skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a nice case study of too much engineering and too much technology, with far too many unnecessary features to start with, with too much of a roll-out (the basic feature demo took over 45 minutes) to too few people without nearly enough thought into actual use cases of a rather complex piece of software that simply didn't perform that well in real world scenarios.

"What's a Wave?" - should be answerable in a couple of sentences, I don't think it ever achieved that level of refinement before being put out into the world.

Even though the basic idea was great, performance of the software in-browser has never been that great, server performance was problematic, especially when waves became too long, no export option of collaborate waves to documents, no real integration with email. Plus it was hard to organize waves. After it went pseudo-public nothing really new happened to it and old weird problems like the funky scrollbar were never addressed.

That being said, I've used it on a number of projects, a couple quite big six-month ordeals, and found it an amazing collaborative environment if you disciplined your team a bit and organized things well at the start of the project.

The concept, combining several, different, modes of communication in one environment is pretty sound actually, I just think that the modes were combined a little too singularly. Certain things like real-time chat and document collaboration are fundamentally different things that should have been relegated to different parts of the interface rather than jammed into one place.

"But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked." Duh, the rollout was rather botched and given what I think I've detailed it's no wonder.

"What is Wave" should have been "a document collaboration tool with real-time side-channel chat and group email" would have been better for the use-cases my group fell into.

What I was really excited about, and what never seemed to materialize in terms of a release from Google, was that ability to run my own Wave server and federate with other Wave servers. That's what I wanted, and what never happened.
Allow me to paint a conspiracy theory:

Verizon: So yeah Google... Apple is interested in making a deal to prioritize iTunes traffic with us. We figured we'd see if you wanted to make a deal too.

Google: No way.

Verizon: OK well, bad news, we're not going to subsidize Android phones anymore. We're never touching Google TV for FIOS. We're going to start selling the iPhone in fact -- and Apple has even let us change the default search engine to Bing as part of our prioritization deal.

Google: Well played. Where do we sign up?
Except, apparently, it did work. (I wish I still had a citation.) Yes, I expect bad schools suffered. In fact, I expect the bad schools went out of business entirely as people abandoned them in droves. This leaves a market opportunity for private schools to spring up and get that tuition money.

I wasn't really referring to things like building maintenance, just instruction methods, curricula, stuff like that. Those are the things that I think should not be streamlined and standardized, for the very reasons described by our distinguished valedictorian.

You raise good points about varying $X but I would keep it constant anyway, because although in an ideal world we should vary $X according to the factors you mention, in the real world it would vary according to the political pull of the people living in different areas.
Sounds like a good idea. However the upvote would have to have a time limit, like upvoted in the last 24 hours. Otherwise powerful arguments will own the top 10 forever :) Essentially, it would look like ASK HN, live.
It means you need to know C well, but you won't necessarily be writing it every day. It's mostly for porting existing code and libs to mobile platforms.
.... not
2 things:

1) Eliminate the word career from your vocabulary. It's something invented by beaurocrats as a rationalization for being timid.

2) Ask your self "can I identify with this product?" Or, more importantly, are you OK with other people making the connection that you are about "Y"? Can you say: I am X and I built Y" with a resounding sense of pride. Would you feel comfortable being introduced on CNBC as Mr. "Y". If the answer is not "Yes!" with an exlamation point, then don't take the job.

What you should never do, however, is base your life decisions on your opinions on what an investment banker might think.

That's not only a bad way to live, but also a bad way to run a business. Be your own compass!
This is either wrong or Google will reconsider. Too many of the people Google likes to recruit would consider this evil and Google is made up of too many people who would consider this evil.
yet another hint that google have seen its better days..
Cursive became bigger. If you look into the various "italic" schools of handwriting/calligraphy, you can still find courses and books on writing that way, though.

I've got that on my things-to-do after this summer...
I've spoken with another developer or three that tell me that, although ActiveX controls remain supported, security policies have changed in some meaningful ways between versions of IE. The result is that your controls that were working fine in IE 6 stop working in later versions of IE. I have not personally confirmed this (and god send that I will never have to).
You clearly don't live near me. It would be easy to take such a picture in Chinatown, DC (unless I was around... ;) ) without overweight people in it. The vast majority of people I see on the street going to and from work are pretty thin.

Maybe cities are different, or maybe DC is.
The inability to play the game in English in a Latin American server is a deal breaker to me.
"As long as the site isn't true-blue porn, I wouldn't sweat it. In other words: if the site caters to people looking to hook-up, no big deal. If the site caters to people looking to pleasure themselves, this is perhaps a problem."

In my opinion this statement is pure stupidity. If you can code and you are the best candidate then you should get the job. I have done extensive work in adult w/ some of the largest adult companies around and I can promise you that the technical challenges of a site that does that type of massive traffic are greater than or on par with what you will encounter at your typical job.

As long as you don't make or appear in porn you should be fine.
> But there's no reason for Google to throw good money after bad

That's the thing—they haven't thrown any money at the problem at all. The whole problem is that it was a half-hearted effort from the start; Google didn't put Wave anywhere visible, they didn't integrate it with Gmail or Google Talk, or do anything else to get traction. They just sort of put it out there and hoped people would subscribe. That's how products work, but Wave isn't a product, it's a technology—and you have to sell a technology, company by company, until it's in use in a sufficiently large user-base that it becomes self-sustaining.

Imagine if the concept of "electronic mail" was invented today. You couldn't pull that off as a startup; you'd have to be Google-sized to even get off the ground.

Now, what Google could have done, would be to go to Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and whoever else that has any product or service that's vaguely message-/chat-oriented, and offer to help them rebuild that product/service on top of Wave. Wave Facebook walls, Wave MSN, Wave Flickr, etc. Just making one crappy AJAX client is exactly not the winning strategy.
I have even heard that Manhattan != New York, although my relatives on the Upper West Side treat Brooklyn as a distant and inaccessible planet.
I could really care less if google killed their own hosting of Wave servers. That's never what I was interested in anyway. A ubiquitous messaging federated service as an alternative to email? Now that's what I was looking forward too and simply never materialized. Where's the download link at google.com to a Wave Server with a much simpler Wave client I can run on my own servers?
It wasn't obvious to me what it was for or how to use it, no-one I knew personally was using it, and I don't have the free time to casually learn an entire new paradigm to do... whatever it was you did with Wave.
I don't have an answer to the question, but thought perhaps this "Ask Reddit" discussion about "If you designed a Porn site would you put it on your resume?" might be useful:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/844pj/if_you_de...
Ask HN: Macbook Pro: Glossy or Matte?
I'm a new college student hoping getting my MacBook Pro this weekend. I have heard opinions and arguments for both screen styles.

"Glossy has better color," but ... "you can comb your hair in glossy."

"Matte works great in any lighting," but "the colors aren't so great."

An additional consideration: matte is $150 more.

Since many of you own or have used a variation of the MacBook, (or otherwise have great opinions), what do you think?

I don't want to make the wrong decision with 2000<. That just wouldn't be cool. Or cheap.

Thanks!
Matte (Apple calls it "antiglare")
They were too busy botching the Buzz rollout.
That's not a conspiracy theory, that's completely making shit up. Apple doesn't appear once in the entire article.
I haven't run it, but by the description installing this software will get not you a whole heck of a lot closer to having your own Wave implementation in terms of server-protocol-web client that I think everybody is envisioning.
... and don't forget the rearview mirror spellers...

http://www.citytv.com/toronto/citynews/news/local/article/61...
Previous comments by John Gruber on Google seem appropriate here.

"Google senior vice president Jonathan Rosenberg published a long memo “about the meaning of ‘open’ as it relates to the Internet, Google, and [Google’s] users.”

It’s the biggest pile of horseshit I’ve ever seen from Google.

Basically, he’s spewed 4,000 words to say that “open” is always good and always wins, Google is always open, therefore Google is always good and will always win. And please don’t worry your pretty little minds about things like Google’s search or ad algorithms or the specific details of how its data centers work, all of which things Google could not possibly be more secretive about. Because if you think about these things, you’ll see that Google isn’t open at all about certain financially lucrative areas where it has built huge technical advantages over its competitors, and that’s not possible, because Google is always open.

I really hope for Google’s sake that this horseshit artist Rosenberg is not representative of their executive ranks. Also: open is an adjective; the noun form in this context is openness."

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/12/22/open
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How can you say 'no big loss' just because you personally didn't find it useful?
AFAIK, he's been quoted a number of times in the past saying things to the effect of "I don't want to leave that much to my kids" i.e., most of it will go to charity anyway.
WTF GOOGLE?
In a perfect world, this shouldn't be much of a problem. It the world as it stands today I would definitely reconsider.

Most startups, particularly in the tech sector, would be fine with this. However, larger companies' HR people might pass you up for this in the future, although never officially of course. Also, you run the risk of being labeled "that ____ guy" which can hurt your personal brand as well.

Bottom line: If your'e young and want to keep all your options open, I would stay away from it. If you don't mind the extra drama and think this is a really good company and opportunity, go for it.
This is nonsense. Nobody would realistically ask you to sign such an NDA and having such a thing appear on a resume would look far stranger and raise a lot more eyebrows than the fact you were working for a gay hookup site.

The only hardship you might experience from taking such a job is the ribbing you'd get from future potential employers, partners, investors and co-workers.
95/100 is better than the current Firefox, so they're not exactly "a couple of years behind everyone else." Only WebKit and Opera have perfect ACID3 scores.
I don't think so. If it's a large site with a lot of demand, then I believe that that sort of general experience would only help you at a later date. I'd say, as long as the company isn't being black balled in public forums, then you shouldn't worry about listing it in your resume.

I worked at a porn site a little while ago, and it was remarkable how much traffic we had to deal with. I left because I wasn't comfortable with working at a porn site, among other things (and funnily enough, they never told me that their main product was a porn site when I was interviewing for the position.)
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My favorite bit is the useless wave notification extension that asks me to login every 2 days because it looses my account information. If I have to login all the time to keep the notification tool alive, I may as well not have the notification tool.
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Evil enough to give up free lunches and the tech world's best resume point? Evil enough to quit if you already work there?
I think that's actually fair. Until I got 6 or 7 people using it regularly with me it was kind of a head scratcher.
>And the people in the documents didn't ask wikileaks to release the names to the world and potentially to their enemies. Bloodshed could be avoided, but wikileaks is willfully looking the other way.

If someone is an informant for an occupying force they have assumed a role in the occupation. This involves risk.

>That's like saying, because you gamble at a casino, it's an accepted risk that you will lose all your money (after we just found out that the casino has been cheating at all of the games).

If you decide to gamble, you put your money at risk. You know the odds are stacked against you: you just don't know to what extent. The rational choice is not to play.
Contrast, compare: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/02/at_work.html

Not exactly the same (only work themed photos, international) but offers some additional perspective.
I'd bet that lack of internal adoption is 50% of the equation here.
Don't forget Mr Murdoch
Agreed. Maybe leave and start your own company offering a better product that meets the needs of the unsatisfied users of your current company's product.
I hadn't considered this angle: are you able to flesh out the degree to which they will be able to do this?

I'm non-technical, so it's not immediately clear to me:

* the potential increase in cashflow yields from improving ad targeting (what change will it make? isn't google pretty good at this already?)
* How the data from Zynga & Slide will flow out of the facebook ecosystem and into the broader web (is your slide identity linked to your google search identity somehow?)

I'd appreciate any thoughts that occur to you. Still puzzling over the point of a back-door into facebook user data and what that might bring. Could they export that into a google profile? Would an understanding of what individuals "like" and "dislike" in concert with knowledge of their social graph's likes and dislikes lead to more targeted advertising?

I guess those are the questions that google bought the company to answer: 182m is not that much in terms of earnings for them, and they might have been able to pay in stock.

Thanks for getting my mind whirring.
I think that's a terrible attitude to have. The Gates foundation has done great work and I'm sure the Gates' and Warren will do their best to ensure that the money they donate goes a long way.
Yea - had some random issues with Solr indexing. That's the startup life =)

It should be up and running now.
I wonder how much pressure for canceling such an ambitious product came from people invested in the Apps team?
Let's assume that leaving right now is not an option. Recognizing that efforts from the lower ranks will have limited upside, what can I possibly do outside of gritting my teeth as I continue to suffer with this awful software?
Similarly, there should have been a push to build more Wave clients. The google default one kinda sucked. I personally would have just like a Wave client built into Thunderbird that would keep me up-to-date on my half dozen mailboxes AND my Wave accounts at the same time.
There's nothing wrong with the word career. Your career is basically the work you do over the course of your life.

As you work, you gain experience and skills that are more valuable. These skills are often specialized to some degree and support each other, tending to make you most valuable for certain kinds of work. As a result you will do a lot of that work. That's a career.

Whether you make a career out of starting tech companies or fixing pipe organs the word fits. In fact, you might start one career as a software developer and then decide to quit and run a nightclub instead. That'd be your career even if you technically had FU money and weren't doing it for anyone but yourself.

So, the question he is asking when he says "will a job in gay porn kill my career" is: will the skills and experience I have gained become worthless in other markets? Career is a flexible English word and takes on additional meaning easily. You can avoid it all you want, but that won't change the realities about how much his experience is worth to potential employers.
He cofounded Apple and personally designed and built their first computers. Let's let the guy slide a wee bit on this one.
Which makes the entire intelligence community even harder to manage for those folks managing it. Is that better than what we have now?

Is a smooth-functioning, well-managed intelligence community in my interest?

If intelligence shape policy, then perhaps. Does it? Some argue it's the other way around: policy shapes intelligence, and you get the intelligence that policy dictates (cf. Iraq).

If that's the case, I could certainly do with a less efficient intelligence apparatus.
I know it's probably not nerd-ok but I read the article hoping it would be his take on the Henry Miller book. Of course, I was sorely disappointed. Then I re-read the title.
Two of the people on the team were experienced hardware hackers, others were experienced iPhone developers.

I believe they did some minor planning beforehand to get the write components to build things.

(I work at Yelp)
That's odd. It's clearly a system like exception-throwing, but without the ability to distinguish from different kinds of errors (say, one might be able to recover from "received malformed input" but not from "array index out of bounds"), and still requiring that programmers check the error return value of most functions they call.

I wonder why they preferred that approach over the Java/Python approach to exceptions.
> This was Google's moment to change the world.

It is Google's moment. They will change the world, as soon as they start controlling who gets access to what on the internet along with Verizon and others.

> ... responsibility we projected on them as being a smart company

That is really our fault not theirs. We are the ones fooled by their marketing and moralistic mission statements.

> They seem to be the first US company to happily surrender to the telecoms.

Google exists to make money. If surrendering to the telecoms makes money then that's what they'll do.

> I can't believe they're doing this. It's mind boggling.

What truly boggles the mind is the number of smart people here who are completely enthralled with Google, and believe it is a source of pure good in the world, fighting those evil companies on behalf of the little guy.

Google is a great company and I admire it for building such an exceptional image of itself in the eyes of tech community. It is a good company not because it saves the world or feeds the hungry, but because it makes money.
From your post it seems you're not quite ready to leave. So trying to share your insights and raise awareness may be worth a shot. That is, if you can comfortably speak with upper management without being singled out.

If the company is profitable and the users are pleased with the product then from an upper management perspective there may not be anything wrong. Until the bottom line is impacted there may not be leverage for change. The key is to alert management to the state of the product and the course it's on.

Parallel development may be an option as the next release of the product would address the underlying issues. This is costly and upper management would have to understand why that's necessary.
> When the Afghan intelligence services...

The who?

On my list of prioritized concerns, Wikileaks falls well below unchecked military. But since you're adamantly opposed to this ...

Surely there is a middle ground, but the status quo was (is) heading in the direction of more secrecy. Sometimes, as now, it takes a shakeup. The very actions you prefer (eliminating classification for 99.9% of documents, streamlined intelligence agencies, criminal penalties) are so far in opposition to the past 10 years that they're literally pipe dreams. If your solution is to hold your breath until your pipe dreams come true, well, that's no solution at all. Meanwhile, the unchecked military rampantly wages war, killing thousands.

If Wikileaks helps the public take even a small step in opposition to these wars by virtue of shining a light on the depth of Govt lies, it will have done a far greater service than those who not only attack it, but essentially sit quietly waiting for impossible things to suddenly happen out of thin air.
He is someone whose job is to find/conjure-up all sorts of enemies and threats facing the United States. His employing think-tank takes a political leaning that's so far to the right, that they see nothing in this world that isn't a "vital interest" or a "mortal enemy". They see the world through the lenses of a globalized Monroe Doctrine. They profit materially from pain they inflict upon people; either emotional pain in the fear they evoke in the American masses, or the real physical pain in others when they launch recreational wars.

So, this hired-mouth can cry foul all he wants. Those old enough to exist before the Iraq invasion remember similar tunes. As for his opinion, it's nothing but an invoice line-item; commissioned by the Gun and Oil interests, draped in a flag and fig-leafed with God.
Ask HN: How to sell music online?
Is there any system that a startup can use to sell music online a la iTunes or Amazon? I'm curious about anything from setting up a store yourself to affiliate arrangements.
Ask HN: How do you organize your git/svn repository?
How do you use the same repository for multiple projects in multiple languages and also use the common code in all the projects ?
Diary Dig search engine reveals US military killed hundreds at Afghan protests
Where is it written that google is the protector of the internet? Sure they could stand up to the telecoms but they have responsibilities to their shareholders also and their bottom line.