skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
An exclusive interview with Skype's goal oriented CEO, Tony Bates. He talks about how he came by his tech credibility, why he chose to work at Skype, the challenges Skype faces, and the company values and themes he hopes will guide Skype to serve a billion users.
This reminds me (uh-oh, another neckbeard old-timer story) of the very early days of the ARPAnet when there about 20 nodes or so...

Back then there were free guest accounts on all the systems (mostly TOPS-10 and TENEX systems along with some wierd one-off machines like the UCSB symbolic math system on a 360/65), and we (at HARV-10) had a hacker who'd come in and mess things up.

So the sysadmin (Geoff Steckel) started a logging process that dumped all suspicious incoming telnet connections input to a local TTY (yes, a physical teletypewriter).

We used to gather around the TTY when it started chattering, to watch the hacker at work. Geoff pretty quickly figured out what he was doing and patched our TOPS-10 monitor source.
We Need Your Help on IT Security
For me, Paypal is simply a no go.
If Paypal is the only way to pay, then there is no way to pay.
(But there are still bank accounts and credit cards).
Black Scholes in lots of languages
I was looking to save myself 5 minutes writing some code by googling for ten minutes and I found this gem. This page of this site is just fabulous (and slightly comical).
Yeah I agree - I have worked in a few agile shops too and I found it to be highly disruptive and counter-intuitive to how I work. I had to get 'Agile' or leave I was told. Eventually I did just that.

I've always had the impression Agile was just another crutch bad programmers lean on. Or maybe it's just bad managers?
The IE blog post, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/02/02/html5-and-web-..., also mentioned something I'd never seen before. MS indemnifies Windows users for included software, which would include H264. And is probably an obvious reason why WebM isn't shipped as part of Windows (client and server).

That'a s pretty big frickin deal. I thought indemnification was off the table, but reading this Google has at least got to say that end users of WebM are indemnified. I honestly don't think they are willing to take that risk given the patent state of WebM.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/D/0/9D0A6265-A509-4...
Most compiled code doesn't have debug info and internal symbols. Yet, changing something like an expiry date is often a trivial task. Obfuscation just means you'll actually have to poke around a bit instead of just searching for "isExpiryDateReached".
Thanks Marcus - I've added a couple of others in a comment.
I'm a CEO, and I'm on the support team
I'll try to make my point again. There is one school of thinking that Google is profiting by farming information from the Internet, literally on the back of many people's labor. You can prove this by running a "Google Sting", that is known as "Google bombing". By having many people setting up honeypot to link an arbitrary keyword to certain URL, you seem to be able to fool Google to artifically associate such keyword with the URL, thus "proving" Google is profiting from your labor. I don't really buy this logic. But Google's accusation of Bing steal from them seems very close to this line of framing.
Would you have bought that book just to get that one answer? Would you have known the book even had the information you needed without Google's help?
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If you operate under a name other than your personal given name, you may need to file for a d/b/a with your state.
The same could be said for 'paid subscribers'.

If you have a product you're selling for $10/mo you'll need 1,667 subscribers to make $200k/yr not taking into account churn, customer support overhead, etc

The question is whether you think getting millions/billions of impressions is easier than getting thousands of paid subscribers or not.

Also, FWIW, 10m impressions a year is nothing - it's 1 impression every 20 minutes on average. 2b impressions a year is more like 60 impressions a second, but still not ridiculously unattainable.
Understanding Why Similarity "Works"
"No Credit Card Required. No Contracts."
Thanks. A lot.
- a teenager
I haven't read Market Forces, but Vinge, Stross, and Banks are my three favorite sci-fi authors, so I'm a counterexample to your theory. I didn't find the Tines boring...honestly, the Zones bothered me more, because it was so central to the story and so unscientific. But it still didn't really bother me, and I enjoyed both Fire and Deepness a lot.
Non-contract prepaid phones are also subsidized in the US.

There have been billboards in Austin, among other places I'm sure, for:
http://www.stopcellphonetrafficking.com/

I haven't considered the math yet, but I suspect that the rate of price decline cited in this article is too aggressive, and that truly subsidy free Android phones for $99 are some time away yet.
That is precisely what they've launched on top of SES.
Does the OSS community mean you or other people whose time you don't have to pay for? Open source works by volunteering and yet I don't see many people stepping up to work on an alternative.
> by turning their back on H.264, Google is ensuring that Flash will continue to remain the dominant force in web video for years to come

Even if Google didn't support the video tag at all, people can still use IE and Safari, right? Its looking like H.264 is going to be the dominant codec, after all, so IE and Safari will support it. If you want it on another browser, you'll need a plugin, sorry. That could be Flash, or it could be something else.

> but the issue here is that we need the HTML5 standard to fully support H.264, and that’s simply not going to happen without Google on board.

No. The answer is no, with or without Google. It's a bad idea to have a per-unit fee for distributing a standards-compliant browser. Go ahead and buy it for the browser you're building--I'm fine with that--but don't make it a requirement.

And to anyone who says, "$0.20 isn't that much", you must agree to back it in cash. If you say you'll personally cover the licensing fees for anyone who asks, well, then I'll reconsider.
[SO qn] Capabilities for Lua: what experience is there?
indeed. beyond that, i think that a dating site that is truly effective inherently means that you're constantly losing good customers as they no longer need the site (though perhaps the natural attrition rate is lower).

its also hard to tell if free sites have come to a weird nash equilibrium, or if their current state is actually optimal and the "best" way to do online dating just sucks. would something more fundamentally different be less successful despite being proven more effective simply because of how it works?
Google could sell a new operating system called Google-7 (for $100) which contains a Cracked Windows 7 Ultimate CD. When Microsoft complains about profiting off of MS labor, Google says: So what? Epic mirror attack.
A definite No I'm afraid - I love most of Stross' work (particularly Accelerando, which has an insane idea density), the Culture books in all of their socialistic contrarian splendour but I also love all of Vinge's work - particularly A Fire Upon the Deep (for its sheer sensawunda) and Deepness.
I think the major difference here is that it's easy to have to migrate from free to paid. If your site/newsletter starts doing well, you hit a point where you HAVE to start paying them.
There's pretty substantial industries that are built on advertising revenue - free papers, television, and the internet. Over the last 15 years countless websites have proven you can make substantial amounts of money from advertising income. It's a proven business model.

Getting paid subscribers isn't trivial either. You need to learn as you go with either approach.
That "none of your business" bit may or may not be true, depending on your local regulations and the loan you're applying for.

As an example, for the US, see http://www.ehow.com/facts_5155455_fha-mortgage-borrower-requ... for a situation in which the bank must see two months of bank statements from a borrower in order to be able to offer them a particular kind of loan (FHA-subsidized in this case). There are similar requirements in the US for larger loans that were imposed in the wake of the subprime stuff a few years back (e.g. at least as of a year ago mortgages at certain rates and certain mortgage amounts required a certain fraction of the purchase price in liquid assets remaining _after_ making the downpayment to qualify for the loan).

Apart from all that, your assets are insurance against you losing your job (for both you and the lender!), which is why underwriting wants to know about them. If there's no legal requirement for them to know, you don't have to give it to them, of course. And just as of course they may choose not to underwrite the loan at the particular rate you want in that situation, because they can't evaluate the risk.
Ugh, we already have posts from Google and Microsoft and no one else has any new information. There have been a slew of blogposts etc that have covered every possible angle to this story. We do not need everyone's opinion on this. Let's please just slow down until someone with real information provides an update.
Why Match.com Shouldn't Have Purchased Dating Site OkCupid
So, what do people think of "focus"? (A drug treatment regime used by the "emergents" to turn people into monomaniacs.)

Vinge goes out of his way to show how it could be abused --- but I sometimes get the feeling that people crunching in early-startup mode would willingly use it, at least for a time, if they had it...
>"The presenters at the launch event were careful to note the Daily isn't a "static" publication, but that new pages can be "dropped in anytime"

I once read a science fiction novel where the protagonist was employed doing that exact same thing and now here Apple bringing us that future!
Once, on purpose, I wrote a login system that enforced globally unique passwords. Ie. no two users could share the same password. I can't even remember why it seemed like a good idea while I was designing it, but the problem quickly became apparent once anyone started trying to use it.
If you follow the links further, Bryan's case seems a little more solid.

Claim 1: ...The claim is implausible (if such parenting can make the kids neurotic, other personality changes must certainly be possible), and the link is to an article where the blog author is not convinced by a book arguing the contrary of this claim. The argument is roughly analogous to saying the heliocentric theory has zero credibility because "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" didn't contain enough measurements.

Bryan Caplan cites his own blog post ("Implausible Wimps"), which explains that it's not a problem of too few measurements. From his post:

"...a massive twin and adoption literature on personality finds that family environment has little or no effect on personality...my complaint isn't just that Marano's case isn't airtight; my complaint is that she doesn't even try to rebut the hereditarian presumption long-established in personality psychology."

The book "Unequal Chances" is cited, which allegedly reviews the field and shows that personality is primarily hereditary.

Regarding Claim 2: Caplan cites his post "Don't miss the invisible gorilla", which in turn cites hist post "Magic Potencies", which cites the book "How People Learn":

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6160

This book appears to talk about more than just learning Latin, though it also uses Latin as an example.

Regarding claim 3, the underlying paper being cited is here: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=4&v...

This particular paper attempts to measure (among other things) "how the knowledge learned from a particular teacher influences student learning of new material."

I think Bryan Caplan is mainly guilty of too many self links, which obscures the original sources he is basing his opinions on.
Awesome 'about us' page
Rands in Repose: The Noise
F- yeah! This (don't forget to read the other book first - a fire upon the deep) is my third favorite sci fi novel series of all time. Right after foundation series and dune collection.

A must read for all hn readers.
If this is actually true (I've never tried to get a VC job) maybe partners in VC firms should plan better because they'd end up with better hires instead of the dregs who can't find a job anywhere else. No wonder some VCs are completely useless.
I have a stupid question: for a one-person business, how does purchasing an umbrella insurance compare with setting up an LLC? Say an LLC in California costs $800 a year. I think you can buy umbrella insurance covering you up to a few million for less than that. And it seems that it doesn't have the problem you point out...?
I don't think it's so clear. Is drafting unethical?

In any case, for all you know, if everyone started using the Bing Toolbar, it may provide better clickstream data, causing more relevant Bing results.
Or a disguised-kiddie which gets very cleverly in but then does very stupid things in order to get caught and get a couple of things:

1. Get others involved by leaving fake tracks.
2. Distract attention.
3. Make you think your honey pot is doing right while some other heavy duty scripts are running on the 'right' direction.
What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation
Also, get ready to have your OKC profile photos/info used in numerous search engine landing pages.

I expect Match.com results to be injected into OKC's results as the first implementation of upselling...
> At one point I think Vinge showed his manuscript to somebody else, because after that he spends a bit of time defending his description of some of the aliens The author protests a bit too much. Because it's a prequel, there is just a bit too much detail.

Almost surely. He had a number of consultants and others go through _A Fire Upon the Deep_ (which I liked better), as one can see from the annotated edition: http://news.slashdot.org/story/03/09/18/0411259/Review-A-Fir...
'Angry Birds' To Star in Super Bowl Ad
It's called adderall, I'm a fan.
Just as I suspected, a search for {murtha "combined systems"} shows that this was yet another government or military connected company which located in that part of Pennsylvania due to Rep. Murtha's strongarming.
Gotta say one thing you always did right with TC50 and now LAUNCH is being entrepreneur friendly. Run by X for X is usually the best way to do anything.
Just to clarify, they don't want to see your bank statement, they want to see the covering sheet that verifies who you are and the address you're at. I had to provide my "bank statement" to Paypal a year or so ago and all I provided was the sheet that states my account # (they have this already) my address (they have this too) and then my banks information (sort code etc) which I don't think is private?

Your bank statement = covering sheet that proves the account is associated with you and your address, not x months of payments made and taken.
The question is: how?

The sentiment (in the US, at least) still seems to be towards less regulation at the moment. Enforcing ethics as well as laws would seem to require even more regulation, unless you have a magic potion that will convince all business directors to self-regulate all at once!
It's not only an issue of rarely having control over which scratch-off card you'd like to pick, there's also the issue of most states having the majority of their games almost entirely hidden. Very few games allow you to see numbers or letters plainly - most require to you to scratch off "your" numbers and then scratch off the "board" as well.
I don't think it's obvious at all that they used his photo. In the Flickr photo, the car is parked on the street, so anyone could have come by and shot a photo of the same car. If the car belonged to a local resident, it would probably be parked frequently in the same location, and if the photo was taken at a similar time of day, it would have had the same reflections, lighting, shadows, etc. as the Flickr photo. So Devers should have proof that this didn't happen before he publicly accuses someone of stealing his photo. (I'm not saying Gap didn't steal it, I'm just saying the burden of proof rests on the accuser.)
I totally agree with you. It shouldn't be hard for Paypal to get better (and I don't understand why they don't), but to make something new that is better is a far more difficult proposition.
I thought Zones were a great idea - what did you find "unscientific" about them? (Allowing for the fact that this is all fiction).
> If that leads to Bing absorbing Google's results, and eg. suggesting spelling corrections they would have never figured out except that Google thought of them first, then they are indeed stealing results, whether they meant to or not, and need to stop.

Even if that's indirect information? For example, the Bing toolbar doesn't really say (in Gargamel's American voice for effect), "Nyhaahaha! I see these google search results! I will steal!" No, rather it says, "Ahh, after the result of a query to this site, we then leave the site to go to this page. If that query and this destination page appear in aggregate, Bing should take notice."

When I first learned how the Bing toolbar did this, I had two reactions: "Oh, that's clever. It's like engaging your users to help you be a directed crawler. It's 'querytext', which is not unlike google's innovation, 'linktext'." and then "But I would still never install the Bing toolbar. Man, that thing is a sad clown show." Honestly, it's one of Bing's smarter ideas.

There is only so far pure crawling and statistical analysis can go; there simply isn't enough data there and everyone knows how to use that data to great effect. Every search engine is incorporating new realtime communications and user behavior streams into their search results. Google certainly does this, albeit without a toolbar. Bing simply has the entire Microsoft software stack to lobby for help, so if someone opts into the Bing toolbar, they can opt into submitting additional information to improving the Bing index.

I'm not a big fan of MS or Bing, but in this they are only culpable for being clever. They are using querytext to improve relevance. I'm told you could make the same stunt work from a Wikipedia search box, leading to a wikipedia page.
The really important thing is is that the phone is $25/mo. as the full usage fee. That's less than half the price of what I'm paying right now on Verizon, and less than a third of what people can pay for the iPhone. I'm considering downgrading to this device right now just because its price is so low.
Cached OkCupid Article: Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating
That's not an analysis, but a commentary on the work Jason did.

But he says a lot of BS, like, "In fact, one of the most brain damaged things of the current software patent situation is the fact that if a company performs a patent search and finds a potential infringing patent it may incur in additional damages for willful infringement (called “treble damages”). So, the actual approach is to perform the same analysis, try to work around any potential infringing patent, and for those close enough cases that cannot be avoided try to steer away as much as possible. So, calling Google out for releasing the study on possible patent infringement is something that has no sense at all: they will never release it to the public."

Patent law makes it VERY clear that treble damages occur with WILLFUL infringement. Good faith efforts, the inevitably fail, won't be subject to treble damages.

It seems like he's bending over backwards to show that Google shouldn't disclose anything, which is absurd.

His opinion that the suboptimal choices means that WebM has avoided the H264 patents seems very suspect to me. And contradictory, because if they did do what he said, and did accidentally infringe, by his (incorrect) logic they'd be liable for treble damages. Blech.
I believe that he was criticizing Krugman in addition to Levitt as a pop economist.
Before I had figured out VCSs I didn't know how to branch in subversion. I had a site that was based on a checkout from about six months before, but I had made a bunch of hotfixes to it while development continued on the main branch. I wanted to make a backup copy of the code on my workstation so I logged into the server and typed:

$ tar xzf archive.tgz live-directory

So by typing x for extract instead of c for compress I accidentally overwrote everything right at the moment I wanted to back it up. Two hours later I had the site working again, six hours later I had it back to where it was before I deleted it. It was painful to spend a whole stressful day undoing the damage from a one character typo.
Sergei compares Clustrix to MongoDB because their target markets are very similar--not because the technology is similar.

As a startup, it behooves them to attack the low-end database market, but I suspect they've found that the primary market for a highly scalable low-end database lies on the web, but that market has chosen to go cheap-and-dirty with NoSQL. So now they're in the middle ground between fast-and-and-loose-and-free and my-enterprise-uses-Oracle.

I think a lot of web development is of a highly speculative, winner-take-all sort, so devs. want to be as cheap as possible until they win the web lottery. For all the flaws of NoSQL, software only solutions do allow developers to make very efficient use of their hardware by running multiple services on the same machine, or run them in the cloud. Once they hit the jackpot, they can afford to either go Oracle, hire software developers to work around deficiencies in their data store (e.g. Facebook), or use a data store from Amazon or Google or Microsoft.

That's a shame, because I think Clustrix is ultimately the right approach. The web has a history of doing the shittiest-and-easiest thing first (ColdFusion, anyone?) only to repent years later to the second-shittiest solution. Rinse, repeat.
They don't even have a kindle reader for linux, and the kindle RUNS linux. Yet they have Windows, OS X, iOS, and android...
Match.com would have to be utter idiots to close down OkCupid. If they keep it running, it's a serious asset, for a bunch of reasons, and one hopes that they'd be mature enough not to care if one brand they own is cannibalising another.

If they close it down, yes, their main brand will be protected, but so will everyone else's. There's no competitive advantage whatsoever in doing it.
Does anyone advise getting insurance to cover these sorts of liability? Would General or Professional Liability or even IP liability insurance cover all the legal costs? I'm thinking that in addition to corporate structure as a way of handling this unknown (but significant) risk.
"The claim is implausible (if such parenting can make the kids neurotic ..."

The claim that the parenting style causes kids to be neurotic is exactly what the OP argues to be false (see yummyfajita's sister comment).
makes me wonder whether Einstein could safely be called a "hacker" too?