skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At the last paragraph he mentions he did make the code reentrant, just not getting in to detail...

I was also reading in hopes of how he changed that :/
Ask HN: Do any small profile changes increase usage in your app?
We found that adding an avatar can increase response rates in Rypple by 20%.
Having a comfortable job long term with this attitude is career suicide. Not only should you be constantly trying to advance financially, you need to be learning new things with different roles and environments. Else you risk putting all your eggs in one basket, with no where to go if your longtime comfortable position vanishes some day.
Plus there's a well-defined order for IP address assignment.
It's a page straight out of Microsoft's playbook. Microsoft pulled the same shenanigans with Cairo and we're still hearing about how some of the features promised back then (WinFS) are right around the corner. It's really not a bad strategy at all. You assume very little risk by not having to actually produce anything, chip away at any foothold a leader might establish and then release your own incremental improvement if your competitor shows there's a viable market.
I use the names of lakes in Algonquin Provincial Park.
This wouldn't work very well for a business that had servers spread out far and wide, but my current theme is cities. Used to be Russian cities - Moskva, Leningrad, Irkutsk, etc. I've since switched to cities in Texas - Dallas, Austin, Houston. (Though I'm keeping Moskva forever.)
Ask HN: Design for a Software Guy?
I've been writing software for more than 6 years now, and I've realized, somewhat painfully, that I can't design my way out of a paper bag. Are there any good resources out there about graphical design geared for a programmer? Are classes in 'Making Art with Photoshop' worthwhile? I understand the ideals of good user interface design, but when I go to mock up something for a personal app I hit a wall.
Races are extended families. People in a race are genetically and genealogically closer to each other than to people outside of it. This racial clustering of relatedness is empirically testable. Race is not a social construct.
Search And Recover 5 Tam Sürüm Ücretsiz
It's been under construction for several years now.
>Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

the converse of this is more surprising. The ball-park null hypothesis is that only 0.29% (290 for every 100,000 individuals) should come from family with history of entrepreneurs - but observed figure is ~50%. From this one should conclude that entrepreneurship does run in families.
Review our Project: TextRAR.com
Synthetic biology and evolution
In Apple's defense they haven't announced anything and I doubt the leaks we've seen were planned by Apple (since they're all over the place in regards to features). Microsoft would actually announce the product and then not deliver when their competitors folded.
Oh! Just a worker.
Who wrote Linux Kernel 2.6.20?
Maybe. How many paying customers do you think they have? 1k? 10k? 100k?

I think $40M/year for them would require somewhere between 30k and 50k paying customers.

I suppose we're all just guessing, but when I run the numbers on their business I think that the founders are already millionaires, are on their way to being 100-millionaires, and, when you take into account that when you don't gamble your money away it has a tendency to accumulate and compound, that their model could produce a billionaire over a 20 or 30 year period.

I don't ever read their writing and think that they're jealous of other people's exits. I think they're already filthy rich and they look down on the venture industry in the same way that Warren Buffett looks down on Wall Street.
Ask HN: Building a web circumventor or proxy server
Dear HN Community:
My government blocks all the political or barely political websites (eg gmail.com) in my country. I am in US right now and would like to build a web circumventor or proxy server to help those in the country. I know there are already lots of proxy servers, but most of them are banned too. Plus i want to learn how to do this myself. If you have advice or resources (eg books/tutorials/code) on how to build a great proxy server, please let me know.

(I am thinking about implementing it on the Google App Engine Server (Python))

Thanks,
Max
I wondered what that meant when I read it. Having discovered Clarence Thomas was a Supreme Court judge doesn't help either. What did the man do wrong?
I don't know of any. The problem is not with the Kauffman foundation study's data, as far as I know. The problem is all these articles that describe the data as surprising, when most of the surprise is due to confusing startups with small companies generally.
No, but marketing requires them in order to be buzzword-compliant.
Kasparov, Karpov set for chess clash in Spain
I have to say I just LOVE HN --- I've been thinking about this for quite a while and was planning to ask "How do you name your machines" today and just found this article ... Problem solved! Thanks! :)
Well, yes and no. Professional bloggers still get vastly more press than they do money, as I discuss in some detail here: http://blog.seliger.com/2009/06/17/youre-not-going-to-be-a-p... in relationship to a WSJ article not dissimilar from the one in The Atlantic. Furthermore, notice that, as The Atlantic says, only 21 of 50 of the top blogs belong to corporations. In a glass-half-full way, it's fairly impressive that so many blogs _aren't_ corporate.

Anyway, the thoughts on the "rise of the professional blogger" have been around in different language since at least the late 1990s, as Scott Rosenberg's book _Say Everything_ observes; I wrote more about the book here: http://jseliger.com/2009/09/20/say-everything-how-blogging-b... .
Intel squeezed AMD very hard with a lot of "Merced" hype, and look what happened.
That his wife plays a significant part of his life?
Michael Arrington is a Mogul? Really?
Here's one of my favorite examples that can work for almost any language.

Remember, before any of this happens, I have already helped the candidate get comfortable and have made the purpose of the exercise clear: to assess where they're at and how/where they might fit in. It is not a test. Just an exercise to help us both. I offer them a soda or coffee, a little privacy, and this little problem...

You have an array. Call it "a" or whatever you want. It has a bunch of elements, numeric, alphanumeric, or whatever. You decide. Sort it. Without using a second array or a pre-existing function or routine. While I'm explaining this I'm sketching it out with my own pencil and paper. I suggest that they sketch out what they want to do themselves and then write some code (in the language being evaluated) or just pseudo code for general purposes. Be prepared to discuss whatever you want to present. Don't go nuts, just a few pages and 15 to 30 minutes. And have fun.

When I return, I have them explain how they approached it. (Here's what my code will do...) Then we go through the code line by line. At this point, it's incredibly easy for me to ask questions, such as...

Why did you name that variable that name?
Why did you use a for loop?
How else could you have done iteration?
How would you do it with 2 loops?
How would you do it with 1 loop?
Which variables are global? Which are local? Why?
Why did you reuse the variable "i" in the inner loop? (Oops)
How can you make it faster?
How could you make it clearer?
How would you change it if you knew the probability of the original order?
How would you refactor this?
How would you extend this to do...?
Which code would you put in a library for reuse?

You kinda get the picture. No 2 interviews are the same. Imagine the programmers you already know having this discussion with you and how much you'd learn about them.

There are no right or wrong answers, just learning. Which is what you want.

This simple test eliminates the 90% of applicants who are not suited for this work and 100% of the posers. You can tell right away who they are.

OTOH, good programmers shine on this. It's actually fun to hang out and talk about this stuff with them. I have even had candidates email me later with revised code based on our discussion. Those are the motivated ones. Big points for that.
Information vs. Meaning
There's no need to defend Apple. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It may annoy some people, but it's hard to argue its effectiveness. So-called leaks are another good method. You get to see which ideas resonate with consumers before investing in their development.

I remember a Joel article (at least I think it was Joel) about a slightly similar concept. He talked about putting a link in a web application to some feature that didn't exist yet. Then you would track the number of 404 hits on the link to gauge interest.
Gotcha, I'll pass it along.

Is the profile with the video in it any more compelling?
The sign up page could be redesigned...but I am sure it is work in progress
I seriously hate these shitty sites (like boston.com) that redirect mobile traffic, and disregard the link the person was actually going to.
Entrepreneurs: Getting to the Right Conclusions
If they do release an Apple Tablet, it sure as hell won't be cheap. It'll be more like the MacBook air than crunchpad in terms of tech and price point.
Michael Jackson - The end of a music era
He was a phenomenon; he was a childlike image that will be in our hearts forever. Who can forget that childlike smile that he always used to have on his face. I believe that he was an ANGEL sent by god on earth to give us the joy...
Okay, I can understand why most of these are on the list, but this one stands out like a sore thumb:

6. Don’t trust the client, it is in the hands of the enemy.

When did that ever stop being true or important? In fact, amazingly many people get this wrong, including many programmers I've come into contact with as a consultant. The top suggestion for securing their server/service is typically to use encryption even though they don't control the client. I don't think this fallacy can be pointed out often enough!
Is this like Dabble DB? The first impression I got and on that note the whole idea could be clarified a bit some sort of elevator style pitch.
These books come out every so often. 5 years ago "emotional intelligence" sold copy.

IQ has a heritability coefficient of between .5 and .8. The rest seems to be non-shared environment. IQ is a very good predictor of academic success and future income (.7 to .8 correlation). There's a hell of a lot of research out there that has shown this again and again.

I'd like to see Stanovich's definition of "critical reasoning" and the studies that show it to be both uncorrelated with IQ and a good predictor of academic success and future income. There just isn't that much left to predict -- two uncorrelated variables can't both have a correlation coefficient of .8.

I'm going to bet that whatever he has defined as "critical reasoning" actually has a high correlation with IQ when measured.
You got a good point there, but education is integral part of the process as well. Some people do not know how to save and have no trust to any institutions. They need to get help to overcome that barrier
They don't need to make it public beforehand, but they really should after-the-fact, to verify their calculations upon it. Then, proving it's unbiased is a simple matter of releasing the hash to the dataset before the contest starts, to prove that the final dataset they release is the same one they generated before the contest started.

Now, on the front of selecting the winners before the contest has even started, and telling them about how to bias their algorithm so it will do better on the final--I can't really help you. I'd just hope that the programming teams would be honorable enough to mention if one of them were offered such a thing.
You're using a fairly prescriptive definition of race. Race, as commonly used, is a social construct. Ancestry functions the way you describe, but as the example given above shows, "race" and ancestry are not directly related.
Will the Namespace Traffic Jam Kill RDFa in HTML5?
What's New in JRuby 1.4
OK, I agree that more transparency would be nice, but I don't think it's a serious concern. It's clearly in Netflix's best interest to promote a fair competition, since the whole point of the exercise (the reason they're spending a million dollars) is to produce the best possible general algorithm for their own use.
Turns out that designing a consumer electronics project from scratch isn't quite as easy as writing about how Facebook has a "fax this photo" feature.

Also turns out that talking about what you want a project to be is easier than making it so. Good lessons for everyone here.
Very cool. Thanks for sharing this.

Did you find that success on this exercise tracked well with success on the job for those that you ended up hiring?
>> "My big problem with this whole "FU" money concept, and your thought I quoted above, is that people seem to think they need to get this opportunity from someone else."

What???? It's exactly the same as selling your product to customers. Only difference is there's one sale, and it's a big one.
All signed up, looks like there are going to be a lot of good speakers.
I see what you're saying and I don't really disagree. I'm just not sure that's what Apple's doing. The problem with Apple is many of their fans are so rabid that they'll fall for even the most ridiculous leak. Steve Jobs says his Toilet paper's scratchy and there will be fake Apple toilet paper leaks on the Web by sundown. So it's hard to tell when Apple's actually leaking and when it's just everyone going crazy.
I'm really glad that the American government has taken some leadership in this. Hopefully other governments will follow suit and make similar mandates/suggestions to their regulatory bodies.
People aren't, in their minds, comparing anything to a fully-realized "Apple Tablet"—they're just comparing things to their vision of a 8.5x11" iPhone, however close or far that is from the truth.
Just had a quick glance. Could'nt really figure out what your service was trying to do. Looks to me like you let people search through spreadsheets/dbases and also show keyword density clouds. You definitely should write some clear and concise copy for your landing page.
You bring up many good points. I'm just sharing what I have done that has worked. And it has worked very well.

My approach doesn't prove anything. It's just a tool. Like any tool, it has to be handled properly. I can immediately tell who is comfortable and who is not. I adjust for that. And this tool is never the last step, just an early and important one.

I don't learn everything about the candidate, but I learn a lot. And no one can bullshit their way through this; they have to know how to do it. Posers shouldn't waste my time; I will identify them with this every time.
Yes, small profile changes increase usage in my app.

However, I've got to be that guy because "natural experiments" like this one are tempting and highly suboptimal. Finding a correlation between uploading a picture and higher response rates isn't useless, but it isn't fabulously useful, either: the photos might well be a symptom of an account that someone has put more effort into, and people could be responding to the higher quality pitches, etc.

Happily, there is a solution: the humble A/B test. Take the SAME company with the SAME text targeting the SAME list and let half of them see your mug shot, while half of them get nothing there. THEN you can have a statistically quantifiable amount of confidence that the lift in response rates is actually due to the photo, as opposed to due to unmeasured causes.
Internet filters seem to have an easy time to detect proxy servers and they will pick them up easily.

What worked for me, I put-up a website in the US. I did use PHP at the time and used curl to scrape content from banned sites and serve it from the website.

I removed possibly offensive words and presto! Obviously this does not scale well. If you have more problems you can use a ridiculously simple encryption scheme, by swapping all English characters to Armenian and converting back to English at the receiving end via Javascript! (I would not encrypt fully as it might trigger filters of a worse kind).
Important code snippets when working with Google Maps API
Did you find that success on this exercise tracked well with success on the job for those that you ended up hiring?

Yes. If someone didn't work out in the long run, it was rarely because of their programming skill, but for some other reason.
Simply put: TextRAR let you transform any spreadsheet into searchable data; you can either share the search page or use the API to integrate with your application.
At Tesla, Musk and Eberhard are suddenly such good friends
I despise arguing politics, religion, or money matters. That being said, I have no hesitation telling people this is the chief reason I voted for Obama in the most recent election.
You know, this might be the first time in a few years that I've appreciated an FCC policy.
World's biggest open-source company? Google
India to lead second wave of IT adoption: IBM
I think they're finding out that coming out with a consumer electronics device is a lot more involved than simply coming up with a list of features and telling someone else to go build it.
You might have other things you love to do but which are much less likely to yield up the financial security you want (or need, if you have a family). Suppose you want to dedicate yourself to, I don't know, singing opera. Maybe you know you'll never make it big professionally but you'd like to run an amateur opera company and perform moderately well for free. Or you want to run a charity of some sort. Or paint. Or...
Specially publications with articles like "Microsoft's Secret Plans To Kill Apple Revealed". I've never seen so much linkbait crammed into seven words.
Rent a linode/slicehost node and put three services up: OpenVPN, SSH, and a HTTPS server. Access in descending order of availability (blocking):

OpenVPN: use it for what it's made for.

SSH: use the "-D" socks5 feature.

HTTPS: use CGIProxy hosted behind a password wall, http://www.jmarshall.com/tools/cgiproxy/

And sure, also try putting up an http proxy server but those are often banned via applevel protocol matching, right? The HTTPS option above can only be stopped if you are A) blocked to your IP or B) not allowed to do any HTTPS at all.
Not a very good article (slideshow?) I recall a great read on this topic about a year ago. Anyone remember the link?
Technically it's not Obama, but an Obama appointee who's doing the mandating (and wrote the linked blog post): Julius Genachowski (FCC Chairman). Obviously the proverbial buck stops with Obama, and it's fair for him to be credited, but it's important to recognize the distinction.
I'm pretty happy with names of typefaces. They can even be tag names!

Router - Courier

Home server - Minion

Slicehost server - Perpetua

Laptop - Arial

Nokia N800 - Futura

etc...
The study results would have only been surprising if they were true for web/tech entrepreneurs, otherwise it's all pretty much expected.
Yeah, ask Zimbabwe how that's working out.

Hey, if anyone has Fuck You money it's Robert Mugabe. (He also has a Fuck You army though, which I guess helps).
Chrysler replaces "dead tree" owner manuals with DVDs, saves 20,000 trees/year
Any speculations on if/how this affects wireless providers, particularly in regards to the recent iPhone/Google Voice/ATT hullabaloo?

If you read the full speeech (http://www.openinternet.gov/read-speech.html) it's clear that this policy states that consumers should pick the winners and losers, not providers, and networks must allow 'non-harmful' devices to connect to the network...
New research into "shaken baby syndrome" puts convictions in peril
The looming (storage) bandwidth wall
Foundation Capital Bets On Intel’s Vulnerability
Pratchettian characters work rather well.
Enlighten me, pray. What does it say about Bill Gates?
Muzica anilor 80-90 - Căutare Google
Cool. Because I work mostly alone I highly value external feedback. It helps me broaden/clear my view on what I'm working on.

HN seems very calm/knowledgeable community so it's very good to know that I can also ask for feedback here. I asked because for the same reason I also wouldn't want to be spamming this comm. in any way.
Extension loading in Snow Leopard
Netflix has definitely got their ROI from free marketing alone. How many articles have you read about this from Wired, Washingtonpost, NYTimes, etc in the 2 years?

This could definitely be a good marketing strategy for a startup with low marketing costs. $100,000 programming prize might be one method for getting your name out in the press, and get you some free work.
Hey, Jordan here from Rypple.

I spoke to the team about the stat, and we agree with you that the uploading of a logo might not be the only cause for that increase in response rates, but we feel it is a big reason. Based on a sample of our enterprise customers, we feel this is a valid stat that shows the increase in usage across all users.

We A/B test a lot of different things in our app, and I agree it would be interesting to further test this stat.

Thanks for your comments!
Which is a mix of arrogance and selective blindness unlikely to do that self-declared "leading edge" much good.
We used the names of planets, once we ran out of those we started doing moons and stars. It's pretty badass.
Spend time getting 4Chan or another huge group onboard with the problem.

Whilst that might be slightly weird advice it's probably the best. As an individual you could spend hours a week providing and maintaining ways to bypass the blocks - but there is no way you will win if the Govt. is actively blocking new "leaks".

They probably have more manpower and access to ISP's at the highest level.

On the other hand look at Iran: despite govt. blocks the channers and other groups successfully provided routes out to the rest of the world entirely by virtue of numbers. There were so many accessible proxies and services it was an impossible task to block them.

The Internet is a bigger "country" than many real countries: that's your greatest weapon.
Did you read the contest rules and FAQ? (http://www.netflixprize.com/rules, http://www.netflixprize.com/faq -- and if you didn't, what are you doing throwing around words like "corrupt"?) It looks to me like they're being very transparent and explained things very clearly. You have a bunch of data in the test set; these are partitioned randomly into two equally-sized subsets, "quiz" and "test". You submit predictions for both subsets, but are only told how you did on "quiz". Netflix provides an MD5 checksum for the judging file that defines what the partition is; this file will be made available "at the end of the Contest". So this will be verifiable by anyone soon.

Also, don't brush overfitting aside. In the (paraphrased) words of one machine learning researcher, "life is a battle against entropy. In the same way, machine learning research is a battle against overfitting." Any data whose test results you use to select your algorithm or to adjust your algorithm's parameters is not properly considered part of the test set; after your optimization that data will provide an optimistically-biased estimate of your true error. Since competitors could get regular updates on their performance on the quiz dataset, one must assume that they were attempting to optimize this performance, and so quiz set performance was not be a good estimate of their true error. You can only get a good estimate of the true error of a method by testing against data that has played no part in its development.
Indeed, the crunchpad is the exact kind of device that sounds really cool when you first hear about it, but then after you think about it for a minute you realize there's no way you would ever need to use something like it