skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Their new "focus" strategy sounds suspiciously like putting all their eggs in one G+ basket

What makes you think that? Google has been killing projects since long before G+ existed. They also adopted their "focus strategy" before releasing G+. Is there any evidence that Reader was killed to benefit G+ in some way?
I worked for about 4 months at a factory. My job was thus:

.5 sec: Put bracket in tapping machine.
.5 sec: Press Tap button.
4 sec: wait to Tap bracket.
.25 sec: Air blows tapped part into crate
--Goto Beginning until 120 parts are in crate
Change Crate
--Then Goto beginning.

Do this for 8-12 hours. Yes. a 5.25 second loop.

Other things in this job was if a part was in the crate that wasnt tapped properly (I found out Im also in charge of QC as well..)I would have to manually check the last day's work all by hand.

I was hired temp labor, at 8$ an hour. The machine that would replace me would cost $.5 million. That was one of the worst mind numbing jobs I had ever done. I figured once I started to contemplate suicide, I should probably get out of there.
There are many ways to define the 'value' of something for different purposes - however a value derived from comparison against a task which nobody would ever want to perform (employ millions of 'librarians' with grep) is not likely to be useful anything.

To give some examples of different kinds of value you could assess for a company like Google - Its value for its users (for early Google this would be basically how much value is gained by using Google as opposed to an alternate search engine) is for instance very different from Google's 'use-value' (how much money Google make from it), its market value (driven by a lot of speculation as to what Google's future might be, as well as its 'use value') and its 'liquidation value' (of assets - assumedly very low when Google began).

The link comes closest to looking at the value for users, however this would be better ascertained from a closer understanding of what Google was supplanting at the time (other search engines such as Altavista who had results which were poorer, but not hugely so) and then trying to derive some basis for how this might affect the 'user', rather than what the cost for Google might be to implement their search mechanism in a technology-backward way.

[edit] To clarify that I'm talking about valuing Google in its infancy (as per the OP) rather than Google at present (which is obviously more than just search) - thanks to martinced's comment below.
I think it'd be illogical for Google not to in some ways compete with alternatives, like Blekko in this case. Google's core business is search, and in the early days, it was this very naive behavior that allowed Google to sneak right under places like Inktomi. Just because a search engine starts small doesn't mean it can't gain traction or market, and if it has compelling enough features, it'll happen in a heartbeat.

I suggest reading "I'm Feeling Lucky" by Douglass Edwards - the early chapters describe a lot of Google's anxiety of being killed by other search engines for one reason or another. It helps to explain why they'd be quick to adopt new strategies to keep results fresh.
My first Ember.js and Node.js app
Some scientists are too old to change, and too proud to believe the results of their younger counterparts. It's stupid and it sucks, but it's crazy to think Microryza will fix this in any substantial way. Crowdfunding science encourages projects that are "sexy" but don't build toward real advances, and so are of questionable scientific value (two examples off the top of my head: http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121115/srep00834/full/srep00... and https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/science/new-research-sugg...). Moreover, projects that the average person can't understand are at a great disadvantage, and your success rate is tied to the ability to sell yourself, rather than the merit of your research or your abilities as a scientist, which the average person not in your field will be unable to assess. For all of the problems with the present grant funding system, I find it very difficult to believe that crowdfunding could allocate resources more efficiently.
Completely agreed - plaigiarism is rampant because collaboration is so natural and doing work for its own sake does nothing to advance one's understanding of the material.

All subjects, to the greatest extent possible, should be heavily based on collaborative projects that give back to society. Demonstrate your knowledge by contributing original research and ideas to Wikipedia. Contribute to an open source project on github using algorithms and methods you've learned in the classroom.

Society should benefit from the education system, not just through run-of-the-mill degree programs, but from the fruits of the labors of its students.

There is so much untapped potential.
The only thing I hate about using DDG is the lack of a synchronized history. It's very helpful for me to find past Google Searches through Web History, because it works cross device.
I took a random sample of 25 papers from:

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/catalog/default.aspx?p=1&...

68% of the authors hold academic positions.
And perhaps he has, but this seems to be an outlier, and Microsoft is collaborating with researchers in numerous academic institutions. If those no longer existed, and thus Microsoft Research was no longer collaborating with academic institutions, would Microsoft Research continue to share reproducible results of their work with the public? We can only speculate at this point, but I'd find it hard to believe that the free market would share as much.
Google has been shutting down features left, right and centre. I'm left wondering: what useful thing has google done since gmail and ads?
The silent sex: are men in peril, and why is this a debate of women?
and definitely better than G+ IMO
Rather ironic as Finland has a comprehensive schooling system he seems to be arguing for selective schools by the back door.

Though in Finland do seem to have the same rigid vocational / academic track similar to Germany where going to the wrong sort of school locks you out of or makes it very hard to go to the top universities.

And comparing his experience a tiny European country with a small and homogenous population and thinking that the USA is going to have the the same challenges or possible solutions is a bit naive.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Kary Mullis (the genius inventor of PCR) talks about this at length in an excellent essay in his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field". The book, overall, is ok - some of the stories/opinions he holds are "alternative" and a refreshing perspective.

"Because of science - not religion or politics - even people like you and me can have possessions that only a hundred years ago kings would have gone to war to own. Scientific method should not be take lightly.

The walls of the ivory tower of science collapsed when bureaucrats realized that there were jobs to be had and money to be made in the administration and promotion of science. Governments began making big investments just prior to World War II...

Science was going to determine the balance of power in the postwar world. Governments went into the science business big time.

Scientists became administrators of programs that had a mission. Probably the most important scientific development of the twentieth century is that economics replaced curiosity as the driving force behind research...

James Buchanan noted thirty years ago - and he is still correct - that as a rule, there is no vested interest in seeing a fair evaluation of a public scientific issue.

Very little experimental verification has been done to support important societal issues in the closing years of this century...People believe these things...because they have faith."
Were you homeschooled? Because I was, and all though I don't want to go into extensive detail on why I despise it, I will just say that parents HS because they think they know what's best for their children, but they often don't.

I lived in an area with a horrible school district, so I understand why parents in school districts like that think they can do better, but in reality HS parents should be putting their energy into making public schools better.
A better historical parallel in America would be the American Philisophical Society [1], founded by Benjamin Frankin in 18th-century Philadelphia.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Philosophical_Society
Vow of Now
To be honest, Vic is also to blame for that one too.
Linus is now seeing firsthand that opportunity is not equal in the United States. You typically need to have attended a good university to get a good job and to get into a good university you need to have graduated from a good secondary school - which you need to have paid for either through tuition or taxes. The goal is to keep the wealth concentrated in the already wealthy. That's how it works here in the United States.

I'll assume for the moment that Oregon's intentions are noble, and they're attempting to right this wrong. How ironic that it will achieve the exact opposite result. The old law of unintended consequences and all. Those of us who were in school in the 70s during mandatory desegregation will recall that too had the opposite effect of what was intended: instead of providing better learning opportunities for black students the white families left for the suburbs leaving the black students behind in worse schools than what they had started out with. Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it I suppose.

So what is the answer? I think we really need to understand the problem: public schools are locally funded and operated and small locales can use real estate to become exclusive. The solution then is to realize that exclusivity can't be had on a large scale. You need to expand the scope of 'local' in the local school system. A good start would be to expand 'local' to the county level. While certainly there are some counties richer and more exclusive than others, they are much more homogenous than individual communities. At least it would be a step in the right direction that would better serve everyone.
Those historical economic expansions occurred precisely because of those labor saving technologies. It was not mere coincidence.
It's one thing to use online courseware as a supplement to education but another to remove a teacher who can sit next to a student and explain things they are having trouble with in different ways and work through problems with them.

I think it's important to have some general grounding in a variety of subjects. I certainly wouldn't rely on all parents (who themselves may have failed in education) to be able to choose a good balanced curriculum for their children.
The reason why the hoopla about Google Reader shutdown won't die is that bloggers and online journalists will lose readership.
Ubuntu has caused most of us to go on a distro-jumping spree, fact is the linux community has gone through a lot of changes in the past 3 years but I think most communities now know what they want cannonical/redhat,etc thus we will see more stability and developments from now
Show HN: A JSON API for NASA HORIZONS Planetary Ephemeris Tables
I don't always all-caps, but when I do, it's because every word is an acronym.

The NASA HORIZONS[1] system is a telnet service that provides planetary data and ephemeris tables, which are basically coordinate-time plots for celestial bodies.

It's pretty archaic and somewhat difficult to use, especially since it just dumps out text tables and you have to parse it to do anything with it.

Some projects, e.g. KDE Marble, use it as a data source and typically just consume it with a little procedural code to get what they need.

I wanted to provide a full-fledged library for it so that you can easily mash it up in a web app, so I started a Gem called Tengai[2]. It has a very minimal set of features right now, but I have a lot of ideas and I'd appreciate feedback (and forking!).

This little Sinatra app[3] uses Tengai to provide a JSON interface to the ephemerides. Check it out:

http://horizons.herokuapp.com/bodies/499/ephemeris?start_time=2013-3-23%2000:00:00&stop_time=2013-3-23%2023:59:00&interval=720

[1]: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons

[2]: https://github.com/zacstewart/tengai

[3]: https://github.com/zacstewart/restful-horizons
tptacek has proven himself unable to reply without snark in this thread. I decided not to challenge the point
Whilst academia has its problems, they tend to be no different to any other walk of life. Yes there are politics, yes there are cliques and annoyances, and yes inefficiencies and crazy decisions made. But I don't think there are many institutions that don't suffer these problems because generally they are staffed with human being, and humans, being what they are, tend to be flawed, political, mistaken, and sometimes brilliant.

Academic institutions are unique for enabling people to work on research problems in an environment that is extremely rich and productive, its not for everyone, its certainly not going to make most people rich in cash, and its structures can infuriate as well as enlighten. Thankfully there are other options in life, and other opportunities, but before you rush to reduce the universities to ruins and homogenise research activities, lets just stop for a second and ask what it is the universities uniquely bring to the table.

Maybe, just maybe, there is something worth saving in the idea of a university. Something that may not fit certain people, that may pass over some brilliant people, that may even struggle to satisfy the instant always-on consumerist education that is so fashionable today. Indeed, the university on a social level is a public good. And that public good, transcends the inefficiencies, the politics, and the other complaints pointed toward the universities. When universities are working at their best, they are for the public good, contribute to the public good, and help make society a better place for everyone.
beat me to it:
www.codeduel.com

I am making the FPS version though.

Nice job!
Can I ask you why you see DDG as the perfect alternative to google? One would think that if you are concerned with the sort of things google is doing, you would bank on an open source search engine, so this sort of thing doesn't just repeat itself.
I don't know why Linus says that Americans blindly accept the crappiness. Perhaps they accept it because its systemic nature makes a hard thing to fix, but the acceptance isn't blind. Most smart people I know in this country seem to have had some clash with the school system in some form or another. Linus talks mostly about funding, but there's also the huge problem that schools don't seem to be teaching math and science, or anything for that matter, very well. For me personally, thinking back to my youth, I think the most important lesson I learned in school was to be cynical and not trust people in positions of authority, to go off and do things on your own instead of relying on them to catch up with you, which is a helpful lesson but probably not one that you'd want to need to discover so young.

On another topic, I can't help but think some of his description of the American acceptance of the brokenness has something to do with his setting of the northwest. When I lived in Seattle I was really shocked at how unwilling people were to question the status quo, especially when it came to things that could be changed by political action. On topics where more aggressive east coasters would loudly complain or maneuver around, apathy and letting things go as they had been seemed to be the default for most things. Of course the education problem is a national one and these latter traits are not unknown to other parts of the country. But the northwest is less cynical, and more content to let things just drift.
K12/CAVA is "public school". It's the normal, California public school system -- it's just a charter school.

But no, I wasn't home-schooled. I doubt it would have been a good choice pre-Internet, to be honest.

Today, I firmly believe that CAVA is the best choice for kids in California if the goal of school is to actually educate them, especially pre-HS, vs. just be state-provided day care. The K12 curriculum and materials are amazingly good. And they're free -- like I said, it's public school. :)
There are places a bit like this, but they are not generally liked by the entire scientific community because they can sort of swallow highly talented individuals and take the pressure to produce off them, which does reduce their output. At least that is my (very limited) understanding.

One example of such a facility is Janelia farm, part of the HHMI, which was endowed by Howard Hughes ('The Aviator'). Another one is Woods Hole, endowed by the Rockefellers.
Intel NUC review: a little desktop PC that holds big promise
Wood's Hole and Janelia Farm were the 2 places that came to my mind, too.
This article misses a significant point: access to online learning is different from and cannot replace motivation to learn, which is what's investigated in the article. The business model of most online universities is based on number of enrolled students, not number of graduating students. Since the barrier to entry is low and the enrollment associates sell well, people often end up enrolling without sufficient motivation to study and quickly drop out after getting overwhelmed by the responsibility they overtook. A more fair evaluation would take students of equivalent motivation to study a degree/subject, and then compare their performances in offline and online classroom settings (of course if you truly want to understand before you speculate with "dirty little" titles).
Can I open up a uslide-controlled presentation on another browser and see the slide changes? That would be mega-handy for our remote presentations.
Sometimes, with smart data structures for specialized cases (persistency, better asymptotic behaviour etc.), it can happen that memory accesses dominate the actual execution. If that happens, and you can't saturate CPU's execution units, the difference between an efficient interpreter and a compiler gets smeared very quickly.
ICANN reveals new gTLDs
You might want to check YubNub [0], which is an enhanced version of this prefixes idea. If anything, you don't have to prepend your queries with ! there :)

[0] http://www.yubnub.org
I agree that it's the only actual "reason." I just don't think it's a good reason. I think it presumes that the value of "taste" for us is greater than the value of "life" to an animal. And there's a lot of evidence that most meat is very unhealthy for you, anyways.

As an interesting (perhaps?) side note, I tasted meat recently for the first time in 2+ years and it was really lame and underwhelming. :/
The thing about Reader is that its appeal - while limited - was limited to a disproportionately influential segment of the internet. This made its shut down stupid for two reasons.

The first is that RSS's well-established failure to go mainstream meant that it was both a minor and clearly contained "threat" to advertising revenue. The second was that the people who did rely on it heavily are among the best sources of free publicity around. These are the people who take it upon themselves to deal with the fire hose head on, to filter for the best, and to promote their discoveries as widely as they can. And given that Google's entrance into the feed-synching sphere had driven every one else out, their departure left no clear replacement. Essentially, Google waded into the most vocal room in the world, replaced the infrastructure with their own, then shut the whole thing down without any apparent remorse or regret. And that left a lot of very noisy people in the lurch.

Basically, keeping Reader going was the cost of keeping the blogsphere happy. Having hit these people where it hurts, they can now expect to suffer a steady stream of sentiment saying "Google isn't trustworthy". For a business that is unusually dependent on a public perception of trustworthiness, this seems especially undesirable.

If a good substitute for Reader appears in the coming months, the problem may be a passing one. But if it doesn't, the lack will be keenly felt. And as long as bloggers, reporters, and other high-volume traffickers are feeling that pain, Google can expect to lose the benefit of the doubt anytime trust comes up. And even if a good replacement does emerge, Google loses the benefit of having potential critics dependent on (and enamored of) something that they - and they alone - were providing.
So you're up 5% on capital employed. Well, if you can sustain that, you'll be doing pretty well!
Rapyuta: The RoboEarth Cloud Engine
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10071-007-0092-5...

There's a definite possibility bowerbirds learn bower making skills from older bowerbirds.

There's also...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect
A shitogram for modern age.
Worst Company In America Round 1: Apple Vs. Microsoft
Require a directory of javascript modules in node.js
does anyone really care at this point?
well, android
The post is mainly about the library, not the command-line interface.
... and if you unset telnet's escape char, they will watch it to the end.
> Not to mention severely biased curricular, I'm sure HN kids would all know haskell by the time they were 9 but what about poetry , sports and history?

A poor education in sports may reduce potential profits of future pro-athletes and students looking for a scholarship.

For others, I'm not sure. Also, not knowing about poetry and history won't harm.

In fact, in term of opportunity costs, it might be a better move NOT to touch these subjects altogether to spend more time on things that matter, or at least on topics that matter a little bit more than these subjects.

Haskell may not be that popular at the moment, but that may change in the future (haskell-like language could emerge!) and still at the moment I'm sure there are paying jobs for people with haskell fluency than for people who are really really good in poetry and history.
Is a $50,000 car a necessity? $20,000? $10,000? Is a car a necessity at all?

How about food? Is a $250 dinner at Saison a necessity? $5 dinner at McDonalds? $20 per pound imported beef at the grocery store?

$200 jeans vs $80 vs $20?

Are glasses a luxury item? How about Google Glasses?

How do you define it? The devil is always in the details with laws and especially tax law, you can't just hand waive this kind of stuff away.
T-Mobile is listed as the top acquisition of 2011, but that deal was blocked by the DoJ and later dropped by AT&T. In other words, the charts are based on announcements, not necessarily consummated transactions.
CAVA is the CA Virtual Academy using the K12 curriculum, and despite having a higher-than-normal number of "special needs" students, does better on standardized tests than the other public schools in CA. (CAVA is a charter school, and thus part of the public school system. Anyone with kids in CA can sign up for it, and everything is paid for -- they even pay for Internet and give you a computer.)

In my experience, CAVA is very effective in all the areas you've mentioned. And they do weekly in person group activities as well, plus field trips, etc.

I honestly don't know anyone in CAVA who's wanted to go back to sending their kids to day care^HHHHHHHHpublic school.