skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Customers is just one small category of users.

Youtube has video uploaders, commenters, raters.

Games have players, coaches, referees, bots.

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

Torrents have seeders, leechers.

None of these are customers.

Sure, Amazon has customers mostly, and some advertisers.

I would say it's not a reflection of distance of software developers, but more an attempt by developers to create a new all-encompassing term which describes all of these things. People, organizations, machines. More than one per real life unit.
I'm worried about the other 99x if I decide to crank one out...
Do union-required holiday pay rates cause the PD to only staff for minimum requirements? Perhaps the PD simply staffs at minimum levels because most officers want those days off? Do holidays cause so many "real" crimes that the police don't have time to write tickets?
or client. Really anything that is more appropriate and less general than user. The context of your business should dictate the term you should use.
Must be a recent addition, it's not in my (~3 month old) installation of Plan 9 Port.
The cloud is where voice is going.....before traditional voice telecom dies. Nice to see this!
I agree with you here. I don't buy a connection between the inability to say I don't know and cheating. If anything I'd think it were an inverse relationship, based on my own humble experience. I used to be too insecure to say I don't know and would often ramble to cover my deep embarrassment of not knowing. That being said the same acute sensitivity to embarrassment also ensured I never cheated on anything in my life - the terror of the embarrassment of being caught cheating far outweighed any potential gains.
Yup. I used to live in DC, where the public transit system insists on calling its riders "customers". We all found it stilted and patronizing.

Your attitude toward your users/customers/whatever matters. The word you call them, not so much.
Yes it is.

Hypocrisy is the state of promoting or administering virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that one does not actually have or is also guilty of violating.

Wikipedia
http://jensontaylor.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/similarities-betw...
I was able to launch an actual instance today.
It's basically a VNC in my browser. Of course you need some kind of streaming for the graphics content. But why do you have to stream the control button sets, too?! My browser is very capable of displaying buttons. It just gives a very terrible feeling if you have the buttons slooowly change their background as you hover over them.
Google Summer of Code: 55 million lines of code released since 2005
Previous discussion from the investment announcement (14 days ago): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4608511
I think you should be more embarrassed by this incredible overreaction than by any association with reddit, which has been responsible for huge fundraising events, record-breaking gift exchanges, AMAs from the POTUS, etc., etc.

If you're worried about your internet reputation, I feel like comments like this aren't helping.
Did the term user ever exist in this context before? Thinking about it it seems right when talking inside baseball, but not when writing copy for your business.
How will folks resist the urge to pee on the QR code?
Has there been any research on average miles driven vs. the day of the month? I would speculate that people who live paycheck to paycheck might drive more at the beginning of the month (after payday when they can afford to fill up on gas and run errands like buying groceries) than at the end of the month. I'm not sure if this would have a significant impact on the data.
Is there any evidence in regard to the nature of quota-esque incentives? Are the measurement periods monthly vs. say, every two weeks? One would assume that, if quotas exist, they would have some periodicity, but there certainly are other schemes.
Wow that was reactive and heavy handed. The answer isn't to stop using the word user. The word user has it place. Certian conversations need a generic term for the people who "Use" your software where other conversations need a more specific word for the people who use your software such as "Cupcake business owner", "Deli Cashier", etc.

User is not a bad word. However, its not the right word to use to describe some one who uses your software at times (Sometimes you want a more detailed word), and sometimes "user" is the right word (You are talking big idea, vision, less detail). eg. "How many users are hitting our server right now?" "We have 20,000 people submitting tweets, and 1,200,000 people reading tweets."
"Vending machine raid"

http://goo.gl/maps/OljbS
> If I ever say the word “user” again, immediately charge me $140.

$140... 140 characters. Subtle jab at Twitter?
So, does anyone here know any Baltimore cops? Could someone who works downtown walk outside, find a cop, and ask? We're all speculating here.
What's alarming about establishing communication best practices from the top? Having everybody use the same lingo for talking about product development is essential. This decision will help the engineering culture become inherently more empathetic to towards their end users.
Unsocial Media: The Uselessness Of Facebook And Google+
Think beyond the rap content and consider it to be a text annotation content engine. The applications/use cases span beyond rap.

this reminds me of what stackoverflow has done - verticalized Q&A sites based on what they validated/proved with stackoverflow itself.
Some of this info might be out-of-date since I obviously don't use all lisp implementations all the time:

SBCL:

* Biggest weakness: not super-well tested on windows

* Strengths: Generates super-fast code, is the most comonly targeted implementation by OSS libraries

CLISP:

* Biggest weakness: Performance

* Strengths: Fast bignum implementation, most portable of all lisps (If you have a C compiler, you can probably get it working on your platform)

ClozureCL:

* Code generated is not as good as SBCL, but compiler is considerably faster

* Better windows support than SBCL

* Has builtin support for OS X gui

Ecl:

* Currently the best if you want to embed CL in C

* Application delivery is very different from other LISPs

* Uses a non-copying conservative GC (which embedding in C easier) that just can't be as good as generational copying GCs
> With doxxing you have documented cases of people being harassed based on people finding out their true identity. So banning doxxing helps to prevent situations where people are harassed outside of the site for the things they do on the site.

And banning posting candid sexually suggestive photos of kids helps to prevent the subjects of the photos from getting harassed at school when someone finds the photos online. I don't see why that should be any less important than trying to prevent harassment of people who take and post those photos.

At least the person who gets harassed over posting the photos is getting harassed for something he actually deliberately did, whereas the kid might be getting harassed for accidentally showing some cleavage or some underwear. Or maybe it is ultimately the kid's fault for not dressing like a Saudi woman when in public.
Are Spammy Links Now Hurting Your Website?
Because they want something that is still valid PHP.
It would all be fake. What's the point?
> which it MUST do

Nope, as far as I am aware there is no law that companies must maximize the value for their owners at the cost of all other considerations. This gets brought up constantly, and I've yet to see anyone support the claim with evidence. Sure, you can sue for breach of fiduciary duty, but that duty does not include no-holds-barred maximization.
and cornhole in the background!
I simultaneously welcome and fear this development.

It's a great move for security, as a well-configured SELinux deploy can provide much finer-grained access control than standard Unix permissions (although, given that Android uses the Unix user & permission model a bit abnormally, I don't know if it will bring benefit over that or not).

OTOH, for locked devices, it gives vendors more tools to prevent rooting.
Ugh.

Are you trying to argue that cancer research is inherently more valuable than text annotation? Because that's, well, brash. Or are you arguing that cancer research has a moral imperative that makes it inherently more valuable than text annotation? Because that's naive.

Investors make investments. You invest in things that you expect to make the most money.
In LimeJS you can use the Box2D library to simulate physics, you don't have to write it yourself.

For collision detection is pretty easy, as the Closure Library (which LimeJS is built around) comes with "bounding box" support to perform this very easily.
I'm a user, have been since 1993, when they handed me that first hit of email username/password.

Never gonna stop.
> "coming up with a non-zero value was really the point."

When you're multiplying a bunch of non-zero quantities, that's the only possibility. It's not really illustrative or useful, though -- particularly because the range of possible estimates still includes "we are alone in the universe".

You don't need the Drake Equation to tell you that it's reasonable to explore and search.
I think it depends, if you will truly take the position because you like it better but there is an equity imbalance then I would say you should inform the potential employer. Approaching it tactfully and letting them know that you would prefer to work with them, but that at the end of the day you trade your time for compensation and given the imbalance you would have to go with the offer that is offering higher compensation for that time.
Udemy Rolls Out New Publishing Platform
Sounds like the key is to let people work where they want. Some people want to work out of the office, others from home, others from coffee shops, etc. Perhaps making work from home mandatory would be just as bad as requiring physical 9-5 presence in the office.
Not being a reader of either of this subreddits does not imply that I don't know anything about what was on them. Their contents have been reported by others for a long time.

Nice try, though.
Scooters for gettin around datacenter! Awesome. http://goo.gl/maps/SiBpj
He created Twitter, so I don't think it was either subtle or a jab.
1) Yes, there were far fewer tickets in the data for 2009 and 2010 than 2011.

2) The fact that the normalized numbers were so small was very unintuitive to me at first too, but the important thing to realize is that in that formula, you're dividing the difference, not actual value for the given day, by the total number for the year. When I first ran those numbers I was so confused by the output. I was originally thinking that I'd normalize it by saying "X percent of the total for that year," but since I was working with the differences, and not the actual values, the numbers were too small a fraction.

Either that or I made some huge mistake in my logic...

WRT the use of standard deviations, like I said in the post, I'm not a statistician, so I wasn't really sure what the canonical way of normalizing data was. I pretty much just made one up. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll look into using standard deviation for the next one. :)
I ran across a little CLI called "weatherman" [1] that does this, though you need to input your location manually each time. The data comes from WeatherBug.com, but it seems to work well enough for my purposes.

1. http://darkhorse.nu/software/
I think this all goes to underscore the fact that TPB doesn't actually HOST anything anymore. Not .torrent files, and not trackers. Not sure on what grounds authorities would have to raid them in 2012. There are no files there any more, just HTML web pages containing magnet links (which are specially coded URLs). The entire site can be downloaded in a few hundred MB...

It's like TPB has achieved Nirvana. It no longer has a physical presence...
Isn't the answer "statistically, we can't disprove the null hypothesis, because the variation near the end of the month wasn't bigger than the month-wide variation"? Getting some actual standard deviations might help.

But I think the data is a little more conclusively inconclusive than a mere "I'm not sure I can tell anything from the data".
It's now possible RSS feed from any Google+ profile, no account needed
Because Google Plus has no RSS Feed available or an RSS Feed Generator, I came up with this service; no information needed, no Google+ account needed, 100% Free, enjoy!
I found precious few salient things on pubmed, but maybe I was using the wrong search terms. Care to link some real studies?
No photographing the server room?

http://goo.gl/maps/1n7jW
Extract from http://pubnub.com/jobs :

Our ideal person is someone who lives and breathes code,
and understands the difference between C, Python, and Javascript.

Well Python doesn't use as many semicolons as the others. Am I hired?
Low grade heat (< 400 degrees C) is really difficult to do much with. If you happen to have need for it right at the spot where it is generated (basically heating buildings) great.

Otherwise you are pretty much out of luck - The efficiency of energy extraction from a heat engine is thermodynamiclly limited by the difference between the hot and cold sides. And trying to transport it any significant distance ends up being more trouble than its worth as pumping water gets energy intensive very quickly (and air has terrible heat capacity.)
It's hard to make precise, depending on a whole host of factors. It's clearly positive, however, as our burn rate on just her salary is far lower than it would cost me alone to maintain my lifestyle.
Thanks for noticing that kevincennis I've just corrected it.
* facepalm *. You should be able to verify a Brazilian number on the signup page now, can you try it again?
You could do this pretty easily with ElasticSearch given that vectors and paths are composed of start/end points, with varying degrees of customizability, but whether or not that would be a good idea depends a great deal on your query patterns and how much customizability and scalability you need.

The strengths of ElasticSearch are in trival sharding and replication intelligent, fast, and soft real-time search.

It's also got a very powerful, easy to understand, highly programmable query syntax that is very easy to generate in code.

It's not a spatial database and what I was originally talking about wasn't designed to solve pathing/graph traversal, but you could still do n-dimensional indexed spatial search in ElasticSearch and that is something I do on a regular basis although it's not the "base" use-case for their geo API.
Construct 2 uses Box2d and Easel.js I believe.. I've seen a number of html5 game tutorials on tutsplus for easel.js but they mostly seem to be "copy what the dev did step by step" as opposed to really explaining things well.

Still this might be worth looking at.
This is our first release of the product and we have more vendor-specific models coming. Let us know if you have a specific simulation feature that you'd like to see added.
Femi from Hipmob here - we recently released an email gateway for our mobile live chat product: if you add Hipmob to your app we now give your app an email address. You can send an email and have it show up in your app: lets you use your existing tools, but still keep your users in your app. Hope this explains the piece a bit better - let me know if there's any more info I can provide (femi@hipmob.com).
The question that remains is: if the documents are well defined enough that you can map them to a schema, why use a document store at all?
How Guild Wars 2 avoids server downtime during patches
Most of the reporting has been wildly inaccurate and misrepresentative. Go figure.
In certain circumstances (for example; sites with a free service level) it's more like a "Potential Customer".
London has these $75,000 public urinals that disappear during the day http://www.engadget.com/2006/11/19/urilift-the-disappearing-...
I was originally thinking that the drop on the 31st could be explained by the last day of the month not counting for quotas, so they could be tallied or something. Then I realized that the last day of the month varies, and that it if that was the cause of the massive drop on the 31st, it would have made a bigger impact on the 30th.

I might do an update with some of the suggestions here, including a graph of tickets / days until end of month. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4666271
Can cobalt nanoparticles replace platinum [in hydrogen fuel cells]?
Lets see how they do on their investment before calling people naive and brash.

Id suggest some "market research" on whether consumers want better cures for cancer or rather text annotation for rap songs
"Jeff Bezos calls for governments to end patent wars" seems a bit dramatic when you consider his actual statements.
From the article, he actually said (emphasis mine):

"...we're _starting_ to be in a world where [patents] might start to stifle innovation...Governments _may_ need to look at the patent system and _see_ if those laws need to be modified..."

If he truly believes that the patent system needs to change (and I really think he does), couldn't he have left those qualifiers out? As it is these just seem like timid observations, far from a call for governments to step in and do something.
You mean "Made Women"?
"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments
saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

pg, is it time to update the guidelines? Or at least ask that people read and follow them? This submission and its comments seem to indicate that the illusion is becoming reality. More specifically, there is already a story[0] on Google's datacenter in which one's intellectual curiosity can be gratified. This one is little more than a meme with Google's name on it.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4663946
Did anyone else notice the bumps on the 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th? I'd be curious to see the distribution of days of the week over those days.
I agree! That might be a good reason for an update.
If you're looking for some old but still educational business theory, read up about the guy whose picture hangs in Toyota's lobby:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Deming_philos...

One of the details which I find highly relevant to software and, particularly, operations is rejecting the mindset of dealing with failure by finding someone to blame and instead changing the system so that one person can't inadvertently cause a failure. I see this a lot with massive ops run books which require humans to repeatedly perform complex tasks without mistake rather than automating it and regularly testing your automation.
Thanks for the feedback everyone. This was my first foray into iOS design, so I expected a lot of criticism. You guys made some great points.
Well, that's kind of the point, isn't it? As a non-technical business founder myself, I just can't understand what that guy possibly would have been thinking. I'd never give up that much of my company unless the other party was coming on board as full partner, meaning they're also going to be sharing all the financial and legal risks (and yes, that means contributing money as well as time). If you value your company at all, 40% is a massive sum to pay someone unless they're sharing all the risks with you, not just spending some of their time. Just giving yourself a $1 million dollar valuation, that means paying someone $400,000 to handle just one element of your business...and you could probably get it done a lot cheaper if you just took the time to go through your options.

As for finding technically skilled people who are available and want to work, it's not easy, but nothing in business is easy. It's no harder than any other part of a business, it just requires persistence and knowing where to look (I should know, I've hired a bunch of them in the last 6 months). Taking a shortcut and throwing a bunch of equity at the problem just shows the kind of lack of foresight that should make you question whether you really want to work with that kind of person.
Right, but for a test VM (my case), that doesn't matter.
The word "customer" already has negative connotations. For example, see Jay-Z's song, "You're Only a Customer," where the hook exclaims:

You're only a customer (uh)

Walkin' in the presence of hustlers

You spend money all night long

"All night long."
A while backed a hacked a little script to update the LCD display on old HP printers with the current weather: https://gist.github.com/832730

I doubt it works any more since I don't think that Google Weather API still exists, but it should work if you switch it to Yahoo or one of the others.
Recently, in building apps, I've changed how I do accounts. Previously everyone was a "user" and permissions got managed by ACL (yes, yes, I know not the best security model..).

Now I give each type of user their own model. So... "customer", "employee", "admin" for example.

This is interesting because when you write code it is instantly apparent who is the focus of an action. It also helps model how the accounts interact with each other.
Hopefully by then we'll all be using self-driving cars.
Where the Internet lives– Inside Google's data centers
Here's a link to the accompanying article:

http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/10/17/where-the-internet-lives-google-invites-you-in-to-see-its-data-centers/
http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/metar
The joke's on them. The ticket will go to the R&D department of the driverless cab company.
Successful crowdsourcing is about identifying a community with passion that can be channeled into useful work. Hats off to Rap Genius to nailing this for annotations.
Thanks for the comment. This clarifies the issue.
The interesting PLs are C/C++, Go, Dart, JS, and Rust. Everything else is BS.
I’m using Fedora in enforcing mode, and so are probably most Fedora users. SELinux is usually completely transparent on desktop[1]. Of course it can sometimes cause some issues you might be unprepared for.

The most recent one I can remember was configuring Postfix to perform local delivery to ~/.local-mail/inbox. I had to manually change security context for that directory. Or linking /var/www/foo to ~/foo is an example of something that you might expect to work, but would be blocked by SELinux.

But those are not the kind of things you would do on Android anyway. They use SELinux to strengthen the security framework they already have in place. SELinux is just the last line of defence for implementation bugs and things they might have missed. It would be completely unintrusive.

The NSA presentation is worth watching, they go through various Android exploits that could have been prevented by the policy they developed, without actually targeting those specific exploits.

https://www.nsa.gov/research/selinux/

[1] It’s also because it unfortunately isn’t actually used by most desktop applications, with some exceptions, like Chromium.
Your idea is great, but you will end up with average Joe using it for other cases thus MongoDB will be nontransactional database engine with SQL interface and sharding feature, which will be much slower and will have less features than any other RDBMS with proper replication funcionality.
I noticed you discarded speed camera tickets, it might be interesting to instead use them as the baseline and see the relative differences.