skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It sounds like this guy wants to participate in StackOverflow just to be there rather than because he finds it a useful tool for his own work. I'm glad there are hurdles for people who are just there to "get a good rep" rather than there to support their real work.

A (hopefully) more common workflow would look something like this:

- a developer googles a problem, the StackOverflow answer floats to the top, and he notices this is a particularly good answer.
- this keeps happening, and the developer gets impressed

then one of two things happens (or both):

- he googles a question, and finds an old question without a great answer, and adds an answer. Yes, old questions don't get as many upvotes on their answers, but they do get upvoted, and at 10 points an upvote, it doesn't take long to get to 50.

- he googles a question and doesn't find an answer, so he posts a question

Neither of these require any rep, and you only have to do it once or twice with a good question or answer to get to the magical 50 karma. And 50 karma is the only milestone that matters on StackOverflow, in my opinion.
Not if things are in the cache, especially in IE. In this case the xhr will complete almost immediately.
The greatest satisfaction I have ever derived from a job was found washing dishes at a main street diner during my late teens. I worked long hours, which grew progressively longer, as my coworkers quit and the owners didn't bother to replace them.

I made a poor wage, and my hands were absolutely destroyed by the constant immersion in hot water and the metal scratch pad I favored. I had little time for my intellectual pursuits, and there was certainly no future in it.

But I really enjoyed the low-key meditation that was possible, given the repetitive nature of the tasks I had to perform. I liked the interaction with the waitresses and the cooks. I liked going home from work after a ten hour day and knowing that I was done, that there was no technical debt I'd accrued during the day, no nagging concern as to whether I'd done the job right or whether the performance of a particular system would be adequate. I was secure in the knowledge that I was the very best dishwasher in town, as borne out by the fact that I was the only person who could work a Sunday lunch rush alone.

Now I have technical debt, nagging concerns, impostor syndrome, and exclusively male and professional coworkers. I like the money, of course, and I like the idea that I'm producing something. But if I didn't have ambition - if I didn't have goals to live up to, or a better world to build - you bet I'd be right at home washing dishes.

Of course, bartending might be hellish compared to dishwashing, but I doubt it.
Ive been exploring phonegap appcelarator and rhomobile myself lately and have been settling more and more on rhomobile. Can you explain why you have been looking at phonegap instead? Im wondering if theres something about it i missed. That you.
Amazon to Offer Oracle's Database in the Cloud
Ah, at least the google toolbar does. If you enable PageRank on the Google Toolbar it sends back all the urls you visit just like the bing toolbar.

From the toolbar privacy policy: "Toolbar's enhanced features, such as PageRank and Sidewiki, operate by sending Google the addresses and other information about sites at the time you visit them."

Google has managed to demonstrate one way MS appears to be using the data. What does google do with their trove of data? That's a lot of data to collect and not do anything with.

If they want to make it perfectly clear they should add into their privacy policies and EULAs.
Just a small note, but despite the common belief, Gmail isn't written with GWT. Serious web app development seems to result in creating a framework of your own, as your examples show, so I'd agree some useful frameworks would be good, but we have not yet worked out what they should do.
Em, it's a community Q&A website, it's not a game, and it's purpose is not to jack up some high score.

Just ask when you need to (when you want to know something you don't already know) and answer when you feel you can contribute an answer.

And stop caring if you get up-or-downvoted, and start caring about the quality of your output.
Bing
Is
Now
Google!
Windows didn't start doing disk caching with Vista. Perhaps it used memory more aggressively, or changed the way it did the accounting, but it certainly didn't start doing disk caching just with Vista, as anyone who remembers the difference in performance of DOS before and after running SMARTDRV will attest.
"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
"So if you’re knowledgeable enough to provide a counterpoint to someone else’s poor answer, you have to post it as a new answer… and then you get down voted (lose rep!) for adding a new answer versus just commenting on the original, flawed answer."

Never happened to me. Sometimes I even noticed that the author had deleted the original wrong answer and left a positive comment on mine.
And that is explicitly stated in their tos. There's no hiding here.
I wondered what the effect of posting a single long article would be.

I would appear that it tends to suppress comments. 18 points and tweeted 20 times in 2 hours - but no comments :(
Meh. It's satire, and it does have somewhat of a point, but I feel like it's even more shallow than what it's parodying. It captures the feel of a bad infographic post well, but it does it to the point where I feel like it undermines their own purpose.

With apologies to Bill Hicks: Ahh, I see what they're doing there. They're going for the shallow infographic satirizing shallow infographics market. Big market there.
Mono 2.10 RC2 Released
Most young people with 100,000$ a year jobs are not in it for the 100,000. They're in it because it leads (if they are successful enough) to a 250,000$ job in a decade or two.
I keep thinking this myself however theres still alot of problems with the html5 frameworks including that while they can access some of the hardware its very limited. Also are you talking specificaly about things like jqm and sencha touch? Or are you also talking about webkit frameworks.
That is definitely a possibility. The trick is to find the right "free" product to give away. It has to have value, yet also not require a heavy amount of support.
Disagree for the most part. There's always something that can be given away for free: blog posts, free trials that lack support and require a paid upgrade for it (e.g. Magento), ebooks, contest giveaways, etc. If you can't give something away for free as part of your marketing, you're probably not thinking creatively enough.
If you have more than 200 rep on SE site A, you can associate that account with your account on SE site B and get a 100 rep bonus on site B. This lets users that are already familiar with the system comment and vote up on any site without having to have gained rep first.
If you are big enough and you do not rely only on US market - change country where you live.
It costs time to zero pages; disk cache pages are not zeroed. Not having a source of zero pages will add latency to large memory allocation requests.

(The pages must be zeroed to avoid the security problem of snooping on data you might not have access to.)
Pretty glad there are already great native apps out there. Lowest-common denominator remains lowest-common denominator whether or not it's done for a principle.
I personally don't mind if one is copying the search of another. The whole idea is to get the BEST search results possible. And thats what I use a search engine for is getting by far the best results possible. I don't mind how they do it and as far as I can tell they aren't breaking any copyright laws...
We haven't really officially started promoting Filmaster.com, yet - waiting for the final iPhone app (March) and the design (April) before that. Filmaster.pl is pretty strong in Poland, thus there are lots of posters, synopses and films added by users but some do not have English versions yet. It will come as thanks to some open source contributors (the site backend is 100% free software) have written importers from The Movie DB and Wikipedia. We'll be rolling out more new features soo so it's best to follow us on twitter: http://twitter.com/filmaster and subscribe to the blog to stay up to date.
Calient Networks (no remote, should be willing to relocate to Santa Barbara CA) www.calient.net

Hiring for several positions.

1. Software Engineer: Deliver fast-track software solutions for Tier 1 Data Center Customers and Telco Equipment Partners, beginning from product definition, development, and validation through deployment.

The successful candidate should be capable of developing real-time embedded
software including implementation and integration.

- 5+ years in designing and developing embedded software development using
embedded operating systemS (RTOS / embedded Linux)

- Experience with SNMP would be useful

- Experience with high availability systems would be very helpful

2. DSP Software Engineer

- Develop and test control of MEMS with an embedded
PowerPC or DSP processor.

- Work closely with hardware engineers

- Familiar working with embedded Linux

- Should understand resonance frequency, Fourier transforms,
and have some understanding of control theory.

3. Manufacturing Software Engineer

- Apply machine learning to manufacturing automation of complex system.

Presently manufacturing data interpretation requires a highly intelligent person.
The software needs to perform diagnostics to allow an average person
to manage the manufacturing process.

- Must have a passion for manufacturing in volume
The Ice Book - a pop-up book brought to life
This is misleading, as the kernel will often swap out processes rather than shrink the disk cache. Its tendency to do this is controlled by the vm.swappiness parameter, which by default heavily favors swapping: http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000

Decreasing this value will favor reducing the cache size and will tend to increase responsiveness. You can set it in the /etc/sysctl.conf file. Low values (≤ 5) are especially good for SSDs where you want to minimize swap usage.
For those who would prefer a native app, here's a list:
http://basecamphq.com/extras
What's the typical return rate on a consumer electronics product? Say a Garmin navigation system or something like that?
I simply do not understand this ego thing with "points".

A million points gets you what? An award for most wasted time?

I wish HN had an option to turn off points on an account, I can't even block it with adblock because there's no element id.

There's more to life than meaningless "points".
I think the problem with most software jobs is that's where you spend all your mental resources. I tend to think about work projects a lot outside of business hours, and it takes a lot of work to stay on top of your game in the industry. This is fine and well unless you want to do real research in your spare time. Especially when you get older and have other responsibilities, it gets very difficult to find contiguous blocks of time when you are fresh.
Kinda surprised no one has mentioned Factual. I'm using some of their diabetes data for my side-startup.

http://www.factual.com/
Twitter Anywhere Version 1.2 released
No, it's a product. Come on. Every product is a "test" of the market so in that one definition of "test", yes. But not in an academic sense, which is what you meant. Because only in an academic sense does the concept of "cheating" exist.
Be a part of a social web revolution.
How teens are sending secret messages in the Digital Age
> The only major broken part (IMO) of SO is that the SE network is becoming so disjointed and your rep doesn't transfer between sites.

By design, I would argue. And a good decision, too.

To use a facetious example just to illustrate my point: without separate reputations, one could build up a huge reputation on http://apple.stackexchange.com/ and then use that influence over at http://askubuntu.com/ to provide a mediocre answer.

This mediocre answer could then get upvoted to the top by those who do not know a better way purely because of this user's reputation. Meanwhile the perfect answer provided by a newcomer to the SE network may remain hidden in second place.

N.B. I think the "bonus" reputation points that can be transferred are a way of addressing this imbalance while pushing people to use other SE sites at the same time.
Depends on what the application is. Theres alot of problems with native apps. So the question is do the pros outway the cons.
I believe that Google and Microsoft evaluate their search engines by entirely different measures. Google primarily by advertising revenue, Microsoft primarily measures by preventing searches using Google. Sure the ad money is nice for Microsoft, but they don't need it for their business to be profitable and they would be doing major research into search anyway because of its importance to businesses - they sell databases after all.

This whole episode points to the sort of counter-espionage operations the two companies are engaged in. Look how important a propaganda victory is for Google? It strains credulity to believe that the release of this information on the day of the panel discussion is pure coincidence.
Heh, in the time it took to create this comment, this post went from 1 comment to 15 comments, making mine less relevant, meaning I'll get fewer upvotes.

And as far as I'm concerned, gaming Hacker News to get karma is much more useful than gaming Stack Overflow. 500 karma is required to downvote, and it takes a long time to hit 500 karma.

Of course, now that I have the 500 I rarely downvote. I wish I would have known that earlier. :)

In my opinion, PG should adopt the Stack Overflow downvoting rule (you lose karma for downvoting), and lower the required threshold. It's hard to tell if downvoting is being used more for good than evil, but it's definitely used to express opinion more often than it should be.
Re: Amazon - all products from amazon have to be shipped. There is no sales tax, but there is shipping charges. Not quite the same, but consumer do not care usually.
Yes I wondered if you could make a rerun bot to complement this feature: it would match text in submissions and tineye images to come up with a % likelihood of duplicate content.
Could someone explain why something like eco makes sense in this context instead of just using rails (ERB) templates. Presumably you have to query the rails backend at some point to get the data. Are the templates in coffeescript for cache-ability? Thanks!
Ask HN: I run windows 7 and OS X, how can I best promote IPv6
Given that we are very near IPv4 address exhaustion, what can we as consumers do to help promote IPv6?
The computer can't be trusted to specify the model without insightful human input though. Correlations that work very well in the short term can break down spectacularly in the longer term.

from the comments below the blog, a comment I can only hope was intended to be ironic:

The only thing a loan underwriter really needs to know is loan to value and foreclosure costs & timeframe. Keep it low enough and creditworthiness is basically irrelevant, you will get paid from the collateral no matter what the borrower does.

It's amazing how much was lost from assumptions that foreclosure costs wouldn't vary with average borrower creditworthiness...
MS shipped SMARTDRV with DOS 4.01, which shipped in 1989. By my reckoning, Windows (running on DOS) has had disk caching since before Linux existed.
During the development of Stack Overflow, Joel and Jeff talked about the answers staying up-to-date in a wiki-like fashion. I think what the author means is that in order to participate in this - i.e. edit and improve an existing answer - you have to have a certain amount of rep.

It's quite likely that a user Googling for their particular issue might find an incomplete or out-of-date answer on Stack Overflow. When they finally solve it they are unable to improve the existing entry, which is unfortunate as for many "long tail" problems they are best placed to contribute.
I usually criticize Microsoft, but I am on their side in this case.

Why shouldn't Microsoft be using this kind of data? Google search result pages are part of the internet just like any other publicly available web site. Microsoft monitors what the users are clicking on Google and probably on Bing and other sites. So what? Monitoring users is not a new thing. It may be unethical and I may personally hate it, but almost everyone is doing it.

Google should stop whining about this and make their search result the best they can. If they had the best search engine, Bing could come close, but never overcome Google by just copying part of it.
Rep whoring? Q&A sites are there to help out not to give you points and stroke your ego.

I think if SO is hindering you into getting a good rep, probably you don't have enough domain knowledge.

PS: I've been there since the beginning and I still got 114 rep. I love the place because it has gotten me solutions at times without even asking.
Not a bit!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjDp0TAZUQI
I'm a little unconvinced based only on the data/graph shown.

It appears that the test "Boosting All" got out to an early lead (sometimes statistically invalid if there are "forcing links" that the dev team is generating and I've even seen teams use those links to order/convert, without thinking through the implications of those actions on the data purity [they're honestly just testing to make sure the changes don't break the site, and naturally need to test all the way through; I don't think it's done to intentionally bias results])

I'd want to see the graph just from Jan 21-26, or to see the day-wise, rather than cumulative, graph/data. It looks to me like it's not winning anywhere near 15% on the right 2/3rds of the graph.
There is also the IMDB database in various format provided by IMDB itself here: http://www.imdb.com/interfaces

Edit: Although the use of this database is not free, I believe for personal use is just fine to download and experiment...
FWIW, I know at least one person whose considerable SO karma helped them land a job (and who wrote those comments with that goal in mind). It's not all about ego.
Ask HN: HN-style websites in Latin America? (in Spanish/Portuguese?)
Hi, I've been searching for sites similar to Hacker News, or Techcrunch, etc., with a focus
on Latin America, possibly in Spanish or Portuguese, but I haven't found much.

I've only found a limited number of country-focused user group-style
web sites mainly focused on linux distributions and sometimes programming languages.

Has anyone found any sites like a Hacker News or Techcrunch for the region, or even
for some of the larger countries, e.g. Brazil, most likely in Spanish or Portuguese?

I'm looking for a focus on advanced tech/hacker/software developers and/or startups.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.
Daniel Rutter did some similar math, using MicroSD cards, since they're smaller and lighter per gigabyte.

http://dansdata.com/gz105.htm

If you fill a station wagon with them, and drive for 5 days, you'll do about 477 gibibytes per second, using 19.4 million cards, costing something like 750 million dollars.

In the real world, (he said, laughing uproariously) you'd only use a couple dozen three terabyte drives, or something, but still. For certain applications, sneakernetting can be much cheaper than internet transit.
One Man's Trash
When you have to back off your 'sales' number for being a 'shipped' number and then decline to specify your actual 'sales' number, 'small' is the implication; whether they said it or not.
I think you are undervaluation the benefits of being a bar tender.

Granted you are not writing software but after the first couple of weeks you should be able to start hacking/innovating new drinks and since you properly became a software developer because you like creating new things, this should give you some of the same feeling.

But an additional huge plus: unlike being a code geek, being a bartender is not a low status job and there is going to be a lot of females around - combine the two and you should have a relative easy time getting laid (and plenty of chances to practice).
I think in the specific case of StackOverflow, having a lot of points is something that indicates to potential employers that you are a useful/knowledgable candidate. And it's not just a vague signifier - they can actually go and look at your answers and see what you're about.
they did fulfill their contracts, which said that they can terminate service for any reason
Uhh... Yeah? Everyone in search does this. I've worked at and with 3 major search engine initiatives, and we all tested heavily against Google in a variety of ways.

But the article definitely gets a few things wrong. For example, having worked at Bing I can tell you this: in general "obvious" misspellings are autocorrected without comment. It's not some sort of magical copying procedure, it's actually a policy. Want proof? Here's an example query you can repeat: http://fayr.am/4KdG (direct query link: http://fayr.am/4JZD)

But otherwise, shit yes everyone is scrutinizing google trying to figure out what they're doing. That doesn't mean other players aren't doing their own optimizations, or even running relevancy metrics against other search engines. Relevancy is not a concept with fixed metrics, and every player in the search market does everything they can to figure out what their competitor is doing.

And even the raw results leakage is fairly par for the course. It's not like Bing searches are a crawl of google searches; Microsoft gets this data from browsers running this toolbar and uses it to help shore up queries where they don't return good results.
yeah, but that's not what the author is complaining about. the problem is that stackoverflow has reputation barriers for performing various actions, so until you acquire some rep, your site experience is pretty broken. this is well and good if you intend to put some effort into building up reputation so that you can participate fully, but it works against someone who uses the site casually but who has useful things to say.
> Why is this being upvoted? Who does not overcharge based on this idiotic logic?

Everybody else?

In Belgium (not exactly the most forward-looking country internet-wise), I can get no-caps internet for 25€ (12M/740K). That's $34. I only have to download 17GB a month to blow out the $2/GB canadians get.

I checked, the current billing month started on the 29th and I already ate through 11.5GB. That's over 4 days (closer to 3 actually, but let's play it tight), which means if I continue at this rate by the end of the month I'll have used roughly 85GB, putting my effective costs at $0.4/GB. 20% of the Bell rate.
I can't help but feel a little surprised that Google found it ethical to lie on their search results page for any reason; and clearly this trojan horse page was a lie. Certainly at every search engine I've worked at we always said, "We can put up adds and help, but we can never outright lie." I suppose that's ameliorated by the fact that this was an internal experiment, but still..

The temptation to abuse that power is pretty big.
Wow, just terrific. This is the reason I posted my link here. Thanks notahacker!
I just finished writing "the only milestone that matters on StackOverflow is 50 Karma", and then you point out that 200 is useful, too. Oh well it won't take long to get 30 more karma if I want it.
If you really want the details on OS X, see http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Perform... and http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin...

See http://www.usenix.org/event/usenix2000/freenix/full_papers/s... for information about the BSD unified buffer cache.

And see http://www.westnet.com/~gsmith/content/linux-pdflush.htm for information about the Linux page cache.