skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whoever runs eFreedom has addressed this at http://efreedom.com/About/

"Simplification of the user interface. We show only the accepted answer (or highest voted answer if no answer has been accepted yet). We removed the sidebar, comments and vote counts in order to minimize distraction. This gets you to your answer and on to your project quickly."

There are a few more points listed there such as translation and displaying snippets of related questions that seem to show a genuine effort to help answer questions.

I think eFreedom nicely illustrates the problem Matt Cutts and the folks at Google face. The site appears to be playing by Stackoverflow's and Google's rules, possibly doing SEO better than Stackoverflow. If Google also ranks based on page load times, eFreedom might be helped even more, since the site lacks the majority of Stackoverflows features and might load faster. So a programmer, having never heard of or cares about Stackoverflow, interested in only finding a specific answer that includes their Google query, might see nothing wrong with the eFreedom response. Suppose the majority doing Google searches preferred eFreedom based on measured clicks. Should the fact that Stackoverflow was the originator of the content guarantee them a higher page rank? What if Stackoverflow was slow? And stepping back from these two specific sites, how do you deal with that across all sites and their clones?

I avoid eFreedom links because I enjoy participating in Stackoverflow and use the other features, and despite the assurances of the folks at eFreedom the site still seems shady. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that Google would take steps to ensure Stackoverflow ranks higher. But that's just one case out of many. It seems like a tough problem for Google to solve across the Internet.
Pitching data helps quantify umpire mistakes
Deficient from any discussion I've heard about the Egypt crisis, is it's potential impact on fiber optic connections THROUGH Egypt. Admittedly Egypt hasn't touched those yet (as far as I know) but volatility there does potentially put those vital connections at risk.

Half of India's traffic to the rest of the world goes through Egypt (remember the undersea anchor incident?) and East Asia can route through Suez as well. If Suez goes down as a fiber gateway, suddenly all Asia <-> Europe traffic is forced to go through the US which would have implications
It's still pretty thin compared to the US, particularly for television. There haven't been any dramatic changes since the launch.
Thanks for linking to the original.

There's some real gems in here from the founder of Syncplicity.

For instance, not having a Mac client meant that the tech press wouldn't touch it. Then, they wouldn't write about it. That's pretty enlightening.
Sounds like a good idea. Sent you an email about Swappa: http://swappa.com
This is a beautiful piece of work. Any chance you might be able to explain the background architecture that might allow others to replicate some of this?

From what I see:
- extensions are coded in Python, and there is good documentation on the plugin mechanism.
- Each platform seems to use the platform's native window system. There is no use of a common UI like Qt.
- The first version is GPU accelerated but the newer one is entirely software.

Seriously impressive work considering it is a single developer. I like how there animations are subtle, and how the entire UI is incredibly responsive. To me, this does to text editors what Chrome did to web browsers.
Ask HN: What book do you recommend for learning ActionScript 3?
Hi, a programmer here. I know JavaScript pretty well, what I need is a programmer to programmer book that will help me to quickly get the essentials of ActionScript 3.0.

Thanks a lot in advance.
Get people using it and provide feedback. Those people should preferably be from your target audience. Fix up the layout/design. Layout/design for home and rest of the website is different. The home page makes me think it's a sports video site though the rest of the site isn't. I don't completely know what I'm supposed to get out of the website upon visiting the home page.

(I'm not your target audience, and I haven't release a website yet. Hopefully my comments aren't too off base.)
Godel's theorem doesn't have much to say either way about "hacking". If you've got a bit of information on a system that a user X shouldn't be able to access, if you completely seal off the user X from that information it doesn't matter how many computations they run. They won't be able to get it. Godel's proof does not prove anything about a system's ability to access its external environment, it proves that a sufficiently complicated system can't be sealed from having certain properties on its inside.
iamwil: "My first inclination was, "but of course you need the splats where the rain drop line ends! How would it make sense otherwise?""

Exactly, I think that's default programmer-logic. "If there's a drop, it must have a splat." I used to do some programming but I'm more of an artist than a progger so I figure writing about little artsy tricks like that might help other devs out. It can be rough trying to fit cool stuff onto tiny phones haha

Luc: I'm a pixel artist at heart so I love color cycling, but ya, appearing in front of another layer blows it up. Also these days I don't think iPhone games use palettes much...I know older cel phones needed them, but for iPhone I seem to be able to get away with just using big ol' .PNGs with no palettes (which rules, 'cause I can get anti-aliased edges).

- Quickdraw
"Is Quora Ready for Pop Music?" would actually be a good question to be posted Quora itself and
"Why is Nicki Minaj so popular?" would make a fine personal blog post... downside of that is the later would probably not make HN front page.
> their ability to seize control and establish a theocratic dictatorship is minuscule, at best.

Ok, that's a good thing then.

Is Iran financing them? Or do they have local support?

What are the relative proportions supporting these factions in the population?
Yep, you can walk in to a best buy and pay $15 (cash) for one: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/AT%26T+GoPhone+-+Nokia+2320+No-C...
I don't understand this. Are you saying that efreedom adds original content to that which they scrape? I avoid them like the plague, but my exposure has taught me that they are merely reprinting SO content with crappy formatting. Not much of a value-add in my eyes.
Yes, bloggers talk about things they just learned about rather than something they're 360-degree experts about.

But that's good. It helps them -- it reinforces their learning and they certainly find out if they got something wrong -- and it helps us -- readers see a lot of articles pop up right when people are interested in and passionate about learning something, rather than months later when they know it all and have moved on.

Early blogging is quick iteration of knowledge. Blog about something you learned today, not years ago.
Non-programmers tend to think that adding a software feature is akin to adding on to a house. Sure, it take some effort and money, but the resulting house is surely better, right? (This isn't always true, of course, but still)

In reality, adding a software feature is often like adding onto a house in the center of it, expanding the rest of the house around it to make room. Suddenly the job looks a lot tougher.
GM invested $7 million in a round that was $17 million in general.
Then you just set the phone to not vibrate when you chicken out, right?
I wanted to take Amazon's new SES service for a spin so I built Cue Me. Let me know what you think!
Which Tab In Firefox is Playing Sound?
Catherine here from KindleLendingClub.com - You've put your finger on one of the pain points for our users :) A challenge of developing a community platform around Kindle lending is that there is no straightforward way for us to hook into Amazon's Kindle lending system to determine whether a loan did or did not actually occur. We're trying to work around this by asking lenders to "confirm" the loan at the time they do it, but it's a necessarily imperfect workaround that we're refining in our next iteration. If for some reason a lender doesn't click to confirm the loan, the lender's book loan offer remains live and triggers reminders when there are other borrowers for the title.

To stop lending request reminders for a particular title, you can delete the loan offer from your profile: http://www.kindlelendingclub.com/myprofile.htm

If you need help or have feedback, we're just an email away: info@kindlelendingclub.com
Internet 2010 in numbers
I'll be glad when the fad of drop-shadowing body text to look vaguely "engraved" passes. Thanks, Readability...
See this newer YC post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2153038
You can get cell phones for under $20, and if stopped by the police have a plausible reason for carrying one.
The goal from the user's perspective is to get to the content they want as quickly as possible. A search engine helps in that, as presumably you don't know where the content you want is if you're visiting a search engine. A search engine that links to an aggregator site doesn't - the search engine should just send you to the original content directly.

Presumably, aggregator sites by themselves also help in content discovery. I find a lot of content through Hacker News. But they should do so by being good enough to be a destination in themselves. An aggregator that needs to be found by search engine isn't doing users any favors.
Well, I'm not trying to belabor the point and maybe I haven't looked enough on eFreedom, but I don't see any original content there, it's just a scrape. Even the "related links" is scraped.

I still don't get the value in that. Where is the "content in" (which I take to mean content generation rather than duplication) that you mention?

I agree with you about the other sites.
I own four set-top devices that support browsing and viewing Netflix streaming content directly from the device.

I own zero devices that can do the same with Hulu.

This is the #1 reason Netflix gets subscription money from me and Hulu does not.
It was on Reddit earlier. That may be where the confusion is coming from.
This is a re-run from yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2147409
Whoops, so I did. Fixed.
It's also interesting just from a project management point of view, or anyone doing a startup, imo. Good blog!
I knew that Erlang was originally written in Prolog, but I somehow managed to never look at any Prolog code before. It explains so much about the structure and approach that Erlang took.

I am curious to explore how the Erlang interpreter was written, in light not of the similarities, but the subtle differences between the two languages. The use of -> was particularly interesting in comparison to how it is used in Erlang.
No, you're absolutely right: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2147409

Good thing too, finding out you're going crazy can't be fun ;)

Sanity restored?
How is this any different than hosting content on a corresponding provider. Videos on Youtube and Vimeo,resume on LinkedIn, Portfolio on any blogging platform,or just simply using Facebook Pages?

I can understand that people have the freedom of putting anything on your site (to a point), but it still requires work to create a new site and having a knowledge of html and css at the minimum.

The cost is cheap $10 a day, but it is still more than the free providers on those mentioned.
Yeah, if there's one thing I can't stand, it's hearing condescending "adult opinions" on things that have been colossally mismanaged for decades.
Egypt: A spokesman for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood announced that the group is making five urgent demands which the Egyptian government should comply with in order to avert several crises, according to a 19 January posting on the Muslim Brotherhood website.

Muhammad Mursi said the group wants Cairo to revoke the state of emergency, dissolve the People’s Assembly and hold free and fair elections, amend the constitutional articles that led to vote rigging in Egypt’s last elections, hold presidential elections according to those amendments, and fire the current government and form a national unity government responsive to the Egyptian people’s demands.

http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/01/nightwatch-extract-egypt-...
I'm very interested in iPhone game development. I'm working on a title for PC/Xbox based on the XNA framework and finding it fairly easy to use. Is there anything like that for the iPhone? Any good place to find a comparison of frameworks? I'm not averse to coding interactions by hand (trying to make a 2D RPG, not a platformer, so Torque isn't appropriate), but I can't make sense of the options.
Ad Turns "New York Times" Homepage Into HTML5 Game [video]
This isn't a technical question, it's an economics question. If you would rather put in effort than dollars, then do it yourself, and it will work great for a while. But if your business takes off, you will accumulate email-related problems like bacteria, and suddenly that $20/month starts to sound reeal worth it.
Any theories as to why the popularity is orders of magnitude higher today? The title, the source? people's mood? Egypt? It is Friday so more people slacking? Time it was posted yesterday vs today (prime time)?
Dynamic scripting with static speed, the best of both worlds
I think the Egypt situation is really big news and since HN is a news site of sorts it brings a lot of people out to comment and vote.
The Rise And Fall of Languages in 2010
Ummm ... just publish it to npm please.

cd /path/to/repository
// create a valid package.json
npm publish .

That way I can:

npm install channel-server

Like I do with every other node.js application.
7 Questions for Sunny Gupta, CEO of Apptio, the CIO’s New Best Friend
If only the 64DD had been so lucky!
I think you're confusing the adverts displayed in the gmail interface with the sorts of ads that Yahoo and Hotmail used to run -- bloated signatures tacked onto the bottom of each email itself.

I can't remember Google not showing text advertising through its interface, but do remember them being very different for not bombarding your contacts with advertising slipped into in the emails they sent.
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=nfl+jerseys

I believe Google's results are less spammy than duckduckgo for this particular query.
Have you looked at Beyond the Pedway?

http://www.beyondthepedway.com/
Thanks for the link, but sorry, I don't get it. The accepted answer on SO is right at the top, and if I thought eFreedom had a better interface we wouldn't be clicking through to SO each time.

To each his own, I suppose, but I'm not impressed by what appears to be their "value" - SEO - and agree the site seems a bit shady.
Microsoft Asks Intel To Build 16-Core ATOM Chips For Servers
Ma (negative space)
If you guys cared immensely, you would respond to my support requests. If you wanted to monetize, maybe you would setup a premium offering. I know that I would gladly pay $50/month to ensure that my blog doesn't have the downtime that it's had in the last few months. I've stated this many times before.
A DOS from a non-terminating process is still a hack.
Tunisia, Egypt, Miami: The Importance of Internet Choke Points
In fairness, I know scads of people with fingers, but only one with an iPad.
You might want to read George Grellas who is also an HN'er as a baseline.

http://www.grellas.com/faq_business_startup.html
You're so right. I knew something was up when I saw a post about Johnson Controls on TechCrunch recently. I worked there and it's a Fortune 100 company. Good luck!

Vik
Looking at products like Dropbox and Evernote, not to mention everything going on with iPhone/Android apps, I can't help but thing that they provide a bit of a counter to the conventional wisdom that native "fat clients" are dead. The people I know who use Dropbox basically never use the Dropbox website except to sign up and to download the client. The client is the magic, not the website.

It makes me wonder what other services might benefit from native clients....
"Google needs to greatly lower the value of keyword-rich anchor texts."

Won't this have a lot of adverse effects? And if keywords in anchor text become less valuable, can't spammers compensate by ramping up their existing efforts?

"I would not be surprised to see Google shift even more ranking signal power from anchor-text heavy links to relevant social media “chatter”."

Why would this be harder to game than links?

Spam happens because search is hard. There are probably solutions, but they're not as easy to come by as the ones suggested in tfa. Still, it's good to see this sort of community feedback on search results, especially given how responsive the search team is to this sort of thing. Keep up the good work, guys.
It was more the hipster bit that I was querying ... the definition (or at least use) appears to have altered a lot in the last couple of years. I think you mean what I'd call a "fashion victim".
Let me clarify, if a question has already been asked such as "Why is x popular?" a search engine is likely to give you a good answer.

If you are the first person to ask a question and you need an opinion then something like Quora can be a great place.
Shame I didn't know of this editor earlier, although I've been hunting for a perfect editor for quite some time.

(Settled on VIM + boatload of plugins, but its far from elegant)

I love the clean non distracting interface, ctrl-p is also a killer feature with the "@" extension.

Only thing I'm missing so far is the VIM autocomplete from all open buffers feature, saves me lots of typos.
The goal is to build a consistent, and eventually large audience, and the value of the site being access to that audience. Yes, you can host your content on Youtube, LinkedIn, Wordpress, or any number of CMSs, but you still have to find a way to drive traffic to your content, and that is usually not easy. The selling point down the line will essentially be, renting the eyeballs for a day to jumpstart awareness for your content.
I agree with the other commenters that it's an employee amount of equity rather than a cofounder amount. I don't know enough to say whether it's a good deal or not; that depends on the company. But what little we're told doesn't sound encouraging.
Egypt is #4 recipient of US foreign aid after Afghan, Iraq, and Israel according to that pdf..
I've been a Netflix customer since 2002. Every time I attempt to use Hulu for anything other than the handful of current TV shows I watch (Fringe, Community, Chuck) I'm woefully disappointed in their offerings.

But more than that I'm frustrated by the UI and search. I don't know if that's why Hulu lost its place in a Netflix world, but it's certainly why its losing its place in mine.
start a hackerspace or at least copy some ideas from http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Design_Patterns

Try to create a space where people can "make" things, maybe having tools, doing stuff with arduinos, android apps, etc.. I'm sure that there's some people interested about that kind of stuff. Fun small geeky projects.

I'm starting a hackerspace in bilbao and finding people has been the easiest part. Just make something cool and fun and create a nice environment. Think about the lighting, most people love our projector with xbmc, visualizations and c64 music over a huge wall. We are also starting a ruby users group.
Ask HN: Online database service for collaboration?
What might a physically distributed team use by way of a database? Something that could, like filemaker or access (or, indeed, any database, but I mention those because they are more usable by less technical users), be set up with tables according to the project at hand, with e.g. form input access for workers of a certain type, table data access for others, etc. A google spreadsheet isn't really sufficient, and building our own app just for this purpose seems unnecessary if this service exists.

I appreciate any help you can offer to point me in the right direction. Thanks.
Please, try to be more professional in tone and more reliable in information than TechCrunch.
> Interestingly, His name is "trustfundbaby."

Thats the joke. Get it?
As an Australian in California, and having lived and worked in two European countries too, I'd say that Australians work less hours but actually are more focused when they do work. I see a lot Americans at work, but not doing work. Long lunches, chatting to colleagues around the office, browsing websites etc. seems to be far more prevalent in American workspaces.
This is like what people see in the movies!!
"Money in it" - that's so Twitter.

No doubt because newspaper ads were priced by the word if not letter.

Hmm maybe that's what Twitter should do... 0-100 characters are free. $0.005 per character above 100.
Though sarcastic, I think this succinctly summarizes the issue.

Aggregators, it's time to wake up. Google is not your friend, Google is your competitor.

We can agree that Bing and Google are competitors, right?
And we can agree that Bing labels themselves a "Decision Engine" and not a "Search Engine" right?

The line between a Search->Decision->Topical Aggregation Engine is so blurry I'm not sure it exists anymore. Google's stated mission is to "organize the world's information." - they are going to add social and they are going to use your preferences to figure out which stories/pages are interesting to you.
I hear about embedly more and more. Good job, guys!
The more times a story gets submitted, the more upvotes it generally gets because more people have already read it. No matter how good a story is the odds are that it won't get past the new page simply because there aren't many people willing to triage stories. And by the time those who see a story in the new queue finish reading it and vote on it, it's often already too late for it to make the front page. Whereas lots of people are happy to vote for a story they've already seen.

Since stories usually hit the front page when their score is around 6, I think it would make sense to give the first five upvoters a share of the karma from the submission. (With the submitter getting the most, and the first upvoter getting more than the fifth.)
Joel: At the risk of sounding trollish, you read like that Chris Crocker guy of "Leave Brittney Alone" YouTube fame. 1) He's a CEO. He'd better have thick skin to be one. 2) Most of your points are dead on correct. HOWEVER, I've repeatedly begged for a premium offering. I realize that that doesn't seem to be their monetization strategy, so maybe I should look elsewhere if I value my blog so much.

Regardless, the guy is a CEO. He better be able to deal with it. I sincerely hope that this comment doesn't make me sound too insensitive, just a little bit. But his problem is a good one to have, and I would love to have it.
> However, the scrollbar itself scrolls until the end of the file is visible at the top of the view. At least in OSX, this is not standard text editor behavior.

Good news! You can easily turn off this behavior by editing your preferences. Just add this to Preferences > User File Preferences:

{
"scroll_past_end" : false
}
Overhyped technology trends for 2011
It's trivial features like this that seriously gets me to switch. The main reason why I switched to duckduckgo wasn't the privacy or better results, it was vi-like bindings.

On that topic, consider this additional binding scheme that DDG uses. J/K for up/down highlights items (articles in this case). Enter when one is focused opens it. Ctrl+Enter opens it in a new tab.
The hotkeys aren't working for me, and I get two errors on Chrome 10:

- Unsafe JavaScript attempt to access frame with URL http://hn.embed.ly/ from frame with URL http://www.youtube.com/embed/yoqsZvSQSTs. Domains, protocols and ports must match.

- hn.embed.ly:3Uncaught TypeError: Object #<an Object> has no method 'shareaholic_publishers'