skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. Old site, doesn't look that good, but benefits from old school 'mom&pop web design' look that might or might not inspire trust in buyers.

New site has less character and is more bland. I cannot get over the cards and the mac. Why is background in screen same as outside - totally breaks the message of software in a computer, make it black at least, so that the image can be read more easily, now the computer looks like an open frame. Or show a stylized screenshot of the software. And why does the cards look so boring? Add some shadows or something. Why are links underlined in menu. Why is try now more prominent than buy now? New design need to get it's priorities straight!

I would like to see an A/B test on whether changing some of the fonts to ComicSans would increase conversion. I think that for this audience it might.
I'm pretty sure he was. Though it does sound like he is saying the new design is cool.
Pretty impressive. Is your social driven traffic via your own profiles on these sites or users/readers?
On slide 52, which is supposed to demonstrate that the Android and Java source code implementations differ, it's clear that the Android definition did not come from Android: The anotherString parameter is not referenced, and there are no offsets as parameters.

I also find it amusing that in Oracle's slides, "Java On Our Computers" is demonstrated with the Java update screen. Sigh.
Like they say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Also, the complicated things that one sees at first sight are a sign that probably all features, including the ones that I didn't see, are complicated. Which is not what I'm looking for.
Oh yeah. Stay tuned! :)
Don't worry. IP and IP protections are good, and won't be abused. This is obviously a case of a punk kid being bad -- I mean really, who looks for info on things they like in publicly accessibly places? I'll tell you who, only hoodlums and miscreants. What's next? Punks noticing buildings before they are finished? Thugs seeing window displays before the store opens?

/snark
alljapaneseallthetime.com basically recommends same techniques: listening first, then verbal. He even goes to the extreme of listening to the foreign language 24/7, even in your sleep. Have kanji (or hanzi, or arabic) posters displayed in your bathroom. Turn the radio on when you're in the shower. Listen to podcasts when you're at work and subway. Keep those podcasts on while you're sleeping so you hear it first thing when you wake up.

Immerse yourself completely, and it'll almost be the same as listening in that foreign country.
That's how the chargeback process works with all Visa and MasterCard cards. The money is returned to you immediately, the chargeback notice is sent to the merchant, and they have 10 business days to respond. If they don't respond, or the banks decide in your favor after reading their response, you keep the money. Otherwise, the charge can be re-applied weeks after you initially got your money back.
Jurors. All about the jurors. Average, non-fuckin-HN-reader jurors, and they know what Angry Birds is. If they had used something more representative like SHADOWGUN, no one would know what they were talking about.
This. For all the hemming and hawing that is done about *AA's and digital delivery, it's got to make sense compared to their current budgets. Most astute people can see the ship leaving the harbor in terms of what the future looks like, but when your revenue is measured in billions, it's easier to just let things shake out and then see who wins than it is to put it on the line and potentially get burned betting the wrong way.

edit: I don't necessarily believe in this as a sound way of doing business, but I understand why they'd think this way.
California clean-tech industry a VC darling
I don't understand what you're trying to say.

There's only one king, but both sides have 15 additional pieces. One extra pawn is often enough to win, and in the majority of games between competent players one side resigns long before an actual checkmate is on the horizon.

If you want to exchange off the pieces and make a draw, you can.
If you're only interested in playing surprising/paradoxical/beautiful moves, so be it.

In go, regardless of the handicap, or whether you want to win by more or lose by less, the objective is still to surround more space than your opponent.
It's pretty sexist if you ask me. A general complaint of mine: tech news (and in this case this blog post) include meaningless pictures of woman in a way that is embarrassing to the industry. I'm getting tired of clicking links on HackerNews and LinkedIn today that look like US/People Magazine to any casual observer walking by. We're better than that.
Livefyre is hiring | San Francisco area
Hi Mike,

Thanks for the feedback. We do indeed have Dropbox and Google Apps integration. If you check out the "Documents" tab in your project, you the option to connect to both Google Docs and Dropbox. You can also connect to Google Calendar via the "Calendar" tab, or grab our Gmail widget from the Google Apps Marketplace (https://blog.siasto.com/clear-your-email-inbox).

Hope this helps!
Well hold on a damn moment. We all know what really happens. The 9-5'ers end up being made to work 50-60 hours/week anyway.
I wonder how medication changes the signs of a liar? More so focused on the idea of ADD / Focus medicines. Combine this article with what "Robot's See", can we create a lie detecting robot on the visual cues?
There are a number of chargeback codes for things like item-not-as-described. If there is fraud on the part of the merchant, they can be deprived of the money and the goods, as far as Visa/MasterCard's Operating Regulations are concerned. If the merchant loses their dispute of the chargeback, their remaining recourse is to take the customer to court.
Certainly possible that they would make more money, but I doubt it. Doing some (very) rough math, HBO has about 28M subscribers. Cable customers pay $18 bucks a month for HBO, of which HBO usually gets 50%. So an overnight change in the business model would require 28M subscribers at about $9 / month.

Just as a point of comparison, Netflix, with a much larger catalog of shows and movies, has something of the order of 25M subscribers

Obviously an overnight change would not happen, there would be a transition over several years and the streaming subscribers may well be supplementary to existing subscribers. But during the transition, cable company partnerships would be strained and existing revenue would be at risk. Not to mention the capital investment required to provide the content reliably, dealing with the multitude of streaming devices, providing customer support, marketing the product directly to consumers and all the other things that cable companies take care of (albeit badly). Netflix is making bold changes in its business model and it's certainly not an easy thing to do.

Ultimately, HBO's core competency is in creating amazing content. It's arguable if they'd make more money by changing their business model, but I'd wager that HBO execs simply do not want to have to deal with all the distractions from their core mission that would occur by doing so.
I'd never heard of Spreedly! Thank you for pointing that out: it makes this project just the tiniest bit more likely to replace my day job. :)
I'll second this after playing around just a tiny bit today. I wanted to train it that I really like the "Four Short Links" in O'Reilly Radar's feed. The problem is that the title looks like this: "Four Short Links: April 19, 2012".

Turns out, I can highlight the text that I "like" in the title of an article and "like" that (or "dislike it"). So I just highlighted the "Four Short Links" part and liked that. Bingo. Done. That is the kind of attention to detail and control that I want to have in a feed reader (assuming it can actually use all that data I'm going to give it, time will tell there).
There's a free version of Splunk that does an internal count (something like 100mb/day) for demo purposes. If one is savvy enough to override that, then I'd also assume one is savvy enough to fake the records when the license police come calling.

I can't be the only one that finds it very disquieting that you have to give a company access to your internal network so they can perform antipiracy checks.
While I'm sure that the prices are a big factor, the only one I care about is: their site is fucking terrible. It's insanely difficult to navigate, the search is atrocious, and finding out what's available online versus in stores is just painful.

There are several Best Buys near me, and I'd love to buy stuff online and go run and pick it up when I find that it's available in one of the stores. Every single time I've tried, I ended up going to Amazon and just getting it the next day that way.

I don't care about the price, I just want it to work.
How Much Money Will I earn Through Adsense like Boss?
See how well this argument has worked for gun owners over the last 50 years :)
Like Dylan16807 said - it doesn't. Chrome already hides "user:pass" bits in the status bar.
To be fair, Gaussian is orders of magnitude worse. See <http://www.bannedbygaussian.org/>.
HN hates Paypal. Maybe the internet blogosphere in general.

Beyond that, I think most people are just fine with Paypal.
Windows on ARM in the enterprise
Haha, I appreciate the sentiment. And yeah, Amazon's marketplace is pretty exciting for us as well - their approach is obviously quite different, but it's very cool to see movement like this higher up on the stack.
Cool concept and execution, but my Facebook timeline is very text driven— which makes the PinView render not very readable.
All chargebacks can be disputed. Best Buy can provide evidence, including the return policies shown on the kiosk, which the banks will review to determine if the chargeback should stand or not. If Best Buy also loses the dispute, the customer will keep their money, but Best Buy still has the option of a court case.
Through the vulnerability scanning I do at work, our tool marks a lot of things just based on version numbers. Looking into them deeper, I see the backported patch has been applied. RHEL does a pretty good job on this, really stands out. Makes my vulnerability scanning a little more time consuming, but frees up time I would otherwise be spending on documenting security breeches and data loss.

Kudos.
Any particular change (like this redesign) might not move the needle, but there exists SUBSTANTIAL evidence that A/B testing can help the bottom line of the company. Read e.g. any of the multiple times the 37 Signals blog covered how they got like 40% lifts to paid account signups by redoing a pricing or landing page.

Do you find me credible on this topic? I'm legally, morally, and practically constrained regarding how much detail I can go into here, but if you trust me: I have recent experience which makes me disagree in the strongest possible way with the generalization of your hypothesis. A recent client CCs me on their weekly Optimizely status report. I've been evangelizing A/B testing for a few years. Every time I read one of those emails my mind gets blown again.
How use AD for authorization and radius for two-factor auth
Did you know that Microsoft can proxy authentication requests to a 3rd party server? The MS radius plugin NPS will allow user to login with an AD username and an OTP, preform authorization based on the username and proxy the creds for authentication.
Cisco memo: We can’t build anything
This move fits with HBO's (and really every content provider's) anti-piracy strategy. Namely, content needs to be encrypted from the time it leaves their server's to the time it is decoded by the screen. The reason for this is simple, if they achieve this goal, they can argue that anyone who provides an unencrypted copy of content must have violated the DMCA (which has provision against tampering with encryption). Whether the technologies have cracked (the article points out the HDCP has been) or whether the provider ever prosecutes isn't the point, the content providers feel they need to reserve their rights at any cost.

Many folks (techdirt included) argue that piracy is just marketing. For instance, it allows HBO to reach an audience they wouldn't reach otherwise. They even speculate that the Game of Thrones ratings bump was due to piracy. While that may (or may not) be true, in most industries, companies control when, where and much to spend on marketing.

For HBO (or any content provider) all these decisions come down to economics and how they can maximize their profits. In this new case (adding HDCP to their streams) they probably judged that the number of customer's they'd loose was pretty small and making the change would allow them to further their strategic goals.
You keep questioning my statistics skill, but you are the one who used the anecdote of your personal purchases as evidence. Your analogy makes sense, but again, you cherry picked one data point. For every case like this, there are 100 where the professional consensus was right, and the lone dissenter was simply a quack.

Of course, there is a giant different between your analogy and what we are debating. You guys haven't proven beyond a doubt that inflation is significantly higher than the BPP or CPI. You are also accusing BPP of fudging their numbers, and admittedly they aren't open about their data sources, but here's the rub.

You could easily create your own BPP type index, make it open with the code in the public domain, and show some real numbers to prove that the BPP is fudged. Right?

side note: shadowstats is not transparent either. They haven't produced the data sources plus the code that generates their numbers.
export devilsadvocate="1"

But in this instance, the "description" was what you saw right in front of you. It's not fraud to sell you something from a glass case right in front of you. From a CS perspective I can see why it would be the right thing to accept a return, but not so much a legal issue.
The missing rational in buying and selling
Oh come on. It is arrogant, unhelpful comments like this that make the tech community look like a bunch of pricks.

Criticism is supposed to be helpful and offer direction.
Expressor 3.6, Not Just A Pretty Face
This is entirely par for the course, and quite reasonable if you understand how it happens in practice and why it exists.

There are Splunk customers who do not allow outbound connections to the Internet and so Splunk can't use automated means of auditing license compliance. So they reserve the right to audit you on site. So if you're the CIA and you are paying for 1 petabyte and you are using 2, they want to know and charge you appropriately.

As a matter of good corporate governance, they are actually doing you a favor and preventing you from being a thief. :-)
In the past you have talked about just using off the shelf themes from ThemeForest and tweaking those. Is there a reason you thought BingoCardCreator needed a truly unique design?

I'm building a couple sites at the moment and am having them designed from scratch but I'm wondering how you determine the cost/benefit of tweaking something off the shelf versus building your own?
Nice. If you ever want to explore drop-in route planning using maps (OSM and/or google), as well as activity tracking using GPS data, we have an extensive javascript API to interact with our service. Basically, we handle everything complicated, and it's just a matter of JS developers and designers making it nice on your front end.
For those who still like the cops angle, I'll do a bit of wild speculation. Once you sign your driving record over to your insurance company, you no longer own it, do you? So they could just repackage your detailed driving record and sell it to any interested third parties through a shell company. This is close to the same model the cell phone companies are using. You end up with warrant-free observation of citizens at a very detailed level without the government directly have any kind of discussion at all about your rights.

I imagine if this trend continues we'll see "packagers", intermediary companies that assemble packages of just about everything there is to know about you and formatting it in a nice timelime -- public posts, blogs, travel records, phone call records, etc -- perhaps with an ongoing subscription service for those folks you want to keep close tabs on. It's a very interesting product idea. "Joe got up, tweeted about the football game last night, then posted this comment on HN. After driving to the gym at 10 mph over the speed limit, he called his mistress for 15 minutes...."
You don't have enough data to really draw any conclusions. In the last step in the funnel, the completion rate with the redesign is between 94-97% with 95% confidence. With the old design it's 92-96% with 95% confidence. Those regions overlap and the designs might be the same or they might be different.
You need honest friends. I looked at a little iOS game a friend of mine was doing. I told him what I like about it. I also told him everything I thought was wrong about it. He was asking me for honest feedback so I gave it.

I didn't have to be mean about it, just clear and straight forward. "I don't like the way this works because ..." "I don't like the way this looks because ..."

Real feedback is much more helpful.
This is great -- although IMO not a replacement for programs like Rosetta Stone, as this method requires significantly more dedication.
> If at the time of purchase I have full information about the product

There's the problem. You assume full information is available up-front. In my opinion, a return policy is actually the method by which the consumer obtains full information.

Say I'm buying a TV. The interwebs will have all of the numerical information, and the showroom will have a demo playing on it, but that doesn't reflect the lighting conditions of my own home. Maybe there's an inaudible high-pitch noise that freaks out my cat. Maybe it gives me headaches after 4 hours, where my current TV doesn't do that until 6 hours.

These are all examples of information that is relevant to my purchase decision, which is not available at purchase time. Thus, your hypothesis of full information is invalid. The easiest way to obtain this information, is through a trial period of some sort. A return policy is morally equivalent to a trial period, optimized for the most common use-case.
Tethr: Getting online in a crisis
Splunk Surges After Pricing Shares Above Range in Web Data IPO - Bloomberg
A friend and I created a similar static node engine called Quill at the last HackNY hackathon. http://justquillin.com.
WOW. That's a deal-breaker.

It would be interesting to get the whole way through the new car negotiating process, then strike this line right before signing. What would the reaction be? How badly does the dealership want to sell that car?
If you don't like the music choices, just create your own room by going to the homepage: http://dancepartydemo.meteor.com/
Watch Chelsea tv Live Stream Online
Hey Courtland

So I'm not as concerned about connecting to those, they're great features to have. I'm more pointing out some flaws from a conversion perspective. Just having those features doesn't do much unless I understand how they work in the context of your entire tool and maybe I'm lazy but I don't want to have to actually use your site as a project tool to figure out if its worth the considerable friction of switching project management tools.

The site is really lacking some form of a walkthrough or demo site or something that demonstrates that your product will do what my current tool does, and how its better. This isn't a blue ocean strategy, its a very crowded market with some very entrenched incumbents, just saying "It integrates with Google Docs and Dropbox" isn't really cutting it.
To each his own, but I don't see how using a lighthearted pop culture reference that some, not most, people will identify with could lead to any substantial conclusions about either the founders or their product.
And already a dead link...
Shellshow - Slideshow in your terminal
When will companies (and soccer teams) learn that this is not how you treat your customers (or fans).
Show HN: Your Twitter Stream Organized by Topics
Ahh you are right - I was A/B sent to old site. Reloaded to the newer one - cleaner, nicer aesthetic, still could use some Armor All.
I'm not arguing for patents, only that a programming language should probably be patentable if other similar creative efforts are, I don't see why they should be exempt. I agree with you that patents are bad overall (if that's your stance) and should be revamped or abolished.
Hidden Neighborhood Boundaries Visualized with Foursquare Checkins
sweet idea!
That's not really the point. I mean, not having a Facebook account stops this demo too. There are other things you might not want to be tricked into clicking on.
Firebase (YC S11) aims to reinvent real-time apps and already has 4,000 sign-ups
Hi everyone!

We built a new Twitter client that automatically arranges your stream by topics.
All tweets are clustered into Wikipedia topics to make Twitter easier to read and filter.

Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your feedback!
English/Spanish here. My wife is Cuban and did not speak much English when I meet her so it was a Huge motivating factor. ;) Italian and Portuguese will be next for me as once you know Spanish you automatically know big chunks of other Latin based languages.
Microsoft technology examples. I am a-feared. Are there wrappers in jQuery or Prototype (et al) for browser side WebSockets access yet, so I only need to worry about if it is supported, rather than how?

Similarly, what does it take to support this on the server side? (in a *nix environment)
A few notes from a recent attempt to use subprocess in the middle of a few generators:

p.communicate() only works if the output of the program can fit in memory. If it can't, python will gladly crash your box for you.

The buffer size of the os pipes on Linux are 64k. If you don't do your reads and writes in this size, it's possible to deadlock yourself.

Reads on the pipes has to be done in a non-blocking fashion, using os.read(), if you're dealing with streams of data that are larger than the memory you have available to yourself.

You can chain multiple subprocesses together directly, if you feed the stdout pipe to stdin on the next process.

p1 = subprocess.Popen(['cat', 'foo'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
p2 = subprocess.Popen(['grep', 'cat'], stdin=p1.stdout, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
p2.communicate()

select.poll() works on the os.pipes which are contained in the Popen objects.
Why freemium sucks
> "acquiring content illegally is a better experience than acquiring it legally."

Recall this famous image: http://www.makeuseof.com/tech-fun/pirated-dvd-vs-legal-dvd/

People get too hung up on small points in this discussion -- "it'll be out in 3 weeks, that's not very long" or whatever -- and miss the larger picture. The larger picture is that there are a lot of unnecessary barriers between consumers and content they're willing to pay for.

Torrents are straightforward, they work right the first time, and they continue to work. Whereas some providers/distributors seem intent on processes that are slow, convoluted, annoying, frustrating, and that might eventually not even deliver the desired content (say, in the language of choice.)
I see your perspective, and I don't want to hold myself up as a morally superior grown up. I was trying to have a serious ethical discussion about something I don't completely understand. I don't think HBO is doing the right thing (from a customer service or business point of view) by restricting their content the way they are, but should it be within their rights to do so?

But I am sorry for my unhumble tone. Using words like "entitled" and "infantile" was counter-productive to a real discussion.