skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I’m a computer scientist, so I think computer sciences can solve a lot of problems – I may be a little biased." A little? Look, I'm a EE and sometimes I get carried away (OK, most of the time), e.g. one of my pet theories is applying control theory to societies, to change them from one state to another (how would you write the state transition matrix?)

But this gung-ho, "have hammer, will pound on any problem" approach has its limits. When Schmidt says "How many wars have started because of miscommunication? Now we can try and solve that." about the future of voice translation technology, that's not only laughable (for the foreseeable future) but it comes off as horribly arrogant to people working in other disciplines and has a bad effect on collaboration.

I have seen people on HN pragmatically applying their technical knowledge to fields ranging from healthcare to economy to the stock market. Using your non-domain expertise to get a fresh look at a hard problem is a great thing to do. As long as you know your limits.
Sorry, the correct link is http://natanyellin.com/2011/01/25/project-management-softwar...
Open Source and Open Research Computation
Microsoft Responds to Jailbreakers With Free Schwag, Not Lawsuits
Just because it is posted here, how do you know it's not? The poster might have been duped himself.
A no-doubt unfunded federal mandate, forcing ISPs to retain a massive amount of data, and participate in violations of the 4th amendment. And of course, the supposedly freedom-loving republicans now in control of the House will just line up right behind it. (FWIW: I'm a republican).
Mozilla Skywriter Becomes Part of Ajax.org Cloud Editor
The interesting thing is how easily you can 'slide' into a full rewrite, when your old code is aging legacy and everybody wants to get rid of it. I've participated and seen it happen many times. It has never worked particularly well.

In my experience, what you mostly underestimate is the amount of hidden features lurking inside a mature product, which all need to be rewritten in the new implementation. The stuff you can easily estimate is 20% of the work (main features), and 80% is all the small stuff you afterwards realize you also need.
I'm in a similar situation. Sending hundreds of thousands a month with SendGrid, and while it'll be more than Amazon, I think the dedicated IP makes it worthwhile.
Show HN: Create a personal Google Blacklist
I created a simple app that allows you to create a blacklist of sites for Google.

It also allows you to create "preferred searches", these let you list sites that you want ranked higher in the search results as well as blacklist sites specific to this search.

Just a note, I didn't put too much into handling the url's that get entered so you'll have to look at the about page to make sure you follow a valid format.

Site: http://blacklist-search.appspot.com/

Anyway, this was really a scratch my own itch sort of thing but I thought other people might find it useful as well. I would really appreciate any input as well. Thanks!
Is it a sail or a drag parachute?
Bollywood Movie Dil to Baccha Hai Ji
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvtFLd6sAMU
clicky: http://blacklist-search.appspot.com
The team is comprised of ex-Digg staff, not Kevin Rose himself.
Thank you for that neat, clear and concise evaluation of my personality. Note that I didn't include "accurate".

Last time this was submitted, and I replied, someone asked:

> why do you hate fun?

My reply to that basically covers your comment, so I thought I'd include it here (with minor editing):

It's clear that you think this sort of email is cute
and fun. Possibly I used to think so too, 30 years
ago. Now, however, I've seen too many of them, read
too many of them, felt cheated of time by too many of
them.

I don't hate fun. I love having fun. I seek out having
fun. I make time to have fun. What's not fun, pretty
much by definition, is someone else's attempt at humor
that is not, to me, funny.

If it had been me receiving that email I'd've resented
the 30 seconds it took to check that its content was
"CD posted", and that everything else was there purely
for entertainment. I didn't find it entertaining. My
tastes have changed over the years.

So, in short, I love fun, have lots of fun, and think
lots of things are funny. That wasn't one of them.
Matthew Brindley created one. Check it out over here:
https://github.com/thesunnytrail/dotnet-sunnytrail
With the addition of the git-flow plugin, git has taken over for my personal projects. The branching model works for me and the plugin makes using that branching model extremely easy.

Link to explanation of branching model: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Link to git-flow plugin: https://github.com/nvie/gitflow

Link to video intro for git-flow: http://vimeo.com/16018419
Three tries seems about right. FWIW: the second version has an actual name: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

The problem I've been running into is that my second version took 1 month to reach 80% "complete" and is taking 3 more months to finish that last 20%.
Someone buying a $500 product will absolutely be side-tracked by small annoyances. Especially when those annoyances are the only impression the prospective buyer has, so far, of you or your product.
If Mahalo has been such a loved product with versions 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 why are they basically scrapping all of it and releasing a new product?

It must be hilarious being an investor and seeing entrepreneurs pitch so confidently with ideas and then the next week see them something almost entirely different and totally confident in that.

Oh right if you pivot it's okay.
For me it depends.
I think that rewriting the 100% of the code is a crazy thing.
I'm working for some web startups, and expecially in the beginning, with really low experience, you or your fellows could create something that fit the need in that specific moment, but maybe in the future is not good, maybe haven't good scalability, or something similar.
In that case, is better rewrite.
Maybe you could save the company and learn a lot of things about that terrible experience.
As much as I admire Alienware computers' design, craftsmanship, speed, etc., and as much as I appreciate the company's interest in linux, I hardly think there's any sense in Alienware linux-based computers, since they're designed for gaming and gaming only.
Startup Goals Have Value Only if You Achieve Them
I think it's a really smart idea. How-to content is huge. Amateur videos of esoteric hobbies can get a quarter million page views in a couple months. I think the biggest risk they are running is trying to produce in super high volumes. I think this will lead to less compelling content. At first they can make it up in volume, but if they have success it will be relatively easy for domain experts to copy their approach and produce relatively fewer videos, tailored to the field, which will lead to higher CPMs.

The other big opportunity is using video as a gateway to ecommerce. QVC is the 2nd highest grossing tv station. There is definitely an opportunity to take this model to the web.
this is pretty fascinating.
The future of app stores - QuirksBlog
Oldest surviving BBC site
I close tabs after reading them.
Neat trick for getting private info for Facebook, GMail, Twitter and Digg users
Msysgit is what I use and I really enjoy it. Git also has a Visual studio plugin now you can use if you prefer GUI to CLI.
I don't know enough about mercurial to offer a good opinion, does it offer something equivalent to hooks in git for setting up custom behavior?
James Murdoch On The Daily, Paywalls, Google And Apple
That's just yet another instance of the 80/20 rule (derived from the Pareto Principle).

In my industry (games) it's well known that 80% of the effort goes into the last 20% of the product, but also the last 20% of polish makes 80% of the quality.
How great entrepreneurs think (study excerpts)
I'm pretty certain that this was inspired by Neurocam. For a thoroughly entertaining read -- which raises more questions than it answers -- I recommend an article from 2004:
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/12/17/1102787276356.h...

(neurocam is not a psychology experiment.)
Does anything on this page look remotely Nigerian to you. #racistfaces

http://www.perimetec.com/7-Things-You-Didnt-Know-About-Email...
This is one of my favorite lessons learned, also covered here:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
yeah same. using a 2006 iMac ... I'm assuming its a graphics card problem? The site says all of the graphics are rendered on the GPU...
On the topic of sending e-mail, I discovered the following note on my utility company's bill payment page. I'm guessing they have never heard of SendGrid or the like.

http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dennis/GGBF...

(They did not reply to my friendly e-mail about it. Or perhaps their box was over quota...)
The legends speak: how GDC got great developers to look back
I think a good analogy is a messy house. Do you bulldoze the house and rebuild it, or do you just go ahead and tidy what's in it?

Only in the most unbelievably dire and awful circumstances do you take the former option...
What’s Next for Apple?
I am curious to see how this will affect his Administration's relationship with Google and YouTube.
Reasons you should care about the flexible workforce
Case study: how to raise prices (Chargify, mentions HN)
AWS Launches Simple, Bulk Email Service Amazon SES
Gaming is one of the few things I still boot into windows for.
In the context of civil or criminal?
Mark Fairchild’s book Color Appearance Models has a nice couple of pages on high-level adaptation effects. Try the example on the page after this link for a demonstration of differing spatial frequency adaptation in each half of the visual field.

http://books.google.com/books?id=8_TxzK2B-5MC&pg=PA155&#...

There are some animated gifs floating around the web that you can stare at for a few minutes and then leave yourself with really weird perception of everything you see moving around depending on its color and orientation, sometimes lasting quite a long while.

Vision is fun!
>In a just system, the RIAA would be able to sue for me for damages amounting to revenue lost - $20 per film they catch me downloading.

I would like to preface this by saying that I don't like the RIAA. The damages they can sue for ARE disproportionate and copyright law is currently massively unbalanced (e.g. never-ending copyright since the 1920s).

BUT, have you actually thought about what suing for $20/film would mean? To recover any meaningful losses hundreds of thousands of people would have to be sued at once - unless civil law is radically changed this would not be economical, effectively making copyrights non-enforceable. Not to mention that "downloading" isn't actually covered by copyright law AFAIK and it's the uploading (distributing) part they are suing for.

Also, note that enforcement in cases of property theft isn't proportional either - it's not "pay for the thing you stole and you're free to go". There are often other consequences (community service/fines/light jailtime) attached.
What hasn't been mentioned yet is that Kubrick was inspired by the short story "The Sentinel" by AC Clarke.

The monoliths in the short story are placed by intelligent beings through space, typically on moons of adjacent planets. The monoliths are sending signals home (wherever that is) once they are broken/destroyed/... This can only happen with nuclear power.

The idea was to have some kind of warning system when intelligence emerges somewhere in space since this new intelligent species needs to be able to leave their own planet AND they need to have discovered nuclear power.

(Disclaimer: I read the short story at least 10 years ago, and I hope I remember it correctly)
How would legitimate use be falsely flagged as spam in large numbers? Other than a malicious conspiracy of some sort, I don't understand why a disproportionate number of e-mail recipients would target legitimate mail as spam. Am I missing something?
"But the Magic is more widely distributed" still relies on magic to justify Apple's market valuation. It's bascially a "this time the rules are different argument," - the sort of argument that historically precedes the bubble's burst.

Considering how Apple came to their current position doesn't provide much reason for optimism that they can repeat their success of the past ten years (hence the talk of magic). Apple got where they are by leveraging commodity MP3 players into an entire product line of Pods, Pads, and Phones based upon being an early mover in the post Napster music business (and with the app store they even managed to sell a fair number of Macs to iPhone developers). The importance of Napster's demise towards Apple's success should not be underestimated.

Apple could encounter such good fortune again, but it is difficult [of course] to see anything in their current product portfolio, the regulatory environment, or the logistics of digital content delivery that offers similar opportunities [again of course].

Looking deeper, the dearth of new iPad competitors may be more indicative of the size of the actual market for slate devices than an indicator of the shortcomings of Apple's competitors - e.g. the slate type device my UPS driver carries indicates the sort of dedicated device design which benefit businesses and some of the shortcomings of Apple's vision within a business model. Magic doesn't cut it.
You need to put "evidence" in quotes. These people didn't have a trial, it was the threat of litigation that made them settle, guilty or otherwise.
The article mentions a discussion started by Micah here a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1780348
Nothing prevents them from requiring SMTP-Auth for authentication to make sure that the sending is coupled to a specific account.

If we are talking compromised machines, then the key would be compromised as well at which point a spammer can use that key to send spam regardless of protocol.

I'm not saying to use smtp auth with your amazon username and password, but with some token derived from the API key, but just SMTP.
Is AOL Scamming Old People?
Sometimes during the initial phase of building a product YOU realize you're on the wrong road and it's actually faster to toss out what you've got and start over.

But what if it is years later, and you are gone and it's up to some new guys to do the rewrite?

Or in the words of Steve: A CEO who had lived through a debacle of a rewrite or understood the complexity of the code would know that with the original engineering team no longer there, the odds of making the old mistakes over again are high.

So I think you and Steve aren't really disagreeing. You're talking about the early time frame, when you are writing all the code. He is talking about the later time frame, when the company has grown and you are long gone.
I wonder if a similar argument could have been made about slave ownership prior to the 13th amendment?

Morality be damned, it is the law.
HTML5 link prefetching severely broken in Chrome
Client Case Study: Switching From eBay to a Personal Web-based Storefront
It says IIW at the top, not IIA.
I wanted an off the shelf consumer RAID1 one desktop. Only Alienware offered something like that. It came with Win7, I am still trying to get Ubuntu to recognize the RAID.
It depends.

For example, if your startup is a web-based service written in PHP, then in most cases you shouldn't rewrite it, because your customers won't get much out of it, and you'll be left behind.

But if your're a database startup and your storage engine is doing too much random disk I/O (which is slow), then you'll have to rewrite that part, otherwise you don't have a usable product. However, you should keep in mind that this is super-dangerous, so you should get something out the door ASAP, even it means taking terrible shortcuts.
And there they are immutable, as well as their values.
Ask HN: How do you politely decline a project?
I've quoted a project to a client (a nonprofit professional organization). It's a rescue mission - they paid a previous developer a nominal fee to build a web application, and many pieces no longer work due to changes in program language versions on the shared host.

I provided a few options, including leaving things as-is but moving to a different host with versions of the libraries that work with the app, or simply paying my non-profit client hourly rate to fix the problems.

They said my estimate was too high, and now they want to meet to discuss the requirements and cost. I'm not really interested in negotiating my rate on this project because I don't need the work, I'm already charging a lower rate because they are a true nonprofit, and whenever haggling over rates comes up this early, I know that collecting my fee is going to be difficult no matter what I charge.

But I'm also not interested in coming off like an arrogant jerk. So, any advice? Interested to hear how you politely walk away from deals.

[edited for formatting]
Startup Suicide - Rewriting the Code
This is always a tough choice, I'm actually on the crossroads right now, though with significantly less invested (about four man months).

I'd argue (and am arguing to myself) that my situation is different, in that it is still early, so the benefits due to an improved architecture will have far longer to amortize.

But it is still scary.

I think the strongest point given, that there is a ton of 'tribal knowledge' encapsulated in a codebase that is impossible to extract completely, is far less relevant in a tiny shop.
Simple. Pay it up front, release the files for free afterwards. The files turn into advertisements for the next piece.
why not start by 100$ and then increase over time?
I'm afraid to see the payroll on that!
The Talent Magnet
I probably don't fit the target demographic for this kind of email, but it seems to me that CDBaby is subtly mocking its customers.

I have no idea why they would do so, but hyperbole can cut both ways.
Automation can help with routine things, and in areas where you have high density you can effectively have spies create missions for other spies: one person's mission is to take a picture and deliver it with a note for the next person, the note tells them their next mission, and so on.

For added fun, check things like Twilio and their telephony APIs. Phone calls and text messages can add a layer of realism.
"Would you be willing to pay extra for a Linux-based Alienware system?"
H1b NYC?
Hey,
I know there's been quite a lot of H1b discussion going on lately. What I haven't seen in the discussion is NYC companies willing to sponsor H1b visas.
Does anyone know of NYC based companies willing to offer visa sponsorship to developers?

Thanks.
I'm using Yep! for organizing my Documents via OpenMeta-Tags (they're synchable via Dropbox). Yep uses Spotlight for indexing Documents so you're able to find fast. The cool part is that you can have a second organizational structure on the data level. (You're able to put PDFs where you need them, eg. project folders, and still find them in Yep!)
For bibliographys and stuff like that I use Sente. I search for all my PDFs with a certain tag in Yep and just add them one by one to sente. This works great for me.
Btw: Sente is also able to create a synced copy, which is great if you have different macs (like I do) and working longer on a paper or article.
Stick to your guns and refuse to re-negotiate your rates. That's not being arrogant (regardless of whether it's a non-profit, or a Fortune 500 company you're doing the work for). Your rates are your rates, and if they trot out the "Johnny the neighbor's kid who'll do it for $50" line, you're better off without them as a client. I'd say they're being arrogant for trying to "discuss" the cost.
After reading through the guides, this is the most simple and clear exposition of email deliverability and reputation I've ever come across.

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/...

(The mailchimp guide is also nice, and very extensive http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/email-delivery/ )

Seems like they'll like use a completely different IP range than EC2, and there shouldn't be any problems.. lets hope
The author quotes Tim O'Reilly and shows why he isn't necessarily correct.

> Don’t need to take my word for it. Just look at all the other industries that have gone digital. Take music. Physical music sales have been declining steadily for more than a decade, and while digital sales rise, they make up only a fraction of the loss. (They’re not even rising much anymore either.) Revenue from Pandora, Spotify, YouTube ads and the like are loose change next to CD sales declines.

> What’s the shortfall? All told, the United States recorded music industry is worth less than half of what it was a decade ago, and the downward slope is only getting steeper. Outside of the big markets, the declines are greater. The Spanish music industry fell 55% in the last five years alone. In China rampant CD copying and file sharing have left a nation of 1.3 billion people with a $75 million recorded-music industry. As a recent Economist report put it, the “worst-case scenario has already come to pass.”

Sales are not doubling everywhere. The industry has shrunk to a fraction of its previous size.
Ugh.

I've seen this a couple of dozen times, and I've seen cases in which the rewrite wasn't done and it was a mistake and I've seen cases in which it was done and it was a mistake.

Steve covers his bases with a lot of exceptions and such at the end -- and he's dead-on that it's about features, not architectural purity, but the article comes off as a strong advisory against rewrites. I would not go that far. If somebody forced me to generalize -- I wouldn't. You can't generalize something like this. Each case is so specific as to be non-inductive.

Since Steve hits the reasons not to rewrite, perhaps a review of the reasons to rewrite might be in order: small changes can take longer than creating and debugging entire modules, code becomes non-understandable to everybody using and maintaining it, the system has errors that are non-reproducible and mission-critical, good developers throw up their hands in frustration and leave, customers ask for simple things that can't be delivered for a really long time and they don't know why, management has plans that nowhere near match up with what can be delivered against the code base. As an example of how bad it can get, I had one client whose customers were mad as hell that they couldn't get a custom report without filling out a bug report and waiting two weeks. They had four guys writing up custom reports -- a problem that has been solved dozens of times before. The reason? The code and data was so convoluted that no box solution or easy answer could make a simple report. Over time programmers can make incredible messes. I don't think people realize just how complicated and complex we can make things.

So yes, there is an anti-pattern of wanting architectural purity and the perfect is the enemy of the good-enough. Seen that a bunch of times. There is also an anti-pattern of shoving things under the rug so long that you start thinking of feature problems as people problems instead of technical ones. Perhaps if we just yell at the developers loud enough they'll go make some kind of magic happen and we can keep the lights on. Our real problem is our developers are such perfectionists they want the perfectly-architected system. Etc. Seen that a bunch of times too. Neither one of these is much fun.

Because they appear to be so common-sense, yet lead to so much pain and suffering, I don't think articles like this help very much -- either from the guys advocating "purity" or from the guys advocating leave-it-alone. This is a gut call, and you'd better know what's going on and have some contingency plans no matter which way you decide. For as much as we like to rag on technical management, this is exactly the type thing they're supposed to know how to do. (Most don't, but that's another story) People get paid to do this, and the reason they get paid is that you can't learn it in a blog article.