skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Heh. I should have been more clear.

I've "onboarded" (enterprisey word for orienting/registering/supporting/creating accounts for new hires) many new employees disoriented/frustrated by their new org's tools.

What often happens when a new hire really disagrees with his/her new tool for task is that they only use it for the "last mile" of the transaction.

So... say they have to turn in an expense report in Excel template. But they like some other app. They will take all their notes in $preferred_app, do all their editing in $preferred_app, and at the last step, export to Excel template.

You should see the machinations I've seen around mail. Convoluted downloading and parsing from Exchange servers with shell scripts... hah.

In any case... this is not ideal. What this does is make users absorb complexity for IT. IT can get comfortable wtih a platform, too leery to try something else. But users, often years into new generations of workflows (not just young people, so many older employees have been using Gmail for years in their personal life for example.), absorb the blow.
Click&Clean 5.2.1 extension for Google Chrome
Features:
✔ Ability to specify different options for Session / when Chrome closes
✔ Secure File Deletion (Bruce Schneiers Algorithm - 7 Pass)
✔ Compatibility with latest Chrome dev. v.6.0.447.0
✔ Remove Google Gears data
✔ Redesigned Tray icon
✔ Ability to set custom icon
✔ Polish translation by Monsz
✔ Hungarian translation by Zamiere
✔ Some Fixes
Roku Developer Contest - Make a new channel
What is meant by the expression "code purity"?
E.g. http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html
Apple has a pretty strong track record of releasing products without regard to buyer's remorse, but this short of a release cycle would be nothing short of astounding. I just don't see it happening.
I keep wondering, If the iPhone 4 does indeed have better reception than previous models, doesn't that mean that previous model (3g, 3gs) antenna design is partly to blame for dropped calls and not just AT&T?
I don't disagree that the signal goes down if held in a certain position with the iPhone 4. I just think we might all not have noticed it had they not implemented the 3G signal meter "feature" in OS 2.1, since the signal degradation might be only 1 bar (see: anandtech's article with numbers). In real practice, my calls get killed because of the proximity sensor issue from my face, not the antenna degradation from my hand.
Probably not. They don't have enough money yet to afford Pivotal. This is probably just good PR for both sides, as well as relationship-building, so that when Diaspora gets an A round, they can start spending it at Pivotal.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/26/pirate_bay_neo_nazi/

It's sorta well-known here in Scandinavia, that aside from being on the frontier of fight against RIAA, they are also neo-Nazi closet cases.

Downvoters, enjoy your cognitive dissonance ;)
You raise valid points, so I'll elaborate on my thinking: I don't really care what binary serialization format is used (personally, I use thrift), there's no shortage of good ones available (msgpack, thrift, protobuffs, avro, etc). I think it's more important to decouple the serialization format from the transport and protocol, so that when/if you realize you need to switch you only have to replace one piece.
Kinda misleading title... "Thus, the only fair conclusion is that we can't say for sure which device offers the fastest reading speed."
Pretty slick. They seem already to be updating it (compared to their demo's display).
IPad usage surpasses that of Android
I didn't do a return because of the antenna issue. I did do an exchange because of the proximity sensor issue though. And, the replacement phone still has the problem. All my calls get are affected by this. Randomly detects my face as input and initiates facetime, puts calls on hold, randomly tries to SMS people, or just ends the call. The real issue is the proximity sensor as that is a bug killing calls now.
No. The engineer is crying because fudging the arbitrary visualization is considered the solution instead of "implementing a realistic algorithm, pronto".
It is ridiculous to assume this situation exists as a result of lack of capability on Greyhound's part. It exists because they make more money this way from people who can't figure out how to make Greyhound give them their money back. Why change it and reduce revenue?
When reading these articles, I continue to be amazed at how many euphemisms there are for "I want stuff for free".
It's difficult to question Apple's honesty here without it becoming an ad hominem attack, but it's difficult for any reasonable person to imagine that somehow throughout the last three years of having a product in market, with a carrier who is notorious for dropped calls, the whole signal-strength-to-bars algorithm hasn't come under some scrutiny. I mean, the first question you ask someone when they complain of dropped calls is: "how many bars did you have when the call dropped?" It's difficult enough to get accurate information from users without feeding them erroneous information.

I don't think it's as clear cut as Steve Jobs instructing his teams to pump signal strength reporting, but if they were given a selection of algorithms to choose from, and they chose the one that reported "more favorable" results, then that's on them.
Objective-C exceptions in methods invoked via NSInvocation are uncatchable
Seriously? Did you create an account just to make that comment? Wow...
This post is spot on. At my company, the amount of amazing stuff we can build basically had the top blow off once we were finally able to access our dataset using map reduce. In an afternoon, we can build something that previously was inconceivable due to the large data transformations necessary to build it.
An interesting note is that Pivotal Lab's VP of Technology, Ian McFarland (@imf), was Friendster's Chief Architect. Ian is one of the nicest people in the SF startup scene, and can share the experience of Friendster's growth, pain, and subsequent downfall.
Yeah. Such as "We decided from the outset to set the formula for our bars-of-signal strength indicator to make the iPhone look good - to make it look as if it "gets more bars". That decision has now bitten us on our ass."
I honestly don't understand how anyone can question that we lack free will unless one believes in a soul or some other kind of "magic". If all of our actions are governed by our brains, and our brains are simply a collection of particles obeying the laws of physics, where is the room for free will?
This article doesn't say anything new that hasn't been said before and has been said better many times.

YES, outsourcing "almost" always doesn't work.
What a fantastic idea. I'd never thought about the positive applications of DRM.
I'm also a suspicious of the insulative coating fix. I think the proposed solution hinges on the idea that electrically isolating the hand from the conductive surface of the antenna would prevent it from loading/bridging the antenna. While a thin insulating layer would accomplish this at DC, it may not at higher frequencies, especially when you get up close to the GHz range.

Your finger and the metal of the antenna are essentially two conductors separated by a thin insulator, which forms a capacitor. A capacitor blocks DC current, but its impedance (resistance) goes down as the frequency of the signal increases. What tesseract is suggesting is that the frequencies in the antenna are so high that our capacitor's resistance is practically nil; the thin insulator essentially does nothing to fix the problem.

A possible way to fix this is by lowering the capacitance of our capacitor. The simplest way to do this is to simply increase the distance between the two conductors, i.e. move the finger farther from the antenna. If you look at Apple's bumper case, you'll notice that it is far thicker than any of the proposed insulating layers.
> the antenna issue seems like it indeed is software and really a non-issue

Incorrect. Read the text on the page you linked to and the original Anandtech article: the iPhone 4 loses almost 20dB of signal when holding it naturally in your hand, without using a case. By comparison, a Nexus One loses about 10dB, and the 3GS loses about 3dB.
I would suggest buying a french press and grinder instead.
Rancilio Silvia is very low tech and hackable. Solid, simple, built to last. The design doesn't change from year to year.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/21/rancilios-silvia-espresso...

http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol04/?pg=124#pg124

http://coffeegeek.com/reviews/consumer/rancilio_silvia
i still don't get the redditness, someone care to explain
In a Linux VM I guess?
The problem is most people building meaningful programs are not people with "just a quick job to do". For those people, having abstractions available allows them to focus on the harder problems that actually matter, instead of constantly reinventing the wheel.

The mental energy is probably not worth it if you are just building a blog for yourself, but in that case, the mental energy of learning PHP is not worth it either. If the job is really that quick, why are you using dynamically generated content in the first place? HTML one-off's are the most straight forward solution.

On the other hand, if you want to build a bulletproof web application, you should probably use powerful tools, figure them out once, and then actually solve your problem.
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Functional_programming#Pu...
The title should be "Outsourcing (offshore) doesn't work (for me)"
Except that they are implementing the realistic algorithm...
Let's not even talk about the ultra fast depletion of the battery when browsing the internet...Or is it just mine?
Less than $750ish

Not fully automatic.

For home/office use - several shots a day.

Mostly for espresso, someimtes capuccino (80/20)

Not interested in bells/whistles/computers - just good espresso.

Solid quality/durability/maintainability is a plus.
Google researcher says friend groups may give it a window to best Facebook
I thought Ive worked for Apple?
Looks like a good one. Will check it out.
We get angry when theologians try to overstep their bounds into science, so we should also get angry when scientists overstep their bounds into philosophy with all kinds of hamfisted assumptions.

I mean just because an assumption is necessary and reasonable for exploring the mechanics of the universe does not mean you can simply extrapolate to something as mysterious as the nature of consciousness and free will.
Outsourcing works, else it would not still exist.
I wonder if a kind of TDD system could work. As in I write a test case and a function prototype, then send it off to a Mechanical Turk type community. Someone picks it up, fills in the details, sends it back. Obviously wouldn't work for some of the more complex parts of the project, but it would save me time from having to build the almost trivial parts.
Eric Lewis (aka ELEW) on Chess, Entrepreneurship and the Music Biz [video]
"However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data's fairly high variability. "

It would have been better to title it "Electronic and Paper Reading Speeds".
No amount of expecting a science-y explanation from the teacher makes any of their science-y explanations correct.

It's not that they had an alternative model of how it could have happened, and tried to offer a explanation with a technical term. It's that they were just throwing out technical terms.

If a teacher shows an egg being pushed into a bottle with a match in it, and one student guesses 'quantum tunneling', that answer is just as wrong as the answers in this essay, and driven by the same process of inserting magic words.
Well, I'm reading / writing this using Chrome 6.0.447.0 dev, and the Firefox that's installed on this box is the FF4 beta candidate... so yeah, I guess I try to stay fairly close to the bleeding edge.
Are There More Girl Geniuses?
On your point #2 - it is true that enterprise software tends to be complex, but this problem is compounded by the fact that enterprises are unwilling to approach building/buying solutions to complex problems with a conquer and divide approach. In the consumer/small business world, small, lightweight tools that solve one problem well(think Redis for databases, Etherpad for collaborative editing, etc.) are easier to make good interfaces for.

When it comes to buying software, big companies don't like choosing small, well-designed tools that they can put together to solve a problem because the decision-making process of choosing technology is expensive and time consuming when you are risk averse. At a large financial institution that I used to work at, we spent months going through different third-party offerings of a new data platform. Everyone hates doing it, and it cost a ton of money in developer time (plus some companies actually charge you to do a lengthy demo). So people just tend to gravitate towards the products that are bloated with features and will solve all our problems at once, and we all know what kind of UX these kinds of products will offer.
Wow. [I felt like] I just lost my girlfriend, because that song isn't mine anymore… It really made me think about how powerful music is as a medium and art form.

To have your own work transformed in such a profoundly moving way has to be among the greatest possible creative experiences.
Apple's Crazy Open Letter Doesn't Even Address The Real Issue
In my experience it would be the opposite so I guess there is always two side of every story.

>> The entire idea of paying dirt cheap prices for an overseas developer defies a basic logic test. Let’s say you’ve got a really bright developer in India who has managed to overcome the cultural differences to work well remotely. Why wouldn’t he charge $40 an hour?

Cost of living in other countries are different.

>> If an overseas developer is good, he can charge a comparable rate to American developers and will stay busy.

That would defeat the purpose of "outsourcing" is it? Again, cost of living is different.

>> A good developer in any country does not have to fear outsourcing or other cost-saving trends. Good developers are scarce everywhere. That scarcity ensures that good programmers will always be able to find jobs and command a certain high-end rate.

I just wish that all companies would think like you do.
Interview with Avi Bryant, Twitter analytics team / DabbleDB
Just noticed: there is a "media download" option towards the bottom right of the video.
I'd be interested in performing these tests without just novels (eg include textbooks that require flipping back&forth) so that the strengths of the iPad could really show.
Only adults can downvote!
To help the redesign of Firefox 4.0, Mozilla just released a heatmap
Agreed, Enthusiasm and Passion are contagious -- when someone cares deeply about something it's hard not be interested.
This also holds true for user feedback. Users are great for identifying problems and pain points. They're absolutely terrible at recommending improvements, for a plethora of reasons. They can't see past their own issue, they can't see far beyond the present design, they have no idea of the internals, they don't realize or properly value unintended consequences of their suggestion, and they often quite simply don't have a good sense of design. Making the most of user feedback requires filtering out the feedback itself and identifying the underlying issue that's generating the feedback. Even if your solution ends up resembling one of the suggestions, it's most helpful to understand the issues driving that suggestion.
Was is more apt. Orkut has lost a HUGE share to FB
We will host The Pirate Bay inside the Swedish parliament
Why did you have to spent $200? Would you give a small breakdown?

My housemates and I have recently started growing stuff in our garden. We did not have to buy soil and pots, only some seeds and tools.
I think that what he's trying to say is that at high frequencies thin coating is not enough. You've got a similar situation in capacitors where with no physical and conductive connection between the sheets, you get the effect of a good conductor of alternating current. You'd create a similar effect by coating the antenna and pressing your conductive (to some extent) finger on the coating - you'd be a part of a large capacitor.

How exactly would that affect the signal is up for discussion. It depends on how conductive is your body, what's the thickness of the coating, what area would be needed to create a visible effect, etc. etc.
Outsourcing definitely works.

The main problem that I with your company is that you guys have poor managers. A good manager will know how to modularize code and quality assurance in such a way that outsourcing will be a well-oiled checked and balanced machine.
You can probably go for eating eggs every day.
Was that a lottery ticket he bought in the store? It would totally blow my mind if it was.

(On the other hand, I'm now feeling a bit dirty for having watched that awful stalking video)
"Outsourcing doesn't work" is as extreme as "Outsourcing always works and is the cool thing to do". Like many other things there are successes and failures, but I guess that doesn't make for a very sensational blog entry or discussion.
Yea, the iPhone 4 loses more signal than others due to antenna being on outside. But real world performance shows it still outperforms 3GS/other phones. Other parts of the Anandtech show that iPhone 4's sensitivity is greater.
Interesting right ear findings:

http://www.google.com/search?q=spoken++right+ear.
Apple on iPhone 4 Reception: Software Update Coming
CS4HS: helping high school teachers reach their potential
Sometimes I wonder how much closures and meta-programming is just code
for coding sake. I've seen lots of examples of 5 line LISP code that does
something totally amazing but you don't really know what it means but it's
so abstract

You could the same for so many PHP frameworks. Why are there so many classes? Why do I have to inherit from a class I don't understand? Why am I forced to define classes at all? Why are my custom classes 50% getters/setters? Why are my objects mutable? etc. etc. etc.

(map :last-name people)

The point is if the language provides the proper level of abstraction, you end writing less of your own hand rolled abstractions.

Again the only thing I'm hearing here is arguments from people who are too lazy to actually see how things are done from a functional perspective. Get off your ass and find out. Then tell me you have a problem with it.
> [...] then surely we can do this?

There's a difference between technologically possible, and economically feasible.
Just how anonymous is Tor?
If the US police wanted to get me for things I did on Tor, could they find me? I am planning on exercising my free speech rights in the near term in a way that may attract law enforcement attention.

Sorry, I'm not a technical person -- I tried reading up on Tor in Wikipedia and couldn't find an answer to this question.
Looks interesting. I really hope they try to change it up completely from 'the facebook model', while still including essential features - personally I'd like to see more emphasis on the virality (yes, virality!) of groups.

These guys seem pretty smart, energetic, and optimistic. Anything that breaks the status quo is good.

However, they could have used some screen capture for the demo ... It wasn't entirely clear to me what was going on there.
That's like saying, "the market is always right; if it seems like it sometimes isn't, trust me, it is."
1> Vast difference between domestic and overseas outsourcing. Domestic outsourcing gets rid of a lot of his beefs.

2> You're not paying the developers to develop software, you're paying them to go away afterwards (so you don't have to keep paying them a salary). The big savings don't come from the hourly rate, but instead the fact they're not employees. You get this same benefit domestically.

Disclosure: I run a domestic product development company.
That's not what the parent claimed. He claimed they changed perception. Which way did it change is not really important. They change what you see, but the reception / what really happens stayed exactly the same.
Ruby 1.9.2 RC1 is out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

I believe it is better to form a hypothesis about a pattern first and then go about trying to prove or disprove it, even if empirically, rather than to observe an apparent pattern and then consider the same observation as proof that it is real.
Three drinks plus tipping up to $10, per day, is very roughly $300 - $600 per month. It may or may not work for you, but it is not a trivial expense.
but if I decide to think again, am I then doing it because it was my decision?
Maro, thanks for sharing your example.

I presume this is you? http://scalien.com/keyspace/

Awesome stuff.
Well the funny fact is people outsource their project to me, after a previous("overseas") developer failed.

The article isn't bad, my problem is that in the beginning it is too damn general. Yes there are a lot of fails, but there are also successes.

My points are:
- in house developers can fail just as well
- outsourcing can be done right, and can be almost bullet proof
- management is what really kills these types of projects

If the management is fit for the task, it can make outsourcing work.
I love to hear this. What are you working on and can you share an example or two of some of the new stuff you are able to do?
Humans think they are on the apex of the shrub of live, because they have big brains.

I guess fish would define sophistication as a nice swim bladder.
I used to work at a company where we used this method to tackle especially complex or politically sensitive issues. I have to say it was really effective at pull everyone together to have a constructive conversation. I wouldn't recommend it on a day-to-day basis, but for larger issues or for issues with several ideas in strong competition, this is fantastic.
Playing Doom.
I do consulting mostly ... I'm building many apps for business that want to optimize workflows, but I'm also doing crazy shit ... like in a cinema room I built software for scheduling/synchronizing movies on digital and analog projectors (also in tandem with lights and sound).

Clojure I'm evaluating for my own project.
In the public schools I attended, the fallibility of teaching staff was readily apparent and didn't require a special lesson.
I wonder whether it really would help with just one person. I suspect part of the problem with groups is that the one who proposed a solution will take a social hit if it is rejected. So, with just you, that shouldn't come up.
Trendspotting: Mobile apps that sync with their Desktop counterparts
The word "work" can mean different things to different people. In this case it may mean "enables c-level management to cut expenses and show short-term profits so they can sell the company."

I think it hardly ever works in the sense of "makes for better and more cost-efficient information systems in the long term."

Over the years I've worked on several expensive IT contracts whose purpose was to bring failed outsourcing projects back in-house.
That or a Moka pot. Not only does it taste much better than in a machine, but handgrinding coffee is an awesome and satisfying micro-break!
Don't forget to factor in the cost of fuel for the truck and the lawn mower, as well as maintenance and any government fees. Otherwise, I like your plan.