skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you data mine your web analytics?
For a new web site and subscription service, we would like to collect detailed metrics about how customers/prospects are behaving. We think our main interests will be:

(a) how people are finding us and how effectively we convert visitors to our site into paying subscribers;

(b) the usability of each feature of our service;

(c) patterns in how users access the underlying data and in which of our features they use to work with which kinds of data.

Our goals are to make informed choices about how to develop the data and features on the service, and to optimise prospect conversion and customer retention on genuine merit. That probably includes things like knowing the demographics and regions where we're succeeding or failing, but we're not interested in selling users' personal data to advertisers or anything similarly dubious.

I'm sure many here have been in this position, so please share what you've learned about different types of testing, which tools you find useful, which analyses you perform on your logs, and perhaps most important, how you reached this point and how you improve your data mining techniques over time. Thanks!
Hmm... I understand the post's point, but it starts off so flawed that it's difficult to take any of it seriously. Yahoo does not have a super-duper market cap; Alibaba does and Yahoo owns 40% of Alibaba [1]; Yahoo certainly isn't a small company, but it's more like a unhealthy, unhappy, declining $6B company.

Big companies have big company issues because managing huge groups of people is a complex process. I like startups and bloggers as much as the next g(uy|al), but startups are not wonderful tonics that larger companies can buy to cure their ailments. One of the exact reasons lots of folks like startups is that we can avoid those issues. The post suggests that you can take a bunch of people who probably don't want to work in a big company, pull them in to a big company and have everything go well...

[1] http://www.quora.com/If-Yahoo-owns-40-of-Alibaba-and-thats-w...
"A group of UK copyright lobbyists held confidential, closed-door meetings with Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries to discuss a plan to allow industry groups to censor the Internet in the UK."

Probably worth mentioning "UK" in the title.
The other obvious issue is that if the show was cancelled by the studio, what makes you think it would be profitable to pay for and produce new shows for distribution across a smaller network (Netflix vs. sum of cable/satellite distribution, which is the case for most major studios)? I suspect FNL/DirecTV may be a counter-argument here, although I don't know the specific economics of that agreement.
Flash 11 will also use the GPU for 3D.
I think you need a font where asterisk is not superscripted. Try Inconsolata.
If the game is 'get a job' and the competition is merit based. Then no, he didn't cheat, he kicked ass.

If the game is 'obtain the opportunity to get a job' then, yup he cheated.

Barriers to entry are sometimes needed, but if the only thing you did to get over that barrier was be born on the correct side of an imaginary line, well, that just doesn't impress me.

Really, american born citizens can't complain about this without sounding like entitled brats. 'I want to win despite my lack of ability.' No sympathy there.

Foreign born citizens that worked hard through the system to get citizenship have a little to be annoyed about, but really the only class of people who can really even say 'boo' to Jose are people who faced his situation and chose to leave and then worked their way back in. If that class of people exists then I would have just one question for them:

"Would you support the DREAM act?"

I really and truly have a hard time believing that they would say, "No."
Are you replying to the right comment? Nowhere in this thread have I advocated deporting people who were brought here as children. I have advocated the opposite.
http://cl.ly/3s1g0z2S3Y2n3e1L0q3U

Someone else might find this screenshot quite ironic. A response article, "Why Tumblr" and Tumblr failing to display it.
Good point which I should have qualified.

Still excluding the tax savings they still overpaid by all accounts, have a long history of wildly good and bad acquisitions and need to give wp7 every advantage they can. There's no way you can rule Microsoft out at this point they've got to be one of the front runners.
Immigrants are more likely to create businesses and therefore they tend to lower unemployment.
I like the idea but the only way I would pay for it is if it provided some amount of value that I couldn't get elsewhere. I like reading online.
Flash won the early online game battle against ActiveX. We all know how flash is positioned these days. It's not a question of regard, but market penetration.
What about Socket.io? Heroku points to this announcement and it looks like the sort of thing that could function similar to Websockets.

(I just started with Node so please forgive any glaring ignorance I display.)
Sounds like there are only two segments, people who think it's a cool toy to run their emails through and people who have businesses to run and see how it can help them refine their message.

It's not about the person as a person, it's about what they see themselves using it for.
I'm partial to Hackruiter (http://www.hackruiter.com). Recruitment done by engineers for engineers.
Note the proof of concept that takes advantage of a similar bug in Silverlight. The instant Microsoft tries to market IE as secure there will be thousands of articles calling them out on it.
Facebook's Reflections on the Open Compute Summit
I'm on the earlier side of the spectrum turning 20 last January. Currently, I'm sitting on my couch writing this while doing research on a "big" startup idea I have, but during the school year, I attend Georgetown. Over the summer, I'll be at Oxford taking a few classes and traveling around Europe a little.
After school, I'm really undecided on what I will do. I would much rather prefer to start my own venture, but the $$$ and relative safety of big corporations are big incentives to defect. I'm really glad I have another 2 years to figure it out.

What are you currently/hoping to do?
Did not downvote, but absolutely disagree. Ethnic nationalism has a bad track record, to put it mildly.
You're basically implementing an optimized version of ObjectId for your use case and having to take a couple stabs at it as well. No big deal, but there are just lots of little tricks like that to learn with MongoDB.

"My stuff wouldn't work on PostgreSQL at all, I have so much data that I must use sharding."

We had to implement sharding as well and chose to do it manually in PostgreSQL. Luckily our schema made that relatively easy and natural. YMMV
HADOOP / HIVE...unbeatable if you are working with big data
I'm a longtime Postgres guy, but I've used MySQL on a few sizable projects. MySQL has come a long way over the years, such that a lot of my original criticisms are no longer valid. My reasons for not using it this day are mainly lack of transactional DDL and the fact that adding indices require a full table lock. There are some interesting solutions to the latter problem that the Percona guys have pulled together, but Postgres handles it all out of the box. Things like partial and expression indices are icing on the cake.
> Honestly, this whole forum post reeks of "I know I did something wrong, hopefully posting here will make the pit in my stomach go away."

This is what you said about him contemplating transferring more money out of mtgox. You're acting like he did something abhorrent, or should think he did.

> my naivety caused me to assume that people playing with bitcoin were mostly just cryto geeks.

They are. But you're trying to say "... and I'm surprised one of them would be thiefly, like this guy."

Really, all this shows is that he should have transferred all the bitcoins out immediately. Then mtgox would have to deal with him instead of just slandering him. Now that he's pointed everything out to them he's just a scapegoat.
You'd have to pick up shows where the fan base was extremely passionate but the show just couldn't find a mass audience. Those types of shows don't come around that often.

With all the cable companies now interested in scripted television, the ability for good shows to make it to a home that will support it through growth is much higher.

Besides the inventory issue, I see huge issues with Hulu and Netflix getting into the production business. Their core business is distribution, not programming and production.
Coffee: The Greatest Addiction Ever
You are missing the point: if it helps you fill tables with customers, it is good advertising regardless of the customers being new or not. Also, how is an offer based on what you know people want worse than one published to the general public in, say, a newspaper ad?
You are NOT answering the issue of fairness of citizenship-by-birth.

You are just claiming that it's ok to have discrimination by contry of birth.

Well, unfair discrimination is NOT OK. That's why you are getting downvoted.

I personally did not downvote you. Even though I strongly disagree - at least you are trying to understand.
I'd like to move in the direction of eliminating them, yes. I don't see any reason to keep US/Canadian border controls, given that the relative parity of incomes means there isn't likely to be some huge, destabilizing migration. The EU's Schengen free-travel zone is a good precedent to follow on that, imo. Mexico is a harder case because of how screwed up the country currently is; opening borders tends to work better between relatively stable countries. But certainly we could start with Canada.
You basically have to be P&C eligible to use deposit @ mobile / home. To be P&C eligible you need to be military or spouse / child of military.
Is PTX really ISA?
It's also virtual, but very limited ...
Unlike PTX, FSAIL will work on both CPUs and GPUs and even will allow system calls from discrete GPUs.
To me it seems weird how kids work these days. I don't know what a pixel shader is for instance.

Thanks for bringing up some nostalgia. A pixel shader is roughly analogous to a hand-optimized texturing routine, except it runs on the GPU.
In my day job as a Data Warehousing consultant it's usually Oracle, Netezza or Teradata.

However, for the first time ever, my current project uses Postgres with Oracle being pushed out of the enterprise at a fast rate.

For my personal projects it's Postgres, Redis and SQLite.
At which color balance though?

If it's auto color balance, it's completely useless.
Goodness.
Asynchronous Event Based Web Servers? :X
Yeah I think that is pretty much how Google found all those awesome engineers from Digital Research and Bell Labs back in 1999-2002. These really seasoned engineers were surprised by what Google had accomplished and wanted to know how the hell it worked.
Umm, I guess if there was gay marriage he could have gotten in by marrying you.
16 Failures of 17 Attempts
Build and Analyze #30: FBI RAID Is Not A Backup
I wouldn't take any kind of recourse (legal or otherwise) and just consider yourself lucky to be only out $1,000. That they only ask for 20% upfront seems like an amateur hour move to me. I knew how this story ended right away after reading that.
This was my "Other"
(I am also 20).

Hah, well, I'm not quite sure, hence this post.

But after spending the past few months researching and meticulously laying out a conquer-the-world startup idea, I've come to the realization that I'm not quite prepared for it. It's going to require too much money and I don't have all of the necessary skills to get it off the ground.

So, until I'm ready, I'm working on a couple smaller projects, both of which, coincidentally (or not), apply directly to the "big" idea. The goal is to make enough income from these projects in order to finance some travel (and the future startup.) Ideally, the skills from these smaller biz projects will prepare me for the big game down the line.

--

As far as the big corporation vs. your own venture, my advice would be to try and develop your own things before you graduate. That way, it will be an easier decision in 2 years; either you need a job, or you don't.

That said, I personally would go for my own venture, simply for the personal freedom. Running an online business that makes ~30k a year would be worth significantly more to me than a ~60k stationary full-time job.
Signaling inherently changes both people, whereas conscious language is one-way
They never say explicit that these are just the US statistics, Bing does only grow there. Here in Germany has Google over 90% and nothing changed so far, also do they never say where these numbers come from.

Why is Bing still not profitable and Google earns more and more money?
This smells a lot like Microsoft PR.
I have a 1.5 TB Postgres database, sharded by schema, that runs wonderfully on a single box (12 core, 36GB RAM, raid 10 of 15k SAS drives). Why couldn't you shard with Postgres?
I think you should answer my question first, since the existence of interstate crime is indisputable and this doesn't seem qualitatively different from the deleterious effects which you are citing in the Cuban example.

But yes, I think we should be moving towards abolition of external border controls over the long term and dissolution of geographic borders with immediate neighbors like Mexico and Canada in the short term.
*His family* (...). His chances of (...) *if his family* (...)

He didn't cheat you into one damn thing. The opportunities that were given to him would not be given to you or "the next in line" had he not been here.

Part of what makes a wealthy nation, hum... wealthy, is the fact that it has enough resources to offer opportunities and services to the whole population. The US can give opportunities for you, him or any one that shows the necessary abilities.
My company has 130,000 employees, so I suspect every one of the above is represented somewhere, but the code that I hack on runs on PostgreSQL.
Interesting. This along with amalcon's posting of the actual bill text seems a lot more fair than my previous notion of a first-to-file system.
It would be cool to see some set of Fabric or other scripts come together which offer some of the capabilities DotCloud is providing but that you can use on your own infrastructure or host.
The mostly-just-one-way-to-organize-it approach cannot be overstated here. XPath is neat, but iterating through parser results is still a pain.
You're right [0], but I think it's too much to expect the tech press to make this distinction. Does it really matter if the N9 uses MeeGo or a version of Maemo that is compatible with the MeeGo APIs? The bottom line is that Nokia has a compelling smartphone platform other than WP7.

[0] http://sf2011.meego.com/program/sessions/harmattan-meego-com...
Yup, I live in northeast USA and the sun has a distinct southern slant even in summer. In winter it hardly gets over the trees.
It depends on how many transactions are there compared to how many people mining. The people who mine are the ones who spread the transactions across the network. The mining computing power is increasing way faster than the people using bitcoins.
The problem with XML is that it seemed to encourage more complicated data structures. People sort of forgot that you still have to process all this data. And that, at the end of the day, a lot of it ends up needing to be represented in columns and rows.
Streaming Movies and TV to watch instantly on Netflix
Just click it again and it will re-publish it.
The post actually appears to endorse using eval to parse JSON. Not only does that allow invalid JSON through, it disallows some valid JSON, and of course is a huge security hole.

If you want to handle JSON data in JavaScript use JSON.parse -- it's the safest, fastest, and most correct path to having your data available to you.

[update: edited to remove bizarre use of whole vs hole... boggles]
Valve could afford to buy the Vatican, and that was before they shipped a single game.
I am a self taught programmer with a BA in Political Science who works as a pseudo-project/product manager.

When I graduated on 2007, I worked at a major medical software company. In 2010 I joined a more traditional software startup (not the Silicon Valley startups like you see here). I think this was a good path for me. I've certainly learned a lot at both companies, although the startup is much more rewarding.

Regarding graduate school, I'm not interested in paying to learn what I've already learned through experience. When I get to graduate school I'd rather study new stuff (not just learn object-oriented design...ugh).
Ah, I agree with that,but there are people lambasting nokia for not sticking with meego since it appears so good, when it's actually maemo.
I'm a big fan of Redis precisely because it has a short list of promises and executes them well.

So many of these other new data stores promise "infinite scale" and leave out the "as long as it fits in RAM" part.
Do it. We made the switch a couple of months ago, and haven't looked back. Very little impact on performance, huge impact on reliability - we hardly ever get datastore timeouts now. And of course no maintenance outages either.

http://neogregious.blogspot.com/2011/04/migrating-app-to-hig...
Crime should have consequences. Sometimes you have to spend a night in jail. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks) Otherwise people might mistake that crime for living an honorable and hardworking life.
I would say any of those sound fine. The one thing I wish I had done was not spend more than 3 or so years in any one location or job in my early-mid 20s.
The business (and passion) of eSports
Travel. You'll be able to get away with doing it more cheaply than at any other time in your life.
I'm not defending the claimed numbers here, but it's easily possible that Google would be profitable at Bing traffic levels. Google is the largest and most profitable internet advertising company, so they could have larger margins per-click simply because of their position in the industry. Even excluding that, Bing could be purposefully doing things knowing that they will lose money (Live CashBack immediately comes to mind) in an attempt to increase market share, so simply being less profitable doesn't really mean that they couldn't be profitable..
One word. Microsoft, if them AMD and ARM are onboard that's it. Remember nVidia is an ARM licensor/developer
AT&T iPad Hidden Fees
So I just got off the phone with AT&T and found out that if you own an AT&T iPad and you use the AT&T service once, from that point on you need to activate the service at least once every 60 days, or else they will disable your SIM card.

Now here's the kicker. If you do want to activate your account after 60 days of inactivity, you need to get a brand new SIM card from them for $25!!!

So much for an on-demand internet service.
Your argument assumes a fixed number of available opportunities. In the work context, this is known as a 'lump of labor' fallacy.
I prefer Hulu over Netflix because it works on the Linux machine I have hooked up to my TV.
For tabular data, relational databases rock. But the relational model doesn't align well with object-orientated programming so you have an ORM layer that adds complexity to your code. And with relational databases, the complexity of your schema grows with the complexity of the data.

The graph-database model simplifies much of this and makes working with the modern-day social graph so much cleaner.

Graphs allow you to do powerful things like find inferences inside the data in ways that would be hard to do with relational databases.

How would you calculate PageRank using a relational database? As I said, with a graph database and Gremlin, you can do it in 2 lines.

To see the types of things you can do with graphs, check out Marko's short screencast on Gremlin (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wpTtEBK4-E).

And also check out Peter Neubauer's introduction to graph databases and how they compare to RDBMS' and where they stand in the NOSQL-movement (http://www.infoq.com/articles/graph-nosql-neo4j).
AND fun
Am I reading that correctly that you're sharding a database on the same box?
Didn't Steve Jobs put out a standing offer to buy Nintendo at one point?
Allow for telecommuting. I'm surprised this gets so easily dismissed.
I'm not saying that technology would be useless. It might be at least somewhat useful.

What I'm saying is that this particular business approach would fail (too much hype, not focusing on teams' advantages, ignoring customers' preferences).

Investors would over-invest, but business would not get enough revenue to pay them back.
How do you know he means that?
Live in Bali, Indonesia for Free – Tropical MBA Semester VI and VII
Not a bad strategy. I have already started a company which has been my number learning experience. I definitely know what I would do differently. Just to clarify the venture was not a failure, but also far away from being a "big" startup (read: slightly cash positive).
My number 1 piece of advice (although I don't know how much it is worth) is to network. It is crazy how mindless some investors truly are. It seems if you can get 1 person with a pretty big name in the tech industry behind your project, you can get the whole gang. Obviously you need a great product, but it seems the true value in startups today is the name.

Are you the business or engineer side (or both)?
Yup. Thats the currently devd version of gitx. There's been the odd bug hiccup, but those have been fixed and it getting moderate dev work.
Seconded. I understand that SF is the place where all the cool kids play, but it's kind of sad that in this day and age of the internet we're still chained to desks in a particular location.
Why Bill Taylor is wrong about great hackers
Yes, but the problem is that "Show HN"'s have two contexts: "maybe you want to use this", and, "offer me advice about my new offering". On the latter, HN's aversion to paying money for goods and services harms its utilities to companies offering premium goods and services.
But better expressiveness is exactly what you need to get your shit done. Being able to say what you mean concisely lets you focus on solving your problem and move on to the next task faster rather than getting bogged down into getting some petty details right.
just gimme sexps
My Organization Repos don't show up.
5 seconds for a 1.7 GB working set sounds really low: it would mean you could write > 200 Mb / sec assuming you could get data from mongodb infinitely fast. Also, what happens to your mongo database while you export data (can you still write to it ?).

In any case, mysqldump is rarely the bottleneck - restoring is. For the latter, you really want to use mysql from percona, because their version of mysqldump has an option to void the data without index first, and create the index later (--innodb-optimize-keys=True). The effect will depend on the database schema of course, but I often see one order of magnitude difference for simple, large tables with a few simple indexes.
I saw the exact opposite.
The guilds that performed the best, got first kill, turned the newest content into farm status the quickest, were guilds that had one man at the top.

He would have officers to whom he would delegate most of the operations, and with whom he would confer as the guild was tackling new content, but in the end his word was final. And it worked wonderfully until eventually the leader left without appointing someone competent enough to fill his shoes.

It was the complete opposite with "committee" based guilds. Everything there was about your standing in the council, who you could bring to "your side", infighting, inertia, analysis paralysis, cliques, rifts, you name it. It was a mess, and most raid nights were spent dying in very stupid and careless ways. DKP hoarding and loot cockblocking would become commonplace. Morale would plummet, the good players would leave, and eventually the guild would fold, be absorbed, or just wallow in suckiness.
Sqlite++