skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're the one who said it's "conceivable" that one or two of the messages are real, e.g. "LOL." So it's inconceivable that 18 or so are real. How is that not splitting the difference in a funny way? The journo's point is that new profiles get sent fake messages to convert them. This is obviously true, even if there are real messages too.
I haven't read the book yet, but I've heard good things about it. I plan to order a copy soon and read it, FWIW.
Rolling Stones realizará gira mundial en 2011
But it only worked 7% of the time despite 20 Google engineers' best efforts, the honeypots being ranked number 1, and the data repeatedly sent to Bing.
As many have pointed out, Google has used clickstream data from their toolbar for a number of years.

Also, Google has used the links provided by hub and search pages to find relevant sites within a niche. They have happily indexed links they discovered on those pages, and then removed or penalized the pages that pointed them to it. It's OK, of course, because any SERP not provided by Yahoo Google or Microsoft is termed "spam"
For what? What website?

One of my websites generates $20 eCPM. Another generates $0.10 eCPM :/

What's your service going to cost? Multiply that by paying users and tell me how you're going to support N employees...

I don't think arguing over this is useful - making money out of advertising isn't rocket science, but it does require learning and experience.
There seems to be a notion that I shouldn't call out WooMe because other sites are doing it too. I don't know where that is coming from.
When talking about time and pay, it's important to remember that if the business has revenue, there better be someone getting paid, for corporations that is.
Cuomo's budget proposes up to 9,800 layoffs
Great for free users - my concern is that it won't scale or that they're not as profitable as they'd like to be.
After Match.com shut down their own free online dating site called Down to Earth it was only a matter of time before they just bought an existing and successful site.
Instagram funding benchmark
I don't think they were reading the right blogs/books. Lots of places to learn about pricing, target demographics, revenue models. Maybe not ones that music guys read?
The future-proof e-reading platform
About the H1, you are right, friend of mine lived in San Fransisco on for a couple of year, on an H1 visa, he had a full-time job, and had a small revenue from his website, paid his taxes accordingly, never had a problem.
(It's actually the same in Canada, i'm in locked visa, and i do contracting from time to time, never had a problem)
I for one would pay a reasonable fee for such a service. So far, I have found http://www.bennadel.com/coldfusion/privacy-policy-generator.... which does exactly what you said: a search/replace of some generic ToS, but reading it I see that almost none of it applies (e.g.: I would have no users interacting with each other and trading goods/services).
Because an email list is far more valuable than Twitter.

If you have 10k followers vs. 10k email subscribers, your response rate is like night and day. Hands down, email wins.

Now there's another side to Twitter, which involves the virality of it and has nothing to do with your followers, but simply people re-tweeting your link. In this case it's a decent ally since it provides that quick-spike viral traffic, but it has a very short half-life.
Ask HN: why is MS vs Google war so important to us hackers?
I am truly surprised to see 10 out of 30 stories on top page belonging to Microsoft vs Google topic.

Just couple of small questions: is it that important? how does it affect in our lives except for some tabloid-ish sensesionalist fun?
http://pastebin.com/LR8Gjkki
I dont worry for Mailchimp, when I see the pricing difference between Amazon SES* and them (even if it's not the same product I know and agree)

* http://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/
It's an interesting space that's for sure. The "chicken and egg" problem is a challenge, but so is the idea (if you buy it) that men and women want fundamentally different things and have different drives and motives when it comes to dating; and different approaches to how they date. Since I started reading a lot of evolutionary psychology stuff, I've reshaped a lot of my views on how dating and relationships work.

Now, granted, EP is a controversial science, and I'm not sure that those guys are spot-on about everything... but I strongly believe that the ideas coming out of that world do reflect some underlying truths about our world. If that's true, then my questions would be "how do you build a dating site that's optimized for both men and women? Or can you? And if you can't, which do you optimize for? Or does that even make sense?"
Nope. Just you.
Thankfully, we'll never have to wonder how river boats navigated the Mississippi without depth finders and radar.

http://www.classicreader.com/book/2886/7/

The Vikings may very well been similarly observant of their world, without resorting to sunstones.
For the record, it appears Mozilla, Inc is very rich and could almost certainly just afford the fees and be done with it. That way they'd close the loop and we'd all adopt h264, pay the money, and be on our way to HTML5 video.

It's clear that the adoption of webm is about control and changing the conversation: Google & Mozilla want to drive the direction and own the space. Let's not forget, mozilla owns the 'open source' identity and needs to keep it going, whilst Google has a significantly vested interest with YouTube.
Actually, Mozilla and Opera would also benefit from not having to license H264. Other than the lack of license fees, how would Google benefit?
They have a huge influence in the world of tech and it's the hot topic of the day.
PragProg magazine Issue 20, February 2011 [HTML format]
Out of curiosity, have you written about your experiences at all? If not, would you be willing to do so? I'm sure there's a HN'er or two that would be interested in hearing your thoughts and observations.
But when I click to register for this conference, they're using Paypal as their sole processor.

So what's the point? Complain all you want, you're still using Paypal THIS YEAR, after being screwed over 4 years in a row. When push came to shove, you picked.... Paypal.... to process your payments. So by your own actions, you've shown you think Paypal is the best processor available.
Startup Quote: Micah Baldwin, co-founder, Graphic.ly
It doesn't look like this is a public document.
Holy shit. There goes any reluctance I had to building on top of SES. Your move, Sendgrid.
Startups are based in faith, and the ones that succeed have no fear.

- Micah Baldwin (@micah)

http://startupquote.com/post/3068253744
Nice and short interview with Red Gate CEO about this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKnEjiSGZLA which explains commercial reasons and why they thought it was possible to keep it free and why they changed their mind
Hey, I live in Durham and I'm incorporated as an S-Corp, which can have some advantages (just don't let tptacek hear you talking about them). I'm friends with your boss at TransLoc too. It would be nice to meet up sometime and talk shop. joshua.pearce at that google mail service.
Sure but the license itself does imply that. The price licensees pay is pro-rated based on usage but is also capped at 6.5 million until 2015. The license will be renewed every 5 years but will not increase more than 10%:

The first term of the License runs through 2010, but the License will be renewable for successive five-year periods for the life of any Portfolio patent on reasonable terms and conditions which may take into account prevailing market conditions, changes in technological environment and available commercial products at the time, but for the protection of licensees, royalty rates applicable to specific license grants or specific licensed products will not increase by more than ten percent (10%) at each renewal.

(PDF link:)
http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/avc/Documents/AVC_TermsS...
call out woome. the situation looks bad. it probably is bad. but call out woome with facts, not speculation. that is the notion.
> At first, they touted the maneuver as being all about supporting “open” formats. But if that’s the case, why not pull support for the Flash plug-in baked into every version of Chrome currently?

This is the single shittiest argument I've ever heard, and continue to hear.

1) Adobe isn't charging browser makers royalty or licensing fees to use Flash.

2) Are we really going to pull the "all or nothing" argument with a bunch of programmers and developers who, maybe more than anyone, are constantly driven by the force known as evolution? Just because they haven't removed Flash today doesn't mean they won't in the future. The probability of Google dumping Flash in the next 5 years is likely, perhaps not high. Furthermore, YouTube's HTML5 implementation doesn't exactly come across as fear for HTML5 video.

WebM needed to be here 5 years ago. H.264 should have been dumped before it got traction. Better late than never, no? Or in this case, off course - but constantly correcting.
Hacker Monthly Special: Startup Marketing (Free PDF)
How to Advertise for Free to get more traffic
I just launched a website which is basically a journal of my training; that helps athlete's get a high vertical leap/and more athletic body. The service is 100% FREE. I am curious to how to get more traffic to the site. I'm on the first page of google for shortest dunker,5'5 dunker, Brandon Todd, and smallest dunker? Any help would be greatly appreciated!!
Flight-Right.com
email:flight.right@gmail.com
Cloud As Application Data Exchange Point
>By that logic Microsoft might as well pack it up and close shop.

Jan 31, 2011
Microsoft Corp.'s net income for the latest quarter fell slightly from a year ago but the software giant still beat Wall Street's expectations despite the weak personal computer market. Net income was $6.63 billion, compared with $6.66 billion in the same period last year.

I don't think MS is losing to much sleep over the never-ending discussion between programmers whether the MS stack is as scalable as open source alternatives.

There are several live sites that prove it can scale. Most sites chose the alternative. At the end of the day its an interesting conversation, but why do people care so much? If I choose to give a couple grand of MY money to MS, why does that bother some people so much?
Old-School Business Card Manager
So the OSS community wouldn't do a better job of building a .NET decompiler?
In this case I don't think Microsoft violates Google's TOS because it is not directly consuming the "service" provided by Google, but rather peeking at what the user has done (and by installing the toolbar the user has already agreed to let Bing do it).
I'm studying in Japan, and amazon's _free_ shipping (with no minimum!) here is about as fast as Amazon Prime in the US, in my experience. Of course, it helps that it's a small country, and I'm fairly close to Tokyo.
I'd like to get Al Jazeera on ivi.tv
"Profile information is used by WooMe primarily to be..." — that 'primarily' is plausible grounds for secondary uses, such as making up 'new' (new to you) 'real' (there is a user who has this profile image) profiles to be shown in different demo/geo segments
Browser breakdown of who's using Basecamp Mobile so far
it is conceivable. it is possible. it is, however, not at all likely.

like i said in another response, they're almost definitely doing shady business. call them out on it. but call them out on it with facts, not speculation. TC is supposed to be tech journalism (sometimes, at least). do due diligence, get some proof and report on it.
> They use clickstream data from Bing toolbar users to improve their search results.

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.

George Harrison didn't mean to copy the song "He's So Fine" when he wrote his song "My Sweet Lord," but he lost the lawsuit anyway and had to pay damages. Whether you call it "clickstream" or "user behavior," Bing is incorporating an association that could only have come from Google, and Google's robots.txt makes it very clear that robots are not allowed to mine search results.

> But that's not unethical, and Google is doing the same thing.

As has been mentioned many times, Google does not take user behavior from the toolbar as a signal for ranking.
There is a huge industry going on on these kinds of sites - not necessarily done by the site owners...

Generally there are two monitizations for a third party; first of all being an affiliate and sending traffic can be big bucks (I paid for my wedding as a referrer for SexSearch and AdultFriendFinder - I'm not ashamed because I didn't use necessarily shady practices to accomplished this). With big bucks, I mean an easy $45 (at the time) per signup, more if it were a female registering. Having a day making $2k wasn't unheard of.

The second, shadier method, is that there will be "service providers" posing or automating profiles on these sites. The "service providers" (escorts, phone sex, porn sites, rival "dating" sites or plain our scammers) attempt to get the people to use their service by enticing the end-user and making them believe they are a real person. This is generally overlooked because for these new unpaid accounts, their curiosity gets the best of them when they can't read these private messages they are getting, and they end up paying for an account. (It was even beneficial to me, even though I wasn't luring anyone in to paying for an account, these service providers would convert them for me).

The thing that backfires is that so many of these service providers will hurt the quality of a site by making users instantly see that something is wrong - just like in the parent article. It's in WooMe's interest (if they are indeed not doing it themselves) to take control over this kind of misuse, and not let it get out of control - they will just lose real users, and in the end money.
How exactly do you define feminists? If you define feminists as a few hundred radicals who work in universities, you'll get one answer, but if you define feminists as the few hundred million people who believe that woman should have the same legal and social rights and privileges as men, you'll get a very different answer.

I mean, my wife and mother are both feminists. And they both have (or are getting) graduate degrees in electrical engineering. And they're both masters of "rationalism and emotional reserve" -- so in a very glaring way, your argument here contradicts my experience.
With regards to liability: your main defense against liability is not your corporate structure or your terms of service. It is not pissing anyone off so bad that they decide to sue you.

I agree that "doing good" is necessary but unfortunately, not sufficient legal protection.

You're overlooking those whose business model is "revenue by lawyer". There are scumbags out there who haven't figured out how to make money legitimately, so they just sue the most likely target. Paying them off is often more cost effective than prevailing in court, regardless of the merits of their case. I know one who kept his small business alive for 3 years with a settlement from a large corporation who just wanted him to go away.

If may not matter now, but once you're big enough, they will find you. Make sure your legal moat is in place ahead of time.
Yes, I'm curious to see how they deal with a response to the messages. Seems like it would be a lot of trouble for them to do anything besides send some fake messages and not reply to them (although I guess they could automate those, too).

It would really be interesting to create a second account, or even a second paid account, and see if any of the messages were exactly the same.
Erik Hollensbe: PostgreSQL on EBS
World's Best Aviation Photography 
World's Best Aviation Photography
Is that what you understood from my comment?

Little bit touchy ;)
Here's a suggestion for WooMe, if it wants to cling to some credibility or at least plausible deniability: upgrade the journo's account for free, so that he can contact the senders of those messages. If the messages are offering dates, and insisting on upgraded levels of membership - case closed. If the messages are promoting some unrelated service - the site has a raging spam problem.

And if the messages are real, I'll be a monkey's uncle.
They used to raise the cap by 10% every year, then last year it jumped 30% and got fixed for the next 5 years. I assume that added clarity was a concession to pressure from WebM even though it meant a higher price hike right now. They also specifically added text clarifying that the cap was not limited to a 10% yearly rise so the max amount payable is explicity unknown and unlimited.
Amazon's current video service is not that great. The downloader does not work. Streaming works fine, but when you buy a movie... you should be able to download it to your computer.
Or paying scammers to "prove" the bleeding obvious. I'm not sure that getting no replies to private messages (happens all the time on legit sites) is any better a standard of proof than 16 hot girls sending generic messages of interest in dating a horse (doesn't happen).

For all I know, one of the Nigerians in my spam folder really is sitting on piles of cash, but I don't think it would be good investigative journalism to give them small sums of money to test how many of them aren't lying.
Dashboard.me is a startup which focuses on your activity online
Perhaps whether they call you after the limit depends on why you went over the limit. It should be easy to determine if the reason you went over is a torrent (even if they can't figure out what torrent), video streaming, or something else.
You have to try ebuyer (http://ebuyer.com) shipping. It blows my mind when I order from them how fast they can ship, I've ordered at ~10:45PM (11PM cut off) and had it ~7AM the next day, I still can't comprehend how well oiled their shipping process must be to get that done.
Competition between these two is important for everyone wants high quality search services. If you have more players they will compete each other by improving their services. A single huge search engine is unhealthy for everyone and on the long term you will notice a decline in quality and this will affect the quality of your online life.

So it is a good thing that today Google has a serious competition.
I've had Prime (US) for awhile and I couldn't be happier with it. I don't think I've ever opted for 1-day shipping, but I'll often receive items next-day anyways.
There's a great scene where young Pham, a kid from a medieval world, learns to maintain a 5000-year-old legacy code base on a starship:

http://books.google.com/books?id=GUUvxumMf6kC&lpg=PA226&...

Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. "The word for all this is 'mature programming environment.' Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here." She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. "We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don't have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I've been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need."

"Almost precisely." Bret was grinning again. "With some minor revisions."
Just curious: when they write "Unlimited", what exactly do they mean? Wouldn't this be a spammer's good investement?
171 (and counting) Enterprise Applications that you can try for Free
The most important benefits of musical education are harder to quantify than awards in competitions. Unfortunately, the latter are easier to use as college application fodder.

Why study music? Because it can let you explore the edges of what your fine motor control is capable of, and what your senses and consciousness can perceive. Because it is a doorway to the mysteries of art and being. Because it can bring people together. Because several years of intense study can bring someone pride in skill and deep joy and happiness for the rest of their lives.

Prioritizing a short-term gain (like enabling your kids to signal to college admissions officers in their teens) over all of the above strikes me as shallow. To me, there is no excuse for besmirching something so wonderful as music by turning it into drudgery for the sake of impressing strangers.

That said, prioritizing an even shorter term gain -- like being untruthful to your kids and praising them for looking cute and making noises so they can experience an ersatz pride -- is an even shallower wallow in mediocrity.
Extensive list of e-mail marketing services, free and paid: http://techblog.willshouse.com/?p=522

(Constant Contact, iContact, Vertical Response, StreamSend, and many more)
Really? Perhaps I'm atypical, but PayPal as your payment option always struck me as amateur hour. Not enough to keep me from buying, but it doesn't inspire trust.

If PayPal really enhanced customer trust, I'd expect to see more large retail corporations using it as a payment option.
Reflector is a fantastic tool. I have no problem with them charging a very fair price for it.
I'm certain (non-sarcastically) that fraud is a Hard Problem. But it's not so Hard that Paypal doesn't make money; why do you claim it isn't possible for somebody to solve the same Hard problem but have non-atrocious customer service?
I'm looking for that service. What are your qualifications and how can I contact you?
Miguel and the mono team will probably knock this out before the weekend.
I agree $35 isn't a ripoff price, but not that 'everybody needs to be paid'.

For instance, Red Gate recently added an F# mode, which essentially doesn't work. If Reflector had been open source and free, I'd have been willing to get this feature running. The benefit I'd derive from a working F# mode would likely make the effort worthwhile.
I'd say you know the H264 devil a little better. Why? Because its spec and patents have been extremely well documented for a decade (or so), commented on, and implemented (there are at least 10 implementations I know of).

Whereas WebM's details first came to light less than a year ago.

You're right that it is possible that either still violate some patent out in the wild. BUT if you were to weigh the odds -- a nearly decade old open standard technology that has openly solicited and worked to get all potential patent holders in the pool OR a technology closed and proprietary until last year. You really call even money on that?
(As a side note, it would be interesting to use Reflector to decompile Reflector itself and remove the expiration date or extend it to the far future. I know it's illegal and unethical, but it would be a fun and interesting exercise.)
Yeah. I do not believe free but not open source can live for a long time. If it becomes good - it will require more dedication to work on product. And this could be achieved either by open source community or by charging for product.