skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would not treat this story as a sign of how to convince VCs. It is almost never the case that VCs say yes because of one magically convincing point you make.

Fred is not a purely functional VC (by which I mean not that he's dysfunctional, but that he's stateful). This slide was accompanied by lots of other evidence, including multiple prior meetings. The slide was just the final increment that pushed him over into yes. It is very unlikely that if a random person had walked up to him and shown him the same slide, Fred would have been convinced.

What convinces VCs is, in order, (a) growth, (b) the founders' personal characteristics, (c) what you say to them. If you seem like an effective person and you have graphs that go up steeply, your pitch could be a bunch of platitudes and they'd still be eager to invest. (As would we, to be honest.) Whereas if you seem like an ineffective person and have no traction, you could have the best story in the world, and they will all say no. (Here we're a little more forgiving; we try to distinguish between genuine ineffectiveness and similar but curable phenomena like youth, inexperience, diffidence, and fear.)
Plenty of users are having problems with a sluggish server. Maybe they just don't have the server resources so accommodate more people.
1. Don't do things by yourself.

2. Make a small commitment - and keep it.
"We must resist the temptation to believe that all thinking follows the computational model." - Peter Norvig, Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, page 147

The thesis of the author's argument is in the middle of the second page. Essentially, he claims that minds and biological systems continually interact with an environment in which not much is known a posteriori. Thus, he concludes that universal Turing machines cannot compute minds.

In the next sentence (top of the third page) he states "Still, this does not imply that minds cannot be computed." Huh? Aren't Turing machines (and equivalents) capable of performing all computations? Or do I misunderstand the Church-Turing Thesis?
Kickstarter: Post to Twitter from Censored Countries
This is the kind of article I come to Hacker News for. A clever hack for a real-world problem with an excellent explanation.
I've used the Beginning iPhone 4 Development book too and I've found it excellent.

Also I used the iPhone development course from Stanford on iTunes U, which is quite comprehensive (these guys will be pretty much competing with this series, which is top notch and also free):

http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/developing-apps-for-ios-...
Define "people". I could see your bank wanting you to have a defined location so they can send you snail mail. Your customers don't really care. Take steam or amazon for instance. As long as I can login and play games or buy books, I don't care where they are or if where they are changes every week. Customer service is certainly easier if you are in the right timezone, but not impossible from others.
There are four ways developers spend their work time:

1) Communicating with you to learn about your needs

2) Making rapid progress because they know exactly what to do and, rather than doing it, tell the computer to do it

3) Being stuck because they don't know exactly what to do, and are trying to figure it out.

4) Sitting around unmotivated because they're not sure they'll be paid for work they could be doing right now.

Obviously you want the developer to spend as much as possible in #2. "Rapid progress" is defined in terms of your needs, so #1 is essential also. It's #3 and #4 that you want to avoid.

1. Remove all doubt that the developer will be paid. Don't look for a fixed price contract. If your project is that predictable, someone is offering it as a product, and it will be cheaper to buy that than to hire someone to reinvent the wheel. If it's not that predictable, there's risk in the situation, and foisting it on the developer can still come back to haunt you (see developer activity #4). Pay on time or (better) in advance. Be open about your budget, and the fact that you have a budget. If your developer knows that you don't mind paying money, he'll have no reservations about putting out his best work.

This can be scary for you, so...

2. Remove all doubt in your mind that you'll be satisfied.

The best credentials are, from most reassuring to least reassuring:

---satisfied clients that you know

---testimonials

---a portfolio of past work similar to what you're looking for

---a killer resume

---they sound smart

3. Be prepared to spend a lot of time in addition to money. The best developers spend their working time on activities 1, 2, and a little time in 3. #1 is irreplaceable.

Also, a note---you're not looking for a friend. You're looking for a hired gun. Think "What would Boba Fett be like if he were a programmer?" Look for someone who's polite and professional, not hip and friendly.
I think solar heat desalination plants in very hot climates like that could be more practical. +40C is fairly common in Singapore and the Middle East
gitorious is for oss projects only, no?
I know some C (it was my first language), but haven't used it in years, so it's a bit rusty. Thanks for sharing your experience though. I'll check out the book.
I've found explaining the situation to another person helps.

Usually having to make coherent statements about a thing causes me to realize what I am failing to put together.

Also, often whatever obvious thing I am failing to see stands out clearly to someone with fresh eyes. Those eyes could be someone else's. Or they could be your own.

Did you know that the human eye constantly moves around even when its staring at something? If it didn't, the same exact stimulus would eventually be invisible to it. They've held eyes completely still in the lab and kept the stimulus the same and eventually the eye stops seeing anything.

The same thing can happen to your attention when it constantly focuses on a problem.
not to say this is the case here, but i'm always cautious with things like this where the main selling points are the credentials of the instructor (see 'about' section)...if the guy is such a badass app developer why is he trying to make money as an instructor? shouldn't he be getting rich building...well, apps?
I am interested, but I dont have experience in backbone.js and node.js
I'm defining GitLab Annex [1] for use in my game which requires me to store a large number of revisions of the same sizeable texture and every version of my game installer. My game installer will have a sizeable monolithic asset archive.

Anyone interested and want to contribute?

[1] - https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/13
> The complaints from Apple developers have been around forever.

I have a theory. Apple developers and users are as angry and outraged when things break or their freedom is restricted, and they do complain (just look at the support boards for Logic, Final Cut, Lion), but they're not as loud to outsiders, because EVERY problem with Apple's ecosystem gets amplified 10x.

I still feel that after 10 years Apple still feels like an underdog to lots of users and developers, and, despite occasional problems, people still love it and want to protect it. Actually, I think the word is 'believe', and that's crucial to Apple success. I mean, who else has such a huge community with so many common goals today?

Funnily, I get the same vibes from the GNU/Linux community (oh, in both cases in a very positive way, btw).
You'll get high from it before you'll die.

This is absolutely true. Too much water can induce euphoria, and can lead to dependence over and above what is necessary for survival. Water addiction is a serious illness; large psych hospitals have halls without access to water fountains for these people.

Google before you downvote, folks.
I drank something between 4-6 liters of water in a couple of hours time last summer, and ended up with fever and throwing up excessively for the remainder of the day. I was more or less knocked-out for the next couple of days. So I can definitely tell you that drinking too much fresh water in a short time frame is anything but healthy...
Cracked Siri has been successfully ported to an iPhone 4
It's definitely not trying to be a GitHub competitor. They love GitHub and just want a way for people to store stuff on their own servers as well. I actually use this and have a hook on my GitLab server to push all recieves to GitHub. Distributed VCS are awesome and I'll never lose my code with this method.
It's a lot of water. Your body will make you feel like not drinking water anymore and sick long before you reach that point. You have to be basically be drugged or completely ignoring your body's signals. You'll also have to go to the washroom soon afterwards as your bladder fills up to deal with the excess water.
It might be just you.
Helping out? Not everything has purely finanicial motivations.
The only non-generic client is Nortel, I'm not sure what's at the other end (but I'd guess Nortel).
ISTR that the SR71 spyplane had large optics that had to loaded by a sled / fork truck and was capable of excellent resolution. See http://www.wvi.com/~sr71webmaster/sr_sensors_pg1.htm for example.
I'm sure he's quite capable, since he is a generally smart dude, but just the same, everything I've ever read makes me think he only likes building things.
Relevant link for those who want to know more about who came up with the magic number. http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/15/
New Video: James Morrison - Up ft. Jessie J - MTV Fresh
Carmack on Rage in his own words, when giving the QuakeCon 2011 keynote (most important bit is probably after the ellipses):

"If you've seen me I've been spending a lot of time over there [at the demo stations] just watching people playing, generally with a big old grin on my face.

"We had so much that we set out to do on this that was different than what we had done before. Id had been almost a stereotype of what you do - first person shooter, run and gun, corridors, monsters jumping out at you, this type of thing. We invented this genre and we followed it for a long ways, but people thought that was all that we were doing.

"And with Rage we set out to be really pretty ambitious, to do a lot of things that we had never done before, and in hindsight knowing that it took six years, we would look back and say, 'Maybe we shouldn't have been quite as ambitious, maybe we should have done a few more of the things we had plenty of experience doing,' but in the end everybody gets the benefit of... we picked hard battles, we fought all of them, and in the end we did a really damn good job on it.

[...]

"It really is probably the most enjoyable id game, from my perspective, that we've ever made. I've played all of our games to degrees, but I was never one of the people who could spend eight hours deathmatching. I know there's a lot of you out there, but that was never kind of my take on our games.

"The pacing on Rage allows us to go ahead and have a game where you have moments of abject terror and intensity, and it's nicely balanced by the areas where you're going through, you're exploring, you're talking in town and doing these things. And we learned a lot through this process. By no means are we ready to be stood up next to Skyrim or something as an adventure game -- that's not what we're doing -- but it is clear at this point that there are beneficial things we can add to the gameplay experience, where we take everything that was fun and good about classic id games, and you can do these other things that add additional layers to it, that don't take anything away."

(Watch the keynote at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgYG-_ha28 )

Carmack's take on his own game seems to be a very very far cry from the parent article's "blame the artists!" whinging. It sounds from what he says about his own take on the game, and probably more importantly from how genuinely excited he seems up on stage, that Rage's mixing up the tried and true id gameplay formula was, personally for him, an exhilarating breath of fresh air.
I'd expect it to be more like a logarithmic increase than an exponential one. The asymptote is the point where you reach perfect integration or fine tuning of the algorithm, at which point extra feedback stops being useful. Or perhaps I'm just taking "exponentially" too literally...
Siri is a game changer. Wait for siri-enabled apps in the future.
Social anxiety disorder
The third paragraph has the core observations.

First quote: "When people talk about designers, an “uncompromising” vision is perfectly compatible with cutting products down to their essentials, focusing them entirely on some narrow set of functions, or making them do one thing perfectly."

One sentence later: "But when people—especially salespeople—talk about customers, the phrase “no compromises” is the claim that the product will do whatever the customer wants, even if different customers want different things. It’s the promise—or pitch—that everyone can have their cake and eat it."

I'll finish with a quote from John Nance. It's about programmers, but it also applies to designers and similar creative people: "They don’t teach office politics in school. They should, but that’s a different story all together. A programmer has to be quietly focused doing mental gymnastics to produce clean working code. It’s difficult and takes all your energy. There’s no time to run around to see who's throwing you under the bus. The games account service plays has consequences."

http://johnnance01.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/never-trust-a-pr...
I enjoy teaching very much, as much as making apps. I even opened my own school in reality to solely teach iOS (http://pragmaticlab.com).

One thing I've noticed in the iOS sector, is that there seems to be a lack of developers in this particular area (possibly due to the steep learning curve). The supply cannot meet the demand. The best way to solve this, in my opinion, is to encourage more developers to try the iOS platform by kickstarting their development.

I've spent quite a bit of time on making these tutorials and thus I cannot afford to simply give them away. The lectures are based on careful thought and personal experience in my lifetime of making iOS apps.
It will be hard to compete with the free Stanford courses.
Especially since the sample looks like it's almost the same format.

It would be better to go the Peepcode route and have ala carte mini videos about specific tasks. How to make a digital photo filter, how to get CoreData working with iCloud, how to make a complicated UI, etc. There are a lot of materials out there about beginning iOS development. There are not very many materials about intermediate-advanced iOS development.

The other option would be to really amp up the production values. All video lessons I've seen, including the Stanford ones, are simply too slow. I usually watch them in 2x speed. The other problem is that the Xcode view is never optimized. It's always slightly difficult to see the text. Much moreso if you are watching it on an external TV set.
I work in a very stressful workplace with the same types of stress (e.g. constant changes in direction, client commitments made without checking with the staff who will deliver, etc). Unfortunately, the root cause of these problems lies with the company leadership which makes them exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to correct. The only way to remove this type of stress is to leave for another company. As you seek a new job, be open with prospective employers about the reasons you are looking, and prepare questions to verify that you're next employer doesn't have the same problems.

I wish you luck -- these circumstances are ver difficult, and they can destroy your health. Run, don't walk away.
Every time I read the headline for a fast algorithm for inverse square root I think "Well, yeah, you just multiply the input by itself. Can't get much faster to undo a square root than that." Silly me.
Scott Meyer one of the worlds highest regarded authors on C++ has never written a line of production C++ code.

Being able to teach a skill and being good at that skill are related but different abilities.
Ask HN: Advice about diving into web analytics?
I'm currently working on my final year Computing project and decided to write a real-time web analytics application with visualization.

For research I'm spending a lot of time reading about the concepts and architecture of web analysis. Any recommendations in what papers to read, coding paradigms etc would be very helpful.

Thanks all.
Do you know if you can set the British English of Siri independent of the phone language? As a Brit in the US, my Android phone doesn't understand anything I say unless I say it in a so-bad-its-almost-xenophobic American accent. Same with my car.

YouTube videos indicate that Siri does understand British accents, but if I have to set the phone language to full on British, that would be a bit annoying (sadly, it is now tires, color, favorite and temperatures in Farenheit for me).
> So how does Blizzard extract more money from you?

Because World of Warcraft.
Thanks for the response, excellent advice.
> And this is why I never understand why so many Apple users want Android & Windows to fail.

Huh? I thought it was the other way around, no? (i.e.: it's not fee, must die, etc)

And really, webapps aren't going anywhere. The App Store was created because of user demand (not because Steve Jobs was a genius), and with Webkit and newer mobile IE it's probably the best time ever to write an web app. It's up to developers to choose.
Throwable Ball Camera May Revolutionize How We Watch Sports
I was not asserting that ONLY stories with games or great art direction succeed.
some people enjoy sharing the things they enjoy.
Isn't "Dive Into" a trademark of Mark Pilgrim ? - trading off of someone-else's brand is kind of tacky.
They do have samples which might help a person decide whether the teaching style works for them.

http://diveintoios.com/samples
Cyber Cell Mumbai Websites hacked by Pakistani Hacker
Siri Assistant is helpful..and funny
Apple's new Siri assistant on the iPhone 4S proves to be a very helpful application...with a bit of a sense of humor.
WiFi traffic has nothing to do with internet traffic per se. The problem is that the only popular WiFi protocol that is anonymous (doesn't require passwords/user credentials) is also not encrypted. This problem could elegantly be solved with a ssh-like tunnel between the consumer device and the WiFi router, the rest of the traffic could still be plain text.
https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/15
I meant live running code of the component you are selling. For example, here is a live demo of the jQuery Accordion UI plugin http://jqueryui.com/demos/accordion/. Hope this help.s
Being stuck can seem like a waste of time because it’s holding up productivity on your current project. However, when I am stuck I often learn things about the platform, debugging tools, even things like how to use google and stack overflow well. I agree it sucks, but I’ve learned a lot being stuck.
agreed. some people call it confessional debugging.
For a customer perspective, check out Avinash Kaushik's books on web statistics. They are highly recommended and full of best practices that you should be aware of. Of course, if you are really ambitious you could reach out to him and others in the industry to find out a niche.

Web Analytics: An Hour a Day: http://www.amazon.com/Web-Analytics-Hour-Avinash-Kaushik/dp/...

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity: http://www.amazon.com/Web-Analytics-2-0-Accountability-Centr...
Polish up your resumé and start shopping around for another job. Places that manage by panic attack do not get better, unless the leadership is changed.

Seriously, don't wait, you are shortening your life by accepting that sort of phantom stress. You have skills, you are not trapped in this job by anything other than your desire to carry through with things you started and your fear of change.
I'm really stuck. I hate my job and dread every day of it. I'm too scared to move on somehow because of some ill form of loyalty towards its owner and a limited job market here.

I've dropped out of college (a really good one, you should know it) because I couldn't afford it any more and I'm now working as a .NET web developer (4 years) with people clearly less knowledgeable about programming and the internet in general.

The most senior dev guy (works there for 14 years) is a cocky jog who only knows VB.NET, who advocates the use of POS content management systems such as DotNetNuke. His code is such a bad and unmanageable mess, I could supply thedailywtf with code excerpts for the rest of eternity. When you try to explain concepts such as anonymous methods to him his head explodes.

Do you think we have code versioning? Do you think we freeze functionality, have releases, or even any sort of requirements for our custom modules and libraries? No, every fucking web site has a slightly different version, it's a pure ghetto.

Sometimes I slack off for the entire day, browsing reddit, and with 30 minutes of coding I'm still more productive than any of ny work mates.

These guys don't know what the "cascading" in CSS stands for. "What is a selector?".

When I started I had to fix the all of our web servers, they crashed every day because of simple configuration mistakes.

These are guys that set up the dbs with a full transaction logging only to delete the transaction logs every day because they're getting too big.

"We" now made the decision to move like 400 web sites, (some of them are nationally known and get a lot of traffic), sites that expose public web services, sometimes have custom services running in the background that require os access, and more, to a SHARED web hoster where we don't have any other access than PLESK. Without any migration plan. Bringing up VPS or dedicated hosts will give you empty stares. They now started migrating and realized that well, it's not going to work out like this... durr... "what do we do now?"

These guys make CMS updates on a live server without informing the customers, if they're having a good day they at least don't forget to make a db and site backup first. Ah yeah, we also don't have staging servers. So most of the guys do development on live sites.

I tried to change things, introduce new practices, I tried really hard. But now I'm just bitter. Before I was a nice and outgoing guy, now I'm not even advocating for alternatives and I stopped giving input.

Man... I'm about to throw up
Computation: digital today, analog tomorrow?
except the voice recognition part doesn't work. other than that! :)

edit: looks like it just won't communicate with apple's server? (Which I think is the main functionality) it's hard to tell since video doesn't show any voice commands working.
Show HN: Job-buddy.com - The fastest way to get a job
Eurocopter demonstrates new emergency backup electric motor for helicopters
JavaScriptMVC 3.2 is out
The main functionality doesn't work. Useless.
He lost me at "As a computer scientist, I am of course highly familiar with the local party scene."
Fair point, although it depends on the game; I enjoyed the sidequests in Oblivion more than the main quest and would submit that most players would be really missing out if they didn't finish them.

Of course, that's quite a different thing to timesinks like "find all 400 hidden widgets" which can get pretty tedious...
I posted it because I used it for a few apps and I really like it.

Changelog:

https://github.com/jupiterjs/javascriptmvc/blob/c53ddc4edcbd...
The user's device would somehow have to be sure it's talking to the legitimate router, and not one an attacker set up with a deceptively similar SSID. I can't think of a way this would be possible, unless popular access points were signed by CAs.
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