skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In software you're always balancing risk. If you have some working software, but it has some flaws that doesn't mean you should abandon it."

I've yet to see a project where throwing out the old software because of its flaws saved effort. Of course, that's partly due to not having had any projects where I was inheriting software written by competent developers in the first place, but the management can't tell the difference.

Every single time that I've seen that argument used as a basis for selecting the refactor approach, it's ended up being a death march because we had to re-write nearly the entire thing anyway. And when we were done, we STILL had a tangled mess of tightly-coupled components that didn't quite work.

It's exceedingly rare in software to find a situation where abandoning the old software is a mistake.

With any luck, I'll find one of those projects some day. But I doubt it, since the trend I've seen is that software quality is decreasing, and more and more components are tightly coupled together because the developers are too rushed and/or burned out to realize it.

If you ask me, the article isn't worded strongly enough.

In fact, it describes the government contracting industry almost perfectly. The entire industry is based on using the sun cost fallacy to reward failure, because in government contracting the LAST thing you want to do is finish a project early and under budget. If you do, you get a smaller budget on the next project.
If there's anything where you should look at human nature rather than the prescribed ideal, it's forum moderation systems.
I find I can argue either side here. If GM closes a single auto plant, that does have a significant impact on that locale because so many people are out of work in a single stroke (see PGH when the steel industry died). 1000 small businesses shuttering their windows across the country still leaves quite a few people unemployed, but the ripple effects may not be as debilitating to each community.
Mobile Phone Tools 4 - Motorola Brasil
I'll email him now.
Me thinks it is mainly because Apple delivers what others only envision. Which is scary.
To state that requires the assumption that we are qualitatively different than a program. I believe that's been a question since far before Turing's time.

What if we are equivalent to a program? Then a program can be made to detect paradoxes.
Why not link straight to the article? http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/extreme-fear/201005/top-...
Better yet, configure a small portion of the memristors as IMP CPU compute clusters to handle the work needed to adapt it.
Ruby 1.9 Encodings: A Primer and the Solution for Rails
Learned Optimism
Is there a problem? Maybe, yeah, but for a limited audience.

Will anyone ever install this? I doubt it. Good thing is the people who actually think this is enough of a problem to install some server side stuff have the technical capability to do so.

I almost just typed in: Solution in search of a problem. After reading comments here + around the web I feel there is some semi problem here that might apply to a broader market- Facebook is getting creepy with how much they know and it's getting overly complicated. I just think this is a really poor way to solve the problem.
Could be a good diagram...

if only it was drawn to scale and fitted in one page.
Apple's P/E is just under 22, which is not terribly expensive for a company that just launched a new, multibillion dollar product line (the iPad) and who has the dominant product in a rapidly expanding market (smartphones).

The writer puts it as "Would you rather own Apple or [long list of companies]?" That's a little misleading, because any of those companies could be overvalued or undervalued by the market, and because betting all your money on one company is almost always less attractive than spreading your risk over a dozen different ones.
it's a very bad idea for many reasons

The only bad reason that I can think of is that they might want to use IE9 as an incentive for XP users to upgrade to Win7. I can't think of any others. (Maybe you could share.)

If XP users want a more compliant browser without upgrading from XP, they'll have no problem, though, so this doesn't sound like a good choice of leverage on Microsoft's part.
Normally, yes, these off-topics aren't very interesting, but it was to me to see that I wasn't the only one making such a gross scan-misreading of the words.

It's curious to me specifically because this misreading seems so much further from the actual letters than most normal misreadings. Is it because of the strong emotions attached to the name that we're subconsciously more "on the lookout" for it?
The Key Is Backing Founders Who Intend to Change the World
I really think that we should be thinking bigger that just social networking. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to only allow email from people in your social graph? Give all your friends SSH accounts on your server?
"... a few others that we can't talk about yet."

With the On2/Google link this sounds like VP8.
To be honest, I'm not sure how does it work for companies providing the technology, but from what I can tell Google doesn't store the personal data itself. They let you store theoretically opaque strings. They might guarantee that their own emails which contain personal data are not stored in the country X. But since they don't really provide a system for storing personal data, your emails might end up in that country. It was your responsibility not to put them in a potentially foreign place and it was you who broke the rule, not Google.

So in the end, their UK office might be compliant - but it's not the same as their datacenters.
If it wasn't for his boosterism, we'd probably still be writing HTML for specific browsers and versions.
If their contribution is greater, then why isn't somebody willing to pay them more? If there was such a trove of hidden value, you would think that some greedy capitalist would snap it up and exploit it.

Because a capitalist would prefer to pay nothing of course. Scientists like Einstein don't get rich while millions or even billions are made off the foundation of their discoveries.
My university just migrated to Gmail (about 2 weeks ago). 30k students and about 8200 faculty and staff members.

It beats the 2 different systems we had to use before (one exchange account and one squirrel mail faculty account), and is probably more secure as well.
Depends on how you define "recently." I think the idea that humans are getting smarter and nobler is hogwash. There were plenty of professional philosophers in Rome while the emperor was burning Christians on pikes as party candles. And Rome was certainly the pinnacle of civilization in its day.

The worst evils of the 20th century were done by people with lots of scientific, industrial and psychological knowledge propping them up. And the worst evils of the 21st century will be no different.
The relatively incomplete state salary database shows UC Davis as having 21,154 employees.

UC campuses are huge enterprises and contain a lot more than some classrooms and dorms. Davis for instance, runs one of the few Californian hospitals that is both an Adult and Pediatric Level 1 trauma center. Davis has many other things you wouldn't expect, for instance, the campus also has an airport and a fire department.

University of California, by employee count, is larger than Intel. Larger than Google, Yahoo and Apple combined. 6 times the size of NASA and is several times over the size of General Mills. Just to give you an idea. UC is a very complex organism and many of its campuses are non-trivial.

UC also plays a role in running our nuclear program and has various units that need to comply with HIPPA and/or national security regulations for dealing with classified information.

So... I'm not surprised at that number and it's definitely nowhere near as far off as you speculated even if it was a little high.

More related to the main story, UC policy currently prohibits use of Gmail applications for non-student affiliates of the university due to security, policy and compliance issues. UC Davis was one of the leading campuses trying to change this, (and I think they might have been approved for a pilot or something?) but it appears they've backed off. (Edit: Ah yes, you'll note the article explicitly cites a section of their notice stating that the UC ECP does not allow for this type of data sharing since the university can't get Google to agree to the necessary data privacy constraints.)
I presume you're talking about Harvard's extension school and their distance learning options: http://www.extension.harvard.edu/DistanceEd/

I'm put off by the $49.95 price, which immediately reminds of of 'Make Money Fast with this AMAZING Secret Technique' courses - you know, the kind that start 'Dear Reader, a few years ago, I was just like you....'. You actually seem to be offering something more serious and less snake-oily, but as with every other 'secrets of...' pitch I've ever seen, it seems to be a repackaging of information that's fairly easily available already.

I personally think you'd be better to lowering the price to that of an impulse purchase (eg $14.99), selling it via Amazon and accepting the revenue split in their favor with CreateSpace products, and then sending out a few press releases, along with complimentary copies to a few key education writers (perhaps timed for a slow part of the academic news calendar). This is a bit old-fashioned, but OTOH the whole cachet of a Harvard degree depends on its institutional antiquity so you want the pixie dust only a serious endorsement can provide.
Although MS's "Testing Center" is fixed in IE's favor, their IEBlog does compare IE to the latest competitor releases and "showcases" IE's poor Acid3 performance. [http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/]
I'm comfortable stating that we are qualitatively different than an algorithm. I'm also comfortable stating that we're probably similar to a Bayesian machine-learning process which is only able to make probabilistic determinations.
I plan to write a bit about Microsoft on my blog: http://blog.brandonbloom.name/

However, I am going to stay far, far away from specifics. I've still got a lot of friends there. Most people work very hard and really care about their product. I wouldn't want to cause any trouble for me or for them.
I don't think they designed them to fail non-IE browsers, so much as they designed the tests for things they had already implemented in IE 9.

I think they could have avoided most of the criticisms in this thread if they had simply added a note saying something like "We made sure that IE 9 passed these tests before submitting to W3C, which is why IE 9 gets perfect marks below. Note also that these tests do not cover all of the HTML5 specification." (etc.)

Having IE9 at 100% on every test with no explanation really makes it look like they're trying to put one over on the reader.
I'm using it as a figure of speech, not a quote or paraphrase of anything anyone said.
Donated 26 bucks. 1% chance of succeeding, but I want them to try. Facebook is just horrible when it comes to privacy.
Glad to see i'm not the only one thinking about FPGAs, the thing that i like the most is that this will likely provide an easy way to load a circuit/cpu schematic on a bare memristors based component.
If the computing paradigm don't change completely in the meanwhile (unlikely), being able to load/clone dynamically some x86 cores, gpu-like cores, etc... directly from a schematic description and use them (old-style system emulation) is in my opinion quite cool.
Good job regurgitating micro econ 101. /sarcasm off/ In all seriousness trying to discuss utility of a general group of people (or even a specific person) is doomed to failure. Utility is a nice round theoretical construct for trying to talk about why consumers make the decisions they do.

However, there is a lot of evidence to show consumers do not make entirely rational choices. Even if they did, trying to determine a utility function for a consumer would still fail. For instance, can you even with certainty determine your own utility function. I know I can't.

Now lets pretend a consumer does in fact only make rational choices, and their utility function for every conceivable situation is known. I have distinct, although unproven, suspicion that determining what choices the person would make through their day would be NP-complete as their present choices would effect their future choices. Thus all possible outcomes would have to be considered far into the future if one truly wanted to maximize utility.

Therefore, assuming what I have just said is fairly logical, it is impossible for a rational consumer to exist even if their utility function is known, since it would be impossible to for them to compute any given choice in a finite amount of time.

In conclusion any discussion that touches on "utility" or assuming a group of people is making "rational" choices is doomed to failure. The truth is we don't know why any given person make any given choice.

Also you seem to ignore the important of positive externalities in your arguments. I believe this is where you disagree with other posters.
Hmmmm, all the talk about the I-95 Supreme Court would support what you're saying.
From what I'm told, a good VC fund will roughly triple over the life of the fund (~ 10 years).
"Journalists are terrified of this company too.

Why? Just ask Jason Chen - the editor at tech blog Gizmodo who got his hands on the next iPhone. Apple's response? They sent in the police, who smashed down Chen's front door, ransacked his house -- while he was out -- and carted off computers and files. When Chen returned home from dinner with his wife, they frisked him too."

This is the kind of argument they are making to support the point????
RDropBox: Easy-to-use Ruby library for the official Dropbox API
Why these quotes? Is anything Thomas Jefferson, Walter Mondale, or the Dalai Lama said automatically true?
The updater checks whether your add-ons will be compatible with the version that is to be installed. You can then cancel the upgrade if you want.
Most of them are barely educated, have families, and vote.
backling like youngling?
> Apple's response? They sent in the police ...

This, like much of the article, is complete hyperbole (unless you actually believe Apple controls the police force).
betting all your money on one company is almost always less attractive than spreading your risk over a dozen different ones.

As a minority shareholder, perhaps, but not necessarily as an owner.
I think it's not a problem of not seeing the data. After all, outsourcing storage and processing is very common now. The real problem is that when you need to see the data, you cannot and you don't know where to find it.

For example, you cannot easily swap the email server for a new one and recover everything from backups. Actually, you cannot even reliably make full on-site google apps backups afaik, which is a hard requirement in many places. If you have problems with disappearing data, not only do you have to wait for Google to fix it, but you have a specific priority in their queue. In extreme cases you might want to get a bunch of consultants to deal with the problem on-site right now. No such option if you outsource your storage.
...and replied. I love the Internet. ;)
Sounds technically very hard, especially at scale.

I guess we can wait and see if they or someone else pulls it off.
there is definitely truth to your argument, but remember that apple != app store
I'd love to know what drives the decision making when it comes to adding DRM to media. The people who buy DVDs/Blu-ray/Games wouldn't pirate the stuff even if it had no protection. Those that do pirate find a way around the DRM, if it isn't there that's just a bonus. This is my opinion.

Is it the fact some department or person at a media company is tasked with deciding how to protect the content and all they have is a DRM solution? Would coming up with an alternative that's classed as thinking outside the box make them fear for their job?

I'd also like to say I'm getting pretty tired of every device I own needing an update. If I don't boot up my PS3/360 for a week I can't play a new game without having to wait for some update to install, reboot the machine, and test it has fixed some obscure vulnerability.
Just 3 Questions to an Awesome Programmer Job
Seriously. No offense OP, but content-free blog linkage lowers the probability of the actual article getting read or you getting credit for finding it.
Microsoft "saw to" that? What about IBM, Netscape, the bundling deals with hardware manufacturers... Microsoft has screwed at least as many small companies as Apple.
A MailChimp mailserver, viewed from a web browser
In the example

my_fun :: (TypeClass1 a, Typeclass2 b) => a -> b

the stuff preceeding the => declares what typeclasses the types you mention later should fall into.

A good example is the module Data.Map; this module deals with finite mappings of keys to values. Since those Maps are based on balanced trees, the keys have to be orderable/comparable. So for inserting a key into a map (http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/containers/0.2.0...) we get the following type

insert :: Ord k => k -> a -> Map k a -> Map k a

This just says that the type of keys has to be an instance of the class Ord (http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.12.1/html/libraries/base-4.2.0...). I.e. there has to be an instance declaration with the function

(<=) :: a -> a -> Bool

Does that help?

By the way, if you want to find documentation about a function and you know its name or type, you can use Hoogle (http://www.haskell.org/hoogle/).
PyQuery over BeautifulSoup
Clearly a labor of love, and very cool. But unless it's licensed, it's also a massive IP infringement. Some people think that if you don't make any money from it, it's not infringement, but that's not the case.

If I loved Zelda (and of course I do) and decided to recreate A Link to the Past and release it as a free iPhone game, I'm guessing I'd get a C&D in short order from Nintendo.
Google's New Search Bar: An Unwelcome Change
Hoodwinked by the Emperor's new Tweets
It's much easier to deal with the soul suck stuff when it's your startup. I'll do unsavory things on my startup (like sales calls or phone tech support) that would be unthinkable for client work.
Not watching a dog get shot. Sorry, not on my schedule of events today or ever. I also don't watch beheading videos from mid east or chechnia.
Product link? I'd like to know what will be making 10k/mo in a few weeks?
Ask HN: Asynchronous customer service
I'd like to know if this already exists or if this is stupid.

All customer services in my country operate in "Blocked IO" mode: you call them, you wait 30 minutes for someone to answer you, and sometimes they even hang-up.

The alternative I'm thinking is: you call, automatically your number is queued, and someone will call you back on your cellphone.

Apart from the calling costs, is there any other reason the latter system isn't a win-win solution?
The Death of Embarrassment
This is very upsetting, but it is in no way gratifying to anyone's intellectual curiosity. It simply doesn't belong here.
Yeah it would be awesome... except people I don't know email me. It's how I meet people. It's how I reach out to people I think are interesting and would like to talk to for any reason. It's how customers and potential customers contact me.
Another nail for the coffin of physical media
My Linux box plays it just fine.

Oh... you mean for people that actually buy the movie.
That's why they build it such that people can simply pay a 3rd party that offers the service and just use them to hold their identity. Not as much control as hosting it yourself, but still not as bad as facebook where you can't leave and they hold EVERYONE's data.
worked for me on my nearly year-old Samsung Blu-ray. i haven't updated the firmware yet
The ostensible reason is to prevent casual piracy. DRM needs to be just hard enough to get around that those who can't bittorrent also can't copy a DVD.
I take it you're a Yalie? I can't believe they're still using Horde, which still (last time I checked, back in 2006) uses iFrames.

They are right to be duly diligent, but even if they don't choose Google, it is unlikely that they should truly self-host email.
Symphony of Science - 'We Are All Connected'
It's quite simple. IE9 will be making use of OS features that aren't available on XP, which is after all a nine year old OS. MS have chosen to take advantage of OS features in their OS-specific browser. No mystery.
Does anyone know technical details about why it requires a firmware upgrade?
Contrary to the opinions on this message board thread, Blu-ray BD+ DRM has not been a technical failure; follow the SlySoft forums to see BD+ disk updates reliably monkeywrenching that product. I haven't followed this closely in many months, but it was a regular occurance.
The thoughts of others were light and fleeting,
of lovers meeting or luck or fame,
mine were of trouble and mine were steady,
and I was ready when trouble came.
- Houseman
Who cares? Making the replacement kids is fun!
The tedious parts of the job are left on the (proverbial) cutting room floor. Like construction projects, there's a lot of people just standing around waiting at a shoot.
"Decide what you would be and then do what you have to do"
It is an interesting point of view, and looks like a trendy one: I've read similar articles/blog posts (I think 5 or 6) in the last two days.
"There is 0 value in fear and anxiety"
The media producers care about the new release window, where they capture a disproportionate share of the revenue for each title. The new release window is measured in days, not weeks. If DRM spares 50% of the new release window from readily-available high-fidelity copies, they've potentially saved significant revenue.

All this boils down to a simple point: the goal of DRM isn't to protect titles from being copied. It's to make copies more expensive, which in turn makes it take longer for copies to spread.
http://us.metamath.org/

Do you know about Metamath yet? It's something similar to what you want, but it's all in a single program as opposed to being web-based.
"The simplest way to get what you want is to deserve it"

"Deliver to world what you would buy if you were on the other end of the deal"

"Have lots of assiduity. That means you sit down on your ass and do it until it's done"

All
Charlie Munger
"It's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy"

-- Steve Jobs
Old news is old?

The author laments that couples behave as if the public is their motel room - yet this is merely a continuation of a pattern that has been there for ages. It used to be that making out in public is scandalous and lewd; it also used to be that baring your ankles in public is similarly scandalous and lewd.

This is nothing new - we've been becoming "less embarrassed" (to put in the author's terminology) for years and years, well before the social media/reality show craze, and it will continue well after social media and reality shows have gone.

Social acceptability changes by geography and time - the author mentions the coworker who mentioned that he's shaved his whole body in preparation for a bicycling event... as a relatively young member of society, I see nothing wrong with this information. He has hair on his body that he had to remove - using means you're no doubt familiar with also - get over it?
No, that is what one of the big complaints are. And while kids have parents, a lot of parents aren't that stupid.

But, do you really think kids know about android?
You tell yourself that, but then you worry that because you have no manager at your startup other than yourself, you think you're tackling the unfun stuff, when really you're subconciously "optimizing" (read: drastically pessimizing) your workload to favor the fun stuff.
Do Free Services Have an Obligation to Users? Should We Regulate Them?