skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Crank Your Specs' Run Times
Really? That's your argument? If that's your argument an equally valid one is you get what you pay for. ;-)

As a consumer you stick with WebM and all that the royalty freeness buys you. I'll stick with H264 knowing that MS has already paid the royalty, the patent pool has virtually every player in the game, and MS indemnifies me as an end user. We'll call it a day.
So what exactly would a control that satisfies you be? How about I submit search terms on the computer terminal that connects to a server that isn't even on the internet. There, those searches do not end up affecting Bing.

The fact is that they used unique search terms that link to unique subjects. They ONLY submitted searches using what they described. That means the only places those searches passed through were the OS, toolbar, IE and Google. They know Google received those searches, did it propagate to Bing?

That's it. They didn't need to offer a placebo to anyone. It's like throwing a ball and hearing an echo. You don't need to NOT throw a ball just to make sure it doesn't echo.
I've run the "sponsored link" ads before, and it's usually $0.40-0.70 CPM.
Where are you getting point 2 from?

In many cases where they have no other data, they clearly weight Google's single data point high enough to create a whole SERP around it. The claim that 'this is just one input among many' implies that some kind of cross-referencing or corroboration takes place. In this experiment that obviously didn't happen.
Google didn't run this experiment to cause bing to show bogus results, they did it to confirm...

There is a counter argument to that. If Bing's claims are true, then Google didn't run the experiment to confirm the results, they ran it to cause the results.

I think 99% of HN, including myself, will share your opinion, but it doesn't counter Bing's claims because it boils down to "which company do we believe?"
New Android Firefox beta beats default browser in JS benchmark
Yes, that's right, and only once. It's like a switch statement, only using inputs instead of fixed cases.

It does make sense to have the blocking version, if there's nothing else to do.
Improved Gist Search
"- How different would their results be if they didn't use clicks from google's search as a signal?"

That's the important one. These Bing people are happy to run their mouths about 1k signals blah blah blah. Who gives a fuck? What is the weight on those signals.

Further, this case was made obvious because Bing couldn't create an answer to a query so they copied Google's answer. Dude admits as much. Why should we give Bing a pass on copying Google's results just because in this instance it was too hard to find their own results?
"eventually offering $100 million for the company plus an earnout of $25 million to be paid over four years"

Terms, terms, TERMS people. I can't believe that with 40+ comments there isn't more discussion of the terms.

It could have been $100M in Google stock on a 4-year vest, plus $25M cash on a 4-year earn-out. At those terms, it's really only a $25M deal if the founding team doesn't think they're going to sit around at Google for 4+ years.

Basically, the one sentence above tells us very little about this purported offer and the reasoning for turning it down. I would wait a week for more details to emerge before jumping to any conclusions about bubbles, co-founder betrayal, or anything else.
First, I have friends working for Microsoft as well as Google. I like and hate both companies, for different reasons. Now, to the meat of what I wanted to get to:
"We have brought a number of things to market that we are very proud of -- our daily home page photos, infinite scroll in image search, great travel and shopping experiences, a new and more useful visual approach to search, and partnerships..."
Seriously?? Are you going to put "daily home page photos" as (first!) point to be proud of? Is it such a technological feat? Kudos for the rest of the items, but I just found it funny
Except Swype is not readily available for the Droid. At least my Droid 1.
For some evidence that your point "it's quite possible" isn't merely some idle hypothetical, search for "Webb" and "Seager" in

http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf

The same author (Leonard) also published a paper in _History of Political Economy_, "More Merciful and Not Less Effective." I remember it as similar, but I'm not finding an ungated version online.
Have you considered Flippa?
http://www.flippa.com
Authenticate sudo with a rotary phone dial
So the user signs up for paid accounts on two different sites? Sounds lucrative and very shady.
Neat, but it's too slow to use in RL.

I have one of the RedEye units:
http://thinkflood.com/

The process of waking up my iPhone (or the dedicated iPod touch in each A/V room), loading the app (if it's not already open) then locating the button you want to push (touchscreens suck for TV remotes, there is no tactile feel) takes WAY to long when you just want to hit Mute, or turn the volume up a little bit, or change the channel.

The Redeye is actually better than this (IMO), because it's Wifi based, it has more value in being able to control devices from another room.
Yes, they do. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Self-help_books for somebody agreeing with that.
Native Win32 for fun and profit
Every time I've reread _Style:_, I'm struck by how agreeable its mindset is to hackers. It's no wonder Richard Gabriel liked it so much. It's practically a hacker's guide to better writing. Highly recommended.
If your analysis is correct, you should be able to explain a scenario under which, given Google's experiment, Bing's result for "hiybbprqag" came from somewhere other than Google.

What is that scenario?
Alias "ls -l" to "ll" in your .bash file, it helps :)
The problem is that Google is doing the wrong test to prove their point.

The should search for Justin Bieber and add in the Bieber search results some really horrible link.

MS should have a lot of relevant info for Justin Bieber, so the Google data should be rated lowly. If this non-sensical result makes the first page then you can begin to assume that their weighing it heavily. But when your query is "erftqnvpwedf" -- that just means that the only relevant info is coming from the toolbar. Bing would show that result even if the toolbar only accounted for 1/(2^50) of the total relevance.

I suspect Google did this test and has nothing to report.
I'd recommend Stephen King's "On Writing", Ray Bradbury "Zen and the Art of Writing", and "Ernest Hemingway on Writing". All have great insights into the joy and struggles of writing. I really appreciate how their musings focus on the struggles of writing well since everyone tries to romanticize writers. It's hard no matter what.
Awesome? Would you still feel that way if your employees spent all day on reddit?!
This is sadly not too far off from the rationale behind Sony's DMCA attack against the PS3 hacker.
We did it again :-) | E'shee means Personal
Thought this was an article about why i shouldn't get a macbook air.
You can't decide to reason through induction on one set of variables (all searches, not just "hzzxsqqdga", are copied by Bing) and leave it out on another (click data on all websites, not just Google, are copied by Bing).
Reawakening the Enlightenment
They're talking about their top-ranking result being used. Are you suggesting that Google place garbage as the top-ranking Bieber result for visitors who use the toolbar?
I was thinking about how instant mass communication and organization might transcend freedom of speech, and even the right to peaceably assemble. Basically, it's much more potent than pure freedom of press/speech and freedom to assemble, and maybe protected as a means for the organization of a militia (armed or not).

Not that it's the correct way of interpreting that amendment by any means, I was just thinking it'd be an interesting point to take on the matter.
Do you mean to sell websites on the side or the company?

I would be open to selling the company as its fully functional but haven't received any offers yet since it's low in traffic / not a huge amount of traction (~600 people have registered).
It's funny, because the reasoning (from what I understand) for subreddits instead of tags was that subreddits create distinct communities. While this is true, cases like FUU comics being in every subreddit point to subreddits as failing to contain their communties. With an additive tag system (Show me posts tagged "Minecraft") or the current system, those posts show up anyway. With a subtractive tag system (For the love of god, no more "FUUU"), they wouldn't show up.

Either way, I agree with you on FUU comics. They became so pervasive I just gave up and deleted my account.
The first comment to the blog post is humorous.

Bing, "Powered by Google". It does have a nice ring to it.
They would have probably resorted to all tricks they could find.
When I think about how self-conscious amateur writers can be I always think of the "Professional vs Amateur" section in http://www.alistapart.com/articles/writebetter/.

I'm an amateur writer.
OKCupid: We Didn't Censor Our Match.com-Bashing Blog Post
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2141990
Fun fact: I created the F7U12 subreddit. I'm sorry, but it's a fantastic way to unwind and a great community due to the fact that most comics are common annoyances everyday people have.

Besides, you can always unsubscribe.
Bing has never denied using clicks on google search. They have, in fact, admitted to using clicks in general before Google even began their experiments. Given that information, why should it be surprising that Google Search, as one of the most-clicked sites on the Internet, has a big impact on that?
For those interested, Al Jazeera's online producer Evan Hill tweets pretty frequently with eyewitness updates on what's happening over there:

http://twitter.com/#!/evanchill

Things have gone up a notch in the last 24 hours or so.
Zesty LLC

http://www.zestymarkets.com

We're building a network of niche marketplaces, using Django, MongoDB and a lot of love.

We're looking for frontend designers/developers and backend developers. Please email me directly if you are interested.

chris@zestymarkets.com
> they clearly weight Google's single data point high enough to create a whole SERP around it

This really doesn't tell us anything about how highly it is weighted relative to other data though, since obviously there will be no other data to weigh in on a nonsense search term.
>> "As we have said before and again in this post, we use click stream optionally provided by consumers in an anonymous fashion as one of 1,000 signals to try and determine whether a site might make sense to be in our index."

Erm, the Google test took pretty non-sensical keywords and put at #1 some completely unrelated website.

And then Bing copied this unrelated website result from Google.

The above quote from Bing (especially the bit in italics) is therefore a little confusing. Since, again, the entire point here is that Bing shown completely unrelated websites taking straight from Google. The results weren't relevant. Thus making the quote fairly contradictory in my opinion.

Yet another 'reply' by Bing, and yet again they seem to be trying to insult their way out of it via ad hominem and strawman arguments.

And yet again, Bing still haven't addressed the key point here: why Google results were taken and used by Bing.
They do have sails.
So, does someone have a solution for setting up a US merchant account from a foreign country for the best choice of merchant fees and service providers to bill through?

I hate all these "don't use PayPal" comments but even for first-world countries like Australia, setting up a merchant facility that can accept foreign currencies is really, really hard and very expensive.
Bing seems to want me to sign in to read this. Am I doing something wrong?
Ask HN: jQuery  Prototype resources
We are about to start a complete redesign of our web app at the company I work for and now is the time to try and push for some changes. We currently use Prototype but I would like switch to jQuery. I'm going to be putting together argument as to why we should switch and was wondering if the HN community could provide some resources that I can use as ammunition.
Could you please elaborate.
Model of solar system: Tychonic vs Copernican
How Islamic law held back the Middle East
I enjoy Tim's books (and find them somewhere between entertaining and useful depending on chapter) but I found this darn near keyboard-kill amusing.

"Be careful of reading health books. You might die of amisprint." - Mark Twain
Look over Lieberman's job history ... he has never held a job in the private sector, period.
- What are the specifics of the mechanism by which they ended up obviously copying google's results?
They said is was user click stream data. User types search into Google, gets results back and clicks link. Microsoft gets sent the search term and link clicked.

- Do they handle clicks from google differently than any other clicks?
Hopefully they do if they are using user clickstream data. Each domain should have something like a page rank to determine how trustworthy it is.

- How different would their results be if they didn't use clicks from google's search as a signal?
Why would they not use Google. Google is a site on the internet where users click links, Microsoft is collecting data from sites on the internet where users click links.
No. Just for visitors that are coming from a specific IP address (their engineers). The only people that would see the bad results are their engineers. But the URL and data that the toolbar gets looks just like any other one.

This is pretty straightforward and I'd be surprised if Google didn't have the infrastructure in pface to do this today (like literally today).
You can't compare them directly, as SO has fewer posts per day (I assume) and the comment trees of reddit are larger and more intensive to display.
No need to code for meta keywords?  Is this true?
I'm just starting out...
Surprising or no, it's clearly pretty controversial. If you are using click data like this, you have to know that you'll end up essentially copying Google. People only click on the results that are there, and Google puts them there.
Great response. I wouldn't have used the term "click fraud," but the analogy is easy to grasp (ie, that the "test" purposely attempts to strengthen an association between things that are not associated.)
120,000,000 is what we (minecraft forum and minecraft wiki) hit for January (as per quantcast) which I think is pretty neat too, for anyone who likes pretty stats.
That's insanely optimistic to the point of absurdity.
love this.
Shocked by Wired’s knowledge of my personal information
My point was that the algorithmic conclusion 'oh well, let's just print it anyway, since it's from Google' is pretty weighty on its own.
'cd ". "' is valid; it means "set the current directory to the one named [dot][space]".

I assumed it was something he'd seen as a way to sortof-conceal a directory, since it's both hidden and looks a lot like the [dot] directory that you'd expect to find everywhere.
It might appear so, but a friend of mine who's in a poly relationship gets harassed fairly frequently on OKC because she's married.
how's that working out for Kevin Rose these day?s?
I'm not doing that. How did you get that impression?
That sounds like a mobile plan in the €30 per month range, not like an unlimited residential plan.
Open Broadcast Encoder 0.1 Beta released
Oh yeah? I've only ever ...heard otherwise, and I'm pretty sure that several of the founders are poly as well. I could be remembering that incorrectly...
What I'm interested in, does the Google Toolbar send back the click stream when you use Bing?
In the case of spelling correction and query expansion, every little bit helps. Suppose you want to learn that people typing [mazad] mean [mazda]. (This is kind of a silly example, as dictionary- and edit-distance-based techniques can do corrections like this. So bear with me.) The event you need to catch is:

1. User mistakenly types a query [mazad], meaning [mazda]. (Probably less than 1% of total queries for Mazda, which is an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the total queries in your system.)

2. The user gets garbage results, and the user realizes their mistake and fixes it, rather than giving up in frustration. This is probably rather rare too, though

3. The user clicks through something that ranked highly for Mazda, and stays there long enough that your system thinks it is a "long click" that probably satisfied the user.

The golden datum here is literally a one in very-many-thousands-of-sessions event, and you need to catch a statistically meaningful number of them for every misspelling (or synonym, or whatever you're trying to learn from this data) you'd like to have your system learn. To have good coverage of the English language, we're talking about many billions of search sessions.

A previous commenter pointed out that Yahoo! probably has enough data; I bet they're right. I don't know if Yahoo! and Bing's technology partnership included access to such data.
How Meditation May Change the Brain
I just bought 3 Ontario Lottery Corp bingo cards to see if the pattern held and he gave me my pick and told me to take my time.
Andrew Warner is in the hospital
http://i.imgur.com/jgXrf.png If you like pretty stats, here are ours ;)
Congrats to the Reddit folks, one of my favorite website on the internet nowadays!
My notion is that you should call out WooMe. Go for it. However, as an author it is your responsibility to try to research as much as possible. It does seem, from the surface level that you described, that those messages are spam/automatically generated. However one could come up with a semi-plausible bordering on the edge of legitimacy rationale why you had received those messages. Maybe WooMe discovered a novel way of nudging users towards communication with each other, maybe they get Achievement Points for sending messages to new users? Likely? Not really, However, chatting with a very cleverly disguised CTA does not constitute thorough research.
How many Commodore 64 computers were really sold?
I'd play devil's advocate here and say that I give Bing a slight benefit of the doubt. Given they cannot perform a parallel Google search on every single user query (this would have been easiest to spot), the technique cannot be of the form "if on google, do x". Rather, it is likely they look at what users search and what results they get as one of the parameters, say normally influencing 0.2% of the search ordering on average (assuming 500 "signals"). In the case of "torsorophy", out of the 500 "signals" only one came up, the Google result (via Bing toolbar from a few users). So, their algorithm makes a note of that, like, hmm... I don't really have anything else so I'd just rehash what users have searched and subsequently visited. So the 0.2% becomes 100%, and internally Bing associates the word "torsorophy" with that website. Next time "torsorophy" is searched it returns that site.

Yes, Bing is likely using Google's data (if available, via Bing toolbar) as part of the ingredients. You can argue whether this is stealing or not, whether this is Google results or user search/visit behavior, and but I would say it isn't exactly "if on google, do x".
OK, I understand what you mean now. :)
http://www.iviewtube.com/videos/177177/jesse-eisenberg-snl-m...
You should re-read the article. Caplan didn't say knowing how to play the piano is worthless, he said "Unless you love music from the bottom of your heart, a career in music is folly." Chua wasn't just encouraging her daughters to practice an hour a day, she was emotionally abusing them in order to force them to put in the huge amount of work necessary to become a professional musician.
Simply saying that they were wrong doesn't make it so. The original post had hard numbers. If you're going to say that those numbers were in error, I want to see the numbers that back it up.
It's a photo finish: Android, BlackBerry and iOS are tied in US smartphone share
More power to that /r/!

However - I am not a subscriber - and the FUU comic as a visual style has become a way of communicating in many other subreddits.

I just want the style/genre of a pic to be taggable so I can opt-out.

Regardless of the content of a FUUU / rage style comic, they never seem to be seen as appropriate view-at-work material.
It's interesting that the author of the reviewed book believes corporations to be a significant differentiator of the Western economies and their success. Recently the limited liability enjoyed by companies, their executives and directors has been somewhat reduced by the courts. Executives and directors have been held personally liable for some of the more egregious acts of corporate mismanagement in the past ten years.

I guess this just shows that capitalism is not a panacea but a balancing act -- one where the rights of the corporation have to be balanced against those of wider society. The Middle East needs to strike its own balance here too, but one that is far more on the side of freedom than it is now.
The extension adds an item that reads "Submit to HN" to your context menu (right-click).. Is it not visible for you?
Why Distributed Teams are Making Your Traditional Office Obsolete
kill it, focus on school, and work on your second idea.
Space Stasis (Neal Stephenson)
Those would be the stats for what???
That's a surprise. When I was with them about a year ago I didn't really have any problems. There was some scheduled downtime for maintenance, but it was never unreasonable.
> I would say it isn't exactly "if on google, do x".

I wish bing had taken this opportunity to answer that question in this blog post. Since they didn't, it makes me more likely to assume the worst. All they would have to say is something like "We use anonymized click data and don't special case Google" to avoid most of the controversy. Then we would be back to debating whether it is ethical to do something theoretically ok even if you know that it practically means you'll be cribbing from a competitor.
What I Learned From My First 30 Days Of Blogging
Going by what MS says, its clear why Google's experiment worked. They came up with very unusual queries for which by definition there will be no data to generate search results. So out of the 1000 inputs only the one input from Google is present and hence the output.
Oh, I agree with that. I hadn't realised there were comics posted in other subreddits that much, maybe I didn't notice because I am subscribed to FU...
From what I can tell, the article you linked says that PoF is making $15mm in revenue.

If OkC were making 15mm in revenues why in the world would they sell for $50mm? That just doesn't add up. Their overhead outside of bandwidth costs wasn't that high, they employ 10-15 (I think) employees and have a small office in Chelsea or sommat. Their profits would be enormous if they were generating anything near that.
I don't understand what are Bing's claims that make it so just went Google did this they were copying results.
The case of the identical rabbit games
Free AppSumo Bundle for Hacker News Readers
If you can't monetize a billion pageviews in ways other than Reddit Gold, you've got to be kidding me.
Dating sites are #8 on "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund": http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
500 days and 2 karma...here's one more. BTW, apparently 200 gets me- absolutely nothing.
Well, plenty of people in the public sector know how to use a computer :)
Scala: Using function types to convey intent
A short snippet in Scala to demonstrate the elegance and clarity when trying to convey intent by using function types. Brief write up also references sbt as development aid.