skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IBM has major offices of comparable size in Austin, Raleigh, and several international locations, as well. I would say the proportion of their Silicon Valley presence is insignificant. They're probably to big and historic to localize, in any case.
The things attributed to the regular Indian folks appears very "made up" ...
"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Turns out software isn't like buildings. Buildings can't be refactored during construction, nor do their requirements change halfway through.

Developing software incrementally requires diligence in refactoring to keep the code clean, but development goes faster despite the "extra" refactoring time and the end product is better for it.
Hello !
I am ZAK MATHIEW visiting this website for the first time and want to continue the discussion.

----

Zak

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The email sent here is informative.
http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2009/Jul/0095.html

It's informative because it pretends to imply a little information about how imageshack.us was compromised:

> anti-sec:~/pwn# perl img-scan.pl

> Found img1.imageshack.us - lighttpd/1.4.18 - SSH-1.99-OpenSSH_4.5

>

> [snip]

>

> Found img998.imageshack.us - lighttpd/1.4.18 - SSH-1.99-OpenSSH_4.5

> anti-sec:~/pwn# perl mass-pwn.pl

This would lead one to believe that imageshack was scanned, a system with
lighttpd and SSH was found, and it was immediately compromised due to
at least one of those two services.

Similar to the copy and paste from the OpenSSH 0-day rumor.

This is information voluntarily provided by the perpetrator, apparently.
Since this person is interested in "anti-security" and keeping exploit
knowledge secret, why would he let on any information about the compromise,
including which service was involved in his gain of unauthorized access?

Why go to the effort to make out lighttpd or SSH were involved, when
disclosing this goes against his proclaimed agenda?

Because it likely has nothing to do with the compromise, and these guys
enjoy starting rumors and watching the effects spread across the internet?

Hmmm, could be?
ImageShack Hacked by Anti-sec Movement
Actually, the center of the universe is on the campuses of the University of New Mexico, next to the guy who sells burrito cheese-burgers.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8601342@N03/sets/72157605272220...
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Every week you can't show visible progress to a customer is a week your code drifts farther from their actual desires. The feedback loop is essential to writing good software. It may be difficult to achieve at times but it should always be our goal.
Workaround for Firefox 3.5 slow startups on Windows - Mozilla Links
I thought all operating system viruses were free. After all, who would pay for one?

(Oh, "virus-free". Stupid Ameriglish)
On the mail servers I run messages marked as spam get a 550 Spam error at SMTP time. The vast majority of users prefer this, as they can't be blamed for missing an email because they didn't look in their 'spam' folder, and the sender knows pretty much immediately that their message hasn't got through (in the event of a false positive).
I've seen many articles recently that suggest Microsoft's bundling of Browser to OS is analagous to Google's bundling of OS to Browser. They miss the key distiction that Google's offerings are /free/ and open-source. You don't like the OS? No problem, you can run Chrome (or Chromium) on whichever OS you want. No lock-ins, no harm to the user.
Am I wrong or is this just not true:

"Google's recent development work on applications for mobile devices has often been delivered exclusively as applications for their own Android platform instead of as iPhone applications"

I don't own an Android phone so maybe there's lots going on I'm not aware of but there seems to be plenty of stuff developed for a) any browser, b) any decent browser, c) iPhones specifically, d) java smartphones, e) Windows, f) Mac, g) Linux.

He state's this is what Microsoft was like 5 or 10 years ago, and yet I think this is still true of Microsoft today. Certainly Microsoft sales folk I've recently come into contact with seem to be actively denying the existance of other browsers in relation to Sharepoint stuff.
He meant the "Spirituality Marketing Center..." But what the hey. Close enough for spiritual work ;)

And of course, by "San Francisco" he meant "Bay Area", which of course means "California." Again: the energy (spirituality) looks pretty much the same from Dakshineswar.
I take it you met these people inside corporate IT or other isolated development shops because I've not seen much of that attitude on public blogs and such. However if I imagine such a Microsoft-centric web developer for a second, I'm pretty sure they would be pushing for IE7 and dropping IE6 as quick as they can.
Thanks for the interesting response.

Most of the changes were not really about wording, more about the timeline on which certain contingencies were supposed to be met and which boxes should have been checked, which were just mostly blanks on printed forms. The biggest one though and the one that bothered me was a wording change to a contingency involving financing that everyone that had seen the document except for the broker had told me was just not something I could do as-written. I wanted it changed. If he had been upfront about his reluctance to change it because he was trying to cover his ass, that would have been great. If he had just let me change it like I did eventually because I wasn't going to sign anything otherwise, that would have been great. It's really the 'condescending ass' part and that we took (in all, over) 4 hours arguing over a single line that really annoyed me because it was not necessary...or at least, he couldn't explain why he didn't want it changed at all.

Anyway, I'm in southern california. I've found plenty of loopnet-ish sites, but none that are like redfin for commercial property or businesses...
ShapeWriter: Making Gesture Writing on Mobile Devices Easy..
WIMAX vendors
Safe from what?

Safe from misuse by Google? I think that's a risk you take with any third party provider. Being one of many millions of users does provide some security through obscurity in that respect. Chances are most of us are just not special enough to be legitimate targets.

Safe from misuse by bad guys outside of Google via security problems? I'm pretty confident Google has some of the best engineers out there. You also have a strength in numbers thing going for you with Google. Lots of people are looking at it. Google is very high profile -- if they did have a leak you'd at least know about it. I can't say the same about some random provider. They could have half wit engineers who cover up data leaks. You might never know. Even bad providers can have sterling record if they choose not to report problems or simply have a run of good luck until someone copy & pastes the wrong command and every bit gets leaked.

Safe from being an anonymous fraction of a statistic when Google aggregates its data? I'd be more worried about my ISP spying on me.

Overall I think it's good to be aware of the risks but realistically there isn't a whole lot you can do about it no matter which provider you're using. If you were to separate all your different accounts to different providers you might at least spread the risk out. If you choose to run your own server(s) you quickly become the weakest link in the security chain. Even if you're a pro it probably won't be your full time job to administrate your servers so that already puts you at a disadvantage.
Or at least to an immigrant-rights center. There's sure to be one in any major U.S.

I remember in grad school I went to testify for my advisor (Korean-born), and they wanted to know that he really was married to his wife, and related nonsense (she also immigrated from Korea and they'd been married for 10 years).

In any case, there's obviously a lot of power to U.S. citizenship: not the least being the ability not to be deported to a homeland that is subject to vagaries of the latest dictatorial "democratic" government (reference to Russia, not Ukraine).

Best of luck.
Wait, I can understand if people don't get it right even to within a few orders of magnitude -- I know I couldn't -- but don't people know that an atom is a gatrillion times smaller than anything visible with the naked eye? High school science can't be THAT bad.
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Just look where the money is: they didn't list stats for ad clicks but I'm willing to bet IE6 users click more than their share of ads, and Firefox users less.
Site of a web start-up that apparently wants to attract enough visits to be worthy of WiMax vendors' advertising dollars. ...which will take a little more (and more substantive) content.
Lenny Susskind on Darwin’s legacy
I saw a great 'style case' on another forum the other day. Someone was pointing out that mercury in fluorescent bulbs was even more hazardous than radioactive waste in a sense, because at least the radioactive waste would eventually decay into something harmless. The counterpoint was, "Well, they should just use mercury-194, which decays with a half-life of only 400 years, and turns into gold, to boot."
"The Center of the Universe" at UNM. Nice photos. Fairly cool concept.

But what does it mean that the CoU is so rectilinear?
Star Trek. Nothing beats TNG, not with the cast they had. DS9 and Voyager were also good. Haven't seen the original series though.

Patrick Stewart might just be my favorite actor. Even with no props or a set, the man could still deliver a riveting performance.
I should restate. Most of these companies have a presence in the Valley. Here's where they are.

1. IBM, Almaden
2. Microsoft, 85 and 101
3. Oracle, Redwood Shores
4. Google, next to Microsoft
5. Softbank, partner with Yahoo
6. SAP, Palo Alto
7. Accenture, San Jose, next to Adobe
8. Computer Sciences Corporation, haven't seen them
9. Yahoo, next to Moffet Field
10. Capgemini, Cupertino
Ah..understood. He was in the wrong.

One of the issues with having a commercial or business broker acting like Redfin is that there are different laws about compensation for commercial real estate than there are for residential real estate. (Commercial agents and brokers have more rights regarding how long, how much, and under what circumstances they are to be paid, for example. This is, for the most part, to protect brokers since these deals are much more complicated and they can potentially invest months of their time and hundreds of thousands of dollars marketing a property or doing due diligence, only to have the deal fall through at the last minute.) In any case, there is more legislation you would have to get around to do a commercial Redfin. I know of a few companies that have tried, but they all went out of business because of expenses or legal issues.

BTW, most consumers don't realize it, but there are roughly a dozen states that have made it illegal for brokers to offer rebates to consumers AT ALL, whether residential or commercial. Sometimes it isn't the real estate companies themselves that are stifling competition and innovation.
The problem with Star Trek is this: it isn't really sci-fi. It's fantasy set in space with technobabble replacing magic spells. Which is fine, but if that's your bag, why not go for real fantasy?

And this is annoying because Star Trek could be "what would the future be like?". They just have rubbish writers. Let me give you an example, the shields failing is a plot device, the ship is in danger, but it doesn't have to take any damage that would prevent the state of the universe being reset at the end of the episode. But in Enterprise, the writers were too lazy and stupid to come up with something new, so they did exactly the same thing with "hull polarization". Drop these writers onto a show about a present-day warship and they'd be stuffed. Whereas BSG's writers would take it in their stride.

The hallmark of real grown-up scifi is that state is maintained between episodes.
Yes, but apply from Canada, just in case ;-)
Exactly. I bought both my classic Mustangs on Ebay. In both cases, I got the online description and photos, asked the sellers for additional information before bidding. I probably went through some part of this process on over 2 dozen cars, and bid on 5-6 of them

Then in each case, at the close of the auction I basically said "So long as the car basically meets the description as you laid out, you're getting paid, but before you get paid, I'm verifying the basics." In one case I flew down to get it and paid actual cash. In the other case (much farther away), I had a car club buddy go check it out for basic conformance (title/VIN match, runs/drives, rust no worse than described, etc) at which point I wired the money, my buddy took the title, and I arranged the car transport pickup. One of my cars is as-good/better than was described all around. One of them had a moderate issue which I chalk up to "well, I still got a smoking deal on it, it's fixed now, and knowing everything, I'd still have done the deal, so..."

If you know what you're doing, and want a (relatively) rare particular car, and don't have Barrett-Jackson type money, Ebay's a great place to buy cars.
That's not really true tho'. Typical career path is prep school -> Ivy league -> investment bank/management consulting -> MBA. Their careers are the result of who their parents knew when they were 5 years old...
This is even more true for Star Wars with its classic plot & conflicts -- if any.
> Haven't seen the original series though

You have seen nothing.
ITIL is pretty standard for managing IT Infrastructure.

It's pretty standard for managing the government IT infrastructure. They're what, GBP 20Bn over budget on the NHS alone... And it seems every week there's a story in the papers about them losing a million people's personal data. ITIL is a red flag on anyone's CV IMHO.
What worries me about Google is not that it has my data, but that it has a massive cross section of my data:

* search records
* e-mail
* calendaring
* documents
* which youtube videos I've watched

etc. I'm sure it's much more than proportionally easier to abuse this information the wider the spread of it they have.
You can surely find a simpler solution to the problem of "find my house key more easily"!
Well, a large software company has varying needs, some of which may not be met well in the Valley. For example, Zappos started in SF, but moved to Las Vegas for the lower cost of living.
Those "old keys" may have had rings on the end, but they weren't key rings!
Picard, Data, Q, Lore.. Hard to beat those characters.

Hm, I just looked at Wikipedia. Didn't realize TNG went back as far as '87, I didn't become a fan till the 90s.
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Both have had moments of awesome brilliance. Both have been slowly ground into the dirt by writers with no exciting new ideas who have gone to the well too many times and finally sucked it dry.
Although Twitter is minuscule compared to Facebook, because it's always been public by default, its influence may be greater in some ways than Facebook. That's the whole point underlying this article: clearly Facebook has been having some Twitter envy for awhile, and they've decided that if they can't join them, they'll try and beat them.
One thing that you must keep in mind is that if you get sick of high US taxes (and they only seem to be going higher) and you want to move someplace like Hong Kong, you will still need to pay US taxes, and you will even be forced to continue to pay them for 10 years if you decide to give up your citizenship.
I think you’re a little too hard on Star Trek. I’ll be the first to admit the writer’s could be better versed in their theoretical physics and a lot of the space travel is just technobabble. But the real sci-fi element of Star Trek (at least TNG and Voyager which are the only ones I’ve watched) is in how technology changes society. The best episodes usually revolve around how this advanced technology has changed the way people relate to each other and how that impacts their relations with species they encounter.

It’s not as focused on the political elements as BSG is but I’d argue that Voyager in particular was a precursor to that more mature form of sci-fi.

To give an example I remember one particular episode of Voyager where they passed through a section of space inhabited by a species that had banned anyone with telepathic abilities. Though there was an action component to the episode the real interesting part came when discussing the rationale behind that society’s decision and the impact it had on those forced to carry out those order. That type of scenario is where Star Trek really shines.
Why Google Is Stealing Apple's Ideas
There are actually three base currencies that the human mind recognizes, and which can all transform back and forth freely: physical resource (i.e. money), unbalanced information (i.e. power) and trust (i.e. faith, connections). Usually, forcibly discharging yourself of physical resources (e.g. giving away money) will create a little trust, but giving away information will create tons. If you can get the organization to put its faith in you, you don't need to worry about having power over it.

Of course, sociopaths don't trust, and many organizations (ala The Corporation[1]) are sociopaths. You could avoid working with these organizations, or, if you think you're up to it, you could slowly work to introduce a culture of trust to replace the existing culture of power. You would, however, be seen as "toxic" by anyone who had not yet been transformed[2]. It would be a bit like a normal body cell lodging in a tumor and growing a body out of it. This might be a big jump out of an HN context, but this is basically the premise of the manga/anime series "Great Teacher Onizuka"[3]—the sociopathic organization transformed therein is a school.

[1]: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3203253804055041031

[2]: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2009/06/21/a_toxic_par...

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Teacher_Onizuka
I don't think the SEC classification is useful for the purpose of locating software companies as the SEC regulates only publicly traded US companies. They're interested only in very specific aspects of a company and they categorize accordingly.
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I was going to try to respond to a bunch of points people made here and on the Techcrunch site about the Redfin story, but unfortunately I didn't have the time to do individual responses while it was still a relatively active thread. So, instead, I'm going to just make a bitch list here now, in an attempt to start a new discussion. 'Cuz, you know, bitch lists are so productive ;-) Here is what I've started with, in roughly ascending order of pissed-off-edness:

4. I'm pissed at Redfin.

Redfin is not that innovative. I think Glenn is a good guy, and a fast learner, but there are better real estate brokerages out there. What do I mean by "better"? I mean companies that save the consumer even MORE money, offer BETTER customer service, don't cut corners or take advantage of OTHER professionals to save money, and have business models that better align their interests with the consumer. I think Redfin is a move in the right direction, but I'm sick of hearing about their "innovation." They're not doing anything other companies haven't already done - they're mainly just doing it more vocally. This all may come across as jealousy or sour grapes from a competitor. It is. I'm jealous because I have a better (and more profitable) venture-funded real estate company - but I can't shout it to the world like Redfin does, because I haven't figured out a way to scale our company while keeping our same quality of service. So I can't advertise or blog about it, and I have to turn customers away because we can't keep up with our current demand. Being the guy with a better widget who can't manufacture enough to meet demand may be a "nice problem to have", but it's extremely frustrating. At this point, I'm trying to avoid going down the "referral partners" path because that largely defeats some of our advantages. So, yeah, I'll have the sour grapes.
3. I'm pissed at some Flat Fee MLS companies.

[This is basically a throwaway, but I bring it up because of the guy posting everywhere at TechCrunch.] Flat fee MLS is a way to save money if you're 100% sure you know what you're doing in selling your own home. For roughly $299-499, you can get your property listed on the local MLS. If you offer a commission to buyer agents, as they require, you will have accomplished almost everything a LAZY agent would have done for you. (If you're greedy, and refuse to pay a cooperating broker fee to buyer agents, you will not be able to list on most MLSs per their rules, and you will have lost roughly 80% of the buyer's market. Why should an MLS association or buyer agent provide their time and resources to help you sell your home for no compensation? Do YOU work for free?) One issue with flat fee MLS companies is that many, but not all, (knowingly) violate their state's 'minimum service guarantee' laws, because it is often difficult for them to do what they're actually supposed to do for that small amount of money. Not all states have these laws, but most do. If you go the Flat Fee MLS listing route, you should just know what you're getting for the money. Some companies are horrible and they blow smoke up your butt without alerting you to the downsides and dangers of this approach. They could improve, for example, by giving you a list of things that you are legally forbidden from saying when you're showing your home, and a list of things you MUST disclose. A second issue with this is that you probably DON'T know what you're doing in selling your own home, even though you think you do. Which goes to issue three...
Yeah, I was gonna point that out. I've got some friends & family members with iPhones, and they use Maps & GMail all the time. I've met someone on the Mobile-Maps team, and he's always carrying around at least 3 different phones because he has to develop for them all. I work on the search UI, and a rough ordering of the amount of time I spend on each browser goes something like Firefox > IE7 > IE8 > IE6 > Chrome > Safari > Opera > Konqueror. The only browser that really gets screwed is Konqueror, and to a lesser extent Opera (sorry guys). There've been features that we launched for Firefox+IE but cut for Chrome due to time restrictions - yeah, it's embarrassing to not support our own browser, but it's less painful than cutting off 20% of the market.
Star Trek is fun enough. But it's amazing to see what Lucas does with his saga on so many different levels. Anyone interested in film analysis and/or commentary might find this worth reading. I wrote it ages ago:

http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/38/clones1.htm