skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Think about a company like Comcast -- millions of customers, thousands of phone agents, thousands of contractors in Comcast vans hooking up home service, multiple regional websites, legacy customers from previous product iterations and acquired local cable companies. Add on to that multiple public and private billing plans, service credits, local deals/specials, grandfathered customers on old plans, a combination of fixed and usage-based billing, optional add-ons, and parent/children accounts for business and landlords. Imagine just how complex that "rules engine" has to be to get billing right.

The company that can manage that for Comcast is going to be delivering hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in value. If they didn't pay someone for it, they'd have to employ and manage a large development team just to do billing. Lots of salaries. That's what justifies the price.

If you're a startup with 3 payment plans and sometimes you have to give someone a credit because you had some downtime, your situation isn't even 1% as complex, and you can get by with a $50/month service or a couple hundred lines of your own code.
How Google does reliability testing
Economics in Action: The Life-Changing, Nobel-Winning Work of Al Roth
Code against SpreedlyCore and you can point your account at Stripe, SagePay, PayPal, or whoever offers you the best rates at the time. If PayPal burns you, you change one variable in your code and all your payments hit a different payment processor. The differences between all the payment APIs are abstracted away from you, and similar to Stripe/PayPal, payment data never touches your server so most of the PCIDSS compliance burden disappears... yet customers never leave your site, either.
sure...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence
The expression anecdotal evidence refers to evidence from anecdotes. Because of the small sample, there is a larger chance that it may be unreliable due to cherry-picked or otherwise non-representative samples of typical cases.[1][2] Anecdotal evidence is considered dubious support of a claim; it is accepted only in lieu of more solid evidence. This is true regardless of the veracity of individual claims.[3][4][5]
Ah, well in that case I certainly apologize. I inferred a tone from your comment which you didn't intend to be there.
> "what are the implications to the Drake equation?"

I'm not a fan of the Drake Equation. The "equation results" section of the wikipedia page shows the range of variability: there may be anywhere from hundreds of millions of civilizations in our galaxy, to maybe we're the only one in the entire universe (a difference of close to 30 orders of magnitude), based on different guesses for some of the other parameters. Both sets of numbers are using the current understanding that we can discover exoplanets etc. and that they're not terribly rare. Prior to that understanding, estimates varied by another 5-10 orders of magnitude.

In other words, these newer discoveries don't get us particularly close to a definitive answer from the Drake Equation. We still don't know whether there's intelligent life at millions of stars in each of billions of galaxies, or if it's possibly just us.

The only sort of data that would let us actually use it to generate a meaningful answer would be the discovery of more intelligent life.
Thanks so much, I could not find this and was too lazy to pull my old files from the basement.
GroupTalent on Finding, Picking and Hiring Designers
Clojure has turned 5
The Clojure project has turned 5, so I thought I would post with some resources that got me dwelling in the community...

How precise you can be: http://squirrel.pl/blog/2010/05/22/clojure-vs-java-the-beauty-of-conciseness/

Usercase with Beanstalk: http://blog.beanstalkapp.com/post/23998022427/beanstalk-clojure-love-and-20x-better-performance

A startup that got an overhall with clojure: http://www.colinsteele.org/post/23103789647/against-the-grain-aws-clojure-startup

I've ordered these by the time taken to read them :D
This was more of a restatement of the press release than a review.
Good advice, but I can almost guarantee that your older self will have even more sage advice for your younger self.

Certainly stay hungry, stay foolish, stay passionate. But keep iterating in all things.
...a world of difference between a company which dominates by providing the best product and a company which dominates by destroying its competition.

So what did Microsoft do to destroy its competition that Google didn't?
Startup idea: auto-dropboxify all web/url shared documents
Startup idea: auto-dropboxify all web/url shared documents, so our downloaded local copies are kept up-to-date with the authoritative copy.

A week ago, I downloaded a pdf presentation to be able to open it locally. Today, when I reopened my local copy of the pdf, I wondered if the authoritative copy was changed by the author in the meanwhile. Wouldn't it be nice if my local copy got automatically updated (a la dropbox) if this were the case? This shouldn't be too hard to do. The generalization of this idea is basically an application-level virtual-filesystem that is web-scale.
Oh, don't get me wrong--I'm very much for state-run healthcare and could be considered a proponent of socialism. I think that any civilization with as much resources as we do (we here being Americans, presumably) is criminal if it does not work to support its citizens cradle-to-grave.

I was just disagreeing with your assessment that fatalism is unwarranted--we do it (caring for mental illness) anyway, because it simply must be done, but we ought not pretend that things will get better.
It's not quite the same but the woman who comes around every couple of weeks and does my accounts, we both acknowledge is about 80% 'slap based' productivity and 20% her specialized knowledge at this point.

When she comes around I usually 'drive' the computer the whole time, and it's great to have her advice on things like withholding tax rates, but mostly it just makes certain that particular things get done on time where if they didn't happen they would have a tendency to snowball into accounting catastrophe.
The 500 Startups Pitch Deck
Dart was actually created by the guys who created V8. They gave a great interview about it in episodes 8[1] and 8.1[2] of Javascript Jabber.

1: http://javascriptjabber.com/008-jsj-v8-and-dart-with-lars-ba...

2: http://javascriptjabber.com/008-1-v8-and-v8-and-dart-with-la...
After getting the 15 followup emails, did any of them convert?
Thirteen23 in austin http://thirteen23.com/contact/
I do happen to know the author. He worked in, as I understand it, an MSSQL environment beforehand, but interestingly he didn't mention that either.

My guess: his thinking was MVCC-implementing databases that could fit the category: "an archetypal proprietary RDBMS, an archetypal embedded database, an archetypal document database/'NoSQL'" for some point in time.

The people going so far to even hit that page already know about client-server, open source, OLTP SQL databases and maybe even some of their shared techniques.

In this list, InnoDB technically should be in the 'embedded database' category.

Point being: I think it's awfully assumptive to presume a conspiracy against MySQL, old feuds aside. The world is just very large and this tries to draw a shape around a bigger part of it.
I work as a game designer in the video game industry, and even though GroupTalent and Folyo focus on graphic design, a lot of the sentiment holds true, especially this:

"If you’re trying to hire full time, you’re going to have to steal somebody from another company by being the brightest bird in the forest, or you’re going to have to find somebody young with aptitude, and teach them how to be great."

In the general talent wars withing Silicon Valley, I generally had lots of luck hiring young designers (and engineers) with aptitude and helping them grow, which is generally a more pleasant experience on the hiring manager end than getting in a bidding war over high priced talent.
Windows has always been the base OS on my home computers. I've used a separate ESXi box, or local virtual box VMs for development. Thus far windows 8 tells me that it is time for me to shift totally to Linux and just sacrifice gaming, which was the sole reason I held onto my windows 7 environment on my primary home PC's. I also dread the day I will have to deal with it at work. I have between 20-30 windows open at any given time with anything from ArcSight to multiple putty sessions running. How will that possibly translate to this blocky touch screen interface?

I can't be alone in this feeling, although I do feel a bit like the old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn..

I really can't stand this environment and
Nokia Asha 308 Price Pakistan, Mobile Specification
It makes sense to deny appmakers from stuffing their metadata with mentions of features their apps don't have. Metadata affects search results, after all. And it makes sense to automate such denial.

But like other Appstore restrictions, the result is that apps can't be self-aware, can't acknowledge the ecosystem they live in nor the ecosystems they don't.
Pandora or Chiron?
NCSA Scientist Backs MICs over GPUs
I feel the reality is that there really is not a shortage of programmers in general, just a shortage of programmers who have extensive experience in technology X, Y, or Z that is presently in demand. If a company has to fall back on "second-teir" talent, I expect the pool is vast and the competition is stiff. I'm not sure where to find data to back that up, unfortunately, but the anecdotes I see do support it.

My bet is that even if, say, you spent many years writing Ruby on Rails applications and you are the best there is at it, you still wouldn't get a call back for a job writing telephone systems in Erlang, even if you have enough experience and ability to quickly get up to speed to do the job well.

This seems like also a good explanation for the sharp decline in over-35 programmers. The technologies they grew up on are no longer in fashion, so they are, in general, relegated back to lower-teir talent pools and have to struggle to find work along with everyone else.
So you're implying anyone who is a software developer is not educated or intelligent, nor has a large salary. I think a lot of people would beg to differ.

In reality, matlab only exists because of inertia. It's the same reason why microsoft windows is still around. There's no substance behind it.
Agreed, but the problem is that a lot of young startups simply don't have those skills at all. So for the first hire, they can't afford to get someone inexperienced since there won't be anybody that can mentor them.

Add to this the number of new startups getting launched these days, and you can see why senior designers are so in demand.
You know that the regular desktop interface is still there, just as it was in Windows 7, Vista, etc., right? You could be using Windows 8 and never have to see the Metro interface, save for when you are doing a search for an app.
SDK looks cool to play with; tools are definitely where its at with this.

Dart (currently) doesn't seem to have any compelling use cases.

If people make tools with in build refactoring and other nice features that make productivity a compelling use case, maybe Dart has a chance to grow~

Still, given the tools that already exist for working on JS, there's still a long way to go before this will be enough to drag javascript developers over to dart...
Re-Evaluating the Role of Real Estate Agents
Great article. Something I think is missing is regular 1 on 1 sessions between managers and employees, as well as between co-founders. As the article points out, stress has a big impact on health, and one great way to relieve stress, solve problems in the workplace and help your employees grow is to provide a regular forum for feedback, coaching and airing of grievances.
When people arrived, they sat down, opened an envelope and read,
“Don’t Have $100k to spend on seeding a viral video? Try Virool.
We do the same thing as X company, but better, faster and cheaper!”

I find this unethical.
Probably old 8XXX Curve owners. Blackberry 7 is perfectly functional and hopefully Blackberry 10 will be a hit for them.
The video shows people interacting with a vertical touch-screen. For short amounts of time, like getting money from an ATM, this works OK, but for prolonged usage like working on office documents, it leads to Gorilla Arm [1]. I'm afraid people will find out the hard way and will get desillusioned about their touchscreen user experience. Why doesn't Microsoft foresee this?

From the Jargon File:

"Gorilla Arm: The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized — the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; “Remember the gorilla arm!” is shorthand for “How is this going to fly in real use?”.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorilla_arm#.22Gorilla_arm.22
Thumbs up for the real-time hustlin' at the competitor's panel. You got me thinking on how to emulate it.

Off topic, you have something funny going on here: https://img.skitch.com/20121017-k22xwtq4ckqjattgd7xweyn6e2.j...
The whole application sounds like an optimizer's dream. Improving performance (especially startup) has always one of the most fun aspects of programing for me and to take one something like sim city where there are probably tons of opportunities and many different things to consider would be a real fun job.
Love it.

You're plainly trying to keep it simple, but how about a speed indicator next to the progress percentage?
Hmmm I wonder if you could make a game built around this core idea, not just of save points, but taking different branches and even merging choices.
i love the hustle.

i find that people use the word "unethical" very liberally. its not clear to me how there is a moral brightline here.

fortune favors the bold.

(edit: before everybody thinks i'm just an unethical kind of guy... i definitely believe in morals, i just don't think this is a clearly immoral action. also, i generally favor aggressive marketing tactics for early stage startups. I think it's one of the advantages startups have over established players.)
Thanks for your article - a couple of questions. My background is that in the dim dark past I studied neuropsych and then worked as an EEG tech (mostly epilepsy screening with infrequent psych patients) for 4 years (2000-04) before going to work for the company that makes Synamps 2 :)

Now, I've only skimmed your method and results as I'm a bit flu-ridden and hence vague, but a couple of things popped out. The first is that you stated there was no control for medication. In our experience doing EEGs on folks on certain psych drugs, there was usually an increase in higher band activity (more beta, much less slow wave) - these drugs would create an unusual but not clinically abnormal EEG. It was rare to see such an EEG in someone not on those drugs.

The second is that for doing mathematical analysis on the EEG, I've had it trained out of me that resting EEG is okay to use. Some task, any task, no matter how easy, gives a more reliable baseline - since the EEG is quite dependent on arousal state, without a basic task, you don't have much control over whether the person is sitting there thinking about having a nap or highly alert and fretting over some unrelated item. For epilepsy you want them drowsy and nearly asleep as that lowers the bar for spike-and-wave activity, but unless a similar thing happens in schizophrenia and slowing, I'd think that doing a task would be superior to resting EEG.

I wonder if accounting for these issues might increase your hit rate? Like I said, I only skimmed the method and results, so I may have missed something that makes these points less relevant.

As an aside, the epileptic EEG sample looks really quaint and old-fashioned, since it has the curved needle-on-paper distortion. It doesn't need to be updated, it just looks like Ye Olde EEG to my eyes... :)
Such a thing was already invented a long time ago and widely celebrated - SQL. It eliminated the need for loops, was designed for ease of use, had a lot of cool features added like ACID, took over the world and ran every kind of business and website. Sadly, because it was invented too long ago (1970s) many people thought of it as uncool and failed to realize it's absolute awesomeness.
Vintage and Retro Free Fonts for Your Designs
One of the most important elements of the web designing is the [LINK=http://designmodo.com/letterform/]Typography[/LINK] which can change a normal art into an attractive and an elegant piece of art. The most recent and the popular design trend are the [B]retro styled fonts[/B] or elements. The right selection and the proper usage of the fonts or typography play an important role in conveying the appropriate message to the clients. The latest trend and techniques of using the retro and vintage script fonts have become very popular in the recent years almost in majority of the small and large scale corporate designs, blogs, online stores, and portfolios.
Those are disqualifiers, which are great sales tool. It basically auto-qualifies a client by making him/her decide from the start if they are going to buy depending on their current situation. Other examples might be:

- You have a steady job, but nobody will sell you a car? If you can get some proof of employment I will sel lyou a car. Today!

- Tired of paying a lot of money for quality web hosting?
Don't want to deal with the hassle of a VPS?
If yu are willing to get your fingers dirty every few weeks in exchange of great prices, service and flexibility, then you might want to look us up. wonderfullyawesomesuperwebhosting.com is the addres you might want to visit right now. Or dont.
Tried to access, pressing the download button has no response on Chrome, can you please post to google docs or maybe drop box with a download link?
that's an awesome idea and i hope we can figure it out one day :P our attempts so far have been unsuccessful. if you have any ideas as to how to do this, send them our way!
Have to pack my apartment, so, good timing.
http://www.comedycentral.com/video-clips/c3iii4/key-and-peel...
Just one quick observation: If you have more than one or two paragraph on „Using Git” in your book, you probably do something wrong. It's a RoR book, not a best practices book...
I've been through an H1-B transfer myself, the lawyers didn't seem to think it was a big deal. From application to acceptance I don't think it was even a week.

I think if your idea was implemented there would be little change in H1-B mobility. Fact is, a foreign worker just has fewer options in the host country for lots of reasons and paperwork is the least of it. The foreign worker probably has no professional reputation outside their own company. Their degree and experience may not be understood or respected. Worst thing is that you're not allowed to have any significant period of unemployment - and even in the cases where you can, family and friends unlikely to be able to help you through a rough situation.
I'm not a parent, but your comment is an informed and thoughtful one.
Komodo OpenLab – developing inclusive technologies
Thanks for sharing these awesome, free fonts! No joke, I've been thinking about using a rubber stamp style title in a logo I was planning on working on and this one fits the bill.
I think the sponsoring company should've been madder at the event manager than Virool. Also, the event manager was none to pleased either, I'm guessing? No advertiser wants to share space with a competitor, but it's generally the fault of the party that owns the space, not the competitor.
One of the more elegant ways of handling this, .net does a great job of integrating with unmanaged (COM, i'm looking at you) resources.
Interesting concept but my concern would be the frequency of synchronization. Would the service check remote documents (potentially several megs in size) every minute to see if they have changed? every 5 minutes? every 30 seconds? Unless there was some kind of pseudo-dropbox component running on the server where the documents are hosted to alert the service that there is a new version of a document, this doesn't seem viable. I could be wrong though, what approach were you thinking for this?
> The only sort of data that would let us actually use it to generate a meaningful answer would be the discovery of more intelligent life.

Yes but since we don't have any of those discoveries the Drake equation is really the best we can do right now.
That's an argument for more strict immigration, not less. We shouldn't let in anyone we're not willing to extend all the benefits of citizenship to.
Unethical is way to strong. Though to me it seems overly aggressive and puts a bad taste in my mouth about company X.
I can appreciate their ability to think outside the box, but when you are using your competitor's resources to promote your company you might be crossing a line. It's a subjective line of course, but I personally find it unprofessional and makes me suspicious about the methods used by such a company to obtain those 500,000 views in a weekend. I'm not anti-marketing, on the contrary I'm very much pro marketing. But what they did is not far from the offline equivalent of spamming your competitor email list.
If I were the event company I'd just bar Virool from future events. I'd have though making enemies would be more detrimental than gaining a finite number of clients, but equally, I may not be the most informed person to make a judgement in this situation.
It's not immoral that the parent company was invited to the panel because of their hard work or even possibly paid for their slot (excuse my ignorance, I am not a marketer) and someone comes in and before their message is even delivered they have spam on their chairs? It's sort of the equivalent of a salesman on commission from the car dealership next door to the one you were trying to visit coming over and saying they have just the car for you. It's trespassing, it is definitely immoral. Or, if you aren't convinced it is immoral, it is certainly a dick move.

Wearing a T shirt with a message inviting questions is fine; shoving your message down customer's throats at the expense of your competition is over the line.
S3 Time Synchronization Delay
The AI might be perfect, but the controls are not. I clicked near the bottom right corner, and it didn't register a move for me, but the AI went again. That being said, Tic Tac Toe is not difficult to solve. The connect four game definitely seems more fun.

http://i.imgur.com/imchk.png