skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
QMail doesn't target Linux? Oh, wait, you mean it doesn't target me and others who doen't want to invest the effort in installing it. That's fine, I use Postfix and it works well enough for my needs.
:) I know someone who got an tattoo of the primordial soup RNA world hypothesis, covering her entire arm. People told her that it could be wrong before she got the tattoo...
But on the face of it, I don't see any problem with asking students if they made (cough, cognitive dissonance, cough) wise decisions...

I joke about getting an MBA so I could become a cartoonist, but business school was literally the competitive advantage that made Dilbert a success.
I worked at Haas all through my undergrad and spent a lot of time in their labs as part of my job. Based on my scientific sampling method of eavesdropping on everyone within audible range, approximately 80% of the Haas MBA experience is devoted to figuring out who's driving to Tahoe. Another 10% is spent discussing professional sporting events (men) or men (women). And on rare occasions they got down to business and cranked out a PowerPoint or two. I remember feeling bewildered that these people were going to be making 10x as much as me in 2 years.

This was long before I ever heard the term PHB, watched Office Space, or otherwise knew that I was supposed to hate MBAs. My point being: I came by my scorn organically.
404 error on that link...
In his book, I believe that Tim says that it's not illegal if you don't store a user's credit card information when selling a product that isn't fully-baked. But I agree that it is a bit shady...
You can have loans without a fractional reserve system.
Less well represented as a percentage doesn't mean those genes will die out.
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Bill Gasarch: List of books I want reviewed
the biggest reason i believe email is not going anywhere is because it is entrenched in corporate life. enterprise moves slowly and to move from email to another system would take longer than it took them to embrace email in the first place (i.e. decades).
Thanks for ruining it for me, pal.
"If these trends continue for 10 generations, Stearns calculates, the average woman in 2409 will be 2 centimetres shorter and 1 kilogram heavier than she is today. She will bear her first child about 5 months earlier and enter menopause 10 months later."

This is a non-story. The change they are predicting is unnoticeable 400 years out.
I don't get the hostility against words like "bullshit" in formal pieces. Bullshit is a good word that many people understand. It means something. Properly used, it takes the place of a dozen shittier words.

Social customer relationship management (CRM), social human resources management (HRM), social knowledge management (KM), social innovation management; collaborative customer service and support; social document management; and enhanced expertise discovery

That sounds like a load of horse puckey to me. I don't like to think it's necessary to use overwrought nonsense like that to get attention.

It's one thing --- a good thing --- to eliminate the passive voice. It's another to straightjacket everyone's communications strategy into Zappos PR-speak, or, worse still, to misunderstand why Zappos works and talk down to the audience as if they were (a) kindergartners or (b) people for whom the words "auto-followed on Twitter by a celebrity publicist" had as much meaning as "Customer Relations Management".

It's not a good thing, either, to make "why Zappos works" into a complex issue. Zappos does a lot of things, but the core of what makes people like them is that they don't get the feeling that Zappos is a soulless bullshit company. It's a really simple step with enormous impact, and it works on virtually everybody. Secretly, even the people who use bullshit dislike it.
Instead of asking for the credit card information (which does sound illegal), I've heard of others who have placed a "Buy Now"-type button on the landing page or fill out form fields just up to the credit card fields (say, for a multistep payment process). A user who clicks on "Buy now" or fills out the first part of the payment form is a pretty convincing datapoint.

I haven't tried any of this myself since it raises a big issue for me: Doing this makes a promise that you don't intend to keep (at that moment). If trust is what gets users to buy, isn't it counter-productive to violate a user's act of trust?

I'd like to get over this because I can see how experiments like this can be useful and I hope you'll keep us all posted with your success rate. Some things I'm curious to know are:

* How much time passed between your AdWords test and your MVP launch?
* Of the emails captured, how many participated in the beta and eventually became paying users?

Best of luck!
No, not really. The upgrade price for either OS is about $130 retail. The difference is that MS is talented at producing bad PR by listing the 'full' retail MSRP at some ridiculous price that no one ever actually pays.
Twitter still supports pagination, it just isn't exposed in the UI.

http://twitter.com/?page=20
FriendFeed Not Dead, Just In A State Of “Chrysalis,” Says Co-founder
For context, the 2008 iPhone sales (whole year, not a quarter) were $1.84B. And now it's $7.4B in one quarter. Is that even possible?

http://blogs.eweek.com/applewatch/content/corporate/apple_fi...

Here's 2009 figures in a similar table: quarter not whole year: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-Q4-2009-by-t...
Hmm I wonder how they're gonna manage the "lending to friends" part. I'm all for it but it should be interesting.
There are a few minor errors:

* the explanation of 8.6 is wrong - it's cbind that's coercing all columns to a common type, not data.frame

* 8.7 is a bad example of good R code - use column names not indices!

* in 9 (and elsewhere) it's not necessary to continually strips names off vectors or use return in functions

* 11.2.1 to count TRUEs in logical vector, sum it.

...
The sun will come up tomorrow. We are 99.99% certain of that, so therefore it's safe to assume it's correct. And it's statistically unlikely for the sun to not come up.

But when making the claim that God does not exist, that claim itself is 100% certain to be uncertain.

So it's safe to assume he does not exist if no evidence has shown he does exist, but we still must acknowledge the possibility of his existence just as you must still acknowledge the possibility, however minute, that the sun will not come up tomorrow.
I think you've hit on some good points, but missed a big one. Running ad words drives traffic to a site that currently has no traffic, better yet that traffic has shown some interest in the product you're claiming to have. If some of those people try to buy (or express interest in) this non-existent product, that says something.

You're not measuring how much traffic ad words brings in. You're using ad words as a traffic generator (ideally generating interested traffic), and of this traffic that comes to your site, you can determine if people are clicking through.

For ~$100 you can determine if there is any interest at all. This can be powerful for people who really have no idea what the market will do. It's not perfect, but not useless.
MBAs are strongly associated with the theory that managers can "manage" competently with no domain knowledge whatsoever. This is unpopular conceptually with people who do have domain knowledge, and those folks can point to scads of examples of situations where a newly minted MBA decided he understood something important and fucked everything up.

I think your "industry has found them useful" argument is undermined by the realization that MBAs tend to hire other MBAs, rather like a virus spreading.
1*1=1, the statement itself is a human definition. And so my point is if we define the universe as the world we reside in, and we define God as an entity mutually exclusive of the universe, then based on this definition God cannot be disproven. Assuming I exist because I am writing this right now, then the universe must exist because I must reside in something (and whatever that is is the universe). Now then God, what we have defined to be what is exclusive of this universe, cannot be disproven because we are in the universe. Therefore you cannot disprove God and this is infinitely impossible, whereas proving that the sun will come up tomorrow is not certain to be infinitely impossible yet.
From what I've heard, getting an MBA is more about networking (the social kind) than classroom knowledge.

Consequently, going to a bar, driving to Tahoe, or just watercooler conversation is probably a good way to make contacts.
I thought I covered that, what follows the line you quoted is what I'm refuting.

But there's another reason not to have it persist depending on the style guide for forms on your site (you are using a style guide, correct?). The style guide may say that incorrect fields be called out as incorrect, using an icon or a red border or whatever; the correct fields are not called out and do persist their values, so you only need to change the incorrect ones. With a login form, the entire form is invalid, so do you persist the values in all the fields but indicate that they're all bad? This may require a change in your site's style guide, to acknowledge the existent of entire forms that could have invalid data and are not in an editable state, but it's does require not just blindly persisting the login name.
I'm sorry, who the heck actually thinks they are?
Bullshit is a perfectly fine word. It simply had no place in this announcement. It's true that there isn't much to the original press release. NewsGator simply doesn't have much to say. Ginning up fake controversy about most "social" tech being "bullshit" wasn't a valid strategy to solve that.
Merlin was trying to convey everything in the press release without coming across as stiff. He succeeded. I didn't get a "fake controversy" vibe from his writing—what exactly did you mean by that?
The original press release is horrible. Just horrible. The new version is much better and would be good for sending to blogs. But journalists will hate you if you send them something like this. They want the plain facts as neutral as possible. That‘s easier to process for them. Well, a neutral text they can copy and paste, anything else they have to put work in :)

(Working in PR makes you fear for the future of journalism. It’s so sad, really.)
I would imagine it is similar to the Zune's sharing feature. If you and I both subscribe to the monthly pass ($15 or so), you can listen to songs on my Zune that are also in the marketplace (for a limited time I think).
I'm not saying the original press release was good. I'm saying Merlin's was just as bad, but at the opposite end of the spectrum.
Actually I'm against lending. And it's because it seems they are trying to pretend the e-book is a real book.
Dubbed the Nook, The Wall Street Journal has confirmed the Barnes & Noble e-book reader.

I didn't know that The Wall Street Journal had been dubbed the Nook. Sorry to be that annoying English major, but I had to point out the terrible grammar in the above sentence. I mean the article is about an e-reader!
Create an energy monitor using XML, Ruby, Rails, and Ajax
Australia for one.

http://www.telstra.com.au/mobile/phones/iphone/

http://www.optus.com.au/iphone

http://www.vodafone.com.au/personal/iphone/index.htm

https://www.virginmobile.com.au/shop/iPhone.aspx

http://www.three.com.au/iPhone?intcmp=W0001

Or you can buy unlocked direct from Apple:

http://www.apple.com/au/iphone/buy/
Link worked for me FYI - Maybe you caught a glitch
Actually, I found it pretty believable that this percentage put their email in. I ran something similar...a SurveyMonkey questionnaire about the product, where the last question was "If you'd like to be notified when this launches, put your email here." 25-30% of those who finished the survey gave their email.

This is ONLY email, of course, not actual signups. I'm expecting 90+% of those people will drop out once we actually email them.
Why Nerds Should Get The Flu Vaccine
Sure, except that Mann isn't trying to write a replacement press release for NewsGator, not really. He's really just trying to turn up some ears toward just how utterly opaque the previous one was. "Bullshit", "douchey", "dumbass", and "hold me" are great words for the intended audience, viz. those of us curious about why the hell the first one was so dense.

In the end, don't you just want to rewrite the goddamn thing yourself? Take out the buzz and the sass, put in the keywords. You're practically working for NewsGator already, and you're definitely caught in the wave Mann stirred up and tossed up to his internet call box.
This can be powerful for people who really have no idea what the market will do.

These people should take their hands off the keyboard and not put it back on until they have spoken to at least one Real Person who has the problem that they are trying to solve. After they have done this, they will know if there is any interest at all. This produces actionable insights: if they tell you they have a problem, then at least some people have the problem. If they tell you that the industry's favorite way for solving the problem costs $1,000, that immediately establishes that there is a viable market for solving the problem.

Compare this to the AdWords campaign: can you tell me what numbers you can get that say "This is a good idea -- do this" and what numbers you can get that say "This is not a good idea -- don't do this"? No -- subjectively "good" results don't imply purchasing intent, subjectively "bad" results don't imply lack of it. You'll get noise -- very precise noise, noise you can measure down to the click, but still noise.
Many universities (in Europe) grew out of monastic study and mediaeval universities were founded both by the wealth of princes and by papal bull. Individual scientists, Roger Bacon say, were provided a living by the church others, Copernicus springs to mind, were sponsored in their studies by particular bishops or similar Church luminaries.

The Catholic Church still operates at least one observatory which has been going since the 16 Century.

As highlighted in the Merton-Weber thesis scientific enquiry in the 17, 18 Century appears to have been pushed on by Protestant philosophy.
I agree email serves a very important purpose. It's the open standard way of receiving messages between computers. We'll always need a way for people to send each other messages using their computers with an open standard.

Email, or whatever its purposes is, will not go away, but it can be improved and adapted to modern needs.
I'm sitting on some shares of $10.60 AAPL from the 90's that I picked up as a pre-teen enthralled with Macs. Apple has really gone quite far in even a decade.
That's 7.4 million sold, not $7.4 billion in sales.
Definitely. They have 10% of the OS market, 10% of the hardware market & good margins on both. Growing from 10 - 15% is admirable, but not as hard as growing from 70% to 105%.
Skim and Plunge
Your comment is unrelated to mine. I am speaking in the context of home viewership. This is frankly quite obvious, but whatever.
I don't know very many people who still use email for personal communication. It's all Twitter, Facebook, Skype, or just IM. Even my parents seem to able to navigate Facebook just fine but have considerably more trouble with their email client.

While I still use email just as much for business communication, I hardly use it at all for just talking to friends and family.
But that would be too simple. You can't just go around and fuel higher expectations like that! It's DANGEROUS!
FastPencil: Get Great Ideas Kindle and Print-Ready
I will definitely do a follow-up on this. It seems like there is quite a bit of interest in this type of testing. I will provide some numbers as soon as I have them.
Already submitted twice before, most recently here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=863344

A little background on the author in this comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=863705
Which is why I said Good sales people :-)
In addition, couldn't the later menopause be explained as a direct result of lower oocyte consumption? With 9 months of pregnancy, that's 8 or 9 fewer ovulation cycles, so wouldn't it makes sense for a woman with an extra child to have menopause a few months later? I'm no reproductive specialist here, but that seems like a reasonable assumption to me.

Add in the selection bias (women with later menopause are more likely to have an unexpected child at a late age), and this really could turn out to be an experiment with no notable findings.
Pace yourself (much) more on things under your control -- that I fully agree.

"""you should always raise more than you think you need to get to the next milestone""" -- that I fully agree too
I don't even think that article needs any response. It's pretty naive.

That said, it's a fact that the current generation of teenagers generally don't send personal email and view it as something their parents and teachers use.
>2) Forgetting tab index

Is that necessary with a properly structured form?
Scientists have given flies memories of a bad experience they never really had.
"Investing" in the short term is simply gambling. It can be a lot of fun, but the average person is (as you note) better off working.
-1 for not mentioning mapply, tapply, or sapply.
Indeed... if they still published stuff like this on a regular basis, I'd still be a subscriber.
"This product is currently in private beta. Enter your credit card details to guarantee your spot in the next phase of release. You won't be charged a cent until you get access"

Then do the authorize.net CC storage thing where you don't even need to worry about securing private details (pre-auth, don't capture payment till you have a product to sell).
don't tell me what i believe in!
So... why are you doing this? Nice gestures are nice, but this one seems really expensive. What's the payoff for Microsoft? Simply a goodwill play?
I don't think life has ever been quite that simple, unless the population of the country is close to one. In any reasonably large society there is a complex dynamic between the king, various holders of political power, and various holders of economic power.

Sometimes the king has been the poorest person in the country, because the national debt is his personal debt as well as the country's. Yes, the crown might try to liquidate its creditors - but they have friends too. And how will the crown borrow more money tomorrow?
Didn't mean to come off too negatively about it. While I stand by my point about the feasibility of these things, this is the type of creativity necessary to encourage better behavior with respect to the environment.
Galileo was educated in part in a monastery and at the Uni of Pisa (founded by a pope). He was sponsored by the Church to do his studies; when he wished to publish his pamphlet the authorities urged caution and refused to state outright that heliocentrism were true wishing instead to gather more evidence. Galileo went ahead pissed off the papacy and was censured.

Indeed if we consider Einsteins relativity then we might argue that the anti's were right to hold reservations as without an ether it is no more correct to say that the Earth revolves around the Sun than it is to say the Earth is static. I doubt they had this in mind though.
How Moody's sold its ratings -- and sold out investors
Suppose I came up with an idea that I absolutely knew was brilliant, let's say edible shoelaces. Unfortunately these edible shoelaces aren't cheap to produce. I'm a one man shop and have almost no money.

I make a fully functional website to sell this product, only I don't have the product yet. When people browse the site and have gone through the pricing page, etc... and finally click "buy" I simply tell them that we're out of stock.

Now I want to see if people are actually trying to buy this thing, so I start marketing but have a limited budget. I throw $1000 at ad words. If I get 100 people trying to buy my edible shoelaces at $20 each then I know that maybe it's worth investing in manufacturing the product.

How is this not useful data? Instead of going all out and spending money on manufacturing and a website, you only pay for the website and hold off on the manufacturing expense until you're confident it'll pay off.
It does if the trend continues. Yay math.
I do not like Perl for programs that need to execute quickly.
Is there something like this for MATLAB?
If she has a middle name use that on the job applications if her last name is not as unique as her first.

Go crazy and add yourself to every social networking profile you can get as one of the links above have said.

Call the editors and request the article be removed, if it is old news and nothing really valuable, they may just do it to respect her privacy. I would do this via phone not email so you get to speak to a human being that understands her situation.

Buy her a domain name with her name in the url. Use that to rank very highly. Does not need anything more than a pure html template with her name and some random bits of info on it.

There is a service called reputation defender or some such name. They specialize in this sorta stuff, not sure how much they charge etc. Just figured I would mention it if it really mattered that much.
Twitter is both orthogonal and parallel to email, nice!
It's not exactly reflected in the valuation and Jason recognized that in the comments in the article:

"If you look at smaller acquisitions like mine (i.e. not like the $170m Mint acquisition), valuations like "N times revenue" or "N times profitability" is less correlated with sales, where as "N times number of founders" is closer to what happens."
Yeah, I agree.

A lot of the problems to do with digital content is because it is trying to behave like it isn't digital content. The "rules" of lending a book in physical format are determined by physics, psychology, & the like. People ahve learned to live with these. The "rules" of lending an ebook are going to be completely artificial, even if they mimic the dead tree rules.

It's like trying to enforce a complicated regime of minimum orders per table that depends on the number of people, the days of the week, what items are ordered etc. That just makes people angry.
Philippe Starck thinks deep on design (video)
I wonder how big it is. I recently got a kindle dx & it's just barely good enough for pdfs.

The touchscreen has potential. I really hope their UI people are better than Amazon's.
I was thinking more about application of Godels Incompleteness Theorem or the Church-Turing Hypothesis or even to take a more basic consideration Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

Based on the standard scientific and logical axioms the cause of the progression of weather is quite discoverable except that the chaotic nature makes it practically (at present at least) unpredictable.

Perhaps you believe the world is entirely Newtonian??

I await your answer with baited breath.