skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't really like this. I work in the advertising industry and retargeting is honestly one of the most exciting things to come out.

Sure there are ways of cookieless retargeting, but it is a hassle. I mean, everyone's heard of Samy's Evercookie right? Then there are TCP stack signatures, and other companies like a few European DSPs that use cookieless tracking to track a person (IMO it's quite easy to use a GET pixel to actually capture a person's TCP stack).

You can use 3rd party cookies for good and evil. For example, for my personal project, Fork the Cookbook (http://forkthecookbook.com) I'm working on using pixel drops to track how many people fork recipes from embedded recipes (how else would one measure success of an idea). Most analytics softwares like Google Analytics uses 3rd party cookies.

I'm not too sure about evil uses of 3rd party cookies. I do not consider retargeting to be evil. Other stuff like tracking browsing history can be done but it is extremely inefficient, and does not really return much for the amount of time and effort invested into it.

What about PII you ask? Start with drop sites, where people willingly submit their personally identifiable information, and then it's up to the DMPs to actually correlate the data, which can then be used as ad targeting information. As far as I can tell, even with the big hoohaa over companies like Rapleaf, the truth of the matter is that it's very very inefficient so far.

Privacy is simple IMO. Don't submit your information to websites that ask for anything more than what is needed. Banning third party cookies is like using a cannon to shoot a mosquito.
Very few "normal" human beings are highly rational and empathetic; it stands to reason that thieves, trolls, and fraudsters are no different, thus it's not safe to assume that they know everything they're risking or all of the consequences.
Not sure blocking all ads will help the web. All those free sites you visit need to get their money from somewhere.
I blocked third party cookies in Chrome for awhile and finally gave up. It broke a surprising number of things, particularly Disqus embeds. Also the Instapaper bookmarklet although I admit that's a nerdy special case. Hopefully Firefox will have a way to let the user enable the few places where third party cookies are desired. That's a hard user interaction to get right.

(Disqus apparently now works without third party cookies: http://help.disqus.com/customer/portal/articles/466235-enabl...)
This is not just for startup founders. As an employee of a startup you are going to go through major roller-coasters as well. Having very close friends to talk to, and that understand your problems (they might work on similar spaces as well), is crucial. Your parents, your family might not be much help on these cases, as they wont understand or be able to give you good advice.

I have 3 friends that are very close to me, and they know every detail of my life (and so do I of theirs), good or bad. When I do need advice, or they do, we can rely on each other to get some feedback on any thing. But I trust them and I know they will have my back, and they wont divulge my personal details.

People that don't form these type of friendships are missing out. It makes the roller-coaster so much easier, and especially when going through life changing moments (job changed, marriage, breakups, etc).

I might have to add though that I suspect the startup community is full of people that are partially inside the bi-polar spectrum. Sometimes it takes a bit of a mania to start something new or crazy, but that euphoric high is always followed by a depressing low. Adding the uncertain nature of the startups, the emotional rollacoster becomes even more crazy and magnified.

....

....

Addition:
The arm-chair psychologist in me says the author might have had BPD symptoms, (borderline) during his childhood:

"I cried in private, hoping that my cries might just be loud enough for somebody to hear. I hit myself, to create physical pain that might distract from the emotional."
I know why some people interpret such things as detrimental to women. But I am reasonably sure there is no point in commenting further today on that angle.
I think that it is unfortunate that you are in this situation. My close friends of all ages are not all necessarily perfectly comfortable talking to me about their deep-seated fears, but certainly some are. And the others have their confidant.

And certainly a fair bit of the feedback I get from my friends is "stop being lazy and work harder".

But I find that if I get too anxious or worked up, my actual quantifiable performance drops dramatically.

If I used your strategy, I would do worse because I'd be spending more time worrying about failure instead of working hard. Similarly, the anxiety of feeling like it's succeed or die would not make me more likely to succeed, it would make my health worse, definitely my mental health worse, and I'd be more likely to fail. It would be like being stressed out and deciding not to exercise anymore. It's only going to make me more stressed out.

Maybe we're just very different people, but I find anxiety crippling and a huge drain on my ability to do creative work in particular.

For me, knowing that even if I fail at starting my company, it will be much easier to get a good job afterwards being able to demonstrate that I've got the drive and interest to help a company's core mission is very, very helpful. This is the best advice I was given by my friends. Yeah, my company might fail, but every other company will be more likely to hire me to a management or other high level role knowing that I tried, even if I failed. They know a lot of it is luck, and that as long as I can demonstrate that I didn't fail due to massive incompetence or laziness (which will not be a reason I fail at it) it makes me a more valuable potential employee.
There are strong parallels here between the NYT bestseller list and search engine results. Both have 'SEO' like services that are used in an arms race and everybody that refuses to play the game ends up being a loser.

Super to see you succeed in spite of being unwilling to play the game.
Safari already blocks most third-party cookies, yet Google Analytics works in Safari. An explanation of how GA pulls it off can be found here: http://webpolicy.org/2012/02/17/safari-trackers/
You could easily get the ad underwater and embed it properly.
Just to comment on your comparison to PC onsite service company... I think if they really market this thing everywhere as 1 trendy new semi-immediate, reliable iphone repair, it could do pretty well vs. the many small onsite pc repair businesses. From my own experience, people are consistently posting pictures of smashed IPhone screens on facebook. (and i've even driven over my own iphone myself, don't ask). I think it's a lot more common for a typical 16-30 yr old smashing their Iphone, wanting to get it fixed immediately vs. their computer not working for who knows what reason being much more serious/complex issue.
I've seen more than one case in which someone found out they were accidentally banned months earlier, and took it very personally. I can empathize.
As an internet user, retargeting is honestly one of my #1 targets. I find it super-creepy that some websites show me things based on other websites I visit, and I want a way to stop it.
My range of wealth has been somewhere between -30k to 60k in the bank. That might not seem like a big range but I can tell you it is worlds of difference in terms of lifestyle. I once made $30,000 in the stock market, in one hour after the bell rang. Thinking it would keep rising, I went back to bed (rookie mistake!). I woke up to to find my gains negated, and my losses at around $15k. Over the past two years I have battled debt, debt that would have been nonexistent if I had just pressed the sell button.

I am thankful for this, very very thankful. I used to be, for lack of better words, a prick (still am, to a lesser degree!). I would spend money on trivial things. Now I know much better the value of a dollar, and have a least a little bit more perspective on the struggle that many people face ($30k in debt might seem trivial, but I paid as much as others with $200k of student loans due to high interest rates). As of today, I am almost debt free.

Startup culture really saddens me, not because of the chase for wealth - there is nothing bad about that. It saddens me because young people get rich really quickly, many times straight out of college or earlier. They never know what it is like to carry debt. They get rich, and they have no perspective. Elitism is not at all uncommon, subconscious or not, and it has nothing to do with how liberal you are, what charities you donate to, etc. Obviously, I do not look down on these people, I just wish they could experience legitimate hardship for their own benefit.
You could sell products instead of services, such as mobile apps or website plugins.

Or, there may be others your age that want websites or software. Start with people you know.
Would you rather see ads for things that are completely irrelevant? Relevance requires data.

Edit: I do believe the user should have more control over what companies are allowed to retarget with an easy opt out mechanism implemented by every ad network as well as a way to limit the frequency. I've experience companies going WAY overboard on their retargeting and it feels stalker-ish.
Windows Azure Restored Following Global Outage from Expired SSL Certificate
It's fine to note that but I have no idea what that has to do with anything I wrote.
The Chromebook Pixel’s best feature
I'd like things relevant to the site I'm currently visiting, not based on an attempt to construct a personalized profile of me specifically. The former is reasonable contextual advertising (you visit a sci-fi site, you get ads for sci-fi books), while the latter starts feeling like someone compiling an FBI file on my preferences.

Apart from the creepiness, it also helps me mentally compartmentalize and context-switch better, when the ads on a site are relevant to the site, rather than to some other site I may have visited in the past which is not what I'm currently trying to concentrate on. Now maybe that's the point: to throw me off my current train of thought by reminding me of some previous train of thought. I was previously planning a trip, but now I'm trying to research something else and trying not to think about that trip I have to plan, so I can get something else done in the next hour. But the advertiser thinks maybe reminding me of that trip would be a good idea, which is maybe even statistically justified, because I do have to plan it in the next week, and a significant amount of money will be spent. But that's so mentally invasive that it's what will probably drive me to finally install AdBlock.

It's like having your own personal Troll Clippy following you around whispering "oh interesting research, but remember that trip you have to plan? LOL I knew you would!" To get things done in a modern workplace that has pervasive use of the internet and pervasive distractions, you have to block out things that are relevant to your interests but not to the current task. And retargeting does not help with that.
That's still a piss-poor heuristic to rely on -- especially because it biases your analytics data toward google-users.
Could you imagine using your own hardware, on your own connection to run your bootstrapped side-project for $100/mo?
I'd rather not have to pay Amazon, OVH, or whoever just to be able to service side-projects.
Perhaps it's related to the plasma phenomenon of dicotron instability?

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassini/cassini...

http://www.plasma-universe.com/Diocotron_instability

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocotron_instability
This also has exceptions. People of Japanese ancestry, not mixed, or anything, from Brazil and Peru, are treated as 'foreigners' just the same, even if they look like any other Japanese, with the exception, their families migrated abroad and that they may have picked up some South American manners and such along the way.
Personally I can't stand retargeting, if there is one turn-off I have when visiting websites it is being hounded from site to site by an ad. That signals to me to never ever buy that product. That it is 'exciting' to those in the advertising industry is a signal all by itself.

Once a while ago I googled for a bit around the time I was buying a car. For weeks afterwards I got hounded by car ads for some brand. Needless to say that brand is not on my short list for any future purchases.

Any advantage in advertising has turned out to be short lived. It's like building up a resistance to certain chemicals, at some point you need a harder variety to reach your goal. And then the resistance increases and so on. Retargeting will work for a while and then we'll be back to square one, more obnoxious ads and less content. Until all you see is ads.
Why? You visit say... kogan.com.au, they know what fridges you look at. That's intent to buy. You're cookied as #12412214. In the backend, that cookie ID is labeled as FridgeLover.

The next website you go to that has an ad slot, when the ad call is made, your anonymized information is submitted, and if the advertiser wins the bid, the advertiser shows you ads of fridges, because the advertiser remembers that cookie ID 12412214 is a FridgeLover.

It's anonymous (though significant efforts can be expended for less anonymity). And most importantly, it helps users recall products they've seen.

It is relevant to the user (fun bits: buy retargeted ads on competitor sites!)
Found one by clicking "rotating vortex" > "infrared images" > "rotating vortex": http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap061113.html . I guess someone got lazy.
Very true.

We try and make that 3 hours high quality. Walking the dog at the park is a very social affair, there are a number of regular dog owners who we've become friends with. Its an off-leash park so watching them all play is very enjoyable.

Dinner is very much an event in our house. I am a (very) amateur chef and cook dinner for my wife every night. Because I finish work in the afternoon I have some time to prepare something nice. After the dog walk we can have a glass of wine and then sit down for a proper dinner.

Its not perfect, but much like the socialising we've found quality over quantity works for us.

I'm sure this schedule will completely fall apart when we have children.
Not to disparage such a huge effort, but there are Python libraries for this sort of thing.

Code:

from sympy import *

var('x,y')

for p in range(8):
print(' %s' % str(diff(x**9+8,x,p)))

print('')

print(' %s' % str(integrate(y**x,x)))

Output:

x**9 + 8
9*x**8
72*x**7
504*x**6
3024*x**5
15120*x**4
60480*x**3
181440*x**2

y**x/log(y)
The whole point of Lorem Ipsum is that it's for pre-copy design. Once your copy is in, you can do final tweaks, but Lorem Ipsum is there so you don't get it pixel perfect for copy set X and then have to redo it all when Legal says "insert just this one word here", throwing out your overly-specific alignment.
We've been using PaperTrailApp successfully, same thing.
https://papertrailapp.com/
Heroku logs are labeled with the ID of the dyno.
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/350/
> I do not consider retargeting to be evil.

What a coincidence that you work in the field!
3rd generation Koreans are still considered foreigners (and they must assume a Japanese name, and oddly none the less considered foreign).

They don't have to assume a Japanese name. Most do, probably the legal alias they have used all their lives when speaking in Japanese. East Asian countries do not have the same attitudes to names as unique identifiers, invariant across languages as western countries do. The third generation Koreans you refer to are Zainichi Koreans who don't hold Japanese nationality.

However, the Japanese Diet has not yet passed a resolution regarding this matter [Zainich Koreans voting rights in Japanese elections] despite several attempts by a section within Liberal Democratic Party of Japan to do so, and there is considerable public and political opposition against granting voting rights to those who have not yet adopted Japanese nationality. Instead, the requirements for naturalization has been steadily lowered for Zainichi to the point that only criminal records or affiliation to North Korea would be a hindrance for naturalisation.

I'm not saying that Japan isn't very xenophobic but if they want Japanese citizenship most Zainichi Koreans can have it with relatively little difficulty.
Which is the exact same thing Lorem Ipsum was for.
It would make it less stigmatized to admit that you're depressed and ask for advice about how to manage it if there were not as much downside financially for doing so. And here I am talking about acute, generally temporary depression, not clinical depression.

I'm the first to acknowledge the difference between acute depression and clinical depression. I wouldn't even venture to say that I have experienced depression because I consider self-diagnosis of psychological problems to be incredibly dangerous. Not to mention offensive to my friends who are clinically depressed (and yes, I have had friends and family commit suicide as well).

Me, I have anxiety issues that I have medication for. Sometimes dealing with my startups is overwhelming and I just crash and can't do anything for a week or more. But I am incredibly fortunate that this down state is not my equilibrium and that I have a strong internal correction that lets me realize I have a problem, gets me to actively try to find a problem, and which so far always has eventually gotten me back to a balanced place.

But I do know people who are clinically depressed, and they should frankly not be starting companies. If a friend who was clinically depressed were trying to start a company and came to me saying that their work was making their depression worse, I would do everything in my power to encourage them to seek professional help (which I am not), and to gently encourage them to consider alternative professions. It is not worth your health, mental included.
I'm a HUGE fan of LinkedIn. You get what you put into it, though. For me, LinkedIn is my online resume - even moreso than GitHub, because the nature of my work prevents me from contributing to open source.

I also definitely care who views my profile, as it can be used as a good icebreaker. Whenever someone interesting has viewed my profile, I immediately reach out to them. Odds are they wanted to learn about me for a reason. Maybe I can help them with something.
There is a general rule of thumb that a person has to look at/interact with/be cognitively aware of an ad at least 7 times before any action can be taken.

Showing ads across sites is just one more way to do that. In fact I would rather have relevant ads show up than irrelevant ads.

I will admit that many companies out there do overdo their retargeting campaign though. That's what the company does that is mistaken, not the technology.
For such purposes, binary instrumentation is probably a more proper tool. Various options out there, I personally prefer Pin [1] because it's extremely robust and gives you good control of the overheads from instrumenting.

edit: grammar

[1] http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/pin-a-dynamic-binar...
I've heard that this is commonplace in app stores as well, especially for the iPhone top apps list.
This seems to be mostly looking at tablets as potential computer replacements, but that's not really where they're good. A tablet (or phone) can be a decent supplement but is unlikely to be a replacement.

A few areas to consider:

* When you're mobile with a laptop and used to working on multiple monitors, there's software you can use to make a tablet or "phablet" into a second monitor. This depends on you having a reasonable stand and you'll probably want it plugged in (at least if it's a phone and you want to preserve battery life), but at least one of the options (iDisplay, iOS and Android) works with either Wifi or USB as a connection.

* Offload non-essentials or things you'd like to be able to refer to - ebooks, to-do lists.

* Offload communications (email, twitter, etc.) that you might otherwise be tempted to have on your laptop - if those are on the tablet, you're not flipping over to them on your primary machine.

* (mostly phones) As a capture device, these may not be as fast or flexible as pen and paper, but where they can be great is as meta-capture devices: take notes, draw, etc., then take a picture of it in something that auto-syncs for you to process further later (e.g. convert that quick sketch into a network diagram)
why is that creepy? Both websites are related through a retargeter. One sends the data over to the other. It's just like they were the same websites or same corporation. If you don't like this then you can avoid theses websites that sell/buy your information. Although that's a good chunk of the Internet. Just make sure you send private information to trusted sites only.
Please use a web-friendly font. Plus, I don't know if using so much pink is a good idea. But then again, I'm not a designer. Or a woman.

Otherwise, keep up the good work!
There's http://www.pycorn.org , an interpreted OS written in python. Although it's "in a very early stage, and is unlikely to be interesting to users who are not low-level developers."
I find my cannon (RequestPolicy and NoScript) to be the right size weapon for the target I am aiming at, which I do not believe is the size of a mosquito.
This doesn't surprise me at all. I am reading all of these critiques and wondering if the people who don't have a use for tablets are all programmers who sit at a desk all day.

My iPad is indispensable. I use Evernote to store a ton of important info. My calendar is almost exclusively managed on my iPad (largely because I set appointments while in meetings). I have a few web apps that are critical to my business that I frequently use from my iPad.

Then there is my downtime. I love reading on my iPad. I also have a Nexus 7, but I don't like it nearly as much. The narrow screen makes traditional websites uncomfortable to read, though the evernote and calendar uses are great.
Been doing it for about 18 months.

For a few months the morning walk is in darkness. But the park is well lit and given our proximity to the inner city its never really pitch black outside. It does get very cold though.
What's wrong with having an opt-in system for tracking?
I have not tried Dynamips so I cannot comment much. But Mininet uses features in Linux: veth pairs, bridge, OpenVSwitch, etc. to glue together a network. If Dynamips works with the above components, it's highly likely to work with Mininet as well.
"It's relevant" is not a good excuse. Using pieces of my email (like google) or my own friends (like facebook) is the result of that line of thought and extremely invasive and creepy.
If you're using lorem ipsum to communicate pricing ($5/$4.99), how do client even know that's what it represents?

Wouldn't it be better if you put that $5/month and let them know upfront copy/prices are not set - they are meant to communicate what that area is for and how much space is dedicated to it.

What if you had in your mind that the space is for $5/month, but used lorem ipsum and designed around that.

Then the client hands you copy that goes '$5/month, $50/ year, Save $10 if you subscribe annually / 20% off.' This will likely to have an impact on your layout and spacing, since you just used 'lorem ipsum' in the wireframe step.
Although I am not a big fan of those videos, this is clever.
Because it's not opt-in and there's no way to opt-out.
I've used this for classes at Stanford. We used it in conjunction with EC2 and it was very handy for creating specific topologies that could be accessed from anywhere.
If you don't like being filmed in public and face-tracked everywhere you go, just don't ever leave home. Can you picture yourself saying that in 10 years?