skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All can be remedied by tweaking the algorithms and that happens all the time, you can also use a certain vertical directly for certain type queries (scholar search etc).

The same way that what a user might enjoy can be inferred the inverse of that can be used as a signal in the algorithm as well. Personalization is just relevance and all is just a matter of tuning.
This is why you always ship the minimum viable product!
What sap would want to be the guy at the DMV counter that has to deal with a 20 year old computer system and loads of irate customers who want their tabs renewed right this minute? What sap wants to be the guy at the post-office counter at 11:30 pm on April 14th? Do you really think that TSA screener wants to feel you up/look at naked pictures of you when you go through the airport queue?

There are plenty of crappy jobs in government, just like in the private sector. Romanticizing it doesn't do anyone good.
Why Seeing (The Unexpected) Is Often Not Believing
I'm glad I have been using DDG for over 6 months now. For the new user, here are some advices.

DDG is my default search engine. Basically, all of my searches are completed in DDG, only very few times I have to go to google to find what I am looking for. My suggestion is that you spend 5 minutes learning the bang! syntax, as it speeds up your search by alot, then set DDG as your default search engine for a couple weeks. You will see that the bang! syntax and the 0-click-info really makes the difference on search speed, and their results are pretty damn good.
It's a personal preference thing. Do you need to? No. Should you? Personal preference.

A lot of people dislike PHP but it does get the job done. However, the only way for you to tell is to try each and see which you like best. As long as PHP serves your needs and you're happy with it, you're fine for the most part.

There are some arguments on technical debt, clean syntax, and scalability. In which case you can explore the other two options. Worth a try.

Disclaimer: I went from PHP to Python. I prefer Python.
New York Post Blocks Website Access For iPad; Forces Users To Buy iPad App
"For example, people have said that the ability to compare two codes is important to see how close they are. They've said this without justification and it is not a use case for which I designed the code."

So, actually, that property would be pretty helpful for deduplication.
HUH! I never think in that way!
The February DDG newsletter reported growth in January from 2.5m searches to 5m. I don't think DDG needs FUD to grow.
Market timing. 20 years ago a top level domain wouldn't have been such a valuable asset.
my entry, HN Sentiment Bookmarklet (http://hnmood.appspot.com) and
HNMood (http://hnmood.com) are totally coincidental :)
APIs Power Netflix’s Move to Cloud
The danger with this mentality is that you are still their customer, making them more powerful, giving them more control.

And when you'll switch to that other device, it may be too late to do that, as you won't be able to find a suitable device in a world where (a) Apple has a monopoly on such devices or (b) everybody else mimics them, yielding similar control over you.

Vote with your wallet, buy Android phones with unlocked bootloaders.
I would agree with you if there was a button I could click to turn it off. Their algorithms aren't infallible by any means. Plus, ultimately they are a business and trying to sell, so they are going to eventually skew results towards things they think I may be willing to buy, rather than things I want to know. I think G is more susceptible than MS, but only because MS does make a living selling other stuff.

I'm not saying it's evil or wrong, just that if my first results don't appeal to me, a simple measure that might work for me would be to turn the filter off. Anyway, they could learn more about me if they let me do that.
It comes up for me - half the time. The other half is a 500 error.

Also, their homepage is a screen requiring me to login. What? Why? I don't know anything about you, SocialPog - how about a page that explains what you are before asking me to invest.

Also, why is this required? http://i.imgur.com/avHf3.png
And what happened here? http://i.imgur.com/Ou3Uv.png
And why do I have to sign in using someone else's system to chat? http://i.imgur.com/td9zr.png
Another Example of Why Competition is Good
I think he means disregarding all that and looking at the raw voxels then applying a modified version of this algorithm, similar to marching cubes.
Awesome tool, but just a heads up: I tried searching for "C" and "C++", and it gave me the exact same line each time.
Good god, reading that knowing how things ultimately ended is horrible!

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

Rest in peace David.
How to use Scala and Lucene to create a basic search application
But if MtGox's technical failure effectively took USD$120M of bitcoins offline, then MtGox has reduced the supply of BTC for some period of time, no? I understand that exchanges are secondary markets, but they seem to be contrary to the philosophy of no centralized control over supply/demand. I always understood bitcoin to be a per-transaction, ad hoc currency – not an exchange-traded commodity. Of course, people are free to do whatever they want with their stuff...

Edit: I realized after posting that I called bitcoin a "currency" above. I realize that it's a controversial position, but my feeling is that, as a medium of exchange, it qualifies a currency.
I heard you can add "&pws=0" to a search query to turn off personalization:

http://google.com/search?q=paul+graham&pws=0
Hurry up Amazing Product from jpearls 60% off 
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This sort of personalization is no different than using a user's click history to determine whether he means cycling or motorcycling when he searches for "biking". It's no different than using history to determine whether someone is looking for a television schedule or coding help when he searches for "programming".

One person's "confirmation bias" is another person's "relevance". Increasing relevance to the user will naturally result in confirming their biases, because there's (probably) no programmatic way to discern contentious subjects in which confirmation bias is applicable from non-contentious subjects where it's not.

The only "shame" I see here is people who ascribe some sort of devious intention to what's clearly the natural result of trying to solve the most important problem in search.
Talk about looking at the finger.
I think you missed the point. Yes DDG ranks, but it may rank differently. Of course, there is an implicit slam on them here: instead of showing you what you want the vast majority of the time, they show you other stuff. This is good on occasion (so you don't live in an echo chamber), but if this was all the time it would mean lower quality search results for simple things.
I appreciate your points about voting behavior, but the point of my question was to get the hard data. (I don't read any indications into PG's comments one way or another and either way, actual data would still be interesting).

Will try rephrasing this question for the 'ask' section.
I would add:

The Lisp hat: basically a yarmulke; i.e. a ) on your
head.
Since this starts with mentioning less it would be nice to have example in less (and mixins would make the code more pleasant to look at).
I started with less, but moved to Sass (http://sass-lang.com/) later.
I'd suggest that you go after end-user consumers first by adding 10:10 support to their personal GPS devices -- iPhone, Windows Phone, Android. If people like the idea, then major manufactures of single-purpose devices are more likely to adopt it. Plus, it's pretty cheap to build an "app for that".
I think there's reason to complain that the reality is far from the ideal. Take Netflix, for example. I rated hundreds of movies, filled out the taste preferences to narrow down the genres I was most interested in, but the "Suggestions for You" were underwhelming, to say the least. Even worse, they simply never changed. So I went back into my taste preferences and checked that I "Often" watched every single mood and genre listed. Now I get a vastly improved range of suggestions, exposing me to some great movies, simply because Netflix is no longer hiding them from my view. I may have a unique individual taste for movies, but Netflix sure hasn't fathomed my criteria with their algorithm.
What's a web BBS? And can you elaborate more on what happened?
I'd say that the COBOL hat would be one of those thin-brimmed fedoras from the 60's, but that's just too cool for COBOL. COBOL doesn't get a hat that was worn by Frank Sinatra.
In ff3.6 you don't even see the pics (are there pics? I assumed so because it is a photo blog).
Not if you add a "Reply-to" as the OP said.
It is well known that people seek out information that reinforces their own beliefs. And while it may not be ideal for an enlightened population, why should Google/Bing fight this natural inclination? Their job is to ultimately give their users what they are searching for, not challenge their users' opinions. Especially since there are tons of benefits to personalized search, and it may be hard to not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Probably for the same reason that 1000 people + Zuckerberg tried to develop a MySpace killer.

Some people think its fun, some people think its a good way to learn, some people are aiming for the fame and glory. Almost all of them will gain something out of trying, the only people who dont gain anything are the ones sneering from the sidelines.
That's pretty inconvenient for any non-regulars. If someone sends them a link to read, they have to then fire up a special app and search for the article manually.

I doubt I'd ever bother. I'd just write back to the person who sent it and tell them I was blocked from reading it.

I really don't think this will do what they want.

Regulars, of course, would have already read the article. (If not, they experience they same pain.)
Yeah, and using their chat is as simple as signing in via Facebook!
Ask HN: Template for initial contract between two co-founders?
Hello everybody. A friend of mine and myself are thinking of starting up a little side project.
If this turns out to be successful, we'd like to have a contract in place that assures stuff like we get 50-50, important decisions must be taken by both of us etc. in general have an initial contract set up between the two of us.

Has anyone had experience with this and can you give some advice? Are there some online templates/samples of contracts like this?

Thanks!
$41 Million Startup Color Is Forced Into An Early, Buzzword-Laden Pivot
USPTO requests public comments for patent reexamination changes
It's what a lot of people called web forums early on. UBB (old perl-based forum software) even put it in the software's name.
Ask HN: Statistics on voting since hiding comment score?
I thought it would be interesting to know how/if hiding comment scores has affected participation on the site in the form of voting.

Since it is an easily quantifiable measure (compared to 'comment quality'), could anyone with easy access to the data dig up this information? I.e. total number of votes cast in, say a month, before hiding comment score vs. votes cast in the month after the change.
I know. But when displaying the Minecraft landscape afterwards you either have to leave the disregarded textures out, which looks like crap, or apply them stretched, which looks like total crap, or apply a smoothed gradient, which also looks like crap compared to the original landscape. :-)

Given that he suggested Minecraft terrains, I opined on how Minecraft would look with such an algorithm applied.
Any filter at all will result in a "Filter Bubble" as defined here (except, I suppose, returning a randomly sorted list of all sites on the internet). Whether the filter is personalized or not doesn't change that fact. What is the actual benefit of everyone getting the same search results when looking for a particular term? Search engines are not news sites or research papers: biasing towards relevant results is not a bad thing.
Which is why I want Google to be split into 6 companies and everybody should avoid Facebook Like button and comment system like a plague.

Too centralized!!!
Largely, I'm not going to disagree with you. I agree that we should look for truths and value in whatever is posted, and foster useful and constructive discussion.

However, you appear to have done that of which you accuse. There is merit in the comment you criticize, even though it is not fully or clearly expressed. Try to draw an intelligent and meaningful discussion from it ...

The point, perhaps, is that a bad analogy at the start of a piece is an example of bad writing. Good hackers need to write well, and the lesson to learn here is that good writing requires moving beyond the mundane cliche and finding analogies that are relevant, accurate, and true.

Yes, this thread got out of hand, and I probably should take much of the blame for that. The down-votes are telling me that people think it doesn't belong. I'll take my lumps. But to dismiss a comment like this as being content-free is to share the blame for not finding value.

The real mistake is the Reddit-like expression of the point, rather than attempting to highlight something positive. With that I agree.
Checking through a few different search terms, that works for me (provides different results)
I think one of the big reasons is that most C# developers are ASP.NET CRUD developers, where, most the time the bottlenecks are in HTTP i/o and in waiting for the database results. Optimizing C# for these applications is a waste of time.

You will find that a greater proportion of C#/Winforms, console apps, windows services etc. developers are performance conscious.
I'm not the grandparent poster, but I think he's saying that executives skilled enough to run the Red Cross are motivated primarily by their salaries, and so those salaries have to be competitive with what the same highly-skilled exec could make in the private sector.
Why do you think it is an issue? I think everyone already filters intuitively. It's called having a "bullshit filter". I believe it makes not much difference whether it's automated or everyone does it manually.

I think the chance that I would click on a bullshit source like Fox News is very low because I don't trust them. Even if Google brought it up as the first result.

My point is that people already only click on search results that they agree with. Nobody wants to see stuff that they disagree with. That is human nature.

So living in a filter bubble already happens without automatic filters. It happens in our brains and we call it personality.
There are other options, i.e. opt-in vs opt-out, separate sections (only show in sidebar), instant on/off, and overall greater transparency.
Irony: Use of a Google product to circumvent Google's lack of privacy or anonymity in one of their other products.
I actually did touch on that in my other reply. You should investigate unused features and find out why they aren't being used, and react accordingly.
Lulzsec and Anonymous Declare Open War Against All Governments and Fat Cats
Color has "38 employees [who] work in a space with room for 160, amid beanbag chairs, tents for napping and a hand-built half-pipe skateboard ramp."

Wow, just wow. And we all thought that the excesses of the original Dot Com bubble (Aeron chairs, etc.) were excessive.

Then again, it might serve as a nice recruiting tool. If the half-pipe is big enough for BMX bikes in addition to skateboards, I could see it being a perk I'd care about. :-)

Now if they'd just design and build an outdoor "street" course, with a few old cars, a box ramp, wall ramp, etc....
I, too, am at a high risk- I've seen members of my family slowly move from "abnormal fasting blood sugar" to "type 2 diabetic" over the span of a decade.

What I'm working on for myself is a set of scripts to take all the data I have about my diet and my blood glucose and making a chart of blood sugar fluctuation. Think fitday+ blood glucose readings + gnuplot. I'm using it to figure out what exactly is driving changes in BG levels.

I'm aiming for a chart like the one here:
http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/16422495.php

I think that there's a great amount of insight to be had if OP can aggregate a few thousand, or 10's of thousands users diet and blood sugar readings, specially when the users are at the cusp of "abnormal blood sugar" and "full blow diabetes".
It's bullshit because search is filtering and the filtering done by search is being exaggerated by those who peddle this bullshit.
If I read another article of the form "If language X were a Y, it'd have property Z", I might throw myself off of a bridge.
You're very unlikely to get away with that. Try starting facebook.aero and see how long it lasts.
"it's hard to blame someone for raising $41 million on an idea if they can"
I'd go for the green eyeshade:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Visorlayout.jpg

Anachronistic, looks absolutely silly if worn today, and was probably only worn by uptight number crunchers even back in the 60's.
Also a long time DDG user. I have it set as my default search provider in chrome, and it has sped up my browsing considerably. Shortcuts like "!w some article" or "!a some product" (takes you directly to Wikipedia or Amazon, respectively) are very handy. The only times I've had to revert to Google are for very specific forum trawling.
I'll be adding the link to the site once I get home from work today, but I've set up a mailing list for anyone who might be interested in getting an email when new features are pushed out: http://eepurl.com/emtQU
Show HN: Find the right Radio Stations to play your Ads (prototype)
Poll: Is your startup's primary domain something other than .com?
Wondering how non-.com domain names are relevant to startups
It's a .com domain
It's a .org/.net domain
It's a country TLD (e.g. .de, .fr, .es etc.)
It's a "foreign country" domain (e.g. .ly, .tv, .cc, .co, .cx, .me etc)
It's .info/.biz/.aero etc
They show you other stuff

Do you have any proof that this isn't what all search engines actually do?
So $185k buys what essentially amounts to the right to "broker" a gTLD suffix. This is building into the system a prohibitively high barrier to entry, which almost guarantees that the interests of the conglomerates will once again trump the small, innovative and more efficient.

More details on why the $185K -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13835997
Wait, wasn't the iPad supposed to provide the best web browsing experience available? How is shoving a custom app for every news site down my throat fulfilling that promise?
Sounds similar to the sentiment of this quote, of which I am always reminded, by posts like this.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

-- Theodore Roosevelt
The raw list: http://www.top500.org/list/2011/06/100
I'm holding out for when the "No True Geek" fallacy becomes a thing.

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_True_Scotsman)
Anyone know what software was used to produce that graph?
To all that have commented so far: Maybe I should have specified that this was supposed to be a beginner's guide to using the terminal.. I apologize for the confusion. And as for not knowing what "comprehensive" means, here is the dictionary definition: "Complete; including all or nearly all elements or aspects of something..."
Perhaps COBOL can get a straw boater?
Calling R lovers to work together on “The R Programming wikibook”
Announcing my first e-book "Awk One-Liners Explained"
It's funny how "Paul Graham" is Hacker News' foo bar.

Also, works well for me.
This algorithm is specifically designed for pixel art. One of the examples in the paper shows that it doesn't do very well on anti-aliased graphics. Therefore it probably wouldn't be of much use on blurry pictures or videos.
Orange UK and the Sound Charger
Social Media Lessons Learned from Anthony Weiner
Panda 2.2 is Just Around the Corner
What sense does this make as a defensive patent?
That was pure sarcasm, in reference to the OP's statement that "their recent hacks were _not_ kiddie stuff". Most of the crap they pulled last week were merely DDOS attacks, where the only real coordination required is getting everyone on an IRC channel at the same time to hit a button when someone says "Go".
> Tmux doesn't work with the Mac's clipboard

I don't use OSX but in linux you press Shift then select with mouse...
Well, I can see it as a phishing opportunity for user logins.
A true gem from the comments thread on the article:

"The PHP Hat: Designed to fit on your head, but actually only fits on your knee."
great job, I'd like to see it applied on http://draw.heroku.com drawings
I agree wholeheartedly - there are plenty of jobs that suck in any industry and, likewise, there are plenty of jobs to be proud of. The blanket statement that "in this country, government jobs are embarrassing" is extremely unfair and, well, ignorant.

p.s. I do not work for the Gov't.
Good call on the green eyeshade.
Yeah, but who's actually going to do that?

Apparently, just about nobody.
It sounds much closer to computer engineering than to CS to me.
Yep, beautiful in FF 4.0.1
The author wrote: "I wrote code that correlated a short list in one record with a long list of values that resided in another record, summed values that matched between the two lists, and presented the result. ... It was all very clear and clean code. Unfortunately, it turned out to be horrifically inefficient, though I did not notice this fact at first. It was only later when I decided I needed to be able to perform this operation hundreds of times and produce tabular output to show a visible matrix of results that the failures of that approach became obvious."

This reminds me of an approach I took on a recent project, where I wrote a variety of ultra-simple routines to look up very specific numbers and results. These routines would often go out and fetch a rather large file of data, and crunch that data down to the single result the caller desired. All in all, it was a highly inefficient way to do things. However, it was not a problem, because all I had to do was drop in a few caches here and there inside the routines, and voila, the whole thing became fast enough.

I found it a very liberating approach, because all of my code looked very "obvious" in its logic. In a few scattered places you see a couple lines of code to look something up in the cache first, but then it drops down into the ordinary and extremely clear logic.

The code also had a very nice "lazy", "on-demand", and decentralized feel to it, with no need for a bunch of gnarly and centralized initialization code.
it'd be cool to integrate it with http://smood.it
I'm sure this is an awesome resource, and I really should check it out since I want to learn more of awk.

That said, I find the initial "appetizer" example a bit contrived. To print all users from /etc/password from the command-line would probably not be done by writing a C program, by most (sane) people.

I would just do "cut -d: -f1 /etc/passwd", which feels simpler than the awk example.