kulkarnic

Not a physicist, but writing one good paper every four years sounds like a very good thing. Would you rather read 40 papers, each of which is a lowest-publishable-unit, or 10 which noticeably move science ahead?

Because of his fame, Higgs had the luxury few do--- he could contemplate quietly, and people wouldn't dare say he was doing nothing. If you do that as a mere tenure-track professor, I'd figure the university would think you're too high risk and sack you.

Maybe that is to ensure that the results remain stable after people start trying out those searches for themselves (and so Google doesn't endorse another company's services).

Wikipedia for results is definitely not the norm for Google searches in India---I just spent a month there and results can be anything from JustDial directory services (for phone numbers, since many local businesses don't have websites) to local newspapers (for reviews etc).

The utility of Google in India is that it provides you the best link across different websites. This is really important because India has a growing population of new Internet users (who don't have "go to" sites like Wikipedia and Yelp), and because it still doesn't have clear winners in many verticals (e.g. real estate)

This is bunk. You're paid to do work which can be done in 40 hours/wk or you're being exploited (and so are a lot of other people). When you're 60 would you rather have memories with your kids, or have the satisfaction of writing lots of code in the 2010s that is not being used anymore because it got obsolete/automated? (don't believe that can happen? Talk to rule-based AI researchers from the 80s)

The only reasons to do long hours are because a) you need a temporary career boost, and b) you're Batman and the world depends on you.

It's neither, I think. It's basically a way to get training data. The novel part is splitting sentences into phrases and asking about the sentiment of each part, which provides the algorithm richer data to train off.

Looks like standard 80-character wrapping to me. I don't see linebreaks on this file, for instance: view-source:http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Helping.html

I think the most interesting page is, of course, http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Bugs.html

There's technology to enable for most webapps (form processing), and search engines right there. And of course, "Gateways: JANET and DECnet for example" are a "Real need."

Really makes you wonder whether the priority decisions you made today will seem similarly ludicrous in 30 years.

And it also doesn't seem to stem words. [flower] and [flowers] give different results (actually flowers gives no results). But I am impressed by the number of classes they have: who labels pineapples in an image corpus?

Even better idea: work at a library. These are buildings designed to be quiet, meditative places, and they want you to be there all day. In addition, several libraries now allow coffee, and most have great Wifi.

Where do you find a library? If you are in the US, public libraries are a great downtown option. As a student at Stanford, I think great libraries are one of the biggest privileges. However, I think you don't need to be a Stanford student to get in! Like other universities, Stanford has a Federal Depository Service (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Depository_Library_Prog...), which means the public has a right to enter and read federal publications at no cost (Strangely, I couldn't find a open-to-public library at Harvard though)

Hope this helps...

Yes, they may complain about society/"industry" not caring enough, and that's mostly because it is true.

Let me offer an analogy: when veterans are badly treated, everyone's angry because society isn't valuing their contribution enough. If scientists and professors contribute at least as much (and think of how far we've come in just the last 50-odd years), I think it's fair they're miffed if you trivialize their jobs as "least stressful" when they're not.

Ok, so what were the predictors of failure?

IMO, if you can talk about these features/predictors, they are true predictors. Otherwise, if people can game the system if they knew these features, I'd think they're more artifacts about your current process than attributes of failing startups (and if it turns out that these features are actually causative of failure, rather than just predictive, everyone can be a better startup too).

I wish Gabriel had inserted a map of where the screenshots were taken. My hunch, which could be wrong, is that magic keywords are geographic too. In a state like NH which leans strongly, maybe the algorithm automatically identified Obama as a magic word. (This hunch is based based simply on ddg being not-quite-mainstream, so maybe its users are more democrat than the country?)

I think it'll be interesting to see the Google response to this. I think the most important question is whether identifying magic keywords happens automatically, or is programmer input involved?

I'd like to know why it works. Does "10x superior onboarding emails" mean 10x better retention/conversion numbers? Backstory: I've been trying to improve retention in a complex system with ~10^5 users, and email doesn't seem to add too much gain. Focusing effort on the website seems to have a larger effect.

How are your emails 10x better? Is it the schedule (Day 1 ... day 4 ...day 7) of emails? The content ("Become a power user like Zach...")?

Unless you say why it is better, it is hard to see if that it is a no-brainer.

I'm still not sure how it catches all unhandled exceptions. I looked at the source code (http://rescuejs.com/rescue.beta.js) and it only seems to wrap setTimeout, setInterval, jQuery.fn.ready, and jQuery.event.add. What about exceptions in other functions? Or does capturing the e.backtrace have something to do with it?

Would love to know (and if this works out of the box, what's to prevent cross-domain scripts from communicating with each other by raising exceptions?)

Honour codes do work-- see Ariely's book on honesty: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062183591?ie=UTF8&camp... (quote from blurb: Ariely argues, and then demonstrates, that it's actually the irrational forces that we don't take into account that often determine whether we behave ethically or not.)

Also, cheating on an exam is a classic tragedy of the commons-- if everyone did it, course grades are meaningless. And yes, this comment has rather misinformed views of "over there".

This is not entirely so. When I visited Japan, my browser prompted "We've detected you've moved to Japan, would you like to change..."

That to me seems wrong. No one learns a language in 7 hours.

The title is unnecessarily provocative-- Square wouldn't magically eradicate downtime after a starbucks deal.

And the website being down is different from the service not working. [Edit: the payment app doesn't work on my iPhone either. I guess I spoke too soon]

Life is about living.

And everything else is ways to optimize that. Sure, self-help that distracts from living could make people miserable. Good self-help OTOH is meant to be heuristics for this optimization.

Personally, I've found wake-up-early and multiple-ways-to-win to be fulfilling: and even if I know the physiological reasons behind the second one, it still remains helpful. I feel the way to win is to actually self-help: find heuristics that work for you and make them a habit.

I am simply amazed that there are 2 million software developers creating projects that they can host on Github. For some reason, I still think of open software development as a rather indie movement.

So much has changed just in the last few years :-)

The appearance of fairness is often as important as fairness itself. With randomness, you completely destroy that appearance. I'll even bet that a lot of people will make up their own theories about how the tokens are given out ("Oh, that other machine usually gives smaller numbers"). So, my hunch is complaints will actually rise.

Btw, one strategy the article doesn't mention is making queues seem more asynchronous-- this is what Starbucks does when they employ "expeditors", those employees who walk the line and take orders (but not cash). The (partial) success of having ordered your coffee mitigates the agony of waiting to reach the cash register (it also makes people less likely to abandon the line).

Having been on the dev side of the conversation with many (mostly MBA students), I can agree with you here. However, this is only one suits v. nerds issue.

Often, I can see that the idea will be large-impact, but the job itself is boring. Sometimes, it's even a simple CRUD app you could Build in a Weekend* but hmm... what I'm doing now is quite exciting so.. "I'll pass. Btw, if you learn Rails, you could build it in a week or two yourself".I can see why this gets people angry. But it's the way demand-driven markets work.

The other side to the coin is that if you knew a little about programming, you could make your project (at least sound) a lot more interesting. (It's a CRUD app, but it needs to be always consistent, and we're trying to offer a zero-downtime service with queues for when the data store goes down, yada yada).

I'll buy it. Unlike a lot of tech/nerd folk, I actually don't think privacy/data ownership makes people jump platforms. If pictures+captions is the thin end of the wedge, that's great :)

Not really. "Framing" is an important consideration-- ask any photographer. I wish the author had gone into other kinds of framing (not just rounded corners), but it's a start.

"For the interested reader", see different kinds of framing in the Path app: http://a3.mzstatic.com/us/r1000/067/Purple/v4/2c/81/7e/2c817... There's color, drop shadows etc.

If you're one of the founders, all I can say is stop doing stupid shit. I don't mean to offend-- finding pictures and clever captioning them is surprisingly addictive, but this really is a step away from social-games' Skinnerian conditioning. In short, it's addictive, not fulfilling.

Diaspora started out wanting to change the world-- creating something addictive may be profitable, but as other commenters say, underwhelming.

Don't do this. Pick good defaults. Options are for nerds, simplicity is for real people.

As a tl;dr person, I just don't get the message: "We’re rethinking publishing and building a new platform from scratch. This is a preview." is about as buzzword saturated as possible. Plus their homepage says "Your text here".

I feel every so often a designer has an urge: let's just build it and see what people use it for. It sometimes works, but mostly the user just stares at the screen until something distracts him/her, and then wanders off.

As Herb Simon wrote (in 1971!) "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention".

The problem you describe is that "smart" address books are actually quite dumb-- they don't understand the context. When you're just trying to call Ted, you don't really care how many mutual friends you have. The solution is actually well-known in the literature for a long time: focus+context (and relatedly overview +details on demand). Show the caller an easy way to get to Ted's number, stat. The rest is just context, which should really only be shown when the user wants to know more about Ted.

Side thought: maybe, what would be useful are phones that guess who you want to call. Instead of the "most recent" list on a phone, maybe you want a "most likely to call now".

Interesting. I've seen a few other apps do this too and always wondered. Well, I think shading the UI might be a better hint, but this is definitely not something I'd thought of before. Thank you.

Robby, congrats on the new launch-- it looks great!

Zero-click search is really impressive when it works [edit: actually, this is zero-search search: you get results without searching, simply based on context]. I think greplin can make it work with heuristics + usage data over the last few years :-) Showing not just what's next, but context (when, where is it? what emails are related?) makes this really cool-- something that can very quickly form a habit, perhaps.

PS: why show Sunrise and Sunset times?(first screenshot on landing screen) Do people actually search for that? Personally, I don't care-- the day starts when I wake up.

Good point, since most pixels are taller than wide (it'd suck even more if they can't sub-pixel render in portrait mode, as it seems the more natural reading position).

Yeah, so what? If you read HCI papers from the 90s (it's what I do for a job-- I'm a PhD student in HCI), you'll see that a lot of very respected researchers claimed that speech technology is not useful (their claim is well-founded: it is slow, environmental noise is unavoidable, what to say is often not obvious, and there's the Midas problem).

But, here we are, with people praising Siri. It's how technology works-- every input modality is useful for some tasks, and at some level of maturity. Dismissing technological potential based purely on past technology is short-sighted. [For examples of how Pen+touch is a good idea see http://billbuxton.com/Pen+TouchUIST.pdf. Add type, and it could be powerful indeed]