skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really dig this post. I've worked at waterfall companies and agile companies doing Scrum, and in both places the tools tended to dictate the process a bit too much for my liking.

Estimates got treated as gospel and planning was deemed extremely important, but nobody was willing to make the time for it to be done right.

I think web apps with shorter release cycles and fast deployments can really benefit from a process like this. You just have to be willing to try out simple, light weight tools and iterate on the process just like you iterate on the code.

Most shops tend to just use what they know rather than attempt to hack the process to meet their own needs. Kudos to the guys at UserVoice for going against the grain.
Slick mobile version. I'm reading the article from my iPhone and I'm impressed.
Business ideas for Buy and Sell Commodities
Another simple business idea to earn money from your home is to buy and sell commodities/goods on particular sites which purely deal in such kind of transaction. In this business, one has to be patient and should be alert all the time in order to buy or sell his / her product on the right time so that the person could get more profit margin from its product.
Google G-Drive
Yeah, those people who put down 9 exemptions on their W4 would not be pleased.
Web patents - what can be patented?
Hi,
The stories about web patents seem so bizarre. Like Yahoo claiming to own patent on showing ads based on some metrics. I wonder what all can and can not be patented. As in, how come Friendster or MySpace could not get online social network patented or how come Amazon could not get online book store patented?
Basically what I want to understand is - what are the features of a product for it to be patentable?
Thanks. Manas
It's very depressing to see very intelligent people knowingly ignore their received benefit from serious, dehumanizing and alienating structural problems.

Nobody thinks the artificial equalization provided by things like affirmative action actually is equality - the hope is that by putting a finger on the scale in favor of equality of opportunity, eventually society (after several generations of induced equity) will actually become equitable because the society itself has been altered.

to suggest that this is not a worthwhile goal essentially means that you think the status quo is fine because it affords you certain advantages that you did nothing to achieve. if you think that demanding people "lighten up" or accept that they shouldn't be a part of things because they can't hack it is actually an objectivist or libertarian ideal, you just don't understand the unfair advantages you have actually already been afforded by birthright.
He could just divide the CPC by the conversion rate and figure this out in about one sentence:

$1.53/0.015 = $101.33
Facebook Launches a Listen Button on Musician's Pages
Funny, I don't remember buying stock in Goldman Sachs or GM...

Anyway, I think kickstarter does enough to make sure people understand the risks involved. If anything I'd say kickstarter funders probably have as good a grasp of the level of risk they're taking on as the average new home buyer or 401k program participant. At the end of the day there's only so much hand holding that can reasonably be justified, I think kickstarter is probably pretty close to the appropriate level of such.
Rather than focus on any single narrow field, why not add Q&A sections. Start with one section (like "how do I play song x?") and gradually add others ("equipment tuning", "computer generated music", "business questions", "technical stuff for narrow audience x" etc.)

With 400k users, you have the community to turn this into a Stack Overflow for musicians.

http://stackexchange.com/about

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/04/16.html [the idea]

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/09/15.html [v1.0]

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/01/24.html [traction]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_Exchange_Network

Also check out how Philip Greenspun's old photography community presents itself to advertisers:

http://photo.net/info/about-us
I wish they'll say Tablet on tablets instead of Mobile, like Firefox will do:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Gecko_user_agent_string_ref...
War Of The Worlds: When Science, Politics Collide
The term jitter is also used in a digital audio context to describe the deviation of a sample rate from its ideal value, so the usage in this context doesn't seem like much of a stretch to me.

Edit to add: an old but interesting reference I found via Google: http://www.regonaudio.com/Jitter.html
What Condé Nast’s Ziplist Acquisition Means for the Startup’s 6.5K “Partners”
The Trapezium Conundrum : Definitions and Ambiguity in math
While I certainly prefer iOS to Android ... it's really unfortunate that such a situation has emerged. I think the Android platform has only done good for our planet. Developers have more jobs, more interesting apps are being created, more devices are being sold, there are more powerful and less expensive devices in the smartphone world that are becoming popular in emerging markets and third world countries (don't quote me, but a nearly free Android handset in Nigeria?) Mobile is a paradigm shift. People are more and more connected while away from their homes and desks. Payments are going mobile. Also, Android is the biggest competitor to Apple. I'm certainly an Apple guy in all aspects, but I do appreciate competition in the market to keep everyone working hard and innovating.

Sucks that Oracle will not consider any of that. That no terms could be reached out of simple goodheartedness. Oracle isn't losing money because of Android as far as I am concerned. There might be profit lost due to licensing, but it just feels wrong to me.
Windows XP Pro SP3 VLK Simplix Edition 15.04.2012 (RUS/2012)
Ah, it's worth clarification here. Here's how we use the nomenclature:

Ticket - a message a customer sends in about an issue or question.

Bug - an issue (that can come from any source) which we track and resolve.

We just Trello for bugs (which may be reported in tickets) but we use UserVoice Helpdesk (http://www.uservoice.com/helpdesk) for tickets. Helpdesk is designed around customer communication, Trello is designed around development.

Hope that clarifies! :)
Oh, how history repeats itself..
This Chat Bot Built an Awesome Startup Culture
Watt?
Warren Buffett Has Prostate Cancer
Windows has little in common with WP7 aside from the name. There are very few synergies that matter in the real world for a Windows user, selecting WP7 over an Android phone. For example existing Windows skills do not transfer in any way. Windows programs, legacy or current, do not run on WP7.

Similarly, the Xbox is a different platform in of itself, might just as well be made by a different company.
Dinosaur eggs found in Russia's Chechnya
if U.S copyrights the english language, this commentary will infringe U.S laws and iĺl go to guantanamo! what wonderful world...
Regarding Ghostery, there is really no way of observing what is being logged and what isn't on the server. Only some sort of legal inquiry can reveal that (eg what happened with Facebook in Ireland)

You could also use noscript or disable third party cookies in browser settings if you really don't want social media buttons.
AFAIK Amazon doesn't have an MFN clause. (Does Apple still w.r.t. books? I thought that's past tense.)

If I am willing to sell for under $10 Amazon offers a 70% royalty (less various charges -- effectively 60%) in some regions, 35% in others, and if the price is over $10 then it's 35% (with no deductions).

Oh my original post is confused -- books over __$10__ are limited to a 35% royalty (which is a huge poverty trap)

In all cases I'm talking percentage of my set selling price. (Perhaps Amazon wants to discount my books and still have enough margin to pay my royalty -- that's a lot of wiggle room -- they can sell my $20 book for $10 and make just as much money off it as if I'd set the cover price at $10.

From Apple, Barnes & Noble, etc. it's 70% minus some admin charge -- effectively 65% or so -- across the board.

Note that Apple does cap prices for "textbooks" created with iBookauthor at $14.99.

I guess in the end this doesn't matter much since we can always split books into parts, but the fact is that Amazon's business model currently involves:

* paying less to writers than anyone else

* evading state sales taxes by fair means and foul

* being the only vendor of ebook readers that can't read DRM-free ePubs out-of-the-box
It's already been fixed, but it was obvious from the context that he meant homophobe.
How To Shutdown Computer with Your Cell Phone
Isn't this basically what bookmarklets are supposed to do?

Facebook's open graph tags are everywhere (you kindof need them to make "like" work properly), and what you're describing could be implemented using a javascript bookmarklet that read the tags.
Yep, that's sexism in action, alright. He's exactly part of the problem, and the fact that he's resistant to changing it just shows how pervasive it is.
Many social sites offer a bookmarklet or browser extension (or at least a 3rd party implements something via API).
I don't entirely disagree with this article but I do know that Google Ad prices are driven by market demand which means that if you price your product to break even on Google Ad conversions you are really just piggybacking on your competitor's math. That's what they have found to work. If enough people use this logic you'll converge on an average market price - not what customers are willing to pay.

TL;DR: You are participating in a pricing feedback loop with your competition.
Here's an example of why they don't want to turn it on (this is one of the examples they use internally).

https://plus.google.com/107158560758466172135/posts

Charlie Kindel uses a backdoor to paste his tweets to G+ and adds very little to the community. There is no interaction on his posts - it's just added noise.
It is definitely useful to do these sort of 'back of the envelope' calculations. A few things to bear in mind:

-It is strongly in Google's interest to inflate bid prices. I would take their suggested bid prices with a pinch of salt. The Google traffic estimator shows that I should be able to get around a 4% CTR on [speed reading] at around $0.50 per click in the USA:
https://adwords.google.com/ko/TrafficEstimator/

-The amount you have to pay for a conversion in Adwords depends hugely on how well you play the game of Adwords. Most people using Adwords have very little idea how to set up or manage their accounts and are paying a lot more per click than they need to (I have looked at quite a few Adwords accounts).

-There are more countries in the world than the USA. You may be able to get clicks and conversions a cheaper elsewhere.

-There are probably lots of keywords related to speed reading that are cheaper to bid on than the exact match [speed reader], e.g.

speed reader course

speed reader techniques

speed reader software

speed reader tips

speed reading

speed reading course etc

They will probably have lower search volumes, but it shouldn't be hard to come up with a few hundred of these. Some of them might also have higher CTR and conversion rates.

-I think the numbers used are reasonable (1% CTR, 1.5% conversion rate). My own numbers are a bit better than that, but not too far off. But my average cost per click (selling downloadable software) is waaaay lower than $1.53.
People just like to be obnoxious when there are typos.
That's the entire point of the article...
Javascript Color Pickers
Get Ready for a Downpour of Cloud-related Startups
What it is not is "clear", for any definition of the term understood by a working programmer who doesn't already know the language and grok the new abstraction.

Browse menu, "implementors," select ifTrue:ifFalse:ifMaybe: and find yourself in a short method in under 3 seconds. (Most of that human menu-selection time.) Maybe another 5 seconds for someone familiar with the environment and its conventions to read and understand what they are seeing.

You have a different POV, because it's the POV of someone who doesn't yet know how to fend for yourself in a different environment. Once you learn a few tricks like this, it's very empowering. (And it's not an obscure trick. A seasoned Smalltalker lives by "senders" and "implementers")

Those two opinions cannot logically be held in the same brain.

I don't hold those two opinions. I don't think . is hard, and I don't think Smalltalk syntax is so much easier. What it is, combined with code blocks as literals, is a meta-syntax. I think it's more powerful in some ways.
I want to see how a minified version look like.
Yeah, but they must be in a separate file, among other things. They're really not feasible for lightweight dispatch like GCD is.
Yeah I pretty much echo this experience. The ironic part is how almost every "Agile" company I've ever seen seems to completely reverse the very first line of the manifesto.

> Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

For my part, I'm completely done with Agile and the Agile community, there is very little of value there any more. Those who did add value have moved on, tired of and pushed out by those looking to make a quick buck consulting or managers looking to justify their poor management skills. It's quite sad.

I'm on a small team now, doing something fun and cool. The process is leaner, faster, way more productive and without all the BS overhead of trying to be "Agile".
Pinterest Is A $7.7 Billion Company
Building Smarter Apps
Great post. The focus should be on the work and getting things done. Gender/race/(other group qualifier) ratios are a matter of fact, not value. Focus shouldn't be on political correctness for the sake of protecting feelings. It doesn't take a Nazi to see that.

People have become over-sensitive, and it's left me asking: Where have all the grown-ups gone?
Firefox has a first-party experimental addon to do this. You can try it out here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firefox-share...
I've backed quite a few projects on Kickstarter, out of the 17 I have backed, so far only one has been a real disappointment (Juicies), 5 are still building their products/shipping in the near future (and are looking good, posting updates, I am confident in them), I have received 6 of my awards for projects I have backed.

So far I have been happy with the projects I have backed and received my reward for, and I've been happy with the progress shown on the other products I have kickstarted. Ultimately it is a gamble whether or not you get something back for your money. At this time I feel like I am giving someone money to try to get their dream goal fulfilled, and worst case I don't get anything in return but they have oodles of experience on what can go wrong and why, and how they could fix it the next time around or what they could do better. Sometimes believing in something/someone is better than just dismissing it outright, especially when it is just money. If you can't afford to lose it (or gamble it) then really you shouldn't be putting that money into projects on Kickstarter you should be using it to pay the bills.

Does is suck when you lose money? Absolutely, but it hasn't stopped me from actively backing more projects. Juicies was my first project I backed, if I had stopped there because of the guys failure to actually complete in time then I would have missed out on helping friends from college and I would have missed out on awesome rewards from many of the other projects I have listed below who did come through and get me my award.

That being said, the only production of physical goods I have backed were (I've also backed a couple of games/art/shows):

Not Funded yet:

Pebble: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper...

Waiting on reward/Funded:

Mobilemount Suction Kickstand: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/674303746/mobilemountsuc...

Twine: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/supermechanical/twine-li...

Elevation Dock: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hop/elevation-dock-the-b...

Received Reward:

CEE: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/itdaniher/cee-the-usb-an...

Prop: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/makecollab/the-prop

Revision 1 - Drafting Themed Cards: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/onefreehour/revision-1-d...

Pulse Sensor: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1342192419/pulse-sensor-...

The Present: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/scottthrift/the-present (Although, I didn't opt for a clock, I opted for "Something" as a reward level)

Disappointed/Given up hope on ever receiving reward:

Juicies: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/laudowicz/juicies-colorf... (My first project)
> If I call something “retarded,” it should be obvious that it has nothing to do with people afflicted with down syndrome.

And it should be obvious that I'll no longer do business with you, because you're horrifyingly inconsiderate of people around you. Sure, you are not offended; that doesn't mean the person with mental disability they can hide from you won't be, if they overhear you.

This is a pretty bad example for the rest of the article, which I happen to agree with in a couple places. I resist calling things "retarded" as much as I do calling things "gay", and I think the sentiment reflects really negatively upon the rest of the article and the person.

(Edit: Oh look, he's live editing it now that I've called him out.)
I would never ask a for-profit company to open source their core software if it doesn't meet their business model (sell support, etc.). Here's the thing though: I don't care one bit about how they process tweets internally.

However, the "bit of code on the periphery" that Twitter has released is far more interesting to me. Bootstrap lets me prototype web UIs much faster, for example, and who knows? Maybe some day I'll end up using their contributions to MySQL, Cassandra or Mahout.

So, if only for purely selfish reasons, I say kudos to them.
Amy Hoy doesn't say you should use adwords, does she? Correct me if I'm wrong as I've only read the free chapters and watched the video, but she basically tells you to find a suitable group of customers, see what kind of product they need, and create it. Also, blog about things which that group would find interesting, like 37signals does, to connect with these customers.

Now after reading this article I wonder whether this can actually work. Can you not make a living by creating a product and getting some sales from your blog + SEO?
The point is that the switch is programmable. You can implement the centralised behaviour. You can implement decentralised one. You can implement anything you want.
MySQL replication with hotbackups
From my superficial understanding, the direct result of this lawsuit affects only Google and Oracle and is only over money. Android will keep using Java (perhaps with a fee of some sort). There may be repercussions from the decision in other ways, but if you're an Android dev I don't think you need to worry.
They can sue, they just need the inventor's permission. In that case, if the inventor is getting their hard work ripped off, they would probably agree to sue.
The person who wrote this felt harassed and slighted. That's what being in a minority often entails. I think it's entirely appropriate that she responded in the way she did. She didn't take legal action, she decided to use a novel way of calling out the behaviour behind the bot.

I find it interesting that you are bleating about lawsuits, when a. The business clearly doesn't care about legal action as they didn't stop the bot when asked, and b. no legal action was ever taken by the author.
Anyone that is not a parent yet will never understand and will never value such quality time.

... and I'm guessing that's the majority HN readers.

There's only 24 hours in a day, no more no less.
A tool which told you there was an absolute change of 5%, but didnt tell you where that change was, would not be all that useful.

I'm sympathetic to the "all-or-none" broken windows philosophy that many developers use, but I disagree with it. If you need to get to 100% of some metric in order to get some visibility on its changes, you're just not going to get that metric.

At Circle, we make hosted CI, and I frequently talk to customers who use jenkins or something, and whose tests are broken. Inevitably, they broke the tests one day, their priorities dictated that they couldn't fix it right away, so they left their test suite red. Because it was red, they didn't notice the suite getting more and more broken over time.

If their test suite hadn't been binary, they would have learned immediately when they broke more tests, and they would have been in a much better place.

TL;DR I blame the tools.
I like them all. Any gate to education is a gate worth keeping open.

(Code Academy is going to really interesting though once more people start submitting courses. REAL interesting.)
"Nobody thinks the artificial equalization provided by things like affirmative action actually is equality"

Do you really think that if women dominated tech, people would be clamoring for more men in it? The few nurses I know have no trouble with the lack of men in their profession. Maybe they're just sexist?
"If somebody cannot handle some crudeness, I’d postulate that he or she does not belong at a startup, regardless of gender. Because, when shit hits the fan, as it invariably does, we need people who can take it."

What does crude language have to do with ability to handle startup situations where "shit hits the fan"? Someone who dislikes offensive language is somehow unable to handle fast-paced or stressful situations on the job?
> A startup is an intensely stressful environment, and staying sane is crucial.

Imagine that you had been denied access to work purely because of your sex. Or your eye colour. Or something else trivial but outside your control.

Imagine that people said your code was shoddy because of this thing. Imagine that every hour of every day someone made some comment or joke about this thing.

Eventually you'd get a bit pissed off.

You may write a calm blog post pointing out the problems caused by the attitudes of people who don't like brown eyes.

And you get a bunch of people calling you weak and dumb and up-tight. So those people can say what they like, all day every day, and you just have to lighten up, and if you ever say anything (no matter how calmly you say it) they mock you.

You can see how annoying that would be.

> A startup is an intensely stressful environment

That's no reason to accept unacceptable behaviour. We should be working to make things better for everyone. We should be helping people who have good contributions. Saying that startups are stressful becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Microsoft gives Windows Server "8" an official name + ships System Center 2012
http://gitmetrics.com/
What is it that Inara's selling?

Shares of Blue Sun. http://firefly.wikia.com/wiki/Blue_Sun_Corporation

I'll be sure to have Zoe and Book make an appearance in part 2. Sorry that my fanfic missed your favorite character.
We probably would have gotten a good preview with the Ashton-Tate vs Fox Software if Ashton-Tate hadn't totally bungled their copyright filings for dBase.
In some cultures people unbury loved ones once a year to dance with them.

Not an anthropologist and would not know details, but found this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspon...