skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a hobby I volunteer as "support" for an MMO, too. I go into an open chat room and answer people's questions. I'm very obviously a human - every response is different, the answers fit the questions (because I'm typing them!), I abbreviate people's names, I share anecdotes etc...

Still people not only ask if I am a bot constantly, sometimes they just decide that I am. (Of course, they still believe me if I start talking to them directly and "prove" it, but in those cases I don't like to ruin the joke if I don't have to!)

The only robotic thing I do is type about 90wpm - and read fast enough to keep track of a quickly scrolling chat room. It's not superhuman, but I am "above average" compared to the casual participants. I can understand people being surprised at first.

But making the leap into assuming a fast typist is a bot - despite all the evidence to the contrary - well, sometimes there is no actual problem. Sometimes people are just ridiculous.
Clickable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker

With regards helping people make their estimates better, make them visible. What gets measured gets managed, and people can't improve unless they can see the target. Make a note of their estimate, and compare against the time it actually took.

You can make this "public" within the company, or you can keep it between just a few people, but you must make it visible. Most people will self-correct when given the data.
Could you give some examples of why Microsoft's stack is so bad and which ones are better?

I often see these things thrown around but very seldomly with any good examples. We use Visual Studio + .NET + MSSql/SqlAzure and from time to time I take a look at what else is out there but I have a hard time seeing how any of it could make us more productive.
Interesting speculation, though without basis in information gathered. There's no reason to downvote you though, it is a speculation. It would really be interesting to see Schmidt in that role.
I am curious what I should do to meditate:

- should I try not to think about anything

- let my thoughts go free

- think about _nice_ things

- make some construction (like visualizing a tree, visualize all element of a clock, visualize a mathematic object)
Ask HN: I made an app that makes people happy, how do I let them know about it?
Tzigla.com is a collaborative drawing application. If you're old enough, you might remember the idea from tiles.ice.org. The first board just got finished (after about 2 months) and the participating artists seem absolutely thrilled about it.

However, it seems that the problem with making an app for non tech geeks is that they're not tech geeks. They don't spend their day hanging around on twitter/hn/reddit/etc looking for new shiny apps related to their interests and then bragging about their finds.

The few active users that we have (about 20, all form a pixel art forum) are pretty thrilled with tzigla but that's where it stops. Maybe one or two of them have brought another person to the site.

What should we do to reach the users who would enjoy using the Tzigla and crank out more awesome boards?

ps: a review of the app would also be highly appreciated
So, does buying hardware have better ROI than college?
What makes me mad about Azure is that they support PHP but not Asp "Classic". I might try it, if it supported my favorite technology.
Exactly. I can't wait until some YC companies start being at the receiving end of this behavior so the insane level of Google worship on this site can finally go away.
Hopefully clickable links:

http://tzigla.com/boards/1

http://web.archive.org/web/20080801154619/http://tiles.ice.o...
The image on this page looks like it's about a third of the size of the Kinect:

http://www.primesense.com/?p=487
I predict you're right about ChromeOS devices, but I wouldn't be surprised if, like the CR-48, they will have "Developer Mode" options.
The concept is amazing, the execution is perfect and the first resulting picture is beautiful.

Well done!

Edit: The only places I can think that may contain your demographic are Dribble, Forrst and DeviantArt. There is also an advertise link at the bottom of DeviantArt
To me, this begs the question: why are higher memory VPS instances so much more expensive? I know they typically have more processing power, but the pricing still seems disproportionate.

And I think the more exciting issue is the falling cost of SSDs. I was recently reading about in-memory databases being much faster not just because of faster access, but because they spend so much less CPU time working around disk access issues. Can the whole OS be written that way? We are quickly heading toward exciting times.
Grate home business books
Look for a Home Business book it would be more informative on how to use Social Media for Networking and Marketing.
People have been saying that for decades. AMD, Intel et al. are still very confident that Moore's law is good till at least 2020.
I just added this to my Travel Blog host to kick the tires. It's pretty slick, and does what it says.

I can click a link on my site, and watch the report update in another window. Nice.

Right now I'm watching a guy in China as he creates new accounts and tries to post spam. It's actually pretty fun.
Sensible timing... can't see it raising as many alarm bells as if he did it at any other time.
We're reaching the scale of process where quantum effects are starting to rule. I didn't say we wouldn't be able to keep expanding, simply that this current model will run out of steam. You can't continue to get smaller ad infinitum.
I don't know. But if I were to design such a system I'd use a cryptographically secure PRNG just to be sure. It's no extra work and has no drawbacks.
Greatest BMW Ad In History Is Not By BMW
Yeah, I've been meaning to, actually.
It's precisely BCC's small scale that makes spending engineering time on performance optimizations expensive. At Google's scale it's worth several thousand engineers' time.
Actually, there are very few pure maps sites - most are hybrid maps/list sites. I don't really see the point, though - the location is what matters most, and you always have the other filters to weed out the stuff you wouldn't want to look at anyway.
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Well, one example that recently irritated me terribly is the performance of VS2010 - on this laptop I'm using at the moment (which is a perfectly decent machine and runs VS2008 perfectly well) it just doesn't run acceptably. The OS has been rebuilt and just about every tweak possible has been applied - even a quick Google search shows that I'm not the only one having this problem.

Now in the past I've used a lot of different development tools and in those cases there is a loose coupling between things like editors (e.g. emacs, vi) and a particular development platform. Now I rather like VS and C# - but the prospect of buying completely new hardware (work and home) just to make up for deficiencies in Microsoft's tools is driving me crazy.

With .Net you really do have to use Visual Studio - if you don't then you probably have lost 70% of the benefits of the platform. If I was to move (actually move back) to using emacs or something as my main editor I might as well move completely to JavaScript, CouchDB and node.js - which was a direction I was moving in anyway for my own projects.
Al least here in Europe, it would already help if the patent offices weren't paid on a per-granted-patent base.
While true there might be a slight portion of outcome bias -- the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made (source: List of cognitive biases, Wikipedia) -- involved in that analysis.
I don't think that's a coincidence.

It might even be an instance of that rare animal called a "joke".
Religion is not a scientific subject, but a philosophical one. You can't prove "taste" either but most people know "bad taste" when they see it.
Gaming Industry lose 'billions' to chipped consoles
Indeed, widespread use is important. When I'm looking for computer components, I scour NewEgg for both good ratings and a lot of responses.
If Apple did this, Mozilla would be bleating about Apple censoring Skype.
Amazing idea!

One data point: my sister draws, she doesn't care about twitter/hn etc, but she does care about facebook, and about forums dedicated around drawing.

DeviantArt and "dolls drawing" forums come to mind, for instance.
How do you deal with the constant distraction to the dev team? Must be quite bad if you have a lot of customers and a small dev team.

Having random people pop up on your IM client seems like the opposite of an environment that encourages a state of "flow"...
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Ever tried to change a light in a modern car? For me it's just a reason to buy a car where I can change a light.
It's also the reason why I don't buy an Apple PC. I want to upgrade the memory myself.
Apple using custom screws: It's there product, so they decide. Apple changing the screws after a repair: That is a bad thing because maybe you bought the old Macbook because you could change the battery by yourself.
Company names asic searches and lodgements
Despite the cordial collaborative tone of the blog post, it seems the picture, taken today, tells it's own story.

Forget for a moment who is who and just consider the picture.

There are two dudes in the 'self driving car', sitting in-sync with arms wide open. There is also another guy with crossed arms who is next to, but not in, the 'self driving car'.

Can you guess where Eric is in the picture?

Review the picture again and make your own conclusions..

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_7ZYqYi4xigk/TTirzCdsGgI/AAAAAAAAHW...
> I'm not sure if the small business owner is really reading through Google's AdWords University documents and watching the YouTube videos. You're going to need people to sell to people and not just bytes on a screen.

This is so true. We've just launched a Groupon-clone a couple a months ago in an European country which has a high percentage of Internet penetration, but even though we've built a very simple online system for the business owners to be able to check the redeem-status of the coupons (once the deal is over), there's the problem that more than half of them don't have a computer or Internet connection at the POS. So right now we email them an Excel file with all the coupon codes which they can print at home. Now, asking these people to know about AdWords and such... I don't see how the situation in the States would be so much different.
There is a clearer evidence of GM-soya hazardousness.

http://www.mindfully.org/GE/2005/Modified-Soya-Rats10oct05.h...

Similar to this case, it is also probably caused by RoundUp herbicide, rather that GM itself, but anyway numbers are dreadful.
Hey, maybe you could convince her to share some of those forums.

I tried googling for dolls drawing forum without much success. Do you have a link?
Nobody's talking about you, Android.
Facebook changing photo gallery UI?
Today, I noticed photos on Facebook looked really different... I asked around to see if others were experiencing the same and here are the results of my limited survey:

3 users in Korea see photos with the new UI
1 user in the U.S. doesn't see it
It's a fair point, but I think that has mainly to do with the developers Microsoft are targeting. Buying new hardware every two years costs next to nothing compared to the salary of developers almost anywhere in the world.
Interesting, having read about the Symbolics machines for years in various hacker-centric history texts, but never actually seen what their interfaces were like, this certainly piqued my interest.

However (s the dynds.org domain name hints) this is very likely hosted in someone's home, on (guessing) ADSL or so. It seems to be very much starved for bandwidth, at the moment ... I gave up, for now.
>That's a very decent stint in any company.

It would be today, but back then?
Thanks! Dribble and Forrst seem like they should overlap the twitter/hn people with artists, good idea.

Oh, and I'm quite positive we have no money for advertising on DeviantArt tho.
Hitsniffer is another realtime analytics competitor, and I love it. Maybe it's not as snazzy as Chartbeat (and Woopra looks good) but if your focus is on watching your customer right through the sales funnel, I'd give it a go.

Works great with Wordpress, and has a plugin that makes setup a cinch.
Facebook Rolls Out Real-time Comments
That, and you don't need a top-of-the-line $2000+ Mac Pro to develop (I think those are for video/graphics guys, anyway.)

For example, my main dev box is a Mac Mini (and it flies even with 2 monitors, Xcode, Eclipse, and a bunch of other things open at the same time.) One could even grab a refurb to make it more affordable.
>When it actually comes to needing support, a lot of people find that Apple's slick sell doesn't flow into support

What are you talking about? Apple support consistently scores near the top. Have you ever dealt with Dell?
Similar results described here:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/23/wikileaks_cables_reve... at 18:10

British scientist (GMO advocate) that was payed by gov to figure out how to test for safety at GMO foods. He discovered that generic process (not the insecticide) of GM was probably the reason for smaller brains, livers and testicles..
Perhaps not lazy but ignored...
I really regret not paying attention to maths at school. What exactly is the % doing there? What is the purpose of % normally?
How much a typical promo video costs and why
If you have two monitors just have Tweetdeck open on the other! Easy.
With a p/e of 25, a lot of growth is still priced in, and I see Google's competition speeding up.
0. Google's cpc is expensive.
1. I will happily spend my advertising on facebook - once I get around to it, this weekend.
2. Bing adcenter is cheaper (though astoundingly shit so far - but only working with it a few days).
3. I would advertise with duckduckgo in a shot.
4. I will give twitter a go too.
I've had really great success with finereader. I tried out every free OCR tool I could find and after poor results went for finereader.

Spend some time on their website so you get the right product, they have multiple prices for the same products, too. I got the latest Finereader (after a coupon code I found on google) for between 130-150.

(I'm mostly scanning books)
You could learn a couple of things just by looking the code of others. If you use jQuery you can see the source and find this kind of code in many places. Also:

var x = a || b || (function(){ /* stuff here */ })()

or

var a = b = b || {}
Here's what I use and recommend:

* Mike Cohn resources were the most helpful to me:

- free presentations around estimating and planning (eg: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/presentations/131-agile-... and others on the same site)

- the "Agile Estimating and Planning" book (http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Estimating-Planning-Mike-Cohn/dp...)

- Mike Cohn "Agile Estimating and Planning" course (2 days) was worth taking

* Software estimation: demystifying the black art (http://www.amazon.com/Software-Estimation-Demystifying-Pract...) is a very useful book too

* For lightweight project management tool: I use a mixture of Acunote (for estimating and burndown chart - I even generate my quotes out of it using Ruby and Prawn) and Freckle to monitor the time spent.

I tried many other tools (including Mingle, Pivotal, etc...) but Acunote is the only one that works well for us.
Both of which are available in the awesome Underscore.js library: http://documentcloud.github.com/underscore/
While Minix, like dozens of OSs, is far from having a measurable market share - especially compared to Linux/Windows/BSD/etc - is also far from being either unwanted or disused. It's actively developed and promoted. Why would you characterize it obsolete based on its difference from "mainstream" OSs? That doesn't make sense.
One of the reasons I enjoy programming for iPhone, you can let the engineer in you roam free to increase performance and not feel guilty ;)
Oops. I remember having an option before, guess they changed that.
I'm not subscribed to the newsletter (use fake emails to get in), but every time I've checked Groupon it's been something that is really not applicable to me. One day it was carpet cleaning, another day junk removal, and today laser hair removal. I'd think that Groupon would go for things that have a wider appeal, like food or entertainment. Oh well.
StumbleUpon, reddit.com/Art.

Upload some of the best resulting pictures as examples of a novel kind of online collaboration in appropriate forums to pique curiosity. Do some themed collaborations around upcoming holidays/events/controversies. (Superbowl, Chinese New Year, Valentine's Day, etc. – each output might carry further, and fit discussion in more places, for a few key days.)

Try to find fans/discussions of the precursor ('tiles') thing and mention Tzigla to them. Find discussions about collaborative art and make sure you're appropriately mentioned in context.

Make sure you have a Facebook fan page so any enthusiastic new users might inform larger networks that way. (EDIT: I see you've already done this.) You might even want to try some small Facebook ad experiments, targeted on people talking about 'art', 'painting', 'doodling', 'drawing', 'exquisite corpse', 'surrealism', etc., but otherwise as different from your existing users as possible (ages/regions/etc). At a very small price – maybe just dozens of dollars – that might find other totally new clusters of people as passionate as your founding userbase.

Good luck!
Can we put in Amazon's one-click wonder? Why should we have to make our buy process slower just to avoid a spurious patent?
I can't decide whether SCO's argument is brilliant or awful…
The palette-like user interface is really cool, but you're using the old Google Maps API.

Keep up the good work.
Scientific claims are verifiable. That doesn't mean that they are true.

Religious claims are by definition and practical circumstances not verifiable since they are claims about things outside what we can observe.

But they are also claims that there is a metaphysical reality which we cannot access through science but contain truths about the world we can access. And that is where it falls apart IMHO.
Another death nail on Google TV?
New evidence supports Oracle's case against Google (copyright issues)
% is the modulus operator. It's the remainder when you divide...so 0 % 4 == 0, 1 % 4 == 1, 2 % 4 == 2, 3 % 4 == 3, then 4 % 4 == 0 again. It's useful in that the result cycles through 0 <= x % n < n.
So I guess there's no conflict with running side-by-side with Google? Does Woopra give ecommerce stats (e.g. what search keyword produced a sale today).
He disagrees with the idea that traumatising children is retro, or with the causation vs causality? It's been a few years since I read the book, but I had his do() operator in mind when I wrote the comment.

Edit: Okay - I clearly have to clarify my comment. Intervention studies are not retro. Studies in which you deliberately traumatise children, however, went out with Ceacescu. I was making a joke (albeit apparently a poor one).
I think a lot of it comes down to hyperthreading, actually. The 3x improvement was in transcoding, which is a reasonably pure test of CPU and memory throughput, rather than amount of memory (4GB -> 12GB), or I/O speed (the transcoding was actually done with both input and output across a gigabit network to my NAS).

Nailing down the improvement in build time to any single change would take more time substituting things than I'd care to expend right now. The extra memory for file cache no doubt helped quite a bit, as did the SSD, but different parts of the build are I/O heavy, and other bits are CPU dominated. My MacBook Air 13" (4GB RAM, SSD etc., but slow processor, running Windows 7) isn't particularly fast at the build.
Consider a set of politicized disciplines, S1, S2, .. Sn (e.g. climate science, GM foods research). Let P1, P2.. Pn be proponents of prevailing theory in respective discipline, and D1, D2, ...Dn be their detractors.

Define coherence K as cardinality of (P1 & P2 &... &Pn) | (D1 & D2 &...&Dn).

Varjag's conjecture: as n approaches infinity, K asymptotically approaches zero. Therefore if true, the argument from authority is rendered relevant.

(the proof is left as an exercise to a reader)
What problems are you guys having with git on Windows?
I will ask her - can you leave me your email somehow ?
Guys, thanks a lot for a very good, constructive criticism and suggestions!
Right, it is an iMac at my home behind an ADSL line. It's not really made for Hackernews size traffic. Interested persons might come back later, when the traffic died down. Typically Lisp Machines are only interesting for a few persons - so the average traffic is not really high.
When I was a kid, whenever I was learning about some aspect of computing, I would have a running monologue in my head about how I would explain this to someone else, to the point that I would write out on a piece of paper an explanation of e.g. an adder composed out of boolean gates, or of how 2's complement made negative numbers work, out of sheer enthusiasm for what I was learning.
"Algorithms are for people who don't know how to buy RAM"... really shows a startling lack of understanding

Are you perhaps missing that it's a deliberate inversion of the more obvious statement "needing more RAM is for people who don't know how to use Algorithms" in order to make the point that RAM is cheaper than an engineer's time?
Instead of hosting 124 screenshots on what is apparently a home connection, perhaps you should upload them to an image/photo sharing site. It's not like there's any shortage of those. A free flickr account will probably do the job.
Are these Microsoft addins causing you crashes or other problems?
Sun's open source legacy - Code and compromises
I highly doubt that this quote is really from Macchiavelli, as in his writings entrepreneurship is not touched in any way.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but you need a trained brain to spot the difference.
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Google Replaces ‘Reader’ Link With ‘Photos’ In Gmail, Users In A Tizzy
Lots of local brands have suddenly gained some traction in Indian market. Mostly because of their cheap prices (Micromaxx brought out an Android one for $130!).

Also, if you look at the PR of these new mobile companies, they are mostly targeted at the people living in rural areas. So, they are in fact eating a part of Nokia's pie, but a final verdict can be said only a couple of years later. Micromaxx is going public soon, so, lets wait and see how many of them make it.
You go to the deviantart forums and let people know. The key is to go find where artists are hanging out, and tell them... don't broadcast where they can't hear, go tell them.

Tiles was great. One of my desktops for the longest time was this: http://www.slothy.com/118.jpg which is a tribute to Van Gogh drawn collaboratively.
Indeed. Why are we doing anything if just throwing money will solve all our problems. Let's just sit back, relax, and throw money at stuff...

Algorithms are a poor substitute for us poor engineers that don't have money to throw :)