skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After reading your comment I immediately thought of the Choose Your Own Adventure and Fighting Fantasy books I loved as a preteen.
> Google asked users to click on their bogus results.

Got a citation for that?
Not really. If Google wants to publicly shame Microsoft it can and is. They're basically saying that Bing is the new "Let me Google that for you". Since they're not currently proceeding with legal motions it's basically just a smear campaign to make people think twice about Bing.

And there's truth to it.
PG's essay for those wanting a refresher: http://paulgraham.com/top.html
About the second point you would ask your bank if they offer a payment gateway service, and offer Paypal or Checkout as a second option. When I am going to buy something online I trust more a service which charges me through a recognised bank, it feels safer in case I have a problem.
It may not be the ideal technology, but this was also what Flash was/is supposed to address, at least partially.
I've long believed these unlimited backup services rely on a Ponzi-like scheme to make money. Home internet connection uplinks are often the bottleneck preventing users from using excessive storage. As time goes on and bandwidth increases the profit margins on existing users goes down unless hardware costs decrease in equal or greater proportion. In order for the companies to remain profitable their growth has to keep up with the pace of storage use by existing users or hardware costs have to decrease in equal proportion. It was only a matter of time before some of these companies got bit by this model.

That said, the new pricing has huge margins built in. In researching the storage business for some ideas I had I found that the costs are significantly lower than most consumers realize. With 2TB drives under $100 now it would take months of a user maxing a 1MBit uplink to kill profits.
Reverse engineering the manufacturing process is a lot harder than "buy CAM data, delete logos, resubmit to different factory." A lot of these products have a lot more than superficial similarity. Ipads are perhaps not the best example. High-end headphones are better.

EDIT: http://fakeheadphones.com/
Puppet Releases Enterprise Automation Tool
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=xa-4b32e1206ddb9576
Investors Don’t Care About The Quality of Your Product
I'm with you 100%. The last thing I want as a user is to have my desktop experience reduced to that of a web app. Yes, there are some nice web apps that do some very slick things to try and approximate the usability and flexibility of a desktop app - but none that can truly match the sophistication of a non-trivial native client.

Perhaps the answer isn't to be looking for successors to HTTP and HTML - maybe the answer is trying to bring the best of web development tools (freedom to choose any language and tech stack) to native app development.

I expect this post is going to get downvoted to oblivion here, but I thought I'd share my opinion anyway.
>Americans can't break NDAs

Erm, where did I say that?
That's an excellent point. When one technology improves on another in certain aspects it's only natural that they be copied back into others. I just wish that we could have it both ways and use some of the stuff we've developed over the years in desktop app-land in web app-land.
WPF/XAML is terribly obnoxious as a layout system. Spark in Flex 4 is a much more reasonable system, and even then it still has its annoying foibles.
Edited with details. Thank you.
I had someone sign up for a subscription, 1 payment each week for 6 weeks. After the 3rd it stopped charging the client. It was just frozen, saying the next payment was due to be taken out of their account on a date that past 6 days ago.

So contacted support and their reply was, well how do we know they actually subscribed.

Well I don't know, maybe they could have looked at their records and seen the IP address and paypal account associated with the subscription with their attached bank accounts and credit cards.

Paypal is great when it works but when something goes wrong it really goes wrong and support just doesn't help.

Anyway, I use a proper merchant now for CC payments. I will most likely implement PayPal once again but just as an option and right at the bottom of the list.
for the record, robin wauters didn't approach us to verify anything in the story and the accusations are untrue and misleading.

we focus very hard on getting people to talk to each other and interact and we have a number of features on the site, driven by users, that make that happen.

Ironically, the user featured in the pic is one of the longest standing and most active on WooMe.
A designer directory, is that not a little old hat for a progressive company like YC?

I thought with the demise of dmoz et al, directories were proven to be an promblematic way to find and sort things.

I'm not saying dribbble.com is the answer to your issue but considering thousands of designers already use it, you can see their work, and there is some elements of social proof (likes, views and comments) it should be a better way to find designers rather than starting from scratch with a new directory.
I think you mean exorbitant :)
My personal finances are with a credit union that most people haven't heard of. Any suggestions of a non-horrible bank? Would using such a service mean that I have to be PCI compliant, or does my application never see the credit card number?
ReadyForZero’s Free Service Eases Credit Card Troubles
His own examples illustrate why it's bad to treat Unix as a single-user system: I hate using software from developers who are always logged in as root. You can't anticipate the needs of admins and users on multiuser systems when you develop as the most powerful user in an environment. "Run it as root" is not practical advice in the real world and it's a bad habit to get into during development.
Since nailer's comment on my other post can't be directly replied to.

From googles mouth

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-...

"We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results"

In all honesty I'm a bit wrong as they did say they used the google box on the page.
Interesting analysis! I've never considered that the inflow of customers could be what kept costs/customer down. I just thought their budget was depending on slow uplinks in the US and that they started getting too many non-US customers with faster uplinks.
Of course it is. Peaceful and amicable are two different things; you can utterly despise the people you are revolting against but still act peacefully.

You also seem to singularly equate coercion (which is needed, I agree) with violence. I find that somewhat dubious; there are all manner of non-violent ways to coerce people.

but history has shown time and again

Ah. Actually not it hasn't - historical analysis does not support such a theory. Or to quote Wikipedia:

> "the commonly held belief that most revolutions which have happened in dictatorial regimes were bloody or violent uprisings is not born out of historical analysis."

Wouldn't you call the current state of Egyptian protests peaceful?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_revolution
I do indeed. There I go trying to use a fancy word...
I carefully restrained from writing "wiser" :)
http://www.spreety.com/ - The television guide for free tv online, free movies online, news, sports, music and more.
My friend, "door #3" in the context of the post above is "the notion of multiple interpretations too intellectually advanced for you." This is an example of door #2, which is "poor reading comprehension."

And please, take the trollish aspersions to some other site.

This is incredible, since you are the only one in this whole exchange who every cast an aspersion, and you opened with it!
<a href="http://www.spreety.com/>Free Tv Shows</a> - The television guide for free tv online, free movies online, news, sports, music and more.
You're right. Flash, Silverlight, Java applets, and Java Flex were all designed to solve these problems, but all of them suffer from the same problems: Their owners seek to control the platform and it has put users in a weird spot. Linux users can'tuse silverlight without resorting to Mono, Adobe doesn't provide flash for them either, as well as the whole mobile issue, and everyone still has a bad taste in their mouth from their experience with Java applets in the late 90s.

We've learned a lot in the past decade watching the WWW mature, and if there's one lesson to be taken away, it's that open standards are necessary for a healthy web.
They'll either ruin it or shut it down. Match sucks just in general design as a site compared to OKC.

I do agree with those saying that this might be the best way for the OKC developers to cash out and get paid for their work. Perhaps it was inevitable.

For users of Match, the best outcome from this deal would be for Match to replace their whole engine with that of OKC. I doubt that will happen though.

For users of OKC, the worst outcome from this deal would be to be forcibly migrated to Match (as yahoo personals users were - which is what I think is most likely to happen here) and get buried in the far less interesting personal ads and less fun community of Match.
Read up on Recurly, Spreedly, and/or Chargify...

and also read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2169870
The real dilemma is that as a service, you can't do it right. If you keep the data around and just mark it as deleted, the EFF will post articles about you violating the users rights for privacy and control of their data.

And if you delete the data, then $publication will write articles about you being unable to restore it.

Take the Facebook "account disable" feature as an example. In the context of this article here, it was sold as a "good" feature (so as something that Flickr should have too).

But this exact same feature was all over the press a year ago as something really bad and just showing how Facebook just doesn't want to let you go.

So. What is it now?

Personally, just flagging for deleted and living with the privacy concerns might be the better option because there are potentially more people deleting data by accident (or have it accidentally deleted) than there are people too concerned about privacy to use the service.

Also, users concerned about privacy just won't be users whereas users who just lost their data were users and now aren't, so that's a net loss compared to the users not joining.
<a Free Tv Shows</a>href="http://www.spreety.com/>; - The television guide for free tv online, free movies online, news, sports, music and more.
Given the culture at OkCupid my dream match [1] for such a purchase was Amazon - that would have been cool & interesting hookup [2].

Match.com is a disappointment, but, yep they do deserve the payout.

I signed up for OKCupid when it launched to have a play - people are more and more using it as a light hearted social network for chatting to random people. I use it quite a lot when bored and fancy chatting to someone new. I did also meet my current gf via them, but that was unintentional; when the actual point of the site is secondary to your use of it I think that is a runaway success...

[1] pun only slightly intended ;)

[2] sorry... :P
You checked it against the assertion of the most interested party?

It's not "click" data, it's the correlation between search term and SERP. That someone visited such and such a page after a click isn't the issue. That someone Googled for a unique term before clicking is at issue.

Grandparent: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2168377

Googling with Bing: http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1915736
The culture change has already started.

Where did the fantastic "Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating" article from OkTrends go?

A great exit, however. Congratulations to the team.
Actually, Google denies that they do the same thing pretty emphatically. Basically, they claim that the same test in reverse would not work, because the data stream from their toolbar in a reversed test would not affect their algorithms in this manner.

But agreed that it seems like a very small nit to be magnified the way it has. Indeed, why they don't do this, and why we should care that Bing does, doesn't seem to be directly addressed other than by hand-wavery and PR speak about the research they've put into their algorithms and such.
Could Satellites Bypass an Internet Shutdown?
A script kiddie [1] hacks into a computer and goes out of its way to demonstrate its ignorance by doing stupid things like downloading a file, but being unable to locate it or downloading Windows Service Pack on what seems to be a *nix system.

Luckily, the hacked computer wasn't a real computer but a honey pot [2] and everything the script kiddie does is recorded for our amusement.

It's a bit like watching a bank robber sporting a big gun without knowing which way to point it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Script_kiddie
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeypot_%28computing%29
A script kiddie got SSH access to this honeypot (system setup to catch this type of activity and log it). He then attempted to download and run various rootkits/hacks/flooders/whatever. He repeatedly tried to change to a non-existant directory, run perl (which wasn't installed), and downloaded a Windows update (pointless on a non-Windows system).

To summarize, a wannabe hacker got access to a system and didn't know what to do.
I'm in the US (Georgia), and the first thing I did to limit liability is to form an LLC (simple overview: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_liability_company)
I'm talking shit about chinese manufacturers.

Compared to how many Japanese manufacturers pleasantly surprised American companies with their quality, strong business ethics, and emphasis on long term relationships, the constant stream of surprisingly slimy practices of Chinese manufacturers is a stark contrast.
No, they haven't worked that out. They're just "making their search experience better". They have no idea what this means.
The site has certainly lost some of its quirky unique design and feel. It looks more like a thousand other websites now, and seems to copy a lot of 37singals. I do understand they are huge now and so have to appeal to a broad group of people, but overall it does feel a little boring and corporate.

It is certainly a safe design that will appeal, but it does appear to have lost some of its brand appeal.
I think that you have identified the biggest flaw with Microsoft's approach.

They are also susceptible to Google "poisoning" the well, by creating a bot-net to provide fake data to Bing.
Match is IAC.

IAC will just leave it as is.
First version seems to have gone online in early 2004.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/okcupid.com
You don't need a legal structure to charge people money. Sole proprietorship is the most common form of business in the United States -- by quite a large margin. For example, BCC is structured as a sole proprietorship: when someone pays me for bingo cards, they're really paying me for bingo cards.

You will probably find that no B2C customer actually cares about the structure of your business, legally. Your website design matters 10,000 times more in terms of trust gained. Your mileage may vary if you sell B2B, particular B2BigFreakingEnterprise.

With regards to liability: your main defense against liability is not your corporate structure or your terms of service. It is not pissing anyone off so bad that they decide to sue you.

You can, if you choose, get an LLC and create a Terms of Service. These are more to allow you to sleep better at night than insurance against catastrophe: no matter what you do right now, if you get sued, life is going to suck.

You want to sell subscriptions? Paypal Website Payments Pro + Spreedly. You can do it in two hours of coding and about two days or so in time it takes Paypal to review your business. I do not recommend doing yearly subscriptions until you have history: doing so increases your risk profile.

Your main regulatory issue for the typical SaaS app is simple: you owe income taxes on it, both to the US and to North Carolina. Luckily, you will have very good records of sales (because you'll be able to grab them from Paypal). If you want to deduct expenses, make sure to record them and keep proof of them (generally, receipts work fine -- for e-receipts, print to PDF and put it in your Dropbox so that you don't lose it).
Installing Tomcat6 With SUN-Java & Apache2 Integration On Ubuntu 10.04
> where's the evidence that it's exclusively search engines they're monitoring? Let alone exclusively Google? There has been no evidence yet presented

The evidence that has been presented by Google does show that MS is monitoring Google's search results, or at the very least users' behavior when using Google.

I agree that there's no evidence that Google is the only search engine that's being monitored, but it makes little difference since for all practical purposes Google == search.

There's also no evidence that MS monitors other websites / behavior other than just search engines, but it's unclear how that would work? You can't just associate two websites because some users go from one to the other (correlation vs. causation, etc.)

- - -

At this point we're still in the "he said / she said" phase, but Google has more evidence and MS is coming out as incredibly defensive (e.g., raising an inquiry from the European Commission[1]: what does that have to do with anything!!?!)

[1] http://twitter.com/fxshaw/status/32519996852674560#
I'm worried too. I envision popup ads plastering the site, the removal of free accounts, paying to send any messages, and overall removing of anything cool about the site.

On the plus side, there will soon be a hole in the market for someone making another non-match dating site.

In my mind, this is like if Priceline/Orbitz/Travelocity bought Hipmunk. The first thing they'd do is 'fix' the UI, then they'd add a ton more ads, 20 more steps to buying tickets, remind you that you can get a hotel/car/haircut/fries with that and get a cheesy salesman to parade it on TV. Then, I'd stop using it.
Kayak / Expedia / other hotel listing sites just got owned. "Hotels Tokyo"-type queries must be a big driver for traffic for them. These HotPot results push organic links to those way down.

For hotels themselves SEO just turned into HPO.
With regards to canvas, I'm looking forward to WebGL. It is based on a robust API that has been in use for decades (OpenGL), tuned for speed on low-powered devices (OpenGL ES), with full programmability (GLSL).

Browser support is still limited at the moment:

* Firefox 4 beta has already enabled WebGL by default

* Chrome beta has it turned on by default, I believe.

* Safari makes it available through WebKit nightlies.

* Internet Explorer is missing out, as usual.

But think about where they'll be in 1 or 2 years. I'm very much looking forward to high-quality 2d/3d content in the browser.

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/webgl
> Yes, but historically this is how Microsoft wins.

What is Google made up of? The then MSFTs are now at Google.
Thank you - I've been looking for the metaphor to express my impression of this whole matter, and you've given it to me.

It's Spy vs Spy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spy_vs._Spy

...a pitched battle between the opposite-but-indistinguishable agents of two superpowers, on a plane so far removed from the realm of actual people and their concerns that the customers don't even appear in the frame.
Why paypal/google instead of a real payments gateway like authorize.net?
Thanks. These look very promising.
Right, reminds me of Intuit buying Mint too.
So your saying that every message received came from a real user of the website?
I switched from Mozy Pro to Jungle Disk about six months ago, and I like it.
That leading quote is great:

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

-- Clark’s law
I partially agree, but with some caveats:

1. Future is also in the games, and here Microsoft has a very competitive product (xbox/kinect)

2. mobile race is not over yet, and WP7 is conceptually a good product, combining polished UI (aka iOS) with at least some hardware variety (aka Android). It just came late to the game, but it is not yet clear if too late. I personally think they can catch up with throwing enough money into it.

3. We will see when they release OS for tablets. They are late here as well, but similar to point 2), maybe not too late.
Oh Russians...

I could just here the steam start to build.
Regarding the specific question of "[how] is this legal", the answer is that students have to have signed a contract at some point agreeing to university policy which includes such a clause. This might be something as simple as "I agree to abide by the rules of the university handbook, including future changes."

I suspect that in many cases there was no such agreement, but universities get students to transfer ownership by signing letters of understanding after being threatened with scary lawsuits. Basically a mob shakedown. That was the situation in my case, there was nothing I agreed to in writing, but they asserted they had such rights and intended to sue if I didn't sign over ownership. Just that they question ownership publicly is probably enough to ensure that former student led ventures never acquire funding or are abandoned due to the uncertainty.

Nowadays clicking buttons on web sites is considered by some courts to be the same as signing a written contract, so this might be another way to get students to agree to absurd things, the same way many internet based companies do.

Without a legal agreement the rights are held by the creators of the work. Since it is not work for hire because undergrad students are not employees, the students own the work. Grad students on the other hand are usually employees and also have signed contracts explicitly turning over ownership of work, so how it works is more clear there.
Would Bing then get called out by Google for the inevitable 'anticompetitive' lowering of Google's Bing search rankings?
When buying books at Amazon you only have to enter your creds once, so that's not really an issue.

What people tend to forget is that developing "apps" on the iOS platform is automatically restricting your market to those who have or can afford the devices it runs on. Just because the business model worked on the web for Amazon, does not mean that you can build an "app" for a closed platform owned by a competitor and get similar results.
Are you kidding yourself consciously or just 8 years behind the news? @_@

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=goog%20msft

Note how MSFT is swinging around 0% growth, while GOOG is steadily between +20% and +60% growth, in regard to share prices.

The market has spoken some time ago, and the trend doesn't look like changing anytime near soon.
I have no sympathy for Paypal -- every time I've dealt with them it's been like talking to a robot -- but in all fairness they do something that's really hard. Can you imagine the number of people who are either trying to rip Paypal off or are using Paypal to rip other people off? I'm left thinking the only reason Paypal works is because the founders were too stupid to realize what they were getting into. (Although if you've never read it, they have a great startup story)

The thing that's especially onerous here is the fact that they keep screwing with the same customer the same way over and over again. I agree with the author of the post -- that's just too much crap for too little return.