This is getting extremely frustrating. Sparrow is a fabulous email client both for iOS and Mac. I love and use both daily and this is fairly devastating. I was really looking forward to the products development, growth, and future releases. To read this announcement and hear that they won't be working on their apps but on Google projects is sad.

To bigger companies: chill out with the "acquihires." If anything, do what Facebook did with Instagram and keep them working on their product. It would be awesome to see the guts of Sparrow used in a Google branded Gmail client or similar (hopefully that happens, but I'm reluctant based on this statement).

I didn't get that from Marco's post at all. I heard a developer saying "stop blaming indie developers for accepting generous offers from companies and start supporting their products instead".

Once again here on Hacker News we are talking about hiring procedures for technical companies. Many people find this topic interesting, because most of us have applied for a job at least once, and many of us have been in a position to recommend someone else for a job, or to hire someone for a job. From participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274

http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.

http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability test.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone is only 0.54 for work sample tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.

Because of a Supreme Court decision in the United States (the decision does not apply in other countries, which have different statutes about employment), it is legally risky to give job applicants general mental ability tests such as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...

interpreted a federal statute about employment discrimination and held that a general intelligence test used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. A company defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more reluctant companies will be about hiring in the first place.)

The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6...

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6...

Some of the social background appears to be changing in the most recent few decades, with the prospect for further changes.

http://intl-pss.sagepub.com/content/17/10/913.full

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/fryer/files/Fryer_R...

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl...

Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, for example "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann:

"Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure."

http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...

But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)."

Integrity tests have limited validity standing alone, but appear to have significant incremental validity when added to a general mental ability test or work-sample test.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_integrity_testing

http://apps.opm.gov/ADT/Content.aspx?page=3-06&JScript=1

http://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk2/1990/9042/9042.PDF

http://www.hotelschool.cornell.edu/research/chr/pubs/reports...

Bottom line: if someone is hiring for a company that produces technical documentation, a company like iFixit.com, and one feature of the product is grammatically correct writing, it's a reasonable subpart of a work-sample test to include testing for revising English prose. If someone is hiring for managing a jewelry store (a local example I know) or for building wood-frame houses, it's quite possible that a work-sample test would completely disregard the issue of correct spelling and grammar. I know a very successful owner of a jewelry store (I know him as a fellow soccer dad who once coached one of my children) who has quite dodgy spelling and grammar and punctuation, but who can communicate in written English for emailing people. I'm aware of multiple local carpenters and other people in construction businesses, including managing construction businesses, who have varying degrees of punctilious correctness in English writing, but all of them making their reputations and their livings by how they construct buildings, not by how they construct sentences. If writing is part of the work (even just for exchanging ideas with colleagues in memos or emails), sure, test it. If writing is not particularly part of the work, don't worry about it.

Armchair analysis of his algorithm after watching his TED talk: a version of LSA that uses PageRank instead of a straight SVD to calculate rankings.

LSA[1] has been around since the 80s and is used in many applications from GRE testing to Apple's junk mail filtering[2]. It's used a lot since the patent expired, it's relatively good and can be computed quickly. Of course, a lot of text-retrieval research has happened in the past few decades, one of my favorites being LDA[3] which relies on a much more sound statistical basis than finding lower-dimensional representations of term-document vectors. Unfortunately LDA's model is not directly computable and answers must be determined via Monte-Carlo methods.

As for 'indepdendence,' his terminology gets a little confused here. At first I thought he was talking about the 'bag-of-words' assumption that most large-scale language models have. These effectively ignore grammar (other than stemming) in order to efficiently determine the 'gist' of a document without its intricacies. However, his videos imply he is talking about word-sense disambiguation[4], which is certainly known about and was the crux of LSA in the first place. If he is talking about lifting the bag-of-words assumption, there has been some interesting work going on, such as [5] (disclaimer: I am a coauthor on that paper).

If you're interested in this stuff, I highly recommend trying out the LSA demo server at [6] (it can get swamped sometimes so don't kill it) and David Blei's LDA implementation at [7]. The LDA-C inputs and parameters are a little obtuse when you first look at it, and I don't have my notes on how to use it at the moment but if you play around with it it should make sense.

This kid is crazy smart, and I hope he gets exposed to a lot of really cool research since he can obviously pull off a lot at a young age. Best of luck to him.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis

[2] http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/LSMSmartC...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_Dirichlet_allocation

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word-sense_disambiguation

[5] http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/D/D12/D12-1020.pdf

[6] http://lsa.colorado.edu/

[7] http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/lda-c/

HN is the whitest malest forum I'm a member of. Spend 30 seconds in the thread discussing a charity encouraging black girls to program[1] and it's blatantly apparent. At least 4chan is self-aware regarding the sexism and racism. Reddit tries to brush it off as jokes or isolated incidents.

HN on the other hand, a [male dominated] forum of established [white] professionals and aspiring professionals, exists in a bubble of absolute denial of these horrible attitudes.

The top voted comment about a new CEO literally questions her fitness as a mother.

I challenge anyone to find any posts questioning any other CEO's parenting choices. (Bonus points if top voted for on a story).

That shitty attitude doesn't exist for Gates, Jobs, Page, Brin, or Ellison. But a woman steps up and suddenly HN cares about her child and votes up a comment questioning how her decision affects her child and second guessing her motherly quality.

1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261619