skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People use mobile phones in addition to desktops. They might be doing a price check on a mobile phone and then actually purchasing on their desktop.

They might be reading the news, which is roughly 50%-99% PR placements depending on the publication, which pushes them down some sales funnel or another. They're just browsing higher up in the conversion funnel. Searches higher up in the funnel tend to be less valuable in terms of costs per click than searches which are closer to the purchase.

Everything in the news is marketing anyway, and it's just as paid for as it is when it's an ad -- often times it's more expensive, because access to the news is rationed by publicists and PR firms rather than by the advertising department. Further, the bulk of social media is the effluvia of PR as it reverberates through people who talk too much on the internet. As far as Google is concerned, that propaganda consumption is just likely to stimulate more searches later on which can be advertised against.

The flow might be: Check Facebook App -> Click Gossip Rag Article -> See fabulous new shoes in celebrity photo -> Order lunch on Seamless App -> Go home from work -> Remember to Google "buy red high heels kim kardashian" -> Click ad -> Price check, bounce (Google gets paid) -> "red high heels discount" -> Click ad (Google gets paid again) -> Buy shoes.

When they are ready to buy, they will pay for the $10 click -- maybe multiple times across different advertisers -- on their desktop or $15 app download on their mobile phone.

The headline that this author uses is also really loosey goosey. Google's ad products on mobile are also increasingly more biased towards generating paid phone calls. When you search for a locksmith or auto repair, you want to get a guy on the phone right now, and are likely to need to buy immediately.

So, this isn't really Google's "growing problem" -- Google as an organization is set up to use machine learning to figure out how to make money off of mobile search behavior. The company is still learning what it has to do to make money off of mobile search behavior and how it differs from behavior on desktops.

Also, as far as Google's customers (advertisers) are concerned, if a desktop search results in people subscribing to an e-mail list that they read on their phone, the advertiser earned measurable results from the money that they gave Google. If their customers don't like to buy on mobile or they behave differently, campaigns can be configured accordingly.
It's odd that Amazon would stir this up again months after the original NY Times piece came out. Then again, maybe Amazon doesn't really feel like it has anything to lose. And maybe attacking the veracity of the NY Times would be in the best interest of someone who, say, owns the Washington Post.
I second that along, with fsharp.org and tryfsharp.org.
It might not say that you trust what the person at the other end does but it does indicate that a third-party has vetted the identity of the person at the other end. Do you trust Google? Probably not with everything but you do trust that the certificate that was issued to them proves that they're at the other end of your search bar.
Agile would be good if it existed as described and was a stable organizational mode.

In reality, every "Agile" place I've worked for really uses Agile-for-name-value-only, which amounts to daily half-hour long status reports on what you did yesterday and project deadlines that come from on high that have to be ratified pro forma by the engineering team.

Yes, I know that's not true Agile. Just like the USSR wasn't true socialism! Agile can never fail, it can only be failed.
I'm in the UK and I use voice search all the time on my Android. Who wants to type phrases into a keyboard when it soooo much quicker to just say it?

Plus the voice recognition's accuracy is absolutely stunning for me; even in a crowded bar.
No, of course not. But "the legal repercussions are so low that no one seriously considers them" is not accurate, as I'm sure you see now. Some of us are in a position to flout various laws, others are not.
IdentTrust is governed by their CP and CPS documents, which specify the criteria for delegating authority.
I did not know about jq, thanks!

Without jq, you can still pipe to python json.tool module:

$ curl http://domain.com | python -m json.tool
Considering most entry-level positions in big tech pay well but come with outrageous hours and no overtime, an accusation of low pay seems justified. I know plenty of Google engineers who recently started in the Bay Area at around $86,000. Considering the amount of time they're expected to work and the costs of living there, that's pretty pathetic for a huge company with deep pockets.
Processing 3.0 Released
That's how I feel as well. Having my phone on hand means I have an answer to almost every question. And I wonder about a lot of things. I really cannot count the number of times I'm driving talking to my wife and we get to a question neither can answer when "Ask Google" is my response. We use voice search on our phones a lot. A whole lot.
And there is enough people who see Amazon as "getting in the door" that they will tolerate a year or two of utter bullshit so they can jump ship to Google or other more humane jobs.
Governments should not own copyrights. A copyright is the ownership to a published work. However, taxpayers paid for the creation of the work, so they are the actual owners. Since everyone owns the work, there is no enforceable right.
What I meant to suggest was that mid tier applications should be regulated like amateur radio; strict rules about what takes place, but anything goes within those confines.

By online I meant the testing process could be done online.
Whether the statements are true or not is what the journalists should care about, and what they did, in this article.

You’ll notice that Carney never disputes the truth of the claims. He only attacks the character of the people who made them- or adds related but not contradictory details. Overall, side issues not actually related to the substance of the claims themselves.
I can't imagine this Olson story is over.

AMZN publicly airs personal and damaging information about illegal activity (their words) of a named former employee, in an attempt to destroy his credibility as a source of their story. The former employee publicly refutes those claims, essentially saying that AMZN is intentionally telling a lie. Someone is not telling the truth, and I'm not sure there is much wiggle room in this scenario for both to be plausibly correct.

No matter who is the truthful party, AMZN has taken on a lot of potential legal liability, and for what? In an attempt to refute one source of an article that has many sources. And a source that said people cry at their desk.

Seems a very large bet to place with little to be gained. I would imagine Mr. Olson has already been contacted by lawyers galore.
An OCaml MOOC just started yesterday, I think there's still time for people to get in:

https://www.france-universite-numerique-mooc.fr/courses/pari...

Session 0 is just a lot of introductory stuff (history of OCaml, etc.), so it shouldn't be difficult to catch up.
You may see it that way. I didn't actually see any egregious failure of NYT "fact checking" in that victimization post spewed by Amazon PR yesterday. Just Amazon attempting a PR slight of hand. And of course Bezos owns WP, so attacking NYT credibility fits his playbook nicely.
The excerpt from that post that I find most appropriate is, "Bad tools typically take longer to work with, and typically teach bad habits to get around their deficiencies." That's how many of us feel about Agile.
OpenStreetMap is the Most Important thing in Geo
I agree, but others may not... White House lawn anyone?
I think the criticism was meant as one of the CA model, not Let's encrypt specifically - you have no choice about using CAs if you want to use https to serve a site to normal users. Also, I'm not the OP and think Let's Encrypt specifically is a great idea, already on the waiting list.
Being willing to say no, is also a huge part of this. The sad thing is always saying "yes" often results in both a worse product and spending your life in the office.
Don't be baffled. Engineering is driven by business direction, and the creation of an upgrade cycle is beneficial for the entire Android ecosystem.

You are not the customer they want.
Fun with Haxl (Part 1)
Announcing Mapzen Search
Office Open XML is indeed an open format. And you asked me to provide a citation for my assertion that shows that governments are trying to migrate away from proprietary formats.

For the U.S. URL, I should have probably been more specific: try http://www.data.gov/developers/harvesting

"As part of Project Open Data most government offices are transitioning to make all of their metadata available via a standard schema contained by a data.json file. These are treated just as any other harvest source."

Actually, I should have pointed you to Project Open Data really, found here:

https://project-open-data.cio.gov/

Citations provided!
I assume these are naturally occuring in the tobacco, as I can't see any reason that polonium or lead would be added to cigarettes. Does marijuana smoke contain similar radioactive components?
The text of the article mentions cold-rooms but the picture shows freestanding refrigerators. For small-scale storage they should should be using front-opening/chest-style refrigerators instead of freestanding ones.

Since cold air is denser than warm air, it falls. That means that every time someone opens a freestanding fridge a significant amount of your cold air falls right out. Top-opening fridges provide a well that retains the cold, significantly reducing energy usage especially on fridges that are frequently opened.

You see it a lot on freezers because the air is much colder and the cold tends to fall out even faster as a result. I think it would produce improvements here as well, since the energy produced by a solar panel is rather limited.

Assuming you could protect the cooling system and provide sufficient airflow - could you operate a fridge flipped on its back? Or does the compressor depend on proper orientation to have gravity return coolant and so on?
Additionally, giving a company bad press is usually good business for the press. Especially in a place like Seattle, where Amazon is not thought of highly in the first place.
EV certs are expensive because they have people in the loop, and so getting a cert for an obviously misleading name should be much harder. You'd have to pass an eyeballed sanity check.
It's interesting that front-end developers rate so high. Having been in FED for a while, I can say it totally varies from company to company.

I've worked at dev shops that were virtual sweat shops and had insane goals for each month. This caused you to work 11-13 hour days to hit your goals, less you get put on a PIP (performance improvement plan).

Others shops went to great lengths to give developers what I thought to be far too much reign to do what they pleased. Come in at noon and work till 10pm? Sure. Take two hour lunches? No problem. Sure the work got done eventually but the atmosphere was super lax with little or no oversight.
Since when does search correlate to productivity?

Communicating, managing projects, taking notes, reviewing/signing documents, sending payments, drafting designs, outlining documents, finding/ordering kit -- are these not productive?

Yeah, you're probably not doing hardcore document creation, or real research, away from a keyboard, comfortable chair, and a nice big screen, but that's not the shape of all productivity.
I don't know much about that to be honest.

A friend had it done, but I've no idea how much he paid.
I think apps have just done a good job keeping you in their little walled garden - they don't want you browsing the web, checking other pages, etc. They want your eyeballs on their screen so they can sell ads.

I think it's easy in theory (and probably hard in practice) to solve this problem. Google just needs to reduce the friction of web searches. I think they've gone a long way to achieving this goal on Android 6.0. For the uninitiated, they added that weird hold to search which automatically picks stuff out from the screen to search and often presents results in a way where it's really easy to switch back to what you were originally looking at.

Imagine if all you had to do was think about something to initiate a google search. Okay, that would probably get pretty dystopian but it would let you do many more searches even while your screen has been abducted by an app.

I think all google needs to do is reduce the frictions to search.
Because of those others we have this problem in the first place.
There are also some productive things that are doable with mobile devices. For me that is learning flash cards with Anki and data acquisition for openstreetmap (house numbers, etc.).

The problems they have is usually the small screen that makes it hard to view much content at once and that text input is really burdensome. Some tasks require these and are thus not suitable for the mobile devices. They however also have advantages to be usable in many situations computers aren't (for using a computer while standing you need a special desk while you can use the mobile devices in almost every position and place) and touch input may be better for some tasks.

For stuff that would be possible both for computers and for mobile devices equally good there's the barrier that it's already been developed for computers and that everybody needing it for work already uses a computer, so you would need to put a unbearable mass of work into it to bring it to already is with computers today.
Yesterday I realized that it has been a long time since an old friend reached out by email to ask how I was doing. I still do, but I also don't use the most popular social media channels. I wonder if the simulation of contact provided by broadcast-style social media is enough to satiate the need to reach out and make direct contact. Perhaps I should delete my page from facebook. Despite the fact it hasn't been touched in four years it might give people the impression that they know how I am. It is easier to find me by actively searching for my name on the web. Then, even if one does this I've heard that facebook will sometimes make a stub page from media they have available to stand in. It feels like a nightmarish trap in which we train machines to supplant ourselves.
They've been pretty good at squashing them.

http://time.com/956/how-amazon-crushed-the-union-movement/
Ah! I didn't know Inkling was a YC company. Interesting.

I'll definitely check out your new sites.
live at http://bmanish001.pythonanywhere.com/
Why do you assert that "highly addictive" isn't scientific?

You could measure things like the average number of trials needed to get rid of an addiction as a measure of whether this product is highly addictive or not.
I clicked out as soon as that blue rectangle completely obscured my view of the page, which I was already struggling to read anyway (not just because of the contrast - it was a very listy article). Why do so many publishers think a popup is acceptable just because it's now called an interstitial, not a popup?
Ah, I see :). Thanks for clarifying.
I suspect they're hearing mentions of the article as reasons for people turning down recruiters and job offers.
There is still an advantage here, though: You can use a different hostname on the origin server.

Use this to serve e.g. an S3 site on your own domain using SSL: S3 -> CloudFlare (with CloudFront) uses Amazon's certificates for their hostnames. Cloudflare -> internet uses your website's hostname and certificates.

Total money spent on SSL: $0.
Life Hack: Get an Amazingly Powerful Computer for Just $70
This is Georgia, not California. Employment law in Georgia is very employee-unfriendly. The company doing the layoffs may fight dirty and threaten to fire you for cause which prevents you from collecting unemployment.

If you refuse the severance with support requirements attached, be prepared to fight and have plenty of money in the bank to live off of, because they'll try to make an example out of you.
You also have to understand the data was culled from Glassdoor and the people leaving reviews there. I would think to some degree you have to take the data they got with a grain of salt.
My search pattern changed when I got a useful phone. The most useful was my old Droid 4. It had the real keyboard, and I used the crap out of it. The phone itself was no winner, but it could render search results reasonably, which is what made the whole thing worth it.

Those changed a little with a Note 4. It's a much more powerful phone, and I do still search on it, but touch input is a modest PITA. I cut back on searches, but I have added some voice use cases too.

In my experience, people with powerful phones use them more. A lot of phones out there aren't so powerful, and they keep it to social, MMS, etc...

I actually disallow FaceBook on my phone. It's a battery hog, and I've better things to do. FB once a week on a laptop is enough for me.
> Since when does search correlate to productivity?

I think it's active vs. passive. You search to find something vs just consuming whatever Zuckerberg thinks you want to know about.
Not in the US as far as I know.
Don't all the browsers offer some implementation of 'cloud tabs', cloud bookmarks, and/or 'read later' sorts of features? Who needs copy/paste?
Structure of an enzyme complex vital in cancer development determined
You'd be surprised how low people are willing to go in a tough economy. I think the bigger issue is also that techs aren't given a fair-income, especially at places like Amazon, because of the H-1B scam. If you are young and trying to get your foot in the door, you'll put up with the low pay.
The problem with a portable VR recorder is that VR ideally records the whole volume of a space in 3 dimensions. People are developing camera arrays that do a decent approximation of 360-degree, 3d video through multiple wide angle lenses and software stitching and interpolation.

But I think that the real "wow" moment will come when you can plug in 3 or more affordable, high-definition video and depth cameras around a room. The way I envision it, you have a power outlet on each of the four walls in a room, but higher up instead of near the ground. Into each outlet you plug in something that looks like a webcam but acts like a high def version of a Kinect or similar. Each cameras records both depth info and video. The cameras communicate wirelessly with a computer or other base unit that's running the "brains" of the operation. It receives the video and depth info and composites it into a live 3d model of the room with the video info used to create texture maps.

I've done some really basic experiments with a single Kinect and the Oculus dev kit and they look about as good as you'd imagine. Blocky, flickery shapes, only viewable from one angle, with jagged edges and funky video. Still, it's already pretty cool looking. It already feels like something where incremental improvements in capture hardware and processing can make this very usable.

Then once you've got these sorts of live 3d environments, it's just a matter of encoding, compressing, and transmitting the data over networks before you've got a decent semblance of live telepresence.

I know this is a tangent from the porn discussion but as with a lot of tech, porn could easily be the industry to push development. I can imagine that live sex shows with real performers would be seen as premium services that companies can charge for (and *Tube sites couldn't immediately duplicate).
If there's a government that you trust, then you're mighty naive.
This has nothing to do with an upgrade cycle. Optimisation costs engineering time which is quite pricy. So it's an easy way to cut costs.
But just like in venture capital, the gains from the winners are used to wipe out all the losers and provide overall gains.

While we'd love to be able to say "pill X costs $Y to make, therefore you should charge $Y+10%" there are many more variables in play that aren't directly connected to the manufacture of the pill.. or even the R&D that went into it.
If you're curious as to why Amazon is behaving so foolishly given that this rebuttal serves only to extend the shelf life of the original story, you should consider that the founder and CEO of Amazon happens to own the Washington Post, one of the New York Times' chief competitors.
Second Drup here, merlin is the key feature. (I didn't know sublime had a merlin plugin)
I have a bookmarklet, which I've shared here: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/wKpewj (there are lots if you search bookmarklet + {something}). It makes the text 1em, not bold/thin, black on tan.

Something a bit better could preserve headings, bold words etc.

Firefox's Reader Mode sometimes works, although not on this site.
Whats the alternative to CA being able to delegate signing? Would you prefer having browsers constantly being updated with new lists of CA's, maybe one new per day.

Second, would you prefer that browsers blessed a new CA completely independently? If not then who should have that power? Governments? Non-profit organizations like ISRG?

The big alternative is to maintain your own list of trusted CA's, going through each and every new CA that you encounter and associate a trust relationship. Not even famous security researchers do this, and I can't really blame them as it is like a lawyer reading every EULA that they encounter and fully investigate the scope of them. The scope and complexity just get beyond what a single person can manage.
For most communication, full stop. I edited a news-stand magazine with TextEdit on the Mac for several years (Apple's bundled text editor, speaks RTF). I found that the complexities of Word just got in the way, and the InDesign guys liked receiving consistently, minimally marked-up text.
Exactly this... I cannot believe he reopened this can of worms. While not forgotten the mental imprint of the original article was tailing off... and he brings it all up to the surface again. I would be furious if I was part of PR.
Where I work it seems to be a bit of a cargo cult, rather than an ethos of actively solving problems. We do standup meetings because sit-down ones wouldn't work. We use post-it notes on whiteboards because just writing on the whiteboard wouldn't work. We have sprints because just doing the job wouldn't work. All the trappings of agile, none of the results.

I'm not hostile to agile per se - it clearly does work. But not where I am, it's just another fad which will eventually be replaced by some other magic methodology.
I think trying to do a big bang deployment of scrum in a slow organisation bureaucratic organisation is probably a bad idea.

Probably best idea is something using kanban. Map the existing process using kanban. Find bottle necks, and fix the process. Start changing bits to it. Start using TDD, maybe user stories, maybe add "sprint" planning meetings.

You might not be implementing "true agile", but its better than complete disaster trying to enforce everything suddenly.

Also this comment he stated in the comments makes me uncomfortable.

"being uncomfortable committing to an outcome that’s time-boxed"

" sticking to a 5-to-9 mentality "

You shouldn't really being "commiting" to a time box. Its a guess, not a commitment. You use velocity to get better at the guess. If you miss, oh well lets get better at it next time by adjusting the story points in a sprint.

He makes sound like he expecting people to work overtime to meet a commitment. This is not recommended in scrum. You should have a normal work time mentality and work requirements should fit into normal hours. If you miss the "guess", you should adjust the next sprint to not include as much. If you work overtime to meet the commitment, you re-enforce the idea that it is ok to commit a overloaded amount of work to a sprint. Bad. Bad. Bad. That can be abused.
The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War