skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with your take on meditation (theologically), but to play devil's advocate: I think the common idea of "emptying your mind" could actually be seen as focusing on something, even if that something is "nothing," or silence.

I've found that one of the best things for "unplugging" is actually Instapaper and other readers. Instead of flitting from link to link and doing shallow reading on HN or Reddit, I tend to send a few things a day to Instapaper so I can focus on them in a better context for reading. I absorb a lot more, and I am less distracted by articles while I'm trying to work, and less distracted by work while I'm trying to read! I'm very thankful for that app.
You know the rules and so do I...
Except that Groupon is a "people business", with lots of sales and support staff. This is antithetical to Google's culture. I'm not at all sure Google is going to win this battle. Will be interesting to watch.
Verizon’s First iPhone Commercial
It's not really a matter of competency - when said screw cannot be opened by any available screw driver no amount of "competency" will let you safely open it. Competent and incompetent alike are affected (unless you think manufacturing custom screw driver heads should be a requirement for competency in repairing consumer electronics).
From their homepage: "SproutRobot tells you when to plant & sends you seeds." So it's helping you to garden, not taking control away from you.

They're heirloom seeds too, rather than hybrids, so you can let some of your plants go to seed and replant next season. Again, it's not taking control away.
TestFlight: Super Simple, Over-The-Air App Beta Testing Comes To The iPhone
The Other Guys and a lesson in economics
I just signed up for the free API. It took a few minutes getting the Ruby client library working but it seems pretty cool. The 2000 free API calls per month is not as generous as, for example, the Open Calais web service's 50K free calls per day. That said I really appreciate the free use to kick the tires.
That's correct! We started work on it in early 2006 and moved to Boston/Cambridge in June 2006 to participate in the Y Combinator program (which was a lot of fun, as many have said). We had a monumentally hard time trying to get people to fund our idea. I remember having a meeting with a potential angel investor (in Boston) that said, after our full deck was done, "Well, that sounds cool, but I'll have to ask my kids to see what they think." That was pretty typical of the Boston investing scene, with regards to mobile in 2006.

It was around that time that Twitter came out (which we poo-pooed due to its lack of features). It wasn't until a few months later (and after we had run out of money and had to get real jobs) that we realized that Twitter was a much better solution for what we had wanted to achieve.

It's not a loss, though. We had a great experience and all ended up getting great jobs doing things that we love. I went on to work at Mozilla. Julia went on to work at a few startups and is now starting a pretty cool video dating site: Inlu.st, and Josh is working at Blue State Digital (he did work for the Obama campaign).
I doubt it, but maybe if they did explicitly use Groupon's data directly from their campaign. If they just look at searches and clicks then all that data is surely theirs to use.
If there is a company doing business in the marketplace and you see an opportunity to enter and compete in that market, that is entirely ethical provided you do not infringe on their intellectual property. For example, Noyce and Moore left Shockley to form Fairchild in order to pursue the semiconductor market.
This is just the beginning.

Google will offer local business bundled QR services. Imagine walking up to a restaurant window. snapping a QR photo, or google goggling, and having the menu displayed on your android, and maybe offers you a daily deal.

Google wins in mobile, and entrenches itself into the local ad space. Can Apple Do this?
Nah, I wouldn't be too sure about it. They haven't even kill Facebook or Twitter yet.
What about slapping that on their homepage or search result page?
AppHarbor (YC W11): "Azure Done Right"
I wouldn't be so quick to cede things to them. How many other areas have they entered recently and killed, especially ones that are fundamentally non-technology based?
zappos does not outsource that for a reason.
Breaking Modern Warfare 3 News: Co-Developed by Infinity Ward
Weird. Skimmed it only as this article is toxic.

I sleep on the floor. Own no furniture. Own no car. We cook a lot from scratch and are making up our own recipes. Why? Because doctors told me "people like you don't get well" and we don't agree with that sentiment. So homegrown recipes are required to effectively implement our homegrown health solution.

If you live like this article describes (and are over age 18), you do so by choice. And whose fault is that?

(Though, yes, I have canned Wordpress themes on my sites. I am trying to move towards putting up more content and coding everything by hand has been an obstacle to that. Nor do I have the money to get something custom.)
"And as location, purchase history, and timing come into play, the data is going to get big if you want to target deals well."

Data, especially at scale, is extremely powerful in this business: http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/11/why-we-invested-in-groupon-...

The one question I continue to have in a situation like this is the "bytes v. beings" approach. Self-service is very compelling and certainly the "holy grail" of local advertising, but more often than not, the onramp to Google for small business is AdWords and that's hard, really hard to understand for a small business owner. I'm not sure if the small business owner is really reading through Google's AdWords University documents and watching the YouTube videos. You're going to need people to sell to people and not just bytes on a screen.

The salesforce, in the immediate term, I feel is the largest initiative Google needs to take on. Demand will always be there, especially across their widespread network. Just get the best merchants (note: quality of the deal is still important in large markets like NYC) and perfect the sales process.
My sense is that even before AKS, most researchers believed primality was in P. This was based mainly on poly-time probablistic algorithms developed in the 80's.
The presenter at the meet up last night watches projects on Github as "a poor man's bookmark." Time for Github to implement other lists.
Jersey Shore Season 3 Episode 4
Jersey Shore Season 3 Episode 4 : Jersey Shore Season 3 Episode 4, entitled "Free Snooki" aired on January 20, 2011. Maybe you can get the Jersey Shore Online Season 3 Ep 4 from the official website, or even have been watching the Jersey Shore Season 3 Episode 4 is on Thursday on MTV.
COBOL is dead. This is just another press release from Micro Focus, a legacy/COBOL vendor. If you're fooled by this, you're not thinking critically.
Beeswax is an information management system inspired by Lotus Agenda
Remember the Milk is awesome - just wanted to throw that out there
I assumed it was checking my browser for exploits and downloading sensitive files from my machine.
Stef's Free Online Smalltalk Books
Unfortunately I've never had any formal training in art (either through technique or through study) - and it wasn't until after college that I realized that this was a passion of mine - so it's been pretty slow going. I've been taking a number of classes and practicing on my own, starting to become more familiar with oil painting and generally trying to improve my technique and composition.

However where my real passion lies is in art history. Specifically I've been spending a considerable amount of time studying, researching, and collecting Ukiyo-e (Edo-era Japanese woodblock prints). It's an incredible art form and to study it is to study the complete culture of Japan in the 17th to 19th century. I'm lucky as I live less than a mile away from the Harvard art library and have a friend that works as a librarian there - so I end up spending a lot of time checking out research material, studying, and learning. (For example, right now I'm reading a book on Kabuki theater and its relevance within the context of Ukiyo-e.)

I've started to write a little bit about the art form (as my time allows, which is kind of challenging) here:
http://ukiyoe.tumblr.com/

I also run the Ukiyo-e sub-Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/ukiyoe/

I hope to do more research and writing in this area during the upcoming months, time permitting of course!
I also wrote one like 3/4 years ago, I primarily wanted to make it easy to just paste an existing html page into it

http://pastebin.me/

(a random recent paste)
http://pastebin.me/23aaa0774910cc347fc9c7c300bda31d
Fair enough, I haven't tried the app--I don't own a smartphone at the moment.

BTW, might I ask when Kongregate is planning to support html5 games? :-)
You have seen Android pre-iPhone, right? At that time it was a Blackberry ripoff.

http://news.cnet.com/2300-1037_3-6230132.html
You can bring up a command line with just the keyboard, even in Windows. The lock would be a problem.
I used to work for a competitor of Olark's and I can confirm this happens all the time. What's funny is that there are two types of companies:

1) Trusts their well-paid chat operators and allows them to type freely.

2) Force-feeds their operators 'canned responses' (as are used in email support) and doesn't encourage them to move off script.

#2 is always what marketing departments want, but it was always worse for the customer. The operator's response was too quick (a paragraph of text hastily selected from a recommended response), there were no misspellings, and they used PR speak that normal humans don't use. Often people would respond, "are you a person?" and some small group would ask questions specifically designed to trip up a bot.

My advice is to allow the people talking to your customer to use a modest amount of slang (a smiley or an occasional lol is fine if the customer is in a happy mood) - let them make a few misspellings - and encourage them to really read the response and even empathize with a customer. Marketing departments hate this idea, but in the end the feeling of a connection to another human is worth the risk of offending a grammar nazi.
Could someone elaborate on what's happening towards the end of that video, when the cell seems to crumple?
Google has never banned advertisers they compete with. You'll see ads for Bing, Yahoo etc. in Google Search all the time.
Thanks for the link and Thanks to tptacek for creating such a list. I had a couple of books on there. Created a wish list for the rest of them!
I completely agree. I do most of my running on my own, early in the morning and it is a great time to get ready for the day just noticing the world, your body, waking up, and accepting those things and moving on. I also try to do sitting meditation before (usually out of bed, meditate, warm up, run), but if I have to choose I run before meditate and call it even.
Athena Scrollbars: Why people love them
you can save two minutes by typing this:
javascript:foo=setTimeout; setTimeout = function(x,y){ foo(x,2); }
Also check out "The Way of the Warrior" classes on meditation for different methods. You don't always have to focus on the breath or try to empty your mind.
Yep, "legacy" PR based on controlling the message is just fundamentally flawed. It is time for candor and honesty.
Canon Cat and SwyftCard Documents
What NYT seems to want you to think: Test taking is the best way to learn. Forget in depth studying techniques or figuring out how you yourself learn.

I had the opposite reaction. I figured the writer had been so indoctrinated into the view that "teaching to the test" was evil, bad, and wrong, that when a positive result popped related to testing, just that one point alone became the "news" hook of the story.

Hmm, in looking at her list of past articles, it appears the author mostly covers the medical beat. Perhaps it's a case of a "helpful" editor spicing up the story with a more controversial headline.
Google has plenty of salespeople as is and has bought plenty of companies with a large number of salespeople (Doubleclick/Admob). They were also willing to take on Groupon's thousands of salespeople with the $6B offer.
Goopun :p
Bug is a simple todo-tracking system for the unix commandline
Every time I see the original picture my heart skips a beat.

I worked with Bob Wallace before he worked at Microsoft. In his too-short life, Bob did a lot of amazing things. In addition to his graduate work at the University of Washington, he was the first editor of the Northwest Computer Club's newsletter.

He was the publications manager for Seattle's Retail Computer Store (ca 1978). He conceived of the portable computer and actually built one using a motherboard and video card from The Digital Group. When asked to write some accounting software in Altair Basic, he refused. And then went on to write a preprocessor that let him use long variable names and better control structures. And wrote the accounting software in that, instead.

Bob worked on Microsoft's first Pascal compiler (I wasn't there and have no idea what else he did).

After leaving Microsoft he founded QuickSoft, invented the concept of shareware, and made a comfortable living off of contributions from users of his text editor / word processor.
Another thought on this video:

Both cons lisp and conc lisp share the same physical structure: a pair of words. The difference between them is the convention of how this is used.

cons lisp assumes pairs are typically head, rest, and so the natural form of most functions is linear recursion: an expression involving some function of head and a single recursive call on rest with a base case handling the empty list.

conc lisp instead assumes pairs are typically left, right and so the natural form of most functions is binary recursion: an expression that is a function of recursive calls on both left and right with a similar base case.

Which prompts some thoughts: are there optimizations similar to constant space tail calls for binary recursion? What about n-way recursion? What would a lisp built of n-tuples (perhaps cache line sized) look like?
Not an academic project, but the idea came out of thinking of what I could do with the canvas element. Originally a CAS was a joke :)

Goals - when it's finished I'm hoping for the following features:
- Showing points for intercepts, maxima, and minima.
- Calculating derivatives and integrals.
- Plotting inequalities and implicit equations.
- Solving differential equations (it would be great if it was with CAS, but that would be very difficult)

Other ideas include:
- Plotting in 3D
- Visualisation of discrete data - maybe.

I think it will be useful for places like schools where it's difficult to install software.

Thanks for asking.
Great site -- my G1 just sold on your site. The selling process was very easy. I am impressed. Hope the sells continue for you.
> My concern is that compared to referrer-leaking of terms -- a standard way to inform webmasters, the same for all search engines -- using the Google Webmaster Tools encourages webmasters to develop non-portable Google-specific skills. This cements the leader's position even further.

What's the point of looking at search engine terms except to optimize for them in some way? The optimization is going to be based on a search engine algorithm, and with Google being the most common search engine that's the one most people are going to optimize for.

That was my point: if you're trying to compete in search and analytics, it's not in a vacuum; it's in the context of a specific company's search algorithm. It only makes sense to tweak your performance by referring to that company's website, e.g. Google Webmaster Tools.
So like wuph?
QR Codes with Google Chart
I agree with Chris here - I wince a little bit every time I see a candidate start off on the whiteboard with a dollar sign.

However, this article emphasis on Javascript at the expense of the other technologies and soft skills that make a truly excellent front-end engineer - HTML/CSS, solid understanding of SEO, Accessibility (WCAG/508/WAI-ARIA), etc.

I've interviewed plenty of front-end engineers who breezed through a similar no-framework javascript question, but fell to pieces when I had them hand-code a three-column, fixed width, centered layout in HTML/CSS (nav/content/sidebar) with the stipulation that the content column appear first in the HTML source.

These candidates also tend not to know:

- What rel="nofollow" means
- What WAI-ARIA is.
- What browsers were affected by and how to trigger Quirks Mode.
- The difference between PNG-8 and PNG-24

Front-end engineering is a holistic discipline that demands a wide array of skills across a big chunk of the spectrum between back-end developer and visual designer.
Overemphasizing Javascript skills at the expense of others is a dangerous precedent.

EDIT: Fixed formatting.
.. there may be more important things to worry about when that happens.
just like they try to beat youtube with google video .... or Facebook with okkut..(not sure how they write it ...) ... if they cannot buy it they create a clone...so far they fail...
Fe is a small and easy to use folding editor.
My thoughts, for 2 minutes:

- Alright, calm down

- What if my monitor goes into power saving mode?

- It's only 2 minutes, I'm sure power save is set for longer than 2 minutes.

- I wonder what the default setting for power saving is in Windows 7.

- Concentrate!

- (looking at the horizon on the right below the clouds) I wonder what it would be like to be a world traveler by way of boat.

- Hey, what are those birds doing there?

- Try to remember your thoughts to post on HN after the 2 minutes is up.

- Look at that swell. I wonder how that works, exactly.

- (distracting noise in background) Feeling tense again!

- I think the wife and kid are watching me take this seriously, and have probably lost a sliver of respect for me.

- (mind drifts into nothing for a bit)

- Well, that was calming. I like looking at the horizon.

- I wonder what I get for beating this.
Mozilla Blocks Official Skype Toolbar Add-on for Firefox
"Goopon" somehow just didn't feel right.
Solution to the puzzle; took about 3 to code minutes after I found the thumbnails for the slideshow.

https://gist.github.com/789200
Remove all your information, hide your wall, set your email preferences to only receive event information, figure out how to prevent the insidious "Like" button across the web from tracking you. There ya go.

When you are creating an event, use one of the hundreds of other websites for this purpose. eVite comes to mind.
Payment Gateway suggestions
Payment Gateway suggestions for sending out Mass Payments(other than Paypal) in the US
Google Zeitgeist 2010: Year in Review (Video)
Pretty much, yeah! When that episode of The Office aired we all emailed each other - it was pretty hilarious. Of course ours was a bit more pragmatic, it would only send to the medium that would best get in contact with you - and you could use it to bulk send messages to your friends. A tool like that doesn't really need to exist in this day-and-age as everyone always has their cell phone and modern cell phones are super-capable.

For reference, the clip from The Office:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytc9-wGCHW0
Wouldn't that be the same restaurant window that already has a menu mounted on it?
I keep hearing this phrase a lot but I'm not really sure I understand what it means. What does 'Social search' encompass? Searching for people by their attributes?
As a fan of Heroku and Git I love seeing this and other efforts to duplicate their ease of deployment and process for .NET developers.

However, I question whether there is enough of a market for these services to be truly successful. There are plenty of .NET developers using Git - but for the most part many of them are just now getting to Subversion - or even worse going with TFS (Microsoft's mess of a SCM). MS developers are also traditionally inside medium to large companies - the majority of which want their applications hosted in their own data centers. MS might be able to convince them to use Azure - but a small startup is going to have one helluva time convincing them to host their LOB app with them.
Obviously military, industrial, surveillance, security, shopper tracking in stores, and cashier tracking for cash businesses, would all be possible uses. Hook it up to a MakerBot and you can use it to disassemble things as well as assemble them.
Ellsberg: With Wikileaks, Google, Facebook must take a stand
Classic Google. First they try to buy Yelp.com and that fails, so they build Google Places (TBD if that turns out to be more successful). Now they tried to buy Groupon and failed and now they're potentially creating a clone of that instead. I guess these are classic examples of Build vs Buy.
Any chance at all of combining data from this and Mapnificent? I notice this has a commute time option, but it's walk or drive only.
I have been maintaining a steady meditation practice for several months. It is something I have become more and more attached to as I really focus on taking the time to have stillness. A good 20 minutes of simple quietude and deep breathing twice a day definitely helps me be more productive and more focused. The hardest thing is not thinking about all the things you have to do after this, and really just be still.

A practical and pragmatic source on meditation is Lawrence LeShan's "How to Meditate". I found it to be an informative read and provide a lot of places to both start and expand a meditation practice.

From time to time I will write about interesting meditation experiences or just ways of becoming more disciplined in my practice. http://www.putafonit.com if anyone is interested.

Seeing this post made my day, glad to see some love for good old peace and quiet in our busy lives.

Robert
That would actually be a great April Fools' Day joke for Google, to change a few obscure indexes, especially one related to April Fools'.
I somehow doubt that Google offers is a very high level decision where the space has been thoroughly analysed by many people. What I mean is, google offers probably looks the way it does as a result of an agile process handled by engineers, this is the corporate equivalent of an MVP, and it's like this because it's easy, not because it's good.
A div with an id of 'slideshow' contains five images, the first of which is shown and the others are hidden using a display style of none. Using Javascript, create a simple slideshow that cycles through the images, displaying each image for three seconds at a time, looping back to the first image when the end is reached. You cannot use jQuery or any other library.

Instead of asking something easy, with a completely unrealistic caveat that makes it tricky for people who think that the "library" was actually a positive invention, why not ask something not easy.

It sounds like you're looking for people who spend their time writing garbage like

while(node = node.parentNode){
if(node.className.match(/foo/)) {
break;
}
}

because `node.closest('.foo')` isn't hardcore enough. That sounds like a crap engineer to me.
Jerry Yang, Steve Ballmer.
Studies show simple meditation (focus on nothing, or one thing - doesn't really matter - just train your mind on a single, simple thing) for something like just a minute or two a day in the morning can have an almost immediate and lasting (if you keep it up) effect on your ability to concentrate.

Concentration is a skill that requires practice, like anything else.
> I invite you to pay attention to anything -- the sight of this text, the sensation of breathing, the feeling of your body resting against your chair -- for a mere sixty seconds without getting distracted by discursive thought.

That's actually quite simple. Mushrooms, LSD, or any number of other psychedelics should do the job. For the more industrious, meditation will do it too.