skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That shows a lot of bad faith on the part of Matt Cutts. It has been explained to death, here and elsewhere, what most likely happened. The fact that he continues to make the same accusation... well frankly he lost a lot of credibility with me. One more manipulative corporate drone, one less genuine hacker.
Could you send me more details about your system? I don't see any issue with the works with icons on my Chrome. (natalie@babyli.st)
I personally suspect the explosion of storage space is the biggest factor in all this. I was just writing software for a uC with 2kb program space last week, and I started to bump into the limit. Optimizing my code for size actually resulted in much better code, because I had to stop and think "How can I do this... smarter?"

(Though if you're trying to fit 8kb into 2kb and have to start doing voodoo, it's true the quality will suffer)
So polish it!
Just curious - how are you the original founder, CEO, & CTO, yet someone else has the ability to kick you out of the company?
Egypt Arrests 4 Facebook Activists
I attended the Hacker News meetup tonight at SkillsMatter, London. A couple of the talks were really striking and I took away one main point which was about marketing from day one. Most of the stuff I've done has involved forums and I generally get accused of spamming.

Please take a look at the site, it finds where to buy dance music from DJ tracklists/charts.

Would really appreciate any marketing tips :)

Many thanks.
"Clickstream owned by user. Opt out by turning off toolbar."

It is not clear to me that the user completely owns the clickstream. If Google's terms of use say you cannot share their search results with anyone else, are you legally allowed to send the clickstream to Microsoft?
It's a good introduction to stack-based programming and yeah, it's normally brought out early in CS classes (or used to be).

1 2 3 4 5 + / - * = ...
Can any forrst.com members send me an invite? I'd love to check out the site. My email is lalalee at hotmail.com . Thanks.
True, but I don't hear nearly so many horror stories about Visa/MasterCard choosing to keep all the money people think they have given you for 180 days (exactly as you agreed they could when you signed up) while they "investigate".

I also hear regular reports of businesses which perhaps should have chosen their payment processor more carefully given the nature of their business, who clearly have a product which doesn't get "shipped" in any way that could comply with that policy - I think a European Ruby conference was the most recent one I've seen discussed here, how should a conference organizer manage their bookings to comply with this sort of policy? He'll, even Burningman got burnt by their ticket seller a year or two back "we're just gonna hang on to a few million dollars worth of ticket sales money, because your annual event that's been running successfully for ~20 years now with ~50,000 people a year recently - it might all be a big fraud!"... Unfortunately, choosing to sign up with PayPal means explicitly agreeing to allow them to do exactly that with very little recourse - and it's not necessarily _wrong_ - PayPals business is basically built on betting they can do a better job of fraud prevention than e banks/credit card companies are doing, and offer payment services to more people than the banks will and earn money from people the banks consider "too high risk". This allows then to provide a service that let's people like the OP go from idea to fully functional ecommerce website in 4 hours, but it also means you're giving them rights to retain "your" money to cover any fraud risk they might consider you to expose them too.

Its not a wrong/bad policy of PayPals, but it's a policy that I've seen many people not realize they were signing up for.
If only you could do something about what happens after you press one of the buttons!

Setting up shortcuts/aliases/bookmarks is already easy, and my "mentees" already know my face and phone number. The usability of all the different websites is the problem.
I used to work at Cheaptickets.com and Orbitz.com and one of the things I never liked was how complicated and "visually busy" their UI's were. Many times I envisioned in my mind what a better approach would look like. Hipmunk's UI is pretty much exactly what I wanted. Something super simple, just enough but not too much. No ads. No bullshit. No upselling or cross-selling. Solid colors. Less is more. Brilliant. I hope they stick with this style and philosophy. It's a powerful differentiator in a market which otherwise tends to be commodity-like, ugly and retarded in approach.

Second but related point I wanted to make. I knew many of the in-house designers at both companies. I can confirm that the look/style/approach of those UI's is not their fault. They are salaried folks, working for The Man, and as with many large companies there's no single person who can put their foot down and say something is good/shit while also having the taste/skills to know what they're talking about. (Like a Steve Jobs at Apple.) A lot of the UI at major travel company websites is the result of "design by committee", by accretion, by slippery slope, by too much advertising, too much philosophy of "just one more thing" and trying to maximize the accounting value of each pixel of real estate. And yes, some of it is the result of A/B-testing and the Local Maxima anti-pattern.
I don't. It's too bad that the whole discussion happening is about "cheating" or not. And not about using everything available for better search.

It would be great to see the discussion change.
This is why I use CrashPlan. Not just Linux, but my Nexenta machine as well (Solaris kernel - though it takes some tweaking), which comes in handy as it's running my NAS (zfs).
They've unfairly tipped the scales in favor of piracy though. That's why the entire thing reeks of entitlement and why no legal service satisfies their demands.

It's deliberate.

That and they provide no reasoning as to their points. They want the purchase price to not exceed the cinema price. But cinema price is dependent upon the area and theater, so it's not so easy to peg purchase to cinema.

That and why should the purchase price be pegged to the cinema price? A visit to the cinema is a one time event. A purchase entitles you to unlimited viewing. That's worth more to me.

Why should TV shows be 1/3 the price of movies? Most TV shows exceed the length of a film many times over. Yet we're supposed to pay less for more content?

They also want to dictate how movies are distributed. They want access to every movie ever made. Nothing gives you that except piracy. The cost for Netflix to do such a thing would be astronomical. And for that, these benevolent individuals are willing to bestow upon the providers of these services 3 movie tickets, or (by their other claims) the price of 3 films. Why? You have instant access to every movie ever made. Watching over 3 movies in a month using this service diminishes the price you are paying per movie. Watching a movie a day makes your movie watching habits cost 1/10 of a film using the service.

That and their filtering suggestions are stupid. Why should a third party service let you sort by IMDb ID? Why should they care what a movie's IMDb ID is?

This isn't a plea to studios to get them to change their "evil ways", it's a way for over-entitled douches to feel good about ripping people off.

If any of these were real concerns of pirates, movies out in theaters wouldn't be pirated.
The U.S. of A., land of freedom. Roflmao.
The quote is from Rockefeller quoting his business partner Flagler. For a primary source, see "Random reminiscences of men and events" by JD Rockefeller, 1913.

Google Books is great for verifying this sort of quote:
http://books.google.com/books?id=IHnZAAAAMAAJ&dq=A%20fri...
I personally had a bad customer service experience from them and switched. It's not obvious to me if you can generalize from one person's experience -- however -- the crux of my issue is their choice to not allow you to call them on the phone. It looks like this is still true (but I'm not certain). As a result of their cheapo policy, and the particular problem I was having, I switched.
Silicon Valley Blog: Acme Packet a key player in the building of VoIP networks
Demand isn't static.
Your costs decrease by the storage equivalent of Moore's Law, but your customers demands increase by roughly the same amount.

In short -- The first digital camera I used had a floppy disk that fit about 20 photos. (Maybe 75KB). My camera now takes 7.5MB Photos (higher if I shoot in raw) and rather than taking 20-40 in a session -- I'll take 100. The first computer I connected to the internet had a 4GB Hard Drive. I currently have around 3.9TB of storage connected to the internet.

This isn't a gmail play. Barring celebrity status -- you can only recieve so many emails... (Dunbars number and all that). As my storage costs decrease I use more storage and need more backups. They mention that these roughly balance out. The problem they have is that costs like electricity/cooling/staffing are not likely to be going down any time soon.
Performance for iTech Fund as of February 02, 2011
Key Stroke Logger - Source Code
If Google's terms of use say you cannot share their search results with anyone else, are you legally allowed to send the clickstream to Microsoft?

So if my dad calls with a question, and I search for the answer, I can't send him the link that I got from Google? Or do you mean something else?
The core of my protobuf-decoding library upb (https://github.com/haberman/upb/wiki) is 3k SLOC of C. That includes

* a hash table implementation
* a reference-counted string type
* a generic interface for doing tree traversals of protobuf data
* the protobuf decoder itself (which implements the previous interface)
* all the code to load proto descriptors (including bootstrapping the first one,
which is necessary to load others)
Physicists Propose 'Time Teleportation'
Yep. And you know, the guys who found that honeymoon revenue stream, I think, are doing well with it. So congrats on getting an MVP of sorts up and who knows where it will lead!
I wrote a passive key stroke logger (back in 2007) called 16k to demonstrate how these type of key stroke loggers work. No one has ever paid it much attention, until yesterday when several anti-keylogging softwares discovered it and realized that their software did not detect it. Since that time, my hosting provider has received multiple abuse notices and take-down requests that I have had to respond to and a few DNS services have blacklisted my domain names (clear cloud dns). I can't believe this has happened.

--------------------------------

nslookup www.16s.us 74.118.212.1

Server:	74.118.212.1

Address:	74.118.212.1#53

Name:	www.16s.us

Address: 66.129.99.88

--------------------------------

My source code and binaries are GPG signed, authenticode signed and MD5'ed and have not changed for more than a year. They've been available for download for many years. And now, all of a sudden, out of the blue they are labeled as malware. I had a small degree of respect for commercial security before this, but now I have none. It seems Security Theater and morons are in charge of companies claiming to make the Web safe.

I was hoping HN would help me get the word out. My site http://16s.us/16k has no javascript, java, cookies, flash or advertisements. There is nothing malicious at all about it.

Edit: Formatting
I'm in tonight, Jason , 8 years in Tokyo, Aussie, Connector, of GoodPeople (GoodPeople.jp)
Actually, you don't want to see Feller, not volume I and rarely volume II! :-)

Probability is a field with a curious mix: (1) Intuition goes a long way but (2) doing mathematically what is easy intuitively can require some relatively advanced math.

I looked over the paper of this thread: Looks like the author's best qualification was learning TeX! Yes, he should have given some references. He omitted little things like the central limit theorem and the law of large numbers -- little things like that! He mentioned the Poisson distribution but without mention of where and why it is common to encounter it. Actually, here is one place can see Feller II -- on renewal processes with a nice limit result that shows why Poisson is so common.

For the intended purpose of the paper, that is, an elementary review, just see some well regarded first text on probability.

But the grown up stuff in probability is much more difficult, although the paper did hint at it. Basically need quite a lot of mathematical analysis as a prerequisite, and the standard is Rudin's Principles. Then need quite a lot of measure theory and then some functional analysis. For that, the nicest is Royden's Real Analysis, but I also like the first (real) half of Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis.

Then for the probability, sure, Loeve, Neveu, and Breiman. Loeve was long at Berkeley and wrote the big book. His writing style is heavily from his native language, French! I like Loeve, but a lot of people don't. Two Loeve students were Neveu and Breiman. Neveu went back to France, but Breiman has long been at Berkeley.

For more, pursue stochastic processes. Generally a good guy to follow is Cinlar at Princeton.
Bcrypt (or scrypt) should actually be used as default for password hashing in application servers. Using something like crypt/md5/sha-1 hashing per default is just completely irresponsible.
I would like one too if possible. My email is alexgandy at gmail dot com. Thanks.
So long as you're not selling yourself as a PE or trying to use non PE work in a situation that requires a PE, you should be allowed to write whatever god damned report you want. Otherwise, we have a serious breach of the first amendment.
An JSON / XML / YAML parser?

The fastest JSON parser that I know of is implemented in ~1800 lines of Objective-C: https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit. Its about 2-3x faster than the yajl bindings for Objective-C are, in my testing.
They aren't crawling, just noticing what pages clients who visit google.com?q=xxx go to next.

If anybody's search toolbar checks a site's robots.txt before sending clickstream data, I would be very surprised.

A client-side robots.txt rule would also make anti-phishing features trivial to bypass...just put a robots.txt on your phishing site.
Bullshit.

Movie studios are in the business of providing a service. The studios have given their time and money in order to produce a motion picture. They are entitled to recompense from people in exchange for performances.

Think of a film as a performance caught in time. The actors, directors, grips, etc. were all fronted money by the studios for their performances. In doing so, the studio has assumed all of the risk for putting on the performance. Therefore, when you copy a movie you are essentially sneaking into a concert without a ticket. You are stealing services.
It appears as though Mr. Lacy is trying to do "Lawyer Level Work". Someone better make sure he has registered with the NC Bar.
While I don't like how Google handled this situation, whining about it is pretty much all they can do.
"Won’t users store more data in the future?
Yes. Users have been creating more data since people started chiseling stone tablets. We are sure users will store more data in the future."

haha...
For the record Google Docs can't be accessed through most large organizations PC's (blocked), any concerned about data security at all, and isn't easily accessed through a SmartPhone...
These days I spend a hurried 20mins in front of my own computer every couple of days or less..

www.doorkeeper.jp on the other hand rocks!
Ask HN: A web site that is vulnerable to a good competitor?
I have been thinking about how lots of successful web sites were late to the market, but were cheaper, or better designed. (stack overflow, plenty of fish, all the 37 signals products, etc.) Can you think of a site where a lean competitor could steal market share?

I have been thinking about survey monkey.
Not sure if she just added it in there, but this book is present in the bag ;)
Loopt--web developer for new project
At Loopt, we're trying to change the way people connect to the people and places around them. This has been largely a mobile effort, because part of doing this is getting people out into the real world.

However, one or the new things we're doing is trying to build the best system for information about the places our users go--helping users decide what to order in a restaurant or which trail to hike in park, for example--and for this to work, we need a great web experience.

This should be a great opportunity to have a big influence on a major new feature and work directly with the founders. We care much more about how smart you are than your experience, and we'd much rather see what you've built than where you went to school or worked.

If you're a great hacker and want to work on something other than the web, we'll hire you anyway.

Please email a resume, links to projects, and, in any language, the most elegant solution to the problem of printing all permutations of a string you can come up with to sam AT loopt.com.
Timings are going to be completely dependent on the server. Anything I tell you will be wrong unless you're running on my server.

And I didn't test any SHA-x algorithms. Any algorithm that has a time you can't easily increase by tweaking a number (BCRYPT_ROUNDS) will eventually become insecure as computers get faster.
If I were you , I would give the users the option to login using Facebook Connect or Twitter. I think People doesn't like signups anymore; Its another password to remember. Also if they are Signed-in using of one of these sites, its more than likely they share it and spread the word. Nice work by the way.
You obviously have an axe to grind, but you missed the point: the situation is such that people would choose to pirate movies even if it cost just as much as acquiring them legally. Indeed I'm guessing that there are private BitTorrent trackers which offer just that, presumably offering better seeder ratios or quality controls on content to justify the price.

I imagine if this "manifesto" were a blog post by a Silicon Valley celebrity, and it began "There's a huge opportunity being missed..." rather than "I will keep stealing your stuff until...", but had otherwise identical content, this thread would have a lot less discussion of the immorality of piracy and a lot more of how startups could disrupt existing distribution methods.
Well then wouldn't 1.3 million feet of fiber sound more impressive than 250 miles?
I am curious whether it is effective or not, but pyramid/MLM is not something I'm worried about. Let's say the price schedule is well defined (and visible), and that people are paying money in exchange for goods, with various level of discount due to quantity and timeliness to encourage sales. In any case, from a good<->evil scale, I don't think what I suggested is even in the league of Zynga, Groupon, and Twitter promotion (tweet this for a chance...), let alone MLM scam. Whether it could be effective or not, that's my question.

To clarify this is what it would look like, using customer #10, #212 (if exists), and #1350 (if exists) as examples under different scenario

(1) #customers < 100

customer #10 pays $16

(2) 100 <= #customers < 1000

customer #10 pays $12, customer #212 pays $14

(3) 1000 < #customers

customer #10 pays $8, customer #212 pays $10, customer #1350 pays $12

The numbers are made up (the actual numbers may not make sense, so don't try to find flaw about total profit based on these numbers). So basically customers are rewarded for (1) being an early adopter, (2) propagating the viral effect, and (3) having good taste.

Now that I think about it some more, this is similar to Amie Street for indie music (didn't quite strike it big) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amie_Street

What do you think?
If the basic description of the item (title, picture, etc) are cached in the application, then 2/3/4 can probably be partly solved by drawing mothers into using the "extra notes" area more. Perhaps by turning it into a conversation, with comments or Facebook integration. Not only will it add context to each item, but everyone who uses it will be more engaged.
Again you put the focus on Google. And again I ask, how is Microsoft's alleged behavior harming the user?

Bing's increasing market share is presumably already due to providing value. If Google's unique sales proposition has become, "we find obscure misspelled words better than those copycats at Microsoft", do you think that's going to make people less inclined to try Bing?
This is a good point and I take back my conclusions from the previous post.

Before I was assuming that 1) MySpace at least was profitable a few years ago and 2) they also received a bunch of money from Google which could be applied against what News Corp paid for it. But most likely, MySpace was only profitable because they received a huge amount of money from Google, so you can't apply most of that Google money against what News Corp paid for it.

This means that 1) MySpace's overall return for News Corp should be roughly thought of as ((current value of MySpace) - $500 million) + net profit since News Corp bought it. The first term should be significantly negative and the second term was positive for awhile but as the parent's link indicates is quite negative recently.
Startupcraft 2 (a Starcraft tournament for Startups in SF) announced
Can also dissuade good people from going into politics if their every expense will be scrutinize nit-picked etc.

Why put up with all the BS and low pay of politics when you can go work for a big company and run up massive expense accounts for lap dancing clubs or whatever else you feel like?

I'd say the jury's out on it...
What if the owner offers you the bread? Isn't that what happens when someone offers to let me copy a file from their harddrive over the internet?

If you look back over my comment history, you will see that I have argued the other side of this issue too. That is because it is a hard problem that doesn't fit well with the moral intuitions that we developed for other kinds of property.

To make matters worse, US copyright laws are way more strict than most people's moral intuitions of what intellectual property should be like. Even if you think the author should have some right to the content they produced, few people think creative works should be locked up until 75 years after the author's death. I have downloaded books illegally from authors that died in the 70s and I feel no moral qualms about it.
Actually, /64 is the smallest indivisible network. You can divide that further, but then you lose this network/host identifier split and IPv6 features that require that (stateless autoconfiguration, privacy extensions...). So in case of normal network, ISP handing out /64 restricts topology of you network in that you can have only one network (with normal end-user devices).

Using smaller networks than /64 is certainly possible, but it's not something you want to do on end-user network and it's best left only for things like point-to-point connections and intra-datacenter networks.
He means something else. Sending the link is not the same as sending the series of clicks and inputs required to get to that link in Google.

Now it may be the case that sending clickstream data on Google to Microsoft is perfectly fine, but it's not exactly clear to me.
Colbert On Bing Copying Google: 'hiybbprqag' Is A Word Meaning 'You Got Served.'
IMO his big win was getting an iPhone app dev (who can actually execute) agree to make an app for him on the premise of splitting revenue.
Either this was real early time of the "App goldrush" before anyone knew money could be made or the dev was a friend (post seems to imply it was a random twitter follower).

Anybody with a reputation as a good iPhone app dev get the age old "idea guy" proposition at least 3 times a week: "I got a great app idea.. I'll give you some of the $ if you code it just for me."