skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All I am saying is that they may have their own motivations and, well, they are more likely to know what they are doing than all of us as it is their primary occupation and business.

In general, we don't have strong opinions on how to run the chemical engineering companies but everyone is eager to tell Pixar what movies to produce. This is a good manifestation of the Bike shed rule
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bike_shed
This is the interesting question isn't it? Do other languages not have similar 'neutral' formulations? How far could such a ploy be generalised?
C'mon:

(map 'string #'code-char '(119 ...))
Show HN: My first app launched... Got an iPhone? Please give me some feedback
When I was learning DOS on my dad's computer at work (IBM XT), I knew how to use the "cd" command to change into a directory. Unfortunately I didn't know how to get back out of a directory ("cd \") so I would restart the computer whenever I needed to get back to the root directory.

Ah, those were the days.
My girlfriend used 3GB of mobile data a month or two ago. She listens to a lot of Pandora.

Your experiences are not able to be extrapolated to another chunk of the population.
The other thing to remember about Flash though, is that they achieve something like 97% penetration very quickly. There are very few devices sitting out there w/ flash9 or earlier.

See this: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/vers...
Ask HN: Agile development at big companies
I work at a big company with dozens of websites driving our business. There are almost 100 developers split up into system-based teams (Architecture, Billing, Content, etc.), almost as many QA testers, and hundreds of content managers, business analysts and other non-dev roles.

My team, Content Services, develops and maintains core APIs for the front-end developers; and we develop, maintain & support a web app Content Management System used by our non-dev creatives, content managers and business owners. We have 10 very skilled developers and a slim but effective support team for our CMS.

In terms of process, we are lightyears ahead of where we were even 3 years ago. Since then, we have gone from opaque 6-month waterfall "iterations" to bonafide 2-week agile iterations.

However, agile methodologies were not developed by teams at big companies, and in many ways, we are struggling to "own" the agile approach.

I am coming to you all for help: Does anyone have experience with this? Given the context I've written and the pain points I'll detail here, can you see any quick wins or necessary process/cultural shifts?

- Our business owners don't write our user stories. Generally our dev team analysts write the user stories after meeting with the users. We have an enormous backlog of over 500 stories--remember, we're serving dozens of business owners working with different sites and types of content (everything from ecards to custom printable mugs).

- We have too many "epics". Implementing a story and doing it "right" often involves so many layers of changes--from db schema to CMS interface to framework updates to API support to documentation to test cases to validation scripts--that fitting it into 2 weeks requires herculean effort and brain-bending cross-team planning.

- We now involve our stakeholders in daily standups and planning, which is GREAT! But we have a lot of trouble with confusing them by talking about tech stuff. There's just no reason for our content managers to know that CouchDB is having stability issues because our custom serialization module isn't handling unicode conversion properly. But switching from "tech mode" to "business mode" is difficult, and many developers just aren't interested or capable of it. Nor should they be, necessarily--a certain amount of specialization is necessary. In a company of almost 500, you can't have everybody know everything.

What do?
> "Their stated reason is for the sake of “openness” on the web, but that’s a ridiculous claim because they embed the not-open-at-all Flash player inside the browser, and will continue to do so."

Adobe Flash. Not Google Flash. Google isn't putting resources into making Flash for Chrome. Adobe is. Google is simply stating that they won't put resources into H.264. This doesn't mean you can't have plugins for Chrome that do this. Just that Google isn't going to do this.

The same reasoning you provide for Google supporting H.264 can be applied to Apple and Microsoft as well for supporting WebM and Theora.
There could some issues for home users such as me(Rogers internet):

Error 105 (net::ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED): The server could not be found.

Which is probably related to dns resolution.
I really tried to make something useful to people on the iPhone, hopefully I succeeded. But now I'm not sure what to do...

Do any iPhone veterans here have some good advice for how to promote it?
Instagram CEO responds to questions about why it cut off access to private API
I'm very much a "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Pixar has never made a movie I didn't LOVE, so until they do, I'll see their movies sight unseen.

In contrast, the digital animated movies from other companies (Dreamworks, etc) have been so BAD that I won't even consider seeing them unless I hear great word of mouth.

Both companies (Pixar and ^Pixar) have earned the reputation they have.
Can't you already do this with the built in iOS functionality? On my iPhone 4, my contacts are in groups already. I did not create the groups manually - I think iTunes created them when I synced with my computer. I do have several groups, though.

example screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/J7ELV.png
Agree, there are also an incredibly huge number of bodies out there to colonize for resources, and the possibility of Aliens coming over to colonize us while we're still stuck on this planet are incredibly remote. Honestly, I think if you do have the tech to get to earth, it's vastly easier to extract your <insert energy source> from the N number of planets out there.

If he's talking about space opera however, that _might_ be possible, but honestly I'm not even sure if we can get off the rock before we destroy ourselves, but yes, that is a possibility.
What about those of us who decided to go month-to-month, for example?

"The duration of their contract" means "you get to wait a little while before getting fucked."
For one project we leased a server from ThePlanet.com that included 10tb of bandwidth for about $399 or so. Our Amazon S3 bill was about $1,200 at the time. If something else in our network fails we can use this box in a pinch as an emergency web server, etc.
Minimum wage impacts in China
Pre-industrial inequality
The NFL (and other football governing bodies?) are actually equally worried, if not more worried, by the repeated lower intensity hits that take place in the trenches (read: offensive and defensive linemen). So improving refereeing is perhaps part of the solution (to avoid some of the more horrific/sensational injuries), but other things need to change to protect the linemen.

It's sad actually, skills players in football have always been the ones talked about and focused on, and here we have, yet again, the linemen mostly forgotten about.

Another point mentioned here is that the improvements in helmet design have undoubtedly led to more violent use of the helmet. I have a friend in the NFL league office, and they're well aware of this ironic (?) fact, but what is there to do? Go back to leather caps without face masks?

The technology mentioned here could actually provide the players with real-time data and threshold points ("you've had 264 high-intensity hits this season; danger zone") which could perhaps help to adjust player habits more readily. I'm thinking about a parallel situation where certain residents used less water (or some other utility) than their neighbors when the meter was visible for routine/daily check-ins.

Disclosure: I played a year of college football as a quasi-lineman (tight end) before the drudgery of football practice led me to quit and move over to [JV] basketball.
This is why we don't have nice things.

"I mean, I'm still getting _less_ screwed than with everyone else" is the reality of the situation, but that doesn't make it good. Or right.
Have we underestimated the likelihood of zero lower bound events?
Child of an international marriage, growing up overseas?
Jobs Said To Attend Murdoch's Unveiling Of 'The Daily'
I don't understand what you're saying. My business relationship is with Pixar is that I pay one of their distributors and I expect 90-120 minutes of good entertainment. They have help up their end of the bargain every time. If I accept their value proposition and trust based on history that they will continue to deliver, why would I not continue to do business with them?
IPad 2 Video
In college our remote broke. I taped a dime to the end of a fishing pole so it had a nice flat surface to push the channel up/down buttons. Channel fishing FTW!
I'm waiting for some honest soul to start the Lightning Strikes Twice Fund. Whenever someone succeeds massively, intellectually we may "know" that there's a great deal of randomness in that but instinctively we want to believe it must have happened because they are smarter, better, etc. So for their next venture we throw our money at them hoping lightning will strike twice. This phenomenon is most acute where markets are most efficient, such as in the stock market.
The iPhone does have support for groups but there is no way to manage them on your phone. It's read-only. You have to do it on your mac.

I like to manage my contacts on my phone. Like when I meet a new person I can just add them to a group right there, without having to go on my computer just to do it.

Also this app lets you do other stuff:

* send a mass message to all people in a certain group

* even do relational algebra on the selections, so you can pick Friends who are not in Family, and message only those

* set reminders to follow up with certain people

etc. I just needed an app like this myself, so I tried to make something I myself would want to use day in / day out.

I think it would help a lot of people -- seriously, why do you need to go to your COMPUTER to manage your cellphone contacts?
Google: “Though IPv4 plays an important role in the Internet, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the protocol will be removed and our resources directed towards completely new technologies, such as IPv6.”
> If you charge your visitors for the videos, you’ll have to pay royalty fines, but if you offer the video for free you won’t have to worry about that, ever. Ever? Yes, ever.

The "Yes, ever." link points to to http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachme... , which says (emphasis mine):

"MPEG LA announced today that its AVC Patent Portfolio
License will continue not to charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users (known as Internet
Broadcast AVC Video) during the next License term from January 1, 2011 to December 31, 2015."

I don't see how "until the end of 2015" means "forever." It's also not clear whether this covers free software or just content publishers.

In other words, it looks exactly like the prelude to another GIF bait-and-switch.
In the style of one of those YouTube comments, "I'm 19 and I have used a floppy disk!!"
Honestly I found this part the most interesting:

> Late in the product cycle (after Final Beta), upper management reversed their earlier decision and decide not to support the B1 chip after all.

After all that work, on compilers, processes, tools, etc, it was all scrapped anyway. I wonder if there is a lesson to be learned there. (The usual startup-mantras don't really seem to apply!)
Doing it - The Marketing Plan Plan Continued
My Web Development Toolbox, 2010 Edition
I'm sure it's all those women voting to blame.
I believe that I used to change drive letters to get around this but it may have eventually remembered the last directory when you changed back.
If you are interested in CDN performance comparison as seen by end-users take a look at our Charts: http://cedexis.com/data/charts.html?country=223&provider...

Gabriel (yegg) wrote about our services on his blog -- http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/12/testing-cdn-perf...
Yes. We could have easily written this. We've been building our business slowly, brick by brick, for a little over 5 years now. We never took outside capital, we have always conducted our development in an iterative manner, and we're quite happy with the results.

There are many things we've opted to teach ourselves to do, in preference to going on a hiring binge.

Maybe this is because my partner and I went through the late 1990's dot com boom, saw the aftereffects of mindless staffing, and decided against it.
Here's what I've done:

- Unlocked iPhone
(I bought a Canadian one, but you can also jailbreak.)
- Clear 4G mobile hotspot

Between this and onsite WiFi, I have all the mobile broadband that I'd want.

After reading the article, I'm considering moving from my T-Mobile monthly service to AT&T GoPhone. I can buy minutes and megabytes for emergency use and maintain this for very little cost. (Which I'm free to do, since I've refused to have a contract.)
Great article. I drew that very chart this morning trying to sort out the implications of this change.

> "As a side note, it would be great if MPEG LA would simply open up the licensing terms for H.264 and make it royalty-free forever for 1: browsers to implement it, and 2: people on the Internet to produce & sell video with it."

How hard would this be to do? Is that all that prevents FF/Opera/Chrome from supporting h.264?
Thanks Ryan. By the way, I'm happy to see you're on HN. I'm a fan of your writing.
On any?

My WRT610N ($160 on amazon) seems to work fine for ipv6.google.com and I have not configured anything.

I would hope all new linksys are similar, but a quick search makes it look like the WRT300N does not support v6.
I think Kevin's response is perfectly reasonable. If his account of Followgram's behavior is accurate (2 sides, stories, and all) I have to agree with Instagram's actions.
Perhaps if you had made notes on paper instead of your mind, and sent them a random sample plus an offer for the rest, they would have reacted differently? (Though not all people react well to criticism.)
This type of knee-jerk over-reaction doesn't add to the discussion. Sure, there is corruption, but there is plenty of good science going on. I'd go so far as to say that the vast majority is published in good faith. Sorting out what isn't is what makes those who game the system so toxic, but good medical practice can mitigate the damage. How? By insisting on replication of highly unexpected findings across sites by different researchers, outside the influence of the private sector.

To call it "science as usual" is inaccurate, and I suspect the main function is to allow you to put your own biased and untested assumptions ahead of conclusions you find unintuitive or inconvenient. This is not an attack on you, it's a statement about human nature.

Everyone has this tendency innately, and the job of science is to fight hard against it by providing proof. Most of us take that pretty seriously.
oh cool. that could be a good option.
EDIT: (Ignore this. It's wrong, and I should have been more polite anyway. I'm leaving it to teach myself a lesson about being hasty...)

If you understood his point, you wouldn't say that.

Not that I agree with Ed on this, 95% of my code is published. But still.
Like most everything... I think IT DEPENDS. I don't think you need to hire more people in order develop your startup, but I think there are some key things you can do w/ the right people.

1) Iterate faster. If you have 2-3 devs working on something vs 1, then you can figure out more quickly if your hypotheses are correct or not.

2) Certain markets (like ours in the non-profit space) require that you have more direct interaction w/ those you are trying to reach. 1 person might have worked well for DDG, that isn't applicable to everyone
Not all people who can code, enjoy doing it as part of their main job.
Hm. What about "There are neither blacks nor whites, only a lot of black and blue?"
A free tunnel broker isn't going to support the traffic of something like google. And an issue Google has previously run into is, clients getting the incorrect DNS entry and trying to connect across to a ipv6 interface instead of ipv4. This is one of the reasons why google had/has that ipv6.google.com dns name.
But they had a screenshot! </sarcasm>
I also have an WRT610N, but I'm failing tests here:
http://test-ipv6.com/

I can also see ipv6.google.com, but I know my ISP doesn't do IPv6.
The difference is that it is so cheap to do your own startup that you can do it with or without other people's money. That was not the case 12 years ago.

The second thing is that the rest of the country is in the worst recession in 70 years - if you are not going to put your money in tech, where are you going to put them?

When the recession ends, money will flow out of tech and into the general market, but that is going to take time and is unlikely to be a sudden rush, more of a slow stream.
Off-topic, but why do so many blogs not have any indication whatsoever of the date posted? It's at least partially understandable for more "essay-like" posts which contain essentially timeless information, but particularly when your post uses the word "lately" in the first sentence, it's annoying to not know if "lately" meant the late 1990s, 2005, or (in 20 years), 2015.
DD-WRT firmware supports it in certain firmware versions. A little start up script hacking is required, but, you can setup a ipv6 tunnel through hurricane electric or one of the other tunnel brokers.
I just realized that I have a bunch of old 3.5" discs in my desk - even though I don't have a single system with a floppy drive anymore. I just cleared out a bunch of space in my hutch. Thanks HN!
Officials are humans and will, by definition, not uniformly apply rules. Technology is the only equalizer here. Pro-style equipment has always leaked into amateur sports, especially football--just take a stroll through your local Academy and look at what's available.

We need data to understand what these impacts are doing to our bodies, and then we need to design technology to minimize the risks. That or we should just stop playing football--not something I'd be very excited to see happen.
This is especially delicious, coming from a company whose trademarks include "Word", "Office", "Access", "Publisher", and "Outlook".

http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/en/us/IntellectualPrope...
It's kind of reasonable because nothing in the universe is truly unlimited, so you'd have to be insane to take it at face value and believe it. The actual meaning is "effectively unlimited" — i.e. you're very unlikely to ever bump into the limits — but that's too much of a mouthful for advertising.
Interesting. In my experience, the feedback

(1) introduces me to new concepts or utilities I had not considered using -- may or may not incorporate

(2) shows me what patterns other developers are accustomed to seeing -- if I chose a pattern for subjective reasons and I am outnumbered, incorporate and adapt

(3) sometimes uncovers bugs or places where I am not fitting into the architecture well enough (or someone else's new development) -- extra eyes, extra attention, all nice

(4) allows me to turn around and show my "reviewers" approaches in #1 and #2 -- educates and changes local culture

(5) introduces other developers to parts of the code they did not write

In short, the code review is not just about me. Although your two code reviews may give me red marks going back and forth, it is ultimately up to me to decide which way to go, and I may benefit from seeing both sides if I have not already seen those. There is a pretty small percentage that I would say is actually completely useless to me. I suppose it depends on how one conducts reviews, and it may also depend on whether your project source is shared with and maintained by others.
As usual, the HuffPo article is much less informative than the paper itself. From the professor's site here:
http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/directory/rivera...

The following is the abstract:

Although a robust literature in sociology and economics has demonstrated a positive relationship between education and socio-economic attainment, the processes through which formal schooling yields enhanced economic rewards remains less clear. Employers play a crucial role in explaining the economic and social returns to formal schooling. Yet, little is known about how employers, particularly elite employers, use and interpret educational credentials in real-life hiring decisions.

In the following article, I analyze how hiring agents in top-tier professional service firms use education to recruit, assess, and select new hires. I find that educational credentials were the most common criteria employers used to solicit and screen resumes. However, it was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige. Employers privileged candidates who possessed a super-elite (e.g., top 5) university affiliation and attributed superior cognitive, cultural, and moral qualities to candidates who had been admitted to such an institution, regardless of their actual performance once there. However, attendance at a super-elite university was insufficient for success in resume screens. Importing the logic of elite university admissions, firms performed a secondary resume screen on the status and intensity of candidates’ extracurricular accomplishments and leisure pursuits.

I discuss these findings in terms of the changing nature of credentialism and stratification in higher education to suggest that participation in formalized extracurricular activities has become a new credential of moral character that has monetary conversion value in labor markets.

Key points:

* she looked at top-tier "professional service firms"

* separated out the "super-elite" schools

* found that just going to a super-elite school didn't mean much; you needed to have done something there
I know I'm taking to a wall for most of you, but anyone with an open mind and more than 3 years of experience knows:

The reason we moved to H.264 is because it's a standard in the video world. It unified online video really well - everyone uses it and we were all tired of the fragmentation.

Flash is also a standard, particularly for multimedia. You can't have 99.7% penetration and not be a standard.

With all due respect to web standards: a standard is something that everyone uses. I think this is the best and most ironic line in the article:

"HTML5 is an emerging standard and anyone dealing with it has to expect change constantly."
How does it hurt their users? This is saving Google money and promoting their encoder. Chrome users can still view H.264 in the browser without having to download anything extra (through bundled Flash).
Interestingly, I was just brainstorming yesterday on how it could be possible to serve my jekyll blog entirely on CloudFront due to the default root object and cname support among others. http://paulstamatiou.com/amazon-cloudfront-cdn-origin-pull

Really impressed with AWS these days.
I agree that having translations adds inertia and resistance to change in the code, and that this can be a problem. You should add localizations when you "need" them and know that you are going to have to support them, not because they're nice to have.

What I wanted to point out was that the article puts focus on a problem which often times is not that big of an issue.

I've mostly been doing web development and localization of web applications, and I guess this makes the build process a bit simpler than what you describe.
Exactly, which raises the question of why Adobe would bother transitioning a market that they completely dominated from one codec to another if they weren't feeling the pressure of H.264 from the mobile space (ZG's assertion appears to be that mobile in general — or, at least, iOS in particular — exerted no such pressure).