skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The good news for both developers and managers is that estimation is a learnable skill. If you get in the habit of making estimates and testing them, you'll get better amazingly fast. See the classic book

It's not hard to learn to make reasonable estimates. Even for unknown problems, I can often say that X has usually taken about Y time in the past and be right most of the time.

The real problem comes when the estimate you give is not the one management wants to hear.
good article, i wish my company would give out free t-shirts.
How do you deal with radiation an heat dissipation?
Sometimes they are promises. To customers. Who've already paid for it. :S
Google App Engine (and other cloud providers) also places limits on how much you can tweak the server side code. Clearly, there will always be apps that require some crazy server-side C code or whatever, but for 99% of apps all that matters is whether pageforest has exposed enough in the API to take care of the important stuff (validation, etc.)

I'm not saying their API is good enough for this, since they just launched, but from a theoretical standpoint I think the concept is sound.
He didn't sell because he thought he would lose money. He sold because he felt AAPL was dishonest with shareholders.
> It's an absolutely a terrible environment to develop, test, and debug in.

For large, essential apps I can see that. Although there are tools that make the experience much better.

But man do I love what JavaScript and browsers have blossomed into. I've always wanted a really nice, simple environment where I can just write a small, self contained app with little overhead, little fuss, and wide ability for it to be adopted. JavaScript plus the new HTML5 goodies fulfills that wish far better than anything else in the past. I've grown to really fall in love with the little bastard language :)
Plus, American Apparel t-shirts (recommended in the article) are notoriously undersized. An American Apparel "large" is more like a snug "medium".

But they are high-quality shirts (even if Dov Charney is a lecher).
Which VCs On The Forbes Midas List Are Investing In Health IT?
Indeed, Apple is no longer a tech company, they are now a brand like Coke and Nike.
Fair enough, but even a men's small is too big for me - so it's not even really an option to wear it. Considering I'm a very standard size for a woman, it's hard to feel like the people behind the shirts are considering my gender. Taste is a secondary concern here.
I shudder to think how many hours I spent poring over textbooks and lecture notes just so I could have the "AHA" moment that comes along with dealing with abstract entities.
You could set up a gitosis server if you have access to your own server of some sort and don't mind administering it.

I have a linux VM on my main computer that is accessible to the outside world with gitosis on there and it's pretty great for a private git repo.
I see that moms and babies aren't "cool." Good. The market is huge, and if people find it boring, then it keeps the competition down.
http://matrix.itasoftware.com/ does that. You can ask for exact dates, but the default is that you give it a date and the number of nights to stay.
Social Media vs. Dictators -- Angry Birds Style
I'm not in YC, but I like enough money that I don't have to worry about money (bills, mortgage, simple pleasures). I don't desire a Ferrari and whatnot (but I see nothing wrong, if you do).
This is a very typical Woz story. A reporter asks Woz a hypothetical question. Woz gives an honest answer. Reporter ignores the statistical insignificance of the hypothetical scenario and reports result as if it has 100% probability of happening.

This happens to many great thinkers.

Obligatory made-up scenario:

Reporter: "If you were in a plane crash in the Andes and the only food you could find was bodies of dead passengers would you eat them?"

Thinker: "Hmm.. interesting hypothetical scenario. It is of course impossible to know what anyone would do in such a situation without experiencing it, but it is obvious that the logical thing to do is to eat the bodies so you can be strong enough to seek help. Whether I personally could eat a human is not yet proven."

Reporter: "Cannibal!!!"
A bit conspiracy theory-ish but perhaps the DoJ let this go through now to provide more anti-competitive ammo 3-5 years down the road.
I've used Delicious for this for years. I used to just tag stuff as "design" but over the years my taste has changed and so now the good stuff is more like:
http://delicious.com/philfreo/design+amazing+inspiration
Very much so, thank you. So it's more how the data is stored and updated in the different kinds of files. I definitely had the basic gist of raster vs. vector, but had no idea how it could affect something like version control in this way. Very interesting.
Who wants to create an implied social network?
I know many people think Color sucks, but I like the concept. An implied social network is pretty cool. Have any of you guys considered making a implied social network?
We mistakenly marked about 50 applications as late
Due to a bug in our (my) software, a bunch of on-time applications got marked as late when people edited and re-submitted them after the deadline. Fortunately we can tell which applications these were, and we're going to take a look at them all and respond in the next couple days. Sorry about that.
Has any site really worked out geolocated photos?
I was planning a trip to Spane and would have loved to be able to see geo-photos of the laces we were planning to go to.

Is there a site that really has this worked out yet?
All: Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do!

Karl: Who leaves Atlantis off the maps?
Lenny: Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
Alien: We do! We do!

All: Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star?
We do! We do!

Skinner: Who robs cavefish of their sight?
Homer: Who rigs every Oscar night?

We do! WE DO!
What are the key similarities or differences between this and http://unhosted.org/ ? Considered collaborating?
For your survey app example, why can't you just allow the client to submit bogus data if they want, then filter out the junk when you collect the data for reporting at the end? (This is assuming that the pageforest server doesn't implode when someone does this, but I see no reason to assume this would happen from a theoretical standpoint.)

For you second example, why the heck would you run javascript eval on the document data? As explained by mckoss, the storage format is JSON, not raw javascript that is executed. This is an important distinction: jQuery and other client libraries contain special commands for handling JSON that exist specifically to resolve the kinds of problems you are describing.

EDIT: It looks like the other reply explains that there is no "trusted agent", so this is clearly a limitation of their system (though not a theoretical limitation, as far as I can tell- No reason they couldn't allow the app creator to log in with pseudo-admin privlidges to do reporting.)
It is true that you'd need to write your app so that you either segregate user's input (the only one reading a document is the original user who created it), or sanitize user-entered data in the client before displaying it.
I think this is pretty analogous to the traditional client/server model. The only difference is it all happens in the client.
There ARE cases where you need to aggregate data from multiple users, analyze it, and generate a summary, that are not very amenable to the Pageforest model - since there is no "trusted agent" that can execute that code.
We barely hear of Google's SPDY, I bet they are secretly working on something like this. They aren't the type to unnecessarly bundle it in with http in SPDY, but maybe they found a reason.
4 Lessons Guitar Has Taught Me About Product Design
Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.
Very well done! However, I'm wondering what the Paramount lawyers are going to say of this. I've heard they're very protective of the Star Trek brand.
Some people mentioned Gnome 3 in here, but by Gnome classic, I think the mean Gnome 2, as opposed to Gnome Shell, which is Gnome 3.

Did anyone else noticed that Gnome Shell has a lot of Unity stuff? Possible Wayland backend and a launcher interface.
yes, you are correct. I misused the minimalism analogy. the command line was the minimalist champion, and in my opinion, linux still holds that crown, despite apple's influence on minimalist implementations of windowing systems and UI.
The Blame Game: Where are all the VC's? A response to a recent Forbes blog post
Patio11 participated in a case-study for Google AdWords. I still trust him to be honest.

Disclosing it upfront on related posts would probably be more than sufficient.
That's unique. Having many friends who were, or are still, postdocs, they were almost always staff, but not faculty in any sense (in the US at least)
/* Don't believe the comments lies. */
I completely disagree that the "normal" way of doing web development (frameworks such as Rails, Django, and the PHP frameworks) is obsolete. First of all, these frameworks can easily be used to build the Ajax-heavy web apps that the author(s) of the article talk about.

Secondly, search engines don't play too well with the Ajaxy web apps. It's not that you can't make them search engine friendly, it's just that once you do that, there's a bigger need for the "normal" frameworks.

Thirdly, I still prefer languages such as Python or PHP to JavaScript.
Mad Magazine "Honors" Mark Zuckerberg With His Own Cover
10-20 years down the road-3D printing will start to make shipping look like a lost artform.
Four reasons why Drupal should fork PHP
Don't be hater ... come work with us! ;-)

Seriously, thanks for giving it a try - I'd love to get your feedback on problems you have using the platform...
A robot that can't see isn't very useful....

One problem I've read in these sorts of situations is the robot eventually or unexpectedly gets killed by the ambient radiation ... and now you have to get humans to dash in there to pull it out of the way.
While your thesis may be correct, some of your assumptions are a bit off:

1) Bing has stopped investing in travel tech, they now use Kayak for search. So do we still believe in the value prop?

2) Farecast (fare predictor) turns out to be not very valuable. So much so, that Bing couldn't even sustain development of their own search tool. Can Google do a better job of it? Maybe. Can they do a good enough job of if that it's ROI positive? I'm skeptical.

I agree that Google believes many of your assertions. I don't agree that this makes it true. Do people really need more sophisticated travel search functionality? Sure, you can imagine lots of cool stuff -- bells and whistles. But ask Kayak if their "Explore" feature (perhaps a lite version of what you can imagine Google doing with ITA) drives their business? I'd argue it's neat, good for branding and loyalty, but not at the end of the day, a major source of value.

That being said -- the key thesis of: Google trying to hold onto relevance in travel search -- is true. However, they are still pretty much a one-horse show (search revenue), and travel is one of (if not the) biggest vertical today.
Anyone want to jump the gun on the author's promised future post, about how to get great shirts, with recommendations here?

(SFBay vendor recommendations based on personal experience would be especially valued. Where does YC get its "[make|made] something people want" shirts, and are they as high-quality as they are high-cachet?)
Have the rest been notified? I did submit on time but haven't heard so far.
Only in the U.S. is an AA large a snug medium.
If you want to see the best example of how to this you need only to look at

http://www.apple.com/pr/

This is the reason it is rare to see a scrappy image of any of Apple's products anywhere (and why Apple products often get used as stock material for other companies).

The Photoshop files are worth studying too - they are often layered and include proper colour-calibration points etc.

Apple treats the press with respect here - there are no stupid barriers to getting a story out (and no gimmicks either - just good clean copy and good clean images).
think etsy.

To me etsy was a nichified idea of ebay:

-remove the auctions since these people want just want to sell whenever the item gets sold

-make it super easy for crafts to sell their stuff; make it easier than ebay.

-make the fees more reasonable

-make the first time use - dead easy; unlike the ebay experience - so many options and too confusing. People scared of making a mistake.

What were these crafts people using before etsy: ebay.
Is this a joke? Hint: You pay for the hosting, not the uploading process...
ITA's strength isn't data, it's algorithms. Finding the best flight is not just NP-complete, it's uncomputable. In practice, even a lot of sub problems are NP-complete.

http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/ITA-software-travel-com...

People think the problem is a graph search problem of finding the shortest path. But that's actually the easiest part of the problem. It turns out that prices aren't attached to individual flights, but rather are rules of the form "If the passenger goes from A to B on a Tuesday, the price is X, and it doesn't really matter what flights they take, as long as the total distance is less than 3 times the line of sight distance."

Then there are all sorts of rules about what fares can be combined with other fares, under which conditions, ...

I worked at ITA software on QPX, and their code is by far the most algorithmically complex code I've ever seen. As I mentioned, there are many, many sub problems, and each one is a tricky algorithm design problem.
If folks have node questions, we would be happy to help - wompt is built on node.

http://wompt.com/chat/nodejs
Phew! I was sure there was a glitch in the system. Now it all makes sense.
InboxQ has a really smart team, and I know they're hiring too :) I'm not affiliated with InboxQ.
I agree there's definite overlap in their models, from the look of it- But there are still clear differences between these two concepts, with differing strengths and weaknesses.
Citations?

I didn't know Bing was using Kayak now, and Farecast has been quite useful for me (fairly accurate) in the past.
Thanks for the pointer to unhosted - I've not seen this before. Sounds like a standard protocol to separate application from data storage - pretty similar to the Pageforest model - except federated!
Kayak is a great company and this is a fascinating time to be in travel search. Go for it! A first job under Paul English (even a few layers beneath him) is a big win and Kayak's engineering reputation so great that you'll have plenty of opportunities down the road.

So in summary: Worst scenario is pretty darn good for you!
Except that all the forms listed there actually mean something and could be used in everyday conversations (some of them are pretty rare, of course). In English those would be communicated by a lot of prepositions. Take "kauppoinennekaan" [1], that would roughly mean "not even with your (plural) shops".

[1] Dashes are on the page for clarity, they're not part of Finnish language
I've read It's an issue with manipulating the fuel: to do so, you unbolt the containment cap on the top of the reactor pressure vessel and fill the entire path from on top of it to the initial spent fuel pool with water. That allows you to safely transfer hot (thermally as well as radiatively) rods and it's pretty hard to get around if you're using this sort of reactor geometry (I understand it holds for both PWRs as well as these BWRs).
Great story. It just goes to show you that you are better off being close to your customers and carefully listening to them than dreaming up revolutionary products in your imagination. It is a bit unfortunate for those of us with overactive imaginations, but it is the truth.
Thanks a lot. Lets turn back to work and come to Convore & Wompt after couple of days.

Thanks again Mr. PG.
Why Sign Up and Sign In Should Never Go Together
TFA states the product does not use file extensions, but rather file headers, so 133t office workers won't be able to use that particular method of obfuscation.
36:30

but it's worth listening to the entire thing, very interesting stuff
Sounds like a great guy to work with. Why do you?
I'm a big fan of all these image generator thingos. I made yet-another-placeholder-generator too ( http://mrspeaker.github.com/lowersrc/ ). The thing I like about my one is that it's all done client-side - not all my clients have the best internets ;)
Because I can.
No, seriously, I didn't mean that server code should be written. You can use those services to serve static pages as well.
What is drumbi and why we are building it
Using 4 points instead of 5 merely removes some of the inherent ambiguity, the results are still likely to organize around similar concepts.

For many things, most people don't bother to think about the difference between crap unless you force them to, so in a 4-star system 2 stars becomes the "mediocre" rating while 3 and 4 differentiates between the good ones. How many people really care about a grade difference between D and an F? Likewise, do people really spend that much time making sure their 1 and 2 star ratings form a consistent philosophy of relative crappiness?

If "forcing" people to make a choice about something that is supposed to be a subjective categorization to begin with is probably not helping anything. If you want to force a like/dislike you should get binary data and be done with it.

"Would you eat this? Yes/No."

That's easy to answer accurately. Everyone will agree on what you mean. If you haven't answered that means you don't have an opinion. Beyond that semantic ambiguity is impossible to avoid and gets worse the more numbers you add.
Awesome! Was worried for a bit ;)
How to kill a successful company.
Professor Clayton Christensen from Harvard Business School
Star Trek series coming to Netflix Watch Instantly in July and October?
<sarcasm>
Indeed! Tablets have been around for years and suddenly there's an Apple logo on one and the fanboys act like it's some sort of technical advance....
</sarcasm>
Cindermedusae - making generative creatures
release early, release often?
Nice, but there's no option for "cats only." As a result, I'm afraid I'll stick to http://placekitten.com/ for now.
Keep an eye on what Jason Scott gets up to http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2731 He's notorious for having many irons in the fire, so no idea when this will actually lead to something though. Maybe he just needs someone to help get it started?
So, assuming I got a rejection letter AND I updated after the deadline, I'm guessing my rejection still stands? ;)
I sincerely hope that you did get the point - that was a "kamikaze" application not meant to get me in, but meant to get them out of their self righteous loop!
You appear to not have read the whole thing. Okay, you didn't have to, of course.
But you completely proved my point: that's what they also do. This is why I tried my best to get their attention woken up at least for this one application. Maybe they'll start waking up before reading other applications in the future, as well!
I believe they never got the point that this is not a programming-centered idea. Not a software startup at all. I want to make hardware, to put it shortly.

Not meaning to brag, but I applied for another incubator as well, and got to the last stage. I was dumped there, but they did say I came across as technically strong and with relevant and solid experience.
Among their tests was a programming test. I sent two e-mails explaining how I'm not a coder but how I'm not supposed to be one. And they passed me to the next stage.

Again, I think you proved the point I was trying to make with Y Combinator flawlessly. Not as an offence to you, though.

And yes, I understand that you weren't trying to bash me but to help me instead. Thanks for that.
Inside the Open Compute Project Server
> The tone of these conferences is not the reason women are not more involved

I'm under the impression that it is - some women have voiced objection to the tone, so we know it's at least the case for some, and we don't have any data indicating that those anecdotes aren't representative of the whole. In fact, since so few women go, those anecdotes are pretty significant.

> Math, Science and Engineering are boring for women

If that were true, it still wouldn't account for the significant difference between the number of women in CS and other STEM fields - we do, though, know that the tone of the community is the reason for some.

> Solution: Don't make them boring when kids are in grade school and high school

Certainly there are other (and more far reaching) issues, but the tone that we present as a community is one that we have more direct control over (with a very simple solution), and changing it to one that isn't perceived as hostile would have little negative impact.
Yes, you should have been notified. Check your spam folder perhaps.
Why in the world would I want to collect garbage. Sure I can post process all of the survey data but it's trivial to do it on the front end so why not. In a significant number of other cases failing to validate input would simply be a non starter limiting this to toy apps.

As to the second point: Who said anything about _me_ running a javascript eval on user supplied data.

Go look at their wiki example click edit and in the text box type: <script>alert('boo');</script> then click the hide button.

Notice two things. The first is that when you type the last > on the ending script tag the included script executes and you get the alert popup. When you reload the page you'll still see the alert('boo'); in the wiki display (in <code> tags) but the <script> tag is still live in the page as there's either no or very limited output sanitization. In a typical client/server application this is hopefully going to be sanitized or eliminated prior to ever being stored. The storage format is irrelevant if the data being stored is spit right back out into the page as in the wiki example.
IPad with e-ink?
The team or the non-developer? You mention both as the most important.
Programmers come in two main sizes: too skinny, and too fat. If your engineering team is mainly "seasoned pros" you want to avoid american apparel altogether. If it's fresh grads you have a few years worth of size medium before 14 hour days and free soda catches up with everyone.

It's different if you are buying shirts as schwag. I once worked for a startup where the t-shirts were more popular than the product and the most important sizes were mens and womens size medium.
Get the Current Date and Time in Visual Basic.NET
Explains how to use the Now() method to get the current date and time in Visual Basic.NET
The Origins of Pattern Theory by Christopher Alexander (OOPSLA 1996)
Point taken, but:

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." - Henry Ford

Someone has gotta be innovative.
MIT's 150th Birthday: The Network Effect
I had the same question after reading this.
agreed. we don't have a language to define the problem in the first place.

i am great at estimating - unfortunately i often go over because what i heard was being asked for is subtly different to what the client thought they were asking for
Check out videorum.org
http://videorum.org
But would Woz join the Google Android team?