skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Remember that (assuming this is real), that money isn't really coming from Google. Google actually makes money from AdSense. So this should really be called Google AdSense Advertisers Will Eat Google.
GAAWEG: Kinda a long name, but I would still prefer GAAWEG with a reasonable background to GWEI with this blinding background.
Will it work if I add http://ycfeeds.com/hackerfeed?user=jfornear into my friendfeed?

EDIT: I guess not, but you should add friendfeed support :D
For some reason this article reminded me of this old TV segment that was hosted by the Genie from Aladdin. The title was "Great minds think for themselves." The title always stuck with me (along with apples "think differently" slogan) in that no one thinks the same. A group of people may approach a problem the same way, but there will never be one true way of doing something. This is why I think it's important to get external feedback from people totally unrelated to you. Sure it can be painful, but feedback almost always helps, I mean heck it's the entire philosophy behind web2.0.

Anyway great article and great responses here.
I bet you could actually use it to get people using a website on a permanent basis. To short-circuit the charging by the hour, just make the goal "complete this short survey on our site... Which is only available if you're a regular user."
I wonder how many people in developing countries are Turkers. The article didn't discuss that at all (perhaps because the journalist didn't have access) but a few $s a day might be worth it in some places. Or certainly more worth it.
no wonder i can't get a response from any yahoo developers
You just have to love the viral marketing coming to elections too. Many people will "support" him just to find out who his running mate is 1st. Then they have a bond which may make them vote for him.
What excuse is there for license incompatibilites when they're so far downstream? By porting ZFS & DTrace, OSX seems to be getting more out of Sun's OSS efforts than linux is.

I guess I was also expecting a substantially different environment, like windows to OSX.
that's true, that is a good point.
Time for TechCrunch to start a Gmail uptime watch.
I'm currently using DB_DataObject.

But am considering switching to Zend or CodeIgniter.

DB_DataObject is working fine for now (it's lightweight, and I had it working pretty quickly). Saves time without getting in the way.
Not quite true. It does use some power, b/c the battery will eventually end up dead, even if you have the wireless connection off, if you forget to turn off the main power switch.
I wonder if Google realised before adwords started growing like wildfire that search was such a potentially powerful advertising platform.

I know that other pay per click & search marketing services were around and were reasonably successful, but a lot of that was probably hard to seperate from the bubble. I mean I don't think there were many plumbers advertising on search in 99' & coca cola was never going to work.
Ruby VM shootout on Rock, Paper, Scissors
Better & more direct would be "We're having problems with your GMail account"

That way they take responsibility for it, rather than blaming the user, or blaming no one.
Online Outliners - The Best of What's out There
Maybe they are patching the cookie security bit vulnerability that was disclosed at DEFCON.
Yes that's how it will seem so long as it's not too big. Just like they present certain college jobs under some obscure classification that means they are not bound to minimum wage.

Or mailbox stuffers. Down here they advertise those jobs as a way to make sure you get your daily walk & get paid a little.

If it becomes a serious channel to a labor market, it might become a way of bypassing Chinas $144 minimum wage.
(BTW, There are quite a few internet sweatshops going already with 12X7 weeks @ $144 p/m)
Probably not these days, since the cost of some coins are higher than their face value. By picking up and using change you'd be saving the government the cost of replacing it.
An interesting article, marred only by the occasional clangingly awful sentence like these:

"I am looking at one of the Dead Sea scrolls of classical antiquity: a shard of half-recovered time. It belongs, I realise, to a genre of accidental art that speaks of our relationship to the past more precisely than any intact work; it is the art of the fragment, an art that yields to us, but never surrenders."
SolutionSet
Often valuable information is conveyed in a not-so calm demeanor. The delivery may not be the best, however.
Tumblr Beta
I'm not sure if this is 100% accurate. My ageing N95 has a "Download" link in the applications folder. This allows you to browse and buy apps. I've never done it because most of the Apps in their are naff and the ones that aren't are not worth the £6-10 they cost to me.
Most people doing this are English speakers that spend their proceeds at amazon.com. The low wage doesn't feel so bad when you are slowly working your way to a 1080p plasma. $4/hour is about the rate an experienced turker gets.
Would be curious for a link to an internet sweatshop...
Because in general, CEOs are held up to the world as superheroes demanding and getting astronomical salaries (usually set by compensation committees stocked with similar pampered upper class twits), and represented in the press by PR companies who generally extoll how they're better than everyone else. And then when their company fails and the employees walk away with nada, they not only get golden parachutes but somehow manage to evoke sympathy while not working for 5 years, supported by the lost investments of, generally, pensioners.

I didn't mean to insult you or your partner, I'm in fact saying that you're probably more deserving of sympathy and respect than the person this story is about.
Only if they have the hardware and cheap, reliable internet connections.

If this is the case, then they are usually fairly literate and generally pursue options that provide a higher return e.g. online training/learning/certification to enhance job prospects, job-hunting, blogging supported by AdSense/adverts, ecommerce/eBay, etc., or in the worst cases spamming/scamming.

Those that would truly benefit from a few dollars a day are the ones least likely to be independent Turkers. The best case sceanario for them in this respect would be to work in a Turk farm (where a host company provides the infrastructure), but then they would only get a fraction of that dollar they earn. However, at least they would be indoors doing non-manual labour.
The death of planned obsolescence -- why today's gadgets keep getting better
"... I'd be willing to bet that a class of problems caught by unit testing in Ruby/Python simply don't exist in Java due to its strong typing. ..."

And I'd say an absence of errors does not mean no errors exist. While I don't advocate unit testing as a cure to defects it is comforting to make changes on a system and know you don't break something because of coverage.
How to Pitch and Demo Your Cool Web App
Nah, I was distracted when I read it. It's clear, I'm just stupid.
You want to look at http://ycfeeds.com
That's hard, though, because a naive application of that philosophy results in a smothering bureaucracy where even simple tasks become hideously expensive. The trick is architecting the process to avoid the possibility of mistakes in the first place (or better: architecting the system being implemented such that it's tolerant of mistakes being made).

What you describe is the operations equivalent of a software guy hacking a one line patch around a bug. Too many of those without any cleanup/refactoring and you start introducing new bugs while fixing old ones.
Hacks for sale
"... It's a very nice hack, but it's certainly not native support. ..."

You are right. I missed that bit but does allow you to give IE users a taste. If we waited for full binary support for all things without hacks nothing would get done.
I wanted to post a general discussion going about creating a search engine since the Ycombinator crowd is a good crowd. How do you guys see Google scaling in comparison with how the web is expanding so much? Do you think they will keep indexing the web and adding new content? I personally don't see that to be very scalable. What do you think Google is thinking about the future in terms of incorporating so many webpages into its index. Obviously Google is using a "pull" mechanism where it crawls and indexes. Do you guys see like "push" mechanism like RSS that will work better and how would that affect the search result? Is there any way besides index to achieve a different kind of search engine? Another kind of content retrieval system is like the Digg where the user "pushes" the content to Digg and therefore it is supposedly more relevant and interesting, but the disadvantage of that becoming a search engine is there isn't a lot of content that the user submits compared with like Google. For instance Digg cannot support query like "c# string replace" while Google will do that very easily because it crawled and indexed the MSDN api pages already, while Digg users might never submit that same page to Digg. My main concern is supporting so many content with different query and being very comprehensive search engine like Google without this huge index and crawling restriction? Any clues? I'm not dreaming about this and I actually want to make it a reality somehow.
Who's downstream of whom?

I don't think very many Unix users want a substantially different environment and Sun can't afford to develop it anyway.
Dropbox uses Amazon S3.
Great article. Thanks.
You know the universe is coming to an end when art and click fraud converge.
What not to do as a technical recruiter
How Google put Bill's grief on show
Reposting my comment on the site for the lols:

We constantly get this crap at work. Normally they get hold of one name of linked in or something and then call the main switchboard.

The worst we had was recruiting firms calling the switchboard to be transferred through. Then they would claim to be Fedex and try to phish for names. "Oh this package has to be signed for by a member of the engineering team, is there anyone who might cover if you are at lunch when it's delivered" Riiiiight!
I just want to say that this is possibly my all-time favorite Hacker News comment.
I'm curious if anyone can translate the letter from Google's legal department?
It's not really that earth shattering. AppStore will help drive more people to the iPhone platform, thus bringing more revenue to ATT.
outliners, rss and no mention of Dave Winer

- http://www.outliners.com/

- http://davewiner.userland.com/outlinersProgramming

- http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail260.html
Basically that Google is aware they are using robots in conjunction with AdSense and despite the fact that Google understands this is an art project, Google has to defend its AdSense program as well as its advertisers from harm. Based on the material on the web site itself, Google believes the GWEI people give the impression that their project is violating the AdSense TOS. Google will unequivocally defend its rights and this generally includes shutting down the AdSense accounts of violators. Google also reserves the right to take additional action.

I.e. not quite a takedown letter. More like "we're watching carefully".
Or how about this: create this content for $0.0X... do it while signed in, and receive recurring revenue (10% of our ad revenue for a given content).
Cool hack.. keep it up. :)
The venture deals that got away
A must read for anyone in the startup world!
Smartphone Decision for Young Programmer?
Switching to T-mobile soon and want to take advantage of their excellent data plan, I also have need of a "rough" GPS device although a fully functioning one is a plus. I know my way around enough that just having google maps 'should' be enough.

Anyway, my choices are any smartphone that is unlocked and GSM. My primary contenders are

Palm Treo, for the price factor since I can get one for under $200 unlocked.

Apple iPhone, for under $500, although the totalitarianism is a serious turn-off.

Any Good Windows Mobile Phone?

Nokia N95, heard it was good, but the reports of cheap construction and laggy interface are a huge turn-off for me. I hate laggy interfaces. Love the GPS though.

Who among you are very happy with their smartphones?

Ability to do wifi is important, GPS is a plus, a good ecosystem of applications is a near-must since I'd like to tether without paying the ridiculous fees for it.

Hackability/Open Platform is a plus, I'm a programmer so something I can tinker and learn on, and provide my own solutions to small problems is a big boon for me.

A decent web browser is a small plus, but Opera Mini is near ubiquitous, so it shouldn't be a huge deal.

Please offer your suggestions for phones!
"... If one is going for a big market, you don’t want to ship one that has bugs, right? That didn’t stop Microsoft—or many other successful software companies, for that matter. The trick is understanding what bugs will be tolerated by which portions of the market and limiting your sales to that segment until your ready for others ..."

Of course your customers don't mind bugs. It's not as if you have to be good all the time? ... Hi my name is James from the "Sloan School of Management". You might remember me from strategies like the "Outsource your development staff", "Take more money than you need, spend like mad", "Customer acquisition costs" and "Let's stack the board".
Ask YC: Photo Centralization Service
Recently, I've been receiving a lot of links to photo galleries where I was at an event and people have taken photos. My friends aren't very tech savvy so photo gallery usage is fragmented amongst them (picasa, facebook, fotki, kodakgallery, etc...).

I want to save these galleries in a centralized place online. I want to put in a url of a gallery I want to keep. Not just simply a bookmark, but the service should rip the photos and store it. As it stands right now, I'll probably never revisit the photo gallery or I'll have to come up with a way to rip it myself.

Most photosharing sites are about sharing not consuming or 'collecting'. I think this would be a great idea for a service, something akin to friendfeed but photos based. Is there such a service already? If not I think it would make a great company simply from solving a problem standpoint not necessarily a business plan one.

Thoughts or suggestions on such a service?
Did you ask for permission to crawl news.yc? (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=271119)
I made a tribute to the day's events: http://chrisricca.com/failfrog
These guys were on net@night a few weeks back: http://www.twit.tv/natn59
Our service is powered by Mechanical Turk:

http://saneshopping.com
Ask YC: How do you feel after watching Planet Earth?
I just watched the full-length Planet Earth film, with Patrick Stewart narrating.

It absolutely blew me away, but left me with mixed feelings as I opened my IDE this morning.

On one hand, the elegance and complexity of nature is inspiring to engineering, and makes the mind reel at the thought of what could come from genetic programming.

And yet, it's very disheartening to see just how puny our engineering efforts are when compared to the fine handiwork of the gods.

How do you feel while/after watching a really good nature documentary?
There's a big difference between the two memos. Jobs' email is "guys, we messed up, let's learn from it". Ballmer's email is to fire up the troops.

I think the different purposes of the two memos explain the difference in styles. It's not a function of the two's personalities.
Programming Language Beauty: Look Closure
I think the whole "hiring an agency is bad" is overblown. Sure for a hacker its probably a waste of money, but for normal people? They really don't have any other choice. Its not like a businessman in his 50s with a startup idea, will want to spend thousands of hours learning to code his project. And for what? To have a crappy little site because you don't know half the tricks, and don't know where to go to find help.

Also the whole "you must have quick changes to succeed" is overblown. Sure a hacker will probably be able to roll out a new change a week earlier, but how much can you really gain during that 1 week?

And in the long run the businessman will win, because while you are busy spending your whole day coding that one extra feature, the business guy can focus on running his business, while his agency works on the feature requests based on his requirement document and mock ups.
at least Twitter has an API!
Great reply. My current thinking for the project I'm working on is that I don't need Hadoop...yet. That said, if it's trivial to implement on a single machine it might be wise to just begin the project in Hadoop so that I don't have to make the switch later. Always balance between 'premature optimization is the root of all evil' and 'choosing the right tools for the right job'.

I'll give it a shot on my desktop to start - thanks for the tips!
Take a look at Kosmix.com

Ignoring relevance for a sec, which display of results looks better? Kosmix by a mile. I think that's what Ballmer means when he says he wants to move beyond 10 blue links. Amidst the aura of "FAIL", one nice thing Cuil had was that you didn't really need to scroll down to see all the results. There's room to beat Google in displaying results better, and that's what Kosmix, PG, and Ballmer are all trying to do, each in their own way.

I don't think the company that beats Google will do it by "out-Googling" them.
As I've posted elsewhere, I think the Blackberry if vastly underestimated by people around these parts, which I don't really understand.

The OS is rock solid, they have very durable hardware construction, a huge number of features compared to the iPhone and a $20 API key will get you access to APIs which iPhone users only dream about (regular APIs require no key).

I don't know what you mean by hackability. The iPhone is good because with the amount of attention it has received, you can get a huge number of cracked applications, something you won't find on the BB. If you were planning on actually buying apps, this won't be a problem.

I used about 12 different BBs for a year and half, and about 2 weeks ago brought an iPhone. I am trying to give it a fair shot, but to be honest I will probably have to sell it soon - the amount of sacrifices you have to make up to use that pretty GUI are just too many.
The person should spend 10 bucks and buy a domain name. Actually dreamhost gives you a free domain name with the account, so I don't see why this person doesn't use one.
I'll be interested in what folks have to say, too. I have a Nokia 3650 I'm looking to replace. It's been a nice system for years, but it's time to move on. The main thing I've missed on the 3650 is a keyboard. Actually coding on the system is prohibitively slow except for the shortest bug fixes or constant changes. T-Mobile's data service has been good and affordable for me, so at this point I'm not looking to change providers.

If the Nokia 810 had a phone I'd get one in a heartbeat.
Roommate has one, it's nifty but one of the laggiest mothers I've ever used. I'd go berserk using it as a phone, personally. :\
I like it, hopefully someone from GMail sees this thread.
I still can't send attachments... Anyone else still having problems? (5:53 PDT)
Virtous cycle must be formed between size and quality of the audience and variety and quality of the content. Those cycles do not build themselves. That is why Apple's App Store is a success and Nokia's or Handango is not.
I remember reading (couldn't find the link) that University texts were about the same price on kindle as hardcover. That has got to be a big mistake.

- University texts are expensive because of the short runs. Authors get only a couple of $ for $100 sales.
- University texts are heavy.
- Students are the ones carrying multiple books around daily. (all those scenarios of not needing to pack 10 books on holiday...)

Throw in the fact that students are a great segment to introduce these sorts of products to & it seems crazy that they haven't targeted colleges as the inroad for this product.

I mean if you could convince Universities that:
- Lecturers can prescribe aby books they want without worrying about being stuck with early editions or the print houses running out.
- Lecturers can publish books themselves without a minimum run & keep 4X the profit from 1/4 of the cost to students.

I mean they could almost make it a mandatory buy. Consider that over 3-4 years you spend approx $1000 (including buying & selling second hand), if they could sell college texts for $20, the total cost to students would be about 1/2 of the cost of hardcovers with reduced hassles.

Amazon seems not to give a damn about that market. I think that they didn't do well in negotiations with publishers. Apple might have done a better job there I think.
What's this $20 API Key? what does it do for me?
Also, can I find an essentially unauthorized tethering app for a BB?
Also, if I get a BB, I'll have to "hide" that fact from T-mo, they use a different set of plans for them. (I don't need exchange server syncing, so I want the cheap data plan).
Do any blackberries have a good web browser? Is it an open platform? Do any BBs have native GPS?
Simple. Functional. Fast. Thanks!

I actually like the fact you can look at feeds and see deleted and changed posts. With observation and a little comparison, you can see the revision process (or lack of) for (your favourite) users.
In my opinion, yes, Google will keep crawling the web and indexing in a similar (but continually optimized) way for the foreseeable future. Here's why - let's say you work at Google and come up with an entirely new way to do search. Here are your options:
1 - Go to Larry/Sergi with the proposal to completely rip and replace millions/billions of dollars of infrastructure and knowledge in favor of a completely unproven new idea. The cost and risk are so huge they'd never go for it.
2 - Go to an outside investor with the proposal to build it from scratch. If it's truly an amazing, innovative new approach, they might fund it and you'd be able to build it from scratch without the political nightmare of trying to rewrite the core product of a multi-billion dollar public company. This is exactly what both the Cuil and FriendFeed guys did (and yes, FriendFeed is very, very, very much a Google competitor).

One thing I always think about is in 100 years (or 1000 years), will we still be opening a web browser, typing a few words into the same plain Google text box, and hitting the "Search" button to get a page with 20 blue links and a bunch of ads? I doubt it. So there's definitely a better way to do search, we just haven't discovered it. My personal opinion is that some combination of social search (i.e. FriendFeed) plus human-powered search (i.e. Wikia/Mahalo) plus semantic search (PowerSet) will be involved in the next evolution. Of course, if I knew exactly what that looked like, I'd be on a beach right now instead of hanging out here on Hacker News. :)
Scott Rosenberg: Chandler 1.0 ships
And it seems that unlike Zed Shaw who wrote the webserver behind almost every Ruby site out there these guys' technology contributions are...a digg-based search engine.
thanks for joining waynep, maybe i can help you out.

email paul - at - deluux.com
His isn't an online outliner though is it?
He built a search engine called Pressflip which has a neat idea(say which searches are good or bad) but fails on the execution.
Perhaps.

I was using the first order assumption that the governmental money supply was independent of picking up change.
No, he doesn't. He's clearly drawn a distinction between Web 2.0 open source and the "rest" of open source. His entire point is to belittle and laugh at Web 2.0 open source attempts.
I don't get it...what's changed apart from everything looking bigger? I felt it was silly of me to put in my login details to be honest...but like a plonker, i did.
It's like Zed Shaw without the factual accuracy.