skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But let's say Google enters a deal with Intel that is going badly. Let's say it's 100% Intel's fault.

Google shorts Intel stock just before announcing to the public that the deal is off and it's Intel's fault? I don't think that's exactly allowed.
A lot of claims, no real data to back them up.
Ask HN: Online privacy / "reverse SEO"
I have an online privacy question that I thought you guys could help with.

Here's the situation. A few years ago, a friend had a personal crisis and talked to reporters about it. Articles went up over the web, which helped draw attention to her problem. She has a distinctive enough name that Googling her name shows the articles, but it wasn't a huge national news item or anything like that.

She's now wondering if there's a way to get rid of them, or move them down in the search results, since she doesn't necessarily want employers finding this stuff, etc.

Any ideas? Getting sites to take down the articles seems like a fools errand. Thanks!
AlphaLab Demo Day Showcases Pittsburgh's Finest
To be clear, the 5% are actually coming out of Apple's pocket, not the developer's. Which, I suppose, is an argument for the service. Also, (though I'm not completely sure) it's 5% of anything bought from the store, not just said app, until that affiliate token is overwritten by another one. So that could potentially be a big chunk of commissions.

Overall, I'm thinking "why not? it's not hurting anybody", but I just feel like they're the agent that screws their clients on how much they're really getting paid. (or to be more Apple-centric: Jobs only giving a small chunk of what Atari paid him to Woz for Woz's work)

However, I don't follow you with "there are 10 more websites doing very similar stuff". It's not a justification to me.
I'd love to enter this if it wasn't just Java. I understand why, but it's still an unfortunate hurdle!
Google Maps - Semi Broken?
In the past few days Google maps has been unable to recognize addresses that it used to be able to find. Are they doing maintenance or something? Is anyone else finding this?
I'm pretty calm, thank you.

I don't have a dog in this fight, I like both languages for pushing the envelope, but I wouldn't consider myself qualified to do a comparison that is meaningful. The only language where I think I could make any statements is C, and that's only because of decades of using it. I've used PHP for business reasons for 10 years and I still wouldn't think I'm qualified to write a benchmark comparing PHP to something else.

The other day, there was a discussion here about 'the hundred year language' (that essay by PG), and I wrote that if there is a candidate for that spot it's either Clojure or Erlang, and my money would be on clojure fwiw.

The python guys ripping in to perl with cherry picked examples, the clojure guys ripping in to python it gets us exactly nowhere.

You don't need to compare to anything to show excellence.

But if you're going to do it, Rosetta is the right way to do it.

If you want to do runtime comparisons then I think you should get a person that has at least your skills in python to have a look at what's going on, and you should not just show one example where you come out ahead.

You should show many examples along the lines of the great programming language shootout. Again, that's real work.

Who knows how many were tried where clojure was terribly slow that were not shown for that reason and so on.

Hand-picked, biased, a waste of time.
Well, there are thousands of people out there whose sites aren't being killed by link spammers, so I think he should scratch his head and look home.
John Furrier sat down with Michael Schoepfer, FB's Veep of Engineering, and talked about operations at great scale, and how they've avoided the fail whale thus far.
I believe "quantified sites" embed a line of code and that becomes public on quantcast ie- public google analytics. Not sure what else they mash the data up with.
I've been around since the whole Data Portability thing was conceptualized. Everyone nodded and stroked their beards pensively, but it's been what? Two years? Three years? Data is still effectively locked up under the guise of portability.
Colorful data
good to see alphalab cranking out new stuff.
Actually I do because I'm the one that developed those pages. Why would I put NASCAR stats on a NBA page? ;-)

Also, as a last resort users will tell me if something is off.
Best choice was to get the 16gb of ram in my Mac Pro. It's epic working with that kind of hardware behind you. I'm running a Windows VM, all my servers are up constantly, dozen programs, etc. And still have 4.25 gb free for the sweet sweet caching.
I personally think that Vista do well because it is bundled with PCs and laptops (no other reason). If Vista competed with XP I doubt that it would will.

A lot of lay people have problems with Vista. Stupid things such as the box that comes up if you want to install anything and speed. People also got used to XP.

IMHO I don't think that a lot of people upgraded XP to Vista. Operating systems have become a commodity in a large part.
We're in this field as well and the number of people who have suggested we sell/licence our tech to government and police agencies is pretty surprising. I'm not down with that, ethically, but there's definitely a need for people who are.
I have had success with getting some sites to remove key things that I didn't like. However, most successfully I have managed to make my own sites be the first results for my name, or at least higher than everything else. I have also had success with being more active with my full name in places that have higher pagerank than the stuff that is just older or otherwise not really representative of who I am.
How many of those numbers are new PC sales and how many are actual upgrades?
> Because it only offers a marginal improvement of XP.

I get your point here and I agree, but... in many ways, it was not only not much better than XP, but quite a bit worse. It took more memory, it crashed more often, it didn't run with (whatever peripheral you have that worked fine before), it was slower, it moved things into other places you couldn't find them, etc.

With that going against you, you have to REALLY step up other areas to compensate, and as you say, Vista simply didn't.

Or, it was to reset the bar so low that Win 7 could do almost anything to be considered "great"... =) (No, I don't believe that.)
DirectX 10 was one of the few "hooks" or killer features Microsoft assigned only to Vista. I'm wondering if they should have spent more time looking for similar killer features before shipping.
It rather reminds me of the rather absurd/sinister stories by Roald Dahl.
No idea. It occurred to me after I posted that the question might be "why were Microsoft's expectations so low".
Not a bad article, but he attributed to some giant evil conspiracy by the banks something that was, in fact, simple economics.

Banks weren't out to swindle people with all those 'new' investment funds, they were reacting to overwhelming demand from the managers of 80-something trillion dollars. That overwhelming demand was driven, in part, by the fed holding the discount window open for so long.

If we remove the author's notion of 'evil' intent on the banks part, for which there is little to no evidence, and chalk it back to 'incompetence' instead, the author's article becomes a rehash basic economics and a lot of empty hyperbole.

For a more dispassionate recap of the debacle, I'd recommend This American Life's article, the Global Pool of Money.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9032768...
Two weeks ago they switched from a third-party data provider to maintaining their own data for U.S. maps and directions: http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/10/your-world-your-m...
They quite clearly said they couldn't be bothered to spend money on it as it wasn't earning anything.

She could, if she wants, get this latest huge barrage of spam cleared out on Boudica and improve spam filters going forward, if she choses. She’s currently debating this. It just may be, as I explained above, that this was the thing that tips her toward closing the site, something she was already considering because of low usage.

In a way it's probably not a bad thing if low traffic me-too style sites are discouraged a little - if there's something worth keeping then for the cost of a meal for two you can hire someone to install a captcha (or whatever) and strip out the spam. If the content isn't worth that then, does the web need it.

The story sounds more like the tale of someone who didn't have time or resources to do anything with there not-especially-unique website and then got annoyed because it attracted more bad attention than good.

The link-spam is an excuse, IMO, to close the site and not lose face. Sure it's annoying, sure it shouldn't happen (like people putting flyers on your windscreen), but don't lose sleep over it.
Demo day was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the opportunity to pitch, and we got some great leads for funding and customers. I'd definitely recommend the whole experience to anyone trying to do a startup. -Nick from CloudFab
Google + Motorola + Verizon = DROID = iPhone Killer ? Droid Revealed
jacques,

I don't quite agree with your sentiment that excellence stands on it's own, but time will tell.

I'd just like to correct two mistakes you made.

1) I didn't pick examples where Clojure runs circles around Python - Like I've stated before, Example #2 is a lot cleaner in Python than what I wrote. The fact that my implementation is 9.4x faster than the Python teams is not subjective and tells you something important about parallelized sequence consumption.

2) I didn't hand pick anything, I picked Lehman because it was on the front page, followed another link to something which didn't have a Python solution, another to the 'Count examples' and so on. I didn't set Python up for sniping, which I why I think the comparison is interesting.

And for the record: I think Python came out looking pretty good.
For decades, hordes of awful sci-fi writers have succeeded through their ability to gratify male tastes. Hundreds of mediocre yet commercial successful sci-fi movies and thousands of mediocre yet commercially successful sci-fi books owe their existence to male readers' appetites for boyhood adventure and manly exploits. By "feminization" of science fiction, I suspect the critic means the emergence of a new category of mediocre sci-fi entertainment that flourishes by gratifying female tastes in the same way. So now women are getting in on the act -- is this bad news?

Five reasons why it isn't:

1. "Guy" sci-fi continues to thrive. I just watched the movie Banlieue 13, which is kind of sci-fi, and found it quite tolerable, even fun. I enjoyed it because I like guns, fighting, and cool parkour stunts. (Of course there was a "big idea" aspect, but it was embarrassingly thin and heavy-handed, and it should probably have been glossed over a little more lightly.)

2. Women never had any shortage of "chick" entertainment, so this isn't a new thing that will warp them in new ways. "Guy" entertainment hasn't made me crash my car through a glass storefront or go on a violent vendetta against people I consider bad, and "chick" entertainment won't turn worthwhile girls and women into shallow, catty, cheating bitches. If anything, this will mean that more women will see sci-fi as just another genre instead of a marker of loserdom.

3. "Feminization" happened long ago in the literary novel genre, and it wasn't the end of the world. Despite sales of literary novels being dominated by female consumers demanding stories of sex and shopping, to the point that novels in the "chick lit" genre don't bother pretending to be about anything else, it's still possible for writers like Chuck Palahniuk to become superstars.

4. "Big idea" science fiction will not suffer from changes inside the sci-fi genre, because the worthwhile stuff transcends and escapes the genre. The stuff that doesn't -- the stuff that seemed tragically, unjustly, and arbitrarily confined to a sci-fi ghetto when you were a kid -- often turns out to be embarrassing bad when you reread it as an adult anyway. It's great for stimulating kids and getting them thinking about big issues. I'm convinced I'm much smarter because the sci-fi I read as a kid taught me to think ambitiously about important things. But most "big idea" sci-fi is psychologically tone-deaf to anyone who isn't a callow adolescent, and the really good stuff has a history of succeeding in the larger marketplace, where "feminization" happened long ago.

5. "Big idea" science fiction will get better. "Big idea" doesn't have to mean big in scale. The personal is the political. Personal issues can be very big -- just think of society as a massively parallel machine solving billions of individual problems of love and survival. The OP's definition of "feminized" writing covers a lot of fertile ground. More "feminized" sci-fi ultimately means more good "feminized" sci-fi, which means a wider variety of good sci-fi for everybody to read.
> the number one cause of hard crashes (blue screens) in Windows 2k/XP has been video driver crashes

Where did you get this from ? A reference would be nice.
What is this thing you call "thread safe"?
Live BBC radio, even outside of the UK? There could be an (iPhone) app for that
An engineer with no social skills will do no better than a marketer with no technical knowledge

Edward Bernays (creator of PR and creator of Freud (the product)) might be the best marketing engineer and he hated social events and large groups of people but he understood them and how to manipulate them.

Engineers understand systems. When you realize that the best marketing is by learning the natural way that humans think and act individually or in a group then you are a good marketer no matter, fumbling bumbling idiot in social situations but knower of human ways.
Really nice to see Pittsburgh getting some coverage
Hi guys, many name is Ohad and I'm one of the guys behind appsto.re

There is a very wide mis-understanding of LinkShre, Apple, etc, here are a few tasty facts:

* Apple will give its affiliate partners 5% out of their 30% profit. For a 99c app, that's 1.5c, that is not money on any scale.
* This money comes out of Apple's pocket, remember? 99.9% of developers don't setup a relationship with Linkshare and claim that money.
* Linkshare is a horrific 1990's-stlye company, where the site is down more than it should be, the reports are extremely hard to consume. This explains why its not worth for the average or even the successful developer to work with them for that measly commission.

Now, as for appsto.re:
* We built significant infra-structure around integrating with Linkshare, sucking out the info, generating the various reports (many of which are far from trivial).
* No, you can't just 'hookup Google-Analytics and Linkshare in 1 hour', it doesn't work like that, Linkshare doesn't want to be your friend, they won't really tell you how/what got sold, and it will require significant research and development.

In short, we built what we believe is an awesome service for iPhone developers/marketers, its turn-key so they don't need to bother with anything. We've been beta-testing with hundreds of developers, they are all happy to the roof, because this allows them to focus on their app and its marketing.

How do we make money? Not from Linkshare that's for sure, we're going to be Freemium.
Yeah, nobody else has mentioned price. Vista is / was expensive! Like half a new computer expensive. Why would anyone buy it for an old PC at that price? Win 7 is too expensive as well. MS just doesn't seem to care about retail sales at all, let alone upgrade. As far as I can tell they actually price products to kill that market and force everyone into OEM sales (where they have no obligations for support).
Free Internet from Google on Virgin America flights
Hear, Hear! Also went to 20Gb (up from 8Gb) on the Mac Pro in the summer. Best 300$ I ever spent on hardware upgrades. Never close apps anymore, and never experience a swapstorm anymore.

Only one very, very big drawback: you'll want that much RAM in every system you use afterwards. I guarantee it: I just put back the screws on my laptop 10 minutes ago ;-)
Maybe what people really want is not portability but something else. Data ownership perhaps.
Through the lens of the average user fearing OS updates, the whole "online application" makes a lot more sense. These average users can be more comfortable with online applications because there is no update that the end user is responsible for (or that they know about).

Also, when they replace their computer in order to "get rid of" their malware, all of their online applications are still there.

I'd never thought of web applications from this perspective before, but it occurs to me that maybe we can thank Microsoft's horrible upgrade path in the early '00s for the large market for online applications today.
Will a facial expression recognizer help autistic kids?
If you put in 'washington' it gives you DC instead of the state. As someone from the west coast, I've always said 'DC' for the capital and Washington for the state.
Jason gives a detailed answer to these questions in the comments at http://blog.asmartbear.com/rich-vs-king-sold-company.html#co... he mentions one key advantage that some startups ignore in the early going: keeping books up to date:

Another advantage: Having perfect books. Meaning: Perfectly balanced every month since the company started. Finances were never a problem as a result. Otherwise they wonder what's lurking--not even that you're being dishonest, just that you don't know!
Let's change the reserve ratio requirement to a sliding scale with larger ratios required for larger deposit holding banks, we'd see large banks broken up naturally to take advantage of the better investment deals by being small. The FTC might be appropriate now, but we need to stop being so reactionist.
Well, webwright implied that many Apple users drink the marketing Kool-Aid.

But I don't think that makes them dimwits. Blatantly abusing the apostrophe, on the other hand...
Are We Becoming A Gadget Addicted Generation?
C does let you deploy nicely. A makefile and some discipline are almost all you need. Granted it's not always easy to write a sane makefile, but that is the coder's and not the installer's responsibility.
While I list most CSS properties together, I actually collect all box elements like this:

margin-top: ...
border-top: ...
padding-top: ...
height: ...
padding-bottom: ...
border-bottom: ...
margin-bottom: ...

margin-left: ...
border-left: ...
padding-left: ...
width: ...
padding-right: ...
border-right: ...
margin-right: ...

The components are listed in outside-in order, with each axis separate. I find this easy to visualize and tweak.

Most other properties, however, I do just list together alphabetically.
Well, it does in that before looking at the relationship of gods and evil, you first have to establish what, exactly, are the characteristics of gods, how many gods are there, etc.

Do theologians consider the case for all of concievable gods? Multiple gods? Only one god?
Hoozajew 1.1: A program for estimating the proportion of Jewish names on a list
> I don’t have numbers to prove this, but the Erlang implementation can also be made faster with a lot less effort since each recursive call can be run in parallel.

Ugh... untrue. Process creation is cheap in Erlang, but it's not that cheap. Naively parallelizing each recursive call loses big time. (And, yes, I've benchmarked this.)

You can get some gain by parallelizing the first couple recursive calls (up to the number of cores you have available) and then running the rest serially, but that uglifies the code quite a bit. And you're still not going to be as fast as the in-place C version.
Pay Per Click Formula 2.0
Pay Per Click Formula 2.0 will be re-released as a physical DVD set in October 2009 by Gauher Chaudry. Pay Per click Formula 2 is the single most comprehensive PPC to CPA marketing course available in the whole internet community.
My boss told me about it when we were having a conversation about favorite blogs/daily reading.
Flickr WTF
We have also had a submission rejected because of content in the application description. Even though the binary submission was not altered, we were forced to re-upload the binary and wait an additional >2 weeks for the next round of review feedback for removing ONE sentence from the description.

There should be a separate review queue for application description, the current system is incredibly inefficient.
If it's a human cut-and-pasting? Or someone employed to workaround strong captchas? Spam for sure.
That's awesome! Now I know what I'll be buying for Xmas :D
www.yammer.com
It's too late now, but using rot13 works well for that sort of thing.
She did quite a bit of work at Chernobyl as well. For 25 years she worked as a scientific illustrator for the scientific department of the Natural History Museum at the University of Zurich (she did illustrations of the effect of X-rays on fruit fly experiments).

She tried to present the impact that low levels of radiation are having on the occurrence of mutations within insect populations in her book.

Granted her site is not web 2.0 and the diagrams do not do justice to her work, but this is no reason to be dismissive.

Are you aware of any studies that the radiation released did not have an impact on the insect population?
Maybe you should just not put other companies' copyrighted game names in your keywords. It sounds like Apple is purposefully slowing you down because they consider you to be malicious.
Good ideas, although I think a number of them are already being executed by Present.ly and Yammer:

http://presentlyapp.com/

https://www.yammer.com/
Have we reached the end of desktop OS development?
Key Star Trek Generations analogies.

But of course ... I've never seen that movie, and if I did I didn't like it.
alphalab is awesome!
Perhaps this is a business opportunity--Reverse SEO.
Brandon, You are a great man. +infinity karma for you.
Shhh no one is supposed to know about this little nugget of Apple genius.

There's a reason Apple does yearly OSX updates, think of how many versions Mac users have had to buy in the last 7-8 years in the time it took MS to release just two OS's.

MS's strong suit has always been it's compatibility which has the side effect of killing one of the 'reasons' to upgrade.
Interesting coverage map. Living near the centroid of population I'll have to drive for two days to get to their nearest airport.
and to add on to the dev hurdle, you must code in obj-c and have a mac. I am sure there are ways around the mac part, but limiting the target language already discourages many devs from building apps for the iphone. i myself am slowly becoming an android fan (ASE - http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/wiki/FAQ)
Ryan Tomayko joins the Github team
Unfortunately the stylesheet doesn't: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%...
I tried really hard to make an old XP machine last until Win 7 came out, but the hard drive decided otherwise. Having heard too many horror stories about Vista the first thing I did with the cheapest replacement machine money could buy was spend 4 hours going through 99 performance hacks for Vista and deciding which to install. I would say it is now adequate, while still having a few Vista annoyances.

I upgraded my work desktop to Win 7 last week. It's what Vista should have been.
The Wikipedia article mentions it, but the source there is MS themselves:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Screen_of_Death

I've read it other places however, and generally agree that crappy software/driver is typically the cause of most Windows crashes. Never had a barebones box BSOD on me.
A basic round up of webtalk about this subject: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Pros-an...
Do share the url for your performance hacks. Still have some Vista machines that could use a tweak.

Black Viper guides still relevant?