skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with your overarching point here, that a broken machine or account shouldn't need to have the customer call or email a support line to get it fixed, and that customer support tends to suck -- especially any sort of support we would expect for 'free'.

However, we are not straddling a line between "customer has to file a complaint to get things fixed" and "things are fixed automatically", where the superior option is automatic fixes and no customer involvement. We are between "customer has the ability to file a complaint, because things don't get fixed on their own" and "customer is forced to call a great deal of public attention to themselves in order to get Google to notice or care, and hopefully fix things", where the superior option (in my mind) is the ability to file a formal complaint which actually gets a response.

Particularly in a case like this, where there is no machine failure or error, but instead a calculated judgement to terminate a user's account with no clear reasoning provided, just some vague "risk" they present to advertisers, I feel that some accountability needs to be had.

Most egregiously, this case raises a serious question of Conflict of Interest. By pulling advertising to an open source project which 'competes' with some of Google's (and their affiliates'/advertisers') products, and being absolutely opaque about their reasoning, Google risks coming off as anticompetitive and ruthless - running some of the little guys out of town by cutting off a funding source. If that was at all part of their motive or reasoning, it absolutely was 'evil'.

If they would just provide clear reasoning, a reasonable degree of transparency, and some form of complaint system where you at least have a chance of hearing back, a lot of negative sentiment wouldn't be coming their way. It's clear that the PR/damage control response isn't carrying the same sway it used to, and also that it was never a special interaction, just visible end users being quieted down to save face.
Fascinating article. But they didn't mention the obvious economic reason why placebo effects have been shunned or suppressed: placebos are free.

If the pharmaceutical industry gets clever about finding ways to make money off the placebo effect, as opposed to getting more devious about pushing drugs into people, that seems to me a good thing.
Behind the Typedia Logo Design
New meth formula avoids anti-drug laws
Nickb != [dead]
The current economic situation has left quite a few talented, experienced hackers in the job market. Those of us who are hiring can really benefit from harvesting this talent pool. From the outside looking in, it seems like Facebook is already overstaffed, but I suppose they should take advantage of the situation and suck up all the talent.

I just hope they hire someone who can make their chat feature actually work.
Not to get into corporate personage, but corporations can still be benevolent or malevolent, friendly or hostile. I don't know if I'd call Apple friendly - they're a bit aloof to be friends - but a company like Pixar I'd readily call a friend.
The problem is when you publish to the app store, you are - in essence - partnering with Apple and I'd imagine you would examine any partnership before consenting to it.

Furthermore, there are real liability issues here for Apple. To assume they blindly publish anything that comes their way puts them at pretty serious risk.

Due to the way the app store is structured, the review process is required. That said, judging for content versus judging for bad code are entirely different things and I personally don't think Apple should be incorporating content vetting into their process.

Finally, Apple should provide the ability for third parties to supply applications outside of the App Store ecosphere. I've said it before, but it makes no sense to me that the iPhone is treated any differently than a laptop when the only massive difference between the two is the 3G chip and access to the cellular network. Could you imagine your laptop locked down in that way? It wouldn't sell. So why the disconnect with the iPhone? I don't know.
If Prozac couldn't beat placebos now

If I understand recent findings correctly, it's not that Prozac can't beat placebos now; it never beat placebos and the studies showing this were simply suppressed. (I just posted about this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=784271).
Ask HN: development for GPS?
With the surge of cell phone apps for iphone, android, palm pre, there are a lot of different things that you can do, but require an accurate location.

Before starting the actual development for an Android app, I assumed that GPS is reliable and fast. I have since found out that there are major issues to get an accurate location (like it usually takes a minute or two to find the first location, and in certain places it doesn't work that well).

I've read the explanation for how gps is supposed to work, but is there a good manual for how it works in the wild? Stuff I'm curious about:

- how do you increase the accuracy, decrease the time? trade offs between constant polling / battery life, etc.
- how do AGPS, differential GPS, enhanced GPS, and other assistive GPS technologies compare, (including cost, if necessary)
- what are the alternatives, and how well they work (is it possible to do triangulation from cell phone towers?), use wifi information?
Travel Buddy
this is the ultimate question my friend !
what is anybody's reason for living (purpose of life) ?

i read an interesting book on the same theme: siddhartha(herman hesse)

"I long ago gave up trying to find external purpose in life."
this is golden . thanks.
Environment? Xcode. Editor? Vim.
This could be really bad: More people using them.

It could also be really good (well better in some ways anyway): No more external issues of money, and crime, that are associated with this.
There really are some great entries this year. I particularly like the implementation for "Hi, I'm" and "Table Surfing". This is our effort: http://decafsucks.com/. A site for finding and review cafés.
Breast Serum - Make Your Breast Beautiful & Firmed
Deep penetrating liposome and the intense ingredients, help your breast firmed up within a short period of time. You can feel the diffierence within 2 weeks and Effective prodcut for enhancing cup size.
Y Combinator - Startup Library as Single pdf (12 MB)
And what do you do, if by chance, it happens that one protection agency dominates and the others recede. What if the remaining one starts forcing you to pay its premiums, and calls itself the "government"?
Looks like Stack Overflow risks the same descent in to mediocrity that plagued Yahoo! Answers. This is the problem with points systems: people will game them, often to the detriment of the site. None of these tips involve actually providing a good, useful answers. Compare with Ask MetaFilter, which provides excellent quality with hardly any game mechanic - instead using community norms to keep the quality high.
"Friendly" is distinctly different from "a friend."

a company like Pixar I'd readily call a friend.

I love Pixar, but they're not my friend, and they're not your friend, for at least three reasons:

1. Pixar, like all public companies, exists for one purpose: to make a profit. In fact, they have a fiduciary responsibility to their owners to pursue this purpose and if they don't, they can be sued.

2. Pixar is an organization made up of thousands of people. It's impossible for a group that's made up of thousands of conscious and self-determinant humans to be your friend. You might as well say that North Dakota is your friend.

3. Pixar does not know who you are. They do not know your name, what kind of ice cream you like, or why you enjoy riding a bicycle built for two. And to the extent that they do have any of this knowledge, it's referred to as data and is used in pursuit of the goals described in #1.

Pixar is not your friend.
Lie Down Computer Workstations
Or maybe they should have a feature in TrueCrypt to allow "Fake Keys". You use your actual keys to unlock your data. You use fake keys to see pics of britney spears
"Basically make sure that something 'good' happens in your video at 52 seconds and at 2 minutes 38 seconds."

What??

Either this post was written satirically, or the author lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the concepts of average and causality.
>If it was merely an issue of "someone who cares about [the patients]" then we'd expect that the actual drugs would benefit from the same effect too.

Great point, this could completely sink my theory. Two arguments though:

1) If the placebo was less effective than the drug and they both gained the same amount of efficacy, then mathematically the placebo is now more effective relative to the medication.

2) It doesn't seem possible to really debunk my theory without taking a look at how patients are recruited for experimental drug studies, as I can imagine the standard procedure being such that my theory would still hold. but I don't know enough about this to say much offhand.

Anyway I'm not going for a Nobel prize in science, but if I were then this is still what I'd bet on.

edit: I wonder if watching funny movies has become more effective over time. This would be an interesting preliminary test.
Bill Gurley: What Is Really Happening to the Venture Capital Industry?
If there was no review process and people were distributing kiddie porn apps, could Apple be held legally responsible?

I'd imagine not any more than Microsoft is held liable when a crime is committed by a Windows user.
The worst time to join a startup is right after it gets initial VC financing
Not at all. The research continues, but instead the the application focus has shifted.

What you are describing is Artificial Consciousness, this is great and all, but the practical applications aren't many compared to regular AI related research. Things like optimizing various designs, automated <insert some activity>, natural language processing, image recognition, etc.
Money is fungible. Looks, friends, sex, and even kidneys, are not.
Well if that feature is well know, that defeats the purpose. It will only work if you roll your own implementation of it (security through obscurity a bit).
In the long term, Facebook's current product probably wont matter too much in terms of monetary success. All that is important is that Facebook is popular enough right now to corner part of the talent market. I would imagine that once you have X number of skilled hackers at your company, your chance in succeeding in any business venture go way up. The way I see it, Facebook just wants to higher the superstars right now and they expect the money to follow later. Google did a similar thing (although Google had a clearer path to monetization).
There's nothing good about meth, period. I'm all about letting people do what they want in private, but meth is scary shit. Legalizing it would be like letting people own rocket launchers.
Fantastic. Now we can buy real cold medicine again, right? Presumably right after we're allowed to carry water onto airplanes.
Here is what seems to have happened: Note that whenever the answer is not accurate, Google uses scientific notation. For example, 1e15 + 30 = 1.0 × 10^15. We accept this as true because Google only claims it is true to two sig figs.

However, in this case, Google means to say 0.0 × 10^15, indicating two sig figs of accuracy. Google's mistake is probably that the internal notation used does not allow it to distinguish between "0" and "0.0 x 10^15", and so it does not report that the result is only accurate to two sig figs as it should.

So, if Google somehow reports the "zero" result in scientific notation with two sig figs, then it will be consistent with the rest of their calculator and clear that it may not be an accurate result.
I think achievements work because they satisfy our inner magpie. It's the same reason "complete collections" are more valuable than merely "greatest hits". The extra items that make the collection "complete" may suck, but, by God, you can check ALL the boxes on the list.

When I play a game with extensive achievements, the game is always fun right up until I complete the last one on the list. At that point, I almost totally lose interest. I have tried to fight that, to the point of avoiding some achievements so the character doesn't feel "done"... but it's hard. As expected, merely starting a different character can make all the achievements seem worth it again (because the checkboxes are once again empty), even though I have already done them all before.
I was thinking the same thing. It'd be really nice to get some of true crypt's functionality worked into the more popular Linux distributions. Full disk encryption is dead simple, but I'm not familiar with efforts to include more sophisticated crpyto functionality. Anyone care to enlighten me?
I want to be like McGrath: Broad
Good to see that he's back. No more details needed than that. :-)
MySpace is in the black, and has been there quite a while. People tend to forget that.
I find that I work best when I know I'm being compensated well, and can just forget about it and get to my job.

Salaries should be fair, based on market value, and completely out in the open. I don't understand the absurd secrecy and awkwardness around compensation, culminating in the unholy obscenity of the yearly performance review. You make what you make because that's what it takes to keep you there. If you don't love it, leave. If you're not happy with the money, get another offer. Apart from that, your work should be what motivates you, not the paycheck.

The Netflix culture slides captured my feelings on the topic well: http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664 If I ever go to another BDC after Yahoo, it'd probably be Netflix.
I noticed that once I got used to drinking diet sodas, the regular stuff started feeling too syrupy and tasted way too sweet.

And although this may just be me, but I haven't noticed any correlation between the frequency and strength of my sugar cravings based on whether or not I've been drinking diet soda.
I suppose. I see more than a few dozen ways that Facebook could launch game changing monetization methods in the past several years and have let them all slip through their fingers.

And then, of course, you see the posts at Valleywag and ATD showing them doing little more than playing ping-pong and video games all day, and I'm left wondering if this talent grab ploy over there isn't just turning good coders into good slackers.

I'm not saying FB's a titanic, but they do an awful lot of deck-chair re-arranging there, it seems like.
Roget’s Hierarchical Thesaurus in a Silverlight App
I'm going to keep my fingers crossed for "search as you type" across all Google properties. This has got to happen...someday...right?
WARNING: Java applet!

CPU usage shot up and my browser froze.
How is reputation different from praise? Isn't reputation one of the main motivators for participation on Free and Open Source software? Also, if we look at sites like perlmonks, stackoverflow, slashdot, reddit etc, karma they are all about points and levels.
I think it's pretty unlikely that Facebook missed dozens of game changing monetization methods. They've got very smart people working there, and even if all Facebook execs had zero business sense, their VCs have plenty of access to people with that kind of experience.

Also, Valleywag is not a very reliable news source.

EDIT: Toned down my post, sorry I was being obnoxious.
This has nothing to do with liability-- they take on much MORE liability by reviewing than just being an open platform. It has more to do with stopping any applications that threaten revenue in any way-- and while you could have some kind of app recall process for violaters, since there is no standard it gets even more messy. They made their bed and now they can die in it for all I care. Someday, in our rocking chairs, we'll fondly remember the "good ol days" of open software under microsoft. Phhht.

Thank goodness for android... really good devices are only now hitting the market and honestly android apps will catch up very quickly. The reality is that probably only 100 apps account for 95% of all ihpone app usage. In the long tail there are a lot more java developers out there than OjC.

HTC Hero drops in a couple weeks. Nice.
Throwing warm bodies at a company just because is a sure way to fail. See any number of failed companies full of really-smart-people. Even thinking machines failed, and they had Richard Feynman.

Facebook has grown large enough now that engineering is not their most difficult task - that's a solved problem now.
Now staying useful without becoming a slow, bloated stupid company is their biggest challenge.

See myspace for an example of exactly how not to do this.
Except, rocket launchers are for shooting at other people.

Meth is mostly about self destruction. Granted, tweakers tend to be dicks, but still, your analogy is just a little bit hyperbolic. We should all have the right to destroy ourselves however we see fit.

Also, wtf? You're telling me I can't have a rocket launcher now!?
The only advice that really worries me is the advice to downvote competing answers. Getting votes for providing quick answers that you then refine is not a bad thing. But I think Jeff and the team may need to prevent people who've answered already from downvoting other answers, otherwise you could be right.
I've been using Outlook 2007 since it launched. It is incredibly quick... when it works. I frequently find that I can be LOOKING AT THE EMAIL I WANT. Then type a phrase that I am staring at, and not have that email appear in the results. Never mind that sometimes it will randomly start taking 60 seconds or more to return results until you restart the program.
When you have .net, you need to market your site with .net on it, else all the traffic meant for you is going to go to .com.
Perfect example is Box.net - they have made .net as part of the branding.
As always, ED tells the horrible truth: http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Yahoo!_Answers#How_to_Play
Well look, its pretty obvious that people who are successful didn't learn most of the skills they use in college. Thats not the claim that is being made though.

The claim is that going to college somehow increases your chances of being successful. I.e. that it sets you on the right path to becoming successful. How could this be? Could be that it teaches you something useful (problem solving, the ability to power through difficult assignments, etc...) that is necessary in a lot of jobs.

I worked for a company before where they didn't necessarily hire people with CS degrees or backgrounds. They just hired smart people and taught them what was necessary. Some people would claim that these people were smart enough to do this because of their college education.

Note: I'm not necessarily sure that college does make you smarter in a relevant way. As has been pointed out, most of the studies have bad methodology and anecdotal evidence is not sufficient to prove a point. So all we can do here is lay out theories .
Slickedit by far, if you dabble in more than one language. I don't use it currently because of its expensive license ~300$, but it wins in sheer power and features as a beefed up text editor.
Perhaps I am misinformed, but it's my impression that MySpace never recruited talent on the level that Facebook has been able to do.

You do make an excellent point about how intelligence is not enough to succeed, however Facebook has already demonstrated its ability to penetrate and hold a large portion of an incredibly large market. This, along with the high quality software they've released publicly, gives me enough confidence in their ability to succeed. It's true that Thinking Machines achieved a large market share in supercomputers, but it's my understanding that this was largely because of the fact that DARPA made Thinking Machines their biggest client for a long time. When DARPA started to spread out their orders, Thinking Machines went bankrupt. Facebook has been able to capture market share on its own.
How does it defeat the purpose? If an encrypted volume can have any number of stored "divisions," each with a different key, how can they prove that you're holding out on them once you've given them N keys? They know there's a possibility that you may have something extra hidden in the file, but that's not the same thing at all as knowing that there's definitely a file that you refuse to decrypt.
I stopped buying cold and flu mixtures when they decided to substitute pseudo-ephedrine with whatever that useless placebo is that they use now.
This is a horrifying suggestion. An individual donor at an aid agency meeting said something similar where a cost effective healthcare alternative was being developed in sub-Saharan Africa. His question was "what if you're successful? won't having more people damage the environment?"

The rest of us in the room were stunned - this man explicitly valued the environment over human life. You make a similar mistake in attempting to smite a symptom. Poverty is never caused by the lack of resources - or the related overblown fears of overpopulation (look up why oil is often called the Devil's excrement where it's discovered particularly in the developing world). It's bad governments - prior and/or current. High birth rates drop dramatically after a society industrializes.

What makes the suggestion repulsive (as much as it is unequivocally absurd) is that instead trying to alleviate suffering and addressing the root causes of absolute poverty, you're effectively starving and forcing deeply impoverished people who are in no position to deny food to accept sterilization.

If you're reading HN, you've already hit a genetic jackpot having the opportunities that most of the world will never have. Not only would this be a slippery slope (if you accept forced sterilizations for the "greater good", why not deny needed medical drugs and treatments or worse?), it's an unnecessary slope. So instead of trying to provide the poor with economic opportunities you'd provide them with sterility?
We should all have the right to destroy ourselves however we see fit.

I definitely agree with you on this point, however exclusive self destruction is not possible in the vast majority of cases. Anyone that is financially or emotionally dependent on an addict experiences some destruction when they destroy themselves. If there is anyone that has no connections to family, friends, companies, or country, I agree, they should be allowed to do meth. I don't think there is anyone like this though. ;-)
Only slightly hyperbolic. As someone who's spent more time than he'd care to admit in East Texas (a major manufacturing and distribution center for illegal meth), people that make this stuff do it in their homes, and eventually tweak out and blow up the neighborhood. It happens a lot more than you'd think...

... not to mention, habitual usage doesn't exactly lead to safe behavior, which is inflicted on others.

I'm not a drug regulation advocate, but it's important not to paint Meth as a victimless drug. The first target may be yourself when you use it, but the collateral damage is not insubstantial.

A better analogy than a rocket launcher might be hand grenades, if we're sticking to small armaments as the analogy.
Well, they're certainly a detriment psychologically. How can something ugly be healthy?

Here you go.

http://www.amazon.com/Aesthetics-Well-Being-Health-Architect...

(Review was one of the first results on Google for "environmental aesthetics affecting health"... Did you research this question before you posed it?)
Hmm...that doesn't seem to be a fair analogy, though. It's not just that Apple is providing the OS that runs the software, they're actually distributing it. A better analogy might be Walmart allowing anyone to come into their stores and put stuff on their shelves to be sold on their behalf. I doubt that Walmart would be legally safe once drug dealers, prostitutes, and illegal arms dealers starting piling their wares in their stores.