skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes - we're building a big integration with lots of ecommerce platforms and would love to find a way we can work together. I'll drop you a note.
I bet it would be interesting to have a graph of tickets over "number of days until the end of current month"
How Lifecycle Emails Can Invert the SaaS Cash Flow Deficit (by patio11)
A quota doesn't need to be monthly. There could be weekly targets. So I agree: day of the week would be useful to see, here.
Why should I bother? I have many projects on my box, each of them lives in virtualenv, each has it's own packages and all the projects are separated from themselves and the system (meaning my global, system-level python can not use any of the packages in virtualenv).

So why should tell system pkg manager about something which is not system-wide?

Also, virtualenv comes in stdlib now!
nice movie
http://freemoviesite24.com/2012/10/outpost-2-black-sun-2012-...
Have fun finding device drivers for off the shelf components which run on *nix. I work on a medical device and ican assure you that some vendors simply do not supply them. Problem is that I need to use their hardware and this isn't an area in which there always exist numerous alternatives. We run windows because it was impractical to do anything else. That said, I've been pushing for Windows embedded for years...
Incentivized Location Sharing Platform
Book printed with enitre RGB colour space
Most definitely.

Youtube has video uploaders, commenters, raters.

Games have players, coaches, referees, bots.

Forums have admins, moderators, posters, subscribers, lurkers.

Torrents have seeders, leechers.

Sure, Amazon has customers mostly, and some advertisers.

New terms are ubiquitous from convention, not from reasoning.
World of Warcraft's Lead designer Rob Pardo on the Role of the Cloud in Games
It's also an auto-submitter account that is somehow un-banned part of the time:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4441016

ExtremeTech and its parent company Ziff Davis has I think 5 employees submitting on HN excluding whatever inspires this guy to auto-submit that site:

- http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mrsebastian

- http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=11031a

- http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ukdm

- http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=adeelarshad82

- http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=russellholly
I agree charging for it is a good way to go. If your potential customers are shopping around, it might be because that they fail to see how you will deliver the same value at the rate you are charging. I personally try to advise customers to spend their hard earned cash wisely, especially when it has to do with websites because they rarely see the other costs involved such as technical maintenance, self maintenance, recurring costs and management. Afterall, they come seeking an experts advice.
Thank you for not requesting a "rockstar" developer.
Let the AIs, not us, formulate a billion-year plan
Just wait until they have to pay for all the drones.

They'll just task one to follow you until you make a ticketable driving mistake.
It doesn't say exactly what change he wants.

The devil is in the details.
Am I the only one worried about the 100x Farmville clones that will now be built by 15 year olds and spammed across the social sites. =)
Great tute though.
Making a naïve XML parser — Part 2: Perl and Regexp::Grammars
How to become optimistic instantly
Learn how CSSDeck was made by the creator himself
Do you have any location requirements?

SitePoint, in Melbourne, offers a grad programme where you rotate between four different companies, 1 month each, Flippa, SitePoint, Wave Digital and Learnable. You get to try your hand at a variety of technologies and stacks, and work on existing businesses.

Note: Some of these are quite start-up'y.

http://sitepointgroup.wufoo.com/forms/wanted-talented-gradua...
That role is actually held by webkit nowadays, with webdev using only -webkit-* css properties (without including the non-prefixed one) and webkit not dropping their prefix once something has been standardized.

See https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/Layout/CSS_Compatibility#q... for instance
Mountain View seems very temperate, but I've never been involved with HVAC. Does office space often need heating rather than cooling?
"No doxxing".
In any normal population of sufficient size you're going to have some screwball outliers.
Ask a Banker: What's a Derivative?
It's fairly alarming to read company dictats like this one. I hate to think that anyone could have some split second change of mind about the use of a particular word and then try to force it on the rest of the culture, top-down.

Yes, there's some sense in which "user" connotes a detachment from the people who use the programs you create, but I hopefully Square isn't such a centralised culture that the CEO gets to decide on it in isolation from "the team".
I imagine Schultz has probably heard some derogatory comments about "Starbucks users". For companies that provide a service (as opposed to a product), it probably sounds more innocuous, to the point where you wouldn't question it.

Edit: to be clear, I'm referring to someone saying "users" in the sense of "drug users". "McDonald's users" is another one I hear occasionally.
Big +1. Users as a term radically homogenizes people you're supposed to be building for. I came to the same conclusion a couple years ago: http://corvusconsulting.ca/2010/08/no-more-users/
I've heard of a few cases where teams were able to use git-annex to store large binaries. See http://git-annex.branchable.com
Apologies - just fixed it. Sorry about that and thx for spotting.
Now I'm just an uneducated bumpkin, but it seems like you've tried to answer two questions here but mistakenly labeled them as one (until you back off in the last paragraph of "Analysis"):

1. Do police give more tickets at the end of the month?
2. If they do, is it because of quotas?

The first is a statistical question, the second is much more complex. I can think of a few very good reasons why numbers would spike at the beginning of the month, plummet in the fat middle then spike at the end. None of them really have much to do with statistics directly.

I think this would be compelling if you'd compare stats for years in which "quotas" (whatever they decide to call them) were policy against the stats from years which they weren't.
I'm playing around with the data[1] and it looks like you may be on to something. October 31, 2010 (Halloween) had 122 tickets, while August 31, 2010 had 531!

[1] https://data.baltimorecity.gov/Financial/Parking-Citations-2...
Not OP, but ..

I played with it a little ... but the 1-base of arrays is too painful right now.

I used to do Basic, Pascal, C, Assembly, Python, Fortran and a few more esoteric language in the same week (almost every week, for a couple of years. Old times ...), and back then, I had no trouble jumping between 0 base and 1 base. But it's been almost 20 years now that I've done 0 base exclusively. And I didn't have enough incentive to get comfortable with the 1-base again.

I'll try again when I have more free time.
I'm a few months away but will ping you an email now, would be great to hear how I could get my service integrated.
> The piracy issue is overblown only to those who have never experienced it first hand. It's not just the artist and the big music companies you're hurting, there's a ton of lower level people who work in the industry who are suffering because of piracy.

The argument seems to be that file-sharing is bad because "potential" jobs are destroyed. This doesn't seem like an argument formed in principle because the internet has destroyed many "potential" jobs (see blockbuster, b&n). Innovation kills jobs (and creates them) and I'm okay with this. But I'm not okay with killing innovation by means of legislation.
Good analysis. Let me comment that it would be improved by investigating quarterly or yearly quota, or controlling for budget deficits (e.g. if 2010 has a large expected budget deficit, likely in September 2009 tickets begin being written with greater frequency).
Redefining Open [2009]
It sounds like you are in agreement with OP.
Exactly, although they have a tarnished brand. They could find the most talented developer and become somewhat of a Mobile incubator. They've got a lot of deals and scale having dealt with Verizon, physical space and employees. They could use Color labs as the shell for lots of products.
'Trying is the first step to failure'

-- Homer Simpson
Just from a brief look at a calendar for 2011 and 2010, it seems like the days were pretty evenly spread out over the week.
"Exponential"
My awesome window manager background - ideal for beginners
Trying to figure out how it was that my big dumb self not only deleted one of my Slicehosts (on purpose) but also apparently deleted the backups of the database that were exported, the other host to which I was making longer term backups, and my backups of the backups all within the past month.

Alternately, trying to find caches of the content. I had some 'An Extremely Gentle Introduction to x" type of posts on the blog that people seem to be missing. :-\
Airplay with Android and Raspberry Pi
Why waste time on frivolities like a "business model" when you can dupe investors out of $40M and spend it on a lavish office and developing a lame photo-sharing app that could have been done with $100K?

If anything makes me think we're in a bubble, it's companies like Color and the people who pump money into them.
Cold fusion - if anyone can crack it, Google can.

That, or perpetual motion.
Shallow clones might be a partial answer to your first point. You can use the --depth X option on the Git command line to only fetch the last X revisions. This means the shallow clone can be much much smaller than the complete clone.
Wow, this is pretty awesome. We run into this issue all the time. Mainly using staging for an external demo, but needing to deploy production updates before the branch on staging is ready to go live. Great work LayerVault!
A few comments on the stats themselves:

1. It looks like the total number of tickets in 2009 and 2010 is about 10% that of 2011. I'm guessing that there weren't actually ten times as many tickets given in 2011, so either the data is incomplete (as the author suggested), or there was a typo. If the data is incomplete, I'd suggest normalizing to the 2011 totals; otherwise, the 3-year average doesn't make much sense.

2. The scale of the "normalized" difference graphs (showing "Actual - Expected"). The formula given is

(actual - expected) / total * 1000 = normalized number

If this is the case, then since the scale goes to about +/- 5, the differences are very small (less than 1% away from what you'd expect!). But from eyeballing the data, that doesn't seem right.

In any case, a better scale might be to expect the data to be normally distributed, and scale the differences to # of standard deviations. (See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution#Standard_de...)
Thanks. There is so much more that could be explored here. It's difficult to really come up with an answer with so many different factors, which is why I'm reluctant to point the finger at quotas in my conclusion.
Because the IE component is a core component of the operating system that other apps can rely on.
Assuming Color's statement wasn't a lie that's some pretty shitty reporting by Venture Beat. Reporting a companies board has voted to shut it down is pretty big news and should require much more verification that one single email. Tech 'journalists' need to do a better job when reporting this sort of thing.
Atlassian Stash was released recently with a code review process built around pull requests (For those that don't know, Stash is a Enterprise Git repository server)

http://blogs.atlassian.com/2012/10/stash-13-enterprise-git-p...

Disclaimer: I work for Atlassian
>IE10 is really good. Not "good, for IE" good. Just good good.

I'd have to disagree. Does it have bookmark/password syncing? Does it have in browser spell-checking? Large library of secure addons? Built in PDF viewer? Quick close-able tabs (like Chrome's realigning close buttons?) IE 9/10 has essentially no modern end-user features other than tabs, which are arguably ancient.
I'm glad buildout isn't mentioned.
Heartwarming. I predict in short order the phrase "customer" will take on all of the negative connotations normally associated with the phrase "user".
It's worth noting that Haml 3.2.0rc1 is some 15%-20% faster than the current master gem. I contributed the patches.
FCC targets Craigslist cellphone jammer vendors, issues six citations
Due to Marketplace And PayPal Growth, eBay’s Q3 Revenue Up 15 Percent To $3.4B
US Federal Reserve 'bomb plot' foiled by FBI
Congrats to the team and all, seriously...

but $15m investment in rap lyrics? When research on machines that could eradicate cancer struggle for crumbs? http://www.kanziuscancerresearch.org/ WTF SV?
It's a reflection on how software developers can inadvertently distance themselves from the ones who care the most about their software most, their customers.

The terminology and historical use of the word 'user' doesn't give enough weight to the fact that their 'users' are actually customers. Referring to their customers properly shows more respect for their customers while setting the expectations from their developers when building services.
Well, I guess they've found the person who leaks everything to the media... It says VentureBeat confirmed the email was sent to just one person. I wonder if this was a mole hunt.

Still, Color is gash and an embarrassment to the whole industry, and its death would not be mourned by many.
This is cute and all but is essentially a reddit level posting.
5by5 Launches Daily News Show: The Frequency
How To Cache Queries In WordPress
Google looks like such a cool company to work for. I'm sad I'll never have the skill set to be hired by them.
It is a little surprising to see something voted to the top that isn't a criticism of the OP, but there's not much to argue with in the email.
Capitalism is a harsh mistress.
We've got Windows and Linux, Apple should just drop OSX.
Work as a search quality engineer at Google and you do pretty much all of that.

Except for running the clusters[1], I've done pretty much all of those steps myself. I started with a nice statistical idea, built some simple models, played with feature selection and learning algorithms, built model viewers, built classifiers, validated classifiers, built demos, validated demos, built a production implementation[2], optimized the production implementation to make it small/fast enough, and finally launched a big search quality improvement.

[1] I certainly write distributed code that runs on them, but maintaining the DCs definitely isn't part of my job description.

[2] Validation of the final quality in prod is actually someone else's job, not because I couldn't do it, but you might not want me to tell you how good my stuff is, cause you know, I might be biased.
User makes me think it's about using the product.

Customer makes me think it's about paying for the product.

Users are my friends. Customers are my clients.
I write modules to decode network protocols for fun. So yeah, maybe i'm not quite right in the head.

On the other hand, it taught me about perverted networking standards like 802.1Q which is more common than you'd expect, and helps when you're trying to figure out why tcpdump isn't returning results you expected.
Oho! That is indeed a very legitimate and exciting piece of technology which you're working on! Lucky you!

(Just to be clear, I'm not remotely an actual rocket scientist. I'm a transport planner / urban designer who specialises in Personal Rapid Transit systems, and starts companies on the side for fun; I've just spent an inordinate amount of time in pubs with fairly eminent rocket scientists, and have acquired an Opinion or two along the way. Plus, I need to keep one foot planted firmly in that world, so that once I've made my fortune elsewhere, I can move on to colonising the inner solar system without delay...).

Personally, I've always tended to be more of a VTVL guy, but anyone who can make wings work certainly has my support. In the case of of Reaction Engines / Skylon, I have to confess a bit of skepticism -- not from a technical point of view (the credentials and capabilities of the team are superb), but from a business-plan point of view. I've done various offhand models to get it to work, and the financing costs always kill it. It only works if you presuppose A.) an existing launch market of about 250-500 Skylon-class payloads per year, and B.) that SpaceX or Blue Origin haven't succeeded in lowering launch costs with their flyback boosters etc.

In contrast, SpaceX has a much more bootstrap-able evolutionary path, which allows them to largely avoid financing costs, and to theoretically get their customer prices closer to their marginal costs much more quickly. My feeling has always been that Reaction Engines ought to focus more on the possibilities for aviation, since it is a large enough market that it could absorb the R&D / finance costs much more easily. Once you're turning a profit in that market, then use it to bootstrap Skylon.

All IMHO, of course!
This was an scandal in NYPD "pay the rent" they called it, related TAL story with audio evidence of the existent of a quota: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/r...
There are some photos, such as https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/images/_300...

I wonder why they've mirrored the image (the left side is quite clearly the right side flipped--take a look at the machine identifier labels). What's being hidden?
The formal fallacies are errors in deductive reasoning. The informal fallacies are errors in inductive (statistical) reasoning. Bezos's argument is neither.
Helmets were optional in the NHL before they became mandatory. Supposedly, almost nobody wore them beforehand (because it impacted performance), but virtually all players supported making them mandatory.
Since when are start-ups a Democracy? Are only bottom up decisions allowed or must everything happen organically? I don't think a decision like this needs a company wide referendum. I actually think it would be a waste of time and resources and create an unnecessary distraction.

I find it refreshing Square is open enough to listen to its newest board member and allow them to make an immediate impact. While small this change may not have come from the current culture that is more tech heavy and take the term user for granted.
International Obfuscated C Code Contest Winners
>Does it have bookmark/password syncing?

Yes.

>Does it have in browser spell-checking?

Yes.

>Large library of secure addons?

No.

>Built in PDF viewer?

No. (Although, Windows 8 does have a reader app)

>Quick close-able tabs (like Chrome's realigning close buttons?)

Yes.

It sounds like you've never used IE10?
Things I wish I knew about MongoDB a year ago
Are these real CEOs or idealized CEOs? I've worked for CEOs who were horrible people and yet extremely successful (ie: running profitable businesses and having repeat success).

Sadly, the nice CEOs I've had were failures building companies.

From my observation, the quality that defines a CEO is that they are oblivious to their own faults and the feelings of others.

They are like bad dancers with confidence. They have no idea they look like an idiot or that they're making you uncomfortable, and if they did, they wouldn't care.
How my PhD unexpectedly carried over to entrepreneurship
Your logical fallacy is ad hominem or appeal to authority. It doesn't matter who he is or what he has built.

The poster seems to favor a more complicated interface with a simpler implementation. That is basically the opposite of what is great about ruby: a simple interface with more complex implementation.

You want a run-down of couple points, fine. These exemplify the misunderstanding of the goal of Ruby.

> Fixnum to Bignum promotion

The entire point of class promotion is to remove the constraints of Java, C, et al. have to the machine architecture. And then there's the transparent and dynamic treatment of variables. Class promotion and dynamic typing allow a more math-like syntax and usability.

> Closures

It is entirely freeing to have blocks treated as they are. Java is no comparison, its overly verbose syntax and lack of dynamic variable scoping is supremely limiting. Similarly, it is a question of brevity, least surprise, transparency, and dynamism.
I think you're right in that the question of the title is really two questions. I tried to make that distinction clear in the analysis and conclusion sections.

I didn't actually try to find information on quota policies (specifically for Baltimore and Maryland) until I was writing the analysis section. I was expecting to be able to find a detailed description of policies by state (or something helpful) on Wikipedia, but that didn't really pan out [1]. I wasn't able to find any reliable information elsewhere either. I think the taboo attached to the subject may keep information about policies pretty far under-wraps.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_quota
Here's a simpler version that doesn't require PHP or an API key. Only works on Plan 9, though, but you could probably port it.

http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/plan9/rc/bin/weather
PartSim - Online SPICE Circuit Simulator
PartSim is a free and easy to use circuit simulator that runs in your web browser.
>To exist as a tech company today, you'd be insane to NOT patent as much as possible.

Patent holders are not required to actively defend patents in order to maintain their rights to them. That's only trademarks.

Amazon has a history of not just filing patents of questionable validity, they have a history of going after competitors for infringement. The most obvious example would be suing Barnes & Noble over the One-Click patent.
It would be interesting to ask the Baltimore PD what incentives are given to officers to write speeding tickets. [I bet they claim none] Then, ask some cops on the street what the real incentive system is like. From there, use the data to see how cops respond to both the real and official incentives.

I wonder if ticket writing happens when there's nothing better to do. It would be interesting to see the correlation between arrests for "real" stuff and traffic tickets. Are there differences in pay rates based on days/times worked? Do more tickets get written when rates are low vs. 2.5x pay on a holiday? Does the PD only staff for necessities when rates are higher or when officers most desire time off?

I'm surprised I haven't read something yet about Stephen Levitt looking at this data. This provides such incredible insight into the impact of incentives and lets us compare the probability that the official incentive policy is perceived as accurate by the officers vs. the likely real but unwritten incentives.
And if you have a thing that can be used by a person, an organization, or machine, what do you call it?

- Agent
- Entity
- User
- Principal
Soviet N1 Moon Rocket Documentary
When my website hit the front page, I got around 60k visits. I was getting about 2k regularly before then.

Short blog post about it:
http://noexcuselist.com/blog/effects-of-hackernews-and-futur...
It's part of plan9port already, for the record.
Hacking, "Used Approved" from Lexus
PPlanter: Rapidly deployable, reconfigurable public urinal and sink
Well, I'm not at all in the field -- armchair quarterbacking it is just an old hobby for me. But if you're in America, my advice would be: go to Space Access every April, and plan on spending your summers in Mojave. That's how most of the people I know have done it.
Nevermind a business model; do they even have a product?
At least use HTTPS so that our passwords aren't passed in plain text across the internet. Or, like you said, implement some sort of OAuth2 login so we can log in with Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, Persona, etc.

(correction) looks like you can use HTTPS, but it is optional. It should be required on login page at least.
Facebook Division of Labor or the Rewired Society