skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You also have to take into account that the delivery of said systems will be undertaken by a consortium. There will be someone like accenture taking a huge slice for general management/PM and this is where the accountability comes in.
I wish these large IT projects would be done in an agile manner. Start in one hospital and one doctor's surgery and work up from there. Of course, that's politically not acceptable because what ministers need is a massive project to announce.

I bet a small group of motivated people could get the work done faster, cheaper and with greater user satisfaction if they built out from a small project to the wider NHS.

I happen to be in the weird position of knowing some of the people who are currently running the UK. I was at Oxford at the same time as Cameron etc. and actually know Michael Gove. I wrote time him just before the election about this very issue. Who knows if they'll listen.
BBC World Cup Closing Highlights from District 9
Why large IT development projects are problematic
Identifying Billion Dollar Companies on Their Way Up
I don't generally like it. It's technically neat, and it's fun to see in effect for the "wow" factor, but I don't like it over traditional 2D.

I wonder how much of that is me just having watched normal TV for twenty-some-odd years and how much of it is due the fact that the art of film making has been developed entirely in the context of 2D storytelling.
I think you misunderstood me.

Part of writing the CREATE TABLE query you mention is hooking up primary and foreign keys and setting up indexes. That's just how you build databases. Even if you never look at it again, you still need to do it.
It's £13bn over a number of years.
More to the point, unlike bottom-up the top-down approach tends to be a solution in search of a problem.
> "...but I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phænomena, and I frame no hypotheses; for whatever is not deduced from the phænomena is to have no place in experimental philosophy. To us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and acts according to the laws which we have explained."

--Sir Isaac Newton's _Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy_
3 Challenging Games for Android That You Will Love
hmm.. AWS is evolving relentlessly, GAE engineers should work harder (and faster) to catch up... It will be an interesting battle (and let's not forget about Microsoft, or even Apple)
They had 8 million unique visitors in last month:

http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/comments/co29o/c...

To put things in to context, reddit ran a haiti donation campaign which was heavily promoted through their ad spaces and blog postings and individual "donation drive threads" and they raised $185k from 3783 users over a period of ~30 days. They broke their first 100k within 12 hours. So if they got 6000 people to donate within 48 hours or so, that pretty damn good, over next few weeks as they add subscription only features its bound to get much much higher number as it gets promoted more.

http://dri.convio.net/site/TR?pg=fund&fr_id=1030&pxf...

They didn't release the money amount yet because they are waiting for "confirmation" from higher up to reveal the numbers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_(data_language_specification)

Chris Date is worth reading for his ideas on what a good language for relational algebra should be like and why SQL isn't that language.
I'm very with you on that one, but how you gonna pitch such advantages to seed investors early on?
For the past 12 years I have often been either the only American in a group, or the only white guy, or the only person who went to a top-tier tech school. I've been in groups that have been totally multicultural, or groups where one other ethnicity or race predominated. (admittedly, everything has been at most 30% female).

I really haven't observed ethnicity or race as a primary factor in team dynamics. Even first language, assuming people have a minimal level of fluency, hasn't been a major factor; even with my minimal French, I've ended up hanging out with French video gamers and sci fi fans (all 3 of them at a big base; they spoke maybe 100 words of English) vs. a bunch of other Americans.

Volitional things like the kind of music you like, the job you do, your hobbies, etc. are really a much bigger factor, at least in my limited experience, than race or ethnicity.
Apache does not spawn a new thread for every request.
@ido: I am a designer and architect [built spaces, not code], have managed major projects and programs over the last ten years, and I have a solution to this, which is immediately implementable as a product/service. Applicable to hackers and civilians alike. It has social/semantic implications as well.
My handicap is the astute inability to write a single line of code to save my life. I am building a prototype, where a friend is helping out, but am also agressively seeking a tech cofounder, preferably in the Valley.
Do check out the teaser at http://www.design-business.net/hicommand
Drop a line if it interests you.
Is he an academic and are there published papers about this? Actually, does anyone know of good (broad/accessible) papers on behavior in general?
Thanks. Makes sense now.
Any good ideas what you could use this for?
The joys of being a new driver. :)

(and in fact, it's only £3k if I pay it in a lump sum, it's nearer to £3.5k if I want to pay monthly!)
The Hummus Manifesto
Congrats. :)

It's worth noting that this won't ever happen again, though. This was basically a one-time gain of $X. So hopefully they don't wind up back in this situation.
Yes. You can leave it open somewhere all the time and check up on it like idling on irc. Pointless? Perhaps, but people like it anyway.
So the newly acquired cash is dumped into amazon EC2 again...
No of course not (I do however think they're vastly more in the wrong in general)
The impression I've got is that the problems with the project come down to a combination of firstly, as @jgrahamc rightly points out, the fact the project has been unleashed all at once across the country rather than one surgery at a time as would be sensible, and secondly (ok, I am risking downvotes here bigtime), I think, poor programmer and management quality - I'm sure there are good programmers on the project, but overall it seems to me the quality must be pretty low. The damage one bad apple can do in software is immense and entirely out of proportion to their position, magnified if that person is higher up in the hierarchy. Additionally it seems obvious that the project has been somewhat mismanaged.

I do understand the project is huge and really very complicated, and naturally a difficult problem probably more so than is immediately obvious, but it is that very fact that makes it easy for poor engineering decisions to have a big impact.
That's incredibly useful. Since it's MIT Licensed I've implemented it on UseTheSource.
I think that was the point of the story. Did I miss something?
It's a huge mess of contractors, sub-contractors and consultancies. Enormous companies or consortia bid for these projects, government ministers have no freaking idea about software or technology so hire consultants to consult about hiring these consultancies and get thoroughly shafted in the process.

For example, check out the UK e-Borders system [1]. The spec, according to the article is

"Under the e-Borders scheme, immigration and government security systems will be linked with transportation hubs to check and log every passenger travelling in and out of the country."

On the face of it, it doesn't sound much more complicated than say the Diaspora project, and I'd fully expect a small group of YC-calibre hackers to put together a functioning prototype in a couple of months. It's obviously not that simple, but what do you expect when you hire a consortium consisting of Raytheon, Serco, Accenture, Detica, QinetiQ, Steria and Capgemeni [2]? Christ.

And how do you think the existing security systems that need linking to have been developed? Do you think there's an api?

[1] http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2202536/borders-wi...

[2] http://trustedborders.com/about-us.shtml
JavaScript escaping is done with backslashes:

var str = "Hello \"world\", how\\are you";

But once you have your string composed, jQuery does not as far as I know have a way to escape characters like < and >.
I agree with your on the programmer quality. I know people working on these type of projects: not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
If you know just a tiny bit of relation algebra, then sql is not hard at all. I love ActiveRecord, since it makes you mix the DSL and SQL. Hibernate is impressive, but sometimes i miss SQL, and get's frustrated with it's HQL.
They have been profitable, although I don't use a fully automated strategy yet, the bots show me where to bet based on statistical analysis (Monte Carlo analysis) based on past games, the current situation in each game and the available odds - I place the bets myself combining information from the bots and my own subjective analysis. The fact that profits are tax free helps! I'm not sure how feasable full automation is, maybe in certain sports like cricket that can be analysed well through stats alone, but for sports like soccer it is difficult to build an accurate statistical model that can outperform a market that can make subjective judgements based on the precise circumstances of a game. Reading the article, it seems like this hedge fund is using experienced traders to provide judgement backed by statistical modelling too.
The kind of company that can cope with doing business with the government is rarely the kind of company that attracts and retains decent programmers.

In my experience most of the programmers in these kind of companies are people who just do it for a job (as opposed to those of us who do it because we can't help it and are pleasantly surprised to discover people will pay us to do it :-) )
I lived in the loin around 2003, pretty much at the worst part (6th/Jones). It was bad enough that I got hassled on the streets by drug dealers when I stood outside (I think they assumed I was involved in the business somehow?), and female friends would be really reluctant to visit without an escort to/from BART. I had 2 guys get shot right outside my door, and the police didn't come by to take a statement from me until the next day (I happened to be looking out the window right at the time, and called it in 5 seconds after it happened).

It's definitely gotten better since the 1990s, but I still would really not want to live there and do a startup.

It's nothing compared to HP, Bayview, EPA, parts of East San Jose, or parts of Oakland, though. When in the area, I often am driving to HP at night (to go to 200 Paul Ave, one of the big datacenters on the West Coast), and I'm always relieved when the gate closes behind my car.

The mission has some bad areas too; unfortunately the area right outside Noisebridge is actually pretty sketchy.
I bet they are charged out at over £1000 a day though.
Consumer Report iPhone4 study flawed
I assumed you meant she wrote "I think compulsory democracy is a contradiction in terms" on her ballot.
It would require a modular antenna assembly to cover future needs as well.
My research group has been doing HPC type stuff on EC2. In fact the press release copy for this sounds almost exactly like what we've been writing when trawling for cash. Of course Amazon also gave us a grant (in AWS credits), so maybe we shouldn't feel bad if any of it was directly lifted...
Hub & Spoke: an example of VRF-Lite
Palo Alto, if you can pick the right property, also has the benefit of metro fiber. If you can find a house or office on the right street (Waverly, a few others; ask at City Hall, the fiber utility guy is awesome), you can pay about $2-3k to get linked in, and then have your own fiber for $600/mo from home/office to PAIX. From there, it's pretty easy to get a wave crossconnect to one of the big datacenters in SF or the Peninsula.

For me, I'm willing to pay the extra $1k/mo to rent a house in Palo Alto vs. Mountain View or Menlo Park specifically so I can do this. Having fiber directly to your colo, when you're working on big data, moving virtual machines, etc., is amazing. If you live with cofounders and use it as an office, or live with 3-4 other people and split the cost, it really isn't that bad.

Otherwise, I look for Web Pass connected buildings up in SF, or buildings that have IP Networks fiber over PG&E. Those are mainly in SoMA, although some in the east bay around Emeryville/Berkeley/Oakland.
Five reasons China will take world tech leadership
So your point is that strip malls and car dependency are bad, right? But that doesn't mean that trucking a tube of toothpaste to my house is good.

FWIW, I cycle to the store, so until Amazon has a distribution hub in my town and cycle couriers for delivery, they're not going to be more fuel-efficient.
It's like this: the bureaucrats (who know they have jobs for life and aren't spending their own money) have lots and lots of meetings, mainly to justify their own existance, and eventually write a spec document that is literally 10s of thousands of pages long. They then give this to Accenture or EDS who are about the only companies on the planet who have enough spare staff to even read it.

Then they say, OK, we can do this, and it will cost that much. Any changes however to this spec will cost THAT much.

The bureaucrats say OK and work starts, then they realize that they need to make a whole slew of changes, since they didn't really know what they were doing in these meetings, none of them has ever worked in the NHS, they went straight from Oxbridge to the Civil Service Management Fast Track. But, whatever, it's only taxpayer's money, and Accenture did take us golfing that time.

So it goes. Fix is easy: any civil servant who overspends is dismissed with no severance and no pension. Then you'll see their interests aligned with ours.
There's a group of Python developers in Hammersmith who are Betfair's number 1 client by volume. The founders are an ex-trader and an ex-professional gambler.

They write their own market data and execution feeds from various sports betting facilities, abstracting everything, and handle it exactly like they're running their own exchange.

They were looking for people a little while ago - I had an interview there and bombed after spending an hour trying to find their office - but they're friendly guys.
ranges between £400 to over a grand in my experience depending on what kind of skill sets.

Remember that scaling this kind of business is hard because you are selling peoples time - so for each salary you pay you can only sell it one time over. Compare and contrast with being a product company - I might spend a few weeks working on a product and then those few weeks of my salary can be sold over and over again.

The scaling of so many employees also brings massive overheads.

So yes - the day rates seem high but the margins can be pretty rubbish.
I've seen 3 movies in 3D. With Avatar and How To Train Your Dragon, I felt the 3D added something worthwhile to the experience. With Alice In Wonderland, it didn't.

I don't think I'd want a 3D TV though, not while you need special glasses to see the picture properly. It's one thing wearing them when you've made the effort to go to the cinema, quite another when you're just casually watching at home; they become something else to lose, like the remote only not as useful.
I'm not sure I get this. He's saying that to do stuff people need to have motivation, ability and a trigger (which could presumably be just them thinking "hey, maybe I should do that"). Is that new? At all? Is there anything else to this "Behavior Model"?

And the referencing style seems a little, uh, odd.

This is scoring very highly on my crankometer.
Bizarre phone ransom Trojan found by researchers
What are the crawling horrors of PHP?
> You driving to the store for your toothpaste may seem like a negligible amount of pollution contribution - but multiply that by everyone in your entire city, and suddenly hauling a fleet of semi trailers would seem downright clean in comparison.

But I don't drive to the store. I cycle. Ever seen a UPS guy on a bike, delivering everyone's Amazon orders?

> there is no SUV with a single passenger hauling 3 bags of groceries

People doing that are, frankly, tossers. If you start from A and say "B is a great optimisation compared to A," then you are missing C,D and E, all of which are better.

As a practical thing Amazon could do, how about slipping a tube of toothpaste in with your regular books order, a few days before you would otherwise have ordered a new tube?
Given I sometimes work on these kinds of projects I could not possibly comment.

To be fair though I think that the "its only taxpayers money" attitude is disappearing. But there are still so many other inefficiencies.

As for your fix. You try firing a civil servant and making it cost less than their salary plus pension.....
How To Design, Install, and Build an Automatic Lawn Sprinkler System
Nokia Mobiles, Nokia Mobile Prices Pakistan, Latest Nokia Phone Sets
Still, why "West"? To confirm your geographical hunch, I went ahead and asked Google:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=ruby%20AND%20rails%...

Just take a look; the django bar is not even a bar, more like a square. Rails seems to have a 40:1 edge over Django in popularity.

The other thing you will notice is that India is where Rails is most popular; but try to pull back the timeline slider and play with it a bit. See how different countries discover rails at different times but soon after lose interest? Except for India, it stays popular there.
I would really love for Apple to have a healthy, but small share of the market. Get too much, and you really run the risk of having to deal with their iron fisted handling of things. I wouldn't want to see them go away, though, they're great innovators and build beautiful things, even if I wouldn't buy them myself.
About the antenna problem. I always read that it is a bar number problem. But is there _real_ reception problem? I mean, has someone experienced that the Phone reception was bad when held in the _bad_ manner?
This is a great map.
I'm considering moving from Europe to SV after my work contract expires to do a startup...so really useful.

It would be very cool to get a similar map of HN startup locations, IT giants' original garage (YouTube etc), well known web 2.0 startups locations etc....obviously some of these won't be easily available due to founders not willing to divulge their location...would still be cool all the same.
he links to this website in one of his papers, it is a website designed to illicit feedback from his peers.

the website of his lab:
http://captology.stanford.edu/
When I was in Thailand beginning of this year we went to Koh Samui. My girlfriend who have a Sony Ericsson had no problem getting coverage but I couldn't get it with my iPhone.

In general the iPhone doesn't have the best coverage in the world. I live in Denmark, we have close to 100% coverage everywhere, but even here the iPhone goes out once in a while.

I still love it though and it beats my experience with Android by many many lengths.
These are the points I strongly disagree with:
>many of issues you cite are overblown (wildlife impact/noise)
Pelicans get covered in oil and die = bad, evil, oil drilling. No pelican should die from oil drilling!
Eagles and bats get hit by wind generators = overblown and acceptable loss, some birds will get hit, oh well.
This particular issue really gets me riled up.

Noise is an issue for people who live close to the generators. I've heard them going and it's not a pleasant noise.

>There are still unexplored places for wind energy (deep offshore, high altitude) that hold a lot of promise, with technology that already have been developed
No they don't, not at least on any sort of acceptable cost basis. It's just pure fantasy to build offshore wind turbines in deep water and think they are going to be economical as compared with any of the other onshore options. Deepwater offshore oil and gas platforms rigs cost a fortune to build and run, but they effectively produce millions of joules of energy during their lifetime. There's simply not enough harvestable energy in the wind to justify anything like that sort of spend for a fraction of the energy produced. It's also fantasy to think you can cover an entire coastline in wind generation and think it's going to come out at anything like a cost effective solution, and particularly when two or three nuclear generators would provide the same coverage with less environmental impact.

Wind energy is an interesting niche product useful for certain areas. It's current status is largely as a result of tax incentives, and it has all the hallmarks of an industry that is overinvested because of available government subsidies. Once those subsidies die (and they will) the market mostly dissappears.

I commend you for coming out in defense of your industry but disagree with pretty much everything.

And as for nuclear fuel only lasting a couple of centuries - for a start I highly doubt the accuracy of that - and further, a couple of centuries is plenty enough time to develop other alternative energy sources. Large scale energy as we know it is barely 100 years old. The big problem 100 years ago was what to do with all the horseshit in the streets, and whether there was enough whale oil around to light reading lamps. The problems facing society 200 years ago are unrecognisable and unthinkable today. It is arrogance in the extreme to think that technology and society in 200 years is going to hinge on decisions made today. It's pointless and a misuse of our time on earth to try and make decisions with that sort of time frame in mind.
Business Catalyst does provide multiple currency but not multiple gateways. I think you can have multiple currencies work via a multi-currency gateway though.
New Yorkers hand over personal details to Microsoft's fake bank
he goes into detail on the other parts of the website

e.g. http://www.behaviormodel.org/triggers.html
Is there any point to this kind of discussion? These kinds of questions have maximum entropy, i.e. if you put a monkey at a keyboard and let it bash the keyboard I bet these are the kinds of questions you would get. One can type up questions of the form "What is horrible about X?" ad museum and not be any closer to creating any kind of value in any form whatsoever.
>> They write their own market data and execution feeds from various sports betting facilities, abstracting everything, and handle it exactly like they're running their own exchange.

What exactly do you mean? The have their own betting agency and selling their customers bets to betfair?
Boring? I love Mountain View and Palo Alto. Lovely little towns where you can walk everywhere. I guess it depends what you like doing though.
I am much impressed with Business Catalyst, but sadly i18n is still their long term goal.
Get Creative with the Android App Inventor
Consider this example: Google Answers focused on answers and failed; Yahoo! Answers focused on social and succeeded.

Is Yahoo Answers really considered a success?

And one-month-public Quora is "hot"?

Lots of hyperbole here.
Redesigning Your Website: Are you Making the Right Move?
“Human beings, by change renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise they harden.” And, there is no doubt to it. They try and find something or the other to refresh themselves.
KISSmetrics' bizarre pricing decision
Fring and Skype Embroiled in Bitter Blog Fight
Ref: Bill Gates/Microsoft and commercial software.

Most operating systems were indeed bundled with hardware. For one thing, this eventually ran afoul of anti-trust in some areas. But there was certainly commercial software on large systems (although, to be sure, because software, hardware, and service all came from the same vendor much of the time, a lot of things ended up getting effectively subsidized by the high-margin hardware.)
Pics from 8th graders successful 100k foot high flight, $200 ballon