skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ads in google are pretty damn effective for everyone who is using them

Possible, but don't forget Google has nearly a decade on Facebook in that arena. With that amount of time, most of those advertisers who found it to be ineffective would have stopped using the service, so it is a selection-bias issue.

In comparison, Facebook's relatively new. With enough time, Facebook ads will become comparatively effective for everyone on them, as people learn how to use them better, as Facebook adds more ads features, and as those with the wrong business or advertising model pull back and try something new.

Edit: What is it with Hacker News being so antagonistic when someone defends Facebook against an unjust assault? If Facebook were Google and Google were Facebook, I would have said the same thing: Time allows advertisers to adjust their advertising strategies and platforms such that, in equilibrium, you wouldn't be using the platform that is ineffective and hence those who still use a platform are probably finding it effective.

This is not a matter of Facebook fanboyism, but one of selection in market equilibria. It's like asking a buyer of some particular brand of tofus whether they like the tofu. Well, they wouldn't buy it from that brand if they didn't, so hearing a majority of "yes" doesn't say so much.
Violation of government accessibility requirements. Oh and it's horribly compressed (150k+ IIRC), text stored on a JPEG (PNG is so much better for graphics), not hosted on a CDN, lacks etags so there is no caching, and the background image of the "seized" text in red is just as bad. Wasting my tax money on massive bandwidth drain to host the page and wastes my bandwidth caps to load it. Makes me angry.
Classic PHP vs Framework (Kohana,Cake,CI) vs PEAR?
Which is better to choose? WHY?

Thanks :)
This is huge. Maybe their implementation will take off and maybe it won't, but either way this is a tacit admission by the WSJ that the WikiLeaks model will be a serious part of what it means to commit journalism going forward.

All of the lawyerly caveats have to be taken in context of that you have a major US media organization now following in the footsteps of a widely disparaged and isolated vigilante organization. This is just standard CYA protocol.
Hi, thank you very much for your comment. We've actually just started experimenting in terms of monthly / yearly price structures. It was previously set at $99 per year, and we changed to $7.99 per month to see if it made the difference. I'd be interested to know what other people think about that.
It's also important to remember that neither the Lib Dems nor Labour could afford another general election.
Why new domain extensions will make .com more valuable
> would they be willing to publish them and face the rath of the US Government?

Of course not. Wikileaks isn't solving a technical problem. They need to exist because traditional news agencies aren't willing to take the hit associated with releasing unflattering information. We saw what happened to financial businesses that dared to provide perfectly legal services to Wikileaks. Journalists who imitate Wikileaks can expect to be harassed, fired, or even prosecuted.

I find it ironic that so many traditional media figures bemoaned the loss of their "gatekeeper" role when the birther controversy was still monopolizing headlines. They have no trouble acting as a gatekeeper when journalism threatens the rich and powerful.
That's the plan!
also cleaning up the graph somehow would be great
Obama himself asked them to have a backup plan: [blah blah url]

Do you really think that the US Navy Seals don't bother to think "Hey maybe we should have a backup plan for this hugely important and very risky mission" unless the President comes up with the idea?

The linked article does smell a bit like the President trying to insert himself into the story.

Mr Burns: You, Strawberry, hit a home run!

Daryl Strawberry: Okay skip! (hits a home run)

Mr Burns: I told him to do that.

Smithers: Brilliant strategy, sir.
Testing pure JS without DOM operations is the reason why I don't pay that much attention to all the bragging about speed: it's mostly irrelevant to what I do.
There is however http://dromaeo.com/ which does test for DOM operations.
Toronto, Canada;
Kanetix - http://www.kanetix.ca

This month we're specifically looking for a developer with Java experience to work primarily on rating engines. You'd be working in a small team of 4 developers.

The majority of the work would be Java with some web development (our web stack: linux, apache, perl, oracle sql, memcached, html/css/js). An insurance background would be beneficial, but is not necessary.

Job posting: http://www.kanetix.ca/job-website-developer
Right, I agree that fusion reactors are inherently much safer than fission reactors -- I just wanted to make the point that they're still not completely harmless.
Then don't use it.

You have no right to permissively licensed code.
What version was it running? Can anyone point to an explanation of the exploit?
It's still unethical IMHO.
I just corrected the headline, don't know how I got "MediaaFire". Thanks.
Who's going to trust the WSJ if they have anything of serious consequence? Rupert Murdoch has been pretty cozy to western governments and large corporations, so why would I as a whistleblower/leaker choose WSJ's outfit given the ideological and conflict of interest issues?

Say what you will about WikiLeaks, but it's pretty much got one purpose and no obvious conflict of interest. In the case of SafeHouse... not so much.
There are some.

For example Big Fish Games. There's also Tableau Software (although not consumer). Neither large compared to Skype, but both ~$100M revenue companies founded about the time of Skype.

UPDATE: After I wrote this I realized what is different about Seattle than the Bay Area, which is something a previous poster put in parentheticals... (web 2.0/3.0). Look at this list:

Facebook, a Groupon, a Twitter, a Skype, a LinkedIn, an Etsy, a Dropbox

These companies, except maybe Dropbox, are about connecting users together. Not about product. Seattle tends to be more focused on providing product. Is it the case that you are less likely to see a Tableau or Mathematica come out of the Bay Area?
You should really make a video about that...
Tracking page load performance with Google Analytics
SpaceShipTwo's First "Feathered" Flight
My friend is working on her MFA in painting and I assure you this product is necessary. I had to build her site and had many requests for her friends.

As this product is for the non-techie, make it simple: no sign-up to use. Let them jump right in. You're already offering a month free. Your "Build Your Site Now" button is deceiving. It takes you to a looooong form. Let them get started immediately. After a few steps of building, request an email to save their work. Once you have an email, you can request more info later.

Good luck. Looks great.
The acceleration is present in Lion and it's more sensitive than in iOS, so you can get through about 5 window heights with a fast flick or go pixel by pixel if you move slow enough. Also if you flick again before the inertia has died down, the acceleration seems to build up, so 3 quick flicks might get you through 20 screens of content. Pretty cool really.
The author's assertion that this project will be impacted
by the Japanese disaster shows that she doesn't understand
the technology.

Fukushima incident will impact any project (at least in PR sense) that has "nuclear" in it, no matter how different process is.
Germany's actions (hey massive cunami caused problems in some reactors in Japan, let's shut down ours!) is a good example that rationality has little to do in such cases :(
Funny coincidence: Just an hour ago, I installed both Node.js and CoffeeScript on Windows using mingw:

https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Building-node.js-on-ming...

To use CoffeeScript with the mingw-built Node.js, just add "path-to-coffe-script/bin" to your mingw-bash $PATH (or the global path, but node.exe only works in mingw) and change

#!/bin/env node

to

#!your-nodejs-folder/node.exe

in "bin/coffee"

edit: Or just add the directory with "node.exe" to your path.
What's the appeal of Go when something like OCaml exists and seems to cover much of the same territory and delivers better performance? Not trolling here, I'm genuinely curious.
I think '|' denotes the beginning or the end of the title, and '_' denotes a wildcard.
Co-Founder of YouSendIt tells Osama Bin Laden beheading video crashes
Maybe your not getting the right visitors? Do you advertise or SEO. Any Facebook Fan Page? You can have 1000s of visitors but if they aren't looking for what your doing its pointless, get the exact user you need to your site.

Also the site looks pretty good, I like it. Just find a way to market it.
Midwest Startup Scene Gets a New Incubator
> Violation of government accessibility requirements.

I've always wondered if they could be sued for that.
Lazy Registration:
http://ui-patterns.com/patterns/LazyRegistration

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/signupforms
Banner and rich media ads sold on a CPM basis rather than a CPC basis.
Not sure if it was accidental or not, but we ended up with the single simplest sign-up/login I've ever seen. We've even received a few emails from users alarmed at how simple it is. We're considering adding a few artificial steps (like filling out a profile) so that users feel more like they are creating an account.

1. Click login

2. Choose account provider

3. Grant us authorization access

4. Done - we pull your name and email address from the OAuth information and autopopulate your user profile.

At this point we don't strictly need any more information, and adding more account providers doesn't increase the number of steps. Actually, when we only supported Google accounts we didn't have a step #2.

We may start asking people some more questions, but for now signing up and logging in virtually identical user experiences.
Yeah, I think at the very least this would be in addition to a "Forgot Password" link instead of replacing it. My favorite software seems to read my mind by supporting multiple ways of doing things, including whichever way I expect. But I like the idea of putting an extra link close to the field itself. Maybe "Password: (_Forgot?_)"
According to itself, it would have been better if it was shorter: "Hacking Hacker News" or even yet, "Hacking HN"
I completely agree with delayed confirmations. On the service we're building right now, we're also letting users get started using the site without signing up at all to begin with. Then, if they want to save their data, they'll need to create an account.

On a desktop app, you don't have to enter a filename until you're ready to save...why should you have to do that on the web? (of course, this isn't useful in cases where data is sensitive)
The words "Dow Jones" is enough for me to dismiss this, at least as a real competitor to Wikileaks. But sure, to be more serious, plenty of good information outside of their sphere of interest could still get released.
Or for that matter, a reading of Darwin. Altruism really isn't that hard to explain in an evolutionary context.
So the optimal hacker news headline is as follows:

Why showing the future is essential to acquiring data

Noted.
Hi, thanks, much appreciated. Funnily enough, we've just been working with a lot of students based in the UK on building free websites for their end of year shows - we found we got a lot of great feedback from them as a consequence.

The sign up form is something that we should definitely look at if it looks daunting or too long, and the wording for the buttons, so thanks for your comments there! Any suggestions as to what you think would make a good call to action in this instance?

Emma
Abuja Tickets - Cheap Flights to Abuja from London
Book Cheap Flights to Abuja from London. Contact Us for Cheap Abuja Airfare, Ticket, Flight and Booking from London to Abuja.
The submission should have been titled:

"Essential Lessons Showing How to Hack Hacker News with Data Visualization"

and it will be ranked #1 in no tim... never mind :D
i know numpy is largely written in c. i am not sure whether i am incompetent at explaining myself, or if people simply are not reading what i post.

my point, again, is that pypy is supposed to give speed comparable to c (particularly in tight loops that don't have changes of type, which you would imagine numpy to be) without needing to write in either c or rpython - you can just use python.

and this is confirmed by the poster on that thread, who said that numpy was exceptional, and that other people should not need to use rpython... my original comment, then, was that perhaps whatever was unusual could itself be abstracted out and made available at the python level.

it's really not that hard to understand, is it? :o(
Nothing makes me feel more secure than "a fairly complicated" system!
This is a bizarre sort of study. What can you do with robots that you can't do much more cheaply inside a simulation, apart from eat up a whole bunch of research funding with an excuse to build tiny little robots?
Redfin's a good example. They're at every UW CSE career fair and Glenn Kelman (Redfin's CEO) gives talks on campus every now and then.

My original comment was a bit too focused on the companies' side of things. I think the main issue is a lack of awareness on the part of students. In my experience (as a current undergrad at UW), students simply don't know about the local startup scene and thus don't take the steps to capitalize on it. Given the decent number of organizations and meetups in the area that would provide good avenues for students to get involved (Seattle Tech Startups, Startup Weekend, Hops & Chops, TechCafe, etc), it's more a matter of connecting the dots than developing new social structures.
to be honest we just recorded the coeff values for each replicate and did the bootstrap variance calculation.

% of replicates with (coef==0) is potentially much more clever, especially since that's the test we want to perform anyway. i'll run that over the data and see what changes.
The little guy in the bottom right corner gets the point across, but he is creepy as hell. Change him into something less Japanese.
Maybe a magician? Pulling back the curtain to show all the magic?
Or an engineer with a helmet showing the gears?
In all fairness, the title does say beta sign-up.
And don't forget an immediate visual indicator of the total length of the document.

I feel like scroll bars have really matured to the point of being almost perfect. The only things I can think of to really change (looking at the scroll bars on this window right now) are: 1. disappear when content fits in the window instead of grayed out scroll bars; and 2. Get rid of the vestigial up and down arrow buttons.

Last time I saw something really horrible done with scroll bars was in Google Wave. What a disaster.

Here I feel like Apple seems to be having issues because they're trying to form a consistency between iOS and OSX, but there's an inherent tension in that iOS is a direct manipulation metaphor, and OSX can't really be.

It goes both ways. On iOS, they're running out of input bandwidth that's strictly metaphorical, so they're now resorting to gestures, which are out of metaphor and not discoverable.

On OSX Lion, scrolling is immediately inconsistent with iOS, because, of course, it's not a direct manipulation metaphor, so there's already an extra level of abstraction, and you scroll with two fingers instead of with one. Because of that level of abstraction, the direction is basically arbitrary, though I suppose it makes it slightly more consistent with iOS, in that you're (in a +1 remove) pulling on the content like in iOS, instead of pulling on the scroll bar.

But not showing the scroll bar by default is especially weird to me, in that the constraint for iOS--screen real estate--doesn't really exist on a desktop environment. Why not provide that information, then? Consistency over usability is my guess.

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
How to configure Google apps email on Blackberry.
Understanding Designer-Developer Workflow
You can also grab the latest node.js Window's binaries (it bundles Cygwin runtime binaries too) and then always run the latest CoffeeScript.

Binaries are available here:

http://node-js.prcn.co.cc/
By doing their job. Much of journalism is research.
Now that you say that I just realised I use my arrow keys and pgup and pgdown keys a lot! I didn't think of them when I commented.
I have a feeling the upcoming lawsuits against sony aren't going to go well.
TL;DR -- Mafiaafire redirects you to an alternative domain when the primary domain is moved or seized. So basically the DHS is trying to suppress a workaround to their domain seizures.

I'm not sure they have much of a legal argument here though, nor do they have a due process workaround... well, unless they seize mozilla.org.
I made a python coffeescript converter/recursive directory watcher that also works on windows if anyone's interested.

https://github.com/danenania/CoffeePy
Just because you know something sucks doesn't mean you inherently hate it.
The US soccer team sucks bad (yes, you all know that) and not because of that, most of you Americans have to hate them, huh?
AFAICT, the whole point of Test::Right is precisely to fix the problems. As for opinion, well, if anybody is qualified to have an opinion about browser testing, it's the folks at Sauce.
I would wonder if whomever their sys ad was, deliberately left their perimeter weak.

Also, did they never do a security audit??
I took a quick look at the signup process. My question to you is do you need details like Company/Organization (optional), First Name, Last Name, and even Email?

I'm not sure how the software works, but do you feel that these details are necessary for the initial signup process?

The reason I ask is that a longer signup process, and the more details you ask for right off the bat, the more daunting it is to users. If it's not much trouble, I would suggest stripping out those that are not absolutely necessary to allow for users to signup quickly and easily and begin playing around with the actual features your system provides them with.

You could always request these details, along with a payment option, once the 30-day free trial has ended in order to sign them up as a paid user.
Council Shmouncil. It's self-claimed "nonpartisan resource for information and analysis". Which means they can BS as much as anyone on internet.
In my experience, few good UW CSE graduates want to give up an $80,000+ job offer at a reputable company to work at a startup.

If you're a good engineer, who's also a recent graduate, deciding to do a startup comes at a cost (e.g. reduced salary) -- more so depending on how much debt you've accumulated.

With that said, I'm all for informing students about all the options that are available and allowing them to choose.

Though, I would love to see more engineering graduates of Seattle colleges join startups.
"Competing" with Wikileaks seems to miss the point. You can collaborate, or you can oppose. The goal is to publish information, not to monopolize it.

(Although if this gets the libertarians/republicans off of their cultural-identity perch and into the game, then I'm all for it.)
Is there any sort of "Planet" for Go? (i.e. http://planet.lisp.org/, http://planet.python.org/, http://www.planetscala.com/, http://planetcsharp.com/ etc?)
I'm not saying their team is incapable, I just don't get specifically why they got as much as they did at this point in the game, that's all.
It looks like Fx5b1 is available through Mozilla's FTP server.

http://www.conceivablytech.com/7132/products/first-firefox-5...
Hi there, you make a great point, and SEO and marketing is something that we're trying to ramp up at the moment. We also have a facebook fan page which again is something we're working on building fans for.
Is planning essential? And are plans really inconsequential?
I kind of wonder why there isn't more outrage over stuff like this. I guess I'm either overreacting or people just don't understand it (or don't care).
I think I would rewrite the headline as "Scientist recreate altruism when looking for it."
It's not false at all. Origin of Species was published in 1859. The Selfish Gene was published in 1976. So even if everyone immediately accepted Dawkins' synthesis upon reading it (which they didn't), that sentence is still an accurate history of biologists' opinions over the years.
Pakistan Rejects U.S. Criticism
I've been dealing with Sony platforms as a game developer for over a decade, and their primary method of interacting with others is one of arrogance. From sample code that doesn't work and still has japanese comments, to incorrect documentation, to requiring developers to build all their own systems, sony often doesn't seem to give a shit about the outside world.

Given what I know about sony as a game developer, I would not be even remotely surprised to learn that they've never done a security audit.
http://www.gophertimes.com/ ?
http://planet5.cat-v.org/ is the closest, but haven't maintained it properly for a while, I should add a few new blogs and remove some that are obsolete.
Accurately simulating physics is quite difficult. Simulations are a simplified representation of reality, but translating a simulation back to actual little robots might not work. This is because of noise you would encounter in the real world that is hard to simulate.

So there actually are benefits to using robots instead of doing a simulation. Simulations are usually faster and cheaper to create but robots give a more realistic result.
Red Hat CEO on patent trolls: Just pay them off
With Red Hat on the verge of becoming the first billion-dollar company focused exclusively on open source software, it has attracted quite a bit of attention — from lawyers waving patents. And although Red Hat fights lawsuits when it deems it necessary, CEO Jim Whitehurst says it's often just better to pay the trolls to make them go away. "When it's so little money, at some point, bluntly, it's better to settle than fight these things out," Whitehurst said.
There are very few recent exploits, unless they were running on Windows, so not sure I believe this.

http://httpd.apache.org/security/vulnerabilities_20.html
>Applying AI to a decompilation problem is just like applying AI to a compilation problem

I think they're very different. Compilation strips semantic information from code. Decompilation attempts to recover semantic information from program structure and, in the AI case, domain knowledge. They are fundamentally different processes.
or your comment shows you don't understand politics?
Trivially you could still unpack it into vendor and then use the :path option when specifying it in your Gemfile.
How about the revolutionary idea of actully letting the
user enter their name when you ask for their name? That is, a name such as 'John Smith' with a space. There's really no reason to exclude spaces - all computer languages allow spaces in strings.
Not part of this article: Sony ran unpatched Apache on a system actually containing sensitive data, Sony was actually hacked via unpatched Apache.
Sure. First I like Java the language. I dislike Java the enterprise platform. I don't like XML as another programming language, I don't like having to fire up a giant container to test a piece of code (looking at you weblogic). Now things are probably moving in the right direction - I did try EJB3/JPA and it was ok. But I'd hate to be a new programmer coming to Java and being confronted with Spring, EJB, Hibernate, JSF and an app server just to shove some data in and out of a database.
"Bank" in this context isn't really about ATMs and check (cheque) processing : It's about trading rooms and algorithms that change daily.

Boredom isn't likely to be a problem : Stress is.