skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a bit creepy but it is the kind of thing that could be guessed from facebook activity so it is kind of to be expected.

Lately I've been seeing ads that correlate with things that happen to me completely outside Facebook. About things on sites I only access through google for example. I find this more disturbing.

I checked the "Block third-party cookies and site data" in Chrome so they shouldn't be able to track my web browsing through ads. I'm not sure where they get their info.

For example, last week I bought a new kind of barbecue sauce at the grocery store and the next day Facebook was asking me to like the specific brand's page. It made me wonder. Are banks funnelling purchase information to Facebook?

I never researched this sauce online although I had looked up recipes on how to make homemade sauce through google. But facebook seemed to know the specific brand I had bought.

A similar thing happened to me when I bought replacement windshield wipers for my car a few months ago. I don't know, maybe facebook was just following the weather and knowing that there had been a lot of wiper destroying freezing rain at the time, was suggesting liking major wiper sellers to everybody around here but I still found it suspicious. I had not looked up any wipers online or mentioned that I needed some anywhere and the ad showed up just after my purchase. I know this is all very unscientific. Anybody else have similar experiences?
warning: someone gets their head blown off in a shower of blood in the first 10 sec. I'm just waking up this Sun morn, not really ready for that.
My parents came up with a great way to make sure my brother and I always found ways to entertain ourselves: saying "I'm bored" to my parents was the same as saying "I need a chore to do around the house."
oh yeah THIS is going to be enforceable.

While we're at it, let's go ahead and ban anger on the road too.
How can an unencrypted internet API be not open? We aren't talking about secret binary commands like Skype here.
I almost made it half way through the article before I went to go check the comments about it on Hacker News!
What's needed is a system to sync state (read items, starred items, etc), preferably one that only you have access to. I propose a standard file format, implemented by RSS Readers that contains this kind of data. The file can be stored on a service like Dropbox. If implemented correctly, you'd never lose your data when switching clients and you'd be able to use different clients on different platforms with your own data.
For this exact reason I closed all the other tabs, closed my phone and made my browser fullscreen. It went well, but about halfway I kept grabbing my phone just to force myself to put it away.

I think I need help. :/
What Every iOS Developer Should Know About In-App Purchases
Agreed, I was thinking that hybrid solutions do seem likely.
I want to share this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O4YV0mrkfQ
This video is from 2011 where people at Rice University are using almost this same method to create supercapacitors - apparently without realizing that they were actually making graphene.
I've needed something like this for years. This is awesome!
Such a shame these kinds of questions are banned from StackOverflow these days. Takes all the fun out things...
100% accuracy is never going to be possible. In fact I wouldn't be surprised to see a price structure for targeted advertisements based on confidence intervals.
75% of the way to never having to work again? A whole lot of people would take that deal, and they'd be smart to do it.

Here's the thing about accumulating money - the more you have, the easier it is. Going from zero to 25% of 'never having to work again' has got to be an order of magnitude harder than going from 75% to 100%.

By the time you get to 75% of your personal 'never have to work again' figure, you'll have access to a better class of financial advisors and more investment opportunities. Your bank will start to kiss your ass. At even a modest rate of return, you'll be making large sums each year with zero effort on your part. You can be much more choosy about the opportunities for paid employment you decide to accept - it's a lot easier to optimize for your own pleasure instead of raw salary.

In short, it's a very nice place to be.
If one bit of gpl3 code made it into iOS, it would be removed and minor damages would be paid. This is one case where the legal system is far more sane than the breathless nightmares of coders.
Proprietary code has the EXACT same copyright protection as gpl3. The licensing differences are wholly irrelevant if the user never agrees to the license.
Ask HN: tutorial or sample project to create Web App on Google AppEngine?
I am learning web programming on Google App Engine and trying to find a good tutorial or sample project to start, I am planning to use the combination of Python+webapp2+jinja2 on Google App Engine platform. Here is the list that I think I have to know, I am from embedded background (mainly C, C++, Java) - far from the web.<p>Python
Webapp2
Jinja2
Datastore
HTML
CSS
Javascript
JSON
JQuery
.... did I miss anything? seems like web programming is very fragmented and involves lots of technologies.<p>Thanks for reading, much appreciate if you respond.<p>- A New comer.
(((There's a hash fragment appended to your link, which makes it point to somewhere in the middle of the linked page, and it took fairly long before I realized I should start reading from the top. The hash fragment: In `www.newschallenge.org/...-that-just-makes-sense/#c-aaf90...f7977e`, the #.... part should probably have been removed? )))

I like this initiative! In the video, I like the idea that people be able to discuss only a part of a legislation proposal. Actually I've been experimenting with something related, namely inline comments, http://www.debiki.com/-81101-future-features#inline-comments.

Re: "based on why you - the reader - came upon that content in the first place, you'll be able to more easily sift for what you're looking for" — do you sort comments based on some information you have on the visitor?

Re: "and then work forward or backwards in the context from those points" This somewhat reminds me of considering the discussion being a graph of comments, in which you can navigate freely back and forth? And you can quickly bypass subthreads (e.g. replies to the pun thread?)?
I'm currently at uni, studying computer science. I can very much relate to the problem of being unable to read a book to completion, however I fundamentally disagree with the reasons given in the article. In my experience, it's not a problem of attention, but simply that I don't have the time to read. I love reading, and wish I had more time to read; pre-uni I read, or programmed in my spare time, but now I'm at uni I find that how my time is distributed has fundamentally changed. today, my time is split between the masses of coursework I have, societies (computing, music and sport), and sleeping. I personally think that it would be far more powerful to study a group of young people who have far more time and fewer commitments. I sometimes feel that my generation has some of the highest commitments and workloads ever which is, admittedly, compounded by different forms of media, and this is really what is damaging the skill of long form reading.

just my 2c
Thank for for making me feel even better about deleting my Facebook account over 2 years ago.

Edit: also, you may want to look into using Ghostery: http://www.ghostery.com Many (most?) of these trackers are not blocked by the "third-party cookies" setting in your browser.
Of course. So when someone posts an article with anecdotal evidence towards the way Facebook uses data, we can assume it might be true in thousands of other cases or tens of millions of cases. It's hard to know which though.

A different pricing structure would be interesting to see sometime in the future.
You're wearing it on your face. Anyone driving by you is going to be able to see it. How do you figure that this would be difficult to enforce?
> Lately I've been seeing ads that correlate with things that happen to me completely outside Facebook. About things on sites I only access through google for example. I find this more disturbing.

Though you say completely outside Facebook, at least it is still just taking signals from other parts of the Internet. Imagine now what Google Now or Glass will be able add!

Seriously though, I think Perfect Audience (YC S11) https://www.perfectaudience.com does stuff like this. Here is a thread describing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4615408

Edit: Didn't see that you bought the BBQ sauce at the store exclusive without any online behavior. Unless you searched for it or use Mint or a similar service, I am at a loss.
Bill Would Ban Wearing Google Glass While Driving in West Virginia
I had responded with a proposal for an RSS reader app way back in the day when they were soliciting applications for SDK access.

Never did get any sort of response..
That may have been your aim and while there is a great potential good, there's also a great potential for evil. You've opened pandora's box and now we'll see how it plays out. My guess is that we're going to see a lot of misguided website abuse this until the Chrome team has to patch it so websites can't know its state.
'Play by your own rules' - How Gowalla lost the race against Foursquare
Yes, with that money you pay social security and health care, which is fully covered with the minimum, mandatory "autónomo" fee. That's nice I guess.

Unemployment is optional (about +20€/month IIRC), to get it you have to prove a specific lost of revenue in a specific length of time, first year doesn't count, and you get 2 months of pay per 12 months worked ("normal" jobs get 4/12). I recently read that only about 25% of the unemployment petitions are approved. I chose not to pay it.

Since the moment you stop being an "autónomo" you get 90 days of "free" health insurance. After that, if you are <=26, you can use the health insurance of a parent or sibling. If you are 27, you have to pay for health care, or prove that you don't have any income to get free healthcare.
There is no need for full system backups if you have backups of the relevant data and can rebuild the machine surrounding the data. For instance to restore a buildserver, you run a script that creates and provisions a new VM, clones a git repo that contains the configuration of the CI server, clones the repos it should build and the server is ready to go. No manual actions and no backups needed.
And yet I'm living in the longest period of peace on the western European mainland since Pax Romana. Depends on how you define success.
It seems the author is not aware of John Tromp's IOCCC maze program. It uses working storage equivalent to one row of the maze. Very clever.
Note that the article says "This article's factual accuracy is disputed. Please help to ensure that disputed statements are reliably sourced." Wikipedia is a really horrible source for topics people may bicker about. In practice, no one pays over 50% of their income in income tax like that article implies.
Wow, I never thought about weighing comments that are longer. But that makes a lot of sense!
Blocking third-party cookies does practically nothing to prevent such tracking. Web-bugs and supercookies, just for starters, are immune to that.

Install Ghostery to get all the low-hanging fruit - you'll probably want to tweak-up the settings from the default. There are still sophisticated trackers out there beyond what Ghostery can stop. For firefox the Request Policy add-on will give you very good control over that stuff, but it requires a "mechanic's" level of understanding to use without pulling your hair out.

Frankly I am a bit surprised by your naivete - this sort of profiling is big business. Huge. I kind of thought that everyone on here on HN was aware of just how intrusive these tracker/stalkers were.
I saw something similar using AngularJS and D3 not too long ago: http://sullerandras.github.com/SVG-Sequence-Diagram
Ocassionally I see memes pop up depicting variations of "the moment you have so much work to do, you decide to take a nap instead" (replace "take a nap" with whatever you do when you're procrastinating).

While this could certainly be laid out as lazy student attitude, if I look back at my own time studying, I often felt just demotivated by the amount of work that had to be done for various courses to pass.

So I agree with you. Students should have more possibilities take their time and explore subjects they're interested in rather than just passing course after course.

I studied in Austria (Europe) though, so I don't know how much my experience relates to that of a US college student.
It might be a small niggle, but the author is pretty dismissive of microeconomic theories of risk.

Despite what the author writes - "Of course statistically there’s no difference, so this isn’t a question of math or economics or intelligence; it’s a measure of your attitude towards risk.", risk aversion is a well studied concept in economics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion

Most people have a preference curve that is risk averse, and for these actors it makes perfect economic sense to take the 10 and not the 20. 'Statistically identical' they most definitely aren't, just the expected value.
Fwiw I'm genuinely curious how people who are convinced BTC is a scam see it playing out. Generally, once a scam is exposed, it collapses, so what does that look like with bitcoin? But if that's too OT, I'll save it for another thread.
I made a similar suggestion 3 years ago:
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/9w93r/reddit_has...
How Etsy Attracted 500% More Female Engineers
I noticed something similar (though without having the wife and kids (though I'm getting the hints)).

I recently switched to working from home while I sorted out a new office and thought "wow, 8-10 hours a day I'll be so productive"... nope.

Much the same as mentioned in the article I find I work best in blocks of 2-3 hours with a decent period to cogitate before the next block. Now I've moved into my new offices I have someone to grab lunch with and/or can go for a wonder round the museum (which is opposite office and has a lovely garden/pond).

It was a valuable learning experience though as I'd always aimed for working from home as a perfect programming environment and it turns out that I'm only productive at home on a night if I've been somewhere else during the day.
good point... changing the description
If it is honestly true that you simply don't have enough time because there are too many tasks with higher priority no including just leisuring time on Facebook or HN, then to me it sounds like you are a person with outright great time management abilities. For me, I spend 90 % of my free time doing completely useless stuff like browsing HN many times a day, hanging out in IRC, chatting on Skype etc. and it feels that I can't get things done which I should, and even would want to. This includes reading some books which interest me, programming and general tinkering with things which once used to be the most interesting thing for me.

My point being, for someone who can manage their time almost perfectly, perhaps reading a book is just about managing the time, but for us who can't... It's not so simple. :(
I wear glasses - legally obliged to when I drive.

Google Glass will work eventually on prescription glasses. Those prescription glasses work even if 'turned off'.
I think Hume may have argued with the 'Cogito ergo sum' statement.
Why specifically tesla and not just electric cars in general?
> last week I bought a new kind of barbecue sauce at the grocery store and the next day Facebook was asking me to like the specific brand's page

Facebook has teamed up with datalogix to track users' offline purchases, but as far as I know this is just for a/b testing and not for targeting/ad serving.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/03/...

It's also quite possible it's just a coincidence; that specific brand happens to be running a campaign on facebook, and facebook either got lucky or predicted you would like their sauce (i.e. did their job well).
I thought so too but the result would be a CD with grey stuff on it.

My plan is to sell Lightscribe DVD drives and graphite oxide, like the store that sold shovels to gold miners.
because what they did was right, make some pressure on a company to "punish" a feminazi bully
> And in the case of the phone company, if you had a little sexy talk with your significant other, no one was the wiser because you had a reasonable expectation your amorous dialogue wasn’t being stored for posterity.

Was that really an expectation? I'm in my early 30s and still remember having a shared party telephone line for several years of my youth and before machine switched networks, operators were also known to listen in on conversations and spread the latest gossip around town.

The focus on privacy seemed to not really happen until digital cell phones started entering the scene, which is very late in the life of the phone networks.
There isn't enough upward facing surface area on your body for solar cells to power anything non-trivial. Also floppy disks?!?
> Obviously their point was that Bateman was too close to Batman.

Their point is moot. DC comics will have to go after people who own 'Patrick Bateman'. This isn't infringement(nobody is going to confuse a trading software named Bateman with a book/movie character); even if it were, the owners of 'Patrick Bateman' and not DC comics can claim infringement. At most, he will have to remove the image of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, but I doubt it will come to it.

Also, batman.js is in business, and DC comics didn't go after them. At what grounds did they went after your friend? Naming your software batman or superman isn't infringing DC's trademarks.
There's Code Golf and Programmers to cater for some of these things - but I'm a little blurry on the rules of exactly what the boundaries of each site are.
http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/
Thank you very much - I really appreciate your advice. I think the "rainy day action plan" is exactly what I needed to hear. Soon, we'll be traveling through China together and I believe I'll get a chance to talk to him more and put your advice to use. Thank you.
I'm not sure where this reputation that Minnesota is some sort of cultural wasteland comes from. If you ask people associated with the arts, many of them will tell you that Minneapolis has an exceptionally vibrant arts community. Outstanding music scene for both local and national artists, highly regarded theatres, excellent museums, etc.
Sequence diagrams are about the only UML diagram I feel guilty about not drawing - I know they can be useful in some circumstances but generally drawing them with most tools I've used is about as pleasant as root canal treatment.

However, this looks nice and simple (editing text!) and I particularly like the hand-drawn style output.
Never. I don't have a Facebook account, but it'd be pretty naive of me to assume they don't have a profile on me as well, especially since they've already admitted doing so[1].

[1]: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2011-11-15/fa...
Thank you very much - I really appreciate your advice. He recently switched medication, and I'll ask him if he's noticed any changes yet. Thank you.
On the routes side it also means you don't fact around having to import a module to get your app - if you can instantiate the app (as it were) and then set up routes you can create a factory much more easily and pass it around with little worries - but anchored to a module import as in the docs is less than helpful

Would love to see or hear more about your default setups though. Is there an example in OSS?
I'm sure the StackOverflow anti-fun police will come for those too.
As someone with a four month old this really resonates with me. I got the best grades of my entire life the two semesters my wife was pregnant, despite having to spend time helping her cope with e.g. morning sickness and school at the same time. I take the night feedings now and find that I just don't need as much sleep as I used to. Some people have always functioned fine on 5 hours or so but I was never one of them. I'm forced to be efficient. My wife needs me to be there to give her a break from the baby on weekends and late in the evening, so I have to try and make every baby free hour count.
This is exactly why HN needs collapsible comments. Not so I can collapse them for my convenience, so that stuff doesn't get buried so easily. Sometimes the top thread is all there is on the first page ... for example, there was this great blog post by raganwald a while. Here's the new version [1] since I assume the posterous one won't be around much longer. And here's the HN discussion of the original [2] in which, as he noted, a comment about IQ testing (completely tangential to the post) took the whole first page.

1 http://braythwayt.com/2012/03/29/a-womans-story.html
2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3772292
perhaps some kind of spray-on film that peels off easy when finished but won't break and is hella flexible.
I made a point earlier that the advertiser chooses the target audience and I don't believe FB does what this article claims. I've seen retargeting creep into FB lately but again someone is making assertions rather than an algorithm IMO. Some 3rd party ad networks let you really drill down.

I think FB can do what this article claims but is not actually doing it.
I also went to Riverdale.

Dunthorpe, which is on the edge of the Lewis and Clark College campus, is sometimes referred to as "the golden ghetto." The houses are, for the most part, enormous. When I was going there, Riverdale elementary, (which is k-8th grade), was chock full of children of business leaders and athletes. Kids of golf pros, The Trailblazers, CEOs and bankers. Long driveways and a private neighborhood security service.

It is not like much of the rest of Portland.

The school would have internationally famous authors come and speak to rooms of 40-50 kids. It was pretty nice.
Ask HN: How high ($'s) should you go when showing pricing on your website?
We're all familiar with sites that have 3 or 4 plans for different categories of usage. Then there's the "Need Enterprise pricing? Contact us" or something similar. When, why and how to you make the determination to have pricing that you don't show? Why not show it all or show none vs show some and then tell your biggest prospective customers to contact you? How do "enterprise" buyers feel when they see that? Catered to or potentially manipulated?
HN user comments deleted?
I see my comments jump from three days ago to 1148 days ago, did something bad happen at HN four days ago?

I don't care about my comments, just curious.
To be honest, magnetic strips on credit cards are redundant in a fair proportion of the world as well, especially Europe, although with a notable exception of the US which seems to be seriously lagging behind in this area. I live in the UK and it has easily been over 6 years since I have been anywhere where the magnetic strip has been read rather than using chip & pin (EMV).