skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the part that's missing from discussion here is: "First: Make sure you understand the problem". Sure, for strictly algorithmic questions, where there is one mathematically demonstrable optimal answer (or at least, a way to compare solutions), this may seem less important, but for more open-ended questions (e.g., "How many barbers are there in [$LOCATION]?"), clarifying the why is essential, because definitions are important and vary by context. It's also important to seek whether a "good enough" solution is acceptable, or if high optimization is important. (Related, what are the memory/processing/load/runtime constraints, if any.) These are the sorts of questions that, in my mind, demonstrates a candidate's willingness to reflect on his/her own solutions.
Unit costs don't work at small scale. For one thing, there's no single ideal unit: In reality, it's a multidimensional space. If you charge by unit bucket size the folks who constantly churn their files may eat you alive with bandwidth charges; if you charge by unit bandwidth folks may upload great gobs of data; if you charge for both bandwidth and storage people will get mightily confused and will tend leave your product for a competitor with a more predictable pricing model. ;)

Costs are also nonlinear. The most nonlinear are support costs. You may pay as much to support the user who pays $1 for your service as the user who pays $100. (Unless you keep a meter running and charge by the support-minute, which makes customers very unhappy.) And in practice it's even worse than that: Anecdotal evidence suggests that the customers who are obsessed with saving money cost more to support.

And let me emphasize that costs aren't even the key issue. Engineers tend to forget this, but the price of a product need have little to do with the cost of producing it. Products should be priced based on value to a customer, and that doesn't scale linearly either. The first few hundred MB of Dropbox are the most precious of all, partly because that's enough to sync my most critical and frequently-changing files, and partly because it includes the installation and setup overhead (and, probably, most of the support costs). Then the next few GB is somewhat less precious. By the time we reach a 49GB plan, the value-per-GB is significantly lower. I don't have 60GB of important stuff. Moreover, Dropbox is significantly less convenient when shlepping around huge amounts of data, because it's not magical: It takes time to sync all that stuff over my lame-O cable connection.
Because they are great programmers/designers but shitty business people.
TWC accepting signups for residential IPV6 trials
Sounds like Microsoft has introduced new definitions for their 'Palladium' concept. Anybody remember what 'Palladium' was? Well, it was a movement from Microsoft to introduce new PC environment which has a firmware and software coupled environment with secured vaults of memory for the third party software to run. According to Microsoft it would prevent malicious softwares from accessing vulnerable pc resources. Well in other sense, Microsoft decides which software are legal and which are malicious. Got the point?
You may be underestimating the prevalence of Dropbox shared folders, which make Dropbox into more type I.
Don't worry what other people are charging, worry what your clients are paying and that they are happy.
>> A good economist ...can tell you what the economy will do.

I was sipping a venti mocha when I read this and I laughed so hard there's mocha all over my keyboard. There are people here, actual paid economists, who are doubling up in laughter at your assertion.
A Year on the Bike: Lessons from 12 months of commuting to work without a car
Felix Salmon makes the interesting point that he could be a trader and a Yes Man:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/09/27/is-alessio-...

"You don’t need to spend very much time hanging around the comments section (or even many of the posts) at Zero Hedge to discern a strong nihilistic and even anti-capitalist strain to much of the thinking in that community. Independent traders are often men in their 20s and 30s who inherited a substantial sum of money and who for whatever reason don’t have a more attractive opportunity in the regular workforce. They work from home, they tend to have a strong contrarian streak, and they have a lot of time on their hands ... It’s a common misconception that all traders are die-hard capitalists. But in fact many of them are quite the opposite. They still want to make money, of course. But that doesn’t mean they want the stock market to go up."
Nice talking, dasil!
The article said that they used, "[...]Spinosad, a bacterial insecticide considered harmless to humans and most beneficial insects." Boric acid kills bugs. All of them (as far as I understand). Based on this incomplete data it looks like if Boric acid were used it would have to be baited with something that would not attract friendly bugs. Perhaps a vat of pig's blood laced with Boric acid or something similar would only kill of blood sucking insects. That'd be kind of nice...
This is a really interesting account of an interview. At the same time, I am skeptical of the author's armchair psychology and his speculation about the 'real' Jobs. He pushes his own interpretation so hard that I can only assume it colored his reporting on the interview itself.
The crazy thing about this is that one proposed solution, that MS require OEMs to supply keys for Linux, could potentially be an antitrust violation, as MS makes money from Linux too (thereby using their Windows monopoly to strengthen their other business of patent licensing).

I don't think there's much of a case here. The UEFI hardening is clearly a good thing for consumers, and having it as a logo requirement just makes sense. And if MS is not using any influence to block other OSes, that seems like the best you can ask for. And recall, OEMs can always ship without Win8 logo and not use hardening (or even UEFI at all).
But you increase their click-through ratio, which means their ad will be shown to more people.
Microsoft's success was not about tech, though they had (and continue to have) plenty of good coders; it was about deal-making. You could also argue that marketing savvy and great timing had as much to do with Apple's earliest successes as the products themselves.
This is the perfect example of a false dichotomy. Why can't both cities thrive as tech centers with different approaches? Why does NYC have to supersede SV (or why does SV have to stomp NYC)?

I'll posit an alternative: NYC ends up being an amazing hub for startups focusing on social (Foursquare, Tumblr, Etsy), fashion (Gilt Groupe), finance (HFT boutiques and small hedge funds), and education. SV, meanwhile, continues kicking ass.

PG always talks about margins, so consider: would the marginal company that barely succeeds in SV fail in NYC? Does anyone really believe that NYC lacks the financial or technological serendipity Graham mentioned last night? After living here for a month and hustling like crazy to talk to people, I'd argue NYC is full of opportunity.

I'd also argue PG's talk yesterday aimed to generate media buzz (see today's NYT article, TC, etc.) and publicity for YC. That's a conversation for another thread.
This is actually yesterday's news. The storm is subsiding:

http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=27&mo...
Is Amazon Simple Email Services an option?
LulzSec Member Indicted for Sony Systems Hack
I don't know what else to expect from a thread with an editorialized title taken from Reddit and ZeroHedge of all places.
It's because that certain subset of HN commenters are exactly the wrong audience for Facebook Connect. They value privacy over convenience, while Facebook Connect values convenience over privacy.

Not every product is for everybody.

The angst is probably magnified a bit by the awareness that they're the minority view. When dominant values are different from your own, it makes you uncomfy.
I'm the Product Manager for PostageApp (www.postageapp.com) and we built our email delivery engine from the ground up (rather than using existing solutions like Port25) and we learned a huge deal about getting emails into inboxes.

This article is a fantastic start and will definitely help you out with delivering email, but there are some minor nuances among different SMTP servers and email providers that are just so quirky that you really can't account for 100% of everything.

Organic growth of your email volume to users who genuinely want your emails is a great way to make sure you stay in their good books, as well as observing some SPAMAssassin rules and auditing your subject line and content to not seem spammy.

It's a huge and complicated matter (getting emails into inboxes) and it's not documented, thankfully we are getting a better and better idea of how to do it.
sorry, forgot to edit the pages. done now. I won't be charging in the future! :)
Actually, only a dishonest economist would say, "they can tell you what the economy will do." NO ONE knows what the economy will do. People make educated guesses, some better than others, but for every economist that tells you one thing, you can find another that will tell you the exact opposite.
The Bling Ring, Fictional and Real Story Review | Start World News
Run a Node PostgreSQL App on Heroku
That's funny, because I have some actual paid economists who work for me and they are scarily accurate. But I could throttle back and say 'they know what the economy will LIKELY do'.

I still think you are transposing economists and analysts.
I'm not rich either and had absolutely no idea about shares, so figured I should learn and am now reading "Investing In Shares For Dummies" - UK Edition. I know it's a For Dummies book but as I really knew nothing I had to start somewhere. It's been pretty good so far - particularly highlighting the difference between speculating (trying to get rich quick / gambling) and aggressive and cautious investing (where you expect returns in 2 - 5 years).

In the chapter on bear markets (downward markets) the advice is:

- Keep your money safe - use interest bearing vehicles such as bank and building society accounts (hmm, really, didn't people lose money in those?), National Savings certificates, or guaranteed income bonds.

- Stick to necessities - get shares in stuff people always need, like food.

- Use trailing stops.

I guess once the market HAS crashed if you're sure which shares are way below value simply because of the crash you could buy those and wait until the market returns to normal?
I think the flip side to this discussion is that there are ALSO Linux logo programs (for at least RedHat) that will encourage the hardware manufacturers to allow major Linux providers to use their keys.

That said, while Ubuntu, RedHat, Suse and other larger Linuxes might be able to swing this for server equipment, someone trying to run a less popular Linux on commodity desktop equipment could be well and proper screwed.

It's definitely a sticky situation, and while I don't know that you can infer Microsoft's activities as anti-competitive because it should genuinely increase the security of their bootloading process, which is great for consumers using Microsoft operating systems.

That said, I am definitely terrified of the notion of not being able to purchase an affordable Linux-compatible laptop.
Bulls make money, Bears make money. It's the pigs that get slaughtered.
I've always had the impression (from afar) that while Jobs may enjoy and want the adoration, he doesn't want to deal directly with those that have this feeling. The rare exception that I've seen are children.

>"We're just who we are. Apple has values we care about; Apple cares about tolerance. We are not a political company, but a company with a set of values."

Some may consider it marketing but I think Jobs truly believes in this.

At the end of the day, I think Jobs just wants to simply be known as someone who made the world a better place than it was before or, more accurately, to make technology accessible to everyone.
"What do you have to hide" is the most naive and/or disingenuous rebuttal ever seen in a privacy discussion.

"What do you have to fear" is a more honest one. As it turns out, there are plenty of malicious actors you have to fear. Private investigators or fraudsters blagging private records. Identity theft. Embarrassing details coming out you'd rather your family didn't see.

But since you have nothing to hide, why not tell me your contact details, your bank details? If you refuse then I think we have established that some things should be kept under control rather than wantonly shared.
It's strange seeing a doomer post here. When HN starts colliding with ZH, things must be glum. Is this bizarro day? Typically I come here for the start-up-optimism, technology-will-save-the-world, how-i-made-twelve-million-dollars-from-a-weekend-project posts. . .
Los rollos del mar muerto
Why would non-Farmville-playing users leave Facebook because they are tired of it's spam when they could just hide posts from it?
The lack of MonoTouch/MonoDroid is the first thing that I noticed. While c# may not be everyone's cup of tea, it can be used to develop across iOS/Android/WP
Don't lead from the bottom line
I agree with the fact that most people who make these comments have a bias. While these bias must be disclosed they are often not done so until the end of the video or article that they've written. It should be required that a person disclose any potential biases at the beginning of their argument so that the audience has a clear understanding of what motivates them.
The Future of Agile Software Development
No one knows the exact how-to of writing great software fast, that’s the problem. Waterfall passed away at the crossing of 2 centuries, whereas new software development methodologies (agile) fail at solving the fundamental problems so far.
This sounds counterintuitive but is absolutely true. I know that London instituted a "tax" on all vehicles entering the downtown area, which helped greatly with the congestion. When I was visiting Munich I also saw that some roads were deliberately narrowed to discourage people driving.

The infrastructure increase can never match the increase in number of vehicles. One can conjecture a modified version of Peter Principle: (Unless drastic measures are taken) traffic density will always increase to the level of congestion. Or think about the fact that regardless of how big your hard disk is, the rate it's being filled is generally constant.

So, bigger roads doesn't make too much sense (there are also arguments from landscape beauty, i.e. remember how they demolished the Beijing Old Town for easier access, more roads mean more of that.)
I am a new entrepreneur, highly respect Paul Graham, and loved his message. NYC has some very large hurdles to get over if it's going to compete with silicon valley or other tech hubs like boulder, colorado. The lack of engineers and resources competing with the other "coolest" thing in town finance may keep growth jailed. also, it's expensive, obscenely expensive to live here, there are no natural places for geeks to gather and work together. hell, even starbucks has been closing up all of their outlets and monthly co-working spaces are crazy pricey. yes, we have a ton of meetups and there are many companies here, but being a geek has a long way to go in this town.
If a consumer does research, as I did, and looks for comparison of the eInk of the Nook and of the Kindle, you quickly discover side by side photos of the Nook and Kindle and conclude that the Kindle eInk is better (it does use a more current version of eInk than the Nook after all). If you wanted color - you with w/ the Nook because that was the option you had out of the big two, otherwise, with the Kindle.
Don't miss the "Process" link at the top, you can see their other ideas.
In my experience, it worked the same way as sharing a room in University. Yes, your side of the room certainly has a "you" quality to it, but even with partitions and clever arrangements of closets and shelves, it's not the same.

When you have your own space, you're completely free to roam. You no longer need consent/approval from anyone else and you're free to customize things as much as you want. When you share a space with someone, you always partially depend on them in some capacity. When you're only sharing with people in your own company it's much easier to deal.

Also, in a co-working space, you could be sharing the conference call set-ups, the conference rooms, you have to arrange splitting the electricity/water bills, etc. All in all, it just results in more headaches.
Whoa dude, $392.10 for you to just change content on a site? Set up a CMS and let the client change it themselves.
Microsoft employees "leaving in droves" during Ballmer's speech
Good point, I haven't thought about that. I wonder what percentage of content is shared, though. But this suggests one important strategy for Dropbox, they should immediately put more emphasis and develop better tools for content sharing to make their service more sticky fro people.
This has to be a trolling attempt.

"...any privacy you have is a complete illusion"
"what do you have to hide?"

Please people, don't feed the trolls.
Having both schemes will lead to duplicate copies on search engines.
The new front page design smacks of those spammy "10 AMAZING Photos of [fill in the blank]" sites which steal other people's content and don't properly attribute it. I can't bring myself to click on any of the stacks; I just want to avert my eyes.
Gmail has POP3, IMAP and SMTP for free without ads.
I think I detect a trend there....
The new Delicious is case in point why you should never write a codebase from the ground up.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
What do you guys get out of your smart-ass answers to potential clients?

You do know that they come to you because they know that you are the professionals. Many of them are completely clueless as to how pricing works for dev/design-work. Asking "how much do you charge?" is a perfectly reasonable question for someone understandably uninformed to ask.

You may be skilled at your trade, but from the sounds of it, many of you are absolutely horrible at dealing with customers who need a bit of guidance and direction with respects to the work they want to get done.

Imagine a curious older relative asking a physicist what light is and receiving "Well, it's sort of like one thing, but it's really not" as a response.
There's only 6 MLM Income Producing activities
This is also good for job searching and client seeking--especially if you're a web developer/designer. The quality of the websites of Inc 5000 companies is astoundingly low, and I'm sure an enterprising person could do really well pitching their skills to these companies.
No, an economist knows what the economy should do, not what it will do or is likely to do.
This argument seems silly. Early innovation does not mean an end to competition, or an eternal lock on a product type.

Google's search engine would have never come into existence if their founders followed this line of thinking.
As economics, as a field, becomes more powerful, the economy becomes more stable. I think this is probably a positive indicator for the value of economics.

This recession is severe, but it has nothing on the recessions of the past. Let's not throw out this knowledge; it was won by the accumulated experience of economic hardship unimaginable to modern Americans.

I have a hard time believing there are any "actual paid economists... doubling up in laughter" in your vicinity. Something about the attitude of your post.
Facebook Changes: A Start Up’s Reaction
First class can still board before the rest of us in steerage in that case though.

First class on in what-ever order is most efficient for that part of the cabin, then the rest on in what-ever order is best for those areas.

Though what would really happen would be "first class on in what-ever order they fight for amongst themselves because they all consider themselves too important to listen to instructions from the boarding staff" followed by "the rest on in what-ever order they fight out as they don't care about the common good if that means they are on 12th instead of 1st".
They are missing the car brand Lexus, which stands for Luxury Export to US. (how spartan a name for a luxury brand!)

edit: Ah nevermind, re-reading the lexus wiki page states that:

The etymology of the Lexus name has been attributed to the combination of the words "luxury" and "elegance," and another theory claims it is an acronym for "luxury exports to the U.S." According to Team One interviews, the brand name has no specific meaning and simply denotes a luxurious and technological image.
Apple rejected over "multi-touch" trademark application
The problem is not in the ability, but in the incentives. If a paid service offered the same functionality, I would be more inclined to trust them. As it is, Facebook/Google have every incentive to collect too much information and use it in a way I wouldn't like.
Google Just Wants To Be #3... Here's Why
Here's his Facebook www.facebook.com/alessiorastani definitely not a fake trader.
There's only 6 MLM income producing activities
If you still consider Perl, I recommend checking out: Plack, AnyEvent::*, Catalyst/Dancer (depending on required complexity) for web stuff.

Perl libraries made a huge leap forward. And for me it was unnoticed.
Mojang vs. Bethesda Scrolls Case Heads to Court
I'd love to hear more about the outgoing SMTP service for people network hopping - I'm not sure I completely understand it and my curiosity is just getting the best of me. :)

Tell us more!
The article's guess is correct: I don't see any manual action on this site, but our algorithms don't think explore.to is a great site.

Jabbles is certainly right, and listen to blauwbilgorgel too--it's good feedback from typical Google users. When I clicked down randomly, I got to the category "Body Shops in Bowers, Delaware" only to see "No results were found for the search criteria you requested, we have included web search results for your query" with a link to Google's own search results: http://www.explore.to/listing/usa/de/bowers/see/auto/body-sh...

Users dislike landing on pages with no content, and they also dislike landing on search results from Google's search results--especially if it's Google's own search results.

Once you've removed the no-content pages, you still have many issues. I searched for pizza in New York and the #1 result was in Florida. That's poor quality, but even your #1 listing for pizza in New York had no original content. It was just an address, a phone number (which I had to click again to get?), and a map. Everything looked autogenerated. No reviews, images, comments, hours--anything, really.

So my advice to you would be to step back and ask yourself, "What separates explore.to from the thousands of other sites that just grab or license data from Acxiom or other yellow page data providers? Why would anyone searching on Google want to land on my pages instead of other the tens of thousands of other yellow page sites on the web?" Then concentrate on really pushing on the areas where you can add value for users.
I found it more of a reflection on how developers have evolved over the last decade and that the understanding of the code / intricacies on how the languages work are slowly being lost. The tips I guess are aimed at those, hopefully few, that haven't been been programming on the web for the last decade and started with 'copy/paste' style.

Note in the article he mentions not to follow the tips when working on a project for a client where there are deadlines. Instead, apply them to personal projects as learning exercises.
Fuck your confidentiality
It is; we use it and it is very reasonably priced. However their APIs are very painful to work with and there is no web interface.