skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "content providers" are authors, artists, and editors, and they aren't going anywhere, much less out of business.

Publishers are middlemen who've prospered by wedging themselves in between the money and the talent.
> Implying that most other economists in the US are dishonest is a bold claim that needs some significant evidence.

I do not think that, and I do not think that I implied that anywhere.

Rather, almost no one outside the BLS collects this information in the US on a scale that allows you to contest official numbers - so that BLS gets to claim whatever they want, and most economists in the US take that as gospel (and are wrong because they are misled, not because they are dishonest).

> Implying that something is dishonest because it is different than it was in the past is a non sequitur.

Appeal to authority ("obviously, the BLS/Fed had their legitimate reasons to revise the calculations") is a fallacy. And I did give the reasoning, so let me repeat amd expand that in case you missed:

Government gets income indexed to real inflation (by virtue of being a percentage of wages/profits/transactions) - so it is not affected by accuracy of inflation numbers.

Government expenditure (salaries, social security) is indexed to a computation controlled by the government. Furthermore, if this computation results in a number 0%-3%, everyone is happy, even if this is not supported by the underlying facts.

Said computation has been revised several times in the last 40 years, where new computation always and consistently results in a number lower than it would have been had you used earlier formulas.

Now, what do you find more plausible: Everyone in government (and extended government - the Fed) was trying their best to understand the economy, and it just happens that all revisions make government look better - or that these revisions were made because they make government look better, despite underlying facts?

Oh, and take into account that government and the fed is actually full of career politicians (bernanke campaigned to become fed chief).

At some point I factchecked government stats and actions for a living. My conclusion is that it is all fudged, nothing can be trusted, mistakes get made to make the government look better 90% of the time. Law enforcement (especially in case of the SEC) is very selectively applied. I can cite numerous examples, but I'm tired. Do your own research (karl deninger, zerohedge, michael shedlock are good starting points), or keep watching the CNN / CNBC government mouthpieces and believe all is well.
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As a Windows Phone user and developer, I've noticed frequent updates help promote app usage tremendously, which is confirmed by the analysis. With so many apps installed on my phone, I tend to forget about 70% of them until there's an update notification and then I'd want to check out what's new. So this is a perfect model as long as there's no shortage of content ideas. This is reminiscent of one of the most successful PC games today, League of Legends, which has had new content released every two weeks since launch couple years ago.

Devs, have you considered microtransaction for Taptitude? You did mention "coins to purchase game updates." Maybe some users prefer to pay for those updates instead? Congratulations on the success!
Is there an events' directory provider?
Hello,

I was wondering if there is any company which creates a list of events happening in every city (or in the top cities) and which sells this content to third parties.

I am thinking about creating an app for events and it would be great to have access to such directory. I see, for example, that LA Weekly is powered by VoiceVillage.
You're probably looking for cheat. http://cheat.errtheblog.com/
I do not mean submitting an HTTPS login form, which works just fine, but forces a full page refresh. I mean capturing a submit and sending the credentials via AJAX, but to HTTPS, which is forbidden by the security sandbox. You end up doing various unkosher things like bringing up the login form over HTTPS in an iframe while the site itself is brought up over HTTP.

Yes, this is fundamentally insecure, and I am aware that this is not a problem with Backbone specifically, but a general problem with the approach of building browser apps without page refreshes over HTTP for everything except for the login screen.
I love seeing new vertical social news sites. Are there open source social news servers that anyone can recommend? It seems like it's becoming a trend to pop these sites up.
It's great that TBL wants all data and communication to be free. He also wants the semantic web to thrive, and that isn't going to happen anytime soon; SparQL and triplestores implementations are just too damn slow to replace SQL and relational.

However, I personally have no qualms with FB having my data. I only give them what I choose to, and I don't assume privacy necessarily will hold up.

Google though- that is more of a problem. The only way I get that data back is by running my own mail server.
I've also sent KS mail about seeing if they can merge the rewards. We'll see what happens.
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When you use it as a very informal synonym for 'real', or as a short form for 'infinite decimal'. (This is even more understandable when you realize every decimal is an infinite decimal, and our convention of truncating an infinite string of zeroes has little mathematical reality.)
Indeed, provided you know the problem domain, the most descriptive name (xs, x_rms) is almost always far shorter than the literal alternative (horizontal_positions, quadratic_mean_of_horizontal_positions).
This script inserts terminal escape sequences into text. These sequences are just text that the terminal interpret as color transitions.

Ascii.io transforms these terminal escape sequences into html/css, so Grc should work fine with it.
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From the article:

"Nature reported that the first round of field tests had a 70 percent accuracy rate. From the available material it is difficult to determine exactly what this number means. There are a couple of ways to interpret this, since both the write-up and the DHS documentation (all pdfs) are unclear."

I'm glad he pointed this out.

"This might mean that the current iteration of FAST correctly classifies 70 percent of people it observes -- which would produce false positives at an abysmal rate, given the rarity of terrorists in the population."

But maybe this isn't so bad if it means that 70% of people aren't molested in the airport, at the cost of missing 30% of terrorists we would otherwise catch. I'm very okay with this: I see this as (1.73 * 0.7)-million happier citizens per day [1] and (0 * 0.3) additional terrorist incidents [2].

"The other way of interpreting this reported result is that FAST will call a terrorist a terrorist 70 percent of the time. This second option tells us nothing about the rate of false positives, but it would likely be quite high. In either case, it is likely that the false-positive paradox would be in full force for FAST, ensuring that any real terrorists identified are lost in a sea of falsely accused innocents."

The author is too smart for his own good here. The second interpretation _should_ be "FAST will call a terrorist a terrorist 70 percent of the time. What's a false positive?"

Those unfamiliar with statistics may incorrectly see it this way. Seventy percent of terrorists will be caught, so that means we'll be more than 3 times safer than we already are! Such statistical incompetence is also strongly correlated to politicians. I can't back that up, though, due to my statistical incompetence.

[1] http://www.quora.com/How-many-people-fly-domestically-in-the...

[2] http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978...
Good point, and that $800 million was prorated over 4 years whereas NASA gets $18 billion annually.
Not fully, you need to add that the legacy airline is funding Jet Blue. Elon Musk explicitly said SpaceX would have not been able to achieve its goals so fast and so cheaply without the access to all the data from NASA. Basically, SpaceX was able to "ride" on the prior work of NASA, while having funding from the NASA. It is more a bit of a mixed spin-off/independent company in this case.
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I got this silly idea how to do it, I don't know if it works:

1. export your real $PATH to eg $REAL_PATH

2. clear $PATH (or set it to some dummy value)

3. Attach a wrapper script to command_not_found_handler, which would call the original command with REAL_PATH and pipes it to your filter (or colorizer or whatever).
There is an opportunity for a service that handles the legal implications of remote workers. Some states have ruled that remote contract workers constitute a business presence. The implication is that they now have to collect & remit state taxes for online purchases. The service would legally employee the remote worker, setting them up as a contract worker, and handle the various state law quirks.
Actually, it IS just one big distributed exchange since Reg NMS requires each ATS to route an order to a rival with a better price.

This is good, because new ATS's dont need to worry about network effects and can compete on features.

On the other hand, this required functionality could limit the set of possible new features. For example, it may be difficult to implement some way to discretize or slow down markets to remove any unnecessary advantages conferred on HFT traders, because of this mechanism.
> We found that what we liked best in a Müller-Brockmann book or on the screen in photoshop was not what we liked best on real data. Photoshop type rendering is pretty poor, which is another reason going straight from print to code worked well for us.

Really good call to omit Photoshop altogether from design endeavors like this. It's a waste of time copy/pasting actual data into your comp, whenever you want to change part of your design, you have to repeat it manually with all the other elements on the page, the fonts render poorly...

We lately try to go from sketch to simple HTML mockups. Having actual data readily available while designing is such an eye-opener. Thanks to web inspector, we can tweak the styles and see the changes get reflected in the entire page. Sometimes when we want to play with the layout, we take a screen grab, cut and move things around in Fireworks.

Nicholas Felton, about the Facebook timeline design:
"You can come into a meeting with a very beautiful comp and it’s like, ‘Oh yes, we should do it that way,’. But you’re never going to know if you can do it that way until you pump in the real data and live with it for days or weeks".

I don't understand how Photoshop is still considered a web design tool. Unless designing a marketing site with no content, it hinders good design more than it facilitates.
Check your units: GDP is $/year; your Facebook is $; $/($/year) = year. You should end up with a result in years, not in percent (which is unitless)
I guess the problem is that there are a lot of things that are "somewhat" important, and I can't do them all, so I have to triage even between the "important" items. A friend of a friend is having a housewarming party? Cool, I normally want to know, and maybe put it on my calendar. But when I get behind on my mail I don't even want to see that stuff on my screen.

And a lot of the unimportant stuff I want to at least glance at, if I have a spare minute.
Yes, but they are still horrible. They don't explain the use case or the context in which they're in.
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A Delta IV Medium's payload capacity is roughly 10,000lbs (to a geosynchronous transfer orbit). A 747's original design payload is more than 10x that. (Wikipedia claims a 747-8F's payload is about 150 tons.)
Not likely: https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=%24foo&re...
All of these multimillion dollar deals were raised by people or companies with proven track records. But with so much money in play, Kickstarter has little incentive to restrict funding limits. If Kickstarter only got paid after the funded project delivers, then Kickstarter and funders would have the same interests.
Site is down for me, google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
I've read for hours on end on everything from a Palm IIIxe(Back-lit 160x160 grey-scale) and Palm T|X(320x480 color LCD) to a Kobo(e-Ink) and an iPad2. I've had no problems with any of them.
Photos of Developer Desktops - yield the dog
I just mean that you should make it easy for bloggers to work with your website, to leverage the science blogging community. Research Blogging isn't my website, BTW, I just submit articles there sometimes. But it's something you should look at. All these independent blogs write about papers, submit their blog posts to Research Blogging (baasically like a trackback) and then they are indexed and publicized by Research Blogging. You could maybe do something similar... say, add upvote/downvote buttons people could use that would link to an article on your site, and then have a trackback on that article linking to the blog post.
You can't use the z buffer because layers may be transparent and require antialiasing on the edges...
I couldn't design my way around a centralized bootstrap node, but after that, it can be decentralized. And it has to be highly trusted, so the vision for the ur-node was a bunch of servers in Switzerland inside a vault, run by a public non-profit; subject to random audits; and funded by the IP royalties of the projected patent. (But thank God we can now rely on the good graces of concerned geeks such as Sergey Brin who have millions to spare. (Right Sergey?))

Yes, there is need for user agents running on the user's devices. Your chrome browser transparently maintains a https connection to mother ship (last I checked). I don't think that part of it is really an issue.
But this way smart people can score some money fast and go on to build something with a larger and more lasting impact (vide today's stories about Elon Musk and his space exploration project). While we get a cool product for immediate consumption every once in a while.
Can you make yourself smarter?
The javascript version covers IE6-8 while the CSS3 version does not.
The same argument applies to non-descriptive names, and the main complaint about short names is that they are often not descriptive.

I like to bring up the English language in this particular debate. "It", "he", and "she" are incredibly non-descriptive names, but each one of them is used many orders of magnitude more often than any "descriptive" name (other than maybe "I" or "you") and yet we don't hear rants about that.

The reason is exactly what the original commenter pointed out - scope. Sometimes the word "it" is descriptive enough all by itself. Other times it isn't. It's a more subtle matter than "worst variable names".
Show HN: Estimating bus arrivals in Reykjavik.
A brief description of the current status of my ongoing project of gathering and generating data for the bus system in and around Reykjavík.
Grep says the variable name "data" occurs about 80 times in the program I'm working on.

I used to prefer descriptiveVariableNames, but as my programs have gotten shorter, my variable names have gotten much shorter. I found that longVariableNames were starting to overwhelm everything else and obscure the shape of the code. They were still communicating theIntentOfTheVariable like they always did, but in a way that felt less helpful and more like lexical noise.

Code shape communicates meaning through a different channel than variable names do. As code gets less verbose, its shape emerges more and more, that channel becomes more and more informative, and one begins to use shorter names so as not to drown it out.

This is very different than verbose programs written in verbose languages. There, descriptiveVariableNames don't take up an unseemly amount of space relative to everything else. The shape of the code is less meaningful because you can't see the forest for the trees. And you're far more dependent on intentionClarifyingNames to orient yourself in that forest.

This is why programs written in concise languages look absurdly cryptic to people who haven't spent time in that language's world. The markers of meaning they're used to relying on are missing, and their eyes haven't adjusted to the meaning that is there. The program may have been crafted to maximize overall meaning across several channels, but one needs time and practice to get what those channels are. And the tradeoffs are probably different in each language.
What you said is confirmation of my guessing. I'm saying if $50 includes beta (currently only $100 [EDIT: just saw $50 for beta added, thanks for listening to HNers ibdnox! Oh, wait, that access is much later than the $100 price point..]), then the amount he may be getting may be higher than the current amount.

FYI, no data to base off, just guessing, hence the words "think", "would" in my post you're replying to.
I read books constantly, and I do own a 2nd generation Kindle, but I think it is buried in a box somewhere from a move I did last fall. I do 99% of my reading these days on either my Android phone, my laptop or my desktop PC. I really think the killer feature that Amazon bring to its Kindle brand is actually "Whisper Sync" more than eInk displays or any other specific device. Being able to pick up my book from where I left off on any internet enabled device is the #1 reason my books purchases are almost exclusively from amazon.
Google Cloud Print can now "print" to an Android device or local FedEx store
I've been to Galiano a few times, and from what the locals tell me, the internet connections there are pretty crappy. It's fine at the resort inn next to the ferry terminal, though.
I knew lots of people didn't sync their phones with their computers. I never thought it was because they didn't have a computer to do it with. That's pretty surprising, but with smart phones being as good as they are, lots of people probably don't need a dedicated computer.
Have you looked at Asana? http://asana.com/
Pubcenter / Microsoft's ad exchange performs (eCPM and fill rate) better than anyone else out there. I know because I work with 20+ networks. As mentioned in other parts of the thread it's probably because there is more demand and less supply.
>In industry it is a cost.

It's a cost to the shareholder. To every layer of management from the shopfloor foreman to the board it's a benefit.
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Ask HN: Real-time collaborative text javascript plugin?
I remember coming across a really next javascript plugin awhile back which basically let you have a text area editable by multiple people at the same time.. anyone know of anything like this?
> "then the workaholics could work more, learn more, and get paid more, whatever, and the just-a-jobbers could just work, and everyone would get paid by what they contribute."

Its not hard, its called contracting for an hourly wage. The problem is that many employers want workaholism at a 40hr a week wage.
This script inserts terminal escape sequences into text.

I understand that part. But there's a screenshot where a "ping" is being done at a normal looking terminal and it just works without being explicitly piped through a program that does the above. What's the mechanism for piping all the terminal output through another process?
Microsoft PM “Resigns” Via Video, Joins Justin Kan’s New Startup Exec
NASA does a lot more than launch people in capsules. It's not fair to compare spaceX to all of NASA. SpaceX has no Hubble, no ISS, no Mars antything, etc, etc.

They seem to be doing well, but let's compare apples to apples.
Obviously, any original estimate for how much money and time it will take to create the aircraft should include a reasonable level of buffering to account for the "known unknowns." Companies like Boeing and Lockheed aren't exactly newcomers to the aviation game, and I'm sure that they have extremely detailed statistics on how common this setback is, how much it costs on average, etc.

It's the same way in software -- when estimating how long a large project will take to complete, you have to assume that some things will go wrong. Maybe you have to track down a nasty bug in a third-party library, or you lose a team member, etc. All of this has to be considered based on its impact and likelihood as part of up-front estimation.
I created a WP7 app that utilizes Microsoft Pubcenter. My eCPM fluctuates between $0.90 and $1.00. When I first released the app, about a year ago, my eCPM was much lower (around $0.25).
I find tech people arguing about the valuation somewhat curious. Instagram has a lot of traction, eyeballs and users. More importantly it has those users in the place where everyone wants to be, mobile phones.

So sometimes you hear complaints from technologists like this "Hey I could write that app in a weekend, throw some EC-2 at it and blam, done. So WTF is up with that valuation?" And that sounds a bit like saying that the New York times is just some typeset ink and pictures. Which technically is not hard to produce, but their reach in terms of audience is actually quite large. So their value is in their reach, not their technology.

So wired wrote [1] that Instagram has 40 million users. Lets look at them from a 'customer acquisition cost' story. Paying out 300M in cash for 40M customers is $7.50 per customer. What is the lifetime value of a Facebook customer? How about a Facebook customer on Mobile? Good question, but if you already have a kick ass display ad business (which Facebook does) and you add 40M daily users, and you tweak the product so it goes through a way that you can usefully display them an ad? Can you make that into a billion dollar a year business in 1 year? 2 years? 5 years?

If engineers have a blind side it's 'suits', which is to say great engineers not only have skills but they also have the intuition to know the value of the product delivered. But products only have value if people know they exist, and the cost of acquiring customers for your killer product, well it can kill your product.

So rather than say 'this is a stupid valuation for a nothing of a company!', lets assume that the folks at Facebook aren't complete idiots, or scheming some back room buddy deal to put one over on shareholders (which one blogger suggested), ask yourself honestly, "A smart person looked at this deal and agreed it was worth $1B, 30% cash and 70% stock, since that makes no sense to me I need to figure out what they know that I don't know."

I personally think they are interested in the customer acquisition in the mobile space (obviously :-)) but I also recognize that having been through these things in the past there is a ton of stuff that doesn't make the press, like process innovations, or specific people skills, or partnerships, etc etc.

The cool thing about this story is that it seems like the founders will get a bit of money 'up front' which can be re-assuring to a founder / employee. Since there are no guarantees that the stock you got is worth anything when it 'unlocks.' [2]

[1] http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/instagram-40-million-...

[2] Speaking from personal experience of getting MANY shares of restricted stock valued at > $50/share when granted and then being worth $0.83 when 'unlocked', yes you read that correctly, 98.4% decline in value. Wouldn't cover tax, much less leave anything for me to write home about. But there are many such stories from the '90s, go use the wayback machine and price TUTS at December 1999 and 18 months later in June of 2001.