skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This line was ominous:

"By the time they got the Adam fixed and were shipping again, people believed that it was an unreliable system, and shyed away from it."

Hoping that NotionInk does not make the mistake Coleco did. One thing that stands apart though is that the blog posts have been made by an engineer and not a marketing guy. Having witnessed first hand how marketing guys can spit-shine a product, I must say there is some hope but only time will tell.
For what it's worth: that's new. I checked earlier to find out who this person was, and the profile simply had a link to http://gruupr.com/. The profile update seems fishy.
The thinking required for engineering and that for science are different spaces for solving problems. Understanding real world problems uses scientific thought processes. And to obtain solutions one has to adopt engineering -- the world has too many variables which only a deployed solution can capture. Of course, getting to the final solution requires multiple iterations between the two spaces.
The article talks about losing IT jobs to other countries but for many of the reasons mentioned in the article, several states in this country are beginning to consolidate their IT operations as well: http://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2007/05/08/state-it...

My state is allegedly planning to transfer all state IT personnel (including the ones working for the universities) to the state capitol within the next four years. I can't say that I blame them. In addition to the wastefulness that I've seen, state IT workers are sometimes worse than DMV employees when it comes to customer service.
It's a test/dev machine, I'm pretty sure that's the point.
Or one could say the former is full of Joe Sixpack clock-punchers who spend 50% of the day on ESPN.com whereas the latter are creating the infrastructure for the jobs the IT types will be going to DeVry for in the future.
It's true, I put it through pretty light usage, with a meg or two data over wifi a day, a few texts and calls. Still gets 2x the life of any other phone I've ever had my hands on though, no matter how light I used them.
Did they happen to mention that the position had become available as a result of your email?
Next time he should buy treasuries instead.
I am - however I have real problems with UI.

I think the coloring and the font sizes they use are backwards (the light gray coloring, with the white and blue make it very hard to visually skim and see how many answers things have, for example) - the ability to identify topics / find topics is difficult to navigate. Keyboard shortcuts in the browser break. The nesting levels are too shallow to allow for deeper discussions - they limit it to mono-dimensional responses with one layer of comments on answers.

email addresses and links don't work in posting boxes.

And a number of other things.

The quality of the content is superb, however (although there is a bit too much grammar nazi-ism, which I feel actually detracts from the flow of information at times)

so, Yeah I like the site - but the UI makes it difficult for that use to be fluid and efficient.
When was I complaining about injustices? I like to think myself a fairly good developer for my experience level and age group and, thus far, employment opportunities have not been scant.

My point was that if you don't actually know how to do anything you probably won't have a job. This is true of both of the examples you put out but not true of the people I'm talking about.
I get the feeling that the "avoiding a lawsuit" justification for not supplying feedback is a result of cargo cult thinking, not actual evidence.
> There's no need to be local today. You can work on anyone's problems from anywhere.

Having worked on several distributed or offshore software development teams before, this statement strikes me as more than a little bit optimistic.
No, the former usually works at a company whose profit doesn't come from software or computers. They usually work on internal-facing systems that other members of the company are forced/required to use to get their work done.

The latter is usually the exact opposite of this.

Disclosure: I am in the former group and really want to be part of the latter group.
The media is very adept at avoiding the real news so if it wasn't Anon it would likely be Assange's "rape".
When you deposit your money in the bank, make sure it doesn't look like you're structuring:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring
Also, unfortunately I think income is also a difficult split to have happen. If you are looking for scale, at some point, some investment will be needed. Even with scalable resource architectures, two co-founders can only answer so many customer communications. That recapitalization will need to be factored in based on a communally accepted baseline. In essence, you can factor in a unit-based investiture that pays out dividends on meeting certain business liquidity scenarios and operating rules. Those units can be sold or traded at will, with new buy in "partners" accepting the new operating license of the business. Remaining unit holders vote changes to the operating license.

I give it 4 months and the SEC will come knocking, guaranteed.
fortunately, most wealth is invested in ventures that hire people.

The economic disasters that impoverish so many are not caused by the rich who've worked to create their wealth but by those who mismanage economies and abuse others to benefit themselves and their friends. These thieves are rich to be sure, but a distinction should be made between the two groups.
I hear you brother. I do ask myself this sometimes.

I came to conclusion that I'm passionate about the "game"! Not money, not the product but figuring out the game of:

1. how my domain/system works

2. where is money

3. who are players, their motivations

4. how do customers/users function

trying out different hypothesis (gaming) for each of the above and seeing data and learning the GAME!

Once you KNOW THE GAME, you can use it anywhere else.

PS: Wall St 2 reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzPFCKDexok
The bargain being made here though is reduced liability in exchange for missing out on a chance to make a really positive impression with someone who has had a pretty serious and beyond-the-surface experience with your company. I think this is the primary point the blog author is trying to make.
There's a global shortage of competent software developers.

There's not a global shortage of IT Support people.
Here in Texas, I've always heard that you cannot call yourself any type of engineer without being licensed as a Professional Engineer. Is this still true? This came about when the MCSE was still around. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Certified_Professiona....
Basically, because all the lefties (and I mean the real lefties, not the 51st-percentile leftish types) need to wind up somewhere, and they don't much like working in the private sector where they're expected to aim towards (gasp!) profit. So they wind up in society's other nooks and crannies, with the university system being one of the largest.

If you're smart and left-wing you become a professor. If you're moderately smart and left-wing you become a university librarian. If you're dumb and left-wing you wind up working at the DMV.

Incidentally, while science professors can actually be a reasonably ideologically-diverse bunch, I doubt you'll ever find much diversity among university librarians.
I can't find any direct links, but I'd suggest Robin Hanson's blog (overcomingbias.com). His hypothesis is that most political/voting activity is done primarily for the purposes of a sense of identity and signalling. He discusses this in a number of posts.

His basic thesis: I have no incentive to vote "correctly", since the odds of my vote affecting the result are nil. Therefore, it costs me almost nothing to vote D solely to show my friends what a caring intellectual I am, or to feel good about myself. My hypothesis is that this is the main reason scientists vote D (the caring/intellectual image).
How ants lead way to speedier computer networks
No one seems to remember that a good part of the reason why iPhone had good developer support from day one was that it was a new start for developers with obscure skills on a dead-end platform.

Yes, I know Cocoa and Objective-C are cool now, but Mac OS X has rebounded partly because of the success of the iPhone. At the time those developers were getting squeezed by Apple themselves on one side with high quality, bundled, often free apps and free web apps on the other side.

That is why the web apps only message got boo-ed by an audience of Cocoa developers, it wasn't an unbiased appraisal of what was best for either Apple, the iPhone or its customers, it was the sound of people having a potential escape hatch slammed shut in their face.
Ok, so buying it and immediately putting it back into the bank is not nice... but what about people who pay cash for everything?

Would it be worth it instead of pulling the cash out of the ATM to instead buy coins every few weeks and spend those? You get the best of both worlds: you get the reward points, and you control your spending by only having a fixed amount on you at any time. Bonus is that you're not going to carry $100 around in $1 coins, so your spend is likely to drop more. (or you have to plan ahead)

I'm sure cashiers wouldn't like you (what, you want to pay for your new computer in 1000 $1 coins?)
I never said it was a bright idea to make the offer, just that the rewards money didn't come out of nowhere. It specifically came from the merchant, in this case the US government.
By the way, it's a serious threat to Vimeo.

I was thinking to start a premium account at Vimeo for publishing educational videos. Now I can go with Youtube.
True that he probably wasn't passionate at the beginning. But he must have developed it along the way. You don't continuously work 16-hour days unless you're passionate.
Why does my ignorance "sadden" you? I would be first to point it out (although I wouldn't say that I'm more ignorant in these matters than the average intellectual) and one does not have to be omniscient either.

You cite some very interesting results. If these are indeed so well known in the political science community, please post links to a few introductory papers.
In the US, you can call yourself an engineer whenever you feel like it, and you can put it on your resume and tell your employers that you're an engineer.

Here in Canada, it's illegal to call yourself an engineer without having a license.
And it's understandable, since accredited university engineering programs are rigorous. All engineers need to study chemistry, physics, math, and you have to go through "how to be an engineer" programs that teaches you ethics, engineering tools, and safety regulations that need to be followed. The programs are not easy, and you end up having spent 4-5 years of your life mostly studying. My friends in science programs are off playing around or partying all the time, but most of the people in my engineering program are studying, with the occasional day off where they go drinking.

I'm in Computer Engineering, and when I compare my schedule to my friends in Computer Science, it's a complete joke. I have 30 hours of lectures and labs a week, while the computer science people only have 15-20. My roommate in second year computer science just games all the time. At 2AM and I'm trying to sleep, and I can still hear him playing with my other roommate, yelling across the hall.

You can also double major computer science with business. My friend is doing that right now. You can't double major engineering with anything, because there's not enough time in a day to fit in that many courses.

Most people are under the impression that the difference between computer science and computer engineering is that one is theoretical, and the other is more practical. (which is what my guidance counselor told me) But when you actually enter the program, you realize computer engineering is far more than just about computers.
The running joke in Canada is that if you graduate computer engineering, you can go build a bridge. (legally, because you have an engineering stamp!)

Yes, computer science solves scientific and engineering problems. But do you really call a toddler an engineer when he builds lego stairs to reach the cookie jar on the shelf?

If so, I hope you're the only person on the bridge he builds.
'The Force' is with you, Katie
Don't know if you'll see this, but as someone playing with both node and erlang, I'd love to hear more about your erlang setup (and your blog was down earlier when I looked).
> We now know that space is discretized

We do not. That is merely the case in some controversial quantum gravity theories.

However, I can give another example. In electrodynamics, you often treat a bulk charge as a continuous charge density (for example a charged sphere) rather than a large discrete set of point charges. This is because then you can apply calculus, which makes computations feasible.
Litigious candidates can sue regardless of what you do. I refuse to let shysters, either opposing or my own counsel, determine how I interact with people.
Probably one of the better articles written by Gruber in a year or two. Well balanced, hit on the strengths and weaknesses of both platforms, and definitely chose his words carefully to not try and seem biased to either camp.

Nicely thought-out and researched pieces are what we need more of, with less argument re-wording and throwing numbers around to try and play up your favorite platform. I hope Gruber's posts continue in this direction.
The problem here is that you're arguing as a consequentialist: maybe ``those bottom-rung folks can be motivated into improving themselves'', but that's a big if. I'm not concerned with what may happen if a policy is introduced: I'm concerned with the intrinsic morality of the policy itself; anything beyond that is crystal-gazing.

The only sure consequence of imposing a minimum-wage law is that private businesses are restricted in the wages that they can offer potential employees. Is it moral that the government will arrest me if I hire a 16-year-old to run errands for me at five dollars an hour? I don't think so.
You're failing to differentiate between supporting a policy versus the truth of a scientific argument.

It is pretty much accepted that minimum wage increases unemployment, although the effect may be small as pointed out elsewhere.

But you may also believe that we should offer a well-designed safety net to those who lose their jobs as a result, and that these people can thus improve their skills to benefit themselves in the longer term. Thus, it's perfectly possible to believe scientifically that the effect as bad, yet still support it as a political policy. (note that I do not support it, but I can understand how someone might)

It's been said elsewhere in this thread that even if Obamacare would work, the speaker feels that it's morally wrong to force other people to pay. So again, the scientific results don't necessarily determine the policy.
Of course, those labels aren't purely artificial. Once you define some measurement of similarity, you can identify clusters in a data set, if there are clusters to be found. Those clusters are reasonable things to lump together with labels.
There are plenty of power plants presently operating quite safely under the current regulatory scheme. Can you point to any specific concerns you have, or is this just FUD?
It's not even close in concept to clippy, but to answer your specific question:

> is there software that provides context-specific
> messaging in the middle of a workflow that is
> actually beneficial and unobtrusive?

I can think of several:

* Auto-suggestion (google, visual studio)

* Spell-checkers (word procesors, browsers)

* Gmail's tips (the yellow bar on top with the "undo" link that appears every time you delete/archive/send a message)
An interesting question is whether this has always been so. Anecdotally, scientists like Galton, Fisher, and Pearson were on the right (from today's perspective, the far right) in their work on the nature/nurture question.

What do historical polls look like? The R/D flip around 1965 will complicate tracking polls, but it'd be interesting to see the data if it exists...
The proper term is "resimulants" or "resimulated persons" (from Charlie Stross' Accelerando)
Under other circumstances, democrats tend to be just as opposed to performing experiments which they feel are immoral. An example:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/nyregion/09placebo.html?re...

(I'm speculating that the opposition are democrats, but in NYC it's a good guess.)

Or, to take a bipartisan example, people of pretty much any party would be opposed to repeating the Tuskegee experiment (or many others). It's not anti-scientific to oppose a particular experiment because you believe conducting it involves immoral acts. You might disagree with the morality involved, but that's not the same thing.
The numbers for android are appealing as a third party developer, but how much money is being spent in the android app store? Ads are viable, but hardly ideal for all types of apps.
I'm in a similar boat.

What I do is keep the day job communication completely separate from everything else for legal and a host of other reasons.

I now send all non-personal email from my startup's address because I want to create consistency. Every email you send creates exposure for your startup. The most successful guys, though they may have a million things going on at once, have an identity they stick to. Jason Fried isn't jason@fried.com and his partner DHH isn't david@loudthinking.com. They both use @37signals because consistency + frequency = branding.
"If Instagram were an Android exclusive rather than an iOS exclusive, would it have picked up 100,000 users in its first week and a million in its first month? No way, I say."

The Android version of Angry Birds got a million downloads on it's first day. Its existing hype and fandom obviously had a lot to do with that, but still don't see why the _No way_
The article is about this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8_Kfjo3VjU
My hands sweat just reading about climbing. Thanks but I'll pass.
> obscure skills on a dead-end platform.

I seem to remember the buzz on the mac platform in 2006 being about it's high rate of adoption in hacker and web-development circles, not to mention surprise about how quickly it was being adopted on college campuses. In 2007, the campus tech purchasing board I was on was seriously considering chucking their Compaq licence to dual-boot mac-minis. This was coming from senior IT staff, all of who were anti-Apple to the point of blocking Mail.app from wireless networks.

The mac was doing well before the iPhone came out.
Study of Emoticon Usage Says Italians Pissed, Swedish Happy
Researchers find some interesting intercultural differences in emoticon usage in newsgroup discussions.
I disagree; Most software engineering is CRUD. Bioinformatics is CRUD with Biology. Trading systems is CRUD with FIX. High performance computing is CRUD across clusters. Game programming is CRUD with DirectX/OpenGL. Even compiler design and Linux kernel is CRUD, except low-level CRUD with assembly or device-drivers.

Anytime you start doing something novel, you are no longer a software engineer; you are a computational biologist, quant, game designer or computer scientist. It's not about splitting hair but having the domain knowledge in addition to coding skills. (Because let's not kid ourselves, programming is easy) If people insist on elevating themselves, then it's their prerogative. But since the market is right and is programming skills are becoming a commodity, I would rather be rich than popular.
It's a design I've been tinkering with for while and have a bunch of notes about. Reputation would be handled by a transparent history of all projects worked on.

The profit-sharing design does not prevent collusion. E.g., if there are a glut of programmers and a shortage of artists in the collective, then two may collude to submit and share a low programmer bid and a high artist bid (and vice versa on another project).

Collectives are hard and are subject to many problems that the free market does not suffer.
Anecdotally it seems that most of the Libertarians who switched their party affiliation to Democrat while Bush was in power switched it back to Republican once Obama came into power and managed to keep up all Bush's objectionable policies while adding a whole bunch of his own.

I am reminded of the old joke about the man who goes to hell and is given a choice of two rooms in which to spend all eternity. In the first, everybody is forced to stand on their head for all eternity, groaning uncomfortably with the strain. In the second, everybody is standing around knee-deep in poop, but they're also drinking coffee, eating biscuits and chatting. After thinking long and hard, he eventually chooses the second room, but the moment after he walks in a voice comes over the intercom "OK, coffee break's over, everybody back on your heads."
Pretty cool.

I guess the use case would be the need to generate an image on the fly from a server. Mixing it up with Socket.IO you might even be able to do server side animation (not using a per second reload setup).

The downside is you use a lot of the speed of running your images on the client side, but as with all things, it is a trade-off.

Great work guys!
Looks like it might be a nice iPad app.
I'm curious what name Google is operating under the California PUC (and San Francisco PUC) with.

You can't just show up with large bundles of fiber and hang 'em from the utility poles in jurisdictions that regulate pole attachments.
I don’t know how the purely ad-based Angry Birds is faring on Android. Perhaps Rovio (Angry Birds’s developer) will make even more money from ads on Android than they do from sales on iOS. We shall see.

We shall see indeed: "By end of year, we project earnings of over $1 million per month with the ad-supported version of Angry Birds" http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/03/angry-birds-android-1-milli...
Mobile Web Development. Where to even begin?
If you can't double major in engineering and something else, you're either lazy or not very smart. Especially at a Canadian university... I mean, come on we're not talking MIT here.
I think you're conceding too much ground. You need only look at Hong Kong vs. mainland China (pre-Deng) to empirically see the difference between massive government spending and laissez faire in sharp relief. Same with North Korea vs South Korea, or East vs West Germany, or pre/post reform India. In other words, you need not invoke morality to demonstrate that a large government sector represses growth.
I remember hearing that Paul Newman's will stipulates against this, but can't find a reference.
But then they wouldn't be Oracle...
Ask HN: Would you rather be lucky or good?
Well, you can't actually do an engineering analysis of a rock face, so you're never going to achieve that level of rigor. Placing protections and building anchors is a combination of experience and intuition; observation and analysis techniques; and a bit of actual physics around angles, direction of force, rope stretch, and force multipliers.
<sarcasm>bonzi buddy!</sarcasm>
Now imagine the same feat repeated every 10ms with billions of dollars and you have the modern institution of high frequency trading.
Digestive functors: composable forms in Haskell
Surefire ways to screw up your iPhone app
that website is fucking garbage.
Definitely one of his better articles. But I think he still has on his Apple blinders. He asks the wrong question still.

He asks, "Why doesn't Android have X, Y, Z?". Rather the question should be, "At what rate is Android picking up X, Y, Z?"

Furthermore, he hints at the cultural divide, but misses the big motivator. Android exists to get you on the web. iPhone exists to get you to buy Apple product(s). I'm sure Google would be just as happy if every app moved to the web, and app stores disappeared. I'm less certain Apple would be as happy.