skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yep. In the past month or so, I've been conditioned not to click on Quora links for disappointment-avoidance.

"Oh, look at that, someone had my exact problem on Quora!"
...
"Fuck this nonsense, I'm going back to Stack Exchange/Google."

...Which then prompts this response: http://xkcd.com/979/ The answer might as well be that far away.

This drives me up a wall. I hate it when websites try to restrict their readership so brazenly.

On the one hand, I respect that the website has the authority and right to control its own information. On the other hand, it was submitted by a collective pool of users, and I just don't have the time to bother with side-stepping the shitty blurring mechanism. I just learned not to click on Quora links anymore.
Keep in mind that most of our costs are also not bandwidth. Our primary costs are the servers, our CDN, backups, and operations. Bandwidth is just one small piece.
He answers that question from someone in the audience at about 55:25 in this Google Tech Talk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms4NIB6xroc
I dunno... there's plenty of mosaic and stained glass art that would seem to point to a world in which hi-fidelity representational art isn't the total end of art.
In Defense of Heroku
How to Get 100 Leads in 30 Days
The only thing I mentioned that did not take place in Israel was the departure from Frankfurt. Everything else happened at Ben Gurion.
Very nice.
It'd also be cool to see a pseudo-3D web page using this technology to track the X and Y position of the face.
Honestly, it needs a lot of work. It will recommend VPS/Dedicated stuff as well if you mark any of the check boxes. It's been a big issue trying to figure out how to automatically recommend what type of hosting someone needs. The majority of the visitors to the site need shared hosting and don't know it. So it caters to them for the most part. The underlying assumption is developers know what kind of hosting they are looking for on a macro level and can get straight to the data. But maybe that's not entirely true?

I am very open to new ideas and suggestions to improve it.
Maybe I'm the exception but I really like the new "download this app" banners. Much less intrusive than the standard splash screens and integrating them with the OS makes sense.
Couldn't agree more. I remember the first time I flew in 1998. I was more scared of the takeoff than actually going through security.
x.com was originally PayPal, so eBay owns the domain once they acquired them.
> I had some thought to start my own business until I have found out that: In Iran once you go to register an LLC you have to have business office – you are not allowed to work from home – you are not allowed to have an online business without a business office located elsewhere other than your home and some years of doing business under your belt [paradox] , It has to be in a trade center. And I do not have that amount of money to have one.

I may be missing something here -- but, why do you have to incorporate? Don't, and then you won't have to have an office.
Adobe CEO flatly refuses  Australian price questions [video]
Thousand word ideas, hundred word ideas
Hmm ... it seems like it's a replay of the web circa the late 90s. http://boston.conman.org/2013/02/07.1
U.S. senators introduce high-skill immigration bill in nod to Silicon Valley
Thanks for the explanation (it would seem that I was replying to you while you were writing this). I do have one question though about concentration objects. I think I have an idea of what you mean by this. I wonder if you have any advise about how to go about diversifying your set concentration objects. I can appreciate intellectually that you could have this be anything, but my meditation practice (somewhat stagnant as of late) has relied upon ritual to a great extent. For example, I have found really only two sitting positions that work for getting settled down. Similarly, I have found it very difficult to stay awake if I try to meditate after eating, since I tend to get drowsy, so I have a ritual of doing this before dinner on weekends. Similarly, there are a few sensation rituals, which I can associate with your concentration objects, that help me maintain awareness of my environment once I get settled in. I could give other examples but I hope you get the point. I arrived at these rituals in an empirical matter, and I see them purely practical mechanisms to achieve some effect, so I am happy to do away with them if it would be beneficial, but I would like to hear your thoughts about how to do so without regressing into a chaos of stimulation.
We went back to other investment firms that we had also received term sheets from prior to committing to Benchmark, but after Benchmark pulled out, the news spread and we had the scarlet letter, or maybe the scarlet zero.

This is why VC-istan is dead. (Not actually dead, but "Microsoft is dead" dead.)
A cheat-sheet of webkit-font-smoothing properties
Massive Google Play Privacy Issue
I did say potentially

In this case no it is not a small company, but I have seen people sign up to things with random email addresses that did map to small-time company domains.

Just be a nice guy, avoid the risk and use example.com is what I am trying to say.
Haven't been there lately, but I don't think that "for Dummies" is entirely what is there. It isn't a great technical bookstore, but I have seen some good books in the computer science section (even if the books aren't that computer-scientific).
Economic reasons != money problems. It seems possible that there's a long-term strategic change going on.
Let me just quote one bit of that:

Our service was free as we were working out the business model. We actually had a genius business model but hadn’t implemented it yet. We wanted more users so we spent money on marketing.

Maybe the real problem wasn't the insurance?
Patent troll insurance skirts the line of being just as bad as patent trolls themselves: "Pay us some money and maybe you won't get hit by patent trolls." It's a great idea, but when I look at it closer, it looks pretty similar to trolling: "Pay us a little bit of money and we'll go away." It's not quite that bad, because it adds on "...and we'll make other people go away," but it's still interestingly close.
Exactly. If we're being rational we should look at what's been pulling in the majority of their money and what's projected to be in 5-10 years. I have a feeling steam is at or near the top and will be the top. Enabling others to power consoles on Steam makes sense, producing more video games makes less sense.

Valves games are becoming vehicles that consumers can use to create more games and sell through valve. If/when HL3 sees the light of day, its innovation will be to better emphasize this.
Random observation:

You're "We're helping" counter currently shows 1,444,500 and counting. I clocked it increasing at approximately 16/second. That would mean it would hit 1,382,400 in a day. Which means it just started yesterday? Or does it just reset after 24 hrs or something?
"submit a patch and hope that it gets applied in the next few years."

What are you talking about?

Comment #5 From Morten Stenshorne 2013-02-13 00:01:06 PST
Created an attachment (id=188026)

12 hours and 12 minutes later:

Comment #11 From WebKit Review Bot 2013-02-13 12:13:22 PST
Clearing flags on attachment: 188026
With the proper image analysis technology it should work, right?
Core Data lets you set up a schema progammatically. There no real need to design a .momd schema with the Xcode editor if you don't want to.

I heartily recommend Core Data. It just works the way you expect it to: it's transactional, it's got undo, it fits right into the bindings system, it supports custom serialization, extensive validation, persistent objects are real ObjC objects, and so on.
Fair points.

I find this whole thing confusing and shocking. It's really unclear that their strategic goal is.
Fn.py: enjoy Functional Programming in Python
jWebAudio - JavaScript Web Audio Library Designed For Games
Fifty states with equal population
And children. Let's not forget the children here.
scrape quora's content and share
From the website under Judging - section b:

<quote>
Judges will determine the number and amount of monetary prizes. Judges may determine that no prize will be awarded.
</quote>

I've created a web-based calendaring and scheduling system that integrates with a number of cloud services including google calendar. It also works offline and provides a solid foundation for a lot of what they are asking for.

I'm passionate about calendaring and scheduling, and I've been heavily involved in this space for a long time. However, I just can't bring myself to task switch to this and risk 4 months of evenings and weekends when a judge could determine that no prize is to be awarded - or award some small pittance.

In my spare time I'm building a new product to spawn a new division in the fortune company I'm working for. My chances for providing a good stable life for my wife and children are far better at my current employer.

It saddens me to pass on this.
Here are two real problems you can tackle for online retailers:

Retailers can often get product data directly from the manufacturer. This is true 100% of the time when the retailer is drop-shipping. The problem isn't really obtaining this data but the canned data you get is pretty worthless. Thousands of online retailers were hit hard by the Panda update (some time ago) because they all used the exact same descriptions provided by the manufacturers. So a lot of time was spent on custom descriptions and "romance copy." If you can find a way to offer unique product descriptions or at the very least somewhat unique then you could save these companies money.

Another problem online retailers face is categorization. Not on their own sites but with mapping their items to the various taxonomies employed by Amazon, Buy.com, Shop.com, PriceGrabber, and so on forever and ever. Find a way to provide the mappings to each of these company's taxonomies and people will pay you. The alternative is doing it all by hand, using a script to cover most of the ground and doing the rest by hand, or by outsourcing it. If I had a service at my finger tips that could have done all that for me when I needed it, I'd have happily recommended it to the boss.

You should charge for these services, of course.
I hope Firefox and IE do the same..Atleast in HTML5 we have common engine...
According to the article their terms give a fee for breaking them - I expect that'd act like an upper bound on what they can get in court. In that case, settling without legal fees would surely be preferable?
If you read the linked post the complaint is that vendors like Apple and the developers of packages like PhantomJS regularly ship versions of WebKit that are months or years out of date. the jQuery dev team could fix every outstanding bug in WebKit and they would still have to ship compatibility hacks in jQuery for years-old builds of WebKit.
They (Benchmark, a top-tier VC) broke a term sheet? That is...not awesome.
Im seeing the same issue on 26.0.1410.3 Mac Chrome
AB is not a particularly smart tool (though it's very handy), but I've never seen it reject as not-accurate any non-baseline sized requests... In fact, I can't imagine the rationale that would lead a benchmarking tool to do so. [Obviously, a testing tool might do so...]
Pixel art like when I was a baby and now it's back in all its flat glory. Yikes. Can't say I don't like making icons with pixels. Cool to make patterns with it.
There are a lot of really talented people working on jQuery, but I'm not sure how many of them have much expertise in fixing rendering engine bugs.
A leatherman is a bit bigger than a pocket knife.
LOL, heroku is not designed for real apps. It's designed for side projects and consulting projects that don't go anywhere.

Anytime you get traffic, move off ASAP!
I think Adam's mistake here is to go too much by the numbers. He presumably has numbers that show that Quora ends up net ahead if they force people to create accounts to read answers. He grew Facebook very effectively by following the numbers. But he may not realize how different this case is from Facebook's. It may well be that for a site like Quora, at this stage in its life, users are not all equal. It may be a mistake to alienate the sort of people Quora has been alienating by doing this, even if they end up numerically ahead in the short term.

I'm one of them. Quora has now spent several years training me to be bummed out every time I click on a link to their site. Every time it happens, I dislike them more, and become more resistant to creating an account. I now think of it as a site for other people, who are willing to put up with the stuff they do. I'm pleased to find there are others like me.

I like Adam, but I wish he'd stop doing this.
Great question. I'm Jeff, with Wevorce. Collaborative Divorce actually started to catch on in the '80s and does some great work. The trouble is that it is more expensive and unstructured. Just coordinating schedules of the various professionals can several hours in fees. That's one of the problems our system fixes. These sorts of issues meant it spread rapidly at first, but has struggle gaining new converts lately.

Actually, most of our mediators (we call them Divorce Architects) come from a Collaborative Law background.
On a very short time scale. DPRK has a colossal amount of heavy artillery sitting just 35 miles from Seoul. To put that in perspective its as if Connecticut had the 4th largest army in the world poised to attack New York City at any time. Its a hostage situation, where DPRK has been holding one of the worlds largest, most prosperous cities with a gun to its head for decades...
It looks like failure to get D&O insurance prevented them from suing a top-tier VC for breaking a term sheet, but it's unclear how wise it is to sue a VC over something like that, anyway.

BTW, if anyone needs commercial insurance for their (California based) business, I've had pretty good experience with http://www.alliedbrokers.com/ Allied Brokers in Palo Alto, so far. Prof liability, D&O, etc. are all things which are probably worthwhile after a >$1mm seed, depending on how litigious your sector is (b2b, particularly).
I suspect people who really want to "protect kids" find a way to do it that doesn't involve greed, lawyers, stupidity, and liberally cursing. Maybe there wouldn't be as much need to protect kids were there fewer people who talked about "getting f*cked" or screwed when talking about kids. Jerk.
You mean the moderators who routinely revert titles to the target page's title when the submitted title is better?
As a long-time Quora user I actually like this and it is one of the main reasons I share so freely on Quora. If I knew anybody could read anything I write via a Google search, I would be much more guarded - and if they suddenly stopped this practice I would put serious thought to deleting all of my answers. But the way they do it preserves a good deal of anonymity.

I don't know if that is their intent, but it's the result.
Show HN: AlienFeed, a Reddit console app
It took me about 5 minutes to install via wine. Looks like no issues but I haven't played with it much.

Getting native linux support would be nice, and I think open-sourcing it has the potential to allow this. Mostly comes down to how the project is run, and if any linux devs get involved.

Until that time, wine seems to work!
Given that the TSA budget is about $7B and that the total intelligence budget is around $50B, that seems a tad high.
How does this compare to phone gap? I wouldn't know about rubymotion since I can't afford it.
Internet Explorer is the last browser standing
Edward Tufte Quote of the Day
The day this happened was the day I stopped contributing to Quora.

I did not delete all my contributions, but almost did.
Hopkins Computer Scientist Students Boycott Final Exam
1. Just because a bug is fixed and accepted doesn't mean it will make it into a shipping browser anytime soon.

2. Even if it were to make it into a shipping browser quickly, there is no guarantee any reasonable amount of people will run that upgrade anytime soon.

Hitting browser bugs really sucks for this reason. The bug has to be worked around no matter what, since there will probably be people running that bug for a long time (this has gotten much better with things like Chrome's auto-update which is why if you talk to people from that team they are such big believers in it). Regardless, you have to remember that the jquery team is providing a product to clients. If a client's site is broken because jquery hits a bug in a browser, the priority is to have that site work asap. Its unacceptable to say "Oh we fixed the bug in webkit, Safari users will see it whenever the new Safari ships which we have no idea when that is since its an apple secret. Bug closed." The best response is "Fixed in new jquery version whatever, just update the script on your site". And once you've fixed the bug for your own concerns, it just doesn't make sense to then spend time fixing it in WebKit as well vs. spending those resources on fixing another jquery bug.
you give them too many rights when you install their app
If men with assault rifles, body armor, grenades, who use military tactics in their operations are not soldiers, what do you call them? The DEA is a paramilitary force, soldiers in all but name.
Can anyone explain why this random routing is supposedly good for Node.JS and Java? I mean the net effect is busy dynos might serve more requests while idle ones remain idle and that is certainly not good for Node.JS or anything. What am I missing?
Google is working on threaded HTML parser for WebKit
Robot rat attacks real rats until they're depressed to test anti-depressants
If you actually care about the data side of your displays I encourage you to put down Tufte and pick up Cleveland.
In Nine Days, the California Money Transmission Act Could Get Even Worse
You should be able to map it to a macro using \set.

# \set foo '(select now())'
# :foo;
?column?
--------
2013-02-14 04:18:23+01

# select count(*) from :foo as foo;
count
-----

Afaik macros just expand inline, do you can embed stuff like \o.
Channel Advisor solves your second problem.
The first problem can be solved with some creative mashups of data, images and videos... plus all you really need is 2-3 sentences to be considered unique content.
Thanks for the question (I'm with Wevorce). I think you're right, that self-selection does contribute to our very high success rate. But the fact is, we definitely see our share of contentious situations and are able to help them too. Since we know that even some of the folks who want an amicable divorce at the beginning are turned hostile by the grind of the traditional system, we don't see self-selection as "a problem." We're happy for amicable divorces anyway they come.

The benefit to our customers goes well beyond signing the papers. There's a strong education and co-parenting/budgeting tool component which, clients tell us, brings way more value than the legal aspect of ending a marriage.
I think I-C was a proxy war. In any given war there are acts of terrorism in that either side in this case (the local proxies of the US) and the adversarial proxy (in the case Cuban/soviet) engaged in some terrorism against the people either side saw as supporters of the opposition. The contras were a coalition of both deposed affiliates and disaffected revolutionaries who switched sides.

I knew someone who was once an optimistic 'internationalist', as they called themselves.

Anyhow, I suppose you could argue that all the soviet-US proxy wars resulted in some terrorism by the local proxies. But we could go further and say that most major wars involved some form of terrorism.
While I generally agree with your thoughts, I also wonder what's the reason for continuing to misrepresent their service until you dig 20 layers deep in docs.
I've seen it frequently, and yes, this is how it behaves, e.g.:

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/579466/94830

[2]: https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=42040

I imagine the rationale was something along the lines of many servers/apps are written to incorrectly return 200 with a descriptive error page rather than 500 or whatever the appropriate status code would be. And at the time ab was first written, pages were a lot more static than they are now, so a different page would be more likely to indicate an incorrect response.
Sorry, but I'll have to disagree. The DEA operates in the criminal realm and doesn't care about health (it only cares about itself, really).

The only drug enforcement we need is an FDA that ensures that what is on the label matches what is in the product itself, and that standards are set for guidance in their use.

If you want to worry about dangerous drugs being available on the streets you should start with alcohol and tobacco.
I don't know, $20k/mo strikes me as an awful lot of money to avoid engaging in work that a scrappy internet startup really ought to be competent at. If you don't know how to run the pipes and they get clogged and your plumber's not picking up the phone, you're screwed.

That amount buys a whole lotta dedicated servers and the talent to run them. (Sidenote: Every time I price AWS or one of its competitors for a reasonably busy site, my eyes seem to pop out at the cost when compared to dedicated hardware and the corresponding sysadmin salary.)

The larger issue is: Invest in your own sysadmin skills, it'll pay off in spades, especially when your back's up against the wall and you figure out that the vendor-which-solves-all-your-problems won't.
Final exam at the end of January? It's the right thing they boycotted, alright?
As others here have pointed out in different discussions: Ideas aren't worth much by themselves. It's the subset that's implementable of which it's the subset that has gotten implemented that's worth anything. If we just love ideas we should better become philosophers.

Sorry to be a bit harsh, but I find it a bit shocking how even in this field where we can basically play god and do whatever we want and what we think is best on increasingly powerful bit-cruncher-and-storer-machines, so many here seem to behave like a herd of sheep and just do what 'everyone else' does. Just sit down for a moment and think! What are my requirements right now? What could be a requirement in the near future? What technologies are there which can help me? Am I sure about these feature? Better read up on it first! How difficult is it to get it to behave in ways that are or can be important for me?

Now list that stuff down. If it's puzzling sleep over it, forget it for a few days. Then suddenly, for example under a hot shower you get an idea - that requirement I had isn't really one, I can solve it differently! Come back, take the now fitting piece of the puzzle and do your job in 20% of the time that would have been needed if you would just have blindly followed some path. That's how it usually works for me. Be picky, be exact, but be lazy.

Now about that routing dispatcher problem: Couldn't we solve that in one to two weeks on a generic plattform, but specifically for a certain use case? Let's say you want to have a worker queue of rails request handlers that work in parallel. Just write that damn router! Maybe I'd be lazy, learn Erlang for a week and think about it afterwards.
My hunch is that Heroku isn't doing this to bleed customers dry. I know more than a few really, really great people who work there, and I don't think they'd stand for that type of corporate bullshittery. If this were the case, I think we'd have heard about it by now.

My best guess is that they hit a scaling problem with doing smart load balancing. Smart load balancing, conceptually, requires persistent TCP connections to backend servers. There's some upper limit per LB instance or machine at which maintaining those connections causes serious performance degredations. Maybe that overhead became too great at a certain point, and the solution was to move to a simpler random round-robin load balancing scheme.

I'd love to hear a Heroku employee weigh in on this.