FaceKicker

Also, sorting by reviews is broken (in the sense of being useful). A product with a single rating of 5 stars should not be ranked above a product with 1000 five-star ratings and 1 four-star rating. It's a really easy problem to solve too...

That's a common misinterpretation of the results of statistical tests. You can never conclude from that type of test that two things are not correlated, you can only conclude that the data you have does not suggest a correlation ("fail to reject the null hypothesis").

This would be great. Shipping is incredibly painful (in terms of cost and time) when ordering from anyone but Amazon...

I'd be surprised if that were true; you could always refuse the money and feel like an even better person (or at least just as good). And then it would attract the people who do want/need the money on top of that.

Hah, that's a better idea. Unless it only transfers the data through a cell data connection (I don't really see any good reason why that would be the case but it's a remote possibility).

Is anyone else really tired of reading this "you're not the customer, you're the product" platitude every day, especially in contexts like here where it's totally irrelevant? Yes, we get it, Facebook isn't directly making money off their users.

That was my question after watching the video as well... I was surprised he didn't try doing a tcpdump or something to see what (if anything) was actually being transmitted off the phone with each of those debug messages, though I don't know if that's possible to do without rooting it. Maybe it would be possible to get the Carrier IQ apps running on a rooted device to test this?

Indeed. Considering that HN is one of the most tech-aware communities on the Internet, it continually surprises me how much people here want "security by obscurity" in managing their personal online communications.

If there are people who you don't want seeing your public posts, regardless of whether they currently have Google+ accounts or check them on a regular basis, don't make them public. Simple.

> There is no question this is a landmark paper. There has been an enormous amount of work for a very long time on this subject.

I don't doubt that at all (though I personally know nothing about the field), I was only criticizing the linked article.

Based on skimming the "our contribution" section of the paper (page 2), it seems like this isn't a new algorithm, but rather a new analysis of the same algorithm (Coopersmith Winograd) that proves a tighter lower bound on its runtime.

Not that that's not a valuable contribution, but the linked article seems kind of misleading, unless I'm misunderstanding the paper...

If they actually aren't willing to test whether cell phones interfere with their equipment, they shouldn't be allowing cell phones on the plane at all. Relying on people's compliance (or even just their attention) to ensure the plane doesn't explode is absurd.

I don't really understand this idea. If you want a reasonable probability of your friend/family stumbling upon your ad, you'd have to be running it for probably about 10% of pageviews. In which case you'd only be running 10 at a time, charging $50 or $100 per...what? Week? That would be < $52,000 per year of income (compare to their 2011-2012 total budget of $28.3 million). Doesn't even seem worth it for that insignificant of a revenue stream.

> If there's an article about his company in a legitimate publication, then he can put a page up for his company in Wikipedia. It'd pass the notability requirement and the requirement for verifiable sources.

It seemed like the person the blog post was referencing passed that requirement as well, but was deleted.

> You know how much I wish I could put my little no-name company on Wikipedia? A lot! But I can't and I'm glad I can't. These standards are why Wikipedia is so well respected.

But why? If there's an article about your company in a legitimate publication, I don't see why there shouldn't be a Wikipedia article about it. How would it make Wikipedia a less useful or lower-quality resource? Are you saying it would get in the way of finding information about more "notable" subjects? I don't understand how.

Sure, my attitude would make the disambiguation page for "John Smith" much longer, but I think it would still be reasonable as long as it's well-sorted into categories (as it is now).

I agree, I wouldn't be surprised if the weights people manually assign to the questions have very little correlation with the success of their relationships. People probably suck at knowing what they want.

That's not to say they're meaningless though; e.g., if someone puts "mandatory" for all his questions, that definitely says something about his personality, and should be used as a feature in the ML algorithm used for matching.

I think the possibility that OP is worried about (making dissent illegal) is probably at least as radical as overturning the clause against ex post facto law (both would require Constitutional amendment AFAIK). So given the level of paranoia required to worry about the possibility that free speech will be gone in the US, the constitutional ban on ex post facto laws isn't really responsive.

> Every time I go in to a B&N physical store, it's packed. They're one of the few stores I'll go to just for the experience of going in there.

And there's the problem - it's packed because people are in there just for the experience of going in there. That doesn't pay the bills.

On my Nexus S I couldn't scroll at all in either direction, and the right side of the graph was cut off.

Slightly relevant data point of approximated anecdotal evidence: I submitted a "Show HN" for my Android app at about 2 PM on a weekday and got 1 or 2 upvotes within about an hour, so I deleted it and resubmitted it later at about 9 PM (exact same title and everything - I felt bad about resubmitting it but I was really disappointed, sorry if this was a faux pas) and it hit the front page within 5 minutes and hit #1 in about half an hour and then stayed there for 12+ hours. Pretty astounding difference...

It's hard to say if that really makes it "unfair", since a lot of Ken Jennings' (and every other Jeopardy champion's) success was due to his reaction time with the buzzer. That's simply a huge part of the game.

On the other hand, nobody would dispute that a machine has faster reactions than a human, so maybe that makes it less interesting. Tough to figure out a great way to resolve that.

How does that work? I thought all verification of certificates was done in the browser...

Isn't price discrimination what this developer should want though (assuming he's interested in maximizing revenue)? I.e., getting people who are willing to pay more to do so, while still getting revenue from people who aren't willing to pay as much?

I thought that was Zash's point anyway.

The sample size has nothing to do with the distinction between a survey and a study, as far as I know. Either could have a small sample size or a large sample size.

If they got a statistically significant result given some alpha value, then that's a valid result, assuming the experiment itself was set up in a valid way (random sampling, controlled, double blind, etc.). Statistical significance tests take the sample size into account. A large enough difference can make up for a small sample size, and vice versa.

Ah, ok, I was wrong about pages working exactly the same way as user pages then, whoops.

That's not how evolution works. Are you saying humans are currently optimal in every possible way?

This is true, actually. Pages seem to act exactly like regular user profiles other than the intention to have an associated brand instead of an associated person, and Google+ engineers have been posting that anyone can create a page (it just might not get the "confirmed name" checkbox by its name). So you could effectively set up a page with whatever name you want and use that as your pseudonymous profile on G+.

Are images blocked on hotmail, yahoo, etc. too now? I've only used gmail for the past 5+ years.

Either way though, it wouldn't really produce a random sample, though maybe it would allow somewhat meaningful comparisons between separate email campaigns even if the absolute numbers aren't too meaningful.

What exactly do people view as "wrong" about building a company to sell? Companies are sold because it's in the interest of both parties involved in the transaction, so it must serve some legitimate function in the economy. Perhaps it's a little different if they're bought by a larger company only to eliminate the smaller competitor, but I doubt that's why buyouts usually happen.

It seems really silly to me to criticize someone for wanting a high payoff to labor ratio or not wanting to dedicate their life to everything they do, but I don't know - what's the reasoning?

I'm in the US. Regardless, I believe you, there could be any number of variables that the sign up process depends on

On the account I just created, that URL just redirects to the home page (where it wants me to import contacts from email, etc.).

I just tried this out of curiosity, but it never asked for my phone number (not only was it not required, I didn't even have the option to provide it at any point during the sign up process). Facebook had no friend recommendations for me at all.

I then tried adding my phone number to my profile (a phone number that I also have on my actual Facebook account). Went back to the home page and looked around a little more, still no friend recommendations. It's actually a solid possibility that nobody who has uploaded their phone contacts to Facebook has me as a contact (I didn't even know that was possible, actually).