skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm 42. Most of the people I work with are in the 30s and 40s and have children. The stereotype of Google hiring nothing but Stanford grads has been over for a while.

As much as I like Aaron, here he is guilty of excessive generalization. Even in 2006 the claims don't match reality. I lived through the first dot.com boom in CA, where companies were falling hand over fist to offer perks, many of them financially unsustainable, because there was a huge competition to acquire and keep talent, as well as keep them in the office for long hours with the promise of striking it rich on what were often worthless stock options.

Google is pretty clear and upfront about what the compensation will be. Everything I was told about what to expect about stock grants, year bonuses, and benefits, has more or less hit the predicted windows. I was never really oversold on what my compensation would be and I was able to do financial planning around it because it was so transparent.

I also don't see what's wrong with 'infantilizing'. We lose creativity as we become adults because of the sheer numbers of rules, responsibilities, and requirements placed on us. If you want people to do good research or engineering, take away as much as possible impediments, like worry over money, laundry, or corporate politicking.

Do we also talk about Phd students and tenured professors in research labs being "infantilized" by an academic environment often isolated from the outside world? I don't view it as necessarily a bad thing. Although I guess you could claim that Einstein still did good work while working at the Patent Office.

All in all the essay is a rather convoluted and weak critique of Google culture and hiring practices based on anecdotal observations that don't match reality.
Open developer console on IsItChristmas.com
This is news? Wow. Who cares!?
Is it Christmas? (Check console)
Here's to hoping you get some time off in the next day or so!

Cheers!
This is a great article bringing light to the employed and how little bargaining (if any) they have in this economy. I'd say it's even worse in countries where population is several times smaller than United States and happen to be just above the border of it. I've seen so many people at my past jobs willing to "stay late" which is often beyond the 9 to 5 range. At one company I worked at, people were asked to come and work on the weekends. I used to get calls at 1 am on a friday, to commit some extra code. Someone who was witnessing the birth of their newborn baby got a call from the company about work...he quit immediately. There's so many stories I hear from people who have worked across various industries in Vancouver, BC. It's not even demanded but people's unwillingness to say no, out of fear of appearing less irreplaceable compared to their peer engineers or designers. Overtime is unpaid of course because software developers and web designers are not "professionals" and no union because somebody decided for all of us that "it's not in our interest" and that an engineer can "freely negotiate their salary". Not in this economy, at least not in this tiny Canadian market filled with exploitative employers.
This is like saying essentially all of microsoft's revenue comes from selling things. Google gets paid via ads.
They didn't file these specific suits "in their own names" because these patents aren't owned by them but by Rockstar, a separate entity of which they are only shareholders and which apparently has committed to the DoJ and FTC to operate autonomously [1].

But they did file a bunch of other suits "in their own names". Both Apple and Microsoft are involved in litigation with other Android manufacturers in multiple jurisdictions, so it's not like they're unwilling to get their hands dirty.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6962488
How to Hack the Developer Console to be Needlessly Interactive for Christmas
"How much did the OP pay to use Facebook as a social platform?"

As much as (s)he paid 5 years ago when there wasnt any as-retargeting.
"I work on Google Fiber. You give us money, we give you an Internet connection."

Real revolutionary, I tell you. No doubt Page and Sergey are having wet dreams by dreaming of the extra data that they get by spying on even more things. Because that's what every Google products ends up being, a snooping device to help Google sell more expensive ads. There's no pride or code of honor at Google, just more ad clicks than the last quarter.

Maybe a put a microphone on each of our rooms to help us? Will that come before or after the brain chip? http://blogs.computerworld.com/privacy/23260/freaky-future-o...

By the way, is what I said true (fraud accounts for most of Google's income)?
Actually: Not just the Koch brothers: New study reveals funders behind the climate change DENIAL effort

[emphasis added]
Amazon Giving away 5$ for installing app from App store
Wow, this hit at home exactly - down to the meal plan and sleep schedule(except that I don't fast on purpose). I used to drink, only at night, so that I could fall right asleep. Works well, but not great for health or feeling good in the morning.
I think that most of your/our problem comes down to lack of physical activity. Start trying to exercise more, even at night. A good physical exhaustion will put you right to sleep, and has the side effects of being good for you. I'm slowly climbing out of the rut this way, and hope you can too.
> I work on Google Fiber. You give us money, we give you an Internet connection.

...so that there's a pretty good chance that [you] will use Google Search, and [we] will then show you ads. Also, [we] inadvertently created a channel for analysis on [your] Web browsing habits if [we] were so inclined, which would enable [us] to refine advertising even more, among other things.

If those are not the entire rationale for Google's "everybody should be online" initiatives, like Fiber and Loon, it's at least a significant portion thereof and you know it. Hell, it's probably why the Chromebook exists. You and I are kidding ourselves if we arrive at a conclusion that Google is in any other business than data and advertising impressions. Facebook needs eyeballs, too, hence why Zuckerberg has been on the same warpath.

I didn't make the account just now.
I've been in this situation in another language: nothing beats (1) reading and (2) listening and (3) forcing yourself to speak.

It sounds like (3) may be a problem for your wife because of her lack of confidence. Forcing herself to speak English, as if there is no option, will make the difference.

If you two were to speak English to each other, so that she could literally stay in English-only mode all day, every day, that would help. Don't call mom. Does she read a newspaper? Read the Chronicle or NY Times or Guardian. Listen to the radio? Listen to NPR, or BBC. Etc.

BTW, do not set as a goal to speak American-accented perfectly idiomatic English. That will never happen, and is not necessary or even desirable. Italian accents rock.
I hate democracy, but I will choose it over any other method for transfer of power. The only credit I can give to democracy is, it ensures transfer of power without bloodshed and in a civilized manner, rest is all crap as we know it.
- I couldn't put all the words because exceeded 80.
say("\n:sparkles::sparkles: :star2: :sparkles:\n :christmas_tree: \n :sparkles: :christmas_tree::christmas_tree: :sparkles:\n :christmas_tree::red_circle::christmas_tree:\n :christmas_tree::ribbon::red_circle::christmas_tree:\n :christmas_tree::large_blue_circle::christmas_tree::red_circle::christmas_tree: :sparkles:\n:christmas_tree::red_circle::christmas_tree::ribbon::large_blue_circle::christmas_tree:")

For those of you who want to play around with the emoji stuff and feel bad about spamming chat:

function test(message) {
events.chat({name: "test", message: message})
}

afterwards call `test` instead of `say`
Being from Vancouver as well, I agree with your sentiment.

I also wanted to add that, due to the Y2K fiasco, BC lawmakers were able to push through an exemption to the overtime laws. Basically, if you are in IT, then you are not under most of the overtime protection laws that other workers have. See here:

http://www.labour.gov.bc.ca/esb/facshts/high_tech.htm
This is written using an OOP language - C++

I was always fascinated at games like this one as to how perfectly they are a use case to OOP paradigm. All objects are sharing a common object, and the player can create, destroy objects, do stuff on the objects ( call their methods ). Objects can upgrade to different versions. Objects exchange information with themselves or even battle among themselves! Really cool perspective, isn't it?
> Multitasking is essentially fast app switching on the devices

> Copy and paste was a nothing feature

> ... although its blatantly been influenced by the direction Apple took, it took Google until Jellybean 4.2 to catch up with the quality of implementation of iOS

I don't mean to come off like an ass (but don't really give a shit if I do), but you're just positing your own opinions in the place of the previous poster's opinions, then acting like you've proved some great point. How exactly are you advancing this discussion? Your post is just as useless as the one you're replying to.

I'm as big of an Apple fanboy as there is, but you're making us look bad. Multitasking and copy and paste may just be "trite memes" to gods like you, but mere mortals like me use both of those on a daily basis.

This is equally applicable to your post:

> ... instead of trotting out tired and trite memes because someone has had the temerity to call out your favourite team, don't.

EDIT: And your question,

> If Android was, as you seem to think, not a copy of the original iPhone OS, why did it take a further 18 months to release anything after the initial iPhone unveiling?

is blatantly phrased as a leading question. You're really trying to make it seem as though the only reason to not release anything for 18 months after the iphone announcement was to copy the iphone. Give the the iphone the credit it is due; it revolutionized mobile phones.

How are you so certain that the question in google wasn't "Why rush to compete with a product that just revolutionized the industry when yours clearly pales in comparison?"
I'm not too excited about the intangibles of the 1950s.

It actually was a pretty good time, if you were American and white. The post-war boom was in full swing, American economic growth was at its highest in the 20th century (stats for earlier periods are harder to estimate, though long-term data series such as those collected by Angus Maddison might show this -- and the railroad and industrialization booms of the 1840s and 1880s were likely close). The US was the world's largest producer of oil (though it had just begun importing from Saudi Arabia), and it had essentially no rivals for industrial production (Europe and Japan had been seriously damaged by the war and were rebuilding, Korea and China wouldn't emerge for decades).

The Korean War was in the 1950s

For three years, 1950-1953. The US's troop commitment was 300,000. That compares with 16 million US troops in WWII. Fatalities alone were nearly as much as the Korean War deployment at 292,000. Korea was significant, but much less significant.

and Jim Crow was in full swing.

And starting to crack. Though it peaked in the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement had its roots in the 1950s, particularly the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. No, it wasn't great, and there's still a huge amount of inequity, but things were finally starting to change.

And yes, there's a reason Nina Simone (and many others) left for France. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBiAtwQZnHs

Life expectancy was much lower.

Not all that much especially when compared with improvements over the prior 50-100 years. Life expectancy at birth was about 66 years in 1951 for white males, 72 for women, vs. 75 and 80 years in 2004. That compares with 38 and 40 in 1850. The biggest single-decade jump for men was between 1911 and 1919 (six years), about the same for women. Much of that came from improved safety (particularly industrial conditions and automobiles), some in behavior and environment (decreased smoking, drinking, and air pollution). It was earlier advances in antiseptics, anesthesia, sanitation, waste disposal, food preservation, nutrition, and pharmaceuticals which accounted for the big jumps. For men, 1900 - 1950 saw an 18.08 year increase, 1950 - 2000 an 8.49 year increase.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

Just about any consumer good from today is clearly superior to the 1950s equivalent.

I'll grant increased capabilities, complexity, and decreased costs, though overengineering (or lack of corner-cutting) meant that many electrical and mechanical products were more durable then. There's also the question of just how much such advances impact on quality of life.
I don't pay much attention to these claims, but that being said I still remember testing the yellow-ish colors Google used to displayed their ads on the LCD display of the laptop I am typing this on by tweaking the angle and yes it can become close to white.
How to Utilize Christmas for SEO
Prodigies tend to receive a lot of encouragement and enabling.

Ying and yang, Too much nurturing can be toxic.
> Do Amish children do that by choice?

Yes, actually. During Rumspringa, they choose whether they want to be members.
The ads are not bad by themselves.
I actually have direct personal experience with both of his "extremes" -- I worked in the office he described as "gray" from 2008 to 2011, and I've been working in various Google offices ever since.

There's really not that much of a gap between the two.
Depends, do you value the degree more or the education?
Google is by no means a 100% perfect actor but some of your claims found their way into tinfoil territory. And no, fraud does not account for most of Google's income. Google is a public company and you are more than welcome to review those figures yourself.

And in my limited experience at Google, I found that most people are very prideful about what they are doing. It's just unfortunate that most things Google are doing revolve around, in the end, advertising impressions.
Interesting that this is posted to HN - software developers in the US currently have historically abnormally high levels of bargaining power and leverage.
I would contend that advertising, marketing, and consumerism are not noble causes for humanity, and engineers who devote their lifespan to enabling such things are wasting their precious allotment of time. Google's revenue driver is putting products in front of eyeballs. Imagine a world in which such a thing was not a market.

Yes, you need awareness of products for people to buy said products. I get that. But no, you don't need to do data analysis on my browsing and search habits to come up with the most effective product to show me to increase the chances of me buying it. Spreading the word about a product is one thing. Treating the human being as a means to a sale, optimizing accordingly, and creating a market for "data" is another. That anybody on planet Earth would consider my shopping habits worthy of purchase just boggles me, and that I am not even consulted in most cases about analysis and sales of such data taking place is just the icing on the cake.

It says something that I pay Comcast $100/month+ for entertainment and I am still shown advertisements for a third (or more) of every hour. I pay for the privilege of being shown new cars. Repeatedly. Black Friday comes to mind, too, as another example of the feedback loop losing control of itself.

To be clear, things are not bad. Our consumer culture is a little bit out of hand, and I'd rather devote my remaining years to producing something of actual value instead of imaginary marketing value. To that end, that Google let me go was in fact a blessing in disguise, and I just hadn't realized it yet.
It's not just a full scholarship, but a full scholarship plus a salary!
I understand that you might feel insulted at the thought that you're degree might have been all in vain, your experience at your school might have been special but as you've said it yourself, experience simply cannot be taught. School may hold lab sessions where you complete assignments "applying" which in some shape or form require you to recall facts transferred to you either through your faculty staff or books, and are told to understand, but with constraints set in place to evaluate you on a quantitative model among with the rest of your peers so that they may decide who is the top 10% vs the 90%.

The real world does not work like this, and often I find that academia prepares you for a world that doesn't behave or exist like the ones described through courses and lectures which are only aimed at grading and evaluating on some set of criteria. It's not necessarily an accurate meter of how you will adapt your knowledge and skills in the real world, I belive Nassim Taleb mentions the concept of 'empty suits', or so called experts who focus entirely on a constructed model of the world they are absolutely convinced will not change with lack of accounting for black swan events (an event that is unexpected and debunks a widely accepted belief, for example swans were thought to be white until the discover of black swans in Oceania) and basically the society attributes an irrational amount of trust and credit in those that have gone to the best of the schools in the best of what they do, not necessarily based on the inevitable nature of change (earth was flat, now it's round) upon random discovery that challenges what we've accepted as "facts".

It's a question of realizing you are being taught how to think and what to think by the institution that measures efficiency on a normal curve, instead of discovering the process and the target yourself.

Now of course, university life is much bigger than just lectures and learning, you meet so many interesting people, you learn that there are more questions than answers, and I think that is the best part. Maybe if you've gone to an Ivy League, you will find yourself surrounded with individuals of influential and powerful families which you can expand your social circle for future business and collaboration and that is all the more reason to go to one, but then I question the ability of someone with middle or lower class status to be genuinely accepted amongst those that have it all already.
There's open space and then there's open space. If there are cube walls and other de facto barriers separating my space from the space of others in my team, and higher walls separating my team's space from the rest of the company, I'm happy. But if I have to choose from one extreme or another, I'd rather have my own separate space with an office and a door that closes rather than sitting at a conference table elbow to elbow with a sales guy who spends all day on the phone.
I sent an e-mail asking what the major was. Never got a response.
Dr. Washington (one of the authors, I believe the other was a grad student of his) seems to be a really decent guy and cares a lot about teaching. He goes to middle and high schools fairly regularly to introduce kids on these topics.

That concern is reflected in the textbook and his course. It's a very approachable treatment and it seems like a lot of emphasis is placed on making it fun.

The downside to a math listed CS crypto course (as it is where Washington teaches) is that there may be less emphasis on flaws that occur in actual real word implementations. A professor in the CS department also teaches crypto at Maryland and actually uses a different book (one he wrote). My understanding is that there is a bit more attention paid to implementation there, but that's coming second-hand.
I'll give you my honest suggestion? Do not waste 4 months learning the language. Just let her go to work. At work, she will interact with all kinds of people which effectively exposes her to the language. That way she will learn the language more quickly and naturally rather than coaching or lessons or whatever.

I live in Saudi Arabia and as a non Arab I had a very difficult time speaking Arabic. I too spent a lot of time trying to learn the language before hand but it's nowhere effective to what you learn in a real situation with people.
IMO it depends on which kind.
I find it a disgusting abuse to expect people to work for no money, even it is called voluntary over time. From what I can tell, its part time slavery. Such employees give this time essentially out of fear. Its a coercion. One reason slaves didnt escape was fear. Same for such employees. No, obviously not on the same level, but the principle is exactly the same.

As I have said several times before; the day I can require and expect my employer to hand out free money on demand, because times are hard for me, or what ever excuse, is the day I give them free time.

Go on, try it. Ask your employer for some money for nothing. Tell the economy is tanking and times are hard for your family. See if they write a cheque.
We haven't finished figuring out how to sort out the mess that was the colonizing of New Zealand yet, but once we have worked through that, it might be useful to refer to when sorting out the earlier messes that the Empire (and earlier rulers) created!
LimeJS HTML5 game framework
plus extortion fees to not drop out after your face is squarely associated with the name amongst the schools staff. also, i think an NDA in this scenario is moot.
There is also the networking, the impersonator will be the one making friends at harvard. After that he only needs to say that he dropped out and doesn't have the tittle, but the conections are there.
Because the bound is unknown, and unspecified.

I agree that the market tends to price some sort of risk. However, the discussion was "ownership vs rent", with the consensus beIng the cost should be equivalent under some measure; however, some expect it to be cashflow neutral, some inflation neutral, and some risk neutral. Of these, the first two can be quantified but the last cannot - and it is therefore not useful in the discussion of whether the prices make sense.

After more than 100 years of discussion, there is still no consensus among economists over whether one should maximize expected value or expected logarithmic value.

People often mention use "on a risk adjusted basis" without qualifying the adjustment - and that's a useless thing to do.
What are you looking to get out of the program?

Ruby on Rails is often taught because it is one of the most in-demand skills in tech startups (other skills would be frontend skills, iOS, data science) - this applies to Silicon Valley, NY, and possibly Austin (not too familiar with Austin's tech scene). Many startups use Python, Java, or C#, (popularity in that order), but it's a drastically smaller number. Big tech corps are a different matter, but coding programs don't really target them.

The location the program is in matters quite a bit and can influence your ability to get a job in a certain location.

I'm somewhat familiar with these programs. If you provided an email in your profile we could talk about it more.
My personal favorite passage (no comment on HN's favorite obsessions at all)

"GUIs are useful. Spell-checkers are useful. I’m glad that people are working on new kinds of bouncing icons because they believe that humanity has solved cancer and homelessness and now lives in a consequence-free world of immersive sprites. That’s exciting, and I wish that I could join those people in the 27th century."
Any family they haven't brought along are doomed anyway.
Haha, what a dumbass. In four years his impostor will have built enough trust with the administration to victimize himself and take credit for the degree. And this guy will be out 160k (no 10k bonus though! Phew... )

Hilarious, typical Harvard.
Listen to music she loves along with the lyrics. I learned Brazilian Portuguese just like that.
there is a lot of inside story that isn't public. Suffice to say, the bugs were DOA.