skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not delay sensitive on the same order of magnitude as something like a dc/dc converter. The relevant time constants in the pilot->controls->control surfaces->attitude->pilot loop are measured in fractional seconds (and when they're not, e.g., in fly-by-wire designs, the loops aren't closed by a person).

The fastest relevant time constant for the control loop of a switching power converter with meager 1 kHz closed-loop bandwidth is measured in fractional milliseconds (you care about poles up to, say, 10x your crossover frequency). For a pretty run-of-the-mill analog circuit like an op-amp, the relevant time constants are often measured in nanoseconds. Heck, even something slow like an audio amplifier has relevant time constants in the tens of microsecond range.

Also, don't underestimate the amount of subconscious math you're doing even for a simple task like walking. Your body's subconscious understanding of physics is pretty damn impressive. The problem is that our brains are pretty specific in the types of problems they're adapted to solving. Riding a bike, sure. Induction motor controller, probably not so much :)
How do you do that? When I type "C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe" in the browser bar it says "Access to that resource has been disallowed."
Free markets are a great heuristic.
Considering you offer football, how much effort would it take for you to offer baseball as well (as has been mentioned elsewhere in these threads)? Basketball or hockey seem like good candidates as well. I figure the logic is similar, no?

Admittedly, I haven't analyzed the logic, nor do I understand the marketplace, but it would seem logical to extend to the popular sports for other seasons (just find friends that are interested in those sports, and pay them something for their domain knowledge).

Edit: On second thought, maybe the schema would be similar but the logic quite sport-specific.
Google plus Motorola equals doubts over Android
They also spelled my name correctly! <- So important.

I remember someone sending me an email addressed to "Shenglong" <myemail@thecompany>, and then the first thing I read was:

"Hi Shelog". Ugh.
Spend a Ton of money on world class industrial designers and sell a rebranded high-end laptop that doesn't suck. I can only imagine that the market for people who want Apple-style hardware (in terms of construction/quality) with Windows baked in is huge.
Hey look, my employer is getting some HN love..
Ask HN: How do people get invited to SxSW?
Was just curious really.

Is this invite only? can you pitch yourself?
The fact that it's a much over-used phrase doesn't make it any less correct. The point stands that naming somebody who doesn't fit into research does not disprove it. My dad and I are both smokers, neither of us has lung cancer - I'm still pretty sure there's a link between those two despite by two pieces of datum.
Stunning; tech is still a meritocracy: execute well and you win. I hope this is not an indication of things to come. The best way to fight this is to shine a big spotlight on those events. Thanks to Travis & Jason for shining a big one on this.
But, I don't think it's the same thing. Changing your behavior is very possible, and being short is not a fault.
Yes, the fall of 2008 was extremely optimal, did the US gov't see the problem beforehand and fix it? No they didn't, it was the market that brought the information to everyone that something was seriously amok in the financial system. (eg. Bear Stearns is bankrupt). It was short sellers, and all the people we love to hate that brought the problem to attention and moved prices to reflect the true value of these companies. (eg. zero)

Efficient market hypothesis does not predict that the market will have perfect information or perfect pricing, or that stock prices will go infinitely up. It predicts that over the long term the market provides reasonably accurate pricing.
I don't buy that argument at all. I've seen enough incredibly talented people in different fields who know at least the basic minimum of human interaction and know not to be assholes all the time. I've also seen plenty of incompetent morons who thought they were hotshots and had the worst personalities and absolute 0 people skills.
I thought that was part of the definition of a fanboy, no?

Irrational "love" of foo, "hatred" of those that disagree due to psychological issues such as cognitive dissonance.
Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. (Rule No.3 from Ways to Make People Like You)
How intellectual must intellectual property be?
I don't think the issue is one of social incapability, but one of failing to match a hire with his responsibilities. If you're going to have your technical guy interacting with customers, then being technically brilliant but lacking customer service skills is not a good fit.

I work for MegaCorp. We have developers here that are incredibly difficult to get along with and a few that are great. There seems to be this sense that the more capable and intelligent a person is the more frequently they're jerks to deal with. I haven't found this to be true. There are plenty of good devs that aren't "holier than thou" (and one of the best devs I worked with was clearly on the extroverted side, though most of them land on the introverted side of things).

I will say, though, that more people have ended up being let go for attitude, rather than work quality where I am employed. To put it plainly, in a large corporation where you have to work amongst imaginary and real bureaucracy, it doesn't matter how skilled you are, if you can't work with people you won't get anything done. Your fantastic project/work will not be looked at because nobody will care to see it and your manager (often non-technical) won't want to show it off because you keep aggravating him or putting him in the awkward position of defending your behavior to his superiors.
Plenty of your comments on here have a polite air to them. Looks like you can be cordial with people very frequently.
Or perhaps Dell's management could take this opportunity to do some soul-searching, to figure out where the market for computing is headed, and what unique value they can bring to it.
That's a fair question, but don't let it suck you into a "false choice" fallacy.

There are plenty of real-world examples of this. In all cases, free trade will make all parties better off on the whole. However, the effect of doing so may be that individuals at the margin lose out, e.g., an unskilled factory worker may find that someone in China is doing what used to be his job. It's pretty well decided now (although not without any controversy) that, at the margin, minimum wage laws increase unemployment in the lowest-paid workers.

The fact that some deregulation may have (localized) negative consequences shouldn't automatically disqualify them: there are more choices than just "let the market run free" vs "continue the regulation". We can, for example, get the benefits of that free trade, and use a portion of the economic gains to finance job retraining programs.

However, I'd also like to point out an implicit assumption in your question that may be problematic. You refer to "the global objective function". Part of our difficulty is that there isn't such a global function that all can agree on. Indeed, it may be that some of our utility functions are mutually exclusive. Many people would say that we should optimize for full employment, but I personally think that's bunk: there are plenty of people who don't want to work, but do so because they need to buy food; they'd rather take care of the kids while the spouse works. The adoption of a single utility function to govern the country (something, it seems to me, that both Conservatives and Liberals would like to see) sells out American individualism, and the diverse lifestyles and values of our people.
> Really: you need to get your head out of app space if you want to talk about platforms.

Do you know that comex has written several jailbreaks for iOS? I think he's more qualified to talk about mobile platforms than either of us.

When we compare two systems, we should look at the code that is different. Everything about desktop Linux and Android is different except for the stuff that all computers need to do. Basic OS services are a solved problem, and that's why you don't see too many people writing OSes today.
I like this quote:

Perhaps my biggest advantage is that, while I do spend some time coding, when I think about our software I am not constrained by the fear that I will have to implement my own ideas. It may seem crass, but as someone who has worked long years in the trenches I know that there is a subconscious tendency to discount ideas that may have huge long-term benefits if it means a lot of work in the short term.

Hate to admit it, but it's true. It's something you fight against.
Jordan Blackshaw's event was entitled "Smash Down in Northwich Town" and included an invitation for something called the "Mob Hill Massive Northwich Lootin'" to meet behind the McDonald's in the town centre at 1pm. It also included the words "We'll need to get this kickin' off all over."

The Warrington posts by Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan were very similar, although he did actually title his event "The Warrington Riots." It was a similar invitation to meet at a location in the centre of the town at 7pm.

The rest of the information on the groups has not been released by police and has been removed from Facebook. (Source: I work in the media in the area concerned and have the police news release in front of me.)
True search engine for apartments
Hi there, you must have caught me right before I increased the level of caching in place on my very-undersized Linode. You should be able to access the site now. Thank you!
That was me. Hi guys!
Thanks! This study looks very small, but still came back with a healthy majority claiming that not only did it not harm them, but that they wanted to sign up again. It also says groupon's internal statistics (maybe they're lying, I guess) conflict with that data, and that 97% of respondents want to do another deal.

This article is also a bit older, so maybe things have changed. But I don't think it's fair to say that this article buttresses your claim that most business owners feel as if they are being hurt by these deals.
Exactly, I don't think anybody expects everyone in the company to spend a ton of effort on being something they're not, but I do think it's reasonable to expect that employees to treat customers respectfully.
Researchers identify first flaws in AES
Trying not to get arrested here.
I really wish the author didn't use such an inciteful title for his section on meetings. The title offers another catch phrase to avoid meetings. I'd much rather have seen Zach focus more on his actual point: holding short, focused, and tiny meetings. I fear that his title, and other catch phrases like it, encourage siloing. Siloing is far more "fucking toxic".
Ward is doing it again
Something else not without precedent is companies duking it out in virtual competition.

http://afterhoursgaming.tv/about/

Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Zynga, Twitter, and Dropbox compete in a Starcraft II tournament. If you're curious, it has reached the semi-finals stage, and Microsoft is the only one who has not lost any matches.
Municipalities Abandon S&P After Ratings Downgrade
Someone who isn't hands on can't make decisions on behalf of those that are. What have they got to go on but hype and vendor white papers? Only if you are immersed every day can you see the forest for the trees.
The last line of the article really just sums it up for me. If you don't have basic every day people skills, you'd better be damn good at what you do, otherwise, it's probably not worth it as you alienate your coworkers and make life difficult for those around you.

And that's before you get a customer-facing role.
If you want to see how a police state starts, look at what's happening in the UK now.
Why (special agent) Johnny (still) Can't Encrypt
Parent's point stands. We have actively spent some money at places my wife found a groupon for that we otherwise would have spent no money at.
I think it very much depends on who you are, different people will have different reactions. Personally, although I use smileys in Skype/SMS/etc. (a lot), if anyone uses them in an email, business related in particular, I get pissed off. I don't know why that's my reaction for email from friends, but when it comes to work stuff: we're talking in a professional manner, so act professionally please. (Again, that's an instruction based on my personal feeling, I'm not suggesting everyone ought to think like that.)

But yes, I do agree with being friendly - as long as it's authentic, not sickeningly fake and over-the-top, it will almost always be an improvement.
I voted you back up because I don't think you deserve to be negative.

But I'd challenge your claim that you can actually profit from the general economic ignorance. The reason I'm so skeptical is because the market is so good at working around inefficiencies that even when we think something's got to collapse, it finds a way to keep going. (if you'll excuse me for anthropomorphizing)
Featuring Garry Tan too!
Let me hop on my soapbox for a minute and say that Mojang really seems to be squandering the greatness that they have discovered in this game.

Minecraft's level of success is unheard of for an indie game, by a huge margin, and it's well deserved. My favorite critic quote called it something like "an end to the era of shallow games". I think they've created a new genre, or possibly multiple genres, with more potential than any one developer could realize in a lifetime.

And yet:

They hocked exclusivity rights to a marginal platform. Now they have to develop and promote a game that nobody can buy for some mysterious amount of time. I seriously doubt that whatever amount of cash Sony dumped on them was worth it.

And what they released, and attached the Minecraft name to, is a drastically dumbed down version of the game: 36 blocks, no survival, no mining, no infinite worlds, no online multiplayer. You can see the disappointment reflected in the market reviews.

I'm aware that a straight port is not technically feasible, but I'm confident that they could make something a lot closer to the desktop version if they took advantage of cloud resources and took mobile more seriously.

Notch is a very talented game designer and I think he has great vision, but maybe not enough confidence in his vision. He's still thinking like an indie developer and grasping at opportunities.
I use postal methods a lot for one of my websites (postsecretcollection.com <- Shameless plug). But they are a tad expensive on the postcard side if you ask me. I just want to know how they get the price down to just 99 cents.
The stock market merely reflected the balance sheets of large financial institutions. The stock market drop did not cause Bear Stearns to go bankrupt, Bear Stearns being bankrupt caused the market to collapse. That triggered enough insurance policies that AIG went (or would go), and GS had enough insurance with AIG that it would go if AIG went.
I think the author is right about the use of emoticons and I think they're an underused and misunderstood form of communication. I similarly used to avoid them, but I also used to get into a lot of misunderstandings in long e-mail exchanges. People would misinterpret my concise and direct messages as being brusque, impatient, etc.

In my experience, throwing in an occasional light-hearted remark accompanied by a smiley face actually makes a huge difference. Obviously it's not always appropriate and, like many textspeak artifacts, they're open to abuse, LOL :). But, in general, I think emoticons put a human slant on what is an otherwise very impersonal communication medium. I would equate their use with the use of small-talk in face-to-face conversations - it doesn't contribute anything meaningful to the discussion, but it often puts people at ease.
He sounds more like a PM than an "architect." Is it because he codes and works in an agile shop that he suddenly becomes an Agile Architect?
> As the Co-founder of a statup that has dealt directly with situations like this in the past, I don't see much wrong with how the situation was handled.

If I saw a service I use unreasonably lock someone's account I'd be concerned for my own. The customer was totally justified in asking their questions, ironically merely seeking assurance for their site.

Instead of telling the customer what they could they imply that it's the customer's fault for even asking because it could involve secret data, and they ridicule the customer for caring - as if they should have just known to shut up and hurry away.

> You wouldn't expect a restaurant owner to put up with a rude and insulting customer being a dick to restaurant staff, so why should any other service have to put up with it?

At a minimum I would expect them to provide the food to-go, and at a discount reflecting the changed nature of the service provided, or to refund the purchase price. That the customer's site and backups got irrevocably nuked doesn't fit into the restaurant analogy at all but just goes how "careless" they are with what could be your data.

However, I would like to call attention to this needless concern trolling. A "dirty word" is not a knife, and is actually a reasonable response to PR shit and corporate excuses.

> Some customers just aren't worth the hassle they put out PERIOD. I don't give a shit if you're willing to pay me $9.99 a month, if you purposely go out of your way to insult myself or a member of my team, you don't gain the benefit of using our product, end of story.

This is a service you provide, if you can't be bothered to do it well don't hide behind your fear of rudeness to dodge complaints.

> "Purposefully go out of your way"

Yes, as if the customer scheduled "Go bug a legit company for no reason".
Useful terminology (working asynchronously). There was a discussion recently about working remotely and I struggled to convey the difference between a remote-employee and a remote-team (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847012)... This is really the core of it. Teams that operate like this have a much better ability to adopt remote workers, for one thing.. and I suspect a much higher index of developer happiness, for another.
This seems a little far from the truth. What if someone needs to fix an urgent live issue? You can't always work async. Sometimes things need to get done, now. E.g. issues on a production system that are breaking the site for everyone.

Sadly, people often think that everything needs to be done now and I think forcing less meetings on people helps that happen.
Girls, Girls, Girls
The point is that its not real success, its fake success propped up by massive funding rounds and there are numbers to back it up. Note that their ARPU (for customers) is less than their marketing cost. Fixing this # before growing is what Clayton Christensen is talking about when he says "impatient for profit but patient for growth". Groupons unit economics suck and they're not getting better.

Revenue and subscriber growth

The median number of Groupons sold to each Groupon customer (someone who has bought anything): 1.

The median number of Groupons sold to each person on Groupon’s mailing list: 0.

Subscribers and acquisition cost

Percentage of mailing list who has purchased even one Groupon: 20%.

Cost per new list subscriber: $5.37.

Cost per new customer: $24.08.

Real revenue per subscriber: $3.43.

Real revenue per customer: $17.55 (less than acquisition cost — keep in mind most people buy only 1).

Real revenue per Groupon sold: $10.49 (less than acquisition cost).

Amount spent on marketing, full year 2010: $241.5 million.

Amount spent on marketing, first half of 2011: $345.1 million.

Source: http://blog.agrawals.org/2011/08/15/the-terrible-numbers-tha...
Sure, but as the guy talks about in the article, he is hands on. He just spends a certain fraction of his time trying to maintain a global picture of the project and applying insights that come from that.

I haven't worked on a project with more than 4 people for ages, but I don't think I would mind this.
Ditto on the Edit. Id be interested as well. Just sent a tweet to the owners...
That's such a remote possibility that, yes, Apple can overlook it or at least consider it a remote risk in their cost/benefit analysis. If anyone had the patent position to keep Apple out of the market, rest assured that they would have regardless of Apple's lawsuits. Compared to the potential benefits of muddying the competitive field just as they make their first multi-carrier U.S. launch with the iPhone 5, it's an extremely negligible potential cost.
act professionally != being dull

I don't see what's unprofessional in using smileys and an enthusiastic tone, to me it sounds better that way instead of sounding dull and stiff.
We'll still work in Campfire though. We have an infrastructure room where we get all of our notices and systems-level logging piped to, and all of our on-call sysops can get together and deal with stuff immediately when it's necessary.

But it's still async... from the perspective of others. I'm not typically deep into the systems-level maintainability on GitHub, but I can check the transcript during or after the downtime happened and can figure out what happened, how the discussion around it went, and how it was dealt with.
Stamp of approval! That's like being commended on human rights by Syria.
"Just the fact that he chose to shaft me is a strong enough indication that he will not succeed."

Very well put!
If 2 viable solutions have this kind of long term vs short term trade off, technical decision makers need to talk to business decision makers.

Often it's reasonable to incur some technical debt with the short term solution, and then switch to the long term solution later on.

Delaying work gets you to market faster, costs less, and means you understand the problem better for less effort.

Obviously, if it's not a feasible roadmap to go with option a first and migrate to option be later, it's the techie's job to make this abundantly clear to the pm / business.
Like I say, I'm not saying it is the definitive way to behave, simply that it's how I think of it - purely an emotional opinion. But I do know plenty of other people who feel the same way.
Hey, cut the guy some slack, that's a proper error page instead of a debugging message. :)

Edit: added a smiley
Six Habits of Highly Effective Mentees
Earlier versions of Safari on Windows seem to work fine
None, yet. :-)
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No, it's not. Analogies are hard, you aren't up it it, stop using them.

If someone provides the work you expect, despite actually sleeping 4/5ths of the time, you're getting what you paid for. That they could have provided five times more work is irrelevant.

The only exception is where the employee's presence, and presence of mind, is the product. Such as with a security guard, retail sales rep, manager, etc.
There was a submission about this yesterday:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2892085

That links through to demonstration videos by Ward himself:

http://wardcunningham.github.com/

Comments over here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2895342 - suggest that some HN participants don't actually understand what a wiki really is, or its history.

Don't know why, but I find that a bit sad. A bit like not knowing about _why.
Firefox never beat chrome, and I like both of them the same amount.

When I first did the data dive, I thought Safari was worse than IE, which I thought made a much better blog post. That would have been way more surprising. It was after due diligence that I was forced to discard that result.