skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't interpret the responses here as anti-labor. There hasn't been much or any union-bashing or pro-big-corporation sentiment on this thread.

Rather, I think most of those who have criticized Andrew are responding to his seeming naivete. I say "seeming" because I'm skeptical that he didn't see this coming. Would he not have been able to guess that his emails would escalate the situation, rather than defuse it?

When you say you're videotaping employees to explore issues of race and class, it sounds like you're doing an exposé. That may or may not be your intent, but when you combine race, class, and unauthorized videotaping in your project summary, it kind of pigeonholes you into the exposé genre.

So Google was worried that Andrew was going to ask leading questions, pull some quotations out of context, tie it all together with pointed narration, and put it on YouTube with a title like "Race and Class Warfare at Google."

Maybe Google shouldn't have jumped to that conclusion; maybe they should have spent more time with Andrew and ascertained exactly what he was planning before having him fired. Or maybe they should take a more liberal view and declare a universal policy of free speech by employees and contractors. I'm not saying Google acted exactly as I'd have hoped, but it seems to me that they acted predictably, if nothing else. The only thing that surprises me is that Andrew didn't expect this to happen.
Taking Real Breaks With The Pomodoro Technique
Working slot machines? Please tell me more...
I believe Schmidt's statement was about activities online.
Consumer Reports:

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/2011/jan...
Some people have no sense of humor. Thanks for the laugh.
hello, care to elaborate the technology stack? :)
It is quite true, atleast in the stock markets, atleast for the short term.
> Let's face it, if they were doing something legal they wouldn't care if they were getting videotaped.

That is, quite simply, not true. Companies have all manner of secrets that are important for their business. There's nothing intrinsically nefarious about trade secrets, and those sometimes extend even into soft things like processes and organization. There's nothing illegal about Google's search code, but they sure as hell wouldn't want someone taping that and publishing it.
However you interpret the current situation, the patent and copyright clause is certainly not operating as intended by its authors.
Bitcoin hits US$ 4, after being mentioned on CNN yesterday
Virtual Youtube
Yeah, there's a lot of research required for a project like this, so much so that I don't think one person could cover all the bases. Another reason I turned to HN.

Like you mentioned before, most of the bigger companies that need this level of power already have it. But the real question we need to ask is, do they want it? Does a cheaper price, less maintenance and greater amounts of power qualify for a transition to third-party cloud-computing? Or would security and the ability to fix any in-house issues out-weigh those?

As far as the server configuration, that's not my specific expertise, so that I'm not sure, but that sounds like a viable solution.

I think I'm going to write up an article on posterous about this, I'm interested to see how many people I can get interested in a project like this, in order to determine if I should dedicate any time to it.

I'll go into more details, such as specifications, features, issues and what the project hopes to solve. I'll post it as a "Show HN" when I get it finished, I'll also reply to to this comment so you know when it's up.

Also, sorry for the delayed response, in the middle of a flight to HK.
>> Let's face it, if they were doing something legal they wouldn't care if they were getting videotaped.

>That is, quite simply, not true. Companies have all manner of secrets that are important for their business.

While I agree with you on the "privacy is only for those who have something to hide fallacy", in this case he was filming in the parking lot. If Google had their trade secrets in view from the parking lot, they cease to be trade secrets.
totally agree with that statement, look at the massive output in php vs the simple readable rb code
Why is it such a surprise that different kinds of employees are treated differently and receive different perks? If I went to any factory in the US I wouldn't expect to see the janitors being picked up and dropped in limousines, or the housekeeping staff joining in on the company vacations. This isn't exactly the same thing, but it's like complaining that construction workers don't get paid as much as architects and investors.
I don't foresee many problems with adopting Dylan-like macros to the C syntax (they're both Algol-derived anyhow), but again this is all up in the air :)

The C syntax is pretty much set. Switching at this state would do more harm than good, and we think that in the long term syntax is less important than semantics.
The fault lies with Toshiba. I have a Dell Studio laptop and CompuTrace is an option in the BIOS - once enabled, it can't be disabled (I haven't actually tried wiping the EEPROM) but it's an option nonetheless.
Sorry, but I want to be able to run the CHKDSK tool. No matter how "technical" the company is and how respectful is their CTO.

Their software kills the standard "autochk.exe" file, making it impossible to fix basic disk errors.
Those are the exact same(!) books I would recommend. The only different thing I would write is an added "... if any".
For one thing, wrongful firing and wrongful failure-to-hire lawsuits are common and painful. No one wants to give the employment trolls more ammunition.
There is a huuuuuuuuuuugly important distinction that has to be made here:

The “Book Scanners” are NOT Google employees!!!!!

They are the workers of a company that was hired by Google to do this monotonous physical labor, you know CONTRACT WORKERS!

That’s why they don’t get any rocket-ships made of chocolate Lego bricks or whatever perks Google employees get.

As for security getting involved that is procedure!! and exactly what happens when you go snooping around on company grounds.

This this whole post is nothing but sensationalist rambling and delusional nonsense.
"Microsoft should also give a raise to whichever executive decided to scuttle the potential Yahoo acquisition, a few years back"

They should give Jerry Yang a raise?
What Safari’s “Reading List” in Lion means for Instapaper
I don't think he is a Google employee. He is a Google aficionado perhaps, but likely not an employee.
Achilles Defense (Clash RIP-OFF)
I checked it out, and didn't end up signing up because I have no idea what it actually does.

I know you say it allows you to put people into circle, but how does it do that? Does it work with existing social networks, or is it an entirely new one that I would have to get my friends to use in order to take advantage of the circles?

It would probably be more useful at first to integrate with existing social networks because the only my techie friends would signup for a site like this. So in a way it's self organizing.
Is university the answer for future designers?
Are you saying there hasn't been a significant anti-labor campaign the last 40 years? Take a look at attitudes towards American Labor in the 50s-60s and now. Big difference, right?

Sure there's a difference, but I wouldn't attribute even half of that difference to some kind of vast propaganda campaign.
But the author himself was also a contract worker and he got more benefits than the yellow-badge workers.
I'd be very surprised if the the building was filled with only 'people of color' but that's not really the point anyway. If you've bothered to actually do any research, you'll find that tons of 'people of color' who are brilliant engineers, lawyers and execs are everywhere in the company, including the top management. If more people of color apply for jobs that do not require high qualifications then that situation is a reflection of society, not some racist conspiracy a certain class of people.
I see, in this thread, a lot of good examples wrt good python books, but the nature of the question left me to wonder. When I hear "What is the K&R of X", it makes me think of "what is the book, preferably by the creator of the language, that represent, most faithfully, the spirit of the language".

For example, compare Programming Perl (aka the Camel book) to K&R, the former is a long, didactic, journey through Perl's linguistic building blocks, while the latter is a laconic, technical, concise guide to C. I think these also embody the philosophy and nature of these languages.
Another example would be Lisp/Scheme books that tend to be academic, and theoretical.
Interestingly I don't see anything wrong with the 2nd half of the motor dysgraphia sample. I have tons of friends who write like that. Here's an example of George Carlin's handwriting:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/04/romantic-mr-carlin.html

I don't think you can take that alone as a symptom. The pain should be pretty indicative though.
Here's the article on which it was mentioned:

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/29/4-trends-...

It was also mentioned on Forbes recently:

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0509/technology-psilocybin...
Designers Envision Eco-Friendly Camper For Tech Lovers
If you want a comprehensive introduction to Python that has no prerequisites, check out "Learning Python" by Mark Lutz. Unlike certain other so-called "introductory texts" this one doesn't presume that you're an expert in similar languages just picking up syntax.
Then his company got a better contract.
I also fail to find the treatment of the yellow badge employees surprising or unreasonable. Just like you said, the only reason people find it interesting is because the yellow badges work next to employees with some of the most well known perks in the industry.

Why does this juxtaposition come about in the first place? It seems to me that the amount of effort an employer will want to go through to keep/attract a certain type of employee is proportional to how much effort they would have to expend to replace that employee. I would argue it is relatively more difficult to replace campus workers than ScanOps personnel (since campus workers are higher skilled and also must become acclimated to the campus on the terms of the employer, while ScanOps can just sign up and start scanning), Google doesn't expend the same effort to keep the employee. Nothing nefarious is at work; a large profitable company is trying to stay that way.

That being said, the reaction Google had does seem a bit over the top, but I would agree that this is mostly the fault of Andrew's tone.
Since I don't write all that often, my hand gets tired quickly and I start joining block letters after a relatively short number of sentences. The suggestion of the article is that we teach children an efficient cursive style of writing from the beginning. In a lot of cases that's already being done with D'Nealian handwriting.

Even better, in my opinion, would be the Icelandic italic movement, as detailed at http://briem.net (check out "Quick results, easy work.)
I bet I can cut through that thing with a sawzall in about 5 seconds or less. Titanium, unlike steel, can't be case hardened, and it cuts like butter. Case hardened steel is hard to cut because the outside is as hard as the saw blade.

They know that lock doesn't stand up to a sawzall, so they aren't marketing it based on the security, because it will quicky be proven insecure.
Android Market eclipsed the Apple App Store in terms of free apps
There are some legendary stories about what happens when Apple enters your market. I think Marco's right that he's pretty safe on the Instapaper front (for the reasons he says). That said, here's another tale of Apple entering a market, written by Cabel Sasser at Panic about Audion:

http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
This is either a bubble or probably the most awesome J-curve of the decade.

Either way, I am waiting to see what happens. I have more than enough bitcoin for a black swan hedge. I am also going to be with bitcoin to the bitter end or the ultimate victory over state-controlled monetary system.
The blog author made his fair share of 'nasty name-calling' as well (bordering on slander, really).
It looks like had I know the article was going to air, I could have doubled my money almost overnight. I would expect the price to stop dropping any time now.
Who do I need to speak to to get Google Talk to not suck? I get signed out several times per hour on my phone, several times per-day through the web interface, and I have a list of bugs as long as my arm I could give you (although perhaps some of these bugs are XMPP rather than Google bugs, I don't know which are which).

The funny thing is that if you actually made Google Talk good, it could easily be the #1 chat application. XMPP Transports are far and away the best solution for managing presence on multiple protocols, if Google provided reliable transports for AIM, Live, FB etc then, combined with the (absolutely awesome) centralised chat history feature you could definitely win users over (I have set up transports on my Google account anyway using Gajim and hot-chilli.net, and it's brilliant). However, GTalk doesn't support XEP-0030 or XEP-0144 which make the process a lot nicer.

Lastly, the desktop and web clients are both a complete joke. The web client can become disconnected without "realising" so your messages go into a black hole, and the desktop client steals focus which is an instant uninstall for me and for many other users.

Perhaps I'm being naive, but the problem of sending a message to a person and making sure they definitely get that message does not seem to be difficult. It works with very high reliability through GMail, for example, or when posting a comment on Hacker News... but for some reason as soon as we are in the domain of "IM" then reliability becomes a serious issue (except with Skype, which is the only IM client that gets this right (and that is the ONLY thing that Skype gets right)).

TLDR: Please make Google Talk good, because it really has huge potential and already has some massive advantages against the competition. Right now though, it has so many huge problems that frankly I think adding video message support is like polishing the brass on the Titanic.
Everything is a "thing" now days :)
Miley Cyrus celebra primer concierto en Sudamérica
Here's my take on on the design (which should be priority #1 if you think the idea is any good):

Minimize the number of font styles. I'm counting over 10 distinct size/face/color/decoration combinations. Cutting that down to 3 or so will reduce the ugly tremendously.

Also try to figure out what you want users to read first, next, etc and figure out a structure where that feels more natural. At the moment, I'm totally confused when I look at it.

I'd also try to come up with a more concise description of what the site does. After reading the description on the left, I'm still kind of confused.
You generalized my generation and "many of the posters here on HN" as being "co-opted" and basically not thinking for ourselves.

This is the wrong board to go making that kind of assertion dude.
No, he is attacking capitalism, he wants the World Soviet where we are all slaves of the, or at least of some, government.
Many states allow ridiculous non-compete agreements.

(Fortunately not California, which is one reason so many startups are located here.)
They might be contracted by another company with shittier terms. And Google doesn't have to make it's inner workings public.
Thanks for the additional info.

It does seem like this is mainly awkward for Chrome. But probably not a big deal.
This is a good point. As a techie, I would not know where/how to find such a person. Anyways the founders should be allowed to represent the corporation, but apparently that is not allowed. Requiring to hire lawyers seems not to be true to the spirit of judiciary. I represented myself and got my green card in two months.
Drupal is a great framework and much more. IMHO using something like Drupal is a higher order of development and we should be building with the bigger pieces that such a tool provides rather than having religious wars over languages. Sure language X or Y may be more elegant or faster at building feature A but feature A has been built over and over again. So why not build on top of something that already provides commodity feature A and concentrate on building the unique features?
So say I'd have a blog with a huge reach. I hear about bitcoins. I buy a million for $4 each. I blog about it. Next day it's at $8. I'd sell the bitcoins, maybe 10000 a day to not let the market crash, and in 3.5 months I've got $4 million more than I used to.
You've got most of the working class opposed to the idea of organized labor during a period of time when working class salaries have stagnated and shrunk relative to baseline inflation, and definitely shrunk relative to household costs like healthcare and gasoline.

Yeah, I'm sure they're against it because they're scholars of austrian economics. They probably read Hayek to their kids when they get home from their shift at the Sunoco.

Here's a question. Read my first paragraph again, that's all basically true.. how often is that picture painted in the media? Almost never? How often is the opposite picture painted of unions being a bunch of quote "thugs"? Hmm.. That sure sounds like a multi-decade propaganda campaign to me.
I will love it if in a couple of years the mainstream implementation of Python is PyPy. People are going to be upgrading their Python installations anyway when they move to Python 3. If y'all can get Python 3 support in, maybe people will switch to PyPy at the same time.

I just wish Google would throw some support your way.
I've been watching the price of BTC rise pretty steadily in the last few days but I can't bring myself to believe that this price range is in any way sustainable. $4 per bitcoin? Not even the EUR and GBP have ever reached that in my recollection. I guess it if does stay like this mining is going to become pretty lucrative and certainly financially worth it.
It's a still small, unregulated market, so yeah, you could probably do that.
"In fact, cursive writing is a bit like sex: Youngsters are going to do it whether we like it or not"

I think that's ignoring the point. The question to whether or not to teach cursive isn't top down, based on some ideological desire of some school administrators. No, it's because the teachers and administration are noticing that the students aren't writing in cursive, and it's a waste to be expending class time on improving a skill which will never be utilized when there are more productive uses of that time.

I remember in third and fourth grade the teachers kept saying that by the time we reached high school there was an expectation that everyone was proficient in writing cursive, that all our assignments must be written in cursive. That was the last time I've had to write cursive. Sure the plural of anecdote is not evidence but I've yet to encounter a situation where cursive isn't effectively dead.

There's no way you can ignore printed script, because nearly all the text that anyone will ever encounter is print-style. Writing in print and learning to read is a pretty obvious combination. Expecting to learn to read one way and write another is unrealistic.

I can't imagine the argument that cursive is more _readable_. Certainly cursive is often pretty, and that may lend the claimed aesthetic quality, but readability beats aesthetics for content any day.
How Synchronization works in Java?
Glad to see positive feedback about the PATO proposal. I can't claim credit for originality -- but I was glad that, when I thought of it independently, I was quickly able to discover John Walker's proposal.
"Failures are the stepping stones to success. Without failure, we’ll never learn how to succeed. So try to fail, instead of trying to avoid failure through fear."

I don't know how this one has hung around for so long (seems like a cultural cornerstone of valiance), but I find it just plain wrong. The first part of it (stepping stones) is reasonable, but the second part is doing a great disservice for those struggling every day to try and achieve their form of success.

Suggesting and encouraging failure is not the same as embracing and supporting it when it happens, and the author seems to be conflating the two.
Ubuntu AppStore: Like Apple AppStore, but with less Suck
Ask HN: Database of automobiles
Does a database or API exist with automobile make, model, year, and other features? Particularly interested in fuel efficiency for particular models. I've searched and haven't been able to find any good options. Thanks!
Indeed. I know of a case in the past where Google expressed concern about something a contractor had done, and the contracting agency immediately fired them. Google then turned around and demanded the worker be rehired with backpay (which the contracting company also did) because the concerns were nowhere near firing level.

It seems that when a customer says "jump", a contracting firm doesn't even paused to ask "how high?"
Not sure if this comparison means anything. This result could easily be due to applications switching from paid to ad-based when porting from iOS to Android.

Example: Angry Birds
What I learned from working with my first client
That's essentially what hacker news does.
Trance / Progressive music gives me a good flow and energy. Tracks of Armin Van Buuren, Carl Cox, Deadmau5 and Tiesto works great for me while coding.
About Research Topic Ideas
Not all students are conversant with coming up with good research topic ideas. These students should understand how research topic ideas are formulated in order to be able to come up with them. This article will help them in this regard.
...which does not, in fact, suddenly make it acceptable for others to follow suit.
If someone forces me to write anything more than my name and/or address on paper I use cursive. I make it completely illegible and unreadable on purpose. It's total gibberish. This way they will never ask me to do it again. Almost always works.
I disagree, for instance, here's a (IMO) exact description of the K&R 'relevance':

"It's not even a very good way to learn C. The idioms and best-practices for C programming have evolved substantially, even since the second edition was published, and some of the code samples look a bit dated."
And this is from 2004, meaning it got even more dated.(http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ten-great-books)

The reason K&R is still the canonical C book is because it represents the language better than any other book, before or since, not because the language stagnated since ANSI C was created.
Firefox's AwesomeBar Getting Better Than Chrome's OmniBox
"This is either a bubble or probably the most awesome J-curve of the decade."

The average American isn't smart enough to understand what bitcoin is, how it works, how to buy them, how to spend them, etc. In five years bitcoin is going to be just another failed standard like i-names or GPG, something that doesn't ever get used except for in very niche enterprise usecases or when nerds are trying to impress other nerds.
Ask HN: How Can We Improve Our Landing Pages?
We are a recently launched company making software for people in the construction industry. We have our own custom landing pages that are each attached to their own PPC ad groups. Conversion has met our expectations so far but it could always be better. We forewent services like Unbounce to keep costs down.

What could be improved or changed on the following landing pages?

Note that there are two products in play here: our primary one which is a subscription based web service and a secondary one which is a one-time payment template for estimating.

Page 1 (for our primary product): http://bit.ly/ldULC6

Page 2 (for our primary product): http://bit.ly/iXVszi

Page 3 (for our secondary product):http://bit.ly/lK0a88