skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not simply about landing pages that confuse a user or sub-optimal user experiences (redirects and other confusing changes to the interface).

Look at the verticals that pay a huge amount for lead generation in the desktop space: insurance, online education, health & wellness supplements, various medical/legal portals, etc.

These high-paying marketing verticals need people to fill out full forms to get the most out of their leads. In addition, having a full experience through the desktop allows users to click on subsequent links for more information so they gain trust before filling out information or signing up for a website. You simply can't get this whole experience on mobile, and until that problems is solved, you won't see anyone doing crazy volume in the marketing world on mobile for those high-paying verticals.
I think college, aside from a few useful things you learn and problems with student debt - if nothing else is a good education for playing a game (and learning some discipline). You have rules and constraints - structure. You can determine what the point of the game is.

For example, the point could be - to get the most A's (high marks) with the least amount of effort and the most free time left over for fun. You don't have to take school itself seriously, but it is similar to a career where it pays to play the game.
My comment was really about the technical feasibility, but I can see that's not obvious if you're not already thinking it.
A terrific popular article on the evolution of whales
No, if your MVP is a total throwaway that you're using solely to validate a hypothesis, and once/if it's validated you'll be redoing everything.

Yes otherwise.

My experience with TDD is that the cost/benefit curve doesn't really pay off until you need to refactor or significantly expand a project, at which point having good test coverage saves you an enormous amount of time/pain.
Google Doodle: In memory of the Delhi braveheart
> So putting pressure on international bodies to enforce crippling sanctions should count, right?

You really want that moral equivalence, don't you? OK, OK, Bill Clinton is Literally Stalin. Next, we equate Gandhi and Pol Pot. Happy?
The whole US government tried to ban encryption wholesale in the 1990s; they even attempted to standardize a bespoke algorithm (Skipjack) that provided key escrow for law enforcement. During the same period, they religiously enforced export controls that classified any encryption code, including simple hash functions, as munitions. I remember buying a "this t-shirt is a munition" shirt in '95 by giving a website the numbers off the bottom of a check(!).

The government lost (although export controls still create annoyances today). Nobody in government seriously thinks industry is ever going to adopt a government-controlled encryption algorithm. Also, this isn't part of some secret history of the Internet; the entire cipherpunk movement was a reaction to the attempt to ban crypto.

If you want to keep perspective, it's important to remember that the world of 1993 looked very different from that of 2012. Very few people believed that every teenager in America would be using the Internet as their first line of communication, or that the Internet would steadily consume retail, finance, media, and even industrial controls. Commercial cryptography itself was merely nascent; "cryptography 2.0", a trend of the late 90s, introduced authenticated cryptography to the mainstream (prior to that people just encrypted and added checksums) --- look at SSHv1 and PGP for representative designs. Nobody understood anything in 1993.

Also:

Sense of Congress resolutions don't create law. They're literally just statements of opinion. So the idea that this amendment would have "outlawed SSH" is directly mistaken.

And, the targeting of cryptography in this language is incidental. It was not only the "sense of Congress" but actual law that telco providers create facilities to enable (warranted) wiretaps --- that's CALEA, which passed in 1994. Biden's sense-of-Congress resolution is essentially just a capsule summary of CALEA made to sound slightly smarter with the word "plaintext".
This statement is profoundly ignorant on many levels, including the relationship between Obama and Biden, Biden's relationship to '90s crypto regulation, and Obama's take on the 4th amendment.

Let's try to catalog the misconceptions here:

* Biden is not a key Obama influencer. The VP rarely is, but this one in particular.

* Obama's tensions with the 4th Amendment stem from counterterrorism and a desire to continue joint NSA/FBI programmatic surveillance systems that they believe are catching terrorists. At the time Biden proposed this language, we were still subsidizing those same terrorists.

* Biden was not the point person for '90s anti-crypto legislation.

* Biden was a cosponsor of CALEA, which actually explicitly exempts providers from decrypting encrypted content.
I think this is a bad idea - salaries paid to different fields are a good (although imperfect) way of measuring the value of those skills to society.

If we subsidize education towards less valuable skills at the expense of the most valuable, we end up discouraging people from going into the most needed professions.
I most certainly agree! Music to my ears as I teach basic mathematics to adults. Probably near your 'pre-Calc' courses, but with an empirical and less abstract focus here in the UK.

What I was getting at (and my not have explained clearly in my first comment) was the importance of a teacher who could inspire confidence in the student, in this case Dave Winer.
Has it occurred to the advertards that perhaps one of the reasons behind the rush to mobile/tablet devices is that the user experience is SO MUCH BETTER without the insanity that is the advert-polluted desktop internet? After all, $12 million / month from in-app purchases (CSR Racing, http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/15/natural-motion/) suggests that the money is out there.

No, I think it probably has not. We're just page-views to be commoditized to most of these jerks.
Because criminals won't find a way.
Silicon Valley is not a thing with opinions. You can't call an inanimate object wrong in this way. What you meant to say was, "I believe a College education is important." But that title isn't inflammatory and eye catching.

Anyway, I think the greater argument isn't, "Drop out of college and become Bill Gates." It's "College tuition prices have gotten so out of hand that it might no longer be worth what you pay for."

Going to a private 4 year can easily cost you more than 100k. With 100k and the right motivation, you can start any number of businesses and teach yourself more about entrepreneurship than you could have in a 4 year business program and you have the chance of it making you money instead of just being a purchase.
An Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning
Yes it does.

I'm the same and have signed up to a fair few but never hear anything back. I may be a sceptic but if I ever get a chance to put my first and last names in I always use the name of the company/website to see if my email address gets sold...

Only asking because I'm thinking of doing the same for a product of mine but don't want to annoy anyone!
Silicon Valley is not a thing that can have opinions. He's just being inflammatory.
I have to disagree with this. It's probably true that e-commerce checkout processes are less optimized on mobile than on desktop, but that doesn't have a huge bearing on ad rates.

The majority of all ad spending is for brand awareness campaigns, not direct response. That's why CPMs for TV spots are still higher than both desktop banners and mobile banners even though TV has no checkout process. The prices are driven by Coca-Cola's spending, not ShamWow's spending. Also, desktop banner CPMs have been going up lately because of the new agency trading desks like Cadreon, Vivaki, and Xaxis. They are helping brands finally buy more digital ads because it's a lot more complicated and fragmented than buying TV, radio, or print.

Also, mobile usage is exploding right now. It makes sense that prices would be low while supply is growing faster than demand. Over time, the usage will level off and the ad dollars will catch up. I think the CPMs then will be a much better judge of the effectiveness of mobile ads, and I think they will be driven by how well brands can engage with consumers through mobile devices.
Busybox + Ash is far from typical for a desktop Linux distribution. It is on the other hand exceedingly common for embedded Linux, and has been for well over a decade.
If you have coding chops, check out the API for that https://github.com/lefnire/habitrpg/wiki/API
History of APIs: ProgrammableWeb
42?

Really?

What was the question again?
The Unix philsophy works great, because it allows you to pipe data from one program to another, and thus build something that you want from primitives.

Now I wonder, how can a Unixified browser combine with other shell programs in a meaningful way?

Without having tried it, I'd expect all of the controll stuff (actual browsing experience, ad blocker, bookmarker) to be written specifically for this browser. Is that correct?
Search country domains using Google
I don't understand how college helps "low information voters". I would guess those people don't go to college or can't afford it anyway.

If you want to help educate people, make it free or almost free, like Khan or startups in the Valley are trying to do.
It doesn't make sense to go to college when everything you learn in college can be learned in a book. Also, some subjects just can't be taught in classrooms-- Foreign languages for example, is pretty dismal in colleges. I've yet to meet someone who actually speaks a foreign language who studied for nearly 8 years in high school and college. Education is evolving and we shouldn't cling on to this archaic method of learning when there are plenty of better ways to learn.
Es not working señor..
The lead-generating scumbags need to be clamped down on, hard. When a phone service provider sells YOUR customer data to the highest bidding lead-generator, you'll agree with me.

Telefonica - you are scum, and you've lost as many customers as I can talk to.
Top Programming Languages of 2012 (HN Poll)
You need to filter out directory entries.

find -type f -ls|awk '{s += $7} END {print s}'
find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 wc -c | tail -1
find -type f -exec wc -c {} + | tail -1
This statement would make sense if you could provide examples of (at the time) younger Senators who actively opposed crypto regulation so we could compare their track records as well.
Freckle's earning the better part of $400k/yr… not sure how that's "somewhat less." Did 30x500 bring in the same money as Freckle in 2012? Yeah, but that's after a lot of neglect of Freckle… which we're rectifying.[1]

Infoproducts are no less hard than software products, by the by… not if you put in the effort to make good ones. They're faster, yes, but not easier. It's not merely "sitting down and writing words" any more than creating good software is merely "sitting down and typing code."

Also, developers are not my audience (for Freckle). I doubt there are very many of "us" (Hacker News types) who use Freckle.

[1] (And the neglect of Freckle was due to focus on Charm, not my infoproduct biz. Which, on the balance, was a mistake, but boy did I learn from it!)

EDIT:

> And what's worse is it feels like the only people we hear about finding success are those that are selling to us.

That's because you don't venture out of your comfort zone. Naturally, the people you hang out with are the people you'll hear from. I, otoh, belong a lot of different, even weird communities, and I know people making a fantastic living off Wordpress plugins, design themes, social media how-to videos, healthy & super simple cooking classes, etc. I recently met a lady who grosses 7 figures a year on dog agility training products. (She's a respected industry expert; we're not talking Teach Your Parrot to Talk here.)

Get out of your comfort zone / fishbowl and it won't be so "weird."
It was the official, overt policy of the Clinton administration through the 1990s.

I'm curious as to which amendments you refer to that "attack Internet freedom" in the guise of catching Internet predators.
This is the basic problem for making GNU/Linux a user-friendly desktop environment - too many moving parts. GNU/Linux is complicated enough to say but it is actually an oversimplification - an average Linux install is actually Linux/GNU + multiple non-GNU system utlities & scripting languages/X/GTK + Qt + XUL + one or more of Tk, Wx, FOX etc./desktop manager[s] of your choice.

Commercially successful end-user Unices (Android and OS X/iOS) have not proceeded as Unity and Gnome3 are, by trying to reduce the existing complexity from above. Instead, they have burned most of it to the ground and started over.

Trying to simplify the existing system by brute force is really not a strategy that is bound to work well. You'll probably never get things simple enough, you'll break things along the way, not to mention cheesing off existing users.

Then again, burning everything to the ground has its own problems (see Netscape 4) especially if your team is geographically scattered, mostly part-time or volunteer.

I really do not know what the right answer is, but I think the question I have in mind when I use Linux is very different from the question that Ubuntu and Gnome are asking. Mostly I'm happy that my new Debian stable installation still comes with Gnome 2 out of the box.
> Maybe a one-off misuse could be caught, but if you see multiple instances of British English in a text block, maybe you can assume the writer intends it to be that way?

Ah. No. This is clearly in Full-On Prescriptivist Peeving Mode, which means The Author Is WRONG!!!! (Yes, all of those exclamation points are required.) It's fundamentally more important to hew to the dictates of someone who thinks English must needs be used according to the rules of Latin than it is to express yourself in a clear and concise fashion. Anyone who disagrees would likely use the non-words 'Electrocution' or 'Television'.
Hidden Secret of Notepad
On a related note, I found this ebook ("Mindfulness in Plain English") an interesting read, clearing misconceptions about meditation and how it is related to mindfulness.

http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html
There were websites where people could transfer a short program from inside the US to outside the US, and then sign a petition to say they had done so.

(http://online.offshore.com.ai/arms-trafficker/)

(http://www.cypherspace.org/rsa/)
Holler.js updated: real-time refreshes & redirects
It looks like holler.js was just updated to allow for real-time redirects & page refreshes for all users via the command line. This is in addition to the original in-app alert functionality. Clever node usage...
Seems like the strategy is 1) do some standard business that makes a standard amount of money, 2) convince people you can make money, being "transparent" by offering a bunch of upward-trending income graphs, 3) write a book about how you did step 1, 4) rinse and repeat.

To me it'd be most interesting to learn about step 2, or "how to build a community willing to pay you to follow in your footsteps". I've tried it before but couldn't find the right balance between helpful and sales-y.
Twitpic blocked by Chrome, Firefox as malware
I'm skeptical of many "don't go to college" arguments, but this is one worth evaluating based on career preferences and personal/financial circumstances.

Myself, I am fortunate in that my choice of career (software industry) remains quite lucrative in the midst of a recession. My wife was not so lucky, in that the crash of '08 precipitated a slow decline of her industry. I am also fortunate that, prior to landing a stable career, my parents were both willing and able to help me out with my student loans, or with first & last month rent.

Sadly I think at age 17 - 18, I am not sure anyone would've been able to make me truly understand how all the trade-offs I was making. For one thing, I made my choice of college (and ostensibly career) in the late '90s, a relatively prosperous period. Maybe I would've chosen differently in a recession. For another, I don't think I had any concept of how hard student loans could and would bite.
That doesn't work for me, but sending USR1 does.
I think I need to learn about hardware design.

I hope we don't end up like gaming console ecosystem: developer machines cost 3x-10x what a consumer version
That's what we do where I work. If someone wants money back, all they have to so is ask, and it will be done, with no hard feelings and they will be welcome back if they ever change their mind.

Do a chargeback, and they go on the "never do business with this person again" list.
Good to hear that.

I posted this because I was interested in the role of the College mathematics teacher who was able to give Dave Winer confidence that he could understand the subject, and that confidence boosted Winer's belief in his abilities in other areas. I suspected there was a degree of rhetoric in the post.

http://threads2.scripting.com/2012/december/siliconValleyIsW...

This comment is interesting (ELGG is an important sharing tool with educational applications)
Use this to learn vim:
http://learnvimscriptthehardway.stevelosh.com

The parent's site offers nothing productive, in fact I think it causes more confusion with it's terrible UI, terrible content and erratic layout. I feel bad for being so critical, but resources like this are why learning vim was so hard in the first place. Why, when I click on the gigantic "Learn Vim Now" text, am I not directed to some actual learning resources?
That line is unfortunate, however he does make some good points in the article. My experience is that private universities tend to cater more to the individual than to the needs of society at large. Countries with free college education are different in that respect. You could argue that one is better than the other, and that catering to the individual helps society indirectly. Of course, that's a longer discussion.
But Brennan is selling a class teaching what he used to do -- consulting -- not what he's currently doing. And he had a $1m/yr consulting biz without any products at all. I understand your feelings, but the facts don't match them.
Amazon is not a commerce company
Didn't Albert Einstein and his generation lived through two revolutions in physics?

The problem with your idea is that history is changing constantly(and more so these days). What we come to believe in one decade will probably change drastically in the next decade as we accumulate new experience.
RHEL, CentOS, and Amazon Linux for servers.

Fedora on my workstation for development, I'm more comfortable with the administration since the tools are similar to RHEL. I prefer to use a separate mac laptop for VOIP, video chat and powerpoint/keynote, and whatever else.
Here's a thread from Chrome's support forum about the case: https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/c...
This has nothing to do with nodejs or any hype around it. Read the parent's comments on why he built this.
I think I could've also gone to a state school and come out with less debt. Ultimately it worked out, but I have to imagine there are plenty of people for whom it did not work out. Even if your degree is worthless in practice (because of circumstance, career, etc), at least you be paying out hundreds of dollars each month for loans.
Ubuntu 12.10 and Fedora (16 I think).
"In fact I usually like to TYZCMZQ when I'm not VJBDTLJX-ing!"
You would risk a system wherein only the most affluent could afford to study CS. And there's already some inequality in terms of unpaid internships, although I am not sure how the software industry compares to other industries in this regard.
Raspbery Pi as a home file server (SAMBA+NTFS)
> That's why CPMs for TV spots are still higher than both desktop banners and mobile banners even though TV has no checkout process.

TV advertising has high CPMs because the results are hard to measure and executives like seeing their ads on TV. It's old school. There's also very little supply compared to online--you may like seeing your ad run during Sunday Night Football but that only happens 16 times a year. Facebook has more eyeballs than that every day.
The idea that education will address the problem of the low information voter is nonsensical.

The probability of your vote affecting the outcome is too low to be represented in double precision arithmetic (last time I did the calculation). Therefore, you have no incentive to vote correctly.

Even if education gives you the tools to become a high information voter, why would you bother? Just vote for whichever candidate gives you $0.01 worth of self congratulation about not being a racist, having good family values, or whatever.
War is often vary 'hands on' for at least one civilian population. Did William Tecumseh Sherman decide to burn your barn? Well now you care about tactics.
The problem here is that it's not just a Chrome Developer account, it's a Google account. There may well be an automated process to lockout users that owe them money.

Steam has a similar flaw. If you file a chargeback on any game you purchase then you'll be locked out of every game you ever 'bought' until you resolve the issue.
Ubuntu on my desktop. I can also boot to Debian on my desktop, and have a number of VM images for various distros. Android ICS on my tablet. Bluehost, Dreamhost and EC2 are my servers. Dreamhost uses Debian and Ubuntu. On EC2, I've spun up the Amazon micro AMI and Ubuntu AMIs. Bluehost has a custom CentOS fork.
If you don't mind me asking, why so far behind?
For my site I have seen an increase in mobile every single month for the past two years. About two months ago it tipped to 50% being mobile (tablets included).

Also, like the linked article, the CPMs I see for mobile are pathetic in comparison to desktop.
>The problem is Google is trying to approach other industries the same way they have with Search: If it can't be solved by a group of engineers and a rack-full of servers, it shouldn't be solved.

Is that a problem, though? If people in a particular market segment value high quality low cost services over accessible customer support, the strategy succeeds. If customers in that market segment value accessible customer service enough to pay extra for it, it fails when another competitor comes in to provide that and takes all the customers.

But what Google is providing seems to be what most customers want most of the time: People bitch about bad customer service when something goes wrong, but they still choose the free service over the paid one pretty much knowing that that will be the case going in.

The market decided that what Google is doing is what people prefer. The general population could have a change of heart and decide to start patronizing companies with better customer service who charge correspondingly more, but they probably won't.
I think it's ok to go without tests at the start of your project, but at some point you have to transition to using TDD, otherwise the ability to refactor the codebase or change existing features becomes difficult and time-consuming.

To give a rough idea, I spent ~ 2 1/2 months working on my app (Dashku.com) before I wrote a single test for it. Then when a company approached and asked to use it with a special requirement, I realised it needed tests in order to be deemed production-worthy. Now the app has tests (both unit and integration), and I'm now resuming adding features to the product.
Mahindra XUV 500 petrol variant in the pipeline
The funny thing is, if there was a laconic (in the original sense) history of the world, the theme would be similar.
Does that make this less important...? Would you like a timestamp?
It's currently on the front page here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4986471
I don't know, it seems to me they're focusing a lot on automation (to reduce costs, among other things).
I just haven't made the time to update my own machine. My students are running 12.04.