skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can't disable disk caching. The only reason anyone ever wants to disable disk caching is because they think it takes memory away from their applications, which it doesn't! Disk cache makes applications load faster and run smoother, but it NEVER EVER takes memory away from them! Therefore, there's absolutely no reason to disable it!

Never say never. You can and should disable/purge linux buffer caching in certain situations. See O_DIRECT and/or POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED. If I'm writing a database, I take care of my own caching, I do not need the OS doing it as well. Also, if I'm doing a huge rsync of a directory tree, just because I just read every byte of every file in that tree, I most certainly do not want to load all of that crap into the linux buffer cache. It will evict my already warm set, as well as potentially cause a ton of swapping.
Thanks man. Much more to come.
Also, it's particularly distasteful for you to throw around a quote about "forum trolls" in response to what multiple people here have correctly pointed out - people here are misreading what this item is.
For those who didn't know about the newsyc Twitter bots, they were created by Jeff Miller:
http://jeffmiller.github.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-ne...

I personally prefer his RSS feeds (http://feeds.feedburner.com/newsyc50 in my case), which lets me follow HN inside Google Reader, keeping track of what I've read / liked. It's useful, because I don't miss interesting stories, and I don't feel like I have to constantly monitor the home page in search of interesting posts.

Of course, it's also good to go vote up new stories sometimes. Especially if you want to be part of the emerging HN discussion (I often comment once everybody is gone :/ ).
It's practically impossible for Google.
The key problem with inverse square root is the risk of having that code unmoored from a very well put together comment explaining the rationale for it, and perhaps a TODO in the backlog about re-evaluating when to get rid of it.

Without knowing that it's a fast inverse square root approximation using the Newton-Rhapson method with 1 iteration using some clever bit twiddling hacks and an initial guess chosen by experiment to be optimally efficient in terms of accuracy and especially for speed you can end up with a lot of problems. First, someone could look at it and spend a lot of time trying to figure out what it was doing before realizing what it did. Second, it could cause people to attempt to replace it without realizing the value of it, causing wasted effort. Third, it could cause people to try to improve it, spending time attempting to find a more optimal first guess, or adjusting the bit twiddling nature in some way. Fourth, and worst of all, it could develop a reputation as a bit of "deep magic" which shouldn't be touched because nobody knows exactly how it works, so nobody ever re-evaluates whether it's worth keeping. As it stands now it's obsolete code given that modern GPUs will perform the relevant calculation in hardware much faster.

Granted, in this specific case a lot of these problems are much diminished (since the company was small, the code and its rationale was well-known by the dev lead, and it's reasonably straightforward to reverse engineer the operation and rationale for the code with some investigation), however this might not be the case somewhere else with some other piece of comparatively magical code.

When you write a bit of WTF code that's actually worthwhile imagine that everyone that worked on the code is now dead and researchers are studying it, what information would those researchers want the most? Now put that in a comment.

P.S. Also, god help you if you happen to be lucky enough to have a chunk of poorly documented "deep magic" code that happens to have a defect in it.
"You can think of the synthetic queries with inserted results as the search engine equivalent of marked bills in a bank."

It's actually more like trap streets on maps.
It does, but it's not ideal. Remember, it's important to separate noloh.com, from NOLOH the tool's capabilities. The decisions we made regarding noloh.com, in no way reflects the capabilities of NOLOH. In a NOLOH application or website, you decide to what extent your content will display without JavaScript, granted we should enable more options, but without JavaScript the site and content still loads and those users can still peruse your content, but not perfectly. However, if you pretend to be a search engine, you'll see they get a completely different version of the website, with generated links, different than the JavaScript disabled version.

It boils down to each end user type getting a different version, JavaScript is ideal, non-Javascript works, but is not ideal, which is something we continue to work on, and search engine robots which is completely different from the others, conforming to standards, etc., see http://dev.noloh.com/#/blog/2010/08/23/strict-output-and-oth....
ATDHE, Sports Streaming Website, Seized by US Homeland Security
I imagine it's because they want the Google results as input even (and especially) in cases when there are indeed results.
I'd like to be able to control exactly who sees my questions and answers. If I'm at a place that I think is awesome, it might be because everyone else in town isn't there in which case I'll have incentive to misinform any/all strangers. For what it's worth I recently released something like Localmind for surfers, so I look at it from that perspective. When the waves are good, we only want to tell a few specific individuals with whom we'd like to share the experience.
exec is useful to create a scripting environment inside a GUI application, without the need for separate processes/interpreters. Not without its issues, but works well enough for relatively simple needs.
It's not really that clever.. it's the search equivalent of a trap street in cartography.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
These seem to be the relevant parts of MSs responses:

"Opt-in programs like the [Bing] toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites."

“We do not copy Google’s results.”

I see MS denying _copying_, not denying _using_ Google search results. That makes the title of the Google blog post incorrect.
Good for Google.

Bing have done wrong (granted probably not legally), and their response to a very detailed Search Engine Land article was a quick, nonchalant 'Huh? Oh that. Yeah, we don't copy Google's results. I know that doesn't really answer the claims but we don't really care enough to give a proper response.'

Bing's actions here (and their response) has seemed very poor and I definitely praise Google in going public with this.

I'd certainly like to think that if I was in a position where I caught a competitor piggybacking off my work, I'd go public with the information too (in a non-confrontational manner of course, as Google are doing).

So yeah: good for Google. Bad for Bing.
At least some of those creepy, Victorian anti-masturbation devices have to exist only on paper at this point.
Pragmatically, the following scenario underlines why this is practice is overall bad for the consumer.

Company A produces product 1.
Company B produces product 2 inferior to product 1.
Consumers use product 1.
Company B enhances product 2 by actively engaging product 1.
Some consumers use product 2.
Company B product 2 rises in market share.
More consumers user product 2.
Company A drops product 1 due to lack of profits.
Product 2 quality deteriorates due to absence of product 1.
Consumers left with inferior product option.
TFA: "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. Those links will now point to deadspace. Additionally, the followers he had accumulated, tags, photo captions and copyright information have been wiped out and may not be restored"

Beyond that, I have well over 2000 photos in my photo library, and I'm by no means a serious photographer. A professional might take several hundred photos in a single day. (Not all will be useable or worth publishing, but the idea that you might just never delete any photos off your memory card just doesn't work for a lot of people.)
In my view this is only a problem if IE8 / Bing Toolbar has a line which is effectively:

if current_page == "www.google.com":
""" Steal results from competition """

Otherwise, generically applying this on other sites is clever and innovative. Effectively turning every user into a web-crawler with a built in mechanical turk to rank useful links on that page.

I think google are framing the debate well, and perhaps exposing something that isn't exactly privacy friendly but to claim they are stealing from google is similar to me claiming google is stealing from me because they indexed my collection of favourite links on my homepage.
The writeup on what Quora is built on say that, "Quora uses Ubuntu Linux as it’s OS of choice," and does not mention any Microsoft technologies at all.
I can only imagine the confusion the Clyde-Findlay Area Credit Union SEO team is going through right now:

"Why are we getting so much traffic from people searching for 'delhipublicschool40 chdjob'?"
The Quora link is just a look at how another Q&A site is built, not related other than their overlap in purpose.
Likewise, you don't launch a startup just to make money.
Right. Typically, Wikipedia would know have a record of the search term being used to reach the page. Of course, it is plausible only if Wikipedia shares that information with others.
So? Bottom line, all search engine results come from somewhere else. When you search for Hacker News, it's not like Google knows what Hacker News is, it grabs the results from else where and ranks them.

When there's only one result, it doesn't matter how you rank it, it will always be the only result.
For decades the received wisdom among good programmers has been that long functions are inherently non-maintainable. However the actual result of companies that track maintenance information is that if the function is below 200 lines, the length of functions is not significantly correlated with maintenance cost. (However a high density of logic within the function is associated with maintenance cost.)

Read Code Complete if you don't believe me.
Agreed. The fact that artists make stuff that 'works' at all should be hint enough that they aren't completely wrong. Just working with a useful approximation/abstraction layer.
Your comment reminds me of the great article that was on here some time ago about the guy who used a PDA and barcode scanner to search book stores for cheap books he could sell on Amazon for a profit:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1764895

A highly recommended read.
>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...

Because what you describe would be underhand and probably a violation of Google's ToS that could cost them very dearly in PR and money (in a court case).

They have access to user data that users say they can access (click-through or whatever) but they don't have access to Google search results directly unless Google allow this (which I've not checked but can't imagine they do allow).

The grey area is that Google's ToS relates to their relationship with their clients (people who search using Google), do they disallow their clients if they're using MSIE with tracking? Doubtful, if they did (by a technicality say) then they could sue their clients but they couldn't (a priori) sue MS as MS are acting in good faith in their relationship with the same clients (people using MSIE allowing data tracking). The onus would appear to be on the Google users not to have tracking enabled (if indeed Google's ToS disallow such things).

Why not just grep Bing logs ... well clearly they can tell a lot about the relevance to a particular term by seeing how long a user spends on a page after searching for that term and following a link. If the user bounces then it's not likely to be high quality. This sort of info won't be easily gathered from Bing logs if indeed it is possible to get at at all.
Right, swapoff is totally acceptable imo if you're having trouble with swap. I was commenting on how "double the size of RAM" is a bad or outdated guideline. There's been a few times where I've regretted not making my swap space big enough, sometimes when getting a RAM upgrade and wanting to do hibernation, etc. My disk isn't super pressed for space so in my mind there's no real reason to be stingy, and then you don't have to grow/shrink partitions if an upgrade occurs after the initial disk setup.
In the extreme this would seem to impact just about any app accesses a paid service and loads content from it at run time. Eg. I know a number of apps that host the browser to avoid having to go through the Apple review process for content updates (or even for minor UI updates). If it can be interpreted as "content" and there is money involved at any point in accessing it then you could fall foul of this.

I guess Apple will play the usual game of letting 99% of people get away with this and just use it strategically for anti-competitive purposes against particular companies.
>but to claim they are stealing from google is similar to me claiming google is stealing from me because they indexed my collection of favourite links on my homepage.

If you've denied google access to your site in your robots.txt, then it would be a reasonable claim. (Google has denied bing access in its robots.txt)
Unfortunately, recent years have given me the impression that if you set the bar too high, there will be so many failures that you won't have any services to turn to. That's my concern. I wish that weren't my concern and that I could heartily and unhesitatingly agree with you.
Code, slides and notes from Strata Conference Data Bootcamp
Ask HN: Laptops in high school?
My high school recently contacted me to see if I had any advice about whether or not they should require their students to have laptops/tablets. It seems inevitable that education will move in that direction, so I'm curious if anyone who has been in high school more recently than me has any advice that I can pass along to the administrators who will be implementing this program.
Thanks, I didn't realize the "www" had to be there, so I couldn't access the site.
No. I do too, that's why I'm asking for opinions. :)
Al Jazeera in Egypt is cable’s ‘Sputnik moment’
That sounds like a great idea to me
Low end furniture competes on price more than brand. If you bought a really cheap side table, they know you'll probably but a really cheap bed -- whether it's made by them or not.
This may not be the device you are looking for but the idea is not totally crazy. Powerful ARM devices can be had for a few hundred dollars. IMHO, the real trick is to implement the communications. With VoIP instead of voice, instant messaging instead of SMS, the day when you can use WiFi rather than mobile wireless may be coming.
Bad advice. By the time he enters middle age, the higher-education bubble will have long since popped. A college education will be cheaper than it is now, and will be available entirely online. Brick and mortar schools will be so desperate for students that they'll be offering zero-interest loans to get him to come back.

Conversely, due to family commitments and other aspects of real life, starting your own business is something that gets monotonically harder every minute until you retire.

Do it now, or it probably won't happen. Believe me, college is what will wait.

(Edit: Maybe I was too hasty in saying 'bad advice.' It's good advice if he actually takes it. If he doesn't have the kind of personal drive needed to ignore people who tell him to take the safe path through life and stay in school, then he may not be happy as an entrepreneur.)
There was a good discussion in the Hypercritical podcast by John Siracusa and Dan Benajamin about Spaces possibly being dead in 10.7. It was in episode 3: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical/3
No. Did you even read the specs? It says exactly what this comes with.
Yahoo Discontinuing "The Yahoo Distribution of Hadoop", Focus on Apache Hadoop
A "(Hint: You can't)" would have saved me, and everyone else who knows how to calculate probability, 5 minutes of reading in the hopes of finding an actual hack that was unexpected.
US and Chinese Firms Are Locked in a Major War Over Technology
It's funny because Microsoft is known for selling their solutions but in my experience their main problem is they don't know how to sell solutions. A lot of the white papers they put out are just laughable.

If what is being said in this post is correct (and my personal anecdotal evidence suggests it is) than Microsoft needs to hire the best Ruby and Python developers they can find. Have a program written in both languages on a Linux stack and then write the same program on a Windows stack. Then open source it all so anyone who knows ruby or python can point to code mistakes that might inhibit performance.

Once that's all done MS should stress test all the solutions and publish the results.

The Razor engine is the most credible thing MS has given the development community in a while so there's no time like the present.
Google could have made this story all the more interesting by using misspellings of the terms nihilartikel and mountweazel in the honeypot queries.
backing up data in the cloud to another place in the cloud just seems stupid

Why?

The difference between backing up your Flickr data to an encrypted drive at, say, Amazon and backing it up to an encrypted drive under your bed is: Amazon has better physical security, and far better redundancy, because (assuming you use S3) the "drive" you save it on there is actually a replicated data store that spans multiple regions and datacenters.

The point of backups is to provide redundant storage that is relatively uncorrelated to the original. Once you move the data to different disks at a different company in (if you like) a different country, you've done a lot to solve that problem.
I reached out to Dropbox customer service to see what they'd charge me for 500GB. I'll let you know what I hear.
Too bad my company doesn't pay for conferences, I, too, would love to go, but it's much to expensive for me.

I'm in Florida. Anyone know of a similar conference in perhaps the Orlando area?
Yes, but historically this is how Microsoft wins.

They win by entering the dialogue. They copied UI from Apple back in the day, and then were able to cut prices, etc., and Apple lost (at least for a decade).

I would caution Google to ignore the controversy completely and move on to more interesting problems in search. Microsoft is very good at playing this game increasingly on their terms, and then they win.

ETA. As a quick caveat. I have nothing but respect for many Microsoft employees. And I don't mean to generalize. I just can't help but remember the similarities to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microso...

Being 'right' is sometimes a premature optimization....

ETA2. Esp. with someone who is very good at making the second dance move. But think back on all the major Microsoft products (IE v. Netscape, Office v. Lotus, though this is a reach maybe, Xbox v. PS, .NET v. Java, etc.). It's just a different approach. But it's a mistake to not analyze it and appreciate it for what it is..
Why didn't Google's investigation go further? Why didn't they decompile the IE8 toolbar to figure out what it was really doing? Maybe that's against the DMCA and Google can't admit to it?

Having the evidence in code would have made the accusation irrefutable.
>"We gave 20 of our engineers laptops"

OK, over the course of several weeks 20 google engineers were able to inject 7/100 false searches into Bing's database. That is more structured like a brute force attack than a scientific experiment. Is Google really surprised that SEO works? [edit]The blog contains nothing significant about methodology - no control groups, no restrictions on automation, no limits on methods used. In other words, what this shows is that 20 Google Engineers were able to hack Bing and that they did so for PR purposes.[/edit]
All Devices Should Access Everything. Period.
Less Graphic Body Scanning Machines Tested at 3 Airports
Did anyone stop to think that Bing is leveraging IE to improve/influence search results regardless of the URLs this monitored traffic is gleaned from?

Google states 9 of 100 planted queries showed up on Bing. You think Amazon, Godaddy, and AOL could make similar claims?

Probably...but those examples aren't worried about their market share evaporating.
You present minimalism as being a fad that can come and go " Minimalism was cool for awhile." It is not a life style choice, it is a process in which to achieve some desired outcome.

Minimalism is a process based on economic efficiency, the science of maximization. Can I achieve the same desired outcome (or better) with the least about of effort or resources?

Minimalism can not end, and won't end. The companies and individuals that practice this process/science are the ones that get ahead.

Minimalism is not the beginning of the journey, it is the end. You have to journey through everything else to finally get to minimalism.
Do you have a specific situation you are considering? If so, may I ask what kind of content it involves?
Or:
"3-d movies are a great idea, lets take scenes from Avatar and put them in our movie" I don't think excessive simplification lends justice to the issue. Just like how piracy isn't necessarily theft, what Bing is doing isn't necessarily copying.
http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/radiumemanator...

I give you the radium emanator, a device used to infuse water with the healthy radiation from radium. From the link, "It appears to have been made from cement mixed with uranium ore."

Needless to say, it was never a good idea, and the use of this tool died out with the end of the radium fad and, presumably, more than a few of the fad's adherents.

I will be very surprised if anyone was still making this or something to do the same thing.
Google developed an impressive spell correction and error detection algorithm to improve their search results.

Microsoft inadvertently benefits from Google's research by simply watching and recording how people use Google. The end result is a Microsoft product that isn't as good as its competition, but it's good enough for some people. Sound familiar?

It's a classic case of true innovation vs. "Microsoft" innovation.
Thanks to New Agers and such, devices like divining rods are still made and sold.
I keep hearing about this coming up, yet no one ask talked about why the data is irretrievable.

What it implies is that the internal tool(s) that the support staff uses was designed to do deletion instead of status changes. I imagine they have a web interface that fires off some backend script which a) runs sql deletes on an account ID and all tables and b) fires off scripts that physically deletes all photos across all servers.

Taking those implications in hand, it points to an incredibly poorly designed system for account management. Some years ago, there was an internal planning meeting where a decision was made to do this. Some people objected and were overruled. The ramifications of that project manager are still sticking it to people to this day.

I have a hard time believing that Flickr would have purposely engineered their systems in the manner I've described. Not impossible, but unlikely.

So I think its more likely that the data is still there, but that customer service has no method to resurrect it. Its probably a mix of internal policies and the lack of devoting a couple of engineers to fix the problem that is causing all of this.
Hello UW! I would like to nitpickingly note that I've interviewed with Sybase twice, in late 2005 and again in early 2009, and was asked no soft questions.