skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, it's very overpriced. This is a common problem with tools like this because it's a niche market; specialty gear tends to be much, more expensive than the mass-market equivalent, to the point of limiting sales. It needs to a) be $99, at which price it will fly out the door, or b) have MIDI, because keyboard nerds are much more used to this sort of technology and likely to make up the bulk of initial sales, or c) have a much, much larger library of pre-programmed DSP modules.

I used to work in this field, and though I don't want to run down the excellent achievement of this project, it's an untried brand and technology in an area with multiple mature competitors. The only really new thing here is that it's in a pedal rather than a desktop device aimed at keyboard users. (Well, video out is novel - but Raspberry Pi has video out and costs $35.) For about $100 more you could pick up a used Nord Micro Modular, which would be enormously more versatile: http://www.clavia.se/nordmodular/Files/MicroModular_folder.p... ...not to mention a wide variety of highly configurable guitar stage processors like this: http://www.musiciansfriend.com/amplifiers-effects/line-6-pod... or http://www.rogerlinndesign.com/adrenalinn-iii.html ...

I agree with the comment above about trying to get Kickstarter funding and doing a larger production run with the resulting economies of scale. Starting high and waiting for sales to drive down the production cost is a poor strategy, and one that has caused many products/manufacturers in this market to go out of production/business. I love this kind of technology and want to like this product, but for $300 I could buy a lot more signal candy.
I'm glad this is being said.

I would add that crappy processes and tools are usually in place because the management/leadership in an organization has made them too brittle. While you don't want to wild-west every "critical" issue, bad spots in a process will naturally highlight themselves over time.

Let your tools and processes constantly evolve instead of blindly subscribing to a methodology, and you'll be in much better shape.
I wonder if the place is covered by something like ISO 9000?
I've only ever heard of it being attempted on animals.
If Everyone Learns to Code it Will Kill a Hero
And more importantly: a complete lack of trust within the organisation.
Lol. I just realized why people aren't understanding my other comments about why this debate matters. Here's an explanation:

Capital gains on the sale of capital assets (i.e., stock) by foreign persons are not taxable by the U.S. Only certain types of capital investment (i.e., real property or income that is connected to a U.S. business activity) is taxable by the US. See generally Section 871 and its accompanying regulations.

Capital gains by foreign persons are generally taxed by the foreign person's country of residence unless the foreign person has a tax nexus to the U.S. Generally, the tax nexus is provided by citizenship, actual residence, or deemed residence. Id.

Eduardo is not an actual or deemed resident of the U.S., thus his only tax nexus was via his citizenship. By renouncing his citizenship, he severs that last bit of tax nexus.

Consequently, the sale of the Facebook stock is now taxable only by the foreign jursidiction in which he is a citizen/resident. In this case, Singapore does not impose a capital gains tax, so he would effectively not be subject to any tax at all on the sale of his Facebook stock.

This matters because Singapore is one of the few non-tax haven jurisdictions that provides for no capital gain taxation. It's also unusual that he did so around the same time that Facebook began publicly indicating it would move toward an IPO, despite Eduardo having been eligible for Singaporean citizenship for some time before he actually renounced his U.S. citzenship. Note also that Eduardo "resides" in Singapore but spends significant amounts of time outside of the country.

This is why so many people (including myself) think Eduardo renounced his citizenship to avoid paying taxes. It's the circumstances surrounding his renunciation which are suspicious. If he'd chosen to move to Europe, or China, or Hong Kong, or some other place, it wouldn't be an issue. But based on the totality of the circumstances, it looks like tax avoidance was his primary motive.

Hope this helps.
It's a utility gem that helps power the Twitter Translation Center: http://translate.twttr.com/

It may not be for everyone but hopefully some people may find it useful.
Touche. I'm not entirely familiar with the options. In this case if you go the CTR route, then you could still possibly use it for branding purposes but still have the click through try to funnel a person into a sale... makes me wonder if there is click fraud going on. Anyways if people don't click on ads, then you might be able to game the CTR route.
Heh, not the same corporate snafu, but my most expensive work was done to change 1 char.

Spent about 3 weeks with a new codebase to find that one number had to be increased. Funny thing is, there was a comment there and somebody had increased it before when they had a similar problem.
People don't realize processes, reviews, standards, and audits are there because of painful (costly) incidents and breakdowns in the past. Changing one line of code in the production app is fast and easy. Crashing the system or screwing up the app logic can cause huge disruption to the operation.

After every single crisis, managers got together and vowed to never let this happen again, and thus processes and reviews are born. After couple years, things will get so stifled to the point of what OP was experiencing.
You don't really get a sense for engagement until your product is being used on a large scale. That's the true test for engagement. That's why distribution should come first.
A film-industry trick to speed up your first round of design comps
Exactly. The point bengl3rt was making, I assume, is that cavalier avoidance of process is a bad thing because it allows mistakes to happen that would be caught. That much is true.

But the assumption that's wrong is that all processes avoid mistakes. Clearly they don't.

And some of the examples here are just plain cargo cult misapplications of good ideas. The point behind code review is to catch design flaws in new code. You never want to demand refactoring of existing code in order to patch features, that hurts, it doesn't help.
If it makes everybody feel better, the temporary bubble has already popped. It's over, it's just that very few people know it yet.

The Facebook IPO is timed to get out the door before the stock market falls any further. It signals the end of this micro era, just as Apple's stock at $644 was the big monster stock of this time frame (referring to the small bubble periods that the Fed generates with their monetization programs and rate manipulation).

The previous two Fed liquidity bubbles, 1997/99 and 2005/07, both had all the same trimmings.

Chin up, it's over, now comes the winter. Hope you've got your funding.
I don't particularly want to pay less tax. I just want to pay my fair share. Having lived in places with much shoddier governments, I think I get pretty good value on my dollar. So when somebody is trying to dodge their fair sahre, I don't like it.
I agree that it's worth being careful on mission-critical code, but this isn't being careful, it's just box-ticking. Ed said he'd tested the actual change, but most of the time is taken up by shifting it out to some parameters file, lengthening its name and waiting for permissions.
Feh... I'm 39 and most of the "I ..." statements in that article rang true for me. I don't think being a "Millennial" or not has as much to do with things as the author believes.

Likewise, most of the quoted stereotypes about millennials were once said about "Gen Y" and "Gen X" kids as well.
A few notes on those points:

1) The fields are probably mandatory because so many times routine entries were not filled correctly, and even MORE overhead was required going back and forth between teams to find out all of the details. If there is a way to avoid this overhead, again, how do you stop people abusing it?

2 & 3) Yeah.. bad overhead.

4) A sanity check is ALWAYS a good idea, whether its a fresh intern or the most seasoned programming in the company making a change.

5) They security processes might seem excessive but once again are probably in place due to issues in the past that have required the review/signoff be there to stop major disruptions getting through.

6) As someone who worked in QA for a while, there is no way in a hell someone can say "push this change through" without a strong questioning of why. QA is there (in most cases) to be that last line of defence. Often letting people know just how many people are really going to be affected by this change.

Being on a testing team often gives you a broader oversight of how all of the components of the code work together, while people working on one project can sometimes get tunnel vision on getting their thing out the door.

Edit: Just like to point out, I'm agreeing with you
I found this interesting too. After doing some digging of my own I found this:

Corvis Corporation is the first company to make the intelligent all-optical network a reality. Our solutions enable telecommunications service providers to construct manageable all-optical networks that will accommodate the continuing growth of Internet, video, voice, and other data traffic

Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20011103200605/http://www.corvis....
"Changing one line of code took 6 days!" is a pretty common WTF story. It comes up every so often, and we all get a chuckle at the ponderous rate of change in large organizations.

However, "Changing one line of code broke everything for 6 days!" is also a common WTF story. As a rule of thumb, you can't avoid both of them, because avoiding one entails the other. I wouldn't fault a company that chooses the first story over the second.

The problem is that things that scale up don't always scale down. The processes implied aren't that bad, for handling large commits to a large process. They're obviously overkill for small changes. But just because the processes are a negative effect on this change in particular does not mean that the processes are a net negative overall. More flexible processes could also end up being more trouble than they're worth, due to allowing (encouraging) sloppy work.
There are many politicians and public figures that say exactly what you just said - that the way the financial system works is bad (actually, IIRC, no other than Obama himself reiterated that talking on the news about huge Chase loss) - and the way the political system works is bad (they even try to organize third parties and independent candidates, which inevitably result in pathetic failure at the polls) - so making it sound as it's somehow topic that no one dares to talk about for the fear of all-powerful 1% is baloney. This topic is talked about far and wide. You can publish any opinion, and even for the most outrageous ones, you get a pretty good chance for your 15 minutes of fame - actually, if it's outrageous, your chances are higher, TV shows need ratings and outrage means notoriety means ratings.

Of course, it's one thing to talk about everything being screwed up and quite another - having any practical recipe of how to fix it and being able to convince enough people to follow you. Words are wind, you know. Allowed is one thing, effectual is another. But not because there's an evil 1% conspiracy - but because mainstream is mainstream for a reason, changing people's opinions is very hard.
"The true job creators are middle class consumers"
You need to keep in mind advertising $$ for those internet users as well. As someone mentioned, China is a huge factor and Facebook isn't available. And the vast majority of advertising revenue a company like Facebook would make most certainly comes from the US and Europe, which is pretty saturated with internet users already. South America, Africa, and Asia are all going to be much harder to monetize on.
I imagine AWS is one big firefight, and it probably outpaced their retail business long ago. That's from outside observation, mind, and it's a guess (but an educated one).

They might be hiring at a normal rate but unable to keep up with operational demand -- which is a real pickle of a spot to be in -- or you're right, they're too choosy. I sincerely doubt there's a shortage of folks to work on Amazon and AWS.
First signs of Google's new 'semantic search' spotted, put to good use
> Microsoft and Apple both went public before the Internet and managed to do quite well without it.

That's because Apple's and Microsoft's products don't (or didn't at the time the companies went public) rely solely on the internet. A big reason why Facebook has such a massive valuation is precisely because the population of the internet has increased so strongly.
Pretty much, yes, though you could argue that the best ones speculate not on what others will be prepared to pay for a company in the future, but on what they think a company could earn.

Pinterest, Instagram etc will likely never earn enough to pay back their current crazy valuations, so their valuations are the first kind of speculation, not the latter. Personally I feel Facebook is also in this group, and is overvalued right now, given their current and likely future revenue.
Did you miss this part:

> It [sic] we don't do this right away, we'll have to have a layoff.

As a company, it's great to have a process for incremental changes, but you also need to have a process for critical hot-fixes.

You're a phone company, and adding a new feature should take months. I get that.

You're a phone company, and because of an unforeseen Cinderella problem, 10% of your customers can't make phone calls. At all.

It is unacceptable to have a one-size-fits-all process, no matter what your business is.
Agreed. 19 times out of 20 people will do the right thing.

Therefore, process like this unnecessarily slows down the organisation 95% of the time.

Much better to trust people and implement very specific and very carefully designed safety nets such as fast rollbacks.

In most cases, the benefits of just trusting people will massively outway the costs of the occasional slip up.
Actually your "side" never cited a source. Again, looking at your comment history, I see you telling a lot of vague stories and criticizing other people's sources, but you never provide a single source of your own. In your entire history, you reference exactly two distinct urls neither of which has any salary or benefits information at all.

Multiple times in this thread and others, you link to a list of large government contracting companies:
http://washingtontechnology.com/toplists/top-100-lists/2011....

And then, a long time ago, you linked to a dice posting in order to ridicule it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3072172

> 5 years experience with SQL Server 2008

> http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=302...

If your job is as bad as you seem to imply, then I certainly hope you heed people's advice and find another. But I'm beginning to suspect that you're being intentionally misleading for some other purpose.
There are an assload of set top android boxes on alibaba. Any of them hackable to run standard linuxes?
Ah yes, only 43%. Sorry I missed by so much when I was generalizing. =)
The Conservative Mind: 5 Q's for science writer Chris Mooney
Adobe Photoshop CS6 13.0 2012 EXTENDED EAST EUROPE / MUL / RUS
6 days you LUCKY LUCKY Bastard - i have user stories over 6 months old that haven't been actioned yet and had to wait 2 months to get a gwt verification file installed
4. Provide a compressed archive of the data the scrapers want and make it available.

No one should have to scrape in the first place.

It's not 1993 anymore. Sites want Google and others to have their data. Turns out that allowing scraping produced something everyone agrees is valuable: a decent search engine. Sites are being designed to be scraped by a search engine bot. This is silly when you think about it. Just give them the data already.

There is too much unnecessary scraping going on. We could save a whole lot of energy by moving more toward a data dump standard.

Plenty of examples to follow. Wikimedia, StackExchange, Public Resource, Amazon's AWS suggestions for free data sources, etc.
Gee, I was hoping to just take the time to transcribe the video and add a couple of comments here and there without having to defend its content.

The necessity of demand is the 'elephant in the room' because so much of the political argument so far has revolved around increasing benefits for the suppliers, rather than increasing demand. The argument has been, "we're supposed to make the wealthy wealthier, and then -- magically -- they will create more jobs."

If the necessity of demand isn't the elephant in the room, then why isn't there broad political support for higher tax rates on the wealthy? Why isn't there broad political support for economic stimulus packages? Why isn't there broad political support for universal health care, a significant expense for poor and middle-class Americans? Why isn't there broad political support for lowering taxes on the poor? Why, instead, do I keep hearing such balderdash as, "The poor pay no taxes at all"?

Nobody's saying that business people don't add value to the economy. What people like this guy -- and me -- are saying is that they don't add value all by themselves. And, if that's a point that people can agree on, then the very next question is naturally, "Why do the bulk of our economic strategies focus only on benefiting them then?"

If a venture fails due to low demand, yes, some investor and some capitalist assumed risk and have presumably lost something. But, worse still, are all those other people -- those employees -- who didn't have anything to risk in the first place, and are now back to looking for work again. In your scenario, there wasn't any net job creation, there were just some positions temporarily filled.

And, anyway, if the business people do the market research they're supposed to do first, and the demand isn't there, they won't bother starting anyway.

Let's stop making up fairytale scenarios. Let's start getting specific. Let's look at things like leveling-off or falling consumer demand for gasoline [1], and then let's look at the tax breaks afforded to oil companies [2], and let's ask ourselves: if we're doing everything right, if we're granting these companies record profits [3], then why haven't they lowered gas prices to increase demand like the magic formula says they will?

[1]: http://soberlook.com/2012/03/us-consumer-is-saying-no-to-hig...

[2]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/how-much-do-o...

[3]: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/02/08/421061/big-oil-h...
The content in the video is available since day 1. The very article contains link to TED's version, which would be obvious to anyone reading the whole article, which makes me wonder - did you?
The whole point is not about the talk ideas being somehow unavailable - but about the author feeling entitled to being promoted by TED and when TED does not provide that for him launching into PR campaign about "censorship". Nobody tried to "censor" anybody's opinion. But some people love having opinions without even bothering with the facts. I don't know anything more flat-out wrong than that.
AlterEgo - Two-Factor Security for Web Apps
So one of my daughters is a knitter, we wrote a perl script together to convert text instructions to charts [1]. Some folks find the charts easier to understand. During the process she really got a feel for how similar knitting and programming are.

[1] http://www.mcmanis.com/chuck/graphics/knit-chart.svg
It seems to me that TED was embarassed by this talk, not because they disagree with the conclusions, but just because the speaker was so unbearable to watch, and TED probably felt that he came off a little weird.
>There just aren’t enough programmers, designers, operations people, and other warm bodies to man all the hot air balloons. So you have a predictable effect: Rapidly increasing demand for an only steadily increasing supply. Thus, inflation.

As one of those warm bodies manning a balloon, I don't mind seeing this happen. I enjoyed having a little market power during the last bubble, and I'll enjoy it this time around as well. Sure, when the bubble pops it will suck, but mostly for people trying to get into the field and not people with experience.
Wordpress it is I think. Going to use a naked theme and build from there.
Or you could just hire responsible people and ask them to use their judgement, you don't have to choose one or the other you can instead apply judgement as to whether this is going to screw shit up or not.

Honestly, though the best way to handle this situation is with a phone call to the CEO/IT Director getting him to write you an email allowing you to override all the checks to get this in ASAP.

Once you're known for clearing things with hire ups, QA will start being reasonable. You have to keep in mind that most people in QA are type C personalities and will be a stickler for inane rules.

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/type-c-personality.html
What I identified with the most is the requirements creep that happens in QA/validation
What's a Cinderella problem? I'm assuming it's a reference to the midnight deadline.
#3 is only an option if you are trying to prevent scraping just to reduce your bandwidth caused by rapid, repeated page requests. If you are trying to prevent someone one from just coming in and scooping up all your data, then providing an API is worse than just allowing the scraper to scrape.

There is no bullet proof way to stop it. So you make it as painful for the scraper as possible. I like the randomized classes/ids and the extraneous random invisible table cells and divs.
I'd just like to point out that you are chastising them for going public after obtaining reliable revenues for several years. This used to be the minimum requirement for going public.
Leveraging Augmented Reality for Social Interaction
I haven't heard or read this talk, and presume that Anderson made a correct editorial decision regarding its merits. My focus is on the statement "But even if the talk was rated a home run, we couldn't release it, because it would be unquestionably regarded as out and out political. We're in the middle of an election year in the US."

I'm not arguing that Ted should be pressured into publicizing this talk. But with great admiration for Ted, I think their approach to politicized topics bears further discussion. I'm stunned to think that an international organization should find it less desirable to broach certain topics due to the timing of a US election.
Some of it is definitely in stocks / IPOs.

RAX had a 100 pe ratio recently. That's as high as Cisco was during the dotcom bubble.

CRM has no PE ratio at all, despite their monstrous market cap.

Amazon has a zillion PE ratio because they're not making much money any longer.

There's a very long list at this point of tech stocks with crazy valuations. When people do their anti-bubble refutes, they only list stocks like HP or EBAY or MSFT or INTC or AAPL, and they ignore the big pile of other tech stocks with massive valuations.

ZNGA and GRPN were both bubble stocks, priced to extremes, and worth nowhere near what they IPO'd at. Pandora, HomeAway, and on the list goes. I bet I can name 40 from the last three years.
Indeed. But that doesn't mean that you have to like taking 6 days to write one line of code.

That said, 6 days isn't so bad as long as we're talking about the time it takes to write the code and put it into production. It's another thing to take 6 days to put the code into source control.