skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not so sure about that one either (though I can see why the GP might think there would be, given the fact that they are in relative proximity and both in ascendancy), but those alone are not reason enough.

I'd hate to lay odds on a Pakistan - Indian nuclear exchange though, or the next time a nuclear weapon is used against a city, too many unstable characters are already in possession of nukes or will probably get them within the next 30 years or so.

Seoul? Islamabad? Teheran? Bombay? Cairo?

The mind reels when you think about the consequences of a nuclear exchange in those regions.

I've always been very much shocked at the ease with which the US decided to try its nuclear weapons on populated areas, the 'we saved lives, the war ended sooner' argument doesn't hold water in the context in which it is usually given.

But in the longer term, it may have helped to stave off use by a whole raft of nations after world war II, given that the horrors of the aftermath were known before more powerful devices were built.

History is fickle that way, we only get to see one of all the possible future threads.
Since you've already committed to not working with the company again, why not call the highest contact you have and, in as pleasant a manner as you can muster, politely request payment for services rendered? If it were me, it would go something like this:

"Hi ____, how are you?. I understand you've decided to implement the _______ project internally, based on the spec I wrote. I'm really glad it met your needs and I think it will be a great solution for you. I spent ___ hours working on it so I'd like to bill you $____ for my time. Does that sound fair to you?"

Then don't say anything else at all and just listen to his response. No justification or anything like that. He's either going to say yes or no.

If he says yes: "Great, I'll send the invoice over. Let me know if you need any clarification on the spec."

If he says no: "I'm sorry to hear that, good luck with your project and have a nice day." Then hang up and don't ever, ever take a call or answer an email from them again. Period.
Tell HN: New Google homepage, A/B testing gone crazy.
Today, I was served the new Google homepage, the first that struck me out was how inconsistent it was. I started to look at all the inconsistencies and found many of them:

- 3 different arrows for the more links.
- mixed use of upper/lower case for the "M" in the more links.
- the position of "advanced search" between the home page and the results page.
- the position of the search button (kind of within the input field on the results page but below with space on the home page).
- you see "Everything" with an icon in front of it (why the icon?) and then you have a link with more, what is more than everything?
- etc.

It can be a game to find so many design errors, things totally wrong when looking at the whole page.

I asked myself, why? Then I found, it is simply A/B testing gone crazy. They have tested gazillions of independent small changes in their multivariate tests, found the optimal combination, but, forgot the big picture.

So maybe the new home page and results page are the optimal ones, but they are inconsistently optimal. For the first time in many years, the Google pages now "feel wrong".

This is annoying me a lot, for 2 things:

- I hate it when I search.
- It will spread like wild fire because if Google has done it, it must be good, so bad designers will just copy the design without thinking twice (so I will need to support that in many other websites).

And you, what do you think about it?
How are you designing your A/B tests not to fall in this trap?
My theory is that the turnout, generally, was still low; and those not turning out have a high proportion liberal voters ("whats the point" etc.).

That and the libs didn't really capitalize on their initial success the other week.

My take? Labour will offer the Lib Dems voting reform and form a coalition with them and the SDLP - that should be enough to hold it, just.

I have to admit I was hoping for a bigger share for the Lib Dems - which would have given a more balanced coalition (whichever way they went). Now their position is weaker.
"Where did the Lib Dem vote go?"

Two things :
(A) Lib Dem lost a lot of ground after the third debate, especially on Immigration - the amnesty issue.
(B) The Lib Dems almost shutout the Labour party in the final days of polling, thereby influencing the tactical voters to favour the Tories to get away from a hung parliament, obviously not enough of it.
I like my Bash tools as much as the next HNer, but always think it's faster, safer, and more accurate to use a windowed gui for moving or deleting important files and folders.
There is something funny in the name here, given that a black dwarf is what results after a star has gone through a melt-down and I think that is a serious risk with that many drives in such a tight enclosure.

He seems to have that factor under control though, 90 watts under load really isn't that bad.

Reminds me of this: http://www.clustercompute.com/ , no longer in service because it got replaced by a single gpu card.
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Yes. That's a big issue every election, but is likely to be an even bigger pain point this time round. Both Labour and the Lib Dems are now calling for electoral reform (some kind of proportional representation instead of first past the post).
I find it ironic that the result of democracy (in the abstract sense: the diversity of opinion) is a non governable country. It kind of shows what type of people we have in politics: stubborn opiniative people who don't even know how to listen to other peoples' point of view.

Elections in a democracy only seem to work when there's not a democratic parliament. Or maybe we are just not used to this and need some time to get used to the idea of different point of views other than the two main parties.
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Hmmm. A a pretty trite observation (obesity is on the increase), a lot of ranting about tangential issues like the splitering of the family unit and some half-hearted genuflection in the direction of possible solutions.
Oh, and the country, or possibly the world, has gone to the dogs.

Yawn.
This would have a lot more teeth in it if it were VCs backing facebook but they are not, so what's there for them to seethe over, it's not exactly their money.

They're anonymous as well, so it really doesn't carry much weight at all.
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I suspect Labour are only calling for this to woo the Libs into supporting a wide coalition Lib-Lab government so that Labour can stay in power.

People will say anything you want to keep power/money, etc.
Same thing can happen in the US with 'winner takes all' voting and an electoral college in between the active and passive voters.
Labour and the LibDems will join together to form a government and change the rules ("electoral reform") so that with their combined 52% and a form of proportional representation the Tories will have real problems getting into power again.

Although it looks like Nick Clegg lost he will actually end up with more power and influence than anyone from his party has had for an awfully long time.

I did find the views of the SNP rather alarming - that if the Tories got in it would probably create the right conditions for them mounting a realistic campaign for independence. I have no desire to be stuck in a wee country, oil running out, with a bunch of insane socialists and RBS.
Depending on your view on the role of government this is not necessarily a bad thing. Canada has had a series of minority governments over the past few years, and that has not been a factor in the recent economic crises.
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Cool, so all I have to do is write an advanced graphics program to get rich. Yay for the iPad!
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The problem is:

Conservatives: South, land owners
Labour: North, working class
Libdem: Students all over the country spread thinly

Maybe libdem should claim wales as their own and relocate all the libdem supporters there.

For all the noise made about libdem in the run up to this election it was surprising just how badly they did. Even their share of the vote was only up 1%.
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As long as there's want enough to translate to a purchase... a sales rep will be happy.
Actually, I'm happy to hear that. The more ridiculous patents come to the surface the shorter it will hopefully take before patents will be either reformed or abolished.
I'm all for turning a profit, but ditching the free accounts, after using them to gain a big following, is reprehensible. I sincerely hope they reconsider and, if not, they fail miserably. If enough companies pull this move, it will do considerable damage to the freemium model.
First thing I thought of when I read this was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Elliot
I would say 22.9% of the votes wasnt too bad. Its the system that makes it look bad.
Down here in Argentina we haven't forgotten about it at all. Tourists heading to the far south in the summer are often cautioned to wear lots of sunblock because it's so easy to get sunburned there.
Won't there be fear that proportional representation = BNP gets a seat?
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Labour presumably also has strong support from people employed by the state - most of whom I would not describe as "working class". I suspect that this explains why the Labour share of the vote seems to have grown strongly in Scotland.
Turnout was higher than it has been in decades. In my constituency it was 71%, in the first few it was up by between 3 and 8 percentage points.
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Regardless, the winner however you cut it, is the Conservatives. IMHO they should be allowed to form a government.

Also, lib dems lost 13 seats they formerly held. If Lib Dem support really was solid, you'd expect them to at least hold on to their seats. They didn't.
It is the first time for me that I think that changes to the google homepage are really a step in the wrong direction. In the past they seem to have had it together on this one, if there were changes they were subtle and did not seem to get in the way of getting the job done.

Now they've gone overboard on the 'b(l)ing' factor, presumably to compete with other search engines that look 'spiffy'.

I'd rather have 10 text links (or even 30) per page without adornment than all the stuffy they've been adding lately.

Duckduckgo could easily capitalize on that, give us the very early google interface with better results.

That would make me switch, their scroll-down-to-get-more trick already is very elegant.
The problem is you a) sound like an anti-fanboy and b) like a tech person (as we all probably are here).

For a "man on the street" the iPad "rocks". All the drawbacks are technical gripes - stuff we will notice and complain about but the majority of people will never consider/come across.

We all know it could be better in many ways and more open etc. they don't.

Also, the UI is stellar and will sell it to people.

shrug
Which result would mean a governable country? There are possible coalition governments or even a minority government. Possibly, they won't be as strong as a single party majority government would be, but they are definitely workable. I'd rather see this as a strength of democracy where you can have some kind of government even if there are many different opinions without single prevailing political force (without having to kill all opponents).
Quite a few http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749617 , lots of them in 'stealth' mode to ward off unwanted attention.
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Its not necessarily a bad thing , the issue here is none of the other smaller parties have anything in common with the Tories,who look unlikely to form a govt. on their own.
Of course, a rag-tag coalition ideologically opposite of each other might still work but not very well, i suspect.
> Computers are devices, not fragrances, they should be feature-full and powerful, not beautiful in a chick magazine sort of way.

Okay. So you want "a man's computer." You are a member of one niche market.

Apple goes after a different niche market (though I think "chick magazine" does not capture its essence).

In any case, Apple makes business decisions. Some who evaluate their growth, earnings, and prospects conclude there is some business savvy in their business model.
> It would be like looking at the world through a very small key-hole

For you.

You represent a vast minority of computer users though.
As several other commenters, this change actually makes scribd usable to me (flash is not stable enough to run the scribd viewer on my linux box).

My remaining problem with scribd is that there are documents that I would like to buy (recipes), but since I live outside of USA, that doesn't work. Would Paypal really be so hard to use for international payments? Or is it a problem with regulations?
That's democracy. It represents the people. If you fear opposing views then you should avoid democracy.

I'm not a BNP supporter by a long stretch but, if they get a significant proportion of the vote then IMO they should get representation in parliament.

I actually considered not voting, our ward is a pretty much foregone conclusion, proportional representation (in preference to first-past-the-post) makes all votes count and would encourage people to vote with their conscience rather than tactically.
That's pretty balanced. If it were a lot of money most people would go to speak to a lawyer, but when legal action starts, the only real winners are the lawyers.

I second the suggestion that you contact someone as high as you can, call them, and tell them that you're pleased they liked the work, that you spent X hours on it, so would like to bill them $Y, then shut up.

It's good advice, in another comment in this item, and here's the link.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327131

If you try it, will you tell us how you got on?
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I'm feeling too much blue! Cached and similar links for example could have been gray instead of the blue variant. IMHO, those links need not be so prominent.
It's unclear that libdem+labour will even be larger than conservative seats.

All money is on Cameron being our next PM.

I'm not sure Clegg actually has that much power, his party has lost 13 seats so far.
This is a terrible blog post, because it makes specific claims about why developers are complaining about Apple's actions and whether they are justified in doing so, which are torn to shreds quite lucidly in the comments, at which point the author dismisses the criticisms by saying they miss the point, he was really just ranting about computational literacy.

So, according to the author, he's really saying "Apple's actions, right or wrong, relevant or irrelevant, do perhaps call to mind the matter of computational literacy, and that sometimes people don't appreciate that different languages are adapted for different purposes." If you read any other meaning into the article, which I do even from the title, you are apparently attacking a straw man.

I don't why it annoys me so much when someone abdicates their intellectual responsibility, but it does.
It sounds like he's saying that the crash was caused by a video from Greece. That's rather hard to believe.
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Yeah, I'm not really that afraid of them either. It was more a descriptive comment, asking if, in practice, fear of fringe parties getting seats would prove to be an impediment to electoral reform. My impression is that it's been a significant issue in some countries with proportional parliamentary systems, and some (most?) have adopted variants of PR for the main purpose of keeping the fringe parties out (e.g. in Germany, you get zero seats if your total vote share is <5%, which keeps the NDP out).
If you like the hardware, but not iTunes, why not buy and use the hardware (and Mac OS X, of course) and get media through other means ? That's what I do. I still use iTunes as a music player and I've downloaded some free stuff. And of course you can sync external media to an iPod through iTunes, so no worries.
There's a list of "references" with links to other patents. I don't know if this patents references them, or vice versa. But one of them is case-insensitive matching:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6675354.html

I just noticed, this is an IBM patent. What are they playing at.

Here's the flowchart for this "invention":

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6675354-0-large.jpg
Yes, which is actually a good example of the system working - even if they weren't able to win many actual seats, the LibDems have managed to put themselves in a position where they can at least influence policy quite strongly.
Magazines may be lighter, but I'm fairly sure that the hardcover I'm reading right now (David Weber's A Mighty Fortress) is about as heavy as an iPad.
There's still time - you can copy your comment, delete, and re-insert as a new comment. If you know how to edit, you should know how to do that.
I guess it's probably easy to create a Stylish user style to revert changes.
So, order abroad and be done with it. One more reason Apple doesn't want people to order more than 2 ipads I guess, it will cut in to their future profits.
Ask HN: Would anyone like to join me on congratulating the BBC?
Despite serving up plenty of dynamic content and video, and despite huge traffic (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2010/05/current_traffic_to_bbc_news_we.html), the BBC's election news website has been fantastic. It's been responsive, up to date and highly usable all night.

This is a real technical achievement and I for one would like to say well done.
The single member plurality system used in the United Kingdom to elect the Members of the Parliament has its obvious drawbacks, however it has one important advantage: it keeps extremism out of the Parliament. Rest assured the if there was a party-list proportional representation system in place, parties such as BNP would have an appallingly large number of seats. I believe a good compromise would be a mixed system where a portion of the seats are elected with the usual "first past the post" constituency system and the rest was elected by using national and/or regional party lists.
My mid-70s father and I both have 24" monitors at 1920x1200. I use the full width for most browser windows, but around 2/3 for some. E.g. full width for HN, but it shaves off a bit more than an inch at each side.

My father has a few eye problems and always goes full screen with the text etc. zoomed pretty large using Firefox. I'm more near sighted than he and keep my text zoomed perhaps larger than most.

So one shouldn't assume that if your user has a big screen and resolution that you can use the full width as raw pixels.
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Laughable. This would never stand the test of prior-art. I think I'll go patent merge sort...
Now both Labour and Conservative will need Lib.Dems, hopefully this will make electoral reform a possibility.
You should provide some image links when commenting on visual appearance especially WRT A/B testing as other users will get a different experience by definition.

Google homepage is like http://imgur.com/sc5h6.jpg for me so I'm guessing you mean the logged in personal home?
Thank you for reminding me about Duckduckgo, I always dismissed it because of the javascript requirement, but trying again today I found it pretty clean. I will need to commit myself to a one week long test to better assess how good it is.
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> Turnout was higher than it has been in decades

Singular; it's the highest since 1997.

Initially it seemed very high; but the morning it looks fairly low again. 65% ish.
i agree, that's absolutely irresponsible. way to personally inject a significant amount of fear into the market where there was none necessarily called for.
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Im not sure that's a good thing. Reform to PR would almost certainly lead to a very strong Lib/Lab coalition. The conservatives would, essentially, be out of the picture for decades in all probability.

I prefer this way where it could go either way (Lib/Con or Lib/Lab).
For ten years I've used a Windows PC with pirated apps, games, and media. As did everyone I knew. Sneaker-nets were extremely well developed, until P2P took over later.

Now that I'm a software writer myself, I see things differently, but that's just self-interest talking.
Worth reading, e.g.: "The Move was based on market structure."

I've noticed several others pointing out that this is not a very liquid market and that that tells us lots of things.
Not completely clear cut. Could be a minority Con govt, or they may be able to get a majority with other parties + independents.

Personally I think we should be concentrating on more pressing issues than electoral reform.
This article is largely ignorant of the larger issues in play. Media companies only sell the rights to distribute in certain geographic markets. If Apple could let everyone buy from the US store tomorrow they would. Granted there are not iTunes Stores for every country, but a larger number. Many of these only have Apps and iTunes U, but that's because Apple doesn't have the legal rights to distribute music or movies in those markets. While perhaps some markets have been ignored, I bet that largely it's not because of a lack of trying. The groundwork for the iTunes Store has already been done in many cases. Every thing I've heard has presented the iTunes Store as targeted to be revenue neutral, designed to help drive sales of Apple hardware.
That is representative democracy in action.

I don't mind that more than 35% of the British people are represented in government.
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It is reasonable and practical to exclude opinions whose popularity is below some threshold from the government; otherwise the number of these insignificant opinions will make government an awful lot harder.
I ROL'd.

add.: oh come on, you bitter, sad downvoters.. this is good satire!
Uhmm, you may all want to brush up on your geopolitics and what "3rd world" means. Eastern Europe is and always was in the "2nd world" (the label that never stuck, just like "1st world").