skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, I'm a contractor and I'm enthralled with the project and the company (which is kinda the position I'm in right now). The company loves this and wants me to stay on full-time, I'd love to stay. However, why would I take a pay cut and why would I take a step back in "rank". Staying on as a contractor I can still work on my enthralled project..

What sort of bargaining can the company perform? What can you offer a contractor you don't want to lose to become full-time?
Though there are other merits to your post, I would like to share this relevant article by Jeff Atwood:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/03/whos-your-arch-enem...

Sometimes having an arch-enemy is enough for users to understand your value add.
-.63 avg karma. Impressive.
Eric Schmidt Going to Oracle
Just a fast rumor I heard yesterday before this announcement. May be True
From my (very limited) perspective, this seems to be mostly publicly clarifying the roles they were already effectively serving in their ad hoc division of labor for a while.

Larry has been the most involved in the technology details, Sergey has been the most involved in the blue-sky new projects, and Eric has been the most involved in the interaction between Google and other entities (as well as very high level direction.)
Anyone else notice that it kinda looks like you are staring over the ocean at a nuclear blast?

Love the site though. It really is relaxing and a neat simple idea. Hard to sit through after a 16oz red bull, but i did it!
Larry Page takes over as Google CEO, Eric Schmidt now Executive Charman
My initial reaction was that this was just another Google April fools joke.
His role just changed to Executive Chairman to handle more of the business operations and be less product decisions
Tried and true: founders make terrific CEOs.

EDIT, Context being tech: Hastings, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Jobs, Gates. I'd say Google was a company in the spirit of these before WorldCom, Enron and Countrywide Financial.
I misread that as April 1st initially and discounted it. Wow indeed. My immediate reaction as a Google user is positive; my possibly uninformed sense is that Eric has a greater capacity for evil than Larry or Sergei.
I wonder if this has more to do with media relations than anything else.

Schmidt had some major media slips & blunders in 2010, it just doesn't seem to be his thing.
I recently started meditating about 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening. I've been sleeping much better and I can remember my dreams more easily. I also notice that I generally feel much more relaxed. It's not a cure all but it really does help.

I do not prescribe to any of the spiritual/pseudo-religion around it though. In fact, if it weren't for the noticeable benefits the 'religion' would have scared me off. There are different types but I'm more into the vedic/mantra and breathing exercises.
Positioning yourself as "the anti-big-evil-guy" can work really well when you're the little guy. It would be stupid of them not to run with it when it's resonating so well. It doesn't really matter what challenges they face, the story for users is what matters.

The Myspace to Facebook example is funny, because Facebook was the anti Myspace. Not only that, they were the anti Myspace specifically because they stripped out features.

Many successful companies were the anti-something or another when they were small:

* Google was the anti-Yahoo

* 37 Signals was the anti-enterprise (and lately, the anti-funded startup)

* Southwest Airlines is the anti-American Airlines, don't you love their free baggage commercials?

* Reddit is the anti-digg
Sometimes people switch out from being CEO to being chairman because it's just more fun being the globe-trotting-jet-setting-lunching-with-Obama guy schmoozing and closing deals and partnerships than being the tedious micromanager.

Just saying.

But it's also fun to fantasize, speculate, and gossip about really rich and important people.
My birthday present!
Guided meditation.
A work-mate started a group, so we meet over in a room at lunch. He brings speakers and plays the recording from his ipod, so we meditate listening to the mix for about half an hour with our eyes closed. It's very relaxing and afterwards I find it easier to focus and code.
I misunderstood then, sorry, but I've had a stream of nothing but nitpicking from the community lately.

The answer to your question is, "it depends". It depends on their socioeconomic class and how many MBAs they know. It might also depend on how much class/profession specific resentment they feel towards MBA holders.

The poor are going to universally consider anyone with a business-oriented graduate degree to be rich, to a fault. There's little deviation you're going to find there unless you encounter the occasional circumspect/self-educated exception.

The middle class would probably vary wildly, depending on who they associated with. (A lot of the middle class don't associate with people of their exact quintile, so a lot of it's going to depend on whether they're looking up or down.)

No hard answers for you though.
There's lots and lots of research out there that meditation increases insight, memory, improves sleep, reduces stress, reduces the physical perception of pain, improves, well, just about everything.

Useful refs:

http://www.amazon.com/Destructive-Emotions-Scientific-Dialog... (the Audio CD set is even better, imo, with actual dialog)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_on_meditation

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43006-2005Jan...

My favorite intros to secular meditation (that is, non-religious Buddhism):

http://www.amazon.com/Wherever-You-There-Are-ROUGH/dp/140130...

http://www.amazon.com/When-Things-Fall-Apart-Difficult/dp/B0...

http://www.amazon.com/Being-Nobody-Going-Nowhere-Meditations...

Doing what I learned in from three, plus the Destructive Emotions audio book, absolutely transformed my life. Like night and day. Now I'm one of the best-adjusted people I know, despite having gone through (and, in a few cases, done) some horrendous things.

What mindfulness meditation teaches you, above all physical side effects, is to accept things as they are. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to change them, if they're truly bad, but most people deny what is reality. As if that helps. (I sure did.) But denying just hurts more, doesn't make it untrue, of course, and denial makes it impossible for you to improve things.

I think most of the troubles in life are caused by denial.

And, bonus, the level of mindfulness makes it easy for me to spot user interface/process (and therefor product) opportunities because I almost never just "tune out" and work on autopilot.
Leading a decade of mediocre home-grown products (save for Gmail)?

EDIT: Name one hit Google product Schmidt oversaw (again, save for Gmail) that wasn't an acquisition. This is supposed to be a company of innovation.

EDIT 2: I regret the use of mediocre. I'm sure the technology, like everything that comes out of Google, was top notch. Certain products though, like Buzz, Wave, and TV, and the bizarrely bifurcated-from-Android Chrome OS, lacked a degree of oversight and discipline before launch that ended up hurting their brand in the space of consumer products. I also think something to consider is that this culture of acquisition has to be very bad for their employee turnover rate.
Those decisions are Apple's prerogatives. When they lock OS X down, I'll scream bloody murder right along with you for the bait-and-switch. But nobody bought an iPhone because they thought it'd be easy to tinker with.
As a gymnast, I found meditation to be be a powerful way to train my mind to focus. This was particularly important for the pommel horse, which is a super nuanced event that you can can't "muscle" your way to success. I do believe I noticed a difference in my performance as time went on.

Now I try to meditate simply as a way of introducing calm into a life that is jam packed with work, socializing and outside projects. One of my goals for 2011 is to spend at least 2,000 minutes in meditation.
Agreed. It seems like it may just be a PR move... Larry doesn't have Eric's growing reputation for slight creepiness. People might like the idea (whether it's true or not) that he's the one making all the calls.
Wow. Back to the original CEO then.

Eric is still around and filling an important role (basically doing what he used to mostly do, he just doesn't have to sit in on earnings calls anymore):

Eric Schmidt will assume the role of Executive Chairman, focusing externally on deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership--all of which are increasingly important given Google's global reach. Internally, he will continue to act as an advisor to Larry and Sergey.
Testing Node.js With IPv6 – First Step, Does It Work?
Reasons why you should launch at DEMO
I tried it a few times last fall, but I feel REALLY awkward doing it around other people. Since I'm in college I don't have many spaces for 'me' where I could meditate, but maybe I'll find some this semester in the library.
Great news! I'm definitely a Larry fan, this means that Google will continue do crazy, risky, potentially world-changing projects in the future too.
I think it needs to be the 1st of April for it to be an April fools joke, right?
Great site, you should make it fail on window resize events too... at least that is one more thing you can detect.
'Tiger Mothers' leave lifelong scars
Verizon Files Federal Appeal against FCC Net Neutrality Order
Edit: parent post suggested that Eric had been demoted.

Executive Chairman is technically higher than the CEO:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chairman

The Board of Directors is the CEO's boss, the Chairman is the leader of the Board of Directors.
The difference is that Google will be run by a founder (again). That's not the case with Apple, where no matter how its spun, Jobs leave is generally perceived as a negative. Given the way the Apple announcement was handled, it would not surprise me if their timing was in part to steal Google's thunder.
Except when they don't... Angelo Mozilo, Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay (among many others) come to mind.
you should continue meditation. It's ok if you start with 2 minutes daily and then slowly move to 5 minutes and then to 10 minutes..

I find the "Tai Chi - Standing Meditation" easy and effective

Refer: http://www.yogiimpressions.com/product-authordetails/The-Sma...
Definitely, I can fully understand this in the Stackoverflow situation where they were directly competing with Expertsexchange, but what WePay are doing is taking a business that offer 10 things, emulating 1 part of it and then marketing themselves as the "good" guys.

I mean okay if WePay were an equivalent to Paypal then what they're doing is justifiable, but they're riding off the hate for Paypal to launch their own business and then everyone thinks oh hey they're the good they're a startup, woo startups! They're getting free passes too, Paypal avoided the Wikileaks things because they don't want to deal with an angry US government and suddenly they're the devil for not standing up tro the government, but when WePay do it they're heros?

I can't replace my usage of Paypal (which is just sending money to people and buying things on Etsy etc.) with WePay, for me (a simple user at best) being unable to do that with a supposed "competitor" surely proves it's a worthless comparison.
Nice "Sid Meier's: Alpha Centauri" video game quotation. I don't see how "Pravin Lal's" sentiment applies here. Apple is probably just doing this to improve the bottom line on warranties by preventing people who lack the knowhow/desire to open the case of their machines. If you really want to get it, you can still get in, you just have to try a bit harder and think about what it is you're doing and the implications thereof (vis the product's warranty). You definitely have access to your own property, you just have to buy the right tools, which according to other posts, are actually available from other suppliers.
For most of us, yes. If Google wants to do an April fools joke on April 4th, all they need to do is edit the index so that the top result returned for "April fools date" claims that April fools' day is April 4th.
I commented below with a proper answer (or my attempt at it) but basically, in each of those situations they are actual competitiors. You could replace Yahoo with google, Reddit with Digg, but you can't replace Paypal with WePay. To me at least it seems like they're school yard bullies, identified a "weak" target, one that everyone dislikes and then using that dislike to improve their own position without actually competing. It's the cheats way and for me at least, I wouldn't be happy running a business that way. If I'm going to spend my time bitching about a competitor, I'd make damn sure that I was actually a competitor.
PadMapper Apartment Search
Abducted infant finds her family after 23 years
I've been meaning for some time to write an article on procrastination.
Great tweet from Eric Schmidt on the subject:

Day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed
Verizon Files Appeal In Federal Court Challenging FCC’s Net Neutrality Order
Here are some books and audio that have been insightful and enjoyable to read about mindfulness and related topics.

Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life - Thich Nhat Hanh

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness - Jon Kabat-Zinn

Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation - Alan Watts

Also, these two audio CD collections are helpful:

Out Of Your Mind: The Nature of Consciousness - Alan Watts

Guided Mindfulness Meditation - Jon Kabat-Zinn
This is how I've been working on my side project. Not with EC2 or Linode, but with a Chunkhost (they're running a beta of very small, 20gb disk / 512mb ram) VPS. Using my Cr48 to develop it has been a dream (minus some minor issues with Cr48's tendency to lock up ssh terms if you lose connection, requiring a reboot to get them out of your alt-tab queue).

It's pretty great - not only can I work on it from anywhere with a working ssh client, but I get super fast speeds.
Stop snickering at the back! Unless you're a Schemer, your pet dynamic language probably suffers from the same affliction:

http://moonbase.rydia.net/mental/blog/programming/the-bigges...
The government doesn't want it construed too narrowly for reasons other than relate to this case--and isn't to defend the people, but rather to defend the Government's ability to withhold things via FOIA exemptions. The Justice's "help" in arguing for a narrow interpretation here would hurt the Government in later cases where they also want to redact information.
4 HP Directors Step Down, Meg Whitman added
I think initial reactions are rarely subject to sound logic.
But on the other side of the coin, this makes it a bit harder for Good Czar Larry to hide behind nasty old Eric Schmidt whenever Google does something inept or morally questionable.
It's accessible from wherever you have a computer with the necessary software and a fast enough connection. Sure, if you don't have your laptop then this could be useful, but that's like saying that a land-line based system for managing your address book is good because it's accessible from more places than your phone is, unless you take your phone with you everywhere.
Being able to execute upon acquisitions and bring them to Google-scale is nothing to scoff at. Example, Android. Despite the Gruber's of the world thinking it is an iPhone rip off, Google made the acquisition (of a very small company--the Android we know today was quite simply built by Google) in 2005.

Update: Also, thought of a few... Translate, Chrome, Talk, and Reader. I'm sure there are more, definitely if you include ones based on acquisitions (Analytics, Earth, Apps, etc).
Thanks for this - I've been running into similar problems. I'll try it out when I get back to my cr48.. didn't bring it into the office today.
I submitted this because I liked how a missing child can now, using the Internet, find out she was a missing child and be reunited with her parents. This wouldn't have been possible without proper technology. Hope you guys like it as much as I did
"I know this may be off topic, but as I find many people find this practice acceptable from the comments, how would they feel if this was applied to other facets of goods."

I don't find this acceptable at all. The rationale seems to be that some people will open up a device, break something, then try to get it covered by the warranty. But trying to prevent people from fixing their own hardware because some take advantage of it is the same backwards approach the music industry takes with digital restriction management: treat your customers like criminals.
9 times out of 10 when I see Paypal it is as a donate button on some website. This is the primary thing Wepay provides. So for at least a portion of PayPal's business(and 100% of Wepay's business) they are direct competitors. If anything them claiming to not be Paypal's competition is dishonest.
Google's Page to Replace Schmidt as CEO
Larry Page to Replace Eric Schmidt as CEO of Google
Really enjoy Jon Jabat-Zinn's material. He's got a couple videos on google tech talks and his guided CD's are very good. I came to meditation knowing nothing at all and his clear and simple explanations helped immensely.
I don't know about bad business decisions, but he certainly had a bad year for putting his foot in his mouth.

And there's certainly no shortage of unpopular, not-classically-Google-like decisions (though thoroughly defensible business-wise) in the recent past: Buzz Privacy, StreetView WiFi debacle, Net Neutrality reversal, the WebM reversal, the Scan-First-Ask-Later library project and settlement process, etc.

If we put any weight into the rumors that the entire triumvirate didn't see eye to eye on all those things, mixed in with publicly-recognized conflicts (such as the way that Sergey clearly trusted Schmidt on the China deal, which backfired spectacularly) I think you can make a pretty good argument for "Schmidt Messed Up".
I don't want all of my URLs shortened.
yes. i tried them but they weren't nearly as fast as I wanted. they were like cygwin in terms of perfomance and slowed down the whole old laptop of mine
Very nice. There was a different tool I used for prototyping html, but it wasn't as nice and intuitive as this.
For now it's bookmarked so I can look at it in more depth later.
I dunno, I don't think that's true. You can replace the search function of Yahoo with Google, but that was only one of a bunch of things Yahoo was doing. You can't fly Southwest Airlines to Tokyo, but you can on American.

As a matter of fact, Southwest Airlines limited service reach makes many of the things they tout possible. AA could never, for instance, operate with only one kind of airplane.

People love the underdog. You might think of big bad Paypal as being the weak target, but I don't think anyone else does.
We really enjoyed the Springboard program as well. In our year, they seemed to put an emphasis on bootstrapable, B2B businesses (possibly because this is the route Red Gate Software took).

We learned a lot from them about how to establish pricing plans and how to market to businesses -- mostly by talking to their staff about how they did these things at Red Gate.
I agree. If The Cheezburger Network is a profitable business that is showing growth, I don't see why everyone is jumping to claim this is a bad investment.
don't forget about energy consumption costs
Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Sun (CTO), Novell (CEO), Google (CEO)... Quite impressive.

As indicated by page 29 of Google's 2004 S-1 Filing Eric Schmidt, Page, and Brin run Google as a triumvirate. Eric Schmidt possesses the legal responsibilities typically assigned to the CEO of a public company and focuses on management of the vice presidents and the sales organization. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt)

Google was always a different company. And we should not evaluate this move as if HP's CEO is stepping down, or IBM's etc. After all this time, I believe Larry can make it. Interesting times.
Lary Page Google Co-Founder to Replace Eric Schmidt as CEO
> I don't believe this is true. I suspect the way most people use print statements for debugging goes something like: "I think the problem is somewhere in this function, let's stick a print statement here. Oops, that doesn't seem to be it, let's try one here. Oops, that's not it either, let's try printing out a different variable." and so on.

What is the basis for your suspicion? I ask because the folks who I see using print as their first-choice for debugging don't work that way. The overhead associated with changes (as opposed to restarting) gives them the opportunity to think (or grab a new cup of tea).

That said, that "poke around randomly" approach does seem to be "not rare" for folks who are "debugger first", as you yourself say.

To be fair, the folks I know who are most effective with a debugger also put in some time on understanding before they fire it up.
I guess Google is going to be more focused on PR (and lobbying) and will be way more aggressive than ever before - in simple lingo , they wont take anymore bullshit (from all sort of heavy weight and nasty competitors) and even more than that they will stop them even before they think to do anything against google ...

Don't be Evil to Customers and Shareholders !!!

But be as Evil as possible if (and Only if) someone tries to screw you !!!
I actually switched to using an EC2 Micro instance because my 256MB VPS didn't have enough RAM to compile some of the packages I needed. The compile took a while, but they were for libraries I rebuild maybe once a month.

As far as development goes I haven't had a problem yet with speed. I tend to do small incremental compiles, and when I need to a full compile I go get a cup of coffee.
well maybe that's the point?
This story reminds me of my experience. I immigrated from China at a young age, but the impression I got from my family is that even in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, people were almost universally poor. I remember my dad telling me that even if you had the money, buying a television or refrigerator required connections.

My father and mother both came from rural areas, where mud huts were not uncommon. Even in China, my dad didn't eat rice until he was in his teens. My father did extremely well on the national exams and managed to get into a university with most of his expenses paid by the socialist system at the time. After getting a PHD, he immigrated to the US with me.

Having visited China a few times with my family, I met some quite successful businessmen, all of whom have humble roots in poor countryside villages. Some of them didn't even graduate from elementary school, but due to connections with the government (the military for example), they managed to start businesses and acquire factories during the time of China's economic growth.

There are a lot of rag-to-riches stories in China, but at the same the time, the sheer size of the population means that there are even more stories of poverty. In my father's family, only he and one of his brothers out of a family of 6 or 7 managed to escape the rural area. Although life is getting better even in the rural areas, it seems there is a massive difference between the skyscrapers of Shanghai and a traditional farming village.
Perhaps deporting you to the countryside would be one small first step. Or is restriction of personal freedom only okay when it isn't applied to you?
yup.

during my chat with the agent to reset my password, i asked him why did they force me to chat and he said that they justed wanted to confirm the "security" info.

I said, I already put that in on the previous screen. There was no answer.
Ummm, this rocks. Simple as that. So great.
Is it just me or is the text a little small and the color too light against the background?