skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's just hard to reject people. I'm an engineer type. I like looking at problems and solving them; the harder the better. The difficulty is often that the entrepreneur is the problem. Giving a real reason is tough.
Look at it this way:

Google is setting trends on tail terms due to its massive market share. Once the trend is set, Bing captures the trend by monitoring user's behavior and provides that to the other users. By reflecting user's behavior in its own index, Bing seems to replicate the Google's index structure which created that behavior. Had there been no Google, there would have been different trends and Bing would capture those instead.

It's not Bing's fault that Google is so influential, and certainly not a reason for them to stop dedcuing relevance frm user behavior. Just because Google creates trends, does not mean they own trends. The users own their own behavior and are free to share it.
I'm inclined to think the red will generate a better conversion.
Google's hiring process is notoriously bureaucratic, and one of the things that they ask you when you make it into compensation committee is "Do you know any Google employees?" It feels great to say "Well, when I worked on chromium, I interacted with [name], [name], and [name]."

You should also know that they're super cool about letting you get into the AUTHORS file, you just have to write good code that they can use, and they'll insist that you add yourself as part of the patch.
It's called SHITS. "Show high interest, then stall." They're waiting for validation from some other VC. "Oh, Sequoia is interested??"
Red does generate a higher conversion, at least on add to cart buttons. I have personally a/b tested this at my day job and the conclusion was red (by a landslide). We tried green, orange, blue, and red.
Beautiful design. Functions well,

As mentioned a few times here, the bookmarklet is a big barrier to entry. I think a walkthrough video would help that substantially. I can't imagine a regular person understanding they can just browse around the web shopping and your site can pick it up. Browser plugins are also a big entry barrier to people who aren't very savvy.

I wonder if you linked out to sites like amazon in a frame where you persisted a top bar around those sites as the user browsed. Might be janky though. *edit: just noticed amazon throws a JS error when framed. damnit.

Another thought is perhaps you cobble some api+scraping stuff together and provide the user a simple search+add to registry function inside your site.

So is your business model based on affiliate programs for all those retailers? How are you tracking whether or not something was purchased?
Side question about the private beta signup:

Are you trying to restrict signups to USA-only, or did you just not take international users into consideration when writing it?

Either way, just signed up and filled in my American cellphone number (which only works when I'm actually in America, which isn't that often) and entered my UK number in the one box that allowed me to write any sort of prose. If you're currently excluding international users, feel free to disregard my application :)
like that too. will talk it over with the team. thanks!
Not at all, dont believe age is a significant factor. Spirit, commitment, and outlook are far more important in my opinion.
Agree with you. Someone should step up their game when it comes to updating their older phones.

Apple can do that with the iPhone and Google can do it with their Nexus models probably because they don't release a bazillion different phone models in a year (like HTC/Motorola/etc...).
If Blekko sticks to their word, I'd be inclined to give them a real chance. Sick of my search results being padded with spammy results.

EDIT: Having looked at them, I'm a little unclear about what they're trying to do. Are they actually letting end-users tag the web? I.e., Google not allowing users to block certain sources.
Password hashing function almost by definition does not handle any data that must be protected from the user, so side channel leaks do not make much sense. Only secret information comes into play in final comparison of hash of user supplied password and your stored hash and I don't see any way of exploiting possible timing leak in that comparison that does not require breaking the hash in the first place.
You just said you can give away your photos by agreeing to not have any access rights to it and still own those same photos. It seems like you are using a different definition of "ownership" or maybe "click stream" than I am so this argument is pointless unless you define exactly what you mean by those words. By "click stream" I mean the aggregate history of clicks along with contextual information related to those clicks as one coherent, single entity and not individual clicks looked at one by one each of which was owned by the person that generated the click and who transfered ownership of that single click to somebody else. If you meant giving away a copy of your collection then that's a little different but that's not what's happening with user generated click streams. The only click stream copy is the one at google, microsoft headquarters and you have no access to it so you don't technically own it.
Next step: Weather machine
Apologies if the similar wording came across as some sort of personal jibe. I was merely trying to point out that even if the question was a simplification as you said, it was still a poor way to assess a candidate, because it's still getting hung up on a technicality rather than determining whether the candidate understands the underlying issue.
Ironically, you are refuting as a straw man a proposition I never made. I have never claimed Bing did that.
I just highlight the fact the way they get data from google is technically a copy, since it has the capacity to duplicate
the entire google database (which again is not what they are doing).
What's his point? it's just the usual passive-aggressive dickishness, I don't understand who keeps upvoting this drivel.
>The association between the query and the URL is the least important aspect.

I don't understand why you believe this. This is the entire basis for why search is hard. It is the hard problem that search tries to solve. Many companies have spent in aggregate, billions of dollars in R&D trying to solve this, and all but a few have folded. It's an "AI-complete" problem in that solving it perfectly would be a sufficient demonstration of strong AI. It's the whole reason why Google exists.
Wow, this is really coming along nicely guys - well done!

I just tested it on my iphone and it's really looking excellent.

Direct link (to demo) for those that want to test it out on a mobile:
http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.0a3/
FWIW, Cloudberry to Amazon S3 works nicely, and super cheap (I guess this is relative -- ~9 cents per GB). I believe Jungledisk does something similar.

Of course, S3 is unlimited too, but the pricing model is different. With multi-part upload and large object support (up to 5TB IIRC), I think it's a pretty good option.
That's a lot of bands. MySpace is still popular with musicians because it's easily templatable, it allows them to easily showcase their work (songs), detail upcoming shows and their fan-bases are typically familiar with it already.

Yes, MySpace is far from ideal, but is there a competing service that checks all of these boxes?
Thanks for the confirmation! What was the site's background colour?
Egypt: This Week in Online Tyranny
Nobody would ever order an "amber." Beer is always ordered by brand name, and by size. In Victoria and Tasmania, beer is usually served in a half-pint glass called a "pot." Beer bottles are usually called "beakers." In every state, Foster's is by far the most popular beer. There are usually other unpopular regional beers available for old people and sheilas, but the national love of Foster's goes so deep, you risk starting a fight if you try ordering something else.

So in most of Australia, you'd want to say something like "Cheerio Mate, beaker of Foster's willya?"
What do you mean? We should "trust" Apple instead?
http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
The buttons were against a solid white background. It was also the only test we ran at the time to ensure that we weren't blowing the test results. I think the entire composition of the page matters though. Conversion rates for an element don't necessarily cross-over to a completely different layout, so testing is always still a good option.
If this isn't enough to convince you, nothing will be. I'm not sure how the evidence could be any more convincing.

Content from Google's result database ends up used to generate Bing's results, full stop. Proved. It may be technical error, it may be only used a little bit, it may be deliberate, it may be accidental and perfectly ethical by some people's standards, there's all kinds of ways to legitimately interpret this fact. But Google has demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that input from Google is used to generate some non-zero bit of Bing's results. There is absolutely, positively no other explanation that accounts for the facts of the case.
Ooops. Well, point remains. :)
Volume of resumes does not mean they are attracting talent.

For years, Google has been the dream job of so many mediocre programmers. Top talent has been viewing Google as a safety-school for years now. The broader tech community is now aware of this. People who knew they didn't stand a chance a few years ago now think that there's a way in. Most of them are still too far down on the talent totem to have a shot.
Mahalo developers will win--hands down.

it's on.
You missed a very hectic & crazy starcraft bracket. I think about 30% of those that signed up didn't show, but was filled with a bunch of random people that were on the waiting list and present. So if you don't sign up in time, you can probably still show up and get a few games in! I did get to play against spez in the beginner bracket (and lost).

It's too bad there won't be a 4v4 bracket this time.
I just launched a clone site myself. Although, mine is snowmageddon. :)
The Computer Science Program in Singapore: Where innovation is marked down.
Good evening HN:)

I'd like to share a snipplet of life as a computer science undergrad in National University of Singapore. A little background information:

Last semester before my stint as an intern at Videoplaza (hey guys!:D), I took up a course known as Software Engineering. Microsoft kinda sponsored the course. It was a 8 modular credit course, that meant an equivalent of 2 normal courses. That made this a huge course. The course scope was well, basically, for teams to put software engineering skills into practise. Iterative programmiing, revision control, software architectural design. You get the gist. The course requirement was for teams to engage software engineering skills to develop a file syncing tool, with C#.

Well, as a full time Archlinux user, I hated that I had to code a full app for a platform I don't even use. I was the leader of my team, and with a little bit of persuasion, I managed to convince my team to go with Mono, and to develop the app to work cross-platform. While everyone was working with WPF, .NET, blabla. My team did some crazy stuff like using SVN to sync files (instead of writing our own backend for syncing), GTK for GUI, iKVM to use SVNKit in Mono, blabla. It was a hell of a course, but we managed to pull through, and our plan to re-use open-sourced components meant we could focus on features, and learning new frameworks. Also, how cool would it be to go rogue on a Microsoft sponsored course?

My team won 2nd place when M$ came down to reviewed the apps after they were done. However, the team was awarded B+ as a grade, and myself, as a A+ only because my peers graded me highly on a peer review appraisal. It bothered me. The code wasn't that bad (review it at http://code.google.com/p/subsynct/), we met with some serious obstacles and overcome it anyways, and within a tight timeframe. I was proud of the result, and of my team's effort.

It made no sense to me how my team only deserved a B+.

And so after months of back-headed nagging, I shot an email to my professor for some clarifications: http://pastebin.com/APXEcFG4

Here is his reply: http://pastebin.com/paMntaY2

And heres my final reply: http://pastebin.com/DHSt1dkg

---

Just an example of how innovation is discouraged and frowned upon in an Asian context. One of the main reasons why technology entrepreneurial activities is in such a poor state in Singapore.

PS: Don't use the app, it was a proof-of-concept. SVN really suck balls in performance for binary files. We learnt this the hard way.
The reason I stopped reading TC, One sided biased(may be bought out) writeups
How handy. Thanks for putting this together and instantly shortening my to-do list.
I think you misunderstood the blog post. I don't give a shit about pageviews on my blog. I know you guys care about the details (I get the same way when hearing about other projects) and that's exactly what I'm going to deliver. In all honesty, I would have written one long post packed full of details, but my brain is running on empty right now and I just don't have it in me. Admittedly, the first blog post was a bit weak. Like the post said, I haven't slept in days. How well are your critical thinking skills after being awake for almost 3 days straight? So instead of trying to write and analyse everything in one big burst I'm splitting it up. But I'll get it all out as soon as I can, before I forget anything.

And yes - stats and hard numbers are interesting, but I think there's more to a good analysis than that. I want to help fellow hackers get better. If I told you I had a 5% conversion rate, turned a $4 margin on each shirt and and sold 500 of them, would that help you in any way at all? I think not. That won't bring you any closer to being successful. But if I told you that I optimized the conversion rate by making a dead-simple bullshit-free site, a single shirt design, and no distracting ads, then maybe you could learn a thing or two that could help with future projects. These are the things that really matter.
Same thing happened to me when I signed up for their service on my Commodore 64.

:(

Why didn't they tell me up front they don't support Commodore 64s?
$ git show e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290 --stat
commit e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290
Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@ppc970.osdl.org>
Date: Thu Apr 7 15:13:13 2005 -0700

Initial revision of "git", the information manager from hell

Makefile | 40 +++++++++
README | 168 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
cache.h | 93 ++++++++++++++++++++
cat-file.c | 23 +++++
commit-tree.c | 172 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
init-db.c | 51 +++++++++++
read-cache.c | 259 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
read-tree.c | 43 +++++++++
show-diff.c | 81 ++++++++++++++++++
update-cache.c | 248 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
write-tree.c | 66 ++++++++++++++
11 files changed, 1244 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

:-)
How could Twitter not change how protests happen?: Egypt and the novel
Do we know they haven't? We only know they haven't reported on such a test.
This needs to happen in NYC stat! Team Hashable representing.
Are you coming up, Jason?
Wufoo (YC 06) is essentially a better designed Survey Monkey. http://www.wufoo.com
My take - People see one and two and those are the two lowest numerals. Fill their brain up with nines and somewhere there are synapses firing which say that's a lot. It's not like $10 is a huge psychological barrier in the same way $1000 is.
Those who got those counters were top contributers who had often been neglected by Google's compensational and promotional structure. Most Googlers are not good enough to work for Facebook.

The vast, vast majority of these applicants have no shot of working for Google, much less of being then poached by Facebook.
[..] is nothing like you'd expect if everyone who started in their 20s in 1998 stuck around until today.

I have an interesting observation around this. I got started in this industry "for real" in the late 90s and worked for some "new media" companies (as they were known at the time!). I also read a lot of the magazines that featured things like "The 50 Most Important People Online" and similar crud.

And.. recently I tried tracking down people whose names I could remember back then. Few were still involved with tech or Internet-specific work. And of those "important" people, few were names I recognized.

To me, at least, it seems like the group of people working online has changed a great deal in the last 13 years. And I'm surprised by that.
Analytic goals for open-source communities
Show HN: What Would Hacker News Say?
can you send me an email? zackster@gmail.com i have an ultraquick iphone app i want to make. i have kickass wireframes already.
No. You can give something you own away. You obviously don’t own it anymore after you gave it away. Being able to give what you own away is part of ownership. (You can’t give something away you don’t own.)

Since you can still make a local copy of your clickstream data (every browser has some sort of history function) you don’t even really give it away, you keep it and hand over a copy (maybe not technically but it is still the exact same data) to Bing.

Here is an analogy: Imagine a scale which, after you agreed to it, automatically sends your weight to the manufacturer every time you use it. The manufacturer made it clear when you agreed that you will not be able to access your weight history. While slightly creepy, I don’t see any ethical or legal problems with that. You own the weight displayed on the scale, you can therefore also agree to send this weight to whomever you want, even if they don’t let you access your weight history. You are also free to make your own local copy of your weight history (for example by writing you weight on a piece of paper every time you use the scale).
Their ability to correct for the missing kids, is presumably because they can assume that the kids missing are missing at random (proportional to their attendance rate.)

This is very different, because while there is some data missing, it is missing at random (albeit weighted), and can thus be corrected for.

If it was the case that kids avoided coming into school that day, because they knew the survey would be held, it would be a very different problem.
And when it becomes clear that that's no longer a viable option, your job is to take care of bankruptcy, etc. You don't just jump ship.
You should wait for my blog posts and take some notes. Your copy-cat site would look better and sales would probably increase significantly.
Catch recruits
CarWoo (YC S09) Launches CarWoo Version 2 To Keep Car Buyers Even More Informed
Many articles on TechCrunch seem to be the gossipy type and are not much better than articles in a content farm that the author is railing on.
You are, indeed, wrong. 2% is a normal management fee, which is a nice, but hardly "killer" salary. That 20% is after the LP's get their return, and could very well be zero. VC's only get rich when things go very well.
Check out MutualMobile at http://mutualmobile.com/

They're the only one I know that can handle building iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and mobile Web apps on time with their level of quality.
Reid Hoffman to Receive VC Taskforce’s 2011 Innovation Catalyst Award
Most of my thoughts have already been echoed elsewhere in this thread, but:

> "To me, what the experiment proved was that clicks on Google are being incorporated in Bing’s rankings."

It proved that clicks on other websites are being incorporated in Bing's rankings, which had already been public knowledge, I think. It didn't prove that only or disproportionately clicks on Google are being thus incorporated, although that is what Google is repeatedly claiming.

> "If clicks on Google really account for only 1/1000th (or some other trivial fraction) of Microsoft’s relevancy, why not just stop using those clicks and reduce the negative coverage and perception of this?"

Is Matt Cutts suggesting that Bing special-case an exclusion for Google results?
I have no good answer for that, I don't think anyone felt strongly about it being either way, so it just ended up like this and not the other way around. :-)

Honestly, I don't think it matters very much.
That video was way more interesting than this semi-fabricated drama. Search result spam, adsense role in it, and how to (not) tackle it is what I'd like to hear more about. Google search results degraded over the years to the point where I have a bing search on my wp7 phone as default search and I actually don't mind/don't care, because search results from google are not an imperative for me anymore (and I'm not cheerleading for anyone).
Yesterday we were all Tunisian...
It's a start up the same way the 4-hour work week is a work week and the 4-hour body is a workout book :) In other words, brilliant satire!
I wish Apple allows developers to decide their exact price instead of price-tiers which are variations of $*.99. I wanted to pick honest pricing for my iPhone app's in-app purchasing plans, but you've no option than to choose these marketing numbers.
They've emailed me twice now asking me to interview. A guy named Dan McCarthy. I said no at first (back in 2007) but I said yes this time (just a few weeks ago). I made it by the first phone screening. They asked really simple questions. I'll have a more formal engineering interview next week.

I think they'd get more high-quality folks if they let people work from home. I'd rather not move to Pittsburgh or NYC, but would like to work on Google stuff. It really interests me.

Edit: I never sent them a resume or initiated the conversation (they called me both times). Also, I don't do start-ups and am not a big open source contributor. I do write and publish code that I find interesting, but that's it. I write code because it's fun (it's a hobby), not because I want to be rich or famous.
He's invested in more companies than I have heard of.
The reason is that with the URL and the query, there's a decent chance you can derive the association.

Now the reason I say this is that to my best approximation the key difference that makes Google better than Bing (when it is) is the index size, and not the search algorithm.

So the two key pieces of value are:
A) queries that people don't do on your site, which would have generated poor relevance

B) Pages that are actually browsed that you don't have indexed or up to date.

Now don't get me wrong. There is value in the association, but I think I'd capture 80% of the value with the above. Now as you point out, these lists are often non-obvious, but Bing does a near equal job of creating the lists. And if you give them the search terms where they have gaps. And fill the index, then I think the gap closes most of the way.

And lets be clear, because they clicked the link doesn't mean its a good link. See ehow.com or expertsexchange. But it does have some value.

And frankly I think MS would have been willing to let it go if Google had gone straight to MS with it and said, "We have this data. Even though its not unethical we can spin it to the media to make it look bad. Kill the association." MS probably would have as the net win isn't that huge. Now the PR loss in pulling it would be worse than the PR loss in keeping it (with no integrity loss, since they [and I] think it is perfectly ethical).