skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Funny that you say that, I was recently saying that to myself regarding Python and it losing out to Ruby in a lot of instances (Passenger is awesome, kinda works with Python, or Heroku (yes, there are a few out there coming up, but they are still a ways behind)).

Ultimately I wish Ruby and Python would have sex and their offspring be compatible with both so that I can use the best of both worlds ;-)
Get rid of Adobe reader and use a real PDF reader, then.
Main tip number 1 (and nobody ever listens to me on this but I'll say it anyway): the forum has to look active to attract people. Remove ALL categories, only keep 1 forum. And then seed it so it has at least a few pages full of interesting discussion. And THEN launch it with an invite-only.

You do not have to be "patient": it will not populate by itself. You need to seed it.

Good luck :)
I guess innocence has died with the internet.

People have been doing this since the beginning of time. There was a south park episode about "the girls" having a list like this. There was a "Recess" (another cartoon, this one geared towards adolescents) with the same plot.

It's a common theme because exactly this behavior has been happening forever.

This type of thing is part of childhood. It sucks, and the kid should be ostracized by his peers for it, not locked in a cage. You're not going to be able to legislate social interactions between kids, and you shouldn't be trying.

/I was teased relentlessly as a kid. It sucked, but nobody was arrested for it, thank god; we were kids.
By that logic every SQL database is also a NoSQL database because the query language isn't all that important to the data storage.
What kind of "PR" will you deliver? Ie. what do you define PR as? What would be the deliverable?
Data Journalism Developer Studio – Release 0.9.4 / Release Candidate 1
yes, maybe, unless touching the remote causes the screen to freeze
Don't forget password resets, that is one feature that is truly needed to appeal to the masses.
Responding to Educational Corporate Reform Bias in the New York Times
Osama bin Laden’s hide-out had cache of porn
you cannot make the argument that unforseeable effects are patently bad. You're contradicting your terms, and arguing that you have an inkling that it would be bad, rather than, possibly, good.
Leadership is about managing other people's panic attacks, as well as yours.
Does the 1st amendment only apply to nice-speech?
Viddy - Like Instagram for video
More cash perhaps - but the private sector can't offer a job for life nor a gold-plated pension. Funny how people forget about those.
This seems more complicated than it has to be.

hash(salt + nonce + password)

gets the same job done. If you don't trust your hash algorithm... pick a new one.

EDIT: It occurs to me that this whole notional improvement (the one from the article and my alternative) isn't as great as it might first seem: if an attacker gets the table of salt+password, and if the attacker knows the password to one account on the system, he can figure out what the nonce is by doing trial hashes using hash(nonce+salt_k+password_k), where salt_k and password_k are the known salts and passwords. In this way, he can figure out the nonce. Since you will very likely run into collisions when attempting to guess the nonce, you will have to have more than one known password, and you probably want to know something more about the nonce, e.g., its length, but fundamentally you're only increasing the difficulty of the attack by a small amount.

EDIT 2: thinking about it more, the right way around this is just to use a gigantic nonce. If your nonce is 1k, good luck brute forcing it. In this case, I'm fairly certain that my proposed alternative is just as sufficient as the original.
I have used 99designs, but I would never use this. Don't understand the value you would offer?
Apple: Analyst Says No LTE in iPhone 5; To Add Sprint, T-Mobile
Ask HN: Is the TV market set to be smashed by Apple?
Apple enters phone market and smashes competitors so hard they reel.

We don't know for sure that they will do the same with televisions but it seems likely.

Are the television manufacturers the next companies to be beaten up by Apple?
>what it allows you to do is to estimate the future duration -- saying that your average LTV is the 6 months of average revenue from your existing customers as the article suggests is incomplete, because the portion of customers who haven't lapsed will continue to provide revenue.

I'm almost certain we agree, just want to add two clarifying points for those interested:

+You probably want to try experimenting with different combinations of datasets for left-censored, right-censored and full lifetime cases. Or, at least segmenting that way when you perform the survival analysis (Haven't checked out noahnoahnoah's references yet, so they may mention this).

+Also, the other tricky thing is when it's a subscription service (3,6,12 month sort of thing). Main reason this introduces complications is that you need to account for a "unsubscribe signal" that may not sync well with the next prompt to renew. So rather than predict a survival likelihood at the unit of analysis (I assume monthly, maybe weekly) you need to generate a likelihood for the point in time when the user is prompted to renew (and again, you can also vary that to move it up before the real end of the subscription). It's not particularly hard to grasp at a general level, but it takes a lot of careful thinking of edge cases.*

*That description may be a little convoluted, to simplify: What happens when a 12mo subscription shows signs of leaving only 6mo in?
I actually like the invite/private idea - creates a certain hype! Also, good point regarding making the forum look active by having 1 category, just not sure what I'd call that category!
Hate speech is constitutionally protected in the United States.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._A._V._v._City_of_St._Paul
That's not lifetime value. Let's break the term down:

Lifetime: The entire length of the relationship with your customer, including the future, not just for the period where you have data, as done in the article. Of course there will be some estimating involved, but that's what happens when you consider an entire "lifetime".

Value: All cash flows (in AND out) attributable to the customer, discounted to present value. Not just revenue as used in the article. If your sales (e.g. adwords) or support costs are at all significant, you can't ignore them.

I know it's easier to criticize than to write up a helpful article. I do applaud the blogger for taking the time to write about this, but can only recommend not using words like lifetime value to describe something else entirely.
This is the same guy who brought to light Facebook's recent smear campaign against Google.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-13/fa...
Here's the story of a so called social media expert: My story. I've been working at various online projects, startups and agencies since 1998 (or 1999 I'm not sure). For the last 8 years I've mostly done consulting in the UX area and some related strategic areas (product development, focus, features...). More and more communities came to me with questions about their features , their UX issues and how to build communities. Since UX social design is pretty interesting, I was happy with that, but then something changed. In the last years more and more brands came to me and asked for social media advice, at first I resisted. I gave them advice, but I didn't see it as a strategic opportunity, by then we had grown to a small consultancy and I saw no moat or specific knowledge we could use.

Because ... well after all Social Media is easy isn't it? It's just using Facebook and Twitter and nearly everybody can do it. I'm a hacker (a nontechnical hacker who knows what lisp is and how to get a database to scale) i thought marketing is stupid, I want to work on cool stuff.

But something happened in the last 2 years, I analyzed how the behaviour of users changed. I helped building brands on social media. I saw the difficulties of people that had active and succesful twitter accounts in developing a succesful strategy for a a company.

I now see Social Media Consulting as a central part of our business and we have a moat, it's knowledge. Managing a Facebook Account with 1.000.000 likes is not easy and it has nothing to do with using Facebook as a personal tool.
The term social media ist still stupid but I no longer have a problem calling myself a social media expert. Expertise is a relative term even a local Social Media expert with 800 followers might be perfect for his clients.
Using social platforms for strategic communication purposes is not easy.
California to Shut 70 State Parks
I think the key is actually the difference between a person handing out printed pages and a person handing out printed pages at school.
Dropbox depends on being able to deduplicate your data.

If they can't decrypt it, they can't deduplicate it.

If they couldn't deduplicate it, the costs would be higher.

Higher costs => higher prices
Yep, we agree. Well said.
If you draw some line and say "we are only going to work on crimes more serious than this", you are in effect saying that anyone is free to do the crimes that don't make the cut.

That would be a pretty crappy society in which to live. It's much better to devote some effort to the less serious crimes too. The more serious ones should be the priority.
I don't see why a hover state should always dictate a link. Especially considering this case with multiple clickable areas within the link div. (Such as Tweet, date, delete etc). The hover is subtle and merely used to guide the users eye along the row to the 'vote' link. Maybe the main link needs an underline to remove any possible chance of confusion here.

Sure, I could position the clickable links over a linked area, but it'd be a usability nightmare with a constant pointer in link state.

I'll give it to you on your first point though, the contrast on the text is slightly low.

Thanks for the 2c.
Trust me on this, most fiction writers can relate to that post 100%. Musicians too, I think.
Poll: relationship between work and depression in founders
Hi there,

I've noticed in myself as well as in other founders that I talk to that depression is somewhat prevalent in the hacker/founder community. I'm interested in seeing the relationship between work and depression in founders collectively. Personally, I'm less depressed when I work more, both because I a) get work done, which makes me happy and b) have less time to think about things that make me depressed.

So, what is the relationship between work and depression for you?

- directly correlated - the more I work, the more depressed I am
- inversely correlated - the more I work, the less depressed I am
- no relation

Here's the poll: http://poll.pollcode.com/3Yb
Clickable: http://poll.pollcode.com/3Yb
I'm actively looking at alternatives. I knew about these issues when they were first revealed a month or so ago, but this just reminds me to actually use something. I'm considering SpiderOak.
I was a judicial clerk on the Minnesota Supreme Court when it ruled on that case. If I remember correctly [checking references, I see I do], the United States Supreme Court reversed the Minnesota Supreme Court in that case, being especially zealous to guard federally guaranteed individual rights.
Never Be Comfortable
I'm used to it. I invented alphanumeric pagers in high school about 5 years after they were available (I had no idea they existed...)
I'm surprised Jon Callas hadn't realized Dropbox is able to decrypt your files. It always seemed obvious to me given several of Dropbox's advertised features necessitate it (in particular accessing your files over the web interface, and probably their sharing features). Most users wouldn't understand this, but the founder and CTO of PGP Corp should.

That said, this article is incorrect on at least one point: de-duplication does not require Dropbox be able to decrypt your files. tzs came up with this clever scheme in a previous comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2461713

Of course even if Dropbox didn't have the keys to decrypt your files you're still trusting them (or SpiderOak or Wuala or most of Dropbox's competitors) by running their proprietary software. But I suppose people are more concerned about subpoenas and compromised servers than malicious actions by Dropbox themselves.
This is so true, especially in areas outside of the hot tech scenes. Social media is such a buzz word these days you have people coming out of the wood work to cash in on it. These "experts" take advantage of the more traditional companies who are looking to develop a social media strategy simply for the fact they they alway hear about it on traditional media. Most of these "experts" have no social proof or reason to be called experts, they just lable themselves. You can say the businesses hiring these people are to blame, but when you know absolutely nothing on a subject how do you even know if you're teacher is bad?
Here I was thinking that everyone on the Internet had seen Fight Club, and you go and prove me wrong.
If you are depressed, why don't you just go out and do something really awesome? You have nothing to lose, right? So why not do something adventurous? Sell all your shit, move to Europe or South America, and go start a revolution.
Actually, yep. It will require on the order of 100TW by 2100.

http://www.inscc.utah.edu/~tgarrett/Projects/Economics.html

http://www.quora.com/Is-thorium-a-viable-replacement-for-ura...
Really? You think this is part of a careful long-term plan, motivated by a fundamental characteristic of municipal power structure?

I would lean toward 'officer applying vaguely worded rules to make the law behave as he feels it ought to', but yours is certainly easier to get behind. Fuck the man!
| Dropbox seems to have decent transport security

Unless you're using the mobile app.

| For a normal user (individual or corporate), trusting dropbox is not any worse than trusting gmail or anyone else who has your data and has market, legal, and other reasons to keep it safe for you.

Except Google doesn't (afaik) lie about their ability to en/decrypt or view your personal data.
Inductance - Fun with giant electromagnet
Rumor: Amazon has an “entire family” of Android devices coming this holiday
That's good news! Guess it's time to remove the mechanism in Celery that disables the multiprocessing pool when running under PyPy.
There are a few assumptions I'd like to question in your comment.

First, innovation is not limited to what is of interest to a CS PhD program.

Second, I'm not interested in "innovating" per se, I'm interesting in creating things that add value to peoples lives and not being pigeonholed as either an engineer or a product person. I don't care if the ideas I'm using are new or not, only if what I'm building is enriching someones life and that my product has users.

Third, I've never been a replaceable number at a company, even large companies. If you work on hard problems, and are good at it, you aren't easily replaceable. People realize this, even when you're working for the man.

Finally, at university you often don't have access to real world data to do research. I know some big universities like epfl do partnerships where they work with researchers and engineers at companies in exchange for access to that companies data for research and publication.
If a file is encrypted, then that encrypted file can be duplicated. I don't understand your point.

The encryption process doesn't result in one giant blob of data. It results in N blobs, where N is the number of files you store in Dropbox.

EDIT: I misread "deduplicate" as "duplicate". You're correct.
Amazon implements trust-based dynamic throttling and only allows verified email addresses. I don't think anyone else does both.

Where's your evidence that anyone has better deliverability than SES?
I wonder if it's possible to have a distributed nameserver designed and deployed, instead of the current top-down approach used for dns.
Did scientists just cure cancer?
I wonder if someone would leak it so wikileaks could publish a list of the titles ;-)
I'm not sure if it's helpful to you, but I use Keypass & Dropbox to sync some encrypted data to my Android phone. It's limited but useful for storing sensitive text. There is an iPhone app: http://ikeepass.de/
I can't speak generally, but when I'm depressed none of the stuff you listed has any appeal. Even much simpler easier things, like sex or sunlight are covered in a terrible veil. The world looks drab and unfriendly. My sensory perception gets altered, everything looks and feels different.

It's hard to think, it's hard to talk with people--- the social scripts are all broken and the baseline feeling of my reality is warped into something ugly. When I'm depressed there is nothing "really awesome", it just doesn't exist.

On the other hand, I've found the whole condition can be fluid/mutable and have felt these sorts of low states much less often since I started meditating and paying attention to my internal state.
OK, so I am a fan of dropbox and I use it across many machines, (better than those on Richess) -- and, as I understand the overall issue to be, the concern is that DropBox may at some point "hand over your files" to (I assume) The Feds -- should they come knocking?

Now, I expect that for all intents and purposes the encryption/security employed by Dropbox is 'good-enough' that I dont have to worry about random-internet-user gaining access to my docs, yet I have absolutely NO illusions that ANY company will refuse to hand over my data to the feds should the feds be seeking it.

Further, I would suggest that anyone with anything they dont want the feds to know about/get their mitts on not be stupid enough to store said sensitive secrets IN THE FUCKING CLOUD

Additionally, I can understand that Drew may not be the most savvy in navigating such issues given him being a young CEO and all - and I can understand that he would want all the DropBoxians to feel comfortable with the safety and security of their data in his hands - but I would like to see a frank, real-world answer to any security claims which delineate in no-uncertain-terms exactly what level of data safety, security and encryption one may expect.

Drew may even do well as to explicitly say "We shall not refuse to hand over any of your data (and its revision history) to the Feds should they come seeking it with legal merit."

If, after such a statement people are concerned about their data going anywhere -- they should get off dropbox / implement truecrypt as stated.

Finally, a question for Drew: given this craptastic event; would Drop Box be open to much more robust file encryption tools being developed as an addon to DropBox; e.g. a third party wrapper application that allows end-to-end encryption while still allowing the web UI etc to work?

(If I misread the circumstances of the whole issue - forgive my little rant)
Osama's DNA: Testing and It's Limitations
A lot of misdemeanor language is intentionally vague, to allow for officer interpretation of the situation. As in every walk of life, some take that liberty further than others.

The justice system is designed to handle this sort of misapplication intelligently, it probably won't come to anything.
Alright at this point we're just running a smear campaign. He's dead. We got him. Let it go. All you're doing is making his followers/supporters angrier.
I prefer how we did it in the military: 13MAY2011.
mysql: %d%b%Y

No ambiguity, easy to parse and 3-letter month is natural delimiter between day and year numbers.
Yeah, both points are true. At least it looks like they are fixing the mobile app ssl thing.

I think lying is a bit excessive as a description; they were misleading, hopefully unintentionally, on something where full and clear disclosure would have been a better standard. It isn't like Crypto AG or other famous vendor vs. users situations, though. Ascribing malice to them seems inappropriate.
Social Security and Medicare to run short sooner than expected
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10AeyTCeZJM

Mark Zuckerberg: I need you.
Eduardo Saverin: I'm here for you.
Mark Zuckerberg: No, I need the algorithm you used to rank chess players.
Eduardo Saverin: Are you OK?
Mark Zuckerberg: We're ranking girls.

Some get billions while others get arrested... yeah, I'm being cheeky.
I love the idea.

Do you have any clips of other things you've directed?

Wouldn't want it to be like the startup scenes of NCT Software in Birdemic...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phsq297Budw#t=19m10s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phsq297Budw#t=31m52s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phsq297Budw#t=10m30s
New Yorkers under 30 plan to flee city, cite high taxes, few jobs as reasons
"you don't have to be mad to work here but ...."

i've found smaller companies are much more tolerant & flexible with nutters (like me).

there seems to be more focus on results than politics. in larger places I've felt more pressure not to rock the boat, and produce the illusion of work, rather than actually delivering things on time. it doesn't seem to matter if you actually do anything as long as you look like you're not doing /nothing/.

and I don't mean a startup. even startups can grow into kafkaesque nightmares because it's the only way they've ever thought to run a company. really, you have to be in a small, autonomous group if you want to get away with not being that normal.

the moral is: being a startup in and of itself is no guarantee of tolerance for off kilter people, the people and culture within the company are important. there is a correlation between small companies/startups and tolerance, but it isn't causation.
Who are you talking about when you say "stop being so goddamn jaded"?
Inflation rises at fastest rate since October 2008
While I don't disagree with this statement:

There are people who think that depression means 'feeling low', and that if you try hard enough, you can 'snap out of it'. These people are idiots. It's not a matter of being strong enough or dedicated enough. For me, like most people with depressive illnesses, there will be times when I just plain can't. In my worst states I can barely remember what a for loop does, let alone code one. Accept that there will be times when you can't work, and make the most of the times when you can.

There is an approach called "behavioral activation" that my psychiatrist taught me. Basically, instead of saying "I'll do it when I feel better", you say "I'll do it so I'll feel better".

Doing things I didn't feel like doing, that felt almost impossibly difficult (like putting on real clothes and going outside) was probably the most effective tool I've ever had with dealing with depression.
Just get off the bitch train and pick one.
I use 1password and wifi syncing. I asked them to add WebDAV support to store the bundle, which is how omnifocus does this, which is probably the most cloudiness I will accept for my password file.
The moment an executive thinks that, it's no longer a startup, pretty much by definition.
How do you calculate CLTV without knowing how long people subscribe with some precision? Doesn't attrition rate factor into the calculation?

It seems that this would be especially hard to determine if (a) you're a fairly new biz or (b) users stay with you for a long time.
Pianist(5years old girl): Bach