skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The elephant in the corner of this argument is the fact that the greediest, most rapacious investment banker still pays for more roads, schools and hospitals in a year than the most earnest hippie will in their whole working lives.
well, haskell itself may not be mainstream, but the author himself mentions mainstream languages like c# borrowing features from it. J, on the other hand, would be the sort of language I expected the author to be talking about - built around paradigm that has not worked its way into mainstream languages yet, but which nevertheless contains useful ways to think about and attack real problems.
I love their web browser, except for the bookmarks. If bookmarks were good, I'd use Opera all the time (I tend to use Opera for Facebook and GMail, and Firefox for the rest).
Yep, you can tweak the settings pretty much any way you like. One tap sharing on Twitter and Facebook also.
There are science sections in quora as well, but people tend to post too many general/popsci/naive questions.
I was not disagreeing that fiber is important, only pointing out that even when eliminating any other considerations the difference in quantity is enough to account for the trend.
I found the article pretty good. It states clearly the issue:

Google need to be clear to their employees what the definition of success in social and they should define it based on their strengths rather than the competition's product.

I believe Google is very close to getting there: they need to deliver a great ChromeOS experience and they improve their apps.

I wait impatiently to give Google 2 photo-sharing customers who won't make it to facebook: my parents.
Release early, release often. The best strategy for a new product.
How to Create Music on the Computer
FWIW, in the multiple times I've taken these buses between Boston <-> NYC, the wi-fi on Bolt Bus seems a lot more reliable than Megabus.
> I guess I was specifically referring to car engines which, aside from the Wankel, are the same basic idea

Well, there have been a few commercially available cars driven by rotary engines (which are pistons being turned by a crankshaft, rather than turning a crankshaft) and cars driven by steam engines, but you're right that at the moment, only Otto-cylinder, Diesel, Atkinson, and Otto Wankel engines are on the market for cars, and all of these except for the Wankel are built around pistons turning a crankshaft.

But if you're talking about innovations on the level of more-efficient two-stroke engines, rather than totally new engine designs, I think you can find a lot of those that have made it to mass production in the last few decades. Atkinson-electric hybrids might be the biggest one, but there's electronic ignition control, gasoline direct injection, electronic fuel injection, coaxial springs to prevent valve dwell, continuous-jerk cams, hydraulic tappets, variable valve timing, etc.

That list certainly supports your contention that manufacturers are too conservative, though.

(I don't really know much about this stuff, so let me know if I'm making some kind of goofy mistake.)

It seems to me that in order to make manufacturers less conservative, we need to have more of them. Widespread CAD and simulation facilities and automated fabrication that lowers the cost of producing prototypes could make a big difference.

BTW, the SyTech is another experimental non-crankshaft design: http://www.autospeed.com/cms/A_0948/article.html
IIRC correctly, Greyhound has/had passes for a certain duration that allowed you to travel any place, any number of times within that time period.
It's only a blunder if it doesn't work. And that depends not on the bonus but whether there's a clear top-down plan for a well-defined social product. Bottom-up development, where each team figures out whether/how to integrate into +1... that will probably amount to nothing revolutionary. If social "features" are just spread like jam around all of Google's offerings, the result will be a sticky mess that nobody wants to touch.

But Google has a good fall-back position with +1, since the worst case scenario is that it simply evolves into a global digg/reddit-style thumb's up signal for the relevancy of a search result (which alone would be a great result). Beyond that, success in "social" will depend on having a well-defined product that's good enough to sell itself, so I basically agree with the article.
Huh, interesting that people here don't seem to be getting this article.

Every organization has a culture, and every culture has blind spots: things that it doesn't value and is not good at. Because it doesn't value them, it doesn't bring in people who are good at them. Because it doesn't have people who know about them to remind everybody else about them, it continues not to value them.

The only way out of this is for senior management to realize that their beliefs about how to build a company -- the very foundation of their success to this point -- are now what is limiting them.

In this case, Google has gone massively overboard on hiring engineers, and has neglected designers, UX experts, human factors experts, people who understand the "soft side" of computing. What they need to do is to bring a bunch of such people in and give them power. But their whole hiring process is built around finding the very best engineers; they have no process for hiring "soft side" experts. Worse, they have nobody who even knows how to evaluate such people.

Now if Page realized all this, he could do something about it. But to realize it he has to see the limitations in his existing beliefs about who he wants working at Google, about what skills are important. He has to realize he needs people unlike himself. And he has to make a fundamental change in his vision of what kind of company Google is and how it can be most successful. It is very rare to see a CEO with the level of self-reflection to be able to make changes like that.
Tuition was probably also around $100 back then. My how we've 'progressed'.
San Francisco hopes tech success isn't Bubble 2.0
It's not a trick. It requires critical thinking skills, and that a student internalizes concepts like percentages, decimals and fractions.
How is that the elephant in the room? Does that mean they should pay less in taxes? How much less?
Authors at Google: Eric Ries "The Lean Startup" (video)
How much would you pay for 1?
...just realized I left out the important part: it searches for something within a month after the date you gave it.
How do you know it was an "accident?" He wants the entire company to think about integrating social into their products. He wants people to be thinking about how to accomplish this. Android, Chrome, Ads, Docs, etc.

By the end of 2011, a lot of "social" is going to appear in places you didn't expect.
I talked to a fellow CS major Thursday evening and he said he hated all the math involved with the CS program, and that he' failed Pre-Calculus & Trigonometry I three times. This came out after he was complaining about his discrete computational structures class being "nothing but proofs".

If you don't like the math, why get a CS degree? Get a physical science degree and learn how to code on your own time.
I would replace the inventory feature with an age feature, because I think for most people tracking how many weeks/months ago you bought the tea is more important than how many cups you have left.

Also, while I conceptually like the features the UI isn't especially aesthetically pleasing. I would also recommend adding the preferred units to a preferences page and eliminating that from the brew page.
Mastering the Art of Application Development by Obie Fernandez
Camelot episode 3
camelot episode 3 The story is the tragic death of King Uther Pendragon, when he spoke of his own daughter, Morgan,
I'm actually surprised Google is trying to compete with Facebook. Their whole premise is they develop products outside the realm of chasing someone else's product or service. This is what separates them from every other company out there.

To me, this decision is WAY too late, as the article points out. You can't win the game when you haven't even been on the field for the majority of the match. This is going to be a HUGE blunder and cost them dearly. Dropping a ton of cash and effort into chasing a dead horse is going to come back and haunt them. I give Page about 2 years tops before they pull the plug on him.
Not one city marked in Russia?
'This was my thought as well. By "B student" does he mean "students who got B's" or does he mean "students of mediocre intellect and industry"? Those are different sets of people entirely.'

"Assume good faith." The piece makes more sense as the latter, and it certainly doesn't break the argument. I don't see any good reason to impute the first one to Adams. (Not that you did.)

It's obvious that it's not easy to separate who is who, but it's equally obvious that the B crew does exist.
Shit like this makes me wish HN had downvotes for articles.
While we're guessing why fb did this, it certainly looks like something that govt bodies which might need to run such infrastructure can borrow. If fb is, for example, shooting for the "national id" programme as I read somewhere, who'd you expect a govt to pick? - a company whose infrastructure cannot be touched or certified for suitability and security or one whose arch is laid bare like so? Of course, the software is part of the architecture, but would the "open graph" suffice?

(ok, 'nuff wild speculation for the day!)
It seems that I'm one of the only people here who thinks the author of the article is on to something substantial. Here's why.

First of all, wanting to get into social is accepting to play second fiddle to Facebook - google is not a leader but a follower in this game. They're known for innovating and this seems to be at odds with that.

Second, as the author points out, Google is not very good when it comes to people and how they work play and interact. This is what social is all about, and it's very hard to put into an algorithm which is the Google way of doing things.

Third, I agree that making all bonuses dependant on the success of their social endeavours is a huge mistake. What happens to the really good algorithmic search people at Google? Do they bust their ass of doing what they do best, or do they try to implement some kind of social search that they know nothing about because that's what their bonus depends on. What will happen to my search results because of this? Yes, it will get worse, and yes it will undermine Googles core product. What Larry has done is basically told everyone that they should start working on something Google is historically not very good at and not worry about their core business. Huge mistake.

Fourth, this shows a poor understanding of the dynamics of incentives, which is something that a CEO of a company as large as Google should be very good at. Paying everyone a bonus based on how one division performs is at best disillusioning to the people who don't work in that division and have absolutely no control over their bonus. It doesn't matter how hard a division works if it doesn't have anything to do with social. What will this do to their morale? At best they'll just hum along, knowing there's not much they can do, at worst they'll start cannibalising their product to try and make it social.
Call it a personal preference, but I'm not terribly impressed by asking for donations on a page loaded with Amazon affiliate links for fairly high-dollar items. I say this as someone who runs my own hobby site paid for entirely by affiliate links to Amazon and eBay.

An example of why I think it detracts from the article: You link to Monoprice.com for an XLR cable (good!) and then immediately link to a more expensive cable on Amazon. Why? Not because it's a better choice of cable, but because with any luck, someone will click through and you'll earn some cash. If you're going to link to a $13 mic cable for the opportunity to make money rather than just link to the $6 equivalent, what's to say half the links on the page are even genuinely good choices, or if you're linking to them because you'd potentially make an extra buck or two.

I'm not crapping on you loading up a blog post with affiliate links - I know that even before I signed up to eBay and Amazon affiliate programs, I often linked to them when telling people where to buy stuff, and now the affiliate programs simply paid me for doing what I always did. But doing that -and- asking for extra money if you found this post useful (presumably, finding it useful meant you bought equipment because of the post)? That changes the dynamic for me.

Addendum: I'd appreciate it if when you downvote me, you let me know what it is about my post that you didn't like or agree with.
I had an air-cooled Vanagon for a while. It was 2½ tons, due to aftermarket camper modifications, and could manage a bit over 60mph on its 70-horsepower 2-liter air-cooled engine, despite having the aerodynamics of a brick. Something with half the frontal surface area or half the drag coefficient, such as basically any modern vehicle, could manage quite well with half that horsepower.

I think the average US car weighed a lot more in the 1960s than in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. Maybe widespread SUV use is pushing that average back up.

Did the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deux_Chevaux really have only two horsepower?
I'm curious; do you have experience (or know of someone who does) of learning Emacs by using it like Notepad and slowly learning the keyboard shortcuts by looking up things in menus? I'm skeptical that this approach would work; I think there are a lot of basic (non-obvious) things specific to Emacs that you need to know to use it well. If you just use it like Notepad and lookup shortcuts for copying/pasting, then I predict that you would just end up using it like Notepad.
I've live in South Africa my entire life, but have yet to encounter a "roving gang of looters". Citation?

My wife was born in South Africa and always wanted to go back (her family left when she was a baby), so when an opportunity came to make a sales trip there she jumped at the chance. This was perhaps 5 years ago. One evening in Johannesburg she and a Brit were driving back from dinner when, stopped at a traffic light, they saw gunmen step up to a car ahead of them, one on each side, and force the passengers out with their hands behind their heads. IIRC, it was a one-way street. Luckily for my wife and the Brit, they were the last car in the queue and were able to make a u-turn and zoom out of there.

Was that a "roving gang of looters"? I don't know, but they exemplify Alex's point.
Amb in JavaScript
Because if someone is contributing more than me in an absolute sense, and that money is getting spent on things that benefit me, why should I care what percentage of his or her income that is? It's just envy.
When I heard that Eric Schmidt was stepping down I couldn't help but be reminded of the "free ice cream" video from a few months earlier (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zbg8IOfdbA0). I wonder if that video hit a nerve. It should have, because this is the way a lot of people are perceiving Google these days. And I think that perception is primarily the reason Google hasn't been very successful in their social offerings.
I have the same issue, but some of those huge T-Shirts can be really comfortable during a hot summer day, if the cloth is thin enough.
Drug dealing, especially in the inner city. You could find most of the skills he talks about learned by dealing drugs. You want to learn things like Learn Persuasion, Attract Luck, Find the Action, Combine Skills, Fail Forward, then look at drug dealing.

The only skill that doesn't strongly apply is Write Simply, although it does to an extreme -- in the sense that the less you have written down the better off you are.
Not "borrowing" exactly, Simon Peyton-Jones is a full-time employee of Microsoft Research.

And for J, that's an APL derivative isn't it? APL was a mainstream language once, still used a lot in banking, particularly in fixed income.
I agree the author is onto something substantial.

Google is a bunch of great add-ons without a message board.

Facebook is a great message board with mediocre add-ons.

Google needs a message board.
Right, these days it's "Hip".
The day OLED becomes cheap to produce and sell, and haptic feedback from flat touch-screen surfaces becomes natural and not awkward.
(S)he also benefits vastly more (in an "absolute" sense) from the roads, police protection, defense expenditures, government's role in financial stability, and many other significant government expenditures. Look at it this way: the "bottom 10%" don't particularly care if Canada invades and forcibly takes all of Donald Trump's real estate (nor, not to put too fine a point on it, do the "bottom 10%" care when there's a revolution elsewhere in the world and American-corporation-owned property gets appropriated).
If you have an income of Euro 20,000 per year, paying 40% taxes will have a significant impact on your standard of living. If you have an income of Euro 20,000,000 per year, paying 40% taxes will have no significant impact on your standard of living.
Canada hasn't invaded for over 100 years.

Meanwhile, Trump pays for things that are used every day.
The engine used in the original VW Beetle was about 40 HP (started out even less, and later models were 60 HP, but for many years it was 40). I have heard that it only takes about 18 HP to overcome air resistance at highway speeds for a small car.

Also, it's important to note the reason for the big discrepancy between the "inflated" horsepower ratings modern cars have vs. the lower HP in older classic cars: power is RPM * torque, and gas engines are rated in peak horsepower. To reach the advertised peak horsepower of modern engines, you have to be fairly high RPM (5K to 6K) whereas an older, lower horsepower rated engine might start to drop off its power curve after 4K. But at lower RPM the torques may be similar, or even higher for some older engines (the VW engine in particular with its Boxer configuration was optimized to have good torque for its size). What this means is that unless you are driving full throttle all the time at high RPM, you're not necessarily pushing all 100+ horsepower or whatever that your modern engine is capable of in theory, and so conversely an engine with smaller max horsepower is not as much worse as you'd think it would be.
I don't think that's necessarily true - if it were not for government services, Jo(e) Billionaire could hire a private security force - but most people rely on the police. JB could travel by helicopter - most people rely on roads. Etc etc.
And often step 1 is a valuable learning experience, as well, both long-term and also for the immediate needs of the project at hand.

But, sadly for the OP, the very name "debt" clearly indicates there is no escaping step 3.
I was expecting something much better for 40 points and the front page.
Thanks man. I've been sitting on aspen/simplates for years, and I think its time may have arrived.
It's very analogous to Microsoft's situation earlier this decade: the hiring process, power structure, and rewards have been optimized for years around a certain kind of person with certain skills. Now, other people with different skills are just as important -- but the people in power have blind spots about what will motivate or attract that kind of person, or make them effective once they're there.
I have a sneaking suspicion they voted for the Liberal Democrats because of the Lib Dems' promise to break up Labour's ID card, database state and DEA missteps - and instead, they just jumped into bed with the Tories.

So, it's a big case of collective cognitive dissonance and more than a little dose of healthy skepticism at the idea that a British bank would actually want to offer a grant, and not a loan - because that goes against their usual track record.
Slow, but amazing at the same time. I love thinking about things like this.

I remember someone calling my old BBS, back in the early 90s, with a TDD to see what would happen. That explained why I had been seeing 300bps callers when I was used to seeing 1200bps-2400bps.

I recall one holiday starting the download of a picture of a bear. I then went and had Thanksgiving dinner with my family for about two hours. I arrived home just in time for the picture to finish downloading. :P
Well if you have an income of GBP 10,000/year then you pay no income tax whatsoever, and get exactly the same government services as a millionaire. In fact you get more since you get free dental and the millionaire doesn't! And probably housing benefit, child benefits, etc etc. Why should you care what percentage that millionaire pays?
This is cool, but I don't really get it. I have an Ubuntu server in Fremont, CA, so I clicked the link expecting to get a chance to enter its IP. It took me straight through to the map though, apparently having marked the location I'm browsing from.

Am I supposed to be browsing from my server?
Interesting, but far from being accurate. I use Ubuntu on about 5 servers, but none of them is within 200km of where I am right now.
> [Google is] known for innovating and this seems to be at odds with that.

What kind of innovation has Google done?

They've done "better" successfully a couple of times, but they've rarely done new.
> whether or not their marketing is dishonest or hypocritical

I'm far too jaded for that one. :-) But I can see how it would irk people.
Just to put the lid on the kettle here, WIFI works on about 1/10 Megabus trips.
Much easier to write the article, yes (of course) but why make the point? It's utterly irrelevant to whether the author has a valid criticism or not.
“Today, Republicans first want to shut down the Internet, then they want to shut down the government,’’ said US Representative Edward J. Markey, a Malden Democrat...

“We look forward to forever prohibiting the overreach of the Federal Communications Commission,’’ Blackburn said.
Even if you discount the batteries entirely, 1000 lbs seems a bit high for the weight of an engine (or even engine and transmission). I suppose maybe a big block V8 with a very strong Ford pickup transmission could weight that much; but it would be more fair to use a figure for the weight of an I4 engine with front wheel drive transaxle, which would probably closer to 600 lbs than 1000.
"This application shows Ubuntu logo over each city where Ubuntu Server is used. Data is collected through volunteers visiting this application and agreeing to mark their city"
This is what happens when your approach to system design revolves around whacking out the latest bugs with quick fixes rather than creating something logical and consistent. How many of these loopholes were created in order to stimulate a particular activity, or to close another specific loophole? At no point have lawmakers ever sat down to completely plan out the tax code, carefully considering the consequences of various interactions between laws, and this is the result.
I played it a 2x speed, which is available if your using HTML5 video over flash.
Perhaps. But in that case it's a much smaller market than I imagined. Also relevant is that ITA raised $100M in 2006, so their $700M exit is hardly a home run by VC standards. It doesn't seem to match the astonishingly strong technical and market position you (convincingly) describe.

http://www.itasoftware.com/news-events/press-release.html?id.... Note that the round included Sequoia who are known for caring only about big markets.
If there wasn't mandated education there would be far less efficient workers for the rich for their businesses. Which would mean their output would suffer.

Not having good public transportation infrastructure would mean there would be a higher cost of freight within a country thus cutting into profits or driving prices up.

In my eyes, the rich benefit far more from a society's systems than the poor do and thus should be paying more into making it better.
> High speed rail has the potential to increase the distance that can be covered in a 60-90 minute commute.

Yes, but at what cost?

And then there's that pesky "and how many people will benefit?" problem.