skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't get my head around why anyone would design a hiring process to "scare off" anyone. Sure, you'll chase away superficial candidates... but some fraction of all the real talent will also blow you off.

This is trivially true of any hiring method - you might scare away a few good people. The right question to ask is "what are the proportoins?"

If I can scare away 100% of the chaff and 1% of the wheat, it's probably a win. I can simply hire anyone who survives. If the ratio is less stark, it may or may not be a win, depending on my costs of hiring, how badly I need someone, etc.

I'm not saying everyone who uses this tactic is doing it right, merely that it's not a bad idea in all cases.
That's not a surprise. They're in completely different businesses.

Google is a display advertising company that occasionally puts out a better display (Chrome, Android). Apple is in the business of finding and extracting value from hardware markets no one else took seriously.
You're actually linking to the old policy, the new one is here and will go into effect in March: http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/preview/

It's actually longer than the "existing" policy, but covers a lot more of Google's services under one umbrella.

In any case, a TOS is basically governed by ordinary contract law, which allows for a much more generalized, principles-based document.

Privacy policies are increasingly governed by regulatory requirements, and those requirements are increasingly demanding a fair bit of specificity, so you're seeing an inevitable and likely permanent state of affairs.
One things they're missing is a major university. Not sure that would ever work in Vegas.
I'm curious about what kind of setup you have running the site.
Yes, I agree that social search can improve accuracy, and that google knows more about its own social information so it can use it more accurately.

Artificially inflating that, for the purpose of pushing their product, is the problem (that's how I'd define "artificial ranking" - ranking on a basis other than returning a page of search results for the user). This avoids the problematic term "objective".

I don't buy the "means to an end" argument. If google really is doing that, it means worse search results, loss of user confidence, and antitrust litigation (abuse of market power).

BTW: the first search example "people and places" seems to require a google+ account (as it wouldn't give me results unless I signed up). I'm happy for a google+ search to yield google+ results.
Verizon’s LTE push is a lesson learned from Apple
Drive-by Gun Scans Prompt Privacy Questions
Mobile Morning Coffee (01/24/12)
Tablets are the future.

What do I use it for? Basically all the stuff I was previously doing on my PC and Phone, because it does it better.

I have a Asus Tranformer Prime (Android). Browsing the web? Check. Playing games? Check. Reading RSS? Check. Browsing YouTube? Check. Listening to podcasts/online radio? Check. Reading movie reviews/watching trailers? Check. Reading an eBook? Check. Email? Check.

Why is it better? Well it is better than the PC, because I can lie down in bed, or on the couch, or on the front porch, or in the back-yard, or anywhere else for that matter, instead of sitting in a computer chair at a desk (I do that all day at work, why would I want to do it at home?). I prefer the touch-screen interface, and I like the fact there are many dedicated apps rather than just using a webpage. For example, I find browsing youtube using the Android app far more enjoyable than browsing it in a webpage. To me, the touchscreen is not just a convenient alternative to the mouse for tablet-style devices, it has ushered in a new paradigm for interacting with applications, it makes the UX that much better.

It is better than a phone, mainly because of screen size. I like holding it in portrait mode and reading RSS feeds. It is also so much faster and smoother than my android phone.

It is my main computing device at home now. I use the PC rarely, and I use the phone only for calls/sms. I still use the phone for apps/browsing when on the move, as I generally don't bring the tablet around everywhere.

I fully understand where Cook is coming from, and as tablets become even more powerful I think it will be inevitable. The only awkward thing I own now is a awkward behemoth of a PC with all its cables and accessories, under an awkward desk, with an awkward pointing device, and with and awkward chair.

What do you currently do on your PC or your phone that you would rather not do on your tablet?
I think if you have iOS or Lion you are automatically included in that number.
AT&T sucks too.. I've had 2 billing disputes with them. Both times I called and asked to speak to the people who say I owe money, so I could understand what was going on (as it was for accounts I never setup). They told me I couldn't speak to those people. I had to file complaints with the BBB to get the billing dispute resolved (magically it got zeroed out and corrected at that point).

I have to say when I had comcast, I didn't have any billing issues.
I use my iPad all the time in my day to day life, several times a day.
In the morning I flip through my Flipboard and catch up email and news while I eat breakfast and sip coffee.
I take it with me to class and look through PDF's while the instructor is presenting. For example, I go on Wikipedia and I look at related material as I learn about it. (And yes in a particularly boring class I go to reddit, here, or play a game). In office I like to hook my headphones to it and listen to music. When I work on a problem set I always open the PDF on my iPad-- no need to print. When I go to a talk I always take it with me in case it is boring. While I eat dinner I also browse the internet, with the iPad next to my plate. Finally, I also read all my books on it now.

All these things could be done with a laptop I suppose, but the iPad is so simple to take out from the bag and just start using it right away. It occupies very little space and is much lighter. In fact, I actually don't use my laptop anymore... I use my desktop in office or home, or iPad everywhere else.
Show HN: Programming language for the masses. What does it look like?
I didn't know what SPYW was, and swear my first thought was it must be an abbreviation for SPYWare. Which is more than a little ironic now I know what it actually stands for.
As someone who works in the cable industry I can say you're making the right choice. Nothing is going to change until more people do this. This industry is suicidal. Some costs that are passed along to the consumers (programming) are unavoidable and fair but the degree to which customers are gouged on equipment fees, service calls, and terrible policies is just mind boggling.

It's like going to a restaurant and being charged extra to use a spoon and fork. When you find out there's a dirty sock in your soup you get the privilege of paying the waiter to remove it for you. If you like you can get a free refill of your water to wash down the lint but only if you've decided to lease the Ultra Premium Platinum Gold Silver Boost Extreme glass (only $7.99 per meal) otherwise you may buy a new glass of water for $9.99 but that deal is only available to new customers. If you've eaten here before you can pay $19.99 for your glass of water. You may however only drink half the glass otherwise we will have to impose a penalty fee. Don't worry about the prices because we're going to get your bill wrong either way and in any event it will be purposefully made to be complex so you can't understand why your bill is so high. Thanks, come again.
Thanks for the correction.

The length of the new privacy policy still seems to counter the assertion that this is something people will find easy to read.
Lean Product Development on Mobile
Xobni: How mobile enabled them to reinvent the concept & relevancy of a contact
"Almost all of the best products are restricted/closed/proprietary systems."

This makes me really sad. It might be necessary, but you also miss out on a lot of innovation that happens when people can build off the work of others.

To steal your examples, would there be a market for the Mac or OS X if IBM had not licensed PC clones? Would there be Facebook/Twitter/GMail if the Internet had not been public-domain?
Its About The Money
If it was 100/1, I'd agree with you, but these are never 100/1 processes; they're cutesy programming quizzes, or video requirements, or lengthy statements of required prior technical experience.

Any process that does not cause a cold high-quality lead to come into contact with an engaged human being almost automatically is broken.
> The length of the new privacy policy still seems to counter the assertion that this is something people will find easy to read.

What about relative to all the documents being replaced?
David Ogilvy: "I am a lousy copywriter" (1955)
Show HN: We made an addictive way to browse pictures on reddit
or better yet, you have semantically named elements and assign them column values in your .less file:

#sidebar {
.makeColumn(4);
}
#main_pane {
.makeColumn(8);
}

#sidebar
= render :partial => 'common/sidebar'
#main_pane
= yield
They're probably customising the search results somehow; just as the GP I don't see any mention of Google's SPYW when opening your link.
I have this book and like it, but I doubt it's particularly useful for the typical nerd wiring up a credible looking web application.
Reminiscent of the fun / creativity / agony of product design work (including the "work from home" and "growl" at wife bits).
i ve been using this little piece of magic (freeware obviously) for about 3 years now, after trying paper, evernote, etc : http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/5371/ToDoList-A-simple-b....
with the level of the granular control i can use it as todolist calendar,whatever. like the simplicity and intuitiveness.
so todolist work for me just fine
What incentive do users have to deposit/upvote?
I seldom make spelling mistakes. I'd estimate that easily 95% of Google's "suggestions" are incorrect in my use case; and having to put the problematic word in quotes, rather than merely prepending a '+', is an editing chore.

The one thing that annoys me most these days, however, is that it also searches for "bike" when I type "motorbike"; I get endless irrelevant results about cycling in many longer queries. I recall other search engines in the past implementing cluster-based analysis to disambiguate homographs (with user selection on the SERP), but Google still isn't clever enough to fully figure out how "bike" means something different on motorbike-related pages than on cycling-related pages.
Diagnosing Disk I/O issues in a VPS
For those keeping tracking, that means their growth rates are absolutely mind-blowing.

Revenues, YoY, grew at about 75%.
Profits, YoY, grew at about 117%.

Keep in mind this is billions of dollars we are talking about. It's "relatively easy & common" for a "small" company to grow that fast on say revenues up to $400M or even $1B range. But on QUARTERLY numbers of $25B and still be growing that fast...that's...just...mind blowing.

To show how mind-blowing this is, let's do some speculation - what will those numbers look like for the next 4 years (assuming that growth rates remain constant):

Next Year (Y1) - Revenue = $81B, with Profits = $28.34 in Q1.

Year after (Y2) - Revenue = $141.75B, Profits = $61.49B in Q1.

Y3 - Revenue = $248B, Profits = $133B in Q1

Y4 - Revenue = $434B, Profits = $288B in Q1

Before you dismiss these numbers as fantastical, keep in mind a few things.

a) The tablet market is still nascent and is likely to continue exploding.

b) The smartphone market is nowhere near as big as the mobile market - even the mobile market still has room for growth.

c) We haven't even seen other products that will likely come out of the pipeline that could create new categories (iTV anyone?)

d) iCloud was just launched. It's like AWS - but for everybody. Give it some time, but I can guarantee you it will be a major, major source of revenue and profits for them (just like Amazon) in the next few years (more than likely towards the latter part of the next decade).

The truth is, seeing these numbers makes me very skeptical myself, but I would have never imagined that I would see a company as old as Apple, doing $26B in revenues per quarter and still growing at 75%/year.
The reputation of "legalese" is really a cultural artifact we forgot to forget.

Back when Men were Men and the masses were somewhere between illiterate and "see spot run", the man on the street wouldn't have had much chance of understanding legal documents in the first place.

Later on, in the English world, the continued use of a lot of Latin also served to alienate people.

There have been explicit efforts to bring legal language back to the real world, and these days it's really no worse than any other professional jargon. Try reading through, say, the New England Journal of Medicine.

(If this weren't Hacker News, I'd tell you to go try reading a programming language reference manual, but you probably wouldn't have any trouble with that.)
The fundamental problem here is not money. It is not lobbyists. It is the artificial market of privileges created by the members of the US Government.

The US Government should not have the power to regulate Doctors, drugs, food, oil, imports, exports etc. It should not have the power to go to war without clear and present danger. It should not have the power to make the Oil business viable by stationing floating fortresses in the gulf at our expense.

For those of you who want to tell me that we need "People To Regulate" Doctors, Drugs and Food: ask yourself, "Is the head of Monsanto the person I want to regulate Food?", because that's what you have. To Regulate Transport Safety, you have a man who makes high-power X-Ray machines.

The problem is not money or lobbyists. The problem is that there is a reason for them to spend their money. Of course, there will be a small number of fundamental rights that will need to be safeguarded - but they will be small, clear and understandable by Citizens.
You should preload the next image, so when I hit [right] key, it just shows up without delay.
I think the "evil moment" is more about the new "Search Plus Your World". Every big social site that doesn't let Google index (and therefore, display) their content has called SPYW "evil", in that it "pollutes" Google Search results with content from Google+, Youtube, and other Google sites, instead of using stuff from Facebook, Twitter, etc. (who, as mentioned above, do not let Google see their content). The whole thing reeks of "You can't see my data, Google, but I DEMAND to be in your search results anyways".

The new privacy policy is only incidental, and, as nknight mentions here [1], it is probably motivated by government regulation as much as it is Google's focus on integration.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3507707
That wasn't pay, those were stock options that are worthless currently --if he leaves before 2016, he gets nothing-- but will pay off well if he sticks around. Half of the stocks vest in 2016, the remainder in 2021.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/10/apple-ceo-tim-cook-di...
What would make this perfect would be pairing it with a pay-as-you-go plan with no expiration date. Although I have a feeling that won't ever happen...
I agree with the sentiment that the problem the OP brings up is difficult, but bringing up the halting problem here seems pretty pedantic.

If you restrict yourself to a turing incomplete language, checking a specification no longer reduces to the halting problem. In fact, there are many systems that do exactly this, and most of these systems are perfectly capable of sorting a list and proving that the list is sorted.

However, I think the real point is that there are at least dozens of smart people who are working on this exact problem all day, every day. The OP shows neither a deep understanding of why previous attempts at this have failed or really, any knowledge at all about the state of the field of programming language research.
that's actually not that far from what programming with well-designed libraries and abstractions is like now. at least, I know I have a more-or-less 3d visualization of my program in my head as I'm working on it... but that could be just me.
I don't think that contempt would apply. Either obstruction of justice or destruction of evidence.
Delicious. An easy up/down vote way would be great.
Try as I might... I can't justify, or figure out how $50 (+ $10 for a mobile app - used to be $20) for a To Do list, however nice, is worth it.
I don't think this design is actually for keyboards, keyboards are just the intermediary step to voice, which casual computer users might well use more than even a mouse, if it works.
There's a bug in your definition of SORT.

The OP complains that it's easy to write imperative and functional programs that contain bugs; I don't think that declarative programs are fundamentally better.
Yah, I'm in the same boat. In late Dec, as soon as I saw Comcast supported SOPA, I setup a Sonic.net account here in SF. I love Sonic's tech support (one of the only few companies I'll get on the phone with for support), and their values - no caps, no support of fucking-with-the-internet bills. However, AT&T fucks up the whole equation with their shitty copper (in some places). Not Sonic's fault at all, of course.

Some parts of SF are starting to get fiber with Sonic. Can't wait to be able to qualify for this. It'll be just like my brother's connection when he lived in Japan circa '01.. Voting with my dollars I guess.
"It's like AWS - but for everybody."

what? icloud has exactly zero things in common with AWS.
It is a nice gesture, but I see it more as a setup for the next statement - "...what we focus on is innovating... and somewhat ignore how many horses there are." He's throwing MS in the race to deflate that prior binary Windows/Mac mind share dynamic being applicable to mobile - that for one to win the other has to lose.

In other words, I read that as Tim trying to convey they are more in competition with themselves than with others; that they're raising the bar by their own standards rather than paying attention to what the competition is doing.
Ask HN: By which law US arrests Kim Dotcom (german) outside of US?
I really can't figure out, how US arrested Kim Dotcom aka Kim Schmitz, a German citizen, having headquarters in Hong-kong, living in New Zealand. How New Zealand allowed FBI to enter the country and arrest their tourists?!

Why can't FBI get Piratebay down, if they already did it to Megaupload?!
I just installed Prey, marked my MacBook Pro as missing, waited, and the light definitely did come on - albeit for around two seconds - while taking the webcam picture.

There is no way in software to disable that LED.
You mean other than just using reddit?
They'll still no doubt be using geolocation to filter results, as well as time of day, browser being used, etc...

At their scale, they can no doubt see patterns in data that make it worth personalising search based on those factors, regardless of wether or not you are signed in.
Pinterest is swapping affiliate links
The thing is that Google is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.

It is obviously damned if it just allows Facebook to cruise to victory. That was the consensus about what was going to happen before the launch of Google+ last year.

But it is also damned if it fights back with all the resources at its disposal. Either the goliath is being mocked for losing to David, or it is being attacked for actually giving David quite a beating.

Moreover, in this particular case, Google doesn't have full indexing access for Facebook and Twitter (Twitter revoked access to the firehose sometime ago). So if they really want to play rope-a-dope, Google could use this to get FB and Twitter to give up indexing rights. Yet without Plus and SPYW, Google wouldn't have had any negotiating leverage with FB/Twitter to get those indexing rights.
bit late but ... you can also see this from the santa barbara harbor. I used to surf there in the early morning and the sun would be rising behind the waves. Not a lot of places on the west coast that that happens!
Programming is such a powerful and important tool. I believe it needs to be in the hands of the regular people.

To enable masses to program, today, there are two approaches. One is to teach people to use existing programming languages, the other is to create drawing tools, so that people can draw a program, instead of writing one. Both approaches face difficulties taking off.

It is not by accident. For the first approach, all existing programming languages are too difficult for the average to learn and use. The second approach is appropriate for the beginners to learn programming concepts. Once the beginner learns the basics and wants to build something more complex, the drawing approach does not scale effectively.

Therefore, programming for the masses requires a programming language for the masses. Star Script is created to meet the challenge. Try it out and share your thoughts!
I wonder what's Apple's strategy when everybody who wants/needs an iPhone gets one (and I'm sure they have one in place). This is a very deep well right now and the record profits will likely continue to be posted for years to come, but the demand is bound to subside eventually right?

Once everybody has a decent iPhone/smartphone is there really a need for anyone to upgrade more often then let's say every 2-4 years?

Can Apple/Samsung sustain their growth when the only really new prospects are the next generation of teenagers entering the market?
>exactly zero things?

So it's not a 'data storage service in a remote data center'?

Sure, AWS is made for servers - but the core business is the same. Charge people (AWS charges developers) to store your data in our cloud. Apple charges consumers.

Different demographic, exact service. Btw, iCloud is like AWS because AWS has many services (S3, EC2, etc.). Just like iCloud has 'store all your images and files', and 'match your music via iTunes'. Two services, via the same underlying core product.

It's identical to AWS - except for the target market.
Exactly! This is actually why I am in no real hurry to look for VC-type investment. Taking VC money at least appears to eliminate the "middle ground" for the business, one becomes obligated to shoot for big money or go bust trying.

It took me quite a while to come to this conclusion though and I still wonder if I'm missing something obvious. :-)
Haha, I pretty much would hire an iOS dev to build it and never release it.
Not that I know of, I'm sorry. When I spoke to the people at Frontier, and I alerted them that I had FiOS 1 mile away, I was informed that Redmond was pretty much all FiOS, except apartment complexes that hadn't permitted/accepted Frontier FiOS.

If I were you, I would ask Frontier if they could install FiOS at your address; and then, if they say 'no', go to your main office and ask that they ask for FiOS from Frontier, informing them that Frontier said installation was free to the apartment complex (which is what I heard from them, but if you want validation, you can ask Frontier yourself).