skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, question: do you think that having a data plan makes you more or less efficient? When I used to have a data plan, I found that I could stay up to date with real-time information on the go. So, at first I thought it was a productivity tool. But over time, I found that I spent more time checking email, because I was checking it more frequently. Instead of just going to my inbox once every couple of hours and cleaning everything in one-fell swoop quickly, with a data plan, I would be checking my email all the time, and on a mobile device it's a much slower process to clean up an inbox. I've since gotten rid of my data plan, and honestly, given the inefficiencies of my constant email/twitter/fb-checking, I don't think it's worth my time to go back for the purpose of staying on top of things. That said, what I do miss is the ability to effectively have a GPS on the go. Thoughts?
Looking through this list of larger sites that dropped, I see one that is similar to the sites I'm talking about, so more people might be able to say what happened: findarticles.com. I have no relation to this site (it is actually a competitor), but I believe the vast majority of its content is licensed versions of articles published by real books, magazines, and newspapers (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/an_1/?browse=A&tag=co...). It seems to have dropped just as much as content mills with low quality articles, such as ezinearticles.com or articlesbase.com. It is possible that I don't know something about findarticles, but this makes it appear like this algorithm change is looking at some superficial common factors and is unable to really distinguish high quality sites from low quality sites.
So I'm not too sure, as I've only had it for a few days, but I already check fb/twitter/email WAY too often on my laptop, so I am sort of concerned about that. I haven't been checking email on my phone too much though, and I'm trying not to let it affect my habits too much, except for the added convenience of being able to look stuff up / post to twitter / share photos, etc. I'm very hesitant to allow push notifications for email, fb, etc.
I really don't get much utility out of Mahalo, but why would it drop in this algorithm change? Isn't the site like a wikipedia for search results?
Far more poignant in Buffet's case given his age and the length of time he's been in the game, and the sheer financial impact he has on the country. He's not a paper tiger.

Mr. Zuckerberg is exceptionally wealthy for his age, but he's young, and it's all based on a single assett. So while not judging, let's hold off on comparing the two for a couple of decades at least.
Yep. I am a happy Prime user; since getting it my Amazon purchasing has risen dramatically, stuff I would go elsewhere for I get from Amazon.

I've toyed with getting a Kindle, but while I would buy the books I don't really want to shell out on the Kindle and not like the feel of it....

So from my perspective this would be killer.
Thanks for the kind words! Flickr is definitely on the short list of sources to add!
Making some enemies: Google "common lisp" and you will find that link in the first page of results.
In a general programming languages forum this could be maybe ok.
But having this in the first page of HN (known for having some familiarity with CL) strikes as something superficial to me.
Brilliant and Congrats... I am going to try out the app today :)
Did you know that two-day shipping is Amazons' default mode of operation in Germany and Amazon Prime gets you overnight shipping there?
Can't buy German Kindle books yet, though.

(I guess this is true for other 'small' countries, too)
Cover letters are a great way to stand out from the crowd.

Most resumes I see don't have them, and a good portion of those that do have a generic 'I want to work for <insert_company_name> and I'm sure I'm a good fit' boiler plate.

Give me some indication that you have studied the company web site, thought about the position and you'd probably get the interview with the cover letter alone.
What they most likely meant was: "This increases the probability that you may have to support yourself working at 7-11".
My university tried this and got sued for it. These things are not yet ready for prime time because they are not accessible enough for those with disabilities.

here is the results of the court case: http://www.ada.gov/case_western_univ.htm
I'm not sure what you're getting at by pointing out this obvious difference. Could you elaborate?
He made a robot elephant, in 1949
CPython aren't actually using unicode strings. Instead of having a sequence of codepoints, you will have either UCS2 or UCS4 strings depending on compile time options.

For example, freshly installed python3.2 from macports:

>>> len(chr(119074))
2
>>> chr(119074)
'𝄢'
>>> print chr(119074)
𝄢

(Surrogates are so much fun).

Python 2.7.1 compiled with UCS4:

>>> len(unichr(119074))
1
>>> unichr(119074)
u'\U0001d122'
>>> print(chr(119074))
𝄢

Notice the capital U takes 8 instead of 4 hexidecimals.
Is God a Delusion? Probably Yes …
SLAP THE REALITY’s IGNORANCE SHEEP HERD
Making money on the device directly is simple: You charge more for it. Keeping in mind that Amazon makes a pretty good margin on the content it sells with negligible infrastructure requirements (the kindle infrastructure would be negligible compared to the rest of Amazon.com + AWS), they don't need to make money on the device itself.

The company that uses the revenue model of making money of the device and selling the content for a negligible profit is Apple. That's how they run the iPod department for one. Devices are sold at a high margin but almost all the revenue for itunes sales go to the content providers.
Who invented Amazon prime?
I like Python's approach. Anything null, zero, or "empty" is false (+ False of course), but it won't do any type conversion, so you don't get cases like "0" being true.

Edit: though I wish the standard library used its configurable truthiness a little more. I'd like a closed filehandle to evaluate to False, for instance.
I would be interested in the flip side. Which sites stand to gain from the algorithm changes? Wikipedia? Stack Overflow? Yelp?
Good point. The Mac Pro is definitely a computer, but it is the exception. The iMac, MacBook + Pro + Air, and Mini are not like that.
A long time ago I convinced or at least started the ball rolling on getting coroutines added to node.js. Now when they finally were added, it was done in what I would call a very wrong fashion. Coroutines could have events pushed to them without being yielded to (there needs to be a guard). Of course the reentry issue is just as bad as the one being solved so I think it was written off as a horrible idea and never returned to.

Of course, it didn't have to be that way if they had proper event triggering semantics. I find very little hope of the community returning to this issue though. Not that it's the only way to solve things... but it would have been a nice balance IMO. (and I still hold that coroutines can be done cheaply... at least as cheaply as event sources if not more)

(Update: to clarify on proper coroutines on node, each needs to be able to iterate on an independent tick loop rather than allow preemption from EventEmitter#emit)
I did some casual analysis of data I collected for a small set of queries, and the exact opposite seems to be true - eHow saw substantial increases on many queries following the update. It's possible that this is because smaller sites above it were wiped out in the update, and my set of queries is very small - but it's clear that they weren't hit negatively.

This update seemed to have a much larger impact on user generated article directories than it did the new-wave content farms like eHow. That ezinearticles and Hubpages finally got hit doesn't surprise me much, because they are frequently exploited as a source for followed links by site owners.
FratMusic Redesign
> Northern Europe has roughly the same population as the US.

Where do you get this number from? Looking at the definition of NE on Wikipedia, even if we include GB and Ireland we get roughly 100 million people. If we don't the number is closer to 30 million. The second number should be closer to your definition of NE considering your comment

> the (relatively) content societies of contemporary northern Europe

So NE has roughly 1/10th the population of USA, so if you are going to compare USA to NE you have to compare it per capita. I don't know about innovation per capita but with the exception of California I doubt there is a big difference, and the only reason California has a greater amount of innovation is cause of the anomaly called Silicon Valley.

Feel free to prove me wrong by getting the innovation numbers per capita during the Cold War. I wouldn't be surprised if Northern Europe would beat USA when population is considered, especially if you do not include former nations of the Soviet Union.
I believe it uses Mochiweb, a well-established Erlang HTTP server. I could be wrong though, as it's been awhile since I messed with Zotonic.
Thanks for sharing the update! Perhaps scrolling the screen up and down a few zillion times will serve as a virtual means to rub up against you and hopefully have some of the "luck"* rub off on me. I've also been enjoying stuff on Violent Acres (clicky: http://www.violentacres.com/ -- also tripped across via HN just yesterday). Somewhere on there, she talks about voluntarily going homeless so she could pay off her credit card debt. Such stories are encouraging to hear at the moment, given how much I would like to just walk away from my current situation.

Peace and good journey.

* that you clearly made for yourself.
my problem with eHow is that it's very common to search for: "how to do X"

And get Google results with eHow as #1 with title: "How to do X"

And when you click it, you get..."you can't do X"

When in reality you actually can do X...all you have to do is hit #2 result for a forum to find out how.

Granted these were usually automotive questions...but still...the fact that eHow outranks legitimate sources with BS 1 paragraph of wordy text should qualify for penalizing them in the rankings.
Yet another great reason to use DDG. Similarly, Gandi's support of Debian is a major reason I use them for all of my domain registrations.
I wouldn't've clicked if I hadn't understood it that way - I don't really care about the sites that dropped, but I know Quora has decent content and if it was the most penalized, that's a huge problem with those Google changes!
There've been a lot of updates and additions at Cliki lately, especially from Vladimir Sedach.
What a nice populist sentiment. Also: Completely and utterly wrong.

The guy who took the video doesn’t mention his iPhone anywhere, not in the title, not in the video description.
>From an economic standpoint, it will encourage hoarding.

You cannot eat bitcoins, nor do they cure illness, provide you with electricity or any of the other things you want (you in the abstract).

It is true that deflation encourage people to hoard more so than does inflation but you are ignoring things like the future value of money (a dollar today is better than a dollar a week from now) as well as peoples tendency to value the things they buy more than the money they give for them (otherwise, why buy it in the first place).

Finally deflation would enable investors to wait out bad times, hopefully killing the bubbles that crop up whenever the market can't sustain the required investments.

If you still don't believe me, consider this: in the middle to late 1990ies people new that computers would get obsolete very fast and that the expensive computer today could be had for less not long in the future, but the value of having a computer today was better than paying less for a new one tomorrow.
Amazon already has Kindle subscriptions for a lot of newspapers. Not just ones with national appeal like the New York Times, but ones like the Atlanta Journal Constitution, St. Petersburg Times, and San Jose Mercury News. Overall they have 160 papers worldwide, with 97 of those in the US.

http://amzn.to/fVMoIU
The specific device is irrelevant and so is your question.

The headline “Smartphone Films Final Discovery Launch From 30,000 Feet Up” would be just as good but complaining about the additional (albeit irrelevant) information in the real headline seems just strange.

The information in the headline that this was taken by a smartphone is certainly valuable – you immediately know that this is not about professional video footage for example from a NASA plane but amateur footage taken from a commercial airliner which is a lot cooler.

Does it really annoy you and all the people who upvoted you so much that the writer of the headline (not even the guy who took and published the video) went that small extra step and mentioned the specific model of the device used to capture the video and not just the general category? Why exactly?
Super Mario Brothers GameBoy (and all GameBoy games) ported to HTML5
Why? Because it's a buzzword now, that's why.
The parent link is Super Mario Bros running fullscreen. It runs best in FF4, the audio in Chrome can be a little choppy. It will suck in FF3.6 and everything else, probably. It uses the (very) experiemental Web Audio API in webkit and the Audio Data API in FF4; it has a fallback to standard HTML5 Audio(), which has known performance issues everywhere.

You can view the full emulator here: http://www.grantgalitz.org/gameboy/

It's all on github: https://github.com/grantgalitz/GameBoy-Online

And a few other ROMS are available for play now:

* http://www.grantgalitz.org/zelda/

* http://www.grantgalitz.org/pokemon/
Why does CMYK matter for websites? Are they printed that often?
Great questions. Thank you VERY much. :)
You can ignore it, you can say it is weak, you can say the iPad will crush all comers, but there is competition now. Both in quality and commerically.

Of course, as always, it is hard to get a man to understand something when his job requires that he does not. For example, where are all these bad reviews for the Xoom? Most put it a bit below the iPad.
1. I think if you are an entrepreneur and you skip angel list that you are stupid. Not sure how you make the logic jump from that statement over to "taking money from OATV makes you stupid."

Obviously OATV is a fine firm, and taking money from them is great. It's ignoring Angel List that would be stupid.

And certainly it's stupid for OATV to ignore/block out angel list... that's sort of the point of my calling out Bryce. Who in their right mind would block a potential deal and information source!??!!? That's just idiotic... and I know Bryce isn't an idiot.

Thus my conclusion that Bryce is grandstanding for attention..... mission accomplished!

2. Naval does a light screen and "short circulation" from what i understand. This means he'll send a deal to < 10 folks to see if it's get traction before blasting everyone. So, it's sort of two-layer filtering I guess.

You won't see bad, or un-fundable, companies on angel list. However, you will see a range of weak to strong ones.
eHow actually improved in the rankings. eHow is usually decent enough relative to the internet. Search for how to change your car's oil and you can find a helpful article that includes video from eHow, for example.

I know there is loads of crap out there, but I'm a bit confused by the overall attitude towards user written articles. It seems like a baby with the bathwater approach.

The same people most against articles sites, don't seem to have a problem with search results full of crappy youtube vids, yahoo answers, amazon and other shopping, twitter gibberish, and whatever else that isn't exactly Pulitzer Prize winning content.
because...

The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion - Larry Ellison
This is a great example of something that has perplexed me for a long time in my own businesses:

How do you drastically lower the price of something (or make it free) without pissing off all the previous customers?
I'd say that's pretty dependent upon one's definition of "good management". Not running the company in the ground is merely acceptable. Looting the company and distancing yourself from the people that sustain your lofty position while not running the company in the ground still seems pretty crap to me compared to engaging your employees directly and keeping your consumption (read salary) in line with the rest of the company while not running said company in the ground. YMMV
Turtle GPS
The author is absolutely correct in regards to his central thesis: Apple's iPad has got the market cornered.

However, he builds so many little strawmen that I fear that argument will be lost. For example, there is competition. The Xoom is competition. Apparently, it's pretty good, too. No, it won't beat the iPad, but it's there. It's good. We've yet to see how well it does, even.

Who knows what will be a real threat to the iPad–it probably won't be Android; the iPad is not fungible (just like the iPhone has proven not to be). Instead, Android devices will carve out market of their own, and continue to compete against each other.

I wonder if it would take an entirely new OS and an entirely new company to successfully compete. I doubt we see anything soon, but I can only hope. Apple's making me feel more and more walled in, every day, even as I enjoy their products.
If you want some exact tasks that seem to be easier in Scala or Haskell, I think that if you take a truly skilled and experienced programmer in each language most tasks can be accomplished quickly, easily and efficiently. For what it's worth, here are some less deep tasks that seem easier in one language than the other:

Pattern matching/data extraction: Both Haskell and Scala have powerful pattern matching capabilities for extracting data from complex types in a simple and clear fashion. However, do to some of Scala's OO features such as case classes and extractors, elaborate pattern matching can be set up quite elegantly. A good example of this in action is the lift-json library that allows users to query a large JSON object in a variety of ways (LINQ,Xpath,etc) and decompose it swiftly. Haskell's pattern matching is accomplished through it's data constructors. This leads to simpler pattern matching on small structures but can quickly devolve into spaghetti with increasingly complex structures.

2. Laziness:
Haskell wins this round as most of Haskell's types are lazy by default and you have to work hard to make them strict. In Scala, laziness is accomplished through either the Stream type of Collection views. Say for instance you have a 1000 item list, map 2 functions in succession that can't be composited and then return some arbitrary numbers of initial elements (perhaps a convoluted example) this is how you would do it in Haskell (this is not how you should ever write this but say, for the sake of argument you had to):

take 3 $ map (\a -> a * 10)­ $ map (\a -> a+1) [1..]

As you can see, this automatically had to happen lazily as it was performed against an infinite list. Compare the same thing in Scala:

List.range(1,1000000).view.map(_+1).map(_ * 10).take(3).force

For the sake of presentation, we just used a long list for the Scala example. If you want to check the laziness, try do this with the view and force and watch how long it takes. We could have also done this with Streams but we will look at this in the next point.

3. Infinite lists. Once you work with infinite lists in Haskell, you will want to use them all the time. In Haskell you just write, say,

take 3 [1..]

to make an list of all positive integers and take the first 3.

In Scala:

def posints(a:Int): Stream[Int] = a #:: posints(a+1)

posints(1).take(3).force

Now, why these three examples of things easier in one or the other? I think that they exemplify the real difference between Haskell and Scala: In Scala, complex things are easier and easy things are more complex. In Haskell, easy things are easy and complex things are complex. This is, of course, a gross oversimplification and there are many caveats: Haskell does functional stuff easier, Scala does mixed paradigm stuff well, etc. Whatever. Every explanation is an oversimplifcation of something more organic.

I would be happy to post more example of differences between Haskell and Scala. They are both so rad.
Danger of extrapolation: http://xkcd.com/605/
It's not all bad. If you use Linux for example, their use of Flash allows you to use the service.
What should I know about the next 6 months? (Reddit comment)
Wikipedia Goes Royal
DDG did say that after 2011 it would be 10% of income rather than revenue. I assume that's because at this point they are barely breaking even...
It started in the tech circles as a word to describe a remote blackbox service. Now it's become a buzzword and buzzwords sell magazines, seminars, conferences, and contracts. Before cloud, it happened to e-commerce, WWW/Internet, multimedia, digital, robot, and automatic. Right now the meaning of 'cloud' has been blurred but within a few years, it will start to mean something concrete again. Give it a few years to find its niche definition.
I half agree with you. I think everyone loves to hate eHow, but it has its place in answering seemingly common sense questions. For queries like the ones you mentioned, I'd say that Demand Media's usual line about "filling in the gaps" on the web is somewhat true.
My qualm is that eHow often outranks much better content in places where their basic step by step articles don't deserve to be ranked. This is an example I've cited before... the two eHow articles with highly relevant titles don't deserve a spot above the state department's great resource that I see as #3. (Unfortunately, the state.gov site has a crummy title tag that isn't doing it much good.)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=&q=how+to+renew+an+expir...
There are a number of options. Have a look at the comments on the article page where people list a few, like Step and FutureJS.
Amazon has recent movies, though. For example, I watched District 9 through Amazon On Demand in Jan/Feb 2010. That's 5-6 months after it was released.

Most Netflix Streaming titles are something you'd find on VHS in your mom's basement.
Great pointers!

What I really want to include in the nearer future is entity extraction. That means that we could send the text-contents of a document to an entity-extraction service (like OpenCalais) in order to get back a list of entities that are mentioned in the text (that's what documentcloud.org is doing). By doing this, not only our documents could be tagged automatically, but also scenarios like the ones you described are made possible (given that entity-extraction can be performed fast enough). What do you think?

I may get back to you when I start working on it. It's on the queue for sure. :)
That is a good point about the note-taking. I was thinking in context of higher ed, but high school/middle school... maybe it would work.

Although I will say I do remember kids taking notes in pencil in the margins.

Also - two textbooks? seriously? I can't imagine any school springing for that added expense, or even parents for that matter.
Matt, part of our site is a blog-like service. We'd love to have a Google service where we submit the content our users publishing and reject them based on the rating returned.

I'm sure this can also be used for evil purposes by content scrapers, but as a startup with limited resources, an automated (and free :) way to stop such content would be great.
Where to find value in open strategies
In my recent experience with my new Android phone, it's best to get an unlimited plan for the first few weeks or months, when you're playing the most with the App store, downloading and trying lots of apps.

But once that inevitably tapers off, and you find the few you use most often and uninstall the rest, then you should check your data usage again to see if your normal email/etc checking habits use less than the lower tier data plans with quotas, and switch back to one of those if so.