skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good article.

Before beginning the Estimation process, it's best to talk with the prospective customer about Cone of Uncertainty first; it helps to set a proper context for later execution of the project:

http://www.construx.com/Page.aspx?cid=1648
What's the reason behind that statement? Is it because it has more utility to you or that demand/wage is generally higher for a programmer than a musician?

Counter argument: what has more utility than bringing people happiness?
http://www.jadeleaf.co.uk/voting-is-bad
We do have some choice (ok, barring the free wil debate, which is for more than I'd like to go into), but we are also largely effected by our cognitive and biological biases. For some easy to dive into examples, check out http://youarenotsosmart.com/. Don't take that name as an insult; it's a fascinating, well written, and yet easily digestible look at the myriad biases we all have. I think we have a lot less choice than we like to believe.
Also, because light is quantum and not continuous, eventually you get to the point where there isn't any light. You can't just keep cutting out X% of the light and still have some there.
The economics of the iPad or Apple TV are much more like the Wii was than the PS3/360. Apple makes about a 35% gross margin on all their hardware. Microsoft and Sony both barely break even or lose money on each console just to push software revenue.

So, those companies work incredibly hard just to break even in hopes of long term profits. A break even company is going to bleed themselves to death competing with a company selling popular products at a 35% gross margin.

At the end of the day it boils down to profits and Apple has so much profit and cash that if they have a good enough product, they can dominate a market in a profitable way that nobody else seems to be able to match.
> Next up: funny ways of counting GDP ;-)

"Once a social or economic measure is turned into a target for policy, it will lose any information content that had qualified it to play such a role in the first place."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ws/the_importance_of_goodharts_law/
Moody's Downgrades Portugal to Junk
was shaky for a while.. back up now :)
This is probably intended to minimize contamination of the equipment with hair. Apparently, they also have metal-on-metal seals on the main hatch, so the smallest pieces of dirt could potentially prevent them from working.
It's China's turn to wrestle with a pile of bad debt
"do you have any idea where we would be without Linus Torvalds, Theo De Raadt, and Ulrich Drepper?"

I'm not suggesting they'd disappear. I'm suggesting that they'd be forced into behaving in a more respectful manner to people.

People stop acting like tools when other people stop putting up with it.
Negative, a regular grammar which describes a regular language cannot be recursive. For recursion you need to be context-free at least.

Of course, most modern "regex" engines provide features which go beyond the strictly regular languages.
I hate this headline. This is not RIAA accounting: its having a bad lawyer and not negotiating a good deal. I've been in plenty of deal meetings and seen the good and the bad.

The good artists retain most of their rights, negotiate a buy out of master recording rights, retain all fanclub/merch rights, etc.

The labels try to gun for 360 rights, but the fact is while there was a brief moment when they could deliver on the promise of the 360, that moment has long passed.

If you are a band, and you want to be a multi-platinum act selling world wide: get a really really good lawyer and sign with QPrime, Frontline, Red Light/ATO, etc.

Let me repeat: GET A GOOD LAWYER.
Implanting a rare earth magnet in your finger
I think iPads and Android tablets could completely swallow the console market if they had more sophisticated control inputs. Right now touch screen controls are a really limiting factor for games, and I hope someone figures out an elegant solution to this.
Great job guys! It seems like there is an opportunity here to build a good testing service around selenium grid. Has anyone done that yet?
They had a group of moderators who were selected to find the best questions. I believe most of the moderators were journalists or bloggers.
The two might go hand in hand...
4 among us today, in an aging vessel slipped the surly bonds of earth, and with outstretched hands touched the face of God.

- Borrowing from Peggy Noonan, Aaron Sorkin & John Magee
They certainly do. Nobody wants to get into RDNSBL.

Although, I believe, most of time ISPs just block outgoing tcp/25 connections for spambot victims.
The name doesn't matter, the technology is what makes Bitcoin. We could change the name to BitBills and I don't think anyone would miss a beat, the work would move forward and those that matter would move along with it.
perhaps time for a new descriptive term = MSP = Minimally Simplest Product a la MVP
The Constitution

A noble piece of paper

With free society

Struggled but it died in vain

And now Democracy is ragtime on the corner

Hoping for some rain

Looks like it's hoping

Hoping for some rain
The x/100000 is per year. The 1/5 number is over a woman's lifetime. Still seems fishy to me, though.
Show HN: Denso - An Instapaper for Video
So I came across this really cool new service that works like Instapaper for video, and thought I'd share it with HN.
Just got my invite today and I've been LOVING it so far. It lets me discover videos, bookmark them and watch offline on my iPad or iPhone.
(My hour long subway rides without internet aren't painful anymore. Phew)
I logged in just so I could up-vote this.
But imagine motivations this could introduce: you can spend more money if you stall the economy !
Being in a startup is like being in a band
Wouldn't the unintended consequence be that the parties become even more powerful than they are now? All the long-standing politicians would move out of official govt capacity and into essentially the same position in their parties, while unknown pawns get elected to the official positions.
Selenium has always been one of my favorite projects. You can tell someone has been thru the stress-test wringer if they know its ins and outs. The newer grid stuff looks great, although I haven't played with it yet.
I don't see anything remotely Apple-esque here.
How One Company Tames the Twitter Fire Hose
Just saw it from Cape Canaveral. Quite an extraordinary feeling to watch and feel the very last shuttle take off. What makes it even better is that there was only a 30% chance that the shuttle would take off due to the weather. In my mind I'd written it off, being an entrepreneur, I should've known better than to do that :-P
You are very mistaken; mt. gox does not have access to your shared secret and simply uses the yubico authentication servers to verify that the OTP is correct. Please go spread your lies elsewhere before you are charged with defamation.
The Key Resources for Building Your Network in the Startup Community
Evaluating jQuery Plugins for Use in your Projects
If they are also attempting to slit your throat at the local Starbucks, then yes.
Why Barca’s Messi Is Better Than Argentina’s Messi?
Why Barca’s Messi Is Better Than Argentina’s Messi?
I'd like to see legislators _pension_ provisions tied to future economic metrics.

Hopefully that would inspire them to take a longer term view, and they would be less able to redefine terms when they are being applied as they are no longer in power. Probably hopelessly naive thinking though ...
Yes. The virtual d-pads are terrible. The biggest limiting factor in the growth of touch devices as gaming machines is that touch control is very different. You have to design for it from the ground up.
Can someone fill me in on what I'm missing? How is this relevant? I don't know OwnLocal so I assume I'm missing something, but this blog post seems pointless - providing nothing more than self-pats on the back and a cryptic screenshot.
Some good previous discussion about a few of these articles from a previous HN binge on them - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971509

(including a terribly pithy remark from yours truly - who was I 583 days ago??)
Please consider the advice on the following link and add all those listed there so that you may then connect to many other HN users already on the system http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2717503
Exactly, you take one group and label them "gifted" and tell them how wonderful they are and how they all are and going to become doctors, engineers, lawyers, and accountants. Then you take the other group and tell them they're "sufficient" and "average".

No wonder the kids who are gifted are going to excel--they have confidence. The "average" kids have already had their dreams crushed. No more art/photography, jazz band, advanced chemistry or computer labs for you! Now all your electives are college readiness programs and that suck the fun out of learning.

I remember honors chemistry at my high school was allowed to do experiments, but regular chemistry wasn't. No wonder the kids in honors chemistry liked chemistry more and were excited to learn. I remember watching my chem teacher taking pure sodium and dropping it in water and watching it explode. The other class had to read out of a textbook.
Amazon Import/Export speeds up large data imports
Old people are ordinary citizens and all ordinary citizens with either die early or become old people. Unions are also collective groups of ordinary citizens. Thus following the money leads to ordinary citizens.
Windows Mobile, apparently: http://rwolpert.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/08/apple-stores-r...
I could see the gaming market being split fundamentally between the casual and high end experience. You either play HTML 5-like games or you want 3D kinect-driven large-screen immersive experiences. They're almost fundamentally different experiences, trying to serve both of them with 1 device seems foolish.
The mind-boggling this is that a billion-dollar industry is bullying a (many?) trillion-dollar industry around. Say what you want about DRM, it's strange to me that software and hardware manufacturers actually put up with it.
> Reduced memory usage (Memory leak is one of the important issue in Firefox).

It's good to see them acknowledging there's a problem. Back in the day when I still used FF (feels like an eternity but couldn't have been more than a few months) the Mozilla developers always denied there were memory issues in the first place.
The issue here is that old-fashioned declared war is essentially illegal under the current regime of international law. Because you have to get a security council resolution or be clearly in self-defense these days to engage in armed conflict and not become an international outlaw, all of the "wars" we've engaged in since the 1940s have been "police actions" or "interventions" or somesuch.
I thought you were being sarcastic but it turns out, from the rest of the thread, that you're serious. You need to get out from this culture of fear you've gotten into. It really is not healthy.
A new method of making electricity from sunlight
Maybe increase the number? That would make bribing effort a little harder since it would require spreading the money to more people. Wasn't the house of representative supposed to be sized in proportion with the population of the US?
A three paragraph post about launching something called "traction" about which they give no information except that it's "awesome" and improves "every metric we track". Also some self-congratulations and a screenshot that sheds no additional light.

Why was this posted?
Getting into a web/Big Data companies?
I have nearly 10 years of C++/C programming.. I have written a few ruby/mysql/perl programs mostly tools to optimize workflows.. I believe i am smart and have a aptitude to pick up new tech pretty fast.

I am very interested in Big Data systems and scaling.. but i lack the experience required to get into such a field.

The current web companies require experience in Big Data/Scaling systems..

What are the possible ways i can approach such companies which would improve my chances?
Isn't that what Sauce Labs is all about?
I'm one of those developers.

Last summer, I took over a troubled Ruby on Rails project; the code was a mess, overly complex and bug-ridden, lack of meaningful unit tests, and an unhappy client.

I needed integration tests. After trying and failing with Cucumber, I switched to Selenium IDE.

A year later, I'm very happy with Selenium. The project is turning around and I sense the client is warming up to me.

I now use Selenium on almost all my projects.
I wonder if this will cap out eventually though. How much power does the average user really need in a phone? Size and battery life will be more important than anything else before long I suspect.
Nice work and a giant Congrats to the entire Selenium team
The card's generally blocked after a set number of incorrect attempts anyway, so it's not as if it could be used anywhere else.

Remember, credit cards originated before there was universal ubiquitous connectivity. It's still no guarantee (think of a small merchant at some outdoor festival). EMV (Chip and PIN) cards have an offline mode which an bad guy can use.
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mkb23/interceptor/

ATMs that keep your card for the duration of the transaction only serve to decrease trust in the mechanism.

In the past, there were modes that allowed you to overdraw your account with an ATM. I imagine this was done in consideration for unreliable communications links or banks that needed downtime in their account balances for batch transaction processing.

"Trust" is a deep and strange concept, but at the end of the day US ATM cards are only a mag stripe and a 4-digit PIN. We'd best not expect too much from them. :-)
Recalls a recent article (anyone have a link? been looking for it) wherein the future of human space travel is deemed nonexistent because lobbing humans to another place is so hard with so few places worth expending that effort for. Do we all want inter-planetary/stellar/galactic space travel? of course we say yes, but faced with expending a lifetime (or a thousand) to get there and burning all of Earth's resources to do it we'd say no.

I'm fairly sure that was actually another blog post by Charles Stross, the author of this article. He also occasionally posts here as cstross, if you're looking for his comments on his work.
http://secretsocial.com -> private and ephemeral.
Turning radio waves into power (with circuits printed on paper)
In the mechanic's case, he has the car. The client presumably was using the car already (unlike your software project) and needs it immediately. His only other choice is to pay you, get the car back, and start over with another mechanic. That generally gives the mechanic more leverage.

You're right, no one can force you to keep working. But typically at that point the client owes you money, you have no tangible collateral in hand (like a car) and while you might be able to force him to pay by suing him, it's generally going to be a lot cheaper in the long run to eat the hours and keep the client. If the project is grossly underestimated and the client is unlikely to provide more large projects in the future, then quitting the project might make more sense than continuing. In which case, depending on the nature of the contract and the project, the client might end up suing you.
If the government has a balanced budget, _and_ there is a trade deficit, then the private sector must be losing money -- otherwise, where is the money that is being transferred to the external sector coming from?
Better idea... Vice Presidents who still hold shares in companies that still hold gov contracts despite censure..Impeachment as the whole 3.4ths of current deficit was by start of wrong wars Iraq especially..
ZeroCater is looking for its first technical hire.
Title is misleading...

If you read the article Carmack is saying that the processing of power of mobile devices will exceed current generation consoles, not that the sales will.

About sales he says:

"Could the bottom drop out on the triple A market because everyone’s playing Angry Birds? It doesn’t seem to be happening. The numbers don’t show that. We’re selling more big titles than ever before, despite having all of these other platforms out there."

About processing power he says:

"it’s unquestionable that within a very short time, we’re going to have portable cell phones that are more powerful than the current-gen consoles."
A $150 mobile device is far from surpassing the Xbox 360 and PS3 in polygon pushing power. Ignoring that the hardware isn't going to be fast enough until Kal-El shows up (and even longer until Kal-El-type hardware is $150) the consoles also permit writing much closer to the metal than most mobile devices.

Consistent hardware is the reason consoles have been so attractive to develop for -- you don't have to worry about leaving 30% of your market behind because you want to use OpenGL ES 2.0, you don't worry about having performance differences between different phones, you don't worry about one configuration having multiple cores and another not. Microsoft went so far to ensure consistency in their hardware performance profile that when the Xbox 360 was moved from discrete CPU/GPU to a SoC for their new slim version they built a front-side bus on die.

Different hardware profiles is why AAA games just seemed to evaporate on the PC for a while. Even now with Direct3D 10 and 11 having given developers a much more stable target to aim for it's still a pain to develop for them. With the mobile market's mix of instruction sets (NEON, VFP, soft FP), graphics libraries (GLES 1.1, 2.0) and their different implementations (necessitating things like this: http://aras-p.info/blog/2010/09/29/glsl-optimizer/), plus core counts, clock speeds, screen sizes, and operating systems, it's getting worse in mobile than it was for PC.

For the most part console/PC games and mobile games are different in player usage too -- saying "why play a console game when you can boot your phone or browser for 5-10 minutes at a time" is like saying "why watch a movie when you can watch cat videos on Youtube". Different audience, different itches scratched.

As for the "WebGL Rage" demo, it's neat but it's very misleading. First he's just displaying assets from the iOS version of Mutant Bash, it's not even the full Mutant Bash game, let alone the full game of Rage.
User Authentication [at] Google AppEngine ~ Tricky for Static Content
How is that different at all from the online distribution systems that the PS3, 360, and Wii already have? The 360 has a fantastic low price indie market in Xbox Live Arcade, the PS3 does pretty well, and the Wii is steadily gaining the entire Nintendo back catalog.

What would people gain from buying yet another device, and what do you mean by a "meta console"? Something like OnLive? Because otherwise, you're not going to see anywhere near the performance that the current consoles get. While graphics don't make the game, shiny graphics do help to sell games.
National Debt, Weak Economy? Lower The Price of Gas
<TROLL> Nice, but I can end it in 4 minutes: STOP. SPENDING. MORE. MONEY. THAN. YOU. HAVE. </TROLL>
> we are also largely effected by our cognitive and biological biases

I agree completely that these biases exist. However, to use a programming term, our biases are implementation concerns.

Injustice doesn't somehow become otherwise simply because we are predisposed to it; our innate biases don't provide a valid excuse for inaction in the face of moral imperatives.
The problem with this is that it reflects the issues with our society more than people's genders. Having a reasonable education and writing about STEM* tends to make anyone male, according to that.

* Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths
No they are not and you sadly you went with the snarky comment. If you are a user, you need to make public your sex or lie (other is not undisclosed and has a different meaning to a part of the population).

Yes, there is always the "don't like - don't use it" defense. On the other hand, they could simply not make it public without permission and save the trouble. Downplaying the concerns of people just because you don't have the life experience to see the problem is not the best way to run a product. Understanding the concerns and making a good faith attempt to provide a solution or at least an explanation why you won't / cannot beyond "get over it" will win respect if not customers.
Action Becomes Object With Fluid Vase
I have no illegal or incriminating emails. So I'm not worried about that. What bothers me is that overly broad requests would see all sorts of my personal life unrelated to the request. What pizza I ask my wife to order, private jokes I may share with my close friends, and things like that. Stuff that is my (and my family's) personal life.

None of that content is illegal or even unethical, but it's my personal data and I'm concerned that others will be looking over it or causing it to be some kind of public record because they are too lazy to filter out the unrelated stuff and just want to enter all of it as exhibit A.

I expect (hope) that strong laws will be introduced soon to address these issues. We're all in the same boat with cloud data and big corps being the gatekeepers.
Software incompetence (and more) lurks behind a cancer treatment trial
Find a skill you do have that is in-demand by one of those Big Data companies, leverage it into a job, and then once you're in, learn everything you can.

That's what I did. I wanted to get experience scaling programs up to massive data sets. It is hard to get a job doing that unless you've already had a job doing that, so I learned frontend web development really well instead. Most big data companies need some sort of GUI visualization or UI programming, and that skillset does not coexist very often with big-data crunching ability, and so companies in that area are often desperate for frontend SWEs. Then once you're in, it's easy to start asking questions, looking at code, and looking at how web-scale systems are put together.
You write really good web site copy.
I liked the preface to the comments section below the video:

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
Show HN: Instant Crunchbase Search
De-Clutter your Forms. Don't scare your users away.
I just read all three of your articles - exceptionally helpful. It fortified some existing beliefs, but most of all, it clarified some soft issues like etiquette and dress.

Thanks!
I am by no means a fanboy but the company I immediately thought of was Apple.
You're absolutely right. I probably should have qualified my statement as referring to manned exploration. (Sung1's comment did say "get us back into space"... I assumed the "us" referred to humans).
Actually I think iPads will do that. They already connect to your big screen tv. Add to that the fact that people are figuring out that you can use an iPhone or iPod Touch as a controller and you really have the potential for something groundbreaking.

Imagine if kinect-like software were integrated in iOS 6 or 7. Your apps could use it as input. So you make a game that does, then users put the iPad in a stand next to your big screen tv, connect it, and play 'iPad Dance Jam 7' or whatever. I could easily see that happening.
Diaspora got this right, and Google+ should have copied it that way they copied the UI for aspects for "circles".
From Failing iPhone Development Class To Developing AirRun
The Economist had a very interesting report on democracy in California recently:

http://www.economist.com/node/18563638?story_id=18563638
In case anyone else is mistrustful of shortened links, that one leads to a page entitled "Grounds for opposition to registration of national trade marks" on www.ipaustralia.gov.au