skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good point. Makes one wonder how many of that 1 million subscribers are doing it at their company's expense.
With hurt, I meant physically hurt, thanks for letting me clarify. Updated my post.
is there a goood up to date summary of the web server options for jruby?
Think of it from Carl Page's perspective, then: his brother had not yet sold his startup for hundreds of millions.
Full speed ahead isn't the fastest path to success
First, this isn't a project I worked on directly so bear that in mind in that I cant address specific points (but will update if I learn the answers).

I will say this much; its expected that many people will find away to get around the paywall via plugins, curl, whatever. There are no illusions about that.

However this is not typical of your average user - that much I've seen. While I'm sure this will happen, and it might be easy for many, it will not be something I'd expect of most users and no something that will impact subscriptions IMHO.
If you really want, there are fingerprinting techniques to uniquely identify a user without using any cookies. (e.g. combination of user agent, installed fonts, screen resolution, screen depth, city, country, ip, etc...)

So they could do it that way.
I don't get the downvoting - this is pretty much the point of TFA, and it's valuable. Ideas like these gain support in the first place because people don't have the critical mindset to see what's wrong with them.
A Bloom filter with an error rate of 1/10^8 requires about 40 bits per item stored. That's about 5 bytes per element, which is comparable in magnitude to just storing the dictionary as a single string. It does also require quite a lot of independent hashes, but it's still going to be cheaper to do the lookups than a linear search through a string.

(On the other hand, it might not compare so favourably with "binary search until we've got it down to a smallish substring, then simple linear search".)
Happend to me with my master's thesis.

Professor told me to do self-localization of soccer robots based on greyscale images and assigned me to a PhD student.

PhD student said "This can't be done, at least not in real-time" and was angry about his professor because he now had to look after me somehow. Of course, he didn't.

Six months later, my program could self-localize a soccer robot based on greyscale images, in real-time. On large fields and with varying light sources, which the previous, color-based algorithm couldn't.

Unfortunately, PhD student was a sore looser and still gave me a bad grade. Professor didn't help.
After they launch we’re going to publish a blog post encouraging startups working on software for schools to apply to them instead of us. - PG

I don't think you can give any higher compliment than that.

I spoke to Geoff briefly about Imagine K12 and I'm super excited about the idea. One of the biggest challenges with education startups is attracting hackers - why do you think that is?

I know when I was working on a "Youtube for Teachers," we spoke to about a dozen teachers and were turned off by how long it would take to actually get anyone to adopt our technology in the classroom. The connections to charter schools that Imagine K12 will give its companies will go a long way towards alleviating some of those turnoffs, so hopefully hackers will apply.
@Sandman, the "oh my, oh my, oh my" part is actually justified as a reaction to some of what you say.

Of course you can try to charge for GPL'd software. But since the GPL requires you to make it available free of charge, there would be arbitrage: people would find where to get it for free, and why would they pay then?
The comments on the post lead me to believe that most people would prefer an icon that blinks or rotates.

That said, I like the new icon. It's far less of an eyesore in my OSX dock.
I think he meant "Early Netscape partnership". Netscape is apparently the NSA now. Who knew?
> If I can't make those two members private, how can I ensure that no one accidentally updates the list without updating the size, or vice-versa. It mightn't be an unreasonable mistake for someone to think calling mylist.size = 0 would empty the list. What is the 'safe' way of constructing this concept?

Conventions. In Python, for instance, all private fields and methods start with a double underscore, i.e., '__'. This is merely a convention, outlined in PEP8. Documentation tools don't pick up "private" fields. Even when they do, they don't list them in the same section as the public fields.

You could argue about the safety of this approach, but at some point you have to let go of the training wheels and let programmers make their own judgments.
Are Long VM Instance Spin-Up Times In The Cloud Costing You Money?
As far as I can tell there's no reason to get rid of IE6 unless you're going to also eliminate IE 7 and 8. Aside from CSS differences they are largely equivalent. Even IE9 doesn't support websockets or even half the HTML5 features of any other modern browser so for a modern web app you still need to drop IE support anyways.
Translation:

We were slowing down the internet by more than 1/2 a second on every page. Now we're doing it less.

Less bad is more good, yes. I wonder what life is like without AdBlock, though.
I fully agree. Not only does Ally refund ATM withdrawals at banks in the US, but also at banks overseas.

While slightly annoying to make deposits, it is worth it to not pay fees and to be able to get money anywhere. And like most banks now, they offer easy online bill pay for free.
Giving them a voice is inevitable, and beating them isn't hard. Just provide point-by-point rebuttals and refer students to them. At some point, after checking five or six stories, the doubter will realize the deniers are either intellectually dishonest or eager to remain ignorant. The real damage is when someone hears two or three provocative ideas from deniers and never learns anything more. Especially if people refuse to engage with them.

I put in my dues exchanging emails (over a period of months) about biology with a white supremacist. He was a very bright guy just starting a law career, and he didn't reveal his ideas to many people. I think he was impressed that I was able to provide point-by-point responses to the claims he made about human evolution. He was very well read in racist literature, especially the older stuff from a time when more sophisticated people were still openly taking the position that non-white races were biologically inferior.

He was under the impression that a lot of the points from those old books were still unaddressed by "mainstream" biology, and the fact that I was able to provide him with straightforward answers and pointers to further reading discredited a lot of his current sources. I don't think I cured him of his racism, but I did convince him that biologists weren't as stupid or brainwashed as he thought they were, and that his sources of information did not stand up to modern ideas, because they were obsolete in some cases and simply ignorant in others. His tendency to believe in the superiority of white people remained, but I destroyed his belief that the issue had already been scientifically settled and was being ignored or suppressed by current biologists.

Addressing the issues honestly is the only way to make progress. It's sad that much of what is written about untouchable political issues is written to gratify people who are eager to agree with the author and just need some authoritative reassurance. "The Mismeasure of Man" is an egregious example. If it included white supremacists (or just people who learned towards believing in racial inequality) in its target audience, if it addressed itself to those people with an intent to persuade them, it would have been a lot more useful. Of course, it would not have won accolades -- it would have creeped people out, because people do not want to see those ideas taken seriously. What they want, and what "The Mismeasure of Man" gave them, is reassurance that those ideas have been conclusively dealt with and can be ignored. But that doesn't actually accomplish anything except providing some peace of mind to non-racists. The goal should have been to shift the ideas of people who are racist.
"Yes, totally. I'll get some facts about xyz and get
back to you, so you can choose the best thing for the team."

The manager comeback to that is:

Manager: Fine, but let's put the fact-finding on the back burner as it's not a high priority right now.
And the packet sniffer showing a request to "timecube.com". Gold.
A new class of Internet start-ups is trying to turn data into money
I think the subtext here is that they're trying to speed things up, while Facebook seems to be slowing down every other page I visit by two seconds or so.
IPad: The Microwave Oven of Computing
Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Symantec the most ethical companies in software
Many, many things aren't a power law, but are widely reported to be due to sloppy statistics and a deep misunderstanding of regression on log-transformed data.

The problem is this: people frequently log-transform empirical counts of things (like library book circulation) and then fit a line to the distribution. Since the line generally fits very well, with very high (but ultimately meaningless) R-squared values, they rush off to write a paper.

I could cite at least a dozen very "important" papers that gush over power law relationships in this or that. Instead, I'll let Cosma Shalizi's excellent blog post on the topic do the talking and citing:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html

It's an excellent read for anyone reaching for a log-transform.

EDIT: I didn't realize that Cosma was the author of the linked piece. The other blog post by him I link here is also highly recommended.
I use levenshtein heavily for one of my products http://www.getatomiq.com
I always get "A-Player" versus "C-Level" confused. Took me a long time to figure out why "C-Level" was better than "A-Player."

Though, I know many CXOs who are firm C-Players.
Let's back up a second. Why are newspapers being disrupted by the internet so severely? Well, for a while newspapers (and later local tv affiliates) were the only mass communication channels available. That put them in a unique position to serve as gatekeeper of news and information for a community, which allowed them to make money off of being a broadcast medium as well as their own original content. So newspapers were able to make money off of classified ads, rebroadcasted wire reports, comics, etc. This situation allowed newspapers to bloat up into huge organizations and make a lot of money off of little effort. The original investigative journalism within a newspaper made up a shockingly small percentage of their total efforts. The internet has made the broadcast functions of newspapers utterly obsolete, making the only economically useful function of newspapers their original reporting, which they do very poorly and also very rarely. Newspapers have a self-identification as this whole broadcast / gatekeeper enterprise, they have been having a hard time imagining they could be anything else (such as an organization that doesn't print classified ads, wire reports, or marmaduke comics).

If I knew what the newspaper of 2020 was going to look like I'd be building a business around that (and I may do so regardless). I know for damned sure that the newspaper of 2020 won't be dominated by material that is unnecessarily rebroadcast, and unfortunately that includes a lot of what's in the NYT today.

As for HuffPo, that's not a source of news, nor is it the future of journalism (it may not even outlast the NYT). As to "paying for a high-quality product" I dispute the notion that the NYT is anything of the sort. It's as much a rag as HuffPo, it's just a lot better at maintaining "production value".

Personally I think the future of journalism will be in smaller, more focused groups who are subject matter experts first and journalists not by training per se but by practice.
Haha, what an amazing joke. Felt for it.
This is beautiful. No more meetings about how many IT resources we'll need to corral to build a homegrown referral or rewards system.
I'm surprised Google is only doing this now. The most interesting thing in the article is "...JavaScript used by more than two million publishers...". I thought AdSense had greater distribution. e.g. There are over 100,000 new domains registered every 24hrs for the dot-com TLD alone.
Juicy Bits of Revenue without Paying for It
When you focus primarily on you customer's problems and forget your own problems, you tend to give your customers something that's not what they really want.

You have to think about your own problems in the context of your customer's needs. You are you, your customer is your customer. Each to its own.
Hah! That is how the code is really written. It's... a unique style, shared amongst the APL languages.

I'm pretty sure there are about two people that can read and write that fluently: Roger Hui and Arthur Whitney.
This reminds me of Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame induction speech. [0]

Is Michael Jordan one of the greatest basketball players ever? Yes. Did he work incredibly hard to get there? Yes. Does he come off as very, very bitter in his speech? Absolutely, because he still dwells on insignificant stuff 30 or 40 years later.

I'm happy for you finding motivation in the random, slightly negative throwaway comments of your peers. Just remember that negative drive might make you successful, but it will definitely make you bitter.

-- from a formerly bitter 25-year old

[0] http://www.nba.com/video/channels/hall_of_fame/2009/09/11/nb...
عبدالله قيران يفرج عن مصطفى الحوري المتهم بتعذيب الشهيد احمد الدرويش
I love this idea. The problem I have with Groupon-like sites, at least in terms of sharing, is that I don't want to blast everyone I know with offers. Most of the people i know aren't even in the same area.

But- usually I know a few people that would be interested in whatever deal or product I'm buying. Being able to target them specifically, and get rewarded for it, is brilliant.
Online Subscription Billing Is Still A Hassle
This only affects people who read more than 20 articles/month. So the content is actually all still there and linkable to the open web.
How to Raise a Successful VC Round or Series A
I don't get it. The LGPL lets you promote to the GPL, but the GPL does not give any special status to the LGPL; it doesn't even mention it outside of the preamble. Why is going through a LGPL library any different than going through a BSD one?
I like Cosma's (the author of this piece) point on another of his blog-posts on this topic of whether you've found a power law distribution[1]:

Ask yourself whether you really care. Maybe you don't. A lot of the time, we think, all that's genuine important is that the tail is heavy, and it doesn't really matter whether it decays linearly in the log of the variable (power law) or quadratically (log-normal) or something else.

But I don't know why I would expect the distribution of library books to be a power law: physical books are inherently limited in how many people can hold them. And the number of books at my school library that are permanently checked out always is rather high. There's a strict upper bound on the max-circulation of a book, so you don't get those super-high values for a few books required to make a power law work. Besides, do you care that it is log-normal and not power? I think the lesson is stop calling things "power law" when you mean "fat-tailed".

Fat-tailed is a good enough description in most use-cases anyway.

--
[1] http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html
A UI is great if it does exactly what you want it to do. But if not, and you want to customize at all, you're stuck. While if you're working on the command line, you can script any behavior you'd like.

A command line approach is also far superior for remote operation, repetition, combining with other tools, etc., because you can script the interactions and control flow.
The problem with this analysis is that those issues are everything. You're basically asking the NYT to redefine itself from the ground up. That's fine. Except why wouldn't it be easier to just start out elsewhere from scratch. "I like that restaurant, it's pretty good. All they need to change are their prices, their decor, their selections, their staff, and their chef... then they'd be great!"

Also, this hits a bit too close to reality:
http://www.theawl.com/2011/01/the-most-emailed-new-york-time...
He better drink his own meme.
Be careful with it, it's printed on vinyl.
I agreed with everything you said... six months ago. I've lost faith that they can execute on this now. I honestly hope I'm wrong.
As I understand it, Google is using the header files only to extract "structure declarations, constants, etc." -- i.e. to get the interface right, not to link to kernel source. The question is whether or not this is a copyright violation... If not, then the GPL has no power.

Note that it's possible to use a copyrighted source to reverse-engineer an interface and not have it be a copyright violation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design#Case_law

I'm hoping this is a lot of fuss over nothing, as there will no doubt be cases in the future where people want to create open-source drop-in replacements for proprietary systems, and if it is ruled that extracting information from header files makes a derivative work, it will be very difficult for them to get the interface right.
I've done several smaller projects in it (command-line tools, one-off programs, etc), and I've been building a small web app in it (as a learning exercise). I'm planning to post my results, and a brief tutorial when I get it finished. Curious if anyone (company or otherwise) has been doing anything bigger...
Please, App Makers, Give Me More Than Download Stats
The Most Important Things I Learned Working With Jim Cramer
I just think of it in terms of OO is important for the design patterns. That's when I'd 'use it.' I wouldn't bother trying to explain the theoretical underpinnings to a beginner - the definitions passed around in these types of debate are hilariously confusing.
Kodu Cup - Game development contest for younger kids
In my experience, good managers would never take things that way. I read edw's post again just to be sure I didn't miss something. But none of his comments are malevolent, nor are they rebellious. They're calm, rational, and probing.

So correspondingly in my experience, only poor quality and insecure managers would get the same impression as you. High quality managers would value the feedback and expertise from their technical folk, and never take direct comments, questions, or contradictory points as insubordination.

It's the first lesson I learned in management anyway. You hire people who are smarter than you, and you correspondingly depend on them for the questions you hired them to answer. Direct to-the-point conversations aren't conflictive, they're productive.

I can't tell you how many times, I've told people, "OK, just tell me the point." Likewise, I can't tell you how many times people have told me, "OK, just tell me the point." People don't like wasting time with unnecessary chit chat when they can get things done, and if there's professionalism and respect in the group, there's no chance such a direct contradictory statement could ever be perceived as an FU.
Surprised the article didn't mention zferral or extole (or more recently - spreadable from the chargify guys).

Actually quora does a better job:

http://www.quora.com/Marketing/What-third-party-services-can...
One less browser to tweak and test. If you look at the numbers, IE7 is going away fast. That leaves IE8 and IE9.

I think writing for a cross section of IE9, and the more modern browsers (FF,Chrome, Opera), and some specialized code for IE8 where necessary, is a big improvement.
If you are near the mountains you can get some epic night turns if you ride or ski. Berthoud Pass anyone?
The interesting thing is that it is actually against Danish law to "threaten, taunt, etc" people based on their race, color, national or ethic origin, religious belief or sexual orientation (straffeloven paragraph 266) if the messages have been said (or printed) in public or with the intent of wide distribution. In 2003 four people were given suspended sentences for violating this law.

In addition it is a violation of paragraph 140 to publicly taunt or make fun of the belief or (religious) practices of any legal religious society. Nobody has been punished under this paragraph since the late 30.

But you are free to deny the holocaust or join a nazi group.
"Zipf, Power-laws, and Pareto - a ranking tutorial"

http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/ranking/ranking.ht...
If you don't want to pay 5 for the fee, don't use the machine. It really is that simple. The owner of the ATM has the right to charge whatever the hell they want, it is their property, they have to service the machine why shouldn't they get to pick how much to charge?
For me, command lines are like delegating a task to somebody else: "Find me all the temporary files older than a week and delete them".

In a GUI, I'm doing the task myself: "Hmm, where are the temporary files kept? OK, which are the old ones? I can probably delete these. Wait, here's some more, etc."

As with delegating tasks to people, both approaches have their uses (and pros and cons).
Heh I'm aware that devs aren't free, being one myself, but a few devs can create a content distribution system that rivals the reach of a many, many million dollar printing and delivery infrastructure. Reasonably priced servers can serve up a shocking amount of content when caching is used properly. So, much closer to 0, and the marginal cost of a reader is effectively 0.
No problem : play and further autoplay could be authorized on a per app basis.
I have seen this happen three times so far, on small scale (~50 people departments and 150ppl company).

It was very successful on all 3.

I can see how a huge organization will turn this into a committee that will end in disaster.
What exactly is an 'A player'?

The definition I perceive from the investment world is - 'Person X is an A player because both myself and other investors I respect pattern match that Person X is an A player'. The attributes of that pattern match vary, but include things like work that is well known, educational and professional pedigree, strong references from long trusted sources in industry, peer reputation, etc.

I've read the book Topgrading, which gives a definition of 'an A-player is someone in the top 10 percent of talent available at all salary levels for a well defined organizational role'.

I've perceived that many modern engineering cultures will bias towards calling an engineering candidate an A player if that candidate has worked with other engineers that are considered to be A players by the same culture. Of course, nearly all organizations have their own methods for assessing technical ability and previous experience as well.

What is the most useful definition of an A-player in a tech startup?
The only way this could be funnier is if everything was misaligned and padded funny, or objects were cutoff from the IE6 quirky box model.
#include <something> are broken in code listings
I'll give you that the flexibility of the command line can be a help if you're really trying to do something outside the lines, but I'll disagree with the second. If we were in 1998 I'd agree, but with the remote desktop tools we have today there really isn't much of an advantage unless you are bandwidth limited.
Interesting that they took the approach of injecting iframes inside the page instead of deferring the ad call via something like a DOMContentLoaded event. Using the DOMContentLoaded event would even allow them to request all advertisements on a page in a single call.
The place of hosting is very important if its not in the same jurisdiction as the court
He's got a good, non-emotional speaking voice, and his content:noise ratio is high. Also, the tempo of the overview is near perfect, and his choice of what video to show to go with his voiceover is flawless.