skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is silly for a few reasons. For one, click through rate and conversion rates are not only a factor of the displaying website, they're a factor of the ad and where the click through lands. For a publisher CPC is therefore often impractical because they have no idea what that will convert to in terms of sheer dollars, given that a poor ad will produce far fewer clicks with the same audience than a good one. (And the distinction between the two is not always easy to tell without a/b testing.) With CPM you know exactly what you're going to get paid.

As an advertiser, CPM is fine too because if you're at all competent and do some basic testing you can build an above-average engagement ad and effectively get a discount. If your ad produces 10% more clicks than everyone else, you can bid more to get the same ROI. This is often easier than you'd expect. I buy all of our Facebook ads via CPM because we've figured out some great ways to get higher click throughs, and roughly what CPMs you need to bid at what times for what demographics and keywords to max out your budget as efficiently as possible.

Also, all advertising is basically CPA-by-proxy so it's not really that relevant to the advertiser whether they're paying by CPM, CPC, or CPA. When I buy an ad somewhere (as I frequently do) I may pay CPM, CPC, or CPA, but I'm simply converting them all into CPA in a spreadsheet because that's the way to get ROI which is the only thing I care about. If I have to spend 50 cents to make a buck, I'm ecstatic, but if I have to spend $1.50 I look elsewhere.

If the publisher uses some shady page-view enhancing technique that doubles page views but doesn't impact clicks at all, that's fine. I just will end up paying half the CPM (or moving elsewhere) because that converts to the same CPA in the end. The market values ad slots in terms of pseudo-CPA, so the publisher can't really boost their revenue in the long run without boosting the advertisers'.

All shifting from CPM to CPC or CPA really does is switch the party taking the risk from the advertiser to the publisher. It's pretty easy to see why publishers don't want to do that. Advertisers really don't want it anyway because it's harder to budget when you don't know how much you're going to be paying today.
You left out Javascript and C, which are even more obvious low-hanging fruit, though not necessarily as mind-expanding.
Are you asking if I would be happier if there was testing done on my ABS brakes/chemotherapy/fly-by-wire software than if there wasn't?
Seriously?
You're suggesting there's an alternative?

Or are you saying you base your level of happiness on the experience level of the coders involved rather than their test coverage stats? Because last I checked, experience levels meant very little. The Tacoma Narrows bridge was designed by - at the time - the foremost structural engineers in the world. Their paper on its design was recognised as the single most important paper of its kind in that decade. The bridge still fell, not because they were wrong, but because of something nobody had encountered yet (in this case, aerodynamic flutter).

Critical code is precisely that - critical. You don't leave it to the "gifted engineer" model of development because that always fails. Noone is gifted and diligent 100% of the time, everyone screws up eventually. It's dangerously arrogant to think otherwise. You build a system of work that lowers the probability that those screwups make it into a working system, that's all. Civil and Mech. and other engineering branches have been doing it for decades. We're just getting started on it in this branch of engineering.
I can tell you for a fact that mentors were not allowed in that final day of presentation - only vc's and angels who had paid a large amount (50k+) into the "seedcamp fund" - whatever that meant. What you have is a project that is pitching as being a transparent ecosystem to help startups - when in fact it's just an investment vehicle milking the goodwill of advisors and mentors to serve the aims of those funds.
First, let me apologize for the essay. I didn't mean to write that long when I set out.

I don't discount the utility of environmental stability. But I have a hard time convincing myself that politicians and bureaucrats are in any position to impact environmental stability in a significant positive way.

If only this was a Pigovian tax on carbon emissions being suggested, I'd probably go along -- especially if sweetened with some development subsidies for the countries hit harder by this. But it's not. It's a bid to get people to stop using the single source of energy that has brought about the largest expansion of prosperity ever seen.

> You say you don't predict economic ruin, but you suggest that more attention to environmental considerations in 1989 would have been 'disastrous'

Well, I did contradict myself slightly there. It was said with reference to the boom in prosperity enjoyed by eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union -- one that was largely fuelled by cheap and readily available gas. Form them not to have experienced that, while not spelling economic ruin, would have been very unfortunate.
I don't - is this a typo? Being Irish, your statement comes as a surprise to me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irish_Times
It prevents the user from selling off the data if this is an infrequently checked account (i.e. the user has not had a chance to even make the decision to sell the info).

Not that I agree with the ruling.
Handwriting recognition rules.
Meet with friends, some scheme coding, little running, sometimes surfing, beer, stoned gaming, judo/jiujitsu.
Oh, and

if has-girlfriend

girlfriend pleasing

else

girl hunting

end
Has anyone seen a site claiming to use OpenID but actually phishing with a redirect to a similar-looking URL (e.g. typo-domains of google/yahoo/etc.) to grab your password?

I always check the URL before entering my credentials, but there's always the risk of similar looking glyphs at a different code point (is Unicode allowed in domain names yet?), or just typo-blindness.
With respect to 1:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_Talk#Discussion_topics
You're making a case that OpenId hasn't succeeded yet. that's not the same as making a case that it has failed.

Of course, success is subjective and relative. I see a little success every time I log in to stackOverflow via OpenId, or get a OpenId guest comment on LiveJournal.
Early Twitter backer Union Square sits this one out
I talk about the stock market for 2 hours live on stocktwits.tv
In this world, perhaps the less that's directly attributed to you the better off you are.

Your identity is also tied to livejournal. I have no such place that I would want my identity tied to. I could run my own OpenID server or some such thing but that's even more of pain in the ass.
hahahaha same here!
The sun is doing all sorts of "odd" things.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/40456

And, there are strange correlations.

http://landscheidt.auditblogs.com
I recently heard a talk on a similar idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogravity_assist

A lot of technology still needs to be developed before something like this is viable, but if it were possible a trip to mars travel time would be cut down tremendously. If I remember right there were two launch windows a year using that method.
I'd rather see move money going into the solar/wind/electric ecosystem, but yep, the greens need to get over their primal fear of nuclear as part of the solution, and the mainstream politicians need to rearrange the funding priories.
Indeed this is your prejudice. Just search for top researchers in USA in field of CS. You will find almost all the Indians that appear in that list are IITians. I hope that will clear your misconception, "they have a hard time defining the problem itself".
Google's response to AT&T
Kevin Nalts: The Stupidest Article About Social Media Ever
Original article (with content!): http://www.ngoilgas.com/news/us-foreign-oil/.
AT&T Fires Another Round in Google Voice Case
I'm going to have to kindly disagree with this.

Some people don't seem to understand that advertising is also about brand awareness. I've seen that damn "evony" or "ebony" or whatever it is free mmorpg ad all over the place, but have never clicked on it.

I'm sure that, eventually, I will check it out. This isn't because of ONE website that I have seen the ad on, it is because I have seen it everywhere.

The value (at least in some cases) is in LOTS of impressions. The CPM model will probably never die (and IMHO, this is a good thing).
Kevin: "I have no specific credentials to write about social media, but I did some Google searches 30 minutes ago and now I’m calling myself an expert. Since social media is new, you’ll have a hard time refuting that claim."
Have you had any negative experiences, regarding the use of psychedelics in this respect, or is it just an assumption, based on your preconceptions, about the usage of this kind of substances?
That's completely untrue. AS the pitch ended, I was asked to leave. Reshma asked me "are you an investor in seedcamp?" - I replied "no, do I have to be?". Reshma: "Yes, everybody else in this room has paid to be here"
One big commercial with this content embedded in it:

"One quick factual point – of course mentors are able to attend the judging sessions, several did this year and have done every year. I think what happened yesterday was a pretty innocent misunderstanding – you came into the room mid-pitch and as you’d not been a mentor during the week, I guess that’s why Reshma asked very politely for you to not join the session."

which Philip Wilkinson then disputes:

"Reshma outright told me that I had to leave the judging session as I had not put money into seedcamp, as had all the others sitting in that room. She asked me to leave before the next pitch began too. Mentors were not allowed in full stop."

What seems somewhat unclear is whether Wilkinson was a mentor or not.
Reshma outright told me that I had to leave the judging session as I had not put money into seedcamp, as had all the others sitting in that room. She asked me to leave before the next pitch began too. Mentors were not allowed in full stop.
The Beagle Bros Online Museum
I don't think the point of this demo is to prototype a real desktop - it's just a demo.
Going to Palm with Dion
I imagine that if you didn't reply to requests in that instance they would just go to your hosting provider. If you were your own hosting provider, then they would just take your to court, and if you didn't show up then the ruling would be in the bank's favor.

At some point, you would have to respond to them.
Then why didn't the court just authorize google to delete that particular attachment? It's on their servers after all. Google can also see whether the attatchment has been downloaded. There's absolutely no reason why the account should be suspened.
Because the judge is an idiot, and that's not what the bank's lawyers requested?
interesting, but google voice is not a phone network connection alone. It is a bundled service with a web front-end. How would net neutrality be applicable in this case?
of course, if you use vimperator you have ctrl-i for that
Has Google complied with the order yet?

I would hope that Google would see it in their interests to appeal. Considering the judge's history, odds are an appeal would go through pretty well and Google gets to keep its reputation in tact for a relatively low cost.

There are other methods to help out the bank without setting this precedent.
Err yes... I too am in Mumbai. My phone bill comes to 1000/mo and traveling to about 2k but you got to budget for the occasional flight to meet potential investors or for a family emergency back home. So I think a net 5k a month average is reasonable. One could certainly get rid of the 15k a month but that would probably amount to getting rid of insurance and the national savings scheme and stuff like that. That's probably a personal call though...
There is a mad logic to it:

Reasoning for de-activing the account: gmail account holder has not replied to follow up emails from the bank to destroy email and sensitive content. Therefore it is possible that the account is dormant and/or infrequently used. If that is the case, deactivation insures that the sensitive data is protected if the user happens to at this late date access their gmail account and lo and behold, surprise email from idiot bank. (This also applies if sensitive data is in the spam folder.)

Reasoning for disclosing identity: gmail account is active and frequently accessed, but the user (for whatever reason) has decided not to respond to the idiot bank. This raises the possibility that s/he has malicious intent of misusing the idiot bank's customers' information. Therefore lets find out who this person is in case the idiot bank's customers' information happens to show up elsewhere on the internet.
don't be offended, hey, its Friday ;)... but you can't appeal to a lower court.
I've got that cheat sheet saved on my computer and I've looked at it several times before, but today was the first time I realized that you can hit '&' to repeat the last :s command on the current line. Very slick!!
Google: "Unlike traditional carriers, Google Voice is a free, Web-based software application, and so not subject to common carrier laws."

I don't get how price or underlying technology figure in this. Almost all of the end-users won't see the difference between one system for making phonecalls and another, and I'm sure the rules are meant to protect exactly those people.
Bespin » Code in the Cloud
I think something like this could be ideal for a hosting company's client interface.
That depends on what stage you were at.
If you both had an idea to 'do search' and had only got as far as picking a name. Then after another 10years of work by you alone you are ready to take on Google, does your late partner's partner get half?

If you need to bring in investment or new people and give them options who has to agree to that dilution?

If in a few years there is a row in the family about who owns your late partner's share - are you ready to spend time and money to defend in court what you said to who at the funeral?

Again my condolences for the OP's loss. BUT
Startup founders need to consider that today they are co-owners with their best friend - tomorrow they may be working with their friend's newly divorced and bitter wife, their useless kids or a slimey lawyer who is preying on their grieving parents.
Sorry that you don't like the "trolling". At worst, I am venting, though I am trying to make a point.

The reality is that I am annoyed at having to deal with perl (actually am using DBI.pm; written by the guy who created the original slideshow) and am annoyed to read him "BUSTING!" a Perl readability myth without even understanding why Perl is hard to read in the first place.

You could have written the Perl code very similar to the Lua.

No, in fact, you can't. You can't use parameter lists in perl. You can't use variables without context.

And even where you can, this particular example which I just pulled up completely randomly wasn't written like lua. Which is what life is like when you are surrounded by perl code and are not a perl expert. Here's real code I was annoyed to have to read:

ABC::Myclass->find_or_create({thing => $thing->itm, otherthing => $x->itm});

Double-colon, hyphen-arrow, equals-arrow, variables with context specifiers, curly braces, and parentheses all for a simple library call. Curly braces normally mean a block of code, but here it means we're defining a hash. Double-colon and the dereferencing symbol mean different things, but I don't really have to care about that, it's just visually distracting. With python syntax it might look like this:

ABC.Myclass.find_or_create(dict(thing=thing.itm, otherthing=x.itm))

If you don't remember what dict() does you can look it up. Alternately:

ABC.Myclass.find_or_create({'thing' : thing.itm, 'otherthing': x.itm})

Note that in Python, curly braces are the standard way of defining a dictionary literal and are not used for anything else, as one can determine by searching for '{' in Python's context-free grammar: http://www.python.org/doc/2.5.2/ref/grammar.txt.

To determine that those curly braces in the perl example defined a hash, you have to root around in the docs looking for curly braces until you stumble on something that discusses hashes rather than code blocks.

All that is anyway dwarfed by the language specific libraries you use, as soon as you do something interesting.

I would agree that by the time you are neck-deep in a gigantic perl project then all that trivia will come second-nature. I have never done a gigantic project in perl. I have read lots of code various languages, though. Perl and C are the only ones where the language itself gets in the way, and C is really not that bad. (C++ is so bad that I'm not claiming to have ever successfully understood C++ code for a significant program)
Plus it wouldn't be fair to the 1300 bank customers who don't know how crappy their bank really is - and how insecure their personal information is.
In this world, perhaps the less that's directly attributed to you the better off you are.

Only if you're ashamed of what you say, or are stuck in a place where your views are constantly held against you. Neither of those are true of me, for which I am duly grateful.
A follow up: I found this article that described what was going on.
http://troy.yort.com/anatomy-of-a-malware-ad-on-nytimes-com
For many of these sites they might as well not have you login at all and allow you to do whatever they let you do with OpenID, since after logging in they only get a unique identifier (not even an email address, am I correct?).
The Mini-Seedcamp events all over Europe and the multi-stage application/interview process offer loads of chances to get to know the people involved before participating in Seedcamp week proper.
Oh god I do this so much it's getting to be painful.
Moritz Revisits Steve Jobs and Apple
Don't count on a bank handling data security well.

Here's a story for ya', I won't use the bank's real name, but it rhymes with HSBC.

Anyway, a while back, I was logging into my online banking and the password no longer worked. So I called tech support to see what's up. They said, oh yeah, your password can't be more than 8 characters now. If it was more than that previously, it got truncated [not sure they actually used that word], so try the first 8 characters. So what does this tell you about the way they were/are storing my password?
OpenID 1.0 was not very useful and 2.0 is supposed to allow you to sign in using gmail, yahoo, etc, but the OpenID libraries (for PHP at least) are buggy in this support.

Without OAuth before i think all you get after authenticating is their OpenID identifier, which isn't much info. The user would still have to provide common profile data like name and email.

So OpenID is really just meant to allow you to have one account to login to all your sites, rather than to make it easier to sign up for new sites.

And really is this even a good idea? I dunno.
No, because your not a bank ;). Our government thinks very highly of banks, don't expect similar treatment.
You can use it to block indent/unindent code, I find that quite useful.
I agree about being wary of overly simplistic ideologues. However, conflating climate change science with such ideologues is itself an over simplification. I'd look into the actual science and see if urgency may be a valid stance before spending time arguing against a call urgency.

This may be a good start.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/628
The Seedcamp fund is obviously where the money for the EUR 50k investments comes from. It seems logical to me that the people contributing the money are the audience of the final pitching round, upon which they then decide who to fund.

There are multiple other pitches (at the start of Seedcamp week, at investor day in December, etc) that are meant for a more public audience.
It is extremely stupid, not to put too fine a point on it to accept any cat in any bag at any price. You need to know your potential investor quite well before going with them.

That's also to the investors advantage, so to see a clause like this is a big red flag.

What if you really don't connect on any level and they still want a part of your company ? What if you feel you simply can not trust them ?

Better to have no deal than a bad one any day.
I don't have a stake in this argument... just thought it would be relevant to re-post Saul's reply.
To put 50K into ANY fund is not a large amount, that's the little league (from an investors point of view).

From a startup point of view it is reasonably serious but for a single investor 50K is small, very small.

If a fund had an entry ticket that low I would definitely look elsewhere, I would be very worried about small time investors coming on board with very little experience and a risk profile that does not belong in the venture capital world, especially not the seed world.
That depends on what stage you were at.

No it doesn't. If a person owns property (in this case, equity), that property passes to his estate when he dies.

If you both had an idea to 'do search' and had only got as far as picking a name. Then after another 10years of work by you alone you are ready to take on Google, does your late partner's partner get half?

And if someone has written most or all of the code for a startup and then he dies, do you think it's ethical to restart the company and act as if the guy never existed?
> push @{$xs->[3]}, 6 # omgwtf?!

Maybe the first time you see it, for at most two minutes once in your entire life.

I kind of wonder if the people who freak out about this syntax stuff have ever studied a foreign language. Do they scream and run out of the room every time they hit an alien grammar construct?
The federal government? He has a job for life and can go home and get baked on some righteous NoCal weed every night. Really, what else do you expect?
Fuck encrypting the email itself -- it should only contain a link to an https site that the intended recipient has credentials to log into (preferably with multi-factor auth). This is what real, grownup banks do!
Zap Reader - Download to your brain as fast as you can handle
Whatever I want! Yeah! WOOOOO! Friday bitches!
Check out what the coders (or developers) in Coders at Work say about TDD. It is said much better there than I can.
this kind of thing was why i moved from the UK to SV. the british culture is closed, there's a constant search for ways to exclude the majority for the benefit of an 'elite' minority. i found SV had no concept of the elite. could you ever imagine this kind of scene happening at YC?

there have been huge strides in the Uk scene since I left in '07 and it saddens me to see something like this happen.
nah, incompetence knows no country.
Info on the science behind this speed reading technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Serial_Visual_Presentatio...
PatchMatch: A Randomized Correspondence Algorithm for Structural Image Editing
Why block? why not just tell the user he is calling an expensive line and charge him more for it?
Saul says mentors are allowed in:

http://blog.seedcamp.com/2009/09/awaiting-moderation.html

Is it possible that Reshma said what she did as a quick shorthand for letting people in? If she knew all the mentors from 2009 (which I understand wasn't you this year), the only other people allowed in were investors.

In other words, she didn't recognize you as a mentor, so asked if you were an investor (the only other group allowed in). And for people she didn't recognize, she provided a sensible shorthand answer for why they couldn't attend. If you're trying to keep the trains run on time, you don't necessarily have the opportunity for a more complete Q&A.

I don't really have a stake in this argument, but just really like what Saul and Reshma have done with Seedcamp.
(Hint: you can't truncate a hash and get a subset string of the original password to still work.)
Microsoft 'We Are ODST' - Best Video Game Trailer of All Time? (video)