skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
70 years. That's a long time to be alive! He was born in the middle of WW2, lived through the cold war, seen the collapse of the soviet union, etc.

Me? I was born around the time the Linux OS hatched and the internet is starting to open up.
I think it can make sense in specific cases.

For example:

I live in Boston and a bunch of people don't have cars. If you don't have a delivery service in your building to take and store your packages, they can be left right outside the door which is kind of dicey, especially if you have valuable stuff.

Some people at my office just have all their packages delivered at work, which makes sense. But if you are going to have a ton of stuff delivered, or heavy stuff, it can be a hassle to then lug that back to the subway whereas it might be easier to have it delivered to the 7/11 that is just a block away from your place.

So like I said, it has specific uses. My guess is that the incremental capital spent isn't much to have the locker system, so why not test it out. Low risk - high uncertainty bet on Amazon's part.
Very sad. His contributions to the world were huge. RIP.
black stripe on top of hacker news is really nice touch out of respect
Don't know if it's like this everywhere, but here if you dial 911 they are obligated to dispatch a police officer to your location. Even if you say "sorry I meant to call 411" or whatever, or just hang up, I guess they think you might be in a situation where you somehow were able to get to the phone and call 911 but then can't talk about the emergency.
Black bar, definitely deserved. Thanks pg.
And the ones who know about Monsanto probably don't know that every visit to the grocery store is showing support to Monsanto.
You've had a lot of positive advice here.

Personally, all that positivity, whether from randoms or your mum never really helped me. Weirdly I found articles like this to bring me up for a couple of days.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190480030457647...
How Depression affected people like Lincoln, Churchill and Ghandi.

I guess the thought that even the greats battled great adversity and resistance helps. How's that for a Nietzchian thought.
They are not totally slipping, but they are slipping in the high end desktop realm. They have not been able to compete with Intel, in terms of high end desktop performance, since the Core 2 arrived. Their first quad core was a train wreck... and the much anticipated (by me at least) Bulldozer seems to be at the level of Intel's year old Sandy Bridge.
This really made me think. But I took exception to your comment:

I agree but don't you think that from an algorithmic point of view Google would be better looking at what the user wants and what monetization models they prefer[...]

No. In fact, I am a rather loudmouthed opponent to Google's somewhat clumsy attempts to measure this ala "Quality Score".

In addition to webspam detection and machine learning, I have spent way too much time in marketing (I have a master's degree in marketing, in fact.)

A neat thing I learned along the way was the value of market research.

There are so many nuances in every line of business. Segments, preferences, pricing, even down to minutia (now well studied) such as fonts, gutter widths, copy styles, and so on.

You can learn a lot by combining large amounts of data and well chosen machine learning algos. But even with a few thousand businesses in most categories in a particular country (far less outside of the US), that doesn't give an outsider enough data to truly distinguish what can be a winning formula from a spammy one. This knowledge is hard won through carefully executed experiments and research.

A few years ago I was researching the topic of landing page formulas by category. One example that stuck out most in my mind was mortgages. There were a few tried and true "formulas" that significantly outperformed the rest. Two stuck out:

1) Man, woman, and sometimes child standing on a green lawn in front of home. Arrow pointing down from top left of landing page to mid/lower right positioned form. Form limited to three fields.

Edit: http://imgur.com/90VmB

2) Picture of home/s docked to bottom of lead gen page. No people. Light/white background. Arrow pointing down from top left of landing page to centrally located form.

Edit: http://imgur.com/JkLlH

These sites were incredibly successful. More than a few of them had to contend with quality score issues over the years. Can an algorithm capture nuances such as the ones I mentioned? In theory... they could. But today, they don't. All of Google's QS algorithms to date have been failed attempts and have caused an incredible amount of harm and distrust.

You finished that sentence with:

to see versus the averages in terms of monetization models on spam sites.

I'm not at all sure what this means. Could you explain? Is it even possible to directly model the monetization model of a site without having direct access to their metrics?
It is useful and is something I'll keep an eye on if any roles come up.

One suggestion - a hide and/or mark as spam button would be useful. I noticed a "work from home" spam job appear in the listings which stuck out compared to the other tweets. A hide button would be useful to make jobs that I've applied for/are not interested in.
One of the most influential people in the world whose contributions were immense. He will be sorely missed.
This is really sad. Dennis Ritchie has made an incalculably huge contribution to the tech world.

I know most here would be aware, but he is a father of both Unix and the C language, technologies which are the basis for nearly everything we as developers do. He helped write K&R, which many regard as _the_ book for C programming.

This is the passing of a legend. Sincerest condolences to his family and friends.
How sad. RIP, dmr.
To remember[1]:

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist notable for developing C and for having influence on other programming languages, as well as operating systems such as Multics and Unix.

He received the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology 1998 on April 21, 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.

"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."

- Dennis Ritchie, on The Development of the C Language[2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie

[2] http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html
How much does a startup cost?
Some crunchbase data mining that comes up with a simple model for pricing a startup.
That is Securities Fraud. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_and_distort
Why would video chat be killed due to the release of a text chat service?
Get Snaptu
I used to read The C Programming Language every year. As a amateur tech-writer, it has influenced me greatly (that and _why's work).
> I'd like to see Journalists get a degree and a license just like a lawyer or a doctor, then maybe we'll get some integrity

Ignoring for a moment the fact that you want to license speech, what reason do you have to believe that licensing has anything to do with integrity?
As someone who enjoys writing cucumber tests, I think that point about using websteps are completely valid.

Points about how cucumber somehow adds another layer of testing etc, I just don't buy it and from my experience instead of doing request specs, which I will do if rest of the team is for that, cucumber is way-way better solution. However it is awesome what we can have multiple ways of doing things so we can argue which one is better. I would stick with cukes, it makes things better.

I also have to agree with point about organization for complex projects, however I did work on really complex projects and didn't feel too much pain, Ack finds things quickly.
No. You can't launch anything with arguments.
maybe they have api integration with cleverbot, the same way they have integration with wolfram alpha :)
Damn it, now I really want Siri.

Too bad I only have an iPhone 4. Pulling the original from the app store was kind of a dick move, Apple. (even though I understand the motivation)
"They're selling them data analysis."

That's rather disingenuous. Let's let them explain it:

"Monsanto has chosen Cloudant to be the core of their new genome analysis platform.

Cloudant’s BigCouch will be the core, for both storage and analysis of a new, company-wide platform powering a fundamental aspect of a Fortune 500 business: the analysis & identification of new traits & genomic combinations in agricultural crops. The data & reporting interfaces will be used across Monsanto and should be instrumental in the making of key business decisions."

"We’ve been working with them for a few weeks now and we couldn’t be more thrilled with the partnership."

Cloudant has placed themselves at the very heart of the Monsanto empire. They are the foundation and core of Monsanto's most essential operations. That goes above and beyond simply selling someone something. They are partners.
Earlier this year, there were a burst of laptops branded 'ultra portable', which I would be willing to call ultrabooks. There was the Samsung series 9, Lenovo x1 and the Asus U36. I personally have the Samsung, and it really is quite like the air. The main difference is that it hasn't got a unibody design.
fascinating. this sort of "take it or leave it because i know better than you do what you really want" attitude is very reminiscent of apple's. it's nice to know that jobs could deal with people who saw things the same way he did.
Building the TwitterArt App in a week. Idea to submission in 168 hours
Post PC App: AirPort Utility for iPhone and iPad
Control System Cyber Security (Stanford EE380 Video)
It would in no way hamper free speech, just as requiring a lawyer to have a degree and license hasn't restricted a persons right to legal counsel.

A lawyer's requirements to practice law are the guarantee that he is properly educated in the law, same with doctors. Granted the stakes aren't quite as high for journalists, but nor does the barrier of entry have to be made as high.

The basics of how to be a Journalist with integrity should be taught and set as a standard, what those actually are, i'll leave to someone else to define, but putting an end to quoting anonymous sources i'd say is the starting point.
shorten plus.google.com/x to plus.google.com rather than google.com, as is the status quo
The important question nobody is asking about Siri is actually "Will Siri make my iPad 3 porn experience weird?"
OMG. Android is the new Linux and iOS new Windows. So jumping the ship to iPhone asap
Ask HN: How far along in the YC term do teams receive 150k?
Start-ups hit Cash Crunch in Silicon Valley
70 years isn't long at all. 100 is the new old:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenarian

With a bit more research, many people could live to be 90-100.
This statement is much worse than Cloudant having Monsanto as a client which I support.

And I'm a big critic of Monsanto but to suggest being socially aware is "politically shallow" is insulting and stupid. You should be encouraging us to be socially and politically engaged and fighting for responsible corporate governance.

You seem out of touch with the real world.
Folks are gonna look back and think, "Damn, kiba lived through periods of profound change!" as well :)
Apple Launches ‘iTunes Movie Trailers’ for iOS
I can't say Galvin's name was a familiar one to me, but I'm surprised I didn't know it given his role in the history of the mobile phone. Perhaps it's that personal mobile phones were such a slower revolution to start than personal computers, that his name isn't as well-known as some of the big names in personal computing's formative years.
Uncertainty: Every Entrepreneur Feels It; Here's How To Deal
This is actually super awesome and makes me want to get Siri.
Oh god. Another legend I truly admire. :(
I wish I had a better answer for you but I actually switched away from Chrome to use this extension. Not only do I not have any helpful plugin recommendations, I'm actually going to poke a few holes in two of your helpful recommendations (sorry). If anyone else has good plugin suggestions I would love to look at them myself.

RequestPolicy is the only plugin I've seen that actually preemptively blocks all third party requests. (I'd love to hear of more.) There is a request to get it ported over to Chromium, but that hasn't been done yet as far as I can tell. The extensions you listed are better than nothing, however none of them will achieve the same result as RequestPolicy.

Ghostery is probably the best of those plugins, but it's still blacklist instead of white-list basted. Working the way it's intended Ghostery can make requests you don't want made, and you will only find out those requests have been made after. It fails open. This is better than nothing, but I don't feel it's optimal.

Disconnect on the other hand, if I understand it correctly, does nothing. Despite honestly good intentions it does not actually protect your privacy at all, it only creates the illusion of protection. As Panopticlick showed cookies are the easy way to track you, not the only way. By removing cookies you remove one method of identification, but you do not actually become anonymous.

Finally, none of these protect against CSRF which is a nice secondary effect of RequestPolicy. Sorry I couldn't help more.
People are mad at the whole system, there is the smell of revolution in the air, people are tired of excuses and rationalizations. Whether you agree with it or not a savvy business should be aware of this and tread carefully.
Thanks for finding that.

However, only 7 out of 128 pilot or active Field Partners report a default rate of more than 1%; indeed, around three-quarters of them report a default rate of 0.00%.

These statistics just don't pass the smell test unless Field Partners are still covering entrepreneur defaults.
Empirical Humility
I wonder how many people here got to know Ritchie through "The C Programming Language", I am sure half of us have it on our shelves.

It is amazing how many lives a single person can touch directly and indirectly.

I hope Ritchie passed away knowing the unforgettable contribution he made to the world as we all move forward on a platform he set down for us more than 30 years ago.

What an awesome legacy to leave behind. Thank you Dennis.
While I dabbled with the language before, The C Programming Language book was a true eye opener for me. Grokking it truly paved the way for my programming career.

RIP Dennis Ritchie.
Its not the license itself, its the journey you have to go through to get a license, that provides the education. Like a driver's license.

I'm not advocating limiting free speech in any way, in fact theres already so many exceptions to free speech that they're impossible to count, i'm saying a standard should be set.

Just as not having a basic food hygiene certificate doesnt stop you cooking in your own home, it would be a requirement to open a restaurant.
We pass them on to Yuri and Ron as soon as their YC paperwork is done. In nearly all cases this happens before the 3 month cycle starts.
The last time I saw Steve Jobs
What is so interesting to me is how everyone was worried about a start-up bubble earlier this year to now where start-up financing is drying up. The whole notion of media speculation by noting short-term trends makes for some great gossip columns, but in reality do not provide real news to the reader. Because in the end this is not news just speculation more fitting for the Sun rather than WSJ.
Yes, I would give alot to have known that I could have done that when I was 20, instead of waiting til much later when the stakes were much higher.

Unless your father quit his job and successfully started a company, you can probably ignore his advice, and you certainly should not take it to heart or let it get you so down. Parental approval just doesn't have bearing on reality.
>BrowserID means I can't use different browsers easily. Pass.

BrowserID requires a single time email verification for a given browser, nothing precludes you from using it with multiple browsers. By definition, it's easier and less intensive than what you're proposing.

>A different password on each site is unacceptable. Being locked into lastpass and the like is also unacceptable.

I'm not locked into LastPass. There are alternatives and I could hack one together with minimal effort.

The other points you bring up have little to do with authentication and more to do with duplication of (often necessary) profile information. There are other solutions for that include extensions to OpenID and oAuth.
Yes, it appears that Amazon is bootstrapping this by using UPS to deliver packages to the store but there's a bigger vision at work here.

This is another attempt by Amazon to solve the "last mile" problem. Amazon already saves a ton of money on shipping costs by packing their own trucks and driving them from distribution centers (e.g. Fernley, NV) to major metropolitan areas (e.g. Seattle, WA) and depositing them at USPS for final delivery. Amazon could even remove this cost for those people who choose to pick up their packages at (essentially) Amazon PO boxes.
Perhaps the number of pre-orders was a success, along with their claimed features at a low price point?
Then what's the point? :S

Click here to load Widget into WidgetFactory!

Then click on widgets. Then copy and paste this key in.
Of course you're on the side of this, you stand to make money from it so anyone that can't see that is "dumb". Hooray for chucking your morals chasing the almighty dollar, eh?
An exemplar of elegance and clear thought. RIP and thank you.
Injured Rat Receives Brain Chip, Can Move Again
The Last Time I Saw Steve Jobs
Well, you don't address the post content but attack the writer directly, also implying that he's a child or a foreign small girl (why "non-American" by the way? Do American women have bigger hands?), which is not really good form.
I'll just leave them here.
(http://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+why+we+don%27t+need+an...)

http://www.uxpassion.com/2008/09/google-chrome-nah-we-dont-n...

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/79620-who-cares-about-g...

http://floggingenglish.com/2008/09/03/google-chrome-just-bec...
Dr. iPhone – High Quality Blood Pressure Monitoring On the Go
I'm old enough that K&R was the bible when I started with Borland's Turbo C 1.0. Another sad day for computer science.
His brother was superintendent while I was in high school. We asked him to invite dmr to come in and give a speech once, but understandingly dmr was too busy and had to decline. If dmr was anything like his brother, he was a great person and will be missed greatly. RIP, you changed the world for the better.
i did graphics work for 3 years, and got so fed up i quit my job a year ago, looking for freedom. the first few months were very nice. i then started to feel down and depressed sometimes. my initial thoughts of freelancing or doing my own thing didn't get followed through. now i'm broke and i still have some hefty loans with the bank that i have to deal with now and then.

now i learn to appreciate a job more. i had to experience this to learn that, and i can't imagine learning it any other better way. when you dont stay focused your mind tends to go bananas and that's no fun, so get a job or have something to do that keeps you focused.

and on another note, i have a 17 year old brother who was heavily depressed for a year or two, many times suicidal, but he's fine now. depressed people are everywhere, you're not alone :) just be cool about it. try your hands at different things, easily-depressed people usually are sensitive and have artistic traits, if you find your art (or whatever it is you love doing) it can bring you up big time. but again, be cool about it, depression is just part of life, and many times it goes away before the person knows what happens.

if it gets unbearable, go to a psychiatrist and get some medications, they help.
Most business don't work out. Most people have a litany of failures before they have their shining success. Your father needs to shut his damn mouth, and you need to toss your "friends" and find people that will support you through thick and thin. Most companies are scrambling to find developers so if you're a programmer I don't see you having a terrible time getting something else lined up until you're ready to give it another go.
#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
printf("Thank you for creating me\n");
printf("RIP,Mr.Ritchie\n");
}
What? No one said anything about invincibility from attack, or security in general. And the point was that they have a complex infrastructure, not that they throw things around randomly without rhyme or reason.
TeleSocial Opens API, Allows You To Add Voice Chat To Almost Anything
If this is happening at all, it must be a very recent trend. There was no sign of valuations decreasing a month ago.
ICloud and Gmail
There are several billion people using many billions of devices every day.

From the code in your microwave to massive computing clusters, virtually all of our software can trace its ancestry back to this man's intellectual output.

I'm eternally grateful for his life and contributions to humanity.
TTY users are declining. I don't know the statistics, but 80% of my interaction with the Deaf is by Videophone (VP) (aka video relay service (VRS)).

Training staff on how a VRS or TTY relay call works is pretty simple. A few general rules are:
1) Talk as if you are addressing the Deaf person directly (don't say, "tell her hello", say "hello").
2) Speak in discrete chunks of meaning with pauses in between to give the interpreter a chance to catch up.
3) Expect everything you say to be interpreted.
C# is in demand, because C# developers are rarer. Also it's a more interesting language to work in and has features that attract smart developers.

Java developers are abundant, and mostly employed in the dark corners of big enterprise software shops you've never heard of.
Wow and then downvoted?!
and g+ is a facebook clone. by the transitive property...
free(DennisRitchie);
Illustrations in Web Design – 11 Fantastic Examples
It's an issue of ethics, morality and emotion.

If that's the case, why didn't you address the issue with the kind of gravity and seriousness that such an issue demands instead of resting on such a vapid comment as the one which our fellow readers have so lavished with approbation? Would anybody have been worse off if you had?
How are you defining journalists again? Are bloggers journalists? Why or why not?
Then they would not be Apple. They would be cloudant.
"What doesn't make it any easier is that I'm 20"

Dude! You've got your whole life ahead of you, go make MORE mistakes, lots more.

Ultimately though don't give up. If you're not sure what you want to do, go get a job (any job) and go back to the drawing board.

Want a job? Just land yourself some interviews and when they ask for an explanation of the gap in your resume, just say "I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pursue [insert your story], in the end it didn't work out, but I learnt a ton and am excited about re-entering the workforce".