skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More confusion though: The advantage over other materials is that our material is from 10 to 100 times more absorbent

There's some snake oil there. If their material absorbs 99%, that would mean that other materials would only absorb 1-10%, which is not true. They even say in the article that black paint absorbs 90%.

What they probably mean is that their material reflects 10-100 times less light. Ie, something 90% absorbent is 10% reflective, and their material is 0.1-1% reflective....
Welcome to Google Hell. I have described my experience here http://blog.foundrs.com/2010/11/15/the-10-step-google-login-... (the 10-step login from hell).

I never wanted to have a gmail account. But to use a certain service, years ago, Google required that I create a gmail account. So I did. Then someone invited me to a Google Apps project, so I got another email there. Then YouTube decided to merge my login info with Google. It's been more than 5 years, and now I have 6 accounts with Google, and it's been hell ever since. It did get better this year as Google started better supporting merging and multiple accounts.

Don't blame the user. I never wanted this to happen to me.
You can't go through life worrying about what might offend people. Because the scope of what people are offended by is enormous. Some people are offended by sex before marriage. Or atheists. Or religious people. Or gay people. Or vegetarians.

Sure, if you're holidaying in Saudi Arabia, you shouldn't walk around badmouthing Mohammed. But for the most part you can be certain that a small percentage of your actions will offend a small percentage of the people you meet. Such is life.

Fun fact: here in the UK, the word "git" is mildly offensive (I mentioned GitHub amongst family and got a bit of an incredulous look). The company the guy works at is an offensive word.
I'd honestly like to know too.

In my _professional_ life, I am not aware of anyone who would bat an eyelash at swearing in a professional presentation. Indeed, some of the best panels I've attended at well-known conferences have been pretty rough, language-wise. But they were, indeed, great panels!

It seems like about half of the commenters here are having trouble parsing the relationship between content and delivery.
I'm sure it's part of a larger strategy.

Explicitly valuing staff retention means that he probably also recognises the value of company culture, group ownership, and so on.
Absolutely true.

I would support any criticism of a lack of female presenters and so on. But "criticizing" humor is in my view the highest form of arrogance existing. Telling other people what they are allowed to find funny and what not is just pure hypocrisy. If someone can't look behind a few unfunny remarks and pull the "I AM OFFENDED" card, any further argument seems impossible. I think there is a need besides the reductio ad hitlerum to introduce a reductio ad affendendum.
Swearing has been demonstrated to help distract yourself from a trauma- but only when it's unusual for the individual.

So, I tend to reserve my colorful language for those times when I've drawn blood and/or tears from myself.
Ah, I see what you mean now. Thank you for clarifying.
It's interesting how it talks about how employees aren't loyal to companies, I think a lot of this is because most companies don't show much loyalty to their employees. Although it seems more likely in start ups.

When companies show loyalty to their staff and not lay them off at the first sign of trouble, really think about compensation (so that employees don't have to consider changing jobs as the only way to get a pay rise) then they may see more loyalty from their employees.
Italy Sparks Market Bloodbath: Financial Stocks Collapse
Use a timer. Everyone has 5 or 10min to discuss their viewpoint; 6 people = 1hour; If someone finishes before their allotted time, tack it on at the end for a group discussion. You have to enforce the time constraints, otherwise you'll just waste everyone's time. It also helps everyone get in the habit of 'getting to point' of what they have to say and it makes for an efficient and productive meeting. Good luck.
As you can see from the comments here, people's reactions to swearing are all over the map. Zach guesses that for his audience swearing will lose a handful and connect stronger with the rest. Even if that guess is right for his audience (which is not a given), it might be wrong for yours. I recommend seeking other ways to help the audience care about what you say.
But people who say "fucking" happily call any sub-optimal software "fucking useless", even when it only has minor flaws.
I am not suggesting that he wasn't effective as a communicator. In fact, I would still listen to his presentations and won't be bothered by any profanity. My point is that advocating profanity in tech presentations is not necessary. It seems like a lot of young people are eager to drop profanity words when they present to wide audiences just to show how cool and different they are. But when everyone does it in presentations, it becomes cliche or even a pain.
patio11 as well as few other HN high-karmers get their most trivial comments routinely up voted to the top of every thread.

That gives me an idea: What if HN hide usernames until you'd voted on a comment (or hide it for X minutes). That'd be an interesting technological change.
Yikes. What could possibly go wrong?

Employees will see this as a deferred bonus. Applying to myself, let's say I make it to 4 years and am fired "with cause", maybe I had one too many sick days, before the fifth year. Maybe at 11 years and 10 months. That is going to be irritating.

But the other thing is that employees will factor it into their perception of compensation. At the end of 5 years after the payout, unless there is something new put in place, or a $10k raise, it's going to seem like a wage cut at that point. That issue needs to be considered, anticipated, and addressed.

Another problem is it likely knocks you into a new tax bracket that year, and possible kills off some subsidy you were getting with the new health care system so now you have to pay the full premiums, and various other similar issues, so all together it could end up being a bit less than one would get with it spread out over 5 years.

Rather than a $250,000 one time bonus at 25 years, which may or may not be possible since it's unlikely this is going to be set up in a trust account, it would be better to see a tax deferred, legally guaranteed pension plan set up and funded. In 25 years $250,000 is going to be a lot less than it is now, in a retirement investment account it has the opportunity to grow.

But, on the other hand, perhaps many people don't think in terms of retirement or taxes these days and are impressed by what seem to be large numbers and lottery payouts. If that's the case, then perhaps this is a more effective incentive than retirement benefits.
I don't think that it should. This was a completely different stack than what the Russians use for launching people, the Russian manned mission success rate is damned impressive, and the US has had a fair number of their own failed probes.
Are We At An Inflection Point For Mobile Search?
Exactly. And beyond the sheer usefulness of it, it's a potential business opportunity.
What other company is posturing this way and also lets you backup (soon to be?) all of your data?

Facebook? They've let users download their data for some time now. (go to https://www.facebook.com/settings then "Download your data")

This looks like this: https://skitch.com/timothee/g8c7r/download-your-information

For all the critics that Facebook gets, it's also good to note that they have customer service. (and pretty good for my little experience)
AutoBlog Sniper Review
Excuse me? I am interested in engaging in mature dialog about the article, not getting into a grammar-nazi pissing match.

If you have a worthwhile point to make in response to mine, then please do so. However I must ask you to refrain from posting unproductive comments like this.
/* You are not expected to understand this */

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/odd.html
What I'd like to see is an ounce of professionalism in most technical presentations. I'm not easily offended by swearing, but I am offended by content. For example, a couple years back at jQueryConf in Boston I just walked out of a talk. In the first 10 min. the presenter had said "fuck" about 17 times and managed to make an MS joke. That's not Microsoft mind you, that's multiple sclerosis. In most contexts I wouldn't have cared, but I paid $300 to attend that conference and it was pretty evident that this guy wasn't going to provide any actual content in his talk.

Most tech talks I've seen in the past 5 years have been terrible. I see the presenters tweeting that they still need to do their slides while flying to the conference. Obviously they haven't rehearsed that all and it shows in their presentation. They read from the slides. The code examples don't work. They throw up pictures of lolcats and other memes to get a cheap laugh. And occasionally they'll swear to seem edgy. Most of this is mistaken as connecting with the audience. It's sorta like when you watch a horror movie that just throws in a loud noise all of a sudden to startle you. The result is that you appear scared but you can still walk away and think it was a bad movie.

The best talks I've seen have been practiced to the point that they seem natural. The presenter knows his content thoroughly. The slides are informative and all support the content of the talk. The talk isn't a thinly veiled vendor pitch for the presenter's consultancy or company. The talk isn't also just a summary of introductory information. There's real substance. Whether swearing is used or not seems to have little impact on that, but in my experience the best presenters manage to deliver a compelling talk by throwing out cheap rhetoric.
10gen's response to MongoDB's slams
Agree. Its surprising how much Google can get by without providing any customer support at all. I stopped using my gmail accounts earlier this year when I lost my I emails and google couldn't track them down.
Antispyware, the most credible fake anti-spyware
WTF are you talking about? The ad makes no claims that the data is kept around forever. Your snarky comment applies to all digital media, mind.
Again, I don't think that's the main issue. The main issue is bringing up an unnecessary topic that a minority will be uncomfortable about given the rest of the audience. The divisiveness, the feeling of "I don't feel welcome here" is a result of that. Whether or not the presenter intended that to be the case is not the question.
Yep. Like I stated in the post. I would do it myself If I had Android or iPhone, but phone for me is phone so old shitty Nokia is enough for me.
The general principle at work here is the "early-adopter" vs "mainstream". Your early users probably recognized that it was a new product and were willing to take a risk with it, recognizing that it's a small organization in charge and that their answers are likely to be answered in a timely manner. Once you've got 10,000+ users and hundreds or thousands of reviews, then you're "established" and people will be much harsher in their reviews, and less likely to contact support expecting some kind of auto-responder and days response time.
National Emergency Broadcast System test reveals multiple failures
Swearing doesn't bug me, it's neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned. But the idea that it's being used to carefully craft a 'persona' in order to 'build a brand' is annoying and frankly immature. I have very little patience with the idea that our personalities can and should be carefully crafted for public consumption, to 'build a following.' There's a world of difference between, for instance, _why's comic persona constructed from wit and creativity, and a 'branded' persona constructed out of simplistic marketing principles.

It definitely reinforces the idea that, in this case, the swearing is a device used to draw attention to the speaker rather than the speaker's point. And that was the thrust of the original criticism.

I usually don't even notice or care if someone curses in a presentation, but my douche-radar starts going off if I get the sense that it's being done for self-aggrandizement. I don't get the feeling that Zach is a douche-y kind of guy. But one of his 'personas' might be leaning that direction.

Is this where the technology community is going? Do we really need 'personas' in addition to technical accomplishments and good communication skills? Are technologists going to start looking more and more like wide receivers?
Why should anything professional be sterile, humourless, polit-correct to the point of being lifeless?
Why is any mention of sexuality "inappropriate"?
It is so sad that we degnerate to primitive knee-jerk reaction—spekear mentions anything sexuality related—I must by offended. WHY? We are _wired_ to pay attention to this stuff, this is a reason why we are there and I really don't get this trend to pretend we are all cold, sexless robots.
LivingSocial & Groupon Looking to Acquire Scvngr
Have you read the cited study?

Maybe we just don't want to deal with salespeople but instead judge the product on our own without being harassed. How is that supposed to be competitive?

If that is true then why do women respond better in face-to-face encounters?
Okay then, Google and the 3 browser players on Android advertise flash support because it's a point of difference.

As to whether anyone wants it, well, what they really want is to be able to browse all their favourite websites. Fair enough, but forcing the web to stop treating a proprietary add-on as mandatory is a legitimate (if imperfect) way of solving that problem.

Flash sites designed for a large monitor are a pain to use on a mobile device, and it's not because of resolution, it's because they're often combined with smallest-possible typeface sizes and a layout that frustrates if you have to zoom in. Believe me, I've used enough restaurant flash-sites that are all but impossible to navigate on my Android.
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys."
Infographic: What happens to the human body after drinking a can of cola
I'd prefer if headlines weren't capitalised. The Moon is pretty unique, it's Earth's moon.
There is something to be said about a lumpsum payment of $50k that is psychologically more attractive to people than the same about of money amortized over a period of 60 months. Extra 11k a year comes down to an extra $900 a month, which for a lot of people is not as psychologically impactful as getting a $50k payment. Smart strategy by the company.
Social norms fluctuate. Things that our forefathers took offence at seem inconsequential to us now, and vice versa.

Perhaps someday as a group we will get beyond taking offence over how someone unmaliciously manipulates their vocal chords and instead concentrate our outrage at more pressing problems.
10K extra a year would financially be more expensive to invest than 50K five years later.
How to make time lapse screencaptures for free (mac)
Apple used to have a sabbatical; at five years, you got six paid weeks off.

Well, it's not 50K, on the other hand it was surprising how many people hung on until five years, took their six weeks off (often including vacation), then quit.

It seemed to get rid of dead wood. I'm still not sure why.
Ghadafi's Libya could have controlled Bitly's TLS key

A. Hosting important stuff under TLDs controlled by unstable, unfriendly governments is a dumb idea any way you slice it.

B. Ghadafi's Libya did control bit.ly. Libya still does, until such time as no one will talk to it without properly-authenticated TLS.

C. TLS keys are not part of DNSSEC. Some people are proposing that idea, but it's not clear if whatever might get adopted could actually usurp a decently CA signed cert served over HTTPS. It looks far more likely that CA pinning in HSTS is going to be deployed much faster than anything over DNSSEC.
I know our age is a bit poor in rhetoric, so go listen to a speech by: Churchill, FDR, JFK, MLK etc. It's really sad to hear some people need to resort to swearing in order to emotionally connect with their audience... If your speech/presentation would be utterly boring unless punctuated with strong words, then it was probably badly structured to begin with.
Great! Thanks!

BTW, it's not just "British people" who write "colour"; the people can also be from British colonies. ;)
Mobile app rewards kids for keeping parents informed of their whereabouts
Someone can feel powerful because they got someone to agree with them and because they believe they are right.

As a salesman, you don't get compensated for "feeling right". Welcome to the real world.

Persuading people is a lot easier if you look at it as mutually trying to make the best decision

Depending on your definition of "gimmick", the above may also be considered a gimmick.
What people seem to often forget is... during the financial crisis following the housing crash governments (especially in the USA) passed out significant amounts of bailout money for all those banks but completely failed to get them under control - so banks just used that bailout money to temporarily guarantee their vital liquidity and once things were looking up again a few months later, they just kicked them out and went right back to their old business, including bonuses and everything.

There were even farce attempts to "get them under control" and the banks themselves would have votes in these decisions HOW they were going to be controlled and regulated. Excuse me??? That is like putting the mafia on trial and making their family the grand jury.

"Too big to fail" has proven time and again to be the absolutely best way of gaming the system almost any way you want. We even bent the very rules of capitalism and free market backwards multiple times to accommodate for these behemoth institutions and to this day, justice hasn't happened and nobody has ever been responsible for this mess.
Whether the speaker intended it is exactly what she's wondering in that quote.

Also, being a heterosexual guy, I would have avoided or walked out of this talk anyway. So I guess I'm just having a hard time telling how much that feeling would change if I were a "minority", because apparently I would have the same reaction either way.
We Are What We Choose
"SIB is Schneider's third company. Now 30 years old, he started his first business, a retail mobile phone company, when he was 18... [In] November of 2008... SIB was born."

The average period of ownership for his prior two companies was under 4.5 years, given that he took a break in between ("to learn to kiteboard, traveling to the Dominican Republic, Panama, Israel and Mexico"). One was sold, no word on the other.

He's asking employees to stick with a job longer than he EVER has.

And he's asking them to have faith that, if he sells again, the new owner will respect this bonus policy.

I'd have zero faith in this. But then, unemployment being what it is, I probably wouldn't quit, either.
You might have been inadvertently employing the "disarming" technique used by pick up artists. "The Game" is an amazing book detailing the techniques used by pick up artists (and no, it's just for people who want to pick up ladies but more generally about influencing people).
For what it's worth, most of these examples (and more) are in Cialdini's book Influence:

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Busine...
Whenever I hear people talk of the "f-bomb" I remember this quote from my friend.

"Euphemisms of bad words are still bad words. Words are not created filthy. We give them meaning. So whenever you say "effing" or "fricking"... you're missing the fucking point." - Jay Levanne
I had the same experience when watching the Startup School video on the office hours when there was an innocent comment by PG regarding the mic and the female founders, and the whole audience laughed. I felt embarrassed at the immaturity of the audience and how much this was normal behavior for engineers. I think the whole cs/hacker field needs to reach for higher standards of professionalism.
The 'official toolkit' Metro is XAML + (C++ or .NET or MSHTML5). I've been told by a (true) Silverlight/WPF expert that the Win8 XAML most resembles the Silverlight API.

Silverlight used to be promoted as:

* Flex/Flash compete
* Public web compete (I never recommended it for such)
* line-of-business (not publicly available) apps
* (recent) Windows Phone 7

Silverlight is now promoted as:

* line-of-business apps
* Windows Phone 7, but maybe Win Phone 8 will look more like the Win8 Metro XAML (I don't think they've said anything yet)

Metro is now promoted for:

* Win8 tablet apps
* Win8 native apps(? who cares I guess?)
* possibly Win Phone 8 apps

I don't know what apps you write, so I don't know what your specific roadmap may look like. I've leaned toward recommending web apps over "client" apps for .NET devs the past few years, and will heavily lean that way going forward. ASP.NET MVC skills translate easily to open source/competing web frameworks. WPF or Silverlight developers can't say the same thing.
You made my point. You don't need to worry about it if don't know. But it would nice to be considerate when you're aware of it. I'm just worried that a lot of young presenters drop profanity words in presentations just so to make themselves look cool. I hope F bombs won't become a rule of giving tech presentations.
Adobe Communication
That's kind of the point, to get them to stay for 5 years. It's an extra $10,000 per year in pay that is only payable if they stay 5 years. Most people leave for better pay, this mitigates that and will not always have to be paid.

If they stay til 5 years and then leave after getting the cheque that's an extra couple of years. It's also a major negotiating point on salary raises. (eg. An employee of 4 years is more worried about the 50K than rocking the boat for an extra 10K raise).

This offer like most perks is cleverly constructed to make an employee who is about to leave stay and think he is getting one over on the company by leaving the day after he gets his $50,000. (Which most employees won't actually do because they aren't sharks)
The potential academic implementations (like in a classroom setting) are promising. Groups of students can collaborate on any projects they want, or even with the teacher present. Commercial implementations could be launched by Stypi to accompany popular academic suites like Blackboard for online assignments.
Ask HN: What makes an hacker "great" vs "good"
After being rejected from a few places I applied for I'm trying to become a better programmer. I thought I was pretty good until I got rejected on the spot by two places. I know where my faults lie for at least one of those places (no idea about the other) but my question is more general.

What makes a hacker great? Let me quantify this by saying I don't really care about what a great hacker has done but rather what qualities, knowlage and skills they have that make them great.

If you want to think of it in terms of candidates, what makes you want to hire one guy over the next?
Some solutions from http://www.thewatchmakerproject.com/post/facebook-to-stop-rs...

Ping.fm http://ping.fm/

My Blog Posts http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=234713335398
What Is Chronic Motor Or Vocal Tic Disorder
Apparently they offer 24/7 phone and email support for Google Apps for Business customers, but I've never had any experience with it. Could someone else comment as to whether or not their Apps customer support is just as bad?
More pictures (Wormhole launch party at the Stanford cafe): http://www.flickr.com/photos/stanfordeng/6323012297/in/photo...
probably won't work.

there is no real trust in employment...to a lot of people they'd just see it as an added incentive for the boss to fire you at the end of 4th year.