skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The US town I last worked in was not at all happy about the traffic externalities of office space. Their attempt to remedy it were complex and entailed a lot of overhead for everyone. Surveys, building restrictions, reimbursement plans, etc.

A tax system could simply charge employers based on the commutes of all employees and offer free to board public transit. Then it could stop allowing commute expense to be deducted in the covered areas..

I find tolls to be a little backward since virtually everyone traveling during the max capacity times can deduct them, while leasure travelers can not.
Turning them off might not be an option. Disks that are encrypted would them become unreadable when turned off.
This is honestly the only thing keeping me on firefox. After getting used to it horizontal tabs just seem so... wrong.
Hmm...interesting article.

In SF, BART is pay-per-ride throughout the system, while MUNI is proof-of-payment in many locations. One thing that I've noticed is that there are significantly more homeless people on MUNI than on BART. As a rider, this negatively influences my experience and desire to ride (mostly because of potential for screaming/attacking).

Especially if public transportation is free, I can imagine that the homeless would take shelter there in case of inclement weather. Not a huge issue in SF, but comes into play in other cities.
Adsense Easter egg game on dashboard 10th logo
Steve Jobs Ponders His Legacy In Never-Before-Seen 1994 Video
Specifically because of the problem mentioned, in fact.
I think "free" is the wrong word for it. Howabout "fare free"? Someone is going to have to pay.

I like the idea of pushing the costs more onto the community as a whole, not just users. Make it kind of like most school systems: everyone pays through taxes whether or not they have kids or if they send their kids to private school.
With a tight enough definition, nothing is free, since it's always someone or something that spent resources creating the "thing" or service. And hence the word "free" can be erased from the dictionary.
True, most A/B tests fail.

However looking at the listed tests, they mostly seem to be general branding tests. Changing your branding, including fairly major redesigns, reliably fails to make a difference.

But lots of other kinds of changes reliably do make a difference. Big button. Putting signup link in multiple places. The word "Free". Streamlining your form. (No, you don't want to ask for first/last name.) Email headlines. Providing relevant results first.

However they make small differences. You need to plan on tens of thousands of successful conversions in your test. You can make this easier by running multiple tests at once. If you're a small company, you can make conversion be "to the next step in the conversion funnel" instead of "to the end". (But be warned, companies that test long enough and get large enough tend to find examples of cases where that short cut burned them.)

However it is very important to set expectations. Expect to find few big wins. Expect most to be modest wins. Keep track. For an established company, if A/B testing is adding 5-20% to your bottom line each year, it is totally worthwhile. (If you have traffic and have not been testing, then odds are that your first year will find more than a 20% boost. But this declines in future years.)

A/B testing is a valuable tool. It isn't magic pixie dust.
I think this comparison says everything that needs to be said about Xeon Phi (for now):

http://clbenchmark.com/compare.jsp?config_0=15887974&config_...

Better luck next generation...
He makes some solid points. To return to the America he remembers, we need to repeal the Patriot Act.
That's simpler, but worse. Education is a text-book example of a good with positive externalities and it's worth subsidizing, especially for poorer people.
No, true, they won't care about the speed. But they will care about the default rate - and the ability to pay the debt down faster correlates strongly with a lower risk of default.
How to (hire the best || never get laid off)
Employee/Employer relationships are the topics that come up with enough regularity across hackernews, reddit and other articles, but other than a couple of random nuggets of wisdom here and there, I never quite came across the fundamental rule to drive them all until today.

Most everyone focuses on the various strategies for weeding out people or specifics for getting noticed. Firm handshakes, interviews beginning with the receptionist, interviews being replaced with mini-projects, whiteboard coding, judging on appearance, punctuality etc etc etc. It's basically a big set of articles with various advice on how to tune the bayesian employee filter or get through them.

While useful, I think we haven't given enough attention to the real rule that underlies everything else.

Obviously, "best" for everyone is quite different, however I'd be willing to bet that there's one golden quality that consistently underlies those that most of us consider "awesome" co-workers or employees.

In the short essay, "A Message to Garcia," it underlines the qualities of the man that is so valuable that no employer can let them go. Ultimately, it's embodied in the man who can carry the message to Garcia.

http://www.benning.army.mil/infantry/199th/ocs/content/pdf/Message%20to%20Garcia.pdf

It's a quick 5-10 minute read, but the story distills itself into being the person we describe as the "gets-shit-done-guy-without-complaining."
BUT... the server (at least in Google Reader case) actually plays a crucial role - it "caches" the RSS feeds, so if you subscribe to some, you can see the history of the feed, i.e. the older articles, which are already not listed in the actual RSS file. This is an important part of the RSS reader functionality - without the server, you will not have that history (unless I am missing something).
You're the only one who seems to have a problem with realizing that your taxes pay for government services. Everyone else has figured out that free in this case means you don't either plop some change in a box when you get on or are not buying a monthly pass.
Techonomy and Jack Dorsey Return to Detroit
Can one company change the next version of the spec without the collaboration of other users? If they can then it is proprietary even if it is open.

Was it developed by a collaborative effort across the market or was it dropped as a complete solution that they then tried to get approved by a standards body? Then it is probably proprietary even if open to everyone to use.
No, I'm not. In the same way that a post related to the iPhone somehow magically turns into a discussion about Samsung and "rounded corners", when the original article had nothing to do with those issues. My point is situations like this are further indications of Sony's incompetence, yet there's plenty on HN who will be standing in line to give them money when the PS4 come out, as if it's a different company without all the fails.
"will probably cost everyone a little more than expected."

A little less on a large enough system wide scale. Hard to find a cheaper way to move people around, quickly, on land, in any weather, than a properly applied bus.

Tourists in taxis is definitely not cheaper and rentals are even worse.

I admit trains/subways are cheaper if the utilization level is high enough, but it has to be Really high. If "your" subway stop has 50,000 potential riders that'll work. But where I live a subway stop by my house would have about 50 potential riders, which is a bit of a financial problem.
I'm not sure paying higher salaries actually brings in better people in all cases, though. University administration has seen a big influx of people who are in it for the money over the past 20 years, the kinds of people who 50 years ago would've stayed in industry. Now you can land a $300k+ academic job, so it's seen as a potential stop on the VP/consulting/management/etc. circuit to take some kind of top role at a university for a few years— rather than being seen as a senior academic position, with a higher but still modest salary. And that has further knock-on effects in that the top ranks of academia tend to have very corporate rather than research/education-oriented cultural backgrounds, and self-servingly think of administration as the most important part of the university.
Why should employers be responsible for the transit habits of their employees? Does this not also increase the cost of employment, thereby decreasing the employee's income?

From what I can see, this would be a hidden tax on the employee, which violates the principle that democracy requires maximum possible transparency.
> then sue law enforcement or the DOJ equivalent for the opportunity cost and storage costs

Does suing the government ever actually work?

(Honest question, I'm not an American and I've only seen people try to sue in high-profile cases like PRISM, which never seems to get them anywhere)
Basic introduction: http://blog.jsdelivr.com/2013/01/nginx-load-balancing-basics...
Beware the cyber-contractor industrial complex
Most A/B testing will fail when you're testing the wrong elements.

I have a challenge for you.

The examples you list are "top" of the funnel tests: buttons for engagement, a homepage redesign.

But when I go deeper into your funnel like your pricing grid page and cart checkout page, I see lots of tweaks that, in my experience, can drive the significant gains that you are looking for.

I'm going to use this page as my starting point, by way of example:

http://www.jitbit.com/hosted-helpdesk/purchase/

When I click order now on the "Startup" plan and get myself to the cart page here was my experience:

a) The load time on click to page load for checkout was >3 seconds for me. You can get some idea of why here http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ or here http://www.webpagetest.org/

b) Your design changes drastically between those pages, breaking the user's flow and attention. 37signals products do a nice job of maintaining conformity between pricing grid to checkout as an example.

c) You're treating a SAAS checkout like a product checkout - asking about quantity, list price, etc. What % of your users add multiple services to the cart? Can you keep this in more of a flow?

d) You have no visible security certificate on the page at all, when in fact even the placement of your security certificate on checkout can make a drastic impact in conversion eg http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/blog/2010/07/proper-placemen...

e) Yes, some people are still confused by what a CVV2 / CVC2 code is and displaying a visual explanation can help your conversions.

So my challenge for you is focus on the RIGHT area on your page to test - your highest intent traffic and I think you will find that a lot fewer cycles need be wasted and A/B testing remains one of the highest ROI activities your org can embark on.
Of course, the fix for that is to police the offending begavior, not tweak some vague correlate.
Those statistics are misleading. The asm.js numbers count compilation time, while the PNaCl numbers don't.
Booth's multiplication algorithm
NVidia hasn't sold direct to customers in years, so comparing them to Apple is a bit odd.

The distinction now is that in addition to buying fabricated chips, you can license the GPUs directly so you can manufacture in tighter ways.
Cartoon NSA Snooping
> Heck I'd pay money for a bus I don't use just to drive home faster.

I think there is a bigger business opportunity in this simple line than it first appears.

Perhaps the bus company's customer isn't the person riding the bus.
This is exactly the argument that ended Seattle's free ride program last year.
I take the bus to work everyday I wouldn't want it to be free, since right now those who have a need to take the bus can, whereas if it was free so many people would take the buses that there wouldn't be enough space and the bus company would have no reason to serve any routes.
Axiom: Public transportation is a more efficient (in terms of many basic resources valuable to society: first and foremost among them energy and space) way to get around, so it's in society's interest to shift as much mileage as possible towards it.

The central question is two-fold: How much of a shift would result from a given decrease in price? And how do we relate the (primarily:) monetary cost of making it free-to-ride with the (primarily:) non-monetary benefits of any given shift? The result of this question could give you an answer if making it free would be worthwhile.

Some thoughts:

I think decreasing the price per ride from e.g. 1 USD to 0 USD would make for a bigger shift in uptake than decreasing it from 2 USD to 1 USD. Not having to think about whether each single tour is worth the price of admission makes it a viable default way of getting around. This is just the usual flat rate argument that also applies to things like internet usage.

Making public transport free would invariably result not just in a shift towards it from other modes of transportation, it would also lead to an overall increase in mobility, which in terms of some resources reduced the gains in efficiency.

There's a valid argument that the efficiency of public transport is highly dependant on the amount of utilization: big buses and trains carrying single digit amounts of passengers can use up more energy than individual transportation. An increase in overall uptake would tend to reduce such problems since you'd get a small bus load full of people in cases where you'd have only a few now.

Obviously, free to ride public transportation is a particularly huge potential improvement for people who otherwise could not afford to get around. And since mobility is such an important part of life in modern society (minus us nerds who manage to leave the house only once per week), free-to-ride public transport has a massive impact in terms of social equalization.
We get it, you really like emacs. It's ok that products exist that are not for your needs/wants.
Avoid using Digital Ocean(DO).

We had very very bad experience with them, file-system corruption, hardware failures.

And we are still unable to recover all our data. And so far, no hope!

They don't answer any of the questions properly, my team is very upset. We felt, they don't have much technical expertise in managing servers.

DO might be okay for testing and learning, but never use them for any production setups.

Update: we are still struggling to get our data back. No hopes so far.

We shall write a detailed blog post on the whole experience with Digital Ocean.
It's aimed at displaying value propositions to a new user - something that startups usually focus on. I suppose Dropbox must be looking to expand their market share.
No, a straw man is when you construct an easy target to shoot down. This commenter is simply the title for its improper (or possibly vague) use of the word free.
Multiprocess is also important for security. It means that simply finding a renderer exploit isn't enough to pwn your system if the renderer processes have no privileges to write/execute arbitrary files.
That's certainly part of it. Non-profits generally cannot compete with Google in terms of cash.

But are there other ways for them to try and attract or otherwise develop talent? Perhaps their current model is insufficient.

It's interesting to see that Mozilla has become more involved with Samsung as a technology development partner. Perhaps that is one model.
This comment is terrible. For one, it's purely anecdotal with no evidence to support the statement "NYU is a school for rich kids". Have you really seen the wealth distribution of these individuals? Second, that very same statement is an attacking one, attempting to paint all "rich kids" with one brush as people who like "luxurious four year vacations." Do all "rich kids" not like to work hard? And finally, is there any proof that NYU is really anything like a "luxurious four year vacation?" - at least as it compares to any other university?
No doubt they would use buses as makeshift shelters. But that's a silly reason to not do a no-payment system. The solution is to improve the city's welfare system (e.g. shelters) since apparently it's inadequate.

The homeless population already exists: changing the metro to proof-of-payment or no-payment just concentrates them into the buses and subways.
There is public domain satellite imagery for USA and Europe available from the US Government (e.g. NASA). There is public domain map data available for the USA, but not Europe available from the US Government (e.g. Tiger data).
There is a technology solution to the crisis of trust caused by the NSA revelations: Internet services could start offering secure email and communications.

Yet not a peep about that.
I've thought through some of what might happen if you eliminate the effects of the "class system." I think in some ways it would make more sense to artificially create them (while maintaining free services), though only if at the same time you're helping people improve their lives / take care of them. If you have a lot of homeless - uncared for (potentially having mental illness, smell, or other) - riding buses, etc. then less people will use those services - and that probably even happens now to some degree (higher care ownership when people might be okay with riding shared transportation if they knew there wasn't a certain chance of harassment or discomfort).
Bangkok keeps on extending its free bus service, and its quite extensive.

Note that the bus system is essentially classed, since only the old, non-airconditioned, slow buses are free (and you can pay for better transit options).
Sure thing: https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/issues/813

What I mean is, that in order to pull from the repository (eg, docker pull base) I need to connect using a proxy server.
Good info. The problem I see with a cap is that it's one size fits all. I'd rather see a system where a school can charge higher rates if it is confident that its graduates will be able to repay those loans.

20 years just seems too long.

And the key point here is that when a balance is forgiven, the institution should bear the cost, not the government. Maybe that's already the case. Can you provide more detail?
Transport for London launch fully responsive redesign
Why does Cubehero need profiles at all?
One must try to keep the laughter in slaughter.
Because you can access the raw map data and do with what you want (more or less). It has open data.
On the contrary, if you just need a box to tinker with sysops stuff and learn, digital ocean is a fantastic solution. Cheap and I've never had a bad experience or anything unreliable.

I can't speak to using it to store lots of not-backed-up files or running a gigantic production server, but for learning about syops it works great, to get back to the purpose of this article.
I think the sites-available is a debianism, not present on all distros. One nice thing that nginx supports is include directives with wildcards so you can e.g. have /srv/example.com/nginx.conf and /srv/api.example.com/nginx.conf and include them in the main configuration file with include /srv/*/nginx.conf.
Mobile: the real reason Enhanced Campaigns should tick you off
It's also biased against institutions offering shit degrees at high expense. If institutions have to start eating the costs of a Byzantine pottery degree, they'll either stop offering it or start finding ways to do it more cheaply.
Run-DMC explains Network Partitions
This sounds like a great company, but I think that in the VC-funded US startup ecosystem, this would be negatively described as a "lifestyle business".

Which is sad, because I would love to build a business like this. However I think it has become exceedingly difficult to build such businesses and compete effectively in any industry with VC-funded competitors.
I'm not sure giving extra kudos to those using git/hg instead of cvs/svn is appropriate either. You usually use what the employer has (demands), even if it's an abomination like MS Source Safe, Serena Version Manager, MKS Source Integrity or Clearcase :-)

A better criteria might be what you do with the rev ctrl system: concurrent development; release candidate tracking; release change audit support.
You could assume that high traffic areas, at least during peak hours, would be considered healthy and productive environments - and whereby those people involved / using those services would be economic producers - which are needed - and therefore you would / should cover their costs overall with the tax base, as their activities are helping everyone in the society.
Second this; having your browser as just another emacs buffer is just too handy; now if I could just get w3m to support the minimum necessary JS to get my regular sites to work . . .
Google's chief legal officer: live Q&A
OpenStreetMap provides that data, which allows you to build any map service you want. Getting the raw data is one of the hardest parts.
> "If you're a liberal arts student you can probably take advantage of all the events, museums, intellectual stuff surrounding you, but there's no way I would want to study pre-med or engineering or the like there (even if disregarding the costs)."

As someone who went to college in a small college town (a 3-college town, even) with no semblance of events, museums, and non-academic "intellectual stuff" to be found anywhere... Wut.

I'd have killed, even as an engineering major, to have access to all of the above. I'd have killed to balance out 4 years of mindlessly pounding of head against books with some semblance of creativity and culture.

I left college culturally stunted and have spent a lot of time crawling out of that dark hole, I wish it upon no one else. It's an endemic problem in our field to belittle the arts, or to regard the total abandonment of the arts as some sort of ascetic virtue. To be clear, there should be no pride in spending 4 years of your life in an academic dungeon and eschewing museums, music, and "intellectual stuff".

Throwing would-be engineers into an arena where there are constantly exposed to non-engineering things and non-engineering people is probably the best thing you can do to engineering education.
maximum of 15% of your earnings for 10 years following graduation

And then we make it 20%, and then 30%, and then extend it out to 15 years, and then . . .

We've been putting people into debt they cannot escape to go to college while telling them they "need" to go to college. Given the history, the end result of any kind of "we take a portion of your income" plan will be to make it ever more efficient for the colleges to capture 99% of the lifetime earning difference between a high-school grad and a college grad.

We need price pressure on the cost of education.
You can download the documentation here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/
Or are you referring to the scripts that generate it?
It's interesting that this event may spur countries into making their own electronics, rather than depending on multinational corporations which may include "special features" for the US government.

This encouragement of nationalism may be what we need to reduce the number of unemployed.
Agreed -- but keep in mind that institutions aren't going to be accepting loan-financed students who are unlikely to be able to pay the loans back, because that results in the institution repaying the government loan instead of the student.
Looks like some people are flagging this. It just dropped from 1st place to 10th, even though it has 72 points in 40 minutes.

To those who think the NSA stories shouldn't be brought back up towards the top of HN until this mess is sorted (for months if it needs to be), for those who think the future of our world is not more important than some change of license on MySQL documentation, I hope you lose your flag privileges, you traitors.

If we can't focus on an important story for a few months, we deserve all the crap we're gonna get.
My experience is the complete opposite. They've responded fast and helped when I needed them. They're cheap and fast enough.

I'm not too worried about data losses tho, we do regular offsite backups.