skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In Agile, process is not equal bureaucracy. Process is equals discipline. - Eric Ries

This is false. Agile is total bureaucracy. From "no code without passing tests" to "pay $1 if you're late to the standup meeting", Agile is about everything but writing software that works.

When I think back to "Agile" jobs I had, I can remember our team spending about 4 months writing 3 files worth of code that did basically nothing for the application as a whole. We did have a lot of meetings and tests, though.

Conversely, when I think about code I've written on my own without any structure or rules, I have over 100 completed projects/libraries in a few years of hacking. And when I think about code I've written for non-Agile jobs, the amount is the same -- lots of reliable, finished projects.

Agile is a way for the bad programmers to slow down the good programmers, so everyone can feel better about themselves. Avoid.

UNIX/Linux philosophies teaches software developer to be discipline.

How? When I write a Windows application, I have a full-screen Emacs with my code, a compile buffer for builds and tests, and a ghci (etc.) buffer. When I write a UNIX application, well, it's exactly the same.
>There is no people search. If I want to be friends with "Joe User", I type it in, and get the response "If Joe is using Speakeasy, and wants to be friends, we'll let you know."

So you need to know enough info, and pass that to the app, to uniquely identify Joe against all the other Joes. That means rather than have the user themselves define their level of anonymity you have the "friends" breech the anonymity in order to locate them. Either that or you make it nearly impossible to actually link up with a person that you know well; and of course you get no feedback to know whether the system bugged out or not.
My vote is for something based on Google Wave (protocol). Standards based, distributed, scalable. Similar to email, you can own your own server (and by proxy, data), but still have realtime updates. I pointed this out when Wave was announced, but most people were obsessed with the hype of wave to understand the possible applications of the framework.

http://ynniv.com/blog/2009/08/google-wave-is-not-email-it-is... (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=754193)

(Edit: BTW, OpenSocial is also XMPP based with a web frontend)
Yes, this is a good idea. I think you can get 90% of the way there on your own though, by asking yourself a few questions. Does it work? Am I sure it works? Will I be able to replace this code with new code in a year without touching anything else?

By the time you've answered "Am I sure it works?", the answer to the next question is almost always yes. If you can test something enough to be sure it works, it's probably modular enough for your application, too.
Always use hashtags with care. While they can sometimes help a tweet make it into specialized aggregators, overuse or unnecessary usage can make a tweet look spammy or insincere.
You can see the clicks on The Denver Post's ( http://twitter.com/denverpost ) first twitter advertising push here: http://dpo.st/ipadsh+
Patrick Winston's "How To Speak" is also very good.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=9F536001A3C605FC
4. A Bunker for rich people during a catastrophe

So, it would be like the arks in 2012? That turned out well for them, especially that part where everyone was fighting each other to get onto the boat.
For Emacs and Vim users, using the mouse is a context switch: It forces the brain to move from the keyboard context to the more tactile mouse context. That is annoying.

There are some people who claim, correctly, that the mouse is usually faster than the keyboard. They (probably) don't realize that's a strawman argument: I don't care about speed, I care about convenience. I'm quite willing to burn a few milliseconds for the sake of a more consistent user interface.
is that because my tweets are protected?

Yes. Can you imagine the furore if you could find people's protected tweets by merely doing a search? (I seem to recall, however, that they did accidentally allow this for a while when they bought the search service from Summize.)
Smokers know the risks (come on, everybody knows the risks), and generally don't care. As the following article states, the mentally ill smoke a lot. It's likely a combination of self-medication and deliberately self-destructive behavior. If tomorrow seems overwhelming, then some hypothetical future illness is just not on the radar. Then there are others who get a kick out of flouting social convention. It's antisocial social behavior...

http://mentalhealth.about.com/library/weekly/aa112300a.htm
People love being outraged by things, especially on social news sites. If it's not the appstore, it's facebook privacy. It's pretty depressing this is the top news item on hacker news.
مشاهدة مباراة الاهلى والاتحاد الليبى بث مباشر
Zynga’s Struggle For Independence: Bailing On Tagged, ZLive To Launch Soon?
Since hardware virtualization was introduced, the whole system can be wrapped by an attacker. Therefore, well coded malware could use the SSDT vulnerability to virtualize the currently running OS and not even have to remove AV protection afterwards. Tech keeps getting more and more flakey :-/
And more importantly, the hashtag has to be recognized by your followers as something beneficial to be associated with.
It's sometimes funny that people take this position.

Personally, I don't give 2 hoots if companies want to sell my information to each other. Good on them. I lose nothing by them doing it. Couldn't care less. (As long as it's stated in T&C that they are doing it).

It's especially ironic, since people moan at the music companies, saying that downloading music illegally isn't theft, since you haven't deprived them of anything.
Would it scale itself based on the latitude you dropped it at? Could you rotate it, and would it still be the correct scale? Does it display the length of the straight line segment that you placed, or the shortest path between the endpoints (Great Arc)?

I suspect that features are only added for the 80% case (ie, 80% of users would use it). There is too long a list of more important things missing or wrong with Google Maps for a random blogger to presume that the people on the Maps team hasn't thought of this.
Clearly this is poised to then take over from HTTP as the backbone of the internet, but by then I'll have probably started an electric car company or two and invented cold fusion.
Monetizing the Rapture
This service arranges for your pet to be placed in the home of a caring atheist (who will not ascend to Heaven) on Judgment Day.

The founder says "I'm trying to figure out how to cash in on this hysteria to supplement my income."
Zynga can (and will ) I just think it adds a more difficulty to retaining customers, and getting the free advertising on facebook through messages and requests etc. as people log-in zlive and don't play on fb.

But here's the worst from Zynga's side:

I dont think there is anyway Zynga can move people over fast enough -- fb will own a large chunk of user data (and realistically that's the big advantage Zynga has right now -- copying gameplay is easy, analytic packages are out there like mixpanel to optimize ROI on ads).

This really signals fb must really see gaming as a pathway to significant profits, and fb is will own the data on the most active and profitable players ( time spent, new games tried and with fb currency $ spent etc.) and could always expose this data to advertisers in some fashion to commaditize the market further.
the simplest thing to do would be to ban the sale or creation of any tradable commodities linked to a stock's value

this sentence doesn't make any sense to me
The basic case is that you have some friend overlap to reduce the search space.

I have thought about a passphrase/secret handshake to get a confirmed connection.
Bit.ly is Harmful to Your Reputation
Your comment inspired me to do some research, and the first page I found was this one: http://www.kamalsinha.com/iit/acceptance-rate.html

Given your comparison to Harvard, I thought you might be interested in this paragraph:

>While it seems true that admission rate at IITs is less than even the most selective US school like the CalTech, it does not mean IIT recruits students of higher caliber. In a country like the USA, educational resources were well developed and the enrollment capacity for engineering majors is kept about the same as the number of seniors intending to enter those programs, if not more. It means less desparation. Moreover, there are lot of top-notch schools schools of about equal caliber which decreases their selectivity figures. My guess is that the top 50 engineering schools in the USA exceed IITs in almost all respect and another 100 or so other schools are not far behind.
I also wrote some thoughts on this subject recently at: http://blog.datagraph.org/2010/04/rdf-nosql-diff
Show HN: what do you think of our new web app, PrioritizeMyWork.com?
Howdy, Hackers;
dustball and I just launched a new web app called Prioritize My Work ( http://prioritizemywork.com ). We've been working on it off and on for about a month, and we figured it was time to share it with the world (i.e. you guys) and see what you thought.

The basic pitch is that you've got a bunch of things to do and not enough time to do them all. You can use Prioritize My Work to build a todo list and then send it to your boss/client to let them arrange them, so you know what to work on first. Assuming you've got good time estimates, we even show you when you're going to run out of time, so you know what's actually going to get done.

We tried to model the interaction model on EtherPad a bit -- you just go there and start working. You get a URL you can copy and email or IM to people. For now, there are no user accounts to speak of.

So -- what do you think? Would you use this? What's it missing?
I think you're being rather unfair to Agile.

The basic tenets per the Agile Manifesto are reasonable enough, and don't imply any of the silliness you described.

Equally, the incremental style of development shared by all Agile processes has always been a better idea for most types of project than having some huge spec up-front and then not talking to anyone about it for six months. This was true long before anyone coined the term "agile" to describe the idea.

Of course, if you choose to adopt something like XP as your process, then you go a lot further. Personally, I consider XP a rather silly idea, because its basic principle is flawed: just because doing something can be helpful, that does not imply that doing it religiously all the time is better.

Likewise, the basic idea underlying Scrum is to have a prioritised list of stuff you need to get done, divided into practically sized chunks; to do a small number of them to make your next release that does more useful stuff than the last one; and then to repeat. Again, this is a sensible enough idea, and something that a lot of projects have done for much longer than the name "Scrum" has been around. It's only when you start adding on bucketloads of meetings and strict deadlines and people with silly job titles that it becomes rather comical.

These problems with taking basically good ideas too far are not Agile's problem. They are just what you get when consultants smell book deals.
> Played any water sports in your bathtub lately?

That doesn't mean what you think it means.

hint: google.
Clickable link: http://prioritizemywork.com
One that got stored in my brain faultily is χ (chi) as "key" versus "kai" - but the indicated pronunciation as ky is still ambiguous (think inky vs Kyle)! Wikipedia says kai. I still tend to pronounce it with a ch sound like Irish, German, Scottish "loch" etc. though.
Hm, never heard of the stuff but I can see that + a reprap rig do small miracles.
Own Your Awesome: Modesty Is A Dirty Word
is there anyway we can take a look at it?
Libraries need to start forming alliances with hacker spaces
Actually I would say it's a slight net minus to have an MBA when doing a startup. You learn nothing of use to you, but investors discriminate against you slightly.

Almost all investors are looking for founders who match past stars. So what they're looking for at this point is hackers.

I have to say I agree with them. I can't imagine Bill Gates or Larry & Sergey enduring B School.
A few water sports commonly practiced in swimming pools, all utterly impossible to do in a bathtub:

* Swimming

* Synchronized swimming

* Water aerobics

* Water gymnastics

* Diving

* Synchronized diving

* Waboba

* Water polo

* Water volleyball
Do you generally not have a sense of humor? That's a serious question. Conan is hilarious, very smart and yet humble and a genuinely nice guy.

I can accept that you might not find him funny but I can't accept anyone implying he's not a good guy.
The number one thing you can do to develop the "correct" software quickly is to choose a language at the proper level of abstraction and with the right idioms to allow you to address your problem space.

If you are tackling a problem space where such a language doesn't already exist, or one where the right idioms and level of abstraction is unknown to you, then choose a language that permits you to easily discover and construct the domain specific language that is required.
Do you think there could be an MBA program that teaches relevant things to what start ups do? and what would it teach?

I feel in some ways part of what Y Combinator does is like an extremely condensed business school that is relevant to start ups.

YC "spend[s] much more time teaching founders how to pitch their startups, and how to close a deal once they've generated interest." YC also invites speakers to share their knowledge http://ycombinator.com/w9speakers.html

I think the ultimate educational experience for a future start up entrepreneur would combine what Ars Digita University taught (programming) http://www.aduni.org/, web design, the relevant aspects of business, a bit of elementary worldly wisdom http://ycombinator.com/munger.html, and to top it all off the school would require the students to work on a start up as a side project.
I like it! Task nesting could be good but obviously you don't want it to get complex and thus unintuitive. Templates might be nice too.

Also, how about 'on it...' and 'stop' buttons, so that you can track the time spent?
True, and I'm sorry, it wasn't my intention to dispute that. However, NASDAQ cancelled trades number is 286... 286.
Devil's advocate here.

1. Maybe this would work in European countries, but I just don't think it would work in America. You're just going to cause your employees to become more disgruntled as they will feel like you're taking away a fundamental personal choice.

2. Meetup.com. I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to organize much faster than that.

3. What is the recent obsession with stopping bullies? I don't have any real thoughts on this other than it seems to be catering more toward the recent media obsessions than anything real. People will always be bullied. Unless your website allows kids to hire a huge, jacked guy to come beat the shit out of their bully, it's not going to help.

4. If there is a catastrophe, how will the rich people get to the bunker in time? Won't the roads, planes, etc. all be out of service?
Donald Duck In Mathmagic Land
The fightbullies and rich person's bunker are amazing ideas. I would run with both of them and see if you can combine them somehow. If rich people feel bullied, they can go into the bunker.
And the wikipedia page about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_in_Mathmagic_Land
The first thing I would try is a bit hacky but might work. I'd take a copy of the data structures you are analysing when looking for malware and then copy it back to the original place just before you call the normal windows function.

It would minimise the amount of time the malware had to get the data in.

What you really need is to move the data into kernel space somehow. That would need a tweak to windows though.

The difficulty for the attacker comes in creating the initial attacker and faker threads. Possibly AV can hook the creation of threads and examine new threads for this potential behaviour (this might kill heavily threaded apps though). Then the virus make would have to attack two separate threads.
Wave is just another boring protocol. Protocols aren't hard. They're not valuable. It's not rocket science.

Building something people need is valuable, and getting people to use it is very valuable.

That's where Wave failed IMHO.
So many lectures on scaling are full of best-practices that are somewhat removed from reality and time/budget constraints. This lecture on the other hand has a lot of common-sense advice and solutions that may be obvious to some, but I must admit, this is going to help me (if I could get the traffic to worry about scaling...).
Click on the second search result.
I was excitedly hoping it would be a guide to how to pronounce formulae, alas not.
What do you think happens when you click it and report a mistake? Do they check the link and remove the flag if the site is ok?

No, they don't. They told me to make a new bit.ly link and give it out to people, as if that would undo the damage that was done

Uhm. Reminds me of Yelp.
Startups are one of those things that are best learned by doing, so YC pretty much already is what you're talking about. We've tried to make it the optimal way to learn about startups. But YC is structurally so different from a university that I don't think they'd be able to evolve very far in this direction.

There's a discontinuity between investment firms and schools. We've taken the investment firm and made it a lot like a school, in much the same way that seals became a lot like fishes. But as with seals and fishes, there is an unbridgeable gap despite the surface similarities.
You might also like mouse-avoidance-mode. I've got it set to 'exile.
XM25 - The gun that shoots round corners
I'm going to make a programming tutorial, I need your opinion
Hi, I need to write some kind of tutorial/documentation for a programming language I created (http://marianoguerra.com.ar/efene/) and I would like to know which kind of books or tutorials are the best for you.<p>for example I like these 3:<p><pre><code> * http://learnyousomeerlang.com/
* http://learnyouahaskell.com/
* http://diveintopython.org/
</code></pre>
this tutorial will be the first documentation for the language, so I don't know if doing it informal would be good or not.<p>Also, I would like to hear some kind of examples that would be interesting to use, I don't want to write a factorial or some abstract example, but something that is usable.<p>The target of the tutorial is for people that come from mainstream languages (C/C++/C#/Java/Javascript/Python) and would like to learn a functional programming language, or want to play with erlang but don't like the syntax.<p>advices?
It was an interesting list for a little while. Now people just keep blanking the spreadsheet. See: Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.
Just my two cents: I thought ideas #1 and #6 were really good. #1 seems like it's "in" right now...the sooner you could do that, the better.
What Twitter needs is to remove the 140 character limitation. Nobody uses SMS anymore, especially when the content contains URLs to non-mobile-friendly sites.
There is a fairly big list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websi... including traffic numbers
Making Random Suck Less
The Ever-Widening World of Tiny Projectors
Well, you can definitely build a facebook alternative -- it will take a while, and it'll be probably not be up to par with what the top-notch talent at fb dishes out, but anyway, you'll build it. It is there. How would you convince people to use it? Without the people, the technology is bunk. I have hundreds of friends all locked into FB - a mass exodus is definitely not possible.

I think that FB has grown beyond a point where any other network can compete in the short run. The more important thing is that FB needs to realize they have attained a size where they need to care about social responsibility and be governed by certain policies. All these attempts by the site to ram down new social values into our culture is what needs to change.
Asking the waiter/waitress to split the check is uncouth.
I actually briefly user-tested such a scheme back at university; if it worked well, I was going to put together a news aggregator based on the idea.

At least in my test, which was admittedly very small in scale, people almost always clicked "Insightful/Agree" or "Uninsightful/Disagree". I'd love to see a better test of this, though.
Microsoft Ponders UV Password Tattoos to Protect Pacemakers
I like the airbnb.com for desks idea. I recently got myself a small office in a co-op and I thought a website like that would be really useful.

The only question is - what's to stop AirBnb from simply re-purposing and rebranding their technology to do this exact thing? That was my initial concern when thinking about this idea.
"Past performance is not indicative of future returns."

A large country in the Eurozone has not defaulted on its debt before. This default affects the price of the Euro. You can't just look at a graph and assume that it's always right.

The Euro isn't even old enough to make claims like "always", anyway. It's only been on the market since 1999 and only in circulation since 2002.
I think that would completely go against the concept of Twitter: short-form communication.
It worked a lot better for them than for the billions that drowned.

Besides that, it was only a movie. Maybe rich people should live in a bunker all the time?

That way they won't waste time when the catastrophe hits.
That seems rather stupid. How is url-shortening a already url-shortened url a security threat?
Problem loading page
This is one of the few books that really changed how I think about the world in a big way. If you haven't read it do so.
I just migrated one of my applications to Heroku yesterday... So far I've been very happy with it! I only needed to change one line of application code and remove my old config files to get everything working.

The interesting part for me is that with aggressive caching I can run my application(s) on their free service with very few hassles. That's great for me as it gives me the chance to spend the money on advertising instead of hosting, where I'll actually see a return.

Hopefully sometime down the line I can start paying for the service to thank Heroku for their awesome work!
While the author has a right to be upset, her attitude toward the support staff — who likely have no control over the situation — is disgusting. ("Your apology is worthless", "Your refusal to check the link", etc. from the email conversation, and the ensuing comments on the blog post.)
Not really. Read "Reflections on Trusting Trust":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing)#Reflection...
http://www.gp-field-guide.org.uk/
I for one agree with you. There has to be a time when we all stand up and say "ENOUGH!". That time is now. Facebook have simply gone too far now, taking away essential freedoms from us. So who's with me? I just deleted my account and told all of my friends to do the same. Vote with your feet!
Interesting. I'm an indie Facebook developer. My most popular app has over 8 million monthly uniques and 350 million pageviews. I didn't realize how substantial said traffic was until reading this article. I scaled my app to that size on my own over the course of 12 months. I know of other FB devs who scaled bigger apps working solo. If average hackers like us can do it, anyone can. The hard part is building a popular app. Articles about scaling are a means for founders to brag about their success without giving away useful information about what made their app popular in the first place.
it's linked:

http://news.ycombinator.com/lists
... if it only were so simple ...
Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It's Time for an Open Alternative