skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My earliest introduction to the "two man policy" was the haunting opening scene of 'WarGames'. "Turn your key, sir."
I also did some experiments and wrote about this back in april, for anyone interested:

http://320x200.org/post.py/2009/gravatar.txt
Why bother with heaters? A plastic cap in front of the tubular 'hood' should work just as well and is a one-off cost. In the photo you can see the problem is the snow piling up inside the tubular shade. Cap the tube and gravity will do the rest.
Thanks for the reply: your something of a statistical anomaly though (no offence intended). This, then, would have "protected" you, however the vast majority of kids looking at porn would be unaffected.
Interested! I'm in Dordrecht.
From your link: "responseXML was introduced in Windows Internet Explorer 7" - in October 2006. XHR was first shipped with Internet Explorer 5 - in March 1999!

JavaScript's syntax is less like Java's than any other popular language that idiomatically uses curly-braces to delimit blocks.

Hamster starts with Ham, but they are as unrelated as two things can be that exist in the same broad category (flesh).
Every once in a while, a comment comes on HN which just reaffirms my faith in the community. Thanks for taking the time to write this out.
This is really great. Good work.
Why, thank you. To be honest I did not expect to reaffirm anyone's faith in anything except irony -- that is, the irony of people thinking that the "Russian mafia" thing is a joke. :-)
Your argument is flawed. Why do we need these for direct mail any more than we need them for:

Display Advertising
PPC Advertising
TV Advertising
Radio Advertising
Trade Shows
In-Mall Kiosks
etc.

Also, how would you do the study anyway? Some people do this effectively and others do not. Certain types of advertising are better for reaching some customers and others are not. It seems you are assuming that in the general case direct mail does not work at all and people are using it just because they haven't measured their marketing ROI for that channel. With minimal research you could see that this is false.
It also allows you to match an e-mail address to a particular account. So, let's say a dating site uses gravatars, now anyone who can see those can match my dating profile to my stackoverflow account (and any other site using gravatars).

I know this ofcourse, and will use a different e-mail address if I need to keep these identities seperate, but many people do not realize any gravatar enabled user profile can be linked to any other gravatar enabled user profile with only a tiny bit of effort in harvesting.
Nothing will stop people from simply emailing that address without checking/guessing if it exists first. The whole subject of this post is an exercise in futility.
Jekyll, the blog engine of kings
I'm interested but not definitely, located in Enschede but can travel in the weekends.
I don't know much about the insides of Russian economy, but I'm absolutely sure that it's possible to become a successful entrepreneur in your country. Of course, probably one won't become an owner of Nornikel or GazProm, but what can stop him creating a successful startup in Russia, especially when you have favourable tax laws? The only thing that comes to my mind, is lack of VC infrastructure. Well, perhaps, I am too much in love with Russia and don't see some obvious things. Cheers.
I use Gmail to aggregate all my mailboxes. Gmail's spam folder keeps things for 30 days before deleting them. I've currently got 2965 spam emails in the spam folder - which is a little on the low side of my average. So, I get about 3000 spam emails in 30 days, or about 100 per day.
Gmail's spam filtering is almost 100% effective, for me. I see maybe one, occasionally two, spam emails in my inbox per month, and have had maybe 3 false positives over the last couple of years. I very occasionally glance at the contents of the first page of the spam folder, just to be on the safe side, but like I said, I almost never find anything mis-filtered.
For me this is good enough - I'm effectively shielded from all spam and don't really notice it as an issue.
Or make the tubes (more) open at the bottom and tilt the lights a little bit.
No, it's more like if the SAT was partially named for the type of soil underlying the foundation of the building occupied by the school where the tests were first given, and then had its hype cycle fueled by shittily-paraphrased press releases from garden supply distributors.

It's Pataphor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Pataphysics#Pataphor
Have you seen their revenue growth? I think you have some really interesting points, but at the end of the day, Marc Andeessen looked at the deal and presumably said, "This is an opportunity" (at that valuation). That holds a lot of water with me and he certainly doesn't have anything to prove.

If you truly think there is nothing to learn from Zynga other than "get on the radar of Turkmenbashi", I really think you should look again.
I suppose I should qualify my ascription of "native Russian" unto myself by saying I am in the US nowadays and for some time.

It is quite possible to become a successful entrepreneur in Russia, to be sure, although neither tax laws nor bureaucratic requirements make it as fluid and simple as in America, and the most efficient path taken de facto is to avoid following them to some measure.

My point was more that when you see really exciting figures like hundreds of millions to billions of dollars from Russians, there is something else at work than the fledgling capital markets for the hoi polloi.
That's a great deal (makes sense for an ISP)! But if you're looking for software entrepreneurs who are coming free, it might mean people who sold 2 or 3 years ago, depending on the business.
No, in the same way that people will not start smoking if they have to use mandatory safety goggles. Of course this kind of method depends on two things:

1) how critical the activity is to people's lives (cycling: low, driving: high)

2) how funny you look with the safety item on (...)
You are missing my point - if anything, I am almost a pure-play scientific hypothesis/experiment/observations/results fanatic. I cringe every time I hear scientific naysayer attack the institution of science.

But, with that said, I am much more skeptical about environmental science than I would be about topics that are somewhat less politicized, such as Eötvös torsion balance experiments - and even _they_ turned out to have suspect results in hindsight.

And it wasn't the email regarding the "hiding" of data I was referring to - it was the several _hundred_ where the various scientists discussed how to discredit or otherwise shut down those who stood in opposition to the popular environmental theories.

I'm all for setting up the experiment and letting the results speak for themselves.
>>"I suppose I should qualify my ascription of "native Russian" unto myself by saying I am in the US nowadays and for some time."
Sorry, my mistake.
Interested. I'm in Amsterdam.
Faster than "the single-threaded C version." I found this a bit shocking - on a 32-core machine, this is an achievement? Obviously it's not Clojure's fault as Scala and Java are in the same range, but it was a surprise.
I am not at epistemic liberty to speculate as to the reasons for the other partners' involvement in the round.

However, my understanding is that this is the land of Paul Graham, who famously and correctly pointed out here [http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfunding.html] that VCs "are like high school girls: they're acutely aware of their position in the VC pecking order, and their interest in a company is a function of the interest other VCs show in it."

The intense, excruciating fear of not being "in" on some lucrative action involving other investors readily willing to put up $100m+ is a formidable motivating force for putting your chips in the game.

By the way, I am not arguing that Zynga did nothing right or is a wholly inappropriate direction for a VC round of some description. This is the Web Economy, of course; more preposterous things have happened than stupendous investments in something as legitimately "virus-like" as Mafia Wars or FarmVille. But it is $180m we are talking about here...
Or more likely, mine, as saying I'm a "native Russian" may give the impression that I wrote this comment in Russia.
I would love to meet some Dutch HN-ers! I'm also in Amsterdam.
Interested. I'm in Ghent, Belgium. I can travel in the weekends.
I'm in Rotterdam, possibly interested.
In! I'm in Amsterdam.
That comment could have been from me!
Ditto.
Faster than single-threaded ...

BTW why is there still no clojure entry in the language shootout game.
"get on the radar of Turkmenbashi and see what falls on your lap next time he goes to exercise his golden systems of elimination in his golden commode."

(Bias disclaimer - speaking as a native Turkmen.)

Wait, wait.. Do you have any specific example of Turkmenistan investing huge amount of money in foreign business just for bragging rights? I'd like to hear one.

In Turkmenistan, money coming from gas export is totally under control of the government and it is being spent wisely, inside the country as much as possible. And there's no single person who can waste millions of gas money on personal entertainment.
No, I was not literally insinuating a Turkmen connection. It's not even the same country. :-)

The purpose for the mention of Niyazov was a rhetorical and a metaphorical one.
Thoreau's simple life at Walden
Interested, Amsterdam!
Interested, Amsterdam :-)
Can you post some sources? My cursory research has shown the opposite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bear#Population_and_distr...

http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/essay_schliebe.html

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/special/polar_bears/

http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/ask-the-experts/popul...

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/07/polar-bear-decl/
Exactly. I "outsourced" my spam management to GMail and I don't think I did ever try to obfuscate my email, they are all over the net :)
My position is that one has to deal with spam by means invisible to end users—and that rules out CAPTCHA and email obfuscating.
It's not really an 32-core machine. It's an 8 core UltraSPARC T1, each core supporting 4 hardware threads. Also this is the sort of problem that C absolutely kills at. C can just mmap the file and run straight across raw the bytes and take advantage of all kinds of cache tricks. For well-written C code the problem is basically IO bound and I was surprised I could catch up to it at all with the JVM.
Jekyll is absolutely brilliant. There are a lot of static blog generation tools out there but this seems to work best for me. I dont use the github integration much (automatic publishing by pushing to github) but do store my site on a github repo.

The only downside as with any static site solution is comments. I currently use Disqus - I have no complaints with them except that I like to own my comments rather than hosting them with a 3rd party.
Is this guy overly paranoid, or am I overly lax, that I don't care?

My email address is all over the internet. So what.
nice, innit?
another downside is that you have to regenerate your whole site manually every time you make a small design change.
Gruodžio 15: Google Chrome Kalėdoms
mark has all kinds of weird stock with extra voting rights, so this is purely an economic purchase. not sure how much though
agreed. would love to know how all the negative PR affected valuation the fundraising process
A somewhat similar project, Aerial[1], does comments through git. Although I've yet to try it out, it seems like a nice solution.

1. http://github.com/mattsears/aerial
The prose is just orgasmic, and worthy of a good novel :-)
I'm sorry, but these strike me as the epitome of chartjunk (see Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information for context). Whatever actual data is in there is hidden in a sea of bogus pseudo-data.

On the other hand, if somebody were looking for people to create misleading and intellectually dishonest infographics then these would clearly be good resumes to look out for.
ఆ లింక్ ఇచ్చినందులకు ధన్యవాదములు
Interested, Eindhoven. Unfortunately, my Dutch is not good, i hope there will be some talks in English.
I don't comment here very often but when I see something so off the mark I have to speak up. This is a short investment for Zynga. They were probably on the cusp of raising more than this amount before the whole "Scamville" story gave them such a headache. They are taking in millions in revenue every day; who knows what the bottom line is, but the investors must have seen it. It really doesn't matter much where the money is from. Trust me, their lawyers ensured this money is clean.

I'm really frustrated that the OP has so many upvotes. All you have to do here anymore is sound intelligent? This is a story about Zynga, not geopolitics. Russian, American, Middle Eastern, European, whatever -- Zynga is on fire.
The day they cure cancer, it will probably be with an addictive drug ;-)

They can't help it. It's their corporate DNA.

I have a great deal of respect for many of their technical folks, but it's been ages since the MBAs and marketroids took control of the company. (sadly I miss the Tolkien quote I was trying to put in here about evil races... It's too early in the morning)
McDonald's to Offer Free Wireless Internet starting mid-January
Same here, I'd say we have a reasonable non-Dutch speaking minority. Amsterdam.
Problem is you can already by phones without contracts and carriers are in no rush to negotiate to lower prices. If intense competition you mean 20 carriers, I agree. But most countries have 1-3 carriers. And most haven't moved on price at all. They might add features and bandwidth, but rarely do you get a price break.
The more semantic you make your HTML, the less that this tends to matter. Right now I'm actually <section>ing and <article>ing my way around my site, so when I want to change the design, I head straight for the one place it's actually described: the CSS.
I'm interested too, I'm in Eindhoven but any big city is ok.
Microsoft Acknowledges Theft of Code from Plurk
"Also, The whole thing would have gone through a whole design process involving a PM and a Test"

They would copy Plurk, but they would copy 2009's Plurk with a product that would enter beta in 2012...
That would be www.hetmeisjeshuis.nl. Here we have out monthly drinks and other activities with the ICT-Kring Delft (society with about 140 ICT entrepreneurs).
Your writing doesn't exactly place you in Russia, more like U.S. East Coast academia.

You have a follower ;-)
is it only 1/26th as difficult to run one mile compared with 26 miles?

I'd say that 1/26th of the effort of running a marathon is taking the first step, never mind the first mile.
Definitely interested, make that a vote for Eindhoven (closer to Belgium).
Bank's antifraud tactics stun security expert: How much do they know?
Definately interested. Located in Utrecht and able to provide a space.
I'm interested and I'm from Eindhoven. Traveling is generally no problem.
What should a meet-up be like? Should there be presentations, workshops or just share drinks and ideas? Please comment with suggestions!
Twinkle’s business horoscopes, December
Maybe you could carry a steak around.
You just call them, and they separately courier-ship parts to you and send a technician onsite.

Go buy a $984 3 Ghz 2 Gbyte Dell Optiplex 780, and, for an additional $216, you get 3 Year 4HR 7x24 Onsite Service.

And yes, I've called them at 11:00 at night. :-)
Actually, it was more like an eius culpa...
Interested, Amsterdam.
Come for good ccv
Western union Transfer
Credit Card Top up
American Express....New Price-$4.5
Discover Card....New Price-$4.00
Visa Card....New Price-$2.00
Master Card....New price-$2.00
American Stamps....New price-$
AU International Card.....New Price-$7.00
CA International Card.....New Price-$6.00
BA International Card.....New Price-$5.00
Pay-pal Login

Contact me at T.mine@rocketmail.com
Dude, seriously?

It's perfectly fine to disagree, but to request a peer-reviewed journal about the efficacy of A/B testing? I don't know, maybe something like that exists, but my hunch is that the only things that get peer-reviewed are new ideas that are unproven and require the tough scrutiny of other smart people who are intimiately familiar with the subject matter.

Regarding A/B testing, go try it. Write down 10 different ways to ask out a girl. Go and ask out 10 girls with the first method, 10 with the next, and on down the line measuring the effectiveness of each approach.

You'll figure it out. :-)
Thanks. Yeah, fast anything code tends to be not very pretty to look at and I'm not a very experienced lisper. But fortunately in most real-world programs the part that is performance critical tends to be very small compared to the rest of the program.
Lida yorumlar
Oracle gives only empty promises for MySQL
Amsterdam++
I'm in as well. Amsterdam.
Could anyone recommend any good movies dealing with nuclear war, or the threat thereof? I've always been fascinated by the subject.
They were probably on the cusp of raising more than this amount before the whole "Scamville" story gave them such a headache.

What is your basis for this assumption? I do not necessarily disagree, by the way - the glut of dull-witted prize bulls in command of large funds jumping at the first sight of anything "viral" is a pretty open secret. Still, I wonder.

They are taking in millions in revenue every day; who knows what the bottom line is, but the investors must have seen it.

If they are taking in millions in revenue daily at anything resembling a high margin, why would they need anyone's ~$180m? As you suggest, such a condition would afford them the dubious distinction of being "on fire"; do you think the lack of ~$180m is all that stood between the incipient, fledgling status quo of Zynga's ramen-profitable basement company and Facebook games "going supernova?"

Do you think $180m can be reasonably dimensioned, at a high return, in a late round, to a company grossing millions a day? Far it be from me to claim authority in this area; my latest capital-intensive, web-savvy proposal - Social VPN over Twitter using base64/uuencode - was a complete flop.

This is a story about Zynga, not geopolitics.

As far as Zynga and as far as Americans should be concerned, you are entirely correct. But it is simply naive to dismiss the enormous role played by considerations of "domestic consumption."

For example, do you think Putin is really a sworn enemy of the West, or do you think public sabre-rattling is an indispensable element of his popularity and interminable hold on power, despite private cooperation and appeasement on a variety of global objectives with the Bush administration and presumably its successor?

Trust me, their lawyers ensured this money is clean.

The pristine crispness of the tender - or the bits that represent it - is not in dispute.
Konkuri launches the Groups/Playoffs tournament system
Yeah... giving them the benefit of the doubt, that's misleading wording: XMLHttpRequest is an object in the JS namespace as of IE7. Before that, you needed to import an ActiveX Object, which has supported requestXML since MSXML 2.0 (that's IE5). See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms757066(VS.85).aspx
wow thats insane!
IPhone developers abandoning app model for HTML5?
Top 50 Cops and Crimefighters on Twitter
While many media resources use Twitter to spread stories quickly, journalists and other individuals who want to know about breaking news might discover another resource closer to the action, namely cops.
For the more adventurous, here a Haskell port.
http://github.com/jaspervdj/Hakyll
No offense meant - kudos for sharing and all - but does this really make HN a better place? I don't think so. If I want to read reddit articles, I'll go to reddit (and probably already have prior to coming to HN).

But really - I do appreciate the sharing bit. I'm not trying to be offensive or sarcastic; I just don't want HN to become even more invaded by /., 4chan, digg, reddit, et al.
Your explanation definitely sounds good and sounds plausible given what little I know about wealth distribution in Russia, but [citation needed]. At least, supporting links of some sort needed
At present, it depends on the strategy taken, ad of course it will depend on the technologies developed. There are actually many many technologies which, at present, will save you money in the long run (and the run doesn't even need to be that long.)

The main barriers to adoption are laziness, cost of capital, consumer behavior (not purchasing LED lights because they 'seem' too expensive), and most importantly, lack of education.

Page 4 of this paper has a great graph where they examine costs and cost abatement for a variety of 'green' strategies. Hybrid cars are the most expensive!

www.khoslaventures.com/presentations/Hybrids.pdf
Limo in Toronto
If you are looking to add a special element to your wedding day celebration in Toronto, then consider a special limo from Wedding Limousines, your first choice for wedding limos in Toronto, the GTA and the southern Ontario region.
WiFi at MccDonalds has been free in France since it started a year or three ago - mind eating one of their burgers is quite a high price to pay for an Internet connection.
I'm interested too, i live in the north of Belgium, so Eindhoven would be great :)
I'm down! Amsterdam
Interested! (and peer pressured into joining for just this!) Amsterdam or Utrecht, Delft will all do :)
And what will my anecdotal experience prove?

Anyway, I'm not questioning the effectiveness of "A/B testing". I'm questioning the effectiveness of direct marketing. Two very different things.
I am simply withholding judgment on the efficacy of direct marketing until I see some solid evidence. Same with the rest of the examples you mention.

So far all I've seen are claims (mostly by direct marketers themselves), not any kind of reliable proof.

As for how the studies would be done, I have no doubt that scientists (who are very clever at coming up with innovative research protocols) could figure something out.

But here is a modest proposal: track the spending habits of a reasonably large, randomized group of people (should be easy enough to do these days), along with the ads they receive. See how many of the products are bought by people who receive and read direct mail ads vs those that don't. That should be a good start.
Also, the reader pictured on their front page seems to be attached to the wrong end of the phone ;)

See: https://squareup.com/
How Phusion Built A More Efficient Ruby 1.8 Interpreter
Cool! I prefer Amsterdam or Utrecht.
Well being a seasonned clojurist, i almost never dug into such low level optimizations, but nonetheless , i find his code ok and very readable.

The only function sacrificing some level of readability (and wich i still find quite easy to read) is the new split function.

I think it is very much a question of being accustomed to the particular style of code lisps enforce. On this topic, the only grip i've got with his functions on the style side is, lots of java interop wich lenghtens the whole thing quite a bit, and big bulky functions that would benefit being cutted in several pieces.
Awesome idea. It wouldn't surprise me if this interface "influences" some future apps that come along..

That said, it's verrry crashy on my iPhone, and other apps tend to be pretty solid for me. If he irons out the bugs over time, I could see this becoming a must-have for me. Distinct from other 3G commenters here, though, I found it more than fast enough to keep up with my scribbles.
Cool idea! I live in Amsterdam too. I'm game.
Snow can be sticky and sticky snow would stick to a plastic window.
Actually, window screens were as important as chemical abatement. That's why installed screens are required in much of the US for a new house to receive a "habitation permit" (in quotes because different jurisdictions use different words). And I remember an article years ago, that providing window and door screens for Africans would substantially improve their health, but nobody was interested in doing or funding it because it wasn't flashy enough.