skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the time since then, I've released a complete hotel front desk system and several lock forensics tools; in fact, it's quite possible that you've stayed in a hotel powered by my company's products. I've also released an open source library for talking to the Emotiv Epoc headset, libraries for dealing with the Belkin Network USB Hub, and several security tools.

As for EveInject, it had some bugs, but worked beautifully -- in fact, people are shipping code based on it to this day.

If you want to see a dozen failed projects of mine, I can show them to you. I can also show you many successful ones.
Google and the Customer Service Myth
I think this deserves its own discussion as it isn't _directly_ related to the Google reorg.

As far as I can tell Google never received any complaints on their _customer service_ until the release of the Nexus One. It seems like tech journalists everywhere immediately pounced on Google's poor customer service for the device, despite the hardware being produced by HTC and the network being provided by T-Mobile. Since then, people seem to have latched onto the zeitgeist and extended the label to Google Apps, Gmail, and even core monetary products like AdWords/AdSense which I would argue do have sufficient customer support.

I don't fully understand why we, the generally technocratic crowd on HN, are doing this. Google, like every company, has finite resources, so the more they focus on customer support, the less focused they become on polishing & innovating. They have a pattern of taking an everyday product (like an email client) and making it so commonsense/easy-to-use that it no longer needs customer support. I assume this is why Gmail was in beta for so long. It was simply a disclaimer slapped on a fully-developed product that there wasn't going to be reps standing by to take your calls. It's almost as if they're betting that things like a word processor are becoming so quotidian that the product won't need to be supported; a bet I would not take them up on.

I almost expect these sort of criticisms when I'm reading something like _Wired_, but I would think HN would have different priorities when it comes to customer service. Think about the last time you downloaded a piece of software; did you chose to download the stable version, the beta, or _the nightlies_? In other words, when given the choice would you choose a technically superior product or one that is better supported?
PROTIP : Load Javascript into your pages asynchronously
Yay, congrats guys!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
From the "Dear John" letters of people departing Google (Dennis Crowley for example) it seems like in the absence of a large political institution, the major political currency at Google is your ability to attract developers.

Given that, it seems like what a manager can provide a group of developers and designers is "workforce maintenance". That is, they will attend to the needs of the team, make sure people don't leave, and make sure they attract more people when they need them.

In other words, HR. The central HR department at Google has no reason to really care about the success of your unit over another, so your manager becomes the person who takes responsibility for the human resources of the unit.

This frees the engineers/designers to be able to focus on creating a great product. And as a side benefit, they happier and their jobs are easier because the manager is doing what it takes to keep them in the unit.
What is wrong with Google Apps?
$50 per user per year with SLA

http://www.google.com/apps/
To me the most disturbing thing as described in the article is that despite an emphasis on rote learning, they can't even teach how to read.

To me it seems that reading and 'thinking' are such fundamental skills in IT that they would just be assumed elsewhere... but an educational system that fails to teach reading is really enormously broken.

That said, I have actually worked with two lots of people in Bangalore. One lot got flown out to my country, and they were nice if a little lazy. On the other hand, they put up with some shit that the 'white natives' wouldn't have, like ridiculously long compile times because some idiot (most likely a well educated white person) had thrown the kitchen sink at their ant script. I wouldn't have put up with a 30 minute build, I'd have lost my nut. They were at least as smart as the 'white natives', they could converse, their English was at least as good (and better in some cases) than the native English speakers.

However, they said that in Bangalore working for companies is very stratified. Everyone wants to work at the large American companies (e.g. IBM) so they are the top tier and get to pick the best candidates, and then you get this trickle down effect, till you get to relatively small non-US foreign companies (like us). From the article, it seems there are even lower tiers, e.g. presumably the good candidates don't apply to the smaller Indian companies.

Funnily enough, later on I got the opportunity to work with some guys in Bangalore who were employed by IBM, and they were completely, atrociously bad. The only time I've seen worse is deliberate sabotage. These guys got on the excuse merry-go-round and never got off, and would keep recycling excuses why they hadn't done any work, even though you'd think "didn't we already deal with this the previous two times it came up?". These guys did nothing.

Naturally, I cheated. :D I took a page out of the managers handbook, declared 'victory' and ended the programming phase. Now we were into the testing/bugfix phase. My 'white native†' colleagues who had also been frustrated by lack of progress in Bangalore were puzzled by this. They said how can it go into testing, they haven't done anything? So I said "run the tests and if you find any problems, fix them" so they said "but there's nothing to run!" and I said "well, that is the first problem to fix then isn't it?". And suddenly the lightbulb went on and they 'got it'. We actually made up all the lost time and then some.

So I'm not particularly impressed with these so called 'top tier' candidates either.

†Not necessarily white or 'native', but naturalised citizens of an English speaking country
I do the same, but s/Rdio/Mog. So much easier to simply pay for access to everything than to figure out what music I want to own.

In the past year or two I have done a complete 180 on my thinking about this.
My experience is that CS-educated programmers will often be more humble and ready to admit that they might not know all there is about a subject, and self-taught programmers more certain that they know the one way to solve a certain problem.

Of course, this might just be the people I've met, but based on personal experience, I think university teaches you that you're _not_ the smartest one in the world, that there are lots of things you don't know, and that things are usually not as simple as they seem.

That said, a lot of the self-taught programmers I know get more humble as the years go by. And of course, all the great CS-educated programmers I know learnt programming in their spare time, and got the theoretical and low-level background at uni.
Longer term you'd hope for another order of magnitude reduction in launch costs. If SpaceX can make a fully reusable Falcon 9 as Elon Musk has said he really wants to:

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2009/01/musk-ambition-spacex-...

then we can start looking at paying ten times less.
I guess I took those for granted. :)
Congrats, Brian and the kiip team!
Minimize round-trip times - Google
In what way do you mean industry is becoming more like academia as product cycles become shorter. I (a student in academia) find my superiors amazed by the speed of the try it fast and in the wild product development of software - compared to long cycles for academic publication for instance?
Last 3 years of my higher education has been an emphasis on "what"s and not "how"s. But a college where every other week there's a test stacked up for the 6 subjects, syllabi is mixed up the way it should not be, even the last semester has two useless subjects lined up, and attendance is compulsory, it hardly leaves you with much time to answer the "how"s you've been wondering about.

This overburdened-ness hardly leaves students the time to think about what they'd love to do in life & any kind of self-improvement. Tired of such a monotonous routine for 3-4 years the escape route turns into getting a job asap -> hence your observation of "how little enthusiasm most people have about the work they'd end up doing" <- for they really never got a time to think & discuss about how they wish to drive their lives.
Does anyone know how they might have made this? Or do you think you could create something similar?
Its not the educational system that is the main reason here. Well the system needs to change but the problem here is caused by the proliferation of engineering colleges (and other technical degree colleges). Its too easy to start a engineering college in India. There are way too many "engineers" and degree holders pushed out that don't deserve to get that degree. The schools only care about getting money and are really shitty. That is what is making for the influx of poor candidates into the employment pool.
How does paying for something ensure no downtime? I'm pretty sure most services never want to be down, paid or not.

I'm missing the connection here; does it somehow prevent people from making errors if you pay?
Why not go to continental Europe instead? Universities are mostly either very affordable or, in some cases, free.
You mean, Chinese do great ?
I think it depends on the customer. Probably somewhere between $50 and $300 million [1,2]. My guess is that the more successful programs will retain their current (probably defense) customers, but SpaceX will effectively serve a new generation of private companies who can take the risk. You also have to keep in mind that a lot of this is political and regulated. Depending on how a government contract swings, it might favor SpaceX or their competitors.

[1] http://www.aiaa.org/aerospace/images/articleimages/pdf/AA_Ja...
[2] http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/archive/2010/July/Pag...
There's a problem with this approach: black holes evaporate, which would yield a useful-life ceiling of 10^100 years. I know I'd like my machines to work longer than that.
From your blog post: "Unclaimed profiles are now NOINDEX. We’ve also changed profile URLs so that indexed profiles by search engines will start being de-indexed."

Not true--your contentless scrape of my github project is the second result for that project name in google. I just made the project yesterday, so it's not a case of the project being already in an index.

I don't want to "claim" my project--it already has hosting, a mechanism for contacting me, and an issue tracker.
I don't know. I found two Ph.D. students who's work ended up being pretty important for them... and the rest of the world:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/
I'm not sure you're in a position to be lecturing others about tolerance after a comment like that.

"Tolerance" is a noble concept in some sense. It means I respect the right of others to be stupid and annoying in the abstract, not necessarily in my passenger seat.
The spaghetti cannon strategy. Microsoft do this too.

Apple does not follow the spaghetti cannon strategy. However the risks of manufacturing a device that doesn't sell is higher than launching a website that nobody uses. It makes sense for Apple to take their time. As a side-effect they've accumulated a huge stockpile of cash.
How is that in any way a "Dear John" letter?
That's a really good idea.

Come to think of it, could black holes actually be used as an energy source? A setup like the one he describes would create a temperature gradient, and it's easy to extract power from that.

That would only make sense if this process somehow "depleted" the black hole; otherwise one could reverse entropy. IANA theoretical physicist so I don't know which mechanisms would be at work here.
Tech Startup, need people with tech skills.
I am working on a new startup and have created a non functional prototype if there is anyone that can lend me advice, it would greatly be appreciated. Also, if there is anyone with the skills needed for the site, they have the potential to become a co - founder with me.
The problem seems to be poor communication in English and lack of a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension. These are problems to be addressed at the high school level.

I attribute these squarely to the teaching methodology which is mostly memorization with no encouragement to creativity whatsoever. On top of this, the teachers in most schools are utterly incompetent and hence lack enthusiasm.

One solution may be to start private institutions that teach or increase the proficiency in such language skills (like how NIIT and Aptech did to computer education when schools couldn't do it).
I can't help but feel like this page does a huge disservice to what he was all about. He wasn't some mystical super brilliant genius. He was a guy who had some particular skills in thinking about problems and communicating them effectively. I have enormous respect for him.

Maybe I'm being too sensitive, but it seems like WAY too many things on that page miss the point completely.
In the case of Microsoft, no. The Office and Windows division are mutually-supporting rivers of gold. Everything else is the spaghetti cannon approach they've pursued since the 90s, with the possible exception of the Xbox.

Most of what Google does is not actually directly profitable and thus not ideal for spinoffs.
Yeah, I alluded to this but didn't want to get into the thick of it.

Degrees are like filters. I've done a lot of resume reading in my time, filtering through candidates for jobs. It's mindboggling how many responses one gets. Literally hundreds. And that wasn't my full time job (which was software development).

At the point that you're looking at hundreds of responses, you start applying certain filters so that you can increase your probability of finding what you want. Typically the initial filter is something that doesn't require a lot of time. For many, this tends to be if they have a CS degree.
This reminds me of a classic case in torts. Three hunters went out. They got separated so that you had two on one side of clearing, one on the other. A bird took off between the two groups. The group of two shot at the bird. One got the bird, and one got the third hunter.

The third hunter sued the first two for his medical expenses. The first two each raised the defense that there was no proof that they were the one that shot the third. They each maintained that they were the one that hit the bird.

They were both found liable. One had actually shot the third. The other, by taking a reckless shot in that direction at the same time, had made it so that the identity of the shooter could not be determined, thus creating the situation that made it so blame could not be accurately assigned.

It seems to me that putting a copyrighted work up on P2P without authorization from the copyright owner is similar. You are doing something that can only serve one of two purposes: (1) to directly infringe copyright, or (2) to obscure who is directly infringing copyright.

Arguably, copyright law could be read as covering this. 17 USC 106, the section that lists the exclusive rights of the copyright holder, says the copyright holder has the exclusive rights to do those things and to authorize those things. I wonder if one could argue that when you put a file up on P2P without permission, you are authorizing the distribution of the file, and so violating the exclusive right of the copyright owner to authorize distribution (regardless of whether or not anyone actually grabs the file from you)?
Oh great. I was afraid I would never find a place that could use my Malbolge skills.
Everyone on the list of space tourists has an interesting past:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tourism#List_of_flown_spa...
Being an Indian and a former student myself, I can't relate enough to OP's article or to your comment. I took up biology in +2, because my mom insisted it would "lead to more options later" even though I wanted to take up Computer Science (Yes my +2 college had that as an option). But I didn't get to. And I regret that decision even now.

I ended up studying something I didn't like in Engineering and didn't get good grades. I failed in a few exams. As shown in the movie 3 idiots, I did get selected in 2 companies after Engineering, but due to those failed exams, they ended up not giving me an offer letter even though I had got selected among a group of 3000(me and 12 others had gotten selected.) And my classmates who memorized everything in the textbooks got a high salaried job. I mean these people would never even know how to solve the maths problems which weren't in the textbooks.

Anyway all this has left a very sour taste in my mouth regarding all things Indian. In the next few months, I'm going to the US to pursue a Computer Science Master's like I always wanted, but I do realize that this puts me at a disadvantage over people who did study Computer Science at the Bachelor's level. But I hope I can do well
</rant>
Its kind of an object oriented style isn't it? That doesn't mean that it transfers well to programming where there are other concerns apart from communication. (You don't have to worry about controlling state in your paragraphs). Anyway, for me the laziest way to improve my composition is to just read Hemingway and let the style rub off.
"You cannot build your entire business plan on the avoidance of taxes," said Assemblyman Charles Calderon, D- Whittier, author of Assembly Bill 155 That would be 'news' to GE...
Greenspan Returns to De-Regulation
Note however that the "unusual toolkit" and "being super-smart" are not mutually exclusive. He probably had both.
nothing wrong with that man. Heck, it would be good for the entire world if more hackers used sociological theory in forming ideas/products/services/etc...
Changing the world is cool and all, but the real reason to go after this job is to work with Ben Kamens and Jason Rosoff. Kamens was the big boss of engineering at Fog Creek when I interned there and is the most humble and capable developer I've met. Jason Rosoff was also at Fog Creek with Kamens and is the kind of designer a developer loves to work with.

So, Web Ninja Rockstar Badass Developers, apply. DO IT.
The situation sucks, but only economic growth will solve the problem. The fundamental problem is scarcity - not enough wealth to go around.

A revolution against economic reality will not create wealth.

(Granted, a revolution against corrupt government workers demanding bribes might. If that's the revolution you want to start, I'll lend my pitchfork.)
Congrats, Moah and Alex!
Robberies tend to occur from 9 - 11 am and on Fridays
It doesn't, which is a point the author makes.
The average investor went to the same school as the MBAs whose power may be diminished if this is true.

Management ideology includes the idea that a good manager can manage anything; that management is a context-free science that should be left to professionals. If you believe that then you believe that this article says Google will be turning over management to amateurs. Naturally you might be suspicious.
From the article:

"I’ve seen many similar pleas recently whenever any popular, free web service has problems: “Please, let us pay you so there won’t be any problems!”

But it’s an impossible dream. If a web service is popular enough that you hear about it when it has downtime or major issues, it’s probably a large, very complex system. 100% uptime is effectively impossible."
Yaletown, Vancouver, BC - Ruby on Rails Hacker

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We are looking for a Ruby on Rails hacker to help us design and develop our new platform. Experience with git, jQuery, Haml, Redis, Postgres a huge plus.

New hires get a brand new Macbook Pro and a 24-inch monitor.

Our office is located in the trendiest part of Downtown Vancouver. We offer competitive salary and benefit packages for the right candidates.

Send your github account and resume/cover letter to jerry-dot-tian-at-suite101-dot-com.

More about the job at: http://goo.gl/1NXV4
Cool, you're just looking out for this potential interns interest right?

So, just in the interest of full disclosure - what have you shipped/built/released if, by your own words, this is such a big deal?

Just curious if you're some hyper producing hacker ninjastar or if you just have it out for this particular HNer.
At a glace it reminds me of any other forgettable corporate site. Maybe it's the shade of blue, maybe the globe in the background. Anyone else agree with me?
Where are you guys located?
My way around them is to simply search for the article on Google News, but the redirect seems to be a smarter option.

In fact, a Chrome extension to simply append the redirect to the URLs of any site it works on sounds interesting...
Photons in general relativity actually do have gravitational fields--the stress-energy tensor, which determines spacetime curvature, is a function in part of the local four-momentum which photons do possess. Assuming four-momentum is conserved in the radiator's frame, the photons emitted by the radiator are absorbed (or rather, accumulate on the event horizon surface) by the black hole and contribute to its mass. I think the net mass balance is positive, but someone who actually understands black holes may want to correct me on that.

Edit: I suppose you could always throw in the maintenance engineers when you're done with them. :)
Using the CSS in Stylebot now. TY.
Blogspam, really? That term implies lack of attribution and little or no value-add, neither of which is the case in the lesswrong.com post.
What makes you think mangers don't suffer from the same thing. Managers are also highly educated often more so(MBAs etc) etc except they will be trying to employ fancy management rather than fancy algorithms.
Huh?

I'm self taught, the last math class I took was 9th grade Algebra.

I wrote one of the first vector based, anti-aliased, alpha channeled UI frameworks for Windows 95 (16 bit!). I wrote a DSP processing engine for a telemedical application to monitor heart rate and blood pressure in 1997. I've written control software for elevators. I've written contract after effects plugins for post fx shops. I've written audio and midi sequencers. My video editing app, Shave, is the only other useful editor in the Mac App Store other than iMovie.

I've never cracked a math book.

Am I the exception that proves the rule? I'm not saying I could write Maya, but I think you are overvaluing your opinion a little.
I agree this is a very useful resource for writing in a concise manner. It is something I am attempting to implement in my daily writing. Even though it is old news the best advice I have come across is to write your content. Let it sit for an hour or more. Come back and read it out loud to yourself. This technique is underused and underrated in my opinion. Thanks for pointing out this resource. Bookmarked!
This argument is tiring. Throwing money at Google isn't going to help. They're already doing everything possible to keep Gmail up and running (very successfully I might add). Whining and using the "Oh but I paid you for this why isn't it working?" line won't make Gmail magically go back up, nor will more money, Google already has that.
If you want to improve the clarity of your writing, I also recommend StyleWriter (http://www.stylewriter-usa.com). It's a bit expensive, but the functionality is unique and helpful.
I'm pretty sure its illegal for non-lawyers to manage lawyers.
I'm confused. How is radiating your heat into a black hole better than radiating your heat into space?