skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can think of many things that could qualify at "internal tools." The question is broad and the answers depend on what your business is, who works there, and what they do (yourself included!)

Possible "internal tools" that come to mind are:
(1) Analytics
(2) CRM-y stuff for the sales and support people
(3) Deployment and testing stuff for technical people
(4) CMS-y stuff to enable non-technical people to experiment with, or even implement, things that are client-visible. And for technical people to do so more efficiently.
(5) Backup, redundancy, disaster recovery etc

If none of these seem more important than others, I guess you need to ask: where is the business now? Where will it need to be in <x> months? How are we getting there? What are the pain points? How can the above improve this (versus implementing new features)?

One cherry-picked example: should technical staff time be spent on improving sales? If sales are your company's limiting factor and you don't have enough salespeople, making them more efficient is really important. If you're still in a soft launch-ish place, then it's not. If you have enough salespeople but not enough leads, maybe mining your own data, or public data, could produce some.
The result of Davies fieldwork in UK elections showed that active local party activities (including GOTV) can be worth up to a 2%-4% swing - this is from an election where 2nd generation electoral computing systems were used.

In Scotland we have 3rd generation systems (one system for all elections vertically, local government, Scottish Parliament, Westminster Parliament, European Parliament, and horizontally, 2011, 2008, 2007 back to the 80s).

The US parties be roughly considered as having 2 and half generation systems, so you might expect a difference at the top end of that.

I don't follow US elections that closely but you can work the numbers out.
> Like some enterpreneurs are much different.

Speak for yourself. I'm not.

BTW, I didn't assume anything, I just read the news and talk to people that have been through the fear of losing their lives by these crooks hands.

I don't understand what you're trying to rationalize here, probably you've never had someone determined to take your life away for nothing.
Actually, for a lot of folks, computers capable of being programmed are less accessible. A whole class of sub-$200 computers disappeared long ago.
The rationale I've heard is that consumers benefit from having a local service location for the brand. Based on that logic, the state limits the franchises to avoid "ruinous competition" (not my phrase) that would threaten that consumer benefit.

The first time I heard the phrase "ruinous competition" used this way, I nearly jumped out of my chair.

But this is why the OP mentions the challenge that Tesla will have in providing local repair service. If it can crack that problem, it may open the door to manufacturer shops of other car models as well.
I head that there is also one for service, it might be considered not political correct and offensive by some but it basically works when one misspells the word "restart" in `service XXXX retart`
For new projects or existing projects that desperately need tools, %80-%90 percent is good. The rest can be used for small changes that have visually large results to keep the uppers happy. After you have a basic tools stated %20 or one day of the week to work on tools is good.
Excuse me, what financial application rounds to 51 digits?
On the flip side, there's never been a more terrible time to be a 54-year-old developer.
This is a major point of confusion for people who are new to the concepts, and I'm glad someone has taken the time to explain it in depth. And it's not just TSP that it happens with. Almost every popular example of an NP-complete problem I've seen is actually an NP-hard optimization problem corresponding to an NP-complete decision problem.

The bad part is that if you don't know better, you'll think "Wait, how the hell would you verify a correct answer to this without searching for an even shorter path?" And you'll be right, but you'll feel like you're missing something. Giving examples of CS that make people feel like they fundamentally don't understand CS is probably a Bad Thing.
I agree. Do the math. If you don't have the man power and the math makes sense, contract it out.
Exactly. "We actually won, but (x) failed us so OBAMA was able to steal the election." Totally expected from Bullshit Mountain. I'd like to see two parties that have some barest grasp on reality in America rather than just one, but I can't say that watching the Republican party disappear even further up its own asshole isn't going to be a hell of good time, in the coming years.
Building High-Performing JavaScript for Modern Engines
I've been using StrongVPN.com for over a year without any problems. It's speed is decent too. I am not affiliated with them in any way.
Xenoceratops: the ‘alien horned-face’ dinosaur discovered in Canada
Predicting Web Directions: Where I Went Wrong, Second Annual Edition
"Tesla is choosing to ignore the law and then is choosing to play outside that system."

Is there a statement more indicative of the fear of innovation in archaic industries?

Let's hope that laws like this begin to vanish and clear the way for innovation.

If they don't, I'm sure Mr. Musk will find a workaround. They could essentially setup their retailing operation as a separate legal entity and work around this.

And that's what big auto needs to understand - legal ploys to stop progress will only be met with more legal maneuvers. How about cessation of belly aching and movement toward a change in the product and retail model?
This computer costs just $13 [video]
The key mantra about Get Out The Vote is that the battle is mostly won in the long campaign.

The key technique is to get a voter to make an emotional commitment to voting by talking personally to an actual human being (think Asda/Walmart having someone greet you on entrance - it works).

Weakly identifying voters (switchers, intermittent voters) are preferentially contacted by the candidate, other more grounded ones get ordinary party members on their doorsteps, plus personal letters etc.

So this failure is likely symptomatic of a general failure of GOTV planning - which means the polls are likely to be correct.

There is no magic polling day bullet.
Did the horse-and-buggy dealers sue the automobile industry when it was starting to threaten them, too?
My weekend project - Create a self-signed SSL certificate instantly and for free
OOPS With CSharp
You comments / suggestions / bug reports are very welcome. Thanks.
Things that Ruby on Rails people tell you
Neil Stephenson went a step further in The Baroque Cycle and had them be the same person, Drake Waterhouse.
I love it. Tackling both the electric car and dealership problem at the same time. This is what disruption looks like.
The Tech Scene in Chicago Blossoms
They have place in the same way that record labels do.
How is this different from cocoapods.com?
> It irks me when people see corporations as these cohesive entities that only ever act with deliberate intent.

How else should we see it? Corporations are an abstraction layer, they're supposed to hide their inner workings and present one face to the customers. Hell, a corporation is a (legal) person. So I don't see a reason to not treat it as an whole, abstract entity - it's the corporation's job to figure out which internal part is causing them to have a bad name.
I remember much more Haskell and probably FP talk on HN some years ago too. Although HN back then was just as prone to getting fixated on a topic for a few days and flooded with stuff about it as it is now.

I follow http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/ , which has much more meaty FP topics than hit HN these days. For example, "Files are to Mounts as Abstract Data Types are to Dependency Injection" and "Video:Duncan Coutts on Cloud Haskell" are two I'm looking forward to digging into.
TFS - I see you draw heavily from a report from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation [0]. I found this part very interesting.

> Safaricom also benefited from launching the service in a country which contained several enabling conditions for a successful mobile money deployment, including: strong latent demand for domestic remittances, poor quality of available financial services, a banking regulator which permitted Safaricom to experiment with different business models and distribution channels, and a mobile communications market characterized by Safaricom’s dominant market position and low commissions on airtime sales.

If these indeed are the parameters, one should make a list of countries which satisfy these requirements and do some compare/contrast study.

[0] http://www.microfinancegateway.org/gm/document-1.9.43376/Mob...
I think the statement "There's never been a better time to be a 14-year old developer" is always true – things keep getting better.
Ray Tracing in Real-time Games
It seems that we just DDoS'd the website, anyways, this is the video of the article http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNbEDmPzrGI
Easy! If this is your company, dedicate as many resources as possible to get you to profitability the fastest.

Would adding better analytics allow you to convert more prospects? Sounds pretty important for getting business, despite it being an internal tool.

If you're pre-revenue, or pre-sustainability, all your efforts need to depend on becoming sustainable. Otherwise, you're making a great product for nobody.
Don't know but I'd bet dinner and beers for "Yes, as hard and often as they could"
Flash drive made out of meteorite
Maybe I'm too naive to see why manufactures having their own showrooms would be such a problem?
>Separating producers from local sales was a big thing.

That sounds interesting. I'm curious why.
Depends if jury believes putting down deposit is "buying" or not.
Higher quality product, better customer service, better returns policy.

Make the experience painless for the user, at every stage of the product's lifecycle.
Because the HTML supported by e-mail is too massive. It makes writing an e-mail client too expensive and also means that security issues are more likely to creep in.

Plain text should stay as is. HTML is the problematic format that needs addressing. When they first started using HTML for e-mails it was just the natural thing to do, but with the benefit of hindsight it was a mistake.

So I am suggesting we take a subset of HTML, add a very small set of e-mail specific features (signatures, quoting, etc) and then deploy. This format should be entirely display-able with a single XSL (as the easiest implementation).
I have a feeling a very high percentage of programmers on HN themselves started when they were 13-15 years old.
That's incorrect. WordPress.com serves hundreds of thousands of websites from a single install. That means one set of PHP files and one database. Not unlike Facebook.
I'm not sure if you're serious, but there are a few problems with that.

First, there's a lot of crime that goes along with running a cartel. Selling marijuana may be legalized, but most of the cartel people have long criminal histories that aren't going away. Murder, torture, bribery, kidnapping and all that are still crimes.

Second, a good deal of a drug cartel's infrastructure is devoted to violence and smuggling. Obviously violence can't be part of a legitimate business. And unless they're trying to evade taxes, the smuggling stuff is just overhead compared to other shipping methods.
Spolsky's argument is that the sale will typically go through without a discount and thus it is not a real problem.

"Big companies often have purchasing departments actually do the purchase. They are trained to expect discounts and the people in the purchasing department know a lot more about asking for discounts than they know about software, because that is their specialized role in the organization. If you politely tell them that you have one price for everyone, they'll still purchase, because the purchasing department ususally doesn't have the power to stop the purchase."
Aggregator spam, direct link is http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2012/11/08/microsoft...
The first thing I noticed is that cocoapods.com is a parked domain.
I think before you start automating you business and processes you first need to know if your product will get any traction. Spending the time on making sure you have the best possible MVP is the most important thing, IMO. You may be launching a lot of tasks manually and modifying the database directly from the console at first but so be it. The fact is that creating internal tools is very expensive and only indirectly provides benefits to your product.

You'll know when you'll need to build better automation to your product; there won't be enough time to get everything done in a day.

That said, there's a downside to following this approach. When you will need to build automation tools you'll be conflicted with spending your time on automation or on improving your product. Improving your product directly provides benefits, tools indirectly provides benefits. It can be sometimes hard to convince yourself or others that you need to spend x% of your time on internal tools.

Where I work we're at a point where automation is very important. As the CTO of the company I constantly have to challenge the CEO and others that spending money on tools will give us some benefit in long term. The rule (or high level design pattern) that we are trying to implement is for every module of our product, there is a tool to understand the data better for debugging purposes (e.g. a UI to see what step in the workflow the process is in and/or what errors happened, etc), and if data is generated, there's an API/Service to get the data out easily.
Famo.us Cracks The Secret Of High-Performance Apps By Tapping Another Dimension
Of course it all depends on your actual business, income (i.e. how much time can you afford to spend on internal tools), needs, etc. Since you're talking about client-facing software, I'm going to assume you're in a software development company, which narrows it down a little.

For our company, we don't develop internal tools for any given problem until it's a real pain. You'll know when it's an actual pain (as opposed to just an idea), because you'll keep seeing it crop up in your day-to-day work, and if you talk about it with others on your team, they'll say, "Yeah! I know exactly what you mean, I was thinking about that the other day."

We wait until it's a real pain for a couple reasons:

1) We want to make sure we're not wasting our time; we're mostly engineers, and we all get real, unadulterated enjoyment from building things. It's only too easy for our enjoyment and enthusiasm for building a solution to fool us into thinking there's a problem. But usually, if everyone on the team is instantly excited about the prospect of solving some problem, that's usually a good indicator that it's a real problem.

2) The longer we can put off something, the more information we'll have when we go to solve it. In other words, we give ourselves time to figure out first how we want to work, and then find or build tools around that, rather than trying to fit our system to some tool.

The second reason is really important too, because when we sit down to really think about every facet of a problem, how it affects our work and how we have been putting up with it and working around it, we'll often realize the best solution isn't some new piece of software; it's merely leveraging some tool we already have slightly differently.

For one example, we started losing feedback and updates in email, because some person on the team would get left off the email (e.g. someone hit "reply" instead of "reply-all"), and we wouldn't realize it until some task went un-resolved for several days. We could have built or implemented some sort of support desk system and made it the clients' responsibility to make sure tickets are submitted and then integrated it with email. Or, we could just create a unique email alias for each client, which copies everyone involved. The latter took 2 minutes and improved communication threefold.

If you keep growing, you'll eventually reach a point where anything less than a full-blown software solution just isn't going to cut it. But by that time, you've seen how the team deals with the problem over time, and all the pitfalls of other smaller or less-custom solutions, and you'll be able to build the most awesome solution possible.
you could also integrate the paid verified ssl's into this. I remember generating it from godaddy was a pain.. by the way nice work.
This whole deal is about design patents (or registered designs, depending on jurisdiction), basically the look of the box that the electronics are housed in; the content ot the box is immaterial in this respect.
Apparently Toshiba thinks ignorance = safety.
Oh, certainly - I would just have thought that getting out the vote is so widely recognized as a key factor in modern campaigns that he'd have put his best people on it. Would we be talking about leadership at all if, say, many of his ads were a little ham-handed?
The opportunities and challenges of responsive design
The Comic Side of IoT
Has anyone ever had a good experience at a car dealership?

I remember getting my first car when I was 16. I was so excited, I drove the thing home and didn't realize the car mats weren't in it. I called the next day: "Sorry sir, Car mats don't come with used Vehicles. We do sell them though ($350!!!)"

The thought of car dealerships going out of business and being replaced by a better business model feels nearly too good to be true. Here's hoping its not!
The movie studio/theater breakup was an anti-trust case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pict....

btw, there is a bug the hn code... add a period at the end of the url to see the link
"Separate legal entity" isn't quite enough. It also can't be owned by the manufacturer.
I'd love to see a company which doesn't copyright repair manuals, doesn't make devices difficult to home-repair on purpose, doesn't do this "planned obsolescence" things or any other assholy tricks to get a short term profit; and then market the shit out of this attitude - explicitly show people the things it doesn't do. I'd be their life-time customer without second thought.
If they know to try that, they deserve access to my gmail account. :-)
If the only choice for dealerships in the classic phrase "innovate or die" is to die, why even say that the dealership industry needs to innovate?
Car dealerships are big business, many of the big new car dealerships are owned by Fortune 500s like Sonic Automotive and Penske Automotive Group.
The smart cartels have certainly invested in the U.S. prison industry. Great hedge against their drug business. Not to mention phenomenal growth because of "war" on drugs.

Proly make money running the drug smuggling as loss-leader just to keep prisons full.
Creative Photography with A Message
>But “compared to the $2.50 we pay for a regular football, the current cost difference for the more durable solution is currently too high.”

My brain hurts. If a ball that costs $20 and lasts 30 years is too expensive, then a ball that costs $2.50 and lasts a day is also too expensive. This is not a difficult math problem.
I evaluated Toshiba laptops during my shopping for personal laptop last year, however the price was not impress (in Singapore) and the build seemed flimsy compared to ThinkPad. So for more high-end options I would go for a ThinkPad or MacBook(with VM), for cheaper alternatives I would go for Dell or Asus. I still don't see much competitiveness for Toshiba laptops (and also Fujitsu, just FYI).

After some considerations, I found myself couldn't be too happy without a decent command line interface, ergo I bought a 15" MacBook Pro and upgraded it to 16GB of memory. The office suite that I use once in a while is taken care by Win7 running in a VM.

I report that I am a happy man now and have no regret. Every cent spent on MBP is worth-while. This post is not meant to hard-sell Apple laptop, just sharing my own shopping experience.
it should help people find a suitable framework a lot faster and easier. also, i hope that it will encourage aspiring Objective-C developers to use more open source frameworks.
The usual reasons, although i suspect the real stopper is #1 , regulations and having to work with banks. Don't forget paypal been established as a bank in europe and often has to walk though regulatory mazes.
Far more profitable to pool lobbying efforts with others in the same boat as you.
> Almost half of those surveyed were using internet-enabled smart or “feature” phones. The scratch cards that many Kenyans use to charge their mobiles have recently begun to advertise their value in terms of data rather than talk time. Meanwhile, mobile-phone operators have been giving free access to sites such as Wikipedia to entice customers.

> Still, only 16% of respondents said they were using their phones to browse the internet.

The iHub report I read said that 88% of Kenyans browse the Internet with their mobile phone instead of 16%. The same report says that 99% of Internet access from Kenya is through a mobile device. I think the Western world assumes people in developing countries are dependent on computers for Internet access because of the popularity of the One Laptop Per Child program. I think we should recognize that the developing world will probably never have the resources or desire to adopt laptops or personal computers and so we should instead focus on providing them with web-content sized for their devices and hardware organizations such as OLPC should look into reducing the cost of smartphones. In my personal experience an android device in Africa costs at minimum of $200.

Reading this article reminds me that there is a huge demand for mobile Internet in developing world and few companies are capitalizing on this.
My disclaimer (and bias) is I'm a hardcore linux dev and never touch windows unless its forced upon me. So with that said, here's my thoughts.

"Myth 1: It's Easier to Bootstrap a Project In Rails"

Maybe, but still I doubt its cross platform (without headaches) - can you bootstrap MVC on Linux or Mac. This would mean you're married to the Windows Env (not a bad thing necessarly if thats what you decide you want).

"Myth 3: It's Better to Develop with RoR Because it's Open Source"

You say the complete .Net stack is open source? If so this really surprises me, considering microsofts rep, so I'd ask for links and is the C# compiler open source?

Finally, where's the advantage? ( I know you say your not trying to say this ) Why should people use something new unless there are reasons for it being not just as good but better at such and such? This whole post was about how MVC is just as good as Rails, which probably is true, but if you're a good dev and know your tools then Symfony2 or Django is probably just as good as well. The only reason to switch is when people start showing exceptionally new capabilities that make the devs life easier by trying out the new thing. Thats what rails did back in the day.
And doesn't moving the decimal point chop off between 6 and 7 bits?