skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is that because it has been tried and failed, or do you think there are exploitable opportunities in this area?
So market cap size legitimizes poor etiquette and borderline anti-social behavior?
Facebook newsfeed rollups: Attention hoarding behavior
As an enterprise software stack, .NET may be fine and competitive. However, the reasons that make it a good enterprise stack work against it in the startup space.

Take the example of a web page returning JSON. In Rails there's a prescribed way to do this. It is generally straight forward and one gets it done literally after 5 minutes of tutorials.

In .NET, you have to install the WCF REST stack, learn about endpoints, bindings, the difference between Raw, and wrapped formats, then there are authorization behaviors (tokens, windows integrated etc etc). Mess around with service hosts in IIS and then pray it works. With everything being pluggable, there is no simple prescriptive method to get code working and moving on to the next feature. The stack is so complicated that blog posts even by MS employees contain errors which stay uncorrected. I have spent two days trying to figure out what is the best practice for uploading a large file to a web service and the combination of options are simply bewildering and with so many parts one wonders if it is going to work at all.

Now imagine this struggle being repeated in every aspect of your development. You will spend the day stepping through Factories and Hosts and Locators using Reflector.exe before finding the little bit of code that does what you want. Then you swear at MS because it is marked "internal" and you can't monkey patch it.

This syndrome is in part due to the size of Microsoft. MS would never dare release software that wasn't pluggable because it has a big audience and big audiences want a clear delineation between what is their code and what is maintained by Microsoft. The startup ecosystem just wants to hack code until it works and get things done. No startup developer can really devote the necessary time to the study of large software stacks before sending out a piece of string.

MS has done an outstanding back-to-basics job with WebMatrix and its PHP-like simplicity. However, it is still a long way behind in other respect.

For example, MS doesn't cultivate a community the way open source projects do. There is no central place to find able consultants, or centralized Planet-style feeds, or given provide a site where users can contribute tutorials. The employees are answering forums in their free time (I saw some post at midnight, and this is devotion, but the msdn forums are literary broken - you can see the answers being doubled up in the rendered page but no one fixes them). The experience simply reeks of helplessness on the poor MS-employees' part because someone else in the company has created such a shitty place for developer interaction.
Instead join my cult, the Cult of Do-ing.
Righthaven hit with class-action counterclaim
Thanks! git-subtree looks very useful. Have you used it extensively? Any gotchas?
sfuga or suga as in sugar

dont know if there are trademarks or if url is available tho
My first day at Google was yesterday. The interview process was a typical full day affair with questions ranging from algorithms to large scale systems design. I had a blast, and definitely stumbled on some questions, but I found it infinitely enjoyable. HR was responsive and helped me find an Android plushie for my girlfriend.

To be fair, I definitely believe all of these horror stories are true and deserved. I think that Google just operates at such a ridiculous scale that it's hard to get everything working together just right. I believe "the system works" in the majority case, but that outliers are particularly bad.
That was my thought as well, but then I thought that the requirements might be different here. git-subtree would allow you to create a git repository (with history) from a directory in a pre-existing repository. You could them just 'git rm -r' the directory from the original repository, but I'm not sure if the requirements here are to completely remove the history of that directory from the original repository too (because git-subtree doesn't do that, to my knowledge).
On Founding a Software House
Surely you can't be unaware that the JVM has a JIT?
I think they pay for a fair amount of Haskell work, no? Not that it'll impact the world directly, but a lot of that stuff "trickles down" eventually.
If they have over 20,000 employees and "they cannot find people to hire fast enough"... then perhaps they should impose even stricter hiring standards so they they don't end up with 10's of thousands of employees who are of such low value that they need to keep hiring more.

Google's main problems are not in hiring more people... it is in putting the (extremely high calibre) employees that they already have to work on concise and appropriate projects that will advance the future of the company in the right direction. Google needs to focus on its management decisions and project creation / execution strategy much more heavily that it needs to focus on the hurt feelings of coders who didn't have what it takes to get in the door.
>you have to respect what I say unless you prove that I'm wrong

the ideology is like a religion, both are outside of the realm of reason, any attempts to prove something in that realm is stupid and futile.

Respect it? What for?
Is it really a problem to pay for the software you run when you make more than $1M/year in revenue?
Thanks, glad you like the demo video!

The inspiration for Optimizely came out of similar frustrations when I was the Director of Analytics during the Obama campaign. We went through a long drawn-out sales process with Omniture Test & Target when all we really wanted was a short demo of the product. Hopefully we've done a good job of building a product that is easy to use and understand so we can avoid doing a 30 minute presentation to explain how it works. We're building the product I WISH we had back during the campaign.

We're actually thinking of putting together a series of short videos showcasing different features of the product similar to how Splunk does this: http://www.splunk.com/videos

Is this something you'd be interested in?
Erm, it's a spreadsheet program, so the data source is your spreadsheet. So if you can get your SQL data into a Google Spreadsheet, you can make a pivot table out of it.
I sort of agree with everyone who says "talk to a lawyer", but once you start communicating via lawyers it's more likely that everyone loses. When I say sit down, I suggest meeting in some neutral territory in an off the record context. If you are past this then you need to lawyer up.
I've always thought that WebOS was a much more suited mobile OS for Google than Android is. WebOS is more compatible with Google's web vision, and if they had WebOS they wouldn't even need ChromeOS anymore. It's a shame WebOS didn't appear sooner, before Google bought/launched Android.
My favorite part is the subtle Blackberry notification sounds throughout the video.
No, being a company that is built upon and successful due to its engineering culture does. Engineers are notoriously the most anti-social and lacking in etiquette of almost all professionals. Anti-social behavior is what drives most of us into engineering in the first place.

Google's hiring practices are simply a reflection of the type of people that they have to hire in order to be successful as the organization that they are: By engineers, for engineers, of engineers.

There are plenty of other (GREAT) companies out there to work for if you don't like the way Google does business or hires for that matter. The only reason people are whining is that they know exactly how AMAZING it is if you are lucky enough to work at Google (great pay, benefits, food, massages, etc, etc, etc)... and they are embittered by the fact that Google said they weren't good enough.

Rejection is always painful... but its best to take your dignity with you and move on when it doesn't go your way.
Do a DNS lookup -- both point to same ip:

veyron:~ veyron$ nslookup

> hackerne.ws

Server: 192.168.1.1

Address: 192.168.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: hackerne.ws

Address: 174.132.225.106

> news.ycombinator.com

Server: 192.168.1.1

Address: 192.168.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:

Name: news.ycombinator.com

Address: 174.132.225.106

> ^D
Declaring WP7 dead in the water after 1 batch of phones is like saying Android was dead after the first couple phones fizzled. The upside certainly doesn't look as good but the fact is these OS's all seem to launch in beta and most of the market is brand new customers not locked into anything yet.

Open sourcing Web OS would remove all chance HP has to profit from it. I think there's a good chance HP, MS and others will follow RIMs lead and leverage Android's ecosystem (and/or Chrome's) while bribing the high profile app developers for native ports of the highest demand apps.
Mockdown: Mockups for Hackers
I think it may be a bit of a problem being a project from Google. Making the system totally secure is a difficult task. That is true for all sandboxes. People find vulnerabilities, people fix the holes.

The problem is not that NaCl is insufficiently secure, but any vulnerability will be spun as "Google making your system insecure". I think an independent group doing the same thing would be no more or less secure, but wouldn't have the baggage that would come from being seen as a component of a much bigger entity.
> Visual Studio .Net (huge)

Funny, I'm currently in a mode of development where I switch daily between Eclipse/Java and Visual Studio / C#, and as far as I'm concerned Eclipse is the best thing Java has going for it. The refactoring and code navigation are miles ahead of what seems to come with Visual Studio. I find myself renaming methods and classes almost indulgently - just to see if I feel better about the name a different way. Having errors instantly highlighted across the whole build tree every time I save is awesome as well. Visual Studio seems quite primitive by comparison in a lot of respects.

My frustrations with Java are much more about the language and how it hasn't really progressed at all in 5 years.

NB: I am using Visual Studio 2008, perhaps 2010 advanced a lot.
According to this: http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=37603

there's a maximum of 400k cells, 256 columns/sheet
Sounds to me like it's implying that if you aren't in "not knowing" then you know enough to act and better be doing so.
Also, doesn't this fly in the face of Google's heavy reliance on internally developed tools?

In my Google interviews, they made it clear I should just name a language I know to solve the problems on the white board, not because they particularly cared about the language, but because they wanted to see my thought process solving a problem in a real programming language. Of course, it had to be one of Google's "approved" languages, but I just thought that was so they could assign an interviewer who could assess the quality of the solution.

When did they start caring about "X years experience in language Y" just like all the ignorant technology recruiters out there?
I am a knee-jerk Microsoft hater (with reasons I won't bore you with). Last fall I saw a bank developer giving a demo of how to build a system using F# and accessing the the windows GUIs library on .Net. I have to say it was very, very nice and powerful. I was half tempted...
I am a grad student in Bioinformatics, and I have my BS in Biology.

I'd say that the field is limited by computer science, not biology. Especially in the high-throughput sequencing field. Currently, the acceleration of DNA sequencing data production is out-pacing Moore's law. It costs more to analyze DNA sequences than to generate them. Also, for some reason, CS people don't seem to be that attracted to bioinformatics.

So, I'd suggest stating focused on CS and Statistics. The biology that you would need to learn in order to understand current hard problems is easy to pick up.

Have you looked at Counsyl?
MS has had its own video conferencing via MSN messenger for years. I don't see the value of spending 8.5 billion in order to get Skype's tech - I would think that money would be better spent on a very fat pipe on which to run the live video.
The Kindle For PC 1969 Bug
So Patrick wahts a good way to guard against this?

Make the blog have a separate category called "Essays" ? Have it downloadable as a pdf ?
Developers Prefer GPL, Enterprises Prefer Apache
Facebook email is live
I fail to see any threads on this (am I blind?) so I will just start one.
Would you credit Microsoft or Prime Sense for the Kinect?
MS Research has been working on the life tracking hardware / software combo for awhile now. Which is something I've personally been interested in and I think is going to be huge going forward, especially with facebook getting people accustomed to a privacy free world. I just don't know how to turn that future technology into profits for me yet.

I expect lots of people to opt into a device the records their conversations... locations... images of the people around them... And the collates into some useable data using voice recognition + facial recognition + voice-to-text

The resultant data could be searchable by person... And bring up every picture of the person.. every conversation.. a map of locations where that person was with you (picture or voice)... etc... Anyway, MS Research has been working on similar stuff and I for one think that is going to be awesome technology someday.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/09/06/life-recorders-may-be-this-...

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/se...
I wrote it after the session, actually...which I was unable to attend because I went to the damn press briefing. Alas. I didn't find out until later when speaking with someone from Google and they told me all about it. Alas, I didn't know about the last minute change...and was annoyed I couldn't be at that session. :)
Which, to the questioner's point, ships maybe in quantity m's whereas the iPad ships in quantity mm's
While your intentions are undoubtedly admirable, and you certainly more than likely have very valid reasons for not "pulling crap like this" (not burning bridges, for one), I hope you're not mistaken by some baseless belief that any company would extend you the same courtesy.
Microsoft acquired the Kinect technology.
Swype's tech? Who wants that? Now Skype' name/brand/subscribers/creditcards on the other hand...
Calendaring may be intrinsically web, but humans aren't. At the very least you need a local client that allows you to get at the information in your calendar without being connected to the internet.

Ideally, this is a seamless integration. Outlook, for example does this so well you barely feel it.
A PetaByte in 16 BackBlaze PODS in 2 racks? That seems a little "distributed". a POD holds, say, 45 drives. I suppose they weren't using 3tb drives either!

45 drives at 3tb each would be like 1.4 petabytes?
As I mentioned elsewhere Netflix does use Level3, Akamai, and Limelight. So the traffic is mainly coming from CDNs.

I'm not sure if by "content-aware routers" you mean something like Content Centric Networking:

http://www.ccnx.org/

If that's the case it'd be up to the ISPs to push that technology to their infrastructure. Van Jacobson gave a very informative presentation at Netflix about it a couple of months ago. It seems you can watch a similar presentation he gave at Google on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z685OF-PS8
I forgot to mention: people in academia are accustomed to having their data analyzed for free. Now that that's no longer feasible: they're learning how to pay for it ;)
...since about 3 months.
1. the IDS system identifies the IPs of the attackers

2. the IPs are geo-located

3. the Reapers on duty flying closest to the locations receive the targeting info and deliver the Hellfires.

Everything in completely automated mode, no humans involvement needed.
I've interviewed for a summer internship at Google twice: this summer and last. The first time I interviewed with them, they emailed me the same day to tell me that my interview went really well and they'd like to proceed to host matching. Unsure of the way the process worked, I emailed the recruiter a week later to ask what the next steps were. She called me back half an hour later to ask if I had any deadlines, which I didn't. The reason for the delay, she said, was that Google tried to first match returning interns with hosts before new interns. A couple weeks later, I had a phone interview with a host, it went well, and I was assigned to work with him over the summer. That was that.

This summer, I decided I wanted to return to work at Google again, but I had a specific project in mind I wanted to work on. I filled out a form stating my project interests (which were very specific this time around), but no recruiter reached out to me. I talked to one of my colleagues at Google from the previous summer, he talked to HR or something, and I got a new recruiter. Then I went through five host interviews in three days, picked my favorite, and that was that.

So in my experience, the hiring process at Google isn't that bad. It's just that if you have a delay that's too long, you need to follow up.
I think if you read the comments here and elsewhere closely, it's not that people are complaining Google said no -- it's that people are complaining that Google said nothing.
The k-anonymity threshold changes as other datasets are released. If you are looking at a dataset with my zip code in it you can calculate a k-anonymous version of that dataset. As soon as somebody else releases another dataset with my zip code in it you must now consider both, and anything you released earlier is likely to be compromised.
Excel 2011 feels just fine - get the latest version. Excel 2007 was slow as molasses, unbearable.
> It's just that if you have a delay that's too long, you need to follow up.

Please read some of the comments and anecdotes here a little more closely. A lot of people (including myself) followed up on the silence, often in multiple ways, and still got absolutely no response.
It matches you with interviewers that know the languages you say you know well.
Hipster Raises $1M for Local Q&A
In my experience Windows ops/admins don't have anywhere near the depth nor breadth of infrastructure knowledge that *nix ppl do, and I have yet to meet a .NET web developer who knew anything about OS internals.

I'm not ragging on MS devs, just an observation from personal experience. The well-roundedness of the FOSS based software engineers makes them a much better suit for startups than MS people. I don't believe technology superiority really comes into it.
Microsoft Announces Service Pack 1 for Office 2010
I really want someone to use ombop.com
Have you read the Mitnick's book? Sounds like not.
Is there a way to learn .NET stack without downloading lots of stuff/having a student license/licensing things?

I do like C# and have used it for Uni projects in the past, but I've done much more work in Python because starting out in it was as simple as typing "python", or making webapps is as simple as apt-getting or easy_installing a framework and doing a simple tutorial. What is the equivalent of, say, the Flask tutorial, for .NET?
Skeleton: Beautiful Boilerplate for Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Development
FYI, my comment has 4 upvotes.

EDIT: now 8 upvotes...??
Microsoft Research has been involved in many projects and papers, being one of the best R&D centers around.

You're also kind of lazy for asking, as you could simply check their website, which contains a list of projects and papers published: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/research/default.aspx

The problem with Microsoft is that they aren't able to turn all that research into usable products. But that doesn't mean the research isn't valuable, some of the best ideas in the world have been happening ahead of their time you know ;)
Microsoft produces a lot of paper in a very large set of fields related to computer science. They invest a lot in research and I know it doesn't seem like it for those outside of academia. Hell I bet Bell labs didn't seem too impressive except for the transistor to the outside world.

Someone mentioned Haskell, they also do a lot in artificial intelligence, operating system research, security (yeah yeah I know), human computer interaction etc.

Not to long ago Apple passed Microsoft in profits, but that difference is much smaller than the difference in R&D budget. If you take that into account, Microsoft is much more profitable.
Appcelerator: Major Titanium Updates, New Subscription Packages...
MSR has the biggest R&D budget in the country after the U.S. federal government. I think they'd hit brilliance inevitably. Probability would demand it.
Cool, except that humans don't always invent words from random syllables. This is symbology, not language. Words often represent the sound of an action or are derived from mutating or combining other words for related concepts or names.
"I have several degrees and speak many languages and still can't find a high-paying job" - well, maybe you should turn to whoever told you several (very likely liberal arts) degrees are in causal relation with a high-paying job?
"I wonder if they'll have large dataset support?"

Hmmmm... That could make for a very interesting possible future - Google introduces sophisticated data mining/visualisation techniques to the masses for free, then allows you to run the same techniques across multi datacentre sized clusters of mapreduce machines on petabyte sized public databases...

I wonder what unexpected results might emerge from that?
Google probably expects that all designers/product management folks that they are interviewing to be good at programming too. There are good programmers, good designers and some people who are really good at both. Since a lot of people want to work at Google, they are using that to their advantage and hiring good designers who are also good programmers.
Passing a Language through the Eye of a Needle (Lua design)
Also the "a googler mentioned you" thing doesn't count. I mean direct contact.
First statement is true. Second statement is false.
That was the impression I walked away with too: much CS ivory tower thinking, little real-world relevance. But they're only interviews, everyday life at Google is probably (hopefully!) different.

As a counterpoint to the HR horror stories: my recruiter was a friendly woman who always responded quickly and politely. No complaints here.
That's $15 more per month than we're paying in licensing fees for our RDBMS.

Giving away money I don't need to doesn't sound very reasonable to me.
I echo the suggestion in another discussion- bring back the PDA! HP can use webOS to forge a different path, reinvent non-smartphone devices!
Why on earth would you trust Facebook with your e-mails?
Is Microsoft trying to end the reign of mobile carriers?
Hm, is that good news? I am not well versed in those black hat search engine scams. Like what if now Google gradually thinks hackerne.ws is the real hacker news, and eventually the owner of hackerne.ws makes it point somewhere else?
Google folks I happened to work with, do exhibit "noticeably higher than average" standards of social behavior. This is in addition to being world-class engineers.

OTOH, there is different spectrum of people in every big company - so maybe there are beasts sitting in the caves somewhere that bite everyone passing by too close :-).

You're right in one thing - one should not put the emotions into the process. A little research of past experiences reveals makes this very obvious.

Treat the whole process like a light cocktail-party flirt, and there's no disappointment afterwards. It's a free tour to the $interview_destination_of_choice, after all :-)
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Available

Casus == accident, chance, fortune

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Available

fors == fors fortis : chance, luck, fortune
I think criticism of WP7 is more of a generalized indictment of MS's shoddy mobile strategies. Remember the Kin?