skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 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 said "exclusively".

> there's no evidence that Google is the only search engine that's being monitored

There's no evidence that it's only search engines.

> You can't just associate two websites because some users go from one to the other

sure you can, if they go via a link. Now you can just notice the link and say "great, there's an association", or you can monitor which links people click on and weight the graph accordingly. "great, there's an association, and this link is more popular than that one". Nice data to capture. Not constrained to search.
I don't know what blows my mind the most: that they don't fucking back up the photos, or that this hasn't happened to anyone before.
I hadn't heard of IAC, so I looked it up: "IAC is a leading internet company with more than 50 fast-growing, highly-related brands serving loyal consumer audiences... our mission is to harness the power of interactivity to make daily life easier and more productive for people all over the world."
if you are writing it for your own use or to learn new skills, then go for it. Just don't expect it to become a commercial success.
I don't know what he received so I can't say. But our tools promote real users interacting with real users. Maybe Robin could talk to us if he has a problem.

Horses for courses not withstanding.
http://whatthetrend.com
For a "sole proprietorship", is it necessary to register a company at all for doing what the OP asked (starting a website as a side project), or can he just do it as an individual and just pay taxes on the profits as regular income?

PS> I am thinking of doing something similar to the OP, and not sure if this complicates things, I am on a H1 visa.
Sony Accused of Packing Rootkit in PS3 Firmware Update
Thank you for a detailed reply. What do you recommend as a source for the Terms of Service. Is it worthwhile to get it from a lawyer or is there a sort of "industry standard"?
Yes. From the original article yesterday:

This all happened in December. When the experiment was ready, about 20 Google engineers were told to run the test queries from laptops at home, using Internet Explorer, with Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar both enabled. They were also told to click on the top results. They started on December 17. By December 31, some of the results started appearing on Bing.
Facebook Introduces HTTPS – Here is how to enable the feature
I was under the impression that using something like authorize.net would impose more restrictions on my application (e.g.: require it to be PCI compliant, etc.) and require more work to get going.
I have few sites hosted with them. Down times are terrible. Expensive doesn't always mean good service.
Grow VC (remote from anywhere). Some areas where we are currently looking for new resources:

- PHP developers

- writers to write catchy blog posts

- infographics for marketing

- Designers

- UI and UX professionals

- video/animation professionals

Apply at: http://www.growvc.com/blog/about-2/join-us/
> You checked it against the assertion of the most interested party?

There are currently exactly two sources: The Google post and the MS post. Who are more likely to know about what MS are doing? MS. I check my theory about what MS are doing with the source most likely to contain correct information.

> It's not "click" data

It's 'clickstream' data (MS's term). A 'click' comes from a page and goes to a page. That's the data MS were capturing. The page the click happened on (query happens to be included in URL), and the page the click went to. It's click data.
W. House Announces Startup America to Foster Innovative, High-Growth Firms in US
That's why it's interesting.

You say Google adds value. Other's don't think so.

Why can't I add value to Google's content and present it in my own way?
I realize the laws are different between the two states, but how expensive and time-intensive was the process?
Thank you for the references. Posted to keep this thread in my saved queue.
I have been reading this sort of advice for quite a few years now, and I'm glad to see that study after study seems to agree. Having lost my mother to Alzheimers a few years back, I'm somewhat paranoid about losing my faculties as I get older, so I've been exercising a lot more. Not sure if I'm getting any smarter, or just getting stupider slower... but even if it doesn't help my brain, it's helping other things healthwise.
You, sir, sound like a snake oil salesman of the worst kind. Either that or you have no clue how your site operates.

edit but apparently 'Jen' does. Screencast here -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOtBmqqKVcc

(Thanks to my Appsumo purchase of Screenflow which saved me 50%!)
This is particularly poignant and frustrating given OKCupids recent acquisition. I'm happy for those guys- but I am sad that the one good dating site will probably be discontinued. It's tough when you know the shady tactics of practically all the others.
Robert Haas: MySQL vs. PostgreSQL, Part 2: VACUUM vs. Purge
Egypt lifts blockade on Internet services
Who remembers a few years back when Adobe Air was first making waves and Mozilla introduced Prism and Adobe's pr team hit the web to discredit it? Good times

Anyway, we've developed an internal app at my job targeting webkit on os x and we required the use of fluid, it was very nice not to have to worry about cross-browser issues. Shout out to Air as I understand and Prism (now Chromeless), more people should use this tech
Ask HN: Have any successful businesses been built around Amazon Devpay?
Techstars is listed as a committed member. I wonder if YC is interested at all?
In their dating persona test (http://www.okcupid.com/the-dating-persona-test) there is the line "If you have any STDs please go HERE." wherein HERE was a link to match.com. It now goes to mingle2.com.
There may be local rules which require some form of business registration, but in the US the typical case is that the first -- and only -- time the government hears of the existence of a sole proprietorship is on Schedule C attached to the individual's tax return, which documents its income and expenses, calculates the profits, and tells you what other pieces of paper to copy the profit number onto to figure out how much tax you owe.

Sole propretorship == doing it as an individual.

This is not legal advice: if you're physically in America when doing the work, the IRS probably doesn't care about your citizenship, you owe it money on your sideline income. It may not be, strictly speaking, legal to work for someone other than your employer (yes, including yourself) while you are on a H1. In practice I'd bet you that this is commonly overlooked.
It's really unfortunate that this is the norm and not an exception. That said, users of these kind of sites are probably most susceptible to this kind of trick as love, lust and infatuation are probably the strongest emotions.

I know of a few people who scrape profiles off of dating site A, create new profiles using that data on dating site B then message users on site B asking them out. A requirement for going out on a date with them (they're obviously posing as an attractive female and messaging males) is signing up to a service that does a background check to verify that they're not dangerous. Affiliate network payout per conversion on background check = $20+ USD

Doing that at scale = you are making $2,000+ USD/day
Do you have an extended marketing department?
Holy cow, you're right.

The original link now redirects to the front page of the blog: http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/why-you-should-never-pay-f...

Here's a Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9OtAvuo...
This is about undergrad work, correct? Since ownership of grad work by university is already defined and accepted.

What was the written policy for undergrad ip previously? There wasn't one, is that correct? And since there wasn't one the university actually didn't own any undergrad work at all since undergrads are not employees of the university and it is not work for hire and they have not contractually agreed to any other arrangement.

So what really happened is the university's lawyers realized there was no legal basis for their claims at all.

Rather than drop the claims though they chose to revise the policy asserting claims.

> Missouri relented in Brown's case. It also wrote rules explicitly giving student inventors the legal right to their unique ideas developed under specific circumstances. If the invention came from a school contest, extracurricular club or individual initiative, the university keeps its hands off. If the student invention came about under a professor's supervision, using school resources or grant money, then the university can assert an ownership right — just as it does for faculty researchers.

So now there is a policy in place that undergrads must contractually agree to as part of agreeing to university rules, which in many cases gives ownership to the university of undergrad work which was not the case before, such as if "using school resources" like their internet connection or student lounges or done "under a professor's supervision", which was never the case before for unimportant undergrad work.

Undergrads haven't traditionally done original valuable research or development. Universities have realized that they do and they want a cut of it. There is no justification for it in the common law, so they are asserting the rights contractually now, while issuing press releases claiming that they are making things better for students, which is actually propaganda since the opposite has just occurred. Something of a common PR tactic to do this.
No, I don't think so, it adds to the discussion (ie, it's not a dupe, it's just on the same topic from a different website).

It will rise on its own merits - I just added the link to the previous so that we didn't have the same conversations on two pages!
SEO types long ago began optimising for Google Places (which drives HotPot)
right. I'm the CTO. I'm not sure what I can do to combat the perception that I sell snake oil. I don't sell snake oil. I help people meet each other.

If you really WANT snake oil I guess I could find some and get it to you.
Let's just focus on keeping politics off HN; the worst opinion-based voting seems to be politically motivated.
You weren't meant to have a boss (rev June 2008)
Yes, just look at Western Union for a service that has a long history whose reputation has been practically destroyed by scammers.
Agree with you 110% on the technical issue; most apps and websites attempt to solve problems in a technical way, which isn't always the best method.
Talking about "stealing content"... On this link , for example (http://www.google.com/hotpot?q=restaurante+bucuresti&ssp...), there's no direct link to the restaurant's website.
Yes. Why not? Who does it hurt?

I intend to write a Twitter client this year, since existing clients don't meet my needs:

* web app
* multi-account support
* rate-limit noisy accounts
* automatic language detection for people who tweet in multiple languages

Sure, I'd love to find something that does this already. But I don't think it exists.
1. Could you point out to a few such niches where there is "real need for software, but limited competition".
2. How does one go about finding such niches?
"I don't know what he received so I can't say."

Speak straight. Do you or do you not send automated messages or messages from fake accounts in an effort to entice visitors to sign up?
Wow, they actually removed it? That really sucks.
I agree that you should negotiate your pay, but only before you get hired.
You have permission to rewrite (any of) mine, if you want them. Wordpress also has theirs available under a very permissive license. NOLO presumably has one available in their books.

If you pay a lawyer $1,000 to draft terms of service, your lawyer will have $1,000 more in his pocket than he otherwise would.
The Facebook of Food? Foodily Makes Meal Planning Social
IPython, with Matplotlib and Numpy, has a ton of numerical libraries, especially LAPACK, which aren't in SHO. Matplotlib is also much more extensive in its capabilities. Some coder cried when they were told to write another Matrix class.

SHO has all the advantages of .NET's ecosystem, so that it can call anything .NET and be called by anything .NET. Making an environment like this should not be about using a Python REPL. You could work on the hard parts - models for asynchronous interactive calculations, or provenance tracking, or helping translate data formats from one API to another - and let the user choose a REPL.
Though Analytics data IS used for things like Double Click Ad Planner.
Cambridge Healthcare, Cambridge, UK (remote considered)

We are a healthcare start-up, creating a unique and innovative healthcare application framework and marketplace. We are working in partnership with the NHS and will pilot regionally, then deploy nationally.

We're looking for a CTO and or Senior Engineer, who thinks that a Ruby/Rails 3 and Amazon RDS stack with AMQP and Distributed Memory Caching is cool, but not enough.

Competitive salary and employee stock options.

For more information please don't hesitate to get in contact, email and Skype in profile. The sites are http://nhs.info and http://about.nhs.info
My point being, writing off any news bias as irrelevant as Qatari politics has no influence on the world stage is ridiculous as Qatar are moving towards centre stage.
I've not yet signed up, but I will later today to check out how this services tries to trick people into paying money with the promise of good looking girls waiting to talk to you.

From TC:

" After a user "friends" someone, we pop up 6 "other people like him" and the user can select up to 6 people to "say hi" to. Again, we try to focus on 1) relevance and 2) online now in populating those suggestions."

Does that mean that a user has to pay for his curiosity just to see a bunch of "say hi" messages?
I had an independent accountant do the majority of the work for me for a total of $750. This included virtually all the setup, including verifying the name wasn't taken, filing the paperwork (state and local), all the official docs, getting TaxID, etc.

The process only took a few weeks from start to finish, which was a nice surprise.
As it's been pointed out, Bing compares more than just the clickstream datapoints. You have to imagine they provide some PageRank/domain weighting to the relevance. So if you setup a dummy site with no existing pagerank/weight, and performed the same experiement, you likely would not see the same results. However, since you can imagine Google is heavily weighted, those data point score high and can rapidly reflect in Bing search results.
The problem is that there is not plenty of money in smaller countries, which are generally just as hard to set up as large countries. So any new service will have limited scope.
I didn't say that Google adds value. Are you talking about Google Search, Google News, or another of their activities as "adding value" or not? Please don't put words into my mouth.
So when's the next PayPal going to take over? This is a company that had a great idea a long time ago and a whole bunch of terrible ones since. It needs to go away now, and we need a company that does what they do better.
It is the poster child of Web 2.0 services and Ruby on Rails. Has the world really moved on that fast that this is old hat now?
http://www.woome.com/

"wooMe is the most fun you'll have online for FREE!"

"get started now! it's 100% free and takes 30 secs to sign up"

Doing a Bayesian update on the claims of automated bot messages, with the fact that the company is willing to make obviously untrue statements on its front page, it seems reasonably likely that they would be willing to lie in other places too. I realise that claiming to be free probably increases conversions, but you shouldn't pursue conversions at the expense of basic ethics. Would you shoot a puppy to increase conversions too?

So, at the moment, I'd evaluate as 80% likely the claims in the TC blog post. Still waiting to read nicferrier's responses to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2170210 though.
Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results — and denies it
Dividends are taxed as ordinary income, while (long-term) capital gains are taxed at a significantly lower rate.
we do not.
"Just because Crockford suggests it, doesn't make it a good idea."

On top of that Crockford does not actually state that closure-based objects should be preferred to prototypal inheritance. See: http://javascript.crockford.com/prototypal.html
Not a lot of people know this but the recent version of Chrome supports running any web-page as its own app. Try it out from Settings [wrench icon] > Tools > Create Application Shortcut. It's great for todo apps or gmail. I know it works on Windows. The link seems to be grayed out in my OSX box for some reason.
care to explain how he was rude and his tone off-putting? and i hope my question isn't rude ;)
"Fantastic!" - I thought. Then:

The Google Earth Plug-in is currently only
available on Windows and Mac OS X 10.4+

Oh, crap.
If there are already enough people who are contributing, what is the problem then? Why do you want to contribute to something if it not useless?
The Computer Attacks You ’ve Never Heard Of
Is it your belief that the messages in question are genuine?
I'd like to garner your opinions: what else could IAC have done in this situation? Or perhaps a better question is what you would have done in their shoes.

One property is threatening the business model of another in a visible way (at least in search engine rankings). I propose that the readership of OkTrends is minimal compared to the wider online dating market, so was this the prudent course of action?
The blog is aimed at people writing commercial software. If you aren't trying to make any money, then it might not apply. But if you are going to put all that time and effort into something, wouldn't it but good to write something that has a reasonable shot at having lots of users?
* [On forums] You'll often get no replies or useless replies (eg a bunch of people who don't understand the problem telling you that you shouldn't be doing that or asking you why) *

Actually, I have made similar experience also on SO when a question becomes a bit more special. I hate it to justify why I want to do it this way. But I was told that it's just the way it is on SO.
You're right, that was totally unprofessional of me to lay such an ad hominem attack and run away...so let me expand upon my thought some more.

Your site either uses fake accounts to trick legitimate users into paying to view messages from these supposed hot women looking for dates with horses and guys who have just signed up yet haven't provided any personal details...or you have a very serious spam problem where bots are running rampant across your site with hordes of fake accounts trolling for new profiles to scam (or a combination therein).

As evidence, I just logged in to my woome account, which I haven't logged into in maybe 3 years, and immediately I got a request for a video chat from http://www.woome.com/sallyl3462/ . Who wants to get laid tonight? Sally does!
You fail to understand how to interpret a "relative growth" chart. Google is not "steadily between +20% and +60% growth."

Since a random point in time picked by WA it shows what you would be up on another random point in time. If you look at the historical returns of MSFT vs GOOG there is no competition. You're original $10,000 in MSFT would be worth many millions and your GOOG stock would be worth less than $100,000.
.NET Reflector no longer a free tool - An open letter to the .NET community
Its not just the recent versions, it's done this for windows since it's first public release.
Yeah an Amazon matchup would have been pretty interesting. I'm just trying to picture the mechanics of the affiliate program. Would people pay for referrals for good dates?
Read the rest of it. The last half ties the argument together quite nicely.
What we have learnt running a bootstrapped startup
Entrepreneurship is the new Art
Google use Google Toolbar to record users clicks, which directly correlates with ranking.
The "www" has nothing to do with it. As a spam mitigation measure, URLs in submissions don't get automatically linked. You need to put the URL in a comment to get the link.

This is mentioned in various FAQs in and around the site, perhaps most particularly in the FAQ link at the bottom of (nearly) every page:

http://ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
There is no direct link on the list page you link, but when you look at the details of any restaurant the link is there with phone numbers and other details.

Anyway, even if it was the case, how do you classify this as "stealing content" (with an obvious reference to the recent Google/Bing fight)? They are offering a service, posting user generated reviews of restaurants and sending new clients to them. It does not even go close to stealing in my opinion.
How to Change your Permalink Structure Without Breaking your Links
Microsoft backs H.264.
The OkCupid guys should get a book deal! Co-author with the Freakonomics guys.
I'd just like to add that there are costs to doing business that you can claim that are well within your right. I'm not a tax or legal specialist but things like servers, shipping costs, and your unpaid time may all be deductible to balance against your revenue.

It's worth it to hire an accountant to make sure your business is crystal clean, and that you're not penalizing yourself unnecessarily.
Sure- I am really happy for them. But, from a "change the world," or "next Big Thing" perspective it's sad to see. We love to think of startups as vehicles for innovation and change. But, a liquidation event can often lead to the mission being hurt. I am sure the OKC team is proud of their work and happy with this result. But, the HN crowd is sad to see them not going all the way so to speak. We wanted a great at SEO/marketing, fun, and free dating site to work.
Are you aware of any process by which new users are sent automated messages from accounts, valid or not?
That link actually rotates randomly between their major competitors. In a few reloads, I got Plenty of Fish, True, eHarmony, and Mingle2. It's likely that they've pulled Match from that rotation, though.

To be honest, I wouldn't mind seeing that line disappear altogether, as it always struck me as being in somewhat poor taste.
They own a whole bunch of businesses (http://www.iac.com/Our-Businesses/), including shoebuy.com, where a friend of mine works.
The article doesn't mention how to type these characters.

CSV, TAB delimited , YAML and even basic XML have the advantage of being human readable AND human-creatable.
My issue with it is this: Had Google not created a better algorithm would those users be clicking on those links? If Google shut down today would Microsoft be able to associate those sites with the search terms?

I should think the answer to the above is 'no' in both cases, which is why this is cheating. It's probably not illegal, but I find the practice to be unethical.

Ask yourself this: If Google shut down today, would Microsoft be providing more relevant, equally relevant or less relevant results for those searches? If the answer is less relevant, then I think it's clear there's been a lapse of ethics.
Indeed. What about pricing? They could have followed the AWS scheme and only charge you for time spent on dates :)
Egypt Coming Back Online
I can't say there aren't spammers using our site. that problem waxes and wanes and we try to deal with it as best we can. The user quoted is most definitely a spammer and I'll look into why we haven't caught that.

I don't think that's what robin is trying to say tho.

We are simply trying to make introductions happen as much as possible because that's what people use woome for. To meet new people.

It seems to work, to my knowledge our users are generally happy we have good time on site, repeat vistits and viping.