skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the proposals is a sensible enough reform -- the budget sunsets. But societies do not pivot. At best, they evolve.

Law is complex because politicians and voters want it to scale with the complexity of society and economy; and the complexity of society and economy grows as a non-linear, exponential function of economic & technological progress and population growth.

Another reason is simple game theory. Lawmakers bear very little of the cost of passing new laws, but accrue most of the political benefits (being seen to be "doing something"). It's a tragedy of the commons situation.

Additionally, part of the job of common law lawyers is to convince judges that they have found a unique situation, never before encountered in the last thousand years or so. They succeed often enough because it genuinely happens.

Ironically, while decrying rules-based law, the Howard proposes instead goal-based law. This pushes policy assessment onto judges. One of the reasons law becomes rule-based in the first place is to remove policy judgement from the judicial sphere, back to the executive and legislative spheres where it belongs. His solution would make matters worse by completing the undermining of US jurisprudence by the doctrine of "realism".

Public accountability is a good idea, but needs to be balanced with the need for free and frank advice. Personally I would make a distinction between operational public servants, who could be easily sacked, and advisory public servants, who would be difficult to sack.
something+something@gmail.com is a valid email address.

Pet peeve: sites telling me to put in a valid email address when I already did.

(You're collecting addresses. You'll validate them by mailing to them. If someone doesn't put it in right, they won't get mailed. That's fair. If they do put it in right, but you reject it, that's not fair.)
A while ago I submitted an article[1] about the YUV colour system, which takes into account human perception of brightness/luminance, and how it differs between colours. It's also an interesting colour system to work with, as the 'Y' channel just stores luminance, so discarding the other two channels gives you a greyscale image.

I recommend reading it if you haven't already.

[1] http://nreynolds.co.uk/blog/hsv-is-dead/
But now: US viewers seek Al Jazeera coverage
Seriously? Anybody else surprised at how little data there is given how serious the accusations are?

From what I've read, the general consensus seems to be that Microsoft is using IE in conjunction with the Bing toolbar to analyze user's search data. And this is something that worked only on 6 or 7 of the 100 terms that they tried it with? That was enough to incriminate Bing?

Google could've at least tested to see if this behavior is limited to just Google or if Bing was also analyzing other search engines (or even other pages). I would've expected MS to have released something like, not Google.
Gruber on iOS In-App Purchases
I hear you. The lineup of speakers does look pretty interesting though.
This exchange serves to further highlight the perverse appeal of Twitter: we get to watch powerful people act childish. I love it.
Android existed back into 2003, well before iPhone was available or even announced: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2005/tc200...

Which is not to say that Apple hasn't contributed ideas to Android, but just an indication that some people were thinking about good mobile devices before Jobs came out with the iPhone (which, by the way, is a bright, colorful, phone-calling PDA, not all that different in principle from late Palm Pilots/Treos).
Nothing at all, just that I've tried and failed multiple times to stick to a routine.
A walk?
I believe that code bases in C were studied. As long as the number of ifs, loops, etc was small, the length of the function did not hurt maintainability.

However in this does result in language differences. In practice the density of ifs, loops, etc tends to be higher in a C-like language than in a stored procedure. So the complexity of functions tends to go up.

The research cited is, however, quite old and did not include any OO code. Method dispatch can hide an implicit "if", and I don't know whether that tends to affect the maintainability of code in practice.
I really don't like it when applications require me to sign in through a third party account. As an option it is good, but not as the only option. Especially with a new service that I am unsure how they will use that access. I wasn't able to try it since I was unwilling to hand over the keys to my facebook account to an untrusted service.
> I may be wrong, but I don't recall many sites that would have good information for a search engine in that string.

Any site which has a search engine of its own is going to have keywords in the query string such as: http://www.reddit.com/search?q=blah
coworker: This code is clearly wrong

6ren: Thank you
http://www.crashplan.com/ seems to be alright, though its java process can get somewhat bloated on OSX...

And yes, I've tried building one myself, but ran up against patent trolling for p2p backup and had to shut it down even though it was just a hobby project. Does anyone know if all these companies have licensed the patents that cover peer-to-peer backups? I _so_ wish I had prior art to show against that... See this for cucku's take - http://www.cucku.com/cucku-shut-down.aspx
I know, I try to come back from work, switch off for sometime and then put in a few more hours at night building something interesting, so I don't really want to think at all if that's even possible.

Legos are an interesting idea.
Have you tried walking? Doesn't really require a routine, you can check out the scenery and go at whatever pace suits you, energetically or moseying along. I have significant physical limitations and this is the only thing I can stick with (and I no longer own a car, so walking is built in to my current lifestyle).
I was also at AOL in the early Weblogs, Inc. days. While we didn't look at ourselves as content farmers the same way you'd look at demand media, I definitely think the $4/post model has it's benefits. For me, it was an incentive to go through a large body of work fairly quickly. Thanks to my work at Engadget too, I was able to get a crash course in technology journalism from the master (Peter Rojas).

I often think of Weblogs, Inc. as a sort of freak of startup nature. Very little funding, but the company had a huge impact, especially on its acquirer. AOL's core publishing technology platform is Blogsmith, Weblogs, Inc.'s home grown CMS, not to mention how Engadget, Autoblog and other influential Weblogs, Inc. blogs have given other AOLers insight into what good content looks like.

As Marshall mentions in the post, I'm wondering where the new minor leagues are. I'd guess just being a regular contributor to Hacker News might be as close as there is right now.
It sounds like Flickr is throwing engineers at the problem now--they responded with a statement which is in the updated post:

http://www.observer.com/2011/tech/flickr-accidentally-delete...
I wonder what this means for services like Netflix. Will the Netflix app be required to offer an in-app purchase for Netflix service?
Suppose it uses all text fields on the web without treating google specially.

Being as charitable as possible here, I'm willing to believe that some well-meaning engineer coded this up without special casing google. Tested it out, found that it worked amazingly well, and then launched it. This seems unlikely, but possible.

However, somewhere along the line someone must have known that the biggest benefit of this signal was recreating Google results. I'm not willing to believe that no one figured this out even if it wasn't the initial intent. At which point there's an ethical dilemma. At Google, a system like this wouldn't launch.

Regardless of the mechanism, I don't believe that nobody at bing knows that this is what was going on. Maybe it's a cynical attempt to get around robots.txt. Maybe it's an honest mistake that gradually became a dishonest mistake, but I'm not willing to believe that they are oblivious.
How about exercising in a stimulating way? Ie. Learning muay thai, rock climbing, etc.
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717
Google's Wael Ghonim still missing in Egypt; company asks for help
and take a look at inline dictionary definitions, page previews, images - the entire business is based on 'copying' other people's info. My question was genuine - what are you thinking, google?
I moved to Sydney from Darwin (a much, much smaller capital city) for 2 years to attend university. It was a profound culture shock. Sydney is a beautiful city to live in ... if you're rich. Otherwise, welcome to Western Sydney: mile after mile of drab, depressing suburbia.

The overcooked pretentiousness got up my nostrils too. Sydneysiders spend a lot of time congratulating themselves on how jolly marvellous Sydneysiders are.
But as Matt Cutts pointed out, there's a very clear red warning on Google Chrome while IE just silently gives you a very unsuspicious disclaimer.
Tech giants to enable IPv6 on "World IPv6 Day" in June
That's different data though. I thought you meant the Google search data.
Twenty Google engineers were charged with getting Bing to hit the honeypots and given several weeks to do so. Balancing the oddity of the query terms with the level of resources Google threw into the operation, I'm not sure if 7/100 is impressive SEO or unimpressive.

What I do know is that the original suspicious result for "torsoraphy" is returned by Wikimedia's search algorithm.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=torsoraph...
They're testing on an Atom platform, which is pretty horrible if you're comparing performance.

Many of the optimizations that compilers can do nowadays rely on better than an in-order "barely better than a Pentium" CPU.
How one admin mistake cost a Flickr user 4000 photos
There was a fascinating article in the New Yorker from a few weeks back on AOL and their strategy over the past few years. As someone who hasn't actually visited aol.com in 10 years or so, it was pretty interesting. I didn't submit it because you have to subscribe to the New Yorker, but in case there are any New Yorker reading HNers who missed it:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_...
If there was no guarantee that a number would appear 1.9 times, then seeing singleton numbers wouldn't be a predictor.

Let's say there's no such demand, and the boards are generated truly randomly and neutrally. If visible-quality X is disproportionately correlated with invisible-quality "Win" then the game is already flawed; this may emerge naturally from the Win conditions and from the game design decision of what is shown in the baited-hook. If the output is controlled post-generation to increase the proportion of Win cards and Near-Win cards vs. Lose and Invalid cards, then the statistical correlation may be greatly increased.

Simplified example: Scratcher with two numbers 0-4: one bait, one hidden, pays if sum is 5 or 6. If everything is fair and truly random, the odds of winning are, 0 showing: 0%, 1 showing: 20%, 2-4 showing: 40%. Already a bad game, but now the game designers want to eliminate cards with sums of 7 or 8 because this confuses people, (not minding that they're changing overall odds of winning), so they block those Invalid cards from shipping without blocking anything else. That gives:

0 1 2 3 4
0 - - - - -
1 - - - - W
2 - - - W W
3 - - W W I
4 - W W I I

The new odds of a given ticket, given the visible number, are: 0: 0%, 1: 20%, 2: 40%, 3: 50%, 4: 67%. The point here is that now a 4-showing-card is >3x as good as a 1-showing card, when it used to be only 2x as good, and it might now have positive expected return.
Indeed, I've experienced that as well, One example being the google picasa support forums (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa).
Great observation about Wikipedia's behavior. Wow, it turns out that Google isn't the only one who can correct spelling errors! Who knew?
How about option 3') add in-app purchasing with a price hike but have a bit of text suggesting the users not purchase that way but instead use their Kindles or amazon.com to get a discount!
I don't think language is a problem in India in cities like Bangalore [I'm currently staying here]. Anyone knowing English can survive here.

In terms of expenses also the broadband along with phone would be under $50/month. Also in terms of accommodation you could get a good sized apartment for $300/month.

And there are other places to look around in India other than Goa :) Can't speak much about places outside of India though.

Although it would depend on what @hacktravel wants to do while travelling too.

> 3. If there are any programs that would speed up my learning that would be great but it is not required. I don't even know if there are things like this...

I'm not sure what you [@hacktravel] mean by this. Are you talking of training programs of some sort? Or tech conferences?
And they've used jQuery since the beginning. Not sure how that is relevant to their core tech choices.
I've made one of those for practice at http://redlandsbuzz.com (my home town). It's backed by MailChimp. What I should do is place a unique cookie, then on the confirmation page, use it to provide referral links. Mine's running on WordPress...

MailChimp takes forever to redirect after submitting the form. They're API is faster...
Are you a Rubyist? The following Ruby events are FREE (as in beer)!

Ruby DCamp: http://rubydcamp.org (disclosure: I run this (un)conference)

Magic Ruby: http://magic-ruby.com/

Ruby Hoedown: http://www.rubyhoedown.com/

NYCamp: http://nycamp.in

Not all confs are about the money. A few, however socialist/idealistic/naive people may accuse us of being, are about the love.
Wasn't there fiasco involving one prominent magazine for PC machines, where the author claimed that Vista was using all of the memory, while that memory in fact was cached.

But when in doubt, what happens with your cache on XP, Vista or Windows7 just use Mark Russinovich's RamMap. For example it helped me realize that NTFS compressed files, although compressed on disk would end up using the same amount of cache (memory). For that reason, it's probably better to store files compressed, rather than relying on NTFS.

http://www.google.com/search?q=rammap
What cha think of my startup: PocketLoot
"..but that customer service has no method to resurrect it".

Having seen this kind of effect from a brain drain in the past, I think you're exactly right. Software needs love to survive and this is what it looks like when software and a company becomes unloved.
“This is really bad, someone should be in China driving this.” (Apple & Foxconn)
We have. The problem of course stems from the more established brands picking apart our tech and incorporating it into their own, thus making our tech obsolete. There's also the issue regarding our existing customers that paid for Professional and Enterprise licenses. We currently offer free licenses to open source projects, but we do understand that there are those that are turned off to any proprietary tech, even if they'll never actually go under the covers.

We'll likely revisit this issue later in the year after we make a series of major product announcements. Those announcments may make it unnecessary for the tech to continue to be closed, until then, everything we do other than the core is open source and available on github, this includes numerous modules. I'll likely blog about this in the next month or so.
Another ex-Weblogs Inc here (hi, Randall!)

It was the pile em up and sell em cheap model that burnt me out in the end. I genuinely spent a lot of time early on writing quality posts, getting breaking news (because I was in the UK and so awake earlier) and doing in depth analysis type articles. Then I got fed up of the pressure to constantly keep churning stuff out, and one day I looked at the crap I was writing and quit. There were tricks you could do to pump up your post quota - I remember starting WoW.com's Breakfast Topic as one such vehicle, though it was also an interesting conversation starter.

Still, I am very glad I did it. I learnt a lot about the gaming and tech industries and got a start in journalism as a result. Which I moved away from, but that was my choice.
What does Chrome have to do with this mode of tracking? Google Analytics will capture a referrer from any browser that includes it, and no browser that I know of displays a "red warning" when including it.
>Are you kidding? You are a moron - this is as close to a smoking gun as you can get. You did get the part that there was NO relationship between the meaningless search phrases and the returned page right? What POSSIBLE situation could explain Bing returning the Google returned page without recourse to Google's search

Eh? Then why did it happen only in 6% or 7% of the cases tested and not close to 100%, a fact that the blog conveniently glosses over?
those twitter zingers are absolutely hilarious!
Get back to the nature. Whether it's hiking, jungle trekking, swimming in the ocean or running on the beach, it's totally reinvigorating. While you are doing it, breathe deeply and enjoy the sights and sound of the surrounding - you will come back a renewed man.

P.S: I'm very fortunate to live in Penang island (Malaysia), where all those things I mentioned just 20 minutes away from my house.
as opposed to TC and Engadget punching each other?
The title for this is misleading. Poverty is defined as the inability to access basic human needs such as food, water, healthcare, education, clothing and shelter. While the relative purchasing power of American's is strong if they go to another country, the relative purchasing power of American's locally is severly diminished. As a result about 15% of Americans live below the UN defined poverty line. So what is "wealth" if you are in that 5% that surely are below the UN poverty line?
Excellent point. When I solve problems like this, I usually wound up with a general purpose solution and then test it out and if necessary optimize for important cases.
> At first I thought there could be three possible explanations to Google’s handling of this situation:

I think he forgot option 5: whether Bing intentionally copied Google's search results or not, if Bing continues this practice then their index will contain a de facto copy of Google's index for tricky queries. Bing will inherit Google's spelling correction, it's long tail, its top results, and any other enhancements Google develops to return more relevant results.

Google invests so much into these things; if Bing absorbs these improvements without lifting a finger, Google loses its ability to stay ahead through technical merit and innovation.

I think Amit is telling the truth: "And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we'd like for this practice to stop." http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-...
There is a huge difference between recreating Google results and incorporating a Google honeypot link into their results through legitimate means. One link isn't a search result, a search result is an ordered list of results. If its whole search results then Bing's got some questions to answer and deserves some bad press. Otherwise, not so much.
I regularly upvote older questions and answers that I find interesting or helpful. It's also fun to have my own old answers upvoted or commented on, which prompts me to go back and reread them.
Co-found a business with a Stanford Grad student through LaunchPad...
>"So you want a person to code up the website while you smoke some pot and the split the profits?"

I think the plan is to spliff the profits.
I recently visited DFW area and it was wonderful. Although I'm sure tech may not be high on the list their, with all the growth I saw I would expect many of the other up-starts could utilize the new tech.

I'm not sure what your startup entails, but I would recommend reaching as far towards Austin as possible. The city is really having what could be compared to a small Renaissance. Art, music, and innovation are all there. Now all they need is a startup from HN.

*That is how I would approach the situation.
I think there's a very clear ethical divide.

Using any Google product, you implicitly agree to them, in exchange, using your data. That's how Google works, and has always worked. That's your payment for using the service.

With Windows - the operating system that you are using - it's an entirely different proposition. For one, you've already paid for it. And secondly, you don't expect the software that you bought to spy on you and give away links you were clicking on in a Google search results page.

Links in a Bing search - sure! That's how search engines work. But tracking my clicks on any other web page, by my OS, that's spyware, plain and simple.
It'd be great if someone could explain to me why python with WSGI is "slower" than C# - I know C# is compiled to bytecode, but from what I've seen, websites are slow because of their I/O and database access, as opposed to the actual language processing things. Especially when some WSGI servers have insane performance in raw request handling (and can be proxied to via nginx). Where is it that C# can actually draw the advantages?
I'm in a non-US timezone, so all I get in most (software-related) IRC channels is crickets chirping. SO is like a searchable log of an IRC channel for when my question was asked and answered 4 days ago.
"The point system is all wrong!"

Epic fail at life.
Dane here. Northern Europe is definitely an easy place to stay for a foreigner, but if you want to stay in a major city, rent is not going to be cheap, and food etc. is pretty expensive as well.
it's on now, baby: fourwords.me

(fivewords.me, sixwordsme.com.au, etc.)
For Good Thesis
The effectiveness of the thesis relies on many elements. The grade one obtains for the thesis will signify its effectiveness. As a good grade is required to ensure the attainment of the degree, students should do all within their powers to ensure that a good thesis is submitted.
Smarterfox.com/registrybooster_t
Very good post. I'd like to suggest another explanation: they really ''do'' see what Microsoft is doing as cheating, and expect others to share their outrage. When you're "in the bubble", talking only with people who share your perspective, it's easy to believe everybody things they way you do. And Google's known for being smarter than everybody else when it comes to search, so at some level people there probably believe that the only way anybody could get results as good as they are is by cheating.
Thanks for another great issue! My brain tells me only the content should matter, but my eyes just love the magazine layout.
Nomad Editions - New York (sorry remote not an option for this role)

http://readnomad.com

Developer for Digital Magazine Startup

Nomad Editions, a startup creating digital weeklies for mobile devices, is looking for an awesome web-standards focused HTML/CSS/JS developer to help build our content on top of Treesaver (treesaver.net), one of the most exciting new open source frameworks for digital news and magazine publishing.

The developer will be responsible for taking wireframes and translating them into standards-compliant web pages in Treesaver.

We're seeking:
- Expertise in standards-based web development with HTML/CSS/JS
- Experience with source control (Git or SVN)
- Ideal candidate would also have design skills
- Interest in working with a very exciting company doing something no one else in the digital publishing industry is doing: making digital content look amazing everywhere

If you're interested or have questions, please e-mail Martha Rotter at mrotter@readnomad.com