skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have the utmost respect for Andy, and had exactly the opposite experience with Conversion Optimizer: it pretty handily destroyed my own attempts to manage the account.

One interesting thing to note is that Andy tracks conversions via purchases. I have always done it via downloads: contra "I think it is unsafe to assume the number of downloads correlates closely to the number of sales." it has been my experience that those numbers track each other like a pair of identical twins dancing salsa.

You can see my numbers here from waaaay back in 2007 here. They conclusion hasn't grossly changed in $10,000 I've spent on AdWords since that blog post.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2007/11/10/conversion-optimizer-adw...

Possible conflict of interest note: Google did a case study with me about this product.

http://www.google.com/adwords/conversionoptimizer/bingocard....

I'm not sure from Andy's blog post whether he gets most of his traffic from AdWords on search or on the content network, although if I recall right it is search. I, somewhat surprisingly, do much better on the content network, although prior to using the Conversion Optimizer I thought it was a hive of scum and villainy. (I still think it is a hive of scum and villainy, come to think of it, but CO ensures that it isn't my pocket being picked and that is good enough for me.)
The person / company you paid to use Gmail.
Found and reported a bug on the work tab. Also, what is the purpose of the sizing field? Can I do anything with that or is it just a generic label for my own uses?
HAHAHA -- another outage! Great electrical Engineering team, Lanham...
Alright. Feed me the bad karma. I still think its funny.

Here's the joke, in case you didn't get it: "Releasing from beta after many years could not possibly be reckless, therefore saying that it is in an alarming manner is a HA HA funny time joke."
Because that kind of hardware+DBA team is prohibitively expensive for a startup?
I'm curious; Is the two weeks notice standard in the states? How about other countries? Where I live (Denmark), the standard is one months notice from the beginning of the following moth. So effectively somewhere between 1 and two months.
If you play a PvP game and/or go into a PvP zone, expect PvP. If you keep getting beat by someone who is playing by the rules, then get better. If there's still no way for you to beat them, then it's on the game developers to balance the game. It's that simple.
Isn't that what he wrote?
Try Brutal Chess, although the program looks real nice, the AI isn't particularly sophisticated.

I bet you could find a flash-based chess game on the internet where you could play with other people.
What you learn from this is that iPhone apps has a ton of crap. I sincerely doubt all 1,600 apps by that one company have any quality
(e.g., knapsack problem can be solved in polynomial time with respect to the decimal values of its inputs, but exponential with respect to the length of the binary encoding).

That doesn't make any sense. The number of binary and decimal digits has a linear relation. I think the ratio is log(10) / log(2) or about 3.32 .
I've always liked putting the closing brace at the same indentation level as the code on its own separate line, but using K&R style for the leading brace.

That way I can just look at the indentation to see where blocks start and end.
The voice I was going for was "immature but net-savvy". I live in central Japan rather than central Michigan so I would put the common word choice down to global cultural diffusion aided by the Internet rather than desire to mock any individual person, particularly anybody you know.
Mind you this article/essay was written quite some time ago now, several years at least.
In spite of all its rudeness, roughness and overboardness, the comment goes to a damn good point.

The author apparently got tired of all that gender blabber as done by RMS, Lefty and several concerned responders, all the easy attention grabbing and hand waving, and wanted to remind the best dichotomy we've got for now:

Real programmers deliver.

Don't ask about gender, race or so, ask about results.

Anyway, I'd like the public statements from well known OSS people to be modest on non-technical grounds. Offend opponents with substance, not style.
FreeBSD 8.0-BETA1 Available
Facebook Pages: no usernames, no title changes
If the system of incentives enables bad VCs to make a lot of money, then the system is broken by virtue of the existence of these bad VCs.
Wikipedia’s Founder On How The Site Was Built
ummm... so this means they broke their implementation of the encryption, not that they have found a way to break the encryption in order to find the unencrypted source?
Fit Body, Fit Mind? Your Workout Makes You Smarter
I just checked quickly and I would suggest you purchase the launch.ly domain.

http://www.libyanspider.com/
Is this a blog post or a tweet?
This reminds me of a windows tool I used to use for this sort of thing - http://www.glowcode.com
As you have to login to read it, here is the text:

The Savvy Networker
Liz Ryan, Yahoo! HotJobs

The 2009 job market is very different from job markets of the past. If you haven't job-hunted in a while, the changes in the landscape can throw you for a loop.

One of the biggest changes is the shift in what constitutes a strong resume. Years ago, we could dig into the Resume Boilerplate grab-bag and pull out a phrase to fill out a sentence or bullet point on our resume. Everybody used the same boilerplate phrases, so we knew we couldn't go wrong choosing one of them -- or many -- to throw into your resume.

Things have changed. Stodgy boilerplate phrases in your resume today mark you as uncreative and "vocabulary challenged." You can make your resume more compelling and human-sounding by rooting out and replacing the boring corporate-speak phrases that litter it, and replacing them with human language -- things that people like you or I would actually say.

Here are the worst 10 boilerplate phrases -- the ones to seek out and destroy in your resume as soon as possible:

* Results-oriented professional
* Cross-functional teams
* More than [x] years of progressively responsible experience
* Superior (or excellent) communication skills
* Strong work ethic
* Met or exceeded expectations
* Proven track record of success
* Works well with all levels of staff
* Team player
* Bottom-line orientation

You can do better. What about adding a human voice to your resume? Here's an example:

"I'm a Marketing Researcher who's driven by curiosity about why people buy what they do. At XYZ Industries, I used consumer surveys and online-forum analysis to uncover the reasons why consumers chose our competitors over us; our sales grew twenty percent over the next six months as a result. I'm equally at home on sales calls or analyzing data in seclusion, and up to speed on traditional and new-millennium research tools and approaches. I'm fanatical about understanding our marketplace better every day, week and month -- and have helped my employers' brands grow dramatically as a result."

You don't have to write resumes that sound like robots wrote them. A human-voiced resume is the new black -- try it!

Liz Ryan is a 25-year HR veteran, former Fortune 500 VP and an internationally recognized expert on careers and the new millennium workplace. Contact Liz at liz@asklizryan.com or join the Ask Liz Ryan online community at www.asklizryan/group.
No, the game designer gets to enforce the rules. The majority can abide by the rules or they can leave. Voting with your wallet is the most powerful way of voting, after all.

If the rules in PvP area specify PvP battles and someone wants to battle that way, that's what they're allowed to do. If he did something illegal, it's up to the game designers to correct that. If he did something unethical, like teleporting a villain to a kill zone, he may be disliked.

At no point, though, should he be threatened with bodily harm or being bullied by the "majority". If they had ignored him and/or engaged him in battle, he'd have no data for his study.
Cake Poker Rakeback - 33% CakePoker Rake Back
If you take "hours spent doing something" as your yardstick, your girlfriend seems to your lowest priority (behind your startup and French lessons). Before you ask whether you should choose between your girlfriend or your startup, maybe you should choose between your girlfriend and your French lessons.
It may be funny, but it doesn't add much of anything to the conversation.

It's a rare joke that gets upmodded around here, but if it happens, it happens because it's also insightful and reveals something novel. There's nothing "novel" about "Google takes a long time to take things out of beta", which is why it's neither a good joke nor a good HN comment. In contrast, Paul Graham says a lot of funny things without even consciously trying because his essays are usually insightful enough to stumble across some surprising truths.

Also, complaints about being downmodded are usually, in turn, downmodded themselves. It's like a bottomless pit of negative karma for narcissists who care too much about the value of some integer on the YC webserver :)

EDIT: I'm not exceptionally interested in debating this. You seemed to not understand why you were modded down, and I explained.I don't really know you and have nothing against you, so I'm sorry if this seemed personal or hurtful.
Get a life :)
You might want to make that explicit in the copy.
What's the point of being rich if you don't have someone to share it with? Money alone isn't going to make you feel successful or happy. If you think this girl might make you happy, I'd take her over the start up.
The right answer to "why" is "because they couldn't get corporations and organizations to pay for Google Apps with a beta tag attached to any of the core offerings of the suite offering".
Possibly interesting point, backed by stupid data.

Yahoo was a directory, originally. BackRub was a search engine, not a "technology to index pages."

Both of these were stand-alone systems, not necessarily a part of anything else. That's the definition between a "feature" and a "product."

Extending it from product to company just makes the argument dumber. Since that would require, you know, a business.
Who cares? Government agency has buggy web-accessible implementation of SHA1. Not notable, and a link-bait title to boot.
Yeah, several people have mentioned the bug. I'm working to fix it now, although I probably won't push again until after EOB today. The size field is free-form... most people use it either with "t-shirt sizing" (small, medium, large) or just put a numeric value in. Eventually it will be used in performance metrics, so you can see your cycle time for "large" stories, for example.
You're asking a group of strangers whether it's okay to leave your girlfriend. That tells me that you should place your priority on your startup.
Interesting back-story on that line:

http://bearcastle.com/blog/?m=20050808
What you also learn is that this was a brilliant move by Apple. Outsource the development, reap the benefits. This was already known, but I would be interested to see how this these numbers stack up against Apple's internally developed applications (cost to produce, and revenue generated).
It sounds like if you ask 100 HR people what a good resume is, you'll get 100 answers.
Link bait title. I had my hopes up for something juicy only to find out something I already knew... government employees build crappy software.
Yeah, funny timing. I'm actually happy they ruined my argument :-)
An attempt at humor, perhaps: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mixalot+%22big+butt...
They have just a few apps (lilke iMapsPro) but sell different versions for different regions. I guess that's just a limitation on the App store, as they can't sell different regions within their app at the current price point ($0.99).

It looks like a clever idea. This way you can still use maps on vacation, without getting the roaming charges. It seems to be just a maps wrapper around Open Streetmaps.
As to jokes: I disagree fundamentally. This is a silly little article anyway. I come out about even on jokes karma wise. You know whats worse than a bad joke though? PG ass kissing ;)

Anyway, of course I knew I'd get more bad karma. I tend to enjoy it once in a while.
did anyone else notice the problem with this:

if(condition_variable==condition2)
/*{
//Block temporarily commented out.
condition_variable=condition1;
}*/
Although the article focuses on exercise for older folks, I have a hunch that it applies to younger people too.
The publishers with 1000s of apps make audiobooks where each book is a separate app. It's an artifact of the app store that content gets counted as apps.
it does make sense; there are two issues here. one is that the author overlooked (or ignored) the fact that "input size" means number of bits. the number N uses ~log2(N) = M bits, so that is the input size, not N, and O(N) is O(2^M).

the other is that addition of two D-digits numbers takes O(D) time (this is what the author means to expose in the article). as you have pointed out, the base (10, or 2, or anything else) does not matter for asymptotic analysis here, because the logarithm functions are all linearly related.
A lot of what the OP describes has already been done by http://noscrolls.com for things that are of the same pattern as what's in the hopper deck. SMS support is also included.
https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html

Grab "zap colors". It's an eyesight saver.
SQL Server and the rest of the Windows stack are effectively free under the BizSpark programme.
Great article by one of my favorite authors. A couple of points - it's dangerous to have executives, regulators, and legislators dealing with financial instruments that are very difficult to understand. It's also dangerous to build models on historical data when the rules are changing. IMO the root of the problem was people like Barney Frank and organizations like Fannie Mae who pushed for more subprime lending.
People are more valuable than things (money). Open communication is key. People never want to feel like they are the second most important thing in your life. Putting her first doesn't mean you have to give up on your other dreams, but you have to be mindful of what you are communicating through your actions. Sit down with her and articulate the fact that she is a priority for you, but that you realize that you haven't been communicating that very well. Leave your ego at the door and ask her what kinds of specific things you could do to communicate to her that she comes first. If you are willing to listen may be surprised how even some small simple things could go a long way towards making her feel important and valued.

The biggest thing I think is that people communicate differently, therefore somethings that aren't a big deal to us may be a big deal to other people, and we might not even realize that we are communicating something we don't intend.
If you can get over that hurdle you may find that it doesn't have to be an either-or situation.

There is also the fact that if you are working too much to maintain even one healthy relationship, then you are working to much. We have people who care about us in our lives becasue they can help us see our blind spots. If She is feeling that your life is out of balance, you should listen to that and do some evaluating, even for the sake of your own health.

If she truly loves you she will understand that your need to be creative and be in business for yourself is a part of who you are, but by the same token, you can't let success rob you of the most important treasures in life: your relationships with other human beings.
Last I heard Microsoft's format didn't even fully adhere to their own standard (although that may have been due to really bad standard authoring rather than anything intentional).
Yeah, I was more interested with the developers making $1000+ off of just 2 or 3 apps. And it's funny, because looking at that software, it looks pretty shitty. Oh, the wonders of enterprises and the stupid amounts of money they'll spend on complete crap...
FWIW, I've built one of those SuperMicro machines, with eight drives, around the beginning of the year.

Allowing for redundancy (RAID 5 on six disks for data, and mirrored the boot drives), we ended up with 6.5TB of storage at about $3500 (that includes i7 proc and 12Gb RAM, and a fancy controller). My labor added some more on top of the $3500.

Mostly, we've been happy. It is more sensitive to heat issues than our HP G5s, and of course, generates more of that heat. If I were to go with any kind of density, I'd need a much more robust cooling solution.
Entrepreneur Interview: Stuart Schultz of GradSpot
Ideally, we'd all devote consistently high-quality attention to both reading and writing on hacker news. I don't always do that, in part because of 'forum training,' and in part because I hardly ever respond to comments unless I'm procrastinating, and thus 'in a hurry.'

Can we address the problem by extending the language? Another poster mentioned a /noextrapolate tag.

What about qualitative metadata, to indicate how carefully one should read the comment?

We could end our comments with a comment character in a representative language.

; means "brief"
# means "pretty normal"
// means "I am (tired || pained
// || procrastinating worse than usual)"

Now, let's see if it works.

//
The quantity of bad VCs seems like evidenced it's broken. If 5% were bad, that'd be one thing. My perception is that it's more like 80%+ are "bad".
He is asking a group of people who have a greater-than average chance to have been in a similar situation in the past. Benefiting from the experience of others seems like a wise thing to do.
It's a self-deprecating joke.
That's why sites like The Funded are valuable. Behavior implies the goals of the VCs, and rewarding those with their eye on the bigger prize (and punishing the others) is good.
Tell Americans What They're Really Paying for Their Food
Yes. Anyone care to give a short explanation of what exactly is so promising about Mono that it's worth all the worrying? Whether or not these fears pan out to anything, they're substantial enough that there should be a pretty good motivation for not just switching to another development platform.
Off the top of my head, several well known successful startup entrepreneurs ended up having serious relationship once they achieved some considerable level of success or even semi-retired.

On one hand, you can't readily tell with that little data if not having a close girlfriend directly correlates with greater chances, or is there some indirect correlation or none at all.

On the other hand, it seems that once you become somewhat successful, you meet and befriend other successful people on daily basis. And fortunately enough, several interesting women do achieve successes.

Disclaimer: not much of experience on my side.

EDIT: I can't help but wonder whether she reads HN.
I would love the ability to designate parent/child relationships between stories.
That's exactly my point. When he finds a woman that doesn't leave him questioning what to do, he'll know without asking.
The harsh truth is this girl probably won't be around forever. She probably has a legitimate complaint, but it also sounds like you're doing what's most important to you right now. When you're in the right relationship you should feel like your partner is supportive and feel like you can be a better person than you can be alone. Relationship maintenance should come naturally. It may not always be easy, but it should feel at least as important as the other things you do instead of like a chore. That's not the vibe I'm getting from what you wrote. It sounds like work is what you love and your girlfriend is the job.

[edit]

Maybe my take on this is a little tainted. I was in a similar situation many years ago. I chose the girl and I'll probably continue to kick myself for it a while longer. In my case, the fact that we even had this issue was probably indicative of the relationship not being the right fit for either of us. There are a lot of things that I wish I'd been able to do back then.
Would there be a market for buying and selling ownership of iPhone apps? (Sort of like Sitepoint for iphone apps .. but more classy).

Good start-up ideas perhaps?
This sounds like Windows Home, Windows Professional, Windows Enterprise and Windows Ultimate... Lent sounds more like a 1 shoe fits all.
It's not accurate to describe that situation by saying the model is broken, because by that standard every investment model is broken. The bad VCs are simply tricking their LPs by selling them bad investments. That happens with every other form of investment, from land to equity to hedge funds.
Automated Funds Now Dominate Stock Market
or just too much caffeine. Green tea has less than coffee.
Let’s say a few months ago I had an idea for something that “could” significantly improve a physical product that’s probably worth 100’s of millions in potential benefit.

To have a chance in hell of creating a defendable patent in the current system it takes spending 10++k and a lot of free time. After that I would need to spend at least 25-50k build a working demo. Then I would need to look for someone to license the idea or sell it to a patent troll. While scampering to create enough other patents to cover the related ideas that now seem obvious. And then probably a few million taking on companies that just use the idea without a license.

Or, I can give it away and get publicity that I don’t want and little cash. And because I am not an expert there is probably a 50/50 chance that I will learn something while building the demo that makes the idea worthless.

WTF, do I do?

PS: The other side of patent reform needs to be a simplified method to disclose new ideas without the loss of all monetary benefit.
Printed Blog Pulls the Plug
"Don't plan on relying on advertising for major revenue unless you're going to generate tons of pageviews. Do not be afraid of charging people money to use what you've developed or to get access to your product or service. Do not put barriers that you cannot control in front of your launch process; don't let yourself become dependent on anything that you cannot control, do not put yourself into a position where you're waiting for someone else -- control your entire launch destiny."
Besides, at some point someone looking to hire him is going to ask him to back that up, and it would be foolish to invent stuff you can't defend. (I realize people get away with lying on resumes quite often, but bold claims call attention to themselves.)
Link to the discussion on HN about the original article:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=690551
do you see yourself marrying her? if yes, this question might have some merit. If no, enjoy the ride until she leaves you.

personally I side with finishing the startup. If it was a wife, sure might have been a valid question, since her leaving you = you getting screwed financially or having some problems with custody of kids etc.

But a girlfriend? If this one leaves, you'll find someone better. At least this way you won't waste your time with someone who doesn't support your ambitions. There is plenty of fish in the sea, you can always find someone better. Don't let the "she is my soulmate" confuse you. Its just your biology following it's programming in order to have you marry her and pop out some rugrats.
No. He starts off by conceding the point, basically. The title is "Code: It's Trivial." So assume that you can write all of the code for Stack Overflow in a weekend. He lists 13 things that his team spends time on that are not writing code (at least not in the sense of adding new features or fixing already reported bugs).

His point is that writing code is a relatively small part of even a software business. An important part, but no more important than many other things that must be done for a business to succeed.
INTP. I found that understanding that helped me out a lot. I recommend to everyone to look into their MTBI type (easy free online test at http://mypersonality.info; not as thorough as the actual MTBI test but good enough).