skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2005: Yahoo acquired Flickr for $35m, Delicious for $15-20m; 2012: Pinterest is now valued at $1500m, Instagram at $1000m.

I'd rather have 75 del.icio.us's than 1 Pinterest but.. I readily admit I'm getting old ;-) So my question is, did the folks 7 years ago get a bad deal or are the valuations now over the top?
I never really use sort by price because I find that the cheapest results are usually not very relevant

That's exactly part of the problem. If I'm searching for something specific like 'iPod Touch 32GB' I should not get results for $0.99 iPod cables and cases.
It's SCSS
It's syntax from LESS/Sass, which allows nested selectors and will generate the appropriate CSS.
"Powered by Yii Framework + LESS"
Is that like "my monthly revenues are 2000% month-over-month" when your total revenues are $200?
And in social science, as we have here.
Good question. Amazon is great for searching, pretty good for browsing, but pretty awful for browse-searching, where you're trying to narrow down results via search but still browse through them using various sorting and filtering types. The consistently awful price handling is the worst part of it.

I often find myself doing product filtering on other sites (yes, I feel a bit bad about this) and then (usually) buying on Amazon because of price and the free Prime shipping.

eg. I'll figure out what I want to buy for a new computer system on Newegg, because their combined browse-search is way better than Amazon's, and then take the final result and see if it is worth buying on Amazon via a direct parts name/number search. Amazon loses about 10-20% of the sales I would have otherwise just given them due to this when it turns out the cost to buy the item on the other site I was using is similar enough to the Amazon price. When the price is even close I favor the other site since they provided me a better UX experience, but I do admit that if the overall cost to buy on Amazon is significantly cheaper, I'll still buy from them.
"because the political system works state-by-state."

Hamilton is rolling in his grave...
If I were FB, my retort to google would be "people just use you for navigation".

Google doesn't do much for you to generate new consumer interest and awareness of your product -- that's a key marketing problem.
Email client (hackneyed)
This is a kind of a sad question, and googleing didn't reveal much to me. The company I work for, like many, has communications structured such that most relevant know-how coalesces in the form of thousands of emails within each employee's inbox (or the many subfolders therein). We use this thing called Microsoft Outlook, which reminds me of ccMail of yore. Alternatives seem about on the same level of lameness -- Thunderbird, ... ???

Is there something QWERTY about Outlook (Exchange?) that impedes innovation in this space? Feels like billions in productivity improvements are somehow being held back.
Even the most zealous are rarely devoid of all nuance.

Note he actually says "Nonfree games (like other nonfree programs) are unethical". That one believes an act is unethical is different from believing it will have a net negative effect vs not performing the act, and there's often a lot of nuance to be had when something is ethically questionable.

Consider the periodically-raised question of taking control of a botnet in order to shut it down. Opinions on this range from "totally ethical" to "totally unethical", even as much of the "totally unethical" crowd would probably admit that shutting down the botnet is a net good vs not doing so.

Sometimes, "X is unethical" doesn't mean "no good will come of X", it means "we need a third option". RMS believes non-free software is unethical, almost surely believes the existence of software in general is a net good, and that Free Software is the "third option".
For everyone talking about a bubble, 1.5B might actually be low. If you agree that Facebook is worth about 100B, according to Alexa, Pinterest is about 1/20th of the size by uniques (by pageviews it's about 1/30th). 1/20th means that Pinterest should be valued at about 5B, not 1.5B.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/pinterest.com
Because these are statewide standardized tests that intend to treat everyone equally, not to help students learn.
>> did the folks 7 years ago get a bad deal or are the valuations now over the top?

More likely Option 3: Vastly more people are connected to the Internet, which now has far superior paths to monetization.
This is a good idea, but it can also lead to burnout. Our kids take a lot of assessments (too many, IMHO), and they start to get cynical really fast. Our school does a comprehensive assessment at the beginning and end of the year to track overall progress (in addition to smaller-scale techniques like the ones you mentioned), which would be fine except that there are so many government-mandated tests* that also have to be given that students start to burn out.

Most professional educators have a pretty good grasp on the pedagogical practices that stress small, repetitive checks for understanding, which-- you're right-- works far better than massive, mind-numbing tests that demand significant student effort.

*Of course, we get the results from these so late that it doesn't give us the ability to make on-the-fly judgements.
Understand Color Science
A counterpoint:

Lately there's been a lot of discussion about some difficulties Facebook has had in the advertising sector. Jason Bigler of Google was snarking about this earlier today. [1] I realize this is largely because all the snarks come out of the woodwork before an IPO, but to a certain degree - they're right. Facebook just isn't a place that puts people into a "transactional mindset." People go to interact, and they kind of seem to like pictures, but only insofar as they're sharing pictures that are (a) funny or (b) very personal and of themselves or their pets.

Pinterest is different. People go on Pinterest to look at pictures of stuff that they like or that they think is cool. Yeah, I can't get into the Pinterest thing either, but I know a few people who do, and I have to say that that model - getting people to amass collections of stuff they think is neat or cool - is much, much more likely to put people in an buyer mindset than most social networking models.

And as a few people have shared above, it seems as though advertising on Pinterest has a lot of momentum; many companies have reported extremely good results. My feeling is that this will continue. The whole metaphor of Pinterest seems to be extremely similar to shopping and acquiring - collecting stuff, putting it on your page, browsing other people's collections.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/gleeful-google-exec-takes-a-s...
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Good write-up

Not sure on my history here but i'm pretty sure i remember only the SASS variant being available (no braces among other things) while LESS stuck to a more css-like grammar. later SCSS came along which was CSS grammar for SASS.

It seems like I've run into more projects using LESS -- anyone know of any statistics?
A friend of my summed this up in a twitter posting the other day: "Those who can, teach. Those who can't pass laws about teaching."
Is [rapidly growing and successful startup x] a pleasant place to work?

FUCK NO

You're growing fast. Everyone's overwhelmed and strained to their limits. People get bitchy and burn out. Systems fail. Corners are cut. Employees do the math on options and come up short.

Not pleasant. Pleasant and fast growth don't have a lot of overlap. Is it worth the ride? Everyone has to figure that out for themselves.
Just because you are not doing something directly and obviously "evil" like hitting a baby does not mean something cannot be unethical.

As more of our world is software and we rely on it to do things like store our personal information and trust it to respect our privacy etc, how is the availability and ability to understand and inspect that software not a potentially very ethical issue?
Hope they get bought out until they come up with a better idea?

(Not knocking the product, or saying they're doing it wrong; just agreeing it's difficult to immediately see the business model)
Unfortunately the tilde selector is crippled: it doesn't target all siblings, only the ones after the base selector.

To illustrate:

<p>1</p>
<p class="two">2</p>
<p>3</p>

.two ~ p { color:red; }
// only "3" will be red

That prevents what would be the most useful cases, like unmarking sibling menu items, slides and the like.
The authors says

"Federal spending has grown roughly as fast as the overall economy over the past 50 years."

And then immediately after that says spending climbed from 18% of GDP to 24% of GDP, which is a 33% increase.
Leaving out the fact that Alex's data is wildly inaccurate that is probably the worst possible way to try to value a company. The most obvious issue is that Pinterest has only been successful for a few months. There's a long list of Facebook apps that were hot for a while then dropped out of existence. Pinterest may still be added to that list.
I think it's a good attitude to take, particularly when dealing with peers. Giving others the benefit of the doubt and not assuming that everyone should know everything you know goes a long way toward making the world a better and more tolerable place. Also, when discussing matters of principle it's extremely valuable to be able to understand and argue for the opposition, rather than merely dismissing opposing views as 'stupid'.

However, the author is fundamentally wrong. There are stupid people. I didn't believe it until I got out of my college/career track and met a few of them.
Products and Commerce with APIs
Another example would be when a developer who build a framework at an organisation has left the company.

90% of the time, when people look at the code, you will hear comments like 'who wrote this garbage??'. In reality, the system was generally built to the best knowledge / requirements that were available at the time.

(I'm sure many people here have thought 'who wrote this crap' and then viewed the author to find out it was something they wrote many years ago, but have just gotten much better over time)
Ask HN: How do I get work done when I am out
I am owner of a graphics / web site designing firm and just appointed a programmer. Previously I used to do everything from taking orders to delivery.
I used to be out for almost half a day every day.
Now that I have some one working under me, I can be full time out, meeting clients and getting more work.
The problem is how to get work done from the employee in my absence.
Developers are very freaky, lazy or worst, opportunist. In my absence, my employee may not work or even steal my jobs, clients, designs etc.

Dear HN, How can I get the employee working all time for my company, and improve every new day, when I am not there to monitor?
I won't tell you where they going. But I know the more people will pin unique, cool photos they stumbled upon, the more artists, photographers and content owners will demand either their share, or take down.

In this another debate of "is this a bubble", something interesting came to my mind. I thing the issue here is that any online real estate that made it big, made it huge because they used the latest technology available. Think YouTube. When it started, barely anyone knew how to program flash and have a container to upload 5MB file and it could be coded in different movie codecs and youtube would read it anyways. This was definitely pushing the envelope! The technology was new, but it let you display videos and thats what counted. I think with the new technology coming in, like HTML5, etc, there will be new websites coming out and grabbing huge audience based on this new technology. So in other words, whomever is betting $1,500 millions on Pinterest, is like betting that nothing new will be invented over the web. This is like buying GeoCites, because nobody is sitting in garage developing WordPress 1.0. On buying MySpace because there is no Facebook. I hope you get my drift...
Drip.fm remixes music industry models with its new members-only platform
As a parent of four children (but living in a different state), I had to think for a minute about what the real problem is here. If I knew that a particular teacher was teaching well in advance of the meager United States curriculum, perhaps even coming close to east Asian standards, I would (as a parent) take that into account when looking at teacher ratings based on a slower curriculum pace. My question might be, "How do I sign up?" rather than "What is the matter with this teacher?" (By the way, the school's answer about how to sign up is found on its website:

http://www.ps334school.org/admissions/anderson-school-7th-gr...

The school accepts new applicants for sixth grade or seventh grade, but not for eighth grade.)

But, really, the problem with the system is not mostly about how teachers are rated, but how little power most parents have to shop. If a teacher is doing a good job for a particular learner, most parents will be glad to seek that teacher's instruction. And if the parents are shopping, the hard-to-measure things in the aggregate that are crucially important at the individual level, for example whether or not a teacher encourages a child to do his or her personal best, will be given proper weight among all the trade-offs involved in choosing one teacher over another. But right now the great majority of pupils, in New York City and elsewhere, are mostly assigned to teachers without parental power to shop, and teacher advancement in the profession is based mostly on seniority and degrees attained

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/us/19gates.html

rather than on the basis of the teachers meeting learner needs better than other teachers. The best way to promote system reform is to let the parents have more power to shop. They will ask for the information they need and weigh it in appropriate ways.
I think the natural path for Pinterest will be to merge with Groupon, another shopping-related site and one that has survived an IPO--at least for now. This new site will combine the deals of Groupon with the design of Pinterest. Users will coupons, which are automatically pinned to the appropriate boards with automatically chosen photos.

Of course, Pinterest is all about design, which is why Groupon will also have to acquire Instragram. This will allow the merged company to select the right photo for any coupon and, if necessary, saturate the yellows, unfocus the background, and add a creatively misaligned border. That night your friends enjoyed the half-price alcohol they bought at Jerry's Drive-In Liquor will look extra cool when the photo has been processed through the "1977" filter. And on the plus side, Groupon/Pinterest/Instagram gets to keep it for their next liquor-oriented deal, giving them free advertising material. It's too early to tell what this new supergroup of startups will be called, but I want some credit if it becomes Groupstagram.

I'm only half-kidding, of course.
Well, I'm certainly grateful that his views are this strong, or else there wouldn't have been a free software movement for the open source movement to arise out of. If you think about it, the world as we know it would be completely different without Stallman. However, I'm not quite sure I agree with his belief that the existence of proprietary software licenses that tell you not to share with your neighbor create a double bind in which you either comply with the license and contribute to the destruction of social cohesion or you help your neighbor but incur psychosocial harm in the form of guilt that shouldn't be. :)
No, the graph clearly does not include the supplementary spending. I ran the numbers for this a while back, and the supplementary extra-budget DoD spending in the Bush years raised the DoD expenses from 22% to nearly 40% in some cases.

Military expenditures are much higher than 22%, even in 2011. These budget numbers hide much military spending in other budgetary components -- for example, veteran's benefits or military scholarships will fit into another category (Medicare, everything else, etc). Statistics that put military spending at a quarter of our budget never include these costs.

A big part of this "change" comes from a budgeting game which hides military costs in other budgets. Contrary to claims in the article, VA benefits and medical claims did exist as an expense 50 years ago -- but they were directly part of the Defense budget at that time.
Interestingly, the Google Image Charts API is deprecated as of April... https://developers.google.com/chart/image/ - they're only focusing on the HTML5/SVG version.
> over half our budget

32.9 != over half. Including Medicaid gets 43, still not over half. Not likely to give much credence to rest of your claims.
I don't think I've ever read an argument suggesting that shutting down a botnet (as long as that is all you do) would be unethical, more that it would technically be illegal.

I'm sure I've heard Stallman say in the past that software cannot possibly be in any way good unless it is free.
>Weinberg says that his for-profit company earned around $115,000 in revenue in 2011

Ouch. I'd call that a for-loss company, not a for-profit company.
I imagine there is some of that involved but perhaps more importantly is the overall usage of the Internet by those people (i.e. time spent online, using mobile devices, etc)?

On the people count front, Google's numbers show %-wise between 2006 and 2010 we went from 68.21% to 79.3% population wise (and population generally went up 4%) so there was a growth in the user base but not one to justify 40x growth in value on similar headlining companies IMHO.
Disclaimer: I work in a similar lab (my adviser was advised by the senior author on the paper, who runs the lab) on a brain-machine interface project funded by DARPA.

What makes this awesome from a scientific point of view:

1) 2-dimensional decoders, where an individual controls a mouse with their mind, have existed for a while. What makes this really cool is that there are actually quite a few degrees of freedom in a robot arm, but they're basically using the same hardware. So the influence of software/algorithms in this case is pretty fundamental. There are a lot of papers on improved neural-decoding methods that at first glance appear really dry, boring, not the `sexy' kind of science with huge breakthroughs, but they end up being crucial to good performance as the complexity of the robot grows.

2) One participant was implanted with the electrode array 5 years before the study, and had the injury 10 years before that. Usually the signals don't last that long in monkey models. And we know that your cortex changes with disuse, so it's awesome that they were able to get usable signals so many years later.

What needs to get better are a couple things:

First, these decoders aren't perfect yet. What the Wired article didn't tell you is that the performance for the woman's implant was around 20-50% successful trials (still awesome from a comparison to no interaction)[1].

Second, incorporating sensory feedback is another challenge that is really hard to address, but also very important. Imagine building a robotic controller in which the only information you received about the robot's position was visual. That's the way this works. If we find a reasonable way to mimic sensors of muscle extension (a proxy for joint angle) then we can create more controllable devices.

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/mind-controlled-robot-arms-show-p...
Finally! I've even paid for Word documents of RFCs (hello, SIP) just to have them marked up, without the idiotic headers in the middle of each page, and hyperlinked throughout.

Compared to reading some other specs (like, say, some of the SCSI ones) RFCs are just painful. Especially with the ASCII art diagrams.

Now, if only the IETF could realise that "being liberal in what you accept" is a horrible idea and remove all usages of SHOULD/MAY or "infer", we'd really be rolling.
The LA Times published a database of these value-added results two years ago, for teachers in the LA USD. The LA USD contains a mix of good teachers and time-servers, with the time-servers well-protected by the teachers' union's last-hired/first-fired policy. Teacher performance is not allowed to be a factor in layoffs.

These value-added statistics, which on a per-teacher basis must be incredibly noisy (they measure a difference, the "value added", of two already-noisy performance numbers) resulted in the suicide of a low-ranked teacher:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39404037/ns/us_news-life/t/la-te...

I've been surprised to hear the credence placed in these statistics when I listen to presentations by principals and superintendents.
When I first saw Pinterest's exponential traffic growth sequence, it altered the way I believed women think.

But at the end of the day, its just a very well executed image board, marketed to women. The concept in itself is not a fad, but they may need to add features that make a user feel penalized for moving elsewhere. (e.g. the network effect from Facebook, or a users library with Kindle)
Not sure why this got downvoted.

Games I think are a very different case to almost any other software and should be treated as such, of course that does not necessarily mean that they do not contain malicious features.
I agree that he was pretty reasonable in the case of this article, but he is a bit crazy by most people's standards. A friend of mine has worked for the FSF and told me that Stallman won't even use the World Wide Web! Anything he needs looked up he has coworkers do for him because they're foolish enough to trust that nonfree web sites aren't malicious.
Cavootle - Location Enabled Polling
Don't forget RELOAD, DECADE, and ALTO. The IETF is somewhat broken right now because they let people who frankly don't matter create working groups, and so those WGs turn out to be pointless. But to their credit, PPSP (swarming overlay multicast) is fairly orthogonal to WebRTC (low-latency point-to-point A/V chat). There are probably some aspects of the protocols that could be similar; I don't know if they're trying to converge those parts.
Hey, that's a really neat site! I like the way it's implemented.
"Essentially scrapbooking on the Web"

A better analogy is probably delicious for women, at least in terms of having a mental framework to estimate the value.
Is there any charting library which supports fetching data from server as the chart is horizontally scrolled? I want to chart some historical data that spans over years.
Firefox on Windows Metro on ARM
> Do you really want Hemingway's texts be licensed under GFDL so you could improve upon them?

We create copyright laws because we want value what is made possible by it.

Games are entertainment.

Games are culture.

I want Hemingway's texts to be available to blind people, to to work on todays e-readers, and not be lost forever because they can't be updated to current technology.

There are specific exemptions in US copyright law to allow brail versions and copyright holders can't stop them being made available.

I want all copyright software source to be registered with the Library of Congress, because I value software.
It's not strictly true that he only has other people do it for him:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979

As far as the internet, though, as I told a friend long ago - Richard Stallman doesn't need the internet. The internet needs Richard Stallman.