skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have just moved from B2B, where many "deadlines" were largely artificial and driven by sales targets rather than real business need, to online retail, where the deadline is often concrete, immovable, and external (trade show, Olympics, Christmas). In both environments I found it most useful to encourage my team to commit to completion of _the best solution they can manage_ by a business-meaningful date (picked by the team after suitable consideration, of course). In this model the team do not agree to a specific solution or scope, though to pick the target date at the beginning they usually have an initial solution in mind; as they work toward the date, they (working with the customer representatives in the team) have the freedom to cut features or components, or to add new ones, as they grow in their understanding of the feature and the limitations on delivery (legacy code, lack of experience, unclear business needs). I have generally found that in an environment where development teams are trusted (yes I know such environments are far too rare) this produces results that are as good or better than the recipients expected, and almost always on time or nearly so.
But there's not much change. For most developers it will require no more changes than replacing "api.twitter.com/1" with "api.twitter.com/11" (or whatever it is) and testing a little bit for the new rate limits (which, as Twitter says, will be enough for apps that are currently within those limits).

The bigger problem is for apps than don't authenticate: Search apps, analytics... anything that does not write to Twitter is probably not authenticated. They'll have to migrate to OAuth and requiring user authorization.

But, as I said, this will not be the case for most of apps. Anyways, it wouldn't be bad that Twitter gave more margin to developers.
Well at 10-75 bucks for dinner they know that they are at least going to get some nutrients. They can't say that the app will even boot up. I had an app that just crashed to the main screen because it wasn't written for the particular iOS version I was using. Getting a refund on a 99 cent app wasn't worthwhile to me so I didn't do it.
Honestly, I think this is the best response I could imagine for this post.
"The roughness of the fractal dimension of a problem that needs to be solved can be calculated more easily in my opinion than with classical estimation techniques."

We're always applying the Roman "divide and conquer" strategy without thinking about it. It wouldn't make sense to apply this, or any other strategy ignorantly! The D&C strategy works because a naive solution to count the fingers in this picture without knowing the fractal dimension is: "divide and conquer". http://mark.rehorst.com/Bug_Photos/fractal_hands_c.jpg
(mirror: http://i.minus.com/ibz9NsZ6ET32aV.jpg )

I think this is also the reason why some autistic people feel uncomfortable when they don't know each detail of a not yet happened situation in advance. Because communicating the fractal dimension, or "roughness" of a problem or situation is the most time consuming and fragile phase in a project.

Here's an article about: "Roughness of fracture surfaces and compressive strength of hydrated cement pastes", which appears to be completely out of topic. But I believe it's nearer to the best estimation technique than other techniques. (Fig. 3) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0008884610...

While you may critique that I've not contributed to solving the problem, you may also notice that I've helped to shed some light on the roughness of the problem to be solved :) (Am lazy, it's very late and I'm just back from training to be honest=)
Had exact same question, why would someone purposely disable/prevent the auto-update mechanism?
Stock Forecasts based on Quantum Physics
Really not annoying at all, they're always interesting to see.
For some reason Google hates my site but Reddit loves it. Who's the Hypocrite?
Looking at human beings as ecosystems could change medicine
Twitter Wants to Stop You from Using Twitter Apps Not Made By Twitter
Twitter Gives Developers 6 Months To “Properly” Display Tweet
One of my CS theory profs had the policy, "A proof is anything that convinces me you could write a proof."
my pain point over the last few years has been pulling data out of pdf documents (ie govt departments think this counts as open data).
I'd pay through the nose for a tool that i could just dump pdf files into and have them find tables and convert them to csv. even if it was only 95+% that would save hours of tedious data entry...
Well I am out of there first chance I see...
We're still in Beta, but http://www.mixwish.com allows you to add items from any website as well. Similar concept to Amazon, but much easier to use.
Ruby and KISS, Sitting in a Tree
I anticipate a flurry of parodies on their use of the term "flock" except away from Twitter and not towards.
Same here, still haven't got anything.
I'm curious why there isn't a place on HN where we can see the startups for each of the classes including their web site, industry, a description of their service, etc.

I know there are a few resources online, but they don't seem to be kept completely up to date. Personally, I love reading about the startups and would prefer to have that information made available here in an organized fashion than having to read about them on TC or elsewhere.

Anyway, no apologies necessary for me! :)
Of course, we have high emissions from agriculture. (All those sheep farts...)
Star Fox 64 took awhile to get started but then the intro was going at full speed and looked good. Once it got to the start screen things slowed down again and become unplayable. Still, pretty impressive!
Quikdraw - an innovative lens holster
حل مشكلة تعليق الواتس اب في البلاك بيري
There could be a revenue stream in here. They're limiting how many free users an application may have, but I would expect they could charge Tweetbot to have more users. Tweetbot could simply build this cost into the software.
This is a terrible article that basically says hope is not enough to change market dynamics.

How numerous comments degenerated into capitalism vs socialism only further proves the original point.

Everybody wants something for nothing.
Screenshots and reviews are very, very limited channels of information.

Reviews can be gamed, even when they're not, the ratings provided are typically highly inflated or simply binary (people give very high, or very low ratings, few in the middle). While descriptions can be useful, in practice most are not ("works great", "does everything I wanted" -- doesn't tell me "... for what" or "... and that was ..."). Negative reviews are often more useful (they're generally specific as to faults), but even then, as apps change over time, it's not clear what reviews relate to the current state of your app (Starbucks generally doesn't radically change its coffee composition from week to week).

Screenshots show a static view of an app but not its flow, responsiveness, accuracy, stability, privacy policy, and a whole slew of other issues.

The best way for me to judge software is to use it. Often for a prolonged period of time.
And then what?

Best case scenario is: those client apps get in touch with Twitter and negotiate a per-user rate to be paid to Twitter.

This could be a great way for Twitter to allow third-party clients, but get a cut of the revenues from the non-free ones.

And it allows Twitter to decide this on a case-by-case basis.

(Or, maybe it's just a way to force very popular commercial clients into complying with whatever Twitter's revenue-generation plans end up being).
India’s public-sector banks are sitting on something unpleasant
IKEA has free coffee
I too switched to FastMail a year or so ago for my email, as I found Joyent email to be slow and didn't have any spam filtering functionality. They have an IMAP/POP email importer which will suck in all your email and folders from you previous provider. Worked like a charm.
Does anyone think that 'Starbucks' or 'Pay me $1' are great signals for Craftsmanship?

I know plenty of office environments with free coffee. There is your alternative, but it isn't relevant. People buy experiences. You go to Starbucks because you like the experience. The terminology. The chatty baristas. The drive-thru you can complain about with your sympathetic co-workers. They could probably charge twice what they do and keep a big fraction of their customers.
Do you actually invest using these ideas? Why is a univariate Gaussian fit to recent sample data a good way to estimate risk!?
For number 3. I don't believe that the US government has indicted, charged, or has otherwise show interest in Julian Assange. The best information I can find on the topic are quotes [1][2] from the US Ambassador to Australia saying that the US is not interested in Julian Assange. The articles also quote the Ambassador as saying that the US-UK extradition treaty would be more convenient than the US-SE one.

[1] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/wikileaks/we-dont-c...

[2] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/breaking-news/were-not-...
Yes we raised over $500k from angels at my last startup and it was the worst decision we ever made. Instead of letting us build a business..we were forced to scale without product market fit.
Next-Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA
No one pointed out it says panic in the url?

http://code.google.com/p/anic/
It's not actually mechanical. It's called kinesthetic learning or sensing. That's one of the three types: kinesthetic, visual, and auditory.
<i>Most individual API endpoints will be rate limited at 60 calls per hour per-endpoint. Based on analysis of current use of our API, this rate limit will be well above the needs of most applications built against the Twitter API, while protecting our systems from abusive applications.

There will be a set of high-volume endpoints related to Tweet display, profile display, user lookup and user search where applications will be able to make up to 720 calls per hour per endpoint.</i>

60 calls per hour are only for certain endpoints, probably creating lists, tweeting... It's really rare that an user uses so much of this kind of resources. The endpoints that are used the more (viewing tweets, look up an user, etc) are actually less limited than before.
Someone did a viewer and just pre-rendered a view of the object at every 20 degrees, which turns out to not require lots of bandwidth. Alternatively, the shapesmith guy sometimes does reduced tessellation on STL models instead of pumping out the whole model.
Not necessarily. They could simply settle with those who sue and not let it get to court. I bet not even 10% would even sue in the first place, so they could still come out well ahead. I wouldn't be surprised if they accounted for that in their planning when doing this in the first place.
I don't disagree (in fact, I think it probably is the case that they get a lower rate for being exclusive), but just to add: Costco also has a partnership with amex issuing their Costco branded credit cards (which isn't a store only card, it works out in the wild), and Costco gets some portion of the revenue whenever that card is used. Restricting you to amex also has a benefit of increasing the likely-hood that consumers will sign up for the Costco cc.
Well said.

"Starbucks Craftsmanship"? Please.

Not sure what artisans you have running Starbucks cafes in the US, but in Australia the barristers are largely low paid teenagers using un-cleaned machines and second rate beans. To top it off most of the drinks have dollop of cream or some other sugary ingredient to mask the awful quality of the coffee.

I would gladly 'gamble' 99c with an iPhone developer over a Starbucks beverage.

EDIT: I'm talking specifically about Starbacks. Australia has excellent coffee. I'm drinking a lovely Sprocket coffee as I write this.
Depending on how ambitious you are, for a more rigorous introduction to basic mechanics I recommend Kleppner & Kolenkow. Though if you choose to start with a more basic book like University Physics I strongly recommend K&K as a second book. This assumes you have passing familiarity with calculus.
These are definitely not "semantic" diffs on the original source code (in this case, OpenSCAD barf language). When people say that visual diff is hard, they are usually referring to the semantic aspects, not so much the problem of coloring missing or added triangles..
The most interesting portion comes at the end; he shows off his caching digest functionality (DHH made the first commit to this project last Wednesday).
https://github.com/rails/cache_digests

Prior to the caching digest, they (37signals) maintained a version number for each cached partial. Whenever a partial changed, the version number (and all parent encapsulating partials) had to be bumped so that users would receive the latest view update.

Now the partials that are cached store an associated md5 of their contents. If the md5's don't match, the view cache is automatically invalidated and regenerated. Brilliant.
Totally agree, but 24 hours is time enough to finish a game...
I am currently working with some govt data. Not fun. If it ever got to the point that I could log in and pull some summary stats from a variety of clean, public data sources, this could be very useful.

For me the issue isn't the complexity of SPSS (or in my case SAS and R), it is getting the data ready for analysis. Obviously I wouldn't expect Statwing to be able to do that to my own data, but for public data sets, which I occasionally use, it would save me a ton of time
It's an early start (I hesitate to even talk about it here since it's such early days), but I put together Seed-DB (http://www.seed-db.com) for all accelerators; YC and all the rest.

I'm a day or two behind on updates because of work travel, but should catch up soon.
Standard Chartered v New York: an unsettling settlement
> Do you mean OpenSCAD and STL diffs side by side, and live edited, so when you change the code, you see the model change?

Well, there's always openjscad. I don't think it was a direct port, though.
Very ingenious, that box has just been updated...
Would it be better to post 'Show HN' with a direct link rather than Techcrunch?
I agree. Why would any of us be annoyed by others trying to create something cool?

But maybe this is also a subtle warning to non-YC companies that Demo Day participants will be hoarding all of the excitement for the next week.
Nobody should be selling "craftsmanship" for a dollar until they have at least 50 employees.
Will Microsoft's House of Cards Come crashing Down?
> The question is, can Sweden objectively and fairly litigate a rape charge involving Julian Assange?

No that's not the question, because 1) Assange has not been charged with anything and 2) Sweden has been offered the chance to question him in the UK (as they did in a murder case involving a trip to Serbia for questioning), or alternatively question him in Sweden, but guarantee that he will not be extradited to a third country. That they've refused all offers is a clear indication that their primary motive is not quick resolution of this particular case.

> If they can, the UK must honor its extradition treaty. If they can't, the UK shouldn't.

The UK denied an extradition request for the Chilean dictator Pinochet, whose crimes against humanity are a matter of public record. "'If they can' the UK 'must' honor its extradition treaty" is a statement that doesn't seem to say much at all.

Also, considering this situation involves the West's most famous dissident, it is important to consider all actions and irregularities in a more considered light. The issuing of the Interpol notice was highly irregular, Sweden's actions were highly political, and the Supreme Court's final consideration of the legality of the request was found to be wrong by the Cambridge Journal of International and Comparative Law:

The Supreme Court wrongly, and without any analysis, assumed that VCLT Article 31(3)(b) is applicable in the interpretation of secondary European acts such as the Framework Decision. It also neglected to look into the interpretative rules of the EU. The result was a fundamental mistake in the legal reasoning of the Court. [1]

Does a law journal's opinion take legal precedence over the final decision of a Supreme court? Of course not. Does Assange's status as a Western dissident absolve him from any transgressions? Of course not. But the totality of these highly irregular and unusual actions demonstrate a clear pattern of political persecution. The naive political / legal reduction of this case that some undertake just seems like wilful ignorance.

[1] http://www.cjicl.org.uk/index.php?option=com_easyblog&vi...
There are two serious problems with this post, and it really saddens me that I see these sorts of posts so frequently here, with so many concurring voices.

First of all, cost absolutely 100% has to factor into prioritization decisions. That doesn't require absolute estimation, but it does demand relative estimation (which he mentions tangentially at the end of the post). If Feature A will deliver $100,000 in revenue but take 18 months and Feature B will deliver $10,000 in revenue but take 1 week, the choice is pretty obvious. What matters is never "return" but always "return on investment." If you don't know anything about the I side of the ROI equation, you're doomed to make bad decisions. With no estimate at all, and just a snarky "it'll take as long as it takes, shut up and let me work" response, you'll inevitably focus on the wrong things.

Secondly, many of us do in fact have deadlines, and they're not just total BS. If you have a customer that you're building something for, they have to be able to plan their own schedule, and just telling them "well, maybe we'll ship it to you in 10/2012 or maybe in 6/2013, you'll get it when you get it" doesn't fly. And it's totally reasonable that it doesn't fly: if they have to, say, install the software, or buy hardware to run it on, or train users, or migrate data from an old system, or roll out new products of their own that are dependent on the new system, they clearly can't plan or budget those activities if they have no clue whatsoever when they'll get the new system.

And if you do have a deadline, you kind of want to know, to the extent that you can, if you're going to make it or not so you can take corrective action (adding people, cutting scope, pushing the date) if need be. You can't do that if you have no estimates at all.

Relative estimation of tasks with empirical measurement of the team's velocity works pretty well; it doesn't work in all cases, but it's pretty much always better than absolutely nothing.

There's a huge, huge difference between doing relative point-based estimation and date-driven, pointy-haired-boss estimation, and it's a total disservice to the software community that so many engineers seem to not really understand that difference, and seem to think that the only two options are "unrealistic date-based estimates" and "no estimates."

TL;DR - Don't just rant for 3000 words about how estimation is horrible and then add in one sentence about relative estimation. You'll do the world much more good if you just help educate people how to do things the right way and spare the ranting.
An example of this is when we were about 2 years into things and we really noticed that our b2b customers for our ecommerce buying club made up close 70% of monthly rev. But we had postioned ourselves as a b2c "wholesale club"..

I fought for us to forget about consumers and focus on our b2b customers. I was vetoed due in no small part to the fact that our investors didnt invest in a b2b company.

We cratered 8 months later. Pivoting was not as fashionable as it is now (2010)

Hope this helps.
So what do you do as a freelancer working on projects that last weeks or months? Tell your clients to go screw themselves, that you'll be ready when you're ready?
The analogy I like to use when people under price their software is "When you price you apps like toilet paper, don't be surprised when most of your customers are shit and your whole business ends up in toilet.
I don't see how this benefits Twitter.

A large amount of users rely solely on a dedicated third party client. If those apps lose the ability to provide the same reliable service, then Twitter (as a platform) will also be affected.
You should put your entire project under $GOPATH/src/path/to/project, including non-code dependencies and main packages.
It is 15 minutes now. (Which is far too short to even begin to use a lot of apps like games that download tons of additional resources without mentioning it in the app description.)
JavaScript Object.observe() proposal
I used ridejoy to find a ride to a trail race a few weeks ago-- it works fantastically. It was a bit annoying having to check online day-of though; it's gonna be nice having it on my phone next time.
I'm just going to stop using Twitter instead.
i interpret that question different; "you can be what you want" to me is like "you can choose what you want to be". and very much believe that is true. so i've chosen to be "happy", "engaging", "kicking ass", "rich". some of my friends dont get it they choose to be "wanting to be rich/happy/etc". the thing is since i decide to be happy, im happy, and will always (try to) find proof for that. so... "you can be what you want", is quite true to me...
That makes a lot of sense, and it's also clear that transparency regarding rates isn't exactly in the vendor or the credit card companies' best interest.
I wrote it, and while it's a good guess, the diff is actually done on the server and cached, since any one commit is immutable.

I had started off doing the diff on the client, and then I realized that in order to support the various different types of file formats, I'd have to implement parsers for every one in javascript. So I moved things to the server, and just send the results to the client to render.
Reading and Writing a Book With DNA
I upvoted your comment but I doubt we'll stop seeing the TC announcements. There's probably an unspoken quid pro quo agreement that TC covers the launches in exchange for exclusivity and traffic from HN.
I'd use it. I have a UPS Store box for receiving deliveries, but it closes early enough that I can only check it on Saturdays, and it costs as much as recurring semi-weekly BufferBox deliveries (which is more than I would use). A post office box would be worse than that, in closing earlier and refusing private shippers. I have yet to see an Amazon locker in a 7-Eleven; it's a good idea but useless when you order from anyone else (which of course is partly why they can justify the effort). I might consider home deliveries if I had a house on a cul-de-sac with an enclosed porch, but it'd be crazy in an office or apartment building full of strangers (which is, what, 1/3 of Americans?)

I was hoping to see Drop Locker (pivot of Laundry Locker, as I understand it) get into this in San Francisco, but so far they seem to just be looking for partners without having found any.
>and second rate beans

Actually, the tragedy of it is that Starbucks uses pretty good beans. If you buy their brand of beans and make the coffee yourself, you can make a damned good cup of coffee.

But Starbucks apparently has standardized entirely the wrong procedure for using those beans, so that the end product tastes like they accidentally dropped a bouillon cube in it.
The semantic aspects would need to be captured with each diff. Currently, if you don't label a change with "Added super sonic ears", there's no way a computer would know those were ears.

Or were you thinking of something else wrt to semantic diffs?
Hey there! We are currently focused on the SF Bay area, but we are expanding very quickly! Depending on what they are looking for we may be able to accommodate them immediately. I appreciate you considering suggesting us, and would love to hear from you/or them at any time! Marika@registrylove.com
I've also used target's printing however the quality is pretty grainy.
Startups, Don't Starve