skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And there was tens of thousands of people who watched notch at some point.
I wish there was some way for the system to ban people if they submit their own blog posts. This is a non-study.

The vast majority of people looking for "java" are looking for the programming language. If they weren't, all those links wouldn't be at the top of Google. For most people, this IS the correct response.

For anyone else, seems like they could just say "huh, programming languages?" And then type "java indonesia," "java coffee," or even "java country." REALLY DIFFICULT

In the first example, all you have to do is click on the non-autocorrected text or even just put that search in quotes. I don't even know why the hell you would look for "college vs. uncollege" anyway, any search for "uncollege" is going to turn up a bunch of pages that talk all about that movement and why it exists.

DDG is a good product, but this article is stupid.
Meratol
I'll search in every nook and cranny as though in that respect, I imagine there will be a big bill to pay for Meratol. I believe in banding together to beat the odds. This post was sparked by the many emails I've received. I wash my hands of the entire thing. Over the last few weeks we've been looking at vital Meratol.
One small thing - the words "wedding vendors" fade into the white part of the background.

Also, you might want to add a little more about what early registrants might get out of it. What geographical areas are you focusing on first? When do you expect to launch? I wouldn't register unless I knew your launch date would be well before my wedding.
Using testimonials to sell: five top tips
re: "Google over does search" (and "autocorrects" your search).

This "feature" has been getting steadily more annoying, particularly with more obscure words, or words where there is a similar word that's in more widespread use.

Thinking about it now, I was wishing there was a way to turn off this feature; but alas, a dive into http://www.google.com/preferences doesn't seem to have "turn off that dang autocorrect" as an option.
I recently had to rent a car for 3 months in Europe.

Google failed miserably. Even the forum posts it uncovered did not really help me find a bargain. There was too much "advertiser" influence in the search results.

Duck came to the rescue -- pointed at a great forum post and ultimately a cheaper rate than I found using Google and the phone. Cheaper by over 20%!
> "In most situations I've encountered, Google's auto correction is quite helpful."

I'm a fairly good speller and a good typist, and I almost always mean to search for what I typed. Most days, Google's auto-correct feature is of negative value to me. YMMV of course.
It's really similar, but you get a few hundred without having to configure anything in your browser, and it's the same no matter which browser[1] or computer you're using without having to sync anything. The downside, as you said, is that you have to wait for DDG's servers.

[1] Which matters a lot to me, since i use 3 or 4 different browsers at a time across a few different computers and often don't have the ability to sync my browser prefs.
IBM unveils cognitive computing chips
Every time I think Wikipedia couldn't slide any further
into craziness, I see something like this.

Oh boy you haven't seen the German WP yet. At least half of what's in the English WP would be deleted due to irrelevancy in the German one, to name just one thing that's wrong with it.

I do agree that there is a line to be drawn, but I am an advocate of erring on the side of vanity. I'd rather have some vanity pages - that cause next to no traffic and don't really take up much storage - than deleting knowledge, however insignificant it might be.
This feature is a builtin on Chrome and Firefox. One need not proxy, and eat overhead time, for specific searches through DDG nor Google, and the keyword configuration is also custom.
Ymmv but it unfortunately matters for me. I switch between my work PC and personal Macbook daily. The different positions for \ drive me crazy, but as least it's rarely used on Macs due to sane file paths. Using a moving key in Vim is a bad idea.
Ask HN: Computer Science Mentor
Hello, I'm a recent graduate from Pomona College living in SF. I've been trying to stay busy teaching myself new things and always working on some sort of project. I was wondering if there was any experienced person who would be able to mentor me. I'm currently working with a start up company, and working as a contract developer, and volunteering for the redesign of a website for a non-profit.
There would be no wiki without Randal. I learned all I knew about Perl from his book. -- Ward Cunningham
More info on this -
http://www.ghacks.net/2011/08/17/the-cnet-download-com-insta...
I would be offended, too, but when I went to his page I see no signs it is under threat of deletion. Tempest in a teapot fugit?
We just had this yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2907415
Is Real Educational Reform Possible? If So, How?
"Structured Programming with GOTO Statements" (Knuth)
This excerpt has been appeared in many news featured on YC, but I think it deserves its own thread. In the beginning there's discussion about the performance penalties of dropping GOTOs. However, in the second part there are a few proposed solutions like event-driven loops (no, it's not what you think). Furthermore, he talks about the possibility of optimizing your code by transforming source code into optimized code in the same source language. Are there some notable implementations of the things he talked about?
Right, so if an ISP doesn't have the capability to do that kind of blocking then the only way to comply with the court order is to null route blogspot.com
An Android port for the Touchpad has just started development
What makes you think the vast majority of people looking for "java" are looking for the programming language? How many people in the world are programmers and are you biased by your own particular situation?

The rest of the non-programming world is probably full of people wanting to know where to buy Java coffee, or wanting to know something about Indonesian islands.
interesting video of GroupMe's office: http://www.techcrunch.tv/show/tc-cribs/k5c3hoMjrwPJRVR0wagp3...
I've said this for a long time, but I think the biggest thing holding back DDG from truly widespread adoption is the name and branding.

No one is ever going to 'dukgo' someone. Searching is a verb, the naming conventions used with DDG in its current form just don't fly. I'd love to talk shop with Gabriel about the identity decisions, and whether he is open to pivoting the brand identity now that the service is getting more well known..
What Is Online Sports Betting?
This is a method of placing bets using the online media. There are different websites that deal with this business and you will be required to open an account with them. You will then place a bet on the team you are supporting and if it wins the match, you will be given money. If it looses, it will be subtracted form your account
This is really an example of taking Google's strengths and making them out to be weaknesses. Google's search algorithm is tuned to what actually works for most people. Does anyone search for Java and click on coffee links? Or links for Java the island in Indonesia? Based on these results I would bet not. The thousands if not millions of people that typed Java before you didn't want coffee or islands. They wanted the Java virtual machine and programming language so all those long clicks to Java programming sites and JVM downloads have corrected the results page to reflect that.

But if you typed "cup of java" or "java island" there would be no mistake. Those people wanted coffee and Indonesia. So that's what links you get.

I have used DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine. But it is not competition for Google. Google is much, much more advanced.

If I typed in a proper name and that proper name was tied to an address in my area such as by being in the local white pages or having an address on a website, I would see the local result for that name because Google looked up the geolocation of my IP. That sounds a little creepy, but I got what I wanted. Google gave that link extra weight for being near my location therefore it wasn't buried on page 50. That's incredibly smart. How would DDG solve the same problem? It doesn't even try.
I disagree. The client is much more interested in what you get done in a day than how much time you spend doing it.
This excerpt has been appeared in many news featured on YC, but I think it deserves its own thread. In the beginning there's discussion about the performance penalties of dropping GOTOs. However, in the second part there are a few proposed solutions like event-driven loops (no, it's not what you think). Furthermore, he talks about the possibility of optimizing your code by transforming source code into optimized code in the same source language. Are there some notable implementations of the things he talked about?
Does he have a book coming out or something? Why the sudden PR?
Yeah, japhyr is right. It may be a personal thing, but I think the left justified Register button is a little off. Maybe right justified, or centered (as I say this, I'm noticing that the add comment button below is left justified as well :)) Nicely done though.
Ask HN: Which is the best ruby on rails stack?
I am working on a rails 3 project and considering to use jruby with tomcat 7 as the app server on top of apache. Is it the best stack for multi-user and concurrent access? Assuming with this config, I can utilize Java threading feature. Is there anything better? Also, it must be cross-platform to run on Windows and Linux.
Original version is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW1s5Ny_4rk
Lessons Learned From Sequoia Capital
Former WikiLeaks Spokesperson Destroys Over 3,500 Unpublished Documents
A bit nitpicky, but Im not sure I'd describe the phone/tablet market as saturated.
It just isn't open to HP.
I'm a fan of Django, so my ideal stack looks something like this:

* puppet - managing server packages / infrastructure
* monit - monitoring server processes / fixing things
* django - primary web framework and ORM
* amazon mysql - it's hosted, and works via plug-ins with Django
* amazon s3 - storing static assets (images, css, javascript, etc.)
* amazon elastic load balancer - for scaling incoming HTTP requests across multiple web app servers
* amazon autoscale - for spinning up new web app servers to handle spikes in traffic
* rabbitmq - message queueing
* celery - processing async tasks in a robust fashion. must have
* memcahed - no explanation necessary
* git
* fabric for deploying software
* jenkins for testing / building software
* nginx for buffering elastic load balancing requests to web app servers
That's an interesting idea, but I think HP's PC division is too much of a dog for Google. Maybe Microsoft; given Apple's rise, perhaps they'll claim they're the underdog to fend of antitrust accusations.
Dead simple View Controller/Templating in PHP
Android vs Windows Phone 7: At least one handset maker thinking about it
You can try it for yourself: http://blago.dachev.com/wikidrill
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

> If you revere competence, you'll enjoy developing it in yourself â€” the hard work and dedication will become a kind of intense play rather than drudgery. That attitude is vital to becoming a hacker.
This is ridiculous. In my experience, graphic designers are not primarily, nor should be, concerned with revenue, ROI, sales, etc. Much less copywriting.

Instead, the client is. Once the client has established his or her goals, and worked with marketing/sales/engineering/architects to determine what pages will be built with what functionality, then you hire a graphic designer to produce a "look" that achieves those objectives in the visual realm.

And depending on what kind of objectives you have, you may want a "clean" style or not -- maybe a "grunge" style instead, depending on your market. You may want "modern", or you may want "retro".

And when the author says "...are not actually designers at all. They are artists." Yes, that's the point. And artists are extremely important in seamlessly merging your brand together with your website's functionality.

But if the author is talking about "web designers" in general, then there's barely anything to talk about at all, because it's become such a vague term that nowadays it's practically useless. There are graphic designers, interface designers, information architects, and so on...
Let me respond to your points individually:

>It's simple to use.

There are many Lisps that are simple and easy to use. Scheme, for one, is
extraordinary simple and easy to use. Indeed, many colleges use it for their
introduction to programming classes.

>It's small and self contained.

This could apply to any Lisp, but again is especially true of Scheme. Scheme is
a very small language; the entire language can be built from 7 special forms.
How much smaller can a language get? Even all the special forms required to
build a "practical" Lisp like Clojure can be counted on two hands. Lisp, in
general is a very elegant and self contained language. NewLisp's elegance and
cohesion does not break new ground.

>It has a REPL and you can do introspection.

Every Lisp extant today has these two features. Indeed, introspection is
inherent to all Lisps; when code is data and data is code, introspection becomes
trivial.

>It has conveniently and reasonably named built-in functions.

>It deals well with a UNIX-derived file system.

Most Lisps have fairly nice pre-built functions for accessing files. Moreover, I
don't want my programming language to become especially tied to a single
platform, by making file-system assumptions that may not hold true on other
systems.

>It's easy to pick up and start using, but you can still do fancy stuff.

Well, it is Lisp. The inherent abstraction of the language will mean that Lisp
won't ever be as "beginner-friendly" as, say, Python or Ruby. That said, Scheme
(especially Racket) does an incredibly good job of allowing total novices to
build programs in a very short time. As far "fancy stuff" goes, I wrote a
minimax chess engine with an interactive graphical front-end for a school
project. I don't know if that's fancy enough, but it certainly seemed pretty
cool at the time.

>The documentation contains worked out examples for every built in function.

Again. see Racket.

>The main developer is very responsive and helpful.

Well, here I must concede a point. I have no idea how responsive the developers
of Racket are, for I never had cause to contact them.

>Trivially cross-platform with downloads, not compiles.

First, this is true of every JIT compiled and interpreted language. Second, its
not as trivial as you're making it out to be. The user has to have the
interpreter installed, unless the interpreter, libraries and script are all
packaged together as a frozen binary of some sort.
> Who registers for download.com?!?!

I did. 10 years ago.
Interestingly, there was a discussion on Quora on this exact point: http://www.quora.com/10X-Engineers/Why-are-the-best-programm...

Yishan Wong, one of the early engineers at Facebook, claims that 10x engineers are actually compensated much better than they appear to be, and suggests that many of these 10x engineers make their fortune in their own ventures.
tl;dr: It's a poor man's Protocol Buffers, XDR, JSON, XML... It doesn't attempt to solve any of the problems 0MQ tries to solve.

Heerreee we go!
I'm surprised this ticked me off enough to post about it.

The only problem it tackles is one 0MQ intentionally and wisely avoided by delving into the data you're trying to send and dictating an encoding scheme.

Quoth the 0MQ Guide: "On the wire, ØMQ messages are blobs of any size from zero upwards, fitting in memory. You do your own serialization using Google Protocol Buffers, XDR, JSON, or whatever else your applications need to speak. It's wise to choose a data representation that is portable and fast, but you can make your own decisions about trade-offs."

Let's examine the claims made about this protocol's relation to 0MQ.

1. It's transparent and you can actually understand it.

Response: 0MQ isn't? There's ample documentation, the wire protocol is exceedingly simple and the code is right there.

2. It could be implemented in any language, not just C++.

Response: ... what? There are bindings for 0MQ for 20+ languages and there's nothing stopping you from implementing everything 0MQ offers from scratch in your favorite language. See Response#1.

3. It doesn't blow up your server with random asserts.

Response: Any external input that causes 0MQ to assert is considered a bug and will rightfully be tracked down and obliterated.

4. You can put it on the internet without worrying about it.

Response: see above -^

5. It can transmit actual data structures or raw binary data.

Response: Here's the similarity to 0MQ, we found it! They both use fancied up P-strings!

6. You can put it in an SSL socket or any other crypto protocol.

Response: True but you can do that with any serializing scheme.

7. It will work with any socket system, events, or threads.

Response: True but you can do that with any...
--

Between this and his PyCon presentation it seems like this "Zed Shaw" guy doesn't understand why 0MQ has caused such a stir. :(
Seriously. Red text on a white background? Yellow selection color?
What would be an acceptable phrasing to convey the same idea? Serious question.
HP: what Leo Apotheker's decisions means
Do you watch Leverage too?

(Leverage is a TV show in its 4th season, and last week's episode included this very con http://www.tv.com/leverage/the-boiler-room-job/episode/13919...)
I'm biased by knowing how Google works.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=java&cmpt=q

The top searches involving "java" are download java, free java, string java, java script, sun, java sun, java code, etc etc. Even in Indonesia, the top searches are about the programming language.

I don't see islands or Indonesia or coffee anywhere.
http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
Thought the US had enough low intensity wars on it's hands already! Special forces in 70 countries at last count. Still, bombing them will sort it all out.
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/2011848...
Q: how do you know if somebody is from the US or Europe?

A1: I take offence at that question.
A2: I don't take offence at that question.
I think the author misses the point that lower prices can actually be an incredible strategic advantage as long as you have the business model that supports it. You only need to look at a business model like ikea or wal-mart to see this in action. It also creates a Nice barrier to entry as the scale and experience you need in order to achieve thst low cost base is often impossible for new entrants unless some sort of disruption happens.

One way to prevent some sort of disruption in a business is to make it so cheap that it's no longer worth the time and effort to threaten your business...
sigh, yes, unfortunately we are going to have to hear this on the main stream news tomorrow, and they will also have it wrong.
Before Google we never Altavista'd or Yahoo'd anything, I don't see why this has to be a problem.

Also, please stop abusing the word "pivot" :(
Complete nonsense. Shopkeeper mentality.
The article does a good job of highlighting certain instances where using Google is a pain in the ass. I personally don't like the spell-correct feature. For me, it is only correct in its conclusion that I mistyped a word about 10% of the time. The other 90% is a nuisance because I have to go back and explicitly tell it that I meant to tell it what I told it.
I'm out of my depth, but there was that idea that used the plasma itself as an antenna, right? What happened with that?
Download.com has always seemed pretty sleazy to me. The only part of this story that surprises me is to learn that they haven't been doing this for years already.
I genuinely thought this article was a joke -- I thought he was going to say something about you should add up the ticks in the 'good' and 'bad' columns and if the total number was greater than zero you should find a different designer :)

I think this guy is just wrong. A designer's job is to design. It's not his/her job to use buzzwords like "business objective" or "ROI" - it's his job to create a functional, relevant and aesthetically-pleasing website. And, frankly, I think words like 'clean' and 'modern' are GOOD.

As a web consumer, I know I think higher of companies with clean, functional, modern websites. It means they have a clue.
Thanks for the plug, finally a VPN solution that seems good (i.e. automatic, good pricing model etc.). That said, please sent an invite (my email stats jtl...)
The hash function will still be O(l).
Flask is great for beginners because it's well documented and easy to understand. You can become familiar with Flask in a weekend -- start with the Quickstart and then go through the tutorial (http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/).

You won't have to spend much time learning it or fighting with it -- you won't find yourself asking, "Will I be able to do what I want in the framework without hacking it?" Flask let's you program in Python rather than writing to the framework like you typically have to in larger, opinionated framework's like Django and Rails.

Ironically, this also makes Flask an ideal choice for advanced Python programmers because it gives you flexibility rather than always wondering "will the framework allow me to easily do...?"

BTW uwsgi is a production app server. For example nginx has a built-in uwsgi connector and you use uwsgi to serve Flask apps (see http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/deploying/), but it's not a framework like Django/Pyramid/Flask.
Please look at Steve Losh's blog post. This contains great plugins ... was posted almost a year back.

http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/
Why can't we have nice things and the Methods of Rationality?
Tens of thousands of non-programmers. A few minutes spent in the livestream chat feed was enough to drive a sane man to madness. 50% of comments were asking if the stream was minecraft 1.8, the other 50% were rude comments about Notch's marriage/weight/work ethic/etc.
Is there a place where we can download end-of-the day ITCH data? There are so many HFT/LLT outfits out there with this data; surely one will be generous enough to release it for free or some trivial amount?
Grow Taller 101
The prices seem a bargain to me.

I'm not a reader of Linux Journal, but $2.45 an issue is absolute peanuts. Hell, I'm considering buying the next few editions on the off chance the content is interesting.

Creating quality content creation still takes money, even if the print and distribution costs are minimised via digital distribution.
Append &nfpr=1 (short for "no full page replacement") to all your google queries:

For example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=college+or+uncollege&nfpr...

I am sure it's not that hard to write a greasemonkey script to do that for you automatically, but I tend to like the feature, especially when I fat finger queries with my cell phone.
That was NOT "/ask".

If you looked at my profile, you would see that I am clearly not a troll.

When you pass #120, that's what it looked like.
not Rome, huh
Continuing with errata: "git submodule add git://github.com/majutsushi/tagbar.git bundle/fugitive" should be "git submodule add git://github.com/majutsushi/tagbar.git bundle/tagbar"
Beating the Arc challenge - In Clojure
If you visit any of those sites enough in Chrome, all you have to do is type a couple letters from the domain and then space or tab to search that site, given that they expose an OpenSearch Description. DuckDuckGo can't do this, as it static keywords instead of heuristically selecting the site you most likely want to search with the characters you have entered so far.
What Every Data Programmer Needs to Know About Disks