skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In PeopleWare authors pose that productivity is the best when people working on the same project sit together, is average when people sit alone and is the worst when people with unrelated tasks sit together.

Ergo, if you are willing to move your "location" as often as you change tasks it's best to sit together.
Well, I think it's evident that we fundamentally disagree on the action of physical violence. Simply, I believe your views, while commendable are impractical. I know that you perhaps feel mind are barbaric.

Are you Buddhist by any chance? Just curious.
Domain squatting has been around for a lot longer than google for domains has.
Hmmm, connections only got me to the interview faster, it didn't seem to make a difference in the decision making process. Did it help for you guys?
The competition has had that stuff for ages.

What a pointless whinge. Yes they have. So?

So Apple chose not to, or couldn't, deliver them sooner. So Apple chose different priorities. It's not absurd, ridiculous, apologistic and it's not a "fault".
I dunno. This bit:

"This is what I tried to explain in my opening arguments. Despite Google's objections to what they perceived to be technical violations of their AdSense terms of service, they also had an entirely separate (but confusingly similar-sounding) program called AdSense for Domains, which handled the exact problem I was trying to solve--that of using advertising to profit from "parked," or unused, domain names, much like putting a billboard on a vacant lot."

strikes me as his saying that he was actually quite aware why Google objected and terminated his account.

That, coupled with his arguing in court that Gee whiz, he was totally following the terms of service for a completely different service that he wasn't actually paying for just kills my sympathy for him.

Yes, Google should tell people why it terminates these accounts. On the other hand, this guy comes across as a domain-squatting asshat.
Your argument seems to be, "self defense doesn't always work, therefore it's useless."

My argument is, "physical self defense, delegation to authority, situational avoidance, other tactics, and the ability to choose which of these tactics to employ works better than arbitrarily restricting yourself to a single tactic, or arbitrarily ruling out a single tactic."

I wouldn't go toe to toe with a violent criminal if I had any better choice. But the bullies we face as kids in school halls do tend to yield rather easily to a bit of physical force.
That is where PR people from FreeBSD or Linux should learn how to write. Not just "we were upgraded gcc to 4.3 and now we have x86_64 builds".
My FIRST job started as an internship at the company. The internship was scored entirely without connections - I think the combination of well-refined cover letter and resume was the trick, as well as my experience with interviewing (the college had us apply and interview for a LOT of jobs).

From the internship came the job. Yay.
Gas Prices Have Risen 41 Days in a Row: Is It Good for the Environment?
Groaaaann....

Please tell me that this sort of thing is not going to become the norm on websites...

This is the reason that I migrated away from facebook.

Text.

It works.
A notification system that alerts me when someone has written on my facebook wall, messaged me on meebo, replied to my HN comment/submission, posted a blog post, etc - a consolidated system.

Did you watch the Google Wave introductory video?
I didn't find it snippy either. Basically my position is "if it looks like a common sense thing to do that's probably what it is, unless there is a big reason to dig deeper into it".
So he can try to game the system by avoiding the three words?

The point is, he was in violation of the terms of the TOS. Google didn't like what he was doing, and cancelled his account-- which is what he agreed to when he signed up.

As for your last point: um, what? Corporations force us to sign contracts? If you want to use Google's service, you play by their rules. Is that really "abuse"?
The three words thing was an overkill by Google, but in the first place using normal adsense ads on parked domains (instead of Adsense for Domains) has been strictly disallowed since the beginning and Google has been very clear on that.
For the Fluid API, Yip only supports window.fluid.showGrowlNotification() so you don't have to worry about dock menu items.

This is a very preliminary release. Rate-limiting messages from a single website is the crucial first step in preventing message spam (and this will likely be implemented pretty soon). As for more advanced "spam prevention", check out the discussion I had with one of the commenters on my post.[1]

I think a beter solution can be found for notifications than for the existing problem with window.alert which can not only be spammed incessantly but also completely freeze up your browser.

[1] http://abcdefu.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/introducing-yip-an-u...
finder has breadcrumbs. cmd-click the folder name on the top of the window. or do cmd-up-arrow.
>> all corporations force us to sign contracts

Last time I checked I was free to sign whatever I like. Don't like the AdSense contract.. don't sign it. Sell the ad space yourself.
I wonder what literally exploding growth looks like...
Or, you make sure that tasks assigned to a group of people stay "related"-- which shouldn't be hard to do, it most large organizations.
Although somewhat sympathetic and agreeing that Google really ought to consider having a proper customer service policy (instead of just making PhD types do some as part of their training), I think the Mr Greenspan is a fool for rushing into print before receiving and cashing the check.

Indeed, I find myself wondering if a similar degree of over-confidence is the root cause of his other negative experiences. His HuffPo articles seem united by a certain 'screwed again' theme. You would think a graduate of Harvard with extensive experience of legal conflict would know that until the check clears or the date passes, an appeal is always a possibility.
You just don't want them to actually defend themselves, ever.

Responding to a schoolyard bully with a punch to the gut is one and the same as responding to a B&E with a shotgun. If you want your kids to do one but not the other, you're sending mixed messages. You don't respond to barroom bullies with a punch to the gut--you get the bouncer's attention. But that's tactical judgment. If you're in the schoolyard, getting a teacher's attention will just as often do nothing, and if it accomplishes anything it only makes the problem worse. It's more like a prison, where the wardens will allow all kinds of abuses happen without interfering.

"Don't throw a punch, ever" is pacifist crap, not tactical judgment.
Google has a different perspective on collaboration. You can see some of it in this Google IO talk: http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions/MythGeniusProgramm...
Just to insert my 2 cents - you are doing "real" computer work. I have a friend (neighbor actually) who has degrees in geology, but is clearly a top notch developer. He runs a very successful small software shop (doing custom development for small to medium businesses, usually on the Microsoft stack) - when you mentioned the 90% social, "pin down what should be done" angle, I immediately thought of what this guy does. His customers could care less that he doesn't have a CS degree.

What he does that really sets him apart (in my view) is that he sits down with the people who are doing the work in these small to medium size businesses and then designs the tools that he feels would make him most productive if he had to do the job of that person.

BTW, I have a MS in CS and spend my days hacking SQL. I really enjoyed getting both my BS and MS in comp sci. Having them was pretty key in kick-starting my career. I started at a huge IT company and the degrees mattered there. They have mattered much less since leaving that company. Don't worry so much about having the magic credentials to actually do "real" computer work, I think of the credentials as being door openers mostly.
The backups are encrypted with gpg before they are sent anyway, so it's not a big issue.
Holy crap! This is really revolutionary. I love the idea of having a global TM (it's like having open source translations), and private TMs. Absolutely brilliant.
Facebook has browser/Growl notifications? Or do you mean their email notifications?

Of course, there will always be ways to turn it off or turn it on only for particular sites. See http://abcdefu.wordpress.com/2009/06/09/introducing-yip-an-u...
Revolutions: How much of a threat are meteors to aviation?
I prefer to sit with my users. As you can imagine, this concept is met with a bit of resistance in corporate America.

I want to dwell with them and be a part of their lives. I want to hear them bitch about their apps, their customers and vendors, their bosses, and each other. I want to know what they go through all day every day.

When I sit and suffer with them, the resulting software is always better. All the meetings, prototypes, demos, specs, etc., etc., etc. have never been able to deliver the same knowledge needed to develop their apps.

OTOH, I don't want to sit with other programmers, unless we're working on the same thing at the same time. I don't care about your problems, I have my own.
Wolfram Alpha’s First Production Update
So have many other unsavory industries; that doesn't mean that any one company needs to get into them.

(Edit: I'm not arguing the OP's point that Google legitimizes the industry, simply that being in it is in some ways dubious. In case it wasn't clear.)
I can't agree more. There were no connections with my current job - the only person I knew in the whole country was my wife!

My resume barely matched the requirements the position, but I landed an interview on the strength of my cover letter. I basically made the same points about enthusiasm, learning ability, etc, and tried hard to come across as hard working and humble.
If I was Google, I would have been really annoyed too:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rustybrick/3607264237/
Technically it's not a problem to define equals based on mutable data, but it is a problem to define hashCode based on mutable data. One could have a class with, say, an immutable X and a mutable Y. You probably want to check equality based on both X and Y, but hash based on X.

Or, y'know, just don't use mutable data for keys. I thought that was what people were supposed to do anyway.
Wow, over-generalize much?

Remind me to keep an eye on the baby next time it's this guy's turn to throw out the bathwater.
Doped up on security theater
> a number of instances where I was asked to read relevant portions of the terms of service out loud for the judge (designed more than anything to humiliate since it was already readily apparent that I could read),

Doesn't understand what that court stenographer does, I see. (Also, quite willing to impute intent where none lies.)

> Though at that point I should have asked him how often he beat his wife, I was too shocked to think of it.

Should be if he still beat his wife.

> Google has more access to information about people than virtually any company on the planet, yet despite its vast resources, it found it more prudent to fabricate disparaging innuendo about me before a judge. The sole purpose was to damage my credibility.

<Innuendo about Google> "HOW DARE GOOGLE USE WHAT I PERCEIVE TO BE INNUENDO!"

> but I'd like to think that more than being a simply typographical error, the judge was conceding that I had a point. There is no law explicitly stating so, but there was no need for Google to behave in as draconian a manner as it did throughout the entire process of investigating the circumstances surrounding my account termination.

Off the deep end, past innuendo, into the pool of magical thoughts.

> The fact that it conducts smear campaigns against small business owners

The only smear campaign I've seen is the one he's perpetrated against himself (somewhere in the vicinity of "social media elite") and Google.

> Google (presumably, since no one else knew) even notified bloggers and/or The Huffington Post of the appeals court ruling

Yeah, I hate those public court records and those journalistic bloggers. Stupid Google.

As loose with his writing as his morals, this guy. (Muphry's law fans, come and get me.)
google doesn't actively go around trying to screw people over. they have engineers that look for certain violations of terms, and it looks like his case fell under one of those violations.
Interesting. How do coffee shops and airports get this information?
We'd love feedback from the HN community. Let me know what you think.
I got into a large consulting company as a junior software engineer back in the day, without any connections.

That sucks. I won't do that again if I can avoid it.
Totally - I didn't mean to suggest his initial loss was in any way inferior or anything like that. I hope that's not how it came across. :)
I agree. I remember when the first story circulated. It seemed a little fishy and it wasn't entirely clear what terms of service the guy violated, if any at all. Now, it's pretty clear that he did violate the terms of service and didn't have much of a case in the first place.

It's ridiculous, though, that it had to be taken this far in order for him to get a straight answer. I think you really have to question the judgment of the people that, through flawed policies or otherwise, allowed this to happen.

Even if things were allowed to start spiraling out of control it seems like there were opportunities to resolve this at a much lower cost-- both financial and in terms of public image. Why not make a phone call to see what it's all about before sending people off to small claims court with boxes of evidence?
Yes, it does Desktop and networking. Try the demo and see if it meets your needs.
So, a clown tries to make a circus out of a small claim case and gets his ass handed in a silver plate by shark lawyers?

Learn to have your mouth shut and accept your small victory, instead of trying to stir a happy-suing-fuck-fest.

He got what he deserved.
Link to the HN discussion on the original story: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=505255

Also, you might feel less sorry for Aaron Greenspan when you find out that he's the one who sued facebook for trademark infringement.
What's the moral imperative that Google is overlooking? To patiently explain to somebody trying to game your system exactly which behaviors tipped you off?
Interesting post, but I don't agree with its conclusion. The "Theory of Everything" in Physics is equivalent to finding the axioms of Mathematics. It does not give us a way to determine the truth of any physical law (say about climatology, just like knowing the rules of Conway's Life doesn't allow you to determine the status of any theorem about it) and so it does not cross the halting problem. The relative "complexity" of math vs physics is not relevant and anyway, until we have a TOE we don't know its complexity.
Poll: App rejected. Is this offensive? Seriously Apple?
Our second attempt at the submission of the free version of our app, Comicstrips Lite got rejected again.

The first time was acceptable, but this time, they seem to be pushing it. They rejected the app due to the content linked below.

http://getcomicstrips.com/public/img_0067.png

It does not seem to me that it is "obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory". Wolfenstein 3D is on the app store and got approved and is way more violent.

Am I missing something here? Comments are most welcome.
Ask HN: Job prospects for typical CS graduates
I've noticed most of the stories of recent graduates that come up around here fall into one of two categories: Either you graduated and went immediately into a startup, or you dropped out and went immediately into a startup. I don't really plan on going into either of those camps straight out of school, and am planning on going into industry for at least a few years.

I have actual programming experience (It'll be 3 years of web programming for a research lab by the time I graduate next spring), but there's nothing especially notable about my academics.

Does anyone have any job search tales of graduating with this sort of record?
The three words are known to people who actually look at the TOS.

It is not hypocritical for a credit card company to offer different services to businesses and individuals, or even to different individuals, nor is it hypocritical to offer differing subsets of services to different customers.
This guy called his a scancam:

http://home.comcast.net/~scancams/
Oohh. Zebras.

Edit: Hoofbeats, zebras, etc? No?

I worry when this type of thing is even be brought up in public debate. Innumeracy is so big a problem among the kino and lottery set that another thing to be afraid of in aviation might lead to regulation (or the attempt of) mandating super expensive "meteorite preparedness" systems in commercial aviation.
Google might not actually be interested in customers who may be trying to game the system. Easily revealing the violation would give people like the author reason to try various manipulations to just barely follow TOS and keep the normal AdSense.
they have something that pops up at the bottom of your screen to tell you that something has happened on the page.

It only works when you actually AT facebook.

Having that sort of "functionality" follow me around sounds like some sort of hellish nightmare.
What?

I'm saying that google ending their adsense for domains program would not cause the domain squatting industry to collapse.
Some other scanning camera attempts:

http://golembewski.awardspace.com/cameras/current/index.html

http://home.comcast.net/~scancams/

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/scanner.html
Always use a UUID or GUID (same thing) in todays web applications. When we get to terrabytes of data as the norm for apps int based keys are going to seem so ancient.

Sure it takes more room but space it cheap, and it makes syncing and distributed databases so much easier (not tied to one machine or cluster)
That's similar to what I had in mind. In order for it to become reality, as you point out, more services need to support it (right now, we just have to wait for the website owner to add support but soon, there'll be a way for users to add support for websites). Another important component is a log that persistently stores all the notifications you receive so that you can go back and check out all your history.

You'll like the next version. :)
When Google's lawyer handed him pages of documents 5 minutes before the case began, why didn't he ask the Judge to defer the case until he had time to review the new material?

Methinks he should have hired a lawyer.

EDIT: Why am I being downmodded? Anyone care to explain?
You can simulate desktop application on silverlight like this one www.windows4all.com
Poll: How Successful Are You (Financially) on the Internet?
I just want to spur a discussion about earning on the internet.

I personally believe hacker news is the elite of internet achievers. Hence, as we hear much about success and failure on the internet, I was just wondering on your perspective, and hopefully the actual data, on the issue.
1 million +
500k to 900k
100k to 400k
80 to 99k
50k to 70k
20k to 40k
10k to 19k
5k to 9k
1k to 4k
$1 to $900
Google public access has a captive portal requiring you login using your google account.
If you simply cut people off, no questions, no appeal, no nothing, you will cull a certain number of innocent people. I can't be certain this guy falls into that category, but it seems lame to not try and settle things amicably in cases where there is a good faith effort to comply. It's just more of their crappy customer service.

Remember when axod got the axe a while back? No explanations, no appeal, no contact, no nothing. They did reinstate him, but it took them quite a while.

Expanding on this a bit, I think the 'pick a link' pictured in the image above was definitely grounds for not getting his money. On the other hand, what happens if you have some kind of user generated content, and someone writes the magic words... and you have ads on the page:

http://twitter.com/davidnwelton/status/2093274918

Edit: one "good faith effort to comply" might be this: Google says your page is in violation of their terms, and needs changing (perhaps omitting the exact details), and that earnings from it will not be paid. You have the option to accept that, fix your page, and get on with things. Something like that might go a long ways to sort out the wheat from the chaff.
No.

It integrates with a system (GrowlHelper.app) which runs with all your permissions and hasn't received any security scrutiny and was designed to take input from a few, trusted sources. What could possibly go wrong?
"as is the speech, so is the man"

I like that. Thanks for sharing.
You've got the general shape of it, but I've got one minor clarification about your history. You make the GaoKao sound recent, when it's basically the modern version of the Imperial Examination. The Imperial Examination started in 605, and ran continuously until the early twentieth century, so this is how China has been selecting their administrators for centuries.

We can debate the merits of Chinese higher education, but it's definitely not new.
I would guarantee that the per soldier spending China commits is much, much lower than what it costs the US. A Chinese solider is a guy with a gun, a US solider carries thousands of dollars of kit and is the product of millions of dollars of training.
Mobile_fu. You're right! I used it briefly on a site before removing the functionality as I didn't really need it.
Thats where you think wrong, my friend, for Aaron Greenspan is a Lawyer.
To me, this case illustrates a scary fact: we entrust large amounts of our data, visibility / reputation (in the form of search results), and revenue (ad sense) to a company that applies no human judgement to individual cases regardless of their importance to the affected parties. This guy may have violated Google's ToS and have deserved to have his account terminated. But that doesn't change the fact that Google (or one of its algorithms) could decide to drop your website from its search results, or delete your GMail account, or cancel your Ad Sense account and keep the balance - all with no appeal to a human being, no opportunity to explain any extenuating circumstances, and little recourse.

True, a person may not be a more effective reviewer in general, Google's algorithms may make few mistakes, and we all benefit from the efficiency of a customer service-free operation. Still, it would be nice to think that if something bad happened, you might have a chance to correct it.
Except that his TOS violation is so flagrant that he must have known what he was doing.
Myself on the last two occasions.

One, in the paper(!), the second through a local technology association website.

I'm still working there, 6 years later.
You're right, it wouldn't. That doesn't mean they have to be in it. It's a choice they're making.
Easy to Make Draggable Div Tutorial
Learn how to easily make a draggable div with Javascript. The code is easy to understand so you can apply the code on your own projects, and also cross browser compatible.
Yes, domain squatting sucks and the writer should follow google's TOS. Further, I don't disagree that he should have lost this case. Now just because he didn't have content on the site doesn't mean that he was squatting - he may have had future plans for the domain. But I agree the advertisers should not be charged for ads that were not presented as they should have been.

That said, I think a ban from adsense for a single infraction without a means for appeal or feedback is a scary prospect for legitimate users who may make a small mistake from time to time. This sequence of events would make me think twice about building a business based on this model.