skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We've been hacked! According to an article in the Washington Post, we've been misled since 1961. We really do not need all those cars - its just a love affair with the "american dream".

"This “love affair” was coined, in fact, during a 1961 episode of a weekly hour-long television program called the DuPont Show of the Week (sponsored, incidentally, by DuPont, which owned a 23 percent stake in General Motors at the time). The program, titled “Merrily We Roll Along,” was promoted by DuPont as “the story of America’s love affair with the automobile.”

The show aired at a time when cars were facing steep criticism, as plans for the new interstate system threatened to destroy or disrupt neighborhoods in many U.S. cities.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/01/27/d...
Do you deliver this world wide?
And they have decided to review the case because they don't have any good relationship with the Russians to preserve any more.
Pinterest likely cloaks traffic. Internal site traffic to a pinboard will require a log-in/register to continue viewing the board. Traffic from the Google index is allowed to continue viewing the board. That is treating search engines differently than human users (unless they throw up this log-in wall for crawling Googlebots too, which would severely hamper crawl-ability of the site).

You do not change the page titles of a site so you can get a few more visitors from Google's algorithm, you change the page titles of a site, because they are ambiguous for all your users. If you want to create more unique page titles you can credit the username that created the board to the pagetitle, instead of a meaningless and everchanging "number of pins on this board". For example "Mickey Mouse on Pinterest by John Doe" or "Mickey Mouse | John Doe | Pinterest".

You run A/B tests to test if user engagement with the site increases. If you run A/B tests to test if certain changes increase your search engine rankings/Google visitors then you are reverse engineering Google. Especially with a large site like Pinterest this may gain you some ill-gotten benefit over sites that do play nice:

"If we discover a site running an experiment for an unnecessarily long time, we may interpret this as an attempt to deceive search engines and take action accordingly." [1]

Even on a site like Pinterest I see low-hanging on-page SEO stuff that could be implemented better. For instance the header for a pinboard starts at line 788. Proper content stacking/HTML code ordering ensures that information retrieval bots do not have to wade through many menu's of boiletplate text, before they get to the unique meat of the page.

There is basically one single way to do legit SEO and most of the tips and techniques for that are transparently written in the Google Webmaster Guidelines [3]. The good news is that this has not changed much at all over the years, so one can stop algo chasing, and start improving the site for all users and all search engines.

BTW: The blog has no canonical tag [2] and puts the _entire_ article inside the contents of '<meta name="twitter:description"'.

[1] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2012/08/website-te...

[2] http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2009/02/specify-yo...

[3] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en "Following these guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site."
The communities I explored them with's values are completely antithetical to SV culture. It's hard for me to reconcile the two to say the least.

Plus they just seem overly idealized. They're just drugs, but I feel like a lot of folks see them as a possible step to becoming Thompson, Richie, Jobs or Gates.
Now that's a great point. There were a bunch of back-links... I will do my research and see how this impacts sales on the long-run. GREAT point and one I didn't think about initiatially... yikes...
Calling that a political assassination is a bit of a stretch, given that he helped kidnap and kill two people.
While ASJP is used to explore potential relationships, it should be noted that it cannot reliably determine language relatedness by itself. The gold standard for that is still the comparative method. [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method_%28linguist...
That's cute until your large business moves down in rankings and you start losing thousands of dollars because who knows why.
Good things:

- thinking in graphs and dependencies

- intuitive understanding of 3d vectors and matrices operations

- a few really useful tricks when troubleshooting anything (this thanks to debugging a lot)

- reading and writing in English

Bad things:

- laziness (I already know how to do this, what do you mean I actually have to do it, too?)
Netflix’s Secret Special Algorithm Is a Human
Reading this thread, it becomes obvious that we have all picked up one bad habit: OCD.
Same, Flash serves h264 to my old core2 laptop, html5 forces shitty VP8. Result is smooth 720p of mpeg4 versus playable 640x480 on googles codec.

Of course computer itself plays 1080p h264 perfectly fine in mplayer, so I might end up writing javascript that fires mplayer with mp4 link (to stream rather than downloading whole clip) instead of displaying video in the browser :(

There used to be mplayer plugin for firefox a loong time ago, nowadays all browsers use building unoptimized codecs.
$9 Marketing Stack for Bootstrappers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cause_of_Yasser_Arafat%27s_deat... has a half a dozen sources indicating that his symptoms didn't match polonium poisoning.
I think the flash player doesn't change quality on resize and thus was able to keep using buffered quality?

I switched to forcing HTML a while ago so can't test. Either way, I'll try that - thank you :)
Those are worldwide statistics (which are great), but in the US, its close to 50/50, UK - 60/40, with the rest of the world slipping down into the numbers you stated.

Amongst the english speaking world, iOS is still a MAJOR contender.
Ask HN: Interesting Browser Homapages
Does anyone have an exciting or useful browser homepage? Im getting tired of the chrome standard.
This is why a lot of SEO advice tends to be start a blog to run along side the selling platform. Write lots of stuff about quality swords to suck in the search engines. Really this shouldn't be necessary. If you want to buy a sword, ideally the SE would know you are looking for shops and not for info about swords. It would then rank according to customer satisfaction or something.. how it would determine this I'm not sure.
Neat.

Obviously apples and oranges, but between this and Facebook's Tor Hidden Service we're starting to see adoption of real privacy tools among major companies.
I hope they are going to be deploying exit nodes as well. It's not very safe to run an exit node but I doubt the FBI will be raiding Mozilla and other big companies for them if this practice continues.
Indeed. It seems to me that we overlook independent invention far too often. Jokes seem especially prone to independent invention to me. Maybe others differ.

If we as a society turn copyright/patents/trademarks/"intellectual property" into the ownership of ideas (as opposed to a limited monopoly to increase the public domain, which is what Thomas Jefferson intended), then we need to seriously consider independent invention. It happens all the time. Consider the safety pin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_pin), nominally invented in 1849, but clear precusors exist from the Bronze age. If "Intellectual Property" exists, shouldn't we remunerate the heirs of the true Bronze Age inventors?

This is an ongoing problem: current US patent cases are very rarely about copying, and are mostly about independent invention: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1270160 We're clearly depriving some "Intellectual Property" owners of their rights and remuneration! To Arms!
This article's thesis seems somewhat questionable, given that none of the examples it cites are actually funny.

I think it is actually very difficult to steal a good joke. There are very few jokes I have heard told by a comedian that I would even consider retelling.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_POLICE_TRACKING_AP...

From the article: Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck complained in a letter to Google's chief executive on Dec. 30 that Waze could be "misused by those with criminal intent to endanger police officers and the community."
Missing an L in "Mozilla" in the title - "Mozila deploying tor relays"
Why not use an orbital mirror that reflects only the wavelengths desired?
If anything this just goes to say that "Going Viral" in the wrong market isn't worth it - you have to know your market! I'm sure the publicity will be good in the long-term, hard-to-measure sense, but targeting the right market will be more beneficial to short term sales.
It could be, according to some sheriffs: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_POLICE_TRACKING_AP...
I don't think I have ever come across PInterest by searching. Am I just searching for the wrong things? I thought PInterest was largely a glorified bookmarking service - what original content is there that the search engines could pick up?
Random question that's been bothering me (since I might have the attention of electronics experts right now)

If I charge a simple parallel plate capacitor, and then pull they plates apart, how does that affect the potential energy stored? Would it be hard to pull apart?
yep, though it could take a bit longer. I've sized them so they fall right under 13 ounces for first class parcel in the states. They're light enough to be considered a different class of mail from regular parcels, essentially.
Switching sides: Thoughts of a tech writer who began working for a tech startup
I use utf8mb4 with binary collation as a default.

When I then get to a column type like email, I don't know what I should use. Dropping down to 7-bit case-insensitive sounds plausible, but another option would be to stick with utf8mb4 but case-insensitive?

Is there a best practice?
Comments telling us blogs telling us what's NOT the answer are NOT the answer are NOT the answer.

(Sentence verified: http://nlp.stanford.edu:8080/parser/index.jsp)
Yes that is a real criticism against Waze. The thought is that the "show where the cops are" feature can be used by those who wish to assassinate cops (by finding them when they are alone I guess).

The obvious conclusion being that the feature must be removed (obvious to a certain Orange country sheriff at least). http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/01/28/382013185/off...
This.

The solution to overhead of hiring isn't "let's do more hiring". It's figuring out how companies can de risk the hiring process. Certainly moving everyone to contracts would do some de risking (definitely around 'parting ways'), but more revolutionary would be to figure out a way to de risk the 'finding talent' part of hiring.
Forgive me for being all preachy, but I think the majority of people taking outbound call center jobs aren't exactly swimming in better choices. They also probably aren't going to reevaluate everything because somebody emoted at them.

The other side of it is that being polite or neutral probably costs you less time and energy than embracing your rage.
Drone Startup Aims to Plant One Billion Trees a Year
(Also what's the best way to learn the formulas so I can figure out these kind of questions for myself?) Buying an advanced Physics textbook seems too daunting.
"...most firms can't utilize the contract style employee because their own processes are so broken, their projects so tightly coupled and intertwined and undocumented, that they can't imagine how to separate something out."

I frequently find it frustrating that an employer can have meetings and make specific plans for a rented person doing a one time project, but they generally don't know how to organize or make their own people more effective. It's like the employees are a given, but this outside thing needs special approval and funding so it needs to be handled well.
The way people hire is all wrong in my opinion too, this is even worse.
In modern euro style kitchens the fridge is always built in to hide it. On the last link you can see the vertical door of the fridge. It is probably not US size.
I couldn't say this any better... "viral" is so context-driven these days!

It's a great publicity piece, for sure, but it doesn't always impact the business... which is very clear now in my own experience!
Drone Maker to Prevent Some Device Flights Over D.C
One Week of Harassment on Twitter
Facebook begins censoring images of prophet Muhammad
Each mode has a time when it gets "good enough," and everything on top of that is gravy.

IMHO, for 2D, that was achieved with the NES generation. And for 3D, with the GameCube generation. (My son fired up Metroid Prime yesterday on the Wii, and it took me a while to realize it was a GC game, not a Wii game.)

But, yeah, Super Metroid is amazing. I only played it recently (~6 years ago), never the original, and I still enjoyed it thoroughly.
non-subscriber link: https://www.google.com/search?q=Drone+Maker+to+Prevent+Some+....
Getting on the front page of Hacker News doesn't really qualify as going viral unless the conversation spreads outwards in some significant way.
Ah, my bad, I was distracted writing. It's Haskell's ($), not the (.).
Mirror/cached version : http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4RhIBeM...
Google Play Downloads Are Growing Faster, but Apple Is Still Winning
Collation is both. It combines both the locale-specific sorting approach, and the encoding.
Im not sure if mozilla should get into such a political field.
How long until this quality can be rendered inside a browser? It would be a game changer for real-estate sites.
This is a good perspective and you're probably right... for what its worth, it was the most significant traffic day EVER... but, i think semantically you're comment here is more accurate.

All tell you though... it "FELT" like a viral event for me!
> I cynically suspect the current concept of full-time work evolved to suit employers,

The reason there is a difference between full-time employment and contract work is regulations put in place to limit the power companies wield over its workers.

Companies like FedEx try to pass of its employees as "contract workers" to circumvent employee protections. I guarantee this is not done to benefit the employees.
What about Momentum: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/momentum/laookkfkn...
I do not understand the obsession for focusing on colonizing only planets. We won't be viably "in" space until we produce mass quantities of raw materials from The Moon and asteroids. Lifting from Earth is always more expensive in energy. Once we build space stations, why would people who grew up in them want to live "dirtside"? Why would people who grew up on Earth want to live on Mars instead of a nice climate controlled habitat? I'm sure some will, but I bet most won't. Beyond mining and tourism, I doubt Mars will be heavily populated.
Highly paid developers, how many hours do you work per day?
Here is my situation:

Currently employed. I work 3 hour work days, 4 days a week. Thats 12 hours a week, or less than part time. My paychecks are 3K. I works out to $62.5/hr, which if you extrapolate 8 hour/5 days a week comes out to 120K/yr.

So I'm paid a salary that is equal to 120K (which is what I think I'm worth), but I only actually take home 40K because I work so few hours.

The reason why I work so little hours is because my boss can't afford to pay me more money. I'm the kind of developer that can get things done pretty quickly, so my boss agreed to lower my hours in lieu of getting paid more.

At first, I liked the idea of working 3 hours a day, but now I'm kinda going broke. I need more money, but I don't want to give up working short work days. I feel like my maximum daily productivity only works for a few hours a day anyways.

Let me get something clear, despite only working three hours a day, I never miss a deadline. Sometimes my boss will give me a task, I'll tell him I'll try to get it done by the end of the week, and I end up getting it done after one three hour session. I do this pretty much every day. I'm able to be so productive because I've been working on this project for 2 years, I know the codebase like the back of my hand. Sometimes I feel like I don't even need 3 hours. Some days I spend the first hour working, and spend the other two browsing the web.

I want to start looking for another job, one that pays higher, but would like to keep my short work schedule. Is this something I'm likely never to find, or should I keep hope alive?
That was some seriously thick jargon in there.
What You Can Do Today to Boost Conversions Tomorrow
On the other side of it, what's the best way for a technical founder to find a sales/business guy? (Has HN discussed that before?)
I've been waiting for Nokia or Bing maps to come out on iOS ever since the new Google Maps app update rendered it almost completely useless compared to the old version, but the only options are Apple Maps or Google Maps. They may be on Android, I don't know, but Bing and HERE are not on iOS.
The answer is to stop using recruiters.

Post your jobs to the typical sites. Manage the resumes yourself (for the position you're hiring).

People say hiring is one of the most important things you do, then they turn it over to the car salesmen of the IT industry and can't figure out why they're getting shitty results.

How this is so hard for companies/people is beyond me.
Personal guess, as I never have either, but I'd hazard a guess that they show up for a lot of recipes, fashion, and interior decoration queries.
Crooks Start Encrypting Websites, Demanding Thousands of Dollars from Businesses
> facebook

> privacy
Show HN: My new game SwipeOut for Android
The 10 Most Important Security Controls Missing in JavaEE
Perhaps then the police should stop tracking everyone's movements with Automated Number Plate Readers (ANPRs) because the second their huge database gets compromised it's going to be exceedingly easy for criminals to figure out when law abiding citizens are regularly not home (and not just during work hours!) so they can safely break into houses and rob them.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Reason is not a policy paradigm. Political decisions aren't usually made because of reason, but power.

After a shocking event political agents try to adjust their communication to fit said event. In this case it worked better for surveillance than for e.g. fast-food deregulation.
Neat!

The sentence that starts "Deeply carved and finished by hand, [...]" might be perceived as misleading. The fact that the carving happens by machine is quite obvious from the behind-the-scenes movie for instance, but I can still imagine someone feeling fooled by it.

Also, CNC machinery is cool and I want some. If only I had a garage. :|
It seems that the "Watch in couch mode" button on the album page is what I was after.
I think I pretty much summed it up, above! HN links to my site, 0 sales. I wasn't disappointed; it's pretty clear that HN is very different from my target market.
Past paper for the post of Labour officer (Inspector)
Its much easier to raid a big company because they have a clear physical prescence and a strong interest to focus on their core buisness. For example, some people in the company may defend their tor node, but managers will look to the interests of the company as a whole, concluding that the loss of dozens of jobs is not worth risking over something that is not a core competancy.
Five Questions to Stop Asking Job-Seekers
While a lot of people were still playing Super Mario Bros on the NES in 1995, the game was released in 1985 (30 years ago) and the console itself (or the Famicom, in Japan) was released in 1983.
I'm not every surprised that pageviews don't directly correlate with sales. People come to Hacker News, and thereby your blog, to read something interesting, not to see an ad for your product let alone buy it. If your blog post is written in a way that shows people the value of your innovative product, it might turn into a sale. But that's not what we're here for.

For the record, I never heard of Desk, but now I have. And if I'd seen your earlier blog post I guess I would have too. Now if I am googling for whatever Desk does (I have no idea) and I find a few products among which Desk, then I am much more likely to go "Oh that was this thing on hacker news" and buy that instead of your competitors. Why? Because I know most products on HN are open source products or small startups with hard working people behind it, and that's something I value and trust rather than any random other search result. Not direct sales perhaps, but publicity is worth something too.
That's not saying that "80% of Waze users are cop killers" though. Just that some people could use it to locate cops in order to attack them.

I don't know if that makes really sense but it's much less outrageous than what the OP implied.
Graph Databases comparison from a user perspective
The IT Workout
It's awesome. I am still busy adjusting my Not So Precise Semi-Manual Pick & Place Robot, and I've delved far too deep into the whole CNC world already.
I hadn't heard of Lux before, but I've been using Twilight on my Android and I like it. Will have to check out Lux to see if it's better.
Yes, but it's not a traditional fission reactor that uses 1% of the fuel and wastes the other 99%. "Fission" is only a dirty word because of the types of fission reactors that have been built.

If you build a fission reactor that burns say, 99% of the fuel and only wastes 1% of it, suddenly it's just as good as fusion, but better because we already know how to do it and we already have tested the design.

Fission or fusion doesn't matter, it's the fuel lifecycle, plant lifecycle and the quantity of waste products per energy output that matter.
And this event is an attempt to make showing up for a 48 hour 'work trial' a norm. This favors the younger, single population, and while you're working on whatever this event is, you are not putting more resumes out. There's the potential for abuse in getting free work out of applicants from other people mimicking this event.

Totally agree. Sounds like each applicant should be getting paid or something. Even so, dropping the rest of your life for two days stinks.

You have to balance the time it takes to tailor your resume to the company versus moving on and finding the next company to submit a resume to. At the extremes, some people don't tailor at all and throw their resume and cover letter at everyone in a suit. Others will do deep-dive research and make 27 drafts of a resume/cover to the point where they already know more about the company than the person who may hire them.

You know, there should be an app for that. Something where you can just put in everything, and then when sending out one resume to a particular company, it would help you customize it for them.

Maybe you could feed in the job ad, and the app uses some fancy NLP to then select which topics you should emphasize on your resume.

It should also keep track of what version you've sent out to whom, so that you can view it when talking to the potential employer on the phone.
Oh good, another one of these discussions.
Counterpoint: If you are extremely nearsighted, contact lenses can give you much better vision than glasses. If I look at the red digits on an alarm clock from across the room while wearing glasses, and I tilt my head, I can see the numbers shift relative to the position of the alarm clock (think about light going through a prism and the colors separating). I had an old pair of glasses where the numbers would shift completely off of the clock and appear to be floating in the air, but my newer ones aren't that bad (I guess the lens material is better, or the lenses are just smaller so you can't look through them at such an extreme angle).
I couldn't give a crap if someone "steals" a small snippet of my code equal in significance to a single joke. Anyone who claims to have learned programming without doing that is lying or delusional.