skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. I'm saying that it requires the awareness of how you could. E.g. Being an intelligent chemist necessarily implies that you could, say, build a bomb. You might never do it. And if you did, you might do it in as-ethical a way as possible. But you still need to know how to blow things up.

Similarly with business. You may never leverage that knowledge, but someone else might. And you need to know how to protect yourself from that.
Mad Scientist Page
oh please, it's facebook, not Google, their "cool" projects involve translating the site into pirate and latin languages.

+ with ~1000 employees, chances are you as a programmer are most likely doing mundane crap. The "extremely smart and focused" people don't take well to having to do bullshit projects.
I'm almost done with something that's basically that. probably will post it here in 1.5-2 weeks.
I do not work for Facebook, nor have I ever, but they do have some pretty neat things PHP-wise on their open source section of the site.

http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php

Particularly, Thrift is what they use to use PHP on the front end of the site to communicate to servers running C++ and Erlang environments. At least, thats what I've heard.
Good idea, already been done. My "Idea Graveyard.rtf" has an old link for that, if you're curious you can hunt down what happened to the content:

http://www.edwards.af.mil/archive/2002/2002-archive-new_inve...

I think the 747 actually has motors that spin the wheels up. The lateral slide is actually not a big issue, the landing gear on most larger aircraft are steerable to allow for that ("crab landing" I think it's called).

Another idea in the file right after that one was to put vacuum flasks into car engines to keep the fluids hot after the engine is turned off. In theory this would reduce emissions & engine wear by reducing the number of cold starts. Turns out the Prius has that already.

On the other hand a Boeing engineer came up with the idea of the little winglets you see on airliners now, Boeing passed on the idea so he took it outside and worked with a guy named Joe Clark. Their company (Aviation Partners) has done very well.

I think the takeaway is that as an outsider to one of these mature industries you may come up with new ideas but you're also at a significant disadvantage compared to insiders.
It could work.

What would need to happen in order for its viability is the host company needs to either own or have management over a number of residences. They would also have to have partner banks or provide the loans themselves.

It would work like this:

Company owns 250 homes in your target city. You get guaranteed for a mortgage with them in advance. Then you select from their properties one that you like. If the property does not fit your needs, you can transfer, after a year, to another one of the properties, with a small moving fee, to another home in the network.

Would take loads of money to accomplish but would be neat~!!!
my problem with the article was that the tone implied that most of these people weren't justified in not liking you, or that it was some natural effect of a bad situation, rather than something caused by your own actions.

The tone was due to a hurried write, as was the ham-fisted nature.

Of course from their end these people were completely justified in not liking me.

But also of course from my side it looks unjustified. How else could it look? From my angle, just like them, I've been acting rationally and with good intentions all along.
I can see the point of the writer; but at the same time, if I was double-full-screening, as shown in the post's screenshots, I would choose to hide the menu bar too! (For instance, I can double-full-screen terminals, and set the menu bar to auto-hide.)

If I'm not in pure full-screen mode, I actually find it distinctly un-Mac-like to force windows to use up every last pixel of space. That's kind of the point...the Mac's document-centered focus, ability to hide apps, use Exposé, and yes, menu bar, make it far easier to have 12 completely unrelated things open and use them effectively (compared to Windows and the Linux window managers I know about, anyway).

One tidbit people might not notice, is that the OS lets windows "stick" to the top of the screen; this works both under the menu bar and under the top "edge" of your 2nd display. So it's pretty easy to arrange windows anyway.
"So they wait until either a) through bucket testing they are sure it is a good idea or b) a competitor adds a feature that users seem to like or the press makes a big deal about. They don't want any new search engine to really get a foothold so they need to react to these competitive feature launches lest a new search engine actually starts getting used :)"

I think that is wrong, and it's pretty much just the first one. Google has the scale to multi-variate test most things very quickly, and is long-term enough in their thinking that they aren't pushing a product just because a few blogs read by .0000000008% of their users are drooling over it.

They come up with ideas (some of which may be copies of competitors' ideas) test the hell out of them, and push the ones that work. End of story. I'd be surprised if they are more than marginally aware there are competitors to their search product.

Seems highly unlikely they've got lots of features just waiting on a post from a rinky-dink tech blog to incite them to launch.
I thought you had a great comment, so I manually entered it.

My article had a lot of logic and tone problems which you pointed out. I thought readers of the blog should see your comments.

Let me know if this bugs you and I will remove it.
I would have loved to have that last week when I was in Baltimore and looking for a RJ-45 crimper. You might be able to convince store owners to enter their inventory if it then showed up in Google searches (it would drive more customers their way).
Yeah, when I saw that I had to check again to see if I was reading The Onion or something.
I was without a permanent address during the month of June and looked at doing this, but the overhead seemed way too much. Places were getting taken before I could snatch them up for short term stays, and even then most people wanted months.

If you do need to do this, the YMCA has a number of locations with not-terrible prices. I ended up staying with friends, thankfully.
http://www.yesicanusechopsticks.com/capsule/
Really like this idea, it's a really nifty concept. On the design side of things I'm on the fence, I like the logo and serif font at the top, though I'm still unsure about the monospace caption, it's possible the entire header would look better in a monospace font, worth exploring.

From the design of the header, the buttons and heavy gradient don't really work for me, you start out very crisp and clean, but quickly clutter with excessive gradients and rollovers, and the central page layout feels very 'cramped' as well, possibly playing with the spacing between objects and the contrasts would help.

Honestly I think your design would greatly improve with a more liberal use of whitespace, possibly no borders for the content, no boxing things in? and I'm not sold on the rounded navigation either, but this is possibly just due to the images not really jiving with me.

Here's an example: http://thismat.com/images/goalbot.png

Obviously this all subjective to taste, but I thought I'd throw it in as food for thought...you might not even be ready to tweak on the design yet.
We have these things called "credit cards" where you are protected from fraud, typically get a certain percentage award through a marketing tie-in, and get to earn interest on the monthly float.
How To Add Twitter To Google Wave
That's a good point. I was thinking that I should just combine them into less popups, but it's probably best to let people have more instruction only if they choose to see it, which could be implemented as per your suggestion. This will definitely require some further testing.

Great suggestion, thank you.
"Singularity is a research project focused on the construction of dependable systems through innovation in the areas of systems, languages, and tools."

Maybe they should focus on innovation in describing what their project actually does.
You never really know if you're pushing hard enough until you ruffle a few feathers along the way.

I used to think if I worked hard enough, I could get anybody to like me. When people didn't, I viewed it as some sort of personal mistake.

Now I'm thinking that random chance has a lot to do with it. The more people you interact with, the more who are not going to like you -- there is always going to be that 1-5%.

Oddly enough from this position I am beginning to see the logic of your point, although I have never taken it to heart. The more real work you are doing, the more people you interact with, the more change you make -- of course is going to ruffle feathers. You can't help it.
Oh, you use (pessimism-mode t) too?
This was a great article.
Zuckerberg has the reputation for being a first class prima donna douche-nozzle, with his hired execs stepping in to do damage control and actually run the company.

But what impressed me in the article was that it showed he wasn't the simple tyrant who accidentally hit a gold mine his reputation makes him out to be, but is thoughtfully (though ruthlessly) trying to adapt and run his company.

I came away colored impressed. I wouldn't want to work there, but I was still impressed.
Yes, I'm quite sure. We're talking about 40,000 annual events among a population of 300 million. I don't mind doubling my risk there especially considering that I'm probably a better driver than most to start with, passing the most dangerous decade of driving with no accidents.
you have no idea what you're talking about
I had expected the opposite argument. Dilbert is pretty smart, but he sure isn't rich. His boss, on the other hand...
> Managers have to force-rank their employees. The more
> Machiavellian managers make a point of telling their
> employees where they stand.

Haven't other articles (and other research) shown that force ranking is not an effective strategy? And if my manager regaled me with daily "ranking updates," I'd go insane.

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

[Edit: added link to Dan Pink's TED Talk]
Thanks for this English word.

I believe there is a large number of people who don't want to buy a house in a particular area (either because of the fact that they'll be moving in a few years, lack of any sort of downpayment, or other reasons), but still need to live somewhere (and can afford to pay a certain monthly amount). This would be the market this service would be aimed at.
There's a trick here. At the surface it sounds naive, sure.

The trick is that people can and should passionately defend and believe in the viewpoints, espouse and defend them, and then go along with what the group decides.

Either "passionately defending" or "going along" is not sufficient in itself. You have to have both.
Who is to say that selfishness is better than altruism? Altruism seems to be a human trait as well -- we do act altruistically on occassion.

It's not clear to me whether that's a bug or a feature. Most cases in which altruism would be possible in the ancestral environment are cases in which acting "altruistically" actually benefits the actor in the long run. We're now in a world where it's less clear that those actions will benefit the actor (or actor's genes), on balance. Altruism does result in arguably worse outcomes in many cases (food aid to Africa, liberating Iraq, etc) in the modern world.

Is it impossible to build a financial system based on altruism?

Well, it doesn't seem stable. A financial system based on self-interest is stable when there are a few people with altruistic motives in the system. A financial system based on altruism would rapidly fail in the presence of a few self-interested people in the system.

Edit: removed extra "actually"s.
I am definitely not trying to undermine what he has done. However, the article gist IMO is that when things were not going well, everyone was blaming him and finally when things are falling in place, everyone is giving credit to him. If facebook wont have grown the way it has in the last six months, the same people, who are identifying what he did as remarkable leadership qualities probably would be saying the exact opposite. So, in short, remarkable is proportional to how successful you have been.
In the article, they give the example of students using this the night before a test. On this subject, it's interesting to me how so many people have simply accepted the use of drugs for improving exam performance. I can't be the only one who thinks it's ludicrous that we are now drugging ourselves to satisfy some arbitrary, artificial tests and that this whole situation is supposed to be ok.

Also, I wonder what the side effects are.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/05/091005fa_fact_...

I couldn't find the view on one page / print button for a minute. The above is the proper URL if you, like me, do not enjoy pressing next.
Graphy lets you embed Graphviz diagrams in your Google Wave communication
what is TA?
Ben Huh of "I Can Has Cheezburger" is quietly building a humor empire
I think this is a better way of thinking about it than "greed". The next natural conclusion that follows is that nobody actually knows how to fix this. It may even be an intrinsic attribute of a growing economy; it may literally be impossible to avoid, short of not having a growing economy.

Centralized management makes the lockstep-motion problem radically worse, solving the positive feedback problem by nearly eliminating feedback and cutting straight to the failure case. ("But the central planners can use feedback!" - not on even remotely the same level of granularity, by definition of "central".) Cutting down the positive feedback loop powering the bubble pretty much inevitable involves cutting out the positive feedback loop driving the economy in general. What's left, really?

Rather than preventing crashes, we probably ought to focus on having the wisdom to be prepared for them when they come.
Am I the only one who finds some irony here?

I mean, the man made his fortunate satirizing the managerial class.
http://thread.com/ is also in this space, though in a different fashion. It integrates with Facebook to get info, but appears that it also limits you to requesting dates within your social graph (friends of friends of friends, etc).

I like http://ge.la.to and their take on this better than Thread, but I'm not entirely confident in their execution. Several aspects of the site didn't work for me and I think the need to fine tune their data mining algorithms. A profile's most recently/often talked about topics should not include "ff" and "rt" from Twitter. ;)
It's all just anecdotal evidence. You can't just point at someone and I could to tell you how savvy they are.

I just note the people I know who come out ahead or behind in their dealings, just as I note when someone says something fairly profound, finds a rather ingenious solution or writes a bit of clever code to guesstimate intelligence.

I wasn't representing it as anything other than a working theory from personal data. But it's not like Adams started from a statistical argument either.

I figured my experiences and generalizations were a fair response to his.
I took my wife and I FOREVER to find a motorized baby swing that didn't take a buttload of C or D batteries, just plugged into the wall. Wires are highly underrated.

OTOH, we just recently moved the computer to the TV's spot, bought a tuner card, a big ass monitor (set to a hilariously low resolution) and a wireless keyboard/mouse (combined, not separate.) It's a pretty sweet setup. Pause tv, check facebook, look for something on Netflix, check hulu. Highly recommended.
This is one of my favorite metaphors. For those of you with an interest in analytical philosophy (and, really, if you thought this wikipedia link sounded interesting, you probably do have such an interest), Ronald Dworkin's upcoming book is called "Justice for Hedgehogs," and is a reference to this idea.

BU had a panel on it: http://www.bu.edu/law/events/upcoming/documents/9.25.09Ronal...
This could help raise the popularity of private jets. And don't truly important decisionmakers travel with an entourage specifically to prevent these sorts of things?
That was my thought initially; however, the more I thought about it, the less I think it would be a requirement. There are condos/townhouses pretty much everywhere; as you mentioned, the only additional layer needed is the mortgage with a bank (or even a p2p lending service like prosper.com).
I think you're missing the point of the Ig Nobels. These are not the Razzie awards. From the very first sentence of the web page:

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.

Note, carefully, the second half of the sentence, which the Ig Nobel committee explains to the audience every year.

These awards are quite explicitly not about poking fun at bad or useless research. Rather, the majority of recent awards are about shining a light on well-executed, worthwhile research that would never become famous at all... except that it can be described in a way that makes it sound hilarious.

Consider one of my favorites:

Harvey, J. T. An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces. Applied Ergonomics, 33, 523 - 531, doi:10.1016/S0003-6870(02)00071-6 (2002).

This is a completely legitimate paper about how to improve working conditions for sheep farmers by redesigning the floor across which they drag the sheep before shearing them. Nothing wrong with the work. But it sounds very funny until you think about it. Which is good for the researchers, because when it won the Ig Nobel Prize for Physics they got to travel over from Australia and get some global press coverage for a paper that would normally rest quietly in a corner of the literature.

As for whether ignorant people will use the Ig Nobels to denigrate science: Why would they bother? It didn't take a Harvard committee to tell Sarah Palin what to make fun of. She or her speechwriters just grabbed an issue of Scientific American and flipped to a random page.
(Actually... yes. Strangely enough, I've been very surprised. She figured it out because whatever site she uses has a "search box" that is basically just adding site:awesome.com to the query. She was then able to generalize it on sites with no search.)
The relationship between matter and life
Actually the backstory to this post is pertinent here as well.

I sent him an email on an old personal email address a few weeks ago, pointing out that we always didn't agree but we always respected and liked each other and if he could spare a few kind words it would mean a lot to me. I didn't receive a response.

I was reading a great book on consulting this week, and it pointed out that you should take emotional chances with our work. Reach out to people emotionally to find out where they are coming from.

About this same time, I noticed he recommended one of the other guys that was on the team.

So I sent him another email at his work address -- basically a repeat of the first email. I figured either he didn't get the first email or the answer was no. And if the answer was no, I should find out why (which I plan on doing when I get back) Either way, it was a win.

Of all things, I did not want an insincere recommendation. Rather I am extremely curious as to why two people who are supposedly experts on teams don't have the mutual respect it takes to point out and praise the positive qualities of the other, even if they disagree. I imagine I somehow ticked the fellow off to the point of hurt feelings, but if so, I am unaware of when that happened. Like I said, on a personal level we always seemed to get along just fine.
agreed. they will use the capital to build apps that leverage a strong user base.
It seems to me like a big part of this would depend on a stable foundation. And in the software world, that foundation shifts a lot. Last I checked, no one in the industry had come together and agreed on a list of programs that would never be changed again. And even if you could stabilize it all, how long would it be before you're forced to port it to new hardware?

The moment anything shifts, any validation work you've done is called into question. Okay, for 30 seconds, your program was proven correct; but how about now? Did the change cause a problem? And how, exactly, would you detect it, without repeating the validation entirely?

To me, this does underscore the importance of keeping programs small, stable, and well understood. If anyone's bragging about how many millions of lines of code they have, as Microsoft put in a bullet point for Windows once, they should not be considered serious programmers. The bigger something is, the less it takes to introduce one of these unvalidated quirks.
Wow! This is really helpful. I've often felt like the design was sort of cramped, as you say. Unfortunately, I'm only an aspiring designer so sometimes I can't figure out just how to fix my problems. I've also been a bit hesitant to play around with the design too much as I've been trying to get the functionality into place.

But you've inspired me. I'm going to play around with the spacing and borders this weekend. At this point I don't think I want to do away with the content borders entirely, but your graphic shows how much more open it would be. Hrmm... I'll have to ruminate on it.

I know the screenshot wasn't a super intensive edit or anything, but it was really nice of you to go through the trouble. Thanks so much!
(Some napkin math...)

If we assume he's awake 16 hours of the day, at 48 breaks a day, that's only 3 breaks an hour. With 10-15 pushups taking a minute or less to do, that's only 5 minutes or so an hour.

For someone who possesses a great deal of drive in the rest of his life, this does not seem impossible.
The right thing is in the eye of the beholder.

For a plan of having a predictable and financially safe year it was the right thing. For a plan of taking advantage of every interesting opportunity the right thing might have been "I can't risk $10k but I can risk $300. $500 if I trade packed lunches for x weeks with my future self in case of loss".

I could almost argue that if you can afford the loss then you're not using the same definition of risk.
This employee-ranking system is common at big companies, including Microsoft and Amazon. There are two key difficulties with such a system, and it would be interesting to learn how Facebook grapples with them:

1 - It's imperative that the criteria for ranking employees is well-aligned with company goals. At Microsoft for example, on most teams you are ranked mostly on what features you ship. That sounds great but it can lead to extreme feature bloat in products. It's hard to take a stand for simplicity and elegant design in a meeting when the other guy's job depends on shipping the feature, and your job depends on getting the other guy to agree to include your feature.

2 - AMZN and MSFT both merge each manager's ranked list of direct reports with the lists created by other managers who report to the same Director or Senior Manager. This process can often be much more political than meritocratic, since other managers usually don't know much about an individual engineer's performance. If a team is flat-out better than other team and all of their engineers deserved to be ranked higher, that can be very difficult to defend in a meeting in front of a VP.
Um, you know ivankirigin works at Facebook, right?