skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Of course you're right, but part of the nature of uncertainty is that you can't know the bounds for sure. That's why it's an estimate rather than a commitment.

This brings up another point of contention between development and project management. When developers say "estimate", they mean "best guess in the face of uncertainty", but project managers tend think of developer estimates the same as plumber, electrician, and car mechanic estimates. Those guys are saying "I'm not sure exactly how much work I'm going to have to do, but if you pay me $X I'll do it." They inflate $X so that most of the time they wind up overcharging in order to cover the occasions when they wind up doing much more work than expected. The $X is a commitment, and the estimate is how much work is needed.

It doesn't work this way in software development, because there are factors out of the developers control. The developer can say how much effort a task is likely to take (the ranged estimate) but not how much time (the commitment.) The time depends on other things the developer has to work on, both expected and unexpected, dependencies on other developers and tasks, holidays and days off for the developer and others the developer is dependent upon, etc. That's all stuff the project manager is supposed to keep track of, so the developer doesn't have a full picture. Unfortunately, most project managers don't recognize this, so they treat the effort estimate as a time commitment, set an arbitrary start date, and expect the developer to be done X days later.
My guess would be that it had more to do with the number of apps submitted since the policy was enacted than the number of complaints on internet forums.

I also believe the original policy had less to do with security and more to do with selling more MBPs (their higher margin product). So if their research showed that those mobile developers without a Mac chose to develop for other platforms instead of buying a Mac it would've only made sense to reverse their policy.
if you upload a picture that is 1440px+ wide it will work. the limitation is the size of the picture.
How much money you take from the roundup money?
I signed up and donated! Wonderful idea!!!
Doesn't that also rule out the majority of podcasts? 8/12 on my phone right now are over 20MB. Seems like a rather harsh restriction.
There was a bug a while ago that it would occasionally kill them, even if you were well above all spot prices.
I don't understand why more commodity hardware companies aren't doing this. Drivers are an actual competitive advantage with 3D video cards and possibly a few other things, but I can't see it for wireless chipsets. It seems to me that making the drivers open source might actually reduce costs, with no real down sides.
yeah, i'm finding that social proof is in many ways the barometer of a good idea.
Well that was a bunch of unnecessary drama for a whole lotta nothing.
Totally cool, but the car is made of fiberglass, so what happens when it gets in a crash? Does it have airbags?

I've heard (although have no good source) that we've made big leaps in fuel efficiency in the past 30 years, but much of it has been eaten by safety advances that make the car significantly heavier.

Can any gear head HN'ers comment?
Yea, Rand's stuff us all top tier and legit information. The SEOMOZ blog is a really great resource for beginners. Stay away from the YOUMOZ posts though since they are essentially guest posts and usually shamelessly self-promotional.

Also, check out the Matt Cutts videos on youtube. They clear up a lot of stuff that people new to SEO have thrown at them (industry bullsh*+).
I had a similar reaction to you on Slashdot a few years ago when it was first announced. I thought it was completely made up.

Yet, it works. Shockingly well. Better for FPS games than strategy games actually (you notice lag on a mouse cursor more than anywhere else).
That AUP sounds kind of ridiculous. I don't plan to burn any Korans, but I don't want my hosting provider to decide what content of mine might offend its personal sensibilities, either. One of many reasons to use https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ imo.
Ironically, Farm Town was once described as "myFarm married with Zynga's YoVille"

But did Zynga initially improve upon Farm Town or simply attract more users through a multimillion pound ad budget? For the consumer market "copy what the cool kids are doing and market the hell out of it" is arguably an even more successful strategy than "take something proven and make it better"
Auto Update for Windows Apps
Ask HN: so many language options my head is spinning...
Here's another "new developer" question for you guys, but it's a bit different.

I've only been coding for the last year (in an arcane language called FAME) and I've enjoyed the creative side of my 9-5 so much I've decided to pick up more languages and CS basics, and maybe look for work in the Bay Area.

I've got a ton of ideas floating around in my head. Visualization/graphics/UX stuff on iOS. A web app for data analytics (something similar to chart.io). Toying around with a mobile OS (maybe messing with Android) some day.

I've picked up the basics of Python, and I've got a copy of K&R sitting next to me, but focusing on just one language is hard!

For those who started with no CS background and tons of abstract ideas: how did you decide what to learn and ship first? What languages would keep my options open to all these different ideas (web and mobile and systems)? Am I thinking too big here?
Has anyone tried this recently? I looked into it a long time ago and it did not appear to be ready for prime time usage.
Product Management Resources For Startups [Awesome Collection]
Thx! Will do! We just didn't want to wait and already start collecting feedback :)
First of all your example is not necessarily simple. It might be, but you don't know that yet.

I would draw up a list of Requirements. It would outline what is, and what is not, in scope. That takes time in itself and you should run it by the client and expand on what each point means. This will allow you to determine anything that can be removed, or needs to be added (and to just understand the project better too).

After that you can use it as the basis of an initial rough estimate.

When you have an idea of how much time it will take, add 30%.
No, it's not a "free speech issue" because you have no right under the Constitution to post whatever you'd like on Rackspace's private property, and the contract you enter into to post anything there specifically enjoins you from posting "harassing" or "hate" speech.

Sorry to be pedantic, but people have weird ideas about what the 1st Amendment actually means. "Congress shall make no law" does not mean "Rackspace shall make no rule".
Well, good.
I do a lot of experiments around the edge of browser performance (and also regularly check other folks' demos in multiple browsers).

Benchmarks are not completely representative to "real world" performance. There are always some areas which work very well in particular browsers and areas in which some browsers are absolutely terrible.

You can get practically arbitrary order of browser performance by mixing "do-good" and "do-bad" tasks.

Subjectively, since recently Opera often feels faster than Chrome [1].

Not always, it's maybe 50/50 split, sometimes Chrome is faster, but in overall subjective experience Opera feels better (by a tiny bit).

I suspect it's because Chrome excels mainly at "behind-the-scene" more numerical type of tasks, while Opera is faster at more tangible "in-your-face" things like DOM manipulation / rendering / canvas.

Also, again subjectively, Opera's performance feels better "balanced". Chrome is crazy fast in some areas (see V8 benchmark), but slow/average in others. Opera is fast almost everywhere, so it has less bottlenecks.

-----

[1] More objectively, from my stuff which has numerically comparable performance:

http://alteredqualia.com/canvasmol/#DNA_crystal

On my notebook, this makes:

- 29 FPS in Chrome 7.0.517.0 dev

- 42 FPS in Opera 10.62 (45% faster)

Though for some simpler molecules, Chrome is sometimes much faster. Go figure.

-----

Another test:

http://alteredqualia.com/attractor/#TPsP2jWzkUx22cuNN5XToJNV...

- 525 ms Chrome

- 483 ms Opera (9% faster)

[1 math unit, 1 rendering unit]

-----

Case for "Chrome-has-faster-math", above example with "high detail" (which does more calculations compared to rendering):

- 1611 ms Chrome

- 2152 ms Opera (34% slower)

[10 math units, 1 rendering unit]

-----

Above with "wallpaper" settings (much more math, but also significant rendering):

- 4304 ms Chrome

- 5116 ms Opera (19% slower)

[20 math units, 4 rendering units]
"Every revolutionary is a closet aristocrat."
- Frank Herbert
The problem is that Yodlee is very expensive to get started with financially, (not technically). The point is to get people excited about the project and to sign up now, to convince someone to foot the cost of yodlee and keep all the money flowing to charity.
Right now zero. We will send 100% minus the transaction fees from authorize.net to DonorsChoose.org.

To be honest we're still looking at all the numbers to see what will be the best way to go about it and what % we need to take to make SwipeGood sustainable in the long term.
What's with 4.2 and 4.3?

I can't build an app that lets my app drive a toy car around via GPS? (That would actually be pretty cool!) I can't build an app that taxi drivers can use to interact with their dispatchers and report their location via GPS?

I can see that those sorts of apps would be likely to run afoul of some other problems, but I don't see how that in and of itself should be a reason for rejection.
I've been doing a lot of Objective-C coding the past few months, and have found it surprisingly pleasant, once I got used to the syntax. Maybe I had low usability expectations for a language based on C. :-)
I think there's a third concept as well which is where most of the "openness" hype stems which is the ability to replace entire parts of the platform. Don't like the homescreen, dialer, camera app, keyboard? Just replace it with something you do like.

That's what I find most compelling about the Android platform. As long as I have access to the Android Market and the ability to install apps directly from the internet, most of the problems mentioned in the article can be sidestepped. With that being said, I do find the trend mentioned in the article to be somewhat alarming. Removing those two features really cripples the phone, but I expect most Android phones to leave those enabled.
So does this avoid B of A's infamous Keep The Change patent?
This is the second article in a week and a half that I've read about rackspace yanking a site. The other instance was even more ridiculous that this one...

Here's the link:
Rely your web startup on Rackspace Cloud? Think again.
http://bencheng.net/rely-your-web-startup-on-rackspace-cloud...

I'm actually a current Rackspace Cloud customer, but this type of news makes me reconsider whether I want to be.
So, free speech is only allowed for adequately articulate forms of expression, as judged by Rackspace management.

No. This is a free speech issue. Those who feel offended are also free to burn bibles and desecrate whatever they feel proper.

As much as we disagree with the book burning festival (it is a stupid thing to do and there are much more articulate ways to express disagreement with Islam), I find freedom of speech is a much more important issue than the sensitivities of religious groups.
Good point. We need to improve the landing page plus signup page. Any ideas? :)
It would be nice if banks offered a simple API to tap into in order to get access to ones account details. I know the BankSimple guys are planning on having Oauth support in able to allow people to build services around their service and now have to go through Yodlee necessarily.
This is trolling of the highest form.

Think of other goods, maybe even other goods that people really really like. Do they not protect them? What about computers? Do we not put them in protective cases? Cars and motorbike? Ever seen one of those guys who covers their car/bike when not in use?

Or what about pens, that some people like to keep inside their case. Heck: I've seen military grade equipment that was still handled and carried with the care you'd reserved for an egg shell or a soap bubble!
Call me paranoid, but I am not brave enough to pass step1 in your registration, sorry!

Although I even know one of the founders :)
I know that. I was saying that in reference to his claim that 55% of Yale students receive financial aid, which is a bit of a red herring, because the vast majority of Americans qualify for some (but often not much) aid.
Cane toads aren't quite the bad guys we thought
Their app sales accounted for 85% plus of the paid app market.
Major reson Django sucks much less than Zope3: There's "only" one way to do things.

Less is more. Choices lead to confusion. Let's continuing making the less even better.
Hash function performance
Python is a pretty good choice. It's general enough that you can get stuff done in many environments with it, even though it may not be the absolute best possible choice. It's also pretty quick to develop with.

I kind of prefer Ruby myself, but have no hesitations about recommending Python if that's something you've got experience with.
I think it's a horrible idea to burn Korans, but this is certainly not the answer. This is effectively just another form of violence, that's not the way to elevate a debate.
Feel free to put in a fake email, but don't be sad if we can't contact you if you win any candy ;)
I was a little disappointed to see that using Monotouch doesn't work my Visual Studio + ReSharper + nUnit development trifecta. C# as a language is nice, but the tools are where it's at.
The threading on the container and it's lid is not something that would be easy to do on a 3 axis mill.

I think it does show off the advantages to an extent, but something else (like their ball-bearing example) may be a better front-page example.
Sure, this is obviously the heart of Microsoft's successful tactics. Facebook, too, considering their newest ideas have been to copy twitter and foursquare. Actually, an embarrassing number of companies think like that. Unfortunately, the marketplace rewards them - consumers are indifferent to what should be a moral outrage AND to their own best interest, which is to reward originality in the hope that it produces more innovation. Instead, they reward copying and sleaze, and the innovators are extinguished - resulting in mediocrity.
Actually it would probably be best to reverse the relation and put user_id's in the event objects. Then you can do queries like this:

db.events.find({hosted_by: MY_ID})
db.events.find({invited: MY_ID}) // invited is an array of users
http://www.onlive.com/
I've just never thought myself as someone good enough for anything, but I simply try.... Sure, I have failed a lot. I have tried to run before I could crawl, but in the process I've learnt and gained far more than those who played it safe.

That's because you're good. Possibly really good.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

EDIT: Dunning-Kruger seems to be more about the less-competent side. The more-competent side I meant to point out is more commonly called the Imposter phenomenon. http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2006/07/the_imposter.p...
In other words, you have no free speech on the internet because all the routers, wires, servers, links, modems are the property of their owners and they are free to censor whatever you post as long as they have sufficiently ambiguous clauses on their contracts that may or may not involve you as a part.

How far can you bend your constitution before it breaks?
I would disagree. They signed the contract with rackspace that said they would abide by their polices and if they violated them, they would shut down the site. Nothing is stopping the church from hosting their own website.
However it also lets them smash the Flash developers who don't actually port their apps to the platform, which is one of the issues they cited this spring.
What I would do:

What is the simplest idea that I have that would hold my attention but at the same time, while simple pushes the boundaries of my knowledge/skill a decent amount. I would run with that one. Why?

Challenging enough to keep my interest. Not so challenging as to seem totally daunting.
I feel like this idea would hold more weight as a non profit.
Second Open Angel Forum in Boston Oct 13th--free access to angels, no payola
We're coming back to boston on October 13th for our second Open Angel Forum.

Startups pay $0.00 to pitch to the top 25 angels in the Boston Area.

Angels pay $0.00 to hear pitches from the top six companies from Boston (or anywhere aroudn the northeast... heck, anywhere on the planet if it is a hot startup seeking angel investing).

Service Providers like law firms and recruiters pay $1,500 to send just one person. We normally sell 2-3 tickets. This money pays for my Virgin America ticket and Wifi to boston... as well as some burgers & beer! :-p
Can you sign off a right your constitution gives you?
Why is burning Qurans offensive? I could see it being offensive if done in someone else's yard, but as a symbolic act of free speech it's no different than flag burning, which I also support.
By social proof I mean when someone you respect/imitate embraces the idea. On a large scale this just means popularity. So I would call social proof the barometer of a successful idea, which only loosely correlates with being a good idea.
GridFS is simple (and probably could be implemented with most DBs) but it was designed to have some nice properties. Notably, you don't have to load the whole file into memory: you can stream it back to the client. You can also easily get random access to the file, not just sequential.
Yeah fair enough :) We need to build way more trust on step1 - any ideas?
thanks for the suggestions everyone
Well, many people do find burning flags offensive as well. That's a different question from whether it should be illegal!
You actually list one of the advantages of GridFS right there in your post: streaming. If you are serving up a 700MB video, you don't want to have to load the whole thing into memory or push the whole thing to the app server before you can start streaming. Since we break the files into chunks, you can start sending data as soon as the first chunk (256k by default) is loaded, and only need to have a little bit in ram at any given moment. (Although obviously the more you have in ram, the faster you will be able to serve files)
I like the way he confuses the Android/Windows market with the manufacturer market. As the head of Acer I'd imagine he is looking after the company Acer and how much money they make, not about the whole Android/Windows market.

And does Apple or Acer make more money from selling computers? Talk of a pyrrhic victory. :D

It wouldn't feel so weird coming from someone who is not a computer manufacturer (maybe from Google, a carrier or someone completely outside). But basically he is saying: "Hey, we'll win in the end, together with everyone else... and get less money out of it than Apple 'losing'. So we are doing the right thing.". So much for his metaphor.
Do you have ideas for a solution? What could "we" do differently, given that the US is really a collection of individual businesses each acting in their own best interests.
Sort of. MongoDB tried to keep a lot of the trimmings of a relational database, but remain scalable. Joins are handy, but don't scale well.
You can copy data over using iTunes, works fine for other apps (e.g. cinexplayer)
If you're reading this and assuming it means the end of the value of academic credentials, I have some bad news: the Valley is one of the most credentialed places I've worked. And with few exceptions, the people you hear about in the Valley entrepreneurial echo chamber went to great schools, or got advanced degrees from schools with great research programs.

In my entire life before moving to SF, I knew only a handful of Ivy League graduates. Here, nearly every other person I meet is an Ivy grad, or a grad from a top-tier research school, such as MIT, Stanford, etc. It's gotten to the point that I'm fairly surprised when I meet people here who went to lesser-known schools. Credentials are still important, even in the so-called egalitarian world of technology.

Call me cynical, but if you're reading this and hoping that the imminent collapse of the university system ushers in an egalitarian utopi, you might be waiting a while. Credentials will continue to matter -- they just won't be accessible to anyone but the rich.
Rackspace is within their rights as a private entity to make this decision, but I'm also within my rights as a consumer never to purchase hosting from them again.
Currently any app can just get raw read access to the Media Library SQLite database file — the current MediaPlayer framework just implements an unprivileged API on top of that.
Time-limited or nagware. Upsells are OK, but IIRC Apple doesn't like nags.
Cinexplayer being notable for just being a straight XVid video player.
My immediate response was: Ha! Good!

..but that's the problem with all these sorts of debates, isn't it? Everyone is acting on their first, almost instinctual response and never stopping to think beyond their own selfish beliefs and desires. Somehow that seems ironic.
Talking about scalability
We thought about it long and decided that the ultimate goal is to have the maximum impact and make SwipeGood sustainable without any grants and gov support. We believe that it doesn't matter what form the org has but how much positive change we can make in the long term...and we believe we can be more creative as a company and more agile in making change happen :)
I agree with the concern about Rackspace pulling down sites, but I can't help but be pleased with their decision on this one.
Because the redneck trash doing this would throw a temper tantrum if someone did it to a bible. It should be permitted, but come on -- we're adults here. This is nothing more than a giant, "Fuck you" to muslims.

For the record, I don't find burning any books or the flag to be offensive -- I just don't get wrapped up in silly symbols.
Given that it actually violates the policy mentioned, Rackspace absolutely has the right to do this, and I don't hold it against them. They did what they thought was right for this situation. Unfortunately it won't have any effect on the Koran burning event.

Personally this makes me more likely to purchase hosting from them (unless I wanted to make something offensive like this).

Counting the minutes until we hear a politician claim that this violates first amendment rights ...
You are using de-normalization in a way that i am no familiar with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization
Refusing to host a website is a form of violence? What?
Free speech is not the opposite of offensive.

Free speech can be, and often is, offensive as hell.

(edit: Quick clarification - this comment is not meant to indicate, either way, my stance on the act of burning Qu'rans or flags, or any other free speech issue, for that matter.)
Trust the man in the pink shirt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m43t44WL8-w
I demand the immediate use of your HN account to make fun of your understanding how how our Constitution works. Free speech.
Two things I thought of....

1) Can I lie and say that I lost the weight in order to get my money back?

2) Is there anything out there that works with positive reinforcement for weight loss? In other words, instead of punishing people (which may work for some), reward people with prizes (money, gifts, etc..)
You aren't contractually bound when you use bizarre routers and wires, but your ISP probably holds you to a similar agreement. Also, you can do whatever you want until you get shut down, but a court of law will see it from the contract side. You can feel free to say whatever you want using your own resources, but if you're using someone else's and they don't like what you're doing, then tough shit.