skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One deletionist got a clue. Nice! But the process or the practice is still broken, and there's a lot more good articles being lost. Hopefully someday we'll have a better wiki (my wishlist: long-term archival, forking, mergeing and fuzzy links) with a less harmful community.
I have an iPhone 3G, a 3Gs and a Tmobile MyTouch 4G.

Both iPhones are a complete joke. To the point of rage WRT ATT service.

The tMobile, while not having 'H' coverage everywhere in SF, is LIGHTNING fast by comparison.

There are several other factors, aside from network, that play into this. The OS and HW on the iPhones are just slow and old by comparison. Where - even on my home wifi network pages are slow to render in the browser.

(Even simply launching the SMS app on the 3G iPhone takes as much as 10-ish seconds to display text)

The MYT4G also has no progress indicator on the sending of SMS - where the iPhone does -- and it does the classic "Load to 90% quickly, then pause forever, if sending at all"

Finally, I have had the iPhone since launch day, and have gone through 9 separate handsets in that time. On every single one of them - the 3G and signal bar indicator have been an utter lie. At times when it claims to be online - it has, over a large percentage of the time I have been a user, not been able to "activate cellular data network" for various reasons - or simply "call canceled" so many times I am fed up.

The "call canceled" sound is heard at least 3 times a day minimum.

In closing, if I could have apple and AT&T reps in the room - I would like to kick them in the balls.
Assuming it's a normal extension and has to abide by the same rules that Non-Google Authored extensions do, the extension manifest indicates the extension doesn't have access to do any cross domain posts so all the filtering is done client side. Digging a little deeper, it looks like the blocked sites are stored in Chrome's LocalStorage, which if memory serves me correctly is somehow isolated per extension.

It should be relatively easy to listen in on the background page while the extension is running and write a script to extract the list of blocked sites or update it with a master list so you don't have to block dozens or hundreds of sites manually.

Not that I think everyone should blindly block everything everyone else does on HN; I personally loathe Experts Exchange, but I do find an answer I needed from them now and then.

I was more curious than anything.

Update: As "dsl" posted above, it does look like the extension makes a call out to a Google Endpoint to record the block as well, but I don't believe that call actually filters the data for you. That's still done client side. So it's probably best not to call the end point directly or update the blocked sites list directly, but actual use the extension as intended?
That's like calling the current situation "technical censorship" since websites are ranked by how they perform on the SEO level.
They won't ban sites from google, they will re-arrange who is shown higher (or lower) based on what the users like.

Google has always been in the business of linking search terms with the corresponding informations that users want to see, this is no different.
Exactly. It all comes down to abs.
They are or probably would be doing that. See this comment by Matt Cutts: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218531
Reading this reminded me of an old story of an exam question about measuring height of a building with a barometer:

http://iws.collin.edu/jtsizemore/4fun/StudentAndBarometer.ht...
His user page now has a passive-aggressive self congratulatory quote from a supporter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Christopher_Monsanto

Lesson not learned. He's still seeking self-justification for removing knowledge from the public sphere. It's almost 1984-esque.
You're arguing that many pages in Wikipedia aren't useful. I don't think anyone is debating that, but are these pages actually harmful?
How exactly is it a big deal? You managed to build a GSM network across the entire US. Then you managed to build an EDGE network across the entire US. Then you managed to build a 3G network across the entire US. Why can't you now all of the sudden build an LTE/"real 4G" network across the entire US? This suite of excuses is the same song of complaint that the american operators return to every year. Oddly, not a single operator in any European country has made a squeak about any of the mobile network generations. Ever.
Me too. Made me insane the first time I drove around NJ... until the understanding kicked in. Then I saw the efficiencies though that took awhile to make up for the earlier frustrations as a visitor.
The Python Paradox is now the Scala Paradox
These aren't unique to Metro Detroit. Portions of the East Beltline (M-44) in Grand Rapids, one of the busiest streets in the area, make use of the Michigan Left.
You'd do well to comprehend what I've written. By saying "my attitude has been truly eclipsed today", you're framing what I've written as a petty attack on you, which it was not.

Striving for "the sum of all human knowledge" necessarily implies a compendium that includes "ancient Chinese poetry" written by a diversified community with editors who are "not tech geeks".

My point is that you tried to retort with a completely sideways quote as if it was at odds with the one I used, when it's not. If you've achieved the sum of all human knowledge or are working towards it, you've already picked up or are continuing to pick up along the way the types highlighted in the quote you used. It's not taking a new direction, because you were already traveling in all directions.

Dipshit. (That's a petty attack.)
In practice there is a certain kind of minhashing that is used in key-value stores, which is called a Bloom-filter.

Basically it is a probabilistic bitmap index for quickly telling if a certain elem is in a set. It is used in BigTable, Hbase etc.

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

The Jaccard similarity (or Jaccard index) mentioned in the article is used for finding similar items in a big set. E.g. Google News uses it for aggregating articles on the same subject.
Yes they block client side (several posts from matt confirm it in this thread).

But you mention something important; for me I don't want to 100% block most of those websites, but to give them lower priority (never in my top 10 for exemple). Like you, as much as I hate Experts exchange sometimes they do have the answer when no one else does. This extension sems to solve that by giving a "show" link to display hidden results (when there are any).
There is fundamental a difference between Unicode and UTF-8/16/32. Unicode says nothing at all about how strings should be stored in memory. It is just a set of symbols and code-points. On the other hand, UTF-8/16/32 are implementations of Unicode. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Mapping_and_encodings for others.

Statements like "first 256 code points in Unicode map to Latin-1" make little sense. They are true if you s/Unicode/UTF-8/g. However, they are not true for other encodings such as ones that use 2 or 4 bytes per character. There 'abcd' is not 4 bytes, but 8 or 16.
Any chance we can get the blocklist transfered via sync in the next iteration of this plugin?
I would also offer is the result really effective. You have tons of highly technical people debating the deep minutia of an issue, while wildly uninformed people, simply from the incoherent questions or answers, are left to fend for themselves, or even ridiculed.
Whoever this guy is should try to make a point without putting words in Feynman's mouth. It is downright disrespectful. I know that everyone knows that Feynman did not say these things, but it is still disrespectful.

Also it shows an enormous ego. Mr. Lippert thinks he is as smart as Feynman but he is not; he just makes Feynman sound like a pedantic asshole.

Mind you I agree with his point that those questions are silly, but again he can make this point without bringing in Feynman's corpse and using it as a sockpupet.
I just wanted to say thanks to all the people on Hacker News who asked for this option. We'll look at offering a "block site" option directly in the search results over time, but it takes longer to write, test, and launch that code.

In the mean time, use this extension to clean up your own search results and tell us which sites you don't want to see in Google.
This sort of behavior is not acceptable on Wikipedia

I disagree, that sort of behavior is absolutely par-for-the-course in almost every dealing I've seen with WP's self-selected editor class.
so awesome. that's all.
Obligatory http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
A while back, Google let you remove search-entries whenever you were logged-in.

This seems similar but I'm not sure why they didn't just continue letting you remove content straight from the Google page.

The feedback page also now doesn't go directly to a form where you can report a content farm but rather to a bunch of choices (I had trouble even determining what to chose to report Spam - the first one I chose was to report porn). By the time a lot of users have gotten to the report-a-site section, they've probably forgotten the original URL.

It is a complex problem, certainly - reporting websites is a good way to screw your competitors for example.
Backend Engineer - Mixpanel Analytics [SF]
Am I the only person that's alarmed that some VCs whose supposed expertise in the world of tech startups qualifies them to invest millions of dollars may be incapable of acknowledging the success or potential for success of anything beyond a 30 mile radius of Sand Hill Road
Designer - Mixpanel Analytics [SF]
That just saved me a hell of a lot of work. Thank you!
> If you discriminate against people whose names are 'weird'

I'm curious why this issue triggers a knee-jerk response of "that's discrimination".

Seems to me that Quora may just perceive that it's not a worthwhile use of customer-service time and resources to deal with edge cases in output from their name approval algorithm. "Fax in your ID" allows a remedy with a standardized procedure and minimal resources spent on their part.

Keep in mind what a small population this really is. You need the intersection of three sets: "rejected name", "bona fide applicant not a scammer/clown", and "unable or unwilling to access a scanner like by getting oneself to a Kinko's". It's quite plausible that this set of corner cases is sufficiently small as to simply not be worth Quora's time to handle. Quora is not a government with an obligation to serve everybody. Of course it sucks for those who happen to fall into that set, but the overall perspective is that those are small points in a large sea of data.

Never assume malice where incompetence will suffice. This includes incompetence by willful neglect in favor of other priorities.
would be cool if there was a subscription option where you can subscribe to some master list that gets updated by people you trust.

or just simply a bulk insert
Check out convore from the command line with Convoread
Let me follow this up now I've seen the sites you posted.

While there's nothing hugely wrong with your sites, there's also nothing hugely right with them. I'm not trying to be negative, I'm just trying to be helpful. So mugshot wars is like a fun hotornot clone, and leftright as far as I can tell is a hotornot clone, and brainerd custody is great if you want to see pictures of convicts, and memify is probably fun if you're into internet memes and don't use one of the other internet meme generators and you can be bothered to figure out exactly what it does (which the screenshot doesn't make clear) and how to login (which doesn't work for me, mac+chrome, for some reason).

Again, I don't want you to think I'm trying to crush your spirit or anything. It's clear you know some stuff about making fun sites. But these kinds of things are flaky - either people love them and they explode, or they don't and they fade away. But they're all learning exercises.

It used to be that you could put up a stupid animated gif of a singing animal and it would be the biggest thing on the internet. But there's plenty of other stuff to do online now. It's not so easy to make a viral hit.

So I would say that there's no reason that your sites aren't taking off outside of the reason that there's no reason why they should.

But look at it this way: it's damn hard to monetize junky viral traffic, so be glad you're not just saddling yourself with enormous bandwidth bills! Consider all this a learning experience - you're better at making sites than you were when you started, so when you have an idea that provides value for people, you'll be able to implement it well.
To get something you've never had, you have to do something you've never done. Or, nobody ever done, really.
I just asked the same question basically: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218427
And you really think no one in the google search team has thought of how it could be abused ? Come on let's be serious here, they are not going to use these results verbatim or even block websites for everyone just because some users wanted to.
If you offer a product that is supposed to fix a closed market managed by Google, and you didn't alert them, then how do I know that the "wild" wasn't your own place you knew where to look because you put it there. Now, if that isn't possible because we should trust your ethics, then that's isn't truly "the wild" nor is any of this full disclosure.
Notability is not a rule on WP. It's a guideline.
No. Learning is an algorithm that is applied on an algorithm. There is nothing spooky about it. I wish more people realized that before they started claiming that "machines and humans are different in that humans can learn from their mistakes while machines can't" -- of course they can.
Yes, there is a difference, and it is not meaningless.

Let's go with your example. You don't touch things that cause pain. And you think that hot stoves, fire, etc cause pain. But what if people show you the trick to walking over hot coals? Then you are able to touch an object that you previously would not have. Not because your list of items that cause pain has changed, but because you developed a deeper understanding of WHY they caused pain, and adjust your algorithm to take that into account. You now are thinking about HOW you are touching an object, and not just about the object itself.

To me, this is a clear, meaningful difference.
We're not talking about semantics, we're talking about a fundamental adjustment to the questions and processes you go through before making a decision.
You should check out the Alberta employment standards office. It's goes the same for non-compete agreements, which are also hard to enforce north of the 49th.
I still have that recurring dream that I've entirely forgotten about some college class, panicking, certain to fail and not graduate. Then I wake up to realize, "I'm not in school. Awesome!"

In the same vein, rich people are collectively waking up from this recession to realize, "Ha Ha! I'm still so loaded even my kids will never figure out how to spend it all. Awesome!"

Those people have to put their money somewhere. Wall Street is a decidedly less interesting choice these days.
Simple formula:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Cos(theta)+%2B+Cos(2*th...
Hey, I think I "called" this a few days back... yep: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2199498

This little bit of successful nerd prognostication cheers me up more than perhaps it should, but oh well.
Back when I entered Caltech, someone mentioned what Feynman's salary was. (Feynman was a prof at Caltech.) I stupidly said I thought his salary was outrageously high. I was pointedly told that Feynman was worth far more than his salary simply to have his name listed as being on the staff (bringing interest, credibility, and donations to Caltech).

And, of course, Feynman being Feynman he did infinitely more than just have his name on the roster. Only his tragic demise was able to stop him.

Any company would be out of their freakin' minds to pass up any opportunity to hire Feynman.

I'd "interview" him for the opportunity to spend an hour with him, not that there's any chance in hell I'd say "no hire".

As for his position and job at the company, who cares. Whatever he wants.
tldr version: i switched jobs because i wasn't passionate about it. i became passionate with some other passionate people and we achieved our own measure of amazing success.
Thanks for listening to our requests!
Ask HN: How can I stop getting spam SMS?
I keep getting spam SMS messages. This drives me nuts, because 1) I'm being charged for those and 2) the carrier doesn't provide a spam filter or let me provide my own.

I'm pretty sure that those two things are related.

Does anybody know a solution for this, or do I just have to hope I can start a movement and yell loud enough to get them to fix it?
As nolok mentioned, the blocking in Chrome takes place on the client side. We're looking at adding block links to Google's search results along with server-side code (which would let your blocks work on any computer you logged in on, for example), but that code takes longer to write and test than the Chrome extension.
How is it possible for Apple to patent Natural Language based filtering?
That's what I wound up doing when it got really bad. I found the easiest way I could complain (I think a web form at the time) and sent them all the details each time.
SpotCloud Launches Commodity-Style Marketplace for Cloud Computing Capacity
I'm going to try it first thing. I hope all of my Chrome instances sync the block entries.
Data Portability Will Keep Your Startup Focused
Yeah, and the brain is nothing more than a bunch of atoms. Nobody is aware that you can make every single thing sound unimpressive by brutally reducing it to its components, and nobody has used that trick before! Way to go, Chomsky. Insightful as a twelve year old.
Congrats on taking the leap.

Having worked on startups with co founders and currently as a soloist here are a couple of tips that may be of use;

Investigate your Market size and typical search traffic thoroughly.

Begin your seo campaign as early as possible, now would be great, if your new to this ping me a mail and I will point you to some good starting points and resources.

Be very selective with your choice of co-founder and try to avoid the attraction of teaming up with business people who promise the world, absolutely demand a track record.

Finally, have fun, build something that interests you, there is nothing worse than having to drag yourself to a pc for a project your not enthused by.

Good luck.
Not sure if I agree with this article. None of the LA companies he mentions have been home runs or anything even close. And NYC is a different story altogether - there's one VC (USV) basically trying to run the entire show, with a supporting cast here and there and even their biggest "success" to date (Twitter) is really based in Northern California. Other companies like 4square are proving to be succesful, but even they finally had to open operations in the SF/Valley area because they couldn't get enough talent in NYC, and ones like drop.io flopped cause they just couldn't get traction despite having a talented team.

I think when it comes to developing pure tech companies - like hardware (although that's moving to Asia, except for "Design") and hardcore software, the Valley will always be the place for those companies.
Places like LA/NYC, etc. will use this technology to enhance whatever industries are a dominant part of their respective economies.

I say this living in the NYC metropolitan area. Personally I would love to see the Wall Streeters vanish and be replaced by tech companies doing cool, interesting stuff. But I know it won't happen.
I paid $10, and then never listened to it.

I still haven't, actually.
Watson vs. Humans: Buzzer-Beating and Daily Doubles May Loom Large
about.com actually has some interesting information from time to time.

Secondly, the first link that appears for me when you search for experts-exchange is wikipedia.
Austin has a great tech scene in general, and the city is great in so many other ways. Come on down. :-)
The two main arguments for why these articles should not be deleted are:

1) The languages exist, are supported, and are used by many users

2) There are other bad articles on wikipedia

Both of these are, unfortunately, terrible arguments.

In response to the first argument:

Wikipedia's rules state that for an article to exist, it must be proven notable by certain types of accepted references. That does not include tutorials, blog posts, software's official website, or questions on support websites/forums. These rules are unfortunate, and have been sources of much arguing, but they still stand.

We, as programmers, get upset when information that is useful to us is removed. The rules exist for a reason, though; one place where they are often enforced is the addition of video game articles. There are hundreds of thousands of video games with significant user bases. Wikipedia has made it a point that it does not intend to be a catalog of software that exists, and for that reason video game articles are deleted often. In order for software to legitimately qualify for an article, it must be significantly, demonstrably important. Existence and popularity is not enough.

In response to the second type of argument: existence of violations does not justify other violations. If don't think the blue slime from Dragon Warrior deserves its own wikipedia page, mark it for deletion and argue your point, but don't reference it as why your bad article with weak references should remain.

Wikipedia has a LOT of articles that are against its rules. We have become used to these, and depend on them, so we get upset when the rules are enforced. Have a look at the actual rules and I'll bet you can identify plenty of articles you have read that are in violation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not
Chris, I'm from around the HSV area, if you want, shoot me an email (In my profile) and we can grab lunch sometime.
Apple's new MobileMe cloud will rely on self-storage for streaming - RUMOR
One of the powerful features of wikipedia vs. topic specific wikis is the ability to spend literally hours bouncing around seemingly disconnected subjects, learning something new at each new node. You can start at Naruto and end up at African tribal weapons in a sequence of incredibly smooth segues that can consume literally hours of time. Almost everybody who does this describes the experience as "pleasant" or "amazing" and all come away having learned something.

A walled off wiki simply doesn't allow this type of holistic discovery. And in many cases, the boundaries between subjects can seem rather arbitrary and fuzzy. Where does Naruto end and Feudal Japan start?
http://www.data.gov/communities/node/116/apps - the data integration being done here is all driven by semantic web, linked data and RDF.

http://data.gov.uk/apps - same thing here, driven by the semantic web and linked data.
There are a few grease monkey scripts that the same thing. I wrote my own that does this and also fetches more results to fill in the gaps left by the "This site has been blocked" entries, but sadly I forgot to back it up before I upgraded hard drives and wiped the old one.
The other alternative beyond uncertainty is that there is a lack of great entrepreneurs and also prospective employees for them to hire.
What's wrong with about.com?

I generally find about.com has high-quality content giving an overview of a topic, much more in-depth than mahalo or eHow.
A graph of a penis with 9 upvotes. I hope this isn't where HN is going.