skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When things are this broken, it's an opportunity. Maybe it's time for someone to start an AdSense competitor whose focus is customer service. It seems to be deeply embedded in Google's DNA not so much to abuse AdSense users as to treat them like components in a machine. They treat AdSense users much as they do servers. Uncertain about a server? Toss it; the system is designed to be fault tolerant.

Maybe Google thinks they have to behave this way to scale. But my gut tells me they could get away with being a lot nicer and still scale. If so there is an opportunity for a competitor to move in here and surprise people with better customer service, as Zappos did in shoes.

It could help to have better fraud detection technology. The more accurately you can tell the innocent from the guilty, the less draconian you need to be with the innocent. And while it sounds unlike Google to have left room to do significantly better, the way they treat the innocent implies their technology may be insufficient.
This is exactly what we've been thinking about for the last year while we've been building http://skillsapp.com. Exactly.

Love it when lucid, articulate writers take my mess of a brain and put the right words to it.
For people outside the community this may seem like a surprise. But Rich Hickey has been saying for a long time now that Clojure explicitly does not try to emulate many of the tools found in java.util.concurrent for the very reason that they are quite good.
Absolutely agreed. In my opinion, Government is the least desirable option in all cases. It's a hatchet when you need a scalpel.

Yet, here we are, 23 days later (interesting that you remembered) having the same discussion. This is happening with far greater frequency than publicly exposed. I've seen it first hand. You have to wonder what Google's trail of destruction might look like.

In the end these are families and businesses that are being affected in very signifiant ways. If one were to want to play the populist card, you could also say that jobs might be lost (or not created) when Google takes actions that damage or destroy company revenue streams.

Also agree that it is not a simple problem to solve. That said, if the problem is too big for Google to deal with it then maybe they should stick with search and bow out of the ad serving business.

A company as large as Google can't be compelled to make changes by one or a few individuals voicing their concerns. This is the fundamental problem. If they were good netizens they'd jump at the opportunity to fix the problem, no matter how difficult it might be. Hire another 100 engineers and figure it out.

The threat of a force greater than theirs might just be the only reason to compel a company as powerful as Google to make changes. That, perhaps, is my greater point.

I really don't want to see government regulate any of it. But I am not opposed to using government to force change or capitulation when few other options appear to be viable.
Having mediocre design skills, I struggled before to create even the simplest landing pages for my mobile apps. Like the article says, I was simply trying to create a one-page site that contains a short description of an (upcoming) app, and a way for people to enter their email addresses for future notifications.

Although this sounds really simple (I can cook up the bare html in a few minutes), I struggled to make it look half decent. Surely there must be some easy way to create such simple landing pages, but I couldn't find it. I tried wordpress themes, twitter bootstrap, and other platforms, but my designs(or lack thereof) always turn out horribly.

My question: is there an easy way to create simple, beautiful landing pages?
> 1) Walk through the data, writing out the IDs to a different file based on the first n digits. Split it into enough buckets that each individual bucket is small enough to fit comfortably in RAM.

That is the same as saying "count all id's starting with 'aa', add all id's starting with 'ab', add all id's starting with 'ac'...", isn't it?
Other advertising solutions for Android apps often pay more in my experience anyway, like Millennial Media, for example. I don't know why offhand, maybe there are fewer apps on them, so advertisers end up paying more for fewer slots. There's also AdWhirl and Mobclix which can act as mediators farming out your slots to other networks as needed. They are all just about as easy as AdMob to integrate, which is pretty straight forward, since most ad libraries are basically just dropping an extra WebView into an app somewhere.
Being "internet famous" just gives you a head start on getting traction. I am working off the conviction that if I build something which solves a significant problem for people, I can build a solid user base. If I do this well enough, people with a large following will benefit from my work and share it. That's when rapid growth should occur.
Correction, there needs to be a newline there.

ZnO + energy → Zn + O

Zn + 2 H2O → Zn(OH)2 + H2
Don't know why, but you probably just set that in motion just by mentioning it. :)
This is true of the entire practice of marketing & advertising. Every "innovation" is just a new way to break through the noise to capture consumer interest. (remember the first time you saw a URL on a truck? so cool! now even my credit cards have URLs on the back and I don't give a shit)

There are two ways succeed: 1) create new forms of media (author talks about this a little at the end) and 2) make better ads on existing media. Pretty much every advertising company I know about tries #2. Improved targeting by xyz fancy algorithm or better creative, which works until it succeeds too much.
Silicon Valley Gets Its Own Airline, SurfAir
s/could/should/
Early reports said Google's planning on releasing these later this year (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/technology/google-glasses-...); as far as I've seen, nothing's changed on that front. No, they're not showing you actual prototype UI yet, but that seems to be more difficult in this case than anyone's giving them credit for.

How exactly do you demonstrate eyeglass computer output in a video? Already it's disconcerting to look a video of someone's POV; for one, there's no peripheral vision at all. It seems to me that a concept video's the best way to get the general idea into people's heads. Then, they can see for themselves in 6-8 months.
This is exactly the kind of "echo chamber" thinking I'm arguing against.

If Notch launched a startup in a space where no-one knows or cares who Notch is, he'd have no advantage from his fame. Of course he shouldn't, that would mean giving up an advantage. But that means you or I can enter that area on a more level playing field.

The world of startups is much larger than the tiny slice of the world that cares about internet fame, and much more varied than your social circle (e.g. HN).

I think the author does make good points, but framing the whole thing as if not being internet famous is a disadvantage shows a very distorted view of startups.
Starter 2D games with Slick2D: drawing the screen view
True, but on the other hand how many times have you been asked to do a task, but upon further investigation the answer they needed could be provided easier with a better question? So maybe they asked for a count, but they really just wanted to know if the count was more like 1K or 100K.
You know what is amazing? Is that as soon you hit bigger or more general problems like this, you always face the compromise of "trading X resource for accuracy". Which leads me to believe that software, so far, has only been deterministic by pure accident.
How can I get started with web development?
"Bertie Wooster" is a character in the Jeeves books. Ernestine Anderson is a jazz & blues singer.
In the United States that's not normally the case; the "American rule" is that each side pays their own court costs, regardless of outcome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_rule_(attorney%27s_fee...). There are specific statutory exceptions for certain kinds of lawsuits, such as Title VII claims and copyright cases.
Some of these sources are older, but according to these color and design are important (for webshops anyway):
http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/display.asp?id=8468
http://www.colormatters.com
http://www.colormarketing.org/uploadedfiles/media/the%20prof...
http://www.nightcats.com/samples/colour.html

And just google for it and you will find tons of papers and studies.
Right, and what makes me like clojure is the default of immutability. Even if I don't use their concurrency primitives heavily, the default to immutability makes writing concurrent code less scary.
The Next Web is a Dutch site btw, but still..
I thought about it for 5 minutes and couldn't find an answer (I found several, but they were all half-answers). I looked at the answer below, and it turned out that you'd missed an important part: The prisoners don't die immediately after drinking from a poisoned barrel... They die after 30 days (in other words, they can drink from several barrels, and if any of those barrels were poisoned, they'd die).

But thanks anyway.
Keeping Instagram up with over a million new users in twelve hours
Seems fine to me: http://thepiratebay.se/
Raising Your Seed Round From Your Trust Fund
Viacom $1B case against YouTube reinstated by appeals court
How do you measure "passion" and "respect"? And how are the twitter tags determined?
My AdWords account was suspended for what turned out to be a simple and easy to make mistake.

One of my landing pages was mistakenly flagged as a bridge page. I suspended the campaign, tweaked the advertising in a way that (based on Google's own bridge page definition) should have been enough, and assumed the problem was resolved.

I decided to try something else, left the campaign stopped, and created a new one. The site for the new campaign was just my blog, so I didn't think it could create a problem. Suspended within an hour.

I learned from others who experienced the same problem that starting a campaign after one of your other campaigns is suspended without contacting Google will get your account suspended. It took an escalating campaign of contact across several Google and non-Google venues to get a response.

Some time later my account was reinstated. It took contacting them again, insisting on a response, to get an explanation and apology. Your proposed solution would have kept it from ever reaching the point of suspension.

It shouldn't take that much effort just to find out something you did was a problem. I couldn't stomach putting in the effort to create another campaign on AdWords after being unsuspended. Who knows what other trap I would fall into?
In much the same way that if you live in a world of Word, vi is hostile. Don't get me wrong -- I use and love irc, for many of the reasons given above. I just think if I could have all or many of its benefits in a way that all my non-technical Facebook friends could use too, there'd be something exceptionally powerful and useful.

It's almost like right now we're in the days of pine and mailman. What we could have is GMail.
Go further... modify something like openx to run your own 'hacked seo' ad exchange network, managing links via these exploits programmatically. :)
My impression is that I cannot license derivative works of GPL works under a permissive license. Is this incorrect?
“Bert and Ernie” are George Bailey’s best friends in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which is where Jim Henson drew his inspiration for names of the Muppet characters.
OTOH, if you can't bound your estimate, most people don't want it.
He's also edited his post to make it less ambiguous.
I imagine if the advertisers weren't receiving refunds they would be the ones contemplating a class action.
I agree.

I don't particularly care for Ruby nor OOP since I mostly use functional languages nowadays.

With that said, I read both books and they're among the best technical books I've ever read. Even I if never have to implement a pattern in Ruby in my life, the level of insight into the language is sky-high.

I just wish he would write Eloquent Clojure.
I definitely never meant to suggest that training people to ignore security warnings was the right way to do anything. I've updated to the post to note that you would be required to install the certificate locally to be certain that it's actually the correct cert.

I appreciate the suggestions for free options. There have been some people that have problems with these services in the past, but I'll definitely look into them.
At that point, the winning-uber-alles guy doesn't get invited to play. Because he's over-competitive and missing the point of the exercise: stimulating the mind with an interesting and novel problem under a constraint of slight time pressure. Not win at all costs.

The game doesn't have to stand up to scrutiny of strong chess players or expert bughouse players. Those people don't play chess as a means of putting them in the frame of mind for solving dayjob problems.

You are defending a position that really doesn't need to be defended. I'm pretty sure that geeks using this as a ten minute brain exercise aren't going to think they are the next Kasparov.
I don't recall it being more ambiguous at any point, but my brain is bad at keeping revisions. Even if you're right, it doesn't excuse the tone.
And all this must have led our author right to Oscar the Grouch for one more name in the narrative.
Ya, that's correct :) It doesn't make much sense otherwise I guess...
So the most efficient interviewing process for the employer is also the nicest to candidates? What a curious coincidence. Are you sure there was no wishful thinking involved in writing this post?
That's not really reconcilable with the guy using the 6 train stop at 23rd and Park.
I've been thinking about this for a while, because I write about several open source projects a week and like to mention the license in my articles. It's often hard to find the license: it might be in the readme, a license file, or in a boilerplate comment at the top of a source file.

Sometimes a license file is included, but the name of the license is not, so I have to try searching for fragments of the text to figure out what license it actually is (I have quite a few memorised now).

It's possible GitHub could solve this by interpreting files intended for packaging systems like package.json. For example, I occasionally find authors of Node modules actually include a 'licenses' property in their package.json but don't mention the license anywhere else.
I quite agree, actually, and I'm glad that my undergraduate department had an actual course to solve this problem.

CS491DD: Empirical Research Methods in Computer Science

One of my favorites, despite the incredible workload. Though for my field I would have preferred Formal Research Methods in CS, but hey.

There's also the NSF-sponsored Research Experience for Undergraduates program, which is basically "summer internship in graduate school." If you do those and like it, you should go for a PhD, because you like academia.

On the other hand, I really didn't like industry when I got there, and for that I blame the fact that I didn't have an industrial internship in college. I didn't know what I would think of full-time industrial programming until I got there.
Tips on Sitecatalyst Omniture Custom Link Report
How To Fix Broken Packages In Ubuntu Or Debian
This is probably a great opp for regional newspapers - they have the ability to have feet on the ground, they are 'local' (ad spends keep money in the region/state/etc) - they should know something about the local/regional players/economy, etc. But... it would require an investment in technology and a commitment to customer service that most newspaper orgs probably don't have and don't want to make. Bit of a shame, as many will go away without adapting, and there are still opportunities for them to adapt/pivot and carve out new niches. Instead, they're happier to outsource all their ad stuff to big players like google.
At 7.85 inches used at the iPhones viewing distance it will be very close to Retina if it has the iPad 3G resolution.
Are Fender guitars substantially different depending on origin? (For instance[1], different wood, electronics, composition, etc.) If they are, even if it stems from where they are manufactured, then I don't think it serves the argument perfectly because I don't really see how a Made-in-America iPhone would be superior to the one we have now. Lower tolerances? More robust?

Maybe I'm naive but I think food and instruments show a lot more characteristics of the craft worker than electronics.

[1]http://www.strat-talk.com/forum/stratocaster-discussion-foru...
Nice! I'm going to start porting some of my AVR and 6809 assembly routines to the DCPU, and of course I'll host them on GitHub.
This article is superb.

We tried placing ads for ninjas, rock stars, and so on, but I discovered this was the cultural equivalent of advertising for white males who drink dry martinis. Not that white males who drink dry martinis can’t do the job, but there’s no real difference between advertising for a Ninja and throwing half your resumés away because you don’t like unlucky people. Either way, you end up with fewer resumés.”

This is so true, so important, and so many startups (and even bigger companies!) miss this. Job ads provide cues, conscious and subconscious, to the people reading them. Not everyone reading the ad is identical to the person writing it, and a badly written job ad can easily send the message "this company isn't for you" to a large number of skilled potential applicants. This applies not just to categories like gender or race, but even to personality types and personal interests. Unless you really want a company of only extroverts, for example, don't write a job ad that scares off introverts.

In the canonical example, if you constantly ask for "rock stars", you will turn off people to whom that doesn't appeal, including tons of good programmers. But it goes beyond that: don't assume that all your applicants are any particular kind of person with certain interests. A job ad should focus on what the job actually is, and things that are important to the job.

The best programmers often have a lot of choice in where they work, and as many HNers know from experience, if they see a job ad that turns them off in some fashion, they will probably not even bother reading further: they know they have better options, so yours probably isn't worth their time. If the vast majority of skilled programmers skip over your resume, it's no wonder you only receive resumes from unqualified applicants.

In short, when writing a job ad, you need to think from the perspective of people applying. Use your empathy, put yourself in their shoes, rather than just writing what you think looks cool.
As a researcher who just accepted a private job, I do have some experience here. My advice is to make use of the fact that academic jobs usually have unsurpassed autonomy and flexibility. If you aren't looking to get a faculty job, think of the postdoc as a relatively low-stress way to prepare for the transition out of academia. Not to say you should blow your job off, but make use of the opportunity to learn things that increase your cross section for industry and are still relevant in your research (even if it would not be the optimal thing to do if you were looking to crank out papers for your career in academia). Most of the academic workload is self-imposed, in the sense that you worry about the rat race for getting the next job, but if you are not interested in continuing your academic career, that's a non-factor.
I don't know for sure, but perhaps the botnet provides higher level abstractions (DDoS, spam mailer, click bots, etc), or a sandboxed environment. "Heroku for botnets".
New Firefox interface mock-ups posted
Background video on the site is a cool idea but on slower connections it's making the page unbearable. I'd consider a static photo instead.
So many gems in this article.

To help spot problems, Facebook employees who access the social network from within the company's internal network will always see an experimental build of the site based on the very latest code, including proposed changes that haven't officially been accepted.

Probably the only place where your excuse for checking Facebook at work can be "Looking for bugs!"

The many data sources tracked by Facebook's internal monitoring tools even include tweets about Facebook. That information is displayed in a graph with separate trend lines to show the change in volume of positive and negative remarks

Guess I need to tweet more about how slow their mobile app is getting...

One of the major ongoing development efforts at Facebook is a project to replace the HipHop transpiler. Facebook's developers are creating their own bytecode format and custom runtime environment.... the company can push thin bytecode deltas representing just the parts that have changed. Facebook may even be able to splice the updated bytecode into the application while it's running, avoiding a process restart.

Even though I'm doing nothing nearly this awesome, this article has done more to inspire and excite me about my own coding than anything I've read in a long time.
If the issue were just what we thought there would be no problem. The real issue is the impression created in the majority of people (which might include us, of course). If the video creates high anticipations that are not met then Glass might be much less popular than it would otherwise have been.

I still think speculating about it is a little silly, though. We know next to nothing about the technology, next to nothing about which engineers are working on the technology, and next to nothing about Google's intentions. The only things we do know are that Glass is associated with Google X (which seems to be dedicated to long-term projects - space elevators, anyone?) and that Google intends to release something soon. That is very sparse data.
I took a look at skills app -- I like the approach and the clean layout, but a couple thoughts from this hiring manager:

* Most of the really good devs I know and hire do not bother with easy metrics like number of tweets, followers, or StackOverflow points. They are perfect to paste together on summary reports and look "complete," but their absolute values or essence don't mean anything.

* The high numbers on public sites seem to be for two classes of devs -- celebrities, who you already know are celebrities -- and people with way too much time on their hands (if they don't work for an open source company, which most people don't). Most people have average values. If someone is on LinkedIn, I'm more interested to see if they have X hundred followers per years in industry up to some maximum lifetime value. I generally ignore recommendations.

* See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3771286 for the discussion about what the number of points actually measures on SO, for example. It's a great site, but it's struggling to handle both breadth and depth of material well. High numbers does not necessarily correlate with expertise, just dedication. Maybe I want that skillset for a customer service rep, but I haven't yet wanted it for an engineer.

* I have shipped 20M loc in my career in 32 regions, and none of it is available on github or sourceforge. Most engineers are like that -- again, the public numbers are biased to certain individuals. Maybe there is a way for candidates to quantify the projects they have worked on?

* What I would love is a way to automatically assess FizzBuzz on candidates. I know there are some sites like interviewstreet.com that try to do this, but they don't yet have the critical mass like linkedin. And I fear, the moment they get critical mass then they'll become a new SAT or other standardized test that becomes too easy to game.