skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's clear to me Google wouldn't intentionally do something identical to what Bing's done.

But given what Googlers can't say, and don't even know about what other groups within Google are doing, it's not 'very clear' to me that you aren't already doing very very analogous things, with regard to every other site on the internet.

You've got the data; you're allowed to use it by your privacy policy; you've got the rationalizations handy. ("Sites didn't block us; fully-informed users opted-in; this is a crucial way to fight the manipulators; it's only helping us weight things we already found by other means; etc.")

Amit's not made anything clear to me, with his finessed "put any results" wording. Danny Sullivan picked this up too, as he remarks in the headlined article:

Google’s initial denial that it has never used toolbar data “to put any results on Google’s results pages” immediately took a blow given that site speed measurements done by the toolbar DO play a role in this. So what else might the toolbar do?

There's wiggle room in the definitions of 'copy' and 'competitor' in your 'never' promise, too. Is it OK if Google Toolbar data hoovers up implied editorial-quality signals from user navigation on every site that isn't a 'competitor'? (And given Google's size, what site isn't a competitor in some respects for audience share?) Is it 'copying' if your use of clicktrails makes a preexisting result move from #11 to #9 after you observe it satisfying people in other browsing sessions? Move from #99 to #2?

(Has the effect of any of Google's competitive analysis ever resulted in a single result moving closer to the position, higher or lower, that it had at a studied competitor? Some people could call that 'copying'.)

Maybe none of the clickstream sources Google uses stick out as a dominating factor because Google has so effectively "commoditized its complements" – and no one other entity (except maybe Facebook) has access to as much clickstream data as Google does, simply from its own sites.

Given that, it seems a little convenient that Google's standard is "every aggressively creative use of behavioral trails that led up to our 70%-90% share dominance was OK, but from now on let's be really rigorous about letting others observe our info-effluents."
Anyone else feel a little guilty just watching it?
Italian scientists claim to have demonstrated cold fusion
It has some meaning. It's hotter than any positive temperature:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature :-D
Can you find a reference for Cutts or any other Googler saying Google Analytics data isn't used for search ranking?
Yes but those executions weren't a ridiculous attempt to appease some "sun god" - many of the those executed in England were witches.

As to the comment above - are you suggesting the Spanish deliberately spread diseases? It seems a little unfair to accuse the Spanish invaders of bio-warfare.
Verizon Sparks iPhone Ad War.
The good news is that this is software, so they can definitely fix the issues with the app itself. What remains to be seen is how high the quality of the writing will be and if they can sustain it.
Let them decide for themselves. Consider those who chose to explore, chose to leave their home village, chose to travel across continents. The members of that tribe who want to know more will explore if/when they decide to do so, and only then should they discover what worlds lie outside of theirs, not by force by us.

Perhaps an advanced civilization would think the same. They have seen us go to the moon and send probes into space, and hopefully this would be sufficient for them to understand that we too, wish to explore and are ready for more knowledge.
Try reading the comment I just quoted.
Times your "probably less than 5%" by twelve and you're closer to the truth:

http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-05/health/bankruptcy.medical...
true, they should be asking what market are you pursuing and how will know about you? Meaning how will you convert their "supposed" interest into sales.
As the BBC reports, the advocacy group that is promoting these images acknowledges that the persons shown have steel machetes, which must be trade goods. So to call them "uncontacted" is stretching a point.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12325690
From a few of the replies (not just yours)....maybe it wasn't clear from my description (or maybe it was)....we pay in advance for everything. We fully pay in advance for shipment 1, and we fully pay for shipments 2 and 3, BEFORE we even receive shipment 2.

We have FULLY paid for 2 shipments, and received only one. We were late paying for #3 (in advance of receiving #2, for which we have already fully paid.) There is never any credit extended to us (despite doing several hundred thousands of dollars of business with them).

Labor is the vast majority of the manufacturing process, so making the argument that they could have taken a loss on raw materials is impossible. As I said, I appreciate our timing could have caused some financial harm and we are happy to negotiate, but I don't think she is interested. I think she is thinking, hmmmm....it would take me 2 years to make $50k on this deal...or, I could make it instantly, without the hassle. That is honestly what I think.

You're 100% right on the lawyer though, that's for sure. Sigh
It sounds like they would have seen planes many times as this guy has been following them for 20 years. It would be interesting how they perceive the planes, they may see them as some kind of god watching over them.
How Public Goods Get Built or Not Built
Keep in mind that most of our thoughts about what is good have been shaped by the society we were raised in. If you were born and had lived your entire life in the rain forests of South America, you almost certainly wouldn't feel the same way.

Their very definition of comfort might be different from yours. Keep in mind that many people in more advanced countries prefer heat and humidity, sleeping on bare floors to soft mattresses, and many other things that many other people would consider odd.

Our culture is about change, many cultures are about tradition. Change is not inherently good.
What a terrible analogy. I mean, there is a pizza-shop or other food service analogy in there, I've made it plenty of times. The problem is that when you make the phone call = request in the analogy, you make the phone connection analogous to the socket. At least have the operator put the caller on hold!

Of course then Grandma, not being an idiot, will say "why not just have driver bring the pizza and not have the phone all tied up to begin with?" and she is absolutely correct. It is better to just set up a scenario where you have waiters, and customers show up a the shop, and in blocking your waiter doubles as the cook, so you need one waiter per meal... and so on. This analogy passes a slightly closer examination.
Disagreeing with Matt Cutts
I wouldn't be so hopeful. One of my professors who works in Antarctica and drills lots of ice cores was bemoaning the Russian mismanagement of the Vostok drilling project.
"For the Internet generation this is our challenge..."
I can appreciate that. I tend to focus on customers that need the higher-end features but recognize that the pricing isn't going to work for everybody.
But this is not a credit issue, everything is always paid well in advance of use receiving it. In the past we have sent well over $150,000 in one order, months in advance of delivery, largely on good faith. So that we are getting treated like this as if we are bad partners, is a bit ironic.
KickStarter's Awesome $27 Million in Crowdsourced Seed Money for Startups
It's more complex than that:

http://lptms.u-psud.fr/membres/trizac/Ens/L3FIP/Ice.pdf

Even an extremely high pressure cannot melt ice at -25 °C, but skiing is still possible at that temperature.
The Idiot Savants' Guide to Rubberhose
This statement probably means there are five times more job seekers than openings.
No wonder he didn't like Facebook: he has no real friends! 5000+ friends and he never met any of them face-to-face? What is the point of that? I only friend someone if I've met them before in a real-life situation. If the relationship never goes past that in real life, then I usually just end up hiding them from my news feed and forgetting about them. I'm sure they do the same for me and I don't give it a second thought.

However, I do get tremendous value out of my real friends on Facebook, since we share event invites, photos of our trips, news articles/videos that we share interest in, etc. I am a performer and all my performer/musician friends are on Facebook, and that is the main medium for getting news out about a show. The days of posting flyers on telephone poles and cafe windows are over - if you are not posting your upcoming shows on Facebook and inviting your friends, then your band is going to struggle to sell tickets.
PornOverflow.com?
Mass College of Pharmacy
To everyone saying that they should be given the opportunity to join our civilization, it's not like they have a choice. They'll die if they get the common cold or flu or at the very least come close to death.

And how do we know that our civilization is "better" for them? It's not like they could become incorporated into our society anyway (not the current generation). Contacting and converting them is more an act of self-righteousness than anything else.
This has been done.

Individuals have been taken from tribes and allowed to integrate into western society.

They usually choose to go back.
The technique is broken for half the browsers so he wanted to warn people first.

But that does make CSS cleverness seem unappealing given that even the "showcases" are broken.
Carnegie Mellon? I'm starting this fall in CS.
Paul, nice work, I needed to talk to Chase yesterday and this would've been awesome.. spent 20 minutes traversing their phone menu and listening to crappy hold musak.
I asked this on TPB, e.g. Why not allow an option to donate a dollar to help starving kids in Africa. Then when TPB gets shut down, kids die.

The second incarnation of this idea was for me to send a $1.00 check to the producer of the TV/Movie that I pirate. Alas, I have not done that for fear of the check tracing me to jail or a money order being stolen along the way...
As a side note, the guys who work on Binpress are very nice people. It was really easy to pick up on even via email.
More like the movie Avatar looks like footage like this ;)
Our way of life is better

This is a dangerous and destructive attitude without exception.
On what basis? Because they've been through some rough patches where they couldn't keep up with the traffic, you'll dismiss everything they've built?
pretty creative. did it work in real time?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4xb1NXvE_w <- this link shows of the jetpack including a demo of a 'shark-attack' maneuver, as well as gratuitous girls in bikinis.
Go to your bank and ask about a secured loan. Basically, you put money in a CD and get 2% or whatever. The CD sits at the bank. You then get a loan for the same amount as the CD at 3% or so.

They've got your money in the bank, so it's no risk for them. You put the loan on auto-pay, you lose 1% per year to do this, but you get 12 of these kinds of transaction credits on your account which is good because they count differently than credit card.

I did it with $1100 and it cost me $10 or $15 or whatever, but I went from not eligible for a credit card with a limit over $250 to getting an uncapped charge card with good rewards in 12 months, which was very helpful in business. I don't know about getting the bad transactions off, but getting good ones on is important too. I don't know what the lowest amount you can do it with is, but I did it with two loans: one $1000 and one $100, and it worked well.
I honestly did not understand if you were being sarcastic in your third paragraph.

I'm still not sure, but it seems you're peeved that Twitter hasn't been perfect and not impressed with Rainbird. (Right?)

This is a bit unfair I think? No one's really waiting for your advice on how to run your data center, whereas Twitter is dealing with the sort of volume that your data center probably couldn't begin to handle without finding some of the same solutions Twitter is now presenting.

Now we could possibly (depending on what you actually meant) get into a debate about Twitter's failures, but that's really not interesting, because your second paragraph is true: technological perfection is not enough by itself.

That doesn't mean Twitter doesn't have anything interesting to say about technological perfection.

But mostly I posted this in order to express the sheer confusion I felt reading your post. If you don't like Twitter, just say so.
133-line chess engine with annotated source
Yeah, that's the inherent problem with this sort of thing. We say the moral thing is to show them and let them decide, but they can't make an informed decision. A lot of things sound really good when you hear about them, but wind up utterly unsatisfying when you actually have them.
"By definition, Alternative Medicine has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call Alternative medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine."

--Tim Minchin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujUQn0HhGEk
Just a thought: maybe that's a feature, not a bug. Seems like a quick and dirty way to put up a site that people couldn't get to unless they're already know what they're looking for (which would imply that you want them to find it). Probably not the intent, but I'm kind of intrigued by the idea of it essentially being an Internet stash house.
This is awesome. I sell code (non-exclusively) on Codecanyon so they take 75%. Only taking 30% is huge for me.
no way to contact you?
Server seems down. Anyone kind enough to post a link to cached pictures?
And, perhaps, food.
Imagine a paper newspaper that was wrapped in an envelope, and the envelope was so difficult to open that it took over a minute before you could see the front page of the issue. Who would buy that newspaper? No one, that’s who.

It takes me longer than a minute twenty to walk to the curb and back to pick up the wall street journal. Perhaps Gruber has figured out the reason that no one has ever read newspapers?
The very existence of that "insult" amuses me. I miss the days when cooler than cool meant ice cold.

<meta>I posted this partially to experimentally examine the downvote clumping effect I've noticed on hn, where some reasonable responses to highly downvoted posts get downvoted by association.</meta>
you realize they have to have some system for figuring out which GET parameter matches the search box? there are lots of sites that have varying GET parameters. so that means someone had to decide, BY HAND, what parameter was the right one.

there's no way they are just magically doing this for "every" search box on the web.
Show HN: Simple text summarizer (I made this)
Weekly Python News: 02/04/2011
I agree it is very confusing. The university will keep its accreditation and if the program is eliminated what does accreditation even mean then?

CS will probably just end up being merged with Computer Engineering again into some Computer Engineering and Computer Science department. Just like 4-5 years ago before it was split up.

The biggest problem the way I see it, is that students might be _forced_ to switch programs, and end up having different requirements for graduation. That's what I would fear -- you took classes that now count for nothing and you now have to take (and pay for!) classes you didn't plan on taking.

Mind you they already did this once when they switched CS from the College of Arts and Science to College of Engineering. They gave students a choice so they could either finish the degree they enrolled in or they could switch colleges. It wasn't that bad really.

> The part about CS being an integral part of any good university does not make sense.

Agree.

They don't mention the main problem -- professors that don't care and don't do much and just suck resources out like parasites. I wonder if eliminating a department will provide a legal loophole to dump some undesirable tenured professors and replace them with some who really care about research and teaching.
Excuse me - it might be that I'm tipsy but did you just call appeasing gods ridiculous while presenting the execution of witches as something less ridiculous?
Actually, there are systems that have negative (absolute) temperature, and "a system with a truly negative Kelvin temperature is hotter than any system with a positive temperature".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature

These are strange systems that can absorb only a finite amount of energy. When they are almost "full" of energy, their temperature is negative. (For simple systems the negative temperature appears when they have more than the 50% of the maximal energy, but it depends on the system.)

This can not happen in normal systems. For example an ideal gas can absorb infinite energy, because the molecules can go faster and faster.
dude, mistrust of others isn't about assuming everyone's out to get you, it's assuming that one person can ruin things for everyone, which is true.
SF Bay Area
SkillAddiction is seeking its first CTO!

SkillAddiction hosts skill gaming tournaments where players compete for cash and prizes. We've been online since 2009 and growing strongly in the skill gaming sector. We've awarded over $300,000 in cash and prizes to our players and hosted over 750,000 skill gaming tournaments.

We're expanding our team for the first time and looking for an All-Star developer ready to make an impact on thousands of active users. Our brand is currently being re-imagined (not the service, just the look and feel), revenues are growing, and our industry is hot! Anyone interested, please get in touch with us directly - jobs@skilladdiction.com OR

Take a look at our job post over at StartupHire - http://www.startuphire.com/job/chief-technology-officer-1170...
Very cool stuff. I wonder if there is any way to integrate something like KeYmeara (http://symbolaris.com/info/KeYmaera.html) for a way to prove correctness of Java systems (or components of Java systems).
Semi-dup. These are the slides, which may be better than linking to a techcrunch article, but more comments are here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2180840
[meta] Someone decided to change the title to "Disagreeing with Matt Cutts" and the post got flagged and promptly disappeared from view. Because clearly it's better for debate if you hear only one side of the argument, right?

The real discussion is that Microsoft is spying (legally) on their users behavior. And Google can't call them on it because they do the same, so they cry copy-wolf.
> Times your "probably less than 5%" by twelve and you're closer to the truth:

Nope. They miscounted and several other problems. (When someone goes broke because they're an alcoholic and lose their job, do you really think that's a medical bankruptcy?)

Google "mcardle atlantic medical" and start reading.
Thanks for the extra ideas :)

I guess I'm just working out /how/ to contact these people - I'm more a write code kinda guy! I'll have to learn fast :)
I thought JP Morgan came out relatively unscathed from the crisis, weren't they the one bank to not need TARP funds?
Pardon me, but while you are certainly well-spoken I cannot help but notice that you present two options only: either someone wants to keep knowledge and culture from "them", or "they" get to decide whether they want to partake in our ways.

I find that large parts of the discussion are missing another point of view: perhaps we could also learn something from them?
Runway aside, you should have already have a direction and an executed prototype already moving you toward that direction before even thinking about corporations.

I don't know where people get this idea that companies come first before good products. Companies are the establishment of two things: Good People and astonishingly great Core Value.

If you're lucky enough to get those two things into the same room then chances are you will grow to a point where creating a corporate entity is a necessity.

Only then can we start to talk about runway.
I would never use it, but that video is the cutest thing I've ever seen. Good idea nonetheless.
He's right it's slow to let you interact.

He's dead wrong that it doesn't download in the background. Most reviewers commented on the sluggish cover flow without realizing it's still downloading for quite some time once you get the first pages.

Watch the spinner in upper left. Most of the issue downloads AFTER you can interact.
Do people really buy source code? I would think raw source code is of limited utility. A lot of the value is in the heads of the people who wrote it.

If you sell source code do you have to include some amount of training/consulting to hand it off?

What kind of source code are people buying? Libraries? Windows applications? Finished web apps?
Looks interesting, but why isn't there a .jar to download or a maven reference to use this project? Moreover, there is no documentation explaining how to activate/disactivate contracts... Sorry, but it seems like half-ass delivery to me !!!
The scraping could be done client side, after users perform the search, just send all the data to MS.

It would be interesting to see where the law comes down on tracking clicks for a competitive advantage. I doubt anything will get past handbags at dawn, as it could draw attention to click tracking on ads, and no-one want that.
That logo...
except that loyalty to a quirkiness is seen as individualistic and therefore admirable.

not saying you're wrong--well, actually, i am saying you're wrong.

i'm not saying there aren't valid reasons to change his screen name now or previously. i'm saying there are also valid reasons to keep it.

and I still think it's funny.
I'm wondering, how do you strike a balance between having a long runway and not falling into a sense of well-funded sloppiness?

Many suggest that the lack of funds forces a startup to be lean and mean, but I can see how appropriating funds has the obvious benefit of allowing you to estimate and plan your risks better.
life expectancy in civilization is easy enough to measure.

However, by definition it is very difficult to measure life expectancy of isolated people. First you must contact them- which starts to change them. Second, you must determine their age, which is a difficult task.

The real problem is that using life expectancy by itself is misleading- it mostly represents access to emergency medicine and antibiotics, and the harshness of the environment. We can keep people alive in the USA for a very long time, but that doesn't mean they are healthy.
Your last paragraph, if analyzed, contains a false assesment. If they walk in a straight line and contact us, and then they don't return to their way of life because they want to keep that contact, then we can be certain they want to communicate with us. We can CHOOSE to stay away. There's nothing that states we MUST communicate or have relationships with all human beings, nor step onto EVERY land until everything's explored and divided. Just let them be, do not interfere.
In that story, the "irresponsible" part is that they took a gamble in order for their kids to grow up in a better neighborhood, and lost.

Sounds like a somewhat calculated risk rather than irresonsibility to me.

also everything people have said about your position of privilege
That makes it sound even worse, actually -- it takes 80 seconds to start up and it still isn't finished? What is it doing for those first 80 seconds?
Hard to say since it's unlikely to be the same plane, they might think it's either multiple beings. I'd suspect more that they think it's a giant bird than a god though.
yeah, what? that's a lot of assumptions. people don't live with assumptions, they live with the realities of having a kid or a spouse or a family or even a girl they just can't get over.
Yes they do. Checkout Code Canyon. They are doing quite well with the same concept.