geocommit: locate your source
The way you phrased your original post gave me the impression you were dismissing the constructor solution for the same reason tptacek dismissed the rest. I certainly agree with your point, as you may have read elsewhere in the thread.

Other than that, I don't assume a patronizing attitude when I say that arbitrarily labeling solutions to such problems as "cheating" is an infuriatingly useless argument over semantics, and nothing more. Particularly so when such questions are used in the context of a job interview; how would you feel if an interviewer wrongly rejected your answer based on what he read on SO, and whose answer she trusted more?

PS. The situations I was referring to is the myriad of such questions on SO; a problem with absurd constraints imposed. They're fun, until 5 people come along and decide going around labeling answers as "cheating". The Stack Overflow meta site has quite a few comments on that phenomenon.
SSL doesn't disable the referrer header. It just happens to not be sent when the link you've clicked on isn't also using SSL. If the link you click on happens to be to an SSL site, they get the full referrer header as intended. A more appropriate way to hide the referrer is to just use a redirection that doesn't include the search terms.
I also didn't notice this until today, but this is a great feature to prevent spam and malware. Usually I feel like my Twitter feed is filled with people and links that are moderately trustworthy, but that leaves everyone vulnerable to someone hijacking a twitter account using firesheep or something else.
I'm not sure how relevant Armin is being there, in all my time doing Django development I've never had to do that much work to extend it. Extensions were always clean, repeatable and reliable.

Even if they weren't, I saved countless more hours by using what Django provides than I spent working around what it doesn't.
Similar to the "you know" of new yorkers or the "so..." (or ...so) of pretty much all of you guys (sfbay area) ;-)
I think you need to read between the lines a smidge here, in all likelyhood that .5B will get sold into the fund in the short/long term.
We will probably never be able to get rid of traffic completely, but we could greatly increase the capacity of a road. If every car was driven by a robot, then the distance between cars could be much smaller than it is right now.
Agreed. I've had "GOOG-411" programmed in my contacts for ages. I called the other day for old time's sake instead of searching and found it was no longer operational. That was a little disappointing. :-/
no, not this again. I remember for days it would keep getting submitted and deaded. It's a fun post, but please not this cat and mouse game.
I don't know whether your first statement is true, but I'm skeptical. Certainly there are some cases where newspapers continue to operate at a loss over many years, but in those cases we hear rumblings about hostile takeovers.

Regardless, I don't think GS comes close to getting that kind of editorial control or information access with this deal.

Although you do suggest the interesting point that Facebook private messages and even public postings could be a very valuable source of insider trading information.
Adobe Photoshop 1.0
On thing I didn't realize immediately. Since the larger registers are program state that has to be stored and restored between thread switches you need operating system support before you can enable AVX. Apparently this is coming to Windows in service pack 1 of Windows 7.
Perhaps more technically, unbound methods _are_ objects (as are [bound] methods, procs, etc.).
A mortgage is also potential equity whereas your credit card debt is not. I'm going to pay to live somewhere (rent or mortgage). If I have mortgage debt, that 'rent' payment is becoming ownership. In addition, the interest on that debt is deductible so, to some degree, it comes out in the wash (so to speak).
"It started with good intentions and then politicians got involved."

Still sounds good to me.

Spammy things like ClickBank need to DIAF.
By the way, if people want to mention more examples of other sites outranking Stack Overflow by replying here, I'll try to circle back to check for them, then use them to poke the relevant team to make sure we're doing everything we can.
Ask HN: Thoughts on dhh vs davemcclure
An engaging debate over valuation bubbles, Facebook, and Goldman Sachs. Happening on Twitter right now.

Thoughts?
The guy got it wrong. If a company wants to bring ANOTHER merchant into the mix, AFTER the transaction has been concluded, it can’t just send my info to them, I have to send it myself. That's what the bill says.

Amazon and ClickBank are just fine.

The question I have is, how does this affect virtual currencies and systems where I pay money to the initial merchant and they turn around and pay someone else (such as PayPal)?
Out of curiosity I've typed ruby matz into the address bar and firefox opened http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto (google works)
Interesting conversation between Dave McClure and DHH about Facebook
Personally, the Goldman Sachs deal reeks of the whole structured products debacle that got us into the mess we are digging out of.
I just posted it here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2064518
Previewing the Atlas Shrugged Movie
Finland:
Start-up notification by private trader 75€
Start-up notification by private limited company (min. 2.5k€ share cap) 350€

No liability to collect VAT if annual sales do not exceed 8,5k - unless you are a foreigner with no fixed establishment in Finland.

May neglect the appointment of an accounts auditor if more than one of following are not met:
Balance sheet total exceeds 100k
Net sales or corresponding earning exceed 200k/year
There are more than three employees on average

Self-employed pension insurance (YEL) not mandatory e.g. if not resident, annual work income is below 6 775,60 euro...

http://www.yrityssuomi.fi/default.aspx?nodeid=15325 (guide text)
http://www.prh.fi/en/kaupparekisteri/hinnasto.html (registrar, prices)

Quite easy, but for example dividends are taxed so heavily that Estonia is a good alternative to set up shop.
You should come here mainly because of quality workforce. Finland is a low-paying country for engineers (65-75 % of German average, 60-85 % of French average, 65-80 % of UK average - stats from 2001 though).
Hootsuite has been doing this for a while with a + icon. Good to see Twitter itself doing it.
A better visualization would IMO just show the adjusted market value and superimpose some exponential growth curves over that (1% in green, -1% in red, etc.). This confusingly takes 1D data and makes it 2D.
I think this may be a big part of the reason why Google employees seem to coyly suggest 'by our numbers these crap results are making people happy' whenever this issue comes up. For a lot of low-literacy users, these results are fine, and as good as they've ever received from Google.
I would have done this a long time ago if my country wouldn't levy taxes on companies that aren't active (dormant).

I hadn't considered incorporating abroad seriously until now.

Are there any gotcha's with a company abroad? e.g. annual tax filing in my country (Belgium)? wages paid out by foreign corporation? ...
Okay well, so i feel like we're in a case of violent agreement, and it's probably my fault because i didn't take the time to write a proper comment in the first time.

My apologies.
Aspect-Oriented Programming, Interception and Unity 2.0
Yet another Google translation trick
Warn HN: zoneedit.com
The new zoneedit.com site transmits login credentials in plain text. The login popup has a 'Secure Login' button, but this only misleads users into thinking their login credentials are secured when they are not.

From the packet:
POST /proxy.php HTTP/1.1\r\n
endpoint=Authentication.action&action=login&userName=hello&password=hacker+news
Bill looks good to me and won't affect our company. I think the bill should be extended though to non-internet transactions as well. I got bamboozled by magazine subscriptions that autorenew themselves even though I never consented to, the consent was in the form of an opt-out scheme.

Nothing worse than buying something for $5 and suddenly they are deducting $49.95 from your bank account every 30 days. Hopefully this bill criminalizes that practice. If as a side effect, I have to reenter credit card numbers into legit sites like amazon, that's the price I pay and its no big deal.

Regarding the companies whose schemes this bill addresses, if they all go out of business, and have their board of directors and corporate attorneys taken out and shot by a firing squad at dawn, that would be a net gain for society. (Reader's Digest, I'm looking at you.)
The average person can't decide if they care about it until they understand it. Until they do, I'm glad people like Gabriel are being paranoid on their behalf.
Is it just me or is the main site broken?

All the top lists either have outright broken images:

http://www.7bks.com/list/196001

or a big 7 Missing Image pic:

http://www.7bks.com/list/484001

http://www.7bks.com/list/565001

http://www.7bks.com/list/57001

etc

Only 2 of the lists actually show book covers. (The Ian M Banks and Mind Bending Fiction lists.)

Maybe a 5th day was in order.
So amazon can track DDG users.
Backward compatibility of gaming systems, in my estimation, started with Sony. Nintendo and Sega certainly didn't have them on their systems, and Sony was the first to do it(again, AFAIK) with the Playstation 2. Gamecubes didn't play N64 games which didn't play SNES games which didn't play NES games, etc.. However, the PS2 accomplished that by having a PS1 core on the same board as the PS2 hardware-whenever a gamer inserted a PS1 disc, it would switch to the old core... which is why they ran perfectly but with no enhancements from the PS2 hardware.

Getting to the point, the PS3's with the PS2 core were dropped not long after release due to their high cost. I understand your frustration, but it's becoming increasingly important to do research and understand each system's capabilities before putting your dollars down... the 360 is no exception here either.
I suspect it came out of this:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/201...
While this is a pretty cool story, I share the author's reservations about what this actually means.

First, Stumbleupon could get more traffic, but less actual interaction. As an example, my personal blog posts recently got about the same number of page views from a post on HN and from a status on Facebook. But, the HN users were on my site for an average of 42 seconds, as opposed to 3.5 minutes for Facebook.

Second, the type of traffic could be different. I have no personal example of this- but it may be that Stumbleupon has more generalist viral content and Facebook could have more tailored content, possibly better for small businesses to monetize.

Either way, really cool for Stumbleupon, I totally did not realize how huge it was.
So what's your excuse for this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM ? PhD in the relevant field, plus actual field experience. Or the not insignificant number of other people with actual PhDs coming to very similar conclusions? (They may seem superficially different but if you take the time to understand them both Dr. Lustig and Taubes basically have the same points.)
Closer proximity to other people in general, for example, was one of the harms I was thinking of. But I'm slightly more misanthropic than most Americans, I guess.

Misanthropy often comes down to a matter of quality rather than quantity. I've lived almost my entire life in small towns, and I'm not inclined to speak highly of the people I shared those towns with. For one, while small town folk are probably friendlier and less suspicious towards their own kind, you're also more likely to find various forms of bigotry. It's no coincidence that everyone I know of from my high school who happened to be black, gay, bisexual, or otherwise a minority desperately wanted out and for the most part have moved to denser areas.
You can still use it on Android. Open the Maps app, activate the voice search, then say what you're looking for. It shows the location with two buttons: navigate or call the phone number.
Not until their life is impacted negatively (e.g., turned down for health insurance).

Most people (in North America anyway) don't appear to care much about their health, either... that is, until they are diagnosed with cancer or suffer a heart attack.
Mine as well, I guess my comment was over the line.
I went to the last one, but only stayed for a few minutes. I'll look into where and when this next one is.
I'll certainly try to find some time for it.
Clearly brilliant, but he also faked a photo of a jailbroken iPhone 4, which (apparently) motivated his partial withdraw from the scene.

Though talk about a comeback... This is a much better online "hire me" than the ones that were popular on HN several months ago.
" Ruby is evolving at a breakneck speed but as a result has very poor release management."

Just what is changing so fast in Ruby? Is 1.9.2 so much different from 1.9.1? Has anything changed in 1.8.7?
It's amazing to me how consistent the UI has been over the years. I guess it's true: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
"1) We were not end users of our product. Dog fooding felt like a chore"

This may have affected your motivation. Its easier to stay motivated when you build a product you want to use. You know this already since its your #1 point.

You can learn marketing by reading books on branding, advertising and marketing. Learning Python/Django for an MVP is also great. Combine that with plan B.
But you know the situation better than anyone.
It looks OK.
A Less Mighty Wind - Three reasons wind power could wane
Ask HN: Review my website (dog owners)
http://mydogbarks.com

Website where you can upload the picture and the bark sound of your dog. Every dog has a public profile with some data.

I'm looking for feedback from dog owners regarding features that I could add to make it more interesting.
Surely that might be the case, I was simply stating my experience.
I'm in the same boat - this has finally convinced me to give it a serious try. I've been using Google mostly in "private" mode in Chrome/FF for a while now, but that's not a real solution.
1-800-BING-411 is still operational.

http://www.discoverbing.com/mobile/411/
Incredible Space Pics from ISS by astronaut Wheelock
Alternatively, FB may just want to keep financials a secret because they are worth a lot more when people are wildly speculating than they would be if they had to be as open as a public company.

(Goldman probably got a look under the hood, but I doubt they will pass that along to the investors they hope to sell Facebook investments to, so both FB and Goldman will benefit from uninformed speculation.)