skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Licensed engineer here (Massachusetts). I don't know WTF Lacy is smoking. I've been in a position where community groups have performed their own analysis to challenge my work and that's fine - either their analysis is wrong and I can point out their errors, or (in the rare occasion) I have indeed missed something and I revise my report. But going after the group who prepared the analysis because it looks "engineering-level work"... I don't know where to begin.

For one, it's not necessarily improper for a non-licensed engineer to do "engineering-level work" - the way you become a licensed engineer is to do "engineering-level work", typically under the supervision of a licensed engineer, but some of your experience has to come on your own ("responsible charge"). But more importantly, just doing engineering work isn't the problem, it becomes a problem if you represent yourself as a licensed engineer when your not.

Quite frankly, Cox should file his own complaint with the NC engineering board against Lacy (assuming Lacy is licensed, his name didn't come up in a license search).
I don't generally ask people to implement a binary tree. I ask about what data structure is appropriate to use in certain situations. I.e., do you understand the performance characteristics of basic data structures and enough about how they are implemented to realize why certain tasks are very inefficient if you use the wrong one.
I would buy it just to change the terrible logo.
Verizon iPhone is significantly faster than AT&T (Video)
Looks great!

When we had our first child, I couldn't find an online registry that I liked, so I scripted a rudimentary one up one night. It worked really well. My wife loved that she could register for intangibles like "Bring us dinner", or any gift from any store. When the baby was born, I took a lengthy paternity leave and, like you, thought I'd build a web app for others to use the registry. I actually took the idea to a local startup bootcamp and it was torn apart by the instructors/angels and left to die on the boardroom floor. Too hard to generate sufficient revenue. Here are a couple of tidbits from my experience for you:

1. One angel had invested in a universal registry and said it took them three years to find any revenue at all. What they did was pivot into a wedding registry that enabled guests to contribute to the couple's honeymoon fund. They made money on travel agent referrals to the couple.

2. This is a crowded market.

A lot of the comments in this thread (like mine!) note how great your site looks. When I showed my site to the bootcamp people, I emphasized my slick design. They essentially said, "No one gives a crap! What problem does it solve that isn't already solved by someone else!"

I thought, "But, but, but... everyone is like me right? Tech savvy and appreciative of good design and UX?"

Check out http://wishpot.com. They are a universal registry. All web 2.0 with social integration. They've got some funding (http://www.centernetworks.com/vc-funding-docstoc-wishpot-kaa...). Been around a few years now.

Here's a competitor: http://www.findgift.com/Services/Gift-Registry/. It was founded in 1997 by a couple from Georgia.

And another: http://myregistry.com. Second spot on Google for "gift registry".

Now check it out:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/findgift.com+wishpot.com+my...

Good luck!
The technical aspect is plain. Copying Google is a great idea. If you're tying to predict the weather and are given a general bag of indicators, the one that is a well-reasoned expert opinion of the weather is probably a very important source. It may even account for a majority of your own predictive power. It would be stupid to ignore it if your goal is to simply make the best prediction.

Likewise, aggressively scraping Google is a smart move. Then you add some new innovation atop it and have a real opportunity to return more informed responses. This is done all the time in science.

In some sense Google simply has to acknowledge that they are a pretty important segment of the web, not some separate entity from it.

So only the legal/ethical question remains. In science it's unethical to work atop someone else's project without crediting them. I doubt Bing would be interested in adding a Powered by Google bar. Moreover, since Bing could directly profit off Google's work undercutting actual algorithmic progress through pure marketing competition (hypothetically, anyway, I am sure that Bing has added tech too) I feel like it's better to restrict this sort of thing.

I think it's fair to say that much like commercial images on Flickr or sample songs, it is unethical and illegal to copy digital services and goods then either claim them your own or profit off of them. I think Google results are suitably close in spirit to this.

So maybe Bing and Girl Talk need to team up and discover and defend the ethical rights of sampling digital goods.
The default OSX “Calculator” has RPN support as well, just press cmd-R. Handy to know if you forget your 12C.
Is this fair? Is this ethical? Is this even legal?

Oh please. At worst, Microsoft's customers are sharing results of their browsing activities, based on information you gave them. How in the world could that be illegal?

Your team is really coming across as whiny on this issue, which seems to me precisely the wrong tactic to take in response to Bing's increasing market share. It makes your team look defensive, as if your advantage is slipping away and this sort of theatrical display is all you've got in response.
Wow. This is a really ugly workaround for a problem that began when you started using MVC. I would assume that any savings in db calls is completely wasted in processing overhead. Even more was wasted just coming up with this rigmarole. More reasons why MVC is bad juju.
Keep doing what you are doing and don't take what I wrote too personally. It's obvious that there are a lot of amazingly talented individuals working hard at Google.

IMHO - One of your colleagues should have stopped that blog post from being put up.
Feedback has been very positive so far - customers are finding it makes the initial screening process much easier. One advantage over Google Docs is the ability to do time-shifted interviews, making it a good first filter for job postings.

Feel free to drop me a mail and we can chat further.
Pakistan court seems unsuccessful for Kasab
Seems like Bing is having trouble explaining exactly what they are doing, and Google is having trouble explaining why they should stop.

Is it illegal? If not, why should Bing stop doing it?

> I think Bing’s engineers deserve to know that when they beat Google on a query, it’s due entirely to their hard work. Unless Microsoft changes its practices, there will always be a question mark.

Kind of rings hollow to me. If I were Bing, I'd want to do what's best for my users.
“An evidence snob is not someone who “want[s] evidence that something works.” An evidence snob is someone who disregards evidence — evidence that doesn’t reach a sufficient level of quality.”

This is a really significant notion.

It's basically saying what you see in old martial arts movies: listen to all your senses.
And not only that, I feel like it should be accepted that Jobs was able to really accomplish things at the level at which he did _because_ of the others helping behind the scenes.
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.

But this whole "no idea how they got there" is kind of bogus. The whole notion of link analysis is to infer from a link that a page is important. Now they're infering from a click that page is important. The relative importance of that page is a function of the search query, like the relative importance of a link is a function of the page from which it originated.

Link analysis and click throughs are both second order effects, right? If CNN.com starts linking to a page, you don't really know why that page is important, except for the fact that CNN.com now points to it.

So lets be clear MS knows how it got there as much as link analysis does. Its because the second order effect of a click implies relevance, just as a link does.
All very true. I actually meant to mention something along those lines but it's been a long day... I should have mentioned that being successful with your own startup is overall more important because you are definitely not guaranteed an exit/acquisition. But keeping exits/acquisitions in mind while creating your infrastructure will greatly increase your ease and your chances of expansion and/or acquisition.
If you know of an open source project that seems like fun to hack on, working on that might be helpful in a couple of ways: It builds your skills in whatever toolset the project uses, and also (if you're good) can help get you potentially useful contacts. (The best matches here for your skill set might be Java open source projects. There are plenty of them, but this, unfortunately, isn't the best place to find out them.)

Alternatively, if there's some small utility you could write (something the scale of, say, a jQuery plugin), or a small Django or Rails website, it might be useful to write that, package it, and write it up. There are far worse things to show an employer these days than an interesting portfolio of stuff on github.

EDIT: this essay on finding interesting stuff to work on just showed up in the 'new' feed, and might be useful: http://svpow.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/tutorial-12-how-to-fin...
> Remember how to allow for an optional setting (`if foo in settings` and `settings.get(foo, default)` don't work).

Instead of:

settings.get(foo, default)

Try:

getattr(settings, foo, default)

This looks useful. Thanks.
As of 0.9.4, the core module is almost 21,000 lines of code and the entire nginx source tree is about 118,000 lines.
programming is all about learning. when i was in high school, i started my first open-source project, an smtp server, and put it up on sourceforge. it was the crappiest C i've ever written, and even djb (of qmail fame) sent me a mail about security bugs in it. it's been a talking point ever since.

if i was hiring, i'd want to see proof that the candidate built something. it doesn't need to be a huge open-source project. even some code that only you find a use for, is better than not having any code out there.
You're probably joking, but sloccount says:

ansic: 82714 (99.68%)
perl: 124 (0.15%)
sh: 78 (0.09%)
asm: 48 (0.06%)
cpp: 17 (0.02%)

(for nginx-0.8.53)
Online pirates organised like Mafia
Runners, couriers, secret inner circles, fights, traitors and retribution. That's the inner circle of piracy.
Hiring An Internet Marketing Assistant
After your company needs sometimes it is important to just hire an internet marketing assistant to do the aggressive marketing. If you hire an in-house marketer, virtual assistant is one of the most flexible workers there are and they can devote their time and efforts marketing for you at a fraction of the time cost that you would have to pay for.
I'd suggest that they're indirectly relevant, because they all address the question of what constitutes fair indexing and what constitutes "copying" or theft of innovative/valuable information.

The evidence suggests Bing is scraping clickstream data to work out where its users go and where they stay, and this includes google search URLs with embedded queries. The evidence doesn't seem to suggest that Bing treats google any differently to any other URL on the web.

So, the questions could come down to: who has the right to disseminate URL strings and mine them for valuable information? Which seems not indirectly related to "who has the right to digitise other forms of media and mine them for valuable information?"
The alleged violator _clearly started_ with the conclusion

What are you basing this on?
I think the problem that I (and presumably the others in this thread) had with your point was two-fold:

1) your tone and choice of language implied entitlement;

2) if not a defence of piracy, did not add a great deal to the conversation.

So what if watching movies in Linux is a complete disaster for you? If you agree that you are not entitled to be able to do this and do not believe that it justifies piracy, it's not clear why this is any more relevant than the fact you can't play back movies on your toaster.
commit to open source or start a project of your own. The only way I learn is by doing and I suspect that is shared among a lot of us. Do, and do more. The skills will follow.
This link is spam. And not the delicious, meat in a can kind.
I didn't suggest it should be our job to make it easy for them. I want great results too and I want it without ads and spam getting in the way as well. In fact there should be more tools integrated into browsers to allow the user to own their own click stream and browsing pattern data and "sell" it to the highest bidder. Do you know of such tools? I don't. We are even at the point both in terms of computational power and data storage costs that each user could potentially have their own web crawler/search engine. The bing and google bars basically steal this information from users and in return provide little to no improvement on search results. The point I was making was that there is absolutely no incentive on either side to share knowledge and converge onto a high quality, common query result set because both companies try really really hard to not appear like the other guy and the result set is part of this.
Very similar to YCharts in a way. www.ycharts.com
Good thing you don't. Stitch away.

Just stick to friends and/or people who won't sue you.
I'll speak for the ones i've been dealing with (Pornhub.com, Brazzers.com, Keezmovies.com, XTube.com, and some other small ones).

Since i started at my company, i only did a website from scratch on one occasion (Videobash.com, not porn), and i think it was done right, it scales very well, using a framework we (me and an ex-colleague) designed and coded targeted for high traffic/high load needs. As for the other sites, i think people here summed it up pretty well, very often the decision are made by managers/marketing people, and we just can't spend the time we want to on optimization and good coding.

But, it's a situation that is starting to change, at least at my company, after a year or so of fighting, we finally started to rewrite all of our sites, using the proper technologies, structuring it correctly, using the framework that we did. You still have to keep in mind that the teams are very smalls, for example, Pornhub.com (17Millions visists/day, 3Billions+ pageviews per month) is maintained by 2 Programmers, and from time to time we can get our hands on an integrator, so understand that it's very hard to address all the issues. So even if, in the case of Pornhub, we were able to scale (since i joined this team) from 12Millions to 17Millions users with less hardware and better performance, i'm still far from being satisfied with the current state of the code.

But be sure, that personally i take the performance of my websites at heart. But there is also all the factors i can't control, advertisers to begin with, a lot of heavy crapy Flash/JavaScript.
A quick thought experiment on this subject: say I search for a term on Bing, find a link I want and then put that link on my blog - when Google indexes that blog have they copied Bing?

Sure its different, but is it meaningfully different? I made the link between the two terms, I also consented for that data to be used in both cases (assuming the data comes from the Bing toolbar and an agreeable robots.txt). I just don't see how the data that Microsoft is using is off limits.
I realize you are trying to make some sort of "Aha! You don't know what you're talking about!" point here, but in practice taking advantage of the fact that you can store multiple types of values in the same variable in a dynamic language is almost always a bad idea and subjects you to exactly the sort of bugs that this question is bringing to light. So, enjoy your sense of superiority because I made a slight mis-statement. The point that the question is phrased for simplicity as a concrete example, in order to see if you are aware of certain general facts, stands.
Re: immorality of theft.

I would counter that it isn't necessarily always morally wrong to steal. Suppose I need some medicine to survive and I have neither the money for it nor the ability to get the money legally. I would argue that since I will die if I don't get the medicine, it's then morally acceptable to either steal the money necessary to purchase it or to outright steal the medicine itself, provided doing so doesn't have the foreseeable consequence of putting the victim of my theft into a similar life-or-death situation.

Would you agree that in this one situation, theft can be morally justified? If not, then say there were 10, 100, or 1000 people in need of the medicine; is it OK to steal to get it then? If not, is there a particular N such that it's OK to steal to save N people? It's just not that simple, and saying "stealing is immoral" doesn't cut it (IMO) as an argument against piracy, even if you buy the argument that piracy == stealing.
In java:
public int nth_fibbonacci(int n)
{
if (n == 0 || n == 1) return 1;
return nth_fibbonacci(n-1) + nth_fibbonacci(n-2);
}
//Would you accept that as a valid response even though it is terribly inefficient? It's what I came up with in 5 minutes.
Maybe they thought dontmakemeinfringe.com didn't have the same 'zing'.
Do you have reason to doubt the validity of this particular survey?

I personally can't see significant problems of this over any survey technique.

There are problems with questionnaires and self-responses, sure, but to say they are worthless is to exclude an entire category of data based on a selective opinion. Horses for courses, if you like.

Many statistical methods are available, some of which are more appropriate than others in particular situations. There is little wrong with convenience sampling if what is of primary importance is convenience, e.g.

(That being said, I'd be careful with taking the results of this poll and applying it to any technology site and therefore the interwebs etc. Inferring from this data that we don't have an ageing population problem would be dangerous).
I don't think that the abolition of grading is a good idea. You need some way to communicate what someone has learned. Current grading systems are meaningless. I can't hire someone with a perfect 4.0 and assume that they really know their stuff.

The example I use all the time is from when I was in college taking subjects like physics and calculus. A few of us were very much hands-on kind of guys that grew up making things and generally connecting with the real world. Other students had never done anything beyond high-school science class. Never a splinter in their finger or trying to make balsa-wood contraption fly.

There was a stark contrast between testing in math and physics because of this. There was a bunch of students that were test taking machines when it came to calculus. Always got A's.

However, when it came time to apply that to a physics test they failed --sometimes miserably-- because there was no real understanding or knowledge.

I find myself re-living some of that as I now help my kids learn science. Dad is no famous for taking the algebra explanation to the garage and grabbing a tape measure, some wood and a handsaw. The function y = x can have a myriad of different domain values depending on what it is you happen to be talking about. This is not what they teach in school and it certainly isn't what they are testing for.

Anyhow, grades need to encode real knowledge. This is what I am striving for in the apps I am working on and hope that some day schools figure it out as well.
Thanks :)

I was aware of a lot of that at the beginning and I have no regrets. I would use BabyList for my own registry and for various reasons wouldn't use the others. We'll see how it goes.
I sympathise a great deal with the spirit of that manifesto. However, I don't full agree with it.

Mainly because it's basis comes down to, "I want a pony, Daddy. And I want it now! And it must pink! And made out of licorice!" And I don't agree with arguments like that because unless you yourself (the person desiring the pony) are the one who's making/building/providing the pony, then you're in the weakest possible position to be making such specific demands. "I'd like a pony too, little Virginia, but I have to figure out how much it costs, I have to go find one, figure out where to keep it, feed it, make sure it stays healthy, etc. And if it's not pink how the fuck do I make it pink? Don't even talk to me about licorice."

Note that I'm not saying that all consumers should conform their desires to whatever the producers feel like producing and providing it under. But I do think it requires give and take on both sides, and the folks on the producer side are much more likely to be constrained by Physical Reality, whereas the consumer role can prance around in Fantasy Land. Wanting convenience is fine. Wanting "fairness" is more problematic, because it's not always clear what is fair when you have to consider things from the provider's position, not just the consumer. And some consumer demands are arbitrary or undefensible. For example, what reasonable basis would one have for demanding that you should not have to pay more money to own a product (a DVD/video) than you would to rent it (watch movie in theatre)? There are arguments for why each should be more expensive than the other, and the "cost plus" model is only part of the consideration. Value-based pricing is also fundamental to economics and market-making. Yes, artificial scarcity can make prices for a thing higher than what it would be otherwise. However, if you're not the one producing the thing in question, you're not in the position to decide whether or how much to turn that dial. As a consumer you can choose not to buy a thing under terms you don't like, but you're not in a position to demand or force a provider to match your ideal terms. You are always free to get off your ass and go make the very thing you want. But if you lack the creativity, energy, intelligence, skills, willpower, etc. to make that thing, then you will absolutely be (at least somewhat) at the mercy of those that do overcome and perform those things in order to provide it. Thus the give and take, and thus a market where price and terms must be reached by compromise on both sides.

Don't make me steal? Don't make me laugh.
I don't understand how this isn't a settled issue. If clickstream data is 1 of 1000 signals, and you create clickstream data for a specialized query that will never trigger off another signal, then your created data will be reflected. That sounds exactly like what happened.

You'd have to make the argument that using this data is wrong, somehow. But to make that argument, you'd basically have to argue that users shouldn't be able to share their habits with whomever they want to. I doubt that argument can be made in a compelling way.

I'm surprised Google is pushing this further, and a little disappointed.
How Tech Tools Transformed New York's Sex Trade
Bing is being parasitic to Google in this situation by generating no value for them.

Well, perhaps Microsoft thinks its business involves providing value to their customers rather than its competitors. What seems consistently missing from the Google PR campaign has been how Microsoft's behavior is a bad thing for the user.
Where are you hosted? Development environment? And other similar details?
The average age of a tech startup founder is around 40 (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/20/innovation-grows-among-ol...).

So no, you've got a few good years left.
Web content layout and text owned by website. Opt out with robots.txt.

Clickstream owned by user. Opt out by turning off toolbar.

Both should be respected.
Also useful (but not mentioned): Universal Principles of Design.