skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This might work in StarFleet, but the problem is that if you promise a manager something repeatedly, by overestimating, they will start to assume you are padding your results.

Having worked on scrum teams before, I find its a good structured way to have a dialog about how much work is left, and how long you expect it to take.

So rather than saying an hour. You would say this is as easy as changing a diaper, or its as hard as navigating through an asteroid belt at the speed of light ( having or not having done it ).

I would appreciate it if managers ask:

Have you done this before? (yes, no)

How similar is this to something you have done before? ( very similar, kinda similar, totally new )

What concerns you about the task, or what risks do you see coming your way? ( detailed answer )

What can I do to get you the resources you need to help you deal with the risks you can foresee now?
Lightbank and Sandbox have their own enclaves. The ITA (Illinois Technology Association) has offices, and some stuff. There is the lean startup circle. You can also out built in Chicago. Midventures also events. Entrepreneurs unpluggd seems to putting on more stuff, lately.
Running a TCP/IP Wireless Network Installation and Support
this article will show you how to install a wireless network in a company setting
Guessing as someone who has very little clue about Scandinavia:

Why have the Norwegian dialects diverged so much

A rugged and wast geography tends to isolate people, this leads to greater drift between local dialects? Sweden is big too, but I think Norway is much more mountainous?

Why can Norwegians understand Swedish but Swedes have a hard time understanding Norwegian?

Norwegians are used to listening for a wide range of dialects, Swedes not so much?

Why has Norway stayed out of the European Union?

What's the point of joining for a small yet well of country? If you're big like France and Germany you can guide the EU your way, if you're small but less developed like Spain, Portugal, all the new members, you hope for increased wealth. But if you're Norway, why join?

Why is the English influence of the Norwegian language more noticeable in the capital than elsewhere?

The capital has a bigger economy, more trade, more people's work requires English, more tourists, even the non-UK and non-US tourists are more likely to communicate in English, more entertainment overall, and this means more foreign entrainment - music, movies - in English.
Does anyone happen to know if there are significant companies in the speech-recognition space besides Dragon and Google?
Or you could use the Viper and Vimpulse packages to enable Vi style emulation in Emacs.
http://www.parkwhiz.com - We started in 2006, when it seemed like TechCocktail was the only startup community in town. Ended up bootstrapping the company, and we recently opened an office in Roscoe Village.
I'm sure some parts of Oracle's database are very good. The part I work with (OLAP), though, is ludicrously bad. New bugs are introduced with almost every database patch, and the behavior of existing functions have changed without notice. For this privilege, Oracle charges license fees by the core.
Try www.khanacademy.org
I once heard bloggers at TUAW get $15/post. But this was back in 2007, I'm sure it's changed since then. I suppose it also matters if someone is a contributing blogger or a full on staff member like MG Siegler and Sarah Lacy at TC
I agree that there is no recipe. But the key take away is that Fred spent a ton of time responding to as many comments as he could physically till end of 2009. And that is absolutely necessary in order for other people to take the time to invest in your blog.
I'm rooting for Google-- would love to see them kicking ass on more fronts.

The SVP of Social seems like a strange choice... Should be someone like Ev Williams. Instead, it's a guy who was an open source evangelist who also helped lead Windows Vista when he was at Microsoft. I'm sure he's a really effective guy, but does he GET social?
Sometimes it depends on the team dynamic. If the non-developers have the will and time to incorporate git into their workflow, then it makes sense. If not, it's not their fault either.

In the end, it's about adopting what is most effective for the entire team to get the job done.
I can think of another programming language called Hedgehog, developed by Palantir Technologies: https://wiki.palantir.com/pflc/the-hedgehog-language.html
Citation needed. I tried to figure out which one of us is correct, or at least more correct and this is the best I could do: http://www.opsecprofessionals.org/articles/dumpsterdiving.ht...

As always, depends on state and local ordnances. If you are on private property you can always get hit with trespass, but the actual trash picking is typically legal. Many licensed PIs make their living going through other people's trash. In short, buy a shredder.
I think an under appreciated gift Apple has given the world is the patience to provide something when it's done, vs. possible.
10 Weekly Best #1 - awesome collection of great stuff
All true. Right now 14/3 Romex costs about 3x more than Cat5. Copper is expensive!

LED lamps use DC power. The LED lamps that you can buy that screw into a standard Edison socket contain electronics to convert the AC line voltage into DC. This is inefficient -- generates heat and wastes power (though still not nearly as much as a traditional incandescent bulb).

By using power over Ethernet for their lighting, the datacenter can use cheaper, cooler, more efficient bulbs, and save a lot of money on the wiring too.

I can definitely foresee a future where new construction includes wiring for both line voltage AC and also low voltage DC. It could eliminate all the bulky transformers scattered around a typical house and save energy and money.
Reminds me of Quebecois French vs. Parisian French, for much the same reasons. In Paris, I can call an e-mail an e-mail. In Montreal? I've been told I have to use 'courriel'. The Quebecois are a little less secure about their cultural identity than the Parisians, so their resistance to loan words makes sense, despite a higher level of English proficiency.

Incidentally, I don't think that study does justice to Norwegians' facility with English. I never worry about being understood in any European capital, but in Norway everyone seemed near-fluent, even in the rural areas. We spent a couple of weeks driving around above the Arctic Circle, and I never had to whip out the phrase book once.
Their FOSDEM paper is a must read. A balanced and honest assessment of their little Lisp.

Customers have not cared whether Lisp is used or not. They have only cared about the results, and being able to change specifications with relative ease even after delivery and deployment has sometimes been a killer argument.
This is what I had in mind. Are there specific templates that are recommended or heavily used?
Canada owns the Social Media Management space: Syncapse, Radian6, & HootSuite
Sorry to be a killjoy, but the premise of this article--that Google developed the speech-recognition technology--hurts my feelings (to say the least) and underestimates the contributions of the NLP community.

Speech recognition, like machine translation, is academic in origin, and much of the work is still carried out in academia. For example, Google did not "invent" machine translation. No, Google Translate is an adapted version of academic systems. Perhaps the phrase tables are sharded and so is the language model, but the general algorithms are the same. Sure, one of Berkeley's NLP grads is working there, but it's basically an adapted version of what's available. They publish papers like "Stupid Backoff" [1], but that makes them as much a contributor as any other member of the NLP community.

Speech recognition is the same thing. Google is the company that takes existing research and adapts it.

To claim that Google developed the speech recognition technology is to discredit the contributions of everyone else in the NLP community. Google has been generous at funding NLP research at the university level. Do you consider the results of those research "Google"'s?

Ultimately, the main difference is that Google has magnitudes more data and the physical capacity to handle that, not that it solved some systems or architectural bottleneck that has been limiting us. Someone once said that all you need is a crappy model and great data to build a good ML-based algorithm...

[1] http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/D/D07/D07-1090.pdf
I was briefly looking for exactly this, after our lawyer suggested manually printing out thousands of emails and scanning to PDF. Luckily my encouragement to use a PST file finally won out. Not a confidence inspiring moment.
http://pumpingstationone.org/
In fact, this is well documented: http://wiki.nginx.org/Pitfalls#Passing_Every_.7E_.5C.php.24_...
The people doing the reviving will be the same ones who have been maintaining the dewar flasks the whole time. Alcor doesn't just toss corpsicles into a vault. They use the interest from investments to pay for research and indefinite maintenance.
Researchers Map IP Address Locations Within 700 Meters
A KeyRemap4MacBook snippet to force yourself to learn the correct shift keys
I don't have the raw data but I have checked the stats page every week or so during the last few months. Minecraft consistently sells around 9,000 copies per day. I also got the impression that that number grew from around 8,000 to around 9,000 during the last months but I could be wrong about that. That rate of growth doesn't seem to grow anymore but it also doesn't seem to shrink. 9,000 copies per day at 15€ is a huge amount of money.
> Public perception was that Live was a failure.

At that time I was paying a lot of attention to search results, from two perspectives: 1) I had some slightly unusual / difficult searches I performed regularly, and 2) examining search terms that brought people to some sites I ran.

For case 1, Google simply wiped the floor with Live. Note that Live had the most relevant results in their index, but they'd be way down on the 5th page, 10th page, wherever.

For case 2, the majority of people coming to my sites from Live were coming there with search terms indicating that they did not want my site. For example, I had content for Phoenix, AZ and some polls. My site stayed within the top 5 on Live for search terms like "phoenix polling locations." Of course every site gets some of this from any search engine, but with Live is was problematic.

My perception was that Live was a failure, and I think my reasons were valid.
It's worth keeping in mind that California is a big place. The difference between the Bay Area and LA/San Diego isn't completely insignificant when it comes to hiring practices and salaries. In my experience, years of experience has more of a bearing on your employment and compensation in the south than it does in the bay where companies are looking for talented people of just about any background, and if anything youth can be something of an advantage when looking for work.
I'm in this field because I love to code, I love to build things and I immensely enjoy technology

So do I.

But if you want me to do those things for you as opposed to doing them for myself, you'll have to pay me market rate+
Oh, not bad. That will make the blogger about $3000 per month, right? (at 6 posts per day)

Anyway, thanks for the info anderzole!
Git, like most versioning systems works by adding a file to a repository. Then subsequent changes are added to the repository by saving only what has changed in the file.

In the case of a bitmap image think of a grid made up of pixels. Each pixel is stored on the file as binary data (0's and 1's). Anything that affects that pixel will change it's value in the file.

With a vector file there aren't pixels necessarily. The drawing is saved as shapes and those shapes have properties. These shapes and their properties are actually saved as text (sort of like HTML markup).

So as the file changes the changes in those various file types are more drastic. With a bitmap there will be greater changes so overall more space is used to store the file and it's history. Also, because it's binary it's difficult to see the changes in the actual file (without opening it in a photo editing program). With a vector file only small amounts of text would be changing and you can literally see the changes in the file and make sense of it.

Hope that helps.
On the other hand, in code styles, languages, idioms, a lot depends on taste. One person might find Lisp code ugly, another one might love it. Some person might find some library useful as a modular object oriented system, while someone else might find it a hellish heap of macaroni code.

Artists might like to experiment with different styles, so might coders.

Also, it's not like most artists try to sell people ugly things. That's also a very small niche. Most of them simply work for companies and design the things that they are told you. Just like coders.

We could debate about this for ages, but it seems very clear that there is both art and engineering involved.
Welcome to HN ;)
I had the same problem. I work for a public university and gave out my salary in an after-interview meeting with a company's HR rep. She said my asking salary was obviously too high based on my current salary. They wouldn't offer me more than +5% because otherwise that would just be an unreasonable jump in pay. She felt so sure her logic would convince me it was a reasonable offer. I shrugged her off and said I wouldn't take the job.

I ended up getting offered 33% above my current, but turned the job down as I felt that HR conversation was a one of many symptoms of a dysfunctional company. (Print media trying to convert to web based income, but already abusing their Dev team as if they were a cost sink before the digital products even launched).
I am curious: What made you think this was spam since it is not?
Show HN: my new startup HowsMyUX.com
I was disappointed the Philippines didn't make it on the list. I spent two years there and they are ridiculously obsessed with learning English. Add to that the 50 years they spent as an English colony and they, as a nation, are exceptionally good at English. Even slum dwellers I'd find were often fairly proficient.
ThankQ!
There is a huge difference between writing your own language and writing a 4 line PowerShell script.

Really, the only gap I had to fill between the high quality parts that I'm already using (nUnit, TeamCity, etc.) was a tiny script to copy files + reconfigure IIS
Oracle doesn't sell software. Oracle sells suits with warm fuzzy feelings.
In some densely populated Asian cities, 690 meters will encompass tens of thousands of people.
You could use cheaper storage like SuperMicro systems that are really dense and then run Gluster across them. Gluster will handle replicating data so each file is on two systems. Running RAID underneath will protect you in the event of a disk failure and then you have Gluster protecting you from total server failure. This would be significantly lower cost that EMC or NetApp and provide you with the same level of data protection. There is nothing wrong with "building it yourself" if you do it right.
see: G H Hardy's "A Mathematician's Apology"
Adeo Ressi to Seattle angels: It’s time to get off the sidelines
Well one problem is that some users have the power to stop conversations dead. I've had two perfectly good questions 'closed' on stackexchange recently. They both had upvotes and answers already, contained patently useful information, in fact one of them had even been edited by Jeff Atwood for 'improvement' - but 5 dorks voted to 'close' the threads because they seem to view their moderation privileges as some sort of regex that MUST be applied, regardless of the social cost. Newer online forums are worse at conversation because they give power to people who are probably terrible conversationalists.

On a related note, don't know if anyone's noticed this, but I remember people using voice chat on the old XBox so much more than they do now. Not sure why that is.
Ask HN: Ethics question 
Earlier this week I wrote an article about Facebook ads and how I've got them to work quite effectively, the article got a lot of coverage (a few hundred thousand readers).

It also got the attention of Facebook, who've asked if they can do a case-study on my startup.

Obviously it would be great for my startup if they wrote up a case study on it. But on the other hand I'm not sure I can ethically accept any benefits from Facebook without it creating a conflict of interests (as my article was obviously very pro-Facebook Ads), and accepting any kind of benefit from FB would obviously bring the veracity of my article into account.

Does anyone have any opinions ?
I'm not sure what an optimal minimum wage would be, but surely there should be some minimum wage. Simple thought experiment: if one person or corporation controlled all the world's resources, should they be able to pay everyone some vanishingly small delta above zero? In that case a minimum wage would only increase everyone's wages and make the marketplace fairer.

Obviously on the other hand, minimum wage increases can certainly reduce jobs.
Depending on the task, it might not actually even be possible. Or, it's doable but not without rewriting major libraries or buying hundreds of servers.
I believe the truth is as follows:

You infer from careless writing that the author places little value on his thoughts, because if you were writing them and you thought them important, you would spend a little more time on their delivery.
Because they are doing something that has never been done before. The unknown is exactly that - unknown. You can make guesses, but they will never be anything but guesses until the problem has been solved a few times.

However, once a problem is solved, it does not need to be re-solved, and so the attention of the company turns to a new unknown problem.
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I started reading/commenting on avc back in 2005 and it was actually because of Fred's music interests. I had found the blog because of his old music podcast he did with his family (Positively Tenth Street). Not sure how many within the avc community were introduced via that method but I didn't see it touched on within the link. I started reading avc for the music, and ended up staying for the tech discussion.
You can find a representative screenshot at http://halera.tumblr.com. Basically, you have to remember the flags at the top of the screen, and find them in the bunch below, on the next screen. Then repeat 10 times, before the clock runs out. In the first level, you start with just one flag to remember, and 4 in the bunch to select it from, and end up with 4 to remember, and 16 to select from.
That's probably not the best explanation for the game; I think it would probably be best if you could try it out for yourself. Thanks!
So you are forcing people who are neither in favour nor against something to produce false pro/contra votes. There are some cases where this strategy makes sense like questions about controverse topics. Other than that it produces noise. In my experience, the debate 4 vs 5 options often has more to do with the authors' personality and training than anything else. Surprisingly little is based on solid, non-ambiguous evidence.
There used to be a HN meetup, but it stopped happening after a few months. A friend and I started Chicago.concat() which has been going strong for a few months and has a great group of people that show up every month. I have since moved to SF, but they're kicking ass back in Chicago. RSVP page: http://chicago-concat.gathers.us
You can't have guns, butter, and tax cuts
A bit of an off-topic tangent: is it true that Arnold Schwarzenegger once asked if he could dub his own part in a film for the German release, as he wasn't happy with the dubbing done for a previous picture, but was rejected due to his accent?

The story goes that his accent is from a part of Austria that is seen as rural so to many, particularly in urban parts of Germany, he'd "sound like a farmer" which wouldn't be right for the part - implying that his accent suffers from a stereotype like that associated with strong west country accents in England.

I heard that "fact" some time ago, and I dearly want it to be true!
I agree.

In fact, I wish the threshold for downvoting were based on some moving average (or fixed-period trailing sum) of your karma. It would encourage everyone who wants the downvote power to write more thoughtful comments (not just write some and sit on their loot).
Breaking News:2011 Social Media Report is Out
Try Noble Tree, ~2600ish N Clark
This reminds me of assembly language in college... Each assignment we were told to end the program on a different type of ABEND ("for this assignment I want you to generate a SOC8, integer overflow" etc, etc...)
I'll retract it (deleted now). Your site automatically started downloading something. No bueno, dude.
I don't look at these comment sections on information rich sites to converse.

I look at them to see curated content that many times is more valuable than the source material being discussed. On the best of them, I get to see what incredibly smart and talented people think on the topic, I get to see their mind work. The value of that cannot be overstated. The social niceties or whatnot of 'conversations' dilute that information, as does removing social feedback mechanisms that bring the most valuable comments to the forefront - that stuff saves me time and energy.

Discussion forums are a different beast.
Need Help, Herbal Industry reports. Anyone have them?
Hi,

I desperately need articles or published reports from the years 2005-present on herbal industry growth and profits.

Specifics are on the male catagory for the herbal industry but I'd be happy with anything.

Thanks to whomever can help.
Interesting...one of the few startups I've seen with quite a few MBAs on staff!
Bit.ly Chief Scientist Finds Rich Data in Shortened Links
I worked pretty closely with a designer just recently. We went from throwing designs over the wall, to basic git based version control. We found that it was a pretty enjoyable workflow for the both of us. It allowed the designer to have more control over the end product, since he didn't need to ask me to update images.

We got to the point where he'd own all of the HTML and CSS, as long as I had certain ids and classes to hook my Javascript into. After we got CI and CD going, he's start pushing out new designs several times a day, giving us a pretty quick turn around time.

I never asked him to use the command line, since Tower handled most of the stuff he'd do. I wouldn't ask him to learn all of git, just as how I'd be frustrated if I had to learn all of Photoshop. I wouldn't be opposed to doing some basic work, like changing the color on the background layer.
Free hosting for static websites
It's not a startup, but there is a fantastic monthly meetup in Chicago for people who like to build stuff for the web (mainly developers/designers). Basically, a lot of awesome people go to a bar, hang out, and talk about things that we all enjoy. Check it out: http://chicago-concat.gathers.us
so you're helping developers find designers? I'd make it a priority to find one for your site first - even do a before/after.

You need to use your service on yourself first before you can expect anyone else to buy into it.

Although I like the idea. As a designer, I'd sign up to somewhere that I could help out developers (who can't design).