skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Data centers in a box: The future of data?
Google here comes up looking dishonest because it is the one that lured the so called "partners" into adopting androind claiming that it was free and now they are left to pick the tabs when apple and microsoft came after them.

Of course going with Microsoft is an option but all these partners have been there done that. So they know better. :)
I think the author needs to display a little bit of that compassion he's talking about and realize that learning social skills is not as easy for everyone as it might have been for him. The world is full of different kinds of people, and it takes all kinds to run a company. If Jules is truly great at the technical side of his job, I see no problem with freeing him to get on with it.
Laziness? He went and deleted the customer's backups.
If this is upheld, I see all software patents being eventually voided. "as a practical matter" can be attacked by using induction. Do an image transformation on a 10x10 image. Do it again on 11x11. Argue that the patent is invalid by induction. Perhaps someone actually has to spend a week the first time on a large image to "prove" induction.

Real time doesnt exist. It means accomplishing a task within a specified interval. If you can do a task in 1 hour and someone else can do it in 30 minutes. It seems to me that it is then possible to argue that doing the same thing in a microsecond on a computer is not patentable.

Perhaps the judges will need a little focused high school math and a lesson on Turing machines.
IE6 is a bad browser, how shocking.

The actual interesting story here is Safari 5.
Why is having standards on lightbulbs a federal issue? Shouldn't it be best handled by the states? Perhaps the EPA or Department of Energy could write a report or make recommendations; but at the end of the day it should reside in the state.
HTML5 Resources
Also see PostalMethods.com - a complete API for sending postal mail. You send them the data (document, street addresses, etc) and they print and mail.
Golden Grid System Released
I got my first paid programming job when I was 18, and I knew that I was way out of my element. So I knuckled down and worked my ass off to try to figure out what I didn't know, and how I could get better.

I'd change jobs every so often to see if I could try something bigger. Every time, I knew I was totally out of my league again... So I knuckled down and worked my ass off to figure out how to be better at that. I was certain that I was going to fail miserably once my luck ran out. Eventually I was going to do something so horrifically bad that I'd get laughed out of town and never work again.

15 years after my first programming gig, and now I'm self-employed. I have a few customers that are helping me pay my bills so that I can try something bigger. I'm still pretty sure I'm out of my league, so all I can do is hunker down and hope like hell I'm not incompetent and oblivious.

I don't have anything to suggest to you to help make the feeling go away, but I'm afraid you're probably going to be stuck with it for awhile :)
"The understanding that they represent their employer and that people are relying on them" - Most developers have huge, inflated egos.

"A compassionate, helpful, and courteous attitude" - See above.

"The knowledge of whatever their supporting" - An understanding of the technical side of a product is vastly different from the functional side as its easy for a developer to say "This is sample. You hit X, then Y then select Z and find Q" which does not translate in any way to a client understanding a product and the frustration of dealing with "simpletons" shines through - thus leading to outbursts like we've seen.

This is of course the standard. I would imagine entrepreneurs and such do not follow this guideline, but for a generic programmer these traits are not something that are a typical side-effect of the craft unless you start moving up in rank.

The fact that the author would be offended by the statements mentioned really reiterates the point that most developers take things entirely too personally. I know I did for the better part of 10 years.
Cited study .doc file in Google Docs viewer:

http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.freakonomi...
I'm saying that your reputation usually fairs better if you say "I'm sorry for being an asshole" vs. "I'm sorry for being an asshole, but that other guy was also being an asshole"

I mean, the second is usually the case; but as a business, you are expected to be 'the bigger person' and, you know, not delete people's personal data because they are being dicks to you.

Defending your actions, in some minds, makes it sound more likely that you'd do it again in the same situation.
By sidebar I meant margins.
It's an amazing quote.

Also, I can imagine if someone is extremely talented/gifted in one domain, its extremely alluring to measure the world against that attribute. It can be self-affirming 95% of the time, because you're better than most people. But the other side of that coin is the 5% who are better than you, make you question your talents and create insecurity.
Majority of Congress are lawyers. Lawsuits like this help theirs colleagues to make more money. They are not going to cut the branch their profession is sitting on.
Your Most Awkward Friends May Save Your Life
Wrong problem. This whole issue was just typical assholery, it's not a failure of introverts or antisocial behavior. By all means, stop hiring assholes, but don't blame it on people who just hate smalltalk and never bothered to learn.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta Now Available
Can you give a little insight about the algorithm ( good question - isnt it ) ?

I have a website that is no1 in Google in my niche word and has been for years - its an old html site and has an nicheword.com domain name

but your engine gives the first search result for "nicheword" - my Facebook and Flickr accounts, then other companies websites, instead of my actual website which is no1 on Google,

and my actual website is like in 10th place in your results which is pretty bad compared to Google,

looking at the DDG search results , it seems like:

1) you put more emphasis on social networds than Google ,

2) and you seem to put less emphasis on the domain address ( nicheword.com ) than Google does ,

I wonder is that logic reasonable - in terms of relevancy of the results,

3) you seem to like wordpress and other well known platforms and dislike good old .html websites ..
Amazon-backed Booktour.com hits the deadpool
One rejection was for an opaque control bar partially obscuring the Google logo on a Map view.

Another rejection was not testing for network availability (connection), when my application requires network connectivity to work.

Also rejection early on for using undocumented API (that allowed app interface to be viewed on external display). Even though the code was commented out in the submitted app, it caused a rejection.

In all cases after fix/resubmission, app was approved (2 weeks each time).
To be fair, the Toyota thing was a grand experiment in human psychology as well.
> laziness and a holier-than-thou attitude

A short explanation might be, socially skilled people are slow (lazy) to understand anything technical and are impatient (holier-than-thou) with unskilled people. Technically skilled people are slow (lazy) to understand anything social/political and are impatient (holier-than-thou) with unskilled people. I think it's possible, though slow, to teach any skill to anyone. To really fix the problem, maybe start by convincing companies that teaching skills outside your area of expertise is worthwhile. I can get technical training paid for by my company. Social/managerial training, not so much. Likewise project managers can't get reimbursed for technical training. The assumption seems to be "Oh well they don't really need it and what they do need they'll pick up on the job or on their own time."
Revolights: Revolutionizing lighting on bicycles
I would have canned Julius on the spot. No questions asked.
Auto Transport Tacoma, Washington
The economic factors are totally different here, but still it reminded me of:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2690799

quote:

"See the following paper for an economic analysis of trial by battle:

http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Intellectual_Life/LEO....

I particularly liked this quote: "[I]t's reasonable to expect to find a large number of retained legal representatives under a legal system in which people feel that their property rights are constantly threatened by rent-seeking litigiousness or in which rampant rent-seeking opportunity gives them an incentive to behave litigiously themselves. The rarity of retained champions in medieval England therefore suggests that rent seeking under trial by battle wasn't rampant.'"
Enthusiasm Goes A Long Way Over Email
I think whole point of patents is they are a registered solution to a problem. So I think usefulness is within their scope. But IANAL either.
The 25 Most Influential Business Management Books
Actually, utility is one of the core requirements for a patent in the U.S. Whether or not PageRank on a tiny data set is still "useful" would be a ? for the patent office, but if it were deemed not useful, that would be grounds for denial.
It turned out to be a bug in their testing framework.
That's the attitude I'm targeting. Drop in five lines of code and use a different stylesheet for mobile. Easy and no danger of making it worse (since they can switch back).

I'm not really going after anything built by a team though. I'm mostly thinking of this as a solution for blogs or maybe the pre-login section of a site. Usually once you're inside a web app, things get more complicated than you can deal with with the simplicity of stylesheet A vs. B.
Software and hardware are totally different ballgames. With software, if you ship and you find that your product needs major changes, you iterate and you're not really out of anything.

Ship bad hardware? Well, you end up with things like partners demanding you take back a quarter of a million unsold units.
SO COOL! Now I want to crowbar this into apps that don't even need it. :) "Who wants to send a postcard from their to-do list!?"
Outsourcing Jobs Down 50%? At Least Visitor Traffic Is…
What's so hard about kindness that engineers can't figure out? I really don't buy that excuse.
Antivirus companies help each other out all the time
How I Scrapped MySQL for MongoDB in Three Hours
Safari on windows is terrible. In my own tests last year it kept erroring out or rendering incorrectly. http://www.craftymind.com/guimark2/
Interesting. I run a web service that is looking for this type of service as an addon, but I'm confused at your pricing. You take 99¢ base plus 30% of anything over that? So if I charge $2, I get 70¢, you get $1.30, and you'll mail a post card anywhere in the world? I run out of Canada, so you're spending 59¢ for the stamp, xx¢ for the payment processing, and xx¢ for the printing. Seems like a solid deal, hope you can make some $$ too!

Edit - I read your blog and see that it does seem to work that way. Interesting, if you work for web services I may be interested as well.
Really? Here's a breakdown of all the patents that Apple sued HTC for http://www.engadget.com/2010/03/02/apple-vs-htc-a-patent-bre...

Which of these you say are related to hardware look and feel?
What is the point of this article? It appears to be that Safari proxy mode is unreliable, which I guess is surprising but not that interesting.

Given that the actual article does not have anything to do with the headline ("error rates" is never really satisfactorily defined, the real story is proxy mode Safari, and IE6 came out 9 years ago), what makes this headline so compelling?

Do headlines with the word "surprising" always work? Is it that everyone deals with browsers, so a browser related story is likely to have a wider mind share? Is it that web developers all just want a chance to make fun of IE6, due to the collective pain that it has inflicted on all of us?
I have read his second book and actually applied his techniques for eating and it works very well and also isn't to difficult to achieve.

I like his books in general cause he tries to maximize efficiency with minimum input mixed with a significant amount of discipline. I think this is why it also appeals to many people. Who doesn't want to get maximum output whilst putting in little effort !
They suck (sic! :) ) badly compared to remotely professional players. Tim Willits even said so himself just recently on Quakecon.
The Magic Of Draft Zero
Thin web server (Event Machine Rack/Rails) available on DotCloud
Offence: Engineer is offended by customer and flushes the customers livelihood (website)

Cure: Management should be offended by engineers and flush THEIR livelihood (job)

Seems symmetrical, but perhaps over-simplifying the problem? Of course I realize that the article above doesn't directly advocate firing the engineer, but many high-functioning technical people just cannot realistically be trained to be social animals too. Those abrasive nerds are really productive outside of a customer service role, so wouldn't a better solution be to fix the mis-allocation of tech staffing resources to customer facing roles?

edit: and yeah, maybe the problem is that this particular engineer was just a dick, and we shouldn't use him as an example in the discussion of technical vs social roles in our companies.
> For example, in The Myth of the Rational Voter[1], Caplan describes how it's actually rational behavior for voters to vote irrationally: the benefit of the degree they can sway the election is far smaller than the cost of acquiring sufficient knowledge to determine what candidate would most benefit them.

This is a minor detail, given that that was just an example you were giving; but in case it piqued anyone's interest, I'll correct it. That's not actually the explanation Caplan gives for voters acting irrationally (indeed, there's nothing that even appears irrational about that; that's obviously rational behavior). What Caplan argues is that voters rationally vote irrationally because they have preferences over beliefs, giving voting in accordance with false but preferred beliefs psychological benefits, and that if these psychological benefits outweigh the negative effects of the irrational voting, discounted by the low probability of deciding the election, it is rational to vote irrationally.
Wow! So many downvotes and not even a single convincing argument against? Gotta love HN.
At first we thought the high error rate could be the result of the fact that we always run Safari on Windows, while it’s made by Apple. That’s easy to dismiss, because earlier versions of Safari were fine.

I'm sorry, what? That's a pretty weak dismissal.
The top Quake 3 players are probably good friends with - if not even themselves - hopelessly addicted Minecraft players. If this was id Software against Mojang, then maybe id had the leverage but Bethesda is not necessarily considered good by the Q3 community.
Ha! That's sleep deprivation in action. In my defense, although I manage to misname the passive mode, its usage is known to myself.
Media Power Coupler - Marry The Observer's Media Bachelors and Bachelorettes
>Google here comes up looking dishonest because it is the one that lured the so called "partners" into adopting androind claiming that it was free and now they are left to pick the tabs when apple and microsoft came after them

I don't see anything dishonest about it. It was given away for free after all and the OEMs software usually sucks as a universal rule. They leveraged the Android marketplace and ecosystem, Maps etc.

>Of course going with Microsoft is an option but all these partners have been there done that. So they know better. :)

I don't know what that snark means, but the meme keeps getting repeated. OEMs have been making rich profits all along selling PCs (and from crippling them with useless software that makes them even more money, causing people to blame Windows for their faults). It's not as if Microsoft bought Dell and then clobbered the other OEMs(like Google seems to be in real danger of doing with Motorola).
Sure, there's some:

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/09/30/rice-university-study...
You are sadly misinformed; apparently taken in by Tea Party propaganda. There is no "ban" on incandescent bulbs, and never was. The proposed standards, which were bipartisan, were intended to increase the efficiency of incandescents over time.
I know this article is supposed to be centered around Tim Ferriss but the meat of it, to me, was about how Amazon was walking right into the turf of book publishers and setting up shop.

Hey book publishers, you shouldn't be concerned at all, because you've seen this coming for years. They made and popularized the Kindle, and you could have made a huge and radical shift toward digital copies of books and including them in your contract negotiations.

Oh, but I guess you could have never seen this coming. Learning from the music and movie industry must not have been an option.

Come on guys!
Geek novelist heading to Strange Loop
Maybe it's lesser known outside of the Zope community, but buildout is essentially virtualenv + pip:

http://www.buildout.org/
Investors to tech startups: Raise right money now
What do you guys think Dell could/should do to get back in the game (besides "shutting it down and giving the money back to the shareholders")?
it's simply raising the stakes a little bit for Apple, who are making enough profit to afford endless litigation

No, Apple cannot overlook the possibility that the import and sale of some of their own products is banned in the US. If that happened as a result of their litigious adventuring, they'd have some real explaining to do to big investors.

Look at what happened with Blackberry and NTP. The actual service (used heavily by the US Government and no doubt patent judges) came very close to being shut down. Probably someone gave the parties a good talking-to and forced the settlement. But in this case, a suspension on the sale of these particular shiny devices is not an existential issue for anyone except Apple's executives.
There's this curious inversion that is often involved, too.

When you think you haven't got anything done and you've just considered yourself the second worst, if not worst, programmer in the world, everybody else seems to praise you and be eternally grateful for your great work. But when you've been in the flow, hacked magnificent solutions, and feel you're on the top of the world, the best you can get is that everybody else doesn't even notice. The worst might be complaints or even direct criticism that you feel is totally unattributed to you.

Yeah, I suck most of the time. It keeps me learning, though, and I do know my value when I need it. I also try not to be surrounded by idiots: better be a small fish in the big pond than a big fish in a small one.
Am I the only one who had to look up that DFW stood for David Foster Wallace?
4 years... There are murderers who do less.
The MSDN Time Machine
It may be true that SauceLabs's code for each browser is the same, but Selenium surely has significantly divergent code for each browser. I wonder how to rule out crashes caused by Selenium's browser-specific code...
I think all that means is that you're always learning. After 15 years of that, you're probably waaaay better rounded than the guys who stuck with the same job for that same period and feel comfortable that they know everything they need to.
Value proposition is surprisingly similar to PicPlum. Printed photos are important.

PicPlum as a platform?
True, but that's the point of TiVo and DVR
Oh look, free, anonymous Windows VMs for 20 minutes (it's trivial to open CMD.EXE from any browser in the saucelabs setup). Any statistics on what people run in those VMs, other than browsers?
Emmanuel Derman's Battle with "The Maladroid" (Android)
Mobile Patent Lawsuits Illustrated
What about the actual posts?
You don't have to do everything alone.
If you like writing and refactoring code - awesome!
There are people out there who like to document stuff,
there are people who like to design or polish.
My point is - if you don't do everything yourself - find someone to do it with, so that the "Project" is complete.
I think one problem here is that they non-chalantly made "poor people skills" equal to "abusive behavior towards costumers" and used the "awesome tech with poor people skills" image as a euphemism in their PR to comb over a VERY ugly situation where they were getting a shit storm of bad PR - it was probably the only way out of that situation short of publishing "welp, sorry, he was a total jerk-off asshole and we fired him".

I do think the (stereo-)typical techs can be said to prefer focusing on interesting problems and on their computers rather than having to deal with people all day long - possibly angry or even downright abusive customers demanding support. I don't see the (stereo-)typical techs as slimy and very skilled at playing the political game and manipulating people and advancing the career ladder through it. (which is something I would see as very specific but definitely STRONG people skills, no matter how repulsive.)

But that doesn't mean all techs don't have any manners or empathy.
Show HN: Github Bagdes application
This is the application that weights only 10k zipped content. I created it as weekend project for 10kappart competetion. Since they still not published it, I decieded to put on my own :)
I tried as well, but god I hate beans. If I could just do slow-carb by egg whites and chicken I'd be set... you actually feel good, eat more (so you aren't hungry) and have lots of energy. Neat stuff. No one will get the crazy gains/losses he claims, but it does work.

Business wise I love that philosophy and try to utilize it all the time.
Here's the same story from a week ago, with some discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2871501

The same story from another source was also posted the next day here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2875094
OnStage: An App for Collaborative Email Design
Indeed. That's what bothers me about the cries for patent reform: you are asking lawyers to let tech companies fire huge swaths of other lawyers.

However, maybe the patent wars (like this HTC v. Apple one) will climb to such heights of absurdity that the economy actually will be affected. Then Congress (or someone) might have to take notice.
"Jordan Blackshaw, left, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, both pleaded guilty to using Facebook in attempts to fuel riots in Cheshire. They have been jailed for four years"

One wonders what sort of lawyer they had that recommended a guilty plea, or in the absence of a lawyer what was done to encourage that plea.

"Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, of Latchford, Warrington, used his Facebook account in the early hours of 9 August ..."

Dateline of story: Tuesday 16 August 2011

One also wonders how their lawyer allowed the situation to progress from alleged offense to media circus regarding four year sentence IN LESS THAN A WEEK. I don't know how Britain usually does things, but in the U.S. a non-violent victimless offender would generally spend most of the first week out on bail awaiting the gathering of evidence for a proper arraignment. Methinks someone has been railroaded.
The earlier data points on the graph show low error rates for Safari browsers on Windows.

The article may have benefited from including a larger caveat about only testing one OS, but this seems like an intellectually honest elimination of a confounding variable.