skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you can offload the website quickly and easily go for it, then proceed with option (2). Who knows, the time you spend trying to sell it may end up increasing traffic ;) I do have to agree with bmelton - how would shutting the site down prevent you from owing taxes come 4/15?
>Bing did not "copy" this.

People only click on the results that are there. Google put them there. People tend to click on results in roughly the order they appear on the page, which Google also determined. Getting the data through an indirect means does not insulate them from culpability.
Get well soon, Andrew. Really admire all the stuff you're doing with Mixergy.
My best interpretation:

The fan profile shows that Fight Club is particularly appealing to the 18-30 crowd (makes sense). It's also a smart film. Most people who like it are either a poor college/postgraduate student or a professional making decent money.

We see this same income dichotomy with a number of "smart" likes and preferences.
Very fitting username
This is a shame, I bought this game as part of the Indy Bundle and really enjoyed it.

What Matlin is doing is defiantly unethical but if it's illegal (thanks to the distribution of the media) then it sounds like Apple aren't doing enough for the hefty cut they're taking.
Well, the designer wasn't paid the price a design should be paid, so, the designer gets some visibility. This is normal...

And this is temporary...

About the tweaking, yes, a lot of work is needed, but so what? Small steps for iterations...

Remember, we are not professional and the website isn't our main focus...
Actually, suppose we have internships to offer in your nonactive territories (say, the washington DC area), should we wait to post them? Also, would REU (research experience for undergraduates) be suitable to post on your site (we tend to pay about $4K for the summer for undergrads and offer free housing...).
It's very awesome. My favorite find of the last several months, if not year.

I'm curious, what are you going to do with it?
Viral Product Launch Pages Jump The Shark
What is the advantage of using zsh versus the omnipresent bash ? I mean there is something that can be done only in zsh and not in bash; or something that is straightforward to do in zsh and cumbersome in bash ?

Of course I can learn zsh to increase my knowledge, but it will be nice to see some clear advantage of using zsh.
Totally agree. Any idea so we can improve it?
WooMe hasn't raised a round in three years. The company they originally invested in is very different to the company you see today.

Give the investors the benefit of doubt.

That site is a total mess now - full of ads, spam and upsell. It is totally unusable.
Great. We are not professional.
Congrats! The InternMatch guys are awesome and are building an amazing product.
I am working on that, but it is quite hard...

If you have any insightful ideas, ("it isn't pretty" isn't one), please mail me...
I'm looking forward to having access to my machines at home remotely without any special setup.

If that's what you want, 6to4 (e.g. AirPort Extreme router with firewall disabled) can provide that today.
Hey Google, take that 100+ Million and start your own YC of sorts.
Actually, you guys are both right. Speaking from experience (administrator at a popular webhosting company), he likely a lot of his rootkits macroed, so he can just login to the box, alt+1 (or whatever he has his macro set to) and then pop out. When the macros fail, he demonstrates his lack of actual knowledge of *nix systems and starts acting erratically.
I was taught to write the first draft for yourself, then revise for your audience.
Well, the old site was confusing in many aspects.

The documentation and support was impossible to find and it was almost impossible to maintain...

Of course, this is a first step and we need to improve; but we are C/C++ developers on our free time, not web developers...
I imagine so, if they were productive enough to reach 1 billion page views per month while doing so. What makes you think that their community involvement isn't the reason reddit has thrived while competitors have failed?
What do you think of triple your fresh insight by electric brain stimulation?
you must not frequent reddit. Sometimes reddit is the news. Last example I can think of was Ted Williams the man with the radio voice. He was brought to popularity on reddit, and was initially asking the community to help a guy out. During the wikileaks black out, reddit actively supported getting the cables out and accessible. So although the community likes to joke around and have fun.. or as you call it memes and in-jokes, there is plenty of news and plenty of differentiating opinions.

http://i.imgur.com/tgo9W.jpg - what news site would tell it like this. ( posted to reddit )
LAST CHANCE... rare programmable robot from 1980's
I'm not American so I'm wondering, how does he pay for this treatment? Does it come from insurance that he gets as an individual, or would his business pay for it all? Curious how things like this would affect a startup.
Apart from his flustered tone, Mehdi said nothing that Harry Shum didn't say in his post yesterday. I don't know why he bothered posting this.
What's that written in?
I wonder if we can have a thread listing technology stacks of various existing sites and services. For example, I'm curious what stack is used for kayak.com. Both frontend and backend, if there's any difference. I'm sure I can come up with many other examples later, e.g. Yelp. Any others?
It's not just "panache," it's also practical. All trains go to Manhattan. If you live in Queens or CT or Westchester or Long Island you won't commute to a job in NJ. However, NJ has a lot of engineering types. You might do ok, depending on your location and what type of startup.
'Well, SpaceX is still playing the "expendable rocket" game, at least for the moment.'

As much as I am an enormous fan of non-chemical-rocket approaches into space (as hartror linked), they all fall into one of two categories: "Not proved feasible" (space elevator and all variations thereof), and "Contains the word 'nuclear' and not proved feasible". I break that second one out as a separate category on the grounds that making many of these proposals functional seems a lot more likely than the more far-out ones, but are Utterly Impossible because nobody will even fund research into a space technology that contains the word "nuclear", let alone permit it to fly. We barely get RTGs into space, because they are the only solution, and not without ignorant protesters nearly managing to stop it.

For instance, I'm a fan of the nuclear lightbulb [1]; I don't know if can be built or not, and I suspect I will never find out, because nobody within my lifetime will try, despite the fact it may require no actually new physics or technology.

If you're trying to make money in this field, best start with the things we actually know will work. Let us all hope the multi-trillion-dollar-market-cap SpaceX of 2040 see its way to funding some of these proposals, goodness knows our governments aren't going to until the word "nuclear" completely loses its fear factor.

Oh, and if we all die because we're hit by a meteor that could have been stopped with a nuclear lightbulb or even Project Orion, let the record show I hate you all, humanity.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb
Another, quite tongue-in-cheek, humorous app found in comments:

http://createasearchengine.appspot.com/
That is the UN definition for "Absolute Poverty" which is different to the UN definition for Overall Poverty. But you are right in that I cited the US figures in place of the UN figures. But my original point remains.

Consider this "In 2009, in the United States of America, the poverty threshold for a single person under 65 was US$11,161; the threshold for a family group of four, including two children, was US$21,756". "Poverty in the United States is cyclical in nature with roughly 13 to 17% of Americans living below the federal poverty line at any given point in time, and roughly 40% falling below the poverty line at some point within a 10-year time span."

Thank you wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States
So if you think laws don't matter, why would you care if the kill switch bill is enacted?
I would never argue that news never appears on Reddit, but going to Reddit with the intention of seeing and actually discussing the news is an incredibly frustrating experience.
In my opinion it does. The whole purpose of this technique is to get better results than just an algorithmically generated list. If people are simply clicking on the first result, then it's not accomplishing what they want. Having a mirror image of Google's results is not what they want (otherwise why would anyone switch?). We all know how gamed the first few results on Google are these days anyways.
Nice to see some Win32 code from time to time. I have to admit I'm a big fan of decoupling the GUI from the main application. I typically write the GUI in C# or Java and the main application in C++.
Your title seems a bit click-baitish to me, but that could easily be my bias.

I think it's great that Reddit has evolved over time rather than trying to force their community into what they think Reddit should be. I am appreciative that if I want to dip into few funny things to come out of things like 4chan I can, without having to deal with a lot of what makes places like /b/ so repulsive (gore, excessive porn, etc). For the most part when you remove the default subreddits from your frontpage and stick to the smaller ones (netsec, web_design, gamedev are some good ones) you can avoid a lot of what you are describing.
Why 2011 Will Be a Big Year for Big Data
I think the best investors are the ones who always have their portfolio companies in mind when interacting with anyone in the industry. Whether it is someone that can be a distribution partner, customer, or employee.

The small things go a long way. Sending emails on news from competitors, checking in by phone a couple times a month, and connecting CEOs with other CEOs that they have invested in and can learn from is key. Given them some angels/VCs are funding dozens of companies, the ones that can remember your engineer's names really says something.

Lastly, it is all about chemistry. Every VC has its mix of partners, some better than others, You want to find someone who really believes in you, the team, and the vision, and work alongside you rather than trying to get a few percentage points more. A good indicator of time that they can spend with you is the number of board sets they occupy as well. If someone is currently on 8 boards, chances are that their mind is in quite a few places at once.
Dropcam releases Android App
While you are correct, I didn't have anything to elaborate on, the denoting of it's significance was to allow others to perhaps continue on that key element.

I agree that this practice is bad, and it should be downvoted; which is why I have upvoted every single comment saying I shouldn't have posted it (though it bothers me that jacobolus downvoted all the people explaining my post - they were being helpful and should not have been downvoted imho).

I will make sure that my future contributions are of substance, and know that the route I took was a mistake.
I do; I expanded it to "ls -l" for the benefit of other hackers who might not be familiar with the convention. :-)
He may not be allowed to publicly disclose the numbers.

It would be like extrapolating how many Android phones had been sold. And then Google buys you and says, "here's the real number, but its Google confidential". You may be allowed to say, "I screwed up, my data was wrong", but you may not be able to actually give the real data.

That's just the real world.
Here's the problem in a nutshell:

The Bing toolbar uses clickstream data to extract information about the relatedness of urls, just like any search engine crawler does (page rank works this way). When a user clicks on url B from url A the Bing toolbar sends information back to MS about the relatedness of urls A and B including all the meta-data involved. If url A is ".../search?q=torsorophy" then Bing will make a note of that and will start showing results for B when you search for "torsorophy".

In principle this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it allows Bing to index sites that it wouldn't otherwise, letting its search index grow more organically. However, when search engines come into play things get problematic, because now the Bing toolbar is little more than an automated method for scraping search results piecemeal. Given that a great deal of modern web surfing falls into the "search for X, click links for X" pattern, this should have been something that the Bing engineers anticipated (if they didn't anticipate it that's bad enough, if they did and ignored the problem that's much worse).

Worse yet, the Bing toolbar is effectively a search indexer which does not respect robots.txt. Let that sink in for a while. Google.com/robots.txt has this line: "Disallow: /search", and yet apparently the Bing toolbar has absolutely no compunction about effectively ignoring that.

tl;dr: MS has created a search indexer which ignores robots.txt, this is bad.
You missed the point I was making, which is that asking a company to fork over expensive information that a competitor like Google would kill for in the name of answering a question about 7 queries is disporportionate.
My school, Penn State, has something called the Washington Program. You apply to the program, then the program coordinator makes calls on your behalf to his personal network of Penn State alumni and other internship sponsors from the DC area. The quality of these internships was incredible: students worked on Capitol Hill, for big name media outlets, and for public affairs firms.

The program works so well because each year it can deliver students who have the "Penn State Washington Program seal of approval", so to speak. To an internship sponsor, the value proposition is simple: "Liked last year's intern? Well here's another."

It's definitely good that a site like InternMatch exists, but I think the best way for students to land a competitive internship is through some sort of social validation. The Penn State Washington Program provided this validation to students who otherwise might not have any connections in D.C.

Perhaps there is some business opportunity here: provide social validation for potential interns just like the Washington Program, but at scale (think Monster.com vs. TheLadders). Or maybe this is something best left to universities and their alumni associations.
I've been asked the "how do I write better" question often enough to write a post with pointers to useful books: http://jseliger.com/2009/08/19/the-very-very-beginning-write... . It's oriented toward people who want to write fiction, but I think anyone who wants to write better would find its comments helpful.
thanks for adding this. was fun to be apart of this and make the film.
It's interesting with Kepler that the majority of peoples interests lie in finding a planet which has the potential to host life as we know it, whereas for the scientists on the project and those doing follow up observations every system discovered like this is essentially rewriting the assumptions on planetary formation.
Forking over data is not required. Making a clear public statement would suffice.
Payment services start with an incredibly trivial base requirement: track an integer for every account, let an account decrease its integer and increase the integer for another specified account, and convert between some other payment mechanism and your integer. Sounds like the kind of thing you could put together with a web framework and an afternoon, and then just spend a pile of time and/or money marketing it so people will use it.

Now add the invasive requirements of various governments to track the movement of money (formerly to "fight organized crime and money laundering", later to "combat the funding of terrorism"). All of a sudden an incredibly trivial problem requires piles of lawyers, legal research, logging, information collection from account holders, information verification, responding to "requests" for information, shipping around physical paperwork, and generally dealing with a pile of stuff that should have nothing to do with a payment system.

On top of that, even if you don't want to deal with issues of fraud (hey, cash doesn't), the various other payment services you'll have to deal with to get money into and out of your account still have piles of ways to screw you with it. If you take credit cards, cardholders will do chargebacks to take money back from you. If you take other Internet payment services, you get to deal with the issues raised in this article just like any other merchant. Most people don't want to trust a new payment service with a bank transfer right away. If you accept mailed or scanned checks you'll probably have to deal with check fraud. And without a physical presence and giant piles of extra money you can't convert to and from cash.

Oh, and if you want to make a service as close to cash-equivalent as possible despite all these requirements, then the first time your service transfers money for some notable illegal or questionable operation, you'll probably get shut down over one of the details you missed, which would probably get overlooked if you operated just like every other "financial institution".
But it’s, I believe, universally acknowledged that Reddit is instead a community or hivemind of in-jokes, 4chan memes, and chain puns.

Maybe on some sub-reddits, but hardly all of them. I see fairly little of that stuff on the ones I frequent, FWIW.
> I estimate that it is possible to reduce launch costs by at least 10x, and that is using 1960's rocket technology with modern computers and sensors.

I couldn't agree more. They are already at least 3x cheaper based on my very rough calculations and wikipedia:

- Falcon 9: $56million

- Delta IV: $150million

- Atlas V: $187million

And they are just at the very beginning of recovering their research costs and systematizing the process of rocket building. I am amazed at what they have been able to accomplish thus far.
Monitoring the clicks and parsing the data should be enough to account for the results we see.
It might seem like really common advice, but just so that I know SOMEbody said it...

Make sure that card isn't slated to auto-renew next year. If it is, cancel it.
Now maybe smart poor people. This vision doesn't inspire.
>otherwise why would anyone switch?

Marketing and flashy features, two areas where bing has been investing a lot of money.
Well said! I'm pretty excited to use these guys again. My last job used them and I instituted the template and stuff but it'll be nice to set everything up from start to finish. Its a great product.
Well, I have no knowledge of Andrew's personal situation, and I probably wouldn't talk about it if I did. But for people in Andrew's general situation, here's how it goes.

They might have insurance --- which is often obtained through the employer, but doesn't have to be. (And which might pay for only certain procedures, or only for doctors and hospitals who have a prior arrangement with the insurance company; also, many policies will pay most of the bill, but not all of it.) Insurance obtained through employers is often a better deal, since the employer is insuring a group.

However, there's nothing yet requiring them to have insurance. (The Obama administration's reform bill will require it, but that provision is not yet in effect, and is already being subjected to court challenges.) If they don't, they're personally on the hook.

And losing access to employer-sponsored healthcare plans is indeed a disincentive to people who might otherwise want to strike out on their own.
You have very little actual knowledge of what their experiments entailed.
If the user is gullible enough - or at least that is the hopes of some of these fake accounts. It pays off even if you convert 10 people a day - and most likely that is a very easy target number to hit.

Keep in mind this is all playing on human emotions; sex or the desire to be wanted being a huge one; and for some lonely souls out there, it makes them easier prey. My history with doing affiliate programs with that industry has proven that if marketed correctly, it can be a very rewarding business, and even with some seriously scary a/b tests (let's just throw the term farm sex out there) you can still get good conversions. People's desires and curiosity gets to them - and in to their wallet.
You can not (as in, you're straight up not allowed) to sell physical goods via Apple's in-app purchase. It's only for digital goods. You can sell physical goods through other payment systems though, that are not Apple's in-app stuff.
We need to draft a bill that would allow him the power to switch off freedom to preserve the internet, just in case.
I haven't looked at reddit for about 4 years. Your question made me go check it out. Scanning through the headlines on the front page made me LOL and spray some coffee out of my nose. It's so random, it's like an Onion parody of news aggregation sites. "Email from Egypt" mixed in with "please stop posting photos of your dead pets." Oh my.

http://cl.ly/311b2u3b0b231Y243f1d
Ah, I get where you're coming from now. Interesting to think how that would work.
"It's not Ad Hominem because the Bing team isn't personally insulting Cutts or Singhai. If anything, it's just using malicious sounding buzzwords. A honeypot isn't even isn't even a type of attack: it's a type of defense."
They not directly insulted Cutts and Singhal, but they offered a fake rebuttal of their actions/proof/views, peppered with malicious sounding buzzwords.

...have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent's arguments or assertions... The proof was concocted by these engineers.

...but can also involve pointing out factual but ostensible character flaws or actions which are irrelevant to the opponent's argument...

The way his statement could be read is: Matt Cutts and Singhal are no more than spammers, tricking Microsoft with cloak and dagger tactics that prove nothing. Which constitutes a clear Ad Hominem.
>The above circumstances provide a remarkable example of path dependency. Had these contingencies not obtained, rockets with orbital capability would not have been developed so soon, and when modern societies became interested in launching things into space they might have looked for completely different ways of doing so.

>Before dismissing the above story as an aberration, consider that the modern petroleum industry is a direct outgrowth of the practice of going out in wooden, wind-driven ships to hunt sperm whales with hand-hurled spears and then boiling their heads to make lamp fuel.

Is he seriously citing the adoption of petroleum fuels as an example of path dependency?
What I learned from watching six hours of Starcraft
Content For Sale at 8 Bucks a Pop
I don't believe he's in the states
buy a corner store or gas station with other clean(er) money, and become a lottery ticket merchant. place winners on your customers to keep people coming back.

the hunch is that it will pay out, but not how much. what if this woman in texas had 5 marked "winners" from a dirty merchant "placed" on her when she bought it to avoid a misplaced accusation?
That's because the need for an alternative has existed for less than 48 hours. I would prefer whoever has decided to do an alternative get a prototype built before announcing.

Announcing before you start can easily lead to vaporware. :)
How to Land a Dream Dev Job Without Web Experience
Well, we thought <video> was going to work a bit more, so we didn't work on the plugins at all...

But seeing the current mess, maybe we should :D