skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's all about the zeros.

Simple fact: there are orders of magnitude more people in the world struggling to use the most basic functions of Microsoft Word than there are people who can write Hello World. Anything which makes tasks easier for people in group A is valuable, even if it's already trivial for people in group B.
Are Readers Customers?
Paul Carr recently wrote a post at PandoDaily that many call "inside baseball" or "navel gazing." Some commenters said that those sort of posts aren't what they want to read.

While I don't care either way for "inside baseball" posts from PandoDaily, I suggested that the site listen to it's customers. Carr and Lacey both responded that they don't have customers, they have readers. Implying that they don't need to listen to them.

So, are readers of any media customers? Why or why not? I am open to being wrong, so tell me if I am.
I realized in myself that the number 3 tool of "Turn Complaints into Solutions", with the intent to "eliminate the kind of mindless complaining that doesn't serve a greater purpose and allow compalining that is justified and worthwhle [sic]", only works so long as once the complaint has been made, that someone actually listens or at the very least, acknowledges your concerns and maybe even offer good counterpoints.

But when presenting a solution that is not acknowledged or listened to, a person can quickly spiral into mindless complaining. This is especially true if you were right in the first place. Instead of a creating a solution-oriented employee, a company can quickly create complainers who always mumble "If they had listened to me, we wouldn't have to spend $X to fix it".

In short, the company culture has to allow complaints to be heard and acknowledged as much as the employee should not complain mindlessly.
It's worth noting that these are approximations of zip code areas, rather than exact zip codes. http://www.census.gov/geo/ZCTA/zcta.html - for most reasons, it'll be good enough, though.
Facturacion Electronica en Mexico
La Facturación Electrónica en México es un nueva herramienta y requisito fiscal, dentro de las nuevas tendencias empresariales y de comercio electrónico en méxico que han llevado a las empresas a implementar nuevos recursos tecnológicos.
Well it's not exactly "stealing" when the app is forced to tell you upfront what it's going to "Edit SMS or MMS, read SMS or MMS, receive SMS". How more explicit can you be?
To be clear: I did my homework, I knew the situation when I started, and I'm not trying to find the government guilty of anything, other than natural inertia.

As I said in the post, it's perfectly legal to book a private car service in New York. So it's not like the idea is a lost cause- I just have to work with private car services. What I'm saying is that having to exclude yellow cabs is a disadvantage to me, the yellow cab drivers, and passengers. Forcing people to stand out on street corners is not very forward-thinking.
MWC 2012: Nvidia  Samples Tegra 3+, Tegra 4 to OEM Partners
Stop asking for permission, start begging for forgiveness.

You can't "book" a cab from your app?

Fine, put a button to 'call' the cab.

You can't "book" in advance, use the data from your app to guess the time someone should call in advance to have a cab for when they need it, then send them an alert to make that call, along with aforementioned link.

You mention livery services for "booking" when a user needs something booked send them to a livery service.

There are a million solutions to your problems, you just have to find them. Also, avoid jurisdictions with regulations contrary to your business model.
That’s an interesting. I rarely use actual measuring cups for main ingredients, so I was thinking of everyday cups, not the well-defined unit.

So I guess my error was using an ambiguous unit, which is even worse than mixing units.
At your cache layer (e.g. Varnish), you would need some VCL to collapse all the hundreds of User-Agents options into something sane like "X-Device", feed this header to your backend, and vary the content based on that instead. This way you can cache just a few representations per resource (e.g., "Desktop", "Mobile", "Tablet", etc.) instead of several hundred. The problem, of course, is maintaing this list of User-Agents.

On his mobile example, it's much easier to simply be pragmatic and serve content for different devices at differents URIs/domains altogether. It doesn't break if you can follow some kind of convention, such that the URLs from one map directly to the other (for instance, mysite.com/news/article -> m.mysite.com/news/article) and then you issue redirects accordingly.
This is not necessarily a win for everybody.

I can foresee a situation where cabs start to favor only bookings/hailings from this app, since the fares (i.e. people getting into the cab) clearly have money (since they have a smartphone) and will hopefully tip better.

The rest of us schmucks trying to hail a cab the old-fashioned way will be out of luck, since all the cabs will be waiting to pick up a smartphone fare.
The amazon profit margin is something like 3%, which some people consider unsustainable; 3% over the god-knows-how-many billions that flow through them is excellent business. The potential sustainability problem comes from having no margin for error or non-trivial change in structural costs. I don't know enough about it to have an opinion.

Regardless, 3% of $400 == $12, so with these numbers, Amazon breaks even on a new $400/year client, and makes money on any client that spends more than that.
Wifi location in Android irks me
We are a company without the cash to try to enforce the NDA

Then why disclose your trade secrets under such terms in the first place?

On busy streets, I sometimes see an attitude amongst pedestrians, who like to casually jump in front of cars as soon as their light turns green. Their thinking is that they have the right to cross. There's a sense that drivers are under pressure by law to keep you safe, otherwise they'll be in trouble and people tend to mistake that as some sort of immunisation against accidents.

But what if you get hit? Is the law going to give you back your legs?

I think the valuable lesson here is that, even if the law protects you and provided you can afford it, there's no substitute for prudence.
Yes, that is the problem they are going to run into, IMO. A similar price-point will buy them an Android phone with quite a bit more power than an early iPhone, and a much more mature application ecosystem. So why bother with Windows?
I live in Canada. Amazon.com (vs. amazon.ca) and Amazon prime almost make me want to move to America.

Amazon.ca is still pretty much just books.
Obviously I failed at conveying my point. Greatly sorry about that.

I think it's mad that in 2012, it's so hard to extend Visual Studio using C# and .net.

I'm not saying it drives .net developers away. I'm saying it hurts the .net platform as a whole.

Would VS's extensibility be easier, with better APIs and documentations, we would see a lot more third party plugins to improve our programming experience with VS.
That's like saying there's no difference between Applebee's and UNICEF. Yeah, they both give food to people. One of them does it to those in need to help them, the other to those that have money.
Hotels, Armenia in Syunik
Syunik marz hotels, hostels and apartments. Great deals and discount available. Syunik is wonderland. It is the most visited region in Armenia. Highlands, great for backpackers.
Whoops, broken rewrite rule. Fixed, thanks.
I suspect that hunter-gatherers did "worse" on other metrics like quality and duration of life. Obviously, no metric is somehow objectively better than another, but many people will argue that working harder is worth it if you live longer and healthier (i.e. you rarely or never have to truly worry about having enough food to survive).

Clearly some (most) hunter-gatherers found that organized food production was a better alternative, since they were obviously the ones that became farmers.
Daniel, the point of your article is generally sound, but you omitted an
important point, motivation.

When you see a clone of hn-books or bingo card creator or some other
idea, you're assuming the motivation for it is profit, and you're
assuming the goal is to create a business.

Your assumptions may often be correct, in fact, your assumptions may be
correct in the majority of cases, but unfortunately, they are not always
correct. You are too focused on "work," "effort," "skill," "business,"
and "profit" to see the less obvious and more idealistic side of things.

The less obvious side is, fun.

The greatest hackers I've known just love coding. They do it for fun.
Many are obsessive enough to use a pedal bike to power their CVS/GIT
server if that was the only way to keep it running. The challenge,
problem, or idea is mostly irrelevant. Though nearly everyone enjoys
having their accomplishments recognized by others, it's not a
competition for attention, recognition, profits, or anything else.

Great hackers often have the luxury of waking up, getting a cup of
coffee, and scratching whatever itch suits their current fancy. All
programmers suffer from the planning fallacy, or more accurately, an
over-abundance of optimism. When they see a challenge, their only
reaction is, "I can do that!" regardless if there is any realistic truth
in their statement. --HN is filled with interesting challenges.

The thing is, the fun is in trying. Whether or not they "succeed" or
"fail" matters very little since all the fun is had in just trying. It's
also fun to watch other people try, and learn from the lessons they have
learned through trying. Programming is not a spectator sport, but
learning from the efforts of others is as close as we'll get without
actually writing some code of our own, and possibly contributing it back
to those we've been watching.

I suspect at least some portion of the clones are merely people who
said, "I can do that!" and for fun, gave it a try. The idea of sincerely
competing in a business sense never crossed their minds as they fired up
their favorite text editor and started having some fun.

If the challenge that I found interesting and fun today was writing an
ebook on being a ScrumMaster, I'd enjoy my attempt at writing one. We
both know my results would undoubtedly suck compared to yours, but it
would still be fun for me, even though the result would still be yet
another bit of competition for you.

The above was a poor example, but I wanted to point out how the "fun for
me" can also be "harmful for you," even when no harm is intended. It's
quite similar to people who drive too fast, or in the opinion of law
enforcement, drive faster than allowed or faster than is safe. Some of
the "fun" people have is inconsiderate and harmful.
Succeeding at the default metrics will kill you
I'm interested in tossing my hat into the ring as well. I couldn't find a way to contact you in your profile or on github so here's me saying "me too!"
You're right about parameters inside of functions, but wrong about return values. It does work for return values as long as visual studio can deduce the type by running the code.

For parameters, you have to help visual studio out by documenting what the parameter does using XML code comments (e.g. /// <param name="arg1" type="String">Arg1 description</param>).
Nightmare re: cost/inventory or both?

I can kind of see how this works for merchants selling through Amazon. AMZN provides the customer with a good experience, makes customer feel valued, customer is more inclined to buy more products despite a bad moment knowing they'll be taken care of.

Probably not how it pans out in practice, however.
I agree, as someone who actually spends most of my life looking at the positive side of issues, I should agree with the essence of this.

However, instead I just found my self thinking "Screw off! I'll complain if I damn well care to." The whole tone seems to be of the sort of "Stop complaining and get back to work Crack of whip." Which is insulting, this sort of language would get me awfully close to sending in my resignation letter in direct response.
Did you sign a contract saying that your employers have rights to work you do outside office hours?

If yes, then yes.
If no, then no.
How to Find Facebook Users on Match.com by Using Face Recognition Tools
Making a business can be pretty good advertising for a consultant.
How does HN get traffic to their github repositories?
The question is simple: How does HN get traffic to their github repositories?

I've post a few scripts lately on github and am not sure how to get people to use them!
Re 64-bit: you are correct. But this still proves my point that Microsoft sometimes deliberately breaks backward compatibility.

Re bugs across different OS versions: your initial comment implied that, because Microsoft puts so much effort into backward compatibility, that app developers do not have to worry about testing across different Windows versions. This is wrong. Just like on Android, Windows developers generally need to test across different Windows versions for bugs, etc.

In other words, my point is that both Microsoft and Google put a similar amount of energy into maintaining backward compatibility. Therefore, Android development presents a similar challenge to Windows development to developers who care about compatibility. And in both cases, the challenge is not that huge... Case in point: the vast majority of apps written for Android 1.5 will run just fine on 4.0 --this trumps all arguments!
As a small time seller I can fully attest to this. I hate selling on Amazon just about as much as I love buying on Amazon.
I thought the same, the entrepreneur told him that both free and passing users weren't coming back. Doesn't that sound like a problem with both customer segments? How does the advice of listening to only one of them helps him any way, if he's not delivering what neither of them wants?

It seems that the proper advice would be to read through feedback and understand what they really want then make sure you have that. Instead of advising to ignore free customers.
If your business can simply be cloned by just reading comments on the internet about it, your business is not that great to begin with.
The Epic Failure of Google+
"a language I have not bothered to learn, nor do I plan to anytime soon"

That's why I down voted you. Is a JS compiler beneath you? Fine. Then post about that. Don't try to slip it into a veiled complaint about title accuracy.
It generates JavaScript. If you want to read JavaScript, it's there for you to do.
The article implies that laying cable in the ground is significantly more expensive than running it above ground. Hence the need to go into debt. The ROI timeframe will also likely change with the increased costs.

The point I was making is that one of the most expensive parts of getting fiber to the home is laying the cable. In this case they were able to do a 'test' run to a neighborhood where they could just relatively cheaply run the cable above ground. I hope that their cost structure still works when moving towards more expensive rollouts, but given how we have seen other fiber rollouts get scaled back or fail I'm not so sure.
Active video games fail to improve kids’ fitness
It must have been a combination of those comments and this previously-posted article (also on the same drug):

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/superman/20...
I agree that this is part of the success. There are other competitors, but they failed.

The other half of the success equation is that they were able to get important people to push their startup (IE: ycombinator and any of the connections they were able to get through this).

If they were just a couple of guys working on it, I don't think it would be as successful.
It depends on the law in your jurisdiction and, potentially, on promises you may have made in your employment agreement. Many jurisdictions will allow employers to enforce an IP agreement which you made as a condition of your employment, and employers in both these and under jurisdictions at least theoretically state claims to such IP in a lot of employment agreements or in appendixes to them. (e.g. buried in the Company Handbook which is incorporated by reference, which may or may not be enforceable in your jurisdiction.)

In general, I would tell employers about that sort of thing and ask for a quick two-line email that they have no objection to $NAME_PROJECT_HERE.

P.S. The right time to do this was before starting work on the app, since your options are very limited if they say "Cool, we own that now, any questions?"
The magic phrase to search for is "extraordinary number of incidents with your orders and corresponding shipments" which is from their standard form email when they cancel your account.

My guess would be that Amazon's business model is very sensitive to the return rate, since returns are very expensive for them: their whole system is built around getting product out the door to the customer not the other way round!

One or two expensive returns from a customer could wipe out all the profit they'll ever make from that individual. If they believe they can identify those customers who are likely to cost them money, it's in Amazon's interest to cut off service to those customers as early as possible.

Perfectly rational behaviour, but I imagine highly frustrating for those customers who naturally feel that they've been somehow accused of wrongdoing when Amazon decides it doesn't want to do business with them any more.
OkCupid having relationship problems behind the scenes that it diffuses using stand-offish, counter-productive measures = pretty much the definition of irony.

This is terrible management, which will hurt morale even further, and smacks of corporate rules being imposed from upstream. Perhaps their Match.com acquisition had some unforeseen side effects?
Wikileaks: Coke and Dow hired Stratfor to monitor PETA and other activists
"Forbidding unhappiness isn't going to make everyone happy."

This is one hell of a quote! It's going up on my cube wall (seriously)

I personally don't have a problem with being shot down with a good argument, but the problem that leads to "mindless complaining" is when management dismisses me without considering my solution at all, and then ends up costing us a bunch of money to fix further down in the product lifecycle -- and guess who gets stuck cleaning up that mess?
It took everything I had to not submit this as, "turing's test results"
Interesting - this article was titled "OkCupid Labs 'No Complaining Week'" a minute ago.
Was that changed by the mods, or by the author in response to the negative response it seems to be getting here?
Here are the basics of putting together a Naive
Bayes sentiment classifier with NLTK https://gist.github.com/1266556

Here is a full project I started to to the same backed by redis adn built to scale for large applications: http://github.com/tawlk/synt
Actually I believe they are attempting to create the proper science to accurately gauge/estimate things like happiness and the effects on productivity. $300 Billion isn't actually that much of an increase. Is it that hard to imagine that people being happier would increase productivity?
This is actually pretty smart. I would probably do the same thing.
Angry Birds uses the Web Audio API for sound, with Flash as a fallback for browsers that don't support that API:

http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2012/01/angry-birds-chr...
You'd have to already know CoffeeScript and Rails to benefit from this framework. I've used neither so personally I'd have a lot of trouble and a steep learning curve.

This builds on top of two other frameworks (Connect and Express) so I imagine the dependency stack for this framework is really long which might make debugging painful.
Qualities Your Best Employees Should Have
In addition to matt2000's question - I'd also like someone to explain when a node.js rails inspired framework would a better option then a standard rails or symfony based application.
What Ails Europe?
Forbidding unhappiness isn't going to make everyone happy.

It's really just a rephrasing of the good 'ol standby:

The beatings will continue until morale improves
How accidentally cutting yourself can save a life.
3 Online Reputation Management Don’ts for 2012
Read the contract you signed when you started working there - this is the kind of thing that should be covered!

If you don't have a contract, then you have bigger problems anyway.
The problem here is not with the audience, but rather with the speaker.

Daniel, you shouldn't even be worried about the copycats; they're not your true audience. Those 500 people who show up to paint the same house as you? They're not your true disciples. They'll play around getting paint on themselves for a week tops and then move on to the next shiny thing. The 3-4 who stay? THOSE are your disciples.

So go ahead. Shout from the rooftops. Share your ideas. The copycats will slavishly praise the good advice, will implement it poorly, and then move on. And the 2-3 people who actually understand you, take your advice to heart, and with diligence and patience implement it will love you forever.

Ideas are not the only diamonds in the rough; people are as well, and only diamonds can recognize diamonds. Don't bemoan by the vastness of the rough. Celebrate the rare diamonds you find instead.
You know there are 12,000,000+ people in PA, the entire state is not employed by AccuWeather.
It all depends on the employee contract you signed. At the company I work for the contract states that everything we make and do not disclose is company owned. This is because our work hours are so flexible that it can be hard to say what is "outside office hours".

But as long as I disclose my side projects they are mine and the company fully supports us in our side projects.

My advice: Read your employee contract and then talk to HR - make sure everything is legit before you make your move. That way there will be no surprises.
Google Music: The Best Service That Nobody’s Using
They are claiming "negativity" is causing this loss. Not unhappiness or depression but merely verbally sharing negative observations (or whatever negativity means). It would be hard enough to measure and quantify the effects of happiness, quantifying effects of negativity is downright absurd.
Something else that badly needs DVCS: government documents including legislation.

But I'm preaching to the choir.
Do you think the fig leaf is there for regulators or the other Android hardware manufacturers? While I agree there is no legally binding firewall (simply self-imposed), it seems there are some concerns they are attempting to address publicly.

I find Google's comments disturbing because the idea of a firewall means they have no intention of integrating Motorola. This would essentially limit any synergy between the two companies and turns this into a huge patent acquisition that comes with a side of distraction. If I was an investor, I would hope your theory of this being a complete joke is accurate since it entirely changes the lens on the transaction.
I know a few companies with rather successfully sell "Made in USA, from USA-sourced fibers" blankets in the $200 to $2000 range. The outlook is considerably more favorable if you go after the market segment with usefully high margins vs. raw market share (see also: Apple).