skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of problems with the visa system and immigration in general. A lot of policies are getting abused. However, the bottom line to me is that there's a lot of great foreign talent out there, and the best situation if you're living here in America is for companies to bring them over here and pay them competitive wages instead of setting up shop overseas and pay them a small fraction of what they would make here in the US.
Twine: “We Organize That Shit.”
You can't give athletic scholarships in D3.

MIT has one D1 sport, rowing. I'm not sure whether they give athletic scholarships for it, but without bothering to check, I suspect not.
> Isn't that what reprap is supposed to evolve into?

Yup... but I don't know if reprap will be able to provide electronic parts on par with current ones in the next 5 years. An open-design factory (that takes up a building) is feasible right now, however.
"Money is important to students as well, the bulk of the income their degree will generate depends on the reputation of the school, not on how much they actually know."

Only for non-entrepreneurial types.

I think for an entrepreneur (in whatever arena -- business, programming, scientific research), using college as a sort of pure, long-term investment in a general arsenal of facts and perspectives can actually pay off very nicely in the long run.

Time will tell if I'm right....
I agree that price is not enough but I do think price/performance is. I believe this is why the consumer Linux desktop has not been as successful as enterprise Linux.

It may take 15 years for the idea of open source hardware to be accepted. Once people are comfortable that lower price does not imply lower quality I doubt that it will be a hard sell. I agree that now that may not be the case for the museum environmental sensor market but until someone try's it will not be known.

Open source software achieves its cost savings by eliminating or greatly reducing many levels of organization and overhead that exist in proprietary software vendors (i.e. sales, marketing, human resources, project management,..) not by reducing quality. Larry Augustine has a good article describing this http://www.sandhill.com/opinion/editorial.php?id=54. It is reasonable to think that the same thing could happen with hardware.
I've never read a book on programming. I read books for certain things: I love books on marketing and I'll probably read Tufte in hard form, I have a copy of his stuff. But for programming I learned almost exclusively online: nowadays, I use the online books that Coda provides.

To be fair, I'm not a brilliant programmer. So I don't know if I'm missing out by learning online.
Yeah, and in key web technologies like Javascript they are kings.
Really good information in the interview. Ryan is a really bright guy. I've admired his control suite for some time.

His discussion of custom events was simplified but makes you think twice about design decisions in pub/sub contexts. Good stuff.
Umair is always thought provoking, and usually just a bit too far out there for me:

"Tomorrow's sources of advantage aren't like yesterday's. They're not built on being able to exploit, dominate, or coerce more strongly than others -- they don't result from being harder, better, faster, stronger. They're about exactly the opposite: being softer, better able to fail, having the ability to be slower, gaining the capacity for tolerance and difference."
And yet despite all this, I still haven't managed to find one actually for sale in a store. Where the hell are they?
I heard a recent podcast in which the inventor of reprap was interviewed http://www.thefutureandyou.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=3812.... In the interview he said that in a new version, to be released next year, it will be possible to lay down strips of a conductor within plastic materials to make circuit boards.
Yeap. In Greek we say 'It's chinese to me'. I wonder what the chinese say :)
Keeping it real with the FriendFeed Real-time API
Where exactly did you get these numbers? Unless Yahoos earn an average of $35k a year, $50M is way off. Also net income is over $1B a year. Not disagreeing with your point at all, just curious about the numbers you mention.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=YHOO
(oops: when cares were new)
Perhaps Greenspun's Tenth Rule ("any sufficiently complex C program contains an.. implementation of half of Common Lisp") applies as well to Java programs containing JavaScript. The question is whether Lisp and JavaScript contain each other.
I found it infuriating. I mean we all make mistakes, but this is clearly some obtuse point that he makes by totally ignoring English.

The content seemed sincere. However if I was in yahoo I would be tempted to spend my life hunting and killing people who don't capitalise sentences. It would scar me for life.
If you don't have the money to hire someone with a ton of experience, try to look for someone smart instead and provide them with an opportunity to build experience.

I think there are far too many people going into law or medicine because of the high pay and that leads to lots of crappy lawyers and doctors. We had a similar thing during the dotcom era in IT and quite frankly I'm glad that most of those people have switched careers and CS enrollment dropped.

I'm also guessing more outsourcing is on the way in law and medicine (in that order).
Neat observations. I wonder how one can become more effective at understanding which features customers won't want. I guess focus groups are one answer, but the danger with these is that your product's desirability may be limited to a local maximum. Further, it seems that the most desirable, iconic products rarely come from focus groups.
Yes, I've had this thought: that this is the beginning of the "high density" version of recorded history.

That, barring a cataclysmic implosion of civilization, the internet archives being populated now will likely be available for perusal 10,000 years from now.

As a corollary thought, an interesting exercise might be to only generate content -- movies, essays, fiction, non-fiction, whatever -- that you think people 10,000 years from now will find interesting. How does this constrain what projects to undertake?
Why Talent Is Overrated
MQL + ACRE = sweet semantic apps
And the most efficient way (so far) to interact with a computer is using a keyboard and yet most people seem to prefer the ease of use of the mouse.
Good question. After a bit of searching, I found these nation / translation tables. Neat!

* http://www.omniglot.com/language/idioms/incomprehensible.php
* http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Greek-to-me
P2P University Launches
The question in my mind against most of these efficiency driven programs is simple. If you're always looking to eliminate waste and become super efficient, you're not spending any time being creative or chasing radical ideas that may or may not be worth the effort spent on executing them.

Innovation sometimes requires a lot of wasteful experimentation and it looks like that is completely anti-thetical to the whole efficiency argument.
I wonder if you can have the best of both worlds by spending 80% of your time on efficiently making money, and 20% on experimenting wastefully? (The split isn't as important as the idea).
Great talk Ezra! Congrats on all your recent successes with Merb, etc.
They hired a consulting company to guide them. How could they possibly help? Yahoo is clearly not looking to make forays into drastically different businesses, not looking to acquire companies in different sectors, and is ultimately dealing with organizational issues possobly unique to a technology company, that Yahoo should have a better grasp of.
Anyone here have any positive anecdotes to share about a consulting company's value addition to tech companies ? Or in broader sectors?
When I proposed this kind of approach on a UK/US corporation I was waved away due to alleged unnecessary optimizations and lack of focus. Every little project tended to get over six figures a year just in support and licensing, any decision agreed in the countless meetings was carved in stone.

Many big US corporations can't survive this crisis because they have a systemic culture problem. Corporate behavior is very hard to change at that size. Truly lean approach requires maturity. These corporations only seem understand as a lean approach to simply reduce the workforce.
Featured Greasemonkey User Script: Add Google Calendar and Reader to Your Gmail
37signals dropped IE6 support :)
Agreed, bad news presented with poor grammar would be bothersome at best. I will say, however, that most of them are probably used to those mannerisms.
That's an interesting idea but it's hard to evolve a culture of superefficient mindbots (a la Toyota's conveyer belt workers) and crazy hackers with no interest in money.

3M struggled with this as well: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_24/b4038406....
Tech layoffs: The scorecard (updated)
Microsoft deal doesn't look so bad now, what with Yang at the helm of this sinking liner.
Have you seen the recent wage inflation in China and India?
Or as a variation on the Turing Test, create a program that reviews all of your published material, then continues to comment and participate in discussions long after you are gone based on the material you consumed and the comments you made while you were alive -- in effect, transforming you into some sort of virtual living dead.

Somehow I feel compelled to add an evil laugh at this point.
Fine - why are they on the brink of bankrupcy? A company's stock price does not affect the value of its assets. If folks are cashing in stock and depositing money, that's good for a bank. (However, taking out money and putting it elsewhere is bad.) If their competitors are unable to make loans, that's also good.
The Unmentionable Necronomicon of WinApps (Bad Code is Language Independent)
I am working on a MFC app internally referred as the unmentionable NECRONOMICON of WinApps. It compiles and builds by magic and by magic only.
Efficiency is a by-product of removing waste. It isn't the goal. Who can argue against eliminating waste? =)

The next step is learning to see waste. And chasing radical ideas is not necessarily waste. Experimentation is not necessarily waste.

Toyota employs something called "set-based product development" where they develop multiple versions of a product at once. Talk about "wasteful experimentation."

Imagine developing three versions of a web site in Prototype, JQuery, and Flash -- all at the same time.
Who would have possibly predicted that....
Yeah - think of it as ARPA on steroids. Remember ARPA?
54 Hours To Build A Company: A Look At Startup Weekend Phoenix
Yup, even better, they've been trying to print motors (with magnetic components). But I still think we're ~5 years away from printing a consumer electronics device. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
That is a good idea. Slack (a.k.a. 20% time) is built into lean. Why? Because running at 100% leads to waste... if you don't have slack, you increase your cycle time and you end up sub-optimizing the whole system.
Sounds awesome. You should go ahead and do it.
The Case Against Senator Obama’s National CTO
Whenever I read Umair's work I find myself agreeing with many of his ideals (sustainable, local business, etc.). But the way he presents them as the necessary solution for today's business woes feels a little force-fed.

Let's see some data, some real research.
Agreed. What you see is what you get is a lie of omission.

What you don't see is the horrible HTML generated behind the scenes cough Sharepoint WYSIWYG editor cough.
Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009
ReserveChute.com launched at Phx Startup Weekend: C'mon back dat SaaS up
come on, don't take it for "all or nothing/black and white thinking". Grab the overall view of it - that we have to think different to weather this storm and have confidence that we can.
I wouldn't say talent is overrated. I'd say hard work is underrated; talent is misunderstood. Luck is also underrated. Wealth is overrated.
Amory Lovins.
Keep in mind they've hired 1,000 employees over the last year, so this is more like treading water than actually becoming "lean".

Also, a better estimate of employee expenses is maybe 150k per, once you include benefits, taxes, et cetera, so this would save around 200 million a year. Yang said the plan is to save around 400 million net so it looks like maybe half of that will come from layoffs.
nivi, is there a free online canonical source of Toyota's lean system, and if so, can you link to it?
Like: http://projects.bundleweb.com.ar/jWYSIWYG/ ?

Also, a WYM editor based on jQuery: http://www.wymeditor.org/
Good day!
It is very informative and has a very good quality in it.
I like it...

"http://mliragana.blogspot.com/
"http://ak47mod.blogspot.com/
"http://mlairagana.blogspot.com/

Thank you very much for your time.
I think what byrneseyeview means is:

What You See Is Half Assed Texteditor
The point right now is not about being stylish or having lots of functions, it's about the direction. They are making an editor that can be properly marked-up and styled. The rest will come.
Common Sense for Delusional Entrepreneurs
This article reminded me of the "product transition" that Apple forecast last quarter. Was it the new MacBooks? I tend to agree with Cringely that it was neither them nor the iPhone 3G. And now - they're disconinuing the Mac Mini.

Could it be that Apple is going to be entering the "nascent" netbook market - perhaps with a screenless MacBook or a touch-screen tablet display? Or a comination of the two
We should try to come up with a good idea for a one-day project.

The Business domain is full of quantitative data and information about investments. Might be something worth exploring....
Middle management doesn't have so much to do with it. It's simply because their business is huge. It takes a lot of behind the scenes infrastructure work to run one of the biggest websites in the world. Include ad sales, marketing, HR, et cetera and 14,000 employees is reasonable.

In terms of revenue per employee Yahoo seems reasonably staffed for its business size, at least for the tech sector. For comparison, revenues per employee:

Yahoo: $504,559
http://www.smartmoney.com/stock-quote/?story=profile&sym...

Microsoft: $663,956
http://www.smartmoney.com/stock-quote/?story=profile&sym...

IBM: $272,896
http://www.smartmoney.com/stock-quote/?story=profile&sym...

Amazon and Google are a lot higher, around $1 mil revenue per employee, so it really varies, but it's not totally crazy for a business of Yahoo's size to have 14,000 employees.

What it boils down to is, problems that are so small they affect 1% of your users, for a small site that isn't worth worrying about. But for Yahoo it's worth it to have a whole team work on the problem.
The ones you mentioned are okay if you're using them decently. I can see why TicketStumbler would benefit from Twitter, absolutely. And Facebook and blogs are different: blogs help you reach out to your current users, and Facebook Pages are built to let you attract fans. I guess that's not the misusage I was thinking about: I referred more to the spammers and the people who sign up for every service imaginable just to attract people. (The owner of AllFacebook, which I used to write for, did that a lot on Twitter, and it always just seemed slightly wannabe to me.)
Review: T-Mobile's 'Google Phone' Is a Solid Start
A peek at memcached's implementation
Umair takes time to understand, but it's worth it: he's not giving answers but asking questions. It's up to all of us to figure out the answers for our own situations with a broader, questioning mind.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_production_system

But I think it is easier to learn Extreme Programming first because TPS is somewhat abstract. XP is very concrete. Check out Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained.
Britain's top prosecutor warns that surveillance technology is creating a police state
India moon mission ready for launch
More: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JJ22Df02.html
Is it possible that Jerry Yang is a bumbling idiot? I mean the handling of things on his watch, and grammar ;)

1 point is a line, 2 points is a trend ....

Well time will tell how much he gets blamed for yahoo's (possible) downfall. I will be very very annoyed if Yahoo can't remain Yahoo, and saddened.
Mental Armor:  10 Ways to Avoid Brainwashing
It makes more sense to say that talent is necessary but not sufficient. I'd like the writer to provide examples of people who had no apparent talent at all, even lacking whatever talents are necessary to get into a good college, and show me how many billionaires you get from that group. Saying that out of a crowd of Ivy League graduates, since only two made it big, that being an Ivy League graduate had absolutely nothing to do with it at all, makes no sense.
I more concern about the key-value mechanism of memcached. As I remembered, memcached used crc32 to generate integer key from string which only takes 32bit-length. By scaling to terabytes as Facebook does, there must be some magic to play around with.
The DEA would probably happily bust down the door of your 80 year old neighbor regardless.
One way to make things that will be interesting in the future is to make things that are interesting now and would have been interesting in the past. If you can span a few thousand years back in time, there's a good chance you have something fairly universal.

This is another reason to study history: so you can imagine what people a thousand years ago would have liked.
It's possible to cut waste and still increase funding for infrastructure, early childhood education, and local programs with a track record of success. That's what Obama proposes.

We can also cut taxes on the majority of Americans, offsetting that cut by reverting the tax rates on the rich to where they were during Bill Clinton's administration.

As for privacy, it sure as hell isn't Democrats that are indefinitely sending people to military prison camps without trial. Or spying on domestic phone calls and intercepting internet traffic for deep packet inspection.

It was under Clinton, a Democrat, that we had a balanced budget and fiscal responsibility - when was the last time we had a Republican president where that was true?
Along those lines, looking back at the Greeks -- many of the same subjects we talk about today they discussed 2,000 years ago.
does the app update the database regularly?

and I also wish there were formatting + images
Interestingly, if you remove "ensemble", then it reverses it.

So:

"Nous parlons français ensemble." -> "We speak English together."

"Nous parlons français ensemble" -> "We all speak French"

"Nous parlons français." -> "We speak French."

"Nous parlons français" -> "We speak English"
Tell you what, though: when I chose between Stanford with its athletic program and Caltech with its lack thereof, I considered the athletics a knock against Stanford. I ultimately chose Stanford, but despite the athletics, not because of them.

Some people just don't care about sports.
Examples of successful migrations of desktop apps to the Web?
Hi, everyone. A company I know has been selling a desktop application for a while, successfully and profitably. They're now considering moving it to the Web. From what I've seen, this makes a heckuva lot of sense, from both the technical and business perspectives.

However, I'm a bit stuck for examples of applications that have successfully made such a transition, and was hoping to get some insights from others here. FedEx moved from PC-based tracking software to the Web, and seems to have done well as a result. Banks have also abandoned PC-based software in favor of the Web. Adobe has ported Photoshop to the Web, but I'm not sure if it's really comparable, or if they're making real money from it. I'm also unsure of how many people use Intuit's Web-based software, rather than their desktop apps.

So, can you think of any good examples of companies that successfully made this transition? Any and all insights are welcome.
He's not dumb. He and Filo were in the PhD program in CS at Stanford when they started the company.

A lot of the problem here is Google. Google draws away much of the online ad revenue that would have been Yahoo's. It also draws away most of the good hackers, so Yahoo continues to fall behind.

If Airbus were an outlier on the scale that Google is, Boeing would look terrible.
The Matter of Scale
You might also try the Lean Software Institute:
http://www.leansoftwareinstitute.com/
Somewhere nice poetically inspires (rhythms of dopplr)
According to the author, shipping code that erases your hard drive when you click "Quit" is not a defect (because it does so consistently), and fixing those kinds of bugs can be postponed. I didn't find his argument very convincing, though. The first time your customer clicks quit and has their drive erased, you will have an ex-customer.
Thomas A Edison
lacking talents to get into a grade school
has physical limitation (deaf) but invented? phonograph?

i would even say as far that limitations (talent, physical, money etc) are necessary to make it big
Talent alone does little or nothing. Talent + hard work = great potential. Talent + hard work + luck = success.

For a great psychological (layman's) treatment of this, see Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck.
I definitely do not see this staying in it's current incarnation. Having to set a mobile phone down in order to use it highly inhibits usability. The lack of tactile feedback might also be a problem.

I do, however, see this tech progressing to other devices and maybe migrating to the front of the phone. If the interface is calibrated well, you could very well have a touch phone with 3D gestures (push/pull/grab/rotate/etc) and you wouldn't need to worry about fingerprints on the screen. Iron man's 3D modeling device, anyone?
So you want to raise taxes on some people, and raise spending. You say this is a good idea; maybe it is, maybe it isn't. My statement above, that dems don't want to do half the list, stands.

You don't have to be so partisan in response to bland factual statements.
From my personal perspective, I'm half expecting Yahoo to end up just like AOL. A subsidiary of a media conglomerate that is just used when making bad jokes and referencing the past. Their current position definitely indicates this, and I'm talking both on the internal company side of things (in terms of products, innovation, and market reach) and on the public side of things (shares).

I can't help but feel that Yahoo! signed its own death certificate when they so loudly fought off Microsoft's handsome buyout offer. Would Yahoo have taken this offer, at least Yahoo would have the potential to still exist and be recognized. It would've been interesting to see how it played out. In a round about way, we can even look at Yahoo as a modern Netscape... they stood up to Microsoft and bit the bullet in the end.

AOL is probably most remembered for their annoying "Free Dial-Up Internet Trial" CDs in the mail that were more cumbersome than spam, what is Yahoo going to be remembered for?
Problems, Indirection and Performance
Q & A with TipJoy founder Abby Kirgin
In this case Bain was brought in to do the layoffs and other "restructuring", not for technical help.
does the app update the database regularly?

The Wikipedia guys release new dumps quite infrequently (every few months), so there isn't an incremental dump update mechanism - the changeset would simply be too big to make it worthwhile.

and I also wish there were formatting + images

Most formatting is retained. Images, however, would simply make the dump too big for the phone.
Derek Powazek: Pixish Closing 10/31 (What He Learned About Community, User Generated Content, and Launching)
He seems to be the whipping boy in the media though (which is how most people would "know" him) - I assume you know him personally though.

I wouldn't expect him to be dumb like that, but a bumbling manager watching your "baby" suffer was more what I was thinking. I am sure there are furious shareholders right now.