skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't believe this is google just because of all the manual labor involved. Google would scrape the whole site and call people with pre-recorded messages or something. The operation would be fully automated. I actually don't have any opinion wether they would do it or not, but I doubt manual labor would be involved if that was the case.
Stephen Hawking's New PC
First steps in data visualisation using d3.js [video]
The _only_ model running Android 4.0 has a larger screen.
Akamai has some pretty nice Internet visualizations:

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz1.html
DuckDuckGo gets a new look
Or combine your one-liner with follow up insight. That way it's not just your joke that is being judged but also your (hopefully) sound argument as well.
Agreed. But Google needs to give a good explanation... at internet speed. And, if this is true and someone at Google is involved, there should be consequences.
I'm quite flabbergasted seeing this:

https://github.com/charliesome/twostroke/blob/master/lib/two...

That is, a parser which is essentially coded by hand, with all token checking, saving and restoring parser's state, functions corresponding to non-terminating symbols of grammar etc.

Are there no good parsing libraries in Ruby (similar to Python's pyparsing or Haskell's Parsec), and could this have forced the author to code his parser from scratch?
> the author is taking advantage of hardware variance and picking larger images.

I think an even more honest way to look at it is that the author uses the Galaxy Neuxs as the Android reference device in all examples, including the screenshots.

This can be defended as a part of Google's effort to try to lead the way for other Android makers with their Nexus series and is probably not motivated by any comparison to iPhone.
Google App Engine? Perhaps the scammer is hosting their scraping app. on GAE.
My experience mirrors yours exactly. I'm not sure how or why Google garnered an untouchable status but I find it frustrating.
What would you generate a barcode for? It's most likely just the ID of the boarding pass encoded, not all the info.
Non-code lines shouldn't be included as they don't get compiled, otherwise you are just penalising for documentation
Is Private Equity Bad For the Economy?
Flat out denying the existence of a well-documented product feature? I'm curious how this will all turn out.
The hinting/subpixel-shading/whatever on Menlo and Mensch looks awful on Windows Vista, although they do provide the proper symbols. After patching Consola, I got the same awful look and no symbols, even with `let g:Powerline_symbols="fancy" set and c:\tmp\Powerline.cache deleted before running the first time.

Edit 2:
The symbols _did_ work on Menlo and Mensch yesterday. Today they do not, even with setting the font and g:Power_linesymbols in _vimrc and deleting the cache file and restarting the editor. There's something odd going on.
If the statement about the Mountain View IP address is true then it's hard to imagine that these were scammers masquerading as Google.

My bet? Google's statement will blame some third party contractors or a miscommunication. Massive damage control and fire fighting for the rest of the day.
But every now and then, one of them will be able to have enough of an impact to be considered a gamechanger, though these are probably outliers. Pun intended. :D
Honestly, is anyone surprised? PayPal is a very large service that does not need to differentiate itself from its competitors with superior customer service. Clueless CS reps are par for the course in situations like these.
This reminds me of a certain song, by Mike Jones...
>> you're more likely the only HN participant who hasn't read much about SOPA

You're judging me.

>> is willing to say so out loud.

Now you're passively aggressively insulting me.
Well, somebody will either get a smack upside the head or a raise. This is a blemish if proven to be a Google operation and there's no way subversive tactics of this kind are looked upon with good grace.
Sure there are, kpeg, citrus, treetop... Probably more I don't know about.
And "AppEngine-Google" user agents were not logged:

http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...
Even saying "HN's crowd" is deliberately flagging legitimate links that are critical of Google is cynical as well. I must ask though, if you think HN is filled with people who are so uninterested in legitimate discussion, then why are you posting here? I'm not trying to be accusatory, but to me, posting on a site where people are not interested in honest discussion would feel like a huge waste of time.
The history tells us that Google subsidiaries have quite a level of freedom to have their own strategy to achieve the desired outcomes. You can remember the paid blog posts for google.jp for example. So, Google Kenya will be kind of banned or whatever and mea-culpa will come out, life will go on.

What I find more interesting if everything is true, is that they have cheap manual workers in India doing the scrapping manually to then cold call. It means that if their "crawlers" are not smart enough, they are ready to go "manual" to enter a market.

For me this is really an interesting piece of news and this is where I am a bit afraid of Google hegemony.
Productize your data
The boarding pass should never be shown at the gate, instead you should show your ID. The agent would then check it to make sure its real and then scan it to see if your in the database to fly that day. It is a simple solution, Someone needs to build a device that can read 90% of IDs.
This is the first 'x written in HTML5' project that I have been actually amazed by. I spent countless hours in JCS modifying the shipped levels to add all sorts of 'secret bases' taking advantage of bugs and glitches.

I remember the online multiplayer community was kind of fizzling out about 5 or 6 years ago... wonder how it is now.
given the 1% transaction fee I'm guessing they don't accept credit cards at all - payments are exclusively through bank transfers. Can anyone from gocardless confirm is this is correct? If so, I think the site could be a little clearer.

In any case, this looks like a useful service with or without card processing, and the more "instant" payment alternatives there are to paypal, the better. Also +1 for some innovation on this side of the pond.
According to the main source (http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-t...), after setting up the sting, there were a bunch of hits straight from google HQ.

These new accesses were coming directly from Google’s network.
The IP address 74.125.63.33 made 17,645 requests (15,554 to BusinessProfile.aspx). Activity really kicked off on 22 December 2011, with 8 different user agents mostly running Chrome on Linux: The top 3 are :
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/16.0.912.63 Safari/535.7 11249 64.268982
Mozilla/5.0 (Ubuntu; X11; Linux x86_64; rv:9.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/9.0.1 4247 24.264412
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/535.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/10.04 Chromium/15.0.874.106 Chrome/15.0.874.106 Safari/535.2 1000 5.713306
Search for “tag=mo.request 74.125.63.33″ from 20 December 2011 to 9 January 2012. Found 17,049 requests
I'm not arguing with that at all - I think there is a very good chance someone at Google Kenya is about to get very fired.

BUT I do want to point out that relying on what unverified people say on the phone is very bad practice, and leads to an enormous number of social engineering security problems.
Have you used Flipboard of iOS? I think it's a well done implementaion of non-scrolling, though you still need to use the touchscreen, it's just a quick flick.
Scanning the barcode and then doing a lookup of your flight reservation against your ID is far superior than just checking the printed name against your ID.
I built my startup using this exact outlay, so it's wonderful to have this guide in hand for when we need to scale Mongo across multiple EC2 instances. This presentation from Jared Rosoff of 10gen was extremely helpful on the first go, and it's satisfying to see that the AWS paper corroborates the content.

http://www.10gen.com/presentations/mongosf-2011/running-mong...

Couldn't be happier with the performance so far.
EMI Sues Ireland for Snoop Dogg MP3s
I have to admit, this is a little strange. I guess my main question is why does a company as large as Google need to solicit money from any business? Let alone Kenyan businesses well outside the scope of it's main customer base?
India’s cheapest tablet, Aakash, turns out to be an electronic brick
It is a good point, however, I think it would be celebrated by the target audience. People, or the "average person" who wouldn't generally visit TPB, or know what it is, will probably not really care about it's support, or even what SOPA is for that matter.

For those who visit/use TPB, I think it would be akin to a rally call.
You must not have gotten the memo--HN still has a creepy, starry-eyed obsession with Google and sacrilege like yours will have you burned at the stake :)
Question: What if you had not stumbled upon the idea to build the toddler games? Would you have soldiered on on a low income or packed up and returned to corporate life? and after how long?
Backbone Boilerplate: A Starter Kit for Backbone.js Apps
But that's his point. If he was aware that his startup actually were a business, and not just a "startup", he would have operated it as a business (and likely learning and pursuing as much knowledge as he could).

However, the term "startup" took his focus away from thinking of it like a business. Once he realized that it actually was a business (which needs profits) he knew that it was a bad one and shut it down.
His first opinion is that piracy isn't a problem. My opinion is that most of the traffic on the Internet is due to pirated material.
Can someone explain how such a HUGE codebase is maintained and new people get acquainted with it? I understand the distributed nature of development, but still, this seems like LOTS of code especially for someone new and who wants to get started in terms of contributing.
Anecdote. I think scrolling on touch screens is tremendous fun and wouldn’t want to live in a world without it.
Risking your life for a shot no one will notice
For an even more extreme example, see some of the comments on this: http://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/kq3l7/how_bad_a_w...
Backbone.js vs Ember.js
Texting is Killing Real Business Communication
1. Scrolling is not a "computer concept", it comes from scrolls.

2. Paging and scrolling are different things. Paging can works well when you're dealing with things that don't need compared (like a list of names in a phone book) but it breaks when you want to compare things.

Consider a spreadsheet or log file: you might want to compare any two given rows, and if they're split across a page break, it's a nightmare.
There was a whole raft of discussions in 2006 on Lambda the Ultimate and elsewhere about using continuations for page flow in webapps, and ultimately the most persuasive argument (against) was that continuations implied linear flow whereas web-page flow could be non-linear, what with the back button, hyperlinks, and all that.

However, I think that continuations are still very cool, and are especially cool when they can be serialized or written to disk/transmitted/etc., because this essentially lets you "time/space-shift" your thread/process, since it's just bits.

Right now, "suspending" a process is something that happens when you close your laptop or pause a VM, but I think that being able to do this at a much more fine-grained level of detail is what will allow general cloud-based computation to really take off, because individual threads would be portable across computing environments.
> "Piracy is not a real problem"

I wish more people would have the courage and conviction to say this out loud. I notice many people speaking out against SOPA on the web or on TV, that always start with "While I do believe piracy is a serious problem,..." - even though they don't really mean it, and they are just saying it because they are afraid of being seen as "pro-piracy".

And I agree with Tim O'Reilly that the vast majority of "copies" being pirated online, would not be bought if they had no other alternative. That's just part of RIAA's and MPAA's bogus claims that every pirated copy is a lost sale. It couldn't be further from the truth.

If you want to test this just compare a Netflix' user consumption of movies or shows, or a Spotify user's consumption of songs every month, to an iTunes user's consumption who spends around $10 per month, and you'll notice that the consumption of the Netflix or Spotify user is a lot higher than that of the iTunes user.

Why is this happening? Because as more content is available to them, they will consume more content, but they are not willing to spend more money on content. Limiting availability to more content, or in this case "curbing piracy", will not result in more sales and more money, because the user will not be willing to spend more than they were already spending.
There's treetop, kpeg and a bunch of other stuff but I prefer writing my parsers by hand. Pretty much all that's missing from mine is semicolon insertion, but that's something I'm working to nut out.
My kid has a number of free ad supported apps on my iPad and they drive him mad because if he ever accidentally clicks them, they fire him out of the app.

He has no interest in the stupid adult things they promote and always just goes back to the app to keep playing. I wish they would either limit the apps or make them paid for - kids apps are not a suitable place for ads.
Your Developer Can Sleep When He/She is Dead
Parking Between the Lines
Intel forced to provide ARM emulation to enter Android smartphone market
IGT to Acquire Double Down Interactive, Makers of DoubleDown Casino
Google and LG may partner on Nexus TV
They did it just like Apple and Microsoft did it with their own audience: by making stuff they like and being friendly to them.

People will always be biased, Google has always been a hacker friendly place so naturally hackers will like them and when you like somebody because you share their (true or perceived) values, you'll be biased in their favor.
Like the article says, something like 75% of all of that is driver specific or related to filesystems. You can still compile a minute little kernel for embedding that will be a fraction of the size of the full kernel. And there's still quite a lot of old cruft in there that could be left out.

Even so, if true, it does seem to be getting quite bloaty. Still, it has to cover a lot of ground nowadays in terms of hardware.
Can anyone tell me why the font there looks awful in Firefox?
Sure, and it's cool that you've taken the jump. It's just that 'just wanting to code' is the exact opposite of what running a business, even a software business, is... Of course the alternatives are even worse when working in the corporate IT sector...
Not sure what you're expecting, it appears to have already "turned out" -- the OP cannot use the Mass Payment service because no one in PayPal will allow him to do so or even acknowledge it exists (unless you have an invite?). The CSRs refuse to escalate the issue so the OP can't talk to anyone else. His options appear to be to continue banging head against PayPal customer service in hopes that he gets the engineer that implemented "Mass Payments" or he can decide to use something else.
This reminds me of the famous Churchill quote: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried."

Most of the article is true, but GitHub is also leagues above anything else out there, and certainly leagues above the mailing list with hand-crafted patches by de-demonizing forks and turning projects more into a meritocracy.

There is certainly room for improvement, but I think it's a step in the right direction.
Follow up to my Google Maps post
What happens to old and expired supermarket foods
Granted, but there's a potential that this is being launched by an enterprising Google employee, and not as a part of a corporate stratagem.

Of course, if it is corporate strategy, I suppose the big G could always get an employee to take the fall and tar them as a "loose cannon" for press purposes, but I guess I'm still clinging to the shards of "Don't Be Evil".
how about just a popup box that lets you choose where you would like to go?

I see this type of situation as something that shouldn't happen very frequently.

Also, you could take this one step further and have it split screen the methods in multiple files if you like.
Approximately 1/4 of Americans have no way to come up with $2,000 in 30 days. An additional 19% would need to pawn/sell possessions and/or take payday loans to raise $2,000 in 30 days.

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/Programs/ES/BPEA/2011...

(edited to use a freely available copy of the paper)
Las Vegas Dermatology | Botox | Las Vegas Skin Care
They scan books that way too (manually), aren't they?
Chrome isn't much better...
I think it is pretty reasonable to assume the parent meant "they wont run any Windows programs that run on other Windows laptops"

As I noted in my reply, he's mostly wrong about that too.
According to Sandvine 2007 Internet report, BitTorrent is 52% of upstream and 10% of downstream traffic (in North America). At the time this put it behind Netflix (24% total) but on a par with HTTP (17% total for both) for aggregated net usage.

Whilst I wouldn't argue that all BitTorrent traffic is pirated I wouldn't argue all HTTP traffic isn't either. Somewhere around 17% of internet traffic being used to pirate does seem a reasonable estimate though.

17% is far from being most internet traffic but is indeed a very noticeable amount, which would indeed have an affect on the experience of legitimate users. This idea that piracy is detrimental to the internet experience for other users is one I find interesting and haven't heard mentioned before.
Feel free to spread this around - or ask me questions. :)

jheriko@gmail.com

I think this needs as much publicity as possible - so thanks to the 7 who have already upvoted. \o/

Hopefully startups can learn some of what not to do.
Development is gamified and more..
Having just checked, it's not Google App Engine. GAE appends the string "AppEngine-Google; (+http://code.google.com/appengine) " to the user agent regardless of what it's set to. But still, I agree there may well be another explanation.

http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=34...
Sensorbots: Swarms Of Sea-Crawling Robots To Explore Our Ocean's Depths
The rise of the programmable self
I've seen people justify this saying that it might be an app running on Google App Engine.

I wonder though if the GAE data center (or part of it) is in Google HQ.

Moreover, as someone (EDIT: the article's author) mentioned in the comments of the article When an IP address registered to Google HQ's internal network is fed a unique phone number, and one hour later that phone number rings from someone who claims to represent Google, and repeats fraudulent claims that have been made for months from entities selling a Google product (that has no affiliate program), it is reasonable to infer that this is taking place with Google's cooperation.

Which is indeed suspect.

EDIT: as this comment below shows, it cannot be GAE: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3460663
A few years ago - even after having already started a company - I used to call myself a programmer or software developers.

Nowadays, I usually call myself an entrepreneur because being an entrepreneur in most cases indeed is fundamentally different from being employed, even if you're employed in the very same industry.

I find it easier to liken my 'job' to that of other business owners (including even something entirely different such as pubs) than to that of a software developer working for a Fortune 500 company (and I've been working for those, too).

I do take pride in being an entrepreneur. Does that have something to do with ego? It sure does but it isn't the only aspect.

I'd say though that society as a whole does have issues with the assumed default mode of being an employee. For starters, 9-5 sucks. Why do I have to sit 8+ hours at a desk to prove that I'm actually 'working'. Our whole idea of work organization is still so centred around the concept of personal presence and fixed working hours that it simply doesn't fit any more. Yet most companies still insist on these ideas. So you can't blame anyone for thinking that corporate working environments are ridiculous and not worth pursuing.
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You are making my words sound worse than intended. It's not cynical: there cannot be an unbiased community so, by your reasoning, neither you or me should be part of any.

I'm just saying that, by the nature of Google as a company and of this community, the crowd here is more likely to be favorable to Google and take their side on issues, and this is evidenced by my own experience.
My guess is that these things are done by rogue Google employee or contractor. Hypothetical profit from this kind of behavior is not worth a tiny bit of potential reputation damage.
Who is Leading the Race to Become a Cyber Superpower?
The downvotes only serve to prove my point

That is false. The cause of my reaction is actually revealed here quite explicitly:

trying to make profit at the expense of others.

The enterprise we're all engaged in on HN is making profit, paid for by someone else. This is a good thing, because a buyer's willingness to pay for a product signifies how important that product is to him. If someone is willing to give me a lot of money for something, it's because he thinks my product is going to improve his situation at least to that degree. Thus, if someone is making a lot of profit (honestly), it's prima facie evidence that they are delivering that much value to their customers.

And no, that's not corporatist propaganda. It's a necessary logical consequence of the idea that people who are free to choose, will make the choice that serves their own needs better. If we can assume that, it all follows automatically.

EDIT: I wasn't going to add this, but can't restrain myself. The line "your disagreement only proves my point" is perhaps one of the worst gambits I can imagine in a debate, possibly only surpassed by "they're just jealous". A person's agreement or disagreement has absolutely no bearing on the veracity of a statement.
A local Google office might do some funny things. Using the autonomy they've got. The program in question is confined to Kenya.
I've worked on Windows. I never really did a thorough analysis, but I'd say kernel mode components total around 3MLOC (out of ~50MLOC total). Definitely smaller than Linux.
It's "legacy Bios mode."

I believe that implementation requirements for legacy BIOS mode are not part of the certification.

And in any event, it is likely that the BIOS Boot Specification (BBS) could be used to provide for unique hardware requirements during booting.
I see an IP allocated to Google. How do you go from that to "google HQ"?
God is just.

God says...
C:\LoseThos\www.losethos.com\text\HUCKFINN.TXT

Tom he turned his head a little, and muttered something or other,
which showed he warn't in his right mind; then she flung up her hands,
and says:

"He's alive, thank God! And that's enough!" and she snatched a kiss of
him, and flew for the house to get the bed ready, and scattering orders
right and left at the niggers and everybody else, as fast as her tongue
could go, every jump of the way.

I followed the men to see what they was going to do with Jim; and the old
doctor and Uncle Silas follo