skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When pg writes "Microsoft is dead" (and the outroar over that from MS apologists sounded a lot like your comment, angry capital letters and all) or "Yahoo is in a death spiral", he's talking about potential for growth, not necessarily short term feasibility as a profitable business. Yahoo is irrelevant to the Valley because by and large their stuff is old hat used by middle aged soccer moms in Nebraska. Lots of companies make lots of money off of middle aged soccer moms in Nebraska, but it's not a growth market, especially if the middle aged soccer moms all start joining Facebook and playing bingo there instead of Yahoo.
Very good counter point. However, the few people I know that work at apple are good hackers. So maybe Apple is a cross between Design/Hacker culture. To me it seems optimal to balance the the Hacker culture with Designer culture. Kind of like a yin and yang. What are your thoughts PG? Doesn't design matter? Most YC funded web sites look very good. Isn't a design culture important to have?
""I suspect this process is well under way at Google these days."

What's your basis for this speculation?"

Conversations with friends who work there mostly. One of the advantages of being older is that you know people in most companies who talk to you off the record over beer, sometimes in very "high" positions.
My wife was the company nurse in a training outfit I attended in the 90s. Her "guitar" caught my eye too.
Korean is considered by some to be the most difficult language for native English speakers to learn, the only thing easy is the Hangul writing system which is very logical and easy to learn.

If you live in the US then there should be no question that Spanish should be the language to learn. If you live in Europe then German would be my choice.
you have my word :)
Irony punctuation
hehehehe that was so funny. And I could see myself in that position in a few months (right now I am laughing though). Going through those double checks and triple checks right now before I take the plunge - quit my job to concentrate on my project full time, and I am so wary of those thoughts in the second and third paragraph. Hopefully the reverse order stays and I do end up feeling free and staying that way!

Cheers,
Skowmunk.
I definitely have a different personality when I speak Mandarin, a language I studied for a year in Shanghai. I am not fluent, so my spoken mandarin is very simple, but direct, without the fluffiness or sugar-coating that one tends to include in English (my native language). Examples:

English: "Would it be possible to get a receipt for that?"

Mandarin: "Please give me a receipt"

The language helps to reinforce this due to its structure and grammar, however, I find I am more confident, outspoken and to-the-point when speaking in Mandarin. Also, I find I am an incredibly stingy negotiator when buying things, to the point of being a bit of a shit... didn't realise this until a friend came to visit me from overseas.

EDIT: Also, I tend to be more respectful when addressing others in Mandarin, using Sir (xiansheng), Master (Shifu) (as in a learned master), Boss (Laoban) etc to give face. Its an immense help and illustrates to me that a little respect and politeness goes a long way.
The people with jobs without benefits are paying minuscule taxes, so it's wrong to say they are paying for the benefits of public sector employees

I pay truly enormous taxes. While I enjoy a modicum of 401(k) benefit, it's several orders of magnitude less than the pension benefits of those being paid through my taxes.

those people are "paying" for someone else's benefits. But no one seems to complain about that.

Of course they do. Have you witnessed the number of people going to shop in WalMart to get low prices on overseas-made goods, rather than pay top dollar? What do you think is telling us?
One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company.

No it isn't. I said that you either need that or to pay people a lot or to be in an interesting industry where there are no competitors who have hacker cultures. If Apple doesn't have a hacker culture, then it would probably be an example of the latter.
If it's any help: it's available on Netflix for streaming.
yes, and they are awesome, Andrew. Keep up the good work!
This job appears to be suitable for people who don't know what they do know. It's an entirely new level of the Ashcroft effect!
You can't fault Jerry and David for not seeing search when the market had clearly supported banners with no basis for search as a viable model yet.

I disagree. Where were those banners shown? Search results pages. The reason people went to Yahoo! was to find stuff. That's the reason Yahoo! became Yahoo in the first place. The Yahoo founders made an invisible, scatterbrained web accessible by giving some sort of list index to it. Google later improved the sorting of the index, but Yahoo was first to build a large, searchable index.
Leaving with a BANG !
I haven't been following this very closely, but Guy Romain has mentioned a language called "RenderScript" in a presentation or two. RenderScript, to my understanding, is a sort of C-like language that the Android team intends to use to fill the gap between Java development and NDK development, enabling less painful game dev.

I'm not too familiar with it, so here's a few links:

Here's a post which attempts to walk through some RenderScript sample code:
http://www.inter-fuser.com/2009/11/android-renderscript-more...

Here's a mention of it on Guy Romain's blog
http://www.curious-creature.org/2010/01/07/nexus-one-live-wa...
I always use my real name when I send email, so email coming to me with my name on it is unremarkable and does not give me any reason to think it's "safe."
"How To Be Alone"
I only read this interesting discussion because I clicked a link from Twitter.

Enough said.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1596907
Go with Microsoft. They're huge, and with their Office software going online, they're your best bet. Plus, Bing is excellent.
720p is fine for a consumer device as long as the usability is there. That's why I still prefer VHS tapes to DVD, despite the lower image quality.
Alex is good people. :)
This is a pretty fascinating angle on the whole online privacy issue. Most of the focus is on potential misuse, primarily burglary. Conceptually, it reminds me of Bruce Schneier's idea of a "data shadow" that follows people through their lives. Schneier writes specifically about banking data, corporate aggregations, etc. and the need for people to "take back their data."

http://www.schneier.com/essay-219.html

However, the article brings up the point that a significant portion isn't our's to retake:

Protecting your privacy is not just a matter of being aware and personally responsible, said Mr. Sommer, the researcher. A friend may take a geotagged photo at your house and post it.

“You need to educate yourself and your friends but in the end, you really have no control,” he said, adding that he was considering writing a program to troll the Internet for photos with geotags corresponding to users’ home addresses.

Given that this is in some degree out of anyone's ability to control, how can people use this data shadow to their own advantage? For example, who needs an ID card if you have a large number of photos from across a large number of people who all agree that you are who you say you are?
Boomerang rocks. It's the simple functionality that I've wanted in my inbox for YEARS. I get a cubic butt-load of email and the problem with it, is it's all on the schedule of someone else. I need to deal with things, but not right now, but if I don't, it gets lost below the fold. I've tried special labels (and compound special labels). I've tried starring things (and plus labels and compound special labels). I've tried reminders outside of email. I've failed at all of them. Inbox 1, Tom 0 - though it's more like Inbox 365, Tom 0. Failing at this is VERY bad for a bootstrapping startup founder. You cannot afford to drop these balls.

Boomerang started as a get stuff in your inbox when it's relevant tool and that's been the biggest win for me. But the scheduled sending is quickly rooting itself into my email workflow. I am almost always heads down coding late at night and will often take breaks to wade through some email. Replying to everything at 3am is not ideal as I then get caught in the 4 - 8am slam of crap email that fills everyone's inbox. Choosing to have my stuff hit an inbox at 10 or 11am, so I'm after the crap and before lunch rocks. Wait, did I just give up one of my super secret competitive advantages over all the rest of you startup folks?

Anyway, I've been using Boomerang since early in their alpha. I've also know the Baydin team really well (we went through TS together in 2009) for a while. Good guys working really hard to solve real problems and make email not suck.

Is it perfect? Not yet. It requires a new version of FF, the Boomerang button is on the left of the Save Now button when you're composing (change this please Alex!), and it can't reply to my email for me, but so far it's pretty freaking awesome. Inbox 0, Tom 1.
This needs to be updated to compare against Word 2010. It's not there yet (and will probably always do line-by-line breaking, because who wants their text to jump around while editing?), but it can also do things that are not easy in LaTeX (where any custom thing requires somewhat deep knowledge).
I don't think what pg means by "hackerly culture" is any different from what you said. It sounds like Apple is doing exactly what pg tells hackers to do: make something people want. "Hackerly culture" to me implies that you have people ("hackers") who are able to explore the space of possibilities and invent new things rather than just building them to some businessman's specification. It's not essential that you vent a bunch of experimental Google Labs projects out onto the world to have a hackerly culture--Apple just aborts more of its false starts in the womb. (Steve Jobs said in an interview once that one of the things Apple does best is deciding which of their projects go forward or not--they had a promising PDA a few years back but stopped development prior to release because they didn't think the PDA market was worthwhile at the time compared to portable music.)
I can attest this.

I got called from Google during 2006. The HR guy screened me on the phone with all TCP/IP questions. I was amazed because he knew so much about TCP/IP and UNIX socket. It turned out that he was a former software engineer in Bell Lab/Lucent. It has been the best initial phone screen that I ever have.
At this stage you're beyond rules of thumb and down to evaluating each deal on a case by case basis, factoring in everything from interest rates to how long you think you'll be in that particular place.
Having worked there, it is definitely very much under way. A great indicator is probably how desirable a company is on the list of Top Companies for MBA's to Work For: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/mba100/2009/full_list...
nutcase lawsuits like McDonalds coffee that is too hot

Learn the facts of the case. It's a very well deserved lawsuit.

Only ignorant morons cite it as the opposite.

Congratulations on confirming that you're an ignorant moron.
For all short pithy names there is a collision somewhere. It's not really that big of a deal.
720p is fine for a consumer device as long as the usability is there. That's why I still prefer VHS tapes to DVD, despite the lower image quality.

How long has it been since you had a complete physical checkup?
Apple has many core competencies other than software, including hardware design, marketing, and retail. But the common theme I see between them is that they refuse to do things the way everyone else does, and that they hire the best and brightest to work on their problems. Also, they never accept that something can't be done. To me, this sounds very hackerly, just applied to different domains.
Maybe saying that hackers want to work with other hackers isn't general enough? People who are good at what they do attract others who are also good at what they do. While it's true that working with the best programmers is a draw, so is working with the best artists or graphic designers or physicists. Mutual respect can cross disciplines.
27 Pages of Windows and Office Productivity Tips
Ha! Out of the frying pan and into the pot. I went from too loose to too stringent.

Fixed now. Thanks for heads up!
Privacy and social networking are naturally opposing ideas--social networking is all about sharing information with people and privacy is all about keeping information from people. That's like saying Google ("organize the world's information") overlooked the importance of disorganization or ignorance. It won't be privacy at all that Facebook overlooks, it'll be something completely orthogonal to that axis.

It is, however, true that Facebook is unlike Google in that, while nearly everyone wants to find information, not everyone wants to share information with other people.
What about extra points for my resume.tex file that includes the company's logo on the cover page and emits different versions based on whether it's intended for executives (summarized version) or engineers (detailed version) based on how xelatex is invoked? Do I get the job? :-)
I absolutely agree, but if you have no choice but to cooperate with the usual "enterprise" hodgepodge with its myriads of standards and protocols, not having to write something that will allow you to do that, is a huge benefit.

You'll have to suffer the environment, you don't have to suffer the language.

But I think it's going to be interesting whether the clojure community will re-write the innards of the libraries they're wrapping already. Will we see e.g. compojure that's turtles all the way down?
Actually, I have always admired Yahoo Store for the fact that it was/is a solid stream of predictable revenue for Yahoo.

What other Yahoo web properties exhibit this?

I was disappointed you didn't mention Mark Cuban (Yahoo acquired his company, Broadcast.com, for $5.9 billion in Yahoo stock in '99).

Fairly expensive domain redirect.

Side note: I have many memories of creating RTML templates, while coveting Trevor Blackwell's DIY segway (the 2nd version).
That's a good question.

Code Anthem is different because...

1) Programmers are ranked based on how they do relative to everyone else, not pass/fail on some random, meaningless level. (like certifications)

2) The only thing that is rewarded is your skill at problem solving with code (ie. not coming back to the site every day). (like SO, RentaCoder)

3) By providing a profile page and badges, programmers can take control of their own career by proactively demonstrating their skill level.

4) Employers can contact job seekers based on their skill level, which is a recruitment process for programmers that -finally- makes sense.
Same. I'm sure I wasn't the only one who wanted the 1080p on the old model. I wonder what the rationale is in not having it.
Seems kind of strange to open the device up to such easy criticism. iTV? It doesn't even have 1080p!
Just a correction to your point #2:
Yahoo won the best paper awards in <b>2009</b> at SIGMOD, CIKM, SIGIR, KDD, WSDM, etc. which are indeed the best data conferences.
http://labs.yahoo.com/news/311
Some ideas:

1. I has iPhone!

2. I don't know what an email signature is.

3. I'm not bothering to figure things out.

4. Default is great for me!
I sometimes want to scream when the DVD player won't let me skip all the crap at the beginning and go straight to the menu. A VHS player just does what it's told! (That said, my VHS player is in the attic.)
I think you're being a trifle naïve.

Verizon have consistently used the "we're blocking illegal filesharing" line as justification for throttling BitTorrent traffic. Under the Google/Verizon deal, the FCC would have no power to say "No, actually BitTorrent is legal traffic", and it would be necessary for individuals to complain about the throttling, and most likely in the process be asked to demonstrate their particular use of BitTorrent was legal.

With the maximum payout capped at $2m, there would have to be a lot of BitTorrent users with significant grounds for complaint _and_ a carefully squeaky-clean file-sharing record before it cost the company more than they were saving from throttling the traffic in the first place.
It's a very hackerly culture (in some ways still living off the inheritance of Woz), but you won't ever hear about that for two reasons:

1. Secrecy is part of the culture.

2. Engineers work hard at Apple, and many teams are surprisingly small. There are no 20% projects at Apple because nobody has the time.
Jetblue has brilliant blog post on flight attendant kerfluffle
> I've seen no evidence that food portions are smaller.

You need to pay more attention then, it's been nick-named the 'Grocery Shrink Ray' and practically all companies are doing it now. The strategy is basically either change the shape of the container (smaller) and keep the same price or to raise the price. Here is a good link to follow;

http://consumerist.com/tag/grocery-shrink-ray/

Oh, and my favorite one yet, "Now with 25% more!" while not actually offering any more.
I really like seeing people with PhDs in completely random non-technical fields. "Ah, I see you have a PhD in Chinese Architectural History...umm, neat."

MDs are even better, because they bring all that crazy doctor-talk with them. I still go around saying stuff like,"This bug is sequella to the change we made for the last release."
I think this is it. As you grow, you need something like n/c management, where n is the production workforce and c is maybe 3. That's not too bad of itself, but it comes with a command chain somewhere between log c and c.

Everything slows down, gets miscommunicated and politicked, and divergent goals appear. The company is no longer about the product, it's about managing the process that produces product.
Yes.

Change your channel's name. Not that big of a deal.

From: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/11/steve-jobs-to-develop...
The Firefox & Chrome extensions can be found here it appears (via a Scoble tweet): http://www.baydin.com/boomerang4gmail/download/
Change your channels name. Not that big of a deal.
3am Meditation: Surviving without the Press
I doubt it'll be releasing in the UK as iTV, as ITV owns the trademark and has done since forever. The confusion will be great enough that ITV could easily get an injunction in place to prevent the sale of the device so as not to weaken their brand name.

Why? Well because ITV is a video providing service, iTV is a video receiving service. You might get away with it, if ITV hadn't actually tackled the video receiving end of the market when they launched their Freeview (which they still partly own) which was a set-top-box for the receiving of free digital images.

There's going to be no Apple vs Apple in this case.
There's no need for grafts for what they are doing. "git filter-branch --parent-filter" will do what they want without any need to much around by hand with anything in the .git directory. There's even an example in the man page for that command showing how to use it for exactly what they are doing.
Twitter bought Twittie (very popular twitter app at the time)
stop, stop, play
Also checkout TeXmacs: http://www.texmacs.org/
I'm a person who loves traffic lights, because the traffic light specifically tells a road user You can go or no you cant go. nobody has to do any guesswork as to who is allowed to go.

And yet about 1/4 of all traffic accidents happen at a traffic light within 5 seconds of a light change. Why? Because one person tried to cheat the rule, while another followed the rule without checking whether it was actually safe to do so.
Nintendo seems to sell a lot of devices at lower resolution (480p). It'll be interesting to see what kind of cost/performance tradeoff Apple makes.
Blekko has been awesome for me when Google fails. The reason I use them is that DuckDuckGo and Google have a very large overlap in the result set, while Blekko does not, so it is a perfect site to go to when Google is being hit by too much SEO spam.
Probably because people don't receive beyond 720p in most areas (I know I don't) through digital cable or satellite. However, I receive 1080p by streaming through my xbox, so Apple TV won't even have a hope of being a replacement.
It's like reading one of those breathless self-promotional google or palantir blog posts.
This only applies if you're working on an uncool language, like Java or .Net, otherwise the language is part of your identity.
It could have been Diaspora but the Diaspora team made such a big public splash and have so many eyeballs now I'm not so sure. Surely somebody at the top of Facebook has got to be looking at that Kickstarter pledge level of $200k and thinking, "Uh, Mark? We have to talk..."
Re: Speaking of talent: Yahoo got best paper at EVERY data-related conference in 2010. No single lab(Google,MS) or university(Stanford etc) has ever done this. Clearly you can achieve this without talent, pg!

engineers/hackers don't usually focus on doing academic research and writing academic papers targeted to top-tier academic conferences. Yahoo Research is certainly a leader in the academic world, but that might not translate directly to the quality of Yahoo developers.

conversely, take hot start-up X of the moment who is known for having awesome 1337 hackers. how many 'best paper awards' have they probably won in top-tier conferences? probably ZERO, since they're not focused on doing academic research.
In case anybody knows:

- Does this plug-in send any data from the client to their server?

- Why does the plug-in require access to my history?

- What is the relative possibility that someone could gain access to (a) read existing mail/mail headers, (b) have ongoing access to read my mail/mail headers?
I like the idea, but in my experience that simply results in a lot of brown dead grass on top of your lawn. If there's enough of it, it even kills the live grass.
Voxeo Acquires Teleku, Interview with Founder Chris Matthieu
It depends if you have 1 HR person or something like 10,20+. If it is a large department, having someone from a programming background that is looking for a change could be a big asset if the HR department is primarily dealing with programmers.
Some companies with hackerly culture - eg Xerox, Sun , Microsoft seem to enter this phase where a lot of cutting edge research and exciting hacking happens but doesnt translate into revenue or customer appreciation. Apple particularly seems to have avoided this problem phenomenally and sometimes I get the feeling that google is susceptible to it. Any speculation into why this might happen ?
The app bit makes it clear this is set to be a direct competitor to Google's Android based TV solution.

Also interesting to move it to iOS4, the first previously OSX device to move to iOS? A sign of things to come?
You know what you need to do. You've got to push yourself forward! Try not to lament about the past, just concentrate on making your future better.
I really don't think Diaspora was ever on their radar. They'll have far more credible threats in the future.
Puma drift cat shoes,drift cat shoes,cat trainers
I had a similar realization this year. For the first time I realized I knew people who currently work at, or very recently just worked at, all the big software companies: Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. It may be partly helped by age, but also perhaps if you've ever worked at a large company with a ton of engineers, then leave, and those seeds scatter, eventually at least one ends up taking root at each of the big shops.
Voxeo acquires Phoenix-based telecom startup Teleku