skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Social Media: The Importance Of Social Media In Business today
We have all heard of Facebook and Twitter right! Not to mention the new kids on the block taking the world by storm, like Pinterest. But do you really know why you should be using these for your new business and perhaps more importantly, how to use them effectively to get your name, brand, company, service and product out there and into the hearts and minds of the people? Social Media is here, has been here for a while and is only going to continue to get bigger and bigger. You have to understand how it works and how to use it effectively to help you in your own business.

Let us take the daddy of them all at the moment Facebook. Some statistics for 2012 for this behemoth gives you an insight into the sheer scale of Social Media:   In 2012 there are 850 million users, of those 50% are Mobile users. The percentage of men and women is split 43% Male, 57% Female. On average women have 55% more posts on their wall than men.

So far there has been more than 1 million websites integrated with Facebook, people interact with over 900 million objects, Facebook has 3 million active fan pages today and there are over 100 Billion friendships.

Every day 1 billion pieces of content / information is shared through photos, videos, web links, new stories etc.

In the world of business 80% of companies are using Facebook as a marketing tool. 39% of business owners said they plan to spend money on Facebook marketing in 2012. Facebook is the Number 1 publisher of display ads, that is more than Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and AOL combined.

Facebook users are up to 150 times more likely to consume branded content in the newsfeed than to visit the actual fan page itself.

As you can see from some of these statistics, Facebook and Social Media has become an integral part of any serious business. The huge mistake many make is not actually knowing how to utilize this huge resource properly. What are the steps to take to use it correctly when it comes to your own business? What do you need to do it put the strategies into place to help? How do you integrate Social Media and your business to make it one organic entity?

With correct understanding and set up you are exposing your business to an audience that has the potential to be limitless. The question you have to ask yourself is: Can I afford to not be involved in Social Media?
Diverging from your main point a bit: 2MH/s is unrealistically low. For a couple thousand dollars you can build FPGA HW that can do several billion SHA1 hashes/s. The bitcoin mining world is getting 400-450 SHA256 MH/s from a $130 chip. With similar technology, you can brute force a 2^44 SHA1 space in a lot less than 50 days.
I'm not much of a Go programmer and do 99% of my work in C but I've played with it a bit and there are places where the abstractions and facilities provided in it are so nice they make it worth it.

The whole goroutines and channels mechanism is fascinating. I've seen and used coroutines in C that in a way achieve what goroutines do but the simplicity and the combination with channels is really great.

Comparing a co-routine based network server in C and Go would be the way to go to see the real strength of Go, IMNHO.
Two Guys From Andromeda (creators of Space Quest) trying to kickstart a startup
I wonder why we don't see more map apps like this.

Just of the top of my head:

Around the world route maps (people submit the trips they did)

Greatest explorers route maps (although I guess there might be some problems with historical accuracy)

Geek Spots Around the world

Known Military Bases around the world (and perhaps a strategy game on top)

The use of large scale maps are IMHO still a very underutilized area because most go for the location based stuff.
Display The Number of Database Queries In WordPress
I figured it out after about 15 seconds from seeing one of the images load on-demand. Which is the time any self-respecting computer programmer should take.
Yes, it would. Problem is that "significantly cheaper" means it costs $1 million instead of $5 million.
Ugh. Autoplay sound (and LOUD) and no warning.
http://picocrew.com/presents/picocrew ....:(
Superiorpaper.com discount
A lot of websites offer paper writing but just a couple of them to provide you with the real discount code for your academic paper and superior papers discount code service is one of them .
TL;DR - Ray Bradbury is dead.
San Francisco Earthquake Aftermath (1906)
Does it really matter if you have a 1% or 3% rate on your bank account? At the end of it, because of the inflation rate, you still have a negative real rate for deposits which would promote investing elsewhere (like apartments).

I don't see anywhere where he said everyone was speculating on property as a savings mechanism. Obviously some parts of China are very poor. The fact remains though that people are choosing to speculate in property, which is logical given the negative real rates in China.
I've never really done a whole lot of lower level programming but IIRC 68K/PowerPC was big endian and I believe that a lot of Carbon was pretty stubborn about that.

Also I don't know how much Altivec code would have needed to be ported to SSE (if any).
>"4 grandparents" problem - no, when a couple marries, the woman's parents are not (generally) cared for by the new family."

I don't see how that changes his argument. If you have a girl then you now have 0 grandchildren to help you when you're old, thus logically causing you to save even more than you would have.

>The savings rate is due to thousands of years of constant invasion, mass slaughter, starvation and death. Look through Chinese history and you will see more than a few "mass extinctions" (80%+ death rates). This leads to a saving mentality, it's embedded in the culture (and not a new thing at all).

Europe has had near extinction events and invasions as well, so I don't think you can really just point to that as the total explanation.

Additionally from what I've read Chinese savings rates have been increasing, so it can't be explained as merely cultural.

>Personal savings are not at all used in this way.

How are banks investing the money, then? If they are investing the money in such a way that it frees up other funds for the government to invest elsewhere then it has the same net effect.
Well at least it doesn't look like PHP...
There's still a lot of cases where it's very hard for even a consumer-facing US-based web startup to get traction in another country, for language and cultural reasons. Japan is a particularly notable case; it's often said that companies without an office in Japan never succeed there. Some examples:

Pixiv vs. DeviantArt

Mixi vs. Facebook

Nico Nico Douga vs. Youtube

China is an even more extreme case, though that also has problems of corruption, legal wrangling, censorship, and so on.
Yeah for a startup that is kind of true; it depends a bit on what it is, but generally 'doing a startup' is costly. I wouldn't say those mandatory social insurance and other things are very different in different countries (depending on your bootstrapping wallet size). However if you don't go for those typical growths of startups and you just want a few million $ in the end (I guess, according to Wikipedia, that's not a startup), it is not so hard to bootstrap and build + make a good living. I don't particularly need rocket ship money.

As an example; my wife and I started a dating site in one EU country (which was crowded with dating sites) for (in the beginning) around $150/month hosting and 'free' programming (I spent a few weeks on it in my spare time). We spent $250 on marketing and after around 6 months it made more than I made from my other company with almost no work (30-60 min/day). Sold it for very nice money (no mortgage); did a few of those kind of things and invested (part) of the money in 'bigger' things with actually employees. I often like that of model a lot better than stories on HN; simply reasoned; there are only a few Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest like companies; the chance that your millions $ VC company makes it is not that large. It's make or break otherwise the VC multiplier is not large enough.

I think to bootstrap, depending on your company, you need the right group of people and the idea depends on those people. If your wife happens to know all the press in your country, it's far easier to bootstrap a number of companies than when you have to hire PR companies. It's your job as entrepreneur to gather people around you who will help you.

So while I agree with your ; for a typical startup you need a lot of resources to get off the ground, but for any kind of business; nah. It depends on your dreams, but if you just want to supplement or replace your income (or work more or less), it's not that hard.
The first graph here is wrong. Recall the constraint that only you and people you invite can enter. If you invite n friends, you have n+1 votes. Since each of your invites also gets a vote, there are (n+1) + n votes total, or 2n + 1.

So, for a given n, your chances of winning is (n+1)/(2n+1) . The limit of (n+1)/(2n+1) as n->infinity isn't 1, as the graph implies; it's 1/2. (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=limit%20%28n%2B1%29%2F%...). So the more people you invite, the closer your chances of winning get to 50%.

If none of your friends accepts your invite, you have one vote, and your friends have no votes. 100% chance of winning.

If one of your friends accepts your invite, you have two votes (your original, plus your bonus), and your friend has one vote. 2/3 chance of winning. For two friends, you're at 3/5; for three, 4/7, etc. Note that we're above 50%, so the delta in your chance of winning is actually negative for each friend you invite.

The author is also confused whether you get an initial vote or not, but that's less important. The author didn't seem to count the friends' votes anywhere: "If two friends sign up, then you have a 2/3 chance of winning, then 3/4, then 4/5, and so on." If two friends sign up, there are either four or five votes total, neither of which is divisible by three, as that sentence states.

But the author's final conclusion is correct -- at least, it's close enough; you want to share with your friends such that they have enough time to enter the contest, but not enough time to share withe their friends. The appropriate time, of course, varies per-friend.
My friend's rather unique though imperfect password was among those present on the list. I'm suspicious.
Google Kills Meebo : Most Products To Shut Down |
$1M+ might be in the realm of the attainable for a Kickstarter project, assuming the device has a sufficiently wide usage. The estimated cost of approval would need to be included in the funding goal.

[If the same studies might be used to seek approval in several countries at once, then it might make such an approach to funding medical devices more attainable for the size of their market. The missing piece of the puzzle seems to be an affordable method for conducting studies to get medical devices approved.

It seems like the industry is highly vertical, with difficult access to financing and compliance infrastructure. This might be an opportunity for a service provider to come in, establish a selection process for clients, partner with universities around the world to conduct studies to the specifications of US FDA, and its EU, Canada, Japan, etc. equivalents' approval, and help store and file the needed paperwork in exchange for a cut of sales.

Maybe it's also time for the UN to create a world body for standards of approval of medical technology which all these nations should recognize; or maybe ISO should take that role.]
This is very cool.

Since you're asking for feedback, here's mine: Definitely add GPS as an option.

Maybe you can hook into Google Places or Foursquare to find the location or address. You can narrow it down to individual stalls if you want to give the user the option.

I know there are a lot of good reasons not to use GPS here, but it seems like having it as an option would definitely help so that people can get involved by just using the app.
Real Life UX: Returning Items to Amazon Makes Me Smile
That's a really poor comment, and is not at all a fair assessment or summary of the item in question.
"We've been open and transparent in our communications".
Patent to prevent students from sharing books
The concern I have with this is that it provides a bit too much information to potential crackers. Security through obscurity is nothing to rely in, but it doesn't hurt to have a little. It's why disabling the reporting of http server version information is a common practice in hardening a server.

OTOH, it may be worth it. It's shocking that LinkedIn could be so negligent, especially after high-profile screwups like gawker.
> "The processes required to be both religious [Abrahamic] and accepting of evolution are so diametrically opposed"

What makes you certain you have identified the process required to be religious? "Required" is a strong word, implying that it is impossible to become religious through any other process than the one you assume.

But the data shows otherwise. People become religious through a lot of very different processes. Some are drawn emotionally, others intellectually. Some are drawn by the religious community and by "fitting in", others by scholarly writings. Some are drawn because they don't like looking at evidence, others are drawn because they are dedicated to looking at evidence. Some may begin from premises that are not falsifiable, but it's quite a stretch to say that's required.

> "if you're a deist, you wouldn't need to think that evolution isn't the sole source of biological diversity on Earth"

You don't need to think that even if you're a total Bible-thumper. As long as your Bible-thumping includes an appropriate understanding of history, such that you recognize the creation story as a response to the Egyptian creation account [0], rather than as a response to Darwin.

[0] http://transformedthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/08/genesis-1-in...
I disagree, there are plenty of small businesses in any country. These bureaucratic hurdles can be annoying, but I don't think they are ever prohibitive or should be anyone's first concern when starting a company.
Amazon really blows me away with their end-to-end experience. The funny thing is that their site's UX leaves much to be desired, but it's highly functional and they still have a world-class brand even without a world-class frontend for Amazon.com. We obsess over our web app's front-end design, but often neglect the end-to-end experience.
Precompiled binaries for Emacs 24.1 are already available for OS X at http://emacsformacosx.com/ .
Sadly, no crazy genius advancements like the fast inverse sqrt. Is Carmack going out of form, or did I just miss something?
That's still a lot of code just to import a single 6 line function...
"Wow, what a comment."

No one could even claim unanimity inside the apple user pool regarding that, let alone outside. Better use some relativity rather than portraying oneself as someone wrapped up by the marketing message.
Weekly Android Wrap-up: June 3-June 9 2012
Confessions of a Former 'Idea Man'
I started reading their page and saw stuff like "take tiny, tiny data sample to have the most difference" and I started doubting. Since I saw the "faster" processing, and given how straight forward it is it parse json in C I was doubting even more.

So I clicked comments, expecting to see this, so that I wouldn't have to do it myself. Ah, makes me happy, thanks!
SkepticBlog had a recent post by Michael Shermer on the current activities of Esalen Institute.

http://www.skepticblog.org/2012/06/05/a-weekend-of-woo/

The "elegantly designed hot tubs (clothing optional, and most opt to go without)" are still a big feature of meetings at Esalen Institute, but Shermer finds more to discuss about the activities during his latest visit there.

AFTER EDIT to comment on another interesting comment. A top-level comment mentions, "Very cleverly, he mixes in examples of absolute crackpottery (e.g Uri Geller, reflexology) with those of somewhat researchers (e.g. the psychology student) who may be somewhat clueless in their experimental procedures but are trying to do valid science, which in our minds equate both." Feynman indeed was dubious about much of psychology as it was written about during his academic career. He was not alone. Psychologists wrote in similar terms during the same period, for example David Lykken in is article "What's Wrong with Psychology Anyway?"

http://cogprints.org/371/3/148.pdf
Understanding public/private key usage in RSA PKCS#1 OAEP
Using content from Wikipedia without kind of attribution is not cool and not legal. All the descriptions seem to be verbatim copies. Boo!
What a joke. They're claiming no customers were affected, in part because the login email addresses weren't released along with the password hashes. All that really means though is that a private group has this information, not that the information isn't out there. They're also ignoring the fact that people reuse passwords- just because they managed to force a password change for the users of their servers doesn't mean the other services the user happens to be a member of will do the same (or even know they should).

Shit happens, and we all know this. The fact that this guy is downplaying it is where I start losing respect for the company.
The fact that he knew about that function and you (standing in as "representative Python developer") did not seems to justify the library pretty nicely from what I can tell.

But, obviously, this code does more than Python's hmac library does, beyond just knowing how to properly verify the MAC itself.
Did not realize Feynman used meditation, isolation tanks, etc.!

"First I started out by investigating various ideas of mysticism, and mystic experiences. I went into isolation tanks and got many hours of hallucinations, so I know something about that. Then I went to Esalen, which is a hotbed of this kind of thought (it's a wonderful place; you should go visit there). Then I became overwhelmed. I didn't realize how much there was."
Depends on the site.. what backend are you using?
Also, IMHO the fact that Haxe looks familiar to people coming from Javascript, ActionScript, or Java is a plus.
That's a really good question. I thought about this and for now its a fair metric. I want to reach 8 working hours a day. Once I hit that goal consistently, I'll have to look for a better metric.
Apple TV set to consist out of two separate parts?
My inclination for doing this kind of thing would be to use PyOpenSSL or a similar wrapper to do an S/MIME sign/verify on each side. Encryption using AES if necessary. I'd be inclined to do this for a couple reasons:

1) If there's anything my grad crypto class taught me it's that RSA, specifically padding, is the most god-forsaken idea ever created by man and you will never, ever, ever, ever get it right. If the words RSA are in your code you are in deep shit.

2) S/MIME seems to be a simpler system than any certificate system I have seen. X.509 is an unholy mess. In fact, all PKI is just a complicated disaster waiting to happen.

3) Super simple API -- it can even be done on the command line.

Is there something different you'd recommend?

Edit: Actually, I just thought of another option. GPG has a --sign and --verify option. If GPG can be installed on the system it may be worth trying to integrate that.
Last.fm joins LinkedIn and eHarmony as password nightmare continues
I think point 2 is the key. There likely will be increased competition once some of the initial regulatory battles have been fought. Having a lock on that premium market segment should allow them to be very competitive in a taxi-like market as well (They can afford to have really low margins on much of that market, where as their competitors won't).

There's really two parts to the business model. It's a balance between making sure drivers are making enough money for it to be worth their time/effort and ensuring that it's a pleasant experience for riders.
>People are well aware that they are nit picking, but they enjoy the resulting discussion! Intellectually inclined people enjoy discussing minutia with other like minded people. They are perfectly aware that it makes no difference, and they don't care - it's just something interesting to talk about. It's no longer nit picking about the original (i.e. the practical use is settled), at that point it becomes a discussion for its own sake.

Pedantry like that indicates that the person may be suffering from OCD, not that they have a high IQ. There is a correlation between intelligence and anxiety-spectrum disorders but there are, ofcourse, many anxious people who have low IQ's too.
Rules of storytelling, according to Pixar
This change is being made without any buy-in from the community, ostensibly for security reasons. I'm skeptical, given the inherent incentives involved.
This is a false dichotomy. Just because your mother uses iOS devices (and probably a lot of other closed devices) doesn't mean you should.

You, presumably, are a hacker. While hackers represent a small part of the population, they represent a very important part of the market - the part that builds the wider ecosystem. We have a disproportionate effect on the evolution of technology. Use devices that advance an agenda that should be important to you - the ability to make devices do what you want, not what its manufacturer wants them to do.

Besides, you make the non-Apple world sound more bleak than it is. While Android is not quite as polished as iOS, it's perfectly usable by nontechies.
Future U: Fear and Loathing in Academia
Lessons learned from my participation in an Accelerator
The current (2008) probability http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/nca/ucerf/

I'm a little more worried about this one: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/structure/crust/cascadia...
The part of your personal project that I might be vaguely interested in is "what can it do for me?". The fact that it's yours, personal, latest, or that you want to know what I think aren't particularly compelling.

Use a better headline next time.

And ... answering your question having visited the page: not much.
I've been using the pretests for a while now, and the built in package manager has been an absolute joy to work with.

If I were to begin writing extensions, I'd also probably enjoy the lexical scoping a lot more.
Turn on click-to play for plugins, whitelist sites you trust: you'll have a brief reprieve before everyone starts using HTML5 audio/video. :-)
I have no issues with the process, but only concerned with the way this change was made. The issue keeps referring to https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=55584 for "details", but there is nothing there except statements asserting how much of a "big problem" this is.

I think this is a bigger problem with large open source projects in general where implementors are oblivious to which functionalities developers cherish and value. Any change in such features would require a more thorough explanation.
Conditional vs. Absolute Learning
1. Static files whenever possible
2. Caches wherever possible
3. Database indexes

These optimizations tend to pay off the most and probably require the least amount of expertise.

A good IDS system that prevents bots and attackers from consuming resources can also be helpful.