skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some advanced features would be, for example, if you're needing your API to send a call to a voicemail system, the voicemail system needs the 'forwarded from' header in addition to Caller ID so it knows what mailbox greeting to greet the caller with, whereas calling a voicemail pilot directly would just prompt the caller that a mailbox wasn't found and to try entering the 10 digit phone number. TelAPI solves this with ForwardedFrom optional parameter (see http://www.telapi.com/docs/api/rest/calls/make/)
The exact same question, plus one month, was asked a week ago, to the day:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4554345
I heartily recommend Joanne Weibe's ebook here:

http://copyhackers.com/product/handbook-how-to-write-a-long-...

$48 is a little hefty but its also frequently on sale on some of the appsumo/mightydeals type sites.
That sort of highlighting almost never should be relegated to a mouseover event. Besides the issue mentioned in the article, if the only way to reliably read a row of data is for it to be highlighted then highlight-on-mouseover makes it a bitch to read more than one row on a table.
Chatty, contest-loving robots now 10% of web traffic, says study
Is it correct to say that support have access to all data on the production databases of all products?
This is an understatement. Even if Github is just a place to put your toy library/project and it's not being promoted, there should be an awesome README showing off what it is meant to do (even if it doesn't do that yet, just point out that those features aren't yet available). When I find engineers on Github who've contributed to projects I enjoy using and I look through their repositories to find projects with interesting names but NO README, I get annoyed. I don't mind reading code, but sometimes I just want to see what this thing does before I go about reading 2 thousand lines of code.

The worst thing that could happen is that someone would want to start using your library while it's in an alpha state, and then complain that it's not perfect. But in the end, if people would really find something you're working on useful, you might get a lot of community support and motivation to finish it, so why not?

And as you state, when features are completed, there should be pages with ample examples on how to use them. Programmers can usually read a code example ten to a hundred times faster than they can read over the documentation for everything used in that example, and in well written code, the expected functionality (that is: documented behavior) is clear from an example alone. Programmers can also write a quick code example with a few inline comments faster and better than they can write good documentation.
Dark side of OpenStack
At first I thought you were being sarcastic... Patrick delivered one of the most amazing talks of all time at Business of Software (ie. the "Old Spice" presentation):

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/26/software-for-underserved...

You might not like this video, but I wouldn't generalize so prematurely.
Looks like your site is throwing an error right now Patrick: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/546067/Screenshots/cpc58_yeew2b.png (I realize that message shows nothing but it's all I could come up with to help out right now)
This is a followup to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4528246
Just bought the course and I'm downloading some of the videos because I watch most of my videos on the go (ie., in the car or on my ipad).

First impressions (ie., first 60 seconds on the course), it really seems like something created for a person sitting at a computer to watch it all. I wish there was a downloadable zip file I could download all the videos at once. I'm trying to download the videos now and I'm running into all sorts of errors and such (I think it's only letting me download one video at a time). Actually I'm getting error messages right now for all the pages. Is your site down?

Update: Ok, it looks like it's back up and running. When I download videos and try to right-click to save mp4 file, it downloads an html file and not the video. I need to go into the video to watch it and then option-return the url to start downloading. Very strange. This happens to the opt-in videos in lesson 2. optins-teardowns video doesn't seem to be downloading at all.

Also, your video sizes are really large. Example, 235mb for an 8:10 minute video (1024x768 resolution). You should be able to get the file size down to 100mb or so. For comparison, Kevin Rose's interview of Dennis Crowley in 720p is about the same size, 237mb, but the interview is about 20 minutes.

Your copywriting video is 686mb for 19:53 length... compared with Kevin Rose's Dennis Crowley video of 235mb for 19:20 length. That makes your video 3x the size of Kevin Rose's video (which is great 720p quality).

Honestly, this is a really sucky first experience. This is going to take my all morning to download these videos because the file sizes are 2-3x what they should be and because the links aren't all working.

And then after I download the videos, since they're so large I'm going to have a hard time fitting them in my iPhone and iPad. Please investigate getting your file sizes down. I think you can shrink the file sizes of your mp4 video to 1/3 the current size but keep the same resolution/quality.

Update: Your optins-teardowns.mp4 file is absent. I can't download it. Please fix cause I don't want to watch the lessons out of order.
I have a list about 20 items long. I'd probably spend a good portion of that two months trying to decide which project to take up lol.
One bad experience can change the perception.

Interesting snub at Google by recommending Bing maps over Google :)
I understand you may be defending the author but maybe think twice before you try to discredit someone so quickly, without any knowledge of their background?

There is nothing wrong with questioning credentials when things get down to a he-said-she-said. Your comment provided no reason to think you had anything more to back up your claims than the usability studies of the OP. If knowledge of your background is going to be important, that might be something you should mention.
Seattle seems like a great place to live to me. I would jump at the chance to move there!

But MS might be a tougher sell. ;)
I've encountered this sort of response citing the high pay in healthcare before. So I wanted to throw a thought out there for feedback.

A relevant point is the "carrying capacity" for healthcare professionals. The USA can probably double the number of people employed in healthcare (using a handwavy argument that that 40 million [edit: I earlier wrote 40%] of the population is uninsured).

Note the number of people with the high-paying healthcare job titles: all of them were below 100k people and many were less than 20k people.

Given that so few people work in healthcare relative to STEM, I'm not really sure that pointing out high salaries in healthcare is relevant.

Whereas I can easily see STEM doubling employment in the USA, from the already high (10's of millions?) employment base.
I thought it felt familiar when I was reading the rules of the game! :p
Selling shovels during a goldrush is a great way to make money! Patrick is sure to rake it in with this one, and with the 'money back guarantee' you really can't go wrong. HN is the perfect target demographic for this product.
How does that respond to middle-mouse-clicks? I use that for open-in-new-tab functionality all the time. There's no need to chord the mouse and keyboard together for it. Right-click->context menu is the same way.
Depends a lot on what department you're in. There are a lot of Pythoners at Google.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/2561008
YouTube (owned by Google) is mainly Python.

Here a talk from Pycon 2012, the technical part starts around 10 min. in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lGCC4KKok
Nice discussion but it isn't exactly the same question. Here OP is asking about people ideas to making something(most probably applications) instead of learning something in two months time.
TSA will soon scan everything inside your body
Rails: Capybara 2.0 Upgrade Guide
Future of News - Journalists Wanted
I first learned Python (which I use for web-related functions) from an engineer at Seagate who uses it everyday in failure analysis of drives (they use something like Python 2.2 still). That's something I always loved about Python -- it can be used for anything. It may not always be the "best" language for the job, but you can always "get it running" in Python.

That's why I love Python.
I understand your point, but if you prefer to allow the market to set employment and wage level, you should be for much looser immigration. The government regulating immigration is anything but free market. If the government were to loosen requirement for STEM immigrants, that is having freer market, not less.
LOL.

These maps have been available as part of iOS 6 betas for a long time. Apple already knew about the problem, but you can only move so fast. Maps are hard.

This letter isn't really an apology, it's a "use these other things while we update our data".
Inside the destruction of 38 Studios
California universities to produce 50 open-source textbooks
I can't provide source right now, but Microsoft pretty much said the same thing when they updated handwriting recognition for Windows Tablet PC Edition.

In the past they'd go through a procedure where they would learn how you write.

But later on, they decided it was most effective for you to learn to write in a way that the handwriting recognition software would understand.
NASA Orion Splashdown Tests Ensure Safe Landings For Astronauts
> I feel like these "sins" are major shots in the dark with no real studies to back up such big claims.

As mentioned in the post, the claims are indeed based on real studies: observing users as they perform prescribed tasks in a usability testing lab.
Was this inspired through talks with Ramit? I am seeing a similar model appear. He uses free emails to sell courses, and you use free blog posts to sell emails.
It definitely depends on your audience but the general non-tech audience probably doesn't know what "FAQ" stands for on average. In fact, most of the things you tech for granted among a tech-savvy audience disappear if you are targeting an audience that includes a non-trivial non-tech segment.

Source: Working at a startup with a wide audience. The email consisting only of the subject line "WHAT IS PASSWORD" was not the least-savvy email received.
There doesn't seem to be a shortage at all. We've gotten plenty of good candidates in our doors that turn us down because our pay is barely competitive and our health insurance is terrible. Pay more money and you can attract more tech workers.

Or lower your standards and make a plan to promote in company education, make the specialized work force you need yourself!
Good for you. Don't use my open source stuff. Turns out I wrote it for me, whether you get anything out of it or not doesn't actually affect me. If you do get something out of it, great. If you contribute great. But unless you are paying me, don't tell me what I should be doing with my hobby time. Period, end of story, full stop. Take your demands to someone else.

Further, demands for great documentation are unreasonable. I can point to hundreds of examples of 'well documented' projects where I still dig into the source code and do simple experiments to learn what the heck it does. This is a combination of how I learn and how I use software. Your docs (for all values of you) are crappy and don't tell me how the software works - the code does that tho, so I actually can trust it. If you want to do truely great documentation, put some comments of expected use at the top of the function/class/whatever definition, some comments on tricky sections of code (not "this does the file read" i get that from the call to read(), but "this also triggers an event from the OS handled in foohandler()), and good clean loosely coupled components.
"Switching customers to annual billing radically decreases churn, one of the key risks to SaaS businesses long-term."

Where I can I read more about annual billing decreasing churn? I've read your blog post (or email?) about switching to annual billing to free up revenue to acquire new customers, but I don't remember reading about how it decreases churn as well.
You may be better of with a re-launch under a different brand recycling the tech. Re-establishing a reputation once it has been dented this badly may be more work than starting afresh.
I agree. I know Patrick is known around HN for giving out good info but watching some of his videos was oddly distracting to me because something in the back of my mind reminds how awkward they are. Even just start by losing the nerdy headset I think it will help viewers focus more on the content rather than the awkwardness in the video.
I knew about the last one, and it was unplayable on my mid'09 13" MBP and its 9400m. I don't know if it's a few Chrome updates or the bump to Mountain Lion but it's smooth as butter now (performance of [0] improved a lot too, it was John Woo slo-mo, now it's realtime — although dragging the ball is a bit jerky).

[0] http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/
As a Canadian, one thing that I don't understand is why companies don't move to Canada. I feel like working in the states, I've priced myself out of the Canadian market (since salaries in Canada for engineers seem to be about 60-70% of what they are in the US), but I can't imagine that Vancouver or Toronto would be that hard to build an office out of. Yet for the most part, companies don't. From my understanding, there would be a lot of benefits to having Canadian offices - easy to travel to the home base when needed, good health care, better immigration laws, and a lot of local talent. When recruiting, we recruit very heavily from Canadian schools. But then we take everyone back to the US with us.
I'm for skilled immigration, but can we please, please rethink the H1B program? At the very least, don't make it so the individual goes out of status the day they leave their job. Give them time to shop around. And get rid of the fee/paperwork every time they switch jobs. Raise the fee to $50k and apply it to the first employer that sponsors them only. More of the risk of holding an H1B needs to go to the first employer that hires them, and less of it to future employers and the H1B holder themselves.

EDIT: I appreciate the responses. Raising the fee is probably the wrong idea.
If they felt they were forced by circumstances to ship the maps application now -- which there's at least some evidence of, if John Gruber's information about the way the Apple/Google contracts were timed is true -- then they'd kind of be in a Catch-22. What features could they have actually cut from the Maps app? The mistakes in 3D meshes and fuzzy terrain tiles make for the biggest point-and-laugh screen caps, and perhaps they could have cut that, but that would have caused just as much screaming. And the biggest issues really seem to be with the POI database, which you can't launch without. (And which, it should be noted, isn't something that Apple built on their own; at least in part, what Apple Maps is revealing is how bad a lot of other third-party geographic databases are compared to Google's.)

As for Apple's culture, well. I don't have special knowledge of it but I live in Silicon Valley and know a few people who've worked there or continue to work there, and your description about it doesn't seem to me to be accurate. There was a great deal of respect for Steve Jobs but there was no perception that he was always right. People did in fact push back against him, and he'd often listen. (And in cases where he didn't, there's still some controversy going on.) I think you're correct to surmise that there's a lot of arrogance in Apple's culture, mind you -- but I can assure you that Google's matches Apple's ego for ego. If anything, Google's corporate culture is more smug than Apple's, not less.
Microsoft’s cloud service SkyDrive is great, and no one has noticed
Very true, this is especially a bugbear of mine when browsing on iPhone. All too often I have eight tabs open that I'm meaning to get back to. Then I click on a link (or accidentally click an ad) and my heart lurches as the link opens a new tab, so Safari very helpfully destroys my oldest tab and I lose whatever was there. I've noticed quite consistently that this behavior comes with sites that just want to keep you on there, so they open external links in a new tab, usability be damned.
Sorry. We already moved to flowdock (https://www.flowdock.com). Turns out its about 1000x more appropriate for us anyway as a central dev status hub. I would encourage any dev team who was using grove.io to check it out. IRC client compatible!
Color CEO Bill Nguyen Checks Out Of Day-To-Day Operations
I've been trying to get better about just helping to fix the documentation when its bad- but that is dependent on me being able to figure it out in the first place with broken/poor docs.
Durring launch week I updated my iPad to iOS6 and used to drive from NYC to Washington DC and back. Addition of turn by turn navigation is a big step forward. So I'm pretty happy.

And as a side note I recently switched back to an iPhone after the latest Google Maps update caused my phone to hard lock and reboot. Take a look here: http://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-4703 It affected my previous HTC Sensational device. Basically maps, or mapping services (which is a lot of apps including background ones) randomly caused your phone to reboot.
The Maps Letter Tim Should've Written
I used to resist using the singular "they" for one person (preferring Spivak pronouns) until someone pointed out to me that documented use of singular they for someone of unknown gender dates back to the 1600s.

And, perhaps most importantly, people will understand you when you say or write it.
Interested in working with big data? Ark (YC W12) is hiring.
This is a huge disagreement between us. If you loosen immigration in general, then you may have freer markets. But if you loosen them only in a narrow segment of the economy and while restricting mobility in others, you may end up creating severe market distortions that don't resemble a free market in any way.

If almost every country and profession had equally liberal immigration policies, then yes, I'd agree. But we're not doing this evenly, and I think this is why so many people who hold a favorable general view of immigration nonetheless object to these targeted visa/green card programs. As it stands, I think that adding a green card to every STEM degree (but not every JD, MD, MBA, DDS, etc) will end up creating market distortions that will probably just further deter US citizens from entering this field, amplifying the cycle of "shortages" and perhaps eventually creating exactly the "crisis" that the policy is intended to address.
No, my comment is: what are some of those applications? If your answer is that it's for running quadratic or exponential algorithms on medium-size data sets, then that explains a lot.

The relatively few applications explains why they are using Kickstarter for funding. If it had more applications, then people with deep pockets would be falling over themselves to give them money.

There's nothing wrong with this -- the page is just so full of marketing-speak that it's hard to tell.
Have Microsoft relocate you, wait a year for your relo payback contract to expire, quit.

Or you could find a position at the many Seattle-area employers willing to relocate you: Google, Adobe, Boeing, Valve, a whole grip of game companies. The world, as it were, is your oyster.
Soon after the original iPhone launch Apple posted a letter apologizing for the price drop so soon after the initial launch.
"We apologize for disappointing some of you..."
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/

Like Cook's letter, it was reactionary and came after the price drop was poorly received. They've used this medium quite a few times for specific things (letter against Flash and against DRM). Generally, to clarify their current position or to apologies.
He did something right. I read it start to finish without pause.

I am in the target demographic, we've just started implementing lifecycle emails at my company.
Raising the fee will only serve to benefit bigger companies (e.g. Microsoft) and hurt smaller companies, particularly startups, from hiring.
Well yeah, this is an exaggeration; things like brute force hash reversing can take kilobytes. Yet you must admit that such problems are in minority even in material science.
Also note that some Linux distros in GUI mode can take like half of that alone (this is this household-experimentation-with-parallelism use-case they advocate in the proposal).
How to Respond to Negativity
Nazi Buddha from space
This green monstrosity is an NBC News website?

Anyway, this trademark should be thrown out--it's more confusing to assert that an "App Store" is Apple-only.
Computing: A Concise History by Paul E. Ceruzzi

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly/

The Computer History Museum is in Mountain View, CA, part of Silicon Valley, close to the Googleplex and Microsoft SV.
It has the second, working Babbage Difference Engine. Also a youtube channel of lectures.
The app works fine. The user experience is better than the previous with the new features (navigation, voice). It's not a tech problem.

The whole problem revolves around business strategy. Mapping data. Google monopolizes this area, and the other providers are all tied to Apple's competitors (Microsoft, Nokia).

So either they come up with their own, or stay on the hands of competitors (since mapping is such a core feature).

I wish they adopt Open Street Maps, or contribute back to it. Mapping is one area where all good solutions are proprietary and in the hand of a few, it completely sucks.
Dharmesh Shah has talked about it extensively -- basically, of people on monthly billing, at any given time approximately 100% are at risk of churn. Of people on annual billing, < 10% are at risk of churn at any given time. They also have less opportunities to hit involuntary churn like, e.g., getting a CC declined or expired.
Around here (Washington DC) Apple's maps aren't much different that Google's as far as address matching - in several queries, considerably better even - but there's a huge gap in all of the ancillary data.

I live near a park with a city rec center, pool, sports fields, etc. and a public high school. A little testing showed the following:

Google Maps: correctly labels all of the above, including building outlines

OpenStreetMaps: correctly labels everything but the school, but they do have building outlines and even parking lots marked.

Bing: nothing but the school name labeled at the nearest intersection rather than correctly in the middle of the [long] block.

Apple, Nokia, Map Quest: featureless void
"risk averse" here really means "it may be a problem for society, but let someone else bear the cost of solving it". one point of antidiscrimination laws is to spread those risks and costs out evenly so that no one is unduly affected.
Not just that, there are a whole set of Azure storage APIs which are just HTTP/REST.

You could use them from any OS that has a HTTP stack. Apple are probably using just this.
Yes, same with my NDK based apps though in my case I have only compiled for x86 and ARMv7-A. About MIPS, is there any MIPS based hardware with Play store access out there that we need to worry about?

Btw you may want to know that there is a bug in 4.0.3 that sometimes loads armeabi code instead of armv7-a code on some ARMv7 systems like HTC One S.
This is definitely one of the reason to go to university, where they teach you these concepts very well. There's no reason you can't learn concepts sequentially though; I wouldn't advocate trying to learn a million languages at once, just that you are taught the theory of OOP, the theory of concurrency solutions like locks, the theory behind communication protocols, etc.