skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
points 1, 4, 6 from the article could have been written in 1998 as well.

how can 2 guys in a garage wipe out AltaVista, Lykos, and whoever else was doing search back then (with lots of smart people, data, resources, state-of-the-art software and user adoption to compete against)?

What is missing is a serious discussion on search quality (which made Google Google).

If Larry and Sergey started today, would they be able to compete against Google by providing better search results,
or has search quality reached a "global maximum" of sorts?

Does search still suck?
It's not really a static ranking, though, is it? The PageRank is constantly recalculated when incoming links change.

I don't know what other search engines have implemented because none of them will let me see their code :-) I do believe if they could implement a link-based ranking system without fear of being sued by Stanford they would. I don't know how different a link-based ranking system would have to be from PageRank to avoid getting sued by Stanford, or whether Stanford litigates this when they suspect unlicensed use. I'm guessing they do sue to defend the patent, because Google's royalties for using the algorithm number in the hundreds of millions, a significant amount towards Stanford's endowment.
"Somebody" observed a long time ago that mature capitalism would produce an unmanageable financial sector whose interests are completely misaligned with the general one. He might have been wrong on a few other issues, but on this one he was absolutely right: the problem is structural and should be considered as such. If we let financial markets grow more and more, crashes will get worse.
How much is too much (aka, me critiquing my own app)
Let me answer your question from an adversarial viewpoint:

"Hey boss, I'm looking at our stats and I see a bunch of unusual stuff. "

"Like what?"

"Well, I see about 100,000 times more MAC addresses than normal. Nothing makes sense."

"Here, let me see... Hmm yes, it looks like someone is trying to taint our data."

"What do we do, boss?"

"Well, let's look at the logs files. It looks like someone sat under the sensor on the corner of Main and 4th between 11am and 12pm with a Linux laptop dumping a bunch of bogus packets. This guy isn't out here sabotaging stuff 24/7. Let's just correlate the MAC addresses on this sensor and see if they appear on the others. If not, we'll delete those rows."

"Good idea as usual boss. Let's be glad this attacker didn't have a drone that flew sorties over or sensors while sniffing nearby 802.11 and retransmitting bogus packets."
The crazy part is they made you pay for the fix. Therefore, it was considered acceptable behavior for Excel 97.
Huh, weird. It would be here, if Google had indexed it yet: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
"I don't think a boycott of EMC is practical."

It's practical for me.
There have been times in the past when I've found almost every USB ethernet adapter available on the market to be of a single chipset. If one very common chip at that time had a poor interaction with your school's switches, boom.

Most of the time, the cheap no-name electronics I've encountered have been pretty feature-complete, or even feature-laden, and any bugs were usually minor annoyances rather than fatal flaws.

But the quality control is a crapshoot, so a good chunk of them tend to be DOA. Of the ones that work fine at the start, many will fail in the following weeks, months, and years at much higher rates than you'd expect.
> I can talk with a human being face-to-face if the thing is faulty

In the US, most "customer service" people are actually just human-looking facades for a computer system. Of course there are shining exceptions who apply their brain and even have domain knowledge. But most of the time dealing with a "person" actually takes more work than directly with the computer as you've got to prepare your request carefully. Companies wanted workers to be interchangeable cogs, and they got what they wished for.
I would like my British MP to ask in parliament if GCHQ are spying on members of the U.S. Congress. This is because we already know that the NSA get GCHQ to do little favours for them to get around domestic spying laws.

I was thinking I just need to cut and paste the senator's question and get my MP to ask it, however, does anyone here have any details to wording or other ideas so that a weasel word response isn't all I get?
The problem isn't access to individual codepoints, it's mixing strings with different encodings without any way of tracking the encoding or knowing that you're doing something wrong.

UTF-8 everywhere works great when you can enforce it. On the level of an individual project, you can enforce it. On the level of a language ecosystem, you can't, and you need to. Otherwises you end up with some libraries who assume their internals are UTF-8 encoded strings, some libraries that assume they are ASCII strings, some libraries that assume the caller is handling encoding issues and will take care of ensuring that it's all UTF-8, some that make no assumptions at all and carry around the encoding everywhere, and some that just haven't thought about the problem and silently break when you use them with data that came from other libraries.

It's interesting that Go and Java - both languages with mature Unicode handling - still have a distinction between uninterpreted bytes and UTF-8 or UCS-2 text. In Go, you have separate []bytes and string types, even though Go strings are just UTF-8 byte sequences. In Java, you have byte[] and String. The problem is not a technical one of how to represent strings, it's a social one of how to get all the library authors on a language to agree on a convention of how to handle encoding.
>> Cesium-137 is product of nuclear fission. Before us humans, there was no Cesium-137 on earth.

There's places of natural fission occurrence on Earth, doesn't that mean that they are potential sources of Cesium-137? I searched multiple sites and found no relation between the topic of natural fission sites and either CS-137 or Cesium-137.

Why should this be a product of man-made fission only?
Get a crock pot (big one if you can find a good deal) with a timer. Buy some chunky vegetables and a roast. Cut the vegetables into chunks, put a layer on the bottom of the pot. Put the roast in. Fill in the spaces with the rest of the chunks and whatever spices you like.

Turn it on. Go to work. Come home. Eat. Eat leftovers tomorrow. Half hour of chopping vegetables gives you two or three days of food, depending. Chop the veggies the night before and refrigerate if you like.

My favorite vegetables so far: red potatoes, shallots, garlic, leeks, carrots, yellow squash, zucchini squash, apples, peppers. I look at all the vegetables in the store now.

I cut my vegetables with a cheap steak knife.
More mud is consistent with the big ball of mud design pattern and the big ball of mud is a time tested architecture.
Thanks for letting me know, I always look forward to reading your posts.
Yep, an effective general purpose search engine is really a collection of effective vertical (subject-intelligent) and horizontal (task-specialized) search engines.

The truth behind IBM Watson is that it's based on a methodology that makes it possible to put huge teams working on different parts of the problem without tripping on each other's feet.
Ever notice how when you get upgraded to a first class seat on an airplane, it takes about 5 seconds to feel superior to those in the business and coach classes? I think part of that is human nature.
If you're looking for something that is not another RSA style OTP solution check out LoginTC. https://www.logintc.com/docs/connectors/

The approach leverages the smartphone for what it is, a connected device with rich user experience interaction. https://www.logintc.com/docs/platform/multi-factor-flow.html

Full disclosure: I'm a co-founder at Cyphercor the builders of LoginTC.
Perhaps one way all of us can make the point here is that when we want to speak to our elected representatives, we insist on doing so face to face, explaining that we don't want a digital 3 way with the NSA.
Site search is an entirely different problem than searching the web, in fact, really good site search for 100-1000, 10,000-100,000 and 1,000,000+ are entirely different problems.
Oh, right. Support != admins. So he is fine with the admins be able to read it but not with the support?
It's not the only abuse of the rules. Looking at the hint, I think there's some flaw in the size-testing tool which they've exploited.
I've heard plenty of bad things about Toshiba customer support last time I was looking for a laptop. It's not too hard to find complaints about them.
In what are these various common data-structures supposed to be implemented? Also in a language that already has them?

We have to keep building and maintaining a kernel, a libc, and other basic infrastructure software. Should we also do that in a language that implements the missing things already? Maybe the CPU itself should implement these common data structures?

What solution do you propose?
You're correct--I foolishly hadn't actually gone over how the Dual_EC_DRBG was broken until after writing this post. In general a broken random number generator breaks many parts of a cryptosystem, but the particular way in which Dual_EC_DRBG is broken only allows someone with a constant "key" which corresponds to the constants in the NIST standard to predict future generated numbers.
I appreciate the shielding Apple added, especially with two resonators in the HF band. The shielding is, BTW, probably to prevent the device from causing interference, not to prevent other devices from interfering with it. (It's not a radio, after all.)

Note that if you do choose to buy the cheaper one without any shielding, it's your responsibility (in the US) to prevent it from interfering with licensed users of the RF spectrum. (In this case, 25m shortwave broadcasters on 12MHz and government-run time-transfer services, like WWV and WWVH, on 25MHz.)

If your device is particularly annoying to some shortwave listener, expect to get a letter from the FCC telling you to shut the thing off.

(I looked up a few of the letters, and I really appreciate the politeness from the government: http://www.arrl.org/files/file/Part%2015%20Letters/04-06-24-... "There are
several simple and inexpensive steps that can be taken to eliminate interference from battery chargers, and we would be glad to send them to you if needed.")
Right. But that is the prohibitive factor for many startups. They cannot afford nor are they willing to pay Stanford for PageRank.
Ask HN: How do you pair users together?
I am working on a mobile web app that needs to pair random users together.

For example, user 1 will let the app know they are looking for someone to be matched up with, and when user 2 goes to look for someone they should be matched.

What is this process referred to as, and where can I read more information? :)

Thank you for taking the time to read this!
Their isn't actually any conflict between state and federal laws, as there is nothing in the federal laws that requires states to make marijuana illegal. The whole idea of a legal conflict is just a conservative talking point.
Thousands of visitors to yahoo.com hit with malware attack
That's right. HTML/CSS/JavaScript is just another pile of technology for rendering graphics. There have been many others, and there will be more in the future. Those "web" technologies are useful now because the enabling runtimes (browsers) are in everything from smartphones to toasters.

The skill the author ought to master isn't the trick pony of HTML circa 2003, but rather how to present information to humans. That said, I'm sure the self-described gurus of buggy whip grip design probably were annoyed by the obsolescence of their hard-won knowledge too (or at least until they started working on driving wheels and road bikes).

Today, the debate is between the various native toolkits on mobile devices and HTML5. The winner will have the most engaging apps as measured by the success of their owners' companies. Maybe iOS 7 will win. Maybe Android. Maybe Microsoft's windowing kit in its next OS will win.
Whoever is asked the question would refuse to answer stating national security.

Stuff about GCHQ is normally handled by the http://isc.independent.gov.uk/
> How about we simply agree that OSI is a monstrous "designed by 99 committees" theory and accept that it is not used in practice ?

Partly agreed. It's worth noting however that the PKI associated with SSL (X.509) is an OSI thing and so understanding OSI concepts is still rather important. This is also why X.509 certificates IMO feel a bit foreign in terms of structure and they tie in closely to LDAP concepts (a stripped down version of OSI X.500) rather than more internet-y directory concepts like DNS where everything is a text string and human readable.

> Hell they don't even follow TCP/IP's layers, but at least there they make an effort to make it look like they do

My point was that TCP/IP and OSI are just fundamentally different. They are culturally different. They have different goals. You can understand TCP/IP better on its own than through OSI. You can't understand OSI by using TCP/IP as a sole reference.

> "OSI is an ancient, dumb, wrong, 10000000000000 feet architect view of networking."

I think it is more correct to understand OSI in context, namely that it was a network model designed to support the OSI protocol stack. This stack was intended to fully merge circuit and packet-switched networks (effectively merging phone switches and the internet). This means you have, effectively, an intelligent network with possibly intelligent terminals, which are capable of doing both circuit- and packet-switched networking on top. OSI protocols ported to TCP/IP like H.323 make perfect sense if you understand that they are assuming they can open phone calls (but in the process of porting them to TCP/IP, they have to use one TCP/IP connection for each phone circuit they would otherwise open). This is furthermore why the network perimeter controls designed for H.323 involve what amount to phone switchy things instead of things like firewalls (and why a simple packet filter won't work).

In terms of the value of not learning it, I think the best approach honestly is to learn TCP/IP without the OSI model first, and then learn the OSI model and what the OSI stack was designed to do after. This gives you whole layers of insight, not into TCP/IP but into OSI protocols ported to TCP/IP.
Even if minimum wage does cause some unemployment that's not the beginning or the end of the story. It's a market distortion created to counteract two other market distortions - namely already existing unemployment and market concentration on the employers' side, both of which depress wages.

So even proving beyond a doubt that minimum wage causes an increase in unemployment isn't enough to abolish the institution if there isn't a better solution to the problems at hand. Plus, unemployment percentage is not a robust enough metric to base the entire conversation on.

I liked Bryan Caplan's piece but to me it was predicated on the idea that minimum wage is based on errors in logic and not based on distortions in markets (especially in his conclusion.) I'm yet to see a better idea for addressing the downward effect of unemployment and oligopolization on low end wages. Caplan's solution seems to be deregulation but to me that's a bit like letting the wolves and the sheep work it out for themselves.
Black Tiger/Black Dragon (ブラックドラゴン) - Arcade
This is actually pretty big. The fact that it's going to be dispensed by hospitals means that the state is going to have to create regulations governing production and distribution. Even though only a few thousand patients will be eligible, in terms of going towards full legalization this is actually a bigger step than many other states where it's easier to become eligible but there isn't any state infrastructure for distribution.
"The VB stuff" is pretty much all you get when you work with MS-Office.

Don't know that I'd call COM "elegant", but you could probably do worse for a language-agnostic object system. Funny enough, I never really "got" COM until I sat down and read up on Bonobo. Someone had a really accessible explanation for Monikers that would've saved me so much hair-pulling if I'd had anything similar for the Windows equivalent.
It's XSL FO, isn't it? You could use XSLT and FO to render XHTML to some graphical output, but it's not an intrinsic part of XHTML.

EDIT: You could use XSLT and FO to render XHTML to some graphical output if you were totally mental.
To be clear it is illegal to possess marijuana in Canada.

Canada is in a weird state right now where police chiefs are suggesting to the government that it should ticket people smoking on the street instead of arresting them, while the federal government is advancing notion of USA style crack down (recently mandatory minimum jail time for growing was passed).

It's not clear what will happen if police catch you smoking on the street, but my feeling is that it may not be treated as a minor issue like it would have been 10 years ago.
Thanks for this, my 'skeptical' sister in law will believe snopes.
Clojure would be my first choice, esp since you're fond of the JVM. Python is also good, esp for non-JVM projects.

Python and JVM languages give you access to the widest range of high-quality libraries, esp in the data processing space, and having high-quality libraries that you didn't have to write is key for rapid prototyping.

Clojure REPL-driven development enables you to define and evaluate functions inline, and the immediate feedback makes development fly. Combine this with Clojure's lack-of-verbosity, first-class Java interop that gives you access to all Java's libs, and Clojure's concurrency model, and you have a toolset ideal for rapid development that doesn't sacrifice performance.

Pedestal (http://pedestal.io/) is the Clojure Web toolkit I would use -- it's designed/backed by Cognitect (http://cognitect.com), Rich Hickey's new company.
I'm not sure RSA would want to make that defense. Right now they're claiming that they made the changes to keep the NSA as a customer and because that customer demanded them and they didn't see the harm.

To argue they were actively working with the NSA on an intelligence operation, while possibly granting them immunity there, would likely cost them even more customers.
Google already has a product for that that's fairly widely used:

https://www.google.com/cse/
Could Evernote be substantially replicated using email technologies like IMAP and Postfix/Dovecot, etc?
A man dedicated to making toys from trash
> I've always considered it bad to use the RH provided python for development.

May I ask why?

I see why maybe using your own compiled 2.7 or 3 might be nice, I don't, I just use the one that comes in with CentOS/RHEL 6.

* It get regular security updates from upstream

* Easy to install, it is part of existing package dependency chain (as opposed to say doing make ; make install from source)

* It comes with a default repo

* Most Python packages today are compatible with 2.6
I'd hate to be one of the congress members that this took by surprise (assuming there ARE any that actually did not know) -- you'd be quickly made aware of your lack of power.
This is a great example of search result subjectivity. I don't care about football. I'm annoyed when it rudely intrudes my consciousness. If I type "eagles" into a search engine, I'm looking for the band. The football team has no relevance to me, even as millions of other people tonight are probably looking for exactly what Google showed you.
How about distributing the indexing to browser plugins? Apart from delegating the work and displacing crawlers, it would also help with relevance, currency, and avoiding link farms.
ROTFL. Sh..t, that is just dead stupid!
Pretty certain COM was designed with C in mind, maybe C++ as an after-thought. The differences between C++ objects and COM objects are severe enough to make it not really a lot of fun unless you limit yourself to C-like behaviors anyway (or use Microsoft's dandy language extensions to generate a crapload of boilerplate for you).
At Google there is an internal metric that always shows Google search quality leading Bing's. That's fine, but I always wondered if Bing has the same internal search quality metrics and they are always ahead?
Well, if we in the UK are some how responsible for Euro spying on behalf of our US masters, then presumably GCHQ is the centre for all spying on all US citizens who come to Europe. I kinda think its almost a silly question. Of course we are, we are just waiting for the relevant leak to confirm it.

UK wise, I reckon its possibly more worthwhile to ask about GCHQ spying on MP's, UK MEPs, and members of the House of Lords. However, we actually do know that UK security services do spy on elected officials as we know a hell of a lot about what they got up to in Norther Ireland. IIRC, Americans were historically critical of how we treated Irish freedom fighters..... or was it terrorists? But were mainland British folk concerned because they spied on Northern Irish politicians? Not that I know of. Then look at the reaction of British politicians to the Snowden leaks. Pretty muted. Again, I suspect that they are kept in line by implied blackmail.

What might be vaguely useful is if we had a set of standard well formatted questions, that people can copy and use to send to our MPs.
> It's now 2014, actually

Is that really the kind of discussion you want this to be?

> you're talking about a problem from 1997,

The last revision of the article is 2002. But your point is well taken. I had assumed this was a current issue. (Maybe it is. I don't have time to dig into those details right now.)

> in an OS where backwards compatibility has been an extremely high priority since the 1980s

OS X was introduced in 2001, and it could run OS 9 applications, so these kinds of problems can be solved if a company decides it is worthwhile to solve them.
The reason for the "getit" page was, at least at one point, because the "download" page was blocked throughout China.