skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually, my reason for spilling on Google is that someone from Google did something unethical after I left and Google refused to investigate (knowing they'd have to fire the person if they did). If Google had done the proper investigation and canned the person, I would never have said a word about them.

I'm pretty much over it by this point, but I still think the terrorists who thought it would be fun to destroy Google from the inside with their imbecilic "calibration scores" need to be named, shamed, and buried. They have attacked what was once a great company, and they are destroying it. I am pointing this out as a public service.

Google is a great place if you have a good manager and an interesting project. If you land on an interesting, relevant project, and your manager supports you in the political processes, it's a great place to work. I've never argued against that, because it's true.

The same is true of 20% time. If your manager believes in 20% time, you have that benefit. If your manager thinks it's a waste of time and will express it by threatening you with a perf smear, then you don't have 20% time.
> Seriously, why should Americans consider it normal to sign a Nondisclosure Agreement when beginning work for a new company but completely out-of-the-blue to have the employer be legally responsible for granting so simple a "privilege" as a 40 hour work-week without threatening to fire you?

The same reason half of Americans wholeheartedly approve anything else that screws them over. At least it's not so bad here that the employer has at-will capability but the employee must give notice to quit.
Dixons is just one brand of Dixons Retail (formerly DSG International) which also owns Currys, PC World, etc.

They rebranded all their high street stores to Currys.digital, and although store numbers have been declining, they are still a regular fixture on high streets.
Won't anyone think of us folks in India. I really want a tablet and I would get nexus 7 if it were available here at that price. Also google music and play store won't hurt either.
Just a quick hint for anyone learning French: The Kindle reader comes with an inbuilt French dictionary. Hovering over a word will show its definition (in French).
Man, I just wish a big company like Google was interested in me, but since I just mostly suck at everything that will never happen.
Thank you so much for pointing this out. For people who are so focused on "data-driven education" they always seem to ignore this. The fact of the matter is that collectively they perform no better than public schools, while undermining those very schools they are trying to 'fix.'

Perhaps part of the issue is that people are focusing on a 'silver bullet' for education. Standardized tests, charter schools, and even things like kahn academy have been offered, but it's all based on a false premise. There is no silver bullet. We know the strategies we need to take to improve education, but we always fail at tactics because of the assumption that there is one tactic that can be applied everywhere and it's just going to work.

That said, there might be one tactic that could work everywhere: teacher autonomy. Let the people in the classroom decide the tactics they need to use in order to teach the children they are charged with educating.
This is exactly the sort of condescending attitude that pisses me off about the CS program I'm currently concluding. Why should software engineering be considered "petty" in relation to, say, the study of formal languages and automata?

The vast majority of students in my program honestly don't give a flying fuck about the academic opinion that CS shouldn't behave like a vocational school - the intent is to go into software development, and CS is the only offering that touches on it. Yes, we're all capable of learning various things on our own (including the theoretical aspects of CS, as instructors in these fields are typically so incredibly incompetent that students are required to teach themselves, anyway), but that's not a justification for providing an education that is largely irrelevant.

If I really wanted to study theory and computational mathematics... I would have studied computational mathematics.

Were it not for the perceived value of a CS degree, I suspect a substantial number of students wouldn't even bother, and probably flock to Coursera, etc.
Indians started cultivating rice (~ 2000 B.C.) much later than the Chinese (~ 4000 B.C.) [1]. Given the rate at which lactose tolerance spread in Europe, Indians had already developed lactose tolerance by the time they started cultivating rice.

[1]: http://sourcing.indiamart.com/agriculture/articles/origin-an...
Look's great. I'm going to give it a try to guide first time users of my app.
Hacking the President’s DNA
I think it would help to have a more obvious method for dismissing the bubble, like an X button, or a button that explicitly says OK on it, to give a better visual clue for users that are using a touch device or don't think to try hovering over the bubble to see if it's clickable or not.
I'm English, with a reasonable English accent.

I'm not kidding, "water" is never understood, across a lot of California.
to be honest, many positions are filled through referral.
Google Signs Deal With Warner Music Group
It wouldn’t matter. Design Patents are valid for fourteen years. Every single product Dieter Rams designed for Braun is decades older than that.

Don’t fight patents with cheap lies. There are plenty of reasons why patents are bad, bad, bad, no need to resort to untruths.
Creating a Product and Learning from Mistakes
Seems very similar to https://taurus.io/
Same situation here as well. I started with eventual distribution in mind (yet another Japanese study app) but it's still a long way away from being what I'd consider releasable. Too many features coded in that I forced myself to try out and will eventually be modified, reconfigured, or whatever. I'll run out of excuses soon enough ;)
(No internal knowledge)

I'm surprised he got fired over maps. Mapping is hard - comparable to writing a search engine. Apple did as well as can be expected for a first attempt. They had some kind of problem with Google Maps, and wanted to build their own capability, which was never going to be easy.

He might have been fired if he cheated, by creating a well curated Valley dataset to prove to the other execs what a great job he'd done. That would annoy people.

I've heard rumors that he was seen as "better managing up than down" (impressing his boss, at the expense of results), and that doesn't strike me as something Tim Cook would like very much (both from his reported management style, and the number of stock options he has). I can see that being a last straw from Tim - "You screwed up, now own up to it. Or else."
Awesome -- which school?
Socialism isn't the opposite of capitalism; it is a complement that addresses specific market failures and can improve its ultimate performance.

For actual examples of not-capitalism, I recommend looking at the coordination work that won this year's Economics Nobel Prize for examples of more-efficient solutions to specific distribution questions. Even corporations themselves are a compromise of free market principles: pure capitalism has no absolution of individual responsibility. It is entirely reasonable to question what trade offs we prefer in choosing mechanisms to distribute scarce goods and services.
All you've done here is take the 'hidden in pi' argument and customized it. If you are only making a sample of random mp3s you have a statistically zero chance of infringing on anything. If you make a thorough set of X-length mp3s then the actual infringement is in the url, because a datastore that has every number is equivalent to one that has no numbers--it's really just an encryption algorithm between url data and mp3 data.
What's the secret to learning a second language?
What makes the Nexus 4 such an incredible phone is that it costs about half of what an S3 costs with comparable specs. Plus, because it's a pure Android phone you have the benefit of getting OS updates a lot sooner than phones running a manufacturers version. Granted it doesn't have LTE but for the price, I can do without it.
The writing was on the wall:

Does Apple have a Scott Forstall problem?
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/29/does-apple-have-a-sco...

Apple Retail Leadership Tells Stores It 'Messed Up' Employee Working Hours, Refutes Layoffs
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/apple-retail-leadership-tells-...
Laptops have gotten nicer but it's still rather hard to find a 19" desktop monitor with a nice DPI.
Though I fear that it's "bye bye overt skeumorphism" for sure, but maybe it's "hello excessive minimalism/removing every last feature"? Let's hope not.

Well said. Ive's aesthetic has certainly worked for the hardware line. Even if for nothing else than just the novelty of seeing what they'll put out, I'm delighted to see him take over all HI.
Not to steal your thunder, but this is a pretty amazing story that may inspire your own tool creation:

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/27/whats_the_secret_to_learning...
> Do you really think that they would radically redesign the next version of iOS?

Yes. Absolutely. After a year of the longer 4" screen I fully expect Apple to significantly revise the UI to take advantage of this extra room.

Don't expect a radical change that throws out everything Apple has already achieved, but do expect new widgets that make 4" screens better.
Isn't this rather self-evident, that those who work to gain control of the structure gain control of the structure, and those who don't, don't? It seems to just be a wordier variant of 'use it or lose it'. Does such a self-evident law really require the appellation 'Iron'?
Well, a few things about your analysis.

First, raising capital and going public are two entirely different things. One is generally an exit event and the other is not. One garners returns for your investors and the other does not. Square is raising operating capital to continue operations, not selling itself publicly to create returns for previous investors. I would be much, much more impressed to see Square go public than raise any amount of money. Or much more impressed with a company that raised $0 going public.

Big rounds aren't what matters when I say miss. What matters is that Square was not able to raise at the valuation it wanted and what that signals regarding their internal finances and the valley's investment community in general (and even beyond since Square raised from companies outside SV).

And yes, Square/Dorsey seem to strike a great emotional nerve, but that's my point. That's not by accident. That's very carefully crafted marketing. And to get as much coverage as they do, they probably spend an enormous amount on internal or external PR. It's all carefully crafted to tell exactly the story that Square wants us to hear.
Dorsey's PR has been mentioned in a number of articles. IIRC Vanity Fair was one, can't remember the other but the PR guy butt in during a coffeeshop interview. They are never more than a few feet away, and make sure articles mention that he wears Prada, dates models, and likes the expensive things in life. It's clear from miles away that Dorsey's image, and hence square is a highly managed affair.

So yes, we know a bit about Square and Dorsey's PR machine, it's been reported on in the press a number of times.
Skeuomorphic design is rarely as little design as possible which is what makes the podcast design so iconic... er.. ironic.
The anti-NGO sentiment resonates with me. I spent the last year living and working in Bangladesh and it's the same story. People get educated to get jobs for foreign aid agencies, not to innovate. This creates a very clear, wide-spread systematic culture of dependency.

Clearly aid agencies are doing good things sometimes. And there are NGOs moving toward fostering business and accountability rather than traditional giving. Still, a lot of work needs to be done. Basically aid should be reserved for post-emergency situations, I believe. Multi-decade aid programs are not going to lead to self-sustaining economies. At least not if some major changes happen.
So I did EECS at Cal. And while some of these things are definitely in the category of software engineering and not computer science, I have to say that, in the few years between my undergrad and today, I've kept in touch with the community. And it's my sense that a lot of skills which one might find on this list are starting to be emphasized more: testing, version control, scale, timelines, communication -- so it does feel like undergrad curricula "get it" and are supplementing the standard courses with some generally useful stuff. Not replacing, but suggesting/providing/using some of the useful stuff in the context of the greater course.

I'm a little surprised schools didn't touch upon complexity already; that's been around for awhile. Yet, it is the biggest category in the responses, so that's probably why.

I'd also say that things like deployment, sysadmining -- browser incompatibilities? These are a lot more role-specific and better learned in situ. If the guy who knows browser incompatibilities needs to know how to do deployment, you are either (a) a pre-funding startup or (b) spreading your talent kinda thin.

I'm sure most of the responses here will say something like "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education" -- which is all well and good for you. But if we want more and better candidates, it couldn't hurt to adopt some of the best-of-the-best practices (version control!) into CS curricula.
Yes, the date when one was studying is a vital facet of the data being gathered here. It's a big oversight IMO to have missed out on asking a question to gain date information (eg graduation year).

I've only got, in this respect, an undergrad diploma in computing and covered 6 of these things in any depth; it would be around the same time as you were studying and we never covered version control at all.
Safari's Reading List comes to mind.
Shading and round corners are skeuomorphic, as is indicating depth on a piece of glass.

What Apple loves is irrelevant (if one is willing to ascribe emotional states to corporations). Daimler-Benz loved steering tillers. Ford loved hand throttles.

Think about the way in which the interfaces of automobiles changed over the first forty years as they went from horseless carriages to widespread adoption. That's what we're seeing in computer interfaces.
Regarding Mansfield, it's interesting that Apple announced his retirement a few months ago:
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2012/06/28Bob-Mansfield-Appl...

Then Cook convinced Mansfield to "unretire" and become an advisor:
http://gigaom.com/apple/shedding-light-on-apple-exec-drama-w...

And now, Mansfield heads up a huge new group called Technologies (wireless, semiconductor, etc).

What a roller coaster for Mansfield... but not just him, the entire management team because they're all working together and dependent on each other.
Actually, for reference of why I mentioned those languages in specific, it's because the following scene happened in these interviews:

Interviewer: Could you figure out how to solve a blah blah blah for me in whatever language you prefer?

Myself: By "whatever" language, do you mean whatever language? Is Scala ok?

Interviewer: We'd prefer C++, Java, or maybe Python. Try with one of those.

It's one of those things like the "pieces of flair" in Office Space. If you require an object-oriented, weakly-typed, imperative language whose syntax you've seen a thousand times before, please specify so. Don't put out job ads looking for creative, intelligent professionals who think outside the box and then tell me, when I come to the interview, that I can paint it any color as long as it's black.
Show HN: YAAK.js - HTML5/Javascript game audio kit for web and app accelerators
Shame. He had great stage presence at the Apple shows.
The analysis is the same. The tax-deduction is a subsidy to the <equity> holders, of whatever asset class. So, for homes, the subsidy accrues to the equity holder. For business, the same thing. Policywise, housing is consumption (luxury, in particular) and business capital structure is investment. Subsidizing the latter has a far stronger policy rationale per-se but the capture technique (components of cost or net profit) is arbitrary. Analytically, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theor....
Coursera's Computational Investment, from Python to Clojure
My main gripe about Mozilla (Firefox, really) bookmarks is how to merge two bookmark files with tags attached.

Let me make that clearer, since apparently absolutely nobody at Mozilla can understand the italicized portion: I have two files full of tagged bookmarks. I want to have one file of tagged bookmarks. The tags from both original files must be preserved. If a bookmark is tagged in either of the original files, it must be tagged the same way in the new file.

Involving third-party hardware in this is not an option. I like my privacy.

It is a source of perpetual amazement to me that there is not an extension that will do this for me.
I've been turned off by Google's recruiting style as well. I don't understand why the current state of tech recruiting is to blast out (almost) generic recruiting emails to everyone. It feels like this style of recruiting should have gone away by now.

P.S. I just wrote a blurb about this last week: http://robdotrob.com/post/33737357324/recruiting-for-bigco-p...
I wish there was a way to subscribe to just the technical posts on the CloudFlare blog, those are always informative. As it is, I can't even find a way to get an RSS feed for posts by particular authors.
I also was reading SICP for my Scheme class at (or near) that time as well. Fascinating. I'm really sad MIT discontinued its use for the introductory course.
I'm guessing I can put html into the fields, since you have the mustaches in?
Finally, AMD is embracing ARM. It just might be the only thing to save them, but only if they are flawless in execution, and Nvidia and others already have years of head start in working with ARM chips.
This is exactly what I've been considering using on http://debugmap.com It's a site that needs a little explaining but I hadn't been able to come up with something usable myself. I'm going to try it out soon, thanks!
Excellent perspective. Apple is not going to succeed or fail based on skeuomorphism. The iPhone and iPad have reached their success in large part because of the tremendous capability and growth of iOS, and Scott Forstall led those efforts. Yes a power struggle seems to be resolved, but Forstall's departure could turn out to be a big loss for Apple.
Cost of doing business. In Steve's words: "What can I say? I hired the wrong guy."
Yes, that's so, at-willness of employment and unions are separate.

I nevertheless believe it comes from the same impulse, because, in general, the employer is in the stronger position than the employee. (Not always, of course, and it's certainly possible that some employers regret not having contracts with certain of their employees.)
What cheap lies? I'm well aware of how old that design is.

If copying is wrong it is wrong regardless of how long ago the original was made. Or is there some magical cut-off date by which copying suddenly is ok? Why 14 years? Why not 13 or 10 or 50? It strikes me as pretty arbitrary. For a company to go all out in accusing others of copying I think they should be above all that and come up with entirely original designs. Why take a 30 year old tape recorder and mimic that, is that really the mark of originality that Apple stands for? It seems quite hypocritical to me.
By whom? The (upper) management, or his team?
The solution then is to ban oppressive warranty terms. Only abusive/negligent care should void warranties like that.
I feel like there should be a follow up survey asking recent grads what their degree enabled them to learn outside of their coursework.

My CS degree hardly taught me anything in comparison to everything I learned outside of my coursework, but I don't feel like my coursework was lacking. On the contrary, my education allowed me to learn new things on my own that would have been significantly harder otherwise.

eg a basic algorithm course lead me to get involved in TopCoder. An introductory course on software development (source control, testing, etc) gave me enough knowledge to find an internship where I learned about peer reviews and how to work effectively with a large codebase - something that is very hard to pick up in a semester of college.
I'd have to disagree with "they don't predict anything".

Do you think P(intelligent|good at brainteasers) > P(not intelligent|good at brainsteasers)?

I'm not saying it's the best test, most accurate, etc. but if someone is really good at brainteasers I'd post it's more likely than not that they're intelligent. There's probably false negatives with people who are intelligent but bad at brainteasers. But for a filtering test (when Google has too many applicants anyhow) I can see why they're used.
LTE isn't even available yet in my country and it's not the third world, but France. 300 euros is cheap for a smartphone like the Nexus 4, in comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S3 is 500 euros on amazon.fr and it's the cheapest price you can get for it, it's more like 600 euros everywhere else.

The lack of LTE won't be a dealbreaker for most people, and probably even those who live in the USA. $300 hits the right price point for a flagship phone and the upside of owning a nexus and getting Google's support is huge. I'd rather get an iPhone than an android that is not a Nexus. Both OS are constantly evolving and getting better, waiting for the carriers and OEM to get their shit together is getting old.
Why is Scott Forstall leaving Apple?
Getting into YC as a single, non-technical founder
Patent US7680883 - Dynamic integration of web sites
Google has historically both been reliant on fair use and the public domain and has defended such in court. I'm not saying they did it out of altruism, but substantial precedents that help solidify fair use come out of Google's activities in court.
I'm the guy whose HD has a specific location for every single last file. My bookmarks terrify me. It is the closest digital equivalent to opening my closet, closing my eyes, throwing my clothes in and shutting it before the contents explode outward in a jumbled mess.