skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. It just depends on if the revenue continues, or dries up once most people who want to buy it, have...

Still a nice success story so far though.
I wouldn't expect the business people to be familiar with OS2. But I would expect them to admit they have no clue what it is.
I can wear some Plaxo or Facebook tshirt so people can recognize me and then the fun starts there!
Trees = Networks?
Summary:
Apple options are horribly overpriced.
Dell XPS laptops are overpriced and are similar in price to Apple systems.

I spent a few years developing OS 8,9, and X Software back when OS X was new. I used a dual G4 and upgraded to a G5. I honestly don't miss OS X it's just an OS and their hardware is expensive in useless ways. If your building a 3k system use 8GB of ram not 2 Xeon chips and 95% of the time you will be happy you did. I am currently using a 3 month old 1200$ dell and its fast enough that I just don't notice any issues. If I would upgrade anything I would spend ~2k on better displays a long time before I upgraded my computer.

PS: Granted some people might be CPU bound and happy with 2GB of ram but that’s got to be a tiny fraction of the market.
I'll add something here, since I'm writing an application focused on language learning: Pick an area to focus on, and provide lots of automation for the user.

Even though my application is very beta, it automates a lot of the drudgery in building studylists, which differentiates my software from all the other spaced repetition systems out there. This has gotten a pretty positive response so far, and has the added advantage of being very difficult to duplicate, giving you a big competitive edge.

Not sure how this could be applied to subjects other than language, and doing it for language is hard enough, but that's what makes this an interesting problem. :)

Also, I've dug around quite a bit, and talked to a few other researchers, and have yet to find any proper studies on the effectiveness of SuperMemo algorithm itself. There are lots of testimonials, but nothing involving a control group, and so until I see some hard data, I'm going to remain a little skeptical.

If anybody knows of such a study (with associated data), please let me know.

Of course, since I'm building a learning system, this puts me in a good position to undertake such an experiment. grin Which I plan to do next semester, using a few hundred students' worth of Japanese classes.
8/7/2008 9:57am Central Time. This headline appears right above, "Parasites that Brainwash their Host."
Having failed a couple papers in educational theory classes for proposing vaguely similar ideas, I'll give you the standard criticism: How does this maximize the child's intrinsic motivation to learn? Which isn't the same question as 'will this be fun,' which you make the case for. But rather, will this make kids the kind of people who want to check out non-fiction books from the library on their own ten years from now.
If they're competent, then the deactivation tokens would have to be signed. They're using SSL encryption for this?
Hi there, Peldi here. I also agree, I didn't think the "rags to riches" sentence applied to my situation either...

axod, I agree that Mockups alone might not be a sustainable business (though it's doing MUCH better than I expected at the moment). My plan is to develop 2 new products a year, and to port them to as many Web Office platforms as it makes sense (i.e. turn them into plugins to wikis etc). I have an ever growing list of ideas for new products already. Together these sources of revenue should be enough to keep a small business going, we shall see...
$10 million invested in Zap electric cars
you didn't know that os/2 main function was cooking the books and came with an unprinter? Jk for any os/2 heads.
Wozniak is a published researcher and Supermemo is basically the fruit of his PhD thesis.
Really? Never? What's wrong with you?
Fake Flash Player Hits Major Web Sites | TechJaws
This standard criticism makes a very strong case, doesn't it?

I was recently talking to someone experienced with making educational software. He said that Indiana Jones is full of bad archaeology, but causes surges in archaeology major enrollment numbers. Inspiration probably precedes motivation. Before inspiration: understanding, control, and application?

In this sense an educational application with a competitive/game component is not enough to build inspiration that lasts beyond the duration of the game, which would have very narrowly defined goals.
If I was keen to get (or keep) VC funding, I doubt I'd be in any hurry to tell a VC that he was smoking crack whatever I actually thought.

While I'm probably a little naive, it also just wouldn't occur to me that he was deliberately looking stupid. So my assumption would have to be that he actually thought this was true for some reason. Possible reasons:

1. He misheard something or otherwise confused OS/2 with something else. DB/2 for example.
2. IBM had extracted some bit of technology derived from the OS/2 lineage and were pitching this as the latest and greatest thing.

On this assumption, flat out contradicting him would make him look stupid, and at least be a little rude. So to me this says more about his character (VC who plays games - sounds unpleasant) than it does about that of the people he says it to, other than that they're prepared to dissemble a little to keep an investor happy.

Me, I'd say "Really? Are you sure!?" but I'm not looking for cash.
Seems unethical for a potential investor to try to trick people like that. Investors are supposed to be partners.

There's no need to anyway. People who don't know what they're talking about usually disqualify themselves quickly enough without any leading questions.
Were your papers failed because they had radical ideas, or debunked ideas (that said, can any educational theory ever be thoroughly debunked, all hard facts accounted for)?
The rub in this case is that Franz's licensing terms (involving royalties on the products you create using their product) are even more heinous than typical proprietary software.
nitpick: spacing algorithm does not "dramatically increase memory." Your memory is not so much increased. Your retention rate is what increases.

Another nitpick: 10 minutes a session is too short for anything of any intensity. For single sessions, 40 minutes would be better. But again there isn't a hard rule. Oh well, ideas surely are cheap.
62% of homeowners think their house lost no value last year. 2/3 are wrong.
StreamGraph Maps Twitter Word by Word
Someone you respect and trust lies to you and you fall for it. Film at 11.

Even if these guys aren't falling for it, they're trying not to make the fellow look too dumb on this.

I would be more comfortable with this test if it didn't include the "thousands of case studies". Had it been true, the entrepreneur would likely be humiliated (or shown much less capable) if he professed to be clueless about this trend. If it's important enough to have 3rd party case studies written in the thousands, surely he glossed over it somewhere.

I'd really like them to say "Wow-- I hadn't heard it was coming back so strongly. We'll definitely look into it. Have you heard what kind of browser/flash/cross-compiler/solitaire support they have?" but I'm not going to fault an entrepreneur from trying to dance around such a strongly worded test by a VC prankster.
Biology freaks me the hell out. It seems like every article I read about it has some new horror to regale me with. It's messy and chaotic and squishy and bizarre.

Give me the spare elegance of math or physics or computation any day. That I can deal with.
I think the point he's making is it's better to admit gaps in your knowledge than bullshit.

While I may not have been bold faced about "OS/2 is back ? OH that's awesome" I sure as hell would have pointed out that Arthur Andersen is gone, fallout from the Enron scandal.

My assumption is that he threw the Andersen bit in to totally kill any chance of 'reality' in the OS/2 comment.
I would just have assumed that he meant Accenture and mis-spoke.

Ok, if he has a pattern of saying dumb things it's different, but if he just goes off on one for a moment - why would you rub his nose in it?
Ugh, I'm tired of the "march to free" crap. There's not always a march to free. Downward pressure, sure, but free? All iPhone apps will be free just like all software will one day be free. Anyone who believes that is just not aware of capitalism and psychology. People will want to make money off their applications, and people will want to pay money for applications. People making money have more incentive and capital to make a better program than someone giving away something for free. Sure, there will be exceptions, but it doesn't mean your iPhone app will be forced out the market any time soon by a free alternative.
Josh Harris: "Pseudo was a fake company."
The Web Developer and His Wife (A Fairy Tale)
I think you are on to something. For example, many people see research in the sciences as the progress of a few unbelievable geniuses, with 99% of people contributing nothing and wasting their time. So, for example, progress in Physics is just waiting for the next Einstein to show up to make the next insanely brilliant advance.

However, I think that is wrong. Einstein was obviously a huge genius, but with an IQ of 160, I calculate there are currently about 9 million (=3 billion * .003) people walking the earth with higher ones. The stars have to be properly aligned so that it is possible to make such an advance. It is no coincidence that Einstein's discoveries were made so soon after other physicists make the contributions necessary for them. If he hadn't done it, it would have been somebody else.
While this article is funny it also just pisses me off. Who are these morons that are getting all this VC money?

After a long fight I've finally decided to believe PG. It does matter where you start your startup, you're not going to get funding in Tulsa OK. Apparently you can be an idiot and get funding in Canada though, maybe I should move there.
"What is it about our culture that makes us so resistant to admitting that we don't know something?"

I've heard it explained as "Male Answer Syndrome"

http://www.wordspy.com/words/maleanswersyndrome.asp
Well, I turned one of them into this K5 article so you can judge for yourself:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/8/2135/17844

Actually, that one I wrote in October 2004, and one of the biggest problems with it was that the professor had never heard of Wikipedia and didn't think that the site could ever possibly succeed. (The first drafts were more Wikipedia-centric, but a lot of that got cut out of the final version.)
Web Application Integration With OAuth
I'm aware that Wozniak is a published researcher, as I've read a good chunk of his work; what he's done on memory plasticity is very solid, and provides a really good argument for spaced repetition.

But nowhere in the doctoral thesis is there a link to any sort of scientific study on the effectiveness of the various iterations of the SuperMemo algorithm. If I'm wrong, please tell me where I can find the information I'm looking for, because it would make my life much easier.

Jesus, Mohammed, Yaveh, and Gordon Ramsay could all come down from on high and hand me a learning method that they all swear by, but until I saw some solid data proving its effectiveness, I would remain skeptical.
If that's true, it's really nice! Just like voluntarily implanting a blood sucking parasite into your neck.
I can't find it at the moment, but I remember reading somewhere that Franz's support team goes way above and beyond what other vendors are willing to do. Supposedly, their developers work very closely with you, if necessary, in order to get the most out of the product. To the point of helping you write code in your own app. It's not so bad having a team of experts at your disposal when you're trying to scale your startup app that suddenly became popular overnight. I think the licensing terms are negotiated on a case by case basis too so the royalties thing may not be set in stone.

It's certainly understandable why people would be turned off by their license, but it's not necessarily a bad deal. It also says a lot that Franz has been in business as long as they have with this type of license. The customers who have signed on must be getting something worthwhile out of it.
I doubt it's going to be either in urban areas or without any supervision. In urban areas you already have access to the grid.

Also there will be lots of metal and concrete, and I imagine some big locks. And it will be close/under either a power plant or a heat exchanger, so it'll be anything but abandoned.
I hope some entrepreneur shoots back, "You're testing how honest and candid I am by being disingenuous."
are you using it urself everyday now?
BitTorrent dumps sales staff, to work more closely with MPAA in anti-piracy efforts
Linden Lab targets Second Life ad farms with zoning regulations
Same for toxoplasmosis, although the behavioral changes in humans appear to be secondary to the changes in mice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis#Behavioral_change...
umm ok. What was the point of that story.
I just started biking to the commuter train station (it's just the beginning of a 90 min one-way). It's 3.25 miles and I do it in about 16-18 minutes (exact minutes matter when you're catching a train). The train ride gives me a chance to air out before work, so the summer weather hasn't been too bad. Chicago winter should be fun :).
Seed: Prime Numbers Get Hitched
Investors are supposed to watch out for and grow the money under their trust. If one of them considers that involves throwing in different questions to find out more about the people and/or product asking for his money, I don't see how that is unethical.

We have countless articles on this system that praise alternative approaches to dealing with markets. This post is entirely about part of one individual's alternative approach.
The file at the current link, which supposedly disables a test app, is just a plaintext JSON-like file. No tokens or encryption or anything like that.
Its not stealing because the music label is still being paid. I bought 1 CD from Sony and copied 9 others. Its just that their price per CD is lower.
I think what you are going for is something like viewzi's screenshot presentation of search?
But maybe not, your 'Usage' page says I can use your service as a host for screenshots?

Either way, I entered a site, and even looking at your gadget demo, all I'm getting is 'screenshot is queued for processing.
Maybe you are getting tons of hits right now, but unfortunately, this seems to me to be much more difficult than just grabbing a screenshot and hosting it myself.

Maybe you can expand for me on why I would use this. I think I'm missing the point. I suspect I'm not the only one.
I think I saw that on an episode of House M.D.
In this day and age, I'm amazed companies think that they can get away with this. It would have cost NXP, what, an extra fifty grand to bring in a cryptological consultant? Versus the nightmare of having to upgrade millions of readers?
Man, that's a strange article. In the process of burning through 25M, Pseudo managed to work hard to produce a lot of content-- it seems pretty disingenuous to 8-years later to call it a "fake company" and a "work of performance art." What appears more like performance art is the letter, which somehow tries to pin this all on Jayson Blair and his corporate masters. Weird.

Does anybody with more background on this care to elucidate?
As the Wikipedia article notes, it was the pilot episode.
Software Startups No Longer Need Venture Capital, Says Founder of RescueTime
Very amusing, I'm sure.

Let's look at it from the other perspective. You're in a meeting with someone you want money from (and maybe someone you even respect). Your whole mindset for the meeting is that you should come across as knowledgeable and confident. He says something that confuses you. His tone of voice says "Even my grandmother knows this, if you don't you're an idiot, and my money and I are out of here". It might cross your mind that he's a VC and deals with a much broader range of the tech landscape than you, focused on your startup for the last year. You might even get as far as thinking "OS/2? I thought that was ancient, but what do I know about the enterprise field, maybe they renamed some $500,000 product as OS/2?"

You have a split second to decide what to say. Do you:

a) Say something that means "Sorry Mr. VC, but you are completely clueless about technology"

b) Ask for clarification for a topic which doesn't really seem relevant

c) Try to smooth over what to you is an awkward bump in the conversation

b) seems like the optimal choice, but I couldn't really blame anyone who chooses c) in the heat of the moment. At any rate, I would be wary of anyone who chooses a).
Well, if you're working 400 hours a week and only getting paid for 40, you've got serious problems.

If you're getting fixed compensation, make sure you know the expected hours before you accept the offer. If they ask you to work more than that, renegotiate or refuse. If you're getting paid by the hour, then you're being compensated so no worries. Don't be afraid of the labor market - it's good times right now.
If one of them considers that involves throwing in different question to find out more about the people and/or product asking for his money, I don't see how that is unethical.

Maybe that's clearer if we use a description more precise than "throwing in different questions:" lying.
More to the point, the existing UX knowledge out there is so trifling, so paltry, so embarassingly miniscule, that even mere "improvement" could represent a thousandfold boon to the consumer.
It's seems unethical for a potential investee to try and trick people that like. They are supposed to be partners!
'Hell Week' for U.S. Teen Scientists
I remember reading a great post somewhere about using the visual shape of usenet discussion threads (as rendered by common news readers) to spot patterns like trolling, political tangents, etc. This was only proposed as an NI (Natural Intelligence) method, not AI, but I wonder...
Most of this makes enough sense to me, although it's hardly groundbreaking. But point number 6 completely eludes me. The argument is that procedural code is hard to test because ... it doesn't have a capacity for overloading in a test?! It's like the guy has never heard of a stub function before. Or formal verification. He thinks about testing only in terms of OOP, and hits a wall when he gets out of his comfort range that he thinks is a generic point of testing theory. This one was just awful, sorry.

(And it also seems to be introducing jargon that isn't required: what on earth is a "seem". Is he trying to say "seam"? Is that something I should have heard before?)

Point 8 ("favor polymorphism over conditionals") is also pretty sketchy. I buy the argument that this makes things more testable, I guess, but there's a long-understood readability argument against this kind of thing. That kind of hyper-pure-OOP leads to unreadable code that stretches even simple algorithms across dozens of classes and source files.
Only programmers who don't regularly use PHP seem to be bothered to point this out. Why don't PHP programmers care? Because PHP is a weakly typed language that operates in an environment where most of the data comes in as strings. More often than not, the double equals does exactly what you intend it to do.

Programmers who use the triple equals in PHP for all comparisons have entirely missed the point.
their software is ridiculously fast. one problem (in the 2.x series), is that there were NO CONCURRENT READS from the database. all access was serialized.

it looks like they may have addressed that in 3.x by allowing read-only copies, but still, c'mon!

if your workload is one that can deal with those limitations, its an awesome product. but it definitely restricts the areas-of-use.
Misleading title. The reporter misstated what Tony said to make it seem more controversial. What he actually says is that you don't need VC to test an idea, not that you never need it.
Too much SEO is potentially harmful.
Language has been shown to emerge naturally? I'm not sure what you're referring to, could you provide a link?
"I think I've got some water in my eye" (pic)
Even if one takes an amoral view of it, there is a risk that the people you were investing in will now waste time investigating a non-existent technology.

Or that they will incorrectly discount things that you say in the future. But then that's one of the reasons that lying is so often a bad strategy in the first place.
Yikes. I feel like I just wasted a part of my life looking for some punch line. Bah.
IPhone Firmware 2.0 Unlocked and Jailbroken
Hmm, if your best resumes are from dice.com you are in trouble ;-)

A lot of techy news sites have job boards too. Joel On Software is a good example, I think Techcrunch has one, dailywtf, there's Startuply if you consider yourself a startup, Slashdot, 37signals. There are probably more examples that I'm missing.
Talk is cheap...do something already
Dan, I'm impressed with the constructive, positive tone you've kept on this thread. That is something every discussion forum could use more of.
parents don't tell lies to protect their children but to protect themselves. they claim themselves to be modern but their mind set is still of the 80s . they think that talking about sex is something very shameful and children having sex is almost unimaginable. moreover they creat an issue about children having sex at the age of 14 because they are afraid of the reaction they would get from their neighbours. "what would people say..." "I will have to stay in this society" etc. so it is not for the good of their children but to save themselves that parents lie.
Regards,
Sriranjani,
india
I agree — I this what Gruber says is partly right. What you need is a desire to learn and love your craft. People who are passionate about UI design will be able to learn and develop great great interfaces. Those with no UI design talents and no motivation to learn will not. This very drive and passion is mostly innate — you can't really learn to love something (yeah, taste can be acquired, but here you need real passion)
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Probably.

But then again, I've never learned to keep my mouth shut, which is why I'm still working for other people.
The need for speed: Making Basecamp faster
Same here, and also:

1. Good modular design is easy to write unit test for and doesn't require design pattern contortions. New is not a modern day plague to be avoided at all costs.

7. and 8. Taking things too far. You can not get a good design with a lot of hard and fast rules. But you might avoid terrible, impossible to maintain code. I think I see the problem now, google is about managing a whole lot of average coders, not great hackers.

Not the best software writing, kind of enterpise-ey sounding.

I also detect a hint of someone writes code, someone else writes test for it - BAD. Unit tests should be written by who ever wrote the code that is being tested. Preferably unit test first, then code.
To be fair: PHP got the implicit conversion thing from perl, which has saner semantics. A lot of the confusion in the article is with things like: ("string" == true) evaluating to true. (Although your guess is as good as mine as to why the author was surprised by 0 == false).

The reason that looks weird isn't because of the dynamic conversions, but because PHP decided it wanted to look like a statically typed language and added junk like boolean constants. In an implicit typing scenario, you don't have separate constants for different types. In this case, the "booleanness" of the thing is a property of the expression (the == operator, being evaluated inside of an if(), etc...), not the data.
He ventured forth to bring light to the world
Animation of the patch update to Kaminsky's DNS vulnerability