skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Could it just be a badly written search spider? The ad is simply an anchor tag around an image. If you didn't filter it out specifically, you would just "click" it to get to another page.
Stop.  Think Before You Incorporate
You actually can.

Have a look at the serialize() API method, as well as the serialize_params options attribute.

It's what we use at Ducksboard to let users arrange widgets in their dashboards.
It would be an interesting thing to test for, that's for sure. But I would assume scientific analysis would focus on stopping depression caused by PTSD or something.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that wealth is not the same thing as dollars.
Our goal isn't to make money - Johnny Ive
Please explain to me why a bot would click on ads? (if anyone knows)

Is it crawlers crawling Facebook? Are they alleging that facebook is doing it to boost revenues?

Their hypothesis seems secure, given that you can't really use the facebook site at all without javascript enabled.

More alarming is Facebook holding their name for ransom for the sum of $24,000 a year!
I love pizzas and your site is cool. One thing though. You search box says "Ener Store id". I do not know store Ids but I entered a zip code anyway and it worked. Why not reword to "Store Id OR zip code" if both work? I will definitely use this whenever I crave pizzas :)
I have a strong feeling that standards of rigor have dropped considerably since the 50's, but I have no data to back it up.
Data Thief Snuffed Out by Craigslist.

The barrier to entry in the classified ads space is the same as every other space - attracting advertisers.

You don't get to steal somebody's advertisers just because you have a prettier interface and attracting them to your site is hard.
Whether you get the document or not is not the issue. What's at hand are the consequences of not paying your obligation. It will come back to haunt you. Student Loans - cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Your credit will be ruined, debt collectors will hassle and any wages you get will be subject to garnishment. I disagree that your education is not valuable to an employer. Many of the most talented developers I've associated with over the year are musicians and their musical training - whether at a school or through self-discovery is was a huge advantage in their careers as software developers. Don't be so quick to disregard your education. Bottom-line, pay your bills or you be sorry.
I'm a paying member and I have no problem with them also using a KickStarter for a special project. This is for several reasons. First, I'm not funding them, I'm paying for access to the videos. Second, I expect them to keep making web development vides, though if this stopped I wouldn't feel violated, since I'd still have access to the videos that are there. I would be disappointed and would re-evaluate whether I want to keep paying for them. Finally, this really is a special project, both in content and what's required to deliver it, and they talk about what they're using the money for in the video. I'm confident that videos unrelated to iOS will continue to be released as this is being worked on, just like they were while they developed the prototype.

The only downside I see is that a paying customer might have thought that $25/mo was getting them all CodeSchool had to offer, and now some people are paying $60 to fund the KickStarter and getting a shirt. To me that's because they misinterpreted what the $25/mo is for. It's really for something much simpler: unlimited access to all the Courses and Code TV.
Wait, so, you wrote off the JVM because of XML and IDEs? Really?
In general, I don't cheat, but I don't find any problem with other people cheating, either. I think the difference is that you find the axis on which you are or aren't cheating (in this conversation, a degree) important and worth ranking and measuring people against. I don't. It's a silly game and people can have whatever numbers they like if they (or, perhaps, their parents) really want them.

I like knowing that the number I got was the one I honestly deserved (this is the same reason I never, say, crammed before tests in school--the grade I got wouldn't have reflected my lasting knowledge of the subject), but I know that I can't trust anyone else's degrees/certifications/previous employments and commendations et al. to represent their honest talent/skill/dedication, so it's a bit silly to consider them any kind of useful comparative (rather than self-evaluative) measure.

Like that other poster keeps pointing out in the job threads: if you want to hire good knowledge workers, an IQ test and a work-sample test will get you further than any set of expensive status-signalling criteria ever could.
The huge market represented by the "long tail" of small companies is the reason FB is valued so highly. It is (supposedly) much bigger than the GMs of the world.
I'd like to see the actual data from this.

How much traffic are we talking about? Where were the bots coming from and how were they detected?
worked for me in Boston, Portland, ME and Portland, OR
All distros are also volunteer projects who are happy to accept packaging submissions from the community.

And I don't understand the "new major change" bit. I have base 4.3, apparently gitit won't run without 4.4. Are you seriously saying that's a version bump comparable to Python 3?
Actually, it's not about just showing "commitment" -- a university computer science education shows me (1) how you deal with a hard problem that you've never seen before, (2) how you deal with being around people smarter than you are and (3) how you perform under deadline pressure. Your four years at an employer doesn't necessarily show me any of these things, at least not without a ton of hard, specific questions from me -- indeed, I think that that's what Ben was trying to drive at in his interview at Steve. In my experience, it also happens to be true that top software engineers have learned quite a bit from a computer science education (especially when coupled with several years of practice), and when I find bright people who have dropped out of school or studied other disciplines and ask them tough, direct technical questions, I often find that they have wild misconceptions about the way computers actually work.

Now, you might very well be the exception to that rule, but the cost of a mis-hire is so astronomically high to me that you can expect that if I ever interviewed you, I would expect you to greatly outperform a top new computer science graduate -- and I would interview accordingly. This is possible, but not likely: a top computer science graduate not only has the same intelligence and aptitude that you had at 22, but also four years of formal computer science education and some top internships to really send the principles home. Of course, it would be a mistake to imply that you'd actually want to work for me: after all, I'm the kind of employer that won't hire a software engineer who doesn't have a university degree in computer science...
Raising awareness isn't necessarily bad, even though its off topic.
The U.S. still produces 50% of its electrical energy from coal.
Using Captcha on an ad landing page to determine whether someone is bot seems like a bad idea. It would almost certainly increase the bounce rate on that page and you couldn't just say that people who didn't choose fill out the captcha were bots.
Nice to see objective & balanced views on the raspberry pi from a MS employee.

10 years ago I would have expected propaganda on terrible dangers of allowing children to use non MS software.
dc micro grid.
Because unfortunately logical reasoning and argument construction are not educational targets for most people. :(
And that's cool, but it isn't a necessity if you are being employed to do a particular job.

(Because of the glut of liberal arts BAs, there aren't a ton of jobs for "well-rounded, cultured, and thoughtful" - though those might be little bonuses)
For me, so far, it shows me

- Commuting times to several places

Here I don't know where it takes the address from. In the beginning it listed a couple off-by-one addresses for friends and family, by now (how..?) it resolved two of these addresses to contact names, so I have now a travel plan to visit my brother, dad or my company. It also includes a wrong address of my in-laws.

This is impressive, technically, but a little creepy and totally, 100% useless for me. I _was_ at these places, but I really don't plan to go there again anytime soon.

Why is this listed?

- The weather, for the local town I'm in. The Standard Thing (tm)

- A Google Translate widget to translate between German and English. I .. feel insulted. ;-) I used Google Translate a lot, in Israel, for Hebrew <-> English. German <-> English? I can do that myself, thank you very much.

Why is this listed?

- A widget that lists the exchange rate between EUR and ILS. Yes, I used to be interested in that, up until I moved back to Germany more than a month ago.

Why is this listed?

- The time and day of week. Off by one hour.

Again - no clue why. But this at least gives a hint:

Somehow Google decided that I'm still living in Israel. It shows me currency exchange rates, the time at 'home' and a translator widget (why between english and the local language though?).

My problem: I don't want _any_ of that. Mostly not because I don't feel that they add anything of value (they don't, for me), more because ~everything~ listed there is irrelevant/wrong. Since the whole idea of Google Now seems to be a magic sauce trying to find stuff that you want to be informed about, I'm unable to 'fix' my data set here.
Nice! Really cool!
Is there a single tool that can take access/error logs and compile these stats? This sounds like something relatively useful ...
Hardware became commodity because of abudnance of mass-produced cheaper IBM clones (producers of "IBM PC-AT compatibles").

Harwdware "grew up" thanks to the innovation by the big guys: IBM, Intel, Apple, [even MS] etc, and their products have always been more expensive. But innovation happened, even though the money didn't go to them when people bought cheap clones.

Therefore, I believe that the "purchasers who will exit the market" never were in the market in the first place, and innovation rate won't be affected.

I think that the only thing that will happen is better HW/SW quality for buyers of quality brand names. Windows will (hopefully) evolve much quicker [heck, maybe even cheaper!] given that it won't have to support legacy crapware any longer.

Windows PCs will probably become slightly more expensive, but that's the price I'm willing to pay for not having to deal with crapware. Users unwilling to pay the price of quality will still be able to run Linux.

I wonder whether MS is doing any research on application sandboxing and controlling information flow, possibly from within a lightweight hypervisor. (Singularity project may have been a step in this direction.) It is THE missing piece in Windows infrastructure. Switching users to do different tasks is still very cumbersome, even with a fast machine.
Thanks, I may end up taking a look at this...
I don't like listings which say "ninja" or "kick-ass" as well, but using "mediocre" isn't much better.

Why not just say "good"? A job listing titled "We are looking for good developers" would make me want to read it further.
Korea is no longer a 'quietly brilliant' place for HTC Office to survive
Why give them a second chance at all? It is essentially a "no risk" situation for them if the only consequence for them is a slap on the wrist for a first offence.
The relevant question isn't whether fracking can be safe. It's whether fracking is safe, as practiced.

And that's what's purportedly being studied. And what the article alleges is likely being perverted by corporate contributions.

After all, we know that drilling for oil can be acceptably safe. And we also know that in the absence of effective oversight, some drillers will lean as far from safety and caution as is economically feasible, to the point of running decidedly unsafe operations.

This research is meant to answer the question of whether fracking companies are sufficiently safe on their own, or whether the public interest can only be protected with increased oversight. [1]

[1] There is no serious policy argument that we stop fracking altogether. Natural gas has become the cornerstone of the United States' energy independence strategy. The only policy question is whether we consider natural gas "good enough" or we view it as a transitory step toward renewable sources. In every case, it will continue. The debate here is merely about oversight vs profits.
I think he didn't imply that. Obviously a company with 400 likes is not a big player in the Facebook ad space, it was just a measure of popularity.

Obviously the news here is not the loss of business for Facebook, but the fact that a click scam was taking place (if true).
Ash HN: Is there an incubator for older entrepreneurs?
I noticed that majority of incubators are founding founders in their 20s - maximum age is maybe in early 30s. This is non-scientific (are there any statistics on this?)

I also noticed that there is a large number of very smart people in their 40s and 50s which are ready for entrepreneurs, but they lack certain skills (mainly business skills) to start and grow a business. If they do start business, these older entrepreneurs end up running bootstrapped and profitable business and the business kinda lingers like that. I believe with some couching from incubator/accelerators majority of these businesses can grow rapidly.

Unfortunately, culture of incubators seems to be to promote young males in their 20s. I don't think it is intentional but somehow things ends up like that.
They are good examples because they show exceptional people exist. Given that they exist, there is a chance another one will be waiting in line to join your time. If you narrow your search, you are going to miss them.
"I love Erlang but I cannot get the past the syntax."

I cannot understand this hangup about syntax. Syntax is the easiest thing to learn with a new language, you just look it up. It's the semantics and usage where the real problems are.

Erlang doesn't have static typing, it is dynamically typed. It has always been dynamically typed.

And however you look at it doing highly concurrent systems with processes is much easier. And who says that processes imply "parallel access to shared memory"? Quite the opposite actually.
I've just bought a Thinkpad from Lenovo via their website. They're doing the same infuriating thing.

> Dear ****,
> Thank you for contacting us on Lenovo Outlet.
> The password you requested is: ******
> Please note: This e-mail message was sent from a
> notification-only address that cannot accept
> incoming e-mail. Please do not reply to this message.
> Sincerely,
> Customer Service

Tesco can live without geek business. You'd think a company like this would care though. They send it in plaintext when you sign up too.
The dichotomy between STEM and liberal arts isn't real. For some reason we declare some kids math-oriented and some art-oriented, but it's bullshit. I have a nephew who loves computers and reads three grades higher than he should, and a nephew who is two grades higher at math and can't use them at all. The one wants to be a programmer, the other a veterinarian. To them, there is no STEM/liberal-arts dichotomy--they will be taught that by some well-meaning adult idiot. Kids don't emerge from the womb as STEM or liberal arts; they have a variety of strengths and can learn any subject with enough time and energy.

The idea that you can appreciate a complex metaphor in a poem or a complex philosophical concept but not solve for x is absurd. It's fashionable to be bad at math and lots of people indulge in the fashion. The proper tool to address this problem is shame coupled with better education. When your niece tries to be cute by saying she's too pretty for math, you give her the disdainful disappointed look that says this shit won't fly and then ask her what she's having trouble with.

Teaching and learning are hard. We keep looking for a simple way out of doing it. Maybe if we teach less of this and more of that, remove this requirement, write this software, etc, it'll be easy. In reality, it's just like diet and exercise. In America, we want a magic pill, but the truth is that some things are just hard. The sooner we stop complaining and start doing, the better off we'll be.
NBC’s choke-hold on the Olympics must end. But it won’t, and here’s why.
Possibly other advertisers trying to push competitors away from facebook so BigDickPillz Inc can have it all to themselves?
For accounts that I use rarely and have a low cost even if compromised, I prefer convenience over security.

As mailman has a fairly technical audience and reminds users that passwords are stored/sent in plaintext, I see it as a feature, not a bug.
I don't really know how purchased page likes work, but why would that matter? Bots / fake accounts used to generate likes have no reason to keep running and click on ads?
Why did you wrap the word "stealing" in quotes? It's exactly what you would be doing. If you think you'll get away with it then you're too dumb for me to hire anyway.
Cost is obviously important, but whenever cost does come up in these discussions the massive externalized costs of coal and gas energy are always ignored.

E.g. in Illinois, we have four major sources of energy: coal, gas, wind, and nuclear. Nuclear is of course dirt cheap on a per kWh basis. Wind is about twice as expensive as coal. However, if you factor in the enormous externalities of coal power generation (probably billions of dollars in Illinois alone) as well as coal mining, the real per kWh price of coal power is double the nominal price, and that's assuming that there is nothing to this whole "global warming" thing.
Those "last-sucker-in-line-investors" could have also invested in LinkedIn [1] and Zillow [2], both of which have done reasonably well after their IPO.

Easy to pick a company to use to reinforce a message (37 Signals would have made a better case against non tech company GM [3], which had hype and government assistance and is still on the way down)

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=LNKD+Basic+Chart&t=2y

[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=Z+Basic+Chart&t=2y

[3] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=GM+Basic+Chart&t=2y

* edited for formatting
Isabel Marant Boots Dicker
Facebook is relatively new to the advertising game and probably doesn't have the sort of experience that Google, MSN and Yahoo have in dealing with the immense amount of click fraud out there.

Worked 3 years in online advertising, dealing with billions of impressions and millions of clicks daily. 80% fraud rate isn't unsurprising, probably is actually higher. Most mature ad networks can easily filter and reject a substantial portion of the fraud, or at least not bill the client for it.
Gitit is my favorite wiki software. One file per wiki page, and page source is formatted in (pandoc-)markdown [^1]. Also easy to configure and run.

[^1]: Pandoc adds some oft-needed extras to classic Markdown, such as support for tables, definition lists, LaTeX math, and footnotes.
FWIW growl doesn't install itself, applications that use it are _supposed_ to offer to install growl for you, but there's been a few that don't and just force it on you.

The growl devs really really hate those applications - http://growl.info/thirdpartyinstallations.php has more info.
Congrats - does the funding affect plans to continue open-source development?
This is certainly a great idea in theory, but I wonder if it has caused them to build things to be a little too fault tolerant, by assuming there are faults when maybe things are just slow. On Xbox, my recently watched fails to appear about 30% of the time even though it appears just fine on the site. The only thing I can think is that it must be taking just a little bit too long to return, so they assume failure and move on.
The only well known fact when dealing with Facebook is that if you want to manipulate their documented rules you need to either have deep pockets or a lot of influence.
This is definitely a second-year programming question, and I'd reasonably expect a second year CS student to solve it - as that's when you start learning about bitwise operations.

The question is, would graduated programmers work with bitwise operations? Or, even worse, programmers who haven't been to school, but still do good work?
Yup - they're the same thing... you trisect the angle from the corner, and end up with an edge neatly in thirds.
Surprised me when I found it too - neat stuff, paper.
The biggest conspiracy theory would say that a bot clicking ads would help earn FB money.

I don't really suspect this to be true, Facebook CTR are incredibly low so if they are faking it they are doing it badly.

I suspect the most likely reason is some sort of spam scraper thing that visits every url or something. I would have assumed Facebook would be well protected against this sort of thing in regards to charging advertisers.
Suidobashi Heavy Industry's Kuratas: your own 13-foot, diesel-powered mech robot
Yeah, I was coming back to this thread to mention this. The antenna around the outside works fine, so the back could be entirely metal, no glass needed. Very bizarre design.
All Americans To Recieve Microchip Soon
The first one with the 2-tone metal back is still the prettiest IMHO. And it seemed the sturdiest. A drop resulted in a dent, not a crack or finger shaving glass shards.
Why not open a new page, and delete all content (but a link to the new page) off the old page?
I've checked the RPi schematic [1] and it each of the USB ports protected by a miniSMDC014 rated for 140 milliamps [2] (and taking 150ms to trip at 1.5 A)

With two usb devices drawing 140 mA, a total of 280 mA would be consumed, thereby narrowly exceeding the 700mA power budget. Fuses are also typically quite imprecise for obvious reasons - they rely on current heating up metal that melts and breaks the circuit, and you don't want it borderline molten under normal operating conditions! So you may well be able to draw 250 mA per port without the fuses triggering.

You'll note the Raspberry Pi wiki [3] has a bunch of bug reports like "Ethernet connection is lost when a USB device is plugged in" attributed to inadequate power supply current.

[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1090 [2] http://datasheet.octopart.com/MINISMDC014F-2-Tyco-Electronic... [3] http://elinux.org/R-Pi_Troubleshooting
The OP says that they are not accusing FB of using bots to drive up revenue.
Well, yeah it changes the order they are examined in, but does it allow one to pay to beat someone else who may have a competing patent in such a way that the payer can be the originator of the invention in question?

Agreed, there is a lot of baggage around this, making it hard to talk about. Does "first to file" really mean "first to have examined"?
Marissa Meyer is Pregnant, Marissa Meyer is the savior...
Why don't people just shut the fuck up about that bitch? What's so great about her?<p>She just wanted to leave shitty post at Google to become CEO of Yahoo and now she a goddess? Damn fuck that. Fucking gossips.
True, but if you're installing OpenJDK from Debian they have gone to the trouble of integrating it with the system-level certificate store, so it's much easier to manage.
Hydro plants have huge impacts on stream and river ecosystems. A good case study would be the impact on salmon in the pacific northwest of the U.S.
Not as far as I can help it. NewsBlur makes money through hosting. And our competitive edge is the network. Giving back to the open-source community is in my blood, especially after my work on DocumentCloud.
Absolutely amazing how many of those reflect the design used in later models of the iPhone. Before the first was even made they had the 3G/3GS prototype, some that closely resemble the iPhone 4/4S and even the iPad. Absolutely awesome!
Wow, I've been looking for something like this for a while now, and this is _really_ impressive. Good work!