skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although I can't say I agree with Apple's decision, people forget that free speech doesn't apply here. Apple owns the means to get on the App Store. They can decide what suits the platform in whatever way they see fit. In some sense, the right that Apple has to do this -- own and rent a "podium," the App Store -- is also free speech.
The Secret to Targeting Keywords
I myself prefer Git, but Joel Spolsky wrote a really slick tutorial for Mercurial: http://hginit.com/

Once you learn about how VCS works, and have used something for a while, you'll be able to make an educated decision about switching to something else.
Well, I was lucky enough to be an active participant at the forum I ended up announcing my service at, so I already had a reputation around my name. I make it a point to answer people's questions and really give good advice, something that a lot of people don't like to do sometimes, so when I announced my service, the trust was already there from all of the users who saw it.

Now, it is a bit of a risk to my reputation, as I need to come through on the service to make sure I make people happy. But, it's nice to be able to say "this is the service I'm offering. It costs X dollars. Take it or leave it"
It's an issue of using a subpar client, not a subpar format. I have yet to find a decent epub reader for a computer. Stanza for iPhone, iBooks, and dedicated hardware render epubs beautifully.
Say goodbye to search analytics
haughtiness is really unhelpful

Sorry if it seemed like that; it certainly wasn't my intention. OP asked a question and then provided some clear data: any attitude toward your customers is your problem, not theirs.

People can be involved in business and startups for various reasons, not just a personal sense of ideological purity.

I believe that caring for your customers is necessary but not sufficient for any business. I also believe that if one doesn't believe that, then they shouldn't be in business. Period. No "ideological purity" here, just basic functionality.

How long will you try to teach you child to walk before you give up? Ask that to any parent, and they'll look at you like you're from Jupiter. Then they'll give the obvious answer, "I will never give up until my child walks!"

I feel the same way about helping my customers solve their problems. And if OP felt that way, his 6 month attention span problem would just disappear. That's all.
Cough ... Selection Bias... Cough
Anything interesting in there? I read the first half of the article and Assange seems to talk himself up as dark and mysterious, but I didn't really see anything particularly insightful or interesting. Does the rest of the piece have anything more substantial?
Good advice, thanks!
> Also it's easy to overlook the significance of the several presidents, Lincoln included, whose peak assets, including the equity in their residences, was less than $1 million in today's money. Can you imagine electing a president like that today?

I think a more interesting list would be net worth on the day they were inaugurated the first time. Lincoln never got a chance to make money after office, but many others did. In the modern era much of the money has kicked in after office.
I'm guessing you mean http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370622. Votes move comments around, so unfortunately we can't rely on "above" or "below" being meaningful over time.
John Gruber's Post-I/O Thoughts
I agree completely. My word choice was poor. By 'Snub' I mean that I felt negative feelings (did not act on them) towards a customer.

This is explained by my above post, which indicates that I set lofty goals which were not met (both by my fault and management inside of said company) and customers got pushy as the days progressed to weeks to months.

Again, I am nice to them and try to support them the whole time, but when pieces aren't delivered, they get angry.
I'm normally a big fan of your comments maxklein, but I would advise to exercise a bit if caution with this one.

I suffer from the same problem (haven't found a solution yet), and I've done the 'get started on something else', but I find that I get more and more sucked into the new thing, and the old thing slides.

If it can be organized ala Google 20% time, and make sure that the overarching goals don't get in the way, then I'd say it may work, but I don't think it is for everybody.
IANALinguist, but I feel like this feeling of simplification is common experience for English speakers learning Chinese. I'd love to hear a professional opinion, or even just get comparative word counts for several translations.

A slight modification to wisty's example would be if you're at a restaurant and the vinegar is at someone else's table. "Give me the vinegar/给我醋(把)" is equally polite to something in English like "Please would you pass the vinegar" which you might be more likely to say to a complete stranger. It's definitely minor, but creates a feeling of convenience which builds over time: terseness as convenience instead of rudeness.

Another example might be getting a stranger's attention to ask a question (again, something common to my experience if not the most varied example). In English it's "Hi, would you mind helping me?" "Hi, could you answer a question of mine?" "Hi, I have a question..." In Chinese it's just "please (let me) ask/请问". The "let me" is parenthetical to make it sensible in English, but it's not required to enunciate it (请让我问你）.

There is zero conjugation, a noun, the action most closely associated with it, and the verb which generates that noun might all be the exact same word with the meaning derived by context or (if ambiguous) helping words -- especially when speaking. People strive to speak chronologically so that "He took the train to the city" makes sense but "He arrived in the city by train" is strained. The 了 particle is so overloaded as to have many different, non-overlapping contextual meanings.

You might say that Chinese is structured more by convention than boilerplate, but that's at best a weak metaphor with a lot of connotations which I don't think carry to human languages well.
No critical information, mostly fluff, but the kind of fluff that hackers love. Assange seems to be very committed to WikiLeaks.
broken link?
it comes up blank here

[edit: the page loads, but doesnt render in chrome for os x]
also, the links are broken (they have an extra http://)
The Bill of Rights originally applied only to the federal government, and was later applied to the states. Perhaps we should also make it apply to corporations?
You and I agree. Sorry if I didn't make that clear, but the way I read the post at the top of this thread, each claim could be backed with appropriate evidence for and against (as Feynman says every scientist's duty is). For a sufficiently well defined situation X, the claim that "Y is the most appropriate solution for X" can and should be tested appropriately.

The "appropriate" amount of testing would also depend on the situation X. The 'difficulty of observation' may be a factor here, but is not the only one. If the situation doesn't require 'hard' evidence (e.g. the consequences are minor) that's fine, but I wouldn't say any of the above examples fall under that category, and people making decisions based on 'soft' evidence should do so knowing that it is what it is.

Also, whether there is or isn't a strict ordering, dependence on the individuals, or a silver bullet would all be facts turned up by sufficient application of the scientific method. This relates to Feynman's points on how it's necessary to do experiments where you "don't learn anything new" and again, how every scientist is ethically bound to report results that contradict their theory.
This is the perfect answer the original post. I wish I could close the thread and promote this all the way to the top.

I suffer from this same issue as the original poster and tried agency world to cure it. Projects rarely last long enough to get sick of them. However what really works is just finding something that makes you happy in whatever you are doing.
I always thought the "meetings are toxic" part was about meetings inside the company to discuss features, etc.
Packt Publishing is in Need of Authors for new NoSQL Books
While Google fights on the edges, Amazon is attacking their core
tl;dr: web analytics company starts claiming bullshit about privacy in search engines

Also, in other news: some people start claiming bullshit about issues than are better for other people but bad for them.

ps. I did upvote this post in HN just for the sake of discussion and comments, but I don't like the tone of the original poster with his 'HN hipsters' and 'BS' all around.
Golfresor Skottland
Interesting discussion of a topic I haven't read much about elsewhere.

Anyone know of any books that dig into this or related topics?
Obviously, it does not work for everyone. For me it works, because the second project is like a "hobby". Hobbies help.
Ask HN: good book or resources to get my SQL skills to the next level
Hi HN friends,

I'm doing web development for about 3 years now (mainly ruby stuff), used SQL all along and before (I was doing C/C++ and sqlite dev). I know basic SQL, joins and all basic SQL querying.
But I'm pretty sure there's tons of post processing code I could write directly in SQL. I mean, I know I can so ... do you have a good book to recommend to get my SQL skills to the next level ?
Some of these aren't even scientific discoveries:

- We’ve already changed the climate for the rest of this century
- There have been mass extinctions in the past, and we’re probably in one now.

Seriously?
"Woah! Quit your day job!
You could be earning..
$4624132.5 Per Month!"

My bullshit meters just broke. It makes me question the validity of your product.
Database Design for Mere Mortals

http://www.amazon.com/Database-Design-Mere-Mortals-Hands/dp/...
Gruber's comments on Microsoft are so dead on...
Google Secure Search is really just a power play
Why do you even need to install the server if it's a personal project - AFAIK svn works just fine accessing repos on a local file system.
There's one paragraph I don't get:

"I tried to find a principle for discovering more of these kinds of things, and came up with the following system. Any time you find yourself in a conversation at a cocktail party in which you do not feel uncomfortable that the hostess might come around and say, "Why are you fellows talking shop?" or that your wife will come around and say "Why are you flirting again?"--then you can be sure you are talking about something about which nobody knows anything."

I've been trying figure out what he meant, so I can apply the same method.
You don't have to (if you don't want). Take advantage of your natural inclination and create new things every 6 months. Find a way to make the "6 month plan" work, whether that involves selling a nascent business each time or if they can become passive income streams. I see little need to fight against your innate personality traits if you can get away with it, rather, you should be taking full advantage of them.
Yes, this is a pain in the butt for webmasters, and yes, if Google arranged for only Google Analytics to display these search terms, it'd be an anticompetitive abuse of market power. But any webmaster's power ends at the limits of their site.

Really don't like people using encrypted search and not passing along search terms? Don't serve them the content they were looking for - explain the situation to them instead. Or pursue a milder approach where the content is displayed alongside a suggestion that they use an unencrypted search engine. That's about all the recourse you've legitimately got.
I think that 'change the world' is too big for reliable motivation. Try finding smaller, more immediate goals that you can better identify with for particular projects. That should help you keep your interest up.
Eric Schmidt 2001 talk: laws of the technology industry
I thought there were some dynamite quotes, real insights from an edgy experience.
Didn't realize it was a big deal, but I always lean towards tacky. I had to make my squiggle line joke.
From the article, he admits that this is a hypothesis about how the service might work. It's actually just an introductory overview of naive bayes, and doesn't address an actual use case of the G prediction engine (at least, not that they have confirmed). The actual examples from google all seem to have discrete outcomes, so far.

Naive bayes is almost definitely going to be something that they offer — it seems like it's just a question of 'when'.
IMHO his argument seems valid. My site's Google Analytics tells me what were the search terms and which search engine sent me the traffic. Why not share that with the web masters if that can help them create better content or tweak their SEO?
If Google Adsense still has access to this data to serve more relevant ads on the destination site and other ad providers don't then it is very anti-competitive.
> But any webmaster's power ends at the limits of their site.

I guess that's it. User's rights are above webmaster's right. If you don't like them you can start disallowing search engines in your robots.txt or blocking users by referrer.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I don't see much value in a standard and multiple competing implementations of the same video format. Unlike HTML, there's only one correct rendering of a video, and the problem is pretty much solved by the first solid portable free decoder. Optimal encoding is an active research topic, but that can rely on whatever the de facto decoder supports.
* Eric Schmidt gave a presentation at the Computer History Museum in 2001 on lessons learned through his experiences in the technology industry.

* The Computer History Museum talk is called "Unwinnable Wars: Personal Persepctives on Technology Leadership" and can be accessed through Google Video

Notes from the talk:

"Lessons Learned":

1. Against A Fast Competitor, A Cloning Strategy Doesn't Work

* For instance, Sun's attempt to develop a Win32 API Clone called WABI failed

2. There will always be an open source choice

3. Consortia don't work

4. There will always be a Microsoft or IBM, etc...

5. Multi-software unification doesn't work (license conflicts, etc...)

6. Your strategy should be complete market domination. Because if you don't, someone else will. There will always be unitary choice at every control point.

Strategies That Work:

1. Low-cost proprietary (Dell, Ebay, Microsoft)
It's shocking how irrelevant they are in most of the things that are getting a lot of press these days. It's hard for me to imagine the scenario where Windows ever becomes a big player on mobile.

I wonder where they'd be if they'd have been broken up by the US government a decade ago.
_Over the past year, hopes have risen among Americans that something might finally be done about the third-world quality of their internet access._

As a third-world citizen, the author doesn't have any idea about the network quality their. I live in North Africa and it's only few weeks ago that we got a new 3G operator (Orange) in the country and it's only powering main cities. The fastest connection you can get is 8 MegaBit (whatever place you live in) and it's only recently that it was boosted from the 4M speed.

The quality is hilarious, you get sometimes a 3 days down time. You probably never reach the promised speed and in rush hours, you can do a coffee with friends instead. The 8MB connection costs around $60 a month; 3G promises 1MB speed at around $20 a month.
I'm not sure. With the big announcement that was made about how they're switching and everybody here on HN celebrating, I was expecting all the [Scribd]'s to turn into HTML5 links. Is that because the HTML5 isn't ready yet, or because the HN code hasn't been updated?
If you want to do a total rewrite, but think some people won't be onboard with the idea, just call it "extreme refactoring". That sounds cool and trendy, and then everyone will be OK with it.
Let's not forget we, the webmasters, create the content for Google to serve as search results...

The least they can do is help us out!
I'm facing a similar situation, but my coworker is suggesting SVN. Should I go along or is there any good reason to start right away with git/mercurial?
Essay on Use in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
The Twelfth Knight by Shakespeare is an excellent play which students can write various essays on. There are different aspects which need to be elaborated, analyzed and evaluated in order to write the essay. Select a good topic and writing the essay will be as easier than expected.
It works better if you refuse to let yourself work on your enthusiastic project until you have X amount done on the boring one, that is use it as a reward for making some kind of progress on the boring one.
I'd argue that code contests like Google Code Jam are the closest to 'controlled experiments' that we have in software engineering. There's a set of specs of what is to be implemented, and a limited time in which to do it. (With different contest structure/judging criteria to testing different things like, speed, adaptability/maintainability, etc.) By trying to entice as many programmer/programmer teams to enter, differences in individual programmer is hopefully lessened.

Even your question, "(What is) the effect of technology choices on programmer productivity?", tries to treat programmers as interchangeable when tech choice A is better for all programmers. Programmer productivity, like intelligence, is something that if you'd have a license to print money if you could accurately and precisely measure.
Same for me. Anybody know why this breaks in Chrome?

[edit: looks like the source is truncated. Several closing tags -- including a few divs, body, and html -- are missing. Not sure why Chrome can't handle that though.]
I did not say it wasn't valid I said i didn't like the tone. Compare the post with something like:

"Look, search analytics are important to the webmasters because X, Y & Z. If search engines start to implement this option we could do A, B & C, but that will make the site owner job more difficult because knowing where your visitors come its huge and too important."
Not sure what you mean by "apply to corporations." Free speech is basically an extension of property rights. If you own a piece of land, you can stand on it and do and say almost anything (other than incite a riot, etc.) you want. Corporations are legal entities owned by the same people that have the aforementioned rights. If the gov't limits the freedom of speech of corporations, it limits the freedom of its shareholder owners.
I'd argue that code contests like Google Code Jam are the closest to 'controlled experiments' that we have in software engineering. There's a set of specs of what is to be implemented, and a limited time in which to do it. (With different contest structure/judging criteria to testing different things like, speed, adaptability/maintainability, etc.) By trying to entice as many programmer/programmer teams to enter, differences in individual programmer is hopefully lessened.

Even your question, "(What is) the effect of technology choices on programmer productivity?", tries to treat programmers as interchangeable as if tech choice A is would make all programmers more productive. Programmer productivity, like intelligence, is something that if you'd have a license to print money if you could accurately and precisely measure.
If your organization is using SVN stick to SVN because your learning curve will be easier (rather than trying to learn two differen VCS systems).

Otherwise, I highly suggest Mercurial; it "just works", has a powerful feature set, and I like bitbucket.org better than github :)

The debate between bzr, hg (Mercurial), and git can become religious because all the tools are good.
His points on Microsoft are well made. Given the strategic importance of this market it amazes me how badly they've done. Realize they beat Apple to market by around 4 years (depending on how you count the PocketPC/Phone hybrids) and Google by almost 5 .

Now they've tossed the whole thing out and started over with a product that won't be out for another 6 months and in terms of features seems to be equivalent to a first generation iPhone (which is relevant because I really don't think Microsoft is going to create a better user experience so they'd have to compete on features)

It's really kind of sad.
Shapewriter seems to be recommended alot, but I've only played with different keyboards a bit on my wife's Hero.
Although syncing with a computer may feel retrograde, I'm sure theres a lot of people, including myself, that would rather keep their data due to privacy issues instead of relying on Google or Apple to store it. However, I think most people would prefer cloud syncing since it is so easy for the user.
Any type of wireless syncing is good for me, whether that's with the cloud, or with a Mac/PC on my wireless network.

USB syncing is sooo 20th Century
I really enjoy The Git Parable (http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.htm...).
It's funny because John starts with "Google is doing this fine" and "Apple is doing that fine", and "we are all gonna get better smartphones with this kind of rilvalry" and then when you think he is goint to add Microsoft into the rivalry: "Oh, yeah, remember Microsoft? it seems like they don't remember the smartphone market"
He meant that if you ever catch yourself in a conversation where no one knows anything about the subject matter, you should end the conversation.
My first line before I submitted the comment was "Barring the tone and 'HN hipsters' terms...IMHO.." but I deleted that in the last moment thinking it wasn't adding any value. But looks like I should have retained it :)
Right. At this point you kind-of have to just imagine the workflow (which is actually what I do quite a bit before tackling an analytics problem). You have to envision an ultimate goal of what you want your output to be, an understanding of what's being done to your data, and then make sure you correctly accumulate and format your data to insert into the system. When they flush out their API docs (and let me use their API) I will write another post!
Git is neat. This is the first time I use a VCS.

Git community book: http://book.git-scm.com
Sorry, you are correct, I meant http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370622
Ballmer was not wrong about the iPhone. He said they would get 2-3% of the total phone market, not the smartphone market. He even makes that clear in the part that Gruber quoted: "... 1.3 billion phones ...". That's phones, not smartphones.

According to http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apple-iphone-smartphone-market... in the first quarter of 2010 Apple had 16.1% of smartphones and smartphones were 18.8% of mobile phones. That comes out to almost exactly 3%.

Ballmer also wasn't wrong about Windows Mobile. The "60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent" was not a prediction, it was just what he would prefer.
beermoney.com
Stellar DSLR Time Lapse of a Space Shuttle Launch
Maybe Google will make money some way, down the road, directly or indirectly from Android. Maybe not. Windows was knowingly building a huge business.

Android, Docs, Chrome or any of the other not directly search or advertising Google activities may be important at some stage. Right now they aren't and it isn't clear that they will be. I don't think Google is treating them as such.

What I was saying is that there will be a big difference in drive between Android 2012 & Windows 1995.
That's an excellent color scheme app! It's hard to make it produce a bad looking color scheme.

This reminds me. I'm not a designer in any way, but I've always wondered whether it would help if the tool you use to design a website is actually focused on designing websites. With photoshop you are editing a list of matrices of pixels. This is a very general tool which means that it doesn't understand the structure of a design well and it takes a huge manual translation step to get to the HTML+CSS+images.

Any ideas on whether and how this could be improved if you made a tool focused solely on designing websites? Not just taking away the translation step but also making designing itself faster.