skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn't arguing on the stance - just their approach.

There is no point taking a risk if there is no reward. I just don't see this as an action that would change people's minds.

I just believe Google has much better avenues for advocacy than this approach.
"How long does it take to learn Squeak, I mean to really learn effectively?"

5 years. Full time. At MIT. In 1983.
A simpler solution is to upvote comments you think are unfairly downvoted.
The OP was asking about bookkeeping and accounting, not personal finance. He's going to want things like revenue, expenses, accounts receivable, etc.

Mint is pretty slick for what it does, though.
I don't think this is about making an actual splash. Maybe it was done for the benefit of the Google employees?

I would be surprised if this is noticed by the national media.
No. My least favorite part of HN is all the meta-debates about karma, downvotes, "is this HN?", etc.

Can we just skip all the meta-debates, and focus on interesting hacker news? So what if you have 50 less karma than you think you should? So what if there are 4 articles that you think aren't hacker news? (Just don't click on or upvote them).
Some of the business plan software (I've used Palo Alto Business Plan Pro) makes it easy to make a business plan of arbitrary length. If nothing else it's nice to get the graphs generated for you.
Last call to participate in Technologizer's iPhone Satisfaction Survey--thanks
Web Apps Become Pervasive, Open Platforms Become More Important
I thought Ellison had a supermodel for each day of the week. Is he cutting back?
Feature Requests:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363
Lousy UI design - you shouldn't give users the option to do something, and then tell them they can't do it.
It depends on the unit that is doubling. From how I read the claim, Peter Norvig is using penetration percentage as such unit. Once you reach 50%, doubling means 100%, which is very unlikely since it is almost certain that somewhere in the world there is someone that does not use certain technology (meaning writing, clothing, radio, cellphones or whatever...). In short: the claim is just a clever joke :)
You missed cperciva's point.

Any technology that passes 50% penetration can indeed double again if in the future it goes below 50%.
I don't object to "backpropagation" aka gradient descent, which is a bit of simple calculus-based optimization. What I object to is the widespread public perception that saying "neural networks" is a brilliant new paradigm-overthrowing Key to General Intelligence, after over three damn decades.

Biologically inspired stuff? I applaud it to the extent that it works. It's not a magic key to anything, and it doesn't avert the challenge of understanding.
Yes, we got the joke. But suppose in 50 years we come up with a cool technology that is so good it drives cell phone penetration down to 1% (ie young people growing up then never buy cell phones). Then cell phones can make a comeback and double to 2%. And double again to 4%, etc.
Using such a tool sounds like a vast lie from the companies benefiting from it. Isn't impersonation a crime? It would be fun to sue for massive amounts one of the fake users and then the company that generated would be liable:))) If ever proven so through.
He can pilot it himself. I think if you are going to have a mega yacht, sail is the way to go over power. Yeah, it's a floating home, but it can also sail - that's awesome. You can take a tender into harbors.

Also, longer sail boats can go faster than smaller ones, when you don't plane. So a bigger boat means you can travel faster over long distances.
I think that's my all-time favorite XKCD. I read it whenever I feel that I'm starting to hedge myself in, and it always leads me on to doing things better.

I'd go so far as to state that this comic (and a few things like it, of course, but this is the most memorable) changed the course of my life quite considerably in my senior year, and that that influenced where I am today.
That's EXACTLY what I thought of when I saw this post. Great movie.
Ok, you don't think that's much code/of very high quality/of much usefulness . . . very well, I now respectfully ask you to tell us how much/of what quality/how useful code YOU have contributed.
This isn't the first time they've made currency conversion errors: see http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/04/google-adsense-currency-e.... Wonder if they made the same mistake in euro and pound accounts?
It's not just Sergey's position. It's Google's position. And it is very related to Google, since there are a lot of gay software engineers, this is very important to many of them, and Google wants to attract and keep these employees.
So: "It's ok, because they're right."

As a journalist (one who just finished interviewing someone I find personally despicable but who's done something newsworthy and interesting so merits coverage) I like to think that my readers are smart enough to suss out their own positions on the things I write about. It's not my job to decide which of the different views on a topic I cover is "correct" or "right." My job's to describe them and how they relate to one another and let the reader do his or her homework on which one they think is right.

Drew Curtis has a great chapter in his book in which he rails against the media's penchant for giving equal time to "crazy people." He makes a great argument, but the problem is that it comes from an assumption that your readers are too lazy and dumb to make up their own minds about an issue, so we should be selective in how we treat different sides of an argument. That doesn't sit well.
We've got a pretty good book on the topic (despite its title: "Business Plan in a Day") but the big issue for us is doing more research on competitors and trying to get an idea of how much we'd need to raise to hit some of our more ambitious goals that kick in at the 2-3 year mark. Just the effort of doing the writing isn't really intimidating.
Google is taking a stand against bias. Bravo for them. They blew it on China - they may be getting this one right.

"Impartiality" on whether to treat people with justice or not doesn't scan.
The Cepheid Galactic Internet
it's probably because of the size of the company and what they're risking by having an opinion on this non-business issue.
The second law of computer science is much more dangerous:

"Any program will degenerate until it is written in a conglomerate of perl and shell script."

There is a windows-corollary: Substitute perl and shell script for VB.

Seriously though, I do think the law is right. It will be harder and harder to push further optimization out of programs. It is much more interesting to look at other problems - and I do think the research went there as well.
This seems to be essentially the same observation that Paul Graham made in his essay comparing founder hackers to employee hackers. http://paulgraham.com/boss.html
Meet the 2008 MacArthur Fellows, including Alexei Kitaev, quantum computer scientist
It mainly has to do with the opportunity/cost of companies deciding whether or not to develop open firmware. If a proprietary version is included in the kernel, they are very unlikely to bother to go through the cost of relicensing the software.
Next time I'll recommend he get crashed into by a passenger plane. Too soon?

You guys are bad with sarcasm.
Why Erlang
of course exploring the box from the inside can never tell us if the box is bright purple and unusually shaped, because there is no outside to stand in.
if aliens ever come along, they might tell us things that are along the lines of "well of course your box is purple how could you not see that?" and of course we'll be able to tell them that their box is lime green.
It's not my job to decide which of the different views on a topic I cover is "correct" or "right."

Right, but it's also not your job to draw false dichotomies and go out of your way to imply moral equivalence just so you can slather a patina of "fairness" over your work.

Even the best (especially the best?) journalists have to editorialize, whether they come to grips with that fact or not. The alternative would be to present an infinity of viewpoints on every topic one covers in any piece one writes. At some point one has to exercise discretion on what gets included and what doesn't, on what gets covered in detail and what doesn't. I don't think it's right or realistic to try to abdicate that part of one's journalistic responsibility.
Wal-Mart Gives Consumers Number 1 Reason Why DRM is Not the Answer
A software engineers sexuality should have nothing to do with his/her work. It's like google asking people to vote for obama because they want to attract and keep black engineers. Bullshit, that's right.
Being neutral about gay marriage is like being neutral about evolution

What a strange analogy. Evolution is a natural phenomena, while marriage is a state-regulated union. There is a set of reasons apart from tradition why legal marriage exists, and very little in that set would apply with any frequency to "gay marriage". The most obvious reason, of course, is that the division of labor between the sexes is inevitably derivative of the constraints created by pregnancy.

Brin doesn't really argue beyond this,

we see this fundamentally as an issue of equality.

But this is an error. It's an easy error to make.
Despite this being largely common knowledge to those who have researched or used Erlang, he gives a really solid overview of the perks of the language. Great summary read for the uninformed about Erlang.
it also seems the surest path to producing an intelligence that acts as if it were a product of natural selection, i.e. one that is selfish, xenophobic, etc. (other sexual competition based heuristics).
Care to back up your claims that Perkins demands greater and greater returns "at any cost" or that he has any real connection to the subprime meltdown?
That's strange, I know plenty of people who are 25+ and still don't learn from their mistakes :)
There was a study a few years ago (unfortunately I don't have the link handy) that showed that the lack of sleep is directly correlated to a spike in creativity.

Edit: here's a wiki article about the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_and_creativity
What part would need to be moved to the UK. Would they have to reincorporate as a UK company? Or would they have to move all there key employees to the UK?
After spending 8 years not getting any sleep, I finally realized that I'm more efficient with real sleep. I finally wised up. In retrospect, my dumbest mistakes have mostly been due to being chronically sleep deprived.
Amongst engineers and scientists, a lack of sleep is a point of pride. We feel like those stupid liberal arts majors are getting no real work done and that we're tired because we are. Whether the conjecture about liberal arts majors is correct, the sleep part is wrong. I'm so much more efficient now that I'm getting more sleep. I've been trying to get my friends to sleep more, but we'll see how that goes....
Exactly. Breaking it down, what do they gain? Possibly some good will of the more liberal users. But powerful religious figures could just as easily (and almost certainly will) turn it into something of a pr nightmare that will ultimately affect some of google's users.
Knight Rider Journey To The End Of The Knight
MIKE MUST INFILTRATE A RACING GANG WITH THE HELP OF AN OLD ARMY BUDDY - Mike (Justin Bruening) reunites with a former Army buddy (guest star Johnny Messner, “The O.C.”) to bring down a drag racing gang that is smuggling weapons overseas. Sarah (Deanna Russo) joins Mike and KITT (voiced by Val Kilmer) on this dangerous undercover mission, much to her father’s (Bruce Davison) dismay.
Entourage Preview of Episode 5.4 Fire Sale
Previously on Entourage, Drama was brooding over his breakup with Jaqueline while Vince’s accountant Marvine pressured him to get a job. The boys head to Shauna for help so she lined up a Sweet 16 gig for Vince. However, when the birthday girl’s mother insisted that Vince sit on a thrown of ice, he refused, forcing Shauna to step in and negotiate the terms.
I haven't tried it personally but this is worth looking into atleast based on the advertised feature set,

http://invoice.zoho.com/
I agree in the sense that one must place differing viewpoints in context, show how they relate to one another, how they're supported or not supported and in general give an accurate depiction of the lay of the land. If there are dichotomies, they need to be accurate. The last step, declaring one other the other "correct" or "right." is what rankles me.
... It is, and we do.
Get rid of "marriage", and this whole mess would be a moot point. :) But, anyway, go Google!
Bidding for savings account rates at MoneyAisle
I want a struct linker
Huge new prime number discovered
Hells no. Don't be so bloody sensitive. Your HN karma is not a measure of your worth...accept downvotes and move on.
He lost me when he said erlang is less than 3x slower than c
I was not thinking in karma, actually I don't care about it.

My point is that hacker news is to share knowledge or ideas and if you are going to say that you don't like a post then you should share with the community your point of view so we can learn from each other.
Seriously, are you really taking your posts to HN as so important than they need to receive review from peers? It's a forum. It is informal, it is not a vetted peer-reviewed journal. If someone wants to reply, they will, and it should (generally) be public (and if it shouldn't, the responder will look up your email address and send you a message, assuming that's possible)...if they don't, it's dumb to try to force them to (privately or otherwise).
Calacanis: Collapsing Economy Will Kill 50%-80% Of Startups
Good study - horribly misleading title. We've seen kids as young as four years old learn from their mistakes.
I was not thinking in karma, actually I don't care about it, at least not now but my point is that hacker news is to share knowledge or ideas and if you are going to say that you don't like a post then you should share with the community your point of view so we can learn from each other. (btw: sorry for repeat this post)
I realized this myself when I wrote my first JIT compiler. The x86 code generated from bytecode was frightingingly naive. With basic code inlining and redundant instruction elimination my scripting language ran at 95% the speed of the equivalent c program with -O3 optimizations. And the assembly code generated by gcc was at least 3 times shorter.

Processors do a damn good job at optimizing code, and cache locality is more important than you'd think. The CPU blazes through redundant mov instructions like there's no tomorrow.

The good news is that building a fully functioning native code compiler is doable by a single person.
My startup: http://www.thinkcomputer.com/software/exponent/enterprise.ht...

Does your books, does your payroll, does your taxes.
Almost definitely. Brin stated:"...it is the chilling and discriminatory effect of the proposition on many of our employees that brings Google to publicly oppose Proposition 8."

A company isn't just a profit machine. People live and work there to a degree. He probably saw some injustices in his company, and wanted to make a strong statement about how employees should be treated.
Fraud Charges Against Facebook, Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg to Stand
then you should share with the community your point of view so we can learn from each other

This is not the third grade, and our discussions are not chewing gum or a note being passed. If someone has something to add, they will. This is already possible. Everyone can comment on any comment.

You are asking to formalize something that already exists, and to do so in a stupidly paternalistic manner. Personally, I don't come to HN to provide feedback on every dumbass post that I think is dumb. (Though I very, very, rarely downvote. I'm far more likely to call something stupid in a comment and explain why...but I don't think anyone should be forced to explain why they think something is stupid. A downvote is a much more concise and efficient way to say it. I just happen to be a blowhard that enjoys the sound of my own voice, and so I comment a lot more than I vote.)

And, I agree with the above: Meta-discussion about karma and voting is just annoying. Stop doing it. It's irritating, and this kind of suggestion comes up every couple of weeks or so and gets shouted down because most of us disagree pretty strongly with it...just as this one has been.
I didn't mention karma in the comment you're replying to. I understand your suggestion, and I disagree with it very strongly, and I said so and explained why.
Doesn't matter. Dumb idea is dumb.
This was published in 2004, and has a note from the author:

This Manifesto is deprecated. My views have evolved, and a new version will be released “real soon now”.
Did they donate money to one side or the other, or did they only express an "official" opinion?

And how would a person who was supporting Prop8 (say, a practicing Orthodox Jew, a Tibetan Buddhist, a Muslim, a Sikh, or a Christian, all faiths which explicitly proscribe homosexual behavior) feel about working at Google after hearing this?
To someone who thinks that gay marriage is about equality, this could be seen as similar to a companies stance on racism or slavery (which is obvious now, but wasn't a hundred years ago). If Google believe that in the future people will look back on this issue in the same way, then this could also be a savvy business position. Also, in the eyes of Sergey, this is probably just another way for Google to not be evil.
If you interpret "compiler optimization" broadly enough, I don't think the argument is right: compare the performance of a typical Javascript implementation from 5 years ago with the performance of the best implementations today. That difference in performance is often the factor that allows previously infeasible programs to be written in Javascript.
Apple doesn't make products to be fitted into comparison tables.
forgive me if i sound naive, but i would have though it was a relatively simple task to design program to decipher which numbers were prime numbers ad infinitum. if it was april 1st, i would have thought this was a jest. is this really that praise-worthy and notable?
Google is helping people to see that these decisions have far-reaching effects. Google is pretty confident that the vast majority of people like its products. So now you have to ask yourself: is it wise to cast a vote that would insult a large percentage of the people responsible for making the products you love so much?
I think what is really going on is a kind of power law thing. After the initial optimizations over about a decade or so, the additional optimizations only help so much. So yes, it is helpful to do the compiler right, but there are diminishing returns after a certain point.
This assumes that compiler optimizations proceed exponentially, but it's actually asymptotic. There is a hypothetical ideal form, where no further optimization is possible. Each optimization brings the program closer to that form, and as you get close, you start running into diminishing returns.

Besides, most of the interesting problems are questions of how many programs you can optimize, not much you can optimize one given program. Automatic parallelization and vectorization is worth an order of magnitude speed improvement, but compilers can only apply it in a small percentage of the cases where it would be applicable.
Good on ya Sergey Brin. Its nice to see a company taking official support in regards to the things that affect their employees in non-work situations.

And for those saying companies don't take sides or make announcements, lets name a couple. Chick-fil-a is closed on Sundays. Why, because the founder is a hard-right Christian who thinks everyone should go to church or they go to hell. I worked there when I was a teenager, firsthand experience.

How about Dominos? The founder built a town outside of Naples in Florida strictly for Christians. Ava Maria, I think its called.

And don't forget SC Johnson, "a family company". Jeesh.
High management pay might also be a symptom of a company doing well and the management being well compensated for it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16QSYESBuRU
It's easy to identify small prime numbers. Prime numbers with 13 million digits are a bit harder -- for one thing, only one out of every 30 million numbers you look at will be prime.
Bodybuilders and weightlifters know that muscle grows in one's sleep. I think the key to working on anything into the night is following up with lots of sleep. That way, one gets the benefit of both sleep and sleep deprivation.

Every once in a while in the past, when I was working on my own project, I've done it to the point where I would sleep from 2am to 1pm, and the next time living in the dark for a day due to going to bed around sunrise (5am) and waking up at sundown (6pm), and so on. Eventually, I would have a normal schedule again. :) This was when my only focus was on writing code for my software and working out, period. Since my software became better every week, and I grew stronger, bigger, and faster as well, my goals were pretty much met and I was happy.

I like my current life as a student, due to the social aspect of learning from, and working with, others. But I am nowhere near as productive at developing my own software on a daily basis nor working out as I was when those were my only two goals. However, I understand that it has only been a few weeks, and I will be able to figure out how to introduce software and personal development into my schedule as I get more used to the demands of my classes. And even though I won't be able to dedicate as much time as I could before, I have the experience and confidence to get in shape and create software more efficiently, as well as the benefit of a being around lots of potential users.
An unlocked iPhone? I'd travel halfway across the world for one
My own anecdata are somewhat conflicted on this issue. I always did well in school, understanding the key issues in a design problem (aerospace engineering) long before my classmates, and I always attributed it to my sleep habits (8-10 hrs daily).

On the other hand, some of my finest moments of clarity have come after all-night cramming sessions. It's as if you fatigue all the usual pathways and are open up to entirely new ways of seeing things.
In other news, Facebook was the luckiest rather than the best duck in the pond, and it shows in the choices they make.
3x Is an exaggeration, but it compares pretty well with very fast languages like Java and C#.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...
Some problems become easier when I'm sleepy because I can't think as clearly but I start to focus very well.

Other problems demand several passes of experimentation. For those it's easier to try a quick test during the day, think about it while doing other things, and then wake up with the (possible) solution the next day.
I for one am not so impressed by Google's stance, at least not yet.
Is the annoncement coming from Google(US) where it is less risky to take such a stance, or Google worldwide where value driven actions such as these would not be as appreicated in certain regions.

An example already brought up, is Google stance on issues related to China, where they've not been so resilent in keeping with their own values.

If Google wants to play this hand, thats fine, I even hope they take up bigger causes like human rights, and back it up with actions. But a two paragraph blog post simply will not do for me.
The HK iPhone is unfortunately frequency incompatible with U.S. networks.
(The) Startup Depression
The personal subscription $25CDN is "limited" to 500 posts/day. Even TC doesn't post that much.

I think the real discussion is moving to Twitter-like mediums (short and quick - who has time for blogging). Looking at Techmeme, it looks like a lot of the discussion isn't really - just rehashing (no time for analysis)
a title never to be solved!