skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kinda huge assumption that you are going to go viral. Mark himself said in some earlier thread that he has been trying many things for many years and this was the one that took off.

Bottom-line is that you can predict what would go viral as much as you can predict what would be fashionable. Not that much.
I think underground economic organizations have a social cohesion that legitimate trade lacks, though. There's a reason that terms like "cosa nostra" ("our thing") are used, and why so many gangs inspire a fierce, blood relative-like loyalty, whereas you'd be hard-pressed to find that kind of strong social bonding in above ground organizations.

Except, maybe Apple.
Not the most important question of the day, but I like etymology.

tldr: both hard-g and soft-g are correct (though the originators of the format wanted the latter)
With failed 20% time projects, Google Engineers writing fiction now
Agree. I have to imagine that someone at Google captured the toolbar's HTTP traffic. Maybe they're holding it back, or maybe it's the same for Google results as it is for, say, Lycos.
I wish I were smart enough to figure out cool statistical problems like he is.
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>the current CEO of AOL and how he is building the largest team of journalists in the country

Journalists or people who right copy?

I'm sure someone will level a "no true Scotsman" objection at me but still ...
You don't have to predict. That's why you clone :)
You criticize the OP for not liking the incentive system, but then openly admit that you don't visit the SO site much anymore because you have other priorities and don't want to play the waiting game. You're nearly saying the same thing in different ways, but you're still criticizing him.

Next, you criticize him for being narcissistic but forget to detail that the SO site is built around reputation, which is an INCENTIVE system for encouraging/discouraging participation, and thus actually encourages narcissism. After all, most people on that site are essentially working for a form of virtual currency to their personal brand. How much more narcissistic can you get? It's all about yourself, with an illusion that you're there to help others. Whenever reputation systems are in play, it's likely impossible to leave narcissism completely out of it. It would have to be anonymous, but even then, some people are still narcissistic privately.

Then, you go on to mention that the questions are less interesting to yourself (how is that not more about yourself than the posters on the site?)... I mean, the hypocrisy is thick here.

Sure, the OP is being critical of SO, but he brings up some good points. He's not really whining about not getting 1000 points after 2 posts. It's evident that he's used the site for a reasonable amount of time and then made some observations that he just can't deal with anymore.

You're obviously smart, perhaps more than most. Perhaps a more constructive reply to the OP of the article makes more sense than simply tearing him down? He makes good points, from his perspective.

I personally see the degradation of SO due to these problems. Less experienced developers can only earn reputation by knowing more than they do, because they are unable to ask repeat questions on simpler topics. Newbies still continue to do it, and thus the site is flooded with repeat questions, and more experienced users get annoyed and condescending. There is no warm culture there, and it's purely self-administrating, other than by some reputation filters. Contrast this to HN where PG and others help to continually curate the community personally and not just with software implementations.

Writing a thoughtful response takes time, and when 7-10 other people are writing thoughtful responses, don't you think that's a bit discouraging? Especially when you think the subject matter is less interesting as you have progressed?

If SO wants to grow a good community, they're going to have to make some serious changes.
Conferences are valued by their ability to capture the energy of a focused audience. OSCON lost most of its value as open source 'won': the featured technologies were too diverse and the rallying cry of 'open source!' was mostly met with "duh! of course".

I'm curious to understand the focus of this one: folks who love github? Cutting edge technology, as blessed by github?
Just some random thoughts:
1. Since your product is better than the cheaper competitor's- offer a "like it or we'll buy you one of their's" guarantee- if you're really better that should help.

2. Someone else mentioned this, but offering free samples next to the competition would be a good way of differentiating yourself.

3. Are tourists the target market? How about making deals with local hotels- have your pastries featured in their cafes/restaurants, or give discounts to hotel guests (make sure the hotel advertises the promotion)

4. An off the wall idea- you can try to "fake" popularity by hiring a bunch of people to stand in line/create the appearance of a busy shop/popular product. This could attract real clients.
Social Harpoon
Do you mean that debugging is infinitely harder than writing the code in the first place (since you can never verify correctness) or that debugging isn't more difficult? In the former case, while it is factually incorrect, in the general sense it's true.

If you mean the latter, I disagree.
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this is pretty much true for web startups in general
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Low swappiness is also useful in tightly controlled VPSes. Swap is absolute murder on a VPS platform. I leave it on as emergency backstop, but otherwise I have turned down to 0. I simply do not want processes swapped out, ever.
Cloud Buyout Binge Continues: Time Warner Buys NaviSite
Subsequent product releases give a customer a reason to come back, especially if they experienced success with their initial "viral launch."
Awesome, thank you. Even though I don't necessarily like Spaces, I still use them extensively. No animation makes it better, I have not used application assignments yet (but probably will soon.)
As many others have said, I don't think that using click data from the browser/toolbar as one of thousands signals can be considered "copying". When doing a query with a nonexistent word, all the other signals are zero because there is no knowledge about the query, so the only remaining one is the history of clicks "sniffed" from Google/etc... SERP. OTOH, on real world queries the signal has probably a relatively low weight.

I don't think that it is a secret that Bing uses click data from browser/toolbar as a signal, it's just a not well known fact. For example in the paper "Learning Phrase-Based Spelling Error Models from Clickthrough Data" (http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P10/P10-1028.pdf) by Microsoft Research, they explain how to improve the spelling corrections by using click data from "other search engines".
If this is all we do then sure, but we've got a number of plans beyond just the first stage of the launch.
That is Ars' interpretation of Apple's position. The actual quote from Apple was (emphasis is mine):

"We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase."
There is a lot of support for Al Jazeera English in the west now, but when they report facts and show images that are news worthy but put American lives in danger, it will again be the outcast station.
I thought it would at least have a capacitive touchscreen, no?
Sounds like a Nintendo DS.
Me too; though I also thought that experts-exchange was a good idea at the time, including its concept of an economic reward system (in fact, I got a wonderfully helpful answer on that forum). Yet, it turned out to have problems, which lead to SO with an even better, karma/game mechanics reward system.

And now, some people experience problems with SO. This opens an opportunity for something even better than SO. I wonder what that would be?
In my experience you can get paid more (cash & equity) as a mediocre ruby programmer vs. a great designer.

Do designers get compensated better now that they are so important and scarce?
You get a poor man's REPL with the Immediate Window in the debugger. You can't create classes (or statements in general). but you can evaluate expressions.

But it does appear C# REPL is coming in C# 5.0.
I have just posted this to protobuf mailing list too, and license is the same so it can be integrated.
It seems that a large part of the problem (aside from flawed algorithm) is that they allow people to pick the tickets they want to purchase. If they required people to buy the tickets in order they're dispensed from the roll it would bring the abuse down dramatically.

Even if you were able to crack the code you'd have to wait for others to buy the losers before a winning ticket would show up. The flaw in this would be if the store selling the tickets was be in on the scam. They'd be able to sell a bunch of losers and pull any winners as soon as it was their turn to dispense. But as with most crimes, the more people involved in it, the harder it is to keep quiet about it and pull it off.
Nice landing page, but you should fix your web fonts.

http://imgur.com/kyzBF (FF 3.6 and Chrome on Win 7)
I'm super interested in this product (can't wait to use it) but I wonder if this is too commonly available if it will reduce the overall effectiveness.
That is not coded at this time but you shall see, sir.
Interestingly, the account is not only 1000+ days, but the same user says their first account was banned:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2157137

So chances are this was a mean commenter in the earlier days too. But it would seem back then it was unusual and unacceptable enough to get the account banned, whereas now the meanness is more common place.

On balance though, as someone who lurked for a long time before signing up to contribute, it is still one of the most supportive communities anywhere that I've had any involvement with personally.
I signed up! If anyone wants to hook up, let me know. Same user name on twitter and lanyrd.com.
Debugging is not always harder than writing the code in the first place (let alone "twice as hard" - what does that even mean)?

Debugging doesn't mean proving there are no bugs. If it did, the quote would be even more wrong, since our inability to do that has nothing to do with how cleverly code is written. But that's beside the point, since nobody uses "debugging" to mean this; it means tracking down and fixing bugs you know about. And it's trivial to see that that's not always harder than writing the code in the first place: some bug fixes (e.g. typos) are easy.
The Whois record suggests otherwise:

Registrant:
Chih-Chung Chang
Level 73, Taipei 101 Tower,
7 Section 5, Xinyi Rd.
Taipei, Taiwan 110
Taiwan

http://who.godaddy.com/whoischeck.aspx?Domain=HIYBBPRQAG.COM
The last time there was a McArdle article posted, I did some research and found issues with it; I also found that this is not uncommon for McArdle. So I posted a comment mentioning this, and got jumped on by a bunch of people for going ad hominem.

So think of it as both public-service announcement (since it's still true that she's an unreliable source) and sociology experiment, to see how people react this time around.
My first thought was that it was click data, and not outright copying. If a bunch of Google employees with Bing toolbar start clicking on links to some made-up term, that should spike the data enough to change results within a few weeks. How can Google positively rule that out without internal knowledge of how Bing works?
It'll be interesting to see how Gruber spins this one.
The Bing toolbar doesn't come preinstalled with Windows.
I excitedly went to the Virginia lottery website, thinking maybe I could find a game or two possibly vulnerable to something like this and then buy a few tickets for the fun of seeing if this can still be done...

But manufacturers appear to have dealt with this by getting rid of "baited hooks"--every number on a card is under a surface that has to be scratched off.

I guess they lose the allure of letting people say "I want to buy a card with lots of 7s because that's my lucky number" but it's a simple and effective fix. Oh well, guess I'll have to get rich through hard work :)
By that logic Microsoft might as well pack it up and close shop. Because any act they would take would be an act funded by Microsoft. So if they can't do anything because people will say it was funded by Microsoft than they can't do anything at all.

But you did get me thinking and I wouldn't see anything wrong with them having someone else do the actual tests. Hand it off to CNet, ZDNet, AOL or whoever. Provide them the funding and let them run the tests. I don't think any big media company would say no.
In my coding, I'm starting to think it's better to write code that is wrong and clear than "right" and unclear. Because then you can understand it quickly when you come back to correct it later (note: including correcting the "right" code, due to bugs, problem change, etc).
Although we use MS for our core we do use Linux and open source projects as part of our stack. The routers/firewalls, redis for caching, and haproxy for load balancing are all run on Linux. In addition we use Linux for a lot of the management such as Bacula for backups and Nagios for monitoring. We try to be open about our infrastructure and both George and I blog about the changes we make at http://blog.serverfault.com
Some things seem like they're a one-shot though, e.g. the Million Dollar Home Page.
Underrepresentation hurts us all
Mono also has a REPL (http://www.mono-project.com/CsharpRepl).
I think a lot of it has to do with scaling up to multi-server clusters where relational properties and ACID guarantees cease to work properly. For small datasets I don't see any benefits over RDBMS.
If you have no information about a URL, algorithms aren't going to help you. In that case, falling through to what your competitor has indexed seems like a pretty smart idea. I don't really understand all the hand-wringing.
Update on EaselJS v0.3
DISCLAIMER: I'm a both UI Designer and rubyist

I remember when I would ask for $50/hour for design work, people would without hesitation go for it, some startups even asked why I charge so low....eh, I didn't know better. While I don't have much experience with rails consulting, from what I've heard, people who can do both rails and ui design can EASILY go for $100/hour. Then again, I have a friend who just landed an ~$80/hour work doing some simple joomla/php work. To be honest, it sorta made more sense to me(even though I'm both a designer and rubyist) that designers made more. My belief is that it's more common for designers to be much more unique than a rubyist.

What do I mean?
My theory is that it's easier to become another kick-ass designer who has a lot of people digging his work than it is to become a "popular" rubyist(I'd consider the guy who created will_paginate to be popular in the ruby world).

Am I the only one thinking in this way? ... it might sound a little ridiculous to some people. :)
I just created an account there after years of lurking and absorbing knowledge from other's questions and answers, but I only have 1 rep.

Oddly enough, I created the account specifically to upvote the answer that solved my problem of which another member had asked about, but I am unable to do so until I submit a problem of my own that has not already been answered.
Or you could work for an American company in Japan where they work in English. For those who want to write software in the middle of Shibuya, my team and a couple others at Amazon are hiring :)
But this doesn't seem like one of them IMHO.
Sciency? Their experiment appears to lack a control of any kind. They only use a Google search page as the source for the links, one that is specially engineered to return specific results for a specific term. Then they count the coincidences to support the conclusion that Bing is stealing search results from Google. Where is the non-Google page of links? Where is the comparison using links from a specially crafted bookmarks file? What is the margin of error? Where are the plausible alternative explanations? If this had been a science experiment, it would have been scoffed at for its narrow scope and predetermined outcome.
This does not mean the content has to be purchased through Apple's in-app payments. It only means that it has to be purchaseable.

That is, if an app can consume premium content, that content must be purchaseable through the app. Any individual piece of the content can be purchased through the app, or elsewhere.
With a control. Launch a fake search engine with similar spiked results but with no traceable connection to Google. If the results only show up on Bing from google-clicks and not from clicks on the control, then it's a good indicator that Bing have Google-specific code. Then run the test a few more times with greater than 100 queries (which in SE land is a miniscule test set).

From what they've said, it seems like they only tested against fake clicks on google.com. That tells us Bing are using click data but nothing more. This is a pretty simple debugging technique, which is why I'm shocked if Google didn't think to do that. I really wish I wasn't the one saying this, wish I didn't have these doubts. But I can come to no other conclusion than the ones I've outlined in the post.
First, it's fun. I can't argue that that may be the case.

Second, you'll learn a ton by working with millions of users. This is predicated on the huge assumption that your viral platform attracts millions of users, and that a large number of these (assuming every new internet entrepreneur is doing one...) are sustainable.

Third, it will pay off. Mark's pay-off, I'm sure, was more than he initially envisioned. That amount, to my knowledge, however, remains undisclosed. I don't believe enough evidence exists to assure such a payoff and create such confidence.

Fourth, you can use the user base to launch another startup. Sure, 1% of ~10M users is cool. But that, again, rests on the assumption that you can build up that base of 10M users.

I realize that this formula may have worked, and that value could likely be created from cloning it. Cloning just may work. I can't shake off the feeling, though, that a bit of misinformation is being spread here.

[edit for clarification]: Of course, both the author's post and my response is solely opinion, which makes my use of the word misinformation, well, misinformation. What I mean to say is that I can't help but draw comparisons to "get rich quick" schemes, where opinion was packaged in such a way that people took it as fact.
This is not correct; the algorithms use to produce search results rely on user input over time. The proper rewording is "They've decided that, some portionof the time, the single best searchresults they can returns is whatever users are using.
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I have a feeling there is more to this story than meets the eye. Either Google did more tests then they mention on the blog and proved irrefutably that Bing is literally scraping their results, or there's some underlying political stuff going on that we're not privy to.
If it were just click data, how would they get the terms?

They're either parsing the query out of the url, or violating robots.txt to fetch the result page, almost certainly the former. This seems like a pretty clear indication that they've special-cased clicks from google. It's theoretically plausible that they are treating all query parameters the same for all sites, but very unlikely given how much noise that would introduce into their results. Even so, they would have to know that most clicks with meaningful query parameters come from Google. This isn't something that's going to happen by accident.
It's a great demonstration of what can be done with an 8-bit RISC microcontroller.

The biggest downside is that AVRs can only execute code from flash ROM. You can't just throw apps on an SD card and run them; the list of apps (which seem to be instances of C++ classes) is hardcoded, and adding a new app requires reprogramming the whole chip.

An intelligent bootloader that could burn executable files from the SD card into ROM would be awesome. Yes, you're only limited to about 10,000 writes, but coupled with Contiki-style multitasking, this could be quite cool.

The other idea (which not many people have tried) is to make some kind of "virtual machine" that interprets bytecode from RAM. There is a Forth implementation (amforth) but not much aside from that. Things get really tight when all you have is 2K for data and bytecode. I'm sure a couple demoscene coders just scrambled off to get working on that after reading this. :p

Rossum has also done some extremely impressive stuff with ARM chips as well, including the RBox, a game console that's literally the size of a coin: http://rossum.posterous.com/building-the-rbox
bump for an awesome startup / architect
This whole accusation by Google was very childish... and I thought adult supervision was no longer required at Google ;)
It's not working on my iPhone. All I see is a white image.
Wow, Microsoft And Google Are Punching Each Other In The Face In Front Of Us
> parsing the query out of the url

Or parsing any words found in the URL. Not unreasonable to believe.
Why <noun> sucks, and <false hyperbole>
> Sure, 1% of ~10M users is cool. But that, again, rests on the assumption that you can build up that base of 10M users.

Also, he forgets that there are numbers less than 1%.
Finally some sense in all this.
I've found it to be reasonably speedy once you deploy things correctly (though I haven't used it too much.) That said, they've certainly got the "make it work" part down, getting the "make it fast" has a way to go.

Again, the "make it work" part always strikes me as the challenge, and to me these two projects are several generations ahead of the capabilities of things like jQuery for things like databinding and custom drawing capabilities.
I would rather see it be done w/o MS funding at all otherwise you will have the skeptics come out.

I think its doable, but it can't be done by MS, Google, IBM, etc...
So... How many signups before we get access? Looking forward to playing around with this...
It depends on your margins. If your margins are 100% then yeah, the resulting drop in conversions will likely overshadow the 30% savings. However, if your profit margin is 31% due to the royalties you have to pay for the content, you're looking at 30x boost in profits. And if your margins are 29% you are looking at a difference between profit and loss.

I'm fairly sure ebooks fall into this latter category, hence the kerfuffle.
"a bit of misinformation is being spread here"

It's my opinion on my personal blog, not fact. I hope that was clear.
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Are you kidding? You are a moron - this is as close to a smoking gun as you can get. You did get the part that there was NO relationship between the meaningless search phrases and the returned page right? What POSSIBLE situation could explain Bing returning the Google returned page without recourse to Google's search?
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The key to something going viral is its novelty. If something has already been done before then it's almost guaranteed not to go viral.
Wael's friends have repeatedly said that he in fact was not apprehended. They asked that this story please stop running because it was "hurting the rescue efforts." Apparently there are photos and video of the man who was arrested and they claim the photos are not him.
Never mind about proving it - google isn't even saying it.

It's not scraping, it's click tracking.
Yeah I think it's usually easier to point someone to a visual portfolio of your work (as a designer) than it is to link to projects you've worked on (as a developer). Definitely seems harder to get noticed for being an awesome developer, but designers can easily show off.