skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Howdy. I'm the guy.

So, you're pretty much exactly who I wanted to reach with the second half of this post, because there is a great gap between a) your prior prediction of reality and b) the actual state of reality. The actual state of reality is "350 emails submitted in the last hour, approximately 60% confirmed."

This is useful signal for you, because the next time you have to make a similar prediction about the nature of reality, where that prediction might be consequential, you will ideally make a better prediction. All HNers who run a business have to make predictions like "I have a limited budget in terms of time, focus, and resources. If I spend effort on getting permission to email customers and then emailing them, will that do good things for the business?"

You might have had incomplete data prior to making your prediction of reality. Here's some things which are probably material to that prediction which would have suggested biasing it in the favor of more confirmed opt-ins.

1) I've spent a wee bit of time on HN for the last three years or so, and some folks around here find that I say helpful things.

2) People will, generally, leap at the opportunity to get something which is presented as being something of value. (Covered, in depth, in the blog post.)

3) A lot of people -- including people who are very similar to you in many ways -- would happily ask to receive email if that were communicated to them as being something of value from someone they trusted.

There's other things which would have suggested guessing a lower number than one might have otherwise:

1) The call to action in this blog post is not graphically prominent. (See my other comment on this thread regarding a squeeze page, which means a page designed to encourage conversions to an email submission. This page is very much not a squeeze page.)

2) You have to read things, go to a separate page, and then take action.

3) The list requires double opt-in (the first opt-in is giving your email address, the second is clicking a link in an introductory email to you saying "Yes, I want to receive email from you"), which will always and everywhere decrease uptake versus single opt-in.
People near me who do this usually get deauth attacked until they change their SSID.

If you want to act like an inconsiderate 14 year old with your wifi, so will I!
Loving it - fun stuff. Don't quite know what I, the musician, would do with it but it's pretty cool.
It'll ship on almost 90% of desktop PC's and there are millions of ageing PC's running XP that have to be near the end of their useful life. In short, how big of a flop could it be?
For personal life events Google Calendar.

For tracking work related events (decisions, projects etc.) I use my own app Review19 - http://review19.com

Have tried a lot of the popular options: Asana, Trello, Pivotal, Google Docs etc. Each has got its own strengths and weaknesses.

My colleagues and I are distributed around the world and Review19.com really helps in non traditional tracking such as collaborative decision making.
OT: Anybody know what that typeface is on the "Humble Indie Bundle" logo? I love it.
You've misunderstood him. He's not suggesting that you buy email addresses from vendors; he's suggesting that you establish the relationship that opts in email addresses yourself. There is obviously nothing spammy about allowing people to subscribe to your mailing list.
I hate the fact that there is a windows store. I know this is the bandwagon everyone appears to be jumping on, but I still hate the idea that software we buy on computers we own is going through a gatekeeper.
Do you have paying customers?

I only ask because it really bugs me when an obviously brand new application has a "Most popular" distinction for one of their plans when it's clear that they really mean "Most profitable."
I might have misunderstood the product. I assumed (though this would be tough), that when you took a snippet of a page, and say the page updated later on - the snippet would reflect the change.

You make it sound like the snippets are static caches of content.
Ajax Control Toolkit 3 - MS ASP.NET Ajax Server and Client Controls - Lesson 7
Say hi to my bro!
It's easy to assume Microsoft is basing decisions on what Apple is doing but I don't think Apple's design choices have any bearing on the new Windows8 interface. I can definitely see why it's easy to assume the connection because of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" motto and their one-step-behind lime of products like Zune, Windows Phone, etc. This time I really think they're thinking independently. It seems as though they've taken note of all the criticisms of Aero and tweaked it to be better and unique to Microsoft. If they've taken cues from anywhere I think it's Google and the minimalist web in general. The new UI chrome is very reminiscent of Google's design across all their products. It's very minimal, functional, and focuses more on readability and utility than what they've come up with n the past. Metro itself is a very cool idea that I really haven't seen from their competitors in any form.

I think you're right that they're deliberately going in a certain direction but I don't think Apple is playing as big a role in that decision as you imply. Despite Apple's growth and popularity Microsoft is still by far the biggest player in the OS market. Because of that I would doubt that they're as concerned with what Apple is doing on the desktop front and more interested in taking cues from them in the mobile device space.

I'm actually a huge Apple fanboy but I have to say the new Windows desktop is really beautiful! I haven't used a PC in years but I'd be happy to look at the New Windows non-Metro desktop all day. Microsoft is still making a lot of mistakes in cluttering their UI with buttons and ribbons and the like but hopefully the next step is to continue their momentum with the new Windows8 UI chrome and tackle the button/ribbon mess next.
The strongest argument against the semi-colon is readability.

#confession Out of habit, I still use it in most of my code.
Congrats on the launch! I remember when we (I was a former groovesharker) started working on it back in November of 2010! Great to see that you stuck with the project through what I'm sure were many ups and downs :)

I'm curious to know how you see the product benefiting people. What do you see people actually using it for?

Right now it seems like a cute demonstration of a data mashup though not entirely factually correct. For example, if I search for "Coldplay" it says 85% affinity for Asian Indian and 82% Plastic Surgery and high Z-score for Hindi? How do you ensure the accuracy of this data?

I think you need to display the results of this data differently to users. If its correct, people without statistics backgrounds will get confused because not everyone can interpret what a z-score means, nor will they understand how it is useful to them.
I'd forgotten about 'guestbook' pages on web sites!
How do they feel knowing that I can bake them at home right now? http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/oreo-cookies-recipe/index...
I listen to DI.FM at work. The free streams are ad-supported, but the only ads i ever get are tasteful ones for their own premium service (which lets you listen ad-free in higher quality), seems like a pretty sustainable model.

Oh, they've been running ads for AlienVPS recently, which is actually kind of relevant to my work. : )
Bajaj Discover 125 ST Price In India,Review
Bajaj Discover 125 ST Price In India,Review,Features and Specification Launched in India in May 2012. Bajaj Auto Launch a new discover 124.6cc Twin Spark Air Cooled, 4 Valve DTS-i Engine petrol version in indian market.
Tell HN: SQL Injection Vulnerability in latest Ruby on Rails
From the Rails Security List:

There is a SQL injection vulnerability in Active Record, version 3.0
and later. This vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier
CVE-2012-2661.

Versions Affected: 3.0.0 and ALL later versions

Not affected: 2.3.14

Fixed Versions: 3.2.4, 3.1.5, 3.0.13

Impact

------

Due to the way Active Record handles nested query parameters, an
attacker can use a specially crafted request to inject some forms of
SQL into your application's SQL queries.

All users running an affected release should upgrade immediately.

Impacted code directly passes request params to the `where` method of
an ActiveRecord class like this:

Post.where(:id => params[:id]).all

An attacker can make a request that causes `params[:id]` to return a
specially crafted hash that will cause the WHERE clause of the SQL
statement to query an arbitrary table with some value.

Releases

--------

The FIXED releases are available at the normal locations.

Workarounds

-----------

This issue can be mitigated by casting the parameter to an expected
value. For example, change this:

Post.where(:id => params[:id]).all

to this:

Post.where(:id => params[:id].to_s).all
turd sandwich.
Sorry, I was just using that as a catch-all to describe learning "things which will probably help you be a better programmer in some way."
By year 2016, there wil be 18.9 billion Internet connections
Good design does not necessarily correlate to fancy javascript animations and cascading whatevers. In my opinion, good design is supposed to facilitate the use of the tool, period. What additional design could be applied to http://news.ycombinator.com that would make the user experience better while keeping in mind the objective of popularizing the highest voted stories and fostering the community through comments on stories?
Kickstarting The Future of Cooking
Still no Start button?
> (The predicted future value of a customer is an odd duck for many SaaS companies. I’ll sketch out the shape of the curve some time. It’s a weird snake that requires a bit of explanation.)

I'd be very interested in hearing that bit.
Why exactly are you so offended by the name someone else picks for their network?
The games I tried on Linux so far, have been really high-quality ports. I know icculus did quite a few of them. I haven't played that many, though.
This reminds me of one of the pages that Google has internally that, very roughly, breaks down the cost of various things so you can calculate equivalencies.

As an example of what I mean (i.e., these numbers and equivalencies are completely pulled out of thin-air and I am not asserting these in any way):

* 1 Engineer-year = $100,000
* 25T of RAM = 1 Engineer-week
* 1ms of display latency = 1 Engineer-year

This allows engineeers to calculate tradeoffs when they're building things and to optimize their time for business impact. E.g.: it's not worth optimizing memory usage by itself, Latency is king, Don't waste your time shaving yaks, etc etc.
Re-posted to the Factlink blog at http://blog.factlink.com/
The Rise Of The Micro-Entrepreneurship Economy
Tornado tracks
Wasn't aware of it, so thanks for the question. I took a quick look and it looks like Agner is using performance counters, which, while being more accurate, are platform specific. One of the goals of lmbench was to be accurate across different platforms and CPU architectures. So it's all userland software only.

You can get pretty far that way, Carl wrote a userland tool called mhz that has been working without modification since around 1998 (when the fastest clock rate was 600mhz on an alpha). Still pretty accurate to this day when CPUs have clock rates 7x faster and fairly different architectures.

Carl wrote up how it works, might be interesting to people who think about CPUs: http://www.bitmover.com/lmbench/mhz-usenix.pdf
I think this is an interesting point. I'm not sure how you censor your front page. I personally don't really care what's there, but you could quite easily offend, and scare people away from the service.
In Defense of Programming Puzzles
The problem with the Facebook stock, is its valuation in relation to growth prospects / concerns. It's as simple as that.

Facebook maxed out the money they could raise on the IPO, and the price fell afterward accordingly. It's better for the company long term that they did that.

It's a long race they're in.
The viruses mentioned were real, too, even if their usage was silly.

"Type cookie, you idiot!"
The reality is that there are many different responsibilities that, confusingly, fall under the singular title of "programmer".

If you're the tech cofounder at a startup, you're probably focused on building a new product that customers love from scratch. You're going to need a very different set of skills and abilities than, say, Microsoft engineer #10000 who is maintaining some old codebase. Or even engineer #100 at Google who's trying to scale to hundreds of millions of people. Etc.

What's weird is that people hardly ever mention these differences. They just say things like, "All programmers should know advanced algorithms"... or data structures, or compilers, or UX design, etc. Even if people/companies don't say this explicitly, they say it implicitly when they quiz for specific material in interviews for jobs that don't rely on that type of material.

If you're exceptionally good at what you do, but you constantly hear that you're inadequate because you don't have this skill or that knowledge, it's easy to doubt yourself. But you shouldn't. The fact is there's nobody who knows all of this stuff, or even most of it. And there's no job that's going to ask you to do most of it (I say this as the sole tech person at a startup where I have to do sysadmin, back-end coding, front-end coding, and design single-handedly).

Just find what you love and get good at it.
It could be, but I doubt it. We do not have a history of office pranks. Each person who came to me was kind of shaken up, not over the lunch per se but over "what is going on with this place that people are stealing from me."

The victims on this, imho, are the people who have built a good place to work, want to eat lunch in peace and can't.
I have to disagree with you.

Software engineering 'ideas' regarding modeling and testing have gone way overboard.

I have a feeling that that all those who peddle fancy buzzwords such as agile and kanban are either MBA graduates with no real engineering background or failed engineers trying to reinvent their career.
2011 Chevrolet Corvette – Feel the Pleasure of Sports with Luxury Features
I must say that I am a bit disappointed with the decision to include Flash in this release. Not only will it delay it's death, but it also seems pretty anticompetitive unless other companies are also allowed to release plugins for Metro-IE10.
I've noticed lots of SSIDs designed to scare people away. "NSA", "Viruses", "SpyNet", etc.
Using pushState? Make sure your links are fine
That's really interesting. Until recently I'd never come across people using SSIDs to express their political opinions, but one of my neighbours has just started using "Vote Labour" as theirs (Labour is the current UK opposition party). I can just about understand people expressing their like or dislike of Obama, but exactly how many floating voters will be swayed by a WiFi access point?
No, in fact, hell no!

http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows8/microsoft-windo...

"Related to this second point is information I’ve received that Microsoft has been furiously ripping out legacy code in Windows 8 that would have enabled third parties to bring back the Start button, Start Menu, and other software bits that could have made this new OS look and work like its predecessor. In fact, I’ve seen that several well-known UI hacks that worked fine with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview are no longer functional in the coming Release Preview. And those with hopes that Microsoft would allow businesses, at least, to boot directly to the desktop should prepare for disappointment. That feature not only isn’t happening, it’s being removed from Windows Server 12 (Windows 8’s stable mate) as well."
This OS might be the biggest Apple flop ever.
There are just way too many fundamental changes which are not proven to be actually better.
I would rather see new iOS touch UI as another full-screen app to see if it can stand on its own before they go all-in with it. Something similar to what Apple did with Classic which was basically another pre-OS X program.
I guess, Apple is being run by different folks today.
The Rise of the Open Source Software
Are you saying people who do theoretical work don't don't it in practical ways?

As an example, take Google's self-driving cars. Would you say the meat of their body of work theoretical? But would say the code they (Sebastian Thrun himself, and others involved in the project) write code that's not very practical, readable, maintainable or without tests? I would say what they do is theoretical work. And they write practical code for their theoretical work.

If you look at Udacity classes - I've watched Peter Norvig not Thrun's so I'll use that as a reference - Norvig places a lot of importance for tests, maintainability, readability and other practical things throughout his class. I would assume the code he writes (however little now, however much in the past) is very practical. Yet what he writes code for has a huge theoretical aspect to it. I'm saying one can have their body of work being theoretical by nature but that doesn't mean they don't write practical code.
Oh boy, here comes the obligatory HN-contrarianism and knee-jerk Microsoft bashing. I dislike Microsoft, in particular, Windows, as much as the next guy but you can't just throw out blanket statements like that with nothing to support them.

Why will this be such a flop? Are you maybe exaggerating? If it is because of the fundamental changes you mention? Which ones in particular and how are they not proven to be better?

I'm not defending Windows8 at all. Like I said, I'm no Microsoft fan myself but even I can give them credit for some of the things they're doing in Windows8. I think it'd be far more constructive to give us some specifics so that we can have a real discussion rather than throwing out generalizations that'll turn this into another religious debate.
I rarely "enjoy nightlife." I just sit at home not tired for several hours, then lay in bed not tired for a couple of hours. If I get "enough" sleep to not be tired in the morning (7-8 hours), then I won't be tired the same time that night. If I get "too little" sleep (<7 hours) I will be tired all day.
Start button was there and was removed just few months back. You can go to the corner and that acts like a start button. It's close to unusable via remote desktop though.
But it is not "additional" domain names... it is the same domain names with a different TLD. How does making facebook.lol, ycombinator.doc or whateverisalreadytaken.google help anyone but the entity that controls the TLD?
I have been using Windows 8 Consumer Preview (and Developer Preview before that) as my primary OS and I love it. I use Windows 8 like Windows 7. All the applications that I use are pinned to the taskbar and I barely enter Metro UI. The only reason I need enter Metro occasionally is to search for apps, files and/or settings. Doing all that in one place without lifting my hand from the keyboard can be handy.
CSI Internet: Investigating a bank trojan.
A Visual Tour of Erlang
>> More and more small local businesses are sending me spam, and I don't like it.

Weird, where are you based? I'm in the US, and I've never had a local business get my email address without me giving it to them. (Of course I gave my email expecting to receive email from them; otherwise, why bother?)
Although this doesn't look like the right hire for something coming on the iPhone 5, considering the recentness and newness -- I'd like to see a new port on the iPhone.

I don't want USB, either. USB connectors are great, but I'm okay with the next generation.

How about Thunderbolt? It's small, it's fast, it's already on newer macs, and it can provide 10W of power. Some kind of adapter would be needed for USB until Thunderbolt is ubiquitous.
I do not understand the skepticism against Windows 8, specially from the hacker community.

The only reason I do not use a Windows computer (anymore) is because there are so few ways to build things on it, compared to a Mac. I remember back in the day when I used Windows exclusively because Visual Studio was the only way to do build awesome things fast. With Windows 8, MS has brought back those days. Developing for Metro is absolutely amazing. I have never felt the urge to write native desktop apps in years until Metro. Not that Apple and Google didn't try.

Anybody looking at screenshots and making predictions should download the preview, fire up that Virtualbox, hack together an app and then decide. This is nothing like ChromeOS, believe me, I am running the 30th May build of Chromium on my other machine. This is something that sits between iOS-ified Mac and Web-ified ChromeOS.
Grooveshark is blocked (at the DNS level) in my country (Denmark). Annoying.
This author sounds a little naive re: technology.

Perhaps he should examine some of the Facebook publicly available scans that have been done by "academic researchers", e.g., in South Korea. It is not rocket science to crawl Facebook.

Facebook's data is accessible. As is any website's back-end database. You are kidding yourself if like the author you think you can put something like Facebook on the public internet and have it be "private". If people with the skills -- and there are plenty of them; surprise, they don't all work at Facebbok -- put in the effort they can get the data. All they need is a reason/motivation to do so.

But let's have some more embarassing "tech journalism" (uninformed pontification) from a once respected journal. Put more nails in the coffin of the notion of "professional journalism".
Well, you probably really should not use Helvetica or Arial in your logo.
Why do they need 9 million, really? That's about 10 programmers for 5 years, with a competitive salary and benefits, plus office costs.
Hehe whoops, just changed that one, not sure what I did there. Another one I've probably got wrong is Obamanation, which I thought was good at the time, like a contraction of "Obama for the Nation" now I'm thinking it's a pun on Abomination. Not sure though!
I'd love to be able to step through this graph year by year. An animation tracing each tornado would be fantastic too.
Hadn't thought of that... this is what comes of being English and not a sports fan I guess :)
FWIW, it's also useful to use something like "HN Collapse": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bbkfcamiocfccgmcjn...
Can you make the front page slideshow stop if I click a link? It moves on faster than I can study the pictures.
I don't think you're restricted to that store, are you?
Hey burrokeet, aspects of the content management functionality you mentioned will be part of the new artist platform. You can request early beta access here: http://greenroom.grooveshark.com/?beluga

We do pay royalties to licensed content holders - please email licensing[at]grooveshark[dot]com for more details
I was just thinking of that earlier, I think you're right it's probably negative. Will change.
I really don't understand what all the complaining is about. For most desktop users Microsoft took away the start button and added a new app launcher. The rest of the OS functions the same or better.
Ask PG: No OpenID login option left me stranded
Hi,

I used OpenID to access my HN account in the past. However, it seems that logging in with OpenID is no longer an option, and that left me in a bit of a pickle. You see, today I deleted all the cookies on my computer, so now I'm logged out of my account and unable to log back in. What can be done about this? It's not like I had an epic karma score, but still, I used that account for quite a long time now and I'd rather not have to create a new one if that can be avoided.

Btw, I only deleted the cookies on my home computer, so I'm still logged in on my work computer.

I'd appreciate it if you could help me with this. Thanks in advance.
Fluent, The Startup Promising The Future Of Email
Yep, the parachute and its lines were deployed out of there.
Repurposing Public Spaces for the Knowledge Economy