skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are we all forgetting why Google has the brand it does? There may be minor algorithmic differences between search engines now, but in 2000 Google's results completely crushed those of other SEs.

Quality of results (and speed) matters most. Brand starts to matter when a product or service becomes a commodity and competitors need to differentiate themselves, which is essentially the situation we find ourselves in now with search. But to say that brand is all that matters is a little simplistic. If Microsoft has truly created a better search product in terms of results and/or speed then brand matters much much less.

But I do agree that there is a perception that Microsoft doesn't know how to innovate in search and on the web generally, so the decision to leave the Microsoft name off of Bing makes complete sense.
To a large extent this piece is PR for the upcoming Global Humanitarian Forum event. But in poorer countries there's less infrastructure to buffer people from a harsh environment, and problems tend to go unaddressed for longer, potentially leading to catastrophic failures like the collapse of the water table, so they're trying to highlight stuff that would be Big News if it were happening in a wealthier country. It is pretty much linkbait though.
They like it? What's hard to understand about that and why the hell are we wasting time asking such stupid questions? :/
> There is no real opportunity to test this on the Internet.

I imagine you could set up an HCI test that makes it look like people are going to be able to micropay, and observe their reactions.
Q and A with Ballmer Discussing Bing
For whatever it's worth:

http://blog.sharendipity.com/were-moving-to-flash-heres-why

Search for my comment, the author's reply illustrates the sort of user responses he's been getting with Java and his announcement to switch to Flash.
Yes, I do, but maybe it's just me but I don't feel uncomfortable when emails, IMs, and other means of communication are separated. Blended experience isn't always a good thing. For example, for me it's much easier to maintain my Flickr and Twitter accounts independently rather than having both my photos and my status updates inside Facebook. To me these are two distinctive task and to have them in separate browser tabs feels more natural. I'm afraid the notion of wave just got to many concepts thrown into.

I would say that it's just to early to tell. Perhaps when I try it out it will replace everything else.
I don't follow your logic at all. I frequently have essentially real-time conversations via email. If someone steps away the conversation doesn't 'end' it just reverts to a slower pace. Gmail with its conversation-oriented view is already closer to an IM flow than most traditional email clients.

I don't have email interactions or IM interactions, I have conversations. I frequently switch off an email chain to an IM or telephone or even in person. If wave lets me coordinate that all in one interface and let me access the same history and context from multiple locations it will be phenomenally useful for me.
Whenever micropayments come up - and specifically with the idea of making the payments from some kind of broker account so that the transaction cost isn't a hassle - it colours my thinking for the next couple of days.

It gets tied into my "vote up" reflex that I've gotten used to from reddit and HN. Normally I'll come across something I like, think "I should vote that up" if I found it from some place with votes. After I'm primed with the idea of micropayments I think "I'd micropay for that".

I don't know what I'd pay, but I get the feeling that the thought corresponds to the same payment amount. It would be nice to have a configureble browser widget that would make paying the default amount as bookmarking something or tagging it for delicious.

The troubling thing is that I'd spend a bit on stuff that I'd optionally get for free, but I don't know how much I'd pay for something like the new york times - the "you must register thing" really bugs me (even now, after I registered with a mailinator account to avoid the hassle). I guess I've just gotten used to trying before I buy (thanks torrent people...)
Dancing links, by Knuth
Highlights from Palm's interview with All Things Digital about the Pre
VCGForex.com – World’s Best Forex Investments all in one place
Valhalla Capital Group (VCGForex.com), is an independent introducing broker in the Foreign Exchange market (forex or fx), licensed, registered and regulated in the USA, by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and also a member firm of the National Futures Association (NFA) and the National Introducing Brokers Association(NIBA). VCGForex.com is focused on providing access to the Foreign Exchange industry's Top Ranked Forex Managed Accounts, forex brokers, forex signals tools, forex trading system, our VCG forex forum and other forex trading strategies.
I think your review is rather short :-)
I'm still hoping for some sort of disruption that will change the game.

The line of thinking is along these lines: The core of what elite colleges (or any colleges) is not really valuable. A university course is mostly a syllabus, a textbook, lectures, tutorials, papers & exams. All are based on knowledge that is freely available. You do not need a Professor who spends most of his time on research that doesn't benefit you teaching you.

It wouldn't even be hard to offer the core of what Universities offer at a much lower cost. What is hard to offer is the vast periphery. The clubs & socialisation. The Gyms. The contact with researchers & other talented and/or rich young people. The social norms & leeway associated with Undergraduate life (this might be more important then we think). The prestige. The prospects created by the contacts, the prestige, the social conditioning & whatever else goes in to making a University education other then education.

A potential catalyst could be the growing Internationalisation of Uni education.
I'm glad somebody is excited. Not to be a downer, but I'm personnaly seeing copy-cat evolution, not revolution. The new toys just aren't going to change the way I work and play.
I'm with you on that. I'm trying to think of a way to tweak Gmail so so stuff from mailing lists can sit in my inbox long enough to be noticed but then be quietly auto-archived if I haven't looked at it after 24 hours. About half of what I receive ought to come with an expiry date.Also...er, [redacted].
"Lisp web development is haute couture"

ie, not actually intended for people to use.

Well played!
Yes, if you register a Starbucks card you become eligible for "rewards" according to: https://www.starbucks.com/cardrewards/default.asp
Which ones? This is the first I've heard of iTunes being used with anything but an iPod or iPhone.
Great, now we will have spam that tries to game the system to be flagged more important.
It's a bit weird to downplay direct access to a remote control in a set-top application.
Wrongful Death California
Bailey & Partners has a strong reputation for handling cases related to the aviation industry in Santa Monica, California.
BLASPHEMY! You may be thinking, education is PARAMOUNT to any civilization! We musn't cut spending on education!

Yeah, and it's unfortunate that "education" often has a capital E and is viewed as being something that only formalized schools, Big Education, can provide.

Spending money on things like internet access, libraries, encouraging greater literacy and reading, and not banning "educational toys" just because they may be perceived of as dangerous (I'm thinking of things like chemistry sets here, which were a lot more fun and educational back in the day) could end up going a long way to increasing the minimum education level without actually requiring people to throw money at schools to have to attend them.
"Cost has nothing to do with value."

Unless you value cost. The value of a degree comes from the story we tell ourselves, and paying $160,000 is part of that story. Most people wouldn't want to go to college if it was free; just look what people were saying when Seth announced his alternative MBA, or look at library participation among 20-somethings for that matter.
If you want to be considered legit, when you have a scoop, you investigate before considering publication.
Lawyer Pennsylvania
Vinsko & Associates handles Corporate Law, Commercial Litigations, Real Estate, Municipal Government, and Personal Injury Litigations in Northeast PA.
That's called "positioning." I agree with what I think you're implying though, which is that it's hamhanded.
Bali Vacation - Holiday Packages
That's when you need to find someone like me - a serial startup CEO who is probably not as good at you as coming up with great business ideas, but is certainly better than you at pitching VCs - there was a post on HN recently about finding co-founders that might be helpful.
Because there is not nearly enough value there to make it worthwhile to "buy" something - you've probably heard again and again that the idea is relatively worthless, it is the execution that brings value.

VCs doing this could also get a bad rep - "Yeah, I pitched those guys - they offered me $50 if I'd give them the company and quit so their guys could run it" - not good for the deal flow the VCs need.
The peril of positive thinking
If the original Lunar video tapes are gone, and so are the rocks, I am back to thinking that NASA faked the whole moon landing...
Quinoa: A Sacred, Super Crop
Persuasive Games: I Want My 99¢ Back
As far as setting up emacs to work with clojure, Bill Clementson's blog has some good information:

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/081205.html
You don't know Arrington. And how would TC benefit from Last.FM and/or CBS being delayed in answering them anyway?

As for deleting comments, I don't know anything about that. I never read TC comment threads because they're generally overrun with trolls. Did they kill troll posts any more aggressively on this story than on others?
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/12/13/514602.asp...
that's awesome. I hope more VCs did the same. Keep an open dialog with the entrepreneurs community is crucial to find out about teams that might have great ideas/skills but happen not to be as well connected with people in the VC world.
I probably write and delete (or abandon) two posts for every one that I actually public. Blogs I post on are thick with unpublished drafts. Usually I abandon posts because I’m not pleased with the writing. I also abandon posts because I feel I can’t make my point clearly or rigorously enough to justify asking other people to read it.

I don’t like writing. For me, writing is always ‘homework’, even when I like what I’m writing about. That might be why I find it so easy to walk away from things that I’ve written.

In contrast, I love arguing or explaining things in person.
UIUC is the truth. If they require you to do a project like that in order to graduate, they have a good grasp on what a CE needs to understand. Wish I would have went there.
There is an obvious "hide while typing" check box (At least in the current version).
There needs to be a real separation between vocational schools and comprehensive universities. I get the feeling that as a society we have a thing against vocational training - even though some of the most celebrated jobs really belong there instead of at a traditional college (e.g. engineering, accounting, etc).

The problem here is that people are going to university expecting this to lead nicely into a job - it does not, particularly for the liberal arts where the path is even more vague. People expect the fact that they have a degree to mean something to employers, when it in fact does not.

This whole thing would be a lot simpler if we didn't have such a grudge against vocational schools - who by and large do not seem to have trouble placing their graduates into jobs.
The claim is Arc is agile and short... The Arc one has too many ()() all over the place.

The arc one is also less powerful, because it uses different function invocations for different types of events.

It's also likely more people will understand the python+pygame version. More people do currently understand the python version... hardly anyone uses Arc.

You need to understand non-common concepts. You also need to understand how to create functions - rather than just call functions.

Does that Arc one mean when the key down happens, or when a key up happens? Or maybe it means in between the key press and key down. Also, when will that code be called?

It's magic. Will it be called from a separate thread, or some other Magic time... before or after the screen is to be updated? What else is going on at that time in the program? With the Arc version you have no idea... it's not explicit.

Also Arc doesn't have first class events. It could have yes, but it doesn't.

ps. the python code above was mangled by the buggy Arc program running this forum.

Here is the code redone for simplicity without the extra shortness and power expressed in the other version.

.

for e in pygame.event.get():

if e.type == KEYDOWN:
if e.unicode == 'u':
shape.rotate()
elif e.unicode == 'j':
shape.drop()
elif e.unicode == 'h':
shape.move(-1)
elif e.unicode == 'k':
shape.move(1)

Or the declarative python version:

.

dict( u=rotate , j=drop , h=lambda:move(-1) , k=lambda:move(-1))
Micropayments are a great idea. It's just that current financial systems don't support them.

What we need is an Internet protocol for accepting payments and transferring value between electronic banks. This will happen eventually.
"Taking the browser out of the mix doesn't solve anything except direct access to a remote control."

Can you name a more important feature for a TV application?
Thanks! Very useful!
SiCortex after 7 years (fresh postmortem)
Arrington linked to it from his twitter a/c. That's where I picked it up

http://twitter.com/arrington/status/1949086115
I'd hate to be arrogant myself, but I'm pretty sure the author "doesn't get it". I wouldn't talk about sharepoint in the same breath either. Wave is a way of tying communication mechanisms together, not a crappy web interface thrown on top of shared storage.
"techcrunch's traffic no doubt rose well above average during the whole affair"

Hmm, let's check:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/techcrunch.com/

Nope, it was down that month.
I just finished my undergrad degree a month ago, and I think I have some insight into this.

By far the most valuable thing I take away from university is not the classes, but rather the experience. As a student you get a lot of leeway to screw up and learn - even interning at large, private corporations. This has helped me in my life (and my career) more immensely than anything else I've ever learned at school (most of which I doubt I will apply in a job, ever).

Secondly, the networking opportunities that you have at a university is ridiculously useful. Short of going to war together I doubt there are many forces that bind people together as tightly as the college experience. I have made many friends, many of whom are incredibly talented and will no doubt go far in life - it's a network that you can't replicate, say, studying online.

Thirdly is the name - prestigious schools, whether justifiably or not, do for some reason make you more employable in a lot of places. I know many a hacker from "lesser" colleges who can't find a job in this economy, while I had multiple offers before my final semester even started.
You can solve this problem multiple ways. "Fixing" climate change, if its even possible, may not prevent these 315,000 deaths. These people (in poorer countries) would just die in some other fashion.

It seems obvious (to me) that the solution is to fix these countries infrastructure so people aren't so vulnerable to a few degrees change in weather. Better energy production (via solar and nuclear) and stable, free market, open governments.

Trying to force world climate cooling doesn't seem like the best way to solve this issue.
Well the thing that got me was there was an assertion in the email that the last.fm employee was concerned about how not handing over the data would affect their rates - which sounded like the data could possibly be have handed directly to one of the record companies in question, which then found its way into the hands of the RIAA.

So, in that respect, CBS's simple denial stating that they never handed data over to the RIAA is accurate - because they worded it that way, that doesn't mean that they didn't know that that the data ended up in the hands of the RIAA.

So to visualise it, it would look like.

last.fm > cbs > record label > riaa

That way, all of the denials by last.fm and CBS would be "true" and yet, the TC story would still be fundamentally "accurate".

(EDIT - This is just speculation on my part from all of the information I've read. I'd have to side with TC because I doubt TC would publish several stories on the matter, months apart, if there wasn't even a hint of truth to the matter. I'd definitely trust the credibility of Arrington anyday over that of your average PR representative.)
Or they could just keep legacy versions around for IE users and entice them to upgrade with promises of new features, better UIs, more eye-candy, etc. Best of both worlds for Google.
The recording process has text explaining this, plus the tester has to push a big button to start recording.
I really don't see how XAML is that much more complex than SVG, but I'm not really an expert.
I wonder if they are moving towards the <video> tag.
The author cites Spencer Wang's estimate of YouTube's earnings yet again, despite the fact that most HN reader have pointed out that those numbers are useless.

It's amazing how crappy information like this keeps getting spread around, and I think it reflects the authors eagerness to prove his point with little regard for the facts.
How do you build an aggregator?
Ok, I've seen this announcement:
--------
The service crawls 3,500 open source forges and gathers statistics and data on more than 300,000 open source projects and 300,000 open source developers.
---------

Or...
---------
This services crawls and aggregates travel data from thousands of websites...
---------

And so on...

How actually an aggregator is built? How it works? Some insights would be helpful for me because I am trying to build a service which would be an aggregator (I won't build it myself but I want to understand).

Thank you.
Define forever? ;)
Sure, you publish a scoop when it's about 'OMG, COULD THIS BE A SNEAK PEEK OF GOOGLE NUCLEAR?!' You don't publish a scoop that could potentially cause quite a bit of damage to a company's image, resulting in a potential loss of business. That's not to say TC/last.fm are right or wrong, but you've got to, for at least a second, think about the implications of what you're going to publish, regardless of wanting to be the first to cover a story.
That is more than a reasonable review- they had a conference call with Dell about the screen!

Thanks for the thoughts. Ideally I would find a tablet with a great outdoor screen. This makes sense if reading is the preferred outdoor activity.
You're right on the money: your momentary attention to a HN post has a value, and that accumulates with authors you like - you're more likely to upvote someone who has already impressed you.

What if tipping is free for the consumer of a blog or video or tune, but the tips are redeemable for a discount with online retailers? Tips and/or comment depth presumably have some kind of analytic value and might be orthogonal or inversely proportional to the the kind of SEO-hackery designed to pull adwords bidding.
Ask HN: reliable domain registration
what's the best?
yes, they deleted basically anything in favour of last.fm, looking now they left a couple around, but deleted a lot of mostly quite reasonable comments.

http://i41.tinypic.com/9ia3jo.jpg was the first screenshot I could find, the top comment defending arrington was the only one that survived, some of them are a bit confrontational, but I seen more reasonable ones deleted.

all while comments calling for last.fm to "Let it burn" are fair play.
And gigaom writers climb to new heights of ignorance with that post.
Five Reasons to Be Terrified of Google Wave
The author thinks that wave is a product, but it is a protocol that they demoed with an application.

It is like email--they are both communication protocols. Why would he compare a protocol to a product that uses a different protocol? It's like comparing bittorrent to Firefox.

The creators rightly dismissed the question of monetization because you don't monetize a protocol, you monetize programs built with it. The demo is just one of many potential products that can be built on it, so they can't answer that question based on it.

They rightly dismissed the competition of Sharepoint and Outlook because that was primarily a presentation of the protocol. The demo seemed like something thrown together to show how communication through the protocol looks like, and not the premier application that they will use it for.

I have an idea for potentially using the protocol for a distributed issue tracker that would work well with a DVCS; the protocol is not limited to Outlook and Sharepoint competition.
Mainly because venture investors need to get their capital back, so they can invest it in new startups.

The most common investors in the venture capital asset class are pension funds and university endowments. They have the least need for liquidity of any investors in the economy. They should be indifferent between selling the stock at market price and holding the stock forever. And they should be able to fund new rounds of startups from the cash flow of their overall portfolio.

It would be easy to claim that a business was making no money while finding ways to funnel it to oneself.

If investors of any company cannot prevent management from looting then there is a major problem. But investors can fire the management. Musicians have no such leverage.
russ's denial was pretty categorical

* Last.fm has never given data linking IP addresses and scrobbles to any third party.

* Last.fm has never given data linking IP addresses and scrobbles to CBS (who, by the way, we don't consider a third party, but who do have to uphold our privacy policy).

considering he hadnt been asked to respond before the article was published, and posted that within a few hours of the article going live, i mean, what more can you ask for?
The post doesn't really make it clear, but most if not all of these figures look to me like Jobs has been getting design patents (not utility).
What this article says to me is:

1) there exists multiple frameworks that are independently excellent

2) some of the best minds in both worlds have nothing better to do other than to take sides in meaningless discussions
Add directory services and it becomes the way to communicate at a company replacing Outlook/Exchange, MSN, Twitter, Skype.

I plan on using it at my company.

The only wish feature is directory services with administrative controls.
With some of the Live stuff it -- for a short time at least -- seemed like Microsoft was finally starting to realize that the web is different than packaged software, and that instead of hyping a product like this while it's still "Coming soon," you should launch small and iterate.

When you buy a pre-marketed Office 20XX, you're stuck with Office 20XX -- when you try out a hyped up Cui...I mean Bing, you laugh and search Google to see if anybody's ridiculed it yet.

But, I guess since the Live stuff failed so badly that they have to continue working on stuff like Bing and buying companies like Powerset, they've decided to blame the process and go back to their tried and true web mantra of "promise veal, deliver a poop sandwich".