skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really glad to see you reply here Matt. Never expected it. Kudos!

I think Microsoft did acknowledge using clickstream data as one of the 1000 signals for their relevance ranking. Now regarding the degree to which they are used, I don't have any internal knowledge of either MSFT or GOOG but from my understanding of how search works, words like "hiybbprqag" couldn't have existed in MSFT's index to return any results. So the only signal that could possibly contribute to the ranking of "hiybbprqag" was the clickstreamm data that was generated by GOOG sting operation. So at least for that query term it must have been a big deciding factor. For the popular query terms, I doubt it's that high. I use both bing and google fairly regulalrly and I can tell that for most typical queries, bing results are comparable to Google but for the tail queries, google does a better job. If they were giving any special weight to google click data then they would have done it for tail queries (which they apparently cannot do as well as google) to improve their relevance there.

Regarding Google specific processing, again bulk of the search activity in US happens in GOOG, so I can imagine a lot of search click data is generated on google.

As for the time, I am not sure why that even matters. From my usage of bing and google over past few months, bing has been consistent in the behaviour. If this was a sudden change, I'd have seen a jusp in bing quality overnight. Don't remember seeing that.
Why does Taylor Northcutt want to kill me?
Me too. Safari 5.0.3 on the Mac.
What do people use these days when they want to self host something a bit more light weight? I have setup a few wordpress installations but really if I wanted something to tinker with I think I would look elsewhere, the code has you trawl though many files at times to make simple changes.
I love Steve Jobs' analogy here. He essentially said that desktop computers will stay around, but they'll be the trucks of a car-dominated industry. My parents (and most consumers) never do heavy work on their computers. What they've always needed--and what these new tablets are finally delivering--is a fast, dependable car that runs a long time between refueling.
I wish I knew. Finding one that doesn't suddenly get one of the following problems:

Computer fried
Got sick
Out of town
too many projects
etc

is my bane...just when I think I have a good one, they get a bad something or other. It's not like I'm paying peanuts or make life difficult either.

Wish I had a better answer, but if you find one, let me know.
Cfengine amongst Chefs and Puppets (SCALE 9x)
That column of text is far too wide for comfortable reading.

Good suggestions on picking an appropriate measure here:
http://webtypography.net/Rhythm_and_Proportion/Horizontal_Mo...
I love Forrst. If you don't know anyone with an invite, submit your application and wait for one - someone will find you and hook you up.
Browser+, naturally!

It's the browser reinvented for the iPad.

Full-screen, gestures, Visual History, swipe to search, Most Visited, and 'Open in Overlay' so you can open links on sites like Hacker News, read the article, close it, and be right back where you started.

Any feature requests, ideas, or comments would definitely be appreciated. Here's a walkthrough video:

http://www.browserplusapp.com
I'm behind a corporate firewall where Chrome isn't allowed, any-one know of an equivalent which will run on Firefox?

As an aside the Chrome Web Store tantalizingly says "Sorry, we don't support your browser just yet. You'll need Google Chrome to install apps, extensions and themes."- are they planning to go cross-browser at some point or just teasing me?
Hacker News Contractors:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...

Hacker News Users:
http://hackernewsers.com/
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Really interesting to see that despite the hype Microsoft Azure really isn't seen as an attractive platform by either current or prospective IaaS cloud providers.
sorry my mistake and thanks for picking it up. Passwords are now hashed and working on the js now
Wordpress is a fractal image of PHP, in that respect. It's-easy-to-start turns into Hotel California.
I do the exact same thing. It's not because I can't comfortably sit with an iPhone 4 in my pocket (sometimes I forget it's there), but it's because I can't comfortably remove and replace my phone in my pockets with a longer/wider phone. Thus, for easy access, it stays on the table.
It's interesting to note that Apple was in a very similar position back in those days. They were dying, and made the decision to buy NeXT to change OS directions. The primary consideration was the OS, not Jobs; they were apparently very close to buying BeOS instead. Jobs being the catalyst for strategic change happened to be a pleasant surprise. He didn't even become the CEO of Apple again until much later.

So, to be clear, even Apple wasn't Apple. Apple didn't reinvent itself. Apple bought NeXT to try to go a new direction; that is, innovation was acquired, not developed in-house. Looks like Nokia would be forced to do the same, judging from the mood around meego (or in this case, simply partner with an outsider).
Sure, when stationary for a moment, looking up information. You see average folks looking dead tree/ink information device in public all the time. They're called tourists. They're called museum-goers. They're called audience. Those things they're holding are called guidebooks and programs.

I think this would make for an awesome museum AR experience.
As a the administrator of a small Wordpress network, I respectfully disagree.
If you want my unsolicited, half-assed feedback, here it is:

1. The way you worded the submission title makes it sound like a parody. I think "LetsLunch, a [business description], is hiring" would be less off-putting. As it is, I think you are scaring away the geeks.

2. Using the default wordpress theme makes you look amateurish, at least switch it to a minimalist, but not immediately recognizable, free theme ("Scherzo" is a good one). I know you've only been going for a week and you're probably busy getting the word out, but this makes a bad first impression.

3. It might help to have a more prominent link to your website from the blog. My first impression was that the blog was all you had (typing in the url isn't a lot of work, but asking first time visitors to do work is asking for bounces).
that bug should be fixed now
good idea. I'll look at putting it somewhere on the edit page
The fact that cheapskates will complain is no reason not to do it.
The first quote shows exactly why they lost the battle:

"""...in fact, if you want to say anything, why don't you run it by me first? And Anil, and through marketing, and while you are at it through a couple other people as well... Cool?"""

Every single issue is about giving maximum control to the users for wordpress. Licensing, easy of installation on almost any host, and language choice. All these said, "Wordpress lets you control your code, where you install it, and how you manipulate it."

In my mind it was a battle of cultures and philosophy. For example, wordpress had the idea of the five minute install. They focused on making the 20% that 80% of users absolutely need as easy as possible.
Just curious.. where did you register the .io domain? Are 3 letter domains still available in .io registry?
Short Sharp Science: Glass melts near absolute zero
Depending on the plane, there are cases where a full systems failure knocks out every means of navigation other than "Mark I Eyeball": http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/f22-squadron-shot-down-b...
Why are you asking plain text password once I have logged in ? Its incredibly risky and scary.
How PoundWire will help bloggers
Considering the fact that Marco is an advisor, and the upcoming Readability iOS app is "powered by Instapaper", I'd assume not much.
Yup. Welcome to the world of tweens.
Why Twitter Is Worth US$10B
They just did US$100M revenues in 2010. Ad inventory products for all 3 products have been sold out.
Spanish and Common Lisp most likely. The former is a transfer requirement for the UC system and the latter will be needed for The Paradigms of AI book I purchased.
When it's cached, your browser won't make an HTTP request to the CDN. That's the entire point.

They can do some VERY ROUGH back of the envelope calculations to figure out based on cache-expiry headers and number of requests how many new people you are bringing to JQuery but not much else. Dan Kaminsky proved this earlier in his DNS/TTL cache sniffing tricks.

And by the time you are large enough to have an impact, your audience will be large enough for you to justify using your own JQuery hosted URL.

In short, USE THE CDN JQUERY. :-)
The easy install and developer friendly focus is what attracted me to it. The license and the language attracted developers and designers towards making lots of themes and plugins. Furthermore a large professional developer base legitimized Wordpress in the eyes of bloggers.
I just want to second the antlr reference book. Even though it is specific to framework, it can still be used as a great, readable introduction to compilers.
For as terrible as the internals of Wordpress are, the user-facing part of it all isn't bad. So if you never have to hack the core, it's a solid product. And since 99% of people using Wordpress like this won't touch the code, beyond maybe basic templating, then the ease of installation is really the biggest part of it's ubiquity.

There's something to be said for open source packages which work really well out-of-the-box for the vast majority of people who use it.

But oh, my lord, are the internals awful.
Readability may be marching into Instapaper's territory, but by all reports, Marco is welcoming them with open arms and a bouquet of flowers:

http://www.marco.org/3044068415
As a contractor I'd do productive work for around 100 hours per month.

As a full-time employee I'd be in the office for 160 hours and probably do productive work for around 80 hours per month.
must be. Registered it at Iwantmyname.com - a very good registrar that I use a lot
Two drunks tied together don't make four legs. They make two legs vs. two legs.
There will be no desktop market. That's the disruption.
Everytime I edit a page it says "you must be logged in" .. (I believe I am logged in)
My experience making balsa wood aircraft indicates that the combination of gluing your fingers to a wing with CA, prying them off, then sanding the glue off was a pretty effective way of getting rid of the fingerprints, on one hand at least.

Do it with two hands and it got very hard to pry the first hand off.
I don't really know, but the book seems pretty basic. I would be surprised if any of the compiler ideas it covers were actually obsolete. They might be simplifications, but they are likely still useful to someone new to the subject. The concrete elements of the book definitely aren't shiny new. The example self-hosting compiler is implemented in a Pascal-like language called Oberon and targets a virtual RISC architecture. But I think the essential ideas behind compilers are the same today as they were fifteen years ago.
They weren't super common but there was a handful of Linux smartphones in 2007.
or like my own Write.fm - similar idea but some key differences (subdomains, markup, multiple pages etc). I like the idea of TidyPub though
NOVA | Smartest Machine on Earth
Something like Directed Edge?

http://developer.directededge.com/article/REST_API
Could WebOS for PC's will make 2011 the year of desktop linux?
under the rush of hp/webos announcements today was this: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/09/webos-is-coming-to-pcs-later-this-year/

It made me think back to ten years ago, back when os x wasn't out just yet, and many hackers (including myself) were using desktop linux as a windows alternative. There were competitors such as BeOS porting to any x86 machine, and a slew of company-backed linux distros advertising themselves as the way to go.

Microsoft won the whole battle at the time because:

1) MacOS X was just shipping, and was sadly limited to PowerPC computers.

2) Linux distro vendors weren't investing much in providing a great user experience. They were at most (and still are) skinning Gnome or KDE and calling it a day. Doing any investment required creating X, which would be expensive for a post-internet-bubble company to undertake.

3) Microsoft shipped windows XP. It's ugly by today's standards, but it's surprisingly the most prevalent OS ten years later.

--------------------------------------------------

Now, after 10 years we come to a crossroads again. The gold is currently developing for smartphones and webapps, and the pickaxes for the most part don't need to run windows.

How WebOS will make desktop linux finally viable:

1) Last I checked, WebOS is based on the linux kernel. This is attractive for folks tired of juggling and making ports to BSD. The great interface to HP is partly a sunk cost due to it's development for the phone already.

2) WebOS on the desktop needs to quickly attract a crowd of developers. While they've made a great js-based platform for their smartphone apps, they need to go one step further for native desktop apps. My guess is that they're going to do a similar step to what sony was attempting to do recently and have some form of an openstep implementation. This is to attract the macos developers to quickly port desktop apps.
I don't consider Blueprint or other CSS frameworks templates, but in general I think templates cause more work than they prevent.

Things look nice to start with, but you quickly find yourself trying to figure out how to remove or change CSS styles instead of just building on top of.
Your claim that DDG uses bing API is like claiming how perfectly you know the back of your hand. You can only talk when you know some facts. And that facts can be acquired only when you work in that company.And please distinguish between fact and opinion. And your claim doesn't make any sense when the founder himself is claiming thats not true.
Honestly, I think the answer is pretty straightforward in this case: WordPress was just a great piece of software, much ahead of its competitors.
I am reminded of an anecdote of a famous physicist talking to Army personnel during WW2. Unfortunately I cannot find a reference with various keywords on Google, so take it as you will.

Somehow conversation turns to the great generals -- the 4 and 5 star generals.

"How many great generals are there?" asks the physicist.

"No more than about 1 in 20 is a truly great general", they answer.

"How do you decide who is a 4- or 5- star general?" the physicist asks.

The army men decide that you need to have won 5 battles to be a great general.

The physicist then explains how it can easily be luck. Suppose that battle success is randomly determined. A general has a 0.5^5 chance of winning 5/5 battles out of sheer luck -- 3.125% in fact. Therefore the majority of "Great Generals" are just lucky.
fixing that now
IBM was a systems company, not a hardware company. The difference is that a hardware company doesn't, by and large, develop their own software.

Apple is another example of a systems company.
You may not have correct fonts installed. I get this on Fx nightlies: http://imgur.com/w6s0t
Achieving Grandiose Failure
Hotel California, from Wikipedia:

>The lyrics describe the title establishment as a luxury resort where "you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave." On the surface, it tells the tale of a weary traveler who becomes trapped in a nightmarish luxury hotel that at first appears inviting and tempting. The song is an allegory about hedonism and self-destruction in the Southern California music industry of the late 1970s; Don Henley called it "our interpretation of the high life in Los Angeles"[6] and later reiterated "it's basically a song about the dark underbelly of the American dream and about excess in America, which is something we knew a lot about."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_California_%28song%29
Some, but not all, 401(k) plans allow you to borrow up to 50% of the balance, at some defined interest rate. You make the payments, principal and interest, back into the 401(k).
Thats right, you should always start working on it as a side-project and launch it, see if it gets any user base or if you can make money by monetizing. Forming a company can be done when you have VC's interested or you are making a lot of money. Until then you can just collect the money from sales or monetization and file it as 1099-MISC tax return. No company is required initially especially for web based startup
Has anyone used Refinery (Rails CMS)?
http://refinerycms.com

I ask because I'm learning to be a better rails developer, and I have a WordPress site that has outgrown its theme, and rather than buy a framework I decided to build one of my own on rails...then I found this.

I'm going to try it out, at least on a test domain, but thought I'd ask the HN community for any advice/feedback.
The distinction between "a brand new market that hasn't yet really been developed yet" and a market that's "well developed [but] still growing" can only be drawn in retrospect. Wintel was a decade late to personal computers, but it turns out a decade late was early enough.
I'm not suggesting they should be forced into anything, and I don't have a problem with the idea of a person using a central hub; I use google applications for tons of things, for documents, calendar, etc. What I don't like is that to communicate with anyone using the facebook hub, you have to also be using it. I can use nothing but gmail for my communications, but someone using hotmail can easily communicate with me.

An equally serious problem is that Facebook makes no assurances whatsoever about whether they will choose to filter/censor communication (as they did here http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-censorship/). If I/a business want to be absolutely sure that any mail sent to me will get to me and never be deleted or censored, I can buy a domain and run my own email hosting; it's not a the whim of some external company.
I agree with this on every point. You don't share your fantastic idea because it's original and unique - but if you go to any startup event you'll probably hear your idea, or some variation thereof, discussed. Most certainly, a VC has heard your idea a time or two (or more). ORIGINAL ideas are really not that original. If people are speaking of your idea in such an exclusive forum, imagine how many people have had your idea that never talk about it? Do a patent search sometime with your keywords and it will depress you.

But while being depressed, recognize that it really does boil down to execution - a phrase I absolutely hate, but have had to surrender to. It's true.

Competition is good! If this got you down, consider it a favor - they saved you time and money. You don't have what it takes (harsh, perhaps - but the truth in a literal sense. I suspect you'll get past this). Having a competitor is the most favorable of obstacles you'll encounter.

Don't give up. Keep at it and do it better than anyone else can do it. If you love it, you'll do it.

Best wishes.
Skin Gun
clicky: http://refinerycms.com
Wow, I never peeked at the HN HTML source before but it's pretty terrible. Tables nested within tables, tables used for layout and non-tabular data, CSS only used for colors and fonts. It's such a simple layout that I can't believe they didn't go all-CSS for it and make the HTML really semantic and tight.
Luxury? Hedonism? OK, maybe Hotel California is a bad analogy.

It's easy-to-start rapidly turns into a tarpit made of sparrow droppings.
Before I got into the "professional" world I never used my email. I had one mostly to sign up for things and a few notifications from services.

When I started my first job, that was related to my career, my email use sky rocketed. Email is now my life blood. I have over 50 servers that drop me various forms of messages and notifications. I have discussions with my boss about the direction we should take things. My coworkers will use it to ask questions.

Email is useful. In fact I would say it is one of the most useful pieces of modern technology we have, but only for a subset of uses. Most people don't have the needs, at least in their private life, that email fulfills. Particularly teens.
Activision Blizzard ends 'Guitar Hero' gig
1 bitcoin worth more than dollar
This isn't so much as a toolbox item but a must read I think
http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/
You are falling prey to a fallacy. Suppose there is a competition (say a marathon) where one thousand people participate. The winner gets to choose a number between 1 and one million and see if it matches a randomly generated one.

If you win, it is true that not everyone could do what you did (you were the best runner out of a thousand). It also true that luck played a HUGE role (one in a million odds after putting yourself in the right place based on skill).
Yes, I think that's the only problem ... Now Instapaper iOS users will be worried that they will have to pay for a subscription in the future.
There's still plenty of TWO letter domains out there. I registered oc.tl with gandi.net a few weeks ago.
Buy a framework? Which ones cost money?
You shouldn't have to depend on CDNs as there's no guarantee they'll be up all of the time. I usualayy have a local fallback that can be triggered in this way:

<script type="text/JavaScript" src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script>!window.jQuery && document.write(unescape('%3Cscript src="/js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"%3E%3C/script%3E'))</script>

The second script looks for the jQuery global object that should exist after the CDN fetch. If it doesn't exist, it knows to get your own copy.

(If you're wondering "hey, where's the 'http:' part in that src attribute?", it's because it's a safer way to ask for a resource when you don't know if the you are under http or https.)

Also, you should try to place your <script> tags near the bottom of the <body>, rather than the <head> so that they don't block the rest of the page from loading/rendering.
MIPS Technologies (MIPS): Sell-Off Creates Opportunity
When I was a teenager, in the early 2000s, we hardly used email at all. We all used AIM to talk to one another. Pretty much the only reason to use email was to sign up for things online.
That makes about as much sense as saying: pick two sports teams to play each other, the odds of one of the team winning is 50%. The point is, that probability doesn't hold, and thus nullifies the anecdote.
I'm not an expert in these sorts of things, but even that is probably asking for trouble (though considerably less so.)

What's worked for me in the past was to generate a random string each time I create a session for the user, which is valid to create exactly one session for the user. That string is consumed with each use and a new one is generated and saved to the cookie (which again, is good for the NEXT login.)

I'm sure it's also far from perfect, and causes potential havoc for users switching devices, and that sort of thing (though, where I've applied it, that was considered a feature, not a bug -- YMMV).

Back on subject, Pen.IO looks money, but I'd be worried about running out of page names fairly quickly. Have you thought about tying those to an account? bmelton.pen.io/test isn't quite as good as test.pen.io, but in 3 months, I don't like the odds of getting a page name less than 10 characters... and this problem only gets worse as you get more popular.
How one man tracked down Anonymous—and paid a heavy price