skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that they probably aren't doing complex user-identification...probably no cookies or JavaScript or anything like that happening on their CDN.

But, IP alone would be enough to follow the trail of most people (I know all the caveats about IP!=individual, but that data is still far from worthless), and collecting IP trails would be absolutely trivial and practically free from a performance perspective. The difference in a high performance webserver environment with logging vs. without logging is less than one percent...probably much less.

With a bit of clever data juggling, and logging of user agents and other information about the client, compare that to past visits from the same IP on properties where facebook has more data (from cookies and logged in activity), and identify users by name with pretty good accuracy.

In short: Performance is not a factor for logging, and facebook wouldn't need a large amount of additional cooperation from the client, like cookies or JavaScript bugs, to track users who aren't logged in. They just need to combine the already available log data in useful ways. A big part of the reason all these fancy distributed key/value stores and BigTable imitators exist (and why facebook has developed their own in-house) is for processing exactly this kind of data.

I'm extremely confident that facebook logs everything, though I have no idea what sorts of things they do with the resulting data.
And it wasn't that hard to find those examples, was it?

The problem with the statement in the original article is that it's not clear if they're referring to blocking torrent sites, or links to Diaspora. In the age of hypertext, it's just polite to link to examples inline, rather than making people hunt down what you're talking about.
While I don't necessarily agree that Twitter is marketing fluff, as you seem to suggest (although I would say it's somewhat overhyped but not as much as, say, Quora), I will add this:

At any particular time there is a Zeitgeist in Silicon Valley. Currently that Zeitgeist is "social". Anything remotely "social" gets hyped into orbit. What's more, you see companies playing into that. VCs/angels are interested in social... entrepreneurs will start "social" companies.

A lot of these "Zeitgeist echoes" seem (at least to me) like they're built to get funding and built to flip. As such, the product is, at best, secondary. Instead you see the focus on getting publicity, getting stories written in TechCrunch, having the New York Times write about you, getting known for being hot amongst Valley insiders and so on.

Thing is, almost none of this translates to the mass market. Twitter at least has some mass market appeal but (at least it seems to me) its use case is narrower than envisioned, largely limited in being a communication vehicle for celebrities to send short messages to a large number of people (rather than being a tool for mass status update distribution, which is more Facebook's sphere of influence).

So I guess int hat respect it is like the movie analogy. Movies are clearly seen as products, almost a factory line in which you can put ingredients such as big-name stars, directors and writers and $100+ million and out comes a blockbuster.

You also see this in hardware it occurs to me. Like all the Android tablets. Motorola etc seem to have no idea of what they're marketing or who they're marketing too. They're simply trying "shotgun marketing" and hoping something sticks. It seems like only Apple and a handful of others really have a coherent vision and strategy (agree with it or not).
Nurturing Genius - A PR Problem that Can't Be Solved By Pretty Faces
Erik Wolpaw was the lead writer of Portal, and is also the writer of Portal II.

The guy can write.
Some people need to be paid to learn something(a job), or pay someone to force them to learn something(trade $ for a grade/degree).
Comic Sans? Seriously?
Judge Unexpectedly Imprisons Goldman Programmer
You might tell him to stop coding and think long and hard about how he could be help with a goal. Tell him the goals of your work. Let him come up with a plan for himself, and if it doesn't work, then he will be OK with it.

It is easy to be harsh and curt, but taking a little patience to deal with this is worth while. You may learn something yourself.
probably the radio or antenna
> Games like Fallout 3 and Bioshock rely heavily on storytelling.

Compare Bioshock to System Shock 2 though; Bioshock is extremely simplified in order to still be playable on point-n-grunt console platforms.
This is not exactly new behavior for them; it's just a new platform. Gmail and Apps users have dealt with this for years.

Customer service and support continues to be the single biggest thing that Google gets wrong. And I say this as an unabashed Google fanboy in most other respects, at least compared to my immediate colleagues.
I think we're both making the same point here - the original iPod had a lot of friction holding it back with consumers. What I was attempting to elude to was this: until the iPod had better connectivity options (USB and PC support) in addition to reaching storage parity (40gb by gen 3) it finally blossomed and took over the market. It's not that the 1st gen iPod was garbage - it wasn't - it just lacked some crucial components before it could conquer the market.
The mirroring doesn't work. Having forced my iPad to do it via jailbreaking, it's clear the A4 chip isn't fast enough to do it for apps with any video or animation at all.
And they've jacked up their cut of the take by 6% over Apple. Apple's 30% is quite enough but an increase of 6% added on top of 30% is just ridiculous.
Their case for the first iPad is very cludgy. Harsh edges, always looks tatty, the least impressive solution to an ergonomic dictate that Apple have produced (except for their mice) and yet I'd never remove it.

It's great for what it does. Provides a scratch free case and a tactile surface and 3D gripping 'column' that's needed to casually use the device in a wide variety of general use situations (plus the pocket to store the screen wipe for the inevitable smudges).

That they've made redundant the market for scratch-protective cases, while improving on the other two must-have ergonomic features is a bit funny.
I realize that it is also a bit of a genre, but didn't they leave out the Philip K. Dick adaptation?

http://www.philipkdick.com/films_adjustmentbureau.html

In my opinion, that's a good genre to mine.
>You honestly don't believe that most Apple customers just buy Apple products because of the brand name on the box?

This is a ridiculous stance. It is dismissive and doesn't explain how Apple turned around from being an almost bankrupt company to what it is today.

You ignore how that brand was built. Esp when Apple was on the verge of death in the late 90's. They couldn't rely on their brand at that point, could they? Apple as a powerhouse is a relatively recent phenomenon.

It's like saying Zappos customers are only loyal to Zappos because of their brand, and not their customer service. Their customer service is how they built their brand. Similarly, Apple built their brand on some really great products.
Simple: you only get to use the software timer/switch if the hardware switch is mapped to orientation lock, which is what I was getting at in the first place.

(I have a problem, in that I assume everyone thinks things out two steps ahead, because that's how it works in my family. This is why bystanders sometimes wonder if we all share a gene for schizophrenia. Our conversations seem disconnected.)
That's one of my main problems with cell phones in general. We're still (behaviorally) used to in-home phones, where people call less frequently and more importantly, so interrupting your current task to answer it made sense. Now, social calls are frequent, and people still interrupt whatever they're doing to answer the phone. They're artificially high priority.

I let everyone know that phones, with me, are low priority - I have an answering machine. Call logs. I can see who you are and when you called whenever I have time - call me twice if it's actually important.

But I'll still check my phone to see who's calling me when it rings, because doing so is such a minor interruption and might be important and not everyone will try again - I'll probably pick up if a hospital or police department calls me. It's not saying "I have more important people to talk to than you", it's saying "Talking with you is not the most important thing that can possibly exist at this time", which is true and expectable - wouldn't you like to know ASAP if your family is in the hospital?
USB Ports? Really?
When there weren't so many options for Linux virtualisation this was where Linode started out: http://www.linode.com/wiki/index.php/Linode#What_makes_a_Lin...
...sorta
Tech Tools To Help a Small Business Seem Big
Very slick app, but discovery on Android can be tough.

Shoot me an email, aschobel (at) catch.com and I can put you in touch with our Google Developer advocates, you definitely want to get featured.

What are you thinking of using for online sync/backup? RTM? Google lets you backup blobs using BackupManager, might be worth looking into.

Good luck!
Love it. Especially the changes they have been making. Keeping Google's signature simplicity, but also adding a little modern look. to it.

Kudos to Goog.
Cisco: World mobile data traffic to explode by factor of 26 by 2015
Ozzie, tks for that, I like the Place: notion it makes sense, am thinking the order of the screenshots needs to be altered also, tks again, will take on board for next update. If you have anything else there is a feedback button in the app itself (if you wish to try it) and you can add up/down vote ideas there also.....should hv seen the first version :-)
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I'm really not. max-age and the Expires header, properly set, will control caching at just about every possible step. If you refresh apple.com several times, you'll notice the max-age cycles down with each refresh, and the Expires header stays the same. They're obviously set up to cause the page to have a short maximum lifetime in both public and private caches, and in the case of a launch, it's not that hard to make sure that the old copy of the page expires at 11 AM PST or whenever you want your announcement to go live.

Announce product, push deploy button on website, people hit website and browser requests a new copy of the page because its current copy expired at 10:59:59, and presto, it all magically works.
A nice kick in the ass to remember my C & C++ roots. I've been too hung up on "perfect" languages and "beautiful" frameworks. Thanks for this.
Pretty funny, but point and click adventure games are still popular. There are several titles on Steam released this year for PC.

The NintendoDS has several successful titles: Trace Memory, Hotel Dusk, and others. A new Professor Layton title topped sales for the 3DS, recently released in Japan.

The genre is probably as popular now as ever.
Buying on specs over usability is not rational decision making from the point of view of most users.

http://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum/dp/06723164...

Highly skilled techies are largely immune to usability problems, so buying on specs may be rational for us.
You don't have to know how to code to hire a programmer, but being able to explain your idea clearly is very important.

Where it does help to know code is when you need to understand the programmer. If he or she can communicate clearly, then hang onto that person by any means necessary.

Within the law. No need to get all Buffalo Bill on him or her.
It can, but for some reason (memory leaks?) the iPad slowly loses that capability. I find occasionally powering it off brings back the ability to load multiple tabs without reloading pages.
Would you be interested in being tutored on writing a web app? I'm assuming you live in NYC? I can tutor you how to build a full web stack incising delaying it to the end user.
I'm interested in building a set of lessons for this purpose which I would then like to sell.if you don't know programmimng then it would be a bg commitment but You could definitely afford such a course.
If interested you can email me: railsnoob @ yahoo dot com
I watch a lot of moves from the early 80s, Back To The Future I is my favorite.

What we (Americans) had then and now has not really changed much. Items are either faster, larger or cleaner looking, but they essentially do the same thing they did in 1981.

The materialistic items sold today, don't add any marginal value to our lives. The iPad doesn't improve your life by much or at all. I think its good that people are realizing this and focusing in on enjoying life spiritually.
While technological progress can be deflationary I have to strongly disagree that work is disappearing. I don't think we are ever going to run out of work.

In fact, more "primitive" societies had far lesser work to do - "studies show that hunter-gatherers need only work about twenty hours a week in order to survive and may devote the rest of their time to leisure", though there are criticisms about the measurement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

Compare this to our modern technology driven society.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#United_States

Also -
"The Kapauku people of Papua think it is bad luck to work two consecutive days. The !Kung Bushmen work just two-and-a-half days per week, rarely more than six hours per day.[30]
The work week in Samoa is approximately 30 hours,[31] and though average annual Samoan cash income is relatively low, by some measures, the Samoan standard of living is quite good."
Tools to make your small business look bigger
You hear this every year. And it's still true. Hollywood is wall-to-wall sequels, IP translations (games, comics, tv shows, etc. to movies), remakes, and the remake's newer cousin the "reboot".

Yet even so good films are still being made. The Social Network, True Grit (a remake even!), Toy Story 3 (a sequel!), The Fighter, Black Swan, How to Train Your Dragon, and Inception were all great films from 2010 (I haven't seen The King's Speech or 127 Hours yet but I hear those were good too). If this is what the system pumps out while it's horribly broken, I'm ok with more of the same.

There's always going to be a ready supply of churned out pap in any medium. Just go to a bookstore and look at all the crap that they keep pumping out. But that doesn't necessarily stop truly excellent works being published as well. Some of my most loved books have been published in the last several years. And with the internet it's easier than ever to sift through the dross to find the gems.
Or they know how to do good in less?
IDC shows sales of all servers growing; except Unix
They offer similar services: a centralised place that people come to in order to buy a variety of products. It's good for your software to be on it. The differences are minor, it's the merchant solution that is significantly the same.

At least with the Android marketplace, if you don't like that 30% cut, you're free to separately market and take payment for your application. The principal part of both is this 'centralised store' approach, combined with dealing with the payment system.

The other thing is good old capitalism. Apple and Google aren't social services, so why should they operate on razor-thin margins? They have desirable products, and are charging normal retail overheads for what is, essentially, a royalty-based industry. 30% is fine, and 'what do you get for it'? The ability to hawk your wares and not have to worry about bad debts or if it's worth taking a 99c sale.
Video Games Good For Kids' Brains?
Jobs Takes the Stage to Pitch Apple’s New iPad
Completely disagree with "always been low"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hollywood
Someone just told me about Josh Kopelman renaming a TOWN half.com!!! Love it!!!!

- Thanks for this CJ, Keep 'em comin'!
Is this google translated article? The sentence structure is really bad.
If you don't want to code, oDesk can help you prototype quickly...just stick to a budget!
Wait, AT&T and Verizon only?
What about us from Europe?

Will there be sim free version?
The reason our government has failed:  Hubris
I would like to help you better understand the point here. Please let me know how I might do this.
I doubt the HN unix gray beards appreciate being lumped in with the FSF unix gray beards.
Your logic is really taking the air out of my rant. This is more entertaining than doing actual work though so that's why I'm still going with it.
About 18 months ago, my dad left the job he'd been working at for 40 years (not entirely by choice), set up a new shop and has been going strong ever since. That's awesome for me to see. Every time I think I missed my chance I realize it's always there.
I was tempted to downvote, then wondered why, then realized that downvoting would have been a translation of an urge to groan.
The Startup Sales Cycle: Part 3 of 3
Adventure games continue to be released by indie companies. Some of those are pretty good. For example, Gemini Rue was released just a few days ago. A Tale of Two Kingdoms came out couple of years ago. Both were polished and quite innovative in their own ways. This is more than I can say about many AAA titles today.
I don't have an iPad and was waiting for this one hoping for the hi-rez screen. I might pull the trigger on it anyway because I'm not that patient, but it certainly would've been nice.
* ad corporationem
This now validates all the time I spent playing Zelda.

My favorite quote is in point 2: "The current assessment system forces teachers to teach to the test. ..... If you design learning so you can't get out of one level until you complete the last one, there's no need for a test."
Capitalism works for more than "just a few people" "some of the time".

Highly debatable. Fly to a third world sweat shop and toss this idea around a bit. I don't think the folks there will be nearly as willing to listen to you as people here have been.

"No system is perfect."

Refusing to acknowledge the flaws in said systems is not a virtue.

"and why have they benefited from it? Because they were all born rich? Capitalism benefits people that want to put the time and effort into it."

They have benefitted from it because by and large, we are all upwardly mobile, well paid individuals working in an industry currently experiencing strong market demand. They have also benefitted simply by virtue of being born in America, where they are wealthier than most people in the world by virtue of simply being here (see, I can acknowledge the strengths of Capitalism as well).

Also, this statement is essentially the just-world hypothesis.

"All of your responses so far have been you, crapping on capitalism. Where is your alternative?"

Crapping on capitalism would be silly, since I've benefitted enormously from it. That said, it would be equally silly to be blind to it's many short comings.

I never said I have an alternative, but no one will ever have one if we don't admit some of the short comings to ourselves. Just because a person can't propose an alternative, does not mean that their observations on short comings are incorrect or off base.
Control: What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About
He's against software copyrights (in their current form) but he's not against trade-marks, for example, which are usually included in the vague term "intellectual property".

Stallman repeatedly condemns the use of the term "intellectual property", because it: A) lumps together a bunch of unrelated/dissimilar things (Copyrights, patents, trade marks, trade secrets) and B) because it implies that they are all "property" and should be owned, like property, perpetually.
Can Exercise Keep You Young?
Hee hee, I knew I should have clicked that button before I posted here. ;)

I find that Gazelle's value proposition has been pretty good, for me. I'm happy to surrender a few dozen dollars in exchange for not having to deal with Craigslist or eBay.
We used that for quite a few years, were able to get 40-50 VMs on a Dual-Xeon box with 6GB of memory with no trouble. It's very lightweight and flexible with memory compared to systems like KVM and VirtualBox
How To Identify Secure Checkout Situations
and we have a similar situation now.
As someone who's been doing the nights-and-weekends thing for a long time, my advice is: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Do you really, really hate your job? Is it coming to a point where you have to choose one or the other?

Quitting your job and jumping onto your app full time might accelerate development, but it probably won't accelerate revenue, at least not a lot. Keep growing it on the side and take the leap when it's not a huge step down from your current income and when sales are steady enough that you feel comfortable.
Binomial Options Pricing Has No Closed-Form Solution
I used to have paying customers on UML on a Red Hat 7.3 box. I had no idea that UML had been maintained as recently as 2.6.24. I really had no reason to follow it, because UML's niche has been eaten away from both top and bottom.

The bottom: For super-high-density virtual private servers, it makes more sense to use OpenVZ (http://www.openvz.org) and its commercial counterpart, Virtuozzo (http://www.parallels.com). I've seen installations with 300-500 VMs running on a system with 2G of RAM. It's not a great user experience, but it sure is ... dense. This is where those $5/month VPSes came from.

The top: For more conventional virtualization needs, there's Xen and KVM. More flexible, less of a pain in the system administrator's ass. This is the route Slicehost and Linode took.
I remember hearing about this in the flash movie "epic 2014".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPIC_2014

I doubt it was the first, but i thought the idea was quite interesting when i saw it.

The idea would be that google would pay people to edit content via a share in the google ad revenue.
I like 'Like Button' the greatest like button on the web!
The greatest like button on the web
Contribute to it's glory & fame
Click on it! You know you want to
Hmm, as popular as ever? I dunno. King's Quest, Myst, 7th Guest, these were the 'Call of Duty's of 80s/90s PC gaming.
Check out AGDinteractive : http://www.agdinteractive.com/
They remade the KQuests and QFG2 and are building brand new adventure games.
IPad 2 - How does it looks like, what's changed
unsurprisingly, your statements are generalizable on the whole MBA population. New Kettle cereals, now with 25% more of lemon scent and soft texture!
Convore needs a room for that. Stereotypical programmer has been sitting on his butt for five hours straight. To go with:

https://convore.com/early-bird-codes-before-8am/
Optical microscope that could see viruses
Try this: http://myip.dnsomatic.com/

Documented here: http://dnsomatic.com/wiki/api#detecting_changes
It doesn't prove it's impossible, it proves that the original predications were well off. Back then people though 1 billion people were enough to worry about the lack of food. We're at 8ish billion now and people are still worried. The world survived.
Do hover menus do more harm than good?
RubyQuestions,a community for ruby-specific questions.
Not 'weird'. That is unrelated and dependent upon other factors.

I'm not referring solely to the iPad. Apple charges an extra $100 for 16GB of flash storage for iPhones and iPods. That's not market rate.

The whole idea of pricing storage like that came from the iPod, and I think by the time you have devices that are used for general computing like iPads, it's time to drop it. I would prefer to have a card slot.

(By the way, for people who may be downvoting my earlier comment because they think I'm some crazed anti-Apple partisan, I do own a MacBook Pro and an iPod. A client is also buying me an iPad 2 for completing a project, so... that's just my opinion about the storage pricing).
Ask HN: Going to TechStars for a Day, any advice?
My team and I were invited to the Boulder TS4AD and I want to make sure we won't be overlooked. Any advice on how to make my team pop? Or stories of the experience?