skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There will always be exceptions to any rule and GiffGaff seems like quite the exceptional case (They’re even paying customers to do support. This is really cool).

Here’s a checklist for whether your company is an exception to this rule:

- Do you have a HUGE customer base?

- Do you have a very stable product?

- Do your existing customer service channels inflict pain upon all who come in contact? :)

So if you’re Comcast or AT&T then sure give it a shot (but I think you’d be better off just fixing #3). This is also why almost all the vendors of this type of technology target large enterprises.

For the other 99.999% of businesses on the web and pretty much anyone here on HN I’m confident saying that not only does customer-powered support not work but it’s detrimental to your company’s future.
I read on my Kindle which is not like looking at a standard screen or you could read real books. I also find manual drafting relaxing, but other hobbies like drawing, knitting, or crocheting can be relaxing non-screen things to do.
Wait a second. Can't let you completely get away with the MS stealing UI from Apple comment when SJobs stole it from Xerox/PARC first. Although to be fair he does readily admit the thievery.
Funny, I just noticed this in the Mac OS X rsync man page for the very first time:

--cache
Apple specific option to enable filesystem caching of rsync file
i/o Otherwise fcntl(F_NOCACHE) is used to limit memory growth.
It's in the blog post: "Internet Explorer 8, which can send data to Microsoft via its Suggested Sites feature"
Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb co-editor, got his start...

[I think Marshall might keel over if he heard you call him that.] :)
Dish Network to buy satellite-terrestrial wireless broadband provider
Well I guess THAT joke fell flat. Oh well...
Hi, I wrote this post - you're right that I should have emphasised the application in security/espionage. With regard to the results, it's very difficult to judge, because in natural language text, even with a low accuracy rate per character people would still be able to deduce the message (see http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/) With regard to password cracking, even a low accuracy rate could make a previously impractical brute force search possible,
I love the enthusiasm..I would love to help!
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2010/11/04/bizspar...

It's remarkably friendly although you could paint yourself into a corner if you went crazy with SQL Server, but there are a lot of options these days for dealing with large volumes of data.

At the end of 3 years the costs are hopefully going to be incidental.
If you've not travelled much, then perhaps South America might be an easier introduction than asia, and some basic Spanish is probably easier to pick up than the majority of non-European languages.

Im currently in medellin, colombia, 2Mb/s broadband with cable tv,phone, costs around $50/month, and my reasonable sized apartment is $370/month (6 month contract). In buenos aires, rentals were almost double for something similar (capital city pricing), and rio was slightly more expensive again (the Brazilian Real is very strong at the moment). If you would prefer not to stay in one place then most countries have 3g in major cities and usually you can find a prepaid plan which is reasonably priced as long as you use it for browsing rather than lots of youtube.

India, and thailand are less expensive than latin america, but it would be harder to learn the language and you'll more likely be spending time with other travellers. Although, given you're on a gap year, then travellers hangouts in asia (beachs, mountains etc) could be fun. I enjoyed Salvador in Brazil, lots of live music and dancing, Rio not so much, Buenos Aires feels very european in a good way, and it has the liveliness of a capital city. I've heard good things about Chang Mai and the islands in Thailand. I spent several years in India and it is very cheap and very different , but except for Goa is generally not so much of a party place compared to say, Thailand. In some places, craigslist will give you a rough idea of apartment pricing - although often there are many agents charging ridiculous prices, so find ads from private landlords to get a rough idea. Otherwise use hostelbookers.com or hostelworld.com , as a proxy for rental prices. Lonely Planet thorntree forums are probably worth a search to get some kind of idea of a destination and/or prices.
Indeed. I'd have sympathy for Flickr if this story didn't come up almost monthly in the last few years. Between this and the account deletions of those who spoke loudly over Flickr's other account deletions, more and more Flickr is becoming a hostile system.

The lack of a retrieval system could be from a lack of Yahoo wishing to invest in upgrades to the platform in general. The last few years have seen few changes for users beyond geotagging and tagging persons, and competitors (free and otherwise) have stepped far ahead in terms of personalisation and galleries.

I'm very curious to see if Flickr turns into another 'Delicious' situation in a couple years.
I think their terms of use say they may pass along the contents of form fields. On a Google search results page, your search query is sitting in a text field.
Actually, unless I'm mistaken, parsing the URL may well yield good search terms, but the query string is much less likely. Look at eg HN -- you'd parse out id = some long number. I may be wrong, but I don't recall many sites that would have good information for a search engine in that string.

What seems far more likely is bing is using click tracking on G's results. This was explicitly not denied by their VP on the search engine panel today. If not many sites except search engines have useful keywords in the query string, that pretty much validates Google's complaint.

In fact, if you go to Google's blogpost [1], the bing toolbar specifically calls out monitoring "the searches you do, the websites you visit, [...]" [1]. And the MS guy doesn't deny using clicks on G's search results [2]. In fact, the pretty much just says they copy G on long tail searches.

[1] http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...

[2] http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/20...
I am being downvoted for two direct reasons and one indirect one: (1) people universally think it's trivial to enable SSL for HN --- and it is, in the grand scheme of things, for non-hobby non-side projects, and (2) people care about the security of their HN account, even though virtually nobody else does, and so they have little to worry about. Meta-reason: people assume I'm being argumentative for the sake of it; I'm not. SSL is a waste of time for HN.
Rent an apartment in Italy, Amalfi coast or Florence, and when not studying, meet and greet beautiful girls!

But if you don't speak foreign languages, I would consider n. Europe as many of them speak good English and you won't feel so alienated. You can also sign up for prog. courses in English abroad. Also, if you are not a super duper independent learner, being in a class or in a study group will get the best bang in the shortest time.
If I were in a less charitable mood, I would suggest that the reason Google is upset is that they didn't think of it first.

More likely, though, it's a play to get Microsoft to come out and say more about what they track and how.
This is worth an upvote in spite of MG's authorship just because of the inclusion of relevant Tweets.
Perhaps. But grandchildren, brothers, sisters, etc can all help, not just children.
I think the biggest question here is, if a site robots.txt file prohibits bots from gathering data, should that also prohibit bots that piggyback on real user sessions ?
Either way your probably going to need a body of solid past work at the volume that the bigger players are after if you want to work there. I guess you can either go this route and make some small time money, or try and build your own blog following.

Of course there will be outliers who get into the good blogging jobs easier, but as he says they expect 5 quality posts a day at RRW, many probably aren't cut out for that and it's probably hard to assess without past work.
AOL's Master Plan
C# is a crazy good language, and with Visual Studio (and Resharper) productivity easily matches Python or Ruby.
I personally can't relax unless my mind is being stimulated in some way, so I make stuff. If your purpose is solely to relax (as it is for me), it doesn't even have to be useful. K'NEX and Lego are personal favorites if I'm mentally out of steam (you can never be too old for Lego!). If I'm looking for something more stimulating I'll get out my breadboard or something similar.
waiting it out seems like a good idea for now. It really hasn't caused any problems yet so I guess I'll wait and see.

Thanks
If something like the Rosetta Disk (http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/) made of Monel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monel) were available at a non-insane price, I'd use it.
This, in fact, could be quite wrong. Consider the fact, that most modern websites include a search engine of one form, or another; and the usage graph of the web has an extremely long tail.

Even considering the top 100 most visited websites on Alexa: all of them has a search form, and only 20 or so belongs to Google; it's very easy to see how the aggregated usage of the other 80 could be much, much higher, than the aggregated usage of Google properties.

Therefore, while Google might be single most impacted organization in the world, most of the data comes from non-google properties. And none of this has anything to do with my original argument of the algorithm itself being benign.
>The flag this waves for me is how easy is it to manipulate Bing results using false MSIE reports back to MS, anyone know of botnets sending fake data to boost page rankings??

You sir, have won the thread.
Really? Doesn't the intermediary that narrowed the list from several billion possible matches to the best 10, including correcting the inherent spelling errors in the query carry some value?
Really? Would it be OK for MS to send home a copy of every Google Search Results that its browser [bar] sees and then use that as their results? Where do you draw the line?
Great Engineering Quotes
> I don't recall many sites that would have good information for a search engine in that string.

Well, Google is one such site - as in, if you have bing toolbar installed and are on google.com/search?q=keyword and click on example.com, then Bing can easily extract "google com search q keyword" and associate it with example.com - without anything explicitly or intentionally relating to Google in their code.

They may also be looking at referrer info.
What's wrong with exercising?
There's no transcript, but this summary is posted on a linked page:

Americans have made major adjustments to our government before, Howard declared. At the beginning of the 20th century a Progressive era ended strict laissez-faire. The New Deal in the 1930s provided social safety nets. In the 1960s Civil Rights came to the fore. Now we need a fourth big change, because our government has managed to paralyze itself with the accretion of decades of excessively detailed laws.

In the Eisenhower era the entire Interstate Highway system was installed in about 15 years. That couldn't happen now. Getting permission to build one offshore wind farm near Cape Cod took a decade while 17 agencies studied it, and 18 lawsuits now pending will delay the project another decade. The Interstate Highway Act was 29 pages long. Our new Health Care bill is 2,700 pages.

The news laws obsess over methods instead of focusing primarily on goals and responsible institutions. They disable the power of office holders to decide and act because they try to prevent bad choices, and thus they disable the power to make good choices. Liberals want to head off game-playing corporations, and conservatives want to keep government officials from having too much power. The result is broken government and a citizenry maddened by a system that defies common sense.

Only real people make things happen, Howard said, not laws alone. We need a framework that enables real people to take responsibility, to have the authority to say "Do it," to say "You're fired," to be accountable and to require accountability.

To get there, Howard proposes three modifications of our government's operating system.

One, a spring cleaning of all budgetary law. Three-quarters of most budgets are now locked in, so present decision makers have no flexibility and they wind up taking money from schools and parks. We need to create an omnibus sunset law, so all budgetary laws have a requirement to be discarded or revised every ten or fifteen years.

Two, laws have to be radically simplified. They must be understandable and revisable. They have to enable the people executing the laws to use their judgement. That means focusing primarily on goals.

Three, public employees have to be accountable. Which means: if they fail to perform, they can lose their job. Under the present system government worker unions have captured the apparatus that employs them and made much of it work primarily for them rather than primarily for the public.

The system will not fix itself. It is up to the public---us---to mobilize and demand this kind of overhaul, to find leaders who will demand it, and support them.
Have you considered that you could potentially make a lot more by open sourcing NOLOH and building a support infrastructure around it? It seems like the closed source aspect of it might be holding you back. If NOLOH truly is the Rails of the future, it might be wise to unleash it.

I've always thought this was part of what kept REBOL from catching on. Nice little language, but its closed nature hampered its adoption.
I'm interested in what the rationale behind expanding the free plan is.
> "Your calendar never lies. All we have is our time. The way we spend our time _is_ our priorities, _is_ our 'strategy'. Your calendar knows what you really care about. Do you?"

--Tom Peters
You make something innovative, truck along carving out your niche for a few years, then a big company rips off your system and uses its massive marketing budget to crush you. Does not getting to massive-multinational stage in a few years mean you've done something wrong?

Or are you suggesting that it's only okay because they're doing this to Google instead of a little guy?
There was some good discussion on hosted Django services on the Django subreddit a few days ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/f1h7g/share_your_exp...
Same for Stanford.
http://see.stanford.edu/see/courses.aspx

Youtube lectures, download through torrents available on the site.

Some are good, and all have a lot of documents attached (all accept the book, often)
> It wouldn't be hard to write a generic parser to detect URLs that look like search queries

vs

>However, if the toolbar has any logic to specifically parse Google's URL syntax

So they're either generically copying from ANY search engine, or they're specifically copying from Google. Either way, the perception and actual outcome is the same. I'm not sure either is inherently good or bad, but I'm surprised that there is such a delineation in peoples' minds.
Can you give one example of this? I can't seem to think of any. There's only one threewords.me, and there's only one chatroulette. The followers most likely won't go viral.
Considering they're a search engine, whose job is to crawl the internet and determine the main keywords of any random page on the internet, I would imagine they have text parsing abilities that make it possible to infer the topic of any arbitrary page.
I use Backblaze and have never had a problem. Stores versioned files for 30 days, is easy to retrieve, and is pretty cheap. The throttle control is nice as all the way up nearly cuts off Internet access for other users on some connections.
Yes exactly. Imagine the scandal that would be had if someone ran a lottery that was impossible to win.
Worked so well for the Joojoo ;)
Maybe the explanation is simpler than that. Perhaps they do trust their own algorithms, but their algorithms contain vulnerabilities that are easy to exploit. Maybe Google figured out how to use this weakness to manipulate Bing's results then spin it to make it look like Bing is stealing from Google. Google certainly knows many of the pitfalls a startup search engine will face. And anyone who's ever had to decipher the madness of msnbot in web logs over the years can tell you the Microsoft search engine team has made some monumental blunders that weren't intentionally malicious. In fact, Google may have just helped Bing by exposing a weakness that they can now patch.
EFF jumps on Do Not Track browser bandwagon
sure, but I think it's reasonable to expect that. I don't pay for gmail and if it all went pop tomorrow I would be incredibly annoyed but I would accept that you get what you pay for. If I had a gmail pro account (if such a thing existed), I'd feel a little more entitled to special treatment.
You're missing the key of threewords.me. It went viral in a small subset of users on FB/Twitter. It could just spread similarly in many other areas of FB/Twitter, you just have to seed it appropriately.
There's an "all's fair in love and war" point you have here that carries some water, but there's a difference between reimplementing ideas and literally reading the output of your competitor and using that in your algorithm.
Especially in the case of spelling correction, it is not so much that Google has "solved hard problems" to get the long-tail right, as that they have a monopoly on the relevant data. Unlike all their competitors, Google has 12 years of the entire history of queries and clicks to mine for signals about how to rewrite queries. Even if you have all of Google's algorithms, it is technologically impossible to build a better query rewriter, because you don't have their data. You can't buy this data short of buying Google, and if you believe Peter Norvig, it's an irreplaceable component of Google's quality advantage.

Microsoft, and any other would-be competitor, would essentially be committing suicide not to try to make up this data gap. If their toolbar is opt-in on the part of users, and you agree with me that my click history is mine to share with Microsoft if I so choose, this is helping consumers. Without some of this data, building a viable competitor to Google is impossible, and consumers do benefit from competition in web search.

Disclaimer: I work in Facebook search. Not the same thing as web search, and I don't really care whether Bing or Google "wins", though I'm temporarily rooting for Bing because as a user I want better, more competitive web search.
threewords.me != chatroulette IMHO.

The latter went viral on the back of press and wasn't inherently viral. threewords.me is inherently viral and has only spread in a small area of the big social graph. That's why it is cloneable right now.
GNUGuitarINUX is gathering requirements for the new version
Questions 2 and 3 both say:

What single attribute is most attractive about your current place of employment?
Good question. robots.txt was designed for an age before ajax and the proliferation of plugins/toolbars/etc. It's a valid shortcoming you've identified, imho.
Heroku Support Saved My Launch Day
1) although you can hope for it, you can't guarantee something will become viral. threewords.me could have just as easily been another "project" had it been pushed out at the wrong time, sent to the wrong people, etc. etc. there's a lot of luck involved. i'm glad it took off the way it did. Mark made sure he would maximize the viral potential by having it easily shareable, etc, but that alone didn't make it viral.

2) i'm just jealous that he got real time experience in learning to scale his servers to support the crazy growth in users. not many people in the world have experienced viral growth with their webapps or startups. so congrats to Mark.
Some committees are pretty awesome. Haskell.
No off site daily back up? I guess we can assume they have no disaster recovery plan?
Yeah, as stated I really don't think they'll be able to claim a copyright infringement based on this, one link is not a copyrightable work.

However, it's not that what Bing did is not criminal, it's that it's a non-issue; there is nothing wrong with keeping an eye on competitors directly or indirectly and implementing good ideas or products that you don't have. Everyone does this, it's just normal business.

I don't know why Google cares or is making a big deal out of it, it just seems like whining to me, like they are mad that Bing can just manually compile a list of good results, even if those results come partially from Google. Sorry Google, that's just the nature of the format you're in and the game you're playing. A list of automatically-generated links with no custom or special content, much less a single link, would be a hard case to claim copyright protection, especially since for most actual queries it would be difficult to prove that Bing couldn't have come up with it independently.

I see nothing wrong with it and nothing unfair about it. Do you think the Google guys developed and tweaked their algorithms in a vacuum when they were starting out? You don't think they ever brought up AltaVista or Yahoo! results for comparison and tweaked until they got the same (better) results? I've heard several times that Google constantly has people manually tweaking queries and results, totally extra-algorithmically, to make sure they provide good results for everything possible. So what if Bing does this too? Bing is even being accused of something much less direct. I just see no problem at all, it's just the way this is played.
"G'day mate. What'd you like?'

"Some amber would be ace!"

"No, are you aware of the caloric value of beer and the negative effect on longevity found by a recent JAMA study? Here, have some nice red wine."
A Googler gone missing in Egypt. Google asks for your help.
Hacker Monthly #9 is out
From 2008, when their current logo was designed by John Hicks - http://blog.mailchimp.com/new-mailchimp-logo-by-jon-hicks/
> to read something you have to look at it.

It seems basic logic is stumping you: when A implies B, and B is true, it does not follow that A is true. You assert that you've looked at the article, and certainly one needs to look at the article to read it, but that doesn't imply that you've read it.

> this is the hello-world equivalent on an art forum

I fear you might be at the wrong place - Hacker News isn't an art forum.
Especially since PageRank is "looking over the shoulder" of every content creator of the internet to do its thing.
Somewhat related question:

If a viral project takes off and a month later 95% of your traffic has died off, but you find yourself with 10 million email addresses (signups), is it ethical or even legal to promote a completely unrelated project by emailing everyone?

I'm sure you could word it in a way that doesn't seem too spammy ("Thanks for checking out xxxx, try our new project: yyyyy").

I'm in this situation.. I've held off so far, as tempting as it is, because I hate spam myself..
Binggate is Bullshit
This is an excellent short term PR tactic, but Microsoft can just say that they're not copying Google's results, they're just using user click data to improve their search results and that sometimes that click data happens to come from users' google searches.

It's understandable why Google's concerned, because it's likely that Microsoft has access to a lot more this data due to their OS and software's ubiquity.
I'm guessing they're only looking at the Referrer field, and they're doing it across the board. (For me, Google's result pages all point back to Google, so they can leak this info via the Referrer field.)

I'd also guess that the data from domain specific sites are more valuable than generic search sites. (User selects appropriate site, does search, selects appropriate result.)