skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Did you add the word "many" on the saved list, instead of the number of saved stories, for performance tuning?

women who create sites to get hired by Twitter Well, I thought of flagging this story, but I saw everyone is interested in discussing it!

Anyway, HN is really slow since the last week, and it's being down for 4 to 5 times daily - for me.
But when I ping 67.15.104.17 , it works fine.

Maybe killing the spam automatically should help? I am not sure.
Besides all popular explanations of "failure to plan" (based on various cognitive biases and reasoning errors), there could be also another effect in play.

Even for somebody who could produce a perfect estimate, sometimes it can be more strategical to present more "optimistic" estimate to others.

Deliberate underestimation can be used to get approval for a project which otherwise wouldn't get through (if a more realistic but much larger estimation would be given).

This can be a way how to get sunk cost fallacy [1] work for you.

"It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission".

If we look at those example "estimation failure" projects, it did actually work for them in the end. They were not canceled, additionally money was poured into them. Maybe if the initial estimate was a correct $102M (instead of massively underestimated $7M), Sydney wouldn't have its landmark at all.

Actually, such strategical underestimation can work as a motivational tool even for a single actor (with no external parties involved). What can be daunting under realistic assessment, could become more palatable when taken in smaller chunks.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs
If they used a custom chip, I bet they could fit a text-to-speech engine in less chip space than the flash required to store the prerecorded audio of the track information.
It could just be me, but I've observed MP3 encoding tends to make hard transients more mushy, which is something that one might become accustomed to.
yes goglebots can read keywords with OCR in your site logo images

Can somebody confirm that? I have never heard about this before, seems cool.
Update:

After 2 CTs, an MRI of my brain, and an MRA of my head and neck, and an ultrasound of my carotid arteries... conclusion is that its all just symptoms of a concussion from the double impact of the accident.

The slurring has gradually improved, as have my attentiveness, word recall, and memory. Headaches actually got worse after my last post, and it was really effecting my ability to work, but after weeks of monkeying with different drugs with my neurologist, we finally arrived at a combination low-dose tricyclic anti-depressant (no longer used for sad folks, now used at lower doses for pain management) for the daily pain, and a triptan for the bad ones. So the headaches are under control which is a great relief. When I have a bad one, between the 'aura' and the triptan I feel like I'm on, or coming off acid but its so much better than the pain and I can still work.

The aphasia happened as recently as last week (word queue 5 big), but seems to be strongly connected with exhaustion as I was going on no sleep and it was the first attack in a week.

All in all, it was a painful and costly recovery but I'm mostly better. And I think I learned a lot about how my brain works in parallel. It was very strange, and educational to have some parts work and others not.
I think that's the kicker - he's providing a real service!

People are looking for this information. He's providing it for them. The fact that he's choosing both what topics to provide and is not personally an expect and outsources is really more a product of an intelligent business operation that it is a nefarious idea.

This actually sounds like something that could revolutionize modern media really.
And even if he had discovered a valid correlation for this period in this country, there is no reason for calling it a 'law'. There is no indication that the correlation will hold up in the future or in the rest of the world.
I'm off to upmod some boring stories.
Remember the guy who was loudly complaining that google suddenly changed its algorithm and his site, which was nothing but an auto-generated directory, suddenly was excluded? Good for them.

Despite providing some ways for folks like this operator to partly game the system, Google has been on the for-front of forcing sites to have something of unique value in order to reach top ranking.
While that's a good point, Google would basically have to remove adsense to have any measurable effects on this business.

These aren't worthless placeholders, they're valuable collections of decent information. He is speeding the ranking process a bit, but that would come eventually.
My feelings are that those who want to read Codinghorror already subscribe to the feed (I'm one of them) - so there should really be no need to pos tthem at all. For me HN is still the place to find things from palces I'm unaware of.
He says it's "inconclusive" in the sense that the evidence doesn't prove what Hauser claims it proves.
If I remember correctly, Arc is an ongoing experiment in language design, not high-performance implementation.
It could be awesome if this is a social network that tries to get more users!

As a fact of matter, pg is discussing now how to make HN extra boring, and make new users - non hackers - run away. :)
Paul Roth ?
RECEIVED THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=159508
Hacker News new | comments | leaders | jobs | submit
login

1 point by PRoth 335 days ago | link | parent

Paul, call me weird, but I searched Larry Mihalko after you had written about him, and I came across this:
http://www.post-gazette.com/regionstate/19991031newabuse1.as...
Was he a teacher at Gateway? If so, then it says that he was being charged with sexual assault or something strange like that. I wanted to let you have the last word on it, because charges don't necessarily mean that much. Anyways, I would rather take your word that he was a genuinely good teacher (which your post indicates)

MY ANSWER:
U R G E N T !!!!!!!
TO: http://news.ycombinator.com/submit
Oh, I do not know what kind of a man Larry Mihalko is. Where did you see that I have written anything about him because I have not. But I sure am glad you found what you did. Please send me a copy.
Mr. Paul:
Yes, Larry Mihalko was a teacher at Gateway.
Thank you for searching out Larry Mihalko for me and I do not even know who you are. Please, if you know how to pull up the many articles written in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, I would truly appreciate. It is truly imperative that I find all of these articles and all of the articles that were in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. All articles on Larry Mihalko and Attorney Philip A. Ignelzi because Mr. Ignelzi supports child molesters who come from wealthy or prominent families and ministers, priests, monsignors, bishops, and cardinals who molest children. I know because I once worked for him. This man is now running for Judge in Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas and is very close with Judges Manning, Strassberger, Cindric, Cercone, et al.
Please send any information you may find to my e-mail address: justiceforfreedom2009@yahoo.com
Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!
Mr. Ignelzi's law firm fired me from my job when I refused to compromise my morals, ethics, principles and when I refused to participate in the company's unsavory, illegal and criminal activities. Because I do not have any money and they have seen to it that my total life has been destroyed, I have not been able to find anyone to legally represent me. I am now in the Third Circuit Appeals Court of Western Pennsylvania and I am losing my case against these monsters who are even in violation of the RICO Act.
For some reason all of the articles written in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review relative to Ignelzi's cases/clients and Larry Mihalko have vanished from 1988 to present. Now, Mr. Ignelzi is very close friends with Judge Strassburger and Mr. Strassberger's son is the attorney for the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. And, Mr. Ignelzi is now running for Judge??????
I was surprised too. I don't see why Google would spent cpu time on this, and I can't think of a way one would be able to validate that claim.
I got an amplifier with a TOSlink (SPDIF optical) connection, and got a cable from the soundcard to the amp. This means there was no analogue distortion or amplification in the signal chain - it just went right from the soundcard to the speakers (which are studio monitors in my case).

You can hear the difference between MP3 and CD/FLAC sources quite easily, so I've come to like CD/FLAC.

I started off listening to vinyl at about 12, CD/tape until 1998, then Napster in 2000. Now I buy CDs and rip to FLAC, if possible, and hardly listen to MP3s.

By the way, albums like Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor sound really bad on MP3, because it's been mixed to a very full sound and compresses poorly. I don't know if that's the producer (Stuart Price) or the mastering people, but a bootleg of this album made from MP3, I ordered by mistake, was really really bad sounding.
Done.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512178
I'd wager it is due to Stack Overflow's recent article.
Sometimes I do a search on google, and roughly half the results are meaningless gobbledegook. Clearly these results are this kind of project. It makes me wonder what percentage of websites are just revenue-earning sites with absolutely no useful real-world content. Like a newspaper or magazine with 50% of its pages taken up by advertising.
Oh, they go lower than that, but you're not getting the kind of "quality" you might normally think of. It is more geared toward SEO and often in broken English. Using the acai berry theme, here's what you might get:

Acai Berry Supplement

When looking for an acai berry supplement for weight loss it is very important that you choose a good acai berry supplement. Acai berry supplements vary in quality so one might not supplement your diet with acai berry the way you expect. Look for a top-quality acai berry supplement that has acai berry taken from the Brazil acai berry trees fresh.
Well, technically, any player running Rockbox (iPod, iRiver, Archos, Sansa, etc.) can do it -- and probably did it earlier, too.

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/VoiceHowto
My God, this is the most interes...

snore

You've truly found a way to help out HN.
If this interests you, be sure to read Parts II and III, and the most recent post his blog.
He's just speeding up the ranking process with the free blogs though. His sites would get the traffic eventually because they are so tailored to the topics at hand.

If I were to do this I'd measure the risk/reward of trying to speed up the growth rates, but everything he did previously is probably good enough.
your own numbers refute that. look at your original percentages. do basic math.

the amount the wealthy control has almost tripled, but the amount of overall wealth has almost quintupled.

imagine that the nation's wealth is represented by a dollar and I control 8% of it. Over time the wealth of the nation doubles but my percentage control has grown to 22%.

before I got 8 cents and the rest of the nation got 92 cents to share.

now we have 2 dollars that I get 22% of...44 cents.

the rest of the nation now has $1.56 to share. Discounting the fact that i'll probably reinvest part of my 44 cents, the nation is still much wealthier than before.
New protocol for extracting cryptographic keys from "weak" or "fuzzy" shared secrets
Google starts tracking browsers to target ads
No. Please no. Don't . It'll drag a lot of idiots here and make this another digg.
Factoring Could Be Easy
Tips for sensible systems administration
No really I've seen the errors probably twice using Chrome full time since its release. And each time they disarm any anger I have and make me smile.

Write your software with so few bugs that its a joy to see them every time they pop up and your doing something right.
Google provides a lot of this data to advertisers -- so they bid for more word combinations.

Even though Made-For-AdSense microsites are polluting the infosphere, in the short term they probably even make Google money. Overstuffing natural results with repetitive, poorly-written information? Great, you're more likely to click a paid ad instead! Making it so all the top 10 natural results are AdSense-holding pages? Great, no matter where you go, you might click a Google ad!
Somewhat off-topic, but we're using Authorize.net's Automated Recurring Billing (thru ActiveMerchant). The API is so simple, it's incomplete. There's no way to reattempt a declined transaction.

Here's what happens: (i) user signs up for paid account with 1-month free trial, but has a typo in the zip code (Authorize.net doesn't check this when the subscription is created); (ii) after the 1 month, the first charge is attempted and declined; (iii) we email user and user updates billing info, so future monthly charges should work but this current transaction is lost forever.

Authorize.net says we should manually charge the user but we (intentionally) don't save the credit card info. Any ideas? Or should we just switch to someone like TrustCommerce?
I can't really blame anyone for making money on what is essentially arbitrage, but the bottom line is that they add no value to the system and they make it harder for legitimate sites to get advertising revenues (by preempting traffic and ad $$).
Dynamic variables hack in Erlang
That's what is bothering me with this stuff.

You just can't put your own bigger headphones and use the Shuffle properly. Suppose you break the earbuds, you must buy some new ones to Apple to skip the tracks !

It's not the quality I expect from Apple products, just a "buy and dispose" thing.
I like the approach of showing the assumption that "factoring is hard" implies a statement that at first blush has nothing to do with computational difficulty. That is, the number of solutions for a particular Diophantine equation doesn't immediately look like it should have anything to do with the running time of an algorithm. Wonder if the approach could be pushed further to other areas of mathematics that are even further afield, e.g. analysis?
Just guessing, but this might be his Acai Berry website:

http://www.acaiberryproducts.org/

#4 result for "acai berry", lots of small articles, and tons of AdSense.
Getting Started with Erlang [pdf]
Yeah, but DISQUS is a YC startup ;)

Also, I think it would probably help - I'm friends with many people on Facebook who are also on HN. If I could see what they were saying, upvoting, etc, while I am on Facebook, it would probably lead to me (and others who are already entrenched in HN and Facebook) interacting more - especially in the new stories area, which in the end is one of the easier ways to keep riff raff out
You made my day. But Google obviously doesn't know the meaning of 'innards'.

Edit: Too bad your joke was so good it ruined HN for the rest of the day.
why Google would spent cpu time on this

CPU time is cheap, and it could be useful ranking information. Compared to an H1 tag, a graphical header is harder to create, so it shows a certain level of investment.

If the words in the graphic aren't repeated elsewhere in the page, then the page author may be naive in the ways of SEO. But that could be good, because the savvy SEO people are all trying to pull one over on the GoogleBot.
You might have a better shot at getting a hearing by posting in pg's feature request topic linked at the bottom of the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
Y Combinator in Erlang
And it's running on top of PLT Scheme, which adds another layer of interpretation.
Refactoring the Consulting Agreement
Actually, Google has an Adwords tools which allow you to estimate what it would cost you to run an ad.

IIRC, that has estimated Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Thousand (CPM) columnns, along with estimated impressions and a sweet API to pull it all together.

Many people estimate Google takes a 20-40% rip from the advertiser, and gives the adsense guy the rest of the payout. So from that you can estimate what the adsense ads pay.
Is this a veiled advertisement for adsenseheaven.com? His whole strategy is based off of that data and you have to pay at least $10 for the list of keywords.
There is also Satchmo, which provides many of the pieces required to build an online store using Django.

http://www.satchmoproject.com/
Maybe you can see what they are saying, but you can NOT see what they are up voting - or down voting!

Disqus is a YC startup So what? Riddet is a YC startup too?
I don't think I've ever seen a story get so many points so fast :D
Sticky open source?
Open Source as an alternative to public standards?
The Erlang Distribution
hahaha, Sorry I laughed out loud.
> Who said I'm angry at the poor?

You did when you brought up the "40% don't pay taxes" b.s. line that I'm beyond tired of hearing from conservatives. I've heard it a hundred times and it's always from an angry conservative blaming poor lazy people for stealing their money with tax credits. After you hear a lie enough times you start to get annoyed with the people perpetuating it.

> I also think a majority-rules democratic system where a majority pay $0 in taxes in unsustainable.

Straw man, we have no such system.

> Leave your emotions aside for a moment. I am simply trying to discuss what is wise.

Easily done, what is wise to look not at the poor, but at the well off when looking for sources of revenue. The poor need sympathy, not scorn.

> In addition, you're imputing a ton of motives and positions to me that I did not state.

Then don't use the arguments primarily shared by people that hold those positions.

> there is no way that I can intelligently engage you if you've already painted me as an evil misanthrope

I don't think you're evil; engage me with logic and questions that don't imply blame on the poorest among us.

> The number of people who pay no net taxes in this country is much larger than the number that get their clothes from dumpsters.

I agree, and I didn't claim otherwise. I was disputing your claim that you were somewhat poor, you aren't.

I don't enjoy people attacking people who don't make enough money to pay taxes under our current system. Those people are not the problem with our system and any attempt to put the focus there seems to me a shallow attempt to deny that simple fact.
It doesn't seem like he is spending that much time to accomplish this kind of income. He IS handling the interesting parts(data mining the google data.) and outsourcing the boring/time consuming bits of writing the actual content.
I can't personally help (London) - but you're in the right city for an IP lawyer in .au anyway.

This is obvious, but do you know anyone who has done anything similar? Bit of a mentor you could use to coach you through this?

Some other specific advice with lawyers: pester for a price up-front first - you may have to ask their hourly rate 2 or 3 times, not to mention how many hours they think they will charge. Don't be embarrassed - keep asking!
So you have to buy specially-compatible earbuds or a remote extension cord? Hrm.
Ever considered just shutting the door to new registrations at peak times to throttle growth? or at least only allowing new members that have been invited from existing members?

I've seen some really whacky comments the last week or so.
Thanks, that was by far the coolest thing about the article...
Most things are calmer after you strangle them.
CPU time may be cheap, but Google has billions of page and images to index. If they were able to extract text from images, they'd probably use it for their image search. I'm also not convinced that the header image is a good indicator of relevancy.
Shortest URL shortener
For C, I think the Linux kernel is a good representative: http://miller.cs.wm.edu/lxr3.linux/http/source/?v=2.6.11.12
Lisp after Python after Lisp
Taxes dictate how many new sales you have to make to hire another person, and vice versa. Just because you're ignoring them when running your business doesn't mean they're not affecting you.

Speaking of equations, here they are: http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0070891540/student_vie...
Restating
I see people took the Erlang suggestion seriously :P

But I wonder, isn't it a bit silly.. I mean, new people will read this post and find out your evil plans to kic.. err, gracefully lead them out :)
Global Warming: On Hold?
I feel the urge to twitter/blog that second paragraph, because it's funny. Must...refrain...
Sure, they could fit a crappy TTS engine on a chip, but Alex (what Apple is using) is 670MB. I suspect a 4GB Shuffle has significantly less than 670MB worth of voice clips in it.

http://watchingapple.com/2008/05/voices/
http://gannett-hscp.blogspot.com/2008/03/biggest-file-in-leo...
And it's running as a single process on a single server without a database storing everything on the file system. That it's doing the traffic it is I find quite impressive.
He's not providing any useful service. He's taking traffic and ad revenues away from legitimate sites while providing low quality content, which wastes people's time (hence they navigate away clicking the only links available: ads).
An invite-only strategy might actually backfire and make the site even hotter (see gmail, etc), although it will be interesting if the feature only turns on at certain times/due to certain conditions.
You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring

I wouldn't mind if, in the service of this cause, the editors killed more fluffy stories.
I printed the list out and went over it with a friend I'm starting up a company with. He actually loved it and we started going over the questions together. Awesomeness.
Why do you believe that revenue is Obama's only goal?
In 2 GB of memory.
What kind of a game? Are you also considering websites that give karma? Or just flash games?
This week was the premier. No one got booted on the premier episode. Next week, someone goes home.

(I'm a bit embarrassed to have the answer. Was at some friends' home, and they wanted to watch the show. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. And I hope Steve stays on for a while and helps deliver the implicit message that "geeks" can be fun and good company.)
I'd say the most irritating could be people who:

* See link to HN somewhere, follow it
* Sign up, post some lame comments, never come back.

So my thought was just adding some sort of barrier to sign up, to deter some of the people who only want to sign up so they can post a pun or some other non-HN worthy comment.

(NB. This is only a hypothesis, I don't know how many people sign up post a few lame comments and never return).
In theory, arbitrageurs will arbitrage away the gap until the margin revenue outweighs the cost. So, in a sense arbitrageurs are good for the markets as they bring them closer to "perfect markets".

As far as adding value bit is concerned, if the articles provided are worthwhile to users, then some value is created. (Although I feel very strongly against the idea of creating spammy blogs that he advocates.)
> I bet the elimination of the top rate actually resulted in a large shift of taxation from the rich, to the middle-class, like you and me.

You lose.

The fraction of taxes paid by the upper 1% and 5% have gone up. (Yes, under Bush too.)

This isn't just a Federal phenomena - it happens at the state level too. A huge fraction of CA's income tax comes from a very small number of people. Their income is volatile.
haha :) I laughed out too!

Edit: it appears a bit too loud, GF thought I went crazy for a sec
Reducing RAM resource usage on a VPS
A hulu of video lectures from Standford, MIT, others
having another active device is probably a large enough drain on the battery to reduce the play time significantly.
How much Google takes is not confidential, you can compute it from their SEC filings. Would you believe that they take 70% of the advertiser's money, and give back 30% to the site owner?
Google Tech Talk - Erlang
Are the new viewers gone yet?