skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From all I've heard, Bezos is more "crazy like a fox" than Jobs was.

There's a lot to hate about Amazon. Apparently, it's a totally caustic work environment, that's only making money because Bezos is such a brilliant strategist.

Like A/B testing everything, before it was popular.

Like telling everyone they need web APIs for everything they do, and will be fired if they use non-web APIs to other team's apps. Way to shove SOA down people's throats! The pay-off is modular systems.

EC2. Margins will drop, but he'll make money on up-selling special Amazon services.
It is simple to improve sensitivity to spam, but at what cost? What about the false-positive rate, which would follow the reduced specificity?
Thanks for sharing. There is always one more interesting than the press release floating around. :-)
It is hard to say without knowing more details of the system you are working on, can you elaborate?
I thought of this too when I heard about it:

> In ten or twenty years Minneapolis-Honeywell, which makes many thermostats today, may try to sell you a really fancy home temperature control system. It will know the preferences of temperature and humidity of each member of the family and can detect who is in the room. When several are in the room it makes what it considers a compromise adjustment taking account who has most recently had to suffer having the room climate different from what he prefers. Perhaps Honeywell discovers that these compromises should be modified according to a social rank formula devised by its psychologists and determined by patterns of speech loudness. The brochure describing how the thing works is rather lengthy and the real dope is in a rather technical appendix in small print.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/little/little.html (1983)
I can see where you're coming from, but in my view the general consumer won't put in the effort to exploit your model if you make it appealing enough. I've known people that rented from blockbuster|netflix and just made rips of the VHS|DVDs for their own collection, but it sure wasn't those pirates that destroyed (or is destroying) their business. GOG sells DRM free games and nothing stops me from giving it away to all my friends, but I still end up paying for a new "copy" when I gift one away.
Win7 feels like aliens came down to Earth and decided to rebuild their own version of OS X. They know nothing about human user interfaces and they are just kinda putting all the pieces together. In the end, all the pieces are there, and if you look at it superficially it looks good, but once you really get into it, it feels like bizarro usability.

Just to give you an example of some things that make no sense:
-shaking windows minimizes everything
-moving the window to the top of the screen maximizes it (its easier for me to just click the box in the corner, and now I can't place windows across the top edge)
-window explorer went from a couple large buttons to a ton of small buttons
-the clickable area of a directory in windows explorer in list view is about half the size, making it very difficult to right click a directory unless its already selected (something done a lot with tortoise svn)
-control settings has become so complex its almost unusable

I won't go on, I know from experience that you either vehemently agree or vehemently disagree.

edit: I should add: I used XP for 10 years then switched over to win7 last year. I am not a mac or linux fanboy. I recently switch to osx full time at home, and use XP to play games. I could not be happier with that setup.
Free markets are where you buy unicorns, aren't they?
It's a very easy trap to fall into if you're living check to check and make even the slightest mistake.

In each such story online, I've heard a claim that they specifically have algorithms to maximize the penalty fees on these mistakes.

Its another instance of a practice that disproportionately affects the poor. Unless you're living paycheque to paycheque, you would never even bother looking into such niggling details.
Steam supports generating backup discs and images. They could release a way of using them without requiring online verification.
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Let's see, for $250 you can spend $10 per room in sensors. Let's say you have 10 rooms. The remaining $150 can easily cover the cost of a fairly intelligent controller. That would be a better system with potential for far more intelligence, particularly if coupled with a simple zone system modification to the AC ducting (valves that can route air where it is needed and prevent it form going where it is not).

Something like that would have a far greater effect on the cost and efficiency of controlling an environment than a single expensive thermostat in one room.

That's what bugs me about these kinds of products. They never address the real problem. They are only there to find a niche that you can sell a gadget into with some pretext that may or may not exist, like the idea that thermostats are hard to program. OK then, try this one, it's cheaper:

http://www.smarthome.com/30429/Venstar-T5800-ColorTouch-Full...

The thermostat is not the problem. Homes (and buildings in general) are wasting energy because we are still approaching thermal management they way it was done 50 years ago. Here in the US it is not uncommon to cover the top of a commercial building with black tar (for waterproofing purposes). And then you wonder why it cost so much money to keep that building cool. These outdated ideas and methods need to change.

That's the problem.
i would LOVE to see source code for this. currently my blog is hosted in wave. not to duplicate the effort, i'd rather you guys did it, but as a base point for other G+ api publishing.

hmm, not sure if this[1] is it, but it is similar.

[1] https://github.com/ayust/pluss
I agree that it's interesting to see these numbers.

But, take into account that Chrome sees much more intensive development than all these projects. Progress is a more fitting measure than time.
I love buying these bundles to support the charities and the developers even though I never really play the games. But it does seem to me that there is more innovation occurring in the indie space than from the mainstream developers.
you obviously have a very limited view: if you're talking 10 or 20 machines, no problem. If you're talking 1000 or 2000 (or 10 or 20 thousand) then it's a whole different ballgame. Doing this would be career suicide. Imagine Monday morning, and half your upgrades cause people to have to change their way of doing things. Suddenly your HelpDesk is swamped. What do you tell your boss? Start off with a phased approach, IT first (the good IT people), then a couple of groups of power users. Allow them time to get aclimatized to it and you learn the sharp edges. Then gradually roll it out to the rest of your user population. Group policy is for changing all your backgrounds at once. But event then, you risk pissing off people in positions of power.
> Windows XP needs to be not only the first ten-year operating system; it also needs to be the last.

I disagree with this.

I agree ten years is a long life for an OS now but sometime in the future that won't be true. The point is that the OS is a platform that should be stable and supported for years, if not decades. At some point the underlying technology and operation principles of an OS will plateau or reach diminished returns and a new OS will not be needed or just not worth the trouble.

Fast tracking OS releases today is really bad for all (except MS which is why they do it). Vista came out 5 years after XP but it was not ready for prime time. Win7 came out 3 years after Vista and Win8 is slated for 3 years after the release of Win7. This 3 year OS cycle is insanity. One reason no one wanted to give up XP was because it worked, it was reasonably stable and no one wanted the pain and cost of moving to a new OS with all the inevitable driver and app problems. I'd bet that most of the new "features" of Win8 are really improved apps that would work fine on Win7 or completely unnecessary. Sell new features in the old OS but make them standard in the new OS and release the new OS on approximately 5 year (and eventually longer) cycles when the fundamental functions of the OS need to change to improve security, efficiency or operation, not because MS needs revenue.

Win7 is a good OS, a worthy successor to XP, but we aren't even out of the Win7 adoption period (by users, hardware manufactures and ISV's) and we are suppose accept Win8 and stir the whole pot again? I suspect that Win8 is going to have the same marketing problem that (in part) submarined Vista. People don't care about Operating Systems, they run them to run Applications.
Something was broken on your setup. I run Win7 on extremely resource-constrained computers (1GB RAM, Pentium III 1GHz) and it works considerably better than XP SP2. I've had the same experience on old-but-not-ancient (Pentium M 1.7GHz, 2GB RAM) machines as well as screamingly fast new boxes (3.4GHz quad-core i7 with 16GB RAM). Across the board, Windows 7 beats out XP SP2 in perceived performance, and I'd be willing to bet it does so in real performance too but I can't be bothered to benchmark.
As with most big companies, whether its a caustic environment or not really depends on which team you're working for. The culture instilled by your manager or manager's manager is more powerful than the corporate culture as a whole.
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Thanks, never knew that.
Vista wasn't bad after SP1 or so.
I'd also observe that "let's create an 'AI' by piling on the special cases until we have a generally-capable tool" has been tried numerous times, and it's a known failure case. After a certain point, the piled-on rules being negatively interacting with each other, and it requires one of 1. true AI (thus begging the question) or 2. treating the set of rules as one of the quirkiest programming languages ever to make effective use of it.

Many people are speculating about how wonderful Siri will be in the (near) future; I'd submit that the evidence suggests that it has pretty much come out of the gate with all the power it's going to have for the foreseeable future. Natural language querying seems to have been stuck at the same plateau for a long time, just like voice recognition technology has been.
This practice should be illegal, just like processing withdrawals before deposits is now illegal, which was also done to maximize overdraft fees (at least I'm pretty sure it's illegal now).

Our government needs to make it easier to switch to a different bank. Tons of people would leave these awful banks for credit unions and such if it was easy to do. I mean it's possible to switch banks, it's a big headache though. People just have too many other things to worry about right now to deal with headaches like that.
I used to use http://httrack.com/ when I needed to do this.
It's nice to see a C-level of a multinational who's an engineer; she has a CS degree.

I have been profoundly unhappy with IBM software products, maybe a new CEO will kick some butt and get some innovation rolling!
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And they are still hiring! They've been bombarding me with emails to interview with them, for some reason.
Which is why you shouldn't be using such a dangerous service when living check to check.

Go to a bank machine, inquire about your current balance, and then extract cash to make your purchases with.

Banks may be predatory with fees, but really it's your own responsibility to avoid this trap, and it's not even that hard to do. You can also join a credit union.
Tell that to the iPhone 5 prognosticators.
it actually makes it worse: you now have at least 2 agencies you have to watch
at least until you disarm the populace, then it's 'free play' all day long
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I think thats a case of perceiving the basics to be to hard to properly execute on. Maxing out build orders in multiple buildings in multiple locations while optimally planning for expansion and getting the right balance of things being built is hard. I guess how this applies is that people want a short cut so they don't have to be the best they can be at the fundamentals.
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Comment pulled from techcrunch:

Chris Zaharias · Having worked in sales at Netscape for four years (1995-99) I have to very respectfully disagree with Ben. Netscape did not recover from a better, faster, free IIS by building a better web server (called Netscape Enterprise Server, or NES). That helped to a small extent, but much more important were a) competitive advantages in email servers, proxy servers and directory servers; b) bundling of those solutions into a server suite (SuiteSpot); c) effective management of inbound lead flow (kudos to Todd Rulon-Miller & Bill Kellinger); and d) stellar, massive, but arguably long-term damaging OEM sell-thru by Ram Shriram's team that allowed Netscape to continue to grow overall server revenues.

Of those $400M server revenues, very little was NES, and as the graph at the below link shows, NES was always in decline relative competitors.

http://www.securityspace.com/de/s_survey/data/man.200909/htt...? mod=TmV0c2NhcGUtRW50ZXJwcmlzZQ%3D %3D
Please tell me that you called them, or walked into the nearest branch, and demanded that they reverse all but one of the charges, and, either

(1) They agreed, or

(2) You promptly closed your account.
For months after the new regulation my bank was giving me a screen when I logged on to online banking. It went something like this:

Recent Federal regulations require us to re-confirm your enrollment in this valuable service you'd previously been getting with your checking account.

[ YES! Please! ]

[ Remind me later ]
I remember when BB&T called me to beg me to authorize them to enable overdraft "protection" on my account. They acted like it would be doing me a favor, and when I asked them why they would even bother me about something so horrible, the lady on the phone insisted that "the government" was trying to interfere in our freedoms or some other such bull crap.
and when you are living paycheck to paycheck, you don't often have the time or energy to wander the maze of niggling details.
In the book "The Big Short", Michael Lewis mentions how one CEO admitted to an audience that free checking accounts were simply a way of screwing over poor people for all these additional fees, like overdraft, etc. It's really because people with less money need to spend more time managing their money because they are closer to drawing down the account, and the banks are betting on this. It's basically predatory banking, and I guess based on the numbers, extremely profitable.

It's the exact type of behavior I would expect from a bank. But let's not swallow everything that the article said. It's not like banks of yesteryear were so magnanimous. Back in the Great Depression, it was the banks that screwed over so many farmers and home-owners that many states, including California, made mortgages non-recourse meaning that banks could only take back the house in the case of foreclosure, something that many people took advantage of during the latest housing boom.
Same way that you do it now - copy the relevant files out of ~/Steam/steamapps/ to wherever you need. I've gotten around re-downloading huge games because everything you need is in there (when I've already done it once before on a different machine, or when I'm getting a game a local friend of mine already downloaded). The only thing stopping you from playing it is the DRM on the executable, but the mythical Steam-is-dead-here-you-go-patch will solve that.
lol sounds like Wells Fargo...
I had a similar situation happen at Bank of America except in my situation I wasn't relying on a single overdraft, I wasn't expecting any. They put in a transfer from my savings to my checking a day after they said it would go through and did the exact same sorting of large purchases to charge my multiple fees.

It took me two and a half hours to get the charges reversed, 30 minutes of which were spent in the nearest BoFA location until I learned I had to commute around town to go back to the original place I opened my account to even discuss the situation.
Why did Amazon profits take a hit?
Not KeyBank. I had a situation like this in college. Several levels of escalation finally got two of six overdraft charges lifted, but I was told that two reversed charges was the limit per year, no matter what the reason.
I was discussing this with my friend the other day and she's convinced that if she didn't have overdraft 'protection' there are still certain merchants who run debit cards as credit cards which then incur an overdraft fee anyway. Has anyone heard of this? I'm looking for some evidence I can use to get her to cancel the overdraft nonsense before she gets further in debt.
If I'm a perspective tenant and fill out the form for one apartment, do I have to do it again if I apply to another property that also uses rentmethod?
Downvote all you like, but so long as your response to getting screwed is "I always get screwed by these evil people" rather than "Shit, they got me. I'm going to take steps to protect myself.", you'll forever be a victim.

I used to suffer the same mentality until I finally woke up and started to take responsibility for my own future.

Things happen to victims. Victors make things happen.
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Even if I'm not actively looking for a job, I'm always looking for a good beer. And I'm sure that's true of many good developers. I've always thought it was weird that recruiters never tried organizing drinkups or sponsoring barcamps.
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If I'm taling to my phone, I'm not looking at the screen for ads. So how does Google bring ads to voice-recog? Is the voice reply interrupted by voice ads? I wouldn't use it.
IBM: Watson.

Now, if Apple could buy IBM...
he's totally right. I have almost bought more games in a year of having a Steam account than in the last 10 years and i prefer to buy them on Steam for the "convenience" of it's "cloud based" service.
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And yet, nicely cherry-picked videos and stills from the iPhone 4S promotional material are just fine for stoking the fires of iOS vs the rest...
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> but you can't call it evil when someone refuses to do something no one else does either.

So is not evil if a person in germany during the Second World War discriminated jews rigth?
That is a good point - the most accurate statement would be: lack of correlation cannot imply there is no relation.

I think we risk oversimplification by referring to it solely as a failure of detection. The first 3 points of the article mean we could probably adjust the experiment right now (or should have before the experiment began). The 4th point, while technically a failure of detection, could be due to unknown confounders (or as Rumsfeld would say - unknown unknowns). So it could be a failure in detection or a failure in knowledge.
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No doubt Peter Thiel means well. Thiel Foundation is a non-profit organization. Today it announced Breakout Labs which aims to fund very nascent research proposals — opportunities that are too early stage or radical to attract dollars from VCs or government grants.
Bank of America is currently facing a potential class action lawsuit for this very practice. I have no idea where it is at, or if it will be successful, but one can hope.
former IBM SE here... SE's at IBM are, technically, technical sales people. they are the ones that accompany the salesman to keep him honest and answer the tough questions.
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If you cared to look for more than 5 seconds, the "Our Thermostat" link at the top of the page takes you to a nice page all about the Nest with just text/images.

http://www.nest.com/living-with-nest/index.html
>exceeding estimates is expected

If this is a cold hard face, wouldn't someone factor that in when making the "estimate" or does "estimate" now have a new meaning?
I'm pretty sure my alarm clock's manual is on another continent.

Then again, it doesn't take me a manual to figure out the "mode" button cycles between showing seconds, day of the week, time in both current and configured secondary time zone, and time and date in secondary time zone. I'm sure it could be made much more user friendly, material efficient, durable, and affordable with a touchscreen.
Good direction, but bad conclusion: "poor signal" is not the same thing as "congestion". This fact is what causes TCP over any form of wireless (including high-speed WiFi) to have been a really bad decision (and one that academic researchers the world over love trying to solve ;P).

The reason is that TCP makes an assumption (almost entirely true in the case of physical cable) that "packet loss" is always caused by "congestion" (due to the router simply throwing away packets it cannot handle), and so if you are losing packets you need to slow down your rate of sending, to help more of them get through.

However, if the reason you are losing packets is "poor signal", then you are going to get a pretty much constant rate of packet loss: if 10% of your airwaves are "damaged", 10% of your packets are going to be lost whether you are sending them at 100k/s or 1b/s (as your choice of "when to send" is entirely random from the perspective of the interference: your device is not modeling the underlying issue so it can try to "dodge the raindrops"; people work on this, though ;P).

The result is that when your signal is bad, even if you are currently getting 90k/s out after 10% loss, your standard TCP stack goes "oh shit" and starts dialing down its transmit window to "virtually nothing", leaving you unable to use that connection to get any data through anymore; even just opening a new connection when this happens (which may require restarting the app) tends to help tremendously.

(The solutions, for the record, all involve some sort of mechanism that allows explicit bookkeeping of either packet loss or congestion. However, this explicit bookkeeping requires various players that are not the device to be "in on it", and therefore makes it really hard to find the right balance of "who needs to install better routers to solve the problem", given the wide deployment of existing TCP... I mean, even getting IPv6 out there has been a tough sell, replacing IP entirely is a pipe-dream right now.)
My bank had something similar. I really don't understand why they're allowed to do it at all, even as an opt-in "service". If I wanted to spend money I didn't have, I'd use my credit card. At my bank, an overdraft counts as a cash advance from your credit card anyway. It's just a way for them to force you to borrow money at an inflated interest rate, and it's absolute bullshit.