skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's just as amazing is in just two weeks, about 95% of Chrome 14 users 'switched' to Chrome 15. That same transition from IEX -> IEX+1 probably takes two years.

That's the power of transparent, automatic updates.
Coming soon ;-)
Ask HN: Can you help me find a thought experiment posted here?
I've been googling and using the Octopart HN search, but can't seem to find it.

The premise of the thought experiment is as follows:

In a not so distant future, everyone is sued for everything by everyone. On any given day you could expect legal notices from companies, persons or other entities for infringing pretty much anything.

The story centers around a father helping his young daughter deal with lawsuit after lawsuit and teaching her which ones can be ignored and which ones should be payed. Some lawsuits could be settled for as little as a penny or two and could be safely ignored -- others, more serious, should be settled, and settling those more serious lawsuits was a daily fact of life.

From what I can remember, it was authored by someone whose articles are posted pretty frequently on HN and I found it here.

Any help would greatly appreciated.
I know it mentioned somewhere that custom stacks were an option but could not find any documentation.
Microsoft opening ‘So.cl’ learning experiment to more users
You wont have them for long because communal property does not get taken care of.
We will enable custom stack soon!
Why Workout? Use Photoshop to Lose Weight
How much adsense ad placements is too much on a website?
Hi there!

I've been following Hacker News for quite some time now, and I figured this would be the best place to ask this. (edit: sorry for the duplicate posting, noticed that the first post only linked to the site and I was unable to remove the link)

I founded a small image sharing website with a friend of mine, around six months ago.
About one month ago, it went totally viral, receiving 150 000 unique visitors on the first day and now averaging around 40 000 - 50 000 uniques per day with average of 3 - 5 pageviews per user.

As this happened, of course our bandwidth usage went through the roof, maxing at around 98 Mbits (more of it here http://stats.userpics.com/com/userpics.com/if_eth0.html), so to compensate this, I added some ads to our site.

After adding adsense banner on the top of the pages, I noticed a huge drop in pageviews (from 180 000 to 70 000 in one day), I've become somewhat of concerned that I might have gone overboard with the amount of ads displayed on my site.

All tips would be greatly appreciated.

You can check it out at http://userpics.com/
Most visitors never go to the frontpage, so basically what they are seeing is this view http://userpics.com/s2bgh.jpg

Too much ads? Too little?

Thanks for your time.
Baltimore Plastic surgery
People say this every time the topic of incorporation comes up. It's true: if you take funding, they're going to tear up your existing corporate structure and rebuild it. This argues for keeping your pre-funding structure as simple as possible. But what's not true is that you'll get passed up (for anything) because you're already set up as an LLC. If your pitch is so flimsy that $1000 of legal work kills a deal, you never had the deal to begin with.
Not yet. But when there is, it'll be called Noir.

There's a lot of components of a good web framework, some of them just aren't there yet.
Pixel City - The Procedurally Generated City
Right now stacks are set based on preference, compatibility to cloud providers, etc
For now: heroku and dotcloud
i don't think they're failing anything. most big companies don't need or want superstar. those big companies who do, don't have these problems.

"bigco isn't willing to pay for [superstars] -- they are executing an established business model quite effectively without superstars, and it makes sense to continue to do that while its economically feasible."[0]

[0] http://www.dustingetz.com/the-unnecessity-of-superstar-middl...
The most amazing thing about this patent is this:

Filed:	May 11, 2011
Issued: December 13, 2011
I've made good money fixing utter crap written by people who decided a new startup is the best time and place to learn a whole new technology at the same time.

There's so many ways for a startup to screw up - marketing, financing, hiring, pure bad luck - without throwing the whole unknown of an unfamiliar language or framework into the mix.

Unless you actually need new tech to solve a specific problem, use what you know.
Box releases 3 new security features
Does that matter? They could just buy the book on their customers' behalf. It's a rounding error.
I understand what you're saying, My motivation is that I want to find the "fundamental nature" rather than artifacts or pretty pictures. The regular z^2.5+c fractal has obvious artifacts when you pass over the branch cut, and I hope that my technique is more "true". (These terms are all hard to define, but I think I mean the same thing you do.) I've explored different escape bounds, for instance, to make sure that isn't causing artifacts. (The bound causes huge artifacts with negative exponents, by the way.)

It bothers me too that my fractals are less Mandelbrot-ish. I suspect this is due to all the branches overlapping and obscuring the details. I'm currently working on a couple ways to separate out these branches. Unfortunately just picking a different branch doesn't help, since it just moves the discontinuities. One plan is to display the fractal on the Riemann surface in 3D to separate the branches. The other plan is to crawl along the edge so you can continuously move from branch to branch without jumps. Julia sets are also on my list of things to do if I ever have time.

If you do experiment with this, let me know what you find out.
Parabens... I've been hoping/waiting for this for a year or two now. Great work, Amazon.
Here are the points I would question. I don't speak from any experience or expertise, so let these thoughts stand on their own merits:

2. Connect to the local startup community? More important to connect to customers and users. I won't discount the value of the startup community entirely, but there are echo-chamber and groupthink effects. Connect to customers first, and then the startup community might be more valuable to you. Treat the startup community as an end in itself and you just end up creating derivative, unprofitable ideas.

3. Read Hacker News? Maybe 2-3 years ago this was more valuable. Now I would suggest skimming Hacker News and using what you can, but also find the important forums and venues your customers use, and read those more closely.

6. Start a blog? Not bad advice, but the more general point--to write--is more broad than that. Blogging is only one medium, and there are many other mediums you have to write well in.
My domain name is searched 101 Million times on Google every month.
I'm looking at data visualization to prevent corporate espionage. In reality it's data theft that brought Wikileaks in to the public consciousness.

I think that most people forget/aren't aware that the data was actually stolen by a 22 year old private. In fact, he goes in front of the court tomorrow: http://bit.ly/viXkwq

When I say 'prevent Wikileaks' via data visualization I'm referring to preventing corporate espionage and data leaks, not destroy the Wikileaks organization itself.

It's more of an easy way to explain it to people:

Them: 'Hey what's your thesis on?'
Me: 'Preventing Wikileaks'
Them: 'Oh, cool' confused expression
Ask HN: Is Desktop Software Dead?
Digging through my list of installed applications recently at home and at work, I realized I could break it down into a three major categories:

Work -- code editors, IDEs, compilers, etc.
Utility -- Email, IRC & IM clients, office productivity suites, and system maintenance.
Entertainment -- Games, Media Management Software

Everything else now relies on the web, even email. Watching all the companies and products talked about here and other small business news sources, everyone seems to follow the trend of building their application for web and/or mobile devices and skipping the desktop entirely. Having not see any recent pronouncements of smaller companies pursuing the desktop, I'm curious to know if desktop software is "dead" to the startup world and left to the monoliths like MS and Apple?
what about PHP Frog for the php/mysql stack?
Heh... well instead of blaming, wanna help fix their code? https://launchpad.net/gnuclad
Ask HN: Is there a list of tablets that have access to the android market?
I keep seeing these cheap tablets coming out but none of them have access to the android market. Is there a list out there of tablets that have access?
big companies exist to execute a well known business model. they invest in lobbyists to keep the business climate stable so they continue to execute their business model. it usually makes more sense to outsource innovation -- e.g., invest in and acquire startups.
I would like the ability to access and manipulate all of "my" browser data in a pipelined command line environment similar to a shell. I want to be able to easily get at all my bookmarks, tabs, plugins, tabs, the dom, history, cookies, super cookies, megalomaniacal cookies, etc, i.e. everything that changes the browser due to my actions, and list it, count it, query it, twist it and tease it.

I'd like that data and environment to be available from within the browser, and bonus points if I could easily get at it from a traditional [[t]c|k|z|da|ba]sh shell.

And I'd rather use a shell-like language, not javascript, but if javascript were the only way to do this then hell yeah I'd use it.
Because they're avoiding "credit" entirely.

I suspect this is the start of their own implementation of "credit", and they're comfortable with losing some money at the beginning. In the long run, the traction they gain from the good customers could/should be worth more than the money they lose.

For the consumer, $3 on $500 is incredibly low interest.
Facebook Pulls Back Curtain on ‘Timeline’
Unfortunately, it doesn't take using a large enterprise application to get locked in to a specific browser. Even something as innocuous as Intuit QuickBooks relies on version-specific browser code for some of its features to work properly.

The small business I was briefly working at maintained its entire financial history in this proprietary application. :(
MSUAA documentary of their visit to SXSW
What? There's a whole huge controversial process around trademark disputes for TLDs, spanning all the TLDs, .XXX included. It was all Slashdot could talk about for months and months, because it favors trademark holders.
Good list -- I think it hits the essentials.

Most of these issues can be traced to a single cause, which is that as companies grow, there's a growing 'diffusion of responsibility' effect that takes place in terms of people's responsibilities towards one-another. Bosses and managers are clustered and have an ever-changing set of direct reports, ergo they see the responsibility of engaging and keeping talented people as a 'company' problem and not their problem. Similarly, talented people see the company as an uncaring monolith, and not a set of individuals that can help them get to where they want to be.

In the end, there is no 'company', there are only the individuals that compose that company. Their decisions make things happen. The less agency you give those individuals (or perceive those individuals to have), the harder it's going to be to keep the most talented around.
Deletionists.
Recruiting Trip to Los Angeles
The 30 Most Useful jQuery Plugins
National Enquirer, meet Hacker News.
I'm not up for rioting. I'm up for creating an back channel that the government doesn't know about, though.

(Think about all the other things that are illegal, like growing certain plants and crossing the street when the light is red. The laws are just there to oppress people that the government wants to oppress, and we'll never change that. One more thought crime on my rap sheet isn't going to make a difference.)
IE9 implements too much of its modern HTML5 and security features using Windows 7. DirectX 10, which it uses for hardware accelerated graphics, text and video does not run on XP. XP is eons behind the times in security features. It's not just a marketing decision, at some point if they wanted to do these things they had to say "this version of IE will not run on our 10 year old OS."
Symbols on the ground are infrastructure, you should not be able to patent a thing like that. Imagine every company that makes vehicles having to license someone else's tech in order to be able to use public roads, or a huge variety (one for every brand) of competing symbols polluting the roads.

Signs on roads == traffic signs, open formats and readable by everybody.
Iran official: We tricked the U.S. surveillance drone to land intact
Canonical to remove all Sun JDK packages from the Partner archive
The fact that MG chose a Mercedes and not, say, a stretch Hummer, is important -- a Mercedes is (mostly) expensive because it's made with care and precision, not because it's an abstract status symbol.
Galaxy Nexus is now available on Verizon for $300
To call him a troll could brush aside a few things worth our attention. Disturbingly enough, a statistically significant number of people in the U.S. actually hold viewpoints like these, and unfortunately a few of them occasionally comment on this site. So to call it trolling would be to ignore the depth of the ignorance and repugnance of these peoples' viewpoints, and the menace it poses to society. It's important to recognize these people and bring into the light their extreme right-wing philosophy at every opportunity. You judge a society by how it treats its least — not most — fortunate members.
Someone's squatting on our name (picplum) -- any way to relinquish?
Predictions for 2012
Update on the two entrepreneurs followed in the documentary.

Brett Kopf participated in the ImagineK12 incubator and presented at TechCrunch Disrupt on his startup http://www.remind101.com

Bryce Colquitt pivoted and has just launched http://www.musicsnob.me

Know both of these guys and I am one proud Spartan.
Look: I will fully admit that these sets are really, really cool. My son is getting a gigantic Millenium Falcon set from Santa this year (DON’T TELL) and both my wife and I are excited to play with it too.

But it’s a model kit. We will put it together once and we will play with it a lot and that will be that. It won’t get remixed, won’t get hacked. Eventually it’ll come apart and be put away and not rebuilt because 1000 pieces is a pain in the ass.

This doesn't make any sense to me. Why on earth wouldn't you mix those pieces in with the rest of the pieces you already have from sets you've already disassembled? Sure, the marketing is a little much these days but unless I am sadly mistaken all the pieces still fit together like they did 30 years ago.
No, desktop software is not dead yet.

You can erect the headstone when you can do everything in the cloud ... at 40,000 feet over the middle of the Pacific, without horrendous latency issues. Or in the middle of a backwoods area with one bar of GSM signal showing on your mobile phone and no ADSL to the local phone exchange because it's several miles away. Or when you can guarantee that no foreign government is going to yank a rack of servers hosting a slice of your cloud-hosted app simply because an IP address traced to some other VM in that hosting centre was being used for bittorrent or posting counter-regime propaganda or something.

Don't get me wrong: the cloud is useful. The killer apps right now seems to be collaboration and backup -- DropBox in particular. It may also be useful within well-networked corporate enterprises where consistent access to services can be maintained and central curation of IT resources is a desirable business goal (i.e. locking down what staff may or may not do with corporate IP). But until broadband is ubiquitous and reliable and fast, the cloud isn't ready for universal consumer uptake -- and that's going to take a very long time (decades, not single-digit years).
Yes, and this is why the easiest way for a developer or engineer to get a pay raise is to switch jobs. Companies that are careful to pay market rates don't have anywhere near the churn as those with fixed pay increase intervals.
MG's point is completely valid. The world is divided into two groups: those for whom the little details like UI responsiveness are supremely important, and those who don't notice it or don't care so much.

I'd also note that gadget sites like The Verge are incentivised to make Android seem interesting and competitive, even when it doesn't live up, because their business model is based on churning out large numbers of announcements and reviews. If they acknowledge that the devices are second-rate then why would their readers care to click their pages?
That is one of the goals but the other goal is reducing the cost for the merchant. Merchants will prefer you to pay with Dwolla as opposed to a credit card because they don't give up as big of a fee on each transaction, this earning them more revenue.
I was coming up with the exact same questions--and conclusion--as you while reading the post.
That's a good idea, but amazon keeps track of what you're using, and bills you at the end of the month. So even if your visa card only has $50, they could still send you a bill for $50,000.
So you're the new CEO at HP, and you look out across the landscape. You see many problems. Lots of things need deliberate attention with a mindful approach to creating solutions that can be put in motion today and followed through for years to come....

And you come to the conclusion that what the company really needs is a corporate identity refresh.

Je ne sais quoi - An intangible quality that makes something distinctive or attractive.

-- http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/je_ne_sais_quoi

I can say, with a high level of confidence, that the intangible quality that produces je ne said quoi surrounding brands like Apple. The current HP logo is sufficiently "designy" to surpass the general public's expectations.
No. When you have a registered trademark, you do not (contrary to what you might believe if you read most Internet forums) "own" the word; you have only registered your usage of the word in a specific field, which allows you to make it easier to prove in court that someone else is being confusingly similar to you in their conduct of business.

However, for most people, their business is small and focussed, so usages of the same name in other fields would not be defendable against someone using it for adult entertainment production. This would be exceptionally difficult an acronym such as "npr", especially as it has been used for many things in the past (such as Northern Pacific Railroad, although Nevada Public Radio is a more interesting example).

(edit: After posting this I noticed I had had the tab open long enough that some other people responded with similar commentary, but I'm going to leave this up as I think it has a slightly different character, as well as a funny example.)
CC would be against this but isn't the target merchant the one that does not already take CCs? Street merchant, plumber, kid that shovels my driveway, or wheeled merchant.
similarly, the 'approaches' pseudo-operator:

while (i --> 0) {
/* do something */
}
I switch between Mac & PC... having both would be sweet.
Show HN: JSPkg.com - host javascript packages (like gemcutter for js)
$3/month on $500 isn't 'incredibly' low: it's $36/year, on a net carried balance that's probably close to zero at least as often as it's close to the maximum $500.

If you could time it just right, so that your balance was $499 29 days of every month, and $0 the one day that it needs to be, the effective rate would be around 7%, a fair but not great consumer credit rate. But if your balance is often closer to zero, and you ever trigger the late fee, the effective rate becomes much, much higher.

It does compare favorably to foreign-ATM access fees.
It doesn't have to be specific. Google has extensive experience in crunching incomprehensibly huge datasets into meaningful, end-user responses. Apple does not.
Perhaps big companies are around long enough for people (talented or not) to grow older until their priorities have changed enough to no longer fit within the company.

Unless you're in quite a large amount of control of a company's direction, it's likely after enough time (if you're talented) you'll want to move on to working on something that is outside the scope of that company's focus.
As a girl geek who grew up on Legos, this makes me really, really sad.

From the NPR article linked to from the article above: "Lego also consciously aimed for boy customers when it embarked on its stunning turnaround. Boys were easier to sell to than girls."

headsmash

"The new Lego girl minifigures have names like Stephanie, Olivia, and Emma, and the building sets include a veterinary clinic, a hairdressing salon, a horse academy and a clinic."

We need more women scientists, girl geeks, etc. And for every person who loves to say "But boys and girls are just different!", there's a stunning example of sexist stereotypes embedded in the very things we buy our kids because our generation cherished them too...

(By the way, if you ever want a conclusive argument that girls being raised to love pink and hate math is societal, not genetic, read "Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference". It's pretty eye-opening, and has plenty of proof to back up its assertions.)
Or they themselves will be eaten by fraud of all scales coming from a million different places, like most of PayPal's competitors 10 years ago. The odds are not weighed in their favor.
Representatives decry rush to judgement on SOPA
>Let's not let our preferences (and that's all they are, preferences, not empirical facts) dictate how we think about and relate to other people.

I don't understand why people get so caught up in something they literally had nothing to do with other than giving their money away to achieve.

While the products we buy have value, the consumer played no role in that value. You didn't invent it. You didn't make it better. You didn't do anything but buy it.

I guess the fact that people put value where no value exists is a testament to the power of marketing.
And users will find it how?

(Sure, after a week or so it might find its way to the same Google ranks as About.com's existing Wikipedia clone. But by then the message has been delivered.)
I'll try to keep this short, since I'd like to get people's first impressions from the site itself, but I'll give a little background. I started building this in May. Since plugins.jquery.com was shut down a week and a half ago, I pushed it live so I could have somewhere to host my own plugins.

Even though it's smart enough to single out jquery plugins and label them as such, my stance is that all plugins are just scripts with a dependency on some library. So this site is meant to be a host for ALL javascript projects, whether they're libraries, frameworks, plugins, or standalone scripts, and whether they're front-end or back-end.

It follows the CommonJS spec for reading data from a package.json file, but also provides on-the-fly creation for projects that don't have one (with a package.json generator).

Any and all feedback welcome. For the curious, it's a Rails 3.1 app with a js-heavy front-end (being on the jquery-rails / jquery-ujs team, it's what I know best), though I've been considering switching the package uploader and processor mechanism to node.
They should have focused on the merchant benefit and not the customer side of this launch.
This change in my eyes is specifically to address the concerns of merchants that will not use Dwolla with the delayed payment system in place now.

I give them credit for trying to solve a merchant faith problem with a customer credit line. Someone that cant wait 2-3 days for money to be deposited in their account will probably not be the kind of person you would lend 500 bucks too, hence the 3 dollar fee, just sayin.