skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What I would miss from Google, though, is stuff like "5 feet to meters." Google does the calculation. DuckDuckGo, like a pure search engine, just gives me a link which will do the calculation.

For that search, DuckDuckGo shows an inline calculation: "Conversion result: 1.524 meters". It also includes a link to Wolfram Alpha, but it shows the result inline.
As a paranoid would say: that's what they want you to believe.

Now that people are learning about how companies use their data in dubious ways (and they can't deny it, only PR-speak it), it's in their best interest to twist the narrative so that people believe that they now have no agency—that everyone is being tracked all the time, and that there's no way to escape that.

Why? Because if you think there's no way around it, you just give up and eventually stop worrying about being tracked and analyzed. Since you no longer care, you give up on blocking tools, and most importantly for them: you give up on trying to find alternative companies that respect your privacy.
The growing push to track your location indoors
Also, I didn't say juvenile humor is pervasive, I meant to say that when a culture's juvenile humor becomes pervasive then it creates a hostile environment.

My mistake for being ambiguous.
I've been using both for 10 years; postgres for in house apps, my SQL when a third party app needs it, and I find postgres much easier to manage.
So you do use a Google product, one of the ones they care most about right now.
I submitted this article expecting to learn a few things about my style. In this case, I didn't actually know you could interpolate into regexes like that, so thanks!

And thanks for the typo catch, too.
I searched NBA Standings in Google and it gave me 5 teams in one division. How is that better?
Given how important being able to advertise can be for some startups, it seems that inconsistent enforcement of AdWords restrictions would be very interesting to most readers here.
> The only difference that I can tell is that Google puts some of the standings in a table on the search results page, which doesn't seem like a huge deal to me.

It depends what you mean by a huge deal, I guess. Going from information on the next page to information on this page is a big difference; it's one less click, which is 100% less clicks. And it's not just the click, the page has to load, then you have to find the information you want, if it even exists. You could wind up talking fifteen, twenty seconds to do what Google has done instantly.

Fifteen seconds isn't a lot, but multiplied by every search you do in your life it starts to add up. Multiplied across the Internet, you start talking about whole lifetimes being wasted-- and multiplying miniscule efficiencies into lifetimes is Google's bread and butter.

> It sounds like you're judging a search engine based solely on the information it takes out of links and puts in its own format on the results page, not by the links it provides. While I agree that bells and whistles like extracting certain results into a table on the results page are cool, that hardly seems to me like the ultimate test of a search engine.

I'd quibble with this too. It seems to me that extracting the semantic content you're looking for directly is the ultimate destination of search engines. Certainly it is a much more difficult problem than text search. Google isn't that far down that road yet, but they're further along than anyone else.
Alexa traffic patterns of YC 2005−2013
The reason Dave McClure is sick of being pitched is not because he's jaded or tired of doing what he does.

It's because it's not humanly possible for a single investor, be it Dave McClure or a YC partner, to process the sheer volume of pitches that come their way. There needs to be some sort of filtering mechanism, and endorsements/recommendations are one way of doing that.

As Dave mentioned in the video embedded in the article, he WILL give his full attention to a founder IF they have already met with 500 Startups portfolio companies (i.e. people he trusts and respects) and proven to them that they are legit.

People like Dave McClure (and pg) have thousands of people vying for his extremely limited time, and so giving his full attention to every pitch that comes his way would be a huge disservice to the other startups that actually deserve it i.e. have actually done their homework, put time in to prove themselves, and committed to forming long-term relationships with people in his community vs. those looking for a quick and easy shortcut to funding and networking.
No. You simply see things through "government and the public sector are great" glasses and I don't. Perhaps you are a government worker. I don't know. I have been an entrepreneur my entire life. And my parents have been entrepreneurs their entire lives. And, you guessed it, my grandparents have been entrepreneurs their entire lives. So my family has a thread of self-reliance that spans multiple generations, cultures and continents. It is very likely that my world view is vastly different than yours across a wide range of areas. And, as I have said many times, that's OK.
This is different than the NEO X5 or its peers because it's bigger, slower [1], costs the same amount, and you won't actually receive it for six months or a year.

It also has a custom piece of software. Which is really what is being sold here.

[1]The NEO X5 is somewhat coy about it's clock speed. But the CPU is a Rockchip 3066. Which is "up to 1.6 GHz." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockchip#RK30xx_series
Pedestal ships with absolutely zero dependence on Datomic, and we intend to keep it that way. Datomic is a fantastic tool, but even we understand that it might not always be the right tool for the job. As such, we've built Pedestal with little to no opinion on backing store.

- Ryan @ Relevance
It would be an ad hominem if I were in an argument with Dave and instead of listening to his points attacked him personally. In this case I'm talking about needing to see the forest for the trees. I'll gladly judge him on his acts a person in the position of being a gatekeeper to a world people build lives hopes and dreams on. You don't have to be a dick to be a good investor and advisor.
You should, it's a great place to visit. It has issues (crime, crappy transportation, etc) but as a visitor you should be able to mostly avoid those.
I'm almost completely off Google (started my exodus late last year) and it wasn't nearly as difficult as I thought it'd be.

I moved into the Microsoft ecosystem.

It's all there. Bing is surprisingly good, SkyDrive surpasses even Dropbox and Office 365 w/ OneNote is the best office suite available. I even got a Windows Phone 8 (yeah, I can get carried away sometimes).

The point is, there's a whole new world out there that's sans Google, and it's probably better than you imagine it to be.
Not sure I see the point for yet another interface on top of mail for Linux. I suppose evolution is ugly enough something might be able to supplant it as a default. However, the lack of Outlook in a corporate environment is the real pain point for email on Linux.

I currently get by using a combination of Kontact and Davmail to get my email, address book and calendar working in my corporate environment. Fortunately we keep imap available as an option so I can get my mail at a decent pact rather than having to run through davmail for that part.

I'm not seeing where Geary is going to make anything better than what I already have. Kontact is already pretty enough.
Newsblur is also open source:

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
Yeah, I'm not sure how I missed that. I guess I looked right over it. I amended my post.
The only one I can come up with is that Sequel Pro supports MySQL and not PostgreSQL.

Truly, the one item I miss the most from making the switch.
Hi Scott,

Thanks for the great advice and examples. It all seems to make perfect sense when someone spells it out for you. I spoke to one of my friends on the weekend and they said the same thing about facebook, "they are there for entertainment". But thanks for taking it one further with the ad words keywords like "ebay fee calc", I think I can start to get the hang of it!
Good points in your article.

Generally, I think outsourcing has gotten a bad rap because a lot of the poor quality firms / freelancers that have sprung up. The big sites like oDesk, eLance, etc. have certainly helped to prevent the scammers that initially populated the field, but more and more quality firms are popping up in countries like the Philippines.

The key to outsourcing is doing it right. Outsource work you or key players shouldn't work on. If you're a design company, find someone to slice and dice for you. If your a coding company, find someone to design for you. Find a partner that can be trusted and you work well with and you're set.
Often a good reason to use not so pretty code is for performance reasons, you didnt mention checking up on that so it would probably be prudent to do so (micro optimisations are totally valid for hot paths in libraries like jquery and browser performance is often very unintuitive)

Also if I was going to write it 'cleaner', I would find something like http://pastie.org/7118990 cleaner.

(but in essence I agree)
Hire talent, not five years with Java
Here's one example. It's an oak tree, right at the top of an apartment building.

http://www.venturevancouver.com/blog/tree-on-top-of-building...

http://www.treecaretips.org/Pruning/TCI0308_p50.htm
Because you can expand that list to instantly see the rest of the NBA?
Lawmaker: Google Glass and driving don't mix
Interesting. I think this will go very well for the US.

As an aside, Australians have access to a H1B alternative, the E-3. The terms are generous and the quota has never been filled in any year. So if you want to be an employee of the US startup, tech firm etc, that's one to investigate.
Minor nitpick: the average founder is extremely likely to fail, technical or otherwise. Being a technical founder doesn't really dramatically increase the odds of success. As someone who suffers from "build it and they will come" syndrome, the article is actually decent advice for ANY founder, not just founders who aren't "technical".
I've used Songza before, its pretty sweet. I think I even found a coding playlist on it?
> It depends what you mean by a huge deal, I guess. Going from information on the next page to information on this page is a big difference; it's one less click, which is 100% less clicks. And it's not just the click, the page has to load, then you have to find the information you want, if it even exists. You could wind up talking fifteen, twenty seconds to do what Google has done instantly.

That's a fair point, but truth be told I rarely find myself completely satisfied with Google's extracted results anyway. When I look up movies, I almost always end up going to another page in the end anyway for more information.

For instance, if I google "movies near me," it only gives me a list of movies with their running times. It actually doesn't give me any showtimes at all. So I definitely cannot make any decisions based on that list alone.

> I'd quibble with this too. It seems to me that extracting the semantic content you're looking for directly is the ultimate destination of search engines. Certainly it is a much more difficult problem than text search. Google isn't that far down that road yet, but they're further along than anyone else.

I do ultimately agree with you; my main point, though, was that the guy I replied to said DuckDuckGo gave nothing useful, which really doesn't seem to be true at all as far as I can tell.

That said, I just found this:

http://duckduckhack.com

It looks like they're trying to let developers add in their own plugins to the search engine for instant answers, which is a pretty sweet idea IMHO.
> However, Android doesn't require the backend support that ties you to Google's cloud that ChromeOS does.

Well that's exactly it. If the Chromebook Pixel ran Android I might have been tempted to buy one. As it is I can't see myself shelling out that kind of cash for a machine that takes 30 seconds to boot Ubuntu.
For comparison, here's a stick with double the RAM, double the cores, and double the flash for 30% less ($70): http://dealsprime.com/ugoos-ug007b-andriod-4-2-tv-stick-hdmi... . For literally a few $ more you can get the same spec in a set top case complete with Ethernet port, in a plethora of shapes and sizes. If these devices interest you, spend an hour reading http://www.cnx-software.com/ archives.

This computer only stands to highlight how completely abused Kickstarter is becoming: the project is little more than a schmoozy marketing gimmick to fund these guys to subcontract one of about a hundred different Chinese vendors to design and manufacture the boxes on their behalf. There's absolutely no reason to pay the premium, the market is already flooded with better alternatives.
The UK is not more violent than America. Most years we have less than 1000 murders total across every single type of murder, the US has 10x that from firearms alone with only a 6x larger population. You hit on the reason why our violent crime seems to be so high, almost every crime that could be violent is counted as violent (for example if someone broke into my apartment while I was out) and in most other countries that isn't the case. What crimes does the UK have (that are violent) that are higher in number than America? Every single crime type that I've been able to find comparative statistics for shows the US to be higher. The UK certainly isn't a crime free utopia where nobody locks their doors but it is not the violent place you paint it as, especially when compared to the US.

Also for some hilarious reading, why not read this article from THE SAME publication that you linked to that says the UK has a massive knife crime problem: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1546085/The-vagaries-...

The different between the two estimates - derived from the questioning of
around 600 under-25s about whether they had been "knifed or stabbed",
and then extrapolated to the wider population, with all the statistical
vagaries that entails - reflects the lack of precise information about the
scale of knife crime in England and Wales.
Am I the only one who thought this was somehow related to the Wii (and its Mii's) or otherwise related to Nintendo?

In other words, had the title been "MiiPC: $99" (without the "Android PC" part), I would have immediately assumed it had something to do with Nintendo.

They really should have avoided that name and/or spelling to ensure it wasn't mistaken for a Nintendo or related console. It would be different if it were a car or a vacuum cleaner -- but as a video game console, I think this is a bad name.
Historically, people DID criticize the kings, often at their own peril. France and England executed one each.
Environment is huge for me too, but when I can't control it as I would like, a good pair of earbuds helps to block everything out. Lyrics distract me at times too.
This sort of thing leaves a sickening dread in my gut that kickstarter is really just a way to drag things down to the lowest common denominator.
I've been listening to a lot of Sigur Ros lately too. Although it has lyrics, I can't understand them and the music seems more instrumental.
I think Mark Suster has a similar mindset (with similar bluntless albeit not as hard-hitting perhaps) -- there's no way he can hear everyone pitch or have a coffee with every startuper, but if you take the time to get an intro through a well-trusted contact that will move you further down the "conversion funnel" to getting a meeting. Sure Dave McClure or Mark Suster or any other investor might be right in front of you, but you also don't want to reek of desperation when you make your move.
There is absolutely no motivation for pushing the price point lower. PCs are devices we expect to use for hours and hours and hours. A difference of $300 will make this into a real computer, most parents value their kids beyond such a petty price point.
http://www.mongodb.org/about/alerts/

Bueller?
yes yes yes yes
> criminals simply don't use weapons on civilians (apart from high value targets, perhaps) because the penalties for doing so are so harsh

Do you think the penalties in the US are less harsh? Kill a cop here and you get the death penalty (in many states).

> This is the sole reason I would never ever consider living in the USA - the risk from a) criminals, b) civilian "heros" and c) the police themselves, all of whom are armed to the teeth, legally. Terrifying.

I think you have an exaggerated view of the dangers of living in the US.
quote - "(can you target by people who have posted a link to an ebay item?)"
That's a great idea.

Your first two points are slowly dawning on me, I removed the people who liked ebay filter, and I seem to be getting more clicks now, however still no signups (but that is another issue!).

I posted on the eBay forum. It was really, really effective!!.. until I received a warning from ebay to stop and the post was removed. However, as you say, there must be other forums where sellers hang out. I will get my google on. Thanks for the advice.
No problem, in ruby style is always pretty subjective since there's a thousand ways to do just about everything.

And, just FYI you do need to escape the backrefs or use single quotes, like:

"\\1<span class=\"nurble\">nurble</span>\\2"
Have any of you ever been to: http://coding.fm/ ? I don't think I could listen to that for very long at all.
So you quit using Google, but you advocate products by Apple and MS? Clearly those companies don't want to monetize your data. Ever.
How far are we from being able to do meaningful text processing with typed arrays and (therefore, presumably) asm.js? Last I checked, there was work being done on a string encoding/decoding standard but it wasn't implemented in browsers yet. Can anyone say more about this?
Google suspends AdWords acconts without much recourse all the time, as a quick search on "adwords account suspended" shows. Doesn't matter if they're paying customers, etc.

The thorny part about it is that the guidelines that can lead to suspension change over time and deleting ads that are no longer in compliance might not safeguard your account. I've known account holders that got suspended retroactively for ads that are no longer in compliance, even though these ads were actually deleted before the guidelines changed. The point seems to be non-negotiable with Google though.

This can be pretty tragic for many small businesses since Google accounts for such a huge percentage of search traffic. Larger customers typically have dedicated account reps who I'm guessing might be able to help in these situations.
Nobody cares. There are already good rss readers out there.
These projects are already affecting the spec. Here's a very small example: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2012-November/... which is used in asm.js and already implemented in Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=808148
My concern is that you're calling someone a "dick" on a public forum. I believe that's unfounded and unnecessary.

Dave is actually a very nice and caring person when you meet and talk to him, his public persona be as it may.
>The mid level manager making the decisions is not a shareholder.

They almost certainly are.
What one woman discovered when she became a teleworker
Well, it has and it hasn't.
For example tiger stripes don't have anything to do with the NOTCH signalling pathway, and the awesomeness of the x-inactivation in tortoise shell cats also has nothing to do with tiger stripes.

Rather, the Hox genes seem quite tied up with this. The Hox genes are nothing new, they were well characterised when I was doing undergrad genetics in 2006.

This article doesn't directly answer th question of tiger stripes but is trying to tie turing's old paper, which focused on tiger stripes as an example, with new research.

Interestingly it seems like this is all just reaearch which has been pooled together with the particular aim of celebrating turing's 100th last year (see [1]) and little of the research is intrinsically ground breaking or unknown to science, but almost done with the express purpose of celebrating Turing.

[1] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-02/kcl-spt021712...

By the by, did anyone think that the textile seashell pictured in the article looked like some of the shapes created in iterations of the game of life?
Until you do something they don't approve of and they shut you out of EVERYTHING overnight.

If Google provided a no-shutdown guarantee and service to service shutdown isolation I would consider them for business. Until such time, no friggin way.

There are far better ways to deal with violators than killing off their entire account and every single service they use. Staged restrictions with feedback comes to mind.
Is Do-It-Yourself Startup TechShop Leading America's Next Revolution?
Fifteen years of coding? He he. These are just babies. Just started learning how not to over-design things.

And in reality years of coding doesn't matter. Learning to code early doesn't matter. What matters is with how many people you've collaborated. And how many releases of different products you've shipped.

You can code you whole life, but if it is the same damn piece of code, you wouldn't learn a thing. And if you don't actually release stuff, you also wouldn't learn a thing.

Last point (releasing stuff) is very important. If a kid 'learns' to code, but doesn't release his stuff - it is not real. Most of that learning is far from reality and wasted.
The brief specs are only one part of the puzzle. The dongle, like many smartphones could most likely suffer from gimped flash interface and channels, low RAM speeds and slow USB (making accessing data on external HDDs painfully slow). Furthermore the thermal limits on continuous operation of the main chipset may be different (due to the difference in ventilation).
The most annoying part of being a developer
One line of JS would fix this:

if (/dir=down&/.test(node.href) && !confirm("Confirm downvote:")) return;
I think it actually might be a little easier to read in Node.js/CoffeeScript.

fs = require 'fs'
express = require 'express'
app = express()

app.use express.bodyParser()
app.use app.router
app.use express.static(__dirname + '/public')
app.set 'views', __dirname + '/views'
app.set 'view engine', 'jade'

nouns = fs.readFileSync('nouns.txt', 'utf8').split('\n')

nurble = (text) ->
text = text.toUpperCase()
words = text.toLowerCase().replace(/[^a-z ]/g, '').split(' ')

for word in words
if word not in nouns
re = new RegExp "(\\b)#{word}(\\b)","i"
replacement = '$1<span class="nurble">nurble</span>$2'
text = text.replace re, replacement

text.replace /\n/g, '<br>'

app.get '/', (req, res) ->
res.render 'index'

app.post '/nurble', (req, res) ->
res.render 'nurble', {nurble: nurble req.body.text}

app.listen 3005

https://github.com/ithkuil/nurble-coffeescript
So you're telling me that these 3 guys, with 75 years of experience in the business including the ex-VP of eMachines, who sits on the boards of a bunch of companies, can't scrape together $50,000 to finish this thing?

What am I missing here? Is this just a publicity thing?
Perhaps the title is the problem here, but the innovation is not the box but rather the parent control and the accessibility for low-tech consumers.

Everyone yelling "ZORMG, you can get a cheaper bare linux/android/pi/etc" is missing the point. This outfit is selling simplicity, piece of mind, and parental control at a fairly low price point.

The real headline should be "$100 android PCs now reach technophobes."
I wonder if most / all of that speedup is just using typed arrays (edit: nvm, they both do). I get similar speeds in Chrome, which afaik doesn't have any special handling for `"use asm";` functions.