skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sending SMS using Google Calendar's python API
The keyword is "incoming":

"Twitter and Bell have agreed that Bell customers on the company's text messaging bundles will be able to receive unlimited incoming Twitter SMS messages at no extra charge."
Followup: Done and launched.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=496331
I would sell other e-learning products. Like the 'video professor'. Also, you could run ads in between slides, which might get you a higher CTR than alongside.

Or start running AdSense, and get some sort of baseline for private ad deals.
What bugs me is that in the case you link to, they've added more crap in an effort to support drivers which weren't written properly in the first place. Windows would be a far better product if they hadn't decided to adapt to so much improperly-written software and oft-needless backwards compatibility.

I much prefer Apple's approach with the switch to UB: they put in an emulator for PPC apps which basically sucks, thereby creating motivation for switching apps to the new format while still technically supporting legacy software. Now, in the upcoming version of OSX, that emulator cruft is being removed (last I checked).
1. Don't drink coffee, ever. Don't drink alcohol, or use any other drugs that mess with sleep.

2. Sleep in a room with lots of morning sunlight.

3. Don't use an alarm clock unless you have a hard deadline you absolutely can't miss.

4. Plan your day the night before, at least in your head.

5. Find a breakfast you enjoy.
great that was my only complaint on an otherwise very nice looking feature.
Ran AdSense for a year. 1.3 million page views delivers about $400 through Teh Google.
> a thing that must be understood and managed.

That's true, but how do you manage it? Especially when it's so difficult to measure in the first place.

One idea that popped into my head would be to keep a running tab of technical debt that's being accumulated in a project. It's tough though, because developers who are in "accumulating debt" mode tend to be the ones with the least amount of time to spend on upkeeping a document that tracks their debt.
Hmmm...you interest me strangely, sir. Supplemental materials may be the way to go. Thanks!
I wish I could give the parent more points.

"Financial Engineering" is discredited and should more discredited.

I'm sure some physics geeks really enjoyed fitting heat equations to financial processes. This exercise ran a foul of the problem that the processes were subject to the normal distribution, were not uncorrelated and had "long tails", etc, etc.. But all these errors were just results of selecting those models which provided actionable data - the markets found those geeks who willing to endorse a dive into reckless asset inflation. This kind of thing has been around since John Law.

The emperor was just as naked five years ago as today. What has changed is what people are willing to see.

Read Nassim Nicholas Taleb. If you're a real geek for this stuff, read Benoit Mandlebrot's financial stuff. HN had a link to Mandlebrot's prediction of the present mess - written in 1998 (when it had almost happened, as opposed to now, when it has happen).
Yeah, I figure that whatever gets sold there has to benefit the folks taking the tutorials. "You've learned the basics, now here are some materials to take you further." Maybe that's it...
"So when you buy a song on Popcuts, it's in your interest that that song does well. You might tell your friends about it"

The huge and fatal flaw in that idea is that as soon as word gets around that people have a profit motive to recommend songs from PopCuts, and it will, then any such recommendation becomes suspect. Would you buy a song on the recommendation of someone who you knew was getting a commission for recommending that song? Of course not.

Wishful thinking about human nature, I think. Ain't gonna work. People are ultra-sensitive to that kind of thing.

But you know what, I don't think anything is going to work. Chalk me up in the camp that thinks there are basically two options now for music sales: compulsory licensing (ie, $10/month pass to absolutely everything), or no sales at all.

I think the music industry has a year or two to implement the first option. If they don't, Oink 2* will be born, decentralised, completely P2P and un-shutdownable, and then the age of paying for sound recordings of any type will come to an end forever.

* Oink was a huge BitTorrent site which was basically the best music resource in the world.
For shifting medium cargo medium distances over inhospitable terrain, I wouldn't be surprised if Zeppelins were more cost-effective than helicopters. Also it might be quite a nice holiday, spending a week or two Zeppelining along some scenic coastline, like a small cruise ship 100ft up. I don't think we've seen the last of that technology.
Most useful projects solved or helped with a website
What do you think the most useful projects would be to humanity which could be helped or solved using a website? Can you name any that are running strong now?
Also, for the techies... here's a PR we put out ~2 years ago that talks about our use of Oracle and multiplayer gaming. Jabber/XMPP became a big part later on.

http://www.oracle.com/corporate/press/2007_may/GaimTheory.ht...
Actually, the site was designed around banner ads--that's why it's so narrow. It's 728px wide--leaderboard width. They were built-in between the header and content. I had AdSense serving 'em up, but it didn't generate much revenue.
Music 2.0 book - thoughts on the future of the music industry
I'm self-critical enough as it is just realizing that someone else is going to read the finished product, let alone everything I wrote before exposing it. I would have a hard time letting my thoughts flow.

In addition, for school papers I would type in sarcastic or snarky sentences just for fun about what I really think of the subject matter or whatever book I was forced to write an essay for at the time. Sometimes I'd go so far that I would save a different copy of the paper just so that I could go back and laugh at it years later.

It looks like a great way to gain insight into how you or someone else writes, but I think it should always be opt-in.
I open a ticket saying things like "this needs to be documented, estimate is X hours to document fully; don't forget gotchas A,B, and C", or "fix this corner case that occurs X percent of the time", or "this will run slowly when traffic reaches X because of Y" and such, giving it a priority that indicates exactly what the technical debt would cost if it wasn't resolved (super low priority is really cheap, no big deal, extremely minor inconvenience). This is partially so I don't forget about it, but also to document that something isn't as clean as it could be. These are not hard and fast "measurement" numbers, but by looking at the ticketing system, you can get a general idea of how far things are behind.

It also gives you a list of alternative things to work on when you're getting burned out on the active tasks.
Impressive flexibility. I haven't encountered any problems yet on FF or Safari.

Another use I see for it is in teaching JS / jQuery / etc.
The longer a writing tradition a language has, the more complex its grammar is.

Chinese is a very strong counterexample to your statement based on your definition of "complex grammar."
It didn't seem that impressive to me. Looks like it made all of its gains 10+ years ago, and their still getting factored into the 32-year average.

If you want go that route, invest in MSFT, which has averaged something like 50% over the past 22 years.
This is exactly what Mugasha ( invite @ http://www.mugasha.com/signup/hack) is doing for electronic dance music. EDM genre is all based on promotions. Promoting music through live sets, DJ sets, and weekly podcasts. The problem is how these sets are distributed. iTunes is a great source for podcasts but they way it distributes these live sets is inherently flawed in terms of a good user experience.

As a EDM fan you want to know what track is playing, so you can come back to it on a later day and listen to it again. Or perhaps you want to buy the song you are listening to on a set/podcast. What we have done on Mugasha is built a player that streams these long (1-2 hours) podcasts on-demand and allows the user to listen to them as if the set was an album.

Embdeeded in the track listing for each set is a buy button (through amazon [iTunes and Beatport](coming soon). We are partnering with Bandsintown to provide live event(tickets) information for the artists that you are listening to i the set. This is not the best way to monetize (for us), but it is great for the artist (thats the goal). We are here to promote EDM in a more effective way and make it easier for users to enjoy this kind of music, as well as for them to easily buy and support the artist.

So if you like dance(including trance) music, please check out Mugasha.
I think that's a main issue. Many of these models are based on math that few people understand. I don't think it necessarily is an issue of integrity, but more an issue of traders and asset managers using the results of these mathematical models without fully understanding the implications and risks. They are, after all, probabilistic models and it seems like they weren't treated as such.
A local commit gives you a rich undo system.
>I think the music industry has a year or two to implement the first option. If they don't, Oink 2* will be born, decentralised, completely P2P and un-shutdownable, and then the age of paying for sound recordings of any type will come to an end forever.

I'm no pirate, but I hope the music industry takes its sweet time.
I wrote in my parent comment that this was based on personal observation. There is no such thing as conventional wisdom on such topics, there are just widespread opinions:

Note, there are two points we are discussing here:

1. Is there a way of saying that some grammar is more complex that others - objectively?

2. Does writing influence the complexity of the grammar?

Now, for both cases, I base my opinion of observation, and not off any scientific papers. Since you are doing the same, the only way we can settle this duel is by trying to show as many examples one way or the other to resolve the issues.

Regarding the first question, I'll just assume that we both accept that there is difference in complexity in grammar between languages. Or do you not think so?

Regarding the second question, I'll say this:

* Chinese Grammar is simple, but it's very clear that Chinese style writing cannot have the same influence. If you do not know a chinese word, you cannot write it, and you cannot read it. As such, you are not likely to use it, and the word will tend to die. In western style writing, you can attempt to write a word from having heard it once. It's also much easier for words to live on, because words are easily copied.

* Unwritten Creole and Pidgin Languages always do very similar things to western languages - they strip it of certain grammatical constructs, and it ends up being like most unwritten languages - past tense and future tense are created by adding words, and not by changing words.
Read my reply to mechanical_fish regarding Chinese.
Good intellectual property lawyers are more spendy than you would wish, so consider carefully the upside of getting good legal advice versus the downside of flying without it. Depending on what you are developing, subject matter knowledge may be important, and that is often better found in a specialty intellectual property firm rather than in the intellectual property section of a general practice law firm. But if your main concern is making sure your agreement with your employer properly separates the rights in his project and the rights in yours, then you may as well seek a general practice law firm, because then what you are looking at is contract law (and the possibility or not of future litigation) as much as intellectual property law proper.
I don't think it'd be any great loss for Twitter to dump SMS entirely.

Stripping out SMS support is what really allowed it to take off in the UK. When you think that there's even a chance everybody is getting yr minutae fired to your phone, it acts as a rate limiter.
Bed-and-Breakfast-Modica by SiciliaSud
Very clever. It's like a souped-up version of the Outline Current Element tool in Firefox's Web Developer Toolbar. Nice work!
One of my favorite weird old English things is "ye." It's interesting that the "y" in "ye" was originally not y but the Anglo-Saxon character "thorn" (þ). Thorn slowly devolved into "y" due to most offset printing typefaces coming from parts of Europe which didn't have the Thorn character in their language. I guess English typesetters decided that a stylized y looks closer to a stylized þ than anything else that they could come up with, and just went with it.

The funny thing though, is thorn is the deprecated character for a "th" sound.

So, "ye olde pub" is actually "þe olde pub," which is intended to be pronounced "the old pub" when you use Thorn properly.

We'd be confusing the hell out of someone from the middle ages by trying to say "ye old" at them and expecting them to understand it, because they'd be expecting us to just say "the."

(Not to be confused with "ye" meaning "you," which is I think more or less an accurate. It's "ye" as "the" which is weird, and reminiscent of discovering the old man in Logan's Run or something.)
I think it's pretty well established that IQ is inversely correlated with reproductive success. It's also well known that IQ is not the only component of financial / societal success. Things like wisdom, creativity, diligence, or agreeableness can't be measured by an IQ test. I don't worship at the altar of IQ. That said, the cognitive abilities that an IQ test measures are becoming increasingly important for the types of jobs that make America competitive. And I'd rather live in a society where the average IQ is 100, than in one where it's 90 (relative to our current 100 blah blah blah)

Anyway, let's leave the race question off the table. Why is it that when large-scale IQ tests are conducted on people from Mexico, and on people whose parents are from Mexico, the average score is around 87?
Seems totally reasonable. The rise of Ruby shows that modern languages should optimize for programmer efficiency first and speed second.

Modern scripting languages have several data structures: mostly arrays, hashes and strings. But it is a hassle move data between them.

The next language should only have one, the ordered dictionary.

x = [],
x << "hi" # 1=>"hi",
x["seven"]=6 # 1=>"hi", "seven"=>6,

Etc
It could use a "go to frame" feature, but otherwise that's quite cool!
Very nice tool. Reminds me of the Dapper interface. I could see this being used to build some sort of notifier service. For example, "notify me when any of these change."

Great work
Framework trend Django Up Rails Down?
Is this accurate? Has Rails lost it's steam?
It is not a problem. Execution of any code in any language can have side effects, like garbage in memory or stack overflow or OutOfMemoryException. Usually, you just ignore these side effects.

Use code convention to define which flags, registers, and memory areas, IO registers, etc. must be preserved by the called function. Just ignore any other changes.
So, has anyone actually been able to find Roger Wallis' CV?

Here are some papers of his that a friend found: http://unjobs.org/authors/roger-wallis
I think "selling" is the wrong model to begin with. Spotify is the kind of model you're looking for.
To me 'managing it' means managing risks, which often means managing long-term expectations. Debt can't exist without risk, even the technical debt mentioned here. The way you manage that risk really depends on project-specific variables - timeline, budget, staffing. You might allow a grievous hack to get something to market now, with the expectation that you will have more staffing to clean it up later. Or you may invest in a robust design now because the expectation is for staffing to be cut to 1/2-head for the next 3 years, and you need something that can adapt under that risk profile.
Twitter Blog: Bell Mobility and Twitter—No Extra Fees
1. Transparent, instant, geographically-relevant market pricing data.

2. Voting, Republic-style (not to be confused with democratic-style).
We did a research study sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of Ed that showed that for learning basic skills, black-and-white screenshots are best. Walking people through tasks step-by-step with static pictures is most effective. Video is really good for some things (showing the correct hand movements to operate an iPhone, for instance), but for basic "click here" stuff, simpler is better.
Google now has an official Twitter account
the article is good, but i can't help the feeling that it is just applying a clever name to a common sense principle that is relevant to just about every field (including finance and technology)
Very well done. It seems to me that Etherpad is a subset of Twiddla. I love Twiddla man.. it's just an amazing tool that pushes browsers to the limits. I can't imagine how much time and effort had to go into it.

Bug: Mine died for several hundred frames. Kept getting the same JS error. This might help you out: http://imgur.com/A82D
Jamroom pretty much allows artists to do this - they are 100% in control, as they run the software on their own site:

http://www.jamroom.net

We've been selling and supporting Jamroom for over 5 years - it really began as an alternate to mp3.com, but has taken off from there.
Chris,

A lot of people have suggested an Amazon affiliate situation, and unless my assumptions are wrong it just won't pay. The following is a copy/paste from a quick spreadsheet assuming some basic information. Amazon gives affiliates 4% of a standard sale, I assumed a CTR of 1% (which I think is very generous), I guessed a 2% conversion rate, and an average sale of $45.

You can see that your monthly take will still be quite low.

Traffic	1300000
CTR	1%
Delivered	13000
Conversion rate	2%
Converted	260
Avg Sale	$45
Your cut/sale	$1.8
Your take	$468

It is entirely possible that your CTR would be higher, but I tend to think not.

You said that with Adsense you only earned $400 in a month, which means you were getting a $0.30 CPM. This is pretty low, and even in this ad market I think you should be able to pull off $1.50 or more. An Ad network would help you do that, and your traffic is high enough that they would be willing to talk to you. Of course this means ads on the site.

This is what I would do:
* Add a forum; with your traffic I think you could have a community discussing issues pretty quickly. I would probably do this as a sister site given your niche name. Of course this 'only' increases your pageviews.
* Optimize the site for ads, forget Adsense, and work with the ad networks. Better still, try to beat down doors of people who might want to advertise directly.
* Despite the small payoff I do like the idea of selling books related to the topic and would try it. I tend to like the idea of dealing directly with a specific publisher however; your cut will likely be better.
* I like the idea of premium content as well. I despise sites that show you only part of a solution, but your site shows that you have enough taste to do this in a way that users would embrace.

Good luck,
Jer
Governing the Facebook Service in an Open and Transparent Way
Traffic School
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It's good to see Ward Cunningham recognized for one of his many great contributions. I once heard a whole NPR piece about wikis and their history which didn't mention Ward as their inventor. It only occurred to me later that I should have written in.

The video of him talking about the debt metaphor is worth watching, especially the last minute where it gets subtle.
California Traffic School
I disagree. Browsers have their own package management. I click on the link for the plugin, say yes to a bunch of dialogs, the browser restarts, and now I have to play.

With a standalone program, more decisions are involved. I have to decide where it installs, and how I want to access that installation.
I see you've never been to http://www.orisinal.com/
Letting users customize the CSS seems like a great idea. When I used MySpace I really missed the ability to do this without resorting to really flaky hacks.
That's some fast turnaround. Well done!
I leave a lot of TODO and FIXME comments in code (which are then tracked and highlighted by my IDE). These range from code that may actually be broken on certain rare or unexpected corner cases (though not dangerously so), to known inefficiencies, to areas where the rough idea for a much better approach exists but can't yet be fully developed.

Very roughly, they are a measure of known technical debt.
Perhaps a labor lawyer, rather than a general contract lawyer. The main thing on your part is that you dont use your employer's IP, time, equipment, or work space. IANAL. Ask the lawyer about this area of expertise, otherise you pay $400/hour for him to learn.
That makes a lot of sense, thanks. Do you know how I would find a decent firm for this? Are there any good review sites? Are we talking $500? $1000? more? Just a general idea...
Any technology can be inappropriately applied. Neither crushed thumbs nor deranged psychopaths discredit hammers, do they?
And an airliner is a metal tube full of highly flammable liquid. What's your point?
I discussed all of this with them and I have been very careful to only develop (or even read articles) on my machine and reserve theirs for semantic technology work. I don't feel anything antagonistic at this point, but I would like to at least understand what I am risking.
I hear that. I'm making about double that and am barely keeping up with my rent in Campbell. Granted, I have a wife, kid, and a lot of debt to pay down.
Can I securitize technical debt?
in the long run, I think we'll see more and more of this consumer electronics cross-over. How much difference is there really between laptops, netbooks, and smartphones? Seems like things are converging and overlapping in new ways every day. Additionally, as computing gets woven more and more into the fabric of our lives, the discrete devices maybe won't matter as much, which probably isn't great for Nokia's brand. I'm just rambling, so maybe I'm way off.
Apple into mobiles.
Nokia into laptops.

What's next?
this is a very good point..

also, one purpose of the "gatekeeper" is to ensure a very minimal level of quality... not the best approach but one that is used often in retail... exceptions are sites like youtube and zazzle...
It's managed by the thought process of the programmers. A good programmer knows when and where the technical debt is and wants to pay it off. If the programmers don't understand this or don't care, there's not much that can be done. Teaching works, up to a point (but no further).

You can't manage this with documents for the same reason you can't manage thinking with documents.

If I were going to try anyway, and were working with a team of more than 2 or 3, I might put a big piece of paper on the wall and ask everyone to write on it whenever they notice technical debt. The bigger the issue, the bigger the note. Maybe use different colors for different parts of the system. After a while, patterns would emerge. But the real purpose of this would not be to track accumulated debt; it would be a device to encourage people to talk about it and think about it.