skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“However, to make such micro-targeted advertising practical, the social networks need to motivate their users to disclose information relevant to advertisers. ”

This is what makes most complaints in the facebook-makes-money-off-of-you vein a complete misunderstanding of technology.

For the purposes of advertising, facebook does not need you to disclose relevant information to anyone but facebook. Advertisers need never come anywhere near that information. The data doesn't even need to be sent to them in aggregate. All advertisers need to do is say “I want to target this demographic”. They then need to get no data other than “someone from this demographic clicked on your ad”. That's it! Facebook has the data, facebook does the matching, facebook provides feedback in clicks—this, yes, in aggregate—and no other information needs to be exchanged.

There is a broader argument being made here, about exposing personal information and what have you, but facebook doesn't need you to make your information public so that advertisers can get to it, they want you to make your information public so that that guy you met at a party last night can find you, friend you, and start liking your posts, thus making you feel that your posts are getting more attention, thus making you feel good about yourself, thus making you want to post more, thus making others want to get on more to read your posts, etc, etc. Of course, they also want it public so that guy over there can look you up and see some of your pictures, even if he doesn't necessarily intend on friending you. That way, said guy is also on facebook, using it more than before.

So I would argue that how public information disclosure is on facebook is far more about retention and usage than it is about advertising. Advertising can be and, at least as far as my understanding of it goes, is done without having to disclose anything to the advertiser. And that's as it should be, since the technology lets them not leak that info. Why would they want to provide that information if they can achieve the same results without doing so?

With that in mind, I wish the facebook privacy argument would stop presenting advertiser information swapping as a real issue. There are reasons that privacy is an issue on facebook, foursquare, etc., (indeed, this app is an excellent example) but I don't think advertising is one of those reasons. That can be done with very little information revealed, even in aggregate.

(It's possible I missed a detailing somewhere of facebook explicitly exposing information to advertisers in a way different from what I mention above; if so, I'd love a link and I'll sit down and be quiet now :) It's also true that between fb advertisements and installing fb like buttons, it's possible to gather more data on a user than concentrating on advertisements alone. But that's a complaint about fb giving your information to apps, and while it's a lot harder to tease out the motivations there, I think they still derive a greater benefit from that in terms of retention and usage than they do in terms of advertising.)
VirtualBox should serve you well.
I wonder how many billions this app could drop off Facebook's IPO, if it either causes people to avoid sharing (unlikely) or brings in a heavy-handed regulatory response in an election year (much more likely).

FB should just buy the company to kill the product; would be cheap in comparison. 1% chance of 100mm loss would warrant it.
Adobe fails to make any headlines that indicate they have any clue at all
A fundamental part of charles' argument is that in order to sell ads, facebook must encourage you to set your profile settings to public. That's not the case. It doesn't matter whether you've set your profile to fully private - Facebook's privacy settings don't affect whether or not marketers can target you with ads. In fact, in that regard facebook is incented to protect your privacy so that you'll be comfortable putting more information in the site, which they can then use for better targeting. Since marketers don't get specific information about you when you're targeted, your privacy hasn't been breached in doing so.

This doesn't change that people should be very careful about their privacy settings, but the fact that facebook does targeted ads doesn't mean they have incentives to encourage you to make everything you post public.
Gall and Pareto applied to software development
One reason is that it's not just your location that's the issue.

It's your location + all the other public information I can potentially find out about you combined with your location. The combination of a lot of separate facts can, together, potentially make people open to risks that aren't immediately obvious.

For example consider what location from foursquare + sexual orientation from facebook + photo from twitter would give to the scum who gay bash. The combination of religion + location + face is another thing some folk wouldn't want to be public.

I hate to think what the National Front would have done with a "gays, muslims & jews near me" app...
"The popular content is downloaded more"? What does that even mean? How are you measuring popularity?

... by units sold, say? Maybe the best-selling content is so because it's downloaded more, not vice-versa as you asserted. Or maybe there's a third factor that causes both. Correlation does not imply causation.

What of those who, as the GP said s/he does, download for free, then buy a copy if they actually like it?

If a product is of unknown quality, but known to be free to copy, it's sound economics to value it at zero. Supply is infinite and demand is indeterminate. Once you know more about it, and know how much you want it, you may want to pay for it. Or you may not, if you don't like it or are a cheapskate. C'est la vie.

It's more likely than you'd think: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pira...
Google Maps Features A "Quest" Map As Directions
Google maps 8bit quest mode.  A setup for 4/1 perhaps?
Consumers don't want to pay at the vendors' price and vendors don't want to sell at the consumers' price. The market is blocked.

(20 euros for 90 minutes of entertainment is a bit high)
Set-up a one time password for your email and put it in your will. Then let your family decide what to do, or not do.
This very "hard" problem was solved long time ago by releasing your product along with a free demo (or shareware, or whatever). As a developer you simply have to make sure your product works on the most popular platforms, or whatever kind of platforms you want. Before the user buys he tries it, so there will be less complaints that the app does not work for them.
Hardware and software will always be fragmented in a free market, and that's ok.
I know I shouldn't care but I am always weary of doing business with any company using MongoDB.

10gen put out claiming MongoDB was so much faster than SQL solutions but it seemed obvious to me than turning off fsync would make the SQL solutions run at about the same speed. Plus, why would I want to run my database in mode where it is easy to lose data? MongoDB may be a useful product but their marketing is deceptive, which will lead to companies using it in inappropriate situations.
Busy Building Things prints inspire startups
Yes it's about the wind (geostrophic currents) and temperature, but mainly because the earth doesn't stop rotating! The resultant forces are different depending on the latitude and depth. Note the dramatic differences on either side of the equator.

The most famous of these uneven forces is of course the Coriolis effect.
Take a look at Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com). It's a command line driver and library manager for VirtualBox VMs. It's integrated with Chef and Puppet if automated provisioning is your thing.
Drag the hero on to the map somewhere and he will land somewhere with streetview, which gets turned into 8bit, hilarious.
My favorite profile is the grue.
无酸纸档案盒，文书档案盒，科技档案盒
All of our digital ephemera (photos, blog posts, emails, reviews, tweets, code, and accounts) and so forth can theoretically last forever. In reality, disk drives and servers can die, domain registrations will expire, data formats will become outdated, and more.

Even if you have the bits and you can read them, you may be faced with a excavation job. Who has time to dig through someone else's email? Are we generating more data than we can process or appreciate? I just checked my family camera archive -- 279 GB, 135,042 files. When does this legacy turns in to a liability?

At some point, long-running sites will have to start making some interesting and difficult decisions. They can start to purge the seemingly dead members, they can have a way to flag a member as alive or dead, and they'll have to report their membership as 10 million live and active users, 20 million dead [and presumably inactive] users.
I don't know, Charlie - yes, these tools can facilitate genocide, but we've shown ourselves to be pretty good at the genocide thing with a lot less sophisticated technology.

The next time we have a genocide, we'll use a lot of different tools to do it, maybe even iPhone applications and Facebook data, but I have a hard time believing the same horror wouldn't have occurred absent this information.

The problem isn't the app, and the problem isn't the behavioral targeting industry that encourages others to share. The problem is us. When one group of us makes up our minds to kill another group of us, it's going to happen whatever the technology at hand.
except the one thing you'd like to argue with.

It's the part of your comment I think is crazy. Of course I'm going to comment on that in particular.

I believe you mean, "I don't understand how that could be the case."

No, I don't. Professional programmers get paid to release working software to their users. If they haven't done that, they haven't done any "great programming". They probably did some clever coding while they failed, but it wasn't great programming.
That's totally valid.. One thing it might be also be worth paying attention to is our ability to focus during a particular time of day..

My ability to focus creatively or detailed seems to be directly tied to how well rested my mind is.

When I sleep and eat well it's far easier to concentrate and slip into flow.

It's Saturday and I woke up at 7, an hour before my alarm.. I've pretty much cut out all my caffeine, sugar and processed foods. The more I cut out our limit the more my energy soars. I have friends who found the same after citing back beer and certain meats. I'm the guy who lived to sleep in.

Either way I find my energy boosts are like CPU usage.

The less that is taxing my body by what I put in it and drain it with leaves more energy for all the tasks. It's borderline addictive to modify.
Husbands of deceased female programmers? You can target the niche markets.
This seems like such an obvious issue that I can't understand how they overlooked it. If you are using failover as a strategy, your failover machine has to be up to the task.
Or just two-finger click.
What backup software do you recommend? I just want to keep my external hard drive in sync, but at the moment I have to do that manually. (I'm using Windows, and I'm trying to avoid having to use cygwin, so rsync is not really an option)
Been a Mac user for years and did not know this. Thanks!
I think he should have signed that text crytographically. (in case his site is hacked, or in case the server goes down and different people pretend to have conflicting versions of that text)
移动电源推荐
Why you should never use free email services to manage your domain names
Would be interesting if they could release the player as OS
> where everything you described - hard to measure.

Quality isn't hard to measure. Where I live, in terms of pizza, there's the chains Dominoes and Pizza Pizza. I haven't bought from Pizza Pizza in over two years, because in their peak times they just crank their ovens and burn their pizzas.

I'm sorry, but when I'm dropping $50 on an order burning/=cooking. When the bottom is so black and charred and the cheese barely melted, you haven't cooked it.

Of the smaller stores, it's mostly a matter of they can't deliver in a reasonable time. One that does I refuse to order from because their delivery guys try to rip you off when you're drunk (order came to ~$75, I had two fiftys and a twenty and wanted to give him eighty. After about 5 minutes of juggling money and change between him an me I realised he had both fifty's and I just said 'I've got it', took the money back off him, gave him 70 and told him to fuck off and slammed the door - I think at one point he was getting a tip of $15 because I grabbed a 20 from a friend. The next time we ordered from there they tried it again by 'not having change').

Every time, I end up back at dominoes because their stuff is fresher, properly cooked and not overly greasy.
This got me wondering about how I could provide my passwords to people if something were to happen to me. Not even so much for Github or the like but for my online banking, credit cards, etc so it would be easier to wind down those affairs. I have online billing set up for those so it's not even like you could wait for the statements to come in the mail and settle them that way.

I can always just tell my wife my passwords, but what if something happens to the both of us?

I was almost tempted to start a document that would keep all that stuff, and share it in Dropbox with a few trusted people. It would be encrypted; I would keep the public key on my computer so I could continue to update it. The private key would be on a CD in a safe deposit box with instructions that those people could access it if I am incapacitated.

Sounds too complicated, though; that's why I haven't ever done it.
It seems to be back up now, but have this CoralCDN (http://www.coralcdn.org/) link in case it goes down again:

http://www.cringely.com.nyud.net/2012/03/the-30-billion-hack...
I think kids of today (teens and twenty-somethings) don't care as much. They don't mind telling the world they are at a bar tonight.

But is this view the result of rational consideration, with full knowledge of all the implications, or is it something these young people have been drawn into without stopping to think about the implications? Or worse: without the full implications even being clear?

In other words: is this really a demographic shift we're seeing, or simply a stage-of-life effect? Will the same teens holding the quoted view of privacy recoil in horror at their actions twenty years later? Will these privacy choices alter the courses of the lives in ways they wish they could later undo? If so, then it seems unreasonable to wave away this mass choice as morally or societally neutral.

Simply put: is privacy a public safety issue or not? If it is, then an argument can be made to restrict young people's (and even grown adults') freedom to choose their "policy" on it, just as many societies do with drugs, alcohol, driving, etc. I think Charlie's post makes a pretty strong argument that privacy is a matter of public safety and societal well-being.

Putting words in his mouth, his argument might be that companies like Facebook are inducing people to relinquish their privacy rights without the full knowledge of the long-term implications -- just as profit-seeking tobacco companies induced large numbers of people to smoke without full knowledge of the long-term implications. Many governments now see the public policy advantages to making the consequences of smoking clear to the public; the same is not yet true of privacy rights.
For the purposes of advertising, facebook does not need you to disclose relevant information to anyone but facebook. Advertisers need never come anywhere near that information.

Facebook's whole lever for motivating people to provide that information is so they can share it with their friends. Why would anyone fill out a demographic profile to be kept under lock and key by Facebook for advertisers?
+1 right you are about micro instances getting hammered by the hypervisor if you use too much sustained resources.

One trick that I used when I was temporarily hosting a small Clojure web app for a customer: I ran the web app using "nice" to reduce its priority. I did not do any measurements, so this is really subjective, but the app seemed to run a lot better as far as consistently getting a little bit of processor time to run.

Not so subjective: I did some Clojure development in a repl on a micro instance (because it was already set up for access to a Hbase cluster) and doing a "nice lein repl" really made development possible, if a little slow.
I think it's very much a matter of resources. Windows will always win because it has the greater market share. Regardless, they still manage to produce a dud every second release; think Windows ME, Vista, Windows 8 (pre-emptive).

My work uses a linux inspired toolchain, complete with emacs setup, however, we use the Microsoft compiler and target the Windows platform specifically because our users demand it.

My home PC is an ArchLinux machine, however, I'm still plagued by the inability to play my videos without tearing on my dual screen monitor setup with hardware acceleration; something that works perfectly well on Windows. I'm sure NVIDIA could provide a suitable solution but there's no money involed so they don't.

Linux will always have it's place in the server world, but as far as end user PC's go; I feel it's days are numbered.
Are they using MongoDB for the wrong purposes? The task they have seems similar to logging and if so aren't there much better software to do that? A logging server perhaps?
This is a wonderful idea:
http://blog.agilebits.com/2012/03/09/1password-emergency-kit

Reminds me again that I still have to print it out and store it somewhere safe...
Cheers from Utah ;) Congrats on all the exciting stuff happening with scan.me lately!
Great article by Mike about Android design.
In all likelihood, that sight won't be around in 10+ years.
档案盒，科技档案盒，干部档案盒，会计档案盒
Last car I bought was a Scion, and they also have the no-haggle policy. One night I was browsing dealerships' inventory online, and spotted a model I liked. Called the dealer the next morning at 8, was driving my new car at 10.

The only part of the process that sucked was where the F&I guy put a serious hard sell on me to try to get me to buy gap insurance and extended warranty.

Everything else went smoothly and the dealer even gave me a higher price for the trade than I was expecting. Their Internet access was down when they were trying to look up blue book price, and so the guy just made up an opening offer that was $500 more than I was hoping to get.
Wow. I didn't know Google drew graphs too; does this feature come with an API? That would be cool.
Looks really similar to Coffeescript. Is it safe to say that this new Javascript feature is a direct result of Coffeescript's influence? I hope so: Javascript is full of little horrors like the 'this' keyword, and it seems like it took a whole new language to convince people that it needs fixing.
Just curious, are there any good practices that would minimize the damage?
"Or even just an unscrupulous ass-hat in search of a one night stand who isn't above researching his target's taste in music and drinks without their knowledge."

Why is he so up in arms about this? What's wrong with this behavior, other than that it is arbitrarily discouraged by most of our culture?

These women are making this information public. If some guy wants to try to use this publicly broadcast information to meet women and attempt to seduce them, who cares? Maybe she'll even enjoy the fact that the guy has bothered to find something common to talk about.
Have you noticed that the problem isn't MongoDB? Every case I've seen has been the data traffic exceeding the capacity of the system. There is no database that works well under those circumstances. Another way of putting it is that these businesses have been sufficiently successful that they have outgrown their own planning and deployment.

As for your second paragraph, MongoDB has had journalling for quite a while, so you can make you writes durable and limited to the speed of your storage.
So, what does flash actually run on these days?

Windows desktop PCs & laptops, on Mac desktops & laptops (for how much longer?) and that's about it.

Well , looks like everyone should sharpen up those JS skills.
There's only been one generation of Android tablets that's played out and they all came with Honeycomb with Tegra 2's. Even Google admitted that HC was a thrown together hack so its not surprising that the devices weren't particularly competitive. The upcoming Tegra 3 devices is the second generation.
MongoDB does have what it calls capped collections - the semantics are the same as a circular log. No idea why they don't use that storage format.

In any event this problem is one of success. That is the kind of problem I prefer having.
Apparently my father agrees with you. He is doing fine, but last year he decided to share with me his account info from money-generating websites. (He gets about $300/month from a stock photo site.) I suppose it gave him comfort that if anything were to happen, the fruit of his labor (ie, income from his designs) would continue to benefit the family.

Also, hate to nitpick, but the phrase is "I couldn't care less," meaning your level of care is already at the minimum.
Did Google open a Milwaukee dev office?

It's irrelevant if the midwest is cheaper. The tech centers have the jobs and the higher rents. (SF, Boston, NYC, Seattle, Austin, NC)
112F feels great.... in the pool.

That said, NY is really hot in the summer and really cold in the winter. I've been to SF and the weather seems too cold and gloomy (50 and overcast in August!!!!)
Beats by Dr. Dre heartbeats High Performance In-Ear Headphones(B
Why i’m okay losing iPhone jobs to China (and why Ruby is better than C)
September 4th is National Wildlife Day
Well, pinwale! It has been a long time. Nice to see that you're A. still alive, B. still doing awesome things like this. Keep up the good work!
I agree with what you're saying...mostly. However, there IS a problem with devices that ONLY meet the requirements in buggy ways due to manufacturer alterations/additions. Its silly to ignore this problem and claim it doesn't exist.
If that's all you want, I'm sure you can find a Windows equivalent to dd to run every day. Do a direct bit copy, and then your external disk will always be in sync with your internal disk.
To a fan of New York-style pizza this statement is pretty close to sacrilege - close enough that I half-suspect you're intentionally trying to troll jcampbell1.

Grimaldi's isn't the absolute best pizza in the city, but it's a very good example of a thin-crust coal-fired New York pie.

But to each their own. I still have a soft spot in my heart for doughy-crust over-cheesed death-on-a-plate small-town Canada pizza since that's what I grew up with.
My comment on a Techcrunch article awhile back sparks a new article and debate. Is technology really a zero sum game?

I still say no...but it seems we're mostly arguing semantics.
The discrimination possibilities are just as unsettling, even if they use the same privacy model.

Say I want to show an "ad" to white, heterosexual, protestant men with libertarian leanings, no history of depression, unlikely to use alcohol in their free time, who don't look pornography, and are predisposed towards compliance with authority currently employed in the technology industry earning over $150,000. Say my "ad" is for a high-paying job opportunity. Or housing. Facebook definitely has the ability to let me do this.

I find that unsettling, in that people can use Facebook to apply prejudices against information I'd prefer to keep hidden but that Facebook has inferred via data-mining even without knowing who I am or actually learning that information about me.

The "stalker" scenario presented here is certainly frightening (although as a heterosexual man I can only really understand the fear in the abstract), but the "reveals information I'd prefer to keep hidden to people with a financial motive for knowing it" scenario is already getting uncomfortable.