skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the concept of DDG but unfortunately the results just aren't there yet...

Look at the search results for "Google Verbatim Mode" on DDG vs Google.

On Google, all results are actually about the "Verbatim" search mode on Google. We even get results like "How to set Verbatim mode as default on Google Chrome" with actual instructions.

On DDG, we instead get a really crappy blog article as the first result, and some unrelated junk about Google Earth DirectX and Windows 8. There's one result that asks the question most people searching for that query would want answered, "I would like to be able to use verbatim mode as standard". However... it's a link to a newsgroup posting with no answers, unlike the Google results which actually provided links to blog postings with the answer.

So, I'm going to use Verbatim mode on Google for now, now that I know how to activate it by default... Let me know if you guys work these issues out, I'd love to use DDG, but it's just not returning valuable results reliably yet.
I read the plos article when it came out. Basically, when a cell realises it is infected with a virus sometimes it will try to kill itself. There are a bunch of checks it does to make sure killing itself is a good idea. Many viruses try to counter these checks. DRACO works by short circuiting the detection -> kill self pathway.

It's a great idea. But sometimes a large proportion of cells can get infected when you have a virus. Someone might get in a lot of trouble if all their infected cells instantly died. Like, can anyone speculate what the side effect would be for an AIDS patient? I don't know myself, but I'd want to know more about this before saying this is a miracle cure.
its interesting although one potential twist is that viruses may be more the communications vector for genetic material than the actual disease causing process itself (which is the payload).

if this gets widely used in the field, will it disrupt "good" things - evolutionary processes, symbiotic infections, etc?

Will it disrupt the ability of manmade viruses (i.e. gene therapy) from working?
Kickstarter, Blockbuster Effects
Judging by my reputation history the best way to reach the 50 points needed to leave comments is (perhaps unsurprisingly) to write some answers! I suggest you find some unanswered questions under tags with which you're familiar.
I actually think the system works quite well; most SO comments are worth reading. One peculiarity of the privileges that I've found is that I'm not allowed to make edits with fewer than 6 characters. I've had to leave some pretty significant typos uncorrected.
Yeah, maybe it should be a circle you hover your mouse over for a second.
Check out the 'featured' tab and see if you can answer something. Easy way to unlock commenting, and several other privileges. Or just post a few good answers, you'll be able to comment the next day.
Search retargeting: branding for the modern marketer
Now, from a logical viewpoint this title could also be "why an excellent software engineer can be a mathematician", or (assuming that excellence in mathematics does not affect your ability to engineer software) "why a software engineer can be an excellent mathematician". Now, to get all the angry mathematicians from stabbing me, here's another truth: bad software engineers (i.e., people who do software engineering but aren't good at it) are useful and are often paid real money for what they do. Bad mathematicians are chased away and either become jobless or find a new destination of being a physicist, software engineer, or restaurant owner, because bad mathematics doesn't pay for itself.

Intuition (the thing that the article's author bumps his head against without noticing it) is really important in mathematics, even though its importance is usually played down wrt. the importance of handling the technical details (correctness of a proof, keeping mathematical structures in your head). In fact, the same faculty used for the formal work is also used for your mathematical intuitions, but then the intuitions are turned into a proof by checking and re-checking how it all fits together.

Eugenia Cheng (a category theorist) uses the term "morality" for the mathematical equivalent of design patterns:
http://cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk/morality/morality.pdf
Can you Manage a Venue without Paper?
Google's Android has generated just $550m since 2008, figures suggest
White House is Announcing $200M BigData Research Initiative
Being Code-Literate vs. Being a Good Programmer...
It was a "non-fatal collision" between the two aircraft [0]. Both pilots were rescued [1]. One aircraft was recovered without incident; the other sits corroding at the bottom of the lake. While the second corsair is in worse shape than the first one and therefore a much more significant challenge to recover, I know several people who would jump at the chance to try if they could get permission from the Navy.

[0] http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/goodyear-fg-1d-corsai...
[1] http://www.dcsfilms.com/Site_4/Corsair_lake_washington.html
Our application for YC (S12)
Isn't this trivium? It's almost like saying a mathematician can be an excellent physicist.

Also, beware - correlation fallacy. In my experience it doesn't have anything to do with the education itself, I believe you can easily generalize and say the average person taking up mathematics has a better analytical mind than the average CS major who's in it for the hype.
Note that pective.com will show you an incorrectly sized image until you tell it your monitor size. I'm surprised they don't require you to enter that before showing the image.
Who does your design? I love it.
I get into using DDG sometimes, then run into a batch of wanting to use !g and just switch the engine in FF and forget to come back until I read some story on HN ;)

It kind of irks me that DDG is still asking if I meant [similar sounding children's book to my business with 3 different letters] when !g stopped doing that months ago. It also has my psycho competitor's defamatory website ranking #8 when this page should have crappy SEO with google.
Would love to see some example queries to debug if you have them handy. (You can check your search history https://www.google.com/history/ to jog your memory if you have it turned on.)
It's called writer's block and it's pretty much universal. The point is to streamline the content creation process so that there are no distractions between you and the work. Hopefully produce more and better work when you can really focus on the craft. Once a blog post gets to the "nearly finished" state then you can deal with the 5000 options WordPress offers around every post, such as tags and crosslinking old posts and formatting and url slugs and and and...
Ten great programs for Linux / Open Source Addicts
You mentioned in the 'Worst Linux PC' thread that your implementation generates JS code on the fly and 'captures up to three backwards jumps'. Do you mind explaining in more detail how this works?
It's not "5 lines", and it's not about "junior programmers". My designers need to work with my Rails apps, and learning the intricacies of setting up a Rails stack is not their job description. Just like maintaining their dev environment isn't mine. There's a bigger issue here than "those kids will never learn things the hard way".
And what would be Apple's equilavent of the Billie Jean song? The iPad 3?
I remember that tablet, had no idea it was Wacom

they are doing a lot more integrations now, though most are pen:

http://www.wacom-components.com/english/partner/index.html
So is DRACO itself a kind of virus ? How does it visit all the cells...
On the other hand, London has more developers than anywhere else in the country, probably both in density & absolute numbers. Pretty much every UK startup I've heard of is located in London.

Yes, it's horribly expensive, but so is SF & SF remains the startup capital of the US.
I originally learned in a class. I carry a pair of titanium bodegas in my wallet.

The first interesting thing you'll probably learn is that the more "secure" something is marketed as being to consumers, the easier it is to pick.

Any sort of safe you buy from the likes of Walmart, Office Depot/Max, Costco and so on, can be picked in a few seconds. I have a not-cheap, mid-line Sentry fireproof safe and I can "pick" that by just sliding the rake into the lock.

Gun locks and home safe locks are usually cheap crap and probably the easiest to pick. I've picked close to a 100 different types.

If you want to learn, I suggest starting with paperclips as they're good at training you on the kind of tension you want to use. Most beginners use way too much tension. Paperclips will bend when you cross that threshold. They're also much harder to pick with than a legit set of picks.

My knowledge really improved when I re-keyed my home locks from some kits I ordered online. It really put things into perspective.
Ask HN: We go global. We should rename our startup. Best practices?
We started a local startup in Caucasus but we get too many emails from other countries if we could do our service in their country. It became so successful that we think we should go global.

But the problem is the name sucks. Because we didn't think big, we named it with local language and we think it's not a good idea going global with this name. Here are some pros and cons of renaming:

PROS

- It will be more memorable

- It will be a global name that everyone can spell

- (maybe) New name will bring a new breath to the team

CONS

- We will lose brand recognition of local costumers.

- We must buy another domain, so we will lose our Search Engine Optimized domain. We spent last year 23k $ for SEO

So what should we do for minimal consumer lost and maximal recognition? Do you have any experiences about renaming startups? What are best practices?

Or should we use the old name?
Not always - see e.g. this (shameless self-plug): http://stackoverflow.com/a/3905805/19746 .

I don't think there is a solution - popular stuff will be popular. Is a solution needed, though? The point is to get answers - votes from answers are the incentive, but in the end, it's just a bunch of numbers.

As long as the results are obvious - e.g. a question with answers having 75%, 15%, 10% and 5% of votes - it's not terribly interesting whether that means 15, 3, 2 and 1 vote, or 750, 150, 100 and 50. Also, being able to vote posts <0 is good - bogus answers will be apparent.
Scientists demo self-healing plastic, 'Holy Grail of Material Science'
Fossil raindrops tell us a fair bit about ancient atmosphere
"Someone might get in a lot of trouble if all their infected cells instantly died."

This was directly addressed in the linked article.
Reputation points in niche tags are definitely harder won than in the popular language tags, but (as you've demonstrated) it's easier to climb to the top of a niche tag and establish yourself as an expert. The real-world reputation you gain from that is more valuable than the reputation score on the site. Great job!
As far as I know, DDG uses both data from other search engines (Google, Bing) as well as its own crawling bots. If they only used their own crawlers, with the current size of the internet it would take a long time for them to get a good amount of data.
I'd love to but I don't use FaceBook.
Cloudflare is supposedly helpful for that
No, but if you get a really bad viral infection, you don't have to hope that there is a drug around that has been developed to kill that particular disease. You can just take this drug and know that it will cure you.
If you're one of the people who keeps hearing about mythical street sweeper bristles and has never found one in the wild, consider the spring steel from windshield wiper blades.

Someone you know has wipers that should have been been replaced years ago; do something nice for them, and get enough pick-stock to last for years.

Bike spokes are also useful, but a bit more work to flatten/grind and shape. (Great for tension wrenches, though.)
Was about to write the exact comment. Sad to see this at the bottom.

Anyone who really wants to be a programmer can be a software engineer, because if you are really interested in programming you spend a lot of time programming and that will be enough to get you an engineer role somewhere.

My dad, an MBA, would never admit to it, but I once caught him coding Excel macros. I asked him "Isn't that programming? There's loops, conditions, variables and procedures!" And he goes "I don't program, I automate tasks for moving Excel spreadsheet data into the our data warehouse.".

Moral: Not all programmers can be software engineers, you have to be someone interested in programming.
Cloudflare seems like a smart option - can anyone who's used it comment? Does it affect your google analytics measurements?
Honestly, all of the "non-profit" organizations out there who provide "funding" to AIDS research need to blow the bank and get behind something like this.
Also, he uses affiliate programs. So if a link in the search results goes to Amazon for example, he'll add his affiliate code to the link.
Your Startup Idea Is So Awesome [SpeakerDeck]
An analogy for privatisation and increasing an economy's capital dynamism is turning up the heat in a reactor. The added energy makes the entire system more powerful if properly directed. But the steam doesn't want to drive a generator; if it's easier to breach a weakness in the containment structure then so be it. The higher the temperature the stronger the containment need be.

Russia was privatised shockingly fast without building up a competent judiciary, informed public, nor the rule of law necessary to direct that activity. So it settled for the path of least resistance to profit and turned inward and venal.

We are still learning about engineering economies on an international scale like this; it doesn't always turn out as "mass destruction". In today's FT Jim Yong Kim, US nominee for the World Bank, comments on being "born in South Korea when it was still recovering from war, with unpaved roads and low levels of literacy. I have seen how integration with the global economy can transform a poor country into one of the most dynamic and prosperous economies in the world. I have seen how investment in infrastructure, schools and health clinics can change lives. And I recognise that economic growth is vital to generate resources for investment in health, education and public goods" [1]. The "policy of mass destruction" headline is needlessly hyperbolic.

[1] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e2adc88c-7733-11e1-baf3-00144feab4...
SO is good for getting answers to quick commonly asked questions. If I encounter an error, and can't solve it after a few minutes, I'll usually Google it. More often than not, SO is the first result, offering a quick fix for the problem. I'll agree that SO doesn't have the intellectual discussion-based community that HN has, but it's really good for answering quick questions which a lot of people run into.
As a counterexample for number one, I've found DDG to be as good or better than Google on almost everything. The only place Google really beats it is in mailing list archives. DDG doesn't seem to crawl sites like gmane.

Numbers two and three don't make any sense to me as reasons not to use DDG. Using those criteria nobody would have switched to Google because they were just some college guys, while AltaVista and Yahoo have a big head start and huge departments working on search...

Number four is simply too inconvenient. I could go through the trouble of switching to incognito mode every time I needed to search, or I could just use DDG.
I'm one of the 83 people who have earned a silver Objective-C badge, whatever that means. Maybe I can get that on a shirt.

I was quite active on the site for about a year, and then my enthusiasm for answering questions suddenly dropped off. I don't know if the quality of questions got worse or what.

Sometimes I miss the old days of comp.lang.c++.moderated. Except the part about being a C++ programmer, that is.
How Do You Go Global Against Clones And Competitors?
> It seems like you think maximum efficiency is achieved by taking 'lives saved' / 'dollars spent'.

I never actually said this; "more people alive in 20 years" was an example. My main point was not "this future is better than that future", but "it is possible to decide which of these two futures is likely to be better".

This is also why I'm not accounting for 'improvements in peoples lives'. Not because we shouldn't account for that, but because accounting for it was beside the point.

That said, I think this would be a reasonable first-order estimate when it comes to comparing two charities. But I don't expect to ever be in a situation where a first-order estimate is all I can make.

And yes, I currently think the "malaria" world would be better than the "batmobile" world. I haven't thought about it very hard, so maybe I'm wrong.

> And why are we responsible for everyone?

If I can make a small improvement here or a large improvement in Africa, why would I not choose Africa?

(The improvement sizes should be assumed to have already taken into account things like funds being redirected, and all the other reasons why charities might sometimes not be efficient.)

> Why do you have to shit on people doing good work here

I'm not trying to shit on him.
When I first saw it I though it was fake.

But seriously, PANACEA and DRACO? Is Dr. Todd Rider trolling the crazies?

For example: http://youtu.be/EneiDKw_zXg
tl;dr: DRACO is attempt by Reptilians to corrupt human DNA, underwater cages, etc
Congrats! Go Philly-based startups!!!!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3742314

"Codename: Svbtle by Dustin Curtis"

Zero talk, when it's right in the title? Never have I seen such egregious inflation of a project because of the personality.
That's why I switched from Google, the !bang feature is something I could not live without now.
SE Xperia Pro, Slide, Captivate Glide, Desire Z? It seems like another problem with the diversity of hardware is coming up with names that don't sound like something you would buy from a vending machine in a truck stop restroom.
Refresh the url to see the 3 different scenes - hurry though, cambria is putting a new temporary campaign up next week I believe.

They're built with a mix of CSS keyframe animations, transition/transforms, and JS. A lot of work was put in to make the animations smooth on the ipad 1(!), and the majority of effects have a fallback going back to IE7.

I used some jquery plugins like 'jquery.animate-enhanced' that would automatically turn $().animate(...) calls into using transitions if supported, but a fair amount of effects were written multiple ways to handle all browsers.
Congratulations Matz. You deserve every accolade and recognition for your great contributions to our tech world.
Free Startup Idea: Holding Our Elected Officials Accountable
Making the Case for Running Shoes
Stop Content Scraping with ScrapeShield
Don't hate me because I invest in convertible notes
HTML5 - Etiqueta Nav
A Better Strategy for Hangman
IT Contractors earn 37% more by losing recruitment agents
Has anyone tried this? So far I've been pleased with who they have picked.
There's money to be made building stages and doing backstage work :-)
People rarely upvote crap answers, and all answers are displayed in random order if they have the same score, so being first doesn't really confer any advantage. Quality answers usually float to the top.
ScrapeShield
As far as I'm aware viruses don't do anything positive for humans, though they can swap genes around and so allow bacteria to evolve more quickly. This is in sharp contrast to antibiotics where we really do rely on a huge number of symbiotic bacteria. So it seems that anti-virus drugs are a much safer thing than the antibiotics we already use.
Ad:tech San Francisco: Startup Spotlight Series Competition - Who Will Win?
Beautiful Collections Of Flowers Alphabet Letters
Speculation on Top of Speculation
Is Paul Graham going to put money for a start-up pharma to mass produce this if this deems to be silver bullet as it claims to be? I smell a lot of money!
Making the Paperless Office a Reality
That's fine. But not providing a static fallback is very poor practice.
What we've learned from 20 weeks of "Getting the News": it's really fucking hard
1001 | Unternehmensberatung MARKUS TONN  |
Unternehmensberatung für Existenzgründer und Mittelstand in ganz Deutschland.
I'll wait for human trials but I love their ballsy acronym for now:

PANACEA (Pharmacological Augmentation of Nonspecific Anti-pathogen Cellular Enzymes and Activities)
Mulberry leather
I can't find a reference for what firmware covers. Could it be as small as something like the BIOS on a PC that doesn't have to change between OS updates?
Escort London
Call girls in London are quite well versed at being hired for business parties, where they show prospective clients around the city
Tablet table top stand - made in USA
> But who said this was his objective?

Certainly not me. "I consider it $250,000 that he's spending on a cool hobby that he enjoys, that also makes kids happy, and that also brings publicity to doing-good-things"

> He's now got symbolic value, as does the $250,000 Batmobile

He already has symbolic value, and I doubt that the $250,000 Batmobile will have that much symbolic value over his current one.

I agree with the rest of your post; but while your defense of the "Batman" approach is valid, remember that he didn't try to get this publicity. If he hadn't been pulled over, we wouldn't know about him.

With that in mind, we can assume that he didn't sit down and try to work out how to maximise his effect on the world; which in turn means that he probably isn't maximising his effect on the world.
I wonder if the resolution issue could be improved by combining inertial sensing in the stylus with the position data from the capacitive display. You should be able to get sub-"pixel" resolution by using multiple sensors this way, though I'm not sure how well it would work in practice, with inertial drift, etc. It might be pretty good though! Worth trying I bet.
DRACO is a drug, and travels through the body by diffusion the same way other drugs do.
In light of the Adobe announcement that they're charging 9% for apps that use Stage3D and domain memory, SwiftShader WebGL in Chrome is pretty huge. One of the major advantages of Stage3D vs. WebGL was the fast software fallback for machines with sketchy GPUs or drivers.
I guess I don't agree with our current reverence for creation. It's easy to create things and shove them out into the world. The work that comes after, though, is unsexy, unglamorous, and usually less fun than the creation part. It's also where most of the value comes from.
Welllll...it takes, approximately, three to five useful answers. Note that they don't need to be The Answer To Life, Universe, And Everything; they don't need to be the longest, or fastest, or best-looking answers to that question - just useful.

I've run a tiny experiment on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/users/779183/friar-tuck - it took me, from "logout and clear all cookies" to "Commenting privilege unlocked", twenty-five minutes (1500 seconds) of wall-time, start to finish; no cheating, no sockpuppetting - just answering three (3) easy questions in a mildly useful way and watching the upvotes roll in.

Alas, "I come to the __Q&A__ site 'often', but can't be bothered to __ask__ or __answer__ anything at all, how come they deny me privileges?" sounds a bit more entitled than "the System keeps me down and prevents me from commenting," doesn't it?