skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This hilariously demonstrates what I've long thought about consulting companies: they don't provide "smarts as a service" as they claim (otherwise they would just take the MIT engineering grad, or simply compare based on GRE scores, etc...), instead they provide "corporate ladder infiltration as a service". They want the kind of people with an impressive diploma, with the right hand shake, who exude athletic acumen and look smart and accomplished. Their job would be to impress middle management which would then permit the consultants to do what is likely a trivial job.

It's sad to see so many people with STEM degrees going down the consulting route. I can't obviously understand why anyone would want to go down that route. If someone is truly intelligent and are purely after the money itself, quantitative finance, or working at Google and sticking around for promotions and stock grants (I'm not even talking about, e.g., Founder's Awards -- which I'd argue aren't out of reach for someone truly "best of the best") would pay much better. If (like most people) they want to actually derive some kind of satisfaction from their work, it becomes even more puzzling.

Carl Sagan mentioned in one of his books that he felt the way science is taught in high schools is largely mechanical and robotic and that might draw the wrong kinds of people into science. Without extra-curricular help (youth science/math camps for some, or in my case dad being an maths professor and mom being a software engineer), many creative minds tend to shy away from those fields for that reason. They presume that these fields are remain like that at university level: I've often tried my best to help-out younger hackers who decided not to pursue a CS education thinking they were "bad at math" (based on their experience with high school maths).

As a result by the time of high school seniors apply to college, STEM majors end up attracting many individuals that like mechanical and robotic work ("plug and chug") in pursuit of external awards and social status. Once they graduate, however, they know they can't contribute meaningfully to their field with that attitude; management consulting seems like a good "refuge" for those types. The lesson isn't "these firms are being silly in their recruitment practice", the lesson is "buyer beware" when it comes to being these firms' customers.
Should you prefer to whitelist sites yourself instead, I can recommend: https://www.requestpolicy.com
I'm skeptical of this unnamed company's actual abilities. In the initial email how are they able to identify anything about your visitors before you've installed the tracking code? Since they apparently can see search terms used to reach your site the only thing I can think of is their code is running on some site that links to you (perhaps an off-brand search engine?) and they're tracking outbound clicks. Or it's fake.

It's pretty easy to guess company name from IP address, especially if you don't care about accuracy. You can kinda sorta do this in Google Analytics under Audience > Technology > Network. That seems to be roughly what they're doing in the screenshots posted. IMHO, this is not the most serious privacy issue on the web.

I would be very curious to hear exactly what percentage of visitors it is able to supply Name and Email for (and how many of those fields look bogus). This sort of individual-level tracking across sites is obviously possible, but I don't think it's common. Google/DoubleClick do not, as far as I know, do any sort of tracking at the level of an individual's name or email address (And why would they? It's asking for regulatory problems and it doesn't really help them much -- they target ads to groups of similar people based on demographics, not to particular named individuals.)
Define "a couple of years."

A couple of decades, maybe.

Even then I disagree, but it's at least plausible.

Years though? I think you're over estimating how quickly this could possible happen.
Mainly for testing
It's not that RVM requires specific report. The meaning is more plain than that: They are no longer supporting (in the sense of promoting the use of) RVM because they feel RVM is doing a poor job of supporting (as in correctly installing) Rubinius.
As the OP, I can confirm the intention :)
I personally think they are missing a great opportunity to reinvent the workstation. If we imagine there are a number of different user patterns in computing: entertainment users (consuming), business users (data processing), power users (creation and research), application developers, system/server developers and infrastructure (servers). (A bit simplified of course).

To me it seems like they are targeting entertainment users, when they really should be targeting power users and application developers. The first two (entertainment & business users) already being dominated by the competition and the last two (system/server development and infrastructure) already having a good track record. The nice thing about researchers and creators are that they mostly want the same things like low-latency processing of multimedia, stability, flexibility, power and value. Features that will trickle down to entertainment users that do care about it, but are unable to evaluate it exclusively.

Paradoxically enough this used to be Apples territory before they switched to Unix. With the exception of value and therefor also power, leaving the an opening for hobbyists (creators) and large scale deployments (research) to Microsoft and Linux respectively.

To do this you'll need application developers to bridge the gap between system & server developers and power users, which there seem to be a surprisingly small overlap between, at least seen to activity. These are unfortunately the people you piss off when you value sponsored searches and flashy menus over consistency.
8 web applications you need to stop building
You're right that his mathematical assumptions are wrong, but I wouldn't hand wave away sound financial math reasoning if you want to make informed investment decisions.
I can't imagine many legitimate sites participating in this scheme. It would certainly violate many publicly posted privacy policies.
Yes. If I integrate with the Facebook API I can't access any user details without first showing them the permissions dialog box. It is possible that advertisers have other access, but I would be extremely surprised if it gave them access to the user's e-mail address.
Genetic researchers grow a fish that has legs
I'm even more impressed by their willingness to make this a feature available to everyone, both through their github cert repo and their rebundling service.
The best thing about the 2007-2009 financial collapse was freeing up a lot more STEM graduates for "real" work in the economy, like tech startups, engineering roles at companies, etc., vs. going into consulting and finance.
They can identify you by name/email if you've entered it on a site in their "network". Their network may not be huge, but a (presumably) similar service had a big enough network to capture Sumit Suman's email earlier this week (https://plus.google.com/u/1/106142598193409336347/posts/2jLJ...)
Python 3 "Wall of Shame" Becomes "Wall of Superpowers" Today
I imagine (though have no actual clue) that it's more of an e-mail sharing network between sites. You sign up for site A, the API tracks that and allows site B to see the signup details you entered.

One one level, I can see why sites do it. On another, one inch higher level, I can see how any site implementing it is so shortsighted that I'm amazed they didn't immediately go bankrupt as soon as they started.
Thanks for figuring out how they do it...

That said since a (very) long time I'm using separate Linux user accounts to: check my professional email + G+, surf my personal email + G+ + FB (my FB is using a fake but plausible name) and a third one to surf the Web.

The one surfing the Web is linked to a fake online identity: entirely made up, with fake friends / fake G+ circles, fake StackOverflow / OpenID and basically fake everything.

I then only ever surf using a transparent proxy for anything "work related": the IP can't be linked to my fake IP.

It's not difficult to set up: I did set up the transparent company Web proxy (VPN would to too) myself and basically Linux user accounts take care of the rest.

Now I'll start using different browsers too and, why not, maybe Tor in one of the account.

I take it I could take all this a step further and whitelist websites that my "personal" account is allowed to connect to (using iptables' owner-uid mod).
No, he's merely alluding to differences between people-oriented and systems-oriented folks.
The Affordable Care Act prohibits charging based on gender. This provision kicks in on January 1, 2014.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Afforda...
this model may be useful
Non-noisy open-offices on the other hand are very useful.

Again, just because you don't like open doesn't mean nobody does, or that in non-US countries an open office necessarily means lots of noise.
It's not just bluehost who advertises "OMG UNLIMITED EVERYTHING!" but then insta-cancel you as soon as you get a hint of traffic.
What are the chances my current insurance company has to pay for treatment many years down the line? If I change jobs there is a good chance I will change insurance.
I would counsel against using anything but RHEL or one of its clones in production, especially if you're running on bare metal. None of the Tier-1 server vendors support anything but RHEL. This is incredibly important if you care about ever upgrading your firmware, or debugging hardware/software integration issues. Otherwise you get trapped in vendor-fingerpointy hell.

Another good reason to stick with RHEL is that they do a very good job of maintaining compatibility between minor releases. You're pretty much guaranteed to be able to install a third-party package across all minor releases. If it installed on 6.0, odds are it will install and work on 6.4 without issue. Others make no such guarantees.

RHEL has way, way better (and accurate) documentation than any other distro I've used, particularly when it comes to unattended installations and server configuration tuning. Other distributions tend to focus much more on desktop users than massive server installations and their particular needs.

It's a common complaint among people that RHEL is always too far behind the curve in terms of software packages. But really, your OS will be stale the day after you install it, much like a car loses so much of its value the day you drive off the lot. Freshness is a tempting siren, but can lead you onto the rocks.

If you're a sane implementor, you're going to stick with any distribution you choose over the course of several years. You will favor uniformity over freshness, and stability over constant (and arguably needless) work. And no matter what distribution you choose, you are very likely to roll your own packages of whatever software is critical to your business, as you'll need custom patches and so forth.
yep...Its an unsecured loan. Student loan is the next crisis waiting to happen. Also, in case of Booth School MBAs, I hear (from friends), that students are charged something like 4% extra...since statistics show 4% of people typically default on MBA loans.
Well, not all people coming from those backgrounds can work in those fields, so one has to be careful.

Many can and are glad to come to to tech/startup worl, though. Indeed some (many?) financial companies/hedge funds are really just software companies in disguise and have great folks working for them.
"During the development of Common Lisp from 1982 on it was immediately implemented on all kinds of machines: especially on Unix, Windows and Macs."

We are both sweeping across history in the same manner, since obviously there were no Macs or Windows machines in 1982, and thus no immediate development for such machines.
Or rather, we are both creating a sketch. Mine, I admit is quick and contains convenient anthromophization.

Commercialization of Lisp was largely focused on Lisp machines. There was no TurboLisp for the upcoming generation of programmers. It never made its way into the mainstream before the internet revolution, and was, as you point out increasingly fragmented (and under financed) by the mid 1990's.
Sure, but how can they possibly know anything about a site that does not includes their Javascript or make any calls to their API?
That's just what it signals to you. To others it signals a healthy environment. If you have a problem with it I seriously suggest you take it up with your management, but I very much doubt that their thought process was anywhere close to the one you describe. If it was they'd be shooting themselves in the foot deliberately.
It was just as terrible then as it is now.
That seems extreme. Why not open your e-mail and social networks in incognito/private windows? Personally, I use a browser add-on to remove trackers, but I realise that isn't 100% foolproof.
You remind me of the guy who made up a t-shirt that said something like "I survived snow-pocalypse". He slapped it together and got it online really quickly, it went viral (in part because he jumped on it, as it was a time sensitive item), and he made a good chunk of change in short order. When asked, he indicated he had longstanding experience with both making t-shirts and doing stuff online.

So, yes, he did it "in a weekend" (in a day or two, though I don't know if it was literally Saturday and Sunday). But there was many years of prior experience which helped make that possible.
While this is awesome and powerful, it ends up being quite annoying. And Ghostery does not seem to miss anything, it blocks everything it should block, and allows everything it should allow. Just perfect.
Yes, that's right... Electric cars are generally cheaper per mile to run.

But power rates vary wildly all over the place, so your running cost and mine might be a factor of 2x-3x different.

For us in california, normal PG&E rates go up to $0.30/KWh and beyond in an average household (they are tiered like income tax rates are).

But with an electric car, you are eligible for a time-of-use metering plan, where night-time (12 midnight to 7am) is very cheap -- $0.05-$0.09 per KWh -- but weekday daytime in the summer is painful at ~$0.50 per KWh. So if you remember to set a timer to charge at night, it's cheap!

You can look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing and sort the table by pricing to get a sense of the huge variance in electricity costs around the world.
I'm almost certain that RottenTomatoes will display your name if you're logged in to Facebook, regardless of whether you've given them permission.

I remember being disturbed when I saw that recently, and immediately sought out and installed a social widget blocker.
quote: At 42Floors, we’ve made the decision not to use any visitor identification tools...

facts (detected by a ghostery at 42floors.com):
ClickTale, Facebook Connect, Google +1, Google Analytics, MixPanel, Optimizely, Twitter Button
The site does include their Javascript.

So I signed up for a demo account and installed (and hastily removed) the tracker
Can someone provide a regex that would identify this tracker? I'd like to run it through our index and see if I can come up with a list of sites that employ it.
What is S&B?
I think that our pricing models for media are vestigial remnants of an era that suffered from a distribution problem.

When I buy a $15 kindle ebook that is from a publishing house vs a $2 kindle ebook that is self published, I have a sense that the artist in both instances gets a similar amount of money - that is to say, the publishing house is what is making that book expensive.

Same with music. The cost of production and distribution is close to zero, with a hobbyist grade audio set up and a laptop one could produce an album the same as anyone else and with decades old P2P software distribute it for free to the globe.

So when artists sell their art for a fair price - $2/3 for an ebook, $4/5 for an album, I'll buy it. When prices go beyond that its usually because a big distributor is involved and I don't mind just pirating the content.

Same with TV. I pay for Netflix and Hulu and I go to theaters. If you withhold your content from those services, or it doesn't warrant a $40 theatre experience, I just pirate it. Also, sometimes I want to watch some TV shows on the go, so I'll pirate something available via Hulu and store it on a device for later consumption.

So really it has nothing to do with copyright, just that I feel that their pricing is out of control and piracy has been made mainstream and easy enough that I don't mind piracy to fill in the gaps to the services I subscribe to.
what is the purpose of your comment?
It's a fair question and one that I asked myself. If the entire service is a fake, then it is an extremely elaborate one because the name and emails of the individuals it did indentify (which I noted was a small percentage) were real.
HubSpot (and pretty much any other marketing automation tool) has this feature, too. They lookup company name and location by IP address and build an anonymous "prospect" record representing each visitor so that salespeople and marketers can detect whether prospects from a given company are hitting the site for information.

The second a prospect submits a web form, all that previous web activity is tied to their email address (and any other info you collected via the form). You now have a real lead.

I don't see any privacy issues with this.

What I would see an issue with is if the tracking company were sending the IP address and cookie back to a central database to query "Does anyone _else_ know who this visitor is?" and then provide PII any company who uses the tracking service.

The moment you start giving my PII to a company that I didn't voluntarily give it to is when I feel a line has been crossed.
> a purpose other than profitable retail of their service

To be clear, Google Fiber aims to be profitable:

http://gigaom.com/2012/07/26/the-economics-of-google-fiber-a...
It's very easy to do in NAT'ed environments and the Linux kernel doesn't implement the suggestion of the RFC draft to include timestamps too.

An attacker who doesn't want to do a MITM attack because that might be noticed can set up sessions to all kinds of servers outside the NAT which support TFO. Then all these TFO cookies are used in spoofed SYN packets with the source IP being set to the host behind the NAT that the attacker wants to flood. Easy enough.
On starting a company alone
Forgiven debt is taxable as ordinary income and the lender will send you a form 1099 for it, but in the case of principal forgiveness plans where "you agreed to a loan provision requiring you to work in a certain profession for a specified period of time, and you fulfilled this obligation," that is not taxable as income.

Source: http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/The-Mortgage-Forgiveness-Debt...
0xDB - Experimental Movie Database
Anatomy of a knockout
How do services like this make money (or at least cover their costs)?
In Debian stable it will probably arrive in about two years in the next Debian (8.0, jessie).
Some require cookies to be enabled (Facebook I know does), so they networks won't let you log in in a private mode.
What I mean by this is others have a better structured, more solid & easily extendable code base, better separation between presentation and logic, etc.. Obviously, this is somewhat of an opinion, and it only refers to the underlying structure. For the end user, WordPress is probably the best. A large part of this is due to its ecosystem of plugins and themes. You shouldn't need to build custom code on top of WordPress unless you are doing something very unique, building an application (as opposed to a "website"), or attempting to tie together several plugins.

Sticking with PHP, both http://modx.com/ and http://www.silverstripe.org/ are fairly popular and well-built. I've also heard good things of http://www.concrete5.org/ , http://www.movabletype.com/ , http://textpattern.com/ , and http://ellislab.com/expressionengine . http://habariproject.org/en/ has also been built specifically to address many of the faults in WordPress and other popular systems.
This is a great idea! Although I'd prefer if the generation form was the center of attention in that page. On my 14" MacBook display I had to scroll down to see it.

Reminds me of an unicode lorem ipsum I came across some time ago which I forgot the name of. Anyone know it?
At the Ivies, Asians are the new Jews
Perhaps I'm being dense here, but the blog post says he signed up for the demo AFTER getting an email that included a "snapshot" of visitors.
According to the sales rep, their tracking capability goes far beyond ip lookup. It explicitly involves saving form data from site A and sharing that personal information with site B.
That will be more difficult if you've got a cluster of servers in which each new connection request of a client can end up at any of these servers at any given time. So the keys would have to be rotated simultaneously for all servers in the cluster.
> What I would see an issue with is if the tracking company were sending the IP address and cookie back to a central database to query "Does anyone _else_ know who this visitor is?" and then provide PII any company who uses the tracking service.

That appears to be exactly what's happening. The email mentions "access to our entire network of identified data ([...] we can identify any visitor [...] if that person has filled out a web form from any other website we are tracking)".
Well, isn't the scenario you would take issue with exactly what is happening here? From the article: "For example, if [a visitor] went to XYZ.com and filled out a web form and then [the visitor] later visited 42floors.com, [42Floors] would be able to identify [the visitor] by name/email as well as company details even though [the visitor] never filled out a web form on [42Floors.com]."
carddrop.com (currently in beta but I can get you an invite)
[disclaimer: I'm the co-founder]
Wonder if it still applies, story is almost 18 months old.
Skull & Bones
I found NIAttributedLabel to work quite nicely for this and it's pretty straightforward.
Curious what your friends say/think about the fake fb name as the main value of facebook comes from connecting with your friends..
> So the MPG rating is based on the power plant emissions per mile's worth of energy consumed by the vehicle and comparing that with gasoline emissions?

This sentence appears to be very, very confused. It's not based on emissions at all. It's not energy per mile. And it's not MPG, but MPGe.

"MPGe" is "Miles Per Gasoline Equivalent", and is not MPG. This is an odd historical measure of engine efficiency which stems from early attempts to shoehorn natural gas vehicles into CAFE standards. For purposes here, I believe what the EPA did is take the energy contained in one gallon of gasoline (33.7 kW-hr) and computed how many miles an electric vehicle would go when consuming that amount of energy put into its battery. It's useful for comparing electric vehicles to electric vehicles, but not useful for comparing across different kinds of propulsion.

What you probably want is Miles per Dollar. This would have to be computed both for your gas car and your electric car, and has to be computed based on the cost of gasoline in your area, the efficiency of your two cars, and the cost of night electricity (most utilities have night-consumption plans for electric vehicles).

But my understanding is: at present most people see their electric vehicles costing about 1/3 per mile of a gas vehicle. That doesn't take into consideration the generally lower costs of maintenance as well (gas engines are complex).
Polycom and Aastra from my experience. Well built and great speaker phones.