skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Opposite experience here really. The team can pad up time estimate for a user story (or decrease total time available for user stories in the sprint) because the team wants to include time to get rid of some technical debt or other internal work.

I do not understand how agile allows for easier micro management as you say. If some team outsider tells our team how to work we tend to invite them as a member to the team for the next sprint, to show us what they mean. That usually sets the discussion in the right direction.

Since the backlog is highly visible, there is much better scrutiny of user stories for customers that have not yet signed a contract. There is also a built in stop of a sprint length before there is a review again of what the team has been ordered to do.

Basically, if the team took something off the backlog, we know who put it there. The team is doing exactly what it should be doing, taking items in priority order. Sales people have been fired at work, developers have not.
Amen. They are slave-driven development methodology.
I think this is related to pecking order, in that once someone is elevated to a dominant role in some sense, the tendency is to not question them, day-to-day. A challenge is a dramatic and unusual event. This tendency makes for a more stable society (or troop of chimps/flock of sheep).

There's a jurisprudential idea that people don't obey the law only out of the goodness of their heart, nor out of an economically assessed fear of sanctions, but of a "habit of obedience". This (to me) seems related to the pecking order instinct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisprudence#Bentham_and_Austi...

Fairy tales (for young and therefore impressionable children) have a strong theme of people being born to a certain role. And the idea appeals to children.

The belief that you can improve is a revolutionary, subversive and dangerous idea.
Exactly.

Color me skeptical.
blog blog blog! I would love to hear more from an elder "statesman" like yourself. What it's like for older folks in the field, getting hired, getting clients, etc.

Thank you.
Hey alex,

You're being downmodded because you've started posting without reading the HN guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.

Please take a look at those before posting, and welcome to HN!
OSS Survey Predicts Resurgence of Java and MySQL under Oracle
Your post is just masturbation. You don't really need to write this comment, informing us of your opinion on this topic. But you do. Because you'd like some karma, and some recognition.

Only slightly sarcastic, but not everything has be to worrying about money.
I've got truly offline replication (as in you can run me on Android and your laptop and keep them synced via the cloud).

Also, none of the other NoSQLs are really set up for schemaless queries like I am. Incremental map-reduce lets you normalize a bunch of different heterogenous document structures in your view, which is more flexible than the key-path indexes Mongo has, and more real-time than Hadoop/Google style map reduce.
Readness.com goes by the JFDI method:

Listen

Code

Ship.
Service forced to disclose names of three anonymous bloggers
The 9th Circuit seems to be winnowing down the gray area around free speech online.
Maybe. Aesthetic tastes differ, and the paper does provide some anecdotes suggesting that MySpace's profiles appealed more to certain racial and socioeconomic groups.

However, social networks do a pretty good job at segregating - as long as your friends are bourgeois and share your bourgeois design sensibilities, you can use MySpace without bumping into too much 'profile bling'.

Instead, it seems that some white and Asian kids of high socioeconomic status joined Facebook because it was associated with elite universities and therefore reflected their aspirations - and once this process started, people went where their friends were, self-segregating along racial and economic lines just like they do in high school (and throughout the rest of society.) Aesthetic tastes became a socially-acceptable justification for that move, but I don't think they were the primary cause.

That said, a good knowledge of the aesthetic preferences of various social groups could be valuable. Could a startup trigger a similar 'white flight' in an established service by intentionally appealing to the most economically valuable demographic? Can we build good niche businesses by creating things like race-specific Twitter clients?
World hottest news: Mobile firms failing on coverage
I agree, and the word I would use is competing machines. Every time me (or my algo) bid up a security price I remove that "cheapness" signal from a competitor, increasing the noise they have to deal with and vice versa. ML hates noisy data. Returns are very noisy.

ML has a much easier time with data generated from situations that are lacking competition, such as data from any process inside a company, e.g. consumer behavior. These are problems that want to be solved.
CouchDB NoSQL Database Ready for Production Use
It's not just "nobody knows" -- it's "there isn't a reason". Big difference. It is impossible to reason about what intrinsic values cause one model to be more highly touted than another because there aren't any. The value ascribed is entirely extrinsic.

This is the obvious way in which markets are different: even though prices get way overinflated from speculators chasing trends, there is in fact a real fundamental value buried in the noise and sooner or later the people who are good at finding that value will outweigh the noise traders and trend chasers. Then the momentum turns into fear (because none of the speculators knew what they were doing) and we have a lovely crash. It's painful and irrational but eventually enough people wake up and realize that prices are nowhere near valuation.

Models don't crash. They disappear, but there's no "reckoning" in which their popularity is brought back to true values of beauty. The momentum is the only source of value.
couch.io is invite based at the moment, right?

can I have an invite? :D
I have mixed feelings about this. I agree that HN shouldn't become just a place to pitch startups, but.... 1. people already "pitch" their startups here for feedback on a regular basis, just not for funding. Is it that different? And 2. there does seem to be a need for this sort of crowdsourced funding scenario.

Maybe a new site (could|should) be created, dedicated to this model of soliciting funding? Something similar to Kickstarter, but for startups seeking funding? But, I think there are a lot of regulations about investing in startups, aren't there? If so, not sure there's a way to reconcile that with this sort of crowd-sourced, highly distributed model. :-(
Maybe Reuters shouldn't be using puns in their titles - but I'm not sure how "distasteful" this this.
True, but stocks, homes and startups all have to eventually produce value, which is a comforting thing.
Sure, lots. They use the same C libraries that the reasonable experienced C programmer would.

(Also, take a look at some of the ghc on llvm benchmarks, it's very competitive with C, and doesn't require you to jump through any hoops. I'd link you, but Google is blocked at work due to incompetent firewall rules. Sigh.)
Flagged. It was funny on Failblog and Reddit. I come to HN for something different.
Practical Tutorial for Creating OWL Ontologies
Not sure what you're getting at. If someone means "hard work", or really, just "work", but they make a new term for the sake of making a new term, then it's all the worse that it's coming from an "actual" pyschologist. I hope I didn't suggest that professionals don't do that. They do obviously, especially in the soft sciences.
I don't really understand that line of reasoning at all. And probably never will.

Ultimately we're just dust in the wind. That's a fact. Our life is very short, as proved by all the research in longevity and how much we want it to succeed.

In my mind this 'you only have one shot at it' aspect only makes life way more important than if there were reincarnation, or life after death or any of those things.

It makes life infinitely more valuable. We don't enjoy life 'despite' its one-shot-itis, we enjoy life MORE because of it.
Android Mailing-List Moderator
You don't need to follow someone to get that stuff.

I have a pretty short twitter name and get @ed with garbage messages by random people.
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Is it that analogous to houses?

Entire housing markets can be overvalued, but you never get individual houses getting significantly overvalued compared to others in the same area.

This, incidentally, is what Coco Rocha looks like: http://fashionindie.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Coco+roch...

I don't understand it either.
> Here: http://xkcd.com/732

Here: http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/2010/04/comic-732-low-quality....

You might want to read what they're claiming they will do before writing it off as "reinventing" basic ethernet.
We'll see him again. No one that talented retires 'forever'.
My suggestions . . . VOXopolis.com. It's anonymous, interactive, private, secure, one-to-one messaging. Pretty slick. Best part is that there is no public airing of anonymous feedback which I personally believe is not how we want to interact in our society.
Congrats, guys! I'm just starting to take a look into CouchDB at the moment. I look forward to getting to know it better.
looks like, no. sign up on the front page for an instance.

http://www.couch.io/get
I loved MySpace originally, then I left MySpace.

1) Craptastic, browser-clogging pages
2) Audio player that kept changing and getting worse
3) Mail full of VOTE FOR ME!!!!!1111 spam
4) Everyone basically begging you to frikkin BUY something of theirs
5) The Walled Garden: Hellish trying to link back to it

There was no direction, no sense that anyone was in charge. This is the second online catastrophe for Murdoch. He has the Kiss of Death for digital.

EDIT: And during my time there, there was never a racial component to anything. It's really a tragedy too. There was music there I never found as easily anywhere else.
Please report back on how these "proxy neighbor office hours" work for you. I've been considering doing something similar for user experience and interaction design.

There's also Design Community Twitter Hours (@DCTH) but Twitter doesn't seem like a great way to handle this sort of thing.
Clojure 1.2 Beta
Even I agree with this. You can't just do whatever you want in C and still get good performance, you have to have a clue, just like with higher-level languages.

I think the original article should add, "performance tends to depend on the programmer, not the language".
Ask HN: service api for image processing
Does anyone know of a service provider that has a good api to send an image for resize? Would be preferable that this service could automatically dump the images into my s3 account. Also would help if there is gem for it too but not necessary.
I followed them back after they followed me, so in a way it's my fault... In another it isn't. The whole follow me, and I'll follow you thing is effective from a marketing point of view, which is why the place is filled with useless affiliate spam.

They could stop allowing that sort of behavior, but they know that a large part of their user-base consists of 'self marketers' and other less subtle spam.

Why can't I sort or filter any of my incoming tweets in any meaningful way? I can have favorites. I can make lists. I CAN'T just type in 'Fck', and stop my feed from showing me the tweets with the word 'Fck' in them.

I can search for tweets about 'Ruby On Rails', but I can't just add those people to a list called 'Ruby On Rails' without clicking each one of them... Several times.

To top it off their API is so limited that just retrieving a list of the people I'm following means I get blocked for an hour before I can do anything with it, and bypassing their silly API is against the TOS. So writing my own tool to filter properly is straight out.

I wanted to write a simple naive Bayesian filter app to separate the wheat from the chaff for me, but they make it damned near impossible to do so without being sued.
Tips for Entrepreneurial Success from Sir Richard Branson
I would add a seemingly expensive solution to this non-existant problem. It may kind of makes sense for heroku because afaik they don't offer redis support out of the box.
It'd be interesting to see how much gym workout is equivalent in benefits to the frequent light-intensity activities recommended in the article.

There are some pretty simple ways to add extra light physical activity to your daily routine. I tend to drink a lot of water, which means I need to go fill my bottle a few times a day and walk to the washroom more often than I would otherwise.

There was also a TED talk about communities in Italy and Japan with long lifespans and lifestyles that involved lots of minor activities
Redis is dead simple, but having another server isn't. While most people can easily handle this, managing systems can often spin out of control. If you are starting a project would you rather handle another server or just have someone else manage it and be done in under a min?
Those who are going to not use Facebook have not been using it for a long time.

Nobody else cares.
"Currently, the specification only allows for a 100Mb/sec Ethernet connection, but the alliance claims HDBaseT will be scalable up to 1Gb/sec in the future. Similarly, HDBaseT can currently playback video at up to 10.2Gb/sec, but it's theoretically scalable up to 20Gb/sec."

Anyone else see a two-order-of-magnitude problem with that statement? Uh .. if it can only transfer 100Mbps, where does the 10.2Gbps video come from? And why does a predicted 10x increase in the base transport speed only translate to a 2x increase in the high level delivery speed?
Going global from day one
Lots of variables:

Who owns the rights to the product when you're done? You or them? That should be a factor in the pricing, of course.

Do you have a clear spec? (If the answer is no, get one or make one.)

How confident are you in your time-estimate of 4-6 weeks? Do you feel comfortable taking the risk (i.e., doing it for a fixed price), or do you want to push the risk to them (i.e., work on it at an agreed-upon hourly rate, for however long it takes)?
Nope, just sign up :)
Application Fuzzing
Sorry to nitpick grammar, but this sort of stood out:

"Not contempt with any of those solutions I investigated doing it with pure CSS..."

(contempt -> content)
> Do you have a blog / site / public notes / anything?

Well, I do write sometimes at http://prag-matism.blogspot.com/ and recently started writing at http://blog.shopyist.com/. But I haven't written anything about NLP yet(guess that's the part your friend would be interested in).

> I'd be happy to pass whatever site you have on to my friend, and she can get in touch and talk shop.

I don't think I would be able to afford someone at this point of time:-). Thanks for pointing out though.
Darpa Develops Artificial Blood
Your novelty account is creepy.
Quit Your Job At 26 And Start A Web Company With No Money And No Tech Experience
Business is a lot wider than startup, though. There has been a huge number of articles about Apple - I seriously don't understand how such a massive quantity of (often gossipy) articles about the ipad/iphone and friends got upvoted, especially considering their hacker-unfriendliness. Then also a lot about Google, Facebook, Microsoft, the RIAA, general politics...
Sounds like Apple is trying to cut its dependencies on Google services.
The Los Angeles Hacker News Meetup is this Saturday
I tend to agree. One of the difficult problems with using AI for market predictions is that the market includes human psychology in the loop, which is not always rational and there are factors which are difficult to include within the model. When people are making buying or selling decisions they're often factoring in imponderables such as gossip, personal prejudices and vague hunches. These hard to simulate decision processes are then greatly amplified by positive feedback - which includes automated trading systems.
I agree with you that there's a big difference between those two, but not in the sense that you mention.

Adopting the "there's no reason" approach is akin to treating the process as random. First advocated by Boltzman to lay the groundwork of statistical physics, this approach basically says that the process is so complex that the only way to deal with it is through probabilistic methods.

This approach in fact is widely used in analyzing stock markets. So in fact, the current wisdom is not to disregard the "noise" in the market to arrive at the "real" model, but to treat the whole market data as noise!
We still have room for one more presenter, if you're interested reply in the thread.
The Two Types of Friends You Make on Facebook - Or Why I Use Facebook Less
Hello, submarine!

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Wouldn't the network latency kill the performance benefits? Redis is also dead simple to setup. The front page is not clear what the $200 time frame is. Per month Per year ... per hour?
"Information is meant to be consumed. It's meant to be free. It's meant to reach as many people as humanly possible, shared, and discussed."

Let's be fair. Different information is "meant" for different things. My email password is not meant to be free. And I think if Calacanis has decided that his writing is now meant for a different level of freedom, that's his call. If others aren't jumping ship with him, they probably just have different needs/goals (and these may change). Thoughtful and open writing really does have a great power for networking/community-building, but there are trade-offs.

A good essay on the whole, I just don't think we should appeal to the moral aspirations of raw information. The current state of the internet seems to show that the world wants (often demands) free information, but we're still reeling (economically and otherwise) from this movement, and waiting to see where it ultimately will lead.
Right now, I just get a 'you are not permitted to view drafts' message.
Motorola to Android custom ROMmers: Buy from another manufacturer
Item delivery of dropshipping companies
Dropshipping Company’s products at a considerable mark up for yourself and then when an order is made your simply pay the Dropshipping Company their cut and they will deliver the item to the customer.
Another annoying limitation is that Amazon MP3 is limited to US customers only.

This greatly annoys me as there's an album I want that's not on iTunes, but is on Amazon MP3. None of the local music stores stock it. My only choices are to either pirate the album or pay exorbitant fees and wait several weeks to import the disc.

Guess which one's easier.
> If you're still pirating music in 2010, and the track you're pirating is available on the Apple Store for 99 cents, then you're just being a cheap bastard.

No, its because you've been brought up with the idea that free music is ubiquitous and encourages more music consumption. You've seen the rise and fall of Napster, Morpheus, Limewire, etc and you justify it to yourself that these sites helped you discover new music more rapidly than having to pay for music. You believe that not spending $100/month on music means you can attend more concerts and buy more merch. Music pirates aren't cheap, they just choose to spend their money elsewhere. Fortunately, the music industry is just beginning to realize where this elsewhere lies. Go to best buy and see the new Dr. Dre Beats headphones that everyone is crazy about. Go to Wal-Mart and see the new Miley Cyrus line of clothes and DVDs. Bands and Brands is the future of music and this is how people choose to pay for music.
That may have nothing to do with linguistics: quality hacks are hard so they just aren't that common. So yeah, most of what hackers do isn't "hacking"
Teens Now Getting High Off 'Digital Drugs'
@earlybird: Ready to Fly
The term doesn't mean "hard work". It's shorthand for saying: "believing that hard work, and not inherent talent, is what brings success". So I think in this case, the term is worthwhile.
Rails would get you started on Facebook app quicker, but then you'd be forever fighting the framework to do things outside of it's core abilities. For something as large as Facebook, that will be all the time.
Casual, colleague-like 'sounding board' services. I would love to see this monetized.

Not because I'd use it, I'd just get a kick out of it.
You get Sony?
Hmmm... gotta admit, it's an intriguing idea. I think you might just be onto something. A new "general purpose" social network, probably not a great idea. But something dedicated to a particular topic, or theme (like opinions) could very well succeed.

Good luck!
I also threw my congrats out into blog-space this morning after updating the install on my laptop. Even though MongoDB fits most of my specific application needs better than CouchDB, CouchDB is a great project.
Are the prices monthly or annual or one-off or...?

And who said Redis was hard to install?
I loved Arch on my netbook until an update destroyed my system and I got frustrated and installed Ubuntu. Looking forward to going back to Arch one day...
cool. Might I suggest that after the pace gets saner, you add a script that fires a confirmation email before creating the instance + includes a "how to use the hosted instance" mini explanation.

This might a) free up some instances that are created only because certain folks have this silly habit of retrying a form with new values when it doesn't work the first time, and b) will make it easier to couchdb novices to get started.

Otoh, I might just be speaking for myself and my own silliness.
Screenshots of 140 character text messages?! Kids these days.
Well done guys. But don't forget to credit Bryant Cutler (http://bryantcutler.com/) for the awesome logo.

update: downvoted? why? I really think the guy should be credited. He did a fricking awesome job which CouchDB has based its whole image on. The faux movie poster linked at the top of this story has a giant size version of his logo as the very backdrop. This shit is important. Credit him, says I!
Safari 5 Extension: Ostrich - A Twitter Client
No Credit Check Bank Accounts: Open For All
I believe that it means that HDBaseT will be able to carry 100Mbps Ethernet in a side channel in addition to the bulk video data
Not sure if you saw the graph hidden in the side

I actually missed it, thanks. But what I'd really like to see are the number of police reports of unintended acceleration by model.

And, thanks to the nature of human memory, after the first few times they aren't even intentionally lying.

What you say about memory is completely correct, but in this particular instance I don't imagine for a second that they were intentionally lying even the first few times.