skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I totally applaud Rackspace's dedication to the public good. But I think their response is their best move economically too, despite the initial cost. They are basically saying "Troll me, and you risk losing the whole patent." It's like dealing with a playground bully. Once you display a willingness to fight, they go pick on someone less assertive.
“Needing two agents to cooperate in a transaction allows a full-service agent to punish discount agents,” Syverson says. “It also allows full-service agents to punish other full-service agents who cooperate with discount agents.” As a result, an agent can steer clients away from for-sale-by-owner properties or from homes represented by discount brokers.

Is this legal?
Your examples are not just wrong, but the opposite is true. Twitter and FB needed crazy cash early on, and twitter still might. FB has a business model now, but they didn't for a long time. But they went from low millions to nearly a billion "over night" long after they had spent hundreds of millions of dollars.

Twitter is just now building a revenue business but has raised nearly a billion dollars.

Google is a decent exception to that rule, but only because they turned their revenue engine on just in time and it was an oil well of cash. Otherwise they would have had major cash issues as they scaled their infrastructure.
For example, they could offer to buy the patent from the current holder, and finance an attack on their competitors.

But they chose a higher road.
Mt.Gox is hacked by Anonymous
Rocket Pop Games Shares how their app got 1M downloads
I won't speak to what's right for anyone else's company but I will talk about where I work;

We engage in social media because our business is a service business. Our customers are paying us every month to continue to serve them. It's therefore important to stay in communication with them and stay engaged with them.

We don't see social media as a major traffic source, let alone sales source, but it is useful for engaging our current customers and communicating with them.

We do also use it as an opportunity to spread the word about ourselves and have more presence but we don't expect, and don't see it as a major source of traffic or sales. That's ok because the purpose of those pages is not to be a sales source.

I think if the point of this article is; don't sink tons of money into social media expecting an immediate boost in sales, I'd say that's a solid point.

But if the point of this article is abandon all social media ye who enter here, that's probably silly. It's not that hard to keep up a Facebook page, Twitter account and even Google+ page.
I am very fortunate to have cashed out at the peak of this bubble. It's a damn shame mtgox is having these problems. I consider it to be a huge vulnerability of the system.

That said, many people are working on alternatives. It's a growing pain. I need to do more research but the concept behind this project looks very promising: https://github.com/macourtney/Dark-Exchange
Neat idea. My only issue is I have a hard time between a 'user' and dust on my screen. lol
I disagree that this was "a perfectly reasonable poll", from that pov I think my logic may not be that torturous.
Prevent spam with Hashcat
Email is pretty screwed when Gmail goes down, but we don't get a bunch of people talking about how centralized email really is. There's a difference between "influence" and "control".
I don't know all those green people in Oceania might get together with the blue people and err nm.
What you are failing to take into consideration is that the demographic that keep a pit or rot mix as a non-socialized and aggressive guard dog over represents the breed as a whole. Yes, a pit bull has a greater chance of inflicting serious harm if they attack, most of the ones that attack are the millions locked in a yard by your neighborhood drug dealer.

I just read through a couple reports, they include wonderful stories like the pit bull who knocked over an old lady and broke her hip as an attack.

Edit: To make an anecdotal, worthless point...I live in a really poor area of Portland. I walk through the neighborhood and on just about every block there is one house with a locked up pit bull behind a 4 foot chain link fence. These dogs are aggressive, abused and very well represent a danger to people.
I am taking it for granted that speculative trading is a pretty common, if not the main activity on MtGox:

- "Bitcoin day trading": https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57169.0

- "Mt. Gox Temporarily Halts Bitcoin Trading to Allow the Market to Calm the Hell Down": http://betabeat.com/2013/04/mt-gox-halts-trading-temporarily...

But I could be wrong.
If I launched a photo sharing site called Laughing Squid, a large percentage of my ideal demographic would hate me.

If I put a lot of work into something, why would I blow my own foot off for cheap publicity?
This is true of any service anywhere, even regardless of whether the company makes money or not. Btw, any ideas of a good replacement for Google Reader?
Is this a hoax?

Does this data come from phishing instead?
I'm interested in ClojureScript development. Will LightTable support it out of the box just like it supports Clojure?
What Motivates us to Work?
It may be better to stick to targeted advertising (e.g. Adwords) where you can aim at consumers further along the sales funnel by controlling specificity and have an easier way to track conversions.

Also any money invested in SEO, as in building good content vs. SEO "tricks", usually has a bigger payoff than paid advertising.
Profiles of Successful Entrepreneurs
"Oh hey! You know we could just give it all back."

Because I don't like part of a company, I have to avoid using any other part of that company? Or if I don't, I can't complain about the part of the company I don't like? I don't subscribe to such black and white thinking.
It's odd that the author singles out AppGratis for so much ire. There are many, many channels for paid app promotion, and rankings in Apple's app store have been heavily influenced by advertising dollars since the fall of 2008 - long before AppGratis was founded.

The advertising-free 'meritocracy' the author wants has never existed - even before the influx of paid app promotion, Apple could arbitrarily send an app to the top of the paid or free charts simply by featuring it.
Ask HN: My niece wants to learn about "computing". Where do I start?
Hey all,

My niece asked if I could teach her about computing. She's about 8, but she's vehemently opposed to so-called "fluffy stuff" - her words. I was thinking I'd just bust out the Wizard book and work on it with her and her brother, but perhaps it may be too abstract?

She seems more interested in thinking about computing than programming games, etc; so any recommendations on where to start?
Yeah I think the point is that if you are using it as a sales channel then you should measure it closely because it probably isn't doing as well as you think. Social media is just an extension of customer support in its most effective use case. You can see Lucidchart responds to customer questions via twitter for example.
California is an undivided sovereign entity--the City of San Francisco is merely an administrative subdivision. The relevant constituency is the population of California, and any Californian who wants to live in San Francisco should be able to do so without protectionist zoning regulations that put up artificial roadblocks to migration.
I've actually applied the "Philip," tactic (read the article to know what I mean) to all my writing. Makes it easy for me to balance educational with a conversational style.
Ask HN: advice/comments on looking for a job in France without knowing French?
Hi all (but mostly the French :-) ),

We're currently in the UK, but my wife's a bit of a Francophile and would love to sample the French life for at least a while. I don't really know much about France, much less the software development job market there. As I don't speak French (I'd try to learn it once there), I suppose the most obvious question is "Can you get by in the office with just English initially?". I imagine that's a "no" for most/all small companies, but not sure if it's the same with multinationals?

Much more subjectively: I'm a fairly junior developer (2.5y out of uni). Should I expect to be able to afford to rent a 1-2 bed flat and support a wife and a toddler?

Any ballpark salary figures will be appreciated, as well as any other relevant comments. Needless to say, if you're aware of any opportunities, I'd be grateful to hear about them :-)

Cheers
I assume it was the targeted phishing thing with the java applet someone already reported, but maybe pretty widespread.
some will read this and think: "disgusting. thanks for the honest appraisal of what it's like... and it's disgusting."

Others will read this and think: "holy crap man, the people that are screwed by the company still make just under a million! I totally want to work on wall street. I'll be rich"

It's a jungle out there
It's fast, but not conversations based; there's no threading at all that I can see, except a "replied" icon that isn't even an active link. It's a shame because conversations (unlike labels) don't require any protocol extension, thunderbird conversations work on any server.
There was plenty of invention before patents existed as a legal concept.

Patents exist because some people who came up with clever ideas thought (properly) that it was in their best interest to be granted a legal monopoly on the implementation of their ideas and lobbied lawmakers to grant them these monopolies.

Patents did not come into being because we, as a society (speaking as an American), determined that our pace of innovation was too slow and decided that we needed to do something about it.

This idea, that patents encourage innovation, is the justification, not the motivation, for the legal construct that is the patent. There were no experiments done to test this hypothesis. In fact, I think the history of invention before patents suggests quite strongly that they are not needed; that, in fact, people will invent simply because we are tool builders and tinkerers.

EDIT: To testify to the fact that people invented before patents: http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2011/12/machine-power.html

A book from 1606 showing illustrations of gear and hydraulic powered devices. Some are fanciful, others less so, but they all clearly show humankind figuring out every last way to apply a technology to the tasks of every day life.
How to be agile without testing
Purchased, thanks for putting all these great opinions in one place. looking forward to the read.
Could be related to yesterdays story about the trojan targeted at MtGox users? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5531245
Het weer: dit zijn de beste (gratis) weer apps voor je tablet of smartphone
Hey Chris,

I love the idea of Light Table.

I'm sorry if I missed a post, but when do you plan on officially releasing the source code to the public? I'd really like to play with it.
Again, there are sides to that. Paris is one of the few places more expensive than SF, and the quality of the density can be a subjective one. I for one dislike Paris and the kind of density it creates (comparable to London, just smells worse).
I thought I made my reasoning clear in my comment on why I chose not to ignore it. I disagree with having polls such as these on HN (as well as asking people about their gender and race).

According to your logic, people should just ignore posts on HN that they disagree with rather than writing comments, the "if you disagree, just leave" approach.

Maybe I overreacted and should have just commented on this poll and and not marked a wrong age bracket. OTOH, I at least commented on my motivation to to do. The motivation of the other $n people (currently 121-1 = 120 under 10) is mostly opaque.
Suggest HN: Hellbanned with automated comments/upvotes?
The notion of being hell banned is a pretty amusing one.

Should HN also maybe randomly comment on hell-banned users (ie something generic, like "I agree", or "good idea!"), and randomly upvoting/downvoting them to give them the appearance that they are not hell banned?
Hah. Great argument. Especially when you consider that 'pit bulls' are not a breed, but an umbrella term for six breeds. So, yes, if you combine the bite statistics for six different breeds of dog (a few of which are very popular; all combined which make up about 7% of the dog population in the U.S.), the _six_ breeds will account for more biting incidents than any other _one_ dog. What a damning verdict.

This doesn't take into account any qualitative analysis either. For example, how many people buy a retriever or lab and train (aka, abuse) it to be aggressive towards everyone (i.e., a guard dog)?

Also, while voluntary, the American Temperament Test Society tests dogs in a number of scenarios for the overall temperament. Pit bull breeds do very well in these tests and have some of the highest sample sizes.

For example, page 1 (http://atts.org/breed-statistics/statistics-page1/#totals) lists the American Pit bull terrier and American Staffordshire terrier as ranking very highly and having 800+ subjects.
It's actually in Standby: https://music.twitter.com/
(there is already a HN submission for it — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5539041)
Most musicians create music without making their own instruments. Nobody would question the legitimacy of a keyboard (aka sampler) in a song. Other sampling is just the same principle extended. I respect keyboard players as artists just as much as musicians who play other digital samples.
Hey Chris, it's wonderful seeing the innovation and awesomeness that Light Table is bringing to the scene.
This book looks genuinely compelling, and is the first "HN books" in which I've been truly interested for quite some time. Alas, the price is too steep for me, and, were I in a position to buy it, this book would likely sit dormant in my queue of unread books for months if not years. Still, good luck.

(As an aside, the website is downright unusable on mobile.)
Why should "Can I pronounce the name of the college?" be a factor in who is the right candidate for a job?
Bitcoin bubble may have burst
I'm surprised by the proportion of yahoo email addresses. There are 662 of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan-African_colours

At least some of the folks who claim to speak for Africa say "black" represents the people.
That's not black hat marketing.
Or just send multipart emails. Best of both worlds (except bandwidth).
I think this is presented much better on MashupBreakdown. They also have more artists.

http://mashupbreakdown.com/
Maybe we disagree on what "fault" means; I think (and I'm pretty sure this is common usage) that if a person takes an action and a predictable bad outcome ensues, that person's at fault. It doesn't make him or her a bad person.

One last example: if you leave the laptop on an open windowsill and it falls out and breaks, is it now gravity's fault? If I throw it up in the air and fail to catch it, am I at fault, or is gravity? If I throw it and want the laptop to break so I don't catch it? Does it really depend on whether I want the laptop to break or not? What if I'm unsure of my motivations?

edit: I hope it's obvious, but multiple people can be "at fault" and the person who stole the bitcoins is more "at fault" than the victim here.
A lot of small online businesses in my area are killing it through Facebook.

Though they use the Facebook pages, not ads, and the ones I know of that are doing great post stuff for women mostly :) (clothes, bags, nail accessories, beauty stuff, home decor).

Many generate 100% of their sales through Facebook.
Assuming phishing/java/trojan/etc. was the vector, I think it there's probably some correlation between people dumb enough to be phished successfully and people using yahoo email addresses in 2013.
They're the third largest email provider on the planet. Any list of emails should be largely comprised of Yahoo email addresses.
There's even a helpful js library for this, previously featured on HN:

https://www.smore.com/clippy-js
it already does :) It's a little harder than it should be right now, though. Basically the steps are:

1) Open your html file

2) run the `connect to browser command` and copy the script tag

3) insert script tag into your html file

4) bring up your page in the browser (it has to have the output of lein-cljsbuild on it to get the initial cljs dependencies and such)

5) open a cljs file

6) eval an expression with cmd/ctrl+enter

7) select the browser instead of LightTable-UI

This process will be getting much simpler in the next release. :)
It may not always be possible to get perfect compression. Suppose for some reason you have the property that the hash for 10% of the words is "be" and the hash for a further 50% of the words is one of the words that hashes to "be." Using rainbow tables for this is not going to go well because all your chains are going to end up at "be" inside of a small number of iterations. But a hash with this property will also fail at its intended purpose because Alice could claim the hash for a word she doesn't know is 'be' and have a 10% chance of being right.

Good hash functions are specifically designed to make hash collisions like that as rare as possible, so in practice the compression ratio will be strongly correlated to the chain length, but you can still have instances where one hash value is slightly more common than another. The result is just that if you use a chain length of 100, the compression ratio in practice will be slightly worse than 100:1.

As to how to choose the heads of the chains, I suspect the answer for getting the absolute optimal choices will either be NP complete or will involve some application of linear algebra. If all else fails you could just keep adding random chains rooted in a value that isn't in any existing chain until you have full coverage. I don't know what people do in practice.
I don't understand why you think CISPA is hard to parse. The 2013 draft bill is public. The bill is extraordinarily short. And much of the objections --- which you rightly call out as emotional --- are contradicted by the text of the bill.

I don't so much care whether CISPA passes. What I do care about is people trying to fundraise by convincing willfully ignorant nerds that CISPA is a backdoor SOPA bill; why, just look, GoDaddy supports it, it must be bad!
When Michael Lewis wrote Liar's Poker he was shocked over the number of people who contacted him, asking for advice on how to get into investment banking.
Both of you talk as if generally, people never worry about such things. It seems unusual to me. Is it because the first language I learned was 65816 assembler?
the "what-if XKCD" related to something like this actually happening is kind of amusing: http://what-if.xkcd.com/8/
A lot of the issue is that people rich/smart enough to move to SF now (vs. those who pre-existed) value education. They're not going to send their kids to SF public schools, so they move to Hillsborough or Palo Alto for the schools. That leaves a population of 20-30s childless people, who are more likely to be liberal, and old hippies, the same.
Countless other companies in their position would pay the settlement and sign an NDA. We can never know the extent of this problem unless companies like RackSpace speak up.
Appears to be a dup of: http://pastebin.com/LxmisuVJ

There was a similar purported 'hack' [1] posted yesterday that was just recycled Pastebins in attempt to scam Btc.

[1] http://pastebin.com/eti9hAHN
It's odd that "most people have no idea who we are, have no reason to care and therefore aren't seeing our social media updates" didn't make it on the authors' list of considerations.

Then comparing to Coke is just goofy. Without even discussing the merits of what Coke's SM strategy looked like, there's no useful comparison between a tiny web company and a century-old international beverage conglomerate.
I don't have an exact date, but it will happen once the beta goes public and the plugin architecture is available :)
That is probably true, but that fact is not an all-access pass to making inaccurate claims about the bill. But it gets used that way all the time.
This list was proven fake - the data came from some other breach and this pastebin is just attributing it to a new hack. Here is the original sourced information (usernames and emails): http://pastebin.com/Kd093NQi

(I'm not going to flag this post for one reason - this pastebin has been passing around, and while there are other mtgox issues right now, this one is false and people should know that before spreading it further.)
Looks like no takers on the full db dump.

https://blockchain.info/address/1NMuzGzxDccvqwLvMuEuTRZSwJ6M...
Right. Even if they are doing it solely to look good, it's heartening to their customers (and potential customers) that they understand that it does make them look good, and why.
Books like this should really offer a money back guarantee.

Why? It signals quality and enables speculative purchasing.

The quality signal I think is obvious.

The speculative purchasing is an incremental sale. Emotionally, I'm not going to purchase this book without a guarantee unless I've decided to commit time to read it. However, with a guarantee I can buy it on the chance that I might read it. It's not logical, I know, but it is how customers work emotionally.

Also, economically your guarantee is basically free. 99% of the time its not worth my time to request the refund even if I don't like the book. The 1% is if your book has made me emotionally angry due to its poor content (1 book I've ever read).

But, people will game the system? No they won't. At least not in sufficient volume to make it worth worrying about. If I want to scam a free copy of your book, it's likely I can find a pirated version faster than I can get my wallet and enter my credit card number.
You are right, we do have some patents.

We have never used them against others.

Unfortunately, we feel like we need to be prepared for when other patent-holding entities come knocking. We know they will, because they already have.

We don't make the mistake of confusing "patents" with "innovation." The majority of what we create, we release under open source licenses, including a patent license.

If people and companies want to play nice with us, we will play nice. We believe that we can compete, and win, in the marketplace. We are only preparing ourselves for the challenges of those who don't want to compete in the marketplace.

Van

(Rackspace VP of IP)
Twitter acquisition hints at new music service
I have no idea about the actual value of social media, but this evidence is clearly stacking the deck:

* Search engines: how does your product become highly ranked and easily findable?

* Partner websites: ditto, how do people find those?

* Friend: how do those friends communicate about stuff like Lucidchart in 2013? This one is not even funny anymore...

* Co-worker: ditto. A lot off our conversations not directly about the work at hand happen either during lunch via social media. "Have you seen this cool app?"

* Other: seriously?

* etc..

I could go on, but social media clearly plays a major role in transferring this information. It's impossible to calculate to what extend these other channels would dry up if you would take social media out of the equation.

It's pretty much the same argument as it used to be about advertising in the pre-clickthrough era: it could not possible be measured in direct revenue. Doesn't make it worthless.
> And I want Apple to decide that — not another company that takes (large) kickbacks from app developers [...] I want Apple to be ultimately responsible for my app marketplace experience.

Yes, that line bugged me as well. Forgetting about AppGratis (because I don't know enough about their business) how do you as a consumer just know that the store owner must be better at curating/rating items for you than a third party who's job that is?