skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks nice. It kind of reminds me of LINQ (in spirit)
Another spy satellite, I guess.
As I recall, IBM had an offer out for Sun, and Sun fell into Oracle's hands quite suddenly when IBM and Sun management couldn't agree on terms. It might be that Google was expecting that IBM would get Sun, and that they were OK with that, given IBM's generally more, shall we say, less frenzied approach toward monetizing its intellectual property...
It seems to be quackery. Points of interest (taken from links below):

>>
Journal of Nuclear Physics? Really?

- A web site registered in California by a secret entity.
- A “journal” that is not a journal but a blog.
- A blog name that resembles the (real) former Soviet Journal of Nuclear Physics.
- A virtual “editor” comprised of a “team of scientists.”
- A “team of scientists” who’s only active participant appears to be Andrea Rossi.
- A “10 kW module reactor” that is anybody’s guess.
>>

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=198040
http://blog.newenergytimes.com/2011/01/14/focardi-and-rossi-...

I'm not really convinced.
Ask HN: Is it worthwhile for your run of the mill web developer to learn NodeJS
Or, worded differently, is NodeJS useful for anything besides what seems to be its target goal (i.e., realtime. web socket type stuff like chat room and collaborative apps)? Would it be helpful at all on just basic websites (brochure sites, blogs, image galleries, stuff like that)?
I actually feel quite comfortable with our metrics. Back in 2003 or so, we had pretty primitive measures of webspam levels. But the case that you're wondering about (more spam, but in different positions) wouldn't slip past the current metrics.
> Do you think we should seriously explore them as well?

Why not? I find it quite astonishing how often starting with verifiably false assumptions leads to worthwhile results. Your tower of reason is a decent construction. I find it a nice place to visit, but sometimes I prefer the woods. A mind too well-ordered misses the faults in its own assumptions.
Nice! Now, any chance of open-sourcing Atlas to speed up the development? =)
I appreciate that O'Reilly had mostly avoided using DRM in its electronic books. My concern with O'Reilly is that the average quality of recent additions to their catalog has declined significantly compared to 10 or even 5 years ago.

Also, in the past some months, their prices have been shooting skyward.
Mahalo pages are still in your index.

Do you consider that site to be a quality & non-spam source of information?
Although a google with perfect results would kill itself because the ads would be pointless.
>OEMs shipping tens of millions of devices based on it

This is assuming it's a part of the code that actually makes it onto devices. Some of the other comments in this thread suggest they may be from a testing framework.
Let's pretend that these 7 things are really important and makes Lift different. The key hurdle of people adopting Lift is probably the Scala language more than anything. If people feel like they are comfortable in a language, they'll use anything they can get their hands on just to have some fun.

But does it look like people are having fun with Scala? When I learned SML in school, I remembered it was quite pleasant. The syntax was simple, type signatures were easy to read and be understood, and the rules were very straight-forward. Basically, I could fit the entire language in my head.

When I learned Java on my first job, I remembered it was also quite pleasant. The syntax was familiar, and concepts easy to grasp. It was verbose as ever, but hey, as least I could brain dump my thoughts into the source code, and read other people's brain dumps. Then Java 1.5 came with its "generics" that can't even remember it's own type after compilation...

A couple years later we now have this bastard child monster all grown up called Scala with its hybrid parametric P /subtype S polymorphic _ with implicit DSL <: smilies and the ever redundant parentheses and braces still in the control structures of a 201x language with optional .s and () in function calls. Don't even get me started on its suicide note that's called the Scala 2.8 Collections in the standard library.

I'm sorry, but I just don't see how this language eco-system can reach a critical mass with the handful of libraries it has now. Maybe when the tools are up to speed in a few years, smart Java people who are sick of Java will migrate over. It just has way too many rules and surprises.
1000Memories in 60 seconds (video, YC S10)
Why only 500? Why not 5000? Or even 50,000 accelerators?

After all, as the author simply claims that, "it depends" if 500 accelerators can actually succeed.

And if we are going bet, let's bet high. No point playing Roulette and betting on black or red. Let's go with the double 0s. So, I propose that "America" launches 500,000 accelerators. (Each unemployed person in the city of Los Angeles can be made a CEO.) Since, "it depends".
Pylons is in maintenance mode, Pyramid is succeeding it.
Anonymous recursion in 6 lines of Javascript
I wouldn't say that rvm is not beginner friendly, but I grant that it has other requirements and compilation can break down due to specific library issues on different systems. To my mind, a better solution, however, would be a compromise: (1) write a script to automate the installation of all the prerequisites (packages and specific library versions) in one step using APT, but then (2) recommend using rvm after that.

Note that this solution also compiles stuff on your machine, and in this case it uses system-wide installation locations. One advantage of rvm is that everything is done as a regular user and sandboxed in $HOME/.rvm. Easy to find and remove, if anything goes wrong or you change your mind later.

(Edited because I misread the command line.)
I remember reading about it on Techrights, for one source.
The amount of power required to heat water 80°C and convert it to steam is approximately 12,000 watts.

Alarm! Alarm! Someone throw that journalist a life ring, she is in over her head.

Update: I was unsure if 'Marriane Macy' would need a 'he' or a 'she', European names confuse me, and got so distracted by her Amazon book that I forgot to give proper acknowledgement to the outer article's byline. Surely "Buddy of Georgia, USA" is a source beyond reproach.
What apps have you found for the iPhone that work will to control XBMC? I've tried a a few for iPad and iPhone and they've been pretty terrible -- I've been using my Logitech Harmony One and AirMouse (iPhone/iPad) but would like a slick iphone/ipad app that would let me use the library features, etc.

I've been running XBMC on a 1st gen Xbox as well (those were the days), then moved to a fullsize HTPC, and now down to a Dell Zino.

If you've got a HTPC setup, you should absolutely give XBMC a try.
You can redefine anybody's business to look like he is competing with anyone else. The point is, those Bing and Yahoo ads still run on Google, so maybe there is some other reason for banning some affiliates, eh?
I've been tracking how often this happens over the last month. It's gotten much, much better, and one additional algorithmic change coming soon should help even more.

I'm not saying that a clone will never be listed above SO, but it definitely happens less often compared to a several weeks ago.
I can't help but think that this is almost an exact parallel of the iPhone antenna problem. Both companies had minor to medium problems in their flagship products, both problems were vastly overblown by the media, both problems spurred an unbelievable spate of batshit conspiracy theories, and to take the cake both companies responded with the same "This is not a problem, but here's the solution." Good problems to have.
I like the service itself, but the website is the opposite of relaxing. Simplify...
Oracle doesn't need money. License Oracle Database if you don't believe me.

It's silly to imply that Oracle brought this suit against Google just to score a few bucks, but easy to say when you dislike Oracle. The alternative, and very likely real reason for the suit, is that Oracle actually cares about its intellectual property and would prefer that Google not do what they will with it.
The Guardian adopts Scala for its Content API
75+ Ways to Do Good With Social Media
This reads just like the nutrition label on Nestle products: the ones that boast that the product has "3 vitamins AND minerals", and, on a distant part of the package, lists two minerals and one vitamin and what the health benefits of them are.

They'd be a lot more credible without the corpo-speak junk in the first paragraph.
I find it disturbing when conversations about the validity of studies (or criticisms thereof) center around things like funding or ideology rather than methodology. It is another way of saying, "I don't take seriously anyone who disagrees with me," which is not good intellectual hygiene.
His reply seems to indicate that they are working on a per-page basis, not moving the whole site on or off the index.
"I don't have conclusive data on radiation but absolutely we have measured ~12 kW (at steady state) of energy produced with an input of about just 400 watts."

Free energy? Something smells fishy...
Apple Mac Repair
I don't think they're talking about duplicate content so much as stuff like Demand Media (ehow), Associated Content, Hubspot, ezinearticles, etc, etc.
About the files with the Oracle copyright header, it seems to be on some remote tree that I can't even browse. Can you opine on whether it was ever actually shipped?
Short term flips can create more jobs and new technologies in the hands of more passionate people.
Actually, the only difference here is a semi-clear narrative and decent writing. What indication is there that this is any less off-base than a thousand other speculations?
Google knows what that site is.

If they're serious about their standards, they would remove Mahalo en masse from their index.

edit: Or, to satisfy lukev, they can keep the index as-is but make sure Mahalo pages never rank high in results.
How do you implement scalable long polling and streaming in PHP? I've always been under the impression that you really need non-blocking IO to get that to work in a scalable fashion.
Steve Ballmer didn't co-found Microsoft.
I'm just impressed with how this was handled. Consider how much more technocratic this is than a news release from ten years ago.

Google issues an announcement via blog post. TC and others start to pick it up. And the original author of the blog post takes questions and provides technical answers, where allowed, in HN.
Of course the pages are in their index. Google isn't a curated walled garden. I expect every page on the public internet to be in their index.

The question is one of rankings. The only time there is a problem is when a spammy site ranks above a more relevant site for a particular search. If I enter a very specific query that only hits a spammy site, then I should see the spammy site, because it's there. Google is a search index, not a "visitors guide to the internet."
Regarding #3, why are these two things coupled in terms of page load? With all the js stuff you guys are doing now with instant, it seems like you could load up the ads on the right a split second after the search results and no one would notice or care...but I'm guessing you've tried this and it didn't test as well :)
Neat story with many parallels to other areas of life (yes, even the hacker's life).

Side note: I enjoy the comments, but some remind me of Reddit. I think there may be some inbreeding going on here. I say this in good humor.
One reason is, the New Yorker pays real editors.
I've got the results of a test run of search results I did in October 2000 sitting on my computer. The Google search results from today are much better than from October 2000. I do think it's fair to make the point that overall Google is much better--and overall spam is much lower than 5 or 10 years ago--before we drilled down into responding to the blog posts from the last couple months.
Stuxnet and The Triumph of Hacker Culture
The timing of this is interesting... About a week before Demand Media's IPO. Must be a bad day for the investment bankers.
I think these are from the Java compliance test suite used to test that a Java implementation conforms to the specification. Sun had committed to releasing the compliance tests, but then dragged its feet and it never happened.
Please, exile half or more of Demand Media's pages from the index before their imminent IPO!
Not sustainable. They key to the accelerators is actually what happens after: ie- how to grow from 18k + simeple product to more people, funding, and a network. That requires yc tuesday dinners, techstars mentor meetings, demo day allocations, etc. Just not possible to have the people that need to be involved there spread out across 500 accelerators.
I'd like them to integrate the business management portion into Places. That would give companies more reason to create a Places page and keep the information current.

Then I'd create a mobile application so that coupons and management could be done from phones or tablets. This would help with the small business that doesn't have a computer or internet beyond CC processing.

I think the consumer side of this should just be a way to redirect people to the Places page of a business and highlight the coupon that business has available.
Rogue - A Lift/MongoDB query DSL from Foursquare
To me, the most interesting aspect of this situation is the conflict between Google's view and the blogosphere's view. On the one hand, "...according to the evaluation metrics that we’ve refined over more than a decade, Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been...". On the other hand, you can't open an RSS reader today without tripping over someone griping about content farms polluting the search results. There are intelligent, thoughtful people on both sides of the debate. Why such disparate viewpoints?

As Matt's post suggests, it could simply be that people's expectations are rising -- search results are getting so good in general (which they are) that we notice the problems more. Or it could be that Google is focused on a narrow definition of "spam" that doesn't cover content farms. It could even be that both sides are "right" -- that overall search quality is rising even as the content farm problem worsens, if Google has been successfully reducing other causes of low search quality.

I'd love to see some hard analysis of this. For instance, pick some a reasonably large set of sample queries, and show what the results looked like five years ago, and what they look like today. Of course, you'd first have to find a set of sample queries and results from five years ago.
Thanks for the concrete query--I'm happy to ping the indexing team to make sure it's not tickling any unusual bugs or coverage issues. Jeff's original blog post helped us uncover a few of those things to improve.
'Dragontrail' Glass Aims to Crack Gorilla Glass‎
These things come up from time to time, the perpetual motion machines and the like. This one is rubbish.

The thing that makes fusion attractive is it makes some minimal theoretical sense - if you can get two hydrogen atoms to combine into a helium atom, you get helium and a surplus of energy. So it is not perpetual motion based on magnets or total bunk like that.

But as jbm pointed out, there's a lot of flaws in it. Not the least of which is that I got tired of reading the article before I saw what critical insight they had in terms of getting those hydrogen elements to combine. If this was a respectable publication, I'd have to think that'd be one of the first things to be explained, at least in journalist-ese.
One thing I think is interesting with all these new technologies and frameworks is the uniting power of REST.

Build the application in whatever makes sense. If some part makes more sense in NodeJS, build it that way. The rest can be Rails/Django/etc. Tie it all together with RESTful APIs.
idle in #javascript for a while. It comes up all the time.
Quora Is Developing An Algorithm To Rank User Quality
Abusing HTTP Status Codes to Expose Private Information
Poll: What do you have in your hosts file?
I am just setting up a new computer and I was wondering what sites do you guys kill with the hosts file (meaning which sites are redirected to 127.0.0.1.)
A premade hosts file (e.g. by www.mvps.org)
Tracking and ads (e.g. ad.doubleclick.net)
Distracting websites (e.g. engadget.com)
Annoying websites (e.g. efreedom)
A combination of the above
If you get an SSL error when going to that website, it's because your browser/os combination doesn't have the cacert.org root installed. If you still want to access the content, you can either put in a temporary exception or install the cacert root.
I came up with this question when I was reading my RSS feeds when I got to an "Ask Engadget" post that requested users to email questions to "ask [at] engadget [dawt] com". It seemed pretty silly for a popular website to obfuscate their email address in such a weak way, and it got me to thinking whether or not the widely-used technique is effective at all.

Does anyone have spam problem with a published email address? Have you had success reducing spam by obfuscating it?
He's stepping down because of the H.264 debacle, obviously!

No wait--that's dumb.
Solid point, and agree.

With open angel forum in 12 cities now we might be able to help fund maybe two or three dozen of these accelerators--but not much more.

The good news is that if even only 1 of 50 companies out of a University accelerator is successful--and the other 49 serve as an education--it's still well worth doing.

the goal of these is to inspire and educate--not have the same batting average as YC or TS.
disagree. counter-example: if I google "philly events" and google sends me right to philly2night.com, I certainly want to see ads selling me event tickets.
Unfortunately you'll have to wait until the white paper for details. Philip Ross has spent a significant amount of time and effort these past 2.5 years researching and implementing various solutions. I unfortunately can't summarize the solution in any succinct way, and fortunately/unfortunately he stays away from outlets such as HN (better for actually getting work done).

However, I can promise you that as soon as he's done, I'll post it on HN and personally send you a message.
Because it's a way to bridge different cultures and problems of each European area. Some startups can't move around, but would love to tap into what other startups are doing around Europe. The same is specially true for investors who normally only work locally. A structure where they can tap into startups all around Europe and chat with other investors, mentors, etc. is extremely valuable.

Plus, by operating in different countries we can leverage and scale certain things that help us help more startups. :)
Why not just downrank the results from the SO clones?
The article seems to take the stance that Schmidt is "leaving", which seems to run counter to the language of the announcement blog post yesterday.
How well does Lift work if you want your applications to still work with JavaScript disabled?
One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads.

That's not quite what I've been reading. I believe the more common claim is that Google has a disincentive to algorithmically weed out the kind of drivel that exists for no other reason than to make its publisher money via AdSense. It's about aggregate effects, not failure to clamp down on individual sites. Or, put another way, it's not if certain sites are serving Google ads, it's because that kind of content is usually associated with AdSense.

AdSense is definitely a problem for search quality. It creates the same imperative for the content farm as Google Search has: get the user to click off the page as soon as possible. And the easiest way to do that is to create high-ranking but unsatisfying content with lots of ad links mixed in.
Reddit is the source. equalRightsForRobots created it, and is writing about it in that post.
JSConf 2011 early-bird tickets are on sale
Not exactly priceless - the upside has to be worth more then the 5-7 billion spent for it to be worth it for Google.

Security from people suing you is probably the most compelling reason you gave here - I see no reason why Google would want to control Java IP and future direction when they can write all the software they need to in house to built on the Java platform to meet their needs.

So is 5-7 billion worth security for people suing you? I guess we'll see, but this is likely the biggest lawsuit related to Java they will ever face, and you can bet they won't make this same mistake again. Unless then pay out several billion dollars, which is unlikely given the tendency of these large technology firms to cross sue and settle with cross licensing agreements, I'd say Google's decision not be buy Sun is still sound at this time.

Just my two cents, I am watching just like the next person from the sidelines, this should be interesting.
Facebook donates testing infrastructure to OSU Open Source Lab
Meditation may be 'simple', but its also incredibly hard.
I submitted this last week but it didn't get any traction:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095598

John Maloof, a 29-year-old eBay entrepreneur and real estate agent, is now principal cheerleader in the effort to find a niche for Ms. Maier at the pantheon of modern photography. He is only about one-tenth of the way into the task of scanning and archiving 100,000 negatives of hers in his possession, working with his friend Anthony Rydzon. And they have yet to develop several hundred rolls of black-and-white film and about 600 color rolls.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/new-street-photogra...

The photos are truly extraordinary.

Watch this terrific segment too - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWEDOnBfDUI

And for those of you fortunate enough to reside in Chicago - http://www.explorechicago.org/city/en/things_see_do/event_la...
What happens when the CD factory closes?
Outer Space Exposure
How about just running vanilla?
I clicked away when I saw the logo of Uncle Sam - that image references both a call to war and a US bias. Just wanted to point out my response, but other than that good luck with the project.
I just want to thank Matt Cutts for always being classy. His blog posts/comment are always just set at a high bar.
In which case the damages will likely be substanially lower :-)
Nicely done. The tone seems just right for this kind of service: a combination of celebration and reverence.
"according to associates" and "According to close advisors" isn't the strongest I've seen in the "properly sourced" department.
Another useful resource would be something along the lines of "funded founders" dinners with companies you've invested in or really like in order to help them deal with growing the company. YC helps going from zero to funded, but what about after? The zero to funded is a 3 month process thing, but the growing after funded is an indefinite time period. Progression I see being useful:

YC/TechStars

OAF

What I described above.
but $6B wasn't a lot for coupons?
Doesn't it depend on what you mean by "works"?

It probably cuts down on spam, but I'm sure it also counts down on legitimate inquiries that didn't get made because the person who wanted to contact them said "fuck it" rather than typing the e-mail by hand. (You could argue that lack of e-mail from those people isn't a great loss, but whatever.)

Isn't spam detection at this point good enough that this isn't a concern anymore? gmail has let precisely three bits of spam slip through in the past two months.
In other discussions I've seen people raise the copyright issues. Her estate owns the rights to these works, not John Maloof. But I don't think anyone except her heirs or other beneficiaries would have standing to sue him. They're either non-existent (she had no known children) or not interested. I'm afraid that won't stop people from causing problems for him once there's money involved.