skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's a lot of truth in this (though as with all opinion pieces, esp. seriously entertaining ones like Stevey's, you have to take it with several pinches of salt).

I have a suspicion that a lot of agile is a hack designed for managers who have problems within their team and don't want to deal with them properly.

It's far easier to adopt a 'proven' methodology than confront the fact that Frank in accounts has unrealistic expectations and changes their already vague spec 30 times while expecting the estimate not to change, or that Peter is driving down morale in the team by nitpicking every last mistake you make while ignoring his own, or the constant denial of the impossibility of actually consistently correctly estimating tasks which have never been done before by anyone.

Dealing with those things well takes real skill, patience + awareness as well as a willingness to accept reality and eschew politics, and that's just hard.

What I particularly dislike about agile is the unfalsifiable dogma of it - you MUST do it like this otherwise it won't work and it will be YOUR fault for not having done it properly. If it works then of course it's all agile. That's a big problem - everything you do in a team should be for reasons and open to discussion otherwise you end up with cargo cult programming and cargo cult software management.

All that said, if you take agile not as a dogma but a series of methods that people have found useful and adopt it to your needs, while not avoiding the realities of the situation, then I can see how it can provide prompts for improving a team.
If you're serious about converting any significant percentage of current MATLAB users (which would be the vast majority of the scientific community), either a JS mcode interpreter or a code translator should be near the top of your list. With that you'll turn heads; without it, everyone will ask why they'd ever throw out their lab's huge library of accumulated, well-understood, thoroughly-debugged (hard!) code.

Also, just out of curiosity, what are your guys' backgrounds? Why did you decide to build this instead of something else? Is this something you'll use (or, would have before you stopped whatever you were doing to start this), or did you just identify a market need?
I actually think that their business model is awesome. The fact is that the general populace is not about to fund a bunch of ~20 minute speeches from various luminaries, but at the same there is undeniable value in getting well-prepared and important thoughts from a bunch of excellent speakers archived and available in perpetuity online. So rather than trying to produce value from a consumer who may see little value beyond a brief mind-bending video, they turn it into an exclusive charity club. Taken on its own, it appears to be a way to sleeze $7k out of pretentious rich people, but they do actually provide a lot of intellectual sparks to the benefit of the world outside.
How about they move away from URL shorteners too?
anyone seen an automatic time tracking app that actually works?

I used to use rescue time, but it seems their grouping via keywords is gone now :(
Donate $5 to A Place to Turn food pantry and the CEO of Punchbowl will match it.
Read the post for details about the Startup Swami donation challenge.
But you don't need "tabs" aka "Your tabs and browsing activity".
New pleasures are possible with html5; vibration API is coming.
Gates Fdn.: immunity assessment tool RFP
I wonder if we don't have the technological means to send short-urls only through SMS and real links everywhere else.
Why doesn’t the MPAA buy The Pirate Bay?
This is pretty neat - can anyone give any insight/guesses into how this was done?
Stop Creating Content You Evil Bastard
Lanyrd (YC W11) seeks UX and visual designer to work with us in London
We are looking for a senior Graphic and UX designer to join our team.

Lanyrd ( http://lanyrd.com/ ) helps people get the most out of conferences and professional events. We serve a growing community of attendees, speakers and event organisers who use us to discover new events to attend, meet the right people while there and catch up on the slides, notes and video from the event afterwards.

We’ve recently announced our seed funding and are now concentrating on building an excellent team and developing our product further.

We are looking for an excellent web native graphic designer to join our team. Someone with a real creative flair, knowledge of user experience and information design and a deep understanding of social software. You will be happy getting your hands dirty; from scribbling on the whiteboard, sketching wireframes and thoughtfully detailed user flows to creating beautiful visual designs.

You will be working in a small team, so everyone gets involved in every aspect of the product. You’ll be working alongside talented developers, collaborating as your designs take form. In addition to helping invent new features for Lanyrd, you will also be involved in maintaining and updating the look and feel of the site and ensuring an excellent user experience throughout.

Enthusiasm is what we’re most interested in; you will have proven experience and a portfolio to prove it, but we want our team to be passionate about what they do.

In return we offer a competitive salary, 25 days of holiday (excl public holidays) which increases by one day per year up to a maximum of 28, a shiny new laptop or iMac, and a generous training budget.

If you’re interested, please send a covering letter, CV and portfolio to jobs@lanyrd.com
There are already countries where international traffic costs more than domestic traffic. Ever rent a server in South Korea? International traffic is often limited to 1-3% of your monthly quota, depending on who your backbone provider is. Overage fees on international traffic usually run an order of magnitude higher than usual.

A policy like that has more than merely economic impact. It discourages people from interacting freely with foreign web services, contributing to a relatively isolated online culture. Korea might be doing this for economic and technical reasons only, but you can be sure that China has cultural and political agendas.

Bringing the same policy to consumers, on the other hand, would be insane. Even in Korea, consumers only pay a flat rate and the ISP absorbs any cost difference.
My personal theory on XP, and to a lesser extent Agile, is that about 90%, if not 120%, of the benefit is in the pervasive use of automated testing, and the rest is either marginal in comparison, or even harmful but propped up by the benefit you scored by using automated testing so it all looks net positive in the end. (Hence the 120%; the benefit of just using automated testing is indeed greater than the whole package.)

I can't prove it. And I do like iterations in the sense of "produce a deliverable product every N weeks" for keeping you from wandering too far down the wrong path, though from what I've seen one of the most popular things to do with agile is just break your calender up by "iterations" then keep doing the same thing you did before. It's sort of hard to get a real sense of the utility of agile because hardly anybody really seems to really try it. (I do not necessarily think every aspect of it should be kept, but much of what it proposes is at least worth a real try. And "trying" shouldn't be a matter of smearing new words over the same procedures.)
Ask HN: I want to hack shopping on mobiles. But how?
I am an avid e-shopper. I shop a lot and almost everything online. Recently, my mobile devices seem to have been getting more attention from me. Stats reveal that its a general trend these days. e-Commerce companies also know this. And hence all of them have a mobile version. Their theory seem to be; Get all the info of the main site, dumb it down, make the UX like its Y2K. Add a couple of dragging and zooming gesture and make it as difficult as possible to navigate through products (those tiny buttons)!

I hate this logic. First, why the dumb-down version? Its 2012, my phone is called a smartphone. It can't just drag like a resistive device, it can Tap, Flick, Pinch, Spread, Press, hell it can even Rotate. Tired of these facts, being a hacker, I decided to stop wining and hack a mCommerce website. The Amazon of the mobile world. :)

The start was good. Being a JavaScript junkie; whose day job is in an Alexa 200 website; gave me the advantage to build a website really quick. The mobile UX was driven by my consumer instinct. I was building the shopping site to solve my problem of not having a rich shopping experience on my mobile devices. My store front was ready and it was driven by Flicks, Pinch, Taps, Double Taps and all of this by holding the phone with just one hand. Mobiles are to be used with one hand in my opinion, using two hands just make all the fingers feel awkward. It looses the personal connection. Anyhow, I was excited and was planing to finally invest in a designer to get the design polished. I suck at Photoshop. :(

This is where I went for advice from someone I respect for his ideas. He said and very quietly and calmly, "You can do nothing, eCommerce is not about technology or UX, its all about warehousing!" Yikes! Thats when it hit me; how and what would I sell? This is where my dream to change the mobile experience of shoppers shattered quietly and calmly. I don't have funds or the contacts to stock products. I know just how to hack.

This is where I am currently at. Not sure of what to do next. So I my question to all you Hackers is how do I now hack the mobile marketplace?

mBay (mobile eBay business model)? Partner someone? open-source the codebase? Sell the platform? or some other Awesome Hack?

P.S. - I am from India and would first like the site to start here and then go worldwide.
Perhaps the MPAA/RIAA/China/Iran should set up their own internet and regulate however they want.
You can join the options using a "+" character.
e.g. http://cat.jpg.to/r+l+gif is a random large cat gif image.
options available:

"jpg"
"gif"
"png"

"face"
"photo"
"clipart"
"lineart"

"black"
"blue"
"brown"
"gray"
"green"
"orange"
"pink"
"purple"
"red"
"teal"
"white"
"yellow"

"huge"
"xxl"
"xxlarge"
"xl"
"xlarge"
"l"
"large"
"m"
"medium"
"s"
"small"
"xs"
"i"
"icon"

"r"
"random"
Looks like it's a front end to Google Image Search, so use at your own risk.
And my log files are 2012-02-21....
Money, code and sex - Web 2.0 the Movie
It works the same as those "We are from bank X, give us you accound details" scam emails. They completely miss people that don't use bank X but it looks much more legitimate for those that do.
The Moon That Embraces the Sun
เรื่องย่อ: ละครประวัติศาสตร์ "ดวงจันทร์ไพบูลย์อาทิตย์" บอกเล่าเรื่องราวความรักระหว่างกษัตริย์ลี Hwon (Kim Soo-Hyun) และหมอผีหญิงคนหนึ่งชื่อ WOL (Han Ga-In) WOL เกิดจากตระกูลขุนนางและกลายเป็นเจ้าหญิงมงกุฎ แต่เธอก็ต้องเผชิญกับการเก็บกักและการดำเนินการ ในที่สุดเธอก็อาศัยอยู่เป็นหมอผี
مشاهده مباراة ريال مدريد وسيسكا موسكو بث مباشر
Excellent point. I would normally do this, but I wanted to reduce the amount of indirection in the code as much as possible. But, it may still be worth doing so people aren't distracted by thinking "Wow, this girl should use constants".
I think a good strategy for a product like this just coming out of the gate would be to do something fun with it. The reality is that there is a large group of consumers who simply won't touch it. You need to establish a foothold, even if it's just a niche market. License the name "Soylent Green" and market them as Soylent Green Burgers... or something.

Ok, so maybe Soylent Green isn't the best idea, but if I were taking this product to market, I'd be really concerned that a straight forward PR campaign to increase adoption would be met with serious backlash. Sometimes an appeal to humor is a great way to move past a social taboo like, uh, meat grown in a petri dish.
On a development note, is it normal to drop large features like this a single commit?
TED doesn't charge and doesn't pay speakers. Same for all TEDx events. IMHO it's a large part of what sets them apart from other conferences.
Using jQuery, Plugins and UI Controls With Backbone
If Moses had been a government instead of a person he would never have made it down from the mountain with the Commandments. We really need to reset government. Or maybe mandate that every law has an expiration date, no more than x years in the future (x being some value shorter than a legislators term).
http://lorempixel.com/ - does something very similar, but you can tell it the size of picture you're looking for and all the images are creative commons.

http://lorempixel.com/400/200/sports/2/
Be a BetaTester
This, technically, isn't illegal. It's immoral and unethical but if you play it right (vague terminology, play to people's paranoia about Windows machines having viruses) then all you're doing is taking advantage of someone's gullibility.

If you deliberately infect their machine with a script which transmits their data for profit then you're doing something stone cold illegal, and it may never acquire the data you're looking for. You then have to exploit it which means selling it on the deep web or (worse, time-wise) criminal black market, which is again illegal, and also a massive chore: you're doing something illegal but then making yourself highly visible/traceable and connecting with the wrong kind of people in order to profit from it illegally (sorry if this seems tautological, but it's worth repeating that it's two distinct acts to acquire the data and then to sell it). Yuck.

You're far better off playing the odds: each employee can call 60 people per day. Even if 1/200 signs up what are these people making? $25 per day? If you've got 5 people in the call centre nailing 1 in 200 customers then you've got a business, provided your overheads are low enough and you're using signed-up customers as a platform to sell to (referrals & 'security' software).

It's not going to make you rich quicker than a legitimate (and I use that word advisedly) botnet or key logger / zombie script, but you're pretty much on the right side of the law and there's very little downside if you're unscrupulous.

(The massive moral downside is that you're an utter cunt, of course.)

The thing which is strange to me here (or perhaps indicative of the fact that they're a useless outfit) is that they don't have the script nailed.

We're all (presumably) relatively proficient with computers here. I don't think I'd have any trouble at all in convincing someone that there's a virus or malicious code on their computer, if I wanted to. There are enough confusingly named but benign processes on OS X and Windows and enough ways to dress up a script to turn them off at launch and "fix" the computer. How many times did that guy stumble over his story? Malicious code; Windows licence; you pay; you don't pay; can we call you back; let me speak to legal; I can see your screen; I can't see your screen.

A more efficient scam would be a slicker script, a 10 minute process, and less deviation. The guy Troy spoke to sounded, to me, like an IT guy more than a sales guy, which is very weird. Kinda like in Armageddon when they train oil drillers to be astronauts rather than training astronauts to use a drill: you don't need IT expertise because the people you want to be speaking with are those who expressly do not have any IT expertise.
Yeah, it's a pretty bad suggestion. Many projects don't directly generate revenue. It ignores practically all support projects that help people to do their job (i.e. improving the bugtracker, sales software, test software etc).
I wish all technical books did this.
I think so, I'm keeping an eye on https://github.com/WiredEnterprise/Lord-of-the-Files/pulls to see if they're getting merged. Pretty cool they hosted it there!
Actually, it can be (and is) used as a general-purpose build tool. I'm using it in some otherwise Java-only projects, and — who knows — it might even start getting some love from Scala hackers:

https://github.com/technomancy/lein-scalac

Once jark (a persistent Clojure/JVM backend @ http://icylisper.in/jark/) is made to work well with Leiningen, then the combination might be a reasonable replacement for sbt.
Startup Row Winners for PyCon 2012 announced
I'm not convinced this is useful JavaScript optimization advice. JavaScript doesn't have integers, and string literals are interned, so it shouldn't make a substantial difference if you have the same literal written out 15 times or just defined once and placed in a property. (In fact, using the plain literal everywhere may be faster because it omits the dynamic property access.)
Is there a documented list of all the parameters somewhere? How did you know about /random+large+gray?
Does Apple ban developers for selling apps on Cydia?
I have software than runs on jailbroken phones and I'd like to sell it, but I have other apps on iTunes and don't want to risk getting banned. Would this be a problem?
How we are using 'Hitler reacts' video to convey our startup's positioning
@1:20, you can see the artist's shadow on the wall while holding the camera.
Actually, the burden of proof should be on you. The null hypothesis is that adhering to agile principles has no positive affect on the outcome of software projects. In order to show that these principles have worth, you should disprove the null hypothesis.
Oh my god:

> GitHub.com is best thought of as Facebook for geeks

Really?
Show HN: LabroyMedia
Pretty fun!

For writing murder notes : http://jsfiddle.net/c8B5G/embedded/result/
There's a really interesting paper on the origins of C++, written by Bjarne himself:

http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/hopl2.pdf
Not quite true -- tweets can include in_reply_to metadata, indicating the last tweet responded to, and location metadata, indicating where the tweet was sent. And of course, the account that sent the tweet is metadata, and so is the time it was sent.

And for my money, the reason they wrap every link through t.co is because this way they have analytics on every link clicked on Twitter. That sounds pretty valuable to me.
I don't follow you. Changing the functional behavior of the back button _sounds_ a lot like broken.
The Heart and Stroke foundation and other mainstream promoters of healthy eating have demonized fat, but I'm convinced that sugar is the real culprit when it comes to obesity and related diseases. It's just a data point, but I know for a fact that I got fat for having a huge sweet tooth. When it comes to regular foods, I tend to eat less than the average man. People are surprised all the time by how big I am for how little I eat. The problem is that until recently, I still ate tons of sugary things (much less so now that I'm on Weight Watchers). Having experienced it most of my life, it's not a stretch to call it an addiction to sugar.
OK, the spec is flawed. Other browser makers have solved that problem quite neatly by not implementing it.

It's also my opinion that while the implementation is strictly speaking correct, IE's default settings are too conservative and it is not at all an easy option for the user to change.
In the past six years or so since this was written, Greg Wilson has advocated gathering data on this and other programming related topics (watch http://vimeo.com/9270320 if you have an hour, or get a flavor for the arguments here http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/06/se-podcast-09/), and has compiled a book of essays (with research) on the topic: http://www.amazon.com/Making-Software-Really-Believe-ebook/d...

I haven't yet read the book, and so don't know it's conclusions, if any, on the various methodologies, but if you're curious about research in the area it would be a great start.

The other thing worth pointing out is that, while the Google Yegge describes in the essay might be different in 2012 than it was in 2006, it's still a different level of organization than even the average software development company, let alone a non-software company that happens to employ internal or contract developers. And Steve is writing about developing within Google.
It is a palindrome in the whole world except there..
This is so awesome. Super simple idea but I'm already grinning like a maniac coming up with ideas of what to use it for
Show HN: LabroyMedia Blog
The Origins of C++
Rio Tinto ramps up futuristic IT-driven mining
Apache releases first major new version of popular Web server in six years
initially i misread this as "The Immortality of Creating your own Content", which is quite another angle :D
"The old regime “makes it very hard to start radical new branches because you generally need to convince the people involved in the status quo up-front about their need to support that radical branch,” Torvalds says. “In contrast, Git makes it easy to just ‘do it’ without asking for permission, and then come back later and show the end result off — telling people ‘look what I did, and I have the numbers to show that my approach is much better.’”"

Substitute "business" for branch and "startup" for git.

Startups are git branching for the economy.
Strings can work fine for event names, I think op is overstating the string hell factor. But say you wanted to eliminate them you could do something like:

var firstTouchBehaviour = {
touchCount: 0,
events: {
firstTouch: 'FirstTouch'
},
setup: function(owner) {
andro.eventer(owner).bind(this, "touch", function(contact) {
if(contact === "added") {
if(this.touchCount === 0) {
andro.eventer(owner).emit(this.events.firstTouch);
}
this.touchCount++;
} else if(contact === "removed") {
this.touchCount--;
}
});
}
};

and

var soundBehaviour = {
setup: function(owner) {
andro.eventer(owner).bind(this, firstTouchBehaviour.events.firstTouch , function() {
console.log("Rarrrrrwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww");
});
}
};
I would like to see more people recording themselves coding, then going back over top of it and commentating explaining what their were doing, perhaps with a "co-caster"/reviewer.
No, Stroustrup implemented a new parser before it was even called C++. He is very clear in "Design and Evolution of C++" and elsewhere why C++ is mostly backwards compatible with C: otherwise, he feared no one would use it.
Interesting... the size option could be useful. lorempixel seems to be limited in terms of keywords to a certain pre-fixed set though.
Skydrive doesn't support encrypted files?
I agree (with you, nupark) For example, thr other day I was debugging a crash in my Cocoa (ARC) app. I've been programming Cocoa since 10.1, although I stepped away for a few years.

Anyway, random crash. My "manage memory manually" training knew it was an object getting released too early: I know I needed to retain it. Think think think... Of yes, my @property declaration was missing a retain declaration. Of course cocoa was releasing that object!

ARC sure helps, and between it and use of the autorelease pool (thanks Brent Simmons!) I hardly have to worry about memory management at all - except when I do, then I need to know what ARC is or is not doing behind the scenes.
Because I am the creator. :p
Thanks for reminding me,
I am adding the list to the about page now.
I'd use:
- howto.com/drink URL for category related to all drink-related articles, with anchor-rich links to other articles

- howto.com/how-to-drink for specific article on how to drink.

Gleb
I think it's much more helpful to have an idea of what you want to get out of your dataset. Generating random data can be useful for stress testing systems, but without an idea of what you want you'll have no idea whether what your exercising is useful or not.
Nothing is about you
> but the alleged crime is very common because IE's implementation of privacy controls is flawed

By my understanding (caveat: I've not read through the standards in any detail) IE's implementation is fine by the standard and the standard itself has problems which other browsers get around by breaking the standard.

I'm not usually one to give MS the benefit of the doubt but in this case Google does look to be the one at fault so while calling them out specifically and not mentioning Facebook and others my be disingenuous, it would appear that Google (and others) are using the loophole to perform tracking against the spirit of the standard.