skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> that implies it's inferior technology.

Search engines learn a lot from their users. Think of spelling corrections, part of them are learned from users that typed both the mispelled and correct query in the same session.

Like in this case, many times better results don't come from better technology, but from a bigger userbase that gives more data to learn from.

Google has almost an order of magnitude more users than Bing, hence an enormous amount of data to learn from.

IMHO what Bing is doing is a way to tap a (biased, incomplete) part of that data (that also Google has, in their clicklogs) to use it as a signal for crawling and ranking.
Instead of whining, I would have gone on the offensive.
So we have a competitor copying our search results. Great. Now how can we fuck with that?

Figure out the requests coming from microsoft and return a different set of search results (e.g. XXX stuff) so that it doesn't show up for organic google resutls. Set the trap and once bing has incorporated those results for a keyterm, spam TC and LOL at Steve Ballmer gettingn worked up.

This discredits the relevancy of bing and all that PR dollars spent rebranding would have gone down the drain. Imagine searching for a harmless search term like 'poodle' and getting hardcore triple xxx results.

Oh well, dont do evil right?
RapLeaf sucks. Their data is so bad that it barely tells you anything. FYI.
I really doubt there is a person out there who will read about this tomorrow and has not heard of Bing, considering how much advertising Bing still does. You also have to consider how any CNN type article of this post will read; the points that Microsoft lied publicly and "stole" results from their competitor, just to keep up, will stand out. There has been enough of a negative buzz for Google about how SEO-ized their results are, so it certainly seems like they have reason to bash the quality of their competitor right now.
It is binary serialization format used and open sourced by Google. Unlike JSON, objects must adhere to a predefined scheme/structure, and hence, it is compact.
Just bought my ticket. I'll see you there!

(also, if any HN-ers are around and want to get lunch or something, lemme know. I might go a day early and just putz around SF.)
I thought the same thing about Team One Tickets:

"Is hiybbprqag some new band the kids like? Why don't we have tickets for them?"
Scroll down to point 11:

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
That is a dangerous thing to do. If there is more than one winning ticket you lose.
>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.

I think Opera's personal browser based server ("Unite") is going to have it's day (or something similar will) - http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2009/06/16/; has a "photo server" built in.
I recently got a "exhibitor kit" packet that lists the costs of renting certain items for your conference display. You know, tables, monitors, booth structures, rugs, plants, extension cords. Stuff marketing teams don't want to deal with packing in and out.

$65 to have power available in your area. $100 for a table. $200-500 for area rugs. $80 dollars an hour for labor to help setup or tear down. A 22" monitor is $200 - you could buy it and throw it away for that price.

I'm not saying it's highway robbery, but it's shocking, and probably indicates running a conference that pops up and then tears down efficiently is simply more expensive than you would initially guess.
Nothing new, absolutely. Sophisticated, definitely.

Ask any non-English speaker: Idiomatic speech is one of the toughest codes to crack because the meaning is "stored" in the reference, not the language. Imagine deciphering these without knowing the idiom: "That takes the cake", "A stitch in time...", "Use the force, Luke", etc.

Drawing idioms and fragments of idioms from music and video games rather than larger culture is a brilliant way to fly under the parent's radar.
I don't have that book at hand right now. I wonder if language plays a role here. Judging from my own experience, a 200 line stored procedure is quite manageable, but 200 lines written in a c-like language are a tough nut to crack.
Ha! So the lottery is paying for everything but education.
Why a Qwiki will probably be a success
There's a difference between looking at word's copy/paste and deciding you want to make your own and making your copy/paste a hack around Word's copy/paste.
"all search engine results come from somewhere else"

I believe the word you are looking for is "interweb".
C# is faster than Python, no question, however how much time do you really spend in your Python code? I don't think I've ever written a view that took more than a few ms to execute, with database queries being the slowest part by far.

If you're executing jobs that calculate things or other batch processes, you can compile them to C/C++ pretty trivially and have a 50x speedup, depending on your loads. Plus, PyPy is getting really, really good.

However, I am as biased as it gets, so take this with a grain of salt.
I have the same thought. It is more a matter of framing. A while ago some people accuse Google of unethically profiting because they are farming the link structure of the Internet, which is the labor of many people (is it Nicholas Carr?) I don't really buy this framing. But Google's accusation seems fall on a similar line of argument. You can also setup a "Google sting" to prove they are copying from the Internet. It is called "Google Bombing".

Bing will be at fault if they specifically target Google. But if you consider entering a keyword and then click a link is essentially targeting Google search, then it only expose another problem, that is Google's monopoly on the search market.
Playing PR games (even if you win) may make you look good at the moment but has a tendency to spiral into more PR games instead of a better product.

Also, as stated on the earlier HN thread on this topic, it isn't at all clear that Google will come out on top. Many users suggested that the Google toolbar collected data on the sites people visited and if the Bing toolbar does also -- well is that really a game Google wants to play? Bing could come out a net winner given the increased attention on their search engine.

Why does this last aspect matter? It is an acknowledgment that Google is taking their competition seriously, which indicates a bit of uncertainty with respect to their own product. The more that goes into this (esp. if Bing hits back w/ info on how Google historically has mined data with their own toolbar) the more that Google has to lose and Microsoft has to win.
Disclosure: I'm interning in the Bing team at MS but my statements here are mine only and do not reflect that of Microsoft.

I don't see how this indicates that they've given up on Bing. They're spending a lot of money on the online services team, even making a loss for the past several quarters to improve Bing. They're playing the catchup game, so this is a quick and easy way to stay competitive while they get their algorithms up to scratch. It's better than the alternative of loosing all their customers/market share and then have no data to help them improve.

I see this more as a compliment to Google, even though Google certainly doesn't see it that way, and I can definitely understand their frustration.
"I'll take it as encouraging that I've reached the level of expertise where my questions are more quickly answered on SO"

This attitude of yours says more about your lack of experience with and appreciation of IRC than it does about its relative merits in respect to SO.
yea true, again for taxes... And it should be noted that Accenture struck a deal with the Bermuda government (me thinks) to pay limited amounts on a fixed timeline, in any case, they were paying pennies (and got a lot of heat for it) while raking in billions.

Ireland, good find, hopefully the gov't can get more into their pot of gold :P
You've presented a very good rebuttal that's hard to disagree with.
The referer is in the http headers. Whereas Bing is using IE toolbars to upload Google search results.
Is anyone pushing these updates back to google? Isn't protobufs open source?
Well look, this thing comes preinstalled with Windows, so all the Google engineers did is go to www.google.com on IE, search for something and - voila a short time later the results are on bing.com.

Automated spidering or not, the way this is setup borders on the edge of stealing. I can see why they feel the need to complain about the issue.
Isn't that on google? Or bing, since that's who yahoo uses. That way, you could get back all of the links. It would take some developer time, but that's exactly what's needed for PR.
They've decided that, some portion of the time, the single best search result they can return is whatever Google is returning.

Sounds like a very rational position. Anything less could be termed 'delusion' on Microsoft's part. And for the longest time, they were delusion about the search market in general. No longer.

They've given up on trying to be better than Google, and are settling for being a cheap, off-brand knockoff that rebrands stale Google search results.

Google being an additional source of data for them does not equal Bing "giving up on bettering Google".
Our Great Sin
I don't know about high school, but I went to a graduate school program that required laptops. It was normal for everyone in the room to have theirs open during class. It was a horrible idea. The better professors forbid laptops during class because they were such a distraction. And we're talking 25-30 year old adults who were paying a good chunk of change to be there. I shudder to think of what 15-year-olds would do with a laptop in class.

Requiring laptops is like requiring paper. You just don't need to do it.
I hate to be "that guy" but

"(...)When I compare our performance to similar sites that are running on the open source stack, we are using about 1/10th of the hardware that they are, unfortunately, and maybe that’s because they are not good programmers. But just in terms of the types of queries we are doing and stuff, the Microsoft stack is actually, appears to be paying for itself – in terms of reduced hardware”

Doesn't really provide any real justifications. I have indeed anecdotally heard good things about mssql, but apart from that I have a hard time believing you couldn't get more or less identical performance from jvm/linux/etc (and maybe mysql/postgres really can give mssql a run for its money, but I admittedly know little about relative database performance)

On the other hand, it seems like Jeff/Joel had lots of experience with the MS stack before, so its not an illogical choice. You want to spend your time building a product, not wasting it figuring a new stack you aren't very familiar with.
That was succinct and concise, thank you.
More interesting than anything Microsoft is doing here is Google's answer to it. If Microsoft caught Yahoo doing this, they'd bury them in lawyers. Google is confident enough to just go public and take the PR win.
I've always liked the idea of "conceptual onomatopoeias":
- the word "word"
- the sound of the word "sound"
- the thought of a thought

...etc.
What on earth are Google thinking? (re: Binggate)
Coincidentally, this is also the code of honor at school/kindergarten.

I wonder what the explanation could be behind this notion of opposing authority to help your peers even when it is costly to you in the short term. Does a game theory explanation exist?

From what I've read most nations occupied by an enemy force develop a similar code of honor in regards to the aggressor.
As an aside, I don't buy the arguments of "they shouldn't be mentioning Bing."

I do buy that argument but only for mass media PR type stuff. The market leader can only give attention and raise awareness to the followers.

The thing is in this case, it's a technical blog posting and really anyone following that already knows about Bing. It was in searchengineland. If they had a link to it on their home page it would be a different story.
Ask HN: Where to live internationally while learning to program?
I want to learn to program and I figure that while I am learning I can also enjoy myself and save some money by living in some interesting low-cost location. Any ideas on ideal locations?

Here are the criteria that I am considering:

1. Relatively low cost compared to living in the U.S., thus somewhere in Asia or Latin America would probably be ideal

2. A fun place to live for a ~6 month period. I have barely traveled outside of the U.S. so I think this would be a good opportunity to immerse myself in another culture and see a different part of the world.

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...

A little more about me and my motivation for this:
I am a college student on a gap year who is very interested in start ups. I have worked on the business side of a start up for 7 months and now want to try learning programming to see how I like it and so I can start trying to build cool things without worrying about finding a technical co-founder. I have about 2 college courses worth of programming know how. I want to balance the learning programming with the traveling/enjoying being in a very different location
New Service Allows Egyptian Voices to Be Heard
Will this cause people who haven't heard of Bing to know about it? Yes. Will the headline "Google claims Bing is copying its search results" leave a good first impression on those users? Probably not.

Whether or not people perceive the claim as accurate or complaining or whatever, first impressions are still powerful. If the first time you hear of Bing is the accusation that they're copying someone else's results (true or not), that's probably not a first impression you would want people to be left with if you were Microsoft. Chances are, people are going to read this as "My trusted search provider accuses unknown search provider created by the same people as Windows Vista of stealing its results".
mate well done. Jealous of you though :D. Hope you do really well. Keep us posted so it will shame people like me to take the plunge some day!
...and points to their jobs site!
Python and Ruby code would likely win more beauty contest (which is actually kind of important to me) but, with the advent of C# 3 and 4, I don't think that there is much difference in expressive power. Not having a REPL still sucks though.
I don't completely disagree in that perhaps Bing should respect Robots.txt when using information gathered in this way. However, the aim of Robots.txt is to restrict the actions of a automated web-crawler (bandwidth limiting and preventing unwanted interaction with dynamic pages), in this case the crawling is not carried out by a 'robot' so in my opinion there is room for interpretation.

I guess its an interesting point, clearly denying access to an area in the robots.txt suggests you do not have permission to use that information. However, only the TOS will be definitive on what you can and cannot do. For example not including a robots.txt file clearly does not waive all rights, but interpreting the TOS is clearly beyond the capability of an automated system.

In this case I would suggest the only safe course of action for Bing would be to have an exclude list of domains and allow anyone to have their own site excluded from this information gathering.
I'm a developer, tech support for my extended family, and admin for a bunch of web stack boxes. Is there a guide on what I (or everyone else) should be doing to mitigate this? Or are the steps that need to be / can be taken immediately only at the ISP level?

From the comments on the article it seemed like there was even still some disagreement on quite what to do.
use hashtag #BingGate
Well, looks like we've figured out how to bypass the courts as well as foreign legal systems. I'm surprised The Pirate Bay hasn't been seized.
Right now today in classes kids text, and call each other all the time in class. Give them a Laptop with access to wireless and they will be on IM, Twitter, or facebook. Blocking those sites just means they will take measures to work around it. I wouldn't put it past some enterprising student to build and run their own chat server, basically anytime they are allowed to use it in school they will be doing something you don't want with it. Don't be dumb and end up like that one school district who got in trouble for spying on students.
No, you come on. You're the guy who was calling someone a troll for pointing out exactly what you just admitted - that it's a really neat hobbyist kit, not an iPhone competitor.
Good luck, keep us posted.
Dude, those are low rates from my experience.

The rates are outrageous partly because all the work (from moving crates to Internet) is done by union workers. The convention centers have exclusive contracts with companies like GES, also driving up costs.
this is a game design issue

Only if the "game design" purposely used a limited pool of numbers for the visible and hidden boards. If there was no guarantee that a number would appear 1.9 times, then seeing singleton numbers wouldn't be a predictor.

My guess is that the restricted number pool was used as a means of easily mapping a number (the number on the back of the card) onto a playing board. Anyone interested in the why and how of this should look at The Wizard of Odds[1]. If the number on the card was used to seed a PRNG which then produced a lot more data, there could be a more sophisticated board generator that doesn't need to take such compromising shortcuts.

So in a sense, the culprit is game design in that rules were created to allow for certain percentages of Loses, Near Wins, and Wins. But there is no reason to mix output control into game design. My suggestion is to make the game rules with no regard to controlling output. Instead, evaluate the generated boards and keep/drop them to control the output.

[1 | http://wizardofodds.com/slots/]
Sparkfun & Instructables Sponsor Microcontroller Contest
This one is a good one: "Why Dropbox Succeeded and Syncplicity Didn’t"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2153046
Terrible.

The design is fine, though uninspired.

But what makes this terrible is that it is without soul.

Bring back the chimp!
Business challenge here is that you have 100% churn. Every single customer will evolve out of the "coming soon" phase, no?
I'm tackling this problem at my startup, ParkGrades.com, by:
1. Seeding the site with as much quality information as I possibly can (given my limited resources);
2. Incenting users to add content through giveaways;
3. Testing the giveaways to see which incentives work best.

Once a given area/topic has a certain amount of information, it's then much easier to promote that area/topic with additional marketing and incentives.
Basically, seems the author is tired of owning nothing after 18 months of writing a blog about it.

Minimalism began long before 2009
Consider Panama
Lotteries as Regressive Voluntary Taxes
I have noticed the same thing! I guess it is not that easy to make good pizza. In los angeles there are places that specifically advertise new york style pizza, and they are more expensive.

One of those more expensive places in my neighborhood in LA says that they import their dough directly from Brooklyn by plane. I highly doubt it. Another one has a sign that reads "We only use authentic New York tap water. (Suckers)"
This seems the most likely explanation, "Cam" is a commonly filtered term.
Google marketing head Wael Ghonim apprehended in Egypt
Yeah, it exists in a lot of different sectors of society. Police have the "blue wall of silence", animal liberationists have "security culture", Baltimore gang members have "stop snitching", Marxists have "revolutionary discipline", it goes on and on.

I think if anything, the game theory response is determined by a distrust of the impartiality of authority. The Boondocks actually had a really good dissection about why "Stop Snitching" caught on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUwvAqLvivU (NSFW, Language)

Specifically, 1m 45s in. It also doesn't touch on that often talking to the police can be used by the police as pretext to crack down on unrelated crimes. So when you think you're doing good, next thing you know, your cousin is getting arrested for having a small amount of weed in their room.

I think any social organization that has something to worry about when it comes to loose lips learns very quickly that you either learn to keep your mouth shut and value your social relationships well, or your social organization ceases to exist.

In a way, social networking puts us all in that kind of situation. Many of us do illegal, socially unaccepted, or consequential things, although what we do may not be morally objectionable at all. We haven't learned yet what the criminal organizations have, which is to a) keep your mouth shut, and b) choose your friends wisely.

Instead, people tend to look towards technical solutions like cryptography.
The last time I had a booth at a conference, I just swung by the local rent-a-center and grabbed a TV. So much cheaper.
Any particular reason why I should consider Panama?
Great points. The design issue is a big one, and I think the main reason is that PSDs can be translated to HTML and CSS easily, but extracting a theme for a set of widgets is much harder. The widgets give you rich interaction and an easy way to set up complex layouts, but as you said can be very rigid and not allow easy modification of their behaviour. And I agree, I end up longing for the simple world of HTML and CSS where I know exactly how to change something instead of fighting the framework. I think thats something that will be remedied if a framework like Planet or my hypothetical one reaches ubiquity however. If developers learn the ways the framework works, just like how they learned the ways HTML, CSS, or Rails works, they'll be ok with extending the widgets to do what they want.

Another good point about routing, and this I'm admittedly fuzzy on. Above mechanical_fish mentioned some serious SEO issues that arise from moving away from the standard paradigms, so I'm not quite sure how it should be solved.

All in all, Planet looks neat, thanks for sharing!
How Do You Pronounce GIF?
TaskPaper and To-Do List Bankruptcy Without the Trauma
Heroku equivalent for django?
I'm sure this has been discussed many times so sorry for the repeat. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
One can only hope that this is not quite over yet.

There's been quite a few well constructed and thoughtful apologies circulating HN lately, one of which was Andrew Mason's apology for Groupon's Japan blunder. Hopefully, Flickr will pick up the torch, and issue a more official, and hopefully more well thought out, apology. After all, it's been less than a day since the incident.

Of course, the deletion in itself is inexcusable. I just hope Flickr steps up.
"We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase."

The only way you can get access to premium content on the Kindle is through PURCHASING. Apple is implying that you can only access content that has the capacity to be purchased in iOS.
I know quite a few people who have lost important data, and yet still don't do proper back-ups (which is crazy given a 1 Tb drive is $70)
Localeaks: Wikileaks model for local newspapers
GAE: http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/django.html
Here's a JavaScript example of such a templating function:

http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/docs/underscore.h...
SE Asia.. cheap once you're there, easy to travel around. great experience. They might have slow internet though