skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the past, Facebook Canvas applications and Website applications have received C&Ds for the "save photo" functionality.

See: http://www.vincentcheung.ca/blog/facedown/cease-and-desist/
"Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful."

[ http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_E._P._Box ]
Email me (address is on my blog)
What's yours stays yours... except for when we stuff up the login system and let anyone login to your account?

Yes I know it was a mistake, but now that you've sorted out the licensing terms, lets move onto the issue of showing people you have improved your security model. Many people put pretty important stuff in their Dropbox, prove them that it will be secure. You need to come out with a blog post outlining all the new security incentives you are doing to win peoples trust back in that regard. Perhaps look at offering two factor authentication like Gmail (I believe they open sourced that), or at least when you setup a new PC to sync you need email confirmation like Steam. Maybe give people the option of having 'extra secure' dropbox folders that require you to give an extra password to access.
"How can I reduce or avoid SPAM?"

- Do not sign up at sites with poor site security
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I don't think this reflects poorly on Admob at all - more that paying 30c per click lead for a $2 app doesn't work, and $50 isn't a sample size.

even at a 5% conversion rate from click to purchase (highly unlikely - for this type of app you are talking about less than 1%) your customer cost of acquisition would be $6. do the math.

with these apps you have to be looking at review sites, social media, blogs (like you have now), link exchange with other apps, making it free and putting ads in it, etc. the hit rate is very very low.
>The common rebuttal is: "You are making the mistake of calculating on the Margin, you forgot to calculate E Fixed Costs"

An even better rebuttal is: "Price is not: (what it costs) + 1, it is the perceived value of the product/service. Costs have nothing to do with it besides deciding the pricing floor".
Would it be possible to have live video profile pics in the future?
That's a cop out. Provide examples, on a clean browser/incognito/no cookies/etc
blockedinchina.net: apparently not blocked anywhere in china
I know I'm not the only one who feels really sorry for the fellow. I'm imagining him sitting by his laptop and scrupulously making sure his target demographics are correct for his ad campaign, and this nonsense happens. Google should make it clear in the FAQ that your campaign will be short lived if you ad funds under a certain amount.
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Jason Fried: https://plus.google.com/107991344352087348543/posts
Great, will give it another go, in that case. There's one little niggle still. Signing into a delegated Gmail account, there's no option for Labs. I want my signature to appear above the message I'm replying to, but this doesn't seem possible.
Paul Buchheit: https://plus.google.com/111732375221065535359/posts
Yes of course there's the distinction between the normative question and the underlying reality that question is about; my point doesn't require a distinction so I found it useless to make it and just went with the phrasing of the post I was replying to.

My point was that there is nothing science won't be able to prove; and that there is only physical reality, and facts, and that once we crack the 'code' (as in 'security code', not 'programming code', although in another discussion I'd posit that it's both) we will learn about the fundamental nature of morality - as humans perceive it; it's exactly this realization (that moral issues stem from interpretation by man) that will show that most things we consider 'moral issues' really aren't.

(the above may make it seem that I'm a moral relativist but I'm not - au contraire, once we peel away the human-induced layers of morality we will find the fundamental nature of it at the core)
The fact that I can invite someone and then they can't get in is ridiculous.

Do you think that person is going to try to get in again later? Probably not. And with only a handful of my invites getting in, my feed might as well be twitter with a lot of big public figures I followed. There's nothing personal there.

It's a stupid way to launch a social service. Social is nothing without my network. So far I have to rate google as still not getting social.
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Agreed, in retrospect the CPC bid was stupidly high. They suggested ~$0.28 after we set our targeting...I guess I trusted google since their Adwords suggestions are generally pretty accurate.

We also ran a $50 campaign previously though I didn't include it in this post. We didn't even realize we had run the campaign-- 1200+ clicks at a $0.04 CPC in minutes.

We thought our payment had never processed, but when we checked our bank account it had-- it's just that Admob spent our budget so quickly we didn't realize it.
With all the hype aside, what's the real value proposition in one sentence?
Men with Hats riddle
And me too...
Civilization Facebook App
Wow. That looks legitimate.

we are requiring every Jobs account holder to change their password within the
next 48 hours. Failure to change your password will result in your account
being permanently locked out.

That's the bit that got me thinking, but more on the lines of "WTF?!" than recognizing this as a phishing attempt.
The problem I see with your girlfriend's program is more of a "verification" issue.

In the simulation sub-field I am there is this "research development process" which includes "verification" and "validation" after the model is performed.

Part of the verification is done by "third party code reviews" in which a party unrleated to the program/project reviews the model description (word document) and does a line-by-line analysis of the code to see that the program matches the code.

I did that during my PhD (a Professor at INSEAD paid me to do a code review of a model).

In the case of your girlfriend's lab, they catched the error via "face validation" (the results looked wrong).
Great list. I didn't know about De Landa's work, looks really interesting. In the same spirit, and for something more recent, I'd recommend Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget. I also find Erik Davis' Techgnosis to be a criminally well-written book.
> Your examples are from HUNDREDS of years ago.

One example was from a current war, another from fifty years ago, another from one-hundred years ago, and the last from two-hundred or more. It shows a pattern.

> A little out of date no?

What's the statute of limitations on murder?

> Until you've got something better, the appropriate response is "thank you".

How about "No, thank you"?

You're in Iraq under false pretenses, and in Afghanistan on unsound reasoning. I don't know what you think you're achieving but nobody wants it, so knock it off.

If you're asked for help, as you have been by Egyptians, Syrians, etc, then by all means, you should expect thanks after - if you'd actually go help that is. This is the fundamental problem - you're looking out for yourselves and you don't see anything in it for you. Fair enough I guess, but then you've got to stop pretending to be everyone's buddy.

> You're just pathetically complaining about America while you're here reaping the benefits.

Why don't you go to Iraq and demand thanks for the benefits you've given them.

> it's unclear who, if anyone, is anywhere near as close [to perfect as America]

You'd have to be psychotic to suggest otherwise!

> random US church groups do more good than most countries

In that they rarely kill people, yes. By merely being mostly harmless they come in far above (almost?) all countries.

Of course they'd do a lot more good if they just fed people instead of indoctrinating them.
3 mistakes every entrepreneur can learn from
My approach is to have the scientist write as little code as possible. That's why I'm working on GarlicSim:

http://garlicsim.org

GarlicSim's goal is to do all the technical, tedious work involved in writing a simulation while letting the scientist write only the code that's relevant to his field of study.
A Mouse Can Infect Your Network
If you would like a friendly entrepreneur to be in one of your circle please send me an invite: jacobalexirwin at gmail dot com

And maybe you'd like to know a bit about me here first: linkedin dot com/in/jacobirwin
Would love to see a blog post about your experience with reddit traffic data / demographics etc...

I'm assuming you can target subreddits with ads?
dude, that is not auto increment id in some database :)
It's the oldest supply-and-demand manipulation in the book.

And G's announced goal of minimizing bugs (as the user base scales) seems legit.
Interesting, Reddit seems to be blocked half of the time:
http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=reddit.com
I ran a $50 Admob campaign over the weekend for a new FREE app we have on the Android Market. It did exactly what I needed it to, it got me about a hundred downloads. Today, that app has a little over 400 active users.

The ball has started rolling, and it only took $50.

THAT BEING SAID, the first time I ran an Admob campaign, I had just about the same experience as this writer.

Admob works great for getting lite-version, free, download apps a little traction. I will never again run it for a paid app.

IN-FACT, in the Android Dev Console, you'll notice that only your free apps have the "Advertise this App" link next to them. I assume that Google probably is very aware that Admob campaigns can work great for free apps, but it's a different ball game when it comes to paid apps.

Lastly, I'd like to add that I took the time to create a graphical banner for my free app ad that made a BIG call to action - Download my new puzzle game for free.
It isn't blocked, it actually redirects to http://www.google.com.hk/. (writing this from an apartment in Shenzhen)
Never seen it blocked here in Shenzhen, maybe a bug with the software or different location in China...
Things change, and China has blocked Google multiple times.
We're getting uncomfortably close to the 'meta' threshold of those ideas...
Unless different parts are hard for different people.
> So far I have to rate google as still not getting social.

Well, they aren't, really. They're just using you to test their system, which I can understand.

Personally, if I got an invite, I'd use it to look around a bit, and then wait for the whole thing to completely open up before actually starting to use it (which would make me a poor tester from Google's perspective).
Also, I can't remember ever thinking of Facebook and its culture of (accidental) oversharing without distaste. (The mistrust came later.)
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that was my point.
You HAVE to buy Outlook to get the PST file out by syncing your local outlook with the Exchange Live server which is unacceptable. You can't access the data any other way.
This.

I don't get it. Google already has usernames - why not use them?
Thanks for sharing. Your conclusion for the majority of app developers is spot on-- for small-medium market paid apps, Admob isn't worth the money.

We're probably much better off spending it all on our Free version with limits to prove the value to free users and hope they upgrade.
Crosspost of my post on reddit on why these analyses are flawed (from http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/hu4l1/apples_ime... ):

SMS is "expensive" anywhere in the world when counting $s/byte, it's not just the US. The reason is that you cannot simply do price comparison based on data-rates: it's a flawed top-level down approach ignoring very real concerns and constraints.

The reason for SMS being relatively expensive per byte is that it's actually a hack which allows us to send data over the global GSM control channel, not a regular phone-allocated voice/data-channel. This makes it's main carrier a very bandwidth constrained channel and SMS is second class traffic sent on a as-available basis, but with queued on demand push-reception for the recipient.

Your data-traffic however has a dedicated channel, realtime priority, and realtime constraints, and it would need to go trough a intermediate service which can queue it if the receiver is not there. And the recipient would have to have an always on data-connection polling for incoming messages, draining your battery, much like Email push-notification does on modern smartphones.

In other words: Data and SMS are fundamentally different services, operating with fundamentally different channels and technologies. Your OSI-minded application-level analysis is incomplete.

True, this might not make much difference to the end-user of the service provided, but there are technical reasons for why SMS and data is treated and priced differently.

As long as SMS is a defined standard as it is now, and that standard involves piping shit trough the GSM control channel and not using data (something you don't want when roaming abroad), the fact that they are priced differently is perfectly reasonable. If the price-difference itself is reasonable is another debate all together.
There's a new book from Khoi Vinh, just read it and liked it a lot. Also it's the first book on applying grid based design on web sites instead of print:

http://www.subtraction.com/2010/11/05/i-wrote-a-book
Google Plus gonna support business profiles soon
I'd say that's not necessarily an advantage. Sharding is incredibly complicated to get right considering all factors such as balancing and recovery.

I'd rather partition the data based on function onto distinct clusters, you know like eBay do.

You can update the indexes in a transaction too, so that's not necessarily an issue. MySQL has problems with this due to locking but the MVCC implementation in PostgreSQL allows much better concurrency.
Very helpful too. Thanks!
This article is pretty useless. The actual hack is detailed here: http://pentest.snosoft.com/2011/06/24/netragards-hacker-inte...
Has anyone looked at the source html of the Google+ pages?
Anyone have any clue what's going on there?

Is this the output from some compiler (Which apparently is generating the css along with the html) or some obfuscation technique?
In retrospect (and maybe this should be a follow-up experiment), we should have advertised ONLY our free, limited version and focused on getting the cheapest CPC possible.

$50 at a $0.02 CPC would yield 2500 clicks. For a free app, if we saw a 10% download (a very healthy assumption I know) that would be 250 downloads of the free app.

Maybe after proving the value of the app with limits, we get approximately 10% to convert to paying of the 250 downloads.

That's 25 paid, or ~50 pre apple tax. Still losing money with very healthy assumptions, but I think we'll try this as well...even after the negative experiment and will post our results.
SLL certificates bring nothing other than a false peace if mind. I've seen fake antivirus software that goes to great lengths to provide verified (!) SSL encrypted pages to steal your credit card details.
Because there are consultants. That is the only reason!
I'd like to mention this service isn't 100% accurate.

For instance, my website http://syskall.com is shown as not blocked when in fact it is blocked (as are all Posterous blogs). Also, http://google.com.hk is shown as blocked when in fact it isn't.

Writing this from an apartment in Shenzhen and regular DSL connection.
Yes, but is he assuming that all initial conditions are known when it hits 6 while also assuming classical theory? If he is, fine. If he isn't, he updated wrong.
Here I want to ask a question: did any of the HN users ever get helped by anything put into the "Help" menu in an application?
sadly, they blew it. after 15 minutes of CIV1 (and 2) I was hooked, afte 15 minutes of FB-Civ i was bored.
I think it's also useful to note _just_ how versatile a PCR machine is in biotech. If every EE hacker needs an oscilloscope, every bioengineer hacker needs a PCR machine. PCR is good for much more than just amplification -- a huge number of variations on the basic technique have surfaced in the past few years, here are just a few:

- Need to synthesize a new gene or genetic circuit? Take a bunch of DNA fragments, design overlapping fragments which serve as the "glue", and use PCR to sew the whole thing together

- Want to know if your bacteria is the right strain? Microwave a colony and toss it into the PCR machine with some probes to check. Same thing if you want to test yourself for common disease risk factors such as the BRCA1 gene.

- Want to know the expression of protein A compared to protein B? Use Q-PCR to get quantitative data on the difference.

- Made a mistake in your latest gene synthesis order? Use PCR to change base-pairs or even edit out regions of DNA to fix the problem region. Conversely, if you want to _introduce_ mutations / randomize segments of DNA, PCR can do that too!

There are many more uses of the general technique including next-gen sequencing and DNA origami that are just too numerous to list. PCR is like the IDE of biology, containing an editor, a compiler, and a debugger all in one!

Really, my only complaint is that a PCR run takes an hour or more to run depending on the complexity.
The number I heard being said by people in the industry is SMS 150000 times and voice 1500 times.
That not a solution, you can't know if the site impement good security measures.

Every site will be hacked (eventually). Just use strong passphrase, maybe a password generator like: SuperGenPass
when you can, multiple emails, and you should be (relatively) safe.
A person in 2011 who has never used a computer has far more serious issues (or "differences") to the way they approach life than you can solve by redesigning menus and layout.

This would be like approaching someone in their teens who still cannot read and trying to design a book you are writing to be more accessible to them instead of your general readership.

It's simply a matter of hand-on, over time. I've converted a few AOL users over the years to Firefox, etc. and there is absolutely nothing you can do to improve their experience beyond a very basic level. They just have to use it for a year and go through their own trial-and-error of learning.
Wow, this is a very cool site. Thanks for the post.
Forget the UI. It's not important.

It MUST be common user functionality both for private and corporate users.

People have completely unjustified trust for these cloud-based services when in the face of it, they screw people's data up all the time. You should be able to maintain an offline archive of all of your data to guard against vendor failure.

To be 100% honest, at least here in the EU, I think they should legislate to make sure that a) you can get your data back when you so desire and b) the data should come back in an open format.
Yes - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0i8gUK1cVw
All these people and companies have massive multi-million dollar PR departments shaping their public images and attacking their competitors', it is impossible to know the real motivations for any of them. Microsoft Google and Apple are among the largest companies in the world, there is no reason to trust any of them more than you would trust, say, Walmart or Exxon.
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Ryan Dahl (maker of Node.js): https://plus.google.com/115094562986465477143/posts
That is unfortunately how many people learn. I have had my share of design graduates coming to a job interview claiming that they are really best at the conceptual stage. I have later found out that actually even design schools have been focusing on that area.

We are left with a whole new breed of people who are craftsmen but being taught to like they are academics.
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This. Let's remove all of the technical arguments and just put it this way: even if the telcos were using magic to transmit messages, which is theoretically free, I would still be willing to pay them $5-$10/month for them to perform that magic, because contacting my friends through texts is worth that to me - I have no cheaper way of getting that exact service and ultimately it's worth what they are charging, to me.

The monopoly argument does resonate, however, and I agree that introducing competition is a great advance.

Do people feel that self-sustaining websites are a ripoff because the creators no longer have to put in any time or effort to earn revenue?
This service can not be accurate, as what is blocked varies within China! And even within the same city, it varies with ISP. Go figure.
Ask HN: What's the secret of Google+ speed?
How come Google+ is so fast? What is the secret?
And you thought testing your development environment was hard.

http://www.blockedinchina.net/?siteurl=127.0.0.1
"prices for individual text messages on pay-as-you-go plans have quadrupled from an average of 5 cents to 20 cents"

Really? In the UK they've stayed static at about 10-12p for at least ten years (for a 'standard' text on a PAYG plan, assuming no extras which give you reduced rates on texts to certain people etc.). We're also not charged for receiving standard texts (there can be a charge for premium ones, but not everyone can send those).
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You can try things like getjar.com which offer a cost per download model. Or list your app on my directory @ mjelly.com!
Ah, fair enough. That's pretty cool. I find that if I want to store something complex like a dict/hash in redis, I simply encode it in JSON and store it as a string.
Sure, e.g. in Adobe applications it points to the manual, which is always really detailed, logical and comprehensive. But you're right, developers often just put garbage there, items they can't find room for in other menus.
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Totally agree with nik here.

Mobile ads are not the means to acquire new customers. Relationships with review sites, blogs, and other media outlets is your best bet. A good review can get you some pretty good uptake. We got reviewed in several Android blogs and reached 18k downloads in a little under a week (our app was free).

I haven't experimented much with mobile ads primarily because they aren't effective and won't ever be effective. At least, that's what the studies say :).
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I think they should have given every new account exactly two invites, and see how quickly it grew from there. Then they probably wouldn't have to shut it down. That kind of artificial scarcity might have made the invite process a bit more fun, too.
Antispam measure. They're trying to make it harder to figure out a user's email address.

You can use http://gplus.to to make a shortname though.
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