skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having a poorly educated workforce is more expensive than most of the options, but you'll only notice that twenty years later.
Disclaimer: I work for the big G

Exactly. Google needs a way to identify and canonicalize people and organizations. I think they've tried various automated and smart techniques to limited success, and it's much easier to say that if you create a profile so that you tell us what your identity is and what your websites are, then we can attribute your work in searches much better. You don't ever have to use G+ the web site after that.

I think that there's a basic misunderstanding of what G+ is, even inside Google, and it's our fault for not making it more clear. Maybe things needed different names.

Google+ is really three main things:

At it's core G+ is an identity service. It knows who you are because you have a profile. Authorship requires this I guess.

Then it's a sharing service. Google needed a way to enable sharing in all it's products.

Finally, it's a web site with a social stream.

It's possible they should have stuck with "Google Profile" for the first part, and then the author might not be so upset that Google needs some information to attribute correctly.

Also, it'd be ideal if there were standards for these things. Google definitely used to go more that route, like Open Social, but those attempts failed against proprietary systems like Facebook. I think things are just moving to fast right now for the slow process of standardization to be competitive. I hope that when certain _features_ of identity, sharing, messaging, etc. standardize again, then new protocols can be standardized around those features. New XMPP extensions, or an entirely new protocol, to support the features of Hangouts would be great for example. A system for securely asserting identity and profile information (not log-ins) in the way that people use Twitter, Facebook and G+ would be wonderful too.
This sounds like a necessary evil of the "disc-less" gaming feature.

Without media, I generally agree: no one expects to be able to loan your electronic copy of a game to a friend, or to resell it.

However, the concern is that this will apply for physical media: it will require installation onto your box and be associated with your X-Box Live account. You can take it to a friend's house to play, if you sign into your account, but you can't leave it there unless you let him stay on your account.

If it accepts "disc is in the slot" as its "DRM," that would be totally fine. The concern is that it won't do that. Which sucks. If you are selling physical media for a console, the license needs to move with the media.
My problem is not with this sentence, but with this passage from the second paragraph:

> ... number theory is the study of numbers [...]

> Geometry, on the other hand, studies shapes [...]

> But French mathematician André Weil had a penetrating

> insight that the two subjects are in fact closely related.

This pretty clearly says Weil came up with the idea of connecting number theory and geometry - or at least connecting them closely - which is very, very wrong.
Looks like eatfeastly.com is more oriented for local guests with local hosts and we try to focus more with international guest
"If educating the masses at a public school is so much more difficult, then why do we even try that?"

We do not want to have a society where an elite, educated aristocracy rules over an uneducated serf class. That means we need to educate everyone, including people who have less potential.

"Shouldn't we work to break up the student population into smaller, more manageable chunks?"

1. Who is going to pay for it? You will need more teachers, and you will need to pay for a system for dividing students.

2. Politics will come into play. The moment you divide students by anything other than their age, you face accusations of bias. Education is highly political; here is an example that should resonate with the HN crowd:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/nyregion/software-enginee...
I totally agree. I seem to recall an experimental clang-based git plugin for this floating around. I think it even handled certain differences in naming convention.

We'll probably get there in a few more years, as we get comfortable with adding more power to these systems, and taking advantage of compiler technology for things other than generating code.
Here's Microsoft's New Kinect Sensor
> and then everyone would be able to play without the disc needing to be present.

With online DRM (like, I suppose, Xbox has) it should be only one running instance at a time per bought copy. Which sounds perfectly reasonable. I suspect there are some "offline mode" workarounds, but this is essentially the same as just "pirating" the game.

All this boils down to a question on whenever lending, trading or gifting an "used" game is legal. If law considers so, then removal of an option to give the game away is a straight violation of consumer's rights.
This is the compiler's printf(), not the one that gets linked in with compiled code. As long as the compiler itself doesn't have more than 9 substitutions, it's OK. Your code will link with a different one.
Your anecdote doesn't prove your point.
This seems to indicate to the power of common knowledge (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic) ) which is not the same thing as shared knowledge. Common knowledge means everyone knows that everyone knows (that everyone knows, to infinity) and that's far more powerful.

The real crimes have nothing to do with soda. Some manager is hired from outside and is mandating daily status reports. Complain about that and you get in trouble, or people think you're a slacker upset that he can no longer hide. Or, let's say that you find out that some newly-hired VP/NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who-The-Fuck-Knows) is outearning engineering old hands who took actual risk; it's unjust, but if you complain about it, you endanger not only your career but the careers of the people who gave you that information.

The thing about free soda is that you can complain about the loss of it without showing insecurity or political bias because the change is in the common knowledge.

Companies get away with much worse crimes than free-food reductions (which aren't even crimes at all if (a) they were never part of the promised employment deal and (b) times are legitimately tough) but because there's no way to hide that stuff, those end up being the touch-points for complaints.

You can't complain about the new stack-ranking system without seeming insecure-- so executives can divide-and-conquer along those lines (we're firing 5% each year in a "low performer" witch hunt, but the top 15% get bonuses!)-- but the loss of free food is a more socially acceptable and universal grudge.

I actually like the fact that when Douchetember 11th happens, these trivial perks get phased out as well. If the executive shitfucks knew how to rob a company, they'd keep the free soda while turning the crank slowly on the robberies that actually matter (meaner performance review systems, equity clawbacks and cliffing).

Imagine what would happen if a large company kept its trivial perks but still disempowered engineers, gradually, over time. It might manage to hold a "best company out there" reputation 10 years beyond actually deserving it. Not that I know of any companies like that, but just imagine how effective it might be and how much executive robbery (at the expense of clueless talent) could go on.
What's the alternative? It's not like FB is going to open up their social graph data so Google can use it to improve search results. I believe that issue was discussed when G+ results first showed up in search. For what it's worth, Facebook is also out there trying to compete on search using its social graph information, which is what the recent Zuckerberg announcements talked about.
The most interesting about this to me is Microsoft's case-study-awful handling of this; people are still befuddled as to whether this is the case or not, and the PR responses read like Jabberwocky.

It's like a politician deliberately following the mantra of "if you can't convince them, confuse them".
a) Whatever gets the job done.

b) The one everybody will talk about is whatever one was used to build the coolest site.

i.e. Wordpress, Flickr, and Tumblr were written with PHP

Though I think Javascript is probably universal to what makes a lot of the cool sites cooler. Maybe CSS3.
Firstly, you'll want to look into Visual Studio so that you can build a plugin. Secondarily, you'll also want to do some market research. The Big 4 all have internal tools that they use, anyway, so I'm not sure that's your target market. Your market will probably be SMB's that are doing everything in Excel. Some enterprises do a lot of accounting in Excel, too, but almost universally, the heavy lifting is done in a robust ERP like SAP or whatnot.

Once you build out the Excel plugin, you can simply sell the software via the web. Set it at a price point that's going to be less than what an average accountant needs to get approval for (typically $500 is the max, but it varies by company). This way they can just buy it and expense it, and not have to worry about it. The last thing in the world you want to get into is trying to (a) sell into the Big 4 or (b) sell into enterprise accounts. Both are going to be more trouble than it's worth.

Also, make sure your co-worker won't get into legal trouble by selling this. That IP may be owned by your company, especially since he probably uses it for his job.
Developing in an echo chamber is kind of a hallmark of many of Microsoft's designs.

(full disclosure: I hold a grudge against MSFT for echo-chamber design affecting me personally)

(full disclosure 2: I actually kind of like the Xbox One and will probably buy one if they're not insanely expensive)
Trend Spotting: Platform Eco-Systems
when I want something all it takes is a single keypress and to start typing. No navigating an arbitrary hierarchy of menus where how things are filed made sense at the time they were filed. It just finds the damn thing

Wasn't this available in the Win7 (and maybe Vista) start menu?
Might be a far out idea, but I wonder if around this stage, bringing in an anthropologist to study the culture of the company and suggest ways how to preserve some of the characteristics that originally attracted the first engineers would help address this problem.
Foursquare Introduces ‘Super-Specific’ Search And Filter Options
"Foursquare has made the jump to become a true utility that might even cancel out a Google search or a Yelp deep-dive."
I think that I remember you from Startup Weekend London in Sept. 2011. It was one of the most interesting projects at that event.

"With a few exceptions, most team members go back to their real lives, day jobs or studies the next day."
That's what I've also noticed.

I think that networking with like-minded people is one of the best part of Startup Weekend (and similar events).
it also breaks if you hit tab while expanded.
xbox doesn't charge you a monthly fee to play offline games
Oh, so this is about a "Gilt" employee being peeved about the presentation featuring the "Google+ Sign In" integration with "Fancy"(a competitor?)?

Well no, it's not anti competitive because when a user logs into a service she implicitly expresses interest in it, making it more relevant to her in a search scenario, and since it's personalised that "prominence" is unique to said user.
Ask HN: Do You Hate Your Telephone Access System?
Hi,

My startup has an office in a fairly old building in Toronto. The building uses one of those antiquated telephone access systems where they give you a code to get in, and a code for guests to use after hours that calls one of our phones.

I'm wondering if any of you are forced to use a similar system, and if you find it as painful as I do.

Is it painful when you host parties/events/meetups?

Do you find yourself sharing your unique access code with others? (ie friends, realtors, random guests, etc)

Do you even care? Or is it just not a significant pain.

Thanks in advance.
I use Aptana too. Yes, I've seen updates from them. It's the best Javascript IDE I've found, but that's not saying much. I guess JS is just too hard for IDEs to autocomplete all the time. Aside from that, Aptana does a nice job on things like syntax coloring and formatting. I used to be nutty about finding a good JS IDE but then I realized that Java IDEs became so good simply because Java was so hard to write (without stupid syntax errors and climbing through enormous and complicated frameworks like Spring).
That's like saying it's be a bit awkward if they laid off a bunch of employees but kept all the salaries of the remaining employees the same. Because by removing the little perks they're trimming everyone's salary just a little. You're already asking your remaining employees to work a little harder to make up for the loss. No need to add insult to injury and ask them to do it for a little less as well. In a time of turmoil I'd rather keep as much as possible familiar.
It's ok, Sony seems to be willing to take them:

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/04/sony-indies/

So far everything I've seen makes PS4 a clear choice over Xbox One as a console, although I'm still curious what Valve has in mind, but it doesn't look like they are in a hurry to announce anything so could be another year or two of waiting.
Of those 3, only Fez was "screwed" by Microsoft, and that was Fish's own fault--he released a buggy game without adequate QA...and a buggier patch with even worse QA...and wouldn't (but could afford to) pay for the follow-up patch that would supposedly have fixed the bugs he didn't fix twice before.

But yeah, it is an incredibly short-sighted decision for Microsoft to eliminate the Indie program. Some of the best new games/studios rose up through that--using C#, DirectX, and other parts of the MS toolchain--but it looks like the next generation of indies will be learning the PS4/OpenGL toolchain instead.
After much digging, here is what I have found. It surprised me and I learned a lot in the process. Very excited to share.

The Divorce Rate is not a measure of the chances of your marriage ending in divorce, though many people use it like that.

The Divorce Rate calculation is a measure of the number of divorces in a given year compared to the number of new marriages. If we accept that at face-value, we're okay. I would like to see it broken down by first-time marriages to first-time divorces; second-time marriages to second-time divorces. I have not been able to find this data, but didn't look exceptionally long ... as I need to get back to work. ;)

There are a lot of blog posts about the myth of the 50% divorce rate. They are attacking this statistic as representing something that it does not. (Even though it is not far from the truth.)

Still, I think it would be worthwhile to evaluate the usefulness of this statistic. Sure, it's an easy number to track. But why? Especially when everyone assumes that this is revealing something that it is not.

Now, onto the chances a first-time marriage might actually end in divorce.

Your baseline chances for divorce in a first-time marriage are calculated using a Life Table and the chances vary depending on a variety of factors. Age, region, education, and I am sure there are others. And if you input all your data, you get the chance that a first-time marriage will end in divorce.

Here's a great, simple description of the Life Table:
http://contemporaryfamilies.org/marriage-partnership-divorce...

Ultimately, the chance for divorce remains around 50-60% on average, but can be as low as 20%. According to this article

http://psychcentral.com/lib/2012/the-myth-of-the-high-rate-o...

"...a woman who is over 25, has a college degree, and an independent income has only a 20 percent probability of her marriage ending in divorce"

The article does not cite a source for this statistic, but it does cite various requisite factors in calculating a first-time marriage chances of ending in divorce.

More reading from the CDC about first-time marriages and divorce:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr049.pdf
Two of the biggest data points for editing products - their popularity and growth rate - don't exist before you launch. I'm sure Google doesn't launch products it believes will be unpopular, so whatever launches and ends up unpopular, that data point was a surprise. It would be nice if you could tell which products will take off before you build them - it would save everyone a lot of trouble.
Free... soda, selzer water, coffee, Naked juice, fruit baskets daily...

The point is that these stupid small things make (or not make) you feel appreciated.

Although I don't hardly drink soda, having free soda available would allow me to believe that the company is willing to spend a few K/yr to say "We appreciate your hard work, have something small as a token of our appreciation"
His comment was not sarcastic and did add some value. The article didn't come off as incoherent to me, the author made a very clear point early in the article ("their products for users [the ones that collect information to inform advertising] are becoming confused, inarticulate, and increasingly malicious"), and he spent the rest of the article backing up the point.

I believe that as a googler you have an obligation to be somewhat objective when google comes up. Googlers have been accused in the past of coming into discussions about google and downvoting critical comments, and I believe that happened here. There are enough employees at google that it can really affect the ordering of comments in these threads.
Google+ can now identify random, untagged objects in your photos
There is absolutely nothing wrong with ‘inconsistent viewing experiences across browsers and operating systems’. Different operating systems are, by definition, different, and so are different browsers. Of course the ‘viewing experience’ will differ between Opera Mobile on a 4" Android device and Firefox on a 30" screen, and also between, say, Lynx and Firefox on the same screen. Differing viewing experiences are the only reason people choose different browsers.

And of course you want to use different type depending on whether you’re typesetting a header, navigation or paragraph. That’s what serif, sans-serif, monospace and even cursive and fantasy are for. You tell the browser which general family you would like to have in a particular place, and the browser/user then chooses the best family from this set depending on their device, font rendering settings etc. etc. (If you are seriously suggesting to use one serif type for the header, another serif type for the body and a third serif type for bullet point lists all on the same page I will have a hard time not trying to violate your physical integrity).

Furthermore, it is obviously important not to cram too many characters in a single line. However, if one font at a given size (which, again, you should only specify relatively to the browser’s default size) manages to fill a line with as little as fifty characters, another font will have a hard time filling that same line with considerably more than 70 – both of which are perfectly fine line lengths.

Again, I am not saying that CSS is evil and that you shouldn’t use it. I am saying that you should leave things to the browser that are best left to the browser.
It strikes me that a shrewd single-player gamer can simply lag behind a couple of years deliberately.

e.g. If at this point in time, you're playing the best Nintendo DS and PS3 games released from 2006-2011, every single one will cost peanuts on eBay or Amazon marketplace.
>Dedicated CFOs and accounting types are simply doing their job. Their singular focus is often the bottom line and the company's financial health.

I disagree that anyone in a corporation should have a "singular focus". As an IT person at an investment bank I've seen numerous times IT people just "do what they're told to do" rather than offer a true consultative relationship to the business. A truly successful person realizes their limitations but offers reasonable suggestions on things that other people may have missed.

I used to work at publicly traded insurance companies and there was often a marketing vs. underwriting struggle but nobody on either side ever had a "singular focus" because it's the lazy way to bankruptcy for the corporation.
Runscope – API Tools for Developers
Don't confuse the tab character with the tab key.

The key is great. I use it all the time. Of course I don't want to press the space bar twelve times instead of tabbing three times. Of course I don't want sloppy indentation with 7 or 9 spaces instead of 8. Is this an actual problem? I've literally never seen either one in ~25 years of using languages that need indentation. The editor takes care of it.

The problem with the tab character is that there's no standard for how wide they're supposed to be, and so everyone uses them differently. Sure, in theory you use one tab character to indicate one level of indentation, and everybody can be happy. In practice, they're often not used that way. People will use two-space tabs with four-space indentation, using two tab characters to indent. People will use eight-space tabs with four-space indentation, using four spaces for one level of indentation, a tab character for two levels, a tab character followed by four spaces for three levels, etc. Some people just blithely mix and match for no particular reason. Put either one into an editor with different tab settings and it explodes into a huge mess.
A further blow in the war on sharing. Of course, this is business as usual for MS.

My mom taught me to share before I was old enough to walk. No government or corporation in the world is going to change my opinion of it.
Agreed. And that's a fair point – "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". However, coding knowledge doesn't suffer from this flaw... just look at the tech wishlist companies maintain. The list of projects they wish their engineers would implement for them "just to make our job a little easier" is almost infinite. Being able to knock off a bunch of those w/in your job instead of outsourcing it is really valuable.
No mention of failure? What things has Gary V failed at?
That's a good book, but it doesn't give any reason to believe this is a "terrible idea" at all. Perhaps you should read it again.
I'd like this if the back button resized the textarea back to it's normal size.
I'm also not a big fan of his use of hyphens '-' for dashes '—', since we're so passionate about typography.
Here's another example of the perils of going from free to paid and why many U.S. WWII soldiers still resent the Red Cross:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-cost...
Many services do not require an "identity", and in fact are of less value when associated with an identity, or when using them while not so associated is more difficult. "Credentials" do not contribute to the act of reading a map. ("Location" might, but not in all circumstances, so that shouldn't be required either.)

I probably misunderstand you, but are you saying that a user should not let her own preferences guide her choices? If she is allowed that small concession, should she not share her preferences with others on HN? I'm not bashing Google, but I am bashing this "desire" that you've articulated more explicitly than most. This user doesn't want to use that sort of suite of services. That's one reason I'm not on Facebook. If there are important strategic reasons to ape Facebook in this fashion, I don't see them. If the reason is more a perception that they have to do something, that's sad.
To be honest, I don't remember much of a hullaballo when either Dennis Ritchie or John McCarthy died. There was a post or two on each event, but nothing like when Steve Jobs died (when literally the entire front page was posts about his death).

(All three events were in October 2011 - Jobs, then Ritchie, then McCarthy)
Summary of Mobile Web at Google I/O 2013