skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are three reasons for Google not to report results of a control-case test:

1) It didn't occur to them to run a control in their experiment.

2) It did occur to them but they decided not to do it for some reason.

3) They did run the control but it did not bolster their case.

As you point out, if they ran it and it bolstered their case there would be no reason not to report it. Of the above reasons, #2 seems the least likely (because it's easy to set up a control and it would better clarify the situation). I do not have enough evidence to judge whether #1 or #3 is more likely.
NBC Ruins The Fun, Fires Employee Over 'What’s The Internet' Video
Site looks nice. You might want to spruce up your copy a bit. "Finally a hosting service with minimal premium fees applied" sounds a bit stilted. "openredis. Premium hosting. Minimal fees."...

Or better yet, focus on the problem you are solving (time & money spent managing a redis server). "openredis. Redis hosting made easy." or "openredis. redis hosting without the headaches".
I have a similar perspective. I know many people whose only electronic communication is on Facebook - it's essentially an integrated email, chat and twitter client with a custom homepage. I have private message threads going with people, and it's essentially email. I have no problem with this.

FB is also a convenient way to keep in contact with people you no longer live near and see on a regular basis. I feel bad for the people who obsess over status updates and feel compelled to share everything. Because if you don't do that, it can actually be a great way to keep in contact with people you actually care about.
I have written quite a few very complex long-running queries with 10-12 tables involved and 4-5 deep nested SELECTs in PostgreSQL and never encountered a case where the query planner was just plain wrong. Most of this work started on 8.2.

It's usually a poorly configured server that causes the problem. The default configuration is almost absurdly conservative. For instance, in 8.3, the default_statistics_target is 10, which is brutally low. For larger indexes and/or more complex operations, this can really hamper the query planner.

When building a new PostgreSQL server, I highly recommend seeking the services of a respected consultant that can help properly tune the server for your hardware & query load. A few hours of their time will net you weeks of time savings, even if you think of yourself as an advanced PostgreSQL user, especially if you're building complex queries or working with larger data sets.

EDIT: typo on default_statistics_target (was 100).
It doesn't have to be recursive. Iteration can also be non-finite-state. In fact, all recursive programs can be transformed to iterative ones.
Twimbow.com (http://twimbow.com)-->; we would love to join. We are spending two weeks in San Francisco in that period for our Silicon Valley tour and would be glad to join the show. More details about our visit here: http://t.co/eiRVGrb Thanks :-)
The Dark Side of the New Android Market
> I'm curious, do you think you could tell me what some arbitrary C code does that I give you, where I've changed all the variables to "a", "b", "c", etc...? I'd be hardpressed to believe anyone in the world could.

If you know the specific context ahead of time (a FSM for lexing, a hash table implementation, etc), then it really isn't that hard.* Are you honestly telling me that you wouldn't be able to figure out how a hash table implementation worked if all the types and variable names were changed to single letters? It would slow you down, sure, but it wouldn't be impossible.

* Speaking as someone who has debugged code with variable names and comments in Swedish.

That code was written with the context of, "Hey, we both know APL really well, here's a quick prototype for a new implementation of it, could you give it a look?" When somebody is showing a Scheme implementation to other Lispers, they don't need to spend time explaining what a cdr is. Context matters.

Most of the functions in that take one or two arbitrarily-dimensioned arrays and loop simple operations over them. Everything takes (w) or (a, w) and returns z. i is a loop index (as usual). w->p is the array of values in w, ga allocates a new array. ("get array"? "generic allocate?")

V1(iota){I n=*w->p;A z=ga(0,1,&n);DO(n,z->p[i]=i);R z;}

iota (the term comes from APL; J uses "i.", K uses "!", Q uses "til") takes a number and returns a vector of integers from 0 to n. iota 5 -> 0 1 2 3 4. Most of the definitions are equally simple, there just isn't much whitespace. DO is a macro that abstracts out the common "for (i=0; i<n; i++) { ... }" loop, which is used all over the place.
zferral.com (http://zferral.com) - Would love to be there!
The best pizza analogy I could come up with is:

In a traditional web server, the person making pizzas only makes one at a time and can't do anything else until that pizza is done and delivered. In an evented model, each pizza maker makes many pizzas at once, and just watches for events (the oven timer goes off) and acts on them. (takes the pizza out) Sometimes if a task is taking him too long, he'll ask an assistant to work on it so that he can get back to making pies.
That's a good idea if I understand it correctly. That is, taking a Redis instance, modifying it in some way so that Pub/Sub supports authentication (probably this means creating an HTTP wrapper?) and then you have a inter-cloud messaging system that is similar to "twitter for computers".
Digital Magazines Are Hindered by Long Download Times
All this time I thought I was just posting things that weren't interesting, or, my comments just weren't worthy of upvotes. It was odd when I posted a link and noticed that when I clicked on discuss, it didn't show a comment box. Logging out and viewing /newest didn't even show the link.

Oh well. Good luck in your ventures.
The implication was that the project couldn't succeed because the management didn't understand basic automata theory, and insisted the programmers use only regular expressions. Presumably the regular expressions were being invoked by a Turing-complete programming language. Unless management decided that Turing-complete programming languages were not allowed, as well.
Worker democracy works
It is simple to protect your data. Don't put anything on Facebook that you want protected.
It's for controlling search results; blocking overzealous crawlers is a convenient side-effect.

robots.txt also blocks indexing of non-html files.
I cannot recreate this using Spring TC (http://www.springsource.com/products/tcserver) server.
I couldn't agree more with your last statement, but I was trying to sound unbiased ;)
Passwords are the problem. They're invariably hard to remember or easy to guess. Or to abstract it out, you're always choosing between resistance to getting lost and resistance to attack.
Well Plenty of Fish seems like a good target, bad design/UX makes it vulnerable

Vault and eBay are another two examples.

What these all have in common is requiring a critical mass of users to work, which gives them a barrier to entry that allows them to become complacent.
@stcredzero, that was exactly my point ... as a software developer I would never bend over and do as being told in that manner, because it is impossible to finish the task.

It wasn't just the management to be blamed: it the case of building bridges, engineers / architects can even go to prison if a bridge collapses.
Front-End Engineer wanted at Tutorspree (YC W11)
We’re using a transparent marketplace to disrupt the tutoring industry ($7B in the US and counting). Billed by TechCrunch as the “Airbnb of tutoring,” we’re helping parents bridge the gap between the tutor they want for their kids, and the one they can find through their word of mouth networks. At the same time, we’re helping teachers earn extra cash just when they need it.

We’re looking for a front-end engineer who has a demonstrated grasp of design. We need someone who can mock up a page in Photoshop, make sure the UX flow hums, and be able to code all of the necessary pieces of the page (HTML/CSS/JS). You’ve got to be comfortable with our LAMP stack even if you don’t dream in PHP. You won’t have to build large-scale features yourself, but you will be building smaller ones, and will work directly with Ryan (our CTO) to implement larger ones.

You’ll be joining the three of us for the rest of the wild ride of Y Combinator. You’ll be sitting right with us every day, talking about what the product means to our users – and how we can make them happier. Our brains are running faster than our legs can carry us now, and we want someone to help speed us up.

If you're interested, drop us a line at info@tutorspree.com. We're not much for cover letters, but we would like links to what you've done in the past.

Responsibilities:

• Implement public facing pages on Tutorspree
• Help drive UI and UX decisions
• Prototype experimental features
• Participate in general engineering needs of the company

Requirements:

• Exceptional proficiency using HTML/CSS/jQuery/AJAX in a production environment
• Demonstrated design and UX sensibilities
• Proficiency with Photoshop
• Strong CS fundamentals from relevant industry experience (Bachelor’s degree in CS, HCI or related discipline a plus)
• Personal projects that show and aptitude for front-end engineering and product design sense
• Ability to work in areas outside of their usual comfort zone and get things done quickly

Desirable:
• Familiarity with Git
• Familiarity with AWS/EC2
• Experience with MySQL in a production environment

Benefits:
• Generous equity package
• Competitive salary
• Healthcare
• Home cooked dinners (don’t worry Ryan doesn’t cook)
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Tahrir.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is January 25th:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had Tahrir Square.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And the 25th of January shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in Egypt now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us in Tahrir Square.
If you were in their shoes what would you do to prevent this from happening? eg what would they need to build/develop etc?
I'm graduating with an English degree but I don't feel like I know how to write a novel.
Zazu's (http://getzazu.com) heading over to the Bay Area from Boston right around then to meet people. We'd love to be there, it'd be an absolutely spectacular way to meet people!

Oh right, should probably tell y'all what we do: We're building Jarvis from Iron Man -- though we're starting a little less grandiose and building the world's most kickass alarm clock.
Percent Job Losses in Post WWII Recessions
Dallas Cowboys and Other NFL Teams Replacing Paper Playbooks with iPads
Not sure where to even start on this one. Spec work sucks, it wastes designer's time and the end product often doesn't turn out great because they have an incentive to spend as little time as possible.

But I have to say, this is even worse. Looking at point #4, they actively went out and tried to get as many designers as possible to do free work for them. From their post:

"The response rate was staggering, with around 85% responding and almost an equal amount actually submitting designs. The most time effective way to do this is to download an auto-text completer which allows you to save a message and quickly populate any document with it by selecting a shortcut."

Congratulations, you just figured out how to minimize your time spent while maximizing the hours wasted by the 'losing' designers. Or, in their own words... "For a minimal amount you are able to tap the creative abilities and talents of a multitude of people across the world. Why pay one designer 10 times more for a product you may not like?"

Edit: Not looking to get into a back in forth here, so I would recommend this to anyone who thinks design contests are a good idea: http://www.no-spec.com/faq
Wow thank you! I dont know how we didnt saw that earlier :) It's fixed on local but there is too much people to deploy in production right now (ruby on rails power ) . We gonna update the website as soon as think are quieter (so I hope never ^^)
Such an exploit could be in place on countless sites you visit daily, with no one the wiser. Further, aside from technical competence, why does anyone trust PoF? Why do they trust any site to not only technically handle their password correctly, but to not subvert it for their own purposes?

I see that my post above got moderated down. People want to lazily, and sloppily, reuse passwords everywhere. It's ignorant. The world would be better if we got rid of this ruse that sites hashing passwords themselves offers any reasonable protection. It leaves the barn door open.
I was aware of crowdsourcing design, but I like how the article outlined each step of their process. Looking forward to the next one about figuring out the message to convey with a site's design.
This article is a good read on pricing: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/37737/Secrets-Of-Freemi...

Per-device pricing means your users need to make a pricing decision every time they add another device, which they may hate and try to avoid.
It came across to me as someone who wants to learn programming for the wrong reasons. For example they heard it pays well. Rather than wanting to learn it because they love it.
What ever happened to PageRank? - Google 24/7 - Fortune Tech
New startup weekend team MealTik just launched, sign-up @ http://mealtik.com to be the first in line.
Awesome idea... I was just thinking about how great something like this would be. Moving our infrastructure over to EC2 soon, and was going to implement Redis for session storage but was a little worried about having to manage it all myself, including master-slave replication. This sounds perfect!
I don't doubt that a competent person could have improved the configuration substantially.

However I didn't get to choose the server, it already existed. Furthermore I was dealing with a restored backup of a production webserver, so it was configured appropriately for OLTP even though I was using it for complex reporting. There was simply no way that anyone was going to risk the possibility of production problems to make my life on the back end any easier. And there was no way that I could in good conscience recommend that they do so.

And I did find my temp table workaround, that effectively let me force any query plan I needed.
> Contexts - A context is a place where I have data about myself, such as an account on a site or service, or in some desktop app, on my phone, or even from a device.

This part doesn't feel appropriately named. The place a data is stored should be a 'Location' or a 'Destination'. A 'Context' might be a better name for where that data is used to express a bigger idea than just itself.

For example, I would look to my phone as a Destination for my contacts and these contacts showing up next to an event i'm going to with others as a Context. This feels more intuitive to me. I know I'm splitting hairs, but would love your opinions.

All that aside, really love this idea! Happy to see people becoming more aware of these issues and finding interesting solutions around them.
Online Retail Spending Reaches A Record $43.4B In Q4 2010; Up 11 Percent
Very cool description!
If you like visuals to go along with each step performed in Git, you might appreciate Pro Git. This book is online: http://progit.org/book/

I'm reading the Dutch translation at the moment.

Edit: for an example page with visuals, see http://progit.org/book/ch3-1.html and http://progit.org/book/ch3-4.html
The article is informative, but I don't find this approach really "ethical".
Ask HN: How do you conduct market research for your startup?
I'm assuming most active members on the board have raised less than $1mil. While operating on relatively tight budgets, how do you determine your optimal target market? Would you like to conduct market research if you could afford it?

I ask because our ranking software could aid with just about every solution these guys list: http://www.1000minds.com/solutions Yet, we believe market research holds the biggest potential if we add a qualitative component to the quantitative portion that's already been built.

Specifically, we're looking at the market that can't afford the crazy figures that market research agencies tend to charge. I'd imagine up-and-coming startups could make up a decent bit of the market that could value our DIY solution.

(I should clarify that we're probably not looking to appeal to the bootstrapping crowd)

In general, what types of questions would you like to get answered if you could conduct studies with your target market?

Any feedback is much appreciated!

-Adam
Not fully implemented? I'm pretty sure all of the billions of requests that hit nginx, varnish, haproxy, and Zeus would disagree with you. What about all those massive sites using memcached on the backend? You know -- Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Craigslist, YouTube?
Stupidity and How to Avoid It
I quit facebook about a month ago. Most of what Steve Pavlina says is quite right and I'm probably better off without it, but there is one feature that I sorely miss: As a young un still at a university, facebook was extremely useful for getting in touch with girls who I meet around campus randomly. "I'll look you up on facebook" is a much lower commitment and casual line than "What's your phone number".
A Knowledge-based Approach of Connect-Four [pdf]
Is this launched yet? if not and you can launch on stage we might be able to give you one of the five remaining slots on stage so you can launch to the world!

did you apply?! email me jason@launch.is
HOW TO: SSH Aliases
ping me... jason@launch.is -- this might be good for the main stage!!! :-)
Ah. :( Thanks for the explanation.
I like this idea a lot, but you absolutely need to kill the logins and just use facebook connect. It solves so many problems with the service, and will help it go viral, AND will let people just point and click on their friend list.

Nice viral app, though! I hope it goes well. I bet you more than double if you use facebook for connection and messaging.
Hey Jason,

no we didn't apply, but I will write you a mail immediately.

We haven't launched and nobody knows details about us.
Review my startup but with a twist. read first.
The twist is that this review is interactive for Hacker news hackers.

What is the main slogan? See where like-minded people will hang out tonight within 30km of your location - in this case, see where hacker news hackers will be hanging out tonight

What do you have to do? Even if you are not going out tonight, sign in and click 'here later' to a bar/office near you using the desktop or mobile website.

Start here: http://www.likeourselves.com/groups/hacker-news-hackers-1222013

You get to see where other reviewers are near you, where they are hanging out tonight, chat online before you even go there and maybe even make a few new friends :)

Finally, you can create a group for your own startup customers to meet each other and for you to meet them. See the demo: http://www.likeourselves.com/demo/

Why does this startup exist? We wanted the option of hanging out and meeting different types of people whenever we wanted rather than wait for events next week/month. If only 100 people across the city want to meet up tonight to drink tequila... this is the way to do it.
I read that most insomniacs are people who go to bed when they aren’t sleepy.

When I began reading I assumed this was coming from a person who has not really suffered insomnia. Real insomnia (chronic sleep deprivation) is very hard to deal with. It's not like trying to go to sleep when you're not tired. It's like being so tired that your brain is "buzzed" and your body cannot fall sleep... you just continually get more and more tired stretching you thinner and thinner. It is absolute torture.
That's a pretty shady approach for a VC firm. Do they deal with startups in this way too?
I wonder how many more people have to quit Facebook before we stop getting these "I quit Social Network X" martyr posts.

Honestly, it's like the people who never fail to let a new acquaintance know that they abstain from owning televisions.
I'm looking for some feedback, so feel free to leave comments here.
I agree that my previous rant was about nits, but these nits add up and act as a barrier to entry to development in the space.

You mention that XMPP is widely implemented on the server, but only a few of the implementations are actually any good. To make matters worse, some of the best server implementations are written in fringe languages (Erlang for example).

I think that XMPP would be more successful if it had been more developer friendly.
The bank bailouts made very little sense, the biggest toxic bank, Anglo Irish Bank, was not a retail bank. They specialised in property financing. Letting them go under would not have resulted in the Irish Government having to cover huge amounts of deposits. The current majority party (Fianna Fail) has a history of connections to property developers and this connection is what a lot of people though spurred the saving of Anglo. Now more information is bubbling up about the exposure of European banks to Anglo and the other Irish banks. Europe (especially Germany) wants this mess cleaned up because if the Irish Government drops the guarantee then their own banks will have a huge hole in their finances. These were essentially risky investments made by foreign banks that the Irish taxpayer is now being forced to pay back.

Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank were profitable (extremely so in the context of the Irish economy) and if kept in government hands would eventually make back their losses. Anglo made it's profits on the back of the property bubble, not something that will be repeated any time soon.

This is the perspective of an Irish economist on the debacle: http://www.ronanlyons.com/2011/01/18/the-irish-bank-sandwich...
The guys at Thounds claim a table!
http://thounds.com/
So Safari has 3d-transform, Chrome has file reader and writer api and webgl which safari doesn't. It's easy to cherry pick.