skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was definitely a cultural problem at facebook in terms of how they were treating the developer community. The copious unanswered critical issues in the forums among other things sent a very clear message that FB has other priorities.

Judging by the comments left by newly hired FB staff on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1731427 and on this post, maybe that attitude is finally turning around. But I personally really feel burned by my experience working with the facebook platform. Their deficiencies cost me a lot of money, and caused a lot of stress due to blame and doubt applied upon my team by skeptical clients. When it comes to Facebook, I'm going to have trust issues for a long time...
At Virginia Tech, we did something similar with back projection called the CAVE. It was a cube (4 sides at least) of back projections large enough that you could walk into it. One of the sides was the floor, which was particularly challenging to set up. All of the projections were also 3D using glasses that used quick on/off flipping (better IMHO than the polarized things at movie theaters) and the system had physical devices (we called them wands) that new their 3d location inside the cube. Essentially, we had what seemed like a first generation "holodeck" (trademarked term unfortunately). Someone somewhere had even modified quake to work in this environment with the wands controlling the location of your gun in 3d space. It was pretty interesting.

Of course, I'm not sure how practical something like this is, and it's very expensive to build.
This point has been made before, but I think it's time to stop calling any angel investor a super angel. The line between angel and VC is already quite small. Do we need a tinier margin between?
Works fine for me already.
url shorteners are so 2009.
I would expect the large file sizes to hurt the host at least as much as the scrapers.

Better to insert random delays in responses to HTTP requests from suspected scrapers (or outright reject them).
HP's new CEO is Leo Apotheker, former CEO of SAP
Everyone but Oracle demands Java independence
Once the 4-character paths are saturated they'll probably simply move to 5-characters. With respect to goo.gl, the help page lists these features:

Immutable - once created by you, no one else can change them

Irrevocable - once created, they do not expire.

I think that most large shorteners don't automatically expire links. It would be pretty miserable if they did.
I just wondered about the quality of information at crunch-base, so I searched for a man who sold his first company "XIV" to IBM for $300M, his second company "Diligent" for $165M (also to IBM) and just recently have left IBM and founded a new one named "Axxana".

The only record I have found was about Axxana which secured $9M (seires b).

see at http://www.crunchbase.com/person/moshe-yanai
When I saw the title I thought it was about Bayard's "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read." (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1596914696)
Elite Colleges, or Colleges for the Elite?
Could they not have bought http://g.gl?
Agorism is a political philosophy dedicated to the idea that free markets (and a more free society) can arise out of a trend toward disregarding governments in commercial matters. It comes with all the typical and commonly rejected anarchist ideas like "any state is inherently unjust and arbitrary," but isn't altogether unreasonable.
i agree with you, but how many of those unshortened links do you think will exist 10 years from now? i think the web is like a brain in which memory is active, not static. it`s just a bit too young for that to be obvious.
Bastards!
;)
"I modeled this website on the same principles of Walmart"
goo.gl has been around for quite a while. Is there something new I don't see here?

Edit: Ah, its website is just new. Here the original post: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-short...

There was already a Chrome extension since the beginning.
It depends on what program one uses for opening CSV i guess .. If the users are only going to use EXCEL, it makes sense to add an extra = in the exports .. if not, that's again an issue ..

also, CSV format dictates that it should be "=""000123""" ..

or just import it as .txt file and treat the column with leading zeroes as text ..
Would the following quote be ironic?

"" My friends said I don't understand irony, which was in itself ironic, as we were waiting for a bus. ""
Intelligent Individuals Don’t Make Groups Smarter
An obvious next step would be integrating Google Analytics.
That's just NMCI's way of showing you love.
Yeah, I just ran the math.

(numbers + lowercase + upper case)^num of characters
10+26+26 = 62^4 = 14,776,336.

That's a reasonably large number (and then my friend just suggested the adding a character if they start to run out).

Thanks!
There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model.

It is always best to think of reality as perfectly normal. Since the beginning, not one unusual thing has ever happened.

The goal is to become completely at home with [a world where people don't understand the difference between PNG and JPG in 2010]. Like a native. Because, in fact, that is where you live.
- (paraphrased) http://lesswrong.com/lw/pc/quantum_explanations/

--

Calling reality "weird" keeps you inside a viewpoint already proven erroneous. Probability theory tells us that surprise is the measure of a poor hypothesis; if a model is consistently stupid - consistently hits on events the model assigns tiny probabilities - then it's time to discard that model. A good model makes reality look normal, not weird; a good model assigns high probability to that which is actually the case. Intuition is only a model by another name: poor intuitions are shocked by reality, good intuitions make reality feel natural. You want to reshape your intuitions so that the universe looks normal. You want to think like reality.

This end state cannot be forced. [..] But it will also hinder you to keep thinking How bizarre! Spending emotional energy on incredulity wastes time you could be using to update. It repeatedly throws you back into the frame of the old, wrong viewpoint. It feeds your sense of righteous indignation at reality daring to contradict you.
- http://lesswrong.com/lw/hs/think_like_reality/
Did this yesterday ... then I realized why more people (including myself) just don't bother.

I started on what should have taken 1 hour of work to do at 6pm... 7 hours later, I was almost done ... It threw off my entire schedule and destroyed my plans for today (I'm usually up at 6am, got up today at 11).

So yeah ... fear of breaking the software isn't unfounded.
URLs in submissions don't get parsed into links. From the FAQ:

Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.
More tools for viewing document revisions - Official Google Docs Blog
If you need to allow identification of users, you'll probably want some sort of username. And adding a username later will be harder than putting one in now. Also, any deviation from what the users expect/are accustomed to (i.e. username/password) will lead to user confusion. I would just go with the standard username/password login.

Personally I don't mind if you generate a random password for me, but either way works.
Hierarchical OLAP databases applications are pretty widely used in enterprises and they often look nothing like an SQL database to users (sure something like Oracle Hyperion may have a relational database buried under there somewhere but the exposed data model sure isn't relational and things like Essbase are pretty similar but don't have any underlying SQL).
Column or row-oriented really has nothing to do NoSQL or not. I'd argue NoSQL is a bad name, and as pointed out by previous commenters, many that are involved in the argument don't even understand ACID/SQL/relational algebra.
I made a simple URL lengthening JSON/P web service: http://therealurl.appspot.com/ - will be happy to help any devs working on these scripts.
bit.ly has smart people working for them, outstanding investors, and can pivot if needed. They're building up lots of analytics tools.

They have pro accounts, and custom shorteners.

http://bit.ly/pages/about
http://bit.ly/pages/pro

I think bit.ly is pretty secure. They're in a different ballgame than the tiny ones.
Research integrity: Sabotage
The QR code capacity is pretty flippin sweet. That's worth using all on its own.
Las Vegas hotel "death ray"
Well that deals with my comment over here... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1734264.
CUDA ION2 Benchmarks
To give any legal advice, you must be a licensed attorney, which requires that you pass the bar exam, which requires (in most states) that you attend an ABA accredited law school. This system limits the supply of lawyers, which drives up their wages. That's bad. But what is also bad is that it allows the ABA to impose its priorities on law schools. (http://goo.gl/tosb etc.)

And don't even get me started on the restrictions on law firms taking outside capital.
yeah same here it seems like my entire life is run through Google these days. I just assume they have so much data there's no way they could possibly care about what I'm doing.

I could be very wrong, though.
I've been googling for examples of that format to no avail. I just wanted to see if Google's browser supports it.
A Document Database for your Browser - proton-db
JPEG (and many image/video coding algorithms) are really made up of a couple pieces -- transform, modeling and entropy coding. In the case of JPEG, the transform is handled through breaking the image up into eight by eight blocks that are then run through the DCT and quantized. This is where the loss comes from.

Modeling and entropy coding are handled on the coefficients generated above. However, this is done on each 8x8 block (note, I am making a slight simplification ignoring the use of differential compression on the DC coefficients between blocks. Since the algorithm is relegated to encoding at most 64 coefficients at a time, there isn't much "modeling" that can be done.

If one reorders the coefficients of the 8x8 blocks to resemble a non-block based transform -- you can perform better modeling to get much better compression with the exact same image quality as the original JPEG image. However, in this case, you lose compatibility with a JPEG encoder since the format of the coefficients is not JPEG.
Like Wave didn't go away?
مسلسل لالولا الحلقة 14
5. Ability to describe an app with more than 325 characters.

I can't even describe what's in an update with this much space.
> Once they hit their limit, do they start erasing the oldest ones? The most inactive ones?

Let's do the math. If we assume that a service only uses a-z, A-Z and 0-9 as characters for the shortened URL, we have a set of 62 characters.

/x -> 62

/xx -> 62^2 = 3,844

/xxx -> 62^3 = 238,328

/xxxx -> 62^4 = 14,776,336

/xxxxx -> 62^5 = 916,132,832

/xxxxxx -> 62^6 = 56,800,235,584

In the worst case scenario, the URL shortener will have to use a 6 character identifier at some point, giving them a complessive coverage of almost 58 billion URLs.

The 4 characters they are currently using will only be enough for a while. They'll switch to 5 soon enough.
At least the unshortened links have a chance of being scraped by things like archive.org; I wonder if it scrapes anything meaningful from the popular URL shorteners.
I have to say that I am NOT a fan of Google's instant search. I hope that Google will one day offer a URI that has instant turned off by default, such as http://google.com/instantoff
Any evidence that "high-volume, high revenue searches are being impacted"?
Yeah. It's completely unsurprising. It also looks like a chunk of the meeting is getting them situated with HR. It's mind numbing but better than getting situated with HR via phone tag.
Umm...how can you claim a loss in quality without looking at the original? The linked page shows two lossily compressed versions of an unknown original image. You're commenting on which image subjectively LOOKS better to you, not on compression quality.
No problem! Keep writing, we can always use more Android examples.
Google is waay too slow on these issues.

Likewise, I can't feel but screwed by the new Chrome Web Store not supporting Google Checkout Merchant accounts from countries other than United States and UK. Thanks a lot for the competitive edge guys.

I'm scrambling to implement a payment processor as soon as I can, but the lack of simple one-click purchase will surely impact sales.

The Merchant forum is bloated with requests for expanding the service to other countries since the day they rolled it out. A mildly comforting assurance that the expansion is in the works is all they managed to reply for three years now.

Seriously dropping the ball (compared to Apple) from a developer perspective.
Greg Giraldo on Failure (2009)
It was another article posted here (I think) detailing the history of some pretty famous products (I remember the Super-Soaker being among those mentioned) and how these wildly successful products all had rather humble beginnings, and sometimes quite rocky starts.

It was a good read, since it reminds one that when you use someone (something) else's success as a measuring stick you quite often are behaving much like the blind men and the elephant.

I bring that up because while I was reading your post I completely forgot those lessons learned and found myself both envious of your success and disappointed in my relative lack.

Of course reading your reply here only helps to re-ground me yet again.

A funny coincidence, I too have worked on similar Python projects, only never released them. In fact I have a HTML similar template system which made use of ‘__getattr__’ and ‘__call__’ to allow you to produce things like this:

def pageSidebar():
html = T.div(id="page-sidebar")(
T.div(
T.a("Add Page",href="?cont=addPage")
),
T.ul(
*map(T.li,(nodeUrl for nodeType,nodeUrl in graphData.nodes_iter() if nodeType == 'page'))
))

return html

Of course this was before I could take advantage of ‘with’, so my product looks a bit too lispy!
Power corrupts: risks from new US wiretap laws
Fantasy Football killing productivity? Pure fantasy
Easy if Apple wants to.
You seem fundamental against them curating any result, now I don't think they do, but it's their right to do so, and sometimes I think they should do so, here is an argument from Eric Goldman (who criticized their in house ad policy) on how curation is within their rights: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2010/09/texas_ag_invest...
Following bit.ly's convention, you can also just add a plus sign to the end of the URL to get sent to the stats page: http://goo.gl/BHTx+
Strange, Lucid works great without any problems on my Macbook Pro 6,2.

What model are you running?
In the economic analysis of law there is a standard argument that goes like this:

If you punish a crime more severely, people will do less of it. But you have to be careful. If you punish both murder and shoplifting by death, a shoplifter who is being pursued by a cop might as well shoot the cop—he has nothing to lose.
For starters, more people could support the Facebook Developer proposal at StackExchange.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/7285/facebook-deve...

Personally, I think the StackOverflow engine would be a great way to build up a crowdsourced wiki of FBAPI knowledge.
Wearable Cameras Are Here
Most IP allocations to organisations these days are not PI (provider-independent) blocks from RIRs; they are simply aggregated from an upstream ISP's larger announcement. That doesn't mean you can't punch holes in their aggregate by announcing that same block (if it's a /24 or larger) through ISP #2, but it does not result in any new numbering allocations from ARIN, net.

It's pretty rare to get a PI block these days unless you're pretty dang large, and taking aim for at least a /20.
Well, being your own ISP[1] is indeed important. To bad it's (1) such a hassle, and (2) the big players don't want to peer with the small ones any more. (In France, the http://fdn.fr non-profit is taking steps towards solving (1))

Overlay networks sound fantastic. Maybe Eben Moglen's FreedomBox (or something similar) could make it a reality?

[1]: For instance by being a member of a non-profit which itself is the actual ISP.
Finally, takeing this long is frankly embarrassing.

Anybody know why this took Google so long?
Thanks for reading.

Yes - we tend to agree. But it seems that the term "super angel" has entered the vernacular to some extent although even its definition remains a bit nebulous.

Mark Suster had a post where he mentioned if you have a fund, you're a VC, and if you invest your own money, you're an angel. That's a nice clean demarcation between the two in our opinion as well. Maybe we'll coalesce on a nice clean definition in the near future.

That said, if you are an angel investor, super angel is much better branding :)
Thanks for pointing that out! We just fixed that - hopefully should be visible on Mac Safari and also Chrome
Two things:

a) Always better to copy / paste article titles to HN. Without the quotes it sounds like "most secure, fastest" is TechCrunch's review of the URL shortner. It's not, that line is a quote directly from Google's press release.

b) Regurgitating Google's press release with a half paragraph objective view at the end is content farming - TechCrunch should sell out to AOL! Oh wait.
I sense a disturbance in the web - millions of sockpuppets being created to ask and then answer the same question of what is the best web app for X.
I'm sometimes amazed how both Irony and Sarcasm can completely go over some people's heads. Now, I know that I didn't always understand those two but no matter what I try I'm unable to explain it to a few of my friends.

On another note. I actually think that Irony by Alanis Morissette is ironic. It is a song about Irony filled with things that aren't ironic at all. This has to be some sort of (meta)irony.
I know what you mean. I once had a tour at a Volkswagen factory. It was jaw dropping and amazing how well thought out all processes were planned and managed.
If you just need a QR code just generate it directly and skip the shortener using e.g. http://qrcode.kaywa.com/.

You can also generate QR codes using the Google Charts API.
Imitation Black Hole Seen On Earth Using Lasers and Glass
A viral "launching soon" form
That's great that they have the sample gallery, but without a lossless source (e.g. a control group) to compare it to the gallery that they show counts for nothing. I grabbed the source for it, I'll see if I can do a jpg/webp/png side by side with some analytical data as well.
Am I the only one who thinks it's funny that he published the agenda of their internal all-hands?

At least where I work, these things always have "confidential" in tiny print in a corner for no obvious reason.
If that's so, I bet he's pretty sore with Om Malik these days.
Why is that? I'm assuming it's because when you see a link you check the URL to make sure you trust the location it's about to send you to. But surely this get's unscalable pretty quickly. Does it not?
I'm happy because my apps are about to get an insane amount of exposure.

I'm scared because I know how many talented developers are about to compete with me.

At the moment, I'm the only app of my kind, but in the iPhone app store, there are PAGES of apps that would be considered similar.

I wonder if this means our ad-supported apps will finally make some money.... hmm.
Windows 7 does sub-pixel antialiasing in either monitor orientation. Looks fine to me.
Product vs. Feature: the Lesson of Xmarks
Official announcement: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-url-short...

... or simply http://goo.gl/5av9 =)
The first post on my twitter account was "what is this and why would anyone want to use it?"

It was definitely not "this is precisely the thing that I had been hoping for 10 years somebody would code up."

If you had tried to estimate the number of potential twitter users by counting up the number of people in the world who were search for a service that would publish their SMS-length plain text messages on a web site, you would have gotten nowhere meaningful.
Judging only from how obsessively I check the bit.ly click-through stats on things I tweet, I think we'd probably be better off without them.
Memory Holes, Self-Pitying Professors, and Stoic Chinese
> "A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain; nor need you regret the hours you spend on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions."

--William Johnson Cory
Why Intel's neutral stance on Atom in servers is a mistake
Now companies can stop opening an American "office" just to sell apps on Android and other like hacks such as Paypal in app unlocking.
This is a tangent but: how do you invoice customers with Google Apps?
You dont even need an account to stalk ppl, sweet
"we adopt a view that we call model - dependent realism"

I have been writing for years that nature is definitional; http://science1.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/true-knowledge/ I am glad to read that Hawking realizes this now.

But this is not enough. He needs to give up his materialism; and reject the materialist physics.

But what this quote reveals is that; study of nature is not a "physical" process; study of nature is not a monopoly of physicists; anyone who is curious can study nature without professional doctrines developed by physicists.

All you have to do is to develop your own model.

I welcome Hawking's statement.
Government licensing is a surprisingly pervasive way of driving up wages in a profession. In my home state of Maryland, you need a license from the state in order to be a barber.

Lawyers have it especially good for a couple reasons. First, they (and thus their interests) are well-represented in the ranks of people who make laws, so the laws on who gets to practice law are very restrictive. Second, legal services are one of a small handful of things that you can be forced to spend money on. Nobody forces you to buy an iPhone. But getting sued is something that happens against your will, and when it happens you have little choice but to spend money on a lawyer.
Most lossy image compression systems use a transform that does not reduce the data size but makes transformed data that is more compressible. This means the final layer of compression is a traditional compressor. These, like the transforms themselves get improved upon over time. JPEG is old.

When I did some experiments with various compression techniques, I found that DCT with a LZMA base compared quite well to newer compression systems.
If it helps give others the courage to do the same thing when appropriate it's worthwhile.

Plus this was above and beyond most any job interview nastiness I've ever read and otherwise somewhat interesting. And unfortunately I have to agree with the many of the commentators: too many women get abusive when they get into positions of authority (at least in software development in my experience).
Yeah, sending emails with absurdly-long links is just about the only use case I've found for URL shorteners. I find it particularly useful for links to Google Maps locations or direction sets.
I'd like to see a poll of users to find out what percent actually uses instant as it is meant to be used. I know I still do searches how I always have, by hitting enter. I imagine most non-technical users are still hitting enter.
Right now it looks like the companies are neck and neck. Each offering a 6 character prefix for urls. bit.ly good invest in R and D and try to get that number down a bit.