skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is called breaking the problem apart into manageable pieces.

As I recall the first time this came up the proposal was to give every 10 yr old (usually their 5th year of school) an e-book that each year would get copies of the textbooks loaded on to, the schools wouldn't need to buy text books and they would always have enough for the students.

It got bogged down (as in tossed out) by the interconnections of various special interests both in the publishing industry and the education system.

This is simpler, allow for the existence of a 'free' textbook. And we can work on making those text books as good as they can be, then allow schools to choose them or not, and then require schools use them once we've got evidence having those textbooks doesn't lower the test scores of students who only have the 'free' textbooks.
Watch the Startup Pitch that Wowed Anheuser Busch InBev
Thanks, Patrick (and "underdown"). That you're such a strong writer with a keen awareness of what your audience will and won't put up with --- esp re long-form --- is the reason your page is as awesome and non-skeezy as it is. ~joanna
also, they'll be peeking at your private stuff and banning you for it

http://wmpoweruser.com/watch-what-you-store-on-skydriveyou-m...
I agree, it was an idea ahead of it's time that if caught on, would have completely changed the concept of social networks. It was a big bet and high risk so I'm not surprised it hasn't caught on. The concepts and thinking behind the idea, in my opinion, was rock solid and more true to how real networks work. I might have even have tried to redefine it as the "experience network" where you can look at shared experiences from many different viewpoints.
An elastic social network to share photos with people at the same event in real-time?

Sounds about as ingenious as a social network around credit card transactions. Oh.
Solid team behind this app. I've also met the CEO and he really knows his stuff and is a great guy. Even though the app isn't available quite yet, trust me, it will be great.
And while we're at it: Javadoc is not a substitute for writing documentation.
The two months is the easy part. Finding funding to live on the meantime is, well, so difficult that it's effectively impossible. I'm a contractor right now and 100% of my time goes to survival. I have infinite ideas, any one of which could make a lot of money, but no way to justify working on them when I'm perpetually behind on rent.
Nobody said that, what he's saying is that the letter issued today is not substantially different from this blog post's idea of the letter.

Everyone knows the maps suck, the question is one of how one should conduct the damage control.

I personally don't see a problem with Tim Cook's PR message. It was short, on point, and didn't deflect much.

But that won't stop from the peanut gallery from taking cheap shots. Because when it comes to product launches, we're all suddenly PR experts.
IANAL, but I think it's quite clear that this is the company's property.

You make a big thing that it was not done on company time, but that isn't really important. It was related to your work, and you used your experience from work to do it. You've also been using it at work - that implies that it was done for work. And then work asked you to make changes, which you did presumably without complaining. You've done everything to set up the image that it's the company's property.

Also, what does your contract say?

I think this is a pretty clear-cut case - sorry.
Steve Jobs would never do that
the downside is that only array operations that are supported this way are the ones that are anticipated by the language designer. … I occasionally think of picking up an APL-derivative like J to play with.

You really should -- it provides a nice counterexample to the "downside" you worry about. Having mapping over arrays (even with mismatched dimensionality) built into the mechanics of function application means that any function the programmer writes is automatically supported by the array mapping.
I am most definitely not your target customer for this (not yet, anyway - one day, maybe, who knows?)

Still, it's quite clear how well you demonstrate value - that last paragraph is exactly one sentence long and yet has five concise, concrete pointers on what exactly makes long copy good. As such, I suspect buyers will be extremely happy with the content of the actual course :)

For now I'll continue to enjoy the rest of your excellent free content. Thanks and good luck!
Can you imagine any other CEO of a company doing this? His behavior is bizarre and confusing. Imagine Tim Cook's email to his employees:

From: Tim Cook, Apple's CEO
To: Apple Employees
Re: Maps and... stuff..

Hi everyone,

As you know, I haven't been at work the past few months. What have I been doing? Well, "What haven't I been doing?" is the better question! I've taken the jet to Fiji, hiked Kilimanjaro, and eaten just the best crème brûlée at this little place off of the Champs-Élysées.

This is what I do when I know a project is a complete disaster, which happens often. I do this all the time. I just travel around. Drink a lot of beer, smoke a lot of pot. It's no big deal; nothing new or exciting.

You'd think the board would've fired my ass a long time ago, but nah - I've made sure to stack the deck with my buddies and we've got enough cash to flounder around for a while. The CEO checks keep coming, and I keep cashing them, so I'll keep the title warm.

Since iOS6 release, the Maps app has gotten a lot of criticism. In response, I've decided to go to Hawaii. To recharge my batteries. Yeah, they were pretty well charged from my last two months' off but you have no idea how draining it was to write this letter. Heavy is the head that wears the crown and all that.

I think I need another couple of months to recover. If some of you quit because of my irresponsible and downright bizarre behavior, I totally understand. To the rest of you, though, expect a pivot. Or something.

Aloha,

Tim
But it worked. Before that the hyperbolic tech media was "How the iPhone 4 sucks because of the Death grip". And after that the tech bloggers were "Why Apples comparison with other phones is a bit unfair, because HTC XYZ does need x seconds longer to be death gripped", which isn't that quite catchy and sexy. Steve Jobs changed the conversation. And even if you dislike his not quite suppressed snarkyness (which I loved, because the issue was blown out of proportion), it is interesting to note how successful Apples reaction turned out to be. Case in point: They still sell the iPhone 4 physically unchanged (I think?) and the issue just doesn't matter today anymore.
I can see someone checking out to a 10-day vipassana meditation retreat to think about where to take the company, but to go hang out in Maui for two months is beyond inexcusable. There is no insight he's earning on day 60 that he couldn't have gotten on day 10.
Exploring smartphone-controlled browser games with Nitrome
Or just finally fix immigration.
"At the very least, don't make it so the individual goes out of status the day they leave their job."

This would do a lot to level the playing field between U.S. and H1B workers: if employees can't easily switch jobs, their employers can pay them low salaries for long hours. From the employers' point of view, however, captive workers are a feature, not a bug. If they had to pay H1B workers salaries that were competitive with domestic workers, they'd stop lobbying for more H1B visas and start hiring and/or training domestic workers.
And they'll have a special folder for celebrities with unusually large primary and secondary sexual characteristics.

And for ordinary folks with said large characteristics? They'll just get asked on dates.
VC Terms & Valuations for Birst, Inc.
I'm ok with them taking away a better hamstrung licensed product for a crappy one that will only get better simply because it probably had to happen at some point.

Yes it's been obvious to Apple (and developers like myself since PR1), but the apology is not for making the decision, the apology is for not being honest with its customers about its current quality.
I'm glad nobody told that to Google when they were getting started.

Even in 2010, 5 years after they launched, they got the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica wrong. This rendered Google Maps worthless. They should have just shelved the whole project right then.

Don't even get me started on Waldseemüller. So much worse than worthless!
You are smarter than me. At least you seem to think so.
Does anyone know of a comparison chart between Twilio, Tropo, Plivo and TelAPI (and any others I don't know about)?
Did you actually set up your system to use case-sensitive HFS+? What does it do that the default doesn't?
No reason to be snarky. Opera chose to disable websockets because of security flaws; see http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/12/security-flaws-force-firefo...
Be right back, off to yoink this into a Tablet app ..
Long-form copy is really about the narrative. Patrick has a great story, which makes his narrative so readable.
MSFT doesn't have to hire just anybody. If they pay more than Google, etc, they'll draw people away from those companies. If they pay more than JP Morgan and Goldman, they'll draw people away from those companies. If they pay more than the law firms that significant numbers of CS people leave engineering for, they'll draw people away from those companies. If the whole industry raises salaries to compete, that will convince more people to go into engineering.

Here is MSFT's basic problem. The kind of people they want to hire often have better options. I left software engineering because I didn't like the constant layoff/hire cycle, the compressed salary scales at the top end, the need to get an MBA to go into management tracks, the lack of benefits, etc. In law I'm making more money even after student loans, and have far more headroom. I have an office with a door that closes and a secretary. I don't work exclusively with men. I work in a downtown high-rise, not some god-foresaken suburban office park. Based on my experience, I told my brother to stay out of STEM, and he took his physics degree to an investment bank. If some bright kid asked me to help him choose between CS and banking/consulting/law/medicine, I'd absolutely push him to the latter.

Tech companies need to get over their aversion to competing with each other for talent. They need to get over this "no poaching" "non compete" bullshit and stop trying to get the government to train their employees on the taxpayer dime. If they want to hire top-notch people away from other industries, they need to start paying competitive salaries and offering competitive benefits and amenities.
The ability to upload an Excel file, edit it on the web editor or the app on my phone, and still have the original xlsx file with full fidelity available through Skydrive is fantastic. I was never a fan of the Google Docs integration on my old Evo running 2.3—it seemed terribly slow to load the docs list and individual documents, even on wifi—but have been very happy with Skydrive and its integration into WP and also Mac OS X and Windows.
not everyone shares your, or apples ideas, about what constitutes a "good practice"
That's nothing, try zerg rush.
You made me curious, so here's a list of US cities with more average rainy/snowy days per year than Seattle[1]:

223: Juneau, Alaska
209: Mt. Washington, N.H.
169: Buffalo, N.Y.
163: Olympia, Wash.
161: Caribou, Maine
155 (tied, interestingly): Cleveland, Ohio
155: Seattle-Tacoma, Wash.

At 37 inches of rain per year, it's not a particularly high volume of rain; it's just spread out over a lot of days. San Francisco is down at 63 rainy days and 20 inches per year, for comparison.

[1] http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762183.html
I agree 95%. However, I really do like to see a lot of simple examples. They can often make things much easier to understand once you see it. Similar in concept to "A picture is worth a thousand words".
The Grunt Fund Calculator
I honestly can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. The bit "[a network] where a system decides who is your friend was just awesome" could easily go either way.

Did you actually find out interesting things from its statements as to who your friends were, or do you not like the idea (it doesn't sound particularly appealing to me)?
Awesome. This is exactly the kind of quantification I've been hoping would start to happen.

Someone submitted this link for separate discussion.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4587026
The Tech Startup Ecosystem: Parrots, Hippos, and Pumas
> However, is it a mission-critical app? What percentage of the userbase actually needs maps on a day to day basis? What did you do in 2005 when your GPS completely failed?

It's not "mission-critical," but by that criterion neither is any part of iOS that's not talk and text and maaaybe basic web browsing. Mapping is surely one of the bigger raisons d'être for smartphones, otherwise people might as well buy an S40 Nokia.
I'm in London, and I'd say it's a small step backwards. The points of interest from Yelp appear to be consistently off by about 10 metres, and many points of interest are missing altogether. I do like the way you can click on a point of interest, which is something you couldn't do in the old Maps app.

So far, all the addresses I've tried are correct, and the driving directions and speech recognition are a step forward. The tube/bus directions from Google were always inaccurate, so I was already using a dedicated app.
Looks like 'VR' in relation to 'vacation rentals' is actually more widely used than it seems at first. VRBO.com from Homeaway (since 1996). So perhaps a valid choice, albeit not so customer friendly.
Can you make it work on mobile with controls on the page?
Wow ... now here's a testimonial!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4587080

EDIT - Linked to the other HN topic. Just click through for the story
I'm not sure why people keep saying this. Google provides tech support forums, which are responded to by Google employees.
Wireless charging is useless, until its essential
Well we have no contract about anything what so ever. My salary position or the PHP program. I modified the opensource PHP application for a tool for ME to use. Here's my non-tech real world example.

Sam sorts papers for a company. There ask him to sort them alphabetically. He is only given a flat table to work with. He decides to build a filing rack as it would be a lot more efficient and allow him to get's things done quicker. The other people in the office see this device and would like to use it as it seems to work way better as well.

Now given Sam leaves the company, that filing rack he built is his. He used no funding from the company to make it. They did not ask him to build it. If they want one like it, they need to build one them selves or purchase it from Sam.

This is my interpretation.
This is a great case study. (And I'm not just saying that because it praises me or is ridiculously convenient given that I launched a course teaching people how to do this like two hours ago.)

In particular, I love the actual numbers about how indicia of trust increase over time. That's something which I have ample confirmation for from clients but most everybody treats that sort of data like it is a state secret.

Hats off to actually making the leap and implementing something, by the way. No lie, one of the biggest problems I have is getting people (myself, clients, people I talk to, etc) to actually do the work. Campaigns which get written sometimes fail, campaigns which don't get written fail every single time.
The funning this, I decided to do this for fun. I spent hours cutting out all of these things (I still have them). Again, it was just for fun as I was probably just listening to an audiobook or something (perhaps a little scotch thrown in there). But... after I did all that cutting did I actually read the post. There was no point! There was no game to play. Doh! I wasn't aware it was only a concept and was unfinished.
> An important change that I think could be made with the h1b would be to allow people to get into Green card status after 2 years of being in continuous h1b status ... irrespective of company. That way h1-b hires aren't used as pawns in lowering wages and abused because they can be forced to do things that an American hire would never do.

This is a good idea. My wife has been on H1B for four years and is no closer to a green card via the H1B path than when she started. It's a joke. She has a Ph.D. in CS, she's been in the USA for 11 years, and her only realistic path to a green card turned out to be marriage. Meanwhile, she's been used and abused by employers and seeing her mentally and emotionally break down due to H1B abuse is difficult to watch.
Add monkeys that throw eggs and you have a brainfuck interpreter.
Not quite.

I got quite a jolt when I couldn't install Emacs on my new MBP with Mountain Lion at first. (I am not a Mac user. This is my first apple computer).

I had to tweak something in control panel to be able to install the downloaded dmg file.

How long before that option disappears? I don't know. But I am afraid it will, some day.
Nice, been looking for a good Docs (Drive?) replacement for a while now!
I would definitely exclude administrators, janitors etc (because these jobs exist in companies that are "in STEM" such as a Microsoft).

I would include medical staff like nurses, doctors, pharmacists, psychiatrists, physiotherapists (not fitness trainers), licensed nutritionists, dentists, dentists' assistants etc.
Chrome 22 breaks things
Andrew and his team worked out of our office space for a few weeks while they built their product.

Andrew's is a stand-up guy and he's recruited a solid team of software developers to take on this project.
Ok, ill go with that. My issue is with how its presented, like it was some revelation. Granted there is probably a method to there madness, it seems to me like they are shooting themself in the foot with raising themself so high when they know they are going to fall(specifically to maps).
For the record, that isn't valid racket code. This is:

(define (factorial n)
(cond
[(<= n 1) 1]
[else (* n (factorial (sub1 n)))]))
must be nice!
Why today's "fast food" startup economy isn't all it's cracked up to be
> Is this my intellectual property legally?

It's a gray area, but because the inspiration and much preliminary information came from your employment, it's one that favors your employer and all the other programmers who contributed to OSTicket under the GPL licensing rules.

If I were you, I would simply ask your employer if he minds that you release it under the GPL, under your own name. And why do I suggest GPL? Because OS Ticket is open-source and GPL (Version 2), and anything you derive from it must therefore also be open-source and GPL.

> I believe it is my property ...

Yes, and the property of everyone who ever wrote a line of code for OSTicket, all of whom deserve recognition and acknowledgment.

> I want to just prevent them from further use once I do leave.

What? OSTicket is open-source, which means your contributions are also open-source, which means you cannot prevent others from using your contributed code in any way they please.

Welcome to the world of open source, where people try to cooperate with each other.
Turn anything into a whiteboard
WebGL around the net, 27 September 2012
Why Sr. People leave MSFT in September
I can see that from this distance -- I should have been more specific about is being a downside of the way MATLAB is only half-assedly array-oriented, not necessarily a feature of all array oriented languages.
Yep, total fluke. Meant to post it last night, but real life got in the way.
1. Figure out a way to get paid for it.

2. If you're designing tools for other people to use, documentation really, really, really matters. Even if it's just a mailing list and wiki initially.

When I'm evaluating tools, I look to the docs, and if I find them lacking, my interest dims very, very rapidly. I'm a systems admin, and don't do much coding (though programmers have a need for docs as well). My main concerns are uptime, reliability, predictability, and well-understood behavior. If a tool shows a wild cowboy shoot-from-the-hip, damn the torpedoes mentality, it's going to make my life (and my sleep quantity and quality) hell.

Life's too short for that shit.
"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." —Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

That last 10% is a killer. :)
When you ask for transit directions, you get presented a selection of 3rd party apps from the app store to give you directions, and those directions are then integrated with Apple Maps.

The app I used, http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/transit-directions-public/id5... was pretty bad on iOS 6 launch day (with instructions like "take a bus", without mentioning the line), but a week later improved to be perfectly usable here in Switzerland.
Open webOS 1.0 is here
Can’t See Your App’s Forest Through the Trees? Get Logging with Graylog2
The PyCon site has a page of advice that links to sample proposals and relevant blog entries:
https://us.pycon.org/2013/speaking/proposal_advice/
> Since iOS6 release, the Maps app has gotten a lot of criticism. In response, I've decided to go to Hawaii.

"Unfortunately, I used Apple Maps, and ended up in West Virginia."
If you recall the discussion we were having about really stressful situations, and the way people react. One is to become a tiger and fight, the other is to flee.

It is important to realize that this is not necessarily a conscious choice, you learn a lot about yourself when you get tested like this, you can see it in people experiencing a disaster like Katrina, when it finally sinks in that this may be the last few days of their lives. That level of stress flips the switch and blam! there you are either fighting or running.

Time to move the CEO into a different role, one which takes advantage of the charisma and energy and vision, but one that does not involve being ultimately responsible.
Most startups that fail don't materialize out of thin air, raise $40M, and fail within a year and a half. I think it's impossible to be too harsh on anybody involved with Color.
I do think most VR owners get it...
Wow ... two in one day may be a new record and if Google doesn't step up with answers, they'll end up scaring everyone away. I completely understand their perceived need for secrecy, but is there some critical mass that once reached will cause business to decline?

The other HN link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4585043
LetsLunch matchmaking site for Business lunches
How we handle deploys and failover without disrupting user experience
It's interesting that it's listed as an SLR in the "Credits" but as an SLK500 in the car list.
That would be interesting, but I doubt it will ever happen. Nobody with any interest in participating in the VC-funded ecosystem (which includes much of the tech media, sadly) is ever going to point at one of the investors who fund that ecosystem and publicly call them out as a sucker.

Even if they, you know, are a sucker.
When is a company going to have an SMS API with reasonable pricing? $0.01 a message is crazy to me considering how little they actually cost.
Except lots of it for their CEO to pay for his vacation.