skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked the "quiz" question someone posted on the linked "Business Insider" article:

You work for a digital age media company who has already achieved superior market dominance in an industry rife with failure and turnover. Your company's stock, though depressed, still sells for multiples above its competition and the option pool is pretty full and limited.

The company's single main product continues to grow its revenues nicely but has failed at virtually all attempts to broaden its product line so it remains reliant on its single huge product which may come under government anti-trust action at some point in the future to say nothing of two leading competitors aiming to unseat it. It's only other breakthrough products are given away free or at nominal charge with no discernable profitable business model.

Is it a good career choice to join or stay with this firm even though they pride themselves on asking stupid quiz questions to gauge your intelligence and make you feel very special if you are offered a position?
I like how upset people get when a site is successful without ads.
Well, it seems like it might have been moderately difficult to get traction, since the SEC had been alerted several times by informed outsiders and they faded.

Also, you could view Cuckoo's Egg (Cliff Stoll) as a cautionary tale, as he had significant difficulty persuading the FBI that there were foreign spies trying to break in to sensitive sites.
Comical?
This is like those stories where the story is artificially separated into different pages for more ad views, except you're forbidden from clicking.

That said, it was a good story so far, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest. I'd like to understand how you can easily go from an idea to pre-order food over the Internet to reddit.
Rupert Murdoch to remove News Corp's content from Google 'in months'
What can you do? I don't know, post your problem on a blog to get Google's attention? Maybe even cross-post into HN?

It has worked before (can't find a link right now).
Yep, I agree with your points about pure intuition leading you down blind alleys unless you have some structure in place.

For the examples, my approach is definitely tailored for people who need to grok the subject after getting a rote understanding. It's not so much to become an expert but to realize what insights would help on the path to becoming an expert.

I figure there are thousands of other sites for the formal definition and practice problems :). I'll check out the article now, looks interesting.
One extra note, not a good idea to use the word "vista" in your product, as it recalls the obvious Windows Vista which everyone pretty much ties to "failure".
Historically in the record business (as in, since the birth of the record business up until about 2000) artists had almost no hope of ever making any money. Playing live gigs or putting out an album usually involved going into massive debt with a record company just to play a few shows or have a small demo release. The artists you ever saw in a record store, on the Billboard TopN, or playing big live shows are the vast, vast minority.

Countless artists just as talented never got that break, which was decided at the whim of record execs. A certain number of artists would be propped up for a period of time, and if some fell out of favor, they would be cut away and replaced from the endless supply of new ones doing anything they can to break in. There was a maximum number of acts that a record company would support at once, since that was the optimum number they had calculated for making profits; there was so much money being spent on things like marketing, advertisement campaigns, award ceremonies, etc and it you could generate more money by selectively picking just a few dozen artists to be "allowed" to be famous and marketing them like crazy.

The music industry is hugely, hugely better for actual artists today. You don't have to sign your house, car and life away to release music to people.
what is the business model on this guy's Tortola travel guide site?

It seems like he isn't selling anything. Is he paying .07$ for adwords clicks hoping those people click on the ads on his site, he must have a crazy ctr to get that to work out?
not sure about all, but most probably yep!
Those tech news sites from Popurls don't allow user voting (just comments), as far as I know. The same for Alltop.
Speculation is for investors. As long as you get your paycheck, who cares? (And "when" they stop giving paychecks, Google will look pretty good on your resume'.)

Why are people so upset about the "quiz questions"? Is it unreasonable for an employer to expect you to think? (Is the "right answer" ever the goal of these questions?)
Yeah, my questions don't really apply to the pair in the story; they knew from the beginning that the software was for fraudulent purposes, and simply lost their nerve after a while, then got arrested anyway on charges of conspiracy. Getting cold feet after the crime has been committed does not earn you leniency.

I suppose I'm thinking of it more along the lines of, say, the person in the next cubicle/department over who knows about such software and wonders what to do about it.

Contacting the FBI and asking the professionals what to do is the most obviously correct path. It's just a matter of curiosity that I wonder what they would say, and whether the advice would work.
Well, if there are only 3 technology sites out there which allow user voting and comments (Reddit, Dzone and Digg) maybe it's time for another one?
I mucked around with aristochat which is based on jsjac, and used some jsjac plain, they mostly worked fine for me although I wouldnt wholly recommend them, remember having to patch jsjac quite a few places.

but I dont have anything live with either, I was just playing around
Google just doesn't do "support" thing in general. It doesn't look like they need to either - what can you do?
Could it be because your Tortola travel guide site is itself dominated by Google Ads? And it links to your other sites which themselves are dominated by Google Ads?

For example the font size for ads on the site appears to be greater than the font size of your content (in chrome).
Microsoft turns to Dolly Parton to pitch IE8
It does seem like something is brewing here. I think it got popular with Tim Ferriss' The Four Hour Work Week where he talks about it...lots of founders came down here. It's easier to bootstrap a web business because:

1. costs are much lower here
2. earning in dollars and spending in pesos means your money goes a long way (geo-arbitrage)

It's by no means huge yet, but there is a band of renegade expat coder/entrepreneurs I've met up with. A sampling:

uplifted.net
easybroker.com
areatresworkplace.com
rubyrescue.com
mixergy.com

and my own site startbreakingfree.com
Here at my day job we have a at least 5 dbs/apps with more than 500, and a few with north of 1000.
Zoom in. They have done a very nice job of decluttering as you zoom in and out.

From zooming in and out of Helsinki, it appears they are averaging the bandwidth of the aggregated samples. I think I'd prefer some sort of indication of "how bad is the bad". Once I've got a megabit I don't care, but if I have a 20% chance of an unusably slow connection, I care.
Robust Models for Optic Flow Coding in Natural Scenes Inspired by Insect Biology
While it is good news, I still wonder when we will see an actual "moon-base" Once established, it will definitely signal a new era of space exploration. And perhaps a new era for humanity at the same time.

Maybe I read too much sci-fi...
Referenced in Wired article http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/fly-eyes/ with title Secret Math of Fly Eyes Could Overhaul Robot Vision
The key problem is one of cost. As it is right now the customer pays the costs of specifically linking up with a supplier for a transaction. The supplier pays for some of the costs of the customer's search via advertising, but generally the supplier only pays for one-to-many interactions, while the customer pays for the one-to-one interactions.

The thing is that the customer can afford a few small one-to-one transactions. It's not hard for them. However, the supplier likely wouldn't be able to afford the costs. Lots of one-to-one transactions don't scale.
Father and 4 sons charged in shocking child sex case in Kansas City
This is but a single voice among a sea of unhappy AdWords customers. I wish I could say this is the first time I've heard of someone suddenly getting hosed by both the AdWords 'system' and their customer support.
The only problem with broadcasting my info to a vendor for some patio furniture is that next week they are going to call me about some nice tiki torches. Then, I'm going to get some snail mail from their buddy the BBQ salesman, and his buddy the meat vendor will come a knockin' too.

Then, one of those guys is going to sell my information to totally unrelated businesses, so I'll start get calls from people trying to sell me auto warranties. I'll get endless catalogs from all their combined efforts, and I'll never be able to read email again, because there will be too much spam in it.

Finally, I will end up subscribed to some porno websites I never heard of, and since I don't want to explain that to my girlfriend, I guess I'll just keep using the canvas folding chairs that I have.
So, in order for Google to get the consent to place cookies on systems, it just simply displays an ad in place of a banner ad saying:

"Click here to opt-out of cookie tracking"

and in smaller letters

"By visiting another page with ads from Google, you consent to allowing Google to place cookies on your system"

Yay. That takes like 2 cents out of Google budget. That takes care of that stupid bill.

PS: The "Technically necessary" can be applied to anything. For Banner Ads to work, you can argue that it is necessary to use cookies.
I don't think that's entirely clear. I've written my fair share of test data generation code that could have been used to fudge as many statements as you might want. One in particular even let the user enter targets (x% growth), so we'd have 'appropriate' data to demonstrate the charts and projection pieces.

So I'd like to think it's possible that they didn't realize they were complicit in fraud until after they saw it applied.

Taking the hush money kinda seals it though.
Hello World from V8
Who cares about her SAT score (which someone can spend months preparing for) if she can not perform under pressure? It's not Google's job to make sure she can withstand the pressure of a stressful job (interview).
Why do we need a law to tell us that browsers are allowed to do what they already do, out of curiosity? Or is this just politicians doing their thing?
Couldn't this law have been obsoleted simply by telling people about the "Allow cookies for these specific sites" settings in browsers?
If you're referring to DOS, IIRC the code was written, but it wasn't owned by the fledgling Microsoft yet. They made the big deal with IBM and then went across town and paid the Pickles&Trout guy something like $5K for it.
Well yeah, but they're still doing the same thing, which means that there are problems that uservoice has already solved that dropbox will have to deal with on its own.

For example, someone said that the search is really bad. Uservoice probably has invested a fair amount of time into searching liberally enough that it doesn't throw out tickets that do match what the user is asking for.
But Google is the concierge you're talking about. It has the description of the product on its page, and it has the description of what the shopper wants (your search terms). The algorithms just aren't as smart as a human being, and you rightly pointed that a (smart) human being is expesive.
Is this enough information/certainty to plan future missions? Can we count on water being there to use for fuel, etc?

Or before that point will we need some kind of scout mission to figure out specifics like "there are X lbs. of water at this site in 3 ice puddles here, here, and here"? If so, how would such a mission work? Manned?
You could argue that. Technically the user consents to cookies simply by allowing cookies to be placed in the browser.
Otherwise known as prolonging the death of an industry that refuses to innovate. How appropriate.
Tell HN: I ripped off Dustin Curtis' snail and got slightly different results
First off, Dustin -- sorry!
Second, I'm still relatively new to RoR and design stuff -- so, yes, I ripped off stuff that I liked from common sites I visit. :)

Anyways, I saw Dustin's post the other day about Snail, his new webapp and thought it was a pretty sweet idea. A couple days later, I saw that he tweeted about it not being too profitable at all. Bummer.

Then, last weekend, my dad happened to complain about having to find "damn stamps" every time he needed to mail a customer a invoice or receipt. (He's in construction, an industry that really doesn't use email for anything...)

Anyways, I threw this together and launched it on Monday and now mail off 20-30 letters a day. It's barely profitable but most of that is because I haven't automated some of the key steps... stuff I'll be doing over the next few days.

Today I threw some ghetto code together for another guy that wanted to be able to email stuff to me that gets automagically mailed off to his clients. I think I just doubled the amount of letters I send every day...

Anyways, I'd love some feedback: http://www.snailpad.com
no. just let google fix the spelling mistakes for you.
You sound like you're going to break down any minute. Seriously, please relax! If a company seriously cares about the exact wording of your answers, you obviously would not want to work there. Management consultancy is a load of stuff any intelligent and hard-working human can do, they just want to test your basic intelligence and reasoning and check to see if you seem like a sufficiently nice human. Don't sweat it that much, your live doesn't depend on what McKinsey thinks of you.
That's just something the mainstream media does. They distall the press releases into simple headlines. Thus some evidence for water on the moon = a headline of water on the moon.

But this time it's for real...
First Google Go Project: A Twitter Client
I have actually been contacted twice since then by Google for subsequent openings (once in the past couple of weeks!). I am currently working on my startup, but I will certainly keep this option open in the future.
Sometimes it's all about finding a market.
You always run the risk of hiring someone bad. Interviewing, particularly rigorous interviewing, is a game that doesn't map very well onto work itself.

That's why the true test of a hiring process is the firing process.

If you can get rid of people that can't hack it, rather than letting them gather as detritus in your system, you'll be far better off than if you simply pretend that you can actually avoid mistakes.
Give them a call. You can find the adwords support phone number on the web. I've called before and actually got really good support from them.

email doesn't get you anywhere though.
Exactly. This was the main point. It's just so off. If you don't care enough about a company to understand the absolutely most basic reasoning behind their cashcow product, why should the company be interested in hiring you?
I said it before, but it's worth repeating. The Achilles' heel of Google is their customer care (or lack thereof).
Finally it has an easy-to-find explanation of Perl 5 vs Perl 6 that newcomers can understand:

http://www.perl.org/dev.html
Just curious, what exactly do you consider the necessary rigor in this case?
Warren Buffet received a MS in Economics from Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, which is where this event was held.
I'd imagine that CNBC chose the location and not Gates or Buffett. It seems like the most obvious place for them to hold an event such as this (excluding perhaps the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting).

Edit: Apparently that came off as sarcastic, it wasn't supposed to be.
Agreed. I was rejected from Google after an on-site interview, but they were quite polite and professional about it.
I've had similar things happen to me (not quite this egregious, but still pretty bad). I haven't been shipping updates for some of my existing apps because Apple won't let me keep existing functionality.

Considering doing Android ports, but there's not (yet) enough money in it, and the software stack is quite a bit crappier IMHO.
+1 on Drupal. It also implements sequences, etc.
Serializing articles and novels is a common practice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature) It works the same as TV shows: you can release an installment before the next one is even written.
Ask HN: How many of you in Houston?
Austin gets all the tech glory in Texas, but there's a lot of great tech and many awesome startups in Houston (not all information related).

I'm curious about how many people here are in Houston?
There are some categories of ads that pay extremely high rates. Real estate and rental properties in high demand areas are among those categories.

Basically, the guy builds spam sites devoted to categories that he has found to provide high ad rates. He brings in as much qualified traffic as he can via lower price keywords and SEO, and then bombards them with those high rate ads. He is attempting to arbitrage the lack of knowledge the advertisers have of what keywords people are searching for, and their ability to garner traffic.

It's not a particularly high paying business on the scale of one site...but he builds many such sites, and then focus on the ones that pay. If you read up on SEO forums and such, this is incredibly common. It's what people with very low skills, a lot of free time, and a strong desire to "beat the system", do when they want to have an "Internet business". They provide no, or negative value, and make a few bucks a day per site.

If Google didn't have their very own version of this business (Google Syndication is a network of similar spam sites operated by Google), he'd probably get away with it. But, I guess Google doesn't want to share the profits.
The author seems not to understand that robots.txt is granular, and that Google even honors the X-Robots 'header' version.

ACAP is pointless, or at least not the big deal improvement these guys want it to be.
can anyone point me to something more about what they've done with the windowing system? I've heard they're not using X, is this official?
agreed. i know google is going around trying to make adsense spam blogs' lives more miserable.

this site isn't quite a spam blog, i don't think, but its borderline.
It could be, but given the relative opacity of AdWords, it's hard to know for sure. If Google just said what the problem was clearly and give him a chance to fix it, he just might.
He does have links to reservation sites (e.g.: http://travel.ian.com). The adsense seems to be just for additional revenue.
Ask HN: What are some use cases for my web service?
Entrepreneurs Don't Need Degrees like lawyers and ...
Wow. That was cool. Thanks for walking through the logic/reasoning.
Exact same thing happened to me. I get an IM "lets go to the movies where its dark and damp and you can be in your cave and shit, bring a laptop"
For the Neo4j graph database, check out:

* the 10 minute code-level getting started guide: http://wiki.neo4j.org/content/Getting_Started_Guide

* a full-blown reference example, including diagrams, graph layout screen shots, code walk through etc: http://wiki.neo4j.org/content/IMDB_Example

* the domain modeling gallery, which shows how to model a bunch of domains in a graph db: http://wiki.neo4j.org/content/Domain_Modeling_Gallery

* popular blog post about how to model a social network in Neo4j: http://blog.neo4j.org/2009/09/social-networks-in-database-us...

* how to work Neo4j in python, ruby, clojure, scala & grails: http://wiki.neo4j.org/content/Main_Page#Language_bindings

If you have more questions, feel free go all mailing list on us: https://lists.neo4j.org.

Hope that helps!
If I may interject, I think in most cases it's much, much better to use a network of connections rather than random walk-ins. You're much more likely to get someone that not only performs well, but also fits in well with your company's personalities.

If you have to interview strangers, I think it's good to inquire into their technical background until you have ample confidence in their technical abilities, and take the rest of the time to discuss career and company goals, personalities, hobbies, etc., in a lax and non-rushed manner. I'd invite the candidate back for a follow-up interview and talk more and then invite him to work out of your office for a few days (with pay, of course).

I think it's much better to have a relaxed and friendly decorum and perform a series of informal "interviews" because you'll learn a lot more about the candidate if he feels confident and open than if he's rushed to answer a bunch of silly logic puzzles and give diatribes on his five-year life plan.
Take a look at Compiere ERP (http://www.compiere.com), they have an open source community edition. It has been many years (6+?) since I last looked at it, but it easily had over 500 tables.

In fact a quick search shows 531 Tables and 108 Views: http://www.knowledgesuccess.com/local/doc/schemaCompiere253b
The issue though is what are you going to do with a moon base? The moon does not hold any significant resources which are useful in the further exploration of the solar system. (Now, I don't know how much water there is on the moon, but my guess is that it isn't enough of it to justify building a moon base just for the water.)

Astroids, comets or Mars, that should be where the action is. :)
Yeah, it looks like an arbitrage play, which I know Google is constantly cracking down on (buying clicks in adwords and sending them to adsense farms).

Quality score is based on lots of things. http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?answer=10...

I'd guess you are falling down on:

"# The quality of your landing page
# Other relevance factors"
Google cache link, as it's down for me right now:

http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:http://dilbert.com/blog...
IE6 Frame to battle Chrome Frame?
Surprise, surprise... Yet another post against Apple on TechCrunch.
From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime,
... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably
off-topic

Flagged
Nimble Robot tightrope walks High-Voltage power lines
Fort Hood Crisis: mental health and how to help | My Complaint
No, that's terrible — do you have any idea how ridiculously terrible these Taiwanese companies are at driver development?
I'm kind of embarrassed by the hackjob of an image attached to that article. Isn't TechCrunch supposed to be this kickass tech news outlet? That graphic is all the worst parts of "political cartoons," but without even a compelling illustration to go with it.
Bing Maps. A Google Maps Alternative, or Better?
They're paid promotional spots, which is also known as "advertising". The definition of "ad" does not require either interruption, nor is it escaped by meeting some "stricter guidelines".

They used to just be brief "brought to you by" messages, perhaps with a corporate logo for a few seconds. Now they often include a lengthy pitch about the sponsor, with slogans, video, and corporate jingles. When GE sponsors a PBS program, it's just as much advertising as when they sponsored "GE Theater" on CBS, with host Ronald Reagan, in the 1950s.

The Chipotle ads that ran on PBS four years ago were just the beginning:

http://www.commercialalert.org/blog/archives/2005/03/pbs_goe...

And then there's the sometimes multi-hour self-help infomercials merged with pledge drives:

http://www.lvrj.com/neon/46898042.html

I have no objections to the practice of running ads. I just object to spinning them as "really, sponsored credits".
I actually think it looks really good! I'm assuming that you're not new to web-development, just to RoR, because if this was a first (or even second, or third) app I would decry it as impossible :-p

Good work!