skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In most cases it doesn't make sense to artificially lower your signup rates like that, except if your onboarding process is very costly. If that's the case then your focus should be on lowering these costs, or focus on better acquisition (you're spending marketing dollars attracting the wrong crowd), and not on shooting yourself in the foot by adding unnecessary friction.

Putting a CC up front doesn't make your prospects value the service more, it gives them a higher barrier to cross in terms of trust. You need a well-recognized brand to be able to make it work IMO. Some people are just not comfortable giving their credit card if they don't know you.

Also, check the references I quote in the blog post, according to the studies conducted by Totango, requiring a CC upfront results in lower end-to-end conversion rates.

Check also http://www.quora.com/Conversion-Optimization/In-what-scenari... , there are good answers that elaborate on this.
Gotta love PR fluff:

"will accelerate Supercell towards [the] goal of being the first truly global games company"

As opposed to, say, Nintendo having accomplished that nearly three decades ago.
You seem uncomfortable talking about the negative side of due-to-inflation "investment drive", the one that has negative impact on society, and keep mentioning again about the good part/cases instead. I got it first time - investment banks, through the power and leverage allowed and granted by legislative framework, contribute to investments. I am not denying that! But well, the consequence of inflation are not limited to the PR-stories, like or not.

Also, I believe the down-voting in my previous comment was because some took my comment personal, not because it had something condemnable in it.
>Maybe forex companies have little choice, especially when you consider airport rents, staff etc.

Yes, it's an incredibly profitable business and the airports know it. Airports will generally offer a monopoly or duopoly license to operate there and charge rent in the millions for busy terminals. That cost gets passed on to the consumer.

I'm not sure what you mean by commission, but ignoring cash management costs, operators can do the conversion close enough to free as to not matter. For example, I can currently sell/buy EURUSD at a rate of 1.35080/1.35085 respectively. That's an effective cost from mid of 0.002%. Anything wider than that is gross margin.
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Top_Ten_Proje...

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Top_10_2013-Top_10

http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/support/I733-034R-2007.pdf

http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/factsheets/TSA-13-1019-FS.pdf

https://code.google.com/p/skipfish/

http://google-gruyere.appspot.com/

http://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/tools/

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2010/11/rewarding-w...

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/governance/security/ap...

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/security-netw...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649874.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649461.aspx

Source: typing "web application security" into google.com

You could probably also search for "Hacking Forums" or something similar and find lots of black hat resources.
> Mail, pizza, and Starbucks all delivered by drones which saves everyone money and creates more happiness

I don't see how it would create more happiness. The "oh look, a drone" reaction would lay off pretty soon. But, perhaps it can save some energy and lessen the use of fossil fuels.

Also, I see they're self-driving. How well would this work with tiny in air obstacles like power lines?
Very impressive how accurate the valuations are. I agree that Rovio's business model isn't as great as CoC and other game publishers.

Think the valuation on Gungho is significantly off though. Gungho made 763 million the first half of 2013, compared to 455 million (http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/GungHo+Online+news/news....)
Interesting. Apologies for not taking the time to do the research myself, but do you have any idea why they were so reluctant to take a stake in the companies that (I presume) their members work in?
> Does it mean that writing a Clojure-to-Java transpiler would yield better results than using the "native" Clojure implementation?

yea, it does sound weird, because if a closure-to-java compiler yields better results, then why not just use that as the closure compiler?

I agree that hand writing a piece of code in java that did the exact same thing as a piece of closure code would be faster in java than closure, because the programmer could make shortcuts where he knows he could.
It is certainly a pollution of code -- a necessity to convert a good, efficient data structure which base graphics can plot into some specific form will always seem redundant from a programming point of view (and I was replying to a programmer).

Obviously the situation is opposite when one considers, let's say, "analysts", i.e. people that expect to be able to completely ignore the form of the data and focus purely on the content -- for them your stack of tools is a pure gold, even with its trade-offs.
Exactly. And if it's big enough, it becomes really hard to steal and it can transport some sort of locker that the client can open.
Agreed, and that's how I do it also. But I'd recommend checking the rate. I have a few accounts and the difference between the cheapest and most expensive is significant (e.g. one bank taking 4% margin, another only taking 1%).
Planning a Hackathon? Keep it classy.
You are completely missing the point of the Bayesian interpretation of probability and I'm not really sure how to explain it any better.

Let's say you have to bet money on whether or not P=NP will be proven next year. You get to choose the odds you are willing to take it at, and you want to do it so that you will win the most amount of money on average. The on average is the important part.

So if you say you are 99% sure that it won't, that merely means you would make a bet where you will pay $1 if it doesn't happen, and get $100 if it does. If you made a hundred such bets and lost only 1% of the time, you would walk away with just as much money as you started with.

The point of the thought experiment is you don't get the luxury of saying "I don't know", you have to actually make a decision of how certain you are. And you can't take 10 years to calculate how certain you are mathematically either, you have to make a decision. And it's all probabilistic. You decide what bet to take based on how likely you think it is to happen. This is how we make most our decisions. We couldn't go about our daily lives if we didn't do this.

I don't think it's an association fallacy. I am not saying "All claims religions made in the past turned out to be false when tested, therefore all religious claims are guaranteed to be false." I was just trying to point out the history of religions removing more and more of the actual testable claims. Because the testable claims are all that's left, since everything else has long since been proven to be false.
I agree there are numerous issues and details. If a suburban area decided to take a stand and pass legislation, we could begin ironing out those details. By no means am I suggesting a free-for-all right out of the gate, but a well executed ramp up of activity could prove successful.
I actually read HN through the RSS feed, which I assume contains everything posted. The noise-to-signal ratio is high, but I've had some luck training my RSS aggregator to hide anything related to startups. After that, I actually click on maybe 1 link in 5 (very rough guess, could be fewer than that).
Responsive Design:Optimizing music apps for Deezer
Someone indicated below that ISRO operates on a shoe-string budget. Can we fix that at least?

I'm not an expert on Indian affairs, but I constantly read about how Indian bureaucracy kills initiatives by slow torture in that country, especially in government. If ISRO can figure things out on a shoestring budget, and those lean and mean operations can provide lessons to the rest of the Indian government, that alone would be an excellent reason to do this, I think. I'm not sure that operational lessons would actually be taken from ISRO and applied to other government initiatives, but if you don't have a in-your-face benchmark in the first place, how do you ever aim higher?
I wasn't aware of her recent efforts, it's very impressive that she managed to do this.

I noticed that Cheshire Oaks (UK) has a Burberry store that seemed very popular with no chavs hanging around. So I was wondering what was going on.
How to avoid another Internet ‘bill shock’
I have only skimmed this article and thus will not comment on its contents, BUT I wonder what is the software package that has been use to generate the article layout?
37k lines of code? And what we have finally? Tiny blog engine without categories support? Fuckin javascript.
I tend to go to a forex company if I have to exchange before traveling, never do online banking for it.

I am not sure how the kiosk fx companies does it but moving money around is always a risk. They can probably charge as much as they like but it is that they cannot exchange unlimited amounts, you have to show how you got the money when exchanging above certain amounts. Money laundering regulations makes up a lot of the regulations in that area.

Bitcoin fluctuates wildly though, and exchanging it is hardly quick for the most part. Both brings down the attractiveness for consumer-type fx.

Airports are location monopolies so companies that operate at them have no incentive to provide cheaper services. They can operate at a healthy (for them) margin and the customers will still come. There is a reason those airport sandwiches are expensive!
Elaborate on your experience? I'd love to know what happened (any conversations...) when you encountered the FCC regulations?
Stock Footage Free
You get the licence plate. That's the benefit. You didn't have it before, you have it now, it's something someone (incl you) value. "benefit" doesn't mean "profit".
Wow great pictures! Didn't have time to read the article but I had to look up the photographer: http://www.kostyukov.com/
It's a shame that 'rarely' and 'no' is too high.
You should also consider the possibility that your potential customer does not have a CC. Here in Germany, that applies to quite a lot of people (sry, I have no numbers).
It's definitely not a whole picture, but it's rather accurate view of the countryside and abandoned villages.
I live in Tyumen and it's not that bad, thanks to the gas and oil industry.
But I visited a couple of villages and _it seems to me_ that this article is rather accurate portray of the average out-of-the-city life in Russia.

I think that it's written as propaganda, but it doesn't change the facts.
If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things. -Scott Adams http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...
ISCEAS 2013 - Conferência Internacional de Engenharia e Ciências Aplicadas
Do you really believe that yours is the first generation that will not repeat the mistakes of previous generations?
> ... the downside is that it's becoming almost impossible to find anyone who is capable of doing this sort of thing without having access to these tools and machines.

The whole point of the article was nobody can feel that pain even if deliberately, not pointless nostalgia. He's not telling you to start from stone age. He's telling lack of popularity threatens the existence much of the history which was just recently available for the interested parties. Let me put is this way:

> On the other hand, some things do tend to niggle at me. One of these things is the sneaking suspicion that we are in danger of losing track of how to do things at the most fundamental levels. If you go back to 1970, for example, there were legions of programmers who could create the most wondrous software out of 8 bit assembler by hand. These days, by comparison, we have incredibly sophisticated compilers, editing environments and runtimes that can do a lot of the "thinking" and the code generation for us -- the downside is that it's becoming almost impossible to find anyone who is capable of doing this sort of thing without having access to these tools and machines.

We are poised to lose the experience, history and other trivia that makes us what we are now if not preserved and is easily accessible.
This must happen- India's only hope is massive Govt Funded projects that accomplish something and hope the engineering debri to spawn an ecosystem of high tech companies.(hope they dont migrate to the US)
There is anti-collision software included. I'm imagining it works very similar to the way Google's self-driving car does.
2 years ago, in my last semester at the university, I volunteered at doing an intro-course for first-semester computer science students. Basically, we made sure they transitioned to the university learning style and they've got some student instead of a prof to talk to. Each student had to prepare a talk on a relevant topic.

One of the things we talked about was career options. Imo, first you want to do a broad search, and then you want to dive into specific careers. I.e. a computer science student could get into software development, system administration or consulting. If development sounds most interesting, she should learn about the differences between several technical areas (frontend/backend) as well as company types (software shop/IT dep in larger corp/agency).

One of the students picked up a book on career options for computer science students and did a 30 min talk. I wasn't really happy with the book and shortening it to 30 min didn't really help, but oh well. But it definitely broadened the horizon of most students. They either didn't have any clear picture of a job, or they knew one or two types of jobs because someone in their social circle happened to have that particular job.

If I had given my student(s) your MVP, it would have most likely failed. With 3 random jobs displayed, it's not broad enough to lay out different career options. Plus, job ads, especially for software developers, teach you as much about being a software developer as a car commercial teaches you about driving a car.

To finding "a better career", I'd still recommend my students a book that tries to list most major career options, and tries to objectively name (dis-)advantages of each job. Job ads, no matter how well done, are a terrible first place to start the search.

That said, I think you've found a problem that currently isn't solved very well and I'd look forward to the next iteration of your MVP.
Website Bugtracking with Internet Explorer Support
> At the age of two he was writing numbers that reached into the millions, so it was no surprise that he eventually read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge

What?
Its not about feedback- Its about saying "Beep- Your process is over. Stop expecting a beepin reply from us" - I dont think this will attract lawsuits
Alembic seems to be helping a lot. It's not a full file description, but as a way of getting stuff from animation to everything afterward, it's pretty darn good.

Programs like Clarisse IFX (which is pioneering a totally new way of assembling scenes - very impressive) have basically been made possible by Alembic.
you could get straight-married (for legal purposes, obviously) to become independent from your parents under the law.
Perhaps, because it was not one's own money, but money lent by bank to a corporation for a purchase of a stake. They call it a strategic investment, I suppose.

Now everyone will get their bonuses and kickbacks, and when the stock/valuation plunges (what could possibly go wrong with Zinga?) that would be someone else's problem.

Business as usual.)
Shut up and stop revealing the Plan for World Domination to the older generations! And bring beer to the next meeting of the Gen Y Conspiracy; John's turn was last week!

Or in English: yes, that's how I feel a lot of the time too, but such claims are worth nothing if we spout them on the internet and everything only if we realize them. So it's better to claim little and do a lot rather than wasting our effort on empty claims or even justified complaints about our elders. Just get back to work.
You don't need to send. Send "helo", "mail from" and "rcpt to" commands and most servers that are not open relays will reject the message after the rcpt to. Issue a "data", and most remaining ones will. At which point you can disconnect without sending any e-mails. Open relay testers are dime a dozen.
Clarisse has really just exposed already existing methods of doing things that the high-end VFX studios were using proprietary tools for as off-the-shelf software. They've not pioneered anything, other than the pricing.

Katana's been doing the same for 10 years at SPI, and companies like ILM, Weta, etc have had their own equivalents (to some extent - not as good as Katana, hence why a lot of studios are adopting it) written in Maya for asset-based pipelines for a while.
The drone could deposit the load at the landing station where you can pick it up.
And food won't be cold after a 100m walk.
I was in the cable industry and I believe it started there. Originally there were two types of cable modems ... LanCity produced a symmetrical 10Mbps system and Motorola produced a (from what I remember) 3Mbps downstream and 512Kbps upstream.

Both the upstream and the downstream systems were shared among the 250 or so homes fed from a fiber-optic node, and the performance of your system was related to what your neighbors were doing with their Internet (this is still the case). When DOCSIS was standardized, they started with the Motorola QAM system. The whole cable system is tailored to deliver information to a home, with a very limited upstream, which is the exact opposite of what's needed for a high-bandwidth server (which needs relatively little downstream and a very large upstream.

Internet as originally provided outside of dial-up was expensive (I was paying $700 per month for 1/3 T1 in the mid-nineties), and the phone companies were pocketing a large amount of money from business customers who were buying Internet OR connecting their facilities with frame-relay. When home DSL became available, the telcos didn't want to cannibalize their business service, so the no-servers, home service tiers there are protecting the (now significantly cheaper) business tier cash flow.

I had a rack of servers in my basement that were Internet connected, and I can tell you that for outbound services (web content etc), my customers/readers/users get much better performance being served by a single $20/month Linode server than they ever did through my line-of-sight microwave connection. Even beyond the last mile, the distribution plant isn't a place for anything but a hobby server.
The OWASP testing guide is a very good start:
https://www.owasp.org/images/5/56/OWASP_Testing_Guide_v3.pdf

It covers the process of a web application test and explains 90% of the vulnerabilities you'll find in web apps and how to test for them.
How is this a practical concern?

The world gets destroyed as we know it, how to use a lathe is the least of your problems.

Open your fridge, pick anything from it. Think of the supply chain and layers upon layers of society that was needed to get that to you.
You can now be, fearful that in an apocalypse event all that wouldn't be there and you'd be stuffed (which is perfectly correct reasoning) or you can appreciate the world as it is now and how it probably will be tomorrow.
Why Not Protect Workers from Customers?
Lua is a very nice little language, and is great for embedding (I'm using it for the Android game I'm currently developing).

Anyone who likes the functional side of Lua should checkout out Moonscript, which I've started using recently. Moonscript is a CoffeeScript-inspired language that compiles to Lua so can run everywhere Lua can, but has a more concise and FP-style syntax - in particular, closures are much shorter and nicer:

e.g.

(x) -> x * x

vs.

function(x) return x*x end

This makes writing higher-order function code much more compact and idiomatic.
Dear Americans,

let me tell you something. The good and cheerful atmosphere at freshman speeches is something you should be proud of. It gives people spirit and a wonderful first experience. The harsh truth will catch up anyways. The speech in this article, how the OP thought it should be, is utter crap and comes from a place of total arrogance and serves only himself.

It doesn't act as an eye-opener, because the students won't listen anyways. They will experience reality soon enough and there's absolutely no need to tell them anything they can't understand at their current position. They are mentally not in the state to receive any "truthful speech". They are in a new chapter of their lives and the only bet is to give it a try. The experience of others is worth close to nothing, because they need to make experiences themselves.

Why am I telling you this? Because I'm German. In Germany, there is not even a freshman speech. What we have can be described as a big "fuck you" from some dean or whatever arrogant professor feels entitled to speak up. "50% of you won't be here in 1 year" is something you get told on first day of university. What is this good for? I haven't seen a single student saying "Oh, this guy's right, I'll unenroll right now". They HAVE to try first, because that's the choice they made for this new chapter in life. It might even be true. 50% unenroll after a while, but it's unclear which 50%.

My girlfriend is becoming a teacher. She studied for 5 years. After university follows a 1.5 traineeship at school, before she can call herself a real teacher. They have a welcome speech for the new trainee-teachers and it went like that:"Welcome, good to see you, but you won't get a job anyways." Again, a big "fuck you" to all these people who spend 5 years in this system, gave their best, are motivated and accept a lousy pay for 1.5 years with ridiculous long hours.

From my limited experience and what people told me who experienced the exact same crap in Germany, I can see this only as some self-righteous bullshit from arrogant frustrated people that serves no purpose at all but only to make THEM feel a tiny little bit better. "I'm here, see, I'm the best." Fuck you!

Be proud that it is a common practice in the US to have motivational speeches that give people a good feeling. There's nothing in the world you can tell freshmen to prepare them for reality. The only thing that counts is how you make them feel in this very moment at the Welcome-freshman-party.
Shouldn't an article about graphical programming show something graphical, instead of just ascii characters?
Long Bet #5: "By 2012, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times will have referred to Russia as "the world leader in software development" or words to that effect.”

Predictor (who lost) was Esther Dyson, an investor in several Ruassian start-ups. Challenger was Bill Campbell, chair of Intuit.

http://longbets.org/5/
It's not about consciousness. We can make a mechanical detector and it behaves exactly the same way as a human observer.
Starbucks is Too Cheap According to our Brainwaves
Study links low birthweight to air pollution and traffic
A quote that I loved from the article:
Allen did email his colleagues with the subject line: “A paper in my mouth.

Ahh, science.
I hate to say it to Zookal, but we've done this in the small Italian town of Verbania since 2010. There was even an article in the local newspaper, Eco Risveglio. Email me at my username +gmail if you want a copy of the article.

They can also talk to Kite Winters in Melbourne if they want confirmation from a more local source, she saw it.
Cash out before the crash out :)