skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I realize that we are pro-tech around here, but Google really has close to a real monopoly power in many forms of online advertising: search, display, mobile, affiliate, they are pretty much bigger than most of the competition. That doesn't mean they are a monopoly, but they certain can and do set their own rules about how business should be done on the internet.

For example, Google artificially inflates their AdWords ad rates using the quality score algorithm. It's an ingenious little black box that they can turn up the dial periodically as needed without looking like they are raising their rates, they're just "adjusting the algorithm".

Or, Google has many times changed their organic listings that hurt businesses traffic enough to push them to AdWords. For example, selling links as advertising can get you banned from Google, and Google aggressively pursues link networks because they can be a cost effective way of advertising on Google that is cheaper than AdWords.

Google does open source and a lot of amazing things for the tech community, but it's also a business out to protect its core business - online advertising and search. Sure, it has a right to do these things on its own network, but when you own 60, 70, 80% of the internet search volume, it's a fine line between reasonable business decision and anti-competitive behavior.
Always Be Closing: Y Combinator and The Art of the Pitch
Julian Assange: Basic solidarity in WikiLeaks & Anonymous
Have you watched "Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead"?

Joe Cross lost 60 lbs (IIRC) in 60 days, by juice fasting.

I lost 27 lbs juice fasting in about 30 days. I didn't full juice fast. I still had an evening meal a fair number of nights.
This is the same complaint newspapers had when consumers pulled out the rug from under them. They felt entitled.

You are worth what someone is willing to pay. With a massive talent dump of new lawyers out there, supply is far outstripping demand.
Retailers are not surviving off inefficiencies in the market. They're "distribution as a service" (DaaS) that handle the complex logistics so that the manufactures don't have to.

Part of why Walmart is putting so many smaller retailers out of business is because they're experts at optimizing a huge part of the vertical stack of retail, distribution, and logistics operations.
Show HN: Control your presentation using your Mobile [Startup] Presefy
Would someone provide some more details around the $10 threshold for Kindle Direct Publishing? I read the page linked from the article [1], and it looked like the two options were 35% royalties or 70% royalties, and the qualifications for the 70% royalties didn't seem to mention any sort of pricing requirements.

[1] https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O...
Ask PG About Work-life Balance
I would like one of these printed and on my wall.
I think your value prop could be honed a bit. I tend to read more on a site than most people will, but I still couldn't get through the wall of text without losing interest and leaving. An example of 'write this code and get this!' would have kept me around.
Please don't be that guy who posts the same link on every comment in a thread.
I think Paul could really say something useful about this topic.

Could be that he indeed already has and the search engine just can't find it.
This is advertorial for App Annie.

The line between content and ads is getting extremely gray.
Assembly Language.
This sounds like a variant of economies of scale. i.e, it's cheaper when you're dealing in bulk. I haven't heard of this being a problem for large manufacturers in the past, I'm not sure why it applies to Google.

I do agree that MS is facing difficulty with Bing because they don't have enough signals to generate decent info on what is relevant. But I'm also not convinced that they have the competence to succeed.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Microsoft and think their monopoly proceedings that forced browser choice were bunk. But that the integration between Office and Windows was largely correct, but Microsoft was too incompetent to do anything useful with it.
Switching costs for consumers are nil, but what about for advertisers and publishers?
This sounds pretty much what they usually eat...
It's linked near the bottom of that page. https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A301WJ6X...
Ask HN: How difficult is it to get an internship if I have zero experience?
I'm seeking a summer 2013 internship in the San Francisco Bay Area. There's tons of opportunities available, but after doing some research it seems like only the most elite students get these positions. Folks from Cal, Stanford, and Ivy Leagues snatch these positions without any trouble.

I'm just a guy who is finishing his community college classes and wants some work experience before transferring to a 4 year college. I've taken various math, C++, Java, and UNIX classes but I don't have much experience outside of that. I'm currently teaching myself data structures/algorithms and try to code little programs implementing them. There's a few other languages I'm playing around with, but its nothing serious. Aside from that, my programming ability is a bit weak, and I'm worried I won't be able to compete with the other applicants.

My main strength is that I'm a fairly quick learner. Given a language or technology, I can probably learn it pretty well in 1-2 weeks with lots of studying. When it comes to actually implementing that knowledge, I'll need a bit of guidance. I'm still a newbie after all.

So what kind of qualities in an intern are companies looking for? Do they expect the intern to be a "rockstar coding ninja" or are they willing to take in a complete newbie and let him try to stay afloat? Also, would I be expected to do whiteboard coding during an interview to one of the smaller companies? I'm obviously not applying to Google or Facebook, but smaller companies. For instance, I'm interested in: Ooyala, Evernote Corporation, Terravide, and a few others like that.

I'd appreciate if someone could give me any insight, and perhaps even suggest any places to apply to that are willing to take in people like me. Thanks.
Help would definitely be appreciated, there's a whole lot to do. See the issue tracker on Github[1] for a starting point. Filter by the "E-easy" tag if you just want to dip your toes. The "A-an-interesting-project" tag is where it gets, er, interesting; those issues represent projects that don't necessarily have a high-enough priority to block 1.0, but that everyone would love to see and that a single motivated, skilled contributor could conceivably produce.

And if you ever need any help, check out the mailing list[2] or #rust on irc.mozilla.org (most active during Californian working hours).

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/rust/issues

[2] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev
It looks cool, but I don't see the utility just yet. Are there patterns that are very useful, but difficult to come up with just by following one of the normal forms?
I wouldn't bother. For me, the revenue isn't worth it. Even under $10, not all sales get 70%. Some still only get 35%. Pragprog was definitely more worthwhile. Sales were more substantial and the folks at pragprog are fantastic. Very professional and easy to work with.
The Life of A Coder, Designer & Developer [Ninja's]
This is data visualization gone wrong. I am afraid you have drawn a wildly incorrect conclusion because the programmers were too lazy to deal with the political and historical inconvenience of Gov. George C. Wallace, the Southern Dixiecrat and presidential nominee of the American Independent Party. Alabama didn't suddenly take 73% a left turn to vote for LBJ's vice president in 1968; they, along with Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Arkansas, voted for George Wallace, a candidate who made Richard Nixon look like Bob Dylan in comparison. Get the facts:

http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php?year=1968...

The moral of the story (in my mind) is that while it's tempting to throw a big dataset into a cool visualization algorithm, if you're not careful about what each individual data point means, you might end up imparting more confusion and misconceptions than actual knowledge.
LLVM's JIT isn't a monolithic entity. There are a bunch of different components and feature options. Some paths are mature and well tested, and others are not. As a result, some projects are using it quite successfully, and some projects with different needs have different experiences.
How to Break Into a Computer (and Prevent It from Happening to You)
Heh. Didn't expect to see comments here. My mate isn't starving himself and isn't going to kill himself if he doesn't actually loose that much - the number was just a goal, something to motivate. If you read the entries you'll see that he's simply eating healthier, and doing more exercise. The main idea is to inspire others to do the same, not to get sick from undernourishment.
This is hardly a convincing article for justifying why Yahoo! acquiring IFTTT is a good idea. I get IFTTT is a great service, but it's nothing particularly special, there's even a Rails clone of it on Github that Yahoo! could modify and use to start their own IFTTT like service.

I am however an avid Pipes user and fan. It's definitely one of the strongest tools Yahoo! have in its arsenal with exception for Yahoo! BOSS which I am currently using for my new startup which relies on search engine data instead of scraping it myself.

It was a nice try. I don't understand how this reached such a high spot on the homepage.
And, do you know what? ServerBeach is not even a good hosting service (my experience).

Good things sometimes come from shit: maybe ServerBeach will clean up their act.
I don't think that's true of the past decade or so. While DC's outlying suburbs in Virginia and Maryland are more Republican than the urban core, they most certainly vote more Democratic than the average suburban county elsewhere in the U.S.
Interesting. I ran a flightfox contest a few months ago and did get some responses. It was a complex route from Bolivia to India. Add to that my visa complications and it made for plenty of fun. The experts however were quite understanding and did spend some time reading and learning my situation (one of them didn't, but once I explained things to him, he was okay with it..).

So the contest ended and I awarded someone as winner. A few weeks later I decided to take a second look so that I could book my tickets. This is where flightfox seems to have changed something.

At the time that the contest got over and I chose a winner - I could see booking instructions for all 4-5 itineraries that I had received. However, a few weeks later, I can only see the one that I awarded.

That set of tickets is no longer available. I can't see the booking instructions for the other itineraries.

I don't know why they changed this. It makes no sense. I mean, if one set of tickets goes out - it's only reasonable that I should be able to purchase the next best set.

Anyhow, for what it's worth, the ticket prices they found were indeed better than the ones I could find - mainly because they came up with some creative routing.
>Microsoft was actively creating patches that broke other browser

Do you have any reference to this or is it another urban legend which is repeated till everyone assumes it is true?
if you use MS skydrive you get 7gb free?

no selective sync but i hear it is coming.. i signed up before when you got 25gb free..
>With Google, all you have to do is type in bing.com/yahoo.com/duckduckgo.com instead of google.com.

That doesn't really help, for example Map Quest from being steam rolled by Google Maps, because a Google map is shown when people search for a location on Google.
this is definitely cool
Well Jesus, you can't say something like this and then not share your vision! Not an effective strategy.
Fantastic! Fractals are beautiful by themselves but when found in nature, they're just that much more amazing
That sounds great. We do have a basic package management system (https://github.com/mozilla/cargo-central), so it'll be easy to get anything you write into the community.
Oakley World Pro Junior Live Webcast | Oakley Pro Junior
Rackspace launches open PHP, Java SDKs for OpenStack
Ouch, my wife and I are pescatarians (vegetarians who also eat seafood). I try to buy Canadian and US seafood, but...

Good article.
1. Price slightly under market. (You can always raise it later.)

2. Do a thorough background check. (Wait for a quality tenant.)

3. Make repairs asap.

4. Be firm, fair and friendly.

These things can eliminate 80% of the problems landlords have.
What do you mean, "the founders"? The two house system was a compromise.
Honest feedback is really appreciated (and wanted) so I'm really glad you replied with that.

We have taken some of those into account - 1) shoutts get categorized into channels (#AskStanford, #gocard, #CS106A etc) and that is one way of making it organized and not overbearing to a user, almost like subreddits 2) when a user opens it at any location, say a gym, they know instantaneously what's popular around there and at that time - the primary reason to use it daily or at least often.

Given that, the above are still just assumptions made by us that will get validated/in-validated soon enough. Again, I really appreciate the feedback it was really helpful.
The rest of Paul Bourke's website is also very cool, so don't miss it!
Agreed the grandparent's reply was a smarmy way of saying it, but, avoidance of majority rule is indeed why we use it. And to look at it another way: to keep one state (or a tiny few) from deciding the direction the rest of the states in the union must go.

I don't think it's a stretch to say we've become a more singular nation state, so that second part may not be as obvious, but, it's definitely still a factor. Imagine the general mentality in a state whose populace you have a low opinion of can now dictate things formerly decided in your state.

In a few words? That really sucks.
Nitrogen cycle: Difference Engine: End of the electric car?
Let me know if you want help with anything related to the finance and tax calculations. One thing I'd mention is that these calculators are fairly common, but the problem is that most people dont understand them. Putting them into context would probably much more useful. I'm a CPA, JD by trade so I have a good amount of experience in this.
It depends - What do you mean by "kickass" ????

A very incomplete list ...

Utmost speed, very close to the metal: C, C++, Assembler

Easiest to learn and write, quickly: Python, Ruby

Will get you a job in most large corporates: Java, C#, COBOL

Will run on all browsers and many servers: ECMAScript, aka JavaScript (TM Oracle Corp)

Might impress the technorati: Haskell, Scala, Erlang, Common Lisp, ML, F#, Scheme

Totally utterly useless and do your brain in: BrainFuck
Ah, thank you! I missed that.
+1 great article, thanks!
I think that proof there is a god can be found somewhere between 'Feedback' and 'Fractals'... would love to check out more information on the mathematics that exist here.
> If you shift the black box back a bit and you have inputs being babies and outputs being high-school graduates, you will see a huge skew still, and this is part of the reason for affirmative action at the HS level.

I don't know how it is in the US, but in Sweden the skew in education is the other way - recently girls do better in school than boys. It hasn't changed the men/women ratio in computer science though (it has in fields such as law and medicine though)
If you think you can learn things in weeks then I'd suggest you teach yourself a language that some of the companies you are interested in work with. Then just hit them up in spring and say you taught yourself in only weeks so imagine how much you can learn in months with them. Thats my two cents. Besides that a bit of hustle and luck will get you into companies you want.
Yeah, sure, whatever you say.
It's plenty secure in the sense that you can't forge a session. It's not secure in the sense that the data is inaccessible if you know how to base64 decode a cookie.

If you're using cookie sessions, you should know better than to store sensitive information in the session.
"According to a regulatory filing, de Castro will receive an annual base salary of $600,000 and a one-time retention equity award comprising $US18 million in restricted stock units and $US18 million in performance-based stock options. He will get a $1 million bonus for leaving Google and restricted stock with a target value of $US20 million."

60 million USD package according to http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/world/yahoo-to-pay-... (paywall unless you come via Google)

Better article at allthingsd:

http://allthingsd.com/20121015/yahoo-confirms-hiring-of-goog...
Not exactly surprising news. If you eat seafood consider checking what you are buying with Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch (website[1] or app).

[1] http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx
We do a lot of business with ServerBeach / Peer1, they are good and have gotten a lot better in the last 24 months. I just don't think they deserve total blame in this situation.

If you are you are providing unmanaged servers, that client misses the warning and doesn't respond, you have to take the next step and suspend that server because many times your contract prohibits you from going in and removing one URL. I wish they had called too but sometimes that isn't possible given the margins on some of these businesses.

Thanks, Ben
(CEO at Site5.com)
Yes, the second star would add to the brightness and make things closer. Also, I didn't see in the article what the actual brightnesses of the two stars 1,000 AU away are relative to the brightness of the Sun. I just used the Sun because it was easy to look up the relative brightness of the Sun vs. the Moon. :-)

Edit: I see from looking at more recent posts that the two distant stars are thought to be spectral class G and M. The Sun is a G, so it should be about the same brightness as the brighter of the two.
I thought you were called a veg-aquarian.
Google recommends developers use the "Android_ID". I bet Admob, Googles app ad network also requests this:

http://android-developers.blogspot.de/2011/03/identifying-ap...
This will only work if we document almost everything we do online. A large part of our life and thought process is still offline, so the answer to "what would X do" will most likely be extremely dependent on the situation and context X was in when he/she made that statement.
You can search for a location on MapQuest.com.

Are you suggesting Google should be forced to display competitor APIs in their search results?
The Side-Project Project
It's about 50% (50.7) http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/11000.html
> We host our Postgres database with Heroku. As a result, I think I've ruled out database level solutions.

What does hosting with Heroku have to do with using a trigger?

> On a related note, it feels good to know that everything our app needs to run is in the code base.

Except the database schema and any additional indexes you need to make it not perform terribly. All basic setup, just like creating triggers.

> Rails fights that with migrations and the callback chain too, so I guess that thinking has sunk in for me.

The problem with doing stuff like this in a callback is that an additional query is sent to the database which can be a big performance problem if the insert load is high. I generally agree that complex logic should be avoided in triggers and is better left in the application code in most cases but incrementing a counter is about as simplistic as you can get.
Liu Bei: China's warlord who teaches good management
Northwest DC has plenty of the whitest richest Democratic voters you'll find.
> You're taking this in a far more argumentative direction than I had any desire to go in. Perhaps I've struck a nerve?

Arguments are fun. No harm done.
And 90s....
Map Quest got steam rolled by Google Maps when Google came out with an insanely better interface and the continued to improve upon it.

It will be difficult for anybody to claw a lead from Google Maps, but I would have had a hard time believing anybody could steal the entire market away from Map Quest once upon a time, either.
great point. better said than my articulation of continuing to innovate through tech cycles.
You can't create new style rules with the new inspector.

It's also buggy and skow to the point of being unusable.

Who ever thought that was ready for release must be out of his mind.

Also, if you chose "use webkit inspector" you're no longer able to view source.

I'm left with no alternative. Chrome is hideous on OS X and I hate that omnibar that Safari now shares. I'm using Safari for browsing and chrome for developing but it's a terrible experience.
I think it's useful for other people to make sure what they're doing alines with convention. For instance, I had no idea about the Library of Free Data Models linked further down the page, so most of the model logic I'm unsure of has been confirmed via Stackoverflow posts. Sometimes, it can be hard to find the exact situation I'm looking for.
Housing will be the next battleground
It's a compromise that has worked fairly well, balancing population versus the independent needs of states. Throwing out that balance could fundamentally unsettle the US, because many states would quickly become tired of New York and California telling them how to live their lives.
Guptaneil and etrinh, I appreciate the thoughtful feedback.

Regarding a reward-based or gamification system, this is an excellent idea. Of course, it would not necessarily be monetary. To give a specific example, Dropbox has become very good at gamifying their recruitment by posing their challenges for expanding storage space. A similar adoption here could be interesting. I plan to follow Tabule's development and adoption curiously.
Carbon mountain bike wheel
I'm interested to know why the only optimal deploy for Django is SSH? Django works great on Heroku as well.
It's shrimp...
Repost of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4440198

I didn't think reposts were possible?
I don't think Microsoft would lose the antitrust case in today's times FWIW.

But back when the case was being determined, the internet was incredibly slow and downloading large files like web browsers was pretty painful (both in time and the avg computer user's know how). So for a consumer to get a competing product to IE (which was free and bundled with Windows) you had to either know how and where to download a competitor or go buy a competing product at a store. These are leaps and bounds over the hurdles of Google competitors today.
interesting => package is 100x reported base salary
Troll Level: Master ;) Yes, I am definitely political-correctness-challenged (to put it in politically correct terms). I intend no harm, but I do like to challenge social norms. I used to think identically to those who think the opposite of me, so I understand where everyone else is coming from.
I love how you can't even see POST data in the new inspector
I would guess that the major alternative for most of the applicants for this program would be studying on their own. You can take as long as you'd like to learn. Doing that, you can spend as much time as you'd like with friends/family, doing community work or anything else you choose. If you're motivated (and possibly unemployed), doing whatever it takes over a 3 month period to learn how to do front-end development might make sense. But like any other decision, there are tradeoffs. This "all-in" boot-camp style takes a lot of dedication. I don't think there's much risk of it becoming the primary way people learn to code, and even if it does, one can still learn on their own as easily as they could before.
I wonder how hard would it be to measure their mathematical properties, like fractal dimension. Perhaps using image processing tools. I heard the simple box counting method is not perfect for complex natural structures. Does anyone know any published algorithms?
They are all portuguese tech universities. I have studied at #8.