skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Posting under a throwaway account because I do not want Google to try and screw me over further.

Hatchlings will probably get their money back because this achieved some measure of popularity on a major site and this makes Google look like crap. If you're one of the thousands and thousands of small businesses that Google has screwed over, this is about the only way you'll ever get your money back because GOOGLE DOES NOT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT STEALING YOUR MONEY AND DESTROYING YOUR BUSINESS.

Everybody that loves Google because they talk a nice game about a free and open society and release some open source projects and say nice things about doing no evil should realize that their customer service is practically non-existent on purpose so they can steal your money easier. The only way to get your money back is to make them look bad.

I hope more people publicize Google's actions in many of these cases so people would realize what a chance you're taking when you do any kind of business with Google.

And think...this is is a guy with an actual account manager at Google...how bad do you think they treat the average small business that just does a few hundred or thousand dollars of ads and depends on that money to pay people?
I lost my Adsense account two years ago, due to valid violations. This saddened me, and was the end of web development for me. The stats were my heroine.

Fast forward to Spring break of this year, I developed a few Android apps and one took off. I signed up for AdMob in early March.

I kept clean and got my fill of daily stats and was once again happy with my new home on the internet.

Fast forward a week and a half, I get an alert saying Admob accounts will be merged with Adsense, uh oh. I was generating decent income at this point, because let's face it, the Android market is just wide open.

I decided to make my second appeal to Adsense, 2 years later, asking for another chance and explaining my understanding of the previous violations. I noted my clean record on Admob and my apps as my reason for appealing.

6 hours later, my AdMob account is banned without any kind of notification. My wife looks over at me and wonders why I'm so sad at the laptop after 10 hours of class. It had become my daily habit to kiss my wife and check the AdMob stats. It's not actually about making money, it is something about watching the growth/lotto.

So, I have now given up on Android apps and just disabled all but the most popular one. I removed ads and cleaned up my last push.

I wish there was some type of leniency. My wife offered to make an account in her name and just take over my Android apps, but the initial thrill is gone. There is a looming realization of Google controlling the majority of online advertising and that one mistake will probably haunt me for many years/services to come.
Head to Head – JBoss v IBM, TCA
Total Cost of Acquisition comparison on JBoss vs. IBM
This is a great explanation, but this statement is wrong: The U.S. has lost that industrial base and it’s extremely difficult to get it back.

It's important to keep in mind that the US still makes a lot of stuff. In fact, we still make more than most: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/07/133561265/3-ways-o...

However, we're employing less people to do it, and those that we do employ require more education than before: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/13/145039131/the-tran...
http://www.pagodabox.com
that was a good one:

http://web.archive.org/web/20101102120728/http://measuringme...
Ask HN: Is Node.js indeed the new PHP?
I'm sure all of you have heard the recent hype claiming that Node.js is the new PHP. Lots of new startups are using it (and some established companies like Walmart) and it seems to be poised for a boom in both the job-market and in the market adoption side of things.

So I ask you, do you believe that Node.js is on the precipice of mainstream adoption? Are you planning to build with Node.js or migrate existing projects to it?

What say you HN?
... they took place in areas where it is illegal to have a weapon in your possession. Maybe not the Giffords example...

You're right about the Giffords example. In fact, one of the attendees did have a handgun, but that did nothing to help the situation. He (wisely, one would argue) kept it in his pocket since a) he could not figure out who was shooting, and b) even if he had, he would not have been able to do anything without hitting bystanders, and c) if he had pulled the gun out, the likelihood of someone else around with a gun mistaking him for the primary shooter would leave a significant risk of him getting shot by mistake.
Most of the people making a living using affiliates don't have the skills to make their own app or SaaS.
Funny, I was under the impression that female founders were overrepresented in tech news. Apart from some anecdotal evidence, I don't think the author makes a very convincing case of the opposite. That being said, it would be interesting to compare the ratio of successful female entrepreneurs versus the ratio of press coverage they get.
The FBI is not going to come after you for publishing a DOS vulnerability in a mobile app; in fact, you could find and publish remote code execution in an extremely popular application (say Instagram or Twitter) without even telling the vendor and still not be in any trouble. People do it all the time.

Most of the stories you hear about people getting in actual trouble over vulnerability research involve web vulnerabilities. You cannot hack someone else's web site to make a point, even if the underlying point is unimpeachable ("this application is insecure and people should know about it").
Soldering Cubelets With Electric Skillets
Actually, I'd say this is a long-term problem that we won't solve until we stop expecting everyone to have a job and figure out some way to distribute out to everyone a piece of the value created by automation.
Two interesting side-topics included in this post:

1) How the Cloud Programmability Team is dealing with the impact of .NET 4.5 on supporting multiple .NET versions. (There is a lot of "they said it won't break much" hand-waving on other blogs.)

2) Relying on a test suite when implementing performance enhancements.
>> The average person became an investor in a specific asset class.

I don't know... "average" people could buy houses. I think it's when you push it out to the edge so everyone gets involved, then you have problems.

Currently, "average" people can't even do these investments. Probably, won't be so bad, unless it becomes a bubble.
Can't one go around some taxes by paying to themselves dividends instead of salaries?
The famous example for this in Germany is Nokia of all 'people'.
(I work on the HipHop compiler.) You start by compiling PHP source.

Simple PHP statements take a lot more space in the binary than intuition suggests. E.g.:

if ($a == $b) ...

would seem like it should be

cmp $rax, $rbx
jz ...

But! If type inference has failed, we don't know what types $a and $b are, so they might be strings or objects or something crazy. So we're going to have to indirectly dispatch to $a's '==' method. We also spend a ton of space on reference counting code; the semantics of the language basically force you to do naive reference counting, since refcounts can be witnessed in various ways, so every time we pass an argument, do an assignment, sometimes even evaluate expressions, we need to manipulate reference counts, and if they've gone to zero call a destructor.

It ends up making the code really large, and one of the things that's unique about our efforts to run PHP fast relative to other dynamic language efforts is that sheer code bulk ends up being our largest enemy; if we're not careful, icache misses eat us alive.

Finally, I'll note that it's not quite a 1.5GB binary. The actual ELF binary is something like 1.1GB, and the remainder of the package we bittorrent around production is stuff like static resources (javascript, css) and primed contents for the APC cache that we want prepopulated on boot.
Google Releases 50 Search Quality Changes for March 2012
I know I'm playing semantic games here, but so is Apple with this slogan :)
Leonardo da Vinci's To-Do List
It happened to me for a blog where adsense was removed for years.

I moved my adwords campain for other business sites since then and advocate it when I can.
>The second paragraph seems like something one could test.

I do not think it would be ethical to test it directly. But you don't have to search far to find people who have had their accounts crashed by angry exes.
The other huge issue is that a Chinese worker can produce an iPad for less than a robot while an American worker costs more.

Not by as much of a margin as one would think. Listen to part 3 of This American Life's retraction of the Daisey story: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/460/r...

The conclusion is that the difference per iPad or iPhone is a small percentage of the profit. They argue that it is, in fact, the supply chain that makes the difference.
Can hustle be taught?
Firstly, how simple is it to convey what this oft-used buzzword actually means?

More importantly, how can you actually go about teaching what many think is an intrinsic part of your being?
FBI's software team built their own version of Basecamp = $451 million...
Indeed - a sudden boom is more disturbing than a rumble.

Still, if it can be made quiet enough not to scare people, it could be inspiring. You hear a bang in time see a man-made object traveling above Mach 2.

Or 3, 4, 5...
Google Glass is not ambitious enough
Are there really people in this community who don't know this?
I see your point, but I don't think it's a real problem. Bookmark a Javascript reference and then you can go there directly, no searching necessary.

If it's specifically previously answered queries you're interested in, maybe something like OneNote would be a better solution? Then you could search your notes and probably find the old answer with a lot less noise.
What Our Phones Can Reveal About Us (Infographic)
Users will tolerate a lot to get their work done
With Vimperator and the command-line input, it's downright uncanny. For me to open, say, Hacker News, I'll type ":o[tab] hacker new[tab]" and a list of completions will appear. Including the main page, my comments thread, etc.

Completions are based on history and bookmarks and includes not just URLs but page titles, bookmark text, and tags, possibly more (I'm still figuring this out).

Plus you lose all the menubars and crap that steal vertical real estate.

vimperator + tree style tab + ghostery + noscript + adblock plus + all-in-one sidebar + autopager + remove it permanently makes for a pretty slick browsing experience.

Chrome is better IMO as an applications interface. Especially, of course, Google's apps: gmail, maps, G+.

I'm leaning strongly toward a bifurcation of browsers. One mode is information aquisition / research, the other is as an AJAX web-app engine. The two needs differ, and my extensively tweeked Firefox config doesn't play particularly well with applications (GMail's keyboard shortcuts, f'rex). But it makes actually, you know, surfing the web, much better.
Ruby's terminology is confusing here, but singleton methods have very little to do with the Singleton Pattern.

The Singleton Pattern is a way to design a class that ensures at runtime that only one instance of that class ever exists. Singleton methods are (effectively) methods defined on a particular object rather than being defined for all objects of a single class.

The terminology is actually correct, because the way singleton methods work is by generating an anonymous class to which only the object at hand belongs (thus that anonymous class is an example of the singleton pattern) and defining the method there, but if what you're interested in is how to define your own singleton classes then understanding singleton methods doesn't help you, and vice versa.
If you're trying to scam Google (e.g. via click fraud), being told exactly how you were detected is rather useful if you want to be more successful next time.
The problem is: there are Open Source projects that are a compilation of works of different licenses that are sometimes more permissive in one term but less in another one (see for example the table on http://www.osscc.net/en/licenses.html#compatibility to see what kinds of problems can occur).

How would you solve this problem?
Consider the other viewpoint: "I don't understand how anyone could complain that a license which ensures that users maintain all freedoms to modify the code as 'restrictive.'"

It's a difference of priorities. Which aspect do you think is more important? You value different things higher than others.
FYI castling is standard in lots of bughouse openings and good in general, early f-pawn sacs are bad. This is at higher levels of play though. If you don't know what you're doing then you're better off with a move like Qe2 or Qe7 than castling.

Early sacrifices are bad because they put both you and your partner down material. Against top players, they will not let you have the pieces you need to win, and they will defend all squares, and if you spend any time waiting for pieces you'll get down on time and definitely never get what you want at the right time. Bughouse requires very fast, very solid play at the top levels.

But defending in bughouse is hard, and piece flow control is hard (requires watching partner's board while still moving super fast), so the newer the players the more that just sacrificing stuff can work.
Jesus. At this rate, we're going to have Emacs and Firefox ported to this thing before the game is even out.

...Actually, I wonder if something like Curses would be feasible...
Ask HN: hosting virtual servers in Singapore, anyone interested?
Hi HN,

I just bought two IBM x3550's with two intel Xeon's + 8 GB DDR3 ECC, off ebay and was wondering if anyone needed virtual hosting in Singapore, not for anything too intense or important as will be hosting at home.

Internet conenctivity:
[local SIngapore] 200 Mbit/s down, 80 Mbit/s up, http://www.speedtest.net/result/1877297307.png
[Hong Kong] http://www.speedtest.net/result/1877293633.png
[Palo Alto] http://www.speedtest.net/result/1877490665.png

Was thinking of running OpenStack to manage VM instances. Just doing this to guage interest for now, not 100% sure, only for personal use or just drop me an email with what you plan to use it for. If you're interested contact r[at]rayquang[dot]com
Is it my imagination or have I seen many "Google Screwed Us" posts and never one "Google Made It All Right" posts? It seems to me to be the opposite of Amazon, where I've seen many glowing posts about CS and very few posts about things going incredibly bad.

Edit: Amazon is also relevant due to their Android app store and soon in-app purchasing. I expect them to start an ad network for apps too.
What's the point of Android now?
This may not be a great solution to combat click fraud, but could google just limit the payout to 1 click per IP per website per day?
Most graduate selection committees will look favorably on a couple of years industrial experience between doing a Masters and doing a PhD. This is irrespective if you continue in physics are switch to a more applied discipline such as engineering. Following the 2008 recession, many people who lost their jobs went back to school to pursue masters and PhD degrees, so this is now quite common.

My opinion is if you are afraid of being locked in, then industry is better place. If you are willing to trade job stability and short term income to not be locked in, then learning how to start and build your own company around your ideas is the best way to retain flexibility.
Here you go:

https://docs.google.com/?pli=1#folders/0BxArLOveUH1bb081YWhD...
Thank you for sharing, and preventing me from potentially falling into this trap.

I was considering doing an ad based project until I read this.
Future of Entrepreneurship w/ Customer Development.
Push karma primarily affects how likely the release engineering team will accept any breaking of the standard rules of getting your code into the push. It generally doesn't drop if you are responsive and responsible for any problems your change causes. The only way to restore points is to show respect and consideration for the hard work the release engineering team does.

(I'm not 100% sure, but I think most of the booze and cupcakes come from people who were appreciative of the release engineering team for bringing potential issues to their attention or for being accommodating in terms of hours and in terms of delay to get things fixed.)

Being irresponsible (not supporting your changes) will factor into your performance review, but working exclusively on low-risk features will most likely hurt it way more.
Will this mess up other things in Google Analytics? Or is there any other reason not to use this?
LetsLunch launches SMART group lunches with proprietary technology.
Tiki Barber is now free to have his mistress: divorce being finalised with Ginny
Thank you, I was able to easily grok what you are saying, I was never thinking of it before in terms of 4:1 payoff, but that makes sense.
"I realize that this probably wasn’t done maliciously and that we were probably caught up in some algorithm gone awry"

I realize the diplomatic and empathic intent here but to me the whole episode is really damning if this is how they handle customers. Depriving people of payment for services rendered goes several steps beyond plain old shitty customer service.
I'm beginning to get a clearer picture of what I believe is going to replace (or more accurately, make irrelevant) current search engines. Most of the pieces are already in place.

Let's say I'm in the mood for a donut, but I can't remember how late my favorite donut place is open (as if, but bear with me).

If I had a knowledgable human at my disposal, I could ask them "When does that donut place close?"

They might answer that "they're open for another hour."

There are two important differences between this and search:

First, my friend uses contextual data s/he knows about me to determine what specifically it is that I want to know, and takes my "query" in natural language. Services like Siri already go a long way toward making this a reality, and good natural language search queries have been quite usable for years now.

Second, the answer is a natural language representation of the information I was looking for, rather than a pointer to where I can find it. Wolfram Alpha does a pretty good job of this if your query is about math or science or some other type of data that can be relatively straightforwardly curated.

If I do the same with Google, I get a Yahoo Answers page asking why donut places close at noon. If I'm a bit more specific and ask "When does Rocket Donuts close?", the top result is, helpfully, their home page. I then click the result and look around the page for their hours, and finally find them at the bottom of the screen. Then I have to remember what day it is, what time it is, and subtract that from the appropriate number.

I also don't have much information about how current their information is, even though the web server helpfully responds that the page was last updated around noon on April 2nd.

One approach would be the so-called "Semantic Web", but I believe getting a majority of unsophisticated web publishers to reliably include semantic information is a fool's errand.

What's really missing is a way to index the web not by text, but by a machine's best guess at the interpretation of the of the text. Basically index a bunch of "facts" on the web, including who is claiming that they're true, and how long ago they made that claim. So the "key" would be something like "Rocket Donuts, Bellingham, WA, USA: Closing time on Thursday" and you would get a bunch of results, but you would sort by authority (something like PageRank) and recency (both descending). Hopefully the top value would be "5:00PM PDT".

Obviously one does not simply walk in and solve this kind of problem, but I believe whoever does would have a shot at replacing "search" as we know it.
We're building an API for ordering things, starting with Amazon
I'm starting a collection of programs written in dcpu assembly here: https://github.com/jazzychad/dcpu-asm

EDIT: created a repo for my js emulator https://github.com/jazzychad/dcpu-js
When I was 12, I built apps to automate MMOs. I was making about $350/mo. from AdSense - not bad money for a kid my age - when my account was shut down on the last day of the billing cycle (ie., the day before they were going to send me a check).

After some initial disappointment I changed to a subscription model, which increased my profit by an order of magnitude and incentivized me to work a lot harder on creating a quality product. Because of this, I don't regard my AdSense shutdown as a bad thing. Knowing nothing about the sort of apps you make, I'd encourage you to try to explore more options to monetize them. Clearly a number of people were using your apps. A different approach to monetization may be just as thrilling and rewarding.
Assuming that his accounting of the facts is accurate, he did do all of the right things. That's why the "Dont rely..." comments are relevant. The affiliate-program market (and that's all Adsense is - a unique form of affiliate program) is almost universally open to this type of abuse.

Would you want to work for a company where you never got to meet or talk to your employer, you never knew for sure how much your paycheck would be, or exactly when it would be mailed/deposited? That's what we all do when we signup for Adsense.
Also: Exotic coffee. Flip-flops.

Someone forgot that true hip happens partly when you make it new because you don't care about tired memes. They're copying the surface but not the essence.
All of Google NYC's Tech Talk Recordings
The Tragedy of Social Networking Sites
The problem is that they don't have any rights. Google makes the rules for Adsense and you need to follow them. You could try to sue them in court, but do you really want to spend thousands of dollars and waste all kinds of time?

Something similar happened to me with Amazon. They kicked me off, never gave me a real reason, had automated responses, and now just ignore me. They also held $5000 for 3 months. I guess with 100% feedback and no complaints, they need to worry about me scamming them.

You never think that if you are following all the rules that something like this will happen to you, but it will. I now will not base any income off of third-parties.

It might be nice for some secondary income, but the risk is too high that they will destroy your revenue stream.

It's sick that so many people make these companies thousands and thousands of dollars/month and they can't even give them the common courtesy of a real person to talk to when problems like this arise.

The only reason they can get away with it is because they are a de facto monopoly.
7x floorspace does not necessarily equal 7x sales. It simply means more choices. There could be 7 women wearing 7 different dresses and 7 men all wearing the same suit. Or turnover could be higher in men's inventory. Etc

Although I see where you're coming from, especially since sales/sqft is a big KPI for retail.
You need to give some thought about how you categorize your events. If you plan on using events for other things, you want to give some upfront planning for how you Categorize and label things otherwise you might make reporting difficult.
Ask HN: Need pre-beta testers for pro football Q&A site
Working on a pro football Q&A site as a side project. Users can ask and answer football questions, and earn points and badges.

Looking for some pre-beta testers; you should get access in a week or so.

Site: http://www.profootballqa.com

[Sidenote: Throwaway account. Current startup is getting some media lately--don't want any distractions]
Facebook Coming to Nasdaq With the Ticker 'FB'
Cable vs. Telco: Verizon-Cable Industry Stop Competing, Forced to Collude
If a new release goes out every day, how is that tested internally for 2-3 days? Do employees get split across versions or are incremental changes rolled out much more frequently?