skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting dialogue between a "Big" SEO firm and a local SEO firm
http://www.pearanalytics.com/blog/2011/why-you-should-avoid-local-coms-seo-services/

This is interesting, and may explain why people have a bad feeling about SEO/SEM in general. I've had similar calls with Yellowpages.com in the past.
> Google, Facebook, and Topcoder have systems to deal with it but ai-class.org does not.

How do you know this?
this is a gross oversimplification.

Of course it is, but so is the claim that Conservatives hate the "Column A" civil liberties. For example, despite it seeming to be a core GOP plank, I only know 2 people opposed to gay marriage (one of them my father <sigh>).

So: yes, it's an oversimplification. But part of what I was saying is that when we're stuck with only 2 parties (in practice), and a single "left/right" dimension, then these awful generalizations are all that we have to work with.
I honestly wonder how many people in that room actually:

1) Understand what this girl is saying,

2) Understand what they are about to vote on,

3) Deserve to vote at all

God bless America!
Strangest Language Features
I think it is between the 5 to 10 mark. I think a lot of people realize that they have hit the mark long after their talents have put them on it. For some reason, people over assume competency in others in our industry. I think it has something to do with the fact that smart people generally rate themselves as less intelligent that they are perceived when self assessing. When I reflected on my career, I realized that I was a senior for about 3 years before I knew I was a senior. I don't know if that is standard but looking at the guys I have mentored who have come of age it seems to be.
The is a common claim, but has anyone actually researched this? Is there any evidence that this is still true? It's my understanding that most of the IE6 market share is in Asia, where many people are running pirated versions of XP.
I was expecting that. :) Much respect for emacs and vim.

Btw there is this plugin for emacsifying Sublime Text 2: https://github.com/stiang/EmacsifySublimeText and this one for vi integration: http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/vintage.html
Stream Address: mms://a1481.l6576439480.c65764.n.lm.akamaistream.net/D/1481/65764/v0001/reflector:39480
Video Codec: WMV3
Audio Codec: WMA2
You'll be surprised (or not) to know quite how disjointed and hacked together their internal systems are.

Not surprised, I've witnessed it first hand (I've been with a music startup).

My argument is that they don't have a software-problem. Managing an inventory of a couple million items is by no means rocket science, they could fix that in a couple months. What the best software can't fix is their mindset, which is firmly stuck in long expired business-models.

Dealing with one of the so-called "majors" is like dealing with a really stubborn 3yr old. You can forever explain the simplest realities to them in the simplest terms - they will still insist on their objectively absurd position and use all the remaining power that they have to make your life miserable in every possible way.

The best strategy is to stay far away from them until they run of money and their inventory moves into more clueful hands. Unless you want to be the one to take-over their inventory of course. In that case I wish you the best of luck - and nerves of steel.
We now search for flash games using Angry Birds. What? Seriously? And we now search for reviews using a film/restaurant/book app? Ok sure. But it's not like this was the main use of Google in the past. Rather than using the IMDB app, we went to the IMDB website. Same with Amazon, ePinions or anything else. And if we don't know where to find a particular kind of review, we're still going to go to Google.
Hopefully they have already dedicated a good chunk of time to reviewing the bill before sitting through the open reading...
Good for Bill Gates. It is very sad that this is not happening first in the US. Pretty depressing, actually.
"fee speech": I realize it's a typo but it's a cool phrase. Kind of 1984-y. I wonder what it means--"pay to say"?
In general, the main differences between distros consist of:

- Versions of software included
- Whether any "non-free" software is included
- How the directory structure is used (for instance, do you use /opt or /usr/local)
- Is there a package manager / ports system, or do you compile everything on your own?
- In the event of multiple solutions to the same problem (common), the distro often makes a default choice
- The GUI often has custom features, such as configuration applets
- The support culture around each

But if a piece of software can be compiled and installed on one distribution of Linux, though I'm sure there exists an exception, you can generally count on being able to get it to work on another, though it may take some work.
This, kids, is the other reason we use Perl.
In addition to Ubuntu, I'd also note Knoppix, which itself was forked from Debian. It was one of the first successful live-CDs and has a lot of forks in its own right.
Google is making a huge shift from dominating search to dominating the browser and the mobile OS, which have basically become the platforms on which most modern technology is going to be built.
While I am super excited for the future of auto-driving auto-motives, does this patent really prove anything novel and non obvious? QR codes are already used for orientation by many systems, and it seems quite obvious that an autonomous car would need orientation sensors and a computer with at least one line of code relating the operation of an autonomous vehicle. I think google has made some real patent-worthy innovations with their driver-less vehicles but this seems to be of the overly broad progress stifling type of patent.
I'd hope nobody screams that Apple invented this, since it's a matter of public record that Siri started out as a DARPA project and was purchased by Apple a mere 18 months ago.
Source Reveals Facebook Is Gushing Cash
I kind of agree but I think in another respect they have looked at an ageing protocol and made it better. They may not have consulted with everyone but it also doesn't mean that everyone will implement or agree with what they are doing.

They are not forcing SPDY on people but I am looking forward to an integration into IIS when it does happen.

They have created something in a hope that it does standardise the way we make web requests.

Microsoft actually did this without telling anyone years ago, at least google is open about it.

http://osdir.com/ml/mozilla.devel.netlib/2003-01/msg00018.ht...
I keep getting this

Connection Failure: This is probably due to the fact
your browser does not appear to support a technology
called "WebSockets" which Tawlk relies on. We are
working hard to bring full compatibilty with a wider
range of browsers soon. In the interim please consider
using the latest version of Chrome, Firefox or Safari

Yet I am using Chrome (16.0.912.63) on OSX.
Warning: the "pull to update" feature is patented by Apple.
No, it's not.

Please read articles before commenting.
What about product and administrative ? Both are usually large enough to be their own categories, especially compared with something like PR.
Not quite what they have in their pockets but on their person.
Interesting stats, and thanks for sharing! Now, what conclusions can we take from them?

One that stands out is that people are willing to pay for Arcade/Action and Personalization apps beyond what the download distribution would suggest.

I'm interested in knowing what the Pareto distribution is, are there apps that are skewing categories? (eg: a very popular personalization app?).

Also, knowing that paid apps are less than 1% (0.7%?) of all downloads is interesting.
Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. This, however, drastically relies on that notion being true. A backfire would be catastrophic.
Source reveals Facebook is gushing cash
My experience has been that the US government is a big IE6 consumer as well.
Step 1, "Register a Business" (LLC or LTD) is not something I'd advise on a lark. It costs real money (hundreds if not thousands of dollars), will require an administrative burden (filing of annual reports, filing of additional tax forms, etc, out of state tax forms if you register out of state or move.)

I think a more realistic approach is to review and understand all of the requirements for registering a business: What papers to file, who to file them with, what the deadlines are, and what the costs are. Once you understand that, you'll know when your business generates enough income to at least cover these costs, or the business is risky enough to warrant the liability protection. (Most software is sold "as-is" and is not that risky.)
Statistics cannot be used to "predict" future behavior of a complex system

They certainly can, and commonly are! Think of weather prediction, Bayesian diagnostic systems, Google's statistical translator and spell checker, etc etc.

Taleb's point is that they fail sometimes - perhaps more often than you think - and so you should be very careful in placing bets on statistical predictions.

In this case the cost of a failed prediction is very low, and a successful prediction is worth quite a lot, so it is a net win for Google.
Pirated versions of XP are perfectly capable of running IE7/8.

The problem is that a few years ago Microsoft pushed Windows Genuine Advantage updates automatically via Windows Update (they might even have done this twice), with the result that all those pirated versions of XP turned off Windows Update forever and never installing anything from microsoft.com.

Oops.
All that these stats really show is that version distribution is the least fragmented on Chrome, which was the first to implement silent updates and supported it since the beginning.
Do you have any research to backup your claim?
I don't think this would help. I've watched people deal with the unknown SSL certificate prompts in Firefox...they just mash "OK" "Accept" "Agree" until the SSL warnings go away.

Only a handful of sites use SSL certs, but every site uses cookies. Many sites use multiple cookies. Can you imagine the nightmare of that many popups asking you about every cookie?
22 Siri "clones" come out every week. Consider me underwhelmed.
"You’ll simply be bumped to the most current version available for your version of Windows (IE9 on Vista and Windows 7, IE8 on Windows XP)."

I was so hoping for IE9 on XP as part of this process...
1. Google is NEVER going into the auto business, but they'll licence or even donate their software to run on any auto manufacturers car.

2. The auto manufacturers will only tepidly roll this out very with tons of regulatory and legal tiptoeing.

3. The end user will have to sign away any legal rights to recourse and/or the government(s) will have to amend statutory rights accordingly before the first cars hit the road.

4. It will happen, eventually. It will save hundreds of thousands of lives/year.
Facebook accounting info leaked
Most people can hardly imagine life without their iPhone... but that hardly makes cell-service a right.

I grew up in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas. We had a well, no central heat-and-air, and a septic system in our back yard. This worked just fine. We had the same quality of life (aside from freezing in the cold winters) that everyone in large cities had.

The difference is that we owned the equipment to take care of ourselves, instead of the local government.
Persistent Bastard
Quick, someone file a copyright complaint against the broadcast and get it shut down! We can't risk public knowledge of this hearing, er, I mean, IP infringement, getting out!
Registering as a corporation may not be smart if you're planning on bringing some VCs on board. You'll likely end up having to reincorporate in some other state for some reasons. Even when you apply to YC the guidelines say its preferable that you haven't filed as a corporation. You can get a simple DBA for real cheap and still be considered a company. I started off at my local County building and paid only $5 plus another $90 for a 3 week required newspaper ad.

But I'm not so sure this post talks about how to do a startup as much as how to start a side project.
This also happens when chrome simply drops the connection even if it is "supported". Chrome 16 and 17 have switched to a newer websocket standard which apparently does not deal with packet loss as well? For now compare with Firefox as well as its Websocket implementation seems to handle a bit better than latest chrome builds in some situations. At the very least we will push out a messaging change for this soon.

Once the load spike dies down a bit we will be working to push out some protocol updates to help provide fallback support for browsers that for whatever reason can't maintain a stable websocket connection.
MongoDB 2.0.2 Released
The tablet Apple tried to stop
Webfaction app memory quota increased to 256MB for everyone
I'm interested to see how this product will grow and how you can eventually capitalize on the idea to generate revenue. Many companies today are already experimenting with the idea of content analysis to gain insight about what the social web is saying about their company and/or to profile their customers using lifestyle based analytics.

One question I have is do you plan on filtering out the noise? There seems to be some content that I would consider spam or highly unrelated to the topic that I choose to search.
If that requires a change to the legacy application then it's never going to work.

There's a reason companies can't upgrade from IE6 without a significant cost, and it is usually one of the following:

1) The company has lost the sourcecode, and the original engineers have left.

2) The company doesn't even have the source code, and has no rights to modify the application.

3) The application is vendor-supplied, and said vendor requires a large cash payment to make the 'custom' change.

4) The application is vendor-supplied and the vendor refuses to support IE6 in the version of their application that the company have deployed. Their new, super expensive version does support more browsers.

5) The company has little control over their IT. Their business depends on a thousand tiny applications built by countless different parties of varying ability. Simply auditing the whole mess is too costly.

So lots of companies take the easy (and cheap) route out and
decide to stick with an ancient browser.
> OK, you could use a similar argument about Greek taxes

That just means they have to 'find another way.' They could raise sales taxes or lower spending by reducing services provided.
While it probably wasn't the president himself, that makes no difference at all in the context of the French "three strikes" law that allows disconnecting file sharers for up to 12 months without the possibility of judicial appeal. I don't know how to express this, there's simply not a chance in hell, not even in a million years, that the Élysée (the French equivalent of the White House) will be disconnected from the Internet because of file sharing.
Surely it's no worse than this:

I was talking to a group of friends about this and thon thought it was weird too.
IZotope releases free iOS Audio programming guide
When will this be voted on?
I have found that Ruby on Rails Tutorials, by Michael Hartl is almost always recommended.

Thanks for the resources!
No cellphones, no texting by drivers, US urges
Will check them out...thxs
The problem isn't good/bad. Problem is that IE6 is nonstandard.
I mentioned GUI as an example of an analogous domain where Google's strengths weren't necessarily of any advantage.
MixRank: A Hacker News Comment Leads To Profitable Y Combinator Startup
Fake ID app maker urges Apple to reconsider ban
Contrarians should probably be held to a higher standard. It is indeed hard(er) to write a comment for a somewhat hostile audience; but if you can't actually make the audience think, at least for a few seconds, does the comment really add value? In fact, a weak argument against a beloved-but-false position may make people believe more strongly - bad comments don't help your cause!
This is slightly making me think about adding a specific version of IE to my Crap Browser Notifier:

https://github.com/milesmatthias/Crap-Browser-Notifier

Maybe IE10 and up. Maybe.
Funny how not in touch I am with the mainstream. The only thing I would consider searching for is Fukushima. I have never heard about either of the 3 women.
Uzbl seems to be a really cool project, but I'm stuck on Windows for most of the day.
At past b2b software and services companies - my experience is a noticeable drop in 'kicking the tires' inbound traffic. For the reasons mentioned, December is not the month people typically start investigating solutions, asking for information, or starting trials. (Many companies hold non-critical hiring until Jan for similar reasons)

Two bright spots to focus on:

1. Any inquiries right now are 'buyers' (like people that visit a car dealership in the rain). Pay extra attention to inbound inquiries this month, they have a pressing need and may be able to convert to sale quickly.

2. Good time to close on existing prospects - offer extra end of year incentive to any folks on the cusp of closing, in some cases as mentioned they have budget to spend or lose, in other cases, you just need to make it worth their while to spend time on you this month rather than next. Don't over-sell, just a get the offer out, wish happy holidays, and either close or move on.
If Google put a black censored bar over their logo, this would be dead in a a couple of days, tops.
Jonathan Fine gave a talk on this at Europython this year.

Looks like there's a video available at http://ep2011.europython.eu/conference/talks/javascript-for-....
Lamar Smith Supporting SOPA with False Or Misleading Research
Looks like today... http://www.dailypaul.com/193200/breaking-news-sopa-being-vot...
So, as a corollary, ideally you'd design the environment so that humans adapt to it in a particular way, thus getting rid of the 'human factor', whatever it is.
Reverse Debugging with Causal Analysis
Lessons Learned From A Failed Kickstarter Campaign
We tried, failed, and got some tips from Kickstarter Co-Founder Charles Adler. Here's what we learned in the process. Learn from us.
Celebrities, and Consumerism are 90% of the most searched items all year? It's kind of sad really.
Agreed. This post comes at this in a way that's indicative of the broader mentality about startups these days. The word startup no longer defines a small but rapidly growing business. Instead it now means a website or some sort of technology with "app" appended to the end with young founders and millions of dollars worth of funding plus hype. The stack you use is now a way to judge your product. If Facebook were to be up and coming today they may very well be laughed out of the valley for using lame ass PHP and old stale MySQL to start instead of some über cool nodejs, Rails, MongoDB, plus Scala and CoffeeScript for some reason. I think it's nuts that the tech stack you use is somehow more important than the actual product. If I cured cancer with HTML4 I'd be laughed at. But if I did it using nodejs I'd be immortalized as the greatest man ever.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2860031
That's a big dish of good old american entitlement.

Not at all. It's a reflection on the current technology job market in the Bay Area. It doesn't last.

f you were on the market during the last boom, the demand for engineers was far greater than it was today.

I was, and my recruiter friends tell me that demand (again, mainly in the Bay Area) is about the same as it was then (late '90s). We're sitting on 3% unemployment, so finding good people is difficult.
Let's not forget that Sarkozy already has at least one strike. He used a song from MGMT on multiple occasions without permission. And then he insulted them further by offering 1 Euro (yes, 1 Euro!) as compensation.
Vintage is cool but has a ways to go, unfortunately. It's missing lots of little details, like how pressing a at the end of a line should start inserting there, not on the next line down.
And him married to Carla Bruni! She should slap him.
"I have never heard about either of the 3 women."

Me too, I had to google them to learn who they were ;)
I used impact.js in a recent game jam, it makes building tile-based / platformer games a cinch. It lacks a few niceities (motion animation, canvas text), but those can be hacked in as necessary without too much pain. The documentation is beautiful.

Our game: http://ravegame.herokuapp.com/

Post mortem: http://bcjordan.github.com/games/rave-thru-dawn/
She's barely comprehensible and monotonous besides. Nobody in that room is listening to her anymore. All three people in the frame behind her are looking at a screen.

Ridiculous.
I think there's a somewhat decent argument to be made here. I consider Obama to be governing as a somewhat center-right politician, and although I know that's not universally accepted, I think if you look at his policies objectively, it's at least a fairly plausible statement. However, there are right wing factions that have, from the start, been fairly fanatically opposed to Obama (race might play some role, but given the political history of the last 10 years, I would not be surprised if the right would have reacted similarly to almost ANY democratic president). This fanatical opposition led to the rise of the Tea Party, which has moved the Republican party even further right and solidified the congressional republican strategy of opposition at any cost - clearly counter-productive to getting anything done.

Now, in my view, this radical far-right constituency would not have been nearly as vocal if a president such as McCain was in office. That's not to say that they wouldn't be there, but I don't think they would have nearly as prominent of a place in the Republican party, and I don't think that the Tea Party would exist at all. When a party is responsible for governing, it's hard for it to go too far off the deep end (I hope). Even far right Republicans would have had trouble vilifying a center-right Republican president, which is how I believe McCain would have governed. With a bit less opposition, such a president could and perhaps would have governed in a similar way as Obama has, but would have faced far less obstructionism. I'm not saying that McCain would have been a better president than Obama - I think the opposite is true, and Sarah Palin flat-out scares me. Instead, I just think that congressional Republicans have dug in their heels so far that even a Democrat who agrees with them on most fundamental issues is seen as a closet socialist Muslim out to destroy the US as we know it. With that kind of view and a minimum of 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate, it's hard to see how a moderate or even slightly right Democrat could govern successfully.

That being said, this year's crop of GOP candidates is pretty scary, and I don't know how well this logic applies. I think a figure like John Huntsman might be able to successfully tame the far right wing of his party while governing from a fairly centrist position, but he may be the only one. Romney is hard to get a read on - if he's just moved to the right rhetorically to get through the primaries, then he might govern in a reasonable manner. However, if he truly believes some of the things that he has said this summer/fall, or has boxed himself in too much with campaign promises, his presidency could be fairly catastrophic. In my view, the only "productive" reason to vote for the "greater" of two evils is if you think that the two candidates would in reality govern quite similarly but one would be unable to get anything done due to extreme obstructionism. If the two candidates would govern very differently, then it seems highly counter-productive to vote for what you see as the greater of two evils.