skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Their drivers aren't taxi drivers in the sense that they don't drive medallion cabs. Medallions in major cities are a scarce, and outrageously expensive on secondary markets. Uber's interests here are aligned with their drivers, not traditional hackney carriage drivers.

Edit: I'm a dope. See child.
Google is only really able to do it because nobody is depending too much on stuff built on top of the browser (yet, anyway). When you've built whole internal apps on top of a browser, as many companies have built on IE, frequent upgrades that change anything can be problematic. Firefox is in an interesting in-between position, where they encourage frequent upgrades, but users who use a lot of add-ons are reluctant to upgrade too often, because upgrades often break add-ons.

Of course, it's not a problem if every upgrade is backwards-compatible with every add-on and intranet app, but that's tough to pull off.
It is true that a Mac's application bundle is preferable to Window's entirely undefined method of organizing apps. However, it is just not true to say that the bundle solves all the app installation and removal issues. Any given app can have files in a number of different locations under /Library. To really remove an app, it is necessary to remove all files under Application Settings, Extensions, Preferences, Launch Daemons, etc. Some apps even place their files in the verboten /Library/System/Extensions, or add files to /usr/local.

All-in-all it is still somewhat better than Windows, where it is still possible for apps to dump DLLs directly into C:\Windows\System32. Most Mac apps obey the convention that /System means what it says: It's for Apple-supplied system files and is not to be touched by anything else. Regardless, it's still a pain to remove apps on a Mac, especially since there is still no standardized or centralized method for doing so.
Defining a problem when it isn't always apparent is tough. In postmark's case, i bet a lot of their potential customers don't realize their emails are going to spam, or they aren't reaching the customer inbox, or that they could be OPTIMIZING and generating more revenue from those emails they are already sending.
Same here. I'd put it on the right, just under the ID & "logout". That space is almost always unused.
It's a shame how Google completely disregards your HTTP Accept-Language header. If they didn't, this would be much less of a problem.
I'm kind of an outlier, but I really believe that context places a huge, huge part in the "superstar developer" mythos. We're very quick to overlook a lot of contributing factors in the rush to declare some developers legendary. "Outliers" does a pretty good job outlining the argument, which I happen to agree with.

This isn't to say that you can plop anyone in the right context and get a "superstar", and I think some people are more resilient to contextual changes that might make other devs crumble.

"If you were launching a technology or developing a product, would you rather have five great engineers rather than 1,000 average engineers?"

I also think that this is a straw-man argument, in the sense that the kind of person who can work well on a 1,000 person team may be different than the five great engineers who can develop and bootstrap a new product. There is overlap, but honestly I think there's an argument that some situations call for "1,000 solid engineers".
Not a surprising line of thought, considering the source. I have worked with some of HBRs products -- Harvard MBAs -- and found them to be arrogant and severely lacking in common sense. I don't know if Mr. Taylor is a graduate, but the attitude sure does sound familiar. To the Harvard MBAs I worked with, developers were viewed as janitors (making sure the software didn't stink too much) and completely interchangeable. Thy were incapable of distinguishing bad from good from stellar developers, and were therefore unable to recognize what a 100x developer brings to the table. Google and Facebook are not similarly disabled, and need to pay what the market will bear.

The choice between "a small number of superstars" and "a well-assembled team that may not dazzle with individual brilliance, but overwhelms with collective capability" is a false one. A "well-assembled team" will have a small number of stars and a larger supporting cast. A badly assembled team will have a huge number of leaderless, mediocre developers. This team will undoubtedly have "managers", who have little or no understanding of what they manage. Having spent many years in software startups, I have seen how one kind of group turns into the other. The stars build something. It becomes successful. Maybe its a startup that gets acquired. The B players and PHBs arrive. The stars get fed up and leave (to build something else from scratch), and what's left is a stagnant, rudderless, politicized, mediocre group that can no longer do anything innovative.

Mr. Taylor says "I'm not sure I'd make the same choice as Mark Zuckerberg -- especially if those 100 pretty good people work great as a team." That's why he's not Mark Zuckerberg.
There is competition. People might take buses, or trollies, or BART. They could also walk, carpool or hitchhike.
Seedcamp named top European accelerator, with Startupbootcamp closing in
To be an utter pedant, that's quadratic not exponential growth :)
> but the real thing that sets him or her apart and makes them valuable is the set of things that they can do that a mediocre or inexperienced developer simply can't do, at all

What are the sort of things that a great developer can do that a mediocre developer simply can't? (Not sarcasm. Just curious)
I like how they don't even put a version number on Chrome.
Would you rather hear the music of a thousand mediocre musicians or four great ones?

I'm not trying to draw an analogy between musicians and hackers -- just providing an example to show that productivity ratios vary hugely depending on the endeavor, so comparing software to soccer or investing is fruitless.
Court Says Business News Outlets Can Scoop Wall Street Analyst Reports
Right, but the text of this blog post claims in multiple places that they're supporting traditional cab drivers somehow.

"Taxi drivers are going on strike, and while they circle City Hall in hopes of getting a better deal..."

"...making sure ordinary folks can get around the city while the taxi drivers strike to get a fair deal."

"Furthermore, we want to put a word of support out there to the hard working taxi drivers in San Francisco..."

As far as I can tell, the reality is that they're deliberately undercutting the strike and profiting by it. Which may or may not be justifiable (I don't know anything about the strike), but it's certainly not supportive.
Banks and financial institutions are subject to extensive document retention and security regulations -- using Google Docs is out of the question. Of course, that is one of the primary reasons why their upgrade paths are so slow.
Isn't this Google Web Accelerator, all over again, with the same problems?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Accelerator
Is there a demo available?

The HN link title is more descriptive than the page itself...
People Are Spending More Time In Mobile Apps Than On The Web
Have to say that was nice documentary.
I disagree. I don't think there's a technology company in the world that can identify talent reliably enough to make the argument that they can find a team of 5 who will outperform 1,000. Even if the 1,000 people are average.

Painting is largely a solo occupation, and you can reliably judge the talent of a painter by looking at their past work. But it's basically impossible to judge the talent of a software engineer by looking at their past code -- there's too much context required. I think the sports analogy is better in this respect, because it's much harder to separate the the record of a sports superstar from the team that they're on. So it is with non-trivial software.

And also: five "brilliant" painters might be so socially dysfunctional as a team that you'd rather take the 1,000 average guys who can take direction well. You wouldn't automatically get a great work of art if you told Van Gogh, Matisse, Monet, Munch and Seurat to collaborate on a mural -- but you see all sorts of great murals that were painted by teams of less-talented artists.
The best bet for an iPad competitor would be someone delivering a standard desktop OS in tablet form, somehow solving the input (keyboard/mouse) issue. At that point you'd be matching Apple's ecosystem with an even bigger one from OSX or Windows.
You need a sample visualization for effect before you ask folks to provide their own.
Show HN: Registry Notebook - universal gift registry app built on App Engine
I'm a long time reader, first time submitter. I've been teaching myself about web development and have been using a gift registry app (for weddings, baby showers, etc.) as my tutorial of sorts. Long story short, I'm thinking about releasing it into the wild, and would love some feedback before I do:

www.registrynotebook.com

It's still very much beta with more features to come, but any comments on UI, UX, or general app/site practices are most welcome. I've also gotten pretty deep into the intricacies of App Engine, so I may be able to share some useful knowledge if anyone is interested.

Right now, it relies on Google accounts for authentication. Not ideal, but GAE makes it difficult to do auth and sessions if you go any other route. On the todo list to change that.

I'm also debating various business models. Gift registries are a crowded market. Most registry sites are free to use and rely on affiliate links for revenue. However, a lot of services are implemented pretty poorly, so there may be opportunity to compete independently of price. What do you think?

Thanks!
Where Cloud Computing Growth Will Slow
Admiration Leads to Success - A Startup Cinderella Story
I'd love to hear about it too.

From a slightly selfish perspective, I'd love to know if you knew about Leanpub (http://leanpub.com) and, if you did, what about it made you do the work of publishing it yourself rather than going through us.

I only ask because you really fit our target author profile perfectly, and we obviously screwed something up if you knew about Leanpub and still decided to build the workflow and sales site yourself :).

If you didn't know about Leanpub, then obviously we need to market better.
Of course Google can't read minds, that does not mean they should ignore information that they have when deciding which results to show or what order to show them in. Sufficient data to provide a better filter for a given user is not the same as mind reading.

You are absolutely right that more criteria should be used if a user is interested in better results, but I fail to see why a deterministic base case is superior. If I never click on news links and always click on travel links, it makes perfect sense for Google to assume that my search for "Egypt" is looking for information related to travel to Egypt. If I am not following my usual search patterns, I can look on the second page, or I can disable personalized search, or I can search for "Egypt News" all of which would give me better results.

Why is it preferable to always make everyone clarify their searches when there is sufficient information to narrow the search down somewhat without requiring additional intervention by the user? This is usability 101 right here.
Wouldn't it make more sense for Uber's supporters to avoid using them tomorrow, thus freeing up more of their fleet for potential new converts?
In addition to number of communication channels on a team, the article neglects the complexity of communication.

Creating economic value through code is currently an extremely complex process. When you consider what goes on between the ears of a basketball player, it is not trivial, but it can be transferred from one player to the next in a straightforward way.

Engineers must think beyond what is able to be communicated. Complex mental models of code and user experience that would take the best engineers longer to communicate than to instantiate.
Adobe Flex and Flash tools update adds iOS and BlackBerry PlayBook support
I'd love to see an "R for rubyists/pythonists/...", basically an R tutorial aimed at reasonably experienced programmers which explains what you need to know about the quirks of R to properly grok it as a language, how it differs to ones you're familiar with, etc.

As opposed to a tutorial aimed at the "I really just want a recipe to achieve statistical task xyz" crowd.

In particular: every time I delve back into R, I forget how its funky data structures work.
Good question. I just saw an expert in the hallway and asked him. The basic answer is that your preference is stored in a cookie, so the preference would be forgotten if you're clearing cookies. If you still have the same cookie and yet the "no country redirect" isn't sticking, that's a bug we could dig into.

By the way, I asked why the "no country redirect" isn't stored with your Google account rather with a cookie. The main reason he gave was that whether to do a country redirect is one of the first things we decide, and it's faster to use a cookie for that than to go looking up the user's account setting. Or at least, cookies have been faster up until this point. Hope that helps explain things.
Justices Have Been Forced To Resign For Doing What Clarence Thomas Has Done
I believe the standard library for bcrypt in ruby also uses salts, it just stores the salt with the hashed password data.

Salts will prevent the typical rainbow table attack where you have precomputed hashes for a large number of attempts. Salts won't prevent brute force, but bcrypt will make it so that brute force takes too long for a single given user.
To clarify: I didn't mean to say that I have a strong ethical preference for universal health care. [0] What I wanted to say, is that for some things, e.g. emergency care, most societies will have rules to require universality. And if we go from there, paying for prevention often comes cheaper than waiting for the emergencies.

[0] I might have one, but it's doesn't matter for the argument. I'm also in favour of independent `death panels', that apply cost-benefit analysis to decide where to spend finite resources of society-provided universal health care.
They have slow update paths because they've spent a lot of money on in-house middleware that they don't feel a need to update, and sometimes those systems don't work so hot on the new browser. Faced with a choice between updating old middleware and not updating the browser, they choose to wait on updating the browser. The longer they do that, the more work the middleware needs to be "up to date", and the worse the problem becomes. Definitely not isolated to banks.
How are you tagging food items? Is it embedded into your fridge/pantry? Are you thinking about using your cell phone to "scan" every item? If the auto food tagging infrastructure is in place, a web/mobile app can have interesting applications.

It might be easier if "intelligence" is integrated into refrigerators like - http://www.engadget.com/2007/04/23/siemens-refrigerator-gets...
Clickable link: http://www.registrynotebook.com
John Wall Throws 1st Pitch Like Mariah Carey
"As a result, the minimum standard was relaxed first by raising the reference temperature 50 percent, and then 78 percent above the original — even though a broken vessel could spill its radioactive contents into the environment."

Amazing. I know that there are many who still think nuclear energy is safe, but I think it's inherently unsafe, not because the original designs are flawed or anything technical like that, but because people seem to get greedy or too complacent around them, and that's what can ultimately lead to nuclear disasters.
The GoF value isn't in being a taxonomy. It's about noticing that given certain environmental conditions and a goal, people will derive similar solutions. Patterns are just time-savers. So, if you see X, then do Y, because it will just work.

That's pretty much what Alexander's books say.

The failure of GoF, in particular, is that people took it as a golden rule for every environment. IIRC, the examined source code was all object oriented c++ and smalltalk code. Yeah - it's not surprising that those patterns aren't going to work well in, say, Haskell.
3 Reasons HubSpot Users Should Be Excited About the Performable Acquisition
When I spoke with state/fed computer forensics types once they said it was ~50% of their workload.
I feel a little uncomfortable being asked to invite my friends to something I haven't even tried...

Oh well, looking forward to the chance to try this out! :)
Data Mining Interval prediction
Hi,
Not sure if this the right place for my question, but if not, then pointers to right forum will be helpful.

I have some real estate data and would like to predict property value given its attributes (area, bedrooms, etc) using locally weighted regression. I would also like to associate a confidence value with my prediction. Do I need to use Bayesian/probabilistic regression to achieve this? Can anyone point me to any research papers/tutorials explaining this technique?

Thanks.
So Windows and MS-DOS which ran on third party "dealer" imitations beat IBM originals sold through an in-house sales network. I don't see how you are refuting my argument.
Why do I feel like they're begging everyone to short the stock?
Can you qualify yourself as a talent? Does your resume and/or cover letter show that?

It's easy for any of us to say we're a talent - it's how you show that you're a talent that will make you attractive to an employer (not only just Google).

At least you know they're looking at your application - I graduated with a political science degree in December and have been sending steady streams of applications for months with nary a peep from Google recruiting.
Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript_framew...
There is a kind of demo on their blog, it's the resume of Ashton Kutcher as if it was made in vizualize.me : http://vizualizeme.posterous.com/ashton-kutchers-resume-info...

Direct link to picture : http://currycloud.com/vizualizeme/vizualizeme-ashtonkutcher....
اسعار الموبايلات في مصر Mobiles Prices in Egypt
As long as you have Twitter and Facebook hooked up to your Foursquare account... None of my close friends use Foursquare, a couple of them have Twitters, and all of them have Facebook. Communicating location solely through Foursquare would fall under "Maybe not good" for me.
The HN title about "'alternative' approaches" strikes me as taylor-made to get HN downvotes. It also makes a statement that is far more general -- and less well supported -- than what the article is actually saying.

In fact, this is a rather interesting article about focusing on prevention and lifestyle changes over treatment/cure after a disease has already started. The U.S. health-care system is strongly oriented toward the latter, while there is plenty of scientific evidence to support the idea that, for many conditions, the former is usually much more successful -- or so the writer says.
I recently looked through the Google developer guidelines and they still recommend not changing the page contents significantly using Javascript. Also, the !# in modern AJAX apps is there to avoid having to run the Javascript in order to crawl the content. Do Google actually do that much with the Javascript on a page even today?
I hope their advertising doesn't attract more negative attention from the local government.
Absolutely nothing prevents you from making derivative works. You can write Everquest fan fiction until the cows come home.

Copying and distributing that derivative work is restricted, however.
Beyond communication and coordination costs - 1000 people at $100,000 = $100MM/yr.
Kind of like the ridiculous percentage of the US population currently in prison.
Loads of people want to be hackers, but that doesn't mean it's something Respectible Society would aspire to. Can you see a politican at a "Hacker Pride" event, or talking about how great hackers (not geeks, hackers) are?
Seems to me the real killer would be the "$35 tablet" type devices, and they won't compete with with iPad or with laptops, but with paper (and that's a market Apple probably isn't even interested in)
The stigma that surrounds getting a failed work term doesn't bother me too much, because A) I've always found jobs on my own anyway, and B) I'd like to experiment with entrepreneurship, or at least something closer to it.

That being said, I think I agree with trying hard to make things work for the next couple of weeks. Even though it might be intimidating or uncomfortable to stick with it for a bit longer, I think that's the most responsible move to make. And on a less important note (but one that still matters), if I don't do that, I'm going to second guess my reasons for leaving - "Maybe I did it just to run away"

Besides, when making a tough choice I've often found that if there's no clearly defined path to take, the best thing is to just be patient until it becomes obvious what to do.

Anyway, it's nice to get to mull things over with someone who knows what I'm talking about (school-wise and in general). Thanks for the advice, I'm pleasantly surprised with how things are clearing up.
For the average user the benefits really are slim. I'd consider myself an early adopter and giver of a benefit of a doubt to most of these sites, and i've certainly suffered check-in fatigue. I go into 4sq maybe once a month now. MAYBE. The deals in it aren't that exciting, badges don't interest me, maybe i've gotten burnt out on it.
So Google should aspire to be more like Microsoft? :/
Yep. The title of the article on 4sq reads "members", which is more accurate. Not sure if the 4sq folks changed their titles or if the HN poster mangled.
Customer acquisition and advertisement.
So you're calling the Nook Color a tablet?
I'm not sure that's a fair representation of the device... it's cheap, a decent e-reader, and hackable to run at least Froyo (from last I checked).

In comparing the e-reader to the tablet, the Nook does indeed blur the lines, but it's resistive touch and e-ink display combined with hackery to run a full touch OS means it's really in a league all it's own.

Perhaps this is the recipe to success for the upstarts. Ignore the "X market" as that means X is commoditized. Differentiate by seeing the pricing and/or vision gap and dive into it deftly.

A footnote: comparing "shipped" vs. "sold" numbers is a bit facile. Lots of difference there. It'd be nice to see definitive "sold" B&N details, but they're not sharing.
Glad I'm not the only one bugged by this.

Next time I think I might try the http://rubyforge.org/projects/rsruby/ bindings instead.
But for Android consumers, hardware manufacturer is usually a secondary choice. I won't contest that Apple's ahead, but all this survey really points out is that Apple has more control over their branding - consumers have no need to distinguish between Apple, iPad, and iOS. Sure it's not beneficial for manufacturers (in terms of market share) to be competing within a single brand, against a company that controls its brand entirely - that's pretty obvious. It doesn't support a conclusion that "customers want iPads, not Tablets", however, since customers mostly aren't framing their purchasing decisions around hardware manufacturers.

Again, I'm not saying Apple isn't dominating, but it does seem like the question was written with the conclusion already in mind.
You can try hg-git[1] to keep using git, and then push to a hg repo[2].

[1]: http://hg-git.github.com/
[2]: http://traviscline.com/blog/2010/04/27/using-hg-git-to-work-...
http://www.everyjs.com/
Or maybe they are underrated and this article is propaganda.

The main problem is that he is criticizing the claim that brilliant people in tech are considerably better than average, way out of proportion with their pay.

To attack this, he brings up the known and uncontested fact that wall street analysts are BS artists who provide no value because their entire field is a scam.

So what. The two things are totally different.