skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I estimate by considering an optimistic, pessimistic and normal value for each task. I then have a spreadsheet that does a modicum of statistical analysis to give you times against probability that the task will be finished.

Some of the benefits I find are:

1. Getting into the pessimistic mindset helps produce better estimates

2. Tasks with a large spread are things you aren't really clear about, and are an obvious target to be attempted first

3. Giving a range of values to the person asking for the estimate seems to help them remember it is an estimate.
Context: John Gruber mentioned this in a tongue-in-cheek sidenote in The Talkshow podcast last night. (~"Take Wilson's Apple analyses with a grain of salt".)

This guy is just parroting the comment in the echochamber.

I don't really think the story has any merit on its own.
How about this: Any language popularity index that doesn't include COBOL is a joke.

This is an interesting requirement because COBOL is used everywhere the kinds of people who make these indexes aren't looking. Finding ways to include it in a reasonable fashion will likely uncover uses of other languages that really are obscure, and that would be interesting.
I agree. If I could just press a button and scan, I might find them useful, but at present it feels like more hassle to find, launch and scan with the appropriate app (RedLaser on my iPhone) than just to type in a shortened URL.
What types of specific usage?

Gimme some examples, please!
does anyone here consciously want to make millions?

Count me in.

is some degree of megalomania an asset in the tech startup world?

Muwahahahahaha. Damn right.

but I also see nothing wrong with wanting to be rich, as long as you recognize it's a side effect of a very successful business.

Exactly. Profit is just a way of keeping score... but the point of a business - IMO - is to achieve some end, which might or might not be as simple as "get rich." I just read Jim Collins' book "Built to Last" and he goes into a lot of depth about how important it is to build a company around a set of core values... to, as he puts it "build a clock, not just tell time." Good stuff.
You need to compute the ratio between the number of successful experiments and the number of total experiments.

If what you want to know is the probability of having the 5 guys paired with 3 men and 2 women (which is what I think the grandfather meant), the answer is

C(4,3) x C(10,2) / C(14,5) = about 9%

(number of ways to pick 3 men out of 4 x number of ways to pick 2 women out of 10 / number of ways to pick 5 people out of 14, /regardless of the order/)

If you want to know the probability of having the pairs made exactly in the order the grandfather mentioned, it's

P(4,3) x P(10,2) / P(14,5) = about 0.9%

(as above, but considering the order)

where C(M,N) and P(M,N) are the number of combinations and permutations of N items out of M, respectively.

(edit to change multiplication symbol, asterisk doesn't show)
'Will Barcodes Gain Mass Adoption?'
I'm surprised that LCARS interface is not there.

EDIT: Request sent.
Very good analysis. This gives a good picture as to where the two services currently stand. Surprisingly Facebook is doing better than I would have predicted. I don't think you'll actually need to do too many more data dumps to see where the trend is. Doing an analysis like this in May would probably be a good indication to see how the respective services are growing.

However, it would still be incomplete since the way they may be growing is through expanding to more cities instead of going "deeper" into a particular city. My guess is that the main cities you looked at are already pretty saturated, though maybe they're not, so doing the analysis next month would definitely indicate which way.

If it's possible now it would be good to see how many cities in North America have at least 1 venue on FSQR/FB, and how many have 10 venues, etc. And then see how that grows over time. I think that way you could get a clearer picture of overall growth without having to make an insane amount of API requests.
I like this a lot, thanks for posting this. However, I can't seem to access the actual articles by clicking on a post - is this just my browser or does this not happen? How does one go to the actual articles?

And it would be helpful if each post had the title of each parent article associated with them.
The best way to study math is to fight it ...
http://abstrusegoose.com/353
You could always try creating a high-level roadmap for yourself. However, unlike your previous jobs, this roadmap would be more of a guideline than a detailed point-to-point execution plan.
I'm starting to gain a lot of respect for F-Secure. First catching the false-positive on the Samsung "SL" keylogger debacle, and then further reporting on other virus traits.

I think i'm going to move over to them pretty soon since Avast let me down quite a few times recently.
Well... from a positive perspective, it creates so many jobs. Pointless and a job hated by people around the world. At least no one's dying... or is it a good thing no one's dying?
I might not have as much experience as you, but if I've only learnt one thing from being active on Reddit is that giving your personal karma-score any meaning is just a major headache and best be avoided. But the development you are talking about can also be witnessed there. For example in /r/programming, there used to be things such as posts with 91 comment karma and _0_ downvotes. This stuff doesn't exist anymore, the community has grown, become a lot less homogenous and more 'nay-sayers' have introduced themselves.
The above is of course just an example that is indicitative of what I'm talking about. In my opinion, it is best to simply accept downvotes without explanation as background noise. They happen and there's not much you can do about it.
I'm sorry but I completely disagree.

Even in this contrived scenario where there's an opportunistic amateur attacker with full access to your computer but only for two minutes, any changes to Dropbox client security only marginally improve your situation. I've got a USB 3.0 flash drive on my keychain that could grab about 6GB in two minutes. How much secret data you got there anyway?

And as a naive attacker, I would probably just but a $40 hardware keylogger if I wanted to steal a coworker's data.

As for tying the key to IP, it adds only some security (doesn't help in your example where your coworker likely shares the same IP) and, moreover, it's a customer support nightmare. Trust me, I tried it once. Some people have IP addresses that change very often. You can't have them re-entering a password with every request.
And for some reason I feel paralyzed by the lack of a clear pathway [finance makes sense, startups for some reason does not].

I feel like I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, but... buy and read Steve Blank's The Four Steps to the Epiphany. That's step one. Step two is "do what Steve says." Seriously, he lays out a very detailed methodology for going from "an idea" to "a validated and profitable market for your product." Note that he's only addressing the customer / market side though... You'll have to figure out how to get the product built. If you're a coder yourself, you can play both Customer Development and Product Development (that's what I'm doing, for example), or if you're not a coder (or just need more help) you have to start looking at how to acquire help with the coding side.
Looked through Google's numbers but they don't seem to be directly comparable to Facebook's. Anyone know how far apart they are?
> on your point about "emancipation of the future generation." There will never be such a thing...

Agree on your other points, but disagree on this one. I think such "emancipation" of the young at least partially has happened in the developed countries (although it is rarely talked about in terms I describe it). It was enabled first by modern education (kids spending more time with their peers grouped by age and being taught arts and sciences in school as prescribed by government standards and not by their parents), and second by the spread of communication technologies (first by television and mass media, then by the Internet and the cell phones). I don't think it has fully happened though because many important (from my perspective) things such as personal finance management, political awareness etc. are not taught to high school-level students assuming they are either "too young," or leaving that area for their parents to teach, which ultimately contributes to much more financial and political weight being wielded by the older generation. See modern Japan for an example why too much power in the hands of the older generation may not be desirable.
The Graystone Blog
Maybe Google in 2011 was like Microsoft in 1995 - Just finished building a product that takes all the market share (Search/Android & Office/Win95), stock having increased by 500% over the past 5 years, and about to enter a tech bubble.

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

If Google will really become the next Microsoft... That means its time to buy Google stocks!

(Disclaimer: I'm about to buy some GOOG)
Hey, sometimes I compile with the expectation of error, just to make sure that the right error comes out.
You should read Vinicius Vacanti's blog, "How To Make It As a First Time Entrepreneur" (http://viniciusvacanti.com/). He quit a prestigious finance job to do his own thing, and it took him a while to figure his way around. I recommend reading his whole story from the beginning, I think it will inspire you.
There are human timescale factors involved.

If you give an estimate that's too far out, it'll be outside your client's planning scale. That means it's so far out, she doesn't know what will happen by then, she won't do the project. In my experience, this is scale is roughly 9-12 months, unless you're dealing with a MegaCorp.

So most estimates end up at 6-9 months, which then slip into 9-12 territory, and hopefully not much further =)

In my experience, coding time is usually easy to estimate, and that's what most estimates coming from developers should be taken to estimate. But then you have integration (nothing works), testing (everything is broken), and then realizing what the client meant when she said X (solved the wrong problem, optimized for wrong features), those are the tough ones.

You should take the estimate for coding time (coming from the developer), and multiply that at least by 2x. Of course, going back to my original point, that estimate may be outside the "human timescale", so you may not be able to tell the client that...

So, to answer your original question, developers can estimate primary development time up-front pretty well, but they suck at estimating integration, testing and shipping time.

A related thing I noticed is that if you ask a developer during the late(r) stages of the project when she'll be finished with the "next stable version", the answer usually hovers around "in 2 weeks", even if the actual answer is more like 3 months. The developer isn't lying, she genuinely believes that it can be done in 2 weeks.

That's why you want experienced engineers and not fresh college grads leading teams and giving estimates. They've gone through these experiences, have a lot of soft data metrics in their heads, and can come up with good multiplicative factors. I'd be curious if orgs like Google have a database of project data to aid planning.
You don't know the problems/limitations you will run into until you begin working on your project. We have immersed ourselves in a culture where it's expected to estimate the unknown.
Same here; I tend to pause movies and read stuff out of the GUIs/code displays. I remember that on StarGate: The Ark of Truth movie there's some JavaScript-like webpage code that was supposed to be the source code of dangerous aliens. StarGate TV series also featured some C and Java-like code; surprisingly, some of those places should actually contain a meaningful text, not code.
The biggest problem for me is not the actual text, but the graphics, it would be great to convert them to some vector and MathML format
One of those G's isn't enough? 3G? 4G?
I presume this is the book: http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...
I sort of did the same thing and occasionally get the same feeling.

I committed to lifting weights 3 times a week though (in the morning), as a way to keep myself going as it makes me get out of the door and I come home refreshed, ready to get to work.

Other than that, eat healthy, get proper sleep, and meet people!

Works for me :)
The WakeMate app is superior on the iPhone compared to it's android version.
Anecdotal:
There are several shops in town that use Progress 4GL. I used to work at one of them. It is a definite niche language language, I had never heard of it until I worked there.

However, if you are a customer of a (smaller) bank or credit union there's a good chance that you are indirectly using this technology.

That said, I'm not sure what this rant is about? Is he mad that scala/groovy are more niche?

You wouldn't find (any?) Progress 4GL on github because it's a commercial language. You have to pay for it. But it generates millions of dollars of sales and is in use in hundreds of companies (at some level).
Some might just be personality? I think many hackers have a cultural disconnect with the traditional aspirations of wealth, because many of their/our aspirations are hacking-related rather than wealth-related. What would I do if I could do whatever I want? I'm not personally very excited by the possibility of staying in 5-star hotels, drinking expensive wine, owning a yacht, having a big mansion, etc., so those aren't really goals. I am excited by the possibility of being able to work for extended periods of time on my own projects without worrying about their profitability though. So that's getting-rich aspiration in a sense, in that I want enough money in the bank to bankroll 20+ years of carefree hackery, which is actually quite a bit of money.

I'm not sure if it counts for your question, though. In a sense you could say that I don't aim to "be rich" in a qualitative sense, but to "be middle class for a long time without working". And you may be asking why more people don't aspire to be rich in that qualitative sense? On the other hand, a person who can live a middle-class lifestyle for an extended time without working is objectively pretty rich...
Which apps have made that much in the app store?

Minecraft has made somewhere around 30 million U.S. dollars, with incredible growth (7 million U.S. dollars in the past month) and they'll probably sell millions more. And since they do their own distribution (Amazon Web Services, I believe), they don't give Apple 30%.
If you feel you need to have a roadmap to proceed, then you already know the first thing you need to do.
Related, Indian men are really, really bad for sexual inequality and violence: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-03-07/india....
Do some research, decide what you want, then proceed. Along the way, pick up some talented guys to help you achieve your goal. One thing though, if you were not satisfied with your previous work, why didn't you just protest and get a better deal before quitting it for good, since you gonna quit anyway? It just seems weird to me.
Because developers don't work in a vacuum. The second you estimate the project, the client starts changing it...
Need to include "tasks which will take significant time but I can't tell you what they are because we won't know until we get there". Managers can't seem to deal with the notion that 10-30% of a project is completely unknown when writing initial schedules.
It's no that far aff - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwx0-oewjsM
What's really incredible is that the SR-71 was built in the 1960's. I just read Ben Rich's book about his days at the Skunk Works and it was incredible to see what they had to do to build a titanium airplane. Tools would break when attempting to drill through the material. The plan would stretch several inches in length during flight from heat expansion. The cockpit would get so hot that they risked cooking the pilot alive if the air conditioning failed (and don't ever touch the windshield if you want to keep your hands). LA to DC in 62 minutes!

I'd like to think we've got something faster now that's just classified but I suspect we've gone to slower remote drones and satellite data that has less political repercussions.
Exactly. There are COBOL jobs that go unfilled every year. The local college started teaching it again (I think using COBOL.net of all things) because the COBOL programmers are all retiring.

Seems to me TIOBE is a good tool to show your boss to convince him/her that it's ok to use Ruby b/c it's gaining in popularity. (I wouldn't do that of course, I would instead state that obviously Python is more popular and we need to use that :-) )
Yes, and just in case you think I'm kidding (or exaggerating) about how good it is... look at the Amazon reviews. 79 reviews, and almost all of them are 5 star. It's an excellent book; at least in terms of content. The production qualities leave something to be desired, but that stuff can be ignored. It's basically his class notes from his class at Stanford, printed through Cafe Press. But it's excellent material.
Is this written in English?
Ruby on rails and groovy/grails comparison
I regularly work across multiple computers(all macs, but 2 desktops and my laptop), so I actually put my virtualenvs in my Dropbox and then they contain git repositories. So I have my full environment installed on all the computers all the time.

You do have to install git, virtualenv and pip on all the computers, but thats not too much to ask.
With Google resigning their QR code initiative and the break through developments in near field communication (NFC), mass adoption seems unlikely.

The QR graphics aren't aesthetically pleasing - proximity based devices are more likely to succeed.
You need to divide by 3! and 2!. One way to look at it is that every selection of five from the 4M and 10F is equally likely. There are \binom{14}{5} (i.e. 14 choose 5) such selections. Of these, \binom{4}{3} * \binom{10}{2} have exactly 3M and 2F. Therefore, the probability is \binom{4}{3} * \binom{10}{2} / \binom{14}{5}, or (4 * 3 * 2 * 10 * 9) 5! / (3! 2! (14 * 13 * 12 * 11 * 10)) = 10 * 9/(13 * 11 * 7) = 0.08991...
Good point, but the worst interventions had been of a military kind, and I don't think the grandparent has a military intervention in mind.
Giving jailbreak users a break?
Almost all bad estimates are due to a lack of information. In software development, the information that tends to be missing are the particulars of the task being estimated (which code needs to be modified, in what way). This missing information is highly unique and not to generally transitive from one programing assignment to the next. Additional information about the process is usually not the problem. Things like CMM tend to focus on the process information rather than the particulars of the coding problem at hand. Which, leads many developers to think: "You're doing it wrong."
EventMachine Slides
Why would Fred dump his holding in Twitter? I'm sure Twitter are incredibly open with Fred about their financials and future plans. Fred's beef was with being a shareholder and not getting that information.
I am not sure about the death of Bing, Bing has momentum and they should take it forward and not lose ground. Competition is important to bring the best out of technology.
I recommend that whatever solution you go with, you ensure that you have ECC at the filesystem level to make sure that bit rot doesn't end up costing you data.

For instance, with ZFS, you can issue a "scrub" command which will trundle through the whole filesystem and double-check the ECC codes of everything stored on it, correcting single-bit errors it finds along the way. Running scrub every month or 2 months would ensure data is not lost.
Remember, though: contacts are touch-targets. The "huge spacing" is there to make the app easier to use. I think the article even touched on that.
How much of that is duplicates? How much is lower quality versions of other images, which could be recalculated if necessary? How much is higher quality than needed, or stored in the wrong way (PNG vs JPEG for jpeg-y pictures)? 500TB is a lot, and perhaps you can reduce that number.
Uruguay is a great little country. In the Education Index, it's in a very nice neighbourhood:

30) United Kingdom 0.957,
31) Uruguay 0.955,
32) Germany 0.954,
33) Poland 0.952,
34) Japan 0.949...

Uruguayan French teachers are excellent too.
I was a MassChallenge winner (@studyabroad101) and if you want any thoughts about it, Tweet at me @adamjgmiller
Don't second guess. What's done is done and now it's time to get to work. So get to work!
Wilson put his money into other companies and his portfolio is still strong (according to him). His job isn't to pursue a particular investment strategy but to weigh risk/reward and to stick with what he knows. He's said in the past that he wouldn't have invested in GroupOn, for example, because it's not what he knows.
Curating The Virtual World
Keyword terms are most common on advertisements in trains, where it wouldn't be polite to use your phone to scan a QR code (and difficult to do to because of the position of the ads). QR Codes are used most often on things you are given personally, such as flyers or coupons.
PragPub - April 2011
It doesn't much matter what you do right now. Just do something. Anything that moves you toward your goal.

The more trivial the better, imo. You just need to get some momentum. Now move out smartly, troop.
I think you need to take into consideration the type of industry that the company is going to take you in. A lot (actually most) of the companies would low-ball their prospective employees, as it looks good in their bottom line that they are getting these developers for less paltry sums.

If the company hiring you is already an established firm with a good history in terms of professional's salary, then I would expect that you could go for a range of 100K - 150K. For startups, it could go as less as 50K and for medium sized companies, it should be fair to consider an offer from 60K to 90K.
Excellent insight. It seems that YCombinator is really in a league unto itself. For incubators/accelerators, the choice is really two buckets: YCombinator and all the mojo it gives you on the one hand, and all the other incubators on the other, which offer relatively similar value propositions to each other. It's interesting how this dynamic has worked out -- much like in most industries, the distance between the top player and maybe #2 and the rest of the field is significant.
Bandwidth over 3G or 4G is rarely free; bandwidth over wired Ethernet very typically is.
That's a great sign that it is.

So what, the system only started working very recently?
no cell or wifi communication possible, but ethernet available

I've seen a usb tunnel for iphone but never anything for android.
You've got a good point, however I think the lengthening and restructuring of adolescence is being counteracted by the disenfranchisement of the youth: by the time that someone is old enough to have any power to change things, they've been steeped in the culture long enough to have accepted it.

Every generation is rebellious in youth, and conservative in age. The problem is that the lengthening of youth means that it's easier for the ruling gerontocracy to remember the pathways to rebellious ideology, and board that up.
Android tutorial: OpenGL 3d game development basics