skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Within the, slightly mumbo jumbo, world of research into team dynamics (yes it exists, yes it is a surprisingly large field) they relate this to something called "information richness".

i.e. Speaking to someone face to face includes visual and tonal clues to accompany the information. Digital communications can be a lot less rich (the worst being discussion forums and similar) which causes all sorts of complexity problems - a lack of engagement, misunderstandings, offence taken at wording (we all know how tough sarcasm is to convey online I am sure).

Then you factor in the problems of different timezones, company and country cultures and varying tool preferences and, yes, it seems obvious that virtual teams will suffer.

This paper seems pretty good from a quick read through; however I think there is a big caveat - they are studying academic research papers. Which is fine, but only one data point.

A lot of effort has been put into new management techniques for remote teams and, nowadays, within a corporate project you will often find virtual teams working as efficiently as (or even better than) co-located equivalent.

But you need a good team manager to pull it off.
Paypal will.

Don't quote me on this, but I think banks are starting to lean on "possession of a trusted mobile device" as their two-factor authentication. The basic theory is that I give them a number I can receive SMSes at, and then any time they want to verify that the person operating my web browser is really me, they say "We just sent you a one-time password via SMS. Enter it, resend it, or talk to customer service."

This has significant advantages over dongles from the perspective of the bank: they don't have to get into dongle distribution, and people are probably better at keeping cell phones available than they are at keeping dongles available.
Just got in contact with Chris Russo who hacked PlentyOfFish His version of the events here -> http://grumomedia.com/plenty-of-fish-hacked-chris-russos-exp...
Surely a socialist pricing policy would be based on how much its customers earned, not how much they used? ("From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.") Or simply subsidised?
If there is one thing I would like it would be the option to specifically authorize a set of IP addresses allowed to access my bank account rather than the implicit way it is done right now.
Thx man, was my first attempt to design anything.
>If Eric Schmidt is being lined up to become Apple's next CEO

Why on earth do people keep expecting this? Apple's success comes from their fantastic design sense and their leading support. Schmidt gets a bad grade in both those areas. Apple has other people already in the company that could do a better job than Schmidt.
I've never worked any other way than as an entrepreneur in one field or another. I'd love to have a chance to try what you describe!
I must say, the documentation is really nice. Not just in terms of completeness, but also in terms of readability, structure and presentation.

http://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/pyramid/1.0/index.htm...

That alone will make me have a play with Pyramid.
New transistors: An alternative to silicon and better than graphene
As a UI designer, there are few things more soul-destroying than having to ask a coder every time you wanted to move something by a pixel or replaced with something that (to them) looks identical.

My gripe with IB is that it is beginning to look long-in-the-tooth: it lacks many of the modern layout tools you might expect: zoom, show/hide layers, lock, align-just-these-together. IB could do with taking features from a vector art package (without becoming too-much like Expression Blend).
List of languages that compile to PHP

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2076631
As a rule, Apple usually doesn't sell two different laptop sizes with the same resolution.

Next gen, the 15" will get 1680x1050 standard (instead of option) and the 13" MB/MBP should default to 1440x900, or at least get it as an option. But the 15" won't see 1920x1200 before the 17" is bumped.

Furthermore, OSX is hardly resolution-independent, a 1920x1200 15" would make for some small targets.
OpenX Performance optimization with Amazon S3 and CloudFront as CDN
Can't you use the direct link http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-attack-full-report/ ?
Your link adds nothing, not even a slight analyze.
> I believe Apple has made a deliberate choice that quad core offers little benefit over dual core with unjustifiably higher power usage.

It's more along the lines of Intel not having any quad arrandale in acceptable TDPs.
The Dangerous Hubris of the Startup World
Did anyone else try to estimate the number of pages in the dictionary? (I'm genuinely curious!)
He has displayed some very poignant insight into his own behavior in that particular online community. I was able to take away some good lessons about my own activities elsewhere. It's definitely important to keep your ear to the ground, as he has apparently learned. I don't think I've read a lot of what he's written; An article or two over the last several years, maybe. That said I have an image created in my mind about the kind of person he is (very self-promotional) but this has shown me another side of the guy. Something I can relate to.

Good on him for being humble enough to lay his own flaws out there for everyone to see.
"replacing the 3.5in HD's with the slim SSD's found in the air"

The MacBook Pro has a 2.5" HDD [1]. The SSD in the MacBook Air has no enclosure at all, the module is placed directly on the logic board [2].

[1] http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-MacBook-Pro-15...

[2] http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Installing-MacBook-Air-13...
Synaesthesia is probably talking about compiling C (lots of pretty small files) or worse C++ (files are reopened a lot, so random IO becomes very important).
Service Oriented Architecture in short allows companies to compose new web services or re-use existing web services.
eg: A check-driving-history module in an auto-insurance company software can be externalized as a web service.

Various SOA platforms provide tooling via eclipse plugins or standalone IDEs and run time environments (as application servers) to compose web services in different programming languages like BPEL, Java etc.

You can manage versions of your web services using the platform (eg: webservice_v1.1 talks to A and webservice_v1.2 talks to B).

You can add access control to your web services.

You can monitor your web services, start and stop them using the monitoring tools provided.

I've worked on a team that built a SOA platform. I am not sure if any existing platform delivers half the things it promises. It sure helps management feel that they are agile and can compose services quickly to changing business needs.
I'm sure Pewpewarrows is aware of that, he talked about tradition not source code.
These are the self-ware posts by scoble which have made his respected in tech/startup circles.

Perhaps this clarifying post will lead to better discussions on quora. Any new service, when explodes, some one out there misses crucial point of using the service. But in the long run those mistakes become new yardstick to rate content and hence leads to better discussions.

So Scoble - thanks again!
Why Your Distributed Team Is Not Working
My bank in Australia does this (for any transaction to an account I've never sent money to before). Works prettty well.

I click a button, they SMS a 6 digit code, I enter it, money transferred (or bill paid).
This resembles the most common way of authentication for online banking in Germany (a PIN and a list of transaction codes, so-called TANs).

Do you always have to pick the next one-time code in the printed sequence? In Germany, you used to be free to pick any of the unused TANs, which made phishing really simple. Nowadays it's more common for a bank to challenge you to a randomly chosen TAN.
The first and only bug and not a feature.
Sure, I'll dig it up and I'll mail it to you, it's on my todo list now.

It was made because I was planning on writing a book on immigrating to Canada from the perspective of someone that has gone through the whole process, and this was to become one article (a blog post) and / or a chapter in there.

The whole thing had as working title 'movingtoca'.

Canada is a fantastic country but some things there are just - how to say this without insulting Canadians - peculiar.

The system works for the most part but if you don't dig in to Canada's history and do your best to understand the way the various interests interlock there is no way you're going to understand how things got to be the way they are.

To an outsider they'd make no sense at all and to people living there that do not have the historical perspective they probably also do not.

Some of these things date back all the way to the prohibition days of Capone!

How do you explain to an American that the same bottle of wine costs 50% more in rural Canada than in New York City :) ?
50% through it now. Highly recommend!

Sidenote - I was surprised that the author of the Economist article didn't use Josh's quoted research from Christian Schraga who estimated the ten-year NPV of a top MBA program is approximately negative $53,000 [1]. If these assumptions are correct, it would take approximately 12 years to just break even.

[1] - http://mbacaveatemptor.blogspot.com/2005/06/wharton-grads-ca...
Think of it as a wide 360 degree panorama picture stitched from images taken at different times of the day. This would yield a wide, non-distorted rectangular image.

This one combined image was then rolled around itself in such a way that its whole bottom edge is now in the center of this "planetary" image, and its top edge is now the outer circumference of the image (the border with black).

If you're wondering why the center point of the image is not heavily distorted it's because it was overlaid with a simple top-down photo of the place the tripod was standing on.
Can't see why I'd need a service to implement something basic like this?
As a rule, or what Apple has historically done? Because those are two different things. And are there any laptops with a resolution higher than 1920x1200?
Chip and Pin in the late 80s in Germany?

It is true that paying in stores with my German ATM card and its PIN was nothing new when I got my first bank account in the mid-90s. However, that system used the magnetic stripe of the card (which is why skimming is still so attractive here); smart-card chips on bank cards were introduced a lot more recently.
Are you trying to make some point?

If you have an answer, I'd be genuinely interested in hearing it, because as far as I know, that little thing is needed for SSDs to work properly over long term, since overwriting pages in a flash disk is significantly more costly than writing data to fresh pages.

If you don't have an answer, well, your comment seems to be fairly content-free.
What Startups Are Actually Getting Money?: Tech News and Analysis «
I only have my parents recollections about this (we lived in Germany in the late 80's, but I was 0 & so can't recall ;)) - possibly it was swipe & pin, I'd have to ask.

But when the Chip 'n Pin system came in here in the UK my Dad's first comment was "oh, they were using that in Germany in '87/88"
http://areallybadidea.com/34320844
Is Stackoverflow deserted?
I don't use SO very much, but just went on it to post a question about a weird IE css filter:alpha edge case I can't find an answer to on Google.

Most of the front page questions have 0 votes and 0 comments. Is this normal, or just everyone away for the weekend? Should I still bother to post a very niche question?

http://stackoverflow.com/

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/uCfrW.png
Clickables:

http://stackoverflow.com/

http://i.imgur.com/uCfrW.png
You are still saying the same thing. "A socialist country would have freedom restrictions in place". Who says that? Norway, and many other countries, have had socialdemocratic governments for a long time, who also define themselves as socialist (for instance, they belong to the socialist international). Why is an authoritarian regime describing itself as socialist actually socialist but a socialdemocratic government doing the same isn't? Honest question here, just trying to figure out how do you end up there.
The phenomena is called Cognitive Dissonance [1] and more-so probably Illusion-of-truth [2] effect. That being said, if anyone is interested in the half-truths of getting an MBA, read Josh Kaufman's The Personal MBA[3]. The first few chapters analytically and precisely decipher the myths around the MBA. In fact he doesn't go as far as to say "Don't get an MBA", rather "Here are the facts, make your own decision".

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_memory#Illusion-of-tru...

[3] - http://personalmba.com/
They do in some countries. The problem seems to be the upgrade of your ATMs all over the country and all third party ATMs to add a biometric reader too.
Skype 5 for Mac blocks all webcam access by Flash. Skype says it is "by design"
Thought I would pass on a word of warning about the recently released Skype 5 for Mac. Once installed, if Skype 5 is running (even in background), it will block Flash from being able to access your webcam. This breaks quite a few popular web applications. Unfortunately users will think the problem is caused by Flash, when it is actually caused by Skype.

Examples of sites and applications broken by Skype 5.

http://www.dailybooth.com - core feature of the site
http://www.facebook.com - webcam record and "take a photo" feature
http://www.picnik.com - image editors that have import from webcam
http://www.webcamsnapper.com - webcam photo widget used by brizzly, dailybooth, many other sites. (disclosure: my company built this app)
adobe connect, dimdim, etc - online meeting apps

Skype has been aware of this issue since the release of the beta in November and yet they have not fixed it before the general release. According to their issue tracker they say this new behavior is "by design".

https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCM-721

In the old Skype (2.8) this was not a problem, so something has changed. If indeed this is not a bug and is "by design" then it is a very worrying move. Imagine for a moment things were reversed. Say for instance a new release of Flash stopped all video calls working in iChat or Skype. People would be outraged, Gruber would have a heart attack.

Just to be 100% clear, Skype doesn't need to be in a video call for it to block webcam access by Flash. It simply needs to be running. The only fix is to shut down Skype then reload your browser. After this the webcam will start working again in Flash. The only long term fix is to uninstall Skype 5 and install an older version.

More discussion of the issue in Skype forum: http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=782411
if you read grumo's comment http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2160916 you'll see it's not quite that simple

[edited to fix name. sorry 'bout that, been a long day]
Where are you based? I live up in the Bay of Islands where it's about as isolated as you can get and still have DSL.

It's been an interesting last few years freelancing from that situation. The isolation from like-minded technologists can have an impact which Skype is only partially able to alleviate. But it's worth it, waking up to the Palm trees and Pohutukawas, being minutes from the ocean and an hours drive from the nearest traffic light (Whangarei):-)
I totally agree with this. I even had the SSH firewall rule of my Mumble voice server for my WoW guild set to only allow my home connection. One downside is if I'm ever given a different IP address by my ISP, I'd have to go to work and change it. Minor inconvenience but this isn't a crucial service.
From Markus' account, it sure looks like that; but note that a "chris russo" says, in the comments, that he's only given a proof of concept and that the web server logs will show that he didn't make a full dump.

Of course, sending a PoC with an offer to fix the security does have a "nice website you have there, it'd be a shame if something happened to it" vibe to it; still, it's factually different from trying to extort money from a company by dangling a dump of their customer database.
'Anxious' Israel backs Egypt regime
An unfortunate stereotype; but it's also accurate.

It's also accurate for most of the world, period. Very few people actually care what is going on outside their sphere of influence.

I think the reason such thinking is particularly and unfairly associated with Americans is because your media agencies tend to be the biggest, the loudest and the most partisan. Plus America is a damn big place, so it is noticeable when many millions of people aren't interested in something...

I often think that those dumping general criticism like this on the US should take a careful look at their own country first, and see if their criticism is even more general than they are making it :)
I interpreted it as giving up on symbian (and the low-end) for the US, but launching Meego there earlier than the rest of the world with some high end devices i.e. be like Nokia for the rest of the world and be like Apple for the US, then let it trickle down.

As the parent post notes, much of this speculation doesn't even mention Meego. If HP can launch WebOS and expect sales, there's no reason Nokia can't do beat the low bar it's set for itself in the US.
SOP for Citibusiness accounts.
If you have boilerplate code that's repeated from app to app you only have to rwite it once, right?

At least that's what I do when developing on a jailbroken iPhone. I don't start from scratch every time.
Thought I would pass on a word of warning about the recently released Skype 5 for Mac. Once installed, if Skype 5 is running (even in background), it will block Flash from being able to access your webcam. This breaks quite a few popular web applications. Unfortunately users will think the problem is caused by Flash, when it is actually caused by Skype.

Examples of sites and applications broken by Skype 5.

* http://www.dailybooth.com - core feature of the site

* http://www.facebook.com - webcam record and "take a photo" feature

* http://www.picnik.com - image editors that have import from webcam

* http://www.webcamsnapper.com - webcam photo widget used by brizzly, dailybooth, many other sites. (disclosure: my company built this app)

* adobe connect, dimdim, etc - online meeting apps

Skype has been aware of this issue since the release of the beta in November and yet they have not fixed it before the general release. According to their issue tracker they say this new behavior is "by design".

https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCM-721

In the old Skype (2.8) this was not a problem, so something has changed. If indeed this is not a bug and is "by design" then it is a very worrying move. Imagine for a moment things were reversed. Say for instance a new release of Flash stopped all video calls working in iChat or Skype. People would be outraged, Gruber would have a heart attack.

Just to be 100% clear, Skype doesn't need to be in a video call for it to block webcam access by Flash. It simply needs to be running. The only fix is to shut down Skype then reload your browser. After this the webcam will start working again in Flash. The only long term fix is to uninstall Skype 5 and install an older version.

More discussion of the issue in Skype forum: http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=782411
21 Cool iPhone Apps for Digital Artists
Digital art is a relatively new area of interest, but it has gained tremendous following in its few years of popularity. Once relegated to a home computer or lap top; digital artists are finding today that they can use many electronic tools for work, including their iPhones.
Cutting the Cord Study - American Families Tested - One Week Without Cable
I did. It seemed to me he was trying to emulate Jon Skeet's Stack Overflow reputation (ref: http://scobleizer.com/2011/01/02/crack-for-technical-recruit... ) but looks like he misjudged his effort.
You're just asking for a "disregard that, I suck cocks" now.
Regarding the 10/100 USB ethernet adaptor and with some wishful thinking, you could see a USB3 MacBook with a 10/100/1000 USB ethernet adaptor.
Complete BS.

It misses the point that people with college educations can start businesses, or raise the quality of production even in jobs with lower requirements.

At worst/best the unrest in Tunesia stemmed from people with a good education being more used to critical thinking, and standing up against an undemocratic government because of that.
My personal blogging/tweeting rules
>> Are you European?

>Yes, working from NL at the moment.

Same here.

With one bank I must use the hardware token solution (and I am able to use any device, not just the one issued to me). With another bank I must register my mobile telephone number with them and they send me a text with an authorisation token whenever I need one.

I much prefer the hardware solution even though it is a major inconvenience when travelling light.
Tragedy of the commons. It's one of the most fundamental reasons that we have states.
65 jQuery Tutorials To Help You Customize Your Site
Beginner or an actual developer, you sometimes need some jQuery tutorials to customize your site or the client's and make it a dynamic platform for its visitors. From the numerous jQuery tutorials that are on the net.
I'm in the same boat. I'm having freelancers do the technical coding stuff. Try elance, odesk, or scriptlance. I'm using the last one.
Augmented reality magic in Davos by Marco Tempest (YouTube)
While we were creating the legal documents in order to proceed, Markus Frind got progressively more aggressive and unresposive with us, and told us to speak with their employees, Kate and Jay, because there was a serial killer, murdering people from the website.

If you ask me, both of them sound crazy and deluded. Marcus' story doesn't make much sense if you read the email on that site[1], but carrying on about serial killers doesn't help your case much either. And that freelancer link is just a red herring - I can't see what it's got to do with the case at hand.

[1] Update: Or even if you read his own post: "I listened in the background and I closed the breach if indeed there was one while my wife was on the phone". Er, was there a breach or not? And why are you calling his mother and not the police?
It is mind boggling that you contact Chris Russo, get his version of the events, publish it receiving page views and ad revenue and then immediately claim he "does not make any sense with his crazy requests and compulsive lies" without any demonstration of these claims. Now, you might be right, he might be a compulsive liar, but if he is why are you publishing his version of the events on your site then quietly labeling him crazy on HN without some measure of proof? You do realise such claims are libelous right?
I noticed that too, after reading the last paragraph about how Adobe Flash supposedly is the "safe" way, in contrast to HTML5. I even double checked to make sure I hadn't landed on the Adobe Developer Community site.