skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who no longer has his terminal ileum (Crohn's), I wish him the best, hopefully he can get better without surgery. Its really not something you want to go through if possible...
I'm beginning to loose faith in the Nobel selection committee. If the goal was to award/recognize the positive impact the internet has had on speech, communication, and reporting such it's role in Egypt this last week then I'd be all for it. - "That's an indication not just of the importance of the whistleblower website itself, but also of the role of the Internet in social change and social justice movements - as tools for communication, collaboration, and mobilization." - But nominating arguably one of the most inflammatory sites on the internet is not good way to recognize those advances.
Look at the actual quote: "...some of the conclusions we drew are not quite as exaggerated as we made them out to be."

The "the data that OKCupid gathered from Match.com's public filings and press kit were not completely accurate" line isn't a quote from the CEO, but a paraphrasing of his statement. It may be that he said that, but this article says otherwise.
Apple will not allow you, and I've heard as such. They have specific examples that can be Venn Diagrammed to your app being giving a rejection.

From the iPhone App Store Guidelines

11.2 Apps utilizing a system other than the In App Purchase API (IAP) to purchase content,
functionality, or services in an app will be rejected

11.3 Apps using IAP to purchase physical goods or goods and services used outside of the application will be rejected

20.4 Apps that allow a user to directly purchase a lottery or raffle ticket in the app will be rejected

21.2 The collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS

http://stadium.weblogsinc.com/engadget/files/app-store-guide...
Squelching disagreement in the name of civility is not a good way to run a business, and they probably know that. Removing a widely-read criticism of Match.com before more people see it, however, does make commercial sense. It is not the kind of explosive secret that must be contained completely to be contained at all; taking it down from OkCupid's site means it will only be available on lower-profile, lower-traffic sites, and fewer people will read it in the future.
Don't forget Reddit Gold. They were at 40k/month when they started, probably up to 60k/month now.
The Suicide Of Bill Zeller (with respect: he was wrong)
Key datapoint: Apple dominate profitability per handset at around $260; third most profitable manufacturer is Android-centric HTC, at around $65 per unit (RIM is in 2nd place, ~$75).
Building a MakerBot
My comment is in response to a comment about "popular queries". And really to the meta issue about how much it is weighed in general.

Google is trying to argue a huge PR point by saying, "Bing copies" with the ramification being that when you search on Bing you're really searching on Google. If Google said this, "For extremely rare searches where Bing has few, if any, good signals, clickthroughs from Google will be weighed in such a way that these results may make the first page".

I'd buy that 100%. The Bing team may even buy it. Google seems to want to start with that thesis, but then try to shove the whole camel in too.
This sounds like the perfect screenplay for an old spice commercial.
MailChimp seems bound and determined to never let me pay for the service. I guess I'm okay with that. :)
Selling physical goods, like seeds, is fine.

Per 11.3, you cannot use Apple's IAP system to sell physical goods. You can use your own.
In Tolkien's defense, the man had some of the finest field-describing skills I have ever seen.
Thing is, this is what happens to you if you complain at Flickr. They don't like having to actually do work. That's pretty obvious from the fact that after over five years of losing people's photos like this, they still fail to back up anything. The founder even lost all his stuff at that cluster-f of a social network gone wrong. What's funny about those slackers at Yahoo's Flickr is that they think they can pull off hosting a porn site, while pretending it's a family friendly place for your kids' photos. That may be fine for the average user that wacks off at work, but not so good for an advertising platform, as it turns out. You see, major corporations and small businesses alike have an issue with their ads being surreptitiously placed onto hardcore pornographic web pages without being told about that. Yahoo's Flickr can play this game of hide-the-porn while tricking the general public into trusting them. But those lies don't really fly in the advertising world on which Yahoo depends. Everyday, several people get deleted from Yahoo's Flickr as that company desperately attempts to make their porn site not really appear to be one on the surface. The copyright infringement is the same thing on a smaller scale. They count on people stealing your content, that's why they tricked you into placing it all online in an easily accessible catalog of stock images from trusting idiots. Make any kind complaint about the way they are doing anything, and you're booted out mercilessly. That's just the way it goes and Yahoo doesn't care one bit how you feel, because they obviously do whatever they want to. They have the government in their pocket and free reign to push porn into grade schools unlabeled, give your photos away for free to anyone that wants them without liability, and harbor countless sexual predators, pedophiles, and registered sex offenders, whom they cloak so they can be right next to your children without anyone being suspicious. Can't really see anything worthwhile about that website, or Yahoo in general. It's all lies from them, and everyone eats it up with a clueless smile.
Yes, it's fine to sell physical goods through an app.
They HATE HATE HATE spam. I got flagged one time because I used the word craigslist in a blog post I sent out automatically through an RSS to Email feed. Luckily customer service threw a banana at the spam team and they got me back up and running.
The problem is that the honeypot doesn't prove anything. These are rare terms by design so clickstream data is all probably all Bing has to go on, and that clickstream data was voluntarily submitted to Microsoft by Google employees.

Google need to go to some extra steps to show that Bing is copying Google links for popular terms. If Bing is weighting clickstream data from Google searches very highly, that is more or less admitting that other search engines work better.
Ask Me What I'm Reading: Kindles & Public Transportation
I love to read and really enjoy talking to people I meet on the metro. The other day I looked up from my Kindle and realized a good portion of the metro was reading their Kindles as well. This brought on a bit of sorrow as books are a great way to start small talk especially on public transportation, but not if you don't know what the other person is reading. Granted most people want to be left alone, but I am sure there are a few out there who share the same passion to talk about books too. So how could I fix this?

I thought of a solution that I have yet to create because of lack of time and lack of not wanting to feel desperate. Basically the idea is to cover your standard Kindle cover or Kindle device with a sock-like slip cover. On all aspects of the slip (inside, outsides, etc.) would have bold faced letters that said, "Ask me what I'm reading". Having it is a slip cover would allow you to control when you wanted to talk about what you were reading and when you just wanted to keep to yourself.

Thoughts on the idea. Does anyone else have an interest in something like this or am I just going crazy?
The optimality of Grover's algorithm doesn't in any way suggest that the upper bound on speedup is quadratic. That result only applies to one very particular class of problems: unstructured (oracle) search problems. There are other oracle problems for which the speedup is known to be exponential. For non-oracle problems the situation isn't yet clear, although many people believe the speedup will be exponential. That will be true if factoring isn't in BPP, for instance.
Free will and the paradox of responsibility
>The end result is a copy of the results of a competitor. If you borrow it, steal it from your users, ...Your index still contains copied results for a fact.

This is pure nonsense, and so is the rest of your post. [edit: The business of] search is not about academia, or algorithms, or engineering, its about providing users with relevant responses to their queries. The best way currently to do that is through crowdsourcing--which is exactly what Google does through Pagerank. Now Bing took that a step further and creates an association between what a user searches for and what they end up finding relevant: This is exactly what we currently call "search". Whether that initial directory of sites came from Google or from some hand culled list is inconsequential. This is not "copying", this is doing exactly what they should be doing.

The point is Google doesn't own the link, or the form input, or the fact that many users clicked on that link after posting that term. The only thing they could be reasonably construed to "own" are the relative rankings themselves. Bing did not "copy" this.
I should also highlight that I was referred to this site http://feefighters.com/ which looks pretty good but is for US customers only.
They've hired one guy (spladug), and I believe they're further along in the process on another. They announced a few months ago that they were hiring. [1] Raldi or Jedberg would be the best people to ask. I'm sure one of them will drop by this thread.

[1]http://blog.reddit.com/2010/11/thank-you-mr-nast-may-we-have...
I think he touches on it in a very generally with this statement.

There is no shortage of proposals for radically innovative space launch schemes that, if they worked, would get us across the valley to other hilltops considerably higher than the one we are standing on now—high enough to bring the cost and risk of space launch down to the point where fundamentally new things could begin happening in outer space. But we are not making any serious effort as a society to cross those valleys. It is not clear why.

Sure SpaceX is the first (almost) successful commercial venture of its kind and has been a long time coming. But they're still using essentially the same old ICBM technology the USA and USSR have been using for the past 60 years.

Stephenson is advocating more energy, research and money be devoted to the technologies on the horizon that would replace giant explosive tin cans.
How bit.ly data shows the unrest in Egypt
Ask HN: Do you consider it a failure Reddit failed its initial mission?
Reddit, as I understood it, set out to be a Digg or Newsvine competitor — a social-powered news service where the best news stories, categories by subreddit, are voted to the top.

But it’s, I believe, universally acknowledged that Reddit is instead a community or hivemind of in-jokes, 4chan memes, and chain puns. Story titles are almost never actual titles but rather click-bait or vague reactions. And yet, they hit 1 billion pageviews a month.

Given that the reality seems so divergent from the goal, would you consider Reddit a success?
This proves that it doesn't have to have a negative effect on the page count to open source the code. Reddit source code: http://code.reddit.com/
Useful when you absolutely definitely need to be there on time - and the other side has just destroyed your GPS satellites

http://books.google.ca/books?id=QymEXZIWEe8C&pg=PA332...
The more in-character response from OkCupid would have been to make a new OkTrends blog post that plainly analyzed the data underlying the removal of the original article.

Data Points:

Dollars Received From match.com | Articles removed
$0.00 | 0
$1.00 | 0
.. | 0
$50,000,000 | 1

Followed by a witty analysis of how statistically, 50,000,000 influences the on goings of OkCupid.
People tend to be most skeptical of infrastructure projects funded with tax dollars coercively taken from them. It takes a lot of bad publicity to begin a populist movement against private transactions.

I tend to oppose many government infrastructure efforts because the government has no incentive to do a realistic cost/benefit analysis of new projects. It is always in the legislator's and lobbyist's interest to start a new project, whether it be massive high speed rail lines, expensive green power installations, or large subsidies for classes of fuel and transportation that are uneconomical in the free market (hydrogen cars, corn ethanol). The only people paying a cost for new projects don't have a direct voice in the planning meetings.

The interstate highway system of the United States has long been the shining example of a "good" infrastructure project. But it has certainly subsidized the development of sprawling suburbs and a car-centric culture. Nowadays many expensive government infrastructure proposals (such as passenger rail) are aimed at mitigating the externalities from the earlier infrastructure projects. I wish we took a little more care at spending money wisely.
Google managed to inject "7 to 9" of their honeypots into Bing. In 91+/100 cases apparently there was enough to outweigh the Google results on gibberish terms despite the efforts of 20 Google engineers between December 17 and December 31.
I'd definitely recommend checking out the app "Movist". It's what I use instead of VLC or MPlayer when Qucktime (+Perian) doesn't cut it.

I think it's based of MPlayer anyway, but it works very well on the Mac when VLC falters (or is just too obtuse to bother using).
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.

But he doesn't argue this effectively. In fact a free site would be worse in this regard -- especially for the scarce resource (women -- who I suspect are often free on paysites, as they are in some nightclubs).

As a female (which I'm not), I'd rather be listed on a pay site than a freesite, if the main issue I have is too many emails from guys.

It almost would appear that desperate women would be on free sites -- since paying a nominal fee for first level filtering would indicate a less desperate act than someone who opted for greater volume, even at slightly less cost.

In any case, I think we can both agree that the blog entry didn't really address in a satisfactory way the central thesis.
Project Code Rush
There's certainly precedent for it being allowed with things like the Zappos app (http://www.zappos.com/iphone-app). I don't have an iPhone to try it with, but from the description it certainly sounds like you can buy shoes and such directly from the app.

There's also the Amazon mobile app, the B&N Bookstore app, the NewEgg Mobile app, even Sears2go.
I am not affiliate with Manwin but found the article that was submitted here recently insightful. It partly deals with their operations:

The Geek-Kings of Smut
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/features/70985/
I loathe my current work position.
It's not Ad Hominem because the Bing team isn't personally insulting Cutts or Singhai. If anything, it's just using malicious sounding buzzwords. A honeypot isn't even isn't even a type of attack: it's a type of defense.
You can also argue that Bing fits in the "offense is the best defense" category. Hit Google where it hurts so Google can't cannibalize MSFT's core business as quickly. From a customer's perspective, it keeps Google honest.
I'm not 100% sure I've read it correctly, but I'm also not 100% sure that closing the company before 4/15 exempts you from owing taxes on the money earned.

I'm horribly ignorant on the subject though, so hopefully somebody else might be able to chime in.
TL;DR version (though you should just read it): The space industry is a great example of path dependency and lock-in in innovation. The reasons why we use rockets to launch satellites are historical dating back to the days of Hitler and the H-Bomb. After trillions spent on developing ICBMs capable of crossing the world, our governments are 'locked-in' to using rockets to get things into space. Using rockets for this purpose is not nearly as efficient as other methods, but we have perfected that practice to the point of perfection. In order to increase space accessibility we need to "cross-the-valley" to another technology, but since it has taken so much money (path-dependent) we are locked-in, and it will be very hard to innovate in this space.
I agree with you and disagree with Stephenson. From TFA: "Sixty years and a couple of trillion dollars later, we have reached a place that is infinitesimally close to the top of that hill. Rockets are as close to perfect as they're ever going to get."

From what I understand of the rocket business, this is completely wrong.

Current rockets designed by the established players (LockMart, etc.) are optimised for performance, not overall cost. This comes from a variety of factors, starting with the basic philosophy of the designers, to the rocket fuels chosen, all the way up the design hierarchy.

I estimate that it is possible to reduce launch costs by at least 10x, and that is using 1960's rocket technology with modern computers and sensors. The key is looking at what is going to reduce overall operational cost. I don't have room to explain everything, but suffice it to say I'm a fan of big dumb boosters.

There are many, many political factors at work that have slowed down the cost reductions which we would see if this was some other industry. One of the biggest factors is that the major governments don't really want launchers to become cheaper. Again, it gets back to the space race, and the governments don't want just anyone to have ICBM capability. The big companies also don't want competition for their cash cows, so they lobby hard to make sure space access remains as expensive as possible.
All search engines look for keywords in URLs. That's why domain names with keywords in them are more expensive. If you're going to mine clickstreams from the toolbar, it's not far-fetched to think you would mine the entire source URL, including the query string, for keywords. Then there would be no need to postulate special treatment for Google search URLs, since the keyword is in plain sight (google.com?q=xxxxxx).

If that is what's happening, then the moral/ethical argument against Microsoft would have to be that they should treat Google specially, by explicitly ignoring clicks on Google's result pages. That seems to me to open up quite a can of worms.
Top 30 Most Respected Venture Capitalists (infographic)
Yup, it's as simple as that :D
This is a good article. Allowing people to live where they want can definitely increase productivity with teams versus close proximity. The collaborative tools available today make this easy and I am believer that many 'working meetings' are a complete waste of time. It also allows us to pursue what we want outside of work. Myself and my co-founder live in different cities because of school, so far there hasn't been a single problem. Full disclosure we will be in the same city in a matter of months. I don't know if that kills my credibility or not...
News Corp. Says It’s Ready To Sell MySpace
Microsoft Adds (Symbolic) H.264 Support with Chrome Extension
If by screwed, you mean owning a very good percentage of a company valued at $25m.
WTF is IPv6? And Why Should We Care?
One really interesting thing about Bing watching google searches and changing their page ranking based on users clicking links... it implies one way to "SEO" (game) Bing page ranking would be to use Amazon Mechanical Turk to raise a page's rank on Bing by having lots of Mechanical Turks doing google searches and click-throughs on the target page.

It would be interesting experiment to estimate how heavily weighted the clicking is vs. the other 999 inputs. I would think a very obscure page would be fairly easily manipulated (Google basically showed that with their "honeypot"), but a more popular page with lots of non-zero entries in the other 999 inputs would be a lot harder to game.
True - a rogue US president isn't a problem.

Of course a Chicago mayor shutting off bits of it when there is a G20 protest.

Or an Alabama governor for a civil rights march.

Or just an MPAA owned senator shutting down an ISP because of a pirate copy of a movie.
I am sure many people are wondering about the alternative to giant explosive tin cans:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch
I don't think real-world merchandise will save them when the next hit game storms the charts.
There were AI algorithms in 1999 that described doing exactly this. Pagerank is perfect for the web. Agreed, tracking people like ants, the links they click on as pheromone trails, makes for a great program: 90% of users visiting website A about pancakes, went to site B about pancake recipes. The problem lies in tracking your users to this extend. On the web this isn't possible, unless you control vast web estate and are unscrupulous about using this data. I bet most Google engineers know about swarm intelligence computing, and aren't jealous at engineers like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GM4Lt5k24s who don't Bing! loud enough.
The search text is in the referring URL no matter where it was typed in. It's captured without ever looking at Google.
Does Assange have an agenda?
Steve was saying that you guys aren't looking for a small exit; is the idea with Hipmunk to stay in it for the long haul? I seem to recall both of you hinting that, while you don't regret selling reddit, you do kind of still wish you owned it. Is the idea with Hipmunk to make it a profitable business and just grow it holistically, without an eye to acquisition?
I only searched London because that's where I am and it geotargeted me. May want to limit that functionality too.
It's not just populist attack, it's attack by powerful entrenched interests. For the most part, those interests are employees of the current system.

It's often said that to lock in a program, you need to create a class of people who might lose their jobs if it is shut down. These people are highly motivated and willing to go to great lengths to protect that program. In contrast, people afraid of tax increases or people who do or don't observe the benefits have little motivation to do anything.

The people afraid of losing their jobs protect that program from ever being cut, but they also prevent any radical improvements that might make them obsolete.
SproutCore Amber: A Report by Yehuda
Andrew reads HN, so he'll probably see well-wishes we leave here.

Get well soon, Andrew!
Sounds like a bad infection
Thanks. I stand corrected. Now I need to get some time to build the app for my friend that I told him would be rejected because of my incorrect line of reasoning.
There is great talent in NJ you just have to place a notice. People are leaving places like NJ for S.V.
I've been reading about genetic algorithms, and playing with some game ideas recently, and this game brings up some very interesting ideas of what one could do with a game...
There have been many attempts since the 80s to change the game just that way, repeatedly failing. The article tries to explain why. I no longer follow the field, and don't know about SpaceX -- hopefully it's found the way or the right time to break the jinx.
How's being an elitist prick working out for you at parties?
Instagram Raises $7 Million, 1.75M Members
Cool post if only for the fact that I discovered Google Refine:
http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/

Awesome tool.
Yes. Why can't people grasp this very simple idea before opening their mouths and spreading this FUD. I see even pg fell for this.

The only way the words "Bing copies google" would be justified is if MS were directly querying Google on certain keywords and ripping off search results. Google have provided no evidence to suggest this. I expected the commmenters of Techcrunch to be unable to grasp this, but it seems that HN is often like this too.