skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Inequality That Matters
I'd even be OK with "Thumbs Up/Down this result just for your own personal book-keeping", so that you can promote/demote results in your own search history (try searching for "_____ tutorial photoshop" and you'll get tons of splog links before you eventually hit a golden result. It'd be nice to save time later).

Google briefly had a feature like this in their results, but they've removed it. All that's left is the Star system, which isn't quite the same.
Not only that, but Yahoo didn't think search was important, so it's not even a real try of enhancing search with curation.

The truth is, if some company comes up with a better search engine, whatever ideas behind it are not going to sound like an obvious win up front—if they did then Google would already be doing that. Instead they'll have to create a search engine that is better, but somehow antithetical to Google's business model so that they can't just copy it, because there's no way for a startup to come up with enough resources to stay materially ahead of Google in pure search. And of course that's only half the battle; then you have to be better enough that users can be bothered to switch (or a browser deal coup).

Personally I haven't found the spam problem to be nearly as bad as the echo chamber makes out. I think silicon valley types just have a good imagination about how good it could be.
> In the U.S.A. entire generations have given up on cooking (mainly for apparent comfort), and therefore have forgotten about it. Literally. Even worse, they are therefore incapable of passing on this cultural "rule" either.

This is exactly it. The marketing power behind processed foods has kept generations of Americans from realizing that they're even able to do things that every household did itself when our great-grandparents were alive.

In our home, I bake our sandwich bread. Even my grandmother marvels that I do so, but with a KitchenAid it takes me hardly any time, costs practically nothing ($0.44/loaf) and produces far better bread than any I've found in a store. When my kids begin to need lunchmeat, I'll roast our own turkey and beef: it'll be cheaper, it'll taste better, it won't have preservatives, and my kids will learn from me what I never learned from my own family: that we can feed ourselves.
PipelineDeals (http://www.pipelinedeals.com) is looking for a full-time senior sysadmin to maintain our production stack, hosted on amazon ec2.

If load balancing, Mysql clustering, maintaining dozens of servers, working with a great group of smart guys, and having an endless supply of fun and interesting projects to work on sounds like your cup of tea, drop me a line.

grant@pipelinedealsco.com

PipelineDeals is 5 years old, bootstrapped, quite profitable, and steadily growing. We are based in Seattle and Philadelphia. Remote applicants no problem!
Need your thoughts and advice.
Hi. I am a masters student in computer science. Last semester(fall 2010), I took a semester break and came back to India(my native country) because I was not really interested in continuing my masters degree. I don't really think it fits me and my goal.

I am working on my own website and testing it as of now. I really want to continue doing that. So, I was just thinking if I could work on my own website and do freelancing part-time to support myself. Is it possible to get around $800 - 1000/month doing freelancing.

I really love developing Ruby on Rails applications. I have developed applications using ROR, PrototypeJS, jQuery. This is not an advertisement for my freelancing, just an genuine doubt since I believe, many of you reading this would have gone through something like this and would like to know your thoughts.
.co did something interesting by making domains $30... which is no different than $8 if you're buying a small number of them.

However, these is a huge issue if you're buying 100 or 500 or 1,000.

Moving domains to $25 a year would probably reduce the amount of hoarding, as it would narrow people's focus.

For Weblogs Inc. I bought 3,000 domains when we started, and for Mahalo I've bought 2,000 or so. It's a trivial cost to buy all the possible options you might need. If the economics were 2, 3, or 4x i would have narrowed the focus down considerably.
Two points here.

= On the floodgates already being opened I'd ask this question: Did the Senate Succeed in blocking Wikileaks? Yes they played bully with a few private companies but in the end they failed because they didn't have the tools to chase Wikileaks to another country.

Give the government control over the ISPs and they'll have the tools to block anything on the Internet without having to leave the U.S. to do it.

= On the case of Free Markets you have to understand Free Markets never try to protect consumers. That's not the point. The point is to make money. But there's always some corporation that's behind in the market. So companies motivated by greed act in a way that protects consumers in spite of their intentions.

Take Net Neutrality. Say AT&T is so dominant in California that they decide to put a surcharge on iTunes purchases. Time Warner who is not dominant then sees an opportunity. By not putting the same surcharge they make MORE MONEY because they'll get an influx of customers from AT&T. Then AT&T has to either ditch the surcharge or lose most of their iTunes buying customers.
It looks like hard disks are going to stay for a couple more years. SSs are fast, but storage costs are still dropping with magnetic disks.
Yell Labs in London, UK is still hiring (slowly but surely).

We're currently looking for great developers with Java and/or Python skills.

We mostly make web apps and mobile apps and the backend services for these.

It's all full time, London based, salaried... a regular job but in a buzzing product development environment. We're all very understanding of side-projects and actually encourage it.

Contact david.kitchen@yellgroup.com
Charity begins at Startup
An iPhone Lover’s Take On The Nexus S
You have to be careful when comparing the US to the rest of the world, because the US is the one breaking the ground of new levels of relatively-well-distributed wealth.

Not so much, see here:
http://www.mint.com/blog/trends/mint-map-global-wealth-distr...

Most of the "western" countries are ahead of the US for distributing wealth amongst the population.
I don't want to stand in the way of a good rant, but if you have to hold down on the plus key for on every site, perhaps you should increase your default font size? Or perhaps something is wrong with your DPI settings? Or perhaps a larger monitor? With the Linux and OSX setups I use, I have no trouble reading this particular site, and rarely find that I have to increase font sizes.
or, "How I failed to see the thousands of blog posts and tweets telling me this was going to happen".
RockMelt is hiring a variety of positions - http://www.rockmelt.com/jobs.html

Mountain View, CA preferred. jay@rockmelt.com
Palo Alto, CA - Flipboard: Web Developer

We are looking for developers with interest and experience working on web tech and know how browsers tick.

Flipboard Pages is one example of our HTML5 auto-pagination, auto-layout framework for making the web beautiful.

http://flipboard.com/jobs or drop me a line.
Even sourcier:
http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?history
Having just bought a new washer and dryer I can honestly say that my friends opinions were not a factor in the decision at all even though we did speak about it before I made the purchase. The main reason being other than some superficial elements of the appliances my friends can't really speak intelligently about their own appliances. They tend to not remember beyond the initial purchase point what many of the features even are. For example I asked a friend if his washer contained a heater and while it does he didn't even have a clue that it did.

I have a relative working at Home Depot and we just discussed this topic at length given my own recent purchase. Most of their appliance customers come in with some idea of how much money they want to spend and what basic feature set they would like. Then they are looking for a knowledgeable sales associate to explain to them the differences and benefits of the various models. They may have "heard from a friend" that a particular model was good or a particular feature was good but even that information is usually incomplete or incorrect. I would fully expect "social" results for these types of queries to result in even more misinformation.
Ian Dury is still an excellent reason to be cheerful.
Thanks for the heads up. The problem is more a practical concern than a financial one. If you have a work permit (EU citizen), then we we would consider you, but I would be lying if I said I wouldn't prefer a local candidate.
The original article criticizing minimalism was written with more depth and more sense of humor than this article written in response.

My take on the two articles: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/01/01/periodic-minimalism...
Yeah, well, web is not native, it's not meant to be, and it will never be, and I for one am glad that it's so different from native development.
AI is the last unconquered sector of technology.

I'm really glad to live in a time before AI makes programming obsolete. I shudder to think about the potential crisis of purpose facing the human race if AI develops to the point to automate all our needs. But that's okay, I'll die and make room for the generations to whom that is simply the unquestioned nature of reality.
If you can control EIP, you can run arbitrary code, period. It might be difficult depending on whether ASLR is in use or not, but it can always be done.
I own the 13" version. I spent some time testing both at the Apple Store. I really wanted to get the 11" one, but the upper row of keys is significantly thinner. As someone who uses vim all the time, this means missing the esc key very frequently. My advice would be to test both versions as much as you can and see which one works better for you.
More like "Scroomz is ignoring twinkies like Yooka ignored the tree."
If you ask the question, "Should the Federal Communications Commission regulate the Internet like it does radio and television?"

then the public's answer is "no".

If you ask the question, "Should the government stop my phone and cable companies from screwing me?"

then the public's answer is "yes".

It's all in the framing of the question.
Yet another new one is QT Web runtime: http://qt.nokia.com/developer/qt-roadmap (for lack of better link really)
I have been looking at ditz recently. I fail to see the point of using C for something like this though?
InQuickER (YC W08 reject ;-]) is hiring on Vancouver Island, British Columbia (Parksville/Nanaimo area, onsite preferred but not required).

We are bootstrapped, profitable, and proud by 37signals' definition. Today we are an 8-person team, and we're looking to add another senior ruby/rails developer and a user acquisition engineer.

Contact tyler@inquicker.com.
We're always looking for people to join our team at KISSmetrics...

http://www.kissmetrics.com/jobs
Still interesting to here how it affected someone - good blog btw. We have all come to rely on our phones these days - when they do fail us it leaves you feeling pretty lost!
> is their project a spam site or not?

To me that depends a LOT on how they present the advertisements and what they do on pages where they don't have information for a product. My biggest complaint with so called review sites is that they are presented more advertisements than content. They also tend to have automatically generated pages for every model number you can imagine, including incorrect ones that they receive searches for. On those pages there tends to be links to shopping sites and prices for unrelated appliances and products. I absolutely consider that to be spam because they are content free.

The problem with google searches lately, and especially for things like appliances, is that the spammers and content mills are clearly winning. In my current search for a washer and dryer the manufacturers page was on page four or five or the results. The first few pages were flooded with bogus content pages, sale pages and unrelated pages. Trying to filter out shopping sites and explicitly target specific keywords and filter others doesn't help. There are a growing number of search topics for which google is simply broken.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Hanlon's Razor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor
Google did try this. I don't think it ever left the lab, but I used it for a while. I think they may have canned it; I just realized I haven't seen it in a while. It was called searchwiki. I think it was originally just supposed to apply to your own results, but I'm sure they analyzed the tendencies to see if it would've helful to use overall.

Honestly, such a system would be ridiculously easy to game with a botnet, so there needs to be significant work in the area beforehand.
Yeah, that's the wrong stat to use. The US has had a healthy middle industrial-age middle class for longer than anyone else, and even if it is ailing today (which is debatable and subject to rapid change with notice in either direction), my points still stand. It also has a higher average income level than most if not all, along with a higher median and a generally larger "social wealth", even if, again, we may be letting some of that slip.

A well-distributed wealth of $15K a year will not show you how that country will necessarily behave when it has a spotty-but-$42K-average wealth.

I suggested strongly that the point not be missed, I guess I should have just cut straight to spelling it out even if it would have broken the flow. You point is not relevant to my point at all.
(Excuse my ranting, could just be crankiness due to a lack of sleep caused by a 7am flight)

My default font size is 16pt and that should be enough imo, but x-small applied to 16pt is still small. My display does have a relatively high DPI at ~130, but that's why I bump up my default font size. :/ I just bumped it to 18pt for good measure.

Despite the joke about feeling old I'm only 28 and have good enough vision w/ my contacts in.

Regardless of my DPI and/or default font size, there is absolutely no good reason to use x-small on a site whose sole purpose is to display articles for people to read. That is pure lunacy if you ask me.
I guess it's partially ignorance. For years I was making "instant" pudding, which was a packet combined with milk.

It turns out that you can make homemade chocolate pudding with only one extra ingredient; cocoa powder, cornstarch, and milk. (A pinch of salt usually improves it, though.)

I still buy rice pudding, though. I've tried making it and it always turns out awfully.
I think some of your assumptions are technically wrong. The only role of an ISP is to let you send (& receive) IP datagrams to (& from) any machine with a public IP. Now, one packet could cost more than another, depending on its destination, its provenance, and its size. But not its content. Not a chance. For instance, the TCP port number of an ISP shouldn't influence the cost of an IP datagram: they're not even part of the Internet Protocol.

Now, if I want to send packet faster than another, I would just use a private network that is not the internet. And if I want to send "certified" packet, I'd just use an SSH tunnel, which will naturally consume more bandwidth anyway. But if my internet provider do those choices for me, I tend to complain.
you failed to address the main point. Google is filled with duplicate content, aggregation sites, and content farms with shit content that has the right statistical profile.

this is not the same problem as different people perceiving results differently.
Yeah, I'm not denying it happens, but it seems like common sense to me. The type of programmer inclined to refactor and rename should be the first to recognize the value of uniform coding conventions within a project.
True, but another part of the issue is a pure algorithmic approach can be gamed, inside a search company human curation doesn't scale, and community curation has scaling problems / seeding problems / can be gamed.

I do think think that some human curation, if for nothing else to mark sites as copy spam, might be workable. Pattern matching is still humanity's territory.
I got the 11" and it does Starcraft on medium settings better than my wine session on a quad core 8800GTS does. Boot time of 16sec is also kind of a moot point... it drops in and out of sleep so effortlessly I doubt I'll ever need to reboot the thing.
The script initializes the image from /dev/zero, which means that an attacker can tell which blocks of the filesystem image are data and which are empty. Unless you really can't afford to wait the minute or so for it to finish, use /dev/urandom - or /dev/random, if you've got access to sufficient entropy (did you pay extra for a hardware random number generator?).
i've been using an 11" air as my only development machine for a month or two. a few minor things worth mentioning:

- no backlit keyboard

- no IR interface, so no ability to use a non-bluetooth remote control

- the LCD screen is glossy, but it's just a film over the screen, not a glass/plastic sheet over the entire display. as a result, the glare isn't as bad as the macbook pro.

- because the display is very thin, the glowing apple logo behind the screen sometimes shows through on the front.
A coworker of mine pointed me to EncFS, which I think is generally a better idea because you don't commit to sizing in advance: http://www.arg0.net/encfs

I have been satisfied with its performance used as the backing store for virtual machine images, though not having a dual-core may be problematic.
Just speaking for me personally, I'd be a fan of trying ideas like that. The potential danger would be that some code could introduce latency or other things that would make the search experience worse instead of better.
From the readme

> I wrote it because I needed a command-line tool for tracking tasks. Besides, after years of Ruby and JavaScript programming I missed plain C.
>I'm surprised by Firefox 4's performance. The Mozilla web pages claim to be matching or surpassing Chrome's speed but my measurements show them to be a lot slower.

Having recently done some benchmarking of my own code, and from simply running the browsers side-by-side a fair bit, this doesn't surprise me a bit. Firefox 4 consistently comes out 3x slower or worse than Chrome/Safari (I don't have Opera handy). I keep seeing claims, I keep seeing benchmarks, but I've never been able to replicate their results with any code I've written. Significantly faster than FF3, don't get me wrong, but they've still got a fair distance to go if they want to claim faster-than-WebKit.

I quite like this benchmark setup. Real-world results, split by display time. Nice writeup!
"When asked the biggest trend I'm focused on, I always say Globalization."
Data Oriented Luddites
In regards to the style of the pages, I completely agree with you -- probably because we have similar tastes in content. Others, however, might not. I'm not saying that flashing text and floating images are okay, just that the threshold between "mildly annoying" and "total shit" is a personal thing.

The problem is, as you point out, that most people, most of the time, are beginning to see results they don't need or like when they type a search. This is a big problem for both searchers and the companies that provide search. If you create an algorithm for directing people's behavior (a search engine) folks are going to game it. You and I might not like it, but "gaming the way people do things" is called marketing in any other context and has been around for hundreds of years.

This leads me to suspect that no simple (or even complex) system of finding things for people is ever going to work for an extended period of time. It's a radar vs. radar detector problem. It's a natural competitive situation.

But it doesn't have to be all bad. From competition and fitness criteria comes evolution. Spammers and search engines will probably be a key part of how AI evolves. It'll be neat to see if we move beyond Bayes -- and if so, how would that work?

The one thing you bring up that's interesting is what to do with bad searches. How do you deal with a mis-typed part number? Should a system know which part number you have? If so, how would that be done?

I think the spammers covering all the misspellings are doing a service -- as long as the site isn't obnoxious and provides the user with the information they are looking for. We think of it as a failure of Google, but in fact it looks like a win: thousands of little spammers trying to find all the mistakes I make and providing content for them -- as long as they have my best interests in mind (and are not trying to trick me). I'll happily look at an advertisement for a Ford Explorer in return for valuable information on my 1978 dishwasher that I couldn't read the entire part number for. And I hate ads. I like that scenario a lot more than looking for a favorite mp3 for a cell phone ringer and spending the next 3 hours in spammer hell.
After an emacs 30 day challenge... a meditation 30 day challenge
Finally, someone else makes the argument that I've been making for awhile:

"These details are important, but the noise about them only makes the omission more startling: the failure in America to tackle the underlying lack of competition in the provision of internet access."

Americans seem to believe that, if a company is granted monopoly status by a government entity or if competition is severely limited, then those companies allowed to operate without free market competitive forces should be regulated. Monthly phone and cable bills are regulated by some combination of local, State, and Federal governments with the presumption that these payments from consumers are the companies' main revenue source resulting from this governmental grant of exclusivity. Now, these same companies are trying to invent another revenue source which will not fall under these guidelines, at least not at first. Great, my bill for "internet service" is still $29.99, but this "service" is now limited to watching high bandwidth video from just a few providers who opted to pay for access to my home. I would not mind so much if there was a neutral tier available with a government-regulated price and a "we sell you on the back-end" tier available in addition. It is that these telecoms are attempting to avoid regulation by changing their revenue model which is so bothersome.

Also, I would not mind if there was some method by which I could pick and choose QoS for my traffic and pay based on priority. Imagine some sort of open standard by which a "choose your priorities" app could communicate with my DSL provider's network. Perhaps Google could make watching YouTube more palatable by subsidizing prioritization of its traffic through a transparent back-end rate structure available to all content providers.

In a nutshell, I have no issue with tiered rate structures or traffic prioritization. My chief complaint is simply that the telecoms want to circumvent regulation and choose the winners and losers rather than achieving their purported goals in an open, transparent, and nondiscriminatory manner.
Only app I spotted on that list was http://www.coolendar.com/ Seems to be hosted on google app engine. Nice example of simple design that does one thing very nicely.

The rest looked like brochures. Not nearly as impressive as a functional app with a good UI.
HDs are the new tapes. The value proposition for large sequential storage is still much better on HDDs. But anyone not using an SSD for their boot drive is wasting lots of time.
I just tried two test queries on blekko and google. Small sample, but there did seem to be less link-bate results on blekko. The issue is whether their results are close to being as up to date as google's results.

I was interested that blekko seems to have done a lot with a modest amount of funding.

Also, I wonder if they are getting some monetization with the association with Facebook.