skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't get through the whole post as it's kind of disjointed and meandering, but its initial assertions seem shaky.

Personalized ads do have business value. After looking at some videos about Native Instruments audio gear on YouTube, I started getting a lot of Native Instruments ads pretty quickly. Unlike television, I am being shown ads for something I might actually buy rather than ads for things I will never buy. If traditional advertising is effective, then I don't see how this more targeted advertising can't be more effective.

As for "uncanny valley", what's "icky" now won't be icky in 10 years. You can get used to anything and kids growing up with the "uncanny" will quickly see it as normal, whether this is a good thing or not.
Avast Antivirus 5.0.5
Nothing wrong with diversifying just a tad.
Shoot me a mail, ken@.
Good Lord, I Might Now Want to Use Yahoo Search Again...
I always, always, always go the route of contacting vendors - over the past 15 years I have reported hundreds of security and privacy vulnerabilities. This is the first time where I haven't reported to the vendor first before disclosing.

The way this came about was a bit different, because it started with a tweet[1] where I pointed out that the file was there, and then it gradually developed into realizing that it is a pretty big deal. The discovery happen out in the open. If you look at my timeline and the replies and conversations you will see how it came about.

With hindsight I could have handled it differently, but it just happen to come out in this way. I added an update to the end of the post addressing disclosure. The goal at the moment is to make users aware that there is potentially a big issue here.

[1] https://twitter.com/nikcub/status/205489752684765185
I haven't read Getting Real but I would ask yourself whether your problem is competition or getting noticed.

If your market is quite crowded and people are making direct comparisons with your competitor, I would suggest taking the distinct advantages you offer, and making them your main selling points (the ones that really really resonate with your customers). Whether its design, UI, features, or some other mix, you want pick an area and fight for it. Losing in other areas is OK but the main focus is winning in your area and winning big.

If your issue is getting noticed, your strategy will be slightly different. It's no longer an issue of competition but one of customers not knowing about you product or service. In this case, I suggest reaching out to blogs, forums, and experts in the field. If you have a nice spin to your product or have something interesting to say, go can sell your story to the media.

If your issue is a bit of both, well, you will need to do a bit of both of the above.
My review of the Nike+ Fuel Band and why I choose to send it back.
I think a lot of the analyses of Facebook's advertising model miss one important point. Sure, their CTRs are not even closely comparable to Google's numbers. However, when people search on Google, they're often actively looking for certain products that lead to high CTRs on these targeted ads. In Facebook's case, people want to socialize and generally don't want to be disturbed by ads.

Basically, Facebook currently uses an advertisement model that is not very natural to its product (and not very well targeted for a number of reasons). But Facebook just doesn't care at this point, because they still generate sufficient revenue through the sheer number of users.

So the real question is whether Facebook can come up with an advertising model that is truly natural to its product (e.g. actual product recommendations by friends in conversations etc.). To conclude that Facebook is doomed to fail because their advertising model is suboptimal seems to be a little premature.
*Linus
The question of whether the "Structure, Sequence and Organisation" of the Java API is copyrightable in the ninth circuit is still before the judge. This question is that one that is of most interest to the rest of us, and is the ruling that is most likely to be appealed (no matter which way it goes).
If it saves $5 a month in electricity, that extra $300 pays for itself in 5 years, meaning all the other benefits (widescreen, being able to carry a 42" alone, less space consumed) come free.
First of all, it's not clear that social media advertising is going to fail, just because the author is not happy with results he gets. It was announced today that Oracle purchased Vitrue http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/23/more/
a company with close to 100 million a year in revenues. Presumably, for many people, it works.

Secondly, the title of the article is After Facebook fails - which implies it will fail and will do so because it's advertising model will fail - but who says facebook primary business model has to be advertising? If they continue to grow to over a billion users - who says that the "like" button on sites all over the web now shouldn't be charged for? who says users shouldn't be charged for premium services? more photo filters on instagram - just pay!

the possibilities are endless, and advertising, for now, is just one of them. my gut says it will become less and less important as a revenue generator over time.
and personally I will welcome that change, cause with all the ads adjacent to the chat bar, the site is looking pretty messy.
I've seen posts here on HN lambasting Torvalds for being abusive, but on further examination, it was around comment #130 in a thread where he'd patiently and politely explained his point of view four times already in that thread, and was still hitting a brick wall with someone wilfully ignoring his points. Of course, this prelude wasn't indicated in the 'linus is an arsehole' tone of the story, it was linked directly and out of context.
I'm seeing more and more serious apps that are relying on browser extensions for a main part of their functionality.

It's a trend that I think has been gradually picking up speed over the years (as extensions have gotten a little easier to manage)
> Apparently many of her sites used that specific photo.

Ah, didn't catch that.
MV/Palo Alto: $1300 - $1900 (The range is wide but the more closer you want to live to downtown,the more expensive it gets. Furnished is going to add a huge cost and getting a 1 br will definitely hike it up even more)

Food: $200 (If you cook and eat very rarely out). However, the average cost of a "cheap" meal is roughly around $10, so do the math for how much that would cost per month.

Transportation: If you are going to live in the valley, you will need to get a car. Things are spread far apart and I am not even sure how good public transport is. If you wanted to come to the city (SF), every now and then, that would be roughly $14.00 by Caltrain for a day pass.
What? Cancer Technology developed by High School Students?
> C/C++ doesn't seem to have done too badly since Bell labs stopped developing it!

I wouldn't be so sure about the C++ part ;)
A lot of startups are based on technical ideas. I for one, love those articles where someone describes their startup experience, the more drama the better. As a programmer getting into a new startup, Hacker News is the best outlet to stay up to date on new technologies, opinions, real world tech news, and sharing personal experiences.
how many of those chords are you going to learn and remember?
The question isn't so much what other things Yahoo! might be using this signing key for, it's what other things bad guys might be able to sign with it.
A lot of people fail to understand what's legally protected by fair use.
Keep in mind that all those page views and all that time spent on the site costs Facebook money. It's not like outdoor advertising where the cost is set up front (then amortized over the life of the sign, device or property lease) and the marginal cost for additional viewers is zero.

Another thing to keep in mind is that there are competitors constantly targeting Facebook. But not just targeting them on price, targeting the features of their site that keep people there for 30 minutes every day. This means that Facebook has to spend money to "improve". Again, compare this to outdoor advertising where the competition is largely just a matter of bidding on space every so often.

I, like you, have no idea what Facebook is worth or how successful their business model will turn out to be. However, I think it's important to keep in mind that turning page views (or minutes spent on the site, whatever) into money really isn't a fully solved problem, at least not in the general case. Facebook definitely has their work cut out for them I think.
> Facebook has all the data but no real targeting

In general, this is incorrect.

What you see as poorly targeted ads are those where the advertiser does a poor job, not Facebook. The tools are there and the most successful advertisers use them.
How many of those users use adblockers? What if the most popular browser started shipping with adblocking enabled out of the box?
I didn't seem to have any trouble posting "get better":

https://twitter.com/jeremysharpe/status/205522693821448193

;)
I can tell you my profile is full of information on me yet looking at the ads I see on Facebook right now: a) "Join the Army as a Truck Mechanic" (university graduate in IT...) b) "Study Marine Biology" c) "Cheap baby strollers" d) "Learn how to make money trading on the Forex market".

These are just the most egregious examples -- most others are just for products and services I'm not particularly interested in.

If it can't accurately target ads for me then I fear greatly for Facebook's business model...

[If you want to see what information they have to target ads, feel free to check out http://www.facebook.com/smerity -- next to all my details are public as I assume if it's on Facebook it's public]
Blog de Carros – Carros Nuevos – Automoviles
Blog de coches 2012, blog de Autos, Noticias Sobre Autos 2012,nuevos carros,nuevos coches,los mejores carros,
Proper placement of your “trust logos” will improve your conversion rate
Responsible disclosure exists in order to allow an obscure, previously undiscovered bug to be patched before others know about it. The idea is that no one else is likely to discover the issue while it is repaired.

This is not an obscure bug. This is obvious -- very obvious. Many people will have discovered this already. Furthermore this is a pre-release product.

There is nothing to be gained by not talking about it.
And that's frequently how it is. There's a fascination that people seem to have with _proving_ that Linus (or RMS, or Jeff Atwood, or others) are jerks.

In almost every instance I've seen, it really is a case that someone has been pestering them, or out to pick a fight, and by the time the argument happens, all the back-story is forgotten (or, in the git-hub pull-request case, deleted by the original author).

The end result is that we have these tabloid-esque articles showing up on blogs telling us that we should be shocked and outraged at the actions of these people because they're "role models" and "shouldn't act like that". It's insane; it truly is.
I've actually been curating this set for a little while. http://clipboard.com/ken/nodejs_modules
You completely miss the reasons for our attitudes concerning the two individuals. Florian is consistently wrong in ways that could harm software development.

PJ is consistently correct in ways that are good for software development. It has less to do with who pays whom and more to do with who is correct.

The distaste is magnified when someone is paid to be wrong but the ultimate source of the distaste that they are wrong.
Given the proliferation of random toolbars on the computers of my family and friends and I would say almost no one in the grand scheme of things.
Coda 2 available for download
That's why as part of setting up 2F they suggest you generate and print a list of backup verification codes. 2F wouldn't even be an option if they didn't provide an emergency out.
That was also Yahoo's advantage for a while.

My point is that the underlying functionalities of Facebook are features of the web in general, not of Facebook specifically.

Facebook made them simple to use and put them all in one place and now has grabbed an impressive amount of share as a result, but they are not on the most solid of ground, as their social functionality could easily be swallowed by the browser itself, or by a clever lump of javascript.

And remember, the inline advertising is only required by their business model, not by the functionality of the service itself.

[edit] That said, I sort of agree with you that they probably have a few years before the mass exodus, I wouldn't give them a lot more than that however.
2000 Photos In 3 Minutes
I used to work at the abuse department for a large web host. In these cases, we would contact the site owner and provide them with a set amount of days to either remove the material, contact the complainant, or explain the usage of the material. If they did not reply or attempt to contact the complainant, we would suspend their hosting. The only time we would suspend a site immediately would be for malware, phishing or child pornography.
"Symbolic-numeric" could be BS, but I'm pretty sure it's not. What might be triggering your BS alarm is the "symbolic." However this word has a precise meaning, especially in Mathematica et al's case. It basically means "replacement rules on arbitrary expressions." For example, we could define a derivative rule in this kind of way:

x^n -> n*x^(n-1)

If you have enough of these kinds of rules and a smart infrastructure around them, you can perform sophisticated "symbolic" calculations. The whole setup is similar in essence to a Lisp macro system. As a specific example, type the following into Mathematica (or WolframAlpha):

E^(I 2 Pi)

The result you get is "1". Not "1.000001", not "1 in floating point", but "1" as an exact symbol. So when they say they are using "symbolic-numeric" methods, what they mean is that they are using a combination of exact mathematical calculations (exact according to pure mathematics - thus invariably symbolic) in combination with numeric approximation/heuristic methods
I believe we're arguing the same point. Advertisers are the ones who do the targeting and even with the tools Facebook provides, they make terrible targeting decisions.

It doesn't matter if good advertisers use it properly, the majority do not. If Facebook don't prevent these poorly targeted ads then they can't guarantee any level of targeting at all on their site. This means that users are desensitized to the ads shown there, decreasing their value as an adspace.
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If he put that he was married on the site, he wouldn't get the dating ads. I just checked my facebook (for the first time in awhile) and 3 of 4 ads where things that made sense and were interesting to me.

I personally don't think Facebook is worth nearly as much as their current valuation, but as long as they have 900 million users who average a 1/2 hour a day on the site they are worth quite a bit. As for the targeted ads, I'd much rather have ads for things that are interesting to me than for things that aren't.
I too write mostly throwaway stuff. Obviously, terse languages are better suited for that than others.

Java makes me cringe. But my understanding is Java programmers use IDE's with autocomplete. They don't do much typing.

As for your pipe comment, are you a whiz with passing file descriptors? What do you think about chaining programs together in this way? Would that solve your pipe needs?

Maybe you could accomplish what you want using lex? The general paradigm is pattern-action, just like awk. Lots of flexibility in what you can create. You could create your own interpreter.

I like writing simple filters. I guess I have succombed to the UNIX voodoo. I think of everything as a stream of text.

I'd be interested to take a crack at your "capture group" problem, if you can give me an example of what it looks like.
JFK: We choose to go to the moon beacuse it is hard
http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm for the full text of the speach.
Volkswagen presenta su Polo WRC Street en la Wörthersee 2012
El pasado encuentro Wörthersee 2012, nos ha dejado ver maquinas impresionantes con las que todos soñamos poder manejar
Friday night?
I prefer the first version. Saying something is "pure garbage" gets the point across far more effectively than being polite. I doubt the latter would have resulted in any coverage on tech blogs or got the attention of anyone at github.

I don't agree with making direct personal criticisms towards people, but I think it's perfectly acceptable to be very blunt when responding to a bad idea (or patch, or whatever). In my own work I prefer blunt and honest feedback rather than attempts to avoid hurting my emotions. Of course it's always better if that criticism is combined with a constructive suggestions on how to fix the problem.
I think the article's author would argue, all of them, given enough time and necessity.
Those two are sort of the same question however.

If this is the only thing signed with this key, then the attack surface is only people running this thing.
Based on all the anecdotes floating around, this one included, I wonder if part of the problem is that the demographic groups advertisers (that use Facebook) really seem to want to target are the most resistant to the ads. This would then lead advertisers to broaden their targeting to the point where Facebook's enormous trove of data is basically useless.

Who cares if your ad is being shown to the exact 50,000 people on Facebook who are a perfect fit for your product if nearly all of them refuse to click on it? So you broaden your demographic selections, the ad goes out to 500,000 people now, but now your product has no relevance for the vast majority of the people seeing it.

Not sure, just thinking "out loud".
I managed to get Mosaic to compile on OS X, interestingly enough some pages do still load and look OK. One was Dennis Ritchie's page: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/

It's a entertaining experience.
This is sort of what I'm thinking. Everyone is claiming Facebook ads don't work because they're improperly targeted, people don't look at them, people don't browse Facebook with "intent," etc. This is a the supposed "failure" of advertising on Facebook.

But what about traditional ads, say a television commercial or a radio ad? Aren't they more expensive, with a more limited and less targeted audience? Isn't the intent to purchase missing there as well? Why is it the case that Facebook advertising is a failure when it seems that it should be at least as (or more) effective than traditional advertising?

Am I missing something?
On (b), given events in the case to date, what does that tell you about the quality of the legal analysis (about this case) done/disseminated by the mainstream media?
It's almost as if there's a business opportunity here.
WOOPSIE POOPSIES!
Really? I think results are always a good reason to question values.

So then 911 invalidates all the teachings of Islam. The children's crusade invalidates all of christianity? Ridiculous, and hardly examples of careful reasoning.

It's best to examine all these Enlightenment experiments from the standpoint of the debate between their critics and proponents before the experiment was tried.

Why? I suspect it's best for you and the particular axe you have to grind.

If the results bear out the critics...

The results always bear out the critics. The question is really how many ways of ruling a country have been tried, and what has there been to show for it. As far as that goes, everything has been a mishmash.

Scientific thinking may be better than nonscientific thinking, but nonscientific thinking is better than pseudoscientific thinking...

If you'd be sincere in this, then please be clearer about causality and causal relationships specifically with respect to >values<. I find your posts remarkably devoid of the specifics here. If you don't have concrete causal relationships, then your argument is just emotional manipulation by trying to link horrible things to ideology you oppose.

In general, meddlers with too much power who are too sure of themselves have caused untold misery, and it gets worse as technology amplifies our power. I'm not so sure particular ideologies are to blame so much as that general circumstance.
Useful Security Tips to Keep your iPhone Safe
As other people have said, the real story here is how badly GoDaddy handles DMCA requests. Taking down a site for a single image is like using a bazooka on an ant. Yes it will stop the infringement, however it will probably damage some surrounding property. While that does not necessarily excuse the personal attacks the woman in the story may have made I think it offers perspective for all website operators. "Horror" stories of people sites being taken down (much like her's) have been on HN in the past with great sympathy shown and in this case I do feel sympathetic towards her cause (despite her reaction). I guess the lesson is talk to your registrar and hosting providers about their DCMA process before it bites you.
I really wish someone would post one of these related to students still in school (we need to work too). Or is the field so competitive the posts would make no difference?
My wife's keen sense of smell one day provided the kernel of this idea. No way I'm the ONLY one...
New Hackathon Brings Ladies and Gents Together
That was apparently a great idea. Email is on the way.
It's 50% off through Friday ($49 USD).

Also, it sounds like they're offering free upgrades for recent Coda 1 buyers, which is nice.
Does it matter? Hong Kong has a judicial system with a long track record.
When Choosing a Job, Culture Matters - Bill Barnett
The people who use adblockers are probably the people who are least likely to click on ads anyway.
As another commenter mentioned - it's somewhat of a selection bias; Linus doesn't go around spouting hate-speech, but when he has jack of someone pestering him with an idea/patch/whatever that he has (many times, repeatedly) turned down, then he'll stop being polite about it.

Could he ignore it? Perhaps. I prefer that he'll let you know, in no uncertain terms, to go away.

These rants aren't actually that frequent, but you'd think that they were constant from the way you hear about them.

It's not really about having firm opinions without being abusive. It's about being called abusive for having firm opinions.
Why the hell haven't shareholders gotten fed up with Ellison yet? These waste-of-time legal junkets he goes on from time to time must be so infuriating.
Firstly, they very well could be stupid.

Secondly, it depends what you mean by traditional ads. I loath television and spend far more time on the internet (and don't use adblock) and yet interstitial ads on the tv and radio (and on the net, eg youtube) are far more present in my mind than anything I've seen on the net.

In fact, apart from those silly bottom feeding ads about how some single mom found out some weird old tip and various medical professionals dislike her for it (because they're out to get you? I don't get those ads..) I can't recall a single web ad. I can tell you about Pizza Hut's cheap pizza Tuesdays though.

As for non interstitial ads, like print ads in newspapers, yeah, I imagine they're about as useful as internet ads.
Are you implying that the use in question was fair use (i.e., that the OP should not have sent the DMCA takedown notice for this use)?
"This is a low-quality essay that is not worth discussing directly" and "This is a stupid essay not worth my time" are saying the same thing, and providing the same level of abuse; one is just using more highbrow language in an attempt to feign politeness.

Avoiding coarse language does not mean you're not being snide or offensive, and people hiding snide commentary in nice prose is one of my pet hates.
Thankfully, it's his personal G+ page, so he can really say whatever he wants, as he isn't acting in any official capacity when he does.