skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mayson, can you be more specific? What has happened to them?

Gmail: I can't think of anything negative that's happened to Gmail in recent times (unless you didn't like the UI redesign - there are certainly mixed opinions on that), and certainly the performance and uptake of Gmail has only improved.

Google Reader: Not much new happening, but it's still running. Are you referring to the changes in the sharing model? Whichever sharing model was better, surely you can agree that having one unified sharing experience across Google produces results in a more streamlined product, and at least this was a step in the right direction.

Google Labs: Was closed down, yes. I still don't understand how this relates to the parent post. My thoughts on closing down labs: Labs was supposed to be a way to get ideas out there in the wild before turning them into a fully-supported core product. This was great for the engineers who had built these things (they got to see them used), and the early-adopters who tried Labs products. However, as time goes on and nobody's doing any development work on a particular thing in Labs anymore, there is still an operational cost to other engineers at the company who have to keep the thing up and running. Since it's a 'Google' product, the brand image is at stake, so we can't just let them wither. So I think it's reasonable to decide to have each labs product either shut down or integrated into a core (supported) product. Perhaps it would have been better to chuck all the old labs and start again, with a published policy that things in labs will either be fully supported or completely gone 1 year after launch (or something). The removal of labs is a signal that there's more red tape around launching new products than there used to be, but I think that's inevitable as a company grows, and more than some engineer's weekend is on the line if a lunch goes badly.

20% Time: Still as strong as ever, from what I can tell. About half the engineers I know have a 20% project, and there's nobody who doesn't have one who wishes they could have one. Most of the time if people don't have a 20% project it's only because they find their core job interesting and diverting enough that they don't have a desire to split their time with a side-project. Despite what some people have claimed on HN, your manager can't deny you from having a 20% project if you want one.

(I work for Google, but not on any of the products mentioned above, and I (willfully) don't have a 20% project. These are my opinions and not necessarily those of my employer.)
That last sentence was beautiful.
he goes by fat, but he is as thin as a tooth pick
APIs are teh suck. The net and web don't have APIs either.
> [...] and a good amount of that work can be copied for free by competitors in the absence of patent protection [...]

Really? I would guess a good amount of that work was writing millions of lines of code, electrical and circuit design, designing for manufacture, and all that stuff you actually can't copy. Patents account for much less of that real _work_.

To circle back to the beginning:

> I don't know enough to truly defend Apple's actions

You're right.

> I do see Android as basically a piece-by-piece copy of the iPhone.

Straight-up batshit absurd.

People don't give Android enough credit for its Danger heritage -- Andy Rubin's previous company -- they developed a whole line of phones with hardware keyboards, web browsers, and downloadable applications. It was also built on top of a JVM. This sounds like the first incarnation of Android (the G1), doesn't it?

The popular notion that Android was a copy of the iPhone or Blackberry is stupid and wrong. If Android was inspired by anything, it was from Andy Rubin's own past.
Who cares about the syntax? The real problem is the weak typing.
I've not touched Perl aside from modifying and using basic scripts for process automation and administration tasks.

But since you called-out Python and Ruby, I'm curious what you meant.

In Python, for example, interpolation would look like:

print "I ate a %s for %s" % ('banana', 'lunch)

(or the newer way with nominally more keystrokes)

print "I ate a {0} for {1}".format('banana', 'lunch')

I've done plenty of PHP work and I get that I can do "{$varhere}" but for strings of any length or complexity it was totally common to use sprintf() an I have to assume the same readability principles apply in Perl?
Cool.. I spent half an hour there. I think until the users are engaged you don't need to worry about design. And by the way, the design is good too.
Perl lets you add new language keywords which take effect during the parse phase.
Security researchers found yet another vulnerability in JAVA after update
> running on "liberty and freedom" while pushing censorship

The Democrats are usually paid more by Hollywood than Republicans. During the SOPA fiasco, the GOP was considering turning the bill into a wedge issue for the election.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/01/throwing-hollywoo...

If you're talking about their net neutrality stance, there are plenty of people skeptical of net neutrality who aren't just in it for Comcast to eat our souls.
What happens if, on inequality, you have a 50% chance of doing one more comparison operation?

The way I figure, which may be incorrect, is the following:

You have x options (here it is 16). x^2 gives us 256 different options for this example. However, if it's only correct correct half of the time then we have to repeatedly cut down our search which results in series:

sum (x^2)/(2n), n=1 to m

which is

(x^2 H_m) / 2

Is this correct? Could someone explain how many random extra comparisons would be needed to thwart a timing attack?
I got a bit of confirmation of that while taking an IQ test at a Mensa meeting. The proctor mentioned that generally something like 2/3 of the people who took the test there scored well enough to get in.
I believe the duplicate url check only applies for a limited period of time, possibly as short a week. (I'm not sure of this though.)
> my memory is limited

This is tangental, but I find this an interesting topic - your memory not limited, at least not the way most people think it is. To be accurate - a body of experiments has failed to turn any evidence for old knowledge preventing formation of new knowledge, or new knowledge pushing out the old.

What prevents formation of new knowledge is time - you could learn A or B, but not both at the same time. What makes us forget piece A is not the piece B committed after A, but absence of repetition of A. If you repeat A every so often, you will remember it equally well regardless of whether you also repeat B or not during the same period.

I get my information from this book, which in turn has references to all of the underling studies: http://www.amazon.com/The-Shallows-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/...
Thanks, the ability to export to Ableton would be very cool. It's actually not that hard; Ableton can import midi, so as long as you set up the actual sounds yourself it's as simple as storing a .mdi file on Dropbox or Google Drive. That's something we could feature. And exporting entire loops should be easy as well.

As far as complicated rhythms go, I'd love to get some audio samples of you beatboxing! One of the things we have planned is a petition for beatbox samples -- we'll write a web app or rich client that makes it as easy and quick as possible. That'll allow us to get some better data than the little corpus I've been building up!

If you want to help out, you can either sign up for updates at http://beatmaticapp.com or email us at dev at beatmaticapp com. It would be much appreciated :)
What I'm arguing is the opposite - that the IQ test actually is precisely a measure of potential in various abstract areas. Whether you do anything with that potential, or how you develop it (as, in the case of my friend, who is a savant in putting Monitors back into styrofoam boxes) - is a function of resources, opportunity, and interest.

Flynn goes further, and suggests that the society and culture that you grow up in, also enhance your ability to execute on IQ tests. The genetic potential (obviously?) hasn't changed, but the environment has shifted such that our "actuated" IQ has increased as we practice more often in abstract tests.
There was an article with a similar goal previously posted to Gamasutra from altdevblogaday, but it's got data and software for you to play along: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/08/10/business-analytics-...
If they had taken money instead of electronics, how did you track them?
>given how many other important problems are not receiving enough attention

This would be a good place to mention some of them.
Grooveshark is an eloquent discovery tool. Music discovery is always a challenge for music lovers.

Example just now made me want to comment here - very simple.

Friend posted a YouTube video with a song on Facebook.
I went to Grooveshark and listened to the song, and others by the artists - not song samples, but the whole songs, which I made a little playlist with.
Hooked on the band discovery, I just went and bought two albums.
Sweet. Thanks for pointing this out. I refused to try Spotify because of the FB requirement.
Perhaps there is too much emphasis on the interview process. Why not use the contract-to-hire method? It could be a short duration spanning a few weeks.

There are of course multiple drawbacks, but at least this method could help alleviate the problem of false negatives.
In Perl you could write

print "I ate a $fruit for $meal"

Or

printf 'I ate a %s for %s', $fruit, $meal
It's a poll. It has to ask a question by definition. (On the other hand, I have no idea why a poll was submitted as news.)
Rdio really hasn't changed lately. Their interface got refreshed, but their catalogue is about the same as always.
I have a problem refocusing again and again. How does one go about that? Are there any resources that can help one with that. I am very comfortable with focusing on one thing and getting it done, but as soon as I switch contexts, I take a while to get up to speed.
Too bad that some guy is going to spend years and years in prison over drug charges when he should really only be charged with theft but I guess the lesson is don't go stealing traceable devices when you're running a dope operation.
Well, they tried by letting the payroll tax expire this last year, but caved after realizing it was a huge PR fiasco. What also gets me is that looking forward, they want to push some middle class tax hikes. I get it that the "rich" pay a LOT of taxes, but the already wealthy aren't really known to be leading the forefront of innovation. If anything we should just leave things as they are, or a slight increase on the upper earners to maintain middle class rates as much as possible.
More accurately, Google has the freedom to do that, because there are so many people applying to Google that the amount of talent they forfeit by not taking those guys is negligible.
Yes! Fonts in Firefox will work now!
"If you cannot convince some American company to stream to you (which is a matter of that company's choices, not some sort of national content embargo) then why not create your own companies and your own content?"

Because I don't have enough handpuppets to recreate Game of Thrones.

Seriously, what a silly person.
Patrick, just to be clear: Are the heuristics you're advocating here just something along the lines of "E-mail this user if they haven't touched their account in X days" or is a more in-depth approach required?
A tiny minority.
Jonah Lehrer’s Journalistic Misdeeds at Wired.com
What I've observed is that most people at Google are working on shitty legacy maintenance.

I was in New York, which is generally considered to be slightly above other satellites on the project-allocation heap but far below Mountain View, because that's where all the players are. Most people I knew were on uninspiring work, although there were exceptions, but you generally had to be Senior SWE or higher before you were even considered eligible for the good projects (and even some people at Sr. got shafted).

Google has a palpable "Real Googler Line". Above it, you're free to transfer and work as you wish. If you want to change teams, just decide to do it. Hell, Steve Yegge quit his project in public. Below it, you have manager-as-SPOF and one-assigned-project... banking without the upside. When I was there, the RGL was moving upward to somewhere between Senior and Staff.

I don't know why you have a chip on your shoulder against me. I never did anything to you.
In an interview the lead said there was a shortage of parts, nothing else was available.
HP Launches Beta Release Of Open WebOS | The Hacker News
yes. this is exactly the issue.

in fact there are some patent owning institutions who have mandates that prevent them from licensing their patents unless the licensee promises to develop. the licensee can't just sit on the patent and do nothing. their is an obligation to develop.

myrvold and his patent troll economic theory totally disregard development (though he will always claim otherwise and cite some red herring examples). while his firm won't "do nothing" as a licensee, they will not develop. they simply wave their big stick, a massive patent pool. they will pose the threat of litigation through noname shell companies. no doubt with these threats he can persuade institutions like the ones above to forget all about development as well. it's all about moving capital.

there are no doubt people, including patent policy makers, who think he and his IT patent lawyer co-founder are "brilliant" and are leading us toward a bright future. after all people are getting paid. but it seems some people are also starting to wise up to the game he is playing and the long-term effects on the system.
Hah, about time.

About 6 months ago I rewrote the Let's Crate (https://letscrate.com) backend to work exclusively with Amazon S3 Direct POST uploads. Getting upload progress to work with that was a royal PITA, but in the end I got it working. If you're interested in how, perhaps that's a good subject for a far more lengthy post on how to write extremely convoluted Javascript. I gave myself a pat on the back (no flash, yay!) and vowed to never do anything like that again.

As requested: Basically, the gist is that you accept the upload via a local JS file that acts as a conduit. You then turn the dropped / selected file object into a blob object and transfer that blob JS file that lives on S3 (using postMessage and a hidden iframe). That JS file on S3 is what actually performs the upload and tracks the upload progress. On progress events, I send back postMessage payloads to the local JS file to show updates to the user.

Convoluted, but it works. :)
Which middle class tax hikes have been proposed? President Obama is using a "study" which claims that to fulfill all his campaign promises, Romney will have to raise middle class taxes, but that's not the same thing. It would be as if I'd claimed in 2008 that Obama would have to raise middle class taxes to fulfill his pledge to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term. What happened with that, anyway?
How much code is enough to be covered?
Hot Startup Profile: Buyou
I stopped telling people where I work after Google. (Someone from Google tried to fuck up my next job, and Google refused to investigate. That's the main reason I hate Google's management. If they'd done their professional duty and investigated and fired the rat bastard, I'd have some respect for them.) But I'm doing well. Working on a side project to release this card game (Ambition) into the wild. The game rules are here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S7lsZKzHuuhoTb2Wj_L3zrhH...
If your only login option is Facebook, I won't use your service. Full stop. I don't have a Facebook account, and I certainly won't get one to be able to log in somewhere else.
the title should be: would the world would be better off with fewer patent trolls?
This should be an infographic, not a 3 page article
I piped it straight to mplayer and the server streamed it smoothly. Just in case someone wonders.

I thought it would be a longer bidirectional discussion more than an interview of Hickey by Meijer. Still nice to see them both.
> Frankly, it cracks me up when someone refers to their IQ seriously or boasts about being in Mensa. Other than testing for mid-to-high level mental retardation, subjectively, IQ tests seem to be terrible at measuring actual brilliance.

Frankly, it cracks me up that you're so confident in your opinion when you argue past a strawman and demonstrate incredible ignorance about IQ tests.

> I tested quite high, but even then I knew I wasn't noticeably smarter than others

Now we're onto something.
You are in luck! I'm one of the developers working on the Wanderful app and it is very much being built. You can check us out at http://wanderful.co/
The current system enables Apple to be the largest company in the world, in other systems other companies end up winning. So you don't get to assume the same companies win win after significant patent reform.

PS: Plenty of large companies have overthrown governments and enabled atrocities on a massive scale. Sure, someone always wins but it's hard to point to a company as benign as Microsoft or Apple and assume something must be horribly broken. Honestly, after comparing the Apple ecosystem with Android Apple is far better for developers than the more 'open' platform. Ditto for Microsoft, they had their time in the sun and 'hurt' their rivals, but compared to say standard Oil, US steel, or the East India Company there practically a charity.
I think this works for any link, not just the first link.
The in-person survey part is good because you can get qualitative sentiment. It's good to talk to customers, even for this soft data.
The quantitative data comes from watching how people behave over time. The bottom of the post shows the graphs of how users actually sign up, and that has 10s of thousands of data points.
True, but implementing a national firewall à la China to stop pornography? I don't care how objectionable the material is; once something like that is in place it's bound to be misused.
It's old news that the (first) supported distro will be Ubuntu.
Ask HN: Is it "bad" to use Themeforest?
I am a developer and I can't design for shit. So, I tend to use Themeforest themes for my personal projects and stuff.

I had an idea for a site which I think could be really useful and could gain traction - would it be "unprofessional" to use a Themeforest theme?

I fund all of my projects from my pocket and have maybe $50 which I can use - I can't afford to hire a designer.

Thanks in advance.
I'd really like to hear about how you did this. Any chance of open sourcing it?
Despite what some people have claimed on HN, your manager can't deny you from having a 20% project if you want one.

Theoretically, managers can't block you from having 20% time, and there's no official permission process you need to go through to take it, but if your manager says, "I'll fuck you over in Perf if you do a 20% project", then you don't have 20%-time.

What I'm told is that, before 2007 or so, Google actively worked to avoid manager-as-SPOF, and that this is what made Google great. But then they hired a bunch of executives from mainstream large companies and didn't tell them to wipe their fucking feet off before coming inside.
Google Comic:  20 things I learned about browsers and the web
Such a system was developed in the 70s, MYCIN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin). It wasn't used because of the state of technology at the time. Today it would probably perform much better.
I'm not sure there's much of a security difference between secure compare functions and hashing, but it's worth knowing about that technique too; do whatever you're most confident in implementing.
Disney’s 3D-Printed Princesses, Interactive Cakes, and Other Maker Technology
Wiper, the Destructive Malware possibly connected to Stuxnet and Duqu
>> that the IQ test actually is precisely a measure of potential in various abstract areas.

I'm trying to understand this. Here's my understanding: That it is possible to take an IQ test and have score x, then perform activities y, retake the IQ test and have the score x+15. How exactly did the initial test measure the potential for that increase? That your potential is x (+-)15 (or 25 or whatever the number is)?
You can make it more painful to take accurate measurements by adding randomness, but adding noise doesn't kill the signal. It is never a good idea to pursue schemes like this; rather, fix the underlying leak.
> It could have as easily been a pitcher and glass and would have satisfied the want.

Actually, no it wouldn't. If you read closely, my want was not water. I'd say my want was closer to convenience. I explicitly did not want to pour a glass of water, my other (free) option.

I wanted to chug down 16 ounces of clean H2O and roll over. Which I did. And it was awesome. Well worth the 2 bucks the hotel is going to charge me. In fact... I'm probably going to make the same decision tomorrow morning. Explain that!

Edit: waiting on a cab, so I'll be even more explicit. This morning I woke up, exhausted after a week of travel and a night of whiskey. Ad usual, a bit confused and not eager at all for my last day of work here in California before I fly home tomorrow to NYC. definitely going to sleep in another half hour at least. I know I need water but I don't even want to move. I can walk to the bathroom but at that point I might as well get up for the day. I look over: cheapo bottled water. The kind where the plastic is so thin you start to crush the bottle without trying. That decision takes less than a second: I grab it, unscrew the smaller-than-a-soda-cap cap and literally squeeze the entire bottle's worth down my throat in under 5, 10 seconds. Sated, I turned onto my stomach, buried my face in a pillow, and welcomed the sandman.

No way a pitcher and glass beats that. Even for free.
I like Bezos's suggestion of having shorter patents for software. 3-5 years is enough to protect innovators, but not long enough to stifle further innovation, and probably not long enough for patent trolls to purchase and then sue people.
I just looked at the Spark wiki page[1], and Sizzle is a dependency (although they say it can be removed if you're willing to ignore IE 7). So it is separable, but might not be that small depending on your audience.

[1] https://github.com/meteor/meteor/wiki/Spark
I've addressed why it's not horrid all over the place in this thread. The goods that store X sells are not chosen by the public or by committee or by anything else. They are chosen by whoever owns store X. That's how every store works and if store X doesn't want to sell pornography or political merchandise or whatever that's up to them. And if you think Apple is horrid for having the same policy as virtually every other store in history then by equivalence they are all horrid. That's obviously absurd so your claim is false. QED.
Sure! Although now that this is supported natively it seems like more of an academic exercise than anything else.

If any others have interest (reply to this comment if you do), I can turn it into a library and put it on Github.
Two wonderful companions to this article are "Thinking Intelligence is Innate Makes You Stupid" http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2007/12/03/thinking-intellige... and (especially) Cosma Shalizi's article on the malleability and heritability of IQ http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html
Indeed, it would seem that if human genetics aren't also changing at a lightning rate, the alternative explanation for the Flynn Effect would have to be that human beings are learning the particular skills called-for to take IQ tests "at a lightning rate".

Does that mean people are learning more skills in general? I don't think so. In fact, it doesn't seem like people are learning the skills on other standardized tests more quickly. What is it about IQ tests that allows scores to increase like this?