skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll be there, and I plan on celebrating CouchDB 1.0

If people want I can bring a stack of CouchDB t-shirts.

Don't want to party crash but I wanted to go to this since I saw it and 1.0 is out today so I don't have much choice. ;)
On Facebook, Telling Teachers How Much They Meant
So you prefer waterfall ? Most of my gigs have been in big corporate environments where people are considered "resources" and agile has nothing but savior for me .
Bad agile is always better than even good waterfall .
I don't know, but I've been describing twitter as a 'digital ghetto' for months now.

If they don't put a stop to the spammers, and build some better tools to filter users they're gonna get MySpaced in a big way.

EDIT
This stunning bit of prose just came across my feed: "LOL NIGGAS IS SO FUNNY .... FUCK IT !"

I don't want to see this, anymore than they want to see me talk about agile software development.
As a technologist at feel at times that web entrepreneurship is all about writing: most entrepreneurs I have met outsource coding to someone else and all they do is write: blog posts, tweets, emails to investors, answering support forum questions...

It's common to hear stories that begin with "Sergey and Larry..." but I doubt those guys spent any time blogging and tweeting about how awesome Google was going to be. Just one more reason to be more like S&G, that's all :)
Scrum is a trick to get everyone into the office by 9 am.
Agile is a disguised form of extreme micromanagement.

Both techniques have been cleverly marketed as a way for developers to work together in a state of harmonious productivity, when really they are CYA tools for managers.
Whatever happened to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Peak ?

(hyped and hyped a few months ago as the ultimate cable answer to everything, replacing USB, firewire, ethernet, HDMI, SATA, etc.)
>>>I wouldn't be surprised if evolution and condom use can be seen to fit togething in an interesting and compatible way.<<<

Most of my ideas on evolution have been shaped by Richard Dawkins. If you've read his books then you probably know what is coming.

His proposal to look at evolution from the gene point of view is something that is simple and logical to me. He points out that individuals are temporary collections of genes, and it is these genes that play games with us not the other way around. I love it how he puts; we are survival machines built by our genes.

However, for some reason some of those machines have developed this ability to talk to one another over things they have created. They seem to be able to reflect upon their own decisions and instincts in order to improve their response to the environment. There is no doubt that the gene/s that enable this became wildly successful in the gene pool. So, in a quirky way we have this ability given to us by genes that prevent us from carrying out the sole purpose of our existence to those genes; replication.

On the other hand we can argue for the-men/women-you-don't-have-sex-with example by pointing out that each time we mate there is a finite cost attached to it, and in order for the genes to be propagated most efficiently we have to take that into account. To a gene what is the use of having 30 descendants if none of them live long enough to reproduce?

What I am trying to say is that we aren't governed by our gene programming to the extent suggested in pop-culture. The genes themselves have given us a backdoor, and we exploit that backdoor a lot. It is an extremely strange recursion that boggles my mind.

So, at the end, yeah, you are right. There is nothing for which we can be 100% sure, but you have to admit this is a fun game. ;)
Yes in principle. Except that those who have a gut feeling for markets and economics usually are not the same as those with technical acumen.

Usually, those with technical acumen find manipulating economic and financial data by hand, and doing so repeatedly, boring. Which, I think, is necessary to gain intuition. On the other hand, those who are willing to do this and perhaps even enjoy studying balance sheets and cash flow statements and product markets spend so much time doing this that they wouldn't have time to learn math and science and AI.

In other words, you will always have either/or guys. Those who understand the algos and those who understand the markets.

Which, by the way, doesn't keep me from trying ;)
A data point:

I work with a lot of doctors that make $200 - $300k a year. And, I'd say that makes the comfortably upper middle class in the Bay Area. Couples where both are nurses can make $250 a year without working very hard.

Salaries at those levels make it very feasible to buy a house and take a nice vacation or two to Hawaii, Thailand or Europe. They drive nice cars and have lovely electronics to play with.
Start a tech blog with your city heavily loaded in the keywords, then start blogging about your traction, start firing on all cylinders, and smart people will get interested.. Link onto HN with your city name as part of the title on every blog post. Host a forum on your site for local developers to share connections.. If something doesn't exist, programmers are in the unique position to create it.
The Future Of Music Business Models (And Those Who Are Already There) | Techdirt
it seems people call these techniques machine learning/AI simply because it sounds cooler: a lot of the techniques have a 30+ year history in statistics. this is the same story as neural networks: neural networks are just nested logistic regression, a technique with much history in statistics.

a lot of high frequency trading is simply linear/logistic regression (on the right features of course). anything more complicated is too slow.
Funny story: I was working on USB at IBM in '98, and because of the new green/purple color convention for PS2, the designers wanted to similarly color-code two of the USB ports green/purple. It took a little explaining, and pointing at the USB 1.0 spec to convince the design folks that it wasn't a good idea.
Suppose a pension fund wants to buy 10 million shares of MSFT. Suppose the "real" price of MSFT is $22.00 and the market price is $22.05. That amounts to roughly $500,000 in extra costs for its clients (may be more or less, because the transaction will have price impact and probably rip through a few levels of the bid/ask book). These costs are forwarded to you and me, the customers of the pension fund. Multiply this by the trillions of shares being traded every year, and that adds up to a huge difference.
works for me™. What links are you talking about?
The reason for this may be that the market is made up of interacting learning machines (if you subsume humans among them). Thus, every algorithm introduced changes the basis on whcih the algorithm was selected. Talk about moving targets...
I'll take the opposite stance. Writing improves your critical thinking skills and practicing and writing improves your writing.
QuickFuse
Sounds quite agile. Set a spring length, time estimate and prioritized the todo list. Then you would get a pulse between developing and reviewing what time is spent on and if you're developing the right things.
You could maybe check /active ? Maybe the highly commented sit on there for most of their comment-getting lifetime.
It's always strange when sites require you to create an account before finding out they don't ship outside the US.
Well, you can not falsify the proposition that I am not thinking. Descartes tried, but then, maybe he just had the illusion of thought.

What could be another example. Yep, no I think that's it.
The visible fly in the ointment is looming confusion over internet ports and AV ports since they use the same connector.[1]

No no no. This new method puts both on the cable simultaneously.
The article makes a big, big mistake. The same proportion of black people left myspace, but if you are white on facebook, and your friends are mostly white, then facebook looks like a white place. Same with blacks - if you are black and your friends are mostly black on facebook, it looks like a black place.

Myspace looks "ghetto" simply because there are more minority bands, and so more minorities still maintain active facebook profiles.
I have a good friend (comp sci PhD) working on this problem, although I don't think her research is published yet. Do you have a blog / site / public notes / anything? Your HN profile is empty.

I'd be happy to pass whatever site you have on to my friend, and she can get in touch and talk shop.
Map-reduce a beer for your homie from the beam VM!
My dad, who has no Internet, and watches mainstream TV, said to me the other day, "Boy it sounds like Apple really screwed up with the iPhone 4, eh?" I said, oh, yeah, screwed up Real Good. Name two competitors to the iPhone 4. At that instant, my dad attained enlightenment.
One of the benefits in forcing yourself to write is that you must learn to structure your thoughts and communicate them effectively. This is a valuable skill in any field.

I can imagine writing skills being especially important as a business scales and more and more information is communicated in written form, both with customers and employees.
Ask HN: Pricing question for a 'moonlighting project' for a company
I've been approached by a mid-size company looking to develop something similar to a shareware project I have available out there.

How does one go about valuing this kind of work?

The project is supposed to take 4-6 weeks to complete. The project is C++ development in a specific field (Wifi). I'm leveraging my existing code (say 50%) to build their product.

Some thoughts and pointers would be great.
Confirmation bias in science: how to avoid it
We're on our first steps towards building a new insurance underwriting and policy administration system, with built in rules engine and all that (for an U$ 150 million dollar company).

Why would you think that would be better done in Ruby? (not flamebait, just honest question - never programmed in Ruby)
Facebook and Wikipedia.
Why did you follow that person?
For a more humorous take on this issue check out

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/31/106-facebook/
A five year murder mystery finally solved. The culprit? A little white mushroom
http://bit.ly/9eLZf8
So if the value of some abundant commodity, e.g. houses, models, etc. is highly dependent on social proof or some other metric that depends on 'gut' feelings to derive its value then that commodity is susceptible to being irrationally valuated.
"Personally, if I was looking for a job and scrum/agile was mentioned in an ad, it would be enough for me to not even consider the posting."

+1.

And I say this as someone who worked for a few years on very successful agile projects (at ThoughtWorks).

(As always) It turns out that the best teams at ThoughtWorks had really good people, who would have made good software even if left to their own instinctive "methodologies".

For TW, "agile" is a kind of marketing differentiator, but many agile projects did (and do) go down in flames there no matter what marketing says.

It doesn't help that the biggest proponents and gurus of such methodologies are mediocre developers, as illustrated by the Sudoku by TDD effort and the Prime Number "kata" and so on..

Fwiw what has survived from my agile days is the practice of writing lots of tests (but no TDD, touch wood), especially when using dynamic typed languages, and a build per check-in running all the tests (loosely, Continuous Integration).

(Imo)The rest of the practices add little value when working with small teams of smart people attacking interesting problems (vs large teams of mediocre developers working on bloated enterprise software).

In my opinion, Scrum is the most "scammy" of all the "Agile methodologies" [1] but the last time I mentioned this here someone making a living as a Scrum Master(TM) wrote me a series of angry mails on how his notion of importing wisdom at some of his clients was being resisted by some "code focused" developers "just like you" there so I'll say no more on that.

So my takeaway wrt mentioning agile,scrum etc in job posts = if you want to hire/ work with large teams of mediocre developers on "standard" projects, by all means insist on the specific process du jour in your job posting.

If you have/want to build a team of sharp developers, product managers etc, let them work out their own "methodology" without imposing practices, checklists, coaches etc on them. It just turns away good candidates.

I understand that people can get quite religious about their favorite methodologies so I'll conclude with

"Just my experience and opinion. YMMV."

[1] "Lean Software" is a close second.
I can tell you why I wont take it too serious for now.

"The problem with inflation is that it needs an additional theory to explain why it occurs and that's ugly."

It's always a bad sign when scientist start looking for beauty rather than go where the facts lead them even if it's ugly.

On top of that, it's not like there haven't been many many many many very intelligent people trying to solve this problem.

He seems to try to solve the problem semantically, i.e. try to re-interpret the facts into a more aesthetically pleasing model which is exactly where it becomes pseudoscience.

To the best of my knowledge (and I am no scientist) the information that we have about the universe simply can't lead to a solution to the problem if it can be solved at all.

Only if we get additional information about our universe will we be able to perhaps find another way to interpret what this all means.

But cherry picking in the current knowledge base won't magically create a theory.

It's not about interpretation it's about facts.

The facts lead us to two "competing" theories that just can't be combined.

Maybe he is onto something, but then he needs to make some predictions with it.
Amichail was talking about people, I meant SpaceX as an example of how the person Elon Musk outdid himself post FUM by founding SpaceX.
If anyone needs another bong hit, the HN bong is hidden under the third comment below.
Could you link me to the post about a guy who never gave up singing?
I remember someone who wrote about how he wanted to be a good singer but was put down by people who said he wasn't cut out for it. But he never gave up and in the end after decades of practice he got good at it. He wanted to take up programming next. Anyone has the link to this article?
There are plenty of niche networks that are interesting and useful (HN, Quora, Reddit). As long as creating friends isn't your primary activity, you're good.

This reminds me of the FML-style websites out there.

Your logo is a train crash right now. I hope its meant as an anti-web-2.0 joke otherwise there is no reason you needed to get Frank Gehry to design you a logo.
Introducing Redis To Go
Just a word on the terminology I used in the article: it was taken from Josh Waitzkin's book, and he took the terms from actual psychological studies performed by Carol Dweck, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck. So the terminology does have some roots in actual psychology).
GeoHot Says Goodbye To The Jailbreak Community
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Worst of all is the idea that somehow time has a direction of flow, i.e., an arrow. The idea that we are moving in time in one direction or another is a conceptual disaster.

That's a funny comment (I realize it's not yours, hugh3), because this guy is flying in the face of respected theoretical physicists. Time is immutable? It cannot have a direction? Blogga please.
Private cloud appliance running Windows Azure
Thanks for the tl:dr there. I was kind of hoping for a conclusion beyond "IDK."
Here you go

http://sivers.org/15-years
I know lots of counter-examples to your theory. However I'd never be willing to introduce you to them because your theories about how to treat them repulse me.
Price it based on the value to them, not on how many hours it takes you to create. If it means they can cut costs by $5000 per month, price based on that. A good example is hotel reservation/booking systems. It only takes a few days to integrate one into a website and tie it with the hotel's in-house system, but you wouldn't charge them a few hundred dollars. Instead, you charge them a percentage of every booking, because it means fewer calls to their reservation line (= money saved).
Flipper USB plug can't be stopped
I sort of watched over his shoulder as he went through this process and it was quite amazing to observe. The guy he ended up working with, for $3 an hour, was quite sharp and motivated. When you think of the 30 hours he saved and the fact that you spend $1000+ on an apartment, the $90 spent is absolutely nothing.
Yeah, the minor details of PHP don't really matter. It's the whole language and ecosystem when viewed as one that is really repulsive. It's also difficult to write good code, because there are no abstraction mechanisms.

Well, there's one -- Java-style OO. But incidentally, Java is almost impossible to use for the same reason.
I'm not sure what your link is trying to show, actually.

But note that most people searching for Django will use only the name Django, whereas Rails is often called "Ruby on Rails", meaning searches for "ruby and rails" will naturally tend higher than "python and django". Again, I'm not sure I understand your point, so I don't know if this means anything.
Wow.

Thanks a lot for the links! They are awesome!

It will take me time to go through them properly as there are some concepts in them which I don't know about. (I just graduated out of high school a few months ago)

Do you mind if I email you questions about what I've read? I have lots and lots of them.

Thanks again.

P.S. - I am quite dumb. I tend to ask stupid questions so please take that into account. :)
Clearly God is an Object Oriented programmer. Universes inheriting from each other, time being an inherited property... Nice.
The actual value of writing is that you get your ideas down on paper and start seeing them formulated.

It's a way to test your thinking, a way to reflect, a way to put it out there and get feedback.
php is a tool. it has its benefits and its drawbacks. you shouldn't have to "defend" the language itself, but you should be able to defend your choice of language. if you don't like a language, go use another one.
Possibly. I've of course lurked for much longer. Even had a couple of other accounts at some point but lost the credentials an..meh. Easy set up.
The title of the article is misleading. It should be "Returning the FIRST 10 rows of a result set" instead of TOP 10 rows. All the sample SQL uses the natural order of the tables, but he implied ordering when he talked about other programmers sorting the result rows in program, so it's really confusing. People often mistaken the natural order of a table the same as the sorted order of a result set.
Congrats, guys!

I have to say, though, while you were busy inching towards 1.0 I've fallen in love with other production-ready NoSQL db's (namely Mongo and Cassandra). I'm excited to play with Couch, just to play with it, but as someone who is already very satisfied with other NoSQL technologies (when I need them), what would be your pitch for why I should give Couch a serious look?
I've always wondered if there was a way to make some money in the market by performing lexical analysis of news articles about stocks and gauging the performance of those stocks based on the contents of the article.

So, you'd train your software by analyzing every news article you could find over the past N years for every company in the market you're targeting. It would look for words or phrases that occurred with higher frequency a few days before stocks made significant moves in either direction.

I suppose you'd probably want to weight the source as well, articles sourced from the WSJ might earn a better reputation than ones from the NY Post for example.

At some point there would hopefully be enough confidence in the data that you could test it out with $1000 or something small; news-driven automation... There are enough people who buy and sell on news and opinion pieces that there may be enough fat there to make some profits.
"So our plot thickens: What’s at the center of this collective “gut feeling” that happens to land on Coco, ratcheting up her popularity and hence, her economic value? The answer holds parallel lessons for how traders in finance markets were able to assign so much inflated value to relatively worthless mortgage assets now known as “toxic assets.”

Substitute Coco for certain high-profile blogger/entrepreneurs and fashion designers for VCs/investors and you get some interesting parallels.

Sometimes the "it" factor overrides otherwise interchangeable attributes.
We (we're two) use some form of scrum which vary over time, to handle our mix of billable work + self projects.

It's always extremely beneficial in our case (and not about motivation).

Things I really appreciate:

- product-owner mindset is the most beneficial to us: things like theme scoring http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/tools/theme-scoring or other techniques advocated by Mike Cohn

- writing user stories + role modelling is really helping us "go out of the garage"

- burn down charts and estimation techniques provided by Mike Cohn help us a lot ensure we deliver on time/budget

- we know where we stand (what's remaining, etc)

So my conclusion: a lot of people these days are avoiding scrum/agile because they are used as buzzwords. It shouldn't make you miss the (extremely) useful tools they provide...

In any case - yes, I'm very actively using all this!
Advice for teams entering the Imagine Cup Game Design event
We're getting hit by lots of 10x waves right now, so while we're doing what we can, if the hosted stuff is sluggish today we'll be faster tomorrow.

Cheers,
Chris
On the dual-boot to your hackintosh. Ah crap that does not seem to resolve the pirating problem. :)

The response to the itunes lover.... Seriously when we mention pirated music sells more, its because studies show that while pirating is up so are sales. In fact sales are higher now than when pirating was non-existent. There is very little corelation shown that pirating hurts music sales, and vice versa, so both arguments are kind-of equally valid. The music industry just wants every damn penny.

See the post about the Humble Bundle's pirating issue. The entire bundle of games could be purchased at 1 penny, yet people pirated, and often there are good reasons why someone will pirate vs buy.
Have to disagree with this. Redis is dead simple to install and configure out of the box.

This seems like a solution to a nonexistent problem.
Sorry but No.

I don’t mean to be rude but as soon as someone comes to HN with a request like this and actually gets funded the floodgates will almost surely open. Every person rejected by Y Combinator will start showing up to try and get their funding via the community and since it really doesn’t take that much to get to the front page I suspect the place will be flooded in no time.

Sorry to be so blunt and had you not posted this yourself it might be a different story but I just don’t like this sort of thing. I like this community…it brings joy to my life and I don’t want to see it devolve into a “Pitch your startup” forum. That’s what VCs are for.