skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think large changes to complex systems are fraught with risks, and Larry's changes are quite large. But given how different Google is, as a company, than any other company out there, its not really possible to evaluate this change apriori as a 'win' or as a 'blunder.'.

I've been out of the 'plex for a year. But when I worked there, every year things changed; from bonus plans, to quality of life 'perks', to who ran what. Google is good at change, they change things all the time.

Google measures a lot. For some it seemed like extreme surveillance but it really was mostly about measuring effectiveness. Of course it also reduced the time to catch the contractor who helped his friends help themselves to some laptops to about 15 minutes after they were noted as being missing :-).

They don't always interpret what they measure well. The feedback loop on that seems poor.

From the outside it would seem that Larry is embracing one of the core Google beliefs which are "Change things to be what you think is the better way, measure what you change, fix what you break." Does that belief scale to the CEO's office? Guess we'll see. If its broken it won't stay broken since I'm sure there are a number of experiments in place to provide feedback on its effectiveness.

The only danger to Google at that point is whether or not they can understand and internalize the feedback effectively. That was a skill I didn't see a lot of when I was there.
He may not want this bill but he will certainly give into anti-neutrality measures in another format. Remember he listens directly to the riaa and mpaa and other such industry groups.
2.Suatanlee Seo Yarrismasi Sac Ekimi Teknoloji Merkezleri
Tablets Cannibalizing PC and Laptop Usage
The First Foods That Will Disappear In A Global Water Crisis
Is there something better than Viper mode for Vim folks? It just doesn't feel complete... I'm trying to give Emacs a shot as I learn Clojure.
ITA raised all that money to build a reservation system to replace the old mainframe systems that are fabulously expensive to run. That would have been a market of the kind that required outside investement from a company that was already profitable (I think ITA had more people working on the reservation system than the search), and that a big VC would love to bet on.

From what I hear it worked technically, but failed commercially due to the badly timed recession. It seems like a fair bet that Google's offer wasn't putting a lot of value on the reservation system. Even if it could be made to work, it's not the kind of a business that Google is usually in.
I'm saying that despite the fact that airlines are a textbook example of an industry with high capital requirements for entry, deregulation did not hand the industry over to a cartel of incumbents. In fact, air carriage is regularly shaken up by new entrants and new market forces.
It's Official: Union Square Ventures Is The Top VC In The World
??

So what's your proposal to deal with such a problematic behaviour?

The guy is quite nice - he only made the thieve risk his reputation by the consequences of his own action. He didn't involve anything like law enforcement, the hosting company or the banners network - which would have cost them time thus money.

All he did is take some of his own time so that the scraper would get the "accusing" version of the website next time. He fixed that at his own expenses.

I believe many of us wouldn't have been that nice. And yes I believe he should keep an eye on this thief, because from what he said (the games didn't play) the guy didn't spend a lot of time on that borked job.

For all we know, this might be his full time job - copying websites, replacing copyright notices and authors, making money out of it with banners. All he needs is a process that scales well financially to be a "scamtreupreneur" (Couldn't find a word so I made up one. Do I get karma claims on that word?? :-))

With bots, selecting target websites etc. it might be possible to make a living out of it while true entrepreuneurs are starving in bootstrapped companies :-/
i'm not sure what to do except hit "random"
Awesome.. we really need some Gmail competitors. I love Gmail and all, but they've reigned king with very little real competition for a surprisingly long time.
I really cannot undertand what you are trying to express. I really don't see how 'caste' is linked to the article and your initial comment "80% Indians are willing to migrate to USA...". Please try to understand what the problem is and post comments on how that can be solved, that will make the conversation interesting and live. I am not trying to suppress anything and i see most of the comments here have gone in different directions.
Don't Reinvent the Wheel
This is really interesting especially given that Harvard now offers "Counting People" and "Magic of Numbers" as classes that satisfy the math (quantitative reasoning) requirement. That's not to say the requirements are better or worse than 100 years ago, it's just interesting how much broader the course offerings are now. You could avoid math, and I know people who did, if you didn't want to take it. And of course, almost no one knows Latin or Greek.
there's also http://news.ycombinator.com/best, for (iirc) the top articles in the past 7 days.

Somebody should really put together a guide to all these half-hidden features, either as a wiki or an individual effort.
Buzz.
How about custom ties for companies targeted towards businessmen?

Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. There are more than enough hideous looking ties in the world already. Let's not encourage them...

The difficult part would be designing a custom tie that looks great, but still represents your brand.

I don't believe it can be done, but more power to anybody that can pull that off. :-)
Yeah, how can anyone not like Apple products!
I don't know if the poster was criticizing the owner's response; I read it as just an observation about the state of things. Also, you're right - the thief got off easy.
Kadavy, Inc., it's just me, and started as a UI consultancy in 2008. Now it's a media company.

I'm writing a book on design http://designforhackers.com

Based on blog posts at http://kadavy.net

I live in Lincoln Park at Clark & Fullerton, which I think is a perfect place for a one man startup. Very walkable.

I meet with other entrepreneurs every wednesday to cowork at a cafe http://jellychicago.com

I moved here from SF, entirely by my own volition. Yes, for real.
So, is it possible that the system is starting to show cracks where it might no longer scale very well at 307 million people. Maybe giving more powers to states could potentially work. I don't know if I like that more or less.
Stagecoach, the parent company of Megabus, began growing shortly after UK bus services were deregulated and privatized (mid 90s). Their tactic was to take the busiest (and most profitable) routes in a city and saturate them with buses, charging lower fares. The 192 route in Manchester suddenly went to literally a bus every two minutes, and Stagecoach buses were half the price of everything else.

They made losses but took nearly every passenger on the route. They then bought the company which previously ran the route and fares rapidly escalated. Manchester now has extortionate bus fares and Stagecoach run virtually all routes.

I imagine that their business model is almost identical with Megabus: sink the competition by undercutting their profitable routes, buy them out/bankrupt them and then reap your rewards.

sidenote: I used to vaguely know the chap who almost founded Stagecoach with his wife. They divorced and she took what was a small local bus company and built it up with her new partner. He started a new company called Highwayman (robs the stagecoach). It remained a small (< 8 buses) operator in scotland until he died a couple of years ago.
You'd also think a cisco engineer up to such shenanigans would know enough to use an anonymous/proxy whois registration.
Look him up on TED
"I think it must be much, much easier to write articles like this about managing Google than it is to actually manage Google."

Based on comments like this getting so many votes, I'm starting to wonder how many Google fanboys use this site. This is true for any critic in any industry. If you have to be the de-facto source of information on something before you can comment on it, then nobody would ever be able to comment on anything. "It's much easier to eat food from a restaurant and pick it apart, then actually go in the kitchen and cook it yourself." True, the critic doesn't risk much.

Motivation is when you give someone an incentive to work hard. As mentioned in the article, if I work on search algorithms, how is a bonus contingent on social networking going to motivate me? I think it's a valid question, and if that's really what's happening at Google, then I would agree, it's a blunder.
Thanks for a very detailed and interesting description of the scientific process.

From the way you describe it, it seems that doing science in your area, is not the science that would attract small hacker groups , because it's long and boring.

hackers tend to contribute to the interesting parts of open source , i.e. languages like python and ruby, and organizations tend to do the big, boring heavy lifting, things like android , linux , etc.

By the way, what about technologies like combinatorial testing, automation , and miniturization ? what would be their affect on the way biology is done ?
Ask HN: Should I buy this domain?
Hi everyone, looking for a name for my B2B webapp project and think I have something. I'd eventually like to turn it from a project into a profitable company.

7 letters, 2 syllables, .com, looks like 1 word, and I can get it for high 3 figures USD. (Not a small amount of money, but my bank balance has gone up enough recently to cover it). Looks great written/typed, can be said over the phone, just doesn't roll 'perfectly' off the tongue.

It's a verb representing what people will do on my webapp (e.g. share) + short suffix (e.g. ly) + .com.

There's a (very) slightly related product using the .net; but it's from a small middle-eastern country, looks small, and it just a sub-project of a bigger company (judging by the different company name in its footer).

I'm not an expert, but it looks like it's being sold a little under value, because similar (worse) domains are going for 4 figures.

I'd almost buy it even for its investment value, but I thought I'd ask here first if there's anything else I should check or do.

Any advice would be much appreciated, thanks!
A bit of an aside from the assertions of the article, but there is some research to suggest tying anything that involves creative solutions to a bonus is actually a disincentive: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/opinion/20ariely.html
Well the Asana guys did write their own programming language.

http://asana.com/luna/
a future steve jobs?
My only request to admob is at least give us some explanation

Don't let some computer algorithm decide our future
Google you don't wanna be skynet
It'd be interesting to hear the technical details of how the switcheroo was accomplished
So we agree, then, that a person should dramatically increase his or her activity level throughout the day (e.g. walk the streets).

However, I'm going to nitpick and say that you're wrong about the gym. Currently, I burn about 1,000 calories on each trip to the gym, every other day. That's a 500 calorie deficit that I'm adding each day. In addition, my body is using additional calories to rebuild muscle, and the additional muscle is consuming calories to maintain itself. It's kind of like compounding interest.
Original source, which also has some other cool projects: http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix
Ver La Fuerza del Destino Capitulo 21
This is one sided, there are many instances when people repeat the same process over and over again to get to get the same results. Improving something is not reinventing the wheel, building the exact same thing over and over again is.
What about for Android?

Green tea requires cooler water than black is that something a person new to tea will be shown or is all data the user enters via trial and error?

If it's pre-determined what about mixing different teas which is a common thing to do if the brew settings per tea type are set can other users submit new mixes 10% green, 90% black and say use X grams and brew for Y minutes?

FYI I just posted to Reddit/r/Tea too.
if the gym is purposely designed to be as boring as possible.

A gym is precisely as boring as the inside of your head.

I recommend audio books.
Deregulation is such a blanket term encompassing so many things (especially the things regulated right now) that it by itself can't be judged a cure-all. Imagine deregulating the food industry by disbanding the FDA.

Loss of net neutrality will hurt small players in the web space(imagine a startup competitor to Netflix which can't afford deals with so many ISPs).
I do think that's true, which is why I'd call this something like "plagiarism" rather than "stealing". The issue isn't that anyone's had an item removed from their possession (as with theft), but someone is trying to pass off someone else's work as their own. Like if I were to publish a novel, but lift large parts of the novel from an existing novel. I guess you could colloquially say that I've "stolen text" from that novel, much as people say that Microsoft "stole" the recycling bin from Apple's trash can, but plagiarism seems to get at the underlying issue more directly.
If the OP's planted information identified the wrong guy, then that guy, who was wrongly accused of being a willful copyright infringer, might be able to sue successfully for libel.

Otherwise, though, one legal irony about this posting sort of tickles me:

* Suppose that the (human) scraper were to sue the OP for libel. And leave aside for now the fact that (at least in the U.S.) truth is usually an absolute defense to a defamation action (although that's not the case in false-light or invasion-of-privacy cases).

* The OP should win, it seems to me, if for no other reason than that it was the scraper, not the OP, who published the putatively-libelous information about himself. Presumably, if the scraper himself had not copied and published (what he thought was) the OP's site, then the supposedly-libelous information would have stayed hidden in the OP's server, never seeing the light of day.

Of course, I could imagine some judges thinking that the case was like the spring-gun cases you read about in first-year torts class: If you booby-trap your vacant house with a shotgun to protect against burglars, you can be liable to a burglar who gets shot, even though he's breaking the law by breaking in.
If Facebook really is a serious threat to Google, he needs everyone in the company to realize that and fight against it.

>"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."

If that good algorithmic search person only cares about his/her job and not the life of the company maybe he/she should leave. I'm sure he doesn't want everyone to make individual products, but they have an army of incredibly smart people that could give valuable input. Setting a company wide priority is the right thing to do.
Milton Friedman Discusses Government Regulations
I am a Hungarian and just reading the comments on this case. You are not the first one came up with the idea. Unfortunately, it didn't ring any bell in my language. 'I don't understand' is NEM ÉRTEM / NEM ERTEM in Hungarian. SE ERTE doesn't mean anything in this context. The closest thing could be NEITHER FOR HIM/HER = SE ÉRTE
Crashes latest iPad Safari. Would have loved to take a look. You guys have any idea why?
Why Don't Developers Like to Estimate Time Accurately?
As a complete outsider (1% web programmer, 99% lazy) I'd say that something lower language would be good. It's probably different to what you've done before. Something like Lua? I don't even know if this counts as low-level. You don't know of any thing to do with your work, but by the time you've learnt, you'll either know of one or have thought of one. Like a brainfuck intepreter. Yeah.. just do brainfuck for a day and get back to your wonderful Objective C.
Agree with the post but it's ignoring the countless number of people who decide to write their own library for X that adds nothing beyond what anything else already does.

Don't reinvent the wheel. Do invent a new type of wheel with more awesome.
Realized there's a typo. Should be "Concentrate.app", not Concentrap.
One more from the same website: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
- The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Blank. [1]

- Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston. [2]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem...
Which they then abandoned. They are still using the underlying libraries they created for Luna, but from straight Javascript.
It's his job, not his hobby.

I have a problem with affiliate links that are not marked as such, I certainly don't ever have a problem with asking for donations.
What else do you "know for a fact"?
So, I thought this might be a "Thunderbird" in the cloud type service (IE: enter all your IMAP accounts and we'll sync it online).

Bummer that it seems to be just another email provider.
Facebook Gives Ad.ly's Celebrity Endorsement Business the Boot
The flickering is greatly reduced on subsequent viewings (even after clearing the cache) and only occurs as the video is starting up now, not a big deal IMO. Not sure why it was so flickery the first time.
Snag it. Don't wait.
Facebook's Zuckerberg to Appear in MAD Magazine
^^ Great books. Also checkout the books about the lean startup by Eric Ries (there's like 3-4 of them now).

I would also recommend the ultimate sales machine. Even though I've only read 20 pages since I started reading it one month ago (yes, I run a startup), it's really interesting and helpful.
so, the equivalent would be abstract photography.
It's nitpicky, but the second time I saw "itself" written as "it's self" I cringed extra-hard.
If You're Arguing That Someone 'Deserves' Copyright, Your Argument Is Wrong
Will buy it as soon as I get home. I started making / drinking tea thanks largely to this HN article on "A Hacker's Guide to Tea": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1934051 and the (many!) useful comments within.

BTW, I've been getting most of that tea from the guy who originally wrote "A Hacker's Guide to Tea:" http://www.chicagoteagarden.com/ and it's been good.
Thank you for that. I'm not normally a fan of humorous posts on here, but that was the best laugh I've had all week!
When to Shift from Reseller to Dedicated Hosting
Reseller web hosting and dedicated web hosting are two types of hosting arrangements and each of them can be used for different purposes. Reseller account is good for small businesses.
A Libertarian Take on Net Neutrality
Did you actually attempt to buy a ticket though? On the Canadian site, the front page advertises the 'cheapest' rate, which you can only get if you buy the first couple tickets on any given ride. After that, the prices escalate (they don't hide that from you though... it just not on their front page).
By less well-funded public services, I mean if you give tax breaks to (or leave tax loopholes for) multimillionaires then (unless you're on the too-high-taxes side of the Laffer curve) the government faces a choice of cutting their budget, or increasing the share of the tax burden paid by those on moderate or low incomes (or unsustainable deficit spending). Recent history suggests that governments offering high-end tax breaks generally prefer the latter two options, which it manifestly is in my interests to oppose. I'm really not sure where I asked the world to owe me a living.

I've already acknowledged that I benefit from services provided to me by government such as a stable banking system. However, as I stated in the original post, in absolute terms rich people benefit significantly more from these services, just as their larger enterprises tend to pay more for software licences, not because the marginal cost to the vendor is higher but because the value to their enterprise is much greater. A government that withdrew funding from (for example) enforcing law might cost me my livelihood in the ensuing chaos, but the millionaire stands to lose more than I have ever earned.
Post Anon cta looks inactive from the grey, try a different color and measure performance. Show a single or list of sample ideas under the main entry field...
I believe you are mis-characterizing my position somewhat - I stated that lower infrastructure costs are a benefit of smaller scale but I did not state that they were the sole measure of success.

While I don't doubt that powerpoints about quick easy money from advertising were legion in Redmond, it doesn't change my belief that Bing has been a significant success for Microsoft despite the money being neither quick nor easy. The notion of measuring the success of the Bing team against the whole of Google is silly. Bing's success should be measured solely by the business benefits it provides to Microsoft.
It seems to be extremely difficult to create enough value in the programming language space to justify a startup. Most of the new languages we're seeing today were bootstrapped by volunteer or hobbyist efforts. Even after these languages gain a "critical mass" in the hobbyist community, the language can still be unproven for some time (maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think Clojure [for example] has much "in the wild" use yet).

Programming language development is valuable because it exposes programmers to new ways of thinking about problems, but it's tough to translate that into monetary value in a world full of stable, time-tested alternatives.
relevant - http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/02/dont-reinvent-the-w...
If the Xoom had been delayed until after Honeycomb was open sourced in say 2 months, would that change the open source status of Honeycomb right now? Obviously no. The timing of the code release is what triggers that change. Honeycomb was exactly as open source the day after the Xoom went on sale as it was the day before.

So why is the timing of the hardware release relevant? I thought you were getting confused with the GPL, in which case it would be relevant. Now that we've cleared up that you know Android isn't GPL I have no idea why you think the timing of the binary release matters. I'd hazard a guess that you think people should act like the GPL applies to their Apache licensed code in order to be considered sufficiently "Open Source" by your definition, which differs from the standard meaning of simply releasing the code under an Open Source licence, which applies to the vast majority of Android code, and will soon apply to the Honeycomb code.

At which point they'll start work on the next version (Jelly?), and presumably you'll once again believe that Android isn't Open Source since having any code in development and not yet released fails your test. Or do they only fail your Open Source test if they ship a Jelly-powered device first? What if they ship a Jelly SDK image to run in a VM? Does your idea of when they have to have released source follow the GPL exactly, or does it differ in any important ways?
I came to emacs from Vim, and at first i tried Viper mode, but i gave up and just went with learning emacs as it is. It payed of in the long term.
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