skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Man, people are really eager to espouse malice to Microsoft. The author's posit is probably not the case. Let's go over 2 things the external viewer should understand about Bing:

1. It represents a major technology refresh. As such, there are bound to be rough spots as the search engineers fine-tune their new index and ranking. Same goes for the sub-sections of the site (like the reference search, video search, image search), most of them have not rolled out all their features just yet, and are still improving results.

2. One area where Google retains an advantage is with very long query strings. Some sub-components of Bing (e.g., reference) can handle long query strings with aplomb, but in general keyword search engines suck with long queries. Google has been working on this steadily for years, and Bing still has a ways to go before matching Google's performance there.

But then again, most few engines answer this query the way Google does, so I wonder if maybe Google has some tuning for this specific kind of query in their ranker.

Check out the yahoo results:
http://idisk.me.com/dfayram/Public/Pictures/Skitch/yahoo-res...

Check out the Altavista (yeah, they're still up!) results:
http://idisk.me.com/dfayram/Public/Pictures/Skitch/altavista...

Check out the Ask.com results:
http://idisk.me.com/dfayram/Public/Pictures/Skitch/ask-20090...

Only Ask.com actually pulls back that page. And Ask.com's early business model was devoted to english-ish question queries.

People need to understand that search engine ranking is a problem harder than they understand. Unless you're working on it right now, you probably have no clue the huge amount of subtle thought, heuristics, and outright fudge factors that go into making a good, modern ranking function. Things which were reasonable 2 years ago are now insufficient. This is not a solved problem, and no one really shares algorithms to improve the performance of all their competitors.
So: for those of us familiar with pg's teachings (the shoe, thankyou, not the gourd), is there much that's worth watching the video for, or is it a rehash?
How is your comment relevant to this discussion?
I thought that all this bad publicity wouldn't hurt Apple and the App Store model, but in the last few days I've heard many people how aren't geeks and who don't even own an iPhone talking about Cydia.
Second that. I knew the laws in the states were bad, but I didn't know they were that bad. Not that it's perfect in Northern Europe.
Technically, it probably would be, which highlights the inanity of these laws.
It's not goatse. Given the curve of the bars and the placement of the downward pointing triangle,it's a abstract of a woman's torso.
That's pretty sweet! I thought this video was great: http://felixsmachines.com/video.html
That's a pretty dim view of humanity-- do you really think that no one before Archimedes realized that stones displace water? Archimedes' "Eureka!" moment was a bit more profound than that.
I've been making the feelSpace belt with an Arduino Pro Mini:
http://feelspace.cogsci.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/technology_01.h...

However, I haven't been able to find a cheap source of tiny vibrating motors (e.g. pager motors), so the project's at a standstill right now.
Well, I don't think it is a general rule, in my comment I was referring exclusively to my experience with the group of people I was working with. These were very talented engineers with a great product idea, yet the whole thing finally deviated into doing whatever so that we could pay the rent and the bills. The guy who is still running the company is doing great, nevertheless the company never sold the product we originally envisioned nor it evolved from that concept.
Is $4.95 cheap enough? http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...

For anyone that hasn't heard of Sparkfun, it's kinda of like a small Newegg for electronics projects.
The basics of search engine ranking are so well understood that if your engine does not pull up results comparable or better than your competition that you have a serious algorithmic problem. The results, after all are a given. The method you use to arrive at them creates some variation but does not magically wipe out certain results completely and replaces them with spam pages. (unless of course your algorithm is seriously broken).

I dare to say the above because I built a proof-of-concept engine about 3 years ago, it took several months and was eventually abandoned because I foresaw that the amount of funding needed to do all the crawling (bandwidth costs) and to scale up the design to hold billions of pages in stead of 100's of millions of pages (pretty good for an amateur effort) was beyond my ability to raise.

The quality of the results had little to do with it, the differences when comparing with google were mostly in how the results were ranked, with google outperforming my little toy considerably. But if a page was present and relevant I invariably found that it was somewhere near the top, but usually not in the 'right' order.

To miss out on relevant content that had been 'seen' would have taken a serious effort.

Keep in mind that ranking only is a factor AFTER you have the relevant results for a query, it is a sorting issue. That does not mean that google or any other engine actually does the sorting when it displays your search results page, but effectively that is what is happening, it is just that for efficiency reasons that the process behind the scenes is setup completely different. Stuff does not magically disappear because of ranking (unless it gets pushed beyond page 100 in googles example, but that means there are more than 1000 links 'relevant' for a given query). You'd have to really mess up to get two engines rank the same page for the same result near the top 1,000 slots lower in the alternative.

I hope this is all clear, these are difficult concepts, the best way to learn about this stuff is to implement a toy search engine/crawler combo yourself. 80legs.com makes it a lot easier nowadays than it was in the past.
The default robots.txt on my Axis camera is deny. Myself and many others often change this to watch people play with the camera and catch things out of the ordinary. Mine is a 35x optical zoom, pan and tilt, have fun:

http://www.dattaway.net:8000/view/viewer_index.shtml
I'm curious. Does hosting with Amazon imply EC2? Or S3 static files? Or some other form of hosting I am unaware of?
Roadmap May Reveal Windows 8 Date
Fake bus stop keeps Alzheimer's patients from escaping
To paraphrase Justice Warren on pornography... you'll know it when you see it.

A lot of people need to step back and realize the sheer absurdity of Apple, a maker of software and consumer gadgets suddenly going into the content censorship business. The Apple App stored seemed rotten to be from the beginning and it's lived up to my expectations.

At the end of the day, there's very few things Apple needs to worry about:

- is the app malicious or hurtful to the system or users?

- does the user have enough info make a decision on whether they want the app or not?

Schiller's reply on Daring Fireball showed that they don't quite get it. They still believe they should be the ones with the final authority, not users.
Sigh. I'm interested but can't possibly divert over an hour of screentime for it.

An MP3 or ipod-video download would be appreciated.
Speed Up Your PC Free | TechJaws: Internet Security and SEO
The original claim was "The United States is subsidizing the medical expenses of the rest of the planet."

When some evidence was provided, you stated that per capita they're only doing 1/3 more than the UK.

The thing is, that original claim that others were arguing with had nothing to do with per capita. The proposition is based on absolute numbers.

And for the larger argument about what current proposals would do to innovation in medical treatments, what we're really talking about is the total amount of research, not per capita -- the latter is a red herring.

The fear is that, if the USA clamps down on healthcare spending, then much of the research that's done in the USA won't continue. And if that's the case, then the pace of improvements in healthcare will slow, and in the long run that's a very bad thing.

That proposition is certainly open to debate. But decomposing the facts into per capita data is a red herring that does nothing to resolve the question one way or another.
Back in 2000 I did a startup with a B2B web-based app for an enterprise vertical (large homebuilders). We tried both hiring an enterprise sales guy and schlepping it ourselves, and here are my take-aways from that experience.

"Successful enterprise salesperson happy to join a cash strapped startup" is an oxymoron in more than one way. Other posters explained it: these salespeople expect big support, big budgets, ads to generate leads, junior staffers to screen the leads, etc. They also expect a lot of cash compensation: virtually all such people I have ever met usually like flashy and expensive lifestyles, because in what they do the appearance of success is one of the factors that breeds success. I remember one guy who seemed very enthusiastic about joining us, but then the deal fell apart because in his contract he absolutely would not budge from first class air travel and Jaguar-class rental cars.

Then we decided to do it ourselves (the founders). We networked the hell out of any friend we had, and our intro to prospects was "Look, we are not sales guys, we are entrepreneurs. We think we have a kick-ass product and we'd love to show it to you, and since we are still small the price to you will be super-cheap compared to the competition if you help us improve it to fit your needs." That way we eliminated a lot of issues and we tried to compete on a different playing field.

The result: we got clients to work with us, and the sales guy we hired never managed to go past a first meeting.
This is a really common problem (we have it, too, FWIW).

Question: Which outstanding salesperson would join a startup that had a low base salary, no draw for salepeople, no proven sales model, minimal marketing material, a moving target for a product, inexperienced management, no sales peers, no leadgen team, no client base to sell into and reference from, an unproven compensation scheme, etc...

From a sales point of view (selling the job to someone good), you have a pretty terrible product. :-) The only way to get around this is to pile on tons of equity, find a sales guy who is passionate about your product, or find one who is bored and thinks startups would be fun. Even then, it's a tremendous leap of faith and your startup has to feel like a likely home run. Salesfolks are financially motivated (usually) and you have an uphill battle here.

The other alternative is to find a "diamond in the rough" - but obviously that's hard to do. I honestly think that's the only alternative if you can't afford the real deal-- because the best guys will run away screaming or laughing. A startup is a terrible financial bet for a salesperson.
I would think that a more proper boycott of Apple's policy in this case would be to jailbreak the iphone. This way, you're boycotting the app store, not the phone itself.
I was overjoyed to find a director's commentary for amongst my favourite films ever: Ferris Bueller's Day Off, on the DVD.

One thing I said in 1998 is that I wish they had a device to erase movies like Ferris Bueller from your memory so you can watch and enjoy them again and again!
No, it's a feature of that particular system. You're discounting the entire idea of single payer health care because one particular version

You're misunderstanding. I'm not saying that all are bad because (at least) a few have a particular feature. I'm citing two examples to show that the "progressive" movement in healthcare shows a trend toward that bad feature. This should be a warning to us about a) the motivations of those pushing this; and b) should we really decide that "reform" is necessary, we ought to guard against this.

Except of course for the however many millions that can't actually access any of this medical treatment. That's the whole crux of things

If that's the crux of this, then you've lost the argument. The premise that you're working from is simply erroneous. It is untrue that many millions cannot access any of these treatments. In the USA, anyone can walk into the emergency room and get treated. While it's true that esoteric treatments having sky-high prices (say, heart transplant) won't be provided, all of the basic services will be provided even to those unable to pay on their own.

FWIW, my wife is the Manager of Budget and Reimbursement at a largish urban hospital. She spends a fair amount of her time coordinating with Medicaid to get the hospital reimbursed for the cost of treating charity and bad debt cases. You seem to be saying that this is all a figment of her imagination, that the hospital is actually turning away all of these people. That ain't so: even the homeless get treatment in America, with the system we have today.
People get happier as they age
Anyone get anything from this "article"?
What kind of girl gives a blowjob while in clas?? IMO she deserves what she got because she's a sex-crazy whore. (Only sex-crazy people would have (oral) sex in a class with other students and the teacher)
Hi. I'm an employee of Microsoft, which is why I have to be so vague about them. I was an employee of Powerset.com, which implemented a natural language search engine of non-trivial size. We were recently purchased by Microsoft. I've worked closely on Powerset's search engine infrastructure and with their linguistic packages for just about 2 years now, and I've started to understand some of what Bing is doing in the last 6 months.

The basics of search engine ranking are well understood, but compare those basics to the results that Google and Bing pull up and you start to see some serious discrepancies from naive rankers. This is because query type strongly influences ranking decisions, and there is implicit knowledge that STRONGLY affects ranking. A trivial example is the geoip data of a querier, which can be used to aid ranking for queries like "presidential scandals". But trending news headlines might also be an input to your ranking algorithm. A very good ranker like what Google and Bing employ is a complex beast with special inputs heuristics, and secret tricks which make them as good as they are.

I confess, I am predisposed to be very irritated at your post. You made a toy engine (and no, holding 100's of millions of pages in a keyword index really isn't a huge deal these days), a toy ranker, and now you're an expert on the state of the art? But before I can get too angry I have to admit that when I left mog.com to go to powerset.com, totally ignorant about all but the basics of search, I too had a similar opinion. I figured we'd just use some variant of LSA for relevance and be done with it. Boy, was I wrong. So I can't get too angry at you about it.
am I the only person that finds bitching about OT more annoying than seeing actual OT stuff voted up. Its been said a million times, just flag it.
IMHO the reason people never give upgrading OSX a second thought is the learning curve. Apple does not change where things are for no reason. Microsoft seems to be supporting bloated IT departments with needless changes to system setting menus. Someone has to learn and then teach where they were moved.
Case in point:
My Mom (82 years old) upgrades her Mac with every OS apple comes out with and never misses a step. Her needs are quite similar to my Wifey who teaches yearbook at the local school. Both use Photoshop, excessively email, make slide shows and albums. Wifey is running XP because Vista required learning new places for the same old or slightly upgraded settings. I doubt she will change to Vista until Microsoft forces her to for the same reason. You can guess who is having a good user experience.
How is your comment relevant to this discussion?

God forbid the guy gives someone a tip that could prove to be useful in the future. Using example.com puts you that much further away from lemonparty. Might not be a big issue on THIS forum, but if he uses http://randomurl.com anywhere else (work presentation, whatever) and it's free and I go register it, well, it could be damaging to him.

Stop your useless bitching and go do something that's actually productive. If what he's doing isn't relevant, how is your comment about his relevancy relevant to a bug? It isn't.
Another one of these? This has to be the fifth "Teens don't use Twitter" article I've seen. We get it! Most teenagers stick to Facebook. Twitter takes a bit more before it "clicks" for most people, and most teens aren't going to put in that effort when they can just stick to Facebook.
> So I can't get too angry at you about it.

Thank you for that :)

Ok, so I'll take your word for it then, you are obviously the expert in the field.

I did not mean to step on your toes, I hope that I'm as well informed as you can be about the subject as an 'outsider', if there is anything that you can reveal about the real reasons for these discrepancies then consider me all ears.

I'm not above wanting to learn about this stuff (that's why I'm on HN in the first place), my perspective to date (based on my own effort and whatever I could read up on that is publicly accessible) was that the results are not the hard thing, the spam is where the real problems lie.

Fudge factors does not sound encouraging by the way, possibly you are proving the original posters point here in some unintended way ;)

EDIT: it would be nice if you could state clearly that you are not aware of any direct effort on the part of microsoft that influences the search results in a way that either promotes microsoft and their products and/or changes the results when they are critical of microsoft, including the blacklisting of critical pages. I think that would go a very long way to laying these rumours to rest. It's microsofts trust image that comes to the surface here, and it seems that that is not very high. Chinese walls between search and the rest of the company would have been the way to go here.
Vote me down all you want, I think it's important to say it clearly and publicly in order to communicate it.
How to find a programming mentor or (better yet) an enthusiast group?
So I'd like to find a programming mentor in my area. Or better yet, an enthusiast group. Think Toastmasters for programming. A LUG or MUG only for programmers of all ages and skill levels, where the only requirement is to get better. An environment of mutual encouragement.

Does such a thing exist? How would I find one? Searching the 'net hasn't produced much in the way of useful results.

I'd like to find a similar thing for mathematics -- specifically statistics -- but my focus right now is on programming.
I'm building a 5' stage backdrop for performing (I'm a singer/songwriter) using the ledstrip Arduino library (http://code.google.com/p/ledstrip/) and 15' of lights I bought from coolight.com.hk.

So far I have a little electret microphone hooked up to it and I have the lights reacting when I sing into it. I'm still working out how I want them to react in the final version (changing colour + speed/intensity), then I'm going to hook it up to a foot pedal as well so I can trigger it selectively (e.g., during the chorus of a couple songs) and build the actual backdrop setup.

The Arduino is really fun. After this I'm going to try my hand at custom guitar pedals and maybe a theremin.
It brought back a little of that early-web, fish-cam thrill when I realized that I could actually control pan and tilt on that camera.
Until someone develops a phone thats as easy-to-use, feature rich, and as pretty as the iPhone, the smart money will be to develop for the platform, evil as the approval process is.

The simple fact is that Apple is light-years ahead of the competition with the iPhone and looks to remain in that position for the forseeable future. And I say that as an Android owner with no Macs in my house.
Yeah, surely someone got a free beer out of that one.

I wonder, once you've convinced yourself the idea isn't crazy, how you go about convincing someone else --- No, look at the tidal chart, and then look at this variation here. See? And then one day you've hit critical mass and the whole lab is looking at train tables, the passage of the moon, and how often yo' momma brings you lunch, trying to find correspondences.

Or maybe there was already a list of possible confabulations, in decending order, and they checked them off one by one. That would be less amusing, I think.
A transcript would be great.
(Edit: This got dead-ed but just in case someone sees this via RSS and has no idea what I'm talking about the original article's here: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1...)

First, I find this as disgusting as you. But I’m going to take the unpopular side here and point out that, in an imperfect world, this is how things have to work.

Let me explain my point. Politicians often aren’t the brightest bulbs in the set. They are people who can convince a lot of other people to like them which makes most the equivalent of good con men. So after they’re elected they tend not to think things through and make simplistic laws like “Any adult performing any sex act on a minor is guilty” (which of course ignores the 17 year old having consensual sex with the 15 year old in high school). But there are checks on a law’s power. Cops and Judges both have discretion for this very reason. But sometimes the system fails and you get lazy cops, a lazy judge and a lazy prosecutor who all don’t care enough to do their job. Then you end up with the situation quoted in the first part of this article.

But here’s the thing: Yes, I think it’s unjust and I think the politicians, lawyer, judge, cops, etc... in this story are all deplorable fools. But the world will always have deplorable fools and only when someone’s burned by them do the rest of us realize something’s wrong so we can fix it. As the article points out the law that got this woman into trouble no longer exists because people saw the abuse and demanded it be changed.

So one person suffers but thousands of others won’t in the future. I wish that one person didn’t have to suffer but it’s inherent in a system where the primary skill of our elected officials is “likability” rather than “intelligence”
Way back in the day of the first ptz webcams we were installing one in a zoo in Amersfoort, the Netherlands where an Elephant was about to give birth.

The webcast was tremendously popular, over half a million visitors over the course of a few days (at the time this was phenomenal), we set up relay stations just to be able to handle the bandwidth.

Being in a cage with a 6 metric tons pregnant elephant is quite an experience I can tell you :)

edit: here is a panda: http://www.sandiegozoo.org/pandacam/index.html
An Open Source Custom Nav Controller for iPhone Programming
Oh, please. Not buying it. Nothing to see here.
You might also be interested in this large collection of PostgreSQL SQL tricks: http://www.postgres.cz/index.php/PostgreSQL_SQL_Tricks
Thank you for making my day. I actually clapped my hands like a mechanical monkey and said "Yay! A giraffe!"
High Blood Pressure Basics
Not to get off topic, but Warren didn't write that, did he?
Also, teensy board projects would be nice to know about.
Suggestions please? I tried Foxit Reader for Linux, no dice, c/p still picks up gibberish. pdf2txt can't extract it. Printing to a ps doesn't help. Would be very curious to hear of hacks around this restriction.
I think this is the Sequoia presentation they were talking about: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/1822343/Sequoia-Venture-Capital-...

edit: found the post also http://hackerne.ws/item?id=328685
Notes on migrating this blog from SQLite to PostgreSQL using Django
Why Developers Prefer Simple Solutions
Paul and Michael are always worth hearing from; Guy, not so much.
Why you can't trust those jobs figures