skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Farecast had a very different UI when MS bought them. The transition to the copy of the Kayak UI happened well after Kayak rolled theirs out and also well after MS bought Farecast.

The scenario/timeline you outline above is reasonable enough to assume - as is the idea that, as Farecast came out before Kayak, that Kayak was actually copying Farecast. What actually happened though is different. Farecast had a completely different model - they were banking on their ability to forecast whether or not you were likely to get a cheaper fare for the same route if you waited. Their original UI was based around that idea and it didn't go over incredibly well. After the Microsoft purchase and before the launch of Bing Travel they did a major redesign and got rid of most of the old Farecast. The old Farecast price predictor idea is reduced to one line at the top of the flights list on the page center.

I wrote about this and posted to HN shortly after Bing Travel went live and because of that I've been introduced to more information about the whole situation than I had when I originally brought it up. In a nutshell, the Microsoft team blatantly copied Kayak's UI and has pretty much gotten away with it.
Are you under the impression that people who use Google services does not realize that their activity is logged? Do you think this is some sinister uber world domination plan by Google you just suddenly discovered?

We know that we are constantly logged and we still use Google. Not because we are forced to use Google or that there are no good alternative to their services. We use it because we want to use it and because they are, in most cases, genuinely superior services.

Don't assume people who use everything that comes out of Google are stupid and ignorant. I actually want Google to log all my activity so that I can have a more connected experience with all the Google services I use. Thats the whole idea, its not a sinister plan.
View Source: http://www.romancortes.com/ficheros/meninas.html

Edit: And images:
http://www.romancortes.com/ficheros/meninas_sprites.png
http://www.romancortes.com/ficheros/meninas_bg1.jpg

Edit 2: http://www.romancortes.com/ficheros/meninas_bg2.jpg
Coffee does pretty much the same thing every other LEO forensics toolset does. I don't think it has admissability problems.
I wonder if it works in a comment, like perhaps [<"@%'&_\?/:;,>কী €].

Yes it does.
Every LEO doing "forensics" is basically an EnCase jockey today. It's not like they're shipping these things to Quantico for imaging under a scanning electron microscope.

Regardless, the reason for online tools like Coffee is that you want to preserve an image of the running system. Removing the hard drive defeats that objective.
Gluster Storage Platform 3.0GA Release
Greetings!

The Gluster Team is happy to announce the release of Gluster Storage Platform 3.0. The Gluster Storage Platform is based on the popular open source clustered file system GlusterFS, integrating the file system, an operating system layer, a web based management interface, and an easy to use installer.

Gluster Storage Platform is an open source clustered storage solution. The software is a powerful and flexible solution that simplifies the task of managing unstructured file data whether you have a few terabytes of storage or multiple petabytes.

Gluster Storage Platform runs on industry standard hardware from any vendor and delivers multiple times the scalability and performance of conventional storage at a fraction of the cost.

To learn more please check us out at www.gluster.org where you can download source and binary, read release notes, and engage with the community.

If you are already using Gluster, please help strengthen our community by leaving your
mark on Who is using Gluster page:

http://www.gluster.com/community/whoisusing.php

Happy Hacking
--
Gluster Team
What is a Turing Machine?
I think it's fair to note the difference between quoting analyst predictions and quoting their analysis of past financial statements.

Not that they can't also cock-up a financial analysis, but they tend to do much better at that than understanding technology or predicting product success; particularly as relates to Apple.
Personally I think the most secure option would be to setup a system to physically destroy the computer's HDD and therefore any information contained on it.

Perhaps a 1.8" HDD in a 2.5" carrier with the spare space being taken up by Thermite and an ignition system?

Don't enter the correct BIOS password within 30 seconds of a boot attempt? Buh Bye, HDD.
How are they going to do that? They tell your browser to 301 to the target URL - the browser is what notices the target URL is a 404, not Google, so Google would have no way to know whether or not the target is gone. The target URLs could be private (only accessible to specific ips). Even if google crawled the page, they would have no way of knowing if your browser could reach it.
They're GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU (U+03C4), GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON (U+03BF)
I don't want to hear a journalist expound on economic matters when they don't have a degree in economics, only in journalism (or no degree at all). I can just go onto one of the many economic blogs, quite a few run by professors of economics. Ditto political news. Ditto tech news on reddit, HN or slashdot where there are multiple commentators who often have graduate degrees in the subject matter and certainly many links posted to peer reviewed articles or at least Wikipedia. So often tech journalism is just the recycling of press releases, or science journalism pops up with, yet again, a correlation/causation fallacy with all of the interesting details cropped out for a mass audience. I am glad journalism is dying...

The thing is, journalism as you paint it isn't dying. The medium is changing, but the landscape is still dominated by journalists, meaning people who write stories on subjects they don't deeply understand, for a mass audience who doesn't know any better. And I'm really not sure that the quality is improving at all. Look at the top 10 tech blogs, or political news sites, or whatever, and tell me I'm wrong. The fact of human nature is that we're predisposed to believe people who sound like they know what they're talking about, and who can write in a persuasive manner. And our info economy has driven us to a shallower understanding of the world, I think, so we're satisfied with getting Twitter-sized updates every 10 seconds on a thousand different topics. The places like Aol and Demand Media who build content farms get this, and that's why they're going for volume and scale instead of deep quality. HN and places like it will never be mainstream, because people don't like to spend this much time thinking about stuff.
Introduction to Python Profiling
Canadian Startup Visa Petition
Open Source Facebook app for journalist
One of the ways facebook tags users is be noticing which groups they join. They combine it with the text in the headline in the group. This leaves a big gap. Therefore I create an open source app so users can build their own network.
code.google.com/p/facebook-twitter-group-directory-journalism/
Patrick McKenzie complains about Google here with some regularity, and it's not all just about customer service (lack of transparency another one).
At least your children would remember you...
Yes, open source software is unique and special. But that's another reason it doesn't fit neatly as a 'textbook' example of a public good. The classical excludable/rivalrous analysis didn't even consider things that could be non-excludable by choice, or which might improve qualitatively by being non-excludable.

That novelty cuts both ways. That an open source software producer can't capture the full value by charging a fee would tend to lead to underproduction. But costless communication, redistribution, and sharing-back means they get value in many other ways -- reputation, code improvements, increased sales of excludable complement products, etc.

This is again why the analysis has to be more sophisticated than "if free riders are a problem, then taxpayers should fund".

The Nobel winner was Elinor Ostrum. MarginalRevolution had a high-level summary:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/10...

"Qualified economists could determine the budget"? With this and your comment about "a few government sanctioned pg's" I see that you put a lot more trust in disinterested experts and bureaucrats to hand out large sums of money than I do. That process -- boards of politically-favored individuals handing out money -- does not converge on the optimal level of funding/production. We know that with as much certainty as we know there can be problems with private underprovision of classical public goods.

But really, what is the "problem" for which an "imperfect solution" is better than nothing? Open source is booming. People love to create it even for nonmonetary reasons -- so perhaps we already have an inefficient surplus. (Maybe hobbyist open source work should be taxed!)

Meanwhile, governments are having a hard time managing their traditional public goods duties and tax flows in an efficient, sustainable manner. You want to give them a new portfolio of economic responsibilities?
The redness of men in Egyptian art is based on the fact that men's skin is redder, due to more hemoglobin closer to the surface.
It seems that donating is good for your karma. Just after I donated my $100 this morning, I received an unexpected payment for $3,800 USD! :D
Oh no! A blogger was wrong! Call the press!
Designing an Effective Piece Rate
As far as I can see,

* Create a load of vertical elements, some overlapping.
* on each one, have a hover css rule that adjusts the background position
of various things.

Clever, not sure why it's better than just using javascript though.
The average human lifespan in the United States has been increasing linearly by about 2 months per year since 1980. In 1990 average life expectancy was 75.5 in 2000 it was 77 and 2010 will be 78.5 http://www94.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=life+expectancy+unite...
Any chance you could implement a "Mail HN Link" similar to what Tweetie 2 does for "Mail Tweet"? That would make it really easy to forward HN links to a number of friends.

If you haven't seen that feature of Tweetie 2, it's awesome. It embeds the tweet itself, along with any relevant links, in an html email. Oh, and most importantly, sending the email doesn't require you to quit the app.

I suppose you'd be embedding the story title, description, a link to the HN thread, and of course, the link to the original story.
Are you referring to nuclear power? We didn't throw it away. Indeed, the very question of waste which can't be simply thrown away has hampered widespread nuclear plant deployment.

Nuclear is off the table until we figure out what to do with the waste.
Yet another one? Quoting mcav "Just when I thought the URL shortener fad was on the way out..."
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=995050
Not decided on whether change is accelerating, but a very significant improvement in my own life is the market availability of an automatic vacuum cleaner (i.e. Roomba). Much like the automatic dishwashers and clothes washers of yore, this is a huge time-saver. God, I hate vacuuming...
Given that he said that in 2002 and the first iPhone came out in 2007, one could argue that he was right at the time. The first-gen iPhone experience (especially with the release version of the OS) was sluggish enough that one could argue that it was still close to impossible.

"Impossible" was probably a bad wprd choice, though, since technology has ways of proving us wrong. :)
> What exactly makes Eisner a "sociopath" and Brin & Page "normal decent people"?

Because Google proclaimed that they will "do no evil". So therefore they are not evil ... fire up your blogs praising Google in 1...2....

Of course a few dissidents who were turned in by Google to face long prison sentences in countries with oppressive regimes might have something to say about the track record of the "do no evil" policy, but somehow everyone already forgot about that.

Once a company outgrows its founders, becomes a publically-traded behemoth, it is really not that different from other publically-traded behemoths. Some just learn from the mistakes of others, and handle their marketing and PR better (e.g. Microsoft is considered the "Evil Empire" so we will market ourselves as "good" on the moral spectrum).

For instance, it helped Google's PR tremendously to take a "moral stand" as a company. Perhaps their cost-analysis showed that when they do something immoral nobody will notice and they'll use their awesome marketing skill, and everyone will forgive and forget. It worked great in that respect. But that typifies sociopathic behavior.

Now I am not blaming Google too much. I think it is the legal environment that creates a Darwinian competition where sociopaths rise to the top. If companies had personalities (I don't think they do, at least not to the extent that everyone anthropomorphizing them), most would be diagnosed as dysfunctional sociopaths. Those that aren't, we never hear about.
Octopuses Carry Coconuts as Instant Shelters
Interesting to note that he quotes a 3 year old statement from Palm CEO that went wrong and has probably forgotten his own position on the iPhone a few years before that.
To respond specifically to the issue of multitasking, I am still surprised that this is such a big deal. Maybe I have atypical phone usage patterns, but the only application I have every wished I could run in the background is Pandora. Anything else I find I only need to run when I'm looking at it, or already mutlitasks. I can listen to music (both from the library and from streaming sources online through Safari) in the background while doing other things. I can stay on speakerphone with someone while I run other apps. People get all in a huff pointing out that the iPhone can't run multiple apps at the same time, but the two things I want, phone and music, work in the background. If AT&T's advertising is to be believed, the Droid wouldn't let me be on the phone and use data at the same time, which to me is almost the be all and end all of multitasking, so instead of gaining something I'd be losing.

For those of you curious, I listen to this radio station streaming, and consider it a great example of a way to embrace Safari for the iPhone:
http://c895worldwide.com/web/streaming/iphone/iphone.html
It lets me add a bookmark to my home screen with an icon it gets from the page itself, and when I start streaming music, it keeps going even when I leave Safari and do something else.
> Despite years of trying, making programming languages look more like English hasn't helped people become better programmers.

That's because human languages are geared towards interactive communication not towards describing problems and solutions precisely. That's why computer languages resemble rather precise math language.

I don't like idea that you should keep inconvenience in place to keep of idiots. Idiots won't succeed anyway but inconveniences harm professionals and novices.

Maybe PHP is too easy but mysql_real_escape_string() is too damn long. And that's why web is full of SQL vulnerabilities.
Ask HN: Dealing with spam from competition.
I help a friend manage a gaming forum.

Recently we have been spammed (private messages to users and forums themselves). All calling to switch to another forum. How does one deal with these, besides putting caps on messages per minute or catchpas?

My friend wants to do retaliation - to spam the other forum. He feels double-wronged since that other forum already is bigger.

So far I have cleaned up our forum, and told him not to message anyone.

However, what is the proper etiquette for this? How does one handle this cleanly?

As far as I see, this all could have been instigated by a third party. On the other hand, I do not know admins of the other forum, and they could be playing dirty. I have no way of knowing.

So what is best way to deal with this?

Thank you

Adam Piotr Żochowski
In the areas with cheap real estate, this is because incomes are low.
As an Italian speaker, I do recognize some of the words, and they seem to make sense. The spelling is in line with my scarce knowledge of 15th century Italian.

We're used to a very rational way of thinking, whereby one would devise a system and apply consistently throughout the whole text, but from what little I have seen and read of this manuscript, it seems that whoever wrote used lots of artistic license and was intentionally trying to conceal the content. So it could be possible that the writer(s) decided to do away with all manners of grammatical rules, and parts of the language, like article, propositions, and the letters F and Z (if that seems weird, imagine that there was no U in Latin). All the other missing letters are not in the Italian alphabet.

Though, it would be interesting to see how this theory works with the non-herbal sections of the manuscript.

Finally, I totally agree with muddylemon that attributing to Da Vinci is silly. Like he was the only literate Italian alive in 15th century.
Twitter Tapping
Reminds me of this PC Magazine piece dissing Arrington's article about a Google Phone.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2356075,00.asp
I think the real money is going to be in creating a physical URL shortening device. An appliance that sit on your network and rewrites every URL using a GUID.
WANTED
I am looking for fresh ideas in digital signage: new technology platforms or marketing ideas, startups or established companies, as long as they a) are fresh b) offer new ways of integrating media c) create new experiences for consumers while they shop, or new benefits for business (retail or brands). This is not an academic question.
Leaving the Carbon in Copenhagen
Obviously, it's more subjective. That said, the fact that X is directly measurable while Y is slightly subjective does not mean that an X:Y connection isn't worth discussing.

When real estate is expensive, it means that (1) past wealth is being valued highly against present labor and future potential (e.g. talent) and (2) that the wrong people are winning. It's a really bad sign; it signifies that a society is past its prime, and will fall into feudalism if changes do not occur.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby:_Champion_of_Youth#Lipog...

If you're intending to be obfuscatory, you might come up with "aberrant statistical properties".
I'm pretty sure I've seen this effect elsewhere. (It was off an HN item some months back. It wasn't actually the story, it was just the header on the linked blog.)
Before Google went to China, there were debates within the company: not over whether there was money to be made, but whether they would be a force for good there. When that was answered positively, they went.

I don't think saying "CHINA = EVIL" is terribly helpful, either.
Actually, I take some of it back!

You had a good point about total size of the code being downloaded, so I went back and tried to see if I could shrink mine a bit without pulling any dirty tricks -- when I realized that a chunk of his code is 'hidden' in the reference to the regular expression object he's created elsewhere.

With that added, and matching my code style to his, my version is less than 20 characters longer than his -- and that's without doing anything sneaky.

But, maybe there just isn't a big difference in speed? So, I set up a quick test. Again, I wanted to be fair, so I could understand what was going on. The two tests are identical, I didn't advantage mine in any way or disadvantage his.

The results?

Given a list of 11 valid CSS properties to "camelize", some with dashes and some without, my code can camelize the set 20 times over in 1 to 2 milliseconds.

The non-memoizing version can camelize the set 20 times over in ... 1034 to 1212 milliseconds.

That's a significant difference, IMO.

Tested on Firefox 3.5/Mac.

...all that said, thanks for reminding me about function size and download speed. I try to keep my own library at under 1000 source lines of code, but there are definitely some areas where I can sacrifice a few lines to lose a chunk of text. (Like, wrapping "typeof object != 'undefined'" into an "undef(object)" function.)
"short URL space"? There's a 'space' for these now? Next it'll be called a business sector or something.
Cool, I hope you keep visiting HN often to stay in touch with the start up scene here.
Remembering the VIC-20
uhh.. its not stereotyping - comment was directed at a government policy that has fostered piracy at all levels in China. The comment is a characterization of policy, not a characterization of people.
ACPO guidelines get very ratty about working on live machines. Especially if you can't demonstrate technical competance.

In my experience the vast majority of police seizing machines can't do that. It would be a field day for the defence I imagine :-)
The article posits that a physical feature can be shaped evolutionarily by environment. Observations of other species appear to support that. We see today that there are different distinctive physical features for people around the globe, so it might be fair to suppose other features may have come about with environmental influence
(even if we haven't yet found correlations). Yet, we also know that the human skull has evolved to change over many years, but if we were to compare the skulls of people across the globe today my guess would be that they are quite similar. Therefore, I think a more accurate assumption would be that modern day humans across the globe have "differently evolved" in some aspects, such as physical appearance.
I think the point of the original post is that Ruby can parse URL-like syntax (e.g., http://twitter.com/statuses/show/6592721580.json) as code, no strings attached.
Like f("2",1)?
I agree and I have explicitly not attempted to state a root cause (other than the tautological 'men and women are treated differently' of course) nor any suggested fixes.

I do not, however, agree that honest discussion can't benefit. Most of the problems I see in online conversations regarding sexism/gender/etc involve nearly everyone involved no matter their position flying straight through the actual words on screen into some higher dimension of rape culture vs the PC feminazis. It's insane, frustrating in the extreme and entirely counterproductive. There's a lot of baggage held by everyone and I think realizing that people can disagree and still converse on the subject would be an excellent first step both towards discerning a root cause and effecting a change.

That's behind my call for an honest discussion and I thank you wholeheartedly for participating.
See http://searchyc.com/submissions/gervais?sort=by_date .
I think this is a little disingenuous. If 2020 comes and we're all using high-resolution immersion goggles to do computing, will you point at the Virtual Boy and say it's not new because they did it in the '90s?

Google and Wikipedia circa 1998 is a lot different than Google and Wikipedia circa 2010. Think high-resolution searchable 3D maps of more or less the whole world, single point of reference for the majority of human knowledge you would ever think to look up different.
Nice cycling lanes and impressive statistics, but I don't get the impression that bicycles are as ubiquitous (yet) as they are in Amsterdam.

I wonder how they handle bicycle parking in Copenhagen, because that's a real problem in most Dutch cities. Especially those cargo bikes take a lot of space.
International Backup Awareness Day
This is sort of like the internet equivalent of a popup book.