skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's the sheer, awe-inspiring _quantity_ of high-level material that's hard to take. I've read parts of of TAOCP very deeply - implementing things, trying exercises, etc. and it is rewarding/exhausting. I doubt that I've worked through much more than 70-80 pages in this fashion from all of the books.

Given enough time, one could probably do this for the whole series to date, but I'd like to at least be working part-time before attempting it.

I never believed the story. It seemed out-of-character vulgar and hostile for Knuth.
VMware, 2007-2008ish
I imagine that even if the RIAA demanded this info, Apple would have no choice but to defend it vehemently in court. The PR backlash you'd get from backstabbing the vast majority of your paying customers cannot be overstated.

And when I say "vast majority", I'm referring to the fact that even ripping a mix CD a friend made you or copying an album or 2 off a thumb drive constitutes piracy.

Of course, none of this matters because it's completely impossible for Apple to compile this data reliably.
The things I have done are to start a side project or find something at work I can write a program to help with.
Outsourcing in startups: How I work with my remote developer
The Many Ways in Which the Internet Has Given Us More Privacy
That is why we have governments.

I have not even downloaded it, and do not know whether it is fit for your purpose (especially for the less serious parts), but http://linux.softpedia.com/progDownload/KOA-Download-31142.h... should be able to handle 'real' elections.
Sorry, I watched it several days ago and didn't note the time. I'm thinking of watching it again to extract that bit.
The labels stand to gain more from this than they do trying to sue everybody. If they started suing people based on data from Apple, what would be the lesson to pirates? Don't pay for iTunes Match. D'oh!

The aim of suing people is deterrence, but you don't want to deter people that have chosen to pay you, even you're making less money (say, per-track) than you would from a fully-legit customer.
Rails 3.1.0.rc3 has been released
It looks like this is for a Bachelor's degree at the university of Gothenburg. From the abstract of the project report[1]:

Development of large web based applications using scripting languages such as PHP or JavaScript can be difficult given the lack of static type checking and abstraction through module systems in many such languages. We argue that static type checking and module systems can help programmers avoid common errors when developing large web appli- cations. The literature indicates that adding an extra layer of abstraction on top of the scripting languages that provides these features can be a solution to this problem.
We suggest a solution where the statically typed functional language Haskell is com- piled to JavaScript code, enabling programmers to create web applications in a modular and type safe environment.

An implementation of a compiler, supporting compilation of a subset Haskell to JavaScript, JSHC, is presented as a proof of concept. The compiler has a graphical interface in the form of an Emacs-like text editor extended to contain an interpreter terminal, to allow execution of arbitrary expressions. To allow for client-side compilation, the compiler is written entirely in JavaScript.
A comparison between JSHC and another JavaScript based Haskell implementation is presented, as well as some unexpected issues with the Haskell specification.

[1] https://github.com/evilcandybag/JSHC/blob/master/report/proj...
> it wasn't so easy to poke your head out and see really different worldviews. With the internet, it's easy.

That doesn't really matter if nobody does it -- and it turns out to be even easier to find (& stay in) communities that simply echo & reinforce your worldview.

As for the rest, I think you're just being contrary for the sake of being contrary. It seems fairly obvious that one of the least intellectually healthy things out there, from individuals all the way up to societies, is to be surrounded solely by people who agree with you. Isolation breeds ignorance and extremism.
It helps to have, respectively: early 20th century internationalist idealists, geeky star trek fans, or a newly imposed nation needing a ready made myth of identity, as a constituency of early adopters.
Esperanto is so similar to any other romance language it's almost trivial to pick up. I can decode a page of it fairly easily. Klingon had a huge body of enthusiasts.

Lojban has no entry level material that is actually engaging. We need a large number of articles about interesting things, but written at the language level of a four year old. With nothing interesting to read, and no other reason to learn other than "it's interesting" it's having a hard time growing.

It needs entry level interesting material.
Not all, if you look at the south part of the drawing there is still an above ground parking structure :(
VWO is a great product but here are some of the unique benefits of using Optimizely:

First is ease-of-use and simplicity: we hope Optimizely is a product anyone can use, not just IT or engineers. Paras Chopra, the creator of VWO recently said on Quora: "Optimizely is a great tool and perhaps even bit easier than VWO, so I would recommend you to signup for a free trial of both the products and see which one is suited best to your needs."

Secondly, we enable power-users: all of the changes you make in Optimizely can be transformed into JavaScript statements that correspond to those changes. We enable you to see the JavaScript that gets generated and even edit it or write your own if you want to create sophisticated transformations of your page (click the "Edit Code" button in the bottom-right corner in the editor).

Third, we enable you to track any numbers of goals, even if you decide you want to measure a goal AFTER you've started your experiment. You can track any pageview, JavaScript event, or custom event and match these goals exactly, using a substring or regular expression. We keep all of the data you've sent us so you can always add and remove goals even if the experiment is still running. This gives you the flexibility and power to measure any goal you have on your website in real-time.

In addition to these three we are also unique in offering automated cross-browser testing, behavioral targeting, undo/redo, and unlimited simultaneous experiments.
I'm happy people have begun to see that scientific tests generally have massive assumptions hidden deep within them, or quietly brushed underneath them.

Personally, I find this to be a welcome change from the typical "oooh-look-at-the-shiny-graphs" mentality that has become so pervasive on HN with regards to performance testing.

Keep up this spirit of questioning, and you'll discover a lot of interesting secrets. (For example, a placebo is 87% as effective as the 5 major antidepressant brands. Also, the CIE 1931 "color space" is a flawed system which is only roughly accurate.)

In general, anyone who presents statistics (of anything) should be subjected to a lot of skepticism. Scientific knowledge can only advance by truly testing one variable and only one variable.
I wish I could apply Optimizely AB Tests in everything I do. Like measuring the best way to word movie choices so that the one you secretly want gets chosen (conversion)!

Anyway, interesting statistics. Larger sample size I think would definitely be more dramatic.
10 Seriously Crap Adverts
I can definitely relate to this.

I've been trying to push the related "you can have everything you want to have, just not all at once" ideology into my subconscious. It's still so easy to forget. Projects get dropped for more exciting ones. And I know you have to keep telling yourself to just hold off and be patient.

This is a great reminder, very well written.
How do you know AB test works if you aren't testing with the same user?
Middle East Turmoil - WSJ Interactive Info-Graphic
URLTeam releases public URL shortener backup/dataset
I'd be interested to see some testing around using a '!' in a conversion button text as opposed to a period.
Ask HN: What is the $ value of audience data? (BlueKai, Magnet, eXelate, etc..)
The company I work for, a fairly large web publisher, was recently approached by a company wishing to purchase our audience data. We have never sold audience data before, and therefore don't know exactly what commission we should expect a data exchange to take.

In the ad network world, I know that commissions range from the 50%->80% range, depending on a few different factors, as ad networks do have substantial overhead (their ad serving/technology platform, trafficking labour, accounting, salesforce).

I would expect Data exchangers, on the other hand, to have lower overhead in comparison, as all the transactions are fully digital and automated - meaning their only real costs are software development and business development.

Does that mean we should expect the data exchangers to ask for proportionally less than what networks take? (I.e. they take 10%->30%, versus the 30%->50% more common in the network world?).
I this to be a surprisingly good use of interactive design (one not possible with a static newspaper). Note that you can slice by geo or by time.
A good friend of mine does something like this. One day she decided that if a fried said they were going to do something she would ask them "by when." If they didn't know she would ask them by when they would know.

She would then make a note of it and hold you accountable for what you said you were going to do and who you said you were going to be. All that she asked is that you do the same for her. It cut down on people saying they were going to do something just to look good or making promises that they knew weren't going to be kept. She became a very popular person to talk to, when people wanted to make changes in their life she was often the person to call since she would hold you accountable without judgement.

Edit: Fixed a typo.
Hi Josh,

Yup, you can track as far down the funnel as you like. Here is an article in our knowledge base that explains how you can do this: http://support.optimizely.com/kb/goal-tracking-and-reporting...

Let me know what you think!
I mistakenly assumed this was a programming language; it's actually (for now) a human language.
This is a tad off topic, but the iPhone authenticator was added early in 2009 (see: http://wow.joystiq.com/2009/04/03/battle-net-mobile-authenti...) and the hardware fob was already in use well before that, with the same stringent identity verification methods in place in case the authenticator was lost.

Blizzard offers the best of both worlds in my opinion: the authenticator is cheap/free and optional so you can choose how secure you want your account to be. Though, as noted, it's expensive for Blizzard to restore all the hacked accounts so they have incentives (free Corehound pet, for example) if you opt-in to have an authenticator on your account.
California sales tax does apply to all purchases of goods by California residents. If you live in CA and purchase something which sales tax apply to, you need to pay those taxes. Since remembering to pay sales tax to the state is a pain in the ass (not to mention an easy way to cheat on your taxes), CA law requires that merchants collect the sales tax on your purchases and send it to the state.

Even pre-Internet, there was a problem with this: California law can't force businesses outside of CA to collect sales tax for CA residents. So if you bought something in another state, or from a catalog, you were suppose to report that on your income taxes and pay the appropriate CA sales tax. Of course, no one did, but it wasn't a big deal because there wasn't a lot of money in these sorts of sales.

With the Internet, more and more purchases are going to businesses that are out of state (e.g. Amazon). Since most people are habituated to having the sales tax included in purchases, they probably don't even realize they owe sales tax at all. Or if they do, they probably don't report it since no one likes to pay more taxes.

So now we come to this "nexus" problem. Currently neither Amazon nor its subsidiaries are in California, so CA laws don't apply to them and they don't have to collect sales tax for CA residents. This represents lost revenue for the state, but by changing the nexus rule to include affiliates, the state can get its sales tax laws to apply to Amazon and thus get more revenue. Amazon is resisting this because it will effectively raise their prices to CA residents (of course, CA residents were suppose to be paying that anyways).

What actually happens if the law is passed should be interesting. Amazon has said they will drop all of the CA affiliates if the law passes, just as they did in Illinois. However, New York passed a similar law and Amazon started collecting NY sales tax instead of cutting off its affiliates, presumably because the hit from having to collect sales tax was less than the money that would be lost from not having it's NY affiliates.
That you can do, but it's less effective because separating and purifying different elements is much easier than doing so with different isotopes.
The RIAA could actually now start to seed files that are pirated. Just populate the world with them, and sit on them for years. It's their nuclear option if nothing works out, they then have all of the MusicMatch data coupled with their fingerprints that uniquely indicate pirated music.
Don't get me wrong; I'm glad you're here.
GNU has taken money for proprietary-friendly licensing of GNU projects. Entirely within their rights, of course, but they have certainly compromised their ideology for practicality in the past.
ui .i mi batci le mlatu

Same here. If I ever get around to making The Computer Game Of My Dreams, I'm going to have one faction, race or species' dialogue entirely in lojban, with no translations or subtitles.
I was about to say, enough with the apple fanboyism already!

Then I read the article.
or Quizlet.com :)
"How to learn Lojban

Write to The Logical Language Group, Inc., and we will be happy to provide information"

Yup. That's gonna work.
If DEA confiscates proceeds of a crime and it's all Bitcoins. Will they cash them and give further validity to the Bitcoins or is it effectively sent to /dev/null indirectly increasing the value and indirect lesson in drug economics?

Interesting dilemma for them.
You could hash the files and say that 50,000 people all had an identical mp3 of a track. Given tagging, subtle differences between CD drives, and the lossy encoding process it'd be fairly probable that they all got it from the same place.

Of course, that's not the same thing as proving in each case that they really did pirate it, but it'd be a start as a way of building a list of people to look at.
Reading books can be a useful starting point, but by themselves they won't get you those skills. They're called skills for a reason: you have to practice them.

I'll repeat the advice out of one of Peter Drucker's books: the only way to really improve in life is to feed back from actions to results. Try to do something. When you fail (and you probably will, the first time), take an honest look at your performance, and identify one thing that you could've done better. Then do it again, but this time do that one thing differently. Did you get better results? If so, find something else you could've done better, and practice that next. If not, do it differently again, and measure the results. Repeat until you're doing everything awesomely. You have now mastered the skill.
Well, shit, I've been working on something similar for awhile now and I was so close to being done.

Any suggestions on how to proceed?
When I wrote that I meant it to be pseudocode, but it does seem to be valid Groovy syntax:

class A{
def close(){println "closed"}
}
def a1= new A()
def a2= new A()
[a1, a2]*.close()
Elaborating: Less complexity in each method leads to less overall complexity. And yes, the worst of long methods is that the internal interaction usually leads to more complexity.
They aren't out and about in the city looking to build new ventures, take risks on big, unproven ideas, etc.

Is it really like that in SF? I've never lived there, only visited; and almost got mugged at a gas station.

The description reads like a fairytale or wishful thinking. I hope I'm wrong, though, because that would be amazing.
Cool! Thanks for the link to the slide; I didn't watch the full presentation so that detail escaped me. As for your question, iCloud is for Macs and Windows too, not just iOS. Unless you have another link to a slide saying otherwise, I'd assume iTunes Match will download its un-DRM'd files to every computer you own.
Ask HN: Should I quit my new job?
I'm 19, and for my age I consider my skill set to be quite good. I have just left college and had my first job interview for a PHP web app company. I got the job and was quite happy with myself considering I was against several other people who all had degrees (I just have a few A Levels), and in the past I have only ever done contact work.

The company mainly looks after a range of games they developed, and I have been assigned the task of finishing off a mobile game which was started a short time ago (I think the guy before me had to leave). There are several things I don't like about this...

Firstly, it's in HTML and JS (jQuery Mobile, mainly), and although it's going to be put on the app store (through phonegap most probably), you can tell that it's just HTML. I don't find the app pleasant to use, so I don't feel remotely proud of it.

Secondly, I don't really care much for games. I play Minecraft now and then, but that's as far as it ever really goes. I'm building an app that I don't feel passionate about and it's draining me.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? Not really sure what I should do.

Thanks
I have no qualms about downloading an MP3 of a track that I already physically own but am too lazy to unearth and rip. Hope they'll take that into account.
You could have been easier to understand if you simply said "nope, you're wrong". But instead, you went on for three paragraphs describing your point of view. You even used a word I had forgotten the definition of: "operators" (Yes, I had to look up the exact definition). Yet I understood everything you said with no ambiguousness.

Was this incorrect? Was explaining your point of view inefficient or causing problems in understanding? I think you inadvertently showed how expressive language has enormous benefits, even if people can never understand it 100%.
Certigna.fr keychain
Thank you for the feedback.Very helpful!

As you said there are many ideas/features that may be added to the product but we would like to keep it simple.."dead simple"
"- Look in obscure places- We're often fascinated with the shiny things in the internet industry. Many overlook the obscure and unsexy. Don't make that mistake. If your goal has primarily monetary motivations, look at the unsexy."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1447467

(This is a part of the best comment I've ever read here on HN. Well worth a look.)
That "Enter Your website URL" field is really annoying. The easiest way to change the default "http://www.example.com to your website's URL would normally be to double click the "example" and type your address, leaving the boilerplate "http://www. and ".com" and such.

But you can't do that due to the fancy javascript and everything. Have to type the whole thing yourself.

If the field cleared when you gave it focus, it wouldn't really matter and I'd just type in the URL myself. But the text remains, in the background, taunting you. It even appears to highlight the "example" part if you double click it.
upwards of 50 million in venture capital for 500k in paid users. icloud killed more than just a few yesterday.
>> If so, they don't yet know whether ursolic acid at levels that might be consumed as part of a normal diet might or might not be enough.

That last sentence may be the most important one for now. Resveratrol has had some interesting health benefit data published, but positive results were correlated to much larger quantities than one could get by just drinking red wine. But if ursolic acid can be cheaply synthesized and proven safe in clinically beneficial quantities, this could be huge. Note that the article focused on muscle wasting and only mentioned in passing that it lowered blood glucose and triglyceride levels and boosted insulin signaling. Talk about burying the lede.
I like Bruce Eckel's writing. It felt like my brain was actually working better. :-)
It's at around 50:20.
Did you even look at the page? http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Learning
Uncertainty and the Nanny Stack
Stress reduction. Imagine if his car broke down. What could be a major financial crisis for many would be a drop in the bucket for him. He could fix it and move on with his life.

Having more things leads to more potential points of failure and less means to repair things in the case of multiple failure. It's a balance for everyone but I suspect that possessions were less important to him than security/simplicity.
One further than this: every time --- every time --- I sit down with TAOCP, even on stuff I assume is going to be basic, I learn something awesome. It is one of the densest amounts of awesome per page of any book I've ever seen.

And I am very not crazy math guy, too.
Two New Elements Added to Periodic Table
Scheme is Love
Josh -

I think tools like Optimizely can track to the final sale if you have an online (ecommerce only) transaction. This works well when the user is expected to complete the transaction online and without changing computers or deleting their cookies during the consideration process.

If you have an offline sales process (where a salesperson takes an order in person or on the phone) or customers who pay by invoice, or a longer and more considered sales process (bigger ticket items), you need a closed loop marketing tool that connects your marketign leads database to the CRM that the sales team is using. HubSpot does this, and connects to Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Highrise, Sugar CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, ACT, Goldmine, or pretty much any CRM.

So, Optimizely for small ticket / ecommerce, and HubSpot for large ticket / offline sales.

Thanks,
Mike Volpe (CMO @ HubSpot)
Calculate the Caloric Difference Standing Instead of Sitting Makes
Apple has said that no information as to who has what in their library will be turned over to third parties. They have said that they will, for accounting purposes, turn over totals. E.g., they are going to tell the record companies how many total copies of each track have been found by the Match service.

That makes sense because the majority of the $25/year goes to the record companies, who almost surely use the track counts to figure out how to divvy up the money.

This is the first step toward the kind of system that we eventually are going to have to go to, where people pay some kind of fee or tax into a pool, can listen to whatever music they want, and the pool is split among the artists (or the companies the artists sell the rights to) according to what people are actually listening to.
A/B testing works by randomly distributing your traffic. We can't assume that every person is the same, but by splitting the traffic randomly we can assume that the two groups are similar.

For a little bit more information on how our particular flavor of AB testing works check out http://optimizely.appspot.com/works