skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree. A research, when begins is independent of its beneficiary. That's why scientific progress cannot be charted. It's surprising that came from Bill Gates. Scientists work to solve problems, to unearth secrets of nature, to create things, not to solve needs of the poor. That is the consequence of their research.
As time goes on, transaction costs are commoditized due to competitive pressures, Most transaction fees in these markets gravitate to nickels and pennies, if not less.

This is one of the best takeaways I've gotten in a while and may be the most damning insight into the Groupon model. Right now it barely[1] works with 50% of the revenues on a Groupon can it still work at 10%?

[1] I say "barely" because Groupon is still losing money but its doing so intentionally in a huge growth phase and land grab once it settles into its actual market a bit this can easily swing into "doesn't" or "successfully".
People should be allowed to videotape cops doing their jobs
Ask HN: What's the best way to show off side projects?
How do all you hackers out there show off your side projects? Github? Personal website?

What do you think is the best way to show them off?
Did you read the Wikipedia page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadoop ? It's a framework for processing large datasets in a distributed environment using the MapReduce algorithm from Google's paper http://labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html .
Groupon model requires scale much bigger than "small" to work.

The cost of acquiring merchant is high even if you do have lots of potential customers.

If you don't have lots of potential customers, a merchant will not take you seriously regardless of how much you spend trying to woo him.

You can't wish away those inherent scaling problems with "opportunity to innovate". There is a reason why the only companies entering this business are well capitalized with lots of existing eyeballs and existing strengths they can leverage (i.e Google, Amazon, Facebook).
Supreme Court: Video games qualify for First Amendment protection
Maybe start the title with "Rumor:"...
I suppose I could've explained it... It's ideal for keyboard-heavy users.

Instead of typing a search term into the search box and Ctrl+Arrow-ing to the search engine I want to use, with YubNub (in Firefox and Chrome, maybe IE?) you type in a command for what you want to do.

"g FDR" does a Google search of "FDR".
b Bing, y Yahoo, yt YouTube, CNN, ESPN, IMDB, and on and on.

There's even some slightly stronger commands:
"tr Chi Eng 晚安" uses Google Translate from Chinese to English, telling me "晚安" means "good night".

Yeah, I mostly use the "g" and "yt" commands, but I love the flexibility without having to arrange search engines. I just remember a few letters/commands. For a long time I'd resorted to typing "site:imdb.com" as my first search term into a Google search box. No more.

Also, you can define your own shortcuts! On a whim, I pointed XBLA to the Xbox Live marketplace at Xbox.com, and it works wonderfully. So now I can just type "xbla Trenched" and get to the page so I can buy the game with a click.

A few of their "Golden Egg" commands:
http://yubnub.org/kernel/golden_eggs?args=
I've helped my grandmother manage her business listing on there. It has brought many happy costumers and for at least 4 months a year we have a full booking of all spaces. However, the product is poorly done. It is hard to navigate and there are no tools to share accounts or have multiple listings within one account. I've also encountered numerous technical errors and limitations that make me think the product might not be secure. It feels like the more recent features are sitting on an outdated and overly complex codebase (just a guess).

So if any TripAdvisor employees are listening - thank you for a product that has worked well for us. But if you can improve it I am sure you could bring in more costumers on both ends (managers and travelers).
No offense, but you sound pretty retarded.
A Closer Look at the Social Loop Behind Turntable.fm's Rapid Growth
Its a good start. I'd also point out that I know of several companies in this space that have eventually been acquired, including tvtome.com and clicker.com. In this case, they were both acquired by CBS Interactive. If your project takes off, make sure that doesn't happen to you. Its basically like getting bought by Yahoo.
Perhaps non-sitting Buddhist monks live even longer than sitting Buddhists?
Unfortunately design is best when it is totalitarian. Good design comes from a core visionary entity, not a committee. This way of working seems incompatible with open source, because developers volunteering their time don't want to be told what to do.
Wait, I thought AT&T selling last generation's (I think) iPhone for $50 with a contract was Apple's "response" to people requesting a cheaper version of the iPhone?
Why Bitcoin isn’t a security under federal securities law – Lex Technologiae
Lulzsec leader outed with phone number published?
Personally speaking, I'm not a fan of the Patriot Act. I've expressed my opinion, e.g. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-and-privacy/#comment-10... and https://profiles.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts/GXPr... before.

If you haven't seen it, we released an update to our government transparency report today: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20074661-93/google-gets-mos...

The report tells which governments send us the most requests. Personally, I'd like it if Google took a more visible stand against the Patriot Act, but the government transparency report is still a bigger step than most other major companies I can think of offhand.
Out of curiosity how long did that take to index?
Those photos are a mix of dutch housing in Amsterdam, including an old canal street. It is about as far as you can get from "Soviet era planned city."

People definitely live in smaller spaces in the Netherlands (and Europe in general), but the quality and amenities of the public spaces is so outstanding, that it more than makes up for lack of square footage in one's house.
Appears to belong to Barret Brown. http://pastebin.com/NGz4NFFL
> Rakudo, while a nice name, is also too easy to mistype - even core committers (me included) have frequently misspelled its name in commit messages etc.

I agree with the principle of this, but you do have to compare this to Pearl.
I have a question for anyone out there who understands the domain: in the pre-iPhone days, how much would you have paid for the separate instruments that this app simulates? I'd have to guess at least a few hundred bucks, right? It amazes me to think that they all can be replaced by a 3.99$ app (assuming it works as advertised and whatnot.)
Additionally, not all mobile apps are the same; e.g., 7 days is certainly too long for games, but probably just fine for a calendar app.

The Android market already lets you customize your trial duration, though in a second-best manner—you upload both a demo and a regular version of the app. Of course, there are a bunch of problems, like trying to migrate data.
Isn't he the same guy who was barred from the iOS store for creating crappy apps that were essentially just webpages packaged as applications?

Wonder whatever happened to that ordeal
Wow. I have heard the term "permatemp" before, but it seemed more like incompetence than malice.
What can I say? Your explanation is wrong. It generates wrong numbers. And gives little to no insight as to why Benford's law works.

Benford's law will hold approximately for any set of numbers with the property that they are distributed over many orders of magnitude, from a distribution which doesn't change much if you multiply by a random number in some range.

An example of such a set of numbers is the set of numbers that come up in intermediate calculations involving a lot of different numbers. (This explains the logarithm books where the phenomena was first noticed.)

Another example are the numbers you see coming out of any sort of self-similar phenomena. As fractals show, self-similar behavior is ubiquitous. As a result numbers like the length of rivers, the height of hills, and the size of cities all tend to follow Benford's law.

For any particular source of numbers, the explanation for why they fall into a category that matches Benford's law will differ. Benford's law is a property that mathematical models tend to have, rather than being a rigorous mathematical theorem.

(FYI Benford's law is something that I've known about, and thought about off and on, for close to 20 years ago now.)
Power grid change may disrupt clocks
Hi jokull,

Would like to understand more, is there a way to contact you ?

Andy
Ask HN: First Programming Job?
I just started a new job developing. I don't feel as if i am learning fast enough. How long was it until you started to feel comfortable in your job?
A very good article. However, regarding this point:

"Groupon may end up being the biggest train wreck in Tech history."

I think that webvan.com, pets.com and a few others may provide stiff competition when all is said and done and the numbers are adjusted for inflation.
Yes, and for a reason. Python 3 is still not widely adopted [sic].

Python 3 Wall of Shame: http://python3wos.appspot.com/
IIRC, OpenBSD has some similar issues with PF rules, and perhaps other configuration files as well.

I can't remember if it refuses to parse the file or ignores the last line, but it's not a fun thing to bump against.
I wish I had the courage to reply that way. I have 1.5, pushing 2, years of web app experience (in PHP and Python), but I am constantly being asked if I would be interested in relocating for such and such amazing senior level Java position.

As a good Midwest kid, I do my best not to burn any bridges by not being polite, but I get tired of telling recruiters I don't possess the experience they are looking for. That is, until the email back asking me to think about it just a little more.
The "Conference Bike" is not quite the same thing as a non-stationary bike desk, but it still insane. (Google has some of these.)

*"The ConferenceBike is pedaled by 7 riders sitting in a circle. One person steers while the other 6 pedal (or not) as the bike moves effortlessly along."

http://www.ConferenceBike.com/
Hacker group the A-Team publishes list of alleged LulzSec members - latimes.com
Facebook hires Sony, iPhone hacker GeoHot
With kids this is the best I've found http://travelswithanineyearold.com/
Being mildly hyperactive has many hidden benefits :)
For many many years the web browser implementations have been buggy and incomplete, and it was always difficult for me to figure out what I could and couldn't use on which browsers and which operating systems. I don't have any specific complaints other than a myriad of tiny tiny headaches that I've left in the past. A lot of them revolved around text APIs and especially the DOM interfaces. I ran into far fewer bugs and inconsistencies when just using static XML.

From what I can tell the browser implementations are getting much better. It has been very odd that browsers have been shipping half-broken implementations for years, and the specification was released in 2003, a full eight years ago.

I think that the failure to implement SVG can largely be traced back to the extreme breadth and complexity of the specification. It's much easier to read through the specification for OpenGL or Postscript than it was to make it through the SVG specification, though I admit that a procedural API is almost necessarily simpler and easier than a stateful scene graph that includes a procedural API on top of it. Maybe SVG Tiny and Mobile mitigate the problem, but those came far too late to make a difference, and SVG 1.1 certainly wasn't deprecated in favor of a smaller and more implementable set of functionality.

In ay case, I'm not going to be guinea pig for SVG again. I may pick it up when others have proven that it has several interoperable implementation on separate OSs, but I still consider it one of the bigger time-sucks and poor architectural decisions I've made. /rant
No, bash doesn't and didn't have its own limit. On an ancient system (Debian Sarge), ARG_MAX=131072:

$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 2.05b.0(1)-release (i386-pc-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
$ strace bash -c '/bin/echo `seq 1 30000`' 2>&1 | grep exec
execve("/bin/bash", ["bash", "-c", "/bin/echo `seq 1 30000`"], …) = 0
execve("/bin/echo", ["/bin/echo", "1", …) = -1 E2BIG (Argument list too long)

As you can see, the argument list too long error came back from the
execve syscall, i.e., from the kernel. (Note that I shortened the strace output to make it fit the page)
$ ab -c 500 -n 1000000 http://example.com/some/resource/intensive/url

Amazing how many sites this kind of "attack" would take down. Most sites don't have any throttling in place to stop it.
Lessons Learned from Startup Weekend Las Vegas
This Google query works fairly well:

site:news.ycombinator.com link:http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

Link to said query: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+l...

Query returns:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=123489

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1293652

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=385068
ok, so that concerns me, because i am not convinced that "more data" is a good thing. more surveillance in general is, it seems to me, going to help those with power rather than those without - they have more resources, for example.

what i thought was good about your app, from this article, was that it was intended for the underdog - that something about the process to combine data, say, was intended to provide a counterbalance to the abuse of police power.

but now you're saying you're neutral about it. that you're as happy for it to be used by the police against others, as for others to use it against the police. doesn't that mean that you're likely making things worse?

and what about other morally questionable areas? mob-justice, for example. what are you going to do if a bunch of people start pooling observations of someone they are calling, say, a paedophile, when there's no conviction against them? or gays? or people of one race or another, asserting that they commit more crime...?

just arguing that "more data is good" seems horribly naive. data a tool that can be abused in many ways. if you're choosing how to shape that force, and choosing well, great, but if you're going to ignore the moral responsibility that comes with the data, what makes you think you are helping?
Oddly enough, despite Ruby's origins, Perl is still very widely used in Japan.
For most things it's pretty damn nice.
Anything that uploads to a server should have plausible deniability built in. What I mean is that it should still save locally the last 15 seconds of video so that you have something they can force you to delete.
Death Knell #56: Apple’s Closed System Doomed to Die | The Mac Observer
I had to check several times I hadn't accidentally hit zoom a few times.

Sounds useful, but how many visitors do you need to have for this to be worth doing?
Very cool post - not only is it informative, but you've taken the "oh-so-rare" extra step of actually coding up a solution to what you're talking about - rather than taking the easier approach and just telling others what they're doing wrong but presenting no practical alternatives. Kudos!
Artist launches album exclusively on Groupon
How to Interview Developers
Market them to their target markets!
I'm doing an IT forensics unit next year, I get the feeling I won't even be taught this (I hope the people telling me these low expectations are wrong).
Why do you think they can't? Deutsche Telekom in Germany will happily sell you an iPhone 4 (16GB) for 1€ with a two year contract (90€/month for the first half, 100€/month for the second half of the contract, unlimited minutes, 120 minutes in the EU, 3000 SMS, unlimited data throttled to GPRS speeds after 1GB). They are doing that whole activation fee scam and will want an additional 25€ from you but still, free iPhones are certainly a possibility and there is no reason to sell them for $200 together with a crazy expensive contract like, for example at&t does. I'm sure US carriers could sell free iPhones with contracts, they just don't want to.

Not that it matters anyway. Who cares about the price of the phone when the contract costs by far the most money?
I've had pretty good semi-accidental success with this method. Half the time I don't even get to the coding questions. Usually after 10 minutes of general technically-focused chatting I know if I want to reject the person. Knowing if I want to hire requires more, but I'm not always convinced throwing them at a whiteboard is the best way.
How was classical inheritance *supposed* to be done in ECMAScript 3?
Twitter says the tweet doesn't exist, so scrot'd http://i.imgur.com/5NhXq.png
Do you mean brute-force trail and error for every possible domain? That looks daunting, and an easy way to have your IP address blocked.
Sorry for the late response. I would look at Agile Web Development With Rails (4th Ed), Programming Ruby (2nd Ed), and The RSpec Book.
It stops recording when the phone is locked. But I'd imagine that as long as it's recording, the phone wouldn't go into lock mode unless you specifically told it to. The good news is that even if someone takes your phone and deletes the video, you can email Qik to recover whatever portion of the video was uploaded to their servers before the deletion.
Ways to screw up your spreadsheet design
Yeah, where's the beef?
There are designers that make pretty interfaces (last I saw Xfce needed some of them, and there are designers who make images (like OpenTTD replacement of the original game files). Yes, both are needed, but most designers go towards making websites or something else over-subscribed.
Groupon is in the right battle - for small business, yet they are an army of old, low tech, type - sales people cold calling - which is extremely expensive and relatively low efficient.
The battlefield of the future belongs to drones. Like these mentioned stock exchanges - quick/real-time response, high volume, low cost, dominated by algorithms. In SMB/deals space it will be something like this - i get up, deciding to skip company cafeteria and go for lunch somewhere nearby, while walking through the hall press couple buttons on iPhone or whatever gadget, in a seconds the automated software of the local merchants (or the bored cashier if business is slow, though software is more plausible case and it would actually be outsourced, hosted Salesforce-style software contracted by the merchant) based on their discount strategies, current load, my status with them (if enabled/exists), etc... would respond with what they have, discounts, specials of the day, length of the line/crowdness, etc,... ie. the response is optimized for and reflects the current condition of the business, click - order if i want and they support pre-ordering, click - map, i'm getting into the car - drive.
"Cheetos" is not my idea of pleasurable, yet fatty, food. It would rather be fine dining; probably even more fattening, but my life would be rather less without it. I would name two experiences that made my life before the experiences pale in comparison: expertly prepared multi-course meal with matched wines, and motorbike riding. Both statistically shave years off your life, but I would not settle for a life without either.
followup, it's a deal everywhere: http://www.google.com/#q=site:groupon.com+david+gray
Although there was obviously malicious intent here I think it's amazing that typing one line into a terminal can result in (potentially) 5 years in prison.
Do you not see the hypocrisy in your own arguments?

You are complaining you cannot get the domain you want but telling others who might not meet your threshold to get a subdomain. Why don't you drink your own kool aid instead of drawing an arbitrary line that suits you? Stop whining and use a subdomain. If you cannot afford a domain in the secondary market that meets your needs, you probably aren't running a global brand. The average domain sale price in the aftermarket is between $2-3,000.

The argument that you don't have access to the domain name system is hilarious. There are plenty of available domains, I dug up 26,000 short, pronounceable (<5 letters) ones a couple months ago. A single namespace has ~63^37 possibilities, that's plenty big.
Thanks guys. It helped me on more than one occasion.
The number of visitors you have is irrelevant.

If you have any visitors you are doing them a huge disservice if you do not have SSL session caching.

You would use external SSL caching like this if you have more than one SSL termination point (typically a webserver like nginx/Apache) behind a load-balancer.
Just because something is simple or easy doesn't make it any more or less ethical to do.
Line-by-line Speed Analysis for iOS Apps
wait, by 'finished' do you mean he died? because I didn't mean to say that's fantastic at all I assumed you mean he was cured?
Such a pointless article. Saying that "Apple's closed system is doomed to die" is not the same as saying that Apple is doomed to die. If Apple absolutely refuses to ever adjust to market demands, technology improvements and changes in culture, then they'd be doomed to die. I think Apple has proven they havea damn good track record of showing flexibility when needed. They run a closed system right now because THEY CAN. The consumers are happy with what they provide and we're all greedily gobbling up what they're selling. When the market starts demanding an open system, I'd be willing to bet Apple will be there supporting that.

Why is it your MacBook Pro runs on an Intel chip and can run Windows7 natively now? 10-15 years ago this was unthinkable. The market demanded some level of compatibility and Apple met the demand.
I tried helping the Wordpress comunity with this Google Summer of Code entry for Android blogging app redesign: http://tomaskafka.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/wordpress-for-and... . I based the design on taking the most common requests and complaints from Android Market reviews, mixed with so successfull 'post anything fast' model of Posterous.

The mentors chose this joke of a buzzwords and a brainless copy of Facebook (Facebook has dashboard with 9 buttons therefore my app will have 9 functions and it is a good UX) instead: https://anirudhspider.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/version-2-wor...

The code of app was terrible - mashup of business and diplay logic organized as 1 screen = 1 class. I recognized that to decouple business logic from view and enable different screen flow, splitting into proper MVP layers would be needed - and offered to do the refactoring as well.

I tried - never will again. Open source my ass.
It's still the better search interface. Hope you make the code available.

Thanks.
Working at Nodejitsu
Never heard of Barret Brown prior to this, but I found a very interesting article on him here: http://www.dmagazine.com/Home/D_Magazine/2011/April/How_Barr....
What would you consider a successful financial exit from the company? Reverse what you would have to sell the company for to hit that number along with 3 other cofounders (and it seems you are not a primary equity holder).

IMHO, 4 persons is too many people for a startup that hasn't yet launched or proven traction.
haha, your geekiness is showing
Why Does Apple Still Have An IE6 Screenshot on its Quicktime Download Page?
So your point being that to the service the same population it costs more if the population is concentrated in a smaller area like in a city, rather than dispersed in suburbs? I hope I am reading you correctly.

I'd submit that the experience with broadband/cell phone costs+coverage in the US vs. other countries shows that it's cheaper to provide services if population density is higher.
True for all smartphones, was probably the biggest factor in the Kin's demise.
Show HN!!

Other than that however, tell your followers on Twitter, show it to your friends, put it on your website (get as many link-ins as possible), etc.

Good Luck!