skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So for those of you that have worked on porn sites- why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly).

Many have parts that are broken, they are slow, have really messy HTML, rely super heavily on flash, and just lack most modern features that most sites would have.

I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks', where the content is the same, but there's nice RSS feeds, everything has strong semantic meaning, HTML5 is everywhere, they use jquery for consistent javascript rendering, the pages scale properly when you size them up, and hell... maybe even try for some user accessibility.

I just have yet to run across a good porn site that looks technically as impressive as someone's 4 hour rails project even. Of course, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.
Except that algorithm isn't lru
Technically, with NAT you don't even have a route to the internal stuff. While with the pure firewall approach there is a route.

In practice, yeah, not much of a difference.
I always look at that stuff and I ask about it during interviews, but I still ask general technical questions. Sometimes the candidate's contribution to a project is nothing more than writing the README file.
Every employee should blog? The horror. The author needs to keep in mind:

1. Not everyone is an extrovert
2. Not everyone philosophizes about his job
3. There are tons of companies doing fine without a blog - and they don't blog about it ;)
Probably wouldn't take too long to check what % are pingable, which would give you a lower bound.
Flame throwers would work nicely
Not sure on how to monetarily quantify it to be honest, I guess the difference between being a 10's of millions a year and being 100's of millions a year.

As I said, I am willing to step down as CEO and just remain a CTO at least for the time being, however the other cofounder's stance is that I don't deserve even that much. They even went so far as to suggest I don't deserve even a code monkey job in the future.
New app for iPhone/iPad users
Any comments?
Yes, I did misread the proof. Thanks for the explanation.
I'm currenty reading 'Machine Learning, an algorithmic perspective' by Marsland. He uses Python and assumes no higher math knowledge. I would recommend it to get a basic and intuitive understanding. He explains things in English, then presents the math notation, then explains the math notation in English again. Then, he provides Python code, and explains the Python code in English. Radical, I know.

I'm also using http://www.nltk.org/ NLTK to do document classification for a client right now, using insights gleaned from his book and also metaoptimzie (http://metaoptimize.com/qa).
I like your stock market insider information analogy because it illustrates the flaw in Google's experiment very well. And very few people seem to realize it. I need to modify it slightly though to make it more analogous.

Suppose your financial advisor (Google) was suspecting that someone (Bing) was stealing their confidential financial reports on stocks. Suppose your financial advisor told you (Google Engineer) to buy 100 random shares (search and click on 100 specific search terms) and see if the suspect (Bing) acted on it.

Even if the suspect bought 100% of the shares (Bing indexes all the search terms with the irrelevant links), you still haven't proven the suspect is stealing information from the financial advisor because there's more than one source this information could have come from. It could have come from you (Google Engineer doing the clicking) or it could have come from your financial advisor (Google itself). A way to solve this issue is if you (Google engineer) had another financial advisor (another website) which told you to buy certain companies. If the suspect didn't act on those shares then you would have MUCH more conclusive evidence that the suspect was stealing from the financial advisor represented by Google.
arguably, the FOIA request cost the government as much money as the favicon, since these employees would have had to dig through old records to gather the information, as well as respond to the emails
The "dating" process only works when both parties are available. If the candidate currently has a job asking them to take time off (or worse, quit without a guaranteed offer) is asking a lot.
At first blush, this seems quite similar to Opera's Speed Dial and the Firefox and Chrome extensions that emulate it.
Answers.com Agrees to be Acquired for $127 Million in Cash: $10.50 per Share
Why Culture is Key
Ten core values of Wealthfront, our engineering manifesto and why culture is so strategic to our company.
Good point, I actually thought of doing that and then dismissed it. Maybe the best perfoming way would be to use the remainder as the index to an array (suggested in another comment)?
Give away something, anything for free in exchange for signing up.

Try what hipster did - http://sanfrancisco.usehipster.com/
The devil's in the details, but the angels are there, too.

Amazing how much impact these "minor" changes can have on the bottom line.

Thanks for the reminder to split test all things great and small.
True. You could easily say this about all professional relationships:

"Don’t confuse being friendly with your ___’s with ___’s as your friend"
This method has made me remember an old interview (1998) and smile.

The interviewer started explaining what I'd be working on. In a few minutes it wasn't an interview anymore, but a free consulting session. He clearly forgot why we were there and even started to take notes!

I was offered the job, but later refused because another offer was better.
I wonder what kind of activities constitute the top 5% of data users? Anyone know of data usage stats and associated activities?
Quitting my job to work on mobile apps and travel the world: One month later
It's been one month since I gave up my day job to work on mobile apps full time and take a one year round the world trip with my wife. Here is a slightly irreverent one year retrospective. Comments and questions are welcome.
I hate to be a stick in the mud, but you have to ask algorithm questions, and you have to ask them to code an implementation. If you hire a lot of people, that is simply the only way to avoid making (some) horrible hires who later cost you dearly. Portfolio of code is not a substitute - you don't know exactly how much the candidate contributed to it himself, and you can't trust your own ability to evaluate a lot of code written by someone else, not unless you spend an unreasonable amount of time on it. Working with a person for a week is not realistic for most places that hire a lot of candidates. A lot of the time I decided to skip all that boring, old-fashioned tech interview stuff and hire someone who looks great on the basis of something else -- anything else, I've regretted it. I do admit things are different if you're in a tiny startup and basically looking for a co-founder rather than an employee in a big organization. But even then I'd really like to do a brief algorithm and coding run to be sure.
why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly)

because it doesn't make business sense to make them better? concept that most HN readers will probably have hard time understanding.
I worked with this a bit at UMass, it's not bad at all. Also from UMass, be sure to check out Factorie the probabilistic factor graph framework in Scala.

http://code.google.com/p/factorie/
+1, Excellent post. You should have a blog or something...

I've noticed this too when examining what I view to be problem spaces. Often there is truly room for technical innovation alone - a better way to do something - but it is only when this technical innovation actually addresses a pain-point that you end up with something great.

For example I've been looking at some ideas in the personal debt-reduction space lately. It's easy to dream up technically better tools that could help people visualize and track how they can pay off their debts and build wealth, but that would require the assumption that the tools alone are people's only pain point. Paying down debt isn't fun. It takes a long commitment with no short term reward. It's not sexy. Work from these assumptions and somehow address them and you've helped solve a pain-point. Work from the assumption that we can build a better tool with feature x, and you ignore the real problem, and your real opportunity to address it.
Home Interior Decorating
The largest collection of interior design and decorating ideas for home improvement, renovations and remodeling online. Includes kitchens and bathrooms.
I think that becomes a better question if it's in a strange base, like 12. The implementation is exactly the same, but good candidates are not necessarily sitting there thinking "I'd just use sprintf, or maybe a stringstream."
Newport beach houses ocean front properties and investments
11-20 seems like a pretty uninformative range, assuming you want to draw conclusions (maybe you don't!) from the results, as it is in this range that you experience the most noticeable increase in both maturity and knowledge.

11-15 and 16-20 would have been significantly more telling. (As an aside, this is especially strange considering ranges such as 41-45.)
Only if they both stole the consumer token and were able to phish the user into going through the authorization flow.
#1 - Agreed.
#2 - Mandate a set of browsers if you work in a tech company that produces a web app, otherwise in a large enterprise you'll have a lot of security concerns and the bearded suspenders in IT will lunch you.
#3 - Give parents the opportunity to shirk work and burden their childless colleagues? Awesome idea. If you make #3 a company-wide policy for everyone, you'll make redundant the other nine items in this post.
#4 - Only works with serious, well-trained and educated employees. If you have a ban on them in the first place, aside from security reasons, you're not working in a place that puts the employee ahead of anything.
#5 - You're out of your mind.
#6 - Will be used with less frequency as a normal social network but can easily be used to facilitate offline communication, but also subjected to the same hierarchy forces found in the org chart. Not a long-term solution.
#7 - This only works if you have a small group of people with similar interests. Can easily become a distraction.
#8 - I'm not child, don't treat me like one by suggesting I engage in games that have hidden morality lessons.
#9 - Great, phone and email from random recruiters will increase tenfold.
#10 - Great if you can get the c-level to think that they don't have all the answers. Also, as soon as tickets pile up, they'll assign handling it to the IT manage it via HR and they'll treat it like yet another ticketing system.

Overall, I see these recs as 2-3 out of 7.
Anyone else notice that even Matt's site ranks below other sites who have copied the content after this change? Here's a search for the 3rd paragraph of content in the original blog post:

http://goo.gl/vVs8A

Some sites, including this one:
http://www.boonebank.com/brc/SBR_template.cfm?Document=headl...

... which links back to the original post (is that not supposed to acknowladge the original source of the article?) and quotes Matt ranks higher in my SERP results
Nice presentation, thanks! Sorry it's not getting the traction it deserves. Maybe people have 'moved on'.

A couple possibly interesting followups:

1) If one was to use the Google Toolbar, would it send similar data?

2) Are links to and from https pages tracked any differently?
How a Band of Geeks Survived a Lynch Mob Assault in Egypt
Great point. I think another example is XML. It was going to free us from proprietary, binary data formats by making everything nice and understandable pointy brackets. Everyone understands things written in pointy brackets, right?

The reality is that we got OOXML and ODF, which are so enormously complex that no piece of software except Microsoft Word and OpenOffice could hope to fully implement them. If there was an ACID3 test for either it would be fully clear how bad and non-interoperable the situation is. We got XHTML, which turned out to be a horrible idea ( http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/01/14/thought_experime... ) and is now abandoned. We got XML schema, because everyone realized that when you have structured data you want data types, instead of everything being just text.

And because XML seduces you into thinking it's much simpler than it actually is, people write their own parsers and generators all the time that have no hope of knowing what to do with a CDATA section, and you get parsers that will fail if the whitespace isn't just exactly right. The whole thing is a giant farce.

Just like you say, people got excited about the promise of XML. This is the perennial problem when people try to create standards in an area that doesn't actually have any compelling implementations yet. Good standards refine and codify existing practice. Bad standards try to invent something and standardize it at the same time.
Traffic Squeezer - CDN (Content Distribution Network) Optimization
Traffic Squeezer - Cloud Networks Optimization
Yeah I was just thinking the same thing. I'll change that. Thanks!
Looks like Stanford already did this with their block:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IP_address_...

Its a pretty interesting list of companies that still hold onto these blocks.
IPhone and Android application development using Titanium
"may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand."

"Verizon says it will only do this if you fall in the top 5% of the company's data users"

To me this sounds fair to users and good for business. I'm part of the 95% and would prefer to do business with a company that puts my needs ahead of the 5% heaviest users.
Could someone please tell me the simple RSS feed for the comments here on HN?
I think the worse news is the transcoding proxies they are announcing, not-so-transparently lowering the quality of any JPEG and MPEG files you download. This is why the Internet needs end-to-end encryption on by default.
Well, you forgot the 2 hour meeting to get approval of everyone involved, then the changes needed after the team weighed in, another meeting for final approval (assuming there was only one round of revisions - this is government here) and then actual implementation. You also forgot the time it took the designer to come up with the original concept - you can't just sit down and produce a production-ready favicon without knowing what it is you're drawing.

So, lets call it 10 hours, roughly? So 58.50/hr...
I'd like to know what the cost of getting this response was, sure the icon's expensive but at that rate it probably cost another couple of hundred to give all this information (I know it's internal and not a contractor but someone has to do it).
Top reasons why we won't use your Perl CPAN distribution
The dev that posts OAuth secrets in support tickets also probably hasn't constructed a fortress of awesomeness around his own user's data, anyways.
True, but it often feels like a quiz is part of it.
To restate; we can say:

1) Assume that an x exists such that 2=x^x^x^x^...

2) Then x = sqrt(2)

3) sqrt(2)^10 = 32

Therefore there is no such x.

In very brief, we can say that there is no number so infinitesimally close to 1 that infinite exponentiation of it does not 'blow up'.

Or to pull a Calc 1 term: x^x^x^x^... does not converge for all x >1. Simple.
Talking to a co-worker, who used to work in customer service at a different US wireless carrier, this is common practice. His example was customers who use terabytes of data a month would get throttled for the remainder of the period, similar to what Verizon's proposing.

It'd be interesting to know how much data the top 5% of users use.
Machine learning toolkits are the new "web framework".
All I know is that this post just made me feel a lot older. Good God, I'm a 'seasoned vet' at 40.
Some factors to bear in mind before balking:

1) The work was done under a support contract, therefore it was probably billed on time and materials and there may also be a minimum or call-out charge (it's the goal of a lot of companies to be able to charge a daily-rate instead of an hourly one). When they say it's not quoted for separately they mean that they didn't put out an RFP, tender it and agree a fixed price beforehand, they asked Reading Room to do the work under an existing contractual agreement at pre-agreed rates.

2) If the work is of a high priority then the hourly cost is greater.

3) It's a government site therefore they probably have a change management process in place which would mean that before anything touches a production server it has to be signed off. If they do things properly (which I honestly don't believe for a second) then there's no way in the world a developer or designer would be able to touch a production server (let alone two) and this would be someone else's job.

4) the design process may have not been as straightforward as just reducing the size. Perhaps they wanted to try it different colours, etc. ? All we can see is the end result and not the process.

Of course, they may have just been ripped off. But then so have we by making pointless requests under the Freedom of Information Act which isn't going to accomplish anything more than an inflated sense of our own self-worth.
You know, its kind of naive to use a binary to represent gender. Just throwing that out there.
Well, I've written that a handful of times, but those were back when I was an embarrassingly bad programmer. Nowadays, I just use one of the various library functions to do it -- if you count C++, there are somewhere near half a dozen ways. It's a task I perform a lot, but the libraries have it covered.

The very same is true for "sort a linked-list", though, and that seems to be a popular one. This type of question isn't normally asked because they actually expect you to do it, but because if you don't know some specific things, the question will expose that.
It's fairly easy to prove that the sequence x, x^x, x^(x^x), x^(x^(x^x)), ... converges for x=sqrt(2). Further, for x=sqrt(2) the sequence does converge to 2, so you're not entirely correct.
By "What is everyone's gender?" I think you mean "What is your gender?" I do not think "everyone" has singular gender.
It's funny how that works. I suspect social proof was a distraction on that optin form.
What's the nature of the agreement between you. Can you just dissolve the start-up and go your separate ways?
I have a tiered system of ideas. At the bottom I have the easiest and cheapest to deploy (aka web based), and as I move up the tiers the ideas become more expensive and require more capital than I have right now -- these costs are prohibitive in my execution.
I get a 500 error when clicking the link to the article.
SEO Mistakes that Crush Rankings
Offer HN: I'm selling my first startup for 1.5k
I'm a college student/athlete and don't have the time to push this company to its full potential. I'm currently the only member in the LLC. Check out this thread for more info on why I'm selling: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2172239

The Company: AdsReloaded.com is a "paid to try apps" model in which users get paid to download/use iPhone apps. This is similar to Tapzilla (YCS10), Apperang, and AppRedeem.

What you get:
-Web source code. It's a PHP/MySQL based system.

-iPhone code snippets:

1) The source code of the framework that verifies that a user has actually downloaded an app. In addition to verifying that a user downloaded an app the framework also has crack detection.

2) The source code to a native "UDID tool" that smoothes the registration process. This was recently rejected by apple but maybe you can beef up the feature set and get it approved.

-All Databases

Stats:

~600 users signed up (although probably only 70 or so active)

~1300 visitors in January with an average of 2 minutes on the site and 3.3 page views.

~600 in revenue all-time

~Have 3 developers contact me in the last month that I had to turn away due to not being able to support the volume they wanted. Demand is there I just don't have the time to devote to it.

I am asking 1.5k for it. I have invested about 3k of my own money into the project and want to recoup at least half. I am really sad to see it go but I wanted to post to HN first to see if I could find it a good home before I turn to flippa. In the event that two people want the site the person with the highest buying price will win the site.

You can contact me through my profile or at matt.sencenbaugh@gmail.com
For a lot of server hosting customers, prices for additional IPs have already increased steadily over the last few months

That's just retail markup. If you peer with tier 1 transit providers you can still get IPv4 space for practically nothing.
I'll add "other"... :) Sorry about that!
>>>The most beneficial action government can take to support long term growth of startup ecosystems throughout the nation are large Research and Development projects.

Unfortunately the government can't magically create resources. The only thing the government can do is reallocate funds from one area to another which is inefficient. The most efficient form of allocating resources is the market, not central planning.

When the market allocates resources there is a much greater chance of the resources being put to good use because they are seeking to generate a profit. In order to generate a profit people must not only want something, but find the price reasonable.

When the government allocates funds it takes money away from entrepreneurs. More often than not what the government invests in would not be bought by citizens for how much resources they actually put into it. This is completely inefficient, as we are putting in let's say 100,000$ to get something that is worth 10,000$ to the people using it. If this were a business, they would be operating at a huge loss and go out of business. But since it is the government they don't go out of business and continue to misallocate resources.

In the off chance that the government uses these resources efficiently, it is certainly not because of any magical "gift" the government has. In this case, the same exact thing could have been accomplished by entrepreneurs. In fact, entrepreneurs are incentivized to seek out these opportunities because there is profit involved.

The only investments we need the "gift" of government to pursue are those that we get less value out of than we put into. It's hard to argue that these are good investments.
I'm going to assume ~$230/hour includes some pounds-to-dollars conversion I'm not going to do the math to check.

$230/hr is not crazy expensive. It really isn't. At my last job we charged $160/hr for things like "standing around while the phone company is there", or setting up a Dell computer, or sitting in meetings.

The UK government isn't some ramen startup.

Of course, it may be that you can't actually just FTP it to the server. At my current employer, you can't put ANYTHING on any of our web servers without sitting at the console. Which is an hour's drive away from my main office. Security does funny things to productivity.

Who knows? (Apparently the UK government doesn't, either)
> and the Javascript question was to test whether you've ever done anything numerical in JS.

It's a lousy test, then. The fact that someone can't tell you the answer to that question, off the top of their head under interview conditions, might mean they are a newbie claiming to know languages they really don't. However, it could also just mean that they have experience with several dynamically typed languages but, since they would never write something daft like '4'+4 in real code, they would have to look up which interpretation JS happens to use.

In case anyone is wondering, in JavaScript, the answer is 44. However, in Perl, it is 8. In PHP, it is also 8. In Python, it is a type error without an explicit cast. You get the idea.