skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Seriously? "How tall are you" and other extremely softball questions? I think the average question quality on Askolo would increase if they would display the asker's name next to the Q.
Correct, Firefox 14 will be released in 12 weeks. (Or you'll get it in just 6 weeks if you switch to the beta channel!)
Impressed by the bookmarklet. How does the summarizer work? Is the Gremlin technology patented? :)
> wonder what changed since then (DropBox? Evernote? ...)

You're on the wrong track. What's changed since then is GDrive - what do you think all those involved were doing in the last 4 years?
Tor/Forge to Go DRM-Free By July (science fiction publishing imprint)
Sure, but an exclusive fax number could work.
The exact phrase is "We don't think you will fit in to our
culture". I won't name names for two reasons. First, I'd
likely get a law suit. Second, the attitude is pervasive.
Recent post-graduates doing first level "filter interviews"
asking questions from their recent algorithms class. The
process is optimized toward new graduates. "What's the
average order of mergesort?" kind of nonsense. In 41 years
of daily programming I've never had to code a sort routine.
I have spoken to Tarjan about computing the order of the
Rete algorithm but I don't think the Rete is covered in the
college courses... and who ever heard of Tarjan anyway?

Sadly, this means that we will continue to repeat the same
mistakes "for the first time". Knuth's literate programming,
Alan Kay's Meta insights, Chandy and Misra's parallel work,
and other fundamental quality gains will have to wait for
another generation, assuming that generation ever gets its
chance.

What I see are languages without standards "evolving". That
is, they are making all old inventions but badly (e.g.
Python has "closures" but only 1 liners. What a joke.)
They "abstract away" complexity but badly (e.g. Ruby has
gems but you have no idea what the ruby stack is really
doing.). This is much different from Alan Kay's abstraction.
To quote Stroustrop "C++11 is a whole new language!" And
MapReduce as an "invention". Oh, please. The list goes on.

The worst part is the stupid hiring games meme. Solve our
puzzle! Take our quiz! Show us your blog! How many angels
can dance on the head of a pin? Make sliding colored blocks
on web pages!

Experience is a valuable asset in most professions but is
looked down upon in programming. Unless, of course, your
experience is "exact"... "oh, we need an Oracle 10.3
database guru with stored procedure experience".

If you want to know what companies to avoid...
look for the ones that emphasize "culture'.
If you're in the continental United States (or Canada), and have a GPS receiver that can handle the WAAS adjustment signal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System), you can get a much more accurate signal as quickly as a regular GPS signal.
1. To use Emacs

2. To use Vi

Or was it the other way around? I can't remember.
Ah! Did not know that. Thank you for pointing that out.
That sounds like a pretty good speech, but I can tell you from experience that the thing that will help kids most is listening to them. We tend to project whatever our frustrations were in childhood onto all struggling adolescents (and almost all adolescents are struggling) but the content of these heartfelt talks is much less important to the kid than being heard and knowing people care.
Rails 2.3 also has:

map.connect "/foo", :controller => "foos", :action => "index", :conditions => { :method => :get }

Which is the "correct" way to do verb-constrained non-resource routes. Not ever routing the wrong verb is even better than checking it in the controller.
The existence of this new product does not make users more or less tech savvy.

If a user goes from 1 copy (hard drive), to 2 copies, then it's a net gain for their backups.

If a user goes from 2 copies (hard drive, some backup system), to 2 copies (hard drive, Google drive), then yes, arguably, it's a net loss for their backups, because they can simultaneously have a HD failure and get locked out of their Google account.

But arguably, they could live in Joplin, MO and both of their current backups could be toast.

Best to have three - hard drive, backup drive in a safety deposit box, and Google Drive if you like the convenience and access and cost, and don't mind the privacy implications.

I don't mind the privacy implications. Google doing something evil with user's data would be absolute suicide for them.
Because the value of the company is tied very strongly to its growth rate.

The present value of a perpetual annuity (to keep things simple) is C/r where C is the recurring payment you get, and r is the discount rate (or risk inherent in actually getting C). Think of r as an interest rate- you demand a higher one if you invest in a risky company.

Throw in growth and it becomes C/(r-g) where g is the growth rate. As you can see, g is very, very important.
Valuing a company is much more complex, but the same basic truth holds - growth is a huge contributor to value.
Thank you for your opinion. No, I don't have legal issue, yet, with my startup, but I am within weeks to go beta launch and curious about term of use, privacy statement. I notice each startup has these on their products (whether it's website, mobile app, custom program, etc), but I wonder how do they get it. Do they have someone draft for them? Or is it a generic statement they can just use temporarily? I am bootstrapping now.

Of course, if my startup gains traction and grows, yes, I will definitely consult lawyer, but since it's still in its infancy, I wonder if it's really necessary to get lawyers just for term of service, privacy, NDA statement.

Thank you.
It looks like the Chrome Web Store is the centralized place for developers to list apps and for users to authorize them. But once the app is registered/authorized, I'm not sure how the server would have any idea whether requests were coming from a web app or a desktop app.

If this is the case, then a native app could exist Chrome Web Store solely for the purpose of letting users authorize the app to access their GDrive.
The State of the Web (according to The Oatmeal)
it's evil what they'll do with your files. one likely step is fishing expeditions by ICE looking for people who have illegal copies of movies or songs on their gdrive.
"As hard as it may be, you need to take a Confucian approach. You must consider first all of the other employees and second your friend. The good of the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the whole."

Citation needed on how that is "Confucian". Early-Spockian, perhaps. Or Benthamian.

On a more general note, I've seen quite a few instances where early stage companies brought in "expert" executives as replacements for founders/early employees and the "experts" really and truly fucked things up. I think more discussion is needed about deciding when and why this transition actually has to be made rather than just assuming that when you hit a certain point you need new people.
Anyone else noticed a significant improvement in overall responsiveness or am I seeing things?
You'd also need a US credit card with a US billing address if you'd like to actually buy anything. Which is unfortunate, because there are many things on the Play Music store I would buy if I could.
Dear VZW and AT&T. Figure out a way to make your money providing a fast pipe at a decent price and we'll love you for it. Keep up the "Adversarial Value Extraction" (data caps, usurious text message pricing) and we'll abandon you like Blockbuster Video when a viable alternative arises.

Prediction: Google and Apple spin off a new, jointly owned company that enters the wireless market by buying sprint and /or t-mobile, and they create the wireless internet we need, not the one we deserve.
if the university purports to teach this stuff, they should hire people who actually know how to teach it. if their tenured PhDs aren't cutting it, they should look elsewhere. (this is how i got my university teaching job.)
Google Drive for Business
This needs to be higher. This is exactly the reason why what the article calls "Assumption X" is flawed.
I still have my fingers crossed for Electrolysis (out of process tabs/sandboxing) to ship before Firefox 30.
> Is there a real concern that someone will take you to court for that?

I think the concern is more along drawing a bright line between black hat and white hat.

Researchers have to do stuff which is borderline illegal; at least it's sometimes tricky to know if they're breaking any laws. Thus, they'll create a set of clear and easy to understand rules and work to those, which means that they reduce their risk of legal action.

"Don't fight abuse with abuse" is (at least was) very common phrase. That's pretty good idea, when some people aren't capable of knowing who the bad person is. We don't want denial of service attacks against innocent people.

Having said that, it's annoying as hell that ISPs don't do more to stop this kind of thing.
The Bad Habits of Insanely Productive People
My reading of this is that the Chrome Web Store is where apps are listed and users authorize them, but not necessarily that the app has to run in a web browser. The user could authorize the app by "installing" it through the Chrome Web Store but download/use it from a totally different channel.

PS: I work at Google but don't have any inside info on this.
You would. But at a much lower price. Do the math on the profit per share of facebook - assuming they pay it all out in dividends. It's tiny.
It ought to be good enough for absolute position. The general arrangement of lights, air vent, smoke alarm, sprinkler, motion detector, and wall proximity are more than likely unique.
Google Drive client written in Python
To protect your company's domain, you can file a dispute with ICANN. I don't think it's necessary to register your trademark first, but having a registered trademark does help in the dispute proceedings. If you do need to register, hire a lawyer to do this.

If it were me, depending on the circumstances, I would probably wait to register a federal trademark until a Series A round, since you have other things to worry about before then.

Disclaimer: This is not a legal opinion, just a personal one.
Anyone else wondering about the problem with 26 letters?
> In most cases, the conversion rate will be so poor that it’s not worth the cost of maintaining two apps and supporting the free users.

I'm an anecdote, not a statistic, and I am addicted to Instapaer now, but I would never have bought Instapaper if I hadn't tried out the free version for a week. It's not even a question of money -- it just really bothers me that any developer would be asking me to pay for their app without being able to try it out.

I'd also prefer to see trial versions that have, say, time limitations instead of using ads. Ads just make the experience crappier, instead of letting you discover what the full version actually feels like.

More generally, it's a fault of the Apple store -- ideally it would allow developers to have trial versions that simply cut you off from an app after 30 min or a day or something.
So, I'm going to be the one to say it. I love you after reading this.

off to play with HelloFax
The problem with dropbox-like companies is that there isn't really a high barrier to entry. If Google wants to clone it, they will.
The S3 price is for unique storage. A lot of content is going to be duplicated across Dropbox users so they won't need to pay S3 for every byte, just the unique ones.
While the article is more a characterization of what it's like to work at Google, I agree startups are more suited for people who want to have an immediate and public impact on something. Spending a year on a startup, even if it has a badly-run me-too kind of concept, can indeed make you look more successful compared to, say, spending the same amount of time making Google's webserver 3% faster.
God, I hope that Google Drive doesn't start following symlinks. That behavior of Dropbox is completely broken and dangerous, and furthermore makes it impossible to use symbolic links for what they're supposed to be used for.

When symlinks are synced, they should be copied "opaquely", not "transparently". I.e., the link itself should be synced, not what the link points to. Opaque syncing of symlinks is the standard way to sync symlinks on Unix, and is what 30 years of experience with symlinks has taught us. Forgetting this painful lesson of history would be tragic.
Hasbro offers free merchandise to blogger, sends lawyers instead.
It ain't going to happen until they rewrite Gecko in rust. But there might be things that are close enough to it.
Identity verification and such are only part of the problem. Even if it is a bona fide person writing the review (and ignoring the problems w/Yelp filtering practices), a truly valid review only comes from one who the readers can be assured really was a customer of Royal Movers in addition to some of the other, lower identity bars.

So how could that work?
Even Boston Bruins goalie's reflexes not fast enough to handle texting/driving
Ha, I should have realized you were an insider. :) Your timing was much luckier, since you had those 2 years built-in, although I'm not sure whether you got to skip a grade when you came back, or had to "downgrade" and sit those two years with lowerclassmen, while your classmates remained a grade ahead. That would have sucked.

Anyway, the fact that you also went back to the US after graduating validates my last point -- yet another "future leader" failed the "task". ;)
USDA: Detection of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) in the United States
This isn't about whatever language is the flavor of the month, although seeing universities teach a language that is less than 20 years old would be nice. It's more about CS programs that produce graduates who have no practical ability to code at all, in any language.
Well, I would argue that the Better Business Bureau is the modern-day Better Business Bureau. :)
Seriously life is to short to watch a 55sec video...are you on your deathbed?
Author Rich Snippets and Why You Need Them
I kind of like the idea, but the site doesn't give first-time visitors a good impression of how it works (before signing up). Maybe a screenshot or something could go a long way here.
I'm glad it's about reform rather than abolishment. I haven't gotten too deply into the book yet but the fact that the word 'reform' is right in the title gives me hope. I'm always (unsuccessfully) trying to impress upon people that copyright isn't a bad thing, it's just how it's used by many these days that creates problems. A lot of people try to convince me that we don't need copyright at all and the next thing you know those same people are upset about someone violating their copyright. Copyright is a two way street and as much as its abused it's also quite helpful too.

But all that's beside the point. I love the idea of reform. There are huge problems with the way copyright is implemented (my biggest qualm is the life + 70 year term) and while I doubt it can ever be completely fixed it's obvious that there's room for improvement. Politically feasible reform is music to my ears.
Dreaded IPO-crash signal flashes bear warnings
A Git user's guide to SVN (because at least 10 of us have that problem)
Feel free to make pull requests.
This has been confirmed from tons of people. How on earth has Yelp not been dismantled by the courts and their CEO put in jail? This is insane. Businesses now have to pay "protection" money to the Yelp mafia. WHY HAS YELP NOT BEEN SHUT DOWN? I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!
What we're mostly looking for is customers who need to build systems, and come to use to build them

You might find it helpful to think about your customers as people with problems that mean they have to build systems. The customer doesn't care about the "system". They care about solving the problem.

1. Should we be focusing elsewhere?

No idea. Are you finding customers for what you're offering now?

2. If so, how do we find the kind of customers you're talking about?

I think we're talking about the same customers. Or were anyway (we're in the process of moving to doing more consulting/teaching/coaching ATM since it gives us more options). We build things for people who needs things built :-)

You find customers for consultancies in the same way you find customers for software products. You need to start going to where the customers are. On-line and offline. Try adding some business meet ups to your technical ones. Listen - don't sell (at first anyway).

Talk to them. Figure out what their problems are. Solve them. Do a reasonable job. Figure out what worked and didn't. Tweak your offering. Go talk to more potential customers. Solve more problems. Do a better job. Start getting references. Repeat.

I've found the Business Model Canvas a useful tool for brainstorming ideas on my own business - looking for alternate revenue streams and markets - http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas - as ever YMMV :-)

3. If not, how do we take a customer, who's a lone guy or a company with a new product, and use the techniques above to present ourselves differently?

I don't know - how do you present yourselves now?
GPS is complex and I may be wrong. But for rebroadcast to work the transceiver would need to be placed exactly between the user and the satellite in space; meaning a different location every time the user moves. If not perfectly placed; the radio signal will have travelled further than expected and give the wrong position. I suppose you could attempt to locally recreate GPS signals with multiple transmitters; but this would play havoc with GPS reception outside the building. Why not just use WIFI?

Differential GPS is not about rebroadcasting the actual GPS position, but the error from a known position. This allows the device to enumerate the error caused by atmospheric effects.
Woolite COMPLETE
Patterns & Practices Symposium Online 2012
I stopped using Yelp after I noted that reviews I submitted were only visible to me, if I was logged into the site.

That defeats the purpose of an online review site -- if the review is only visible to me, why am I posting to Yelp, and giving them valuable data they just will sit on, as opposed to logging in my own local host `reviews.txt`?

I noticed also that a number of favorable reviews, seemingly written by authentic reviewers were also suppressed in like fashion.

See Amazon for a site that gets posting reviews mostly correct.
I find it interesting that everyone brings up working less / earning more as necessary because they've kids.

As if, when you have no kids, you've obviously to work more and earn less.

In general, you have no kids because you realized that you wouldn't have enough money for them to get everything they need / it's too risky.

And that doesn't mean you don't work as well. In general it means you've taken more morally adequate decisions and less financially adequate decisions in your life.
Show HN: iDoneThis+AwesomenessReminders, Get Work Done, Get Awesomeness
It sounds like you're saying MS just didn't implement any features that would take advantage of faster hardware, which is kind of sad if true.
Google Drive - Privacy?
Yea, but they were the first ones to restart advertising with Rush Limbaugh. And their system is just as game-able, albeit at a slight cost.
> There is no conditional, and without a conditional you can't get a conditional.

A two element array of function pointers (or code addresses) and an operator that turns true/false into 0/1 is enough to do conditionals.
So undercut them.
I think most of the talk about reception issues on the GNex relate to Verizon CDMA version of the phone. I tried out a GNex on AT&T here - 4.0.4 has a bug that results in 3G connectivity issues - the recently released minor OTA update fixed that. Prior to and after the update, indoors I get 2-3 bars in my house whereas at the same place with my Atrix I get consistent 4 bars. But calls and 3G Data experience is similar on both phones. So unsure if lesser bars on the Nexus mean anything. Outdoors I traveled 700+ miles with it and had no issues with reception - mostly full bars, 1-2 bars in few areas but calls worked fine there.

WiFi - it is not worse or better than any other device in my house, which is to say it works well across considerable range without any drops.

I bought it from Amazon for $643 - but fortunately I was well within the return window so have returned it today for the $399 Google market version.
Google Drive definitely has shared folders.
Did you hear about the recent RSA SecurID breach?

http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=3872
FWIW: The legal disclaimer on my health site was adapted with permission from the legal disclaimer of a published author who has a PHD. He expressed concern about my legal exposure and had been hauled into court or something himself at one time for doing similar kinds of work. He advised me to put up a disclaimer and encouraged me to adapt his and sent me a copy. More recent language on the newer front page grows in part out of the fact that I worked for an insurance company for five years, where I received annual training in some of the federal laws that could potentially impact my health site. I state clearly that what I do is not medical. It is about eating right and making lifestyle changes.

I would also recommend being careful, considerate and sensitive. Politeness and manners help avoid situations that could require a lawyer.

Best of luck.
For terms of use, another post mentioned modifying Wordpress's terms, which are under a Creative Commons license. For privacy policies, this area could be a little bit trickier if you have an open beta - if any of your users get pissed off that you did something with their data, and your privacy policy isn't up to snuff, you might be in for a world of hurt. With a closed beta or if you're not dealing with extremely sensitive information, I wouldn't worry as much.

Like I said before, a good startup lawyer in your local area is worth their weight in gold. For the basics, you can probably find a dozen lawyers who have worked in big firms who are working for themselves now advising startups like you, without having to spend what little cash you have. Some coworking spaces have lawyers too - and they're usually happy to help and often have structured office hours.
I figure this is inevitable, since music downloads have largely gone DRM-free as well.
If the API allows, I give it a week tops for the first two to appear on Github.
Growing up a programmer in the 80s
There are usually quite a few positions for programmers in polar areas. Checking the Ecology and Geomorphology lists I don't really see any right now, but they do exist. If you're serious I'd shoot hr@icecube.wisc.edu an e-mail and express your interest and ask if they have any idea of groups looking for programmers.
Ask For Task | Helping Canadian get their "to do" list done Socially
Shouldn't be hard to test; see if you can upload a 6GB file.
There is no way for a pronunciation to not depend on the surrounding context. You do not spell words letter by letter.

Thus minimal pairs are the king.
Movement in Manhattan
"any highschool kid can go ahead and just build it"

What high school did you go to where everyone was an expert on multithreading, network io, disk io, bidirectional synchronization, and state persistence?
So this is the entreprise product you guys were talking about months ago? $6 per employee? I know wellness programs that charge less. This is something people can easily do on their own thru a weekly status report.

Getting a daily email with a list of accomplishments can get rather old and annoying. Plus imagine your employees hearing this new policy... and trying to keep a straight face?
The second email made it seem more obvious it was a joke to me.