skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that if you spend 6-12 months training people you've got WAY more costs to recoup than a normal contracting firm so you'd have to take a higher percentage off the top. The rates would be higher for the niche so the take home would still be good, but a smart person would see you taking 30+% off the top, and know they can only give up 10-20% at another place or none by going freelance once they have some network in place. The sunk costs of the training and bench time around that are very hard to make back.
What about input devices? Via bluetooth? Or am I missing something that is in the dockstation?
That's a fine philosophy for the just-ship-it model of startup webapp development, but this is a piece of server software which is supposed to scale high and far and reduce its resource use as much as possible (part of the emphasis of the release as noted).

If you're writing a piece of some software with one specific function and it doesn't affect anything else and it doesn't take any more time to make it efficient, just do it efficiently the first time. This way you don't have to come back later and rewrite it (which by the time that's required, somebody already wrote something dependent on your crappy design, which now has to be fixed too, etc)
This is PRECISELY what you hear from folks who are trying to sell you religion, or stuff like EST.

"Of course it's not working, you're not doing it right. We'd be happy to work with you some more on that."

Followed by the "ka-Ching!" as they cash your check for the consultancy.

Agile is so often turned into a micromanager's paradise that I've just stopped involving myself in it. Our team holds scrums, none of the engineers show up. It's pathetic.
Works fine in PHP as well:

php > $ಠ_ಠ = 1;
php > echo $ಠ_ಠ;
1

php > $π = pi();
php > echo $π;
3.1415926535897931159979634685442

php > function ಠ_ಠ() { echo 1; }
php > ಠ_ಠ();
1
I’ve created a custom OS X keyboard layout that allows me to just press `⌥` + `O` to get `ಠ_ಠ`. Here it is: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/custom.keylayout/tree/maste...
Or you use compose or alt?
Enjoyed your video. Would be great to get hold of one of those Touchpads...
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Developers
A lot of those Android features are new in 4.0, though. Given the depressingly low number of phones out there running it, it isn't surprising that people don't know about the changes.
Yes!
You can see the first year's videos online now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBQMVF7CPuc&list=UUIpFa-L...
I hope to start posting the 2011 videos this week.

The pirate ship of Theseus talk would probably also interest hackernews readers and/or Canadians, as it's perhaps even more politically relevant today as it speaks about copyright.
That is amazing. 17 outstanding pull requests =)
Bottlenose 2.0 Is a 6th Sense for the Social Web
I find it amazing that governments don't recognize the futility of their efforts to stop piracy. Will blocking the Pirate Bay is going to do raise the profits of copyright owners even the tiniest bit?

As long as people can communicate information, there will be piracy. The only thing that will result from government efforts to prevent piracy is varying loss of our rights to communicate.
The Control Revolution And Its Discontents
Just make sure not to have a like button for each or you will end up with 60% of your likes on your FB page and 40% on your domain(made up %'s but you get the picture).

I'd go with linking all of your likes to the FB page.
Phone system
...and by "more useful", I mean "more profitable"...
"I've always wondered what the legal specifics of using the included loops and samples in Logic, Reason etc are [...]"

I cannot speak for all music composition hardware and software, but from my experience, the primary constraints on the products that I use (e.g., Reason) are generally two-fold:

1. Packaging or recording factory-included loops or sounds for the purpose of re-distribution as a stand-alone audio library is prohibited.

2. Using factory-included sample tracks for commercial purposes is prohibited.

Otherwise, factory-included loops and sounds can be used commercially in your compositions.

Again, the above are just my experiences. However, as noted by leviathant's comment with the Korg ER-1 experience, it is always a good idea to read the license agreement.
Real Entrepreneurs Don’t Multitask
Groupon Leaks Reaction from German HQ
This is a standard case of technology cutting out the middleman.
I agree with everything stated here.

I'm also a Unix admin, but I used to be a Windows admin.

Unix people can usually comfortable with either

That depends entirely on the person. Most of the Unix admins I know would jump through hoops to not work on Windows. Also, I've found that the more zealous their enthusiasm for Unix, the less comfortable they were with Windows.

To increase shareholder value for Microsoft

To me this means that while you don't have much of a choice in their direction, they're not going to do something totally off the wall that causes a large backlash (ala Gnome 3 or Unity) because they still want you to buy the upgrade. Yes there's the ribbon, it's not a perfect example. But it also means that every piece of hardware that comes out is going to have Windows drivers.

I'm also going to have to throw in a new category:

Support

There's paid support for Unix, but it's nowhere near the prevalent as Windows support (does this translate into cheaper?). If I had to give a computer to someone who may need technical assistance I would give them Windows. There's some individuals that can maybe have a user friendly version of Linux and be fine with it for months, but as soon as they want to hook up their new shiny, it's going to result in phone calls.
It might be the philosophy of "the just-ship-it model of startup webapp development", but it's not why I have it. It comes from the philosophy of high performance systems research where you can spot inefficiencies all over the system, you just don't have enough time to optimize them all, and any extra complexity you put into the system better be worth it. Every "optimization" you put into your system better have performance numbers associated with it; if you can't experimentally demonstrate that the optimization is worth it, it's not.
The actual text he writes, like each sentence and phrase, is extremely well crafted syntactically, whatever style he is going for. In particular, I've noticed he is extremely aware of verbal ambiguity. His prose has coherence and obsessive detail that remind me of Bach's music. These things seem deeply intertwined with software dev, I'm surprised he doesn't show up on HN more.
Our startup has product-market fit...Now what?
Thanks for the suggestions. Plaxo looks like it might do the trick. Contactually looks like a perfect fit, but at $15/month I'll try the free service first. Since this won't be used for business but rather my personal contacts $15/month seems steep.
What killed my iPhone app sales?
Hello HN,

I am an iPhone developer with two apps in the App Store and the question I had is what did I do wrong? My apps Wedding Songs Planner - First Dance and Weddings Songs Planner - Professional are a free and paid version of the same application. This app will help brides and grooms create the perfect playlist for the songs during their wedding.

Originally, I had only put out the paid version of the app. After one marketing campaign and few wedding blogs posting about the app I had sales at about 5-10 apps per day. Which is not great by any means, but it was at least fairly consistent. In an attempt to get more downloads and sales, I decided to put out a BIG update to improve the user interface and the overall functionality of the app. Along with this update, I put out a free version of the app with reduced functionality in the hopes of converting some users to buy the paid version.

After some issues with Apple accepting the updates, the app was finally updated and released. The problem was that the sales DROPPED
to levels that I hadn't seen since before any blogs had picked it up and some days I was seeing 0 sales. The main points that I could see that might have caused this were:

- A name change: Wedding Songs Planner to Wedding Songs - Professional

- An icon change: What I had thought was a much improved looking icon but may have blended into App Store more.

- Overall look: The overall look was much improved but maybe the audience did not agree.

Once the free version was approved I released it in the App Store, sales did not go up. I tried reducing the price to $0.99, sales did not go up. I tried changing the border to red, sales did not go up. I changed the name back to Wedding Songs Planner - Professional which may have helped.

The price is back up since the sale did not help increase downloads. I'm hoping the name change was main problem but now that my app has dropped in the App Store it will be hard to bring it back up to where it can be noticed.

This is a cautionary story, sometimes when you think something is an improvement, the market doesn't agree. Test things before putting them out!

If you have time, please check out the free version of my app
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wedding-songs-planner-first/id497832316?ls=1&mt=8 and if you have comments good or bad leave them for me!

If you want to contact me directly please send me an email at appstractart@gmail.com

Thanks,

Jeremy Jacques
http://www.placenoun.com/<keyword>/<width>/<height>/

http://www.placenoun.com/unicorn/600/700/

Actually usable for placeholder images since it returns an actual picture, not an html page with an image tag.
Which makes one wonder why they pandered to the content industry with it at all. There's no requirement they make such a system, and it makes their service less desirable and usable.

Google's responsibility is to respond to DMCA notices; that's it. They have no requirement to create a Draconian copyright monitor.

(The standard response is "so the content industry would work with us!!!" Who gives a shit? Oh no, we wouldn't have any of the shitty "Vevo" channels laced with advertising without Content ID. What a terrible loss that would be.)
Creating Animated Bubble Charts in D3
The first Weapons of Mass Creation in Cleveland was community funded on Kickstarter 2 years ago, and keeps getting bigger.

It can be done, best of luck to you

EDIT: link (http://wmcfest.com/)
Yes, the author is missing some Android features. Android notifications, at least in Android 4.0, are as usable as those in WebOS. Android 4, at least in the tablet form, also has the convenient access to settings the author mentions. Overall, many things in Android are now on par with WebOS, but that is a recent development.

The WebOS multitasking paradigm still has significant advantages other mobile OSes, and I would say that that is its biggest remaining advantage. I find it makes it much easier to organize ongoing activities into logical tasks, especially when those tasks involve using multiple applications.

That said, since I installed Android 4 on my Touchpad I have yet to boot back into WebOS. At least some of that is due to having an Android 4 phone and wanting consistency, however.
Riak Performance of Link Walking vs MapReduce
10 Thinkers That Executives Actually Listen To
There's also NameCoin (http://dot-bit.org/)

I don't think it has any chance of being widely adopted in its current incarnation because of two major flaws:

1. The early adopter advantage is too high (the designers took steps to limit this, but not enough.)

2. Renewal is free (encourages squatting.)

And there are other missed opportunities. A built-in auction system would be nice, as would a mechanism for registering a "tld" and inviting public registration of subdomains.

Still, I reckon they got the basic idea right - decentralised registry of domains, using well-tested (thanks to bitcoin) cryptographic algorithms.
"Realistically, Ubuntu for Android has been developed for future handsets that are going to have the horsepower to push everything the software is going to require."

So, like, six months from now.
Oh, I expected this. Thanks for the link.
The author was pandering to the iOS audience, and the tone followed.
NYT Writer defends Forbes writer accused of "stealing" his work
Yeah. Sounds particularly apt.
I feel that Canonical is making the same mistake Apple did. Taking engineers off of OS X Leopard and putting them to work on iOS was such a bad move.

In Canonical's case, it's an even worse idea, isn't it? Why spend engineer resources targeting the tiny Android market rather than the huge desktop Linux market?

Obvious sarcasm aside, I'm really happy to see Ubuntu innovating here. If it was commercially available, I'd be plunking my money down now. But I'm already a Linux user so I'm an easy sale. Kudos to Ubuntu to try and market to people other than those like me.
Advertisers are spending way too much on print, too little on mobile
I think Wedding Songs Planner[ - Professional] is a much better name than Wedding Songs - Professional. It much better says what the app does, as the second name sounds like it's just a list of wedding songs.

It's hard to comment on the icon and look, since we haven't got access to the old app listing.
I don't get it. You've linked to page 28,842 of the Latest Blog Posts index. It shows articles more than ten years old. So what? What am I missing?
Only if it comes with a wireless keyboard and mouse...
It looks great, but I still think Google needs to make it so when docked like this, what you see on the PC screen is the "tablet UI" of Android. It makes more sense, and you don't even have to waste resources running 2 OS's on a mobile processor.
BI/Analytics on NoSQL: Review of Architectures Part 2
there are no lawyers in small claims court
> I really think iOS should also steal the back button from the Android.

There are many potentially interesting things in Android (although I think WebOS would be a far better source of ideas to steal, it's always been).

But not the back button. The back button is probably the worst part of Android's UI, it's the embodiment of "mystery meat" navigation and interface: a hardware button which behaves in a completely arbitrary and essentially random manner without providing any clue as to what will happen when it's tapped.
I have been writing PHP without “classes” for years… what am I missing?
Tech Jobs for Returning Vets (Infographic)
It's being demoed on the Atrix 2 lapdock. Google for that to get an idea of the sort of target Ubuntu has in mind.
I think Canonical are going to die if they keep on the crack pipe as much as recently. This is a fine example of it. Customers and users are dropping like flies already. I don't know anyone now who hasn't bailed on then and gone with mint, Debian or centos.
"The other problem is that while Canonical is pushing the build to hardware manufacturers and mobile carriers, it has no plans to release it to the general public for independent development."

It seems to crazy to me that Canonical is going to lock down this software and not let people try to install on their own devices for their own purposes.

While I couldn't be more excited by the idea of this project, that article made me very concerned about the future of Canonical and where they are going as a company.
Canonical has done many questionable things recently, but innovation like this is why they are going to succeed commercially.
But isn't wireshark fugly and clunky on all platforms? I love the tool, but the UI has a lot to be desired. I'm frankly a bit surprised that they opted for copying it instead of remaking it.
Moreover, as someone who's spent a significant chunk of my career basically being a professional optimizer, one of the worst things to fight against is code infected with a plethora of micro-optimizations. Micro-optimizations tend to be based around fragile, case-specific assumptions and when they're used, a smarter, deeper optimization to a more generic version of the problem isn't reused because somebody decided that "every bit counts".

100% agreement on "if it's not showing up in your profiler, don't optimize it".
Yeah, and in the past had a Mac G5 for his home desktop. He run Linux on that.

And before that, he used an iBook running OS X to write his autobiography on MS Word (he said so in an interview).
Why are you using mesh to save source code? This is what source control software is for. Getting it onto other machines is only half the point, also revision history, branching, blaming and conflict resolution are important.

Not that that should detract from your main point about locking for too long, that isn't good. But I wouldn't recommend using that sort of thing for source code is what I'm sayin'.
I can address some of these, as I've been staring at the profile quite a bit:

"bulk innerHTML updates vs. granular DOM twiddling (especially in different browsers)."

A part of the cost is definitely in making these small changes, but not a huge part. For what it's worth, we're in the process of implementing a feature that would allow you to specify the re-rendering granularity in the template itself, but we don't want it to be heavily used by end-users.

"Handlebars vs. Underscore templates -- although Handlebars templates are quite fast."

I don't see the cost of rendering handlebars templates at all in the top of the profile, which is not surprising, as the templates we're rendering are very small, and Handlebars templates are very fast.

"Fine-grained bindings needing to be kept in sync inside of Ember for Metamorph.js purposes."

The cost of bindings are not ongoing, but rather when a `set` happens. Internally, this code is somewhat equivalent to the Backbone event system (we even trigger `change:foo` events) with some more chrome on top to manage things like computed properties. Most of the cost here is not in the internals of the binding system, but rather in the effects of the binding system, like re-rendering the `{{content}}` and updating the style.

In short, the internals of Ember know about as much on an ongoing basis as Backbone's internals know: namely, that there is an observer on `change:content` that needs to be triggered when the underlying property changes. Again, we do more work once that event is triggered than Backbone does, but the vast majority of the cost is on the receiving end of the events, not in the event system itself.

"Other miscellaneous overhead."

From my analysis of the profile, this looks to be the primary cost. The view layer itself could stand to be more optimized. For example, we use a state machine internally to control what events are legal in different states (preRender, inBuffer, hasElement, inDOM). It was our first state machine implementation inside of Ember, and we didn't do some obvious optimizations (like cache legal transitions).

The ember-states code, which ships with ember and is used in ember-data, is far more optimized, and moving to use it should eliminate some of the cost I'm seeing. At the very least, it provides us with a central state machine implementation that we can continue to optimize over time, resulting in performance improvements all around.

There are other areas where micro-optimizations will almost certainly help (such as in the event system itself and how it's used).
Is this the way Apple is headed? Just dock your iPhone, boom, OS X on the monitor.
webOS seems to have the opposite problem of most open source projects: great interface but could use some work on the technical side.

An OS with a great interface is one hell of a head start for open source on tablets.
I've learned this myself from someone else like you who has passed this on. When I bought my iPhone the manual was extremely vague on features like task switcher. Where did you learn this? (Sorry for going OT, I just wonder if there is a "Secret Guide" somewhere that I've missed.)
The samples provided by companies who have a deal with Google - the recording industry - are the only "master" samples, not your uploaded stuff.
> Ruby developers should ditch Ruby and move to Visual Studio/C#/.NET since it might be one of the best platforms around

Except that VS/C#/.NET isn't one of the best platforms around unless you code for Windows. And that's one more reason not to move to other platforms - because the tools they use don't support the alien technology as well as what they've been using.

> The jobs are no more dead-end than Java or PHP or Ruby jobs.

You obviously have a different idea of what constitutes a dead-end job. I imagine it's a job at a company that thinks of IT as a cost of doing business, something competitive advantages are not to be derived from. Those companies will not invest in new things until everybody else is doing it and hire the same kinds of professional other companies hire. They use certifications instead of interviews because then the whole hiring process can be done within HR. I've seen a lot of them.

> VBScript is barely around in maybe in around 5% of companies running IIS

I know it's not a thorough review, but I see plenty of .asp URLs around within corporate confines.
One thing that jumped out at me pretty quick in comparing the two implementations in jsFiddle is that with ember every property is set with an individual call rather than passing in an object of properties to change. Here is a version with backbone using individual set calls with a notable dip in performance: http://jsfiddle.net/6rvkC/

Is this limitation in ember because of the computed properties? Would changing this even help?
would an interesting concept to replace fiddler for http analysis if it captured packets
And yet, many iOS apps end up using screen space on a Back button. And I find myself missing it on those that don't.
They need to look like they're doing something for the elite or they'd lose their political sponsorship. Seriously though, it's not going to change a thing. You can't kill an idea.
Canonical Announces Ubuntu for Android
Ubuntu's full desktop OS coming to multi-core Android devices
Fortunately...

I wrote a comment under it, and since that day my mailbox was flooded with notifications about other replies for months to come. I think about doing some analytics on them; say, plot the number of comments per day over time - I'd expect to see something like e^(1/x) - 1.
> new "major version" is jargon - a term of art with a generally accepted meaning of incrementing the most significant version number.

An example of which would be http://semver.org/
Good question. But purely from a practical perspective, the risk this presents to an average web startup is completely negligible compared to other risks... like not finding a solid product-market fit. Personally, I'd go with C and spend my time working on the product or landing customers.
> Anyway, I’d be interested to hear people’s thoughts on this

I would rather try to evaluate the size of the abstract syntax tree. I think this is more relevant since int main(){int a;} is obviously similar to int main(){int b;}
I wouldn't base a decision on benchmarks alone, but can imagine myself using them to narrow down my own set of tools to benchmark against my workload.
This isn't about agile. This isn't about methodologies. It's about one basic principle that's true in every industry, for any and every management system:

PROCESS IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR LEADERSHIP.

No set of rules can compensate for bad management and employees. Rules usually empower bad managers and disguise bad employees. No methodology -- agile or otherwise -- can stand up to bad execs, bad project leads and/or bad coders.

It starts with hiring. That's how Google gets away with loose rules -- they prioritize hiring "Google-level" coders and managers. All else is details.
The whole task switcher of WebOS looks like (iOS) Safari's tab-switching (with apps instead of pages of course), except with more goodness: the applications stay live (à la Android) and can be seen updating in the switcher, you flick applications off-screen to close them, it's possible to group application cards to make switching between a group faster, etc...

It's all very neat, and very easy to understand. You can see the WebOS 1.0 cards demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUSui3rH1a8