skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Didn't the AI winter teach us that rules-based expert systems can only get you so far?

I can just see pgbot turning down Google because its founders were too weakly committed - they wanted to sell the whole thing for <$1M and go back to their grad studies.
If he's talking about the FBI, he's talking about USGOV.

If he's talking about USGOV, the demographics of Congress, the Cabinet, and the Supreme Court are pretty clear.
Beautiful work. Any chance you'd help me out? http://testplanmanagement.com
I agree that it's better to be more thoughtful in how you handle existing customers and it's even worse spending 75% to give a 50% discount, however I don't think it's necessary to hide Groupons from existing customers. We encouraged all our customers to participate in our daily deals and spread the word. The customers appreciate it and we get more business.
Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux
Programming, motherfucker
Yeah, I'm pretty sure you dreamed it.
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The thing that worried me is that the founder said they didn't launch at SXSW because he wasn't a fan of conferences. It was on within a few days of launch and seems like the perfect proof of concept for it. When you have just been funded for so much who cares about your personal preference.

Either that or you need some kind of exclusivity in niches to build a critical mass of users like Facebook with colleges. Google Wave was a great case for the path color has gone down not working, people getting into the app, not seeing anyone else to interact with and forgetting about.

Even having a fake persona in it that you can delete, just to give people a feel for how the app works would be better than what they have now.
First of all, thank you for py-bcrypt. Thanks to your hard work and generosity, the tiny sliver of the internet that I manage is a more secure place.

Now for the request (sigh, you knew it was coming): at my day job, I have to develop on Windows and it's not feasible to install Visual Studio 2008 Express on my web server. Is there any other practical way to get py-bcrypt running in that environment?
I'd be up for that if i'm fluent in your language, what are you looking for?
There is opensource software (via OpenStack) to run a distributed blob store like this at scale.

My guess is Apple just doesn't want the hassle of dealing with it and/or this is temporary while they get their hardware set up
Pretend Office - email archives
From a logical standpoint, you are correct. From a marketing or political (business, no government politics), Apple could blame Microsoft for iCloud failing, regardless of the truth, to a point.

To put it another way, I frequently tell people "Businesses choose Java because if it fails, it isn't because they choose Java." This means that if the Director of IT says to build with the industry standard of Java (or .Net), it is not the Directors fault if/when the project fails. The project manager, the developers, QA, middle management, etc failed to do it correctly. It is a safe choice since it is industry standard and thus well proven. If it takes longer and costs more, it means it was a much more difficult problem then they expected, but since they used Java they got it working.

If on the other hand, they went with Rails/Django/Node.js/Erlang/NoSQL/etc, and it fails, the Director chose to use "new and untested" technologies, he/she is the root cause. Regardless of the fact that it could just be that realistic goals/management were never used.

I am not trying to say Azure is industry standard or the safe choice, but the way to shift blame is the same.
Complexity on Forbidden-Minor Planets?
That's like saying that Google's prowess with map-reduce is irrelevant because we also have Hadoop. This stuff is very hard to get right and nobody does it better than Google.
Wow, that is quite similar. The steps to change one to the other would be pretty simple. For example: switch the color on the logo with the color on the List your space button. I must say that the AirBnb slideshow is way better. It shows each slide for a longer period of time, and the transition is slower. Relaxing to view, as it should be.
Richard Clarke: China's Cyberassault On America
Was Tor actually invented by the NSA? I didn't manage to find any sources for that, could you provide one?
If they had something new to tell us, you'd hope they'd have done it by now via the product. Time's 'a wastin'.
Your points are good ones but I don't think the author is saying that you are always better off fighting than not. His point is more nuanced.

My read is this:

1. Don't panic.

2. Get professional guidance.

3. Weigh the calculus well of how the troll will likely respond to resistance before deciding to fold: the troll is aiming at low-hanging fruit and may not choose to pursue someone who is prepared to raise obstacles (a matter that needs to be carefully weighed with professional help).

4. Part of this calculus (not emphasized in the article) is the position of the larger company whose platform is being targeted, whether Apple, Google, or whomever. I find it intriguing that the developers first targeted were very quick to publicize their plight and then went dark after being sued. This may signify that Apple has privately agreed to hold them harmless in exchange for their agreement to keep this confidential. And this would make sense. Apple would be foolish to make a blanket commitment to indemnify all developers when its agreement with them says that all the risk falls on the developer. At the same time, it can't afford to let a vulture come in and feed on the people who ultimately make the platform work. Hence, a strong letter to the world saying that it will vigorously defend its license rights (but with no public commitment to hold developers harmless), a motion to intervene in the lawsuits already filed by Lodsys against select developers, and dead silence (and, we assume, a forthcoming defense) from those same developers who normally would have taken the extortionist license terms and folded. This very likely means that the developers will stay the course with support from Apple, and that support almost has to include a private agreement to indemnify for this scenario to make sense. I am of course speculating here and might be dead wrong. The point for developers who have been threatened, however, is not to fold reflexively in such situations before exploring what Apple (or any other party defending its platform) is really doing behind the scenes. Even though this article did not get into this aspect, its main point really brings one to this sort of examination: if you are threatened, get good advice from knowledgeable people who know how to help steer you through this sort of maze. That is money well spent and it does not require you to spend a fortune fighting a troll one-on-one. The fact that a proper assessment might show the troll to have a flimsy case only reinforces the idea that there may be room to resist, if you do it right.
"its no where close to the easy installation"

I'd beg to differ. It may not be identical, but App installation on my iPhone/iPad/Macintosh from the App Store is pretty much "Click, authorize, done"
Not sure I want to pay for an app that helps me find more apps.
Khloe and Lamar,Season 1,Episode 3
Khloe and Lamar,Season 1,Episode 3
Khloe and Lamar Episode 3 will focus on Khloe giving Lamar any taste of his own mess, Khloe takes a look at his insecurity
Cassandra is highly tuneable in terms of consistency and propagation, the vagaries of Facebook's particular(ly huge) deployment I can't speak to, but generally speaking you can make it have almost any properties you like.

MongoDB lacks that flexibility, but I like it too, for other reasons.
Pedro Lourenço Autumn/Winter 2011-12
Perhaps you're misunderstanding. Let's say there's a Groupon "$100 of food at ABC Restaurant for $50". You pay $50 for the deal to Groupon. Groupon takes half of that as their commission, leaving the restaurant with $25. Now the restaurant has to provide you with $100 of food for the $25 that Groupon gave them.

If the cost of goods are 30%, that $100 in food costs them $30. They're only getting $25 for it. My slide rule tells me that's a $5 loss per customer. The restaurant hopes to make it up on drinks and such, but that $5 loss is only cost of goods and doesn't include staff, rent, and other overhead. It also doesn't factor in the fact that people who came to your restaurant only because they could get cheap food don't tend to be big spenders.

I'm sure you've seen this: http://posiescafe.com/wp/?p=316
First Laser Made of Living Cells Has Arrived
There's a sensible reason for implementing a law of this kind - if they catch the guy that wrote Zeus, I'd like them to be able to prosecute him (not that they could, as he's probably not in the EU, but you get the idea). Of course, it does need to be carefully written to avoid collateral damage.
I think it is difficult to judge based on a % only situation.

If you only have 100 users and you're only get 5 users coming back in the last two days, you might not have hit a market fit.

If you've got 10k users, that's a different story.

But I wouldn't use a 2 day window, as I think that is too short.

I'd use monthly active users (how many users login once a month) or weekly. That should be a more valuable metric.

Again, this depends on exactly what your service does, your target market, how often you expect them to login, but 5% doesn't sound bad to me for a 2 day window.

What happens when you extend the window?
Maybe you could install just the VS 2008 runtime libraries? http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=...
If you're up for taking a look at my Android project's UI, please shoot me a message: matt_p_green (at) Microsoft's now-lukewarm-mail-service .com

Thanks!
The sparc pizza box was first. The SS1 was coming out around the same time that NeXT was moving the cube from floptical-only to allowing a built-in hard drive.
I'm pretty satisfied with my Hacker Newsletter page (http://www.hackernewsletter.com) and run A/B tests on it all the time, but would love to get some help & feedback on the actual email itself (last issue here - http://bit.ly/mKaMq2). It needs updating, but haven't figured out where to start yet.
Didn't Apple just build a couple huge data centers? I was under the assumption they were supposed to be for iCloud?
I thought this was "hacker" news?

HTML5, which is actually just "HTML" since it will be a living standard from now on, is comprised of:

- new browser APIs (canvas, storage, geo, etc etc)

- standardized markup error handling (consistent behaviour for tag soup)

- new elements

There is no word of CSS3 in any official HTML5 document, and it will remain like that since CSS is a separate standard.
The pizza box design is older than that. The Sun 3/50 and 3/60 from 1986 or so were the first I'm aware of. The Sparcstation design is a straightforward evolution. NeXT shipped cubes (without hard drives...) first in 1988. The NeXTstation pizza box wasn't until a later iteration in maybe 91 or so.

And $10k is about right. You could pay less if you skimped on memory (I think most of the various workstations were around $6k for a minimal configuration), and much much more if you bought the fancy framebuffer cards.
From the box about Peter Pham at the bottom of the article:

Currently is the Co-Founder and President of Color.

I understand it can be difficult to keep these things up to date, but at least make sure it doesn't contradict the article it's posted on!
Actually, this is a problem with most entry level tools. Professional level tools like Omniture Test and Target or Optimost with Autonomy Segments handle MVT testing per segment, segment defined by external variables (appended data or data from Dataxu et al), business variables (return customer, prospect, etc.), or just online variables (IP address Geo, repeat vs. new visitor, etc.)

Professional level, btw, is defined as "costs a lot" and "are painful to use" and "have poor interfaces"; more recent tools give up some of the power and cost for ease of use.

However, as you point out, these easier MVT tools (or Split-Test tools) focus on showing the "winner" or "winning variables", winner defined as "most impactful on the total traffic or sample of this traffic during this time". You are right that this is not the final answer... but it's a good starting place; if you solve for the majority of users, it's usually the biggest step. Then solving for unique smaller groups can often result in lower volume but higher value conversions... if you have time.

That being said, including segment variables in the analysis is a wonderful thing to do, and I encourage it. I look forward to when Visual Website Optimizer and other "entry level" tools include these in their analyses by default... and we can look to the end of Optimost, Omniture TnT, and the other "enterprise" tools.
http://www.diagnosia.com/en/ - European source for medical drug information
To target techies or non-techies
Okay guys, after studying UX design and Steve Blank's Customer Manifesto back and forth, I have decided to create a mobile web survey tool.

I was quite amped about its benefits until I received feedback from potential customers during the customer development phase:
1. Non-tech/marketer people - "Uhh.. how is this going to make me more money?"
2. Tech/marketer people - "Thanks for the idea, we'll probably get out mobile web developer to add it to our upcoming app"

So being a tech person, would you find utility in using a third party mobile web/native-app SaaS that could be added onto your primary app?

Scenario - You are creating a mobile app for an events company. They ask you to add a feedback feature with MCQ's, Scale Q's and longform text input. Would you:
(A) Create the whole damn thing yourself
(B) Save yourself 30+ hours in development time and plugin the SaaS feedback tool?

Cheers,
James
Out of curiosity, I wonder how well we could emulate one of these today?
I think his point is that 2 raised to 192 is 256 times larger than 2 raised to 184, meaning that you are getting 1/256 as many possible keys by reducing the key length by 8 bits.
Pandora Raises $234.9 Million in IPO
My 2 cents is that this is a short term trend, if it continues for the next 3 months then I will raise an eyebrow. From people I know I see absolutely no sign of any decline in facebook interest.

Could be: Summer has come, kids are now hanging out physically more than virtually which is what happens when you have homework/school (hs -> college)
you make it sound like we should congratulate lulz for good work
Seems to me like you are talking about Cohort Analysis: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/10/the-cohort-analysis.html

But you are right, a tool for this would be nice.
So Shall TV Be Disrupted? Or Democratised? Or is That the Same Thing?
Pakistan Arrests C.I.A. Informants in Bin Laden Raid
How we do browser side caching using stompy/apacheMQ and javascript
http://xkcd.com/908/
sounds like you're just a hater.
Ehh, I used to work with ASP.NET at work, moved to ASP.NET MVC, and now I switched jobs and got stuck with the classic ASP.NET flavor again. As much as it pains me to admit it, it does feel "aged" and "legacy" to me these days.
Dear Fremont Troll Vandal : YOU SUCK.  A blog post / rant.
The thing is though, I can't tell if these arguments also apply to x86-64. AMD started with a clean slate without caring about backwards compatibility, so I wonder if a lot of these squabbles are about a legacy instruction set?
He's probably bored as hell, just waiting for the day when he can cash out the last pile of chips and do something else.
New Deal for Information Technology
This is a totally subjective thing, but they both have terrible names, IMO. Airbnb is slightly more memorable but equally horrible to actually say aloud.
Lockpicking tools are illegal and yet locksmiths and companies that make locks are allowed to have them. That seems pretty directly analagous; I see no particular reason why we couldn't have licensed and bonded digital security experts/companies.
What makes you think Apple won't make money on both?
Aeron chairs and tricked out Mac dev systems aren't exactly cheap these days.
Sure, but how much did a GB of RAM, a GB of bandwidth, a Ghz of CPU, and the code to run a basic service on it cost?
Perhaps they have a bunch of windows servers inside, but why windows.net?
Yes, in the land where everyone is logical and only makes decisions based on pure reason, that's true. But on planet earth, people act irrationally.

From a strictly logical sense, it's meaningless. But symbolically, it says a lot. The fact that Microsoft failed at something and then got bested by someone using their technology is symbolic of how far Microsoft has fallen.
It strongly implied that the author of py-bcrypt intentionally sabotaged it.

It explicitly says very much the opposite, pointing out that the problem isn't the wrapper. I can't understand how you could read the blog post and come away with such an impression.
You have a lot of options, but we would love some feedback on http://grouptalent.com
Well, as long as the company is private, you can stop that from happening. I have shares in a few private companies, some of which I've invested in, and some of which I earned through work.

Every single one of these had a "right of first refusal" clause in the investment / option / stock grant agreement; If I have a buyer, I must give existing shareholders the option to do the deal at the same conditions -- and they can either take it whole or leave it.

Doesn't make much of a difference for me (once a buyer is available, I'll get the same conditions), but it does let the company -- if it so wishes -- keep the investor pool small, if they pay to play.

Also, having been an entrepreneur and having raised money myself -- 500 shareholders is something you don't accidentally get to before your private company is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And at that point, you won't care about the cost of releasing audited financial statements - the reason everyone avoids that at that point is that you can't keep your cards secret anymore.
I would love some help designing the site and UI for my startup autotax.me

Its a tax platform that will help automate taxes for small businesses. If your're interested my email is cameronkeng@gmail.com
Sarah Palin's Inbox
Perhaps they haven't gotten all of said data centers live yet and needed to use Azure and AWS as a temporary measure.
This is one of my problems with younger developers. They slap framework code together rather than actually figuring out what's going on underneath.

It's one of the reasons I still use PHP. It's the perfect balance between framework and coding.
The porsche 911 line definitely handles better than the 350Z. Even in bad weather, which is where I would expect most of the accidents would have occurred.
Considering the amount of none trivial work about having to port your apps from one Rails version to the next I would be surprised if the Director didn't get part or most of the blame for forcing them to use Rails. And saying that they could just stay in an old version is not valid. When bugs are discovered in the old version most likely they will not be fixed because everybody has already moved on. Enterprise projects already have a high rate of failure and building it on a platform that has a history of making substantial changes on every new version is a really, really bad idea.

An honest risk analysis of the enterprise project would raise a huge red flag for using a technology that continues to change substantially in every version such that it is not backwards compatible.
Are you paying for Facebook now? How is that even relevant?
> The SEC couldn't staff up to take on more workload, because Congress held the purse strings and (mis)appropriated the fees meant to pay for same.

You imply the SEC actually wants to do their job, which is not true, as has been demonstrated by e.g. Markopolos in the case of the Madoff, and many others. The SEC has been captive (in the sense of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture ) for decades.
Recently, I've had reason to set up systems of various types from that era. Frankly, SunOS 4.1.3 is a dream compared to consumer stuff like Macs running System 7, or PCs with Windows 3.1. Sure, it isn't going to run modern software, but you can reliably do things in the shell, and quickly, that are tedious on those other systems. Great stuff!
If you don't have to sign to recieve the letter (certified or registered mail), then don't contact them, because there is no proof that you actually received it.
Protecting against DDOS attacks (2008)
Thanks for sharing your experience :)

In my view, ability to connect with your customers post-experience was a home run!

From what I have read most small businesses do not have the necessary infrastructure to do that. Curious to know what technologies did you use to capture that?

Also, did you have cases where customers tried to reuse their groupons?
Ok, but wasn't MySpace in ColdFusion? I don't know if they had anything today that is scalable on their backend.

Was NoSQL around back then? They're right about the custom hacking that is required and that Facebook does (i.e. MySQL).

Good web technologies existed at the time. They may have not had Rails or Django but servlets were certainly an option.
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http://trackjumper.com took almost a year to break even. Had I been working on it full time, it would have happened much sooner.
It seems much more likely that they'll return a big portion of that to Sequoia.
Love Startups? Love Monsters? Join MinoMonsters (YC W11)
Actually, I'll admit that I can't either. I may be wrong about this, and it may have just been a rumor that sounded about right (NSA has made several contributions to the cryptography community)
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I'm sure some veterans from Sun or maybe Fujitsu could do it, but I think the CPU architectures have changed enough that it would be painful...

There are probably lots of applications for which -- if you can't find hardware -- it is easy enough to compile on an old version of RedHat using x86 hardware, instead. Either way, what starts to kill you is tracking down old proprietary software like specific versions of Motif.
“Go the F**K to Sleep”: How a Facebook Status Became a Children’s Book
Temperature as a single variable doesn't deal with /known/ problems.

Besides the well-known effect on temperature, CO2 also causes ocean acidification, which among other things kills coral. In its own way, ocean acidification is far scarier than global warming, because there is absolutely no question that it is taking place. While you need a PhD to analyze climate data, you only need high school chemistry to demonstrate ocean acidification. Moreover, you have to deal with the carbon dioxide directly to solve this problem; you can't just try changing the albedo of the Earth, through mirrors or surface reflectors or particulates in the upper atmosphere. And worse: simply stopping where we are may not an option. The current levels may already be long-term undesirable.
It's a safe bet that if you can't articulate the position you're arguing against, you don't understand it well. That could mean it's such a crazily dumb idea that you would never have thought of it, but it could also mean that they're much smarter than you.

For what it's worth, I have no idea what their plan is, either.