skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well one of the things about Google that I really like is that they really make a lot of effort to make sure that the #1 result is the page you actually want. It's part of the whole 'Feeling Lucky' thing.
I'd rather not have to read through the entire search results page to figure out which one is the most relevant.. that's the search engine's job!

In other words, don't make me think. :)
We've been hearing about LED bulbs for too long to believe that now, finally, they're just around the corner.
because you have to look somewhere first.

#1 is whatever is the closest to the upper left corner.
What you should make is a specialist search engine for hackers. They're the early adopters in search engines, so if you get them you have the quickest path to getting everyone else.

Imagine how alarmed Google would be if there were a different search engine the top 10k hackers all used, even if they had everyone else. And rightly so.

http://news.ycombinator.com/apply ...
Seth's Blog: Marilyn Monroe, the Mona Lisa and Jackson Pollock
Deploying Merb with Git, Vlad the Deployer, and Ubuntu
Let's play pong
http://ianab.com/trillion/547597778686.html
Sounds like he has a Y-combinator style of investing in media companies. Relatively "small" investments (1MM in his case), but outsize influence in his ability to make personal connections between people who can complement each other.
Searching Cuil for 'cuil' results in a lot of hits, none being their site. Searching Google for 'cuil' has them up at number one, plus news results from today's PR bash. That's a big ball of fail.
it's not user friendly, and from what I know it's impossible to have applications working in the background so the app would be useless.

i can't imagine what would happen if Nokia expected every user out there to swtich states on their own! Fail, that what would happen. It's not a laptop...it shouldn't behave like one.

N95 had also some battery problems and were fixed with a later update. If there are indeed any problems, Probably Apple will fix them too.
IBM to buy French software company Ilog for $340 million
What's different? I don't have to trust committers. People can commit to the repository without having their changes affect my work until I want them to. It's a pull model, instead of a push model, when you use it the way it was intended.

The flexibility, of course, allows you to use a distributed version system exactly the way you would with a centralized one.
.ro, .il, .cn ...usa???
No, I was impressed with google the first time I used it, and that was early on.
What is a Good First Programming Language?
Ex-Googlers launch rival search engine
Guy is amazed you can get 28th on google in no time.

You can get first on Google for obscure terms just by commenting on YC. The site you are on matters, the issue is only whether knol gets special treatment or matters in the normal way.
Whoever does their PR earned their check today.
"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement." -- PG

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
Amy Hoy: Informational Hygiene
See: MobileMe
20 GB storage. Easy to use. Price: $99/yr.
Dojango: Two great tastes in one can
you mean like octopart?
Shanghai is not Beijing, it's reasonably clean. Beijing takes pollution to a whole new level and then once more.

/lives in Beijing
//hack, cough, sputter
In my experience, it has been helpful in untangling contradictory changes based on changing customer specifications over time. Mostly, I think it's worth doing because the cost of doing so is really, really low (e.g. a hook to your add-block-comment function, a few characters), but there are edge cases where it's very helpful. Take it with a grain of salt, of course. (I edited #4 a bit.)

I agree with you about the annotate part, but (for example) I'm not clear if there's a cheap and/or fast way to find at what point a comment appeared in Perforce, when it may have been added six release-branch merges back. (I recently started using Mercurial for my personal projects. Night and day.)

There's a somewhat parallel debate about the pros and cons of signing comments.
China has some of the best party spots on the planet. Especially if you have a little Mandarin you can have one _hell_ of a time and as much XYZ* as you could possibly want.

* Where XYZ includes women, liquor, food, music but not high speed Internet, political freedom, clean air or urbane conversation.
Good observation.. those differences probably starts with your co-founder and trickles down through subsequent hires. Reminded me of the value of tools like DISC, myers-briggs, the book 'Now, Discovery your Strengths', and the '5 dysfunctions of a Team'. Anyone else know of any useful tools or proverbs along this line?
Chef David Chang on failure, Thoreau, and vegetarians
Oh no, not at all. Those cramped, futuristic styles are not the aim. It might be cool to try to pull them off as a retro style, but otherwise I'd stay far away.

By 'block' I meant "display: block;" css statements, more or less. Take a look at the link from Jason Santa Maria for one example of those this can be interpreted; although, in my own designs I use them a little differently.
Facebook Fends Off Attack of the Clones
I think I would let a beginner start with HTML (semi-programming) and then toy around with JavaScript.

At least with JavaScript I can see some use for the average person (spice up homepage, Greasemonkey, Mashups), whereas otherwise I am not sure what an average user would want to program.
One big part of quality of search is figuring out which sites people click on when they search for something and making that result more relevant. I can't imagine Cuil not doing that, and over time their results will probably get a lot better. Considering they started off with no data like this, not bad so far.
It's back up, I kind of the like the UI with more data displayed on the page
Ask HN: What are your favorite browser add-ons?
What are the YCers' favorite browser plugins for web development or just plain browsing?

Are there any features you use in Firefox/Safari/Opera or another browser that you just haven't seen elsewhere?
Facebook Hires Mozilla Exec Mike Schroepfer As Director Of Engineering
PHP 5.3 in feature freeze
We're currently evaluating iLog at my work. Do you think under IBM ownership they will still continue to support .Net?
Paxos Made Live – An Engineering Perspective
Nice joke! I liked it!
Both candidates favor a cap-and-trade system, and with the president's backing (and signature) it will pass easily.
I guess my early results were different, I often recall getting "better" results on Yahoo and AltaVista, but preferring Googles overall UI better, so I kept at it.
How to Jumpstart the Economy - Tax Free Small Businesses
Firebug is a pretty obvious choice. Highly recommended!

I also use Flashblock.. oh and Sage for RSS.
Bit bombs and other dangers
Numerolgy, hilarious. I have to use that one someday, hope you don't mind. At any rate, I meant to post a Smolin paper on LQG that posited quantized space,
and if I recall there was supposed to be some data coming in from an observatory that could lend some weight to the theory (back in 2005?).
What blows my mind is how fubar the voting machine industry has been when it has a model example of regulation in the gambling machine industry. I realize that some of the technical design goals are different but many of the regulatory aspects are extremely similar.

Reliable and trustworthy voting is the linchpin of democracy. There is no excuse for voting "irregularities" in this day and age.
imdb for your movie example.
You might have "Consolas, Andale Mono, monospace" if your body text is sans serif (since Consolas is sans serif) but "Andale Mono, Courier New, monospace" if your text is serif (Andale Mono and Courier New have serifs). I agree with you that "monospace" has to be at the end.
Storing all history locally changes several search operations from time-consuming emergency techniques to immediate options.

Support for network structures besides "central server with commit haves and have-nots" greatly reduces the amount of inherent politics and the seriousness of forks.

Every repository is a full backup, and could become a new primary server if necessary. Even if you still use a "commit to central server" network structure, this comes in handy.
My personal favorites in Firefox for personal browsing are: Adblock Plus, Colorful Tabs, NoScript, Nuke Anything, Popup ALT Attribute (for XKCD), and Tree Style Tab.

For web development I find Web Developer and Firebug indispensable.
So, do you think this headline to become possible in some future:

"Is Microsoft the new Apple (or will it keep to sell bananas)?"
Here is a command that really opened my eyes to how cool sed, grep and piping are:

ls -R | grep ":$" | sed -e 's/:$//' -e 's/[^-][^\/]*\//--/g' -e 's/^/ /' -e 's/-/|/'

courtesy of this site: http://www.centerkey.com/tree/
Better than tax-free big businesses.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216510

I'm wondering how HN didn't match this as a duplicate article. The URL's are identical. Is there a timeout of 1 month or something for article submissions?

NOTE: as graywh points out below, the earlier submission used 'www' and this one did not.
Crowdsourcing and user generated firings
I like that DCVS makes the "commit to central server" idea a community agreement rather than a technological limitation.
Hmm. Revenue for 2007 was $161.5m. So they are paying 2x revenue. Market cap was $221m so they are paying 53% over market.

But the really amazing thing is their Net Income: $4.8m (2007), $6.6m (2006), $6.7m (2005). So they are paying 71x net income.
In terms of browsing, these are the add-ons I don't know that I would fair well without:

easyGestures, Adblock Plus, ChromEdit Plus / Smart Bookmarks Bar, Greasemonkey, Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer

Also a fan of some others such as Zotero, Delicious, Tab Catalog and a few others.
Beautiful Migration
Mercurial Woes
There are a few different things that click for me with git (e.g., local access = lightning fast operations for those things I want to do all the time), but I guess the single biggest win in my opinion is that the tool no longer dictates workflow within a large organization.

Whether you realize it or not, if you've got a group of a thousand developers and you say "let's keep our code in Subversion" (or ClearCase, or... etc.), you've just made a whole host of decisions about how the individual project teams are going to collaborate with one another.

Distributed version control systems let you consciously decide what the workflow will be between project teams, and this hasn't been possible before.
s/get it write/get it right/
CalDav enabled for Google Calendar
Nice! :-)
It depends on the application you're looking at. Flashlights are improving magnificently with the introduction of LED bulbs. Heat, battery drain, and illumination are all improved.
It's all about what makes for "good TV". An economic catastrophe, earthquakes and shootings make for good TV, so you hear a lot about those things. A kid that drops out of college, gets VC funding and flips his startup to GOOG for Bazillions also makes for "good TV".

An entrepreneur that plugs away creating a small ISV or a team that creates a small SAS site is rather boring, so you're not going to hear about it. That is unless you have a DHH who is willing to throw rocks at the establishment and gather some press that way. DHH writing "F*ck You" in a 72 point font in a Power Point presentation--that's good TV.

The guys over at Shoppify make a decent little SaS product, last I heard it was 4 guys working on RoR and were profitable from the first few months. When I watched a RoR presentation by them last year, they said they hosted 25,000 online stores. No one hears about them, however... why? It's just not good TV.
Average environments beget average work
Exactly. You can still use a DCVS like a centralized system, if you want, you just get automatic backups, faster searching, and load balancing for free.
Chatbot Game supports embedded videos. Will this lead to more interesting chats?
A question: back when we were all using AltaVista, did we know we needed Google?

Or, put another way, was Catherine Deneuve the next Bridget Bardot?
Actually that could be turned around to drive hardware manufacturers to open source, along the lines of, "if you want to play in this important and visible market, your drivers have to be open source".
Damn straight. Now all we need is for the government to actually implement this.

Shouldn't take any time at all, I'm sure they'll be done by tomorrow evening.
The blog author was one of the founders of Lycos (read: search engine long before Google) and was pretty involved in keeping it alive under stress (albeit 1990s stress, not 2000s stress).
Review: Our Top Choices for Restaurants in Venice California - Associated Content
Beyond REST
I think it would probably take a court challenge for that to happen. That being said, I think a court challenge would probably have a good chance at succeeding, especially if you were offering a copyrighted piece up without financial reward.

Big pockets required for that one though... perhaps when I'm rich. :)
The Implicit Association Test
Digg.com co-founder diggs TravelPod
Male Test Scores Are More Variable Than Female Scores
Long ago, a boss told me: "Hire into your weakness." That's a tough pill for managers to swallow. If we hire people who are stronger than we are in certain areas, we run the risk of looking incompetent. We may look foolish, or be in a position to have to ask for advice more often than we like. If we hire people who are better than we are in some realms, they may not respect us.

good lord. do people really think like that? if so, i think they've got much bigger problems than merely hiring people like themselves.
We use a bug tracking system.

If talking about when somebody sets up their own and uses it to nag people.
Voodoo Envy 133
WebToSnailMail
Align your graphic elements.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_(typography)

http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/comments/five_simple_st...
I think "crowdsourcing" is a bit of a flaky concept, really. You're not getting anything valuable from Average Joe, you're either getting a democratic assessment of something (ie, 1K Average Joes), which is nothing new, or you are tapping into the top 1% of a particular niche.

That being said, the concept of firing your employees to tap the crowd as an entity for free is completely flawed.

What I find more likely to happen is that the crowd, whether the 1% or the group as a whole will begin to understand the value they create and will start to charge for that value. If the business community wants to hasten that reaction by ensuring the crowd is as under-employed as possible, then so be it. This generation of workers has shown themselves to be much more adaptable than "super efficient" businesses ever were.
Same for me. I tried two test queries and had none of the results that I wanted to see (which I do see on Google).
Yes, I imagine a lot of people do think like this. Hell, I'd say that, for most people, losing authority is seen as worse than simply failing without losing face.
Absolutely agree. The idea that the user is responsible for diddling around with complicated settings in order to get an essential feature* to work flies directly in the face of the way Apple products are supposed to work. I don't have one: is it really that bad? That's a showstopper for a huge number of users if true.

* And yeah, I'd put "24+ hours of battery life" way up there on the list of essential features for any device that goes in a pocket.
Some great white papers on the tech/biomedical industries
I feel bad that this guy needed to be "vindicated" by stating something that was so obviously inline with all semi-correlated data points, from life expectancy to average salaries.

It is clear that in our species, the female is the pretty one, while the male is judged on achievement. Given that, the male most certainly will be the gender that pushes boundaries.

I thought this was pretty much a given. Why people can't accept that we are programmed differently (and, more importantly, that it has next to no impact on any particular individual or the life they choose to live) is beyond me.
Interview: Michael Dell, CEO & Founder of Dell Inc.
Top 22 Mac OS X Products: Part Two
Top 22 Mac OS X Products: Part One
Print view: http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml...
The process doesn't have to be conscious. People who are competent in areas one doesn't understand can come across as vaguely intimidating, while being weak in areas where one is stong might be interpreted as stupidity. As such, unless you are extremely honest with yourself you run the risk of underestimating those that differ from you, and overestimating your mirror image.
As far as color-scheme assistants go, I like http://www.colorsontheweb.com/colorwizard.asp .
IRS issues + health care have been the two greatest areas of stress when running my own business. I was a bit naive about both the first time around, I'm not sure I'll do it a second time.
Imagine a Bigger Market and You'll See a Bigger Market
Pretty classic quote: "That’s not to say that we’re all created equal and that star power can be unlocked with hippie music and sandals alone. Just that there’s a ton of untapped potential trapped under crappy policies, poor direction, and stifling bureaucracies. People [are] waiting to do great work if given the chance."
Activismism: political illiteracy and moral zeal
This one doesn't have the www(dot) in it.
Cuil, semantic search by ex-Googlers
It's often a subconscious decision.
Are Online Ad Dollars Being Wasted On Gen Y?
"We're working on a new subway system. We're going to base its layout on building patterns rather than where our riders actually go. It would be a violation of privacy, and just plain wrong to check which buses are crowded."
CitiBank:Windows is the only secure operating system.
Citibank continues to block Linux users from their site.
If I were you, I would borrow layout ideas from www.cuil.com
Well, at least it's helping your hacking.
Zip bombs:  42 Kilobyte file when unzipped makes 4.5 Petabytes
Python for Scene and Model Description for Computer Graphics
Good point. Don't know how I missed that. Thanks.
> ...quit thinking about how you can land a room full of rock stars and ninjas (note to recruiters: even if these terms weren’t just misguided, they’d be tired by now anyway)

Thank you..
You'll still have to do all the paperwork to report your employees income etc. + small businesses make up like 99% of gov't revenue from business, so I doubt they'll want to cut you a break.

What they need to do is come up with a better web based solution. Right now the state websites are crap, they don't even tell you which forms you need to do. They need to come up with 1 government website, where you select what your business does, input how many employees you have, input your revenue and expenses, and then based on that info you get a generated list of all the forms you need to submit, already pre-typed with your relevant info. Then add email notifications for when its time to submit a new form.

Seriously why the hell do all government websites look like they were made in the 90s?
The way it's written, it's not "Zero M Q" it's actually "Null M Q." On early personal computers like the Apple II, the null-set symbol was used in the display font as zero, so maybe that's a reference to this.
A discussion and review of Joel Spolsky's The Best Software Writing I
That's optimistic, but to be successful with "hackers" the search engine would most likely have to steer its user experience in directions that wouldn't appeal to an everyday user. Typically, us geeks want both maximum control and elegant usability, always preferring control to usability. With most users, the inverse is true.
Virtualization Needs a New Backup Strategy
An Old Task in Python
Spreeder.com | read 300 words/minute instantly
The App Store could spread like wildfire through Apple’s product line
I think an important factor is missing: personal gain. At 37signals their income is tied directly to the quality of their work. That's just not the case in larger companies and it seems a pretty big hurdle to overcome.

There's a lot you can do to motivate people besides money, but in my experience it's fairly superficial motivation. It's enough to make work pleasant and keep people contented, but not enough to really kick ass. Google is a perfect example.

The only times I've seen teams of people do their best possible work is when they believed there'd be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (measly bonuses don't count). Money is as close to a silver bullet for motivation as I've ever seen. When the promise of riches is in sight all the smaller things just don't matter. When it's not there all the smaller things are the only things that matter.
My search for 'cuil' on Cuil was even worse, leading to zero results, while a search for 'Cuil' yields lots of results (but, as you noted, not cuil.com itself). So it looks like Cuil is case-sensitive as well as incomplete.
The loopholes this would create would lead to some very well paid accountants. I'm all for the idea of letting small businesses get tax breaks, but I think that Exxon could find a way to break themselves up into 25,000 smaller companies.
Seriously why the hell do all government websites look like they were made in the 90s?

Because they were.
Flickr Founder: I Wish Microsoft Had Bought Yahoo
No Infinities: the universe is discrete.
Pysimpledb - Python Simple Database Access
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=os%20x&sl=long

Seriously?
Peering into Microsoft's Cloud
There are "big ideas" which look interesting and fresh for a general public, but they are boring and plain wrong for any professional in the field.

I'm sure you can find such things in your area of expertise.

All that glisters is not gold.
Using CouchDB for I Play WoW
The thing about crowdsourcing in tech support is that the crowd is the one that's experienced the problem, and is practiced in using the solution. The thing that Brad Smith does not understand is that the technical support staff from Intuit play a different role in the ecosystem around his product than user experts; and removing the in-house tech staff would likely drive away the user experts.

I don't think the 'crowd' is going to wake up and start charging for things they currently do for free because the most effective forms of crowdsourcing depend on small individual contributions being given collective effectiveness by the context.
Good point. See also the "Underhanded C Contest": http://underhanded.xcott.com/?page_id=2
This ties in nicely to the threads about the necessity of comments. :)

As a bonus, most (all?) of the sed commands are also usable in vi's ex mode (the : prompt).
"Whether you realize it or not, if you've got a group of a thousand developers and you say "let's keep our code in Subversion" (or ClearCase, or... etc.), you've just made a whole host of decisions about how the individual project teams are going to collaborate with one another."

As mentioned in the article, what are these choices? What EXACTLY changes about the way teams will collaborate? This seems to be his real question...
what surprises me is to see an article like this on hacker news, and to see it getting serious upvotes.

if you ask me, the author of that article is not part of the solution, she's part of the problem. she's describing a framework where decisions are made based on ego and pride. exactly the sort of environment that the average hacker news reader wants to avoid.

then she goes on to describe how you might fix one small part of this -- by deigning to hire someone not exactly like yourself. while leaving the rest of the ego-based framework intact, no doubt.

i'm guessing the real problem she's describing is deep insecurity. i'd prefer to see her tackle that one, rather than some tiny insignificant facet of it, as she's chosen to do here.
I tried starting with lisp, and...well, that was a year and a half ago.
HG != Hg