skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
However, the best thing to do to learn copywriting is follow the advice of the late copywriting ace Gary Halbert.

Buy a book of control salesletters. ("Control" is an industry jargon which means that its a salesletter that has won in split tests with other versions of salesletters selling the same product.)

Then copy and write the salesletters down by hand. Because copywriting is essentially writing. You can read everything about it and yet be a so-so copywriter. Or you can just copy 30 or so control salesletters and learn more than you would by reading voraciously on the topic.

My swipe file book of control salesletters of choice is World's Greatest Direct Mail Sales Letters by Herschell Gordon Lewis. But its out of print. And second hand copies sell for $200-300 or so.

Another good and more affordable book of control salesletters is: Million Dollar Mailings by Denny Hatch
Looking through the list, I see a lot of junk websites I don't want to recover. Most people who seem to be complaining about Panda have really bad websites. Most people wont even give you their URL after moaning about it for a good few minutes. Perhaps it's time for them to change their strategy. I'm sure there are legitimate 'victims' but I'm yet to see one I sympathise with.
You probably have never seen this happen, hence your naiveté. When a bunch of cops show up at your door, each of them doesn't identify themselves separately as a cop. The leader will usually announce, "SFPD! We are here to investigate blah blah blah...", and probably show a badge. His other comrades will just stand there. They don't go down the conga line, each swearing an oath that they are cops. It is assumed that the first announcement is enough to establish authority.
Opera TV Store brings HTML5-powered web apps, browsing to TVs, set top boxes
Thanks. That's exactly what my use of "basically" meant and FFS since this is HN I will be sure to note that in the future. :)
Yup, totally agree
The customer-facing mobile carrier dashboard that I want (wireframes)
If you are into python web programming, just a simple blog engine thingy would show you know a bit.

Steps (you can cut out anything that ends up being difficult - it's just a demo thingy from a student):

- hello world, using a web framework. Go for a minimal one, like flask / bottle / web.py.

- hello world, with a list of <a href="/1">Aricle 1</a> links. (hand written html mock-up). Something like:

def GET(self):
return '''
<body>
<ol>
<li><a href="/0/">Article 0</a></li>
<li><a href="/1/">Article 1</a></li>
<li><a href="/2/">Article 2</a></li>
<li><a href="/3/">Article 3</a></li>
</ol>
</body>''') # does this need a head?

- generate the html links in python, from a list ['my first article', 'my second article', '<b>Escape html injections?</b>',u'\u4f60\u597d does unicode work?']. The html should now be:

(head)
<body>
<ol>
<li><a href="/0/">Article 0</a></li>
...
<li><a href="/3/">Article 3</a></li>
</ol>
</body>

Note, don't worry about titles. Titles are a pain (you convert them to url-safe "slugs", but the slugs might clash ... you could spend hours on it and it's just not fun).

- write the "article" pages. They should look like:

<body>my first article</body>

For bonus points, make sure you can't inject html (the <b> post should not be bold), and that unicode works OK.

- Add a page where you can post. You will need a text box to post in.

- Use a sqlite3 db instead of a list.

- User authentication? Cookies? For a toy project, don't use passwords, just log anyone on with whatever name they input. Use cookies to keep them logged on. Password handling and secure HMAC cookies - (ask the interview how this should be done - give them a chance to show you how smart they are, or why they just use a solid tested framework that does it all for them)

- Finally, pimp the site a little. Eye candy always impress. Just don't waste time on it.

- Check it into github.

That's about it. It's just a toy project, but gives them something to look at.
"Due to the rapidly decreasing demand for downloadable software in favor of web apps [...]"
I just hope they get rid of the memory leaks in their web apps...
Er - no. Downloaded from oanda.com, uploaded to google correlate.
My experience is from 10 years ago, where I set this up for a startup I worked at. This was the situation: we had built a platform for trade finance. It was like eBay but for trade paper. eg. somebody is exporting $80M worth of oil, and they need a bank to finance it. We had 500+ banks from around the world on the platform, and they would all bid for the business.

Because we were dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of commitments, we needed a certificate architecture that would verify the seller, the buyer, and for each of those parties to verify the site.

I went to Verisign and asked them for the best solution, and this is what they setup:

- we had a Verisign terminal setup in the office. This was a normal computer, but locked down to only run Verisign software. It was a flavor of UNIX

- the terminal had a smart-card reader on it, and a private net connection that went only back to Verisign.

- the authentication to login to the computer was two passwords, both with secure tokens, and two smart cards

- when you login, you do the ID shuffle, which involved two people who had background checks conducted on them etc.

- we generate a certificate, which is then signed using a sub-CA certificate that Verisign issues to us

- Our certificate thus acted as a CA, but it was authorized by Verisign, so the certs that we signed would then check out using the built-in browser CA certs

This cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to setup, and cost us hundreds of dollars for each cert we signed. When I did the due dilligence on the solution, I visited 3 london-based banks who had implemented the same system. The selling point was that we could act as a CA, but without really being a CA.

Verisign's sales pitch was that you could never become the root CA because of the stringent policies that had to be put in place (isolated networks, key generation, etc.), but for the fraction of the cost, we could sign certs using our cert which would be verified up the chain to the root CA which was Verisign

I can't stress how secure this whole procedure was. The root CA store was the holy grail - nobody that did't have the infrastructure or procedures like Verisign would get anywhere near it. I now read stories 10 years later of dodgy dutch companies with no budgets being given root CA privileges, and I am just blown away.

If these guys needed a solution to sign certs, they should have been setup with what we had, and what the other banks had, not just given placement in the root cert store. Verisign would check and double-check everything we did, and would frequently revert certs we signed where they suspected something was wrong.

With this story it seems there was a completely amateur operation given privileges to sign certs as part of a root CA.

I have 163 root CA certs on my OS X machine. 10 years ago I am certain the number was 4 or 5

note: this was so long ago that I probably have some of my terminology mixed up, but what we bought was the right to sign certs as a sub-CA of Verisign, a privileged root CA. I also got a very cool tour of Verisign which is another story.
Hasil motogp Misano – MotoGP San Marino
Hasil motogp Misano – MotoGP San Marino : 4 September 2011. Motogp Misano merupakan seri motogp 2011 ke 13 yang digelar di sirkuit Misano San Marino mulai Jumat 2 September hingga minggu 4 September 2011. Hasil motogp Misano sangat berarti bagi Jorge Lorenzo karena di seri Motogp Indianapolis hanya menempati posisi ke-4.

Pada sesi latihan bebas pertama (FP1) motogp Misano Casey Stoner berhasil menempati posisi pertama dengan catatan waktu 1’34.180 disusul oleh Ben Spies di tempat ke 2. Di FP1 ini Dani Pedrosa yang merupakan pemenang motoGP Misano 2010 hanya menempati peringkat ke-3.
I agree. It's definitely hard to pry yourself away from actual development, but some time spent analyzing any sort of plan will be rewarded. And you're going to be asked for it anyway, so might as well have something ready, right?
Ask HN: I think My code isn't Good enough
I have been programming for the last 4-5 years but whenever I look at some good code written by some one else I always have this feeling that my code isnt good enough. By "good enough" I mean that my code isn't as beautiful(readable) and reusable. I always try to change the way i do things the next time but i keep getting this feeling. Do you guys ever fell like this and what you think I should do to improve on that ?
I can't help but feel we're just doing it wrong in cases like this. Surely there must be some way to refocus that same level of energy in a way that's much more effective.
"Just skip the parts on optimizing your telegrams..."

Or bend it to optimize your tweets.
As a BBQ loving Texan, I find this fascinating. On the one hand, it does seem kind of creepy, on the other, this could be some cool resilient community-building technology to create a real alternative to the current food economy.

I don't think this will ever be a complete replacement for real meat. There are such subtleties to how an animal lives and what it eats that affect its taste. Wild hogs and domestic pigs are the same animal but taste entirely different (I prefer the wild variety).

Still, I'd prefer higher quality lab-grown meat created under safe and open conditions with some free range/hunted organic on the side to the factory farmed meat we're stuck with today. I drive 35 miles out of my way for groceries every week to avoid that stuff.
You still have to power the thing. Declining oil production and the limitations of battery power are going to be a severe limiting factor that will influence the way we roll out self-driving automobiles.
zombiejs?
The images and everything Microsofty are provided by Microsoft for this use. VirtualBox is open source and ideal for something like this.

The automation might be mired in some obscure clause on either end, but it's just doing things you can legally do by hand.
A new way of measuring how different colleges pay off in the long run
That is not the point. I do not need a session variable of my search results. I just need the results, displayed on my screen.
Yeah it's closer to something like Google App Engine if we want to stick to comparing things. I remember enjoying deployment with GAE so it must be the same kind of service. So maybe if I was doing some serious stuff and wanted to move fast I'd forget about money in the short term (and it doesn't look too expensive), but for my own little website I have a VPS that serve a bunch of tiny stuff (blog, Trac, 2 tiny wsgi apps) and that here if you know how to administer a VPS it's hard to beat price wise. (running the VPS on Linode which is a great service). But to make this scale it's not as easy as another pip deploy like it seems to be with Gondor ...
It's constant, almost everyone experiences it. Best thing to do is look at some really old code you wrote and realize how far you've come. After that, write more code, read more code, write more code. Programmers all want to be better, this drive helps us become so, but it also drastically diminishes our ability to be content with our current situation. If you really want to see how far you've come. Find someone who reminds you of yourself and mentor them. It's much easier to perceive change in others than change in ourselves. Watching mentees progress reminds you of when you underwent the very same realization and helps you become more aware of liminal points in your programming journey.
Consider the massive usage of Facebook and Twitter, the lack of outrage over the warrantless wiretapping scandal (running for 10.5 years now), easily available voter records (see e.g. the backstory behind Latanya Sweeney's original identifiability study), and lack of public comments about requiring ISPs to store all session information for a long time - I would say that is strong evidence that USA as a nation does not actually value privacy.

edit: wireless wiretapping scandal -> warrantless wiretapping scandal, silly me.
Serious question: what do you think the word revenue means?
Enjoy the 3G while you have it. B&N has dumped it, Sony has dumped it, Kobo never had it. I think the future is WiFi-only for eBook devices.
Good point, I forgot that you could just use it standalone!
Having dealt with the Selenium and its frustrations in the past, I tend to outsource this sort of testing if at all possible. Some things can only be truly tested with eyeballs.

One tip I do have is to disable jQ animations during your test runs so you aren't having to jump through hoops in your test suite just to wait through animations -

jQuery.fx.off = true will do that.
I guess there is an issue that you can work on your pet software project in your free time, but you can't be working on a law case three hours a week.

Probably part of the reason things like the FSF and EFF came into existence, too.. i.e. if the tricorder app's author had assigned copyrights to the FSF this would not go down so quick I imagine.
What I don't get is why people use their own name at all.

Neither my Facebook account nor my Google+ account are in my birth name. That hasn't stopped me interacting with the people I know and the people that know me. Ok they might not be able to find me (I just went through the first 30 pages of a Google search for my name and none of them is me, and my name isn't terribly common).

If you need a page in your birth name because you want people to find you, fair enough, my entry in Friends Reunited is my real name so people from school can find me if the want to.

I understand the issue of someone with a certain amount of celebrity from a pseudonym being caught out - would Johnny's Rotten or Cash have their G+ profile suspended, I suspect so ?

Control your own destiny.
"I wish I shared you idealism. You're talking about the SFPD - the same SFPD that has gotten away with beatings, illegal arrests, blatant racism and bigotry for decades."

I know what you're saying: but that shouldn't stop us from trying!

Look at it this way. If we don't raise questions, then things continue on the trajectory they're on (Newton's Third Law? ;) ). However, if we do raise questions, in sufficient numbers, then we have a chance, however small it may be, to effect change. So why not try to effect change? We have nothing to lose! At the worst, things are no different; in the best case, things get better.

So please! Contact your supe from this page: http://www.sfbos.org/index.aspx?page=1616
It'll only take a minute.
This is a non-story for the reasons stated but a story for other reasons.

It's standard that widget publishers require to use their widget "as is". That's basically what Facebook is saying. Not only do you not know what any custom modifications will necessarily do but it's a completely valid argument that you want a consistent user experience with your widget.

As for user tracking, this is basically an inevitable byproduct of Facebook hosting the widget, a situation I'm sure they're not unhappy about, but this really isn't a big deal in the context of how the Web works.

The story here (IMHO) is trust. Most pages have a Google Analytics tracking script on them. Do you trust Google? I do (disclaimer: I work for Google). Protecting user data and privacy are key priorities here. It's why Google+ has relatively simple privacy controls and allows you to export your data at any time.

Do you trust Facebook? I don't. Then again, there aren't many companies I do trust. But Facebook's track record seems to be to befuddle the user and trick or opt them into sharing things wider than they understand or want.
Yap. Just went this morning to the depot closer to my home which is around one hour away (and that's because I use the DLR, otherwise I would walk for maybe those 90 minutes you talk about). This for two DVDs...

I'm avoiding buying stuff because of this.
Do you need to have a 50 page document ? - no

Do you need to have a document showing you understand your growth and revenue model and the underlying assumptions ? - yes.
Bezos on Charlie Rose:

-They want a purpose-built device where no tradeoffs have been made, where every single design decision as you’re walking down the process has been made to optimize for reading.

-The number one thing that people are doing on their iPad right now if you look at the rankings is playing a game called “Angry Birds” where you throw birds at pigs and the pigs blow up. The number one thing that people are doing on their Kindle right now is reading Stieg Larsson.
Because it costs more to fly to the moon? Every government has crap like this.
It could mean either a Pixel Qi or Mirasol screen.
awesome, thanks for finally doing this :)
Health Insurance Quotes in the UK
>>>There might be a reason Sony makes their readers with a metallic case

Used to. The latest Reader WiFi is all-plastic.
This is for battery performance reasons, not because it's familiar to book readers. An e-ink display only needs to consume battery when the image it's displayng changes. If you scroll, you refresh the whole page and you only show up one new line of text. For the same cost of batery, you can turn the page and display a whole new page. Scrolling is ridiculously wasteful on e-ink.
SEEKING WORK - Remote

Kernel and File System Engineer.

I've worked on kernel mode software, like drivers, filesystems and the kernel itself for Windows NT and Solaris. I've also worked as a systems engineer. I prioritize Go, Plan9 and research work but I'll do anything that's interesting and challenging.

If you need SQL or web development I am not the guy to ask, I don't like it.

If you need an operating system I am the guy to ask. If you need someone that understands hardware up to the solid state physics involved, I am the guy to ask.

If you need something that hasn't been done before, even if it's really high level, I am the guy to ask. I am a generalist, can work at any level of the stack and can invent new things.

Contact me at aram . h at mgk . ro

Remote or Vienna, Austria. I have a SSN and can be legally employed in the US. Contract work or consultancy is ok, but I prioritize full time positions.
on a side note, do you people test graphics?
I mean, it's kind of easy to say "I get a div #foo".
But how do you check if it has the right shade of $color and a rounded corner and the text content is not overflowing the containing box?

I live in constant worry of changing css and totally screwing up a completely unrelated bit of the web app, and the usual thing I get told is "well, it's very fast to check if it still works", which reminds me of me not understanding why unit testing is useful.
An accesible & intuitive layman's explanation of Bayes' Theorem
So when are you guys going to back up the openness propaganda and open source something of substance other than protobuf?
The general population barely knows what rights they have, let alone what rights they cannot give up. It is an important aspect of the conversation.
I found the conclusion at the end of the article, that e-readers as a platform are incapable of non-linear reading, a bit silly to be making about e-readers as a whole.

These complaints are really issues of software, and UI specifically. The technology needed to add a "Go to random page" option to the Kindle is absolutely trivial; it's a matter of the UI developing enough that features like that actually surface to be given visual prominence equaling their demand. I really do find the experience of looking back a couple pages extremely painful on a Kindle; that experience is screaming for UI improvements (which are probably a lot easier on a touchscreen; I'm imaging something like iOS video scrubbing).

I'm sure it took at least a bit of time for the concept of codex page numbers to develop, and I'm sure until that point people thought "with scrolls, we could measure length to get a sense of position, and now we can only guess based on thickness"; I find this no different. The solution then was to think of a way to intuitively incorporate that need into the codex, not to give up on the codex and hang on to scrolls.
It will be interesting to see if Amazon permits loading of competitor eBook apps. Right now, both Aldiko and Kobo are available in their App Store (I can't find Sony, that might be a search bug, maybe...). And if they do allow it, are we in for a 30% in-app purchase vig down the road ala Apple?
I am working on it here:

http://www.github.com/nikcub/parley

I will have a new version out at the end of this weekend

I think it is time to kill all third-party requests. If you want to show users an ad, host it from your own server.
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New Golden YSS-475 Soprano Saxophone with Case
Price: $478.86. $20 off Back to School Sale. Free Shipping.
The way Groupon defines their 'revenue' is the problem. Groupon uses Gross Revenue Treatment, not net revenue (as eBay does).

They include in their revenue the total price of the offering, but they only actually see half of that price. For example, if the coupon is sold for $20, Groupon only actually see $10 of it and they should be accounting their revenue using the $10, not the $20.

Imagine how much revenue eBay would have if they counted the total cost of the auction and not just the portion they actually receive?

>Groupon accounts for its revenue differently than say eBay, and in a way that some say is misleading to potential investors. The company defines revenue as “the purchase price paid by customers.” Then there’s the issue of “the cost of revenue,” leaving the company with what it calls “gross profit,” which is “the amount of revenue we retain after paying an agreed upon percentage of the purchase price to the featured merchant.”
Here’s the thing: Many companies like eBay [...], which also take a fee for transactions, would consider that “gross profit” number a “net revenue number.” UCLA Anderson School’s accounting lecturer Gordon Klein says the S-1 uses terms in a way he’s never used them before, and this unusual accounting tells him that investors should “run from the stock.” : http://goingconcern.com/2011/06/theres-some-fuss-about-group...

Also, the fact that Groupon delays paying their merchants is what allows them to have an operating cash-flow as they even say in their S-1 filing:
Our merchant payment terms and revenue growth have provided us with operating cash flow to fund our working capital needs. Our merchant arrangements are generally structured such that we collect cash up front when our customers purchase Groupons and make payments to our merchants at a subsequent date.

>The second issue is that the accumulation of the merchant payable, has resulted in a substantial working capital deficit. Essentially, despite being cash flow positive in the short term, they are not generating enough to cover their operating expenses like the amounts owing to merchants, salaries, rent and other costs of running of the business. As such, without additional financing, they will not be able to meet their obligations. This is extremely serious and which is why many have analyzed Groupon as being on the brink of insolvency: http://www.montrealfinancial.ca/blog/5-notable-disclosures-i...
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Does this strike anyone else as a bit crass? There's no mention of "I'm so glad I was sick that day; I could have died." He does mention he's happy to have career...

And the part where he says "But if I could erase everything that happened to my world and to my industry on that sunny September morning and go back to my old life, just as the way it was, I’d do it in a heartbeat." Well, don't a lot of people, especially those who lost loved ones? He's complaining about the loss of his more extravagant lifestyle, really??

I wish he'd have left out the personal bemoaning of the loss of all his consulting gigs that made him lots of money and delved deeper into why larger companies became dominant in the financial IT sector rather than independent consultants after 9/11.
Twitter adds ‘Post Tweets to Facebook’ option