skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How I'm loosing 20 kilos in 60 days.
Ask HN: Cracking the Chicken-and-Egg Problem
We're a small startup that launched the beta version of our app at Stanford University 10 days ago (www.shoutt.me). Shoutt is a location-based information sharing platform...and thus, a social network of sorts. We decided to launch at Stanford due to various reasons like proximity to us, % of iPhone users, etc. We do plan to launch at more schools next semester, but right now we're stuck!

Being a social network, we face the classic chicken-and-egg problem. To overcome that and get users on board we did this:
1. Have a very niche launch (Stanford)
2. Run a competition where we give out a great prize every day for 30 days to the most active/creative user that day
3. We distributed over 1500 flyers across dorms announcing Shoutt & the competition. You can see them here (http://shoutt.me/Marketing/)
4. Posted on student mailing lists about Shoutt and how it is useful
5. Emailed several student organizations about using Shoutt in a way to best benefit them as a group
6. Hired 3 undergrad students to help spread the word

What we are seeing right now is:
1. Users are trickling in, growth is stagnant and not upwards
2. We do have a couple of evangelical users, but not many
3. After speaking with many students - we've realized that most are aware about the existance of Shoutt due to our initial push, but it iss passive knowledge. There hasn't been much conversion from knowing to downloading.

It has been just 10 days, so it is still early...but we're not seeing as much traction as we'd like so we're starting to get worried. I was wondering if any of you had experience or tips to offer. Thanks guys!

What Shoutt does & how it is helpful:
Shoutt is a location-based app to share information with those around you. We're bringing the act of shoutting to the phone - when you shout only the people around you can hear you. This works as a great way to share information with students around you and thus helps connect hyperlocal communities. It can be used to connect places as small as a dorm or a department to as large as the entire campus/city - the distance is decided by the shoutter. Also, unlike other networks there are no friends or followers and is focused primarily on the shared information.

Shoutt can be applied to a wide range of scenarios -- Announcements (events, publicize, news), Collaboration (homework, study groups, hobbies), Marketplace (buy/sell, recruiting for orgs, help), Random chatter (updates, celebrating Cardinal victories) and Asks (ride shares, Freshmen questions).
Merit does not require effort. I haven't heard anyone claiming that their ability to program is a measure of their worth as a human being. It is, however, a measure of one's usefulness to a development team.
Disclaimer: This isn't actually my website, but a close friend's. "How my friend is loosing 20 kilos in 60 days" just wasn't quite as concise.
Ever used the search box on Amazon.com? Then you've used A9.
I don't get what's radical about the perspective. I think most people would already agree that many demographics get fucked over when it comes to having an opportunity to learn and pursue a career in what they might otherwise wish to. As far as I can tell that is pretty much the only point that the author was making; the rest is just arguing about the semantics of the word "meritocracy."
I agree, this is a really, really cool visualization of something that would otherwise be rather difficult to understand. I've always known about the "Southern switch" but something like this really highlights it. Alabama in particular had a almost 83% change in the vote from 1960 to 1964 and a 73% swing back in 1968! It's also cool to see the slowly cyclical nature of the elections, although the wild swings from one party to another seem to have slowed down quite a bit.
If dropbox wanted to be evil, they could put ads on your filesystem.
Hmm thanks for the tip, I'll try switching to plaintext. I wish we hadn't wasted so much time building an HTML template now.
Evil foreign shrimp is evil, so stock up on some Good-Ol-American pork and beef instead! Signed, the Advertisers.
Certainly you can implement this same pattern without Redis. Triggers in Postgres would be a reasonable way to do it. I didn't say you can't do this in Postgres, I said you can't do it with COUNT().

It does indeed sound like they're storing every click: that's precisely why using aggregate functions would be expensive.
getting a sweet internship at some cutting edge technology

Author is arguing/implying that overcoming this "gate" was the source of [the example's] later (developed, proven,etc) skill. It might not be a perfect argument, but its there IMHO. I think if you believe it's not a good argument/ point, its best to attack it directly. That is all.
HTML Tidy for HTML5 (experimental)
Because it would only take a single generation for each group to split in half.

Are you planning to to do mass migrations every few years to force people with different opinions to go to a new location?

And why is there a need for geographical separation of ideas anyway?

People have wrong ideas about TONS of things. What makes this one so important that you would split the country over it? For most people the biological origin of the world is a very unimportant issue.

And do NOT answer me that the difference is scientific belief of not, because most people have no understanding of the science at all, no matter what they believe.

What it's actually a proxy for is acceptance of authority or not. Some people believe this authority, some this one - but there is no real difference between them - neither one actually understands the subject matter at all.
Could you please NOT use the word 'actionable' ever again? Please?
Most places I've worked at really do want to hire a diverse group of engineers. At one company, one of the managers was asked by his manager to hire e.g. more black women. His response was "you show me one, and I will hire her".

Personally, I'd like more women in the field as well. I wouldn't mind working somewhere where, I don't know, even 1 out of 3 people were women, instead of 1/10. But I think availability has a lot to do with it.
Quoting a promoted comment from ruddy at ars technica:

"One does not have to be a monopoly to trigger antitrust scrutiny, the actual criteria is to have "market power." Like a monopoly, it is not illegal to achieve market power, it's just illegal to abuse it in an anticompetitive manner. There's no question whatsoever that Google has market power in the online search/advertising market. The only question is whether they've abused it to muscle in on other markets."
That's what I thought because I am around the same age and can relate with lots of what he likes.
I am always astonished by what an outlier DC is.
I hadn't really thought about this as an option, but I think it's an interesting thing to point out. My hunch is that not many college students actually pay for Dropbox's service as it stands, though. Not to mention, the main-main goal is probably user acquisition which this should definitely aid in.
"FizzBuzz is famously hard"

Are we talking about the thing of writing "fizz" for multiples of 3 and "buzz" for multiples of 5 and "fizzbuzz" for both, for the numbers 1 - 100? If that is famously hard, then the definition of hard must have changed massively while I wasn't looking.
I used it for a complicated round the world itinerary.

My first competition didn't get any takers ending with no flights, but I contacted support and they re-ran it and I got about 8 different itineraries - all cheaper than expected.

Funnily, there was $1000 to be saved by flying from Melbourne to St Lucia (Carribean) via London (~15,000 miles) rather than via LA (~11,000 miles). That made no sense to me at all!
I wish we could click on a state and it would stay highlighted. That would be much easier, in my opinion.
I'm not. If you ever visit, it's pretty clear where each economic group lives. Practically anyone with money who works in DC lives in VA or MD. DC has the highest ghetto per capita in the world.
FizzBuzz is famously hard, but it's not that hard

Every time I see something like this, I cringe inside and wonder at how memes get distorted.

FizzBuzz is not supposed to be hard. In fact it is supposed to be as EASY as you can possibly make an actual programming task. So easy that most programmers would have trouble believing that there are people calling themselves programmers who can't solve it in their sleep. Seriously if you know enough of a programming language to print output, run a loop, take remainders, and write if tests, then you can write FizzBuzz.

Put another way, if you can't write FizzBuzz, then you probably can't write ANY useful program. And your interview can safely stop right there because you failed.
I would love to hear even a theoretical version of this story where pulling the plug so quickly is not a error on ServerBreach's part. Since you bothered to create a throwaway just to post this, you might as well offer some specifics. As it stands, it just sounds like you are trolling.
Just make sure things stays very consistent and readable, I think that's the most important.

I don't think ret vs return is big deal. Both are understandable and relatively short, or expected. On the contrary, odd unknown, new syntax may sometimes be.

Good job on the new release :)
I don't think she's saying that. Do white males without programming skills get programming internships at a higher rate? Are there even a significant number of people who take that path?

Hiring is not the problem. Getting underrepresented folks to choose computer science in the first place is.
Search Your Email, Docs & Spreadsheets Right From The Main Google Box
I'm amazed just how many times external conditions can force a change for the better. Similar thing happened to one of my favorite cafe here - landlord wanted them out, they had to scramble, then found a bigger, better, cheaper place just nearby and they have more business and more interesting events than ever before.

Also, I like the transparency of the whole thing.

Well done! If I was living there instead of 16 timezones away, would definitely go and become a member. :)
I'm neither arguing for or against the reactions you describe, but from that perspective, it's worse when a hosting company screws up because other companies are relying on them for business. When most startups screw up, the scope damage is limited to their direct customers, and the amount of damage is limited to the price of the startup's service.
Not sure if you've noticed but they are being investigated. Investigations however do not imply guilt, and this is not a criminal investigation so it's not analogous to your example.

There is no clear and shut case here, no evidence of cartel-like behaviour or raising prices on consumers. The FTC will hire an economist who will argue that exists "market failure", Google will in turn hire several economists, scholars, and law firms to prove them wrong.
But doesn't the market favor people of means? The market already has a metric - financial success - but the market cares not for justice. I think all the author is asking is of us to open our eyes, and do our best to further goals we deem worthy, and let the market do what it likes. We're people, we can act on our beliefs. Why should we be slaves to the blind yet unjust market?
Seems the original link is behind a paywall. I found this link to be a little better: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/sprint-nex...
We're so excited about this. The space is enormous - over 16,000 square feet! It's about double the current footage we're legally allowed to use and is 100% move-in ready. Now we just need to get the fiber pulled and the interior done up and we'll be good to go for the next phase of hacker empire. Yay! (We'll be subletting the old space at Whisman once we complete the move.)
What I find astonishing about this is the material that's covered, the Beck Hopelessness Scale. This is a diagnostic test of 20 questions to help assess depression. To get a copy, it costs $120!

http://www.pearsonassessments.com/HAIWEB/Cultures/en-us/Prod...

Thankfully, they include 25 questionnaires, and you can buy more (in English or Spanish) for only $52. $2 per patient isn't a huge cost, but psychological care is already dangerously out of reach for those who need it.

I'd be interested if anyone in the field (a practicing psychologist, maybe psychiatrist) could provide an idea of:

a) How many copies do you buy for an office? One per psychologist, or would it be shared?

b) How many tests like this does a psychologist typically employ? I haven't anecdotally heard of any being administered, but I also live in Canada, and maybe socialized medicine takes a tougher view on $2 pieces of paper from the 70's.
The problem here seems to have been that ServerBeach didn't bother to make a phone call before shutting off the servers of a not insignificant customer, for what turns out not to have been a very good reason.

If they let the customer know that this really was just a mistake and is not their policy, okay, well, it's unfortunate but maybe not fatal to the relationship. But if it is their policy -- and until they say otherwise, it's natural to assume that it is -- then I can see why people would have a problem with that.
The most famous escaped Waterloo project has got to be Unreal: http://planetunreal.gamespy.com/View.php?view=UnrealGameInfo...

It's kind of funny how brilliant Waterloo could be if the weather was just a little better.

Quothe Tim Sweeney:
TS: In 1997, we had started Unreal. We were well into the project, and we weren't making the progress we needed because everybody was all over the place -- it was a very complicated project.

So we got everybody together in Waterloo, Canada for a year to finish the game, since some of the guys already lived up there. It was really nice for about six months, and then it froze over and didn't thaw again for another six months, so we got really annoyed at the cold there.

After that we decided to set up a permanent office and bring everybody together so we could be a more efficient developer. We looked all over the country, decided on Raleigh, and moved here in 1998.

It was funny to relocate here because absolutely nobody working with Epic at the time had been born here. It was just a random place that we chose after looking at the cost of living here, on the west coast, and all over the country.

( http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132426/from_the_past_t... )
Google Earth Fractals
Software as an Art
>A meritocracy is a system for centralizing authority in the hands of those who already have it, and ensuring that authority is only distributed to others like them or those who aren’t but are willing to play by their rules.

This is quite an unusual definition. I always thought that a meritocracy was about giving the people best able to do a job the greatest rewards. The article seems to be assuming that all meritocracies are actually corrupt meritocracies, which is a rather sweeping generalisation...

More to the point; a corrupt meritocracy can hardly be distinguished from any other form of power/political structure that has become corrupt (in the sense of rewarding people through crony-ism and other discriminatory practices), so I don't really see any valid argument here other than "corrupt systems are bad, mmkay?".
Do it yesterday. Send it registered mail. Until the copyright office receives it, YOU DO NOT HAVE DMCA SAFE HARBOR PROTECTION! It's not the only thing you have to do, but an important one.

See Viacom v. YouTube:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viacom_International_Inc._v._Yo....

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/04/second-circuit-ru...
If the PC police could do Fermi problems, they wouldn't be polluting my news feed with inane conspiracy theories.

http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/math.htm
is there a good spot to find all the papers he's coauthored?
Uninstall visio Microsoft office
1. It has a good name and theme. "Space Race" is a genius choice due to its double meaning.

2. This is marketed more as a competition between organizations than a simple referral program. Neither is a new idea, but the combination is interesting.

Also, the references to the Cold War are interesting, though I may be looking into it too much. Personal rewards for referring friends is like capitalism. Group rewards for each school is like communism. With Dropbox, you get both! :)
Apple Store exchange: a bunch of brand new unopened iPads for a mac pro
won a bunch of iPads this summer, every other hackathon i crash. some opened, most are unopened.

i'm like a bad pirate with a desktop dragon's lair full of piled up loot.. so, yes, it's been a while, much past their 14-day period...

but is it possible to somehow exchange these for store-credit off an even larger purchase (e.g., a decked out mac pro)?
Amazon's second tablet strategy
I think you're right in the sense that the president doesn't really control things like the direction of the economy as much as most people think he does. However, I do think there are decisions that the president does have direct control over that have huge long term effects. For example, it's hard to imagine a Gore presidency would have had quite the same call to action in Iraq that the Bush presidency did, which really did have long term consequences on the economy and on the government as a whole.
Terribly, terribly sorry for the meta-comment, but I have to say, it's been thrilling lately to watch the intersection of two bubbles that are usually totally isolated — the "social justice" community and the "hacker" community — and to see the naivetes of both groups exposed, especially because both groups are composed of people who usually take themselves and their own intelligence very seriously.

I work as a programmer, but my social circle is mostly semi-luddite radicals and hippies. Somebody got chocolate in my peanut butter.

Why this is happening is intensely interesting to me. Programmers have emerged as a highly visible priveleged social group, whose actions have huge and often unexamined social consequences. One example is the rising cost of living in San Francisco.

For a group that isn't used to considering itself "priveleged" in the usual sense, it must be disorienting to suddenly be scrutinized in this way. I wonder what the response from "hackers" will look like over the long term.
Bitcoind pyminer with pythonparallel support
I want to know what you think about it.
I know ASIC's are comming...
I have a theory:

Are you less annoyed by the spam because it will benefit everyone at MIT? I think students will be more willing to spam because it isnt seen as being selfish.
> I'm not sure why this person decided to redefine the essence of meritocracy

Because the very word "meritocracy" was invented to describe an Orwellian society dystopia were "merit" was the only metric for value. He just use the original definition.
I recon you should just throw them on eBay
It is almost entirely big city. Most American cities, considered by themselves, would be over there on the left with Washington.

Here's a visualization of this; mostly bluer cities and mostly redder non-city:

http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/JAVA/election2004/
I propose that it is easier to give unfair advantages to minorities at the college level than it is to fix the unfair disadvantages before that level. This is why I support affirmative action.

This is interesting, because it really does get down to the core of the argument: how do we improve the academic success of minorities?

Unfortunately, letting someone who can't do calculus into, say, Stanford, is not going to fix the fact that they will be WAY behind their peers. The psychological damage from this alone is tremendous. In fact, I believe there are some interesting studies done on this "mismatch" phenomenon, since racial minorities actually have a higher interest level in STEM careers, but are put at a disadvantage and become less likely to graduate as one due to being AA-ed into a student body where their capabilities are WAY below the mean of their classmates. This leads to an extremely high dropout rate which could have been avoided if they'd gone to a school that better suited their abilities. Instead, thanks to AA, the dropout rate for minorities in STEM departments is ridiculously high, and talented people who maybe just needed a less intense curriculum to adjust to instead end up becoming history or gender or racial studies majors or whatever major you can 4.0 in just for having a pulse.

Personally, whether it's harder or easier to do it at the pre-college level, I think it far wiser to leave the college admissions race-blind (to prevent discrimination) and focus on fixing the broken infrastructure that is failing our socioeconomically disadvantaged students.

That kid going to Stanford will do much better if he has AP calculus available at his high school, instead of just getting AA-ed in with an inferior skillset (which may or may not be their fault). We want people to be able to succeed, not set them up for failure. As a bonus, most people are fine with the idea of giving others an equal shot, but not so fine with the idea of race based discrimination. AA makes other groups resentful and suspicious of the AA-ed party, but helping people have equal access to preparation for college? Who's going to argue against that?

The best way to end discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
The question is, who and what defines merit in a meritocracy? The article claims that those already in power do and thus it is they that control who gets to move up the ladder.
Good luck (to your mate), thats a big amount to lose in 2 months.
why would you assume that using pig fecese will cause disease ridden food?
What does being Canadian have to do with this? :P
A critical look at trolling subculture and how we talk about it
I really wanted to use your service in the past but I couldn't justify paying so much just for image conversion.. I see it now comes as standard! Thank you!
Yeah, guess he shouldn't have had that brilliant idea when they were so hard to come by???
You can already specify the folder you want to sync.
See http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/hm.htm for support for this idea.

According to current research, the result of more homework is increased conflict in the home over doing homework, and increasing correlation between the education level of the parents and performance of children.

To first order, the gains in learning among those whose parents are sufficiently educated to help their children are offset by the negative effects of incorrect practice on those whose parents are unable to help competently.

According to the statistics, if we got rid of homework for elementary school kids the result would be to have happier households and a more equitable society. I'd be for that, even though my children are probably helped more than hurt by homework.

I'll check in on this discussion after I help my grade 2 son with his nightly homework routine...
Have your views on Common Lisp changed, since you wrote your ANSI Common Lisp?