skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed. Though there are some fairly easy steps to reduce this as much as possible.

1. Give guests full use of all the features of the site. Posting, editing, befriending, etc. Store this information by identifying them by the combination of IP + username (which they have to enter for each post) or something similar. This will encourage them to participate (no barrier to entry) and let them decide whether or not they want to become a full member.

2. If they register, link everything they posted while they were guests to the new account, i.e. change the username on all the old posts (if necessary), etc. That way they don't lose all their stuff.

3. The only required information should be a username and password. An e-mail address should be optional, with a warning that if you don't provide one you won't be able to recover your account if you lose your login details. Naturally you should be able to provide one later if you decide you really don't want to lose the account. This keeps the "You just want to send me spam" people happy.

4. No mandatory confirmation email. When you click submit on the registration form you should be logged in and ready to go. Opening your mail client/website is an unnecessary and annoying step.

I might have missed one or two points, but adhering to these rules should take the majority of the pain out of registering.
Oh, so it had less revenue than normal. I guess it was a sound investment then.

That is cooler, but also not the wisest idea economically. Investing so much of your money based on your ideals rather than because you think it's a good idea is a good thing to do principles/karma-wise, but it does make you more likely to make a bad investment.
More books for my ever growing wish list!
Wasn't NeXT set up by Steve Jobs in 1985, around the time he was removed from Apple? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1985.E2.80.931986:_Foundin...

After several months of being sidelined at Apple, Jobs resigned on Friday, September 13, 1985. He told the board he was leaving to set up a new computer company, and that he would be taking several Apple employees from the SuperMicro division with him. He also told the board that his new company would not compete with Apple and might even consider licensing its designs back to them to market under the Macintosh brand.

Jobs was joined by former Apple employees Bud Tribble, George Crow, Rich Page, Susan Barnes, Susan Kare, and Dan'l Lewin
The Real Guitar Hero - Simon Says | TechJaws
I've always wondered this too
Stock is obviously part-ownership of a company. When a company makes a profit, it has basically two options - 1) re-invest some or all of the profit back into the company, or 2) divvy it up amongst the owners (ie. stockholders), which is more or less a dividend.

My old man runs a small business with about five stockholders. It's a mature business and he has no real plans for expanding, so every year he divides the company profits up between the shareholders.

You could sell your stocks to other people, but this would depend on the rules governing the buying / selling of shares as set out by the company when you acquired the stocks. Often this is just by agreement because there isn't a very liquid market for shares in private companies (for obvious reasons like lack of transparency and difficulties in valuation).

If I were to buy shares in a company, my valuation would depend on the company's earnings and the opportunity cost of putting my money in a "risk-free" investment (like treasury bonds)... which would dictate the base price-earnings ratio for which I would be indifferent to investing in the company or bonds. Of course, the company's potential for growth would affect the valuation (ie. higher P/E for growing companies).
While I agree in general, to say that Amazon has zero impact on the state is also not true, as the packages don't magically teleport to customers.

Along the way, UPS enjoys fire and police protection, places wear on the streets, requires traffic enforcement, city planning, water, etc.

Note that in theory, NYS residents voluntarily self-report and self-pay state and local use tax for purchases made out of state on which no tax was collected. I'm sure that amounts to hundreds of dollars per year for the state...
The site this article is referring to could be "Coolhorse"
http://www.coolhorse.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=OINF&St...

EDIT:Although I do not see how this one could make 25B a year.
Yeah, once I broke down in the shower, crying. I was also in my 20's.

My current girlfriend sometimes would pull that "I don't feel the same anymore" stuff. It was happening almost every other month, but there was a pattern. We instituted a rule: no talking about relationship status within 3 days of her period. Things are much improved.

As for coping, yeah, a lot of this is just weird brain chemistry stuff. A little Buddhist philosophy is useful. Just remember that feelings are transitory. Don't let yourself get swept up by them. Don't let your most significant understanding of reality get swept up in them and be determined by them. Don't take action based just on these feelings. Let it past first, and then deal with things when you are calm. (Things might still suck, but be sure you're not in despair when you make decisions. Find someone else to talk to.)

When you're broken up with, there's another set of biochemical changes in your brain. Yes, it's supposed to look like withdrawal. In fact, some biologists will recommend that you take up something like jogging because your endorphin levels are crashing. Remember to take care of yourself, particularly your physical self with every bit of care that you would've taken care of her.

Know who you are and be true to your principles, even if this feels like you are giving up your one unbelievable cosmic chance for ineffable happiness. (If you are in your 20's, this is very unlikely to be the case.) Be gentle and firm if the situation warrants it, but don't ever be angry. Be willing to let her go, if that's what's the best for her, or the world, or the Allied war effort. (Yes, as in Casablanca.) Concentrate on being the most good, honorable, and empathic man you can be. Do this because this is really the one and only chance to get her back. There are all kinds of manipulation you can try to get her back, but ultimately these will shortchange you even if they do work at first. Be willing to do what's the best for her, for you, for everyone as a whole, even if you have to let her go. Be willing to give her that one last act of unselfish love. Let her go quietly if that is indeed what it turns out to be. (This is not to refrain from expressing your undying love for her. By all means do that. Rather, refrain from the use of threats, emotional aggression, holding yourself as hostage, that kind of stuff.)

I made lots of bad moves in relationships out of anger or strong feelings in my 20's and 30's. I have come to this conclusion: In the end, you have to ask yourself how much you value Love. Are you willing to stand up for Love? Are you willing to protect the one you Love, even from yourself? Are you willing to risk going to the grave alone for the sake of Love? In my mind, a man is only really worthy of Love if he can say yes to all of these questions.
Here's my attempt: http://www.gigbayes.com at a better Craigslist search FWIW.
While your ability to quote Wikipedia is quite astute, you have lost me when I try to figure out what you're trying to say through said quoting.

Mind explaining it in some words of your own instead of jumping around the bush?
Court says evidence is valid despite police error
I've been obsessing over this question ever since they closed out 20m in funding.
I think you replied to the wrong link.

I was confused because I was reading about the office closing and couldn't figure out where the 100 positions came from.
he was forcibly removed from his position and couldn't set anything up.

Wasn't NeXT set up by Steve Jobs in 1985, around the time he was removed from Apple?
Really nice game. Reminds me a lot of The Incredible Machine. I think I will get one for my kid.
I am sad for Nortel. I did an unpaid internship course in high school at Nortel which was a great experience and best of all, at the end I got 300$ bonus. This was in 1999 back when Nortel was on top of the world. They were the company people wanted to work for in the Ottawa area.

They were a real company before the hi tech boom and were corrupted by it. They suffered a decade of poor management that saw them through stock options scandals, accounting restatements, and general stupidity. I remember spending half the money I earned one summer on Nortel stock after the bubble popped figuring Nortel was at ~50$, they cant go any lower.
While it's quite probable that Burger King violated some part of the Terms of Services, I'm cynical enough to think that encouraging people to remove relationships from the Facebook graph might have played a role too.. (Come on, you thought it too, don't deny it!).
> The only solution is to forbid money management as we know it

Why it is impossible that people voluntarily do not gamble their money with slick money managers? That is what I'm doing...
Finger size link to earning power
From that site I found references to about 5 studies that caused the autism scare, but according to the site, don't really provide evidence. If that is really all that is to the scare, I guess I will really take it upon myself to look up those studies should I ever have kids.
Schiller wasn't, he was medium-level in marketing; but Ive was fairly senior. His team were churning out great designs -- there's a book called AppleDesign that showcases the work, the majority of which didn't make it into production because Apple simply didn't know what it had.
They've made pretty great improvements to the availablity and reliability. It still goes down, but not nearly as often as it did. That despite virtually doubling their traffic in the last 6 months. So my guess is they have just about everyone focusing on optimizing and scaling.

I agree though, lots more they could do including a solid oauth implementation for the api...perpetually coming soon...
If something's that close to being fatal a person get's hospitalized.

If you're that rich, you don't go to the hospital, the hospital comes to you.
EHLiYET SINAV SONUÇLARI
Silver Lining for California Businesses
Probably. Amazon's market cap is ~$21b now, which makes sense with "the message I received from the CEO of the $25 billion retailer".
Ask HN: Beginning to Code on the Iphone?
I've recently started learning how to develop an iPhone app, however I have relatively little programming experience under my belt. I am a pretty technical guy, but would like some advice from experienced programmers on how I should continue. The app is a game and would require sprite animation and perhaps a basic physics engine but nothing too intensive. From what I can reckon, I would need to learn Objective C, Cocoa, and then Open Gl ES. Am I correct in this assessment? What would be the most efficient way to go about this?
Didn't Google hire something like 10,000 employees in one year? Imagine how many recruiters it would take to do that.
I'm sure they are using Vimeo for quality reasons, but I could be wrong.
I agree that face-to-face interaction between master and apprentice are critical for certain type of skill learning.

However, all memory based knowledge can all go online. Also, video and audio of lectures, homework assignments, etc. Much like MIT opencourse, UC Berkeley webcast.
Apple Shareholders Suits Coming In 10, 9, 8, 7...
I think an implicit lesson in this story is that you should have a system to track the way visitors travel through your site (access patterns). With this in place they could have seen at a glance from the very beginning that a lot of customers balked at the register form immediately before checkout.
Why No Company Should Have More Than Seven Employees
I fail to see why this got 23 upvotes. From what I can tell, it shows examples using their API. They are an alternative to VoiceXML. VoiceXML is a industry standard that most companies use.

I would avoid Twilio as I cannot find a justification to making a different standard. Although their transparent pricing and hosting everything is appealing. I actually looked into them before but their xml language turned me away.

If you want to play around with making voicexml apps for free try out https://studio.tellme.com/
He couldn't set anything up within Apple. Obviously he was free to do what he wanted outside of Apple.

Honest question for you: Were you nitpicking for the hell of it, or honestly confused as to what I meant?
Funny. Maybe about two years ago, I could not login to my "first" ICQ account either. Never knew why that happened.

Also, none of my buddies complained about getting weird messages from that account. Was that the case with your account?
I did usability for a retail site two years ago that had pretty much the same problem, and solved it the same way.

I would say that the numbers are probably accurate.
I think many (if not most) topics don't have such an obvious single authorative source.

Machine Learning: Tom M. Mitchell
I think he's trying to say:
In '85 - Jobs couldn't really do any succession planning / future products / directions / etc... So he didn't set anything up for apple (unless you count the fact that long term they bought NeXT etc etc)

In '08 - Jobs will be sorely missed. The WWJD (What would Jobs Do?) question will be asked around apple for years to come
This shouldn't be surprising at all. Priority in news is not determined by what we might consider to be of real or objective importance.
Applied Cryptography, Schneier

Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques, Gray and Reuter
Amazon wouldn't make such an obvious mistake. besides they would have found it in a/b split tests which they use extensively.
This was only uploaded after they had fallen through getting a sponsor for the series. John August decided to show it to people because it was unlikely that it was going to be seen anywhere else.
The cost of a “complex” Jobs health issue: About $6 billion (so far)
Innoventors
Not that I know anything about Amazon specifically, but I wouldn't be so sure. Sometimes it's hard to step back and change something as fundamental as requiring users to register before they purchase. Even if people inside the company had said it was a good idea it might have taken and outside "expert" to get it done.
I think there's some shopping cart software that has similar language in it. That's probably what Coolhorse is using.
Another of my favourite examples from Luke Wroblewski's book is "A Case Study of Explosive Ordnance Disposal" by Jack Moffett:

"When “Number of Deaths” is one of
the field labels, you can be certain that every design decision is an
important one."

Fairly vivid too!
Tor anonymous network now has zero known bugs
7 Essential Steps to Surviving a Post-Layoff Existence
Seems reasonable - but you should also investigate Core Animation.

Look at the Stanford course: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/index.php

Although there aren't any books I can recommend, I have heard that Beginning iPhone Development is good for newer developers.

Good luck!
The Bloomberg version of this story was already submitted. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=431722
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?d=t&s=AMZN
Much more likely.
I've personally had a lot of fun playing with Twilio. Hint, though: don't decide to pay until you're done using up your demo minutes because those go away when you have a balance.

Getting to pick my phone numbers, etc, and have someone else host the infrastructure is pretty cool. I'm just trying to figure out how to really leverage it at the cost level to make it a worthwhile toy. There are a number of good ideas, but they require a lot of marketing effort to become efficient.
They're liberal with the invites, just try to get on their beta invite list. A week or so ago I got mine right away.

http://www.twilio.com/request-invite
As bad as this ruling is, the fact that it was reached over such a meaningless and small crime is even more of a slap in the face -- It's like hey let's not even bother pretending the constitution means anything.

If the ruling came out this way because they caught a serial killer, or some other sort large crime we could at least excuse their horrible judgment by them being blinded by the case and not its ramifications, but this is just ridiculous.
Sad, but not unexpected.

I went through a year-long internship program as part of my CS degree, during the period in late 2000 and 2001 when the bubble burst. Nortel sucked in more people from my class than any other employer. Since they had to agree not to lay off students, interns were often the only ones to survive the early layoffs. There were people who watched their entire department fired several times over.

It made for some interesting stories, but not a lot of people who wanted to return after graduation.
never said capital (or access to capital) doesn't influence value creation. it can negatively or positively affect value creation depending on how that capital is allocated. however the act of capital allocation does not create value. why is that so difficult to understand? im not saying capital allocation isn't important, however its one means to an end (value creation).
NPR Music http://www.npr.org/music/

WNYC (New York Public Radio) http://www.wnyc.org/
Since when is the wii super techy? And the Helvetica shirt isn't big enough to be noticed by non-techy people imo.
I don't understand what you mean. If you update the location with location.href, the page will reload. I think the poster wanted to avoid reloads, hence the whole point of using rsh.
in usability this is a pretty common mistake that most people in the field would know about. besides, as I said, even if they are dilletantes they would have caught it in split testing.
I had a job with a small start-up. They advertised "performance based bonuses" when I was hired, so I figured I would make up for a not-so-hot salary with the bonus. We had a good first year. The owner even sent out an email thanking the four non-founders for our effort, and stating how many million dollars they made.

A few weeks went by after the email (Christmas was fast approaching), and I still hadn't received a performance review. Two days before Christmas, the owner walks into my office and mumbles something about a little extra in the check. Well, I got $400. I considered it a slap in the face, and found a new job.

A couple months later, right before I quit, the gave me a review, and a 4% raise, but it was too late.
Addmired (YC W08) launches super addictive iMob Online on iPhone App Store
It would be very easy to improve searching on CL without needing to license anything from Google, especially given that CL makes plenty of money. It's quite shocking just how bad the Craigslist user interface is, and has been for so long.
having it somewhere with beer would be nice. that way the day can devolve into a bare-fisted language war.
You've seen MXC, I take it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MXC
He's 78...how good could his future health prospects really be?
looks like some good ol' oscommerce
Bay Area iPhone Conference: 360iDev
I just found out about this conference a few weeks ago. If you are living in the Bay Area (or are interested in traveling), I recommend coming to 360iDev!

http://360idev.eventbrite.com/

I've gone to one of their conferences before (for Adobe Flex), its going to be at eBay town hall in San Jose, CA.

Its a 3 day conference that focuses on:

- Game Development
- Non-game Application Development
- The Business of iPhone development
- Hands-on Training

The event is only $200 bucks which is a steal for hackers on the cheap!! Not cheap enough? They just handed out a 10% discount code on Twitter: 'TwitterFriends113'.

I also noticed during checkout that they send you a complimentary copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto, pretty rad!

Just thought I'd let my fellow hackers know about this conference, they don't appear to do a lot of advertising.

Let me know if you are going, we can maybe do a HN meetup there?
This app is going to explode (in a good way).
That was amazing. Thank you.

And you're absolutely right. The question "would she be better off as a person without me?" has weighed heavily on my mind. I've brought it up several times, and she says she does want to try to make it work. I just hope she is acting true to herself, and always will. The last thing I'd ever want is for her spirit to be diminished because of me.
Seriously, Gabe and the addmired crew understand gameplay and virality in a way that absolutely blows my mind. They're a team to watch in 2009.
Justices Say Evidence Is Valid Despite Police Error
No, it doesn’t. Hospitals have thousands of Doctors with all kinds of specialties along with millions of dollars of specialized equipment. People are hospitalized so they have quick access to all those Doctors depending on what happens to them. You can’t “bring a hospital to you”
Oh get real, of course they do. Do a Google search for “CEO takes a sabbatical” for Gods Sakes. One of my personal heroes in the tech industry was a guy named Brad Silverberg. He was #3 at Microsoft under only Gates and Ballmer and he took a year sabbatical to ride his bike of all things.

As far as "there’s always a reason" I have to ask: Have you looked at what the symptoms are for the disease he has? Fatigue, Hair Loss, Urinary Tract Infection, etc... I’d take a few months off if I were him. It doesn’t mean he’s any sicker than he says he is.
Why is this not an editorial?

Someone was depressed while writing this. I don't think people really want that vaccine.

Despite what they say people really do want the up and down, and don't really want all the same - even though they say they do.
JOIN MY MOB! 100000288
Coding Horror Strikes Again (RE: Windows 7 UI)
China becomes third largest economy
Got Gastro
I Can Haz Community? (Ben Huh on improving community)
VoiceXML certainly has it's place in the Enterprise, but it's definitely a steep learning curve. At Twilio, we've attempted to simplify the model for developers who are already busy with many projects and technologies.

As Caligula pointed out, you can "play around" with VoiceXML on a number of Enterprise platforms such as TellMe, but if you want to launch, you'll have to engage in a long enterprise sales cycle and sign long contracts. That's no fun :(

- jeff

Jeff Lawson
Co-Founder, Twilio
Ok, you I trust. That other guy... :)
This is the best explanation of how to get short term gain at the cost of long term ruin I have seen.

However, let's not get caught up in the details. These bankers knew what was going on. Wall Street told shareholders around the world that they had their best interests at heart, when in fact they were selling them up the river. There is a word for this kind of deception: fraud.

And yes, it is still illegal, even if "everyone is doing it".

The SEC should have stopped this a long time ago, and there is a name for that too: corruption.
I'm quite fond of Apple's font rendering and font design, esp. the Monoco monospace font. The way it looks in both TextMate and VIM is astonishing to me.

No, the same font renders like a crap on Win/Linux/FreeType/Cairo/whatsoever ...

Considering I'm facing the code in the font most of the day, I'm willing to pay $100 to just have it.
Gelernter: Replace 90% of teachers with cloud-resident "learning tracks"