skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree very much. I really like the features of Google Voice, especially the call screening. And I hate the way AT&T doesn't let me set up spam filters for text messages, happily charging me for crap I don't want. So I'd love to have the power of GV to block those before they ever hit my mobile number.

But Google does a sorry job of personalized customer service, and yes, for a phone, I want that.

I'm basically a Google fanboy, and my wife accuses me of thinking everything they do is perfect. And even I see this as a problem.

I think Google will have to get more serious about customer service to become a major, primary provider of phone numbers.
Twitter site blocked in Egypt
I think the author wrote from personal experience, so he could be either too young or not even born yet during Greate Depression.
It would be rather poetic if he just used firesheep, but I somehow doubt Zuck is logging on to his fan (not personal) page from cafes with unencrypted wireless. Possible, but unlikely.
I seem to recall the term, and I understand the perspective, I think. Although I've learned to be cautious, as along will come a situation where I find I have to "unflip" it, at least for the current context.

So, I'll usually at least listen to the initial pitch. And even when there's nothing to it, sometimes it's easier to listen and then ignore, than to get into a debate. It's difficult and often useless to debate someone unwilling or unable to change their perspective.

The hard part with the bozo bit, though, is recognizing when you have to flip it for yourself. And a chronically stressful situation seems to bring that on, sooner or later. ;-)
"43 Ways OAuth Will Murder Your Children"
Monads for the Curious Programmer (part 1)
I get that about logo from almost everyone. Coming up with a name is just so hard. And since I give a subdomain for each of your idea, it was necessary it's not long. Will fix the typo right away. Thanks!
I like to mix and match. From now on, I'm going to imagine my keys are a motherless brood of koalas... whom I just stabbed with a machete into my desk.
The state of the Internet 2010 infographic
No, I haven't applied to work at google, but I have been contacted by two google recruiters in the past, told both of them politely to go to hell, and they left me alone after the second time. :)
I just got an interview request last friday from google, I am scared shitless about the interview process as a graduating senior.
This is why Apple wins - Amazon, UI matters
Yes, we could have that -- not sure exactly how we'd quantify it though. ;)
The problem with losing keys is the one time you don't put them down on cruise control - when you put them down someplace strange, so when you search for them on cruise control, they're not where the automated part of your brain expects them to be.
Chain.js - a microframework for handling async JS
I live about as far from a Google location (Missouri) as it's possible to live inside the united states. I'm not interested in moving, and I don't think they'd let me work remotely. That's pretty much it. I'd rather just build something awesome and get into Google through acquisitional osmosis. Maybe at that point I'd be ready to move, but for a bottom of the totem pole position (which I may not even be qualified for), I'll stay where I'm at.
How about "I applied, was given an offer, but rejected it"?
I'm regularly approached by Google recruiters, but they never have anything interesting to offer me.
I didn't say that you'd enter a text search. I was speaking to the goals of the search not the specific modality. If Google were able to fulfill the goals of the searcher (as they claim to want to) then ads would be unnecessary.
helvetica is the font of the establishment! resist, hackers!
As someone who didn't make the cut, seeing blog posts like this or job postings from them pop up on my RSS reader really stings.
plus: Everything you need to own, you buy at Amazon (rhymes!)
"Timing is everything"

I was just looking for such a service. I registered. Thanks.
me too.

I remember going to their campus, and getting a ewww... this place has a too corporate vibe.

Three of the people that interviewed me seemed burned-out, no enthusiasm whatsoever. Also from my conversations it seemed that Google is a pretty political place (even though it tries hard not to be one).

Only two of the guys, I clicked with. One had done mobile dev since early 2000, and we had worked a lot on similar problems.

The other guy I thought was cool had come from an acquisition.

I didn't even get to meet the recruiter who was supposed to handle my case, and I was greeted by somebody else.
The whole interview experience felt like cattle processing.

For some reason I came out with the opinion that Google is a very unhappy place, and competitive (cut-throat perhaps), as it attracts people that are smart, and have tough time being average.

Perhaps it is subconscious sour grapes, or not, but my thinking is that while Google it is chock full of smart people, it seems not to be a fun place.

Ps. I know two googlers in person, and I think they are really smart people, and I respect them as engineers, but I just don't think them as entrepreneurial types though.

So as individual place, it has a lot of smart people, but as a collective and as environment google is not a fun or attractive place to be at least when viewed on a superficial level from the outside. Maybe that's why they have to pay really well to retain their engineers.
thanks, the only reason we capture this data is to keep track of your shopping lists. I will take into consideration though.
Love the chromium backend of it - I'd love it even more if it were merged with vim in a macvim-esque sort of way.
"The reason for failing to be hired is invaluable feedback on your shortcomings, which are much harder to self-assess."

Good luck trying to get any useful feedback from a Google or Facebook rejection. Often it's just random.
My understanding is that Vegas is on a major highway and has a natural trade (gambling). Other Nevada gambling towns which are not on that route are less successful. Is that correct?

To cover myself, refer again to my prefatory remark that I was generalising enormously.
I was recruited, but didn't make it past the second interview.

It's unfortunate. I was excited at the prospect and they did try to encourage me to continue through the process. I had lost my initiative though.
Two questions:

1) What is this? Why would I want to register? (Also, why do you even have a sign up link if it just says "coming soon" when I click it?)

2) Why don't you have a fallback for custom fonts not working, aside from displaying a message telling me that they're not and that everything is going to look like crap?
PM'd you. I do front-end as well.
I got my invite within a day or so of applying. Was a bit surprised at the time.
Ask HN: What do you use to track online purchases?
We run an online store and want to start figuring out exactly where a customer comes from upon purchase. In other words, when somebody buys something, I want to be able to see whether they came from Google, or Yahoo, or some affiliate etc.

Which services have you used that perform this sort of tracking well?
Anyone work at Google in GermanY? What do you work on? What is it like?
I've been using HNDroid for months with no complaints.

Checking this one out now.
Quit it with the "most users" reasoning, unless your goal in life is to part fools from their money.

I don't follow your reasoning, but still:

Listing granular permissions is like throwing up a confirmation dialog before a destructive action: better than nothing, but more often than not gets ignored.

Yes, after that, your friends call wondering why all their data was deleted or why some app is updating their facebook wall. And you tell them to pay attention next time, and they swear they will.

And they don't.

I don't have a better solution, but that doesn't mean that this is the right one.
Scientists Disrupt Moral Reasoning With Magnets To The Skull
FlashBlock is your friend.
Entsorgung
Does facebook use captchas, to slow bruteforcing, I tried entering a few wrong passwords for my account but didn't get one. However I doubt that bruteforcing or a dictionary attack was used.
The Three Generic Types of Front End Engineers
That's odd; I find Quora sluggish, cramped, cluttered and painful to use in comparison to SO. I also find it less intuitive to use; every time I go there (about 5 times so far), I get the feeling that there's a lot of interesting conversations going on somewhere on it based on my inbound link, but I don't know how to get from one to the other. Almost all content I see from browsing, rather than coming in via a link, is banal to the point of immediate disengagement. I don't think I've spent more than a sustained 7 minutes or so on the site.
Adding more choices. Thanks!
I had a reasonable expectation; everyone should have a reasonable estimation of their skills from what you do in your side projects and how others regard you. Google hires solid engineers, not just the top 1%.
Interestingly, most of the people voted for "I never applied because there is no way I'd get hired".

And I thought I was the only one who thinks this way.
Give 37Signals a free pass to the Internet Identity Workshop
Is anyone on Forrst? Their service looks like something I woudl like. On the technology end, it looks easy to post images and code for the purpose of discussion, and that would make my life a little easier. The community looks like one I'd like to be a part of, too.

On the other hand, I'm currently re-working my own blog and am really enjoying designing the front end and tooling the backend to fit my needs precisely. It's a labor of love and I don't want to let it languish.

If you've used forrst, what do you like about it? What don't you like?
Check your school's policy.

I'm doing an honours thesis this year and some of my ideas have immediate commercial applications, so I looked it up. At the University of Western Australia, unpaid work by students remains the property of the student (Sub-regulation 4(2) of the Intellectual Property Regulations).

The rules change if your work is funded somehow.
Best Webdesign Blog
I don't come from a CS background, am self taught but have over 12 years of professional experience behind me - I know what I am doing but can't rant of algorithms off the top of my head.

During an interview when I couldn't answer a question about CS theory I drew on something I learned as an English major: the analogy. I said:

"Imagine that you aren't a tech company hiring a developer. You are a band hiring a lead guitarist. Do you want someone who studied music theory who can wax poetic about diminished arpeggios and phrygian scales? Or do you want Jimi Hendrix, who is self-taught and doesn't read music, but who can rock out with a Stratocaster and a Marshall Stack?"

I've used that one twice, and I've gotten the job both times. It also helps when you can pass all of the written tests. At my last job I outscored all of the CS majors on all of the tests they gave me!
(Late entry) I applied and received an offer, but I rejected it. Touché!
StackOverflow is to Quora as Wikipedia is to Encarta.

Give it some time and Quora will simply disappear.
Recommendations for the Entrepreneur’s Bookshelf
I've never heard of this happening - sounds like marketing BS to help sell the need for this solution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case#Headings_and_publica...
Be seeing you!
This! Oh, this!
There was no rewrite that killed the company. There was an attempted rewrite that went nowhere, but the company was killed by IE4 being good enough and free.
Should I switch from Sendgrid to Amazon SES?
ah, that is a different app by the same name... try searching the market for "com.jazzychad.hn"
You can see a description of what Google does in Munich here: http://www.google.de/intl/en/jobs/germanylocations/munich/. Have a look at the Software Engineer openings.

The Munich office is also growing, so if you'd like to work for Google in Germany, now is the time to apply :-)
The Many Health Benefits of Yoga
No. This is a solution in search of a problem. USB is the most successful computer plug for a reason, and that reason is simplicity.
Transhumanism as Simplified Humanism - Eliezer Yudkowsky at Singularity Summit
Hum, I didn't apply and was rejected, sort of.

I was contacted some three years ago by a recruiter on LinkedIn, talked a couple of times via email, then the phone interview. The interviewer asked me questions about networking ("describe what happens during a HTTP request at the various levels of TCP/IP") and Linux internals ("what to do if your open a shell and any command you type results in 'Not enough memory'?"), and we chatted a little bit after that.

By talking with him, I learned that it was more of a sysadmin-y position (dealing more with infrastructure and supporting application developers) then actually working on their products.

My interested waned quite a bit after that. Combined with the fact that my Linux internals answer was far from stellar (I learned a thing or two about /proc afterwards), it didn't surprise me when I got the "we are sorry to inform you..." letter a couple of weeks later.

I don't know if I was being overconfident or if it was the effect of the "web 2.0" bubble, but I though then that I could be hired. I would apply today if I heard of some interesting position in Cambridge or NY to work on Android. Alas, it seems that the Android team is all in the West Coast.
nah, think of yourself as a 'false negative'. Their loss.
A Google recruiter told me their acceptance rate is lower than Harvard. I was rejected by both.
Yep. I'm sure FB will be smart about it.
With apps on both the iPhone and Android wouldn't it be possible for his phone to poll the FB site in the background without his knowledge?

EDIT

I know 3G is encrypted. What I'm wondering though is if you ever let your phone join an unencrypted wifi network (say at a coffee shop) would it remember the network and then join again automatically the next time you are there?
Is the "About" button more important than we think?
Does anyone else find themselves reading the first 1/3 of a landing page and then clicking on the miniscule "About" button at the very bottom most of the time? I think of it similarly to a deck I'd present to an investor: I'd give my problem-solution spiel and then move quickly into my bio slide. It is my personal opinion (and Mark Suster's) that the features, demo etc aren't absorbed/swallowed if that kind of detail is presented before the listener knows who's behind the product. As a consumer, I'm inherently skeptical, so I can't stomach a whole page of "the hard sell," even if it's above the fold. Do you think there's merit in placing a tiny bio block or a whole paragraph--something beyond four words at least--from a reputable press review after the pitch and call-to-action? I know it's not de rigeur but something worth thinking about nonetheless.
Come on, it's right there in section 6.5.1 of the specification which you'd know if you searched the web, downloaded 11MB of data, unzipped it and sorted through it for the "Universal Serial Bus Specification Revision 2.0", then read all 622 pages of that.

6.5.1 USB Icon Location

The USB Icon is embossed, in a recessed area, on the topside of the USB plug. This provides easy user recognition and facilitates alignment during the mating process.

And from this I learn that all my Apple keyboards and mice are non-compliant devices since their marks are painted on rather than embossed into the connector. I'll have to replace them.
Understanding the rise of China
A great story of persistence, until the last bit. Were you just playing a game of tit-for-tat hard-to-get against Google hiring managers? Joking, but I am actually curious why you finally said no.
It very much depends on how social and how much of a self-promoter you are. If you are willing to fight for the latitude to follow your own direction you will do really well. But it is important to be social as well, as you'll encounter more opportunities as well as your own sharp edges quicker.
Lapsus launched: Time tracking without timers
Dropped out of college. I think that disqualifies me. (Probably not but close enough.)
100K$ base + stock options (Annualized) / bonuses 15~10k $
= 115k $ per year pre tax.
if you are really experienced add another 10~15k to your base and same to your stock + bonuses
= 135 ~ 145 k$ per year.

if you are a star dev, you can always try your luck on wall street firm, D. E. Shaw., Knight Capital and such.
20 People Switched on Your Online Life
Anything in the TRS configuration is prone to shorting when connecting/disconnecting. Not at al suitable for an interface that includes powered conductors.
That's ridiculous. The Unix security model doesn't even address untrusted applications, unless you think auto-downloading and running Unix executables would work out well. The situation with web security is terrible and there aren't any "good old days" we can revert back to -- every mainstream OS has done it wrong. Good security is difficult and influences many parts of a system, but if it were a priority for any of the big players, it would have already happened.
I agree with the OP's conclusion - permissions need to be finer-grained and authorisation prompts more informative. But with OAuth as it stands, those things are under the control of the API provider, and app developers have limited control.

If my app has a button to follow someone on Twitter, my app needs Twitter write permission, which also lets me tweet as you and read your DMs. All I want to do is follow someone, but Twitter doesn't offer finer-grained authorisation, so I have no choice but to pop up the dialog box asking for full write access.

Twitter's an extreme example, but not the only one. The Facebook API also has some unintuitive permissioning requirements (for example, you need more permissions to "like" a post than you do to comment on it). Unless the permission model makes sense to users, apps have a hard time communicating to users why they need the permissions they're requesting. Judofyr's suggestion above would help a lot with this problem, but it's still not something that can be blamed entirely on lazy app developers.
You would be comfortable with YouTube's alternative hosted in Russia connected to the web by a likely mob influenced ISP?

Laws the United States makes have a more wide reaching affect that you seem to realise. Your outlook of online freedom is quite optimistic. Smaller countries follow the lead of larger ones and for profit corporations generally do their best to follow (or write) the laws of the United States. What happens here influences the behaviour of many. After all, no CEO wants to be arrested on a layover in the United States because their company happened to break a US (this has happened.)

The reality is that organisations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been fighting hard against our own government, the United States, since the early 1990s to keep the internet as free as possible. Had no one decided to take up that fight your internet would be under control of such gems as 1998's COPA, along with who knows what garbage the RIAA and MPAA would dream up.

The rising influence of authoritarian states such as China dim the prospect of an open and free world generations to come. While they may flaunt intellectual property law today, make no mistake when it is their own intellectual property being infringed upon they will happily add infringement to one of their 68 crimes punishable by death.

Make no mistake, what happens today will have a decisive impact on how free the world is 50 or 100 years from now.

Nominating Donald Verrilli Jr as the Solicitor General of the United States sends a clear message that the Obama administration seeks the same expertise in chilling internet freedoms as the RIAA and Viacom did when they hired him.
Was recruited (for a non-dev position, technical program manager).

First strike was the recruiter trying to lowball me that VPs at other companies come in at this level.
Off-topic, do you have any plans for moving over to Pyramid ?
facebook doesn't use captcha's as much as it does other security features. if there is a log-in from an ip address that seems suspicious, it can ask you to identify your friends in photos to verify your identity.
Sorry about that. The reason there's a limit is to keep the emails relatively short so people will actually read them.
I admit there was some slight hyperbole there. Let's say it's one better than giving out your password because it cuts down on the password reuses issue and you can revoke.

If that's all that OAuth will ever get us, then it's a failure: either because the goals of the spec were infeasible or because developers weren't able to use it to its fullest (I lean toward the later).

OAuth is not about solving password reuse. It's about granting other clients rights to specific resources on your behalf. It's about telling a 3rd party app they can tweet once, and not read my direct messages; they can read my Gmail contacts, but not send; and so on...

I for one believe in the need for this. But the original poster is right: as long as developers request blanket permissions, I'm not going to use their apps. I may be in a small category, but I'll ask again: is this the kind of behavior we want to condition into users?
They should have sold to Microsoft when they had the chance.
That's a great analogy - but when the actual test relies on CS theory it becomes a problem - otherwise I haven't had any issues with jobs in the past (not that I haven't been rejected before, I just haven't had any issues landing a job in a reasonable amount of time).
Trust me, as an app developer it annoys me too that there's no easy way for me to allow users to opt-out of contacts access. Making a second app is just too complicated.
I wonder how that explains the over-complex multi-layer protocol. (Go look up OTG)

Or maybe because USB-IF is built of committees made up by (mostly) the least productive people in given large organizations.
USB ports are supposed to be current limited. Given that those components cost money to buy and money to place… I think we know where low end equipment vendors are going to end up.
Exactment.

Also, people damage the heads and/or the jack by trying to insert them the wrong way? Either the plug slides in gently, or it doesn't budge.
Yet another unrelated-but-related reply: I actually feel a fear of rejection when posting on HN. I know I usually don't have much to add, so I don't post often; but it has happened a lot of times to start writing a reply, and then just discard it for fear of being harshly downvoted/getting snark replies.
Man, really? I would do great in that interview. Data structures & algorithms are the main reason I don't apply.
Isn't Joel (one of the founders) in El Cerrito in the Bay Area?
[I think] that criticism applies to a few on the list but not all of them. Phrases like 'bottom line,' 'clearly,' 'essentially,' and 'basically' are often reductive or just plain filler--hardly ways of showing uncertainty or qualifying statements.
Full time only or internship?
- ... that the USB symbol is always on the top side

Yes, I thought that, except that on my father's computer it goes on the bottom. I checked quite thoroughly.
You forgot:

- stop trying to push it into power connector
- stick it in RJ-45 hole, that doesn't feel right
I don't know that it's very practical either; but the fact remains that it is, in fact, a solar sail, just not a particularly good one.
Right, and they do this for a period from February 2008 to December 2008. We do the same here at the Federal Reserve when developing models.

Sure, the data is historical, but your model doesn't distinguish between "old" and "new" data. If your model predicts test data (in-sample forecasting, right?) well then you have something interesting.
Emacs would be awesome too. :-)
Clever Algorithms, Nature-Inspired Programming Recipes in Ruby
The End Of Facebook and Free Software's Quiet Revolution