skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Let's compare perks size?
Hey everyone! Long time submitter first time Asker. I'm trying to do the Lean Startup thing and survey my customers (which are you guys, the tech entrepreneurs with great places to work!). It's a quick, 10 question, anonymous survey and it would mean the world to me if you could take it and help me in the first step to understanding a market. The survey is here:

http://bit.ly/workplacesurvey

any advice or criticism for the survey and its questions are welcome!
Clickable link: http://bit.ly/workplacesurvey
The compiler rewrite that's meant to enable REPL (along with some cool metaprogramming features, I hope) isn't targeted at 5.0, but a still later release. Though you can get a C# REPL in Mono today.
On WebM again: freedom, quality, patents
More popular if done as a way to trash them, I expect. You could make "trash old usenet posts".com and have a ranking system for "worst decisions ever".

(C.A.R Hoare's billion dollar mistake, for example).
Google Crisis Response
Well, I think is not such a bad idea to require students to use their laptops at courses.

If one wants to learn one will use his laptop in this sense, for a serious student using a laptop can boost his performance. If one is not interested in learning,one will find other ways to distribute his attention.

What your school should not do is to impose regulations about the operating system and configuration a student laptop should have. A student should have the liberty to run Windows, Linux or Mac on his computer. A diversity of machines will let others to learn about alternatives. They should be encouraged to learn to use as many applications as possible.

Today, the education should not be about quantity, but about creating the mind set for organizing the information. About learning to think with your own mind. In this sense a laptop could be a valuable asset for letting the students access this information.
Think about this from Apple point of view, the Kindle app is free, uses Apple infrastructure, and Apple get nothing out of it, besides the increased usefulness of their devices (which isn't tiny).

I can understand them wanting to get something for this. I am not saying that this is what they believe, because I still think it is crazy.
Git on Dropbox
1% wasn't chosen out of a hat. I see it in real (startup) life a lot.
I highly doubt the files are irretrievable. It's more likely it'd cost Yahoo a whole lot of time (or a large cost in getting specialist contractors) and they would rather just risk facing bad PR than coughing up the money.

Maybe they'll do the latter after some rethinking!
The holier-than-thou attitude by Google here dumbfounds me. Android phones and tablets would not exist in remotely the shape they do today but for the innovations of Apple. They organized with Apple's competitors to provide an offering extremely similar in spirit and often in form to what the iDevices do. There is zero chance Android adopts all the "conventions" it has without copying Apple. The world was not on a fast track to full phone, bright screen, touch capacitive displays and gestures and app markets before Apple pioneered them. iPhone was not the logical inevitable implication of the technology that had gone before. If Google thinks Bing is not playing fair, Google has 10x as much to answer for in real damages to Apple for thieving their innovation.

Some would say, "Well, Android has innovated on top of iPhone's precedents." So has Bing, right? In fact, I'd claim Android owes far more to Apple than Bing does to Google.

Some would say of Android copying iPhone, "Well, it's fair because we want competition in the mobile space, not for one company to dominate." Sort of like how Google dominates search? How much would I love for a true competitor to Google, so we can test, e.g., their policy of having terrible customer support.
envious of the UX/Customer Dev position. This is exactly what I do in my day job and know the impact this has on the overall product.
The tweet author might be referring to recent claims that Android contains non-licensed Sun code.
Find God's Match For You.
Since we talk about niche products/markets here a lot :)
Only for terms that are worthless.
Un-done to-dos are like unread books on the shelf: they tell us who we wanted to be. The fact that we haven't done them tells us who we really are.
I'm guessing you caught that sarcasm, but for anybody who is unaware - he's the one who made threewords.me
I strongly believe that it will be important for the team to work together, to keep the momentum, focus and goals in check. Also, I believe that working together will be essential to build the necessary foundation for the inevitable future growth. If you are interested, and there's the possibility of transitioning to W.Sac, contact me directly so that we can discuss the possibilities further.
Oh, I caught it, but it is still a valid question :)
China: The Unprecedented "Civilization State"
Little Freedoms #2 - Nursing a Flu
That's not all they did:

We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

Essentially, the engineers enabled the user tracking features of IE and the Bing Toolbar, ultimately seeding Bing with the desired results. How is that stealing?

On a related note, can this technique be exploited to improve site ranking on Bing?
This isn't the answer you're looking for, but I'll give it anyway:

Reframe your site so that you don't rely on the community to power it -- make it so each user can use the product to its fullest extent without a single other user.

We had this same problem during the early planning process for our (currently just my) startup. Ultimately we realized that we were looking at the problem the wrong way. Instead of making the tool community-powered, we made it individual-user-powered. This lets us be "successful" with far, far less users.

Obviously this probably won't work for your site, but maybe it's just a useful thought exercise.
Trades are booming in Australia. I've been traveling in Australia since January. I meet loads of tradesmen from places in Europe who come down here because the wages are high and there is a lot of work. My sister's husband is a builder, and his friend are electricians, and they do as well or better than any salaried programmer in Silicon Valley or New York. The electrician in particular makes about double what I did, and I was making well over $100K a year.

Regarding being a bartender in the Northern Territory: The advice in the article is pretty good if you are in the USA and under 30 and don't have any prospects in the USA. The wages are pretty good for most types of seasonal service work.

One downside the article doesn't mention, is that I think you can only do this visa once. Thus, it's not really a long term career plan.
Did they do the same test with blekko or duckduckgo too? It would be interesting to see if Microsoft is the only one doing this.

I would try it now, but the test has been polluted by all of the news articles.
I had about 400 yet-to-be-completed items in my to-do list before I started afresh. Seemed like way too many. How about you?
The article was interesting, but using Google and Bing as plurals really disorients me. I had to stop and mentally substitute every time he said something like "Google are thinking".
Doing Business in..Sydney
If that were the explanation, I would think they would come out and say it. (Maybe they will shortly.) Even so, I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't notice that most of the benefit of the technique comes from recreating google results, at which point we're back at the original ethical question of whether that's ok.
The statement about the "open source stack" is especially ironic considering that StackOverflow just switched over from using MSSQL full-text indexing to using Lucene for search: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/01/stack-overflow-search-...
Wow...all of these ideas are pretty good. I will definitely discuss some of these with my friend.

Thanks much guys, and keep them coming if you have any more :)
Great point. A good reason to keep them around in some form, even if you only revisit them occasionally.
The degree to which Microsoft is copying Google is to a much higher degree. Google did not do an exact "copy/paste" like Microsoft did here. At least Google did it from scratch.
Agreed, this is truly shocking behavior on their part.

1) They do the same thing. When I have the google toolbar installed and use bing, my clickstream data goes to Google.

2) On a micro level, there is nothing wrong with this at all.

Of course, on a macro level, both sites trample all over user privacy, so you should be using DDG.
The result of this PR move does not decrease my opinion of Microsoft as a company, or Bing as a product. I held them both in fairly low regard already.

The result of all this is that I now perceive Bing to be considered more of a contender by Google than I previously did.

I doubt that is what Google intended. But then, this PR move was probably meant to change the opinion of people who had a higher opinion of Microsoft and Bing than myself, or were just casual users with no real position.

Either way, it does put Microsoft on the defense for something that I wouldn't construe as malicious.
on dedicated servers the difference is like $10 or $20 if you're leasing, and if you're rolling your own hardware there's BizSpark.

How much does BizSpark cost after the initial pricing period lapses?
From http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/07/will-using-google-anal...

"[Google] Search Quality in general does not use Google Analytics in ranking ... You can use Google Analytics, you can not use Google Analytics, it won't affect your ranking within Google Search results." It's dated middle of last year, I guess it's possible that something has changed, but nothing I'm aware of.
Can't someone just analyze the Bing toolbar binary and figure out what's actually going on here?
Mosquitoes, Trains, and Software
Really interesting comment at Reddit about what Google might be thinking:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fd3g9/google_bi...

Apparently by creating fake results they've published something "creative" and thus potentially able to be copywrited. Just speculation but interesting.
The only way to get good pizza in the Valley is to fly it in from the East Coast, so that makes sense. :-)
He meant sciency in the marketing sense. You can market science and not actually be scientific.
I'm sorry this miscommunication has caused you so much consternation; I will readily agree it's no iPhone competitor at this time. It may even be a toy. But don't dismiss it. That's all.
Speak at them. Saves a TON of money.
Philippines
Why? English is spoken by most. The people are wonderful !
The weather is great and you can see so much on 7000 islands. Its also central for side trips to Hong Kong, Taiwan (computer show in June) Mainland China, Japan and more.
There are 70,000 Americans living there now.
The Bing toolbar only sends information back to Microsoft, it doesn't decide what to do with it. For this kind of a task it would be simpler to use a packet sniffer anyway.
ATDHE Seized: How Site Takedowns Are Ceremonial
The data's sent back via SSL, from what I've read, and disassembling is not going to be practical.
Google should have kept quiet, and figured out how Microsoft is pulling data from Google. They could then create a script that would cause Bing to link new borrowed content to goatse.
Really? That sucks. (The post 5.0 thing sucks, not Mono). With REPL and Async (and the other metaprogramming stuff) I was thinking 5.0 was going to be their biggest release yet.
Sure you can. People do it every day. It's called direct mail marketing.
IE will send this data even without the toolbar.
Not only does it not seem unreasonable, but for a company like Google, I find it incredibly hard to believe that at some point they wouldn't have tried it themselves, at least as an experiment.
Do you seriously think that a copycat service beating out and killing off the actual source of innovation is somehow a good thing?
It would not work, except that some lotteries have been trying to get creative with marketing. They want to give people an illusion of control, hence letting them choose between several "different" tickets. This is the "baited hook" they mention.

In theory, the tickets are not actually visibly different. In practice, apparently they are, just not in entirely obvious ways.
What each generation does online
The guy has his backups. His problem is not the data. His problem is the human-networking side of things: lots of places linked to his photos (including the flickr blog) and those links now point to dead space. That will reflect badly on him, I'm sure, and not flickr.

If I were Yahoo, I dont care how much it would cost, I would have someone, or someones, recreate his account as it was, even if that meant calling in a data forensics team.
Ask HN: How do you relax?
A fairly straight forward question. The second part of it is, most of my relaxation during weekdays seems to involve being glued to some sort of screen. My iPad if I'm reading, my PS3+TV if I'm gaming or my laptop+hulu if I'm watching TV Shows / general talks.

I enjoy all of these, but is there no way (please don't say exercise) to wind down without having to look at a screen?
I doubt the debate would get this nuanced, but I believe Google only tracks users on their own site. It appears Microsoft is tracking click across at least one search engine.

I think this distinction has legal as well as technical implications.
http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/Faqs.aspx#Startup-Question...

Startups may take advantage of the BizSpark Graduation offer that allows startups to keep the software they have with the option to purchase subscriptions and maintenance if they want to keep it up to date. This also allows them to continue using their Microsoft software at no cost in perpetuity and allows them to renew subscriptions to this software without paying any initial license fees. Startups can:

•Keep their MSDN Ultimate software and optionally renew their MSDN subscriptions at any level

•Keep all their Windows and SQL Servers they are using in production and optionally purchase the first two years of Software Assurance (updates and ongoing maintenance) at a 50% discount
If you're skilled at solving a customers problem, $100/hr is far underselling yourself. For a skilled (very rare) designer who can solve a customers problem $300-500/hr is perfectly acceptable.

Mind you the vast majority of "designers" out there are artistés designing whatever trendy bubblegum is fashionable this minute rather than solve a customers real problems.
'Composable Abstraction' is a pervasive theme in this talk. The presenter suggests that it can apply to general library design equally well as to how it's used in Ring and Compojure.
Will the results/directory be made generally available?
That's standard practice in the UK when referring to companies.
This is how SproutCore validation logic is used on the server, BTW.

It's easy to use SproutCore's (very) powerful model layer on both the client and the server.
Why would you use such a service? If you are serious about your startup or users, DIY.
Link? I haven't heard this mentioned yet.
That isn't the theory under which CAN-SPAM operates. Spam is banned because the recipient bears most of the cost of its distribution. That simply isn't the case with direct mail.
Google created the relationship when they enabled user tracking features in IE and Bing Toolbar, then used a specially created Google page as the HTTP REFERER to the desired page. Go ahead and duplicate the experiment using a non-Google page or file. I'll bet Bing "steals" those results, too. Google seeded Bing, plain and simple.

Note also that the example search links in the blog post are all from the non-SSL Google search. User tracking doesn't necessarily rely on the HTTP REFERER in this case, since the browser already has access to all of the necessary information. But it would still be interesting to see the experiment repeated using the SSL-encrypted Google search, which disables referrer information, along with non-Google sources.
I think it's just the British English way of referring to companies or groups with plural verbs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_di...
SproutCore loves the DOM. You're thinking of Cappuccino.
PRIVY - it's who you know
There are so many types of noodles that you can try. From chinese noodles to Italian pasta, noodles sure are one of the most popular dish all over the world.
Japanese ramen is another type of noodle that definitely worth to try.
I think the key to all of this lies in the code for the bing toolbar (and the code that parses its data).

If I search twitter for "binggate" then click on a link, the referrer would be:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=Binggate

It wouldn't be hard to write a generic parser to detect URLs that look like search queries, and it'd be a novel way to gain a lot of information from private indexes (stack overflow, twitter, lucene/solr setups, reddit, etc).

If this is what Bing is doing, then kudos to them for clever thinking, no foul play.

However, if the toolbar has any logic to specifically parse Google's URL syntax, or if they're filtering and correlating google.com URLs against their own algorithms, then it's copying and foul play.

The surprising thing here is how much publicity Google's giving the issue knowing that Microsoft could shoot them down in no time with a few code snippets (if there's no foul play going on).
Please don't make every article McArdle writes be about McArdle herself. That's boring.
Normal people can't. Somehow the real visionaries can. Just saying. In technology, Steve Jobs would probably rank at the top.
Fixing Broken Government
Thanks for the clarification. Does the toolbar send a notification to Microsoft on every click? Or only clicks on Google SERPs?
No. I'm not tired of Apple's rules.
Writing C# is pretty darned pleasant. In fact, some things - like sequence filtering and aggregations (which a lot of plumbing code boils down to) - are much more pleasant in C# than they are in Python. Lots of sugar in C# keep you from missing things like language integrated dicts and lists, too. C# brings home a lot of concepts from the world of static functional languages that give me the warm fuzzies, and drops a lot of concepts from the world of Java that made me feel icky and gross.

Due to the easy, abundant libs, I would still go to Python for hacking something together. I would probably seriously consider C#, though, for something more substantial.
There's no clear indication that the clickthrough analysis is specifically targetting Google, vs. targeting any search engine or even targeting any page with that text in the URL query string, etc. Maybe it is, but they haven't shown it.
Arrgh. Another example of "let's interpret the comment in as idiotic a way as possible when there are other easily imagined options." I know it doesn't come with WiFi. I read the whole page. I knew it when I asked the question but it is possible with a lot of other hobbyist platforms like Gumstix to buy WiFi shields and extension boards. This is an answer more likely to be known by enthusiasts of the platform.

Yes, I read the specs. Thanks for jumping to incorrect conclusions and contributing noise when you could've contributed information.

I'm looking for a way to quickly manufacture an ad-hoc urban mobile network. Cheap processors on mobile texting devices over WiFi mesh is one way of doing this. (While providing good encryption to keep information out of the hands of the authorities.)

Congrats, you've just become an anecdote!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2158202
Close, but you didn't understand it quite right. Google knowingly submitted info to Microsoft to confirm a suspicion that Microsoft was using google.com search results from other users to populate bing results.
Google's outrage seems silly to me. They made a fortune harvesting other people's judgments on relevant webpages. That's what PageRank is.

So Microsoft takes their search results - it's all in the game! And Google wrote the rules!
The Reddit commentator appears to be operating on the idea that trap streets and the like are copyrightable under US law, which is a fairly common urban legend.

In reality adding a fake "fact" to a collection of real facts does not allow you to sue someone if they copy the fake fact along with the real facts; from the decision in Nester's Map & Guide Corp. v. Hagstrom Map Co., treating "'false' facts interspersed among actual facts and represented as actual facts as fiction would mean that no one could ever reproduce or copy actual facts without risk of reproducing a false fact and thereby violating a copyright ... If such were the law, information could never be reproduced or widely disseminated"
I know designers in NYC who make a lot of money, but they have to work freelance and hustle. On the other hand, I'm just an average Ruby programmer and have been through total softball phone interviews ("what is M-V-C?") where companies wanted to hire me for $120,000 + options.

I guess I'm more wondering if companies are really paying designers 6 figs + equity for salaried positions. Or if it's really early stage startup, if the design salaries achieve parity with the programmer salaries.
My analogy has more to do with approaches to UX than it does with economic model.
The guy's phone book example is wrong, though. Putting fake entries in a phone book does not make it subject to copyright. Google or Bing for "Feist vs. Rural Telephone" for the leading case in the US on this.
thanks, I was beginning to wonder if I was 'right' or not. Didn't know the standard was singular in US.
How  Google's Honeycomb Tablet OS Could Beat Apple's Mighty iPad
turtles all the way down, my friend: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_YgpHa1oeHME/TTxZAZWLaxI/AAAAAAAAC_...
This is the first proposal I've heard that points a way out of the current horrible mess of brokenness in US government. With luck and effort, the next crisis will bring a teachable moment, and government will pivot to a better model.
I may be misunderstanding what is happening, but is it possible Bing is just doing what it was programmed to do- examining the user's browsing habits? Is it necessarily directly and purposely targeting Google?
In case you missed it, innovation is expensive.

If a copycat service can immediately clone the innovator's work and provide the exact same service, then they are likely to outcompete them, because they have much smaller costs.

To suggest that such freeloading should be encouraged removes any incentive to try and innovate in such areas.
Whether it's wrong or not, it does make you wonder where Google's priorities are. How much time (cumulatively) did they spend on this and could they have spent this time improving their algorithms instead? Maybe it took a few hours, but still.
I bet that in cases of copyright infringement a logical delete isn't legally sufficient. Sure, you can leave the database pointers in place... but you're going to need to actually remove the infringing content. In that case, at least, a true delete tool would be needed. Like any Internet discussion about copyrights or other people's backend scripts, this is all purely speculative.
Yes but when Microsoft took on Apple back in the day, they were young, agile and relevant. The same is much harder to say of the MS of today. They aren't winning very often anymore, especially in the consumer space. And I say this as a Microsoft alum and really enjoyed my time at the company.