skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an interesting concept. But I see a couple of issues:

- You need physical stores. These take a lot of money and expertise to set up and run. And to expand/scale in any meaningful way will take a LOT of money. Plus of course you've got the added expense of having to actually do the shopping on behalf of your customers (ie walk round your inventory and fill the basket). Kind of the opposite to the Ikea model. As Ryan Air have conclusively proved, people will put up with ANYTHING if it's cheap(er).

- Your stores are going to have to be as big as a supermarket to really be of use to people.

And on the competition side:

- What's the advantage over just ordering my goods online from a supermarket? I don't even need to go to the store then, they just get delivered to my front door. Or do supermarkets not do this in the US? IN the UK at any rate you can choose very specific delivery times as well.

And on the marketing side:

- 40 minutes in a grocery store? You can easily spend this much time online filling up your basket. Personally I've never felt that online ordering has saved me much time. The USP of online shopping is not time saving, it's "when" saving - I can do it during a quiet time at work for example. But with Ernies I still gotta go pick it up...

- 73 hours per year? Doesn't sound like much to me. And walking round the store is healthier than sitting in front of your PC :)
I mean no disrespect and don't wish to rag on you unfairly, especially as your top-level post made a valid point and had a helpful link to prior discussion. You are obviously a long-term user and contributor, and often provide useful links to past discussion, which is very helpful.

So, the downvotes: your original comment could have been interpreted as sarcastic, which might be why it was downvoted. Worth noting that overall it was positively received, who knows, maybe someone just slipped on their iPhone?

Your other comments have two problems. Your tone is somewhat passive-aggressive, for example:

"triumph of evil [that is, comment quality may be getting worse]", "clearly concern for the community is irrelevant", "community is gone, and HN is something else", "respect, quality discussion and value that's being boiled out"

Coupled this with the unfortunate fact that I (and presumably other people) also recognise your username for often complaining that HN is getting worse.

That is probably why your meta posts are getting downvoted: you have made your point before, and unless you have something new to say, that makes it noise and the community norms are to downvote noise.
Click through is less important than the number of people clicking into a certain plan and signing up for beta. That would be a good conversion rate. If that's 40% then hell yes!
It very much is related to the software: Android 3.x is not open source because this 'process' has meant the code has not been released.
Come On, Really: How Influential Is TechCrunch?
There's no need for retro-activity here. It necessarily does not give any incentive for the works for which it applies, while still costing society the same high price.
It would be interesting if for new laws, there were some sort of judicial opinion that could state to their best of their ability what the purpose of the law was.

i.e. Some legislators write a law, then pass it to a panel of judges, the judges attach a note indicating what they determined the purpose of the law was, and then the law went on for a vote. The opinion wouldn't have any legal effect, but it might provide for a bit more honesty.
Cybercrime costs £243bn, almost as much as global drug trafficking
Build a bed. The last bed you sleep in becomes your spawn point, and they look less ugly than giant dirt towers.
well, seems like self-censorship a la http://enzenhofer.posterous.com/69067051 will be the future of TC
I think you're giving Microchip too much credit. They say that contractually they "can’t release [their] existing stacks", not that they can't port other open source stacks to their hardware, or develop their own from scratch.

I agree with you that they're trying to do the right thing, more or less. (Speaking for myself, not the OP,) the reason for the negative reaction is that they're touting their kit as "open source" when it's not, after a long history of proprietary development. If they had lived up to their claims from the start, I think the reaction would have been entirely positive.
Microsoft continues to profit off Android
Automatic Reconstruction of Typed Input from Compromising Reflections
I recall reading that FRP might be included in scala 2.10
Sarkozy Routes around Parliament, Forces Copyright Clauses on ISP's
Yes, for most of Google's products, the customer is the advertiser and the user is the product.

Most, but not all, though.

For example, AdWords is also (mostly?) targeted at small businesses, who are therefore customers but who are, for all practical purposes, considered users, and treated as such.

That's the problem, IMHO.
"We let anyone refer their friends to FeeFighters and get paid $25 for it"

Could you elaborate on this? Is it efficient?
The myth of free wi-fi
Nike Goes 'Back To The Future' with Power-Lacing Air Mag Shoes. Its About Time.
I submit this not because of the story it tells (which, while breaking my heart, is clearly off-topic for Hacker News) but for the presentation.

The New York Times does a terrific job when it comes to presenting information. They could have just embedded a standard audio player but they did not. They present the audio in a way that makes it accessible even if you have little time. It’s possible to skip around effortlessly and you never lose sight of the big picture. They are also not shy to use new web technologies when possible. This particular page works on my iPad without a hitch.

This is one of many examples where the New York Times really shows that they are able to find new and better ways of presenting information.
Brainwave controllers
Nice accessible intro, but it'd be nicer if there was a summary of supported "this"s and "that"s - I am generally reluctant to sign up for services unless I know pretty well what's in it for me.

How about a table of supported events and actions, or at least a number of different examples?
This sounds like a horribly broken development process to me. Is there any article that explains the idea behind this? I would really like to know how this could work.
Fast Path Decimal to Floating-Point Conversion
Apple Moves to Block Samsung’s Galaxy Tab in Japan
I find that my posts to their mailing lists don't go through half the time. I have no idea why. I guess my cordial comments fall through the cracks some times.
Ascorbic Acid Coated
Social Media Agency
Social Redirect provides different services like Social Media Marketing,Social Networking Management,Wordpress installations and Security solutions, Online Portfolio, Brand Management, Disaster management & Search engine Optimization
I think that goes for a lot of programming languages. You're just "spoiled" by some sites of languages heavily involved in web programming (and especially the sites of the frameworks and libraries used for that). I'm actually a bit wary about "beautiful" sites, as often it means that this is "web designer code"…

Also: age. Not many Forth sites are very recent, so often you'll gaze into the abyss that is the 20th century web…
That's a great site and will help people that haven't got any trading experience to 'play' a little bit without having to do all sorts of things in the 'real' money market

A little feedback:
Tooltip texts for some of the interface elements would be nice. I had to think a bit before figuring out that "P/L ($)" is supposed to be profit/loss.
"Your stores are going to have to be as big as a supermarket to really be of use to people."

Not necessarily. You could make more efficient use of space if you don't have to arrange the store to be customer-friendly.

"I don't even need to go to the store then, they just get delivered to my front door. Or do supermarkets not do this in the US?" Most places, no. Where they do, it's more expensive.

"Personally I've never felt that online ordering has saved me much time."

It certainly could if it were done well. Don't you normally buy a lot of the same things? A good interface would remember that and help you reorder favorite items quickly. Also, groups of items - "all the stuff I need to make recipe X." The store could even upsell by suggesting a recipe and selling you all the items you need to make it, then including a printout of it.

Think how quickly you could shop if you could specify the meals you want to make this week instead of looking for each item individually.
vim and emacs would be fun too :oP
> What is it exactly you think these sites should do differently?

Filter the signal from the noise. TC was mostly just an arbitrary filter on the noise, with inscrutable criteria. For quite a stretch there you were only on TC if you were somehow related to Twitter. If anything it's improved on that aspect as Arrington has been less involved (but it's still too noisy for my taste).

I never had any problem with TC itself, it's easy enough for me to not read it, my problem was that people seemed to think that it was somehow more important than it really was. Pardon the tautology but it was/is only really ever important to people who thought it was important, like how some celebrities are famous for being famous.
Bloggers in your target market are priceless.

When I launched http://www.scribophile.com/, a site for writers, I made a list of 50 writing blogs. They didn't have to be big names; writers love to write so there's lots of writers' blogs out there. I sent them a friendly and business-speak-free invitation to try the site with a free premium upgrade. Not everyone took me up on it, but a subset of those who did ended up participating and blogging about the site. A few years later and I still get traffic from some of those blog posts. I also still continue reaching out to bloggers, but now offering a month's ad slot if they're interested in writing about us. Now that the site has significant traffic, it's a great incentive for them.

Make sure to reach out to people with a carrot of some sort--give them an extra reason to want to write about you. You'll never get a 100% success rate, but even a 10% success rate will be worth it.
You think people who start their own rock band do it for the pension benefits? Also do you really think this is about a handful of rock groups that would benefit from this? It's all about the labels, period. They stand to gain a lot more from this than a bunch of 70 year old artists, who by the way, are still gaining from their more "recent" 50 year old music.
Because reading it in pdf is better than not being able to read it at all.
Thank you. I re-read with this in mind, but I can't really follow the examples since I don't know Scala nor any other functional language. Is it correct to say that the paper is more about 'advanced' uses of signals (and only mentions observers in passing), and from section 3 on relies on the parallellisation features of the language and runtime to create an event-driven state machine?

I'm still not sure how they use 'reactive programming' and 'inversion of control' in relation to each other - it seems that what they call 'reactive programming' is 'inversion of control', no?
> I believe that Rails has no problems with SQL injection? All my database queries are going through ActiveRecord.

Used properly, it's safe, but you can still screw up with ActiveRecord. For example:

User.where("name = '#{params[:name]}')

That's vulnerable to an SQL injection. You can make it safe, by using something like:

User.find_by_name(params[:name])

Or if you want to stick with the where clause, one out of many ways of doing it, is:

User.where(:name => params[:name])
For http://www.erbix.com/ we have several traffic acquisition channels working at the moment:

1) SEO - We follow the mantra of segmenting by personnas, not features: imagine classes of users for the webapp and present the product to them based on each segment's needs. See for example http://www.erbix.com/eris-form-creator/collect-feedback/ or http://www.erbix.com/pluto-team-organizer/to-do-lists/ for how we did that with 2 of our most popular apps.

2) SEM - we buy keywords on AdWords, and, the critical part, we monitor signups as conversions to be able to track those clicks that actually convert. What we learnt in our case after spending hundreds of dollars: the clicks from the content network were cheaper but we never got a conversion from them, while those on the search pages performed quite well. We also zoomed into several other characteristics of converting clicks, which lowered our price per conversion (i.e. Thursday was from a long shoot our lowest performing day so we stopped advertising during this day etc).

3) Blogging - see http://www.erbix.com/blogs/erbix/view for recent posts.

The key to all those channels is to go through a 3-step cycle continuously: implement, measure and learn. Implement the traffic acquisition channels you can imagine, measure the effort and the results you get (clicks, conversions), compute the relevant acquisition price for each channel, learn from your data and zoom into (segment) those well-performing channels hoping to find an even-better performing niche. And repeat.
I live in the south east of the US (where this store is hoping to open) and there are no grocery stores that allow you to order online here. The only option is to go to the store and shop for yourself.

You are right that you could spend 40 minutes filling up your online basket, but what if you could save your basket and re-order it the next time you "go shopping." Thus you fill up your basket with the items you already buy every time you go the grocery store, then you never have to fill it up again...Could be a big time saver.

And 73 hours per year to me I think in terms of what else could I be doing with that time? My going rate is $80 per hour so that's $5840 I could be making instead of grocery shopping. And sure it's more fit to walk around the store, but perhaps I'd rather go to the gym and actually do a real work out?
the stats there are pathetically little :(
Not having Amazon (either as the find-everything, ship-in-one-day store with great customer service, or the webservices) is one of those things that reminds me I'm in a third world country.
If I wrote a book in 1961 (hypothetically, that would have been precocious even for my parents), it would be in copyright for 75 years after my death.

If I recorded a song in 1961, that recording would go out of copyright this year under the previous regime.

The rights and wrongs of lengthy copyright protection are a separate issue, but the differential treatment of different artistic forms is something I feel should be addressed. This is a step towards equalisation (not full equalisation but a lot less controversial and so easier to enact), and for that I'm thankful.
Reporter's conflict of interest
Without meaning to put a damper on your technical work, you should keep in mind a few things:

-- systems that work with money are attacked hard and often, by intelligent skilled people

-- in fact some of the people who attack your system are likely to be both more skilled and more intelligent than you are

-- systems that work with money that fail, fail spectacularly ("What do you mean someone withdrew $8 million last night?")

-- banking websites, Paypal, etc. are all like icebergs - you don't see 9/10ths of the things they've done to prevent spectacular failure

-- spectacular failure is your destiny if you don't work very hard to prevent it

-- spectacular failure may be your destiny even if you do work very hard to prevent it

You should plan accordingly.
Developers and API's in Hackitaly
Of the things you mention, the only successful one is the Kinect, and it doesn't come from MSR: it was an Israeli company that Microsoft bought after they were turned down by Apple.

Speaking of which, do you remember that about the same time that the Ipad came out (or just before then), Microsoft was demonstrating a touch surface for coffee tables?
Get the Gist with Gis.to
Another decent way which wasn't mentioned here so far is to comment on other blogs and pages with similar content. Not only is it a boost for SEO but, if your app is related to the post, people who read the comments will click through if relevant.

In SEO a main strategy is actually doing this, blackhatters use software that automatically posts comments on related blogs, but the whitehat (clean) method is to do it manually, and it works. Try to comment on as many high quality blogs as possible (high Page Rank).

Tip: Try to use your keyword for your name so it is anchor text, although some blogs might not approve your comment because of that.
> You could make more efficient use of space if you don't have to arrange the store to be customer-friendly.

I didn't mean physically particularly, I was thinking more about the range of inventory required. Let's imagine 80% of people want 20% the same stuff. So yeah you could optimise by stocking just that 20%. But I bet you people will move back to ordering from the supermarket where they can get 98% or 100% of what they want. It's just easier than ordering from two places, items don't get duped or missed and of course it's quicker.
I do this myself on my OpenBSD server by simply using an SFTP-only account that has its home directory set to a virtual filesystem that uses encryption through the svnd(4) node. If I want to move the entire encrypted filesystem to another server or so I just copy the file its contained in, and mount it there. Setting this up took about 5 minutes.
From the perspective of a longtime hg user who switched jobs and is now in git land: hg is easier to pick up and start using than git.

git lets you do incredible things with your tree, things that hg forbids or makes impossible. But git also lets you make big mistakes, and isn't very nice about helping you fix them.

hg, on the other hand, has a much nicer learning curve. As an example, try to forget everything you know about version control and type `hg help push` and `git help push`.

Which one would you be able to parse? Personally, when I read
"The format of a <refspec> parameter is an optional plus +, followed by the source ref <src>, followed by a colon :, followed by the destination ref <dst>",
I want to punch a baby.

At the end of the day, if I want to transition a team away from SVN onto a DVCS, I'd pick hg -- just because it lets a team Get Shit Done without spending a ton of time learning a new VCS. But if I'm starting my own project? I'd pick git in a heartbeat.
Lessons Learnt about Communicating with Customers
Bless you good Sir.
Oddly enough, I've never yet seen anyone making the "harmonization" argument argue that the lengthier term should be reduced, rather than arguing that the shorter term should be lengthened. Why is that?

Nor is it clear that different countries and different media should have the same rules in the first place.
I'd love to see a keyboard layout based on data like this.
Very very cool! The idea is great and the interface looks slick!

However, what do you do in terms of protecting people's accounts? You say that the money is stored in your account? Gasp! How do we know you can't turn around and take all the money?

Also, what do you do to protect the accounts from a single rogue trader? If someone deposits money, margins up and loses a bunch of money, how do you protect the rest of the accounts?
Or Google is telling the truth, and Honeycomb is a temporary aberration that will be fixed upon the release of the next version in a few months. Why it is so hard to believe that Honeycomb is an OS that is not ready for public use (meaning in this case, put on phones and other such devices by manufacturers wanting to have the highest and latest version number Android when Honeycomb isn't designed for such use)? It isn't ideal and I wish they would just release the source and let the chips fall where they may, but there is no indication that Gingerbread is the last public release or the model is the second-latest is publicly available.
Queens Storage, Brooklyn Storage, and NY Self Storage
From the sounds of things US supermarkets do not have the online and delivery presence that they do in the UK. I reckon the 4 major supermarkets here deliver to 98% of the population, same price as in-store with free delivery (hourly delivery spots do cost a bit extra though).

So maybe there is a market for this across the pond. But then you've got the risk that the US supermarkets get their act together (and really it would amazing if they didn't).
I'm at work, and so don't really want to watch the video, so I'm going to ask directly:

What does this give me over Ocado (or their many many many competitors - I mean, Asda deliver?!), who I order from, and then they deliver? This sounds like it just adds an extra step of my having to show up, rather than just agreeing that I'll be sat at home in my PJs watching Jeremy Kyle at the right time...
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We are in the consumer-social space (http://boothchat.com) so we need to go out in the wild and find our customers. I'll talk about the first 2-3 weeks of starting up.

At the very beginning you'll need to do direct "sales". Apart from any ongoing efforts to attract press, SEO, SEM, etc, at the beginning you'll have to go out there and beg.

Locate your target audience and create campaigns. These campaigns should create you leads, which you'll have to turn into accounts and then customers... I'm talking like a salesperson here because the principle is the same. Were i mention 'accounts' imagine visitors to your website, where i mention 'customers' imagine those visitors converting to users.

E.g. specific search for relevant to your startup keywords on Twitter. Then engage with these users both from your personal and company twitter account. Never "sell" directly, rather try to get into the conversation.

Do that in a systematic way for a couple of weeks and soon you'll have your first hundred users. Of course this method does not scale, but by the time you're done with it hopefully your other efforts (press, SEO, etc) will start to kick in and you'll move to a whole new game...
Windows Seven Transformation Pack for XP
They call those papers.
Here in Montreal (perhaps also in other large cities) I can order groceries online from any of the major supermarkets and have them delivered to me (mind you, I don't have a car) for a reasonable minimum order value and a mere $2-3 extra. Maybe you are intentionally not targetting these cities, otherwise the idea is not really new at all.

You want to see a grumpy clerk? Go to Switzerland and forget to put the little sticker on your bags of produce. Damn.