skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've found when doing mass mailings the best solution is to use a service whose sole job is to insure your email gets delivered. I haven't used many such services, but Constant Contact (constantcontact.com) comes to mind. They provide things like tracking how many people viewed the email (by using HTML in the email to load a remote image, I believe), tracking link clicks inside the email, etc, though for your purposes it doesn't sound like this kind of service would be helpful.

In this world of spam paranoia, I've found it to be way too much trouble to do mass mailings yourself and expect to actually get around all the spam filters. Services like Constant Contact are paid to do just that, so your chances are much better.

I use AuthSMTP for all of my personal and business outgoing email and it's great (I've been using them for almost two years now). I've never had any downtime and they have a simple interface to view sent emails, so I can easily confirm an email was actually sent if I'm in doubt. The one or two times I've interfaced with their support, they seemed technically adept and were very helpful.

For my clients who insist on writing scripts to do their own mass mailings, I always recommend using AuthSMTP and simply writing the script to stay within AuthSMTP's stated volume guidelines (maximum of 50 recipients per single message, though they recommend keeping it to 10). Oh, and they do have a "Show Errors Logged" section that shows you all the emails that didn't go through.
Scaling memcached at Facebook
icontact.com
I think the point is that it opens the door to blocking whatever they think is "inappropriate" which you may not agree with. It's not just censorship of the bad, but censorship of what they don't want us to see.
Uh... why should anyone be allowed, much less required, to censor the net?
Except you CANT guarantee yourself a win, and you certainly can't guarantee yourself a win at any price. It IS essentially random what the bidders competing with you do in response to your "last" bid.
I'm trying to think of another logo that is so simple yet is so relevant and communicates so much, but I can't seem to. Any other examples?
In many (popular) moral systems, nothing is wrong with this business model.

In our legal system however, something is probably wrong with it.
Tweet Grid - Trending
Perhaps this "deep comfort with meaninglessness" explains why -- anecdotally at least, in my experience -- there seem to be higher levels of atheism among programmers than among the general populace.
mailchimp.com
ExactTarget will help you manage getting past spam filters.
Fred Allen's dictum: "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public."

http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue147/ed.html
E-mail as the social network
I'm not sure how this is different from any auction at eBay, Christie's, Philips, or your local car auction.
Why is guaranteeing a win a requisite for being an auction site?
I believe what you're referring to is the regulations on collecting data on people under 13. Which is why you've got to check those meaningless 'I'm over 13' boxes. Annoying and pointless, but not really censorship.

The bulk data taps are much more worrying, and those are mandated on the ISPs (look what happened to the Qwest CEO). The next thing forced onto the ISPs will be mandatory proxying of certain connections (like the system that recently snagged wikipedia in the UK).
Because we have thousands and thousands of computers, each running a hundred or more Apache processes, we end up with hundreds of thousands of TCP connections open to our memcached processes.

I guess using a single-process Web server would be too easy; it's practically cheating.
I just flagged it and moved on, although I really wish pg would just nuke all the politics stories, because otherwise they start breeding.
Recession will (hopefully) wipe SEO off the earth
If you do SEO for a living, you will be out of business or irrelevant in 3 years
If they reduce the charge per-bid enough, then it does become an auction site. (And if it's large enough by that point, they'll still be raking it in.) They could also invite others with goods to sell and share the per-bid fee. If both of those things happen in a timely fashion, then it will be difficult for the authorities to argue that it's not an auction site.
Recruiters also.
We use AuthSMTP.com with fairly link-heavy text. It's often pretty lengthy text, so that might help.

Make sure your SPF works.

Most of the suggestions here are for campaign software, and that might help-- just use a mail merge feature. Such software often has metrics like bounces, opens, spam-responses built in.
Here's how that will work out in a competitive market:

* Some companies will be fearful, because they don't understand, and, as you say, will indiscriminately avoid all open source software.

* Other companies will take the time and effort to understand what GPL, BSD, the Apache license, and the like mean and require of them, and as a consequence will be able to take advantage of open source software where it is appropriate. This will be a competitive advantage for them.
at first I thought "are you kidding me, someone actually tracked this?" and then I found myself being by pulled by an invisible force to find how many pages he read from his "favorites" - 50,623
Former NASDAQ president charged for $50bn Ponzi scheme
The provider of a free service has a right to dictate the terms of use. However, a government service is NOT free, it is paid for with taxes. And last I checked, producers of content that the FCC deems inappropriate are paying the same taxes as everyone else. (And increasingly in this YouTube generation, that could be almost anyone.)

Filtering is a CLIENT SIDE operation. The FCC isn't doing anything useful specifying what content is filterable. If the government wants to be useful, they can publish a list of recommended web browsers that allow user-specified filtering, e.g. through a list of URL patterns.

The approach of filtering the entire Internet service is of course overkill. It would be like using police to barricade the public roads that lead to an adult film store. The road is yours, paid with your taxes; whether or not you enter the shop is up to you, part of your own, personal filter.
Arthur Kantrowitz
Functional Programming is harder than Object Oriented Programming
Article details why OOP languages have been so popular over the years while FP languages have remained relatively unpopular.
The net threatens the status quo, so the status quo will attempt to control the net. Stronger attempts to put the net.genie back in the bottle are coming.

I most certainly agree that the net should not be censored, but stopping censorship will not happen through democratic means - the herd is easily panicked with tales of child abuse, terrorism, organized crime, etc.

The control will be defeated through technical means - pervasive encryption seamlessly integrated into every day applications, such that filtering "bad stuff" from "normal usage" is impossible.

All I'm saying is that I'd like to see one ISP blaze the trail of total control (and thus become the technical battleground) instead of all of them at once.
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
Herd mentality strikes again. I didn't think this was a big deal when he wrote the original post and I still don't think it's a big deal after this follow-up.
That is the opposite of the practice used in the print world - where lorem ipsum comes from. The rationale is that the semantic meaning of the words can bias design decisions. This sequence of "words" has the same distribution of letters as English, yet means nothing.

What is the rationale from the web designers you've spoken to?
Emoticons singing carols using textToSpeech
Incumbent campaigns
Where were you surfing?
They each have a Web page in their help sections where you initiate contact. Look for the bulk emailing sections.
To a limit. Admittedly, having different argument types is pretty useful but still, 5 independent parts with their own semantics some of which may not be usable in certain contexts* ? how are auxiliary arguments useful in the general case?

This still does not affect the rest of my claims. Having multiple execution models in the same language is bloated. So are many other things in the CL standard.

* Details: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/03_da....
For the past 26 years my dad has told me it has. He says this big bang is just one of many big bangs and that big bangs have been going on for an infinite amount of time (forever).

He also told me about particles smaller than atoms before quarks were moved from theory to fact. I never really thought much about all the stuff he told me until I started hearing of discoveries and theories about the same stuff.

He studies Sanskrit and the Vedas.
Grading is the worst job I can think of. It alone steers me away from most teaching positions.

(shudder) I have to grade finals tomorrow. egh.
Ask HN: What's a modern equivalent of the 80's "War Games" movie?
I saw "War Games" (1983) movie as a teenager and that changed my world. For a European guy like me, it was the first time I saw a home computer or a modem. Matthew Broderick's incarnation of an computer geek was so cool I was determined to become one. I didn't even know the term "hacker" but that movie definitely was influential enough to make me want being one of them.

That was back in the 80's. What movies (if any) are driving young hackers nowadays?
Actual article:
http://mattwilcox.net/archive/entry/id/1031/
A lottery ticket for $0.01 is still a for-profit lottery, which comes under a truckload of independent oversight (for good reason).
Larry Lessig moving to Harvard
Apple eases up, starts selling iPhone fart noise app
Its not an auction if bidding costs money regardless if you win or not. Its more of a raffle.
I've always been fascinated with the game theory, math, and psychology behind these schemes. There's a bunch of variations of the auction model that can guarantee or nearly guarantee a profit. One of the more popular auction models is to make the winner the person with the lowest unique bid, but it costs to place bids.
If the goal is quantity of gorgeous women, and only to the point of sleeping with them, then who cares why they like you? :-)
It is not, but it is a flaw in the argument of the post i was responding to.
That's where roommates / flatmates can really help. Using craigslist you can often find 600 - 700$ a month rooms in areas where a nice one bedroom apartment would cost you 1500+ / month. Now days cervices like Pepod and zipcar can make not owning a car easy to deal with in reasonably urban areas. So a 400$ a month apartment in dumb fuck + a car might be more costly than dealing with a roommate in a "higher cost of living area".
It's not so bad in CS, a lot of the courses I took (and the one I TA'd) used automated grading systems.

My autograder was a CGI-perl script. Dead easy.
Well... Both rely on their customers being complete fools...
I don't see the difference between this and playing the slots in Vegas. In both cases the house has the advantage; in both cases more is paid for the final prize than what it's worth; in both cases the winner likely gets a good deal on the prize and the losers lose their investment.
Find another career. Hack at home for fun.
The lowest bid game is equivalent to simply giving it to the last person who bid isn't it?
08ama. L33t!
I'm also using mailchimp, I do ~500 emails per month. Not a very high volume, so it costs 3c per email, but the data they provide on the campaigns is worthwhile and especially helpful when I have to report back to my clients.
Nothing is inherently despicable about the model. What is despicable is that it is advertised as an auction site, not a gambling game. Also, a lot of these sites (there are many like it) don't have very much transparency, and it would be easy for them to not award a prize at all while still collecting the bidding fees.
Good for him for straightening things out. I can really understand getting ticked at ignorance, even well-meaning ignorance. Moreover, I can really understand being ignorant on an esoteric issue... I am quite ignorant about a great many things.
These types of distribution deals can be great for your business. Just make sure that both sides understand what is being agreed to as far as the execution. I have had some bad experiences with feature creep when working on white label partnerships like this. That is, we thought we were delivering a white label version of our existing solution as is and the partner thought that they were getting unlimited customization.
No disrespect, but to assume there must be smaller and smaller particles than atoms and there must have been universes before ours is probably much more obvious and comforting than trying to think up wave mechanics or explain singularity.

Scientifically, your dads words carry no more merit than that old lady who thought "its the turtles all the way"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
Not signing up for cryonics - what does that say? That you've lost hope in the future. That you've lost your will to live. That you've stopped believing that human life, and your own life, is something of value.

No, it's because I value my life so much that I don't believe in cryonics. If it is your belief that it is possible to live N number of lives, your current life loses some of its meaning. Maybe you don't strive for so much, because there's probably more time later. Maybe you don't try as hard because if you fail, you might get a do-over. Maybe you don't shoot for the whole "regret nothing" thing with as much tenacity.
I don't agree with the assertion that all Americans (or even "most") will move to free Wi-Fi and drop their current paid access. Wi-Fi is a shared medium, and the more users on it, the worse the performance. What good is free if it's unuseable? IF this comes to pass, I may try the free access, but you can bet I'll still keep my DSL account.
I have only once found the problem to be bad memory on the test machine. But let me tell you the joy, figuring that out was hard to describe.
Who keeps track of the books that they've read? And why? I can think of better ways to spend my time.
Uhh, the Nike swoosh? The Adidas three-stripes? McDonalds arches?

Obama's logo is good, but if you're talking about simplicity and communication, it barely compares to the culturally-transcendent nature of those corporate logos. Those logos don't identify with a language or anything, they simply carry meaning.
Apple iPod Ad on Yahoo Games (watch)
Slick presentation, but I have to ask a few basic things:

Were the heck do you get the 50Bn number, where do you get the 10% number, and what leads you to believe that the problem is ease of use?

Does this 50Bn number include photos that the owner does not want to share? Photographers take tons of photos they throw away, professionals take photos for work (evidence, training, etc). I generally don't post photos at all.

"no uploading" -- does that mean I have to leave my computer on and connected? Or are you uploading in the background?

Is uploading to Flickr actually that hard? The demo looks like there is a pretty high 'click tax', to the point of choosing an iTunes/iPhoto xml library file, etc, and that's on top of downloading & installing the program and signing up with a credit card.

Nitpick on the home page: "adddress"
I think the University of Johannesburg's logo falls into this category:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UJ_logo.png

(Excuse the quality of the image).

Here's some information behind the logo:

http://www.uj.ac.za/Informationabout/OurBrand/tabid/8287/Def...
Ah, so you'd rather have one established technology to circumvent than numerous being worked on in parallel. Gotcha.

I will stick with my irrational assumption that the Internet at large is safe from this shit, at least until I'm too old to care ;)
++ on this.
None taken. My dad is a writer by profession (he was a technical writer while I was young, and that lead me to computers and programming). He is by no means scientific in anything he says or does and he always taught me and my siblings to think for ourselves and never take anything as fact simply because someone said so.

I was just sharing that I thought it was amazing how there are texts (the Vedas) that have been around for thousands and thousands of years that basically state as fact the very stuff people are discovering today. Most people would agree that it's absurd to say that people even one thousand years ago knew about atoms and the big bang, and yet there seem to be books that say they did.

My dad does appear to assume a lot of stuff, and we have argued (debated) on topics for hours and hours. But as someone who believes that it's statistically guaranteed that we're not alone in the universe, I also believe it's equally as probable that people knew about, and wrote about, stuff we're "discovering" today.
He obviously has both integrity and compassion. Good for him for taking his lumps and hopefully expanding her awareness that the sun doesn't rise and set on Redmond, WA. I hope she will explore the vast richness available in the open-source world, especially Linux. There is some great software out there for educators and students.
If they are not charging for the bid (chance to win) but for the bandwidth when submitting a bid from the web page, then they get around this. They can demonstrate that by having another channel for bids, like email messages formatted Majordomo command-style.

Make this easily accessible, and it will be hard to argue that they are not an auction site. However, it can still be arcane (and slow) enough that the majority of the public still won't use it. Again, no one's gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
These logos were seemingly scraped from this video with the designer describing the creation process:

http://www.vsapartners.com/news.asp?article=70
I should also add that we use separate IPs for one-off emails that are not really bulk email (such as signup confirmations, emails you send via our API). This is hugely important for deliverability.
I kept reading because I'm not easily offended. Then the words "chica" and "bonk" offended me. Even out of context. Sorry :(
It seems interesting and the ratio of recording the book to reading the book is favorable...
Actually, good businesses only do the former. Great/exceptional businesses do both.
Ever since a high school teacher busted me for starting an end-of-term paper only three days prior, I've always copied the final copies of any documents I've had to submit anywhere into a clean document created the morning the submission was due. I'm glad that the habit I learned still has value past high school & college.
Right, especially since Bell Labs is about the most institutional example of that kind of environment. I suppose not many people really had as unusual of an entry into that environment as the subject of this article did. Things were quite different back then.
I'd take $50k up-front over $70k for a year, since in the former I immediately get a ton of free time to think of something better to do, learn a skill, move to a better area, etc. In the latter I'll be no better off a year from now than I am right now.
But you are buying the right to bid. One could argue that it's a separate service altogether, like a costco membership that's graded on how much you buy.
I think cryonics is about as useful as all those old tombs in Egypt. We could probably clone some of those body's and reviving people from cryonics might be an interesting experiment for our decedents but in both cases much of that dead person will have been lost. And trading resources in this life so that some shadow of me might show up in the future is not worth much time. So yea it's the best hope we have now, like it was their best hope back then, but all they are talking about is imperfect copies.
If they were smart they'd be selling "memberships".
By that logic, would you rather die in 5 years than in 50?
Yes. Under normal circumstances, the attackers would have silently harvested all the victim's accounts and sold them in Estonia.
Ah, interesting! If anyone has an article explaining this process, please point it out!
Do they have an API that you can inject email into their system with?

Edit: It looks like they do have a programmatic API. Next question: can you do single-opt email? And the cost page makes it look like it's free to send out a single email at a time.

If all this is accurate, it seems like this would be a perfect service. Free, API, single-opt -- so what's the catch?
Well said. There's one thing I would add if you're doing defence work which is about security. The complications brought on by working with classified data can be very frustrating: limited or no internet access, limits on the software you can use, hassle presenting results at conferences etc, having to double check everything you write/say to the outside world to make sure you haven't said something you shouldn't. And no, knowing secret stuff isn't worth the hassle - most of it isn't even interesting anyway.
More like I'd rather have a sandbox that gives an advance look at what's coming to the rest of the net.

My assumption is only slightly weaker - the long term internet is fine as privacy technology will outpace politics, but there will be turmoil as they battle.
When I first heard about this I thought that it sounded like suicide too but for entirely different reasons: If Cisco decides to fight rather than reconcile this case might not turn out the way everybody thinks it will.

And then what?
They can be replaced, but they will not be replaced by US companies. The south spent about 50k / worker to get Honda and others to start building cars in the US but much of Honda's labor force is still out side the US.
"the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion"

I think that would have been better worded to read "mindlessness".
If they had zero debt they would not be in trouble so it's not just them but everyone who they owe money to (including retired people) that stands to lose money.

PS: This bailout if it worked is far less costly than taking over their pension plans would be.
Err... It takes about 5 seconds per book. You finish a book, you write it down. I've been doing this for years. Sometimes it is fun to look back and see all the books I forgot I read.
PageRank is simply a measure of how many pages link to your pages, weighted by their own PageRank. Traffic has nothing (directly) to do with it.
James Hamilton: Data center architect leaves Microsoft for Amazon
Your New Agreement With Google, Chrome Users
Andy Grove urges Intel to build car batteries
Sounds like gambling...
Can a Russian entrepreneur really cash in on the emoticon?
How would you like to be on the Google Pack team right now? What a lame assignment.
Also the Greeks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_theory#Philosophical_ato...

And there's the Greek concepts of cosmos and chaos. That's not to say the Indo-Aryans weren't there first. Just that there appears to be something primal in these concepts to very early cultures. In populated areas, I think we've forgotten the impact of looking up at the nightly stars. Artificial light, whenever we need it, also seems to take the shine off that wonder.

I remember the first time I thought about an infinite array, in time and space, of big bangs. It's a cool thought especially with the realization that we're thinking it while stranded on a tiny, wet rock floating in the middle of nowhere.
I noticed you're already down to (-1) and seem to be new to the site... Just a little pro-tip, don't bring out any views around here that go against the tenets of scientific naturalism.

If you do, you're generally assumed to be yet another irrational religious fundamentalist and the drive-by downmods will come faster than you could imagine. Awhile ago I couldn't even discuss design theory in contrast to biological evolution without getting dismissed as someone irrational who just had an axe to grind.