skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm in agreement with some of your points, but not others.

The most important thing to stop the concentration of wealth taking over the government is to limit the government powers. If the government is a smaller part of peoples lives, and the economy, then capture of the government by a relatively small minority must then have a limited affect on the greater population. Power always concentrates in the hands of a few - that's always been the way. In a free society the checks and balances are there so that even if a group manages to capture power for a short time, it should balance out over the longer term. As long as there is free association, free speech and free and open voting, then these things can be corrected.

I agree that capture of the economic benefits of a company by the executive at the expense of the workers (ie, company is bankrupted) isn't a good outcome, but the fact still remains that most companies are still operating and employing people. Not every company is an Enron, the majority of the population is still employed.

Yes, using one family is a bad data point, point taken. But then just about everyone I know is better off than their parents, if you take total measures of wellbeing into account (not just monetary measures).

As for other discussions such as outsourcing - it's beside the point. You give me the French revolution, I give you England with no revolution, and just as much disparity. The 'revolutions' were a giant waste of time and lives at any rate, and were as much to do with lack of control over destiny as much as relative wealth. In any democracy a revolution isn't going to happen while the polling booths are still taken seriously. Someone might lose their political head but not their actual head.

The problem with arguing against wealth disparity is that you can only end up arguing for wealth distribution, which generally ends up making things worse for everyone overall. And most people make the mistake of introducing the 'fixed pie' idea of wealth into their thinking at some stage.

Again it comes down to 'it's the worst system around, except for all the others that have been tried'.
Well 1st IMHO you can say you believe the version of history you've been thought in school (you didn't believe before there is any history?). Obviously there are different official versions in differ countries. For example according to US schoolbooks US was the primary reason Germany&Co lost WW2, but not so in Russian schoolbooks.

2nd I don't see how you've checked any data. Say you see word 'terror' is mentioned many times after 2001. What if most of the books say 9/11 was an inside job and there were no terrorist? The fact that the word 'terror' is used often in books doesn't mean there was actual terror going on.
Maybe not exactly Perl-like, but you may find the bstring library useful: http://bstring.sourceforge.net/.

The documentation also lists alternative string handling libraries like c2lib, wxString etc.
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New Year Sachin Tendulakar Calendar 2011 Wallpapers Photos Selections
Life goes online after death with 'memory boxes'
Would you mind sending me an email (see profile)? You've got me really curious now.
It's seems to me like an explicit "Report Spam" button would help. The problem with SearchWiki & "Remove result" is that they have many other influencing factors as to why people would click those buttons.

People are pretty good at recognising "scams", but you need to tell them that's what they're looking for, not just how the content makes them feel. It seems like the report spam button was a large factor behind gmail's spam filtering success. Would love to see the same approach applied here. I know I'd be hitting my report spam button in chrome pretty often :)
Atlas Shrugged for the kindle: [http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-ebook/dp/B003SWZ8JA/ref...]

You can get a kindle app for Android, iPhone, Mac and Windows for no charge.
Marie Antoinette would approve of that sentiment. Let them eat Big Macs?
On the other hand, your own view might be skewed if you are only looking at USA.

USA offers the most opportunity(including numerous lottery type multipliers for outliers) to get rich without breaking common ethic norms .

I am currently in a European country with an average Gini coefficient. Still, almost everyone (read over 90%) of rich have indulged in suspicious behavior while creating their fortunes. Since this is only using public information, one can only hazard to guess what lurks around in shadows.

Sadly, when I look at a rich suburb here, most of it belongs to people who have benefited from corruption, embezzlement, stealing, lying, cheating, contraband(least of evils here) et al.
The term "HTML5" is not nearly as vague. It's less exclusive than some purists would prefer (because it's used as a general term for corresponding changes to markup, CSS, the recommended parsing algorithm and the DOM), but it's not like "HTML5" could suddenly refer to Flash tomorrow.
It's really cool for sure, but you know what this one man once said "Real artists ship!" Too bad Microsoft didn't put this in a tablet eons ago.
I actually worked for ARM, but not on their main architecture. I worked for a satelite office acquired a few years earlier, which was spun out again last year. The project was a dynamically retargettable compiler for DSPs.
Google showing adverts on google.com/search is one thing, but I think the real metric to look at is usage of the Google advert network on the sites themselves. The more googlesyndication.com or doubleclick.net on a site, the spammier it is.

The problem is that Google can't penalize a site for using these technologies. And not because Google makes money from sites using these adverts, which they do, but because it'd be an arms race. The guys taking advantage of SEO would catch on and change advertisers. Google could penalize other advert networks too (Bing say), but then they'd be open to accusations of anti-competitive behavior.
"You don't "ask a question" to the search engine like you would ask your grandmother."

It doesn't matter one jot 'how search works'. What matters is how the majority of their users think it works. And they think it works by asking a question. So publishers need to work with that.
Just because that's the case for illnesses (and brushing your teeth?) doesn't necessarily mean it's true for your hair.
It's like this for anywhere where you don't need to compile anything. Perl is an example; Debian depends on Perl internally, so you really don't want to depend on it as a programmer because it's going to change according to Debian's needs. If you fuck up @INC by installing stuff in there, then you run the risk of breaking your operating system. So most Perl programmers on Debian use some combination of local::lib or perlbrew and just have a Perl-install-per-app.

Emacs is a little different in that nothing is going to break the system; but if user A wants Emacs extension A and user B wants Emacs extension B, but they conflict (say, by depending on different versions of foo.el), then the system can't resolve that. By delegating the management of third-party extensions to the user, this conflict is avoided.

My personal policy is that I only use OS packages for things I don't care about. I mostly use emacs, conkeror, rxvt-unicode and xmonad, so all those packages are intalled from git/darcs into my homedir so that I can easily hack on them. Stuff like "ls" I let the OS handle, because the stock "ls"'s featureset meets my needs.

Anyway, package systems are nice from an organization perspective, and there's no reason not to submit your favorite Emacs extensions to Debian. But it's not a perfect answer to every situation.
"let's take a good look", "let's figure out", "let's have a vibrant discussion".

Is there ever a time for action? What evidence would you need to decide that a forced attrition program is a good idea?
Wouldn't spammers just "Report Spam" their competitors?
Quora is very different from StackExchange sites. There are no badges or karma. Users aren't ranked. The site revolves around following people, questions and topics that interest you and your homepage reflects those. The design is much cleaner and pages update in real time. You also pull in your social connections and can follow your friends.
AT&T outlines plans for 4G network, phones
AT&T, which has been late to the 4G race, announced detailed plans for its faster, fourth-generation network on Wednesday while showing its first 4G smartphones.The carrier has begun upgrading its network to a protocol with the awkward name of HSPA+ and that is faster than today's 3G.
You're right, and yet I disagree with you (which I guess means I'm wrong).

Your position is the path of least resistance: indulge users in their ignorance. It's optimized for the short term, and in other contexts leads to great catastrophes (fast food, for example).
The objective is Clarke's third law:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The winner in search will be the one who strives for that.

If _I_ were presented with "How do I cook a blueberry Pie" - I would immediately do the following search:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/search/delegate.do?fnSearchString...

Plus a few other pre-eminent and trusted food-networks (Allrecipes) - searching for "Blueberry Pie" on each one, I'd then scan the quality of the comments - looking for insight into other chefs (cross checking their history to see if they, in turn, can be trusted) who clearly have tried out the recipes, and have made relevant comments. I would then identify the recipe that looked most likely to work for me.

I would expect no less from a sufficiently advanced search engine in this, and all other domains.
Zynga is in talks with yahoo i have heard.
Geoffrey went to do safetyweb.com after dancejam.
They are not trying to beat Intel on their own turf. The phone/pad/netbook craze demonstrates that a lot can be done with relatively weak CPUs. The heavy lifting (if neccesary at all) can be done by the GPU. As NVIDIA their main focus is GPUs I guess that's their strategy.
Thailandia da scoprire tra templi, resort e natura - Blog Top Sites
Setting goals that make you happy
Wow, a Bachelors in Business and marketing aint so bad after all :) Now if only I had a CS degree to match my 4th chosen career path ...
Isn't it telling that you, if youre speaking on behalf of google i.e. working there on search, dont even know where your weaknesses are dont know where to even begin? If you have to rely on community input to even spot a direction for improvement you probably are in deeper trouble than all these articles suggest. Would Google even be where it is today if they hadn't spotted a weakness and improved it a decade (or more) ago?

I've personally mostly given up google for basically _any_ kind of product search, because it reminded me of going through my spam-riddled email inbox before my provider hat spam filters (or before I switched to gmail). Before that, I've had to give up the Google Groups Usenet interface because it was so cluttered with spam, that it wasnt even funny any more how useless it was, and Google _still_ kept associating its name with it.

If you have to, kick the spammers out manually, to prevent users jumping ship, until you eventually sort it out algorithmically.

Edit: When you downvote a posting I put time in to write, you could at least tell me what downvoteworthy I actually did, so I can refrain from doing it in future, since it is in our common interest to avoid downvoting and being downvoted. So, can you please elaborate in hindsight?
Don't really think that makes sense. Ad placement, site design, ad relevancy etc... all dominate the reasons of why people click ads. I don't think you're going to get much information about content relevancy out of the CTR as you can't hold those other features constant.

If Google is looking for how useful a page is, they're better off just looking at whether people go back to their search results and click on another site after a short delay.
on similar lines - P90X
works great.
Open Softwear - Fashionable prototyping and wearable computing
If that strategy worked, spammers could use it in gmail to void spam filter utility. I'm sure the volume of legitimate requests would help drown that noise.
I'd describe it as a social network for questions.

In contrast to Facebook, where the vast majority of information is mind-numbingly dull (maybe that's just my friends) it connects people based on interests and requests for expertise.

So far, it works.
Twenty Google Chrome Apps Every Urban Planner Needs
Google has far exceeded anyone’s original expectations as a web application. It is used for just about everything. Google Chrome extensions are the best way to get the very most from Google, and there are a wide range of extensions available.
you mean they didn't get taught that when they got their masters in education.

I have to wonder too how many times lessons need to be planned. Do math and English go through radical changes every year? Do good teachers each need to teach multiplication in their own special way?
Facebook status healthy? Really? Check the graphs...
It would be interesting to know the proportion of Google ad revenue between displaying ads on its own properties (search, but also Gmail, etc.) and networks of ads on external content.

The reason why spam exists is because people make money from it. If AdSense is the problem, how much would it hurt to just drop it?

Certainly another system would appear, but then Google could discriminate against any website with ads on it without being accused of being unfair to competitors.
Evidence that non-performers are not in a union should be sufficient.
In 3G (or 4G, whatever) the speeds are dependent on a lot of things you can't really control: amount of users, location, the 3g device, weather, etc etc. So you can never really promise "with us you'll get at least x megabytes per second!". On the other hand, you could advertise the "maximum speed", which is also meaningless since nobody ever gets that.
They wouldn't use such a "metric" because it'd be completely useless, not for some other reasons you just made up. The homepage of the NY Times uses AdSense, for example.
http://i.imgur.com/XR8Nj.png
Isn't Thumb targeted for memory-constrained architectures?
You can get scalable Paxos replication for yourself when ScalienDB comes out:

http://github.com/scalien/scaliendb

(My product.)
I disagree. I was part of the three-person team that created Libranet 3 (a commercial Linux distribution) years ago. Every member of the company kept active contact with the community via the forums and mailing list. This created a sense of community, and gave good insights into what our customers expected.

Of course, every now and then a troll or disgruntled customer would appear. They can be truly poisonous to you and the community. And the tricky part is distinguishing 'disgruntled, but insightful' people from 'sour, and unproductive' people. If necessary we sometimes had to apply force and ban the user.

But if you make an good product, the group of happy and contributing community members is at least two orders of magnitude larger than poisonous people.

Of course, it is very well possible that game forums attract a whole different class of people those of a commercial Linux distribution.
Great example - 35,000+ people a year die in the United States alone because of people's inability to drive safely.

Perhaps there is a better way.
Couldn't part of this problem be solved with an algorithm that identifies when several pages have roughly the same content (ie. original wikipedia article + 5 copies of it elsewhere on the web) and then giving the oldest occurance in the index a much higher rank?

That would kill incentive to create these spam-sites and give the user the result s/he was looking for.
> If people are saying bad things, you're doing something wrong.

I disagree with this part. You can't always please everyone, and the fact that some people say bad things doesn't necessarily mean you're doing something wrong. Of course, if half of your forum is filled with hate posts, yes, you might be a little off-beat.

Now, I totally agree with the fact that it helps building a community. Two-way communication is what users are more and more looking for.
Just like any opinion, one very well written, it kind of made me feel that he can be right.

But No. I don't want to believe in that.

Also, I really don't understand his situation. Only the one with the injury knows how painful it is. But I really wish the nice people don't leave the world so soon for a stupid reason.

It was scary to read his explanations why he can not open up. We can send some peace Bill's soul's way if we learn the situation a bit better and try to be more helpful to people who might be in trouble.
The 'Before' and 'After' system can work well for coaching. But good teaching is not necessarily coaching students to produce better results in tests. According to me, a good teacher will help students gain an interest in the subject, appreciate the subject better which in-turn helps you perform better. A student is capable of flunking in-spite of being taught well.

In my opinion teachers should be assessed by parents and the management by having a system where every now and then parents are allowed to be part of the class.
I've stupidly been doing all my dev and testing in Chrome OS X. I tried out Firefox OS X today and located several bugs that were preventing main functionality from working; they're now fixed. Maybe that applies to cross-OS Chrome somehow? (I got other reports about things being broken on Chrome Windows.) If you get the time, I'd be thankful if you could try it out again and let me know if anything's fixed. I haven't figured out the change URL/share URL bugs yet, though.
69% and 31%. It's in their SEC filings.

If Google discriminated against websites with ads on it, their SERP quality would drop.
Sure, but one key advantage of Windows is that it has a huge legacy of software that already targets x86 and that would have to be recompiled/reoptimized to ARM.

The performance of a built-for-speed x86 is very forgiving. Eclipse runs well enough on my Core i5, but I suspect it would have problems on an energy-efficient ARM.
These bad search results are not an IT problem, they are the results of top Google executive policies: act like you want to be good and do better for the Google users but keep on serving up the same old stuff because it is tied to the revenue cow and the paying clients. This problem would never have existed if Google considered the end user experience more important than the advertisers.
Benchmarking Myself: The Technical Details
Why does Google no longer offer the option to permanently remove a specific domain from your search results? My personal search quality would be dramatically improved if I could specify even a short blacklist.

In fact, dear lazyweb: is there a browser extension or greasemonkey script that makes Google return 100 results at a time and then filters out the best 10 based on a blacklist?
Here's my first shot at a theory of how Pixel Sense might work

There is an IR LED backlight as well as the regular white backlight. They have an additional per-pixel LCD shutter that blocks IR. The display repeatedly displays sweeping horizontal and vertical patterns on the IR blocking shutters. At the edges of the display there are a series of IR light detectors. When an object is placed on the display, some IR light will bounce off the object and be internally reflected in the plane of the panel glass. The light is received by the detectors.

What think ye?
If there’s one truly strange argument in DJB’s presentation, it’s on Page 39. Here, he complains that in DNSSEC, .org being signed doesn’t sign all the records underneath .org, like wikipedia.org.

I'm not sure this is an argument against DNSSEC, it's more of an argument against DNSSEC's marketing. The DNSSEC folks like to say that DNSSEC is deployed to .org. Well, that's technically true, but since no .org domains are signed themselves, this claim is useless. DNSSEC provides no real security currently.

I watched DJB's talk and I thought the first half was mostly for entertainment, rather than detailed discussion of the weaknesses of DNSSEC.
The whole problem with the vaccine scare is that some parents believe the FUD and make the actually rational decision that they'd rather have their kids get measles and live, than get autism and be damaged for life.

These parents do what they think is best for THEIR children.

But the cost for doing this is that OTHER children that rely on herd immunity will start dying of measles.

So by having every parent do a local "optimization", the net result, an unvaccinated world, is much, much worse. And then to add insult to injury, it's just plain wrong that vaccines cause autism, so the parents that believe this are only making the world a worse place for everyone and not really doing what's best for their children in any way.
It's featured on the front page of The Guardian today, described as "the hottest question-and-answer website you've probably never heard of"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/05/quora-quest...

That column will be in the print edition today as well.
Yes, the end of my comment was a (weak) attempt at humor, since there has been quite some talk lately about Google building cars that will drive themselves:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html

Edit: actually, all I really wish for, is for allintext: to work all the time. Why would I be a robot if I'm logged in, on an account of a normally active Gmail box?

Also, why is it such a secret? Why not make it more visible? A checkbox on the home page...
How representative are those around you of the general population?
Some football coaches do well because they have good players, not because they coach them to do their absolute best. Other coaches do well because they get lucky and win games by 1 or 2 points even though they don't coach very good football teams (Michigan State springs to mind). I wonder whether student test scores give a more or less accurate impression of performance than on-field performance. The existence of the tool is surely better than nothing, however.
A thouroughly good read. You should watch the talk that he's referering to before reading this first though:

http://www.vimeo.com/18417770
Mystery that is Macedonia
Not sure why you are getting up-votes for this. It isn't adding anything to the conversation other than obvious Microsoft bashing.

The Pixel Sense technology is obviously quite new, so I'm not sure how they were supposed to put it in anything eons ago.

As far as Microsoft not shipping... Well they ship more stuff than a lot of people. True that their tablet and phone offerings are not as good as the competition (yet), but that isn't through not shipping, it's through creating products that was out of touch with consumer expectations.

In the phone world, over the lifetime of the window Mobile, they've probably been quite successful. In tablets, less so, but still they have shipped numerous times over the past decade.

Just saying.
The Food Network? Really? The home of "semi-homemade"...? ;-)

About Clarke's law, here's an observation by George Bernard Shaw: "Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it."

Quotations aside, the process you're describing is certainly excellent; it's probably what Blekko is trying to pull, in a scalable way. It'll be interesting to watch how it plays out.
Not entirely certain I agree with this. There are precisely 3 people to whom I will answer the phone at 3 in the morning. None of them are people I am in business with.

Then again, I have been burnt by being too free with my time in the past - when you're being called at midnight four nights in a row for "emergencies," it gets old.
For any SQL/NoSQL system, the more RAM, the better. They need as much RAM as possible to cache the data.

If you observed cassandra consumes a lot of RAM even with small dataset, you should tune the GC settings. Besides it, JVM itself consumes a lot of RAM.