skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a much more selfish, and imo, effective solution to this.

Instead of looking down or focusing much on what other people around you are doing, look up and away from the direction you're walking and walk quickly and confidently. I usually focus on the 4th or 5th floor of the buildings across the street. There's still enough awareness via peripheral vision to avoid colliding with people, and that's the only thing you need to worry about.

The other humans will be subconsciously aware of the direction your eyes are pointing and be fooled into thinking that you can't see them and are about to run into them. They will basically be forced to move out of the way.

Since I discovered this technique a few years ago, I've used it hundreds of times. So long as there's some foot traffic flowing in both directions, you can always get into the oncoming traffic lane of the sidewalk and use this method to make people scatter out of your way.
News from IETF codec WG meeting in Maastricht
Someone should make a PC version of this.

Oh wait, Nintendo wouldn't like that, would it?
I'd love to have your 120 minutes to do nothing else but reflect on what's been achieved, what lies ahead and strategize on the best way to get there. I find Evernote on Android to be a great way to record/file thoughts.
This whole thing is just asinine. Everyone is grappling with the problem of how they can get their piece of the pie. If I were Time, News Corp, WSJ, Conde Nast, etc, there's no way in hell I'd dump any more money in to Apple's curated platform until Apple figures out exactly what the hell "curated" means.

The content providers aren't exactly in a favorable position. Producing an HTML5 version of their content means they'd have yet another production channel to support. Publishers want a create once, publish many solution. Adobe's (the biggest name in content creation) current answer to this problem is a horrid mess of gigantic, flat images embedded in a rudimentary framework. Think flat images and image maps. It's a technical shortcut at best.

Ideally, publishers should produce HTML5 versions of their content that take advantage of the more competent layout and text options therein. This content would display well on the iPad and future devices that implement the WebKit mobile browser, which looks like it will be the front runner for the time being. Even if Firefox Mobile gains a significant foothold, HTML5 is still a champion of interoperability when compared to native apps.

Basically, they're all tripping over their feet because they're unwilling to commit to their own solution. Yes, Apple makes it easy to offload the delivery and payment portion of the process, but they extract their pound of flesh. Who can blame them? Apple's greatest fault lies in the fact that they're making up the rules as they go along. They need to feel a little sting as a result. Until they do, they'll feel entitled to continue with the status quo.
I should add that it's the massive network switch that makes this all possible. You can scale disk I/O by adding disks, and you can scale in-memory sorting by adding cores and memory. But it's awfully expensive to buy your way out of a bottleneck in your network when everyone needs to talk to each other at full speed.
They are heading down a dark and narrow road by doing dumb stuff like this.
At the simplest level: if the company doesn't meet its revenue and profit targets, I don't get a bonus.

Teachers aren't even evaluated at the level of "more exams passed than last year" or overall results relative to comparable schools.
The delay to switch from "everybody's smoking" and "only losers smoke" seems much shorter to me. Simply see any 80's movie (Terminator, for instance): everybody's smoking (cops, thieves, etc). 15 years later smoking in San Francisco was enough to get angry looks.
They probably do. However, it doesn't show, because their performance isn't rewarded equally.

That's why I'd like to see studies comparing (women's performance)/(women's reward) to (men's performance)/(men's reward). If discrimination harm's women, the ratio should be higher for women.

I don't really trust opinion polls (except as a measure of opinion), particularly when they ask questions like "is your failure to get promoted/paid/etc caused by $YOUR_FAULT or $NOT_YOUR_FAULT?"
Global Tech Company Contegix to Sponsor Clojure Project
That's cute, but Jesse Schell is entirely wrong. Users overwhelmingly prefer direct payments.

Mark Pincus talks about it here - http://markpincus.typepad.com/markpincus/2009/11/my-take-on-...

Peanut Labs backs it up with independent research - http://peanutlabsmedia.net/2009/11/02/survey-finds-arrington...
I completely agree with you.

Unfortunately, sometimes when I'm checking in at US airline kiosks, a "helpful" attendant will come over and start operating the kiosk for me. I can't stand that -- it's the worst of both solutions.

For example, when I'm using the kiosk myself, I can take my time browsing the seats that are available and pick the best one. When the attendant is "helping," I feel like I can't explore my options.
I like the author's attitude: "Lets do this thing, and empower women, fight for gender equality, and change the world, but lets be realistic about it. Lets own the problems on our side and fix them."

In my experience, anything that begins with "Define X as the agent of good" falls into the trap of "X does $BADTHING therefore $BADTHING must be good", and credibility is lost (it also works in reverse, "define X as the agent of bad..."). On the other hand "Define $IDEAL as the goal" has a tendency to look for good from all directions, and address the bad wherever it comes from.
Use the best tool for the job. For queueing, that's probably 0mq or ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ, depending on your needs.
This site is great. Two things to think about:

(1) I'm 99.9999% sure Patrick McKenzie will be here within the next 15 minutes to tell you in detail how to pull this off, but you are selling something that has a natural content SEO fit and you should chase that down.

What you want to think about are ways to break down your subject matter into categories (again: it's natural here; the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, etc). Look for other angles; when are people praying the rosary? For what occassions? Think about kids, think about class projects, etc. Break content into atoms.

For each atom of content, have a system that allows you to host it on its own page with a meaningful URL, a meaningful title, a meaningful article summary (meta description), the atom's worth of content, some contextual content (general stuff about the rosary, how you got to that page, etc), and some basic call-to-action to get people to pivot from reading information about the rosary (which is how you got them to your site) to looking at easily buying a rosary (extra bonus points if there are convenient ways to customize the rosary based on the atom of content the user is looking at).

Note that this sounds suspiciously like programming and application development. Who'd have thunk it; selling things online can be an engineering process!

I have been continuously astonished by how quickly you can capture swaths of Google search space by generating content that directly and succinctly answers one very specific question people ask Google. Remember: do not try to answer every question on one master page. Anathema! Have a crawlable sanely-indexed sanely-browsable system on which you can hang hundreds of pages.

You can start all these things very simple, and once you start, if you attract a baseline level of traffic, you can start A/B testing, which will get you to a place where you can start assigning a dollar value to each thing you do for the site.

(2) This system looks very well set up to address the case where I want to carefully buy one customized rosary. Isn't it very common that people want to buy many rosaries, say for the 60 students in the 5th grade at St. Barnabus elementary, or (if you are one of my aunts) every one of her 18,000 nieces and nephews?
He mentioned it's similar to Ioke, which looks like this

if(42 < 43,
"wow, math comparison works" println,
"we have some serious trouble" println)
These guys offer something similar for about $35 or you could make one yourself.

http://www.laptopsarena.com/type-on-your-laptop-while-walkin...
If You’re So Damn Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?
Ten Years of LtU
Great idea - I don't believe there was previously a Redis solution for Heroku users.

I'm not seeing an obvious benefit for people self-hosting though.
It sure can suck, but it's all choices. You don't have to get investment, don't have to hire employees. You can do consulting on the side so you're not poor. You can even take holidays if you plan for it.

So a lot of it is just down to planning.

It's pretty similar to having a baby I think. It can suck sometimes, but it's pretty much the best experience you can ever have.

Good luck for the release in Sept :)
Take a look at this thread from the other week:

Ask HN: What is the best Java IDE? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1523394
That is another option - basically run and join a gym under my building so I can have a shower when I get in.

Mind you from the article:

"Regular workout sessions do not appear to fully undo the effects of prolonged sitting."

Here is the guy with the world record in typing and running

http://uk.video.yahoo.com/watch/563605/2808706
The suffix array:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffix_array
Lavaurs algorithm: Abstract Mandelbrot set
The past, present and future of R
It's interesting to note how much Google's (citation) influence has decreased over time. 60583 -> 19354 -> 3893 for all years -> last 10 -> last 5, where "all years" means about 12 (!). I'm guessing it's the exponential falloff of PageRank paper citations over time.
Blekko: New Search Engine Lets You “Spin” The Web
It looks good, nice to see real eCommerce exists (e.g. you pay something for a product, I was beginning to feel like everything was a service of a service).

One thing that really really puts me off web sites is if I can't tell shipping costs quickly and easily. Your site is good in that at least you don't have to register to see the total cost, but you do have to add a product and go to the cart to find out shipping. If your shipping is a flat $8.45, I'd suggest having that under a FAQ type area.

Also gift wrap options are good.

I'd be interested to know who you are hosting with. Is it a 3dCart or Shopify type or did you go solo?
There are fairly low cost overnight accommodation on trains in Europe, but it tends to be couchettes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couchette_car

proper sleeping cars where you have your own private small room are a lot more expensive.
Mercedes Benz Showcase (Using Flash)
One problem Starbucks around here seem to have is that they will inevitably make cups of coffee for mystery customers who never pick them up. I've seen as many as 3 cups of very precisely crafted coffees on the counter with nobody else in the store.
I don't quite get why the citations for major institutions have grown at a rate of ~10K per year since the late 90s, but much fewer for the decade before that.

Can anyone explain?
They also acquired iPhone game startup "Tapulous" about a month ago. Clearly they have big plans for social and mobile games.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/01/tapulous-acquired-by-disney...
Anybody who still believes in "write once, run anywhere" has never tried deploying to multiple platforms. "Write once, debug everywhere" is more like it, which is why Eclipse has some weird property check that is Windows only in the first place.

That said, the JVM is probably the best environment for doing cross-platform deployment.
What about using something like Jott?

http://jott.com./jott/jott-assistant.html
My IDE is the terminal. I don't want that in a text editor.

I use a text editor to edit text, and a terminal to do everything else.

As long as it can do syntax highlighting, copy paste, line numbering, can show files/dirs in a tree so you can select files easily, I don't want anything else.

Obviously I can understand that other people love clicking on "create a function" in their IDE, or tab completing variable names, or clicking on "build/run". But it's just not for me. Even the quote/bracket auto-insertion in textmate drove me crazy until I disabled it. All that extra crap 'refactor!' 'language bundles' etc.

<anecdotal>

The code I have seen (Java) produced from programmers using IDEs has been universally horrible. Full of duplication useless boilerplate and general rubbish.

</anecdotal>

If you were writing a novel, would you have a menu with common book 'patterns', or tab complete the character names? For me, it interrupts my flow.

There is a popular myth that you 'need' to use an IDE to code Java. Which is just ridiculous. Perhaps it's a self fulfilling prophecy though. Code produced by IDEs isn't nice to look at so you need to edit it in another IDE, or spend an hour cleaning out all the rubbish.

</rant against IDEs which I detest>
Just enjoy the walk, you don't need to be connected to technology 24 hours a day :)

But, the Twidler does look cool! Has anyone here used one? I'm not sure about walking around while typing but I can imagine setting in a comfy chair with one.
How do you explain that while the NEA supports the firing teachers based on age, rather than merit - ejecting good young teachers while retaining old bad ones - while it's innovative charter schools that can go right ahead in paying teachers highly in hopes of attracting the best teachers: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/education/05charter.html?_...

Who is sticking up for teachers there? The NEA, which supports age over talent? Or the charter, which is focused on attracting and retaining good teachers?
> bug fixes/feature requests weighted by importance

Isn't there a DailyWTF about a company that did just that and found that the testing people conspired with the developers to invent bugs, locate them, and then collect bonuses for fixing them.
If it's been that painful perhaps that's a sign that the current idea isn't a great one.
Aside from direct damage which varies from negligible to substantial, the indirect costs should be taken into account. They're not always easy to guage.

Something that takes a lot of time certainly has an opportunity cost. The time it takes could have been spent doing something else. Someone addicted to a game may spend less time getting exercise, learning what it takes to get a ham license, learning to program, working on real personal relationships.... the list goes on and on.

Generally things that give instant gratification tend to be addictive. Has our society suffered from not living within its means? Have we fostered an environment that actually encourages addiction to spending?

Look at the nature of what's on commercial tv, and the ads.
The programs are designed to keep us hooked. (they don't sell programs to us, they sell us to advertisers)
And look at the nature of the ads and what we consume.
To some, our purpose in life is to CONSUME. Just who is that good for?

Next time you play a game or pick something to watch, ask yourself what you're gaining, what it costs, and will you better of later or be a better person as a result?

Maybe the skills learned in those games aren't useful enough to be worth the price.

Of course if we measure lifetimes in man-hours and look at the numbers a different way can get some disturbing stats.

It's probably a leap to equate the cumulative hours lost to gaming to death. Perhaps it would be easier to accept if we measured the hours spent with updates and fighting malware? (That would make a catchy story... measure the lives lost due to Windows bugs LOL)

We don't have to be productive all the time, but shouldn't we find pleasure in ways that help our minds and bodies?
Yeah, its's been several years since I used NetBeans in GNOME. I've probably just blocked the image out of my mind.

Either that or I don't care about matching font settings. Or possibly I was so used to Windows fonts that I didn't even notice the discrepancy.
I'll try to remember doing it from now on. I always thought HN had a "no duplicates" search like reddit does. I was wrong.
Somewhere (linked from HN?), I saw an article describing a publication scoring system where your score is the largest n such that you have at least n papers each of which has been cited at least n times. I'd be curious how these organizations rank under that system as well.
Washington Times Open Source: Django Alphabet Filter Released
I agree and disagree with you here.

I think the kiosk/Internet verses customer-rep/ call choice is actually a convenience issue more than it is a relationship issue.

However, I really do think that the whole relationship with a huge multinational thing is overblown. What does it even mean to have a relationship with a company? When I have a relationship with a person, it means that we know each other, have an understanding of each other, possibly we're friends. Companies however are collectives. I can't possibly acquaint myself with every member of a large company nor can they be expected to all acquaint themselves with me. A company can keep a file on me, tracking what I've with them and who I've talked to, which is sort of a relationship, but not really. They can also appoint someone to be my dedicated representative, but the rep can't represent the company in all of it's aspects.

I think that the nitty gritty of it is that for the most part, my transactions with corporations are ephemeral. If I end up building a relationship over them, then something is wrong. I don't want a relationship with Dell (for example) I just want to buy a computer. If I have to talk to their tech support, that means something went wrong. I'd be nice if my bank's representatives were friendly and polite with me, and if they were helpful, etc, but I don't really care if they remember my name.

Already have friends, I don't need a bank to be one too.
My experience has been that different languages require different tools. Emacs has always been great for my Javascript and Python work, but, even with JDE, I can't get a good flow going with Java.

Regardless of how tough it makes you, I think it makes you smart for using the tools you work best with. :)
1) I hope you are correct about Patrick, I always love reading his take on things and no doubt he will have one on this. We've also been studying his Bingo card site setup because I think we want to do the same thing (IE: generate lots of content for very small, specific topics). He has had some great posts detailing his workflow, so we have been referring to those as well. Definitely going to do this.

2) Actually, after you add your rosary to your cart, you can change quantities on the fly (I want 15 of these rosaries I designed). It will undoubtedly need smoothing and clarification.

Thanks for the kind words!
Small Business Marketing: Web Design Best Practices and Tips
Your second comment illustrates the straw man aspects of your first comment. There is very little military funding in municipal budgets.
If you're looking for something a little simpler to process jobs using mongodb check out mongo_queue http://github.com/skiz/mongo_queue
Wonderful suggestions on both accounts.

We went solo and built from scratch with Django, not because it was easier, but because we want to do a lot of fancy stuff with content, tracking, A/B testing and custom product generation later down the road.
Hi Axod,
Yes, it's down to planning and foreseeing, true. And there's two reason I wrote that post like this:
1) to poke the bear, and specifically address the young aspiring entrepreneurs who only read about the good side of it.
2) not hiring, doing consulting on the side, not getting investment is a great way to go, the 37 signals way. we chose the other alternative to get where we wanna go faster. future will tell if we were right :))

Anyway thx for the comment, and finger crossed for the sept release :)
This article and its misleading title is a typical demonstration that the chasm between academia and the real world isn't getting any smaller any time soon. Who are you going to listen to, people who spent their lives building businesses around the premise of servicing their customers or people who want to tell you how to do that which they haven't?

OP makes the classic blunder of confusing misguided tactics (poor implementations of self-service) with wrong strategy (excellent customer relationships). And then comes to an absurd conclusion with its sensational title.

I'd prefer to stick with a simple adage I've heard so many times from successful business people:

"All things being equal, people would rather buy from a friend. All things being unequal, people would still rather buy from a friend."
>Another option is to see if you can put what you learned about compulsive behaviors to better uses - I think the world would be better off if people were compulsive about maintaining good finances

I've said before that I think many resource-building games have similar reward mechanisms to running a business[1]

Look at, for example, eve online. I know at least one very smart guy who put more effort into accounting within that game than I put into accounting at my business.

If you could figure out how to exploit this; you know, to make doing the accounting for my business as rewarding to this guy as doing accounting in eve online, hot damn, you could make a lot of money.

[1]http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/5/15/5477/35240
Good questions: check colleagues' info at start of new gigs, many people from my working past have contacted me through LinkedIn, and the email traffic on a few interest groups is low volume and of reasonably good value.

I have never used LinkedIn for its original function: finding a contact point in a company through a mutual connection. The reason for this is that it is so easy to simply email someone, introduce yourself, and try to say something interesting enough to them that they will spend a few minutes getting acquainted.
For those of you that don't know Godwin's law, it states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1".
Even with IFS, you cannot boot from third-party filesystem. "Root" partition is going to be NTFS anyway.
Get an Audible account and pick some of their excellent unabridged audio books - for example the excellent biography of Churchill by Roy Jenkins is 37.5 hours!
I'm going to go out on a limb and say I like having a person on the other end. Questions are (for me) more quickly answered by a person. I also think the way the employees treat you is a good indication of the quality of the business.
Over-Educated Programmer Does Online Marketing
Aldous Huxley was right, not George Orwell
Readtwit is closing shop
I read the whole thing out of stubbornness but I need a rest now and will look a bunch of lol cats to make up for it.
The worst case is when the company is trying to push a relationship on you that you don't want. There are certain types of stores where the salespeople are commission driven (in the US, at least) and it is IMPOSSIBLE to get the salesperson to go away in many of the places that these things are sold.

My personal least favorite is furniture shopping. Furniture (for me) is a very personal decision on artistic merit that is best done in quiet solitude. I want to touch, smell, examine, and test the furniture and I want to do it at my own pace and without a shadow who won't stop yammering in my ear. Look, I understand that this is a pressure sales job. I understand that you don't want your co-workers to steal your sale. Give me your card, I'll do my shopping, I'll find you if I have questions and when I want to buy something, I'll let you know.
I prefer the bit in this article: http://www.varnish-cache.org/wiki/ArchitectureInlineC

Where he says: "It is a particular common kind of hubris for IT architects, to think that they know better than 100% of everybody else, this is less of a sin in Open Source than in Closed Source, but a sin nontheless."
People are rarely compensated fairly for their contributions to society.