skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For each of the barriers you brought up, have you got any ideas on how Cherry could've addressed them? One trick I've learnt in the past couple of years is that solutions don't need to be 100%. If Cherry had found solutions that worked 80 - 90% of the time for those barriers, they would probably be doing an alright job of overcoming them.

There aren't any. The problem is that car washing is an extremely low-margin and low-volume business relative to other industries. High margins are measured in the singles of dollars; high volumes frequently means reaching double-digits in customers in a single day.

Cherry's business model actually increased the costs of business substantially by adding in costs for traveling, equipment, employee or subcontractor acquisition, insurance that would apply to infinitely variable service sites, and marketing costs that a normal car wash service would not have to deal with (note: making a distinction between a car wash service and a car wash facility; the two are separate and distinct business models). Thus, economically, it was essentially impossible for Cherry to succeed without first conquering the basic problems that dog existing car wash services.
We had zero clients, no investors, and my dog was my only other team member (and neither of us are famous to my knowledge). I built a product that would solve a problem, and Black & Decker was my first customer. They didn't give a shit about the amount of respect we garnered in the startup or business community. They didn't care about the volume of other users we had, our investors, or the fame of our team - they just wanted a need met at a price that made sense to them.

And that's what we did.
Know a wantrepreneur? Give them the Gift of Code this holiday season.
Ah, remember, this is hardware and, this is Verilog, not C.

What you are looking at is called "one-hot" encoding.

If you enumerate your states you are asking Verilog to infer a register to hold your states. This also means that you have to have additional (slow) combinatorial logic to identify which state you are in.

With one-hot encoding each state is represented by a single and discrete flip-flop (FF) and no combinatorial logic is required. If you have 33 states the state machine has 33 FF's and only one of them can be "hot" or set to "1" at any given time.

One-hot encoding is faster, and offer a lot of other advantages (ease of debugging, ease of optimization, timing closure, etc.).

Here's a good resource:

http://www.xilinx.com/txpatches/pub/documentation/xactstep6/...

Go directly to Appendix A.
Constructive criticism, yes absolutely. Labelling things as wankery and reiterating that you don't see the point aren't. All they're showing is that you're missing the point.
DIY Tardis looks bigger on inside with augmented reality
Wait, what?

I spoke against a concrete and specific thing, this very article, what more "examples" do you want? Pointing to a particular thing is the very definition of an example.

So, yes, this kind of article is very often seen, and we're very familiar with the genre to need more examples. It even admits so itself, as it starts with: "It's OFTEN CLAIMED that learning Haskell will make you a better programmer in other languages.".

As for the articles' examples: meh. Using Haskell signatures to sketch public APIs in other languages is somehow better that using any other similar notation? Even if it was so, he never proves it better. Just some handwaving. And his other big point is about thinking in terms of maps, sets, filters, reduces and such. How is that unique to Haskell? Lisps beg to differ...
>At best this is an unfortunate "pilot error"

It is in no way "pilot error". If the post you replied to is correct, the dropbox software performed an action it should never perform - deleting files the user did not tell the OS to delete. What's more, every dropbox plan I'm aware of keeps deleted files for 30 days, so if it wasn't possible to recover some of the files, dropbox failed not once but twice.

It's all very well blaming the user for not having multiple redundant backups, but that doesn't change the fact that deleting user data without explicitly being told to do so is one of the most egregious sins software can commit. It's not "pilot error" when the software performs an action that should never occur.
One easy way to solve this problem would be to do it like how Github distinguish between personal and organization repositories (with a context switcher dropdown).

On the backend, this would involve converting all current accounts into "sub-accounts". Joining a team would basically create a brand new sub-account under the same login.
I know this isn't necessarily a case, especially considering this is from a mailing list, but just like with the Enlightenment post a couple of days ago - how about some screenshots? A human-formatted "What's new" page?
Yes, it's open source, there's no marketing effort, etc., but it would still be cool if I could see it and learn about it without giving up hours of my time.
You're right to be concerned about complexity: simple things are easy to understand, easy to predict, and easy to change.

That said, I think you'll find many of the ideas in Riemann to be radically simple. The config file is just a Clojure program. Streams are just functions that take events. Events are just maps of keys to values. Everything is an event: there is no concept of a first-class host or service, no need to update the config when you add a host, and no poller loops.

Riemann tries to draw strong boundaries between the different layers of monitoring. It speaks a simple network protocol and interoperates with other systems for event collection, visualization, alerting, and storage, instead of building in those systems. In many ways Riemann is defined not by what it includes, but by what it leaves out.

That said, there's a lot of work required to make simple abstractions behave correctly, especially around IO and error handling. Wherever possible I try to draw clear internal boundaries to isolate this complexity, but it's still there. If you have specific complaints about code or interfaces which seem too complex to you, I'd be happy to try and explain or change them.
To DHH credit, he always has fair points in his opinions, but the way he expresses these points is never diplomatic. For example, he couldn't resist making some blanket statements about java world and rspec.

I am not sure about how intentional that is, but it surely is dramatical in 'flame war eliciting' sense of word.
Instagram hit with class action lawsuit over terms of service change
This has NOTHING to do with Dropbox or not trusting it. As a developer, if you've been around computers for more than a microsecond the NECESSITY and VALUE of backups don't need to be explained. Dropbox is not backup, no matter what anyone says.
I don't think consumer space is dead. I think the mentality of "get users now, get money later" is dead. It was always a flawed philosophy. There's no guarantee that if you build a network of people, those people will actually want to pay you. (Case in point: Facebook.)

So I'm agreeing with your last point: "If your startup makes money and has customers, you'll have no problem raising money."
I did literally stop reading, because, rightly or wrongly, the README said this tool isn't for me. I thought I'd mention it, because I suspect that the author didn't really intend to say I shouldn't use it, and I thought they should be aware that they did so.
NAT didn't force you to use the web, just to use a client-server model, which is a very different thing.
Game Theory: A Year When Real-World Violence Crept Into Play
It appears that your point is that science graduates have mainly found employment in academia. This is just not so - chemists and biologists have traditionally found employment in the chemical and pharmaceutical industry.

My points is this: for a few years now chemistry has moved offshore, there have been heavy layoffs in the pharmaceutical industry, and the synthetic chemistry has been off-shored to contract shops, mainly in East Asia. But the pipeline is long, and any chemist who began their studies in the early 2000s, when the trend started, is (justifiably) pissed off that then cannot find work in their field even with a solid degree.

There is talk about alternative career path, but the observation is that those pay less then the original career promised.

We see the offshoring trend continue, the biological research is moving offshore as well, the pharmacology bubble is bursting, and soon only management will remain stateside.

This heavily afflicts people with advanced degrees. Considering that the common wisdom on this website is "skip college, get to work with the equivalent of a bachelors from Coursera/Khan &c", I cannot see that demographic unaffected. In India and China you can get an excellent education, and you will work for much less than an American or European. I cannot see computer engineering unaffected by the offshoring trend.

Exactly what is your point?
yeah, it's been a nightmare converting all my old widgets... but in a way, I'm glad that projects like AwesomeWM have the freedom to break everyone's configs if it means newer coding standards. The alternative -- retaining support for all previous versions, at the expense of bloat -- is much less preferable.
Kenyan Women Create Their Own 'Geek Culture'
CSS pointer-events
The 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge [1], a self-driving-car competition, was extremely successful. Winning entrants spent far more than the prize of $2 million - predominantly funded by sponsorship from companies interested in self-driving vehicle technology.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
The split between people who have children and their friends that don't predates Facebook.

When you have kids your life changes so completely that you no longer have nearly as much in common with your friends that didn't. It is hard to imagine how social media could prevent this.
Let me translate it for you, then. Wankery: Complexity brought on by the love of an abstract idea without meaningful practical benefit.

By definition I don't see the point in architectural exploits that can be labelled wankery.
Tell that to Sebastian Thrun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun), whose work on the Google driverless car project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car) and current position as a Google Fellow owes so much to his successful work on previous DARPA challenges (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge).

Granted, the challenges cited above didn't directly provide any market-ready products, but the practically-minded research and development they induced significantly advanced the algorithmic and engineering know-how available to those looking to create marketable artifacts. More generally, reputation is hugely important among researchers and head-to-head competition is a cost-effective way to generate and distribute reputation.
J2EE's sins include far more than just EJB. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Platform,_Enterprise_Editi.... Servlets got just started running with a bad crowd, even though deep down it was a good kid.
Omdbapi.com doesn't have the trademarked "imdb" word in their domain, they also seem to use wikipedia and freebase as their source.

Similar to how "Scroogle.org" stayed away from violating Google's trademark.
Presumably because LaTeX is designed for typesetting for fixed page sizes while HTML is designed for creating content that reflows to different window sizes and devices?
Agreed. People often use the term "consumer space" as if it only means some free app or product being given away for free ad infinitem... Dropbox, Airbnb, Uber, Kickstarter are all consumer services that all had huge years in 2012.

Dropbox is a particularly interesting example because it has a B2B counterpart in Box. Dropbox however is 2 years younger and about worth about 8x more. Consumer is certainly not dead. Free consumer maybe, but even then, Snapchat just showed us that VCs still have an appetite for free apps that skyrocket in user growth. (and appetite is an understatement.)
It's a joke.

Tongue in cheek, self referential and self deprecating with a dash of realism.

Made me chuckle.
i've been using mango http://mango.serotoninsoftware.com since 2006 to monitor control systems, mostly for small hydro power plants but also communications networks, smart homes, solar arrays, etc. Unfortunately development on the freely available source has stopped so I no longer get a better product every year.

Bigger projects i've used either citect or wonderware, both of which get the job done but show their age and are at times painful to use, although not as horrible as many of the other legacy control system HMI software out there.

Mostly data is collected by polling modbus slaves, although OPC would be another important protocol to support.

It seems like wonderare or citect is ready to be replaced by a distributed system that uses the web browser as the display client. systems monitoring software such as nagios, openNMS, cacti overlaps with the control system HMI software arena as both

1. display real time data, preferably with some context (eg gauges to indicate how close to maximum or minimum limit, alarm or shutdown thresholds the variable is) and sometimes overlayed on a diagram to assist in visualizing or understanding the process

2. "trend" (log and plot) historical data for analysis and reporting purposes. Better yet would be interactive plotting (zoom etc).

I've been wondering about graphite (which riemann can use) as part of the solution, and people seem to be producing great plots with d3.js.
As an aside I've used kst and veusz for desktop interactive plotting with success.

In summary: if riemann supported the modbus protocol it could be useful for control systems.
The product page has some screenshots[1] as well as the wiki [2].

[1]: http://awesome.naquadah.org/
[2]: http://awesome.naquadah.org/wiki/Screenshots
hi, website does not list all the devices :). I will update it over the holidays downtime. Can you please send me an email with your meter name ( i think said you use the contour USB?)
This should keep you busy for a while:
http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx
Would appreciate any advice on how to create such compelling web services...
How about a simplistic argument against location-based pricing? (Yes, simplistic, but sometimes such an argument serves a purpose.) You're shopping "on the Internet", where there is no physical, "bricks and mortar" retail outlet. [1]

At most, put real differences in shipping costs into the "shipping" portion of the final total. (Something readily auditable.)

Anything else should get a long, hard look.

(I'd consider it akin the "redlining" in the real estate marketplace. Geographically based, but having an outsized impact upon specific demographic/cultural/racial groups.)

--

[1] Certainly, in the U.S., retailers have loved to embrace precisely this argument, from the perspective of avoiding state sales taxes.
The JAva point I felt was truly fair here. Servlets were good, but then it became the huge EJB which was bad. His rspec opinion - as expressed here that is - was "I dont like the DSL". Those seem fine really.
I know, you've repeated that several times. "Without meaningful practical benefit" is what I'm referring to when I say you keep stating that you're missing the point. Just because you happen to not see the meaningful practical benefit doesn't mean there isn't one.
There are some reasons for using one or the other depending on your needs. Ruby vs. JS, for one.
Filter Day
I thought this was the reason apps existed: to cut down loading time. I hate it so much when someone, in their app embeds a browser and load their site.
i been trying to get an re-insurance co interested in marriage insurance. Any takers?
Amazon is discounting ebooks, whenever it’s allowed to, unlike Apple
Ternary vs Switch vs If
Programming Languages To A Non-Programmer
Looks good. I made http://www.deanclatworthy.com/imdb/ if anyone is interested too. Feel free to add it to your library.
I have recently player Diplomacy as a board game with some friends. WebDiplomacy.net is much more enjoyable, even if everybody would be in the same room. Never tried pbem, but i believe you would need something like jDip to visualize the map anyways.
Use ack instead of grep to parse text files
Well, it's a question of total value, weighted by frequency. If the autocorrection gets ten syntactic errors fixed for every one semantic error it introduces, it's probably a net gain for the writer.
Digitizing this data, making it accesible vs. having it as a printer paper folder, is the first step. Once we have the data, we need to make decisions based on it. Computers are a lot better analyzing 1000s data points from multiple vitals. Main problem is the device connectivity fragmentation.... at Infometers we are working to solve that problem. Reason I say this, send me a names of the diabetes monitor you use - I might already support it.
You should really consider redesigning this feature. Having "Teams" control all the personal accounts of their employees means none of my companies can use it. So, we're stuck with folder sharing for the foreseeable future.

I'd expect Teams to work like folder sharing, but with the storage not counting towards the individual account space limits.
Its better to have no tag-line as opposed to a bad one.
Also I believe a tag-line can convey 'benefits'. Not sure why you would recommend otherwise. Coca-cola's "Deliciously refreshing" worked well.
Not sure if you consider 'ad slogan' to be the same as a tagline, but some of these are good examples: http://www.winspiration.co.uk/slogans.htm
Dropbox engineer here. There should be a drop-down item to switch accounts: https://www.dropboxatwork.com/2012/12/easily-switch-between-...

The first time you select 'Switch Accounts' you will be able to log in your personal account. After that, you will be able to switch accounts without having to type the other username every time.
OkHttp : An HTTP+SPDY client for Android and Java applications
>Comes off as un-professional at exactly the wrong moment.

No, adding a touch of humor is highly professional, not to mention good marketing.

Remember, they are not marketing to enterprise managers, rural Utah programmers, or corporate 80's programmers in suits, but to todays and tomorrows "hip" programmers.

Now, some of today's programmers arguably square and adhere to BS 50's professionalism ideas (where professional = boring, somber and well groomed) but most would take the unicorns over any kind of "professional" copy text.
SlimerJS : A PhantomJS-like tool running Gecko
Am I the only troubled by the name? Riemann's interest were far from monitoring systems...
burdening the world with 6 (six!) descendants sounds pretty entitled to me.
It's probably against their TOS, but it is possible to run your personal dropbox account and a team account on the same machine. It's a pain to set up, but works well once it's running. And since you're paying for both anyway, it seems like it's at least in the spirit of the TOS.
I'm surprised at the footprint of evilwm (217MB/62MB), as shown in the htop window here:

http://awesome.naquadah.org/w/images/6screenshot.jpg

I had always assumed it was pretty lean. I use evilwm, and on my system it weighs in at 32MB/2.2MB (virtual/resident).

What does awesome bring to the table that minimal WMs like ratpoison and evilwm do not?

(Not trying to get into a WM pissing match. I'm genuinely curious.)
OK, let's take a look at your points:

> I'm not sure knowledge of an obscure Windows-specific drag and drop quirk should be a requirement for using Dropbox safely.

Not a "obscure Windows-specific drag and drop quirk". This is how the OS works. If you are a developer you need to know your OS.

> I'm not sure use of a partition table editor should be a requirement for using Dropbox safely.

It isn't, but if you are smart you'll take my advice and go implement it right now.

> Most people use the operating system that came installed on their PC as-is.

Developers are not "most people" and should certainly not behave as such. Your data is the only thing that is important. Your work product. Investing in separate drivers (not partitions, separate physical drives) on every development machine is invaluable. And, backing-them up with disk images on a daily basis is just as important. If the system drive goes out your data is intact. If the data drive goes out the system is intact. Recovery is an academic exercise. If both drives go out it is a little more of a pain in the ass, but at most you'll loose a day's worth of work, not a lifetime or a whole year's worth.

> Dropbox makes the following claims on their website:

Pardon the raw-ness: I don't give a shit of what anyone says or claims about any service. Neither should you or any serious developer. You, and only you are responsible for the safety of your data. You HAVE TO assume failures, not just locally, but also remotely. Hardware fails. Software fucks-up. Even if Dropbox (or name your service) guaranteed 500% redundancy I'd still have my own backups. It would be irresponsible to do otherwise.

Then there's the practicality of the whole thing. The machine I am using to type this has the following physical drives (not partitions on a single drive, these are independent pieces of hardware in the chassis):

Internal backup drive
External backup drive (USB)
System drive
Data
Library
Development

The last four are backed-up daily with incremental backups to both backup drives.

The data drive alone has over 300GB of data right now. The Library and Development drives are about 150GB of data each. That's 600GB of valuable work in three drives probably representing millions of dollars of work-product and value.

So, Dropbox is backup, right? Well, uploading 600GB to your "backup" would take somewhere in the order of 100 days of continuous 24/7 upload with my current DSL connection (~600Kbps upload speed). That's a third of a year. Nope, it's not backup.
My current employers have invested in the Birkman method[0][1], which many people at the company see as quite helpful. I remain skeptical, but then again I found the Enneagram[2] to be helpful in giving me some guidance during a particularly trying time in my life.

[0] http://www.birkman.com
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Birkman
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram_of_Personality