skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the Googler: “You lost me at the ‘only clicking on ¼ of the ads’ comment. Let’s move on.”

Yes, indeed. Someone who has a slightest clue about the whole stuff just can't say 1/4 of users will click an ad in Gmail. I am sorry for her, but that is just so off...
I don't know why people are upset. I don't, however, think there's a category of "thinking" to which these questions provide insight. I use a completely different toolset when answering quiz questions than when I'm answering "real life" questions. "Railroad crossing watch out for cars, can you spell that without any R's" is a typical 'quiz' question that asks you to abandon ways we know people interact. Asking someone, "How many pounds of tonails are cut every year?" is asinine.
Thanks for the details.

I was looking the question history, and even I don't understand what I didn't understand.
How large is the tech scene down there? I've been wanting to move but only to a hacker friendly city (Sadly NYC is mediocre). Anyone know of some local websites for developers?
This is one step away from linking to a tweet. Great quote, but the original article is more fitting for HN.
Darn, BroadcastShopping.com is already taken ;-)
"Coffee was originally eaten".
When I worked in the Alaskan fish canneries during summer break from college, one of the things we used to do to help stay awake and alert during peak times was eat chocolate covered coffee beans.
Calculus can be rigorously done with limits, continuous functions, little-o notation or infinitesmals. The key word is "or", use one approach and don't jump around. (After you understand multiple you can see how they connect and then jump around.)

Of those approaches infinitesmals look the simplest but require the most complex mathematical machinery to really do right. Yes, you can construct a non-standard model of the real number system with a transfer principle that lets you transfer between proofs done in the one to the other which lets you formulate calculus using infinitesmals. But using a construction using the axiom of choice to prove that the derivative of x^2 is 2x is kind of like using a sledgehammer to push a tack into a cork board.
But if the only way they could contact you was through the specific "want ad" that you posted, wouldn't that help some? You're not asking them to come to you, you're asking them to reply to that ad. They shouldn't need to know anything else about you except what you posted in the ad. This assumes that the Broadcast Shopping company that is acting as the mediator between you and the sellers isn't going to sell your contact information, but that should be made very clear, "Hey, the only way a seller can contact you is through this one ad, and you can turn the ad off as soon as you get the offer you're looking for".
Nothing is official. Applying Occam's razor, I predict that Chrome OS will use Xorg with a custom window manager (Moblin-style).
Yes, I would like to rent iPhones in my local market, pre-loaded with certain applications.

Problem is, I may not be able to do this economically and may have to go with Android instead. I suspect it will be far easier to buy hundreds of HTC Heros directly from HTC than to buy iPhones from Apple or distributors.
So you institute a ranking algorithm that also watches for spam to insure that all of a particular vendor's replies aren't either the same or just filling in a template with keywords from a request and otherwise the same. That way, if a vendor makes too many unpersonalized offers, they could get warned, lose karma, whatever. Whereas if a vendor really targets someone's needs well, even if they don't have the price or exact item that the buyer wants, that buyer might still shoot them some good karma for trying.

shrug
We don't need to get into message-board-geek mode here. All I'm saying is, there is a significant difference between the "ads" PBS runs and the "ads" NBC runs.
Facebook Developer Garage - Berkeley on 11/19
Change:

Just address your envelope, write your letter, verify
its appearance, then pay using your Paypal account.

Add the words "electronically", or "via this website" or something like that.

You have a bunch of '2' showing up all over the place.

Mention that you don't retain the contents of the letter once printed (if you don't, and I hope you don't).

Include a photo of a sample letter so people can see if the paper really looks greenish (joke). But really, people want to see if the printout will look professional. And a photo of the envelope too - with stamp.

Mention where you are physically located, so people have an idea of how long delivery will take.

What happens if the letter is so long it takes many sheets of paper (i.e. more stamps) - is there an additional charge? Can I download a book, paste it in and you'll print and mail it to me? Just mention "up to 5 sheets of paper" or something like that, in the pricing page, but don't bother programming it, handle it manually.
T-Mobile corporate owned store. Salesperson questioned whether it would work, since I didn't have a Sidekick unique identifier on my phone. Works fine. Unfortunately, port 80 and a few others were blocked back in July, when T-Mobile stopped actively letting unlocked iPhone users buy the Sidekick plan.

If you can't switch to the Sidekick plan through t-mobile.com (under Manage->Plans), I would suggest going to a corporate-owned store and asking, or calling up Customer Care. There are a number of discussion threads on this subject if you Google around, especially involving iPhones. The HowardForums wiki also has some good information, although sometimes out-of-date, incomplete, and ungrammatical.

Be warned, though, I was apparently paying $1/day regardless of whether I used any data or not. All the same, this is the only GSM/unlocked prepaid data plan in America that I'm aware of, and it's still the cheapest. Just have to figure out how to circumvent the blocks.
That's rather un-economical at $1,000 per device, even accounting for the USD/EUR exchange rate. The price, shipping and customs fees are gonna kill me.
No. Every device that you might find in a netbook either already has a driver or will never have a working driver (FSVO never).
Yes, it is http://gapingvoid.com/books/ by Hugh MacLeod. He draws cartoons at the back of business cards.

I am sorry I didn't quote the name of the author at the first place. I couldn't recall where I had read it. I searched around for a while and couldn't find it so I just posted without the author's name but in quotes to show it was from someone other than me.

Thank you for finding the book title, it helped me find the the site where I originally read this.
That might be more obvious to the interviewee if the interview were done in a room with a whiteboard. They could ask to use the whiteboard to sort things out. Over the phone it's possible for people to get the impression that they are supposed to spew and answer right away. It's just a matter of mindset though.
There are a lot of ways to do this type of problem.

Say, 375,000 men and 25% of them men get a hair cut every 2 weeks taking 30 min, most men get far fewer haircuts but they bring the average down to about once a month.

Av workweek = 40 hours * 4 weeks = 160 men per barber sounds low call it 200.

375,000 / 200 is less than 2,000.
This was also posted at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=940019
What do you mean by the third point?

3. Fiction: XML adds values. Fact: aascii tab delimited in consistent formats add value, while XML SUBTRACTS value.
That blog post pretty much describes what Needish wants to be: www.needish.com
I agree. Whenever I read one of these articles, I feel like I should post my own story of how I interviewed at Google and it was completely reasonable, if expectedly rigorous. I really only had two complaints: 1) they sent me to lunch with a guy who works on AdSense, and at the time I was working at Yahoo on their Content Match system, so we had a pretty awkward time trying to figure out what we could talk about without disclosing anything confidential, and 2) it took a really long time after my interviews for them to actually produce an offer (maybe 4 weeks or so), although their recruiter did give me regular updates of what was going on in the process.

FWIW, they did ask me for a lot of awfully detailed information about my current and past compensation packages and what other companies I was interviewing with. I mostly declined to provide that information, and they didn't push it.
very nice: simple but has enough features to be valuable to people.
The Century of the Self is an amazing documentary. Everyone in this country, and the western world should see it. That and the Power of Nightmares also by Adam Curtis.
Minute mysteries
I think the point was that there are too many options:

Now you shop on the Internet, and you can buy from anywhere on the planet.

The options for any particular purchase approach infinity, or so it seems.

So while you may get tons of ads offering to sell you something, how much effort is spent determining which is the best match for what you want. It would be better to get 5 results that are really close to what you're looking for than 500 that are sort of what you want.
Non critical thinking people are not worse as they can have other strong skills like immagination or creativity or ability to understand user feeling or simply a lot of taste. I think that with this kind of interview Google is creating a monoculture inside the company. The effects may be the fact Google has some problem pushing web services where technological strenght can not do a real difference.
Every report I've read about any employee in Madoff's company suggests that all the employees were people with really weak skill sets. They were grateful to have the jobs they had, and unwilling to quit or to go to the feds because they knew they couldn't get equal or better money anywhere else. The reported backgrounds of most Madoff employees look very sketchy for the amount of responsibility those people supposedly had in the company. And then, initially, everyone was telling investigators that they knew nothing about what was going on, which was plainly inconsistent with the titles some of those employees had in the company structure.
I'm puzzled why the author released one-time "snapshot" of the current development state instead of placing the code in a world-readable repository (errr...github?)
I haven't been shipping updates for some of my existing apps because Apple won't let me keep existing functionality.

This happened to a product I was working with, as well (albeit with trivial functionality we had no trouble taking out). The logic is extremely silly, indeed.
Exactly.

I'm the "programmer in Michigan" (actually Minnesota) she mentioned in the article. I live in a 3,000+ sq ft house. We moved from an 1,800 sq ft house that we only used half of, so we obviously didn't need all that space. So why is my house so frickin' large? We needed at least 10 acres of land with less than a 50-minute commute to work and wasn't 100 years old (Minnesota's climate is very harsh on houses). Every place on the market that met the basic requirements we set was close to, or more than 3,000 sq. ft. Many were much larger. Around here builders simply don't build small houses on large lots and I suspect they won't anywhere else in the US for much the same reasons you give.

Personally if I could sell my house tomorrow and buy a 1,200 sq. ft. home on 20-30 acres I'd be thrilled to death.
I mean that for all practicing data analysts that I know, XML is a pain in the ass (parsers, xpaths, etc, all to get it into a csv that you can import), while nice ascii text is easy to work with.

If you want metadata, a well written narrative paragraph along with a code book is INFINITELY better than embedding the metadata in the data.

Furthermore, a lot of supposed metadata in XML is just dross like "<column>blah</column>".

Finally, all the crap in XML way ups the signal/ noise ratio; if you do need something that maps to a complex data structure use JSON or something rational. Such needs are not very common in data analysis, in contrast to web applications; data analysts use multiple tables and are usually pretty close to relational databases and SQL (even if they don't call it that).
I can imagine some circumstances where the hierarchical structure of XML would be useful, but in just about every data processing job I've undertaken that involved XML my first step was to get rid of XML and convert it to something like .csv or ascii tab delimited.
Shorter Scott Adams:

Business idea: beat Google at its own game.

It's just not going to happen. My approach would be to start with the expensive ad-hoc shopping services that already work for rich people and figure out how to standardize, commoditize and mass market them.

Any idea that has an element of "replace humans with ai" to it is ultimately in direct competition with Google. Which means both that your service will not be more useful than Google and that they will crush you whenever they want to.

The path to value, for everyone other than Google and Amazon, is to not replace humans but instead make them more powerful.
I don't understand what you're getting at with this list.

1. Yes, datasets need to be cleaned. But you need to have the dataset before you can clean it, and different people will want to clean it in different ways. Get it up there first, and keep the political debates confined to the gathering methods. Griping about raw datasets only gives them an excuse to keep delaying putting anything out (in other words, this critique is actively harming the movement, please stop making it).

2. I don't understand what you mean by this. If a link points to a high-quality dataset that's otherwise hard to find, then it's very valuable.

3. Not all data is expressible in tab-delimited ascii tables. I'd like my SEC filings in well-structured XML, for instance.

4. This is a strawman. Nobody serious has ever said a good data set is easy to use and understand.

5. Ironically, this is the one point you make I agree with, and then you claim it doesn't apply to data.gov. I think this is actually the worst thing about data.gov right now, that they think they're giving us anything when they post their little summaries. Give us the raw data, please.

6. Isn't this just restating a combination of #1 and #3? Yes, big clean monolithic data sets are nice, but the priority is getting access to the data in the first place.

7. You're restating #4, which was a strawman.
I know it's anecdotal, but I've never clicked on an ad in gmail. (to be fair she said that all users will click on 1/4 of the ads presented to them, not '1/4 of users will click on an ad')
Here is a variation on an application that involves mailing physical letters. It reconciles two salient facts:

1) people love to complain and be activists, but are also lazy and would rather click a button on the web than lick an envelope

2) most businesses respond better to a printed complaint than a digital one.

Anyone can start a petition. e.g. "You, the cafe at the corner of Fifth and Main, charge too much for their coffee and we would probably come their more if it cost $.25 less." You provide the address of the recipient: Expensive Coffeeshop, Fifth and Main, Smallville, NY

The application is integrated to facebook, so each time someone signs the petition it is posted to their wall for people to see. Once a critical mass of signatures has been reached, and the numbers of signees starts to level off, the petition is printed and automatically mailed.

(I have copied this idea onto idea-ne.ws: http://idea-ne.ws/item?id=155)
OK, we disagree. Except that #4 IS sort of redundant, though I want to make the point that data is almost impossible for a layperson, and still really hard for a practiced analyst.
That's debatable. Many candidates would rather just end a failed interview early and do something they'd like with their time.
If you need hierarchies, use JSON, IMHO, or keys that reference between tables (the census PUMS data does this with persons nested within households, using two tables).
How To Monetize Scientific Controversy
Where do your customers come from?
She spent 5 minutes on it, 5 Minutes...
Perhaps you should allow people to upload a company logo? If your dad is mailing customers for his business, how much better would it be if you did the letterhead for him?
Please watch the video and say something insightful, don't just flame something about business schools.
I do like Haystack better, but not because of minimal design, and I'm not sure what "focus on the company" means.

I like Haystack better (this is very first-impression for them too because I hadn't heard of Haystack before) because it gives you right up front in a bold way exactly and only what you care about. To put myself in the users shoes, I want to hire a designer. What do I care about? Who's out there, what can they do, and how much will it cost me. Haystack answers this is 3 seconds. It also keeps the contact information simple and web-based. If I need a phone number or address, I can always email and ask.

Haystack has some problems of its own, but I think as far as the profile pages go, Haystack is much better.

Perhaps you could have different profile templates which are catered to various types of businesses if you don't want to go completely freeform (and it's probably a good idea not to because then it will turn into Myspace and be scarily bad). Or perhaps you could have widgets that users could add like a portfolio or like a contact info or testimonial box (instead of putting these on all profiles). Or, since templates and widgets have been done to death, perhaps you could come up with something different. Who knows. I just know that what you have right now is very phone-book-ish and not particularly compelling to the user looking to hire someone for some job.
Was the Twitter Retweet Feature Designed to Bring Value to Search Partners?
I'm from venezuela
Well, there's nothing in this article that really requires rigor, because there aren't really any problems. It's talking about the concepts of limiting processes and infintesimals, but not how to use them.

In the one example given, sin(x)/x, the difficult bit is glossed over when it talks about sin(x) being more-or-less equal to x when x is "close to zero." The rigor there is missing entirely, because that's not the point.
I don't want a toaster - I want a way to prepare my bread.

His idea is good, and will work for the simplest of problems, but I imagine it doesn't work very well when the consumer doesn't know what he wants. A solution to this problem would be much better.
Agreed, they are different... but more similar than they used to be.

And, if PBS can work out a happy medium -- a constrained kind of ad that's compatible with its purpose -- so could Wikipedia.
Buffet's mentor Benjamin Graham also taught at at Columbia. Buffet always speaks of Graham as one of the most influential people in his life.

In fact, I watched a few minutes of the town hall last night, and he mentioned Graham at least 4 or 5 times.
This is a huge mistake on Microsoft's part.

The newspaper industry in the US is in an accelerating, long-term decline. Circulation has been steeply dropping since about 1993. And ad revenue, a newspaper's primary source of revenue, has been dropping like a rock. It's already half of what it was only 5 years ago. Even if the current trends improve a bit, the newspaper industry will be somewhere around 10% to 3% its current size a decade from now. Though given the accelerating decline in ad revenue it's possible that this process could proceed much more rapidly.

Getting an exclusive right to content from a dying industry is the definition of a bad business move.
How could they feasibly provide this? They would need to provide for essentially everyone that has a computer, and anything they did provide would be filled with people asking things like "my mouse is broken, how do I fix it?"
I think the essential point is this,

"There’s a bigger story here, however. It’s one that’s been told before, but until things change, it needs to keep being told. Simply put, the App Store is broken."
What? TC is supposed to be this kickass tech news outlet? Says who?
Thanks for that tip, I had wondered how best to do it.
This will be the last time.
hookers can use it on craigslist to avoid giving out their email address to potential law enforcement, i suppose
I've watched most of the show now, and I don't recommend it. Lots of feel-good fluff, basic regurgitation of Buffet's philosophy, and back story on their careers that you can find in the introduction to their wikipedia bio articles.
subpoena magnet?
An Interesting Network Security Book on Intrusion Detection Systems
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 111 - Captain Kirk
I actually meant it when I said I didn't understand what you were getting at. I initially read it as you saying that there shouldn't be a data.gov at all (because raw data's useless, curated data's expensive and difficult, and simplified data summaries are likely to be misinterpreted by lay people), but that can't be right, so I'm really curious what you were actually trying to say. What would an ideal data.gov look like, to you?
It always seems very theoretical and anomalous and far away until it invades your project and affects you.

For every one of these blog posts I see, I wonder how many developers are out there who just gave up in silence.
One thing you don't need to be an entrepreneur is a college degree
Ask HN: Who wants to do this experiment with me ?
I've just started a little experiment on a site that I run, I'm allowing the users - any users - to switch off the ads if they want that.

That way the irritation goes to a minimum for those users that do not want ads, and for others they are now in some way 'opting in'.

I'm not trying to 'set a new standard' here just curious about how my experiment will play out.

This site has about 3M pageviews per month and scores terribly in the ECPM, about 12 cents.

What I'm mostly curious about is whether the impressions will go down and the ECPM up or if the impressions will go down and the ECPM will stay the same.

The first one I would call a success, the second a failure.

I'll let this run for a month to see what the effect is.

Is there anybody that wants to do the same thing ?
Thanks for the comment. Have posted the original article.
This isn't beating Google at its own game (which wouldn't be that hard, and lucrative since you could sell to either Bing or Google) - this is destroying ads, sucking the air out of Google.

With such a system, nobody is going to want to look at ads because people will come to you when they need to buy stuff and will go elsewhere they want to play a game or watch a movie.

Google can't crush you on this, if customers prefer this model (and they will) - they can only attempt to buy you out which isn't so bad.
Spicy - check out Wasabi from NetVibes | nextATOM
For now, they're coming from word of mouth within my dad's circle of friends.

Probably not enough word of mouth for this thing to scale dramatically (yet) but enough to help me cover my costs and then have some serious beer money on top.
I respect Adams' opinion generally, but I don't understand why he thinks the buyer would get the sorts of responses the buyer wants. Why wouldn't the buyer just get spam (or, at best, directed advertising of the sort that Google already has)?

If advertisers were able to respond well to the important keywords in his description "easy to clean", "Mediterranean", "amber", "budget", they'd already be doing so with Google ads.
It will only be dumb if they try and stay with the limitations of html and current browsers.

If they take advantage of features unique to the iphone I think there is a chance it would be more successful.

What if they gave you a better "offline" search engine than they offer the user thru the browser?

Maybe submitting via your paid app you get a communication channel with "new internet tv newsreaders".

Maybe iphone submitted content gets given priority?

Yes, potentially this development can be looked as a shot in the foot, but I think creativity could make such concepts fantastic and profitable.