skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not quite sure what exactly it is you would want from them. http://www.google.com/search?q=mashed+potatos has a list of recipes for the query. Seems like exactly what you would respond to the question "What do you know about mashed potatos?" If I changes it to "mashed potatoes" like suggested, I get the rest of the results you mentioned. Again, this is exactly the kind of stuff you wanted.

Now, if you want something "quirky", why are you searching for a generic term? What kind of "useful" result do you want from a search on mashed potatoes? If you give them a crappy search query, they should be giving you as generic of results as possible.

One thing I've found is that if you are looking for something specific, don't search for something generic. If you wanted something "quirky", why didn't you do "mashed potatoes quirky"? Then you get a restaurant that features mashed potatoes heavily in their recipes, a carmelized onion mashed potato recipe, a mashed potatoes festival, several more "interesting" recipes, and a book called "Grinning in His Mashed Potatoes".

It sounds to me like the results have improved, not gotten worse, if you aren't getting a poem about mashed potatoes on the first page of search results for just "mashed potatoes".
I don't really want to be rich, I'd rather make interesting and fun stuff.
David Gergen and Bill George: "A National Deficit - Of Leadership"
For me, it's been part of a longer trajectory towards the appreciation of "the mess" in all of its dirty glory. I've always been an "algorithm" person: find the underlying pattern that gives beauty and stability (the two being synonyms, of course!) to the apparently chaotic world around us. Increasingly though, I've come to find that discrete difference has its own beauty and instability (the two being synonyms, or so I keep telling myself) that I had been blocked from appreciating.

Less philosophically and more pragmatically: during a time of reflection I was thinking about how my demand for precision was limiting my social interaction. I hadn't been as big a douche as some people I knew, but I could see more of myself in those people than I liked to admit, and realized I needed to change. But I can never change if I'm right, of course!

So I began to talk with people I knew were smart but didn't have the same penchant for demanding precision. On their testimony, I came to believe that there must be something good in ambiguity, though I couldn't comprehend what. I began to practice 'not objecting' when someone would use language or ideas ambiguously. This was immensely frustrating, but I vowed to let it be and try and find the value. Enough times of getting a glimmer of insight led me to finally admit that there was something worthwhile in ambiguity, and so I changed my mind.
Windows 7 Launches in Japan (picture)
Well--I only have another ~6 months where I can, so better take advantage of it, no? (The press loves it.) If I can get a great connection from someone that is impressed by my work and age, I would take it. Founders like to take whatever advantages they have, right?

But oy! Yell at me in private. mark[at]markbao[dot]com. I'd rather this thread be a discussion about Startup School than other issues such as this.
No, seriously. Have you seen the followup response at http://jimcloudman.tumblr.com/post/223517306/re-the-curious-... ?? It's so amazingly ridiculous. You have to read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt:

I think another part of it, though, is that the panel manufacturer must be drooling over the fact that this is really the only way to move a lot of high-end panels, and therefore gain access to serious economies of scale, driving the prices down and bringing IPS panels to a more mainstream market. ...This is what I love about Apple. Nothing is driving innovation anymore in the PC market - the average computer today has little more capability than a computer from five years ago. Apple, however, is using the brute force of its market share to drive technology forward...Then, the rest of the industry follows suit in a vain attempt to catch them...

What compels people to turn their total ignorance of the hardware industry into love letters for Apple? Not only do Apple's economies of scale have nothing to do with the cost of e-IPS, Dell was the first out of the gate with an e-IPS display (
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/15/dells-2209wa-lcd-monitor-... ) but of course these fanboys didn't notice.

So now, because they don't know there's a difference between s-IPS and e-IPS, it's Apple's business strategy that is changing the world, rather than the scientists and engineers at LG. The ones who actually invented this new low-cost technology.
Side question. I'm also considering doing consulting or contract work so I figure I should have a separate resume for that.

Does anyone have good examples of a resume geared towards consulting?

(Are they even much different from regular resumes, do consultants need resumes?)
Something I read in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell shocked me into reconsidering my role as a father. I'm not a big fan of that book in general, but I found a pearl in there.

I used to think that I needed to set and enforce hard rules, as if this will teach my kids order. I don't want them to take the easy way out or try to negotiate everything. I thought my approach was a good balance to my wife's, as she doesn't assert much authority.

According to a study mentioned in Outliers, my style of parenting is prevalent among the poorer social class, and it leads to a mindset of resignation. Wealthier parents listen more to their children, negotiate with them, and help them take their place in the adult world rather than just be quiet and follow the rules.

This idea has connected a lot of dots for me, and I think I can be a better father than I have been.
Ah, quite right. I'd forgotten about those details.
I think what he's working on and his age is truly impressive. I do however have to agree that the wording actually makes it less impressive than it is and more like a fake plug.
For all of those that were wondering what my 'mystery project' was, it's an all out effort to backup all of geocities.com in 6 days before closing time.

It was a lot of hard work, with the help from Abi and some others.

I think we got most if not all of it.

The account restoration process will probably take the better part of the week, there is just too much raw data to do it all in one go. There are still a whole pile of integrity checks to be done and broken links to be repaired.

Please be kind to the server, it is still doing a lot of very hard work in the background. On the homepage there is a status indicator that shows you how many accounts and files have been restored. How many accounts and files eventually will be restored I can't tell you right now but my guess is that we've managed to save a very large portion of geocities.
I've long appreciated poetry for it's ability to 'get at' the world in ways that I would consider rather precise. Metaphors are not a tool of ambiguity, but rather precision.

Though I haven't read much poetry (nothing that doesn't appear in Harper's or New Yorker): I'll have to go back and re-read some things to see in what ways my interpretation has changed, if at all.
Thanks a lot... you're right, the client doesn't realize the value of my time and it's the biggest problem for us. We should never say "yes" after a deal is done...
Diversification doesn’t mean stocks and bonds, it means owning and operating several or many different businesses

I don't see why you can't have it both ways - run several businesses and use the profits to invest. A small-scale entrepreneur (like me) with a handful of businesses earning a few thousand a month can use the supplemental income to build up savings and a healthy investment portfolio without having to liquidate the business. If you focus on long term investments and use strategies like dollar cost averaging, the ups and downs of the market should be on par with the risks of running several businesses.
Since I started using more advanced search features regularly I have gotten significantly better results. Things like +"my search term", -free, -download, -cracked tend to heavily limit the spamming of results, and if I want something specific using tricks like inurl:keyword and site:siteToSearch tend to make what I want just jump out on the first page.
After the Deadline now Open Source
Review my startup: http://nimbu.net/ - smart website monitoring
I've finally taken the plunge and got my first startup out of the starting blocks. It's been live for a week now and I've been adding new features almost daily. I'd really appreciate any feedback. http://nimbu.net/
I've been reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate lately. It has changed my view of the role of consciousness in everyday life. It's also clarified my understanding on various social issues, the relationship with the individual and society, and the evolutionary origins of the emotions.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through.
How to Check and Remove Malware from an Infected Website | TechJaws.com
I suppose. I found the eight startups more surprising if you're a founder. I've found one startup [full time] takes over 150% of my capacity. How do you know you're executing that well if you're thinly spread?
women on the pill still menstruate
Jane Street? (Or can you not answer that?)
You can do a select All and then Export them all at once.
There is one change that gets me often. Using a hyphenated-word used to require that the two words occur in order, although it would also match the two words joined together. It also used to turn off stemming.

Previously it was equivalent to ("hyphenated word" OR +hyphenatedword). But now it seems to behave almost the same as the unquoted (hyphenated word).

Just to make matter worse, when I tried out my example just now I found that the first result (a wikipedia page) for "hyphenated word" doesn't even include the phrase!
Hi DanielStraight, thanks for taking the time to reply, as you have helped me clarify some thoughts.

Firstly, I've tried this in person on about 20 people, and almost every one has reacted with "No Way!" and snatching the string from my hand to do it for themselves. They thought it simply had to be a trick, it couldn't be true! They were amazed.

I agree, pretty much all this says is that people are, in general, really bad at comparing height with circumference. The thing that interested me was that every one of them "knows" that C=pi.D. They still got it wrong, and it blew their minds.

I was hoping some people here would try it and have a similar reaction. It appears I was wrong.

However, the continuing point is this. The few who didn't get surprised, are surprised that others are surprised. To me, that says that they expect others to think as they do. For entrepreneurs this is the route to a quick and not-very-painless death for their enterprise(s).

I was intending this exercise to be an analogy for people, just as the color of the bike-shed is an analogy. Clearly my intent failed for you. You have taken it very literally, talking about the designers, and how the ratio might relate to usability.

That wasn't my intent, and I clearly failed in my intent, at least with you. So I have learned a lesson.

My readers aren't me.

I'll be thinking about that for a while.

Thanks again for your time.
Agreed. I always fail to see how a person's age is relevant to what they do. In a large population, there are bound to be outliers whose brains mature somewhat earlier than the rest. So what? For any given accomplishment, how is it made any better or worse by the accomplisher's age?

Full disclosure: I am a 30-year-old cynical bastard. :)
E-books help attract library members
I've been working on something similar for about the same amount of years.

Would love to hear from people interested in these types of application(I'm not ready for a public release yet, but will begin putting up a bunch of Writeups/Demos soon):

http://endergen.com/

My Contact info:

http://endergen.com/me/
Oh, yeah, certainly. I've been trying to figure out how to maximize efficiency in all the stuff that's going on. Part of it is doing a lot of strategy planning beforehand. It's true that I'm thinly spread, but I do work with co-founders, developers and sales agents that help, you know, share the work of the startup. I don't try to say that I'm a single founder in all those startups. That, along with a fairly intense work ethic (80 hours a week ish not including school) it works out.
In the last week I have read way too many resumes. Here are some of the things that I would look to tell all future candidates...

- Your resume should be no more then 1, if you must 2 pages (1 page per 10 yrs experience). I can't tell you how many 5-7 page resumes I receive that get a quick skim and thrown aside.

- Use the cover letter to address the company. Who ever is reading it is probably reading others as well. The same generic boring BS gets old. Every letter says "I would be a good fit for your company and my skills match your job description". That is obvious or you wouldnt be applying, or you didnt read the job description. Tell the company what you can do for them and not what they can do for you. Mention why you want to work there and what intrigues you about the company. Pretend you read the job description and researched the company. Be personal-able. You are trying to stand out amongst potentially hundreds of other candidates.

- A skills section is useful, especially for tech jobs. But you don't need to mention every tool you have ever used. No one cares that you still know win 3.1 (I see that on resumes sometimes). Give the highlights and worthwhile list. More is not always better.

- Definitely include your publications, speaking events anything that shows your community activity. They dont need to be more then a line or short description.

- Some people put what tools and languages are used for every project. It starts getting repetitive. I think those can be covered in your skills list. The projects should be short and sweet with a few bullet points. Tell the reader what the project is and what you contributed. You don't need to list everything you ever did at a company. Just need to give the reader a taste of your skill level and ability to perform the job they are filling. If they like you, you will get an interview or follow up questions.

The goal is not to digest your entire life story and work history into a resume. Old jobs and projects can fall off the list. I know its hard to part with some of those things, but it will better your chances that someone will actually read your whole resume. You want to impress them as quickly as possible. The goal is to get an interview.
I think we agree on the facts, just not the interpretation. Once more, it requires getting an untrusted binary into the target user's environment such that they can be fooled into running it.

How is that different from any of the four million other ways of fooling users into running untrusted binaries?
http://www.reocities.com/newhome/

Yep. Spot on!
Solvate: Stop Doing Your Own Admin Work
Your Pricing and Signup link is deceiving. You should separate the pricing since that what I expect to see when I click on that link.

Other than that, I think the idea is straight forward and decently presented. I would like you to highlight on that front page what makes you different (read: exceptional) than other providers.
It has been interesting reading the recent getting users thread [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902322] as I've been trying a lot of the methods on there to gain some traction, so far without much success. Any other tips?
Review My Web App: A wiki for article summaries.
Rural Ohio Internet Options?
I'm planning to buy some farmland in Rural Ohio in a few years (not exactly sure where yet.) Anyway, I'm wondering how good the various out-in-the-sticks internet options are now? I'm thinking I will mainly have access to satellite, maybe 3G. I mainly need to be able to do web, email, ssh, plus vpn/remote desktop to work.

Any ideas would be appreciated, thanks.
One of the nice things about Rip is that it supports RubyGems so, to an extent, you can have your cake and eat it too. The collective investment Ruby developers have in Rubygems is pretty large, so if it gets replaced by something else, it's not going to happen overnight.
Nick Griffin's BBC TV Show Trial
oh, i wasn't yelling at you - totally not. more a general musing. at least you're doing (very cool) stuff.
This is misguided, as Facebook "friends" aren't your friends so much as they are your address book/contact list. FB doesn't differentiate between someone you know through work, someone you went to school with and someone you see socially. If I added up everyone who I ever might want to contact about anything ever, I'd probably have more than a thousand contacts. I don't hang out with any more than a few dozen people regularly tho'.
why not R6RS?
How is that any different than what's being done today? Cable boxes?
Wow, that's amazing. I think I'll be using this a little more often.

Notably, you return a result for a specific osCommerce error message that I wrote about a while back (!); Google doesn't even know I exist.
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Monitors/product...

"Panel Type: VA - Vertical alignment"

The Apple screen, on top of being higher resolution, is also a IPS panel, which gives much better viewing angles as well as color reproduction. It is the only type of LCD suitable for photo/video work.

For a bunch of people who complain a lot about getting good value for your dollar (and how Apple doesn't do that), you sure are misinformed about the gear you're buying. I suppose as long as it throws some kind of image up on screen it's good right?
Thanks, I take your point about the pricing, will separate them for now.

My aim is to provide more data analysis than other monitoring sites and give you feedback on the performance of your web application.
Netflix on PlayStation 3: The Great Sony-Microsoft Equalizer?
The resume is important, but what grabs me every single time is a insightful and thoughtful cover letter. Honestly 75% of resumes look the same. If you can get me with the cover letter 9 times out of 10 you'll at least get a phone screen.
> What puts me off is the reflective finish.

Apple sells stick-on "de-glossing" film. The one I bought works fairly well.
Lessons Learned: A real Customer Advisory Board
I think the overall signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet has simply taken a big dive since the advent of blogging. I'm sick of seeing the mindless duplication of content in search results from a re-blogger who copy & pastes a summary and link. It's frustrating because there's no easy way to spot it until you've actually clicked the link. Once you see it enough times you can spot the duplication on the Google search summary and skip it. The risk is you might miss the 1% of people who can be bothered to spend a few minutes to add some useful information.

One thing I have noticed is YouTube's search is dreadful. It's embarrassing for a company like Google to not offer an adequate search engine on their own site. The grace period of the YouTube purchase is long over. I shouldn't have to retype my search 5 different ways to find what I'm looking for. These days I've just given up and search for simple terms and look through 10 pages of results or try related videos until I find what I'm looking for. Not super impressed with Gmail's search functions either. My mailbox is mirrored on Gmail and my local mail client (Apple Mail) Mail will almost always find what I want when Gmail gets confused. Apple isn't even a search company. Google can do a lot better.
I love the ideas behind rip, but I think even Chris would say it's not quite ready to replace gems yet. For one thing, it depends on specific bash-isms.
Thanks for those links. Hopefully I will now fall for some other traps.
Yes, I'd totally do that (at-least use my Linux partition) if a) the experience of running Linux on a MacBook was a little smoother (I've just bought a new one and I kind of like Apples hardware) and b) I wasn't dependent on PhotoShop et al.

My current setup works good enough for now though; I'm pretty much working in "modes"; stay pretty focused on isolated tasks (either designing stuff in PhotoShop and Illustrator, watching a movie or coding in vim and running tests in a terminal .. alas, I have to switch to a browser to check stuff every once in a while).

EDIT: Added a quotation mark.
Yes, as in - this is not sarcasm; the actual article title is: "Facebook's Memcached Multiget Hole: More machines != More Capacity"
Check out PlayOn (http://www.themediamall.com/playon/) if you want to stream Hulu to an XBox, PS3, etc. I use it and it works like a charm!
Note the Mix/Models of these Companies Now Hiring
All HN readers can identify with that - right ?
Announcing PressHat: News aggregation, distribution, and reporting
Having a features page which explains that in a little more detail might be beneficial. Same with have a feature 'grid' that compares your service to others.

I have signed up and am testing it out, so far it looks very easy to use. I do like the visualization with Google Maps to get various response times. Very impressive.
Clickable: http://nimbu.net/
After all, if we live to reproduce, then anything that sets in after that event is irrelevant from an evolutionary standpoint.

I imagine there are some people who reason that way, but they'd be ignoring the obvious survival benefits of having parents (and extended family) to help raise a child.
Even with the +, google makes some interesting "interpretations". I notice when I search on one of the BSDs (e.g. OpenBSD) it seems to pick pages that just have BSD on it.

Plus, google's handling of punctuation (e.g. f-script) is a pain since (even with the +) it will do weird substitutions and consider blanks good enough.
I met Mark at the Startup School reception at YCombinator the night before Startup School. He is a very knowledgeable and genuine person. I wish I would of had the same passion as he does at his young age.
You may be over generalizing. I think that it depends a lot on the client.

For clients who often try to get more work for their money, I agree. Good clients will offer a little more money for small change orders.

And, all that said, this is why I most enjoy working on a time and materials basis.
In my experience, Yahoo really excels in image search and whenever there are structural changes made to websites (for some reason, Google doesn't really handle moved websites / pages well - there was even an article about that a few months back). But overall, there is around 90% overlap between the major search engines as demonstrated by multiple studies.

That being said, I do feel often like Google's search result quality is decreasing. Bias due to using it exclusively perhaps?
I've changed the link to just Signup for now as the pricing isn't an issue
So this is the "startup" -- more "colossal undertaking" -- that I and a couple of friends have been chewing away on for a couple of months.

Hit the blog link at the bottom for grainy video of our iPhone app in action and other pretty pictures.

We've decided that since we're going to have a longer development cycle than the average weekend project, we're going to announce our presence much earlier in the development process and see if we can get some helpful feedback -- and maybe a bit of a following -- along the way.
Tell HN NYC: Hackers & Founders NYC Meetup #6, 10/29 at Stand Burger
Ask HN: Is AI useful in industry?
So I was thinking, I really like AI, but I don't want to be an academic. So I'm wondering, are there any industries where AI is actually being used? I've heard of some projects like tumor detection and ever some use in finance, but do people actually trust it enough to use it?
I would second this. Some of the features look really intriguing -- like the uptime graphs and the global visualization -- but I want more info -- like how often my site is pinged and from how many different locations.