skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Big companies are starting to ditch Microsoft Office for Google Apps. If this becomes a trend, Microsoft's second huge cash cow will be under immediate threat.

The IT guys removed Office from all of our computers at work and replaced it with OpenOffice last year. I would imagine that this is happening in a lot of places. Between OpenOffice and Google Docs, you have 90% of what you need to be productive, at a cost of $0. The other 10% costs you a couple hundred per seat. I bet a lot of companies are doing the math.
When you quantify output, though, it tends to reward conservatism: work on smallish, high-probability incremental improvements, not big things, because big things have too high variance. It also rewards being good at overselling work, although that's a bigger problem in some areas than others.

I think people actually are already pretty good at judging research quality on something like "effort", or more to the point: how good a scientist is so-and-so? But it requires familiarity with the person over some time, and tends not to scale well. If you ask a scientist about the quality of research of one of their colleagues they've been in the same department with for 10 years, they'll rarely refer to publications, and they often won't even refer to discoveries. Instead, it's inputs rather than outputs to the research process that they evaluate: how well is the person managing his/her lab, how insightful is he/she in picking problems and approaches, how good at mentoring students, how well does he/she really understand where this field is and where it's going / should be going, etc.

There is correlation, of course, in that the good scientists most often also produce good results. But at least among the researchers I know, if you have to pick one as the "real" one, inputs rather than outputs are it. If you observe someone for a while, you can tell whether they're a good scientist or not, and you can also tell the places where it doesn't correlate with outputs--- someone's been doing everything exactly right on an important problem but just hasn't gotten a break (or maybe did get it, but it came a month after they were scooped by another group), or someone else is kind of mediocre but got lucky with a big result. Neither's the common case, but it's not that rare either; it's not like research is just a crank you turn and results come out. =]

I guess the main issue is how to scale it. I think the above is pretty much how people already do make decisions when they're familiar with someone's work. If someone is up for tenure, my impression is that profs in that person's area will rarely even bother looking at publication lists when deciding whether to vote yes/no: after working with the person for 6 years they already have a good idea of whether the person is a good researcher they want to keep. It's mainly the people in other areas (in a large department), or in administrative roles, who seem to have no choice but to use the CV as the main basis of their tenure decision.
Hi Jason,

Great post, but just thought I'd mention I went searching for the RSS button on your site and couldn't find it anywhere (in fact, I subscribed to the comments on that post in my reader before I realized it was the wrong feed).

I could be blind, but in the end I noticed it was Wordpress so went to /rss/ to subscribe. Just thought I'd let you know!
Juggle. It's about pattern, space and structure, so it tends to suit technically minded people. At the same time, you really can't think of anything else when you're learning a new pattern or trick. You need to get to a zen(ish) state, not thinking, not feeling, not sensing, but being the structure.

Well, at some level.

It's also surprisingly good for the muscles and breathing, and it's been proven to make your brain grow in both grey matter (the cells) and white matter (the connections).

It's also said to improve co-ordination, peripheral vision, reactions, and balance.
Performance comparison of cloud computing vendors
It's not like the first-gen devices have killswitches.

Killswitches are iOS 4-only apps, which (based on experience with iPod touch) will show up in AppStore, but you will not able to install them. Also, you cannot get previous versions (3.x-compatible) of applications from AppStore.
The average UK salary is looking more like double what you're getting.

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/default.aspx?page=1&sortby=...

Check what it is specifically for your area, since it does vary a lot and London salaries pull the average up. Then raise the issue with your boss, and be prepared to give notice if they're not going to pay you more.

£18k is a mediocre salary for full-time helpdesk work, nevermind eight years of experience at dev. You're being proper fucked here, and you need to get away from it.

If you're too scared to walk from your current job right away - and I'm in much the same position and can appreciate how you feel - pick up some easy PHP dev work from RentaACoder, Elance, or guru.com on the side. You should be able to give up some weekends for a month or two to make money on the side, which will prove that you CAN make money on the side and give you some headroom for when you quit.

Oh, and the sites you've made don't really matter. You just make what you get told to make, right? Everyone understands that.
Neat. Even better if there was a Hacker News Startup Challenge, similar to Rails Rumble, where instead of mere 48-hours, you work for 1-2 months and launch, then you get reviewed by a panel of judges. This would be much more interesting to me, I guess.

It would be awesome if the winner would get a free ticket to fly to the Valley and join the current YCombinator class for one of their famous dinners, and get to present.

Wishful thinking, maybe.
The other thing to say here is that the latest research indicates that carbs may actually be a leading cause of heart disease rather than fat. For example:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=carbs-again...

So low carbs can be healthy even if you're not trying to lose weight.
Take a look at the MIT Open Courseware math classes. These are particularly good when you're on the train. You can find them online on Youtube, iTunes U, or at their site:

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/

Understanding calculus helps you to understand the relationship between functions, which is very useful with doing FP-like things in your code.
If you're asking how to set up a Delaware company as a non-US resident without ever stepping on US soil, then yes, it's possible.

You can do that via an agent. You can find one by googling 'Delaware Inc' or 'Delaware LLC' or by looking at the official list of registered agents at http://corp.delaware.gov/agents/agts.shtml. It usually costs around $200-$300 per annum for the basic service.
Computer Intelligence Predicts Human Visual Attention
Your body doesn't need cleansing. What it needs is a healthy diet to start with. Eat healthily, get exercise and fresh air, and you won't need to go on extreme diets that will only cause you to put all the weight back on later.
Bayesian NBA Basketball Predictions
It could help if you take an sports almanac and become rich gambling (BTTF!). You know, to be able to fund those projects, or you're gonna sound like crazy to potential investors.
>> Why is it a bad idea to call my jQuery plugin "jQuery Combinators," and why are K and T such terrible names for its methods?

FWIW, In Prototype.js, K is the identity function.

I think the problem is in assuming that people reading the code will know K and T are combinatory logic concepts, considering the terms aren't even described on Wikipedia (at least as far as I can tell).

(BTW: On a side note, the code currently throws an error if you don't have "Functional" declared.)
Scott Stapp of Creed is interested in career opportunities.
Less politics, less sports, less human interest, less celebrities, less drama, less elections...

... perhaps it would be more instructive to let us know what you DO want. There might be dedicated online communities for your interests.
I think the problem is that a lot of programmers will assume that you're trying to use intellectual violence[1] against them. To protect themselves from feeling ignorant, they shift the blame onto you. It's unfortunate, but I don't know that there's any way around it. Not everyone understands abstractions like K and T combinators. I think your choice is between: 1) "dumbing" it down or 2) letting some people be intimidated.

In the end, remember that it's your open source library. If people feel so strongly against those names, they can fork you.

[1] http://sourcemaking.com/antipatterns/intellectual-violence
I've lost 8 inches off my waist since august through not dieting and ramping up exercise (it's really important to not diet). and last year and I would say the advice is not good practice in places. I've not weighed myself once, I have no interest in my weight, or my BMI. My waist (and the requirement to have bought and thrown away quite a few trousers and shirts in the 10 months) are as much of an indicator as is needed. I want to become fit for life and not set goals to attain and get quick wins but make no long-term impact.

1) Never skip any meal. You are using a short-term, unsustainable, trick to drop some lbs you are guaranteed to put back on because you are not teaching yourself anything sustainable (same reason that low carb diets don't work long term for 90% of people).

2) Weighing yourself all the time when losing weight by diet alone is a psychological game that suggests you have a "goal" weight in mind which you will get to and have not gained any idea of food discipline or life-long control which should be your primary goal.

3) People who over eat can suffer from guilt cycles and your weight at any one point can induce more guilt (gaining pounds when you feel you have made even more effort to eat) even though it is not relevant as long as the over-all trend for life-long health is getting to and maintaining an approximate body shape which can fluctuate and still be healthy.

4) Being on a diet means coming off a diet. You will learn no long-term lessons about how your body and eating habits work for you.
It's still important for everyone doing math to know that the convention is bad, though, even if it's not worth switching. Then it becomes clear in several instances that slight blemishes in the beauty of equations are of human origin. It also help you think of 2pi as an object.
This isn't strictly a web application, but if you are a Java programmer then one project I'd recommend would be integrating the Twitter Search API with FreeMind for the purpose of facilitating real time curation of tweets. Real time curation is apparently the number one request for software that the twitter people get, and FreeMind is the ideal platform for curating tweets. All that's needed is a way to intelligently get tweets into FreeMind so that they can be quickly sorted appropriate buckets, and since FreeMind is written in Java it might be a good fit in terms of skill set and project size.

To give an example of how this would be used, the project described above would reduce the time of making this from about seven hours to about an hour: http://www.squidoo.com/Hacking_Education

Also, here are two relevant blog posts:

http://scobleizer.com/2010/03/27/the-seven-needs-of-real-tim...

http://shannonclark.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/curate-for-me-a...
Ask HN: Max no. of EC2 instances used by a single web app?
Including DB & API machines, our web app occupies 18 heavily utilized Amazon EC2 instances under a traffic load of ~7k RPM. "Conventional wisdom" says that we're mis-using EC2 by keeping so many virtual instances running but I prefer hard data to "conventional wisdom".

Curious to hear from the HN community: what’s the most long-running EC2 instances you've seen in a successful web app?
Same thing happened with the gamma function. MathOverflow:

http://mathoverflow.net/questions/20960/why-is-the-gamma-fun...
Yep, I definitely think so. Bookmarking something to the homescreen takes at least 4+ sec's, changing the wallpaper took at least 7 secs, sliding through emails now has hickups, etc. iPhone 4 already ordered ;-D
NationalCyberSecurity.com has all "Original Content"
When I saw the host and title I was concerned it may have been a rehashing of this urban legend - http://www.snopes.com/religion/pi.asp

Relieved to see it was actually this article, which I've actually referenced a number of times in discussions with engineers to make myself sound like I know more than I actually do!
http://www.myweightracker.com/about
Rapidshare kills reward program piracy concerns
This is very strange - OS4 feels distinctly snappier on my 3GS.
Would love to start a discussion about a win win solution to this. Copyright holders vs pirates is a hotbed issue but I think there's gotta be something that can be done to appease both.
"Keyboard not found. Hit F1 to continue"
Why iPhone "Angry Birds" game publisher ignores calls from Google and Microsoft
see also:

"The Diet Spreadsheet" by Jeremy Zawodny

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006851.html

http://www.myweightracker.com/about
I'm not asking about being digg proof, but not even HN proof?
Drawing or sculpture. Dance. Calligraphy. Magic tricks.
Reminds me of the magic quadrant:

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=131166

Though that's not how I heard about it personally. One of the smartest people I've known in business used it for analysis of the costs/benefits of groups and persons within a business (it seems impersonal -- and perhaps patience with those in the negative/negative area makes sense).

It's amazing how effective two-dimensional analysis can be though (esp. with two dimensions that are measurable, meaningfully, in relation to some other dimension -- e.g., short-term and long-term benefits/costs, as axes, are related to each other via the axis of time).

Why two work so well and not three is also curious. I guess 27-cubic analysis is harder on the ol' pre-frontal cortex.

Because I think the beauty of this quadrant analysis is that it's thorough. You're able to judge two dimensions thoroughly, whereas normally they're just averaged together. A star developer who is arrogant and lowers the productivity of others can be put in a context (maybe he or she is a short term benefit, but a long term detriment, which is otherwise easy to overlook).
Tough to say. You will not like this answer, as it is not precise. I think it's that when I hack python (and I did so professionally for a few years), I feel like someone is trying to tell me what to do. I don't like being told what to do.
I think he's just reframing the levels of causation a bit. You don't say pregnant women gain weight because they eat more than they consume, although from a thermodynamic point of view this is strictly true.

Have you ever met skinny unhealthy programmers who are very sedentary and eat a lot of junk food? I have met many. The point is that different people have very different reactions to food, in terms of hunger, mental reward pathways, tendency to burn off calories through adjusting subjective energy levels (e.g. lethargy) and things like jittering, and hormonal responses. Some of this is affected by the kinds of foods we eat, and much of it is affected by genetics.

The real point is that we can do better than saying "just eat less and exercise more" by looking at things from a different perspective. (I'm speaking as someone who lost 45 pounds in the last year and am currently at about 10-11% bodyfat by the way.)
Whole amps and handfuls of ohms aren't that rare, they actually match pretty well to what comes out of the wall socket. And that 1.8v or 0.85v or whatever it is these days space heater that runs your computer takes really quite a lot of amps.
SpecFlow 1.3.1 released
SpecFlow aims at bridging the communication gap between domain experts and developers by binding business readable behavior specifications to the underlying implementation.

SpecFlow provides a pragmatic and frictionless approach to Acceptance Test Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development for .NET projects today.

SpecFlow is open source, distributed under the BSD License.
To reply to the rails deployment thing, you can just go with passenger and then you only need to pick between nginx and apache which really comes down to plugin support. (Provided you don't mind compiling nginx to change plugins. You can hot-swap the binary so downtime isn't an issue.)
Even worse, in physics h-bar = h / (2 * pi).
Bootstrapper wants to incorp in Delaware on own to save $$.
Bootstrapping...lawyer wants 3500 to incorp me with the basics. I have incorporated many times but not in the SPECIFIC way it needs to be done for a statup seeking investment by FForF, angels, etc. I got the founder friendle docs: http://www.thefunded.com/funds/item/6085 from the funded. Im thinking about doing this myself to save ...oh about $3200. Any advice for? against?

Thanks,

Bootstrapping inChiTown
You mean 1 - 0.75^4 != 1. It is more than even odds, however.
I have a recent Thinkpad X201 (got in May) and it required some tweaking to get any kind of graphics (even for the OS installer itself) to work with Lucid Lynx.

Some features still don't work as well as they do under Windows 7 on the same machine, mostly in power management department:

- Battery life is not as good (4 hours max)

- Fan seems to be on more under Linux

- Screen brightness can't be adjusted

- Fingerprint scanner doesn't work, but I don't need it anyway

Otherwise, the machine is great under Ubuntu:

- It's fast and powerful but very light

- Easily fits into any bag (12 inch screen)

- Quite sturdy construction

- 500GB of hard drive space allows me to run any kind of VMs I need

- Up to 8GB of RAM

- 802.11n networking (works fine with Ubuntu)

- All of this for about $1200 Canadian, including taxes (13%) and shipping - it was under a promotion
A nifty little travel blog
Yes, but are you so sure you know which is which that you should be that critical? The field has left objective standards so far behind that it's hardly more than an aesthetic choice for anything that someone would publish. (It's not like someone is going to publish something with spelling errors every third word.)
He has a couple more past businesses too. I'm not sure it matters though; he knows how to make money. The only real difference is volume.
Yes I trust the doctor, hospital, and manufacturer to provide me with completely unbiased information on what stuff I need for my health. The problem is, the only people who can interpret that information are the same people who directly profit from my choice. They will suggest unnecessary and potentially harmful things. I guess I could go to medical school to really understand things well enough to make a truly informed decision. That would be great for the concept of separation of labor!

Of course I am probably just being paranoid. We should instead head back to the good ol' free market medicine days, when anyone could put anything in a bottle and sell it as a patent cure-all. Back then people lived way longer, and had way better options for medicine.

Please note: I'm not saying the system isn't messed up, I'm saying you solution really isn't much better.
John T. Reed is a pretty smart guy, you might look into buying his book.
http://johntreed.com/hyperinflationdepression.html
There are a couple of better domain names i can think of that that.

How would you populate initially?
App sites should have what they can't show on the app browser (video, hi-res screenshots, etc...). But I honestly don't see the point of spending lots of time on a site for it.
Remember "This error should not have occurred."?
GvR showed complete misunderstanding of recursion until someone mailed him a copy of SICP.

http://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/1838308947

And the bibliography:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8lgp0/guido_van...
That’s not a kill switch. You can continue using everything you used before.

A kill switch would be something that makes your experience worse.
On the last point: anything dealing with ISO, Quality Assurance or auditing for big bisnesses will sell well. It is a massively underdeveloped market.
>>> You've yet to establish the net negative effect, so I think this is putting the cart before the horse just a little.

I'm not the one claiming that trickle down economics is a morally justified way to rationalize the goodness of IP regimes. Why do I have to disprove conjecture which is not generally proven as a net benefit? Proponents of this dogma are the ones who want to justify IP regimes, and not only that they (i.e. you) insist this is the way to progress. You've got to prove that the inequalities created are better than the inequalities averted. That basic first step (proof of net positive) has not been done. I am not suggesting action (i.e. IP enforcement), I am suggesting inaction. As in, don't fuck with people unless your theory is proven.

Of course, it's worth pointing out that whole line is thinking is utilitarian. Are you truly utilitarian? I doubt it. So some consistency would be nice too.
What about the fact that sin and cosine have such elegant Taylor series expansions if you use radians?

In radians, sin = x - x^3/3! + x^5/5! - x^7/7!...

In 'Double radians', we have a 2^n factor in front of each term.
> Also I think you imply a false dichotomy between 'the pursuit of money and success'

You cut out the critical "in the eyes of others" part.

As for a "false dichotomy," spending your life trying to make more money and present the image of success is not a path to happiness. It's quite well documented that the best thing you can do for happiness is to improve your personal relationships. As for money, it doesn't lead to happiness. A lack of money leads to unhappiness, but you only need enough.

Anyway, I really think you're missing my points entirely. I'm not saying you shouldn't seek self improvement, and I'm not saying you shouldn't try to achieve things (which may or may not lead to riches). I'm saying do what you want to do for yourself and focus on your relationships. Don't be led around by false ideals implanted in your psyche, and don't try to be "good enough" for others, as it will only make you unhappy.
Well we agree on the basics, that's good.

Imagine a tiny black hole arriving on earth. It grabs some mass. The black hole is moving, but the mass it ate is not. So rather than free falling, it looses momentum. As it falls through the earth it keeps doing that.

So it will not rebound back up to the top at the same height it fell. It will be lower. The second time through the same thing will happen.

Each time it oscillates it will get lower and lower.

Next. Say the black hole is a bit bigger. And it eats some mass on one side of the earth - now there is an imbalance. There is more mass on the other side. So the forces will cause it to slow down more than it otherwise would.

When it finally settles down enough to make a cave, it will "swing" as much as it can. But each swing can not be any higher than the one before. Over time, with random atoms falling into the cave it, it will come to rest at the exact center.
Since my first iphone I updated my iPhone yearly without spending a dime, because I was always able to sell my old iPhone for more than what the new one subsidized cost.
I would point out that "it's so damn easy for programmers to rename them" is a bit of a cop-out. It's never really free to do that, because then your code looks and feels foreign to other people writing code with the same library.
Why 10 Million Dollar IPOs Matter
"Who is General Failure and why is he reading my disk??" :-)
Yes, I know that, as I've pointed it out multiple times in the past. Erlang is "better", but, if people writing code for node.js pay attention to how they write code, making the long-running stuff done via callbacks, as they have been doing, it will be "good enough".
Look, I know they are trying to think "outside the box", but their state has some pretty nasty lawyers and I can't help but think that some distracted driver will do some suing.