skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your "honest question" contains several false assumptions, as you well know, Michael. Who do you think you're fooling?

I'm not sure who the "unluckier 90 percent" are, because a) X is much, much smaller than 1% of the company, and b) you're not laying out any other 90%-sized subset of the company with your other comments.

People inside X also have calibration and perf, of course.

Your ongoing ranting about "closed allocation" is more complicated; I think you make (elsewhere) an in-theory-mildly-interesting point, but you hugely overstate the significance. It's true that new googlers get relatively little control over allocation (though often not as little as you claim), but it's well-understood, even by you, that 12 to 24 months of good work at your starting post gets you a lot of flexibility. (Most knowledge workers, at least those past the first blush of youth, accept that a year or two of merely-awesome work are a fine stepping stone; we already know that you disagree and claim to want to change the world immediately, starting today.... how's that approach working for you?) If people don't want to work on something, they don't work on it.

Nearly everyone at Google works on challenging problems (well... I have no idea if the cafeteria staff think their work is challenging, so let's restrict this to engineering, sales, legal, and finance). Everyone at Google is building their careers. Can anyone doubt that?

Some of us are jealous of the people who work in X (I am!), most of us are not (I don't know why), but in what universe does it make sense for the existence of X to make me less happy than the non-existence of it?

----

More generally, most people do not believe that they are entitled to dictate their salary AND what they work on. And that goes double for people who don't yet have a proven track record of success.

I can pick what I want to work on, if I'm willing to accept whatever salary comes, including $0. (I've tried that, heh. What a surprise, no one wants to pay me for my opinions about board game design, nor my amateurish programming-language-design skills. I know, I know, I can't believe it either.) Alternately, I can make a great wage, working on something that's pretty awesome, but not exactly what I want to work on. Why would I be angry about that choice? If I want the best of both, obviously I'll have to work on making myself valuable enough that it makes sense for X to hire me.
Understand your data hotspots -- just because it is in Dynamo and you have moved the slider all the way over to "20,000 IOPS" doesn't mean anything if DDB has partitioned all your data into a single shard behind the scenes -- you'll peak at 3,000 IOPS (for example).

Unfortunately you _still_ need to be aware of how you plan on querying your data to maximize the performance.

This is one of the most common questions/comments I see in the forums.

More info:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developergu...

Also be aware that leveraging the Local Secondary Indexes _does_ enforce a 10GB limit on items with the same hashkey, see the last section here:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developergu...
Let me be a little more precise here. What you basically need to know here is that entanglement describes a correlation between measurements, and you cannot know whether that correlation exists until you collect those measurements together. This is the fundamental reason why it does not "transmit information" faster than light in a certain sense. However, that phrasing is misleading because you can use it to do things which would otherwise require transmitting information faster than light.

I like to illustrate this by a game based on "GHZ states" which I call "Betrayal." The idea is that there are 3 people working together, but I'm going to make one of them work at cross-purposes to the other two. If the team can recover gracefully from my mischief with high probability, then they all win a big cash prize.

The game is simple: the three people can prepare however they want in advance, but then they must go into different (relativistically-separated) rooms, look at a screen with words on it, and hit either a button labelled 0 or a button labeled 1. Then I collect these three numbers and sum them up, to get The Sum. So if Alice hits 1, and Bob hits 0, and Carol hits 1, then the Sum is 2.

On the screens in the rooms, I give them a task. Sometimes I do a "control" experiment: I tell all three of them "Make the sum even," and the team wins if it's even. Sometimes I create a traitor: I tell two of them, "make the sum odd", and one of them "make the sum even", and the team wins if it's odd.

Three classical players cannot beat this game 100% of the time, no matter how they prepare in advance. Three quantum players (i.e., three players sharing an entangled Greenberger-Horne–Zeilinger state) can. So if we repeat the game enough times, they can convince me that they can beat the game with higher probability than the classical limit, and thus win the big cash prize.
Starting a Business
Here are some potential reasons (I obviously don't know the actual reasons). You won't like any of them, but I hope you can take me at my word that I'm not a partisan (I have a passing familiarity with Erlang that comes of maintaining a Riak cluster, and I've built some fairly large projects in Golang, but my core languages are C and Ruby).

* Golang has a more conventional, familiar, boring, "safe" language design than Erlang does. If your current language is Python, you're apt to find Golang congenial; I describe Golang to my friends as "a modernized hybrid of Python and Java".

* Golang has a more flexible concurrency offering than Erlang. It has a very flexible (statically typed, sync-or-async) first-class channel type that you can deploy anywhere in a program whether you parallelize it or not. More importantly, it has first-class support for "conventional" shared-everything concurrency with mutexes and semaphores and whatnot. If you're designing everything from scratch to fit your language's preferred idiom, this may not matter, but if you're porting an existing design it might matter a great deal.

* Golang has what I will perhaps hyperbolically refer to as first-class support for strings, with reasonably performant regular expressions, a clearly delineated "just a bag of bytes" type designed from scratch for high-performance buffering and packet framing/demux, and a sane approach to UTF-8 Unicode. It also turns out to be a very elegant framework (as imperative languages go) for building parsers, since you can put the concurrency stuff to work for it. These are common programming tasks and not one Erlang is well known for handling gracefully.

* As I understand it, both Erlang and Golang have comparable lightweight process/thread/coroutine/whatever facilities. Golang was designed from the start to handle huge numbers of demand-spawned threads with small, dynamically allocated stacks. I'm not saying Golang does this better than Erlang does, but it might be tricky to argue that Erlang's process model is better than Golang's.

* Erlang requires an installed runtime and executes in a VM. Golang produces native binaries. You can compile a Golang program on one machine, rsync that single binary to another machine that has never been blessed with a Golang installation of any sort, and run it without a problem.

* Golang has modern, extremely high-quality tooling. Entire huge Golang projects rebuild in seconds or less. The compiler is extremely helpful. Code formatting and documentation are first class problems for the toolchain. The Go package system is well thought out, and, again, is familiar to Python programmers.

Just some guesses as to reasons in there.
It's great to see Yahoo! in the news so often. Growing up in the first Internet boom, Yahoo! still holds a place in my heart as my first search engine and homepage.

Flickr has been a great asset for Yahoo! but has lost much of its momentum, especially with the rising popularity of Pinterest.
Seems like a lot of energy wondering about the dynamics of what people think about a posting.
Its real estate stuff, audio, video, photos. I'd guess in the neighborhood of 3-5 gig/day. Sometimes lots more. I'd hate for a "30 gig day" to set off a bunch of alarms that had me explaining myself to some corporate enforcer all the time.
I like Erlang a lot, but learning Go is much easier, especially for people with a background in imperative languages. When you code in Go everything seems very familiar, even for someone who tries it for the first time; in Erlang not so much. Now, don't get me wrong, I think it is amazing to know different paradigms, but some people just can't afford that luxury (think lack of time).

There's probably no match for Erlang's error handling mechanisms out there, I actually dislike Go's panic mechanism, but if you have a small piece in your system which needs to be wickedly fast and highly concurrent I see Go as a perfectly good choice.
Multiple times the speed of light? I think you're confusing speed with capacity.

I have a two-lane country road with a car going the speed limit. Now replace that with an eight-lane freeway with the same speed limit, and put a car in each lane driving at that speed.

Are we now driving at four times the speed limit? Each car takes just as long to get to its destination.
Can it do concurrency better than Go? How so?
If people are going to interpret the diagram as being to scale, and they know people are going to interpret the diagram as being to scale, and they deliberately make it not to scale in order to mislead, then they are lying. I don't really care about some nebulous "it doesn't say they're to scale" that neither side of this ever considered.
That's all true. Two more things, though:

1. Many big shops like Wal-Mart that you trade with every day can resolve disputes by themselves: they have enough trust of their customers to lose. So when you pay with CC, you make them bear extra risks and costs that you are ultimately paying for in the end. If they give you a convenient and cheaper way to pay them directly and irreversibly, would you choose that option? Same for smaller guys that you happen to trust. Github is not the biggest place on earth, but if it's cheaper for you to pay $12 with BTC instead of $15 with CC, would you trust them not to steal $12 from you? (They cannot steal more than that.)

2. Now, to solve the problem of lousy wallet and forgotten passwords, you may use something like BitcoinPayPal which you trust and store your wallet with them. How is it different from normal PayPal? BitcoinPayPal does not have to charge your CC, so bears no risk of chargebacks. So they can make fees much lower and provide you with "all sales are final" option (see previous paragraph why it's good) or more efficient dispute resolution without taking money from merchant blindly (if PayPal tries to be more merchant-friendly at disputes, you'd simply call Visa to make a chargeback from PayPal itself). This will allow merchant to make a 3-7% discount for you.

I myself can see how many shops I trust with irreversible transactions, so I'd prefer paying like that and cheaper. And possibly using 3rd party wallet keeper without dispute resolution (with two-factor auth, of course).
Advertisement always bends facts to one side or the other. Usually ads put extra emphasis on a positive thing, while omitting the negative.

Even more often ads don't use facts -- they just play on people's feelings.

In any case, the goal of advertising is to deceive the buyer, not not inform them. So I don't think anything should be expected from any company that needs to satisfy shareholders. I don't see how Apple's ads with a man asking stupid questions from kids, or Droid's ads with cool robots is morally better then what M$ is doing. But in this case, MS is just being stupid and ruins their image. They don't even pretend to be a company that tries to be morally good. If this becomes more popular with mainstream media, the ad will hurt MS much more then it benefits them, same as this piece of FUD that got to the frontpage of /r/linux:

https://www.microsoft.com/hk/windowsserver/compare/windows-s...

In my opinion, all ads should be banned. It's a huge useless industry of liers. Corporations that are good with ads are not necessarily good at making products, but they get unfair advantage. It also distracts the main effort of from making a good product.
“100 million in 6 months”

100 million licenses sold to OEMs and the retail channel. Actual sell-through is unknown. But even if we use these numbers, Windows 8 is much less of a success than Windows 7. Four years a go, there were half as many Windows PCs as there are now, but Microsoft sold the same number of Windows 7 licenses in the same amount of time.

Also, if PC sales are any indicator, consumers and businesses alike are not interested in Windows 8. Back when Windows95 was introduced, people were camping out in front of computer stores to get their hands on it. Are you willing to bet what percentage of Windows 8 sales are boxed upgrades?
If you're interested in lisp without the JVM, there's always ClojureScript. Once the JVM compiler is up an running it compiles most of my ClojureScript code in about 1 sec, and there's utilities that auto re-compile code as files change.
Thanks for the feedback. We just use the eventing. It would be pretty easy to include the BB Events mixin in there. Maybe that's 0.1
I've seen this before, but watching it while thinking about Glass was a completely different experience.

It does indeed seem like Glass would have been ideal in most situations covered in the video.
Most people learn pretty quickly that comparing yourself to other people is a pretty quick way to make yourself unhappy. The unluckier 90 percent (actually, it's more like 99%) realize that they are phenomenally lucky to be in the 0.1% of people who are hired by Google in the first place.

(More generally - most people simply outgrow thinking like this around college or their first job. I have a bunch of really smart friends. Many of them are like, "I thought I was hot shit in high school, but then I got to college and realized I'm pretty ordinary" or "I thought I was hot shit in college, but then I got to the working world and realized I'm pretty ordinary" or "I thought I was hot shit in my last employer, but then I got to Google and realized I was pretty ordinary" or "I thought I was hot shit at Google, but then I got to Search/Research/X and realized I was pretty ordinary." And then they're forced to develop a self-image that doesn't involve being "better" than other people, because you realize that no matter how high you go there will be someone higher and it'll just cause you pain and disappointment for your thought process to fixate on that. I know a lot of people that enjoy challenging themselves, but they find the challenge in playing the hand that they're dealt, not in whining that they weren't dealt a better hand.)
This is something I considered a while ago actually. I'll keep it in mind as it might be the way to go. Thanks!
I'm a lot more interested in them adding OTR encryption than having interoperability. However, if they never intend to add OTR (which being Google, seems very likely), then I'd want Hangouts to at least work with other IM's that do offer OTR, like Gtalk has worked so far.
The fact screen sizes are quoted in diagonal length does not contradict the assertion that reasonable people are more concerned with screen area.
Although it's just a legend, this article just made me think of the tuna "Guaranteed not to turn pink in the can!" marketing spin.
If ladders were commonly advertised by their width (as TVs are by the diagonal)? Yes, absolutely.
Also the usage of color is fascinating: The put two things side-by-side and highlight one of them in gray and one in a subtle green, which immediately conveys the message "stronger color = better value". It looks like a product comparison with the better values highlighted. And isn't. The whole page is a great example of black-hat marketing.
The fact that one must watch out for integer overflow on a buffer size calculation for malloc, realloc, etc. should be no surprise to a thoughtful C programmer. It sounds like somebody just did an audit of an old code base looking for bad patterns and this is what came out of it. It sounds like great work on the part of the people doing audits/fixes but I'm not sure it's freakout material ("massive" seems a bit sensationalist).
Introducing Flowee, a Framework for Building Workflow-based Services in Java
Flowee is a framework for building Java services backed by one or more workflows. Its primary purpose is to provide groundwork for rule-driven workflow selection and execution. Developers can focus the majority of their efforts on building the tasks which hold the actual business requirements.

Workflows built on Flowee will run without the need for "containers" or "engines". The framework is lightweight and integrates seamlessly with any application.
>I've independently come up with the same decisions on many of these points and, weirdly, a very similar blog design

Yea. I feel the same way, though strangely a lot of this is recent and I didn't have the same opinion a few years ago. A portfolio site I made just 3 years ago looks quite immature now. I just put this together with a little static generator a few weeks ago and it's the first time I've posted it anywhere:

http://www.jere.in/

I do disagree with the post on links. I don't see why underline is necessary and personally I don't like the look. Also, I don't find :visited that useful when reading articles; having it on something like Google is another matter.

I did think about an option to toggle off the highlighting of links completely to reduce distraction.
We had a wood burner installed - they put up the chimney and were going to earth it the next day. Bad idea. Lightning fried a Mac SE30, made its enormous colour (!!) 19 inch screen only show orange and ruined the phones.
If one abandons the idea that there is a privileged 'now' (what philosophers call the A-theory of time, which is already difficult to make compatible with special relativity) this effect is not weirder than simultaneous entanglement -- admittedly, this is already sufficiently weird.

(Most physicists, and most philosophers, believe that the right theory of time is a B-theory of time: once every event is lain down in a four-dimensional spacetime diagram, there is nothing else to describe; no facts, in particular, about which of these different times is really now, the time at which the whole universe is.)
14 Revealing Signs You Love Your Startup Job
Isn't this old news already? it happened a week ago and I think Jef Bar posted it to HN at the time.
I "observed" nothing. That's what Moore's law says, not me.

P.S. HN doesn't let me downvote your comments, because you are replying to my comments. But, I suppose it's impossible I'm the only one that disagrees with you, so I must be hacking the website.
"I have no idea if the cafeteria staff think their work is challenging"

The cafeteria staff works amazingly hard at their jobs and there're a bunch of challenges involved in feeding 30,000 employees well on a weekly budget. Go to Chef's Table at Jia (if you're in Mountain View) and ask about the job, or even just find the cafe's head chef (they're usually standing around the food looking proud of it) and strike up a conversation. They usually love to talk about their work.
Which database is best for stuff like this?

And works with Python.
It's still a net negative and downright disheartening to see an obviously contributing account nuked... HN has the most opaque moderation system of any community I've ever been in..
If it was down to me and another candidate for a job then I'd have no problem saying "Look, you want to do X and Y(e.g., multitask); the other candidate doesn't have experience with X and his scores on Y weren't great (let's just say I know this). My experience and test scores are superior for what you want to do, and what you want me to."

Now, that's more civil than the world of advertising, but it's the same general principle. Commercial tend to make it a little bit more humorous. Comparisons aren't always polite, but they're often appropriate.
I still think it's better for the private sector to assume the risk inherent in that debt than it is for the public sector to do so.
Just a note: we are still researching and working on the fold mechanisms (for actual parallel execution of the reducers). Since it is easy to run distributed software in the Erlang VM, we are also evaluating the best ways to have distributed strategies built-in. But the foundation is already there.
It's not. As https://developers.facebook.com/docs/chat/ explains, "Facebook Chat should be compatible with every XMPP client, but is not a full XMPP server. It should be thought of as a proxy into the world of Facebook Chat on www.facebook.com.
Google has said that it was a difficult decision necessitated by new technical demands. But even if this new protocol responds to different technical requirements, that shouldn't prevent the company from making it public and interoperable.

Well said. Google made a bad move with breaking things before enabling interoperability by publishing their protocol. It's not the proper way of doing things. Firstly, they could extend XMPP, Jingle etc. instead of creating something from scratch.

If they can't (though they didn't explain why), they need first to develop a protocol, publish it, and then start deploying it. Not other way around! Right now they are moving towards cutting the connection between Google users and users of other XMPP servers. Connection which works already now. I can understand that they might envision new communication patterns, but it doesn't mean one has to break what already works before enabling others to interoperate. It's completely immature on Google's part. Going the right way might take more time - but it will not increase the horrible mess that the IM scene is today. What Google does now is creating only more mess.
Leadership lessons from the Shirtless Dancing Guy [video]
i'm sorry i fail to see the argument. it's perfectly fine to have your own proprietary format, but publish the specs so others can interact with it. who said anything about ietf having to sign it off.
What good is this if the US government passes those "Internet wiretapping" bills that FBI lobbies for?
The trouble is that there are many, many Wordpress sites out there that are not an average Wordpress install. People (disturbingly) write e-commerce sites on top of Wordpress.
SQLite is not the right tool for the sort of things Wordpress does not because you couldn't write a blogging tool using SQLite but because Wordpress is crazy.
Thanks for the heads up Max!
Really? Ok, I learned something new today :) Of course, if it wasn't obvious enough enough I'm from Europe where Fahrenheit has always confused us.
So in your opinion, languages are ranked in order of "performance"? See, in my experience, it just doesn't work that way. Sometimes it does, sure, but it's not a rule that I can use in my life.

Seems like it would be nice if I could just say "I need this done fast, I'll use Python" or "I need 'performance' so I'll use Golang"

And to be fair, many benchmarks in Go don't perform nearly as fast as C or even the JVM. Go has gotten faster with each point release but again, these sorts of raw performance benchmarks aren't really good for anything except providing an apples-to-apples comparison. Because it's not usually a question of building the same exact app in the same exact way in one language or another.