skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Why will software be any different? It takes no resources except a brain, a computer and a connection. The whole world has the same quality of brains and computers as we, and their connection quality is often much better and cheaper than ours."

It takes one more resource: communication. Custom software development is quite different from motorcycles. If you need custom software development, and your business is going to depend on the result, outsourcing that effort to another country, especially across cultural and maybe language barriers, can be a disaster. You need developers who understand your business and the expectations of your customers.

In fact, take your argument and apply it to every other position in a company. Only a few of them, like sales, truly require an in-person presence, yet companies don't outsource most of them. Are they crazy, or are there good reasons for that?
I've used Gemstone's OODB. It really isn't too good to be true. I'd look to 'not 100% free', not '1.9', no easy migration path to other data storage platforms ( switching off gemstone wouldnt be like switching from MySQL to PgSQL ) and various other concerns of that sort.

I'm am quite interested to hear from people who use Ruby but aren't interested in Maglev as to why they aren't interested.
Patent Issue Delays Doom 3 Source Code Release (Carmack's Reverse Alg.)
OpenSUSE 12.1 Arrives: What's New and What Happened to 12.0?
Even if they are safe, I will probably opt-out but I definitely don't like being separated from my baggage on the belt during the pat-down process.

This usually isn't an issue, you can see your bags or have them set aside. The issue I have personally been running intro (I travel about 2x per month on average, meaning potentially 4 trips through these things) is that when you opt-out it seems like it is taking longer and longer for them to find a suitable pat-down attendant.

This could just be my own skepticism, but it certainly seems that the wait is getting longer and longer each time.
Play framework uses hibernate + JPA under the hood (although you may be able to switch it for something else) but provides so much candy around it that it feels like using Doctrine or something.

This isn't a bad thing as hibernate is an extremely powerful and complete ORM which I trust allot more than any of the half baked ones.

If you want to use hibernate properly I recommend reading "Java Persistence with Hibernate" It explains the framework very well including the logic behind allot of the things that feel strange or over engineered with it.
Are you also going to open-source some parts of the project?
Wikimedia supports American Censorship Day
#1 does not apply. If your balance goes below zero, you start paying interest. It's a pretty high rate (12-18% or so), but nothing that will get you into trouble as long as you top it up within a week or even a month. There are no other overdraft fees.
#2: I don't know, I've never encountered a reward card. They're certainly not common here, probably don't exist at all.
#3: You have a point there, but interest on simple current accounts (as opposed to savings accounts) is often zero percent here, certainly not much higher than 1% or so.
(I live in the Netherlands.)
If this is true about the Google fold that has got to be one of the most stupid things I've heard them do.

So Google decides where the fold is and not the designer or visitor? That seems stupid to me. How are they to determine such a thing? How are we as website creators supposed to know what Google's idea of the fold is to make sure we get that high value? Seems another way for people to game Google by stuffing all the content within this "fold" making for crappy websites.

Am I crazy that I think we shouldn't be designing websites for search engines but for people?
What makes you comfortable with the mm wave system? My understanding is that more research is needed on how millimeter waves affect cells. http://thz.caltech.edu/
Great point - voice recognition is one of my favorite parts of Android (especially with the enhancements in ICS) and you'll obviously need a mic for that.

-

Even though this is Amazon, a company with a strong tech heritage, I'm pretty dubious of anyone's ability to improve on stock Android, especially now that it has strong design leadership in Matias Duarte. The improvements in ICS certainly look far more compelling than anything Amazon or B&N added.
Wow, I didn't know children read, much less contributed to, HN. What a fucking waste of time.
The first web app I ever built (about 6 years ago) was related to sharing photos of home design and architecture. I got something like 4 signups, and it was free...

Being my first effort, I did everything wrong. Too many features, delayed launching, awful code, unrealistic traffic expectations, fear of billing systems (probably warranted at the time) - pretty much everything.

But... not giving up too easily, I tried selling links on the site. (I had no traffic, so ads were a bust. I figured it might have some SEO value). Turns out that's not a bad niche for that sort of thing, and the site wound up making a few hundred dollars a month in link sales. That has since dried up (across every site on which I've sold links - I think Google is figuring this out), but it was nice that it wasn't a total waste of time, financially speaking.

Every stinker is a step forward.
I agree with you 100%, and from an educational and learning theory perspective that's the way to go. Something that is engaging, interesting, exciting and cool is highly motivating and therefore has a much greater chance of being able to "sneak in" the learning while the kids think they're just having a bit of fun.

Unfortunately, that's now how it works in England. It's completely bass-ackwards and all performance and learning has to be measured so that it can be inspected, compared to others' and reported on.

Unless there is a political "sea change" in England with respect to this issue, your "preference" is worthless. Edexcel, is a private publisher who writes the exams, and sells the textbooks and makes millions of pounds a year on the system as is. Inspection and Regulation can be billed at a tremendous markup and it pays for a lot of lobbyists.

Unions in England were broken by Thatcher, so the 3 (4?) teacher's unions (yes, plural) are powerless to lobby against the system ... in a brilliant case of divide and conquer, they spend as much time arguing amongst themselves as lobbying for teacher's right to be trusted.

The office of inspection of schools has a motto of something like "Better education through inspection" ... how disjointed is that? Not through "instruction" or "enjoyment" or "making cool stuff" but "inspection"

Sorry ... your preference is irrelevant.

I feel very passionately about that, every day they're failing their children and they can do so much better.

It's a large part of the reason I've quit teaching but, Que Sera right?
In environmental costs, I'd much rather have FeNi chemistry fully explored. Nickel iron batteries can be abused by under and over charging, short circuiting heat, cold, vibration, and other effects and still last decades.

Jay Leno has an antique car that still has a working FeNi battery. I think it needs topped off with distilled water every so often. The electrolyte is KOH so it even acts as a preservative. The only problem with the reaction is it's slow to charge and discharge.
Just a bit of advice from back when I was sending letters over the DMCA.

If your congressman is supporting the bill, don't bother. My Senator at the time was Fritz Hollings; came from a poor district, so he was dependent on a lot of outside contributions. I recall Disney being one of his largest contributors. I received a response 3 months after it passed that more or less told me I was a enemy of commerce. I won't lie, I was a little shocked to get back such a pointed letter when I was as courteous and respectful as possible.

I learned my lesson from that one. You can send a letter to anyone and generally it is a great idea, but if they get a dime from your position's opposition, it is just pissing in the wind. It's just business.
Nikon D7000 - Nikon Cameras Black Friday
Steps To Building A Successful Internet Business
A reddit user on the real reason the US is buying these scanners:

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/mdwox/eu_has_bann...
I experienced "security theater" just this past weekend coming back from Nashville. As the line for the x-ray scanner started to grow, they started letting people just go through the metal detectors. Once the line shrunk back down, they started forcing people to go through the scanner again.

I opted out of the scanner just as they started letting people go through the metal detector again. The TSA agent told me, "you know these are completely safe and no human sees the pictures anymore, right?" If I had gotten in line just a few seconds later, I wouldn't have had to go through the scanner or be subject to the enhanced pat down. I mentioned this to the TSA agent doing my screening and he said, "sometimes timing is everything". If the scanners are as necessary as they want us to think, I'm glad to know that the chance that my plane gets blown up doesn't depend on how well those scanners work but simply on whether a would-be bomber went through security during a busy period.
At Amsterdam Schipol they are used for many flights (especially to the US). There is no opt-out, as there is in the US.

I don't know if these are X-Ray or millimeter wave scanners, though.
Agree... Leave Italians some few more generations to get used to those cumbersomely intelligible idiom and phonology... :)
The total variation distance is an upper bound for the absolute difference in probability over all subsets of permutations.

In particular, we can consider the set:

U = {all permuations that have never been seen by a human}

The counting arguments in the article lead us to conclude that the uniform probability of U is very close to 1, i.e. almost all permuations have never been obtained by a human shuffle. The Bayer-Diaconis result implies that for certain types of shuffles the probability of ending up in U is at least

1 - (the total variation distance above)

So for 8 shuffles, we have a probablity of at least 82.4% of landing in U. This is considerably weaker than "every shuffle is unique".
Creating pictures on the web with Forth
Thanks! I do plan to post it on HN, I just want to wait until it's a bit better (right now stackoverflow dominates the results, so I need to adjust the ranking system and index more sites).

BTW, I don't see your email in your profile.
Resistance Bands - Comparisons with Free Weights
The reasons I don't use tarsnap:

1. Not a big enough company. Colin might get hit by a bus.

2. Rackspace has no incoming bandwidth charges on their cloud.
Game versus App?
Assuming one wants to quit his job and wants to delve into the realm of development on his own to survive, where he should focus? Game or App? What people mostly want? What's the big market?
People lived in this environment (Soviet Russia) for a lot longer than 6 years. And as the author points out, it doesn't take long for some people to acclimate. Snitching on friends and the other "ugly" aspects are part of human nature. Even if we can avoid some of them most of the time, just think what crazy things you're doing to other people today without it even bothering you.
I had a similar problem to this, it pissed me off the ages although I did spend allot of time trying to do it with @ManyToMany as having a separate Entity just for the relationship seemed like bloat to me.
As I recommended before, read the book "Java Persistence with Hibernate" and things will start to make more sense.

Hibernate is generally far more concerned with being flexible and robust than it is with being DRY or providing a perfect database abstraction. You really do still have to think about your data from the point of view of the DBMS regards 'Owning' Associations etc.

One thing with Play! is that it does try to over abstract hibernate a little bit and turn it into ActiveRecord which is fine for simple things but hibernate is not like ActiveRecord!
GO ON THE CRAZIEST SITE AROUND SINCE.....
This is better than Instapaper.
This review is a good example of the strange willingness to ignore the fact that the iPhone and iPad are "convergence devices".

The original iPod was held up as a great design because it did one thing and did it well. The iPhone at the time of introduction did 3 things poorly (phone, iPod, browser) but succeeded because it was a good trade-off. You were going to buy a phone anyway, probably an iPod too. If you could pay a small extra fee and get a passable mobile web browser and only have to carry one device then that was a good deal.

However the cognitive dissonance remains in the Apple community where compromise is never supposed to be good enough. So the Kindle Fire can be a "fail" because it's not as good an e-reader as e-ink devices. Guess what, neither is the iPad, just like the iPhone is still not a better phone than some disposable handset with a months standby. Nor is the iPad as mobile or as cheap as an e-ink reader but as an overall package it's pretty neat, particularly if you watch a lot of video and surf the web for entertainment and want to play Angry Birds. And so is the kindle Fire, just scoring a bit more highly on mobile and cheap and losing out on some other things.

It's just plain weird to worship one set of engineering trade-offs as perfection and ruthlessly attack another set of tradeoffs that, in the big picture, are so similar as to be indistinguishable to most normal people.
Use labels as placeholders for HTML forms. jQuery plugin with IE6+ support
Government IT projects: [One] trial and [no] error
Everyone can, but almost nobody does. He's walking encyclopedia when it comes to this sort of thing.
See my other reply below to toyg, if your company is writing a lot of similar software your going to have to start making flexible standard stuff rather than rewriting it every time.

But I agree with you if you're going in with a blank slate.
I don't think the grid is completely correct in Manhattan, even where the grid exists. It puts Washington Square Park , which southern end should be 4th street, as 6th street, and on the northern end of the grid, George Washington Bridge, which comes into Manhattan at 175th (I believe), is marked at 180/181st.

This is a really cool map, but some minor adjustments and testing to get the correct fit in Manhattan first would make a notable improvement in the overall product. I'd say fitting goals would be Houston as 1st street, and maybe 191st-200s area for north bound (Bronx continues the pattern, but it's much less consistent). Good work!
A couple of the components used are actually already open-source:

https://github.com/esnme/ultrajson - Super-fast JSON serializer.

https://github.com/esnme/locust - Scalable load testing tool capable of simulating millions of users.

https://github.com/esnme/amysql - 100% async/event driven MySQL driver.

https://github.com/hjlarsson/gevent-memcache - memcached driver for gevent.
Getting started with Kranium.js – a brilliant framework for Titanium Mobile
Is this a one off website or based on some framework? This seems like a very powerfully general purpose advocacy tool.
would be nice if they provided readability as a library or a documented API for third-parties.
Save U.S. Jobs
> "cram everything above the fold, no matter the cost"

The reason I said it's a straw man is because I've never seen anyone actually champion that point of view. I've seen minimalist landing pages, but I haven't come across any I can think of that try to cram everything above the fold.
I hope there is still good support for us old folks who like our plain old Java!
I think it takes a bit more deep analysis of what your skills & qualifications are along with what ideas you would have for either an app or game. Are you already an iOS dev?
bwahahahahhaha???? I can't figure out if I should laugh or cry? This is the same thing as the Indian government declaring that PI is exactly 3.14 or something to that extent.
re your point: "For all we know that company might have created some revolutionary technology but, who knows, their build system is still crappy and they forgot to change a symlink somewhere?"

if you're prepping for a meeting with such an influential person (regardless of your thoughts about him, his opinion carries weight in tech circles) wouldn't you triple check everything and make sure it's ready to go so you don't blow your one big shot? in that situation people should be prepared and have a backup device ready with the app loaded to shove in his face instead so he could still mes around with it
yeah we only had 20,000 letters sent in by consumer groups and a huge twitter campaign #debill.

All that meant was a discussion where the MP in charge of the bill thought that the IP address meant Intellectual Property address and all of Labour turning up for 5 mins to vote it through before the general election..
Internet Engineers' Letter in Opposition to DNS Filtering Legislation
And there really is nothing to fear. You can supplement that income by building apps for other people in their spare time now that you have a valuable skill. There's no reason you can't have it both ways.
Decorative Knots, Neddle Case
VC Experts Q3 2011 Life Science Valuation Report
Please tell me a little bit about your product before I leave my email. Could be awesome of course but it doesn't give much confidence.
Tuning Graphite for 3M points/minute with a single backend machine (a story)
Just tried it with verbatim but results are still no good =( I can see how it is doing exactly what it is told to do ("www.yelp.com/events"), but not what I would like. I like the idea of being able to do verbatim searches though! (and still miss the + button...)
Omaha, Chrome's open-source autoupdate system
My objection to "the semantic web" is:

1. Semantics only have meaning in a given context.
2. "Global context" is an oxymoron.

And most of the song-and-dance routine about how wonderfully fantastic the semantic web will be implicitly assumes the creation of a global context, in which we all reasonably precisely agree on all the semantics of everything, and that's total pie-in-the-sky.

Recommended reading (which has the advantage of being a war story and not an exercise in theoretical handwaving): http://reprog.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/semantic-mapping-is-h... Also, follow those first two links down too ("the MARC format" and "Dublin Core") for full comprehension. You can't even get agreement on being what an author is between two contexts, and you think you're going to build a glorious semantic web‽ The semantic issues aren't going to get easier after that attribute....
Here's a good writeup of what Roberts had to say over on geekwire…

http://www.geekwire.com/2011/popcap-ceo-secrets-building-gre...

Money quote: "Luck is always a factor in business … and the most successful companies actually take advantage of luck"
Sadly no :( would have been very interesting
Free service and free apps? Whats the business model?
This is one reason I use dropbox. My data is sync'd between 4 computers in different locations, as well as a copy on the dropbox servers.

Even if dropbox disappeared overnight I would have my data.
There's a bigger joke here. They are asking people WHO ARE ALREADY NOT KNOWLEDGEABLE ENOUGH TO ADD A WIFI ENCRYPTION to change their network SSID. I think .01% of the population will benefit.

Naturally opt-in < opt-out.
Since when did start-up become synonymous with consumer application start-up?

If it makes you feel any better, our startup is enterprise focused. Not everybody is focused on just consumer apps.

I don't know about you guys, but I am enticed by the idea of selling something to organizations that generally expect to (and do) spend actual money on products and services. The whole advertising based, or even freemium model, world of consumer apps just doesn't resonate with me. Not saying it doesn't work, obviously it does. Just saying that it doesn't feel like where I personally want to be.
My laptop runs duplicity once every two hours from cron which does gpg encrypted incremental backups to a network share.

My HTPC does the same, but to an external hard drive plugged in via USB.

Easy and quick to set up, and I don't have to rely on a third party run service.
Accel Launches Third India Fund; Will Invest $155M In Early Stage Startups
I beg to differ. Instapaper 3.0 was an amazing step forward for the software.
Garage to Fortune 500: How 5 Companies Started Small and Ended BIG
So how long do you reckon we will have to wait for something like this? I'm still waiting for lithium-air batteries from MIT http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/better-battery-storage-07...
I tried to get my previous business partner to realize that, but he (like others) feel uncomfortable with the "luck" factor. I'm not because I realize I got lucky and thus have even greater reason to take advantage of it. :)

My new business partner is 100% on board to seeing and taking advantage of luck.
This would be a real game changer for electric cars. Even a "mere" 3x enhancement would already make them really competitive with combustion engines ones, but with 10x they would just be better than our traditional cars. Let's hope this technology can be industrialized in an economic way.
It's not my product. It's the product of the guy who invented the initial search algorithm of Google. :)
How to Choose Used Auto Parts
RE to Scoble: Why I'm ignoring self-help gurus lately
While more study is needed with any system it is my understanding that millimeter wave radio waves will not penetrate very far beyond the surface cells while x-rays will pass through the entire body mass. Just on the raw mass affected by the device the millimeter wave system seems less risky.
Armin Ronacher's article explains why they couldn't use either: http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2011/11/15/modern-web-applications-a...

(He's the author/maintainer/we_need_a_new_word_for_this of jinja2, btw)
I think if you bent the corner of several cards, depending on how you shuffle the cards it might affect how random they are.
Ownership isn't the important thing, it's the only thing - Felix Denis
The original source they refer to is http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/1... ... which seems to indicate European airports can still use the scanners as long as they comply with privacy guidelines and the technology uses something other than X-rays. For example, passive-millimeter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_body_scanner
How Applidium reverse engineered Siri's protocol
> The most irritating example of this is that if you don't pass enough arguments to a proc object the other parameters get filled in with nil. In my mind this should throw a type error, but in Ruby it doesn't.

Maybe automate checking this? I don't know Ruby much, but there's .arity method on proc that seems to be apropriate for this.
Cloud Computing in General
Rebranding Bank Simple
How to forcibly eject a CD/DVD from a MacBook Air USB SuperDrive
>People aren't arguing that ALL of you content needs to be above the fold.

I've been working with corporate and non-profit clients of all sizes, from mom-and-pop's to fortune 500, for the better part of 5 years now. (I'm the online Marketing Manager at a Web Development Agency-I code, too) Across that whole gamut of clients I still hear people arguing for literally everything above the fold. It's a conversation I have at least once per quarter. (I've even had it with start up founders.)

There are three client education conversations I've had at least one of every month in the last 5 years. 1) The difference between a web browser and the internet which usually stems from discussing graceful degradation in web design and functionality. 2) Why the fold is not as big of a deal as you think it is. 3) The difference between SEM and SEO.

It's not the most fun thing in the world, but it's the reality of building websites for people with money.
Discount Nikon Camera
Pirate wireless network on NYC L train