skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The best way to ask a coworker for help: Look for a moment when he or she is not in flow that you will break. Returning from the water closet or coffee maker, or just if you happen to glance at their screen and see Gmail or HN or something.

(Yes, a programmer can be in flow while doing those activities, but the incidence rate is lower.)
IOS/Android Programming Contest
It seems like part of the problem with procurement was not clearly illustrating that a discount had been applied after all.

PM: Well I’m going to need some kind of discount. How about 30%?

Me: As it says on our website, we don’t discount.

PM: But I’m buying 400 seats!

Me: Yes, and we already provide a nice discount for bulk orders, which is already included on the invoice and documented on the website.

I.e. he was wrong to say 'we don't discount'. The answer is actually - 'yes, I've already applied your discount. Because you are buying so many seats, you get our discount of x%. If you bought another y, you'd get z%'. Sounds like it could have been communicated better.
Hold on a second, you originally wrote, "if the p-value is less than .05 (by an arbitrary and accidental custom) the model is rejected." Usually by model we mean an alternative to null hypothesis. So essentially you said, if p < .05, alternative model is rejected and null hypothesis is accepted. Well that's a contradiction to what you just stated in your second post (and to what we both agree on).
After starting a family and enduring heart surgery, one learns there is no "quit".
I understand the sentiment trying to be conveyed here, and I do agree that by speaking up a developer can help prevent a bad feature from being released while learning more about their product offering. However in the type of company described, where the 'natural set of responsibilities' places the developers as merely implementers of the vision created by the managment and product teams, the developers are not in a position of power at all and cannot be held responsible if a poor feature makes it to production.

Only in a company where developers ARE the product team and are a part of the decision making process can they trully be considered the last line of defense. In the scenario painted in the OP, the developer has not been empowered to play defense, and if they do so by not coding the feature they risk becoming unemployed.

I don't think you'll find a soul here that wouldn't sympathize with a developer in that position, and I definitely would not want to be placed in that kind of a situation, but it does exist and is quite the norm outside of the startup world.
Who the hell would want a person like that in their company?
(1) Find something that causes people pain

(2) For a fee, fix it

(3 optional) build Scrooge McDuck style money bin to contain your new found wealth
I Hate CSS
They even got the helicopter and humvee right (sort of).

The French started experimenting with helicopters in 1906, so it's not that surprising.

The people in 1900s have over-estimated the usage of robotic arms. We don't have that kind of arms working on human yet, but we do have them on automotive manufacturing.

We don't have robotic arms in consumer products yet (I believe this will change in the next 10 years), but they are pervasive in the manufacturing industry in general, not just in the automotive manufacturing.
There's an interesting pun in this one: http://acidcow.com/pics/20110225/future_11.jpg

The label next to "concierge" reads "descenseur". It's a reference to the French word for a lift, "ascenseur", from "ascension", "to go upwards". A descenseur would then be the exact opposite of a lift - an apparatus to go downwards. :)
of course I don't believe that. The question is how best to handle that cost? Through voluntary action or through an inefficient behemoth of a bureaucracy. I'm going to get overtly political here, but I have to say: I cannot honestly believe that a country that fails to successfully take care of osama bin laden without slaughtering millions of innocents along the way, has any hope of managing something as delicate as individual healthcare needs for 300 million.
If the bill was just what the Times is portraying it to be, it does sound terrible. However, the poorly-written article seems to grossly misrepresent the bill in favor of a scare story. Reading the bill summary and Patently-O's run-down, there are some points of concern, but in general it looks like a net positive. Simplified and enhanced third-party prior art and review procedures sound like a huge win.

Bill summary here: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s112-23
Ok... again, not trying to be combative but:

a) This still doesn't really answer my question.

b) Would it be illegal to put up a website and say that essentially no one can use it? Aside from some exceptions like discrimination, ToS's define how you can use a tool, which is exactly what they were doing. Is there some law stating that if you host a website, you must allow users to link to it in any way they like?
http://twitpic.com/44qqyn
CSS: Transition Timing Functions
At first I thought these were original photos taken to look like something from the Street View cars. The people looked strangely staged. I was a little surprised to find out they were authentic.

The staged aesthetic of the photos is really something interesting and unique, almost voyeuristic in some sense.

This comment ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2271247 ) linked to a great writeup that really captured the feelings I had looking at many of them.
So, Mac users can now have two toolbars specified in their chrome, and everyone can lose control of how the browser is displayed? I'm not sure, I'm reminded of:

if (event.button == 2) {alert "no clicky!"}

While there should be a launcher in the browser that can create SSB or a shell for the web-app, I highly doubt it should be so tightly integrated with the chrome that a website could take control of the browser window without user intervention. This seems to just move the typical in-pane menu up to the top of the window.

This might be a good idea, however I'd rather Firefox included a launch mode that allowed it to load in an SSB, not to suddenly change the window into a different app, which might be fine under Windows, but is pretty awkward under a Mac as it breaks window switching.
Working on this topic. Found this link. Maybe it is helpful to others too.
http://www.pastefire.com lets you send any selected text from anywhere on your mac (and PC? not tried) via right click - free!
So Thunderbird doesn't import/export in a standard format?
Zombie Sweeper v 1.0
A point by point rebuttal.

1. The op knows this but is implicitly believing his audience is different from the cited fields often enough to make point (1) relevant. Moreover, it's perfectly correct to say that many journal reviewers are not interested in Bayesian methods.

2.1. This is highly anecdotal and not at all a strong point. I'm sure Efron has knocked out a 600 core cluster doing frequentist bootstrapping (1). I'm also certain that many, many Bayesian methods run near instantly on modern hardware. I'll concede that there are fewer closed form results, though.

2.2 This is very true. Entrepreneurs?

3. "Data so sparse, expert judgement so rich" is exactly where Bayesian analysis is most pertinent. Use a prior to clarify and quantify your expert opinion and then demonstrate that indeed your few observations are worthy to change someone's opinion.

4. Choice of frequentist testing regime introduces subjectivity, too! Moreover, since these have been heralded as "objective" for so long it's pretty difficult to get people to recognize as much. Oftentimes, a frequentist method will be equivalent to a Bayesian method under a maximally uninformed prior. This is still a subjective assumption (though there are benefits of such a prior).

---

Frequentists test are oftentimes very necessary. They have already been highly optimized in many cases and thus are available on low resource computing platforms. They are definitely an important engineering solution! That said, Bayesian methods do a far better job being clear in their assumptions and simple in their logic.

There is certainly room for better software (free or otherwise) to replace BUGS/JAGS/whatever for the largest use cases of statistics in many fields. Also, another point you make about Bayesian methods making life difficult during certification and publication is exactly right, and probably the largest (unspoken) reason why they're not going to be used in core scientific fields for a long while.

But both of those reasons are distinctly practical and unscientific. Bayesian methods do a better job using your data. They do this by allowing expert knowledge to enter into statistics in a sensible fashion. Finally, they introduce an easily understood interpretation on the answers to your statistical questions.

You might not personally want to use them today for practical reasons, but the author of this article is very much in the right to try to encourage more scientists in more fields to take a look.

(1) Sorry, I'm actually not at all sure if this is the case. Bootstrapping is still more computationally efficient than MCMC, I think. I just used the example because I think it's ridiculous to make either point.
Does the 8th pic say that 'dinner shall remain dinner';the way of eating would be unchanged?
Singapore is the size of a city in the US, it's hard to compare the efficiencies of government programs. Medicare's enrollment alone is over 10x the size of Singapore's population.
Techno-Panic Cycles (and How the Latest Privacy Scare Fits In)
Microsoft is largely B2B - it sells software licenses to OEMs for the hardware, and licenses to large corporate customers for productivity software like Office and SQL Server and so forth. Most of Microsoft's sales aren't people buying Windows in stores.

Salesforce.com is another example of a B2B startup which grew explosively.
more power to you - its always the most flexible if you are using the lowest common denominator tool. My point in the post (if you read it) is that since we do use AWS, and have code to manage its specifics (which we have to do in fog as well) by abstracting the cloud resources into CloudFormation, our recipes get more portable. YMMV.
How To Disrupt And "Hipmunk" An Industry
Yes. I have different workflows for stuff like, "Is this a known bug?" vs. "how should I model my domain?"

For the former, why dive in and learn something that someone else has already figured out, especially when the "something" is so mundane as an API incompatability? I would much rather spend my time figuring out interesting stuff.
Using whatever editor or CLI you want sounds like a nice touch, might not be so expected in such a big company.

Does this extend to browsers? Is it open to use Firefox or Opera or Chrome as your main personal web browser, or is there a corporate mandate to use Internet Explorer on every desktop within Microsoft?

(I know the OP on wordpress may not read this here, but any other input is welcome)
Yahoo Blocked Delicious Founder Joshua Schachter From Investing In Twitter
Strange because last I heard, Sprint was providing the wireless network for the Kindle.
Sounds like the dev types get 3-4 monitors and very beefy PCs, and work 40 hour weeks.

Why would you want/need a laptop in that case? Multi-monitors with a laptop is asking for ergonomic-related health problems.
My paint job is well done and tasefull and failities didn’t fuss at me about it.

They key point is tha tthis is up tot the team (or team’s) that own the code.

This all sounds great, but everthign isn’t unicorns and ponies every day:
There are problems to be sure – somtimes the bug data base is slow,

Would have been cool if he had spell-checked this before posting it.
Did Jason Baptiste draw that graph? I thought Paul Graham did at the YC offices. (The one with the Tech Crunch of initiation)
Shots of 741 starring in old Fairchild catalog: http://imgur.com/jkrv7 (or direct http://i.imgur.com/jkrv7.jpg)
I think that our future is actually more impressive than anything that they could have even possibly imagined then:

http://thingist.com/t/pageview/1674/

What's interesting is that these illustrations are only 100 years old. The things we have right now, smart phones, robots, the internet, MP3 players, etc. seem far beyond what the futurists of the last century were imagining.

Honestly, the things we have now seem beyond what people were imagining even 50 years ago.

I wonder if we'll see this large of a technological revolution again in the coming 100 years (or an even bigger one [check this video out: http://vimeo.com/2319926 for an interesting take on this])
How so? Numerous studies have shown that second-hand smoke is very harmful:

http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/tobaccocancer/seco...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_smoking

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/secondhand-smoke/CC00023
I would have thought that it was obvious that I wasn't serious about the HTML5 thing. I figured the smiley would have been the giveaway.
I launched the site in late Oct of last year and it is growing by leaps and bounds. It's built with Ruby on Rails. My hope is to build a community around sharing links strictly related to development and design. No general tech news links or other distractions. I'd love to get some feedback on it from the HN community.
>Me: As it says on our website, we don’t discount.

Should, like you say, have been "we've given you an X% discount to reflect the size of your order, if you buy Y more then that will increase to Z%; how do you want to pay" ... or something like that, no?
Everything old is new again: Terminals in 2011
>with the advent of pair programming and agile methods, many designers and developers are more effective in shared spaces

I'd be interested in seeing a source for this. I personally believe any creative endeavor is better performed in isolation.
Second-hand smoke outdoors? I don't think so :)
Almost forgot to mention the most important aspect, the site is invite-only. It's read-only to the public.
This could be limitations of the artist and of the medium.

These images were produced by chromolithography, a many-staged process of chemical interactions. Adding lots and lots of details and tiny, realistic figures would be difficult. And perhaps expensive. I can imagine a situation where the cost of the process is an exponential function of the number of places different colours have to border each other without bleeding.

It's tricky enough to draw that kind of thing in any medium.
While I do think the design is very well done, I'm not sure I see the benefit of something like this, vs. Delicious and other social bookmarking things.

Keeping it a gated community is going to make taking off VERY difficult, unless you have some over-sharing, highly prolific people in out of the gate (no pun intended).

While there may be groups that do want to keep their sharing semi-private, are there enough to build a meaningful audience (read: potential advertising revenue stream) for the service, or will you just charge for it (saw no mention of this, but may have missed it).
Yes, and /bin/sh is often not bash. A sufficiently hosed system may give you only /bin/sh until you can repair things, and knowing these tricks in those cases can be a real lifesaver.
>Is there some law stating that if you host a website, you must allow users to link to it in any way they like?

None that I know of specifically - however putting a website up is an implicit contract allowing normal web usage (for credits: now define normal and enforce that contract).
Quora for Startups: Sprouter Pivots to Focus on Q&A for Entrepreneurs
Ask the Experts: How to Participate in Linux
Looks like its just doing markov chaining against previous messages.
The Decline and Fall of System Administration
Don't try to learn from failure
I simply read that straight as being "a lift moving downwards", can you explain the pun?
Running a startup rarely makes sense. You are pushing on and on despite all warning signals telling you not to.

You barely have money left. Most of your friends have been reduced to ghosts and memories, You can't recall the last time you saw some of your family and you are constantly working. Working instead of eating, working late into the nights and beyond, working when you're supposed to be taking time of and resting. It's so easy to get tunnel vision and descending down the rabbit hole if you are not careful. Easy to forget to check if you're doing the right things properly. Easy to ignore or rationalize having blown every single deadline and budget you made.

When you compare startups with usual 9-5 salary work, it's actually amazing how much risk founders take and how incredibly hard they work. And people wonder why startup founders - the very few that actually make it - get so much more money than the employees.
As I read this, he's not making links to their web pages. He's deep linking to their content and displaying it within what appears to be a custom browser. While there is plenty of debate about the propriety of deep linking and whether sites have the right to bar deep linking, displaying content within a custom browser is analogous to 'framing' content without permission, and framing content a no-no.

Creating deep links to their content would be launching Mobile Safari with their content in it.

Now, it could be that after he talks to them and they have a look at his app, they decide that yes, he's framing their content but he does so in a manner they feel is in their best interests and is compatible with their business model as they see it. In which case, they will give him written permission to do so.
This becomes confusing - it seems at first like a social bookmarking site, but then there's resumes. It's a gated community, but read only to the public.

I'm not sure any of this is BAD, and I may just be stupid, but the 'why the hell should I care' bit seems to be confusing? Is it a job board, or a news/content sharing site? Both?
I hope they can improve their CDN.
Lately, I've been seeing lots of Buffering when watching YouTube Videos.
Completely off-topic, but the first thing I thought of when I saw this was R-Studio, an old file/disk recovery software. I was surprised to see that the R IDE has a trademark on "RStudio" (in both US and Canada) given that the former has been around for at least a decade. I guess R-Tools just never cared to file for a TM?
There is a serious legal question about whether or not a ToS for a website is enforceable. Probably, if ANY ToS is enforceable then this one is. But it's an open question. The argument against enforceability goes something like this:

TOS enforcement stems from contract law. A principle of contract law says that a contract is binding on both parties if they agreed to it, but there must be SOME benefit to each party. A TOS between a website and its users clearly meets this threshold, but in this case agiletortoise didn't gain any benefit from the website -- he simply wrote a program that directed the user's browser to go there.

That being said, the best solution is the one that agiletortoise used: simply direct people to someplace less hostile, like Google, Bing, or Wikipedia, instead of Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha loses, everyone else wins.
Seems like it's forrst.com + resumes.
By the way, if you want to read the public posts you can find them at http://talentopoly.com/posts
> Would it be illegal to put up a website

> Is there some law stating that if you host a website

You're looking at this backwards.

The TOS is not a contract that automatically applies to everyone; I don't have to agree to it if I link to your site.

Generally, if you want to prevent people from using your website in a certain way (that's not blatant abuse/hacking/etc), you're going to have to resort to technical solutions, because your only legal recourse is copyright law, which may or may not apply.
Seems like a really great event. Hmm, maybe we should do one of those in Seattle ...
The Overpayer's Club
I really enjoy the creation aspect of coding in the same sense I enjoy painting, but I do not like "puzzles" in the sense of there being one answer and I have to fiddle with shit until I get it. I always felt like I was in the minority of programmers with that attitude.
I'm not sure if you're aware James, but some people seem to have been posting miscellaneous news item of interest to the tech/startup community in between all your links. You should put a stop to that before people start using this site for that purpose instead of just driving traffic to your site!
Anyone have experience with good frameworks? An overview, perhaps?
iPhone developer looking for iPhone app designer/artist (the latter more important than the former) for some part time remote work.
The EFF has been doing some good work on TOS abuse. https://www.eff.org/issues/terms-of-abuse
I'm sure they would be interested because this linking policy is absurd. There is no way a practice like this would be 'illegal' anywhere but on Apple's app store where I imagine Wolfram Alpha holds at least a little sway.
There may be cases where linking violates copyright (Total News seems reasonable, although that's really probably more of a trademark issue), but I think the main problem is that most judiciaries and legislatures are a bit unclear on how the internet works.

However, I'm also in a better position than judiciaries and legislatures, since I'm talking about right and wrong, not legal and illegal.
I recently(ish) starting to work on web design after years in desktop product management. A community like this could be terribly helpful.
AGPL license, interesting. I suppose the plan is to monetize with a hosting/SaaS service?

Edit: Found the answer on their blog:

> RStudio is also a company, and we plan to sell services (support, training, consulting, hosting) related to the open-source software we distribute.
Use sass: http://sass-lang.com/

In particular: sass --watch styles.scss

Big productivity win.
I've largely given up caring, but there will be people who notice ...

> app I made that maps your friend's locations.

This implies that your users only have one friend each, which might be true for some, but is unlikely for poeple who use Facebook, given the implicit defintiion of "Friend."

It's irrelevant, but I thought you might like to know.

And I haven't logged in becuase I don't use Facebook, so I guess I don't have any friends ...
I agree, I'm just saying it's better than giving up. Sometimes founders think they have to (and can) do everything that's all.

In this particular case, a $200k contract might warrant hiring new people instead of failing...

But i'm all for the do-it-all CEO...
A Glimpse on Amazon Web Services
Most likely the PM feels the need to get discounts above and beyond the standard rates - he always wants to feel that he was able to get a better deal than anyone else. You'll find people like this everywhere.
World Wide Web Foundation - founded by Tim Berners-Lee
how about the singularity.
Ugh, another frivolous down vote. Why do people do this?

Anyways, experience certainly can strengthen us and give a soothing perspective to the hardships we are enduring. IMHO this makes it all the more important that you're really into a startup because you are passionate about it and have a more solid motivation factor than just money or, even worse, desperation.
Absolutely. My point was it has less to do with the numbers game than the nature of the cops' jobs.

I'm shocked at the jury in this particular case. Both the bit about the beard and the alibi didn't create a reasonable doubt? Many are quick to blame the prosecutors, but those 12 jurors should be ashamed of themselves. There's no indication that the prosecutors in this case lied or concealed exculpatory evidence, or that the defense attorney was asleep during the trial.
Thanks, I shall change the theme to something a lot more sensible :)

edit - I chose that theme since I thought it fit with the theme of the blog itself. Changing it now to something focused on readability.

edit 2 - fixed hopefully. thanks for feedback
I dont' know who drew it, but I saw it on the wall at YC during the first AngelConf.