skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you are wrong in your assertion that "it takes a lot to rile up a company". It takes very little, as you can see from his story.

Just pointing out blindingly obvious facts of privilege, race, and class can cause large companies to shit themselves.

That's the point.

You see his statements as passive-aggressive. They aren't. Passive-aggressive is something like "I respect your right to your opinion, no matter how steeped in white male professional privilege it may be." His statements are completely factual, even underplayed. I didn't even hear any ill-will towards the company (that just fired him, and threatened to fire his friends and co-workers), any conclusion about Google or TransVideo's actions, or indeed anything other than mild interest in people who didn't come from the same background.

Now, we don't know what really happened, other than his own account. But I find the story credible.
As a bitcoin veteren, what, if any, do you expect will be the US reaction once it becomes big enough to cause problems?
Love the idea, but how is this different than Facebook Lists (Other than the fact that no one uses them)?
I think it's the value of the index X $1,000. So the notional value traded per day is more like $1.1 billion because the index is now around 73.
You don't profit 8.5 billion dollars by spending money every time a self-important internet critic thinks you ought to.
Text search in SimpleDB: a Ruby example
Preserving Aboriginal Australian Heritage Online
Your dad's "winning" of the case was a mixed blessing. It did not result in temporary workers becoming real employees with full benefits. Instead, it removed a number of benefits from temporary employees of large corporations all over the country. It also removed the contractor's ability to work for longer than a year at a time without a break.

For example, Intel does not allow temps to use the gym because their legal department worries that might make the division between employee and contractor less solid.

The ruling has created a group of roaming workers who will often work a lesser job for 90 days until they can go back to their big company temp job.

A number of contractors would consider themselves better off if your dad hadn't sued Microsoft. Corporations don't need to do anything illegal for this to be the case.
correct, I am not a Google employee...but I do need to relax a bit.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2501121
I used to work at Google and the "class system" was something that grated on me from time to time.

I didn't know any yellow badge folks myself, and was ignorant of their existence, just as the article mentions.

But red badges (contractors) are ubiquitous. In one case they fired all the QA contractors and made them reapply for their own jobs -- we're talking about people who had deep knowledge of certain projects, who'd been on certain teams for years, who were valued contributors, people who we didn't want to lose. But because they had a red badge, they were subject to petty whims of bureaucrats from on high, unlike white badges. At least on my team, almost all red badge QA contractors were of Indian origin, and often female.

Now that's not very different from how a normal company works. But Google just made the distinction difficult to ignore since white badges had so many privileges, including, for engineers, the right to reallocate themselves, or to exploit the famous 20% time. Google's image is that they are pioneering a different way of working, with more workplace democracy, but the truth is that these privileges are limited to as few employees as they can get away with.

And of course, the biggest class division has to do with the people who do physical labor and sanitation. I tend to work after hours and I also tend to talk to people even if they're supposed to be "invisible", so I've had conversations with some of the workers. (Ironically, one conversation conducted using Google Translate). That person emptying your wastebasket might be qualified to do nursing back in her home country. Oh, and it might amuse Yahoo employees to know that their recycling program is a complete sham -- everything is emptied into the same trash containers anyway, and the workers are forbidden from taking the cans away to cash in themselves.
I agree with everything, except his last point:

"And if they build a large enough feature-set and backing service to make it a true competitor, they’re likely to create a lot of potential Instapaper demand."

Isn't that a little backwards? If Apple builds a true competitor, then it's going to create a lot less potential Instapaper demand. See Watson and Kaleidoscope for reasons why.
First

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2501121

Sorry for the negative vibes.

Second, to clarify, I would actually say this to somebody's face (and have in the past), but this is clearly the wrong forum for that kind of outburst and is precisely what pg is talking about when discussing the lower level of comment quality. Lesson learned.
I will definitely take up on your offer. I am now following you on twitter and will be in touch soon.
You're missing the point. Google has this manual monotonous task of scanning millions of books, so they choose the company that offers the most cost effective workforce, paychecks and launch breaks are taken care of by the contractor Google hires as they don't pay those workers directly.
To be fair to Absolute and Toshiba, there are advantages to this sort of tracking/anti-theft software being integrated by the manufacturer. Building it into the BIOS, though scary and rootkit-like, gives the software persistence across re-installs of Windows, a feature I doubt the standalone competitors boast. If I was a laptop thief, the first thing I'd do would be to image then wipe the drive.

But yes, consent is a must. Absolute and Toshiba should have avoided this issue by adding a clear, detailed notice/consent screen on the first boot.
Must mean it's time for me to write that "Get in on the Bitcoin Revolution" book.
There is more information and a video in the original article: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-03/gray-matter-ca...
5 Techniques to improve traffic
Indeed, what are your current plans for Python 3.x?
Crockford talks on JavaScript at Etsy (1+ hour video)
fact: feeding 26,316 employees every day has zero effect on the bottom line.
I don't think arguments containing implicit assumptions of the form, "if I did X, Y would happen," lead to insight.
I did use bitop extensively. Having every bitwise operation be a function call was not as pleasant to type (or read) as dedicated bitwise operators but it did get the job done.
What they fail to mention is what happens to coffee shops not in "a stone's throw" from a Starbucks. I expect it's exactly the opposite. When the new Starbucks moves into town, everyone goes there... Eventually. I'm sure there's a day 1 surge of people trying the hype, then people going back to their old ways, for the most part. New customers are where the problem is. Every business has customer churn and needs as many new as old ones that are leaving, for whatever reason.

With a Starbucks too far from you, who is going to come looking for you? Only those in visual range of Starbucks are gaining from their presence, and probably only when Starbucks is too busy for their own good.
Isn't that what VoltDB is for? http://voltdb.com/

Edit: Also, I see no mention of whether Druid is going to be open sourced or not.
you don't get to decide what is or is not a "non-issue". You have opinions just like anybody else.
http://apps.facebook.com/newprogrammingbooks/
Again these are not Google's employees they are the employees of the company which was contracted by Google.

Sadly the majority of low wage contract workers are minorities, it's not Google's fault.
Google's profit was 2.8 billion on 8.5 billion in revenue.
What exactly goes on in a BitCoin party?
the least painful structure for me is a non recoverable draw and then a large percent of sales. This makes them 100% commission but they still get paid even if they arent selling. However once they do start selling the commission goes against the draw that they have accrued. This means if it takes 6 months to sell 100K you are out their draw, but you dont pay them additional commission on the 100k.

drop me a note if you have questions.
Slight point of interest, do you mean the recycling at Yahoo is a sham, or that it would amuse Yahoo employees to know that Google's recycling is a sham?
I basically agree with this thought, although the perks at Google are great PR and appear to be genuinely adored by the employees. At a certain scale of income (enough) perks probably can make a positive enhancement above what they actually cost (and above what the increased salary if the perks were eliminated would "feel" like).

So, if we assume the perks are working for Google at the high end -- at the low end it seems logical that if those said perks are extravagant enough the feasibility of adjusting the money on the low end down enough to compensate for the low end also receiving those perks becomes very negative to those employees. At the low end pay scales where things like being able to pay rent and afford children, receiving cash money is likely preferable than receiving less money and a limo ride to work.

It is possible more perks in lieu of cash at the high end, and more cash in lieu of perks at the low end is actually the optimal solution to compensation package.
Physical books aren't what they used to be, as recently as the 90s. I was disappointed with Knuth volume 4A -- the glue binding makes it a pain just to hold open far enough to read comfortably, like just about any new hardback now. I'd rather have gotten a PDF. (DRM formats are still out, for me.)
The Toshiba Satellite sitting beside me is running slackware like a champ. Problem solved ;-)
It's not just visible to "other HNers," it's visible to everybody. Bit of a tone-deaf request.
I don't get this sentiment. I thought that most people with jobs like this weren't getting free meals. I mean, do data-entry workers in your country really get free food, hair cuts, gym access, and cleaning services, among other things? A while back Google offered a million dollar counteroffer to one of its engineers who was going to leave. Do you really expect them to offer millions to a data entry person who is going to leave?
> The closest thing to K&R C for python is Python Essential Reference by Beazley. The structure mirrors K&C.

This is probably pretty intentional. I had Dave as a professor for several C based classes and he recommended K&R highly. In the introductory course, he even used it as the textbook.

(btw I also have attended one of his new Chicago Python classes - recommended, he's a great teacher)
Post Pic Making a cool Blue button in Photoshop
Invest in mutual funds; read Chomsky.
I should explain, I've worked at both Yahoo and Google. Yahoo's recycling program is a sham, at least for Mission College circa 2007. I don't know about Google.

I've told people about the qualified nurse working emptying wastepaper baskets, but the thing that always makes Silicon Valley nerds go apoplectic is learning that their hard work putting soda cans into the blue container was all for nothing.
My mistake. Thanks for correcting me (both of you). I had gotten the impression that people went to Thailand for cheap surgeries that usually worked out but that it was a little sketchy/suboptimal/risky.
First apologies for the ad hominem attacks, and thanks for calling me out on them. It's shoddy thinking that belongs more on a Fox opinion show than on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2501121

Second, Thanks also for providing an explanation for your downvote. I'm one of the few that believe a comment should be required for an upvote on HN because there are simply too many reasonable comments that get slammed without explanation (not saying my comment was unreasonable, just applauding your comment in response).

Third, I disagree with you. Even on a plain scan of the page, the very first thing he has up there is one of the videos he was supposed to turn in before termination that he mysteriously:

a) brought home, which wasn't his property

b) couldn't find upon request

That opens the piece as disingenuous and the rest follows from there.

The entire piece reads as a cry for attention which of course we are all giving him.
See pessimizer's comment:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500938
Personally, what I got from that statement was that the author didn't think the issue was serious enough to pursue the investigation, and is an honest person so didn't feel it necessary to conceal his intent.

Google totally made the wrong call here, because as you say, someone who was looking to write a deep, hard-hitting muckraking piece probably would have lied.
Right. That's because a brick wall, marketing collateral and sewage or water or gas pipes are physical goods. You can in fact, "take" their products. Nobody can tell if you make a copy. In fact for digital music, technically speaking, copying is required to reproduce the actual sound waves.

Also, in the real world, you've got contracts between the buyer of a good or service and the manufacturer of a good, or the provider of a service. It's a civil law problem if one doesn't pay. The "intellectual property" maximalists are asking to make infringements (note: not theft) a criminal offense, which is government support.
...Isn't registration still free? How is it not publicly visible if other hackers (HNers) can view it? I think I will add my email anyway... I am not anonymous. Just wondering about your logic.
Ask HN: Have you written a book?
I bet a lot of us have, since this is a group that is inclined towards A) intellectual pursuits, and B) making cool things. I'd be really interested to see what kinds of books we've all made. They don't need to be published through the traditional process. In fact, I'm actually more curious to see creative ways good hackers have gotten their ideas out there.

So, if you've written a book, would you link to it and talk a little bit about what it's all about?
But isn't bitcoin supposed to not just work but actually be somehow better than ordinary currency?

Wouldn't that include being more stable? Or am I missing something?
I'm sorry to say it. But this is all mostly misguided advice. No context whatsoever
Migrating to Public Cloud
The credibility of the story isn't the issue, the issue is it's sensationalist nature

These are the contract workers of a company that was hired by Google and as it is typical of contract workers and low wage jobs they are mostly (and sadly) minorities.

They don't have access to Google's perks because they are not Google employees, their paychecks and amenities are taken cared of by their contractors.

Security personnel get involved when people are snooping around company grounds this is all procedural, lets not take this stuff out of perspective.

Edit:

@neilk: there is nothing wrong going on. There are full time 401k employees and temp/contract low wage ones the author is representing it as if he uncovered a wrongdoing and was stopped from investigating it which is delusional.

Edit 2:

@neilk: It could be because their book scanning project is the subject of court cases and lawsuits and an overall sensitive project that some of it's inner workings they prefer to keep hidden, or maybe because he's not a Google employee and they weren't certain of his intentions so they played it safe, or because it's not the most glamorous part of their business, or a thousand other justifications, but as you mentioned it's all within their right.
Cmd+Space works as a pretty decent app launcher, functioning pretty much exactly the same way as Natty's new Super key which acts a lot like Vista/7's search/start menu.

I still don't see why Ubuntu's is better. It's cool how it slightly blurs the line between installed applications and available applications, but that's it.
No, they don't. But things have a way of squeaking out anyways. For better or worse, Google bears the burden of being characterized as a geek Shangri-La; where justice and intelligence reign supreme and everyone gets richer.

Is it fair? No. But Google's used that perception a lot in the past and their justifiably worried about losing that good reputation, given their increasing difficulties with retention and hiring.

A scandal about 3rd class workers with untouchable status is the last thing Google needs right now. They should have handled this better.
I'm not totally sure. I hear there will be BitCoin-shaped cookies and some games.
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> working class salaries have stagnated and shrunk relative to baseline inflation, and definitely shrunk relative to household costs like healthcare and gasoline.

The way "baseline inflation" is measured (through the CPI) involves a growing baseline. Salaries/incomes have stagnated relative to that not-really-a-baseline, but that's not really a meaningful way to look at working class economics.

I know yummyfajitas has challenged you on this point in the past, and I don't recall seeing you ever answer it, so I'm going to repeat it: over the time period in question, can you produce any reasonable list of "household costs" under which working class families now are not better off than working class families in the 1960s?

Even gas prices aren't very far outside the norm. In 1960 a gallon of gas was 31 cents and the "national wage index" was right around 4000; at the start of this year a gallon of gas was $3.09, and the most recent NWI data I can find (2009) was just over 40,000. This summer's run-up is not out of line with past fluctuations.
HBO GO Out Now In Android Market, Stream On The Go
Nice try, spammers
The email field is invisible. If you add it to your profile it's world-visible. I still think the usefulness outweighs spam risk, though.
Future cloudy, ask again later :) Because of the way our JIT is written it would be entirely possible for us to branch for py3k and put JIT improvements on both with relatively little effort, it's likely that at least our next release will still be 2.x and just feature optimizations though.
Thank you. Creating lists in Facebook only let's you filter news feed but doesn't allow you to post to them. With circles, not only can you filter out to just see friends in that circle but you can also post updates that will only be seen by them.
ye hence my past tense because I couldn't recall one from more recent products. that sounds like a reasonable reason why they don't do it anymore
They should have just used QlikView - its proprietary but blazing fast..
Sounded like they were moving towards a different encoding though. Is this still valid? http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=201#c1
It's been pretty useful before. Wanting to contact other HN'ers about specific things is fairly common and there's no private messaging system. I agree that it would help if PG could add a contact link, but he seems a bit busy lately.
Its how "they" work, whether or not "they" are capitalists, if they're in a capitalist system.

Oh, paranoia! Point being, it isn't that the people are capitalists, just that the culture allows self interest based threats...

I may be letting paranoia get my goat, but it seems to me that lots of people are coming down horribly heavily on this blog post, and I wonder if its some form of a pr case being built against the poster.
Thanks, though some of the comments here are negative, they are still very helpful. Also, the CSS framework did start with blueprint but as the application progresses, so did the CSS and markup.
Sigh... I wish Linux (and Ubuntu in this case) were better at UI/UX. But still, it's so clearly designed by programmers (not always a bad thing, but sadly more often than not).

So what's called out here as being good? Well. Subcategories. Average users don't respond well to taxonomy, generally. People are also not good at classifying. So in that example shown, what's the difference between "Arcade" and "Sports"? I've played football games in Arcades. Where should users look?

More: "Some items can be bought, others just downloaded" Cool, where can I filter so I only see free apps? Because it's nowhere in the screen shots, and I will bet money that it's the first thing a sizeable percentage of users want to do. Which would be known, had any user testing been done. I hope it was, but I'm guessing not.

I could be nit-picky - "Get Software" vs. "Installed Software" - they're not even the same tense. Imperative tense is commonly interpreted by users as causing an action to happen, not a categorisation. I could go on too, merrily burning karma as I go, but all I see when I look at this is how far it has to go, not how great it is. Don't get me wrong, the Apple version is by no means perfect, but I bet it performs better in tests with actual users.

Someone needs to get a real UX team together and actually sit down for a real project - not "someone and their favourite futuristic GUI idea for the next version". I would hope that Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc. have the budget to do that, but I see little sign of it.
I see many recommendations here, and in prior discussions, to use bcrypt. Having finally actually looked up how bcrypt works, I have two concerns.

1. It uses Blowfish, but it modifies how the key schedule and S-boxes are set up. Doesn't that essentially make it no longer Blowfish, but rather Blowfish inspired? Blowfish has a long history and has been well studied. By fiddling with it, don't they throw that out?

2. Suppose you are storing passwords encrypted using bcrypt with a cost factor of n. You decide to increase that to m. How do you compute the new hashes for existing passwords? From the description of the algorithm in their paper, it looks to me like you can only do this by having the original, plaintext password. Thus you can only strengthen a stored password when the user logs in, so you can compute the new stored password.

Both of the above issues could be addressed by doing something like the following. What advantages does bcrypt have over something like this?

hash_password(start, cost, salt, pass)
h = pass
for i = start to cost
h = sha256(i . ":" . salt . ":" . h)
return h

To store password p1, with salt s1, and cost c1, compute h1=hash_password(1,c1,s1,p1). Store (c1,s1,h1).

To later update this to a higher cost, c2, compute h2=hash_password(c1+1,c2,s1,h1), and store (c2,s1,h2).
Thanks! In case someone is interested: After 7 days, the gross sales are now 4300$ and my revenue 3000$.
I'll make and update today to include screenshots on the sign up page.
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"
well, I'm not a bitcoin veteran, but I lost a few bucks to the e-gold thing; what's to keep bitcoin from suffering the same fate?
This reflects badly on CompuTrace and they could certainly have taken steps to ensure that Toshiba's use of their tools didn't affect their business prospects. That they have a "Hey, do what you want with it. We don't care." approach to sales makes me wonder who else is buying from them. As above it appears IBM is on the list as well (unverified).
Sure a screenshot I can do. And update will come shortly :)
Hands-on GIMP 2.7.2 review
7 Things We Learned this Sprint
Experimenting with public Sprint Reviews
If this is a typical arrangement that companies often make, why is it sensational?

@yanw: I agree there's nothing wrong going on, and everyone is within their rights. What's wrong with taking a picture of it? And before you reply that all photography on campus is supposed to be discouraged, you're right, but in practice nobody enforces that policy if you're taking pictures of other parts of Google. There are tons of photos on Flickr.
Overlapping circles is a feature in the works ;)