skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with Yandex is that it does index English language content, however not all users (by far not all!) are aware that it's limited geographically and by TLDs. If I look up, say, "Succinctness is Power", which should bring up PG's essay on his web site, Yandex instead retrieves a bunch of pages that mention the article and also Russian translations rather than the original. So the user is left thinking that the original is not even on the web (unless she carefully examines the links on web pages that pop up in the result set).

They were clever enough to index en.wikipedia.org, although it is usually not at the top for some very obvious requests (e.g. try "Turing Machine"), which is an indication of a rather poor ranking system.

My impression is, Yandex does not compete with Google in any way. Despite its slogan ("Everything can be found" or something like that) it's just a limited web index that doesn't even state explicitly about its limitations. And that's strange at least.

Edit: NB: they have a minimalist front-end at ya.ru
Formal methods : program verification, with graphics
ESpace's NeverBlock: Fast, Non-Blocking IO In Ruby Without Changing Program Flow
Welcome to the party:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79253
Java interview questions
NVIDIA: CUDA 2.0
What you describe seems to be some romanticized version to the past. What could be considered modern industry is heavily dependent on the productive ability of the unskilled worker--the skilled "part" has been superseded by either machinery or technological advancement in the productive process--and as such, systems such as those involving master-apprentice relationships, fell by the wayside. As a libertarian, you understand that competitive advantage is of utmost necessary for not only the survival but advancement of business and industry. How could going back to an antiquated, archaic, and dangerous system of production possibly be beneficial to the interests of business? Moreover, have you read of the plight of workers in the 19th century (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_Acts, http://www.usp.nus.edu.sg/victorian/history/workers1.html)?
It wasn't pretty.
Video Recording for Jailbroken iPhone 3G | TechJaws
http://www.paleofuture.com/ is a great source for this kind of stuff.
UML models on KDE: Umbrello.  OS X, Win32 ports coming
I'm down for a San Francisco meetup
No. You were right that with large inputs the program stack will blow up. However, the definition of tail recursive is if a function returns the value of a recursive call or does not make a recursive call and the factorial and Fibonacci functions weren't even tail recursion in that sense. Ie. it didn't matter where they were implemented, they would still blow up the stack anyway. The "worse" is because they will always blow the stack without some drastic optimization.
Anyone from SF driving down and interested in carpooling?
NetBeans project switched to mercurial / Hg in January: they like it
Yeah, the fact that I have to sign in via Google really squicks me out. I mean, the url looks right, I get the secure little bar and everything, but even still.
Politics in india
Several good lessons both on the positive and the negative side.
There are a number of problems with the article, and this is one of them.

Phone makers building products on top of Android _will_ be able to differenciate themelves, to the extent that they want to, because the platform is extensible. It's dissimilar to an OEM licensing Windows - they can pick the bits that save them money, and throw away the rest.
Variation and natural selection is nothing like artistic evolution, and teaching them as though they're the same (or even similar) undermines actual scientific education.

Kids aren't dumb, and 'packaging' education rarely succeeds.

(It also, on a side note, gives fodder to anti-evolutionists)
The cellphone is already something of a commodity. The carriers would love to see the same thing happen to the smartphone. This would be great for the carriers, because they sell a complement to the smartphone -- cell phone service.

Having a broadly licensed OS for smartphones might do this. Apple might not like this. Then again, Apple might like it very much. They could sell "high end" smartphones for a premium, much as they do with PCs now.
The tech graveyard: Here lies Amiga, Atari, Commodore, Compuserve, etc.
The rules are the first derivative of the intent. This haunts all religions. You will always get a special group of people who follow the rules without considering the intent, usually with the goal of feeling superior to everyone else.

Its called "legalism", and it leads to all kinds of nonsense.
sorry. things didnt fly with the management.
Git for the lazy: ~20 commands
Any Benelux hackers here?
Just wondering if there are some people for Belgium or the Netherlands on this site. Would you like to do a meeting?
here is the full transcript of the Times Magazine interview with Putin:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/printout/0,29239,1690...

it's pretty interesting, actually. For example, Putin is
often quoted with saying that the Collapse of the Soviet
Union was the "biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the (last) century." Without context, that sounds like strange, if not downright dangerous thinking to western ears. But it also can help our understanding how the collapse and the chaotic 90s were perceived by the Russians themselves:

TIME: Were the 1990s a time of paradox for you?
On the one hand, you say it gave you the Gorbachev
freedoms; on the other hand, in your statements you
have stated that there was a period of total collapse
and the tragedy of the destruction of the Soviet Union.

PUTIN: I don't see a paradox here. The administrative
planning system that prevailed in economic life, and the
complete domination of the Communist Party in the
political area, resulted in a collapse of the country.
When people no longer cared about the state they lived in,
they didn't need such a state, therefore there was no
surprise that the people couldn't care less about that
state. They believed that things couldn't get any worse,
but it turned out that they could, and did. The tragedy is
that people were utterly dissatisfied and disillusioned
because the free-for-all was declared as democracy, the
theft of billions of dollars was described as the free
market and the theft of enormous assets belonging to the
people were declared privatization. What did the collapse
of the Soviet Union mean? Twenty-five million Soviet
citizens who were ethnic Russians found themselves beyond
the borders of new Russia. Nobody gave thought to them.
Twenty-five million would make up a major European nation.
Before taking a decision, one should consult the
population. Do you want to live separate from the state
you live in now? I'm confident that if we were to hold a
referendum in many of the former Soviet republics, the
vast majority would say no. But nobody asked them. Was
that a democratic solution? Of such a difficult problem?
Well, we're not trying to revisit this but that was so.
Who asked us or them? Twenty-five million Russians found
themselves outside the Russian Federation, without any
economic means, amid growing local nationalism. When they
couldn't possibly come to the new Russia, to their
historical motherland, because they didn't even have money
to buy a train or a plane ticket. Is it not a tragedy?
Panic Attack At School | SlashBe
Qt for mozilla/firefox
I remember something that one of the VCs at the first Startup School said:

"I can tell you all about business in four words: Boom. Bust. Boom. Bust."

I guess the VC business isn't so different from the rest of the economy. ;-)

Curiously, if you look at nearly all of the early Web 2.0 successes, they came out of the wreckage of small companies that failed in the recession of 01-02. Pyra begat Blogger. Game Neverending begat Flickr. Paypal-for-Palm begat Paypal-the-website. Memepool begat Del.icio.us.

Except for Paypal, all of those were angel-funded or bootstrapped. I wonder if VC-funded companies simply get too big to turn on a dime when the economy sours.
I'd say "Build One To Improve" instead of "Build One To Throw Away".

Software is infinitely malleable, so there's no need to start from scratch. You can morph your code from its present state to any desired state smoothly, keeping it working (and passing all its unit tests) the whole time.

"Throwing one away" usually also throws away lots of hard-won corner case fixes and QA testing.
Google India Labs Group Site is hacked.
Patent problems: Startups often die before USPTO approves applications
Patents are really killing innovation.
Ask YC: Feedback on BreakkUp.com
BreakkUp was originally an idea my gf had roughly 2 weekends ago. The idea came about after receiving 4 phone calls in a row seeking advice regarding relationship troubles. I took the idea a step further by building it around a pre-established model (Digg) using open-source (Pligg). Maybe this was a bad idea on my part, maybe not...

For me, this project is an experiment in replicating models for other verticals using open-source. And, an exercise in CPM/CPA advertising and PR -- two areas I don't feel I have a strong understanding of. I'm currently working to raise money for an original idea and ad revenue will play a big part in our ability to stay afloat.

In total, from idea to beta product -- I've spent less than a week putting this together so criticism certainly won't hurt my feelings. We most definitely need to work on an About Page and Tutorial, my assumption is most females have no idea what Digg is.

If I had more time, I'd like to put more focus on the presentation of this site so it looks less digg-like, but my client work needs attention this week. Gotta keep the lights on!

I'm rather excited about BreakkUps opportunity to generate modest revenue (assuming we get traffic) because I feel the audience will often be in an emotional state when visiting, and roughly 50%+ female.

We also own these domains:

BreakupWithHim.com
BreakupWithHer.com

Suggestions, comments, criticism please. Thanks guys.
BreakkUp was originally an idea my gf had roughly 2 weekends ago. The idea came about after receiving 4 phone calls in a row seeking advice regarding relationship troubles. I took the idea a step further by building it around a pre-established model using open-source (Pligg). Maybe this was a bad idea on my part, maybe not...

For me, this project is an experiment in replicating models for other verticals using open-source. But more importantly, an exercise in CPM/CPA advertising and PR -- two areas I don't feel I have a strong understanding of. I'm currently working to raise money for an original idea and ad revenue will play a big part in our ability to stay afloat. I'm rather excited about BreakkUp's opportunity to generate modest revenue (assuming we get traffic) because I feel the audience will often be in an emotional state when visiting, and roughly 50%+ female.

In total, from idea to beta product -- I've spent ~a week putting this together so criticism certainly won't hurt my feelings. We most definitely need to work on About and Tutorial pages, my assumption is most females have no idea what Digg is.

If I had more time, I'd like to put more focus on the presentation of this site so it looks less digg-like, but my client work needs attention this week. Gotta keep the lights on!

We also own these domains:

http://BreakupWithHim.com

http://BreakupWithHer.com

Suggestions, comments, criticism please. We haven't started advertising it yet except to peers...

Thanks guys.
http://www.pluggd.in/2008/08/google-india-labs-group-site-is...
Amazon's Checkout By Amazon and Amazon Simple Pay are complete solutions - much simpler to use than FPS.
Could someone tell me how this is hacker news? Preferably one of the people who upvoted this.
I love the look - very clean, very nice. I don't know about the idea but I think it looks quality.
Right. Most of the rest got angel funding.
Zed Shaw's Free Hackers Union
Do I mod you up or the article down or do I just mutter something about kids and my lawn!
We've become reddit.
Right now the top two stories are:

1. How the Soviets Drilled the Deepest Hole in the World

2. N Korea's Kim died in 2003; replaced by lookalike, says Waseda professor

Interesting reads? Maybe... off topic, definitely. This could get ugly with the upcoming election.
Write unit tests first, they are not just for bugs. They help a lot with scope and design. Then you might not have to build something just to throw it away.
Yandex is local - limited to CIS (ex-USSR zone) in terms of people the search results (and the search index) are optimized for.

Yandex is mainstream, it's not a geeky site, and most Russians don't speak English well enough to prefer originals to translations. So most of its users just don't arrive at the limits of Yandex's index ever.

Of course it's nice for me to be able to go to google.com and search in Russian or in English or in any other language (and get results in the language I search), but it's just not what the majority of Russians needs or wants.

Their policy on the search index was 'only russian-language content' (their bot analyzes page text rather than looks at the TLDs or IPs), then a couple of years ago they started including more and more sites in english, starting from encyclopedias etc. This is possibly also because their indexing technology was deep into morphology of Russian language from the very start in late 1990-s.

PS their slogan is a bit more dramatic - 'Everything WILL be found' :)
Practice practice practice. I had a great deal of difficulty as well and only after a SHIT tone of practice did I realize that long term memory of theorems and doing proofs is 90% of it.
I tried this same experiment with pligg on a site I put up, freenormous.com (free samples and offers). I found that almost no one posted, even after I worked hard to get traffic and spent money on adwords. Now I get postings--they're just all SEO and spam.

It is very tough to build a community. I spent a lot of time talking to myself under different usernames. Only around 1% of users will post (maybe less, from my experience).

I also found that even with 1000 visitors a month, I was making less than $5 per month with adsense. That would be fine if it didn't take a continual flow of real posts to build content, but it does.

This soured me on adwords based based businesses, and even moreso on any business that requires a network effect to work. Now I focus on business models that offer value even when there are no other users.

It was an educational experiment, though, and for the time investment, gave a good return on enlightenment.
People like Timothy Gallwey and Betty Edwards should be studied. There ought to be a system of identifying people like them and trying to find out what makes them so outstandingly good at teaching.
the partial solution: vote, and keep submitting y our deep tech software/hardware, inscrutable if you don't have a PhD from MIT, articles.
Dum dum dum.
Perhaps odd to comment on myself, but what if I (we) more liberally up-mod the on topic posts regardless of quality... Ideally (as others have suggested) we could vote on relevance separate from quality/agreement.
The iPhone costs $199 + $175 ETF = $374. The cheapest iPod Touch is $299. You only save $75 by buying the iPod Touch instead of the iPhone. Considering the extra functionality of the iPhone, the iPod Touch is a rip-off.
The website looks good.
If I could downmod this topic, I would. But since I can't, I will upmod other topics that interest me more in hopes that this topic will drop off the front page.
I don't think things are so drastic:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Item 1. certainly seems to fit the bill. Item 2. not so much. However, given the growth HN appears to have experienced over the last 6 months the signal to noise ratio nothing short of remarkable.
Couldn't agree more with you re: building a community, which is one of my main concerns with a big project I'm trying to raise money for as it relies directly on critical mass for match-making (not dating related).

Thanks for your feedback. Like you I've already learned a lot from this -- have spent a good deal of time researching ad-based revenue. For $100 worth of hosting fees, and my time for a few days -- most definitely worth it.
Razor Profiler: Check out your Ajax code
Come on now. Really?
This was already submitted:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=284413

For some reason, there's a trailing '?' on the URL.
How militant some developers have become about ditching ie6 doesn't really make sense. It decision seems pretty clear: if you are a site for techy users you don't need to bend over backwards to support it, and you can probably drop it; if you are a general-use site or site that plans on having 30+ year-olds you better have some support for it or you're taking a 25-30% hit.

We tell our ie6 users one time (at registration) that their browser is not up to date and that they should upgrade to ff or ie7 to take advantage of all of our features. I've seen this solution that looks nice and unobtrusive: http://www.pushuptheweb.com/

I asked my girlfriend a few months ago why she never upgraded ANYTHING on her computer, ie6 included, and she said she only wanted to check her email and buy things, and that installing updates always took more time than she wanted to spend in the first place, and that she wasn't sure which updates to trust. Many people can't upgrade their browsers, many people don't care to, many people don't know why they should.

oh well. that's the world of warcraft that you play :)
Fair point. Deleted. Sorry I missed it.
I'm not saying return to the technology of 1890. Most people back then learned on the job. Most people today learn on the job ( very different skills though). The only difference is that today people spend the years 16-22 drinking and playing video games, in kind of a holding period. We could eliminate it entirely and everyone would be better off.

In 1890, a person may have left school at 16 and started working 60 hours a week in a dangerous hard labor job. In 2008, the person could leave school at 16 and get a job working 35 hours a week in customer service. Or anything else. It's not public schooling that made modern jobs so much better, it was the growth of technology.

Since under this proposed system people would start work earlier and have to pay far less for school, there would be a lot more time and money to take off a year sabbatical to travel, save money for having kids, work fewer hours, etc.
Ask PG:  Is the [dead] tool algorithmic or moderated or both?
I have "show dead" turned on in my profile, and I'm amazed by the amount of spam that's shown as dead on the new page. How are those links caught?

Is it algorithmic, moderated or both?
That's a good idea. When one start up in my area I'll go there give my presentation. It will be good marketing anyways.
It's a good idea and will be successful with very little effort. But you NEED to make the comments possible without signing up for the first few weeks, you'd have made me bookmark it if I had been able to leave a comment Because I'd have been curious to go back and reply. But no, I could not comment, could not be bothered to sign up and so moved on

Comments open for a few weeks, spam on yahoo answers and fluther and in a few weeks you'll have a big site. Send me a thank you note then.
The CSS3 :not() selector
Hiring a startup CEO: A sensible antidote to "founderitis," or an unnecessary risk?
cliff notes: make your app not crash

well, duh.
"They’re given the rules to remind them, keeping close watch on the no powerpoint/website only rule (powerpoint+website+code is cool, weird hardware is better)."

We've used this rule for every single one of our presentations. It's worked well.
Great point and something I've considered doing but it's not in the pligg setup config, so I'll have to dig into the code to make it happen. (i'm a designer but I know a little PHP)

Since you've confirmed this notion, I'll make it a high priority to get it done before we start marketing it. I don't really like the idea of "spamming" though.

Thanks for feedback!
No other product managers?
The Traffic Guru
SOA What?
Hilarious and useful. Just forwarded to some of my more uh..."outgoing" friends.
I like the open comments idea - what do you think is a good way is to stop the inevitable spammers that come with openness though?
Metaphor isn't the map either, but it works. If you read the article a bit more closely, you would read that the problem is to find a bit of traction on students who are primed to walk away. As much as I despise the little rodent, if Mickey makes it, more power to him(or more to the point to a teacher determined enough to make a difference.)
The Student as Nigger: a 1969 essay on education
Introduction to CouchDB
Haskell: Batteries Included
I am one of two front-end engineers at a major site with 10 million members. We're having this discussion internally. From our side we want to stop because 80% of our time is actually spent on making things work for IE6. It's a huge number. 80% of my salary is being spent on less than 30% of our audience.
78% of our total traffic is IE, with 66% of that being ie7 and the remaining being 34% ie6.

The biggest hurdle we face is that we aren't a small company. We can't make smart decisions like adding upgrade prompts because marketing would throw a fit.

The approach right now we are taking is to get data. Microsoft ends support for IE6 in July 2010 when support for WinXP SP3 ends. After reading about the blogger who found only 2% of his ie6 visits were real, I am now looking into that for us. On our projects, I am keeping track of how much time is spent on supporting it versus ie7, ff, and safari. What it boils down to is that we will only be able to drop support when we can prove it costs us more than we make from ad clickthroughs from ie6 users.
Thanks for clarifications, but to my understanding they won't index Russian content if it's not under exUSSR TLD AND it's not physically hosted in the exUSSR. It took me 3 years (!) to convince Yandex (through submissions, mails and even phone calls) to include my Russian-language blog, only because it was under .com and hosted in Texas, despite the fact that my blog had a lot of references from the .RU space.

And no, they confirmed, it wasn't because my web site was marked as spam. They explained to me that "some" servers have to be included manually because they are beyond their "default" space.

What puzzles me is that Yandex is definitely not the entire Internet, not even the entire Russian-speaking internet, and yet it claims to be finding "Everything" without mentioning of the limitations in place. My point is, this is misleading for the users, if not just plain cheating.

Soemthing is definitely wrong with their policies with regard to indexing the Web.
Rocket Surgeon
try newlisp, it works in bsd, linux, osx, xp/98 (i tried)

you may not be able to use the syntax/examples from other lisp/scheme books coz it's a bit different (people say it's a broken lisp)

but it's hell a lot of fun to program in it
CS Grad. Student/Part time PL/SQL guy - With side-project.
I think your site would work much better as a blog highlighting other people's usability. I think it would be a great idea to review other people's sites and make comments about them. Don't portray them as low cost or free, just do it. No one wants to see an average review though, thats no fun. Find sites with HUGE usability mistakes and highlight them and why. Some of the better rants on http://demogirl.com/ can be used as an example.

Having a blog also makes you an authority, which gets you to expert status where people are comfortable paying you for your services. I know blogs are a lot of work, but once you get going and have been doing it for a while it really pays off.
Video of the new bike-sharing program in D.C.
just a normal monday