skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Francis Ford Coppola:

Q: How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?

A: We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it's only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n' roll singer being rich, that's not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I'm going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you'd be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, "Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money." Because there are ways around it.

http://the99percent.com/articles/6973/Francis-Ford-Coppola-O...
Hopscot.ch is a peer to peer video chat community for topics
What developer with a real backlog takes customers without a willingness to make a deposit? Following this advise is a sure way to get the type of developer they're alleging Pasco is.
Would like to see more contrast on the Call to Action button. White on White is not ideal.

In addition I would add some good reasons why it's not a big deal to sign up. A trial period or no long term stuff. That should give your conversions a boost.
And you stealing the movie helps them how? Two completely independent wrongs do not make a right.
stockroom isn't porn, they just use it to sell whips.
This is like a Jitterbug phone for the internet.
Apple shareholders demand Jobs succession plan
Do you offer a simple input field for users, where they can enter a URL?

I think the bookmarklet is a bit high threshold for some (if not most) users. Telling them to copy+paste a website URL and enter it into a field on their control panel is not.

For SEO your site could use a little work. Perhaps a blog about pregnancy could help get your domain ranking for some niche related terms. You are probably aiming for social sharing here, and organic search might be a lesser priority. Make sharing on Facebook and Twitter a lot easier (API helps) and visible (icons help). I might not sign up, but still like or recommend your app.

Also adding just that extra page to convince users to sign up, or a even demo video, can help with user engagement.

Finally I'd have a small look at making your site canonical, by rewrite or specifying canonical: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-y... because /about and /about/ return the same content. And to quote W3C "Always declare the encoding of your document" (declare a meta charset like ISO or UTF-8 in your header http://code.google.com/p/doctype/wiki/ArticleUtf7).
"Winning" a chance to give away part of my freedom?
Love the idea ... very cool! I need to sharpen my skills before I sign up though ...
He's using scare quotes to make you sound scary. ;-)
Fortunately it is impossible to steal non-rivalrous goods.
+1 — Dan Pasco's a great guy.
pre-HN :) (which was a small number)
I think quitting a job by tweeting that the company is trying to extort you into indentured servitude precludes being a "class act".

> I don't know the full story. I don't know what Casasanta is hoping to achieve by posting this.

Well, he was publicly accused of trying to extort someone. Doesn't that merit a public response?
...and google "babylist" returns surprise surprise babylist.co.uk

It seems silly to try and compete with established players.
£1 for the new favicon, £584 for sitting through multiple approval meetings.
Given that I first read the terms "trip generation" and "route assignment" when I was in high school, and in reference to SimCity, I think we can safely assume that the problem is actually the recommendation.

There's some legal precedent* in blocking unlicensed people from making recommendations, notably pertaining to legal advice given by people who are not members of the bar association. On the other hand, Will Wright could clearly not be held liable if some loony city planner tested his designs out in SimCity. Also, individuals are generally permitted to represent their own interests with legal argumentation, and this guy is apparently someone with an interest.

* -- Ironic though it is given the subject matter, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.
Sounds like really bad coding taken to another level. At some point in your program you will know which thumbnails are needed for the page. Instead of structuring that logic and commenting it well, perhaps even turning it into a sub-system or library, you pepper the templates with database calls. And then, you waste more CPU time by scanning the full HTML output of a page multiple times.

This is like AJAX all on the server side. All the hassle of async processing with none of the benefits.
Cause Mark Phillips likes cock
I said your analogy was unproductive. I don't agree that all of them are.
Are the days of unlimited online backup over? Our answer is: No.
Interview with ebackers founder marco massaro
Let’s take that thought to its conclusion. If clicks on Google really account for only 1/1000th (or some other trivial fraction) of Microsoft’s relevancy, why not just stop using those clicks and reduce the negative coverage and perception of this? And if Microsoft is unwilling to stop incorporating Google’s clicks in Bing’s rankings, doesn’t that argue that Google’s clicks account for much more than 1/1000th of Bing’s rankings?

My take on this is quite the opposite. If MS thinks they're doing nothing wrong, they shouldn't stop. They should do what is best for their customers.

Reversing what they do now because Google "caught" them, would IMO, imply they were doing something wrong and got caught.

I personally think what Bing is doing is great. I regularly use Bing and Google. I wish there were a streamlined way for me to broadcast to both of them... "for search term X this is the relevant link!"

MS has found a way to do this, and as long as its opt-in, I like it. I wish Google had the same (although I do realize that since Google owns so much of the traffic it is less of an issue for them -- its a net loss in terms of the flow of information).

But maybe a question for Matt... Can you and MS work together for a toolbar that does just this for both engines?

As a user this isn't a matter of Bing copying Google or not. But its about the fact that search relevance still kind of sucks. I feel like I can make the search experience better, especially in those occassions when I go to your competitors site.
Yeah that is what i meant. Not "based outside of" ... well i think it is bad english anyway my fault, i meant "based in the UK".
It's still a double-edged sword though. The 17 year old loves being able to skin their own page with a unique design, add their favorite song, etc...but then when they view someone elses unique page and have no idea where all the buttons went and have a song they hate autoplay on page load, the UX still sucks and drives people away.
Show HN: Call me Help find out which is worse: AT&T or Verizon.
Neither does movie studios calling me thief for watching a movie I bought on DVD on my tablet - while at the same time claiming $Bn grossing movies made a loss when it comes to paying the author.
As I commented previously when we had a poll on the ages of HNers, the data can't be relied on to make such an inference. That's because the date are not from a random sample of the relevant population. One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that "voluntary response data are worthless" to go along with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation." Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this phrase.

-----Original Message----- From: Paul Velleman [SMTPfv2@cornell.edu] Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 1998 5:10 PM To: apstat-l@etc.bc.ca; Kim Robinson Cc: mmbalach@mtu.edu Subject: Re: qualtiative study

Sorry Kim, but it just aint so. Voluntary response data are worthless. One excellent example is the books by Shere Hite. She collected many responses from biased lists with voluntary response and drew conclusions that are roundly contradicted by all responsible studies. She claimed to be doing only qualitative work, but what she got was just plain garbage. Another famous example is the Literary Digest "poll". All you learn from voluntary response is what is said by those who choose to respond. Unless the respondents are a substantially large fraction of the population, they are very likely to be a biased -- possibly a very biased -- subset. Anecdotes tell you nothing at all about the state of the world. They can't be "used only as a description" because they describe nothing but themselves.

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...

For more on the distinction between statistics and mathematics, see

http://statland.org/MAAFIXED.PDF

and

http://escholarship.org/uc/item/6hb3k0nz

I think Professor Velleman promotes "Voluntary response data are worthless" as a slogan for the same reason an earlier generation of statisticians taught their students the slogan "correlation does not imply causation." That's because common human cognitive errors run strongly in one direction on each issue, so the slogan has take the cognitive error head-on. Of course, a distinct pattern in voluntary responses tells us SOMETHING (maybe about what kind of people come forward to respond), just as a correlation tells us SOMETHING (maybe about a lurking variable correlated with both things we observe), but it doesn't tell us enough to warrant a firm conclusion about facts of the world. The Literary Digest poll

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5168/

http://www.math.uah.edu/stat/data/LiteraryDigest.pdf

is a spectacular historical example of a voluntary response poll that didn't give a correct picture of reality at all.
My eyes didn't immediately make it to the register button, so I would probably change the color of it.

This: http://babyli.st/ (It's the top link right now), looks really really great to me. There are two sortof "columns" to this layout. One one the left inviting me to register, and one on the right telling me why.
I am still amazed that Goggle even looks at or cares about Bing results. That is not a good sign. It makes them look vulnerable.

PS: I haven't checked out our competitors pages for months, too many ideas of my own.
They are back in the other game, too (lenguajero.com). See this blog post, which happens to be called "back in the game": http://aflanagan.com/back-in-the-game/.

Quote: "Instead of building something complicated that was based on our free community (i.e. a freemium service), I decided to write two guides about something I know about, and something our users care about, learning Spanish slang."
I think Matt lays out a strong argument for why they have made such a stink. And it sounds like a pretty compelling defense for their actions to go public.

But...

1) I think they will regret it bigtime when all the attention they are causing makes the bored government officials poke their head in and realize that at a macro level, neither Bing nor Google does anything to protect user search privacy.

2) I think Google has more to lose by bringing this to light than they have to win. Despite Matt's defense, it's hard to see it as anything other than being petty and pedantic. But this is there response to anything that threatens their search pageviews, and that's understandable even if erroneous.

They should focus on trying to be innovative again, that was the Google I respected.
They have money and and an itch to scratch, who says they are interested in being bought out any time soon?
Oh man. That research paper he quoted strongly indicates that MS is specifically targeting Google.

I was totally wrong. Bing are copying Google. I'm sorry (I am the "What on earth are Google thinking" author).

I still think the honeypot experiments didn't support the conclusion. But this paper coupled with Bing's lacklustre pseudo-denial strongly indicates that my view of events was not accurate and that Bing were indeed blatantly piggybacking off Google's hard work.

I'm really disappointed. I gave Bing the benefit of the doubt, saw that there was another conclusion which explained Google's observations and I advocated that. But now it really looks like MS overstepped the mark and were deliberately picking out Google URLs in order to use signals from Google's algorithms to improve Bing.

That really is cheating.

edit: although still it's not conclusive. I don't know what to think now. I think I should stick to writing code :)
Can you tell us why we can't just fill out a form? Why do you need my phone number?
Django-bcrypt
I agree that MPs are relatively underpaid [1] and mistaken adult movie claims are a cause for embarrassment rather than the source of the national debt.

But I don't think it's ridiculous to prosecute MPs who defraud the public by claiming "homes" belonging to other people that they've never even stayed in; even though the prosecution costs far more than the actual offence. Lines have to be drawn. It's expensive to prosecute people for shoplifting too.

[1]underpaid enough to be justifiably anal about claiming expenses; not so underpaid that doubling their income by home flipping is the only way they can feed their families
Depends on what the threat is in this alleged extortion. You might want to get out ahead of something like that.

Not sure twitter is the best medium for that, but hey, it's what happened..

The more I read everything, the more it looks like Casasanta was likely threatening to write a bad blog entry about this if the developer didn't work more for him doing something. I don't know the facts here, but it feels like there was a mismatch of expectations here somewhere. Not sure if it was an intentional deception or a X didn't think the same thing as Y or what. Perhaps Casasanta is due more than he got, perhaps not. That's a niggling factual issue we are unlikely to ever know without more information.

I DO know I wouldn't touch this code with a 10km stick. Who know who really owns copyright on all this after this sort of blowup. It's a good way to end up in court if nothing else.
I recall learning prefix before I learned RPN. Then again, our teaching language was scheme. Writing an RPN calculator was one of the first homework assignments, though.
An IPv4 address space walks into a bar. He says to the bartender, "A strong CIDR please. I'm exhausted."
Favorite design books (Irene Au - Google Head of UX)
I remember reading about this pre-launch sign up in HN ... is there a code snippet where startup can put on their website?
In fact, you can look at most real physical theft in the same terms and see how silly this "copying, not stealing" argument is. If I steal a $10 loaf of bread, how have I harmed the baker? Most people would say, "you took $10 worth of goods from the baker". But of course you didn't, says the pirate: you took $0.50 worth of flour and water and yeast from the baker, $0.20 in energy costs, and $2.00 in labor costs; you owe $2.70!

The grim rhetorical reality of this argument is that most of the people on the pro-piracy side of the argument will go you a step further. "$2.00!", they'd say. "Why, everybody knows it should only cost you $1.00 to bake a loaf of bread."
>once all the referral cash starts flowing you can just buy it :)

Looking at the company I think you might have to pay a hefty whack to get that domain.

I'm going to guess that they didn't have anyone there who knew what to do with your request, was it a money offer. I think I'd make a modest money offer (no more than a couple of hundred GBP) - people generally know what to do with an offer of money.

Make it very clear that you want to buy babylist.com name only, that you're not competing directly with them and are based in the US.

I don't think you want a huge offer as this will ring a bell saying "ooh, I better check with someone if I can get more ...".

YMMV considerably, grace and peace.
The way the "manifesto" is worded does unfortunately reek of entitlement, but they do make a valid point. If you see their bullet points as rows in a product comparison table between legal movie distribution channels, most of them score badly on most of those points, whereas piracy ticks nearly all of them. (It would of course be a fairer comparison if there was a row for "is legal".)

They're making the point that legal movie distribution channels are worse products - by those criteria - than piracy. Put another way, there are other reasons for choosing to pirate a movie besides not wanting to pay for it. It's unrealistic to demand all of the things this manifesto does, but actually the sum of their demands doesn't seem like a bad ideal to aim for.
Step 1: Install

Step 2: Add to INSTALLED_APPS

Step 3: Enjoy more secure password hashing.

...

Step 4: Set BCRYPT_ROUNDS to something higher than 12 when computers get faster.
> They are worried about you writing foo + bar and being sloppy about the types of your variables.

In that case, perhaps a better question would determine whether the candidate understood that in a dynamically typed language, variables don't have types, values do...
Many people don't realize how non-trivial renumbering a network is. I transitioned the resnet at a public university from a /19 to a new /18, and it took several months of planning to pull off.

90% of the space was assigned via DHCP, but that remaining 10% which was statically assigned was a lot of work. Imagine tracking down every device assigned an IP address, scattered across a college campus.

Our routing configuration was trivial (single super-net, single site, &c), compacting an enterprise /8 would be an insane amount of work.

The long view isn't making a quick buck off v4, it's moving to v6 as quickly as possible.
This is absolutely not the way to get people to show up to your contest.
As far as I know only 2 MPs or so were prosecuted. Considering the enquiry cost several million, that doesn't seem like money well spent.
Scaling RoR: Clouds against the Floods
The page itself seems as if it was written by fifth graders: "Movies are delivered adds free."

No streaming movie I've ever purchased has required me to pay for the privilege of doing arithmetic.
This should get laughed out of court. You only need a PE license to approve drawings and design work on an official level, not to perform studies.
Cool! And just today I was thinking about generating quests / stories.
"but it's still taking something "

taking ? Or copying?

Something? Or some representation?

A problem with these discussions is that people use common words as if everyone had the same understanding of their meaning and application.

If I download a movie, I'm not taking that movie. And what I end up with is not a thing; if I then move it over to another drive, no thing has moved, yet the movie can be watched.

Now, in the end, this action it may or may not be wrong or immoral or whatever, but arguments based on physical notions of "take", "thing", "own" are putting the cart before the horse.
"Win" is perfectly reasonable to use whenever someone is gaining something that they want. For instance "I hope we win that big contract we bid on." The contract isn't free money, but it's considered a "win" because it's a favorable outcome.

If your business wants a 100k convertible note, it's very reasonable to say you're going to try to win it with a great pitch.

Edit: Personally I find the phrase "earn an excuse to continue living the dream" on the about page a bit more troubling.
Loren, thanks for sharing, first and foremost. I appreciate this thread (and the original) a lot.

I have a related idea and I want your opinion (and others fellow HNers')... Say, you sell the T-shirt for $16 each including shipping. The twist is that if there are over a fixed number of orders then everyone gets a discount, with the earlier buyers get a deeper discount. i.e. the more people buy, the more group discount, and the earlier you buy, the more discount. Do you think, based on this exercise and your experience, whether this will help make it more viral? Or would it be too complicated and hence destroy the conversation rate and virality?
I love this idea. Please fix the spelling and grammar errors so that the powers that be take it seriously. Thanks!
Matt's assertion about "Suggested Sites" sending this data seems to be conjecture. I ran some packet captures and didn't find anything of that kind.

However, if you install the Bing Toolbar then it does send URL clickstream data. It explicitly asks you beforehand if you want to send info about "the searches you do, websites you visit..." though.

Full post: http://projectgus.com/2011/02/bing-google-finding-some-facts...
"It's fine to hire someone who can reason through and discuss solutions... as long as you're also going to hire someone who will write the code for them."
Holy crap, I was just checking out your CD earlier today on Amazon. Had no idea a member was a fellow hacker newser.

I was also in a hard rock band for 7 years, though we never signed anywhere.
Crazy talk. In Canada this computer scientist would be invited to chat with the engineering firm, not brought in front of a licensing board. Writing a report, even a very technical one, that is political in nature should always be protected. What shouldn't be allowed is people passing themselves off as if they had a license then people building things based off of their plans.
Will SSL Collapse Under its Own Weight?
It was same group of people responding. They have grown old :-O
Rupert Murdock's "The Daily": Indexed.
Agree, I'm using:
PostgreSQL for normal SQL
Memcached for non-persistent fast changing cache
Redis for session storage, slowly changing persistent cache
Completely OT: "outsourcing their medial billing is a way to increase collections"
It's unlikely to tell you who's a jerk, or who has a cocaine habit.
Which fad?
In the spirit of completeness, the paper says they use Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

But the paper doesn't say this is what Bing uses. Looks like it, but we should be clear. This is MSR, not Bing.

Good paper though. But it is another example of MS actually not thinking its bad. They published a paper on this where they spell out how MSR would do this. Did people in the academic community protest that this would be copying if implemented?
The Goals And Means Of Meth Control
Investor advisory firm calls for Apple to disclose CEO succession plan
As to how strongly Bing uses Google as an "indicator", I think the results from this definitely-not-long-tail search are pretty telling:

http://www.google.com/search?q=how+old+are+you

http://www.bing.com/search?q=how+old+are+you
DSH: Haskell list comprehensions - relational queries over your database
The Data Center Powering the Super Bowl
Check your competitors page right now. It will take you less time than reading the next post on Hacker News, and what you find may (or may not) surprise you. That consulting tip is on the house. :-)