skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You may not, since you understand the concept of natural language in the context of search queries and that it's a hard problem.

I would wager that a non-trival subset of users in fact do use natural language in searches, especially in the context of the 5 w's; "what is...", "where is...", "when is...", etc. These aren't technically more difficult to understand than your average search query and I would imagine with the volume of google's searches, they do a good job of dealing with these types.
Illusion Cloak Makes One Object Look like Another
The Super Soldiers of 2030
Considering, [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=231209] are you still evaluating what makes the front-page according to this algorithm?

(p - 1) / (t + 2)^1.5

It reminds me of the distance formula in a vacuum that evaluates [or rates] a submission as a ratio according to it's position out of 210 [basically any story with a non-zero karma value (p - 1) that evaluates <= 210 has made the front-page] I guess the gist of what I'm getting at is, how are you generating these lists? Are they all extended from this algorithm and filtered according to a condition? Have you ever generated a list that doesn't extend this algorithm?

[EDIT]
Ok, so while I'm here, in this meta-HN of a thread, I'm going to ask a question that might seem like absolute bat-shit:

What is the running-total (summation) of all our Karma as users of HN?
I'm sorry this is necessary, but yes, it's a bad attempt at humor based on the "why your anti-spam proposal won't work" meme of many years ago: http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
Here's an excellent series of photos of the inside of the house http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/04/29/inside_steve_j...

Sorry for the appleinsider link, but in the few minutes I have at the moment I wasn't able to locate the original source (link in the ai article isn't it)

[Edit: This looks like the originals http://www.terrastories.com/bearings/albums/album/7215759415...]
Nuts & Bolts: Campfire loves Erlang
HA! I'd actually seen that one before but I honestly didn't remember it when I wrote my comment above. Subconsciously my mind was telling me what I already knew.
Life’s First Spark Re-Created in the Laboratory
5 out of the the top 25 are self-help books on the topic of eating less.

4 of those 5 are targeted to women, 2 have the word 'girl' in the title.

3 of those 5 occupy spots in the top 4.
Almost entirely third party- Apple does make a Texas Hold'em game.
FYI, Contenture is about a lot more than ads. It's also the dead simplest way to create premium features for your site with very very little work.
World's First Quantum Cryptography Network Developed in China
The web browser has very little to do with this problem; it is merely doing what the website has told it to do (or not to do).

I run a small forum where clicking back and forth between forms without losing what you've typed is a very important feature. It works exactly the way this author wants in all browsers because the headers are set correctly.

Similarly, I also work on a big web application where clicking the back button and getting stale information is bad. Again, the website sets the proper headers and the information is refreshed (if appropriate) or left alone (if appropriate).

This is not a browser issue. The differences are likely caused by how different browsers implement (or don't implement) the standard.
Genome Sequencing for $100
If this view persists, the entire site's direction is going to change because some proportion will upvote only from "classic" and others only from "main."
I got an advertisement from these folks in my inbox this morning because I pay for Clicky. (Totally worth it, by the way.)

Here's the fundamental problem with this advertising venture: everybody in the ecosystem freeloads on the site that makes the "sale". (Convinces a user to pay $X for access to the content on that site "and by the way get access to all these other sites, too!") This makes a lot of sense for, e.g., Paypal.

Quick aside on how Paypal works: everybody else in the ecosystem freeloads on eBay, because eBay is far and away the #1 source of Paypal accounts and every marginal Paypal account helps every other Paypal merchant. However, a user signing up for a Paypal account in your checkout funnel sucks for conversion. Ideally, you'd want to get new accounts generated by other businesses but never have to pay the "new account" tax yourself. However, since Paypal makes a cut of all transactions and eBay makes a huge direct profit for every additional account they sign up, it makes sense for eBay to grossly subsidize the rest of the ecosystem. (Plus, they can control it such that you can't play in their ecosystem without paying the new account tax.)

OK, now take this to content businesses: remember, everyone freeloads off the site that wins the account -- you don't have to convince an existing account to open their wallet again, you merely need to attract their eyeball. But users don't perceive value from "Get access to X... and, by the way, a bunch of other sites you might not care about and we won't list right now". They're willing to pay for X. If you're X, where X is presumably something massive like the New York Times or deeply meaningful to users like, I don't know, HN would be, and you know people will pay you money for your content, why the heck would you offer to split that money with other people who are not sharing appreciable amounts of money with you? (Because you're massively bigger and better monetized than them, you directly generate far more accounts in the system -- losing money, brand value, and user attention on each -- than you receive from, e.g., my site which has 50k visits a month.)

Ecosystems based on freeloading don't work unless the equilibrium is such that all players benefit from the freeloading. In this system, the players which you need to enable the freeloading are greatly disadvantaged by it. Sucks to be them. Accordingly, they won't sign up, and without them there is no ecosystem to speak of.
You don't want to breath a continuous stream of hydroxyl radicals. Its hard on your lungs.
Looks to be quite a secluded place: http://bit.ly/10yjcY
I strongly disagree that Joel & Jeff have built their FogBuz/StackOverflow for the sole purpose of cashing in on conferences.
FogBuz & StackOverflow aren't under the 'guise' of helping the community. They actually are incredible resources.

Just because these two are putting on conferences does not mean that they didn't create very valuable resources.

I think this author is also wrong about the costs of putting on a conference, but the key is that if the conferences don't offer value, they won't last and they won't get attendance.
A conference is a product just like anything else, if the product is bad, people won't pay for it.
Ask HN: flirt140, how are they determining the gender?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/12/fked-company-and-adbrite-founder-launches-twitter-dating-site-flirt140/

flirt140 - Yet another twitter app :-(

one line caught the attention though

"Kaplan says a proprietary algorithm is used to determine gender of Twitter users and claims that it’s pretty accurate"

Any idea how they are determining the gender?
Stuck On Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Or AOL? Gmail Just Made It Incredibly Easy To Switch
7 of the top 25 are about unhumans: zombies, vampires or demi-gods.
It gave you a job!
I think this is the search system Wikipedia has been needing to sort its data. This is not a tool for discovering knowledge like Google is.
they are probably doing simple stuff like checking the type of words they used. Like if twit has "xoxoxo" then its a female or they check the user's friends and look for references to the user in their twits. i.e. "vijayr posted that [he] created a new thread on hackernews"
I agree with what they've said and I wasn't going to comment but.. I clicked back to come back to Hacker News and it was instant. Like, not even 100ms to do a modification check or anything. Bam. It's there. Perhaps this is a Safari 4 beta thing?
Why did you choose those programming languages that you use?
How dare they make money!!!!!!!!
My first step would be with first names. Michael = Boy and Amy = Girl. You'd be able to cover most of the users like this.

Look for He/She in messages directed @User.
A Parable on Obsolete Ideologies
How to Fire Your Boss and Start Your Own Consulting Business
Why does "yet another twitter app" make you :(
Forward idea

A bit off topic, but while we are on the Back/Forward subject, I am suprised why there is no standard for implementing a "Forward Link" meta tag for website.

For example in HN news there are pages (next page), and so do most websites. Wouldn't it be great if there was a meta tag that specifies what this logical next page is... and pressing the forward button will take you there!
I think their strongest conversion point would be getting rid of adds. If I realized that a few of the sites I visit almost daily and get linked to me regularly would all magically have no adds if I signed up for a service, I might do it. It's not that I'm paying for a service from a website, I'm paying to get rid of an anti-service: the ads.

All that said, I have NoScript, AdBlockPlus, and RemoveItPermanently installed on almost all my computers.
The idea is that you get paid based on how many people visit your site. There should probably be significant bonuses based on sign ups coming from/through your site.
I don't know about Twitter, but determining gender (on average) from English language text is pretty much a solved problem in natural language processing.

http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.html

See this paper:

http://u.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-final....

Sidenote: this was an epic win for me in Gender Studies class, when I said that not only was the professor's claim that the genders communicate "essentially identically but with some individual variation" wrong, but I would constructively demonstrate it by blind-assigning a stack of any papers she cared to give me. (I also gave her a copy of the above paper, which she read with interest.) The class then retreated from the scary notion of binary decisions on the basis of the scientific method to the more comfortable one of endless arguing whether the differences were socially constructed or biological.
Ask HN: Why can't you "put" files through ssh?
I hate having to have one terminal with ssh running and one terminal with sftp running (especially when sftp doesn't have tab completion or any of the other handly shell shortcuts). Am I doing something wrong?
yes, I thought about it. but how many names can you save/check like that? won't it be a tedious process? Also, what about names from Europe, muslim names etc?
that is a neat link. thank you for posting it.
I'm not so sure about that. It depends on how it is implemented. If the older users see the classic page by default, then you will see much more of a divergence.
Why not use scp?

Although, I'm not 100% sure what you're trying to accomplish.
Tests should reveal code intent
You can do SCP. There are also various shell scripts that actually let you pipe data over.
hmm. that much isn't difficult to do - I checked out the site, didn't find a single mistake in 7-8 attempts of searching. Does this mean, that they also determine businesses/organizations and drop them from their list?
So imagine I'm the New York Times. OK, I can charge people $1 to read the NYT. If I was Joe Shmoe, my revenue share from that $1 would have been fifty cents. However, since I'm the freaking NYT and generating more accounts than everyone else on the system, the network bumps my payout to 80 cents. Whee!

Wait, absense of whee. Its my content that was worth the dollar to the user. Why should I give twenty cents to Joe Shmoe?

And without the NYT on board, Joe Shmoe's Blog About Things You're Not Quite Willing To Pay For But Are Glad Exist On The Internet is screwed.
I have a feeling that if you open up a way to sync accounts, trolls would find ways to exploit it very quickly. Perhaps it would work if there was not automated, but required an admin to authorize the change. However, I'm pretty sure that unless this is rarely used, they would not want to deal with the number of requests.
nothing against twitter, just that there is too much twitter news these days. it is a great, fun and useful service, but not exactly world changing
What's your ad network?
The real problem with the author of the initial post was that not only he had an "attitude", but he even was technically quite incorrect (he could have done worse, but still...), and not just once!

The collision fundamental misunderstanding was really not forgivable :/

Had he been technically correct, the whole non-stop "your question is really too imprecise" thing and perhaps even maybe the stinky "oh my God, the interviewer does not even know the XORBLUB algorithm" one would be more tolerable. But in the context of his own report of the interview, he is just pedant and not that smart...
Well, from the man pages, it looks like this still requires another terminal besides my ssh terminal (plus a lot of typing), so it's pretty much the same setup as using sftp, right?

I just don't see why I can't type "put filename" in ssh like you can in sftp. That really seems like a pleasurable user experience.

This really became a pain point for me last week, when I was testing a lot of code on remote machines. I want to be able to manipulate them with ssh, but I also want to be able to transfer my local copies easily.
Guessing randomly you have a 50% chance of being right. Weight the odds based on a few rules of thumb and voila?
RIP Internet Explorer: 1995-2021
I believe that iTMS has evolved into a revenue machine for Apple.
personally I rarely vote. Maybe other older members act similarly.
How much effort should one put into a business plan then (once the idea is solidified in their head)? Where is the point of diminishing returns? Is it still worthwhile to do a five year forecast (especially when it's highly unlikely things will go as you plan (for better or worse) over that much time)?
Well and it's a piece of shit.

Steve Jobs loves creating things to his exact specifications, I see no reason why he wouldn't want to do this with his house.
What about articles submitted by over 1 year olds? A quick look of the front page shows we'd lose articles by:
vorador, blasdel, kqr2, lrm242, ontilt, vijayr, markup, charlesmount and figured. On the whole those are pretty good articles, but a classic submits would be interesting to compare with.
Great, now my browser can use even more memory! I suppose that could be mitigated if there was an option for the number of pages to hold open for the back button this way for each tab and window.
But he didn't build this house, not sure what you mean?
I submitted this HN post and it says you're Male for both formal and informal.

So, whats the verdict Patio11, are you Male or Female?

Great link nonetheless.
Ugh I logged in through OAuth and it automatically made me follow their Twitter account. There should have more fine-grained control over what applications can do without asking/telling me.
The feature is powered by TrueSwitch, a product that as its name implies makes it easy to switch from one provider to another.

More abstractly, I think business models which are predicated on reducing switching costs of customers in a given industry are interesting, because they lower the pain that another company is trying to maximize, and therefore is probably valuable to both the end-user and competitors in the industry (either of which may be willing to pay).

Another example I can think of is CellTrade, where users can get out of their cell phone contracts by trading them.

Anyone have other examples of this sort of business model?
patio11 is male.
I submitted a few text too, its quite accurate.
No, Firefox is just the same. It's really a web server thing - there is such thing as 'caching', although OP seems to want to override such directives for all pages and have them all cached.
You build a database and program to match the names to a list. The database would contain only a few thousand records which would be easy to manage and speedy. Very simple process for a programmer. None of this work should be done manually.

For names you don't know you keep using other means to dig further. But no matter what tools I would use, matching names to gender would be highest weighted procedure and the first thing I'd try. Of course, there would have to be second and third things to try too.

Remember, these guys didn't say they were 100%. Who even knows what their definition of "pretty accurate" is.
he wants to knock down the old derelict house and build a new one.
What was their twitter account name?
I think if Firefox knows you're online, it will hit the server (sending e.g., If-Modified-Since), but if you go offline, it can tell and puts itself in offline mode, where it browses from the cache only. You can do the same experiment just by doing File - Work Offline.
I agree with you -- decades of psychological research show that people acclimate to what they have, and then want more.

Imagine cavemen postulating about what we'll do when we have these big machines that can carry us around at great speed, and when our food is already made for us and no hunting is required. Could they have guessed we'd work in glass office buildings so we can buy iPods and McMansions?

I suspect we're in no better position to guess how we'll use our future economic output, only that we will definitely want to spend it.
Google’s Last MySpace Payment: $75 Million On June 20, 2010
Microblogging Startup Status Update: Where Are The Twitter Competitors Now?
Chemist finds hidden gateway to RNA
the twitter execs seem to be off in lala land lately catering to celebs
I kinda dislike when people talk about things as they know something about it, while they know squat.

And get rid of the pictures, it's annoying.
[video] Kroes: Intel Now "Sponsor of the European Taxpayer"
Free Daily Horoscopes
An interesting site with free daily horoscopes.
want to know the secret? you're going to love it.

when you login, you have to run a search. it asks whether you're a guy/girl looking for a guy/girl. i'm guessing they might just save that first parameter, no?

that said, that natural language processing link is really sweet.
Capitalization is obsolete
List of Really Useful Website Design Showcases
Thanks. Color me paranoid, but I would never install a program that looks at my HD and reports aspects of its contents to someone else.
Gender Guesser is less accurate (60%-70%) for HN then a Perl one-liner (>95%):

say 'Male'
Ask HN: Feedback on webapp, online meetings for group collaboration
I've been trying to get my wife to switch from Hotmail to Gmail for years and I was excited by this development, but.. it doesn't help with the e-mail forwarding problem, alas :( There are some workarounds but they either involve money or third parties.

Of course, Microsoft is smart enough to realize that if they made forwarding available for free, there'd be a major exodus ;-)
There're still many rough edges but it's definitely time for HN feedback! Please check out the 2min tour and try out the service.

We realized that many folks who use Dabbleboard (whiteboard app, also launched on HN a yr ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=202798) use it in combination with Skype and -sometimes- desktop sharing services. So we decided to build the complete service for online meetings. Unlike WebEx et al which are more useful for 1->many presentations, the focus here is on _collaboration_ within small groups.

Would really appreciate any feedback.
Your Hulu Questions, Answered
flirt140
the real question now becomes where is the information WA is getting its results from and how is that chosen as the premier source for a particular query?
Ask HN: Can you live w/o hackernews or w/o google?
Curious - there are plenty of google alternatives (none perfect), but there just is almost NO Hackernews alternatives that combine this range of topics.

As such, if you had to lose one, which one would it be? For me, it would probably be (very reluctantly) Google.

Also, how does this translate to the broader qn of search vs. discovery?
I think what needs to be avoided is not the lulls, but the lulz.
Ah. Of course. I didn't consider that possibility. Now I've tried back/forward while connected to the internet and looking at Network Usage in Activity Monitor. I noticed that most of the times when I hit back/forward, there was no network traffic. I expect most of the traffic I did notice was either due to cache refreshes or due to other apps(probably mostly Thunderbird) I have running.
It looks a lot like python to me, but with native compilation and function overloading. Which is a good thing. I'll keep an eye on it...
I have always found it kind of... (weird? An amusing quirk of the culture?) that my HN account is tied very closely with my real identity and yet I'm always addressed by login name rather than real name here. I guess you can file that away as yet another example of the power of defaults.

On other business-related forums, like the Business of Software board, everyone either calls me Patrick or "that bingo guy". That might be because of the display name alone.
MySQL Forks
The Soul of a New Programming Language (2005)
Could Adobe be open-sourcing Flash?
There's a similar service at genderanalyzer.com, based on UClassify's API - http://blog.uclassify.com/gender-text-analysis/.

It thinks Sergey Brin writes like a woman: http://www.genderanalyzer.com/?url=too.blogspot.com
I think the description provided in the article is pretty unambiguous. Perhaps other people might want different behaviours but what was described is the article is exactly what I want.

I don't care if the cache is valid. I don't care if the webmaster thinks the page needs to be updated every 10 seconds. All I want is the previous page exactly as it was when I last viewed it. It's my browser and it should do what I want. If the webmaster is relying on browser behaviour to ensure I don't resubmit a form then frankly they are asking for trouble.
If google drops them, perhaps it will actually inspire them to fix some/all of their usability issues.

I still have a myspace account -- I just cant remember the last time I logged in. The last straw was advertisements that screamed at me on mouseover, the inability to perform simple tasks without 6 clicks, and the fact that you cant even login easily.

If they lose guaranteed revenue, perhaps they will have to address these issues, and more. I wonder if it is too late.
Just looked at a few dozen tweets, the use of exclamation points seems to be a dead giveaway.
Has the web killed off high quality typesetting (e.g., TeX, TeXmacs, etc.)?
It seems that the more information is put online, the less people care about the quality of the typesetting. Accessibility is much more important. And thus far, browser typesetting has been much worse than systems such as TeX.

Although PDFs can look great (e.g., generated as a result of using TeX/TeXmacs), people seem to prefer html over pdf. They don't care that much about typesetting.
Interesting. However, the blog fails to deal with the proper noun issue.

(Also, don't you think it's bad form to self submit your own short blog rants here?)
No problem, just my surprise at the overwhelming mass of comments criticizing the poster. I'm not saying his actions were perfect, but similar posts in the past (such as "Stupid Interview Questions") elicited a much more balanced split between criticizing the interviewee's actions and criticizing the interviewer's actions. I just expected something else from the aggregate of responses, which is not the same thing as disagreeing with any one individual response.
I think it's easier to see the breaks between sentences with a capital letter rather than relying solely on a small period.