skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would really like to believe this article, and take out all our social sharing buttons, boxes, iframes, api layers and throw them in the trash :)
Yeah, that's my thought as well. He was the one who either accepted multiple fake Skype accounts as contacts or let the attacker know 5 of his contacts. I'm not sure that Microsoft failed here, rather it sounds like he did.
Depends on your definition of generating revenue. For example:

1. If Coca-cola starts a social media campaign (and gets 1million likes) and Pepsi doesn't (0 likes), Coca-cola has a stronger brand position. Is this easy to calculate in real terms? No. But then again, Coca-cola nor Pepsi actually bottle their own products so they are measured on brand awareness anyways.

2. A friend of mine just started making custom bicycle wheels. He's gotten 3 new customers literally from our triathlon facebook group alone. Also, I would guess at least 5 people (probably way more) have had massages from a sports massage therapist in our club, simply because they posted on our group "I'm in need of a sports massage who knows a good one?"

"Social media" isn't necessarily a new way of driving business, but rather it's a new platform for capturing something that has been happening for decades - word of mouth - and then trying to position yourself (at scale) to exploit that word of mouth.
Just to touch on one of your points, we've actually found that most people who talk about us on social media are those using or looking for free accounts. There are certainly exceptions to the rule, but the overwhelming majority are people who don't want to pay a cent for the product. We still love those people, but they don't pay the bills. And like I mentioned in the blog post, a pretty significant sample of users confirmed that most who discover us through social media are on free accounts.

Like I wrote, we won't be abandoning our social media efforts anytime soon. But we are taking another look at how much time & effort we invest in those channels.
take her to the bookstore and show her books on various topics, find out what she's interested in particular, then take it from there. i wouldn't avoid showing her any book or resource. if she gets it great, if not no harm done.
The experience reminded me of one as a child when I unfairly sold some worthless items to neighbors at a stoop sale in front of our house in Brooklyn. When my parents found out that night, they made me go from home to home on our block returning the money.

I think I like his parents :-)
So...your's is the second or third comment that said something along the lines of "I've been diagnosed with aspergers, but you'd never know."

I'm curious, what led you (or your guardians?) to seek out a diagnosis?
Having NYC style density is one thing, actually supporting it is another. If anyone has used the MUNI light rail system in SF it is plagued with constant delays, breakdowns, inefficient routing, and of all things traffic jams. The light rail is also a hybrid aboveground/underground system, and when above ground is not separated from the motor vehicle traffic, which causes more delays. When underground several lines merge onto one track (bart does this too) this is another pain point.

As for bus service thats even worse. One of the original goals of muni was that residences should be within 2 blocks of a MUNI stop. That sounds great on paper, but in reality it makes trips excruciatingly long. When a bus route has to stop at every other block, or in some cases every block, especially on flat terrain, it exemplifies the absurdities of MUNI's grand plan.
He's equated Ruby with Rails, which isn't so unreasonable given how they're used in practice.
The tenderloin is 72,000 sq/mi.
Shouldn't that title be "... may have burst again?" Bitcoin is going to fluctuate quite a bit and your guess is as good as mine regarding when it's going to stabilize. Anyone who says otherwise is guessing ... though it's the nature of guess that some will turn out to be correct and someone's going to crow about it.
What are you talking about rss is not killed off, ask the feedly team rss is still alive and well. Point me to any site and I will show you their rss feed. The reality is most sites aggregate their content using twitter, rss, facebook.. so they are encouraging you to aggregate it in the same way. Really we have an issue with that.
You're not hellbanned.
The article goes on to mention Pepsi & Coca-Cola's more rigorous experiments, with a similar finding of no value.

You're essentially asking for proof of a negative, i.e. prove that social media does not matter. This is as you stated impossible. This is also why the burden of proof is always on the person making the claim.

If companies are going to spend money on something, there should be proof that it has value.
You seem to be going on the assumption that if anyone ever gets to any website in any way then it was a result of "social media". Having people follow you on facebook does not get you in the top of search results on google/yahoo/bing. People can communicate without facebook. IM and texts still exist.
I expected most of the services to screw up on the avocado, that's why I made it part of the order. When the Postmate got it right we speculated over why. The answer we came to is that women are more likely to closely evaluate produce. After talking to some of the services, it turns out that women are overwhelmingly better shoppers. I assume this is because culturally women grocery shop more than men.
And here's the clincher: the buyer already has the ability to ask for a refund from Gumroad or a credit card chargeback. Those who really want their money back will get it anyway.
I'd pay to be able to host my own.
I think the key here is: "Avoid replicating the default iOS styling and interactions".

Avoiding the "Uncanny valley" some apps can compete with native.
I'm actually not sure if I have failed yet or not. I started a niche website set up/hosting business targeted towards churches. After a month and a half I have ~15 free users and no paid users.

I know a month and a half isn't long at all, and maybe these things just take time, but it's just a bit discouraging when not one person signs up for a paid plan.
Things to Make with a 3D Printer
Once I started asking these questions while playing video games I became so frustrated that I stopped playing them.
Actually, it will. 2^-25 is represented exactly, since it is really represented as 0b 1.00000000000000000000000 * 2^(0b100011001 - 128). The exponent is represented exactly, and the mantissa (the 1.xxxx term) is representable exactly since it is exactly 1.
It's also easy to get broken behaviour (on one site I use the url is updated without a new history entry, and even on GitHub the page sometimes gets desynced).
>When $50K of BitCoins is stolen today, and is $500K of BitCoin five years from now, every last cent of that filthy lucre can be monitored with acute cryptographic precision until the end of time.

Unless I am mistaken we can also see Bitcoins get stopped dead in its tracks after the user loses their wallet file due to data loss, no?
the signalling isn't primarily to current and prospective customers, it's to other trolls out there. The $75k (negotiable) offer of compromise is on the low end of such demands and the signal to other NPEs thinking about suing Rackspace is Be Prepared for War.

That customers think this is a good thing and burnishes Rackspace's reputation for being on the side of developers, etc. is a nice bonus.
whats wrong with society where we don't want to tell someone constructive criticism or positive feedback like it was a face to face conversation except online ?
That's an interesting solution, but it really only works if you never change your password. Which isn't a great practice...
Its freedom in exchange for comfort: the casual user no longer has to worry about looking for software because there's a large corporation telling him what he can do and what he can't.

For many freedom of choice is stressful, but receiving orders is not.
I needed a few of them. We paid.

Ravenscraig steel works was, er, rather large so buying it up would require very significant capital. The rest of the supply chain was being disrupted at the same time.
I like notmuch with the Emacs notmuch client, because it'll work fine when I only have a terminal available, but when I run Emacs+X11, it'll also display images inline and has some decent mouse support.
Step back from the ego-driven culture of investment banking, into the ego-driven culture of startups. Hmm...
The main reason why Aspergers is no longer used as a diagnosis is because it's a fuzzy area on a spectrum, not a clearly delineated thing.

So yeah, you could be somewhere along the spectrum. Or you could just have certain personality traits that are somewhat like it. Be careful with labeling yourself unnecessarily. It can be comforting but also limiting.
On that point, how does the patent holder typically learn of cases of infringement? Would it be as simple as a surreptitious email? Or do you need something like a writeup in a publication, so they will see you as a potential goldmine?

I'm wondering what it would take to force a fight on crap patents - create something that infringes on a patent, contact the NPE through some untraceable channel to inform them, then await the lawsuit (or "licensing offer").
I had a very similar experience. I was filling the screen with white pixels with PSET in Basic. Just a tight loop setting each pixel. It took a handful of seconds.

When I rewrote it in assembly and the screen was instantly filled with white pixels, I couldn't believe it was true. You just can't set pixels that fast! I went back to "debug" my assembly code by setting the pixels to different colors to convince myself that the assembler didn't somehow "cheat" by just setting the background color to white. And sure enough, assembly just turned out to be orders of magnitude faster.
Simon Baron-Cohen Autistic Spectrum Test [video]
I feel like I'm being charitable by discussing CISPA as if it was somehow similar to SOPA or PIPA, because CISPA has nothing whatsoever to do with SOPA or PIPA.

I do not have a problem with people who generally oppose Internet regulation of all sorts (I don't agree, but I don't make fun of them either).

I do have a problem with "Internet Hate Machines" of all sorts. You are not entitled to invoke principles to deploy bad facts.

Have you read the 2013 House CISPA amendments. I have. They're public. I'm guessing, no, right? Are you a gambling man? Would you like to bet me how agreeable they are relative to the text of the bill itself? The 2012 CISPA amendments tightened and restricted the act. What do you think the new 2013 amendments do?
Hmm! Well I took a shot at it on python

"Python 2.7.2 (default, Jun 20 2012, 16:23:33)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple Clang 4.0 (tags/Apple/clang-418.0.60)] on darwin"

http://i.imgur.com/2B4T0nn.png

the first 2 outputs are the same, demonstrating that commutative property holds. the next pair of outputs seems to indicate that commutative is failing (but this may be associative in the background). The third pair of outputs reveals explicitly that associative fails. So it's the 2nd pair that is probably causing the confusion in understanding since a lack of parenthesis seems to imply that we aren't looking at some sort of associativity when we really are.

Now, if we go to code bin and run the same test:

http://codepad.org/tBH9PgJE

There is no discrepancy, and that's because of rounding.

Now it is clear to me the confusion, and I hope that helps illustrate some of the issues for others!
I'm pretty sure Steve McConnel had a bit on this (adding the absolute magnitude "small" numbers up before the big ones - sorted) in order to avoid underflow and loss - in the book "Code Complete" back in the early 90s.

Obviously, it's a known old issue, since the IEEE folks point out that their standard produces an error (NaN) to indicate data loss if you add things with too small and too big a magnitude together. Not all floating point is IEEE, some implementations just give you their best estimate, throwing away the little bits.

And, please, DON'T use floating point to work with currency, ever. http://roboprogs.com/devel/2010.02.html
Well that's because even the Great Gmail has not yet reached the point of being "EMail Central". I have a GMail account but I also have at least 3 other email accounts.

I don't do Bitcoin though so I guess the big question is whether a service like MtGox is actually reasonably necessary or not. It sounds like what MtGox has above and beyond GMail is the built-in network effect that has propped other exchanges up throughout history; you go there to trade because that's where the traders are. You don't have to go to GMail to exchange electronic mail.
I think they are trying to say that demand forces supply.
I've been nearly taken in by a similar scam done by e-mail: a message from an aunt, saying that her handbag had been stolen while she was in Spain, and she urgently needed some money to sort things out and get home.

It needs a target who's close enough to care, but not so close that they know the details are wrong (as far as I knew, my aunt could have been in Spain). The apparent theft can stop a credulous target from trying to phone the person.

Finally, it only needs to work occasionally to pay off, and the OP mentions having over 1000 Skype contacts.
"thereby earning genuine trust with current and prospective customers"

I don't disagree with that in general but I will raise the issue that you would need to know the percentage of current and future customers that really care about things like this to know the effect that it will have on their business in dollars.

Consumers and business are fickle. Good will has a value but people will drop you in a dime if the next shiny ball comes along with a better product and/or lower pricing. My guess is that the community that cares about this relative to their sales volume is not as significant as your statement suggests.

As an similar example, people on HN regularly hate on godaddy but they are still a giant in the domain business and end users that use them (I deal with those end users since gd is a competitor of ours) don't care about any of the shenanigans. And the "tech guys" that feed business to gd in general seem to be pretty happy with the relationship judging by transfer rates.
Have you seen those "sponsored results" on Google? Better ban all their apps too.
Ah, I didn't realise that. so they're independent of the bitcoin address system? I had read that their trading engine can't be parallelised and assumed the blockchain was the reason. I stand corrected.

edit: this guy explains it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5539387
Rude and uninformed.
Will this mark the release of the source code?

"As such, I believe it only fair that the core of Light Table be open sourced once it is launched."
What's wrong with receiving valuable information without being able to ascertain who sent it to you?
I just looked at your website. Why offer a free plan at all?
For example, going to the database and retrieving the data uses less CPU and time than deserializing the data into an object into Ruby. That is the sense I am talking about. The bottleneck becomes the code talking to the database rather than the database itself.
The Agony, the Ectasy, the Dual Monitors
Iron Rivals: Fantasy-themed strategy game powered by football statistics
In domains where fine-grained performance is not paramount (i.e. most programs), no, people don't worry about that sort of thing very much. How do you even go about reasoning on cache lines in a Ruby on Rails app?
Yeah. I wish but this isn't going to happen.
Listening to feedback
Rally Software Raises $84M In IPO
Nice to see a bit of discussion of thinking about games. This approach is very similar to how literacy is taught (at the high school level). Not just being able to read, but to understand complicated writing and its motivations/intent/effectiveness.

There's obviously some tricky differences, though. For one, each experience of a game is personalized by the choices made. Games can produce very similar experiences ("on rails" games) or very different experiences (a bad example but: playing WoW as one race vs. another can be quite different early on).
It's not poor taste; it just shows you don't know much about history.
But you do need to put in the practice time to be able to be productive when you need to be. If your process involves a lot of procrastinating with intermittent bursts of brilliance ,you won't be able to be relied upon when things get tough. Stephen King became the writer he did because his wife would tell him to write a story, the baby needs diapers, and he did.

So before you can work smart, you have to know how to work hard. Otherwise you're just goofing off.
My issue is not with the vetted characterizations of symptoms in DSM-IV, but with the nature of the original article and pseudo psychologists like some middle school counselors. This is a subject that needs to be treated with some form of scientific rigor, not feel good fluff pieces.
Strictly speaking, when the DSM-V comes out, no one will have Asperger's _per se_ since they've removed it (under the assumption that people will either be classified under the revised definition of Autism, or not at all).

Under the DSM-IV, one of the criteria reads: "(III) The disturbance causes clinically significant impairments in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning." -- generally, it's up to a psychiatrist's professional judgement to determine this. Sometimes it will be obvious; sometimes it won't. Don't self-diagnose.
DIY Cash Blower Sales Motivator
Hie Chris, which languages enjoy out of the box support/awesomeness of light table. Im a power vim user and light table is the first ide that has me thinking of switching. Keep up the good work :)
Thanks for posting realistic and honest figures. As developers we can become obsessed with building things, and inflate the potential return. I can understand your frustration, working at such a high level, building, marketing, debugging, drawing artwork, etc., only to have what seems like pennies on the dollar come your way.

It takes guts to share, so thanks.
I liked reading this after reading the poll about how old average HN readers are. Different ages have different priorities. Sometimes people aren't busy simply because they want to be important, or feel that they are better than you, or have over extended themselves. Sometimes people are actually busy.

Depending on where you are in life, sometimes you realize that the "Terrible Trivium" is actually the people around you who keep demanding focus.
Doing Marketing (for developers) Differently
Thank you for the feedback Feralmoan!
Summary of MtGox Reddit AMA Q&A from this morning
I used to make that same fort-from-the-french correction until I did so to an Italian girl who looked at me curiously and explained this.

Although I think (in the spirit of pedantry) it's worth noting that the french pronunciation of the word depends on whether it's fort or forte and, of course, the first syllable of the next word!
The question is - has this policy reduced the number of spammy, irrelevant or ignorant comments on the Play store. It used to be several notches below the quality of Youtube comments.
I'm not even sure how to respond to this. For one, there's a distinct difference between Asperger's and High-Functioning Autistics, and while they may have taken it out of the DSM, it doesn't change the fact that these changes in characteristics exist and when diagnosed correctly, can still identify the subset of issues each are facing and how to respond/deal with those issues.

Secondly, people forget that autism, as a spectrum, is being studied further and further and as such, we are finding more reason to believe that it actually does affect a lot of people -- not necessarily that it is grossly misdiagnosed. Furthermore, the number of doctors knowledgeable enough in diagnosing someone at any range of the spectrum is low. As we learn more about it, we are seeing people their 20s, 30s, some even well into their 50s and 60s finally being diagnosed because they were able to adapt well-enough that it seemed nothing was wrong on the outset.

Similarly, females on the spectrum are also often misdiagnosed with anxiety, depression or eating disorders because of how it affects them, and therefore we think that autism primarily affects men even though that may not be the case at all. Society tends to prime girls at a young age to be more sociable (but doesn't frown upon them being shy either), so they are often able hide under the radar, but continue to suffer in other ways. I'm on the spectrum myself, and I've had doctors laugh at me for wanting to be tested because "I 'look' and 'act' 'normal'," to them, which is incredibly insulting. Additionally, those that are trained to detect autism are often pediatricians, not general practitioners that aren't taking into consideration the adult patient's learned-skills over time. This is often what leads people to try to figure out what is wrong with them through other means, and I don't think we should be going around telling other people who they are and aren't. There will always be hypochondriacs, but this is one of those situations where I feel like we should try to take people seriously before we write them off entirely.

So thanks for the armchair neuropsychology, but nobody needs it; we still have a lot to learn.
Ahh! Thanks for the clarification. I said it out loud 10 times fast but still couldn't figure out what it was supposed to mean. That's likely because "Apache" and "server" appear at the same time so often, so I don't hear any ambiguity.

I looked over various email/usenet logs from 1994 but couldn't find any mention of Apache before that email of yours, nor a source to exchanged patches for NCSA httpd.

In terms of documentation, I see three factors: 1) "out of the blue", 2) it was a neat pun, 3) there's the association to the 'tenacity and fighting skills' of various Apache nations. (Which, contrary to rtf's quote, do use 'Apache' in their own name in English. )

I believe main reason is #2, and it looks like you do as well. The current FAQ reads "'Apache' was chosen from respect for the Native American Indian tribe of Apache (Indé)". I believe that is contrary to the historical evidence. Do you still have any of the records for the decision?

FWIW, Handbook of North American Indians: Southwest edited by William C. Sturtevant, p385 says:

The English word Apache is from Spanish Apache, which was first used by Jan de Oñate, on September 9, 1598, at San Juan Pueblo (Hammond and Rey 1953, 1:345). The most widely accepted source for this word is Zuni (ʔa·paču) 'Navajos', the plural of paču 'Navajo'; in Oñate's time no distinction was drawn between Apaches and Navajos (Hodge 1907-1910, 1:63; Dennis Tedlock, communication to editors 1977). Harrington (1940:513), and other authors before him, derive the word Apache from the Yavapai word 'axwáača 'Apaches', perhaps through confusion with ʔpačə ([ʔəpa·čə]) people'. Similar words are found in other Yuman languages. These hypotheses are weakened by the fact that at the time he used this name Oñate had not yet encountered either the Zunis or any of the Yuman peoples (Schroeder 1974a:232, 239). A third, rather improbable etymology derives Apache from apache, a rare spelling variant of the Spanish mapache 'racoon' (Santamaría 1974:69).

It then goes on for another few pages on all of the different variants, categorizations, obsolete names, and names used by other languages.

This is enough to tell me that rtf, at the time of writing that quote, has no greater understanding of the topic as I, a once regular listener of Native America Calling.