skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't follow. The price-fixing claim stems from publishers forcing Amazon to raise their prices by threatening to cut off Amazon's access to their books; it doesn't have to do with competition from the iBook Store. However, it alleges that Apple was complicit in forcing Amazon to raise prices, not through competition, but through threats.
> That seems high indeed, but everyone I talk to "in the wild" who runs high traffic sites actually sees a much higher percentage of their search engine traffic coming from Google, usually from 80-90%.

Wouldn't the people that Gabriel Weinberg talks to be people who run websites much more likely to be frequented by the highly tech literate? Seems like a fantastically biased data set.
I used to work on search quality at Google, but I think I can answer this just using public information. ;-)

I think the answer is that Yahoo and Bing have a much higher rate of navigational queries - queries like [facebook] or [twitter.com] that are just the name of a site. This class of queries does indeed send a much higher proportion of their traffic to a small number of sites.

The available public statistics seem to confirm this. One example is here: http://blog.alessiosignorini.com/2010/02/average-query-lengt...

I'm sure they're not perfect, but let's assume these numbers are reasonable. Single-word queries are a decent proxy for navigational queries. 27% of Google's searches are one word, but 54% of Yahoo's searches are one word. So if you were measuring on any site that didn't get one-word traffic, you would see Google's searches overrepresented by 1.5X already.

This makes sense if you think about it. The sort of person that searches on non-Google search engines is very different than the sort of person that searches on Google. People who search on non-Google are much more likely to generally not understand the internet. They are likely to just use the search engine that was preinstalled when they got the computer. They are likely to not understand the difference between a URL bar and a search box. And they are likely to only use search for typing in the name of a site and directly going there.
I am working on building a new portfolio site, since this one is a bit out of date. Will launch next month hopefully.
Self publishing isn't irrelevant to your point. I seriously doubt those terms you quoted from Amazon are the same terms the big six negotiated with them.

As wild speculation, I imagine the terms Amazon and Apple have with the big six are identical and that's where the charge of price collusion comes from: there's only six publishers than really count and no one can sell their eBooks at a lower rate now.
Email me with details about your project. I'll try to help you out if possible.
Thanks for posting the source. That's one of my favourite sayings and one I would do well to remember more often.
Sounds interesting, I would really be interested in following up with you about this. I'm very interested in improving quality of life while at the same time reducing costs and overall inefficiencies. My email is radio4theages.tech@gmail.com.
AWS? More than 24hrs downtime in the last year.

You must have incredible luck. Sure, AWS has a lot of outages; but most of them only affect a small proportion of their users.
Of the three components that Samsung manufactures for Apple, two of them are commodities: Flash and DRAM. Apple can source these elsewhere should it need to, without much hassle.

The third component, the "Applications processor" is the A4/A5 chip. Apple designed this under license from ARM and so Apple owns the IP. Samsung simply operates as a foundry.

While it is not trivial to take a chip design from one foundry to another, since the design involves process technology, etc. It is something Apple could do from generation to generation.

So, for the next iPhone that comes out this fall, it is quite possible that the FLASH could come from intel/micron, the DRAM could come from toshiba and the chip could be manufactured by intel, TSMC, or another foundry. All of these companies would be happy to have Apple's business.
In Defense of Call Of Duty
Of course. Its cognitive bias at work. People are always discontent with their government. Failing to properly understand economics and politics, people exaggerate things to find reasons to accuse the government.
My point is that if he intends to give the money to starving children in Africa (or, really, to people who say that some percentage will end up being given to starving children...), the fact that money is money means that there's no reason not to do that at once.

I'm not one of those willing to call what Odio did theft; it's merely rude and underhanded. But I do wonder if people who do business with him in the future will not pause to remember that he's proud of being someone who will exploit the exact letter of the rules to his own advantage (probably mere self-satisfaction in this case, but one does wonder why he didn't do the donation first...), even when the spirit of the thing was otherwise. It seems possible that he has given up considerable future income in return for the personal satisfaction he derived from stepping on someone else's fun.
3100 can't be the threshold for top 350 ... I'm almost on that and I'm a jerk.
Easter eggs are the best. I just changed team and my first question should have been what is the process to add one :)
Download Mozilla FireFox 6 for Windows/Mac and Linux
If you find some publisher boosting your content, invoice them!

Early this year Computerworld took an image off my website to illustrate an article. I sent them a polite note saying that my single-use fee for the image was $250. It took me a little while to find the right person, but they eventually apologized for the error and sent me a check. It was a pleasant moral victory.

For the curious, their article:

https://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9203159/Cubicle_wars...

And mine:

http://www.scissor.com/resources/teamroom/
Hm. Well, I don't like them. It's subjective, you might disagree. But off the top of my head:

1. Contracts. They want 1 years minimum contracts for any dedicated servers. For truly gargantuan orders I could understand this but for one puny server? Never.

2. Their definition of "cloud" is different from mine. To use their "cloud" services your servers need to be public facing, ie on public IPs. Want them on your own VPN? You can stil get the cloud prices but not the API. you create and cancel servers via tickets. This is different from VPS how?

3. Sloooow provisioning - even if you are able to use their "public cloud" API to provision a server - prepare to wait hours for it to be done, leading me to suspect it does nothing more than email a tech to provision a VPS and hook it up somehow. Oh, you can't pause them to save money either, again making me think these "cloud" servers are nothing more than slicehosts with an extra layer of abstraction

Is that enough? I could go on.
also make sure to factor in shipping, which amazon often must bake into the price slightly.
In chapter 1.19 B. uses the same footnotes repeatetly.
He starts to count from 1 eigth times, counting to at least 4, the highest is 37.

Chapter 2.36 is also odd, he uses footnote 28 as well 42 eleven times each, while none of the 8 Urls in the footnotes of the chapter appears in the text.

Maybe ~codes ?
> I think the answer is that Yahoo and Bing have a much higher rate of navigational queries - queries like [facebook] or [twitter.com] that are just the name of a site. This class of queries does indeed send a much higher proportion of their traffic to a small number of sites.

> This makes sense if you think about it. The sort of person that searches on non-Google search engines is very different than the sort of person that searches on Google. People who search on non-Google are much more likely to generally not understand the internet. They are likely to just use the search engine that was preinstalled when they got the computer. They are likely to not understand the difference between a URL bar and a search box. And they are likely to only use search for typing in the name of a site and directly going there.

From observing non-tech savvy people using the internet, what I've found is that a lot of times, they know about Google and use it when they want to consciously make a search. But when they just want to access a site, they will type just the name of the site into the URL bar, which with modern browsers increasingly results in a search.

This method of searching uses the default search engine, which is often altered from Google even in browsers like Chrome due to these non-tech savvy people installing various software that changes the default search engine. But when these people want to do an "actual" search, they literally go to http://www.google.com/ and type in the search query there.

What's interesting is that a lot of times, they'll accidentally search with the default browser search instead, and they don't even realize that they're not using Google, which leads me to believe that they don't realize that there are different search engines, or that depending on whether they use their browser's default search or go to http://www.google.com/, they will get different search results.

I would be really interested to understand what goes through the minds of these people when they use the internet, because these sorts of things just scream out at me when I watch them browsing the web, but they seem to be completely oblivious to it. I just don't understand how they can miss the completely different site layout and URL.
Creating Sunsets
Nope, the people I was referring to for the most part run sites targeted at the general public not techies.
Please, for the love of all that is holy, please stay away from Guru plugs.

I got three (I wanted one, boss ordered three, sigh!) of these to develop on a "ARM", when Tonido did not have enough in stock.

These sound like a small turbine. It is impossible to work with these switched on.

The earlier versions were heating up so badly and melting electronics, that the manufacturer decided to put a crappy fan inside and create a new problem.
I get redirected to google.ca and it frobs the parameters. Thanks, Google, once again for ruining things with your “region-specific” search experience.
Alternatively, publishers could just sell their ebooks to everyone at a wholesale cost and then not concern themselves with what the retailer sells it for. In this situation, if Amazon wanted to do deep discounts, that's on them. Isn't this how Amazon works in other areas?

According to this infographic (http://p.printingchoice.com/e-books-vs-real-books/) that wholesale price would be about $10 on average for both paper and ebooks and then the retailers could make decisions after that point.
Top How  to Select Your Next Product Idea
I absolutely agree with this. I find that time and time again, when I refrain from talking as much as possible, people tend to listen more and more when I speak.

I have also found that silence can be very useful in an educational situation. When I tutor kids in math and they are having trouble working through a problem, the tend to look at me after 5 seconds of effort and expect me to help them. I just stare at them until they go back and look at the problem again. 75% of the time they figure it out. I'll admit, I got the idea from Plikt (the tutor of Valentine's children in Speaker for the Dead)
I get redirected to google.com.au, so same issue.
Using the new Twitter PIN authentication to create a tweeting dashboard widget
Edited - My comment earlier was worded poorly and did not come across as I was hoping.

The price fixing talk did not start with Amazon. It started because when Apple joined the market the publishers where not going to give them the same deal that Amazon had forced on them. So I think Apple wanting to get a piece of the market worked with the publishers and they all set the same pricing. Now it happened so quickly that people think they fixed the price which I agree they did. Instead of each one working with apple to come up with there own pricing.

This whole price fixing thing came about when Amazon had 95% of the market share and was able to dictate the prices, since they where the only ones selling e-books in large amounts. Now that apple is in the market along with other people Amazon share is at about 55% so they have lost that ability to control the market.

I do think Apple and the book companies came together to set a hire price and force Amazon to follow suit or risk not having all the books that Apple would have.

I do not understand why the books have to cost that much. I agree with NathanKP in that they are just files and the cost to the publisher is almost nothing at all. I know they are wanting to make a profit but I think when you charge more then a paper book something is wrong.

Go all e-books with a lot less paper books and call yourself the greenest in the business. I find that a lot of companies are scared of change and I am not sure why. I see change as a great thing that can propel the world in to new and better technology.
And how long before this will be surveilling all of us?
This doesn't really seem like rational self-interested behavior on the part of the students. There are thousands of doctors trained every year in a country as large as France. A student's choice to mean or nice to the tiny subset of his peers which he will have substantial interaction with is going to have a negligible effect on the average score. Therefore, it's very much in his interest to cooperate with his small group of local peers in order that the group can do better than the average.

Since students do end up being nasty to each other, that tells us there's something very irrational going on. Thus, it might be more effective to try to manipulate that irrationality away than changing the fundamental structure of the tests.
Huh? North Virginia was down for something like 30 hours in April. I had some instances in there. Hardly "incredible luck". And it was not just me: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=AWS+Virginia+outage
I’m #11, I get there by commenting a lot, but honestly most of my comments aren’t worth reading. The mean may be 8, but I suspect the median is closer to 2 or 3.
I wonder if it is prohibitively expensive to do a real life system test on a big data center

It's probably prohibitively dangerous. Backup power systems don't have many-nines of reliability; generators which are reliable enough for the once-a-decade event when a car crash knocks out your utility power aren't anywhere near the reliability needed to run your datacentre for an hour every month as a test.
The query is fairly easy to extract from the original URL, but here it is:
site:news.ycombinator.com 3100...100000 inurl:"/user?id"
The article mentions "What makes this even weirder is Hitwise also recently came out with a report saying Bing/Yahoo users click on more links than Google users." This is a metric that Hitwise calls success rate and they say Yahoo has the most successful searches.

I did a debunk of Hitwise's "success rate" metric back in February: https://plus.google.com/109412257237874861202/posts/A7d5joZ3...

In essence, I don't think Hitwise can tell a the difference between a click on a search result vs. just going to a different site. So doing a search and then leaving looks just like a success to them. For example, yahoo.com has a "Trending" box in the top-right of the page, and clicking on Rose McGowan will do a Yahoo search. If the user goes anywhere after that search, I believe Hitwise will call that a successful search. Likewise on msn.com, if you click many of the links, e.g. "Pencil skirts that will turn heads" that actually does a search on Bing. I believe going anywhere else on the web afterwards will again look like a successful search to Hitwise. I think a large amount of casual browsing on Yahoo/MSN is counted as "successful searches" by Hitwise.
One zone in US-East had a significant outage in April; and only instances using EBS were affected.
Shipping, handling, etc isn't free, though.
体臭対策サプリ人気ランキング！！
I do not feel like the goal of my comment was to contradict what you said, only to clarify and strengthen it: the people you are arguing against believe that Microsoft built .NET to damage Java, and demonstrating that not only did they choose it because it was "the way to go" but that they were actually /forced/ to do so, is a much stronger way to undermine that belief.
The y' mode appears to have an unstable solver that's very useful :)
Ask: Anyone can help me in the first days in Barcelona?
Hello, I am a Ruby on Rails developer from Poland I am moving to Barcelona in early Septmerber. Is there anyone to help me (for a dinner, couple of beers, cash) in the first days in Barcelona? (rent a flat and so on). You can find me @_tomekw at Twitter or http://jestem.tw Thx!
I believe it's global, but if someone wanted to do the legwork to determine US only, all the log files are uploaded on an hourly basis here http://dammit.lt/wikistats/
Hah, interesting concept. At first glance, I thought it prob. wouldn't be the best thing to feature this on a show that targets people who see friends pass on a weekly, if not daily, basis. However, after thinking about it more, it would be interesting to see how they (seniors) think about the concept and if it differs from our(younger folks) point of view. Our show will be a live call-in show, so it could make for an interesting segment. What's your email?
Twounce.me - beta signup for the Twitter out-of-office autoreplier
75% of motor vehicle purchases were "Made in America"? That is astonishing. Unbelievable, even.
I agree that startups won't likely have something as ground breaking as page rank. I only referred to that example because I knew everyone would know the algo. I merely meant to illustrate "show us how you're doing a new take on X" rather than "show us you've got something ground breaking". I also free that something that is groundbreaking may not seem so at the time.

If my rails/node reference was to you, it wasn't meant personally. Just as an example that struck me, and one of many.

The four bullet points are very useful, and more importantly they are genuine. That's really good about them. They give me a good perspective on where your business is at, and where you're thinking right and where I think you've made a wrong choice.

I think I didn't mention that one of the more important piece of information one can get form a job listing is whether the owners of the company have their heads up their asses. Seeing that you made what I consider a "wrong" choice reminds me of that. (And I don't think you have your heads up your asses, but that's the kind of situation that developers really want to avoid... ad asks for "rock stars" and mentioned cutting edge technologies and languages, and then you find out you'r doing ASP programming.) Those four bullet points make the company real in my head.. if that makes any sense.
There's an expired SSL certificate there, expired in April this year.
"You are aware that a private party cannot, by definition, violate your constitutional rights, as they are only protection from government, not private parties?"

Superb. That means I can finally ban all redheads from my restaurant.

"You are trying to sneak "communication" in with "speech"."

Oh go fuck yourself sideways with a cactus, that is the most retarded reading of the the first thatI have ever heard. FURTHERMORE, you make the mistake of thinking that we only have the rights specifically mentioned on some piece of paper. This is not the case.
Really good lens? Really good CCD? It might be better than your run of the mill Blackberry, but it's not that great.

Specifications aren't everything, but the iPhone CCD is a 5 MP panel that's 1/3.2" diagonal. Not to look far, the Nokia N8 has an 12 MP CCD at 1/1.83" (resolution too high, but hard to argue with the sensor size). Point and shoot standalone cameras are normally around 1/2.5"; 1/1.7" is considered high end (Canon S95/G12 etc).

The iPhone lens is 3.85 mm f/2.8; the N8 is 5.4mm f/2.8; the wide end of the S95 is 6.0 mm f/2.0.

(Higher diagonal sensor sizes are better; lower lens f-numbers are generally better.)
If someone had not done it loudly and publicly, someone would have done it quietly and probably larger.

I mean, come on, what's the alternative? "There exist no exploitative jerks in the world"? We already know that's not true, just to cite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociopath as one (very large) example. Maybe Jonathon has learned some stuff from his experiment, it went exactly as I expected.

It works for a while, because at first people make grand gestures to show how cool they are to each other, and they outnumber the abusers, but as the fame wears off, so too does the benefits of making the grand gesture, whereas the benefits of sponging never go away. It doesn't mean life is hopeless nor does it mean the bad will always outweigh the good in the world, it just means you need some more structure to things before you can expect net positive outcomes, and that structure will take some experience, and reflections and refinements based on that experience, to best manifest.
Duly upvoted! I appreciate your willingness to keep an open mind.
How to : Playing Google+ Games | Google Plus Users
This is a great deck, but I'd love to see one on how we can use Redis at Heroku; it looks like the options are (a) Redis To Go, which is unreasonably expensive, and (b) an insecure connection to an m.large at EC2.
Unfortunately, the poster chose to break his dignified silence by posting a epic paean of fatuous self-praise on-line, interspersed with some quotations from his fathers 'blog on wisdom'. Really.

It would be interesting to hear the other sides of the story:

"Yeah, when he finally spoke, we were all surprised he could still talk, it was sort of weird. But I guess he was our manager so we had to listen to him".

"When he went silent in the middle of the negotiation I wondered what the hell he was doing; is this some sort of new trick?"

Dispensing this kind of wisdom seems to be yet another popular form of 'premature victory lap' on HN, where fairly wet-behind-the-ears types with no major runs on the board can puff themselves up by handing out the Keys to Their Success.
It is completely off topic, but since you professed different opinion I would like to know if saying: "I might be able to explain to my GF what I am doing.", would be OK in your opinion?

What If I said it, since my GF is not very computer literate? I just believe that using completely neutral language does not solve the problem of e.g. racial and gender inequality. In fact I find it hypocritical. There are many problems in human interactions. However I believe that we are doing it wrong, we need to be more creative. Just mending the same symptoms all the time is giving us diminishing returns.

Portraying all friendly groups of people in media as interracial mix, does nothing to alleviate racism. And also beating manliness out of western men does nothing to help women in areas where they are really in dire need of help.
I knew I'd get down voted because this is an emotional issue for some. I didn't miss the point of the letter. It said the cost woud be to 3.8 billion to move LTE coverage from 80% to 97%. It didn't say the cost of matching the entire Tmo footprint in the US would be 3.8 billion. There would be massive coverage infill improvements for ATT by taking on the Tmo towers in addition to the LTE improvement. This would be a massive win for ATT customers in quality of service. It may bite them in price down the road, but definite good in the short term.
I rarely submit. The mean of my comment scores also isn't very instructive, because I get +2..+4 on every non-angry comment solely due to name recognition.
Is it just me or is Hitwise acting pretty aggressively/misleading against Google lately? It started last month with some of their Google+ stat numbers, and it's been at least 2 more such cases lately.