skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's much easier to say there are considerable gains than it is to show it, as yet I've never actually seen it measured, just some gut feely stuff where the team says they do or, as I hear almost as often, don't like how the new system is working.

Obviously, with any severely dysfunctional team---I mean some teams still don't even use a VCS---any sort of productivity oriented training should arguably result in significant gains. But these improvements are often looked at in isolation. Being more productive at building the wrong product is still not going to add value. So it really depends what you are measuring and Agilists constantly focus on measuring completely meaningless things, like developer velocity, while expecting the rest of the organization actually knows what it's doing when it prioritizes backlogs or says things are ready to be worked on.

I was in a Scrum training session where the head of product management was concerned when the trainer explained that velocity was largely an arbitrary internal team barometer and couldn't be used to measure the relative performance of teams. He asked "then how can we [use Scrum to] measure their relative performance?" The irony of this was that the biggest productivity issue I could see was the lack of a clear and effective product development process. This meant that iteration after iteration we were constantly building in circles and with only a vague plan for the product. Scrum was not even beginning to address this.

Of course Scrumistas, always claim that these failures are just the result of cargo culting, "doing it wrong(tm)", or just not understanding "Agile". The problem is that these organizations are paying those same people to teach them and are still apparently not getting it, so who is really at fault? It's clear to me both Scrum and XP processes fail at teaching organizations how to learn and improve as a whole. They fail because they focus way too much on explaining the process and pay only minimal lip service to larger organization issues like continuous improvement, product development, customer validation and even basic planning (unless you want to count planning poker, ugh).

Bottom line is, they are oversimplifications at best but at worse are blatantly misleading organizations and software development teams.

That isn't to say there are no good ideas in agile. I still feel a learned lots trying to be a proponent of agile and even Scrum and XP. But after repeatedly going through the painful process of failing, I eventually learned there was more to this and am finally moving on. I should also state I'm still a big fan of the principles of the manifesto, but in the end I no longer see the relationship between the manifesto and the manifestations of agile, particularly in Scrum and XP.
Wait, people do this?
Is this a design, where the idea is that I make my own JamBook out of things found around the house (much like the Hipster PDA: http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-the-hipster-...), or is this a product that I would buy from you?
The Facebook - Amazon comparison
Exactly. So I think it is unfair to assume he isn't prepared to stand in front of a Swedish court. It doesn't even really matter whether this threat is real or not. What matters is that he appears to believe it, and that there are enough oddities to exacerbate his fears and raise questions for other people too.

So that leaves Sweden with two options: Trying to work around that and coming to a compromise that allows them to try him, or face a standoff that could very well last for years.

So far they seem to have gone to a curious amount of effort to avoid trying to make any accommodations at all to move the case forward. Maybe they are just being totally obtuse and irrational. Or maybe there really is more going behind the scenes.

I would like to see him stand trial. If he's guilty, he should serve the sentence. If he's not, we need explanations for why this case has been treated this way.

One would think that the Swedish prosecutors office would like to see him stand trial too, yet they seem to do everything they can to ensure it drags out.
Equity splits have at least as much to do with risk as they do with contribution. But it's risk in a more general sense; you don't get compensated for being so financially insecure that the venture might wipe you out completely. Instead, it's "risk" that captures opportunity cost.

Unfortunately for the poster, despite the fact that his prospective partner already has a well-paying job, his risk in starting this company could be higher, because the opportunity cost to an established CEO of joining on with an unproven venture is very high. CEO's tend to "trade up" to other CEO roles at established companies.
"The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got" Series
Are you responding to me? I'm confused since I basically agree or are you just agreeing?
Yes, I am aware. That's why I think the NY Times is being hipocritical.
Great job, man.

However, this project and another that is on the frontpage of HN reminded me that projects like these should always come with a checklist of browsers that support them, even though it is meant to be implicit that all browsers should support the projects.

I don't know if there's a Travis CI-like solution available to solve this task, but it's be useful and relevant if there is.
Seriously, 50% down of the stock value is a "stock swing" for you?

Of course it "affect the ability of the company to operate day to day". Not to mention morale of the team (and the monetary value of the company stock the own), it does affect it; good read here [1]

as of your second point, I agree with it and see the value now.

[1] http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080918053426AA...
Nice work, but boy do I hope that I never see anything using this on the internet.
I'm impressed! Works better than i expected. Excellent, thank you for sharing.
I should have been more clear, a lot of designs passively cool the reactor / primary loop, but they don't have long term 100% passive cooling on the secondary loop. Though a counter example would be welcome.
I find his articles fun to read and thought-provoking. A lot of what he says goes against the conventional wisdom of the startup world or against my own way of doing things. So his ideas provide a good (and entertaining) opportunity to re-examine them.
Yes. It used to be much, much more frequent before smartphones. It is decreasing rapidly, though, as we'd all expect in a time and age where smartphones seemlessly backup contacts to the cloud.
But if you hide the video, YouTube has no way to show the ads it wants to show you.
It isn't the first time. The offer to have him face interviews in the UK have been given regularly ever since they first wanted to talk to him after he'd arrived in the UK. Instead they went ahead with the EAW, and then refused several more offers while sending representatives to London for the extradition hearings instead.

That is, unless Assanges British barristers are lying in ways that'd risk them disbarment.
Not really. iMessage can be used in a transparent way with non-compatible devices (it can just fallback to sms), and it merely loses its advantages. People won't care too much that it's closed, and will still use it. And it won't lock them. If their next phone isn't an iDevice, they will just go back to sms.

FaceTime doesn't fail merely because it's a closed protocol. It fails because it's a closed protocol and the application has no way to fallback to other networks in order to communicate with non-Apple people.
Show HN: A simple community for photos and stories - Snappy (Android alpha)
Same here. This guy is actually the ONLY guy I enjoy reading in Techcrunch.
Exactly. He says Larry Page never failed but the reality is he "failed" to sell his search engine Google but "succeeded" in not giving up. He tried for almost 2 years and when no one showed interest he decided to take it forward himself.
It's not a scale. Red isn't worse than orange, they just mean different things. Orange is issued to notice of an immediate threat to life. If anything, orange is more severe.

http://amiobjective.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/assange-case-comm...

[Edit: Added reference]
> If this is a conspiracy to get Assange then it's a pretty poorly orchestrated one at this stage

Which should be a giant red flag that it is indeed true and not a random made up rumor. You sound like those who claim the Osama raid was fake because it was messy. When the fact that it was messy should give you a smell of reality in it. Real life is messy. The conspiracy to get Kim Dotcom to the USA was just as messy, and real. The fake weapons of mass destruction on Iraq were absurdly messy from day 1. And it was a real conspiracy. You can tell that those "911 was an inside job" conspiracies are made up because 1000's of human beings would need to be perfectly orchestrated for it to work.

Something of the size of trying to get Assange to the US on fake rape charges, would obviously have its own screw ups. Implying there's nothing to see here because it's not perfectly orchestrated like a Hollywood movie, would be rather naive.
This is an inaccurate assessment. Our experience was exactly what YC say it will be for most founders. We applied and were rejected because we were little more than an idea and two business founders. We applied again next batch with an alpha site live and several more people on the team, we got an interview. We didn't know anybody, and never sent any communication to YC beyond our application.

Since then, I have recommended around 3 applicants to the YC partners. One did not get an interview despite over $100,000 in sales. One did and was rejected. The other was also rejected, and was recently acquired. Maybe I'm not the "connection" you're referring to, but from everything I've seen the application process is what they say it is. And then you have people like the OP who do enough to show that they are more remarkable than you thought.
Your words are most likely wasted on a blog too. If the choices are social network or blog, we're kind of screwed. I used to read paper magazine articles because they were interesting to read. I bought a magazine and read it like a book, like a collection of stories. There is almost nothing that comes close to that experience online. Some forums, maybe, but that's it. Nowadays you have to scan through several hundred items to find one interesting article to read, and even that will be short, time-sensitive and optimized for skimming rather than reading.
At least put it in a gh-pages branch so we can see it without having to download and view locally.
Judge rejects Facebook settlement over ad feature
I remember need a new number groups used to be quite common before the wide adoption of smartphones. Is this still a thing?
The Assange Case: Common Misconceptions
Sounds like the right trajectory.

Yahoo! < Zynga < next thing
Very classy farewell blog post.
My jaundiced view of civilian nuclear power is still colored by one of my most vivid experiences in the Navy nuclear reactor program. It came in the course of prepping for the [chief] engineer's exam, after two years of sea duty running reactor plants aboard an aircraft carrier. That in turn had followed a year of intensive academic and practical nuclear propulsion training.

Our "coaches," all senior nuke officers, had us work through the details of some what-if scenarios. Funny thing, we didn't seem to have covered those particular scenarios in our initial training.

It was pretty scary; to this day I'm not convinced that conventional-design civilian nuclear reactors belong anywhere near population centers.

What worried me wasn't the technology itself, but the human fallibility. In the Navy nuclear program, we had the occasional [foul]-up even though we were ferocious about doing things right. We used checklists for everything, even though we were required to have memorized practically every procedure, especially emergency procedures. (In an emergency, the first thing you did was to take the "immediate actions" to put the plant in a safe condition. The second thing you did was to get out the appropriate checklist and start working through it with your watch team.) We second-checked each other's work, and both the worker and the second-checker had to sign off on the work. Noncompliance with the prescribed safety procedures (and with the prescribed serious attitude) was guaranteed to get you in big trouble. The Navy systematically collected and disseminated lessons learned from throughout the nuclear fleet, and every nuclear ship's nuke operators routinely trained on those lessons. All this derived from the tone at the top, set early on by Admiral Rickover.

Both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were caused (so far as is publicly known) by cascading human errors; apparently the same was true at Fukushima. I have no experience whatsoever in the civilian nuclear industry, but these accidents have reinforced my doubts about whether a civilian work force, even one heavily populated by ex-Navy types, can achieve the kind of zero-defect culture we strove for in the Navy.
Julian Assange, love him or hate him, is certainly a hacker, and Wikileaks is potentially, depending on what turns out to be true, one of the most important technology stories this decade. It is a story about the Internet being told on the Internet, and has major implications for the future of the Internet.

The fact that a technology story is also political, also has global ramifications, matters in other realms and daily life, makes it more important as a technology story.
It would be neat to bypass the facebook group method and just have a website that you can request people's phone numbers (just a simple submit form). Then the numbers aren't publicly available for everyone to snoop.

The reason people make the group or event is because when you invite everyone they get a notification and a lot more people see it rather than a status update (that maybe <10% of your friends see). So maybe creating an event or group then linking to givemeyournumbers.com/john_smith
And why should that somehow exclude them from having to describe how and why it's secure? Pfft.
Predicting Kids' Success ... with Marshmallows
Ah, the documentary I saw quite poorly framed it, then.
If you use the iPhone, YouTunes lets you do the same thing and create playlists for your favorite songs: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/youtunes-live/id519596476?mt=...
This can be solved with a slightly redesigned data-model. Go back to 2.

App Engine is premium service -- it's replicated across at least three data centers, scales automatically, and has a world-class team managing it. They provide a free memcached service, and the pricing model is designed so that you use it. If you design your app to use memcached from the start, you can eliminate much of your read costs.
Stanford’s Self-Driving Car Tears It Up On Racetrack – Tops 120 MPH
Tell Me About Your Failed Startups
You still see it in places and with communities where smartphones are less popular. I see a lot of them from students in middle and high school. (Although usually as status updates, not groups.)
>For comparison, the original Xbox used an x86 of the same clock speed

which is fairly useless as a point of comparison, as not only is it the completely different arm architecture, but it is also Arm V6 (arm11), whereas even our smartphones have been arm v7 (cortex A8, A9, A15) for the last couple of years. If i had to equate it to an x86 clock speed, i'd say 400mhz was possibly a fraction generous.
Show HN: burn.fm - A new old way to listen to music on Youtube
A friend did something a little similar with this site - www.ransomnotemusic.com
Also worth pointing out the Magic Lantern Firmware[1] that supercharges low end Canon DSLRs.

[1] - http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_Lantern_Firmware_Wi...
I'm a summer intern at Khan Academy working on various App Engine projects. My uneducated guess is that we're one of the platform's bigger customers.

One of GAE's biggest downsides is lack of control: unlike EC2 where you get to mold vanilla Linux installations to suit your needs, your application must fit GAE's service model through and through. But by giving up some of those freedoms you receive a whole lot of awesome in return. Khan Academy has successfully leveraged App Engine to scale to millions of users without hiring a single sysadmin or spending too much time worrying about anything ops-related. We're able to handle traffic spikes like our 60 Minutes appearance and the launch of our new computer science curriculum (http://khanacademy.org/cs) with no sweat. To deploy the site, any developer (or our friendly CI bot) can simply run our "deploy.py" and wait a few minutes, then get back to spending time on the product. We haven't had to think once about whether or not the database can handle the write load we throw at it; the App Engine Datastore is uniquely worry-free in that regard. (Well, I'm sure Google SREs worry about it plenty, but we don't have to.)

The GAE platform is a moving target, which is a Very Good Thing because it demonstrates Google's investment in the product and indicates that the App Engine team truly understands developer pain points and is working to solve them. I'll point to backends and Guido van Rossum's work on the NDB datastore interface as features that give GAE developers a little more freedom to use the platform in the most efficient way possible. If you're going to complain about lock-in, you might as well go all the way and take advantage of everything you get in return. You might find that it's not worth your time to replicate all of that elsewhere, especially when doing so on top of an IaaS provider like AWS introduces its own set of inefficiencies and points of failure.

P.S.: If you'd like to come work with great people on great stuff without worrying about keeping the site up, we're hiring: http://khanacademy.org/careers
Totally. A company that doesn't want to pay attention to why they do things a certain way, and keep evolving it, doesn't care to grow, or stay in business.

Too often, excuses from a site like http://www.yourlogicalfallacyis.com sums up why an organization doesn't maintain enough documentation of their business and the knowledge contained with it, and it's free to just walk out the door.
Open webOS Beta is less than two weeks away
he is using the term "mediocre entrepreneur" to mean not Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg

Yes, I agree. There are always a few outliers who by combination of luck, skill, and hard work (mostly luck though) hit a home run their first time at bat. "Mediocre" can mean "ordinary" or "unremarkable" and a history speckled with failures is pretty typical of most "ordinary" entrepreneurs. I find it actually encouraging, that someone with the admitted faults of procrastination, poor networking/social skills, and poor negotiating skills can still, eventually, find success.
There are a lot of new designs (i.e.: not BWR) that passively cool and shutdown without the input of any external energy.

That's true of some new BWR designs as well:

http://www.ne.doe.gov/np2010/pdfs/esbwrOverview.pdf

Claims 72 hours of passive heat dissipation -- the heat sinks are [giant] tanks of water inside the containment building.

The HN article mentions a passive cooling system in Fukushima Daiichi #1: a gravity-driven steam condenser (footnote #5). It failed when electric batteries failed, because it needed DC electricity to open valves. (I think this isn't the case in ESBWR).

The systems with limited functionality in the absence of power were an isolation condenser (in unit 1) and a reactor core isolation cooling (RCIC) system (in units 2 and 3). An isolation condenser takes steam from the reactor core, passes it through a tank of water to cool and condense it, and then feeds it back as water into the reactor pressure vessel. The flow is gravity driven (i.e., no pumps are needed). The system in unit 1 had a thermal capacity of about eight hours.
Same here, I relate a lot to his personal traits.
Disruptions: Tech Companies Battle for the Wrist
Cellphones have already muscled onto watches’ turf as a time-telling tool. Now, some of the biggest technology companies are eyeing your wrist, too.
Where have you heard that about Google? I've heard good things about their (current) culture, especially in regards to 20% time. Have I been misinformed?
Asteroid mining by Planetary Resources
My recommendation is to detect phones through a combo of screen size and touch support and serve a background image or color instead.
"They are both SQL, it's just a small amount of extra syntax"

I suspect more than a few syntax adjustments would be required before users could rely on the port. The upstream project (e.g. wordpress) would need to be aware that their users were trying to use postgres in order for such users to be actually happy.

I could be wrong, but I have not seen a port of a real app that came down to just syntax differences.

It might be a different story between two implementations that follow the SQL standard reasonably well (MySQL is pretty far from the standard in many ways), but even in that case I'd be cautious.
OP here.

Many said this isn't wide-used anymore. But as a high school student, I still get invited to those groups/events frequently, and people said they've been waiting for something like this for a long time. So there is still a big market here.

Glad I could contribute my little bit to make this process a lot faster. Well worth making this as my 5-hour side project.
Yes, I know, but this is not the problem I was talking about.

I find myself implementing a caching layer for my models (this was pre-ndb) instead of the feature I intended to.
if you judge people for being self deprecating, you wind up self selecting people who overpromote themselves
Yup, that's the first thing I noticed.

Having a spotify/itunes-esq UI for youtube is a great idea, but this is just ripping off Spotify a bit too closely IMHO.

However, I seem to remember that a German competitor for Spotify has done almost the exact same UI copy - so maybe Spotify aren't that bothered by it. It's not as if their UI is that ground breaking (as someone else comments, it much like iTunes), it's the backend tech that makes Spotify so good.
I would definitely get the money back, that's just me though.
>he had to be accused of a crime that would have been illegal in the UK.

The extradition to the US of the guy who ran a site with links to pirated content comes to mind as a counter-example

e: his name was richard o'dwyer. The only related UK law is copyright infringement, links do not constitute that. He appears only as guilty under UK law (and perhaps even US law) as google, and less than Youtube. He complied with DCMA requests.
This is Stanford's take on what can be done if you could fully program the computer in your camera and it had the sensors of a smartphone: http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/camera-2.0/
OP is referring to very real, disturbing sentiment that tops many discussions of Julian Assange's charges. Hop over to reddit sometime for real fun.

I did not think OP agreed with that sentiment. But he did brush right past it without addressing it.
He looked like a bird with clipped wings. All those days cooped up in one place must have had their effect.
Yay, always wanted to hear someone from Khan Academy talk about GAE :)

Of course you guys are already at the millions-of-users use case, but KA is a (the?) great example of an app where GAE worked out from start to finish, which I find encouraging.
Show HN: burn.fm - A new way to listen to music on Youtube