skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just once it would be great if tech companies could lay off the hyperbole and posturing and just give it to us straight. Bing copying Google? Not really. Honeypot attack? Give me a break.

Here's what appears to be the truth:

The Bing toolbar keeps track of what people click on after doing a search. Even when it is from sites that aren't Bing. If it is a search for something obscure (or made up) that Bing has no other data for, then that clickstream data can affect Bing results for that term. Most of the time, however, that is just one of thousands of inputs. It is useful data, but not a defining part of the Bing engine.

This was obviously a huge PR move on Google's part. The information was released to a massive search engine blog right before a big search engine event with both Google and Bing in attendance. Bing could have come out of this shooting straight and looking like the more mature party, instead the come across like they are unsure of themselves and have been backed into a corner.

Score one for the bullshit artists at Google.
Making it up in volume: How profit and volumes traded-off in the fourth quarter
I haven't downloaded either of them, but at least on the App store page, iCoder's Lugaru isn't accompanied "with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange." iCoder's response in the article seems like a slightly more coherent version of "if it's on the internet it's in the public domain."

An earlier version of paolomaffei's comment also pointed out that the original post says that only the code is GPL2, and the game assets are not to be resold without permission.
a test is a controlled experiment. it's nothing like product development. analogies between the two make no sense.
That's the sort of pundit we need more of. Pretty much everything I've read on this story, from Google, from Bing, from various commenters on HN, has been pretty nonsensical. I'll take 1000 words of "hold your horses" over 100 words of nonsense any day of the week.

Though I admit I may only read the first couple hundred and skim about halfway through before closing the tab.
You might be right about the bandwidth thing - been a while since I've read it - but it doesn't change the fact that crypto algorithms suddenly breaking (for non-brute-force reasons - again, you're saying it's bandwidth and not computing power) or AI suddenly becoming possible once you're saturated in a different mixture of nanomachines doesn't make sense.

I cautiously disagree with this, by the way:

>If you push any science fiction hard enough, you will find something impossible in the real universe.

What in Accelerando is impossible? Even more generously, what in it violates our current understanding of physics?
This is a pretty straightforward case of copyright and perhaps trademark infringement; I would be pissed off if I were Wolfire, too, but the reality is, they just need to send a DMCA takedown notice if someone's infringing on the Lugaru trademark or copyright on the levels / game data.

If they had never marked it, or placed the mark out in public domain, or bulk licensed the content out with their content release, then this would have absolutely been in bounds to do, although annoying and shitty by the knockoff developers.

Anyway, Kotaku doesn't really dig in to the legalities here. The wolfire release blog post clearly states that the game content is not for commercial release, so I'd think this is the way for Wolfire to approach it.
Yes an MBA is kind of a Masters degree, but it's not a real Masters degree. If you want to go back to school, better to do some sort of research where you can really exercise your brain and continue on from whatever inspired you @ undergrad, than waste your time learning value frameworks with other MOU wannabes.
I can't agree with that. You always want to improve, even if there is no "competition". Don't worry much about competitors that only imitate, but pay attention to those who innovate and exceed you. So, exceed yourself before others do.
No, but they must have also been doing regular searches at bing.com in order to test their claim. Where do you think they got their bing results from?
The point isn't to change history and remove it from the internets, the point is to not be a dick.

You can't delete things on the internet- content is mirrored, and popular posts like that are quoted, copied, and scraped across the internet. There's no risk of the post disappearing.

However, when they're in a meeting with the head of Match and their team, it'd be pretty dickish to keep the post up. It's rude. Removing it removes friction between the teams, is a nice peace offering, and in the end changes nothing- the post is instantly mirrored.
Maybe they are. How can we know?
Maybe they just scrap every google page, as a way to circumvent robots.txt. (5 years ago no one would have given msft the benefit of the doubt, b/c we've all seen their track record, funny how they are now perceived as the up-and-coming guy in the game)
That is a very good point. The article gives no detailed term information other than the big looking number, $100 million. A sum that could come in any number of terms with most being worth significantly less then were it cash.

I will say Dave Morin seems to have made some good calls in his day.
why would the founding team leave with $75m worth of Google stock on the table, all they have to do is show up for three more years.

Given a choice between a nice job at Google with a multi-million dollar salary doing the thing you love with the resources and infrastructure of Google behind you vs going it alone, the choice seems (no matter what the terms) like a poor one. It's not like Path have any really ground breaking technology. How defensible really is the idea?
Get well soon!
We're looking for interns. In addition to what's listed on our site, we're putting together an intern team to build an android app (starting from scratch, though it will be similar to an existing iPhone app). We can provide housing if you don't live in Southern California.

http://jobs.laserfiche.com/View/Details.aspx?jobid=33
What if that weight was empirically determined by an algorithm instead of by a human, would it make it OK or should Bing hardcode in a demotion to that google-based data source?
I didn't assert that they don't. I asserted that they only had one data source in that case.

Whether they throw up new SERPs in reaction to data from other single sources might be interesting. But if true, it's also not very complimentary.
I'm surprised Stephenson didn't touch on SpaceX's potential as a game changer. The biggest "next" step to increased space access, is a vastly cheaper, more efficient, and potentially more reliable orbital rocket. And, SpaceX is doing exactly that!

As Musk is so fond of saying, the existing options are the Lamborghini's of launch vehicles, whereas he's trying to build the Honda. Safe, reliable, and cheap!

I have a lot of hope that we will have a new Space Renaissance in our lifetimes and I think the work that SpaceX, and other companies is doing will be instrumental in getting us to Mars and beyond.
The problem is, the intentionally ambiguous and misleading wording Google has been using implies the test was "Bing special-cases Google". This is why I'm not buying any of this. Google is smart enough to use precise language when they want to, and apparently not to when they want to.
The question is currently the joint most highly voted on unanswered qn on Stack Overflow, having had one bounty expire unawarded. I've offered a second bounty of 200 rep.

Surely there are Lua hackers who care about capability-based security?
I can think of an even better algorithm:

1) When a user enters google.com/search? , scrap the page (pay special attention to their spell corrector)

2) Send all the data back to MSFT

3) Profit nicely!

It's simpler, and probably works as well as the best competitor out there ;)
Reflector uses Mono's Cecil. It ships with a copy of the Cecil license.
In previous versions, I was stuck by how terribly Red Gate implemented the "time bomb". You run Reflector one day and an innocuous dialog comes up saying "A new version of Reflector is available. Do you want to upgrade? OK/Cancel" And if you click "Cancel", it exits, while silently deleting the executable from the disk.

I can't think of another program that violates user expectation quite so thoroughly.
Same. The subtext says more than the words do.
i've definetly had the same problem googleing for go resources. i also eventually figured out that doing a search for golang <whatever> was the best way to go.

still it can be kind of frustrating for a beginner with the language to always get the query wrong the first time. luckily the documentation and source code available on golang.org is really useful.
There are some fist editions floating around out there, you can find them here for about the same price as the current 3rd edition.

http://www.bookfinder.com/search/?author=John+R.+Trimble&...

I just got "as new" 1974 copy. You guys can have the rest ;-)
Assange: It’s Only Transparency When It Happens To Others; Otherwise It’s Libel
Announcing Pwn2Own 2011
And I have much lower opinion of the Google team (and they had much further to fall). They intentionally use ambiguous and loaded words like "copying" specifically to stir up drama. Google is smart enough to use precise words when they want, and not to when they want. The ambiguity was intentional.
Underwater Acoustic Pinger Locator
Might find this useful: http://astrometry.net/
Code Red as Cyclone Yasi bears down on Cairns, north Queensland
Test your IPv6 Connectivity
I haven't read any of his books, but as an Australian, Mr Ferris's tone fills me with dread, suspicion and an instinctual need to take the piss.

I've seen various endorsements here on HN of the diet and the training regimen. In both cases I have a point to make: almost all of you are seeing novice gains.

Strength coaches recognise this phenomenon. The novice can see amazing gains in hypertrophy and strength in a short time with very little stimulus because they have never had to adapt before. Their capacity for adaptation is barely tapped by infrequent training and they're coming off a low base. It is not uncommon to see total newbs put on a decent weights program add substantial weight to both bar and body in 8 weeks.

In fact, novices are so underadapted that almost any training at all will see improvements in strength. Riding a bicycle will improve squat maxes, for the novice.

Likewise with diets. Often folk swear by diet X because it works for them. One of three things is usually happening:

1. It's their first diet, and they're simply having a caloric deficit for the first time in their lives.

2. They're still enthusiastic and regimented when they make the endorsement. Boredom has yet to set in and sabotage the gains.

3. They're an experienced dieter, having tried quite a few; but this particular diet just so happens to fit their particular combination of taste, hormonal cycles, insulin resistance, adipose senstivity juuuust right.

It's not linear. Did you gain/lose 10kg this month? Don't count on it next month. Maybe 9. Don't count on it for a year, either. In my first month serious weight training I added 60kg to my squat max. If progress was linear I should be squatting several tons by now.

But it isn't. Eventually you require more and more stimulus to disrupt homeostasis, to force new adaptation of the muscle, bone, tendon, nervous, cardiovascular and endocrine systems.

Take my sport: Olympic weightlifting. When I first started I went from naked bar to snatching 60kg in about 6 weeks. On a linear basis I would be snatching 750kg or so at this point, which would make the world-record holder by a factor of 3. Of course that doesn't happen, currently I am just shy of snatching 120kg.

With a goal of snatching 130kg in March, I am now training twice a day, four days a week.

Elite-level international competitors in my sport will train 3-6 times per day, 6 days per week. At the elite level it takes enormous stimulus to cause adaptation. 4 hours per month, let alone per week, just isn't going to work.

One more thing. Apparently Feriss mentions hCG in his book as an aid to sexual performance. Does he mention that its major use as post-cycle therapy for steroid users? Because, to be quite honest, I would be surprised to find any iron sport enthusiast using hCG who wasn't also performing the twist-and-jab exercise first.
And crosshairs in moon landing photos make perfect sense to people who belive it was faked.

Tim's books have some worthwhile advice backed by solid data and also some very anecdote-based conclusions. If you're not flat out calling him a liar, his methods have worked for at least himself. That's all that he claims. If you want to know if they'll work for you, try some of them or do the research yourself.
30,000,000 - the number of times the Cornify button has been clicked.
>over 7/100 made up words appearing in a set of search results

Again, that's not the allegation, that's the evidence. The allegation is that bing is using data that essentially amounts to a wholesale copying of google's results.
Here's my fave commentary on the Ferriss snake-oil schtick: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/01/08/5-time-management-t...
I do 6 figures a year through PayPal, and my account is now over 10 years old. It's never once been locked/frozen/restricted.
Can you reveal any $ numbers; e.g. CPM, conversions to paid accounts, anything?
Yes, but then this also means that for every term in Bing's index, "how it ranks on Google" is 1 of the 1000 factors. It takes a very obscure term to show it, but we shouldn't conclude from that, it happens only for obscure terms.

BING!! uses GoogleRank as a ranking factor. Perhaps they even adjust the weights of this factor, according to what the press/blogosphere is writing about Google's index quality...
> What in Accelerando is impossible?

Faster than light travel. We do not actually know how to build computronium and it probably won't have the exact parameters given in the novel; real computronium may be many orders of magnitude less powerful. We do not know that living on Saturn is feasible from any engineering point of view. We do not know that there is any level of technology that will enable us to build a living adult human-like body in a matter of days as described in the book, as the ape manifestation of Manx was created. We do not know the limits of nanotechnology. We do not know that there is a path from humanity to post-humanity that still includes entities that were at one point human. We do not know what the limits of intelligence are. Is "Accelerando" really possible, or is it merely hiding in the unknowable more cleverly than older science fiction authors?

Bear in mind I often cite Accelerando as an example of sci-fi that is mostly possible (excepting the faster-than-light bit), but it's more that we can't currently prove it impossible than that it is guaranteed possible. We can't eliminate it on scientific grounds but there will be engineering limits in the real universe, too, and there's no guarantee that anything like that is actually possible. And the probability that the social implications of everything Accelerando laid out are correct is effectively zero, no offense to Stross, as nobody can really work it out.

We further do not know that we are not actually living in a simulation in which the "magic" parameter is merely set to 0, but switchable tomorrow on the whim of the Great Simulator. If you do not like the Zones of Thought today, well then the Accelerando-computronium can simulate it adequately enough to meet the criteria of the story one way or another. Given that this actually happens in Accelerand itself, I'm not even stretching; consider A Fire Upon the Deep as Accelerando fan fiction if it makes you feel better.

I'm advocating being a little more careful what nits you pick not because I'm a hippy who just wants to bask in the glow of the work, but because I've gotten to be a master nitpicker over the years. Nothing's perfect.
Snow dodocahedron on Porter Square
This is a pretty thought provoking article. I've always really enjoyed Neal Stephenson's odd perspective on things -- in fact, I always want to smack people who complain about his stories' content and ending situations, and tell them "That's not the point, read the descriptions of things dammit.". The thing I really enjoyed was the bit about "the catch is it has to be the size and shape of a hydrogen bomb".

Anyway that aside, it really brings up the old infrastructure problem -- Large investment in infrastructure is a two-edged sword, bringing both benefit and lock in, and when it comes time to change there is lots of debate. I think Neal either misses or avoids a big part of the argument here -- infrastructure is turned into the bad-guy and the good guy. People don't see the benefits it has brought for a myriad of reasons - they have internalized it, they are not in the class of society that directly gets money for it (and the general improved life isn't apparent because their neighbors are in the same boat), they are afraid of tax increases (or lack of tax cuts), they don't understand the current tech, and figure that "it has problems so anything else we do won't fix it either", it has broken society in the following ways...

Really all of this though is just setup. The way I see it, large scale tech and infrastructure projects are hard to get at and harder to revamp because they are just too easy to target with populist attacks from all sides. The issue is usually complex, but easy to attack with a simple disingenuous quip. Doubly so when the alternative is something that sort-of works, because then the quip doesn't even need the effort of disingenuety, just a mean spirited "they are trying to change the perfectly good stuff we have just to take it away from us, and ignoring everything else to fix"

I have no idea of the solutions we could offer to these types of scenarios, but I do think that somehow we need to find a way to look at these piles of infrastructure we have an find ways to make them better. To do that we need to get around the "infrastructure problem".
Programming Games: Celebrating 30 years of Color Robot Battle
Failed! But then I knew that, I'm on comcast and I believe they've only recently rolled out IPv6 support in a single area (according to http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/020111-comcast-ipv6.ht...). It's supposedly the first dual-stack DOCSIS system in the states, and it's in Colorado. I suppose it'll be awhile before it makes its appearance out here in the Bay Area.

That said, I'm looking forward to having access to my machines at home remotely without any special setup. Very tired of jumping through hoops for such a simple use case.
> They said, however, that they'll make sure their forthcoming legislation "contains explicit language prohibiting the president from doing what President [Hosni] Mubarak did."

Oh great, I'm sure the Egyptians can testify as to how laws prevent leaders from doing bad things, especially in cases of emergency / unrest / whatever.
the more detailed searchengineland.com post mentioned that they only got 7-9 of the 100 nonsense terms they tried to inject to show up.
Keep in mind that two of the co-founders are Dave Morin and Shawn Fanning. The former likely made many millions (real and paper money I'd think) as manager for the Facebook platform/Facebook Connect, the latter made many millions from Napster.

So, even though this offer and this decision both leave me a bit shocked, they already have the nice job and the resources they want. (office close to the bay, downtown San Francisco/SoMA is also nicer than the drive down to Mountain View)
Mistakenly believing that an act of humanity is a sign of that person/group/country's ethical superiority is a tragically common, and tragically ironic occurrence.
The paper that killed FEXPRs (1980)
"But to get the search term, they are parsing something"

referrer in the http request?
Well, SpaceX is still playing the "expendable rocket" game, at least for the moment. They're trying to recover and reuse first stages, but they say that they're set up to be profitable even if that doesn't work --- and while their prices are cheaper than others, it's not enough yet to change the way you'd build a satellite.

Besides, Stephenson at least used to have a consulting relationship of some kind with Blue Origin, the rival launch-system startup funded by Jeff Bezos, which is still awfully quiet about their vehicle, at least for the moment. (I was wondering if this was a preview, but even if it was, he'd be highly unlikely to say so.) If the relationship continues, or even if he just holds stock, that might be reason enough not to talk up the competition.
Or it would be that the satire is meant to reflect Tim's methods and the ridiculousness is meant as a refutation (in much the same way that "A Modest Proposal" was meant as a criticism of Britain's callousness — satire is generally a form of criticism).
Billy Joel Songs Explained.
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I personally would never date someone I met on a pay dating site, because desperation is an honest signal of poor quality.

That's the same thing people say about free software. :-)

With that said, I think you may confuse desperation with efficiency. If I were single in this day and age, I would certainly use pay dating sites (assuming prices were reasonable). Not because I'd be desperate, but it widens your network considerably, and you don't have to waste time at bars, clubs, social mixers, etc...

And given the number of colleagues and friends who have met people online -- I'd say the superficial quality at least (looks, jobs, education, humor) seem to be higher than average.

In any case, the article provided no evidence either way. What would have been useful is for them to show proof that women on pay sites are less desireable than women from say, MySpace ;-)
They'll need a good task management app, I'll offer free producteev.com accounts for you guys
Hit me up : ia@producteev.com
Why the camera isn't the culprit for the white iPhone 4's delay -- Engadget
My results: 7/10 for IPv4, 0/10 for IPv6
Income for Fight Club fans is interesting, apparently correlating with both very low (<25k) and very high (>200k) incomes. I suppose a couple themes make sense with that data, the low income group presumably agrees with the anti-materialism message and rejection of following cultural norms of corporate careers. On the other end, the high-salary group is possibly the intelligent non-conformists who took risks which were rewarding (entrepreneurial or otherwise) which resulted in high incomes.

That, or being a fan of Fight Club means you're more likely to mess with online surveys...
Founder and CEO Kevin Systrom On Instagram’s Launch
I have met people online, and known people who have met people online, but they were all on okcupid or other free sites; never on a pay site. I didn't say all online dating was like that, only pay sites. A free site does widen your network, but I think the point of the post was that paid sites have mostly dead users and therefore the network is rather small.

V.v. free software, I think the better comparison is between a free dating site and free software; lots of people contribute to make it better. Certainly it's partially true with OkCupid; users do add a lot of the content, writing match questions and quizzes.
I am sorry about that. We try to make it clear that the trial pro account is a trial that upgrades in the copy. If you want to send me an email I can make sure to refund you.
The cone was a placeholder/warning for early builds. By the time it got stable, everyone recognized the cone = VLC and they decided not to change it.