skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No kidding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_%28window_manager%29#Contr...

(In #xmonad, we have chortled a time or two about the self-destructiveness which has sent so many Ion users to Xmonad.)
I agree with this, although I'd go even further. If this app's sole purpose is to retrieve a couple of numbers (surface temperature and relative humidity) why do we need graphics? What purpose is achieved?

Given the extremely basic task at hand, as an end user my main concern is that it's fast (even over slow connections), reliable and simple. If it breaks I can fix it.

My preference would be to retrieve the numbers into a non-graphical console via a few keypunches. All I want is a couple of numbers and I'm done.

This could be done with a TCP client like netcat and a shell script that uses basic UNIX utilities. And I could teach an 11 year old how to do it.

If a "smart" phone OS does not allow something so simple by default, then to me it's not very useful. It's been dumbed down. "Smart" is the wrong word.
Big government, taxes, licenses required to own televisions. As unpopular as advertising is, that's even less likely to fly.
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This is driving me crazy. I feel the author's pain.

It's gotten so bad I've created a web site that gives me plain headlines of all the tech, science, world, sports, and political stories I might want to read. Phase 2 is walking the links and using something like Readability to make those readable as well. http://newspaper23.com

I didn't do this as a for-profit startup kind of thing -- it's for my own sanity. Everywhere you go folks are screwing with you instead of just giving you content. I wanted a place I could go to just catch up quickly on the opinion of the day. No bullshit.

I also feel like it is a mistake to blame this on SEO. SEO has nothing to do with it. I have a few sites optimized for SEO myself, and the only thing I want to do is present plain, simple, easy-to-understand text. How else would people easily consume it and recommend it to others?

Nope, the problem is stickiness. Everybody wants their site to be sticky and entertaining -- to the point of popping up email sign-ups, ads, social crap, you name it. SEO just means getting people to visit. Believe me, the last thing you want to do is annoy them. It's the folks who already have large audiences that are crapping all over the net. And they're not doing that for new eyeballs, they're doing that to keep the eyeballs they already have -- it's called engagement. Content providers make a clear and decisive design statement when they decide to screw over readability for stickiness. (Yes, some small-traffic sites do this, but only because they could care less about the audience in the first place. Any visitor for them is a mark. These are the guys who are never going to grow and stay big and simply don't care.)
I think they're a UGC site: there isn't a formal editing process., regular users just upload stuff which interests them. The publisher pre-approved the ad.
The ad was explicitly approved by the editor. That's how BuySellAds works.
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Those aren't 1/1000th of GE's tax dodging and you know it.
I suspect that "doug" in the articles comments has it right.
Users are happier to see dozens/hundreds of "matches" that they know aren't all that good despite saying 90% than if they saw 3 matches that were more correct followed by a huge drop down to 50-60%.
>"No, you can't opt out of online tracking any easier"
Not true.

1.) Tor
2.) http://priv3.icsi.berkeley.edu/
3.) Public WiFi + HTTPS Everywhere + private browsing mode
4.) AdBlock+

Most combinations of these can thwart tracking.
Ads that look like content work well.

FB's sponsored stories, Twitter's sponsored tweets, Adwords, brand sponsored content on demand media's properties -- it's all the same shit.

Let's not jump on our high horse here.
I have a 6 & 10 year old and I work from home. I'll be the first to admit that it's not always easy, but with practice and realistic rules, it can be done.

With respect to the "travelling programmer" meme, I think it's less common for the older (say > 40 years) among us. As one who falls within that category, my priorities are far different now than ten or twenty years prior. I enjoy the stability of a permanent home, of watching my children build relationships in their schools and neighborhoods, of participating in my children's amateur sports teams.

Occasionally, my wife and I will fantasize about travelling the world, living experiences with our kids unlike those living "normal" lives, but we never do. I suppose for us, the "normal" life is good enough. We are together, and we laugh, and learn and live as a family. Not to say that our choice is right for everyone, but it's right for us. For us, uprooting our children from the only lives and friends they've ever known contains an element of selfishness that we're not prepared to swallow.

For me personally, I'm just as happy holed up in my basement office fiddling with BeagleBoards, or soldering together little electronic projects as I'd ever be doing anything else. I guess I'm simply a geek homebody.

But for those like the original poster and those that strive to attain similar, more power to you.
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But he does not say "just a sandbox", or otherwise imply that a "coding sandbox" is less valuable than a non-profit organization. They're different things.
>"which is why I'm surprised more people don't opt out of those things."
Because people don't know about them. That's also why there isn't more public backlash -- they're just doing what they can [barely] get away with legally.
Chargebacks are not a quick process (at least in my business). It would take well over 1-2 months before the chargeback was completed, and with the volume Amazon likely has to deal with I doubt they are tied to his account already?
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I'm not sure it's really possible to meaningfully compete with Google, at least in the US search market. They're synonymous with search, as evidenced by the neologism "just google it". As much as Microsoft wishes it, no one actually says "just Bing it" if they aren't being paid to do so. The amount of mindshare Google has at this point seems insurmountable, no matter how many technically impressive tricks Microsoft can cook up.
I don't know. I wouldn't really advocate skewing their data on purpose. I mean, this really is harmless stuff (for now at least). Just because it doesn't bother me doesn't mean others don't take offense though. What bothers me most is how they tout the opt-out method like its some totally reasonable thing. This is 2011 where our phones might as well me surgically attached to our bodies. That just sounded really out of touch with reality.

When they start collecting data that really violates privacy without a reasonable opt out method then I'd totally go for not only skewing the data but finding a way to take that system down.
Does anybody else do this?
+1: I think this is a very good satire of common SEO/marketer mindsets.
I don't know as it was over a month ago. Perhaps it is in combo with something else or a specific ios version. I do know that as soon as I added it kaboom, commented it, then back to normal.
From my experience EaselJS is pretty fast. You gotta be aware of the demos on Firefox, because it gets pretty slow due to multipe error messages unless you set the following flag:

DisplayObject.suppressCrossDomainErrors = true
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It's very easy to avoid the repository effects of pepper spray, just hold your breath. I don't understand why all these people with asthma are making such a fuss over this.
A yaml config would still be weak (this has been discussed before: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2009-February/007239... )

But the nice thing about starting with a full language using the normal API is that you can always water it down to get something less powerful and easier to use, and this has been done with Xmonad before, as 'xmonad-light'. See https://braincrater.wordpress.com/2008/08/28/announcing-xmon... http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/xmonad/2008-August/006211.h...

xmonad-light has no users and may be bitrotten by now, which shows how much it appealed to Xmonad users.
So you don't think open source can produce higher quality software, and you don't have any evidence for anything.

Fair enough.

[edit - changed "produces" to "can produce"] - doesn't change my point.
My position was that Groupon should not have gone public in its current state.

I think a lot of folks felt this way, heck I think even Groupon would have liked to hold off as the time got closer. Unfortunately Groupon put itself in this position, they took a billion dollar VC round and used it, almost exclusively, to pay out early investors instead of putting some back into the business for additional runway. I think both the investors in that round and Groupon management were extremely short sighted at that point and now they reap what they've sown. They were bleeding cash right now, and I think they realize they weren't going to get very favorable terms in another raise, so they went the IPO route to raise operating capital. So yeah they had some damn good reasons to go public right now. They just could have been avoided.
PI calculus/actor model/'erlang style' concurrency.

In (synthesizable) verilog, you have tiny state machines communicating via explicit channels (clock+wires+buses), and functions that get turned into gates. A higher level language would give you ideal channels (mapping onto fixed hardware channels or synthesized to HDL). Depending on their complexity, the functions at each state-node would also be transformed to use more general blocks and intermediate states.
Ask HN: What good technical questions have been used to filter engineers?
Over the years, I've seen a number of jobs that use a question as a filter or to move applicants to the front of the pile. I'm interested in getting feedback regarding which type of filter questions startups have chosen to use, and how, if at all, elegant answers were a better predictor of a successful hire.
I think their goal was to support any language. Do they still even support VBScript now?
Interesting idea, and on face value it looks quite useful, however generally this type of trading is only a little better than casino gambling. Unless the algorithm has real valuable insight I would be very dubious as to it's benefits. If it does have really valuable insight then I would expect the creator to use it to run their own fund and investment and post results. Perhaps all that is to come though.
Due to austerity measures, the cost of living is increasing quite a lot. Taxes are increasing on basic goods such as electricity.

There are actually a lot of people in a lot of trouble in the country, as they cannot pay their bills anymore.
According to [1] (Portuguese data website, you might want to use Google translate), the average monthly salary for a qualified professional was 699€ in 2009. For high management, it was around 2.158€. The national monthly average was 867€. So when it comes to salaries straight out of college, I would say that 1000€/month is probably in the top 70%.

I got the chance to be an exchange student in Finland last semester, and I could see that over there, computer engineers are a lot more valued than here.
Due to the austerity measures, the cost of living in scandinavian countries is not much greater than the cost of living in Portugal (we are losing regalies such as 50% discount on public transportation for students).

[1] http://www.pordata.pt/Portugal/Remuneracao+base+media+mensal...
Regarding your first question, we want to offer a subscription based service both for the webapp and our API. The API access is not advertised yet, but we are planning to offer an access to our raw data in real-time to be processed by the user.
I have heard good things in the past about beginners using Goerzen's tutorial: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Config_archive/Joh...
Clearly this is what we want to hear, but do you know something concrete? Feel free to add teaser dates, vague references to AI, or the word 'space' in your response.
You could ask the author for a min copy his disk image
what do you mean by "legitimate content"? Something that someone posted out of pure altruism and with no intent to make a profit? We can argue about how big of a percentage of the internet that is
If there's one thing I've learned about "the smartest guys on the planet", it's not to listen to what they say to the public. If you're on the front desk, you might get the real story behind the news.
Or, people like HIM are PAYING for the Internet.

Personally, I think it's people who like to tell other people how much they're RUINING the INTERNET that are RUINING the INTERNET, but I spend a lot of my Internet time on message boards, so I'm probably biased. It's probably bad recipe sites that are RUINING the INTERNET.
So far my first generation Nook likes my side-loaded ePub files real well. I don't put PDFs on it. I also don't buy through B&N as I have an allergic reaction to DRM. :-)

I have 173Mb of files purchased and downloaded separately and side-loaded from PragProg, Manning, O'Reilly and SitePoint. (And a few classics from Gutenburg.)
I'm curious as to why you'd draw a distinction between AdWords and scam filled advertising. Google's bread is buttered by credit cards, diet pills, and degrees. Search any relevant keyword if you don't believe me. Most of the advertisers I share pages with on the AdWords Content Network are also not pages you'd want your mother going to. The economics of Internet advertising heavily favor scams.

Would it be better for the world and users if a site about teaching activities had off-topic ads inviting people to sign up for weightloss pills (snake oil with a rebill scam) or software which actually makes teaching activities?
The particular reason this opt-out is odious is that opting out requires you to stop participating in a service the mall has nothing to do with. If an opt-out is, "to opt out, press this button before entering the mall", or, "to opt out, stay at least ten feet away from our mall maps", or, "to opt out, do not enter the food court", then they could sorta kinda make a case for legitimacy. (Those would be somewhat bizarre, admittedly, but at least they're directly related to the mall in some way.)

The "but I need my cell phone" objections are missing the point here: the opt-out is policy is bad not because it's making you forgo a convenience or even a necessary item, but because it's hijacking your commercial relationship with someone else entirely. Kind of like the technological underpinnings of the tracking, which are mitm-ing on the signal itself.

I wonder what the cell companies have had to say about this?
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Warning: This type of behaviour may be illegal.

For the US see the FTC guidance:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/20635261/FTC-Guides-Concerning-the...

(the FTC has bought prosecutions on this topic recently)

It's also illegal in the UK and presumably a lot of Europe.

You can't make an ad look like an legitimate endorsement, it's as simple as that. In this case the small "sponsored placement" text could easily be taken to be about the following ad which looks like an ad.
Didn't say they were obviously wrong, just that something feels missing.

However, not sure how it's silly to blame a user if they waited a month. Personal issue? Fine. But procrastinator and phone phobic aren't really excuses for this. If you're really concerned about your Kindle (I would be VERY concerned if it were more than a day.) then I would do almost anything in my power to fix it.

Wait a month? But that's a whole month of me not reading my books!
>"People should have the option to opt in not out"
And this is why I hate "SEO" types. They'd reply with "but then we wouldn't get anyone to opt-in!"...which is exactly my point. Not many people want to do this.

Take a survey: ask people in the mall: "Would you like for us to track your every move inside our walls (and probably a bit outside too lol because you know we didn't invest in proper RF shielding) with no benefit to you although we'll be selling this information to the mall and making money off your non-consent?"
There's little difference between organic and adverts. It's just content that the webmaster has put there. It clearly says "sponsored content", which discloses the fact it's a paid advert.

So personally, obviously it's not evil.

If people were being mislead into clicking, then none would convert to sales.
>"XOR"

Probably using 2ROT13 because they heard it was more secure.
When you purchase a book on your Kindle, you get taken to a page saying you bought the book.

There's a link for "Made a mistake?" which I clicked once, thinking I would get a confirmation page as well, and the refund was instantaneous.
Its funny that there is an almost exact same thing in audio processing called masking, where a loud signal will hide a quieter signal similar in frequency.

Maybe this is the visual processing equivalent?
Two way street. 125 pound girl might not be accepting of someone more than double her weight.
That's part of what we're trying to do with http://TipTheWeb.org/ , letting people support the content they like with voluntary micro-donations.

For instance, I've already tipped the original article 20¢ :-) (see my Tip stream at http://tiptheweb.org/tipstream/patg6vy3pyb62/ )

If publishers can get direct financial support from their audience, they wouldn't need to overdo things with ads, and they'd focus more on providing the best possible experience for that audience. Better for everyone.
#xmonad on IRC is always populated with friendly and helpful xmonad cognoscenti
It does when "very proprietary hardware" is code for "supplied by the NSA."
If you were determined you could jam the wireless spectrum, as long as your signal was strong enough you might be able to block subscriber IDs from making it to the tracking antennas.
But I thought the main premise of Groupon is that the deal brings people in and the <fill-in-the-blank> from the business brings people back. I guess a deal could be run again to capture new customers but it's hard to imagine the need if the initial brought in customers and more importantly, brought back customers.
This makes me want to invest in a CDMA/GSM dev kit so I can spoof IMEIs and ESNs. I'd send them:

AA-BBBBBB-CCCCCC-'); DROP TABLE imei;--

EDIT: another thought would be to use a directional antenna with a high-power transmitter (should only take a few watts with a +23DB panel or something) and have a script run through IMEIs and ESNs a few hundred a second, then just wave the thing around wildly.

If you want to stop this, you have to make it not economically viable for them. Real-life tracking calls for real-life DoS.
That's probably the reason that it's still locked. If he initiated a chargeback, Amazon should put a hold on his account while the entire process gets completed.

Chargebacks are supposed to be a last resort consumer tool, when every other option has been exhausted.
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You're reduced to arguing that, since you offer a good product, it's okay to use the same dishonest tactics that the bad guys use.

I suppose you're right. Better that a user is tricked into clicking onto Bingo Card Creator than a herbal Viagra affiliate. It's just not a very high moral position to take.
This feels a little like saying "Once you've run an advertisement then why would you ever need to run another one?"
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{I blogged & wanted to share} One year ago today a startup was born
On one hand I want to say it's "evil" because we've grown up in a place where ads != content. And even though I feel as if I should object to ads being "hidden" among normal content, I don't.

The purpose of going to a website is to seek out a certain type of content. If somebody then paid to have that content delivered to you, what makes it inherently more "evil" than any other content? If it fulfills your need, what does it matter whether or not it were paid to be placed there? In fact, why must we know that they're ads at all?

"Cheating" would be placing a listing that does not accurately represent the content behind it. So if I click on your ad and it isn't what it claimed to be, that's misinformation. But an ad for a free trial of a Bingo Card Creator among other software listings seems equally legitimate, whether or not it was paid to be placed.

It's akin to product placement in movies. A scene requires somebody to be drinking a soda, so a beverage company approaches the director and says "well, while you're in the market for people drinking soft drinks, might we recommend Coca-Cola." The viewer ends up getting advertised to, sure, but the ad still fulfills the role of any other item that would have been there otherwise--it just happened to be paid for.
I don't think it's so much a matter of how fast CAN you go from idea to first line of code, but rather, how fast SHOULD you go from idea to first line of code. Starting writing code for an idea is often as simple as opening your text editor or IDE. So on the order of single to double digit seconds?

That doesn't mean that jumping straight into writing code is a good first step. Figuring out what you're building, why you're building it (is there demand?), how it will work from a user perspective, and how you will architect it, are often useful questions to answer before diving in.
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I know it's possible, but goddamnit I didn't want to learn Haskell in the first place! That is my bone of contention.

Yes, yes, it might make me a better person but I want to try XMonad more than I want to fuck around with Haskell.
I thought about where exactly patio11 crossed the line into evil territory, and I realized that there is no line.

All ads are deceptive, because they are all trying to steal your attention by showing up when you are looking for something else. That we've developed the ability to ignore most of them doesn't change the basic principle. But the degree of deception can certainly vary.

By running ads, you are pawning off the user value of your site. The more effective the ads, the more value they are losing. It's a zero-sum game.
The letter clearly states he has contacted every Amazon support option he knows of:

I have filed a complaint with the BBB, emailed everyone I
could at Amazon, called the Customer Service Line, the
Kindle "Executive" support line, and Corporate. I have
been apologized to by everyone I have spoken to and been
told that they have never seen this situation before.

None of them can tell me if I will ever receive the
content I have paid for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_electricity#Electromag...
yes, I am. Its a getting-to-know-you process, so chatting with a lot of different people is my path.
I think where the ad "crosses the line" here is the faux star rating; the other (unpaid) listings have been user rated/ranked and Patrick's ad is misusing the trust that users of the site potentially put into the ratings.

I think that if the stars were removed, or, say, greyed out with the "Rated by lots" on top that would be absolutely fine.
I think the question boils down to this: Who will be the first to offer merchants a more favorable cut than 50/50? Or who will offer to let the merchants hold the cash? It's an inevitable race to zero for the coupon providers.