skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When you lose the core users/early adopter types (the ones that used Facebook the most since early on), it's only a matter of time before it spreads to the mainstream.

The decline may be "hidden" in its early days, if Facebook keeps growing in new markets. But the trend remains. It's that happened to RIM, too. They were growing overall (globally) years after the iPhone came out, but losing users in its core markets, which meant it was only a matter of time before the same trend spread to the new markets, too, the ones recently conquered.
It does happen to some extent. I have always been impressed by the way slum areas build tons of functional structures from scrap. But there is only so much you can do with limited resources, and extreme poverty implies that.
Using today's fabrication techniques, yes. But not if new, less capital-intensive techniques are discovered.....
I thought I had seen it before. It saves the post processing step that the NASA algae experiment had. Still it's an interesting result.
My Happy Inflation Days
The main downside of these kind of interviews is that the candidate has to prepare.

This may be well suited for fresh grads, but not for mid-career senior engineers.

You should seek good candidates as is. But, you already assume that one needs to prepare...
Amryis produced a drop-in biofuel before this, but this work appears to use a novel biosynthetic pathway.
I'm not bothered by targeted ads. I'm bothered by the idea that someone who has amassed all the information about me to show me well targeted ads can do other things as well.

For instance, they could sell pseudo psychological profiles or provide scoring services to potential employers, banks, insurance companies, landlords, users of dating sites or governments.

They could be subpoenaed and hence make me vulnerable to extortion by everyone with a sufficiently large legal budget or a political interest. The data could also be stolen by organized criminals.

In other words, it would give great power over my life to anyone who gets hold of that data, and therefore I do not want this kind of data to exist.
I have had a very hard time trusting Sony since the removal of the OtherOS/Linux support on the PS3 (which was not their first hard-line opposition to owner control that came to my attention by then). Since then, I have tried to avoid even simple Sony wares (headphones, etc) - even if the hardware was sexy - on the theory that they were the sort of company that would sue the sort of person I consider myself to be (specifically, someone who is likely to hack any phone or game system I buy).

Maybe others feel that way too. I don't know how much that would matter to the average phone user, but it might uniquely matter to the sort of people who are looking for an open boot process.
..says the American, whose average daily energy use has harmful and negative effects on global warming and rising sea levels, perhaps permanently damaging the planet for all future generations of humanity, but would rather not care than care for the most part.
I am very adept at Photoshop and Illustrator. I can cut images, and touch up, no problem. But I am a miserable designer. Groking design is something way beyond any skill in an app.
What jacques_chester said, except I was mostly thinking about the engagement level of the traffic. I.e. I go to HN for deep reads and to find out about cool new tools and services. When I go to reddit, for example, I'm there to lol at teh funny .jpgs.
Ridiculous, all this states is that the "cloud email and storage offering" for the uni will be provided by Microsoft, nobody's being forced to be "locked in" to only use those products.
At the larger tech companies, many of their problems typically are an issue of scale. They are dealing with large datasets, massive numbers of users, terabytes of data, etc.

When dealing with scale, its important to have efficient solutions. They may need to be time efficient or space efficient due to constraints. Even though space is cheap and hardware is fast, inefficient algos may never work or be very high cost.

Maybe you won't be the one implementing this infrastructure but you may be implementing code on top of this infrastructure and it matters that you understand (at least the basics) the consequences of designing things a certain way.
You still have to physically remove the composted feces which is a logistical nightmare in an urban area, there are reliability problems with maintaining the proper environment for proper decomposition (temperature & moisture) and compared to pit toilets are bigger and more expensive (though in an urban area, you don't have the land for pit toilets).

Really, a wet sewage system is superior for densely packed areas.
How can I animate movement of the browser screen?
All I'm reading here is that we should be able to decline immigrants based on cultural stereotypes.

How is their culture toxic?
Noscript users, or in case anyone else sees lots of numbers like "Q1969448" instead of data values in the tables (articles?): Wikidata apparently requires javascript but doesn't make it clear. Allow scripts and refresh.
>>Are millions of people dying in Mumbai's slums and we're not hearing about it?

Its a very complicated issue.

Don't read too much into it. The fact that they live in slums has sometimes little correlation with their purchasing power or sometimes their financial status.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharavi

This slum is a mini industry in itself having exports of over $650 million an year. Its possible many people living their have their own cars or even their own homes else where, which they have rented out for some monthly income.
Its mostly a side project as of now, although I do want to turn it into a venture if possible. I couldnt find your email in your profile. Send me an email and lets discuss what we can do. My email is in my profile. I would be glad to collaborate.
For those who are confused (many of the posts currently appear to be), this seems like it is an attempt to semantic-ize Wikipedia-style definitions.

For example, representing a term as: Earth "is a" planet "belongs to" the solar system, "has" [properties X, Y, Z].

This has applications in natural language processing and other types of artificial intelligence (for example, within a particular niche, it could be useful in an expert system). Think about this type of thing as a complex graph representing "knowledge" in some abstract but still useful sense.
Indian here. Yes population is the biggest problem for us.Which naturally leads to many problems like this one.

* I agree with author this is absolutely true for slums like Mumbai. (But does not apply to whole India. Second tier urban areas scenario is not this bad )
* I agree that in most of rural area practice open defecation.

In general whey open defecation is in practiced,

* Since we have too many people even one bathroom in rural area per home is not sufficient(seriously)
* Attitude of people towards cleanliness.

IS GOVT DOING SOMETHING FOR THIS?

* Yes lots of schemes have come(more than 10-20 years back and still continuing) in its slowly picking up.
* The best scheme in my state(Karnataka)the govt is paying Rs 7000/- for each house to encourage them to construct toilet from 'gram panchayath'.
* Thanks to media and celebs who are getting involved more these days.

Yes we have problem, we need to solve it.
Ha! I don't know why are you putting multi-ethnicity of India and people being apathetic towards general well being of society they live in. For last 200 years or so, survival has been single important goal of a middle/lower class Indian family. We have been plagued with unchecked population growth, famines, diseases & poverty. You read some of books (By Premchand, Tagore) and it used to be worse. Winter used to kill people in thousands and then famines. For a country which was dependent on Agriculture for such a long time, uncertain rain (and fight over who gets the canal water) used to spell disaster.

The problem is - even today for middle class families for whom survival is not a problem, haven't started caring about India they live in. We take our world for granted. :(
So we do lock-downs still, but it's not about working crazy hours, it's about focus. Under lock-down you are allowed to push the other stuff to the side for awhile. For instance I typically do 2-3 interviews a week, help with training new interviewers, etc. This can easily be 5-6 hours of total time out of my week. This is part of being an engineer at Facebook. Onboarding sessions, new engineer mentoring, etc. This is all part of normal workdays, unless you are in a lock-down, then you focus on getting whatever it is you need to get done done and not worry about the rest for awhile.

I personally disagree pretty heavily on sleeping in the office and working crazy hours. I find it very counter productive and generally think it leads to bad decisions, bad code, and ultimately bad products. It is certainly the exception, and not something you should be doing if you aren't 22 years old and/or more than a little crazy. I personally haven't worked crazy hours at Facebook since probably 2009.

Talking about this sort of thing from a PR perspective seems has to balance getting people excited about our environment and explaining our goals and day-to-day. I've found it's something the media outlets love to play up. The normal day-in-the-life of an engineer is fun, but chill, and not particularly news worthy.
And in smaller publications, warnings about how hackers can access your brain waves!

http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2013/04/28/brain-hacking-re...

Whole article behind paywall, and also above the fold of the business section of the Sunday April 28th SF Chronicle. Good times.

Also, as the maintainers of some reverse engineered EEG drivers, I'm in agreement with pretty much every other pessimist. They're toys. Fun toys, but toys. We're waaaaaaaay off from the cool control shit, especially at a mass marketable consumer level, but believe me, there's gonna be tons of cool research shit on the way there.
It's more like a , you might get killed by a car if you step into the street kind of theoretical. Or the drip of a water clock will fill the container in 8 hours kind of theoretical. Or a don't plant too early or your people will starve kind of theoretical.

A theory in science is a model backed by the huge majority of observational evidence and the collective experience of the model's community. There are no other equivalent human institutions for reliability. None.

So saying "it's just a theory" in the case of uranium-dating is a fairly unreasoned attitude.
I think that whoever created that classification system was the one who was really confused. If the list of all American novelists is too long, it can always be broken down by the initial letters of their last names.

Not to mention that some first names can be either male or female and that the genders of foreign names may be hard to figure out if you've never heard them before (there are plenty of American novelists whose families came from elsewhere). This would make it easy for Wikipedia editors to misclassify somebody.
Well, that sounds just weird. Either you expect the people being interviewed as part of their prep to learn and remember forever everything they ever may need at Facebook and that could possibly be asked in the interview, or your argument doesn't make sense. If I hadn't any contact with parsers/compilers for a while I will need to look stuff up. When you have no frame of reference in my process when getting the information necessary to solve the problem - how can that possibly be a good indicator of me being able to solve an unforeseen problem? If there is a known solution and I already have the exact algorithm, the hard part is over and it's only about writing code. Which is exactly what people seem to complain here: The skill to reproduce a known algorithm is at best the lowest possible bar.
I dont understand what the problem is with using a slow backend even for static content (just because it is easier to program). Just use varnish to cache the pages and you're good, right? Or am I missing something?
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world.

"The other involves orcs."
-- John Rogers, "Kung-Fu Monkey" blog
How is it better than Menlo, also based on Deja Vu?
To play the devil's advocate, why should I treat every appliance that happens to have a microprocessor in it as a general purpose computer with root access? Personally, I want some of my devices to have some of the same traits as appliances. I like my phone to just work, always. I don't want to even be able to misconfigure my phone in such a way that it doesn't work right.

Don't get my wrong, for my PCs this isn't the case. I still like to be able to tinker, even if it means I can screw stuff up. But it's not that unreasonable to be offered a phone without full customization (or without it being easy), just like it is with microwaves, TVs, automobiles, etc.

Granted, this is a very subjective issue. Some people want little Linux PCs with root access in their pockets, and for good reason. I'm just not one of those people. End devil's advocate.
Ah! But I have a hack for that!

Xcode handles mixed proportional and monospaced fonts fairly well. Comments are in a monospaced font, everything else is proportional.

I assume you were joking, but the issue of ascii art in the comments actually came up super quickly when I switched to proportional fonts.
spending $1 trillion by 2018 is alot of money.. Dont you think articles like these are a precursor for the year 2018 ?

why are we hearing about indian sanitation and infrastructure NOW ?!
Quant Finance: A Good Collection of Feeds
The Restangular url is here: https://github.com/mgonto/restangular
A feature Wikipedia could use is category intersection. Then you could view a list of pages that are in the "women", "novelists", and "Americans" categories, and no editor would have to curate that list. It's pretty easy to factually verify whether a page is about a woman, or a novelist. Taking human judgment out of the picture would eliminate many kinds of bias.
Although I'd rather biased people tell me I can do things than tell me I can't. Then I can make my own choices.

I'd rather err on the side of personal freedom, especially when those trying to decide how we live our lives may have an agenda. That agenda could often even be promoting a different industry's interests, for example banning internet poker was heavily pushed by the brick and mortar casinos.
Incorrect (currently). They allow you to delete after you deactivate, but they make you wait 14 days while deactivated in the hope you realize you need facebook.
have no idea how to play that. or it's broken on ff.

clicks and keyboard keys does nothing there.

also, nothing on the readme.md
I personally disagree pretty heavily on
sleeping in the office and working crazy hours.

I agree completely. Facebook's tried to recruit me on at least one occasion and I turned them (you?) down flatly for this reason (that, and I don't want to ever have to write PHP).

I get that you don't have complete control of the press you get, but maybe it'd be worth focusing some attention on these work-life balance issues in the outlets you do have complete control over.

getting people excited about our environment

1 billion users. Boom, done.
Well, this is a bit of a stretch, but if you already have the unlocked phone, you could still pay the subsidized price for a new device and instantly sell it for a hefty profit. I say it's a stretch because it is still fairly annoying, but I always do it for every upgrade on each of my family plan's phone lines. We're going to keep paying for service for the foreseeable future and not changing carriers anyway, so we might as well take advantage of the subsidies that are built into the monthly bill. Plus, I can always have the newest device if I so choose.
Wow. If we can't maintain ways for the cream to rise to the top in the US, we'll continue to become increasingly mediocre.
if they're using hashed emails for tracking, we're pretty much clucked. There is an option in gmail that can prevent this.

if your email is abcd@gmail.com, use abcd+sitename@gmail.com (gmail will ignore the stuff after the + ). You can also use . separators.

Now, to keep track of that...
Did anyone else looking at the front page of HN jump to the conclusion that if this strain or similar of E. coli could be developed to live of human faeces India could become a future bio-fuel giant
I have offered you two opportunities to actually ask me a question rather than objectify me as an Enemy Of Your Beliefs.

You have declined both.

And now I am apparently a statist. Merely because I disagree with you.

And I am supposed to attack your belief in property laws? This would be pretty hard for me, since I don't actually care about property laws whatsoever. I generally care that people who are alive stay alive, but if people insist that ownership has force and land has some particular master, I don't really mind.
One thing that's not clear in this story is if by "editor" she (and you too) mean the random anonymous stranger who happens to edit a Wikipedia entry, or someone with more privileges/authority on Wikipedia. Because if this is about random strangers starting to edit her article, the problem might not be so much about Wikipedia but about people in general.
Breaking literally every tech blog would be way hard to do. :-)

We've gotten literally two bug reports about broken blogs of any sort in the last year (I just checked; and both are now fixed, btw), so I assume there aren't issues anymore. But if you experience any, let me know!
Your Mac, iPhone or iPad may have left Apple with a serious security risk
New Fluid Simulation Algorithm Allows Realistic Water Physics [video & paper]
What makes you so sure about that? The estimations I have seen of Apple's insane profit margins on mobile devices suggest that it's entirely possible. Granted, Apple produce at a much larger scale than the Nexus 4, but I still think there is plenty of margin for Google to be making reasonable profits from the Nexus 4.
By calling it an investment, you misunderstand the purpose of Kickstarter.
All joking aside, is there any hope that the extremely user-hostile CAPTCHA will go away any time soon? Half the time I see it I wonder if it's really necessary. The other half I wonder if the service provider could be a bit more clever or industrious.
It is so cool that you guys can post about this stuff externally. It's one of my few regrets working at G. Thanks for the interesting reading.
Makes me think AMD could see this + 3d printing(like makerbot and friends) as something they could move to…
It seems like you're only seeing the aesthetic side of design and missing the functional side. For example interface patterns, typography and color palettes can be evaluated without opinion.

Interface patterns have their best use cases and the designer needs to pick the right one for each part of the design, making sure it works as a whole.

Typography is based on making text easily readable - there's always some leeway for opinionated typography but a designer shouldn't stray far from best practices.

While the exact colors in a palette can be opinionated, they too have characteristics that should be assessed without opinion. Are there enough contrast between the colours? What if the user is colorblind? Will people with low vision be able to see everything clearly, especially text? Are the colors appropriate for their intended use, for example a red hue for alert, green for success)?

"It does not look right" and "it does not work" are the kind of feedback you get from people who don't know the inner logics of a design. Feedback from an experienced designer might not mention aesthetics at all.
Other company with a similar process (in my experience): Yammer
Betas (new TV pilot about startups from Amazon)
I don't disagree with anything you say. As I mentioned earlier that all people who hack such interviews do have basic understanding/skills requisite for the corp, quite enough to play the gymnastics of the interviews.

A good interviewer does try to gauge whether the answer was known to the interviewee. But I have seen that happen far more at hot startups than big companies- primarily because of their more stringent process which leaves less wiggle room for guess work and is more tuned towards concretely judged parameters.

I just don't like the facade of 'hiring the smartest people' in the world, when their mechanism largely filters just well-trained average people.

And I most certainly don't want to sound condescending, so I apologize before-hand. But I probably used a different definition of average than what you or most people here may have in mind. I know quite a few ACM ICPC world finalists, am a region finalist myself, and have conducted/ published CS research with reasonable impact. So I was simply using my PhD program peers as good, and people with lesser (proven) skills as average. My fault, but I hope you can see what I was trying to say.
Contract? Are we taking about business or science?

Now I am really worried. Is the goal to produce "tangible results" (papers, press, professional aclaim, popular fame) or try and maybe, even probably, fail to uncover something new but true?

Is everything corrupt?
>You can't blame the government

Of course you can. And you should. This is all about terrible - and in many cases non-existent- governance. Widespread public problems this this cannot be solved by individual citizens or organizations. They need the power, money and resources of a government.

> the country is so populated that it is extremely hard to make this drastic of an imposition and follow through with it.

Population is oft quoted as the root cause of most problems in India. Perhaps it is. But population certainly doesn't explain why these problems don't get addressed or get the attention they deserve. That again is because the government of India does not effectively govern and manage the country. Elected officials rule over their subjects via institutions and political systems whose goals are more aligned with keeping them in power than the welfare of citizens. They lack a fundamental understanding that their job as an elected official is to govern and address issues of their citizens.

Problems like this can only be resolved with effective governance from which springs awareness, policies, infrastructure, funding and programs. But what happens when the people governing simply don’t care for their people?
This is your #1 most hilarious comment.
I am confused by why this would be relevant since generally water, sewage, and garbage collection is managed by local municipalities. At least that's the case in every country I've been to (which is many, although sadly India is not yet one of them).