skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're thinking of Zawinski's Netscape resignation:

"you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company."

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html
Daily Feedback is more important than Traditional Performance Reviews
bitbucket repo: http://bitbucket.org/dwaiter/django-bcrypt
I feel a strong non-rational urge to write "hacker news is turning into reddit", and then rush off to reddit to write "reddit is turning into digg" on any-and-every thread, and so on.
I'd be surprised if they're not currently doing this in Amazon.
Or they're actually being productive this afternoon.
Unless that was a heated comment that was later apologised for, it sounds like your differences might be irreconcilable, no matter how much you can potentially contribute...
Hi Folks,

I'm the author of the post. We recently hit one year with our first employee and a bunch of these questions started to surface. How many of you do similar things? What sort of resources have you seen with regards to giving good daily feedback?
Craigslist Has A New Competitor
http://www.anywayanyday.com/ got me cheaper prices for a particular flight.
was it started by DMCA? I mean the practice of limiting, even outlawing, of analytical thinking.
VC Firm Eyes College Entrepreneurs With Summer Incubation Program
Fascinating. I was planning on doing the same thing and now I don't have to -- thank you for taking the time. As you mention, this stuff could all be happening server-side, of course.
Very true. Hacker News is not a community where second-rate grammar and spelling is the norm, however.

Also, I'm sure you can see how those who are copying/stealing/whatever you want to call it might wish to call it copying instead of stealing, as that implies a lesser moral judgment (deservedly imo).
"Copying" was a pretty brutal word to use-- not surprising that it raised MSFT's hackles a bit.

MS clearly uses toolbar users' clickstreams (on and off Google) to improve their own search efforts. Google created an artificial scenario where the ONLY input was Google search behavior and lo, the search results are exactly the same. Whether or not that steps over a line (I don't feel that it does), it's not "copying" in my book.

Another interesting point is that Google has been beating the "open" drum for a long time now. No walled gardens, right? If a Facebook user should have the right to take his data with him wherever he wants to go, shouldn't a Google user be able to fork over their behavior data to Bing?

Matt's point about MS' lack of clarity when getting folks permission to grab their clickstream was dead-on. THAT is pretty outrageous and MS should be ashamed of that.

Regardless of all that, hats off to Matt for keeping a cool head and stating his position in a respectful way.
I might be biased, I do prefer Outright a little more...
Talk about a Hacker News bubble. Are you really suggesting that if you want to work at Google you should start your own start-up? This seems ridiculous to me (I agree with the rest of the post though)
Did some contracting on one of porn -tube sites. Also worked on lesbian "stuff" web shop. Crazy days...
I do heavy Adwords analysis with my startup. One of the more interesting things I've come to discover though is that facebook provides much higher bang for the buck in regards to CPC and CPM (based on my limited budget, I can not saturate either FB or Google for my target keywords). However - the traffic behavior from users coming out of FB is very different than those from Google (and the Google ads network).
For my current business I found that while FB was cheaper - traffic from google was more worthwhile (measured by conversions). I think that there are certain types of businesses which would do far better on FB ad network then on Googles however, and am flighting ideas across both.
Bombay High Court: Astrology is a science
Random new hires have free access to their infrastructure, except for private user data. (For some reason, this always surprises people in interviews - I know I was surprised when my interviewer said "Oh, it's no big deal if you want to grab 2000 machines or so and run a MapReduce" - but it's not exactly confidential, most interviewers will tell you if you ask, and we basically think nothing of it.)

There are safeguards in place to make sure experimental jobs don't stomp on production critical ones.
You're right. There seems to be a gray area around whom owns the "click data":

- "Are users entitled to give away for free their navigation history ?"
- "To what extend are search engines allowed to implement specificities based on that data ?"
I disagree with you about it not supporting his side of the story. Extortion is gaining something via a threat of coercion. The SMS (if authentic) is pretty clearly a threat, leaving us just in the dark about the exact action demanded.

Whether or not a crime or tort occurred here is for those with JD's to discern.

You are correct about the obnoxious part of it, but I'm uncertain that Pasco had any opportunity to avoid this public crap beyond giving into the demands of Casasanta according to Pasco's twitter, he got a threat in the mail yesterday this was going to happen: http://twitter.com/#!/dlpasco/status/33271220623384576

EDIT: OH, you're talking about the "Oh is this enough work" part that Casasanta is talking about. I was talking about the "Why did this dispute go highly public" part.
Taken in context: http://i.imgur.com/BTGz8.png

Reddit recently posted their traffic stats, http://blog.reddit.com/2011/02/reddit-billions-served.html which shows they have ~14 million visitors.

Point is, a lot of people still know and use myspace.

I could see it coming back if they set their goals straight and concentrate on being the place for artists/bands in the music industry to promote their stuff.
I'm not talking about using just visits to improve search though, I'm talking about using the pattern of interaction on a site to basically replicate a site's data. That is, imagine netflix recommends movie X to you, now Bing infers that Netflix has done so using custom code to parse their IE logs, and then recommend movie X to you.

IMHO, this would be completely unethical.

That's exactly what Bing has admitted to doing with google:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870412450457611...

"Stefan Weitz, director of the Bing search engine at Microsoft, said in an interview the company studies how certain users interact with Google in order to improve Bing. ..."
That sounds dangerously close to a pyramid/MLM scheme ...
How we're promoting our startup with free desktop wallpapers.
All Happy Amazonians Are Alike…
Excellent analysis, thank you, especially in the distinction between "suggested sites" and the Bing toolbar's behavior. I can't argue with your methods. However, I do differ with some of your conclusions:

> The behaviour I’ve seen explains Google’s experiments, but does not support the accusation that Bing set out to copy Google.

I don't think it's so much about "set out to copy Google" necessarily, as it is that they are explicitly parsing Google queries and results from the clickthrough data and using it (quite directly) for their own results. What they set out to do is immaterial given what is provably happening.

> Bing Toolbar is tracking user clicks and Bing could use the result to improve search results. I don’t personally see any great distinction between this behaviour and Google’s many tracking, indexing and scraping endeavours which they use to improve their own search results.

The difference is that Google has proven that the results of certain queries are being directly fed as Bing results. If Microsoft does the same with Google rankings, I'd see your point, but right now the evidence only points in one direction.

> While I personally dislike the privacy implications, Bing Toolbar is pretty upfront about it when it gets installed (unlike much web page user tracking.) The fact that the tracking is plain HTTP not HTTPS, with the content in plaintext, would seem to indicate that they weren’t seeking to hide anything.

I'd be interested to see if Google over HTTPS queries are being transmitted by the toolbar over HTTP. That would be a pretty serious privacy violation IMO, especially when you pair that with unencrypted wifi at Starbucks. See the AOL search log fiasco: http://www.somethingawful.com/d/weekend-web/aol-search-log.p...
Odds that he didn't use a tripod... slim.
N-Control Avenger for Xbox 360 is now shipping
N-Control Avenger is a special attachment created for your Xbox 360 controller. Showcase at this years CES, this attachment allows your reflex become even faster! The controller is designed for hard core gamers that want to take their gaming abilities to the next level.
When you take $10 from your mom, your mom no longer has that $10. When you pay money to buy a magazine, the shop no longer has that magazine and you no longer have the money. Taking in the usual sense is moving.

But pirates insist that they can "take" without depriving the owner of anything. That's copying, which is a different kind of taking. It gets even more complicated if somebody first purchases a legitimate copy of a song or a movie, and then produces more copies to share with other people. You run the fallacy of equivocation when you use the word "taking" in both senses.
So, copying a representation belonging to someone else is "not stealing"? Is that the goal of this semantic fudging - somehow its not so bad?
Seeing as that the potential punishment is just a strongly-worded letter, I don't think anything will be going to court.
I too am not a lawyer, seek professional advice before relying on stuff you saw online etc.

The basic rule here in Australia is:

1. Give all the legal advice you like, just don't be surprised if you're sued because it's wrong. Non-lawyers do not enjoy solicitor's indemnity.

2. You cannot give legal advice in exchange for any form of payment, unless you have been admitted to the bar.
"Datex"? Scary. Not sure I agree that the example given at the beginning of the article is a big problem (why not just make the model apis more fine-grained?), and also not sure what this has to do with MVC specifically.
jeffmiller, check out Hacker Dojo, http://hackerdojo.com, which is just over in Mountain View, near CalTrain/VTA lightrail, and has exactly what you need. According to this long time member.
Answers.com Shareholders Are Furious Over Sale, Promise To Block It
I don't see stealing as wrong because it deprives the owner of their property, I see it as wrong because you're taking something you don't own on your own terms, not the terms of the person who owns it.

So if you work harder at stealing something than the previous owner did at making it, it's not wrong? That actually meshes pretty well with the popularity of heist movies. :)

If Tony the musician wants $10 for an mp3 copy of his latest single and you take it for free, that's immoral because it's his and he wants $10 for it.

I don't think most pirates would disagree, properly defined. It's just that if Tony gives Uhuru an mp3 copy of his latest single for $10, and then Uhuru makes her own copies and sends them to her best friends, the pirate would say that the copies Uhuru made were hers, and she wanted to share them for free.

[edit: subject object agreement]
1. Hulu in Linux is effectively impossible. It's completely broken in Chrome and it stops after 10 minutes of playback in Firefox. More importantly, it does not have the movies I'm interested in.

2. Netflix has no client or support for Linux. Microsoft won't license the DRM components and Netflix refuses to change.

I never, ever mentioned that I was forced into breaking the law, but thanks for putting those words into my mouth. Make no bones about it. I broke the law because it is more convenient. I would pay for the movies if, as I already stated, I wasn't forced to borrow someone's car to buy a frickin DVD.

Surely, you can understand that "Don't consume the content at all" is as much of a copout as someone saying they were "forced" to steal the content. Both I and the movie industry would benefit from me having easier access to the content that I would happily pay for.

This is partly why I'm hopeful to see what Amazon has in store.
The difference is that Google has proven that the results of certain queries are being directly fed as Bing results. If Microsoft does the same with Google rankings, I'd see your point, but right now the evidence only points in one direction.

However, these are also the only experiments that have been run - outlier data, gaming the algorithms. If you only test one possible outlier scenario and don't control against any other, it's fairly ambitious to stand up and say "this is exactly what is happening!"

IMHO it would have been better for Microsoft to respond along these lines, instead of going into counterspin mode, though.
Halving launch costs would be significant, it would save the satellite industry many billions. Note that half orbital speed discount is much more than 50% in launch energy savings.
News Corp as a whole, brings in about a billion in revenue / quarter. MySpace loses $150 million+ / quarter, and that's a number that is continually increasing. So if they don't sell it, a few years from now it could seriously threaten the entire company.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372103,00.asp
My usage of "take" is insignificant, it's just a word in my argument. You can "take help" you can "take ideas" and they're not physical.

Please don't focus on the word "take", instead the actual argument :|
I have no idea how they work and I've never had the desire to use an RSS feed myself. Maybe one day.
I've used this as I work with Ethan and it's really slick!

I've generally found puppet to be overkill for my deployment needs (I prefer fabric) but the level of scripted deployment I'm enjoying is making me reconsider...
from his blog on his shirt design web site:

http://beetnikaesthetics.com/blog/beetnik-tutorial-a-must-re...

click on the link to "25 must read t-shirt tutorials," you'll learn most techniques for shirt design there.
I'm not sure I get your example (not clear when Bing would recommend a movie to me). So let me give that I do understand.

I go to Netflix and search for the move "Network". I end up clicking on "The Social Network". Later on Bing, if I search for "movie Network" -- I'd hope that one of the movies that comes back is "The Social Network", based on that clickthrough data from Netflix..

In my mind the only thing that is borderline unethical is that we've artificially limited this clickstream data to one company. I'd like to give it out more broadly. It's my data right?
Actually the code was already written -- see the bottom of the README.

It took about 30-40 minutes to:

* Add the BCRYPT_ROUNDS setting.

* Remember how to allow for an optional setting (`if foo in settings` and `settings.get(foo, default)` don't work).

* Add the setup.py file.

* Write a README.

* Test with a real Django site to make sure nothing was broken.

* Create and push to repos on BitBucket and GitHub.
Not shown: 1000s of goofy lifes have been saved from this app.
Ads, not "adds."
Code Golf & Programming Puzzles -- now in public beta
Sigh, I am not interested in an argument.

I did NOT come here to justify my actions, piracy or to complain and nothing in my post can be construed as an attempt to do so. I came to point out that watching a movie, legally, in Linux is a complete disaster, to the point that it's not worth the hassle for me. I understand it's breaking the law. I'd rather break the law than go through the nightmare of obtaining the movie legally.

How am I supposed to watch "The Italian Job" legally in Linux? I'm listening, because I would happily pay for it rather than torrent it.
Yes! Copying things without paying for them is in fact more consumer-friendly than any conceivable paid option.
Depends on what the point is. If the point is to get proof out before the article that you've been threatened, well, its likely better than nothing. Press release would probably be better.
Thank you. And this is precisely the problem with this whole fiasco--its just a bunch of conjecture and assertions. But because its from Google its taken with much more weight than it would be otherwise.

Google has created precisely the conversation they wanted based on their assertions then gets indignant when Microsoft refuses to step into it.
I don't know that this counts as a startup. This is not to take anything away from it -- it's a brilliant idea, and well-executed; it has everything that makes a good startup good. It just isn't one in sort of a purely technical sense, in that it's a single product with a limited lifespan.

All in all, well done, though.
This is laughable. They chose keywords no one would ever see as part of a real search. They are literally nonsensical strings of random letters.
It happened while I worked there. It was a site that featured 18 year old girls that looked like they were underage. It was the guys third week on the job and while he had no issues with bestiality or anything along those lines he felt that a line had been crossed with hosting "child porn" even-though we had the records on file that said the women were all over the age of 18.

There is a reason we kept backups, and why the new guys (myself included in the first 4 months) were only allowed access on load-balanced systems so that if we did go rogue the downtime would be minimal while the more senior admins flipped a switch.
> 1) ...neither Bing nor Google does anything to protect user search privacy.

do you mean external or internal privacy? in terms of leaking information, SSL for search is about as good as you're going to get for privacy...if it's the browser or an extension (toolbar) that's watching searches, there's nothing a web site can do.

> 2) I think Google has more to lose by bringing this to light than they have to win.

That may be true, but there was a pretty cutting colbert segment on this last night where nuances about clickstreams weren't really a concern. personally I think google should have taken the humour route in the first place, as the "smoking gun" isn't all that damning at first sight. it requires some thought, which leaves plenty of room for disagreement and doubt.
This seems like 'I want a store like the iTunes Music Store for videos' that doesn't have the movie-company BS that the actual iTunes movie store does. (i.e. DRM free, has absolutely everything, doesn't cost a ridiculous amount for TV shows, etc) They'd need to add on 'simultaneous worldwide availability' and Linux compatibility, maybe subscriptions, and the subtitles stuff, but it'd get close to satisfying this manifesto.

I hope that a store like this exists soon. But given the track record of the studios, it's not likely that they'll become sane anytime soon.
Do Math, Become Unstoppable (Best Ebay Ad Ever)
The other hidden benefit to this is that VCs are usually the only way for stealth mode companies to be hiring.
Andrew Moore's tutorials are also outstanding for people new to Machine Learning or in need of a refresher.

http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/

Ones useful for reviewing probability theory include:

http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/prob.html
http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/pdf.html
http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/gaussian.html

But they're pretty much all excellent.
The part that seems interesting to me is that Google scrapes other entities' data (Reader, News, Books, Scholar) in dozens of other ways, and that behaviour is generally regarded as totally justifiable.
I don't think you read the whole article, because Matt quotes Nate Silver in saying that exact thing

You said: " -Being part of '1000 signals' does not mean all signals are weighted evenly."

Matt quotes Nate: "First, not all of the inputs are necessarily equal. It could be, for instance, that the Google results are weighted so heavily that they are as important as the other 999 inputs combined."
I mainly use my phone(currently Evo). As for sources, I have Twitter setup with list based on business,tech,science,news and general. So I can easily scan headlines based on subject. I also like the app Pulse, set up with the newsfeeds that I visit the most. I like how it gives me a summary of the article. Although sometimes it does force closes on me. Eventually I'll get a nook for this purpose.

A lot of articles do blend together, but I just read the ones that seem interesting/important to me.
Google should also quit trying to build the invite-your-facebook-friends feature in order to get virality for their services. Because, you know, it does a big disservice to their engineers and marketing people that they must rely on facebook.

And if they are not relying on facebook, why not just get rid of it all together?

"Because it helps the users".
Oh I see. But so does Bing's actions.

"Because its individual users giving permission"
Same with Bing.
Can Data be Dangerous for Your Startup?
Thanks for that, I am more curious about how he learned design in general because of the kick-ass aesthetic sense in what he's shared of his work.
> They should focus on trying to be innovative again, that was the Google I respected.

I work in search quality at Google. I'm busting my ass every day working on fundamental reimaginings of how results get ranked. I'm going to keep doing that regardless of what bing does, because it makes the world a better place, and it's fun.

But, suppose the stuff I'm working on works out, and tomorrow Google shows up with a wholly new set of awesome results. This is very possible, there is a ton of headroom left in search quality, I've seen the experiments myself.

Then after a few weeks of sniffing clicks, Bing comes up with the same set of revolutionary results, but they have no idea how they got there, they have no idea what the evidence is to rank them there, all they know is that people like those results on Google. Is this fair? Is this ethical? Is this even legal?

People in this whole debate have the idea that the user is creating this association between the result and the query, like the user searched through the whole web and came back saying "hey microsoft, check out this great result for this query! I found it! Isn't is awesome?" They aren't. Users click on whatever results you put in front of them, generally starting with the top and working their way down.

Ranking results is not a science with some objective optimal conclusion. Ranking results is fundamentally subjective, and while data-driven, is ultimately an opinion. The user does have some discriminating power in this whole feedback loop, but it's miniscule compared to Google figuring out how to show them that result in the first place. Bing is taking the closest proxy that they can practically acquire for Google's opinion, and using it directly in their ranking.
18 years old and been working professionally for almost 3 years (since I was 16) :)
Bundler Pro Tips
Casasanta has a history of this sort of thing: http://kingscourt.posterous.com/more-from-john-casasanta-mac... is another example.

And to me, it sounds like the only reason this isn't extortion is because Dan didn't go along with Casasanta's plan.
As I already said in my reply to Matt (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2169585)

> Well, no, that's a research paper that says that they have made experiments in that direction, but this doesn't imply that this is currently done in Bing.

I answered Matt's questions and raised some other points, still waiting for an answer. Matt, could you please comment?
I like their user interface, I think it is brilliant. However I have found cheaper prices elsewhere (actually dealt with a real live travel agent); so I am not sure what is going on with that.