skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's assuming reviewers only derive utility from some product's star rating and not from voicing their opinion. If it were solely game theory, we'd see tons of 1- and 5-star reviews with only one or two lines of text (as this would maximize utility while minimizing the time cost of reviewing). For websites with more affluent user bases, (Yelp, Amazon's non-video game products), that's not the case: there are some epic screeds for and against restaurants and coffee tables.

To me, it looks like a self-selection issue: people only review a product if it either (a) changes their life positively, or (b) causes them trouble. If a product only impacts someone's life in a trivial way, well, why write a 3-star review for a trivially good product?
News Pro: Reuters App for the IPhone Dissapoints
Thomson Reuters, the U.K.-based news service, released News Pro today, a new application for the iPhone, iPod touch, and Blackberry that gives users easy, almost real-time access to Reuters' news wire.
You'd be shocked at how much very expensive enterprise software has never been updated to support anything newer than IE6. It's not that enterprises don't want to upgrade their users, but that their hands are largely tied (hooray for Chrome Frame!).
From a user's perspective, the site loads quick and displays fine. Would there be any particular reason that would motivate the programmers of Subway.com to clean up their code or reformat it in a more efficient way?
Never mentions whether it is on crashes-per-mile basis or just total crashes; around the time period they are referencing I remember a bunch of headlines like this:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008034444...
Ask HN: Suggesting next actions
It seems that from the first day I used a computer, I've wanted it to suggest I do something based on what I've done already. Whether it be click a button, change a setting, or open something, it seems that some actions could easily be guessed and suggested.

Is this pie in the sky or something that seems feasible and useful to the you guys? I know HN has some of the most brilliant people responding to questions and feel that someone has to have thought about this or know of a current project or why there isn't one.
The symbol N stands for the set of nonnegative integers, namely, 0, 1, 2, 3, . . . (ask your instructor for the complete list).

Ah, math humor ;-)
I could have sworn a member of the IE9 team had a comment thread a few weeks back asking for feedback here on HN. I cannot seem to locate it now however -- any help?
Another interesting fact: Both Taiwan (40%) and South Korea (43%) have piracy rates comparable to Singapore (37%), but 5-6 times more IE6 users (32-38% vs 6%). The correlation is not particularly strong there. Other factors might be at play.

In South Korea, for example, all payment gateways and government portals are required by law to have certain "security features", which can only be implemented as an ActiveX control. (Good luck with security!) That explains the 94%+ IE adoption rate. Also, all those ActiveX controls break every time a new version of IE comes out, so users are understandably reluctant to move away from IE6. In fact, I've heard rumors that the only reason IE8 still supports ActiveX is that the South Korean government specifically requested it.

Of course, China and India together totally skew the statistics. Each of them is bigger than everybody else combined.
It happens with victims of assault also. Some people really, really need their back to the wall and places that don't allow that affect their productivity / comfort level.
Here's the company I work for now:

Type of work: web development (PHP)

Project management style: Laid back

Salary/benefits/stock policies: Generous salary, great health benefits 100% paid. Privately held, so no stock, but good bonuses paid monthly

Possible career paths: small company, but expanding, so good opportunities to move up

Size of the company:30

Other perks: half days on Friday, free gym membership, free iPad, fully stocked break room with gourmet coffee

Basically it is a dream job, and it's a 5 minute commute. If I were forced to work anywhere for 10 years, this would have to be it. At the same time, I am an entrepreneur at heart, and I have a growing side business that currently puts me on the verge of not having to work. It's only a matter of time before I stop working altogether to focus on my own business(es). There is nothing I could add to the list above that would change that fact.
Reworded your clarification for my own help:

A German makes 10 widgets in 5 hours and bills 4 hours. The German achieves 2.5 widgets per billed hour.

An American makes 10 widgets in 5 hours and bills 6 hours. The American achieves 1.67 widgets per billed hour.
Muscles Get Tired, Bones Don't.

This is simply incorrect, as are most of the conclusions that follow from it. Basically, many muscles can trade off individual contractile fibers to remain under tension all day without perceived tiredness.

You are not a stack of blocks and you can hurt yourself by pretending that you are. Your body includes tensile as well as compressive structures and the whole thing is tied together with a control system. You are not meant to stand up without reflex muscle contraction! (You also aren't meant to sit or stand in one position for very long, but that's a longer discussion).

I trained as an Alexander Technique Teacher, but for the technically inclined I'd recommend reading Moshe Feldenkrais's Awareness Through Movement as an antidote to this way of thinking. See Understanding Balance by Tristan Roberts for more detailed information about postural reflexes.
Deleted Facebook and MySpace Posts Are Discoverable--Romano v. Steelcase
GCC plugin-based ORM for C++
I do recommend yousendit instead. For me, the "sending big files to someone" is a great hook to get them using the rest of dropbox' features.

Judging by the downvotes, I guess nobody agrees with me :)
It's not just the μ-law backend, though; it's also the codecs used on the cellphone network. For example, 3G GSM supports AMR-WB, which is apparently fairly good quality, but the carriers don't have to enable it. Some European carriers use it; but they have actual competition. I'm pretty sure AT&T, for one, limits their network to AMR, at half the bitrate.

FaceTime can do better because Apple is bypassing the carrier network altogether.
20 years later, the girl is still in therapy.
11b) Dick likes to show his supervisors how much work he does so he schedules meetings with his "team" at 7:30AM and 5:00PM, then takes a long lunch.
It's not just the game. The community surrounding it is so damn loyal and enthusiastic. Notch is a god to them.
Websockets everywhere with Socket.IO
There are two things. First, although the above transformation is theoretically possible to achieve with statically typed language, it is for sure harder in practice. In contrast, in Erlang it is super easy and natural although it may often seem as ad-hoc. But being able to do something like like on the fly is tremendously useful in practice.

Second, which is more important -- in my first example, I forgot to mention about the ability to use two versions of the same module at the same time. Check the thread below for more details.
Whew, that's gag-worthy.

I think their problem is they are trying to make "experiences" when people really just want quality software.
The author got the original statement backwards, partly because the original quote was confusing. From the Geohegan interview:

"Look at their productivity rates. They’re like ours. I think we understate our hours and they overstate them, because they take so much time off and sneak off early from work. If the productivity rates being reported are officially the same, and if they’re understating and we’re overstating, they’re probably working more efficiently than we are, and maybe the fact that they’re taking time off has something to do with that."

Sounds like Geohegan himself made a mistake in the second sentence, which could have led to the confusion.
If it matters that much to you, just say "no" when they ask if you support IE6. However, I agree with the article: it's a good strategy which seems to have worked for at least one person.
I'm wondering what are the major side effects of this. Hmm?
Running a startup is way much difficult than working for Facebook.
Thanks for the tip, I'll look into implementing it within the next 1-2 weeks.

Right now there are a few other conditions that need to be fixed (the data store being full, adding a purge-least-used, handling the fetch API failing, etc, etc) before I make any changes to how the data is stored.
Middle Market M&A Heats Up
What's cheaper in Germany? Housing appears to cost about as much as a major US metro area. Transportation costs more. Health care is obviously cheaper, but Germans pay much higher taxes. Food appears to be just slightly cheaper in Germany.
If you talk to people in the real estate biz (I too have been looking for a house), you'll find that banks have about twice as many properties sitting empty as they do out in the market, and they are trickling them out because if they put them all on the market at once prices would crater (which would incidentally trigger another wave of repossessions).

That right there should tell you that prices are still artificially high. In this case banks are controlling the market to hold them up. By the way, putting them all on the market would not necessarily lead to another wave of foreclosures.

If it's the government propping up house prices, kidly explain why prices are stable when there are ~300,000 homes in various stages of foreclosure:

Foreclosures are primarily driven by the owners ability to make their mortgage payment. Current house prices have little to do with that ability. A lower price could prevent the owner from being able to sell, but that assumes there would have been buyers at the higher price.

Seriously, what information are you basing these conclusions on?

Prices have come down, but the government has done it's best to hold interest rates artificially low so that people could refi and possibly get out of the idiotic loans they took on. These low rates have also helped those with money buy houses at the still over priced prices thus propping them up. There are also government sponsored loan modifications that help to keep people in homes that they can't afford. House prices are 'sticky' on the way down by nature, but the government has helped make them stickier through all the help they have been giving.

Historically house prices have been set by the average income of a given area (and in general prices raised along with inflation like salaries)[1]. This is because people buy a house based on the monthly payment that they can afford. Low interest rates lead to higher priced homes and and vice versa (as an aside the best time to buy a house would be when irates are sky high and likely to fall because the absolute price of the house would have to be lower for anyone to afford it), but what stays roughly the same is the payment.

What happened during the bubble is that money was so cheap that house prices ran way out in front of most peoples ability to afford a house without taking on a crazy loan. Even in areas where prices have fallen, if you compare prices to average income you'll see that many houses are still way beyond the average persons ability to afford them. In addition to the supply situation you mentioned, if you also add in that many people have been permanently put out of the market with banks now requiring down payments, better credit scores, and conventional loans the demand side of the equation has also fallen (and may never return to those levels).

[1] Like most rules there are exceptions, in particular location. An area where many rich people buy second homes for vacation purposes may not reflect house price as a function of average salary for the area. Common sense will tell you if you're in one of those neighborhoods versus one where the people living there work nearby.
What CPUs? As the article says, the NUMA characteristics show up with Optera and Nehalems; older Intel chips didn't have it.
Mark Zuckerberg and Jesse Einsberg talk.
From the outside looking in: Dave Fowler & chart.io (YC Summer 2010)
yeah the Go To Country Switch is a product of sheer brilliance
In case anybody is still reading this thread, here is an ugly diagram of Thimbl's network topology:

https://docs.google.com/drawings/edit?id=182y8FZDPvY1R-SQnYC...
We have Google analytics for the web app, as well as the unread count for each user, so we can see if they are looking at the deals or not.

As far as monetization, we were thinking of either affiliate revenue or selling the app if people were willing to pay for it, but the main goal was to see if we could make something people liked.
If I'm understanding your question correctly, (applications of machine learning) there are plenty of examples of this.

See google search suggestions, facebook's news stream, google ad suggestions, last.fm and pandora's music suggestions, etc.

Read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning, and you too can know as much about machine learning as I do!

(edit): actually if you read the wiki article you will know an infinite amount more about machine learning than me.
Disclaimer as usual: I dont speak for MSFT, yada, yada.

I rarely get into one of these 'defend-MSFT' threads but I couldn't let one more of these 'MSFT engineers are great but marketing is not' threads go by.

I think your characterization of how product managers and devs/PMs/test work at MSFT is way wrong and represents a simplistic 'engineers vs bean counters/marketing' of sorts (apologies if that's a strawman). It's always a tag team effort and it's not always easy to see the boundaries between marketing/biz dev/engineering. All sides take part in collective decisions. If you have any real issues with big product decisions for any product at Microsoft, you need to go to a VP or the executive team. And most Microsoft VPs are from a engineering lineage.

On a separate topic, I have nothing to do with IE but in this case, the product managers seem to be working really, really hard with what is a extremely hostile crowd. In some cases, the community has assumed what the real answer should be and even when they get the absolute straight line on why something the way it is, there is disbelief. (the truth as what I would hear if I met Dean Hachamovitch in an elevator and asked him the same question as a Microsoftie).
Apple Logo Is an Agnostic's Crucifix, Star of David: Study
Still can't find a link to the SIGGRAPH talk but the libnoise tutorial is a nice example of how to code this sort of thing

http://libnoise.sourceforge.net/tutorials/tutorial3.html
<snip>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html lang="en-US">
<head id="Head">
<!---->
<!-- DotNetNuke� - http://www.dotnetnuke.com -->
<!-- Copyright (c) 2002-2008 -->
<!-- by DotNetNuke Corporation -->
<!---->
</snip>

From the URL above...
Seems like online shopping's suggested items (such as shopping on Amazon) would fit the bill, or maybe the recently opened menus common on many programs provide suggested actions (even context-specific menu options). Am I misunderstanding your question?
This is awesome Jacob, and good work from Django Core - there's a few things for python-core to consider here as well.
alt="Were Winners Eat!"
Having worked on IE back in the day, I can take a good guess as to why XP isn't supported. (I haven't had the time to read all of the reddit responses yet).

It comes down to cost. Microsoft tests everything way way more than is apparent from the outside. Adding XP support (backporting some version of software D2D) is probably not that difficult from an engineering perspective, but the ongoing test cost is significant. That functionality/cost tradeoff is largely out of the engineering teams hands.

The chain of 'whys' probably goes like this:

Q: Why can't they do XP?
A: Because D2D isn't on XP and because of test cost.

Q: Why is test so expensive?
A: They have to test the hell out of it and XP increases the matrix.

Q: Why so much testing?
A: Because of long release cycles means you only have one chance to get it right.

Q: Why long release cycles?
A: IE is part of Windows and OEMs and Enterprises want long lead times to qualify software.

Q: Why is IE part of windows and not disjoint like all other browsers?
A: IE has to roll up to some P&L in Microsoft and the mission is to make Windows a more compelling platform.

BTW -- Safari 5 doesn't run on Mac OS X 10.4...
flavour-of-the-month journalism

You have a redundant adjective there.
True, Business arrangements like whilte labelling do involve written agreements. But having a written agreement is just one factor, how robust the written agreement is in protecting the rights of the IP owner, hmm that would depend.

And usually you would want lawyers who are on your side of the table to review, if not write up the agreement, not the lawyers that the prospective business partner brings (unless they are a well known and trusted entity whose creds are sky high, like in the case of YC)

Also, a legal document, especially dealing with international business is only as good as the country with the weaker and less robust legal system. I am originally from India, a country with a democratic government, relatively decent free will and an independent judicial system, and still it is far from being as robust as that in the US. Now there are many countries where the legal system is no where as independent as the one in India, so you can make a guess as to how much protection the legal systems in those less 'free' countries will give in spite of having a 'legal document' in place.

This also happens to be the reason why I am trying to set up a company in the US first for my next start up, because it still offers one of the best protection for businesses, while simultatneously being one of the best markets.
The Plans For Steve Jobs' New House
Good points and I agree with you to an extent.

However, large corporations that aren't upgrading probably aren't encouraging, nor do they want, their workers to be visiting cutting edge sites. Usually the computers/browsers are used for company intranet stuff, which doesn't require advanced features. If anything keeping workers from visiting new, cool, cutting edge sites (regardless of what they may be) would actually be incentive to stay with IE6. I do concede, though, that there probably is a fair amount of necessary browsing to other client websites, distributors, etc that needs done.
yea that appears to be DNN

But subway.com root has

<meta content="SharePoint.WebPartPage.Document" name="ProgId">
<meta content="full" name="WebPartPageExpansion">

who knows what the hell they are actually doing... Whatever it is - it's an ugly ass kludge
Even assuming that many tenants will lie, you can ask the landlord or the broker. Now it gives them a harder choice: instead of not telling you they have to lie. Quite an improvement, IMHO.

Also, many things can be checked even without asking if you know what to look for.
What is this technology that you are trying to partner with search engine (assuming that it is because you mentioned Bing)? I'm asking this because Yahoo is going to be integrated into/with Bing soon...so I don't see why you would want to partner with Yahoo. Well, I don't know what is the product in the first place.
> Its almost like someone has a gun to their head and they are really carefully with what they say.

It's not just one gun. Saying the wrong thing can get you in trouble with any number of people: lawyers, PR, managers, and other employees.

I suspect that much of this is due to Microsoft being a large company, but I can't be sure as Microsoft is the only large company that I've worked for.
1) reusability
2) maintainability
3) self pride
With just a few days of revenue, Notch could retain world class accountants, lawyers, and sys-admins for years. :)
Then this is probably right up your alley: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/cmbishop/prml/

"Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning". And I dare say there may be more space used on the equations than on the text.
Fair enough. You do make some good points. =) However, I think it's fair to say the Office for Mac team has done a lot more to make their software for the Mac, rather than just a mere port.
Yep... after all, I can (anecdotally) point to a number of successful businesses in which the founders were simply trying to get rich.
I see, so he's essentially proposing a memory to memory swap functionality as opposed to just memory to disk. It sounds like a workable solution, although it would require some engineering in the kernel paging algorithms. You'd also need to make changes to the scheduler so that you could intelligently schedule threads on the node where their memory is. It sounds doable, but it seems that this is a lot of work for kernel engineers to do that could be done by software that is NUMA aware.
Thanks for your insights. I like the "how disappointed would you be" approach since it's a question users can easily answer that conveys actionable information.

Incidentally, I just ordered the "Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development" that I found through HN, and quite a few people on here endorsed. If anyone's interested, I'll share the results of reading/applying that book.
I was going to say just this. I think voice calls in general are obsolete. Unless it's an emergency, email or text me and I'll look at it when I have time.
Heck, I want this in my hacking. Grep for all the TODO/FIXME and run it through MTURK....

hmmm

Might work better if you write a test for the code.
I really liked the part of Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age that had the main character, as an exercise, go through learning how to program all kinds of low-level parts via physical analogs (gears and water sluices and so on) in her illustrated primer’s story, and then realize at the end that she understood how real computers work.
Journey Infographic: Freelance to freedom
They're definitely not obsolete, at least outside of technology companies. Many businesses use a fax machine on a daily basis to send documents and order forms, as it's much easier than scanning things and then emailing them.
Was wondering where the "Machiavellian management style" came in, since the article merely describes a pointy-haired micromanager.

Your items are Machiavellian indeed -- misguided "cunning duplicity" to "keep his people on edge" by deceiving or manipulating for his personal gain.

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1615524
Why I won't TurnItIn
You're probably right about the labor-saving techniques. In Germany, you get gardeners with automatic leaf blowers (i.e., faster, but more noise), and with a whole slew of bottom-tier jobs (such as supermarket baggers) missing. The car industry is purely based on robots and automation - which is probably the same in the US.
Ireland has the same problems that the US has right now: Not enough industry. Germany actually produces a lot, which made the crisis less severe, even considering that the German finance sector basically did everything wrong they could do wrong. The boom in Ireland was founded on the service industry, with huge tax breaks to finance it. And the US has been moving more and more industrial jobs offshore.

I don't want to over-simplify. The US has a higher population and thus doesn't need to export as much. But actually manufacturing something ain't that bad. Didn't someone complain recently that even Silicon Valley is doing that less and less?
I used to do html/css layouts very frequently just a few years back, and after tracking my hours to determine this, I found that coding for IE6 idiosyncrasies essentially doubled my html/css dev time.

So I'd have a layout done and ready to go in Safari, Opera and Firefox (Chrome wasn't on the market then) in 4 hours, and it'd take another 4 just to get it working correctly in IE6.

Luckily though, I billed hourly (so it was never really a problem), but it just amazed me to realize how much money clients were throwing away trying to support IE6 at the time.