skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Presumably PG will the full text of his talk on his website in a couple days, as he has with all the others. Is there anything gained by reading this list of bullet points a couple days in advance? This doesn't seem particularly time sensitive.
>Eating apples is natural for human beings,like many other fruits

With a small correction that eating apples that were not bred for sweetness and did not contain as much fructose as today's apples is natural. Therefore, there is such thing as too many apples (and fructose is probably not better than glucose or sucrose in any way).
Ask HN: I am running AdWords to promote my iPhone App. How do I...
I am now running an AdWords campaign that links to www.gaiagps.com. Once they get to the site, I want to track how many people click the "Buy Now" button that brings up iTunes.

Normally, I could just put a tracker on the page I wanted to measure, but since I'm popping them off to iTunes, I need to track clicks on the link, not page landings.

My solution for now is this: I put a javascript Google Analytics trigger in the <a onclick> to track clicks of that link, and then I can cross-reference that against paid traffic.

However, does AdWords have a way to track these conversions directly? They have a "Conversion Tracking" system, but it seems to only work if they land on a page, not if they click a link, because you insert an Javascript snippet in the page to track conversions.

Am I missing something about AdWords Conversion Tracking, or is the GA the right tool to use here? I suppose I could also redirect them to a page with tracking code before I redirect them to iTunes, but this seems like kind of a hack.
Pipe Dream on my old Windows 3.1 was the first incarnation I saw.
Tetracycline is routinely prescribed for acne, which isn't much of a need, strictly speaking.
Asking For a Dollar
How Bing could kill Google
Smart move...Also allows people time to learn the language, and then move into 3 gradually... Go Python People...
Ad Agency of the Future - throw out Mad Men.
Yes, as jacquesm points out, Google actually gains from a default spelling of how the word sounds. But Cuil does not.
Pretty sure twiceler is Cuil....
Is that still true? I think advertisers everywhere are realising that page views are a pretty worthless measure. Just my own narrow perspective: I have been reading all the major ad business magazines in Germany lately, and there, everybody seems to be eager to ditch page views in favour of length of stay, visits, unique users and the like. Everybody feels betrayed by everybody's use of page views.
Glo Makes Studying the Bible Easy
Glo is a new interactive Bible that makes studying the Bible every day easy. This installed software product on DVD-rom takes the traditional Bible in the most trusted NIV version and makes it browsable onscreen. But that’s just the beginning. Glo’s unique lenses allow you to browse content through “lenses” five different ways: Bible (canonical order); Atlas (major stories and locations mapped); Timeline (events linked chronologically); Topical (search by subject); and Media (HD video, photos, and much more).

It doesn’t matter where you are in Scripture, what region you are exploring or what period of time you’re in, Glo has resources that allow you to experience it. Scriptures include tons of extra material that bring your Bible-reading experience to life, with thousands of high-resolution images and articles, plus HD video, maps, virtual reality tours, and more.

And it’s all easy to navigate and feels natural. One of the biggest innovations behind Glo is that it uses what’s called a natural user interface, which mimics how actual physical objects behave. So it feels natural. Each new use creates a “session” that can be accessed again by clicking a tab in the navigation. Finding information from a former search and cross-referencing with a current result is fast and easy. Studying the Bible every day has never been more relevant to today’s busy lifestyle.

Glo's first release is for use on Windows PC, which includes laptops and slate PCs. In the coming months, Glo will be available on Windows Mobile, Mac, iPhone and popular Internet browsers.  For more information and press materials about Glo, please visit: http://www.pressvillage.com/glo or http://www.globible.com
I have good news related to the subject of organising research on the web. I'll try and open up the staging version in a few days. However, I don't have infrastructure to support a large user base yet, so please get in touch through HNTesters@FilmIT.si if you're willing to try the service out, and I'll send you an invite.
Dollar seen losing 'global reserve currency' status
Mad Men and risk, consequences, realities, fear & commitment
When I compare the curriculum I had to the one my father had... well, there is no comparison.

Granted, he was a bit on the far edge of things. But, they were machining amateur rocket engines in high school. In junior high, he ran a printing press for the school paper, casing type, etc. -- the whole nine yards. He had the opportunity to perform on the stage of Chicago's Orchestra Hall.

Pure academic work also appears to have been of a higher caliber. This was a public school system. albeit one of the best in the area. I think he graduated with probably the equivalent of what would these days be considered a couple of years' worth of college level work.
How is that not covered by the following provision to the law?

An exception exists where the cookie is "strictly necessary" for the provision of a service "explicitly requested" by the user
What Craigslist Has Come To
Twiceler is Cuil's UA.
The first question I'd ask is whether people ever use Google to search for iPhone apps? My take is, Not really.

Perhaps it's different in the GPS world.
They can dictate more than prices to suppliers: they can also dictate financing terms. This allows them to collect from customers before paying supplies. So in some cases they literally can lose money on every sale and still make it up in volume, by investing suppliers' capital for their own purposes.
Ah! thanks.

That clinches it then. One more agent for the ban list.

Apropos, I think that plenty of bad guys are masquerading as twiceler as well.

Mozilla/5.0 (Twiceler-0.9 http://www.cuil.com/twiceler/robot.html

When 'CUIL' first came out their crawler was all over my servers, sometimes to the point of making them inaccessible for users, I remember having a devil of a time getting rid of them because they came from lots of different IP blocks.

Apparently their bot is called twiceler, maybe they should name it 'CuilBot' or something to that effect.
Validity of software patents goes on trial today at Supreme Court
Myspace has been losing share, while facebook has been gaining a lot. If you look at it that way, mySpace is losing. I am not sure how well it is performing for Murdoch.

You have to give kudos for him trying to get into a new market.

As for how he will lose if he removes his sites from google, time will tell. I assume he has done a lot of work looking at the area.
Yes. Sure, but they do so to provide some functionality the user actually wants. And if he does, you can ask him. When she's signing up would be the perfect time. Another checkbox you have to click. Annoying enough, but no big problem.

Sure, other (non-sign-up) functionality might also need cookies (changing font size, switching themes, the small things) and you might not want to annoy the user with stupid checkboxes for those kinds of stuff, but other than that?

I still don’t see the big scandal.
Google Closure?  I'm not impressed
The Placebo effect was debunked in the New England Journal of Medicine several years ago.

When you do studies that track three groups -- treatment, placebo, and no intervention -- the placebo resembles the no intervention group. People just tend to get better when they get sick and that is conflated with a placebo effect.

Google "placebo nejm" for details.
Personally, I would worry about having my livelihood run on those servers. What's their redundant power system now? Do they even have one?

Their wooden pallet/cables hanging over table system seems like every Sysadmin darkest nightmares...
It would be nice if it were treated more as an art, but don't you think whoever is paying for the grants would rather the effort be put into digging deeper into specific research topics that may eventually be of use to science rather than finding beautiful proofs and relationships between things we already know to be true?
> Ruby's anonymous function syntax was pretty novel

Ruby: {|x| x+1}

Smalltalk: [:x | x+1]

What am I missing?
Google releases Closure, the tools behind the JS geniuses
It's almost definitely cultural. My adviser drives a Mercedes. Everyone else finds his tastes to be strange but harmless.

On the other hand, he probably pulls more than the rest of the department put together...
I'm not sure if this is how Bing will kill Google, but I do think Bing is going to slowly take a lot of market share away from Google. How? Niche specific search customization.

For a while now I've been bugged by how searching anything on Google is done with nothing but one text box. There's no customization. You can't tailor your search or refine it based on values and properties specific to your categorical search. I think Bing recognizes that and is gunning in that direction. Their restaurant finder lets you filter out restaurants with dim lighting, for instance. You can't do that with Google. And if Bing keeps adding various categories to their search, I'm willing to bet that it'll be a lot more useful than Google.
I wouldn't be surprised if copyright laws get more restrictive yet less enforceable. The result is that you can't bet on copyright actually working.
Kiss Corner: Liverpool vs Birmingham Live Streaming PPV
+ Herb Lubalin
I did that last year. It was absolutely awesome fun. I already knew 90% of how it works, but hadn't connected the dots myself before.
How long would it be before Google gets into this game as well?

And how long before fragmenting search results across multiple search engines leads to a thriving new market of news sources that don't sign exclusive distribution deals?
how is this different from the likes of jquery?

edit: it seems the library is similar in terms of dom manipulation, but the compiler and templating system seem to be the major differences?
Being discussed more actively here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=931877
It would help if your example was syntactically correct Ruby. (EDIT: I see you fixed it)

And I meant novel in that it brought the notion into the dot-notation-happy world, where the majority of programmers lived and adapted it. Both Ruby an Smalltalk took the feature from a predecessor, as I understand it, and mentioning an also-ran like smalltalk slipped my mind.

Does that weaken the point significantly? The feature is good and Python should finish integrating lambdas rather than sitting on their half-cocked nod to it. They cannot now Fo that for 2 years, maybe more.
I'm guessing it's not the brevity of the URL that bothers you. Is it the numerical identifier? What should it be instead?
While the landscape may be broad, it should be exciting that you can spend your entire life studying one facet of a subject as deeply as you like and there will still be an infinity of other truths you could have discovered. Talk to colleagues studying other fields, even if you never have an amazing cross-discipline breakthrough, it is nice to hear about other elements of mathematics.

disclaimer: While I finished my degree in mathematics, I immediately entered the field of programming, which was what I had intended to study.
About 5 years ago, in 7th grade, almost the exact same thing happened to me, but with a TI-83 graphing calculator. I would estimate that there are approximately the same number of kid programmers as there were. Modern PCs and macs don't come with compilers or interpreters, and there is no "command mode". Why would the ordinary kid ever open up cmd.exe, when everything you could ever want to do on a computer is on the web? I only learned TI-BASIC because a friend's dad is a hacker. He inspired me to check out the only book on programming at our school, which happened to be about BASIC. The truth is that, while kids are closer to computers than they were 30 years ago, they're not much closer to programming.
He mentioned (in the video of this at least) that it could be used as a bargaining chip to Google which makes a lot of sense, so I suspect Google will immediately be part of the game.
Google fails to address app storage issue with Droid and Android 2.0
My parents share the opposite story. I went to a public charter school and they always said how they didn't learn or do that until in college/after.
Django vs Rails
And frankly a bit obvious for anyone visiting this site.
"In a worst-case scenario for the high-tech industry, the ruling could invalidate many existing software patents or at least make them more difficult to defend in lawsuits. And it could make such patents harder to obtain in the future because software is generally patented as a process for doing something rather than as a physical invention."

I think that might be the best case scenario.
There's argument whether its the best way to do it but CPM is still the standard for selling ad space and that's based on page views.
"You can't tailor your search or refine it based on values and properties specific to your categorical search."

It's a nice idea but to be honest this is out of reach for 98% of internet users. I've probably explained to my mom what a blog is half a dozen times and still doesn't get it. She also refuses to stop double clicking on links...

A search engine for savvy people would also not be a great business position because those type of people don't click on ads. There was an article last week on Hacker News that 8% of internet users account for 85% of all clicks.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArtic...
Economists Seek to Cure a Defect in National Data
I de-edited the end of my comment, because of weird time-related issues.

> The feature is good and Python should finish integrating lambdas rather than sitting on their half-cocked nod to it. They cannot now for 2 years, maybe more.

It's hard to "finish" a thing that hasn't started. Python has a whole aesthetic, and multi-line lambdas will likely never be a part of it. It's really quite a minor difference.

I really think I'm not a zealot on the issue, and that I'm quite aware of the differences: http://billmill.org/multi_line_lambdas.html ; what I'd like you to demonstrate is a place where giving a function a name is more than a minor inconvenience, and list comprehensions don't satisfy the need.
Have you seen google squared? It sounds like a step in the direction you're after, although it's far from perfect.
Friends and Weight Loss
It is not a joke. Homeopathy is the billion-dollar business he is talking about.
That is also one (colloquial) interpretation (but not the literal interpretation) of "fuck it."
Imagine, work your whole life, get to the top of your field, and drive an Impala!

So what? Not everyone defines the quality of their life by what car they drive.
It's not the first post of this kind on Techcrunch, I can only imagine how annoyed they are with all this stuff if they keep repeating it every n months...
I'm sorry, but lambda notation was created around 193X and used for anonymous functions (in computer programming languages) in 197X. It's definitely not novel. People are simply rediscovering it now.
appsto.re
Thank you. That was an interesting and insightful observation [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859617]. His argument for reliability made scaling seem almost moot. You rarely see someone toss around the idea of 'reliability' when (they are) discussing whatever they think 'the cloud' means. Nevertheless, it was a refreshing reminder that newer (better) technology is not always about optimization, its about mitigating risk by building a sense of predictability into your solution (application).
Yeah...so on day 1, Bing goes after a bunch of exclusive indexing deals, and on day 2, Google does the same. Assuming you're a content provider who is willing to do a deal like this, and you're going to get roughly the same amount of money, who are you going to go with? Probably the guy who has 70% of the market. This seems like a quick way to get Google's market share to 80%.
Agreed. There doesn't seem to be much substance behind this.

Long story short: crazy people are crazy.
I doubt it somewhat - Google isn't the kind of company that likes to be in the position of dependence on anybody else.
Could you expand on that? What does the level of education they are aiming for mean?
Is it
(a) that level of skill and knowledge acquisition with which they are personally satisfied, or
(b) the piece of paper that gives them an advantage over those roughly equivalent with them in getting a job, which is only available by fulfilling some conditions, usually based on attendance and test taking?
Judging by the number of blogs and people on Twitter, your mom is probably no longer the typical internet user. Or at least there's enough savvy folks to be a sizable marketing opportunity.
It would be bad thing if competition in this area devolves into this sort of conspiratorial atmosphere. While competition is great to have as it pushes positive change and innovation, it is worrying in this instance for its ability to degrade the usefulness of search engines.
In Ontario we have some crazy law that forces all public sector salaries over $100,000 to be disclosed. For example, here is Waterloo's: http://uwaterloo.ca/documents/sal2008.php (incidentally with a pretty respected mathematics department).

A little shocking at first, but most of the people are deserving.
>Linux will never be a factor on the desktop

Never?
Gold - a six thousand year-old bubble
Excellent. Just be warned, the only part of HH that doesn't work right now is the website integration, since _why killed hackety.org.

Let me know what he thinks, and any feedback that you might have. Positive comments are a great motivator. My email is in my profile.
In your father's day a hell of a lot more people didn't finish high school, and that was okay. Now everyone is supposed to finish high school, so there's pressure to ensure everybody can actually pass the required curriculum, i.e. water it down.

Then there's a countervailing pressure, like in CA the state graduation requirements were set by reference to the entry requirements for the UC system (which is supposed to be for the top 12th of CA students)
Agreed...it all makes sense when you see the quote a few lines down from that:

"The software industry would lose an important incentive to innovate if the government ceased issuing software patents," warned patent attorney James Carmichael, a former judge on the Patent Office board of appeals.
This strategy does not benefit end users. Therefore, end users should avoid it.
The Closure Compiler is the big news. As the article says, it turns your regular JavaScript code into compact, high-performance JavaScript code. This is some of the magic behind Google Maps, Gmail, and I assume Wave.

This is a very big deal for JavaScript developers because it is like having JSLint, YUI Compressor, and Chuck Norris rolled into one.
You're right, they're pretty similar. The ZX Spectrum was a little personal computer, sold in Britain through the 80's. It was pretty cheap, probably the equivalent of $750-$1000 today. Certainly cheap enough for parents to buy for a bright young boy.

Since the ZX ran BASIC, programming for the spectrum and your TI-83 is pretty comparable, although your TI-83 was a bit more powerful. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum
I started programming around 6th grade, and I am in 11th grade now. I started because one of my "really smart friends" was doing it. He started because his dad made his own linux distro .(That's a lie. I know his dad has made his own linux distro, but I honestly don't know why he started, but I am sure his dad is the cause of inspiration.) The point is that I am sure tons of people would love to learn to program if they are simply given the opportunity- the inspiration (and the tools).

Why would I be sure of this?
People have come up behind me and asked questions like "Wow, that's a really cool word-like program. Where did you get it?" Of course I tell them I made it and almost always I get asked how. I've even given out a couple of programming "lessons". (That's a lie. I've given out hundreds of programming lessons, and I've written at least ten little programming manuals to help people begin to program.) However, the real point is: If given inspiration, kids are very curious creatures and will start to program.
Would this affect Google News? I don't think I'd miss search results without certain news publications, but it would water down my primary input for news.
it looks like they're giving away their incredibly sexy ui components.
And when kids download "decent programming environments" they have absolutely no idea how to use them. =/

That one comes from personal experience.
There's a noticeable gradient in car preferences as you go from northern to southern California. At multiple points in my career at UC Berkeley, I saw older model, unshowy American cars parked in the "NL" parking spots. (Guess what NL stands for, hint not a country in Europe.) After I graduated and started working in the Bay Area I met many people would could not have been making <$200k driving normal everyday cars. The most extreme example would be someone whom I knew for a fact was worth eight figures driving a Cadillac. It was shiny and new but, really? A Caddy?

As I went to high school in LA, where it seems like 2/3 of the population over 20 is driving a late model BMW, this was something of a eye-opener: a lot of rich people just aren't that into cars. That, and the whole conspicuous consumption thing is a lot more en vogue in some places than in others. So to answer your question, the faculty at Stanford probably drive a lot of Hondas. (Someone chime in if I'm wrong, haven't been to the Farm in a while.)
I don't really know into deep the Rails community but what you say regarding Django's it is true. I really like the average mindset of the folks in that community.
This article is good news, but unfortunately it is poorly written. I felt they were very prejudiced in favor of software patents.
I must be misunderstanding something.

I know that clean room implementation has been used to avoid trade secret and copyright claims, but that seems to have little relevance in this case. If anything, it seems to somewhat show the need to have a patent protect developments like this.
Google approved both notices.
I think this is missing the point, which is that the new generation doesn't care about ink and paper news. There are some out there that seem to believe that people will "miss" outlets such as the NYTimes and WSJ, but I don't think that they will. All that really matters to people is getting relevant information and opinions about current events.

Part of me thinks that most of the people defending ink and paper are doing so purely for sentimental reasons. Citizen journalists have proven time and time again that they can stand up to the plate and deliver interesting content.
But the next question is: Who has the deeper pockets with which to throw more money to the content providers?
I think you have all of your facts right, but a different conclusion seems to make sense.

It seems like all of that simply means that we need to make sure the balance is struck in the right place. And no matter what balance is struck, it will create some problems and make some people unhappy, but getting it at least close to right is likely to be good for society as a whole.
Is there anyone from the FSF (or similar) who might file an amicus brief?

It's the Patent Office that is fighting this? Is anyone from the open source community helping them?