skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would they do it? To be found.

There are over a trillion web sites. Why did people put in so much work? Because they had something that they wanted to be found/seen/known by someone else.

The semantic web, in the form that it will come in, won't be nearly that much work. Instead of each business creating a web site, they'll just fill out the data of what makes them what they are and what makes them unique.

There are a trillion textual web sites, nearly all created in the last 15 years, most of which don't need to exist. My prediction: Very soon, they won't.

Edit: I'm not talking about current initiatives like LinkedData. If the SW would only come like that, I would agree with you.
The problem is, that I have a feeling that farmville players are not the most technically minded.
Scraping google for an extended period is in fact incredibly hard, but not because of the lay out.

I'm fairly sure that someone on googles management has had to give scroogle a free pass on the scraping because at any serious usage level they'd normally have been blocked long ago. I'm guessing they have weighed the advantages of having scroogle out there versus the disadvantages of a bunch of bad press. They might even think it is good to have sites that are openly critical of google out there.

Scroogle should count their blessings that it has lasted as long as it did, now they should get their act together and fix the bugs in their scraper.
How to Save the News
Really? Are people still" trotting this out?

You know I haven't been able to play a single HTML5 game on my N1. Every single one requires either a physical keyboard or mouse events that I can't simulate.
God's will be done. I ain't praying for anyone. I love God. Let Him do what He wants.
That was exactly what I wrote below :)

I figure google doesn't mind scroogle at all, maybe is even amused by it (but that's reading the tealeaves). Someone inside google has had to push some buttons to permit scroogle to continue the scraping for as long as they did, normally they would have been auto-blocked in an eye blink.
I would think that the ajax API could also be twisted to their needs. It requires an API key that Google puts some limits on, limits that they might want to apply to Scroogle in any case.
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/
7 Weird Ways to Stay Organized
Which is awesome, I love that more attention is being put to security and privacy practices of companies online. Hopefully it'll be the catalyst for a lot of positive changes in the near future.
Within W3C's mission statement ( http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission ), this is not mentioned. Can you provide a reference to back up this claim? (that is, that W3C is supposed to promote open tools or would violate any of its principles by not requiring to support any particular video encoding)
Google uses CAPS LOCK that I understand as a command "be consistent no matter what".

The quote from PEP8 translates in my mind to "be consistent if it's worth it".

These policies are not orthogonal. You can't satisfy both in all cases.
I can recommend one 'hobby' above all, especially for programmers and all people working intensely on projects: rock climbing!

It's a great hobby/sport: It is free (just get the initial equipment: shoes and a harness), you'll get to wonderful places in nature, it's exciting and challenging, you'll get better very quickly and notice it, you'll meet many nice people, it's a great combination for using both body and brain(!), and most of all: It forces you to stop thinking about projects! If you climb, your mind will be _instantly_ free of all everyday business.

Imo the easiest way to start is finding a beginner climbing group around your location; there are plenty - especially in the US and Europe.
True, but you also take the risk of arbitrary app rejection with the iPhone market.
Altruism leads to true and everlasting happiness.
I'm a runner too, but I found out that it is not the best activity to stop thinking about a topic. My mind keeps wandering around, unless I run so fast that I'm totally exhausted for the rest of the day.

As I recently discovered that activities which require your undivided attention work better for me. My meditation is motorcycling and downhill biking :)
The real fix would be to abolish software patents, and with it, the licences.
Best Visual illusion of the Year Contest - 2010 results
Red Flat, and it has been around for 11 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Flag_Linux
I would add something about music and something about art to that list.
Why not get a secretary? If email is the lifeline to your work-life then it makes sense to pay someone $15/hr on a part-time basis to deal with the chaos. A capable assistant can very easily organize your email saving you the time to do what you do best.

Maybe there is an opportunity here for a web-based solution to this problem. Of course he doesn't want to give someone access to his gmail account. So maybe there's a way to selectively allow someone access to your inbox folder with auditing/logging/organizing features. This way someone else can manage your inbox but not go around snooping for password reset emails.
Tichy is correct. The semantic web is essentially a big knowledge management effort that's doomed to failure (like most KM efforts) because xyz Joe Random web page maker really doesn't see any incentive to go through and spend a couple hours of his time marking his page about futons up for the SW. It's a waste of his time.

Even if he did, by some miracle do that. There's no way somebody else can make much more use of that information beyond what they already can through other, lower effort facilities like search for example. It requires powerful, web-scale reasoning engines to even make sense of that, none of which we have today.

Supposing even 5 years from now, some startup is founded to do the reasoning, say Cuil 2.0, what do I get for it? Better page retrieval? Is it 2% better? Is it 30% better?

It better be 30% better, because 2% better isn't worth hundreds of billions of aggregate dollars for everybody to go through and mark up all their pages to make them SW ready. And since nobody really knows (there isn't a useful reasoning engine that does anything that you can't do with search in the web space that I'm aware of, and most of the ones I've seen provide results far worse than search, Wolfram Alpha is probably the closest to a half-working semantic reasoning system you can find, and it's not like it's taken the world by storm), nobody will even bother -- a classic catch-22.

The SW is just a repackaging of old broken AI ideas. We already know systems built on essentially the same principles don't do much for the average person, the SW is just a doubling down on the same bad ideas -- "it didn't work before because it wasn't big enough!"
Not only is it their style guide, it's got useful tips for non-designers who have to play the role sometimes too!
I'm flabbergasted that a piece of software that apparently does a small (less than 76 bytes per frame) hash can detect illegal "content".

Just think: we can let NEC's software determine legality and do away with all these messy and expensive judges, juries and attornies! All nuance, neatly captured in 76 bytes per frame.

Wow, just wow.
Thanks failquicker. I'm still looking forward to your blog concept by the way!
Maybe SEO for Google

And, of course, the "semantic web" will be able to disregard bad data (published out of malice, incompetence or bitrot) because it ... hmm ... because ... hmm, er ... ah, well. They must have it covered.

(I'm somewhat reminded of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system , only with the maintenance problems squared or cubed.)

P.S. The RethinkDB guys (Slava, etc.) are chasing an interesting problem (DBs on SSD). I submitted a link to their blog: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1337391
Was the first thing I did, and was disappointed with the result.

1. You have no pricing information available. I have to give you information before I get any pricing information.

2. Screenshots. Basically, I just see you sending seeds and an email saying "Plant this now!"

3. Do you provide information on how best to plant the seeds. I know certain plants are best planted in a certain manner, or things to consider.

4. Options. I tell you want I want to grow? Cool. I want to grow herbs. What herbs are you going to send me? Do I have to be specific? Do you have specific packages? "Basic Herbs - Great for beginners!"

5. People who know how to plant and garden probably don't need your service. People who do won't have a clue, and might be in a situation where a big garden isn't feasible. Any thoughts to 'apartment gardens' or growing herb gardens out on the balcony?
I wonder if knowing there is a team of people focused on increasing your happiness, increases your happiness? I'd imagine it's fairly hard to get a double blind test going for this experiment!
I think your reasoning about why people make web pages is error-prone.

Just another node on a semantic graph is not what anybody wants to be, otherwise the web would be populated with HTML 1.0 pages. It's not like making one of those is much harder than filling out a semantic form.

> most of which don't need to exist.

Who says that? I think my page on mauve socks should certainly exist. There's an awful lot of stuff like that on the web. And the SW is no more useful for finding that than search is.
I would rather it just cost less as opposed to entirely free. If there were a paid alternative to GMail, I would move away from that too.

Paying for something reduces the likelihood that the provider will do unscrupulous things with my data for financial gain. Or at least I feel like they’d be less likely. And ignorance is bliss, right?
It is absurd that a company (Facebook) would put itself in a position where another company's negligence/mistake/whatever could possibly put its users' data at risk.
and the direction of the total step is about 60 degrees off, leaving sqrt(3)/2 step in the right direction.
Nice answer, thanks.
Who would wait? "Say, every thought about arranging code as Objects?"
How will it be any different from the other providers ?

That would be the key, being free is not really a differentiator any more.
One thing is for sure - FB is not having a good week.
Looks like someone is in the need of better spam filters.

Just for fun I disabled the spam filter on our mailserver for a few minutes a while ago, took me hours to clean up afterwards. The spam volumes are simply unbelievable, but with proper filtering it really isn't that much of a problem. I think I get about 20 to 30 spam messages per day nowadays that somehow make it past the filter. I do update the filter rules with every message that gets through though, usually on subject or body keywords.
Are you trying to grow plants in your apartment, or outside (on the balcony)? There are many herbs that grow easily in pots: basil, thyme, oregano, chives, parsley. Bay Laurel is good for a big pot.
Exercise alone will do most of the job.
This is a pretty old article (Oct 2006), and likely superceded by more recent work: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1222562...
which finds that autism "clusters" don't have anything to do with pollution or chemical exposure, but rather how educated parents are. One would guess that parents who work as engineers would probably count as "more educated" and likely as "older", too.
I'm not sure about US pricing but here in the UK Android devices are similarly priced to the iPhone.
There's also the other problem: saturation. Everyone who I know who wants to use an iphone already has one. A number will upgrade when the next one comes out.

I have an ipod touch, but don't want to have to carry that much size/weight to have phone service.
Please feel free to post your Twitter account here so we can, um, "follow" you ;)
The Android Parcel Project - A gem-like package manager for Android components
True. Unsettling.

It seems Facebook is on an absurdity run. The last two weeks have been full of absurd bugs, absurd ideas. </rant>
Email can be pretty personal, and in the end someone will have to answer it.

He's not even getting that much mail, if you count it out he says that 'from the beginning of April to the first week of may' he went from a few hundred to an unmanageable thousand.

That's only about 30 messages per day, if he simply kept up with it it would not be an issue. Once the mountain is high enough it can be very intimidating.

Imagine not washing the dishes for a full month.

edit: changed spam in to mail, the point still stands.
I'm using sphinx an it's really awesome, you can see how it looks (I tweaked it a little)

http://marianoguerra.com.ar/efene/tutorial/
I'm in the Philippines and certain sites get blocked here also. It doesn't cause me much problems because I use my VPS as a proxy, but I don't really have high bandwidth needs. I have family in China though, I hear the internet connection is slow because of the filtering. That would be a concern of mine also.
The article constantly refers to users as being people who will benefit from making editing easier, so it's fairly clear they consider all users potential contributors. That usability of editing tools leaves something to be desired is implied by them improving it. That Wikipedia wants more contributors is implied by its mission.
If that "I'm not in the US" button can lead to a page with general planting recommendations for people abroad, it'd be a very nice touch! Maybe a list of tools that are useful, or a link to services that may help, if you're feeling extra kind.
The Function memoize looks like a python decorator to me(http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0318/ ),

IMHO, code can be more pythonic and still minimalistic if we declare fib this way using decorators

@memoize
fib(n)

also we don't need to use the line : fib = memoize(fib)
after this change

I don't know though if decorators were not used on purpose..

Update: I have commented updated code on recipe's page - http://code.activestate.com/recipes/577219-minimalistic-memo...
"What I do is ask them some question that they could plausibly answer as a way to starting a conversation" - there is an idea right there - how to move from an opener to a proper conversation in a non-pub/bar/club environment ?
For the Win, Cory Doctrow's new novel about economics and gaming blackmarket
Better page retrieval? This is what a lot of people just don't understand. It's not "what exists plus 30%". It's a different equation entirely.

I live in the Czech Republic. A young girl recently put a note on our train station board offering babysitting services. Why didn't she use the web? Because she can't. Until someone makes a Czech babysitting database, she can't. Because no one would ever find it. Text doesn't work that way.

How many web sites are: dating, real estate, jobs, etc? That's data. So why don't they put it on the web as text? Because no one would ever find it. Text doesn't work that way.

Whoever fixes this, changes it all. They take out Google. They take out Monster.com. They take out Match.com. They take out Facebook.

Whoever can do this will change everything.

We've spent 15 years building the mountain of the web on the wrong construct. We need to rebuild it.

You think it's doomed to failure but I'm telling you concretely, you'll see it within a year from today.
It sounds like his problem is too many nonspam emails.

Which presumably wouldn't be helped by spam filtering!
But he says they're all non-spam mails.
I hope enough people boycott sites that use the FB instant personalization thingy. But hope is not a strategy, alas.
Factor improves performance further - A collection of compiler improvements.
What, people here seriously love Zynga? After their CEO admitted he used scam "monthly text message plan" marketers to get most of their revenue? After he flat out admitted that they rip off their customers any way possible to make a quick buck?

Why should we reward such a terrible business model with success. Zynga uses marketing partners that have more in common with organized crime than reputable businesses.
This already happens every day when the blame is passed through to Oracle, Gartner, etc. without any acknowledgement of the fact that, bad as the software truly is, it was selected and purchased at great cost and [usually] considerable delay by the people disclaiming responsibility.

In other words, this will only be a fatal flaw if the business customers stop giving IT departments a free pass for being bad at technology.
This has been here a few times before: http://searchyc.com/Data%252C+data+everywhere

(Just for the record, this seems the first time it got traction.)
GreenITers
Ah yes, my bad! thanks!

But that's only 30 emails per day!! Where do I sign for that?
>But the more efficient I get with email, the more of it that comes in.

Jevons Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Another theory of why the Yo-Yo effect happened on the Stock Market , the reality though is no-one really seems to know.

These are all conjectures, there is no proof.
The first demo was the most interesting use of Flash. Any demo with video is pointless. The iPad/iPhone are now going to drive sites from Flash video. I'm in the camp where I think together Apple and Google can fix html5 so that Flash isn't necessary. The web is much too important to be built around a plugin, unless Adobe completely open sources their plugin.
I have wondered if this was in the cards for a while now. I have had trouble reconciling it with a few things though. On one hand, from a competition standpoint, there is an argument to be made that google is providing free cloud-based sync for all users. Therefore, Apple needs to be competitive with them. However, Apple rarely (never?) releases products as loss leaders. They are always interested in breaking even or (ideally) extracting a small amount of revenue from every offering. I can't see them generating sufficient revenue using advertising, but perhaps iAd would be one way to do it.

On the other hand, the cost of hosting email, calendars, address book sync, etc... is fairly small. I could see a dropbox-like scenario where you get a small amount of free storage (plenty for contacts, calendars, and recent email). Then you pay for additional storage and/or access to premium streaming content. That offering could be built into the purchase price of most Apple gear without a dramatic price increase.
3 controversial A/B testing tips that you may not agree with
Sometimes I forget everyone is not Canadian. Bodybreak was a series of educational ads on Canadian TV in the 80's. For ex: Here's an exercise you can do sitting down. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1p6K0xGKd0&feature=relat...
5 == count is the condition, so if (5 == count) ... uses a Yoda condition in a conditional.
The Greater Apple Co-Prosperity Sphere
> Wake me up when the app market is competitive with the iPhone.

the money market isn't in small end-user games. It's in custom business apps, where you are paid for initial developement and licensing by a company for a specific product that they want their employees to use.

At least, that's how I see it.
What You Bring to the Table
Business Cycle Winners and Losers
Software-as-a-service stashes business tools on Internet
Have you seen this classic piece from 2001?
http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

It argues quite convincingly why semantic web is useless.
I'm curious though, since Dropbox isn't really a way of communicating. I guess someone could have published the url to something in their "public" folder.
An essay on metadata (2001)
The 3G continued selling well after the 3GS was introduced because Apple lowered the price to $99 with contract.
People want a winner and a loser.

They also want to be on the winning side, whichever one that is. They'll argue and argue forever trying to convince everyone that they're right and you're wrong.
Maybe not spam filters, but better filters in general; from the sound of it, I'm amazed that the author doesn't already have this in place for his 30 most valued contacts.
All the more reason to modify your facebook settings to disallow their third party vendors from accessing your data.
By "a couple million out of that [15 billion]," I meant both.
Dropping Privileges in Python for Tornado Apps
Nice! I just got to the homepage and thought "hmmm, that's original and pretty cool!"--especially because I have become a closet gardening geek (although all my neighbors know it and love it).

Page 2 after your zip code is also well done, but it is obviously not going to easily convert first-time users, but let's see how this free sign-up goes and then maybe conversion will be a bit more likely afterwards with convenience being the big seller, obviously.

OOPS! Got a bug screen that something went wrong when I was signing up and choosing which veggies I want to grow :/ That's ok, you just launched.

IDEA: It would be even more awesome if you went beyond veggies. I am not into planting veggies yet, but love annuals and perennial flowers.
I hope moving entire websites of information into customized lightboxes isn't the future of CMS's.
He hardly gets mail though. He can't keep up with 30 messages / day, if I only got 30 messages/day I'd be so happy...
IMO, pick something like 999$ for something like that. If nobody does it you are out a few hours, but plenty of people have far more money than time and you would be shocked what people will pay a little help.
I just looked at the Android SDK for the first time the other day, and it seemed to indicate that you must write your apps in Java? That seems even more restrictive than 3.3.1 to me. Or did I miss something?
Buyer's (and non-buyer's) guide to secure remote access
What a cool idea! Congrats on launching. Yeah, way to go!
Doesn't bankruptcy imply a lack of emails? ;)

When it comes to dealing with spam, I'm often tempted to change my email address of ten years and start off with a blank slate. I'm genuinely curious to see how long it would take to ramp up. I rarely hand out my [myname]@example.com address, instead using [companyname]@example.com - so, amazon or somedodgywebsite@example.com and then filtering spam depending on that. Is it time to start over?
The TorProject website itself is down in China
What do people think of the Black Swan theory?
And soon after 1864, you could have been faxing documents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelegraph
Earliest Fax Machine - 1864
I'm with you, I was just responding to the person who said that the "lack of integrated email app" was a drawback.
You have a point about the low volume at 30/day. I've had 100+ emails a day in the past for long periods so I understand how bad it can get once things pile up. President of our company gets 100+ emails a day and could surely use some help. I've met quite a few good administrative assistants and they are aware of how trustworthy and reliable they have to be. They can just glance over an email body and if it sounds really personal, put it into the "personal" bucket. They can also reply to emails that just need a "Thanks" and forward other emails to appropriate people as necessary. If they take notes, they can describe all their activities to the mailbox owner in a few minutes.

I'm just saying as good as computers/apps have become, a second set of eyes and hands can still make a busy CEO's life easier.
true happiness is a low burn rate.
Although true, this is seemingly biased as Android usage spans a plethora of phones whereas the iPhone is a singular phone on a singular carrier. It's a very tough comparison to make. This would be similar to comparing the number of copies of a single book being sold under one publisher to the entirety of O'Reilly book sales. Kudos for even coming close.

Side note: I do not own a single mac product. No biases.
> Where do I sign for that?

If you want fewer emails, you need to stop signing up willy-nilly.
Its pretty terrible that a big site like Yelp would be open to a Cross Site Scripting attack.
I dunno, I pay for extra storage on GMail (and the rest of Google's services) and I don't think it removes the ads. It's just extra storage.