skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ironically, I view the paid placements atop Google's SERPs as legitimate search results. I find myself doing Google searches just to click on the ads and see what kinds of products my web-enabled colleagues are explicitly advertising to people with my needs.

And I don't think it's at all foolish that people subconsciously believe that those highlighted results at the top of SERPs are "the high-quality results". They often are! They lead directly to well-designed product pages that tell you just what you are looking for and that have refreshingly direct BUY NOW buttons.

Whereas the top non-paid search results are, as often as not, either duplicates of the paid content at the top (by no coincidence, companies with great SEO often know about AdWords as well) or passive-aggressive advertisements-in-disguise. (Give me a straight sales pitch instead of all that tiptoeing around.)

Google is basically the equivalent of all those trade magazines: If you're in the optics business and you need to know who sells lenses, you subscribe to Laser Focus World specifically for the ads and the product reviews. Or the local alternative newsweekly: I leaf through those to look for new restaurants or clubs. Or a coupon book. I can afford to laugh at coupon books, but people do read and use those things.
I just think it's a terrible idea to have a product's front page be a Facebook page.

[EDITED for clarity]
How I Became A Professional Day Trader
Blame no one but yourself
The pedant uses the delta over the mean of the old/new values.

So: 100 * (1.14 )/((1.14 + 3.63)/2) or -104%
Yeah, because as 2008 taught us, removing regulation and "opening barriers" to free up Capitalism sure as shootin' is the way to go!

Good god... How the hell could anyone argue against regulation after the nightmare the derivatives market has been.
OKCupid would probably get better matches if it dropped the user submitted weights and ideal match preferences completely and instead used its database of people in relationships as training data for a proper machine learning algorithm.

The current approach is entirely oriented to give people what they think is important and what people think they want. It would probably be better to derive that from existing relationships (successes).

I would be a little surprised if people at OKCupid hadn't already thought about this. Whether there is actually any momentum to change the core matching mechanic or not remains to be seen.
Ugh. Can we get some intellectual honesty here? Of course you have a high CTR to bingocardcreator.com when people search for "bingo card creator".
I used ion2 for a few years. Now I've been using awesome for a few years. They're both nice. Overall, I think I prefer letting the wm arrange my windows. There are a few times where I have considered writing my own layouts, but that itch has never lasted long enough for me to scratch it.

It is too bad that ion is no longer maintained. Choice is good.
The site owner is probably grateful for that mindset. Development time, servers, bandwidth, these things all cost money. Neither your page view nor your "screw your costs where's the free shit?" attitude pay the bills.
We use Superfeedr for feeding the news into the python back-end running on AWS. SQS queues are used to send and receive messages between our web portal and analyzers. The analysis is done in real-time and reported to the web application running on Google App Engine. Amazon Simple Notification Service is used to report to the webapp (and will also be used to send to users subscribed to the API). We use S3 to store the raw documents, but CouchDB for the metadata and the results of our algorithms.

Regarding our algorithms, we use Reuters' OpenCalais as a first step to the NLP, but augment it with our own stuff for the bull and bear extraction.

The webapp uses Knockout.js and all other standard stuff like jQuery and underscore.js. We "build" the javascript using require.js.
A good and fair question.

Generally telling the truth to strangers strengthens society. If someone chooses to lie to strangers, society properly should brand that person as not worthy of business and maybe worth imprisoning for fraud. Because future lies are potentially costly, it makes sense for us to watch for (and sometimes punish) lies harshly even when that lie is itself not very costly.

Beyond the straightforward definition of truth though is a larger concept of integrity which means, roughly, that what you say and what you do together form a meaningful "whole." For example, many people believe movies can have artistic integrity--such a movie displays the filmmakers' best guess as to the meaningful truth of its situations. If they were paid to use Coca-Cola or to show the can in a particular way, then the movie doesn't have that integrity, and we maybe should be skeptical of their commitment to the truth generally.

Similarly, sites such as BusyTeacher implicitly purport to rank results in some "honest" (even if not transparent) way. If a particular product, in their honest assessment, should be number 3 and should show that information and should take up that amount of screen real estate, then Patrick wouldn't have to pay for the ad -- the same info would be there organically. If they are showing a paid ad but marking it very clearly as such--there's integrity in that as well. But if they are showing the ad in a way that is misleading, even if only at a glance, then they are compromising their integrity. By the way, to my eye the Google ad looks like an ad at a glance, while the BusyTeacher ad looks like a listing at a glance, but others might disagree, so I'm not really trying to weigh in on the ad itself, just why it might, in theory, be bad.

So although this may be "bad behavior" I also think the costs are small. The advertiser profits, the site profits but loses their integrity (which they probably don't much value), the users are somewhat misled (those who bounce are somewhat harmed; those who end up purchasing are probably not harmed). But in a broader sense, I do think that our community is improved by generally encouraging and helping each other be honest, especially those we do business with (even if it's only an arms-length advertising arrangement).
I always thought it'd be funny if it turned out google solved the energy crisis in their 20% time. Imagine how smug they'd be. It'd make apple look pretty stupid.
I sure as hell care about backwards compatability, along with 93% of the desktop market.
Agreed. The sooner a site I can live without starts using scummy tactics to drop ads the sooner I drop them. Nothing like losing viewers because you're too hard pressed to run legit content.

(Obviously this is my opinion. I understand the whole "if you're not paying for it then you're the product" stuff, I just think its dishonest to lead people on one way or another)
So why does image blending for ads work better than contrasting ads, but contrasting (usually red) sign up buttons convert better than blending buttons?
Clickable link http://www.redcappi.com
Now make it machine-searchable.
Or, you're converting the nebulous "value of the site to a user" into cold, hard cash. The game isn't zero-sum, it's closer to an IPO (or some other stock-issuing event) in that sense: theoretical value becomes real value, but now you don't have "control" of everything anymore.
Ahh ... so the Evil Empire's new tactic for Total World Domination is to deny they have Total World Domination.

;-)
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Install Garbage Disposer for the Mechanically Challenged: Videos
He wasn't too subtle, he was just wrong. The comparison between Google's separate/distinct paid results and these ads inserted into organic results is completely absurd.

Notice that he didn't have to write "Spot it yet? Hint: it’s the row without the Facebook button." when referencing the Google paid ads -- only the "blended" ones.
What If Facebook's IPO Dreams Are Built On As Much Hype As Groupon's?
I think you can simplify your home page and messaging.

When I first got to the page I had to hunt around to work out exactly what it was that you did and what your unique selling proposition was.

I would suggest running some usability testing: maybe grab a copy of Steve Krugs "Don't Make Me Think".
Amazon owning app distribution is irrelevant
U�as Encarnadas
Some of them. Others you can't, and you have to wait full 30 seconds. Given that what I want to see is usually 3-5 minute long video, it's pretty significant (10-30%) time.
Here's why I say ruin. Remember when you could do a search for product reviews, and actually get product reviews, instead of a million template link bait sites?
MarkLogic Community blogging activity: MarkLogic 5, Hadoop, TDD, and more
Simplicity is not a simple concept
Tomboy/PluginList - GNOME Live
Autism Articles
As far as I'm aware, no such ruling ever occurred. Corporations are currently barred from funding federal political campaigns. They also have no free speech rights that your (non-person) printing press or cell phone lack.

(Before you cite Citizens United vs FEC, please go read what it actually says.
In short, the decision is about the free speech rights of the human owners of a corporation. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZO.html )
How to make a man last longer in bed naturally
turkeys love candy
Creating a PHP User Survey: Writing to Database Tables
In the first two parts of this series, we created the data layer that will hold the polling data and established methods for setting the variable values and reading from the database tables. In this part, we will build the methods that will write new polls and answers to the tables.
That's the libertarian answer, yes. But it doesn't work. In fact this kind of thing is routine in the corporate world. The randian solution here requires that there be a class of corporate executives willing to live comparatively impoverished lives. But they don't exist, because they're chosen by corporate boards populated by people who don't want to see their own perks vanish. And those boards are elected by, overwhelmingly, investment bankers living in the same world who view the inefficiency in their investments as minimal (remember they want to sit on boards some day too, and won't rock the boat).

All of those people (the "1%" I guess) would need to simultaneously decide to take a pay cut to produce your hypothetically efficient executive compensation. It won't happen.
He is comparing to Google, but I think there is a huge difference. It's not an Ad blended like a content. It's an Ad faked in a content style. He is copying the exact same style, the same kind of content (title, description, category, photo, rating) and not even mentioning it. There is no way to find out if it's an ad or a real post.
> What I'd really like to see is a "real" news website that supplies non-biased news written by real investigative journalists with no advertisements. I'd pay handsomely for that.

+1, I'd definitely pay for that. Right now I don't trust news media by definition, and I believe only what I get from articles featured on HN - because I can be sure that when I click on "comments", I'll find it thoroughly analyzed and debunked by people who actually know and care about what they read. </rant>
The importance of hiring the right people
Spotify paying subscribers jumps to 2.5 million
Really awesome, some of the robots remind me a lot of Z-Bots I had when I was little.
why not let people search by specific conjunctions of questions they've answered publicly?
For web apps... I recommend you track AARRR aka startup metrics for pirates. It stands for Acquisition, Activation, Registration, Referral, Revenue.

http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/09/startup-metrics....
The interface certainly does look good, but man, I miss some consistency in navigation! And is it so hard to have mouse free control for application that is essentially GIT client?
I don't think SOPA has much to do with Internet governance. It doesn't contemplate any changes to IP addressing, DNS, or BGP. It doesn't really attempt to reach outside the US. (ACTA is another matter.)

shouldn't the faculties in charge of running it be global institutions as well?

This has been discussed in great length elsewhere, but I'll give a few points. While in principle of course the whole world should have a say in Internet governance, in reality all the specific proposals that I've seen are about making the Internet worse in some way. The good thing about ICANN is that it's so ineffectual and slow-moving that it can't cause much damage.

Consider the global telephone network which is regulated by the ITU, an organization that appears to be 100% captured by telcos, many of whom are national PTTs that make AT&T look friendly. Right now the ITU is trying to figure out how to take control of the Internet from ICANN so they can "recognize local values" (i.e. censorship) and make everything much more expensive by e.g. eliminating settlement-free peering.
I haven't heard of that one yet.. got a link?
Q: Do you want to pay for reading content on the web?

A: No.

Q: Do you want to see ads while reading content on the web?

A: No.

Q: Do you want everything to be free all the time but maintain a capitalistic society?

A: Yes.
> And thirdly the dozen social media buttons on every single page.

You mean the "Like" / "+1" / "Tweet" buttons under articles? What's wrong with these?

I personally want them to be on websites and I actively seek them after reading an article, because clicking on two or three buttons is so much easier and less distracting than having to copy the URL and paste it into every social website I use.
You either pay with your money or your time. I chose to pay with my money.
Using CORS
That's why I find advertising such a ridiculous business model for a search engine. Let's spend all this time and money and invent the most amazing technology to find the best results for any search and then... let's sell the top spot to the highest bidder.

I don't have a better business model to offer, but I do think the world would be better off if Google were more honest about ads and made it more obvious that they were ads.
The capital allocation is smart for an individual company given the political environment, but the political environment is silly. The current system of politics and influence is likely a Nash equilibrium. In the current environment no one has anything to gain by unilaterally changing their strategy, and thus hiring lobbying firms is a good allocation of capital.
Seems to be a fitting reply to Marco's post.
The way I see it: you own the book itself, but don't own the writing and story - the information - contained within it. In my mind, ownership as a concept for non-physical goods is much closer to the idea of copyright.

Oddly enough, I suppose every book I own here has legalese in it saying that I don't have the right to lend, sell or "otherwise circulate" it without the publisher's consent.
Maybe third party devs care a lot about who owns app distribution.
1) I'm uncertain as to their thought process. Typically, when people sell me stuff at a particular price, my mentally model is "Hmm, they couldn't sell that same stuff to somebody else for more money." Just for a comparable, I generally advertise on remnant inventory at CPCs below a dime, not at a quarter, so I think it is possible that BusyTeacher understands their unit economics a bit better than your guesstimate does.

2) Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: Alexa is clearly wrong.
If you want to do naughty things then by all means do them. There's not much harm done when people are slightly deceived into clicking onto a legitimate product. Big deal really.

Just for the love of god don't lie to yourself about it or try to rationalize it.
Do you have a link? Thanks!
I'm only talking about complexity for the user.
This is just crazy.
> Cool story, bro. Most people these days either use the browser that comes with the OS, or install the one they want.

This does not refute in an way that MS quit the EEE game. Merely, you seem to troll me ("Cool story, bro.").

> Really? Did you forget that Oracle started a lawsuit against Google for the usage of Java within Android? Or how about Apple's lawsuit against Samsung for the look and feel of the Galaxy Tablet? How about i4i's lawsuit against Microsoft?

Exactly, a few big fish and some smaller pure trolls. I am not aware of industrywide patent enforcement. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of IT companies, who don't pursue software patents let alone enforce if they have.

> [Citation needed]

I am not aware of industrywide patentfights regarding software patents. Telecom companies do battle each other ferociously over patents, which are not necessarily for software (from what I read, not relatively many software patents are involved).

> From Wikipedia: The C# language definition and the CLI are standardized under ISO and Ecma standards that provide reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing protection from patent claims.

If MS decides to sue they decide to sue.
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This Indian song gets 2 million view in 6 days
Why this kolaveri di?
I miss Flash. I know it had big issues but this stuff makes for some hard livin'.
I am not sure what the use case differences are. To me, git is simply a better version of svn.
Do you know what a "high CTR" is? Did you read the sentence that followed the one you're citing? Why are you so eager to jump on everything he says? I wish you'd stop. Please. You're sucking the oxygen out of the room.
I agree, I wouldn't be surprised if the weights people manually assign to the questions have very little correlation with the success of their relationships. People probably suck at knowing what they want.

That's not to say they're meaningless though; e.g., if someone puts "mandatory" for all his questions, that definitely says something about his personality, and should be used as a feature in the ML algorithm used for matching.
I'm a big fan of the GitHub for Mac GUI, I still have to drop down to the terminal to handle a few specific commands (especially when the GUI gets stuck in a merge conflict loop), but it helps me quickly handle stuff and thumb through local repos, especially helping me visualize stuff.

One thing I've noticed is that GitHub's web interface often misrepresents the number of branches we have. The number count is correct, but master is the only branch visible. And it only seems to happen after merges with the GUI...
I hope that one day this same (or a similar) diode material is made into a privacy-protecting glass, so light can get in but not out.
Given that the range of "right" answers is 4-7, that really only filters out people who respond <=3 or >=8. That's not much of a filter, and people who failed it would quickly be outed as not all that bright anyway. I agree with those saying it's not a great question to put any weight on.
The sheen is the product in this case. Jay took this wonderful obscure code and wrapped it up nice and pretty to share with others. The examples and docs he provides were enough to allow me to use this plugin. That is the value the provides.
The end of Google health was really sad. A centralized medical records system would be an incredible time and money saver for healthcare.

Although I'd love a self-driving car, and I think it will certainly save a lot of lives.
On the website, we only show you branches with unique commits. So if you merge a branch, it won't appear. This kind of sucks, but that page will get better with time.
Please stop grinding this axe. You're not even bothering to respond to comments anymore; you're just repeating the same point over and over again. "Completely absurd"? It's the exact same tactic.

I couldn't possibly think any less of you after these comments. What do you think you're accomplishing by writing this way?
Love the fake 5 stars. All that's missing is mimicking the scammy copy those ads always have: "See this weird trick a mom learned about bingo cards"
The instructions from the wiki for Unity-2d integration also work fine:
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_Unity_...

That runs xmonad with the unity panel; it doesn't add the launcher, but I was never a fan of that to begin with (in part because its interaction with xmonad wasn't great, but I never spent much time trying to get it working properly either so it might be possible). The key difference is the wiki assumes you're installing from cabal, where-as Mark's assume an apt-get installation which already comes with a .desktop file.

Note that the wiki instructions mention the need to explicitly add gaps at the top, which Mark's instructions didn't. (Also, that the wiki config doesn't actually launch the launcher!)
What does Patrick's advertising technique --- really, think about this --- exactly what does it have to do with Google SERP pollution?
Agreed. Reminds me of all the smart people claiming there's no housing bubble back in 2005.
I wrote a simple plugin for Sublime Text that opens the GitHub app and it's been working quite well as a replacement for Textmate & Git bundle.

There's been a few rare times where I've had to drop back to command line because of crashes, but I'm glad to see it's being maintained and updated.
Javascript was originally built for the browser and later expanded to other areas.

I'm not claiming that python wouldn't need a new standard library to manipulate a browser's dom tree or whatever. That's about all it would need though, so it seems like it would have been far less work to embrace and extend than to completely start over.

You seem to be arguing from the perspective (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that javascript is a good solution and a fine programming language, and I am not claiming otherwise. I just don't understand why so much effort has been spent creating and polishing Javascript instead of making slight improvements to a previously established quality language.

I suspect the answer is that your browser has an advantage if your javascript engine is faster, but there can be no advantage if everyone uses the standard python interpreter.
Those "random rules" make the code base much easier to read. This kind of thing is a big step backwards for people working on large projects, especially people who need to come up to speed on a large code base.
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Surprise: Microsoft quietly opposes SOPA copyright bill
I don't understand who still sees ads. It's apparently a huge majority of Internet users, but I don't understand where they come from.

This is like that quote for "How could X have won the election? I don't know anybody who voted for him."

If you learn one thing from me, learn that male twenty-something techies are not the golden normative standard for all forms of behavior. Some people actually do like ads, a lot. (Even twenty-something techies love some ads. I watch more Old Spice commercials than I watch actual TV!) Most people just don't care enough one way or the other to change the channel.

I encourage everyone to see how real people actually use these devices which we're trying to convince real people to use.