skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Blucig started getting marketed about 3-4 months ago. They are actually owned by a very large internet porn king. He rolled out ads on all his sites and consequently they came to the attention of large number of people even though they have been out for about a year and a half prior. Electronic cigarettes are made by about 6-8 factories in China.

The Blucig is a rebrand, just as pretty much any the rest of them are. A lot people ordered the Blucig and then flooded the e-cig forums to complain that they had not received their order in over a month. This is either due to the fact that Blu did not foresee demand and did not order enough stock or more likely, their large shipments were seized at customs as the FDA has decided that they are illegal to market (at the request of Senator Frank Laudenberg who received $128,000in campaign donations from Big Pharma) though two other large E-cig companies are currently challenging the FDA's decision in court. The judge is expected to make a decision this week.

Smaller home based e-cig companies are still managing to get their shipments to slip in. If you are to order one, I recommend ordering from one of those.

E-cigs are currently one of the most spammed products on the internet as far as I can tell. If you read anyone's recommendations, consider whether it is an affiliate. There is a lot of expensive rubbish being spammed. Also consider that these cost $12-$17 wholesale on average and make sure you read the warranty before ordering. Most of them become useless in a very short period of time, batteries especially. Atomizers should be considered consumable products as the liquid will gunk them up. I go through at least one a month.
If you want the most recent episodes of LOST, this should work:

http://bit.ly/gJtxL

It may not be so useful right now, since the season is over.

DISCLAIMER: I currently work for this company (www.truveo.com). We run a video search engine.

AFAIK, Hulu doesn't provide episodes of LOST; they're only available on ABC's website.
real world

Tell that to physicists “renormalizing”† it over and over all days long…

† I almost forgot not everyone on HN may know what that is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization
There are sites that estimate ad revenue:
http://www.webtrafficagents.com/WebSitevalue/WebSiteWorth.as...

Then, you can use Quantcast or Alexa to determine page views:
http://quantcast.com
http://alexa.com
Stage 8 - Management

You let other people do the work for you.
What is interesting in research such as this is the cognitive science aspect. Both from theoretical and methodological perspective. Not only does it explore how deterministic we are, measurements in what what is essentially a hostile environment (betting strategy incorporates both bluffing and empathy/simulation of the opponent) are also a perfect double-blind experimental setup.
Yes, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and Iran have banned them outright. S.Korea consider them a tobacco product and tax them accordingly. Other restrictions apply in some other countries.
Yes it's like Victorian buildings, bridges, etc. Those Victorians sure knew how to build to last!

But wait, we only see their buildings that did last. Everything that's not a Victorian structure is evidence of something of theirs that didn't...
Essentials of complexity-theoretic stand-up comedy
Demographic Deathwatch: Credit Crunch & Debt Burden are Just the Beginning
Large sites with bulk qualified traffic e.g. auto or real estate classifieds can do 200m PIs a month and still make $5-$10 CPMs. To do so you'll either have to rep your own site or use a good agency, and be quite targeted e.g. Escalade ad for X5 search results.
Glucose, galactose and fructose are absorbed in the small intestine, although a small amount of glucose is absorbed through the mouth.

http://www.nutritionnook.com/carbohydrates.php

http://www.northland.cc.mn.us/biology/bluetick/nutrition/lec...
Nice tip, thanks.

You'll probably want to also do this for the "All items" section as well, that'll take care of the unread count in the page's title.
> Fact is, there's a huge open source community that would do 90% of that work for free in order to get their names on a high profile project like that.

A naive and unworkable strategy at best.

As a major open source developer and project leader I've come believe that the majority of relevant open source works comes from a tiny, motivated, and highly skilled minority. And remember, OSS developers don't work for free because they want their name on some product or webpage. There are jobs for that, and they even pay.
Zed is a dick, film at 11.
It just shows how culture always trickles down from the top. Gates, Ballmer, etc are all tremendous dorks, and their dorkiness pervades the Microsoft brand. I suppose Steve Jobs' smartest move was recognising the importance of style, and having faith in his own good taste.
I don't think that's the original problem at all. the original problem was simply aggregating a bunch of feeds into one page. I use my feed reader a lot and have no problems with using the "mark all as read" button every so often.
To be 100% fair I have more than paid for my phone since signing the contract :) I rang them up wanting a new phone and asking if they could do me a deal if I agreed to a higher monthly fee and a full 24 month contract (the phone aimed at being an Iphone).

When I first rang them last month there was 6 months left on the contract and they were quite happy to do this - except they wanted the full 6 months paid off first! That's more than the phones original value. I offered to pay the value of the phone (seeing as they get my custom for 24 months locked in - and I am a 10yr customer). not interested.

I agree - trying to get something for nothing is silly :) but I think I deserve some reward for my loyalty? Especially as I will actually be paying for the phone AND increasing my contract amount (and locking in for 24 months - which really means forever as it's an Iphone :))
You could do a purely applied approach, look at some Data Mining books, like Witten/Franke and the Weka java framwork (there's quite a few good books, check amazon reviews, ) and the assortment of methods that are applied from basic logit/probits, through clustering, SVM, neural, evolutionary programming, .
I have a niche high market value site, generating a CPM of about $26, with a very healthy CTR. It's only a little side project and doesn't receive that much traffic, so it's certainly not my main business. But just goes to show, you don't necessarily need millions of page views, or indeed hundreds of thousands if you select your market wisely.
> the company culture was very different 15 years ago, and earned it some (deserved) negative reputation

Market-wise, I perceived Microsoft as kicking ass during the mid 90's with products that were crushing the competition, whereas nowadays I see them as floundering ineffectively.

If the workers weren't happy then, but are happy now, how does that fit with my perceptions?
What happened to the don't post flame topic rules? Surely Zed's blog post would have been a better entry path at the very least.
The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack
I would agree there is not much point subscribing to TechCrunch, Mashable et. all, But there are other types of content, like:

- friend's blogs

- vanity/competitor searches

- Niche blogs that you follow

[Warning: blatant plug coming]
I use http://friendbinder.com to follow my friends RSS, Twitter,Facebook etc. in the same place. I don't use a feed reader for big news sites anymore - they are just too noisy.
He was hired for customer support. I don't think Google even has such a thing.
Cutting Edge Prosthetic Arms (video)
If it's getting $26 ecpms, why aren't you buying assloads of adsense traffic for it? If you have good retention, surely you can buy customers for less than you make off of them. If each customer averages only $100 pageviews that's still $2.60 a pop.
This is terrible, wrongheaded advice. It's like Pablo Picasso, in the middle of his Blue Period, trying to convince younger painters that red isn't a useful color for serious artists.

If you want to study graph theory or combinatorics [1], then calculus will be pretty much useless to you, and you'll naturally go years without using it.

Calculus is also useless in some situations in abstract algebra (which are said to have combinatorial character). There are other parts of abstract algebra, e.g. Differential Galois Theory [2], in which calculus is pretty important.

Topology is similar. Elementary topology is part of the foundation supporting calculus, while algebraic topology is one of the tools that's useful when we try to do calculus (or solve differential equations) in non-Euclidean spaces.

Fields making heavy use of calculus include differential geometry, differential equations (ordinary or partial), dynamical systems or control theory. That subsumes most of physics. Fields underpinning (and largely inspired by) calculus include real and complex analysis, measure and integration theory (aka axiomatic probability theory). Also functional analysis, which is a generalization of linear algebra, which is the bookkeeping methodology of calculus in higher dimensions.

[1] The first sentence here says it all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorics

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_Galois_theory
Good and valid points.

I think the GP were mostly thinking about the red tape and administrative problems that had to be surmounted.

(Stross? Really likes the books!)
RSS seems well suited to feeds that update less than once a week, since I'll probably forget to check. For example my blog posting rate is about 1 every 2 months.

If a site updates at least once a day I'll probably remember to check it.
HP has a very decent and durable machines in the corporate line. I have one that operates practically 24/7 for two and a half years now. This particular one I've bought after my desktop workstation (IBM IntelliStation, double Xeon, Wildcat graphics, 15K drives..) died after just little more than one year in service. So much for desktop vs. laptop durability. I also prefer the keyboard (and rubber mouse buttons) to the ThinkPad's design.

Buying form corporate line has an additional benefit that one can use a docking station for all the external monitors, hard drives, mouse, keybord, speakers and the ethernet cable. Of course I know ThinkPads do have a docking connector too, but Macs do not and I hardly understand how people can trade convenience and commodity price for a shiny paint that wears off from sweat in under a year and a shiny GUI that annoys me (maybe it's just me) almost as Windows does.
Wikipedia's controversial video player coming soon
I take exception to the accusation of misogyny, but perhaps I wasn't very clear. I'm sure that Ariel is a competent and intelligent person, and probably capable of a lot more than puff PR blogging for moribund corporations. I'm sure she put in an honest and significant amount of work setting up the site and the interview and so on. In fact, her competence is essential. The whole point of the exercise is to cast a character who can convey authenticity.

It's like reality show casting. It's not scripted. The people are real. But they're in a role, to create a particular kind of scene. And the scene they probably wanted to create was "attractive+nerdy girl runs a fansite about our our awesomely cool developers and our cool corporate culture".

Yeah, probably most smart people know that it's really an MS site. But branding exists for a reason -- it works unconsciously. If anything my comment isn't misogynist, it's anti-straight-male. I'm tired of how predictable men in our industry are.

As for Google PR -- it deserves to be satirized too. Their thing is to have developers directly address the public, in relatively plainspoken videos. This entails yet more subtle distortions (mostly by omission), but it's not as flawed as the Microspotting approach.
It's the stage 5 programmers that scare me the most. They're the ones who want to rewrite everything from scratch because the current codebase doesn't contain enough patterns and it wasn't built using "proper" methodologies.
Forget poll widgets - Prediction markets right in your website
The energy ROI on that surface area of photovolcaic cells would not make that feasible.
The Economic Failure of the Space Program
For perspective, imagine skills where you are at stage zero, ones you've not even heard of. There are probably quite a few.
> Taken individually, most of these services have reasonable security precautions against intrusion. But there are huge weaknesses when they are looked at together, as an ecosystem. Like dominoes, once one fell (Gmail was the first to go), the others all tumbled as well.

Like many others, I gradually gave up my internal resistance on Google knowing most everything about me and have adopted Gmail as my primary mailbox.

1) Enable SSL by default on Gmail

https://mail.google.com/mail/#settings

Scroll down to bottom and choose 'Always use HTTPS' for 'Browser Connection'. Click 'Save settings'

2) Change your Gmail security question (you may want to do this now because you may have forgotten the answer to your own question that you set way back when you registered)

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

3) If you can't answer your Gmail security question, it will send a password reset email to your secondary email address. Consider the risks of having the secondary email address compromised (and decide whether to remove it or change it to one with a secure 'secret question' process - e.g. if you work for a company, your work email)

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...
Eek. I get an average eCPM of $0.06.
Software Engineering: Dead?
The most important lesson here is that no amount of security on a website/server/physical piece of hardware will stand up to the test if the user is lax in their usage.

Social engineering is the new wave of security breaches and it would seem that strict password policies etc are just as important as an intrusion proof system/network.
In the type system:

> data Zero

> data Succ a

> class Add a b ab | a b -> ab, a ab -> b
> instance Add Zero b b
> instance (Add a b ab) => Add (Succ a) b (Succ ab)
VBoxHeadless - Running Virtual Machines With VirtualBox 3.0 On An Ubuntu Server
According to the article - as far as I remember - closed only means, that you need to closer to the passport.

> The official range of an e-passport’s RFID is supposed to be no more than ten centimetres (four inches). But with $100 worth of hobbyist gear, Israeli researchers managed to skim encrypted data off e-passports from several feet away. A student at Cambridge University in Britain went further, intercepting e-passport transmissions some 50 metres (160 feet) away.

> That was enough for State Department officials in Washington, DC, to insist that American e-passports be fitted with metal sleeves to shield them, when closed, from prying electronic eyes. The measures seem to be reasonably effective, though e-passports that get wedged open slightly by keys or loose change can still be read electronically from a distance.

> Slightly open passports could leave holders vulnerable to physical attack. Each country encrypts data in a characteristic way that terrorists could use to identify the nationality of the person carrying the chipped passport. To demonstrate the point, a firm called Flexilis used a partially opened American e-passport tucked in the pocket of a dummy to trigger an explosion as it passed a dustbin containing a small charge.
Simply amazing. The convergence of robotics, biology, and software is both powerful and frightening.
This is really good advice. Also, remember that it means nothing beyond what it says, all you really have to work from are the definitions and the theorems. :)
> The sawdust of debt, and the monetization of assets rather than the production of goods, continually came to define the internal composition of the system.

Ah, those lovely Americans. Always clamouring for the lost paradise of an industrial economy.
America - on aggregate - is not an investor, but an investee. Look at the capital inflows.

(However America may provide a service as the world's speculator, if you meant that. (No negative connotations implied.))
In addition to what you listed, I think the article's point about one's password being findable in their mailfile is a great catch.

In order to be aware that someone has compromised your mail, it's essential that they not be able to reset your password to its old value. Therefore, your password for e-mail should never be findable in your mailfile, nor should it be the same password you use for any other web service. Because you never know what stupid web service will send your password to you in cleartext upon request.

Of course, it's not a good idea to share passwords among different services in general, but keeping your mail password separate is particularly important.
However that correlates positively for a lot of people.
How To Write A Name Generator (In Ruby)
This is why old media is sinking. It is not just about the old channels but old authors too.

In the same way I was disappointed by O'Reilly articles recently. Now when choosing to read an article I'm not looking the source (WSJ, Techcrunch, ...) but the author. (like Zed :). But foremost at article's HN comments

Old media's only currency is the rating thus they'll have to produce something sensational like this article. New media's currency is community credit and respect so we are producing knowledge
Bash WTFs
Well, I guess it depends on your situation.

Let me take my situation to explain:
I see myself as a non-traditional web developer during my own free time. I like to work at various locations (my desk, sofa, bed, outside, library, ...). But at my normal, regular work, I'm just a traditional developer who demanded a dual screen set-up at the job interview.

So you have to ask yourself, are you the more traditional type who does work at a desk? You're better off with a large screen area/desktop. If your desk doesn't matter for you and you're just going to work on a lot of various locations I'd say, go for the laptop. Just for the record, you will notice some people said they used laptops with external monitors. You should ask yourself if you will ever use the machine as a real laptop, because if you don't, you'll probably be off cheaper with a regular desktop due to better upgrade opportunities/longer life in general.
> But what you have to realize is, that 100 years ago most people couldn't even read or write.

You mean, globally? In the industrialised nations, people were quite literate in 1909. Especially in the USA with all the emphasis on bible reading.
It's a pity that google docs doesn't have that SSL option
Got myself an original imac
I deliberately set up a secondary email address that I use for nothing else and has a unique but memorable password.

Then I just mashed the keys for the security question.
Yep, testing is essential for landing pages. But successful tests require good amount of traffic which might not be possible for smaller campaigns. So, best approach would be to follow best practices in landing page design and then tweak one thing at a time to really optimize conversions.
And right now you have Democrats almost anywhere.

How about introducing a proportional system? Or approval voting?
Nearly 2 years ago I started using Google Reader. I signed up for a few great feeds and read it every morning and every night. Over the following months I signed up to more and more feeds, eventually to the point where my reader was flooded with up to a thousand articles per day, and I struggled to find time to do my work between keeping up with this influx of information.

Then one particular week where things got too heavy, I just didn't have time.

Now, I wouldn't say I have OCD, but I really dislike doing things out of order. I can't watch a trilogy out of order, I can't watch a new TV series unless I start at S01E01. When I returned to my reader I suddenly had 6000+ articles to read, and dreaded the thought that I'd have to read some out of order.

I don't know if I'm alone here, but eventually I no longer enjoyed the prospect of opening Google Reader. To keep up with all this information, I felt I had to, but it ceased to be fun. It's probably been a month since I've opened it, just casually reading reddit and HN, as well as a few forums I have in my Firefox Toolbar and a few emails a day I've subscribed to.

One day I will likely go back on Google Reader and somehow cull the hundreds of subscriptions, all neatly categorised into topics and subtopics, back down a number I can read in an hour per day. But I suspect I'll find that difficult, and so instead I just stay away.

And that's my story about RSS.
If you're trying to script a C application, Lua is also worth a look. It's similar to Python (with more Scheme influence: coroutines, real lambdas, fully lexical scoping, no GIL), but its design favors being small and easy to embed over "batteries included" (since if you're scripting a C project, you probably already have the libraries you need).
You could try MIT's free courses!
What's a good real analysis text these days? Is Spivak's calculus book still a common favorite?
The big difference is that Grooveshark is not a YouTube scraper. Much better quality of music on Grooveshark, but crappy UI.
After reading the TSID (Twitter's Secret Internal Documents) which basically tells Twitter plans to "dominate the world" with their Service, is that TC does not deserve any credibility publishing an advertorial making it looks like a revelation from the "underground" hackers; that's cheating.
Google will have to eventually respond (with action) to that and more security concerns outlined in this June 2009 open letter to the Google CEO demanding 'security by default' from 38 leading security researchers including Bruce Schneier and Ron Rivest.

http://files.cloudprivacy.net/google-letter-final.pdf
C# Set method timeout using generics
It's a project from a few years back that failed to live up to my misguided immediate expectations. So it was put on the back burner and now and again I look back and its been making steady progress. I'll get back to it soon and see if I can crank it up a few gears. The investment in time has been done, and it has a foothold, so now it should just be a case of expanding on what's there.

I'm not sure if what you have described would work for my particular site, I think id need an actual product rather than just articles and content, otherwise it's a bit of a gray area?
Sooner or later you'll have to create Your Personal News Agency. A reader or any aggregator is just the INPUT part of the job but how do you process and make available the generated knowledge, the OUTPUT? In a wiki or a blog post? None of them are semantic so inapropriate for storing knowledge.

Future Readers must focus on the output part of the process otherwise there will be so much input without proper output that everything will look like noise.

Signal vs. Noise is in fact your I/O rate.
I'm confused by the assertion that a source code audit would catch nothing. Even if the auditors didn't know that the check would be optimised away, the code is very unnatural. Normally you check if a pointer is NULL and then deference it. In a code review, every time I see a pointer dereference I'm thinking: "how do we know that's not NULL?". So a check afterwards should not keep this code from being caught by auditors.
Indeed. Lua also offers a tremendously flexible method of setting up sandboxes or restricted/unusual function environments.
From my own experience? I no longer get anywhere near this but last year I made between 4-9k per month on only a few thousand pageviews a day to my personal blog - I was getting > $10 CPM from Adsense no trouble. No scams, etc.

Sadly my blog went down the rankings a bit and with the general advertising slump, even several hundred dollars is good for 2009 :-(