skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, there are situations where retargeting makes a bit of sense, like selling business services on a low-traffic website.

But most e-commerce retargeting, IMHO, is trading on the fact that a naive marketing manager will put too much stock in a high conversion percentage. All of those people were, by definition, aware of the product and actively shopping. Did you create a customer? Probably not, maybe by virtue of them clicking the ad instead of going somewhere else, but that's still pretty zero-sum.

Prospecting for people who haven't previously clicked the item on your site, but would be interested, is a lot harder and potentially more valuable.

All IMHO of course.
Fullscreen is important!
I think the parenthetical actually is your most important point. All of the behaviors I've described are perfectly acceptable among known company, but unfortunately not everyone has that fine awareness. I also find sex jokes and toilet humor funny, but not in an environment that's already a sexual harassment minefield to me. I could take a step back and say "don't make innuendoes to people you don't know very well because it's rude" and that would also be true.

I agree that we should let people know when they transgress our boundaries, but putting the onus on women to constantly call people out on their behavior (which we should all do more, even though it's really hard and uncomfortable and scary to do) removes men's agency to also help with the problem - something I sincerely believe many men would like to do. I think approaching how we interact with a bit more thought and awareness of the unintentional impressions we may give off will go a long way for all of us, as humans, to interact better.
Can you name a few other companies which operate at Google's scale and are less evil? I feel Google has had a big contribution in how open internet as a medium is. I'd like to believe that the people at Google's helm are generally nicer, and can be trusted with this massive responsibility (more than a lot of other people and other companies). I also believe and hope, that they are picking signals from these conversations and resolving to improve and be better in future.
PS: Absolutely no affiliation with Google.
While that's often true, many (most?) users have no idea that they're making this deal (i.e. "I let you store your cookies on my computer and in return I get free stuff.").

The European "cookie law" has caused many websites to give better notice that they're planting cookies, but it's rarely clear how those cookies are being used.

There is a better way. What if I purposefully signaled my intent to potential sellers, rather than having them guess what I want (based on their data about me)? Amazon wish lists are an example (although they'd be better if I stored the list in a place of my choice, where I control who sees what, and I'm told who looks). For more on this idea, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_relationship_management
It's going to make me sad if the leading Clojure web tools end up integrated with a proprietary database.
Don't worry: I think the chap with the carrier battle group might be overcompensating for something :)
I'll give a nice subtle example of sexism that I committed.

Back in the 1990's I helped teach a AI Systems course. It had a fair few female students - probably more than average for that sort of course actually now that I think about it.

Part of the work I did was helping in the practical labs. I thought I was doing a pretty good job - until one of the smarter students took me aside and pointed out a rather dumb unconscious behaviour of mine.

I was systematically helping the women more.

The men I'd help when they asked, or when they'd obviously hit a wall and were making no progress. With the women I'd step in almost as soon as they hit a problem. Anybody who has done teaching will tell you that students progress by solving their own problems - not by having the teacher step in and solve 'em for them. I was hurting those students progress by stepping in too early. I was stopping them learning.

I'd love to say that I immediately saw this as a problem... but I didn't. Because - y'know - despite the 70's being my first decade I was a pretty right on guy! I wouldn't be doing sexist things! Uh uh. Not me.

Fortunately some vague remnant of intelligence kicked in after about 20m of muttering (backed up by some personal memories of the problems that being helped too much can cause) and I accepted that I had fucked up and started fixing that behaviour. And thanked the student who had pointed it out. To be honest it's still something I watch myself for when teaching today. A chunk of my social and cultural programming is still trying to tell me that women need to be helped more.

And that - to some extent anyway - is the problem I see with some folk when the sexism topic comes up.

These days the majority of people I encounter don't think men are superior to women, or that women are incapable of being in technical fields, etc. Compared to 20 or 30 years back the incidence of "women in the home" or "women don't do computers" folk I encounter is very small.

The problem is with the folk like me ;-) The folk who think behaviour X can't be sexist - because they're not a sexist! Because the behaviour is almost - or even entirely - unconscious and shaped by the previous N decades of culture and society.

Things do change - but oh so slowly.... and those habits can be a complete sod to break.
Totally agreed. And at the same time there are so many improvements that can be done in a new terminal emulator other than displaying rich media!
http://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/176077?hl=en

Company tried to sell a product that Google prohibits. Where is the story here? Trying to say "well they do it too!" is not and is never a valid complaint, just as it wasn't in primary school -- their day will come. Further the desperate reaching to make Google evil is a stretch given that doing this can only possibly lose them money (favoring the "big guys" isn't rational for a bid-based service, where the highest bid gets Google the most money, regardless of the vendor).

The only real story here is that Google managed to achieve such dominance in advertising (though it certainly isn't as absolute as some are pretending).
Great write-up. Highly appreciated. I hope getting visas for tech founders will get easier going forward. Until then it's invaluable to be able to talk to and read from people who've done it before.

Thanks a ton for taking your time to share this.
This epic accountant turned your dull Excel spreadsheet into an awesome RPG
When functions have no value(s): Delta functions and distributions
Open the error console (via the Web Developer menu item) and you'll see messages there. Success shows up as "Error: successfully compiled asm.js code." :-)

P.S. Looking at your code, I can tell it's not asm.js conformant yet, though it should just be a bunch of small tweaks (e.g. an expression like (a+b) will need to be (a+b)|0, etc.).
but I'd be tempted to boycott a vendor who prohibited weapons ads for any reason other than legal compliance

Craigslist is pretty aggressively anti-weapon. Do you boycott them?
I advise one only have "frank exchanges of ideas" with one's boss!
Following your bliss, right off the cliff
Of course this comment would show up. We get it. People overuse the word. You're offended because someone used it on you once and you only loosely fit the description. Instead of muddling the comments of every post that contains the word hipster simply because you take offense, at least have something to contribute to the discussion.

The same thing happened with punk, goth, emo, and now hipster. It will happen again. Either get used to it or actively avoid participating in the things that people stereotype as hipster. Since that is nearly impossible, just get used to it. People who get offended by labels are just as ignorant as those that use them.

And before you get all offended, you might want to think of every time you tried to label someone else as anything. It can be as simple as black, white, programmer, etc.
GUI-based programs could have an underlying command-line interface that the GUI is a mediator for. In that way, common tasks can be recorded by simply walking through the steps in the GUI, and a script is generated without even having to know any scripting language (at least for the simpler tasks). I know that there are programs that have a GUI which just translates user-input into scripts/commands; has this idea been realized in some applications? I know that some GUI-frontend for R outputs the resulting script of your actions, so I guess you could at least copy-paste the relevant code there.
The issue with eliminating management is equivalent to the issue of eliminating feudal aristocracy: this is the way things have been done since as long as we can remember.

Much like we don't need Kings to rule us, we don't need managers. We can complete tasks in small, focused teams and interface as necessary to create large organizations. However, as with aristocracy, the management wishes to maintain its authority at all costs because it is extremely self-serving. Neither aristocracy nor management add any value, but by historical and institutional momentum they have come to rule the corporate world.

Finally, as with aristocracy, to change this ancient paradigm of management the people need to fight back. That means refusing to work for old management controlled companies and instead contributing to their destruction by becoming entrepreneurs.

Refuse to work for managers, and rob the corporate behemoths of their talent.
It's easy to see why Google banned these guys and not Amazon.com or Walmart. I could sum it up in one word: trust. Amazon and Walmart have it, these guys don't.

Personally, if I'm going to buy a knife, I'll buy it from Amazon. I trust them on a whole bunch of levels that I don't trust these guys.

Is it fair? I've been doing SEO / PPC for over a decade and its never, ever been fair.
As much as I enjoy winning a moral victory from a hospital bed, I think I'll pass.

Fighting someone with the intention of calling the police afterwards doesn't make sense to me.
Pedestal is still very alpha and I'm not sure that I would use it for any of my projects... yet.

For instance, using the example apps provided I couldn't get the chat application to work properly -- if I opened up two windows to the app, only one of them would work at any given moment.

I wonder at the real use case for this style of application, the included hello world app was almost 2 megs of javascript resources (this was without minification or advanced google closure compilation) it seems excessive for a small 'your page updates when server sent changes happen', and certainly more expensive than the approach taken by projects like meteor for similar functionality.

I think some of the features it offers are a glimpse into the future, tracking the state changes from one moment to a next rather than firing off and forgetting about events, almost like version control for your clientside state. This sounds incredibly useful, but for what I'm not quite sure. What sort of apps need that sort of functionality to the point where the extra ceremony required becomes justified?

Another interesting concept is that it is theoretically possible to shift the generation of the app tree deltas to the server and turn the clientside into nothing but a dumb renderer. The thinner the renderer the easier it becomes to target alternate graphical environments.

I know the guys at relevance have hinted about the above, it'd certainly be interesting to see.

Definitely a project to watch :)
So we wait to see how it plays out...
Text reflow accurately characterizes the issues I would think you'd be working on, to fix what I've seen.

I just fired up a virtualbox. All you have to do to see the misbehavior is run 'ps wuax' in a regular 80x24 terminology and then go to fullscreen. Your cursor winds up in the middle of the screen, above some of the text that used to show before the cursor, and before the cursor is a big empty space or certainly nothing sensible.

I just confirmed that my build from 3/20 has the problem, and a newer build on 3/25 has the same issue.

I will file a ticket if you can't reproduce right away, and gladly help out!
Isn't that what the article is talking about... I.E. this could break a lot of custom CSS within our application. Anything that is hacky and works with ie 6-8 will need to be redone.

Is that right or did I read the premise of this article completely wrong? I know you are right for IE 9/ IE 10, but if they change IE 11 to force us to redo our CSS then... that sucks (but is kinda good too cuz I hate the legacy crap code we have).
In Philly I would consider these sorts of trashcans self-vandalizing. Hooligans don't bother because they get trashed by normal use anyway; much better to spend precious hooligan time vandalizing nicer things, such as regular trashcans.
How did they take an anti-weapons stance? The article points out that this small vendor was kicked for selling exactly what the larger vendors sell.
qt-emscripten does something similar, it builds the JSC interpreter together with Qt.
If you are running a paid app or making rapid changes your users will notice.
Because of asset seizures, I am starting my new company outside California
JUnit ExpectedException Rule - there is a better solution
BitNami (YC W13) Launches App Store for Server Software
For any arch'ers looking to upgrade, note that "mysql_upgrade -p" can take a long time depending on how much data you have in MySQL. It took a few minutes on my laptop with only a few medium sized databases.
This sounds more like extortion than a legitimate lawsuit. He's suing you for breach of contract when the breached clauses don't exist, and based on false pretenses, while exploiting an asymmetry in financial resources. I wouldn't be surprised if a good lawyer would find cause for you to turn around and sue him.

Lawyer up. Lawyer up. Lawyer up. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200 until you lawyer up.
Not really sure if it works for non-EU residents, but you might give it a go.

http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/infoAndGuide/companyRegistr...

PS: Haven't used it personally, but I know some people that used it to form companies in the UK. (people being from outside the UK, but in EU member countries).
NEXUS 4 POWER USER RIGHT HERE
I've been using that for a while now, it's pretty good. Seems to take up a lot of memory and cpu after a while, though.
I keep thinking that the text "easiest" is selected. Dammit.
lol, thanks for the math lesson.

When I said "in this situation", I wasn't referring to your hypothetical situation where the alternative is to tear up sidewalk and run new power lines to the trash cans. I was talking about the article, which had nothing to do with that.

Maybe I misunderstood what the parent commenter was asking when they were asking about cost savings coming from solar power. Doesn't matter, moving on.
Ubuntu is suffering from a couple of things at the moment.

1) It's very popular, and thus there is some kneejerk backlash. "This band was cool before all of you knew them, and now they're awful".

2) Some genuine concern from calm and knowledgeable people about some things Ubuntu is doing - some ignoring of the userbase; some coding not going upstream or too much going upstream etc.
i wonder how often things like "the pick up" happen in other industries as well. I would imagine women just see it in practice more often in the tech industry simply because of ratios. When you're the only woman there you're more likely to get hit on 500 times than if there were 500 women there. I also wonder if it's less acceptable in tech industries because you have bright women who would rather be respected because of their minds than their bodies, and are willing to say something about it. Not to mention, how often does the whole "boss having affair with secretary" happen? The problem is systemic everywhere. I just have a feeling it's more pronounced in tech because the same women see the problem over and over, versus a lot seeing it here and there.
Unfortunately that other service doesn't exist. Sure there are other places to advertise but for a lot of businesses it won't come close to replacing Adwords.
I'm proposing in a view of a potential customer. If you see the pricing of a competitor, like framey.com, they make it easier for you to choose your estimated price range.

It is just a more marketing standing point. What is better, 4gbs of music or 1000 songs?
I know Linux is a kernel. But the thing is, on the article "What is Linux" at linux.org[1], it says, "Linux is an operating system that evolved from a kernel created by Linus Torvalds when he was a student at the University of Helsinki. ... To say that Linux is an operating system means that it's meant to be used as an alternative to other operating systems, Windows, Mac OS, MS-DOS, Solaris and others."

How does this fit into things?

[1]: http://www.linux.org/article/view/what-is-linux
Should I Take My Friends' Money?
You've said what I've been trying to articulate for a long time - in much better terms than I ever could. Thank you!

I like the dichotomy of songwriter vs. producer - but I would guess it isn't always so discrete - i.e., production and mastering is essential to conveying the emotions and moods of the songwriting. In fact, I would argue the lyrics are often overemphasized in analysis - they are more of a vessel for tones and cadence of the song.
I'm not aware of any invalid status codes, the main issue is that vanilla S3 does not support index or error pages. Instead, it either returns Access Denied or a list of all objects when making a "GET /" request. However, S3 has a website feature, which allows you to set up index and error pages, and redirects.

You might also want to put CloudFront in front of the S3 website. You lose some capabilities like root domain, but you gain a lot of performance and voodoo magic like mapping part of your website to a different origin (e.g., you can request RSS feeds directly from a third-party website using only JavaScript and CloudFront as a proxy).
Reporting Back from SXSW Interactive 2013
What about things like data structures, general understanding of programming language semantics, basic problem decomposition for data hiding and abstraction, ... ?
Slackware is doing this too.
With lots of data there's no doubt that they are measuring something, but it's not clear that they are measuring what they want.

Your breakfast analogy would be more like:

- Some days Alice eats crumpets while sitting in her house and it takes her about 20 minutes.

- Some days Bob eats a bagel while on the way to work and it takes him about 5 minutes.

- Therefore, bagels are 4 times faster to eat than crumpets.

See the problem is we have conflated lots of correlations at once. There is 1) a tendency for certain types of foods (languages) to be used for certain purposes, and a tendency for certain kinds of people to prefer certain foods (languages), and neither of those correlations are necessarily caused by the properties of the food (language) itself.
What a coincidence! Just today, Slackware also switched to MariaDB! [1]. Two weeks ago, it was openSUSE [2]. It's on the cards for the next Fedora release in May [3]. Wonder when will Debian (and its children) make the switch.

[1]: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Slackware-Linux-switc...

[2]: http://blog.mariadb.org/opensuse-12-3-released-with-mariadb-...

[3]: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Fedora-19-MariaDB-ins...
> Even the best-pruned tree will occasionally have the occasional branch break off in a severe storm.

I would imagine it's not that easy for a tree to truly root itself in whatever shallow sandbox they plant it in. You're more likely to have the entire tree fly straight at you.
> They're unhappy with its actions, perhaps even livid, but it's always a tone of "Golly! This is really unfortunate and I'm sure nobody at Google really meant to do this, but...."

They're trying not to burn bridges, which is good business. But it's true Google has a monopoly on online ads, which should not be allowed to continue unchallenged. Don't like Dell? Buy Lenovo. Don't like AdWords? Die.

On the other hand, the strategy of the OP is questionable. Google asked them to stop advertising for one category of products. It's admirable to have chosen the high route of stopping to do business with Google altogether, but it wasn't the only option. They could have continued to advertise for all their other products on AdWords, and then cross/up-sell customers to the forbidden fruits once these users got to their site.
Terminal multiplexers (screen/tmux/dtach) and native terminal emulators each provide unique features, so for me the best is a combination of both!

If you use a mac, I encourage you to try iTerm2/tmux-git. The combination allows you to reconnect to a remote tmux session and get a window with all of your tabs for that server. You'll never need to know the tmux commands again. You'll just use your native commands to switch tabs, search the history, see the list of open tabs, open new tabs, etc. This is the killer setup.
Discarding the anti-weapons stance for big advertisers like Walmart is hardly benevolent.
Uniqueness validation is built into the collections API. If you attempt to add a model with a duplicate ID you'll get a 400 error. In addition you can specify validation rules in the config.yml file. Some additional info here: http://backlift.github.com/docs/validation.html#validation-r....

As for query parameters on the collections API, we totally agree it's a must and we're working on it.
The "big guys" sell a lot more products in a lot more categories, so are presumably putting in a much larer number of bids - it is not hard to believe that Google sees a lot more revenue from Amazon than some random knife shop.
HN certainly wasn't the only one ragging on Summly.
http://gizmodo.com/5830076/how-i-made-a-15+year+old-app-deve...

d'Aloisio seems to have a attracted disproportionate mainstream press coverage and and unusually critical tech press attention considering his app's relatively low budget and short life, even for a youngster. Being expensively acquihired by Yahoo might not change that, but I guess the monetary reward at 17 gives him the last laugh
The web is an open, diverse and ever-evolving ecosystem, and I hope that it remains this way for years to come. OK, there are no silver bullets nor panaceas, but that's more of a quality than a shortcoming.
There's been some interesting bookmarking apps lately, yours included. The question is how are you going to get traction?
How to start a business | Small Business Consulting Group
This reminded me of Gremlins 2.
You pretty much need to anyway. Ever been stopped by the police when you don't have ID on you? It can be an ordeal, especially if you aren't white.
As is often the case, Google has to find a line that allows legitimate brands to do their thing, but also make sure that smaller/less legitimate sites not exploit their systems.

Google won't tell Amazon/Target/Walmart, to stop selling a product or get banned from AdWords.

But a small retailer who wants to circumvent the rules could capture PPC traffic for a similar (but legitimate) product, and then funnel people to the 'banned' product page.
Rather than Google policing the landing page's CTAs & on-page intent, they find it easier to just say "you can't sell that thing."

Here's what I would do if I were Google: simply not show any PPC units (paid or product listings) on the SERPs for 'Assisted Opening Knives'. Suddenly the whole issue goes away, and Google doesn't look hypocritical - since they're then not making money off a product class that they claim to find objectionable.
It's exactly what I'm working on, thank you.
See trac.enlightenment.org/e/ticket/1184
It will be there for the next release.
Volunteers Needed Help Kids Learn to Code: Student Hackathon, April 20th