skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People have different expectations from a Q&A site.

SO is pretty rigid about what they want. That's a good thing - their servers, their rules. Firm guidelines allow users to find either post useful questions, or find some other site.

Except, that's not what happens. Someone asks a question that's a lousy fit for the SE format; and people like it, and upvote it and answer it and the answers get upvotes. Then some mod comes along and closes it, and there's a bunch of negative feeling.

SO is huge, and needs constant tending to keep it useful. Cool urls don't change, but when Mark Pilgrim (who has a gajillion urls over SE) leaves the Internet there's a gajillion urls that need to be found and changed. (No, I have no idea why a site run by programmers, for programmers, can't kludge together a script to search for and replace urls.) That's one small example. There are plenty of other examples.

Then there's the "problem" of duplicate answers. Ideally, there would be one great question, with a bunch of answers, with the best answer being upvoted most and the answer most fitting being accepted. But very few people searches before asking, and all the tags are not useful, so there are a lot of duplicates. That could be okay, except the dupes are usually worse quality than one great question. And the answers lose quality over time - there's only so many times that someone is going to write a great answer.

Then the gamification is broken on some of the sites. You start off almost unable to make any contribution, and people with low scores do not get the upvotes. (This guy with a million votes must know what he's talking about, UPVOTE.) In theory you could concentrate on an obscure segment. In practice not much on SO is obscure because there are so many users.

The fragmentation is a bigger problem, I think. I want to ask a question about linux software, on my Ubuntu install. Already there are two different SE's I could ask on. There could be more depending on the software. This is a more vicious form of the duplicates problem.

The proliferation of SEs into ever more niche segments is okay, I think. They either sink or swim. Lousy for you if you've invested time and effort into something that sinks.

There is definitely a niche for a subjective version though. All those questions that peope love to ask, and answer. ("What's your favorite monspace font?" "What are your 3 most important programming pearls of wisdom?" "What book did you find most useful when you started, and what is most useful today?" etc etc. Obviously, versions of these questions exist in reddit and /prog/ and news:comp.* and etc etc.

FWIW I love the SE sites, and I love the fierce moderation. I've disagreed with it at times, and certainly with the cold way it gets implemented. But I'm glad SE exists. I just wish I knew a where I could ask different questions and have them seen by a huge crowd of clueful users.
I think QR codes are almost never applied appropriately. I can Google something as quickly (if not more) than I can scan and process a QR code. True, a QR code may help me reach deep info easily, but a QR code has meaning ONLY to a computer; a URL has meaning to both a computer and to a human.

Let's say I see a poster advertising, say, a contest by Budweiser to win Superbowl tickets. Two scenarios that, for the sake of argument, are mutually exclusive: A) The poster has a QR code. If I don't scan that QR code then and there my interaction is done. B) The poster has a URL (BudweiserSuperbowl.com). If I don't visit that site while I'm standing next to the advertisement there's still a chance I may remember the URL and decide to check it out later. This is the similar to the reason we invented DNS to obviate the need to memorize IP addresses.

brk's example of a QR code on a washing machine at Best Buy was far more useful to Best Buy than to the customer: scanning a bar code can yield technical info, reviews, prices etc. whereas scanning a QR code will only give you the information that Best Buy or the manufacturer wants you to see.

Some places I wouldn't mind seeing QR codes:

- Videogames have more and more long alphanumeric strings to enter to enable online features, downloadable content, et al.; why not also include QR codes for Kinect to scan?

- Mini QR codes on menus to take you directly to nutritional info for a dish could be cool
The article ignores the sentiment that applies to me and probably others on this site. I would rather earn the $1k working on my own products than $10k working for someone else.

There is also the potential that the $1k will grow over time.

I therefore don't think it's reasonable to value my time at $10k for the purpose calculating my profits.

[The figures will obviously vary on a person by person basis.]

More broadly, I view this from the E-Myth [1] perspective:

If you work within the business as a job, you're selling yourself short if your business is generating $1k a month when you could be earning $10k working for someone else. The money you have left on the table has a real opportunity cost to you as an individual and should probably be valued closer to the shortfall you are taking of $9k.

However, if you view your business as a system - something that has money going out (product, marketing, people you pay) and money coming in (sales) then that money is a genuine excess that the system is kicking out and into the entrepreneurs pocket and is most certainly profit from his endeavor, whether $1 or $1MM.

[1] http://www.e-myth.com/
Do searches on github count?
OpenDNS 2012 Sysadmin Awards Applications open
And "Administartion". But, hey, the jam looks appetizing.
> so it was pretty easy to trick people into opening an infected .exe.

I remember telling this guy it was a fake virus (the jokes you could download on internet before) and that he had to turn off his anti virus to launch it. It worked.
If you find this interesting you might also want to look up Richard Dawkins' demolition[1] of Wilson’s book The Social Conquest
of Earth, in which Wilson (according to Dawkins) promotes a
discredited and confused theory of group selection.

[1]http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/edward-wilson-soc...
Campaign to stop the closed door meetings for regulating the internet
Wow do I ever think you (and even 'damoncali below) are wrong about this. This is the opposite of a "useless post". This is a post about how lying to yourself about the definition of "profitable" can cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

Is it really? I mean, that makes sense if the only point of being an entrepreneur is to make money, and you're totally fine with working a $DAYJOB as an employee. But, for some of us, it's about more than the money, and fighting to make the startup succeed is totally "worth it" even if "it" is tens, or hundreds of thousands of dollars that we might otherwise have earned as an employee.

You cannot factor out opportunity costs when accounting for your business.

Indeed.
>You’re going to struggle to get the kind of performance you’d get from a commercial SAN or NAS, with battery-backed cache, but EBS is considerably cheaper.

I don't get this at all. It isn't a case of "struggling to get the performance", it is a case of "you will never come close to being in the same league, much less the same ballpark as the performance of a cheap entry level SAN". That would be fine if they offered something with reasonable performance, but they don't. Our only options for storage are "incredibly slow" and "incredibly slow and transient".

The really bad aspect of this, is that it isn't cheaper than a fibre channel SAN. When I last priced it, a HA + replication setup (3 devices, 2 in a HA cluster on site, one offsite being replicated to for disaster recovery) was the same price as the same amount of EBS storage for 1 year.
Very true this is aimed at a generation of Xbox players (youth) who aren't tied to the old methods of getting things done this is basically a computer/tablet with enough power for the standard user and if word,excel... etc runs on it, it's what my kids are getting for school very flexible for them. Though three things can kill microsofts growth.

1.price point, people won't understand the pro model's pricing which will be the same as a standard pc in the $1,000 range

2.dont try to be like apple actually do the opposite, prove your product is different.(the viewing should have been live your the new guy on the block)

3.make a tough decision and only allow windows 8 on touch screen desktop p.c's if it's not touch screen you have to use the alternate desktop interface.

On top of this I'm wondering how much the language their using will be an advantage C++ if any, if they supply devs with great templates like apple.
programmers.stackexchange.com is for more subjective issues related to software development, but things are still expected to follow the Q&A format.
Meanwhile the first post is "Stop claiming you’re profitable".

Anyway the page doesn't give many details... i would say it's a gumroad on steroids founded with more social and a portfolio? Uhm i am quite skeptical
- hey guys, no live examples yet, we'll send a few to all our subscribers really soon though.

- the market we're addressing to is formed by creative professionals, mostly photographers / illustrators / graphic designers / fashion designers etc.
Windows 8 is a big risk for MS - they are being sidelined by Apple and Android and running out of time. They couldn't take the risk of other companies designing and manufacturing Win8 tablets not coming up with the goods for the product design/hardware.

That's not to say Nokia or Samsung etc won't be putting out an exceptional Win 8 tablet, they may well do - but then again, they may not.

In terms of profit - I think MS will price the hardware as low as they can, to fight off Apple. Their profit will come elsewhere
What exactly is the difference between using this and the freebase api? Are they just converting data formats?
Webby or nanoc or some other static-site generator tool?
Click "add a new Genre" repeatedly.
Having realtime facial recognition at conferences, for example, would make my life a lot easier.

This is an advantage? This is what you're willing to give up your privacy for?
If you are making more money on your bootstrapped startup than you could be on oDesk with similar time investment, you are profitable.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/96850920/FunnyJunk-The-Oatmeal-Res...
Composite Slate: 5 Summer Maintenance Tips | NJ Roofing Blog
Just observation of the fact that many of their better posters have either willing left or were banned.
WinAVI Video Converter 9.0
no live examples yet, we'll send a few to all our subscribers really soon though.
I thought you were kidding. Talk about cheesy.
Why not? He doesn't seem any worse than most of the digerati out there. He'll be pivoting at Le Web in no time.
Richard Branson invests in Codecademy
". a negative number, like an array or memory address offset? "

A negative number yes, but not really a memory offset (you shouldn't mix negative numbers and memory offset, really)

But yeah, if you're doing "math" go for it, but it's on rare occasions where you need negative numbers (subtraction yes)

The most common case I remember may be sound samples, where you have signed chars.

For all other cases you would be using floating point or decimal numbers
What happens to the people who were paying for the premium version of Greplin? Are you providing any refunds? At a minimum, are you unlinking their credit cards and ceasing to charge them?
*at least insofar as the replacement agency has the ability to enforce.

Which is still almost zero.
I think what is great about the Surface line is that now other OEMs will have to design and produce even better hardware to compete. This is very good news for the consumer.
The Apple Collection 1986
The future "Haswell" chips are going to have support for transactional memory.

No news on these guys though. Give it time. In a few years these things will be getting up to speed in features/RAS and such.
This.

When it comes to the UN, nothing matter if it doesn't come from the UNSC (and even then, it only really matters if everyone's OK with it). ECOSOC and the ITU have a bunch of treaties underpinning them, but they've all got enough cave-outs to drive a supertanker through. The ITU can hem and haw all it wants about how ICANN should be turned over to them, and nothing will happen save a follow-up report coming out in a year about how this hasn't happened, and how unfortunate that is.

The larger issue, as other have alluded to, is that this is more evidence that the global south isn't happy with the US-centric management of the Internet (which isn't news), and that they'r getting organized to try and make this an issue (which is). Having said that, if you'd like to see how well that group does getting things of substance passed when the US isn't interested, check out most things the UN Office of Disarmament Affairs leads end up.
Location is important. I'm based in NYC, and while I'd love to do YC, the connections I'd make at TechStars NYC might be of more use to me when I'm planning to stay in the city permanently.

All hypothetical opinion of course, because I am in neither.
Each of the added features is $1. Depending on what each one of those does, that could be a bargain, or not.

curiously, I don't see the "hosted photographs" feature. Photographers might be a good audience for this kind of service, since they don't have the time to fully develop their own websites.
Fair enough. It was more intended to allow for granular feature selection. Perhaps we need to make it a bit clear.
Ahh double space, that makes much more sense. Sorry for not looking more closely before posting.
perhaps, but the underlying post is remarkably light on actual metrics and details -- or even specific examples -- of what quality decline means.
You can't? Here's a MacRuby script that can take a photo with your webcam: https://github.com/pioz/snappy.
Microsoft has not announced any Windows features that would be specific to their own hardware. And there are other manufacturers gearing up their own Win8 tablets (Acer comes to mind). As a consumer we'll have a choice as to what we feel is the best Win8 tablet. Microsoft doesn't care as long as we're buying Win8 in some form and ensuring their long-term survival.

Microsoft likely wants to ensure Metro app functionality, inking, etc are all available on great hardware. Microsoft is entering the realm of the iPad, and to quickly gain traction in this space they will need to ensure they have a fantastic hardware experience to go along with (what they believe) will be a fantastic software experience. They could leave that to 3rd party manufacturers - and they are certainly giving those manufacturers a chance - but they must feel it's necessary to create something themselves to help lead the way.

I'm intrigued. Let's hope this works out better for them than the Zune did :)
The UK Government just finished accepting entries for a consultation on plans to allow same-sex (as well as transgender marriage) in England and Wales, and the Scottish Government is also running a consultation.
The Fight to Create America's Newest National Park
While I don't agree at all with the idea of abandoning classes for clever ancestry-driven selectors, the author is absolutely right about the advantages of the HTML5 content model and the portability of semantic markup.

I wish more people would advocate for a middle ground between this content driven approach and an OOCSS approach. They work so nicely together.

Who ever said that you should stop caring about using semantically correct tags when using portable classes for styling?
The difference between SPARQL 1.1 and MQL (the propreitary Freebase language) is like the difference between chess and checkers.

In SPARQL you can write queries that involve any graph relationships that come into your head. You can take the UNION of multiple graph patterns. With SPARQL you can also get back 200,000 or more results.

With MQL you quickly run into the wall when you find that you can't write the query you want (you need to write 10,000 queries instead of one) or that the query you want to run times out, or that it only lets you get back a limited number of answers.

It's also possible to do batch processing with :BaseKB Pro with extreme efficiency. We did a calculation that would have taken 100 years on the biggest machine in the AMZN cloud in SPARQL in just 24 hours on a mac book pro with an optimized pipeline.
Any way you can use your own service to create another site I can see?
It seems to me like this article confuses one member country proposing something as that proposal being accepted. Members at a meeting are free to propose all sorts of wacky stuff - that is why they are meeting to discuss the merits of the proposals.

Also -

China is proposing "to give countries authority over the information and communication infrastructure within their state"

Isn't this already the case? Who has authority for communication infrastructure within a country if not the government of that country? Or is the insinuation that the government would seize ownership of the infrastructure?
Any idea why would he put his Steam ID in the applet?
Could he? Germany only has registered/civil unions/partnerships, yes?
"profitable" is not equal to true or false. People who understand business use numbers to represent it and evaluate accordingly.
Photo hosting is included free for each account. i.e. as part of the Professional website and Portfolio. Video and additional media (e.g. audio) is a pro feature.
NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You
Very good point! You are totally right. I did hit hard about those points in the emails I sent before launch and they have been very successful. But not on the site yet. Will do that. Thanks for the suggestion.
I like that, except that templates are used on demand, so onload would be useless. A better way would be to put an id on them and defer their load for when really needed.

<link hef='blog.html' rel='template' id='myblog' defer>

But still, we don't want to load 50 templates at the same time if the app is big then use one or two in that session, that's why loading them on demand with httprequest might be a better solution.

*Besides, being static in nature they would be cached on the server and client for instant access.
very good point! we actually do offer the hosted photographs / images feature but need to add it to the copy, thanks for the heads up!
That actually isn't his point. He's very clear that what he's talking about is that your cost of living should be counted as a business cost. Once your business is covering your cost of living, he says that you should count it as profitable, even though you're not yet making the salary that you could.
We do listen to the people! No other site gives so much power to regular users, up to and including moderator elections. The problem with listening to the people too much is that popularity becomes the most important metric, with predictable results:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/01/the-trouble-with-popul...

It's a balancing act. What people actually want, and what they think they want, are often two different hings.
Potential Investor: "I loved your pitch, and I think your business model is great, but in going over your projected financials, I see you're planning on taking a $4,000/mo salary from day one. Don't you think you should have a little more skin in the game?"

Entrepreneur: "At my last consulting gig, I was making $8,000/mo before I left to start this company. I haven't been taking any salary for the last two months while I built a prototype, so I would certainly say I've got skin in the game. At the same time, this business is going to sustain a lot more than just one $4,000/mo salary - if you don't think it can, then you shouldn't invest in the first place"
Seems a bit desperate. Not the best way to promote yourself.
> URL has meaning to both a computer and to a human.

I'm not convinced. I think that most people don't remember URLs, in the same way that they freak out when an error dialog pops up and the just click any button to make it go.

"What did it say?" you ask, trying to fault find. "Oh, I don't know", they reply, "I just clicked [NO]".

And honestly, no-one is going to remember "budweisersuperbowl.com". See also AOL using "aol keywords".
IRC is great, but SE-based sites are meant to also help the nth person to ask the question you're seeking, too...
Box expands to Europe and poaches from LinkedIn
Our sincere apologies for the confusion - our launch got jumped 48 hours by a press mixup and we've been working all night to get everything in place as quickly as possible.

Greplin search hasn't changed - it is still availalble as Cue Search - both in our app and on our website. Web access is hard to get to for the next few minutes - right now it's accessible at https://www.cueup.com/login (will be linked from cueup.com momentarily). In the iPhone app, the search functionality has been streamlined and is available as a tab.

We still care about search a lot. It's the foundation of all the new features, and it's critical to the long term goals of our service.

If you encounter any issues, as always, we're quick to respond at support@cueup.com
Duolingo launches after 125,000 users translated 75 million sentences in beta
Once upon a time I'd have been too naive to believe this sort of thing goes one. Sadly, I have worked for deeply unethical people twice who would pay for all sorts of parts of their own lifestyle out of company money seemingly on a whim. I can see many or all of the allegations set out in the article as being true, although I hope the abuses were not so heinous.

I can't explain such behaviour because I think it comes from such a different mindset to my own that it is truly alien. If the allegations are true it would seem Domecq has a level of disregard for others that is psychopathic in nature - not caring at all for either investors or the people working for the company and perhaps not even understanding that she should care about them.
Why We Need Firefox (and Chrome) on the iPad
Can you elaborate a little? I'm not familiar with what destruction happened in Detroit.
I left Apple to start my first business in 1991.

A year later I ran into my former boss from Apple when I was out eating lunch. He asked how it's going, I said well. Then he asked, "Ok, are you making more, or less, than you were at Apple?"

Embarassed by the question, I admitted the answer was "more".

I think his question captured perfectly the real issue here.
In that case, I would think about advertising that (it's not obvious). Also, if there are limits/quotas on media.
From their job application forms, it seems like they use a lot of Autodesk 3D modeling tools along with Adobe creative processing/finishing software too. I'd also really like to know what software packages were used exactly.
FounderDating Success Story: Yabbly & the Value System
Two cofounders on how they new they were the right fit for each other - shared value systems.
Infographic: World IPv6 Launch By The Numbers
Your claim about 20 years required to return the energy to produce a solar panel is false. Googling a bit after "energy returned on energy invested" (EROI) indicates that there aren't really any reliable ways to measure this number. Wikipedia quotes 1.5 for the US, which seems ridiculously low.

This study (http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/10/1796/pdf) from 2011 indicates an average EROI for solar panels of 6.5, and this does not take into consideration that this number appears to be rapidly increasing for newer and cheaper panels. See article from the Oil Drum at (http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3910).

A conservative EROI of 6.5 would indicate that it takes about 4.5 years to earn back the energy to produce a panel, assuming static energy output and panel lifetime of 30 years. In short, the data I can find indicates that you are wrong.
Paste this into your web inspector / firebug / whereever you do Javascript to automate it, it's quite interesting!

window.setInterval(function() { $("#random").click(); }, 800);
When Will Users Stop Being Fooled by Online Scams?