skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Microsoft inflates their search share statistics with sites like this: http://www.clubbing.com

Where they bribe people to play games that "search" on Bing in exchange for points they can use to buy things.

Additionally, this site is really easy to automate bots for (there are whole communities that work on this) in order to automate the prize winning process.

Even still, that's all good for Microsoft as far as I can tell, since even playing with bots brings up their share in the search market.
Perhaps a malpractice lawsuit against Winklevi council is next?
Well the only successful strategy is to have a pitch that solves some sort of pain point that they are already having.

One of the hardest things to do is pitch something where the potential partner doesn't see a problem. And by 'a problem' here I mean 'is causing pain at the moment.'

You can tell a company until you are blue in the face that you will get them more leads, cut their operational costs, or streamline the experience the customers have when they deal with them. But unless the company 'doesn't have enough leads', 'has a problem with current operational costs', or 'has customers complaining about their interaction', all you will get is a thank you for sharing and nary a call back.

The fact is that the larger a business is, the more averse to changing they are. The reasoning is pretty simple, most larger businesses both don't know all of the variables that are going into their costs and customer experience, and they know they don't know all of the variables. Thus, if the system they are using is working for them (for their definition of working, not yours) then they won't change it. All they see is downside (change makes things worse), and little upside.

The only successful strategy that I have seen work with these folks is to find a way they can somehow canary your product with their own real data but without changing anything they currently have. That may take some extraordinary steps on your part to set up a completely parallel chain, but the payoff is that you can tell your future partner/customer, using their own data, how your change will help them and not hurt their existing system.
Other than the political stuff, what is the difference between Pentadactyl and Vimperator? I've been using V on one computer and P on another, and haven't really noticed a difference.
That's an interesting idea, but there seems like there would be a tremendous amount of complexity in encoding how the various strokes or components fit together. In English, there are twenty-six letters that fit together in one linear order, delimited by spaces and a few punctuation marks. How would you write that "down-and-to-the-left diagonal stroke meets unfilled square somewhat above the midpoint of that square's right-hand side?"
Twitter is beyond the scale of most businesses. This -- whether Scala or Java or PhP or RonR or Python -- is the best choice for our code base generating millions of hits per day is a problem many of us would love to have!
See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5QSclrIdlE , which is actually a product that you can buy, though I think it was never localized for the US.

Edit: Also, http://johnnylee.net/projects/wii/ , under "Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the Wii Remote" (down a bit).

(Also, to be clear, I just mean these as interesting "see alsos". I am not saying "it's been done" (so what?) or "it doesn't work" (I have no direct experience to make a judgment). Nor am I saying anyone accused me otherwise. The iPad is still a potential interesting sweet spot for this tech.)
FWIW, I'm already liking not seeing the score of comments. I can see how it really contributes to the discussion. Maybe do a poll later to vote for which changes should stick around?
Firefox 4 is incredible, it's finally on par with Chrome but with all the great addons. Tons of people still use Firefox.
I think the point is not to write for what users want. You should write based on what your personal opinions are. That way we get more new and interesting opinions.
Comments with <1 points should be ignored, and an adjusted score should be calculated thus:

adjusted_score = ln(square(upvotes - downvotes + 1))

This way, all comments/posts that generate some goodwill are rewarded, and the incentive not to post for fear of hurting the average is removed.

And the log will frustrate karma whores b/c they won't be able to separate themselves from the pack as easily.

Also I think some measure of how controversial a comment/post is would be useful, since it would help find interesting areas where the community is in disagreement.
I believe 'ff' was referring to FriendFeed not FireFox.
PageRank in theory relates to how well my site ranks. Does having high karma make my comments float to the top? Or show up in a bolder font?
Manchester United vs Chelsea 12h April 2011 - highlights | Footy Station
Yahoo is just bing search, so they're combined I assume.
If you're looking for a miso-like api but for cinema check-ins and local movie recommendations try this: http://filmaster.org/display/DEV/API (the project is open source, btw)
Winklevoss lose; get 65m.
Drawing Entrepreneurs to Canada: Entrepreneur Visas
Game changer. This will become a standard part of tablets/phones of the future. Cameras will become optimized to efficiently provide this support, ala Kinect.

I'm happily impressed.
cheap vacation, Northern Europe. Google 87%. Bing 10%. Yahoo 3% (the site has a huge amount of Explorer users).
I think his point was that this exploit was done outside of a browser sandbox, which places it in a whole new category of security issues.
You could just as easily say this is microsofts fault for not applying stricter policies on activex controls within office products.
No, they haven't lost the fight with FB yet, though it looks really grim. They have the option to get an en banc hearing. Unlikely but still possible. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_banc

They can also appeal to the Supreme Court. Again, unlikely but still possible.
One thing that has worked for us is following them around. I mean literally. Find out what conferences the CEO is speaking at and approach them after they get off the stage. Sounds scary-stalkerish but it works. Even if you just get their card and make a quick connection. I've done this before for FeeFighters and gotten many meetings/partnerships out of it.

The other thing is LinkedIn. A warm introduction counts for a lot. Build your network, you never know who might help.
I would expect the most common applicant would be someone with some number of years as a military or civilian test pilot.

On a more startupery/hackerish note have folks been brainstorming what sort of business opportunities there are going to be in a world with space tourists? Clearly souvenir barf bags (joking) but more seriously, perhaps one-off altitude tracking devices, an iPhone app that tells you when you are "in space" or not "in space", an eligible singles who can afford to spend the afternoon visiting space kind of thing.

People will eventually be spending more time in orbit, are there applications there? Zero-g 'flicks' when holding your iPad to make it to do things like move to the next page.
>In college, I never took a course on Compilers or Programming Languages...

>I got the job through a summer internship, which allowed me to bypass the rigorous 8-interviews-in-a-day hiring process. And I lucked out... completely escaped having to code over the phone.

I'm not trying to troll. However, I honestly do consider you landing a Google engineering internship/job with those school background (and zero coding experience outside of school up to that point) being pretty lucky. Consider this guy[1]. I believe he would've most likely gotten the internship had he gone through the same interview process as you. I know that's just my subjective opinion. However, the bottom line is he went through a very different (arguably harder) interview process than you did. It's harder in the sense you could have very well failed had you been asked to code over google doc + phone. The key factor here is this process that Google uses everyday to turn down countless competent but not extraordinary people - you did not have to go through it. That is the basis I deem you lucky.

There is a certain level of respect (among other befits) given to former or current Google engineers among hackers. And I would argue that is the case largely because of the very difficult process that they had to through to become one. I can totally understand why you had the sense of inferiority and insecurity of your coding abilities, having not gone through that process.

Of course none of this makes your point of everyone is good at different things and you should not beat yourself up any less significant. I agree with you on most other points. I'm also happy for you that you've overcome these self defeating thoughts and have proven to yourself. As some one else mentioned in the comments, the problem was you being you own toughest critic.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2384018
Twitter have hard throughput issues that are real engineering problems. 'Fluff' is probably a better term for the cheap and cheerful web sites that Rails is designed to produce than a message handling service on the scale of Twitter.
This isn't a knock against Ruby. Java and Ruby are designed to solve different sorts of problems (though there is a lot of overlap). Twitter is not in the overlapping region.
Maxauthority, the founder of the vimperator project wrote his thoughts comparing the two on vimperator's google code page (http://code.google.com/p/vimperator-labs/wiki/VimperatorVsPe...)
In general, it isn't much different, however, since vimperator version 3 it will start being much more different as vimperator is now trying to make the user interface as intuitive as possible while keeping the awesome modal controls from vim where as pentadactyl will still try to conform to vim.
Check out vimperator 3's design goals: http://code.google.com/p/vimperator-labs/wiki/Vimperator3Des...
I second this. It baffles me when I see an article with 100+ karma and 5 comments. How can something be so interesting and yet spawn so little discussion? It makes no sense.
I still think it was dumb for Yahoo! to abandon GeoCities!
thanks, i meant something like this from chc link:

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

except the phonetic method you describe, you may enter graphical parts of symbols. so i thought unicode should encode these parts. but there are more than one shape-based method, along with several phonetic methods, so they encode all the possible ideograms, making the unicode chart that big
The story does not say whether their previous settlement with Facebook is still valid. Is it still valid?
http://kotaku.com/#!5541044/looksleys-line-up-micro+review-b...

Looks like it did come out in the US, although from the review it looks like we might not have heard about it because the effect just didn't work well enough.

Maybe this implementation will deliver? It looks fairly promising, and the effect looks like it might be more pronounced on the (compared to the DSi) large screen of the iPad. Of course, I'd like to pass judgement on it personally, so here's hoping for a demo we can hold in our hands soon.
It's starting to feel like the future.
You can even set up an autocommand to auto enable pass through mode for specific websites and disable it when you move away from the page.
au LocationChange .* js modes.passAllKeys = /mail.google\.com/.test(buffer.URL) | /google\.com\/reader/.test(buffer.URL)

that created an autocommand based on the LocationChange event which is run against all websites and then it sets the modes.passAllKeys property to true if the url of the buffer matches that of the regex.
Would they even get a better settlement this time round? Do they have legitimate claims on an gains Facebook has made since the last settlement?
Best quote:

“Frankly, I am quite incredulous that they’re continuing to pursue the matter,” (Prof. Goldman) said. “I think they would be a lot happier and wealthier if they would take that money and invest it in their therapist.”
it's implemented in several ways, i am late as always :)

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

(thanks chc for the link)
ffmpeg is patent encumbered. If "just ship ffmpeg" were an option, then this wouldn't be an issue in the first place.
A survey about lying to your customers
Previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=992218

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1374635
Yeah, I really miss being able to scan for high-point comments already. I've only spent about 15 minutes on HN with the new changes, and I've already basically started ignoring entire pages of comments because they'd take too long to sift through to find the insightful stuff.
Thanks. My idea. I wanted a way to measure my effectiveness directly.
This seems like a big deal even if it didn't work in the previous attempts. In part because I feel like it eventually will work.

I'm excited and impressed by it. Although I do get a little disappointment that I didn't think of it. What the heck is my brain doing in my free time?!
Why the United States Is destroying its education system
"They're talking about how Google funnels 88% of its non-US revenue (which totals $12.5B) through its Dublin subsidiary to reduce their tax burden."

Please stop using the phrase "tax burden". It's loaded language and not-so-subtly encourages a biased interpretation. It would be like saying "tax opportunity"; i.e., "an opportunity to pay tax".
Does anyone know what the copyright status would be on these designs? Some of them would make excellent T-shirts
I feel I have to contribute a sob story from my younger days, which is peripherally related, but may have some relevance. This was back when applications were largely desktop based.

1.) See gap in market where the existing software is limited in functionality and difficult to use

2.) Develop software where everyone who uses it thinks it's amazing, easy to use, intuitive etc.

3.) Discover that although everyone loves it, it's really hard to market against the entrenched incumbents

4.) We got a salesperson in who after seeing the product agreed to being paid on an if-and-when the product succeeds basis

5.) Started looking for synergies and partnerships to help market it. Our salesperson had a lot of industry contacts and he used them to find out who the best people were to talk to at various organisations. He also managed to get introductions to some people. Other companies he found out who to approach just by doing some basic research, calling the company and asking around etc.

6.) Found an appropriate partner with huge customer base who was interested in providing it to their users

7.) They show interest, get NDA, legal agreement etc. drawn up, start negotiating

8.) Spend months demoing product, negotiating, graduating into meetings with increasingly senior staff etc.

9.) The main person we were dealing with is replaced with someone else, things go very quiet for a while

10.) After much deliberating be told that they've decided that the product wouldn't provide sufficient benefit for their users so they've decided not to go ahead

11.) Watch them launch a grossly inferior clone of your product a year later and win sweeping accolades

12.) Lawyer tells you initial legal agreement isn't worth paper it's written on

Then we considered open sourcing the product, but it turned out to be a nightmare because we'd used so many 3rd party components that it would've require huge amounts of work to get to a point where we could do so and we'd poured too much time and effort into it already.

As you can see, plenty of mistakes were made. I learnt a lot in the process though. I don't regret a moment of it.
You can try Everbank www.everbank.com , which has World Currency accounts. It is a US-based bank, but you can have a Euro account, from which you can do wire transfers to Europe. Their conversion rates are good.
ITAR basically sets the restrictions for who can use things that are on the Munitions List. That includes rockets, satellites, sensitive data etc. That's in addition to the usual missiles and bombs and whatnot.
SSL and the Future of Authenticity
NASA has carried up at least a dozen foreign citizens over the years on various shuttle missions.
This could be extended with eye tracking to create even more impressive functions.
Props to Judge John Kane. Take that, trolls!
I manage a site with 61.92% of users using Internet Explorer

Google = 92.66%
Bing = 3.65%
Yahoo = 2.03%
This is pretty amazing. I think that this coupled with multi-touch interactivity could be pretty revolutionary. It turns the iPad into an "iWindow".
Is this more or less what the new nintendo handheld does? How do they differ if not?
Is there a name or model of this phone? I can't tell from the video...
Once you increase the scale sufficiently, it's more cost effective to hire a team that makes the code run faster rather than add large expensive servers. This is what's happening now at Twitter.

It's not that Java is now absolutely 100% better than Ruby on Rails, it's just that Java is better for a site of that scale.
This Time, You’ll Learn Node.js | Nettuts+
Actually, it wasn't the op-ed that occasioned the response, the Republicans launched their request prior to the publication of the op-ed.

It was in respones to this blog post: http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/15/alec/ about the The American Legislative Exchange Council.
The 3DS screen is closer to one of those lenticular "3d" things you'd see on a ruler or a bookmark as a kid. It uses two interlaced images that are fed to each eye separately. The iPad 2 screen is just a normal screen.

http://loot-ninja.com/2010/06/22/how-the-nintendo-3ds-screen...

Basically, the iPad 2 demo only gives the illusion of being 3D when you move it, but since your head and hands are pretty much constantly moving it should look "mostly 3D" if it has enough sensitivity.
My guess is that touchpad-style inputs would have won out over keyboards.
Actually a high ratio of comments to upvotes is a bad sign. That usually means there's some kind of religious argument going on.
Start-ups Rejected By Y Combinator (And Investors) Flock To YC Reject
Edit: title
Yep. Ruby on Rails: suitable for apps with less than 1 billion queries per day.
I wonder what happens when several people try and look over your shoulder. How does it handle multiple heads?
So this is "3d" now? Wow, I've got a lot of cool stuff that is 3d, including a prototype compiz plugin that does roughly the same thing. Gives you spatial context for windows on your desktop environment via Kinect and OpenCL.

I had no idea I could get away with calling this "3d", and have people in the comments thinking it's the same technology as the 3ds.
high point things usually float to the top.
Let me first say that Haskell is extremely cool and every developer should experiment with it. Laziness supports beautiful/declarative expression of programs, and there are some useful ways of structuring programs (e.g., operating over lazy lists) that are far more natural in Haskell than OCaml.

However, for some programs, having a type-system that is fussy about side-effects imposes a significant effort burden for a meager correctness payoff. (For other programs, this bean counting is a huge win.) Also, I find it tricky to reason about the performance of lazy programs.

OCaml (and presumably SML) hit a practical sweet-spot in the statically-typed functional programming world.
I'm pretty sure that the 3DS isn't doing any head tracking. If you move your head much at all the 3D effect breaks; you have to be looking practically dead at it.
Here is an idea. Individual karma scores, no matter how they are scored, will create certain kinds of incentives. What if you create a global karma score for the entire site, which is an aggregate of all user activity? Posting, commenting, voting, would all not only be scored for each user individually, but for the site overall, or perhaps in the future topic categories could either be teased out by hand, or assigned using some NLP technique like LDA, and each topic could have a score.
It would at least be interesting to see the health of hacker news on a 0-1 scale somewhere on the top menu bar, and maybe some little stats behind the score to help illustrate the thought process behind the score.
You could use cosine distance for each posting from the n highest scoring posts, and take the inverse of the sum of the distances to score a potential for each post. The sum of all the potentials of all postings within a certain time period, taken as a ratio over a trailing average potential over a longer period would a an interesting way to possibly get a view into how diverse and how high quality each posting tends to be.

A sitewide score would also allow you to make each user's score be a weighted combination of individual score and their contribution to the whole. Consider it a form of shared fitness.
hiring processes depend a lot on luck, way more than maybe we'd like to think, mostly based on who you know and whether the person across the table 'likes' you or not, and what positions are available. but she succeeded in the real world internship position she held and did good enough work that other people vouched for her to become an employee. that probably wasn't a 'lucky break' at all.
Sony also dismissed the case against the rest of the defendants (f0f members included). It looked like Sony didn't bother to go after any defendant but geohot after they filed the case. However, SCEE is still suing Alexander Egorenkov (graf_chokolo) in Germany to the tune of 1,000,000 Euro.
Why doesn't anyone look at the extrovert/introvert question here? Its soooo much easier for an introvert to post on their own wall "Oh the new Tron was really cool" and then when other introverts meet them in meatspace to talk about how cool Tron was (or wasn't). Whereas those same two introverts in the same room at the same table sharing a meal might not be able (or willing) to surface both that they had watched Tron and they thought it was cool. Because, as introverts, they have an inner fear that if they thought it was cool and the other person didn't they would be negatively judged and things would become awkward.

So from the introvert's perspective I'm sure that Facebook and Twitter has greatly expanded the topics that they discuss with their introvert friends in 'real' life.

That being said, I recognize that intro->extro is a spectrum and I don't claim that folks who consider themselves introverts don't spontaneously start opinion based conversations, I only claim that having established a-priori the opinion space of the other person makes it easier for introverts.
That doesn't really matter. There's basically no usability difference between:

"You need to install plugin X to view this video."

"You need to install QuickTime Component X to view this video."

"You need to install third-party Firefox codec X to view this video."

Except that the third piece of software likely won't exist, and Mozilla might not even let it exist.

If browser vendors make it hard to install and use a codec for patent-encumbered formats like H.264, that will only prolong the use of even worse plugins like Flash for the purpose of playing H.264 videos.
Did someone else already do this? I could have sworn I read about this in 4-Hour Work Week (not Ferris, but someone he mentions).
Start your pitch to the producers not the management. If you're pitching a hospital talk to the doctors/nurses. Bankers for a bank, and associates for a law firm. Don't ask for management or the person in charge. I've dealt with a lot of organizations at a high level. Trying to jump in line and go straight for the CEO will get you lost in the noise. The bosses are already bombarded with requests promising everything.

You need at least one good producer to back you. These people are a lot easier to reach. They aren't usually sold too, and generally are closer to the pain points ("pain points" flow downhill). Once you have someone on the inside to vouch for the idea, then start moving up the chain.