skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you've found a system that delivers a great product on time, then keep going. But formalize it, and get complete buy in from those running the show. We are talking about a repeatable and trackable process. With a well defined system, you simultaneously get visibility and accountability (for both the developers and product owner). Compare that to a software framework, where people have found enough commonality and repeatability to simplify and streamline how things get done. Why put in the effort required to learn a framework? It cuts down on time to market, cuts down on your lines of code (seems to be a debate about LOC benefits), and gives the team a single, well understood frame of reference.

Having a process that is transferable between teams and companies makes the lives of everyone better, and gets us to past a lot of the overhead that leads to unfulfilled goals and unrealistic deadlines. What if your team grows to 4 people, and they all have their own idea of how to get stuff done? Without some formality, it becomes the wild west. What if you decide to leave, will you leave chaos in your wake? What if management keeps bugging you about getting stuff done sooner? If there is no well defined process, then management may be left believing the software team just isn't 'professional' enough to get things done. With a well defined and understood process, everything can be tracked and people can be made accountable for their choices. We aren't talking about a witch hunt, it will allow the company as a whole to grow and get better at defining what can be accomplished in what timeframe. If everyone agrees to abide by the process, but continually subvert it (1 + 2 = 4), then you can either suffer now (work 50+ hours a week), suffer later (build up of technical debt), or find somewhere to work values building really great software in a coherent manner.

So what is Scrum? It's a process, as are Waterfall, RUP, and XP. Those of us that willingly practice believe it's a great way to achieve maximum visibility and minimize scope creep, all while reducing artifacts and overhead. It allows us to deliver value early and often. It gives developers the tools and justification to point and say "It can't be done given our constraints". Scrum is great for team ownership, and encourages us to get early feedback on features.

Regardless of how you decide to get stuff done, make sure you have 100% buy-in from the people cutting the checks. This whole topic reminds of the discussion on designer pricing (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3042803). We assume non-technical team members (our customers in many cases) implicitly understand what it takes to get a product shipped. We must do our best to bridge the gap between expectation and reality.
What makes F# so much more compelling?
Loading pics from the middle
The DOM is great and all but I'm increasingly frustrated by slow loading of images on mobile devices. Can some smart person figure out how to load images starting from their center?
Yaron Minsky has a few videos about Jane Street's use of OCaml in the finance industry:

http://www.janestreet.com/technology/ocaml.php
Amazon reveals $79 Kindle
What journal pays scientists to peer review?
Masterpiece Engineering (1969)
Effectively, we square each difference so that they can't cancel each other out.

He seems to sort of confuse himself here, at first he says the squaring is so that it emphasizes bigger differences, then he says it's to make positive & negative cancel each other out. I think that the second part is just a nice bonus to the first part, but I don't get why he doesn't just use the absolute value of the distance anyway. "Hellp" is no more or less fit than "Helln".

The crossover and mutate are sort of mashed together and could be made much more robust. For example, giving each gene a random chance to mutate would do a much better job at keeping the populations from evolving into one big similar mass.

This is a good start but leaves a lot to be done for any sort of real implementation of a genetic algorithm.
I didn't realize they'd hidden cached pages this way...but here's a data point on human behavior that may be non-optimal for Google:

So, yesterday, I searched for something on Google, found what I wanted, went to click Cache and it wasn't there.

I didn't think to go mousing over the page...I instead did what any red-blooded search engine user in a hurry would do: I copied the URL, pasted it into Bing, and viewed cache from there. 0_o
Probably to Goldman Sachs.
Because it is Amazon, this will bring in a new wave of buyers and opportunity for developers.
Amazon Kindle Fire tablet: Android-based, 7-inch display, $199 price tag
It's discussed in the article, but I would recommend reading "Don't Roll the Dice" which is a free e-book on software pricing by Neil Davidson: http://www.neildavidson.com/dontjustrollthedice.html

(Neil is CEO of Red Gate Software and co-founded the Business of Software conference.)
It rocks...
Yes, Amazon is efficient and plays to win. However, given what Motorola and Samsung have been producing, I think people had justifiable skepticism. Even the WiFi-only, 7" Galaxy Tab is priced at $350 (75% more than the Kindle Fire). Granted, Amazon seems to have more of a "game-console" product cycle with the Kindle series. If they don't have to up the specs every 6-12 months with a new processor, display, etc. they'll be able to get a lot more money for the same design.
How long does it take to make turkey?
Where's the bookmarklet?
Sadly it seems they've said they're not providing one.
It can get pretty Rube Goldbergesque, apparently. The main rule of thumb is that if you're doing GP with CPU strings as your representation, beware of including run time in the fitness function. Because you will almost inevitably get over adaptation that breaks on any other platform.
A large USP of the Kindle is it's E-Ink display (leaving aside other ereaders from sony etc. for now). I have often recommended people to 'get a kindle' when asked about reading books electronically; this will no longer be the case. I think this new addition dilutes the Kindle brandname.
What is talking about are called more technically called second order desires. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_volition)

From his example he "wants cheese cake" but he "wants to want to focus on his work" and instead he is "wanting cheesecake". Wikipedia gives the good example of the drug addict who "wants drugs" but he "wants to not want drugs".

Its very close to the ideas of self control and willpower.

Second order desires are important in artificial intelligence as most AI only has 1st order desires (e.g. 'make a plan of actions to accomplish something'). Second order desires can be used as a controller for 1st order AI processes, and are therefore very powerful (think about a real time system that can know when it has spent too much time planning, and needs to use whatever its current best plan is).
CentOS releases continuous repo for immediate access to patches
Tucker Dale vs Evil
Tucker Dale vs Evil
ou get the chance to obtain a copy of the ou get the chance to obtain a copy of the ou get the chance to obtain a copy of the
It's not much compared to the iPad, but not everyone can afford the iPad. The $199 price point puts it in a different category. Heck, at $199, it's the kind of gift I'd easily buy for a friend or family member's birthday.
> should we really be surprised at all that they're doing it?

I'm sure nobody is surprised about information retention in general from carriers, but the details are interesting.

It's essentially spelling out three things:

1. If you're calling people a lot, you should use Verizon: your call records will disappear within a year whereas others will keep them 2 (Sprint, T-Mobile prepaid) to 7 (AT&T post-paid) years.

2. Text message is a bit more complex, it's the same as calls for details but verizon is the only carriers storing the actual message for any length of time

3. If you're mostly using data, go with T-Mobile, ideally prepaid: they have the shortest cell tower history retention, don't keep any connection information and don't even keep bill copies (for post-paid). The downside is that they'll keep a log of your calls and messages for 2~5 years.

As you'd expect, AT&T is by far the worst (dead last in all categories but data connection session informations)
Show HN: Price Internet service for your business location
Twitter Bot MrDisclosure Wants Investors To Disclose Conflicts In Tweets
In an age marked with increasingly complex conflicts of interest, this is a very neat idea.
مسلسل سيلا الجزء 2 الحلقة 44
مسلسل سيلا الجزء 2 الحلقة 44
Here's something I don't understand: One reason for introducing the KIPP 'character report' was that only 33% of their students were graduating from college. But the following article from 2009 says that "KIPP’s [college graduation] rate so far has been over 90%":
http://www.economist.com/node/13938869

So has the focus on character been enormously successful? If so, why not mention that in the New York Times piece?
Ward Cunningham working on new wiki software (progress videos)
More specifically, instead of waiting for the next stable release (6.1 as of this writing) you can register the continuous repo which picks up all the bug and security fixes targeted for the next release (no new features) and you can apply them, keep your version-older system up to date.

This was done as a result of 6.0 taking so long to get out after RedHat released, leaving a lot of servers unpatched as everyone waiting for the big rollup release to pickup all the changes.
That's the news I've been waiting for. I mean, other than the new tablet, I was interested in their plans for the e-ink reader, so that I can decide whether to wait for a new version, or buy the Kindle 3. Kindle 3 and Kindle Fire are two very different devices and it's best for them to announce their plans regarding both.
Oops, I even checked before posting and didn't see it, though I was looking for it on the bottom right.
Thanks for doing the code dive, Matt, and then blogging what you found. I will be curious to see what they wind up doing with the Google Voice integration. Yes, it's predictable that they would do that kind of integration... but still good to see.
Yeah, the FDA, insurance companies, and entirety of health care isn't great, and yeah med school really sucks for the people to go there but you can't just throw that shit out there are very good reasons that these ideas were put into place and those ideas have just become diluted with greed.

The systems need reworking not removal.
Connecticut Wedding Limousines
Verizon HTC Thunderbolt Gingerbread Update Now Available
Kindle Touch is what I wanted..yay. Now, if only they would open up their KDK and give it useful API calls, I'll be happy.
I've never really had any issues with stress, so I can't speak to that. However, somewhat related, I found daily exercise (more intense on some days, but at least something every day) did a lot to improve my sleep. In turn that made me much more effective when awake.
That infographic is just wrong, I wish people could stop linking to it all the time.

The data it is based on is some small numbers from the first months after Spotify launched, before the revenue strems had actually started. No hard numbers are released, but it is generally acknowledged in Sweden that Spotify is now the largest online income for artists.
January 7, 2009 at 7:32 pm (Thats the date on the article). Cant blame him for not predicting the future.
Wow, thanks for exposing me to how braindamaged win32 really is.
This all depends on the type of customer. If your customers are high maintenance customers that require a lot of support, then having more customers paying less money may not be worth it. However, more customers often means more diversity so you're more protected against a few taking their business elsewhere. And then more customers might mean you have to hire more people which can affect the culture of your company. Seemingly simple decisions can run pretty deep when you think about the true cost.

So it really all depends, but it's definitely not bone-headed.

If you're interested, here's an article I wrote for Inc. that discusses some of these ideas:
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20101101/go-ahead-raise-your-bus...
.NET compatibility and Visual Studio tools are two huge practical advantages for F# adoption over OCaml IMO.
The correct price is what consumers are willing to pay for not what you think your profit margin should be.
Prices Plummet - Why Buy Silver?
Do 'the Risky Thing' in Digital Humanities
Zero-Gravity Sequencing
Ask HN: what's the best way to market my product to startups?
I've just launched a service* aimed straight at startups. My problem is that I'm not sure how to reach my target market.

I've tried contacting the big startup blogs (TechCrunch, Mashable, and a couple others) but it seems they're not interested in small-scale bootstrapped projects like mine (I didn't get even a single reply).

I've contacted incubators, coworking spaces, etc. directly but also with a pretty low reply rate. And I've also thought about advertising, but it seems pretty costly ($1000 for a campaign targeting startup blogs on InfluAds, for example) and more like something I should do at a later stage.

My best lead so far has been Quora. If your product can appear as one of the top answers for the question you are solving, you'll get very targeted traffic that converts extremely well.

But I'm completely new to this whole marketing aspect (I'm a designer by trade), so I'd love more ideas.

* http://folyo.me – a site to help startups find great designers with minimal effort
I should note that Ward Cunningham developed the first wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham

I really enjoyed listening to his appearance on This Developer's Life: http://thisdeveloperslife.com/post/1-0-6-abstraction
The content of PG's talk more than made up for his lack of flair. And besides, he was honest and funny. IMHO several of the more charismatic YC alumni spoiled their talks with Powerpoint abuse -- either not-actually-funny pictures or too much text. On the other hand (ahem), the guy who had all the graphs used his slides really well for that.

(Loopt CEO, I think you were saying really interesting stuff, but I found it hard to take in, because I was trying to read the words on your slides at the same time. I think your talk would have been much better with zero words on the slides.)

Oh, and if anyone's worried about their public speaking skills, remember Knuth. Content trumps flair. :-)
Radioactive lenses
I don't understand this rationale at all. How does the Kindle Fire devalue the Kindle brand name? The Fire is a different product from the e-ink Kindles. You can still say "get a Kindle touch for $99" or "get a Kindle with hard keys for $79."
Welcome to the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos
Moncler doudoune
I programmed OCaml for couple of years, and now I've been programming F# for past 3 years.

OCaml is more verbose than F#. F# is on par with Python.

F# besides having all features of OCaml. (You could (and maybe still can) compile OCaml using F# compiler.) also has some nice extras.
Workflows (think monads in Haskel). Workflows in turn used to implement Asynchronous Workflows, and mailbox thread processing. So you get Erlang style multithreading.

Another point for F#: since it's on .Net and .Net actually runs on multicore machines the way one would think it should run. OCaml on the other hand has garbage collection that does not play with multicore very well.

Last but not least: F# can call any .Net function or create any .Net object -> you have access to a lots of things out of the box. F# - batteries included; OCaml - batteries are not included.

[Edit - spelling and formatting]
Facebook is watching you: http://www.smileecards.com/card/facebook-is-watching
For the record - I'm the submitter, but not affiliated with this project in any way - I just saw it on /r/programming over at Reddit and figured that some of the people here might be interested :-)
May answer your question: http://www.quora.com/How-does-Bloomspot-Prime-aggregate-POS-...
I'm curious, what happens if you can't return stock that you've borrowed in order to short it? either because of a situation like this or simply because you went bankrupt due to bad debts.

Wouldn't this be a common scenario given the very nature of the risk?
The last video really illustrates the software's possibilities: http://vimeo.com/29540826
You appear to be using your own definition.

Correct pricing, in an economic sense, is that which an undistorted market will bear, using whatever definition of "undistorted" you like. It's that simple.
so, sounds like Apple's skimming the top end of the tablets, and Amazon's skimming the bottom end.
I'm not ready to say a lot about how I solved this problem other than:

I quit.

My job was killing me. If you looked at it from the outside, you would have said I should be perfectly happy: great pay, bonuses, respect at work. But seriously: I was unhappy with the endless meetings, bureaucracy, and a culture that didn't value creativity and passion for building really good software.

I'm still working all this out. I'm independent and learning a lot of great stuff that I've wanted to learn for years. I'm building some products that I hope will take off. But even if those fail in the sense that I don't make enough to live on, I know I will succeed in a bigger sense: I will find a place to work that has great people and values building really good software that makes people's lives better.

Why am I so confident about that? For the first time in years, I feel alive and full of curiosity and interest in the world.
My reaction to the "Kindle Touch" concept: Ewwww, fingerprints all over my precious books. I can't help agreeing with muxxa.
So I'm reading along... getting interested... sounds promising... purchase might be on the horizon...

Amazon has painted over the rough surfaces of Google’s Android operating system

Now I won't even consider buying it until the cyanogenmod port is in decent shape. Why do manufactures always do this to android? The custom UI looks nicer (arguable, roll with it), but always kill usability because they don't understand how to have their software play nice and feel right on android. It might be better on the kindle fire because the biggest offenders I see are the dialer and text message app, but I won't hold my breath.
What’s that cruft you are talking about? Ignoring for a moment the cache link (I’m not sure how many people use it, maybe it’s worth testing whether Google could do with it being a bit more hidden) Google’s results page is very sparse and only provides truly useful tools.

I use Google’s ability to search for links from a specific time frame all the time, for example. I couldn’t do without it, it’s also accessible and minimalist. I also quite often switch between the different kinds of links I can search for.

I don’t see much on the results page one could reasonably remove. Exposing some of the advanced search options in the UI was the right step for Google to take. They didn’t pick everything, only the most important stuff. It’s all still very minimal.
New space race or Chinese Cooperation
Amazon Unveils New $99 E-Ink Kindle Touch
One problem with using that technique is that it's has been patented, along with derivatives of it, for quite a while.
It doesn't devalue it, it dilutes it.
Facebook message content: Forever.

Sad to compare this to Telecoms.
Images from the Wall St Occupation
How about Google Bookmarks? https://www.google.com/bookmarks/

Requires a Google account, but free beyond that.
It's all about volume. Some money made on Spotify, some by selling CDs, some by concerts, some by merchandise. And there is ofcourse exposure.
In my experience, the software industry is a bit more open to the idea that business models will need to adapt to the realities of the internet age. And yes, many of us are quite sanguine about it.
With the stock market down, there should be a lot of cash sitting around, waiting to be invested in something else than treasuries and gold.
This is more than just a skin, like the handset manufacturers do. It's not supposed to be an Android device, it's an Amazon device.
They aren't making an Android table, they are making a Kindle tablet that runs some Android programs.
"Look, Ma, no more worries about matrix condition number!"

The naiveté of this is staggering.
You still need to worry because those factors of ten are not exact.
Editing the Genome - Here,There and Everywhere
I'm guessing this means no free Kindle this November like Kevin Kelly was predicting. http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/02/free_kindle_t...
Great price point. It's basically in impulse zone: "This book is 6 dollars cheaper at Kindle price... if I buy 12 it pays for itself..." but note there's no physical keyboard. Without a touch screen, it looks like it won't do note-taking, which is a bummer.
Take a look at the limitations section of the article at the end. F# doesn't have any of those. It has great tools, massive library support, and really good parallelism support. Unfortunately it comes with its own drawbacks. It is a more complicated language. The type system is weaker. Performance isn't as good.
No, they are not. Only if Google can’t find anything – which makes a lot of sense.
> Objective Value:
> (Hourly rate × Development time in hours) − Price = Value

Um, no. This assumes the value of the product is based on the inputs, and is incorrectly modeled from the seller's perspective. Any product's value is determined by the buyer, who is the one making the purchasing decisions. The value is not in how much time the developer put into it, but what it does.

Yes, the article is about subjective value (and finding it), not objective value, but taking the developer's (biased) perception of value as a starting point is a bad idea.

Pricing should be determined early in the development process to inform go/no-go, and the amount of development effort to apply. Starting from scratch on pricing after the product is ready is backward.
Exactly what is the differentiation between a tablet and e-reader? This thing is aimed squarely at the BN Nook Color. Why is it being compared to the much more expensive and feature-full iPad?
Modular inverses are used in the RSA crypto-system. Here's how that works.

I choose large primes P and Q (with some other properties) and compute N=PxQ. I select a small number E that is co-prime with Phi=(P-1)(Q-1).

I publish N and E.

I keep secret P, Q and Phi.

I then compute D, the multiplicative inverse of E modulo Phi. In other words, D * E = 1 + k * Phi for some k.

I keep D secret.

If you have a message M to send to me, you compute X=M^E and send me the result. I compute

X^D = (X^E)^D (mod N)
= X^(D * E) (mod N)
= X^(1+k(P-1)(Q-1)) (mod N)
= X^1 * [ X^((P-1)(Q-1)) ]^k (mod N)
= X * 1^k (mod N)
= X

We use here that A^Phi(N) = 1 (mod N) provided A is co-prime to N.

We used to computation of a multiplicative inverse modulo something when we computed our secret key. Very important.

In practice there are lots of possible attacks on a naive implementation. Just for one - if the primes are such that P-1 or Q-1 have lots of small factors then N can be factored fairly easily. You can find out about the method here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA#Operation

Various possible weaknesses and attackes are described here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA#Security_and_practical_cons...
The picture I saw seems to make it the same size and shape as the B&N Nook Color.
Arguably, Rule 110 [1] fits the bill. Once you have your data, you just apply Rule 110 endlessly.

One could argue that one has merely embedded the actual operands into the data fed to Rule 110, and I would then observe that in the context of Turing completeness, there is a fundamental fuzziness between data and code that goes "all the way down". All your no-operands single-instruction can really be is "do it", with "it" specified by the data.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110