skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The rise of Fab.com thefancy.com and the other design websites that sell physical products that the owners ship have motivated startups to make fulfillment more efficient I think.

Fulfillment is the biggest pain in the ass of a business. You won't understand until you have to do it yourself. Even 10 packages can take an hour from beginning to end. So a few startups caught on and the rest were inspired to offer solutions as well.

I personally can't use Shyp because I have a sweet & easy setup already.

1) I have all my shipping supplies in the basement (boxes stacked to the ceiling).

2) I pack my orders (from DayOnePP.com) and buy postage using Stamps.com and print it out on sticky labels using my laser printer.

3) As long as 1 box is Priority Mail the USPS will pick up for free the next day. She's usually here at 3pm so I know when to be ready.

4) If not, there's always a post office within 5 minutes that has a 24/hour package drop off container. I just run through that before work and drop off all the boxes I've got.

It literally cannot get easier. I don't wait in line for anything and still get the cheapest prices on postage by using the online discounts that stamps.com(& PayPal Shipping & Pitney Bowes Smart Postage & Endicia offer) .
For most people, A/B testing a complex app (non-app websites are a completely different beast) is not economical compared to tackling larger (and hopefully obvious) design problems.

If your product is so well designed and developed that there's literally nothing obvious that you can improve without either 1) isolating changes down to colors or placement, and/or 2) throwing different options at the wall to see what sticks, then I say:

Congratulations.
Most of these pronunciation ones either sound exactly the same to me, or I use interchangeably like the two pronunciations of the word "a".

...hmm, I wonder if "a" has any geographic breakdown.
How do you define user's "join date"? Is it the first time you saw the user?

For that matter, how do you identify the user? If the user logged in from two different machines, does it count as one user or two?
That was really well done and funny! The ending comment had me laughing.

It reminds me of a similar video Animator vs. Animation.
What, exactly, do you expect in terms of hard evidence from someone who is claiming they find Facebook useful? Do you expect to get a spreadsheet of their usage activity and a split test they ran where they defriended half of their closest friends and tried using e-mail for a week? The only people who can share "hard evidence" of engagement data of the Facebook news feed are Facebook themselves, and they are not going to do that.

When it comes to understanding user satisfaction, anecdotes count a lot, particularly when those anecdotes re-enforce the thesis of a product by example.

You raise the question of what is the point of Facebook if you hide 90% of your "friends". Just asking this question shows that you don't really get what the author is saying. Putting quotes around "friends" tells me you are missing the point that the author is, in fact, leaving left un-hid people who meet two attributes: are legitimate close friends/relatives and post interesting and meaningful content. What remains is a one-of-a-kind stream of content that provides him/her with the ability to feel they are in tune with the lives of people who they are no longer nearby.

People who come to HN and rail on Facebook about privacy concerns and ethics have a point. People who come on HN and rail on Facebook The Product are missing the point. If Facebook's news feed is not engaging, it means one of two things: you have over-friended and not hidden people who post bad content, or you are not connected to any people who post content on Facebook that you enjoy. There are many, many people that do not fit in either of these categories.
I think you mean 'for addressing a group of people'. We have plenty of words for groups of people. And we have ways of addressing them, they just take more than one word: "you -foo-". It's like the infinitive in English is two words, (to -foo-) but in most other euro languages it's only one.
It's not the fact that they throttle. It's the fact that they hide the fact that they throttle.
I had my contract renewed back in Jan and it din't include any tethering option. So I guess I am stuck for the next 1 1/2 years. However its great to see the new bundling option being offered. It really comes in handy when you are on the move or on vacation.
I think it's the same ol' DX, just back in stock.
Show HN: Planit - A planner app developed with HTML5
That's not what Freemium does at all. Look at the games list, and you'll see the Top Grossing are also the top Free. That's a problem. Many of them cannot be enjoyed without paying. Clash of Clans, for example, cannot be played w/o getting attacked unless you spend actual cash to get gems to get a "Shield" to keep from being attacked, and you cannot compete with good players unless you pay cash for gems to speed up building and troops. The top players are spending $2500 a month.

A more reasonable model is a Lite version and a Full version, or a combined lite and full with the in-app purchase to unlock the full. However, this model is a problem if the app is ever pulled, because each time you re-install you need to re-unlock, and may not be able to. I strongly prefer to delete the Lite version and install the Full version that I never have to unlock.
Ethical Hacker on NPR's The Story
Re: Fiesta.cc - we're on it. Ping me (alexey at username dot com) if you'd like to be in the beta for paid corporate email accounts, and I'd be happy to help you out!
Is it just me, or is this the perfect use case for Insert Me Anywhere?

http://insertmeanywhere.biz/#/home
The Wikipedia ideals of having open, unbiased, and free access to information and being able to freely collaborate and edit articles directly conflict. If editing is "free", so too is slander and misinformation.

Unfortunately, I have no good solution to this problem. But then again, neither does Wikipedia.
There's a serious possibility that people are more interested in putting fitbits on their dogs than they are on themselves.

Wealthy pet owners will spend an irrational amount of money on their dogs in almost the same way that wealthy parents will spend anything on their kids.

I don't own a dog, but every person I've spoken to who does has told me that this is awesome and $99 is pretty small relative to what they spend on their pet. (Granted, most of these people have a reasonable disposable income that they're willing to spend on their dog.)

So I'd really love it if the people commenting would disclose whether they own a pet or not. I suspect a lot of the skepticism is from people who don't own pets.
I know; this is shameful.
I’ve been pointing for years to the fundamental rhetorical problem of wikis — that making the link target and the link label the same, as Ward’s Wiki did, moves all links to nouns and noun phrases with disastrous impact on the link structure. Wikipedia no longer uses WikiLinks, unfortunately, but almost every link remains anchored to a noun and almost no editors use links intelligently or creatively.

I don't see a problem with most links being nouns and noun phrases. Wikipedia is a reference, not a literary masterwork, and so consistency and the principle of least surprise should be followed. There's also no guideline that I know of that forbids the use of links creatively or intelligently for non-nouns, as long as they wouldn't negatively impact readability.

I also don't believe Wikipedia/Mediawiki has required link labels to match link targets in something like ten years. It's often desirable or necessary to do that purely for semantic reasons.
I have always heard it referred to as "a monkey's wedding." Though I think that came from my dad who grew up in apartheid South Africa, so it might be racist...
If the question was 'murder or suicide' than I'd say it was likely to be sooner, but I think the combination of "megalomaniac + homicidal + access to printer and plans + access to ammunition + following through" is pretty low. It doesn't really ring true for me either: "first to murder someone with a 3D printed weapon" is only going to appeal to some tiny fraction of the above. Not that it couldn't happen, I just find it too unlikely to really be plausible.
What idea do you hate? The article conclusion is:

> Spending money on great apps means not only do you get great apps now, but you’re also essentially investing in great apps later. Let’s fix the App Store economy, and let’s start by paying for apps without shuddering at $4 price tags.

He didn't say pay $4 for crap. He said "great apps".

(See my Genesia example elsewhere in this thread, which most customers will never discover because it's not in the top 20, not promoted by Apple ... and not free to rank for downloads with in-app purchases to drain your wallet if you dare trying to play it.)
I just moved to the valley and I love that they offer $10/m unlimited international calls and texts. They also offer free tethering up to 2.5GB's and unlimited data (w/o tethering). They claim not to slow you down at a certain point with unlimited data.
They can start by actively discouraging lawyering and deletionism.
I'm curious about the project.
Just because the failures happen and get press doesn't mean that the law gets fixed. There is TREMENDOUS hysteresis in the law. The only way anything ever gets fixed is if the majority of politicians think they will all not get re-elected unless they fix something. That doesn't happen too often. Besides none of them will go anywhere near something that sounds like "being soft on crime" or "think of the children" or what-have-you.

Ultimately it's what happens when the system is highly skewed towards zero accountability. The cost to the individuals pursuing these cases is small and there's good upside risk: putting away child pornographers is great for your career. And the downside risk is HUGE! Failing to put someone away for it is going to make you look really bad. So reasonable people making reasonable decisions need never happen.
DC you say? I'm in Arlington/Alexandria, any info about their coverage there? I'm definitely interested in switching from Verizon soon.
I received my first bitcoin tip.  I'm so excited.
Grouper is growing like crazy and requires Facebook.

This is basically Grouper, without the group, and way too expensive ($75 per date? Are you kidding?). I would also say much less appealing then Grouper as well, because going solo is a much harder sell, at least to the younger demographic.
I find it pretty easy to ignore people here and I don't tend to remember who makes comments on my comments. But I can certainly see how blocking someone would help cut down the flame wars.
That looks great; I'll have to try it out. I don't recall what software I tried before. They all promised stuff but it came out garbage, especially when charts and stuff were involved.
> but I really believe that the next "big social thing" will be a start-up that will somehow make it easy to approach people you don't know and spark up a conversation.

Absolutely. This is a particularly acute pain point for us nerds, but it afflicts just about everyone to some extent. Our social circles are unfortunately limited in a way that technology could certainly address.

I envision a service that would include everything from dating to finding Dungeons & Dragons groups to just finding people to chat with who are currently nearby and share an interest. Google Glass would make this kind of thing even more interesting.
In regards to the Wikipedia list of American Novelists, could it not be that sexism for the last many hundreds of years have rendered a collection of what many consider to be the "most prominent authors" being primarily male. I am not saying that it's right, but it would seem that given our propensity as a culture through the years to over value the opinion of a man, a list of mainly male authors is all but inevitable.
Is the list of feed URLs you have collected thus far (without the cached feed content) publicly accessible?
I've applied several times, can't wait to be accepted.
Link for anyone interested: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/animator

It's interesting to go back and look at some of the semi-old-school viral content once in a while.

I'm a little surprised Albino Blacksheep (and fetchfido.co.uk apparently) is still running to be honest.
the concern is not just about a single power reactor being misused to produce bomb fuel, but about the picewise contribution a nuclear power program makes to the nation's capacity to achieve their weapons ambitions
150ppi? What is this, the dark ages?
craig mod says:

> If you are overtly negative

> (which is different than

> having opinions differing from my own),

> you get hidden.

i didn't know who was writing this when i first read it.

but i still chuckled when i came across that sentence...

and when i looked and it was _craig_mod_, i laughed at loud.

because it's "just fine" if you disagree with craig mod,
just as long as you kiss his ass while you're doing it.

otherwise, he will peg you as "overtly negative"...

-bowerbird
Hmmmm, I didn't realize that "sneakers" instead of "tennis shoes" was a north eastern thing.
Makerbot in acquisition talks
We are about to release a very interesting solution to this. Write me if you are interested in more info perl.jonathan at gmail
Look, your initial claim that the reporter is reasonable when saying that the protocol should be "impossible" to attack is completely unfounded. The details do matter.

For example your hypothetical protocol is grossly insecure. Keys transmit signals over dozens of feet, not inches. All an attacker would have to do to attack your hypothetical protocol would be to capture one exchange. Then he can XOR the challenge with the response to obtain the 32-bit secret, allowing him to clone the key!
If you're not used to the WSJ paywall, access the article via the Google results page instead: https://www.google.com/search?q=3-D+Printer+Firm+MakerBot+in...
What is an "MG"?
I think you missed my point. I expect hard evidence (or even anecdotal evidence!) when making the following claim: "Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby."

A) I think that care deeply needs to be defined.

B) My opinion is that FB is too superficial to merit any kind of "deep connection." Here is where some evidence would have been nice.

B.1) Even so, considering that (just about) everything on FB is semi-public, I'm not sure how anything posted on FB would be conducive to a personal and deep relationship with anyone. Unless we're only talking about private messages sent via FB messenger or something (but FB as a whole is a different kind of animal).

I wasn't railing on FB the Product, as you call it. But I think that the new generation is looking for something more substantive. (There have been slews of such articles [providing hard evidence, incidentally] lately.) I think I'd also be looking for something more substantive (even though I'm 27). My point is that it doesn't seem possible to maintain a personal and deep connection with just about anyone through FB (given the semi-private nature of the service); saying otherwise is begging the question: how, exactly, do you maintain this relationship merely though the superficiality of FB?
The technology used here to do the image processing is GLSL, in particular fragment shaders (aka pixel shaders). GLSL is a very small C-like language that's become a standard for GPUs. GLSL code gets sent (as a string) to the GPU by javascript via the WebGL API.

Seriously is a JS library for handling the boilerplate of WebGL, composing and compositing multiple shaders in a pipeline/graph, and adjusting their parameters. In addition it comes with a bunch of pre-written shaders.

Shaders themselves are a lot of fun to write, IMO. A pixel shader is just a function that computes a color given an input pixel location. (A shader can also take in additional input such as "textures" to sample from, e.g. a video frame.)

The shader is run with massive parallelization in the GPU. In theory every pixel can be processed simultaneously. This is how these effects can run in real time.

Here are some more examples of what you can do with pixel shaders (including sampling from the webcam in the browser -- should work in Chrome and FF),
http://pixelshaders.com/examples/

I'm in the process of writing an interactive book about pixel shaders,
http://pixelshaders.com/
Talking about Facebook is the ultimate bike-shedding discussion. Everybody, and I mean literally everybody inside and outside of the tech world has an opinion. That's fine, but when people start extrapolating their opinion to predict the fate of Facebook (and this applies more to the previous article than this one) I just have to laugh. I'm sure Facebook will make a fascinating topic for anthropologists 50 years from now, but in the meantime I don't need a slew of columnists going all Nostradamus on the subject. What one likes or dislikes about FB, or tips on how to use it are all potentially good topics, but the grand predictions are just so much noise.
Sorry, I should have explained. It's how he achieved the scooter shots.

You can see the rig here
http://shootseeker.com
I've been on a few Groupers. The reason they ask you to bring friends is because they're setting you up on a blind date. If the blind date goes bad and there's no chemistry, your friends act as a hedge against having a bad night. Sure, the girls may not be good, but you've still got your friends so you can go somewhere else afterwards.

When we setup drinks, you see who you're going out with, so it isn't blind. You know there's at least some physical attraction, or something about the other person you're interested in. We don't assume for you that it'll work out, both people decide in advance that they want to meet up. Worst case scenario is you meet someone interesting, and maybe you'll stay in touch after that.

As for pricing, I still think the service we offer isn't priced high enough. Grouper makes $120 per night out, we make $75 or $150 and it's not blind--they're splitting the cost between your friends. If you're busy, your time is valuable. For every 100 messages you send out on a dating web site, you'll get on average 10 replies. For every 10 replies, you'll on average get 1 date. For every 10 dates, you'll have 1 or 2 good matches. That's a lot of manual time, and I'd say that alone is worth $75 if you're a busy professional.

We will never attract professional grade matchmakers at this price point, but we can at least do a lot of the work for you and suggest good matches. If you want to hire an actual matchmaker, you'll be paying in the order of thousands of dollars. Linx Dating, just to use an extreme example, is $30,000 for 11 introductions over 2 years. And that's not counting the $500 application process.
You sound like an old co-founder of mine. When he latched onto something, be it developing code or burning a DVD collection, he went all in, and dropped everything else for extended periods of time. While I do this at times as well, I think it's best to live a balanced lifestyle (http://www.pathways.cu.edu.eg/subpages/training_courses/Well...). I believe you can have a family and take vacations and still build a killer startup. Look at famous people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, the CEOs of many fortune 500 companies - many are married with kids - and yet still very successful in business.
Fuck yeah, seriously. The times have changed!
As does pipe.
I disagree with 'zero' deaths. the UNSCEAR report does not say zero deaths. it says that the increased cancer deaths due to the reactor disaster over the coming decadrs will not be statistically discernable. That's not zero deaths.
lol Frodo...
i came up with this idea for power but i quickly became overwhelmed so i only told a few people... its more fun watching Elon Musk talk out of his ass about renewable energy...

https://sites.google.com/site/verticalwindfarm/

shhh!
Marketing! For both Exec and Stripe.
Interesting, din't know it was uncommon. Could they be targeting certain areas, maybe the ones with high data usage? It happened to me when I moved to NYC and found myself stuck in an apt with no internet for the first few days.
That really depends on the PDF. Most PDFs I read are CS papers (heavy on PL theory). The only pictures they have are commutative diagrams. For that, e-ink is pretty good.

Of course, screen size is a different story. I've had some luck getting the TeX sources and recompiling them to fit on the screen, but that's too much effort in general :P. Still, for the papers I tried that way, it's great.
> Aside from using some user resource (like battery or network) how is this different from what website have been doing for a long time?

1) Network requests (and thus communication with a remote machine that can log those requests) is an innate facet of the web. You can't load a site without explicitly choosing to make a network request. An app, however, might have no innate reason to make a network request at all.

I think #1 is the most important, but also:

2) JavaScript can be disabled.

3) HTML/JavaScript and browser network requests can be reviewed. Mobile applications are almost completely opaque to users.

4) Cookies can be blocked to reduce tracking surface.

5) Web analytics and cross-web tracking is already something people are concerned about, resulting in the introduction of do-not-track and similar.

Desktop apps have almost always explicitly asked permission before tracking users, whereas the web community seems to have brought to mobile a blasé approach to privacy and user respect.
> While this is great and I sincerely congratulate Google for it, I still find the wording slightly disturbing. They say they were going to close down the API because only "a few large developers" were using it.

Incorrect. They said they were going to make it a whitelisted, by-request, partner-only API for that reason, rather than that they were going to close it down. There is a fairly significant difference.

> For me, openness is a relatively unconditional principle. You do it because it is a virtue in and of itself.

In the real world, few things are unconditional, and while Google has certainly claimed openness as one of its values, Google has never claimed that using open standards is an unconditional principal that is never weighed against other concerns.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. They aren't matching you up with people they've vetted or know -- they're just finding you a date from other online dating services. And then charging you $75 (which could end up being $150 for them if they get both people via their site).

Semi-related, but Tim Ferriss has an interesting story about how he "outsourced his love life": http://blog.timferriss.com/1/post/2009/07/how-to-tim-ferriss...
I asked because when I did a lot of shipping I had the same setup that you just mentioned. I'd just use the paypal hookup to print shipping labels for no additional cost.

Beyond actually packing and shipping the product I don't see what else there is left to solve.