skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I could be misreading it, but I believe the premise is "more traction => more action".

If I'm right, the idea is that the algorithm dynamically weights the "display frequency" of the two (or n) options. So as one of the a/b options shows itself to be more successful, it's shown more frequently. Because the test is self-correcting, you as an A/B test runner don't have to decide when the results are significant enough, and the program itself will automatically choose the more successful option.
No, it's not A/B testing for the reasons I try to explain the in the post. A/B testing can't change the choices while the experiment is running, doesn't adjust to customer preferences in real-time, etc.

You can optimise for revenue. Button presses was just a simple example.
Las Vegas Bachelor Party
Bachelorette Party, Bachelor Party in Las Vegas. Marquee Las Vegas is ultimate destination for a bachelorette party in Las Vegas. Marquee Las Vegas bachelorette parties are organized to be the exclusive experience for any bachelorette celebrating her last night out before married life.
This submission is quoting this page: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-07-scientists-battery-nanow...

That is, in turn, referencing this page: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl2017042

That, in its turn, refers you here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/nl2017042

Which is paywalled. 8-(

Make do with whichever summary you choose.

And yes, they've built a battery, and interestingly, they've got it technically correct.

Technically, an AA "battery" isn't a battery - it's a cell. It's not a "battery" until you have a whole - well - battery of them.

This has gained me points in trivia quizzes, but is so far outside "normal" usage that if you try to correct people about it you get even worse ostracization than correcting people about "less" and "fewer."
I don't want to be snarky in response to an ffmpeg developer, because I love ffmpeg and respect his contributions, but still, this is not exactly news. The explosion of the entire category of "video sharing sites based on Flash" happened right after ffmpeg added FLV support.

That was the missing piece -- before that, you could only convert videos to FLV using Adobe's proprietary (and expensive and crappy and GUI-based, not command-line) tools. ffmpeg provided the missing chunk of the pipeline, and a lot of people had the exact same "aha!" moment, and within a short time a bunch of sites like launched (or converted to a Flash video player from a crappy "Click here for WMV, Click here for QT, now wait a good long time" experience).

ffmpeg didn't just help YouTube, it helped make the entire category of video-sharing websites go big.
I recommend Skol.
If you touch a patented codec (in a country where software patents apply), you need to pay for patent license regardless whether you wrote the code yourself or not. Google must be paying for H.264 encoding already.

> Why would google want to reengineer and build closed sourced video converters?

To adapt them for their infrastructure and trade-offs. They are transcoding a lot of video. Zencoder for example modified their transcoders to encode multiple formats from a single decoded stream (I presume with ffmpeg you'd end up decoding same video multiple time during transcode into multiple formats).
From my knowledge of history, the winners god's is always right, just as history is written by the victor. That latter part includes the former, and goes far beyond what we usually acknowledge. It's not only that the victor's reasons for a war are considered just over the loser's. The values of the victor, his cultural framework, are used to judge the loser's and the rest of the world's. And history is written from his viewpoint. It's a meta victory.
The original formulation of the problem is that you have a slot machine (one-armed bandit) with multiple arms, each arm having different payoffs.

You want to maximise payoff while minimizing time spent on arms that don't pay off as well, but you obviously need to spend enough money on everything to estimate the probabilities.

That's the gist of the problem.
Relevant: http://explo.cs.ucl.ac.uk/ (International Conference of Machine Learning 2011, Workshop on "exactly that".)
Google TV box flops for Logitech
Monthly is better than annual for one reason: People over-estimate that they'll get a date so they'll avoid annual unless you offer something very compelling beyond trying to get a relationship on the website. eg person will hang around to chat to friends or do quizes.

If you really want to create a dating website, you have these classic problems:

1) Abundant men. eg spam 100 women a day over several accounts until they get a response.

2) High turnover. Got a date? Great, they're not coming back. Your email gets quickly marked as spam. Among other issues.

3) Over-estimation. People don't say their true height, weight or even show the correct pictures.

4) Chicken and egg problem. The biggest hurdle to overcome first. How you overcome it will affect the above three.

Have fun!
Good work Adobe, it's important to prepare for the future. Sucks they couldn't make it a web app, then it could run on my iPad.
Thankfully he has crawled back under his stone since the MobiGames debacle.

Or has he resurfaced and I've missed it?
In polite society, it's frowned upon. In the real world, they laugh and say "Oh what a sweet kid" when you ask such a question.
It seems like a personal choice to me. If you want companies to use your code internally, and are okay with the fact that they might make improvements that they don't release back (or think that voluntary releases will be sufficient), then GPL or BSD/MIT is fine. If you don't want to allow for proprietary forks of stuff used in webapp backends, then AGPL is a better choice. If you have a different set of preferences about how people use your code than either of those, you can keep it proprietary and just negotiate custom licenses with potential users.

AGPL seems like a particularly reasonable choice if you're running a SaaS and want to release your code, but also want to make sure no competitor can use your code as a starting point from which to leapfrog you without releasing the improvements back for your own use. That's the approach gitorious takes, for example. Of course, the other way to keep competitors from leapfrogging you with your own code is not to release it at all, or release it with a proprietary license--- the approach github and Dropbox and many other SaaS take. From that perspective, AGPL is at least more liberal a license than the "no code release" license.
What we aren't hearing about is the people who declined to use Airbnb and had their homes ransacked because a burglar spotted they were empty. The risk of having the place trashed by a guest has to be offset against the improved security from having somebody in the place. Do we have any data or even credible estimates of the sign and magnitude of the _difference_ in security from using Airbnb?
Skeptics: Does Apple have more cash reserves than the U.S. government?
VLC is able to playback RoQ as well apparently. It was not able to skip through the video though. Also the film is 27 seconds but VLC displayed it as 1:46.

In any case, VLC can handle stuff like RoQ and that is why I love it.
For God's sake we get it. Why does this drivel have to be on HN everyday? Sometimes when you deal with strangers, they are crazy. Not TECH, Not HACKER, Not INTERESTING!
Alkaline foods
Complete 2011 alkaline and acidic foods chart in a list easy to read and understand how it helps diet and health. Alkaline foods list shows the difference between acidic foods chart.
I had a look at the Cheat Sheet - many thanks it is exactly what I need. I have some basics with Haskell and as you said it is a nightmare to figure out what the operators are doing. I am still working through Real World Haskell, the book is really good - but what I miss is this kind of short reference (well, the cheat sheet being 14 pages, it is not really short).

Thanks for this link!
Touche! Only 14 hours too late for me, I fear. :(
The "dropout" meme is interesting, because, even though it implies that the subjects did not finish college / postgrad / phd , they did enroll in it and in many cases found inspiration / colleages / ideas while doing it. This seems to be more common than people choosing not to go to college at all.

P.s. are there anti-education agendas; i would be curious to read about it
How good SEO website content affects search engine ranking?
There are many webmaster who wants to know how good SEO website content affects search engine ranking. The answer to this question is answered here.
> Besides liability for damages incurred by the guest, hosts are also probably on the hook for liability should the guest be injured (or worse) while staying in your place.

Good point. I'd imagine hotels are required by law in most jurisdictions to take out public liability insurance.

Then there is the issue of who is responsible for ensuring that properties are actually safe for rental on Airbnb (i.e., no exposed electrical wires, slippery steps, etc.)
Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (August 2011)
Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords INTERN, REMOTE, or H1B if the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome. Feel free to post any job that may interest HN readers from executive assistant to machine learning expert to CTO.

Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancers? (August 2011) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2831651
I would like that.
There are two kinds of enhancements to consider: Enhancements that are specific to your product and enhancements that are general to the library you're incorporating.

If Rails had been AGPL, every single webapp based on Rails would have to have its source code released. Now, Rails is not AGPL, does that mean that anybody using Rails (and not making their entire project open source) are "useless"? The vibrancy of the Rails community seems to disagree with that assessment.
Nice link. Thanks.
They didn't. Note the use of 'and' not 'therefore'.
Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? (August 2011)
Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER, your location and whether remote work is a possibility.
I have a better one. Project manager replaced enums with strings and instead of the switch statement he put a long list of if-s (without the else-s, too), and a lot of obfuscated crap between the braces.. Guess who had to sort out that mess?
Also, the motivation for that horror was related to how those string parameters were visible in intellisense (because they were made static members in a class). Don't even ask.
If you're interested in trying it, drop me a line at noel at untyped dot com.
Yes. Items rise with points, sink with time and flags, and are penalized if they don't actually have a link (such as your question here). If items get a few votes very early, and it's a reasonably quiet time, 4 or 5 votes can easily be enough to get to the front page for a time.

It may be that there have been recent scoring tweaks, but your observations don't really support the conclusion.

Disclaimer: I'm just a user, I have no inside knowledge.
Yes it is. The services collect email addresses and then send their spam to all of them.
In what way is unsolicited and unwanted email not spam?
it says "Error establishing a database connection" when i click the link. it's true and even a bit on topic ;)

edit: hallelujah, the db is up now, after 30 minutes. can somebody upvote me back now? ;)
Debt Ceiling Battle: Harry Reid's Plan May Benefit Smartphone Users
Floop - New Haven, CT or remote (us only, northeast preferred) - iOS, Android, OpenGL, Mobile app design (Information Architecture through gradients and icons)
We're a funded "stealth" startup building what we call a social opinion platform. Our iPhone app will be launching in the next two weeks. We'll be gathering feedback and iterating quickly, so we'll need some help! We're interested in anyone with one or more of the skills listed above. We're low overhead, flexible on hours, and all we really care about is getting shit done.
Please submit code/github/portfolio if you are interested. We'll be happy to add you to our testflight before we chat so you can see what we are all about. Good compensation, equity for right person. pat at floop dot com.
Cheap Red Bull Hats
Chicago White Sox Hats Sale
> Google won't touch or integrate anything that is GPL licensed into their own products

ffmpeg is GPL, and it is being used in youtube. Isn't that the story here?

> Using copyright law to force corporations and developers to become contributors and active participants in your software project is, to me, a ridiculous notion.

So the fact that so many companies contribute to the Linux kernel has nothing to do with its GPL license?

Without the GPL there would be a "tragedy of the commons" situation: it would be best for the common good to share and avoid duplicated efforts, but it would be advantageous for individual companies to use the code but not share their improvements. The GPL fixes that by enforcing cooperation.
Exactly that false sense. I 've never used airbnb, but reading the positive hype i would be very positively biased to use it, while i would think Craigslist is "creepy". It's a matter of overinflated hype here more than anything else I think. With great hype, comes great responsibility, a wise man once said.
>unarmed combatants choosing to not wear uniforms

I think you mean armed combatant. An unarmed man being by definition a non-combatant.

The reason western militaries use uniforms is very different from the one you give. The fact that it differentiates conventional combatants from civilians is a consequence of wearing uniforms, not the reason. The original reason going back some centuries was to provide adequate, uniform, protection to poor peasants that lacked good clothing, distinguish own's troops from the enemy and instill "esprit de corps". The whole uniformed troops clearly marked as combatants is today a very Western value. We obviously would like everyone to fight like this, especially because Western armies are very good at this kind of fighting and would win quickly. Instead, they fight like guerillas, hiding among civilians, which multiplies their force and we can go on to complain how it's illegal according to Western customs.

And the whole "protecting civilians" argument doesn't hold water anyway, the ratio of civilian-military casualties keeps going up in the modern era.
Flexible Nav - Improve your navigation experience
localuncle is hiring, too (will submit to the list as well).

http://blog.localuncle.com/jobs/

We're hiring:

- RoR Software Engineer (full-time)
- Software Engineer Intern (part or full-time)
- UI/UX Engineer (full-time)
- Mobile Developer iOS and/or Android (full-time)
- Marketing, Community Management and Social Media Intern (part or full-time)

Contact me (I intern for them) or directly through the page (tell 'em I sent you, for a delicious cookie!)
Sex sells in the domain name game
Since you're using mturk, do you currently offer your customers the ability to decide which countries/languages they wish to receive reviews from? It'd be nice to only receive pertinent results if you have a very targeted market or can't sell internationally.

I've actually created human intelligence tasks (HITs) for websites on mturk myself, which can be quite a cost savings if you're willing to do the gruntwork yourself. You can create templates for reusability if you've got a set of questions you'd like answered about your site.

If anybody is interested, I'll create templates for you and sell them for a tiny fee... Hell, I'll make it a dynamic page and let you pick what you want on it and generate the output. Fully customized, reusable at any time, and you can name your own price on mturk.
Golden Triangle India
Golden Triangle India - most popular tour package of India provide tourists real taste of royal Rajasthan - city of forts and palaces, visit to Agra - city of Taj Mahal and more
Executing an idea, means monetizing that idea
Direct link: http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0106/
Ask HN: What does "launch" really mean? Is "beta" a private launch?
Do you have to have "major media exposure" to call your site launched? How many private users qualify for a successful beta trial? Thanks!
In this case I think it's perfectly reasonable. Given the fact that the Daily Fail uses page views as one of their key metrics, and publishes articles that are essentially bait purely to generate page views, denying them their currency is a legitimate tactic.
sorry, do you have metal doors there in SF? as we do in Moscow, Russia. the doors that can be opened only with the help of special forces
SEEKING FREELANCER

web/graphic designer for remote recurring work.
A Day in the 4G Life: The Digital Swarm
T-Mobile in Bonn, Germany.
The rolercoster seems to be going backwards...
Is that a reference to the Trojan War?
SEEKING WORK: I'm thinking about taking on some remote work in the US from here in Italy during the month of August, when things in Europe grind to a halt. Rails would be the most obvious thing to work on, but I've done a lot over the years. Other languages I'd be interested in/have experience with are C, Tcl, Erlang, and mobile Java (J2ME/Android). Get in touch at davidw@dedasys.com
For UK'ers check-out the job board I run, lots of startups use it to promote their jobs:

http://www.coderstack.co.uk/startup-jobs

(Mostly full-time non-remote jobs)
I'd guess that half the apartments in SF are in old wooden houses, with wood doors.
Introducing Clojure to an Organisation
The Rise of Specialist YC competitors
Interesting how this might be confined to tech, due to the shorter product cycles. Case in point: Richard Branson and Virgin's empire. Technically, they're (Virgin Group) a branded vc firm, but Branson himself is a chairman, not a CEO, and I believe that he wasn't the CEO for the companies that he started either (the name Nik Powell rings a bell.)

Taken as such, perhaps it's not that hired CEOs are useless intrinsically(as the tech world loves to believe) but merely are good at operating in existing industries (Virgin Records wasn't the first record company, Virgin Atlantic wasn't the first airline, etc.)
SEEKING WORK
ruby on rails | web frontend (jquery, html5, css, etc.) | mobile apps | location: boston. remote: yes and welcomed.
> Why exactly is a vandalized apartment leaving her homeless? Is it too damaged to occupy? Does she simply not feel safe there?

Yes and yes. I'm assuming you've never had your appartment broken into and ransacked.

And reading EJ's story, it's somewhat worse than your average break-in-plus-digging-for-valuables. Same for the guy in this article, seems about just as bad. My initial thought was "sounds like the same people", but more likely the common denominator is "meth-crazed junkie binge".

If there's one thing you can blame EJ is that her stories are a bit of the rambling-longwinded-trying-to-be-a-writer-please-get-to-the-point sort. But that's neither here nor there.

What I don't quite understand is, I read that in order to prevent under-the-table deals (where AirBnB wont get commission), AirBnB won't let you communicate with the guest until just before they go there? Anyone got some details on that? Cause if that's so, they DO have some responsibility to make sure these people are trustworthy, preventing the subletter from finding out themselves. Maybe not legally, but definitely practically, ethically and not-being-a-bunch-of-dicks-ically.
Los Angeles or Bay Area or Shanghai preferred, but remote work is possible for exceptional candidates. Full-time only. If you're interested in working remotely, you must live in the U.S.

Factual aims to be the place where people meet to share, improve, and mash-up data. Our vision is to be an awesome and affordable data provider for startups and developers, so that they can focus on innovation instead of data acquisition.

We have a terrific team that is still fairly small, and an incredible CEO (he was the co-founder of Applied Semantics, which was sold to Google and became AdSense). Last year we raised a Series A from Andreessen-Horowitz, and our customers and partners include Facebook, SimpleGeo, and Newsweek. We have lots of challenging problems to work on at all layers of the stack: data cleaning and canonicalization, deduping, storage, serving, APIs, etc. If you love data, Factual is the place to be.

Ideally you know Java, Clojure, and/or Ruby, and you'll get bonus points for experience with machine learning, NoSQL, algorithms, infrastructure, and/or Hadoop.

http://www.factual.com/jobs or you can email me personally at leo -at- factual.com
It's about time your lolcat tumblr looked pretty...
Not a blatant plug as such (ok, yes it is). But we're looking for suggestions on how to improve our digital daily deals site.

Any feedback?
> I don't know if you realize this, but the author, P.J. Eby, is the same guy who wrote the original WSGI spec.

yup (though to conclude anything from that fact is a clear fallacy).

I've realised that what I actually disliked most was his blog-post and not the actual project (I've used identical shims to wsgi-lite by choice over the years).

"CAN'T REPLACE WSGI WITH SOMETHING BETTER? CHALLENGE ACCEPTED"

"WSGI IS DEAD" (Except when it isn't.)

I realise that the above was probably done for facetious editorial reasons rather than his actual intention with the lib. He hasn't really replaced wsgi, he admits should only be used wherever appropriate

Armin uses the async point in part to give technical reasons why WSGI can't really be replaced in full, before concluding that he thinks replacing WSGI for purported notions of pluggable utopia is a red-herring anyway before posing the question of any WSGI replacement: does this really '[make] frameworks work better with each other?'

I don't think PJ really tackles any of that.
SpaceX readies November launch to International Space Station
SEEKING FREELANCER - content writing, copy writing. Remote work, 20 hours/month.
Oh cool, it can be very useful for pages like Javadoc, even if you are in the middle of the page you have always access to this Table Of Content so you can navigate rapidly, I think a greasmonkey script could be useful to run the bookmark automatically.
I like the styles too.
Not just a blatant plug (sorry about that) we're looking for feedback on our digital daily deals site. Suggestions/ comments welcome. :)
That's pretty cool. I'm a programmer and have 0 clue about animation and design - but the UI makes it pretty straight format for me to create some primitive animations. (Which I can then include into my Mac app via a Webkit view).
Waltham, MA, local only, no remote. H1B a possibility.

OpenClinica is hiring Java Developers (Java EE + Spring + Hibernate + Eclipse + Maven, etc), Inside Sales Associates, Clinical Trial Setup Managers and others. Check it out here:

https://www.openclinica.com/openclinica-careers

Feel free to contact me if you have questions. (Email in sig)
LinkUp.com Search Engine - Minneapolis, MN ($5,000 to relocate, $2,000 referral bonus) - Lead PHP developer focusing on new feature developlemnt

Recently finished a large round of funding, looking for a 80% onsite developer to lead our small, but amazing, development staff and pursue new features to help jobseekers make their task suck less! Work can involve whatever seems necessary or interesting (from iPhone to Facebook to 2-page standalone domains for a specific feature.) We use git, Solr, many Amazon AWS services - come join our team!!! (Or email eric@linkup.com if you have more questions)

Apply at http://linkup.jobs/?&a=showJob&ID=4471
Arguing about the definition of words will very, very rarely help your business.

With particular regards to these words, they mean whatever Marketing wants them to mean. To a first approximation, I'd describe any service I can get into with a web browser and a credit card but no strings pulled on my behalf as "launched." But if Marketing says that it isn't really, truly launched until TC gets their exclusive, I would not burn my karma arguing with Marketing over the point.
In Praise of Mediocre Research