skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Try not to worry about annual raises within your company. Chances are you'll get anywhere between zero and cost of living, with maybe the best performer in your group getting an extra percentage point. It's just not worth getting worked up over.

Think instead about increasing your value as much as possible while you're at this company. Once you're demonstrably worth a lot more than you're currently making, it's time to move on. The next guy will pay you what you're worth, whereas your current employer will find excuses to keep paying you what they're paying you.

Repeat this every 2-3 years early in your career and before long you'll be where you belong, salary wise. It's a shame that it works this way, because often one of your first companies will be a really nice place to work. If you stay there, though, you'll stay underpaid throughout your career.
Oh come on, COME ON, I'm all for research too, but 15 messages from women in the middle of the night who want to date a horse is not something that requires going deep undercover before you decide that it's fake. And he said that it would cost him $60 just to contact anyone or do anything on that site.
I don't have the time to go looking for it, but he does in fact make precisely this claim in one of his video talks that I watched a few weeks back. Make of that what you will...
Free Internet porn isn't unfair competition to pay sites
Vaccine for Cocaine Addiction Discovered
It's this kind of stuff that always gets me fired up about one of my previous employers and the cadre of clones that they run.

What WooMe is doing is nothing different than any other adult "dating" website in that they send messages to users with the hopes of getting them to sign up with a recurring charge (that the company hopes they forget about) and then immediately cut off almost all of this instant contact that the paid user just received. Then about a week later they'll send out a mass mailer to a set of demographics with more fake messages just to string that person and get them to continue forgetting about that recurring $24.99 charge.

Don't even get me started on upselling.
They appear to be spamming for the express purpose of converting free woome users to paid ones. Come on.
You want to call them out here? Maybe with an anonymous handle if they know you?
Ok, that is pretty damning.

If someone signs up and realises they've been duped, they probably won't even contest the CC charge due to a variation on the Small Penis Rule: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_penis_rule

They'll just cancel their account to avoid being rebilled.
Thanks. I will try to make a more modern looking one.Sidenote the UI is just a paint drawing of what I was thinking. It is not the real UI
"As corny as it may sound, we were particularly impressed with Guy Kawasaki’s ‘Create value and money will follow’ advice when we started up...Had we known then that he was going to create AllTop in future, we would have probably introspected a little more before buying his line of advice."

I don't understand this statement, specifically the reference to AllTop. Can someone offer me some insight?
Every time I read an article like this, I wonder again: Why is no one competing with PayPal? People talk about sites like Google Checkout or WePay, but they are not viable alternatives, either because of different fee structures, international availability or other issues. Is PayPal doing something so hard that none of the incredibly talented and intelligent people in the startup world feel capable of challenging them? I feel like anyone who can replicate the right subset of their features (to start with) and guarantee good customer service would instantly have tens of thousands of jilted PayPal customers signing up. "PayGuys: We're Not PayPal". From zero to hero. Am I crazy?
At Google we strongly believe in innovation
If you have an native (non-javascript) object that has been bound to a Javascript object, this is where the link between the two is stored. Basically on the C side of the bindings, when a native function is called, you receive the "this" object, and you can simply call JSObjectGetPrivate() to retrieve a pointer to the corresponding native object - assuming that you have previously called JSObjectSetPrivate...
HTML5 and Web Video: Questions for the Industry from the Community
Although strictly speaking you're right, it breaks the intent of robots.txt as the users' clickstream is fed into the server-side indexing engine alongside robot crawled data.

Arguing that according to the strict letter of the spec, robots.txt only has to be obeyed by true crawlers does hold water as strictly speaking Bing could disregard robots.txt altogether - it's not certainly not legally enforceable. The intent of robots.txt is clear and Bing should be trying to obey it wherever possible.

In this case it appears the keyword was associated because it was typed into the Google search box, and from the there to the faked destination. IMHO when the clickstream was analysed it should have disregarded clickstreams that pass a robots.txt-excluded page as these could establish associations that were not supposed to revealed by crawlers.

We aught to hold Bing and any search engine to the highest standard when talking about crawling etiquette.

Also, see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2169817
You know they can do better, but they traded rigor for money and fame.

This is a relatively uncommon viewpoint. I thank you for sharing it. One should automatically suspect the popular interpreters of any field of trading "rigor for money and fame." If you have any blog posts on this subject, I'd be curious for the URLs. The Freakonomics guys have a bit of popular recognition which could be leveraged for marketing an OkCupid book. That said, it's likely that OkCupid has enough popular recognition to leverage for book sales on its own.
It however looks like a user and people will think it's a user. So it's a fake user.
You know, I suppose had they put a Paypal button on okcupid's home page saying "donate now to prevent match.com from acquiring us" they would have easily garnered more than $50m.

As a user, I almost feel betrayed that they sold out to match.com.

Edit PS: Not betrayed because they sold out, but who they sold out to. I would have cheered an acquisition from a non competitor (ie like amazon as mentioned previously).
I didn't say you fabricated the story, I am taking issue with you claiming they are fake users, made by us. They are not, they're real users of the site. Could be there was a lot of spam on the site at that time - but we weren't sending you fake activity. You acknowledge that the lady in the picture was real.

We didn't do anything to stop these getting to you, as you say elsewhere in this thread. Since you weren't top online anymore (and if you're not engaging you also drop off the top of the 'online now' list) you just didn't get these messages anymore.

As for contacting us... well, I'm sorry, I guessed we dropped it. I've been trying to track down your email and I can't find it.
fwiw, to provide a counterargument, i'm stuck with paypal. i applied to a "real" payment gateway and was denied due to low estimated processing volume.
Let me consult my list of companies which make money from being MPEG LA licensors:
Apple
Cisco
Daewoo
Dolby
Fuijitsu
HP
Hitachi
Philips
LG
Microsoft
Mitsubishi
NTT
Panasonic
Samsung
Sharp
Siemens
Sony
Ericsson
Toshiba
Reference: http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx

I am SHOCKED to hear that Microsoft would like to continue receiving royalties from all those H.264 license fees and doesn't give a toss about open standards.
crap - will be sticking to my free version. Soon they will charge for access to their own software documentation.
Just wanted to say that this is perhaps the most accurate response to this sort of situation that I've heard in awhile. If it is a good piece of work, why not pay for it? The time it would take to verify a FOSS solution meets your needs already outweighs the $35 perpetual license fee. Not to mention, this thing rocks.

For fun and profit, peek into some Silverlight containers and run Reflector on the DLLs.
Someone should take a copy of the OkCupid blog. That place is a wonderful source for interesting facts about attraction.
I generally buy a hardcopy, or do pdf. I use the kindle to read books primarily (not textbooks, news, periodicals, etc), but I definitely agree that some of the conversions with images aren't great and diagrams aren't always crisp.

Does anyone have any input using actual textbooks on a kindle, or kindle dx? The iPad is great for diagrams/textbooks so long as you aren't reading pages upon pages at at time.
You're doing this for work, right? Why not go ahead and pay the $25 and see what the messages say?
which for an annual subscription fee of $79 a year gives users unlimited free two-day shipping, for a while

2 days? Is it different in the US then? We get next day shipping with Prime in the UK (usually I can order up to about 8pm at night and have it arrive next day by lunch).

On the topic of the article; seems like a very vague piece of speculation. But also seems a reasonable move for Amazon to make ("Kindle Video", anyone?) at some point. Being free to Prime customers seems unlikely to be honest, but if that is their model it sounds killer!

Predictions;

1. The streaming won't be best quality (at least at first)

2. Will be US only for aaaaaaaaaaages :(
What about a .org dating site with similar culture? How much did OkCupid cost to run? Could someone Kickstarter such a site into existence?
Indeed. This is the reality that forces everybody in tech to switch jobs so often.

A company that was realistic with the value of their staff might find that they kept their good employees for more than a year or two.
Let's be clear, Google hard coded search results for PR purposes and generated the PR with a 20 engineer black hat operation specifically intended to inject the honeypots into Bing's results. It was not a clever little hack. It was a multi-man year industrial espionage operation utilizing some of the best talent in the industry for the sake of a PR win.

The fact that Google's operation only succeeded with 7 out of 100 honeypots is telling evidence that Microsoft is explicitly trying not to do what Google is accusing it of doing given the scale of Google's operation.

This has nothing to do with Bing. Google's Prime Directive is their promise and no one else's. The fundamental nature of a promise is that it breaking it is not excused by "the ends justify the means."

However, some people may consider a promise to be breakable under extraordinary circumstances. I won't disagree that such a belief can be considered reasonable. But the circumstances under which Google violated their Prime Directive are hardly extraordinary - dragging Microsoft through the mud at a search conference
They're all way outside US jurisdiction (where all these sites operate), so there's really no point. These aren't people I know personally, merely acquaintances from various black hat communities. Honour among thieves, and all that.
He's got nothing on the World's #1 Hacker, Gregory D. Evans. His e-book is awesome. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/22/worlds_no_1_hacker/
I'm not sure why Firefox has to support H.264 on all its platforms, but in this case it can, through Flash.

Even if it couldn't, why would it be a bad thing for Firefox to support OS-supplied codecs on OS X and Windows, and a set of built-in codecs, such as WebM, on Linux?
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H.264 patents are a red herring because WebM is not known to be patent free either. The assumption is that patent holders are waiting for WebM to gain traction before springing the lawsuits.

The devil you know versus the devil you don't.
To be fair, packages have a hell of a lot further to travel to get across USA than here in England, so the longer shipping time would make sense.

As to your predictions, I agree with it being US-only (if it happens), but I would expect good quality. I mean, it's not like they're some random company with no understanding of the web, they do have AWS' infrastructure to use.
I know you're not the only person to have that thought today; and given the volume of the readership on this site, I'd pretty much bet money that a LOT of people are thinking about that right now. I'd do it, but I'm too busy with other projects. But I'd be amazed if another PoF / OKCupid style competitor doesn't emerge in short-order.

Maybe one will even go through YCombinator. pg and crew have said they see that as an area they'd fund:

(http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html)

8. Dating. Current dating sites are not the last word. Better ones will appear. But anyone who wants to start a dating startup has to answer two questions: in addition to the usual question about how you're going to approach dating differently, you have to answer the even more important question of how to overcome the huge chicken and egg problem every dating site faces. A site like Reddit is interesting when there are only 20 users. But no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users—which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem.
Lisp and Erlang Atoms, Ruby and Scheme Symbols. How useful are they?
Game-theoretically, defecting only dominates in the one-shot prisoner's dilemma; the iterated prisoner's dilemma has other solutions which can resemble Omerta.
Sounds like a good fit for you guys. I really like your service and value in this space. This was a market we were thinking about serving but Prefinery being stalled made us question its value, so we weren't thinking of this kind of focus.

Congrats on this coming together really nicely and best wishes for you all.
If Amazon & Netflix start becoming full-on competitors, it would seem to make Netflix's use of AWS a little awkward. I wonder if Netflix will regret the decision to move more and more of their infrastructure into Amazon's hands.
I use DevPay for S3stat.

They built it as a way to upsell Amazon Web Services, but I don't use it that way. It turns out that it's also a dead-simple way to handle recurring payments for a web application. It's orders of magnitude less work to implement than Amazon's other payment services.

The downside is that they don't put much love into it. Obvious features, such as manually cancelling a subscription or being notified when somebody cancels are missing, so there is a bit of pain to offset the ease of getting it up and running.

That said, I'd use it again.
Do they not have state level distribution centers? If not, I see your point.

I also just recalled; recently Amazon bought the British company LoveFilm (who also do streaming).. interesting timing.
>> Actually, that is Google's core business, and from the amount of revenue it's generated most likely harder than rocket science.

You're talking about all of the work needed to make a search engine good, I'm talking about the specific algorithm needed for that particular type of query (rare, obscure, easily misspelled word). Different scopes.

And again, my observation in that bullet point is that, imho, the "torsoraphy" type of query could have been improved by something like the "close enough to rare word? + does wiki page exist?" algorithm, rather than copying.

Re: recording click history being shady: I don't really see what's so fundamentally different between that and recording surfing habits via ads. It goes back to the first point: Google could say they don't use that data to improve SERP relevance, but we're going on faith on that claim.
The W3C (via the WHAT WG) did have a royalty free codec as part of the spec in Ogg Theora. It was removed because it became clear that key players (specifically Nokia and Apple) were refusing to implement it, spec or no. A spec that doesn’t match what people are willing to implement isn’t a very good spec.
Rather than downvote you, I'll disagree in a reply.

Ads are an extremely unreliable business model. If you want to be an entrepreneur, run a business. If you want to run a business, sell stuff. Don't fall into the trap of "oh, I'll just tack some ads on later and we'll be fine."
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2009/09/123_52401.h...

South Korea built vast infrastructure around IE6 and ActiveX. Just a year ago a full 60% of Korean traffic still came from IE6. Why? Because they relied heavily on features that were not in the spec that Microsoft deprecated and nobody else can or will implement.

An extreme example. But it highlights the importance of sticking to specs that can be freely implemented by anyone. Five years from now when MPEGLA decides to throw down the crap hammer do you want to have to keep around old Safari binaries just for sites that migrated to h264 while the rest of the web moved on?
so the thing in the screencast is not a message from a user, nor does it claim to be.

It's actually an experiment with a 3rd party to see if an automated response system converts people to our paid service well.
IAAL. If you do the self-service route for terms of service, make sure you do your homework. If you do a search/replace on someone else's terms (even those offered under CC or other permissive licenses), make sure you at least run some Google searches on the rationale behind each clause of the terms. There is a HUGE amount of common ground from one site's terms to another's, but you can still get badly burned if you miss something on liability, IP rights, user generated content, etc.

The one area that I recommend you learn about is enforceability of online terms. Make sure you understand concepts like unconscionable terms, conspicuous notice, valid assent, and so on. These are big, ugly words, but the concepts behind them are not difficult to grasp. Every online transaction is a balance between disclosing important terms to users on the one hand, and not being obnoxious about it on the other hand.

Same advise applies to privacy policies, although it's worth noting that those are typically just plain language disclosures of your practices (at least in the U.S.)

Anyway, I'm curious because I'm considering offering review/preparation of website terms and privacy policies as a fixed fee service: what would you say is a fair price for that?

(Obligatory: My comments above aren't intended as legal advice and I don't represent anyone on HN.)
We had that situation back in the early days of modern mainstream internet. Remember Real Player? WMV embedding? It was not fun.
Bah! Ramzi is my main 1337 h4xX0r man! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDFXaqDf8kk
i agree that its most likely fake, but it seems like TC would be able to comp him for the $30 for a membership it would take to lend weight to the story.

are the messages fake? again, yeah, probably. but its also concievable that one or two are "lol a horse" type of messages. kind of depends on how the site itself works.
Guy, bless his heart, often preaches voodoo. His quote essentially means that you don't need to worry about where the revenue will come from -- just create something cool and the money will get to you somehow.

They're saying: BS. Start a business. Think about a business model. Charge users.

(AllTop is an RSS aggregator for a variety of interest areas like Museums, Cigars, and BBQ. There is absolutely no revenue model except for publishing advertisements. Guy, being Net-famous, was able to sell it after about a year's work. Your mileage will definitely vary from that.)
Book of Red-gate - I want to create a company like... (red-gate)
Most interesting bit: "Microsoft is willing to commit that we will never assert any patents on VP8 if Google will make a commitment to indemnify us and all other developers and customers who use VP8 in the future. We would only ask that we be able to use those patent rights if we are sued first by somebody else. If Google would prefer a patent pool approach, then we would also agree to join a patent pool for VP8 on reasonable licensing terms so long as Google joins the pool and is able to include all other major providers of playback software and devices."

Could be an olive branch, or it could be a veiled threat (they seem to be implying that VP8, much like Linux, actually infringes Microsoft patents). Unfortunately the rest of it seems like political posturing, and Mr Hachamovitch has always been seemed a slippery character (going on his posts to that blog) so I'd have to assume this is a cunning rhetorical trap rather than a genuine offer until someone who knows better convinces me otherwise.
Stormpulse has around 5 million uniques per year and the ad model still isn't viable without destroying the user experience.

In other words, you need more traffic than most people can fathom.
I've no idea about their US distribution, but presumably in a country so much bigger than the UK, if they did have a massively larger distribution network, they would also have to charge more for the service. Maybe they opted for a slightly less impressive service rather than a higher price tag.
Amazon video-on-demand is actually a great service, technically speaking, and they already have a streaming library at least as large as Netflix. I am actually very surprised that Amazon has it so tucked away in their site and don't promote it much.

While it currently isn't economically viable for heavy consumers using it as a substitute for TV, as Netflix is, they definitely already have the technology in place. All they need to do is get the pricing/subscription model right.
Expect a big push for WP7 once it available on Verizon/Sprint. Microsoft in underdog mode is a very different and dangerous beast. See Windows,Xbox, Word, Excel, NT, Exchange, .NET, IE. The first few versions were laughed at and dismissed but later ones mostly blew away the competition(yes, IE was better than Netscape in the 4.0 and 5.0 days while Netscape took forever to release their 6.0).

Apple likes to retreat into it's niche where it controls everything (helps avoid antitrust regulators breathing down its neck) and has high margins. This is already happening with the iPhone. Android while gaining in popularity, lacks the polish in the UI and performance.

Even with much better raw hardware, Android performs worse compared to Windows Phone 7. See http://pockethacks.com/windows-phone-7-smoother-than-dual-co...

The going empirical formula is version 3 of their products are when they start becoming good. While WP7 is technically version 7, it's actually a complete reboot of the platform with zero backward compatibility. They're taking the middle route between iPhone and Android, having variety in hardware but strict hardware requirements to prevent fragmentation and a controlled app ecosystem. That said, they don't have a good tablet strategy. Maybe Windows 8 will really be tablet optimized, or maybe tablet hardware will catch up to make it run smoothly(the Win UI is still a hard problem on tablets though). Or maybe they will port the Windows Phone UI to tablets.

In short, very interesting times are ahead in the mobile/tablet space and it would be a mistake to write Microsoft off.
i've had a thought on how to run an online dating site rattle around in my head for a while. always wanted to give it a shot, but i'm still busy working on something else. i even coughed it up on a HN ideas thread a while back, just to see if it would get made.

if i were to suddenly have more free time, i'd probably give it a shot, myself.
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It should, if they're sending data back to the mothership. Alexa's toolbar among others should respect robots.txt
MongoDB vs. Clustrix: Fault Tolerance and Availability
Smalltalk should be in the list :)