skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, separate question, since apparently I have a bunch of people here who understand this:

I need to track link clicks made on advertisements in our iPad app. I can't do it from the app because 1) our backend is open source, and they're not implementing that and 2) I don't know how anyways.

So I thought of using redirects. The link in the app goes to our site and gets redirected to the advertiser's site. That way I can track it with Google analytics and since i understand that, everything is peachy.

Therefore, the questions are: 1) is this an acceptable practice? and 2) is there a better, easier way that I'm unaware of?
Can someone explain the use of // instead of /* */ for CSS comments? According to what I've always known, // isn't even valid.
Ask HN: Share your successful and unsuccessful launch strategies
- What strategy did you use for launching your product?

- How efficient was it?

- Did you have to pay for ads?

- Did the classical invite-only approach work for you?

If your launch was not a glory, share that story too.
Thanks! Our web hosting (NearlyFreeSpeech.NET) had a button I could click and it did it automatically.
I tried to transfer into CS in 2004. The policies from the bubble had not yet been revised and so it wasn't possible. I received a degree in "interdisciplinary sciences" but had all the credits required for a CS degree (and only 4 credits shy of a physics minor, which was my original major).
Also, these scholarships are based on financial aid. Yanked directly from article: " 10 female students, we’ll provide a $5,000 needs-based scholarship"
I'm sorry, but it's insulting that you think those of us who find these stories disgraceful aren't aware of the issues. You think the audience here is skewed? I think you are apologizing for Google where no apology is due.

It is not a given that Google's anti-customer service policy is the right one. There are other tremendously large multinational corporations who have friendly customer service relationships (e.g., Amazon and Apple) and aside from being the "right thing to do" it's working pretty darn well for them from a profit-and-loss perspective.

I don't care how you define "customer". If Google had confiscated 40K from any partner in circumstances resembling these, and refused contact with their partner despite having previously assigned them an account rep, I'd find this shady.

Like pg mentions, this is certainly an opening. Despite your protests, Google's partners don't like this. When partners don't like something, that's an opening for competitors. There are several other ad networks, some at least reputed not to employ such a destructive and passive aggressive customer service strategy.

The only problem is, Google has a near monopoly for search ads. Can you agree that near-monopoly power gives a company the power to adopt abusive policies? It's hard to tell whether Google really is forced to ignore partner emails or whether they are partly able to get away with it due to their market power.

It's not like companies purposely adopt terrible policies. Of course Google currently thinks this is the best trade-off. And this is now our bullhorn to say, no, we don't agree that this is the best trade-off. If we can't hold Google accountable to showing the faintest bit of decency to this partner in this circumstance--assuming the facts are correct as related--when can we complain about a company's policies?

Edit:

People aren't out to get Google. Please, stop with the "I know it's (suddenly, and frankly inexplicably, IMHO) fashionable to Hate teh Google around here", which is a fallacy closely related to ad hominem.

Apple and Amazon are the subject of repeated flames like this one? Please cite a few HN posts where this has come up. Nobody is against Google freezing problematic accounts. People are against arbitrary-seeming policies and poor customer service. Flames alone don't matter. The facts of each case do matter. And in the cases that have come across the transom here, the facts have more often been against Google.

Do you agree that it's in theory possible for a company handling fraud detection in online transactions to behave unethically? Because it almost sound like you're saying "fraud detection is hard, let's go shopping!" Just because a business engages in fraud detection of online transactions doesn't mean their policies are suddenly above reproach.

We are all well aware of the difficulty of detecting fraud in online transactions. This isn't new information. What's at dispute is whether Google is actually forced to treat people poorly during the course of handling online transactions. Most people say no. Ultimately, the government and/or competition will decide.
By your logic, scholarships "based on need or because the person comes from a poor socioeconomic background" would be considered classist.

Grants based on gender attempting to correct an imbalance are not sexist. Classifying them as such is ignoring the greater context: a severe lack of that gender in that field. It also diminishes examples of actual sexism.

I'm not sure why you think scholarships based on gender are sexist but scholarships based on socioeconomic background are fine. There exists a very real bias against women in the tech industry.
Hmm.. this is a really cool feature, but I think I saw it first on http://minus.com.
Pirate Bay Promotion Promo Bay Attracts 5000+ Artists, Sticks It to RIAA & MPAA
I really love posts like this with an open-source project attached (w/ Apache license no less!)

It's such a niche thing but if you've ever tried to do this you know what a b*tch it is to do properly. I have never seen another open source solution for this problem.

Thank you for the code, I will peruse and consider using it over a beer tonight!
One Big Reason To Go Public That Nobody Ever Talks About
Not to continue a pointless flame war, except to respond to your very last point: you realize that banks do terminate merchant accounts at the drop of a hat, right? The situation there is absolutely symmetrical with the one here. They also will freeze a customer's card at the barest hint of strangeness, forcing you to call in and verbally OK the transactions. This happens to me once a year at least.
WorldStock:40全球股市最近的指數，讓投資者擁有全球視野
You know what's kind of funny, though? I bet that a not-so-small percentage of people who are nodding their heads up-and-down wildly in response to this essay think nothing of filtering their applicant pool based on github profile.

After all, it's a "coding" metric, right?
This is a service that I've seen before. Not yours of course, but others like it. Why would I use yours as opposed to the others out there? All I see is that your product is "easy". It's probably a great service, but you've got to let people know why you're so great!
EFF: Don’t Let Congress Use "Cybersecurity" Fears to Erode Digital Rights
He targeted high profile tech sites running Wordpress, for the most part, so my guess would be a WP vulnerability.
This was definitely a letter for the Pinks. I found it hard to take seriously.
86 year old gymnast wows crowds
Backing the author's claim is the fact that Apple has done all the legwork on this, and ended up doing all this stuff in China. Unless you have also figured out how to profitably source manufacturing in the US for consumer electronics at the scale of tens of billions of dollars of revenue per year, the burden of proof is firmly on your shoulders.
They use Amazon EC2 there's some more info here: http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/12202313862/sto...
The ruling that allows copying facts from others is SCOTUS's (Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 111 S.Ct. 1282 (1991).

As you imply, the ordering of the facts constitute a creative expression, which is not the same as an arbitrary arrangement of facts: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-you-copy-raw-data.... (Unless it's an alphabetically-ordered phone book or something to that effect.)
That's why you should write down some instructions for your family so they can let them know. It's probably a good idea to describe your relationship with your clan a littlebit, because they'd like to know, and so they can make better judgement on how to bring the news depending on how close you are with your clan members. Another good idea is to mention that "Uncle Joe probably knows how to log on to Minecraft and such" (/s/Joe/your favourite tech-savvy family member or friend/, of course)
I don't like that we can't question this story because it's fictional. It has legs because of the way it is written, but no one can jab or poke at it without the obvious "well, it's just a story, man" line. I hate outs like that. It's been mentioned that there is an overall religious feel to these articles. I think it's because religion always has an out when it needs to explain something using evidence. Then there is the article title, "I don't hire unlucky people" with "raganwald's posterous" as the header. Not sure how someone could glance at this and determine it was fictional - but I think you know that.

> The fact that such people are in a minority doesn’t invalidate their (or your) feelings

Well, we don't know if they are the minority or not. No one has really taken a poll. I'll say I've found the same lineage in your articles. They tend to play on the emotionally-binding do the right thing narrative - which is fine, but the articles always conclude with this overall "so that's why you have to do it this way" feeling. Morals aside, there's really no validation to these ideas. It's one thing to tell a story and have a happy ending, but the subject matter is often timely and succinct to current events - making it (in perspective of the moment) newsworthy. I understand it is easy to talk around that, so I guess one would have to ask "Why do you write in this way?". If your articles are politically-driven, then why write fiction? If story-telling is your angle, why the call to arms narrative?

This isn't to say your writing isn't good - to the contrary. But if we're talking about whether your articles could be confusing to some – I'd say I agree.
Would you please email me? I have a few questions for you re: your resume.

My email is in my profile.
Is their pricing really that bad? I'd assume it's just what's required to break even.
Ruby doesn't have something like PEP for Python?
lol. with this kind of title you will be spammed for sure. good luck, but own fault.
Plenty of sites let you drag from your computer into your browser to upload a file, including http://imgur.com (as featured on reddit).

Dropbox is a good case because it works incredibly well and people actually use it.
Um... Amazon and Apple are also the subject of regular flames like this one. Amazon affiliates and app store vendors are routinely frozen. And yes, they lose money. There's no free lunch here: I know it's (suddenly, and frankly inexplicably, IMHO) fashionable to Hate teh Google around here (c.f. even PG above getting into it), but fraud detection is a pervasive unsolved problem in our society. Credit card banks haven't solved it. Online sales proxies haven't solved it. PayPal hasn't solved it. Ad vendors like Google haven't solved it.

Criminals are smart, and it sucks. But this is the world we have to live in. Picking on one vendor in particular (and over a IMHO very questionable case) is just unfair and unhelpful.
Will add it tonight.
"Rural's white pages do not meet the constitutional or statutory requirements for copyright protection".

...

"This case concerns the interaction of two well-established propositions. The first is that facts are not copyrightable; the other, that compilations of facts generally are."

...

"The key to resolving the tension lies in understanding why facts are not copyrightable. The sine qua non of copyright is originality. To qualify for copyright protection, a work must be original to the author."
I agree; it's a really, really weird thing to say, especially if the person has studied computer science - maybe he's yet to read what he finds to be a good textbook? My favourite teacher in high school showed me that certain subjects can actually be interesting, intelligible and enjoyable, and my favourite textbook so far off the top of my head (The Algorithm Design Book) did the exact same.

Great and awful professors and books tend to make an impression, and people on Hacker News could go on forever on algorithm books.
If it's not a really long GPG key or anything, it's probably easiest to just write it down on paper and store it at a secure place. Secure being, if you trust your cupboard to hold the binder with your bank statements, that would work fine.
I think it is a positive thing to discuss the structure of the scholarships, whether one agrees with it or not. Let's have an open discussion of it.

I would love to see alternative methods to involve women more in coding rather than just paying them.

The current method just 'feels wrong' to me.

I've also seen programming competitions with a 'top female programmer' award but no 'top male programmer' award, which also feels wrong, even if the intent comes from a very positive place.

I've spoken w/ several female developers/engineers and they were not excited about that kind of structure.
In about 6 months, that is going to be Yahoo's new business plan, once they realise that suing facebook doesn't count as an industry in and of itself.
Accomplishments totally matter. Being able to show some work you've done is huge. How can anyone argue with success?
They are using .scss, so // is valid there.

Prefixing each commented line is more efficient in text editing than wrapping things in blocks. Editor support for mappings to comment out sections of text are more consistent in supporting prefixing each line and removing that than wrapping and unwrapping a selection with the block syntax.

Also, that way you can comment out a larger section and subsequently uncomment a part of that section with a single action instead of uncommenting the entire thing, then re-commenting the part that you still want commented out.
There is nothing related to WiFi in this system. The hotel is running the traffic through a transparent proxy which is performing MITM "attacks" to disable ads from providers and show their own ads.

It is icky for all sorts of reasons. I suppose an individual website could consider it theft of ad revenue, and an end-user could consider their privacy invaded.
That seems defeatist. I've whitelisted plenty of sites because the owners are selective in who they let run ads. Penny Arcade's creators posted a story (which I can't find a link to) about how their business guy (Robert Khoo) spent days working on an ad deal, then handed it over. They rejected it because they couldn't endorse the game being advertised.

This is the kind of thing advertisers should be doing. Actually be involved in the communities you're advertising to and you're going to know what they want to buy. This is why ads on PA are non-intrusive (rarely more than one loop on the animated ones), and are always relevant. There's quality control on both ends of the deal.

Nothing can help someone advertising garbage. But that's a whole other discussion.
Video: Rachel Z. Cornell Is A Badass You Want To Know
We mean hacker in the pg (http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html) esr (http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html) sense of the word, namely an awesome programmer who loves learning, groks hacker culture, and self identifies as a hacker. Not a cracker. Certainly learning about computer security is part of being a good hacker, but it's not primarily what Hacker School is about.

Incidentally, have you ever read Hacking: The Art of Exploitation (http://www.amazon.com/Hacking-The-Art-Exploitation-Edition/d...)? It's my favorite book on the subject.
>"But he won't [having a public discussion], because Dodd is a coward and a DC-insider who only knows how to cut deals, not how to actually respond to the public's best interests."

SOPA was a malignant offshoot of a dying industry, but that doesn't justify being irrational.

Chris Dodd is no longer a Senator, he's now the chairman of an industry trade group - he isn't responsible for the "public interest" any more. Cutting deals in public would dilute the MPAA's negotiating leverage. He isn't being private because he's a coward but because he's not a clueless negotiator.

It's the Lamar Smiths who are the clear and present danger. The sitting representatives and senators supporting this crap are the ones violating their responsibility to the public interest, they're the ones warping the chess board. Dodd? He's another player.
What I find interesting is that there's no mention of "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful".
Ah, gotcha. I read "CSS" and just, you know, assumed "CSS".
If it's really $40k, you haven't done everything possible. Call a lawyer, file a suit. This kind of money won't pay for a big firm, but you can absolutely get someone local. And in discovery you'll learn why you were banned. Or you get some of it back in a settlement.
Isn't this just called a bloom filter?
Code Search is no longer public, but we use it internally. It's great for developer productivity to be able to search millions of lines of code in a second. (On my first day, I did a search for jrockway and found code I wrote at a company that Google bought. Yay!)
What domain registrar is toughest about protecting its customers privacy?
I'm considering registering a domain that an aggressive third world government might potentially be unhappy with. In case the government goes after my registrar, what domain registrar would put up the most resistance on my behalf? Thank you!
enlighten me... what kind of spam?
For comparison, the USPS is one of the biggest private employers in the US if not the biggest, and it has just under 600,000 employees. The active US military is around 1,500,000 strong. China's active military is closer to 2,300,000 strong. There are more full-time Foxconn employees than active troops in the militaries of any but about three countries.
If you want to see a combined privacy rating for both the website and all the advertisers that you're exposed to when you visit a site, PrivacyChoice has a browser plugin that will help you.

One thing that I've noticed is that old-school media tends to have absolutely terrible scores, and they tend to share lots of stuff, and they share it with less privacy-conscious ad networks. I was very surprised that Facebook and Google, companies that are supposedly so predatory that they have the FTC in house to monitor them, stack up better.
Beyoncé | I Am
I think we are more hostile to women now than in the past if only because we say we aren't hostile at all and in the past women and minorities knew they needed to fight their way in. If you know you're up for a fight vs just thinking you're evaluating possibilities you're approach is going to be different.
Basically, since the younger generation has bought into the idea that sexism/racism is on its way out they are more likely to believe someone when they say - you can't be any good. And why be persistent if maybe you aren't actually any good?
I agree with everything you are all saying.

What I was trying to claim is that there’s a relationship between heuristics and the ham/spam ratio of the documents being classified. When there is very little ham and a lot of spam, my claim is that false negatives are extremely expensive. When the benefit of hiring is very high and the cost of interviewing is low, my claim is that false positives are relatively cheap.

Given these two, my claim is that given current market realities, when hiring programmers for a mission-critical role the best strategy is to go light on spam-filtering heuristics and heavy on direct inspection of the ham content.

But obviously, some heuristics have their place. To a certain extent, everything except “Start work on Monday, there will be three month’s probation” is a heuristic.

And “This article is almost complete useless” is also true, given that it says in many paragraphs using a contrived format what I just said in two paragraphs, it obviously contains a lot of redundancy and extraneous noise!
American digital public library promised for 2013
Fabrications Robotic Network
Yet another reason to run a VPN over any unknown network, such as hotel wifi. Aside from people sniffing your traffic it will also protect you from MITM attacks - be they benign like this or potentially more serious.
You forgot to mention "brings his katana to meetings" (the sword, not the Suzuki motorcycle).

It's kind of "friend-of-a-friend", but I had a boss who told me about working with a developer who actually did that, I think at a game company in the late 80s.
That's absurd. I am constantly recruiting for more women in my field and talking to those in school about how programming can be exciting and challenging. Many of these girls are already in computing classes, with 1 or 2 girls to 20 or more boys. It's difficult for them to know how else it could be, and it highly discouraging for them especially at an age when socializing with their peers is extremely important.
As I understand it, the main reason is that IRC is decoupled from Facebook completely (or should be). In "Oh shit, the sky is falling!" SEV situation we can trust (sorta) that IRC will be there.
If you want evidence, I think you should look elsewhere besides Hacker News. It’s a nice place full of very smart people, but posts containing empirical evidence gathered under controlled conditions are few and far between.
I strongly prefer logically grouping related styles.

The only advantage from alphabetizing rules is perhaps slightly faster scanning of rules, but I don't think it is even very helpful in doing that. You generally don't have that many rules in a single style anyway so it's not a problem that needs solving.

However, by grouping related styles I think there are a some small yet worthwhile advantages. Grouped styles can reveal intention, while alphabetizing does not at all. Grouped styles can also make refactoring quicker and less tedious.
And even if your team is superstars now it doesn't mean it always will be. What happens a few years down the road when you now have a team 5 or 10 times the size with people of varying skillsets and areas of expertise. Now that guy with mostly Python or Ruby experience needs to make some changes to your JavaScript code with what little knowledge of the language they have. It's helpful to write things to be as idiomatic as possible in those cases.
It's been a while since I've had to deal with it (bootcamp), but I'm pretty sure we still use Watir [1]

[1] http://watir.com/
Now the author suggests that the cited coupons.com extract means: “We can share whatever you provide us whenever you touch or interact with our site”

To my reading it means nothing like that. One of us is suffering severe reading comprehension problems. Is it me?
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It's likely that the issue is due to that specific hotel / ISP instead of blaming the entire Marriott chain. In fact, you could contact Marriott for them to investigate.

Hotel chains usually have brand standards relating to internet access, so this particular install may be in violation. For example, I know the Hilton chain requires its (newer) hotels to use AT&T, so it's unlikely there's tampering from the ISP/provider standpoint (though MITM attacks are still possible so always use a VPN).
My ISP also does this. Once in a while I get a pop-over ad in the bottom right corner of HN. As a matter of fact, I just got a pop-up to this ad: http://219.238.235.221/shenzhenyocc/swf.html