skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I hate reading them...but they're essential if you're looking into something controversial (which may not be evident if you don't know the subject already) and you're worried about the accuracy of the current page.

Some of the edit wars are mildly disturbing - it's like this nice social consensus on the topic page, but the history pages seethe with bitterness and resentment. A rather unpleasant reflection of our society and psychology, in a lot of cases :-/
Here's a TC article from this Spring that discusses some of Xmarks monetization efforts:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/07/xmarks-begins-monetizing-bo...
I think you missed the humor.
Well waiting for your computer to respond can be really frustrating. Having to finish typing something isn't so bad. For me anyway. So it'll help, but for such a huge infrastructure overhaul, is it really worth it?
Serious question, have you tried looking in the teen/young adult section? I think the biggest size there is around a 28".
You've really hit the nail right on the head for exactly what I've been feeling some sort of odd, decentralized anxiety about for a while.

While reading your comment I realized that was the problem. Google kinda sucks now because of people gaming the system.

But who else is out there? I'd probably switch my search if I knew where else to try.
We have been using OpenVPN to secure one of our Rackspace servers dedicated to development for the last couple of years. We also have ejabberd running on that box (just talking to the vpn interface). It works great for distributed development and the internal secured jabber IMs are great for transferring sensitive stuff like passwords between remote folks. We also have a persistent conference room for a shared "watercooler".

The main problem we have is key management. Does anyone know of a good admin app for generating, storing and revoking keys?
The point is that merely decreasing but not eliminating the ability of prostitutes to find customers will increase the power of the most larger, more exploitative operators but not eliminate the phenomena.

We can see a similar pattern in the drug trade. Illegality creates large, monstrous cartels when it doesn't eliminate demand. For example, the semi-legal pot growers in California aren't great but they are much better than the Mexican cocaine cartels (murdering 100's of people at a time last I heard...).
Steve doesn't take into account the amount of people that will actually make it through their search term entirely. Is there data somewhere on how often users click on suggestions as opposed to writing out the term in its entirety?

Even so, Google will still rank sites based on SEO and will in turn use that to suggest terms when users are typing. This just means that it's even more important to be the top result for a given search term.
Bing Instant? : http://www.istartedsomething.com/livesearch/
I like:

- community, of course;

- minimal design.

I dislike:

- only total score for comments (no up-votes vs down-votes);

- no folding;

- no tagging;

- no way to "watch" discussions or comments;

- "More" link at the bottom of each page expires (thus you have to start from front-page again, not nice if you read HN not that often);

- no way to join discussions whenever someone find duplicates;

- no contributions section (searchyc.com (which seems abandonware, btw), pages with best discussions by topic, etc.).

EDIT: I dislike HN not being able to format an item list.
You can use the right arrow for 'I'm feeling Lucky'.
My main problem with .NET-derived stuff is not the availability of the source or your ability to ship products with source derived from it, but rather the risk of Microsoft deciding one day that anyone who uses their patented technologies should pay licensing fees. Their community promise only covers the bare ECMA standard, something, AFAIK, this is not part of.
Tired of synchronous file uploading in FF, Chrome & Safari?
Gates Foundation Acknowledges Flaws in Report
This change has the brilliant side-effect of coaxing users to give more specific descriptions of what they are searching for.

Before instant search, a search term was sufficient if it brought up the desired result in the first page or two, but now users will continue typing until the page they are looking for appears in the first two or three results.

Google could (for example) use this info to come up with better descriptions for subsets of ambiguous searches, improving the relevance of search suggestions.
Syntactic flexibility and programming language survival
Oh you're right about that. What may not be entirely obvious though is that oftentimes 1 query can be far slower than 3 queries. In a lot of cases, that one query would have to do joins against multiple tables– I've personally seen speedups of 20x or more by just decomposing a single complex query into a few smaller and more focused queries.
It's hard enough to find well-fitting clothing when you can try it on. I'm not going to be ordering over the net anytime soon.
Great post but note that the total complexity/LOE of adding that feature would be significantly reduced if (1) it was delivered earlier in the app's lifecycle (less users, simpler code, lower expectations, less/no customers, etc), and/or (2) quality/UX standards were relaxed somewhat.

I agree that even a seemingly simple feature can be hard to deliver, but on the flip side there are dials a developer can turn to adjust his LOE up or down as desired. Tradeoffs as always.
37signals don't use sharding. They use one database server with enough RAM to load the db into memory
Ask HN: 9to5/Consulting/Startup, where are/were you most happy?
I realize that HN is the place for startups and living the dream. Sometimes it's not a happy dream, so I ask, "Where were you most happy?"
In the same vein, I highly recommend the article "How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?". This was features in Joel Spolsky's "The Best Software Writing 1" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590595009?ie=UTF8&tag=...).

Link to article: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2003/10/28/53298...
I love the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra but I wish it wasn't so obsessively focused on classical music.

What's wrong with such a wish? It's not like I'm going to picket in front of YC's offices.

Regardless, would you be willing to move to a fork of HN?
Is your argument that the dynamics of the sex trade are the same as that of the drug trade? Because I don't believe you. I don't even believe that most prostitution is driven by organized crime. I don't think you can point to any prohibition of any item and say "that's going to work just like the drug trade", unless you're prepared to argue that we should all be allowed to buy Stinger missiles.
no - but I thought a really good example was when I typed in HAHA and saw that one of the options presented was:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I clicked on it because it was so much funnier than the rest of them.

Turns out: affiliate link.

Or some sort of americanized japanese dating porn or something ... couldn't really tell.

Still. I definitely agree that it completely changes the SEO game.
How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?
Because they could help shape the next generation of creators and innovators?
Firefox 4 Beta 5 Resembles Google Chrome Again
Maybe to duckduckgo.com ?
Even in right-to-work states, public sector jobs (like teachers) may practically require union membership, and the conditions of work are largely dictated by union negotiating/political influence.
Well, 2 comments and we're 1 for 2 so I guess my 50% figure was right on.

I'll respond with a couple more questions: Do you place a value on increasing future "creation and innovation" by doing a good job of educating kids? If they learn exclusively from mediocre, by-the-book personalities, do you think that helps or hurts the "creation and innovation" parts of their brains?
In simple terms, HN becomes a secondary brain for me. And that saves me time.

I could have saved a lot of words by just saying this :)
Tip: load iTunes U videos as 'Photos'
On the iPhone and iPod Touch, videos captured with the camera go in the 'Photos' app. When viewed, you can get a timeline of thumbnails, helping to navigate in the clip.

You can load other videos this way as well, including iTunes U videos or WWDC videos. The thumbnails may be useful in finding the right point in a class or series of slides.

Just import them into your device using the Photos tab in iTunes.
I've always wanted to play with this. I think it was used for the dubiously useful "Windows Sideshow" gadgets that were briefly pushed when Vista came out.

From what I remember it was briefly licensed to third parties but was never commercially successful. I'm really glad it was open sourced instead of being killed entirely. If nothing else would be great to use in some educational settings.

One technical caveat: it's called the ".NET Micro Framework" which implies it's language-neutral (like the rest of .NET) but it's actually interpreted and understandably only supports C#.
My opinion is that this is a challenge to Microsoft. "So you want to compete in search, well match this! See whether your server infrastructure can hold up!"

Having used the feature for a while, what I've found is that I basically don't finish typing. I just stop when I have good enough results. At first I found it annoying, but after I got used to it I found it very nice. Now I find myself annoyed that it isn't built into chrome's search bar.
Art history. That's where all the girls are. Speaking from experience, here.
Speed Bumps of the Future: Creepy Optical Illusion Children
Researchers Successfully Translate Brainwaves Into Words
It also underlies much of the Obama admin's Head Start initiative.

Of course, things like that are a lot harder to mandate from the federal level. You have to get into things like measurement and (opinion here) most of the really important things about teaching are very hard to measure.
Actually, I do see a correlation between pizza size and pant-waist size.
While I agree that the current Craiglist's predicament is unpleasant, what is it about that "First they came for ..." thing?
The task is no more complicated than it was before. I've seen no evidence that conclusively shows Craigslist had a positive or negative effect here (most seem to take it for granted that Craigslist is a positive or negative force.)

Generally it looks like Craigslist was making enforcement easier by providing a centralized repository of everyone's actions.
I agree with you and the parent, and just want to point out that I did say that PG was helping shift the balance of power. I think having someone with power and money and influence in the valley who consistently demonstrates that hungry startups can build great things with almost no money must have some kind of effect.
I agree that Hacker News shouldn't shift its focus. However, I also think the gp post has a good point that it would be nice to see a wider variety of topics (although I'd prefer it to be a separate community). Is there another Hacker News-like site that has the same quality of discussion?

Edit: fixed its.
Is Auto-Complete Optimization something SEOs already focus on? For example, trying to get the keywords they rank well on placed relatively higher in an auto-complete list for Google, Bing, etc?
I wonder what the price will be (per CPU)?
A related issue that I don't see addressed in the comments is the trade off between salary, opportunity cost, and equity. If there are two founders, one who could earn $150k, and the other who could earn $50k, should the former always get three times the latter in compensation, given equal commitment? If there is no salary in a bootstrapped startup should one get three times the equity (or at least some portion of allocation)? If both have the same market salary, but one has greater need, should the one be paid more? Should they in consequence get less equity?

All difficult questions I don't have an answer for.
Many online clothing stores offer a liberal return policy to allow you to try them on.
So you are looking for a UX, Dev and Design person in one? This is very very tough. Three tough disciplines that are hard to find in one single person.
This seems true for all social media sites; use it to your advantage.
i'll try it for a week and see how it feels. :)
You mean, "First they came for the sex traffickers, and I said nothing, because I agreed that the sex trade is bad and that making it more expensive and riskier was a worthy use of my tax dollars"?

Next you'll tell me that they're coming for the car stereo fences.
Fascinating topic - lots of startup talk is fun because you get to do things from scratch, but this is very pertinent to the Real World.

In terms of "standing still in the market", I think the incremental rewrite contains a lot of that too, no? It's just spread over more time. You're still rewriting it, and during that time, you're not adding new features. An example might be retrofitting some testing code to a system that's never had test code. That could potentially be a fair amount of work, and given a constant pool of resources, it will take time away from "new stuff". Just that it's not so much of a quantum leap - you can still drop your new testing code and go implement some must-have feature if you need to, without saying you have to wait for the whole thing to be ready.

Sadly though, my experience in this is that the reason there's a ball of mud in the first place is a political/social one, so that any "dead time" is frowned upon.
I've been in business for 5 months and I pay myself $0.
Stop Lying On Your Resume
The Internet in general does make it much easier to engage in "victimless crimes". That is not going to change unless a truly massive level of repression is imposed. I would oppose such an effort.

The situation is a signal that society needs to find a different means to deal with the problems like child-trafficking than making prostitution in general illegal.

And I certainly do expect law enforcement to accommodate - law enforcement works for me, meaning society in general, last I hear.
How Google Instant Could Kill Your AdWords Campaigns
$25 was a couple days worth of lunch money in the 70s?
That seems to be inherent in the social news set up. Is there any way to account for the time an article was submitted and keep the front page fresh?
What you refuse to see, is your worst trap
My friends' startup is tackling this issue for shoes, using lasers: http://shoefitr.com/

The interface is really, really well done, check out their sample page: http://shoefitr.com/mock_checkout.php and click 'let Shoefitr help you choose the right size.'
The strategy you usually take with scaling a relational database is sharding, partitioning and de-normalization. And given that Basecamp has millions of users I don't imagine their database structure to be pretty or normalized.

This said, if they have their database sharded by project_id then it would not be that big an issue, but it can be that their database structure is very complex or messed up...
I'm not inclined to brush aside the union issue as you do, but you do make a good point about the increased competition from other professions.

Perhaps less-skilled entrants to the profession are more vocally supportive of a union than those who are confident in their individual ability to excel. Even in right-to-work states, that would create selective social pressure which would make entry to the profession less attractive to those with a competitive mindset. An old friend of mine who tried teaching elementary (in CA) for 3-4 years before leaving in frustration said she was willing to tolerate the pay and pecking order that was in place, but it was the attitudes of the older teachers which she really struggled with.
User Experience Books for Beginners
In my experience, it's already a problem. When I'm shopping online with a brand whose fit I don't know, I order everything in medium and large and then return the size that fits less well. I'd imagine most online clothing stores have sky-high return rates.

I don't think many brands would want to do this, but it would help if they had a chart showing how their fit compares to other brands. E.g. "much looser than Dolce & Gabbana, looser than Calvin Klein, tighter than Gap".
Mozilla Corporation, obviously.
Google is a large company. I’m pretty sure that they have a lot of people working on search quality.

This seems like a popular fallacy (Does it have a name?), probably a result of anthropomorphising companies. It’s hard for a human to solve more than one problem at once and if they do they have naturally less time for each problem.

Sure, there can be similar effects in companies but it’s certainly not inevitable, not as inevitable as with humans, anyway. We just don‘t know whether improvements in search quality suffered because of this new feature. It doesn’t strike me as something search quality people would typically work on, though.
Ask HN: How did your startup get traction?
How did your startup get traction? How might we get traction given the details below? (I realize what worked for you might not work for us given certain differences.) What worked for you and why did it work particularly well given your business?

Our website has a modestly useful application that provides results that are slightly better than our well-known competitors. Our results are MUCH better than what an average consumer would get on their own without using us or our competitors.

Customers have offered very strong testimonials after using our service, invoking the name of God or saying that we're lifesavers. Improvements we've made for some of them have been very dramatic.

We are not well known (wouldn't be surprised if you never heard of us), but we have been mentioned in the news (like NYTimes, WSJ, Reader's Digest) in print, on TV, in blogs. We've won a few awards in our industry (like a Best-Of-[year] at an annual industry conference).

Our service is something you'd only personally use one or two times now, and then maybe it would be several months or years before you'd be in a situation to use it again. This might be the biggest challenge facing us. Getting traction seems easier for a site that you'd check every day like facebook or HN.

Because the use of our service depends on whether it applies to your situation, we are offering something that is only applicable to maybe 5% of the general population at any given moment.

The industry is boring. It takes less than 10 seconds or 2 sentences to say what we do, but it isn't something people enjoy talking about. I'm trying to come up with some similar industry for you to imagine -- maybe going to the dentist or refinancing your mortgage.

Edit (reason: collating details relevant to my company's situation here for new readers' convenience) One problem is that some portion of this 5% don't even know that our kind of thing can be done in their situation. But every time I go on a random forum and ask people if they know it can be done, all the smarty-pants reply and say Yeah-I-Already-Knew-That. I mean ... who's going to admit ignorance, really?

Many thanks in advance! (Tis my first post so apologies if I screwed up anything.)
Does anyone really thinks Google is too slow?
You don't have a hypothesis, you have an unfalsifiable conjecture that maybe women have some mysterious natural disinclination that you leave undefined and then conclude there's no problem.
I don't think I'm the Renaissance Man, I have just enough time to be good at what I'm already doing.
why on earth would I teach at those rates when I can be an engineer?)

Because you might enjoy working reasonable hours, 2 extra months of vacation, 10 extra years of retirement, tenure and defined benefit pensions? You might (like most teachers) also not be smart enough to become an engineer?

As for that half of the country trying to bring teacher pay down to market rate, why are they are problem? Why should teachers get paid above-market rates at taxpayer expense?
We don't "need" it, but taking Google's stats at face value for the moment, it will save 350 million hours per year. That's not insignificant.
I'm in a similar situation to you. I'm skinny and also short. This might explain why I noticed that shirts I found at The Gap seemed to fit better (were smaller) than ones I found at Old Navy.
Graphing Bach
Annoyingly busy. I sort of feel like this is a prime example why you don't put engineers in charge of UI. Just because we can is not a good enough reason to do it.

Also, having both a dropdown and a whole page refresh, what?
Offline: What does it mean and why should I care?
You should post some info about your product. When you're pitching to top-notch developers, you're basically "applying" to them, not the other way around.
Heck, we have truth in labeling for monitor and TV sizes, so why not pants?
Ohh, I see, blue = unencrypted. That makes sense, thanks. So there really isn't any gain over using SSH with private key authentication with this?
The fact that it's not built into Chrome's search bar means that I will never see it after the 5 minutes I just spent playing with it. I've been searching from my browser, whether Chrome or Firefox, for a long time now.
If you think prostitution is victimless, you and I will just have to agree to disagree, just as I agree to disagree with people who think abortion is murder.

Law enforcement should accomodate the will of the people. It should not blindly accomodate the will of the market and the progress of technology. Markets are good, technology is good, but neither are great drivers of public policy.

If you're right about prostitution, change the law. Unlike newspaper classifieds, the legislative process did not become irrelevant when craigslist caught on.
Same story, different source, no comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1671103
If you comment on the time-sink nature of HN you should at least mention the noprocrast option.
IMO, this change is a little distracting and annoying as far as my searches go.
Putting that aside, a question that arises is how will this affect the user in terms of accessibility and screenreaders.. usually autofocusing to fields is not encouraged as far as accessibility is concerned.
Thats very interesting. Thanks!
I apologize.

My take was that the job of running a 30 person company was being equated with running Enron. Actually, someone who can successfully run a 30 person company is worth more.
Some more tips:

- Proper clothing (e.g. dry fit) which helps sweat evaporate faster

- Using a more efficient road bike if you're currently riding a mountain/hybrid bike

- Pedaling at a lower gear, and higher cadence

- Properly inflated tires

- A bag with mesh back support, so your back doesn't get all sweaty.
It's just an asynchronous load of data, so I don't see why Chrome couldn't leverage it as well. Might lead to some interesting UI, actually.
Market rate isn't "what yummyfajitas thinks they should be paid", and it's not "what the 80 year old nuns down the street get paid". You'll find most charters pay higher than public schools for an equivalent amount of experience (public schools have a lot of 30 year veterans on the payroll, charters not so much).

Anyways, if you're looking for talent, then market rate is the rate required to lure in talent from other industries. You can probably pay a little less because people like the idea of being a teacher, but it can't be egregiously less, which is what it is right now - what would I make as a first year or fifth year math teacher?
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Because the math is easier for suppliers who don't want make change.
Is Cloud Computing / SaaS a wonder drug with nasty side effects?
How long do you think it will be until there are plugins giving you the same feature in Firefox and Chrome?