skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's awesome that skimlinks exists...years ago I worked for a company that relied on affiliate revenue and we had someone working full time to maintain relationships. I imagine they lose some of the pickier affiliate programs, but this is an awesome way to test out the revenue model.

It also brings up another interesting point. If this revenue model works for pinterest, it means it could also work for pinterest users. Someone can create a browser plugin that automatically converts user links to affiliate links when they get posted to pinterest, and kicks back the commission to the poster. Probably too hard to distribute the plugin, but still thought it was worth mentioning.
Errbit is an awesome self-hosted, open source alternative - https://github.com/errbit/errbit

It's compatible with the Airbrake API, so you just need to configure the Airbrake Notifier gem to point to your Errbit instance.
This looks like a great start. The first suggestion I would make is listing the features down the page instead of across. I think that will make it significantly easier for visitors to see what your platform has to offer.

Also, I would expand some of the sections. For example, under Listings Distribution Network -

Landlords and Managers: List your properties for free

Agents and Brokers: Save time by quickly searching for quality properties that match your desired criteria
Please also check out Errbit - https://github.com/errbit/errbit

If you don't like something about it, I'm always happy to accept pull requests :)
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I wrote a little MobileSubstrate (Jailbroken iPhone) shim to intercept the most common API used to access this data, block its use, and alert the user when it's happening.

https://github.com/bri3d/AddressBookPrivacy/downloads

It should be available in the BigBoss repository as "Address Book Privacy" sometime tomorrow.

My tweak catches and displays the use of address book data as it happens, and based on my observations I think the Hipster version of address book theft is a lot less egregious than the Path one. Hipster accesses your address book only when you ask it to "Find Friends" - "Contacts" is selected by default. While this certainly shouldn't be the case, it's nowhere near as bad as Path, which sends all your contacts without asking every time you log in (along with again if you select "Find Friends").
There are plenty of cases where immigration can be negative, particularly in the short term, so controlling the amount of immigration makes sense.

In the case of corn subsidies you can argue that the political process has been derailed in favour of special interest groups. If you follow the chain from corn -> HFCS -> diabetes and heart disease, it's not even acting in the citizen's best interests.

Similarly, it's also trade issues that make malaria worse than it has to be. Screens for windows would make it much less likely to spread - but the material is too expensive for most of the people who really need it.
Question for wiser vim users than myself: If I delete (say, a line comment) with `D`, how do I paste it as a line of its own without macro trickery involving `o<esc>p`? Is that possible?
I respectfully disagree. Tools like Weka, nltk, etc. are okay for exploratory data analysis, but it's risky to use them for problems that scale, problems that differ from the norm, or homegrown solutions for data that does not yet exist. Because a large portion of HN users are interested in bringing their ideas to life, I'd suspect that the latter particularly resonates with them.

The problem facing people who intend to work with data that does not yet exist becomes one of feature selection: what data matters and how do we use it? For NLP tasks, does stemming matter? What about part-of-speech tagging? Some classification problems are not linearly separable, which makes certain kernel methods impossible without using (and knowing to use) the kernel trick.

In the end, I think my reply here is tautological: ML is too complex to be transformed into a set of APIs a la Google Maps and Google Search.
In our Q platform, we specifically upload only the hashes of the address book. There is absolutely no need to have the actual email or phone number of people in order to find "who is on the service". However, when you INVITE people, we specifically download the full email address because we send them an invitation ourselves.

This is just one out of 100 things that our platform does while solving the usual stuff of apps: user signups, importing address books, invites, etc. However, we applied for a patent on some of the stuff we do. Even though I personally don't like patents, it's the thing to do in the current environment. Going to write a blog post about it soon.
I hate when they bring up Warren Buffett. He skirted the US tax laws for the majority of his life and now that he's older, he wants everyone to pay more in taxes.

If he really cared, he would have fought for higher tax laws earlier in his life.
There are many people who want to have power and control, but don't have the skills or experience to do anything concrete and exceptional. There is an entire management advice industry around finding tools and psychological tricks which allow those people to appear high-minded, visionary, and strategic. Eric Ries may not be one of these people, but his 5-why's lecture presents one of those tools. Anyone managing a team of ditch diggers needs some hard-to-criticize collection of platitudes which can be uttered to avoid either joining the diggers and/or being identified as completely useless.
Do you really expect Apple to MITM every app (and update) to make sure that every developer in the world isn't sending random stuff to their servers?

Are you really that anti-Apple to believe that?

Blame the developer, not the distributor.
Even on Google, that doesn't affect the user at all. I wouldn't mind.

However, it would definitely piss off the affiliate program...who should just boot Google from their program.

Now that I think about it more, that's the real problem with this. The businesses are most likely getting sales anyway, and pinterest can't argue that they're doing anything special to generate the sale. Since pinterest can't censor links to these merchants, they'll probably end up getting booted from their programs.
This should be combined with my even more radical plan for fixing some irregularities in the year-by-year accounting system for income tax (notably, the fact that progressive taxation punishes you more for earning nothing for nine years and then $1m the tenth year, than for earning $100k steadily each year):

Annually, you calculate how much income you've earned over your entire life (and of course subtract any deductions you've become entitled to over your entire life). Then you look that up in a progressive (i.e. convex) tax function which tells you how much tax you owe for your entire life. Subtract the amount of tax you've already paid with all prior years' returns, and pay the difference.
Stripe has great docs, which are hand-edited results from Docco.js. https://stripe.com/docs/api

Mashery has iodocs
https://github.com/mashery/iodocs

One thing I particularly like about Backbone's docs is that it has some executable code, which is pretty swank. Similar, but not API docs, but Marijn Haverbeke's book Eloquent Javascript has a built in console that lets you load and test snippets from the book. Cloud9 IDE built with node.js I think also allows embeddable executable snippets in the browser. It'd be cool to see more interactive api docs using similar techniques.
It would be absolutely trivial for Apple to flag apps which use the Address Book APIs for closer inspection (including making sure that the user has to opt in to have their Address Book sent anywhere) - the same Apple tool which detects access to unauthorized ("private") Objective-C APIs could just as easily flag access to the AddressBook framework.
I'm working w/ ujeezy on this.

Here's the basic problem we're trying to address: if you know what you want on eBay, search is generally sufficient, but product discovery is really hard when you want to browse. We're trying to test whether or not a more visual way of browsing eBay would be something that would appeal to both casual eBay users and serious eBay enthusiasts.

We've setup some hypotheses to see if this is something worth pursuing (based on a minimum sample of 500 uniques):

- Click through rate (clicks to eBay): 20%

- Conversion rate of those clicks: 3% (over 7 days)

- Return rate for users: 15% of users return within 2 days of their first exposure

Any exposure would be appreciated. I'll post our test results if there's interest once it's complete.
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"Some would argue that it is inherently unfair to tax “paper gains” before they are realized — Mr. Zuckerberg won’t receive $28 billion in cash; he holds only paper. Moreover, markets are inherently volatile; one year’s paper gains is another’s real losses. However, these arguments are far less credible when paper losses give rise to real tax refunds."

Wouldn't it be simpler and more consistent to get rid of these tax refunds, and have neither paper gains nor paper losses taxed or refunded, than to have a separate tax for gains and refund for losses?
Stop Using jQuery.  Use Javascript.  Use Nodejs.
As many have notes in the past, 2 + 2 does equal 5 for sufficiently large values of 2. Marking it as an absolute falsehood merely indicates an insufficient knowledge of various areas of mathematics.
Instagram sends up your whole contact list up IF you go to "Find Friends -> From my contact list".
Yes, or at least not allow open APIs that make it so simple. What else is the point of a walled garden? They're able to make sure all their other arcane rules are followed (like Amazon linking to their web store), they should be able to keep data safe.
Not a tax lawyer, but doesn't the Jobs family pay 35% death tax? The writer intentionally does not mention this. Although this is not income tax, its false to suggest that they are someway cheating the system.

Edit: grammer
I really like this idea. I would add info about how long certain data is retained.
For one, if you want to see the later answers, you need to log-in. On SO you can just see everything, and it used to be that you could post a question as a guest.

In addition, there is a whole family of sites on StackExchange, each with their own set of active users and people. To me, Quora just seems like a better version of Yahoo answers, while SO is what I want a successful Q&A community to be.
Lol, what does it matter when both terms are stereotypical bullshit?
I believe that both browsers are based on WebKit and V8 (that's what they've said about the stock browser in the past, anyway), so your results aren't too surprising. The Chrome app adds a bunch of new features, better UI, and makes the browser into a real, bona fide app.

That's my read on it, anyway.
That looks alright, but they really won't last very long without charging. Error catching services are very expensive to run.

Errbit (https://github.com/errbit/errbit) is an open source and free alternative, which is self-hosted. It's also compatible with the Airbrake API.

It's easy to set up in a few minutes, either on heroku, or on your own server. As well as being free, you can store your potentially private data in-house, and customize and integrate it as much as you want.
I've bitched about how restrictive Apple is with the App Store plenty, but that ship has sailed a long time ago. But once you decided to have a restrictive app store and declare to provide "freedom from programs that steal your private data" (http://gawker.com/5539717/), be the best damn restrictive app store you can be and actually provide freedom from programs that steal your private data. Apple has inserted themselves as necessary component in the developer-customer relationship of iOS (and even declared privacy as one of the reasons why they are necessary), so they damn well should take some blame here.
- Pipelining would be pretty cool if it worked. There are a number of problems with it:
* head of line blocking
* transparent proxies that don't support pipelining properly
* error detection
- FIFO queuing: Why is the client in a better position to know in what order the page needs to be rendered than the server? Isn't the server the one that knows all the resources that need to be sent to the client?
- Client initiated request: Yeah, server push is a complicated area. But there are some cases where server push is clearly superior. For example, data URI inlining ruins cacheability. It's better to server push an already cached resource that can be RST_STREAM'd than inline a resource and make it larger and uncacheable.
- While we'd like to get rid of headers as much as possible, it's still impractical to completely eliminate headers like User-Agent.
- SPDY does not force data compression, and optional data compression has been removed in draft spec 3.
If it's common sense why do so many companies fail at identifying and addressing root causes?

One failure that I see very frequently is that the analysis reliably stops at the invisible line between the trenches and the management.

I.e. the people-problems are very well identified by everyone in the room, but nobody feels like calling out the guy who sits on the other end of the table in your next "performance review". It just doesn't seem like a good idea.

This is something that I'd like to see people like Eric talk about.

Because either I live in my own personal bubble here or that is a much more common problem than people not knowing how to trace back a technical issue to people and processes.

In fact, every engineer I know could sing you a song about it. But again, perhaps I really just happen to live in a particular bubble far away from Harvard...
I am thinking of precise reasons why these services want the e-mail addresses in the first place. Is it to create a social network graph of the email addresses? Does this mean that all of these small services have a social graph? That doesn't seem so bad given that most people have already given that to one very large institution.
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> They did not in ANY WAY have our permission, either implicitly or explicitly to collect private information about our children, who are, 3 and 4 years old.

What are you talking about? Do you expect them to perform complex data analysis to figure out that certain contacts are young children, and then explicitly ask permission to share those? Or do you expect them to preemptively ask for any potential sensitive contact information? "Can we use your children's information?" "Can we use your in-laws' information?" "Can we use the address of the President's safehouse?" Etc.
As the author off-handedly implies, this only works for liquid investments. It's obviously unworkable for someone with a massive paper gain in an illiquid investment -- e.g., shares in a privately held company whose stockholder agreement prohibits transfers.

But if the proposal would be to force paper gains only in publicly traded companies to be marked to market, then everyone will work awfully hard to avoid ever directly holding shares in publicly traded companies... which, I don't know, seems possibly problematic.

Seems more realistic to go after the revenue on its way in to companies. (E.g., require companies with executives domiciled in the US to pay US taxes on worldwide profits. No more "Double Irish" and zero US taxes for GE, unless Jeff Immelt wants to move to Dublin.)
I'm familiar with that treatise on how to disagree. While it is a great resource for certain styles of conversation, I stand by the tone of my response. Thank you however for your opinion and concern for the community.
You are referring to the estate tax. The term "death tax" is deliberately misleading and used as a propaganda term by those who want to repeal the estate tax.
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The idea of owing tax the moment a company goes public seems tremendously stupid. Not a single person I know who's had shares in a company that went public was able to sell them immediately. They all had to hold onto them for some set period, and some of them actually had to pay tax on the gains before they could even sell the shares (to get the liquid capital to pay the tax). Maybe I'm missing something?
> That’s what Lawrence J. Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle, did. He reportedly borrowed more than a billion dollars against his Oracle shares and bought one of the most expensive yachts in the world.

I believe this is also what Markus Persson (Notch) of Minecraft fame did. He mentioned a couple of months back about how it's cheaper for him to borrow money than it is than for him to take money out of the company. He's not as rich as Zuck though.
In this type of meeting the analysis always ends before it gets to the point of questioning the guy who was calling the shots that went in the foot.

One of the things I really enjoy about 5 Whys done well is that it can be done asynchronously. You don't need to gather everyone into a room for a long drawn out retrospective, preach lofty best-practices that everyone knows, and come out of it with nothing actionable on a reasonable timeframe.

Instead, someone who was close to the incident can draw up a quick email with the 5 whys, a tally of person-hours spent on the incident, and send it out quickly.

Oftentimes the answers from the 5Ws /are/ obvious to engineers -- we need more monitoring! that wasn't tested well enough! we didn't have time to prepare for this problem! -- their power comes in formalizing cleanup of technical debt, and prioritizing it appropriately.

Production problems don't get swept under a band-aid, new features get queued until the proportional investments are made.

And, yes, if the 5 Whys has management buy-in, it does address why the problematic cron job was rushed into production in the first place.
"How can you honestly not remember this guy's name" - A commenter from the original post.

This comment makes me think about whether this story is even true. I'd say it probably isn't based on that one statement alone. How can the guy not remember the lawyer's name? He has emails exchanged and the guy supposedly stole money from him. I like to forget negative stuff, but I can assure you I would remember this guy's name.
This is pretty disappointing. I hope the lack of an update means it will just be delayed, or maybe this is just wishful thinking.
Yes, can someone clarify what happens at death?

Even with the proposed change, it seems if Zuckerberg dies after the IPO but before the year's end, his heirs would pay no taxes on the stock?
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I do not understand why anyone is complaining about anything other than perhaps Apple's choice to make this an app-level permission rather than a "one-off" permission.
Not sure why you need ReactOS if that's the only requirement. You should just put stripped-down Linux installs in their place and run WINE, on which almost all applications work perfectly well. ReactOS in fact is mostly a kernel project. The majority of their userland support comes from WINE. The difference is that they are trying to clone the kernel to provide the truest Windows-like experience (including driver compatibility).

If you don't need the hardware support the reality is that you'll be much better off using a newer version of WINE on a Linux installation than you would be using a ReactOS snapshot.
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> If his Facebook shares decline in value next year, he’d get a refund.

This seems like potentially the biggest problem with the scheme, at least in a sane world. What if, as happens in the markets, the shares decline in a big way? The author addressed it briefly in the end but I felt it was half-assed and an overall unsatisfying answer. The government is happy to take $X where X is huge but next year $X is gone on government spending and the refund due to any reason (bad economy, bad company) is basically created out of thin air. Unless the government happens to be better at using $X to create $X+$c than the original holder of $X, the refund has to be artificially created or deducted from other government programs. Nothing new for our government though, especially for amounts as insignificant as billions of dollars when trillions are so easily created. Seriously, justifications like this:

> A mark-to-market system of taxation on the top one-tenth of 1 percent would raise hundreds of billions of dollars of new revenue over the next 10 years.

don't sound very convincing to me at all. All this arguing over a few hundred billion dollars over 10 years? The US government is still spending trillions of dollars each year, we're still trillions of dollars in debt. Maybe the government can keep going for another 100 years in this crazy state, maybe it can't. If it can't, I'd rather get the worst of the possible financial problems over with now and have the US citizens deprive the feds from all sources of income and talk about things like taxes and valid uses of tax revenue from a fresh start with an entirely new government (even cooler, a saner and more distributed approach to government than massarchy). This might be radical enough to get some downvotes but I don't think anything less than a radical change will fix things in a way the huge majority will enjoy. (Other radical changes I'm banking more on and care more about are things like a positive Singularity.)
Errbit can literally be set up in 5 or 10 minutes. Either on Heroku or on your own server.
And if you are currently using Airbrake in your Rails app, all you need to do is add one line to your config, and it's done.

That's a great point about Heroku though - there should definitely be an open source EC2 framework that provides a similar infrastructure...
Here's a good list of highly-praised books. Most of them look like they could make it past the censors: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-m...

From those I personally recommend "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" and "Gödel, Escher, Bach". SICP might not make it through, but GEB definitely would (although its direct relevance to day-to-day work in web development may be questionable, it should do a lot to spark an interest in computer science).
I won't deny that it's a term of propaganda, but how is it misleading?
DuckDuckGo (the search engine) is doing the same. E.g., search for something that returns Amazon search result, and the link to Amazon will have their affiliate tag included.

A positive point, however, is that they are open about this on their website: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216405-m...
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How much of a performance increase can be seen with transactional processing?
I've used web-based cron services in the past for projects on shared hosting that doesn't offer decent cron support. This would've been a godsend; most are downright terrible or ill-maintained.