skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, that depends on the size of the library and how much I am using it. I really don't need a library to handle the logic of connecting to a server and sending things as simple as IRC messages. This is not something that I really expect to use outside the context of a bot. However, if there were a good library for creating a flexible bot (which would thus include the small low-level IRC stuff) then I would be interested. But investigating what was out there for creating IRC bots in Python, I really wasn't impressed. Most every bot framework is designed for sitting in one channel and listening for specific commands or command prefixes. Nothing wrong with that, but that only covers one sort of IRC bot.
I think that most of their results come from Bing if I remember correctly. So the scaling doesn't have to be as heavy as it might seem. But I may be wrong.
Don't believe pop science
the zero click content is often helpful to me, and is certainly a significant upgrade for me over basic bing results.
As with most new search startups, people will give it a chance. Hence the increase in traffic. I tried it a couple of times but, as most people do, I then checked Google just to make sure I'd really covered what is considered the full spectrum of search.
With everyone's concern with privacy, I'm surprised Ask Eraser isn't mentioned more frequently (http://sp.ask.com/en/docs/about/askeraser.shtml).
The stiffness needed to protect a glass screen from any flexing adds weight and structure that you can reduce with a flexible screen.
Fastestfox, Cyberspace and others use our API: http://duckduckgo.com/api.html
Hey Jason,

This is Charlie from the GiftDish team. I'm locked out of comments from the GiftDish account.

Thanks for the feedback.

1) We're currently evaluating product gifting. Currently, all gifts are "instant" and we're worried about the complexities around shipping/returns/etc that come with products. It's a great use case and we're trying to figure out the best way to do it.

2) We currently working to enable other sign-in options besides Facebook. As stated below, without automatic events, the site is very empty. Additionally, we're soon going to allow invites via email, so you can send gifts and collaborate with non facebook friends.
Critically important for any independent developer. Making a great site, service, or app isn't enough these days.
I really enjoyed and feel inspired by this article. It's given me specific ideas for my next project that I'm excited about. So I was surprised to see mostly negative comments here. But I suppose it's because the ideas and conclusions in this article seem to have been derived more anecdotally than experimentally, and HN is a very scientific-minded audience. But I absolutely recognize the power of variable and unpredictable rewards as a hook in my own behavior. So that's just more anecdotal evidence, but in my opinion, applying this idea to your product will make it more fun for the user (assuming others feel the same).

On a sidenote, I disagree with the common aversion to applying psychology in the design of your product. Applying psychology to the user is a means of manipulating them, but so is interacting with people in any sense. It doesn't automatically make it a "bad" thing. Better understanding people's desires and making products that meet those desires seems to me like a pretty worthwhile goal.
Interesting that they are beginning mass production. In today's manufacturing process, doesn't that mean they already have a customer?
Your good-sounding idea failed gloriously in a large scale in East Germany (just that the money was used to pay back part of the debt).
The problem is that most sales processes can be rigged (ours definitely was), if only by making up such a complex procedure that only those in the know are able to fill out the forms in the short time allocated by the same people.

I guess that every "simple" idea on how to approach decollectivization was tried in one of the former socialist or communist countries (there were a whole bunch to try theories on, after all). That the author probably chose the one they could most easily pick apart.
So how is DuckDuckGo going to make money?
Facebook login - no go!
Mike Lee gives Appsterdam to the App Makers Community
"God"-given rights? Lol.
How do I go back to the main menu?
Bring back fine volume adjustment from the keyboard (OS X Lion)
Introduction to Backbone.js Part 1: Models - Video Tutorial
Affected By The Twitter Unfollow Bug? We’ve Got An App For That
The first thing that put me off was "Begin here <Facebook login button>". I don't use Facebook, I don't even have a Facebook account, and I am not sure how I feel about having something as personal as a Facebook account instantly connected and associated with another service, even just to try it out.

To state the obvious I have nothing further to say about your service, as the mere login procedure scared me away.
They can also piggyback and associate themselves on Draw Something's success, and promote it amongst their own users - which they may have seen their some of their userbase switching over to Draw Something, a game they didn't own or control. What's the value of losing that mindshare? I guess potentially $200+ million.
App Lets You Name Facebook ‘Enemies’
Thanks for the compliments Prez,

We're based up in cold Portland, Maine.
With PayPal you can send money to any email address. If that address isn't associated with a PayPal account an email is sent telling the recipient to sign up to PayPal and claim their money. [1]

I don't see why giftdish couldn't work the same way: you send your gift to an email address and the recipient then has to open account to claim their gift if they don't have one already. Having a gift waiting would be a pretty strong incentive to open a new account.

[1] - https://www.paypal.com/webapps/helpcenter/article/?articleID...
Non blog-spam version:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120327-new-s...
Number one rule of marketing a website - make sure it doesn't say this when someone visits: Error establishing a database connection
> Dismantling the state run businesses should have been done more slowly, to allow the Soviet people time to adapt.

Poland, Hungary and the Baltic countries mostly did this, and they had far less problem after communism than Russia and most other former Soviet republics.
Karma's one. Others include Groupgifting.com, Ugift.in, Wrapp, and YouGift.
As mirrored by a few people already, I would be interested in this product but I don't have a Facebook account.

Could you not provide options of where to pull event data from? iCal or a phonebook for example? This would give many of the users here a route into your application and you would still have the option of using the facebook api.
Wow, is that real? How is this not front page news on every network? This would be as big as the discovery of antibiotics.
Fastestfox, Cyberspace and others use our API: http://duckduckgo.com/api.html

Would love to hear ideas on (iii).
He's probably thinking of "IceWeasel" which was a rebranded firefox a linux distro (Fedora maybe?) was shipping due to some sort of copyright/licensing quirk.
What Awaits You at Norwegian Cruise Lines
Is your #1 source of information related to all popular cruise lines! We have cruise line reviews and articles about all cruise related topics and popular cruise destinations.
I like your core point. If you aren’t building something of value, then the press doesn’t matter you won’t last anyway.

But the “90% of Techcrunch companies are gone in 6 months” stat is just wrong. I don’t know who this Dreamit guy is, but seems to have no bearing on the reality of an average Techcrunch post.

Namely, most of the Techcrunch announcements nowadays are AFTER some amount of angel money has been raised. And most companies target around 18 months of cash. So even if they were building something horribly crappy, there’s no way they are gone in 6 months.

Looking at page 1 of Techcrunch today, and filtering just for early stage startups. We have: Worlddesk, Snapguide ($2m), Kibits ($1m), Circl.es, Hootsuite ($20m), Skills.to ($3m), RentSocial. While you can go through $1-3m quickly if you spend badly, six months is unrealistic.

As others are saying.. this is just a dumb, wrong stat.
Does anyone know how much of that comes from Linux Mint?

I dabbled with DDG a few times, but only when I changed to Mint did I start using it frequently. I've since wondered how much of a proportion of the traffic of DDG is because it's now the default search engine for Firefox in Mint.
So you think a short-stint is no longer a black mark on your resume?
LAMP for robotics
If Europe, in particular the UK, can pass more anti-copyright and tech-friendly laws, wouldn't it be a no-brainer for most startups/companies to move there?
Give Your Apps a Backbone(.js)
there are much worse problems to have. Like no one going to your site
Davweb,

That's our plan, and it works in much the same way within Facebook, now we just need to get it implemented.
How Coldplay rocked the house with AT&T's help.
Do you any more detail on this? I found this via lockwiki.com for Maryland -- it says, "A person may not possess a burglar's tool with the intent to use or allow the use of the burglar's tool in the commission of a violation of this subtitle. "

IANAL, but it seems like simple possession is allowed. But maybe my reference is not up to date.

http://law.justia.com/codes/maryland/2010/criminal-law/title...
of course, coming soon for Android, sigh..
I hate this (!g) though.

If I want Google results, it's a heck of a lot faster, easier, and natural to just Google it instead of adding some kind of search operator BS to my query. I used DDG for a while (a long time ago, admittedly) and basically had to !g every query I ran in order to get acceptable results. In the end, I gave up because it was just adding typing and thinking time to search.

I suppose one could argue that the interface lacks some of the annoyances of Google, but I feel like quality and speed are the most desirable traits of a search engine (in that order). If we're just using somebody else's results anyway then why should we accept a slowdown?
So much publicity for Curtis over the last couple weeks.
My kids like the cute picture of the duck.
Does this mean channels, like in CSP (what Go does), are unfit for distributed envs because they are synchronous?
Securing MongoDB traffic with ssltunnel on Windows
Do's & Dont's of A/B Testing
> Of course he would never do that.

Why? Maybe he was paid by the linux foundation during that time? Other sources of income? The gratuit "of course" is not clear to me.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you try to say, but:
" rails.app ought to make Rails more popular [...] wider deployment of Rails enriches Ruby developers". Are you saying that Yehuda should not make money from his efforts, but the Ruby developers in turn can use the results naturally for their gain?
In Texas, Cicada Killers used to freak me out as a kid:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphecius_speciosus
"Linux is the hype du jour." Gartner, 1999
!g "search query" on DDG will do the search on google.

Entire list here: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
Opportunity cost. If the world can't come up with $25k to fund this project, then it must not actually have enough of a market to be worth Yehuda's time. He can go find something else to do for $25k worth of his time that will likely benefit someone more than this would have.

It's not like we're investing $25k of angel funds to have him build something that he is then going to sell for $500k without sharing the profits. We're simply paying the living expenses of someone who wants to solve a perceived need for the development community.
I don't much like DuckDuckGo's results. For example a search for "Minecraft" via DuckDuckGo produces:

#1 minecraft.net (official site)
#2 facebook.com/minecraft
#3 joystiq.com/game/minecraft (news blog)
#4 minecraftportal.com (minecraft blog)
#5 minecraft.en.softonic.com (a site distributing a copy of the phased out minecraft trial version)
#6 minecraftwiki.net (official Minecraft wiki)
#7 kotaku.com/minecraft/ (blog)

The #1 result makes sense and is great, but why are the rest of the top results all blogs (besides the wiki)? It seems to heavily favour blogs. The official Minecraft forum isn't even in the top 20...
Wait, how on Earth could you call Argentina an as-free-as-possible market? And I'd far rather live in Chile even in the bottom quintile than any other country in South America.
One of National Public Radio's (NPR) shows -- "On the Media", perhaps -- had a several minute segment on Google's privacy changes and someone who decided to "divorce" themselves from Google. They mentioned DDG as the search engine they'd switched to and commented favorably on the experience.

That's at least the second time in recent weeks that I've heard DDG mentioned on national or state public radio.

It might sound... "incidental", but those kinds of exposures really get "the masses" to go and have a look.

EDIT: Here's a reference to the "divorce" segment:

http://www.onthemedia.org/2012/mar/23/divorcing-google/
Why are we inviting people? Why are we collaborating? Isn't the "Sending Gifts" the main thing your site does? The mechanism you use to login should not affect that in any way.

Further, why is the site based on Events? I tried to send a gift to test it out, but there's no "Send a Gift" button. Why is that not a big giant element at the top of the page, sitting next to a box where I can type an email address?

Instead, I need to find the "add an event" button in the nav, then jump through a bunch of steps to create a new event with a date and find the one option in the list of event types that lets me actually send a gift without entering more information. Seems like a lot of unnecessary complexity that detracts from the central focus of the site.

That said, it's quite pretty. And the workflow to send birthday gifts to my facebook friends is pretty cool. You just need a way to send gifts to people who aren't in my Facebook list and/or aren't having a birthday.
What We Look for When Hiring
I'd like to have one physical book that becomes any virtual book.

Differing page counts and all that aside, a UI feature I like is being able to locate content based on relative location, which is especially handy when I can recall the general concept but not specific search terms.
Haha. Reminds of the "The social graph is neither" article [1].

"Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90's. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet."

[1] http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/11/the_social_graph_is_neither/
You could connect with other websites where you can input each birtday date to remember, etc.
A lot of friends are putting fake birthday dates just to check if people remember their real date and I didn't even put mine (or at least it is not displayed) but I have a google doc storing every birthday I want to remember. And no I don't want to wish happy birthday to everyone in my FB list, nor see "do you want to send a gift to XXX" and feel guilty about it.

TLDR : add the possibility to give dates/names/mail in the site instead of just facebook scraping.
I ran into these when camping a couple of years ago, and they freaked me out as well: a wasp as big as your pinky, with wings beating hard enough that they'd blow around the sand when close to the ground.. And they lived in burrows that happened to be under the campsite's firepit, where I was cooking!

But a ranger explained to me what they were, and over the rest of the weekend they never actually bothered us.
Hmmm... I'm getting some weird artifacts in the new version on my 2010 iMac with this little canvas toy: http://www.apejet.org/aaron/code/sparks/
!g "search query" on DDG will do the search on google.

Entire list here: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html
reply
How to Avoid Getting Fired from Your Own Startup
I'm curious how you ended up implementing lock-picking? The big problem I notice with most implementations (leaving aside flaws such as incorrect number of tools) is communicating the tactility of lock-picking. I've played a game (Fallout 3? I don't exactly remember) that attempted to introduce a tactile aspect through controller rumble, but the effect didn't adequately reflect the lock-picking experience.
Poll: What is your current Stack Overflow reputation?
I know that a lot of Hackers frequent Stack Overflow, so I am curious as to how much actual participation there is from Hackers on SO, and what the general reputation of Hackers is.

I think it would be particularly interesting to cross reference these results with the "What's Your Favorite Programming Language?" [1] poll. Unfortunately, that would require way too many options. :)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3746692

Note: please don't forget to vote the poll itself up if you find it valuable/interesting, in order to gather other participation.
0 - I use Stack Overflow as a resource, but don't participate
0 - I don't use Stack Overflow
100-1000
1000-2500
2500-5000
5000-10k
10k-25k
25k-50k
50k-100k
Coloring Games for Windows, Mac and Linux
Thank you all! (I'm the founder.)

In response to a lot of the comments here, please know that two major things we're working on are better programming queries (https://duckduckgo.com/tech.html -- one of my new favorites https://duckduckgo.com/?q=alternative+to+picasa) and speed.

For speed, just this week we upgraded our whole caching system, which should significantly speed up a lot of queries. I'd be interested to know if anyone has noticed any difference over the past day or so. This change should equalize a lot of the location differences, which is the main issue. In some parts of the world we were way slower.

Also, for anyone wanting to get involved we've been open sourcing more and more (https://github.com/duckduckgo). We're working on better entry points, but one could start here now: https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki. For programming documentation in particular, this is the repo: https://github.com/duckduckgo/zeroclickinfo-fathead. That will answer queries like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl+split

On the back-end we could also use some sysadmin help :). Here's our hiring info: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216387

Of course, we're also always looking for feedback, the more detailed/specific the better: https://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html
Simple results are better than Google - including the summary of the term grepped from wiki.
Complex or rare queries aren't as good.

I use it at home - it's quicker to find out when the new South Park episode is out. But it's less use at work for finding the solution to that weird problem
Aakash Vs BSNL Penta Tablet Full Reviews,Specifications
The Baltic countries also started with smaller and medium-sized companies first, privatizing a lot of stuff in the early 1990s that didn't have deep systemic involvement in the economy. The large, more difficult cases, like banks, electric companies, etc., were kept state-owned during the transition period. Once the transition was on better footing, they privatized the larger companies mostly in the 1997-2002 timeframe. That also let them float those companies in more traditional ways, such as IPOs on a stock market, rather than the experimental voucher system that was used in Russia.
I just wish DDG could implement autocomplete/search suggestions. It's probably silly, but I've become as accustomed to typing a few letters into Google and it knowing exactly what I'm looking for as I have to tab complete in a unix terminal.

I've also really become accustomed to "instant" search. And
I'll be the first to admit I thought was a total gimmick when it was announced.

Edit: After reading what I wrote, I realized it came off as if I didn't like DDG or didn't use it. Neither of those are true. I really like DDG and use it fairly often.
Great question; I have no idea. We just get mail back from the editors that says things like, "your PDF breaks our scripts; regenerate it directly with LaTeX."

Some, like Springer-Verlag, also have an editorial process where you have to send your .tex files to them and they will merge all of the documents and run LaTeX on them. I don't even know how you could get xetex (or pdflatex) to work with that system.
But a bit of a problem for a company whose business model is based on copying everything online and worrying about the authors later.
Fitocracy for iPhone
Opa has some brilliant design decisions. Also, with the advent of Source Maps in Chrome and Firefox, the time is right for an end-to-end integrated web development language. Though I do find it strange as a long time OO person that "tightly coupled" is used as a positive trait in the "Hello Opa" post.

As I predicted years ago, Static and Dynamic typing are starting to lose their distinctions. I wonder if someone has started producing an as you type type inferencer? Given the right language design, I don't see why the editor can't keep track of all of these details, revealing types on mouseover and greying out vars that are ambiguously typed, much as syntax errors are hi-lighted in programmer's editors.
There is a set of knowledge in the world. It is vast, but much of it has already been contributed to wikipedia. The knowledge of the world continues to grow, but I don't think at the rate that it is contributed to wikipedia.

Contributors are really mining the collective knowledge of the world, and so they are running out. So similar to mining an nonrenewable resource, the cost of extraction goes up with time:
http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg521/scaled.php?server=521&#...

With difficulty in making significant contributions dropping off, you would expect to see a drop off of new users (they really don't get rewarded enough for their efforts). Back in the day, you could contribute something meaningful that you know to wikipedia. Most likely now, someone has already put it in.
I agree, it was the multi-player which made it the great game it was. I remember my buddies and I made up a game in the Complex map where one person would take what we dubbed "the house" which was an area you could go up and had a vantage point of several areas while the other person had to try and take the "house". It was a good time.
Actually, I used to follow the street sweeper around in the city I lived in and pick up the tines that broke off and did make my own lock picks. They are very strong and flexible in a good way.
I agree with OP. This is a complete non-starter for me if I can't actually send physical gifts. I actually just assumed that you were an amazon affiliate play:)
Long live the Hockey Stick!
it's debian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation_software_re...
Wonen: bescherm je gevel tegen vocht
It's already monetizing via ads specifically, sponsored links which are highlighted in Yellow and are syndicated through Microsoft adCenter. They also take affiliate commission on sites like Amazon and eBay.
I find that I am slowly losing confidence in Google. What I often do is input searches in the form: "general term", "specific term", then click on a link and immediately do a find for the specific term I searched for. In the last few months, the specific term I searched for often does not exist on the linked site at all, which I find quite annoying.

I tried bing a couple of times, but the results are even worse.

Maybe Google verbatim mode will fix the problem? I've set up a quick search recently, but have yet to start using it.
Same with an independent cloud service.

There HAS to be a better way than carrying around a legacy device.
Android: Is it even a real platform?