skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Apps for travel
I traveling to the United States this October. I was wondering, what would some imp. Apps be so that Im able to enjoy the trip ?
Apples to apples, this is less of an answer to adwords and more along the lines of an adsense competitor. IMHO This launch will take a huge bite out of quantcast + any cookie pooling/dmp companies. It will also be interesting to see how adroll and other retargeting companies end up fairing.

Budget-wise, I think this will expand the pie for over all ad spend rather than suck out any air from googles ad platforms.

Chris Dixon basically describes this game plan 4 years ago, http://cdixon.org/2010/05/15/facebook-is-about-to-try-to-dom...
Everything was pointing towards free TLS for everyone, but thank you. I won't be using this with Windows Server.
Well... that's a pretty drastic reasoning, leaving aside all weighting of facts. Does it also apply to a Haskell programmer running System.Process? ;-)

The fact is: system() and all it's relatives (popen comes immediately to mind, there are doubtlessly 100 others) have been used, will be used, by 'incompetent' programmers[+] and as long as no other method is as widely established (and: even taught in introductory textbooks), we better provide a workaround that closes most of the holes.

[+] or just programmers weighting the merits of having a parser supporting variable and home-directory expansion, curtesy of /bin/sh -c right built in, which is completely adequate for many tasks. And yes, I know the limitations of it, and would not use it myself most of the time.
I really wish I had some benchmarks here. Postgres can be crazy fast, but can it compete with Elasticsearch? How long would a typical query across 1,000,000 documents?
While it's certainly good enough for english bodies, its half-assed support for compounds is a problem for bodies in languages that use compounds (German for example).

There is sorta-support for compounds, but only really for ispell dictionaries and the ispell format isn't very good at dealing with compounds (you have to declare all permutations and manually flag them as compoundable) plus the world overall has moved over to hunspell, so even just getting an ispell dictionary is tricky.

As a reminder: This is about finding the "wurst" in "weisswürste" for example.

Furthermore, another problem is that the decision whether the output of a dictionary module should be chained into the next module specified or not is up to the C code of the module itself, not part of the FTS config.

This bit me for example when I wanted to have a thesaurus match for common misspellings and colloquial terms which I then further wanted to feed into the dictionary, again for compound matching.

Unfortunately, the thesaurus module is configured as a non-chainable one, so once there's a thesaurus match, that's what's ending up in the index. No chance to ever also looking it up in the dictionary.

Changing this requires changing the C code and subsequently deploying your custom module, all of which is certainly doable but also additional work you might not want to have to do.

And finally: If you use a dictionary, keep in mind that it's by default not shared between connections. That means that you have to pay the price of loading that dictionary whenever you use the text search engine the first time over a connection.

For smaller dictionaries, this isn't significant, but due to the compound handling in ispell, you'll have huge-ass(tm) dictionaries. Case in point is ours which is about 25 Megs in size and costs 0.5 seconds of load time on an 8 drive 15K RAID10 array.

In practice (i.e. whenever you want to respond to a search in less than 0.5 secs, which is, I would argue, always), this forces you to either use some kind of connection pooling (which can have other side-effects for your application), or you use the shared_ispell extension (http://pgxn.org/dist/shared_ispell), though I've seen crashes in production when using that which led me to go back to pgbouncer.

Aside of these limitations (neither of which will apply to you if you have an english body, because searching these works without a dictionary to begin with), yes, it works great.

(edited: Added a note about chaining dictionary modules)
No worse than what US authorities did in 'Occupy' protests...
That's going to depend on the size of the documents, number of terms, etc. The other big question is ranking -- from what I can tell, PostgreSQL's ranking functions (ts_rank and ts_rank_cd) can be performance problems, but I haven't seen any good head-to-head benchmarks on a given corpus.
I've been working on an application that might help with some of these issues. It allows protesters to communicate anonymously and securely in crowds using adhoc wifi/bluetooth and onion routing. Protest leaders can create a protest and add a password that spreads via word of mouth in the crowd and ideally isn't told to police/security forces. Leaders can designate lieutenants and the chat can be read-only to everyone except them. And it works even if security forces turn cell towers off. The work in progress is here: https://github.com/jackflips/Protest

I need help building an android version and fixing/auditing the current code. If that sounds interesting please get in touch :)
I've got a project that needed multilingual support over very, very small documents, and ended up just rolling that myself -- neither ElasticSearch nor Postgres cope very well when you start mixing multiple languages in the same document.
Will cost around 100$/month with sources.
This is an extra thing, not the big announcement that we've been talking about. That comes Monday (California time)... not long now.
Stay tuned. Wanted to get this out of the way first. :-)
This sort of culture needs to be weeded out. We are perfectly able to create enough waste as it is, there should be no need to advocate this sort of mentality any further. Either donate directly or don't.
I've heard certain types of schedulers can take the position of the disk head into account.
You dont need to sign up to check the demo. Simply click on the login button. In fact registration is not yet open. Thx we will check what s wrong on FF.
Really? Let's say I'm a fly fishing lodge... What do you think I'd pay more for:

1) someone who visits fishing websites
2) an individual who purchased (verified by credit card data) $5K worth of fly fishing gear
The good news is that you can always just stop giving Facebook information about you. I have largely stopped using Facebook a couple of years ago, though I joined in 2004. I use text, email, phone to communicate. I don't really have any urge to sign in and view my feed, the most interesting stuff I find on HN and Reddit. If there is something truly important about a friend, I'll hear about it whether or not I use Facebook. In general, the less I use Facebook the more focused and productive I am. Thats just me though, I have plenty of friends signing in on a daily basis and consuming the newsfeed like popcorn.
I don't think it's a glum sign. They're still selling for a significant margin over what retail prices will be. And if you, as a prospective buyer, only need to wait a couple more weeks to get your hands on one[1], why would you pay double retail price?

[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/09/27/apple-expected-to-...
Fun coincidence: Bismarck implemented the first welfare state in the history of the world, with sickness, accident and disability insurance and old age pension.

To quote:

The real grievance of the worker is the insecurity of his existence; he is not sure that he will always have work, he is not sure that he will always be healthy, and he foresees that he will one day be old and unfit to work. If he falls into poverty, even if only through a prolonged illness, he is then completely helpless, left to his own devices, and society does not currently recognize any real obligation towards him beyond the usual help for the poor, even if he has been working all the time ever so faithfully and diligently. The usual help for the poor, however, leaves a lot to be desired, especially in large cities, where it is very much worse than in the country.
This maybe an incredibly naive question, but couldn't you work around the compounding issue with wild carding?
It will be interesting to see how advertisers take advantage of this data without alienating people. A lot of people don't mind seeing a targeted ad on Facebook since they have a relationship with them but would be disturbed to see a very target ad in another app. Target saw this when trying to deploy their targeting to pregnant women, they had to camouflage their pregnancy product coupons with other random ones as "some women react badly" [1].

Also article claims that Facebook isn't selling your data but aren't they really if advertisers are going to get to set a cookie for usual advertising accounting of reach and view caps? E.g. Buy campaign targeting users with qualities X,Y & Z and then set a cooking on users who saw the ads so now I know they are all X,Y & Z.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...
* You can demo without creating an account. In fact creating accounts is not yet open.
* Thx for the feedbacks. Will def help for the next release. Thx.
I haven't made benchmarks specifically against other products, but we use PostgreSQL across a database of 7.7m blog-post length documents and have found the search to be extremely fast.

The only times in which search slows down is when you search for common words that are not stop words and are also performing ordering (such as ranking) across that body of results before returning your window. That is to say, the search is still fast but sorting a large resultset can be slow.

The only gotchas I would call out to anyone thinking of using PostgreSQL full text search are:

1) Beware of row-level queries like ts_highlight() for extracting a fragment of the matched text, be sure that you are only doing this for the n lines that you are returning for a LIMIT and not the entire resultset (most of which you will discard).

2) Beware of accuracy and think about the text you are indexing. If you are receiving raw markdown and transforming to HTML, then you shouldn't index either (raw markdown may contain XSS attacks that can survive ts_highlight(), and the transformed HTML will contain markup that will be indexed). You should figure out a way to build a block of raw text that is safe to index and to show fragments for (ts_highlight()) which likely means running a striptags() over the HTML and also putting hyperlinks into the text (if you want those to be searchable) and indexing that.

We had no issues with performance, control over search ordering, or anything else. The only gotchas we encountered related to sorting and displaying results, and we resolved both easily enough, though too few of the high-level docs like the linked article pointed out the potential issues there.
That's why they're rolling this out via Atlas, an enterprise ad server. They're focused on brand dollars, which go toward demographic targeting rather than intent/behavioral.
Ask HN: Software for creating my own Yahoo Directory or DMOZ
Now that Yahoo! Directory is disappearing, I'd like to create my own directory of websites. Are there any open-source software solutions for creating these kind of directories?
Postgres, elasticsearch and SOLR all seem pretty heavyweight to me.

What's the lightweight approach to create an inverted index nowadays with some basic stemming?
This makes a lot of sense for certain problems in the domain. I've thought a few times about how to introduce the right bit of agency into actors in order to have them accomplish a larger goal without a central authority.

I created a couchbase cluster joiner that would have the nodes converge into a single initial cluster based on ec2 tags. I thought about how people would group up on their own when walking into a room and came up with:

Join a group
Judge value of group(is it the largest + tie breaker)
Leave and join group of highest value

The problem wasn't so hard as the termites but it removed the need for a central controller.. And I was proud of myself :)
The key questions I have are:

- Will this respect DoNotTrack?
- Will Facebook users be able to opt-out of this targetting?
- Will it respect my privacy settings when I set all my "personal" data to "Only me" or "Friends only"?

I find it quite abhorrent that a service, so personal, is now truly using that data against me whilst I'm outside of the service. I will be among the first to leave if the answer to all these questions is no.
> I suffer the daily experience of being baffled by articles in my field, my subfield, even my sub-sub-subfield. The methods section of an experimental paper explains, "Participants read assertions whose veracity was either affirmed or denied by the subsequent presentation of an assessment word." After some detective work, I determined that it meant, "Participants read sentences, each followed by the word true or false." The original academese was not as concise, accurate, or scientific as the plain English translation. So why did my colleague feel compelled to pile up the polysyllables?

This reminds me of something from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!". Feynman was attending some kind of interdisciplinary conference, and says:

------- begin quote -------

There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read – something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on that list. I have this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself, “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means.”

So I stopped – at random – and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”

------- end quote -------

Feynman wasn't the only one who could not understand what others were saying:

------- begin quote -------

There was only one thing that happened at that meeting that was pleasant or amusing. At this conference, every word that every guy said at the plenary session was so important that they had a stenotypist there, typing every Goddamn thing. Somewhere on the second day the stenotypist came up to me and said, “What profession are you? Surely not a professor.”

“I am a professor,” I said.

“Of what?”

“Of physics – science.”

“Oh! That must be the reason,” he said.

“Reason for what?”

He said, “You see, I’m a stenotypist, and I type everything that is said here. Now, when the other fellas talk, I type what they say, but I don’t understand what they’re saying. But every time you get up to ask a question or to say something, I understand exactly what you mean – what the question is, and what you’re saying – so I thought you can’t be a professor!”

------- end quote -------
Well, I would say that "ESP is not sending emails" is a slight exaggeration when one person out of hundreds has problems downloading the book (hello_newman seems to already have downloaded it without my help).

Again, just drop me a line (so I know which address you used to signup and I will send you the link).
So far Apple has been able to stay out of the race to the bottom when it comes to prices of its devices. And it did not look that the price of its devices was going to slow its sales much.
I have always believed the 2 year contract system with small upfront cost has helped Apple move devices a lot in the US. And without 2 year contracts it would not dominate as much as it does.
Previous submission not more than a day ago with more than 60 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8378819
>he hoped a new crackdown on smuggling by customs officers would help push their price back up.

Black market economics. Restrict the flow of desired product only serves to enrich those with access to the distribution channels.
Thanks for the clarification and insight :) I was mistakenly under the impression that stampede was utilizing Fleet's scheduling abilities.. Assumptions :[
Well the article is right in one sense: Postgres full text search is probably better than you think it would be and is very usable at non-massive scale

However, I still wouldn't recommend using it. The queries and indexes are all unintuitive, complex, not very readable and require learning a bunch of new syntax anyways (as you can see in the examples in the blog post). So just take the effort you would spend doing that and instead learn something with more features that will continue running no matter how large your scale.

While the blog mentions elasticsearch/solr (which are awesome and powerful), it doesn't mention sphinx (http://sphinxsearch.com/). If I were trying to make a simple search engine for my postgres/mysql powered site, I'd use sphinx. The indexer can be fed directly with a postgres/mysql query, and it includes simple APIs for all languages to interface with the searcher daemon. And of course it is super fast, has way more features and can scale larger than you'd ever need (sphinx powers craiglist's search).
Nope, because that wouldn't work with stemming and pluralizing.

Think finding "weisswürste" when people search for wurst. Unless you correctly build a tvector of (weiss, wurst) from "weisswürste", even with wildcarding hacks, you'd have to search for "würste" to find it.

Also: Not all words are compoundable. Doing a blind wildcard search would lead to false-positives which is somewhere between annoying and very annoying for the user.
If it's indeed the same document, you're screwed. Yes. But in Postgres, I could at least have different column (or join tables with different language codes) for different languages and then query them with either dictionary.

ElasticSearch doesn't support that: All fields in a document are assumed to be of the same language which leads to a huge duplication of documents in cases where most fields of a document are language-independent.
C# got rid of type erasure and is better for it. Java really needs to bite the bullet and do the same. It is just a compatibility hack anyway.
That's basically what I ended up doing -- writing an analyzer that made a reasonable guess as to what language each word was, and filing it into the appropriate bucket, with a generic bucket for "everything else".

Ranking is another story, though.
Well, great! I sometimes forget timezones. It's already Monday here.
Keep in mind that preserving space was of the utmost of importance in 1982. Eliminating data redundancy was considered the utmost of design, eschewing maintainability, intelligibility, and real application behaviors.

Please do not allow your data model designs to be artificially constrained by the requirements of the past.
Can't the author sell the app over his own website and process the billig over fastspring?

At least that is what Peter Borg does with Lingon (https://sites.fastspring.com/peterborgapps/product/lingonx).
The Science Behind Why Jeff Bezos'2-Pizza Rule Works
When I'm travelling internationally, a currency converter is always a
good one to have.

You can try searching for public transit apps specific to the
cities you'll be visiting. Depending on where you'll be travelling,
there are some nice ones that have built-in maps of the transit system,
trip planning, and real-time departure estimates. For a city like San Francisco, you may need more than one to cover the various public transit providers available (BART vs MUNI, etc). Lacking a specific app, you may want to just bookmark mobile versions of the public transit provider's website.

I also like installing a maps program that can make use of offline data.
On Android, there's OsmAnd. That way, even if you no longer have data
service, you can use the GPS to get a sense of where you are and what's
nearby.

TripIt can be nice for keeping your travel itinerary easily accessible
-- but of course it's always good to have hardcopies either on your
person or in your carry-on.

Good luck!
Re Ferguson - I hope they didn't take a page from what was clearly one of the most inept police actions in recent history...one would think they were smarter than that.
Similar project:
Danube: http://projectdanube.org/
> Chinese military base in HK since 1997

the drinkbottle? Passed through last week and didn't see anything out of the ordinary.
Reality is not git: You can't just rewrite history.
Prolog is a full programming language, SPARQL is only a query language.
redis sets or sorted sets with a npl library (natural for node, treat for ruby...).

I'm sure there are packages that do the storage and retrieval for you, but it's the sort of lightweight thing you can do quickly and tweak from there.
The students were already boycotting classes and attending the protests around the CGO on Friday.
http://xapian.org/
Eliminating data redundancy isn't about saving space and can increase space requirements depending on the data. It's really just the database equivalent of the DRY[1] principle. Which is itself about maintainability, intelligibility, and real application behaviors. Although I will admit that 4th and 5th forms can trade intelligibility for flexibility.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself
You can always just roll your own with lucene or lucene.NET, which is what ES/SOLR use underneath.
7 Motivational blogs for Managers
Facebook is the only platform that has the scale necessary in the english speaking world to attempt a full-blown competitor to AdSense. I'd suspect that Facebook's relatively slow crawl toward full monetization is part of the reason they didn't do it sooner. They're just now getting the ad machine up to speed.

I'm also curious to see what kind of results Amazon's new ad network efforts yield. Narrower scope in some regards, but they obviously have incredibly valuable data.
I would disagree with you. if executed correctly they can generate a really great return. it entirely depends on what you're promoting and how you're promoting it just like any other channel.
Those sites probably cookied you with an FBX retargeting pixel and then followed you to FB.
Ask HN: Is there a service to interpret raw genetic data from 23andMe?
Due to an FDA order, 23andMe no longer provides health related reports. However, I still have access to raw genetic data. Is there a service/website where I can share this data (anonymously) to see genetic predisposition to various diseases ?
I'd expect it to go one of two ways:

Either you just happen to see a lot of ads all over the web for bars and day trips in Thailand after you did a Facebook check-in at the airport saying you're on your way to Thailand

Or

The ads will be similar to what you see on FB, eg your friend Jonathan likes the new diet coke, why don't you try some, john? With the ad clearly outlined as not being part of the site with a "ad delivered by Facebook" disclaimer and clear FB styling.
Running BitTorrent Sync on a Linux desktop or server
The authors of this piece are very brave. In a few weeks Gruber will be calling them jackasses in his claim chowder post.
Poor bash has had a bad week. I happened to spend some time last night playing with a bash script for controlling btsync running as as its own user. It was fun! See, bash isn't big and scary, its a cute little scripting language (lol).

I thought I'd share these instructions for setting up my script and btsync itself. If you're not familiar with BitTorrent Sync, its a decentralized file sharing network. So there's no costs, no limits, and no middle-man. I think its pretty cool and I'd love to see it catch on as an alternative to the "trust model" of storing your data on a company's servers.

Anyway I hope this how-to is useful to somebody. Cheers
I think the thing about monopolies being positive, or at least not as bad as whatever else (regulating them) is pretty standard thinking for a certain brand of libertarian, which Thiel is.
Microsoft Launches Xbox One in China