Why Google made this change, from the article, "In this case, we are following the lead of the UN, Icann [the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers], ISO [International Organisation for Standardisation] and other international organisations."

When it comes to Israel/Palestine, every mapmaker in the world is taking a stance.

Another example: long form sales pages. They've been discussed here on Hacker News before, and many people here hate them, but they do (apparently) convert very well.

I should have thought of that example.

Yes, long-form sales pages are an excellent example, which I can personally attest do indeed work.

For a bare-bones approach, this shell command would also do the trick.

cut -d\ -f1 ~/.bash_history | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head

(Note: There should be two spaces after the -d\ .)

(disclaimer: this is my link/blog/software)

If that doesn't work for you, this might:

history 1 | awk '{print $2}' | awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"}{print $1}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail | sort -nr

What that doesn't give you is the command tree, for example "git commit" vs "git checkout". It just does "git".

[edit, added gem link] The gem is here https://github.com/paulmars/huffshell

Generating the word tree is short and simple, though. It's also useful as a standalone Unix utility. Here's my one-minute hack:

    import sys
    import collections

    tree = lambda: collections.defaultdict(lambda: [0, tree()])

    def printtree(node, indent=0):
        padding = indent * ' '
        for word, (count, child) in node.iteritems():
            print "%s%s %d" % (padding, word, count)
            printtree(child, indent + 2)

    wordtree = tree()
    for line in sys.stdin:
        node = wordtree
        for word in line.split():
            node[word][0] += 1
            node = node[word][1]
    printtree(wordtree)

I've always wondered why Wikipedia doesn't include affiliate links to Amazon on all their book and movie articles.

I think their current logic is that affiliate links force them to choose which online store they want to support, which is something they appear loath to do.

Look at the page they send you too when you do try to buy a book in an article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0802130984 . It's so large and completist that it has two tables of contents, and it's so obsessively non-preferential that it does a good job of hiding the one amazon.com link that most people are probably looking for.

Personally, I've bought 100s of books and DVDs after reading their Wikipedia articles, and I'd be happy to let the WikiMedia Foundation get my affiliate dollars.

The point is that the information about the book might not be completely objective when money is involved. It's that tiny bit of bias that might get injected in the article, by someone who is affiliated, be it Amazon employee or someone from Wikimedia. When this might not be a real issue, no one can be sure, and the trust in absolute objectivity is lost.

You're right, but money already is involved in these articles. Authors and actors (and agents, I've suspected in a few cases) are keeping a biased eye on their articles.

I think it would be difficult for Wikipedia to be corrupted by money. There's too much transparency, and there's too large of a community. The admins have already discovered with dealt with large-scale attempts to game the system.

What's actually at stake here is the appearance of objectivity. Affiliate links, which are nearly universal across the web, should be minimally objectionable.

(from Jakob Nielsen)

"Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold."

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html

The article includes the results of an eyetracking study, and a few examples of viewing patterns where people did spend a lot of time below the fold.

As someone with technical knowledge and no purchasing power, I dislike talking to salespeople and technical people. I just want the name of a product that I can recommend to my boss. I want that datasheet.

I recently tried to recommend a great product to my boss. I had used it in a past job, and I knew what company made it, but I had no idea what the actual product was called. I didn't want to waste my boss's time, so I tried to do the research on my own and figure out what specific product I was looking for.

Their website wasn't very helpful, it was filled with generic product names and an amalgamation of SEO-friendly keywords and the word "solution". I emailed them to find out which product I was looking for, and next thing I knew I was on a sales call. Then I was on a sales conference call. Then they popped in for a sales meeting, even though I never told them my company's address.

I came away with a vague idea that their products were both nameless and probably very good. I explained it all to my boss; he took a pass.

I could've saved everyone a lot of time if I just had that comprehensive datasheet.

Some bots auto-revert changes that are likely to be vandalism or spam, like if an anonymous user adds a link to a blog on a free blog hosting site. (Specifically, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:XLinkBot .)

Sometimes you can work around this.

Find the install.rdf file for the plugin, and change the maxVersion variable to "4.*".

It doesn't always work, but I've had good luck with it.

Thanks. I'll give it a try later tonight.

I ran it for Javascript, Ruby, and Perl, and I got this:

{"JavaScript"=>48, "Ruby"=>46, "Perl"=>28}

I was about the say the same thing, but about Infoseek.

And I did say the same thing, not two hours ago! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1983568