_ques

Every Yahoo workplace is wall-to-wall purple and yellow. Think about what it's like to work there!

I can see this working out once this goes beyond the "initial critical mass of users" hump. Some high-level comments:

* There are several organizations, agencies and committees with similar goals _inside_ each institution (university / high school). Given that your goals are aligned, it would be nice to see a way to onboard entire organizations (i.e. groups of students / mentors) -- even if it is not from the general frontpage. That way, you can think of Meritful as a SaaS provider for each of these orgs, and it also solves your critical mass problem.

* Student orgs (High Schools, etc) come in with well-articulated reasons as to _why_ I (a potential mentor) should work with them. This helps me make a decision along the lines of "I am looking for a group of 10 students at grade level 8 who are interested in astronomy and are free on Thursday evenings for all of Fall 2012. Can your group match that?" Note how this is different from scouting talent -- mentors just have more constraints.

Not true. Padmapper has multiple DBs.

Google can scan apartment listings and show them as results in their format. PadMapper cant. What's the difference?

See http://www.craigslist.org/robots.txt .

http://www.engadget.com/2012/05/15/burritob0t-hands-on-video...

  for i in `seq -w 19`; do 
  echo "http://hackermonthly.com/xmas/hackermonthly-issue0"$i".zip"; 
  done | xargs wget

I would really like at least _some_ part of the Internet to remain a collection of documents, and not a framework-based application.

Codify these guidelines into a "Standard". Give it a name, say "Email Efficiency Specification". In your automated footer, add:

"This email was composed to comply with the Email Efficiency Specification: http://eespec.org

Once it gets some traction, have profs at b-schools / PHBs at corps mandate it. To sell the idea, call it the 7th sigma or something.

I think what he's trying to get across here is that there is a significant amount of overhead that is getting in the way of Google's own culture. Breaking it up into a conglomerate of smaller pieces would typically _increase_ this cruft -- Microsoft even in its current state is a good example of this. At Google however, this would _optimize_ the system instead, making it leaner, meaner, and as passionate as the employees it is losing.

(The blog post doesn't mention it clearly, but the author is an ex-Googler)

See: http://i.imgur.com/efj7m.png

"Data provided by MS Academic Search"

You want a story, here's a passionate story!

MSR Asia is based in Beijing and is one of the fastest growing research outfits in the world. They're slowly showing up all over the place in the CS world, and this is just one of the examples.

Consider Microsoft Academic Search. It BLOWS AWAY Google Scholar, Citeseer etc. in terms of features. Once they attain coverage parity, there is reason to use anything else.

Academic Search, Trinity, and similar projects out of MSR Asia seem to be directly having impact in Bing. In a matter of a short few years, you're looking at a barebones search engine (Live.com) building an R&D infrastructure, with prototypes, and production modules feeding into what is now a pretty rocking search engine. [Example of Academic search integration with Bing: http://www.bing.com/search?q=donald+knuth , scroll to bottom -- page also shows Freebase integration in middle]

Ironically, Microsoft is playing David in the David vs Goliath story here, and the passion is showing in terms of the ecosystem of computing projects and products that are making it into Bing.

If you want to look outside of Bing, consider the Kinect effort. Did you know that the _hardware_ ships with mathemetical models built at MSR, trained using Dryad? (Dryad is an MapReduce competitor out of MSR) The training is the "secret sauce" and why you don't have to spend days calibrating the Kinect.

None of this is privileged information -- you just have to follow the hyperlinks :) The open source world is built on collaboration and sharing, and hence the "story" is the backbone of most work. But that doesn't mean other people don't have stories and passion!

It is important to differentiate between

* Catastrophic failures: You fail so bad that you have no option but to trash everything and start again

* Detectable / Manageable failures: You fail, but this failure is not central to your existence, so you simply try again

While there are some cases where you have no option but to risk catastrophic failures, manageable failures are something people completely miss.

Fitness / Weight training has all sorts of examples of this, the goal is to identify the limits of your abilities and to push this limit, without risking permanent damage.

Consider this: Blogger (Pyra Collab tools), Flickr (GNE), Twitter (Odeo), Nokia Phones (losses for first 15 yrs), Google (initial focus was Enterprise Search until Adwords / Adsense acquisition) were all pushing the limits, and failing, but not so spectacularly that they didn't have resources left to pivot.

Identifying the difference, and the ability to contain possibly-catastrophic errors into manageable pieces is the true art of the startup.

These:

http://store.fastmac.com/product_info.php?products_id=458

Every employee has a right (and in some ways, a duty) to criticize his / her employer. This is how a company improves.

I am just surprised that given the vibrant startup environment, TechCrunch hasn't been replaced by a decent news source in that format (e.g. a more blog-like version of HN with some sort of an editorial voice).

Google actually does do open-domain fact-based question answering for queries like:

"what is the capital of china"

which are probably closest to Jeopardy questions (technically speaking.)

The team that does this is a lot more than seven Google engineers. Yet, it is not the top selling features of Google, because -- it's not that easy.

There is a fine line between "seems easy" and "nearly impossible". A Google engineer does not equate to infinite skills.

I think Ooyala is beautiful. It's a bunch of ex-googlers, I like to think the "oo" carries that. And it's an abstract name, which is ok given their business (not end-user). According to their materials, "Ooyala means cradle in Telugu, a Southern Indian language."

[i don't know anyone at Ooyala, I just found them on the web]

Personally, I feel this is the Achilles' heel of an otherwise splendid website. Their NIH syndrome forces them to implement everything in C++ ( http://www.okcupid.com/faq : 200K lines of C++ ). I don't know how to be agile with a system like that, and it probably explains the rate of feature growth compared to other social networks (FB, Friendfeed, Quora)

Neat! I was looking for something very much like this!!

Two feature requests:

1) Discrete values: I want to track things say on a scale of 1 to 5, or 1 to 10. It shouldn't be too hard to implement this without cluttering the UI; you can have a check box that says

[x] on a scale of ___

and use the icon of the log as a rating slider.

2) I would like push notifications / alerts prompting me to enter things. E.g. Insulin every 3 hours, or mood every 5 hours.

I would totally pay 5$ for an app that does these 2 things reliably.

[edit: wow dude, this app is buggy :) 2 minutes and I already found one bug: +/- doesnt show up unless you first switch to keyboard and then back to +/-!! Hire a programmer / tester to fix these things and concentrate on the product, it's a better use of your time!]

"Peepli Live" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1447508/ , available on Netflix Streaming) is a satire about the state of farmers in debt in India, and is worth a watch.

If you make an interface that automatically runs this on visitor's browsers and populates a form that users can hit "Submit" (or alternatively, simply make an AJAX call), you can get hundreds of diff OS / Browser Version / Hardware combinations.

Aggregating these numbers should give you really nice insights into diff VMs / platforms etc.

Voice bank algo challenge:

What is the shortest sentence (or set of sentences) you can construct that covers all the phonemes required for a voice bank?

(Corollary: Convincing someone into saying these sentences now lets you impersonate them using text-to-speech)

At least engadget is witty.

Here are a few strategies to get by:

1. Double-count your startup as coursework. Enroll only in project-based classes. Spin off each module in your startup as a project -- e.g. Distributed Systems? Write the EC2 part. Databases? Write the Lucene part.

2. Many EE/CS departments offer bschool classes at the 400/500/700 levels. Use these to get startup advice / stay motivated.

3. Take research credits, have entrepreneurship-friendly faculty guide you through the research parts of your startup.

4. Take a semester off, work on things, come back. You'll miss out on social life, but that's a tradeoff you're making.

5. Concentrate your startup work towards the beginning of the semester, switch to coursework at the end.

6. Be hyper-vigilant about course-performance. Since you're technically constantly slacking off, you will often need to perform disaster recovery; e.g. shoot for extra credit, to make up for a midterm you didnt study for, etc.

+1. I think what you should build is a layer over these websites, sort of like a Planet(http://www.planetplanet.org/).

After turning Grayscale on, it took me 2x the time to go back and disable it, because i was looking for the "blue" icon and had a hard time distinguishing between all the icons.

Color helps in _saving_ me time as well -- so let's not forget that :)

This article is over a year old.

Gmail is hand coded, not Closure.

"Google Appengine has a lot of limitations"

Well, that is kind of exactly what this question is asking, right?

"and is still sees frequent downtime."

Ok, so downtime is a valid reason.

"GAE is simply not a viable solution for a site with reddit's traffic at this time."

Again, not sure if I can learn anything from this sentence.