skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If a mistake becomes too costly to consider - I think less mistakes would be likely to occur.

This conclusion assumes that the people running the business are capable of resolving such issues. If they are not, then all it does is put people out of business. Not everyone grows and adapts when faced with such pressures. Some of them just go extinct.
I have the same feeling about HN. I've been regularly visiting HN for a year now, commenting when I have something insightful and voting articles and comments up if they're exceptional. Yet I still don't have enough karma to downvote. The feeling I get is- I'm a long-time member of the community, what do I need to do to be trusted with a simple downvote?

This isn't that bad since I can still be part of any discussion, but it makes feel unwelcome and a little frustrated when I see something that should be downvoted.
I would have asked for something closer to a full refund and possibly a longer, if not lifetime, term of free usage.

It's obviously expensive for Flickr to offer something like this but I mean they accidentally deleted 5 years of a paying customers work. I think a refund is the bare minimum.
I think this is silly. Unless Google can come up with a copyright claim on its search results, and I seriously doubt they can, they have nothing to complain about. I use Google's search results too -- information you pump out publicly can be used to the advantage of your customers as well as your competitors. If Google is scared that Bing is "stealing" their search results, they should quit making those results public in a way where people can "steal" them. Accept that freely available information is freely available or clamp down and stop publishing information that might help your competitors. In Google's case, unfortunately, the info that helps Bing is also the info that is essential to Google's customers.

I know of some other media companies that are hyper-paranoid about their mass produced, widely disseminated, public content being "stolen" by others, maybe Google should set up a lunch date with the RIAA.
What a coincidence. My Flickr pro account expires on Feb. 15 and today I've decided to move away from Flickr and not renew my account.

What I've done in the short term is to use FlickrTouchr (https://github.com/tominsam/flickrtouchr) to retrieve my ~7 GB of photos from Flickr and upload them to Dropbox. The Dropbox gallery feature works quite well and has the advantage that you can easily backup/modify the underlying files.

In the long term I'd like to move the pictures to my own server (allowing me to use my own domain, etc.) and hack together a simple frontend similar to Dropbox' gallery.

If you decide to move away from a Flickr pro account (and if you also have non-public photos on your account) don't forget that after your account is switched back to a normal account you can only access the 200 most recent photos. So if you want to delete your photos from Flickr it's best to do so before the pro account expires.
I haven't used openlazlo, but SmartClient is slow on the client. Ditto a lot of the current set of heavy "desktop app" client side frameworks. As soon as you get out of developer class machines things get brutally unusable.
I bring well over a decades' worth of operations experience, experience starting and running four companies, two which flopped, and one which I merged into a company that I sold. I'm currently spending all of my free-time learning Ruby and Python, and will jump into Rails soon, and am hoping to collaborate with a more experienced web developer to jumpstart that learning curve.

I also don't come with the negativity and snarkiness you're demonstrating, but an open mind, a ton of energy, and a desire to build rather than to knock down and criticize others, something highly lacking in the tech community, as you're so readily proving.
I don't see anything wrong Bing is doing. There's clearly an indirect link between the synthetic query and Google result.

If Bing was outright stealing Google results, all you have to do is:

1. setup the synthetic queries on Google
2. search for them using Bing

Clearly, it took several weeks of Bing toolbar being installed and people going to site X after searching for Y. The Bing toolbar has the right to assume there's a relationship between X and Y. It's a legitimate "ranking" strategy.
Google should proceed with caution, do they really want to get dragged into a debate about tracking user actions to influence search results?
What strikes me odd is why Microsoft would bother with making a sneaky toolbar that calls home instead of just grepping through their Bing logs for queries with no results and then running these queries against Google...
I want that!
If they mentioned bing in a super bowl commercial I'd agree with you but this is a tech blog. I believe there's a difference in the marketing results between the two.
I think they (google) can really only cry foul if there is specific code in the Bing toolbar that targets google's search results.

The way that they describe the approach, it seems like the Bing Toolbar would also be scrapping results from bing itself, yahoo, altavista, ask.com and many others.
"Clearly, it took several weeks of Bing toolbar being installed and people going to site X after searching for Y."

... and even then it only worked for 7-9% of "synthetic" nonsense queries.
Not only is what you said correct, it's from the second sentence of the article: Mirco Wilhelm has the original files saved elsewhere, but the photos from his extensive Flickr collection had been linked to from all over the web, including the official Flickr blog.

I am forced to conclude that few read the article, since most of the comments have focused on the - erroneous - idea that he depended on Flickr to store his data and had no backups.
MS is not a horrible stack to develop on. It performs great and for the most part you can avoid a lot of the licensing costs anyway - on dedicated servers the difference is like $10 or $20 if you're leasing, and if you're rolling your own hardware there's BizSpark.

SQL Server starts free and it was actually only halfway through last year that I stopped using the free version at Playtomic. It's also the only significantly expensive part - and very easy to not use in favor of something that is free/open source/cheaper/whatever.

I'm glad I went with .NET for my startup - a few days ago I calculated some current numbers: 29 million unique people logged over 3 billion events during a 10 day period. It's holding up well enough for me and my very lean, mostly Microsoft-flavored startup.

Yesterday I came across this writeup on what Quora is built on too:

http://www.philwhln.com/quoras-technology-examined
Amazon Web Services Lets You Rent Oracle Database Services by the Hour
Seriously, RTFA. Look at the specs.

This isn't some basic version of a cutting-edge technology, it's just an 8-bit microcontroller with some geegaws. If someone wants to make yet another low-end handheld game and make some money selling it in discount stores, more power to them...but you aren't going to compete with many far more advanced platforms in the same arena.

If you want to pretend otherwise, by all means drop some pithy, defiant quotes and condemn my lack of vision...and we'll still both know nobody's going to build an iPhone-killer out of this.
Thanks for the detailed response. I think my real question is whether if because of some disagreement, that my firm would be forced by law to fly to Hong Kong to argue with them in court. Clearly that seems like a ridiculous expectation, but I have no idea what kind of laws exist between countries about these things. It would seem to me that if they sued our firm in HK court, that our presence is at our own option. Not that we plan or look forward to such an occurrence, but we want to fully understand the risks.
To make matters worse, my understanding is that when the state receives money from the lottery for the schools, that money does in fact go to the schools... and then an equivalent amount of money comes out of the school's budget and goes into the state's general budget.

So, for example: if the school budget for the year is $5 million, and lottery brings in $1 million for the school, the school doesn't get $6 million the way a lot of people seem to think. The school gets $1 million from the lottery and the state only has to pay $4 million out of the general budget.
That tweet is drawing a very specious connection. Android did not, as far as I can tell, copy any of Apple's algorithms or piggyback on top of them. It is a novel implementation of some of the same ideas in the iPhone.

Similarly, it's plagiarism if you take a Harry Potter book and publish your own version with the names changed, but James Patterson's "Witch & Wizard" has a copyright of its own despite being rather similar in concept.

(Edited to remove question about phrasing thanks to atularora's clarification.)
My understanding is that Amazon was guaranteeing some publishers the same profit per sale that they would get from a hardback book in exchange for allowing Amazon to fix the price at $9.99. In some cases the profit was more than the $9.99 Amazon was charging so Amazon had to pony up $1 or $2 on each sale.

I think more recently Amazon has allowed publishers to use an alternative agency model that lets the publishers set their own prices and Amazon takes a fixed percentage cut of the sale. This doesn't cause Amazon to lose money, but now publishers can sell eBooks at nearly the same price as paper books which hurts the Kindle's attractiveness and slows adoption.

Regardless, this is an unworkable situation Apple has constructed. Amazon barely makes 30% of the sale price of each book if it even makes that much at all. It can hardly afford to give away its entire fee and then some to Apple.

This is either a strong arm attempt to get Amazon to agree to a strategic agreement for a fraction of the revenue or Apple is simply trying to destroy the Amazon Kindle app entirely. Either way Apple wins and Amazon loses. I suppose consumers can come out ahead if the strategic agreement allows in app purchasing of Kindle books for the same price, but it could also be bad if the iOS Kindle app disappears.
While it's great that Google lets you delete information, harvest-your-data-by-default is not a choice made with your best interests at heart.
Ask HN: How Should I Handle My International Traffic?
Hey HN,

I launched www.disrupt.fm a little less than a month ago and have seen some steady growth so far after a few blogs picked up the story (including Mashable!). The site allows people to download music for free in return for sharing it with their friends on Fracebook. The website integrates pretty deeply with Facebook, and since I recently read that about 70% of Facebook's traffic comes from outside of the US (can't find the link), it makes sense that I would be seeing a lot of international traffic. I didn't consider this when I was developing the site so I have a few questions:

1. What collation should I have my database set at so that I don't see funky characters when users upload songs with à/ã/ë and other special characters in them? It's currently set to utf8_general_ci.

2. What do you think I should do about all of this international music being uploaded? I assumed that there would mostly be american music being uploaded, but I've seen a ton of international music uploaded each day. should I create an international section and/or genre for when the musicians upload music? Or should I leave it like it is and have all the music in one section?

Thanks guys
"This conclusion assumes that the people running the business are capable of resolving such issues. If they are not, then all it does is put people out of business."

If a company can't be relied upon to look after my data - I want them to go out of business.
clickable: http://www.disrupt.fm
Which would also make the products much more expensive.

And I have a feeling that this money does not necessarily go into making the product more reliable, but that it is used to buy a better insurance.
standby -> stand. Sorry for the typo
The conference is in downtown San Francisco, provides 6 meals, and is throwing 2 parties.

If you think $500 is expensive than I don't think you have any idea how much it costs to rent a 300-person conference room at even a mediocre hotel (let alone catering on top of that). And this isn't a mediocre hotel, it's the Hyatt Regency.

That doesn't even touch on the cost of organizing and running the conference, travel and hotel for speakers, etc, etc, etc.
Explaining a $15 bowl of soup to people who don't know anything about Asian food can be tricky.
That 1% still covers:

Access to the device's GPS.
Access to the devices Accelerometer.
Hardware Accelerated 3d Graphics (Although this is possible with WebGL, I would wager the tools are more focused towards native clients)
Access to the device's Camera / Film Roll
Your argument is seriously flawed. Just because something is made publicly available doesn't mean it's free and clear for anyone to reproduce.

For example, if I don't chain my bike it doesn't mean anyone is allowed to steal it. Taking my bike is still a crime. How I protected it has nothing to do with the criminal act.
Well, if you notice, they toed the water first.

Google didn't fire right off the bat with the hard-hitting blog entry, but instead basically gave a more detailed version of the same thing to Danny Sullivan. They wanted to see how Microsoft would react before going official with it, because even though Microsoft's response was predictable, there's always a chance that Microsoft would have surprised everyone with their response. (They didn't, in my opinion.)

What's struck me most about this story as it has developed throughout the day is that Google's actions are very deliberate and planned.

I wouldn't consider Google as continually mentioning Bing, either; in fact, I don't think they've paid much attention at all to them. Put Bing in the search box on their official blog, and you'll see that this is the only post specifically about Bing -- a perusal of older posts indicates that the rest are hitting on comments or TrackBacks (i.e., the background image misfeature).
Cool stuff! We've used mailchimp at my old office. Aside from one hiccup that caused our emails to be delayed, we've had a great time setting it up.

We had production ready templates in about 20 minutes! Keep up the good work guys!
This appears to have been changed, with an explanatory note of "this low-cost noodle dish".
Did you have the same intention by including the link to the non-existing 'global activity' in the top nav? My guess is that everyone will click that one if for no reason other than the fact that this is a new toy - we're going to click everything.

In general I think you've got a great idea with this product. Solid alpha/beta. Keep up the good work!
Tobi (South San Francisco, CA + Portland, OR; no remote)

Tobi [http://www.tobi.com] is an online fashion boutique headquartered in the SF area. We have a small but strong core team, and are looking to add more talented engineers who want to build the next generation online fashion shopping experience. We view ourselves as an Internet product + technology company that happens to do fashion, and our team and strategy reflect that. Our stack is Ruby on Rails and Postgres, but we don't require previous RoR experience (none of us had it when we started, so that wouldn't be fair, now would it?).

If you are interested in solving interesting tech problems in a fun space with great visibility, then get in touch with me at anthony@tobi.com. Thanks HN!
> If Google is scared that Bing is "stealing" their search results, they should quit making those results public in a way where people can "steal" them.

I'm curious how you'd implement that idea.
Agreed situation is the worst on the first round that involves a VC. It can also arise in later rounds if you take strategics or new VCs.

Given that most YC companies will still go on to raise a seed angel round after this 150k, they will be hit by extra pro-rata dilution. If we assume a $5m seed round post money, then the 150k translates to 3%. If you raise a VC round with a VC that insists on a 20% stake then the overall affect is 0.6% extra dilution. Every point hurts at that stage, but not that bad :).
It's an appeal to the average person's "fair play" instinct.

I'm not saying that they should or shouldn't do something like this, but it seems very effective. They have a perfect narrative for people to wrap their heads around, and even if nothing illegal was done, it still feels like Microsoft is doing something "wrong".
I don't get how in todays day and age the person lost their own copies of their photos. All the photographs I have taken with my current camera are still on the memory stick, on my hard drive and in the cloud. Why? Because data storage is massive compared to your average cameras photo quality.

My camera holds about 2,000 pictures on the highest compression setting on an 8GB card. It's not like that amount of data is precious. I have hundreds of movies and thousands of TV episodes stored, why is it that this person couldn't keep their photos?

I hear a lot of stories like this, and being a writer I can only think "are they stupid?" Until recently everything I'd ever written, if stored in RTF and rar'd would still fit on a floppy disk. I think I've expanded to two.

I now have a flash drive for storage. However my basic method is to simply download and rar all my files from Docs, email it to myself through gmail and load it onto the USB drive. It leaves me backed up in 3 places and the original copy.
F*ck minimalism: How a movement began to end
Releasing fast Protocol Buffers for Python with lazy decoding support
Have they changed the article? I'm seeing "ramen profitable" now...
"(Update: Chris Albon tells us in the comments that a
number of Ghonim's friends "have confirmed for a day now
that the man in the video and screenshot is definitely
*not* him." Because of Albon's assertion that "at this
point the rumor is hurting the search for him," we have
removed the screenshot and the video we had previously
posted.)"
The time it took bing to show the results has nothing to do with the fact that they took it from googles result pages. They clearly took the results from google or possibly from another source that took it from google. Bottom line, the results came from google.
Setting aside the ethical questions, because I don't really care, when I look at the probable outcomes of this, I think it's wise for Google to point out what's going on here. This string of stories positions Google as the smart, sciency search engine, and Bing as a collection of hacks. This is how I'd want the public to perceive the battle if I were Google.

But even though this makes Google look good, PR-wise, Bing should still use this trick, if it makes their search results better. It seems like a short term solution, but a good one to get their results more competitive, while they work on the core problems Google has already solved. Google should call them on it and expose their hackery, so people know where the good search science still comes from, but Bing should still do it. They are both playing the game very rationally.

As an aside, I don't buy the arguments of "they shouldn't be mentioning Bing." This isn't like the POTUS running against some no-name congressman - this battle is already well-publicized, via hundreds of millions of dollars of ad buys by Microsoft, so the general public already knows there is a competition between Bing and Google.
From http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...

>Suffice to say, Google’s pretty unhappy with the whole situation, which does raise a number of issues. For one, is what Bing seems to be doing illegal? Singhal was “hesitant” to say that since Google technically hasn’t lost anything. It still has its own results, even if it feels Bing is mimicking them

This is actually just IE's "spying" working properly. If an MSIE user that has allowed Microsoft to see their browsing habits follows a link after a search then MS are associating that link. This is sensible as it's measuring actual visits following a given search.

If someone searches for a googlewhack and Bing have no results for that term then it's natural that MS would then use this data to associate the googlewhack with the visited page.

Initially I thought this sounded like MS being underhand but really they're tracking their users and associating their users search terms with the pages that they visit - _not_ using this data for search (given they have permission) would be silly, no?

The flag this waves for me is how easy is it to manipulate Bing results using false MSIE reports back to MS, anyone know of botnets sending fake data to boost page rankings??
Chrome breaks 10 percent browser market share for the first time
It is unclear whether the Google results appear in Bing from the same computer the initial queries were made i.e., it is a personalization of search results or Bing uses that results for other users too.
Well you are both more right than me - we can probably settle for 15$ which makes it even more impressive for the user
Consequential damages aren't covered in these services' terms of use because nobody can afford to pay for them. Should Amazon be liable for Netflix's profits on EC2? If so, Netflix isn't paying Amazon nearly enough money.
Stealing a bike necessarily deprives a person of his property. Copying your competitors when they do something people like is a time-honored tradition and certainly not illegal as long as the copying occurs along certain guidelines. If Bing was scraping Google en masse and just putting a "Bing" interface on it, Google might have something here, but looking at Google's results and deciding they have some better results (and it's unclear if they even did that) and then making sure you have the same "better" results on your page too is not wrong, and deprives no man of his property.

This is merely Google whining that Bing is delivering sort of good results because that threatens Google.
Great idea, digging the execution too.
There's http://backblaze.com which is $50/year for unlimited backup.
One very powerful use case for this would be "Is the snow affecting the train to x?" - because the public transportation's websites are always so delayed but the answer is finite/simple enough that it'll probably be answered.
Is it possible bing is pulling the results from a third party provider who is doing the cheating? Maybe a middle man is partially whats to blame for the delay in the results.
Here's an alternative hypothesis: the bing toolbar might look for explicit search queries (either strings entered into a textbox, or q=, query= parameters), and navigation from such pages to external domains. This would match all "search engines" in the most relaxed meaning of the term: product search, thesaurus, lexicons, dictionaries, everything; and I'd argue to be a legit signal for a "general search engine" to match.

(Legit sidenote: Google has, via the use of Analytics data, a mass coverage of clickstream for the whole web, which are default opt-in, follows you everywhere, and can identify you uniquely. The Bing Toolbar at least asks first.)

If this is the case, Google isn't being picked upon; rather, they are merely the first, who figured this out externally. Cookie for the scientific rigor, but no cigar for the way they PRd the story. Correlation, after all, does not equal causation.
>Bing Toolbar would also be scrapping results from bing itself, yahoo

Isn't Yahoo search powered by Bing anyway?
http://cdn.deno.pl/misc/hn/mailchimp_redesign_02_Feb_2011.pn...
Honestly, I don't know the answer to this. Their online access uses standard SSL, but the data uploading is unknown to me. Security comes second to convenience and reliability for me. Anything sensitive information, I'll encrypt locally myself, which in turn encrypts on Dropbox.
Well, Windows doesn't come with grep, so...