skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That does not address the business concern of capturing new business via signage

Yes but the question is how much business do you get from signage.

I work for a construction company, you wouldn't know we exist by signage unless you drive down the industrial address our company is on. Most of our business comes from the signs on our trucks and trailers. On a single job I've had upwards of a dozen people come up to me and ask for a business card because they're impressed by our work.

We're not going to get huge business by a sign on main street, we get business by just doing our job because you get interested customers who might be hesitant and have questions. If they come and ask why us vs our next leading competitor, I can tell them "because they only use contractors, you might get good work and you might not".

I haven't been to a single restaurant in the past 5 years that either I didn't look for, or someone didn't refer/take me to.

I understand why some business owners might be annoyed if store front signage is restricted too much, especially if they're dependent on walk-in customers. However, I can't think of the last place I had to walk into that I didn't already know where it was.

However, I know around here there's Little Caesars pizza restaurants that keep popping up in plazas out of the way and they hire people to stand on the sidewalk to hold a sign. Why do I find this less offensive? Basically because someone who might need a job is actually getting paid, rather than a fee going to a signage company, and also because they're doing this on baron sidewalks that are basically only ever used by highschool kids anyway because no one walks in a non-verticalized city.
Can freemium work without hitting a home-run ala Dropbox?
Science meets crap
I just don't see the relationship between government overstepping the mark... and buying a proprietary product form a company you respect, because you want to use the product and are willing to sacrifice the desirable but non-essential quality of unfettered access to its innards.

...OK, actually I do see the connection. The suggestion is probably that if the technology is not totally open, you don't know how much power you're giving away (the manufacturers could be cooperating secretly with the authorities). But if you really feel like this, all you need to do is refrain from using your iClosedDevice for any type of work or communication that you wouldn't trust in the hands of the manufacturers/authorities.

... And OK, I see the point that we need to support the alternative methods or else their won't be any when we need them. It's just the either/or sentiment that bugs me.
I'm worried about the level of interference this will cause in the already-crappy 2.4 GHz band. I'm sure most restaurants will just plug in a wifi gateway and leave it with default settings, probably with the broadcast power all the way up and set to channel 1 or 6.
iPhone v1 is a pretty good example of a MVP IMHO. No copy paste, no multitasking, no 3rd party apps, the list goes on. But it was still the best phone money could buy.
Retail political and topographic maps are a relatively small part of the work load of most cartographic studios.

Forestry and petroleum exploration require constant updating and presentation techniques.

Precipitation and drainage maps are extremely useful in agriculture.

Aviation section charts are updated quarterly.

Most vineyards, large farms, and ranches have probably had custom mapping done at some point.

It's actually a pretty fascinating field when you appreciate the breadth of data that is regularly correlated to maps.
Would love to start carpooling. Looking forward to using this!
Will definitely check out this book. I recently learned some R and just used it for a very specific type of programming task (Morphometrics for a biologist).

Very happy to have learned a new language outside of my normal Python/PHP/JavaScript realm. If you're looking to learn a new language that is a bit different than what you might be used to and want to brush up on some math, I highly recommend playing with R for a while.

Another book to checkout is O'Reilly's Data Analysis with Open Source Tools, which has sections on R and NumPy.
Some numeric data types will trim off leading 0's so if you have a number like 00543 when stored in the DB it will be retrieved as 543. Things like social security numbers and phones numbers are unique identifiers that just so happen to be numeric they should be treated as such with regards to data considerations.
Path smoking Facebook is like Siri smoking Google.
If it ever happens, it will be EPIC.
Freemium is certainly not applicable for all products and services.

Phil Libin (CEO, Evernote) has a good framework to think about this. Simply put, if the value of your product to your customer increases over time and usage, freemium could be a good way to acquire customers [ofcourse, this works when incremental cost per customer is very small]. On the contrary, if the value remains constant or decreases, you are better off with charging right away or subscription model.

Phil has talked about this multiple times. I can't share the video of the FI session that I had attended; but I found a similar talk here.
Warning: It is ~25 mins long.
http://vimeo.com/11932184
That's a good point, but it's a startup point, right? At scale, the percentage of the addressable market that is sufficiently served by your free option does matter, doesn't it?

I get that this is a startup article, and my thought reading this article was "well, that's conversion math for you." But you're making a broader point.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
"Another"? Please reread both the post you replied to, and whichever previous post you believe I made pinning the problems of the US on foreigners. I can't recall ever making this claim, and it's so wildly divergent from my general world view that I suspect you clicked "reply" on the wrong post.

Let me just point out that:

a) I don't consider variation in average performance due to composition changes to be a problem (in this post I explicitly disavow that view:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3378157 )

b) in the post you reply to I said that composition changes were too small to affect average performance anyway - i.e., I'm saying Finland has too few immigrants to significantly move their averages.
Lists Browser App is finally approved
Two things come to my mind:

1) Do you think most tourists (be it in Sao Paulo or elsewhere) can speak the local language? Read it? Do the signs need to be very visual to make even sense?

2) Isn't there still a huge difference between the number of times you actually found an ad helpful ("Ah, okay.. Let's go there") vs. awkward, boring, distracting?

I especially like the first one. This country has less people than Sao Paulo. In fact, the local language is probably spoken (and read) by less people than those living in Sao Paulo. Billboards are everywhere, including hotlines, shortcodes, directions - and I cannot understand a single one. I'd argue that the average tourist here wouldn't care about the ads. They are for residents/citizens.
It's not actually that much. Most of it goes on technical: namely, servers and developers. I think they currently have two people in legal, and something like 50 in technical (development, ops etc.).

I'm an OTRS volunteer - that is someone who answers email sent to the Foundation. A lot of the potential legal issues get resolved amicably by volunteers before ever hitting the legal department.

An aside - one thing I've learned dealing with people making legal threats to Wikipedia: it's astounding how even some of the biggest multinational companies on the planet are completely clueless about copyright law.
I noticed this in Starbucks in Toronto in the past week. I haven't been there in years and wondered how they rid themselves of the laptop wielders, and noticed that there's no power outlets left. The couple that are, are the floor-mounted key-locked like those in big shopping malls for the maintenance and when they set up kiosks at christmas time.
move on, nothing to see here ...
Microsoft Smart Watches Are Officially Defunkt
Did The Boston Globe Just Support SOPA? Sure Looks Like it.
Mixergy is really interesting and it's refreshing to hear someone like Bo Fishback who's pretty down to earth talk about how execution is everything.

You can get the podcasts for other episodes here - http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mixergy-audio-podcast-cha...
> The article pretty clearly stated that focus on equity might be something to try.

That is bound to fail because it would be a wild goose chase, there are a thousand variables, and the temptation is strong to try to isolate the ones that lies close to one's own ideological prejudices and ignore the rest, Note for example the focus on equality here and not on the fact that Finland's schools are more disciplinarian than schools in the rest of Western Europe. If you dig up the statistics you can see how little Finland's pupils are enjoying school, more akin to Japan than the rest of Western Europe, but the results are better than the rest of Europe (which certainly doesn't lag Finland in equality).
Maybe 37signals is thinking in launching 37HerokuYardCloud.
The Future of the Internet: Where Do We Go From Here?
My new doll
You're right David but, as someone who has built a couple of marketplaces, I find that founders often don't spend enough time on the "tougher" side. The common mistake (been there, done that) is to spend something like 60% of your time building the harder side and 40% of your time building the easier side. Instead, you should probably spend something more like 98% of your time building the harder side and 2% of your time building the easier side.

Which is the harder side? Generally, it's the people with the money. :) However that's not always the case. If you've stumbled into a massive market with high demonstrated spend it might actually be harder to build the supply side. I'd side that's likely the case with a company like AirBnB (they've done a great job building both sides of course).

If you can build the more difficult side (usually demand) it will typically pull supply out. It typically doesn't work the same in the opposite direction.
Well that's fair enough. I didn't really mean to go off on you or anything but I just felt like there was this pattern I notice around here sometimes. And I'm speaking generally here so what I'm about to say ismt directed at any one person, it's really for all of us including me because I've been very guilty of it sometimes too.

Sometimes I'll see someone talk about some open source project and call it shitty and tear it apart needlessly. We all need to remember that not every project starts out great. The creators put a lot of time and energy into giving us something that we could all use and even expand on for free. It might not be the greatest piece of software but bugs can be fixed and we should appreciate that someone gave us a head start on making something amazing from it.

Not every open source clone is bad. Clone != unethical or shitty. Sometimes it does but not always. I know for a fact that there are a ton of people looking for a self hosted StackOverflow style forum out there and I'm glad someone made it and open sourced it.

It's one thing if the creator is out promoting the thing like its great but really isn't but I don't think it's fair to come across something like this and call it crappy and I've seen it a bunch. Maybe we can do better, maybe not. If we can then we should go ahead and do it instead of tearing down others.

There's a running trend of hackers having to be the smartest person in the room all the time and that's just silly. I much prefer being the dumbest guy in the room, climbing the ranks to be the smartest, then switching to another room where I'm the dumbest again. That's how you grow as a person and a developer.

And one more interesting thing I see is this: a person will go off on how all software should be open source and piracy is okay because of x, y, and z but then turn around and attack an open source clone of something. How does that make sense?

And we all do it whether we admit it or not. Before we do it again let's use our judgement and really think about whether it's appropriate in the situation. Put yourself in the other person's shoes and then speak.
I'm in Atlanta and looking for work, mind showing me the positions you're hiring for?
What's clear about that? Don't assume that these businesses can accurately measure how effective their street advertising is.
I wonder: are there any good rules-of-thumb for when to go ahead and add indices at table-creation time?
Not so clear. Many advertisers will quickly disavow this approach, and freely admit they instead aim to create vague positive feelings for the brand.
I understand your communication just fine. HN is however not immune to its own little cults or pockets of personality worship. Questioning some of those people, however validly, will often result in downvoting for your gall.
“I can see why the original headline might have been edited for clarity - the mental leap from "porno site" to "productivity porn" is non-obvious.”

Perhaps it is non-obvious reading only the title, but the article did go on to clarify what the intent of using the word "porno" was.

My problem with it is that editing the title in this manner sets up an expectation for the reader, and could cause the reader to become upset when they see the actual title has the word "porno" in it. As I said, the article clarifies what I mean, but if someone is sensitive to the use of that type of language, then they may feel they have been duped into looking at content they wouldn't otherwise look at.

As I pointed out in the article, this doesn't appear to be a common experience. I couldn't find anyone else online complaining about Hacker News censoring their content. But, I wanted to make clear what my intentions were, and hopefully open up a discussion that could possibly lead to needed clarity on exactly what the rules of this community are.
"I think instability is less a sign of architectural problems than of simple failure to iron all the bugs out."

The architectural problems might make it harder to iron the bugs out.
The difference between misguided and evil is often not especially clear or relevant: the simple fact is political exercise is by its very nature polarizing.

So: the fact that companies are in a position to directly manipulate Spanish politics _is evil_. It _is_ the use of naked force: I defy you to argue that they are not 'compromising' their logical case.

Force and 'convincin' are merely two tools in a Machiavellian view of politics. And as you seem to imply, the Media Companies are quite willing to be Machiavellian, so there isn't really any particular reason for the opposition (us) to try to hold on to a high moral ground.

Sometimes a company needs to go down in flames as an example.
the tech is definitely geared in that direction. carpooling is first because we needed it for our own use :)
... And OK, then you saw the point of the article, after all.

EDIT: Lesson to self. Don't post while you have a cold, and pounding headache as a result. It'll get you downvoted.
I can't find it, but there was a great post on HN awhile back about how Finland doesn't really know what makes its schools so successful. Thus, articles like this pull some facet out of the hat as the key differentiator.

There was a good comment, suggesting that instead of modeling who has the highest test scores, instead model who is most successful at climbing the ranks of PISA. That's probably a better way of figuring out what contributes to success, because there are fewer independent variables.
365 awesome designers - every day a new designer
This is even worse: all I hear is that it is a virtue to apply "our most important traditions and values as a nation" when speaking of first-class beings (citizens of our great nation), but we are not bound by anything to extend the same courtesy to others. Embarrassing, humiliating, and sad.
And soon the internet companies will be charging "business" rates to supply restaurants with internet.

Another law that will have unintended consequences.
Rather than the safest option "95% of the time", I'd say doing so is probably best "essentially all of the time except for a few unique circumstances, all of which you'll know when they happen."
You shouldn't spam this stuff here, all that'll happen is your account and domain will get banned so if you ever write legitimate articles instead of this summary spam crap you won't be able to submit them.
Poor aesthetics cause psychological harm through both distraction and pure ugliness. I shouldn't have to combat decades of scientific research on attention-stealing simply to maintain my train of thought as I walk down the street.
But the point of the article seems slightly different from Stallman's stance. The article said 'support Linux, even if you use Windows' - whereas IIRC the FSF says 'never use Windows' or something to that affect.
Employer’s Basis for a Good Customs Broker Training Background
Completing a customs broker training is a big challenge to say the least. Unfortunately, it is not enough to give you a 100% assurance of future employment and a promising compensation figure.
> The U.S. population is dwarfed by that of China yet very few people would argue China is more innovative than the U.S.

Not yet.

Apparently the province of Shanghai has already surpassed the Finnish educational success with their 23 million inhabitants. I have no doubt the Chinese are not trying to replicate that system as much as they can.

Though I would still prefer the Finnish system with 5-6h school days for my children, there is no reason to believe bigger systems would not be scalable for improvement.

And as far as I know, the US system used to be way more competitive back in the day. And we also have to think whether the educational depression is a state or a trend... (http://youtu.be/NXIR9ve0JU0)

> Don't get me wrong, Linus Trovalds and Nokia are great examples. But they aren't enough to make Finland a bed of innovation.

Not yet.

The entire country pretty much started industrializing a generation ago. A few big corporations in forestry and some high-tech is what brought us from the stone-age. But such establishments tend to shackle a fair amount of brain in such a small economy.

Given the record, I'm fairly optimistic of what will happen with all the brain freeing up from Nokia. It was a valued company hiring around as much people only in Finland (pop. 5m) than companies like Google hold globally. (pop. 7b)
"The Obama administration requested the indefinite detention provisions."

[citation needed]
As a web developer and designer I've always found it annoying that whenever I want to add noise to an element background on a website, in the absence of any CSS3 support for noise, I have to boot up Photoshop, create a new image, fill it with the desired color, and apply the noise filter, and I have to go through this process again and again every time I want to tweak the background, wasting precious development time on such a mundane task.

So this New Year's Eve, I set out to solve this problem and this is the result, ICanHasNoise, a web service that lets you generate background images with noise with just a URL. For example, the URL http://icanhasnoise.com/123456/200x200/4 would generate a noisy background with color #123456 (gradient backgrounds are also supported), size 200x200 pixels, and with a 'noisiness' value of 4. This URL can then be slotted into to a CSS background-image rule and voilà, your element is noisily backgrounded without the involvement of any sort of image editor, and if you want to tweak the background, all you have now to do is change the URL.

I built this website to scratch my own itch and I hope that others will find the site useful too. Thanks for even bothering to take a look and as always, feedback is very much appreciated!
Prediction #1: A new CEO for Apple
And thank you for doing that work!

FYI, there are three FT legal now. There also are a number of legal interns at any given time. I worked with one of them in 2011 on making Commons a little more robust against potential lawsuits.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff#Legal
I got "The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive" for Christmas and it's just fascinating. Interesting history on the Turing test and AI and philosophy and very well written. I highly recommend it.
Yes, but that result is most likely on a Sandforce-powered SSD, which sports different transfer speeds based on the payload (compressible/incompressible). Like the GP notes, this is not a problem with SSDs in general.
Ok, so your primary concern here is that there's a huge gap between immigrants and non-immigrants in Finland? (I thought you wanted to argue like many others before you that the immigrants in the US caused the non-immigrants to perform badly.)

First, I know little about this gap in Finland or what's causing it.

However, I can hypothesise that it has to do with the immigrant children having attended school in Finland for less time. Further, the Finnish school system has been developed for Finnish citizens and is less prepared to attend to the needs of different ethnicities than to different socio-economic backgrounds. For starters, the immigrants need to learn the non-Indo-European language.
Maybe the revenue will come from a carpooling discovery standpoint, where you find people that have a big car where you can ride, or people to help you pay for gas
A Nobel Peace Prize winner? The man who promised to close down Guantanamo Bay and has still yet to manage to do so? Whose election campaign promised "Change" yet whose only significant move in that way so far, in office for 3 years, is the repeal of DADT? The man who I (along with so many liberals) want desperately to believe in, but who just makes it too hard for us?

Yes, that man.
This is a great idea and initial execution. Consider K12 carpooling as well.

I've got kids in middle and high school, and in our community most of the kids get to school and home via carpools. My wife did most of the driving, and it was a perpetual headache for her. She'd forget when it was her day, kids would get sick and need to cancel pickup, or kids would decide to walk home. Parents would trade driving slots and then no one else would know who to contact when things 'came up'.

We're not carpooling this year, but she would have loved group messaging (msg parents, msg kids, msg all) and the roll call features. She also would have appreciated it if you guys kept track of who was driving and if she got a text message 30 minutes before it was her turn to drive.

Congrats!
Same here. I think they are just using a 500mA charger.
Has anyone here had any experience hiring or working with grads of Finnish schools? How about Master's/PhD level grads?

I'm curious how an employer or co-worker would view the quality of their school's end product.
Patrik is a script-writing machine! Thanks to his work (and many other people), we now have 307 NSE scripts. They are all documented here:

http://nmap.org/nsedoc/

Also, we released a new version of Nmap today with 51 new scripts and many other improvements:

5.61TEST4 Release Notes: http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2012/q1/23

Download Page: http://nmap.org/download.html
Rather it's only use proprietary software if by doing so you are able to make it more free.
Yeah--check out the background of Bingo Card Creator. There's lots of HN discussion on it, too

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/12/21/bingo-card-creator-etc-y...
Would be awesome to be able to pass in simple text HTML like: <p>Paragraph <i>here</i>.</p><p>Second paragraph <strong>here</strong>.</p>.
On Airbnb Reviews (An update)
Clopen
Not iPad 3 or AppleTV — But Apple Planning Media-Related Event in Big(ger) Apple
In terms of monetization, this would translate nicely to an iOS/Android app, for one.