skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great article...kinda scary, though, from the point of view of a young adult (22) trying to shake a lifetime of careful indoctrination and religious brainwashing.

One begins to wonder...is any of it true? As Pilate asked, "What is Truth?" Is it even possible to find truth within one lifetime...and if so, how is it possible to know whether it is really truth, or another carefully fabricated lie for the comfort and peace of humanity?

I'm feeling rather skeptical about life right now...just did some research on a subject I was raised to believe was Satan's tool, and discovered all the propaganda I was spoon-fed as a child and teen was just that...more lies, told for the sake of religion.

Not that I am surprised that it isn't a tool of Satan. I certainly became skeptical about that before now. But that all the "facts" my parents used to convince me of it were so totally fake. Especially since they taught me the importance of good research early on. This implies that it was a premeditated lie on their part.
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So I might be a bit odd but for the rails site which I did run for awhile the db layer was sqlite replicated on each machine. Since it only did reads this turned out to work better than MySQL.
Everything was on EC2 instances (except for the dev instance on my laptop).
The correct combination of technologies depend largely on your application, what are you building?
Rainbow's End -- a novel by Vernor Vinge that shows what is possible. Now go build it.
understandible, although even at a good school, if someone already has a certain state of mind, they're going to seek out people similar. change won't happen unless they're either forced to or truly want to. doesn't sound like either are true.
it's not so much as not using it... it's whether I require it. meaning do I spend the time to make the site work without it.
The N-Prize. Get an object into orbit: budget 999 pound
this is also a decent potential solution that we considered but couldn't follow through with
It was a little light on how this is different than a regular low power cmos element that you might find in any webcam. Its pretty easy to use an arm to just grab an image from a disembodied webcam and write it to sd.

What exactly does the Hubble have to do with it? Is it lower power than cmos? better image? what? I want to be excited (and I want one!). Tell me why this is exciting!
About the subsidies, I found this discussion interesting: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/15/104213/829

Thanks for the nuclear link. Haven't had time to digest the swiss documents.
Check out local business owners too - many of them love to mentor local kids, and several came from situations like your brother's. Sometimes you can arrange an apprenticeship-like situation, where your brother volunteers his help in their business. One of my high-school classmates had an awesome internship with a guy who made Japanese woodworking tools.
Death comes quick enough, so why help it? Terrible things tend to result in death too.

But that's why life is such a gift. As the movie Trainspotting said, choose life.

Thwarted goals are a challenge. We'd probably get bored without them.
Barclays in the UK is reasonable. They have a stupid long number as a "membership" number, but you can retrieve that online with a few personal details I can remember.

The security is then a password (select 2 letters using drop downs) and pin with an optional 'calculator' based using your debit card (not helpful if you don't have it with you though).

Once inside the features are good. Repeat payments are simple. Paying to a new provider who is a business is pretty easy with their search function. The statements are alright although I wish the display options were a bit better, and included a search for specific transactions. It would also be good if they made more than 3mo of statements available (like, DB sharding, hello!).

Finally while they do export to a few formats that have allowed me to update iBank on my Mac I wish it were possible to have something automagic that didn't require me to login in by hand at all. Possibly that breaks banking regulations in the UK, though.
http://ianab.com/trillion/344940631126.html

Do all the URLs leave snarky messages?
For posterous.com, we use slicehost VPS, ruby on rails and mysql. Pretty standard setup overall. Separate DB, App and Web server slices, and a separate job server for longer-running postprocesses. S3 for storage and backup.
If you go past a trillion, they give you a free bonus page.
Definitely not ready for prime time.

I did several searches that said there were multiple pages of results but clicking the link to the second page brought up "no results".

I'm also not sure how fresh their index is. I went to a page from the results that didn't have the content the search said it did. Normally there would be several reasons for this but I happen to have enough knowledge of the target site to know they just have a very old version of it indexed.
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Former Employees of Google Prepare Rival Search Engine
first things first...am i the only person who wants to keep saying "kweel" and not "cool"??

in terms of the site itself, i am sort of liking the design / layout of the search, although like agotterer said, it still needs a lot of work -- from what i can tell, popular search terms have pretty darn good results but unpopular search terms return sub-par results (see his example haha)... in terms of a threat to google?? id have to say its not, at least in this stage of the game, but only time will tell i suppose...
The racism is pretty disconcerting, and it sounds like the friends are the problem. We absorb the attitudes of the people we spend time with, and our peer group is who we respect. If our peer group is great, we rise to meet them, but if they are trash, we ourselves become that trash.
Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn’t The Whole Story
Google knoll - Do no evil, Wel apart from copyright violation, convent theivery, web spam
Right now? Vastly flawed rankings-wise.

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=gstepl

Every response is copying the message from a post I wrote on an inactive blog. More active results don't appear whatsoever.
Thats a good question. Its an online service/applicaiton that will stream DJ sets (1-2hours longs) in an interactive way. There are going to be hundreds of sets. Just image the usability like youtube, where each set is presented like a youtube video and is going to have a track-list and discussion. The streaming is going to be done using lighttpd Mod_streaming (pseudo http streaming) played via a flash player. Thats the gist of it.
interesting... I think the columns make it hard to read though... kinda poor ui there. otherwise it looks good.
To be honest, mostly laziness. Probably not a good enough line of reasoning.

And I agree with above: I'm always amazed at the sorts of people that read HN.
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At least Cuil has some respect for privacy:

"We do not keep logs of our users’ search activity."

"We analyze the Web, not our users. Read our Privacy Policy for details. It’s short."

http://www.cuil.com/info/privacy/
I was going to laborously spell out C-C-C-C-C-C-C-Combo breaker, but then I remembered that I only have one life to live...
how is it pronounced? their name is not memorable.
I think that this is an interesting approach. I like that they show more info about each result, but I also have more difficulty scanning through the results. I'm not sure if that's really a net win.
"Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuill's technology drills into the actual content of a page."

Fancy presentation can't save you from the fate of altavista. What are they doing to solve the trust problem?
well I didn't like the name either, but I thought maybe it made sense for the tipping aspect. Seems like you're building a great product, and branding/positioning/messaging is obviously very important for what you two are doing.
According to the article its "cool". I agree that it is not a memorable name.
Natural Wonders Of The World
Let us give a thought today to the world that we live in; this spectacular, bewilderingly beautiful, wonderfully wild world of ours. Yes there is now, a more or less official list of the Seven Wonders of the World, but I don’t think there is one of the natural wonders of the world. I looked around to see which was the most representative list.
sounds more like kewl
I searched for one of my own websites and was extremely pissed to find that it found a bunch of more popular sites that link to it, but not the site itself. Eff that. I'm 100 percent in favor of google competitors, but that's just invalid...
An un-American feel aids expanding US Web firms
It's just as memorable as google was on it's first day. A little branding and constantly improving results could make it a player. But, only time will tell. I'm cheering for them.
http://pastebin.com/m54b7d354

Looks like it just hit a bunch of links from the first page.
Yes, it is. I'm going to talk to the school about that since it must be a pretty widespread problem. Maybe next year he can be placed with other students in his core classes.
Cuil
The New Microsoft Conspiracy?
I tried it out. It looks nice and polished, it just isn't as simple as google. I'm not exactly sure where I'm supposed to look for my results and what the order is.

Also, just a personal opinion. Black is a very, very bad colour to go with as focusing on a bright object on a dark background produces eye strain. It instantly made me dislike the front page... where its main purpose and function lives.
give it some time folks. google wasnt better than ask.com when it launched.
Thanks for your input. I might try to remove the implicit expectations that are placed on him. Even though since he withdrew I am careful not to pressure him, I'm sure he still feels there are expectations upon him.
http://www.cuil.com/info/

I can see the info page.. Since lot of people are covering them, they are seeing a spike in traffic and maybe not able to handle it.
Anything that can compete with Google is a good thing. I have already added them as my default search in Firefox and hoping they get better. Results are not yet perfect yet, but at least they are doing things differently. Best of Luck Cuill.
Not debasing the currency is a start.
This is both a tear jerking article and a realization to startups everywhere.

Your idea seems good... initially... with no answer to the chicken and the egg problem... how do you become a dominate entity...

I'm only 23 and yet I vividly remember over half of these startups. Granted the majority of these started and ended during the dot com boom / collapse, these are still and will always be a realization to internet specific companies. No user base means no revenue.

Many questions arise; do you need to sell if you have a dominate opponent offering a lucrative opportunity (Alta-Vista <- Google) or do you wait it out (Facebook -> Google) and postulate an opportunity greater than your biggest competitor believes can or more importantly will see for the fate of your company.

Friendster is a company much like Facebook with many unique niches to offer. Why did they fail? Did they not see that bigger picture; did they not have a good board of directors; did they not have a robust infrastructure?

If you had a bulletproof startup that had every corner covered, had an outstanding leadership team with a concise business model and looked at each niche and improved it; is that the recipe for success or does that give them a 50/50 chance for success?

I think:
Friendster, Ning and sites similar offer a unique niche.
Facebook, MySpace and sites similar are the sites above combined.
What if you were the site that combines the unique niche of the most popular sites like Facebook and MySpace? What if you had a dominate leadership team that had a robust product which offered the most popular services combined and improved on those ideas. How does that separate FedEx from the USPS? If a company has a lucid vision for their product, how do you separate that from the already existing ideas... after all... every new idea is generated from an existing problem? How do you separate a new idea from a solution to an existing dilemma... how do you separate a better solution from an existing one? Is the quality of that solution directly pending the ease of use to the end - user or is it determined by the freedom, creativity, ingenuity, funding and end - user registration numbers?
I think the ultimate success of any company: good, bad and mediocre is based on the personal beliefs of the initiator of the product and their 'support team' (startup partners). If they ALL firmly believe in the success of their product with absolutely no doubt then they have the material, answer and solution to solve the loop - hole that garnishes users and divides the user base among other entities that offer similar services.
Yes it was. Ask Jeeves was a stupid "natural language" thing back then -- basically a giant, hand edited, FAQ.
The team is impressive, they've been involved in AltaVista, Google, and Ebay. And Anna seems pretty confident that Google isn't going to change, although one of the lead Google engineers came to speak at our school last semester and said that they change the algorithms hundreds of times each year. He said it's not uncommon that they tweak it several times a week. Maybe it's not going through drastic changes, and maybe it doesn't look like a Yahoo portal, but they do continue to improve their algorithms.

It's really cool to see someone branching off and trying something like search, and I actually support Patterson's efforts. But there is a lot more to Google than just their search algorithm technology. They're running with the momentum of the brand, not to mention the massive collection of apps that people loyally follow.

Can you build a better search algorithm than Google that runs faster, with fewer computers, and containing more indeces? Possibly. I happen to know a lot of people who can cook a better cheeseburger than McDonald's, but that doesn't really get you "all the way." Google has criticisms, such as the search logging, which could be used for leverage and could make for easy user acquisitions. However, when you have HappyCamper1 who is (UsingGoogleSearch && UsingGmail), they'll most likely need a better reason to switch search engines because they're already using an e-mail service by the same company.

The important thing is that she gets into this space and attacks it vigorously. No king rules forever. May the best win.
Joyent Accelerator (Solaris) -> nginx (w/ fair proxy module) -> thin -> rails

mysql for data

memcached for caching

sphinx for search (ThinkingSphinx plugin)
Probably not. EC2 is really handy for spikes in usage but it sounds like that's not a concern for you.

Maybe something like SliceHost would be a good idea for you. Same root access, lower prices but no automated expandability.

As for "supposed enterprise uptime" -- AWS is good stuff, but it measures outages in days per year. I'm not a fan of the word "enterprise", but I don't think it allows for AWS's typical 3-8h outages.
Right now, if I want to build something more complicated than an online brochure, I need to sell my vision to a coder or investor before I even have a working prototype.

This really sucks. It means I have to over-sell an idea that I don't even know is good yet (because I haven't built it) and then I have to give up equity at the worst possible stage (before I have any traction).

I've got design and management experience under my belt and I'm pretty sure my brain is capable of enjoying playing with code, too. So I'm choosing this path to amplify what I'm capable of doing in life, and to follow my gut.
1) Make the search box on main page bigger and move it up a little bit.

2) I want larger navigation page numbers and icons. Center it once again. Maybe put page numbers on top as well.

3) Make safe search on/off a toggle switch. I don't want to go to another page and then hit save etc.

4) black/blue motif just hurts my eyes.

5) Ditto with the font

It's amazing how ingrained searching Google is for me. When I want to advance the search page, I instinctively move my cursor to the bottom right of my screen. Whenever I search on Yahoo or Live the presentation of the results just seem visually painful.
I have a personal litmus test for new search engines - a vanity search on myself. I know my own content across the web better than anyone else's. By far, Google still rates far and above for returning the fullest and most pertinent set of results than any others. Cuil fails at this.

More generally, I compared common searches I do regularly relating to things like "javascript framework" and "css" and the results were poor.

Its not only about who has the biggest index. Its about retrieving the most relevant data from that index.

To be more crude, its not about the size of your <guess>, its about how you use it.
cuil fails my vanity test as well.
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Thanks. I was actually reminded of Google App Engine after following wmorein's link to web.py, and then thought about using their webapp framework instead of Django.
Ah, true. Then what about mentioned VU/Buzzword and Flektor, plus Mozy/EMC, Gravatar/Autommatic, MyBlogLog/Yahoo! and Newsvine/NBC? Offered useful products, not sure if they were in the black yet, but acquired.
Looks good, and has a nice feel.

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=python%20generators&sl=long

But not so good here,

http://www.cuil.com/search?q=python%20generator%20examples&#...
I think google is more 'spellable' than cuil... or is it ciul or coul or ceul.
Hell, the title for the post spells it with 2 'l's
Am I alone in having serious doubts of the ability to have an open source implementation of a voting machine?

The problem is that to have any benefit from having an open source solution, all of the code in the system needs to be open source, including all of the drivers etc. As drivers need to be adapted to the specific hardware that they run on, it is normally only the manufacturer of the equipment that can write them. Think video drivers in Linux, as an example. Hardware manufacturers probably see little commercial advantage in providing their source code, and even if they do, there is no guarantee that what they give out as source code is really what they have loaded into the voting machine.
Releasing a 3G version with an even more severe version of the 2Gs battery issues made much worse product.

The weird thing is, Nokia can do 3G and Webkit on the N95 and N96 with these probs.
I like the first message: "It's true: you can click on the boxes."

Maybe I've had too much sugar today, but that made me laugh out loud.
This is by far Vernor Vinge's worst novel. Its a weak story mostly about some old people trying to keep the books in a library from being destroyed in an effort to instantly digitize all of their information.

He wraps some near-future concepts into it, like mixed-reality games and such. Otherwise it really does very little to explore the real concepts that we are encountering now and in the next couple of decades leading to the singularity.
They are totally out to get you. Putin wants to nationalize your startup, Russian mob wants to force you into spam slavery (and will kill you if you don't do good job) and HN particpants want to silence you.

Or maybe you are blowing it out of proportion. Either one.
hmm slightly weird. I searched for a term and didnt get any results. I searched for the same term 10 minutes later and i got results?
Anyway, some stuff is not returning any results : "nvidia gtx 280" didnt return any result :(
Does anybody know what happened to that second el? They used to be Cuill for the longest...
That's nothing. Last time a president got uppity in America he got killed, too. His name was JFK. No one is safe here, you see. THEY are out to get poor little hackers, big time, so run for you life. Make sure your HN account does not point anywhere they can find you.

Or maybe start calculating risks instead. Either one will do.
Just because a company is sold before it's profitable doesn't mean that it couldn't ever earn money, or that it doesn't deliver value to the buyer.

It doesn't personally interest me, but there is nothing wrong with building a company whose primary value is as part of something bigger. It's like attacking a tractor company for not growing any food. If they can enable farmers to grow more food, then they've created value.
Hi,

no, the shop isn't massively specialized but I think it would be too much to comfortably take on with Shopify (where I am currently setting up another store).

With regard to placement agencies, are you able to point me in the direction of any such agencies?

Thanks very much.
Trying to like this but failing. It didn't get even decent results for any of the queries I fed it.

I wonder if competing head-on with Google is a wise strategy. It's really hard to beat them without years of effort, and until then no one wants to use your site. There must be some other way.
But Jo(e) User doesn't really care about that, he or she cares about search results. If (and admittedly this is unproven) Google can deliver better search results by logging and analyzing search activity to personalize results, then Cuil is already at a disadvantage.
I personally found the search results page a tad confusing. Having the results in a grid layout, my first impression was that they were all ads!

.. also, how do I know which result is #1 ? Top left? Middle?
Prediction: a Knol boycott emerges real soon now.
The search results suck.
With only 500 customers, you don't need the power of EC2. There are plenty of places where you can get a Xen instance or buy a dedicated box for a monthly fee that track closely enough with EC2's pricing. What those alternatives lack is the ability to add instances (potentially dozens) with minimal notice.

I've had great uptime with EC2, but it just seems overkill for 500 customers. EC2's advantages come when you get big to the point that you need to increase capacity at a moment's notice.
these are bad:
- relevance of search results
- colors
- layout of search results
- specialisation for different types of search results is no where near where google is.
- some searches for things I know about returned 0 results.

Also... frames?

If they think google hasn't been updating their search engine for ages they are kidding themselves. Google has done very well to keep the design consistent for about a decade, but things are changing all the time.
Exactly. I've seen some Google ads that were a bit too targeted lately -- related to stuff that I searched for last week -- and it is getting spooky. I'd like to have a decent alternative. Maybe I should just get used to Yahoo, but this looks hipper, no?

That being said, they haven't indexed my site yet. Amateurs!
It doesn't work. Almost none of my searches worked. I think it gives too much importance to title text.
It's not about them seeing the "commercial advantage" in free market terms; it's about mandating a particular approach (in this case, open hardware and software from top to bottom) because it's the only way to insure that the basic infrastructure used in elections works. This is not a case where the whims of the market should decide the approach taken.

If no one gets rich on the design and implementation of electronic voting systems, that's fine. I'd rather see it run by well-intentioned, poorly-paid academics within a strict peer-review model than by unknown private entities.