skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think any other analysis is too complex to offer any real insight. We can look at the NPV of the possible future earnings, to get a better idea. For the given opportunity cost, what's the impact on future earnings (over the next 10 years or so)? Does working at a startup that gets acqui-hired give you a potential to make earn more in the future? If so, how much more?

What if you break even in the long-run, but you value autonomy over money? So you get a couple additional years of more autonomous work in for the same total money. That's still a win, but we lack the financial forecasting instruments to properly value that. The same can be said for all other non-monetary possible motivations for working at a startup.

Looking at the money you may have given up, and requiring that ALL of that be made up in one lump sum to be a success event seems silly. It misses future income (which is relevant and can/should also be forecasted), as well as a number of other salient factors.

Any financial model we come up with, will still be just an opaque gage. So if we're really just looking for a simple heuristic, looking at possible alternatives is an ideal choice (but as heuristics go, which all evaluations of this would be), it misses some things. I'd still argue it's the best simple evaluation metric, and that we're not losing much by foregoing a more complex analysis.
I've read GCBC and initially found it quite persuasive. But it seems that Taubes isn't really correct. The best refutation I've seen is from obesity researcher Stephan Guyenet.

From http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-h...

I hope you can see by now that the carbohydrate hypothesis of obesity is not only incorrect on a number of levels, but it may even be backward. The reason why obesity and metabolism researchers tend not to take this idea seriously is that it is contradicted by a large body of evidence from multiple fields. I understand that people like ideas that "challenge conventional wisdom", but the fact is that obesity is a complex state and it will not be shoehorned into simplistic hypotheses.

Carbohydrate consumption per se is not behind the obesity epidemic. However, once overweight or obesity is established, carbohydrate restriction can aid fat loss in some people. The mechanism by which this occurs is not totally clear, but there is no evidence that insulin plays a causal role in this process. Carbohydrate restriction spontaneously reduces calorie intake (as does fat restriction), suggesting the possibility that it alters body fat homeostasis, but this alteration likely occurs in the brain, not in the fat tissue itself. The brain is the primary homeostatic regulator of fat mass, just as it homeostatically regulates blood pressure, breathing rate, and body temperature. This has been suspected since the early brain lesion studies of the 1940s (47) and even before, and the discovery of leptin in 1994 cemented leptin's role as the main player in body fat homeostasis. In some cases, the setpoint around which the body defends these variables can be changed (e.g., hypertension, fever, and obesity). Research is ongoing to understand how this process works.
Yahoo Hires Former Amazon Exec Kathy Savitt as Marketing Head
The American Dream in Little Women
You're right. I wasn't sure earlier, as I was typing on a phone with no JS console.

but never mind:

Array.forEach.call(paragraphs, function(paragraph){paragraph.innerHTML = 'Hello.';})

will work fine.
The player is playing the kind of game where everybody loses. But there is a way to make everyone win: act like Google has been acting up to now. Every big actor should build up a protective pile of abusive patents (it's so easy nowadays) and threaten anyone that might sue them of counter-suing.

It's just like the Cold war: nuclear weapons were a reality, so everyone got lots of it and mutual assured destruction ensured nothing too bad could happen.

Now Apple decided to play an all-in against its main competitor to establish monopoly by using its abusive patent against someone they knew could counter-sue. And now, instead of discouraging that kind of practice and realizing the perversion of the patent system, the jury decided to encourage them.

In other words: this player chose to play a disgusting game. I think we can hate both the player and the game.
If that applies here, please point to a piece of software that did that prior to the iPhone. I would be genuinely curious to find out about it.
Is not this is counter intuitive? Companies will look at this list and say oh so many other companies are not supporting Canada, why should be spend time on supporting Canada.
I would be curious for some example of non-proprietary software you could install on Linux that would not work in one of the many options available to OS X users: homebrew/macports/fink, dual-boot (or replace the OS), virtualization, or just build from source.
This particular "religion" is backed by studies that say it's the most effective way to eat to lose weight. Granted, the only studies I know about are the ones Taubes cites, but is there evidence to the contrary?

It seems to work for a lot of people and the science behind it makes sense to me. I don't see why it should be discouraged.
President Nixon's speech in-case Neil Armstrong did not return from the moon.
It was about time, always wondered how 'via' improved user experience in any way.

EDIT: since I'm getting downvoted because some of you don't agree:

There's like 140M active Twitter users (as of March 2012) and like, 30 clients (guesstimating). If I assume there's like 1M developers on Twitter (which I don't think it is), this feature is still useful to less than 1% of their user base. Not exactly a "must have" feature IMHO.
Maybe it's professor specific, but EECS 151, 280 and 281 all stressed using gdb. ddd was mentioned, but most of the debugging examples used gdb. I took these class several years ago though, so it's also possible things have changed since then.
Well, ccache helps a lot with that. And sometimes it becomes easier to throw an __asm__("int3"); into your code than try to massage gdb into breaking at the exact right spot in your code and only under certain conditions.
A big plus about being an imitator, especially in a space where people pay (!) for goods or services, is that the questions "does anyone want it?" and "will anyone pay money for it?" have already been answered in the affirmative.

It's not a guarantee - they still might not want your stuff. But it's a great vote of confidence in that general category of goods or services.
The txt file isn't just about the user though, it's to aid in indexing useful information from the site, so having some sort of breakdown into nested administrative divisions is something that makes sense (after all, I don't just say "I'm looking for a steakhouse in the USA" when I'm trying to decide where to have dinner). Of course, administrative divisions introduce their own problems and work against the whole human readable / human writeable nature of what they're trying to achieve.

On the flipside, even Line 1, 2, 3, country isn't sufficient for all addresses. If you have an addressee, additional delivery information (eg a department), need to include a rural route identifier (eg for Canada), or need to store/use bilingual addresses (again for Canada) then you need more than 3 lines. If you want to talk edge cases, having a country code means that places like the Haskell Free Library and Opera House (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Free_Library_and_Opera_...) can't be correctly addressed.

Hell, even the Falsehoods programmers believe about time doesn't come close to capturing the intracacies of lunar/lunisolar calendars (eg those with 13 months in a year, or a variable number of months in a year etc).

I guess that my point is that you need to find the balance of utility and complexity. If you need to be able to store every format of everything you wind up with either a hugely complex schema, or a single field that contains everything (and may even not capture everything completely), but that's not useful for anything except end-user display when the user is able to parse (or make a good guess at) the data.

Unfortunately there isn't a single winning approach - so unless you draw an arbitrary line your specification can't encompass every edge case while maintaining simplicity and achieving what it's set out to.
Cool link! And I heard that argument before in my trolling attempts - usually I answer like this:

A central nervous system is defined as "the complex of nerve tissues that controls the activities of the body". Plants don't have "proper" animal nerve tissues, but they do have a complex system that controls activities of the plant, by sending mRNA/proteins through the phloem to the parts of the plant that need regulation (a lot of it is local regulation but psssst, this kills the trolling)

Nice link! Never heard of that before. But if (non-conscious) IBM Watson has a quotient of +12, and humans have one of +13, what good is it for?
> It should come as no surprise that ebooks are nontransferable either.

They may or may not have to be transferable in the EU.

http://www.techworld.com.au/article/430090/eu_court_ruling_s...

I wonder if the case of the OP - someone leaving behind a very large digital library and a heir that demands to use it - could lead to more court rulings here.

eBook DRM is my biggest digital problem right now. It seems I will only have O'Reilly books to pass on :(
As other posters have pointed out, the problem with many DRM schemes is that there's no guarantee the company will stay in business, or will continue to host the DRM servers.

In fact, if the DRM'ed stuff you've bought is a one-time purchase (as opposed to a subscription of some kind), then it's in the provider's economic best interest to drop support as soon as possible. There's not going to be any more money coming in from the user once he's made his purchase, but there's going to be money going out to pay the DRM servers' costs because they consume physical space, power, bandwidth and technical expertise on an ongoing basis (as well as hardware that wears out and needs to be replaced).

I personally support as little DRM-crippled content as possible. I only purchase e-books in open formats, use GamersGate instead of Steam (avoiding DRM-crippled products), and buy a fair number of physical books and DVD's. I've actually walked away from imminent purchases, both online and in stores, when I discovered that the product I was about to purchase had aggressive DRM.
It certainly encouraged innovative and creative developers.
The API changes stated that they wanted all clients to look the same and to have a similar experience. Could this be a hint that they want to rule out 3rd party clients slowly but surely?
There's also stories like craigslist and reddit. It's an uncomfortable reality that the future of many industries are going to need far fewer people on the payroll.
I'm sure that Semmelweis's bumbling associates would have agreed with you. But the fact remains that empirically he was saving lives; there was more truth in Semmelweis's claims than in theirs, and it was a matter of life and death.
(source) http://www.archives.gov/press/press-kits/american-originals....
Nah, mixing imperial and metric is a canadian thing. They even do it in aviation, which I find insane...
Tried it. The main side effect is how silly people will think you are when you explain it. You do end up eating less, but I think a lot of the responsibility goes to the flavor-free periods you need in the day.
It helped people discover new Twitter clients by seeing what other people were posting with. I'll admit that this benefit may not have been anywhere near worth the added clutter and screen space, but it was good for something.
And how exactly is that?
I think they are more concerned about users avoiding ads than they are about a consistent user interface.
The irony is that could lead to reduced congestion. See the experiments with following distances at http://trafficwaves.org/
Yeah, it's of no interest except to nerds, who are always a minority.
Bad Horsie - Steve Vai
Massive Attack
Whispering a prayer - Steve Vai
Taurus Bulba - Steve Vai
Beat the Wind Challenge: Build a robot that can win a windsurfing competition
Exactly. I found out about new clients quite a few times because of the via stamp.
I'd agree with this -- if I do a google search for something pretty general and get the typical array of search results, I'll always check out about.com result before any similar site.

Because they actually do their job and provide good answers a decent percentage of the time; and generally feel less spammy/scammy than most sites.
> "counting calories is just painful. Have you ever really tried to do this?"

Yes. It is (or at least was) the core mechanic of Weight Watchers (converted to a "points" scale), and it worked pretty damn well.

For me, it was a pain for about 2 weeks. By then, I'd figured out all of my common food items, and how to cook dishes with reduced calories but that were still plenty filling.

As a result, I now know how to structure my diet to get the same benefits without actually having to count.
When chatting with friends on Twitter, I can see if they're on their mobile phone/desktop/etc.

It adds some contextual information, which is only useful 0.1% of the time to a minority of power users, but it's still nice.
Free publicity for their new twitter clients and tools.
I'll accept that. The calorie / Calorie / Kilocalorie confusion is pretty annoying.

Apparently EU food labeling may be in either kcal or kJ (at ~4.2 kJ/kcal).
Actually I agree with you in this case, given the massive amount of attention on Twitter now, but in situations of lesser scrutiny, the 'drip-drip-drip' is often the the more cunning move.

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normalcy and all the related concepts, eg boiling the frog etc.
Link: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2012-01-09-bitcoi...
Not only that, but Aaron seems to be skating perilously close to the position that admitting that you screwed up is, in itself, sufficient reason for you to be promoted. It's not.
SVGeezy - a JavaScript plugin for SVG fallbacks
Your posting has also written numerous times and yet I have seen no one answer this question:

> Don't be so naive, a world without copyright could perfectly work.

Nobody forces authors to rely on copyright and authors are not all stupid sheep. So why doesn't the market lead to copyright-free books if they are viable?

And even if it works for some books, who says it can work for most (or all) books? Just like FOSS is a good model for Linux and lots of science/enterprise/commodity software, but still hasn't caught on in many other areas. What is holding video games without copyright back from overtaking traditional AAA titles?

A copyright limited to 7 years would be interesting.
is there any way to make this compatible with ruby 1.8.7? Seems like just what I need, but haven't upgraded my current app with a newer version of ruby.
In the case where the product is similar to the competitor I agree. It decreases the "market" risk, since you know the market's there, but it increases the "execution" risk, since you have to out-execute someone who's already in market with a proven solution.

In more abstract cases, though ("AirBnB for dogs") it just helps the listener to understand the company and doesn't really speak to market size.
Teens Beware: Using Marijuana Could Make You Dumber
Should I start showing people my beta service now or wait for a bit more polish?
This is a silly question to ask a board full of agile-bodies but I am curious to get a consensus of how readers on this board feel about this question:

I have a very early beta up of a free service I'd like to offer (and maybe even open source). I feel the timing of it is right, and the service useful, but I have little time to work on it and so it could still use several weeks of hard polish and testing.

That said, I feel that given what is currently happening in the world of social services (app.net, twitter's api changes, etc), it is timely.

Do you feel it's better to take another week or two and add a bit of spit shine, or should I start getting feedback immediately?

I expect the answer most people will give is to just get it out there so I can find out if it's what people want, and if not, why. But there are definitely cases where that might be a mistake, and I would like to know what things someone might be cautious of when making this decision.

Thanks to all you great folks at HN!
Of Roller Coasters, Cancer and The Linux Community
@bdougherty Would be nice with some credit, seeing as you obviously based it on my lib:

https://github.com/bdougherty/BigScreen/blob/master/bigscree...
https://github.com/sindresorhus/screenfull.js/blob/master/sr...
Reposted: A cryptanalysis of HDCP v2.1
If by latest running shoe you meant latest cushioned, arch-supporting, spring-embedded running shoe, I disagree. That kind of shoe will cause you to run very poorly and will probably injure you, unless you pay careful attention to your form and practice hard. If, on the other hand, you meant a barefoot running shoe (partial to Vivo myself), those induce a much more natural form and make it easier to maintain. I've been running with a barefoot shoe for years with just three principles, which I discovered mostly on my own by feeling it out before finding out that I was right: 1) Pelvis aligned with the ground, 2) Spine erect, shoulders back, 3) Strike ball first.
The linked study, like most marijuana studies, has no meaningful controls and therefore represents a correlation, not a cause-effect relationship.

The conclusion drawn from the popular account (i.e. "could make you dumber") is not supported by the study in any scientific way.
That will cause you to miss some behavior if internal URLs ever change that users bookmarked or remember.

As an example, a TV station site I follow had a /fullepisodes/ basename page which wasn't updating in sync with their show pages, apparently pulling from a different data store. After about six months of declining updates to that page, they eventually re-vamped it with a more-correct data source. I like to think it happened because I and others kept browsing directly to the easily memorable URL
Once again: nobody is arguing that acqui-hires are bad moves for the founders.
That's obviously true, but I'm not sure it responds to either Aaron's point or mine.
I really liked the via tag for one purpose.

Buffer.

I liked to know when folks were live tweeting versus time delayed tweeting as it gave me context. If they were live, I'd respond. If they weren't I'd just consumer the content (if interested) and move on.
I'm all for raising awareness for what you think is right (even though Apple is my favorite company, while I disagree with if not most then many of what they're doing and how they're doing them), but this comment was like the typical Christian (or for my case, Muslim) missionary: "Hi, how are you doing today! Nice weather, isntit? Oh, and by the way, love Jesus(Allah) a bit more why don't you? He's a great fellow, Jesus is." - most of the time hurting their cause more than they do to help it.

It wasn't the OP's intent, I'm sure. All of us get angry some time and mix things up and comment on unrelated articles. I've posted more unrelated/stupid comments that I care to count.

And by the way, I'm not remotely angry. I have a lot of arguments about the subjects and have argued with many about it (not passionately, but all of us were reasonable and not typical fanboys). But I don't want to see them reiterated over all HN stories, that's all.
and it helped me to remove useless/automated tweets from timeline using a home-made greasemonkey/user script.
How to turn your mobile app's haters into evangelists
Metric Spaces — A Primer
And whatever happened to MS surface and any patents they held?
Because incremental change is way easier to manage and deploy and test than massive ones.
All of these things. Except the 'larger' part. If you're SVG is larger then you can successfully do 'node reduction' on it without losing fidelity. There must be a python tool somewhere that will tell you which nodes are less than one pixel apart at different rendering densities.
In terms of social interaction it adds quite a bit. Imagine the tweet: "This party's awesome".

Seeing if it was published from Twitter for Blackberry, Tweetbot for Mac or EventualTweet tells me a lot about yourself as a person (and believe me, stuff like this makes/breaks relationships).
Right. What I really meant is, "a format that is not US-centric".
Yes, "gimmicks" that make billions upon billions of dollars.
i'm not familiar with craigslist's staffing, but reddit is a great example of why a website with 500k users can't survive on a staff of 4 people. It is amazing what they did with a small team, but it was very clear that they needed a larger team, both on the technical/engineering side of things and on the advertising/sales side of things. The amount of money they were making was shameful for a site with their traffic, and the site performance was (and continues to be) equally shameful.
Trouble with web browser orientation
"Severities should be dealt out all at once, so that their suddenness may give less offense; benefits ought to be handed ought drop by drop, so that they may be relished the more." - Niccolo Machiavelli
Users who will pay for twitter API access to use as infrastructure != users who will pay in general
Ask HN:How to estimate $ amount apple has spent in Samsung suit 
In trying to prove the point that apple is truly stifling innovation and spending good $ to do it
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4441289

My comment here lays out some ground facts/truths.

Respond there for questions.
Maybe email him and let him know?
The goal of a marketer is to grow a customer base. That's what these growth hackers are doing, they're just doing it in a more technically advanced way via data confirmation and split testing.

Referral strategies have been around for decades, the Dropbox guys didn't hack anything they just applied an old principle to a new technology.

Growth hacker and marketer are synonymous titles.
You wouldn't believe the amount of crappy DMCA notices that get sent out by various bots. So far we've received ones for:

1) Our copy of jQuery (FOX claimed they owned it)

2) Our contact page

3) Our custom written javascript includes

4) Our CSS

5) A daily notice for two weeks, even though the infringing file was removed within minutes of the first request

It's utterly abusrd. There's really no way to make the crappy notices stop (you can't contact the company that sends them, they ignore email/phone calls).
Show HN: Embedstagram
More specifically, jargon is wonderful once you join a community that uses it. Much like any other language, its lifespan is measured by how many speakers it has. As a term, it is not significantly meaningful from "pidgin" or "creole" or "dialect" or "slang".
This was a weekend project I knocked out primarily to scratch my own itch. Any thoughts you folks have are warmly welcomed.
Verified by Visa (AKA '3D Secure') is a huge pain, and in all bank implementations that I've used in the UK it's trivial to reset the password.

My current account is with LloydsTSB and they now don't bother asking for your 3D Secure credentials and just go straight to the 'accepted' callback, because it pissed off so many of their customers.
Amazing news, Crowdtilt!
I do not know if I am misunderstanding the OP, but I think they possibly meant non-US services not available in Canada, not services not available in other countries.

The latter would not make much sense, or at least would not be expected, given the name of your site...
Tweetpolice
Automagic Default.png
I thought 140 characters making or breaking relations was somehow frivolous. I did not realize that those clients had a relationship weight associated with them as well.
Preferring composition to inheritance is hardly unique or new. However, having that designed into the language is far less common than it should be.