skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Walmart isn't a service.

I don't really know what distinction you're trying to make here.

> Walmart doesn't have access to your most intimate information like Facebook does

This probably varies from person to person. Walmart potentially has medical prescription data, which is inherently sensitive, but also a ton of data on nearly every product you buy and your shopping habits (obviously, only for people who buy nearly everything from Walmart, which is a lot of people), and of course credit card numbers. And some people (like myself) don't have a huge amount on Facebook. All I've got is my name, high school, college, current employer, a few movies, books, and musicians I "liked" ages ago when I first signed up, plus a tiny amount of private but nonsensitive chat history and a handful of unflattering photographs.

Regarding Virgin Mobile and JetBlue customer information: I find it hard to imagine that either of these wouldn't have way more sensitive information than Facebook for the average user/customer of each organization.
He mentions his own settlement somewhere in there, although it's not discussed further.
I'm not sure what conditions led to that outcome. My successful registration (using my license #) yielded the following message: Congratulations! Your DMV signature has been retrieved and attached to your voter registration form and will be provided to your county elections office. Your form is now complete. Thank you for registering to vote! Please print a receipt for your records.
I could be missing something but I find this article a little ridiculous and devoid of any useful information.

I work for Atlassian. It's a $100M business. It wouldn't fall into either category. We've gotten there by selling a lot of software over the internet. We spend hardly anything on customer acquisition. There is no viral effect to our products.

Another successful business I can think of off the top of my head is ZenDesk. They have to be approaching $100M. Their main sales channel is the internet (low customer acquisition). They have zero viral effect. You either have X support staff or you don't therefore you will need an X-user ZenDesk license.
I have an iPhone 4S and I'm definitely not upgrading the OS.
Well, gotta admit that I always liked my iPhone detecting an AP requiring some kind of user confirmation or something like that.

It's a lame way to do it though.
Toward randomized controlled trials for public policy
Chromium's design doc for handling captive portals (for comparison):

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1k-gP2sswzYNvryu9NcgN7q5X...

When a main frame HTTPS load is taking a while, we preemptively open a background request for http://www.gstatic.com/generate_204, and check the response code. We do the same when displaying SSL warnings and ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR pages. The URL points to a service that returns HTTP 204 (“No Content”) responses, and the domain does not set any cookies or save any logs. If we’re not behind a captive portal, and connected to the Internet, we should get the 204 response code. If we’re behind a captive portal, we should either get the logon page or a redirect to one. If we get an error or a non-HTTP response, we’re either not behind a captive portal, or can’t find the logon page if we are. For the purposes of captive portal discovery, we treat all HTTP status codes except 2xx, 3xx, and 511 as errors. This works regardless of whether the captive portal works by intercepting DNS or HTTP traffic.

We also preemptively run captive portal checks when displaying SSL certificate error pages, since these are often caused by captive portals as well. There is no timeout in this case.
I second that! He was 19 and in a private chat with a mate. It's all about context.
I did both. Eventually got tired of wandering in tunnels, and zoomed out.

But it recaptured the joy of exploring a new video game world.
Wow, by the looks of that screenshot Obama is absolutely thrashing Romney in terms of "Likes".

Maybe Obama is just more popular with a younger facebook using crowd?
Jordan 12 Obidian
It's not fully retina. Most of it is, to give credit where credit is due, but it falls short of a 10/10 stars.

The icons within the ribbon bar bar are very hit or miss. If you're on a Retina device, here are some screenshots to illustrate:

http://cl.ly/image/2R2i420N2S2o
http://cl.ly/image/1k3w2O2u2D23
http://cl.ly/image/0P2U0u1p451k
http://cl.ly/image/0v1u1D3d3W40

In contrast, the main toolbar looks great:

http://cl.ly/image/071q3r3l3i30

I also had the same issue as a number of other people where the app did not launch in Retina mode the first time around, and needed to touch the *.app files to make it happen.

Obviously, MS Office is a huge suite with an enormous number of resources. It's no mean feat, and just getting the basics up to retina is a great accomplishment. Personally, I'm just glad to have the editor in retina - I'd been opening Word documents in Pages for months now. Especially when you consider that some of these images probably come as-is from the Windows team and they may not even have access to them in higher resolution, I guess I can completely sympathize with the current implementation.
I don't think age matters. We all do/say dumb things, period. I suspect very few people would be happy to be represented by a worst sentences they've ever typed or uttered. If you really want to make a case that Facebook shouldn't be trusted with privacy issues, base an argument on their previous privacy failures rather than something the CEO said years ago.
Data science vs statistics
On the other hand, I know several Swedish programmers (here in Sweden) who do programming on a US keyboard. In part because it's more difficult to get the {}[], etc. keys with a Swedish keyboard. I suspect the same might be true with other nationalities.
You don't sound desperate for a job.
I just added the three intro panels.
Yes, I'm sure that's exactly what he meant. Ugh.
Open Source UI Components for Starling Framework
After reviewing the study [1] and some informative comments [2][3], I'm putting this into the urgently interesting but not yet substantive bucket. Serious statistical problems with having only 20 control rats out of 200 in a line that has not only a strong tendency to develop tumours but a high variance in expressing that tendency make the results, which were spread across ten micro-studies, difficult to interpret.

I agree, however, with Dr. Antoniou's (Kings College, London) statement [3]: "At the very least, what this study highlights is: firstly, the need to test all GM crops in two-year, lifelong studies; and, secondly, when looking at testing the toxicity of herbicides/pesticides, we need to test the full agricultural formulation and not just the active ingredient."

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512...
[2] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5db0b344-024b-11e2-b41f-00144...
[3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19654825

P.S. Article's title is "French GM-fed rat study triggers furore" and not "GM crops found causing cancer in rats" as presented.
To me, it's like Aaron lost the game with Zuckerberg because Zucks wasn't fighting fair and Aaron expected him to. The expectations were clearly different on each side. Zucks wanted to win the game and take all the marbles any way he could, and didn't care at the who's expense it came, including his friends. I think Aaron expected more fairness and is hurt, but not surprised Zuckerberg hasn't changed.
I want to invest in your startup. Sounds like a great opportunity, definitely profits from day one.
Maybe, my reasoning is that while I'm in the privileged position of being young, it's a greater loss for me to potentially botch the interview today and jeopardize future employment with Matasano than to just eke it out today.

Additionally, how do you convey to an employer without sounding like an asshole "Please, I need to be hired AND get paid at least 700$ before the end of this month"
I want you to be able to say whatever you'd like no matter how horrible without fear of government censorship; however, I will not let you use my printing press, blog, etc to do it.

There is nothing inconsistent with this.
I disagree. Should the New York Times leave their front door open and allow anyone to walk in off the street and write an un-vetted opinion piece and place it on the front page of tomorrow's paper? That would be ridiculous.

I don't see how you could then turn around and claim that NYT supporting freedom of speech is in any way a double standard. They aren't preventing you from creating your own paper, in which you can say whatever you like. When the government limits your speech, you don't have that option.
Talking about the benchmarks game as a shootout promotes "the same sort of (misinformed) tribalism-by-language" -- I didn't say you were promoting a particular language tribe.

>>Perhaps use an HTTP 301 to redirect<<

Perhaps that was understood 5 years ago, and there are obstacles to that approach. (Not that I think that's actually why people like to talk about the shootout.)

>>promoted in TFA<<

Here you are -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4544096

He's talking about this -- https://groups.google.com/d/topic/golang-nuts/KqA1Jlpu2nM/di...

He came up with it all by himself, the same way people make factorial performance comparisons.

>>(and linkbait tastes good)<<

This kind of traffic-less blog post isn't a benefit -- stackoverflow is by far the main source of link traffic, and much more traffic comes from direct search.

>>Do you see how the easily-digestible plots (indirectly) promote tribalism over rationality?<<

Do you see how you can intervene and explain what the plots actually say?
Really refreshing to see how people use their resources in another industry. I'm glad to hear that he got inspiration from the hacker community at SXSW.I haven't watched the movie yet, but I have it bookmarked for this weekend.
Successful Business Owners Principles
I think it still works with zooming because the scale is so extreme that it leaves you wondering whether a tiny smudge is worth zooming in on. And once you zoom in far enough to read the text, the surrounding objects look as big as they're meant to be.
relevant:

"Huxley was right"

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/images/Amusin...
Ask HN: What is the estimated value of a job posting on the front page?
If YC auctioned off a one time ability for a non-YC company to place a job advertisement on the front page, what do you think it would go for?
Assume it would have the same behavior as the job postings put up by YC companies, and that this was only done once.
Rich JavaScript Applications – the Seven Frameworks
Look at it another way. Here we have a process which may not be much of a barrier to customers who consider the product a major purchase but is apparently chasing away potential buyers who are prepared to spend several thousand dollars on an impulse purchase.

That's an unfortunate filter to have in place.
Why are 5 million kids on Facebook if it doesn't want them?
Exactly.

Our propensity to buy peaks at a certain value - say 10 points for me in this instance.

Every time an obstacle is placed in the way that propensity gets reduced by a value related to the frustration level. As the points reduce our propensity to buy becomes irrelevant in the face of the many other things going on.

They had already for me lost points for 1: not making it clear that the printer only uses PLA and not ABS (-3), 2: the fact that it doesn't accept ABS (-2) and 3: because only one color of PLA is available at the moment (-2). The unnecessary registration was enough to halt the process. (-6)

Note how relatively large the usability scores are versus the functionality scores. Being easy to deal with is absolutely paramount in commerce.
"It isn't clear if getting someone to believe in your 'extremist philosophy of radical openness' is necessarily a con, unless of course you yourself don't believe in it and/or are doing so only in furtherance of some other interest which you are obscuring."

I do believe this is what Greenspan was getting at.
I thought that it was the "click" part of the original navigation that really frustrated me, rather than only seeing a little bit at a time. I gave up on the original in a few minutes because my hands/wrists were aching after using a touchpad and then a mouse

I used the zoom versions after the fact primarily so I could swipe to look at the original 1:1 more comfortably, and then only later to follow up on what I thought (correctly) was just a bunch of blank space. Clicking to drag specifically really dampened my enthusiasm for going off in random directions to investigate the whole thing.
Ultra-Bot on Kickstarter is about to offer an upgraded platform of 8x8x8" or 512 cubic inches. It has a very good resolution and can handle PLA and ABS thank's to the heated build platform. There is also a future option for a dual extruder.

For $1,099 you get an assembled Ultra-Bot with heated build table. Soon they will offer another, larger, Ultra-Bot for $1,249 with the larger 8x8x8" build platform.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wjsteele/ultra-bot-3d-pr...
BeeLiked Twitter Competitions, Invites now available.
I remember thinking that nobody would ever overtake MySpace.

80 million users!

Facebook gives me great comfort that the race isn't always to the swift.

And the contrast between Facebook and the launch of Google Wave has demonstrated that having a dense social graph early is critical to success.
A bit pricey, perhaps? That works out to a max of 1 exception every 2 minutes for the paid plan, and 1 exception every 8 hours for the free plan.

By contrast the $25 plan on Airbrake[1] is 15/min and the $29 plan on Coalmine[2] is 20/min. The free plans for both are about 1-2 per minute. (Disclaimer: I work on Coalmine)

But it does sound like a good service. Nice that there's some competition in this space finally--that's great for everyone. :-)

[1] https://airbrake.io/account/new?dev=true

[2] https://www.getcoalmine.com/pricing
I did once use Interac for an online purchase. It was because the merchant required a "Verified by Mastercard" or some such which was impossible for me to get on my Canadian credit card without a Canadian address (I live overseas). It is a bit of an edge case, I admit, and I would still choose the credit card over the debit card most of the time, but it is once example where accepting Interac was a good thing for the consumer. Of course, I would have been happier if they just accepted my credit card without the "Verified by Mastercard" BS.
Windows Phone 8: HTC Windows Phone 8X and 8S Preview
A lot of people don't have great relationships with their landlords. In most cases it seems to be somewhere between neutral and active dislike.

In other words people contact them as little as possible unless there is something really wrong.
See below for the point scoring approach to purchases.

A 3D printer has been on my radar for a while, and I saw this as the first design that's refined and cheap enough for my purposes.

I do tend to make quick decisions, and $2200 is within my range at the moment.
I'll start things off. When I've used recruiting firms, they get something between 15-30% of the first year salary of a successful hire. I have the conceit that you'd get better applicants via the HN ad than a recruiting firm, so I'll value a successful placement at $30k. On the other hand, a job listing on a jobs site could be as little as $100, but this low cost would be due to a lower quality of skill in the applicants and a lower chance of actually making a hire. I'll swag the chance of actually making a hire due to the post at 1/3, so I'd say the final auction price would be $10k.
well unofficially, at least so they say, in the very beginning, the lightweight fighter program was conceived in secret by 5 guys in a back room in a pentagon - John Boyd, Pierre Sprey of the Close Air Support/A-10 fame, and a couple others known as the "fighter mafia". Much of the specs, requirements, and various aerodynamic parameters were determined before the bureaucratic majors and colonels knew about the project. The prototype aircraft were designed by engineers as side projects at Lockheed and Northrup, more or less under the radar. It probably helped that all the bigwigs were haggling about the F-15 at the time, which acted as a smokescreen.

It wasn't until it became apparent that the YF-16 was the real deal and probably going to be successful that it was finally exposed to the Pentagon procurement process, where it started to put on the pounds, and lost a bit of the agility that made the prototype aircraft famous (i.e. it had delta kinetic energy moves that the F-22 and F-35 can only accomplish via thrust vectoring).
This reminds me of the story about the guy who called the police because he had his weed stolen from him I read in a local paper recently.
Watch the code behind your ASP site run in real-time
Deferred method combinator
Hey man! I take pics of all my coffees :) You've hit on a trend - the key is to nail an incentive for people to use you over simply uploading it onto Facebook/Instagram. Why would users use SocialLatte? To see what the coffees at particular coffee shops are like. To network with other coffee lovers. To find gourmet blends. To find cosy coffee shops to catch-up with friends.

Just putting my marketing hat on here, but I suggest you refine your value proposition - e.g. on your homepage replace 'Sign in and start sharing' with something more value-laden, like 'For coffee lovers' or 'The ultimate coffee guide' or 'The world coffee hub'. For PR, the press love lists, e.g. 'Top 5 coffee shops', and you can do thought-leadership pieces on coffee habits and culture. Hope this helps!
This article is one of the reason I created my tool: http://www.qamine.com

Qamine integrates directly with github and is designed to be used by small and medium companies that cannot afford those expensive tools.
I'd be willing to bet more than 40% of iOS devices are not multi-homed - iPod Touches and wifi-only iPads.

From http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/08/apple-lifts-curtain-on-... :

> Apple has sold 46.5 million iPod touch units in the US between the device's introduction in 2007 and the second quarter of 2012. (That's in addition to the nearly 86 million iPhones and 34 million iPads sold during that time.)

iPod Touches alone are 28% of total iOS sales. If wifi-only iPads make up 60% of iPad sales (and I think they're probably higher), then that's 40%. Consider also that the turnover rate on phones is probably higher than the more focused devices.
Ask HN: Place in the startup world for a generalist natural/computer scientist? 
Hi HN,

A little bit about me: I am going to finish up my undergraduate degree in May of 2013 with majors in Computer Science and Chemistry and a minor in Mathematics. I have programmed since I was a little kid and am well-versed in a myriad of languages (thanks, Dad!) and it is by far my favorite method of problem solving.

I've had various different internships throughout high school and college, from working at IBM's Linux Technology Center to working in labs from biomedical engineering to organic chemistry to quantum computation. The atmosphere I've experienced at all of these places has never felt quite right to me -- I'm a very social person and I enjoy risky and highly collaborative environments, which is why as of the past year or so I've been toying with the idea of seeking out a job at a startup after I graduate.

Since I had never really been exposed to chemistry before college, I spent my extra time doing chemistry research (often times, this involved at least a fair amount of coding, most of which I unfortunately can't share) and not as much developing personal projects and other things that startups often look for when hiring new grads -- I've made a point to switch my focus from chemistry to computer science for my final year, though.

My question: Is there a place for a generalist natural/computer scientist in the startup world?

Thanks for your insight!

EDIT: Formatting woes.
You mean Arrington's defunct rag?
Yeah, app developers definitely got the worst of it. I haven't seen many articles where users have complained though.
SingTel Acquires Intelligent, Social Photo Aggregator Pixable For $26.5 Million
thanks for the heads up, i was wondering what happened the other day. didn't see that thread
Boring is Productive
Let's keep reinventing job titles to pretend they are new and sexy.

- Business Analyst: Data Scientist
- Systems Analyst: Growth Hacker
- Public Relations: Social Media Evangelist

What else?
Sounds like Apple's algorithm for the App Store is pretty horrible and primitive. I wonder if most of the success stories came mainly from the fact that Apple was picking them for their feature lists.
Regular user of Instapaper. :)
As soon as I got an email about it, I upgraded Instapaper to check it out. Made my day. :D
It's unlikely that Apple will fix this any time soon. I can't think of a single time when Apple gave one of their pre-loaded apps an overhaul except when releasing the next major version of iOS.
Not quite as full featured, but here's my onError handler that just emails me (via a postback) when an exception is thrown in the client. Kinda hacky but works well enough and its free.

https://gist.github.com/3753328
Epic action sequences combined with cryptography, information theory, currency/economics, WWII, and a crazy ambitious tech startup idea. It doesn't get any better than that.
In a free society, he is free to write as much as he likes and you are free to neither read nor reply to it.

The base of his argument is offending a persons preferences is not sufficient to self censor ones own actions - and I agree.

I also agree where he said any legal start up is fine and free of guilt - but don't worry I would be behind any start up or government initiative that gave away heroin to Junkies. The so called British System worked very well for many years, until the Puritan guilt pressure ended it in spite of empirical evidence that harm reduction did in fact reduce harm

so convert your start up to social entrpreneur status, and go make something to be proud of

the only reason to feel guilty is to have talent to create and not do so.
Can you expand on that? What's nice and clean and exciting about it?

Someone else posted link to Apache Kafka developed at LinkedIn.

http://incubator.apache.org/kafka/design.html

It seems like they address similar use cases... it would be interesting see a comparison.
I think the point that his rousing hand-waving passes conveniently (and at great length) over is that the internet is a novel medium and legal ideas about what is and is not ethical business practice are very poorly defined if they are defined at all.

For instance at what point can we argue that the rights of Facebook users and the "stickyness" of the service should limit the autonomy of Facebook as an independent company?

E.g. perhaps at some point, if Facebook becomes nigh-on-ineradicable from the fabric of our lives, should we nationalise (globalise) it? The argument would be that it's not just "another service" and it's too important to leave in the hands of private individuals interested primarily in profit, and thus the rihts of its many users outweigh the prerogatives of its "owners".
PennApps is very cool. For those that liked it, please consider the Windward Intercollegiate Code War - its the largest student only event. http://www.windward.net/code_war.php
Yegge, is that you?!