skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Comments like this lacks context when discussing law, accountability and moral responsibilities.

The anti-piracy people proclaims that they are copyright experts. This is the domain that they are supposedly educated in, work in, and should have expert knowledge in. Its what they claim in courts all over the world. As such, yes, they should had vet any content that they host in their name or the service they outsourced. In this context, they should had known better.

A normal consumer is not however expected to do this. When I go an hire a lawyer, or a medical professional, or a construction worker, I am not expected to vet that they know what they are doing. However, if I own a law firm, I am somewhat responsible for those I hire or outsource. If I own a hospital, I must vet the doctors before hiring them. If I am building a bridge, I better make sure those construction workers know what they are doing or be prepared to face responsibility.

Contextless, responsibility is at those you buy a service from. With context, it can end up at the buyer. In this case, The anti-piracy people are more responsible for the content they host than the average person who post something on their blog.
If there were lots of STEM jobs (that pay reasonable wages), then wouldn't people move into them without government subsidies?
Why would you be stuck at iOS 6.0 when 6.1 is a quick over-the-air upgrade for all iOS 6.0-compatible devices?
After seeing "off the record" chats synced across browser sessions a few times, I became convinced that Google was storing the chat session on its servers at least temporarily. I can't help but wonder if this is just a way to remind people that "off the record" really isn't, and nobody should be relying on that particular property.
I deleted it after I found out it requires you to have a Google+ account. I guess I shouldn't have had my hopes up considering it's called Hangouts.
I believe there's always value just for the sake of learning. That aside, I am mostly a server-side and web-programmer and found lately closer and closer to native mobile programming... So I will go with it and embrace the native power of mobile devices :)
There are two potential labor market realities and we still don't know, as a society, which one is right:

1. Labor finitism: there's a fairly fixed amount of labor that society will pay money for, and us proles are doomed to compete against each other for it, in what ultimately becomes a race to the bottom.

2. Labor progressivism: technical and scientific progress will free up resources for more interesting and higher-yield work, and make everyone richer. To quote Keynes, the rising tide will lift all boats.

In a labor-finitist world, the worker's job is to extract as much payment out of capital-holders (for as little work) as possible. The labor-finitist world is almost Malthusian in its ruthless cruelty. In a labor-progressivist world, it's actually good to do the grunt work quickly, so you can graduate to more interesting stuff.

Of course, reality is somewhere between these two extremes. In the very short term, it's labor finitist: people have to formally "create" jobs. In the long term, it's labor progressivist; the labor pool does expand, with its rate being an open question. The open question pertains to the 0.1-20 years range over which we actually make career decisions. It's like Efficient Market Hypothesis, whose truth comes down to "what time frame?" (Over very-short or very-long timeframes, EMH is demonstrably not true for well-known reasons. Over typical timeframes, it is.)

If labor finitism is true, then we want to drive young people far away from whatever we do. Given that the software industry is already a horrible place to work, just being honest about the low autonomy and shitty legacy code and arrogance of non-technical management-- also, the fact that, even though our salaries might look good on paper, we make about 1/5 of what we should given the bullshit we have to put up with-- ought to be enough. We just need to counteract the Googley propaganda about this career involving actual autonomy and respect.

If labor progressivism is true, then since science and technology are the driving forces of that progress, we want as many people in those industries as have the talent, because that will bring us out of scarcity faster.

It's unclear which is the case, though. Labor progressivism is true in the underlying "real world", but this society is littered with legacy power relationships that, I'm afraid, make labor finitism a lot more accurate. Just look at the terrorist attack that has been inflicted on the academic job market for the past 25 years if you don't believe that.
Google Versus
Not even remotely close.
In India I found that there's a widespread belief that refreshing the desktop (on Windows machines) makes things go faster, and some people do so repeatedly while waiting for slow computers to load heavy programs.
I always suspected the generation above me (graybeard professors) had to deal with that culture, and that's the reason why scientists are such phenomenally bad leaders - they didn't really interact with other people during their formative years. By the time I went to grad school, almost all of my male peers were actually "jock" types (and really nice guys to be honest), and really smart, too, but that could be field-specific, 20 out of my 24 classmates were into synthetic chemistry.
"We discuss them (in person typically at a scheduled meeting where we discuss these features as well as business consulting about where to take the business, how to grow it, what features have been requested, what to add, etc.)"

Wait... you... 'Though'
It's been years since Google actually released something useful on GAE. All while AWS has blown it away with an array of new systems e.g. SWF, EMR, Glacier, Transcoder.

I always liked what Google was getting at with GAE i.e. a simpler, more cohesive AWS. But it just doesn't seem like Google has its heart in it. And we all know what happens to products like that at Google.
Petition to End the Fluoridation of Drinking Water
Google has been using A/B testing for quite some time I think; they even do it with Chrome nowadays. Wouldn't that work to manage load?
> Yes, but they must first guess that password ...

My chat client, IMAP client etc all save the password. Guessing the password is the least likely avenue of attack.
Most of the arguments are biased opinions and can't really be defended. But... if you don't like wordpress, why not assess projects such as Symfony2 or Drupal?
Whoops, I thought the question was about Compute Engine. Yes, you can sign up for PHP on App Engine at the link you provided.
I wonder how long google talk will last in Outlook.com
Media Queries: Things I Wish I’d Known
I know someone with Asperger's who cannot shake hands - he keeps his hand stiff but flat, and kind of slaps it against yours while your arms move up and down.

It's odd.

I also know other people with very limp handshakes. I don't mistrust them, but I do think it's weird.

But what I hate are the ALPHA handshakes. Not just firm, but too much squeezing, and trying to turn so their hand is on top. It's calculating and manipulative and just weird. I never know whether to just let them do it; or to let them do it and then turn it when they're lulled into a false sense of security; or whether my entire handshake with them should be a battle of twisting and turning.
You've just met one. Pleased to make your acquaintance.

Quite a bit above $100K too, and I don't even consider myself a guru/ninja/pirate/whatever programmer either.

I'm not alone either - literally every programmer I keep in regular touch with, and literally every programmer at the shop I work at is making well into the $100s. In fact, a good friend of mine the same age as me (mid-20s) just accepted an offer in the $180s.

The cost of living argument is also mostly bull. I've lived and worked in 7 different cities, ranging from cheap $300 rooms on the wrong side of the tracks to $2000+ luxury high-rises. Nowadays I live in Manhattan, and I've done the math multiple times - it costs me about $20K more per year (with fairly generous numbers) to live here than in, say, Seattle WA where I once worked. Of course, the pay difference between NYC and elsewhere is a lot higher than $20K. Even accounting for taxes, food, and everything you're still coming out well ahead.
Show HN: FlatUIKit - Flat UI components for iOS
They can't retroactively do evil things if they don't have it on their servers.

>I can think of many other possible explanations for the change that, while you may not agree with them, are at least reasonable.

Like what? Care to share them with us?
They've already started to bite the bullet and provide real customer service with Google Fiber. We could be witnessing a huge change in their institutional attitude toward customer service.
Search "beam me up" on Bing
Serious question: how practical is it to build something like Hangouts that is meant to compete with iMessage, WhatsApp, Viber etc on top of XMPP? is it even possible?
car2go is a pretty solid service in Austin. rent by the minute, pick up anywhere drop off anywhere.
To determine ""Good Enough" developers" is NP-Complete
It's also possible that she started as Maggie Smith, married Mr. Brown, and then they both changed their last name to Smith-Brown.
Seriously! The real question is why Google isn't sending Microsoft direct donations. They're so uncharitable.
Good point. Highly intelligent brutes who are not interested in their country development. Which probably sounds crazy in civilized ears but is akin to saying that in feudal times aristocracy wasn't interested in living conditions of lower classes.

You see, they are still feudal, you need to account for that when analyzing the country.

So, as feudal masters in the past, the KGB/mafia that currently runs Russia understands politics very well. They are extremely skilled at political strategy and know and understand how to gain advantage. They will read Dostoyevsky and listen to Bach. At the same time they don't really care or/and understand economy as this is not really needed for them as long as they sit on the vast natural resources reserves. Something like Saudis.
Hey everybody, creator here. Let me know if you have any questions/comments/feature requests - I'm going to keep working on this.
Like using mobile phones at gas stations, this is an issue I've heard numerous justifications for over the years.

One interesting one was the health effects of having 200-300 mobile phones ranging at full power inside a sealed metal tube in the sky. Not so much an issue for passengers, but flight crew on long haul flights subject to these signal levels for 8 or 9 hours several days a week! Obviously Airplane mode would solve this but telling everyone to switch off sounds a better way of enforcing this. Of course this assumes there are any adverse health effects from mobile phones at all, but that's a whole different can of worms.

Another 'theory', I've since dismissed, relating to the requirement to switch off particularly at take off and landing, is because a plane load of 300 mobiles roaming between base stations at 400mph can cause the mobile operators a few headaches!
This seemed inevitable. This interface and backend is so inextricably tied to Google+ and Google's new infrastructure. I'm very disappointed. Google's services work well for me, they're well integrated, I love Android, but Android is no longer the bastion of freedom and openness I'd hoped for.

I'll be very happy with Google Hangouts but I'm still waiting for the properly federated chat that appeals to the masses.
more info here http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2013/0...
My reading notes:

- "almost a dozen developers", for the same project? Sounds like hell just to save a couple bucks...

- ...or do you want to "make something really awesome regardless if people use it"? what would anyone want to do that? Odds are if you're doing it for fun you have the money to hire a good developer and therefore not go they painful elance/odesk route (check this out http://giacomoballi.com/find-ios-developer).

- in your chart you're missing bad developers. plenty of those hanging out on outsourcing websites...

- if you're working with a good dev (I won't assume other scenarios) they will know more than you do. They can and should help you. You're limiting yourself if you just pay them to code.

- good for you for making the mockup that's way more work than most of my clients do (check this out http://giacomoballi.com/explain-idea-to-developer).

- speak "good" english? Sorry, couldn't help it... :)

Good intro post regarding you experience.

Look forward to the next one!

G
That didn't stop them from rolling out Google Checkout with any (human) customer service, as I painfully discovered :(

Google seem allergic to phone or email contact with users.
You mean instead of handing out N invites, just pick N users at random? Why would that be better? You confuse and potentially upset the randomly-chosen users, and you disappoint the eager people who actually want to try the new thing.
Why would it have no sensation and experience? Give it some from a simple simulated environment and body. Assuming it takes a freshly dead brain, vitrified, ultra-microtomed, and scanned in to be reconstructed for simulation. The mind wakes up in a sparsely decorated hospital looking room, remembers having just been out for a walk and crossing the street, then something about an oncoming car. A friendly looking doctor appears through a window.

"Morning," the doctor says, "you've been asleep a while and probably feel foggy and confused. You were injured, but your body healed a while ago. We can get to all your questions later. But first we want to test your thinking and rule out any brain damage... could you go to that computer and type out brief descriptions of the images that it shows you?"

When the simulated mind gets frustrated with typing about pictures, and stops producing good output, clear the running simulation and load it from the start again, with new pictures. This gives a strong-AI image labeling system. For more in depth tasks more simulated world interaction is needed between waking up and getting some work out of the mind, but you can also try lots of times and variations to get that right and once the mind is at the work-table store the state right before the mind begins working. Use that as the starting point each time.
Also, my experience was this:

Grad school: 24k -> 26k over 6 years, at a highly-ranked institution. (MIT, my only other offer, offered me a measly 18k, I declined for obvious reasons).

1st postdoc: 30k for 1 year. I left, because my project was completed. This turned out to be a good choice, because my boss quit six months later (and threw the other postdoc under the bus - he was lazy).

Lab tech job: 35k. This was a job that was supposed to go to an entry level post-baccalaureate. I got it within 14 days of moving to San Diego, took it, because I knew the job market was rough. It's worth noting that I took a job that was a demotion, in terms of credentials, but got a pay raise.

2nd postdoc: An "internal promotion" from the previous, 40k.
Perhaps I am the one is over focused on distributed use. However, their are a lot of servers in the world ;)

Also how do you classify work loads like physical simulation that are one of the classic use cases for parallel processing but not embarrassingly parallel in that they need lots of communication between cores?

Better tools for analyzing distributed computation would be cool. I think that we would have to think carefully about the kind of bugs to look for. Since data access/distribution is slow more thought tends to go into it (and there are systems in place for doing it well) but there are of course loads of other issues that show up.
> Right, that question is exactly why I say that it devolvees into an argument over metaphysics and epistemology. Also, I acknowledge what you say about including ethics, although my opinion on that is that ethical discussions also - at some level - devolve into discussions of epistemology and metaphysics.

Well, you need epistemology and metaphysics to reason about ethics. I mean, if you deny basic facts of reality and/or have no means to valid knowledge, you won't get very far.

Given those, though, ethics really hinges on looking at the nature of a human being. For a human being, is there any need or method to figure out what is "good" and what is "bad"? That is how you end up getting to my original point (a).

> "What is good in a social context" is a less important question to me. I don't believe in trying to "engineer" social good by manipulating our view of what is or isn't a "right" of an individual. Society, to me, is just an emergent aspect of the interactions of individuals. I believe you have to start with what individuals can or cannot rightly do, and accept whatever consequences that may entail.

I agree. But that's because of the implications of (a). And you still have to figure out how we're all going to get along. That's all I meant by, "What is good in a social context."
I can't believe how Paypal isn't out of business. With their poor service, dire fees and all. It's become a very poor service.

It's a massive market. Google has hit a jackpot there. I salute then.
Interesting move on Google's part. Clearly the payments space is a getting a lot of investment from both big and small players each with their own take on it.

It is also the first time that it felt like Google was stepping where it might not belong. And its a weird thing since I believe anyone should be able to do anything and let the market decide. For some reason this gave me the same vibe I used to get when a Microsoft would announce they were going to enter some hot new market in order to chill any investment/work in that market. I don't think that is their plan, but perhaps its a happy side effect they get?

I'd much rather see Google create an actual bank and then integrate with that banks services than do it this way.
In a work environment, ALWAYS make sure to use the proper business hugs:

1) http://youtu.be/80yjtJFf-v0
2) http://youtu.be/_zQviu9N6Hc
3) http://youtu.be/A_6UzC-dw04
Google Drive / apps script integration is a great idea. Unifying our storage offerings across the entire company is a great idea too (but an aside for this conversation). I disagree with the "get something out" mentality, though. Shipping a fully managed runtime that scales as well as Java, Python, and Go, that is hardened, and is secure enough that we'll run it next to Gmail, Search, Geo, etc. is no easy task. It's not something you decide to do on a whim a few weeks before i/o.
Unless you know what is actually distorting the market in the first place, counteracting a distortion with another distortion seems like a risky approach to problem solving. As the author points out, a good deal of money already goes into this. It seems if something is distorting the market, we aren't very good at targeting it, given the lack of results.
Parallelism and concurrency are certainly different. Don't think I'm saying otherwise. Our disagreement is that I'm saying parallelism is a subset/type of concurrency and you are saying parallel execution can somehow not be concurrent execution.

I still stand by my assertion that you misunderstood the quote from the Haskell wiki:

"Rule of thumb: use Pure Parallelism if you can, Concurrency otherwise."

as something that supports your claim that parallelism is not concurrency.

From Wikipedia:

"In computer science, concurrency is a property of systems in which several computations are executing simultaneously, and potentially interacting with each other. The computations may be executing on multiple cores in the same chip, preemptively time-shared threads on the same processor, or executed on physically separated processors."

I find it hard to believe that parallel execution of multiple threads aren't "computations executing simultaneously" and therefor aren't concurrent.

Do you have any more detail about why you (or Rob Pike) think that parallel execution is not also always concurrent execution?
IntelliJ IDEA 13 Early Preview is Out
>That app shows Youtube videos without ads. That seems like a clear violation of Youtube's TOS and I don't blame Google for being upset about it

So, for years, Google's stated reason for lack of a Youtube client was that Windows Phone didn't have enough marketshare, and now suddenly it has so many users that it loses so many ad impressions because Microsoft's Youtube that the content creators are suffering because all the millions of freeloaders using Windows Phone?

i.e It doesn't care enough for the ad impressions on Windows Phone to itself make an app , but when MS does, the loss of the same revenue is the reason for sending the lawyers in and pulling the app?
So does a corn broker considered a money exchanger/transmitter? Corn be a "store of value". What about gold? Or oil? Or a Cryptographic chunk of data?
Not sure if everybody sees the same example but the map I see with different ways by car and by train is cute but obviously very wrong. A railway is rarely straight and even less so in the middle of the Alps...
Those stories sound pretty terrifying and I'm impressed you continued with it!

- Pedestrians who don't see you coming

This one struck a chord with me as it's my biggest issue with cyclists (and I am one). The pedestrians have right of way, so you have to ride defensively.
Also, I've nearly been in a collision with a cyclist who thought it was OK to run a red light on a pedestrian crossing.

When I'm on my bike I obey the road laws, I don't see why so many people have a hard time with this.
it's awkward only if you make it awkward.
Why is DO so slooow today?
Google launches Googly Play Music
While PHP has low barrier to entry and there are a lot of people who tinker with it, PHP still powers a lot of production websites, far and beyond the hello world apps or the 'pictures of my dog' wordpress blogs. Your implication that there aren't "powerful stuff" websites running on PHP is just simply not true.
While my users today did get a message on their Windows clients, all my chat histories still seem to be "off the record" for my Google Apps for Business account.

Not sure how long that will last.
Because quality projects like symphony Symfony 2 does not fit into his works view of php.
Despite the clear warning signs, I am willing to put money on people whinging in a year or two when they shut down those servers, just like everyone got all upset about Reader.
Submitted the first time I saw the problem last year, didn't bother doing it again after that...
No - Google Apps have terrible support. Basecamp has great support. Stripe has great support. Rackspace has great support. Google Apps... not.
Maybe things have changed some. Mostly, the people I hung out with at high school did not have issues with science and math, but there were definitely people there who did.

I suspect most people remember me as being really into bicycle racing more than school, so I don't suppose I was seen as the nerdiest of the nerdy, and had friends, girlfriends, and so on. Also, being in a college town probably meant more of a focus on education.

CSS? Definitely a different time! This came out the year I graduated from high school: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/draft-ietf-iiir-html-01.txt
So there's no presence/status notifications? I'll miss that when this hits GMail.
On the other hand, the page telling you what the Hidden Service URL is does go across the Internet as plaintext and can be modified to contain a malicious URL by exit nodes if you view it via Tor, which you'd probably want to.
I'm not, at the moment. Let me know if I'm missing something.
I wasn't aware that Google Talk was keeping chat transcripts until a couple of weeks ago. But it turned out to be a huge win for me when I had to deal with a former business partner.