skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I run a site (gamexplain.com) and have had a fair amount of problems getting our SEO up to snuff. We've followed a whole lot of the fundamentals espoused by people like the author of this article, but we still struggle with the incoming links, and that has hurt us somewhat. We don't really want to spam our articles to every aggregator and blogger under the sun, though maybe that's what we should have been spending our time on rather than trying to write informative articles that stray from the norm of what you might see from other gaming sites.

Quite honestly, the best way for us to get incoming links in this industry, is to write articles that I would not consider "quality content," but rather inflammatory, misguided, or just plain offensive. In the past, articles that fell into these categories have even garnered us attention in the academic community, so take that as you will.
Keep in mind his technique is differentiating himself from "a typical site" - if your plan is to generate genuinely compelling content that other website owners will want to link too, you're automatically (assuming you execute well) going to get a higher percentage of your traffic from referrals than people who's idea of a link building strategy is to approach everybody in related-but-non-competitive-fields and ask them to add reciprocal links buried somewhere down in a "links" page that nobody ever visits, never mind actually floows links from...

Not that those links aren't valuable - they'll add pagerank for you, and if you can use your own carefully chosen anchor text you don't need terribly many of them to make a page rank very highly for a very narrow "long tail" search query, but you don't acutally expect any inbound traffic from that sort of backlink. The sort of backlink the article is suggesting is different, it _is_ going to generate referral traffic - other websites aren't going to link to your "great content" unless they're expecting and intending their visitors follow those links to your site.

Like you say, 80% of traffic from search _is_ "typical", that's because "typical sites" don't in general have compelling linkable content (except perhaps by accident or because some SEO sold them on "linkbait").

(like you say upthread "depending on the details", I'm not sure why the parent post to this is getting downvoted...)
This is mostly about the business side of things. Many of our customers are encoding to multiple formats to deliver a better user experience and we wanted our pricing to adapt.

Technically, we encode all of the outputs for a file in parallel across multiple transcoding servers. We're looking for ways to reduce the number of steps involved in moving an input file through the system which may result in some sort of forking of the decode to multiple simultaneous encodes, but that remains to be seen.
Related poll: Are you a Steve or a Chris?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2307060
I don't think I made my point clear here.

What I'm saying is a racist would never say "I'm not hiring you because you're skin's [Whatever Color]". He'd just make up a legitimate excuse. And since everything other than race, religion and a few others is a legitimate excuse he could say anything and get away with it.

The only way to enforce an anti-discrimination law would be to definitively prove what's in that person's mind and we can't do that. So the law is unenforceable.

Given that a law just forces that racist person to interview even though he knows from the start that he's never going to hire you. Which is just a waste of his time and yours.
I don't like the verbage here. I would Just say:
Click on the page to go ahead. The "It's Worth it" is a turn off to me.
I agree with set028 that 4 clicks to the bottom is way to much.

Instead maybe you could do something like this:
1. Have your logo and tag line at the top
2. In the center put your messaging and have the user either click it to scroll to the next message or do it automatically ever N seconds
3. Have the sign up at the bottom i.e. make it fit on a 1024x768 screen so that the user always sees your company name and how to sign up.

Hope that makes sense
Right -- and providing dev tools and server platforms for free to students at the high school and college levels is why the MSDNAA and DreamSpark exist on the MSFT side of things.

Of course, it took literally a couple of years to get each of those programs started. I remember spending months just arguing back and forth about whether or not an edition of Office should be in MSDNAA (since it is a development platform, from the point of view of add-ins, Access, etc.) and how much lost revenue it would be.
Hey, this is really great. I love these apps which turn existing video into new forms of media. If you haven't seen it already, you should check out Cory Arcangel's "Colors PE."

http://colors-personal-edition.coryarcangel.com/
Ask HN: Is there a "street-team" for startups?
I was wondering if there are street teams for new startups? It would be a cool idea and people love free stuff. I know I would check out a startup if I got a free sticker or something cool.
What do you use to get your email? Do you index it? The last time I tried using Gnus it used to take more than a minute to start up and I really don't think I have that much mail, although I am subscribed to 10+ mailing lists.
Could be. A personalized "newspaper" may not end up being that much better than what you already have.

On the other hand I think that personalization as a concept can be applied to pretty much anything and if done right will improve the experience. So a lot of the points in this post can be applied elsewhere.
Xcode 4 will still be included for free with the OS, I'm willing to bet, just like previous versions were.
Wow. If Facebook can manage to get HD content up for that low of a price, this may be a huge coup for them. At three dollars for a two-day rental, this service would already be half the price of what Microsoft charges for similar rental content on the Xbox 360 (at only 720p, no less).

I do have a point of contention with the article though as the author seems to think that most college students aren't crafty enough to connect their laptops to their televisions to watch the streaming HD content there. Preposterous!
As stated in the article, spreading windows across more virtual desktops prevents clutter. I've been using a tiling window manager for a few years now, so now that I've just gotten a new work MacBook, I don't minimize windows, ever (or use the dock, for that matter).
Amazing Game Engine: Unreal 3 Video
We built this in-house, but we're excited to see that other people are building out apps too. (I'm an Android user myself, and use the third-party Convorsation app https://convore.com/convorsation/ )
Every Mac still ships with Xcode on the OS install disc, as do the OS X upgrade discs. Let's wait until Lion comes out before assuming that won't be the case anymore.
I believe this is the relevant Chrome bug: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=40344
Chat app could easily kill a server just a few years ago, at least using the "default" technology available for the mass. Now there are many solutions to write a scalable chat application. This is definitely a good point :)
The New Humanism
You think that Apple are the ones who want to lower the bandwidth? I'm the one who had to download 3.8GB for a whole IDE and development kit when all I wanted was gcc and a linker. If they cared about bandwidth more than making programmers download their own tools, they'd have made the command-line tools their own separate install.
Which is fine, as long as one doesn't display links to a lot of different users on one page (like an avatar alongside comments, hosted on the <user>.site.tld domain). As long as all those different user domains don't appear on one page, there's nothing to prefetch...
ah, another chat program on node.js
Firefox 4 RC now available
Book Review: Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking
I've been coming to the dojo for two months, and I have to say - it's been the single most beneficial thing I have done for my startup. Period.

People - amazing, helpful, friendly. Not only met a cofounder, also found other developers, founders w/ great advice, and new friends.

Ok I could gush all day, I'll stop (don't want to sound like an ad). But feel free to drop by. I'm always willing to do a tour.
And how popular is DreamSpark? I signed our organization up for it, did all the hard work and provided easy download instructions & serial keys. I had exactly 0 (zero) takers.

It's just still too convoluted compared to the OSS options out there. Everyone uses PHP, Python or Ruby.

I realize that Microsoft still has 90% of the personal computer market, but it all reads like the last days of Big Blue to me. The king is still king, but the writing is on the wall.

And this is not a Linux neckbeard saying this.
I've made my point clear. If you think web browsers should not have the ability to play any audio that's a different topic than whether an OEM gets to pick and choose which parts of a standard to implement and which devices can support it. This is exactly what made the IE web development days so particularly maddening.
Xcode 3 is still a free download from http://connect.apple.com/ also on the Xcode 4 page it has a link in the bottom right that allows you go to the Xcode 3 download page.
Not so much if you want to do any iOS work.
Automate Offsite Backups with fog
Genetic Errors Nixed Penis Spines, Enlarged Our Brains
Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think they even exist in Portugal.
Agreed. Eager to see how well these work in the longterm.
Sounds eerily similar to the Epic Win app, just focused on fitness rather than generic self-improvement.

Nevertheless, I think that "gameifying" more aspects of people's lives will directly result in an increase in the quality of those lives. Games provide people with a near-instantaneous sense of achievement that they may not be able to find in the "real world." Carrying these feelings of accomplishment over to even the most mundane elements of individuals' lives should help to make people fitter, happier, and more productive (heh).
"Basically, taking out editors and marketers"

When this becomes more popular and every publisher moves online, editors and marketers will be in in demand, because it will be difficult to get anyone to download/read your stuff without a marketing campaign behind it. The digital market is still in its infancy.

"Book Publishers have survived the "piracy" of book trading for years"

They've survived traditional trading, because it's not much of a threat, and it's physically limited. Anything digital can and is being pirated and as it becomes easier and easier to get things for free, markets will suffer.

Newspapers have been the first real casualty and books will probably be next.
Everyone of course realizes that the $4.99 pricetag is only for non-ADC members. The whole thing is still available completely free on the Developer site for members. I don't really think we need to get all upset over them charging five dollars rather than requiring an ADC membership for $99/year.
http://about.adkeeper.com/team/leadership-team/scott-kurnit/

I think he knows what he is doing.
I believe Apple's version of binutils is cctools, which is at http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/cctools/cctools-782/ . It includes ld and as. As you mention, the standard GNU source for binutils won't build, as it doesn't understand Mach-O, but MacPorts would seem to be free to use cctools for linking/assembling.

If this turns into a "real issue", such that XCode 3 was rescinded and XCode 4 remained paid only - as opposed to some stupid accounting problem which might mean it would be bundled free with Lion, with XC3 hanging around for (Snow) Leopard - then I suspect we'll soon see MacPorts or their kin come up with a downloadable toolchain based on this existing Apple open source work that would allow them to continue virtually unchanged.
Why You Should Say Yes-And
The article was incorrect on this account - NK distributes its own flavor of Linux.
It looks like it doesn't work on 3GS. I wonder if there's any technical limitation preventing it to work or just a marketing strategy.
But what about updates? Now handled by the mac app store, for apps bought by the mac app store. And the iPhone SDK may or may not be distributed with the mac, which may be out of date from the current iOS.
Fair question. What you get is scalability (Softlayer is explicitly for low-volume transcoding), an API (Softlayer might have one, though it's not documented at the above link), a lower error rate, higher visual quality, better compression, more options, and hands-on customer support. Not everyone needs these things, but many people do.
nice. yeah with a phonetic dictionary you'd get basically the same stuff we do.
Understanding brute force Daniel J. Bernstein
I was in school using Dogpile and some friends recommended it to me.
The whole IDE portion isn't open source, just the compilers. Thats like saying IntelliJ shouldn't charge for their IDE because the java compiler is free.
Thanks for the reply. I stand corrected.
I would think along the same lines. Then recently I was doing contract work that included ability to upload and preview video files. My client had a very average vps and was not willing to spend much on having me install/test a bunch of packages to get video conversion going.

Bring in zencoder and I had video uploads working for him in a couple hours.

(Granted, I think someone who knows their stuff when it comes to ffmpeg etc. could very well do this in two hours without zencoder, I think. Nonetheless, this is one use case.)
Microsoft to launch Internet Explorer 9 at SXSWi
YSlow for Chrome
Oh, absolutely. But a targeted attack with that level of sophistication is hardly going to let a few Windows updates get in its way.
> OSX's base install does contain any C compilers, it's in the Xcode install.

I think you ment to say "Doesn't" instead of does. This nullifies any argument that GCC and the Gnu Toolchain are free to download, if in a year from now the OS you buy doesn't contain GCC in the base install in order to download and compile GCC.
When people ask me what Hacker Dojo is all about, I tell them "Ever heard of a think tank?. The Dojo is a do tank."
The summary for those in a hurry

"Ultimately the Personalized Newspaper must instantly deliver a meaningfully personalized experience upon sign up and continue to evolve with the user’s interests with no manual input required from the user - behavioral/interest data must be passively collected from multiple sources not just limited to user interactions with the newspaper. The consumption and discovery process includes data from friends, trusted topic curators, the general reaction of the entire audience, and most importantly a small amount of content that falls outside of these filters - allowing the user to discover new content and topics they may not have known about."
A very detailed guide to reverse engineering OSX Applications
> Me and 99% of the sites I have read today...

99%? Really?

I'm just looking through my browser history, and I can't see any site I've visited today that appears to be funded only by the kind of targeted ads we're discussing.

> In my experience, the most lucrative advertising campaigns are based on audience tracking and retargeting.

Perhaps you are fixating on certain types of campaign, then? Either that or you have very limited experience of different possibilities, but from your other comments, I doubt that is the case.
But it's almost four times bigger than Earth...
The same thing happened with the original iPad, most likely, as was noted above, 4.3 was already nearly done when the Verizon iPhone was being prepared, as seen by many 4.3 features being in the current ViPhone. Most likely the next release or the June iOS 5 will again reunite the lines. This has happened before.
> Yes, you read correctly. JavaScript on the server. Weird huh? That’s what I thought.

Really? It wasn't so odd back in 1996 when the Netscape web server supported it. To be sure, V8 and node have wildly better performance characteristics..but the idea of js on the server isn't exactly new: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server-side_JavaScript.
They did with all previous versions of Xcode, I don't see why they'd stop now.
The GCC toolchain can link Mach-O binaries without using any code from Apple. Building GCC cross-compilers like this is a pain, but crosstools takes a bit of that away:

http://www.kegel.com/crosstool/

Basically, you can generate your own binaries and ship them under the GPL. No Apple needed.

I'll ask for more info from someone I know who built an OSX cross-compiler under Linux.
Throw away the keys: Easy, Minimal Perfect Hashing
DIY Wireless Keylogger - Pick up keystrokes remotely in real time
"Xcode 4 is a free download for all members of the iOS and Mac Developer Programs. Log in to your account to begin the download."

- from the Xcode download page.

Slightly annoying that it costs money now, but $4.99 for a full featured IDE (even one that used to be free) is still a pretty good deal.
Charging based on compute time makes no sense to me. Not only does it force your customer to guesstimate their required compute time (a function of code they haven't yet written and servers they don't administer), but it also implies that your service offers little more value than the commodity infrastructure underpinning it.

I'm far more likely to have advance knowledge of the number of inputs and outputs I'm expecting and to pay more for features. My gut feeling is that the real value in what you've developed is that business types with little programming knowledge can use a spreadsheet based on data automatically imported from elsewhere. They'll be the sort of people very happy to pay more for widgets that simplify using the relevant libraries (your screen-scraping example is excellent) and very uncertain about how many minutes I need (unless I'm doing something very simple on the free plan). If you need to charge more for intensive processes it might make more sense to have it as an abstract bolt-on like Heroku's dynos that can be added on top of the monthly fee.

Unrelated aside: for some reason I have to sign in to view one of your examples: /user/tutorial/sheet/1024
Yes, apt-get for Windows would be fantastic, if you were forced (or wanted) to use Windows. Right now a few Windows programs do updates well, like Steam and Chrome, but a platform-wide solution (like dpkg+apt, or rpm+urpmi/yum) would be better.
It installed without a problem on my 3rd generation iPod touch (64GB) and the Apple website says that it’s compatible with 3rd generation iPod touches [0]. Why are you asking? Is it not working for you?

I’m actually wondering whether 4.3 works on the 8GB “3rd generation” (by name only) iPod touches since those had identical specs to 2nd generation iPod touches. Apple’s website is quiet about that so I assume it works.

[0] Scroll all the way down: http://www.apple.com/ios/
I have several email accounts for different domains set up with google apps. One is the primary one that I am always logged into, and the others I have set up as an account I can send mail from (Settings, Accounts, Add another email address you own) in the primary account. In addition, I set up a filters for each of the email addresses that label the incoming mail according to what address it was sent to, so I can easily identify which of my identities is getting the email.
I'm no more unhappy with Apple for wanting lock-in than I am with the sky for being blue. All mature platforms with significant market share seek it.
I use OhLife[1] to keep a somewhat regular journal online.
You all might want to check out their landing page, its very neat and to the point.

On your website, after about two scrolls, I didn't want to keep going. Also maybe make the font a little thicker/bolder. Good luck.

[1]http://ohlife.com/
I usually work out of Sunfire in an office tower in downtown mountain view, mainly because I get a nice desk in a secure office for free, and get to be around great entrepreneurs and angels/vc people. However, I am also a member of hackerdojo and find it a great place for team meetings, events, and anything collaborative -- I just like having a desk where I can leave a bunch of monitors and other stuff all the time, which is the one thing hackerdojo doesn't offer.

Another great office space in mountain view is Layer 42, over by Google -- it is a colo facility with cubes for rent, and you patch straight into your cage.
Are you sure that most VC comes from savings?
You did reject their premise and then agree with their facts.

To someone with a 20 second attention span (or someone spreading 20 seconds' attention over 5 minutes of interview) that sounds like talking your book. Soviet Union has no problems. There are no little green men.

I don't know what you're obliged to say or not say, but you might get better results by reframing: "If this is a bubble, then bubbles happen every five years."
In the sidebar.
Insider Trading Should Be Legal
They also have a 5-year 50,000 bumper-to-bumper warranty. I had an issue with my glovebox on my an Hyundai Elantra (same company) It was my fault (long story), but they gladly replaced at 40k miles.

I'm a huge fan. I now own a Kia soul. In the two years I've had it it's been rock solid.
Personally I'm quite happy with tarsnap.com. I've got a few gigabytes with daily snapshots going back about 6 months at this point. Total cost, approximately $5.
For those interested, I made a simple multiplayer Facebook card game[1] for a client using the same technologies, plus Redis and CouchDB.

The source is unobfuscated, so you can check it out if you want.

[1] http://apps.facebook.com/alloutcricket/
Tips for self-publishing
Yeah, looks pretty, I suppose. As good as it looks, though, it's still not photo-realistic by any stretch, and still falls prey to the uncanny valley much the same way most games have this past generation. All games look good these days. That's pretty much a given. If you have the budget to invest the resources into crafted a detailed world like the one presented in the demo, it's gonna look good.

So why exactly is everyone so excited about this demo? I can tell you that it's not because of the technical merits, like DX11 tessellation or support for Nvidia’s Physx, Apex and 3D Vision. Instead, it's likely the moody lighting, cinematic camera angles, and detailed textures that caught peoples' eyes, none of which say anything about games made using this engine.

Maybe I'm just a bit of a curmudgeon, but this video hardly seems like a revolution in any way. Rather, it's just more of the same of what we've seen out of Epic for the past five or six years.
Hacker Dojo is a "hackerspace". Hackerspaces exist all over the world: http://hackerspaces.org/

There is even a hackerspace in Pittsburgh:
http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/HackPittsburgh

In theory, hackerspaces are great places where "people can meet and work on their projects." In practice, however, hackerspaces - like any start-up - have the DNA of the co-founders and original visitors. As such, some hackerspaces are better managed than others. Likewise, some hackerspaces are a better "fit" for one type of hacking or another (start-up hacking, hardware hacking, artistic hacking, etc.)

Hacker Dojo just happens to be extremely well-run, well-funded, and perfectly located in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Google Profiles updated again: now add photos to your Google profile
Why not just use the Forwarding option (also under "Forwarding and POP/IMAP" tab?)
Their linker is open source: http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/ld64/
An open source compiler, too. Right now OS X doesn't ship with a compiler, so while the source of the compiler is available, there is no way to compile it without Xcode installed.