skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to simulate and rescue a complex project
I am involved with a large Construction Project (5 Hotels Project) that has been plagued by the typical large Project Complex (behind schedule, cost overruns etc.. Current planning using Primavera (Gant Charts have failed to capture the complexity of the Project and have become so cumbersome that no-one is really using them). From observations on this Project as well as numerous others both in Construction as well as Software, there is a critical point, where the size of the project tends to cause some sort of emerging properties that cause all these inefficiencies.

I am trying to get ideas as to how to simulate it. Most people simulate activities (systems approaches fall into this), but my intuition is that I should be simulating people and not activities. Some sort of cellular automata idea. Another observation is that the project history - in a way has properties similar to those of traffic, with work slowing down without anyone really realizing the reasons behind it.

I am looking for ideas out of the box, links any research you might have come across. It is really not much different from Software Engineering.
"we don't want to make even more mistakes by saying something that isn't true."

"We are working with MetaLabs to resolve the issue" would have been a perfectly fine public response. It would have made Mozilla's intentions clear, without piling on any new mistakes.

(BTW I find it interesting that people are yelling at me about jumping to conclusions, while themselves jumping to conclusions about me jumping to conclusions.)
Don't forget to charge from day one :P
Now this is just getting ridiculous. There are people and organizations out there making the world better, saving lives, saving the world. Please stop with the theatrics.
Thanks for posting the details. I was originally trying to organize a SXSW event together for Hacker News folks, but this is much better.

See you all there.
Electronics Manufacturers Use US Legal System to Thwart Hardware Hacks
This could deploy more quickly since it's actively assisted by the explosion. This shoots up, rather than floats up (admittedly "float" in this case is a pretty high wind velocity! ;)
You too can learn how to make money by writing about how to make money writing business books.

If only this were a joke.

(Thanks, davidw, you made my day!)
Exact same experience yesterday. Weird.
Level 3 to Offer First-Ever Live Streaming of an SXSW Event
Indonesian Defense Security : Manifesto Hacker Internasional NASA HACKED
> “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Is this a reference to quantum mechanics?
I would give it to CERN
You're doing your science wrong.

The upvotes are because the conclusion is novel.
I'm sure it's more of an attempt to be sure you're going to be fine with leaving. If you sound like someone who is confident and will get this all done in a reasonable time frame, I doubt you'd get much push.

The important part is making sure the person has thought about their exit. If you know what you are going to do and are confident in your decision, great. Lots of people haven't really given it much thought and just try to muddle through and stay nice.
Can you explain? I don't know anything about why the internal design won't work anymore.
"Kündigungsschutz" (employment protection) is actually something different. It basically means you can't be fired except for one of three reasons:

1. Reasons in your behavior. For instance, if you steal from the company.

2. Reasons in your person. For instance you have developed a back-problem and can't do your job anymore.

3. Reasons within the company. Like restructuring eliminates the job you were doing. And this reason also requires that the employer has to prove that you cannot work at a different place in the company. If the company wants to fire a lot of people for financial reasons it has to be "sozialverträglich" (socially acceptable) which means employees with children and older employees can't be fired unless all younger employees without kids are also fired. There are exceptions.

It is actually quite hard to fire someone in Germany, who wants to stay. It takes years and if the employer loses in court he has to pay the salary for the time of the judicial proceeding plus the employee is still not fired. Because of this risk and the associated costs for the employer it is common to have some compensation payed to the employee. Its usually about half of his current monthly salary (before tax) times the years he was in the company.

The employment protection is not negotiable but the "Kündigungsfrist" (period of notice) is, to a certain degree. I think 1 month is the minimum. Employment protection is applicable if the company has more that 10 employees and the contract is indefinite. Fixed term contracts are only possible for at most 2 years. After that the employment becomes indefinite automatically.

Here is a long version in english:
http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/ifpdial/info/term...
Type-level computation is actually quite limited by default in GHC; it becomes quasi-Turing-complete only when using the UndecidableInstances extension, and even then it has a very shallow stack by default, though you can increase it if you want deeper recursion. If memory serves me, Oleg Kiselyov has a type-level implementation of the untyped lambda calculus, which is rather more pleasant than brainfuck.
Well, admittedly I made it partly for my own personal use and partly for fun. I just thought that most of the sites that did this weren't very well done, or didn't achieve what I was looking for completely.

It is a little discouraging to have your work dismissed in a couple sentences though. I put an awful lot of time into it.
I really like your integration with Google accounts.

It made me log in and try it out straight away.
If you want "safe, secure, and backed up" you need some sort of auto-duplicating paper (common for lab notebooks) and somewhere to store it.
Phonebooth Free: An Alternative to Google Voice for Small Businesses
Women Who Drink Gain Less Weight
[edit: please ignore; don't want to delete because then the responses will seem odd, but this no longer makes sense given the new title]

New title from ilamont isn't smart. It's inconsistent.

[Something can be counterfeit and lead. Like, for example, a fake Intel Core i7-920 processor. Also, HN traditionally keeps titles.]
http://73primenumbers.com/about.html

"In case you didn't get it...

This site is a parody of 37signals.com, who I actually
respect and admire quite a bit. I especially love
Ruby on Rails, and am grateful to them for releasing it."
Are you only accepting applicants from the schools list in the footer?
The Facebook Imperative Cannot Be Stopped: Salesforce CEO
Isn't c++'s type system also turing complete via templates?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/189172/c-templates-turing...
Beyond the smartphone battle: Seven patent lawsuits you should know about
Why "Trailer Park"? I suppose it's a pun on something?
Not to mention ~ 1000 following, when I can't even follow tweats from ~ 25 people.
No no no! For the love of $(DIETY), don't call them openstache and closestache, but rather leftstache and rightstache.

While there isn't a difference in left-to-right language, those of us unfortunate enough to have to support right-to-left languages need a nontrivial algorithm to decide whether openstache is actually a leftstache or a rightstache (because the grpahic form of the character is that of a leftstache, independent of directionality, rather than openstache, which mirrors based on directionality)
unless "backed up" means "piled against the wall in the corner"
Ie, they got caught later.
Ask HN: Recommend first programming language to master (options included)
I have coded a game in Scheme, improved it in Common Lisp, ported it to Emacs Lisp, almost got it working in Perl. I barely know C, have seen Haskell (got swamped by types), understand the essential ideology behind Smalltalk, created two more small games in Forth, and don't like C++, Java, Ruby, and Python for various reasons. I also have added 5 to 10 in 6502 assembly.

My problem is that I wander much too often. (I have also toyed with Icon, x86 assembly, OCaml, SML, Fortran, and shell, awk, sed, grep)
I really like Lisp, but I think I should probably get a good grip on the lower rungs first. Could HN suggest a short list (or a single language) to master first?
P.S. if its any help, I use Arch Linux, but am thinking of moving to FreeBSD in the next few months.
When it's a ripoff of design work by a company Mozilla opted not to pay?

Yes, yes it is.
"working counterfeit" didn't quite fit. Do you have a better suggestion? It's worth making the distinction -- see http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=918 for example of working counterfeit chips made during "ghost" shifts at Chinese factories.
Campfire?
Rate my site - YayMyLife.com
http://www.yaymylife.com

How do I increase value of this site?
Bidi support! Yesssss!
Investors look beyond games to the ‘game-ification’ of life
Opera Logo with CSS
It seems like an OK site. With these things polish is really key.

- Use fixed width layout

- align the sign in link the the right margin

- let people see submit links even if they aren't signed in. If they click on it, then sign them in.

- stock it with a lot more bits. Right now there are just 3!

- have more than one user. Get your friends in on the beta first.

- make it seem alive and constantly changing, so people come back.

- make the bits shareable on twitter / facebook, etc

- the iconography is sort of weird, I saw a pancake, an asparagus (?), and the logo looks like a green folded piece of paper with eyes and a bite out of it. If you don't know how to design (which is totally OK), then go for minimalism.
Mozilla are lucky it was a blog post and not something from their lawyer.
Important functionality cannot be modified without a full recompile, which is always annoying. Try calling, say, font-backend functions from lisp... and then try overriding them.

All of Emacs needs to be dynamic, not just some of it.

It would also be nice to allow other languages to target the Emacs VM without rewriting those languages. Something like LLVM would be a good intermediate platform; lots of compilers can generate code for it, and the various assemblies can call each other.

Most users don't care, because they just want to write a function to replace < and > with &lt; and &gt;... but some people writing more complex modes would appreciate cleaner internals. Why shouldn't Emacs be as fast and accurate as Yi, after all?
Welcome to the non-hacker business world, where people react badly when you rip them off.
I bet less than 10% twitter users tweet at least once a day.
That's pretty damn good, but http://74signals.com/ is still my favorite (read the page title).
We're a small team, and early on we are focusing marketing efforts on a short list of schools in order to keep things manageable. We're certainly accepting resumes from other schools but we can't promise any results just yet :)
Modelling javascript
Being able to press the up key in the input textbox to scroll through your previous "commands" is a nice touch.
In a perfect world heroku would be the ideal "pay later" option. I.e. you start out with them and once you outgrow their platform you simply hire the sysadmin then, and make him transplant the beautifully clean rails app onto your own infrastructure.

Except... reality is harsh and ugly.

You want the guy with the sysadmin foo on your team from as early as possible. Because if your thinking goes along the lines you just described then clearly you don't have him yet, nor someone who told you what slippery slope you're about to tie yourself to.

If you have the admin guy then he will find you a cost effective platform to start out with quite effortlessly. Which might be heroku in some cases, but is usually just a bunch of rented or virtual servers that he sets up over a weekend. In the latter case it might actually cost a few bucks more initially than the "heroku free plan" - but he'll explain to you in kind words why he thinks it's worth that in the midterm. And he'll probably be right.

If you don't have him, then heroku can't save you. Heroku will run your stuff for a while just until things get interesting and worthwhile load starts to build. That's the point where the sum of your mistakes brings it to its knees. Due to basic mistakes usually. Related to simple things like file descriptor limits, stuff about TCP connections, or a basic understanding of how disk i/o works and how to craft the SQL to make it not hurt so much.

At that point all you can hope for is that you're already profitable enough to afford not only that guy you skipped on initially, but rather his bigger, hairy brother, which is the only kind generally willing [and able] to take on "search & rescue" gigs. For an adequate sum.

At this point your friendly "pay-later" route has turned into a nasty "pay 10-20x now" roadblock. In an "Insert coin to continue" sort of way.

This is not about what heroku can or can not do. This is about what kind of skills you need on the team for a web-startup. Don't skip on the admin. Or rather, don't skip on at least one guy who has been doing the admin thing on a real live app for a bit and also during some not-so-good times.
oops, i first read this as "have 10 feet or less" ... yeah, probably even more than 74% :)
How about "Hands On: Unboxing the Fake Intel Core i7-920"? (but fwiw I do - now - see the distinction you were trying to make).

[edit: maybe "third shift" is more popular than "ghost shift"? http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/...]
Basecamp? Backpack? Highrise?
Seems more of a shame for Mozilla to have done this, even by simple negligence.
26% producer/74% consumer is more than the 10%/90% I expected. Not everyone has something interesting to say and that's all right. I don't really want more people tweeting what they have for lunch.
I'm seriously considering Heroku, for my test/learning projects, and am willing to pay a little. Blossom and Koi are good for me.

But one thing that is making me think about VPS instead of Heroku is the ability to run multiple apps from one VPS unless I really need the power.

Does Koi allow you to run multiple Rails apps/websites per Koi, or is it 1 per Koi?
Famous last words: "Since the comparative efficiency of x vs. y seemed easy enough to quantify, I endeavored to do so..."
I only asked because my school address does not end .edu which is required for the signup form. Although I attend school in Canada
"but obviously that isn't going to happen now."

It hadn't happened. The deal was off.

Why do people try to convince designers that they should accept being ripped off in hopes that some of the people ripping them off will throw them a bone?
How Quakes Measure Up
I kind of thought about including a link to some pencils and notebooks on Amazon, but I thought it would be a better parody without that.
GTK widget embedding code

Does this mean embedding GTK widgets into Emacs? Or making a new GTK widget that is an embeddable version of Emacs?

I suspect it's the former, but if every GTK-based application could embed an Emacs editor, I think that would be pretty awesome too.
Yeah, I know that price tag says $199.99, but since you walked out of the store with it stuffed in your pocket, I know you like it - how's $180? $160?

Hey, don't walk so fast, I'm trying to negotiate with you. Wait up!
Just another comment - I see no indication that hunch is going to give it's employees 12 months notice before letting them go.
It's happened to me to. It's hard to go directly at competitors. Users will only switch if your thing is significantly better, by that I mean some multiple better.

Anyway, it looks like you've got the skills to make something nice. Maybe you could try to push the space into some fresh direction that no one has done before, instead of doing an incremental improvement.
Gist plugin for Outlook released
A nice perk for using the App Engine :)
Austin JavaScript is having a party with free beer, food, and vintage arcade games at Kung Fu Saloon on March 15th from 4pm - 9pm. http://www.austinjavascript.com
From the article

"Is it a communications utility a la Facebook or is it a media company?"

IMHO It's neither. It's an asynchronous ecosystem that connect people based on affinity rather than friendship.
Don't be embarrassed.

This is 'launch early and iterate' at its finest.
Obviously. I just don't.. hmm, "feel" the pun.
I still prefer The 38th Signal: http://38thsignal.blogspot.com/2007/07/phone-tells-you-that-...
If you don't think you've mastered "Lisp" yet, you could do worse than one of the two lower level ones, Common Lisp or Scheme. In a lot of ways they're close to the machine while still giving you all sorts of nice high level stuff.

However, looking at what you've done so far, you could do worse than getting a good mastery of C. It's a descent "smart assembler", it's not all that big as a language (plus the minimum of the standard library), it's good about teaching you concepts that are close to the machine and it's a common base for a lot of the higher level stuff that you've used or played with.
In 10 years we are going to look back at these photos and laugh at how ridiculous the first jetpacks looked.
I posted a much more entertaining forum thread yesterday about this, but no upvotes... bah. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1179578
I'm pretty sure there is nothing stopping you from flying an ultralight (or even regular) aircraft to work. Except for cost.
Obviously it was just me who thought this would be a good idea. :)
Why? A 1000 foot fall is much cheaper to treat than cancer. (Step 1: scrape up organs. Step 2: incinerate them.)
That's the point where the sum of your mistakes brings it to its knees. Due to basic mistakes usually. Related to simple things like file descriptor limits, stuff about TCP connections, or a basic understanding of how disk i/o works and how to craft the SQL to make it not hurt so much.

What if you are not a making these mistakes, how is Heroku (or another service like it) going to bring you to a harsh and ugly reality?

It seems Heroku is fine if I don't want to monitor my own sever all the time and deal with the maintenance that goes along with that.
Also under consideration:

- Seven Habits of Highly Effective '60s Folk Bands

- Your Own Mongolian Empire: What Genghis Khan Taught Us About Enterprise Management And How You Can Apply It

- Productivity Secrets Of Oscar The Grouch

- Cardinal Richelieu: Visionary Corporate Evangelist

- Ned Ludd's Business Success Lessons

- Unleash Your Startup's Inner Unabomber
Agree. I also think the prize should be given to organizations/people who specifically seek out to promote peace, not just produce it as a byproduct.
Unless you like to ride it facing the wrong way. Then it's a backscalator.

Or is that the one going the other way?
26% aren't necessarily producing though it could be under 10% and the others just tried it for a day or a week and saw no use.
If you wander too often, you don't need a language, you need a purpose.

Find a project you're going to finish. One that's going to motivate you enough to go through all the work needed to build it and debug it. Then come back and ask us about languages.

Any language is great if you spend enough blood, sweat, and tears bending it to your will. No language will be good enough if you don't commit.
An estimate that Mozilla rejected before using the design they were unwilling to pay for.

EDIT: If I were MetaLabs, I would not be horrified at the prospect that people perfectly willing to rip me off would be reluctant to hire me.
A bit off topic, but JumpPost (the site launched on Heroku that this article refers to) looks an awful lot like you ripped RentHop's design. You guys thinking about changing that anytime soon?
http://www.renthop.com/list
http://jumppost.com/apartments
I just can't get bullish about Twitter for the long haul with mainstream adoption. I know I might get flamed for this, but I'm trying to give some observations:

* Tech inclined, but non-industry friends just don't see the value of Twitter. The word pointless is used almost every time.

* Those that try it leave very fast. That's where the 10 tweets per person seems to be about right.

* The engagement just isn't there. I know someone mentioned the whole 90/10 ratio, but that's different here. Imagine if only 74% of Facebook users posted something or updated their profile. That's really really bad.

* I asked a room filled with 30 college seniors who come from good backgrounds / fairly smart / business students etc if they used Twitter. One person tried it and one person uses it for their job, not personally.

I'm not saying Twitter is horrible or Twitter is going to die. I just don't see it being the huge monstrosity of a multi multi billion dollar company a lot of people expect it to be. That's okay. I'd rather see it stick around for those that do value it, rather than die because it tried to become something it just can't be.
New Gestures coming to an iPhone/iPad near you: triple tap and long press
Here's what ads might look like on the iPad
yeah, that is the issue - send me your email address to jeff@collegejobconnect.com and I'll get you set up
It's Time to Destoy the Billable Hour
After they gave it to Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama, does it really matter who or what else wins it?
Do you have any more info on this?

Even if so, this work seems interesting because they are showing the derived clusters to the users, thereby providing value. (Though I'm interested more in their approach than in this application -- it's a hard problem that pertains to my work on neural circuit reconstruction.)
Apple’s Secret iPhone Developer Agreement Goes Public
I find the following nomenclature to be both concise and descriptive e.g., "open square" or "close paren":

() == parens
[] == squares
{} == staches (formerly curlies)
Doesn't seem all that tough to me

my_len_acc :: [a] -> Int -> Int
my_len_acc [] so_far = so_far
my_len_acc (_:xs) so_far = my_len_acc xs $ so_far + 1

my_len :: [a] -> Int
my_len some_str = my_len_acc some_str 0
Internetnews: Navy Brass Latest Hacking Victim of the Deceptive Duo
Anyone have experience with this vs amazon AWS?
(amazon seems to be cheaper)
I would give the medal to Vint Cerf and the money to the Internet Archive.
Looks like something that should be implemented as a plugin for Eclipse or Visual Studio. Kind of interesting, though.
Hopefully this will make working on the Gridspy project easier. Typically I have 3 IDEs open - my Firmware IDE, Eclipse + Visual Studio.

In Eclipse I am editing a twisted project (usually 3 different files at once but only 2 methods from each) and a Django project (probably about 10 files to juggle there).

In Visual studio, I tend to have another 10 files open (the firmware builds to Win32 too).

God it would be awesome to have all that on one monitor in little bubbles.
IPad SDK 3.2 beta 4 removes Video Call/Chat references
I guess that is why it is an eclipse plugin.

Pity it doesn't interoperate with all eclipse-compatible languages (just yet). I'd love to use it to work with Python.
Git's Little Bundle of Joy
Sure they can. By definition, if you have a job, it is paying you money. Anybody can choose to save some of that money every month with the intention of taking a good long vacation in the future. It doesn't matter how little you make, you can always adjust your lifestyle to allow for savings.

So while it's entirely possible that you can't afford that luxury right this minute, that's entirely something you've chosen for yourself. And the interesting part is that you can do something about it.

With a few basic changes to your life today, you can afford to take 3 months off next year.
“Trailer Park is addictively easy-to-use. It’s so simple even a fucking idiot could use it”
-A fucking idiot
The Real Danger to Facebook Lies Within
Maybe the W3C? Tim Berners-Lee deserves it.
I don't think he's really dismissing your site.

Positive and negative comments come with the territory once you launch/announce your site to the public.