skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My favourite prank was by College Humor's Streeter, tricking his friend Amir into thinking he'd made a half-court shot for prize money:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI7AUgp5fPI

If by some chance you haven't seen this video before, watch for his reaction after the giant cheque is presented - it's priceless.
how much does Zuck still own of FB ? I read 25% percent somewhere, is that true ? Hes almost up with the google guys in terms of net worth then.
wow! this will be the first thing that I am going to read on 'my' "new" kindle :)
Seeking Wisdom
The Social Web Index- All-Time Highs in Pressure and Price and Shame on Facebook
There's one thing you can do pre-emptively that'll help: if using a CMS of any kind, use it to build your content as static HTML wherever possible. Dynamic content sucks when your wee Athlon box is trying to field 100 requests per second.

(My blog's currently quiet, fielding no more than 15,000 http requests per hour at any time this year so far(!), although it's been more than an order of magnitude above that in the past month. Srsly, unless you've got massive clustering mojo you are not going to be handling that load gracefully unless you're serving static content.)
Redis site now implements interactive examples with embedded live Redis cli
Why did you kill the cupcaking submission?
It didn't seem very dirty and now I can't make a witty comment.
Really? I thought some of the other pranks in that serious were more impressive than that one. And the stakes seem to keep getting higher...
Thanks to Pieter Noordhuis (that started from the work of Alex McHale in try.redis-db.com) for implementing this awesome thing.

I hope other sites will follow this approach of a "live" documentation where the user can type commands. This makes a lot of sense for dynamic programming languages as well.
Indeed, while CIA ain't that smart or capable like some people believe (aliens? flying saucers? mind controlled drones?), they are also not as moronic and bureaucratic as others believe. They probably are significantly bureaucratic as any organization of their scale is - or they are constantly stepping on their own toes.

What I really wanted to add is - that most of their (and other intelligence agencies round the world) agents are not tall muscular black shaded gorillas like you see in movies.

In US case they're the diplomats, they might be 3rd party governmental officials, or indeed your university professor.
Great submit to HN: not because of the money stuff but because of this great visualization. Me thinks, to emulate and try to produce such great data visualization for our users, that's our best investment plan.
As others have pointed out, my post came across as overly harsh and condescending. To balance this out slightly, I'd like to point out that I found out about your article not via HN, but via my RSS reader, since I follow your blog! Keep up the good posts! (the ones for which I subscribed!)
He has hit the front page of Google for 'facebook login help'.
Maybe off topic but could you explain what the correct caching headers should be for a case like this?
How about if it was keyed on i/1000 instead of i<1000? Would that still be a hidden conditional?
IMHO the colors are somewhat misleading.
Since the data have already been corrected for taxes and inflation positive returns are net-positive and should be green. In the original picture even 0-3% returns were red.

This is what it looks after shifting all the colors one step towards green:

http://imgur.com/KqU1B
Does anyone know how inflation was adjusted?
VOIP news portal Voipsurf.com  launched
portal provide New & Technology update about VOIP , Unified communications ,mobile VOIP , VOIP security.
Sure, but heads up limit has very little strategy compared with tournament no limit, which is what the pros tend to play.

Likewise, I understand Go has been completely solved on a 5x5 board, but Go bots rarely beat professionals even with several stone handicaps.
Thought 1 - but doesn't that mean you immediately run up against the halting problem? Surely we could create a type representing Program, and a function 'halts'. No compiler is going to be able to tell us which programs halt.

Thought 2 - Aha, is this the reason why the language isn't turing complete, so we KNOW that we never run into that difficulty? In other words, the language is constrained somewhat so that we can do these dependent types, because we can then guarantee there's always some calculation the compiler can do ahead of time to ensure all cases will work.
> Put a few guards behind bars and maybe the others will stop allowing cellphones?
>
> You'd think seeing how horrible prison is would encourage the guards to follow the law themselves.

It didn't work for the prisoners (many of whom are return customers), why would it work for the guards?
Although my Loom server code is completely standalone and does not use Apache, I'll take this opportunity to discuss Keep-Alive policy since the article mentions it.

The Loom server automatically scales down the Keep-Alive interval as the server load increases. Each child process monitors its own life span, basically like this:

# These parameters are configurable.

my $max_children = 128;
my $min_life = 10; # seconds
my $max_life = 600; # seconds

# Now compute the lifespan.

my $num_children = get_current_number_of_child_processes();
my $free_slots = $max_children - $num_children;

my $cur_life = int($max_life * ($free_slots / $max_children));
$cur_life = $min_life if $cur_life < $min_life;

At this point $cur_life is the maximum number of seconds this child process should live. If the child has been alive that long or longer, it voluntarily exits.

An instance of this server code is running at https://loom.cc . You can find the source code via the News page at https://loom.cc/news . The relevant function is Loom::Sloop::Client::check_lifespan .
How Bad Design choices destroy the web?
As you all know Design to the point is essential in Graphic/Web Design, here is an article for you, what would happen if you chose Bad Design, so it will destroy the web. Very useful and informative Article.
I just don't understand the problem that Google is having. Why can't they simply penalise sites/domains that are full of rubbish? Or manually boost domains and sites that aren't.

The lack of innovation in search worries me - there are big commercial incentives for Google's results to be poor. Though the emergence of viable alternatives will change this.

I'm sure I read that the average revenue per search was $0.08 or something around that mark. At that level it's worth having some human intervention. Perhaps Yahoo had something after all!
It is almost as if a dam has cracked and we are seeing the first trickles of "Google sucks lately" stories. It is increasingly becoming an arms race - Google tweaks its algorithms to defeat SEO, Spam and other Gamers and the gamers tweak their tactics to outwit Google's tweaks.
Anybody else see an opportunity in this phenomenon to supplant algorithmic search with curated search?
Silly, how could they possibly find time to learn HTTP when they have to keep up with at least three blogs of mountebank victory bloggers in addition to learning the latest Drupal plugin?
Plan 9 compose sequences under X
Best Facebook developer
That is exactly my point, why develop for WP7 if you can work with the technologies you want for other platforms which also have a higher userbase?

However I suspect that some of the titles from companies such as EA or Gameloft are still written in C++ even though it is not supported officially by Microsoft. It is highly likely that they have some kind of early access to native code compilation for the platform.
RHCE - The real deal
Standards matter, but differ between platforms and even distributions.

Ruby is not—and should not be—beholden to any single distro's particular oddities. Adaptable, yes; broken on other platforms because of, no.
> If the Epigram is not Turing complete, then what kind of programs cannot be expressed in it?

I think one quick answer for questions like this is "an interpreter for $LANGUAGE". The reason is that, for a language in which all programs terminate, a type-checked program is a proof that the algorithm terminates. Thus, an interpreter for $SOMEPL in $LANGUAGE is a proof that there is an interpreter for $SOMEPL that terminates on all input.

If $SOMEPL is $LANGUAGE, you get a Goedel/Halting-problem problem.

This is all, of course, assuming that "interpreter" means "function taking as input a valid program and outputting some finite data containing its normalized form". If you define an interpreter to just be a function that performs one step of evaluation, you can get away with it.
No. Haskell has type safety which was never intended to be included in Lisp. On the other hand, Lisp has the s-expression syntax which allows for usable compile-time macros. Neither language is a subset of the other.

How useful type checking and macros are in creating real-world software is not a question I've seen answered well. Smalltalk-style languages (Python, Ruby) don't really practice either.
The lack of support for multiple installed versions of the same package is a major failure of dpkg and rpm.

Have a look at NixOS for a different approach to the problem.
Don't. Edsger Dijkstra once wrote:

The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.

I'm not sure I'd go quite that far in describing PHP since it actually does have most of the facilities of a modern programming language. I will say that it isn't a good choice for learning the basics of programming, for reasons that are more cultural than technical.

A large amount of the example code that can be found around the net in PHP is less than exemplary relative to what's typical for other languages. To make matters worse, the language itself has a large number of inconsistencies and bad practices in its design. It feels like something that has built up over the years a hack at a time with no coherent design philosophy behind it because, if I understand the history right, that's about how it happened. While many real-world systems are like that, it should be your goal as a programmer to avoid it.

What do you want to get out of learning PHP? Maybe we can suggest some alternatives.
Why can't "apt-get install redmine" do what you suggest behind the scenes?
With the amount of cash they have in the bank, it would behoove them to spend a little on human oversight to protect their reputation as the go-to search site.
> For any given Haskell Compiler I would think that I can construct a program where the Haskell Compiler won't be able to determine, in polynomial time, whether the list has length 0 or not.

Ok, sure, but in total languages (that is, languages in which all functions are total), compilers generally don't just continue running if they can't figure out that some list you've applied "head" to is non-empty. They generally exit with a type error, complaining that you haven't proven that your list is non-empty.
Well, index funds are lauded over choosy stock-picking for providing on an average similar returns without the hassles of active portfolio management. I have never heard anyone arguing that index fund strategy ensures consistency of returns year after year.
"World's Greatest Prank"

Quite a hyperbole for a prank few have heard of and which was fairly limited in scale.

If I had to name one prank that had great impact and that is still famous around the world, it'd be Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which at the time had the entire nation riled up, believing that aliens were taking over the world.

http://www.paleycenter.org/the-greatest-halloween-prank-ever
the problem with curated search the first time around was that it was too hard to keep up. your curated index invariably fell behind. yahoo started out as a curated index of the internet and eventually went to algorithmic search because they couldn't keep up and that was in the 90s. i don't see how anyone could even conceive of keeping up now.

perhaps you mean something more like the zero click search that duck duck go has?
This is really just a rehash of other posts from the last month (linked in article).

This post basically complains about two things: the finer points of SEO and content farms.

Content farms is an easy one. They're the Web equivalent of spam and I'm talking about the likes of Associated Ontent and Demand Media. They re a relatively new (last few years) phenomenon.

My personal view is that no one is better placed to deal with this new threat than Google. Email spam is basically a solved problem on Gmail. Thats not ss there aren't false positives and negatives but it's oohing like it used to be or could be. It'll take time but I believe that content farms are a transitory and doomed business model.

As for product searches, this encompasses many things. Anecdotally I recently searched for "<camera make and model> review" and found what I wanted no problem. Prices I found on pricegrabber (they have an iPad app).

SEO is a trickier beast. For one it's a constantly moving target. A combination of suboptimal source SEO and content farm SEO gaming allows the scrapers to survive. I can't say that keyword position matters all that much. Anecdotally Jeff claims it does but many factors are at pay so it's always best to be careful about making absolute claims.

Jeff claims not to want to be acquired. I'm reminded of a story I heard. Basically: if you wanted money (from angels) ask for advice. If you wanted advice, ask for money (IIRC this story came from either Mark Suster or Jason Calacanis, can't remember).

So, if you want to be acquired, say you don't?

Lastly, I'll reiterate my own opinion that social search isn't the answer in the general case (ie it will have specific use cases).

Content curation is a mixed bag. I believe there will (for at least a very long time) be a place for niche verticals. For example, dpreview is a vertical for cameras. General purpose models like Mahalo I think are doomed for much the same reason that Jeff and Joel have contended that general Q&A sites are doomed.
> Often, these turn out to be incorrect programs or programs without a good structure/architecture.

Then this critique would apply to most - all? - Erlang programs too ;-)
The idea of building up by having something that prints 5, and then using that to build a print 25, and so on, is good.

That then inspires another question: given a function, foo(), that we wish to call exactly 1000 times, what is the way to do it in the least amount of code given that we are only allowed the following:

1. calling foo().

2. defining new functions, whose bodies consist entirely of calls to previously defined functions or to foo.

3. calling those new functions.

For computing amount of code, let's take it as 1 line per function call, and 1 line per function defined.

So, for example (in pseudocode):

function foo_50
foo
foo
...
foo

foo_50
foo_50
...
foo_50

where there are 50 foo's in foo_50, and 20 calls to foo_50, would be a program of length 71. Breaking it down by powers of two:

function foo_2
foo
foo

function foo_4
foo_2
foo_2

...

function foo_512
foo_256
foo_256

foo_512
foo_256
foo_128
foo_64
foo_32
foo_8

would have length 33.

Is that the best we can do? How about for a general N? How about writing a program that given N writes the optimal program in the above form for N?
"Haskell has type safety which was never intended to be included in Lisp."

Racket has a dialect with static types.
http://docs.racket-lang.org/ts-guide/
Do you have experience in another language or is this your first? Any CS knowledge?
Gratuitous differences between Debian and the upstream installation layout are REALLY ANNOYING. It breaks all sorts of online documentation and means Debian users have to deal with unnecessary compatibility bugs.
Yeah, I found Youtube videos very helpful as well. If you know where to look, you can find Lynda.com videos around too..
> There are times when you wish you had dynamic typing, but this is usually a fault of the type system and there are better answers than ripping the type system out entirely, once you ascend to a mathematical way of looking at it.

Indeed. Having a static typed language means that you are tied to a single static-typing system. OTOH, I guess you could apply different type checkers to the same dynamically-typed program.
Email spams basically a solved problem on Gmail

I don't want to move the discussion away from web spam, but I disagree with your statement. I have email for several domains hosted on Google (as well as a regular Gmail address) and they all suffer from legitimate emails regularly going into the spam folder. A quick search has shown that I'm not the only one suffering from this problem.
Lately, I've been exploring the theory that too many Google employees exist:

Thousands of highly motivated employees attempt to expand their resumes + make an impact -> blind expansion of site features + sources of ad revenue -> loss of company character + restraint

Once the profit appears, no one dares to backtrack.

Does that make sense, or am I just speculating?
I think this contributes to an ongoing trend and even bigger threat for google. The way we access the content of the web isnt the same way it was back in 2000. Back then a search engine was your only starting point for the web. Now a growing part part of redirects comes thru in some way curated (mostly social) channels. The poor search results will only increase this trend.
What happens if other sites are scraping content faster than Google can crawl it? In these cases, will Google really be able to guess which site is the original? For all they know, SO is scraping a lot of its content from other sites.

If this kind of uncertain-originator is any part of the problem, one solution might be for Jeff to temporarily block robots other than google/bing/etc. from retrieving new content, until say, ten minutes later. This gives the search engine a chance to figure out who the original is, while still (I think) remaining within the spirit of CC-SA. A Google API call (I'm high reputation, please crawl this new page now!) might be even better.

edit: clarified API suggestion.
I'm a noob regarding investing, so bear with me if I use incorrect terms or kick open doors that are already open etc. but if my interpretation of this graph is correct, it also offers some guidelines for investing in funds (not individual companies):

1) from the visual it seems to me that the starting year is the most relevant. If you start in a good year, it will mostly turn out right, regardless whenever your end (exceptions aside, for which see point 2). If you start in a bad year it will mostly work out badly unless you really have some time to spare or manage to run into a very rare occasion (e.g. starting in 1947 and ending in the mid 1950's). But that's just from the visual, which can be very misleading, so the raw data points would be interesting to do some statistic exercises. If that holds true though, it could be a good guideline - assess the current returns of a particular fund and do not invest [in it] if the current returns are not high enough. While this would make you, by definition, miss out on any really spectacular returns, it could reduce risk enormously without sacrificing much in terms of returns.

2) if you happen to have invested in a fund that took a nose-dive, hang on to it and don't sell for a long while, as in the long run you're apparently very likely to end up at the 20-year median (guess it's called a median for a reason ;-) which is not too bad. At the very least your loss is going to be minimized with time.
Nginx also has good http caching built in. I use it in a heavy load scenario and haven't had a single problem.

http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpProxyModule#proxy_cache
I suspected the search results I was getting over the past few months were of a lesser quality but thought it was just an aberration.
What are you talking about? What "web interface" ? Thunderbird doesn't come with a "Web interface". If you download mail via POP3, it's obviously all gonna go into a single folder, but if you download via IMAP, then it goes in whatever folder it was on the server side...
Direct email from Websoft (http://websoft-ng.com)
when was the last time you clicked through to a page that was nothing more than a legally copied, properly attributed Wikipedia entry encrusted in advertisements? Never, right?

Jeff gets it wrong yet again. Has he never heard of (or clicked a search result that led to) answers.com?
I don't get it - you ask "what's wrong", but then go on to state "This is only due to the fact that it sits on the slowest, cheepest [sic] and the most overloaded server that there is". So apparently you know what's wrong.
Our startup had a great 2010. How was yours?
OK this was the only feedback I received so far up. That it's slow. Sometimes it is. So I am saying it beforehand.
Two Envelopes Paradox Revisited
IDEO Reimagines the Music Player | Brain Pickings
It might make sense if they were all, working on the same thing.

They're not.
Give me more. Or is that it?
Its that old issue. If you are paying you are the customer - if you aren't paying you're the product.

With Google the customer is the person placing the ads and the product is you.

The content farms are the middle man - they try and place you (the product) onto a paying page (the customer) and stop you going to a non-paying page (that doesn't pay-per-click).

Google has 2 business models:

* I search for an advert and Google sells me directly to the customer

* I search for something and Google takes me to a middle man who sells me to a customer

The first business model works great and I often search Google for an advert.

The second business model is broken - because I (the user) want a search engine that takes me to my destination - if something that triggers a purchase happens along the way, fine).

1/3 of the web now consists of Google's Middlemen selling Google's ads for Google.

When my (then) colleague Dale had 500,000 page views from his HTML5 pacman (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549056) he didn't put Google Ads on it because 'Google Ads are Cheap'.

But then my (non-technical) customer Tim specifically said he wouldn't put Google adds on http://cyclingbibliography.org/ which is designed to make him income, I thought, Oh!.

At Xmas my 12 year old was moaning about Google when looking for something.

It has now reached the point where a page ranking algorithm which penalises sites with Google Ads would be welcomed by many people.

Google's problem is that only way out is to reduce its income - when it has been tweaking its software to increase its yield.
That's assuming the scrapers will respect robots.txt. Some of them would, and that would help.

Assuming google does take into account who was first, a similar solution is for Jeff to submit his content directly to google for indexing, immediately it's published.

EDIT I'm wrong; google only accepts top-level URLs for indexing, not new content: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
meta-comment: I honestly don't understand why you are voted down. This is a very valid question. Maybe it's a stupid question, I don't know. I just know that I entered the comments thread here at HN after reading the article specifically to ask this question but the OP beat me to it.

Does this comment adds redundant noise to the conversation? Really? If you have a good reason to disagree with the subject matter (indices seem less attractive that purported) please share it with us in the comments, I know I'd be genuinely interested.
Apples to Oranges comparison:

Porsche -> Mkt cap 11.72B
Volkswagen-> Mkt cap 54.59B
In evolutionary terms, Google are gaining a very solid advantage every day. If Bing were to start growing suddenly, their tools for beating black-SEO and spam would be more primitive due to the lack of natural "predatory pressure". Bing's lack of immunity against some attacks would then set them back.