skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Cud for thought: "Contented cows give better milk"
The short of it:

Its surprising how well the principles explained in the book "Contented Cows give better milk" held up when I analysed

1) two gas stations I worked at and their work environments, the way the owners operated them

2) The work environment between two companies, a small one (~ $20 mil) and fortune 500 company ($14 bil)

3) the way different managers work

4) the team dynamics in different teams and how they perform

Conclusion: would strongly reccommend this book for anybody looking for pointers in developing a high performance culture in their companies(not that it is the all of it)

-------------------------------

The long of it (the reason behind why I say the above):

A bit over 8 years ago, read this book, which was course material for a friend doing an MBA. Liked it so much that I told him I was going to keep it after he gets done with his course and did exactly that :)

About a year later, on an impulse and out of boredom, I made a list of things that differed in the actions, attitudes, behaviors and in general, the culture, of the owners and workers of two gas stations I used to work (was a student, back then)

One was a very busy place with lots of daily revenue (going into a few thousands), long lines of customers, a majority of them loyal over many years.

The other was a very slow place, the revenue not even making a couple of hundreds on some days.

When I compared the list, it turned out to be perfect example of what the book was trying to say.

Since then, more or less on automode, I have been analysing the cultures in differnt companies that I worked at, different teams I was part of or had exposure to, working styles of different managers. The stuff in the book keeps holding up real well based on what I have observed so far.

(It should be an easy guess in which gas station I made that list :) )
Absolutely brilliant. I feared a generic profile at the end but the level of detail was incredible.

I'm impressed! I'm an INTJ.
It's more than whiney developers now. It was one thing when Apple never made clear the guidelines and chose to reject apps; now that they've made guidelines very explicit, going back on them would very publicly damage other companies: Large companies, like Adobe and Oracle, who would be very upset as well if Apple reneged on this change of policy.

They won't go back on it. Not now.
The problem with tax evasion in a democracy is that, when combined with a government's ability to borrow money, it removes the one of the main reasons why voters should care about how much the government spends. If you don't pay taxes, government spending is free money, at least until the debt burden becomes obviously unsustainable and things start falling apart as a result.
Jinja2 is indeed much faster and offers a more flexible expression syntan than Django's template engine. However, Django's native template engine has one huge advantage right now - when there is a syntax error in the templates, it almost always gives informative errors the correct location. Jinja2, as it is right now, often gives no errors and completely wrong locations for the problem. This has been a serious disadvantage for me when dealing with more complex templates. This is surely temporary, but is the state of affairs right now.
Never Make a Promise You Can't Keep - Especially in Your Privacy Policy
This is a common, but interesting angle on procrastination. eliminating distractions, time boxing and counting are all valuable elements not only to overcoming procrastination but also to improving the underlying element, motivation.

In the middle of the article above, the author mentions what I think is the root cause of both procrastination and in turn, motivation in general:

"Cultivate strong habits and build a routine"

I think that habits are the foundation of success. If you develop good habits and work to enforce and refine those habits to meet your goals, you will succeed.

This (simplistic) theory is echoed by almost every self-help resource available. Some say associate yourself with those who have good habits, while others think that progressing through a number of repeatable steps is the secret to success. Personally, I think that it's different for everyone, but everyone that I know who truly "gets stuff done" simply has developed good habits professionally, personally and recreationally.
Social and asocial bookmarking with Licorize (beta)
Well, personally I think there is a difference.

I completely agree that it's always good for a customer to complain about the product if there are problems. Gosh: read all the Mac faithful complains when a new MacOS comes out! Similarly if your phone doesn't work, or your car is not comfortable you go and complain.

BUT, the crucial word there is customer. People who would never buy an Apple product out of principle, or unless Apple becomes totally completely open source/open market/whatever, then those complains are pointless.

It all goes back to "vote with your wallet". Apple may listen to the first ones because their behaviour may change: the latter won't, they'll just complain, and Apple couldn't care less.

That said Apple is also a pretty stubborn company, and often even when it is in their best interest and their customers are complaining (AND voting with their wallet) they may keep their believes. It's one of their problems, though it's of course their right, and it may even make sense.

(for example a luxury brand is more interested in maintaining their recognisable features rather than adapt... but it's their choice: they judge how many customers they lose in the short run vs. how many customers they will retain in the long run)
Starbucks is not detecting iOS wispr URLs. It's detecting the user agent. Change your browser user agent to anything else and try it again.

It's the same way I get on my University's network without logging into the awful SafeConnect.
When consulitng I find that truly listening to users and trying to eliminate any vagueness that they seem to be confortable with is very useful. It not only clears up things for them, but it is also a inherently good way to 'bond' with them.
Just in time for me to start coding my first iPhone app!

I'd wanted to use Appcelerator's Titanium to avoid learning Objective-C and to keep my options open with respect to Android phones. I've sat on the development on this idea for a few months now wondering if Apple would finally reveal their hand. I'm glad they did but I'm honestly surprised that they've done "the right thing" and moved away from monopolistic tactics.

Wahoo! Coding starts on Monday :)
Adaptive optics lets telescopes compensate for atmospheric distortions to get similar performance to telescopes in space. It's also used for lasers. I don't know how it works but it sounds like it would be applicable here.

Your minimum diameter formula doesn't sound too restrictive.
Just change your user agent and send out any request to any page...
It's funny how every article about productivity and anti-procrastination is effectively costing productivity and makes people stay away from what they thought they should be doing just a little bit longer.

If the number of people that changes their minds after reading this multiplied by the time they would procrastinate otherwise is larger than the total amount of time people spent on reading these articles it is a net win.

Of course I had to go read the article...

@ryan: typo in the second paragraph, 'live' instead of 'life'.
Well they are separate issues. But your question is key as well, with the increase in wireless it probably won't be long. Even still with a few minutes access to a vehicle (such as at a mechanics shop) a remote attack could be setup...
Are there really diminishing returns on STEM research?
This is truly an excellent article. I've never read an article online of this length before where I haven't taken a break or switched tabs.

Having said that, the Vanity Fair website has a lot of fluff ("Which President Decorated the Oval Office Best?" anybody?). If they concentrated on quality articles like this one I'd subscribe in an instant.
Who do you develop for? Don't say Android unless you mean rooted Android. In which case you could also develop for jail-broken iOS.

EDIT: As explained below, my point isn't that Android isn't open today but that it's their (or the carrier's) platform.
> Unless they're denormalized for optimization purposes?

Bingo?
Zach, do you have 2 ids? zachinglis and zach-inglis?

because if not, someone's trying to masquerade as you ..

if you do, please stick to using 1 id vs. using a throw away account just to comment.
Preditter
Have you tried Django Appengine?[1] It works pretty well and supports most things in django (including the admin interface).

[1] http://www.allbuttonspressed.com/projects/djangoappengine
you can't find a sound isolating IEM for $100. usually it starts at $200+
there's a good review in this forum:
http://www.head-fi.org/forum/thread/478568/multi-iem-review-...
It's not about more taxes, necessarily, it's that everyone should pay their "fair share", not some people pay 50%, and some wealthier people pay 0. If they think that is too high, they need to convince the politicians/electorate to lower the taxes. I can't just go steal stuff from the supermarket because I don't like the price.
What are you talking about? Target the Dalvik VM and Google doesn't care what you do, what language you do it in, or what tools you use to build it. Sure there are some parts of the system that you can't access without root privileges, but that's an entirely different issue.
i think the reason they don't see frustration free versions at target and walmart is they are probably using the same products in online retail they would ship to local stores. So having two product sets cuts down on their efficiency/economies of scale.

I wish all products on amazon were frustration free packaging.

There was a story a while back about the guy who invented/worked on the clamshell packaging getting frustrated, quitting, and starting a company that sold a special knife to open those packages. fwiw
Agile Metrics You're Not Supposed to See
The argument has been made that for every iphone developer that would quit making apps another (or two) would take their place. And that may be true. But a developer that has quit is not going to sit around and do nothing.

He's going to use his expertise gained on the one platform to make a go of it on the other. So an exodus of frustrated developers is really a very big problem.

Of course the customers will never know of anything like that happening behind the scenes. But they'll see their buddies with their shiny non-apple phones do stuff that they'd like to be able to do.

Where developers go, customers follow, you ignore them at your peril.
Is there a non scribd version of this pdf? Scribd says "all download limits exceeded from your ip" and won't let me download or read anything beyond slide 26.
I don't understand how he could interpret Verizon making and promoting their own app store as meaning the platform isn't open. Am I missing something or is the fact that anyone can make their own app store mean the platform is more open?

Also, one minor nit is the 2.2 stats he's referring to are from August 2. I'm sure they'll be much higher with the 2.2 rollouts that occurred for Droids and Incedibles (others?) in August.

In the end, if manufacturers/carriers make a bad product, it will fail in the market, but with Android, they're free to do that if they want.
I disagree. Apple's stubbornness has its problems, and sometimes it's a pain. At the same time this uncompromising stances are common among those with strong believes and vision. And Apple has those (if you agree with their believes and vision is another story though ;) ).

Case in point: the original Mac had no arrow keys to FORCE the developers and the users to change their frame of mind and make heavier use of the mouse. Had they compromised maybe people would have gone for the path of lowest resistance, and people wouldn't have accepted the advantages.

Other cases:
- USB (how long did it take in the PC world to get rid of serial ports?)
- 64-bit cocoa (or rather 64-bit carbon)
etc...

It may seem madness, but there is logic in the madness. And usually if after many months if not year they are still proved wrong, Apple relents (e.g. fat Nano, Cube, DVD>CD-RW, tabs on top in Safari, etc...).
App Store Review Guidelines
Just too late for me, bought an android on Monday!. Too bad, I figured I'd waited long enough and had decided they were not going to budge.
How WiseStamp, a Dogpatch Labs startup, adds social media to e-mail signatures
Digg 4.x is like Star Wars Galaxies NGE.
Battle of the bottles - technical analysis of trademark infringement claims
Types of Links and their Benefits
When it comes to promoting your on line business and taking it to new heights, links are indispensable. There is no denying the fact that links play a crucial role in determining the Page rank and trust factor too.
Dell finally releases Streak source code - at least the GPL'ed bits
ARM Aims at Intel, Cortex A15 Headed for Smartphones, Notebooks and Servers
If you own your phone, T-mobile smartphone plans are $20/month cheaper. That's $480 over a 24-month contract, it doesn't pay to get the subsidized phone. (Yeah, unless you get an N1, it's still a branded phone with some crapware, but they will unlock it immediately and you can change your plan at any time.)
I've heard that Navy pilots do this; every carrier landing is reviewed.

I wonder how the NFL players would fare at elite military training; P Company or All Arms here in the UK, Ranger School in the US, etc.
Are applications developed with the current version of FlashCS5 now allowed ?
To the moon! We'll mine some there :-)
This programme put back health IT in teh UK by a decade. Instead of promoting open standards, it pushed closed systems and demanded a rip and replace approach to existing systems, even when the replacemetn systems were pure bvapour ware.. The restof world should take note and not repeat this fiasco.
Thanks for the info. Haven't talked with Vodafone for a while because their data prices always seemed high. T-Mobile and O2 were cheaper, hence me knowing a bit more about them.
I'm expecting to see a very biased distribution as compared to when you'd test a random sample.
I think you mean "as you point out there is no proof...". He points out that there is evidence in his "They mention it in their release" sentence.
I procrastinate because I read too many blogs posts about getting things done and procrastination avoidance. I procrastinate because I'm procrastinating my way to perfection.
I wonder why the author didn't try to draw an analogy to cheap, high-quality Japanese imports. Oh, probably because there isn't one. Due to cultural differences, disruptions in higher education will most likely be homegrown and hopefully create downward price pressure on traditional higher education.
Python limits what can be changed at runtime: Ruby doesn't. That in itself attracts more outgoing, adventuresome people, whereas Python is changeable enough to be flexible, but not unstable -- which attracts people more interested in stability and security.
Probably not much. Anyone playing sports at this level is genetically predisposed to it; you can see that they're big guys, but what you can't see is that they recover from training more quickly than the average person too. The ones that lack this ability already burnt out before getting to this level.
Re; "I am cool" being in the top phrases. Could be used in a sentence, like "I am cool with that".

Jus saying.
When I run into a perplexing thing like that, I put a tag on it so I know to come back later once my mind has had time to work on a different problem.
Gotta love the domain name + favicon :-)
Simulator training flaws tied to airline crashes
The "failed dream" been successfull but never for long. As disk bandwidth and network bandwidth increase irregularly and leapfrog one another, it goes in and out of fashion.
I don't follow the one on sexuality. Is that angels and demons? What do they represent? And what spectrum do the shades of grey belong to?
It's a welcome move.

"In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need."

This presumably puts the likes of Monotouch back on the board as well as the possibility of some form of JVM (so long as the whole thing is packaged inside the app).

Interesting to see what it means for Flash. Gut feel is not much - obviously there are some benefits in being able to rework existing Flash apps but I can't see it being a development tool of choice for anyone starting fresh.
At the same time developers follow customers. ;) It goes both ways.

But yeah, I agree with you. Do it at your peril, and they tried, kept going probably thinking the pros. out-weighted the cons, and eventually after 2 years pushing it, they relented.

That's all I am saying. And yes, I admit Apple would have sticked to its guns for a little bit longer (basically until, like in today's mac, users were so familiar with the mac UI, that any rougue developer would change it at his peril ;) ).

But anyway, customers feedback or developers feedback (as you point out) is very very different from the trolls and haters you see populating internet forums. :)
Apple products are a mutant virus... says Acer founder
If you're going to swap out everything, are you really using Django to begin with? Why not just use TurboGears[1], which seems based on the idea of swapping out standard components?

[1] http://www.turbogears.org/
Free spice - spice gold
Exactly, that's what I'm most interested in. I've seen the skew in some communities be almost 100% INFJ's, which are statistically rare.
You know, while Apple's rejections seemed to be arbitrary at times, I was surprised that my reaction to reading this was that the vast majority of these rules are pretty sensible. A lot of them come down to "your app must not crash or be full of bugs, it must do what it says it does, and it cannot be malicious." For all the hoopla, I expected this list would read like a crazy list of charges handed down by a kangaroo court.

The thing on here which I really strongly disagree with is the ban on making apps that replicate functionality shipped with the phone. If users want an alternate mail client that supports IMAP IDLE for example, it should be up to the user to download that.
Also physically a bit tricky.
You would have to announce it in advance, to allow time for the new currency to be produced - in which time everybody would hoard euros.
Then everyone waits for the new currency to fall like a stone, so nobody uses it, so no tax revenue.
Dell Streak source code out for all to see
I think he means attempting to solve the 'symmetric multiprocessing' problem using threads, rather than using threads for sensible things like IO-forking/event-driven, asynchronous stuff.
Apple relaxes restrictions on iOS app developers
I'm also an INTJ which is already adding to the probability of skewed distribution. Then again, it's not and won't be surprising to see many INTx types as developers are usually of this type.
Now that MonoTouch appears to be in the clear on iOS...

It sounds like C# is going to be a viable language for 3 major mobile platforms this Fall. Windows Phone 7 supports C# by default. MonoTouch brings it to iOS and MonoDroid takes it to Android.

It sounds like there will be some really neat opportunities to reuse C# libraries across all three platforms, while dropping a native platform UI on top of them.
In other news, hell freezes over, and Microsoft embraces open source.
Startups Wait For the ‘Super Angels’ to Descend
It's the usual open for whom argument.

Say Verizon creates its app store, promotes it, and removes Google's Marketplace. They also make sure you can't install apps any other way, including the original Google's marketplace.

Now, they have been able to do all of this because it's open, so yeah, it is more open. However what they will hand over to the customer is more closed, and possibly a worse experience.
I think this is what Facebook wants to be with OpenGraph!
I have downloaded it from Scribd and put it on Google Docs publicly:

https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0Bwm9XbY0OR2wZjc1YjQ3Mzg...
It's saying that sexuality is usually shown as being black/white, but actually there are many shades of just not grey, but also green, blue, and purple.
You've forgotten to include COOL.
Here's the page on ARM site: http://www.arm.com/products/processors/cortex-a/cortex-a15.p...

Actually they have an use cases even for Wireless Infrastructure with "octo-core or larger configurations" [under the Performance tab].

Samsung is already on the bandwagon, together with ST and TI.
Have you never heard an executive complain about workers being expensive while being compensated several million per year?
Twitter’s User Streams Launching Soon
He's not arguing that it makes it less open, he's saying it brings down the quality of the OS, since carriers can remove features and add their own junk.
I frequently quote the way Joel phrased this:

If you've spent more than 20 minutes of your life writing code, you've probably discovered a good rule of thumb by now: nothing is as simple as it seems.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/NothingIsSimple.html
Twitter User Streams API
But it's their platform. Maybe they don't care today but how do you know they, or the carriers wont care tomorrow? That risk seems at least as big as Apple going back on today's announcement (for the record, I would view both small).
I finally made my peace with procrastination when I stopped fighting against it. Now my secret to productivity is to load several projects onto my agenda so that I end up getting work done as a way of avoiding getting other work done:

http://quandyfactory.com/blog/1/productivity_and_procrastina...
But why are American universities placed so highly in the cited ranking if everything is ashambles as the article author claims?

The university prices are obviously on an inflationary course, but how else do they compare to the world outside?
T-mobile gives you a $20/month discount. I agree that it doesn't make sense with the other carriers. An important issue is that the carriers operate on different bands so your phone is still tied to a specific carrier (if you want 3G to work).
What kind of constructive arguments, exactly, need to be marshaled against it? "Hey, Apple, have you considered that a blanket ban on third-party development tools fucks over developers who use third-party tools?" Why, yes, I suspect that they did consider that.

It's not like there is some equal subtle list of pros and cons that need to be weighed, here.
mrbabyman can go fck himself! I quit using Digg years ago when all my posts would get reposted by mrbabyman. What is the point of me even posting if some other asswipe can post the same dam thing? Just one more time...fck you mrbabyman!
Strange. Didn't Steve Jobs mention he doesn't want another software layer? Because it leads to bad apps and they can't push API changes as fast, because these third party layers have to update?
That makes almost no sense. S3 is a purely network based file delivery service over HTTP, and pre-dates EC2 by a significant amount of time.

A Xen supervisor needs a fair amount of memory for its own operations, plus it can buffer the physical disks in the machine as well as any network attached storage. If these servers were also hosting S3 in their "spare time" it would degrade performance, and expose the system to potential vulnerabilities.
Hopefully the fulfill this promise of being more open. They accidentally leaked financial records of many app developers to their competitors. Nothing has been said about this.

Link to story: http://togapit.com/apple-leaks-sensitive-developer-data/

On another note, I believe they are relaxing the rules due to epic's involvement. A lot of there code uses Lua.