skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's easy to point out Google's mistakes and point to their engineering culture, but look at Microsoft as a counterexample. Microsoft has more or less the same story as Google; one or two wildly successful products supplementing the rest of the business. The other groups at Microsoft leap into new markets to try and expand the core business (Xbox 360 being a fine example). I doubt we would call Microsoft's culture an engineering culture in the same vein as Google.
I'd suggest focusing on one industry or subindustry - retail, realty, accounting, etc - and market and focus on their specific needs.
The Growing Power of Visualization
Note: If you do it this way, and use your own domain (I'd recommend registering it through someone other than Google), if/when Gmail goes lame, you can pack up and take your address with you.

(Meantime, keep your emails backed up.)

I also hope, a bit, that the paid version means Gmail/Apps may have some degree of independence/durability that is separate from the advertising revenue. I'm probably wrong, though, at least at this point.
http://www.mathim.com/ and http://typewith.me/ and http://www.mangamasters.com/paintchat/
Is this Glassdoor's way of pranking CNN?
Condé Nast got hooked by $8 million spear-phishing scam
Remember that Bar Camp started as the Bay Area Rejects Camp — those of us who Tim didn't invite to FOO.
Industry/subindustry is a good one. I'm using it for (another) startup myself, so that might be a good one (they have to build teams). I'll give it some thought. Hiring is so thoroughly broken that almost any system would be an improvement I'd think.
My OpenPandora has arrived, finally
That's kind of the point I was trying to make in the initial post. The first one to two years in engineering schools tend to be very similar across majors. Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics are all required. After about your sophomore year, you will be adding quite a bit of time to your college career if you decide to switch.
I interviewed with Epic Systems last week, saw the question about flowers, and answered it correctly. If all but 2 are roses, all but 2 are daisies and all but 2 are tulips, you have three flowers (one of each).

Contrary to the article, though, Epic asked this on a written assessment test, so they were not so interested in thought process.
Tom Limoncelli's Time Management class - $449 (w/ a conference thrown in)
This is outrageous and, in my opinion, is unconstitutional. Americans and American businesses are entitled to equal protection under the law, and handing out customized tax breaks to a couple neighborhoods in order to benefit a specific company is shameful and corrupt.
I'm not really sure, but I think it's because a lot of my "dialogue" is internal, and it's annoying to put pronouns in there when it's always first-person. E.g. "I should do the dishes" or "I'd like to see what happened to that HN conversation from earlier." I just think "hm, should do the dishes" and sometimes I talk that way out loud. I know it's really confusing though, because if I say "should do the dishes" out loud, it sounds like I'm telling someone else to do the dishes.
ChronicDB could help here http://chronicdb.com
I'm thinking of small devices like wireless routers, phones and maybe even wristwatches. I like the idea of having a full stack framework for web apps, served locally on a tiny device. You could reuse a lot of code that way and at least for phones, potentially avoid some of the cost of having a native app with totally different code from your web app.

But yeah, LuaJIT recently added support PPC and soon will add ARM, so point well taken - to do what I'm thinking of, it may not really be necessary to have anything in C.
How to Solve It, by G. Polya

http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/math/polya.html
Also a search team (a9) office in palo alto.
My main problem with the current laws is that they could only be enforced effectively by extremely draconian measures. Same as my problem with the drug laws, really. Unenforceable laws just breed disrespect for the rule of law.
It's called "tax avoidance" when you do something entirely legal to avoid paying a tax. Like when you stop and buy something at a store by your office instead of the stop further up the road, which has a higher sales tax.
the apps on the iphone are still way better, hands down.
Music production costs are the lowest they've ever been.

Copyright was created as an incentive to create. Personally I believe that if there were no copyright law, musicians would still create.
This was addressed well by someone from Netflix but I can't find the link. Basically he said that Reddit weren't so much the victim of AWS rather than the victim of not understanding the product enough and not spending enough to buy the right instances and thus ensure their constant performance. The guy from Netflix justified this by the way that the different sized instances are split across their respective hosts and, surprise surprise, if you buy the bigger instances you get more of each machine host and less threat of someone taking you out.
The Fix My Face Fund - Another use-case for WePay
If anyone is interested in answering such questions, or are interviewing for positions that would require them to answer such questions, they should read the following book:

http://www.amazon.com/Would-Move-Mount-Microsofts-Puzzle/dp/...

In my past life, I used to work in private equity, and as such before landing that job has a lot of interviews which posed such questions for trading, banking, quant hedge funds etc.

The ridiculousness of these questions amazes me; most companies spit out the same 1000 questions or so across multiple candidates, and eventually people just learn the answers to such questions and memorize them.

I think case interviews, where you actually have to solve problems are much more effective, and can be used towards different positions.
It's just insane. The one sector of the retail channel that's really cranking is online.

And given the many (not the occasional bad experience, the many...) that I have in shopping at brick and mortar retail, I feel little to no sense of obligation to shop locally. Either they don't have it or the service is terrible.

It seems like some government entities argue that w/o the competition of online business these brick and mortars would be thriving. In what other realm is 'less' competition a good thing?

And I don't buy for a second that it's not a level playing field. I currently live in Oregon (came from California will be moving back there again relatively soon...) where there is no sales tax and retailers still generally don't have a clue on how to manage their inventory and deliver a good customer experience.

So sales tax will do nothing to resolve the issue as it relates to local retailers.

The bottom line is that good retailers that manage their inventory and provide a great experience will thrive regardless. The bad ones won't survive either way.

And for those that are always saying they will gladly pay more taxes, I say got for it. Send your money to the government - literally nothing is stopping you. Cut and check and send to the state - they can accept those checks.
He himself says he uses a small email host at $40/year, but paying for Google Apps is essentially the exact same thing as what he is doing.

He point of "its just IMAP" is mute. Gmail supports IMAP. Regardless of how reliable it is on and ongoing basis, if you look at it for the ability to export your data, its the same as what he has.

It sounds like his point is to use a smaller service. A smaller service would be less complex, but services that are bigger are likely popular for a reason.

A car that is a best seller is worth considering buying. You don't want to avoid a best seller just because its a best seller.
Yes, it seems like a broken system where everybody is wrong/wronged. Definitely needs an upgrade!
Thanks, I didn't know about those. Typewith.me looks pretty well done. My friend and I actually used to use flockdraw when we wanted to draw free body diagrams and circuits. It would be interesting to see, though, how integrating a such a drawchat system into Khan Academy would play out, considering how fast the community is growing and the type of audience it is developing.
That's really impressive! The video is a great demonstration and a real eye-opener.
Well, one way or another it was blown on spending that couldn't be sustained in a downturn.
سعودي كول
To be more clear on the gh_pages idea. If you rename your master branch to gh_pages then github will automatically let you browse to it. For example one of my projects which includes a index.html just like yours on github:

https://github.com/icefox/git-achievements

And on icefox.git.com:

http://icefox.github.com/git-achievements/
Can attest to Haskell and Snap being excellent for small web services where you need a boost - especially when concurrency is involved.

Wrote two small services for http://www.webpop.com in Haskell, both based on Snap. One for dynamically resizing images on the fly and one for handling uploads of large files and streaming them straight to Cloudfiles.

In both cases I started by trying node.js (both cases deals with either fetching or sending files from Cloudfiles so IO operations is what takes time) since the problems seemed very suited for node's eventloop model. In both cases node.js really disappointed.

Ended up giving Snap a try and got really surprised at just how well it worked. Performance is amazing, it's not much more code than the node.js version and theres no endless nesting of callbacks. It handles high levels of concurrency incredibly well and both services ended up using around 8MB of memory each - even under load...

Main problem is the lack of libraries that you tend to take for granted in more webby languages, and obviously the learning curve is pretty steep (but also very rewarding).
This is a good number to use. The full table is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_close_pack#For_spheres

IIRC, there's a passage in Conway and Sloane's comprehensive review of sphere-packing (the same Sloane as EIS, http://oeis.org/)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387985859/ref=dp_proddesc_...

that says "much of our effort in this book is to find a packing, in arbitrary spaces, that is as efficient as the simple tetrahedral packing is in R^3".
I don't think you are being a smartass, I believe that's the only correct answer.
To be brutally honest, your product makes no sense to me and I have reservations about the problem it is solving actually being a problem.

It's defining hook, that people using it must accept any job offer, is outlandish. On further inspection I can use Hustlebee to submit applications to multiple companies. Doesn't that make the promise of more dedicated employee leads empty? Why doesn't it at least check the email address to allow only one submission?

If you decide to go back to the drawing board you need to re-examine your views of the job market. There are many more potential employees than there are employers, that is why people apply for multiple jobs at the same time. It really isn't that big of a deal to a company when they extend and offer and it is turned down. Essentially, you are solving the wrong side of the problem here.
Bring Twitter API data into Google Docs to quickly view/manipulate
Space Junk a Growing Threat for Astronauts in Orbit
First off, the payroll tax applies only to companies with payrolls > $250k; does your demand for 'equal protection' mean that you insist on companies of all sizes paying this tax?

Second, the tax break is not Twitter-specific (although even if it were, that would not be unconstitutional). It applies to businesses located in a certain part of SF, and it exempts a company from the first six years of payroll taxes.

Third, city supervisors have the authority to adjust tax structures with a level of geographic-granularity. Why shouldn't they be allowed to make a dumpy part of town more attractive to businesses?

Do you complain when cities and states make themselves more attractive to outside businesses by giving exemptions to certain classes of companies? Do you complain when cities block big-box stores like Walmart from opening in their limits? (Since those are as targeted as this exemption.)
Do you use an alarm?
How is it corrupt? And isn't that a net gain for the city, since Twitter was going to up and move a few miles south?
Kinect Turns Tourists into 3D Souvenirs
Why GUIs suck, revisited
For people not familiar with Feynman, here is a recent review of one of his story books:

http://goo.gl/5QLaG
The best entrepreneurs, from what I have seen, are the people that want to and must be involved in all core business responsibilities. The passion and persistence required to create something demands this.

However, I believe there are exceptions to this, such as design. If you have great product vision, technical ability, understand your users and you are infinitely passionate about the product you are building, I see no problem with outsourcing (at least initially) to 99designs or similar sites.
Comparing object mapper performance on .NET
Implementing a preemptive kernel within a single Windows thread
I just sat down with him once, so I've got lots of facts but no chronology:

- I think he had some personal projects that had some success
- Then he was "discovered" somehow and then went on to speaking and TV
- He's from Vancouver and moved to SF to work with Digg in Business Development and then got caught in their lay-offs
- He then decided to raise money and start this company.

I think he comes from an upper middle class family of Hong Kong / Taiwan origin. Even if he was from a wealthy family - he's not thrown away these advantages like so many of them have. All of these stories are perfect-storms anyway - even the poorest of them use their luck, it's just harder. This ability to use luck and hustle, the mental game, is the essence of success IMHO. We need to teach our kids these things and give them access to the people that will show them the way.
I agree that the article does seem a little tabloid, but I think speculating on what will happen to G as a complete outsider is to a very high degree a gamble..

There would be so many issues at play here.. How well can Larry get buy-in from various levels of the organisation? How well will the Google culture evolve around his proposed changes? What will they do to ensure Quality of service goes up?

At the end of the day, Google right now is a one trick pony. General consensus in this thread is that Android is successful within Google right now. I don't buy into that though primarily because it's a business unit that does not make any money...

I think there's a long way to go and a lot of forces at play
Next player next to: Apple, Microsoft, and Google. They're small compared to those 3 giants and Amazon is going to enter their MKT cap territory by 2020 in my opinion.
One of my favorite details in Wall-E is how when the ship blasts off from Earth, it scatters a bunch of orbital debris.

Any ideas on how to clean up space junk?
Release of Irradiated Water Is Stopped in Japan
Google already gets paid for Gmail. It uses Gmail as a platform on which to serve very targeted advertisements on every page. Likely a greater overall value with their number of users than if they did away with the ads and charged for the service, instead.
Exercise! One thing you can be sure that is missing from not only a CEO's list but a lot of entrepreneurs. A lot of people may feel that exercise only robs them of precious time but conversely as pointed out, it keeps the mind fresh and sharp thereby increasing productivity.

Lincoln once said something along the lines of "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe".
Apple releases iAd Gallery app: all ads, all the time
Free Download Panda Antivirus Pro 2011 Review full version
Rogers Waters Talks Ideas
Please do a write on this! Fantastic framerate :)
Take this GUI and shove it
Would DEC Still Exist if Non-Competes Didn’t?
"A JVM Does What?"
From Search Engine To Space Exploration For Co-Founder of Moon Express
"If you had 5,623 participants in a tournament, how many games would need to be played to determine the winner?"
Let d = Log_2 N. Sum 2^(d-k) for k = 0 ... d

The a-ha solution to this puzzle is to realize that every participant but one has to lose exactly once. Each game has only one loser, so you need 5622 games.

Your method overestimates the number of games needed because you start counting at 0. (Think about the simple case where N=2.) Even if you started counting at 1, your method wouldn't in general give an exact answer (and would typically under- or over-estimate depending on whether you started counting at 1 or 0, respectively), but if you had a nice power of two (say, 2^d on the nose), then the sum from 1 to d of 2^(d-k) would give you exactly 2^d -1, which agrees with the a-ha answer.
The Shuttle is an excellent example of how an initially good idea (reusable launch vehicles) can become twisted and perverted by excessive compromises and congressional meddling. The Shuttle as it was built was actually a step backward from previous generations. Not only was it not properly reusable (it was at best refurbishable and partially reusable), it's unusual characteristics caused it to require a huge standing army of engineers to keep the program going, regardless of flight rate. As the true limits to the flight-rate of the Shuttle came to light it became obvious that no matter what the Shuttle system was capable of it wasn't capable of lowering launch costs over conventional expendable boosters.

It's a good case study in the downfalls of a waterfall type process and of committing too early to a system before it's true character is known.
Is anyone seriously considering porting this to C? I'm thinking of doing this myself, as I'm really interested in applying the algorithm, but I don't have a lot of experience in this kind of thing.
Would probably make sense for someone to just write a site agnostic 'drawchat' plugin.
My disagreement with this perspective is that demand is measured in dollars, not desire. The perception of a problem in the supply pool is a problem with the quality expectation (or need) per dollar of salary, rather than a problem in the workforce itself.

I think that programming is just at a difficulty level where employers really either have to spend the money, or realize that their business model really isn't viable if it depends on a large supply of competent $36K programmers.
Very true. I worked for a startup some years back where the technical cofounder had a nasty habit of reserving all the interesting problems for himself and fobbing the scutwork off on employees. It was intensely frustrating. Yet somehow they never understood why they couldn't retain programmers...
Show HN: SpotSift, efficient professional networking using your mobile device
Unqualified Names in the SSL Observatory
Can you really draw this conclusion based on these two points of data? There is no way to determine cause and effect.
This is my startup. It's currently only available on the iphone http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spotsift/id428185865?mt=8&... and I'd love some feedback if you're into this space (mind you my app is very beta).

If you're in the bay area, I'll be doing a soft launch tomorrow at the 106 miles event in Palo Alto which is a meetup for entrepreneurs. I'd love for you to participate and give me some user feedback.

http://www.meetup.com/106miles/events/16401491/
Which is a more pressing matter, the great oceanic garbage gyres or the orbital gyres.

How do we fix these? Garbage and space taxes?

We need a garbage x prize for cleanup ideas for both.
The first question shows that the software/OS is more important than the actual hardware. At least for the android users. Nothing surprising here, that's how it should be. (And that's the reason traditional big players feared android - it turns them into low margin hardware manufacturers.)
Rails 3.0.6 has been released
Robert Bigelow:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bigelow

His space station company:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Aerospace
I think it's based on the intuition that "you get what you pay for"; if a company has more revenue they should be able to spend more money on availability. Unfortunately, I don't think money is the bottleneck here.
Are your ads clear about what you're selling?
Aww, you spoiled my illusions.
You're doing all the work of dividing by 7. There are shortcuts to checking divisibility [1] - 2, 3, 5, & 9 have the easiest shortcuts - but 7 is a complicated case, which I'd probably just divide out anyway.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisibility_rule#Divisibility_...
They were attempting most likely to follow Strunk & White's idiotic dictum to omit all needless words. More often than not, when people trust Strunk & White to do their thinking for them, bad language occurs.
Would two gardenias work as well?
keywords are "consistent experience"
>> Log_2 1000.

Actually that's the maximum number of guesses needed (assuming you're aware of the binary search concept), not the minimum. The minimum is 1. This is a trick question and you have failed the first interview question and have been shown the door... Good illustration of why the questions are, in fact, ridiculous unless they are just used as a "jumping off" point for discussion (which is rarely what happens, IME).
Do people with blue eyes reproduce more? I've not heard that before. I thought the ratio of blue to not blue eyes was due to the whole dominant/recessive gene thing (do I mean gene, or maybe allele? a long time since I learned this stuff at school).
you might want to revisit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

but yes, I think you are the exception
Is any other industry blowing up as much as web / gaming startups?
Just curious if there is anything even close to the boom we are seeing in the tech / startup world for hiring... I know alternative energy was hot for awhile.

Oil? (boo!!) :)
ahh. thanks for the info. it's back to #newtwitter again it seems.
I was listening to the facts of his arguments, not the quality of his elocution. Paul Clement vis a vis Paul Clement's arguments was utterly unimpressive.
Assuming that societal advantage results in more offspring. Do the rich have more kids than the poor? I'm not sure that they do.
Yes, I'm not denying that he was unconventionally an incredibly talented physicist. But in the process of figuring out his process (and the processes of lots of 'brilliant' people), we discover that we can't pinpoint exactly WHY or HOW he worked. That's the point. Nobody can. He was a human being and he certainly had flaws, which I imagine he'd be happy to acknowledge.

I just dislike putting people onto pedestals like this. If you had hung out with him over a beer, I'm willing to bet you'd be surprised how normal of a person he was.
There is no guarantee of causation, but do you see another explanation of why GOOG dropped 3% today?
Thanks for the clarification, I mis-understood the pricing table. The total would then be ~$50USD, still a unpleasant price (NB. I don't think the price is unreasonable for the service, just something "hidden" in the blog post: If it was closer to $20USD, it would be less of a shock.)
I keep a blog about miscellaneous stuff at http://blog.byjoemoon.com (plug) but I don't think that's what you mean.

I got out in 2006, and I had already stopped writing by the time I made team leader, but I did keep a blog for some of the time I was in, and I collected it (the interesting stuff) at http://www.servicerecordbook.com.
Companies and families (including individuals) surely do, but has ANY government ever "saved for the lean years"?

I believe some kings have, back in the absolute monarchy days.
Openness and reputation
As much as I love logic puzzles, the real question is "How can you convince someone with hiring authority in the company that you would be an asset to them personally?"

This does not typically involve resumes or dredging up old math team tricks on command.
The fact that they are combined to form a third program underlines the point.