skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Though he stopped before handing over any sensitive information, the incident put an end to Mueller's online banking. "After changing our passwords, I tried to pass the incident off to my wife ... as a teachable moment," he said. "To which she deftly replied, 'Well, it is not my teachable moment. However, it is our money. No more Internet banking for you."

Citing Cybercrime, real reason is wifely decree.
As explained in other comments here and at the Guardian, P2P isn't factored in. Some seem to think it'd have a small effect, but I've kept an eye on netstat while using Spotify and quite a lot of traffic is coming via the P2P network. Much to my chagrin, actually, as my upload bandwidth is occasionally hammered and my entire connection turns to crap :(
I've started working from one day a week and have found I can get significantly more done away from the office. Maybe going into work a couple hours before others would help too...
I normally try to schedule blocks greater than 4 hours for programming and i do everything else on the remaining block of time. This normally requires a little bit of planning the day before and may be disrupted by peers or emergencies, but it works for me.
I've never even thought of installing more than one package manager. I package CPAN modules when I need them. If I needed gems, I'd probably do the same thing.
I loved Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence by Ivan Bratko.
What I find most annoying is that I couldn't care less about wireless functionality. There's rarely a time when I'm out of USB-cable range of a computer. Do I really need to be able to download fresh books while on the toilet?

Seriously... Does anyone care about the wireless features? Certainly they could release it in Canada and let you download books and just figure out the wireless stuff later, no?

Instead they are going to lose my (current and future book-buying) business to Sony.
try adderall. you might be adhd.
There is another article on this, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/why-you-cant-... , also linked at HN, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=868723 . It's speculation, similar to what I wrote here earlier, still no real news.
> Part of the problem is that the search page is dynamically generated; neighborhood-specific landing pages would help capture those more targeted queries.

Yes, yes and yes. SEO matters for almost every site, but it is a really big deal for this kind of site. I tweaked the internal SEO of my site to highlight and description (One Bedroom Apartment in Newark, New Jersey) of the listing and it paid off for those "long tail" searches.
Ask HN: I want to start a vertical ad network, any recommendations for tools?
I'm starting a vertical ad network in the smartphone apps space (developers and development studios would come to us to promote their apps on our network of app review websites).

I have a portfolio of websites to seed the network with, and the aggregate monthly pageviews is already non-trivial. So no problems, there. I also have a reasonably strategy to acquire advertisers.

I'm looking for recommendations around:
1. Which Ad server to go with
2. Back-office services: billing and payment distribution to partner publishers

I've looked at Adify (very pricey setup fee and no trial), and have applied to the iSocket beta.

Anyone have any suggestions or experience with something like this? Thanks!
Sounds simple and... it sorta is. If you spend some time learning about sales, you'll recognize the "rejection is good - it's one step closer to the next yes!" theme.

In this vein, I want to recommend "Ready, Fire, Aim" by Michael Masterson. It focuses on the same topic (selling subscriptions to information products) but the ideas can be applied to most product businesses. The focus is on getting those first sales, figuring out how to convert, then fleshing out the product.
We already do this. It's the "Search" box on Firefox, Safari, Opera, Galeon and Konqueror.

The only time I visit the google homepage to search something is when I'm stuck with Internet explorer.
- "That’s why most tech books seem to either be by authors who’ve written one book or many books."

All books are written by people who have written (1) book or many books.
I've tried it for a few minutes and I like it.

I've tried downloading the loopable brown noise file, but when I put it on a loop in quicktime there's a break at the end of the loop which is annoying.

Anyone knows how to make a seamless loop?

edit: I've tried it in iTunes and the break isn't quite as annoying (though still there). You can make it a bit more "full" by playing the website (oscillating) and the loop file at the same time.
This advice may be good for someone selling a commodity, but for software, it doesn't make sense to me.

Basically, OP says to sell a large volume of a commodity product to many customers. Since you only convert 1% of your prospects, you'll have to do a lot of pitching. (100 * a large number = a really large number).

Sounds like you'd be selling all the time with no time left for programming.

I'd suggest exactly the opposite: Spend almost all of your time building a great product, and do one of two things with it:

1. Make it a niche product and sell it to a small number of tightly targeted customers. Your conversion rate should be much higher than 1% and you can charge much more, not needing so many customers.

2. Make it a web-based commodity and leverage technology (SEO, blogging, etc.) to reach a large audience. You don't "pitch" thousands of users, you just reach them and let your product pitch them for you.

I just don't understand how someone who can program (which is the critical path for software products) should be spending all of their time selling.
This is steampunk, man. Even more pimp than that demo with synthesized speech on a Commodore VIC-20.
I wrote a version of McCarthy's original Lisp in Python if you want to study the roots of Lisp.

http://github.com/fogus/lithp
Surely such previews fall under "fair use"?

The music industry has made it abundantly clear for almost 30 years (since the early days of tapes, really) that they believe fair use does not actually exist.
I think craigslist just needs a decent API. That way you'll get all the listings in one central location, and still get decent search possibilities.
How good is your Lisp?

LISA does forward chaining within CLOS, so you always have a real language on standby when you need one. JESS has Java.

Prolog: what a frustrating language to use in the Real World and what a delightful lab language.
Agreed, even if it's solely for the marketing potential it's a good place for Apple to be.

Apple's niche depends solely on keeping its customers satisfied, which is generally by Apple being seen as cutting-edge, however the requirement has changed from when Apple was founded to the present day. Even Microsoft is in on the act (lead free solders, removal of PVC packaging, etc.) so Apple certainly can't stand to be seen as behind Microsoft in the eco movement, it would be akin to the Prius being less fuel efficient than an F150 it'd be ludicrous.

Regardless of the motive I believe Apples actions are good primarily for one reason, and it has nothing to do with CO2. The greatest environmental effect of our technology hasn't been our air, it's been the mercury and lead levels in 3rd world villages and towns where the materials our technology is made from are scavenged for money.
..It's been done and has the biggest competitor out there.

The following is item #25 from http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

25. A Craigslist competitor. Craiglist is ambivalent about being a business. This is both a strength and a weakness. If you focus on the areas where it's a weakness, you may find there are better ways to solve some of the problems Craigslist solves.
It was. I didn't know anywhere actually did it :/
The manhattan neighborhoods need to be broken up more, I immediately noticed these missing soho, lower east side, chinatown, nolita, greenwich village, and hells kitchen.
Don't know if you were trying to be facetious but I downvoted because this is potentially dangerous advice. Just because he can't concentrate with coworkers and other noise around, doesn't mean he has ADHD.

OP: For noise, really good noise reduction headphones are the key to my sanity in the workplace.

As for internet distraction, I found two things helpful. 1) Eliminate non-essential immediate/push notifications. and convert them these tasks to on demand type tasks. Turn off twitter notifications on the iphone, shut down your IM client, and only check your feeds when you want to, not when they get pushed to you. I find the interruption of the notifications plays hell with my concentration. 2) install rescuetime and track (or even block) your internet sites.
record every hour of your day in an easy-to-record system such as OSX's iCal. facing your inefficiencies and patterns is crucial for doing better. combine what you learn from your past with what others here are saying about better planning and habits.
http://github.com/diN0bot/iCal-Analyzer
After my on-site interview at Google, the recruiter called to let me know I was rejected. (It was about four weeks after the interview, though...)
Virtual Mirror augmented reality (one step closer to Minority Report)
Except, of course, those books which are written by people who have written a couple (2) books or a few (3) books.
"Clause and Effect" by Clocksin. Also, the worked exercises
at Ninety-Nine Prolog Problems, https://prof.ti.bfh.ch/hew1/informatik3/prolog/p-99/
Arstechnica, RWW, Mashable (less frequent), Twitter (if I may say it), LWN
Shooter, I wish you the best of luck for your continual recovery.

I've been ill (dizzyness, almost passing out, weak left arm, chest pains, burning throat, swollen glands, twitching muscles, burning/pinching at joints) since June and I just fell out with my NHS (UK) doctor this week and went private.

The NHS doctor has been telling me its a virus and it'll go away on its own, and the muscle twitching was normal for a few days. I finally went back last week (have been back 3-4 times before that) when he was promising me a blood test to check for an infection and he is refusing me, he says we only have 10 minutes and I have too many symptoms, and even that he never said it was a virus infection.

So the few symptoms that he will look at are sending us down completely the wrong path, I don't want to keep chasing symptoms when we should be going after the cause.

I called the NHS directly and they told me to demand a blood test, but the doctor still declines. He even went as far as to tell me I don't have the symptoms I was telling him I had.

So on Wednesday this week I called a private doctor, got an appointment two hours later, she looked at my entire list of symptoms (15~) and checked me over, confirmed I have an extremely high temperature, inflamed throat and swollen glands. Had my blood tests today and I'm going in for the results tomorrow. That's more action in 3 days than my NHS doctor managed in over 3 months. I just hope it'll all be over now, as I've been trying to launch a business throughout this.

Before contacting the private doctor I felt like id slipped through the net and it was useless. I've not even been checking HN much lately so it was pure randomness that I stumbled upon this thread.

I still have a referral for neurological tests and a brain scan with the NHS if required. But I have been adamant that its not a family running disease because both my Mother and Sister have the same symptoms, all occurring since roughly the same date. If it wasn't for that id possibly still be following a (hopefully) less likely route.

A drop in the water compared to what you've been through, but I think I can relate at least a little to some of the initial frustrations that you've had to deal with. Thanks for sharing your story and I'm glad that you eventually pulled through all the confusion and are getting the treatment you need.
Baloney. If growing a business was so predictable there would be absolutely no place for startups. that's the sort of intellectual fraud Taleb refers to in the Black Swan.
I don't like going to the front page or even using the browser's search box. Better to type CTR-L to get to the address bar and then use a shortcut registered "g". "g terms" and you are quickly at the results.

alias "g" to "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s

Putting this in the address bar also means you get incremental history of previous searches. If the term was long, you don't need to type it again. If you need to modify a recent search slightly, it's there as a template.
Its a good reminder that you have to sell, sell, sell.

But his example that your selling an email newsletter with valuable information, leaves you wondering when you have time to create the newsletter. If you actually did have time to talk to 100 prospectives a day, you would have zero time left for anything else.

A better representation might be: say you have what it takes to research and put together a very compelling newsletter that you can charge $25 a month for. Now lets say, your wife is also at home unemployed and you both magically can last a year trying to bootstrap the business. You bust your butt creating the product and your wife makes 100++ phones calls a day. Sell, sell, sell.
I read the title to say that Apple quit the Chamber over Apple's opposition to the EPA. I'm glad to see that it was the Chamber's opposition that prompted Apple to quit.
INQ To Build Spotify Branded Phone
Thanks for sharing, Peter - one always hears numbers being tossed around, but it's interesting to hear the whole story.

It sounds as if you've burned your bridges with Apress to some degree - do you have any interest in continuing to write books with a better deal (e.g., with Pragmatic Programmers) or are you burnt out of the whole thing entirely?
ReaTiWe - your Real Time Web playground
http://reatiwe.appspot.com/ is your playground for all cool real-time-related stuff, which become popular recently - XMPP, webhooks, pubsubhubbub. The system have two main parts: web interface and XMPP bot, both deployed on Google AppEngine.
This is a very good resource.
I'm far from being an expert but "Lisp in small pieces" is frequently recommended.

There are a lot of free/opensource implementations to study. SBCL is widely used and ppl working on it are available in #lisp. It may be the same for ClozureCL.
World's top 100 universities listed
Have You Listened to Your Program Today?
The music part would never work for me... whenever I put some music to play I get completely absorbed, and all studying, or coding, for that matter, comes to a full stop.
Feel free to email me about deploying our targeting ad server.

When I was in your shoes a year ago, I found out I had to write my own. In advertising, you either have the technical know-how or you have the sales force. You can't just use OpenX, sit back and hope to make money.

It is a sick twisted industry, but it pays my bills.
i use http://rescuetime.com its free and helps me track what i waste time on and gives me a target to focus on when developing
Try to work on something interesting. Hate to sound snarky, but it's that simple for me.
yoga comes pretty close, i would suggest starting with that if you don't mind giving it a shot. focus on breathing.
How might you resolve the conflict of interest that private insurance companies are better off if they refuse your treatment and you die than if they pay for it?
T 3.0

http://mumble.net/~jar/tproject/t3.0.tar.gz

The most beautiful compiler for any language.

P.S. Why not ask the specialists? the people hacking Lisp compilers for the love of it; unpaid and unsung heroes? Drop by #lisp or #scheme in Freenode and see who is there. Most competent Lisp compiler hackers wouldn't be caught dead in this neck of the woods; it's just us web guys, blowhards and joe nobodies.
Use a portable HDD and plug it directly into you 360, it'll use a hell of a lot less power than a media server and will only consume power when your xbox is running. Totalling about 9W of extra consumption assuming constant usage of the USB drive while the Xbox is activated.

I can't see anything running for lower power than 9W.
My piano already does this. I can talk into a mic and it converts it into notes. It just doesn't mechanically play the keys.
"You don't "pitch" thousands of users, you just reach them and let your product pitch them for you."

These are the same thing. Just because you're not taking each potential customer to a steak dinner, it doesn't mean you're not selling them. I don't see how you get customers without showing them the benefits of your product. No matter what the medium is (blogging, advertising, interviews, SEO) - Pitching, selling, it's all the same thing.
Thanks! I'll email you.
See the 30% withholding in taxes at the bottom right?...the US tax man will still steal 30% of your royalties

The good news for US citizens: you pay no FICA (Social Security & Medicare, currently about 16%) on royalties, which are not considered regular income.
"Why not? as nike say “just do it”, if the code has 10 bugs but is finished in half the time then you’ve done good, that gives you loads of time to fix the bugs, and more importantly you get to those moments where you realise x,y&z need to be changed much quicker. Not only that, but would you rather have a week to go and have a list of 80 bugs, or a week to go and 2 major deliverables a week overdue.."

What!? Has he never read Code Complete? I'd rather be 2 weeks overdue with no bugs than on time with 80 bugs. 80 bugs means I'm really overdue by a month...
I don't think I've burned my bridges - though they might disagree! I've mostly appreciated the experience with them; it's just some of the institutional policies I take umbrage with. I bet many writers feel the same way about publishers they work with time and time again :) I don't think that being OK with people pirating my book is detrimental to Apress either. They already let other authors "open" their books (e.g. Scott Chacon, Mark Pilgrim) and I want to boost print sales which benefits them far more than me.

On the second question, I definitely want to write more books. I didn't think this after completing the first edition of Beginning Ruby but the reviews I got just blew me away.

I suspect I've sorta prematurely burned any bridge I had to the Pragmatics (as cool as they are) with a slightly hasty negative reference to one of their books a while back (I've been nice since, honest - sorry!) but if I were sticking to the Ruby theme, I have a big enough audience with my own Ruby sites to self publish (and maybe avoid print entirely).
I know this is weird, but for me the best way for me to concentrate is to lie down on my stomach with a laptop in front of me. Not good ergonomically, and I think its because as a kid I did all my homework lying on the floor in front of the TV.

Hard to do in an office environment without strange looks. ;-)
I'm not talking about actually solving P vs NP. I'm talking about approximation algorithms. My point is this... lets say you have two problems A and B. Even if you have an approximation algorithm that solves A to within 50% of optimal, then reducing B to A, solving A and converting to solution back to one for B won't necessarily a 50% approximation for B.

(Sorry if I missed your point and this explanation is redundant).
Could or can MacRuby be compiled on *nix machines if the Cocoa bindings and any other proprietary os x bindings were left out?
You know, to actually have a feature like search by square footage or some other quantity usable, you would not only have to have that field but train every user to enter that field in the form. And that's not going to happen.

The user will paste in whatever they're written already for the description and put random stuff in the extra fields. Especially when it's a Realtor/broker/etc - they want a listing to include the good stuff but not have to say anything about the bad stuff (including that it's doesn't have XYZ). The Realtor speak that seems to pollute newspapers and craigslist only seems like a disaster to us. In reality, it is a finely tuned system combining communication and non-communication that has arisen over the years.

Craigslist is the victory of "good enough to understand", which is exactly how human natural language works. The continuous Craigslist complaints here are about "it should be up to my ideal" are about not getting that "good enough" is the way that people prefer to communicate - with added ambiguity often being prized by at least one of the communicators - notice how job search ads generally work the same work (the number of Palo Alto locations I've gotten when I've searched for San Francisco on Dice.com isn't any more coincidental than craigslist's disfunction and Dice.com is only paid ads).
it is just an alternative to home servers and consumes approx 5 watts. There are other uses for TonidoPlug - not limited to media streaming
This is really an important idea. For example part of a website I'm working on displays "customer testimonials".

The right way to do this for user experience is to to allow the user to cycle through the testimonials using AJAX. This allows for some nice looking UI and is faster because less data is exchanged with the server.

The right way to do this for SEO is to have each page with a different testimonial on it with it's own custom title, meta description, and SEO friendly URL.

Which way we go is still undecided.
I would really like to see some serious craigslist competitors. There are basic things that craigslist refuses to allow users to do, like keep a list of things they're interested in.
Insurance companies are neither Good nor Evil. That's absurd. They're simply in the unenviable position of having to be the decision makers in the distribution of a scarce resource (health care).

Saying the insurance companies are evil is no more informed than the people who railed at the Obama administration for suggesting that end of life care should be rationed.

The most fundamental issue is that health-care is so damned expensive in the US. That's why we get in the degenerate situation we're in now where it seems like insurance companies are the arbiters of who shall live and who shall die.
"Generally speaking his company sells 3-day usability testing workshops for $23,000."

Don't you think that the selling of $23,000 usability testing workshops might constitute an incentive for him to push for more hands on usability testing rather than the blind acceptance of his findings?
> a bit high

Seriously?

It must have taken at least a couple weeks of work to write and polish up this app. Then there's ongoing marketing, support, more dev if he adds the features people are asking for here, etc. If the app sells 1000 copies its first month (which would be pretty good!), the economics barely make sense at $1.99. At $0.99 it's basically a community service project.

Games can be priced at a dollar because the audience is everyone with an iPhone. For apps that are carefully tailored to the needs of a small group, you must expect to pay more.
"Trying" adderal doesn't have to mean illicit adderal.

Used under physician supervision he (w/doc) may find a dosage and plan that works for him. YMMV.
Microsoft creates social computing sandbox
I think he was suggesting that they could do a human-interest story about a real-life Dr. House (to take advantage of sweeps), with Shooter as an example of someone whom no one else could diagnose properly. They could completely leave out the bit about the insurance companies if they were so inclined.
GoalStage Report: Top Ten Most Unfashionable Premier League Players
The players who have belied the Premier League glitz and glamour ethos in favour of good old fashioned blood, sweat and tears. These ten are just the kind you need for those long trips to rain soaked locations and bobbly pitches. It is important to recognise that being unfashionable doesnt necessarily imply not good enough although in one or two cases that is indeed what is meant.