skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd like to know the scientific basis of EffectCheck. The site offers no explanation. Could you point out specific research papers, or link to technical info? Thanks!
I see it as being a straw man argument.

The article makes the assumption that personalized search results are bad for you, then goes on exemplifying it, but does not say or demonstrate in any way why personalized search results are bad, especially since it doesn't give any context about the person making those queries.

Search ranking is a matter of context. "Egypt" does not mean anything, other than the name of a country, and different people mean different things. When you're searching for "Egypt" and want to get travel tips, if you don't get them you can always expand your query to "Egypt travelling tips". But even that is a pretty shallow request and you can further expand it like "Egypt travel guide to the pyramids".

The search engine's job is to find what I'm looking for. And IMHO the current state of the art is a little behind my expectations - I would have expected these personalized results to be far more effective than they are by now.
High-level overview of remote thread injection on Windows
Yeah I'd not label it a language issue but rather as you've already described it, as an implementation issue.
Ham radio operators use a "grid square" code to specify locations, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Locator_System

this is particularly used in VHF/UHF operation where something special is happening if you contact somebody more than 200 miles away. (Last month I talked to somebody across Lake Ontario about 280 miles away with my handheld thanks to a tropospheric duct.)

Grid square codes range from 4 characters to 8 depending on how detailed you want to get. Less detailed than jgc's system, but already in use.
Thanks for clarifying things jacobian. :) I'd love to help out in a limited capacity (time constrained currently, unfortunately).

In the past I've submitted tickets via the Django ticketing system indicating errors/clarification/what-not for the docs, but almost every ticket got flagged as spam and didn't get submitted. I kinda gave up after that point. Any suggestions on how to get tickets submitted?

Oh, and one tiny feature request to the ticketing system: password reset. :)
Windows Runs On 87 Percent Corporate PCs
What do you guys think about a smartphone app that could be panned around to capture a 3D image then used the golden mask to calculate an objective attractiveness score?

Would be some fun engineering and probably pretty popular.
Yes they are, though my email is in my profile if you would like to talk :) I'm the one behind http://hnmood.com
The Vital Things You Ought To Know Concerning Online Banner Advertising
Hosting review: Dreamhost
Nerd chic is as dead as punk in 1990. Most social movements are commoditized by way of cultural signifiers, and when the cultural impact of those signifiers goes away, so does the soul of the movement.

"Nerd" used to be about the intellectualism of it, the replacement of certain social interactions with an indie academic mindset. Now, "Nerd" is a marketing demographic, replete with physical identifiers: black plastic frames, object fetishism, a certain "look."

P.S. Punk is still alive in Minneapolis and SoCal. It's just not popular, so the people who actually give a shit are active. However, the rejection of populism is cool, and "cool" attracts the populace.
While the latter is logically true, one has to be careful. It may be easy to erroneously interpret that as comparing “rebellious hacker teens not recruited by terrorists” and “rebellious hacker teens recruited by terrorists”, which pair has no such guaranteed monotonicity.
Git Basics for newbies to git.
Just when I (and everyone else) was saying how horrible this is, I was shocked to find out the Google did something very similar to a Director of Operations named Brian Reid. They fired him 9 days before the IPO- leaving him with 119,000 unvested options at $.30 strike price. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist)
RealClimate: What if the Sun went into a new Grand Minimum?
Check out micro-creativity at its best
So for a few hundred thousand dollars I can actually buy clownpenis.fart ? Of course i'd have to hit the lotto first and even then saturday night live might sue me... maybe i should have gone into IP Law?
I hate to get spiritual here, but this is a major dose of bad karma, and I won't be surprised when shit hits the fan and something happens to these companies during, or after the deal.

In the meantime, I'm looking for a way to get off of Skype. I wish Google would spend more time improving Google Voice and Google Chat. I wonder if Apple has plans to turn Facetime into a Skype alternative?
A lot of places rather distant from Paisley have PA postcodes - e.g. on the Isle of Mull.

Also there are non-geographic postcodes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom...

e.g. SAN TA1 - which is my favourite :-)
I don't understand the situation well enough to say if it is a "money grab" or not, but it seems like another good reason to abolish intellectual property.
CoffeeScript Development in 3 mintutes
Ruby on Rails Cloud Hosting Options (With Technical Details)
AVM violating license of the Linux kernel
Me too. But I find Rails a lot more helpful, especially when your site turns into a mashup of web with forms, Ajax and a bit of REST. Django doesn't have opinions of much outside a standard HTTP request/response.
Video is only 3m35s long and I thought it was worth a watch.

Nothing shocking or new, but the video does a good job of tying all the steps together for how (drug) corporations can reduce their tax load.
Why do you believe it's not the CNN-approach?
Adobe Updates Flash Builder and Flex to Support Building iOS Applications
Thanks for the kind words. Appreciate it.

English is a language I'm always learning more about too!
If programming languages were hacker news comments this one would be common lisp.
I hate that country specific thing.

Somewhere, I think even on HN, I was taught about google.com/ncr - which should solve that problem (being in Country A and arriving on the localized, unreadable landing page) once and for all.

That said: I've DDG as my homepage and I'm a happy user.
On-stack replacement in v8
Bloodhound diary: Supercar gets pointier nose
Correct link:
http://arcturo.com/library/coffeescript/
Entirely possible; I'm writing these before bed after getting home from work. I just have a feeling that if someone tried to convert 2% of the world's USD to rubles in a few seconds without an equivalent transfer in the opposite direction everything would explode. MtGox not being able to handle a transaction like this simply means that there was less than 500k flowing in the opposite direction every ten minutes. If there were, that would imply either a spectacular amount of arbitrage or enough transactions going on inside bitcoin for people to be changing 500k back and forth every ten minutes. This crash just means that neither of those are happening, which I find entirely believable.
I'll let tansey go in to more detail when he gets back. But for now, heres a link to one of his comments from last time EffectCheck was on here.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2603438
And Sinatra was built to serve the APIs for the SongBird client.
This is an important point. I always have trouble explaining to people what I'm working on.
If you're working on a Facebook killer, when that hot babe at a party asks you what you do she'll actually understand what your working on and might be impressed.
That's quite a point.

My own standing is that most of the time you need what you have to have to complete task at hand. Then you could go at YouTube and refresh "Recomendations" to your heart content.

The other way around is to wreak havoc to important parts of your life.
Referrals are the best way to get high paying jobs from clients that dont' suck. Our biggest source of referrals right now came from a shitty job I did after another shitty job on Craigslist. Now, we're building a list with a blog and great products so that we don't waste time on those job boards, which haven't been worth their time.

We also pay 15% referral fees over the lifetime of clients, which our customers and friends like.
Why is that disturbing?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

"There is little difference between personalization and the relevance of search results."

Even if you're a Sailor Moon fan, you might actually be looking for information about the rock rotating around this planet when searching for "moon". In the same vein I might be a liberal but be looking for a multitude of opposing views and ideas when googling "core values of NRA members".

Oh btw, we engineers, our algorithms, aren't smart enough to foretell people's inclinations based on their past habits, we also can't read minds. The increasing use of personalization as a factor for relevancy will, imho, lead to user dissatisfaction, precisely because they make shoddy assumptions.

Believe it or not, but some people also want to be surprised and learn new things. YES. We exist!
VillageVines Relaunches As Savored, Expands Discount Dining To 10 Cities
I expect my search to be faithful to the terms I enter. If the results aren't satisfactory, I'll narrow the search with additional terms. Withholding information based on some guess at my political leanings is dishonest. I'd be appalled if a librarian did it; why should I expect less from a search engine?
http://spotwoo.com/

My weekend project a couple of weeks ago, an attempt to solve this sort of problem. I was picking up a friend, and there was no easy way for his smart phone to tell me where he was. So I wrote a site to let 'im. I haven't finished testing it, but folks might be interested.
If ICANN goes by trademark law, then you should be able to register something generic like friendly.aero without infringing on friendly.shoestore. If they don't then they are being stupid. If there are going to be hundreds of TLDs, you can't automatically protect every trademark in every TLD. Trademarks are not supposed to work like that.
Isn't it a bit much to say that Apple has sided against the consumer? They certainly didn't do that with publishers when they wouldn't give up subscriber data and they didn't show it with their constant battles with the music industry and NBC.

Regarding music discovery on iTunes, it has always been the case that if you want good music you're going to have to look for it. Popular music has always been the easiest to find, be it on iTunes or your local record store. My main concern is that iOS forces you to buy music only from iTunes.

As for the patent, Apple patents anything. It doesn't mean it'll ever see the light of day. Some other ridiculous Apple patents:

Apple patent application reveals ad-supported OS, desktop Armageddon
http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/22/apple-patent-application-...

Timely Apple Patent Introduces iMac-Like Docking Station
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2008/01/timely-a...

Apple patent shifts controls to rear of iPod
http://www.slashgear.com/apple-patent-shifts-controls-to-rea...
It's true that sometimes I'm looking for specific things, but other times I'm searching to get an idea of "what's out there", to fill gaps in my knowledge and make sure I'm appraised of what's going on in the world. It'd be nice to at least have some control over what kinds of searches I'm doing. For example, if I search for my own name, what I want to know is something like: what are the most common search results other people get when they search for my name. The same is usually true if I'm doing "related work" type searching for research; I explicitly want to find stuff outside my immediate area of specialization, in order to make sure I'm not missing anything that other people would've expected me to cover.
Checked out the offending work. New Egg's Geek On logo bares absolutely zero resemblance to Best Buy's Geek Squad logo. Best Buy doesn't own everything "geek" and orange. Are Syracuse geeks next?
MongoDB, OpenStreetMap and a Little Demo
hi, smilliken,
You may contact me davidullua at yahoo.com.cn. worked with multilingual web site development with 7 years experience in Shanghai. Known English and Chinese well. I can provide the prototype in the beginning of the proejct, keep in touch.
Check my web site with multilanguage support, and my tech blog here:
http://portal.rtmsg.com/
http://www.beyondlinux.com/blog
10 Best Cinema iPad Apps
Diagnosed autism is more common in an IT-rich region
Lettvin really missed out by refusing to try LSD. I bet he would have sung a different tune if he had.
Apple trademarks AirDrop
2 things:

1):
Most projects that I've used c# for just aren't performance constrained. What's more important for us is the productivity dimension. We have _lots_ of hardware. We have a few programmers.

I've actually just finished the _only_ c# program that had a performance aspect. It was/is an in-house search engine. I profiled it, fixed the hotspots and it's fast enough.

2:
MSFT Marketing. Linq|dynamic are heavily sold by Microsoft. You'll have to read Joe Duffy's blog for actual performance advice: http://www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/2010/09/06/ThePremature...
"We developed a novel method, called UDmap, to identify dynamically assigned IP addresses and analyze their dynamics pattern. UDmap is fully automatic, and relies only on application-level server logs that are already available today."

Not sure if that answers the question.

Source: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/S-GPS/
http://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

Searches per day in Feb average = 197,687

Searches per day in May average = 205,759

FUD certainly won't grow DDG out of the extreme niche it's in.
You can find a demo here: http://173.255.217.196
I think this was to get it on HN again. It was already on with that URL at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2653594 :-) I've seen this tactic used a lot lately and it's a natural response to HN having a time-diverse audience and no mechanism to prevent dupe posts.

All that aside, it's a good little introduction to CoffeeScript and works well alongside Burnham's CoffeeScript book published by the Prags.
Guidelines For Working With External Code Libraries
Boilerplate Boilerplate
New security issue at Dropbox
Humorless, unappealing, but hard to disagree with?
APIs Power Netflix’s Move to Cloud, Enabling World Domination
I haven't tried to reproduce this yet, but if it's true, it's quite serious.
Ask HN: Non-Tech Ideas Business Ideas to Change Careers With?
This is probably the wrong place to ask, but there are some smart people here with great comments so what the hell.

After 10+ years of being a software developer, with the last three having cofounded a startup, I feel like I'm having a bit of a career crisis. I find that just I don't enjoy it like I used to. I'm tired of sitting on my butt everyday in an office even if I make a comfortable living doing so.

While I don't live a lavish lifestyle, I still need to make a living to help provide for my family. My wife works, but I earn a higher portion of our annual income currently. Fortunately, she's very supportive of my trying to address this feeling.

I'm curious if anyone here has ideas as to where they might look to for business ideas with growth potential that don't involve software specifically. Have you encountered some small businesses out there where your entrepreneurial mind thought they looked promising? I'd like to avoid something that is highly capital intensive so that I don't obliterate my savings in the hopes of changing careers.

If anyone else has felt similar and transitioned out, I'd love to hear your story. Maybe I should follow Zed Shaw's advice and manage a burger joint! :)
Love this concept and would like to see more about it
I have seen already on the Iphone. Can't remember what the name is.
I agree, it can be remedied by better algorithms - such that can recognize when I'm doing a search for a known item and when I'm performing exploratory search. In the first case, personalize away, in the second case, please show me everything.

The challenge is that people switch very quickly between these search modes and don't even think about it.
Turn off personalization by adding "&pws=0" to the end of your search url on Google. You can also use incognito mode in Chrome.
Mobile First Helps with Big Issues
If it is as you say, only the #1 result for searches that have a high probability of it being clicked, then it's generally fine with me. If they were blindly pre-loading the first few results, I'd have a problem.

I guess I should give Google more credit, and assume they're not idiots.
EffectCheck looks really cool, but didn't seem to have any demo/try it out feature. I suppose it's not there? Or did I miss it? Thanks.
Small changes to the inputs can result in dramatic changes in the output.

For example: I know that (50,1.11) is pretty damn close to (50,1.12); how do I begin to think about the distance from MEQ N6G 7RN4 to MEQ QYD 901Q?

In my mind, that's a pretty huge distance -- look how many places changed!

Not so: that's the difference between (51.0955, 1.13) and (51.0965, 1.13). Pull that up in a map. That's a difference of, what, a hundred feet or so?

IMO, a location encoding that can't indicate at a glance that two close locations are -- well, close -- isn't helpful.
If you want to build a native app, use the native development tools. I've yet to see a third-party platform that offers 'support for building iOS apps' result in good user experiences and positive reviews. Take these, from Conqu for iPad (built with Flash Builder/Flex)[1], for example:

"App looks nice when it finally loads. Every function has a serious time lag that makes the app unusable."

"However, be warned, this app is painfully s-l-o-w -- at least for me. So slow it has been placed in the "tried apps" bin."

[1]: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/conqu/id440591468?mt=8
My girlfriend and I took a 3 week trip to New Zealand and Australia in December looking at a possible relocation from the U.S. and we passed.

Speaking as an almost ignorant visitor:

Immigration is not an issue, the point system will take care of that. Salaries in NZ are much lower than in Australia, and it seems people jump to Australia if they can. Auckland is great (if a bit industrial in areas) but once you've seen the country, going anywhere means taking a flight and $.

Australia taxes are high (and permanent, taxed on world wide income if you become a citizen) and salaries for professionals seem to have a narrow range so that there is a strong middle class, but you need to be in finance to reach salaries in the 6 figures.

Sydney is amazing, but very expensive. Melbourne is a nice second and more affordable, but salaries are also lower. We didn't checkout Brisbane.

Great vacation, not so sure about leaving the US for it.
Surfing in anonymous mode with Chrome should work as an opt-out, or shouldn't it?
Traffic from people who don't end up viewing the page aren't "people who might find it relevant".
I think C# is in the category of "fast enough".

When I was working through project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/) with various languages, the only one I really had to optimize was Python (vs C/C#/Haskell).

I really like Python, and for most stuff it's fast enough. Just saying the real penalty (that I noticed) is a scripting language, _if_ it's heavily arithmetically constrained.

Some (non-trivial) games in C#:
http://www.arcengames.com/w/index.php/aiwar-alienbundle

http://murudai.com/solar/

However, it's possible and even practical to also write games in Python. See the pygame project.
When WiFi doesn't work: a guide to home networking alternatives
My team is always looking for freelance developers that don't suck. What are your rates? What do you like to build?
Nah the PHP hat is an ugly beanie knitted by your gran that keeps your head really warm. But isn't totally comfortable.
Genius, Breakthroughs, and the Manhattan Project
Mind adding in HandlerSocket?
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/03/28/whats-up-with...
"a story of two startups"

once upon a time there were two startups. both launched a so-so product. users liked it, kinda. both startups analyzed their product after the start phase. both saw: hey, users aren't using 90% of our features. one startup decided two ditch 90% of their features, the other said: but hey, we already invested so much work in it, we don't want to throw it all away. lets make a reDESIGN (with DESIGN in UPPERCASE letters).

one startup was bought 1 year later, the other is now (3 years later) switching their strategy to mobile (as their website stuff ... just ... did ... not .... work ... out).

hope you like the story. you can decide for yourself which startup was bought?
Venture Bets on Chance Online Gambling Comes to U.S.
I don't think Apple is actively anti-consumer but it's clear to me where their primary loyalties lie. As for music, there are a half-dozen better curated specialty music stores I patronize that provide a far, far better customer experience than iTunes (check boomkat and hyperion records for example), but perhaps I'm willing to work harder to find new and interesting music than the average buyer.

And sure everybody is filing all kinds of spurious patents right now but it's hard to imagine how this one could be used defensively.
A Dirty Business: New York City’s top prosecutor takes on Wall Street crime
Try and springboard off your existing contacts.

If you just finished university there should be some subset of people at the university who already know you in the context of tech (assuming tech was your major). Professors/administration either have projects or know plenty of people who do. Talk to everyone there you have rapport with.

This is where I'm at now. I developed quite a name for myself and my work while at university, and now six months after leaving I have more work than I can possibly do--almost without exception referrals from university contacts.
You could also write those, yeah. I mentioned Upstart, which is a replacement for init.d scripts in Ubuntu. There's also djb's daemontools, and a couple of other ways to do it.
This reminds me of a crank who wrote a letter to the Manchester Union Leader who thought the NH lottery was fixed because about half the numbers that 'hit' (out of 4 digits) had a repeated digit.

Unfortunately, a few facts about combinatorics rarely calm those kind of people down.
The 'political leaning results' are just a tool the author used to try to explained his (ill-informed) point, there are no evidence to any such degree of personalization specially not to any 'bubble' inducing extent, it's all very sensationalistic.

And for the record the political example was about facebook wall.
There's obvious opt-out things for the miniscule amount of people who care.

Exactly the same as the "search term leakage" rubbish.
Prior to 2.2 you couldn't, and there are a ton of Android devices out there that will never see that update.
Am I the only person that thought jerrya's original comment was quite well thought out and reasonable, and was only later put off the discussion by other people attacking him?

If criticisms such as jerrya's are the plague of Reddit, then surely "this is a bad HN comment" is the plague of HN. And yes, I realize I risk being self-referential here, but I really think this needs proper calling out.
If it's not clearly stated, then perhaps people didn't miss it because of their bias but because... it wasn't clearly stated.
http://www.getpaint.net/

I'm not saying paint.net is a replacement for photoshop. However, for me, it's in the "good enough" category.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.NET

"Paint.NET is primarily programmed in the C# programming language, with small amounts of C++ used for installation and shell-integration related functions."

Again this is good enough for a lot of peoples image manipulation. That area of "good enough" is getting larger all the time.
What does faithful mean? You want German or Chinese results? You want global or local results (in your language of choice). There is always personalization in search.