skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. Perhaps this isn't too bad. Then products will actually have to be useful and worth the money again.

That said, I think certain brands that have always been known for their usefulness or reliability should continue to do well. There always has been and always will be an up-market. It's what the upmarket looks like that changes over time.
I use "they" and "their".
Essentially what he is saying is that it is better to take initiative and do what you think needs to be done rather than try to get approval first.

There is a parallel here to startups -- no risk no reward. By taking on a project without approval you are basically putting your job on the line. If your manager approved the project, he would be on the line. Unless he really believes in the idea, it's unlikely he will do that. Better to wait and see how you do and then pile on once success seems more assured. You will find the same thing with investors -- noone wants to give you money until you are already successful.
That is big. The department stores I saw during (very limited) travels in Japan were all much like the upscale multi-story Macy's you'll see in American city downtown areas.

That same style of store may be on a similarly long downward sales trend in the US -- given the rise of other specialty and discount outlets.
Everybody thinks this is a recession, so no need to worry.
Thanks for pointing that out, I did not know that.
Is Gmail Down? Ask Twitter
What does that have to do with the article?

Does it change the reality of people feeling this way?

During the market panics we had in the fall, you could say that it was an overreaction, but if you look at where housing prices and debt have been historically, I think you will see that the economic factors driving this are very real.
The use of he has been denounced as sexist. The problem is that there is no gender neutral third person singular pronoun in English. Well there is "one", but it sounds stilted. Some authors alternate between he and she, I sometimes use s/he. But s/him, s/his? In informal writing, I find myself using "you" a lot. Others are trying the plural for the singular. It sounds uneducated, but I bet it's the one that will take.
Even with GA, once you get above 1M pageviews a day, it starts to get unreliable, especially for data that involves drilling down to complex URL structures and durations. I believe they start sampling at some point to save processing on their end.
peterhi: thanks for all the great suggestions or feedback.
Hm.. isn't friendfeed similar to twitter? They don't seem to get (any) downtime. Also, there's some Indian twitter-like service which apparently has higher traffic volumes and no downtime either.

If all this is correct, then it's probably not "that hard" to keep something like twitter with an "acceptable" uptime.
New service to distribute tasks via SMS targets developing nations
Presumably DoSing wouldn't be the objective here. If some of your services in the loop send SMS messages or modify your checkbook register, that would be much more annoying than a simple DoS.
For the budget conscious - having to commit a set figure each month might not be an appealing option (they're already locked into rent, electric bills, etc). For the not-so-budget conscious, the discount might not be worth the effort to set up this system and lock yourself to one grocery store chain (people like variety - one week Safeway, the next Trader Joe's). The grocery-space does need improvement though - who knows maybe it could work?
Note that I am specifically talking about research "that will never produce a dollar." That was the whole point of the article - stock holders shouldn't be subsidizing research that has a ~0% chance of benefiting the company; a lot of MSR is devoted to this type of research. Universities tend to do a very good job of regulating their numbers in a specific field, but the billions of dollars Microsoft throws at research is throwing that off balance. If a researcher can't find a University position, there are tons of other jobs he can find.

Normally, it can be argued that anything a company does makes things more efficient in a capitalist system. In this case, a lot of shareholders (and I) and arguing that what Microsoft is doing isn't.
Everyone CAN start a blog and use it to market their business. If that is the only marketing channel, attributing the success of the business to it is not that big of a stretch.
The Dijkstra argument is that looking at examples, learning about concrete cases may prevent you from thinking about the most general abstract problem, for which you may devise an elegant solution. So according to the Dijkstra argument the prototypes you create may bias/prejudice your thinking, and should be avoided if you want to get to an elegant/optimal/general solution.
In my opinion, he made over 2 million dollars because he owned the name weblogs.com, which Verisign bought for 2.3 million.

I don't think it has anything to do with his weblog. It has to do with the success of Blogger, and after that, blogging in general. If I had never maintained a blog, but owned the name weblogs.com, I would be 2.3 million dollars richer right now too. I seriously doubt that Verisign wanted weblogs.com because of their pingback system, seeing that it was becoming less and less relevant as Technorati and other similar sites grew.

But I do agree with his main point that his blog made money, and Dan Lyons is wrong.
I was wondering if anyone could break down the pricing plan for me. Talk about needlessly complicated... Also, if any current BOSS users can comment on how this will affect their operations, that would be awesome.
Let me repeat a comment I made in response a similar comment above:

he Dijkstra argument is that looking at examples, learning about concrete cases may prevent you from thinking about the most general abstract problem, for which you may devise an elegant solution. So according to the Dijkstra argument the prototypes you create may bias/prejudice your thinking, and should be avoided if you want to get to an elegant/optimal/general solution.
http://plover.net/~bonds/genderedlanguage.html
BOSS Update: Open Monetization, Pricing, Structured Data, and More
Is anyone mining twitter for common streams of complaints/updates? That has to come as close as possible to the feed of the world, and what's important. It's just begging to be made into info-porn. Even more so than the great work NYT is doing.
He is the traditional gender-neutral pronoun.

If you care about being denounced as sexist, you can make your writing do weird things, like s/he.

If you're tired of being told how to think, just go with he. It worked for Shakespeare. It can work for you too.

I find myself using "you" a lot when "he" would be much better. In my opinion, it lowers the quality of the material. Likewise, some authors want to impress you with their sensitivity and alternate between he and she. This I find particularly annoying, for I could care less the sex of a gender-neutral example. I find it distracting. The s/he thing is so far out there as to elicit a little pat on the head and a warm smile (as you would do to small children) to anyone who finds it useful.

Sorry -- pet peeve of mine.
I meant:

Connection: close

replaced with

X-Ignore-X: close
I'd be more inclined to believe Jeff when he says he doesn't need the rules, if I had some evidence he actually knew them.

From what I can see, the problem of "overly-rule-bound developers" is nowhere near the magnitude of the problem of "developer's who don't really have a clue."
I see karma as a way to motivate more activity on the site. It turns participating into a game that you can win, which gets people's competitive juices flowing. We all love measuring ourselves against other people.
Good to see Nate Silver produce interesting forecasting data post-election. I was afraid he would disappear into nothingness after his fifteen minutes of fame.
It's also illegal in Canada. The laws vary in different states and provinces, but there is probably a law in every US state and Canadian province which prohibits commercial food preparation at home.

However, there are no food prep cops. The department of agriculture does not have swat teams waiting to raid home kitchens because they got a tip that the proprietor recently bought 10 lbs of sugar. Nobody cares unless someone gets sick. If the sales happen in any sort of volume a commercial kitchen will be needed relatively quickly anyway.

(my aunt has a business selling fancy holiday cookies to Macy's and she started out at home.)
I use he almost always when 'one' sounds wrong. I'm not important enough to offend anyone. Plus, if someone is truly offended by seeing "he" in writing, they have bigger issues, in my opinion.
Ask HN: What do you think of my group chat app?
is anyone using omniture?
Snakebite: The open testing network for open source
It's not ready yet. But it's coming. No more will anyone need to hoard G4's and SPARC stations in their garage to test their open source projects.
I've created a hamburger restaurant where I'm expecting average Joes to walk in off the street and cook the hamburgers, in return for a percentage every time they make a sale. Sound promising?

Of course not. The burgers will be inconsistent and usually bad, and there'll either be too many or too few cooks at any given time.

It's the same with review sites. You're expecting people to do the work for you in return for a completely unknown amount of money. You'll get a zillion reviews of some popular thing, and no reviews of DRAM, and reviews will be inconsistent and bad.

If you think it's worth people's time to write reviews, then you should hire people to write them first. Hire college students at $15/hr. They can work from their dorms. Assign them products to review. Set standards. Have quality control. You can probably build up a really good set of reviews for only a few hundred hours of labor. Probably less than you've put into the technical part of the site.

Eventually, once you have a thriving ecosystem, average Joes will contribute reviews. But you can't just wave your hands and expect people to flock to your site to do work on speculation. You have to lead.
I remember when I first saw a Sony store in Canada, after never seeing one in the UK, I had no clue they existed. I believe it went somewhat like "Oh wow it's a Sony store, that's cool... wait what the hell's the point of a Sony store. Is it like a warranty repair place? I thought they were all mail-to places not stores."

It's just alien to me why Sony would need a store, when everywhere sells Sony products. I mean bestbuy, walmart, sears, the source, futureshop all carry Sony products and they're all easier to get to than the actual Sony store!
If you want to learn about a real blogger making actual money from his blog (and not related software/consulting sales), head on over to JohnChow.com.

He turned a few front page Digg stories into a blogging success story and clears a healthy 6 figures each year now.
I saw that name and instantly thought "gizmodo.com clone/imposter". Gizmodo is one of the leading tech blogs out there so having a name that's 2 letters off of an already unique name might hurt you.
I made $2 million from a typewriter! All I had to do was use it to write a best selling novel and pitch it to the right publisher!

While he might be correct by saying he made it "with this blog," that entirely misses the point.
Dave Winer has made over $2M with his shitty software and pointless blog? I'm either inspired (if THAT guy can do it, so can I) or I want to kill myself.

Edit: oh wait, nevermind. he made the money because he owned weblogs.com and sold it to Verisign.
Paleoconservatism
One theory about this effect is called the Jobless Recovery - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery

Part of this theory is that recession forces companies to automate jobs in order to increase productivity. The net effect is that these genre of jobs are lost forever. So, instead of these jobs being replaced when the economy is expanding, the economy must wait for new jobs types to be created in order to experience employment growth. Subsequently, one could make the argument that business owners will experience faster growth than the employment rate.

Marshall Brain has an interesting speculative piece called 'Robotic Nation' regarding this theory: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
Makes me think it might make sense to have a configuration user and a "runtime" user. Any application that asks you to make a change to your configurations when you don't expect it to can be considered suspect.
Lame. His entire premise is a user manually executing code from a malicious source. He asked the fedora team about his article and they said it was "well-known and expected behavior" and I agree.

I might as well claim I can spread linux viruses on Hacker News by telling everyone to open a shell and type "rm -r ~" or "sudo rm -r /*".
i understand the advantage of scripts. my sister loves python now because she can munge csv files much faster now (she's a scientist)

api's allow people to do cool things. they're libraries. kids would find programming on a calculator much more tiresome if they had to write the multiplication method first.

i guess tinkering with a calculator is fun, but that seems kind of old school, and also pretty narrow (in my day the kids with the fancy expensive calculators were the ones taking APs and headed towards private colleges).

writing a 10 line python script that does something with twitter or other social networks--tons more fun than math.
I do remember the good stuff MSR has done, but does it justify the cost? Microsoft has probably spent about half its current market capitalization on MSR (very rough estimate based on its budget for the last few years: 7-8 billion, and the fact that it has existed for 18 years. I think it's safe to assume that they have spent >75 billion on research since MSR's conception.) Even if half of this is justified (a generous estimate), Microsoft has lost a quarter of its value to useless research! This is not the norm at most companies.

Normally, I think research is a great thing (I did research in grad school), but not the way MSR does. They take some of the brightest minds in the industry and have them work on "products" that never see the light of day, and then patent their papers. Microsoft engineers do most of the revenue generating work. C# could have been created outside of MSR.
Good idea. Grocery chains love loyalty programs. Though, grocery margins are thin. It would be difficult to profitably give substantial-enough discounts to lure people into the program. The numbers you've cited like 10% are too high.
gaius, you and i are on the same wavelength. the old skool calculators and video games is actually a very narrow approachability (as someone who never had either nor was much interested in either), but is significantly more present on this site. however the new skool method--macs for trendy teens and college folk, or processing for artists, or good old scratch and alice for young kids--is much more present seizure-inducing social network sites, or off the web scene altogether. the anecdotal data here is significantly skewed. the real power of approachability is the variety of people doing technical projects now who otherwise were too intimidated in the past.
This wasn't about trying to project confidence. It was a study that looked at students working alone. I find I will sometimes cross my arms if I am thinking hard about a problem. What was interesting was that the study provided some evidence that it would help me to persevere.
Where's the incentive for me to work my butt off and risk getting fired all for my Big Dumb Corporation?
See http://twitter.com/comcastcares

Also:
"SM2 is a software solution designed specifically for PR and Marketing Agencies to monitor and measure social media. As businesses and consumers increasingly utilize and rely on social media, your agency needs the best tools and expertise to stay competitive."
http://techrigy.com/
we use social signaling to communicate in ways we aren't aware of. In tests researchers found they could successfully predict outcomes of conversations based entirely on body language. The fact that most people are unconscious of these signals means you can hack them. This is largely what the "pick-up" community is about.
Uh-huh. The next study will reveal that the sky is blue and the water is wet.

This should be obvious for anyone who has spent a number of years in the corporate world - have you never seen that staple of the corp environment, the moron with no skills but a loud mouth and no scruples?
E-Book: The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages (by S. Peyton Jones)
This guy makes a lot of claims without any details.These would be better classified as gnome or kde viruses. I actually think finding a buffer overflow on pidgen or another gnome c application that accepts inbound traffic might be more effective for writing viruses.

- That said some security around ~/.config/autostart wouldn't be a bad idea.
Keeping Encryption Safe From Future Quantum Computers
I just struggled with how to best structure our company in regard to apple's financial cycle and payout for appstore developers.

I bootstrapped the company's initial costs as the founder, and the partners are paid in profit share (initially 60% me / 40% them). This wasn't the best route as nothing was being reserved for the company's growth or future costs, but it got us started.

Yesterday I changed the entire structure. Now everyone gets 50% of the net profits (myself included) and 15% is put into a 'founder's fund'. It's a cash parachute for me if the company crumbles, and a cash pool for bonuses, hire contract labor, marketing activities, etc.

For reward incentives, anytime we hit $XX,XXX a month in sales... then half of the 15% that goes into the fund is split amongst the partners.

I think this is going to work well for our virtual team and keep everyone interested in the general well being of the company and their respective projects. I still retain 100% of the company's product ip, but partners are able to publish under the company on their own.
You are being taxed to fund the production of a much more expensive sugar substitute.

High tariffs on cane sugar are there to protect corn farmers, but the wast majority of businesses enjoy no such protections.

Because some things like hard candy just can not be made with corn syrup, some hard candy manufactures have moved factories to Mexico.

Note that it wasn't labor costs that made them move, it's the fact that imported sugar has tariffs, but manufactured hard candy - 100% sugar, does not.

This costs the US productive manufacturing jobs.

And lastly, in some people's subjective experience many things made with cane sugar just taste better.

Many people who have tasted both US and Mexican or Canadian coke or pepsi claim this, but again that's subjective.
When Texting, Eligible Women Express Themselves Better
IBM may allow 20% of its workforce to work from home
You can have pre-set baskets in PeaPod.
Google's Grid Meter Looks to Save Homeowners Some Green
It's interesting that this is only happening now, after Japan has suffered through a decade-long recession. Did an entire generation grow up with different values, or did the down economy change consumer behavior over a long period of time to reach this point? Or both?

Mapping this to the US, the transition from spending to saving and from bling to value orientation seems to be happening very quickly. Wonder if it will last.
Yahoo! did say that there was a pricing model coming in the future for BOSS from the start. I'm sorry you feel frustrated. I'd be interested to hear if you have any ideas about how we could have communicated that better. It sucks that you we flip-flopped.

Disclaimer: I work for Y!
Exactly, lack of motivation is a big deal. Games these days have crazy production values (GTA IV took 3.5 years, 1000 people and $100 million budget).

I know, there are also some very good indie games, but you have to be very creative to be able to compensate for a lack of production values. Not everybody is so multitalented.

One possible solution is to get into programming by modding existing games (instead of starting from scratch). Many cool games have very good scripting engines (for example Unreal, Civilization or Half-Life).

If you mod an existing game, your work is incremental, you can play with all these expensively produced assets. There is an instant gratification when you see some change in the game world made by you. Additionally, your results are immediately understandable to your gaming buddies.
It's like human machine learning.

Rules are what you use to program programmers. If your aims are limited and it's a good set of rules, why not.

If you want to use your programmers to do something you don't know how to do, instead create an environment that evolves the right kinds of programmers and set them loose.
This reminds me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's TED talk on flow.
The difference between the hacker style and the Dijkstra style is more apparent than real. Both rely on successive approximation.

See for example http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EW... where Dijkstra goes, in painstaking detail, through the process of solving the "8 Queens" problem, building up the solution piece by piece.

A hacker would probably come up with exactly the same algorithm, though probably written more quickly in another language, and with a few more compile/run/debug cycles.

The thing is: the mode of attack - breaking down the problem into simpler subproblems, solving one at a time, and in such a way that you're pretty sure that each step is correct - is used by both successfully. It reminds me of a study I read many years ago in Gerald Weinberg's Psychology of Computer Programming. The investigators studied the work patterns of many good programmers, and one of the variables they studied was number of runs per day (this was back in the day when one submitted ones program as a deck of punched cards to be compiled and (possibly) executed. They found that the good programmers tended to divide into two groups. The first (more akin to Dijkstra) mostly submitted a program which compiled cleanly, and executed, followed a significant time later by another. The second group submitted a program, got either compilation or runtime errors, quickly submitted a fixed version, perhaps iterating a few times, then went off for a while till they went through the quick cycle again. The point is: each group consisted of equally good (as far as could be measured) programmers. Both styles are usable, both styles are necessary to have in your arsenal: you need to be able to think through a problem, and prove your solution correct; and you need to be able to tackle it piecemeal and experimentally when it's too tough to tackle all at once.
The article basically points out that KDE and gnome both provide convenience methods in launchers that can be used for nefarious purposes and compromise the security that the execution bit provides.
> Wouldn’t having functions be first class citizens be locking them in the same cage with data structures as well?

An important difference between first-class functions and objects is that first-class functions are still functions. Closures are also functions, even though they merge data and code together just like objects do. But objects merge data and functions to form something that's neither data nor a function.

This, I think, is a shame. Data and functions are the most important abstractions in computer science. Objects not so much. If you aren't simulating something, then there's no natural ontology that you want to model with objects. By comparison almost every system needs to process data. The data about an object is not itself an object, and it doesn't help matters to conceive of it as an object.
80% of management is emotional. Just like 80% of statistics are made up.