skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
those are all great domain names!
I'm a "techie," the kind that dabbles in various areas of software development and I'd choose an Apple computer before any other to do my dabbling with.
The Best Cover Letter I Ever Received
No, the reason why it's difficult to contact people at Google is that 1 billion+ users visit us each week, and we only have ~20,000 Google employees. Even if every single employee did nothing but user support 24/7, each Google employee would need to do tech support for 50,000 users apiece.

Likewise, there are 200,000,000+ domain names. Even if every single employee did nothing but webmaster support 24/7, each Google employee would need to do tech support for 10,000 domains apiece. The same argument goes for supporting hundreds of thousands of advertisers.

The problem of user, customer, and advertiser support at web-wide levels is very hard. That's why we've looked for scalable solutions like blogging and videos. I've made 300+ videos that have gotten 3.5M views: http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp for example. There's no way I could talk to that many webmasters personally.

So we haven't found a way to do 1:1 conversation for everyone that has a question about Google. That's not even raising the back-and-forth that some people want to have with Google. See http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=... and http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?fid=... to get a glimpse at the sort of prolonged conversations that people want to have with Google. In short: it's a hard problem.
Gmail lets you use filters to prevent emails that match your rules from being marked as spam.
As much as I fancy the prospect of a real world Jurassic Park, I'd much rather they began with herbivores rather than a T. Rex, velociraptor, or these flying creatures.

But then again, Jurassic Park without a T. Rex would be like an amusement park without a roller coaster.
If you're getting your phonemes from an IPA dictionary, couldn't you check for emphasis too?

Seems like you'd want to match words that begin and end in weak syllables, e.g. Beethoven + veneer = Beethoveneer (overwrought, superficially emotional music).

You can also pair strong syllables: sorbet + Bayes = Sorbayes (dessert ordered on the condition that real ice cream is unavailable).

But putting a weak last with a strong first wrong-foots you: Beethovunforgiven.

EDIT: in case it sounds like I'm nitpicking, I love this.
Genetic Algorithm Used to Build Car With Box2D
I believe Eric Schmidt is stepping down because he believes doing so is what is best for Google. And I believe his reason has little to do with whether or not he thinks that he is the right person for the job or that Larry Page is the better candidate.

I think Eric believes that it is time for Google to get a real CEO because he has been the CEO in name only.

C is for Chief and Eric was never the chief since he was not the person who gets to make the final decision.

E is for Executive and Eric never spends much time executing because he was too busy herding cats.

O is for Officer and Eric was not able to look out for the interest of all the shareholders, just the two largest ones.

Good luck, Larry.
Given how much human error happens in hospitals, I would be happier to have less pesky humans involved.
To be clear, they're just doing fully electronic checkin. The title had me imagining room service and housekeeping robots.
I wonder how fast nginx would be with C scripts for modules, rebuilding executables as needed using file mtime? Might be worth the experiment. For things like presence servers and COMET, it makes sense to code in C. Anyone else interested in exploring this subject?

Edit: Found this "comparison" http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/G-WAN_vs_Nginx which I suspect was written by the GWAN guy himself judging from the unusual sentence structure and phraseology. Independent confirmation necessary.
The article talks about 100,000 negatives laying around. This was years of work and probably a daily activity. Hardly qualifies as "inherent".
Contest for startups with IPO as 1st prize... scam or just silly?
even if it's half the price?

(remember that food, health, and lodging are probably where most people spend the majority of their money)
I like MongoDB, but am familiar enough with type-obsessed languages like Haskell and Scala to summarize your response as

"not much"

I'd argue there are potentially better priorities available for a DSL->DB mapper. But hey, they're the ones putting themselves out there and putting in the hard work, not me.

So, more power to them and I'm glad they're contributing back to the community.
Great question. The "don't wait for ads" policy has been around since ~2001, way before AJAX became common. In theory you could make it so that the ads loaded when they were ready, but that could also generate a visual "pop" that I imagine would annoy many users.

My preference is just to enforce a hard time deadline. If the ads team starts to miss that deadline and revenue decreases, then they're highly motivated to speed their system up. :)
I'm a programmer, and I'm as annoyed as you about the SO clones. But keep in mind the vast, vast majority of Google users couldn't care less about StackOverflow.

Moreover, the unique licensing around SO content, along with its mass, presents an interesting edge case for Google. They should of course fix it, but it's not indicative of the average or mode experience.
openid and google would be handy, but that's just me, not sure on the masses. Will sign up for watp and get started.

Tiles have a creative element, scarcity and a time constraint. I always wind up getting hyper competitive and tearing through as many as I can in a session. It's an evil crack-like substance for arty types.
I have not found the automated airport experience anything less than panic-inducing.

I live in Europe and have spent several years thoroughly enjoying the convenience that the machines at the airport provide. I'd love to learn what panic-inducing experiences the author is alluding to; can any HN'ers help out? :)
the hardest part about this site for me was finding a good dictionary of words->phonemes... unfortunately what i found did not come with emphasis. if you want to try to find a better dictionary for me i'd check it out. good luck though with the way google's search is these days ;?j
Given how many bugs (no pun intended) the average programmer is capable of inserting into programs, I'd be much happier with an adaptable-to-cockups human than a pesky "computer says no" entirely automated solution.
Brendan Eich talks about the Future of JavaScript
What sounds odd of all this is that I think the spam sites and "content farms" are generating a lot of ad clicks for Google. Will they really take appropriate actions against this sites if this will mean a significant cut on the earnings?

I played with adsense a lot in the past, and if you did too you should now how spam sites generate a lot more clicks than sites where the user is actually focused on reading content...
We do have some data on this. I'll ask about whether do some comparisons of "Google today" vs. "Google three years ago."
Go Community To Attend White House Event Welcoming Chinese President
When President Hu Jintao of China arrives at the White House this
Wednesday, the U.S. go community will be there.

“Obviously, we’re incredibly thrilled and honored that go is playing
such a visible role in this high-profile event,” said [AGA president]
Abramson. “With the game emphasizing the long view, as well as trades
between the players instead of all-out victory, we think go is the
perfect metaphor for better relations among all people."
Universal Encoding Detector
> > who Googles URLs instead of typing the

> I also Google for URLs from time to time

Of course, typing "facebook.com" into Google and clicking on the first result (which, of course, is "facebook.com") is not really the same thing as typing "facebook privacy" into Google to get a quick link to the facebook privacy policy. One of these is convenient, and the other one just adds a step. It's the difference between googling for a URL, and googling a URL. Adding the "for" obfuscates.
"In order for Schmidt to go to Microsoft, Ballmer would have to be forced out"

Not only that, but Schmidt would also have to win the confidence of Microsoft veterans, some of whom have been rumoured to have CEO ambitions (e.g. Sinofsky). Despite his stellar credentials, this may be harder than it looks. Ray Ozzie (whose vision and ideas would probably align with Schmidt's) stepped down as a CSA after all. And I am not sure if Schmidt understands the consumer space well enough to drive Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox. I am not sure he gets business well enough to drive Office either. He gets engineering, and that helped him lead Google this far, but engineering is not enough if you want to lead companies such as Microsoft and Apple.
We build GEOcities-style websites for 99$ a piece - WebKing
Doctests make very useful, always up-to-date and tested, documentation.
What I was trying to illustrate was that those reasons shouldn't be the only ones for starting your own business. I agree that those qualities may exist in many entrepreneurs, but they might actually be more of distraction than anything else. Passion for your product or solution should be the driving force behind an entrepreneurial endeavor.
Cory Doctorow wrote about this in a column last year:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/dec/21/keeping-ema...

He's had the same public email address published without obfuscation for more than 10 years. He describes his anti-spam setup which has served him reliably and argues that the nuisance imposed on correspondents by scrambling his address isn't worth it.
That was a great effort...how long did it take to put everything in place
It's been up-voted more, however.

On the plus side, the story got here only 4 hours after the original one.
Don't underestimate the influence of developers and the tech elite jumping on a usable desktop Unix in the early 2000s. The first places I ever saw more than one or two Mac laptops in one room were developer meetups. And you know each of those influence purchasing decisions of their families and friends as a trusted source. If OS X didn't have Unix underneath I would need three hands to count the number of people I would not have told to buy a Mac because I wasn't using one and loving it at the time.
Apple don't sell cheap laptops. In 2009 they had 91% market share of laptops that cost over $1,000: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Apple-has-91-of-ma...
Even without growing the number of users they have, they can certainly raise their revenue per user, which is the big question as far as I can tell.
Didn't 4.0 and .1 render your phone nearly useless? Even on .2 I've seen measurements of some things being faster and others slower, not to mention weird cargo cult advice to switch certain things off and delete caches or some such.

When you also consider that basically none of the features of iOS 4 made it to the 3G, I think it's a pretty poor example.
Poll: How much time do you spend checking and responding to email each day?
0-5 minutes
5-15 minutes
15-30 minutes
30-60 minutes
60-90 minutes
90+ minutes
On Quora, the former owner of eHow recently wrote[1] that when he handed over the keys to the people who bought the site, it had an excellent quality of content. This gave it a good 'credibility' on Google. When it was taken over, it was turned into a content farm, but the atrophy of credibility is possibly to disproportional to the spam parameter variable, which leaves it in Google's results. At least according to one of his listed explanations.

I recall about.com as a decent site a while ago, but I believe it was acquired a while ago by ... Yahoo!? Go figure.

I think that might be what makes it so complicated.
[1]: http://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Google-push-down-low-quality...
The Most Emailed New York Times Article Ever
"Does that mean that Google manually decrease rankings of spammy sites that their algorithms haven't caught?"

Although our first instinct is to look for an algorithmic solution, yes, we can. In the blog post you mentioned, it says

"I should add, however, that there are clear written policies for websites recommended by Google, and we do take action on sites that are in violation of our policies or for a small number of other reasons (e.g. legal requirements, child porn, viruses/malware, etc)."

As the quote mentions, we do reserve the right to take action on sites that violate our quality guidelines. The guidelines are here, by the way: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en...
The FCC requirements about non-user-modifiable equipment are vague, so some people interpreted them to mean non-standard connectors and others interpreted them to mean simply not telling the customer about non-compliant antennas.
Of course not everybody should be able to contact Google 1:1, but at least all the people that were subject to an action that required human intervention from Google.

Example: I get my adsense account or site banner in a non automatic way since there is some problem with the content: so not into an automated way, but because somebody looked at my site.

I should, in that case, have a chance to communicate with Google. This is inherently scalable as everything started with a 1:1 action.
I don't want to leak our eval methodology to competitors, but you can take subsamples and get those samples hand-rated by experts.
I don't get it. What properly sourced facts? Since when does adding an occasional "according to a close advisor," or "according to associates" count as proper sourcing? Proper sourcing means that an independent third party could verify the claims. The article is very even handed, and may even be correct, but at face value it's nothing more than the author's opinion and unsubstantiated references to unknown people.
How often have you searched Google and been sent to one of those pages?

They don't want useless content in their serps. If someone goes directly to the domain, that's in no way related to search quality.
Yesterday's Delta IV-Heavy rocket launch: a personal impression
Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund hits $2.5M in start-up financing
Which has nothing to do with this situation.
This part of life is pretty difficult. You have so much promise. You can do anything. It's just a matter of picking a direction. That direction will shape you into a great ______. Or so we all thought...

To a certain degree, it doesn't matter what you choose: I certainly didn't choose to be an entrepreneur until a couple years after college, and I certainly didn't imagine -- when I was in your position -- that I would come to love building businesses and technology. And there was no way I could comprehend what it means to make money or not make money or choose ramen and equity over money or work for 80 hours or not work at all.

I thought I would be an author. I was going to write my generation's Great Gatsby or the Neuromancer of Neuromancer's time. That didn't quite happen. As it turns out, very few things happen as you expect them to -- but that doesn't mean you can't choose your course or plan for the future.

To give yourself the best shot at achieving what you want -- even if that changes... whatever you decide on doing -- you should make sure to surround yourself by people who will challenge you, stretch you, call you on your bullshit and help you up, brush you off and push you back into the fray when you fail. A good University will force you into this situation. University was a shock for me -- I was no longer a big fish in a small pond. I was mundane. Or at least, I felt insignificant. But being around people who I esteemed highly forced me to aim high and helped me to not give up.

So, yeah, I don't know what to tell you. Just aim high and don't give up, I guess.
> So Apple is the only company that is guaranteed to say in business? Then why don't more people buy Microsoft mp3 players?

Perhaps because Microsoft has shown little interest in mp3 players, giving out some lackluster products and burning customers and partners along the way (PlaysForSure, anyone?)
None. It lets me know when something arrives. :)
Apple never licensed OS X to clone makers. The clone era was very short (at most 1993-1997), and ended while the Classic MacOS was current. OS X didn't ship until 2001.
Hmmm, I was able to checkin and checkout at the Hyatt Regency at Pittsburgh airport last year without dealing with a human being. On arrival, swiped my credit card at a computer in the lobby, which dispensed a keycard. On departure, same computer printed my bill and I put the card in a slot.

There were people working at the checkin desk, but you didn't have to deal with them.
I use reader, switching to it after bloglines finally died. (It's been resurrected, but I've been too lazy to go back. I'll wait until they've worked on it a bit.)
I believe you'll find that filed under "monetization" - stuff that has value solely because other people assign value to it. Same reason a $100 bill is worth more than the rag it's printed on, or an ounce of gold is worth far more than its industrial uses would imply.
email is where you learn of deals, leads, get paid, etc. It's still the most important piece of the puzzle.
Good advice, although I don't think I can trust chart.io as a company when they have a spelling error on their front page.

"Chart.io quickly hooks up to your database and lets your create real time charts of the metrics you care about."
The app store is not the problem. Not being in control of your own computer anymore is the problem.

And just because techies see problems that non-techies never even consider, are they wrong in issuing the one or other warning? One day it might be too late, and the happy naive non-techies might be in for a rude awakening when somebody has established a monopoly on distribution.
...it's not just the experience it's everything: the hardware, software, UI, materials, industrial design, aesthetics...

This. Try and think of one other computer company that has/takes/enforces that much control on every aspect of their product. Sure, some companies make decent high-quality hardware, and some companies make okay software. But what sets Apple apart is the quality/attention to detail that goes into every aspect of the product.

Each product is designed as an cohesive package, that "just works" out of the box. If you want to hack that product, it's your prerogative, but don't complain that it's not as easy to accomplish.

Disclaimer: We are a Mac software company. We consider hack-ability important, it's just not what Apple is selling.
Sorry, I was responding to the "They'd be a lot more credible without the corpo-speak junk in the first paragraph." by trying to defend that the statements in the first paragraph were true.

Regarding the specific concerns that people have been raising in the last couple months, I think the blog post tried to acknowledge a recent uptick in spam and then describe some ways we plan to tackle the issue.
Sorry, meant to upvote.
The difference between O(n) and O(n^2) is huge, but once optimizations get you fractions of constants, it may be worth looking at more memory.
Stanford researcher uses living cells to create 'biotic' video games
No, but those who take the time and effort to learn how to program are likely to have different views than the non-techies that don't program. Although the contrast between the views is not black-and-white, I think the article brings up a good point.
That depends on whether you're looking for primarily an income or an equity outcome (and yes, both would be nice, but most businesses are far better at focusing on and delivering one, not the other).

Most traditional blue chips deliver regular, well-sized dividends. Their stock price (and therefore, as an investor, your equity value) will largely move with the markets. You don't buy them for out-performing equity growth or a liquidity event, but rather for the regular profits they share as dividends. FWIW, I think Microsoft has an option to become one of these companies, instead of chasing rapid shareprice growth.

The comparison is buying for equity, where you hope to buy low and sell high. Dividends aren't a priority - and since they often amount to cents per share and you're chasing share price growth measured in multiples, dividends are almost irrelevant to your success measurements.

As you point out with Google, their share price could already be considered high. I don't know what their dividend plans are for the future, but that (plus growth more in line with the market, maybe a little ahead) is a "tangible value" of holding their shares.

jwegan - I know I've probably oversimplified that for you since you have familiarity, but I thought it worth spelling out for other HN readers with less awareness / experience. Hope it didn't seem condescending.
Print is dying, so you should read it more
Statistical machine learning and data mining. 32GB isn't enough but, then, it's hard to name any amount that would be enough this kind of work.

Almost all of our machines are either 32GB or 16GB.

As btmorex pointed out earlier, "Once your data set doesn't fit in memory, it is indeed a scarce resource. And 24 GB is really not very much data."
Hasn't CitizenM (http://www.citizenmamsterdamairport.com/amsterdam-lodging-ho...) done the same for yeras? This isn't really exciting, it's just a badly-working touchscreen interface.
Can Your Camera Phone Turn You Into a Pirate?
Until the iPhone they never made phones, either.

And until the iPhone they hadn't made a marketplace for apps.
Thanks man! I really appreciate your kind words. If this helps people derive more value from their side projects, that would be awesome.
Vint Cerf's message to Australia: Internet censorship isn't effective
If they were going to force him out they would have done so after Vista/Kin. There are plenty of people inside MS who would have been suitable for the position, and there've been capable CEOs on the market in the last 4 years.
It is incredibly entertaining. The voice-actor deserves to get more work.
I'd argue the number one reason why Apple's got a bigger marketshare than Linux is that Microsoft delivered Office for one but not the other.
In theory it shouldn't matter whether my security expertise is in-house or I pay some external party to provide it, right? The usual argument for economies of scale also applies - it's beneficial to have the platform provider manage security for the customers. I think the problem is that Heroku's (and most other providers') promise of security is nice in theory, but in practice they carry no responsibility if anything goes wrong.

I agree that it's important to make sure the provider's security policy is sufficient for your needs in the first place, however.
In my entrepreneurship program at school, someone asked a speaker how he managed to avoid taking a job and sticking with starting a company. He responded "I never made a resume. If you don't have a resume, you can't get a job."

Perhaps it isn't quite that simple, but it's a nice story.
Matygo: Fast Iterations - 1.1 and 1.2 up
We started writing the script mid-December. Launched today. So about 5-6 weeks.
Speaking of things not always being what they seem, a lot of the complaints about Florian can be traced back to FUD from Groklaw, which doesn't take kindly to people who criticize IBM.
Yeah, I'm not saying high-end tech-savvy users never did anything for Apple (I bought my Macs for largely the reasons you describe), but when Apple makes commercials, they're not advertising "the most usable Unix-compatible OS in the world", they're advertising "it makes web and media and lifestyle stuff really easy".