skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To add a bit of info on this, we had over 6000 signups in our beta (month 1) using LaunchRock as the landing site with a 28% conversion rate.

I would say that we could've driven more traffic to the site and increased the absolute conversions while lowering the conversion rate BUT I'm comfortable with having our beta site a little more hidden than say a general marketing splash page.

My two cents are that if you have a compelling product, your beta launch page is a pretty trivial commitment and you should expect conversion rates much higher than Ecommerce. 30% is not unreasonable if you're not spamming. If you're spamming, 10% is achievable but hard.

Traffic sources: Our Portal, Twitter, Launchrock virality. I have to say the Launchrock virality techniques worked much better than I thought they would. It made my job as a marketer much easier.
I think the best you could do would be to stay near the trailing end of the pressure wave. This would be where the air was moving (slightly) in the same direction as your travel. You would also travel through the lowest density.

But I suspect you'd always be better off by simply evacuating the tube as much as possible.

Or possibly there is a medium other than air being considered, one in which the speed of sound was much lower at a given density. Perhaps interesting things could happen if the working fluid was a refrigerant and the sound wave was intense enough to induce a phase change cycle.
No Koding, I won't run you on any of my device.
Security experts on the NSA’s real problems
Source article (requires login): http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/indepth/2013/jul/01/expo...
I guess that was a poorly phrased question. Auernheimer was convicted of "conspiracy to access a computer without authorization" so more specifically, is web scraping the same thing as "conspiracy to access a computer without authorization"?

Web scrapers look just like real humans, and its publicly available data, so when a website doesnt authorize web scrapers, how do you draw a legal differentiations?
>The peer-to-peer Skype system was dropped shortly after, and all Skype communications were centralized through Microsoft servers.

Wrong. As usual.
1. There are a ton of monitoring solutions out there, we need to know more about your stack first. This is easy enough nowadays to be a requirement imo, even for an MVP that actually has a semi-functioning app

2. Gross. Get all that stuff seperated as soon as feasible.

3. I like stripe, fwiw, and use it in all my webapps.

4. see answer 1

5. Talk to your users, a lot.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/7215762635414957...

Here are some more maps for other cities. Detroit is kind of expected but I am surprised that many of those cities are as segregated as they are. There is a legend in there too.
Had family who lived in that area during the late 60s--do you have any thoughts on why Chicago bounced back and Detroit did not?

My hunch would be being less invested in the auto industry and more in general trade and banking.
Well, you smile a lot when you're selling yourself, but yes. Currently I work under annual contracts, so notice sort of goes both ways. Basically, notice is negotiated for at the beginning of the contract, (if you want it). But, if the other party were to violate the terms of a contract in a meaningful way and I had another opportunity ready, I might very well leave on little or no notice. The closest I have ever actually done in practice was only after calling several meetings with company officials to address specific issues over a period of months. The issues were not addressed to my satisfaction so I found work elsewhere. I got my open projects organized for them and ended up giving four days notice. Oddly enough, they later paid me to interview my successor. I even did some more work for them a couple years later.
Why I Open Sourced A Bitcoin Arbitrage Bot
I assume this means the Apache foundation will stop providing whatever services they provided. What those are, I'm unsure, but given the inactivity on the project, I assume it won't be a huge difference.
Red Hat funds cygwin, and I'd argue that it's at least similar in magnitude.
Awesome! I'm looking forward to the self-hosted registry among other things (for all of us that are corporate schmucks).

So much more to start to tinker with.
Severance is NOT generally paid for sacking incompetent employees, that process is called Termination For Cause.

Consider the following:

1. A company lays off a thousand employees as it outsources a division, or combines with another firm (management decision).

2. A company decides that a product isn't cutting it and lays off the entire product team.

3. My own experience: I was asked to leave a senior position to join a brand new division of a >billion revenue organization - with the expectation that a new business unit would be formed. Four months in, the parent organization was facing external pressures and decided to stop the whole venture - and yes I had pre-negotiated a severance deal for just this eventuality. According to the author, that decision by the parent company was somehow my fault? Was I incompetent? Should I have skulked away in shame, with no payment at all for the risk I took?

This article is business advice as dispensed by a grade schooler.
LOL, what public sector unions?
sigh. Data doesn't flow through super nodes. It's ONLY a directory, signaling service. At most, like a dozen packets get signaled and shuttled between the two peers until they can STUN to each other. (The exception being if Skype TURNs full cone traffic, remains to be seen, but I assume they will for convenience).
But then people see you touching the side of your head. Personally, I'm hoping for a ring controller.
If you read the article, it establishes that the practice flourishes in Europe still.
I think the pattern has been established in cities which avoided bankruptcy, like San Jose - you hire a barebone skeleton of public employees, re-negotiate the contracts in light of macroeconomic conditions, and subcontract everything else - those employees are now eligible for 401k or IRA or other more exciting things.
Check out the docker-registry[1] repo.

[1]: https://github.com/dotcloud/docker-registry
Actually Detroit population started declining in the 50's, and the riot didn't really accelerate the decline:

http://www.mybudget360.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/detroi...
It's great to see so many improvements in the DIB engine. I had to run Electronics Workbench through Wine a couple of years ago, and while it was definitely usable, it occasionally got messy corrupted graphics.
>Lots of cities had race riots in the 60s. Lots of cities were rough during the crack epidemic, too.

Not a lot of cities have had black mayors continuously since 1974.
I have a hard time feeling sorry for bondholders in these situations. There is always some risk in lending money. Perhaps they should try and find more creditworthy institutions next time.

A lot of money in the US is being lent with the assumption that creditors will always be bailed out by the state or federal government; that mindset exasperates excessive borrowing and spending at the local level and encourages creditors to make risky loans. This is the textbook definition of a moral hazard.
Love this, and will try it myself. Thanks for sharing!
>#4 Tell stories.

Great leaders are great teachers. And great teachers are great storytellers. “Narrative is how we learn. If you want to be a leader, you will teach and tell stories. The two are inseparable.”

When I hear this I can't help but think, narrative fallacy. Narrative may have traditionally been "how we learn", but recent research into biases and heuristics (Kahneman & Taversky especially) suggests it's not entirely reliable.

This bit of advice doesn't go into much detail on how telling stories is essential to leadership. Anyone have any experience on just what is meant here, and whether narrative fallacy is a concern?
We are currently using a LAMP stack. But we know that we need to do most if not all of these things, the question is what order? Where should we be spending our time?
We're going to release a blog post about this tomorrow morning. Send me your twitter handle to @sam_alba, I'll ping you when it's out.
It was what, 60 the other day in SF when it's been 90-something everywhere else all week?

Most people that visit think it's 'cold', they're expecting the hot weather of SoCal
Yes it is entirely a canard.

How many units were built in 2006, 2007, and 2008?
>>> If they force the bond holders to eat it all then the market for municipal bonds will be hurt badly

Everything Detroit was rated 'junk' for a while, so much of it is already priced into 'high-yield' portfolios.
Man, that link really has a misleading URL.
You talk about time to other cities because it's a constant.

We talk about miles because otherwise, we'd have to say,"I live seven minutes from downtown SF between 10pm and 7am, an hour and a half between 7am and 10am, twenty minutes between 10am and noon, an hour between noon and 2pm, forty minutes between 2pm and 4pm, an hour between 4pm and 7pm, and half an hour between 7pm and 10pm."
NYC is above 90 for what, 10-20 says a year? I'd wager Austin is above 90 for 150+
As noted by another commenter, the governor of Texas has very little power compared to most other governors. The Speaker of the House wields most of the power in Texas.
Markets work.

Look at the price of housing from 2007 to 2011, and if you understand the role of price in marketplaces, you'll understand why construction was so low.
Since you have considerable insight into politics, what do you reckon is the solution? What could be done to change zoning laws? What are the steps to take, policy-wise and politically, for San Francisco to able to Chicago-ize?
What "backdoors" were revealed, may I ask? It's been known for years that Google makes user data available to law enforcement agencies when there's a warrant. They've been up front about this with their transparency reports. The only revelation here is that there are additional secret FISA requests they can't include in the reports. That sucks and shouldn't be happening, but users privacy isn't being compromised any more than it already was.
Unfortunately 'ringing' in the ears is a sign of permanent hearing loss. The hairs in the cochlea snap. The brain eventually adapts and filters out the ringing, but the actual damage can't be reversed.
Tricking children to

Sex with children was never romanticized? (Sparta, I'm looking in your general direction here.)
That's how we get the pitch into the funnel in the first place!
No, that's DuckDuckGo.
Python Logging: How to Log to Multiple Locations
That's essentially claiming that somehow market forces don't apply to the database industry.
It's not just the big three auto plants. There is all of the ancillary plants that make the parts and sub-assemblies. Raw materials, Logistics, Accounting, Foodservice, and everything else that goes along with productive activity.
Interesting comparison.

Would you rather implement POSIX over Win32 or Win32 over POSIX?
I'm very liberal, but I don't see this as screwing the retirees. I think they got a better than they should have deal. The unions over-reached and they got rates of return that were unsustainable. We haven't even talked about the gaming of the system that happens (punching up salary for the last year, so their retirement benefit goes up).

The police chief in a town near mine retired on something like $300-400K and it was discovered that he had taken a job at another city, several hundred miles away.

There is so much corruption and abuse of the municipal retirement plans that I think a reboot is in order.
That's a grand idea:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032555

the author has said that there's a far more modest development plan somewhat mirroring his proposal:
http://www.grandboulevard.net
Is it really a sacrifice if you promise yourself something impossible and then fail to make good on it?
We are working on that for a later version :)
It is worse than that bad.
> Does Google have time to invent new kinds of networking equipment? Probably not.

Hah. If they have time to invent self-driving cars, balloon powered internet, and wearable computing devices I'm pretty sure they can spare a few people to invent networking equipment that would save them millions.
I somewhat prefer the Foundation grid system to Bootstrap's equivalent; the way that the classes are namespaced for mobile responsive layouts is pretty handy.
Very true. That the roads between these cities mostly go through sparsely-populated rural areas helps.

EDIT: Though, the point I wanted to make was that it was an abstraction over the longer distances between the cities. To rephrase my examples, it's 360mi to Dallas, 430mi to Denver, 260mi to OKC, and 600mi to Houston. (Now that I'm looking up distances, I can add 500mi and 7.5 hours to Austin in that list - that length isn't in my cache, so to speak.)
Why the assumption that this must be a false flag operation? It makes just as much sense taken at face value.
In 2009 the U.S. membership of public sector unions surpassed membership of private sector unions for the first time, at 7.9m and 7.4m respectively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-sector_trade_union#cite_...

http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-troub...
On (a) there ya go:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-12/detroit-s-20-offer-...
But in some cases it does come down to someone just not having the experience, the talent or the work ethic to meet the performance required

This is all predictated on "some" cases? "On Severance (in some cases)?" From the way you describe it, some cases are those in which the employee was able to rook the entire hiring process despite their inability to do the job, but how did they get an offer in the first place?

This brings up a secondary point: is "the performance required" something that changed between hiring and the decision to fire, i.e. a leadership issue?

Without having illustrated these scenarios, it sounds more like "Ready, Fire, Aim," sweeping employees to the side when it turns out a little-informed guess was wrong.
journald was enabled in Fedora very recently, on the premises that no one would feel a thing, just an implementation detail of systemd. Now systemd's syslog compat is seen as unnecessary overhead, and at some point the goalposts will move again and alternatives to the systemd journal won't be supported.

I'm writing this because I've been seeing the same sort of shifting promises when systemd assimilated udev. At first it was a trivial repository merge, just something to make the developers more comfortable, no impact to anyone else. Now building udev without systemd is unsupported, and some “cleanups” are made to tie udev to systemd and kmod. This doesn't benefit systemd but it hurts anyone who uses an alternative.

The same kind of breakage of alternatives is pushed on gnome via logind, and the kernel via cgroups. It would be myopic to focus on promises made in a particular thread and ignore most of systemd's history.
I actually like Putin better, these days.
The cheap parts of Detroit are that bad. After a screening of BURN, an film following firefighters in Detroit, a firefighter commented 'A gallon of gas is much cheaper than a movie ticket.' There are blocks of houses where 0, 1, or 2 houses are occupied.

Downtown Detroit is safer and has better services, but it costs more than the rock bottom prices.

There are people targeting start ups for Detroit though: http://detroitventurepartners.com/
The Data Behind Purchasing Behavior at UserVoice – Pricing for Conversion
fear->fair?
Hey it's Canada we use poutines/decilitre or the ratio of hockey rinks to lacrosse rink, even more rare is the Thicke but that's more for density.
Do you know of any part time programs there ?
No, it's just that the official frameworks are either all or none. VideoToolbox framework exist but is private so far.
15k left is obviously hyperbolic. It is an extreme used to make a point.
the private registry seems awesomly easy to get set up. This has been the only thing keeping me from using docker for deployments, super excited to try it out!
I've always thought this would be easier to make than Wine, since OSX is already Unix-like, Darwin is free software, GNUStep already has a lot of the Cocoa base classes and Mac apps use GL instead of D3D. You'd be able to get programs like Photoshop running on Linux with the added bonus of them being able to understand Unix paths.
First, Erik wasn't Lisp. He didn't even work for a Lisp company, except for consulting for Franz briefly. Second, your cause and effect meter is way off. The resurgence of Lisp happened because there were a LOT of people out of work in 2001 and many of them started working on CMUCL and SBCL.

Erik's influence ended outside of comp.lang.lisp and the influence of that usenet group was fairly small, in the greater scheme of things.
As a biologist and chemist studying cancer, this sounds an awful like the "ontology recapitulates phylogeny" theory which, while a cute just-so story, turns out to be a particularly misleading way of looking at developmental biology.

and now I'm going to be pithy: Looks like some physicists think oncology recapitulates phylogeny.
What about the heat and the cold?
Were any of those cities of Detroit's size, and did they too lose double digit percentages of their majority white populations?
How the government gets your cell phone's GPS data
We have a full OpenVPN Raspberry Pi Tutorial [ submitted by one of our visitors ] but it is still waiting for the GREEN light [ Testing and Confirmation ] so we can publish it. ETA is ~3-4 days.
This doesn't really sound like a completely new theory; Haeckel proposed in the 1800s that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", and it is widely understood that cancer is like a de-differentiated state.
0. A warm list of emails about people interested in the service (this really helps!).
Floobits is down...

and back up.
How do people afford this?!?
I've been using Foundation for everything lately, and I'm really impressed with it. This new medium grid size thing is a great upgrade.

What I never liked about the Bootstrap/Foundation CSS frameworks was having to mark up my HTML with those damn "small-4 large-8 columns" attributes. It felt to me like that purely-visual stuff should be kept in the CSS, not the HTML.

So I was thrilled when I found I didn't have to put any of that in the HTML - that it could all go in the SCSS, which then parses/compiles it into the final public CSS.

So you can just have:

<div id="sidebar">blah</div>
<div id="article">blah</div>

... then in your SCSS file, do this:

div#sidebar {
@extend .columns;
@extend .small-3;
}
div#article {
@extend .columns;
@extend .small-9;
}

... and that's it! It adds those selectors to the final CSS file and your semantic HTML will have the layout/look you want.

To me, that changed everything, and I've been a fan since.

This has been covered other places, but I don't think it's been covered enough, and I think it was another HN commenter that turned me onto it like this, so just paying it forward in case someone else didn't know yet.
> It's rather clear you have no idea what criminals are treated like.

"I'm going to feel with my glove inside your waistband now..."
We're big floobits fans. Using it to pair remotely with Sublime.
Exactly that; Chicago has a diverse economy that isn't as dependent on manufacturing; Chicago is also a finance center and a transportation hub, neither of which hurt.
Rents - like wages - tend to be sticky downwards.

Usually what happens is that a large increase in supply doesn't immediately push prices down, but results in a large overhang of vacant housing stock. The developer eats the cost on that for a while, but then the next recession hits, people lose their jobs, banks foreclose on the properties, and that starts the tumble in prices. That's how it worked in 2009 - rents dropped significantly in the Bay Area as employment numbers tumbled and people moved in with roommates. It does depend on their being a recession before demand catches up with supply...if there isn't, prices just don't increase as fast in the meantime.
If it is anything like Flint, it is really bad.
> If you're only doing this to get better service, stop doing it

But... the whole point of the article is how to get better service from your IT department.
Controversy of Common Lisp Package in Emacs Lisp
I'm currently living in my startup's office closet in SOMA.

I used to have an apartment a few blocks away, but my roommate moved out and the rent went up. From a month before my move-out to a week after, I scoured through craigslist trying to find an acceptable home at a reasonable price. But now, having lived in my office for 3 weeks, I have lost all will to look.

Perhaps I don't get paid enough as a developer in SOMA. I'm certainly not making six figures.
Because they don't need to. Millions of users will still use Skype anyway.

A better question is why is there no obvious open source Skype clone? NAT traversal via supernode (with or without traffic forwarding) is well understood, we have several decent free encryption options to choose from and Skype open sourced their excellent audio codecs.

The problem with Microsoft running Skype is they are making Skype users connect to Microsoft hosted supernodes instead of user hosted supernodes. In terms of strengthening the reliability of the service, this might make sense. But in terms of privacy it is troubling. Microsoft is a very poor steward of user privacy and has a terrible record of adequately securing their products.
The library shopping checklist
This looks great. I have a feeling that Foundation is going to gain more traction than Bootstrap in the long term. I've seen @mdo and @fat asked several times online when Bootstrap 3 is coming out and they've said soon for the last few months. Very vague. Foundation has the weight of a company, Zurb, pushing it forward.
People, people, the solution to this is a public transit system that is better integrated, efficient, cleaner, and offers 24/7 service. Which will not happen in the Bay Area because of NIMBYism.
Story Counting
Have you seen http://reactos.org/ ? The are reimplementing the whole Windows NY system, with the help of wine actually.
Bubba don't surf.
Homeland Security Threatens Employees Who Read News About Leaks
I'm guessing the person who wrote this is upper-middle class and has never known anyone poor enough that the loss of one paycheck would utterly destroy their family's lives.

Should we miss pickpockets. Should we be sad that American children are less likely to go hungry or become homeless when some scumbag takes the rent money out of Mom's pocket. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU.
Nope, I live here because of my job in SF.

The city is ugly as hell. The food here costs a fortune. The bars are full of pretentious douches.
Awesome.. exactly what I was looking for :)

I'm in the process of trying to drive initial traffic to the Soulmix private beta (http://www.soulmix.com), so this is helpful. I would love to see more people say exactly what they did to drive traffic at the early stages of site. Bloggers often make it sound trivial, but I'm not sure that is true.
I think there's a tiny error in the article:

With story counting, you use velocity in much the same way as usual, the only difference is that velocity is just a sum of stories rather than a sum of story points.

I think it should be "count of stories" instead of "sum of stories", because you can't add stories as they aren't numbers.
A good idea! Thanks!
"A Prayer for the City" follows Ed Rendell's mayorship of Philadelphia. When Rendell succeeded Wilson Goode the city was on the verge of a financial meltdown. The government was literally not capable of producing a balance sheet and had no projections. Philadelphia would have melted down into total disaster if events had gone slightly differently.