skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Three quick hacks which I tell consulting clients all the time:

1) That thing OKCupid does to blog posts? Do it. Really.

(It occurs to me that, in general, "Imitate OKCupid" is good advice, but the specific thing is their sharing flydown menu. See http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/10-charts-about-sex/ and just keep scrolling, you'll see the effect when you hit the comments. Apologies for the topic, they are an edgy dating site.)

This is, in my recent experience, about ~3 hours of work, even if you're not a CSS/Javascript wizard. (And it will be easier when I get done with immigration stuff and have time to productize and OSS the implementation I did for a recent client.)

2) Blog posts typically have a spread phase (dominated by the new release window) and a residual traffic phase. Nothing says you can't optimize them differently for both phases. For example, put your citation-worthy headline and a prominent graphic into the post for launch. Change it to a SEO headline and add pre-graphic call to action after 48 hours.

3) The perceived value of blog posts is worse than evergreen resources. Strongly consider making those; they often have much higher ROI. The difference is largely just a matter of packaging.

a) Resources don't have a prominent date on them.

b) Resources don't scream I Am A Blog Template with, e.g., comment sections or headers which look like a blog.

c) Resources get more attention to unique, brandable visual design than blog posts do.

That might sound like a lot of work, but it is really not.

P.S. Oddly enough since I pay them money, I had never seen the KissMetrics blog prior to today. Egads. I am taking notes -- there is a heck of a lot there which is steal-worthy. (Note lack of date on posts. Note position of calls to actions prior to comments and on right navigation. Note email submission. Note per-post icon design. Note position of icon next to sharing buttons.)
Good point on the Rand Paul article. We have a few editors but obviously stuff slips through. Thanks for the praise though.
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This age range, 15-24, is really diverse, but here we have college graduates, college students, high school graduates, high school students, and younger dropouts, all mixed into the same statistic.

What percentage of college grads are unemployed?
What percentage of high school dropouts are unemployed?
Several decades ago, when the 55+ crowd was under 24, what were their employment rates?
What are these trends across gender?

Given how few sectors feature competition between 55- and 15-year-olds for the same work, the given comparison is far less interesting...
Amazing predictions, IMHO, except for the last one:

The study also predicted a much greater diversity in the American political power structure. ''Videotex might mean the end of the two party system, as networks of voters band together to support a variety of slates - maybe hundreds of them,'' it said.

Am I alone in thinking that it we're more polarized and entrenched in our two party system than ever, with internet aided confirmation bias being one of the primary causes? (I.e., political "filter bubbles.")
the pines notifications have an 'x' to close them when you hover over the notification with your mouse.

is that not what you meant by the ability to close them?
I've used IfByPhone and Twilio for a little more than a year for building telephony apps that integrate with software products to improve workflows. You are looking for feedback on their virtual phone system offering which I haven't used first hand.

If your team is tech savvy, OpenVBX from Twilio (http://www.twilio.com/api/openvbx) might be a good option.

You might want to check www.phonebooth.com as well.

Good luck!
Good point.

Someone (I think Martin Fowler) suggested spending 2-3 days upfront sketching the big architectural points. I generally think that is a good idea.

But I do like OP's analogy of UML being used to make the maps that us programmers will use.

I guess I am looking forward to the day when we don't have to make our maps manually.
Which, because it doesn't imply any are excluded ("all profiles"), implies all existing profiles, public and private, will be public. From there it's a pretty straight conclusion to think they'll switch existing private ones to public. The rest of the article (actual text of release excluded) reinforces this conclusion, and does precisely nothing to discourage it.

Of course, anyone reading the actual text of the release will understand what's going on. But A) clearly few of the commenters there did so, and B) they've already linkbaited their way to free advertising / ad revenue.
Besides the technical stuff, the links and discussions here on HN have helped me with entrepreneurial concepts the most. It helps when really established and well known people, and people who have plentiful experience in starting, running, and marketing a business are discussing things.
Hacked: India's National Security Guard site - Security - News
I don't think that rule works over holiday weekends.
I couldn't disagree more. I do think that what we do today is set a price floor on both labor and family that makes things worse for people on the lower end of the income spectrum. I'll give you two examples.

The first is housing and social services. In the US, social services, especially housing vouchers for hard-to-find apartments are only available to single mothers -- a household with an able-bodied male will almost never qualify. The result? Two-parent households are priced out of the market, as demands for the best low-income is driven by single mothers with housing vouchers. (A poor tenant with a voucher is preferable, because the government always pays the rent.) So we incentivize single-parent households, which are more likely to remain in poverty.

The second is the nature low-wage employment. We expect wage-earners to pay for alot of stuff that is really expensive for a low-wage person to afford. That $20 week health insurance premium with $20 co-pay is expensive when you make $30k/year -- and the coverage usually sucks. In the US, low-wage workers tend to get minimal vacation time as well, so you're basically one illness away from being indigent.

Costs for events that tend to happen are out of hand. My wife found a cache of old bills and vouchers in her office. One was a reimbursement for worker who fell into a hole and broke his arm in 1950, resulting in an overnight hospital stay. The bill? $25. ($135 in 2010 money) In 2011, you'd be hard-pressed to find a motel for that price, and an ER visit for a broken arm would easily cost $10,000.
The same thing happened with Digg, it used to be tech based. Then it got popular, then they screwed it up, and now no one uses it. I think hacker news can avoid this by keeping their minimal UI and not adding shiny bits.
I can see the sad result, employees relying on tips.

To paraphrase a republican, if the minimum wage was abolished, everyone would have jobs.
Claiming My Blog Posts and Social Profiles | Kin Lane
Perhaps the difference is subtle. Members of the Air Forces have been known to take abuse for being 'above' the fight. Once they blow up a building its really up to troops on the ground to finish the fight.

Similarly with the Arab spring, while it is undoubtedly helpful to disrupt the Government's use of and interference in , the Internet, it's the people who are willing to stand up and say "Here is the new way to run our country and I am willing to give my life to that ideal." who impress me more.

Just like it is more impressive (or makes more of an impact on me) when someone in the US chooses to actually serve in Government to fix it, or invests their time and energies in revitalizing the institutions that allow it to change to the will of the people.

In the original article Sabu states "When Tunisia filtered off its internet from the world, it was the Tunisians who came online using dial-up and literally allowed us to use their connections to tunnel through to re-deface the prime minister's websites. It was the most impressive thing I've seen: a revolution coinciding both physically and online. It was the first time I had proof that what Anonymous was doing was real and it was working."

I may be too old or too out of touch to appreciate how significant 'defacing the prime minister's website' was to the overall effort. When Khalid went to Egypt and stood in the square and rallied people to support the overthrowing of the corrupt government there I thought, "Here is a guy who is willing to put his life on the line for a cause he believes in." And I felt a great deal of respect for that. When Sabu mentions how great is was that Tunisians created dialup gateways that subverted the government infrastructure and they went in and scribbled on the Prime Minister's website, it just wasn't very impressive to me.
I'd love an invite!
Gmail address: paul.bridger

Thanks!
What can tech startups do to help this situation?
Nice tutorial, thanks!
IIRC the vertical bar (or was it the tilde) was in a totally nonstandard and awkward place too... didn't seem very smart considering it was still a UNIX machine.

The navigation keys were not such a big deal once you realized that all text fields accepted basic Emacs keystrokes for cursor movement.
I'm curious what you mean here. I am reasonably sure that mesh networks are actually distributed, at least internally. Are you referring about the Internet gateways that are generally a part of a mesh proposal, or possibly that mesh networks don't scale like centralized networks do?

I'm saying that mesh networks are 1) not connectable on the scale of the Internet and 2) not scalable.

I think that we could create a truly distributed network. It would not be nearly as efficient as the Internet we are accustomed to, and it would not be based on the current Internet Protocol.

No offense but many DS papers have been published in this area and most aren't even positive in the theoretical sense, much less the practical. Crudely, I think it's time to put code where your mouth is ;)
Would be fun to get an old cube and stick a mac mini (or few) inside it.
Ask HN: Recovering a stolen laptop
Hi HN,

My house was recently broken into and among other things my brand new macbook pro was stolen. Since dropbox is always running on my computer, I was able to use my account's "last activity" info to discover the ip address of my thief.

Any suggestions for some next steps?

Thanks!
At my work, we like to invest in companies that we think would be attractive LBO Candidates... Blackboard really fits the profile.

1. Entrenched business model

At my school we used Blackboard and we had about 50,000 students. Getting everyone on board to switch from Blackboard to a new system would be pretty tough. The university would have to spend a lot in terms of re-training which would make it tough for a new system to gain traction.

2. Recurring revenue stream

Blackboard has a recurring revenue stream which is pretty awesome for a private equity buyer. You see, the PE game is pretty simple. You buy a business for X, where about only 10-30% of X is actual cash you put up. The rest comes in the form of debt.

A recurring revenue stream is great in that your subscription fees can cover the interest payments on your debt and in many cases will allow you to have more debt as part of your capital structure than normal. Lenders will see that your business can generate a stable enough cash flow to support such large amounts of leverage. A business such as Blackboard could potentially support leverage that's on the high end of the scale because of its recurring revenue stream.

3. Ripe for cost cutting

A company like Blackboard is bound to have a good deal of fat that can be cut. Slashing R&D funding and whatever growth spending will increase the amount of cash flow that goes to investors. My guess is they will streamline the company to be more focused on its sales force than whatever developer-base they have in place at the moment.
Awesome post. I am in the exact same boat as you. I read this stuff every day as inspiration and to learn more about the world of programming and computers. I am also working through python to learn my first language (chose python because of xkcd). Feel free to email me if you want to discuss difficulties or challenges with programming in python or in general.
It would be very hard to believe that there was much cash in the deal. The Wall Street Journal is reporting twitter is raising another round that will value them at $7 Billion (see http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230480310457642... ) If you value twitter stock at $7B then perhaps they received $50M in stock,
Well I would love one but since I am an Google Apps customer I am out of luck. camille () rousselfamily . com
I'm talking about an ad network. Like AdSense. They haven't done that yet, so revenue projections for what it would be are just guesswork.
The '138 patent got stomped. Do they have others?
I wrote the post mainly from an online tool perspective. Yes, Joel on Software and Coding Horror were very targeted as well, I didn't use them an example only because they belong more to the community camp.
Check out this from on WHT, you might find someone there:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?s=addaf02caed...
If you have to ask you aren't cut out to make that type of website. I've found most CEOs to be pretty accessible.
Fake antivirus posing as Microsoft Update
A fake antivirus software in the Internet is posing as a genuine Microsoft security update. Know how to stop it and keep your system protected
Sheesh, 3 more downvotes? I get it, HN doesn't like brevity!
Google Chrome New Ways of Searching
The latest release of the Google Chrome browser will feature new ways to search for information which include voice search, image search, and instant pages
python and PHP also support # for making comments. It could be argued that python has just as much if not more mindshare than ruby. :)
I'll throw Django REST Framework in the mix there as well: http://django-rest-framework.org/

Why? See http://django-rest-framework.org/howto/alternativeframeworks...
...What?

First of all, 1 country in 203 had a holiday yesterday. Second, if you're worried about your link not being seen on a holiday, maybe you should wait until after the holiday to post it.
What about languages that don't have gender neutral pronouns?
I've heard other people thinking that.

If it makes you feel any better, I don't really agree with you. :-)
"Too Important to Patch" - Wait? What?
You can use the API to export your friends list as facebook UIDs which can be used to reconstruct your graph assuming your friends have also opted into the third-party service with their facebook data/uid.
netflix US is also crappy. What makes you think it's better?

Proof: Take a look at their top 100. only 2 you can stream in the US, all the 98 others are via DVD only.
My rule of thumb is to say them out loud separately:

My wife's weekend project

My weekend project

so...

My wife's and my weekend project
Next up Google Windows followed by Google Anti-Virus, who knows one day we might have a Google president.
Yes, but these new jobs are often a long-term thing, and the economy must undergo enormous structural changes for them to form. The US underwent enormous economic and societal changes in its move from an agriculture-based economy to a manufacturing-based one.
It's not true that you have to create a profile. If you want to use Google+, you have to create a profile. If you just want to use Google apps/search/voice/chat/etc. then no, you don't.
I really wanted to like RingCentral since the price was pretty good, it has lots of features and the UI was pretty easy. But the reliability was marginal (once monthly extended outages; random call drops). This was over a year ago so it's distinctly possible that reliability has improved.
Lower than survival? Please.

People need a purpose. Something to do. That's a big part of what work is -- and our society provides all sorts of incentives that take those opportunities away and destroy the communities (as in people communities) that people with less means once depended on. In the process, we make alot of other people rich.

Crime like what you describe is evidence of desperation -- people are able to strip copper out of buildings because none of the neighbors give a shit, and the local government's policies make it viable for speculators to keep buildings vacant.

Read "The Death and Life of American Cities". Poverty doesn't need to equal misery, and being provided with stuff doesn't equate to happiness. We forgot about that after World War 2.
Or they could let things play out as is, seems pretty certain though whatever the case it's not the kind of acquisition where they will be looking to massively invest in improving the product.
apt-get install php5-xcache
Startup CRM Solutions
I'd like to know what solutions are out there for a lean startup that has quickly outgrown spreadsheets.

What do you use? What is your sales process like? How do you take in leads? How big are you?
Designing on the iPad for the iPad
Well, here in Portugal (and I hear in Belgium they have a similar system) our national ID card can sign and encrypt data using an internal private & public keys. That could be used to encrypt email securely even on a rogue machine.
The main technical problem is the lack of readers. The actual main problem is user education - nobody knows how to work with them.
Although perhaps financially this totally makes sense, I had to use Blackboard in the last year at University, and it pains me to see that somebody's paying 1.6 Billion for that piece of crap!
Erlang and OTP in Action is great for learning about OTP. It's not really the best introduction to Erlang the language itself. I'd recommend Erlang Programming by Cesarini AND Thompson for that. Programming Erlang by Joe Armstrong is good as well.
I found the animated stripes to impede the readability of the text. I agree the various notifications would be hard to separate for colour blind people. One could add some icons to indicate the type of message though.
Why I love Rails -- it just can't get any simpler
"Feel free to send me a message or email me if you want to bounce and ideas off of each other with Python or anything else, I get the impression we are both starting off on the same page"

Is that open to all?
Most of that is almost certainly, in part, for tax related reasons. Intel is profitable; profitable US companies want to keep those profits outside the US (see: Google).
Some more Google+ invite Workarounds
Google+ needs to pass more than the geek test
"The consensus I’m hearing from people on Google+ is that it is no Buzz or Wave.

It’s a quality product that has had a successful launch so far. I’ve even heard of people considering switching from Facebook to Google+ or from people who don’t use Facebook but will use Google+. These people all have something in common: they’re geeks and technologists."
> How does it compare to Model M keyboards?

The 1st-gen NeXT keyboards use Alps key-switches, like the Apple keyboards of the late-80s. The one I have is rock-solid and one of the finest keyboards I've used.

It also had some clever innovations:

- It is very compact. It has the same width as a traditional PC keyboard, but without the top row of function keys. That means it's only 5 rows high.

- Consequently, the Escape key is next to the "1" key, where the backtick/tilde key would normally be. However, the tilde is an important character in Unix, so if you hit Shift+Escape as if to type a tilde, you'll still get a tilde character. It's a nice touch.

- The Control key is next to the "A". Command and Option keys are on both sides of the space bar.

- There is no Caps Lock key. To engage Caps Lock, press Command+Shift; green LEDs on both Shift keys light up to indicate Caps Lock.

- There are no home/end/page up/page down keys. They are replaced with Power, Volume up/down, and Brightness up/down. All NextSTEP applications support the traditional Emacs shortcuts for Home/End/Page Up/Page Down etc., and that tradition lives on in OS X.

- The hardware (cube, monitor, or printer) has no buttons or switches of any kind. Power, volume, and brightness can only be controlled from the keyboard (like a modern laptop). That means you can't turn the machine on or off without the keyboard, and the keyboard connects to the monitor!
- Copies of the report, titled ''Teletext and Videotex in the United States,'' were scheduled to be available after June 28 from McGraw-Hill Publications, 1221 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

Typical New York Times. No URL.
I wonder how big a part looking down at trade workers is playing in this.
Agreed. As pointed out by others, this is a perennial problem with GCs in general. Obviously it doesn't happen very often, otherwise the business risk would have forced Matz or the Ruby community to fix it, else no one would have ever deployed on Rails, because, you know, there's that Fatal Ruby VM Bug that crashes your applications constantly and costs people lots of time and money.

The analysis was good, but the tone was ludicrous. It sounds far too much like: "Hey! everyone in the world should abandon MRI because of a bug I found!! That's right, me!!"
Well, we're using a large number of gems, a number of which rely on native code.

This issue is no doubt a pain in the ass for gem authors to debug, but it's definitely not something that library users are running into with any sort of frequency.
I think you are missing the downward spiral part of it. Today's budget affects tomorrow's economy which affects tomorrow's budget (through tax revenue), ad infinitum.
Once someone gets their site set up, what is the plan for actually getting eyeballs on it? If you can figure that out then you are on to something.

I see that you are using social networking with Twitter/FB, etc, but that is a chicken/egg problem. To use social networking to advertise your site, you need to actually have an audience to begin with. In which case, you probably wouldn't be interested in this type of product.

What would be really valuable, I think, is a way to get people you have no social networking connection with on the site, ie, via AdWords. Using AdWords is some kind of alchemy - find a way to simplify and integrate with that, and that is a fine product.
What kind of government spending can you cut that does not reduce demand of some kind in another part of the economy?

If the answer is "entitlement spending", where do you think the money spent by the government on Social Security/Medicaid/Medicare/welfare/jobs programs/etc goes? Into consumer's hands and right back into the economy.
Better practice to develop a new product based on an old project?
It is not a good idea from the view of me, a developer, to do this.
As you may image the disappointment of our team when the PMs decide to develop a 'new' product based on our project 3~4 yeas ago, which used old techniques, such as struts 1.3, swing, etc.
But we have to do this. ("rewriting the project using current techniques is slow, and under high risk")
How can to raise the morale of our team and improve the productivities of the development?
any one have the experience?