skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But that point (that sites give away free content for advertising) doesn't have much to do with blub's point (that many sites use hostile, non-privacy friendly tactics for advertising).

Basing your site revenue on advertising doesn't require trackig across sites/domains, supercookies written in flash, circumvention of user-defined browser privacy settings, etc (which is probably what blub is talking about). Honestly it doesn't even require cookies or retaining IP logs, though I don't think anyone here is arguing that those are malicious.

That's why your comment is a fallacy. Websites providing me content for free, and websites respecting the privacy of their users are not mutually exclusive concepts.
I can't imagine how paying 20 people fulltime salaries is anything approaching "low"

Expense != Burn Rate

A burn rate is just negative cash flow. It's just the negative value found on the end of your income statement.

You're only considering salary. They're also bringing in money from their careers offering and their ads. Also, Amazon links get auto-converted into an affiliate link. On a site that gets as many pageviews as they do, these would be not insubstantial revenues, which reduces their burn rate.
Move over Mercedes, ford got a new pinto for much less. Damn I'm good at savings.
On the other hand, I hope something better comes along. Grubhub charges restaurants 10-15% commission on order (10% figure from $8.5M revenue on $85M food order, 15% figure from other sources I've heard). There got to be a better way.
I love the quote "What it really is about is systematically reducing your dependence on luck"
What are the most important cognitive biases to be aware of?
There's no namespace collision here. The word namespace has a specific meaning; it doesn't just mean whatever you want it to mean.

http://www.wordnik.com/words/namespace
Kenneth H. Marks: Increasing the Value of Your Company Before the Exit
Just think: Completing a pointless assignment will, by definition, provide zero benefit to anybody. Watching TV also provides little benefit. Hence, completing that assignment is at least as lazy as watching TV.

[Actually watching TV does provide a benefit: it's relaxing. The same is not true for assignments.]
Y Combinator's Graham Doesn't See "Bubble" in Technology
Rule 110 in HTML5 + CSS3
Apps Need Great Experiences, Not Tech
Building Products That Win
To be fair to al3x, I was genuinely wondering if you were serious.
Ivi TV founder: It's better to be right than rich
I'd bet that someone who's been unemployed for 99 weeks without anything to show for it (e.g. taking a trip around South America), probably doesn't have midlevel or senior skills.
How does it get powered?
I was hoping to see some sleep hacks in the comments here. The author cites a few in the article:

1) Naps
2) Go to bed earlier
3) Start winding down at least 45 minutes before
4) Write down what's on your mind

Does anyone here have any other sleep hacks to share?
IIRC, the Web Sockets implementation was something the WCF team was already experimenting with for their own purposes and originally had not much to do with IE9 or the IE team. Since it was implemented in WCF, obviously it would require a CLR (i.e. Silverlight).

Putting it on the HTML5 Labs site is kind of goofy, and the whole HTML5 Labs thing is sort of a dubious PR exercise to begin with, but I guess it does at least show they're experimenting with the Web Sockets protocol.
Can I download VeriFone's pseudo-Square app from the App Store? I don't see an iTunes link on their website.
It was just poorly phrased. by "direction" they meant "from receiver to transmitter" or "from transmitter to receiver".
The author seems to have a bit of a money fixation. She is obsessed with how much money she has -- her blog graphs her net worth publicly! -- and with the image of thriftiness. Saying that someone who orders an appetizer at a restaurant, considers dessert, or has more than one drink must "handle money differently" from her is just obnoxious. I bet she smiled knowingly to herself, and maybe shook her head a bit, when those appetizers were ordered -- some people don't know how to save money!

In this blog we are merely observing the firings of someone's ego who identifies as "thrifty" and a high earner. I'm sure any awkwardness with her friends is created by her!
Analogies are Fighting Words
I also liked his book, also called "Predictably Irrational": http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expande...
>Be aware that you perform this software hack entirely at your own risk. Barnes & Noble says it invalidates your warranty. The process ran smoothly for me, but when I read the Internet chat rooms, I found at least a few people had had problems. If it goes wrong, you're on your own.

Move over Apple, the geeks have done something only geeks will do, and B&N might sell another couple percent because of it. And let me know when it can play 3D games at the framerates the iPad (much less the iPad2) achieves.
New in Gmail Labs: Smart Labels
I've always been one of those "Field of Dreams" SEO guys. "Build it and they will come."
I don't know if people will fully understand Jetpack yet, because it's early -- like the iPhone 1G. But this is the most significant release Automattic has done yet, in my opinion.
Names are important. Putting aside that "DuckDuckGo" itself is still an odd naming choice, this choice isn't much better, considering the blog post mistypes it too:

> DuckDuckGo chat bot: im@ddg.gg
> DuckDuckGo now has a chat bot at im@ddd.gg that will respond [...]
They mention Linus, but don't mention RMS?
~5% of the average population is on Gmail, with 43%+ of users out there still stuck in Outlook.

I always wonder why we don't see a more concerted effort to build a dead-simple email prioritizer / labeler for Outlook.

Outlook has decent extension management features - Xobni has made some inroads but I feel like it addresses a much more complex set of needs and is unweildy for solving this basic problem.

Microsoft made a somewhat interesting attempt w/their "email prioritizer" extension in MS Labs but they killed it rather quickly and I haven't seen much progress in releases that are managable / simple enough for the average user.

So amongst all the hackers of hacker news is anybody working on a project along these lines?

email prioritizer ref: http://lifehacker.com/#!400639/email-prioritizer-adds-pause-...

43% ref : http://litmus.com/resources/email-client-stats
Monads basically let you add an extra calculation to your functions. Why would you want to do that? Mainly so that you don't have to do it manually. Think of it as tacking an extra calculation onto the side of each function that operates in the monad.

For a "state" monad, that calculation is maintaining/passing the state. For a "logging" monad, that calculation is maintaining the log. For an "error handling monad", that calculation is checking for and propagating errors.
"Currently we don't have time for due diligence"
Apple releases iOS 4.3 -- Engadget
>DuckDuckGo chat bot: im@ddg.gg

>DuckDuckGo now has a chat bot at im@ddd.gg

Apparently the domain name even confuses the author
Same here. The use of the word "cloud" here is a misnomer and feels very strange coming from a group of folks many of us previously assumed were above that sort of hype.

I'm confused why someone would want to run the decidedly hamstrung version of Wordpress if they have the option to run the "real thing"?

For example, Wordpress.com blogs do not allow JavaScript of any kind. They make decisions like this to better be able to handle the scalability of their hosted offering, and for that it's entirely logical, if not a bit annoying.

Would the Jetpack version of Wordpress be similarly locked down? Of course you could make tweaks to it to do whatever you want with it once you host it on your own, but then again, why not just use the full wordpress.org version?

Open-sourcing a few plugins that were previously only available to Wordpress.com users would be just as nice, but I guess then the ability to put the word "cloud" in big type doesn't fit as well.
Apple releases iOS 4.3 with faster JavaScript, support for AirPlay in apps
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe (plus, the invention of the smiley emoticon)
The research is voluminous and has been around for a long time. Articles like this make the results easy for us normals to digest.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=sleep+deprivation&hl...
That's a fascinating conspiracy theory, but having looked at the code myself, I'd have to say someone must be nuts to have gone to extra efforts to create a new engine that specifically won't run on XP.
Clickable:

http://GetLocalNe.ws
Are Cloud Based Memory Architectures the Next Big Thing?
I would not be surprised if Maurice Herlihy managed to get a Turing Award in the next few years.

I would be surprised if Stallman got a Turing Award however. I can't think of anything beyond his philosophy that makes him stand out in any technically innovative way.
Apple - iOS 4.3 Software Update
I assume the choice of table names or query templates in the case mentioned (make a report for atypical client C run faster) would be limited to a handful of possible query templates.
Google Analytics is a third party service that is tracking users' behaviour around the Internet, quite possibly without their knowledge or consent. It doesn't matter what the original site operator can see. Google can see everything. This is exactly the kind of shady behaviour that this law is supposed to prohibit, and Google getting screwed on this point appears to be in keeping with both the letter and the spirit of the law.
I suspect that it is two reasons they don't have IE9 on XP:

1) They don't want people using XP. If other browser vendors want to take it on, I think MS has decided that they're fine with that. But they don't want to enable XP anymore.

2) The test matrix is a huge test cost. Doing XP means cutting something else. I think they decided that the cost of supporting XP wasn't worth it when they looked at how it effected their roadmap.
Ask HN: Any advice on finding a copyeditor?
I'm currently working on a one-man project. The company blog is the main marketing mechanism, as well as the closest thing to a technical writeup. A few posts in it's become clear that I'm spending way too much time on polishing the writing after I have the basic ideas down. Plus it's easy enough to offload, so I really should be delegating it.

I'm looking for contractors on google, and there are bajillions of them. They all sound the same. Does anyone have a recommendation or just what to look for?
I could be mistaken as I'm not a ubuntu user, but I think the whole ubuntu vs. kubuntu vs. xubuntu thing is about available space on the media. Canonical seems to want to keep their distribution on a CD size disk and not go to dvd (for the common path at least). All of the distros that support x, kde and gnome on one disc seem to do it with a dvd. When they ship live cd sized discs they seem to have to pick only one of the three.

Mind you, I think in todays big bandwidth world I'd go with a single DVD, but I am sure there are decent reasons not to. If nothing else, it seems like Canonical really just wants to concentrate on gnome.
I like the idea of making it easier for everyone to use labels and filters. I couldn't imagine using Gmail without custom filters -- especially for notifications. This should be very useful for those using Gmail. Is this available for Google Apps customers?
Skimming the Square credit card reader
I agree wholeheartedly with your assertion. The Jobs approach is clearly sufficient, but by no means necessary, for a company to succeed.

Take a look at Apotheker's predecessor Mark Hurd. The man is revered in and out for literally saving HP after the Fiorina era and returning it to powerhouse form. He did this by focusing in on financial fundamentals and efficiency - business basics.

True, he's not by any stretch of the imagination considered a "visionary", at least in the same way Jobs is, but he helped build a potent rival a different way.

I am extremely interested in seeing how Apotheker's tenure will play itself out.
Chrysler's Twitter Account "Compromised"?
A tale of two programmers
Yes, your initial response made that clear. Hopefully my response to you made it clear that I don't buy it, because it ignores the main reason why the feature is so attractive.
Starting from a clean slate with iOS 4.3
What is it going to take for LCD manufacturers to provide high resolutions for 15" laptops. 1366x768 is low on a 15 inch laptop imo. Not blaming HP here, it seems to be an industry wide trend. Used to be the case that you could buy 1920x1200 in a 15 inch form factor. Then it came down to 1920x1080, now even thats gone.
They sort of do already -

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/07/faster-dialing-with...
Clickable: :)

http://www.projectdirigible.com/
Huh? I never said they wrote the graphics stack not to support XP. I said that there's no technical reason why you can't have a fallback rendering path to work on XP. Chrome and Firefox show that this is possible.

You can point at the FAQ all day, but you can't deny that there is a way to do GPU acceleration of web content on XP.
Does stopping then resizing then starting an instance preserve local non-EBS data?

Is it like a "portable hibernate image" of the system?
Maybe he's sad because, like me, he's a web developer who will have to support yet another non-compliant piece of junk browser from Microsoft.
It's not about education or productivity.

Top colleges, military training, and most early stage start-up environments all have either explicit or implicit cultures where part of the values indoctrination is to "achieve under fatigue".

It isn't about what's optimal for long-term productivity or health. It's about gauging mental toughness and weeding out those individuals without an adequate level of committment to that particular community's values.

If the individual can perform adequately under an extreme depravity of conditions, then they can be expected to excel, or at the very least, fall back to an acceptable baseline of trained performance when provided the surfeit of resources available under day-to-day tasking.
> You can also walk your argument back, which is what I'd do if I were in your shoes.

Good point. I'm just leaving my argument where it is, since I've poignantly lost. The way you summarized it made something clear to me, though, so thank you for your response.

I had a response typed up to the "we need to switch to $X" elsewhere in this thread, then discarded it and went back to work after writing a much smaller one. That's probably the best way forward from the whole mess, since it is indeed true that magstripe technology is outdated and insecure. It's amazing to me that with the prevalence of strong crypto we haven't come up with something better that has been mass-adopted. Until Joe's Gas-n-Snacks in Bimbleberry, Kansas accepts my new-fangled card, I won't consider the replacement mass-adopted.

There's an interesting aside: Square hurts adoption of new-fangled payment technologies because it caters only to magstripes.

However, I still disagree on mere principle with "it's already broken, so no need to do it right for ourselves". That's a dangerous path to take in itself.
Thank you, I saved that as a keepsake. Would you happen to have a photo of how Digital Convergence Corporation is doing today?
It's actually not clear, because the phrase "buy it" is ambiguous in this context. It could mean,

1: You don't agree with their reason, or

2: You don't believe that is the real reason.
Or, drowning swimmers to find dopers (provigil etc).
The problem with your argument: you choose how hard you want to work at your job, but you can't choose your race.

Racism is always irrational, and it's absolutely against the employer's long-term rational self-interest to let race impact employment decisions.

Refusing to hire the unemployed no matter what the circumstance is definitely irrational, but is that really what employers are doing?
Move Over BMW, My Kia Cost $12,000.

I had a Kia that did the job for 230,000 miles. If all you want is transportation, it does the job.

If you want all the nice things that come with a BMW, however, well, you get what you pay for.

From the article:
"Of course, it's hardly the same as an iPad or a Xoom or a Galaxy. It doesn't have any cameras. It has a slower processor. It's not for power users. The video support is pretty limited. A few Android programs still won't run on it. And dedicated gamers will doubtless find it frustrating."

It's an attention grabbing headline which is the purpose of a headline. But the author is not truly comparing Apples and Oranges. He simply wanted to highjack eyeballs.
Click Distribution & Percentages by SERP Ranking Position
>"DuckDuckGo" itself is still an odd naming choice

I think what makes the name weird is that it interjects not zero, not one, but TWO hard sounds ("ck") in the middle of the name. It requires 5 movements to speak it out loud (Du-ck-Du-ck-Go), as oppossed to 2 (Goo- Gel). One has to be careful with adding hard sounds into the middle of product names.
Microsoft confirms Internet Explorer 9 will launch on March 14th
I couldn't disagree with you more.

The current system does not work. Tracking people around the Internet is shady behaviour any way you cut it, and a lot of people don't like it.

A lot more people don't even know about it, which is why the effect on sites today is still relatively small. Try sampling a population who have been fully informed about what is going on and see the reaction you get.

Ultimately, businesses do not have carte blanche to engage in whatever shady practices they like in the interests of increasing profits. This is why we have laws and why we punish businesses that break those laws.

If publishers who want to spy on everyone make opt-in mandatory in response to measures like this, they will just create a market for publishers who are willing to share their content with ads based on that content alone rather than on tracking individual visitors' personal details. This worked well enough to establish things like Google ads in the first place, after all.

I have about as much sympathy for any company hit by these measures as I have for cigarette companies who are forced to display a warning about the proven health implications of their product in big letters on the packet.
This seems exceptionally misguided and short-sighted. The example the author cites is for his blog. 50% of his blog traffic comes from search engines; he doesn't do SEO, therefore SEO is a waste of time.

Has the author ever attempted to land competitive keywords in competitive markets? Has he tried bringing in direct sales leads through organic search-engine results?

People who are really good at SEO can show legitimate improvements in sales from their SEO tactics. It's not simply a matter of "if you build it, they will come". Yes, maybe they will, but when?

Does it make more sense to write awesome content about, let's say, vitamin supplements, for four years, get a nice following and hope that some people buy from you? Or does it make sense to try to jam your site onto the first couple of results for "vitamin suppliments" on Google by employing some of the SEO tactics the author considers a waste of time?
I don't use IE9 for my browsing and I am sad.
I am a web developer and now we will have 3 or 4 versions (depending on whether IE6 support is required) of Microsoft browser to care for. And they all are outdated compared to Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari.
It is obvious to notice that, this is yet another useless research stat.

Everything is equally important for life to survive, breathing, drinking water, food, sleep, exercise. How does it matter if breathing is more important that exercise? It is common sense; you obviously breath more than you do exercise.
Controlling Your Bladder Decreases Impulsive Choices
Seriously jaw-dropping picture of the Sun
> what about Taligent

Apple during Job's exile

> Apple Pippin

Apple during Job's exile

> 20th Anniversary Macintosh

Apple during Job's exile

> Motorola ROKR (colaberation with Apple)

That one yes, though it was not actually Apple's design he did demonstrate it I believe.

> Macintosh Portable

Apple during Job's exile

> Apple Lisa

Jobs was forced out of the lisa more than a year before release and went to work on the other Apple project at the time (project which you might have heard of)

> Apple Newton

Apple during Job's exile

> Apple ///?

Involved neither Jobs nor Woz.

You can hang the ROKR to his neck, and the Apple /// and the Lisa if you stretch reality a lot, but the rest makes absolutely no sense at all.

It's interesting that you didn't mention NeXT though: it failed technically (never succeeded on its own), but managed to lead to an acquisition and most NeXT people took control position at Apple.
Crime Writer Makes a Killing With 99 Cent E-Books
This is a great post.

Though, as someone who has produced a fair number of hits (and flops), I think hits are almost impossible to reverse engineer & duplicate.

My first (and crappiest) iPhone app was released a few weeks ago and continues to get almost 5k downloads per day, and has hit #1 in several countries. I have since released "better" apps but they have largely flopped, by comparison.

Same deal with websites. I've had some that are huge (millions of monthly visitors) and some that are ghost towns.

I have a YouTube video of me playing the drums that has over 5 million views -- then videos that are largely the same or better that have hardly any views.

List goes on. I think talent, luck and frequency are the biggest factors.
4) Stop using an alarm. Wake up when your body tells you to.
I completely agree with you. This place is slowly growing into another Reddit with more junk crowd joining in regularly.
Actually the author routinely makes typos, at least 3 in every post :). Fixed.

Note it is also at im@duckduckgo.com
The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions
Well some people are passionate about starting companies and leading people. So they sometimes dont care about the exact area.
And in those cases they want an idea which can lead to hiring a team either by bootstrapping or through angel investment - a lot of timees this requires a "hot" idea...
Books (or anything else) written in TeX do not have to use the cmr fonts. I agree that the cmr fonts aren't very nice, but that's nothing to do with getting long in the tooth; they were not-very-nice from the day they were first made. (Of course this is a matter of taste; some people may love them.)

TeX is still holding up well against anything else you might care to throw at it, at least as far as quality of output goes. For typesetting mathematics, it's well ahead of anything else I know of. Not quite so great in terms of usability by the masses, though.
i am pretty sure it is.
Overstock.com Rebrands itself as O.co. Smart or Dumb??
I guess they didn't notice that all smart phones have this ability as standard, and call it "Camera". One quick snap, and boom - I've stored your CC number. No need for fancy hardware!
Addressing a Big New Audience: VMware Acquires WaveMaker
So is their a security flaw in the combination of the Square reader (hardware) and Square app (software)? That would be a problem and VeriFone wouldn't be in the wrong pointing it out.

Or is VeriFone just saying that hardware Square manufactures can be used for skimming? If that's the case, the email is pretty ridiculous. Skimming technology is nothing new and like others have said, readily available.
Use another font?
Yes - just enabled it in my Google Apps account. You need to have Labs enabled.
> Presumably they've done this to prevent web games from becoming popular and eventually dethrone the App store.

No. They've done this to prevent web sites from outputting sound when they're loading (or just as they're done loading). Your blind hatred is moronic.
E-mailed you - I'm certainly interested. I wouldn't go off of a google search for "copyeditor" to find someone.
nuclear battery, more or less

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