skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps Google, with its obviously inconsistent censorship policy, is trying to rile up the users being affected as well as the companies of their services to finally take action again the entertainment industry's censorship. Perhaps Google is the Green Hornet here, posing to be the bad guy?

Then again, I think that I'm just wishfully thinking, not wanting to accept the fact that Google has finally lost its independent mindset and vision of connecting the internets.

The last sentence on the blog sums it up best.

"Google may have been proud to leave China because of its political censorship, but it should be ashamed of promoting commercial censorship worldwide."

I wonder how Google can justify those contradicting actions.
The Rose main reading room of the NYPL Schwarzman building (that's the one with the lions) is quiet, has wifi and outlets, and is inspirational.

http://www.nypl.org/locations/schwarzman/general-research-di...
Ask HN: GMail blacklisting new domains?
Hopefully a Google employee or someone with insight into Gmail's spam algorithms/blacklists can help solve this puzzle.

I'm the founder of Goals.com, and we clearly inherited a very old domain name. Fifteen years old, to be exact. That means we've also inherited an unfortunate legacy of spam.

We've done everything right in handling this. We use SendGrid for our transactional emails, have set up white labeling to use DKIM, SPF, etc. And we've even made a point on user sign up of checking the spam folders/filters. We have close to 99% reputation, provide unsubscribe links or a link to email management, and try to make sure our emails don't read spammy.

Someone at SendGrid has been helping me out with this (Kyle – thanks, dude!), and his efforts have been great but futile. We finally buckled and registered a new domain, only to find that those emails, too, were being blacklisted. Kyle helped us out again, and again even the most basic, least spammy test emails were going straight to spam.

I was told that Google has no procedure for fixing this problem, that we are blacklisted with no option but to use '@sendgrid.com' for our emails. This could be fairly confusing to our users, so obviously I want to avoid this if at all possible.

Does anyone know how or why Google has been blacklisting domains (even new ones), or know how to fix such a problem?
Yes, I have spent too much time studying psychology. And it depends on the person. You sound right-brained in that you can handle and even embrace uncertainty when extraverted, but become rigid when introverted. A person who is left-brained would be the exact opposite (rigid when extraverted, but flexible when introverted).
a lab at a university
I believe the minimum spend for this service (Account Executive) is $10,000 per month.

Google also assigns account managers at similar spending levels.

However, I have to agree the Facebook's account managers are far more helpful than Google's. They have more authority to re-approve ads that have been denied, and they seem to understand their own rules better than their counterparts at Google. YMMV.
Another issue for those that rely on adwords for traffic, in certain countries brands are able to use their trademarks to prevent certain keywords being bid upon at all, for example this recently happened the keyword "chanel".

It's possible many would argue that this is fair enough, but what happens when someone gets Google to bad a fairly common work or something the relates directly to another product.
I'm not sure on the any changes to destination url's result in having to be reviewed again. I have frequently modified tracking parameters in the url without incident.
I am glad to hear I am not alone here. That "reputation for not screwing us buys you better service" would be nice, and it would scarcely be a first for Google, since it is baked into their Quality Score ratings and spiritually similar to things in core search, too.

I can only remember having had a handful of ads disapproved. Most times I just resubmit with something teachery in the ad text.
Interesting idea

Does anyone know who the creator of this is?

I would love to talk to him/her about a possible tie up with something I'm developing
How's that a bad thing? It means few soldiers are getting killed in combat. In fact, for most armies suicide is a bigger cause of death than combat, simply because most countries aren't in state of war.
Here's a fast Python C extension for protobuf that's already usable:

https://github.com/acg/lwpb

I read through your upb code about 3-4 months ago, was initially impressed, but couldn't get the Python extension to work. Certain abstractions really lost me, like pushing and pulling between sources and sinks. Why not just let a top-level event loop run the show in terms of buffered reads and size calculation for writes? But maybe you've refactored since.
CardMunch Acquired by LinkedIn: An Investor's View
I noticed weird behavior recently with my spam filter in gmail. For example, some emails from midventures.com are getting through and other ones are marked as spam ( none of them are actually spam ) Not sure why this is. I don't remember ever having issues like this before.
Acushnet company. Sporting goods manufacturer most famous for Titleist golf balls.
Ev Williams on the urban legend that Twitter launched at SXSW
Well I tried running some adwords on the 'display network'. I've tried at various times over the years with this and always abandoned it as a festering pit of spam and fraud.

I decided to try it out again, in case things had improved somewhat. And before I knew it, I had a couple of conversions. There was also a lot of 50% CTR rates for obvious spam farm sites. So I excluded all of those and upped the budget.

And I got a few more conversions. Some really odd ones too - from myspace.com and other sites that I would think my customers have no business being on (or being on and in a purchasing mood, to be more accurate). But then I compared actual sales with analytics and other information. While my adwords account was reporting 'conversions' my sales were actually not showing these conversions.

Now I might have the conversion code wrong (doubtful, it's just a copy/paste) but something tells me varios spammers have worked out ways to make some of your ads show conversions to stop being excluded from the list.

Whatever the reason, it's switched off again. Traffic and sales show no ill effects.

So I'm back to my original hypotheses : the display network is a festering pit of scammers and money wasting.
Commendable. Really well executed.

How about linking up with online communities.

I'm sure a lot of people on reddit would love this for no-fuss IRL meet ups. Likewise forums/ online games etc.

Well done
I go to the office every day but I do about 50% of my work from home.
China warms to possibility of a muzzled Facebook
Other: architect
i read this despite expecting it to be yet another whine about how women are oppressed (rather than, gosh, just different) and was pleasantly surprised to find it was a pretty good and helpful piece on startup and career advice.
What's with the $100k - $250k category?? The lower 5 categories should be combined into 2, $60k- and $60k-$100k. And the 100-250k category should be split into 3.
That would depend on how the rate compares to the general population, wouldn't it? I would expect the rate to be higher, because "we're not running a damned daisy farm", as Nathan Arizona would say - but how much higher is it?
My thought was of Guido from the movie Risky Business: "never fuck with another man's livelihood."
I'm not a Google guy, but I've had some experience setting up new domains for email. You have nothing but my best wishes. Its a pain in the ass. Sounds like you've checked a lot, but in case you haven't, check to see if your IP(s) are on spamhaus and other blacklists.
The face recognition problem is very tough and we are nowhere close to solving it for most real problems. The results on Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) [1] show that even on the easier "verification" problem -- "are these two images of the same person?" -- the best performance is under 90%.

To figure out how this translates to recognition -- "who is this person?" -- you can roughly take the verification rate V and number of different people in your database N and get a recognition rate of roughly V^sqrt(N). (This is a very very rough estimate!)

So with 1 person in your database, your rate is just V = ~90%. With 100 people, it's already down to 35%. And so on...

(I'm the author of one of the best methods on LFW right now -- the attribute-based one [2].)

[1] http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/

[2] http://www.cs.columbia.edu/CAVE/projects/faceverification/
So how do they make money?
I like the overlapping row of tab thumbnails at the top
I'd love one if you can spare it. Just hoping the plans for a Chicago bus actually come true!
Interview with the CEO of the faster growing web company in Malaysia.
Agreed. Facebook is where teachers go when they're not thinking about teaching.
Personal or household?
Before or after taxes?
Earned or total?
Salary or Salary + Benefits?
etc
> I'm kinda off-put about their decision to censor the software program titles, rather then say copyrighted illegal content.

Pardon, but are you really serious? Disregarding the obvious senselessness of the term "copyrighted illegal content", people search for book titles all the time. People search for software all the time. Half the stuff people search the Internet for is copyrighted or trademarked. The only reasonable way to stop suggesting torrents is to block on the names of torrent software.
Um, this problem really is that simple. If you're doing something where you really need many factorials, you use a lookup table (and probably don't call a factorial function at all), or you use a closed-form function to give an estimate. And it's going to be painfully obvious which one you want.
For a vivid discussion on the blog post by Jessica Livingston see also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2144956
Is there any attendee participation? What makes it a "conference" vs. a series of online webinars?
Just compare the websites.
http://mojolicio.us vs http://catalystframework.org
You should add cPickle to the benchmark as well -- I bet fast-pb still comes out ahead, and that may be an eye opener for many Python devs.
I was of a similar mind several years ago. Can I suggest that you try Conversion Optimizer? I have my occasional issues with Google, but that product is everything they do right in a little packet of joy with a bow on top. It virtually completely solved my issues with the Content Network.

I have end-to-end tracking on my conversions these days and I can verifiably trace ~25% of sales to trials started immediately after a visit from an ad on the Content Network.

The network certainly is a hive of scum and villainy, but they give options for not doing much business with that portion of it.

P.S. I cannot speak authoritatively for your conversion code, but I'd suspect you're seeing the effects of residual conversions where someone comes in from myspace.com, then later searches via brand name, and you're crediting the brand search but not myspace.
Google Begins Soft Censorship Of Arbitrary Piracy-Related Queries
I work from home and hate it. I know that working from the comfort of your home is supposed to be the holy grail of workspaces but the thing I miss the most about working in an office is working in an office and being able to come home and have a space where my mind can unwind from my responsibilities and actually do the sort of relaxing that gives me good ideas
Ask HN: Is it realistic to go from zero to freelance rails dev in 3 months?
Hi,

Could experienced developers please tell me whether it's realistic to become a productive freelance developer in 3 months of full time study and practice?

The goal would be to good enough to bill $25/30 hour on odesk.com for building a site from scratch to finish (architecture + code + design).

Other than conceptual knowledge from interacting with freelance developers (OO, MVC, ...) I know nothing wrt developing (coding) applications.

Please find below what I plan to learn over the next 3 months:

1. Ruby
- Pragprog.com: Learn to program
- RubyLearning.com: Core Ruby
- Pragprog.com: PickAxe
- RubyLearning.com: Ruby Metaprogramming

2. Rails
- Railstutorial.org
- Pragprog.com: Agile Web Development with Rails
- Rails documentation

3. Design
- W3Schools: CSS & HTML intro
- Pragprog.com: Web design for developers
- Pragprog.com: CSS3 & HTML5

4. Credibility
- Build own application
- Ruby Silver certification

5. On the (freelance) job
- Railsmentors.org if I need feedback
- Find freelance developer at same rate to subcontract things I can't do efficiently (and learn from the code and the process).

Should this suffice? As you can see I will try to learn the same stuff from different sources - in my experience that's when things stick the most in my mind.

I am also wondering whether I should finish more advanced books (Rails way, Rails recipes, Ruby Quiz, TextMate, Rake, ...) before becoming a freelancer?

Thanks for the feedback!
Dropbox is a better name.
Before taxes, no non monetary benefits.

Not a perfect measurement, but it is the standard.
Sounds like some form of coopetition: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coopetition
Netflix says Apple TVs streaming more of its movies than iPads
My favorite example of the broken patent system is United States Patent 6368227: Method of swinging on a swing.

Abstract: "A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other."

Link: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6368227.html

And some news coverage: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2178-boy-takes-swing-a...
It doesn't suggest that to me. It suggests to me that they would prefer you not ask for too many permissions because they've learned from Farmville that overbearing apps get bad PR for Facebook, and the fact that some number (perhaps quite trivial) of people will be turned off by it is a convenient disincentive.
If you can get the Chicago tech community excited and supportive, that will help the case. We'll make the final decision based on where the most participants and sponsors come from.
8 Google Products Larry Page Should Kill
Incidentally, so that I don't earn a reputation as Resident Google Critic: I love Google, I think they've created more value for more people than any company in history, and but for Google I would still be a cog in the machine at a Japanese megacorp. I just don't think they are infallible, and in particular I have learned that their PR is as likely to be accurate as any other megacorp's is.
And I'm practically begging them to leave your money on the table so I can get paid more Adsense money and get charged less Adwords money.
I just told you who I work for in another poll, so I think I will avoid this one...
Android 3.0 HoneyComb Preview
Well, maybe not:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
YIKES, I loved your post and wanted to upvote, but with the tiny buttons on my Droid I downvoted instead. So, if you want to know what kind of jerk would downvote such an inspiring remark, well...
does anyone know of cheap mobile phones that are easy to connect to via USB or rs-232 (or whatever) from Linux? I want to have some remote sensors be able to send SMS...
You need to get your ass back in that office and code.

Edit: Just realized I replied to pg. Well, get your ass back into that office and implement some of those great ideas then.
Facebook phone rumors resurface: cloud-based, HTC-built?
Wow, these are some very badly selected buckets! Most US people with tech jobs are going to be in the 50-200 range.

Unless you have some other reason for caring about these specific buckets, I'd go with:
0-25k (stipend, student, unemployed)
25-50k (part time, early career, or founder)
50-80k (junior person or early employee, maybe founder)
80-110k (most early/mid career individual contributors, non-technical managers)
110-150k (senior individual contributor or management)
150k+ (specialist, management in larger company, or successful founder in later stages)
agree with most comments here that the pen/paper address book seems a bit out of place. i'd imagine that the swivel door to keep the address book is quite cumbersome and certainly this would add unnecessary weight. also i feel that the simplicity of the design is somewhat ruined with handwritten entries in the address book (see link below for a picture):

http://www.johnsphones.com/store/johns-address-book/item89

i'm all for minimalist designs, this phone seems to segment a very niche user base that is only interested in using phones to call people, however small that is, i'm sure there's a market. though the price point conflicts with this as i feel people in this market segment are probably looking for low price as well.

some additional comments, a video on the webpage would be nice showing the interface for navigating through an address book or adding contacts. i think the dial buttons are nice, but imho the slide buttons on the side of the phone are a bit arcane, perhaps individual buttons would be more modern.

i'm actually quite attracted to the general design of the phone, the keypad is laid out quite simply, the lcd at the top is out of the way and quite utilitarian. i'm a smartphone user myself (nokia e72), but i'd love to have this phone if it included bluetooth and i'm quite curious as to the ease of use of the phonebook because i really hate storing numbers by keypad. based on the design, it'd be nice if you offered a higher end john's phone, let's say you added bluetooth, a 5 MP camera, and a micro SD storage slot, you'd have a pretty good shot at getting some premiums for people that are looking for something fresh in comparison to iphone/android.
I was under the impression that your vote in a poll can't be backtracked to you. Perhaps, pg might be able to add some code that could do it, but I doubt the data would ever be leaked/released even if he did. Plus, you can always create another account for this purpose if you want to be safe.
'Against a decision' and 'against a company' are different things.
What does CardMunch do that Google Goggles doesn't? So far, Google Goggles has been quite good at scanning business cards for me and adding them to my contacts.
btw, what's the operating system on this baby?
yeh... i guess most people are lurkers, and i always have been... makes me think of the thing about 90% are lurkers, 9% contributors and 1% heavy contributors

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html
21 Empirical Findings About Human Happiness
Agree. I know Google is the new evil but all they've done is turned off autocomplete. If I type "[film name] torrent" in Google, I still get an instant, direct link to the piretebay download of said movie.

I think it actually makes sense to hide from autocomplete - because, after all, you don't want to entice people to go for the illegal stuff: If they want to find it, they can. But you don't want to suggest it first thing.
Understanding code is challenging enough. Dealing with crap annoyances (also known as "individual styles") makes it that much more challenging. I've talked with enough engineers who feel the same way to know I'm not alone.

If you are able to grok code at a higher level, that is awesome. Recognize that the majority of engineers aren't in that bucket and that style does matter.

If it didn't, why would anybody have coding guidelines?
And assuming you're good at typing one-handed

:)
i hardly ever used sms in america. in asia (japan and china), i use sms obsessively.
Interesting. Sometimes we speak metaphorically of life's inertia. If the part of the brain that controls our actual movement also controls our habits of thought, I guess we are not far off!

Nietzsche said that all great thoughts are conceived while walking... perhaps this is why.
a.) a pair of foam earplugs does wonders for noise cancellation. much cheaper than $200 noise-canceling headphones, and works just as well (assuming you don't want to listen to music)
also as to how these things are designed. i'd love to try hacking one together. perhaps i'll find some info on the blog.
Proabably not the domain but the IP? Have you checked the headers?
'500 Server Error' has replaced 'Registration Coming Soon' for Google I/O 2011
Sometimes, progress in debugging manifests itself as _new_ errors. :-) I hope it's a sign that they're making ready the site for the long-anticipated registration.

500 - Internal server error.
There is a problem with the resource you are looking for, and it cannot be displayed.
OK, I'll burn more karma because I'm feeling feisty today.

marshray is concerned about Google's move, just like a lot of other people. boredguy8 is obviously not concerned and thinks marshray's concerns are so dumb that they would be better as a joke. But he doesn't say why he thinks those concerns are a joke, he's just condescendingly pointing and laughing and calling marshray stupid. How is that acceptable debate? Like I said it is insulting and useless. If you are going to downvote me please explain what's wrong with what I'm saying.
Intel Plans to Invest $100 Mil In Research Centers At U.S. Universities
Well, that's nice, but I've been pretty happy with http://gmail-notify.sourceforge.net/
The obvious answer is for Google to charge for support plans, like AWS.

E.g., $100/month for up to 3 hours of support a month with 4 hour response time, $500/month for up to 10 hrs/month with 15 minute response times, etc.
I can't agree with rdl more. You should re-stage your poll.
We actually hosted some meals during the YC interviews for guys to participate in and chat with YC alum. We will look to do something like that again in the near future. Thanks for the feedback!
Check Out My New Favorite Browser Plug-In, Built by a Venture Capital Firm
Apple investigating hover gestures as multi-touch alternative
My bet would be that they just tie it into LinkedIn so it becomes a way for people to make connections on LinkedIn easier - this leads to more usage and revenue for LinkedIn.

They used to charge but it is free now.
The more people sign up in those spots, the quicker we will launch. Should do well in both those areas.
With Looming Facebook IPO, Better Buy a House Now (If You Can Find One)
Is there a way for me to do this now that votes have already come in?
Thanks for that explanation. It's really odd how the quality of logic (and balance of moderation) on this site sometimes seems to dip below what would be expected on Slashdot.
Programmatically comparing programming fonts
It appears to return similar results right now. I've always been frustrated when I would search for software, and the entire first page results, besides the actual first result, were rapidshare and megaupload aggregating blogs.

The query of the title of the Pragmatic Bookshelf book that happens to be open on my desk returns 4 relevant links. The remaining 6 are sites advertising free PDF downloads. Back in the day, one would have to go to a dedicated search engine for these links.

As much as I dislike "Censoring", Google should decide whether it wants to be in the business of providing links to sites that clearly are aggregators for filesharing and fileuploading links to pirated and copyrighted content. The Pirate Bay, et al., can take care of that.