skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand the point behind this entirely.

The Swiss Army Knife metaphor, however, is, in fact, a bad one, thought it seems all right initially.

The key bit is this:

"By combining many products of low utility, it [the knife] becomes a product of some utility."

False. The basic 440 stainless blade is of immense utility. So much so that many, myself included, choose to carry a pocket knife that contains nothing but a single blade. The Swiss Army knife sacrifices a small amount of the utility of a good blade (by making it slightly smaller and the handle less ergonomic) in exchange for significant additional functionality.

Sure, the saw pretty much sucks, and the scissors are of minimal use, and so on. That's not the point, though, at all. It's that a Swiss Army Knife allows you to have those things at all in unexpected situations. It fits in your pocket and can help you build a lean-to significantly faster than with only a blade.

The take-away, of course, is that what's important is not the feature list, but the use case(s).

Joel Spolsky, via arethuza on this page [1]:

"Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features." [2]

For those who end up choosing a Swiss Army Knife as their best friend, having all that "bloat" around is precisely the point.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2922104
[2] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
None of the Google engineers I've met have had 20% projects. They said 20% projects were uncommon in product groups (that have shipping deadlines), but more common in the web teams.
It's because it's only for enterprise setups that use LDAP in the particular way described here. It's not every Mac OS X user, it's not every enterprise Mac OS X setup. If they had been using AD it would have worked. So really it's not as wide spread as DropBox's issue that was for every single user.
What's Wrong With the Triple-A Games Business? (Part 1)
http://www.spaceflightnow.com/station/exp28/110824prog44p/ -- another take on the topic.

"Russian space agency says a problem with the upper stage propulsion system caused a premature shutdown and the vehicle's catastrophic failure."

I love the euphemisms that space industry uses, when they mean "the rocket exploded" (or, in this case, turned back and fallen). The most epic one is "lithobraking" :).

Also, sad news.
What’s Wrong With GNU make?
The Geometry and Topology of Coxeter Groups
4 Tips to Increase B2B SaaS Sales
those are space ship failures, not rockets. the current failure is one of a rocket (delivery vehicle).
I disagree.

Why try and build your own community when there's already an existing one with a lot of useful questions, engaged moderators and smart people answering?

Especially when you've failed to support your existing community at all.
The beauty of the open web
I assumed that 20% time was a clever way to harness engineers' idle time and redirect it from "dickin' around" (and Hacker News ;) to projects that may benefit the company.
CNBC had a good special on McDonald's a while ago called "Big Mac: Inside the McDonald's Empire."

They talk to a franchisee, and to me it looks like you need to work really hard to be successful. You're basically the CEO of your own business with your own money at risk, so it is nothing like "passive monitoring." Anecdotally, it's pretty clear to me when you walk into a McDonald's how much the owner cares about it - some are pretty impressive, but some are also awful.

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=1409843942
Algorithmic Trading and High Frequency Trading Interviews (Reddit's IAmA)
Are EBCDIC machines such a common development platform that trigraphs should be default on instead of default off with the option to enable?

Though I suspect trigraphs being enabled is a very rare source of bugs to begin with, it seems likely that it is still more common than the scenario of active development on platforms that don't support the normal characters (eg the actual development is done on the platform rather than cross-compiled).
Now there’s also Dusseldorf, Germany, where judges are proving
themselves quick, competent, and more often than not, erring on
the side of the patent holder.

My employer has recently also been sued by an American company in the Dusseldorf court for an alleged patent violation, so I can confirm the part of "erring on the side of the patent holder" from personal experience.

In this case, the dispute was over the production of a chemical substance and the other party alleged that this stuff simply cannot be produced without violating their patent. Our company's lawyers and chemists presented a huge mountain of experimental data and analysis stating a number of alternative ways to produce the stuff, including the method currently used by our plants in Asia. The court then took this information and asked the plaintiff "does this look reasonable to you?" to which they of course answered back "no way!" and hence essentially won the case. Their final verdict was basically an exact copy of the plaintiff's statements.

So I don't know about the part of being competent, but this court is basically issuing default judgements on the behalf of patent holders. Being there personally for some of the hearings, I also got the impression that certain lawyers are very well connected to this court, causing them to just wave certain cases through without too much consideration.

Our case ended with an out-of-court settlement and I subsequently lost track of the final outcome but it sure was an eye-opening experience for me just watching how it's done.
Due to decades of deregulation it's not clear many people committed any crimes. If they did it may be incredibly hard to prove. In any event while the economy remains weak it's unlikely we'll see any major push on that front. There are however pretty specific laws against advertising illegal drugs. Didn't Google even admit they knew what they were doing was illegal?
That is awesome, and better than the other one I found (though slightly out of date), but it still doesn't identify the instigators. I would love to see an interactive graph like this, with the arrows drawing out over time.

Interesting to note at that point, Apple was being sued over twice as much as it was suing. Patents are so screwed up right now.
Right? It's kind scary.

Thanks for this.
would be great to see this in a pdf for easy reading
I like the idea of supporting your managers in front of employees even if you don't agree. Address it later in private so you don't undermine them.
Tells you something about Apple's testing methodology. QA team at Apple must be playing real fast and loose.

Yep, I agree. I've been very disappointed with Lion, even taking into account the common "Don't buy an x.0 Apple product", there were some terrible bugs (I was personally bitten by the inability to look up DNS servers after waking from sleep, which I can't believe was missed in testing).

Apple's software quality has been markedly going down. iTunes is a UI mess, and I used to really like it. Safari continues to lag behind the competition (no omnibar/awesome bar? Really?), iWork has stagnated. I suspect the reason is that Apple is growing, and the Eye of Jobs is focused entirely on iOS products, so the quality is being diluted in other areas.

I strongly feel like Apple's leadership is looking f, orward to the day when they can kill off the Mac completely. The line of "we'll always need something for developers to develop on" doesn't make a lot of sense. With Apple on x86, I can see a future where Xcode lives on Ubuntu/Windows.
Your link goes to something else about an aikido dojo. Try this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1730320
The presence of a network connectivity on an iPhone (or even an iPod Touch) is a bigger problem than the ability to put notes in it. Notes are just a basic help, while the full answer is a different matter.
I think most people would be more enraged by "we're going to delay your flight because it's less profitable for us" than "Oops, wow, we screwed up."
Sage Notebook: Create, collaborate on, and publish interactive worksheets
Never seen that! Thanks! This link works for me: http://web.mac.com/ben_moseley/frp/paper-v1_01.pdf
Web Developer needed
Hi hackers!

We are a young startup looking for a web developer to help us bring our product to market. We need someone able to hit the ground running, so any previous experience with at least one of the following environments would be great:

* Python with Django (preferred)
* Python with any other web framework
* Ruby on Rails, or any other Ruby web framework
* CakePHP/Prado/CodeIgniter
* MVC.NET

So, if you are someone that can code a login form in his sleep and reverse engineer a database to work in his favorite ORM, please feel free to apply.

Please check the linked page for instructions on how to apply. Thanks in advance!!!
I agree with you, I should have said "high" utility - not "some utility". I'd update the post, only I'm not keen on re-writing history.

I think the metaphor is correct in that regard, I'm saying that adding on stuff works for the Swiss Army knife - but maybe not for Your Web App.

Thanks for the comment :)
By all means throw in a link :)
Indeed, if you haven't tried it yet then you absolutely should. I highly recommend Just Cause 2, it's a huge game and it plays perfectly. You can play any game for 30 minutes without spending a penny.

Disclaimer: I wish I was an investor.
How This Pro Photographer Recovered $9k Worth of Stolen Gear
RSVP for the Hipster Launch Party
Or we could simply start treating consumers like Adults. I would prefer the honest truth even if I didn't like it, to a lie that defers my emotions onto unrelated targets.
Maybe package is a better term? I'm just referring to all of the materials constituting a brand: logo in various vector formats and configurations (logo+text, logo only, b/w logo, etc. etc.), fonts, colors (print and web), usage guidelines, messaging, etc. etc. etc.

Package all those materials together, and you end up with something along the lines of a database.
Would you prefer to fly with greedy corporate pigs or incompetent screw-ups? The OP clearly prefers the pigs (as would I, actually.)
Since the site seems to be dead, here is a bit of wikipedia discussion on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponent#Zero_to_the_zero_power
Whoa, are they replacing _all_ documentation with SO? I figured they meant that this was going to replace the severely less than helpful developer forums and FAQ pages.
Could the Way We Mate and Marry Boost Rates of Autism?
Design Secrets For Engineers
The most ambitious project at eBay for a long, long time - search megaproject
Why do U.S. laws protect the pharmaceutical industry at the expense of citizens? -- Isn't this the much more interesting question? Does it actually surprise anyone that, in areas where there are big market opportunities, you will find more scams on average.

Other than a supposed incentive for domestic pharma to innovate, is there another reason anyone can point to for classifying Canadian pharmacies as illegal? Personally, I can imagine a scenario where investment in drug research would actually increase if the industry wasn't afforded so much protection by federal law.
> Seeing people covered in tattoos and piercings gets old and tiresome for some reason.

"For some reason"? This sort of willful cognitive dissonance is always fascinating to see in the wild.

Here's a hint: it's either you, or it's them.
c.f. Wesley Snipes tax evasion case. Prosecuting famous people because they are famous is ok.
Okay rationalist, what if you were sick and someone important deemed that you were "extremely unlikely to generate quantifiable benefit"?
Sweet! I prolonged my stay in Seattle to about half a month and I knew I could bump into a hacker's meetup like this!
Making Money on the Internet Using Kaboodle
Amazed at being expensive or cheap? With oscilloscopes and milling machines, the old adage goes, "they don't make them like they used to."

To get better performance that some of those old 'scopes would cost thousands of dollars today. Not everyone needs color graphics. Give me a green line and I'll be fine.
Apple is coming under increasing competition in the mobile phone market, specifically from Android. Despite the buckets of cash Apple has on hand, it is a fair assumption that Apple is increasingly focused on taking down Android by any means possible, including buying tons of patents and taking Android handset OEMs to court.
That is a fantastic use of technology.

This is interesting: "Now, during good CPR, this is probably going to be around 25 — if you keep this up in that 25 range, then there's circulation still going on. ... That's where you're going to get a positive outcome,".

So essentially, if CPR is working, you don't need to die even if your heart and lungs aren't working on their own. CPR is doing their work well enough, for the moment anyway. If they keep at it all the way to the hospital, you may survive.

Of course, if you'd seen Lindsey brought back in Abyss, you'd already know this is possible :-)
Google+ Realtime Post Stream
Mostly single usernames. Everyone keeps the passwords in 1password, which is synced in their own Dropbox. The best thing about 1password is that you can look a password up easily for a team member. I suggest to everyone to use the random pwd generator in 1password as well.
Great article, with the exception that code indentation does not appear to have made it through the editing process.
That is a very disingenuous thing to say. Apple sued HTC, Samsung and Motorola. The only lawsuits against Apple are the countersuits in the cases that Apple started.

There is plenty of reason to be mad primarily at Apple.
The DOJ PR does not argue that the harm is undermining research, it cites putting US consumers at risk.
Al Qaeda In Azeroth? Terrorism Recruiting and Training in Virtual Worlds
Economics In One Lesson
Awesome! Where are you from? There are a ton of other meetups in Seattle, maybe I can point you to a few more you'd be interested in. Email me and I'll see what I can do.
"If we discovered that space aliens were planning to attack, and we needed a massive build-up to counter the space alien threat, and inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months," Krugman says, referencing an episode of The Twilight Zone in which an alien threat was manufactured to bring about world peace.
"On the Designing and Deploying Internet-scale Services" by James Hamilton: http://www.mvdirona.com/jrh/talksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf

html version: http://www.usenix.org/event/lisa07/tech/full_papers/hamilton...
Behind The Scenes at 500 Startups
YES. I'm actually really sad that I'm unable to invest money in the huge expansion that's happening in the software industry right now. Due to Sarbanes-Oxley, this entire industrial development is completely off-limits to regular Joe investors. It sucks to be aware of this and not be able to do anything about it.

There are many reasons why this is bad, first and foremost that this is where a lot of the action is right now and those of us with less than 10 million available to invest are stuck investing in only the rest of the economy. Which, from what I gather from the news, is pretty mismanaged in the US.

After trying out OnLive for 5 minutes even without playing, it is obvious that this is the future for most gamers.
>I strongly feel like Apple's leadership is looking f, orward to the day when they can kill off the Mac completely.

Yeah - it sounds unrealistic for any other company but Apple is not at all shy of ignoring and finally dumping products that don't do great for their bottom line.

Either Xcode on Windows/Linux OR Web IDE - iOS App Development may be offered as a service. You develop on the web and submit code to Apple's server farm where specialized devices compile/deploy/run it and send it to your device to test it - maximum control for Apple. But I think that's a little too sophisticated - so might be a while!
NPR's Planet Money Podcast explores Bitcoin
Apple Expected To Sell 120 million iPads in 2015
Yes, it's pretty awesome. One of the top five in the US, I'd imagine.
Website Helps Recover a Nikon D3 Using EXIF Data
Not always dead for me - I think it's just under a heavy load. I guess we've "SlashDotted" it, or, more accurately, "HN'd" it.
> Where I work, TechSmith, we've been trying the 20% time thing on different teams. We call it "TechSmith Fridays" and the goal is to make TechSmith better by Monday.

Soo... it has fuck-all to do with Google's 20%?
It may also be possible for an attacker to impersonate an OpenLDAP server in order to induce (and exploit) the behavior.
Preparing To Fire an Executive
I don't remember. I'm not very good at writing posts that get a lot of upvotes. You are more then welcomed to try -- this app can get all the marketing help it gets.
Nvidia answers the touchy multi-monitor question at SIGGRAPH
Inside the Secret World of Hackers
I got it for my iPod Touch. From working with it, I'd like to use it on the iPad.
Building a Business on Nonexistent Norms
I think it is kind of silly to move somewhere just for tax reasons. I've spent nearly my whole career so far in relatively higher tax jurisdictions, but it's typically way more than worth it for what you get with the location. And for example I'd much rather live and work in the Pearl district of Portland than in Vancouver, Washington. But it seems like Seattle versus Portland is anomalously competitive.
Why can't Canadian pharmacies sell drugs in the US?
I really don't think it's simply a choice between honest or dishonest. Sales is telling a story. It's your opportunity to craft a narrative complete with good guys, bad guys, a quest to solve a specific problem, and a happy ending of how successful your prospect will be if they buy your product. You can highlight the weaknesses of your own product and actually improve your case by then explaining why these aren't actually weaknesses at all. These aren't the droids you're looking for... Further, a product is more than the sum of its features, just like your career is more than the sum of your resume and your life is more than the sum of your bank account or how many trophies you have on your wall. Sell the big picture.

Also, if your product really does suck, get a job working for someone who has a better product. If no one has a better product, build it or do the best you can with what you've got. There's quite a bit of that in software where the best product simply doesn't exist yet, so sell the current best despite its shortcomings. Great salespeople have to be sold on the product they're selling before they're willing to sell it to someone else--it's easier for everyone that way.

Sales is all about understanding people quickly and helping them get to where they want to go, I'm not sure why technical people often have a problem with this but I suspect it has to do with an underlying lack of confidence when it comes to people and asking for things; it's not that they're inherently more honest than people who work in sales, I've heard that one plenty and I find "honesty" (as they see it) is usually just an excuse for their timidity, something to hide behind. And your average salesperson probably is a hack, but so is your average engineer.
XP is pretty modern in relation to elevator seek. It's been used since the 70's, at least.
Having no formal CS education (I consider myself a coder, not a programmer) I found your spell checker example to be intimidatingly beautiful. It feels like learning to play guitar and hearing Hendrix play: it's fun to do it but kind of depressing knowing I'll never come close.
How to build a company that's ripe for acquisition
Sure ;-)

I'd love to hear your thoughts on it because product development as a concept is something that has only recently come onto my radar and im constantly thinking about how to improve on it as a discipline.

Here was the first part: http://krmmalik.posterous.com/the-anti-swiss-army-knife

and here the second: http://krmmalik.posterous.com/the-anti-swiss-army-knife-part...

You'll notice an evolution in my thought process from the first to the second.

Enjoy ;-)
When I interviewed there, one of the interviewers jokingly referred to it as "120% time."
In that case here's the Coral CDN mirror: http://www.askamathematician.com.nyud.net/?p=4524
The Beauty of Data Visualization
In the case of Linux, more specifically ext4), you get some benefit from having the blocks of a given file contiguous, as they will end up being one single extent.
Same here. I had to reload a few times before it worked.

Here's the version I found in the Google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Jxv6vFH...
XBus by PayPal Labs
I think the key thing here is to know which problem is being solved or tackled by the product. For those that require an actual swiss army knife adding more utility for them would be useful, but for other applications it would be bloat.
I read the article. But I'm looking past the words and not believing the BS from the reporter or the PR department.

The nutritional information on snack wraps and lattes shows that McDonalds is still trying their old tactics, but dressing up food to look healthy.

Let's look at some numbers:
- A snack wrap is about 350 calories for 118g of food. It contains 19g of fat. That's a snack where 16% of its mass is fat.
- Their salads contain up to 21g of fat. In a salad.
- Their lattes (unless you get the non-fat variety) are high in fat and loaded with sugar (up to 53g!).
That Apple has competition does not mean that they are unable to compete. They are _extremely_ able to compete.
I'll address it, as I have worked on many bad movies :-)

The answer is that no, you don't know how bad it is, and you may not even know after it comes out. Sure, you know about its shortcomings, and you also know about its good points. But you don't know what the audience wants, and neither does the audience. One person's idea of cheesy is another's sentimental moment, one person's idea of refinement is another's idea of overworking, and so on. On one level, filmmaking is a craft where you manufacture entertaining stories, in written and then animated graphical form. There are formulas that work in certain ways to manipulate the audience's expectations or communicate information about the story in certain reliable ways. Amateur films look bad because the unschooled auteurs waste a great deal of time trying to achieve very basic tasks like keeping track of where people are in space or how people are reacting to each other.

On the other hand, you're dealing with intangibles like excitement, humor, fear, curiosity and so on, and have only a hazy idea of the context in which your film will be seen and judged. It takes years to develop and refine the sense of what an audience will respond to. Look at James Cameron; one of the most successful film directors of all time, with a bunch of Oscars to his credit for everything from artistic to technical achievement, not to mention a ginormous pile of money. Now go back and look at some of his early work like...like...Piranha II. It's awful in many ways. But that's a stage you have to go through, and there's no guarantee you'll get out of it.

If you're making something like a car or a bicycle, you can test whether it works or not very easily: the laws of physics will give you a clear answer. Art is something different. You have rules of thumb that get you most of the way there, but nobody knows for sure what will work. It's like trying to assemble a clock out of jello.
Fast food is absolutely not the cheapest alternative

Well jeebus... of course I meant compared to sitting down at other restaurants. That's what the article was stating.