skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For all their other faults, Google at least tries to protect privacy and keeps after data export too. Those are two key attributes that are important to me.
The article doesn't say, and I didn't see a link to the report which might have provided useful information...

However, I can see two basic forms this survey question might have taken.

First: "which smartphone would you consider buying: iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, ..." (Or asking type-by-type "would you consider buying an X?"

Second: "which sort of smartphone would you consider buying?"

You can get wildly different answers by changing the form of the question. Providing a list and saying "which would you consider?" is probably going to get a lot of people saying "sure, I'd consider that", whereas asking without the prompt is going to produce a list of the devices with actual mindshare.
Interestingly enough my Uncle is the same way. He is an entrepreneur although, his business has absolutely nothing to do with the tech industry, so it's not a problem unique to hackers, but to startups. Along with my own experience, my startup is in tech field, of trying to get a startup up and running I would have to say number 4 is probably, at least in my and my uncle's case, the most probable cause of insomnia. The later it gets the less texts I get, the less emails to answer, my friends are all asleep, and I feel like I can finally get some work done.
Amazon limits you to 100 Spot instances per region without contacting them to change the limit for your account.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/faqs/#How_many_instances_can_I_run...
Don't forget that the invisible flags affect the rankings. People seem to have become more aggressive lately about flagging things they think don't belong, and some have - to mind mind - rather odd views in that regard. A few flags from a minority of zealots with a misplaced enthusiasm and an item will sink like a stone, never to be seen again. I've generally found that that explains most of the otherwise apparently odd behavior, but I don't usually watch the "Ask" page.

Can you point out anything on the "Ask" page that you consider odd?
Product. Conversion. Scale
Depends on how memory/storage intensive the tasks where:
"26.7TB of RAM and 2PB (petabytes) of disk space. "

One advantage of going with Amazon, is their really high-speed and voluminous ephemeral storage available per instance in addition to your EBS backed root volume.
I may be arguing semantics but isn't the first a type of the second? It's STILL solving a problem people have today. It just is a problem that consumers don't recognize very clearly for some reason.. maybe because they framed an existing problem the wrong way (ie. they think problem X is a financial problem when it was really a psychological problem.) Twitter for instance solves the problem of not having our social/attention needs met. It's a problem that too's abstract for people to complain about, but it's there.
Good points. We all have moments where we exhibit some or all of these traits. This is not about an individual moment (or e.g. working for a terrible, demotivating manager, or on a crappy project).

But I do think there are some people who may be very smart or experienced, but who just are not very effective. Some of this could be contextual (in which case it is valuable for both you and them to find them a new home), but sometimes it is just a person's personality or approach to work.
Or so they'd like you to think.
Agreed. I wouldn't use Google+, I would also recommend to everyone I know that they never use Google+. The implications of loosing my gmail account over a trivial name change are just too seemingly random and risky. It's just not worth it.

Facebook won by default. Google+ had a chance, it really could have succeeded, but something went terribly wrong with it's management. Piss poor execution and hints that Google is really struggling to find good talent to run it's new enterprises.
The humiliation of Barack Obama
That wouldn't prevent someone from creating multiple accounts with stolen credit cards though, right? num_accounts * 100 = DDOS.
And then Palm acquired BeOS IP in 2001 for $11 million.
So that it can't be used as a spam vector: Gmail trusts all mail that comes from Google.
Even Faster Domain Name Search
Whole again or Google rebrands its ‘Huddle’ feature
I really fear the day when Microsoft, without any valuable products, becomes nothing more than a patent troll...

An NPE with Microsoft's patent portfolio is something very, very dangerous.
That's true of Facebook, too. Complain to your legislators, it's because COPA is so impractical that nobody bothers to attempt to comply with the measures necessary to allow kids on a social media site.
They do have limits which you have to ask to remove. For example, you are limited to 5 elastic IPs per region. We had to ask to get that limitation removed and explain why we felt that we needed more EIPS.

If I recall, we were also limited to (10?) instances and had to ask for more and explain why.

It took a few days to get approved.
A lot of people wondered why in the world would MS endorse a 4'7" phone (the HTC Titan). From people I know who work retail, including a cousin who works for ATT retail, people come into stores wanting either an iPhone or a smartphone.

The iPhone users are pretty set. Their kids have it, or they had one before, or their wife has one, or everyone tells them it is the best.

For people not set on iPhone, it sounds like the decision is often made in the store. And apparently big screens and thin phones area big deal. Android has dominated the retail presence. If WP can match the retail presence, it can probably start splitting some sales with Android.
I'm alarmed that the comments here are so bitter. Am I the only one who's had a positive experience with G+ so far? (Is my perception rose-tinted because I really, really want Facebook to die?)

The new Hangout stuff is great, and the addition of screen sharing has now obviated my need to use Skype. Maybe when On Air opens up I'll be able to broadcast my programming sessions.
LinkedIn's sleazy invite tactics
The other day I popped on to LinkedIn to look at a profile and there was an input for my email and password, which I thought was weird as I thought I was logged in. Anyways, I entered my password and email again and hit OK. Well it turns out this was an import from contacts box that they just happened to make look very much like a login. Anyhow on the first screen it prompted me to invite some folks so I selected 3 of them and hit ok, thinking I was done that, I hit ok again accidentally, and low and behold, it emailed every single person that I had ever emailed. We are talking clients, co-workers, friends, even kids who had sent in support requests for one of our games. Now - I probably deserve some blame for not paying enough attention, but at the same point, why would you dress up some major function like this to look like a login box. So that was bad. But what is worse, it decided without asking me, to send yet another batch reminding people who had not signed up and there is no apparent way to turn this off. Anyhow, be warned. Not sure if this is worse than them defaulting to using your photos in ads
I wish I was an architect rather than a programmer...
One can be a US citizen without ever having been in the US. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_nationality_law#T...
I'm the guy behind Folyo, feel free to ask if you have any questions.

Oh and I set up a 20% discount just for HN readers :) It should get applied automatically, but don't hesitate to contact me if it doesn't work for some reason.
Ask HN: Are comments on recent posts allowed?
There's a use case for this: making an editorial comment to elaborate on the Hacker Newsiness of a general news story. For example, I just posted a story about Full Tilt Poker being accused of running a Ponzi scheme. It's notable that one of their founders was profiled in the New Yorker for his use of game theory to optimize his poker play (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_wilkinson is an abstract--the article itself is amazing.)

When I click on "Discuss," I don't get an option to add a comment elaborating on this. Is this a spam-protection mechanism, or something account-specific?
The hype from weeks ago is long past over. Google plus came out of nowhere, took everyone by surprise. They instilled a sense of scarcity through invites in order to make the people want it. Eventually the people just forgot about it. I wanted Google plus to work, but it lost momentum long ago.
I keep hearing about how blue light in the morning helps you wake up and have more energy throughout the day.

Does anyone have experience with this product: http://www.amazon.com/Philips-goLITE-BLU-Therapy-Device/dp/B...
I commonly refresh the page and get a nearly brand new list of items. Most of which I read weeks ago. I'm just wondering if it isn't some sort of feature meant to give a second (third, fourth, nth?) chance to items which may have been pushed down prematurely. I think this because the front page works fine and I imagine they use the same sorting algorithm if not the exact same code.
Determining A/B test sample size
Amazon have GPU-based instances available - giving the customer the combination of GPU processing and the large RAM/backing store resources.
PPP tends to undervalue infrastructure as it ignores things like subway system when comparing the cost of two condos. Unfortunately it's really hard to value infrastructure as a farmhouse can gain a lot of value from a bridge built 40 miles away. Still, at some level a house is a house is a house even if it’s in a ghetto.
"i" undeclared
Another clear, incisive article from Tony. Everyone's subscribed to him already, right?
that's still not been fixed, has it?
While it varies from case to case, have you considered running affiliate offers instead of just regular banner ads? Might be worth testing - if you could get banners up advertising the next big game, you can earn a commission if they pre-release through your ad. I've found that can often earn more than regular display ads, but might be worth testing. (By the way, while Amazon converts well, it only has a cookie length of 1 day, while most others have a cookie length of around 30 days, so you could also try testing different affiliate merchants).
Ask HN: What is Your Personal Start Page?
Could be in the traditional sense (iGoogle, Netvibes, or other portal) or non-traditional sense (my e-mail or Flipboard or Facebook/Twitter is my start page) though doubt the traditional sense is relevant to HN.

Inspired by: http://clintonwu.com/post/10445425917/death-of-the-personal-start-page
Just US citizens. FYI a person can be credulous, meaning gullible, and a claim can be incredible, meaning hard to believe, but I'm not even sure incredulous is a word.
Eliminar la celulitis rapidamente
eliminar la celulitis rapidamente es un sitio donde aprendas mas sobre la celulitis y conoceras metodos y tratamientos para combatirla.
For all intents and purposes it's the same in Canada. If you have any significant ties to Canada you pay Canadian income tax if you're a citizen.

A significant tie could be as simple as owning a motorcycle, a corporation, or still having a Canadian bank account.
yup, I agree. Part of me thinks Google needs some crazy PR gimmick to get G+ long-term traction. You can't do with feature like Circles(I mean, seriously?) You're Google, go out and do something CRAZY that will get America talking about, and all the news outlet buzzing about it. I don't care if you're an engineer-oriented company. If you wanna compete with Facebook, do something absurd.
This is an interesting result, customer pays slightly less than a million/month (1279 x 24 x 30 = 920880) to run such a cluster. Using a 'Westmere' class processor (2 procs/mobo 6 cores per proc) that is 2500 machines, at 400W per its a MW of electricity (call it 111K$/month with a .15/kWH cost(includes cooling)). It would be interesting to price out the other costs for the machines to understand what sort of revenue that would be.

I wondered about spreading it out around the country through, seems like you would incur a lot of latency which might become a bottleneck.
If they have the headroom to spin up 30,000 cores I wonder what their total headroom is in each availability zone - and what %age that is of their total cores.

Sure, we'll never know - but it's an interesting thought experiment.
The line-up at the door must've been starting to thin out :)
Yes it has but "it ain't that good". There's a lot of RF noise up there, so they still use air-based platforms such as Raytheon ASTOR/Sentinel. They're cheaper as well, even if you need a couple of Tornados to follow it.

I'm not saying any more otherwise I'll probably get bagged and tagged.
Also, right folds preserve the structure of the datatype folded over. If you fold right over a list with the empty list as the start value and cons (or (_::_) in scala) as the operation, you get the original list back (i.e. same value, not same object). A left fold on the other hand is just some arbitrary looping constuct.
Do you raise this in the context of asking people to self-asses their productivity or something else?
I agree with your reasoning. Everything you do on Google+ can be flagged, and you're at risk of losing your Gmail account by using Google+. Even a name change could put your whole account in jeopardy.
Various Psychologists Give Their View On The Ego
This stuff just seems easy to figure out from a resume and asking questions. If they can talk competently in detail about cool stuff on their resume, and you yourself are smart enough to spot BS, then you know they get stuff done.

As for culture fit, again, a socially competent interviewer can size these things up reasonably quickly.
For those who don't know, Folyo's creator Sacha Greif is a talented graphic designer who's worked for Hipmunk, and did the design work for an OSS Rails CMS called Locomotive.

He's got a discerning eye for quality, so I trust his judgement in curating a list of great designers. Looking forward to a version for programming jobs!
If you read my article, you'll see that's not what the study finds. They estimate that less than 10 percent of the wealth lost by defendants goes to patent trolls. The rest is destroyed.
If you can do this reliably, you should start a business.

Common knowledge is that hiring programmers is insanely difficult. If you have a gift for it, you could make craptonnes of money!
What they're talking about is aggregate, so lets say you have 2K in your chequing, 5K in your trading account, and if you have more than 3K in an RRSP you have to file an FBAR.

The FBAR isn't the big deal for wage earners, the big deal is the failure to file.
Others have pointed out that the SLA isn't an issue. As for the separate service thing, there was a recent transition that was supposed to rectify this, merging the Apps and regular accounts services. The page you link to is about the need to remedy clashes caused by this transition.

During this process, users who maintained secondary accounts were encouraged to merge them into their Apps account. I used to have two accounts, one for Apps services on my own domain, and another for things like Reader. I now only have one, my Apps account, because the accounts clashed and had to be merged.

So the doubly galling thing about this Google+ farrago is that a) it proves that the accounts transition did not in fact stop Apps accounts being second-class citizens, but also b) most of us no longer have our secondary accounts, because we merged them at Google's insistence.

Add to this several years of teeth-grinding annoyance at the incompatibilities between Google Apps and the rest of the Google world, and, well, that's why people are complaining. :-)
Overall, (and, forgive me, since I'm going relatively OT here) I've noticed a lot of hostility towards Google in every Google post. I've not been with HN for too long, so I don't know if this is what partially defines HN, but I'm starting to get irked by it.
In the USA, poverty leads to obesity. In India, poverty leads to starvation. There's a huge difference when a government's concern for the poor is getting them to eat "healthier".

Have you ever seen a desperately thin homeless person in the US?
I imagine they're referring to the fact that a person born to parents with U.S. citizenship is also a U.S. citizen, whether they ask to be or not, and whether they were born abroad or not.
Another neat side of this is that as he gets better, the people he will be competing with will be able to dedicate more of their lives to practice. For example, I'd imagine PGA pros practice at the same level (time and dedication) as Dan is, but they've been doing it for years already and have a big head start on him. Beating his competitors will get exponentially harder as he gets better even with the amazing work ethic he seems to be putting in. That's cool.

Also, now I'm slightly inspired to work harder at getting better at things I care about by using deliberate practice. Granted, I won't stick with it even for 1000 hours. I'm very impressed with what he is doing.
Of all the companies to single out as entities you wouldn't want GPS data to be acquired by, Apple and Google are an odd choice.

I mean of all the possible companies that might acquire this GPS data, it's not like Apple or Google already have copious amounts of GPS data on us. Is it?
I'm doing something similar with trying to learn how to program. I call it Brute Force Learning which is not exactly deliberate practice but more akin to just doing it and hoping it sticks. The reason is because I've always wanted to learn how to program, going back to wanting to build my own BBS door back in the day which gives you a reference of how long I've been around computers without learning to program. I know the reason was never an issue of mental capacity but just a question of will, which is why I'm now carefully keeping track of my learning time log.

I just started the experiment and do not have much online but if you're interested you can follow at http://theoutliers.com
I'm old-fashioned; Google News.
Being granted US citizenship when born abroad to an American parent is an enormous benefit.

If you don't want the citizenship, all you have to do is renounce it.
Feds allege Full Tilt Poker was epic $300MM Ponzi scheme
I wish there was a way to merge this post with a related one:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3018236

Google+ offers quick and continuous iteration of new features.
Cringely thinks that will happen unless Windows 8 flies:

We’ll start with Microsoft and Windows 8, which I’ll argue are going to be formidable competitors in the tablet space, primarily because it’s that or start spending all that cash on diversified investments to turn Microsoft into a Berkshire Hathaway. This is probably Ballmer’s last stand as a high tech CEO.

http://www.cringely.com/2011/09/ballmers-last-stand/
This is a fair point - you should definitely tailor your hiring approach to your needs. But for all the types of people you mention, I think you would want people who are very productive and able to GSD for their areas.

Do you think this is not the case? Or are these specific types of roles where you think having effective people are secondary?
…that means acceptable downtime of 437.something minutes or 7 hours of combined unavailability…

You're off by one power-of-10: 43776*(100%-99.9%) = 43.8 minutes of acceptable downtime.
15 must have Android apps for IT professionals
What Should Yahoo Do Next?
Quake 2 Source Code Review
Joins in DB world
At the higher levels of play, StarCraft II is both skill and strategy. If your skill is what's holding you back, then yes, all you need is more practice. If it's your strategy, you could grind for a lifetime without improvement.
totally agree on the cron format. we could take a look at cronwtf as a cron to english translator. (http://cronwtf.github.com/ and https://github.com/technoweenie/cronwtf)
Open Team Communication Translates to Higher Shareholder Return
You can renounce US citizenship at anytime if you have another citizenship, just don't expect to ever be allowed in the United States.

edit: Canada requires another citizenship, the US does not allowing one to be stateless.

http://travel.state.gov/law/citizenship/citizenship_776.html
This is like the person that plays 'hard to get' for 15 years, then finds out everybody's taken.

Windows of opportunity come and they go just as fast. Google+ had a chance, I think they've missed their connection.
There's no way to figure this out from a one on one interview with that person?

I mean, a half-day programming test feels excessive. Are you worried about loosing good candidates that just don't want to deal with the headaches?

I've heard people try to justify insane hiring processes by saying "we want to filter out the people that don't want to work here. We only want people that really want it." But the best programmers -- the ones you want to hire -- are going to be in high demand by companies that look at their github, have a three minute interview, and pull the trigger.
Thanks so much to both you and @lorna. :)
The Pre3 and the Touchpad are the right thing? They may have been the right thing in HP/Palm's eyes at the time, but they're dead now. Flatlined. Time to let go.

I hope the hardware engineers land on their feet at other companies, but I have a hard time believing for a moment that 525 folks comprised the Hardware division alone and nobody else was caught up in this. Developer Relations and webOS Development seems to have escaped the axe this time, but if I were working there I'd be looking over my shoulder more than a couple times a day.

Unless webOS gets a new lease on life through either a coherent strategy or new hardware licensees (preferably both) VERY soon, it's dead. They had one massive dry spell during the transition to HP that killed what market share and most of the developer mindshare they had; they're not going to make it through another one and have both consumers and developers give it yet another chance. All but the most dedicated webOS developers have already left as it is.

My prediction: Once the CM7 (Android Gingerbread) port hits, most of the people who bought the Touchpad at firesale will evaporate away from webOS along with whatever developer revenue was left to be had, dual-boot or not. webOS will end up an embedded OS for menu-driven appliances and other applications of their ilk, but never see another non-enterprise consumer mobile device again.
Why is it difficult to remember things from before 3-5 yrs?
The worst part is there's very little you can do to give your side of the story. Their judgements are practically final unless you're sleeping with a Google employee who can have an internal chat to clear your name. But like I said, right now, you couldn't pay me to sign up to Google+. If it ever becomes mandatory, I'm moving my emails out.
I find it interesting that out of ~50 comments in supposedly early adopter crowd, there is not a single positive comment about Google+. As much as I want them to succeed, this looks like a pretty bad sign.

And yes, I am one of those who cannot participate with my Google Apps account.
Six crucial tech companies you've never heard of
The first answer to this is really cool…
from the beginning, too. Shades of "be naughty"
"it doesn't suggest at all that placebos themselves are doing anything beneficial for patients."

Fair enough. But those patients who don't take their medicine as prescribed are ~25% of all U.S. patients. So in fact adherence studies are a much better measure of the efficacy of medicine than clinical trials, which means that just because a drug has been shown to have clinical efficacy doesn't mean that it actually at all effective in the real world.
Thanks to everyone in the community for hustling to get me to DC!