skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think this is news to anyone who's familiar with the rising popularity of social games. During the facebook gaming boom, "pink" games far outpaced "blue" ones in popularity and profit. I worked at a zynga competitor around 2008-10 and it was very clear that female audiences were less demanding, less prone to cheating, and more willing to regularly spend money (in the aggregate) than their male counterparts. In other words: lower maintenance, easier profits. We would release the exact same feature in two games-- one pink and one blue-- and the pink game's revenues would spike while the blue's flatlined. Definitely not a scientific approach, but one that repeated itself on multiple occasions.

All of this transitioned nicely into mobile social games, where we are today. There is some risky gender stereotyping that can arise in tandem with these kinds of discussions, but from my experience the revenues make it pretty clear which audience to target.
I'm sure the engineers have been haunted by the Genesis landing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_%28spacecraft%29#Recov...
it would be great (and probably trivially easy) if it included a button to add the song to your soundcloud faves.
We just issue Celery jobs to track events in Mixpanel, so if their API is failing, the jobs fail and get retried later on.

If we get too many messages accumulated in the queue where these jobs go, we just purge it (better lose that data than let RabbitMQ die because of memory exhaustion). Although there have to be a whole damn lot of events there for us to actually notice
Good call. I'll add that to the About. I'm going to do a quick supplemental vide on the setup as well between now and next episode.
I just wish there was an open source project as good as GMail and maybe the new Outlook for a browser-based email you can run everywhere. Native clients are nice but they are native, so you can't take them with you (Different devices, operating systems).
I haven't used my microsoft ID in a while - open it up now and my profile picture is pornographic.
Interesting welcome to a new service.
> The other advantage that I didn't fully realize until I started running the ads is how the activity within the Facebook Event serves as a reminder for people to show up - we see tons of ads for events every day that we want to go to, but very few of them ever make it onto our calendar the way that Facebook Events do with one click.

That's a very legit point. The various features of FB events make them "stickier" (or whatever the buzzword is) than regular advertising...the feedback options, with prospective attendees asking questions and seeing how you respond to them, is also likely to boost interest. It's not quite fair to say "Oh, this is the same as Craigslist ad postings, except you paid" just as it would be silly to ignore Airbnb because it seems just like paid Craigslist ad postings.

That said, given the nature of the niche market here (though you probably know better than anyone), it's not clear that the success would easily apply to other kinds of businesses...or phases (i.e. a startup trying to get attention vs. a business having a out-of-business clearance sale).
New Pleasure Circuit Identified In Brain, Could Change Addiction Treatments
French T-Shirt Company Tries To Trademark Anonymous Logo
In my experience, snappy with very small messages (< 200 bytes or so) can increase bandwidth usage, so I'd say the way in which one uses redis can impact if compression is useful or not.
The ads at the right really bother me. Product ads and deal ads with big $ signs and "% off" feels much more intrusive than a google text ad.
Yeah, I actually only recently started to understand the impact that area subreddits can have - great channel for certain audiences. My intuition is that most of my target audience for vinyl isn't yet on Reddit, but maybe that's changed and I just haven't realized it yet.

There are certainly a lot of forums out there too, but most of them aren't local to one area, so most of the sales are online (I did a lot of business through these forums in the past).

In retrospect, it would have been rad to run this as a fully fledged A/B test. I honestly just didn't know that the ads would have quite the impact that they did.
Closing the Gender Gap: A Peek Inside Programs to Train Female Developers
The DRM I guess is understandable (if annoying). The thumbnail functionality surely could be done by simply restarting explorer.
Opportunities never stop showing up to those who live in a mindset of possibility. It's more an issue to validate which opportunities people want, and are willing to pay for. This remains the single biggest challenger any aspiring technical founder faces.

Opportunities likely seem few and far between for those who entertain, feed a mindset of doubt. Doubts slay all possibilities if you let them.

It's best to have a middle of the ground approach to remain open to possibilities and let them eliminate themselves through a idea validation process like finding product-market fit.
This is probably meaningless for most developers: it is only going to be made available "for use in development, qualification, and testing". Further, there's no information on what license this will be released under.

It's a shame, but given the amount that Azul has poured into research it is not surprising.

At least we can look forward to some interesting benchmarks and code analyses, perhaps?
I find it baffling Microsoft doesn't support IMAP access to any of their e-mail properties. You're stuck with POP3 or else a webmail client when on the desktop.

They do offer Exchange Activesync for mobiles, but without EWS or IMAP you can't really complete the circle and give customers a decent email experience.
>it was the first AJAX app around a decade ago to my knowledge

Yup. In fact, Microsoft invented XMLHTTPRequest for use in OWA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHTTPRequest#History_and_supp...
Unity is the best desktop I've ever used.
I wholeheartedly agree with Terretta.

It sounds to me like cfinke made a poor choice when acquiring a used instrument, then extrapolated that to 'all old instruments are bad/can't properly hold pitch'. (/exaggeration).

cfinke should've just gotten someone who knows about pianos to help him/her choose a good one, the way you might with a used car (although the choice is more subtle and less statistics-based).

As a counter example, I practice every day for hours on a baby grand piano from the 1930's which is very sturdy, with a beautiful tone. It was sitting unused (and untuned!) for decades in an old woman's house.

It was purchased for 1,000 euros at an auction, one of only two bidders.

I had it tuned by someone: it still sounded problematic, but good for practicing. I had a different tuner come and he made it sound incredibly good after a single tuning.

So the technician makes a huge difference too.

Piano restoration is fascinating, but engineers tend to underestimate how important trained hearing is in in order to improve the sound.

(rather than just being able to make a piano function properly on a mechanical level).
Site is down for me - here is the cached Google version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:wOFiv4Z...
The article reminded me of a thought I had regarding FB's monetization strategy: strictly local advertisements. The ad matching algorithm would place the most weight on geographical distance then interests etc. FB's ubiquitous nature today could make this work.

Here's a use case that motivated the idea: I live in a densely populated area where everyone around me has a car. Say I wake up to a flat tire. I'd much rather pay someone $20 to just fix it in 10 minutes than get the car towed or figure out how to do it myself. Imagine searching for "fix spare tire" on Facebook and receiving search results for five people that all live with-in two blocks. Choose a person, agree to pay with cash, they show up and fix the tire.

The service FB provides in this example has real value. If this service existed I'd actually use Facebook, take a good look at the ads and perhaps even pay a small monthly fee.

To use an over-used term I see this as "the Airbnb of everything else". It could be applied to simple plumbing tasks like fixing the toilet (which was a real pain-in-the-ass to figure out). It could even apply to borrowing vacuum cleaners! The point is there's under-utilized resources around people. Imagine FB helping people utilize these resources like Airbnb helps people utilize extra living space.
Jonathan Ive on How Apple 'Nearly Shelved' the iPhone
> The system simply does not have the power to be that device in your home. ... It is, at best, a tablet

Implicit in your statement is the assumption that "a tablet" is less capable then a dedicated console. Is that necessarily the case? Perhaps the aging console hardware still has an edge in blockbuster first-person shooters, but considering consoles generally render at 600p, I doubt the technical disparity is that considerable.
The announcement appears to make Zing available to open source projects, not to make Zing itself open source. Still potentially useful.
Profit = Selling Price - Cost of Goods Sold.
Cost of Goods Sold = original price of goods + marketing costs + labor cost + facilities costs.

This isn't the precise formula, but it's close enough. It's still a good ROI, but it's definitely not scalable as this was a liquidation. You also have to calculate the tax rate on the sales as well.

If you're grossing $10,000 and you spent $2000 on records, 8 hours of labor (paying yourself $15 per hour) + the cost of the facilities (let's say $100 for the day) and $150 on marketing.

You'll still pay sales tax on the full $10,000. Let's say your sales tax rate is 8%, that means $800 in sales taxes. So now, you're at $9200, so now we can subtract your costs, which, according to my hypothetical approximations total $2370. If you want to exclude your labor cost, you can do that, but it'll still be taxes one way or another, depending on how you claim it.

So your profit is $9200-$2370 which is $6830. For a short term capital gain (which is what this is,) the rate is approximately 25% for Federal, however you also have state capital gains taxes (it's either taxed as ordinary income or as a capital gain,) which will be about 7% (depending on the state), but that 7% is taken off the total gain of $6830. (25% + 7%) of $6830 = $4645.

From the $15 per hour you get paid from your wages, you'll then get to pay social security, self-employment and medicare taxes on top of the federal income taxes. You can avoid this by not paying the salary, but you can't work for free in the eyes of the IRS.. you'll either pay the tax on the wages, or the total gets added to the profit and taxed as a capital gain. Of course, you'll get a slight home "office" deduction for using your backyard as a facility, of course that gets offset by the facilities fee you've earned (and will be taxes on.) It's cheaper though, to charge yourself the facilities fee because that comes off the capital gain, which lowers the taxes on the gain, while only nominally increasing your personal tax (due to deductions.)

Let's just round the total profit at $4600.

So, $150 in Facebook ads to earn $4600.. still a pretty nice ROI, but it certainly isn't $10,000.

We all know the seller isn't going to go to this extreme in either paying or reporting this income to all the jurisdictions involved, but when calculating ROI or other things upon which a business is based, it's a little disingenuous to claim "making" $10,000 when in fact, that number is far less. But I get it, $10,000 makes for a nice headline.
He's "profiting" from a conversation. That's how things go around these parts (things always come in waves, and the people looking for hits will quickly get an opinion out. By the way, would you like to hear what I think of the new Apple ads?)
I had forgotten about annotations, those might be ideally suited for editor and env tips. Honestly, I use Emacs, so I'm not that interested in the vim tips, I just didn't want these to turn into a series of Haskell-with-Vim casts. :) even thought your env does looks pretty slick.

Really nice video, looking forward to more!
Show HN: My First Android App - Wordcraft, a word game solver
This is very reflective of the acquisition process my company went through when it was acquired(Priced at $13 million). However, one area that can't be emphasized enough is the distraction, time, and mental capital that this process entails. If you are not careful, it can hurt your business and its trajectory. Luckily, we had good people running the business for the founders while we concentrated on the acquisition process. One area not addressed very closely in this article is the difficulty of not sharing the possible acquisition with employees as you go through the process of gathering all of the due diligence data and having all of the meetings. Of course, keeping the acquisition process a secret from your employees isn't always required...but in our case it was. That added to the stress of the due diligence process for us.
Human Workers, Managed by an Algorithm
What native devices do you want to see? What kind of devices do you want that would need Thunderbolt speeds, and aren't on the market today?

Could you have gotten Thunderbolt speed with Firewire? No.

For slower data rates you have USB (2 and 3). So what's your point?
Also for parts and service down the road, I tell people to stick with Yamaha, Roland and Korg for < $1200 instruments. You're not likely to find a Kurzweil or Nord used in that price range. Casio's play pretty well, but they've only been making decent weighted key (hammer action) digitals for a few years.

Lots of info at that subreddit FAQ. Also this, about how Yamaha makes lots of models with Graded Hammer Action

http://www.reddit.com/r/piano/comments/x4mw3/need_an_advice_...
I agree, not a new approach, just a new coat of paint. Refreshing UI for sure, but their copy is a little overreaching.
I expect to be a lone voice in a sea of positivity...

The very notion of A/B testing a piece of art disturbs me profoundly. The idea that publishers would say, "Our analytics show readers engage with these types of passages so you need to increase your usage of X passages by 50% and use 50% more words from this list", paints a fairly dim view of the future of artistic expression in a world that is concerned with profitability over substance at an increasing rate.

Publishers already have a far heavier hand than I'd like them to or most people know about. Giving middle manager types data when it comes to artwork can only lead to place where self expression through authorship becomes a dead art-form.
I was getting the proxy error message with https. I never tried http then.
Amazon's cloud music player now includes iTunes Match-like feature
Wow. I love how they baked Skype right into Outlook.com. A great use of an expensive acquisition.
Thank you for this post - I hadn't seen Bret Victor's essay before.

On a side note, your bookshelf link is broken (it contains a > at the end). It should be: http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/7795/screenshot20120731at...
Surely the fastest encryption scheme would be none at all? It's times like this that it would be nice if ssh still supported the equivalent of "-c none" (or was it "-e none" in v1 ssh?).

Of course, this is based on the assumption that the OP was happy to run their redis sync over the Internet without any other form of encryption. Either the underlying protocol provides encryption or they aren't concerned about their traffic being snooped or MITM'd (albeit very unlikely between two large providers) and so adding extra encryption on top is just an unnecessary CPU overhead.

I've run plenty of (production) stuff over ssh tunnels but it was always nervy with it and happy when the deployment was revamped to avoid the use of ssh tunnels completely.

I'd much rather each underlying application was able to provide tunable encryption and compression itself (using existing trusted libraries such as openssl) as part of its protocol. ssh tunnels are a kludge not a viable production solution (IMHO).
I like how in their first chalkboard mock-up "Oldmail" looks identical to Gmail.
$10,000 at $3/album means over 3000 albums were sold that day, out of 6000 available (according to his ad). So more than half of this random collection was worth buying, and if lets say each person buys three albums, over 1000 people came to his house?
Though absolutely no advancements in fashion :-)

If even the jump from the 80s to now has taught me anything, we, right now, are going to look ridiculous to people in 30 years, let alone 100.
You can skip most of those steps doing a network install with unetbootin, no cds or usb drives needed

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
> That's easily several hundred percent.

What if selling the records via eg. Craigslist would have cost less than $150? Then the ROI would be negative.
I'm guessing this info isn't on the website because you haven't got around to it yet, but knowing how things work is what attracts me to services. I'm wary of companies that claim to do things but don't say how it works, so you should consider putting up a "How-it-works" page. Do you have a list of supported formats?
Just another comment about the pricing, 500,000 is a LOT of readers. Very few indie publishers (at least single authors) are near that number for a single book. Having a range for authors between 5,000 - 100,000 might be a better sweet spot.
The article says "He quoted an NBC spokesman as saying: "Our social media department was actually alerted to it by Twitter and then we filled out the form and submitted it."

I can read this in one of two ways: Twitter (the company) alerted NBC, or Twitter users on the social network Twitter alerted NBC. There's not much clarity there, but obviously the former is scary and confusing and the latter happens all the time.
I'm trying to understand 3scale's product. On one of their landing pages they state, "Handling 10’s or 100’s of millions of API calls per day? – No problem. We scale 3scale’s management systems so you don’t have to – our infrastructure is highly distributed and scalable on demand for your needs."

Now, their architecture diagrams show that that developers directly connect to the API servers. So the origin servers must be scaled out to handle "10's or 100's of millions of API calls per day" anyway.

So 3scale provides some kind of external dashboard that you can point an event stream at and get analytics? That is, something like New Relic for APIs? Is that correct?
is anyone else having trouble with the captcha?
> It's immensely pleasurable having a piano next to where I program. I don't know what I am doing, but I suspect this is a lot of the allure - I sit there and poke, and figure out my programming challenge of the day while my fingers are occupied. We all know full well how the frontal lobe needs to be engaged for the "coprocessor" to have a chance at resolving our issues for us.

While not directly related, this is exactly the same reason I have a beater guitar hanging directly next to my workstation - if I get into a bit of tough code, I just take a break, strum a few chords, and then get back down to business.
How does this work? If I sign out in one tab, it signs me out in another tab, on Google Chrome. Just tested it.
Yeah, in part, but after I invited people I knew, plus posted the event on my business's Facebook Page, there were only 40 or so people attending.

To me, it shows the power of combining native Facebook functionality like Events with Facebook Ads.
For fiction and other works intended to be purely art, sure. But for technical, explanatory books...seems like better analytics could be a huge boon.
Perhaps I'm overreacting here, but I think I would receive a lot of joy over the SEC investigating this and Marc Pincus landing his ass in jail. I don't blame everyone that works there for the evil that I consider Zynga, but damn, that dude is just pure slime. He even admits as much.

Karma is a bitch. He deserves anything that comes his way at this point.
Simply Smiling Can Actually Reduce Stress
Show HN: Metataste.com - Movie Recommendation Engine
Just wanted to say that you can use the ctrl+enter shortcut instead of pressing send, like in Outlook.

You can also tab between "to:", "subject" and "body" parts of the email by just using tab (tab twice when finished entering email addresses).

I much prefer using a keyboard than a mouse.
There's little public information about small acquisitions and how they happen -- thanks for sharing. Everyone would be better off if there more information and transparency around these processes.
Ask HN: Learn Subversion or Git?
I am trying to convince a professor to teach one of these technologies in a sophomore level programming course at my university.

What are the benefits of learning a VCS early?
Between Subversion and Git which would be best for students to learn?
The free Gmail is better than Yahoo's paid service, though.
Alas, poor Sparrow! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite utility, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it.

---

Here's hoping that other email clients learn well from Sparrow's success.
Never underestimate the next generations need for finding their pet pevee. They know more about what is going on than you might think :)
You might just be A/B testing your samples or your jacket text. I'm guessing a lot of authors would agree with you that they don't want to change specific passages in their stories. But I see a lot of them working on making their sales better by providing better blurbs. It's the equivalent of being able to change your outside back cover text to get people more interested.
Draw a world map on canvas
The js extensions are fantastic. It's a real shame there is little (no?) documentation to help people get started.
Suddenly my Gmail looks cluttered and old. Bonus, I got my name@outlook.com. That's a big win. Hope they make good stuff.
Where's the apology from Twitter?
How I Turned My Love of Whiskey into a Business w/o Tech Skills & Cheap WP Theme
I agree. If people skip to a section of a coding book all the time, an author could decide it needs expansion or might base a whole other title on the subject.
But that's a separate product - QuickBooks Payroll.

Also, instruction for payroll deductions are pretty simple[1]. Usually everything you need is on one page. Plus a very short list of exemptions (401(k), HSA, FSA, cafeteria). Nowhere near 11,000 pages of tax code.

[1] http://www.suburbancomputer.com/tips_state_tax.php
Seems nice, but unusable for using other than outlook.com addresses as I can only use their SMTP server and they give no information for setting up SPF.

That causes other servers to think that email sendt from outlook.com is spam....
Google to Buy Social Agency Wildfire Interactive for $250 Million
In 2012, the question should be Git or Mercurial?
"Secure Boot retains flaws in its design that will ultimately mandate that Microsoft's key is on every PC (because of core UEFI driver signing)"

And if this Microsoft key were to be found being used as part of an exploit, ala the previous Microsoft cert being used to sign Stuxnet?

Not that I am encouraging any specific behavior...
Not Again: Barcelona's After Song and Other News ~ Mister Spruce
NES Duck Hunt in just CSS
There are plenty of sane reasons, DDOS included (which seems like what happened here), since our digital world is built on physical systems that have limitations and suffer from external influences that can't be contained.