skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Supporting your point, astrophysicists have been using citation counts in this way for quite a few years thanks to the citation data provided by the NASA Astrophysical Data System.

Citation counts are biased, but at present they are the best we have. Their main attraction is that they are transparent and hence trustworthy, and a proxy for what we really care about: aggregate expert judgement of importance. Any replacement will have improve one or both dimensions--I don't think timeliness alone is enough.
I worry that I'm feeding a troll here, but...

> I'm curious your target have access to Google.com during your "interview"?

No, of course they don't. The idea is to see how well they think without being able to "just google it", so when they're tackling a problem nobody has tackled before, they aren't completely lost.

> Also what is going to happen to your hazing process when people start walking in with Google glass?

Probably they'll get asked to take them off, much the same as you might do to a candidate who walked in using a cellphone.

> If your canned intelligence test questions gave been recorded and indexed aren't you going to feel a little silly?

Candidates are told that the interviews are confidential. And no, I wouldn't feel silly if people recorded the questions and put them on an internet. It would be kind of a warning sign if we were embarrassed about them - the reason they're confidential at the moment is the same reason you can't look up upcoming exam papers on the internet.

> If a company is using f2f interviews to "weed" out candidates...

What on earth is a job interview for if not to reject some candidates? It's kind of a negative way of looking at it, but that is exactly what they're there for; to weed out candidates who are good (they must be at least adequate to get that far) but not good enough at the moment.

I'm not even gonna start on the last paragraph. Goodness knows nobody, especially Google, have a perfect interview process, but comparing it to eugenics is a little hysterical.
Voice-controlled nanocopter
Whatever he's smoking - he got his startup to the top of Techmeme. Maybe he gave some of that stuff to Gabe. And to the ones retweeting the article.

Whatever his wild prediction of the future is - it sure sounds a lot like twitter. Maybe a more "leanback" version of it? Better self-control over the algorithm (actually a good idea.., but wouldn't it be a lot easier if twitter just did that? Or app.net?) Did the weird stuff he's having let him sleep through twitter? Is he counting on twitter being too reliant on the control of the feed for monetization reasons? That's risky, but bold.

Or can someone explain this to me?
I think it means building phones and tablets is easier than building warehouses, developing partnerships and affiliates.

Keep in mind that Apple has been doing this (building touch screen devices) for about 6 years, while Amazon has been doing this (e-retail) for more than twice that time. Apple already has serious competitors, while Amazon maintains a near monopoly. I think this is the essence of what the article was getting at.
I never called them scum. Not my words.
Its an interesting post, but it seems to stop short of explaining the full situation.

Apps are complementary goods to smartphones, but I imagine in the case of the App Store, substitution forces are more overwhelming in price determination. I say this because as a Windows Phone user, it was common to see higher prices for similar apps compared to other stores. The Windows Phone store having far few developers and thus far fewer substitutes.

The complementary nature of the Apps can also work in the other direction. The more people who purchase iPhones and iPads, the more demand for the apps, which actually exerts upward pressure on app prices. The question is just what is more important to the user, hardware or software, and I think while the post makes one point, one could argue just as easily that the hardware dominates the decision.

As with any econ problem, the forces at play are numerous, so this is no slight of the post, just some other factors to consider.
I think there are many incremental improvements that could be made to the US political system that would enable future, more wholesale improvements. I'd love to see someone like Mr. Gore champion the cause of instant runoff voting / ranked choice voting.

IRV/RCV effectively removes the risk of supporting candidates that aren't already hooked into (and beholden to) the existing political fundraising machinery. What's better, is that IRV/RCV could be adopted without constitutional amendments or other up-front, wholesale changes to our system of government.

I'd like to imagine that, with the spoiler effect removed, data-savvy third parties would be able to most effectively use the Internet to increase their votes-to-dollars ratios. In fact, I'd hope that intelligence in this arena would be a filter function.

Of course this doesn't solve everything--money would still largely dictate candidates' levels of exposure. The difference would be that people could stop using party affiliation (and by proxy money raising potential) as a pre-filter for candidates.
Congrats, Bobby!
Now the real hard work begins :).
It's just a number in a database. What you say and how you say it is more important than what other people think of it. If your words are important to you and you said them in earnest, why does it matter?

Side note: You may even be unconsciously censoring yourself in fear of losing karma. It's a similar effect to suddenly having a lot of followers on Twitter.
im surprised this is only now making it to HN front page, it was published a while ago and is quite underwhelming in my opinion. it's an entertainment fluff piece, which i guess shouldnt surprise anyone.

the ideas are not ideas, they're technologies - or inventions - and most of them are blindingly obvious and already being worked on. even as far as technologies go, there is very little imagination here.
What is it about the site (varunarora.com) that causes the text to shimmer in a visually painful way when scrolling? [FF on Lubuntu]
Every time I read something like this, I can't help but feel that society has lost sight that the primary purpose of copyright is to promote and encourage creative endeavors for everyone's benefit[1], not to safeguard individual ownership of 'intellectual property.'

Is anyone at this school system even wondering, "does society at large benefit from this?"

--

[1] As pyre points out below, this is the case in the US, but not necessarily in Europe, where the history of copyright is much longer and more complex. (Thanks pyre!) The Copyright Clause of the US Constitution is: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
The first thing I did with my galaxy nexus was turn off mobile data, and I haven't turned it back on since. It's not that hard.
High-Tech Cargo Airship Being Built in California
You misinterpret what "core business" means. Apple's core business is making phones and tablets. There is now fierce global competition in these sectors.

I can't think of any other company that competes with Amazon at anywhere near the scale they are operating at.
As the update to the article quotes:

> The chances I leave [Apple] are minimal because I have all my music and photos and such on the phone. The inertia or friction of moving is fairly high.

This is also starting to become true with the kindle for consumers.

Another advantage of Amazon however is its many business customers - i.e. those who use and rely on AWS. I would imagine the friction of moving away from AWS are even higher for a business than for an end-user to transfer their songs and videos...
And remember, the tax advantage doesn't hold everywhere (certainly not in California anymore). Amazon has to offer something better other than price, and I think Prime is a large part of that.
So what would your list look like?
I take the word "atheist" at literal face value. I call myself an atheist because I am "a" == "not" a "theist" == "religious adherent". Agnostics are also in that category.

The squabbling about non-theistic definitions is stupidly pointless. Come on guys, we're all not theists here!
Article claims that it's easy to compete with Apple, yet hard to compete with Amazon. Fair enough, makes a lot of sense to me.

And yet, last I checked, a lot of companies made serious money in retail, but very few companies managed to earn substantial profits in smartphones, tablets and notebooks.

I seems to be harder to compete with Apple than most investors think it is. (I say that as a developer who hopes that an open platform will win the smartphone wars.)
spot on. especially with your first point about energy.
What Ostracism Really Means
First Licks of "Two Scoops of Django"
This has been AT&T's practice for a while. The big carriers want to make huge monthly fees by charging people for the privilege to use a smartphone on their network.

You have a few alternatives: Get a GSM phone that AT&T can't recognize, i.e. one that wasn't made for AT&T. Alternatively you could switch to one of the prepaid carriers that allow smartphones at no extra fee. These options may not last forever though.

(I discuss a couple of prepaid options here: http://www.zappable.com/2012/07/smartphones-for-cheap-ii/ )
> For young researchers--say, within 5 years of your PhD--you haven't had time for citations to accumulate, and journal name really is the important thing.

Maybe for people who don't know better.

For example: 5 years out is when a "real" tenure review takes place. (Tenure occurs at 7 years: Thumbs up or down usually occurs at 6 years, you get most of the readout at 5.) Mere publication may suffice at non-research institutions, which are primarily centers-for-profiting-off-education, but at any place where research is worth a damn, they have already measured impact. One of those measures is citations.

The same was essentially true at places like Bell Labs, but the process was not as formal.

Edit: I see from your profile that you are at TJ Watson? Last I knew, they definitely paid attention to citations for 5 year reviews, much like Bell. I find it hard to believe that they've watered down.
The Super Bowl will be streamed live online by CBS
This was written as a 'memory crutch' while learning Django and synthesizing the content in Greenfeld's and Roy's new book, "Two Scoops of Django" [1]. I hope it helps other novices for learning how to get started based on best practices. This is a living document, so I will make effort to incorporate feedback.

[1] https://django.2scoops.org/
A Guide to Super Bowl Party Small Talk
That's my biggest issue with Emacs: there are more than one million lines of elisp in circulation.

There isn't going to be any text editor come anywhere close to that.

I need something "programmable" so I'm "stuck" with Emacs.

I'm a bit bitter because sometimes (often actually) I wish Emacs was multi-threaded, easier to interface with externals tools (to make it a bit more like an IDE) -- that is, able to quickly invoke external tools without blocking everything etc.

But I realize that Emacs is soooo big that it's probably going to take a long time before we see a "modern" Emacs.
A hazing process is a tribal ritual used to stress candidates and humiliate them to weed out those who are deemed unfit to some standard that members of the actual tribe usually don't conform anyway and to measure the devotion of the candidate to the tribe by submitting to and acquiescing to the authority of the ritual.

I have no idea why you would suggest jealousy. I have no intention of ever working for Google unless I am acquired. Perhaps my reply was poorly worded, but I find this kind of process very unenlightened. If I'm "bitter" it's only because I guess I would expect better from a company that has vacuumed up so much available oxygen. Also, I have no idea whether this is actually the case at Google, I was just responding to someone who represented their experiences as such.

Finally, the last thing you want from an engineer is to be "good on their feet" unless you are hiring for some critical ops position. Rather you want someone that takes measured analytical approach.

This is like choosing a President based on their debate performance or the security provisions of the TSA. It's just theater bordering on the absurd.
Just from the screenshot in the article, it looks like at least 14 of the 23 links shown are completely legitimate (the HitFix.com, ihav.net, IGN.com, and HBO.com ones).

Since I read one of those sites (HitFix.com, a news/reviews site), I'm actually now curious how many of its articles have been spuriously removed from Google's index thanks to incorrect takedown requests like this one.
The "x begat y, and y begat z" chronologies that go on for hundreds of years can get pretty tedious.

The sub-books that involve lists of Jewish laws can be a little dull too, though some of the laws I'll admit are pretty funny.
What a weird article. The reason Intel pushed faster and faster chips, cheaper and cheaper is because they're selling items, not service, and they have to keep selling chips year after year, while facing competition. They do it, because otherwise they'd go out of business.

Unlike US ISPs, which face almost no competition, and will remain in business as long as they provide some sort of service, charge just below exorbitant rates for it, and keep the service level just above the minimum needed to avoid consumer mutiny. It's not like people have a choice, and therefore they stay.

Asking major US ISPs to change their mindset is completely futile, they have no reason to do so, because their current strategy extracts the maximum amount of money from the market, and the minimum service upgrades they do keep them updated and not completely obsolete. The only thing that can make them change is competition. Most of you are americans, you apply this principle ruthlessly in most areas of society, but why do you have a blind spot for telcos and cable companies?

Meanwhile, my city hooked up my apartment building to the municipal fiber network last year. I volunteered to do the project for our housing co-op, so I called up a bunch of local ISPs, some small, some big, and got offers for our building. Some of them were good, some were bad, some were cheap, some were expensive, some were flexible, some were rigid, and ultimately I picked one and recommended to our board. And a week from now I'll enjoy 100/100mbit for $30/month along with everyone else in my building, and the cost is fixed for five years. After that period, we're free to re-negotiate the contract and pick another ISP if we're unhappy, but you can bet your ass that the one we picked are gonna do all they can to keep us happy, so they keep us a customer.

Competition tends to force companies to do that.
Well, this site may not have it in short URL form, but if you do need to shorten something else without too much of a hassle, there are lots of bookmarklets out there :

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=short+url+bookmark...
Thanks :)

Yeah, it's true. Now, we have "real" issues, like actually creating a viable business, right? :)
Further schools are Already legally required to teach students so any contract signed to trade copywrite in exchange for attendance fails to give the parent or student anything thus failing to become a contract. (Contracts require both sides to gain something of value aka consideration.)

PS: Schools often run into this issue when trying to set up contracts with students / parents.
Apple have <10% share of the desktop/laptop market, about 20-25% of the smartphone market, and <50% of the tablet market.

Most of their profit comes from phones and tablets, and in both of these markets their global marketshare has decreased, or at best held steady, in most quarters over the last few years.
Why is aaronbrethorst ranked both 38 and 39 in the "Overall karma leaders" list?
And yet 5 years after the launch of the iPhone Apple still hoovers up a vast proportion of the profits in both the mobile industry and the desktop computer industry. Meanwhile 17 years after it launched, Amazon earned in total as much as Apple does in a single quarter.

The point is that Apple's devices are not easily disrupted by low end competitors because building software platforms and ecosystems is incredibly hard and once established they are very resilient to disruption.

If low end disruption was such a dire threat, the Zune would have rolled the iPod and Amorok would have supplanted iTunes. The majority of Android handset makers wouldn't be on the ropes financially and Microsoft's Phone and tablet software would be rapidly accumulating credible market share. And yet....

The author is trying to explain why what has been manifestly and irrefutably happening in front of our eyes for the last 10 years plus, and at this point is a matter of historical record, is impossible.
Not sure if it's a bug or my browser is just too old, but on Safari 5.1.7 (OS X 10.6.8), the "See your Data" button doesn't do anything. Works fine in Chrome.
Segway inventor's next endeavor
I've spent as much time travelling in Eastern Europe as my bank account can afford. It's insulting and rude to suggest I don't have world knowledge merely because I can see pitfalls of capitalism.
Your second line doesn't make sense. What does companies making money in retail have to do with being able to compete with Amazon?

Now, if you could say that incumbents attacking Amazon's base stole serious revenue from Amazon that would be something. But what does it mean to say WalMart makes serious money in retail, ergo it is easy to compete against Amazon?
How much profit is being derived from the work of children though? It seems a stretch to make a comparison with plantations/slaves. Any profit that is generated from children in school is a side-effect, not a primary goal. Though I can see this setting up a situation of perverse incentives.
Generally speaking (not specific to ST), "vim compatibility" is a vicious tease.
Is this supposed to be funny or what? I don't know Sublime, it probably has some unique features but I don't see even a single feature like that in this list. It's all - including point 5, VIM emulation mode - pretty much expected from any modern editor. The last thing I used before switching to VIM was Komodo IDE, which had everything mentioned in this list (and more because of the "IDE" part, but that's irrelevant). I don't know for sure, but I suspect things like Eclipse or Visual Studio these days have all these features too.

Really, we should stop saying that one particular tree is especially great because it has green leaves. I sincerely believe that there ARE innovative, interesting features added to many editors but I just don't have the time to dig through tons of obvious things to read about the single feature that sets given editor apart. I'm glad and happy that your editor does syntax highlighting, code folding, autocompletes words and has a plugin system, it's obvious, now can we move to the interesting part?
A viable business is always the goal :).
"A law that applies in every situation" is an instance of empirical universality, which is the weaker species of universality. Kant's entire problem with this is that a principle that has to be applied to a case in order to be true can admit exceptions since the only way to actually prove it true is to intractably observe every situation, so instead the warrant for the principle ends up being a mere inference. On this point he's specifically going after Hume: If I can only infer that the sun will rise tomorrow because it rose yesterday and the day before, I still leave open the possibility that the sun simply won't rise tomorrow. This is how Hume started questioning necessary causality and Kant totally freaked out.

Pure Universality is strictu sensu synonymous with necessity because a principle of this sort is a condition of possibility. This example is technically incorrect, but for illustrative purposes all stones either necessarily fall back down to the ground when thrown up in the air or I'm not able to write this. Kant thought causality in much the same way, either human beings can necessarily conceive of it without any empirical support or experience in toto is impossible.

Kant explicitly wants to derive morality from Pure rather than empirical reason. Self-interest, altruism, pleasure, and even our everyday notion of happiness are set by the wayside in the name of actions that wholly brought about by principle than any expectation of reward, service to a higher cause, or just plain conformity (which are all arguably the same thing).

The key thing to realize is that Kantian morality is really really inhuman: for all intents and purposes, Kant wants to automate morality. Hence my language of "Act as if you were a force of necessity".
I like this!

Is there any way of fitting some kind of averaging in there? There is karma per day, so perhaps posts per day?

Also, (http://hn-karma-tracker.herokuapp.com/superstars)

98 and 99 appear to be duplicates.
Sure, but karma is an important measurement of the (perceived) quality of your posts. If a comment gets upvoted that's not only because people agree with you but also because they think your comment has value. Likewise, if a comment gets downvoted, that's a fair indicator it did not have a lot of merit.

Of course, HN distorts this somewhat by just having one score for all the possible reasons a user might have to vote on a comment, and inevitably superstar posters get upvoted reflexively often drowning out better comments. But overall, as both a tool for measuring quality and a reward system it works pretty well.

By voting, we give each other points of a credibility currency that transcends individual discussions.
Apparently I've been "getting away with it" on my Galaxy Nexus (on which I turned off data instantly). So there's a data point for you.
>This is also starting to become true with the kindle for consumers.

I disagree. In my experience, buying books on Kindle has been almost a reassurance that it could be read on any other platform, either through a web browser or iPhone/Android app. Amazon has made it easy to switch platforms and still be hooked on their services, whereas Apple essentially locks you in to their ecosystem with only allowing their content (iBooks and movie rentals, but not music in some sense) to be enjoyed on Apple devices.

Services like Spotify and Rdio make it easier to switch platforms -- if I want my music library on another platform, all I need to do is download an app. That kind of flexibility and availability is more powerful and consumer-friendly in the long run, in my opinion.

Here's an interesting read from Paul Miller of The Verge:
http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/4/2669066/ecosystem-the-winne...
Nice work and more, great advices. Congrats.
I have been using vi/vim since 1989, and I found spf13 to be a totally frustrating experience. Twice I tried it out and quit. It messes with settings of neocomplcache (issues reported and verified with authors), it installs plugins like autocomplete (??) which can also be frustrating. I had hunt through the source of some 20 or more plugins to figure out the offending ones and remove them.

However, that's just my experience. I'd suggest he try a clean vim and add plugins as he needs them. There are plenty of links suggesting great plugins for developers. "sjl" (steve losh) has an article which was linked here (Coming Home to Vim) that mentions some good plugins.