skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This survey is producing pretty meaningless results. 55% will replace Google with Bing, but at the same time 55% say it wasn't different enough from Google. Furthermore, how do you plan to replace a search engine? Either you do it or you don't. This survey seems poorly conducted, and I think there is little point in conducting a survey about this in the first place, as the traffic generated by Bing vs. Google can be relatively easily measured.
In other news, over half of McDonald's customers said they would also eat at Burger King.

Not exactly informative.
A great solution to goods with extremely low marginal cost is reasonably priced unlimited subscription services. It's cheap, convenient, legal, and benefits everyone.

Unfortunately Apple has used their near-monopoly in the music player market to prevent subscription services, so Napster, Rhapsody, et al are cut off from the majority of the market.
However incoherently, they serve to confirm a conclusion that some people want very badly to draw. QED.
I'm already seeing a fair amount of traffic (paid and organic) arriving from Bing from a variety of geographic locations. Of course, Google still dominates by a monstrous margin, but it's more traffic than I ever saw from Live.com or Yahoo.

Any other B2B or B2C businesses here seeing the same?
Французский язык: он-лайн уроки французского языка на StudyFrench.ru
Writing Low-Pain Massively Scalable Multiplayer Servers
Great talk from Steve Souders (yslow) @ google IO about front end optimisation
I agree, I am not satisfied with it either. However, compromises are made to put it online. I would like to change it with more visual. Will consider this.

Thanks for the comment!
Overview - ADG: Automatic Drawing Generation
Recipe for creating revenue for News Portal.

Take 1 part hot topic
Add a pinch of unexpected result
Accuracy completely optional

I'm all for competition against Google, hell, I'm even rooting for Microsoft to do well (I can't believe I just said that) - but I'll wait to see what happens as I don't think it is as cut and dry as everyone is making it out to be.

My prediction, I think Bing will do well, it will definitely steal some market share and I don't think we'll see a Googleless searchscape in the near or distant future.
How Captcha kills the romance of the WWW (except spammer wins)
This article is somewhat poorly put together. There is a good chance that their conclusions are erroneous.

That said . . . I have replaced Google with Bing as the default search provider in the browsers on my machines. So the central idea of the article may have merit.

Just an idea . . . perhaps we could take an HN poll on the question of how many HNers have switched their browser search provider to Bing.
What if U.S. banks repay government too fast?
I incorporated as an S-Corp when I started. Two weeks ago I got into the fbFund incubator program, and the first thing they asked me to do is to convert to a C-Corp. I'm glad I started with an S-Corp because converting to C is a simple form I can do myself. It's also doable with LLC, but it's a lot more paperwork.
its not a survey, its just an online poll, and from the looks of it, it seems to just be a marketing ploy for a newly launched site

http://www.onenewspage.com/pressreleases/20090605_GoogleHasF...
I agree. After reading that sentence I literally looked to the address bar to make sure I was not reading an article in The Onion.
I know of Google's Feed API : http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxfeeds/

But AFAIK, this API doesn't offer to actually do the polling for you. In the end, you would still need to spend a lot on BW to guarantee you get the updates in a timely manner. Also, (and that goes with the previous point) they cache the results from feeds... which is really not what we want to ensure fast detection of updates.
That's pretty much how it should be done. Let's hope the guys at astalavista is smart enough to do that. Your approach adds an additional layer of protection in case, as you'd put it, someone gets into your home server and deletes them. That, and tapes are less likely to get corrupted or become unreadable than the drives on your server, which may cut down on recovery time.

When your business gets bigger, it might be worth it to look into dedicated hosting and have the datacenter do the backup for you. After all, you want to spend your time managing your IT crew, rather than driving those tapes to the bank :)
Can anyone enlighten me on why they can't use normal mouse? Writing on a keyboard could be considered "writing two or more letters" which is forbidden according to wiki. Is using mouse "Applying the finishing touch"?
Ask HN: Do you think IPv6 will improve the geolocation results?
Seems to me like there'll be a lot flexibility in letting you know where exactly the user is coming logged on from.
If bittorrent and Kazaa, Napster didn't exist, I wouldn't have even heard of or even tried hundreds of artists, that then resulted in me buying their albums and attending their concerts.

I estimate (very conservatively) because of Napster, Kazaa, Bittorrent, etc., I've spent thousands of dollars I otherwise wouldn't have on music, both on CD purchases and at concerts.
I'm guessing the way they got this statistic (if they didn't make it up completely, which they may have) is by asking the question "Would you use the expression 'to bing it' to mean 'to search for something'", and most people responded with "eih sure why not".
This article is not worth of a comment. I read that on Onion I guess- someone was asked about Bing and he said "Well, I don't know about that. I will Google it once I get home."
On an another note, imho, Google is way ahead of the game. When I heard about Bing, Roger Federer's match was taking place in Paris. I searched "Federer" (no quotes)on Bing and it showed me all good web-page results and that's it. However, when I searched "Federer" (no quotes) on Google it not only showed good web-page results but it also showed me the real-time match data on top of the organic results. Now this is something amazing, I mean really :)
Bing can be a game changer, who knows, but they have a some catching up to do.
Thank you for the clarification: this is a lot different from explicitely specify GEO coordinates...
I call bullshit on the article and especially on the lead paragraph. The voluntary response "survey" mentioned says nothing about consumers in general. See

http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...

on voluntary response polls as a poor source for inferences about the behavior of the population of interest.
InfoChachkie Nuggets #2 - Entreprenurial Links Of Note
Yes, fascinating.

Any clue to the number of nutrinos in existence? Or say the distribution of them, from the very old to the ones spitting out of the sun?
Your previous comment was already a lot more clearer to me then the front page. :)
Maybe I should make it clearer: yes, you can figure out what the site technically does in 5 seconds, but you'll never know why, because the important bit is obscured almost immediately: "hopefully... some nice company will donate a dollar for every unique person who Blames Drew's Cancer to the American Cancer Society and the Make a Wish Foundation"

Do you really think people will just figure that out by themselves? Maybe not an epic fail, but definitely a case of sacrificing getting the message across for the sake of visual charm. I had to reload the page 10 times to get the correct wording for my quote above.
Great link! I've read about a lot of this stuff in text books
etc, but it all fits together so much better when put in its
proper historical context like that. If I understand it correctly, his main result in algorithmic complexity theory implies that it is impossible to prove the absence of a pattern in data. Does this thus imply that there is no way for us to know when we know everything?
Term Sheet Manners
To add to your point, they won't stay equal for long--if Apple keeps innovating--palm is doomed to catch-up, which is a dominated strategy over the long haul.
I agree.

Not only does it make it easier to tell when one has actually reached the bottom of the page, it gives more room for proofs, and who knows what could happen if we run out of room!
You've got 5 seconds to get your point across before your user clicks the back button. If you're lucky, after that 5 second scan, that user might click on the first handy link to see if it leads to any information. I gave your site the benefit of the doubt and scanned for 30 seconds and clicked 3 links. I never found anything that caught my eye enough to actually read on that homepage, and clicking links put me on two forms and a pricing chart. Now I'm back here with no idea of what you do.

There needs to be a 5 word chunk of text in 36 point font explaining what you do. Next, maybe a few big bullets explaining why this will help me solve a problem I actually have, and a call to action that I can click on to start solving it. At the most, you can put 7 distinct things on that homepage for my attention to land on. Choose them with care, because the average visitor to your site is going to be even more indifferent than me.
So what's holding them back?
JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit - Interactive Data Visualizations for the Web
So, basically, the record labels have and always will need to rely on human stupidity to turn a buck.
Hire a hacker
FOR THE WORLD'S BEST HACKING SERVICES
Hacker4hire@hackermail.com
"to any reasoning person, the iPhone will win versus its second-rate copycat when they are at the same price point."

what flawed logic!

There are many differences, for example, does the iPhone have a keyboard?

I think you are mixing up what an iPhone is. They didn't invent the ambient light sensor, for example, the blackberry has had ambient adjusting screens for years, the touchscreen isnt an Apple invention either, and there are more than a few other touch screen phones out there...

"only produced mediocre handheld PDAs"

hmmmm, another factual flaw, did you ever use a Palm, 'back in the day' - they were class leading devices...

You can already sync from anywhere ... using the internet.

"Apple entered the cell industry forty years late and changed the game"

hmmm, I wasn't aware of a cell [phone] industry 40 years ago... Lets get facts straight before gobbing off. And Apple haven't changed anything, they bought out a cool touchscreen phone, that's all, they are being outsold by RIM still in the US and worldwide the iPhone sales are nowhere near many other phones.

"It's deplorable that no competitor can muster enough innovation to compete with the device."

I presume you're just trolling, because if you were to look at the spec of many (most) other newly introduced smart phones I think you'll find the iPhone is not even close to being competitive. Its just cool and popular in the US.

"I want to buy a book and the screen will instantly switch to eInk and I'll be reading said book"

eh? I think that's called a Kindle, not a book, books are printed on paper.

There's plenty to get excited about, you just have to crawl out of the basement and take a look around you :)
It kind of did, for a day:
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/bing-overtakes-yahoo/
Trent Reznor has good advice for online media publishers
Interesting that the links stand out so much more when the post is downvoted. Draws the eye. Maybe that wasn't what was intended from the downvote CSS. :)
Also not sure if it's illegal where pg is to discriminate based on age.

Age discrimination isn't illegal; age discrimination by an employer against people over 40 is. Since those in question are under 40, and YC isn't employing said persons, legality doesn't weigh into things.
OK, so it's only everyone in the world who's using a 13" screen, which includes, but is not limited to, everyone using a MacBook or a MacBook Air. Do you truly believe that's not a major problem, when all these people are left wondering why Drew's Cancer is being blamed for random stuff? They'll never know that they're trying to raise funds.

I really love the visual design, which is why I said it's only an epic fail until the issue is addressed. Because this is the launch - you can't stop the viral spread of something like this.
Call me crazy, but on this subject at least I'll take Enrico Fermi's aesthetic judgment over yours.

If I have to manipulate a big equation I give nicknames to the different pieces, like "the curvature leftovers" or "the linear stuff" or "that ugly fucker from under the radical."

"The little neutral guy" seems like a perfectly natural name to me.
if anyone doesn't know it, that is Sergey Brin's blog
No publication with any sort of journalistic integrity would post this information without either some sort of similar, independent, 3rd party survey or, lacking that, details on the methods and practices used to execute the poll and basic statistics on raw data results from the respondents. As currently reported, these results are without merit or meaning.
More like good design practices avoid massive refactoring. The way the article puts it, choosing the wrong legal structure is like writing your webapp in hackish Perl, realizing it's becoming popular, and then scrapping your code and redoing the whole thing using a decent framework.
Good points, and am aware of them. We decided to go with any home page, we could do in few days, just to publish, and work on that on the fly. I am seeing a complete visual/informational change in the next weeks, hopefully with some help.

Thank you for your insightful comment. Highly appreciated.
You should read the comments on the page. Its a lot of fun. And by the way, the article a truck load of vague assumptions.
l33t

Ohh and i just signed up your email at a couple of hacking forums in Nigeria.

Best of luck and godspeed.
Thanks for posting this. A truly inspiring speech given by someone whose life is rooted in an awareness of history and whose actions today seek to serve those who will come next. An impressive man.
"A survey of 1,000 people.." uhh... 1k people can't be objective.

By the way my search results don't appear to be grouped. Probably because that functionality is not added to localized (by default I have Latvian) Bing versions. Switching to English version, everything is ok.
yes that helped a good deal, but not solved the problem completely.
My question was not really about the God, but religion and institutions that promote some sort of Dogma.
SSshh, if the general populace learns about selection bias the strategic whitepaper industry would be doomed.
a very bad news. He did not deserve such a death.
Well Apple did see a business model and made money.

Every time I read these articles I guess -people that at movie/music industry - are they too old for technologies or what?

I don't need a CD, just content.
"This survey has been sponsored by Microsoft Corp."
On the other hand, I am seeing (so far) less traffic than I did from Live + MSN search, and I cannot see much differnce in my rankings.

May be the people you are getting are the sort who are likely to try Bing? MAy be you rank higher on Bing? Maybe people who would have clicked through to my site are now satisfied with pop up summary on Bing?
The article doesn't really explain the differences in the two- he just says why he likes S-Corps better for early stage startups. I formed an LLC because I have no plans on taking any venture capitol.
> we haven't really found anything fundamentally better

This is plainly false if you bother to lift a finger and read about the ideas of Genera, CoyotOS, ErOS, Smalltalk, etc. The UNIXes (and VMS, and its mutant Microsoft progeny) are pieces of junk which remain popular solely through network effects.
Ask HN: Does Obama's speech wooing Islam will make a difference to world?
Obama through his speech has tried to prove that America is not against Islam and wants to live in peaceful environment with Islam.

He has made points that by giving our money to pakistan and afganistan he is making a statement of Goodwill with Islam.

What implications does that have for world in general and US in particular?

Is this speech of historic significance?

Does giving our money to Pakistan will solve problems of create more problems for America?
True. There isn't currently a great path away from app engine, but there is nothing about app engine that prevents someone from building one.

As for user auth, I'd suggest setting up a table that stores the user's email address and a random hash, so if google auth stops working they can just "reset their password" and you can use your own auth system w/ the same email address as the google account.
Linux was a copy of Minux.
A dialogue between two aliens discussing the human race
The picture gives me a sense of the youthful inspiration and commotion much like the articles does. A great picture and a great article. Anybody in their 40s founding startups these days or have we just accepted our waterboarding?
nice! webshots + aalib :-)
A good, substantial interview that gives a lot of background on Dyson's views.
Survey: I will replace Google with Bing
Survey: I will _not_ replace Google with Bing
I'm 14 and in highschool and I believe we spend way too much time on things that have no affect on increasing our knowledge. The textbooks are also surrounded by bureaucracy and they sound like they were written by robots. Every emotion, opinion, or different view of an event is thrown out. Math textbooks just give you a proof and some examples. Most of the time they don't give you why or how you would use it, nor the underlying proofs that were used to come to theorem or proof.
"A survey of 1,000 people by news portal One News Page..."

I couldn't even find said news portal's website, and if it exists, it has no established reputation. This drivel does not have a shred of credibility.

Flagged
I'm actually more curious about the long term careers of such prodigies, especially such extreme cases.

Me too. There does not seem to be much correlation with long-term achievement (relative to other smart people who aren't prodigies). There is usually a vicariously overachieving parent or two in the picture.

I'm interested in the subject because, like a lot of people here, I was a mild case of it myself. Looking back, I'd say it led to early burnout. I don't think it did much good - but then, as an old professor of mine used to say, "Life does not bear counterfactuals."
bribing mozilla/firefox to make bing as default search box is probably more effective, could be cheaper too
He was 45. (according to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajeev_Motwani)
I don't know anything about corporate investors, but the frequently cited problem with LLCs is their ad-hoc structure. For example, there is no requirement to have shares, but such a construct can be defined in the operating agreement and would be needed to have investors.
The newspaper suicide pact
As I read the article, that was my first thought. The fate of one man is extremely significant to him; but it must be viewed in context. If his misfortune was exceptional, and the remedy a rapid return to form, then this story is reassuring; but that is not the case. Instead, his misfortune was commonplace, yet the remedy applied only to him, leaving untold others calcified in their situation.

In that case, his story is a meaningless aberration.
I use sounds in our videos at http://www.learnitfirst.com/ and I found it was worth it, money-wise, to go ahead and buy at a reasonable price. I've bought from stockmusic.net as well as shockwave-sound.com. I think their sites save me time.
The device rips off everything innovative about the iPhone including the accelerometer

I know of at least 1 situation where that's just not the case.

Nokia's n95 has an accelerometer and shipped months before the first gen iphone shipped, with it being unveiled months prior to the iphone announcement as well.

The rest of your argument sounds like fanboyism or trolling... I can't decide which, but I'm leaning towards the latter given you want a phone with a holographic projector?

Sure you don't want to add in a time machine and candy dispenser into the device too?
In all fields, there are soloists and there are teams. There are team sports and individual sports. Michael Phelps is a soloist. S. Wolfram is a soloist... he has a backup band though...
Ask HN: I'm working on some tests for Amazon EBS volumes. What do you think?
I wanted a way to run automated tests on Amazon's Elastic Block Storage so I could compare performance for a single instance type over time and between Linux and Solaris. I also wanted to be able to run tests manually to check for performance degradation. I've been working on an EC2 deployment tool and I realized that I could use it to automate other kinds of workflows too. This week I finally put two and two together and created a really simple test workflow for EBS volumes.

Here's what I came up with:
http://gist.github.com/123400

Right now I'm only running Bonnie64 tests and only for small and large instances of Linux. There's also no fancy reporting, just Bonnie's txt output. My plan is to add other tests and then figure out something simple for reporting (Google Charts, probably). After that I'll add Solaris and other distros / machines sizes.

Do you have any suggestions for other tests/benchmarks to use? What do you think about the approach?
Here's an active link:

http://gist.github.com/123400
We're using EBS, so I'm interested.

You might consider posting your results in phases. People will probably have good suggestions about what to test next.
I live in Manhattan, and one thing I've noticed is that panhandlers are generally polite and unobtrusive, and other homeless nearly invisible. I'm sure that's the result of aggressive policing -- a spoken but unofficial "don't hassle anyone and we won't find an excuse to bring you in." Maybe the answer is to minimize the negative effects of homelessness as much as possible without attempting to "eradicate" it?

Bear in mind that obviously I only know this equation from the middle-class white-collar side; for all I know, the lives of the Manhattan homeless are no better than in cities where they could be more rambunctious.
The site is back up now...
BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 Smartphone Unlocked
BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 has a light sensing color display with QVGA resolution. It is a 2 megapixel camera phone. Other notable features of this unlocked cell phone are sure type QWERTY keyboard, GPRS, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi.
And some people purchased who would not have done if the music hadn't been available for free. I don't know if those sales made up for the people you mentioned. But I'm sure you don't know either.

I agree that the record selling industry is dying, and probably can't be saved as we know it.
My main requests:
1) Display only "large" pictures (1024px wide). That's what makes The Big Picture special.
2) It should work on any browsing page on Flickr. I don't want to re-enter my search criteria on another site.

Questions:
1) Should the script use AJAX & DOM manipulation to modify the Flickr page? Or just redirect to a page on another domain?
2) Should it ever run automatically on page load?
3) Do we need to use any Flickr authentication for the browsing user?
Sadly, it was not a Perl shop. I was one of only a few developers.

My next job was at Morgan Stanley, which had great infrastructure, both for Perl and otherwise.
Thanks. This link looks useful.
I think it's more likely that browsers implement the W3C geolocation API before IPv6 becomes mainstream, which will cover use-cases where accurate geolocation is important, but will require the permission by the user. I don't think we'll ever reach a point where IP geolocation is something you can rely on.
It is trivially easy to convert from S Corp to C Corp - one quick letter to the IRS and you are done - no lawyer necessary.

I organized my last startup as an S Corp so that initial losses would flow through to me, the founder and primary initial funder. Then, once I'd "lost" all my investment, and we were approaching outside investment, I converted to C Corp. This worked great, except for the loosing all my investment part.