skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Disclaimer: I teach this stuff

I don't make a big distinction in scrum, Kanban, Agile, agile, Crystal, etc.

If the burndowns were buggin' you, stop the burndowns. If the daily standups seemed pedantic, stop them (or better yet, fix them). If your team is too large, Kanban might give you a better sense of control but development's big obstacle is communication, not control.

I think Kanban boards are great. If it tickles your fancy, go for it.

But it's no more a silver bullet than scrum was. At the end of the day, teams that regularly adapt beat teams that jump from one big thing to another, apply it rigidly, then wait too long to jump to the next big thing. The idea is continuously tweaking what you're doing, not latching on to a marketing term.

Hope that didn't tick you off :)
Did i ever say that our device does not have a DSP ? thanks. Alberto
On the high school level, perhaps jr high as well, if you could replace the 5th day at school with a day in a workplace - some kind of internship - then I think you would end up with a better system. Perhaps vastly better.
I've understood that basically before FSF was founded, there was no need for "free software" as software was generally considered a side-product by computer manufacturers. IIRC it wasn't until early 80's when companies started routinely charging for and licensing software, thus propelling the founding of a counter-movement such as FSF.

RMS and folks just wanted the old way back. Please correct me if I'm wrong on details, I'd very much like to know better.
My comment was just an observation of common rhetoric here, not a direct response to you.

But re: limiting freedom: Do you think that giving everyone the freedom to kill people would be a net improvement of the freedoms of people when you take into account that people who are killed don't have any freedom at all.

It's so easy to say that freedom means that "I should be able to do what I want without regard for others". But thinking of freedom only in the active sense is an extremely naive idea of freedom. What about my freedom to remain free of the consequences of your actions?

Concrete example 1: SUVs disproportionately transfer risk to the occupants of smaller vehicles in the event of a collision. Is someone's freedom to choose to drive an SUV more important than my freedom to drive a Miata without undue risk of being killed by your SUV? Why do you think your lifestyle choice should be more important than mine?

Concrete example 2: In the US, some people think it's an essential freedom to be allowed to own firearms. This has lead to a proliferation of firearms which means that the US has the highest rate of gunshot deaths of any modern country. Why should people's freedom to own a firearm be more important than my freedom to go about my business without worrying about getting shot?

My point is: there's always a tradeoff. Not acknowledging that tradeoff is either disingenuous or naive.
Getting new users to stick is key, and very difficult. But there's a lot more too it than your registration pages and marketing videos. All that stuff guides a user to try it out, but its when they log in for the first time when the challenge begins. The first user experience is whats important.

I've recently been putting a lot of effort in refining my apps first user experience. A good source of inspiration for me was http://ui-patterns.com/collection/blank-slate - guide new users to take actions that are shown to increase retention (add a post, create a milestone, etc..) and they might stick around.
I imagine this to be a fairly significant caveat, though perhaps that's more theory than practice. Am I wrong? :

"Note however that it is a requirement of the Maps API Terms of Service that you use the Geocoding Web Service in conjunction with a Google map. This means that when it comes time to use cached geocoder results in an application, the application must display the results or any data derived from them on a map generated using one of the Google Maps APIs or Google Earth API."
Agreed, CueCat was well before its time. Dave Mathews (not the singer) was one of the creators of the CueCat and generally everything he does is well before its time.
heritability of IQ at around 0.5

Heritability of IQ has nothing whatever to do with malleability (or, if you prefer this terminology, controllability) of human intelligence. That point has been made by the leading researchers on human behaviorial genetics in their recent article that I cited in the first reply to this submission on HN. It is a very common conceptual blunder, which should be corrected in any well edited genetics textbook, to confuse broad heritability estimates with statements about how malleable human traits are. The two concepts actually have no relationship at all. Highly heritable traits can be very malleable, and the other way around. It looks like the author of the new book mentioned in the submitted article has gathered a lot of evidence about malleability of human intelligence, which I will check as I read the book. (I've read other writings on this subject, and regularly participate in scholarly discussion of the latest research on this with Ph.D. psychologists.)

Intelligence, to be useful, must be used effectively.

I do agree with this point.
Notes on Mixergy interview with TwitPic founder Noah Everett
If you're employed then you don't have to do any form filling at all. It's responsibility of your employer to pay all the taxes and you only get the amount after taxes in your bank account. Typically accountants do all the computing.

There is an exception, self-employed people. They do have to fill in forms and compute everything but their taxes are flat, there is no non-taxable minimum. They have less total tax % but also less perks (no paid vacations or sick days etc)

Update: no, we don't have to declare foreign bank accounts afaik. It might change this year because they just started taxing income from capital gains which will cause some headache for me personally.
I was under the impression that Gecko was sometimes slower because it implements standards better than Webkit.

Quote from:
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/bz/archives/020267.html

"This is not exactly an isolated incident; a number of the performance issues I've run into recently in Gecko have had to do with correctly handling edge cases that this particular open-source engine happens to just not handle. I guess it's easier to do well on tests if you cheat.

More interestingly, Opera's performance on this sort of thing is still quite good, and I have yet to discover them cheating..."

The comments are good too, and include input from Dave Hyatt, but you have to skip over the "contributions" of some aggressive webkit fanboys.
I really want to pick up a midi keyboard for this game. I dabble at piano and can read music but this seems like the fun factor would encourage me to practice.
Charles P. Thacker Wins ACM Turing Award
Celtic Jewelry made by www.ANTIK-GROUP.com CELTIC WEDDING KNOT
Possible reference to the heading “Know thy client and you know the real project” in the article. I'm no expert in second person singular pronouns but I do believe that sentence is an improper mixture of thy and you. (Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou)
Worcester Polytech, but I didn't finish
Carnegie Mellon
There are plenty of barcode scanning apps, the best probably being RedLaser (http://redlaser.com/).
Billions of cycles per second. But executing an instruction frequently takes 20 cycles or so. That reduces instructions to hundreds of millions.
What's funny is how anyone is surprised. This isn't some new manifestation of Apple -- it's the Apple Computer I grew up resenting through the first 10 years of my career. Prior to OS X, Apple was always about being closed, proprietary, and all-controlling. That they ever ventured away from that must have been viewed by their leadership as a 'necessary evil', to be done for only a limited period.

This agreement, which I rejected and thus did not become an iPhony developer, is not at all a surprise. It's as warm and familiar as Apple pie. I'll have cake, instead.
I am sure you don't know neither how I work nor how does Panic.
And under "getting the CSS exactly" right I understand slightly different things from "getting the design right"
Give me some tips about hacking please please please.................
The Ultra Fast Web with Varnish Web Accelerator
If anyone is interested in a more tractable experimental platform for the study of this effect - it has also been observed for light propagating in an optical fiber.
There is an interesting analogy between the nonlinear wave propagation effects believed to be responsible for ocean rogue waves and those responsible for optical effects like supercontinuum generation.

Here's a recent nature paper where researchers observed "optical rogue waves" in the light propagating through a microstructured optical fiber.

http://www.ee.ucla.edu/~oecs/comp_pub/intr_opt/Optics154.pdf

This follows the pattern of solitons - they were first observed in a boat canal, and later found in optics.
你好, Having gone to public and private school, i can give a fair recommendation that while I learned more academically in private school, I learned more about dealing with difficult people and real world situations (accidentally) in public school. Home schooling can be part of the answer I just hope you are allowing your children to grow. More schooling isn't an absolute, just look at japan and ask why they don't produce (as many) innovators.

I very much applaud your efforts to improve education of your state, i hope you keep up the good work. After looking at your bio, i see that you're very involved in the education system. I'm curious what brings you to HN other than good news and good commentators ^_^ . Do you also have plans to take over the world with a start-up like the rest of us?
gfodor,

Have you tried using a 2 week long branch on a fast moving repo with a team of 4 developers and 1 designer? It can be tough without a daily commitment to rebase. We see between 15-25 commits a day on master.

The point of the article was to be atomic with commits and to really push to try BDD. I don't care if you are a convert, you will see the benefits when you try to adhere to the principals.
John Resig (of jQuery fame) talks about why this approach was taken in the design of the sizzle engine that powers jQuery. Its towards the end of this talk (which is quite good by the way), I would find the exact time but my work internet thinks its inappropriate content and won't let me watch the video :(
eye color is a bad one to pick if you're making the case against genes being predictive of traits

Not so, actually. The author of the article did research before writing that rather than just misremembering something taught in school based on obsolete research. Eminent geneticist Victor McKusick developed his interest in human genetics in large part because eye colors of his immediate family members were not always as expected on the basis of naive views of the inheritance of eye color.

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

http://www.thetech.org/genetics/ask.php?id=29

http://www.bookrags.com/research/eye-color-gen-02/
You're right in that I'm not a web developer for advertising agencies anymore :) I did a quick experience for a small one, and surely I won't do that again.
Palin grew up on socialized medicine
I'm generally on the left, but let me ask: what's wrong with abolishing income taxes and, instead, charging consumption taxes on purchases and transfers?

I may be utterly naive in my understanding, but I'd support this. No income tax at all; heavy consumption taxes. Tax private jets and true luxury goods at 95+%, food staples at 0%, inheritance transfers at 99% after an allowed small amount (handing an inheritance down to kids counts as "consumption") and general consumer goods around 30%. Real estate would be taxed 30% in general but much 75% (marginal) if the owner's real estate holdings (including the house being purchased) exceeded 8 years' median income.

The tax would apply to services as well as goods, thus averting the regressive nature of the traditional sales tax.

Please tell me why this is too naive to work. It seems like it would be a major improvement.
Kollege Kockup: Something Is Not Right In Higher Ed
It is most probably.

That's it I am getting an editor.
Wabash College
U Catolica de Chile
Hackanonical is my new favorite word. Thank you for that.
Searching for a detail, I found that this piece is reprinted in this book:
E = Einstein: His Life, His Thought, and His Influence on Our Culture, by Donald Goldsmith, Marcia Bartusiak
( http://books.google.com/books?id=zGzcV40b3IkC&lpg=PP1... )

[The detail was the name of the founder of the Vienna circle, murdered in 1936 - it was the philosopher of science Moritz Schlick.]

The table of contents looks good. Einstein's Bovine Dreams would be a good name for a band ...
Santa Fe, NM red tape may kill hi speed Internet
Seems interesting, it reminds me of delicious but for products. That to me is the best use case, like their example "Scan a cereal box barcode and attach your best treats recipe".

The other ones, like putting a barcode on a birthday card, I'm not so sure about.
Vodafone HTC Magic shipped with Conficker, Mariposa malware
Incidentally:

> As another member of the institute, the physicist Freeman Dyson, observed...

This would be the same physicist who, among his many accomplishments, came up with the concept of the Dyson Sphere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
I often use this algorithm:

1. write a function in pointed style
2. run it through pointfree
3. is it shorter/easier to read? then use pointfree's definition

This is really a personal shortcoming though because after 20+ years of writing code in "standard" languages my brain is sufficiently warped that I'm not always able to think of the short and clear solution without "grinding the gears".
WinMo tweaked again, Ubuntu on a HTC Touch Pro2
I think it's worth noting that WebKit itself is based on KDE's KHTML library. Apple didn't develop WebKit so much as decided to use KHTML over Gecko.

Both the Gecko and KHTML projects were started around the same time.
I've had that experience with video cards too, on Linux with an ATI FireGL v5200:

Built-in (open-source) driver: not great performance, but usable.

ATI driver: suspend/resume broken, frequent lockups requiring anything from connecting via SSH from another machine and killing the process to a hard reboot, and finally discontinuation of driver support about a year after the card was off the market (just in time for a version of X requiring new drivers).

I have a new laptop equipped with a FireGL v5700. Last I checked, the open-source drivers didn't provide 3D acceleration, so I suppose ATI's driver is better despite still having the above-mentioned issues.
could you post a link to it?
Apple iPhone app fine print hurts developers
FileMaker shuffles forward with version 11
View source: XML.
The only machine in the factory in the cheap third world country with a CD burner was also the only one connected to the internet - so was the one that the techies browsed porn on and so was infected with everything.

ps. if you think this is unlikely - take a look at the crap on your CEO/CFO/salesman's laptops sometime.
I'm pretty sure you are calling the xml format there. Use View Source!
Anyone who has done well for themselves will leave. Those businesses that start to go well will leave.

Picture the situation: You've started a company that's started to do well. You've worked day and night for years, suffering in the hopes of some payoff. Finally you can afford some nice things, then suddenly you're taxed at 95%.
Makes you feel wanted, doesn't it?
Fedora 13 (Goddard) Alpha release notes
Are you perhaps being downvoted for claiming NIH syndrome in response to a post which is about them taking code from another project? And which also details that they've already bolted-on a JIT that was created by Adobe?

(And the irony that you're wanting them to adopt a codebase that exists mainly because Apple didn't follow your anti-NIH advice and adopt Gecko has already been covered in other comments, though no-one seems to have mentioned that Google could have have just worked on Webkit's Squirrelfish/Nitro rather than write V8, which meant they had two competing projects internally until they switched fully in version 2.0 of Android last September)
Unity game engine 3.0 will support Android, PS3 and IPad
My DropZap iPhone/iPod touch game is free for a limited time.
Google links up with Dish Network; Opening gambit against Apple TV?
The real-time web really sucks
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/faq.html#geocoder%5Flimit

"If more than 15,000 geocode requests in a 24 hour period are received from a single IP address, or geocode requests are submitted from a single IP address at too fast a rate..."
My account has been reinstated. Looks like I may have to incorporate an LLC in Oregon, but that's easy to do.

Here's the e-mail I received from Amazon:

==================

I confirmed that your contact and payee addresses have been updated. Because you have changed your state of residence, your account has been reinstated. However, we want to be sure you are aware that you may be asked to provide proof of residency at your new address. If this is the case, we will contact you with instructions on what documentation to provide and the submission process for this documentation.

Thank you for your participation in the Associates Program.
do you read the source of the linux kernel to understand how to use bash? how about the source of a wifi driver before connecting to a network?

your premise is rediculous.
> Economic activity has benefits for society at large -- we get stuff out of it, and there's a feedback loop where more people with money in their pocket means more demand, which means more people employed, which means money in their pocket, etc.

Yes, there is. However, the amount of feedback, which economists call the "multiplier" is a matter of considerable dispute. Obama's current point-woman on this has published research showing that the multiplier for much govt activity is typically less than 1. (She's saying something different now.)

> Giving money to people in lump sums (which was in fact about 40% of the bill, the bill was 40% tax cuts) is fast and simple, so it certainly has a place, but keeping people in a job is far more effective because you create externalities.

You're assuming that the person is producing something of value and at a reasonable cost..

More to the point, the original poster asserted that a job which cost $200k was worth more than just giving the person $70k/year even if we ignore such factors. (Numbers made up.)

Note that Krugman recently wrote that just giving money to unemployed people doesn't cause problems. This is in contrast to his statement in "Macroeconomics" that unemployment payments encourage people to stay unemployed longer than they would otherwise.

> That job is producing something of value to the economy, that person is gaining skills/experience leading to future employability

I'd agree, but this flies in the face of the arguments used to justify higher minimum wages.

> Counter-cyclical spending is, according to economic theory, the one point in the cycle where the government should be encouraged to spend money like they're in vegas, up 50k and hanging at the strip club. Breaking this negative feedback loop is priority #1 -- debt can be paid back later,

I know the theory. However, it assumes that govt does something that the US govt doesn't do, namely save during the other part of the cycle. Given that, it's unclear that the spending during the down part makes sense.

To put things in terms of another HN argument, it's unhealthy to eat the calories that you'd need to train for the Ironman if you're not actually training for the Ironman.
Turing Award Winner Named
You gotta love politicians. The discussion is about Europe's Flat Tax.

But katinieks says no, it's really a progressive tax because of all the "tweaking" the politicians have done.

Assuming this is correct, what do reasonable people do? Call it a flat tax and add in "but it's not really" every time it's mentioned? Call it a flat tax and have the _real_ flat tax idea be tarnished by what they've done and called flat?

Not trying to get in on the discussion. As a guy who watches people talk about problems, politics always amazes me in that the language very seldom matches the underlying reality. This makes every honest political discussion a tricky search for definitions. As a side note, I've found once you get the definitions done, most people are not that far apart.
So a company that makes their money from you buying stamps, has a pointless process that makes you send lots of letters, with lots of stamps.

Not so daft really !
Ask HN : Why every little startup seem to have a designer on their team?
Every startup these days seem to have a designer on their team (I'm thinking of http://mite.yo.lk/en/ but it could be anyone). How can you afford that?

I mean, I can pay for a web designer but it costs me too much and the design does not evolve with the product so we go on and make our own shitty design.

What do you do to have at least an OK design?
Is it part of a UK-US alliance that Royal Mail take it upon themselves to make the USPS look relatively less backward?

In any case, this seems another example of a 20th Century operation seeking to function blindly in the 21st Century... with the result that its customers breathlessly await the day when some startup will put the operation (and thus its customers) out of their final misery.
Yeah, the first thing I did was 'view source'. Sheesh, what a mess.

Check out this: http://static.stickybits.com/web/images/fp_08.jpg. Zero SEO value by putting text in images.

For such a great design, it totally fails at implementation.
Thank you all for having mercy and not downvoting me =P...
Maybe a better question would be, what school and what major?

UW Madison, Computer Science.
So, pretty much yeah, an erector set, though possibly a bit stronger. It's not old-school erector, though. Looks like Meccano has been making Erector sets since about 1990.
I'm only trying to be a little snarky, but if Apple had limited themselves to producing a hand-held gaming console, I suspect folks would be a little less upset. There's a moral difference between locking down a purely entertainment gadget and one that's intended to store and manage most or all of my personal information.

And yes, to the extent that consoles are moving out of the "purely entertainment" category, their SDK restrictions are becoming equally troublesome. I think a good argument can be made that this is one of the reasons they're having trouble getting beyond the gaming market, in fact.
The Cisco CRS-3 triples the capacity of its predecessor, the Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System, with up to 322 Terabits per second, which enables the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second; [...]

How much longer until LoC finally becomes an official SI-unit?
2009 ACM Turing Award winner: Charles Thacker
In this case, the software appears to be an on-screen battery charge monitor that users could download from a website. It was not included with the device or required for operation.
Free music downloads
I wish they would add a geoip lookup method.
Poll: iPad or iPhone 4G
The blogs are pegging the iPad's competition to not be other tablets but something much closer to home, the iPhone 4G.

What about you?
iPhone 4G
some people will always whine whether it's free or not.
And Socksen.
Tell HN: Sphinx documentation builder
Practicing in the form of a game makes practice more fun, and, therefore, makes it more likely that you will practice. Those of us would-be casual musicians may need an additional motivation to practice other than a pure love of the instrument.
Yes, consoles are bad for freedom. But they aren't trying to replace general purpose computers, as Apple is trying to do with the iPhone and iPad.