skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a very weak experiment and conclusion.

1) The author made a Facebook page for a fictional product that was rather obviously silly - downloading bagels - and talks about it as if it were a real product.

2) The FB ads campaign ran with an absolutely horrid targeting set:

> I chose the United States, the UK, Russia, India, Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. I narrowed it down slightly by targeting under 45-year-olds interested in cookery and consumer electronics, but was told that would still give me a potential audience of 112 million customers.

This is completely silly. Trying to target 112 million people means you won't be able to draw any sort of conclusion or get valid data - nor expect a meaningful response - without spending tens of thousands. If he wanted a response in the US or UK, he should have started there and focused on it to the exclusion of all else.

3) His statement "it seems that Facebook adverts can be very effective in generating interest in your business from certain countries but not in the US or the UK" is borne through no real testing or time. He spent less than $100 - you cannot draw any sort of conclusion from that information.
Initial price is critical because initial reviews and overall reputation will be based on that. Nexus 7 shows that pricing cheaper doesn't harm the product perception if it is clearly a good product.

The other issue if pricing is deliberately set with particular reference to the iPad is that it might need readjust everything when the next Apple product arrives.

The main thing they need to do is show that it a really great product. If it is better than the iPad at three things but there is on dodgy aspect that is what everyone will hear about.

Who is the target market for the Surface? Those who would otherwise get a Netbox/laptop? Existing iPad owners? Current Windows users with no tablets? Mainly business?

I think if they want to hit the non tablet owning consumer they need to offer better product than the Nexus 7 at pricing just a bit higher. I don't think that they can match price with the iPad for that market unless people are treating it as PC replacement (which is dangerous ground for Microsoft but may be the correct self disruption move in the innovator's dilemma.
That's not what he said. What he said was that there exist customer advocates. You can see this for yourself by finding them on Google+ and looking at how they chose to advertise their job description.
170 Years of America’s Changing Geography In One Animated Gif
It is too bad that Blue Origin isn't in the list.I would much prefer that they were in rather than two 'good-old-boys club' contractors and one new entrant. The politics in this process which are really not serving either NASA or the people of the US well, really suck.
There are rules... and there are rules that change the rules
I'm not convinced that the best CEOs have to work such crazy hours.

It comes down to efficiency. We should all focus on being as effective as possible in the shortest amount of time. Prioritization is another way to look at it - spend time on the most important things.

This reminds me of Colman Mockler - longtime CEO of Gillette. He thwarted corporate takeovers throughout the 80's and led Gillette to massive growth and share price increases, up until his death in '91. He did all this while adamantly not working past 5pm. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find much information him online but the book, Good to Great, covers him in detail.

Sheryl Sandberg is another great example of someone who draws the line at 5:30pm and seems to be hugely effective. http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/12/facebooks-sheryl-sandb...
Electronic Arts Sues Zynga for Copyright Infringement Over The Ville
I agree it makes you look like a more popular business but does it make you feel more popular? I feel that growing a fan base organically helps you learn lessons and garner quality feedback for your product. Maybe some people who like your page wouldn't feel compelled to give you advice for your business because it appears that you have a winning strategy already with all your likes.
There's a shocking amount of schaudenfreude whenever bad news emerges about Facebook, Apple, Google, or Microsoft.

Big Tech isn't a superhero. It shouldn't come as a surprise that a company hits highs and hits lows.
Original link from here https://t.co/d1yRQyd3
http://www.squareonemd.com/pdf/Does%20the%20Gender%20of%20Pa...

Any study is going to be confounded by the cultural training received, but this one concluded that among American women and men:

"Average differences
favor women over men, but parenting skills
are not dichotomous or exclusive. The gender
of parents correlates in novel ways with parentchild relationships but has minor signiﬁcance for
children’s psychological adjustment and social
success."
Let me get this straight: the article author paid $10 for his page to "be liked" in Egypt (population estimate: 90 mil) and India (population estimate 1.2 billion) as he himself claims "a potential audience of 112 million customers" and then was surprised that he got total of 1600 "likes" from the given area in 24 hours?

Then he acts surprised!? What exactly did he expect?

As others also point: his page is a joke, somebody will always "like" the joke, maybe even recommend it to other friends!

From his target population, one of 70000 potential "eyes" "liked" the joke in 24 hours. So what?
The contingency plan is do it right the first time!
One of Musk's original goals was to do it 10x cheaper, and accd to his recent discussion with NPR, he's already at 1/8th of the cost(1). What an amazing accomplishment.
1. http://www.npr.org/2012/05/18/153015277/on-eve-of-launch-spa...
If it is safe, it is no longer bad behavior.
As a parent of 2 (5 and 3) who works while his wife does the more important job, I couldn't agree more. It is so obviously beneficial to children to have a parent at home full time. It certainly does not have to be the mother. The problem though is that expressing this opinion is hard because most parents that work carry an extreme guilt with them - regardless of whether they pretty much have to have two incomes or simply choose to.

All else being equal, quantity of time is better than "quality" time when it comes to raising kids, IMHO.

As an aside, the US is so out of sync with the rest of the western world when it comes to it is laughable. As a comparison - Canada has 17 weeks of Mat leave for the mother, followed by an additional 35 weeks that can be taken by either parent. You receive 50% of your salary (to a low max) from the government during this time as part of the Employment Insurance program.
Not everyone thinks it's human nature. In fact, there's no real reason why we should think that it's human nature rather than (say) a purely social phenomenon that's entirely learnt, and can therefore be changed.
Show HN: Open-source content management system:TYPO3 and filepicker integration
It's the same with Google Search and SEO. SEOs simply observe what actions the algorithm rewards and optimize for that.
This is about the future of the connectors, at some point they have to abandon legacy. It is thinner, that's obviously a future move.
"You can do as you will but not will as you will"
The SpaceX announcement:
http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20120803
WPA2 Cracked
I attend a small tech school outside of NYC, and it's not terribly well-known, and not terribly well-ranked. I was a good student in high school, and got into schools ranked much higher than the one I attend now. Why? I love the location here, and I love the "personal" factor that comes with a small school. I've met lots of interesting people, I live in a beautiful town with beautiful views, and I really enjoy what I'm learning. It just "felt right" and it still does today.

Some days I get a little upset that I don't attend a prestigious university, and I'm not really sure why. There's always grad school, though. Anyway, just a personal experience.
Ask HN: Review my business idea please.
So I have a small idea. I am not going to get rich on it, but this will be my first business so I am OK with total failure too.

Please tell me if this is stupid or what. Also, please give me any other comments or thoughts you have. Is this similar to some other idea? If so, which one?

The idea: Pay $1 to promote your business to 1,000 people. So you go to my website, pay $1 to tell a joke/anecdote/story to 1,000 people and your product/service is advertised to these 1,000 people. The people reading the joke pay nothing. They come to the website to read good quality jokes.

Here's an example:

Hello, I am Janet Wooster from Brooklyn, NY. I have been building iPhone Apps for small business since 2009. Many satisfied customers. Please call me at 555-5555 for a free consultation.

Here's my joke for you: A train was crossing America. One of the engines broke down. "No problem," the engineer thought, and carried on at half power. Then, farther down, the other engine broke down, and the train came to a standstill. So the engineer made the following announcement: "Ladies and gentlemen, I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that both engines have failed, and we will be stuck here for some time. The good news is that you decided to take the train and not fly."

So, bottom line question, will you pay $1 to tell 1,000 people about your product/service in exchange for telling them a good joke/story/anecdote?
Jail is in the works http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19060444
Wiki says the inflation adjusted cost for the whole program was $196 Billion. At 135 flights, that's more than a Billion dollars per flight.

No wonder we've been stuck.
I grew up on a dairy farm, and while I'm sure some farmers operate exactly as you describe, I'm not sure you should paint the whole industry with one brush. Every farmer has their own opinions on how their operation should be operated, so every farm will be vastly different.

> They are kept on a stream of antibiotics

This was never true on our farm. Cows would be treated if sick, but that is it. I don't even remember them being sick all that often. The biggest problems were always related to calving complications (see below).

> They often develop mastitis

This largely came down to choices made by the animal, like laying in the muck even when there's a nice fresh bed of straw nearby. No farmer wants to see a cow with mastitis, even if just for profit reasons so you always do your best to try to avoid the problem.

> The females are placed into small "igloos" with no chance for grazing or physical contact until they are old enough to reproduce.

You mean until they are old enough to feed on their own. The reason they are individualized in early life is because otherwise the stronger calves will eat all of the food and who wants to see a calf starve? Even while in the hutch ("igloo"), the calves are free to interact with the nearby calves in other hutches.

> Male dairy cows are used for veal (and I'm sure you know how that goes).

I'm not sure the general population does know how that goes. I've heard all kinds of horrific stories about how veal calves, specifically, are mistreated. The only differentiator for veal is the age of the animal, otherwise they live like any other beef calf.

> Then it's 4 or 5 years of constant pregnancy and milking until they are "spent" at the ripe ole age of 6.

I remember plenty of cows that were milked for far longer, but we definitely lost a lot during calving, and as a result of that 4-5 years probably isn't far off the average milking span. Sadly, calving is hard on the animal. To be fair, this is something humans equally struggled with until the advent of modern medicine.
> Node.js can (when used correctly) handle loads of connections in a single process

Node uses an evented IO layer, that is completely orthogonal (and thus irrelevant) to streaming responses. You can stream responses with blocking IO, and you can buffer responses with evented IO.

> Phusion Passenger is clearly trying to evolve their model to achieve similar if not fully comparable results.

If you think that can happen, you're deluding yourself. Ruby+Rails's model means you need one worker (OS-level, be it a process or a thread does not matter) per connection. With "infinite" streaming responses this means each client ties up a worker forever. OS threads may be cheaper than os processes (when you need to load Ruby + Rails in your process) but that doesn't mean they're actually cheap when you need a thousand or two.
Poor guy, he now has only a little over 10 billions. I am overwhelmed with sadness thinking about it.
Vt. police: Man angry about arrest used tractor like monster truck to crush
Using that logic, no hacker should ever work with Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Airbnb, Craiglist...

Athletes don't care about the management of the IOC. They compete in the Olympics to compete against the best. They aren't going to give up their dream of challenging the luminaries in their sport just because a few IOC members take a few bribes, any more than you would stop working with Apple b/c their contract labor policies drive a handful of workers to suicide.
probably, yes.
> Actual formula is number of clients = total number of threads.

That's what I said/meant by "worker", whether it's a thread or process does not matter, it pretty much has to be an OS-level concurrency primitive.
Their earlier literature makes this harder to believe:

> Metro is our design language. We call it Metro because it's modern and clean. It's fast and in motion. It's about content and typography. And it's entirely authentic.

At some point, trying to spin something obviously related to legal issues makes you look silly. Why not just say they respect the established brand and gain nice-guy points?
I was on a Delta flight some years ago and the flight attendant announced "This flight has been designated a surprise and delight flight", which made it clear they'd been ordered to do that. Then they gave out some little trinket they'd presumably been paid to hand out; a web search finds people who were given breath mints by Delta in 2004. Needless to say, I was surprised but not delighted.
MVP: The Features Are Silent
DataGotham: The Empire State of Data
Nepalese constitution has an algorithm for the construction of the national flag
Why I ditched GMail for emailFacebook.com
If you've thought it through, great. Whatever works for you. Good luck. But I just thought I'd address the subtext of your comment for the benefit of others who might be reading this too.

> With 2+ kids, it becomes cheaper to hire a full-time nanny. ... [grandparents] would do a better job than a stranger. ... grandparents take care of the day to day.

In my experience, a quality daycare person is superior to all except the best of the best nannies (I'm talking about those $80k/yr nannies NY Times wrote about). I think of myself as getting access to an experienced child development specialist, rather than as renting a warm body that just keeps my child physically safe.

I'd go with a quality (note emphasis) daycare over grandparents every single time.
Learn Backbone.js Piece by Piece
SpaceX is just one part of this program... As part of the new agreements, Sierra Nevada will receive $212.5 million, SpaceX will receive $440 million, and Boeing will receive $460 million.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/08/03/nasa-awards-11-bil...
Is GDP a realistic comparison - wouldn't a normalized measure like per-capita-GDP be more useful?

I really question whether any of the evidence you mention (strictness, GDP, etc) are anything of a real measure of the educational systems. Would you say GDP is a measure of the medical health of the country?
I haven't used MagSafe2 yet but MagSafe1 on my 2011 Macbook Air 11" is too strong. When you pull from an angle it just slides the laptop with it. I would guess that's what Apple is trying to fix with MagSafe2. It may not be much of an issue for the heavier laptops but going forward it's likely laptops are going to continue getting lighter -- not heavier. I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks here.
Anyone seeing this unusual Chrome bug?
the link made me LoL
As a technologist, I'm becoming more and more convinced that implementing an interface mixing touch and mouse/keyboard input, and shipping Windows 8 as a runtime for both "Windows-8-style-UI" apps and classic Windows desktop apps are terrible mistakes.

As a developer, you need to choose between supporting Windows 7, with a huge market today, and Windows RT, with no market today, but with Microsoft's promise of a market tomorrow.

For users, the added complexity is likely unwelcome. Now when you see some software for "Windows", you'll have no idea if it happens to be the version of Windows relevant to you.
Interview with a High-Frequency Trading Expert
Don't forget all the people who now save a bit on their milk. This could add up to a significant amount annually, especially for the most poor. I'm not sure that I care about the living conditions of cattle at the expense of the living conditions of humans. Now, if you'd like to tax cattle farmers for the amount of horror and tragedy they create and then redistribute the tax proceeds as a lump sum to all citizens, that should properly balance the ethical situation.
Replacing ASP.NET Forms Authentication
Valve's statements about Windows 8 usability were mirrored by Blizzard.

The source engine is faster under OpenGL on Windows as well, not just Linux. So It's an OpenGL vs Direct3D debate, not Windows vs Linux.

"Is all this noise just saber-rattling?"

All this noise is branding/promotion of the Valve brand, and would likely be going on even without Windows 8.

But I agree that Windows 8 will likely try to copy Apple's iTunes success and that Valve needs diversify.

I'm hoping they do a console running Linux at some point.
What's your experience? Examples? Please share ...
As I say, paying for likes is nothing new, but in that case he didn't pay anybody but Facebook, that's what makes it confusing. Though your hypothesis is plausible - even though liking random non-related stuff would make one less like real person for me, it very well might make it more "active" for whatever algorithms are used by facebook or SEO types, and thus more valuable, at least in the eyes of SEO types.
I suggest you read this excellent piece my Cosma Shalizi. http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza...

There he talks about the computational complexity and limits to planning. He also talks about markets, how non convexities leads to inefficiencies (allowing polarization of wealth) and why large firms form: difficulty in setting prices and being informed enough to make optimal decisions benefit concentration of complementing talent.

As computational power increases and communication friction decreases I expect we will start to see company size decrease and lifetimes to within an order of magnitude of the sceanrio in alluded to in Rainbows End where companies are old at 5 years and large ones have 3 people.
How would you ensure that I, a business, is getting something in return ? Yes I can pay that dollar and even come up with a joke. How does that relate to what I do as a business ? Why would a consumer select me just because I shared a great joke ? What value am I providing ?
Well, of course a majority of people seem to embrace traditional gender roles - that's what our society rewards people for! We look up to women who drop out of work to raise kids and look down on men who do the same as unmanly, tut-tut about how women who don't have kids will regret it later once their feminine instincts kick in, beat up people who wear the wrong kind of clothing for their gender (clothing, for fuck's sake!), ...
This is essentially the liberal wet dream. The main philosophical difference between classical liberals (libertarians) and today's liberals is largely a question of practicality. This is also why libertarians tend to see themselves as lone heroic dreamers while liberals tend to see themselves as working in the dirt to make the garden grow.
I'm not sure how some people generalize like this... It totally depends on what you're doing and who you're targeting.
If you have an iPhone app with 1 million daily active users, VCs will be knocking down your doors to write that Series A check. A spammy Facebook app with 1 million "users" is a totally different beast on the other hand. It really depends on your definition of a user, which the author conveniently leaves out of his analysis.
Follow the money, you'll get to the source.
RPI? RIT? Those are my guesses...
Agreed. I should have been more specific. I'm talking only in the context of making a business of sending people to Mars as described vaguely by Musk in various interviews.

I am still very skeptical that there is a non-government way to keep someone alive for a round trip. That's a very tough problem to fix with limited finances and time.
> He's saying it doesn't have to be the greatest tool for the job, he's saying it's a good intro for would-be programmers and dabblers.

Perhaps. But we should be able to do better. Pygame, for example -- The example I found[1] looks quite nice and easy to use:

[1]http://www.willmcgugan.com/blog/tech/2007/6/4/opengl-sample-...
This is despite the fact that my roommate was a computer science major, and UW has one of the best Comp-Sci programs in the nation.

The important question is whether his father would have preferred he attend a higher-ranked school with an inferior CS program, or whether he just wanted his son at a "better" school with a similarly spectacular CS program.
One of the comments in the article suggest something interesting: how about pricing it at $200 and adding a $10 - $20/month subscription to Microsoft services. Perhaps Xbox Music/Video or Xbox Live Game of the month or extra SkyDrive storage or Office 365 services.
String theory explained in
VentureDeal - Venture Capital This Week | July 30 - Aug 3
Except, of course, LLVM bitcode isn't meant to be distributed: it's designed as a compiler IR, and merely an intermediary form. It's also not portable: the existence of types like x86_fp80 and ppc_fp128 make this quite clear.
Microsoft Reveals New Email Service Outlook.com Now Available for Use
This captures the problem: "I emailed Google telling them what I had done, and that I fixed that problem, and that I really hoped that WAS the problem, and I begged them not to remove my apps because I was diligently trying to figure out what I had done wrong, and that I WOULD fix it - I'm a reputable developer, and I play by the rules."

That says really really bad things about the eco-system when your target 'developers' are so confused and unclear about what they can and cannot do, and the enforcement of same is not testable a-priori, that they have to resort to begging for understanding.
I played in the online league in .3 and .4. Glad to see they've made it to a 1.0 release. It was an awesome game.
Disagree. Depends on the meeting.

If you're on a tight deadline, there are different workgroups involved, a quick meeting can ..

Get all parties talking.

Coordinate resources.

Etc.

Spend 10 minutes doing this, break until the next meeting, or agree to skip it, depending on circumstances.

Now, if you get stuck with a manager who insists on rambling on .. and on .. then yeah: big time waster.