skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used YBOSS on a prototype of a firefox extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9986

It works ok, the main issues are:

* the results are not as good as yahoo's real results

* about 10% of the time the yahoo click-through url is incorrect (meaning instead of seeing the result you see a yahoo error page).

I've since rewritten it to use Google's "AJAX" API (which is just JSON). Check out the flash section for how to get the JSON directly.
Visual News Sites
The general sentiment I'm seeing is not simply "don't advertise" but to make those dollars count more than buying adwords etc. can do for you. In some cases that even means doing time consuming things that don't cost money. That's all business motivated, still.
They can, but students can be cheap for its own sake.
Require an email confirmation at the student email address, say, annually. Also exclude alumni addresses (not too hard to filter 'alum%' or 'post%' and I don't know of schools that use different prefixes for their alumni (speak up if you know; note alum% would get things like alums, alumni, alumnus, alumnae, etc.).

-Sorry for using % as wildcard, but star becomes italics.
FWIW, algae shouldn't be a problem, because you don't have to use water; any clear fluid with a similar refractive index would work. Another article says they're actually using mineral oil.
I heard some of Job's speeches on philosophy and it really resonated with me. I think he's a really cool guy even if he's a bit arrogant. The real value is in who he is.
I have some anecdotal evidence that may or may not be relevant to technology related customers using stumbleupon.

My wife's craft blog sees spikes sometimes into the 10k unique range (from the usual 1-2k) from stumbleupon, and that's just from someone else recommending (i.e., she's doing nothing to try and get that to happen).
Researchers had expected the newer sea ice, which is thinner, to be less resilient and melt easier. Instead, the thinner ice had less snow cover to insulate it from the bitterly cold air, and therefore grew much faster than expected, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Their assumptions where wrong, but coverage area is not the same as thickness. When you look at the average temperature over 10 years and it starts to drop then we can say global worming is wrong but local effects are so complex we don't really know which areas will worm vs cool.
T = turnover per client per month

E = variable expense per client per month

A = Average lifetime of a customer in months

P = Percent of students that turn into paying customers

As = Average lifetime of a student account before it is either terminated (graduated) or turned into a paying account

The lifetime value of a customer is (T-E)xA
The cost of a student account is ExAs
The acquisition cost of one customer that has previously been a student is ExAs/P

if ExAs/P < (T-E)xA then you should do it.

Stick the numbers into an excel sheet and play around with the basic assumptions. Chances are that your answer will be obvious.

Note I had to use x for multiplication since the character normally used for this is used for markup :-(
I'm a lover not a fighter. It's win-win.

Seriously though, I have been trying to fight less. I see patterns that tend to lead to arguments, but it's mostly a challenge of finding a way to keep on an even keel in the face of unfair criticism so that I can deploy my strategies.
I'm a student with a paid plan, and I'd love it if you'd give up even 1 free private repo with more than one collaborator. I don't need a ton of repositories, but It'd be cool to not have to worry about having more than one person working on a project. I think it'd be a great way to get more people interested and develop customers in the long run. Also, I'm going to give a talk about Git at our next ACM meeting in a week or so, if I could hook people up with some kind of free private account they could play with, I think you'd have a few new customers.
Oh please. We don't have anywhere near enough information to be able to say what sorts of fluctuations are normal.

The only long term data we have is "fuzzed" to the point that we can only see long terms trends, not the short term cycles.

Take a look at ANY natural process and you'll see that in the long term it's stable, and in the short term fluctuates wildly. That's EXACTLY what's happening here, and is totally normal.
People lie^H^H^H spin all the time, Jobs included, for all sorts of reasons. They also carefully choose words and what to reveal to make statements that are unfalsifiable/defensible, but still give the wrong impression to most readers.

I believe what Jobs has written here is substantially true -- the identifiable incentives for him and the company are to reveal the smallest amount of true information possible to assuage fan and investor fears. But there always remains a nonzero chance he's using his famous 'Reality Distortion Field'. So sabat's point in the grandparent post is fair.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field
Providing SCM to universities is a great idea. My university's CS program didn't once expose us to source control, which I think was a mistake. Going through four years of not using source control produced some bad habits which took a little while to rectify (my source control consisted of occasionally doing "tar czf backup-timestamp.tar.gz project" occasionally)

Our UPE chapter (CS honor society) tried setting up a SVN system, but it never really got off the ground.
sitepoint.com has a marketplace. Lots of crap in there but you may find a blog or site that's relevant with decent traffic or keyword rankings in your niche. Anyone else have a link similar to sitepoint?
no spotify?
This is not related directly to marketing but I have seen a lot people recommend usertesting.com

And one thing I was thinking about doing in this vein is to go to local coffeeshops and offer people coffee or $5 etc. to sign up and try your website while you watch and take notes etc. You know, just say "hey do you have 15 minutes, I'll trade you ___"

Has anyone had good or bad experiences with that? It might even get those people to sign up / stick around for good.

If you don't get people interested, you at least get usability feedback. (obviously if you don't need that feedback simultaneously with marketing, then this would be an unreasonable amount of time and money to spend)
Thanks for the advice. My next step will be to release a free version that acts like a tutorial, and maybe a web version since I'm pretty fast with Flash. Then maybe I will give up and lower it to $1

Changing the game mechanic to somehow reflect your "brain fitness" is probably a good idea, but then again, the whole thing feels like a sunk cost. If I am going to have to do some coding, I would rather work on new stuff. Maybe I'll start a blog about making a new $1 iphone app every week.
As an alternative, vote up (er, Like) my suggestion: http://friendfeed.com/e/c5a09856-762d-43ad-9298-b32080b4190a...

Then you, I, or anyone passionate about getting her/his own site easily integrable with FriendFeed can set up a UI to do it from our end.
Political Compass
Apparently it was the Twitter admin help desk application that was hacked. It's been taken offline. The phishing was separate.

"It will be good for the people calling for more secure, standards based authentication on Twitter and elsewhere around the web." [from article]

"it is important to note that OAuth would not have prevented either of these attacks" [from Twitter]

I see the point for OAuth third party applications, but that's not the attack vector here. That's just free association. What more secure authentication do people want? Client certificates? Dongles?
seems like a pain in the ass...why not simply give people with .edu accounts a 1 year free access, and then make them pay? 1 year should be plenty of time for a person to make something thats $12 a month profitable
To clarify: we already offer GitHub to universities for educational purposes.
OAuth Core 1.0, the main protocol, was finalized in December.

Is there anything out there that is well known and stable?
I think the word "sophisticated" there is to mean something like "we're pretty sure we figured it out this time".
I worked at a branch of "The Hub" for a short while and it wasn't very good. The idea was great but it lacked any sense of community. I guess you need to build the community first then put it in a building.
which is, of course, not at all the meaning of sophisticated? Which was my point.

Anyway, I just thought it was a funny word to use there, and people have been modding this comment probably more than any other comment I've made. Inverse importance/modding relationship for the win!
I don't know what you mean about the trend for deregulation -- the amount of regulation and spending on enforcement has significantly increased in the past 8 years. So if anything, we are more regulated now than we have ever been.
i think this is a double-sided issue. some people need the focus. some people need the distraction.

if i were in this situation, i would need the distraction, even if it were just using the exact same skills on another application. gives me a break, clears my mind of the woes of the "real" project, and sometimes allows me to take different mental paths to solve a problem i was having difficulty with.

to follow your metaphor, an overfull balloon or a balloon that is fully expanded for too long will burst.
I think all of the C-style languages are doomed in the increasingly parallelized world. I don't know much of OpenCL specifically, but all of the HLSL/Cg/GLSL derivatives seem woefully unprepared for tasks which are not "embarrassingly parallel". Some of the newer derivatives might be capable of solving tougher problems, but that doesn't mean they are good at it.
+1 on peace offerings of tea/sandwiches. They totally let me know that 1) my spouse is committed to talk about it, not just run away or say "yea yea yea", and that 2) he isn't being defensive because he is still trying to take care of my needs.

Little peace talk actions also has a second positive side affect:
My spouse is the type to "talk his feelings out" before really processing and organizing the thought in his head.If he's eating/drinking it slows him down a bit.
The PC-BSD folks work pretty much independently of FreeBSD -- but they released PC-BSD 7.0.2 based on FreeBSD 7.1-PRERELEASE a few weeks ago, so my guess would be that PC-BSD 7.0.3 based on FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE will happen some time in the next week or two.
As a student I say "Yes!"

Just require a valid .edu address at sign up and send a confirmation email. Allow students to put in their edu email as well as their personal email because I really only use my personal account, as do most of my friends. Just send a confirmation email each semester or something as recommended by another commenter and that should be strong enough verification. Some people may try to cheat the system by either using an alumni email address (which you should filter: alumni.*.edu) or purchasing an edu domain to host their own email on, but those are both very unlikely and I doubt you'll run into them often if at all.
There is at least one school that I know of that doesn't give out email addresses to its students anymore (Boston College or University, I forget which one); for those students just put a note next to the .edu field saying something along the lines of "Your school doesn't give you .edu addresses? Just email us and we'll help you out."

I don't think there's much else you can do to verify student accounts. If you're really ambitious you can ask for the student's ID number, full legal name, and university and then call up the registrar office to verify their registration. My school also participates in the National Student Clearinghouse: http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/ but it costs money for each verification. Obviously these options are kind of extreme and I'm pretty sure only banks and hiring agencies would spend the time verifying an enrollment this way.
Do you have a link on the help-desk-app angle?

One of my guesses would have been updates via SMS. I've read it's easy to forge caller ID; if it's as easy to forge an SMS origin-number, and you knew these accounts were set up to allow updates via SMS from a certain number... voila!
I will admit that the numbers can be juggled around quite a bit; but from most charts SS is 20% & medicare/medicate/etc are about 40% dod is about 20..

the fact that SS is funded by a dedicated tax doesn't have any relevance.
Working on a startup as a student has a lot of unique challenges. When I'm away from school, there's no where good to work. When I'm at school, everything vies for my attention.

I've discovered that the public library is extremely useful. The thing is, the soon as my project takes off I'd be willing to spend money, but with my resources so constrained, I really have to be frugal.

If you perform a service for the public good, I have a feeling that within a few years, it will start to pay back in some way. Whether it puts you in the black from providing free service is another question.

The public library doesn't have much to look forward to because the people that hang out there are mostly old. However, a service where people are creating value is likely to turn over into something useful to the service provider in some way. You might want to consider offering the free service to students for a year and watching the conversion rate.

If nothing else, you'll certainly help train the next generation of software engineers which will certainly turn into something useful for everyone.
Sure, but if you have housing covered, work from a shared space like we're talking about, $3,000 a month aint a bad living for just food and bills...

More importantly though, you're right - its about extra space and better control not infinite space.
Vilifying those who seek to ferret it out is just shooting the messenger.

People certainly have every right to discuss what they want. I gladly exercise my right to call them out as tasteless in a public forum with my name attached to the comment.

I disagree with this last bit of your comment though. My comments aren't about the messenger. I don't mind TechCrunch posting it. It is news when a CEO posts a message like this. I don't like the segment of the audience whose motivations I question who made him post it.
That's interesting feedback - I've heard good things but only talked to people in a few specific hubs.
Arrington force-feeds CrunchGear and MobileCrunch
So this works until you're about 27.

I'm just saying: the existence of shared hacker spaces doesn't make YC more viable if VC collapses, and you have to account for the fact that many people (most people?) will pay attention to money when it's a 3x-5x difference.

It's also not that easy to get to the point where a business is making you 40-50k/yr, even though that number sounds low.
Zed is probably the only blog author I would really like to meet in real life. And this video seems pretty close to what I imagined he'd be like.
We (from http://www.versionsapp.com, a Mac SVN client) had the same debate in our mail group. We decided against free as we want to offer email support to everyone and that just costs money. We ended up giving almost 50% off and almost everyone seems to be satisfied with that.
The average lifespan has not changed much once you hit 18, but your chances of dieing between 30 and 40 have gone up where your chances of dieing between 60 and 70 have gone down. I need to find and old actuarial table from the 50's to show compare with today.

Edit: http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/table4c6.html

I should say the odds of hitting 100 from 1 are about the same but the odds of hitting 100 from 65 have increased.

Male death probability with some comments by me:

01) 0.000513
06) 0.000182
11) 0.000104
12) 0.000156
13) 0.000273 (wow big jump suicide?)
14) 0.000435 (some car)
18) 0.001061 (more car)
21) 0.001361 (full car)
23) 0.001438 (peak of early death risk)
31) 0.001367 (still car)
41) 0.002629 (start of heath issues?)
51) 0.005657
61) 0.012966
71) 0.030131
81) 0.075724
91) 0.199019
101) 0.388563

PS: Old age is bad for your heath but 21 vs 31 is about the same because it's mostly accidental death aka car accidents. Just watch the increase from 14 till 23.
"Dont be surprised to see an Electric Lotus shortly" said Lotus CEO
You're both correct, actually. The "it's all ok" dolts will simply take this as evidence that it's all fine, and it IS the sort of thing that we should expect from global warming... but we don't know enough to say with any certainty that global warming is in fact the cause; there could be lots of other causes behind it that we don't know about.

And we could get another massive volcanic eruption that makes our mucking about look trivial by comparison, rendering the whole debate moot :)
Because I'm not using "liberal" as an insult. I can't tell where you see an ad hominem, I'm "dismissing" Chomsky because he has a long track record plus popular image of being a radical liberal, which was the focus of my reply. I think you are assigning too much tone to a text-based discussion.

The use of "liberal" in the other thread was referring to "classical liberal". I was mainly trying to point out how the definitions that are popularly used these days should be preferred over definitions of "liberal" that might have been accurate two hundred years ago when the original "classical liberals" were contemporary.
it strikes me that twitter has acute technology problems. Remember the scalability problems last year? now this security issue. Friendfeed in contrast, has none of these issues.
It's likely to vary branch to branch. I would recommend Pervasive Media Studio Bristol as an alternative in this case. I've yet to check out either London branch.

As an aside does anyone know of good London co-working spaces?
"For instance, if you have $50 million of weekly VaR, that means that over the course of the next week, there is a 99 percent chance that your portfolio won’t lose more than $50 million."

So, if you run with that strategy for, say, 2 years, the odds are one of those weeks you will lose $50M. Sounds secure, where do I buy in? Fortunately for my current portfolio and margin limits, it is mathematically impossible to lose even $1m in a given week.
the argument sounds very similar to communist apologetics saying: "blaming communism on the Soviet collapse is a fallacy, simply because the Soviet Union (and all the communist nations) were never real communist countries like Marx and Engels intended".
...different definition of the term than the mainstream.

Mainstream American English, sure.

In Europe, 'classical liberals' are still just called 'liberals', or sometimes villified as 'neoliberals' by the Euro-left for their adherence to brutish Friedmanesque economic views. I think that usage also dominates in regions of British English. So more English speakers worldwide might agree that Friedman is a 'liberal economist' than parochial Americans would disagree.
I do automated backups of the dev environment nightly to an external hard drive and to an ftp location off site.
$7? Couldn't you just politely tell them to drink 2 or 3 less beers a month?

Seriously, I think the "I'm a student, I'm so poor" shitck is getting a little tired.

I think you'd get a better bang for your buck (in the feel good department) by offering free accounts to Indian/east European coders, given purchasing power.
Agreed. I paid for food, rent, books, tuition, etc. I'm still paying for the tuition, probably will be for the next 10 years :).
Even though it may become complex I think it should be judged per project. WingIDE (Python IDE) for example gives out free copies of it's Professional version to people who have existing semi-notable Python projects. So you could do something similar. Or perhaps just a discount. Just as long as people don't abuse your services.
That's a fair assessment, and I also agree that we shouldn't be assigning people to either side of the aisle in discussions where it's not important. Alas, social security is a very political issue that has many people with strong feelings in either direction, so it is very hard to avoid seeming partisan.
This is an important point you've raised. In particular, lowered infant mortality combined with a poor grasp of statistics makes it look like you and I are living longer, even when those infants that might have died before could end up keeling over at 30 from health problems and we might die a few years earlier than we were likely to a few decades ago.

Also, people who are living longer as a result of advances in life-saving surgery are doing so in poor health as a result of the reasons for the increased necessity of these surgeries such as coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes. Increasing the retirement age in this context could mean attempting to employ a bunch of people not fit to be productive, in a worst case scenario.
What Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers can teach us about interface design
You could do 3 or 6 months for free then charge if they have a school email.
The crisis existed largely because existing regulations were loosened, and those that weren't were laxly enforced against people who were gaming the system. The markets in the late 1800s and 1920s were both largely libertarian, free, and unfettered -- and both failed pretty miserably, which is why we have (flawed) institutions like the SEC now.
i suspect getting married had something to do with it. I used to buy tonnes and tonnes of books, collected soundtracks, assembled troops of figurines and model kit mecha units...etc. But somehow I've become like you as well -- I'd much rather spend 20 bucks on dinner and a movie at home cuddled up with the spouse than another CD or DVD. I married young (22) so I should still be in the prime years of blowing away money, but I'm not. The other day a hobby shop was having a 80% off closing sale and I didn't even go.
Agree that you should try to figure out what doing so would actually cost, and what you might hope to gain from the situation.

Of course, if the costs are expected to be relatively low (which I would imagine, given that it isn't likely to be a large % of your users), even if the expected value is zero, you should consider the goodwill and potential long term benefits you might gain.

Plus, you can always try giving out free student accounts, and then if it becomes too expensive, stop. You might even consider a manual approval process, just to make it enough effort that most people won't bother unless they really want it.
It's not available in the US, and therefore doesn't have much attention here.
The people suggesting .edu email address verification (especially fancy systems with 'alum' filtering) forget non-US colleges.

One solution might be to use Facebook Connect -- I'm not sure if you'd have access to all the data you need, but people on FB tend to be honest about this kind of personal info, FB maintains a comprehensive list of colleges (and requires email verification to join a college network), and for extra security you could perhaps restrict it to people with over 10 friends in the college network, to make it a bit harder to scam.
I'm not sure TopSpin is the market leader in artists communicating directly with fans. iLike has been slowly but surely building outstanding tools to accomplish this, and with Facebook, they've got thousands of fans already signed up.
Gruber's Macworld Expo 2009 Predictions
don't know about other schools, but I am an alumnus of UCLA and was able to recapture my @ucla.edu address.
I will have to try this out when I get home.

I still think I would prefer the Nakamura Lock, though, because it accomplishes a similar goal (steady flight due to a proper center of gravity) with less complexity:
http://www.exploratorium.edu/exploring/paper/airplanes.html
I was puzzled by that heading as well.