skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting. Real estate is definitely technologically underserved relative to its market size.

I think this is a play at incentivizing residential buyers/sellers to let you refer them to the local Realtor the first referral and taking the referral to let the user buy things with "points"? If so, I love it.

for giggles:
existing home sales 5mm/yr * 200k/house. Assuming a full commision of 3% on one side and if you get 25% as a referral:

A typical transaction could be worth:

$200k * 3% * 25% == $1500 (less redemption value in points, so basically a redeemable user point has to be less than .03.25 purchase price)

If you owned one side of every single existing home sale, that is worth:
5mm * 1500 == $7.5B/yr

How do you intend to reach users? I guess with a value of $1500 per conversion, you can afford to spend liberally on adwords to catch users as they are searching, but I suspect the words in that space are competitive and expensive. Even if you get the a 25% referral on the full commission, someone else is able to pay up to 100% of the referral on the commission in user acquisition costs, so you'll never be able to outspend the actual broker in paid search.

Basically you'll have to be creative with how you pay for traffic.

Which isn't to say its not doable... This sort of reminds me of deal aggregators like Yipit -- they get a commission of the transaction from someone like Groupon, so that means groupon can always outspend them, so you ahve to find some other way to get your leads.

What is your plan?
Been there. Most people are not motivated enough to do something like that, and it ends up feeling like a chore. In that case it's more productive to not be at the office.

It makes some kind of sense: boxing the time for creativity ends up killing it.
stackoverflow.com would be a better place to ask such questions and it is likely that the question is already
answered there.
I agree. A "libertarian world" is nothing like a utopia, and that's the point. It's a world left up to the people, not to a group of political elite. Critics might argue that this further separates the haves from the have-nots. That could happen, but when compared to the haves/have-nots in other systems, I'll gladly choose one based on maximizing individual freedom.
Bandit optimization has been discussed previously on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2831455

The problem with this article is that it's a) not very detailed, and b) the conclusion is linkbait. Bandit optimization is a useful tool, but it has drawbacks, and it's not always better than A/B testing. In particular, bandit approaches take longer to converge (on average), and don't give you reliable ways to know when to stop testing (when all you know is that you're using an approach that's optimal in the limit of a large N, your only guarantee is that things get better as N gets large). These techniques also make assumptions that aren't valid for a lot of web experiments: identical "bandit" distributions that are constant over time. Throw a few choices that are optimal at different times of day/week/month/year at a bandit optimizer, and it'll just happily fluctuate between them.

Also, there's a lot of variation in performance depending on the parameters of your test -- some of which are completely unknowable. So if you want to really learn about this method, you need to read more than a blog post where the author has concluded that bandit optimization is the new pink. For example, here's a pretty readable paper that does an empirical analysis of the various popular bandit algorithms in different paramterizations:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:KgmC8CnPhxwJ:...

This is just one article, but there's tons of literature on this problem. (In fact, if you use the 'softmax' criterion mentioned in that article, you're doing something very similar to simulated annealing, which is a rather elderly optimization technique.)
Drupal developers wanted. Pay rate: $10-$12/hr
Just thought I'd forward this wage scale for a recent job opening to give readers an idea of what the programmer job market is like outside of San Mateo:

Hourly Rates (Introduction):

Intern $10-$12 / hour

IC $12-15 / hour

Hourly Rates (Experienced with Drupal Theming):

Intern $15-$18/ hour

IC $18-$20 / hour

Translation: Intern == student, IC == independent contractor. Location? This is in the San Francisco Bay Area. Suffice it to say that things are different on the other side of the GGB.

I won't say who's hiring because I don't need the competition. I'm asking for $15/hr. Wish me luck.
Had not seen the site before. Amusing how far off nearly everybody was on the pricing.
He mentions this flaw and proposes the same solution.
The reasons I would cite: the Ruby development community leaves a lot to be desired from a sysadmin's perspective. We went through similar pains with Perl, but they're mostly a decade or two behind us. With Ruby, there are multiple concurrently maintained trees, it's hard to sort which one should be "primary" on a system, and you have to do a lot of serious grokkage to understand that RVM isn't really intended for maintaining system Ruby installs, but a local per-user developer instance. Which, when what you've got Ruby for is managing chef, is a more than slightly whack.

http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=617
http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=681
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2059964

Much of Perl's use is by sysadmins, which means it plays well in their space. By contrast, much of Ruby's use is by web developers, many of them on bastardized MacOS systems (they're born bastards, it's not the developers' fault ;-). Which means that Ruby's packaging is whack.

I don't hack much of either, though work around both. The nice thing about Perl from my perspective is:

1. It's included with the system. I run Debian/Ubuntu boxes if I can possibly help it, Perl is of of the tools used to write a whole slew of system scripts, and as a consequence, it's very well managed within the distro. Red Hat/CentOS aren't far behind.

2. CPAN plays nice. Under Debian, your CPAN bundles are installed to /usr/local/ Debian's just sorting out where to store Ruby gems.

Thanks to chromatic for mentioning perlbrew. I've encountered RVM in the past month or so and have been trying to wrap my head around it. Understanding RVM in terms of perlbrew helps a lot:
http://ithaca.arpinum.org/2010/06/13/rvm-and-perlbrew.html
Is the price low?
"Ego death is said to be characterized as the perceived loss of boundaries between self and environment, a sense of the loss of "control", the loss of the accustomed feeling of existing as a "personal agent", and loose "cognitive-association binding".

This "perceived loss of boundaries between self and environment" is said to be experienced through a sensation that one is the whole universe (and therefore there is no need to differentiate the "I" from the "universe") or by simply acknowledging the "I" does not exist."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death
Is it not likely a bell-curve? IE: Is it not likely that there's a correlation between high line count and average quality?
Right now it's Samsung SyncMaster 2443s. The trick is to go into the font stuff and explain the LCD layout to the font renderer. I think MacOS already does this but on Linux it's usually somewhere in Appearance.
> Browsing is far better on the Chromebook than it is on any Android or Apple device I've used, hands down. The device is basically ready-to-use for browsing as soon as you lift the lid, in contrast to the fair amount of time it takes to get logged into the Macbook (especially if another user has a few applications open in their session).

FWIW, this is not a property of the ChromeBook, but a property of how you choose to use it (which may in turn be a property of its relative cost if anything). My 11" MacBook Air runs two apps (Chrome and iTerm) and I do not leave it locked or logged out. At worst I have to apple-tab to Chrome from iTerm once I open it before I can use it to browse.
Sorry Coventry isn't suitable. For reference where would be central/convenient for you?

Disclosure: I'm a PyCon UK organizer.
Interesting that NO ONE uses Windows.
How does a decay factor not "trust your 'new' data more than really 'old' data"?
It depends on the game. I think we're right at the point right now where some developers are making a huge push toward absolute realism (see: LA Noire's facial models and Battlefield 3's destructible environments), but it's still in the early stages.

I think a huge part of the problem isn't a sudden move to laptops, I think it's that the current generation of consoles is seven years old, and major developers (i.e. those with the resources to innovate) tend to design with the console in mind these days.
> PS: For a US example compare how law enforcement deals with impoverished areas vs wealthy areas in the same state.

I see this pattern in actual experience:

"PS: For a US example compare how law enforcement deals with [crime-ridden, lack-of-self-control-prone] areas vs [peaceful, quiet, classy] areas in the same state."
exactly why I use Chrome for my gmail, and not day to day browsing. It may be irrational, but prevalent nonetheless
Belchy Brainteasers
I have no doubt that "network computers" are going to have a bit of renaissance soon. I just doubt that people will be in a rush to buy a $1000 version. People may like simpler computing experiences, but they won't buy just based on that. The iPad took off cause it is a sexy (and fairly cheap) product. The simplicity just enhanced the experience. High end Chromebooks would basically require the purchaser to value simplicity over everything. They would have to not buy cheaper computers that check off more features and can even run Chrome themselves. And I just think the amount of people who are aware of their limitations and will spend more than the average person to accommodate them is very small.
Google is known -- by their own blog! -- to use this data for ad targeting. Until they say they aren't, it's more than reasonable to assume they continue to use it for ad targeting. They are certainly aware of other ad networks using the search query string: employees have mentioned it in conference talks. If they were using no more information than any other ad network has access to, it would be trivial for them to publicly say so. Until then, I suggest writing the FTC.
It was covered in TechCrunch, Bloomberg, and other big journals, too -- it definitely got a lot of views.

The difference between the small number of updates (2261) and the presumed large number of views is precisely why this was a great use case for memcache/MemCachier. High-read/low-update content is the perfect caching use case.
Cute. Potential lawsuit. Confusing name choice. [Clippy][1] is already a thing. It's the open source 'copy to clipboard' swf by mojombo.

[1]: https://github.com/mojombo/clippy
Your app wouldn't be worth any more now than it would have anyway. They own the technology, you'd need to own a userbase worth $100m.
Yes, the pricing will be very similar to 2011.
Maybe a script that looks for interesting domains that belong to Fortune 500s, Alexa Top 500, news orgs, key players in your industry, etc.
Salesforce in talks to buy Buddy Media for over $800M
Really nice collections
I get your perspective, but that hard-and-fast rules thing is a trap. One that Wikipedia cleverly avoided:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:IAR

I can't tell if your claim is that a) You just don't want to run a site that has some good content that doesn't follow the rules, or b) you don't know how to run a site with some good content that doesn't follow the rules.

But you're definitely throwing out good content and driving away good contributors because of your inflexibility.
> I think the GP means things like it's ok to leave a 4 year old throwing a temper tantrum with a baby sitter while heading out for date night.

There isn't anything about that that I disagree with, nor is there anything about that that suggests you are putting your children second.

Indeed, quite the opposite, in fact.
So we can immediately dismiss your "Programs are not meant to be written in idiomatic language. They are meant to resemble the C implementation." claims as baseless.

The only example you chose shows programs that manually unroll loops are not accepted. (And that's stated explicitly on the Help page. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/help.php#unroll)
UC Irvine Starts Teaching Google Analytics Course
he's only 14
Simple. Make two game modes: Indestructible Cabin mode and Hardcore mode. In hardcore mode, if you get into an accident and the cab happens to crush your legs, you have to finish the rest of the game in a wheelchair.
It's not like there's some limited quantity of votes or badges. Or that there's too much fun in the world. So the only reasonable complaint there is that the home page shouldn't have them. Gosh, could there be a technical solution for that?
People remember and talk about the great stock purchase they made, while the painful memories of terrible investments are repressed and seldom mentioned.

They is no guarantee that Facebook stock will significantly appreciate... indeed many believe that it is overvalued and will keep go down, which is why they are selling the stock these days and the price is going down.

If you want to gamble with your money, go ahead and purchase a speculative stock like FB, you are taking a big risk for a potential big reward. I personally think it would be wiser (but surely less exciting) to purchase low cost index funds with your money.
>Also, the call out box at the top is obviously an ad but it's not marked "Sponsored link", which is really scammy.

That's because it's a link to a webapp the author built.
Check this site out for a comparison of the various module counts per language. It is really incredible that rubygems surpassed CPAN last year and continues to grow at a very rapid rate. Quality may be another matter, but still, impressive.

http://www.modulecounts.com/
Simple, unless you get full-blown OCD like I do over certain ideas. Then everything: exercising, sleep, eating healthy, etc all goes out the window until the obsession reaches its ultimate conclusion.

So no, it's not so simple for some people.
Well, that's your goal, for a very specific definition of "best". But as you can see from the feedback here, you're driving off otherwise qualified people who had different goals, or different notions of "best".
As long as 10gen doesn't turn into Oracle, I'm fine with it.
We make nouns out of adverbial/prepositional phrases often, and alias ("in other places [known as]" -> "a name by which one is known in another place") is just one example. We talk about items, but "item" is the adverb that means "also", and you'd find it in recipes: "2 eggs. Item: oil. Item: water.". (Less similarly, you'll see brochures called "take-ones".)
Working in IT I am rather glad CRT are dead... Especially Sun Microsystem monitors.

I think they would line those things with lead.
Philo - Django CMS
Looks great. I wonder why the author went for a specific syntax for interned strings, as opposed to doing what Java does (automatically interning String literals).
Ammunition is actually the limiting factor. Primers, especially, are difficult to produce even vaguely safely in anything less than a $50mm+ plant. Whereas I could easily make an automatic short barreled rifle using just equipment at many hackerspaces or machine shops.
A/b testing works on low volume websites were multivariate does not.
You lost me at JVM.
Molecular basis to trust and altruism
What does this have to do with my comment? My point was there is nothing to be gained by calling attention to and arguing about job requirements.
John Carpenter's early science fiction film DARK STAR has a humorous but illustrative discussion with a thermostellar bomb's AI about the limitations of experience and the self:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjGRySVyTDk&t=22s
Language keywords:

Ruby ~40
Python ~40
Java ~50
Perl ~1800

Perl can have all the community support, packages, and testing that it wants, but I dislike programming in it and find it difficult to code in. This is not because I have only ever done Ruby or Javascript, I would consider my strongest languages to be Objective-C and Java, I have used C quite a lot, I know what I am doing with programming languages. I just dislike Perl.

Did you know there is a Perl package that will catch references to undefined symbols and fuzzy match them to the closest it can find in the current scope. To me, that seems to be the marker for the general quality of the code.
Agreed. And I'd add that for me, the point of A/B testing is to learn something. We're not just interested in whether A or B is better; we're interesting in getting better at doing what we do. Studying the A/B results is half the fun.
Baltimore Hackathon June 8 - 10
Or if you don't want to add in a prior specific belief about americans vs. non-americans, just keep one counter per option per continent-of-source-IP (or whatever) and the learning algorithm should work it out on its own. Of course, if you use too many bins then learning is going to take far too long.
Sure there is, if you control for functionality. You can't solve complex problems concisely without the right abstractions, and the right abstractions are 90% of the battle for code quality.
The Restoration of the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA)
How does that interact with Ctrl+a being select all?
Everyone is competing with Silicon Valley for talent, regardless of where you are.
I've used Ruby, Java, and Perl professionally and my favorite by FAR is Perl.
Learn JavaScript Online - CodeAvengers.com
Pinochet, The Cold War, and the Most Pathetic Match Ever Played
I have kids and your viewpoint is really, really extreme, and I don't agree at all.
I think the answer is you don't. People are really stupid creatures who prefer to hire not based on what's best but what they feel comfortable with. This results in 95%+ of people being hired not for what is best for them but of circumstance and of well, luck.

Think about it. How many well qualified resumes out there were discarded because the hiring manager was angry their football team lost yesterday? How many were lost during the office party? Probably more then we want to know.
Pinterest poaches Facebook star as shares slide
This would have been great when I was paying for film in my SLR.
Rewrite of http://allthingsd.com/20120529/salesforce-set-to-snap-up-fac...
Game Closure (HTML5) poaches Zynga's Mobile CTO
Google leans pretty heavily on machine learning for even trivial design choices http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html mentions the infamous testing of 41 shades of bue to decide which was the correct one.

But truly someone has to design the learning system, at some level you will always have design, if it is the design of how the design is to adapt to it's environment.
DuckDuckGo is Perl.

http://duckduckhack.com
makes sense for facebook to buy a mobile ad demand mediation player eg AdMarvel
It's just that it doesn't make sense that someone would "absolutely hate" either, let alone both.
This is thought-provoking, which is good. However there are significant issues with the approach.

1. Real world performance varies over time. For instance there are typically daily, weekly and monthly conversion rate fluctuations. Not an issue for A/B testing, but a big issue for this approach if a random switch in direction happens at the same time that conversion fluctuations happen to head in a good direction.

2. (This is really a special case of #1 - but a very, very important special case.) This approach creates long-lasting interaction effects between tests and independent changes. That requires explanation. Suppose you're running a test. Version A is somewhat better. But version B is temporarily looking slightly better when you make a significant improvement to your website (maybe you started another test that works). Now you're adding a lot of good traffic to version B (good because of the other change) and very little of the new good traffic to version A. This new version B traffic soundly beats your old version A traffic. This correlation between time and website performance will continue until the old version A traffic is completely swamped by new version A traffic. With only 5% of your traffic going to version A, this can easily take 100x as long as your test has been running - or more. (Properly constructed A/B tests do not suffer this statistical anomaly.)

3. Code over time gets messy. One of the most important characteristics of A/B testing is that you can delete the mess and move on. With this approach you can't - it just hangs around adding to your technical debt.

4. Businesses are complex, and often have multiple measures they would like to balance. For instance in a recent test, conversion to click was hurt, conversion to a person who clicked 5x was helped. A/B testing let us notice that something weird was going on and think about what we really cared about. This automated approach would make a decision and could have hidden a real problem.

5. Many tests perform differently on existing users and new users. A/B testing with proper cohort analysis can let you tease this out and decide accordingly. This approach doesn't give you that kind of sophistication.
Rational cost/benefit analysis is probably that you should learn first aid, carry a trauma kit in your car (trauma dressings, seat belt cutter, glass breaker, etc., accessible to the driver and secured in a crash), and have a cellphone and map of where the nearest trauma center/ER are. That would protect you just about as much in most shooting situations, and in the 10000x more likely vehicle accident (yourself or someone else).
It's actually kind of interesting you bring this up! I used to use Digg like crazy back in the day, and then about 2 or 3 months before Digg 4 (it was 4, not 3, right?) I jumped ship to reddit. Reddit seemed to have much better content, much better conversations, and was more relevant to my technical interests. Digg had started that way, but soon became hype stories / drama / memes / cat pictures. After having used reddit for about 1.5 years, I discovered hacker news. After reading hn for a bit, it started to become obvious that reddit was starting to feel like Digg did before I left. Nothing but memes / complaining / cat pictures / look at what my (girlfriend / kid / cat did) / lol science is cool kind of stuff. I image that over time the same thing will happen here, and is probably happening right now. Enjoy it while it lasts I suppose!
I don't think this flaw is real.

If "whatever design was most popular at that time" has a billion trials and 90% successes, and "a new superior design" has 100 trials and 97% successes (97 out of 100), than the new design is favored by the algorithm. No need to "catch up" to the absolute number of successes.
wrt testing, ruby is getting there with http://travis-ci.org

Also the rspec ecosystem is becoming more and more mix-and-match.

It's nowhere near as integrated as perl yet though.
Actually, despite Fox News' obsession with bashing the Solyndra events, Solyndra does not prove your point at all, nor is it at all related to my point or to what Schilling did.

Solyndra received extensive private equity funding, in addition to federal investment that looked like a good deal at the time. It was also not run by left-wingers. So I'm not really sure what your point is. All investments can fail, and not all the failures tell us anything about politics.

I of course agree that "actual" businesses which are "competent" create jobs, but it's not always easy to tell in advance what is actual and who is competent. Certainly, solar energy in general is an "actual" business.

It should also be noted, since you took unsubstantiated potshots at the Obama Administration, that the vast majority of stimulus-related bets made by them have paid off handsomely.