skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's true that SAP ERP could really do with a better interface (and it does, for the consumer end of the market by the way). But SAP ERP is bought by people who enjoy the business benefit (increased revenue, decreased cost) rather than by the users - that's life.

To say that SAP ERP doesn't scale on the other hand is a bit nuts. It scales easily to the biggest companies in the world. Apple iTunes Store sales billing runs on SAP.

I've not spent a lot of time looking at open source ERP in the context of large enterprise. I'd be interested in a serious comparison of the contenders and their UX, ability to scale to many countries/currencies/languages and their ROI and supportability and extensibility.
As great as this example is, I generally live in fear of browser-specific behavior.

In the best case, it solves the niggling inconvenience of having to click on the correct browser extension to install.

In the worst (and far more prevalent case), poorly coded browser-specific behavior stops me from accessing websites at all if my user-agent doesn't match something on the server's limited whitelist, or nags me continuously to download a "modern" browser while I am, in fact, running the latest build of Chrome or Firefox, simply due to a poorly configured regex.
Facebook have also built a Haskell tool to generate/update their PHP now as well, https://github.com/facebook/lex-pass
No he didn't.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/
Who should host the next GOP debate?
The methedology of the original 2005 study has been questioned. To me it sounds like the researches may have conflated weight loss caused by illness with having a low BMI at time of death.

"... epidemiologists from the ACS (American Cancer Society), American Heart Association, Harvard School of Public Health, and other organizations raised specific methodologic questions about the recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study and presented analyses of other data sets. The main concern ... is that it did not adequately account for weight loss from serious illnesses such as cancer and heart disease ... [and] failed to account adequately for the effect of smoking on weight ... As a result, the Flegal study underestimated the risks from obesity and overestimated the risks of leanness."

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/505703
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction
Realtime privacy snapshots of the social web.
He's one of the few true Scala experts around (how many can claim they've been using Scala for more than five years?).

The code he writes is probably as idiomatic Scala as it can get.

Yet another reason why people should be wary.
It's only defamation if it's not true. And if it's not true, why are you posting it in the first place?
Yup, I had one recently. The company had buyback rights at the strike price of the options that were equivalent to typical vesting terms. So, a 1 yr cliff, 4 year monthly vest. I.E. Any time in year 1 they had the right to buy them all back for exactly what I would have paid to exercise.
Presumably because one cannot test a nuclear reactor in the US -- at least not as easily as it can be done in China.
Find Any Link Shared - Ever
Here's a good example though. Serafem is basically prosac, but it's approved for treating severe PMS basically. They license the patent for that correlation from MIT.

A doctor prescribing generic prosac instead would then be violating MIT's patent.

Unfortunately here medical patents are already here. I don't think the Supreme Court is going to switch course either. What we really need is for Congress to act and impose compulsatory licensing on all patents if the end technology is a medical one. This is also what is needed to bring medical costs down in this country. Unfortunately Congress is in the hands of big business so they will probably run the other direction....
Verizon Confirms Widespread 4G Outage
Facebook also does that.
I thought the uptake was going to be that the whole concept of a gift card is ludicrous. Instead I'm sold on using a different kind of gift card.

Don't get me wrong -- I often prefer getting gift cards to getting something useless, but they just seem like a cover for not knowing me very well. I suppose they make sense when there's likely to be an asymmetry in charity. But if you're going to give cash, why give at all? What use is it to exchange $50 bills?
What about Amazon? Seems to approach cash value.
Can somebody explain what's happening here:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Amazon-Gift-Card-50-Fifty-FREE-SHIPP...
Yes, he is Chairman, but not involved on a day-to-day basis. Note that in the link you posted the most recent article wrt microsoft and bill gates is in June 2008

If he was really running the show I think things would be very different (ie they wouldn't have f'd nearly everything up like ballmer has)
Yes I am very lonely here, but it's interesting. I'd love to bring the tech and enterprise it crowds together and learn that we're really not that different.

Oracle is much worse from a sales/license perspective and a lot of my SAP customers are frustrated with them. Most of my customers have excellent relationships with their SAP account team.

On the ERP falling apart point - sorry but that's just not born out by fact. Project failures and system failures happen and most of the time that's caused by either using the wrong product, or by bad consulting - or poor support. I've never encountered a SAP ERP that has fallen apart.

SAP is a company with two CEOs - one sales and one technical, and they are definitely half a technology company. I really recommend you take a look at the tech they are producing. Of course they have to sell and market it - they have to turn a profit from all the R&D. Shame you have had a bad experience with the sales community.
> options worthless and owe $4000 in taxes

Presumably you mean: stock shares worthless and owe $4000 in taxes.

Without that correction, many people will wonder how you own taxes on unexercised options. (It is possible, but quite uncommon.)
Good stuff here. As a ruby person, you probably also know about Wukong (https://github.com/mrflip/wukong ) which lets you do Hadoop stuff without looking at Pig. (I don't know about Pig version 0.9.1 but I have had pretty weird bugs on version 0.8)
So am I to understand that GiftRocket's whole business model is predicated on the belief that giving cash is rude?
It's a bit like the charities founded by the robber barons, isn't it?
A SOPA compromise is floated
> but is really unethical if the founders didn't take care of existing stock holders.

Happens all the time. Usually it means that the acquiring company issued a bonus to those employees it was bringing across. If you're not one of them, have a nice day.
>The Windows Store will still link to third party websites carrying non-metro apps.

Where have you heard this? I've heard speculation but nothing official.
They offered six figures but we politely said we weren't entertaining any offers at the moment and that our main focus is in launching and promoting our app for the foreseeable future.
A gift card's value on the open market is not necessarily the same as its value as a gift.

We respond differently to cash than to gift cards. If I receive cash, I tend to treat it the same as all other money I receive. Mentally, it goes into my "income" pile and I'm just as conservative with it as I am with all of my other income.

On the other hand, if someone gave me, say, a Best Buy gift card, I have to spend it at Best Buy. The giver is saying "I want you to have a fun electronic something, but I want you to pick which one." I'm going to use it to splurge on something I want as opposed to something I need. (With that in mind, I find grocery store gift cards odd.)

It also wasn't obvious to me until the end that this was put together by people who have a product that compete with gift cards.
I think the main source of dislike is that the lawyers appear to be the only ones profiting: they receive substantial payouts, the lead plaintiffs they talk to receive payments, but the bulk of the class they supposedly represent receives worthless coupons. The suspicion is that they're negotiating primarily for themselves, willing to sell out the class with a shitty settlement, as long as they themselves get a good payout from it.

I've been reasonably happy with class-action lawyers when they've negotiated actual, non-trivial cash-money payments for their class. But Ticketmaster store credit, so they can take home money while failing to get anything for the class they supposedly represent? Fuck off. I filed an objection to the proposed settlement when I received that offensive proposal. If all they can negotiate is $1.50 in store credit, then I think we can safely say that they failed in their lawsuit, and shouldn't get any payment.
That's how you know it's a company run by bad people.
At a guess, things like nation wide authentication servers? (I don't know how devices are authenticated in LTE though)
The biggest useragent problem I have these days is clicking a link to a specific article on some site with my phone, and getting redirected to the front page of their totally separate mobile site, left with no way to find the article I was trying to read.

The second biggest problem is actually with software like Dropbox that's cross-platform, and the download page automatically chooses the version I want. Dropbox itself actually gets this right, by presenting small links to each specific platform right under the main download button, but I'm always running into sites that make it hard or impossible to get at a specific platform's version different from the one identified in my useragent string.
LINQ works /with/ entity framework, as well as with XML and generic collections. Entity Framework is not a replacement for LINQ.

Also, I think it's a natural progression for the project to start out as a "skunkworks" system, and be gradually more mainlined as it matures. It's on version 3 now, and version 4 is right around the corner.

I'd rather see it happen that way than have a huge release and a giant push onto a platform that isn't fully realized. Most "enterprise" organizations would never move onto a version 1.0 platform anyway.
Possibly. I think it's a good sign.
I think what you are saying can be true, depending on the sales exec. What can also be true is they are looking to build a long term relationship. It varies from person to person unfortunately.

What you describe is a classic large Systems Implementor problem, and that can be very true. The A-team sold the project and the B-team deliver it. They screw up the requirements gathering and the implementation. I've seen it happen many times.

Sometimes the product is to blame because it doesn't work as promised. Most of the time the consulting organisation didn't know the product well enough and made a mess of it. Totally agree on your contract point. Agree contracts, terms and conditions up front. Pay attention and take time.
The best explanation I've ever heard for gift cards is that they force the recipient to spend money on "something fun" rather than being strictly practical. Some gift givers would rather know you went out for a nice meal or bought a new tie or something than that you used their gift to buy gas or everyday groceries. I'm not sure I agree with this sentiment, but I can see where it's coming from.
Blagaojevich gets 14 years in prison for corruption
Show HN: Second Color - a unique RGBA per second, from 9/9/1941 to ~10/31/2077
Ask HN: Why does NYC Department of Health think Babaghanoush is ice cream?
If a restaurant in New York City tries to sell babaghanoush in room temperature it will be shut down by the New York City’s health department. The sick bureaucrats who run NYC’s health department think babaghanoush will poison people if it is sold in room temperature.

I am posting this to ask the international readers of HN if in restaurants in their city vegetable-based prepared and cooked food are sold in freezing temperatures as in New York or if they are sold in room temperature.

Would babaghanoush spoil in the few hours that stays in room temperature before being sold? What is the modern authoritative source on food conservation that I can refer New York City Health department to update their antiquated laws?
Nerds and Male Privilege
clickable: http://gigaom.com/cloud/facebook-shares-some-secrets-on-maki...
"Top Overall Searches:
1.	Facebook
2.	YouTube
3.	Google"

In other words, many people still don't know the difference between the address bar and search.
Most open source licenses don't forbid 'mere bundling' with some other software, even if said other software is Evil. Most likely download.com just doesn't want to have to deal with source distribution requirements from GPL/LGPL software.
Linq != Linq To Sql
He is a victim here, why blame the victim over the perpetrators? Makes little sense to me. As well as saying "evil flourishes"...
The big thing that flies in the face of this is that people spend tons of money on gas, grocery, and Wal-Mart cards. Some of those might be for underbanked people, but many aren't. With Amazon, for example, I'd guess most people just instantly apply the credit to their account and don't think about it after that.

There's a thoughtfulness treat-yourself aspect to them, and there's a practical make-sure-this-can-be-used aspect. The data seemed to point that the practical aspect is missing, the gift cards are valued less in secondary markets than their more practical counterparts.
Carbon fibre violin made made from scratch
Proximity to a fault line is also a major factor (influencing local building codes, as well as common sense and economics).
I was intrigued -- until I tried to send one - and paypal auth page showed a higher amount than my gift card amount --
FAQ says $1 + 5%. Get real.

They're absolutely right: CASH gets you more!
I wanted to graph the results thus far. Pretty interesting... About 20% of responders claim exit yields of over $150k.

Check it out here
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AlQ_IeF38HHndGo...
I'd like to second that comment. Unlike most companies, e.g. Apple, JetBrains is really responsive to bug reports.

They have fixed everything I have ever filed a bug about. (I use RubyMine for some Ruby projects, because even though the UI is kinda insane, coding without text completion is IMO more insane.)

On a related note, their bug tracker, YouTrack, is also probably the best of the dozen or so major ones I've used. Really fast, great keyboard support, and free for small teams.
Yup.

"GiftRocket combines the thoughtfulness of a gift certificate with the flexibility of cash."

Gift certificates are an $80B market in the United States, with a business model more or less based on the same belief.
I think this could be good motivation for you and your team, at least now you know you're on to something.

Good luck and I hope all goes well.
Tell them you are moving full steam ahead unless they plunk down x% of proposed buyout figure.
If the good guys are Haack, Hanselman, and Conery, then the bad guys are nearly everyone else.
A response by J. Suereth to this post http://suereth.blogspot.com/2011/12/scala-fresh-is-alive.htm...
Surely you've read enough HN to know that profiting from an exit is more than just luck?
It's not brilliant in the sense that it's innovative, but rather because it's attention to detail that 95% of sites don't bother to touch.

Sometimes it's something ever so slight that makes the difference between a conversion and a bounce.
Agreed.

After working with Active Record, it's really hard to switch back to Wordpress and write:

$today = getDate();
$my_posts->query('year=' .$today["year"]. '&monthnum=' .$today["mon"]. '&day=' .$today["mday"]);
Yes, mySQL. I'm sure I've made loads of mistakes in structuring things. I don't know where to start checking my indexes for mistakes though. Any resources you can point me at that are somewhat newbie friendly?
The bid is past cash value. Now it is valuing the free shipping..
UX isn't about who did what first. It's about doing what makes sense for the user, then reapplying it in every scenario that works. Pull to refresh on the iPhone was utter genius and everyone adopted it. No one is saying, "Well Tweetie did that first!"

Also, it seems like a "no brainer" now, but during the development it's easy for these no brainer things to either be ignored or written off as a waste of valuable engineering time.
No, he's not offering content at all (except a sporadic blog post). Our -new- product, the one that's going to bring us the growth we direly need, is the one that's being evolved on our two sites, in parallel.
The Three Barriers To Creative Freedom
Gives Google too much credit, on the one hand, by saying they will create an elegant OS that unifies desktop, web, and mobile (a sort of "holy grail" actually)... then says this is a bad thing.
The numbers are from the latest quarter.
Huh. My TA from my senior design project works for TerraPower now. Small world.
Manpages for specific utilities really should not be reiterating basic unix knowledge (e.g. that piping data to a file via the shell > operator doesn't break symlinks).
Got it. That makes sense. We can't beat 'free' on the price point, that's for sure. But we -can- offer support, spend money on marketing, and hope that our existing platform keeps him in the dark.
Who is going to be giving used gift cards this year?

But more seriously, someone needs to make a firefox plug-in or app that automatically searches for discounted gift cards when I happen to be browsing Amazon, etc..

And there needs to be a search engine for these gift cards, because I want to buy the 40% off Harbor Freight variety.
I was seconds away from updating my status with a quote from that entry... then I saw it was from John Mayer and I realized how much grief and sarcasm I'd get for having posted and linked to the source.

The sad thing is, I like a lot of his music so the fact that I was truly intimidated by posting a link by him for fear of what my friends might think of me probably says more about me than it does him (and perhaps speaks to a bit to why Rdio and Spotify had to add privacy controls). Oh well! I'm intimidated by music snobs, I guess. I'll be intimidating another time.
The iPad Shuttle: Make It, Apple
Tech Career Expo  SXSW Interactive announced
One Engineer’s Love Affair with ZeroCater
Okay, we're making progress here in figuring out where our thought processes differ. I have two more questions for you:

Imagine a stadium with 1000 fathers, each of whom has two children. (It's some kind of convention, I guess.) You say, "Everyone who does not have at least one son, please leave the room." You would expect 750 fathers to remain in the room, correct?

Now, assuming you answered yes to that question: Imagine you ask these remaining 750 fathers, "If you have two sons, please raise your hand." Would you not expect 250 of them, or 1/3, to have their hands raised?
Anyone know how to remove software from being listed on download.com? In My Products on upload.com I don't see any options, nor anything in the FAQ. I emailed them, but I suspect it will be days before I get a response...
Disagree. It's gotten better, but the tooling is awkward, the commonly used UI (TortoiseGit) is wonky, and not being a "native citizen" on the OS isn't acceptable--MSYS is a mess to have around on a Windows machine and even the "minimal subset" that you can install with Git is more than I consider acceptable. (I realize that entirely too much of Git is UNIX-based plumbing, but that's their problem.)

I gave Git another shot when Bitbucket started to support it (I won't use GitHub, as it happens), but it didn't shake out for the above reasons. I like being able to open stuff up on any of my machines and the lack of care I perceive in Git on Windows drives me to stay with hg a lot more than it would otherwise.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to reply to this. It's really valuable to have a community like HN, who have been here and done this all before. I took the advice of "get over it and just keep hacking" and have just emailed the first batch of beta testers.

I spent a while on the front-end so it feels more like a 'product'. That actually had a powerful emotional effect on me; now I look at it with pride. I know it's just a few lines of CSS and big pretty fonts, but it just 'feels' like its real now.

I got to watch a user see the site for the first time yesterday and watch him interact with it. It was a nice moment.

My hope is that, even if this guy launches a product before I do, that we'll steal the spotlight due to our size and existing customer base. We can also offer support and on-demand customization (for the biz customers).

Now I just have to hope that people will actually pay for this! They're paying for written content, so I can't imagine that they won't pay for this.
T-shirts, not technology, might save the record industry
So, anyone who has any real connection to a topic shouldn't be writing about what they know on Wikipedia. Awesome.

Man, I wish Citizendium hadn't fell apart. It didn't venerate nonsense.
Try 0.1% to 3% for employee # < 10.
Yeah - that sucks, but is actually also necessary for optimal performance for users as well. I don't think it's excusable to have two HTTP requests for page content. (and hash bangs are just as bad when loaded directly)
Well, I didn't downvote you, but I feel like I should reply...

Your comment was essentially of the form "Some Xs are Ys, Z is an X, therefore Z is a Y", which is of course wrong. "Simplistic" is not one of those words whose pejorativeness depends on context.
Anyone know of a Silicon Valley equivalent?
While I love the interactive infographic my favorite part of this is referring to Frederick's of Hollywood as a place "no one has heard of". My girlfriend sends me at least 4-5 links to items on that website every few weeks. Where can I get one of those gift cards for 50% off?!
The numbers for 150k through 11m are very believable.

However the 'greater than $11M' is really looking like a totally anomaly.

http://opani.com/dirk/crunch-acquisitions/results/#key=(redu...
Oh come on.

I realise this is an unfortunate accident and people may ask hard or even unfair questions about how prepared the crew were, but blaming the people minding their own business in their home for "building a house in the firing line of a military shooting range" is just ridiculous.
On the roadmap for Q1 2012
الرسام دييغو ريفيرا
الرسام دييغو ريفيرا
الرسام دييغو ريفيرا
الرسام دييغو ريفيرا
INFOGRAPHIC: Beautiful People Really Do Have An Economic Advantage
But in all seriousness, gift rocket is not a gift certificate, it is cash.
It's even funnier than that. The coupons are for $1.50 each, and you're allowed a maximum of 17 of them, no matter how many tickets you actually purchased over the years. Thanks, Ticketmaster!
Awesome to see a hugely popular and powerful development platform getting noticed by Github. It's great technology that deserves more love and positive mindshare in the open source world.

The last startup where I was CTO was largely based on the Microsoft .NET stack and we loved almost every ounce of it as a technology. Until, of course, we tried to hire startup and open-source minded engineers in the Microsoft-hate land of Silicon Valley. That's practically impossible.

StackOverflow and (hopefully) now Github will ideally do a lot of good in the next few years to break the stigma against C#.

It seems like the C# community at large contains Enterprise-oriented folks, who only like to consume open source and not give back. They just want to get their projects done and make a profit. I wish we could see more altruistic entities and startups embrace the technology. @haacked - fix it! Github seems like an ideal platform for change in this regard.

Oh, yeah, that startup was acquired and they threw away all our back end tech for no other reason than it was Microsoft based. It's not all bad, though, I do love my shiny Macbook Pro. ;)

Feature requests:
- CodePlex migration tool (I have a project there...)
- Github client for Windows
- Github VS integration