skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That would be really annoying if my friend and I weren't talking about Coke. But if we are talking about Coke, then I don't mind a stranger chiming in with "Hey, since you're talking about Coke, here's something you might like", as long as the stranger's message is highly relevant.

Do you really believe this? Is the literal experience described, of a stranger injecting semi-relevant commercial comments into a conversation you were actually having, really something you, yourself, would find pleasant??

I feel as though there's a huge population of marketers who don't put themselves enough into the shoes of consumers to realize that this kind of things feels invasive, not helpful.

It's like marketers start with general point that relevant display ads work better than irrelevant display ads and assume that maximum customization of an makes it maximally appealing to the average person.

You don't realize that a person doesn't actually want any feedback from a company at random and that "personalizing" brand advertising just makes it creepy (as oppose to personalizing informational advertising, which makes it more useful).

I don't want my favorite company in the world injecting even relevant comment into my ordinary conversation. If I wanted to hear from them, I'd ask them. (and Facebook's right column just gets creepier).
Top golfer to donate ALL of his 2011 earnings to victims in Japan
I don't see this "buying up significant percentages of web content" thing happening. Is that the books thing where they scanned the books themselves? Is is YouTube, where they offered a good enough video platform? Is AdSense and AdWords, where they made monetizing a website simple and painless?

And Microsoft's Brad Smith saying "It is obviously difficult for competing search engines to gain users when nearly every search box is powered by Google" is beyond hypocritical. He can't possibly be stupid enough to believe that himself.

No. Microsoft is not complaining of unfair practices by Google. It's complaining because now they can't use the same practices they always relied on to squash a competitor that has grown too large for them to feel comfortable.
Looking for:
-	Funded (angel or VC)
-	Has been earning positive revenues for 1-3 years

For a pricing study that will be produce useful results for Startups.
startmate and pushstart both seem to be sydney based

anyone know if there is anything like this in melbourne
Right, they're "Vulnerable" (which is the 'best' category of threatened, from the elephants' perspectives)
Vic Gundotra’s Paean to Android’s Openness at Google I/O 2010
Copied from one of my previous comments in an old thread:

http://name.com

I've used godaddy, namecheap, and 1&1, but ended up switching all my domains to name.com. One of the best interfaces I've used as it doesn't try to abstract the DNS records from you. That was one of my biggest issues with 1&1 and godaddy - their interface made it so that I never knew exactly what my DNS settings were, just what the spoon-fed messages that I was given told me. The only "abstracted" thing that they do is provide a one-click solution for setting the dns entries for google apps (which you can still manually edit, as they appear in your DNS records). Here's some screenshots of the backend:

http://i.imgur.com/F5j5m.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/rx3uq.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/vGwwz.jpg

Seriously, try it. I liked them so much that I paid to have my other domains transfered to them. That alone should show you how much I enjoy it over the others I've tried.
How did that compare to --mmap?
Awesomeness is Awesome
I work for a large educational institution in Australia. Some 7 or 8 years ago we had an Microsoft Access based database that had morphed through several versions of Access. It was a complex database and had one major flaw, when the interface opened up it opened in an actual record - users tended to start data entry on top of an existing record plus other features that annoyed the heck out of the users. Our IT was centralised but we also did some local support (by me), untrained but with hands on experience. So one day - April 1 - I sent out an email advising of a new interface which could be used for most purposes which overcame these problems and asked people to register for training by lunch time. The new interface was called Lirpa1 - 1 April backwards, and another name - Devil - as our normal interface was called GODS. I mentioned this to one person, luckily, because they suggested I tell second boss up as a precaution.

Apart from catching those who could reasonably expect to be caught, three things happened. First, I came back from getting a coffee and first boss up, whom I would describe as a female agressive bikie moll type protecting her authority, was standing by my door with second boss who had been talking to her. Neither admitted it outright (second boss hinted several years later) but first boss up had turned up to yell at me for announcing a major change without her authority and to ask what the f. I was doing etc., etc. and second boss had stopped the outburst in time :) Second, one of our data analysts, who should have known better, at a meeting several days later praised this initiative. By that time everyone else knew about the joke but didn't know where to look during this praise. Third, and this took me several years to realise the probable cause, some four or five months later the data analysts were given access to the background tables which allowed them to run proper queries and reports without all the glitches. I can't help thinking that in my ignorance my joke had shown the way to an easy solution once they had thought about it. No one said thanks!

http://www.jdmag.com

[URL href="http://jdmag.com"]http://jdmag.com[/URL]
<a href="http://www.jdmag.com">awesomeness squared</a>
Going falconing is on my bucket list, so I can't get too angry.
Spatial Indexes: Fetching Data/SQLite
A few billion people in Asia would disagree. In Tokyo right now, it's 7am April 1.
> PS: I spent my childhood and early 20's in South Africa and we hate this great-white-hunter tourist shit, but it sure pays the bills if you're the driver guide or booking agent.

Uhm... no.

Do you know how much money hunters bring into rural areas? Do you know what a big shitload of game farms they fund?

I would argue that American hunters are the biggest boon for animal conservation. I see many farms being turned into game farms. In certain areas you cannot throw a rock without hitting a game farm.

American hunters put their money where their mouths are and pay serious $$$. The so called "animal rights groups" pay basically nothing and expect animal nirvana.
Senator, we need some data on environmental catastrophes in Africa due to recent wars.

I don't know. War. War happens.

We can spy on Gaddafi.

Sold!
The following appears to have been recently added to the page: "Most recently, a new model for reflections of heat produced on the spacecraft[5] has been proposed. While this greatly reduces the amount of unexplained acceleration, it does not appear to completely eliminate it.[6]"

[5] http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/26589/

[6] http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/pioneer_anomaly/u...
I'm sure the entendre didn't escape the early proponents, you're right.
.ly domain reseller suspended by SoftLayer citing US/UN Sanctions
My contact at libyanspider.com has informed me that his hosting and DNS service at SoftLayer.com has been shut down citing UN/US/ Presidential Order of sanctions against Libya.

Some ~12,000 sites owned by ~5000 Libyan and International customers are offline or unreachable, 20 employees out of work.

LibyanSpider is the largest reseller I think of .ly domains. They also offer other DNS and internet services.

Softlayer was kind enough to add "Best of luck in your future endeavors." to their notice before even shutting off his support system account. *wince

[quote]
Unfortunately, your account has been reclaimed due OFAC violations. With the current situation abroad and subsequent changes to the list, your account has been deactivated immediately.

OFAC: http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Pages/Programs.aspx

Best of luck in your future endeavors,

SoftLayer Accounting
[/quote]

If anyone has a contact at the NYTimes/Washington Post or similar, I have some more details I was asked to share with a responsible journalist.

ping me @strebel
PS: this has no affect on our service at page.ly, but I feel for the guy, a small business owner, getting caught up in geo-politics.
Also depends on whether your current role is challenging you enough and is in an area that you want to excel in. If you are young and just getting started sometimes the opportunity of mastering the field is itself very valuable.
It's their source. You are free to pick the last released version and improve it yourself.

The source they didn't release may not be completely theirs (we can't know this because we don't have it) and before releasing it under an open source license they may be required to clean it up.
Dickbar is dead
Original FB blog post, which has more facts less fanboi trolling:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2390751
Ask HN How to save time?
This is a broad question. How do you guys save time in a day to do more meaningful tasks? no TV, outsourcing tasks(what sort of things you outsource?). Just curious to hear from your personal experience.

EDIT: Just to clarify a bit, this is not about how to avoid distractions (although thats one of the most effective ways to save time), but how to cut down the tasks or multitask in life. For example, some people cook or do laundry or some chore while watching TV, dont read books, but listen them while driving etc.
I picked one of their ideas. My goal was to find a project that would allow me to learn and I think I'll have a lot of opportunity to do that.
Close Combat Training - interesting facts (?) about fear effects
I've been moving my domains (one by one as they expire) over to dynadot.com. So far I'm very happy--they have a much better interface and no annoying upsell junk during checkout.

I've heard they have a less powerful DNS interface but I run my own DNS servers so I've never noticed.
The problem with charging from day 1 is that the entry cost on the Internet is so low. That means that even if I make a great product and start charging for it, someone else can easily make a copy-cat product and make it free. The logic behind charging in version 2 or 3 is simply that by that time there will be a loyal customer base that would not be as easily swayed by a free copy-cat product. This has nothing to do with being a "sell-out" in the startup community, it's just about being an aware entrepreneur.
Turn on "noprocrast" on HN
Honeycomb isn't desert so named well by purpose -- Sweat honey is caged in honeycomb and protected.
You don't think YouTube contains a large percentage of web video, or you don't think Google bought YouTube?
Best was mission to Mars, back when Google could do no wrong...
I agree with you on the last points, but they're clearly burning it round the track, not driving in suburbia so Tesla's moaning about the figure is a bit moot.

If Tesla want to stick to the 211 claim on a track it's a whole different matter. From the press release Tesla seem to be saying that Top Gear lied about how far it would have gone on the track, which is nonsense.

After all they knew exactly where Top Gear was taking it, all cars go there.

Overall I thought that Top Gear were positive about the car in terms of raw performance, just as something you'd drive it's not practical even as a sports car.
You can be employed by someone else and still not work for a short-sighted middle manager type. My boss knows I post on HN, he doesn't care as long as I get my work done, and he doesn't tell me what to do.

I think your comparison is more along the lines of "Do you work with shitty managers or good managers?"
so you are a freelancer and your employees are freelancers as well, and you're wondering if that makes you owner of a company?

well in that case i wouldn't consider you a company just because you hire freelancers. if you are a person who gets gigs here and there and then passes parts of it to someone else for a cut, i doubt that would be called company. however, if your projects come in at a steady and reasonable rate and you pass parts of them to others to do, also at a steady and reasonable rate, then i think you have a company, good sir!

but of course there are other factors as well: 401K, benefits, etc.
If it's not theirs, how can they give it to some of their approved partners?
Is it really your position that one can string together multiple DH0 / DH1 arguments, add a DH6 argument, and be on the high ground? That sort of reasoning could only come from someone who is so narcissistic that he created a forum with all of the trappings of a reasonable place save the single essential one, just so that he could continue to delude himself and the hand-picked psychophants he surrounds himself with.

If that fails to make clear the weakness in the position, the point will be repeated.
The real difference I see between google and twitter is space and focus. Google had room on their clean results pages to place ads, and they also had users that were used to skimming and overlooking a lot of the text on the page anyway. Ads were not a huge problem for google. Twitter's app users don't have the space on their feeds for a few square centimeters of ad space, especially because we don't skim and skip over tweets (unless they look like the have lots of @s and #s). Tweets are like prepackaged feelings already. Someone who barely read tweets would have nothing left to intake. Twitter needs to find a way to place ads without taking up space or annoying reading time. That, or find a place on the page which doesn't LOOK like its taking up space. Meaning, if the bottom cm is always an ad, it isn't dropping down into my tweets. I just have a slightly smaller screen, which I will acclimate to quickly and won't annoy me regularly. Also, the ads can be more expensive that way. Put the ads on the screen all the time, not just some of the time, and they won't impede upon my twitter space, they'll sit within twitter's ad space.
You are going to be offended that some of the conservations in Africa are maintained by 'rich westerner' hunters who do not want to see the animals gone in order to preserve hunting.
It doesn't seem to me that people enjoy pirating or not paying for goods. The ITMS volume or seeing how piracy in US has been declining steadily are good indicators.

People go towards piracy when the system doesn't satisfy their requirements. Downloading a pirated movie is not as easy as it is to pay Netflix $10/month to have a vast catalog of instant streaming options. There is no comparative service that is free (legally or illegally). It's also argubly easier since you don't have to choose the format of the movie you are downloading or the encoder or several other options while being unsure wether it will play on your PS3 or XBox.

If you create an intuitive and reasonable system for consumers to operate it's very likely that they'll stop looking towards a sub-par alternative like pirating things.

A couple of examples:

Why should I care, as a consumer, that Hulu hasn't reached a deal to stream some TvShows to my PS3 but did reach it for the Web site? It doesn't make any sense to anybody but those who profit from this. How can this be helpful? People got Hulu Plus with the idea that everything would have been available on the PS3 and then some more, but this wasn't the case. This is a frustrated consumer whose demand couldn't be met not because of lack of technical capability or just impossibility. It's really just because of obscure business deals that have nothing reasonable attached to them from a consumer point of view.

The same could be said about music releases that are not international. What is the point of this? How is it that a UK consumer can listen to a given album while a US consumer can't (and vice-versa)? Provided both want to pay its full price.

People go towards piracy as a last resort, not as a first step, it's almost a precious feedback mechanism that tells the market what people really want.

You can of course dismiss all of this by simply saying that the consumer has no right to decide whether he agrees or not with the business decision. It's true, but that's not moving forward the discussion in any useful way.
Now of course both are fundamentally flawed. In fact, top-down control of call center agents is fundamentally flawed, and call center agents are not industrial workers.
While I automate some computer related tasks, I can't automate house chores, working out, etc.

So I wrote an app to remind me:
http://i.imgur.com/exzb0.png

I find this sort of thing most useful if you have chores that you want to do regularly, but not on a specific day (i.e. clean every Tuesday).
Actually, now that he puts it that way, Google's position looks much less hypocritical.

Even if Google were to completely close the source forever, and never release the new updates, they could quite consistently claim "We created Android to shake up the phone market. You now have two men. Andy Rubin, and Steve Jobs. You have two carriers, Verizon or AT&T".

More charitably, they're still only talking about early access. Presumably, eventually the Honeycomb sources will be released. Which would further allow them to claim that android is 'open'.
you're forgetting that microsoft actively leaned on hardware manufacturers so that they were forced into deals where they had to exclusively sell pcs with windows installed, or be penalised with higher licensing costs. that in turn meant that yes, you did have to use microsoft's product, or at the very least pay for it.
Oh... But they don't own the content there - whoever put it there is free to port it to, say, Soapbox. Or Vimeo, or blip.tv or justin.tv or even S3. And even delete the instances in YouTube, leaving Google with nothing.

The only problem with that is that Soapbox no longer exists. Because Microsoft didn't want to spend any more money on it.
When is a Tech Company Dead?
Dinner with Sequoia Capital (bidding)
Like free "google mail".. that one was a riot.
Yup. Doubtful anybody could simply make use of this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/
Similar but different. I work for Akvo.org, a software/online services foundation for development aid, which i co-founded. But technically I am a freelancer, and own my own company. Similar in many ways to my previous startups and very different in others.
Where does grad student fit in this schema? :-)
Pro Tip: Actual dissent requires being on-topic. And that means paying enough attention to know what the topic actually is.

Had you actually read the OP, you'd have understood that the crux of the criticism has to do with mindless participation in an obviously bad system. That is, a system that turns a necessary but easily abused task into a profit center - thereby ensuring that it will be stretched to utterly unnecessary proportions.

It had nothing to do with hunting in general, or being a vegetarian in particular.

For the record, there's (a lot) more to the issue than a few meals. Even in the limited areas where elephant populations are not highly endangered, there's still substantial controversy around any practice that allows the ivory market to legitimately revive itself, since it not only provides cover for black-market ivory, it also fuels the kind of demand that leads to increased poaching in places where elephants remain truly endangered.

You should also know that what you saw on that video is the exception, not the rule. In the all-too-common cases where elephants are killed illegally, any stray documentary crews would also be killed, with all the bodies left to rot. The same goes for rhinos, tigers, and other magnificent creatures unfortunate enough to have one or two body parts valuable only to chronically egotistical douchebags.

Assuming that being thoughtful enough to read isn't too much trouble, you can start to educate yourself by considering this: http://www.ifaw.org/ifaw_international/save_animals/elephant...
So, I'm going to go against the grain here...

I think there is a lot of great stuff about Quora. Design isn't one of them, here is why:

The site and its team have shown a specific arrogance over voices of dissension about their design. Visually there are aspects of the design that make it difficult for people to use - the choice of colors for the text, the size of the fonts, and the contrast make it tough to quickly sort the information provided.

Their topic management system is difficult to use. The search box hijacks what you're typing and provides no easy way to get the cursor back.

The topics and threading of comments has issues as well. Topics lump a large number of content into a singular bucket, and though you can apply multiple topics to a question, you cannot filter responses in a given topic.

Commenting is limited to singular responses, non threaded conversations and are far too easily buried.

Architecturally the site suffers from sever performance problems when there are a large number of answers to a give question. See this post on companies hiring in the SF Bay, which on many machines will crash the browser.

http://www.quora.com/Which-startups-are-hiring-in-the-San-Fr...?

Typical browser behavior gets hijacked/broken as well - HOME and END keys no longer work, and at times, scrolling seems to break.

The Quora Search Bar, though, does provide good snappy returns of questions that have been asked from all topics that contain the words you enter. So I like that feature.

Overall though, I don't know what gasses fill the echo-chamber these folks design in, but I surely think they are high if thy think the site is stellar.

Further, why do the facebook alum feel like facebook blue is the best color to use? I hate it - and simply adopting design elements from your previous employer doesn't show me that you're a great designer.

Also, in this presentation she says "Concentrate on what matters most: purpose and goals" yet they seem to shoot down any criticism of their design decisions as quickly as possible, as opposed to hearing what others think. So, if the purpose and goal is to make a site that is instantly useful, responsive and navigable - isn't it a good idea to see what users are saying about it and take criticism?

I really like Quora, but it is in its infancy - I refuse to jump on the bandwagon that believes this thing came out of the gate mature and tested over the years.

You want to see a site that has an unbelievably good user experience? Spend some time on Reddit. Damn good design -- oh and guess what, they implement pretty much every great UI/UX idea that users submit -- for example, submitter highlighting in the comments thread is just one.
"Sure. My pit crew will use a gas pump, yours will use a charging station."
I wonder what would happen to my 15% conversion rates if my shopping cart wasn't so crappy... I'm superstitious about switching though because of a fear that it might mess up our organic search traffic.
Just When I Was Ready to Give AirBnB a Try
Well if you actually chose not to work at Google or Facebook, there were obviously other motivating factors than a decent salary. None of these other factors are listed here. So it's impossible to say.

Of course many people here will immediately judge everything by dollar amount alone, but by that logic no one should work for NASA, which has crappy pay.
Robots dive deep underwater to solve airliner crash mystery
Hmmm... On the one hand I own my own company. On the other I have various things on the side in various states of progress. Some of this I contribute to, some of this (most notably minklinks) has stalled, some of which is yet to come (but of course, there is no 44 conspiracy).

Can I be employed by me and have one or more things on the side?