skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>asking engineers to be in charge is a burden I don't think many want.

if your environment has a significant amount of elements that engineers (or generally - employees) wouldn't want to be in charge for, then you are already deep into the problem and the shortest solution here is to assign managers to be in charge of those things.

The key is to not allow the situation to degrade into creating "demand" for managers. For example, once you create one manager for a group, s/he would want to talk to somebody, preferably managers, from other groups. That burden on the other groups would naturally trigger response - creating managers in the other groups. That starts to structure the information and decision flow the way that rank-and-file employees lose much of the visibility into the product and business and thus lose the ability (and motivation) to take even small decisions, thus requiring even more management ...
When supplier are coerced into changing their prices by force, that isn't the market at work.

You don't like the word "coercion" or "force" because you think stuffing review sites with non-good-faith-reviews it harmless, even though it contravenes the expectation that a reviewer represents a single entity who has actually attempted to consume the book. But the same logic was used during the Wikileaks Visa DDoS flood. You can choose to believe that DDoS attacks are legitimate, too. But you cannot with a straight face say that those attacks are the market at work.
You think that's bad? I still see new video stores opening.

What bank would possibly fund a new B&M video store in 2011?
http://youparklikeanasshole.com/
I'm working on an open-source framework, and a series of command line tools built on top of the framework, for symbolically manipulating context-free grammars, non-deterministic pushdown automata, and non-deterministic finite automata. All of it is implemented in C++. I have done some neat things like implement CFG production pattern matching using an EDSL that lets me express foreach loops in C++. I'm currently looking for people interested in contributing / using the code.

The project page is http://www.grailplus.org.
Sounds about the right amount of time for network lag.
" I, for one, don't want to code my whole life. Something 37signals can't offer me."

I'd say it's just the opposite. The lack of organizational hierarchy and title means that people can work outside their normal expertise more easily. Nobody is stuck in a box.

Designers pick up programming skills as their interests allow. Programmers with UI ideas can try them out. Both contribute with writing, with workflow ideas, and on customer support. We've even had people completely shift roles from programming to design.
Exactly, thats why military can not and does't use airplanes ;).
Ask HN: Have you used Prefinery to launch your beta?
I'm launching a private beta soon and was considering using Prefinery to host the landing page. Can anyone share their experience with it?
Google spends a lot of money on seeming cool. Some of their stuff is neat, but in the end its just marketing. Their core business is still selling overpriced advertisements.
Organizing a UX Day - how should I format/structure it?
He was referencing a quote, not the structure of 37 Signals.
Why does all self-published work need to be of the quality of Jabba the Hut fan fiction? You see my point but have decided to caricature it.

I look at this situation and see it as evidence that the days of large publishers acting as gatekeepers for authorship are limited.

You seem to look at the same situation and see it as an injustice that merits some kind of intervention at publishers to change the price of publisher-approved books.

I do not agree; further, I think it's impossible to hold your viewpoint in 2011 and at the same time say you believe in markets.
Certainly competition Did matter: Dropbox is competing with other solutions and killling Them.
Pensioner in Georgia cuts Armenia off from internet
HTC launches $100M tech venture fund
I can't speak for the higher end of Montessori as I only attended when I was just starting out my career in education, but I found it to be rewarding for someone with a wandering mind, more so than the strict rote-based Catholic-influenced education I was subjected to further on. I also experienced British private school, and that was definitely better than public but without the scientific approach that I saw at Montessori.

It depends on the kid, I guess. I have an independent, creative side to me that also needs strong discipline to get anything done, so I'm grateful to have experienced both worlds. As far as current prices go, my divorced and randomly employed mother was sending both my sister and I there until we opted for the local public school as it fit better with our social lives, and I know there were some kids there in the same boat as us, but overall it was a good mix back then with the benefit of being in the hippy Cambridge of the '70s.

My advice would be to buy the best education for your kids that your money can buy, and unless your local school system is the pits, I wouldn't home-school them. There's a lot to be said for socializing at an early age and teaching the kids subjects in addition to the regular curriculum isn't against the law either. If the kids are smart, they'll put the regular coursework behind them and need the extra teaching anyways.

If the child is a dullard, don't waste too much money on them as you'll need it for later on for when they really fuck up.
Am I missing something or is it indeed possible to put an ebook on an Apple device or an Amazon device at a price point lower than $9.99?
Twitter Search is Now 3x Faster
It's an interesting article but I feel a bit bait-and-switched by the title; this is a definition of consciousness so weak that it's not really very interesting. I don't think I accept a definition of consciousness that appears to boil down to "shows similar perceptual illusions as the human perceptual system".
I think the point here is that the developers themselves aren't generally the ones that are choosing to use XP: they're stuck on the platform that the IT department supports. Getting upgrades can be challenging, especially in a large corporate environment.
Online Security: Very Bad and Getting Worse
CoSQL: SQL and noSQL are really just two sides of the same coin
My daughter between the ages of 2 and 8. My wife really wanted it, but I was skeptical. She seems to be doing pretty well and - it could be a personal bias - she also appears to be performing better in school than friends her own age who attend public schools.
Why is the focus on GDrive in an article written today? Sure, 4 years ago it was a reasonable fear to believe that Google would crush the competition in any space they entered. Since then Facebook has revealed significant weaknesses in Google's ability to compete in social and brought them down to earth considerably. An analysis of DropBox's success needs to consider the numerous competitors at the time they started rather than a years-old Google specter.
Netflix's Business Model Isn't Sustainable
Desktop Tower Defense, which I personally enjoyed more than Angry Birds took less than 100k to make.
Yeah I gotta say the pricing is pretty disappointing especially since I was kinda expecting it might be free and open source.
Why is the press so ignorant of basic statistics? It is really depressing. I wonder if reporters actually don't understand the difference between correlation and causation, or if they just willfully ignore it because it makes for catchier headlines and easier research.
How did Rebekah Cox get recruited to Facebook?
Also, even just thinking about using Skydrive on my Ubuntu netbook is painful. Dropbox is truly cross-platform and painless.
My first thought would be that going from C# to Java or ObjC shouldn't be too difficult for decent programmers - that that's maybe 20% of the needed effort, tops. The "hard part" is learning the frameworks and patterns of the new platform. Additionally, not being able to directly use/learn from sample code (from the platform vendor or free on the net) is a significant downside.
Noisebridge is pretty open to this, I think. Email me if you want.
Cheap hostings reviews » Blog Archive » Web Hosting Options
Corey Haines has done this with software development. In a similar fashion working for room and board. Which turns out to be a great deal for the company and I assume great experience for Corey.
Dammit you're not. This is a great idea. :)
Looks remarkably similar to Facebook's platform. If I'm going to take an interest in a new platform, it ought to bring something new to the table, not just "we do that too now, so connect to ours instead."
Here's what my wife and I are planning to do with our daughter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1656756

Edit: here's a useful overview of alternative teaching methods - http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/25926
Only if your education differed from the so-called basket of techniques lumped together as "the Montessori method".

It's been my experience that a home environment with parents who read and care about expanding horizons will tend to offer the children guided "self-directed" learning, observation and indirect teaching, and productive routines of "focused" activities versus idle play, and these children will tend to outperform peers without that same desire to constantly learn instilled in them -- regardless of the formal education they acquire.
Kids who put their faces right up to the light could press the button in under 30ms.

That seems really fast. I can't do better than 200ms on the online reaction time tests I've tried, and zooming the screen or putting my face closer doesn't seem to help.
"Except there's a problem. When a contact emails you back, you don't see their business card. If you want to phone them, you have to jump from Gmail to Google Contacts via a series of clicks just to even see their number. This is crazy..."

Hover over the sender name in an email or the inbox and a 'card' pops up with picture etc. Click their name to see all details. 1 click, not too crazy.
Vending Machines Officially Suck Less Now Thanks To RFID
Does anyone know if linked in now allows access to public information over api. Previously due to API rate limits, you could only get (publicly available) information about a person if he went through oauth process. Whereas for other oauth api vendors, such as github for instance, you only need to have your(developer) api access setup and you can search for publically available information without bothering end users to authenticate
Android – A developer’s perspective
I think it's a hoax too, but I also think that even if it is real, this kind of behavior is inevitable, for two reasons:

1) Respectable scientific publications reject cold fusion papers out of hand, even when they're submitted by Nobel-winning physicists. Anyone motivated by publication doesn't do cold fusion anymore.

2) The patent office rejects cold fusion patents out of hand, so anyone motivated by money has to rely on trade secret for now.
ARM Assembler for iOS - Series started
Laurence Kotlikoff: The Purple Health Plan
How much time can you spare learning exactly what each of those other people are doing and how it might affect your work? For that matter, how much time can those other people spare to explain yet again exactly what they're doing, in enough detail for you to realize how it affects your work? As I see it, much of management's job is to protect me from investing most of my time in conversations which didn't need to happen because they won't pay off.
We produce Millions of Employees...But only thousands of Employers....
What CIOs Really Think About Tablets (45% think tablet would replace notebooks)
30 Years of Operating Systems in the Movies
Java has generics too. But I agree that C# has expanded faster (though expansion isn't necessarily good). I'm not sure that you get any of that by using this framework though. It seems to be near one-to-one translation of the java classes and methods. Sure you can do lambas, but can you use Parallel? I doubt it. LINQ to Sql? Doesn't look like it, the docs use Cursors, like in the Java Android.

It's $400 to have your braces line up.
Why does this result surprise anyone? Traditional US schools exist not to cultivate individuality, and make people more expressive and creative, but rather for different reasons.

Grade school is designed to teach people enough to read The Bible, and enough writing and arithmetic to not get cheated by the fancy, downtown shop keepers.

High school is designed to teach the bulk of the citizenry to work according to a fixed schedule, probably in a factory, along with a faceless mass of similary trained people.

It sounds inflammatory, but it's true.
There was a missed opportunity by the author here when blaming Motorola. I can forgive poor advertising because I like to think I'm one of those people who will make a purchase based more on research than something I saw on TV. However, I was flabbergasted that the Xoom was rushed to market so quickly that it had a non-functional SDHC slot and required you to send it in at some later date to get a 4G antenna put in. It is unbelievable that such a large company would release a product that is so clearly unfinished. What I find sad is that I'm sure plenty of non-technical users will miss the memo about the 4G upgrade and will either return the product because the internet connection is slow or even worse, will live with a product that didn't deliver the featureset on the box.

As much as I like to pick at Apple for all of their nonsense, the competition in the tablet space (and in many ways the mobile phone space) should be embarrassed with themselves.
"It reminded me of when, in 2007, Drew Houston stormed onto the scene with his "GDrive killer," which was, of course, Dropbox."

So wait, Drew Houston specifically made and positioned his product in response to perceived competition, and the moral of the blog post is "Focus on your product instead of looking over your shoulder at the competition." Does not follow. The moral I got out of it was that perceived stiff competition can drive you to make something really, really good, even if the competition never actually materializes.
Google has some cool core technology. In a way most of it is a vehicle to sell/target ads, sure, but the relationship between their cool stuff and revenue source is a lot closer than with Red Bull.
Good catch — I didn't even know you could do this. I always used to click on the contact, click on "More", and then click on "Contact Details". I much prefer not having to have click at all :)
I wasn't. Finding twitter apps is really difficult, I never know what to search for.

This looks interesting. I'm going to try this out. It may replace the need for my app but I'll be finishing it anyway.
i agree with the no suit sentiment. but i work in a place where plenty of people look like crap in a suit. it's all about how you take care of yourself. you can look put together in shorts and flip flops. ultimately you're asking someone to give you hundreds of thousands of dollars. your ability to get dressed in the morning will say a lot about your ability to build a company.
At this time, to create an incentive against the culture of secrecy that prevented the sharing of technical progress, a system of temporary monopolies called _patentes_ has been invented.

Its descendant--now spellt _patent_--is today used precisely to prevent technical progress from spreading.
tl;dr: Children of rich, well-connected parents tend to attend better schools.
I think the way an individual normally dresses is a reflection of their personality. You can infer quite a bit about what someone is like based on their pants, shoes, shirt, and even overall coordination. Some of these inferences are valuable, others are just interesting. This certainly doesn't mean that you are smarter or more motivated if you wear a suit.
The real meat is the 1996 study they mention:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/313/5795/1893.full?ijkey=3...

Although they reference the study in a really odd way:
"Neuroscience author Jonah Lehrer cites a 2006 study published in Science that ..."

What does Jonah Lehrer have to do with the study? AFAICT absolutely nothing. He appears to be a contributor to the WSJ, but he didn't write the study. And none of the links they present are even to the article where he apparently cites this study. I have no idea why he's mentioned here.

Tangent aside, I think that's the real meat.
> If they can get past the fact that I worked at a porn company,

Employers that worry about this are rather silly. I'd hire a candidate even if he was starring in said porn productions.
It's not small. There are actually two runtimes installed, one is 18 MB and the other is 12.25MB (over 30MB required).

I've been using the monodroid developer preview for a few weeks. When I started, the runtime could only be installed to internal storage. This was one of the biggest challenges when trying to use it. Hopefully that has changed now.
The idea of parallel unconscious processes selectively passing important info to a "broadcast" network of neurons was new to me, and if that's the way consciousness works in the brain I think that's absolutely fascinating.

That the first half of the article never talks about a bot actually was a pleasant surprise. The human brain is way more interesting than a bot.
I love RedBull's approach to sponsorships and marketing. Like many others, I really think they just get it.

RedBull sponsors such a wide variety of activities, it's amazing. They hold tonnes of mainstream pop culture events, and then have events like these and other obscure sports/hobbies. Not only that, they do a very good job at executing these events as well. That said, is the market for RedBull that big? Sometimes I have trouble grasping how they do so much aside from their core business while being profitable. These events probably cost less to promote in total than I think, and I'm assuming RedBull does have a high markup, but am I missing something?
This is exactly right. I suspect that the parents of people who attend Montessori schools are more educated than average to begin with.

Go into an inner city Los Angeles elementary, and I guarantee you the great majority of parents wont have even heard of the name.

TL;DR: the parents of people who care enough about their education to enroll them in a montessori school, would have probably turned out pretty bright kids regardless.
I had expected for this to be the HTC in Taiwan, but this is also a good development. Now that many tech firms feel more loyal to industries due to the ease of connection on the internet, its nice to see companies showing real productive loyalty to their geographical nests. I'm glad not everyone's leaving the real world behind. But maybe this is just the direction of progress. Its anyone's call, and I'm just glad there are some people with the foresight to advocate a symbiotic internet-reality relationship, in which the reality must also be sustained, and not just a full online lIfestyle.
Motorola's Android 3.0 Honeycomb Xoom sales forecast slashed to 100,000 units
I don't remember most of my Montessori school experience (other than making baked apples and learning how to wrap a sari), but I know that despite going to a very competitive and exclusive K-12 school afterward, I was one of only two kids in my kindergarten class who could already read. I used to sit in the back of the room and read during nap time.

I also vaguely remember having a head start on math as well, which allowed me to breeze through the math games during computer time and play more advanced games like Rocky's Boots (a game where you assemble logic gates). Like the "January-born hockey player" thing in Outliers, I feel that going to Montessori school may have possibly given me a compounding head start in my computer education. Either that or it just gave me an inflated ego.
See http://catb.org/jargon/html/B/bucky-bits.html and related.
Isn't the value of the API in the data you're retrieving, not the design or feature-functions of the API?

I'd think that your choice of integration between Facebook or LinkedIn (or both) would be based on your intended audience.
I fell in love with the idea of biology research when I worked in a small lab as an undergraduate. There was a sense of intellectual freedom and exploration that was intoxicating, as well as a certain romance to working late nights in the lab, working with obscure technology to chase an idea.

Then I went to graduate school, and it became clear to me that professional research is a grinder -- just as political and bullshit-prone as any other job (if not more so), but with lower stakes and crappy earning potential. The core of what I loved was still there, but wrapped in seventeen layers of bureaucracy and careerists and conflicted interests. Modern science is as much about money and power as it is about ideas, and that really sucks.

The author is right that your advisor often wants you to do things that are against your own long-term self interest: they're paying you to work on a project, not spend time chasing rainbows. And you're right that the self-determination and opportunity in professional science is almost completely gone. You've got to be the PI of a lab if you want to have a career, but the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against you.

At this point, I think that the true promise of science can only be realized by the independently wealthy.
The "Walz" is not for building primary skills (i.e. in our case Software Development or in their case Carpentry). It is assumed that carpenters doing it are already quite skilled in their respective profession. The reason of the "Walz" is to teach self reliance, soft skills and to round out ones primary skills by being exposed to practices of their craft that have evolved/developed differently from those they learned during their apprenticeship.

In short the goal is to become a "Master" which in the german vocational tradition originally meant having your own shop and not needing to be an employee any longer (so in our case to become a founder).

I think the internet undermines these goals, because, well IMHO it is becoming more and more a gigantic echo chamber (we all read the same blogs/books, admire the same persons, use remarkably similar tools etc.)

I think it is astounding that a lot of very smart people assume that currently hip and promoted best development practices, say for a Web 2.0 whatever platform are relevant for other areas (e.g embedded, big iron, medical, aeronautic, finance) because there is not much evident push back in the blog sphere from practitioners in these spheres... which AFAIK is more a result of these people tending to much less likely to blog or work on open source software, than of the universal applicability of said practices (and if the push back, the results I have seen so far have been highly embarrassing for the hipster crowd).
OK. Vaporware does not matter.

I think we all know that :)
ok, I've just run my first android app.
it took me about 1.5 hours to download/install everthing
Emulator is really slow, it took me ages first run in Debug mode and the UI response time is bad so far
http://flic.kr/p/9wsYQ8

so back to WP7?
Awesome, thanks for the tip, will check it out.
You can build an adapter to make the Symbolics keyboards USB. I've got the parts and the keyboard, but haven't taken the time to re-compile the code for the Teensy 2.0 yet.

http://netzhansa.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-to-convert-your-sy...
30 ms doesn't seem possible. Check the Human Benchmark for statistics, the fastest ones are around 100 ms: http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/stats.php

Maybe light delay was not randomized and people were just predicting when it'd light up? I remember this kind of trickery being used in Jeopardy to beat Watson.

Another example is the Olympic sprint, where any reaction under 100 ms is considered a false start (if I read correctly): http://www.condellpark.com/kd/reactiontime.htm
'Urban Homesteading' is no longer just a movement but a company trademark