skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just wish Apple would just post some real guidelines about what think about this general tactic. In the absence of that, I'd love to hear some stories from developers who've done this and gotten their apps approved/ rejected.
Unless there is a contractual clause saying that google employees shall have no services provided to them from another company (and from the word "forces" I assume there is not), google should not have forced this employee. Insecurity is not a hallmark of a genuinely better company.
Check out his other videos on Vimeo for stuff he's been trying out with cosines & inverse Fourier transforms.
> However one must be quite civilized and have high quality of life and standard of living to exercise altruism.

Not necessarily. There are plenty of people that have nothing that still devote time/money into helping others before themselves.

I hate to reference the Bible, but there was a parable in there about a woman donating 2 cents to the poor verses wealthy men donating piles of money (I think this was 'bags of silver pieces or something like that). She gave more than they did if you consider the percentage of their total assets/worth that was donated.
You forgot race condition :-P
Can someone in the know explain how scheduling works? And whether pharma incentives affect the process?
Seconded for the first paragraph of this comment. No comment on the second one.
Boston Area Big Data Summit, October 22, 2009
The title of the article is "Rational Irrationality" and not letting the system to crash now, seems to me (and to many others) very irrational.

"too big to fail" syntagm does not look good either to the author of the article, in the end he says:

"As memories of September, 2008, fade, many will say that the Great Crunch wasn’t so bad, after all, and skip over the vast government intervention that prevented a much, much worse outcome. Incentives for excessive risk-taking will revive, and so will the lobbying power of banks and other financial firms." ... "The next time the structure starts to lurch and sway, it could all fall down."

Bailing out big companies is not capitalism as we learned about it. And the bottom line is it hasn't crashed now, the governments did not let it crash. Whether this is good or bad, I guess we will see in the future.
Heh, I'm amused by the term "Mountain View Chocolate Factory" -- but where's Charlie?
Well yes but I think it has more to do with the incentives that are placed before people. As an organization gets larger it gets harder to tell who really contributes what. It also gets harder to socially police people who are attempting to game the system. If some people are successful gaming the system others are incentivized to do so as well. It can be easy to label a sub-optimal outcome as bad management but those managers usually aren't dumb. They usually have perfectly rational reasons for the things they do - it's just not what the policy designers had in mind.
Hive is a pretty sweet project and also super useful.
The author of the article almost alludes to this when they write:

>Consider the freeze that started in August of 2007. Each bank was adopting a prudent course by turning away questionable borrowers and holding on to its capital. But the results were mutually ruinous: once credit stopped flowing, many financial firms—the banks included—were forced to sell off assets in order to raise cash. This round of selling caused stocks, bonds, and other assets to decline in value, which generated a new round of losses.

We might be less crash-prone if we had system that didn't crash when the growth of the money supply was interrupted. It seems like it's not just maintaining the current level of credit is necessary for stability, but the indefinite exponential expansion of credit is necessary to stave off problems.
> We have a desire to promote the success of those with our genes, but discrimination is forbidden.

How so? Am I not allowed to be a white male that exclusively dates white females? Is there affirmative action for dating/mating now?

Discrimination is forbidden in ways that have nothing to do with genes and evolution. Do you really think that the KKK was all about 'promoting better genes?' In modern times, they may have convinced themselves of this but it is bunk science. Neo-Nazies, skinheads, KKK members, all of them discriminate against others, not because they want to 'get rid of others to promote their genes.'

And you say 'those with our genes,' but that normally means one's offspring. Even within the same 'tribes,' preference is given to one's offspring above all else.

This has more to do with human nature to want to join a community and exclude others, which is closer to our warring nature than anything to do with procreation.
I have to dig further into what happened there. It should be fixed now though, I've tested through several options.
RentHop (YC S09) Video Pitch on Reuters
If your team finds it genuinely useful, it means you haven't conveyed the mental model correctly to your users. Have you tried sitting strangers in front of the software and seeing how they use it? Iterate on the interaction design until you find that it clicks in face to face testing.
If you spend that long with a tool, you certainly push out and find the weaknesses
Turns out, being sarcastic is hard. Wasn't trying to start a flame war, just making a simple snarky comment.
I'm a Teacher's Assistant for it. It means I teach recitation, answer questions, and grade stuff.
Interesting idea. Thanks!
"-There is a great need for sarcasm font."
- http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/9lo59/random_thoughts...
Did anyone else catch that guy's name? Ah Skeet!
I would! I can't speak for anyone else, though.
Really? I heard that no summer Olympics in history had ever made money except for 1984.

I expect it's one of those creative accounting things where you can come up with pretty much any number you like.
You're correct. I think they described this process in the documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room" . I remember in interviewers with traders there that this was one pretty motivating factor for a lot of the corners that were cut at the company.
I don't see what's different about this and, say, the Minnesota Vikings asking Brett Favre not to wear a Packers hat.
doesn't say he was forced to just suggested. If he didn't want them to say "no" he shouldn't have asked.
Great points!

I understand the dislike for "jocks vs. nerds" theater, however:

a) It's more immediate than dreamers vs. realists. Everyone can relate to jocks vs. nerds , even if it ticks them off (as in your case). Doesn't PG have several essays breaking down the jocks vs. nerds divide?

b) That's my read on the situation, having hosted dozens and dozens of debates about the Olympics over on my site, WindyCitizen.com. The whole jocks v. nerds angle actually originated in a thread over there. A few local bloggers picked up on it, which got me thinking about it as a great way to explain why both sides could say so much and yet hear so little.

c) It's funny. If you don't find it funny, that's perfectly fine. I and the editors there were busting up about it when I pitched it to them. Extending the metaphor out to include Obama was too perfect. Learning the head of the bid committee is part owner of the Chicago Bears made my day.

Thank you for reading the piece. I respect and understand it wasn't your cup of tea and thank you for telling me so on here.
Top of page: "If you like this interview, vote for it on news.ycombinator.com --Andrew"
The book is about developing Web Apps (tailored/optimized for the iPhone) and so no approval process is required.

Edit:

Please see my reply to the comment below.

Also, this is from the preface of the book:

Fortunately, there is an alternative. You can build a web app using open source, standards based web technologies (jQuery and jQTouch, in particular), release it as a web app, and debug and test it under load with real users. Once you are ready to rock, you can use PhoneGap to convert your web app to a native iPhone app and submit to the App Store. If it is ultimately rejected, you aren’t dead in your tracks because you can still offer the web app. If it is approved, great! You can then start adding features that enhance your web app by taking advantage of the unique hardware features available on the device. Sounds like the best of both worlds, right?

So, the step to wrap your app with something like PhoneGap is only needed if you want to sell your app on the AppStore. You can try to submit and then, if it is approved, you may add more hardware dependant features (which aren't covered at all by this book).
Folder Printing Needs Your Perfection And Precision
motorcycles are not covered, not self balanced, and not useful for all weather conditions. something like car - a covered one.
"Rule #6 If you want to be a CEO, get close to other CEOs"

I came to this same conclusion the last time I was job seeking and it was a critical decision factor for me, coming from a larger company where I had little contact with any decision makers. The job I wound up taking was the one where the CEO met me for coffee to discuss what the company was all about.

That CEO who met me for coffee was Ben Huh. Working at Cheezburger has been one of the most satisfying jobs I have ever had.
The IOC specifically asked the Chicago bid team about this last night during the Q & A following their presentation. The Chicago team was asked if its country would improve its accessibility to the international community.

The heads of the Chicago bid deferred to Obama, who they were fortunate to have in the room. The president's response, IIRC was "I know there's been a problem with this with previous administrations. I will make sure it's not an issue this time around. We see the games as an opportunity to return to being a friend to the world."

So it very much was on the minds of the IOC. Good catch.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=858150
Jon Skeet also has the highest rep of any user on stackoverflow:
http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656
Something went horribly awry with my primitive number parsing system. It should be patched up for now, I'll have to go through in detail later and make sure there aren't any holes.
YUI Mac Like Style Desktop
It says "Hook into advanced iPhone features (e.g. accelerometer, geolocation, vibration, and sound) with JavaScript".

You can do that via Javascript running through an app (Phonegap is great for this), but can't do that via a web app.
I bet John's lawyer suggested he pull down the message. Either that or the other guy wrestled control of the site back.
You can't just disagree with something by saying "Wow".
But they will throw out those billionaires that arrive on their own jet.
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/43

Remember HN readers you can't enter the US under visa waiver in your own Learjet, but we all knew that didn't we?
I like this. Too many times I find that if I put off a project once it starts to get pushed off indefinitely until I sort of give up on it.

Persistence will get you further than intelligence or luck.
Funnily enough, Enron had the same system where if you scored towards the bottom you were quickly shown the door. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,129988,00.h...

Of course, most big companies have a employing rating system, but Enron was different because 10-15 % people were asked to leave every year.
Why don't you use paren matching?
> It's more an ability to shrewdly calculate just how much you can take advantage of other people and get away with.

This assumes that the path to getting wealthy is "taking advantage of other people just how much you can get away with it" - it's not. Most wealth building are positive sum games.

Related:

http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html
It wasn't immediately clear to me how this actually works. After looking into it, I found what you'll probably be interested in:

...building a native app with Objective-C is a risky proposition.

Fortunately, there is an alternative. You can build a web app using open source, standards based web technologies (jQuery and jQTouch, in particular), release it as a web app, and debug and test it under load with real users. Once you are ready to rock, you can use PhoneGap to convert your web app to a native iPhone app and submit to the App Store. If it is ultimately rejected, you aren’t dead in your tracks because you can still offer the web app. If it is approved, great! You can then start adding features that enhance your web app by taking advantage of the unique hardware features available on the device...

The conversion is done by wrapping your web app inside a native app using WebKit.
I used to think exactly like you but I've changed my mind now. I think there's a world of difference between being a jerk and being rude and telling people the truth. Or rather, one doesn't have to be a jerk to call people out on their BS.

For example, Don Box (of SOAP, XML, etc fame) is the nicest guy you can meet. And he is super nice even when he is shredding people's arguments and seeing through their BS.

I have no idea how Zuckerberg is in person though and wouldn't judge him from articles. But in general, there is no reason to be unpleasant just to be brutally honest.
Heh, no it's not. That'll just get you marked a radical and summarily ignored by anyone with power. Not that I agree with that, but that's how things are.

The _real_ way to get software patents taken care of is, as with any other matter of public policy, to convince large swaths of major, consistent contributors to the campaigns of your incumbent representatives to press the issue.

This will probably be difficult because people with money want to do evil with these patents and they will just counter your pressure, though there is some hope that the big players will decide that software patents are too dangerous altogether if a few more injunctions like the one against the sale of Microsoft Word come out (see i4i v. Microsoft). But right now, Microsoft is trying to use its patents to neuter its open-source competitors, so they may value that too highly. We'll have to see!
Wow, it's hard to know where to begin with this post. It seems strange to me that you're trying to use Marx to justify a liberal position. After all, Marx would be the first to disagree with you about the feasibility of using the state to check the market. Marx saw the state as little more than the 'executive committee' of the bourgeoisie, so using the state to check the market is just not going to happen until revolution leads us out of the capitalist stage of history.

Your equation of evolution and capitalism has a nasty heritage of Social Darwinist thinking. I think it's a misunderstanding of both evolution and of capitalism. Better not to make such an analogy.

Monopolies, deception, fraud, slaves, and so on are not at all unique to capitalism and have been with humanity throughout history. There's no compelling reason to believe that capitalism favors these practices for rational or irrational reasons.

It's not clear why the government is the only institution in society that can avoid failure. It's moreover not clear that the government doesn't play a role in setting up failures as a consequence of its intervention. Marx (or Lenin at the least) would certainly hold that it's the state that creates the very phenomena like monopolies that you decry as "irrational."
It is perfectly reasonable for Google to discourage employees from entering into non-disclosure agreements with competitors.
What's advocated is the use of successful ideas and bits of design philosophy from P2P to build storage clouds out of unreliable commodity disk-heavy servers.

The slide deck is not intended for reading -- there will be video later.
Google is pretty nice to this guy, though, as it's clear from SO that he must not do very much work for them.
Gentlenerds, start your weekends!
send me an invite, and we can talk about something... drkrool-gmail
This is more like them asking him not to receive an honorary degree from the University of Wisconsin.
Not only that, but his status there is of a legend.

"Jon Skeet Facts" - http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/9134/jon-skeet-facts

Some of those are quite hilarious

Oh, and this site http://askjonskeet.com/
If your 30" display supports DisplayPort, you will soon be able to get a Mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable (http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=102...). Why it's taken this long, I do not know.
Ask HN: Data storage question
How would you store user-submitted tabular data if you didn't know the column data types of the submitted data prior to it being uploaded?

Note: The data must be able to be queried.

One idea is to convert each cell in the table of data into a row in a database that holds the value, data type, and position of the cell in the uploaded table.

Any other thoughts?
should be case 'boolean', not case 'bolean' in both places
Ah, yes, "suggested"
Regarding PhoneGap specifically, which the book seems geared toward, for a short period of time Apple believed, erroneously, that the iPhone PhoneGap code was exposing unapproved APIs to developers, and were rejecting apps that used the platform. At that time, I think some devs were obfuscating PhoneGap and submitting the same apps, which were approved, so even then Apple were not objecting to anything actually in the iPhone PhoneGap code.

Apple have been in touch with PhoneGap devs since and clarified the matter; there's a good blog post here regarding that:
http://nachbaur.com/blog/updates-on-apple-phonegap

Since then Apple have had a much more informed stance towards PhoneGap and have approved lots of apps using the framework (there's a list on the PhoneGap site).

*full disclosure - I work for Nitobi, who sponsor PhoneGap's development. Though the original link suggests using PhoneGap in its preface, there are competing platforms, such as Rhodes and Appcelerator, that also get through to the App Store.
The honorary degree doesn't include a contract.
It's like being a vassal. People can worry about contract this and contract that, but that's all a distraction from the feudal servitude that developers are under to their corporate lords.
prgmr.com does VPS's also, and you should be able to install FreeBSD on their VPS
I'm not sure why Google would care as they don't have a product competing with C#, although the two companies definitely compete in more and more areas. For Jon Skeet, the only thing he loses is the free software from Microsoft, as his reputation in the C# community right now is much higher than that of your average MVP.
I'm a big fan of Mixergy-- Andrew's interviews are terrific and from the perspective of aspiring entrepreneurs. Definitely a site that will be of interest to HN readers.
I used to work at blist (now called Socrata) where we had to solve this exact problem.

You could use a schema-less database - either a document store like CouchDB, or a schema-less table/column store like Cassandra or Tokyo Tyrant.

Or you could use a standard RDBMS and generate new tables on the fly. (This is what blist did when I worked there; I think they may have a different storage model now.) Or implement a column store or tuple store as a layer on top of the RDBMS, like Infobase:

http://openlibrary.org/about/tech
Most NPR stations I've listened to don't spend much time on local news. Instead, they play syndicated NPR or CPB-related programs. Same with the local TV news networks. Lots of time spent on entertainment and national stories, but very little time spent on local issues.

It's hard to tell if that's because there are no customers/advertisers or because it's too expensive to produce...

By crowd-sourcing the task, the cost equation is mostly out of the way for them to see how much of a market there is.
What is smart? There is no proper definition of smart so it's a pointless question. Many people seem to define "smart" as "good at making money" in which case of course the smart are getting richer. If you consider musical smarts, artistic smart, being a great teacher, carpenter, whatever.. very often those don't make any money, and yet I have met people who do each of those who are absolute geniuses.
You are absolutely right by saying that all patents should be treated the same. Now depending of the field, their effect may differ. In the pharmaceutical sector, they rise the price of medicine. In the food sector, they allow Monsanto to patent crops, herds, and then sue farmers for their not-even-transgenic goods. In big industries (with big players), it just wastes time and money through cross-licensing, and prevent new, small players to enter the market. In the software sector, it sets an atmosphere of paranoia, and prevent certain kind of free software to exist in some countries (H264 video encoding, for instance).

You are absolutely right when you say that the purpose of patents is to reward the risk takers. Except they actually don't —in my opinion. They tend to favour the big, established players, which cross-licence anyway, nullifying the incentives of patents.

Paul Graham himself basically said the same thing: you can't reasonably reject some kind of patent, and accept the others, if only because you can't set clear legal limits.

Needles to say, I'm against patents. All of them. Rick Falkvinge convinced me.
I must say this is pretty shitty thing to say about someone. A backhanded compliment at best.
I don't believe "rich" is a scalar, either.

When I look for a firm definition, it appears to be, in effect, accumulated wealth (however one might define it). However, especially in a taxation context, I hear it associated with, if not equated to, income. (Granted, this could merely be an artifact of a taxation system which relies heavily on taxing income).

Let's put that aside and use the "something people want" definition of wealth.

One can certainly convert to a scalar value (money) a particular form of wealth (asset) at a particular point in time (i.e. sell it). However, since the reverse is not true, (e.g. just because, if I had it, I could sell the Mona Lisa for $X does not mean there is a value of $Y for which I could buy it if I didn't have it), it seems safe to say they are of a different type.

Although that doesn't mean that wealth itself is not a scalar, I contend that any additional dimension, not bidirectionally convertible to a scalar does. Risk (e.g. that people will want an item more or less) is such a dimension. Inherent depreciation is another. Scarcity is, arguably, another.

Perhaps a more compelling situation is where a particular asset is worth more when concentrated, such as fissionable material or arable land. The former has what one could consider a sharp increase in value at "critical mass," whereas the latter increases more steadily due to economy of scale.

Perhaps "smart" is the same kind of non-scalar, but I'll let someone else exercise that conjecture.
Great product. Hard to find doing Google search though. Need to get it to show up when typing "Excel sql", "Excel query", "sql in excel", etc. etc. I think if you do your sales will rocket. Good luck and thanks for a great product
I think this is bad PR for Google but the fact that Microsoft makes MVPs sign non-disclosure agreements might be a contributing factor.

IANAL, but if it were me and I had been working on technologies for which there may be information that I potentially couldn't disclose to my day job, I would be worried about the conflicts that might result. For instance, if you are spending several days working around a bug in the OS and Microsoft gives you a pre-release version of a service pack that fixes that bug, would you continue to work on the work around or just tell your boss it's not worth the effort? As an employer, I'd be even more worried about a bogus lawsuit that might result.

Sometimes you can't have it all.
I usually refrain from making 'me too' comments, but sheesh, really, what a lousy remark to make.
If signing a contract is prohibited, do any Google employees have credit cards, bank accounts, or mortgages?