skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Expect to be able to passively track how long you brushed your teeth in the near future.

I guess "passively" is the key. This sort of action-specific data capture has to be implemented in a way that you don't have to intervene to record and process it. The law of diminishing returns will cull anything of marginal utility if it can't carry its own weight (effort in > value out).
James Hamilton: AMD Announces Server Targeted ARM Part
http://furry-incest-porn.xxx/server-status/

Yes, it's potentially an issue.
That would probably be a good thing. Most people don't have good oral hygiene practices.
I just read that Fog Creek Software is (among other actions) carrying 55 gallon drums of diesel fuel up 17 flights of stairs to keep things going. I doubt that method is sustainable for very long.
http://twitter.com/fogcreekstatus
Easier than PHP: EJS + Node + filesystem based routing.
Real evidence would require a double-blind test, but there is already such a large productivity difference between programmers you'd need a pretty large sample.

And what possible metric could you use to determine if the code is "better"? That's a really subjective thing.
"Sorry, I can't help you with that"
Hearsay: During WWII the code breakers of Bletchley Park were provided with benzedrine tablets.
What you want to avoid with this sort of AB testing is the same person seeing multiple prices. The easiest, decently close approximation is just to split the page served by geocoded IP. The regions should be split randomly up-front.

Also don't underestimate the value of the more expensive plan to making your $4.95 plan look cheap. A simple answer to what could be premium is contained in your terms: Make the $99/month plan suitable for use in a production environment, as web middleware or a backend, etc by relaxing restrictions and having some sort of SLA.
I would love to know the details here. What I'm suspecting is that Google has figured out a way to combine both client- and server-side processing for both maximal responsiveness and accuracy. Maybe there's even some Google Instant magic going on, so it'll basically predict what you are going to say and pre-fetch something based on that. I don't know much about voice recognition, but I guess it would speed up the client-side algorithm if it has knowledge that your next word is probably going to be either banana or apple.
Zetrip finds travel photos and recommendations from friends, raises seed funding
Especially when you are stuck in a new state with no healthcare & a family dependent on you

I don't say it's the right decision for everyone, perhaps for someone with a dependent family the right decision is to stay with the big company. But to take away the FREEDOM to take a risk, that is simply wrong... let me quote James Madison from the 10th Federalist Paper.

It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy (destroying libery), that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.
No, Gmail didn't do that - but people still avoided social interaction in those kinds of situations by reading magazines/newspapers/books or playing gameboy, etc.
If only Google hadn't stuck it to them with Android ALL users would be better off. We'd have Google apps on iPhone hardware and UIs. It hurts to think about how much better it could be.
House was right.
$25k for a single experiment is possible. I've applied to the national science foundation for a single experiment and my budget (along with funds for me to present the data at a conference (~$1500) was around $12k as we had most of the stuff I needed already.
This lab is already established, they just need some extra funds to run this specific experiment (from what I've read).

Re: mouse work. I'm assuming they already have the facilities to run these experiments...especially at Princeton. If they don't, I'm sure a neighboring lab has the mice/protocols to run this experiment and they will/can cola berate. They write up an IACUC protocol, go through a few bouts of revisions and they should be able to run the experiment. This would be a simple protocol as they are just injecting mice with the drug, this isn't out of the ordinary by any means.
Want a startup job? There’s a Google Spreadsheet for that
I'm not denying that News Corporation is influential, I just think the primary motivation is profit rather than an actual desire to see through any kind of political agenda.
I remember it being 30' for water, but it should be a bit more for diesel (since diesel is not as dense as water). Mercury, an obviously much denser fluid, can only be pulled up by a vacuum a much shorter distance (around 760 millimeters iirc).

Still, the extra height isn't going to buy you much.
From what I understand there is only one study on the relationship between creativity and LSD:

Psychedelic agents in creative problem-solving: a pilot study. Harman WW, McKim RH, Mogar RE, Fadiman J, Stolaroff MJ. Psychol Rep. 1966 Aug;19(1):211-27.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelics_in_problem-solving...

The results suggested that LSD has a positive effect on creative problem solving. I think it is a shame that no follow-up experiments have been conducted.
Citizen science is one of the goals of my YC application :) It will be here soon.
If what I've written over the past few days does not appear to be a long look in the mirror, I've not made myself clear enough.

At the same time, abusing someone's trust implies intent to harm. If you actually read the emails, you can see that no where I deny the risk involved. I didn't hide anything about the company (or myself) hardly having an idea of what we were doing.

But where there is risk, there is opportunity. That was the dream I sold to Patrick, not to fool him, but because it was my dream as well. I hardly see that as abusing trust.
Not sure that'd be accurate for me since I logged into the dev center using the live account I have (non-hotmail).
Data Centre Brags on Twitter Right Before Superstorm Sandy Takes it Down
Generators higher up makes sense, but 17 stories high? I suppose real-estate concerns limit where you can put them though.
Every company at the conference was an example of the effectiveness of growth teams. Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, Twitter and so on have all found that being rigorous about optimizing their growth models has increased growth and engagement.

They were also at pains to mention that you cannot A/B test your way to a great product. You need deep insight and intuition to build a great product. But once you have a great product, you can help it grow faster by being rigorous about optimizing the drivers of growth.
Looks like Disney fixed theirs.

Can't believe there are admins at this level that miss this.
Makes good sense to me. Who knows more about milking overstretched and outdated IP?
+1, naturally.

I work at Cheezburger. It's funny/weird to see my co-workers like this. It will be interesting to see what else they choose to show.
What does it mean to be a 'passionate' programmer?
I keep seeing this word listed in job ads. When I think of 'passion', I think of people like Kanye West, Dennis Rodman, and Ernest Hemingway. People who follow their heart and don't give a crap what other people think.

In my experience, the programming industry doesn't tolerate people like that. You're expected to be a great communicator, be nice and courteous, have good people skills, and follow directions. That seems to me to be the opposite of passion. Am I correct?
I signed up. Already using it to check if a server goes down. Have a lot more things I plan to use it for as well. Awesome service.
I disagree with a number of your points. I've noticed a huge reduction in the amount of spammy content I see in google results (over the last year, maybe), to the point that I actually make "productName reviews" searches again.

Your focus on pagerank is at least somewhat off base, considering that it's only a factor in ranking as noted by someone below, and it's a ranking that pretty much all the search engines use as well ("The Bing ranking algorithm analyzes many factors, including but not limited to: ... the number, relevance, and authoritative quality of websites that link to your webpages").

There is something to be said for no-follow links being a symptom of something broken, but, OTOH, page rank is still a good indicator of what people out on the web find to be useful and relevant content, allowing you to find popular content, cluster it by subject, etc...essentially crowd sourcing (a portion of) relevancy via something people do anyways. Gaming was inevitable, and no-follow is really more of a way to disincentivize spammers...the fact that with no-follow you get the spammers anyways (to get human eyeballs instead of crawlers') demonstrates that the motivation is always there. If a search engine trusts wikipedia's outbound links they don't have to obey no-follow in any case, but you still have the situation that everyone will have their own favorite "impartial" external links to add, not to mention people with a vested interest in the subject.

The possibility you forget in your "microsoft can plausibly compete with [google]" point (leaving aside the fact that most people are just ignoring it) was that bing has improved, and that has nothing to do with google breaking anything.
Google went crap when it started favoring news and blog publishers over all other content. Almost all the results are blogs/news these days.
I see a lot of this type of sentiment here on HN, and I think it is because we are people who build technology and therefore study technology obsessively. Anything that stays the same for 5 years will feel ancient.

Most people, though, just want to use technology to accomplish other things. For them, radical interface changes reduce rather than improve value.
I was watching some video the other day where Jon Stewart made a random appearance. All the people around him had their phones out taking pictures of him instead of actually experiencing him being there. It was like proving to other people that they'd had an awesome experience was more important than actually having that experience. Or like they were going through life as tourists, making sure they checked every box and shared it all with other people to make them jealous. "Been within five feet of a major celebrity - check".
Scientists offer quantum theory of soul's existence
Why content-based campaigns rule ROI
First IANAL. That said: In the US, invention-rights assignment assigns all of your inventions to the companies, whether it relates to your normal job activities or not.

CA labor law is (as usual) a little different: If the invention is on your own time, with no resources whatsoever of the company, then the invention is yours regardless of the assignment . Of course, proving that you did not use company resources comes down to $$ in lawyers and court costs.
Speed and Ritalin work really well, highly recommend trying it out once or twice to anyone interested. It's just a fun experience and you get a lot done lol

Glass of wine, relaxes my body which let's me think more and worry less about my comfort.

Nicotine resets my brain after solving hard problems. E-cigarettes are a nice healthier option.

Marijuana is great for sitting down with pen and paper to draw out large concepts or designs.

Coffee is just like Ritalin, just weaker and you don't get the stimulated euphoria.

I find working is impossible unless I have a goal. Psychedelics have let me see life in a different light and feel more at ease with my life plan which in turn makes work easier.
NYU operates a CoGen plant under 251 Mercer that runs on natural gas and can fail over to diesel. It provides power, steam, and cold water for air conditioning to many of surrounding properties. The net result is that NYU servers frequently stay up during power outages, while their ISP usually goes down.
Speaking as someone who isn't part of this run, and therefore is sort-of-impartial, I think you're doing the right thing, and I'm really glad you're giving these people some breathing room during difficult times.

If nothing else, you'll get a crop of /really/ disaster-aware backends.
Race, Class, and Gender in the History of Computing
just that there are other not-so-awesome startups & not-so-awesome founders out there.

There are not-so-awesome big companies, not-so-awesome politicians, bureaucrats. To live your life afraid of running across "not-so-awesome" people and opportunities would mean you guarantee you will never encounter the truly awesome people and opportunities.
Apple is using data from both Tom Tom and Open Street Map in the new iOS 6 maps.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/11/3078987/apple-tomtom-opens...
"If, on a graph, the plotted data does not match the
initial hypothesis, make the line fatter."
-- J. Meals

Or, to repeat myself, yes, it's rather easy to come up with these models and tweak them to sell your team|book|conference|etc.

I'm still waiting for an example where such a model predicted something non-obvious.
WeatherChute.com launches - first-person photos from Hurricane Sandy
I thought this was called adultfriendfinder?
What does Grandma or Uncle Fester want to know?

If you actually pay attention to Apple adverts, and then look at Apple's wild success- well, looking at the two together, I can only surmise Grandma and Uncle Fester want to know how (Apple thinks) the product will make you feel. Any nod to features is merely coincidental.

Really, I notice time and time again- us geeks seem to be completely out of touch with what makes for the most effective marketing to everybody else.
It will really rustle my jimmies.
If there is no reason for it to be public, then it shouldn't be public, no matter how obscure the issues with it may seem to you.
Magnitude 5.0 is 1 in 100. Magnitude 6.0 is more like 1 in 500. You do a cost-benefit analysis for the different return rates.

Hospitals should definitely be built to handle a magnitude 5 or more. You're talking about a high probability of loss of life if they can't handle a 1 in 100 year event. Data centers, who cares? It's cost vs expected damage, and unless it's a safety-critical server (emergency services co-ordination?) you're probably just as well off shipping the servers somewhere else and eating the cost of the downtime.

As for getting a 12kW generator in a natural disaster, generators are in extremely high demand. You'll have trouble finding one. The other fun thing about generators in a disaster - people usually don't test them, and end up panicing in a dark basement with no idea how to switch them on and hook them up.
Apple is hardly the only corporation whose tea leaves journalists and bloggers try to read.
I agree with everything you've said, but unfortunately, it still just won't be used on my iPhone. There's no way I will launch the Google app then click on the microphone icon. Replace Siri with this and I'll use it, but as long as it's a separate app on my phone it won't get used.
System Strings: iOS and OS X strings localized in 34 languages
Sure, right-wing tabloids are a market niche that News Corporation specializes in. I still don't see a consistent agenda or ideology, though.

And it's hard to call News Corp's entertainment properties a "tiny sideshow" when 20th Century Fox distributes a fair chunk of Hollywood's output, when three out of the four most popular sports leagues in the world are broadcast by either Fox or Sky Sports, and when Fox is easily one of the more successful TV networks in the United States.
Your post reminded me of a CK Louis sketch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSSDeesUUsU
Where do all you dickheads come from?

Try to give a little constructive feedback instead.
Well, if you actually toke the time to read the docs, you would see the value it has. It has personally saved me many hours of development, and I am a back-end + front-end developer too. Don't just start shooting assumptions about the community that surrounds it without reading the help first. And, no, it doesn't just say "because it's for nerds", it says a whole lot more things, but if you wanted to read them you could, you just don't want to. Seems like you just wanted to vent that comment out of your system :).
Come on corpy backend guys, dont hate on new frameworks, if you don't like them just let pass through.
A Cautionary Tale for (Startup) Sales People
I work for a very large company (65K+ employees, thousands of developers). Our IT department has a $1 Billion+ per year budget). The industry is financial/insurance, so we have a lot of red-tape when it comes to purchasing things.

I recently wanted to get some development software from a company that we have never purchased from before. The first step in the process is to get a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in place, followed by a review of their EULA.

After our purchasing area sent the NDA to the software company, one of the salespeople wrote back and told us that they didn't want to use our NDA, they aren't going to modify theirs and that we should go through one of their resellers that we already had an NDA in place with. Fine.

Then purchasing starts to take a look at the EULA. It has some terms that are never going to pass muster with our legal department; for example: they can use our name in advertising. No one is allowed to use our name for advertising. Not IBM, not Oracle, not Microsoft, no one (all three of those companies signed our NDA). So our purchasing department decided that they don't want to deal with them to get the EULA changed since they wouldn't even work with us on a simple NDA.

We are going to purchase a competitor’s product - there is no open source equivalent.

Why does this matter? Once everything was in place, it would have been really easy for someone else in my company to purchase more software from them. And we spend a lot on software.

Just because someone at this little company didn't want to take the time to research who they were dealing with and gave some attitude to a purchasing department, they will likely never have a chance here again.

If you're a startup, you might want to do some research about a company that comes knocking at your door and seems to be a bit of a pain in the ass. If they have a $1 Billion dollar IT budget (or even a little less than that), it might be worth it.
Alternative Web Search Engine
An amusing quote, but I don't think Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Pincus, and the CEOs of the other companies are all being deceived by fatter lines on a graph!
Imagine the horror when you find out all the worldly financial assets you've accrued over your entire life are just a few database entries dispersed over a few databases on some spinning disk in some rack in some datacenter somewhere?
We can always count on California government officials to intrude on technologies they know nothing about.

This is nothing more than a quest for cheap publicity and endorsement of various pressure groups, which promote the self-interests of their funders and staffers under the guise of the "public interest". What they really want is regulation that would let them profit from shakedown lawsuits.

These sorts of assaults on product development freedom need to be nipped in the bud.
Internet Messaging Platform (Email, Jabber, IRC)
Well, since you seem reluctant to provide an example, I'll try it with a question:

Did Myspace have growth hackers?
I like it. I cannot count the number of times I've just popped open a new gmail tab to address this exact shortcoming.
Not saying I haven't been there, but that's a lot of multitasking. You could probably get the tasks done more efficiently if you worked on the homework assignment and recruiter emails in serial, and then set aside dedicated time to check your inbox.
Selection bias. Everything is done with good intentions, good things and bad things. Very few people set out to do the wrong thing from their perspective, and plenty of evil is done via cold calculus (think most of US foreign policy) that is defined by lack of empathy.
How I found my lost iPhone
hope they don't lead STAR WARS the 'JOHN CARTER ' way.
Let John Lasseter and the rest of PIXAR team handle LUCASFILMS
Maybe they can tell me how to make my jagon bigger.
How cool is thelistserve?
If you haven't gotten on the mailer list for http://thelistserve.com yet, you should. You submit your email address into a raffle to be able to write one email to everyone else in the raffle; once a day an email address is chosen and they're given the chance to mail everyone else with something they think people should know. So far its been a pretty cool experience- the other day I got an email about how swing dancing classes saved this guy's life. Who knew?
I believe he meant that he wishes android would have a universal home button.
I believe that was constructive. I told him that his layout decision severely narrows his target audience.
It is easy and plenty fun to set up an experiment among your friends.
Their about page needs more information. I'm pretty sure I know what this is, but at the same time I'm not.
I was going to throw a nod to this in my original post.

Although Google Glass in this case is using technology to solve a personal/social/cultural problem I do think it's one of the few times in recent memory to be an actually good solution.

I believe it gives the individuals such as myself and others who do value the living over the sharing a chance to get the best of both while giving those who value sharing over living a chance to enjoy the moment more.
I'm not installing itunes to view a movie, I have a player I like.
> but because those services rely heavily on giving every customer their own SQL database, there is almost no reasonable way to get fast failover to a different data center

Why did you say you could do fast failover to LA in 2007? [1] It was the case then that every customer had their own SQL database too.

I'm not trying to be snarky, your team is obviously putting forth some heroic effort. I'm just an affected customer that is curious why the question seems to have two mutually exclusive answers.

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:lHEK939...
THAT was constructive.
Why would you host in New York, how dumb? Everyone knows that when aliens attack, disaster strikes, time for nuclear armageddon or it's the end of the world, that it all starts in New York. I've seen the movies so there!
I don't understand. How is a universal home button different from the home button it has now?
*Lua
Did anyone else get that awesome ad at the bottom just below where he talks about how crap ad money is? One of those classic "you have been selected to win an ipad" ones. It was so juxtaposed with the content I thought for a second perhaps the entire post was satire.
I think the right question to ask is whether the service is improving peoples lives or not. Social networks are useful and improves life in many ways, but their mission is to maximize sharing, user engagement to drive ad revenue, regardless of whether this is good for the users or not.
I'm in Kansas City myself and it would be very cool to see you guys grow in the midwest. Best of luck to you and your team!
Yes, well, I'm all for having a popup and for having it stand out in terms of design. I just say that the GameCenter-Popups is a very poor design, especially by apple standards.

In other words: The metaphor is fine but the execution is lacking.
Why would you have needed fast failover in this case? Sandy's trajectory was predictable enough that even a day-long migration could have been completed with time to spare.
I don't need to justify it, because it isn't a point I'm trying to make. But there's a whole article at the link at the top of the page that attempts to justify it.
We'd be better off in a world with no Android, where RIM still hasn't shipped a modern smartphone OS, and with a Windows Mobile/Phone environment that has broken application compatibility twice in the past two years?