skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry dude, but you must not remember them vividly, because the majority of these sites did actually have a user base and did actually make revenue. In some cases (WebVan for instance), they actually made quite a bit of revenue.

They were simply prey to illogical economics. They had all created machines that were too large for the revenues to support.

As for Friendster, I know it's been fun to say that they've failed for the last 3 years, but as far as I can tell their story isn't even close to being over. They have billions of pageviews and a growing userbase. I'm guessing you'd probably switch places with them right now.
Or here:

http://flownet.com/ron/cuil.gif

(They seem to have fixed this.)
With $33m in venture they could have spared a few Gs for a better domain name.
We're running a pretty "old fashioned" deployment: Apache 2.2 on a dedicated load balancer and SSL terminator, proxying (using mod_proxy_balancer) to a handful of servers running about four Mongrel instances per core. It's all backed by replicated PostgreSQL and Oracle instances for persistence.

We do service monitoring and control via monit, deploy via Capistrano, and run a custom source-built Ruby distribution from a network share mounted on each of the app server boxes.

I'm watching mod_rails/Passenger with interest, and once it seems to have stabilized a bit, will probably try it out for at least some of our apps.
That is pretty ironic considering that google is actually a misspelling -- the correct spelling is "googol".
I'm not impressed so far. A search for "linux find and replace multiple files" returned zero results. On google it returns 280,000. Further reducing the query to "find and replace multiple files" and "find replace multiple files" still return zero results.
I'd be interested to know about some of the cooler pages that are indexed by Cuill, but not Google.
WebVan... not a memorable company... Lycos, Alta-Vista (the original search engine), pets.com, over half of those companies had a good idea...

Friendster, 'billions' of page-views... per month?

I think I'm missing 1% of what your saying... I wouldn't switch places with them, I'm not where they are yet... I'm in the development stage, alpha-stage.

Above all that, these companies are on multiple sites listed multiple times for being 'part of the economic dot com failure'. Is that what your referring too when you say "created machines that were too large for the revenues to support"?
This PISA test is ridiculous as a standard to measure the general intelligence. 400,000 is not a very big sample size in certain countries. It seems that this method measures more of the homogeneity of the education level of a country rather than the smartness of its students.

I'm curious about the sampling method of this test, it's really hard to select a representative sample among diversity such as U.S.

That being said, I do agree with the way a lot of classes are taught in American public schools. Especially the projects where students "glue things on a poster for an hour", mindless things like that really waste time and energy better used in something else.

And I cant help but think that Finnish kids really dont have much to do compared to people at other countries? They might as well do really well in their studies!
It seems to be putting incorrect pictures with names. I did a simple search of "Hacker News" and Sam Odio came up on the first search page. I thought, cool, Cuil managed to put his picture right next to his Hacker News profile. But then I clicked through to his blog and unless he's really changed over time, I think they got the picture wrong :)

Take a look:
http://billkatz-test.appspot.com/static/images/cuil.png
Guy, check the stats.

According to compete, Friendster is doing 400 Million page views per month and growing.

Revenue for WebVan in the 2000 fiscal year was $259.7 Million: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_2001_Jan_25/a...
Oh, good point. When something's posted here, I kind of assume it is recent.
Makes sense -- I've probably been guilty of interrupting others, though it's rarely bothered me. Anyway, private offices are lonely.
Hi! An early version was first given at SXSW. We are going to give a few talks around town soon, will keep u posted.

PS: Are you the rescuetime guys? :)
How to Save Local Newspapers: Cellphones
So it looks like Google grabbed about 40 links before giving up? I wonder what a good "score" is? At first, I'd guess less is better, but too few might be running the risk of throwing out potentially good pages. Too many, and the bot is just wasting effort. The 40 score could vary as well based on parallel conditions assuming many bot instances are sharing a task pool. Be sure to post the Microsoft results if/when they crawl you.
That's very worrying. Adverts people might be interested in shown to them? Cause for concern...
Laparoscopic Intervention in Treating Acute Appendicitis
It was our operation theatre exposure session and I was wondering how our professor would be performing the appendicitis surgery (appendicectomy) on a patient through laparoscopy. I was little mo
With problem 1, wouldn't the old edition still be cheaper than the new? Or would the publisher just stop publishing the older edition? Even with new editions I've come across situations where the bookstore was having an impossible time ordering enough to meet demand.

And the second...I just guess I don't understand why new editions have to be adopted so quickly sometimes. I taught myself all sorts of subjects out of used books I got at garage and library sales. Years later actually taking the classes with a brand new edition of a text, nothing's changed. Only the price..used books would be dirt cheap and the new edition would be $120. So the department assigns a book, why do they have to assign it? Kickbacks from the publisher? My question above about the publisher discontinuing the older edition?

I guess I'm ultimately mad about this whole situation (and yes, I was a textbook torrents user although they never had the texts for my classes). I even had one class at a CC (I think it was anatomy) where the class itself was only somewhere around $70 but the materials and mainly the text|online access|workbook were in the $300 range. I about flipped out then.
>And the second...

Several times in my experience the only difference between editions was that the publisher had changed the work problem (and maybe fixed some typos) for the sole purpose of making the students buy new books.
[Spoiler:]

I always assumed that the Joker had secretly swapped the detonators (i.e., you push the button, and the ship you're on is the one that goes).
If FailCamp succeeds, is it still FailCamp?
Don't Make Me Click (Google TechTalk)
I'm not sure I'd call it a rival yet... very disappointing results. http://www.cederman.com/?p=97
Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
You're probably intentionally missing the point -- but what I was referring to is the fact that they are quite unashamed about retaining data about me.
Hah, I also used the vanity search test and Cuil failed pretty badly. I have an extremely unique name too - http://www.cederman.com/?p=97
In The Netherlands a group has succesfully fought against the use of voting machines with secret software. For now the use of voting machines is not allowed anymore and the Dutch people have to vote using pen and paper. More info: http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English.

"On May 16, 2008 the Dutch government decided that elections in the Netherlands will be held using paper ballots and red pencil only. A proposal to develop a new generation of voting computers was rejected."
Cuil Finally Gets Going
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My first search resulted in a 404 page several seconds later. Then.. it went totally down for a few minutes. Now, it redirects everything to http://www.cuil.com/info/unavailable.html

Interesting first impression! Google didn't have this trouble, but then back in 1999 we didn't have billions of Webheads flocking to whatever was new and shiny... that was the investors' job ;-)
I'm not sure I agree with him. I have an iPhone 3G. My boyfriend is a die hard anti-Apple fanboy (sigh, us two are complete opposites) and has a samsung blackjack II and is tempted to get a blackberry bold when released. One of his coworkers has an n95 he loves to death.

All three of us have pretty pathetic battery life on 3g.

My iPhone only dies faster than their two phones because they won't stop playing crash bandicoot, dizzy bee, tap tap revenge, and de blob on my phone. Meanwhile there's really nothing interesting to do on their phones besides snoop on their emails and the games that exist for windows mobile etc. aren't really...as fun. That is all.

(Also, the above would correspond with my opinion and experience that all 3G smartphones have awful battery life anyway, so if that's the only reason why he switched then that's not much of one.

He says he mostly does email and voice calls though. I don't know where he lives that his calls are dropped and he gets little to no signal, but my iPhone gets comparable signal to the two other smartphones and I've never had a dropped call (except when I was a couple floors underground). I will admit I almost never actually call anyone on my phone though; total talk time in 1 year and 1 month is around 1 day 6 hours. But I do lots of email! And it's a perfectly fine device for that. Just those blasted games that everyone wants to play...)
I have an "old" server running Rails 1.x apps on Apache 1.3 using FastCGI. It's been surprisingly reliable, and has hosted apps without significant issues for over three years now (my first Rails deployment was December 2004). All of these apps use MySQL.

My "new" server is, again, Apache 1.3 but using SwitchPipe ( http://switchpipe.org/ ) which is a lot more reliable as it manages the mongrel and thin processes I am using. However, in the future I anticipate I will move to Phusion Passenger ( http://modrails.com/ ). I am starting to use SQLite3 more in apps. It's "fast enough" for small sites.

I used EV1Servers (now The Planet) for quite some time, but now am a SoftLayer man!
I am not sure we read the same book. This was an outstanding look at the near future. Three things off the top of my head that I took away as insightful:

1. As computing gets cheaper and basic AI/pattern recognition follows suite, the ability to get a group of human experts to collaborate becomes more valuable.
2. The "Rip Van Winkle" effect of an Alzheimer's patient waking up after a cure is found and having to go back to high school (or what voc/tech school has become) allowed for an interesting exploration of how little impact computers have had to date on K-12 education and how much they are going to.
3. The portrayal of the military as an enhanced system administration function was interesting and matches what Barnett is proposing in "Pentagon's New Map."

It's not the far future space opera of "Marooned in Real Time" or "A Fire Upon the Deep"--both of which I also enjoyed--but it's about a lot more than "some old people trying keep some books from being destroyed."
As far as I know the question is completely theoretical: we haven't been able to use the idea to produce any predictions which we might use to measure whether the universe is this way or isn't.

Also, that linked paper seems to be nothing other than numerology. It is interesting that the numbers are so close, but that could be a pure coincidence.
Right, that's what we're saying. Nothing fundamentally huge changes in most of these editions, so the students keep getting ripped off as they need to buy new editions and old editions become harder to sell.

I wonder what would happen if lots of students and faculty members from all over grouped together to refuse to buy such editions? In my dreams, but just to make a point to the publishers. I can only imagine how much of the cost of a new textbook is pure profit for the publishers and authors.
it's down right now... i guess they weren't expecting anybody to test it out
But don't you see that this book was a very shallow? As a piece of work, setting aside the pre-singularity tie-ins, the story was boring and the characters were uninterresting. The technology aspects of the story did little to actually explore near-term implementations of emerging tech in little more than glossing ways. There was little original thought in this book and was little more than VV's recent speeches of the last few years.
And….Cuil Goes Offline
Help HN: My app 'looks crap' in need of design advice. 
I have spent 0 time working on design of my little app:

http://www.myplaylist.biz/

As it is just an experiment in the making and something to grind my teeth on while I await to find a decent job in this industry, thus I have concentrated on back-end features and processes,
now though I am seeking advice from others for ideas about how to improve the appearance 'look and feel' and fist impression..

Please be brutal and constructive.

Thanks in advance
This means they miss big opportunities to improve their search results.
I think they should have single column search results.
How can you call it unproven? When I google for Python I get stuff related to programming because of my search history, when a zoologist looks for Pythons he'll see stuff related to snakes.
Let's give them some more time so they can prove themselves.
The ranking is unclear, top left is 1 I guess but then middle top or left middle?

More important, results are not impressive.

Why is it that this would beat Google?
I find that blog post characteristic of what's wrong with academia. Lisi's obviously not a nutjob, and obviously not an idiot, and he's treated with contempt for proposing a big idea that might be wrong; might even be spectacularly wrong. Academia as a whole would usually rather see people get back in line and go on solving irrelevant problems. I found it encouraging that in the originally linked article that he at least did find some people in the scientific community that would treat him with a modicum of respect even if it was just in taking the time to explain why his theory doesn't fit the bill.
paywall (login?)...
Online Credit Card Processing for Non-Americans
A similar question was asked about a year ago [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88263], but there weren't any useful answers and I'm hoping there is better advice to be had these days, since I am running into the same problem.

Short story: I'm running a BVI-incorporated firm with a corporate bank account in Hong Kong and am trying to figure out ways to accept online credit card payments. The business is completely legitimate.

I've looked at several of the service providers recommended in other threads, but they all seem to require companies to have US merchant accounts. I am not an American citizen and it isn't feasible for me to travel to the US to open a corporate bank account there in person.

Does anyone have any recommendations on merchant service providers that "get it"? Providing the necessary documentation to establish legal merchant accounts or fulfill regulatory requirements is not the problem. The problem is location.

Anyone have suggestions or advice?
"The browser with this cookie, did these searches previously"

I don't think this is worrying. If they start using personal data they hold, sure, but this is just creating a personalized experience. Lots of sites do it. If you don't like them doing it, disable cookies for them...
I typed in the name of the greatest rock band of all time() and got a play list (it worked), but the pictures in the slide show were baffling: a bunch of cats and pictures of food.

() Meat Loaf (YMMV)
Thinkhost review
www.thinkhost-review.org is thinkhost review and thinkhost coupon site, reviewing thinkhost hosting since 3 months ago.
1. The .biz domain was created for spammers, and people who can't get a .com name. .biz/.info etc have 0 credibility...

2. Site looks usable enough.

3. Unfortunately there seem to be 3 million similar sites springing up recently that do exactly the same thing. What is unique with your site?
Uff, does that work? You really don't have bug-tracking system, and instead of entering bugs there, you just use email or word of mouth? How do you track the whole process then?
I cant get the result for my newly registered domain name on cuil whereas I can see the result on google.
Also no blogspot/googlepages result for your query.

I found the result page lot different compared to google UI.
Its paradigm shift and difficult to comprehend. Our brain and eyes are used to google search result look and feel.
Its not that bad. You played it down quite well.

I'm no expert but that red clashes with the lime green. I'd suggest using a pink. The blue writing is a bit hard to read, perhaps make it a lighter blue.

To be honest I wouldn't change it too much. It doesn't look like a shiny new 'web 2.0' website but I think that's a good thing. A lot websites look like they were made by the same person these days. Their perfection (and conformance) makes them invisible.

Congratulations on your new app. Btw I like your 'music videos'.
the bluish grey on the greyish black doesn't work, you need more contrast.

red on black is tacky... maybe use an image.

not design, but you might want to put some <noscript> tags somewhere telling me somethings (like info which seems to be help) don't work without it.

I'm having trouble spotting ads from content. things seem kinda all over the place... might want to change the groupings justifications and colors...

although I notice that I can play by click on the group of images, which barely make sense to me, it redirects... I don't know why it redirects it should just play, and the controls should be below it.

your nav at the top doesn't stand out, simple is use a gradient of a different color from your background.

just some suggestions, I'm not a graphic designer (I do pencils for art though).
The relevance is completely awful. I did a search in Cuil and ended up with a serp where 6 of 10 results were for the same site and the rest were comprised completely of ridiculous sites like one-page sales-pitches.
No, your code is not so great that it doesn’t need comments
They appear to have fiddled with something. I got no results earlier, but now I do, and while they're not great, it's much better than nothing.
not sure you read his question. He's asking for help with design, this is a learning project 'till he get's a real job not a business.
I'm not averse to voting machines provied:

* The code is publicly available

* The code is publicly verifiable - eg, every voter is provided with a 'voting receipt' with a non-identifying UUID and their voting results. Users are allowed to look up this info online at any time they wish.
Thanks to my economics education by reading JoelOnSoftware, I am guessing that Google is trying to make content a commodity. Their main business is to be able to search through vast amounts of content, hence the more content there is, the better for Google. So blogger, App Engine and Knol make perfect sense.

Joel on Commodities: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
Reddish (ycombinator/reddit clone for Google App Engine) open sourced.
Web hosting rebate
If there are so many people bashing cuil they must be doing something right (privacy features, UI) we just don't know all of it yet!
Same litmus test, got nothing. Tried a couple of other topics I know well, results weren't particularly good. The presentation is moderately interesting though.
Overall, it looks okay. Nothing too offensive. Have a look at some colour scheme sites to get a palette of complementary colours. http://kuler.adobe.com works very well, as does http://www.colourlovers.com.
Sometimes I wonder if in the age of print-on-demand, copyright should also be an obligation to make something available.
I think the most important thing macro economically is how many people are working at full potential. That's what we should use as a sustainability measure. I'm not using the more established term full capacity, because that refers to the quantity of work and not so much at the quality. So the question is, does this pattern of seeking an early exit increase or decrease the number of poeple working at full potential? It certainly does both. But what's the net effect?

Of course there is the other question of how well that work is aligned with what consumers want. That's not easy to answer either, because consumers don't know what they want until they get to try it.

It may be that overall it is a good thing to have startup founders incubate ideas and basically throw their fledgling projects at some big corp that tries to sell it to as many consumers as possible. Big corps have less creative potential but a broader reach, so that may work. I'm not sure though.
So how are they planning to monetize this? AdSense?

So far they're vague on this. Ironically Cuil was useless,
http://www.cuil.com/search?q=cuil%20money&sl=long
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cuil+money&btnG...

but with google I found this:

"Eventually, Cuil plans to make money by running ads alongside search results, she said, but provided no further details."

The design is nice and the layout/features seem promising, though. Pleasant to use when it works.
How would one earn "beenz" and "flooz"? If you didn't have to invest real money in order to earn them, I don't see why any retailer would want to accept those as an alternative currency.
I don't particularly agree with him, either.

If you're doing sensible things, like turning off push e-mail when you're in the office, not keeping 3G on when you're in patchy coverage, etc. it should last you the day. I live in London, where there's 3G signal _everywhere_, which helps a bit.

We really need a developer to step up and design an iPhone app that would let you save and easily switch "states" that could flip all of the various power-management affecting settings at once. (3G, push, GPS, WiFi, etc.) Someone who does this could easily sell it to virtually every iPhone owner.
Sorry, yes. In that case I think the design is good enough. Just need to apply it to something else, and go for it.
His main (and only) issue with the iPhone seems to be battery life. Interestingly, tests have shown that the iPhone's battery life is about on par (somewhat better, in fact, see links at the end) than other 3G phones' battery lives. However, people are using the iPhone way more than other phones, so the limited battery life is more noticeable.

So he basically returned the iPhone because he liked it so much that he used it way more than any other phone he's owned.

Simple solution: Turn off 3G when you don't need it.

iPhone 3G battery life comparisons:

http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3353

http://gizmodo.com/5024804/iphone-3g-battery-life-beats-the-...
Would this work?

http://www.artofsolving.com/opensource/pyodconverter
Or maybe you could hack somthing together with twill and this site: http://www.zamzar.com/conversionTypes.php
Interesting, but it seems more skewed to Internet newbies, or people wishing to browse broader topics.

As a programmer who uses google daily, I tend to search for very specific terms and I scan the first few pages of results very quickly, and Google's layout makes that easy. But I also never click on any ads. So perhaps my opinion does not count :-)
NASA: 50 Years of Towering Achievement
Reddit is open source as well: http://code.reddit.com/.
> Sure, but it's hard to say if adding or omitting a feature is going to be a net win for a growing user base.

I meant more along the lines of libraries to do useful things, which is a win pretty much any way you look at it.
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