skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Something faster, and with zero (or very close to zero) transaction fees. Also, something that people aren't afraid to lose (like a credit card), and which is pointless to steal, and where fraud is reduced. Something with a screen to show balances and other info.
Remote work and distributed teams provides one heck of a challenge for sure. We've been finding our way by trying different things and succeeding or failing - but I certainly agree with what Jeff Atwood said about keeping up with chat and mail lists... We're very cross-platform, so video chat doesn't work all that well for us across Linux, Windows, and Mac, etc... But I think the weekly status reports to the team has been forgotten, so we'll have to start that up again. :)

I did a presentation for EclipseCon 2010 about our challenges that you can find here (with links to a slide): http://www.eclipsecon.org/2010/sessions/sessions?id=1156

Great article though. Today it's nearly impossible to avoid a distributed team to get stuff done!
Except that the current word is that the FCC chairman is looking for a "third way"....
IMHO there is a growing niche of creating websites on WP (or any other extensible CMS) as a way to cheaply test your ideas rather than invest the upfront cost of building a site from scratch.

Providing a service of building websites quickly & cheaply using something like WordPress can be valuable and lucrative even in the corporate world. I recently proposed this to my company for a new project and got the green light (after getting quotes of above $15K from other shops for a custom job). It was however difficult to find WP hackers easily and ended up building the site myself (in a fraction of the time and cost).
The title says "odds"—what did you expect?
or 3: The whole thing is made up.
Behind Blue Eyes. An Extreme Tattoo
and as far as I know they are the best mechanism to predict the outcome of an election. It's an honest opinion since they are betting their own money independently of their personal preferences.
I'm another one of those standard programmers who doesn't build physical things.

Until I got involved with my startup (3d printing is all about making stuff!), and starting the local hackerspace, and just learning about the process of making stuff in general. When you don't know that it's not that hard to do physical things, it's pretty rough to get started. I'd have thought hardware was incredibly difficult three or four years ago. Or at least difficult for me, and weird.

Now I fool around with electronics and garden. Good times.
The major point in Clayton Christensen's book is that existing/old companies are way too used to high margins (and low/median volume) on their products. Think mainframe computer vendors versus PCs with 64 KB ram: it requires a different kind of company to survive on a Dell margin than on a mainframe margin. Christensen's point is not that new technologies requires new skills, as (technological) skills are much easier to get than to transform a company financial structure/culture.

Apple was used to high margins and low volume. Steve improved the product selection when he returned by simplifying it and thus reduced costs, something very few companies are able to. He made it focus, and made it able to produce things cheaper. This was the most important change of Apple that he made.

Both iPods and iPhones started out as low volume / high margin, and as such fitted very well into how Apple operated.

Nokia has lower margins, so in theory they should have been much more likely to get the mp3-player marked (if they had ever tried). Funny Apple should be able to undercut a company that has lower margins. But Apple was able to reduce costs. So therefore Apple got to keep the market share instead of loosing it when the market prices went down. Had the iPod still been the $500 mainframe-like price, Apple would have had Mac-size share of music players today (single-digit percentage) instead of the lions share.

And Apple (i.e. Steve Jobs) has 2 very important qualities that cannot be copied even if you have all the money of Microsoft:

a) good connections to the music industry so he could get iTunes Store at a time where e.g. MS failed to get deals as good as Apple's. He had the trust of music executives. You cannot buy trust, only temporary friends, and as Machiavelli told us, no friend is as untrustworthy as the one you buy for money.

b) taste. Look at how badly the US car makers have done after they lost the taste they had in the 50's and 60's. Producing cars more cost effective is much easier than getting the board to hire a CEO with taste. Most car buyers prefers to pay for good design more than for functionality, so when the US cars lost the "wow" factor, then they were delegated to the Dell end of the scale and they have trouble building cars at this price level without loosing money. Taste is what made OSX, iPhones and iPads "just work" and look beautiful at the same time instead of being just a Windows Vista lookalike. Blond with brains and money.

And Apple has Tim Cook to run the operations. So they could lower the price as the market price went down. The competitors can't even sell their iPad killers for significantly less than the iPad (and they don't even have an app store). Practically same price for less product is not how you dethrone the market leader.

Everything comes from the people you have. That is the fundamental competitive advantage that Apple has.
Go Language: New Talk and Tutorials
Yes, the codebase. But all of the models and artwork and everything like that are also apparently Creative Commons licensed as well.
I really enjoy chromes translate feature, It translated the text on the page well. However it fails on the text that is actually part of an image. I wonder if they have any plans in the future to use OCR on images during the translate process?
wow http://onesocialweb.org actually has working code. doesnt seem to be any demo offering public registration yet though. might try and install it myself later.
Last week I checked there site and read: "Share music with your Facebook friends". And that's what I thought it would be so I didn't download it.

But today I read a Wiki page about it and I understand it's much more than 'Facebook only'. It's a great app!

Am I the only one who thinks there homepage is very unclear?

By the way: the VPRO is very progressive. They have been serving great music for years: http://3voor12.vpro.nl/luisterpaal/ (Dutch)
"Economics is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services."
Just keep in mind something that I've observed over time. It's anecdotal and Your Mileage May Vary (disclaimers, etc etc) but I take it as a reasonable parable when phrased as such...

I don't know if the thought/plan/idea has crossed your mind, but be very, very careful about walking in to current company with other companies offer and trying to negotiate to stay. E.G. "They offered me this (be it money, perks, hours, or anything else) and I'd like to stay here but ([list of items from previous list that are most appealing]) is quite tempting. Can you counteroffer?".

It may be different at different companies (I'd hope so) but I've observed friends & coworkers do this and end up in a worse situation staying. They've signaled to people above that they're disloyal/easily distracted/however you want to phrase it and the perception changes. The company in most cases felt they really needed to make an effort to keep the person, but the treatment and trust changed significantly afterwards.

TL;DR - Be careful about negotiating with company #2s offer to stay at current company with perks/salary/etc from company #2. You may find they keep you out of need but keep you at a distance going forward.

As for the meat of the actual question you asked - I would recommend that there's no harm in taking things through to completion with the other company and seeing what they have to offer. Even if you decide ultimately for WHATEVER reason, if you handle it gracefully in most cases you can prop a door open for yourself. Assuming you get a great offer from the new company but decide that you'd like to stay where you are for a few more months , if you handle it professionally (maybe phrased as "finishing a project") there is no reason that "no thank you" has to become "no thank you for now".

Most good companies who value talent and the like will not suddenly burn your resume and curse your name if you turn down an offer in a professional manner. The likelihood is that if they wanted you today there's no reason they wouldn't jump at you in 6 months if your situation changes.

Again, TL;DR - Don't burn bridges on either end if you can help it. Manage the opportunities in a way that whichever direction you go you can leave doors open at both if your situation/opinion changes.
If the link works, but your browser's address bar shows the wire form with "xn--" in it, it is due to the browser's security policy. For example, Firefox will only display IDNs correctly for TLDs they approve of: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/tld-idn-policy-list...
Breakthrough for Free Software Gaming
Well here is list

Q:Once there were few tiny functions of x playing in the garden. Suddenly the differential operator d/dx came to eat them up. Everyone else ran away but which function did not?

A: e^x

Q:The next day again the tiny functions were playing in the garden. Again the differential operator came. Again e^x stood there very bravely, but got eat. Why?

A: It was d/dy not d/dx.

(Pause for laughter).

Once a mathematician was eating chicken. He kept on dipping it in a bowl. Another mathematician came and asked, "I thought you were going to have curry with you chicken."

"Yes I was", said the first one."Let us assume that there is some curry inside the bowl".

(pause for some more laughter)

Now let us move on to IT sector. This is the best one I have heard so far.

Once three guys from Microsoft, IBM and Intel were peeing in adjoining booths. The Microsoft guy finished first, washed his hands. He took a paper tissue and wiped his hand clean. He took another one to remove the dampness of the hands and said,"At Microsoft we do everything efficiently".

Then then IBM guy finished. He also washed his hand. He took a tissue and tore it in half. With the first half he wiped his hand. Then with the other half we remove the dampness and said,"At IBM we do everything efficiently, using minimal resources".

Now the Intel guy finished at last. He didn't was his hands and walked directly to the door. He opened the door, looked back at the two and said "At Intel, we don't piss at our hands".

(Take a bow)
"They are willing to do this because every home has 10+ services on offer and switching is trivial."

How can you say that when so much of the rural U.K. is without any broadband? When the rest of the small community that has the/a home of a top dog of BT? only gets broadband when they notice he's the only one who has it? When a tax makes it particularly expensive to get the feeder line out to a community?
Going global with EC2 and GSLB
As a developer and a publisher who has used Wordpress for many projects, I have to say: good for him. He's doing it almost as it should be. Uses solid CSS frameworks, and sort-of good publishing platform(WP) and provides good support(According to his site).

For todays projects, I tend to use small microframeworks using Python, but WP is still my 0-60 in 5 seconds platform.
You can use sorted sets to find out how commonly words occur.

redis.zincrby(metaphone_key, item.item_id, 1)

This will allow you to sort items by highest number of occurrences
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

"a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group."
Being that it is the Domain Name System...:)
Canadian DMCA Bill Within Six Weeks
And it sometimes seems very difficult to explain to the management types that adding people to the project will not make it go any faster.
The user pays money in the hope of winning more back - it's gambling however you slice it.

There is no information of any value here outside the context of the site itself - unless you're claiming that your audience is a representative sample of the UK population?
Google Ain't "NEW" in Canada
An Essay Organizer
If you think you can write one of the most beautiful essays with a good essay organizer… think again! Have you jumped from the frying pan into the fire? If you know what you are getting into,
ZeroGravitas. Apple also banged on in 2004 about how awesome PowerPC was compared to Intel. Remind me what happened 2 years later? Yes, companies do slag others off..

The smartphone market was held up for many other reasons too. It mostly came down to the fact that the mobile OS's sucked at the time. One would have also expected Android/iPhone sales to have been flat without flash support, and this is untrue (Apple have said they refuse to support Flash, and iPhones are unfortunately flying off the shelves).

If you think Flash will suddenly replace the fact that software support for ARM is limited, that the CPU's are slow (and only recently started operating at good enough speeds) and that no major OS's even support ARM (Windows, Ubuntu, redhat, many other major linux distro's) then you should perhaps list EXACTLY what you think consumers need flash for (youtube perhaps would have been one valid reason, but it has been accessible via other means since at least 2006 now).

Whilst technologies such as Flash and ActiveX do still have their uses (hopefully though HTML5 will kill flash), I doubt that the lack of flash would have influenced any manufacturers into delaying an ARM product (which would be slightly cheaper), if they were serious.

Lets face it, The major issues with the iPhone 2G was the lack of applications (and even a javascript refreshing security camera stream caused safari to crash) and on Windows Mobile it was general usability issues. Or do you think these problems would have magically disappeared because of a really-slow version of Flash?
Check out Open Bravo. http://www.openbravo.com/product/erp/functionality/
Chris Osaka's book Purely Functional Data Structures is a revised and expanded version of his PhD thesis. Here's the link to the latter: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf
"Why does it matter if it's "fair?" Our economy is based on value propositions—that's why we can charge 100x the price for a box labelled "enterprise edition" that contains a stream of bits no different than the one labelled "home edition."

Using this comparison, one piece of fine art is no different in value than the other because the value of the paint used to create each is the same.

"that's how a scarcity economy works; "

I keep hearing this argument and it's just wrong. Just like art, the scarcity isn't in the bits that you can copy. It's in the talent, time, and energy used to arrange those bits on a higher level.

When anyone can create (not copy) Photoshop CS5 in a few hours on their computer, you might have a point.

"An information economy works completely differently"

I like how software, music, and movies are called "information" only to make the argument that it should be free.

"the best possible "solution" to distributing an information product is to have everyone in the world owning it at the maximum price they're willing to pay, on a value gradient all the way from $billions to $0."

If you want to make a living, this doesn't work. If people are given the choice of paying $100 or $0, most will pay $0. This is why business doesn't work on the basis of donations.
It seems a bit odd to me that he talks about working remotely and how awesome it was, but then all the coding jobs for his site (which he was somewhat selling in this entry) are for people "in an office in NY".

But I agree, if you're working by yourself, you definitely need a very structured workplan, and it's very good to have someone to "report" to, even if they're not coders, but just as a grounding point for feedback and a passive nag to not slack off and get things done.
The API is just http + json, so it works with any language. But we also hope to have an open source Python integration library very soon. (Anyone want to help us with that?) :)
I don't see why the banks' trading desks would want to make the bond market less opaque, their flow trading desks benefit from it.
Diskless booting will make your life easier
I don't think Gnash fixes anything. The reason why flash is so prominent is that there is no good flash-creator-like program out there that outputs files as HTML5/SVG/AJAX/Javascript. People use Flash because it is the only good way to create animations that work for many people, but with a proper editor, we could eliminate the need for additional addons entirely.
Great, after last.fm became subscription only I needed a replacement.
I have this thought in my mind that google is looking at and using my email for it's own purposes. I have a google apps account for my business (free).

While I understand they do use my information for advertising purposes, is that the extent of it? Am I just misguided? I don't really think there is anything to worry about, but I don't trust them. Should I?
Oh, no... they don't add people. They add "resources."
According to the PDF: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/Wor... it's virtually all due to changes in fertility.

As countries grow in wealth and life expectancy, the number of children per woman tends to drop off drastically.
I've worked on a distributed team for three years now. We've found that regular phone conversations and weekly "status" emails (nothing formal) really help the process and keep everyone connected. Typically we use email and Skype to communicate, but if an email conversation begins to get too unwieldy, we simply get on the phone.
As a press75 customer I have to say I've had a very positive experience. They're selling a high quality product and support seems to be good even though I haven't had to call on it myself.
Gulf oil spill data visualized
The currently much maligned Nokia started making wood pulp, then moved to rubber, then to electronics. IBM's transition from mechanical tabulating machines to mainframes and minis should count. Nintendo went from making playing cards to arcade games to home consoles.

In fact most companies that has been around for more than 50 years have probably had to make at least one or two such migrations just to survive.
For example, I really enjoy the solutions that Valve/Steam and Blizzard/Battle.net came up with. I give them a CD Key and they give me unlimited opportunity to download and install the game that key goes to. Steam even goes one step further and ensures that it's updated.

More importantly, neither of them require online interaction - you can set Steam to an "Offline Mode" in case I want to go an airplane or my Internet connection isn't doing so well. On top of that, I regularly max out my downloading speed when moving games around on Steam. In Steam's case it's much more convenient than pirating (don't have to check for quality, no cracks to apply) and adds even more value (checks for updates automatically) to the game. On the flipside, it's exceptionally difficult to bundle up games shared from Steam - but the gifting codes are just as easy as buying the original game. Blizzard hasn't yet made it too difficult to bundle, share, and upload a downloaded game (other than multiplayer not working due to CD-Key issues), but I find a lot of my value in the multiplayer component.

That kind of direction, where DRM adds value to the game rather than adding layers of complexity, is the direction I wish DRM would go in.
Ryzom is free software What can we do from here?
Graphs over time: http://politicszone.betfair.com/

To interpret the numbers do 100/(decimal odd) to get percentages as shown in the graphs.
But if Gnash can run anything the Flash "IDE" outputs, then everything works. If enough people start using non-Adobe implementations of Flash, applications will have to be tested against those implementations.
Good article.

The part that was missing was: your mileage may vary.

I love hearing about how teams make it work. But over and over again I see a team do things one way that worked wonderfully well for them and then everybody else just copying that. Then it doesn't work.

Every project is a new game.

It's a well-worn anti-pattern
>> Stop using Facebook if it is becoming a problem for you.

That's a good enough solution for people like us, but the problem is that the vast majority of people who use Facebook are completely unaware of the privacy implications, which can be potentially dangerous. Combine that with Facebook's recent culture of sneaking new terms past users, rapidly changing privacy practices, and to be honest - a poor record when it comes to security holes. This isn't just a discussion on whether or not I should boycott Facebook or just go elsewhere - this is a discussion on whether Facebook is harming people who have no idea it's happening.

edit: I totally agree about never putting stuff on the internet you don't want to be public - but facebook's initial setup, IMO, gave the user a "reasonable expectation of privacy" - which when established in a court case makes the service provider responsible for maintaining the user's privacy. Facebook is well aware that most user's haven't got a clue what is going on with their data.
If there's X things that make a market look unlikely to succeed and so prevent investment, then things are going to develop even slower if it's X+1 instead. Poor Flash support is just one more thing that hampered smartphones, just as it hampered Linux. I'm not saying either were perfect if you ignore Flash support.

My point with Intel is that they're going to choose the very worst aspects of their competitors to talk about. If ARM phones could kill your pets, or explode in your face, then Intel would be talking about that. The fact that they were talking about Flash support means that it must have been, in their opinion, one of the biggest weaknesses of ARM in the smartphone space.
While genetic algorithms are useful for solving certain problems, Sudoku puzzles exhibit a strong combinatorial structure that can be exploited by other approaches (Constraint Programming above all, I think).

When modeled as feasibility problems, for instance, their solution can be found very quickly -- it took 0.2 seconds to solve that instance on my laptop.
That article is fairly info-lite, even after visiting the source article (linked from OP). So "members of the faculty were concerned that it wouldn’t keep their correspondence private enough" but they don't say why they feel that way or suggest there's any actual evidence of lax security. The Google Buzz thing is a red herring since UCD weren't using that anyway, and as an apps administrator you can say which services your users are allowed to use.

I do have an interest in this: I'm about to move a campus to Gmail. I have no evidence it's less secure than the Exchange/Postfix systems it will be replacing, and I suspect in many ways it is more secure. I would welcome evidence to the contrary but the OP doesn't have any. This sounds like a bunch of people who don't understand "hacking" making loud about how the cloud just has to be less secure than their in-house systems.
Since you and lukev shared similar experiences and are currently modded highly, I want to say I am the opposite of you and more like Jeff, but like he said, maybe we're a rare breed among programmers.

People make me feel empowered. I enjoy the watercooler talk, I feel depressed when I lunch alone (really, really down. For days). I like to talk, I like to make people laugh.

I think the lesson is to know who you are. Jeff and me like social, you and lukev like more lonely. Don't rely on blog posts telling what's better, find what works for you and go for it.
I didn't even know giraffe riding existed. I always figured your username was some inside joke.