skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Google already has "search engine sex", it's called revision control (although I really doubt this is what Krugman had in mind.) To solve Google's spam problem, they either need better business priorities or smarter engineers, depending on which popular explanation of Google's spam problem is accurate.

> And the most persuasive answer, as I understand it, is defense against parasites.

Probably more likely the general ability to merge in one generation two or more highly advantageous adaptations into one individual, which could include parasite defense but also everything else.
"I'd allow users to upvote or downvote their search results"
Google already did that.
But for some reason they were unable to efficiently use results of that project.
I think something is broken in Google's mid-management.
I'll definitely look into this. Sorry for making you you guys press hilarious keyboard combinations! I'm astonished you even figured out double-shift. =p
> The real answer is, the metrics are flawed.

Not sure what you're saying here. The metrics of karma, whether you like it or not, is what Hacker News is based off. It would be hard to say that we are discriminating against posts with less karma by not letting them be on the front page. However, the other metric system of the account's age is unrelated for the most part and therefore should not be a factor in most things.

> One of the more interesting ironies is the people claiming the quality is declining due to new users are actually new users

I'm not sure if this is entirely true. PG is an exception, but he doesn't speak for all of the early-adopter users.
I understand what you're saying, and I would never have claimed the same about Mint or Heroku (okay, I may have for YouTube).

I think your argument hinges on the square device being complex. Let me break down what's inside:

A piece of plastic, a single sensor, 2 wires, and a 3.5mm jack. That's not exactly "consumer electronics".

And yes there are consultant firms who could drive the entire production of this device, from design to production, for a large company that can't rally the internal resources.
I think the second issue mostly happens when things execute slowly (e.g. with a HDD bottleneck). So something takes focus, then something else completes and takes focus, etc. (I agree it’s terrible, just explaining what I think is happening!)
Next on the blogroll, "Social Networking Startups": A review of new bars in my area.
Another "strict parents" story, also coincidentally Asian: http://www.asiacarrera.com/bio2.html
It costs nothing to you and I to switch search engines. The cost is a lot greater for the kind of people who type URLs into Google's search field, to navigate the intertubes.
On the downside, I think you'll be disappointed with the bicycling situation in SF. Yes there are bike lanes, but it seems like automobile drivers are hellbent on murdering all bicyclists.

On the upside, if you like the outdoors, there are very few places in the U.S. that are more beautiful than northern California. (I think that Austin is the best place to run my company, but everywhere had tradeoffs.)
Google has plenty of great ideas. What they lack -- is execution in most of these projects.
For example, anti-spam efforts at blogger.com is a joke.
18% seems pretty low, but I'm on the west coast.
No, I do not believe in a strict order imposed by the hierarchy. My view, which I've come to through studying both Maslow's Hierarchy and Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration, is that you're able to operate at the highest level you've so far achieved during your lifetime, even if one of the lower levels is missing. For example, one who had all five levels fulfilled during childhood will be capable of self-actualization in later life even during periods of physical or fiscal insecurity.
this article screams of linkbaiting (I guess it worked, it got onto HN and I checked it out).

Author concludes that "Google needs sex" because cloning avoided parasites (not strictly true, but whatever) but then signs off with "I don't know what Google sex looks like".

Duh.
Wow. As of 9:12 PM Pacific time on 1/10/11, the '5-10 times a day' and '1-5 times a day' categories both have 247 points. Almost every time I've checked, they've been with in a few points of each other. For such a huge sample size, this is a surprise to me.
Here we see a search engine in his native habitat, foraging the fields of the world wide web for his sustenance, advertising targets. These beautiful lumbering beasts play an important part in the ecosystem, processing great quantities of flora and excreting them into little packets for the creatures further down the chain.

Master of his niche and with no natural predators, the mighty search engine's greatest threat is the ongoing habitat destruction by Mankind, as slash and burn development techniques replace the verdant fields of pages with cheap plastic knockoffs and gaudy littering, which the mighty search engine haplessly consumes, but grows fat and slow from gorging on the empty calories. If this practice is not soon ended, the search engines may have to be placed on the endangered species list.

But hark! What's that sound? A female search engine in the throes of heat has entered the clearing! Her mating call reaches deep into the soul of the male search engine... "ACK kwire! ACK kwire!" and the male must have her. He unfurls his spectacular page index count to impress the female, and truly this is a virile male, for his index count easily reaches into the trillions! A rare specimen indeed. The female is impressed and approaches the male to exchange their algorithmic details. Soon the deed is done and satiated, the male wanders off in disinterest. Soon four or five baby search engines will be born, each of which to thrive in the harsh environment of the web must eventually kill and consume their parents, a difficult feat that no baby search engine has accomplished in many years, but such is the harsh reality of the untamed wilderness.

Tune in next week when we'll follow the adventures of the cutest little baby search engine as he grows, encounters his first clickbot, and acquires his first distracting side business, all before facing his first mortal threat of acquisition by the trophy-seeking megacorporate hunter who wishes to gut the young search engine and turn it into the something to hang on his intranet to impress his fellow megacorporates.
Tell me about it. Was on a date last Friday and couldn't resist checking it when my lady friend checked her phone for the time. I showed her what I was reading and she was floored. Her attitude became far more amiable since she believed I was going to be the next Julian Assange. Thank you pg!

P.S. As a kid, I always dreamed of a secret online community where the world's smartest people gathered to discuss highly relevant and interesting subjects. When I saw Eliezer Yudkowsky reply to a post by Paul Buchheit, I knew I had found the promised land.

P.P.S. We need a poll that asks how many of us quit our jobs due to pg's work and/or HN. You'd have at least one vote from me :)
I doubt a 2011 Cadillac DTS is directly comparable to a 1980 Cadillac Sedan Deville. There's a lot more technology in a 2011, more advanced creature comforts, etc.

ie, if you were to make a car with the build quality and features (am/fm radio, etc) of a 1980 Cadillac, but with modern engineering and assembly, it'd probably be significantly less than $46,280. Especially if they could expect to sell in 1980-level quantities rather than today's.
Many comments can be made on the actual state of surveillance in many democratic countries...

These commenters can only comment on their perception. After all, perception is reality.

Many Chinese think life is grand, no idea about the level of examination their lives have.

Let us live our own lives as if everyone knew.

I'm very libertarian (private life should be private). But karma knows no bounds.
Remember that save points / levels were often a technical limitation
Andy Gavin, one of Naughty Dog's co-founders, posted on HN a few weeks back summarizing his work with Lisp (and GOAL) and how he's now moved to Ruby:

From the late 80s through the early 2000s Lisp was my language of choice.
The post author went through many of its advantages -- mostly true. I even
went so far as to write an entire compiler and environment (a
several man-year endeavor) to design two different runtime oriented
dialects called GOOL and GOAL used in 8 Naughty Dog Crash Bandicoot
and Jak & Daxter games. All 30-60 FPS action games -- 40 million copies
sold. All written in Lisp! (more or less)

Eventually, it was Ruby that got me off Lisp. It does most of what made
Lisp great, and the support factor is huge. There are clean standard
libraries for everything, the garbage collector is good (the one in ACL
is was so awful and dated -- I last used it in '07 -- you pretty
much had to turn it off.

I miss the S expressions and the macros. But you can do most macro like
things with a good block expression in Ruby, and you can even do
auto-generated macro like functions with strings. It just isn't
as elegant as Lisp.

The Ruby class system is a bit baroque, but it's actually
better in many ways than CLOS, which suffers from being too dated.
In Ruby you can do a lot of very cool things with extend and include.
It's just a slightly different way of thinking.

The implementation isn't the fastest, but it's good. The Lisp
implementations were all clunky and felt like 80s codebases.
Oh wait, they are.

Support. The rate of change in Ruby is 1000x that of Lisp.
Some new website has an API -- someone writes a Gem immediately.
In Lisp you don't even have a really standard networking library!

(from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1998321)
It's also worth noting that this isn't a Jewish or Chinese phenomenon, it's an immigrant thing. There isn't much Jewish immigration to the US anymore, and cultural divisions aren't as sharp. There is, on the other hand, still strong emigration from China, which is why this behavior is now thought of as a "Chinese" phenomenon.
The author is dead wrong about benefits of sex.
The key benefit of sex is the ability to preserve huge gene pool and try out multiple combinations.
The battle against parasites does not worth huge reproductive complexity that sex introduces.

On the other hand the author is right that Google is inefficient in fighting web spam.
That's nothing! When I were a lad, we ran our startup from Arrowtown in the heart of New Zealand's Southern Alps - and we still do!

www.schoolconferences.com
Why is that surprising? Those options have the same frequency.
While in recent times this might be true, I seem to recall AMD also beat Intel to 1Ghz, and I was not paying that much attention at the time, but I think they came with multi-core cpus around the same time if not a bit earlier than Intel.

Fusion also seems to be slightly ahead of the curve, but I follow all this stuff less and less so I'm not that familiar with the details of how exactly it compares to SandiBridge.
Right around level 27 or so these baddies come in that shoot probably 20 or so individual letters at once at you, and that's when things start getting a bit more interesting...
I think there was more going on there than just printing the money. For instance, the farms were going fallow, there were sanctions, etc, limiting supply of goods and driving up prices even without considering the money supply.
"I remember when motherboard makers were shipping wares in unmarked cardboard boxes like you got porn from behind the counter. "
Ah, the beginning of Intel's antitrust troubles.
Google Docs spreadsheet, one sheet per month, with shared write access. Easy to handle both recurring expenses and one-offs (hypothetical keg party, hypothetically broken window from hypothetical keg party). Also easy to factor in percentage shares -- we go based on relative income because some of us make 2x what others do, but we're redistributionists like that. Only downside is that people who aren't typical hyper-fastidious programmer types may accidentally mess with the formatting or formulas without realizing it.
What I really want is to get the data from the server and compare the poll response with the actual number for each user. As in, "you reported that you check 1-5 times, but you average 12.7 on work days."
AMD had intel flat beat on multi-core for a long while.
Not exactly. Depression killed her sister. She blames her mother for training her sister to hide that depression at all costs.

She may never know "why" the depression happened (as if there needs to be a reason) but unfortunately she probably has a pretty good idea of why her sister didn't turn to family for help.
Land of Lisp is focused on Common Lisp( and CLISP as environment of choice). As the author says in Chapter 1: "We'll be dipping our toes in some Arc and Clojure in the epilogue."

Bottom line: the book is a charming and quite solid introduction to Common Lisp.
If you want specifically a book for Clojure and only Clojure this is not the one.
> A not unrelated issue is the high rate of Asian American girls/women who refuse to date and marry Asian guys. It's so blindingly obvious as to why, I'm surprised anyone ever has to ask the question.

Y'know, I'm not so convinced that that's it. I think people of a different genetic background as ourselves are naturally appealing to some extent, but dating/marrying outside of any race is largely taboo. Asian woman/Caucasian man is socially acceptable right now, but I think a lot more of it is going to happen going forwards.

If China continues its ascendancy into an empire, I'd predict more Chinese man/Caucasian woman parings going forwards. The numbers already bare out that mixed race parings have been increasing at quite a high rate. With the skewed gender ratios, increasing Chinese wealth, and most likely international emergence of Chinese arts and culture and sex symbols... I think there's going to be a significant increase of Eastern European woman/Chinese man and Caucasian American/Chinese parings coming in the very near future.
Agreed.

myproj['**/*.rb'].search(/^\s*class/).lines.size

And they say perl looks like line noise. The ratio of ispunct to isalpha in that line is 2:3.
It does, just very slowly - later levels have words that fire other words at you. It's surprisingly fun. There's a lot of potential here for game mechanics like achievements, challenges, leveling up.
Great idea, but do we know for sure if pg has access to this data?
When working with teams what is the problem with just doing "git pull" and "git push". It seems this is more truthful, and merge commits are evidence of what is going on with the repo. Rewriting history might simply appear nicer in the log, but what is the point really?
ok, you won, Wellington is clearly less remote than Arrowtown. iWantMyName is based in NZ and we love it. I see the valley not as a requirement to be a successful startup "in the US".
Congrats & thank you for a great product & access to your API!

We're (http://sleep.fm) using it to wake up our users & speak whether their flight is delayed or on-time. THough I do wonder if things will change in regards to the the API?
Harness the power of Django third-party apps
/me reads wikipedia article

Huh. By the sound of it, they take the stance that violence against non-violence is a flat-out unjustifiable act, regardless of the consequences.

But on those grounds, can't you say the trolley is a violent enemy that must be stopped, so violent acts are justifiable? You certainly can't expect to cause violence only to the enemy, especially if you consider psychological violence to be violence (and why wouldn't it be? Torture is torture.). By causing violence only to the enemy, you may be causing psychological violence to any who happen to in the blast radius / capable of witnessing your violence, thus you are causing violence to them.

So it's a moral goal for a flawless world with no-one else in it. Of course, if the whole world were like this, then pushing someone in front of the trolley would be justifiable, because they would have not been justified in not throwing themselves in front of such a violent enemy, if they were aware and able to do so.

I don't buy it. Ideals are worthless if they can only exist in an impossible world.
Poll: Does the amount of time that you spend on HN hurt your productivity?
A follow-up to the poll posted earlier today (1/10/11): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2090191
This is for kingkilr, I accidentally downvoted you. Damn, my sloppy clumsy fingers. Really sorry. Could anyone upvote him to compensate please. And erm could pg increase the gap between the up and down arrows.

Was also going to comment that AMD beat Intel to the 64bit instraction set and it was Intel who had to play ctachup.
That's because average users don't vote on search results.
I guess the mass of people requesting we offer an API for goo.gl says otherwise.
See my comment on the parent post about downvote. I couldnt reply to you earlier as HN disables posting to downvotes for a while, I think.
As it turns out, it works pretty well with the latest IE9 Platform Preview, long as you switch IE's user-agent to one of the supported browsers. I think you're onto something though, because it does look less shiny in IE than in Chrome.
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Bump is YC09, for those who don't know.
What do they need that much money for? It's a simple contact sharing app. And how will they make money?

Foodspotting also got 3M today, for a simple photo sharing app that has no revenue model.

This bubble is very close to bursting. Too bad for those pension funds and university endowments.
The problem with the default git pull is that it treats every "give me what's up on the server" as a first class merge commit.

It adds a lot of noise to the commit history if you're trying to differentiate between "oh, this bug fix or feature was added into master/trunk/whatever" and "oh, that was just bob getting the lastest code from upstream"
I'd guess that the clickstream data can yield conclusions that are nearly as accurate as manual voting, if not moreso. It's not worth cluttering the interface for data with such low marginal value.
Yup.

But HN is sooooo fun, Dad...
I doubt it's just a contact-sharing app, I think they've branched out (or always intended?) to creating a generic platform for exchanging information with people standing next to you.
Those chips ran hot. I remember 40 degree celcius (104 F) summers with no AC, when I would compile the 2.4 version of linux kernel on my PC with its case removed. Those heat conducting pastes solved the problem eventually.
I think this is pretty cool. I've wondered what a ruby shell would look like. I don't "get" bash at all, but I find ruby very natural. I've gotten better at writing bash one-liners for basic sysadmin tasks, however anything more complicated is hopeless. I've found it easier to write chef scripts to automate any server task than using bash.

I'm no sysadmin, but I think you're doing it right as is. Scripting languages and DSLs like Chef are designed to be a better solution for those problems than shell scripts.

It's kind of funny, in a way. Perl was originally a scripting language for sysadmin tasks designed to replace shell scripts, that matured into a programming language, that influenced the Ruby programming language, from which we have a Ruby shell in which, presumably, we can write shell scripts again.
>I think they came with multi-core cpus around the same time if not a bit earlier than Intel.

My recollection is that Intel made it to the consumer market first, but did so in a kind of hacky manner. The original Pentium D was actually two dies on a single package, whereas the Athlon X2 was a multicore package with coherent cache from the start.

I believe AMD did beat Intel to the server market, but this is all from memory, so I can't say for certain.
> what is clear to many is that the sole object of adjusting these knobs in not to make the results pages more relevant.

You're implying there is a sole objective. There isn't. And if there was one, it would most certainly be to maximise relevancy.
The first example is made excessively complicated as well (why not just grep -c)?

"grep -c" is great if you know it. The problem is it's a trick which only works for grep, and learning and keeping track of all of these tricks for every tool you use is a real pain. Never mind that "grep -c" will never be as flexible as wc.

It's more reliable to follow the Unix philosophy:

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together.
I am a western (Brazilian-American) living in China.

All this drilling and tests may sound crazy, but I do think it teaches an important value that is missing in the west's education: discipline

My wife is a teacher. She taught kids in the US (California) and here in China. One difference is that in the US a huge amount of her preparation time is spent on making lessons interesting to students, otherwise they disconnect. In China she is more focused on the lesson's subject matter, rather than tweaking the lesson for entertainment / attention value.

True, Chinese education does not value creativity or self-expression like in the west (and Chinese students are aware of that). But the lack of discipline is not the way to go IMO.

Jean Hsu's post is wonderful, by the way.
I wonder if this is partly due to these families growing their kids in a "foreign" country - Chinese in the US, Jews elsewhere.

These families feel their kids have to compete with the natives and may be at a disadvantage initially.

Once you get the safety of feeling at home -- this sort of behavior tends to disappear (Japan being the exception here.)
I came across http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan when I was reading about Japan on Wikipedia. It led me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_society which says that the high suicide rate may be attributed to the societal structure. These societies set high standards for individuals and that may result in high performance from the society but, at the same time, may depress under-achievers to such an extent that people commit suicides.
This is so amazing! Now I realize the power of html5!
What I meant by "the metrics are flawed" is, how you personally evaluate
the reputation of another user is a personal choice based on very
limited and potentially deceptive input. Additionally, how the system
itself evaluates reputation of a particular user, article or post is
also imperfect.

Only part of the algorithms for evaluating reputation are revealed in
the HN source code [1] but other parts are not public. PG has stated HN
runs with some of his own personal, unpublished modifications for the
sake of preventing people from gaming an imperfect system.

The up/down vote and 'flagging' feedback from users is important input,
and does help the system more fairly evaluate things. Since the
vote/flag input is from human beings basing their decisions on
incomplete information and personal preferences, you can see how the
system will remain imperfect.

A good example is below I cracked a joke about divulging PG's secret to
success being talking to himself in a soundproof closet... --the
downvote I got tells me someone didn't find it funny. Such is life.

On the bright side, if you can think of a way to avoid the imperfections
in a reputation evaluation system, you could make millions, and you
would certainly have PG's attention. It's a painfully difficult problem
to crack, potentially undecidable, so even a better imperfect solution
would be extremely valuable.

[1] http://www.arclanguage.org/