huggah

Good question. I'm not sure, but I suspect it shouldn't do anything interesting; mercury allows oxygen to move through the otherwise impermeable aluminium oxide crust and "rust" the metal.

Since sapphire is already 100% aluminium oxide, but arranged in a crystal lattice I think it should be stable in contact with mercury unless the mercury disrupts the lattice (a possibility--my physical chemistry is weak).

Often data contains structural features that initially aren't observed and without them appear to support a hypothesis only weakly. By exploiting the structure, we can see things much more clearly.

An example: say we want to know how a drug affects cognition. We give a simple test to a bunch of people on and off it, blinded, etc. The control group's average score is 74, and the test group's average score is 72. We can use a t test to see if there's a statistical difference, and find there isn't. We can't conclude anything about the drug.

Now imagine we have exactly that same data, but we were careful to give two tests to each person (in a random order, and different tests, of course). We take another look at the data and find out that every single participant scored lower when they were on the drug. With even a fairly small sample size this provides strong evidence that the drug impairs cognition, and probably tells us quite a bit about how much it does.

The article is probably talking about multivariate regression; the more important number comes a few sentences later---"retention was related more strongly to manager quality than to seniority, performance, tenure, or promotions". So presumably, they did the same sort of analysis, carefully pairing people who were similar in as many ways as possible, and found out that good managers are more important than seniority in terms of employee retention. The more variables you have, the more even large differences can hide in raw group averages.

Your last sentence answers the question you pose: the new UI is attempting to train users to use the browser search bar.

A huge number of Chrome users go to google.com to search for things; if the new page looks like the Google search page, and it moves your cursor to the address bar, Google hopes these users will learn that you can just search from there. Maybe it's an experiment that will fail, but it seems like it might work.

> they could even make ad targeting work by moving their mail-reading bots to the client

Gmail ad targeting isn't a bit of JavaScript that can run in real time in the background. It's a series of huge map reduces touching data sets larger than any client computer could store. Just indexing a pre-prepared list of mothership ads would result in a horrible user experience (far poorer ad targeting).

Google has a vested interest in only showing you ads you might be interested in; it doesn't work as well as it should, but it works magnitudes better than the state of the art 10 years ago.

I can easily imagine an authority issuing a warrant to rsync.net without knowing that there is a canary in place. It seems less likely for an NSL with an attached gag order, but still possible.

Nothing in the names policy prohibits pseudonyms. If your given name is "Jason Ramirez", you're welcome to have a separate Google+ account with the name "Nancy Young".

You only have to prove people know you by a name if you want to go by "#RS", "Albert Einstein", or "GreenLife Rx"; all three of those are likely name violations for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with knowing who you are.

This would be much more interesting if it asked you about symptoms of sleep deficit. E.g., "if you go into a dark room and lie down in the middle of the day, how long will it take you to fall asleep?"

Someone who habitually sleeps 6 hours a night but never feels tired is probably fine. Someone who habitually sleeps 8 hours a night but always feels tired should try sleeping more, and if that doesn't work they should seek advice from a doctor.

I expect there is a large segment of people who suffer from sleep deficit and would be more effective if they slept more, but don't know that it would help them. I don't think this is the correct way to reach such people, or the correct message to give them.

A few kg of blueberries a day? All my food for one day together weighs less than that. Did you mean grams? That seems low, but kg/week is still way too high.

How on earth can we usefully generalize from the experiences of white men born ~1918 who attended Harvard? I think longitudinal studies are massively important, and I'm all in favor of them, things like:

"Alcoholism was the main cause of divorce between the Grant Study men and their wives"

Don't really give us that much of a clue about how alcoholism (for instance) affects everyone else. I suspect it's similar; but this doesn't give us any data on anyone who isn't in a very very specific group.

This is after his first vocal cord was paralyzed, but before the second one was also damaged. You can hear what he called "a slightly weaker voice than normal which some people think sounded a little funny"--it quavers a bit. I was hoping to hear his voice before the first injury, but that was before Google was a phenomenon so there might not be any public recordings of him.

The objective is same-day arrival, and it works pretty reliably as long as you order by 3pm or so (in my area, at least). More importantly, you're given a clear indication when you order when you will actually get it (you can choose a delivery window, and see which ones are greyed out).

The delivery windows go as late as 9pm, so I'm sure they will try to push back the last time at which you can order and still get it delivered same-day.

Without testing, I'm not sure, but I think Mini Kites is actually likely to be a flagged name. The last vestiges of the "real names" policy are really just to keep businesses from getting Google+ profiles (Google wants businesses to keep Google+ pages instead). So there's an ML algorithm that determines how name-y or business-y a given name is, and flags names that it thinks belong to companies rather than people. I suspect Mini Kites (and almost certainly MiniKites or Mini-Kites) would trigger the review process.

Except for #3, I don't think these measures could be considered intentional. However, I imagine they have a large effect and go a long way to explain the difference between SF (or NY) and most of the midwest/mountain/central US.

No, but I work at Google, and I'm interested, so I've had lots of chances to play with it and talk with people who are on the team or are in the dogfood.

ETA response to the second question: I'm very happy with the display. That's probably as much as I should say, and I don't know the actual details anyway.

The display in Glass is incredibly unobtrusive. Glancing at a direction arrow (for maps) is no more distracting than glancing at the speedometer--it's less distance for the eye to cover, and the displayed images are ruthlessly simplified so that absorbing them is almost subconscious.

I think the danger comes from people who get text messages while they're driving and want to look at a shared photo. That should be disabled while driving, which glass can make a pretty good guess at.

Every single person I have talked to who has used glass for more than a few days has found the instant camera to be the most compelling feature of Glass. The author of this article did as well! In that context, I can't see how it makes sense to offer a camera-less version, at least not at launch.

I'm frustrated at how frequently gwern is assumed to be male. If you aren't sure of someone's gender, please use gender-neutral pronouns. So many of her articles have been posted to HN lately, yet I've only seen masculine pronouns used to refer to her.

When I was hired, I had a list of five managers to interview with. During the first two weeks after I started, I talked with each of them and decided where I wanted to be placed. It was made clear to me that if I didn't like any of those five, I would get another list.

Just my experience; I started at the beginning of 2012.

Which implies that this wouldn't do anything to diminish facial-recognition from consumer devices (e.g., facebook auto tagging, Google Glass, etc.)?

Considering that fear does just that, this seems like a miserable existence.

I think the larger concern is that by providing good gaming resources for older material, they boost that at the expense of their newer profit centers. After all, gamers have a limited amount of time.

However, I agree that this isn't really that much of an issue. The audiences who will grab the new stuff are (as you pointed out) largely different than the ones who will buy the old stuff. Also, a lot of gamers, both new and nostalgic, will buy the old stuff to read and enjoy, but not play much and will continue to buy WotC's new material.

It's really not acceptable that the author of this article can't even consistently use 'photon' instead of 'proton'. Can we stop advertising pop sci summaries that fail to handle summarizing papers?

This is great! I'm glad you're experimenting. I don't like this particular experiment, however. I far prefer using space / page down to handle a page of text at a time. I don't see much benefit to your method instead, and among other things, I miss having consistent visual anchors when I read.

Dangerous for humans, you mean. The fact that a species can survive while being so disease-ridden that they routinely kill the animals they infect seems to lend credence to the "super-immunity" claim.

I'm not sure this is actually the case for bats, but assuming your statement is true, it seems to be evidence for the presence of super-immunity, rather than against.

I can't tell if you're trolling or not. In case you aren't, a uniform distribution isn't "uniform" in the sense of the above quotation. You're right that it's not less random, but someone looking at draws from a uniform distribution would normally describe it as "clumpy"; hence the article.

+1 on the community aspects. There's a Resistance cell in South Bay (of San Francisco Bay Area) that's pretty highly organized and set us up meetups to go item and experience farming, posts "target" lists (high-value portals to be taken down) and the like. There are meetups for all kinds of things of course---Hacker News, Less Wrong, Reddit, whatnot, so this is just one more, but it's nice getting together with a bunch of strangers that you end up getting along with.

The game enforces this subtly; higher level players (I'm level 7) need high level items, but the way to get those is from (equally) high level portals. Players can't make a high level portal on their own---a Level 7 player can make a level 5 portal on her own, two can make a level 6 portal, and 8 are required to make a level 7 portal. Since a high level portal hands out excellent items, it's a target, and it makes sense to build it, exploit it immediately, and not try to hope that it stays up long. Community building!

Brandon Badger (https://plus.google.com/114800310452543164210) is the Project Manager. He's been running contests on Google+; submit artwork relating to ingress, stories, etc. hashtag them #ingress, and if he like it he'll reshare it and give you some invites.

I didn't even know about the contest when I wrote https://plus.google.com/110847385311561387629/posts/ePGPdJCS..., but apparently it got to him anyway and he gave me some.

Check out his feed for examples of the things he's reshared.

This is an understatement.

"Ingress is causing a surge in mobile power pack sales." Might hit closer to the mark. A majority of the high-level players I know are tethering a Nexus 7 to their phone, and attaching their phone to a mobile power pack. My phone gets slightly less than 1 hour on it's own.

Did you read the post? For him, Ingress is kids/family time. He's not the only one I know playing with his kids. Running around outside, hunting locations, competing against a shadowy opposition? That sounds like excellent quality time with the kids!

The problem with this is that for questions like "how could I build a cable company?", answers don't help".

If you want to build a cable company, a payments system, a new government, or colonize mars there is no high level answer. There are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of sub-questions that need to be answered. Eventually so many that you need to hire people to ask and answer them, and you won't even know what the question was.

The truth is that if you really want to go to space, no one will help you. Not because we don't want to help you, but because we can't. We can speculate, and dig up research or law or economics---but at the end of the day, all you're doing is inviting us to help design your bikeshed. If you can break down the problem, figure out which questions to ask, what information you don't have, and who does, that person might be able to help you. By the time you've gotten that far, you're already on the verge of sinking your life into this---and if you want to build a cable company, that's what it's going to take.