skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The greatest myth that exists about meetings is that they are inherently bad." -- Patrick Lencioni in "Death by Meeting"

The real problem is not meetings themselves, but that most meetings are run ineffectively. Contrary to what one might expect based on the title, "Death by Meeting" recommends having more meetings, but gives guidelines on how to run them effectively.
> So if the sunlit side is under higher pressure, how do the hydrogen atoms return to that side? I must still be missing something.

The article says it is compressed in order to move it back to the high pressure side.

> Also, is there really enough hydrogen ionizing at 400C?

I don't believe (traditional) ionization is occurring. My guess is that it works at the molecular level like reverse osmosis works with salt water to form fresh water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_osmosis The dissociation of the hydrogen atoms into protons and electrons is through heat and pressure, facilitated by the semi-permeable membrane.

Note that the membrane is key and is very unique. Johnson [...] proved he could make a ceramic membrane capable of withstanding temperatures above 400 degrees Celsius. A semi-permeable plastic membrane is non-trivial. A semi-permeable ceramic membrane that passes protons, strips electrons, and blocks hydrogen atoms while running at 400^C has to be really, really tough to do.
One common technique used by agile methodologies (yes, I know that word has a ton of baggage) is to estimate in terms of story points rather than actual hours, days, etc. You start out thinking of a point as "one ideal day of uninterrupted work" to use as an anchoring point, and then for any work you want to do you break that work down into stories that you can estimate work for. If the story is bigger than about 3 points, you break it down further; if you can't estimate it, you do more research so you can.

The important part is not that the estimates match any number of hours per se, but rather than the relative weighting is about right, such that something you estimated as 3 points is, in actuality, about 3 times as much work as something estimated at 1 point, and all 1 point stories are roughly comparable in terms of work.

What you then do is to empirically estimate the actual mapping of points to hours/days as you work by tracking your velocity. In a 40-hour work week, how many points do you actually get done? As you get better at estimating, ideally your velocity becomes more stable, and then you can map from points back to days in order to make scheduling decisions. We switched over project planning and estimation to that strategy on a fairly large project I was leading, and it helped give us much more accurate overall estimates.

Now, that's all easier to do when you're working on a long-term project, you're familiar with the existing code base and the problem domain, etc. such that you can actually break things down into stories and do reasonable estimates.

That said, I think that the general idea of point-based estimation is still useful for you: rather than trying to estimate hours or days, work on getting better at relative estimation using something like points, and then empirically measure your mapping from points to hours to determine your likely schedule and how much you should bill.
Meetings aren't the problem, in my opinion. People who don't know how to properly run meetings are.

I spent some time in the military, and one of the best skills that experience ever taught me was how to properly prepare for and run a meeting.

Some people prepare too much for meetings with useless props/aids that aren't required, some people allow the attendees of the meeting to derail the subject uselessly, and so on and so on.

I'm a consultant in a large game company right now, and there are too many "emails instead of meetings" types. It's amazing how a quick 10 minute discussion at someone's desk can replace a solid day of useless and confusing email "discussions".

Meetings and email threads are simply tools to get the job done, and as with everything, it's a matter of picking the right tool for the job at hand.
Why Reddit's been slow lately (dev group post)
Google also had a talk about liquid Thorium fission reactors. That seemed doable.
How a Physically Aware Internet Will Change the World
Reposting my comment from the blog:

Browsers are the one responsible for providing the referer information to the web server. If you come from somewhere that isn't a browser page, it is sent without a referer (and considered a "direct link")

I wish I could track visits from external apps and bookmarks, but there are some privacy concerns, too.
The phrase "got busted" can mean merely "was discovered".
Explain that to a potential investor. "We snubbed 2% of our potential user base because we were too lazy to make sure that our site degrades gracefully." From the article, that's _6 million_ of Yahoo!'s 300M+ user base.

I really don't understand what's the big deal about making sure your site works without JS, it's just some extra work that you're going to have to do anyway later down the line (and it will be more complex then).
I wonder how much of Zuckerberg's time all these lawsuits take up. I can just imagine him saying, "AGHHHHHHHH, ANOTHER ONE?!"
The menus have cut, but I have never figured out how to use it.
Would you though? Surely anyone who buys a Mac would just use OS X (and then dual boot Windows for whatever reason they needed it for.)
The Linux kernel has grown more during the last 2-3 years than ever before. Kernel level stuff is something you can't (yet?!?) host in the cloud, which lends credibility to the original argument.
If you've read up on YCombinator, go an hour and a half late. I was at the Boston Q&A last night. Nothing I didn't already know was brought up during the Q&A. The real value is the conversation after the Q&A session is over.
More discussion at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1787510

That thread is linked to an Engadget post, now off the front page but with 107 comments as of this writing, compared to 18 here.
An author of innovation discusses failure and taking risk
My start-up contributes to open source (mostly the route-me framework for iPhone mapping).

We see it as good business. We are known to be route-me experts, which has helped us sell our platform for mobile map dev (and dev devices).
Hopefully they'll let one of the larger rapid-prototyping companies handle that task.

Typically, when I need more than a handful of 3D rapid prototypes I'll order cast urethane pieces. The rapid prototype shop will take my part, create a two-piece SLA (type of 3D printing) mold, then cast the individual pieces in this 3D-printed mold. Turn-around times are very quick.

Lately, though, I've been able to get molds cut and have 20-100 first article pieces (sans final texture) in 4-6 weeks from China. If they've already settled on the design, they may want to just send the $50 contributors a first article and then ship them a final unit again later. Of course, it's not entirely the same feel as a 3D printed part, but it's probably far stronger and still gets them to the front of the line.
I'm consistently surprised at the kind of things Kickstarter projects offer to donors. If a project becomes really successful, some projects may get into a bind. One project offered a phone call to donors, which alone would be really difficult with a lot of people. (>1000?)
I bought a Toshiba Portege r705 (13") last weekend and run Linux (ArchLinux) on it exclusively. The only issue I have had with it is that backlight control goes away after resuming from a suspend. Everything else works flawlessly, and the laptop is vastly superior compared to a Macbook Pro as far as what you get for your dollar.

$780 at Best Buy for 3.0lbs, 2.4GHz Core i3, 4GB, 500GB 5400RPM drive, dual-layer DVD writer, SD slot, HDMI and VGA out, eSATA port, built-in 4G (Linux-compatible with mainline kernel drivers), chiclet keyboard similar to Macbooks, 13" 1366x768 display (glossy but less glossy than a Macbook).

Get a ThinkPad if you want to spend more.
I think this is a cool idea.
A bit over half of the tickets are officially sold now.
There is no good freelancing site that caters to bigger companies for i.e. embedded development that requires (part-time) on-site work. The companies have a hard time finding good consultants, and vice versa. Many locally acting middle men make a lot of money from this possibly easy-to-solve communication problem.
Fixed, my memory failed me. You are right, it was Bejeweled 2.
There are some people who aren't really getting CarWoo, so I'm gonna try and explain:

CarWoo is sort of a domain-specific CRM. It lets you manage communication with dealers in terms of providing an RFQ interface and in terms of controlling the conversation flow by serving as a middle man.

If you're fine locating and emailing all your regional dealers, accepting the risk of spam, voicemail and general bother for the next couple of months, collecting all responses in a spreadsheet and comparing to various market data on your own... I don't think CarWoo's for you.

CarWoo seems to me to be aimed squarely at the experience of buying a new car. Part of the experience is getting a great price, of course, but if your goal is to shave off every last dollar convenience-be-damned there are plenty of more labor intensive processes available.
This is a complaint, not a business insight: "Those customers that were working on a hobby business, or just something they were not investing in significantly, seemed to have the time to tweet all day long, post multiple negative comments on every possible channel available, and shout the loudest." Same with the TechCrunch section.

If you choose to make an apology, you might as well make it sound as sincere as possible.
A nonstandard port removes a crazy amount of login attempts though for something as simple as adding:

Host example.com
Port #####

to your ~/.ssh/config
There's not much you can do to get useful work out of low temperature differentials. Carnot's theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_heat_engine#Carnot.27s_t...) says that the maximum efficiency of a heat engine is n = 1 - T_cold / T_hot, where the temperatures are given on the Kelvin scale (i.e. absolute temperatures).

That means between say 20 Celsius and 45 Celsius you will never convert more than 8% of the thermal energy that needs to flow from hot to cold into useful work.
Meetings are necessary to get everyone on the same page. Short term it is difficult to see the benefits of meetings, but long-term success is only achievable if everyone is cohesively chasing the same goal.

I completely agree that meetings need to have a concrete agenda and should not allow anyone to monopolize air time. But they are important.
You might want to adjust the pricing tiers. With $19/$79/$399 per month tiers, I have to guess that most people will start by trying the lowest tier; but that's limited to 2k visitors.

If you're doing an A/B test with 2k visitors and you've got an "A" conversion rate of 1%, you need to see a 60% improvement (16 conversions vs. 10) in order to have statistical significance. That's a huge improvement, and I doubt many people will be that lucky.

You'll probably be better off setting the limit for the lowest tier at 10k (and adjusting the others upwards too); that should dramatically increase the number of new users who find your service useful and stick around.

EDIT: Or another option would be to have a "free 10,000 visitors" trial rather than a "free 30 days" trial.
Keep your 'legacy technology' demands away from our cellphones
Looks really exciting. Sounds like a great idea. I'm looking forward to checking it out.
Don't make me hunt down the video of Stephen Colbert getting paid per use of the word.
Just to add to this, I would center it around the 'process' of trying to select the winners if this is all being done off historical data, otherwise people will just game the system via google/wikipedia.

That being said, I definitely like the idea of having it be a social sort of tool where people compete on the winners.

Perhaps using the data you can somehow figure out how to generate random horse races based on real historical data and real horses and then people can really try to pick the winners instead of game the system for points through a simple google search.
Sorry you thought the video was dry. I'm not the best voice actor in the world. We were thinking of putting a song from the Inception soundtrack in the background or using a real voice actor from http://www.voices.com/

Do you think either would help?

Also, would love to share how we went about determining our various plans and rates. We did a lot of customer development on this and it might be interesting to other entrepreneurs. Let me know if you are interested and we'll blog about it.
most open source doesn't depend on companies paying someone to work on it

Not directly, but there is a correlation. For example the amount of open source that our shop puts out is definitely related to workload - as we have shed staff, the remaining people start to burn out and have less time for side projects, "personal development", as well as less energy for coding at home.

Our enthusiasm has not waned, but our ability to tap into it has diminished. I don't recommend it, it's bad for morale. Good devs need room to grow, and open source is a great outlet for this.
I'm also guessing the majority of NoScript users have exceptions whitelisted for many trusted sites, given how many sites are completely useless without JS.
Are you sure you're going to keep that ! at the end of CarWoo? Like Yahoo!?
Those are questions of policy rather than law. What you propose seems very sensible to me from an economic and diplomatic point of view. But as you must have noticed, there are a lot of people who are loudly against more immigration; primarily illegal immigration, but once you get past that the main lobbying groups (CIS, FAIR) would like less of all immigration. Also, such reforms are never popular during periods of high unemployment; and finally, a very small number of people who come to the US are actual crooks fleeing from justice, or involved in the flesh trade, etc..
> it's actually there for copyright protection

Not really - you can't copyright facts. IANAL, but if you want to create a map based on another map's information, you're free to do so. Google Feist v. Rural for more info.
A Mac "Retina" display wouldn't necessarily have to be 326 dpi like the iPhone 4's: computer displays are usually quite a bit further away from the user than iPhone displays.
I don't have any experience with other laptops, but both my previous Thinkpad Z61m and my current Lenovo T500 have been great at running Linux and generally running without a problem. The only thing that really sucks are the batteries. On average they last around 18 months, so you have to take 2 * $100 for new batteries into account.
For those unfamiliar with Craig Hockenberry, he is a talented developer with high standing in the Mac and iOS developer communities.

He writes at http://furbo.org and wrote the book, “iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual” (http://appdevmanual.com/).
Yes, we designed Optimizely with precisely this use case in mind. Here is the documentation on how to set this up: http://support.optimizely.com/faqs/getting-started/experimen...

To clarify: If you want to run one experiment on a single dynamic page (not multiple dynamic pages) you can do that as long as the structure of the page does not change. The best way to find out is to just try it. Load one of these dynamic pages in the tool and create your variations. Then put the embed code on your site and click "Preview variation" from the variation drop-down menu (you can get there by clicking the small upside down triangle next to the variation title, e.g. "Variation #1"). If you have the embed code on your site this will show you the page on your live site. You do NOT need to start the experiment to do this.

Hope that answers your question
Perhaps related: Illness (with effects similar to fatigue, or worse). Particularly frustrating when it's chronic and without a ready remediation.

I don't mean it as a cop-out. But rather, that if one is experiencing such a problem, it needs addressing. Overcoming it through sheer willpower makes for a good TV movie but can be counter-productive when taken on as an objective, personal measure -- especially when others are echoing Nike's "just do it" in lieu of actually helping fix the problem.

Lose the slogan, and put getting healthy at the top of the list. If your medical provider has nothing to offer, keep looking.
That decline looks too "perfect" to be believable.

My theory: projects migrate away from sourceforge and don't bother to enlist new repositories in ohloh.
Here is a good example... where you get an idea how it might be useful

http://searchstream.co/index.php?search=mp3+arcade+fire+subu...
Once they distribute it, they are not just users anymore. The people who receive it are the priority with GPL. The major difference with the GPL is that the user is king.
Already successful companies rarely can hand out 5% shares just like that, the existing shareholders probably won't have it. I'm fairly sure the OP is referring to "5% of app profits" offers, i.e. shares in a yet non-existant enterprise. You'd effectively be acting as an angel investor in a company run by someone who won't actually do anything. (investing time rather than money)
Another approach, though more alpha in code/docs:

http://github.com/jvinet/jive
We were too lazy to spend at least twice the time creating the product.

Shorter version:
2x more work does not justify 2%
Do any of these A/B testing tools support offline conversions in any meaningful way? For us a phone call is a conversion. I'd love to be able to build the logic to support that once (give me an API call along with GET parameters to the page that I can post back to you), and then be able to use tools like this to actually try different tests.
Yes! https pages are a great place to start experimenting because they are so close to the conversion event most businesses care about: making money. Optimizely works seamlessly on https and http pages alike.
Do you have info on the way the lines change from initially being set to post time? That shit is totally fixed, if you could figure out what certain line changes mean in terms of predicting a winner you could perhaps make some money.
You are not alone. Many of the (real) programmers I know fit the reclusive but highly intelligent stereotype and don't have Facebook, MySpace (does it still exist?) or Twitter accounts. But all of the programmers I know would gladly profit off of the, as Zuckerburg referred to them, "dumb fucks" who just give out their information to any website that asks for it.
It's potentially a lot of extra work. If your site's UI is heavy on the AJAX, a non-JS option basically means writing a completely separate UI.

Explain to an investor, "We don't have features X, Y, and Z, which our competitors have, because we were spending time maintaining the non-JS version for 2% of our user base.".
If your web page is a simple marketing site, blog, or e-store, then I completely agree.

But if your web page is a complex application, having to support no-JS either shuts you out from from a huge set of interface tools, or forces you to maintain two interfaces in tandem. To me, 2% doesn't justify that, particularly when you can just politely inform the user that their browser has a significant feature disabled, and inform them how they can remedy the situation so that your site works.
Very good response, I agree that the base functionality should exist without Javascript, and I would assume that most who disable it are willing to forego bells and whistles, but will still use your site if the basics work. This also ties into best practices of having Javascript which degrades properly.
Really: New Windows Phone 7 Official Ad
This is a term that can lead to mis-communication. Most of the context I know the term "got busted" implies punishment. The exact usage and implications vary from place to place, often varying by very large amounts, so care is required in the usage of such informal terms.
What's the USP on Optimzely when compared to the already quite formidably awesome Visual Website Optimizer?

Also, as someone that really wants to incorporate this tech into my larger scale marketing efforts I am put off by the pricing models to both of the above mentioned sources.

When only one of several ad campaigns are doing 100k visitors a day you can see how that pricing model does me no good. Particularly when you take into consideration that I never stop testing -something- on a campaigns landing page.

Also would love an API so that something like this could be tightly integrated into my custom conversion analytics solution.

Congratulations on your launch nonetheless.
FFS, use Adblock
You are so fuckin wrong, JS is not a security vulnerability it's a programing language.

Wikipedia: JavaScript is an implementation of the ECMAScript language standard and is typically used to enable programmatic access to computational objects within a host environment.

If you want real privacy, then why not just disable cookies? ohhh your login won't work... well then just disable your internet connection then.

Disabling JS wastes bandwidth because you can't do partial page replacements. OMG so much stupidity.

Edit: So many downvoting trolls.
Edit #2: Even more trolls who can't even leave a reply.
And you know who I'm talking about. :-)
Great question! Visitors are bucketed randomly into each variation. Once they have been bucketed they are cookied and will see the same variation over and over again if they reload the page

You specify how much traffic you want to allocate to each bucket. You can do this when editing an experiment and going to "Advanced Settings" :: "Percentage of Traffic to Variations"
No, they don't give any permissions with OpenID. This page lists both OpenID and OAuth-using services. For an example of a service that uses OAuth, try LaTeX Lab (http://docs.latexlab.org/), which uses OAuth to get access to your Google Docs.
Thanks. You should submit it.
According to The Economist the 3D printing is outsourced to Shapeways so the load shouldn't be a problem.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/10/small-scale_p...

Shapeways is apparently already doing north of 10k prints a month:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/shapeways-and-its-3...
A map isn't an abstract collection of facts -- it's a picture drawn by a team of cartographers. You can definitely copyright that picture.
But the non-information that is the trap door makes the whole copyrightable.

If the trap door shows up on your map, you cannot claim that your map is factual. You cannot claim your map is a 100% copy of mine, either, as that would be copyright infringement. IANAL, but I doubt that a judge would rule otherwise.
Related: MapQuest is headquartered in Denver, Colorado. It used to be that if you searched Google Maps for MapQuest, it would point you to the wrong location.... which gave MapQuest a good idea of which MapQuest job candidates used Google for directions to their place.
Once you're into the territory of building custom UI controls, effort starts going up, up, up. I've found the existing UI classes to be perfectly good for their intended purpose, but try extending them and they'll frequently break, requiring either a rewrite or late nights of debugging (and you don't get UIKit's source). This is particularly deadly when doing contract work and the client's designer is used to web dev, where you can often hack around stuff. On iOS, "trivial" design changes sometimes cause major headaches.

The other not-so-obvious complexity here is probably the data model, which seems far from trivial, especially given the constrained memory environment (lots of images, etc.).

The times don't seem unrealistic at all to me.