skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I seems like the general system is something like:

A) A set of tools to talk with external systems
B) A set of tools for manipulating the internal representation of payroll data
C) A GUI for interacting with / managing the system.

When their internal process is simple managing the payroll system should be simple. When their internal process is complex you get fat consulting checks. Which brings up a great point, it seems like large companies that simplify their internal systems could avoid writing a lot of consulting checks, so I suspect they must be out there and you just don't hear about.
The problem with these stories is that they assume that correlation is causation: they pick some subset of all the things that influenced Amazon and present them as the decisive influences, without a evidence to support that suggestion.

I humbly suggest that many people that share this worldview and attempted to execute based on it have failed. This advice is as worthwhile as 'lean startup advice': there are no guarantees, it depends on many factors and most will fail.
"
The idea that they're not seriously pushing for this is flawed."

Yes. Not everyone has to be 'in' on the scam.

You seem to have some information that the WH will be for some such bill; that's more than I've known.

Biden? Yes, he would get to make a tie breaking vote in the Senate.
And the promised capacity increase is always 10x, neither more nor less.
Automated Tomcat ISAPI Redirect Setup for IIS now in private Beta.
It's not just about diversity of competencies. It's about complementary but dissimilar skills. Apple is able to make beloved consumer electronics because they mesh aesthetic sensibilities and design with quality hw&sw construction. Google succeeded because better algorithms (page rank) led to higher quality results and good software engineering techniques (map-reduce, sharding) married to novel data center operations (heavily automated consumer hw based servers) allowed them to crank out results faster and cheaper than the competition, making ad revenue all that more potent and enabling lower margin ads (such as adwords).

Without a solid track record of success I can imagine it might be difficult to convince outsiders of the merits of a company that is more unusual than its competitors. I think the solution to that is the same as always, keep efficient and execute well until you acquire the profit or the funding to grow.
'Asynch UI' has its uses but, in case of email, I don't think benefits to users have much substance. Yes, perception is a critical design factor we must all deal with on daily basis but we shouldn't forget that 'magic show' entertains at best and offers no real value to users. 'Magic' by another name is hoodwinking and can easily induce confusion and anger when misapplied.
There's something to be said about user confidence and a user's confidence level directly correlating to their productivity using your app.

I could not have thought of a worse example than removing a progress indicator from sending an email. Making an "async UI" work in a fluid way that provides confidence to the end user is much harder than simply changing the state immediately and hoping that 99% of the time, it works.

Error handing can be a pleasant experience if done correctly, and in this blog post it's just an afterthought.

Here's a better way to do it:

- I click "Send Mail"

- My UI changes as if it were sent, allowing me to do other things in the meantime.

- I receive a growl notification in some other part of the UI that tells me the email has been successfully sent.

- If 1 second has gone by and I did not receive a response from the server to confirm that the mail has been sent, I will see an indicator that tells me that the sending is in progress, where the growl indicator would have been.

- If it is an error, the indicator changes and allows me to click it to go back to the mail composition view.

The concept of providing perceived performance is not new, but the details are in the execution, and you will shoot your self in the foot if you don't cover all the little details that are required to make something like this work.

Otherwise, some company is going to implement some jarring async UI incorrectly and piss off a lot of users.

Yes, blocking a UI is bad, but notifying the user of progress and task completion is a very good thing.
Some research companies will build things that are 5 years off from being viable and that approach is generally contrary to "lean startup advice".

But Amazon built something that was viable immediately AND fit into a 5-7 year plan.
This isn't "calming them down". This is throwing gasoline onto the fire.

Google should understand that in countries where privacy is considered an fundamental right, the default answer when it comes to gathering this kind of information is "no", no matter how minor the issue may be.

Telling those authorities "we're gonna do it anyway" is a major provocation.
I especially want to thank our new team members. They've really put a lot of work into this release. You guys rock!
I see your point, and I even mostly agree.

Deus Ex is probably not as good as an example as System Shock 2. Deus Ex was way too long ever for me, and can indeed become tedious.

System Shock 2 also has something like a skill point system, but it feels different: In Deus Ex you can always do almost everything, just with more or less efficiency. System Shock 2 tends more toward unlocking e.g. the ability to use a specific gun. The game also has a knack for keeping you low on at least one supply (health or ammo or weapons or so).

Experience points are limited, you get them for progressing in the story. So you can't stay around and grind. (That's similar in Deus Ex.) So your level of abilities is just a convenient way for escalating the stories. Just like getting new weapons in Half Life or new kinds of tanks in a real-time strategy game.

On the other hand, you might like games like nethack or Spelunky. They have a notion of your character growing in abilities, but since each game is short, you start from zero each time, handling the progression well just becomes another skill. A bit like picking up weapons and ammo in Quake 3 in the most efficient manner possible. Or Master of Orion, where getting new technology is part of the game (and can be compared to getting new skills in an RPG).
Photo Manipulation Tutorials: 50 Wickedly Creative Tips | blogfreakz.com
There's a pretty long answer to that question. User stories are a critical piece of XP (eXtreme Programming), and Tracker is a project management tool targeted directly at XP teams.

But you have to buy in to XP in order to see the value of User Stores or Tracker.
DotCloud rolls out MongoDB replicaset, MySQL and Redis master-slave
You don't need an exploit to install ROMs on Galaxy S variants (and in general most/all Samsung smartphones). The first stage bootloader supports partition rewrite over USB using a leaked "Odin" tool (or the open source "Heimdall" tool built through reverse engineering).
I actually use a similar Dropbox Music setup to seamlessly sync my music via WiFi. I use Android, so sadly I can't check out your app. But it sure looks great, and I would definitely use it!

For those w/Android who would like to use Tunebox -- I use:

1) Music folder within Dropbox, keeps all my music in synch even when switching computers (I use many different computers/laptops, and sometimes my phone isn't in reach but I'd like to listen to my tunes). I have the 50GB plan, my library uses about 20GB of it.

2) The super-uber-incredibly-awesome DropSync[1] Android app which syncs one folder from Dropbox in the lite version. Which is more than enough for me! New music, which I downloaded to my Dropbox on my computer some time earlier gets wirelessly synced for daily use with my phone as soon as I connect to a Wifi. So awesome!

Seriously, I feel like DropSync is the best-kept Android app secret ever. Use it, if you use Dropbox.

[1] https://market.android.com/details?id=com.ttxapps.dropsync
Another competitor to PayPal for online payments. Cool domain name
You don't say? they have washing machines that they plug and unplug every single day? 2 lines, why didn't I think of that. Brilliant! It's so cheap to build a 3-phase charger at 400V at 32 amps so you can charge a 20kWh pack in 2 hours (60kWh in 6!). Everyone should do it. It makes perfect economic sense! It's exactly like gas. Everytime I want to fill up my car, I sit at the pump for 6 hours. But this battery tech will change all that. Yes, now that we have better longer-lasting batteries, it won't take so long to fill up. Nevermind that there is an ENORMOUS demand for batteries, that these are at least a decade away from production, and thusly economies of scale are already reached. But sure, continue to tell me the same old bullshit. eventually someone will believe it, and we'll all start living in the future.
New Common Crawl blog post addressing many of the questions raised here last week.
http://www.commoncrawl.org/answers-to-recent-community-quest...

I work at Common Crawl.Thanks for all the interest and the good questions! Lisa
> Of course, if for some reason none of your Macs will even POST or you happen to be Mac-less, and you're nowhere within driving distance of someone with a working Mac or an Apple Store the, yes, disassembling the drive is probably a reasonable option.

You forget the part about the damaged cable like what can be seen on a few pictures. If the link between the MacBook and the drive is severed, there is no way a firmware on the laptop could cause the disk to eject. And with no forcible eject trigger you're left with the 'cracking the case open' solution.

Shouldn't happen more than once per drive though, so I guess this is why Apple couldn't be bothered with an actual forcible reject button.

EDIT : he seems to claim that the reboot trick does work, so apparently the cable is still at least partially functional in his case.
Not surprising. TSA left a box cutter in my suitcase. http://blog.ninthyard.com/2009/04/fun-with-government-part-2...
it allows you to reach people who aren't your facebook/twitter friends - cool!
it is easy. If you own you re-sell what you own. If you granted the rights under the license, you re-sell the rights granted under the license until the license states that the rights aren't transferrable. You agreed to the license. All this licenses and ToS are complete crap, yet until the law changed, the law seems to favor the crap. And by complacently agreeing to it, we help to proliferate it.
Google appears to use Oracle Hyperion and Oracle Essbase - obviously not for their main product offerings - but they do use Oracle products:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/uslocations/mountain-view...
There are interesting differences between the continents (probably even greater differences between countries, too):

* Firefox is No 1 (tied or otherwise) in Africa and Europe, and second in North America

* Chrome is safely in second in Asia, and miles ahead even IE in South America.

Personally, I very much prefer Firefox.
I get a blank loading screen for about 5 min, then some random sound on my phone. A lot of connection issues :( - sticking with the default mail app for now.
The point of DNScurve is not to bother attempting to create a cryptographic chain of custody for all DNS records (which is what DNSSEC does), at least not until after we've set it up so that a browser can make a request of a server that cannot be tampered with.

It is a vastly simpler, tactical solution to the DNS "security problem" (I'm a skeptic about the long term importance of this problem too).
>The scam works just as well if it does pass, too -- and the monopolistic content industries have deeper pockets than the people paying the opposition lobbyists.

RIAA/MPAA with more money than major telecoms? I'm not so sure...
Does "shuffle" intelligently shuffle through cached songs while offline? That'd be handy.

And is there an "offline" toggle in the app, or would you have to put the device in airplane mode?

I like the idea of having my music in the cloud. I just don't like the battery drain of constant streaming. Or the "what happens when I'm on a train/a plane/a crappy-2G connection?" cases. Robust offline support would be totally awesome.
Thanks for the insightful comment. I think you hit the nail on the head when you write "it makes sense to have much of the financing of higher education rely on individual resources"

Unfortunately, there seems to be several outside forces that pull students away from the more practical degrees that would almost guarantee employment.

First, government subsidized students loans don't differentiate among majors. I don't private student loans do either. I find this odd, I would rather lend money to a petroleum engineer major than an English Lit major.

Second, college students have spent their academic life influenced by people who privilege learning for the sake of learning: teachers and professors. They push the myth of "follow your bliss" onto way too many students. Personally, I believe in "follow the money", then you can "follow your bliss" to your hearts content.

Third, most colleges really don't seriously care about career placement and development. Sure they have career development offices, and invite recruiters to campus, but imagine if a college really cared about preparing students for a good career. Imagine having potential recruiters evaluate professors and courses instead of just students. That would be pretty interesting.

"Education" in its current incarnation makes the lethal mistake of mixing the practical with the "learning for learning's sake." This leads to terrible value proposition for the majority of students and for most employers.

Until this business model changes, there is little hope.
Fixed. Try now.
Ok. That makes sense... I was thinking about supermarkets/grocery stores when I originally asked the question, as they do this all the time. The situation is different when there's an author who'll complain.
While I agree with you. Chrome still gives me the 'Aww Snap' error page a little too frequently for my liking.
Citations, please!

You are saying these things with massive assumptions!

edit for clarification: you are not using any sort of proof mechanism in your statements. No data, no citations.
Annie Liebovitz recommends iPhone as "snapshot camera of today"
>this should only be as safe as any other Lithium-ion or Lithium-polymer battery.

So, they will explode fairly often then.
Your Need of the Day While on Move- Bluetooth Headset
Bluetooth has become one of the most widely used specs in a desk phone. Now Bluetooth headsets are increasingly becoming more popular. The persons, who are always remain busy, make use of the Bluetooth Headsets.
Some windows live properties backends use SqlServer as well and have thousands of SQL instances running, so it does scale.

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archiv...
You do know that you can show the user a prompt warning them that they'll lose unsaved data if they close the page or go to another URL, right? That solves this issue.
Yeah, the last troublesome Apple laptops I had to deal with were 2001-era iBooks. Those were kinda tricky.

" Maybe batteries have to be sold with a hard shell, the MacBook Pro battery doesn’t have that in order to save space"

And the saved space can either be used for more battery, or to reduce the size of the computer. They save the thickness of the battery case, and the thickness of any internal walls in the battery compartment with which a removable battery would mate. I'd think those walls might need to be somewhat substantial, to keep the battery in and prevent flexing and loose connections.

I suppose in theory they could also use irregularly-shaped batteries, that would let them fill every bit of space with battery.
An anecdote about one's own life is not just an anecdote...it's personal experience. And personal experience offers a perspective that no amount of data can. We are discussing how to nurture creativity and productive skills, after all, and inherent in that goal there is a severe measurement problem that severely limits any data-driven approach.

The twin studies I'm aware of basically say that you can expose twins to identical circumstances and they will still turn out different. I'm not sure how that contradicts his main point though.
FanFueled Raises $1M to Challenge Ticketmaster and EventBrite
This can be applied to any site that offers value. Before Stack Overflow, it was whether Google was making you dumber. In my specific case, no, SO has not made me dumber. I've learnt heck of a lot from that site.
The past year I've spent a lot of time developing with Cappuccino and it's been great.

I started using Atlas. I wonder if Atlas will get any love, or if I'll have to figure out how to convert my CIBs to XIBs?
The problem is if the disk is stuck mechanically.
Netflix class-action lawsuit offers Wal-Mart payout
I used to use the Odin thing, but it makes me nervous. Heimdall doubly so. There's now that "ROM Manager" app in the market, which manages to flash firmware starting from userspace. I haven't looked into how it works, but I assume there's an exploit involved somewhere.
You make two assumptions:

1) There is "one" way of representing payroll data. There's not. When you get a none trivial amount of clients, all their edge cases put together destroy any ability to fit the data into one conceptual model elegantly.

2) Companies have control over payroll rules. Large companies often can't simplify their systems due to contracts or the subsequent employee mutiny. Unless you want to get sued, lose the lawsuit, and pay out the nose (which I've seen happen), you can't just change how you do payroll on a dime.

Not to mention, there's a ton of disfunction too. Payroll managers aren't always the brightest tools in the shed. One project I worked on lead to the payroll manager getting fired over "bad stuff" I uncovered. And then as I uncovered more stuff his replacement was let go too.

...payroll can be a total clusterfuck. Avoid at all cost.
Definitely. One reason why we created it was that even though Facebook and twitter can add location to posts, no one really uses it in the proper mindset. On facebook, you're constrained to your social graph. You can't try and seek out neighbors who live across the street that easily on FB or Twitter, but here it would be really simple to do.
I thought one of the selling points of these machines was that they result in shorter lines and quicker security screenings??
Unfortunately I feel ReDigi is most in the wrong here and not necessarily the RIAA. All someone has to do is go into their iTunes and redownload the file they previously purchased, or make a copy before making it available to ReDigi. It may have been meant to be a legal way of selling used songs, but I feel that is just not possible in a digital world.
Attention passengers: Shipment status update
Next Generation Consoles to arrive in 2012
When worse is better
Publishing Your Blog with Dropbox and Jekyll
Tapping Into Facebook’s Audience for Startup Success
The Interface Builder integration is fantastic now. You really should be using it, it's worth the time it might take to port your CIBs to XIBs. Lots of things just work for Cappuccino in IB, including bindings and custom table cells.
This is correct; it's the companies that are heavily regulated that have a hard time choosing a nosql solution. The flexibility of SQL means you can create a report at any time. This is necessary when the government comes knocking wanting some specific data pronto.
I don't see reasons for such dramatic headlines.

Isn't this similar to your syslog (on linux atleast)?

There is no indication that this logging is being used for anything but debugging purposes in case of failure or crash.
He does have a point. A high school teacher friend of mine and I were discussing how certain aspects of school, like scheduled class time, project deadlines, etc. were intended to prepare the students for the workplace.

As an adult who makes my own choices, I only work when I want to work, and I only meet deadlines which I set on my own accord. I imagine, given the context of this site, that a lot in the HN crowd are the same way. However, when you get out into the real world, most people do follow the same schedule and obey the same rules that were ingrained into them in school.

A lot of people do not even realize that they have choice. I have actually met people who look down upon me for not following the same 9-5 schedule that everyone else does, like it matters or something. I imagine that attitude comes from their upbringing by having it pushed upon them by educators.

I wouldn't go as far to say that the only reason for school is to shape people into obedient workers, but that element is definitely present.
while there is nothing that prevents you from making copies. there can be a certificate of original purchase issued to you and registered/signed to a specific user's public key in a cloud database.

upon sale of the electronic item, you can re-sign/update the cloud cert with the new owner's key. so if a it came to proving that you own the music, you can reference a cloud database and decrypt the signature.

it's really the only way forward that comes to mind without being invasive but still allowing enforcement.
Spot on. I find it amusing that people who talk about the benefits of college education fail to see the flaw in their argument* - apparently they could have used another stats course.

*Any statistical analysis of the college/no college income differential needs to adjust for socioeconomic status, IQ, personality traits, opportunity costs of time and money, etc. I have yet to see a study that thoroughly does this and still shows the huge gains to college that a first glance presents.
Ask HN: Just got fired. Wanna learn web development. Where do I start?  
So I came back from lunch at about 1PM EST, and had just settled in at my desk when my boss told me to follow him, and was led downstairs to a conference room where the HR Manager was waiting. Truth be told, I knew what was up. Half an hour later, I was out of the building. I was a sysadmin there for just over a year, managing Windows servers and had recently introduced some Linux servers, for NTP, RADIUS, and was setting up a KVM Hypervisor.

I discovered HN in college, via PG's 'Why Nerds are Unpopular' essay. I've started a few ventures, mostly offline, but nothing that ever really stuck. I know I want to run my own business. I'm familiar with the concepts of Lean Startup, Customer Development, and of course, 'Make something people want.'

I've been talking to some small business owners lately, and it seems there's a need for a web design service tailored to them...something above the 'neighbour's 16 y.o. son' level, but below the advertising agency level. Most of them only need a basic site....About Us, Services, Team, Contact. They just need something that looks professional.

I'm thinking this can be done with WordPress or any other blog/CMS platform. I actually used to be a freelance graphic designer, so I know how to make things look good. I want to learn web development so I can customise WordPress templates for use.

I can program in Python, and like I said, am a professional Sysadmin. How do I get started in Web Development? Any thoughts on my business plan?
Interesting point, but what happens if you click "send!" and then close your laptop. Is your message sent or not?

While your point about the server-end being a queue is true, there's an expectation once your message is offloaded onto Google's queue, they will reliably process the message in a reasonable amount of time.