skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This b-school case study strangely appears to ignore the customers. User and customers are different things for these companies. Mint found a way early on to sell the data it had to financial services companies that wanted to target users. While Mint had to figure out how to take care of users (since they were the product offered to the customers), their ability to find customers (i.e. companies that paid them) set them apart from other solutions and enabled them to make money.
By the use of "an", I learned that I have been pronouncing SQLite wrong. The maintainers clearly prefer the spelling out of SQL in the title.

I've always been on the "sequel" side of pronouncing SQL (hey, it's no worse than "scuzzy" for SCSI), which morphed SQLite into "Sequelite". I never realized how bizarre that sounded (almost more like a material than a database).
I'd not thought of persistent connections and window size effects - both good points especially when the receiving end is either far away or unreliable. It could save other resources too: if you deliver the content to the CDN in 0.1ms and it takes them a further 0.5s to get it to the other end, you don't have to care about the 0.4s during which your server might have otherwise been holding a PHP process (or something else similarly heavy) open.

Another thing that will help long distance if you use a large enough well managed CDN is the interconnectedness of the CDN's nodes. Google probably has a much better pipe between there point of presence here and the one nearest Qatar (to use your example), so much so that "my server -> them -> then again through their fat pipe -> user in qatar" may well be faster then "me -> user in qatar via other ISP and international peering arrangements".
Just so you know, the phrase "shocked -- shocked! --" (which you seem to be referencing here with your invocation of "sickening -- sickening! --") is a reference to the movie Casablanca, where it is uttered cynically by a corrupt police chief who is not shocked at all as he's been participating in the illegal activity himself from the very beginning. So, if you are genuinely sickened, it's inappropriate.
On the one hand (a) is probably right. On the other hand it is a story of technical interest to those of use who are not part of the "angry mob". For me I have voted up some of the stories because they contrast interestingly - the way, for example, the TC stories have contrasted to EJ's accounts are interesting.

And as an example of how "damage limitation" can bite you (fairly or otherwise) there are a lot of lessons here.

End of the day; this is a big story in this community and there are some key lessons here. I'd definitely vote up someone who could blog about it critically from a "things you could learn for your business" position.
But what is optimal?

I think it's pretty obvious that taking money away from the rich giving it to the poor, maybe even in the form of food stamps, has a very direct and immediate effect on GDP. So it is clearly optimal in the short run in terms of GDP and also for helping those who really need it in times like these.

But in the longer run, some of the money needs to go into investment or society will stagnate. Some of that investment can be done by governments, but central planning isn't very good at exploring new ideas. Transparent, democratic governments can be pretty efficient in doing things that are already well known and institutionalized. For instance, European health care systems are hugely more efficient than the US one.

On the other hand, the Googles and Apples of this world are difficult to imagine as creatures of some government.
I don't see the respondents as an angry mob. Are you lumping edw519 in with those people?

You aren't applying Occam's razor. The simple explanation is that this is the most relevant HN story in recent memory. It involves a startup, it involves a YC company, it's one of the most valuable startups in the site owner's portfolio, it's an international print news story, it involves tragedy, and the outcome will make us all think about what it means to be a successful start up.

That's why the stories all have traction. It's a fantasy to think it's an irrational mob.

Edit: I should say I see neither the respondents nor the upvoters as an angry mob.
No.

You do however need the following first-order equation to work out to a quantity of money which is meaningful to you.

(customers * profit per customer * number of times each customer pays) - (customers * cost per customer + static costs)
I was torn between Android and the iPhone for a while. But fear of experiences just like the one described eventually led to pick the one I knew would work. I picked the one where the single responsible is the best in the world at sanding off all the rough edges of the user experience.

Past experience with Apple Care and with other devices having multiple responsible parties made it easy. When many are responsible, none are ultimately responsible. Except you, of course.

Apple goes out of its way to do everything for you that has a learning curve and where there's no point in you learning it. It just makes more sense to write a piece of software that performs a complex task well than to expect millions to struggle with it.

Yes, I know Android is infinitely flexible. But on a mission critical device like my phone, I don't want to have to infinitely flex.
Being out of touch with reality can mean many things, but from my point of view just on politics alone Andys dream is impossible.

I don't agree with Khoi entirely, I believe Andys and work like his is beneficial to everyone, but I do agree its mental masturbation.

If you missed my earlier critique of it feel free to read through it, its long and was well received: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2805982
In theory, there are infinitely many passwords that map to the same hash, so not all passwords are recoverable. In practice most passwords will be recoverable (given enough computing power), because there will only be a single 'reasonable' match (you will probably find only one for passwords of reasonable length).
I don't see how they could bend this particular story that way. You'd have to have a contrasting narrative making hotels out to be superior -- but here it was the property owner that got screwed.
AT&T to throttle data speeds for 'unlimited' hogs
I think it would be reasonable to reduce the tax by the amount of foreign tax paid, but I don't think it would fix the problem. Most of the money in offshore havens was barely taxed. So instead of 35%, Apple can pay maybe 30% bringing it home. That's not enough of a drop to motivate them. It would probably open some more loopholes, too, but I can't be sure about that.

The real issue is that some countries want to allow this stuff. They want these shell companies because it brings them some revenue they wouldn't otherwise have. And who can blame them, really. So as long as we have international companies, we'll have tax havens. I'm not sure if there really is a fix.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2818407

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2819411

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2820611

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821072

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821210

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821635

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2821985
40k for six months of my life in an area where I don't have a lot of familiarity or a network of business associates or friends isn't a great deal.

Six months of my life to win a contract with the Chilean government to use my software, and I'm sold. How much support or networking is done by the program? Is it pretty much you get the money and you're on your own in a foreign country?
I've used at least three Android devices now and I always recommend people to buy only the flagship device of a manufacturer. They usually get upgrades...eventually (hello Samsung?) and the experience is usually better.
Imagine what you could do with the heat that a macbook puts out.
By scrollable categories, I mean that you have categories mentioned below in long list. I don't know if anyone would have patience to go through them. Certainly not me.

A scrollable categories list would show different categories in a nicer way with 4 at a time and a more button to view the complete list if someone is interested.

You might have better metadata than anyone else but I didn't get it from looking at the page.

Flickr does a pretty good job of displaying other information on the side of a photo. You can do the same with your metadata http://www.flickr.com/photos/gcattiaux/2349773004/
Mysterious battery drain seems like a really common problem on Android phones. Sometimes my Droid X lasts till 6PM -- sometimes it's dead by 1PM. More or less the same usage patterns. When it dies early in the day the phone is definitely warmer than usual.
they are lucky this is happening at the same time as the US debt ceiling. on a slower news cycle, this would have been on the nytimes front page
Technology is iterative and incremental, not revolutionary.

Most of what's happening on the Web right now (as cool as it is) is enabled more from increases in compute power, speed, interconnects, bandwidth (rate/volume of access), and connectivity (persistence/ease of access), but not from any inherent lack of vision in a prior age.

And when I say "a prior age", I'm not talking about the 90s, 80s, or 50s. Try 19th century (Jeremy Bentham, Jules Verne). Or the 10th century (1001 Arabian Nights has some cool stuff in it). Or Roman, Greek, Biblical, or Egyptian eras.

Drag yourself off to an ancient history museum sometime. You'll find items there that you use daily, or at least are very, very familiar with, from literally thousands of years ago: tweezers, dice, mirrors, bracelets, Egyptian sand toilets (a large stone seat over a box in the ground).

"Old" isn't synonymous with "tired" in technology. Particularly for tools which are in continuous use and evolution, it means "tried, true, tested, and refined". There's a law of diminishing returns, and of asymptotic convergence on an ideal.

I'd love to see the ICE replaced by something cleaner, more energy efficient, and more sustainable. People have tried for nearly 150 years, and I've been a fan of several alternatives (alternate fuel, Wankel, gas turbine, steam, electric) at various times. With the exception of the Wankel, all of those were present at the time the ICE emerged.

So much for innovation, eh?
Didn't even think of that. Good point.
Not anymore. iOS5 has OTA updates. (the last beta update was pushed OTA)
Can you even get insurance on an illegal activity. It seems clear that many people on Airbnb are either illegally subletting their rental apartment or in places like NY where Airbnb is violating laws meant to stop illegal and unlicensed hotels.
Alzheimer's is such a horrible disease. The prognosis for cancer has improved incredibly over the last few decades; it would be nice to see some funding re-prioritised for Alzheimer's.
Yo dawg, I heard you like NoSQL but missed yo SQL so I made UnQL for yo NoSQL.
Agreed. I have tried to express this to others after my father started to really change. Most people were shocked and assured me that I wouldn't think that way if I actually had the disease. My only response to that was to say that I hope this is cured by that point.
Researcher says world we see is mostly make-believe
Sure thing, I'm going to write you an e-mail to give you an idea of what's existing and what we're building in the next month or so as well as an invite.
These guides are probably not as useful to the majority of the HackerNews audience, but I thought it might be helpful to explain why we're publishing these guides.

It's hard to believe, but absolutely true, that there are WAY more people who aren't using ANY version control than have made a clear decision about using one over the other.

The benefits of version control are clear once you start using them, but are less clear to people who haven't used it before. We want to illustrate that benefit while at the same time making it easy to learn about best practices and techniques to improve your entire development and design workflow.

It's been a fascinating process finding large dense communities of designers and developers who still have excuses for not using ANY version control. There's still a huge public service to be done for teaching version control basics and best practices to the audiences who don't have any significant adoption yet.
Sure, but that in itself does not make the economy grow. It could potentially make the economy grow if the person I buy the stock from uses it to buy other shares in an IPO and that company spends the money to fund actual work. Or if that person just puts the money into consumption.

I'm just saying that boosting some share price does not in itself fund any labor. That's important, because the difficulty of getting the economy growing again after a balance sheet recession like the one we just saw, is to get money moving, not just sitting somwhere with a nominal price tag on it.
I have no (easy) way to check that. Two of them got 13 points each, all got at least 4 or 5. Some discussion started, but they didn't get very far.

But that's a specific example from today. Statistically, showing that on a day chosen at random there is at least one example shows that it's very likely to happen most days. Certainly it happens often enough that discussions do get split, and it annoys my sense of rightness, my sense of good design.

As an engineer, it offends my aesthetics.

It significantly hampers my enjoyment of HN, but based on this poll it seems I'm clearly in a small minority. I guess I'll just have to live with it.

One of my foibles, I suppose.
That's 55 cents a day over a 2 year contract. And if you make $25 an hour after taxes (hopefully you make more), you're be working 92 seconds of every day just to pay the iPhone premium.

Me thinks the better experience saves me at least 93 seconds of pain per day, possible even 2 whole minutes worth.
I really like the gist of the "rules" presented here.

I don't think the tone is useful. You can be efficient, strict and no-bullshit without being an asshole (think: Spock).

For example, rule #3: Bring pen and paper to every meeting with me. Pay attention to what I say; I'll try to speak with care. If I frequently must repeat instructions, or remind you of something I've already told you, you will not work with me again.

...could easily be rewritten to be as effective and less authoritarian.
If you can bear to get to the bottom of this list, there is a gem waiting for you:

"Don't sent me long documents. I like precision and concision. Say it on one page (or less)."
That and the Facebook application for Android is one of the worst apps out there.
I didn't downvote your question. I don't believe HN lets you downvote someone who replies to you, and I don't have the karma to downvote anyway.

I don't think you would accept a concrete answer. Do you believe that every dollar in every place (federal tax revenue, corp coffers, billionaire's money market account, average joe's mortgage, food stamp, etc.) has the same value to the economy? If not, then you must agree that some of these are better places to send a dollar than others. Whether choosing a suboptimal flow "hurts" the economy is semantics.

If you think that putting another dollar in a wealthy man's account is the best use of the dollar, then I would say that history disagrees with you, as there's little evidence that "trickle down" economics work. Something like 80% of economists say it doesn't work.
Am I the only one who doesn't think this is that big of a deal for AirBnB?
IE6 users are kind of stupid
We use SQLite exactly for that. At some point we were generating +50000 shader (.hlsl) files for 3 different platforms (so much due to various techsets and techniques).

Loading them back from the tools/game took a long time, for that reason they were put in small SQLite db - which is a little bit more complex than this "CREATE TABLE files (key, value)"

This sped up us significantly. We might be using this idea for more and more small files lying around.
What your browser says about your IQ
You might be able to use Hany Farid's work on doctored photographs to show they've been tampered with. See, eg, this interesting transcript of his Nova appearance.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/hany-farid.html

Steganography/image manipulation is an arms race but you'll keep the low end fake IDs out. At some point in the race master criminals are going to go for higher value targets than random apartments on AirBnB. And... problem solved.
Oh, sure. I don't think that this was some sort of hotel conspiracy. I think it was some douchebags who decided that the anonymity provided by Airbnb would make a great cover for some extensive identity theft. I agree, the conspiracy theorists are jumping to conclusions here.

But why would you assume that she's trying to squeeze something out of Airbnb, as opposed to what she said, which is to warn people about the risks and about the fact that Airbnb basically has no plan and offers no real help for how to deal with this sort of situation? I've seen nothing other than an explanation of what happened, and a clarification that their spin on the issue doesn't really match up with her experience.
On the surface it seems like a fair and balanced approach to the problem. I wish there was an actual number set, rather than the top 5% of each month's users which means that they're promising to always throttle speeds of 5% of their customers. Perhaps they're hoping this will cause a race among the customers who use the most data to reduce their data usage every month?

I also find great humor in the throw-away line concerning the necessity of the acquisition of T-Mobile at the end.
What's your reasoning for this? (or are you just saying that that is the way it is, even if it's not proper?)
I suppose it depends on your definition of "simplicity". My go-to simplified data storage container is Berkeley DB. (Little did I realize Oracle recently shipped a Berkeley DB with SQLite inside it... heh)
I haven't been in the industry that long, but I've encountered a few "security professionals"--auditors, penetration testers, etc. All of them have been totally incompetent; they could tell you the definition of, say, a SQL injection attack but had no idea how to really analyze a system. On the other hand, all of the great programmers I've met have had a really good grasp of security. I'm starting to think that if you don't write code, you're not qualified to audit it.
I'm not arguing that it's not uncommon to be upset after a break-in. I'm saying that the levels of emotional response she's describing are so over-the-top that I find it incredibly difficult to identify with them.

An inability to return to the place due to panic (five weeks after the incident, no less)... lying in a fetal position outside the door.. these are not the actions of a well-balanced person who is in a difficult emotional state due to circumstances. These are the actions of someone who really needs some serious help.
You hit the nail on the head. Apple curates the array of products it offers, while its impossible to tell which Android best suits you.

Google needs to create a new platform that curates as well as Apple does. Or sit and watch while Amazon builds one on top of Android.
I don't interpret these as rude and I quite like the tone. You know exactly where you stand and how to act - leaving the little time you have to do the job well. No messing around and no feeling your way into a relationship. I'm printing this out for my wall.

The world of academia is not under the same pressures as the business world where there are a completely different set of forces at work. I'm not sure thats a great comparison.
Actually, if you do:

return undefined

in Coffeescript, then the resulting Javascript just won't have any return statement at all. Has the same effect, but good to know anyways.
We also received the letter. We have several attorneys working on this right now. One attorney we just learned of is Sid Leach in Phoenix, he specializes in patent law and has spent considerable time dealing with patent trolls. Our attorneys will be contacting him in addition to the work they are already doing. Many, many companies have received this letter. Our current take is that the patent will ultimately be proved invalid, but that is yet to be decided because it has not been litigated on its merit yet.
To be clear (I don't think I'm putting words in schrototo's mouth), the ROKR was the disaster created jointly by Motorola and Apple.

What was special about it? It had a dedicated key to bring up iTunes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR_E1)

I had the same thought: the OP's venture between Vodafone and Facebook doesn't feel like the "Facebook phone" that has been rumored for a while… but who knows, Facebook doesn't make hardware so they probably don't have the same opportunities that Apple had and they probably want the maximum availability, even if half-assed. (I would think it's harder to completely screw up an experience around posting a status than around managing and syncing a music library)
Meh. My wager is that anyone that gives lists like these to their employees is less brilliant and more of an asshole then they realize.
Hogs, or people who want to use the service they were sold?

Compared to much of the developed world, the USA has really poor telecommunications services. Why do we need to go backwards?
Um, point 15 has 'Don't tell me there's a problem without offering a solution. '
To me, this is like requiring auto makers to install GPS in their cars to track driving data. Sure, it's not just given to the government. The automakers hold on to that data. That way, if there is any suspicion of criminal activity, a warrant for the whereabouts of a particular person can be retrieved. "It's for the children!"

How can such a bill be legal? The government can't search my computer records without a warrant being issued for reasonable cause. They're attempting to bypass this by mandating the ISP intermediaries retain said records for 1.5 years. I don't know. It just seems way to grey-area.
>Is YC simply going to moderate posts about their own startups at will? Especially when everything is, fact for fact, true?

I had a HN account for a few months, my posts were getting generally positive responses. Then I made a comment containing criticism of the YC startup the article was about. I think it was fair criticism, I just gave my reasons I couldn't trust their service enough to use it. It was my highest-rated comment ever, and sparked a fair bit of discussion so I think the community tended to at least agree that I had a point. The next day HN got a lot slower and every new comment I made stayed at 1 point permanently and were never replied to. It seemed funny, I was used to getting at least a few points on my quickest made comments. When I logged out everything was fast again and my new comments were nowhere to be seen. I had been shaddowbanned and slowbanned.

So your question should not be "Is YC simply going to...". They already do that.
Anonymous releases internal data on another FBI contractor, ManTech
That's just my cynical take on things from dealing with stuff like this in the past.

I honestly don't think there's much AirBNB can do to vet people which wouldn't make the service unusable.
I'm not so sure. It sounds like this person is articulating a deal breaker. It's not unfair or unreasonable to have deal breakers in relationships. Better to know in advance, right?
Oh god. Please no, collection literals are the worst idea ever. Making up special rules for some special classes in a language? What the fuck!?
How Google Dominates Us
Or better yet, just `return`.
Peter. This patent was filed in 1998. It was reexamined in 2010. You're right that everyone is using it now, and it can be proved that Amazon used it before this patent was filed. However, someone will have to litigate this to bring that prior art into play.