skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few quick thoughts:

- generally speaking, the conclusion seems to be that for regular queries, Bing uses mostly other clues to figure out relevance, so this is basically a storm in a cup of water. Regardless, since both Google's and Bing's algos are closed-source, we're going on faith when either company says data gathered from one of their products doesn't affect search quality.

- the whole thing about making a ranking overrider and talking about it publicly seems like a stupid move. Why in the world would you say you developed such code and then "deleted it" in an all-code-is-version-controlled-these-days world? This won't go very well against the claims that Google gives preferential treatment to its own services (e.g. email, maps) vs competitors.

- The experiment reportedly was triggered because Bing results were getting better for misspelled searches. But, seriously, returning wikipedia as the top result for something with low levenshtein distance to a rare word is not exactly rocket science...

- if Google feels that its SERPs are the most relevant possible, shouldn't it make sense that competitors trying to improve relevance will inevitably end up showing the same results as Google on at least a subset of queries?

- if you're saying Bing has just as good results as Google, regardless of the means to the goal, then how does publicizing that help the whole "Google's overrun by spam" meme going on?
You're totally right, nice find.

Just happy that my current SE favourite does not seem to copy and to actually have their very own results: http://entireweb.com/#q=hiybbprqag
The 'Undercover Boss' approach would work a lot better in my opinion (but, the exec still has to show up). Maybe some type of secret EXEC program, kinda like secret shoppers. I know, no cool gadgets, just people. Which is a good thing.
uarhhh, he has taken my lollipop
not familiar....can you enlighten me?
Don't brag about writing 104 lines of code.
If you don't have good technical skills yourself, just state that and explain what you can add to the partnership.
Data Downfalls (written by a Facebook Director)
I must concede it is possible I'm simply having a hard time feeling what it is like to be so compelled by your neighbor's purchase of a stupidly expensive car that you must purchase your own stupidly expensive care in response. No sarcasm. I've never been that responsive to peer pressure, and from the very youngest I remember my response to the peer pressure culture was to simply leave the culture entirely in spirit, if not physically (though if I had realized that I could have I so would have). This is not normal.

... still, I really do find it hard to believe that you are so weak willed that you would do such a non-optimal thing, but you are willing to fly all the way around the world, where, I might add, such temptations will still be present even if they aren't quite as pressing. This whole argument, if it's going to apply to anybody, sure strikes me as sailing through a narrow window at best, while proclaiming the window to be far larger than it actually is.
Not worth quitting over. Editing of others' posts is part of the culture and almost never an attack.
Time for the content providers (Google, HN) to invest in ISPs?
It has nothing to do with the bandwidth costs to Bell or Rogers.

It has everything to do with customers beginning to establish the habit of getting their TV episodes via the internet instead of paying Bell or Rogers to deliver those via satellite or cable.

If customers are allowed to establish that habit, Bell's satellite TV business is DEAD. Every time someone writes an article about how you can drop your cable or satellite package and get all your TV programs from services X, Y and Z, Bell executives throw up a little in their mouths.

That's what Bell is afraid of, not the (tiny) incremental bandwidth charges as overall usage increases year over year.

Thus, unlimited internet must be discouraged. Thus, bandwidth caps.

Bell doesn't offer unlimited bandwidth at ANY price.
Bing caught copying search results from Google
You are just jealous that your engineers haven't thought of this yourself.

I bet is just recording general searches (input query) + clicked links. A pretty good idea.

And don't tell me you are not using the results from the google toolbar to rank the sites in google search.
I have bought headphones from Deal Extreme. Everything you buy will be a rip-off, but prices are very cheep and shipping is free (from Hong Kong).
Thank you for the advice! I guess I should have clarified US or international, but at least your answer helps shed more light on both scenarios. Much appreciated, I will definitely speak to an attorney before anything.
FBI set to turn up advanced security search engine
stackoverflow rocks, you just suck at using it cuz ur an idiot.
Or you just "quote" your original misspelled query and Google will search for the misspelled version without any additional click.
Is this malicious site detection by any chance, or does that use a different mechanism?
* It must be real hard to call your JSON encode function on your data set, that would make it 1 line longer. :) *

Unless you don't want to always transfer the entire dataset between the client and server every time.
In Light of Egypt’s Internet Block, U.S. 'Kill Switch Bill' Raises Eyebrows
Supposedly that's how the Pentagon was hacked in 2008
Ikea | Flat-pack accounting
+ Very simple interface, regular mom and dad can use
+ Its real-time, its just like your friend has your Map/GPS app
Madras University result for UG programs available here
Apple: Nothing Has Changed. Except For This One Thing
But in this case DDG does give Google's auto-corrected (without even telling you!) and I bet it happens to many terms as it is mostly a proxy/filter of Bing.
I agree with what you're saying, but I don't think it addresses the post. It's certainly true that Stack Overflow is the best place to get answers to programming questions and I won't dispute that. Here, though, is what I think the problem is. I think it mirrors the OP's problem.

Stack Overflow became and is the best place to get answers to programming problems because of the community it has been able to build. There are always competent people ready to provide an answer and they do it quickly. However, the problem is that the community is difficult to participate in. You need rep to do anything and you don't get rep until you do something. You also need to compete with a lot of other people in order to contribute usefully, which makes the barrier even higher. Ultimately, this undermines the community, which is what makes Stack Overflow good.

You can say that these effects can be ignored because answers are still given and you'd be right. But the difficulties do exist. I have enough rep on SO now to do most things (maybe not down-voting), but it was hard to get, so I can attest to what the OP was saying. I can only imagine it's harder now after the community has grown and rep inflation has kicked in.
I haven't had time to implement it, I wanted to get the signup working quickly.

Honestly I'm not sure I will send a quarterly newsletter, I just wanted to cover myself incase I did in the future for people that pre-registered but never signed up after an invite.

In your case how big of a barrier to signup is that?
Redwood Systems -- Fremont, CA (sorry, no remote) http://redwoodsystems.com

We're a 50 person startup that makes an LED lighting controller and sensor system for commercial buildings. Our system saves a lot of energy and we get a ton of sensor information that's lately been leading to some interesting analyses and visualizations.. We're putting physical systems on the web and it's pretty exciting! There are Engineering openings in our UI, Embedded C++, Test, and Sales Applications groups http://redwoodsystems.com/about-us/careers. We're also looking for summer interns if you're still in school (contact me directly).

I'm relatively new and it's an awesome time to work here. We have big name clients in the valley and we're constantly working with them to make a better product.
I agree with a lot of your points, except where it comes to JSON encoding. In many of my apps I use an ORM, NHibernate to be specific. I've found that this makes a lot of operations on the server side much simpler as there is less code for me to write and debug.

The problem comes though when I'm ready to encode to JSON to send to the client. Your correct that it is just one additional line to encode to JSON, but NHibernate creates objects that have relationships to other objects, and serializing those relationships can be very tricky. I have not found a great way to do this and often end up writing simplified versions of the server side classes and code to map from a server side class to a client side class.

Now you could argue that my framework or language sucks, but I think this goes to the point of the article. I feel the code I am writing on the server side is pretty solid and I am happy with my productivity. But as soon as I introduce any complex behavior on the client side, I end up with a lot of duplication and the entire code base gets much harder to manage.
I really doubt Apple would boot Kindle from the app store. I think what happened here was just Sony getting turned down because they had an in-app store that was not going through Apple.

I think Apple realizes how huge of a mistake it would be to ban Kindle from the App Store.

Edit: this is pretty obviously just Sony feeling burned and wanting to spin this into as scary a story as possible.
Thank you for posting this. I was busy this weekend sketching out the beginnings of something similar and cataloging which museums where nearby which I could entice with "my" idea. Time to change direction.
If $newcoolsite only runs on IPV6, nobody will use it and it will quickly become $deadwannabesite. This is a very big chicken and egg problem.
Is there a public facing link viewable without signing in to Facebook for those of us without an account?
And, for very detailed play-by-play data for decades of games, check out retrosheet: http://www.retrosheet.org/game.htm
While the "cheating" angle on this seems hugely overblown, I do think that companies that harvest data through toolbars etc. should be obligated to explain upfront in clear language how they use the data. Not bury it in the legalese of a vast impenetrable ToS.
I guess that's best possible defense for them at the moment.

"We do not copy Google's results (however, we do use them in 'creative' ways!)"
This could be extended to say "Today, Development Sucks." Today, not only do you need a web-accessible application to stay competitive, you best develop native iPhone and Android apps. Even better, whip together a native Mac app.

You think both client-side and server-side validation is bad? Try developing 4 different client-side applications on different languages and frameworks.

Evernote came out and said it attributed part of its success to developing native apps for Android, iPhone and now Mac. Adobe Air and HTML provide an inferior user experience on respective devices.

This is also the reason I feel 37Signals is falling into obsolescence. They just launched a mobile "site" for Basecamp. Not an app, but an HTML, mobile-optimized site. Their blog admits to simply wanting to focus at "what they are good at" which is the first foot in the obsolesce coffin. They hired an iOS developer for their Highrise iPhone app, but said they felt the talent should be in-house for future projects. I agree, but their decision, again, was to keep doing the same old thing. Not exactly an innovative, hacker mindset in my opinion.
FWIW, I attend the Less Wrong/Overcoming Bias NYC meetup regularly, and while there are maybe a couple borderline aspies (and I do mean maybe), most of the regulars are far from it. The NYC group may be atypical, but our "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" factor* is pretty high, and I'd say the emotional intelligence of the group is above average by a decent margin.

*Of course, I'm being metaphorical here, since this is written down and all.
Exactly. If they are just matching (even more simply) $search_term_entered to $clicked_link then you would expect that they are "copying" from any search engine configured in the toolbar.

Now the interesting thing to reverse engineer is what other information might be passed along to give relevance to the search term/click pair. If Google could establish that there was a third piece of info in the tuple, such as "originating search domain" and that Bing used this to weight term/click pairs based on the authority of the source, Google's claims would hold more water. I suspect that Bing has to apply some kind of validation of the term/click pairs (for instance, only sending pairs that appear on the same results page from accredited engines), otherwise they would be subject to "Bing bomb" attacks where users or botnets vote up lower ranked (or even unranked) clicks for a given term. (And if they don't validate or detect gaming, then there would be ample opportunity to inject all kinds of synthetic behavior into Bing's search results. Based on the relatively few number of users and clicks it took to own a long tail term, it seems like the protection they have is very weak or simple.)
I was very bullish on mobile HTML5 apps a couple of months but that has changed. As a user I really appreciate native apps on iOS and their overall consistent UI and efficient use of the limited screen real estate.

Basecamp feels totally different compared to other native apps on the iPhone: the back button looks weird, no fixed navigation bar and I'd expect to see the typical tab bars (all things you currently can't really imitate with HTML/CSS/JS).

It may not be a shit sandwich (as in http://daringfireball.net/2007/06/wwdc_2007_keynote ) but still it's clearly a trade-off driven by developmnt concerns. I totally understand that it's not really feasable to develop native apps for all those mobile platforms out there, but again it doesn't feel like a decision made from the user's perspective.
I use a pair of skull candy titans at work(they are ear buds, but some of the best I have tried.) They do a good job of passive noise cancellation and have inline volume controls.

The nook ear buds are also really good(they come with 5 different size covers if the reason you don't like your current ear buds is fit.)

At home I use skull candy Hesh headphones which I rather like, but I wouldn't bring them to work as they are a bit garish.
To succeed, take some time off
> "proven paradigms" is a ridiculous term by itself in software development, putting it in web development context just makes it dumber. If desktop apps are so good, then how come web apps are still around? There is a reason why people still prefer jQuery over many of those.

I'm not sure usage counts are an indicator of quality. I bet the majority of javascript developers use jQuery because it's what everyone else is using, similar to why they're using php for writing their apps.

I'm not saying that jQuery is bad, just that usage counts is often a bad indicator.
Apple seems to have a policy of regularly testing the water for further lock-down/lock-out/lock-in.

Almost as if they think because an awful lot of people have accepted it on iTunes, a similar number accepted it from Microsoft for such a long time (and still do) that it's simply a matter of waiting until the public are too jaded to care any longer.
Twitter-based Hedge Fund
Click&Clean 7.0 for Google Chrome
Added:
- Delete Web indexed databases
- Delete extensions indexed databases
- Delete sandboxed filesystem (Web)
- Delete sandboxed filesystem (Apps)
- Delete application cache
- Delete Web application data
- Working with multiple profiles simultaneously
- Reset search engines
Downtown brooklyn's new neighborhood forum
Interview w/ Nicolae Rusan, Co-founder of The Shared Web
At least the parent post to that one knows they got someone's attention.

I think Abbie Hoffman once said, "If you ever raise someone's hackles, then you've struck gold!"
Thank you all for posting links and links to links to datasets, I have an unrelenting interest in data aggregation and machine learning, and didn't even know where to start. So helpful, and I am no longer stuck. :)
Looks like the site can't handle the traffic as of now (1.20pm ET).
Apple responds: we want a cut of Amazon, Sony e-book sales
Sure. The demand curve shows the number of people who will purchase an object as a function of price.

Typically the number of purchasers is high at low prices and decreases as the price goes up.

The value of the market is the area under the curve - so the exact shape of the curve matters a lot.

The shape of a demand curve can be odd. If you look at the graph the third demand curve has a 'hump' in it. This is characteristic of products like 'jeans' where a lot of people buy cheap jeans, but a significant number will only buy 'designer' and won't purchase at lower prices.

Basically all demand curves are very similar at the low-price end. People will take home stuff from hotels that they would never purchase, pens, notepads, rubbish wee shampoo bottles...

If you are doing a startup it is important to look up the demand curve and try and figure out what someone will actually pay for.

In addition you have to shape the demand curve. The demand curve for designer jeans doesn't have some sort of 'geographical' hump in it - the people who make designer jeans made that hump by a variety of cultural and other means. In order to start shaping the demand curve (and shaping your product to possible demand curves) you need to be trying (and failing) to sell up the demand curve in the interesting bit...

There is a big confusion about prices out there. People say 'oh, Twitter is free' when what they mean is 'the users are the product, Twitter's customers are other companies who want to buy data...' People also talk about Freemium as a price when in fact it is a marketing cost (if I give free stuff worth $10 to 9 people, the 10th will buy for $100 leaving me $10 clear).

The takeaway is: go and ask an outrageous amount for your half-baked, crappy prototype. The reasons people will give you for not purchasing are all vital info.
Write a script and place it on a USB key. Set the script to autorun on Windows, using autorun.inf. Then discard a few USB keys in the company parking lot, with labels like "wedding pictures" and "presentation files."

If someone picks up a USB key and connects it to their computer, you will have a backdoor into the company.

Caveat: You can disable autorun for USB keys. (I think Windows 7 does so by default.) You can workaround this with something like the Teansy USB, which tricks the computer into thinking that it is a keyboard.

http://www.offensive-security.com/metasploit-unleashed/SET_T...
Clarity is a good thing, and uniformity and standards definitely help with that. Looking at the revision page you linked, I don't see anything there that's offensive. I may have made similar edits myself had I seen it (at least, if it were a question in an area I'm familiar with).

Keep in mind that StackOverflow isn't just about answering your question; it's about providing a large searchable knowledge-base so others with similar questions can easily find ready-made answers.

Like it or not, collaborative editing of this kind is a cornerstone of the site, and is explicitly addressed as part of the FAQ[1].

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/faq#editing
xatax, I just recognized your name from an incorrect answer you provided on StackOverflow that nevertheless was accepted (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4435906/print-when-textar...). You made assumptions and then adopted your self-confessed strategy of “quickly add[ing] an answer which …gives the asker enough to finish the answer on their own,” but failed to understand the problem inherent in the question. You seem to be “rep whoring” and part of the problem on Stack Overflow. How dare you just write a wall of text to dismiss as “terrible” someone’s critique of SO.
No, because the story is wrong.
Exactly. The OP's point is that it's hard to get over the initial rep hurdle so that you can participate.

This prompts the idea: is there some sort of way that new users could quickly and reliably gain a minimum amount of rep by doing a bit of maintenance on the site? Say, flagging spam or suggesting correction which must be approved by someone with lots of rep? If this is possible, why don't more people know about it.
This post appears to be written from the perspective that the goal of Stack Overflow is to gain points, when I believe the goal of Stack Overflow is to answer questions.
Working abroad always appeared to me as something hard at the very beginning, especially for a Russian, especially in tired of immigrants Australia. I don't know, maybe it's all biases from my family members and friends.

I'm 19 yo (minus one week), not so bad programmer (a lead developer of a small outsourcing firm with some "CTO" responsibilities for 2.5 years). All my attempts to find a job abroad (in USA especially) and leave the country left me thinking what I should save up some reasonable amount of money and be ready to show something impressive in my portfolio (or get a degree, which I can't even afford now whilst having no desire for spending four or five years doing something useless in cheap and easy college):

1. I've often been asked to be interviewed in person - its more than 500$ for a one-way ticket, plus some money for bed and breakfast, plus getting a visa isn't cheap and simple adventure. Okay, 20000$/yr is a "wow!" salary in Sankt-Petersburg for 18-25 year olds, do your math

2. I've been told that employers abroad don't like to hire foreigners because there're too much responsibility required by the law

3. And [as I've been told, I've read and I believe] due to these problems it's too simple to end up being a "janitor" developer in some heartless corporation just because visa doesn't allow to just walk out looking for a better job, and neither do living expenses.

I only applied for developer jobs, though. Maybe bartenders have more luck.

I don't know if it's really because of some division of the world or due to my narrow-mindedness and cowardice.
I don't think that posting song lyrics that your parents don't understands is quite as steganographically advanced as hiding messages under wax tablets. Not much new here.
Exactly. Reputation is supposed to illustrate your expertise. If you gain 1000 rep points in the cooking SE, does that mean that you should have 1000 rep points in the programming SE? Of course not, since your expertise is with cooking and not programming. If you were to carry across reputation from one SE to another then it would make the reputation meaningless. Instead of being an expert cook with 1000 rep points you would be an expert SE user with 1000 points that might have come from answering questions about cooking, programming Ubuntu, startsup, etc.

Now THAT would break the system.
>you can't upload files or photos from your (mobile) browser

How come? Mobile browsers don't support it (for security reasons?) or it's slow/eats up precious bandwidth? Or am I misreading you completely.
This is what I don't like about recent HN comments. A small quip which has nothing to do with the article dominates the comment section for miles.
i've also heard that JET experiences were all over the map. for example, i know one guy who spent most of his time cleaning.

on a slightly different topic, do you have any thoughts on the availability of non-teaching positions for people who don't have business fluency? i know there are some, but the bulk of jobs for foreigners are clearly in language and cultural instruction.
There is, however, the legitimate complaint that they apparently do not finally have a little competition on their turf. Their competition is cheating, not innovating. That helps who, how? At best for "competition" sakes, Bing nabs a big share of the market; now there are two big dogs who make it hard to enter into the search realm with new ideas.