skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know that Bing has "failed" yet, but I highly doubt it'll be anything other than one amongst many in the pack in 5 years.

Microsoft has always been good at the pivotal turnaround. Recognizing when a key moment was on the wind, mustering together a tremendous effort, making a good number of smart decisions and putting out a solid anchor product that (re)cements their position in the industry and reinvigorates the brand in doing so. Windows 95 and Windows 7 are perfect examples. IE4 (yes really), Bing, and Windows Phone 7 are also good examples. One of the big problems with Microsoft is that its organization and its culture are extremely tied to the traditional 3-ish year ship cycle. A hugely successful diving catch every other ship cycle or so is rapidly becoming less and less feasible as a means to hang on to or acquire a market. Microsoft does not seem to get the web at a fundamental level, it doesn't seem to have the capacity to release software at a pace of yearly, monthly, or continuously.

And that will ultimately be the undoing of Bing and the Windows Phone. The only way MS knows how to crank out releases faster is the deathmarch, and that is a certain route to doom.

Worse yet, since Gates left MS has no real technical or managerial leadership, it's bureaucracy all the way up and down. This has been affecting the culture at Microsoft little by little, also partly coupled to the stock price having plateaued. More and more talented devs are finding that MS lacks the excitement and the reward of cutting edge development, so they are moving elsewhere. Also, without that talent around fewer good projects are pushed forward, fewer projects succeed, people become less satisfied with their jobs, etc. (think about the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" only translate the bad stuff, on a corporate level, to hundreds and then thousands of George Bailey's going away). This makes the environment that much less rewarding for everyone else who remains, so yet more people leave. And slowly but surely the creep of a more rigid and bureaucratic corporate culture and organization fills in the gaps left by the people who had the most clout in the company, causing yet more and more talent to evaporate away.

It's a self-reinforcing cycle that will lead to the rapid diminution of the company and its prospects over time and the examples the article provides of the process as it happened at Bing have played out throughout the company. Nobody young with high prospects seriously considers Microsoft as a destination anymore, and increasingly the older devs are either retiring on their massive earnings from the glory days or they're just looking for somewhere else to be that's a better use of their time and talent.

MS continues to make a crap-ton of money from its core products, but it will be institutionally ham-strung in responding to the threats that will steal away that revenue (such as mobile-heritage operating systems). Because those threats will grow at a rate MS is incapable of competing with.
Well, put a magic folder into your magic folder: encfs. ;)
Hedgehog: an embedded Lisp in 20k
>or you are in the process of doing something so important that it requires 100% of your attention (this never happens for more than 10 minutes),

Never worked at something, then realized that 3 hours had gone by? Never happens? Then you are bad at whatever it is you do.

Anyway if it is so important to get your answer within 10 minutes, you should have the cutesy to show up in person and discuss the matter. Email isn't meant to be instant.

Sending an email is a request for the recipients time and frankly you have no right to expect people to give you what it is you request just because you request it.

What an unnecessarily arrogant blogpost.
Well, according to this post, everyone who was technically knowledgeable about Bing has left.

That implies that there will no longer be any relevant technical progress, any more.
I think Dropbox claim they can't see the files you stored unless you share it with someone else or copy it into the public folder.

I think the rest is encrypted using a key generated against your password and they only store the hashed version of your password, which couldn't be used to generate the key.
Clickable: http://pubcentral.net/
I'm not too familiar with the Mechanical Turk in practice, but I expect that ease of management could easily account for a $1.50/hr wage premium.
Yes, we are. This is what gave me the insight I mention above. Our significant words were "women" and "clothing" (we're a women's clothing shopping site) now they say "media wiki" is our most significant...!

Its what leads me to believe Google has almost chalked us down for the wrong set of terms, given that it must have thought Mediawiki was almost a big part of our site.

Theres that and the Mediawiki duplicate pages, too which doesn't help our cause...
Not knowing C is fine, but not having an understanding of the machine you use to make a living, well, you can get away with it, but before i started learning C and reading about low-level issues, i felt like I was cheating.
Thanks, I'm going to head there now!
Middle managers are rewarded for making budget and meeting release dates. Seems good, right?

So they agitate for (wait for it) maximum budget and minimum feature set. So that success is assured and their metric is optimized.

Unfortunately those things are exactly contrary to company goals. Why does this happen?

{opinion} Middle managers are too remote from either customers (financial goals) or top management (company goals). They're in the middle, right? With layers between them and either end.

And when you try to optimize any process with too many degrees of freedom, you have too many variables and get to choose which ones to look at. So middle managers look at their own career and ignore the rest.

My suggestion: line up all middle managers in the parking lot (important), stand at the end of the line, and put one bullet through all of them (optimizes cost in bullets).

If my company Ever has middle managers, its time to call it quits.
You're right. Ideally, people should be rewarded for the actual results they get, not for the amount of work they appear to have put in it.

A guy who would on the surface do very little yet gets excellent results, should be appreciated more than somebody who appears to do a lot of work yet has no end results to brag about.
Solar system (SWF)
That's a sad social status quo.
http://less-everything.pissedconsumer.com/less-everything-s-...
For some reason, Prezi has been really widespread at humanities venues since 2009 or so, especially any sort of computer/media/digital-oriented areas of the humanities. But, I've never seen it used at a CS conference.
Well, I've worked for 1 year at HP phone support, especially on tapes.

I assure you that tapes fail all the time. Their mechanical nature and the strain on their delicate components make them susceptible to failure.

EDIT: Unless you're talking about high end like Ultrium. In that case, it's solid. But then much slower, more expensive than a same size hard drive.
Fair point, although with email we're talking (for the majority of users) about huge companies which will almost certainly linger.
Even Jon Skeet cannot parse HTML using regular expressions.
I think in the long run for such amounts of storage Tape Libraries would be the cheapest solution (in terms of cost per GB and management)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_library
Last YouTube sensation: "kirstendirksen", videographer of tiny houses
"You can afford to spend 30 seconds every 10 minutes to deal with emails."

As others have mentioned, this would destroy programmer productivity and flow.

It seems the author is picturing a scenario where you can just read an email and fire off an answer. In my case, an email may require an hour of research or a day of work to answer. If I'm already working on something, just having the new task mentally on my stack is going to distract me from my current task and thus delay me getting to the new one. Or else I'll switch to the new one and completely lose my place in the current one.

Infrequent email checking is much better for my productivity.
I just skimmed the article: did the guy do this? It would make sense, or at least be an "easy fix" to disable a host_id if it's seen twice and alert the user to what's going on.
It should not be
The real benefit is that a more casual and honest environment is created at the conference.

At the typical sterile, corporate, business casual conference in my field (finance), there is a particular very boring code of behavior. There will be very little honesty - if you think a product sucks, or you think the industry is broken, you'll keep it to yourself. The guy from Morgan Stanley will never ever disagree with John Mack .

From LessConf's advertisements, I get the impression that their conference is more honest and more fun. The guy from Google might even disagree with Larry Page.

If this results in a few oversensitive people staying home, that sounds like a tradeoff well worth making.
How will this work out in a world where the telcos seem to be bent on increasing costs and introducing data caps?

I live in South Africa, where the normal ADSL account gives you 3 Gb of traffic a month (10USD/gig for each gig after that) at a maximum of 4 Mbit/s (10 in a few areas). I know we are probably an outlier, but judging by what happened in Canada recently, and a few cases in the US, its seems possible a reverse case of Moore's law will come into play.

Also, most people (speaking globally), wont have the network capacity to support this kind of system for many years. There would likely have to be a truly massive increase in network capacity before we ever see this really take off.

For fun, try running your computer off an NFS - even with a 100Mbit connection, it gets annoying quickly.
The difference is Dropbox has some 21st century common sense that actually make it a viable solution for the cloud:

Eventual consistency is good enough

but I agree, many of the points he's making are nothing specific to Dropbox.
Why does it become invalid if a third party sets up the computer like your customers?
clickable: http://howsmyux.com

While I'm a bit skeptical about your idea, I do think there exists potential for a middle ground between job-centric sites (e.g. elance, odesk, 99designs) and network-centric sites (e.g. forrst). Good luck!
There used to be a graph of sales over time available at http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/ - but it's down now (and has been for at least a few weeks). Does anybody know an alternative site which collects and displays this data? It's just taken from http://www.minecraft.net/stats.jsp but as I'm interested in how it changed over the past few months it's a bit late to scrape it myself now.
I wouldn't worry. Human societies have very effective methods for dealing with excess men.

Here's a popular one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War

EDIT: I really am worried. This is a terrible situation and one which I could see as getting much worse.
Online employee attendance and time tracking software. See timesheet online.
uAttend offers wi fi enabled employee time tracking and management software. Web based plug n play time clock and attendance time tracking software. Use with your payroll system. Generate timesheet online.
The New SingleNode NoSQL Database: java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentHashMap
"Email isn't meant to be instant."

Exactly. If something isn't urgent, send an email. If it's somewhat time-sensitive, send an instant message. If it's super urgent, go talk in person. And please have the courtesy to know which is which.

Whenever you expect an immediate response, you're saying "this is more important that whatever you're doing." Saying that when it's not true shows that you don't respect that person's time.
The technical explanation for this is given in comment 3 of the page and sums it up perfectly:

"I think the flaw here is that HTML is a Chomsky Type 2 grammar (context free grammar) and RegEx is a Chomsky Type 3 grammar (regular expression). Since a Type 2 grammar is fundamentally more complex than a Type 3 grammar - you can't possibly hope to make this work. But many will try, some will claim success and others will find the fault and totally mess you up."

More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy
Well, _my_ ssh and gpg keys are password protected;)

I agree though, there is only so much Dropbox could do. Since you can already deauth a computer, it doesn't need to be done by password resets.

I think if Dropbox detects two host_id's at the same time (not just in the same time, but both after each other in, say, double the sync period) then it should deauth the host and alert the user to what's going on.
Strange. To me, as an outsider, it looks like Bing has just started to get good enough to be considered as a threat to Google. Of course, they have a long long way to go. But it appears as a rapidly emerging product rather than a dying product.
2012 -Mercedes-Benz-S350-Bluetec - 2011 Detroit Auto Show
MLM Software
C.B.OnlinePvtLtd.com is an Online Software Solution Provider company expertise in MLM Software development and Online Marketing. Our software range includes MLM software,
Phone peripherals powered by audio jack
You probably didn't internalize how much data 500 TB was :)
You're thinking about this too pessimistically. In this situation canceling LISA was unfortunately the appropriate response.
1) James Webb is currently costing 12 times the expected construction costs.

2)The astronomy community unfortunately can't pay for LISA, JWST, and all of the other smaller projects at the same time. The other solution, as opposed to keeping lisa, would be to cancel the small stuff. But, I think it is more appropriate to go after this large cost item first before the smaller items.

3)You're forgetting that science isn't just composed of these huge projects, there are still tons of smaller projects that have money poured into them. Radio astronomy still receives money and builds nice telescopes (I think the MWA is the most recent). And let's not forget that for Gravitational Waves, LIGO is still being upgraded to LIGO advanced and is expected to directly observe some gravitational waves. Since its arms are much shorter than LISA's, it studies different frequency waves. LISA is expected to study waves from merging black holes while LIGO studies those from merging neutron stars and supernovas.

Like others have said, this is just a low point in the fluctuations of a large budget. It's not the first time we've had to cancel expensive projects, and cool science can still be done.
It seems like Dropbox is going to be a pretty big company, and their infrastructure largely runs on Amazon.com, which is a company with more revenue than Google.
Looks like we were doing the math at the same time (see my post elsewhere, here). You'd be looking at 15 of these servers, but then I have no idea how much the expense of maintaining them would be. That's also the cost of storing their current data plus redundancy. It may be the cheap solution, today, but I wonder if it would scale on the order of a seriously high end tape system (I linked one in this thread that potentially stores 91 archived petabytes).

I couldn't find pricing information and since this isn't something I ever deal with, I don't know what the industry standard would be. I would not be surprised if the cost of setting up a very high capacity tape system would come out as the better deal in the long run. Perhaps the BackBlaze solution would be cheaper with half to a full petabyte, but over the long term, the high capacity tape systems might beat the multi-petabyte pants off it.

Of course, that kind of depends on how quickly spinning drives expand in size and drop in price, which could feasibly account for the difference in cost between the two options over time. The important variable there is in whether their data accumulation outpaces the drop in prices on spinning drives.

No matter what, cloud hosted solutions seems pretty much off the charts. Even if the storage was reasonable, I'm guessing they have to transfer several terabytes a month to the backup which would be pretty painful on a lot of networks.
FSB wants to ban Gmail, Hotmail and Skype
Best Fabrics to Use for Wedding Aisle Runner
Choose the perfect fabric for a do it yourself wedding aisle runner. A selection of inexpensive to fancy cloth is available to suit your needs.
This is super paranoid and somewhat disappointing. Occam's razor says that it's just an opinionated blogger. Apple has a huge marketing budget and no known history of astroturfing (unlike, for example, Sony). They don't need to do it, it's not their style.

Anyway, the author of the blog has a response: http://android-gripes.tumblr.com/why

Edit: Imagine this blog was titled "iOS gripes" and talked about unjust bannings from the App Store. Would you suggest that Google was astroturfing?
So, Aussies... is it working for you that child sexual abuse is being lumped together with "gratuitous (by whose standards?) ... or offensive (to whom?) sexual fetishes?

Not that I, personally, am not repulsed by them, but what about banning "promotion" of "...violence or use of illegal drugs?" Is this standard applied in your movie theaters, too. That would keep you "safe" from a lot of Hollywood's productions.

I don't mean to be hard on Aussies - since wide swaths of U.S. population might vote for such censorship. I'm just wondering whether such tight, subjective control is the norm down under?
I wouldn't worry about [terrible thing]. There are natural responses to [terrible thing] that are fully foreseeable consequences of [terrible thing]. One of them is [even more terrible thing].
Argentina was #16 overall and #1 in Latin America. As an American living in Argentina I think that sounds about right. Knowledge of English is definitely more widespread here than in other countries in Latin America that I'm familiar with, particularly in Buenos Aires.
QR codes deserve mass usage (they can be in different sizes, store different data, etc etc...), but all they get is hype and some public appearances on billboards from time to time.
Lefty scrambles his way into contention at Augusta
A Dissection Of Google's Official SEO Tips
The key word is "evacuated"

There is less air friction if your tunnel is maintained at vacuum.
I guess dropbox could use the systems provided by the OS to securely store passwords like other applications do?
Am I crazy or does the Android speedtest seem much more pleasant and usable? I've not used either, but from the single screenshot I can much more easily get a handle on the info from the Android one. The iPhone one seems a bit riced up to the detriment of usability (which is the important thing that Apple does well, not just looking pretty, right?).

e.g.

1) big down and up icons next to the down and up speeds, to reinforce the text at a glance. 2) The text "kilobits / sec" is a readable white, rather than mid-grey and isn't obscured by the indicator hand. 3) Though the text on the Apple one has been corrected to match the dial which now shows K or M, the currently measured speed is given without units. I had trouble differentiating between the "1.18" and the "58" immediately below it which appears to be an advertisement.

Also, isn't the Android one just the old iPhone interface. So is the argument that Android is so fundamentally flawed, that it makes apps magically look exactly like an iPhone app from 6 months ago?

Here's an iPhone 3GS and 4 screenshot showing it being basically indistinguishable from the Android one (except buttons were moved to the top):

http://itracki.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/181941-speedte...
And the previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1487695
Self hosting decision
Hi guys, I'm working on a Webapp with Java back end, could you please advise about hosting solution.

I just saw yc startups hosting decisions for 2010, and almost none is self hosted, is there a particular reason for this?

Is it worth it to self host to save some cash since I'm not funded (yet I hope :)) regarding the time it consumes, besides I'm no sys admin master.
Thanks for your help
This is probably too cheap, but Blu-Ray media is about $2/25GB, or $80/TB (and a new standard is coming). You'll want a lot of redundancy, so "just" $40k in media won't get you there, but it is less than the $120k for hard disk storage quoted by pstack (Blu-Ray discs don't even need power and cooling; on the other hand, Backblaze Pods don't need interns to keep feeding them blank media).

You should probably do some RAID-like error correction to keep the number of extra copies you need reasonable. (E.g. two copies of every disc, every fifth disc is just the XOR of the previous four; that'd give you two backups for every disk at a total cost of $90k.)
SmcFashion.com: Evening dresses, Party dresses, Prom dresses
You can find dresses and gowns that will suit every occasion and will make the occasion a special one. The party dresses, prom dresses, evening dresses are made by fashion experts that have full knowledge of the various fashion trends in market. For further assistance on such dresses, contact http://www.smcfashion.com
World Wide Catacombs
The Pros and Cons of Joining a Start-up Incubator
What's considered mass adoption? By consumers? If not, they've been massively adopted by manufacturers from my understanding.
Dropbox + git = Designer Luv
Going after the loved ones of the target of your fury is a tactic of criminals and despots.

I agree. However, as others have pointed out that's what Sony is doing. Yet they are not being prosecuted for it. So in some sense perhaps this adopting of the tactics of criminals to use against the criminals themselves (speaking hyperbolically or at least theoretically here- perhaps too strong to apply directly to Sony) is in some sense justice? Especially where the law fails.

Hey, I have a family. I sure as hell wouldn't want someone who was pissed at me to come after them. But then, I wouldn't go after their family either.
Trail Blazers Move into Sixth in Western Conference Standings
Fortunately, BeautifulSoup saves the day for HTML parsing tasks.

(http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/)
Hi all,

Interesting remarks. I am a developer. Probably a bad one from reading your comments. My point of view is that every problem, however complex it is, can be split into more simple problems which need no more than 10 minutes of attention at a time (when I say attention it's really 100% of your brain - no chatting, no twitter etc.).

I develop in rails with cucumber for use case designing. So for instance my workflow would be:
- write a cucumber test (if you spend more than 10 minutes on a single test, it's clearly too complicated or not granular enough)
- check emails (if any), answer (I'm amazed at someone here saying he needs 1h+ to answer a single email. Sure this can happen, but less than 1% of the time.)
- watch the cucumber test fail and write the corresponding feature (again if more than 10 minutes, then you clearly don't know how this works)
- check emails (if any), answer
- write ruby on rails code to make the test's step work
- rince & repeat

I have to add I'm not just a developer - I'm a startup founder. So I'm doing more than developing. And checking my emails only twice a day would mean I'd miss many opportunities...
Where Does Gmail live now? Google Docs? If they are lumped together in "social" then that division would seem to be much less focused than the others. And perhaps misnamed.
One might just as easily say:

:%s/C/Lisp,Haskell,OCaml or Erlang/g

It all depends on what you want. And yes, I know a few excellent computer scientists who don't "know" C.
It could turn around. Fewer women will mean that your daughter will be able to choose from a pool of single men and perhaps choose the richest one. If your family is poor, it can benefit from this.

I think India should be more concerned about its overpopulation than about single men, if anything having skewed sex ratios will help her reduce overpopulation in the long term.
Meet Google’s New Leadership Team