skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This was pretty typical at Microsoft too. Many groups (Windows, Office, Exchange, etc) had a leadership group hold a regular "war room" type meeting at which major decisions were made. From 10 to 30 participants was common at these (usually weekly) meetings.

It's a sign of bureaucracy, not trusting important decisions to individual contributors, and an ass-covering vehicle to remove blame when mistakes are made.

Some of it reflects a needed amount of "care" - but it can easily lead to bad organizational dynamics.
Therefore, sky is forever.
Latest Chumby OS version that's in the Chumby 8 supports an embedded WebKit view that can be invoked from Flash. Too bad it seems like the Chumby app development world is dead right now.
Love this! Just passed the link around the webOS Dev Relations team.
The same could be said of many of my CS friends at MIT.
I agree. Why are do so many people need to weigh in on what the "numbers" must be telling them. The process seems way more subjective than analytical.
Sounds like hours of pondering about international tax issues would follow this decision?

I have a sole proprietorship in Finland. Sometimes I've given thought to having this type of standard corp in US, as if I have another hit Facebook app or whatever it seems like it would make me an easier entity for others to deal with.

Apart from the tax issues, I worry about having to pay an US lawyer high US wages for advice / set up fees. Maybe I'm starting to believe all the news stories too much, but doesn't being incorporated in US also make you much more likely to be the target of some frivolous patent / other lawsuit?
Agreed, I've gotten to the point where I've removed most of the "subreddits" from my homescreen and only have specific ones added (for example, I've removed "video" and "images", in favor of say, "aiclass").
BoA Purchase Agreement from Berkshire Hathaway
Amazingly timely given that I'm about half way through A Deepness in the Sky.

(A diamond asteroid figures into the plot.)
What parts of it strike you as sloppy? How would you improve the design? We'd love to hear specific feedback.

We're admittedly programmers and not designers. Our main focus for the redesign was to improve usability, remove clutter, and decrease the overhead involved in finding relevant content. The new user guides and API docs in particular got the most attention in this regard, and I'm pretty happy with the result. It's not super sexy, but it sure is usable.
Thanks. Feedback is definitely noted!
Definitions are not simply a matter of taste. They aren't validated by popularity, or authority, and we're individually responsible for the definitions we hold: each of us is the ultimate authority on definitions, in a sense: we each bear the responsibility for our own conceptualizing.

But that doesn't mean that concepts or definitions are subjective. Quite on the contrary: in order to be correct, definitions have to be induced from reality, just like like any true scientific concept (such as momentum, for example). The purpose of a definition also has to be kept in mind: definitions are what we use to mentally distinguish one concept from another.

Once you understand the above, you can see why it's really sensible to take the Objectivist stand on the word "self."

And for the same reason, you can see why we had to take words like "gay" and "queer" away from the bigots, who used them as epithets to smear hatred on good people. The bad rap that selfishness has with the culture today smears everyone. I think it's high time we fought back.
Wikipedia:United States Education Program
Graph Processing versus Graph Databases
It is a well written article, language wise, but content wise, it spews jealousy. The author is entitled to have an opinion express it, but in this case it seems the author wants to gain attention by going against the tide. It's good going against the tide when you stand for something, which is not the case in this matter...
Annzo Corp | Facebook
Annzo Corp is on Facebook. Join Facebook to connect with Annzo Corp and others you may know. Facebook gives people the power to share and makes the world more open and connected.
Just added my email to my profile, feel free to contact me.
The problem here is that your work ethic is not up to par because you can always think to yourself, "Why should I waste my time on this?" and not have an imperative answer ("I need to pass this class").

The major draw of a University education is that it forces you to focus and do the work. If you are driven and do not need the grade excuse to dig into a subject then you do not need to attend a University.

This becomes ever more apparent past the undergraduate level when you enter the workforce or a graduate program. You will end up going to classes or learning about material that interests you or is relevant to your work and you will do this without concern as to whether or not you get a grade at the end because all you care about is learning something you are passionate about.
Diamonds are just a special form of carbon which is, itself, not very rare. Granted, it's fairly hard to coax carbon into that form, at least if you want something that looks like a gem, but we already have CVD processes which can make diamond.

The main reason they're valuable is due to marketing.
I've one book under my belt, Inside ISAPI.

A couple of high points:

It took literally every free moment I had for 6 months. Every evening, all evening, after I got home from work. Every weekend. And technology goes stale so quickly, your book probably won't have a very long lifespan, so you'll be lucky to get very much money out of it. I probably earned much less than $1/hr if I could figure out all the time spent.

On the other hand, it's one of the best resume builders you can imagine. Going into a potential employer with your book under your arm is worth quite a bit.
Best apps for your Samsung Galaxy S2
Case against Microsoft, Yahoo spam filters chucked from court
Spawned from the Hell Fire of Etherpad: Etherpad Lite
I suggest we use the word "lemming" instead. If someone is willing to walk off a cliff to obtain a new phone, it seems like the right word to use. Also, you can press that button at the bottom of the screen and they all blow up.
Real Alternative is re-distributing the RealPlayer codecs.

VLC respects RealNetwork trademarks, designs and code copyrights... We are very careful about that...
Hilariously cool. Hopefully this report is the nail in the coffin of the "ninja" job posting fad.

Buttttt, since you're measuring clicks and not job candidates hired (the actual important metric) is there really a relevant takeaway from the data?

Hard to quantify but if this is proper conversion rate testing you've got to make sure you're optimizing around the proper metric.
Schmoozing for Introverts
Curiouser and curiouser...

"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."
- Sir Arthur Eddington
I'll chime in here, just in terms of the design of yuilibrary.com

* Use a fixed-width site. Most people go for something like 960px.
* Establish horizontal and vertical eyelines or columns.
* If you're on Github, might as well use gists. Offer example projects as open projects on Github
In this thread: people take their personal experiences and try to extrapolate to all programmers everywhere.
Filling out text, select, radio & check fields with capybara and cucumber
Similar to GWT?
This article is fairly evenhanded in that it says "you're entitled to your opinion, I find it weird, here's a possible explanation for how you feel and here's why I don't feel the same way" while your comment makes it out to be a bitter attack -- I can't detect any bitterness in the article, only a commentary that worshiping this man seems strange, while there's considerable vitriol in your description of the article.

The use of "The Cult of Apple" is common enough it's not so much a judgement by an individual as a way to sum up the group, especially when he only references it in passing once. How else could you describe all the people who do admire the company/Jobs with such passion in a succinct and understandable manner?

He even goes so far as to say Jobs is a brilliant man and deserving of praise... But points out since he is just a man, he's not deserving of worship. He's not attacking, he's saying he has trouble relating to the unadulterated adoration/worship of certain (vocal) fans.
Show HN: Bookmarklet for removing duplicate tracks in Rdio playlists
Digg really shot themselves in the foot when they tried to make the site "personalized" - most in their audience wanted there to be just "one" primary home page.

Reddit seems to have been able to create many successful smaller communities around sub-reddits.

It's another lesson that trying to be all things to all people usually satisfies no one.
I get my meme fix on Reddit these days.
Now You Can Do eCommerce Directly on Sina Weibo, 360buy is the First Trier
I've co-authored a book that did OK (Pro VB 6 & XML), and was about halfway through a book (Beginning Ruby) before the publisher (Wrox) went bankrupt and I got next to nothing for my efforts.

I've also been paid to write book chapters that never saw the light of day, and assorted articles for magazines, Web and dead-tree.

Basically, the money is often poor when predictable, but can be OK if a book does well. Overall, if money is the goal, get a job as a waiter; it will probably pay better.

OTOH if your book is among the first on a topic of current interest and doesn't suck you can do alright.

It can be a lot of work. For the VB book I needed to spend some time researching some W3C specs and making sure I had some technical details correct, but much of what else I wrote came from an application I had already written, so it was fairly easy to write about. For better or worse it gave me a falsely rosy picture of book writing. :)

The Ruby book, though, ended up being more work than I expected; documenting a language's behavior is more detailed than describing an app in that language. (Sadly, many language tech books suck because the authors don't actually know how the language works and fall back on loose, often incorrect, assumptions and analogies.)

A book can help build a reputation, get you speaking gigs, and in assorted ways contribute indirectly to income, so book sales alone may not tell the whole story. But it's pretty unpredictable. Books get canceled; hot topics fade away. Maybe you or a coauthor really cannot write.

If you're not innately excited about the idea, or don't feel confident in your tech writing skills, you might do well to hold off. Maybe write some blog posts, gauge reader interest, and test market the idea of a book.
I think hydrogen-3 mining is probably more likely. From what I understand, it's far more common on the moon and gas giants than on Earth, and it's useful for fusion.
Turns out i'm not the only one contacted about this book.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2926354
And, on which platform do you think those apps were created? On an full Apple computer with Mac OSX, most likely.

Try to program on the iPad. (i) you need a proper keyboard, (ii) you need a proper dev environment, and (iii) interpreters are forbidden and you are not root anyway.

Try to do anything on the iPad. You need an App. And since you can't write one yourself (at least not on the iPad), you have do download one that passes through Apples moral filter (no sex but war is okay, so much for "peace and love").

It's not like you can't create with the iPad. But the thing is not a general purpose computer to begin with. It wasn't meant that way. Apple optimized ease of consumption, and for that they sacrificed everything that got in the way, including creation.

I'll slightly amend my phrasing: for production, compared to a general purpose computer, the iPad is worth next to naught. And Apple likely doesn't care, though it would be bad PR to admit it.

Now if Apple suddenly gave you the root password, that would be another story. My argument would be limited to the form factor, which isn't such a big issue (just put your iPad on a docking station).
Also a greek exclamation common in songs, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmeCC53FKes
As a kid, studying science, I found myself frequently frustrated by the topical and, I felt, irrelevant inclusion of biographical details of various scientists in discussions of physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics.

To my young mind, the scientific facts were independent of who discovered them, and this was an unnecessary distraction. "Just the facts, ma'am" would have been my preference.

In my dotage, my view has changed.

First: each of these scientific facts was discovered by a person, or more usually, teams of people, sometimes working together at one place and one time, but often at a remove in both dimensions. It's a social process. It took a long time for me to realize that these weren't simply dry words on a page or facts in a class.

Second: each individual's insights often grew from experiences and thought processes specific to them. Understanding the circumstances helps understand (and sometimes explain) the insights (it also occasionally provides clues as to weaknesses of the conclusions as well).

Third: we're social animals and remember things in a social context. Once the _dramatis personae_ do become established in our minds, it adds another layer of interconnectivity for recall of facts.

Fourth: as I came to interact with the world as an adult and met people I'd read about (or read about people I'd met), I came to appreciate that these weren't some two-dimensional cartoons or gods, but real people, much like myself, and knowing and understanding them could help me not only understand their work but to further it myself. It's the rare week now that I don't see something in my news feed that doesn't have a direct personal connection.

So: while I'm certainly not a fan of all things Steve and Apple (though I make very heavy use of his NeXT interface, in fact, as I type these words), I recognize that he, as a man, with his background and inspirations, created Apple, and drove it through two distinct periods of phenomenal growth and development. If he copied, he copied from the best, and improved in the copying (usually). He has a clarity of vision and a view of the ideal to which any physical and technological instantiation is at best an approximation, but repeatedly he's blown all existing models out of the water, and created whole new paths of development and advancement.

For this I can indeed bow to the man.
Interesting read on the history of diamonds/marketing them: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you...
I'd go full-on retro with a Solari Board: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solari_departure_board
Real Networks is absolutely not relevant anymore. They had their "heyday" in the late 90's when dial-up was king. This is pure corporate fascism at its finest. Can't Real Networks go the way of the fallen -- and I use the term loosely -- "internet companies" of the last century.
I could see that. Small userbase and even smaller app world with no real revenue model.

I know Qt is very easy to run on the Chumby hardware, so making a widget w/WebKit that just loads a web page over and over would be a snap.
There are common points. However, Opa goes much further than Gwt (and its toolchain supersets) in terms of automation, concurrency, distribution and security.

Automation: by default, you do not have to give the compiler any hint as to whether code should be compiled towards the client, the server, the database, etc. The compiler solves all of this automatically, inserting whichever Ajax/Comet calls wherever needed. You can, however, provide annotations for optimization and/or security purposes.

Concurrency/distribution: at its heart, Opa is based on an actor model (although you do not need to use actors for simple applications). This actor model lets you connect easily clients, servers, etc. or subsystems through a very simple paradigm.

Security: every Ajax/Comet call inserted is checked for a number of criteria. In particular, the structure of messages is checked automatically, entry points generated dynamically for one single client can only be used by that client, etc.

Note: I'm one of the authors of Opa.
(Addressing the owners of visual.ly)

I hope that "Chance to beat baseline" column isn't a naive measurement of "confidence" that's updated on every iteration.

I've mentioned this several times in threads such as these, but if you're blindly applying basic statistical analysis to a partially completed test, you are badly misinforming your customers.

Please read this: http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html

Of course, if you are taking these results into account I apologise for mentioning this again and wish you every success.
This was more of a prototype. I believe they will be scrapping it after alpha. The current technology and database architecture is more of a testbed for us to see what needs to be fixed in the future version. I was there as a software engineer.
I don’t, for example, praise the inventor of the microwave every time I nuke a pair of Hot Pockets.

A microwave isn't a very personal device. You don't hold it in your hand or religiously carry it in your bag. You don't rely on it for communicating with people. It doesn't give you access to any new information or ideas. You interact with it for maybe a few minutes a day. You can't create new things with it. The admiration for personal technology is a lot closer to the reverence musicians hold for particular brands/models of instruments which is based on their build quality, their unique sound, their design, and many other intangible details.

The connection people might feel to Jobs is probably based on the simple human experience of relating to people with similar ideas/views or the relationship people have with someone who influences their own way of thinking. I feel a deep personal connection with most of my favorite authors and musicians though I've never met most of them. You could easily marginalize them as people who have accomplished little more than putting words on paper or sound waves on tape but I would not agree with that at all because of the experiences I've had with their words & sounds.
Yea, I read that thinking the same thing. It's also possible that, regardless of how this was perceived internally, it's being touted as a great anecdote because now is not the time for a 'Steve Jobs is a dick' post.
I'm definitely going to try #1 (schmooze to support others). I was thinking about this recently and wrote about some of the strategies I use (http://youruisucks.tumblr.com/post/6832529747/so-an-introver...). Honestly, having a goal for an event is the best way for me to keep my human emulator spun up.
I think the blog post is a good idea, but doesn't necessarily give an in-depth look. Too short.
loner or just driven out      To belong or to be
my chat with a prof of ME @IIT Bomb ay in maddu mess a month ago
I asked him

“why didn’t you just kicked the job and moved on instead of fighting the ridiculous charges and consequences.”

He replied

“My wife told me not to ” :O [[wtf]]

And the answer he did not resist was “that would have been admission of guilt”
If one is working on very low level problems — as you are — then an academic education is tremendously useful. What you refer as badass is the work of a true computer scientist. There are indeed incredibly brilliant academics in most computer science departments.

However, most of us here — including the OP, it seems — are interested in higher level problems. Not those of writing compilers or optimizing some arcane algorithm, but those involving successfully running a startup. Academia is far behind on the later, and as a student myself, I share the sentiment of the OP.
Thanks for the response. It's really helpful. I'm not really that worried about the money, but it sounds like I do have to consider what my free time is worth to me.

Did you write your book solo or with a co-author?
Most business meetings aren't led like a professor guiding students (or, frankly, interns). Steve also doesn't talk like the quote, it would be something more like, "Why the fuck are you wasting my time? What the fuck do you even do here?" He's one of a kind--arrogant as they come but with the talent, smarts and execution that actually back it up.
Completely agree. The old adage is "it's now what you know, it's who you know".

This is especially true in the computer industry. If you want to create a startup you need to know people with money to fund you, and business/technical people you can get to help you out with your ideas. On the other side, you can get a great start on a job as a programmer if you know someone who's willing to give you the time and exposure you need to learn and grow.
iQuit.
I don't think most people got it. They'd tag themselves as at "Home", "In bed", "At Paul's house :)", etc.
Twinkle twinkle little star ... Like a diamond in the sky
Never ever ever describe your own pride and joy by naming another product or company, regardless if they're a competitor or not.
Admittedly this was a flame fest waiting to happen but it's still surprising that this article was removed from HN front page.
It just looks ugly, hard to put into words. It feels like there's too many shades of colors & font sizes. You don't need gradients to make a site look good. Maybe you guys just need to hire a designer.

I feel like you have over 20 different shades of blue if you count all the backgrounds & borders on elements -- which is annoying since blue is usually the color for links. Facebook is known for their blue color, yet they only use 4 shades of blue total.
Clay Shirky Says Good Collaboration is Structured Fighting
The Garage: Microsoft Building 4 makeover
A drab Microsoft office building has been transformed into a bright and airy garage-like workspace
Meet Ness, the Pandora for restaurant recommendations
+1 on the fixed width. I'm a developer, so I have a big monitor -- it's hard for my eye to follow sections of the document without lined up elements.
If we could make a few discoveries like that a little closer and in slightly more hospitable environments

"Close" and "hospitable" only appear in space in science fiction. In real life, it's uniformly deadly to well-prepared people backed by billions of dollars of military hardware, and so vast it staggers the imagination. (People really don't have an intuitive understanding that just one light year is ~300 times more than Voyager has traveled in the last 30 years.)
Is that just me or the Todo app example (http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/app/app-todo.html) was scraped from Backbone's examples (http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/examples/todos/inde...)?
They're just changing it so location information becomes integrated into all the other types of posts rather than being it's own thing.

Makes sense, the old way felt like they were trying to graft foursquare onto facebook.
No wonder Steve didn't like Flash: it made the MacBook Pros run extremely hot, and instantly kicked the fans up to full throttle.