skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Watch sergey's interview with tim o'reilly on youtube from last week, he mentions that something out of x lab will be coming out by the end of this year. Also, the fact that he's not actively working on google+ and their cutting of previously ambitious projects like energy, google health, etc and the new york times article mentions stanford and nyu, welll known neural network researchers (andrew ng and yann lecunn) means it's probably ai related, probably neural networks applied to computer vision. Space, i probably don't think so.

Of course this is all speculation, i don't have any inside info.
It's that an irrelevant technicality though? Say he reads only on his phone, and lost it. Does that make the case more or less important? What if some nice person buys him physical copies to replace the DRM'd ones? Does that get Amazon off the hook?

There's a principle here. The specifics aren't really the point.
They have 287,000 employees. At $10k/employee/year, that's $2.87 Billion, on which they should have paid roughly 15% in taxes (about $400M).

Throw in the $490M GE gets directly for it's wind projects, and ignore the value of it's loan guarantees, and we are up to nearly $900M.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/279802/america-s-wors...

Do you seriously believe GE has dodged more than $900 billion in taxes?
Here in Canada I can't use Spotify, Pandora, Google Music, or Amazon's thing without jumping through hoops and proxies, and I'm just too old and lazy for such shenanigans now.

Grooveshark has me as a customer for life whether the labels want want to play nice with them or not. The only alternatives we have are Rdio, Slacker, and maybe a couple of others. None of them are nearly as good as Grooveshark. Grooveshark's biggest drawback is having to jailbreak to get their iOS app, and that's not something they have control over. Major points to them for developing it anyway for a smaller jailbreak audience.
I led a problem resolution team at a large company. If we ever knowingly received three calls from any client for the same problem (through any method of client contact source), or the complaint was vocal or serious enough on the first call (or first identifiable call), the incident would be forwarded to us and we'd deal with it directly. Rarely did the most complex issue take more than a day or two to resolve. On occasion it took a week or two if it was especially complex, but we'd contact the client directly and offer to give them a daily update so they'd know what was going on.

I'd be quite surprised if Amazon didn't have a similar team, even if just a dozen or two staff, if they are experienced, that's all that's usually required. The savings lost to poor public relations, and improved customer relations, easily make up for the cost of the team.
Good Health is Multi-Colored ... The American Blueberry (Bilberry)
I don't really subscribe to your argument in a cloud-based market where - to me - the biggest looming threat is to lose access to all your data.

There was another incident (Amazon again) where they lost a person's annotations for the Jobs biography in a software update[1]. Amazon seem to be botching the cloud aspect of e-books, and while their selection is orders of magnitude better than iBooks in my country (because I can buy from Amazon.com), the reason I buy e-books in the first place is because of what the cloud offers - with marginalia/annotations being the best selling point over dead-tree books.

Annotating e-books on the Kindle app on iOS is also a ridiculous pain in the ass, but that's for another time. I love the selection Amazon has, especially the self-published articles from bloggers, Ars Technica, newspapers or magazines and such, but the way Apple keeps screwing these things up, I plan on choosing the iBooks version, if available. I honestly think I might have thrown my phone against the wall, if all my Isaacson biography annotations had been wiped.

But that's just me as one customer. I am sure that some people have the priorities you do, but I wouldn't exactly predict an unequivocal PR failure. :)

[1]: http://mjtsai.com/blog/2011/11/21/kindle-annotations-lost-in...
Thank you for the words of support.

Unfortunately people in my generation are not seeing a brief end to this.
Emigration has increased by about 40% last year. And this is in a country where the public universities are the best ones, so the state ends up investing in people's education, but it cannot keep them in the country.

Also, low salaries in computer engineering are not the only thing wrong in the profession. I have heard countless stories of people working in consulting companies, having to do unpaid overtime work.
Internships are also usually unpaid (and this is on every area, not just Comp. Eng.).

I am a senior student at the aforementioned top university, and I don't think I know anyone that isn't thinking about leaving the country (even if for a while, not permanently). The university's vice-president gave an interview for a national newspaper: he referred to this problem as "our brains are leaving the country" (and he meant not only students, but researchers as well).
Seriously? This is a privacy concern? I really should get into the tin foil hat business.
Extraction of Main Text Content Using the Google Reader NoAPI
€1000 Virtual Item For Game Raises €2 Million In 4 Days For Bigpoint
If they've decided to abandon plugins and proprietary languages in favor of javascript, why shouldn't they feel that it is ok to criticize Google's approach?
But on OKC you can choose to consider multiple answers as "right". So if you want to make 5 or 6 continents acceptable answers, you can do so.
What's wrong with saying "I told you so"? I would say there were more people blindly championing Groupon in the lead-up to the IPO than contrarians. Let the contrarians enjoy their moment, and let the champions eat their crow. As long as we learn our lesson, it's OK.
My Editor Says I Must Be Funny to Write -
Can we just note again here that in your construction, "the bad guys" include Google themselves? The tactic we're talking about is, as Patrick notes at the very start of his post, the same one Google uses at the top of every SERP.
No, the title is incorrect. Opting out is not going to the mall (private property).

I kind of see it like saying "I want to buy something on your website - but I don't want to give you an email address or credit card!" Obviously not a perfect analogy, but really, you are going on their turf and utilizing their services. If you don't want to play by their rules, don't patronize them.
I'm not going to judge a book by its cover. All I can see here is list of chapters and some links to related projects. Unlike Dive into HTML5, there is no free online html version of book here. May be someone who have read it can tell it better.

However, I found these resources on html5 to be very informative.

http://slides.html5rocks.com
http://studio.html5rocks.com/
HOW good people end up there

patio11's post tells us right up front where he learned this particular technique: Google taught it to him.

I'm not even speaking metaphorically. Google invented this technique, they use it on every search-results page where there's any money to be made with it, and they published an educational page that explicitly teaches the technique to everyone else, a page which Patrick links to and quotes.

Those of you who rail about the evils of advertising in general, or this technique in particular, are entitled to your opinions, but do please aim your rage at the appropriate target: Google.
WP7's app bar icons - Where consistency fails.
I usually spend about a day considering my idea's merit, then I get started. I use ruby (I prefer Sinatra to Rails), on OS X, and Chrome as my browser. I use Sublime Text 2 as my text editor.
I would argue that the only infinite supply of deals are deals where the profit margin is so high that it supports profit at 50% off plus Groupons cut.

A restaurant does not have 300% profit margins, so long term a restaurant cannot support this model. Only service businesses, or businesses with fixed costs with low variable costs per additional customer, can be on there.
So let me get this straight. Critics of this tactic want to get rich doing their own startup, while using the very techniques they just renounced to generate traffic and conversions? Seems a bit hypocritical to me. Wake up folks - business success can be 'seedy' sometimes. As long as your product creates more value than customers are charged, then it's a win-win for everyone.

What if these so-called 'seedy' techniques represented the difference between success and failure for your own startup? I'll bet your position on the white/grey/black hat continuum would shift quite promptly.

Well done Patrick, and thanks for sharing the details about another valuable marketing tactic that people can try.
It's not a privacy concern until someone takes the small step of being able to track a phone with surveillance cameras. With technology like this, I can't imagine it being much more difficult than plotting the viewing areas of the cameras and then overlaying the positions of various phones on the same map. This approach won't immediately point out the person the phone belongs to but you could easily have video coverage of the person available for review. You can always pick them out of the imagery later.
Amazon page for pepper spray
Some Thoughts on Teaching (Bret Victor)
No. Only if Google included barely distinguishable paid placements in their organic results would it be a fair comparison.

I'll concede that some minority of users might not be able to distinguish paid results from organic on Google, but no one could do it with these "blended" ads -- that's why he's getting such a high CTR. Users are being tricked.
Money Making Ideas From Home
If the inability to block an ad is the primary determinant of "ruining" the internet you probably need to re-evaluate your sense of entitlement.
I usually spend time in a research phase. Writing out the main goals/ideas, writing pseudo-code, then actually coding. I find it works much better than the hack it all out approach, but takes a little longer before I actually start coding.

Many people don't like this because it takes some of the fun out of it. But, I usually end up with less re-writes and bugs in the end.
The ghost who liked the Kindle
New Samsung Galaxy Nexus Ad: A Page From Apple’s Book
I am looking forward to the follow up post. Plan 9 is one of those OSes I have been meaning to install and attempt to use since I first read about it years ago. My idea was to install it on a few year old laptop, so I wonder if that would be less hazardous than trying to kick it onto a VM. I guess depending on driver support, it might actually be worse.

Part one reminds me of when I was very excited to have my first home unix install with 386BSD. I think my install came on 5.25" disks. From what I recall, it took me a month to get it running in the most clunky way and found myself returning to OS/2 2.0 for my getting work done system. Was finally glad when I discovered the more (at the time) install friendly Linux.
also, since this is HN, what did you use to build it?
Ads are clearly not a zero-sum game, any more than links offsite are a zero-sum game. Transfers in attention are like transfers in money. It is entirely possible for both sides of "I give you money, you give me a banana" to end up better off. Similarly, if you're looking at a list of ways to teach kids subtraction, "I give you thirty seconds, you show me subtraction bingo" leaves both sides better off.
This is one of the post passive-aggressive rants I've seen in awhile. Bravo.
You certainly implied a branch-free workflow. Otherwise why would you have a dirty local workspace and multiple checkouts? And why would committing break a build? I'm unaware of any CI server configured to build every branch in the SVN tree.
Out of curiosity, what would you do if the client got to this point, and your team determined that it was a fraudulent claim?

Obviously, if it's legitimate, you would have the ability to fix the issue right away. However, what if there were enough red flags that it didn't seem entirely right?

Not saying that this is the case either way, but I'm curious what the standard procedure is in that case.
Workout For Abs
What's the rationale of not providing a conventional login option? I for one do not have an account with any of listed services - Google, Yahoo, Twitter, etc - and don't have any plans to.
Firefox nightlies do support Python. It's unfortunate that nobody wants to migrate away from JS though.
GP is talking specifically about the recent ruling that corporations have e.g. freedom of speech, and can therefore send lots of money to fund political campaigns. It basically gives corporations a huge amount of political power.
ACtually LLVM isn't a virtual machine, it's a compiler intermediate representation.
It's a cycle.

1) Someone builds a product

2) Feature creep

3) Next gen comes along and builds a simple variant with only critical features

4) Feature creep

5) back to 3

It's human nature to want to 'improve' something. With software that invariably means more features. New managers/owners of any project usually arrive with a shopping list of improvements - because more features = happier customers right?
Good eye for catching that bit of nonsense. Someone commenting like they know what they're talking about. If potential investors valued Amazon based on its 'cash yield' at the time of its IPO who would have invested.
>>I tend to read a book once and then I am done with it

This may be true for novels, but science, engineering and math books are usually used for a long, long time. I still have all of mine for reference and every once in a while I do come back to many of them.
It would be cool if they tried to work with people like this.

Adam Trombly -
New Energy Device Demonstration Fact: Adam Trombly had been invited to demonstrate one of his generators at the United Nations and the U.S. Senate, but these events were constrained by the first Bush administration. Then the device itself was taken in a government raid. There are dosens of cases where inventors make alternative energy devices that are then taken by the government.

John Bedini -
New Energy Devices Fact: Inventor John Bedini began working with Tesla’s theories of “radiant energy” decades ago and has produced an assortment of battery-charging devices that generate more energy than it takes to run them. He announced that he was going to start offering them at low cost. Soon after that, he was attacked in his lab, and warned not to produce the machines. For his own safety he had to let go of marketing free energy devices.

John Hutchison -
Lab Raids Fact: Canadian John Hutchison not only created some free energy batteries, but also used Tesla's theories to counter gravity, to make objects float. This could revolutionize the field of propulsion. His lab was raided and equipment was taken by police and government officials in 1978, 1989, and again in 2000.
Yes defo look for in e.g. US
Agreed, though it depends on how the other ratings are established.

Communication is ultimately about the semantic information conveyed and not the specific words used. If you intend to convey the wrong information, even by using technically correct words, that still counts as lying to me.

Since the other items say "rated by 1" I'm inclined to believe it's a small community that self rates the items. Hence, patio11's co-opting of the styling conveys the information "lots of members of this small community rated BCC 5 stars" rather than "lots of some random group of people rated BCC 5 stars".

I agree that graying out the stars would make it more honest.
Let me clarify - I would much rather a teaching activities site be filled with BCC ads over weight loss ads. That doesn't justify the use of deceptive advertising beyond exploration.

This is the -exact same- line of thinking that goes on at social games companies with viral game features. Good people say: "20% of users respond to this request, it must be interesting to people. Send more!" This is completely oblivious to the negative value you're imposing upon those other 80%. Just because your negative value is LESS negative than a rebill scam doesn't make it positive.

There are potential customers on sites outside of Adwords network. You've proven that. Now capture them in a way that doesn't trick people into clicking on your ad.
Not many people know about SPICE and what is wrong with VNC
OKC has the worst matching algorithm on the Internet. I signed up for an account, spend a large amount of time to get my profile "100% complete", answered over 1,000 questions and was still consistently matched with people I had absolutlely no interest in dating at all. I can't count how many times I saw 0% compatibility scores, people hundreds or even thousands of miles from me(I'd specifically said no more than 30 from my zip code) and worst of all, several men(I'm not gay and didn't express and desire at all to meet men on the site). I deleted my profile after 6 months and when they asked me why I was leaving I told them how their matching process would be better using a random number generator. It's too bad because OKC is one of few free dating sites I know of that actually has a decent number of women using it.
Did you read the article? Was maybe Patrick too subtle about the point that many (probably most) of Google's users perceive the paid placement at the top of every SERP as a search result?

These "blended" ads are labeled as sponsored results as well.
JavaScript isn't a special "browser-only" language. It's just a normal interpreted, dynamically typed language (much like Python or Ruby) that just happens to run in all browsers. Right now it also happens to be quite a bit faster than Python or Ruby (as far as I know) and is also extremely expressive and flexible.

The fact that Python has "a wealth of libraries" isn't particularly pertinent--web apps mostly need web-specific libraries, which Python doesn't have (because it isn't in the browser). Most people using JavaScript get by with jQuery, maybe some web ui framework and perhaps something like Raphael. And, with the advent of node and server-side JavaScript, JavaScript is getting more and more libraries outside of the browser as well.

Of course, the browsers could support a bunch of different languages, but I think the complexity outweighs the (limited) benefits. Google, obviously, disagrees and thinks that Dart should also be an option, but I really think it isn't worth the effort.

Ultimately, JavaScript is more than good enough as a browser language; while it does have some annoying quirks, upcoming versions (and things like "use strict") are getting rid of most of them. There really is no overwhelming reason to switch away from JavaScript, and even just adding another language is probably not worth it.
complexity for you does not mean complexity for the user
Xda-developer threatened with lawsuit for exposing Android OEM tracking software
The high school production of King Lear has nothing to do with your cell phone, either. But you should still turn the damn thing off. Having to forgo one relationship to participate in another is neither surprising nor odious. You don't have to shop at this mall.
Visualizing PostgreSQL Data with the Google Web Toolkit - Marakana
Some of the best free learning on social media, a selection
Such an overwhelming response. Thanks everyone! I'll try to reply to most questions here so they don't get lost:

a) About moving somewhere else, I've done it before, actually, between 18 and 27 I lived in Scotland, England, Germany and The Netherlands working as a software developer. They really they pay more but right now not really able to do so again. I have a kid on the way (found out 10 minutes ago that it's a boy!!!)

b) I have thought about setting my own shop, but between finding clients, supporting a house and taxes, it has been hard. Things should change beginning next year as I'll move to my own products or freelancing full time.

c) About opensource and github, inspired by some comments, I opensourced (MIT license) an old Mockup tool I was making for Mac before being hired. It is at:

https://github.com/BrunoSousa/wireframes
https://github.com/downloads/BrunoSousa/wireframes/Wireframe...

I'll also open source a couple libraries for Mac and iOS but have to double check the agreement with my current company as part was developed for them or if not, remove the code that isn't mine (I started them before moving to this company)

d) To all that mentioned sending them an email, I'll be sure to do so by tomorrow. Need to update the resume as well.

e) Again, to all other posters, thanks so much for the info and suggestions. I'll take them all into consideration!

edit: I thought I had my email in my profile but anyway: brunomtsousa at gmail dot com
I see the authors point, and I'm not a designer, but as a wp7 user, I have to disagree.

Looking at his image comparison, with and without the circles, he's absolutely right that without the circle it is easier to see the image.

However, which looks nicer? I'm sure there was discussion at MS about which to chose, and it won't be the first time that visual appeal won out over function.

As an example, the lack of strain relief on Apple cables (and unfortunately many other companies have followed).

Another issue with the lack of the circle in theory is that it allows designers/developers to believe that they have free reign over this space. The circle may be as much of a hint to designers that they are limited to these areas to keep the UI as clean as possible.
Here is what Google said:

> We will continue our work to generate cleaner, more efficient energy—including our on-campus efforts, procuring renewable energy for our data centers, making our data centers even more efficient and investing more than $850 million in renewable energy technologies.

So they're still investing close to a billion dollar in renewable energy.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-...
I was wondering why I couldn't see his examples. I forgot I was running ad block.
Submit to HN: Whispero
The Art of saying 'No'
Why is it unfortunate? Once you learn it properly, JavaScript is a very pleasant language to work in and, I find, quite a bit more expressive than Python. It also doesn't make using a functional programming style painful the way Python does.
True. Generally the failure of the packager is that they never do a clean install and build. And yes that is tedious but it finds so many issues, and isn't so bad with VMs.
The Google ad that I note-for-note copied has a CTR in excess of 20%. It should - it is exactly what the user was looking for, presented in a way that makes that obvious.

[Edit to add: I thought I might have been exaggerating, so I looked it up. Nope, 21.3% this year for [bingo card creator]. For [bingo creator], which is not a brand term, it is 18.5%. [printable valentine's bingo card]? 8.7%. Do people get the picture?]
Crickey!!! This is like Khan Academy on steroids. How do I get it to post automatically to facebook and twitter when I bookmark new links?
The Default Use Case
Hi. I work at OkCupid.

I can't address all the particulars raised in this analysis, but the biggest is essentially correct:

> The worst side effect of the current scoring system, is that a spammer could easily answer only the questions with obvious answers (basic facts and display of non-bigotry) and get a decently high match percentage with a lot of people. At which point, the spammer uploads a picture of an attractive guy/girl, writes some generic profile text, and scams away.

The algorithm as described in the FAQ does suffer from this problem. However, we have enhancements that address the issue very effectively. The FAQ is slightly out of date, and shouldn't be taken as a complete, exhaustive description of how we make matches.
Best Facebook Fan Pages for Branding
What it takes to make Reddit front page — data and stats