skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My experience has been that specifying in great detail HOW to do things (as SCRUM does for s/w development) doesn't work as well as specifying WHAT to do and letting people figure out how to do it, but holding them accountable for results.

This description of Scrum is so wrong that it couldn't get wronger. Scrum says: the product owner says what they want, the team decides how much they can deliver in a month, then they go off and do it however the hell they choose. After a month they come back and demonstrate what they got done, in the form of working software and only working software. The stakeholders then get to decide whether they like the progress that's been made and whether or not to continue for another month. Nobody gets to interrupt the team while they're working and nobody gets to tell the team how to do their work. That's the heart of Scrum. You can see it's much closer to the opposite of how you described it.

But then I noticed that you were merely responding to this, which is obviously where the wrong idea came from:

The development team is run by a project manager. His role is to move the top priority user stories from product backlog to the sprint backlog and break them in atomic tasks that are distributed to your developers

This is risible. If that's what they're calling Scrum, I fully share your skepticism. It's the essence of the failed approach that Scrum was a reaction against.
TV is stuggling to accept the inevitable transition/metamorphosis into a TV-computer hybrid. Neither won or lost, they will simply converge.

People like sharing big-screen audio-visual entertainment in shared spaces. People like shows and movies and games and sharing. People will have a large-screen device called a TV in their living room for the conceivable future.

The broadcast model will soon be obselete, but the TV itself will not die any time soon.
HA-ha!
I'm not interested in getting into an internet battle, especially not at HN. But I did not make a personal attack, I only criticized your comment (however, you did question my credibility based on where I live).

The problem with your comment is that it was irrelevant to the issue at hand. You're entitled to hold whatever political opinions you want, informed or not, but this isn't a site about politics and it wasn't a topic about politics, which is why your comment was inappropriate. If you want to rant about politics, there are plenty of other places to do that. But I would request that you allow HN to remain free of that sort of thing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8fbrUjjivw :)
Yea, I posted this mainly because it shows how desperate the conservatives are to smear Obama. Blaming the economic issues on him is completely ridiculous, yet here we have the WSJ, formerly a highly credible business publication, posting an editorial that claims Obama is destroying the economy.

Conservatives view this crisis as a chance to get back in power, and they will do what they can to ensure Obama fails. Listen to Rush Limbaugh's recent speech to get an idea of how they think. It is truly sick.
Empirical studies show test driven development improves quality
His reasoning is similar to saying that since out of millions of sperm only one will fertilize the egg, the chance of having a baby is 1 in a million.

For smart people seriously trying to build something people want where VC funding makes sense, I'm sure the chances of getting funded are above 50% and the chances of succeeding are above 50%.
Graphs are more fun than alcohol.

(Adding some geeks of the opposite sex (or same sex if preferred) may increase the fun, though.)
Of course it's true, but why would joe six pack user care? It's not user friendly.
Actually, I wanted to refute your argument with a data point.

American Idol is the most DVR'd show in history. Even tho part of the "process" is to watch and TXT your vote (for a fee), it turns out many people are passively watching the show. They DVR it, watch it, and wait it out till next week.

Essentially, this is the first evidence of internet lurking crossing over to Reality TV contests.

But otherwise, you're completely right. TV is watercooler talk.
I don't really know what to think about this trial, but I don't like it when stories insult my intelligence by implying that there is some doubt as to whether The Pirate Bay is mostly used for copyright violation. There would be no Pirate Bay without "pirated" movies and TV shows.
Interesting, I didn't know that. Thanks for sharing that data point!
From what I've collected (I don't follow all this very closely), around two months ago, the Supreme Court somehow made it clear that they would not reopen internet law anytime soon, which, in effect, shut down the RIAA's main purpose: to take test cases to the Supreme Court in hopes of changing the laws. Layoffs would make sense in that context.
I realize the author wasn't proposing that something like this could be a business, but humor me:

Had this idea a few years back with a business model that paid publishers for cpu cycles gathered from a javascript or flash widget. We hoped to then sell this service to data-intensive industries. Decided it wasn't feasible.

We need to consider cpu cycles gained from this regime vs. bandwidth and cpu cycles lost from the hundreds of web, queue, data servers needed to run this model. IMO it is unlikely that this model will pay off once you consider things like network latency, and trade-offs like job size (higher job size is better) vs. job completion probability (lower job size is better).

Even if the potential for viability were there, it isn't clear that there is a market for something like this. Large scale computing challenges obviously exist, and a lot of people are making money with solutions like cloud computing, but these problems typically involve proprietary data sets, using proprietary or industry standard (good 'ol apps like MySQL) software. Chopping up your sensitive data and sending it en masse to the public to be processed on javascript instead of C++ doesn't exactly fit client needs.
Bowing to the head of state is more done out of respect than any religious duty.

And before you get all high and mighty on the monarchists, keep in mind that many people currently feel the same sort of reverence to the current president. Even worse, many feel this towards the latest hollywood starlet.
The Manga Guide to Databases
Or, as the Germans say, "wäre".
NZ Start-ups and the 90 day trial period
Customer Hacks: A course from the king of customer development
It doesn't really make sense.

Yes, if Amazon is down, Twilio is down but that's true for anything. If your internet connection goes down, you can't access Twilio either.
But chances are that Amazon's EC2 will be up while one startup's own servers will break.

I find that interesting how relying on cloud computing is often met with two remarks:
1. If Amazon/GAE/Rackspace goes down, your company is down too.
2. Why should I trust Amazon/Google with my data?

But why would you trust the company that uses these providers more than the providers themselves? The providers probably have more to lose. And why would that company be better at keeping the servers up and running?
TV lost? While I agree with many of the points PG brings up, I feel something is missing.

According to Nielson, TV viewership is at an all time high (http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/tag/total-us-television-...). Also, Oscars had a 13% increase from last year with 36.3M viewers. 50+M viewers watched Obama's inauguration on TV.. not on their computers. And of course, we know that those teenagers who are using social apps still cast more votes for their favorite american idol contestant than the sum of adults cast for president. (btw, if anyone knows where to get an annual histogram of viewership in US, that is what I was really looking for). TV viewership may indeed plummet in the future, but as of right now its at an all time high.

Then, I can't help but notice that I still procure my internet from my cable provider. And that same cable provider is not only actively fighting against network neutrality, but they are also blocking my ability to download anything from Torrent. They are far from beaten.

Lastly, what is the real difference between watching shows on my TV verse Computer. They are both using digital pipes, they both have microprocessors, memory and HDs - one has a bigger screen than the other (usually). The only real difference, and increasingly so, is that one is proprietary, and one is open. TV has not lost.. their content is (unfortunately) as relevant and abundant to the average American as ever.

All TV has lost is utter dominance - much like MS windows lost its utter dominance with the adoption of Linux and the rise of OSX (but they are still #1 by a lot). However, whether its piped through a monitor or an HD flatscreen, the US consumer will continue to glue their eyeballs to the content we call TV today for some time before open content can even begin to realize the same advertising dollars as the proprietary networks do.
Thanks for all of the discussion, everyone. To help clarify my argument, I've published Instapaper's browser usage stats from February as reported by Google Analytics:

http://www.marco.org/83217369

Internet Explorer was used for 3.63% of visits to the site during the month before I made this change.
I think it's dangerous to declare this contest over. Clearly, the large interests on the losing side of this battle aren't willing to go down without a fight.

Between net-neutrality, restrictive piracy laws and all sorts of anti-consumer tools we are far from seeing the notion of TV as it currently exists being effectively replaced.
used to use an example wherein I pointed to the absurdity of a car manufacturer asserting a right to all photos of their cars, but some car manufacturer actually did that without widespread derision recently.

Yeh I am fairly certain in the UK that wuold not stand up. Certainly it doesnt fall under copyright.

What happens when you write a book and ask people for money to read it (unless we are arguing that everything should be free :)) and then someone else copies your book and sells it slightly cheaper than you. Should we not have protective laws to stop that occuring?

I think copyright is being confused here. With the similarity aspect we are talking intellectual property not copyright. Copyrightr (In the UK) applies simply to direct copies or derivative works (in your example if someone copied my book but added a new ending and a few new chapters).

If someone rewrites your entire plot without using any of your text they are fine (and the 2 works will stand and fall on their relative merits). But if you tried to write a book about Harry Potter the Wizard you would probably run into trobule - because the name has (I believe) been trade marked in that context (I could be wrong - but it is a dramatic example).
Internet increases connectivity therefore long tail becomes even shorter than TV's one. netflix' data should confirm it.

The general idea of the essay is false now (TV hours > internet's one).

IMing or twittering on iPhone is not the same as watching a TV program simultaneously with millions of other people.
Yeah, so there are only a small number of colleges that expensive.

How about we say $100k of debt for a degree?
It seems to get every picture 6 times.

Would you be interested in publishing the source, as an example to other people who might be tempted to do similar things in bash ?
There really are people planning to reduce their income to get below Obama's $250k bracket
that's how i started by saying "most startups fail..."! ;-)

and yes there are startups that return a nice amount to a small group. my first company, Trio Development, was sold to Apple. we were 4 guys, no venture funding, and 23 years old and were psyched with the outcome.

the point is that way too many people come out to silicon valley thinking their startup is going to be the next google or even a smaller success like a mysql being bought for a billion dollars, and the fact is that most don't happen that way, so make sure you love what you are doing regardless of whether its a big success.
I don't have high hopes for this getting upmodded, but it sure is a funny story.
Reading the full text, I wanted to bring attention to a section titled "Thoughts on the World Economic Crisis." The introduction could easily describe what's happening now, and it is followed by useful refutation of causes of the depression that should be kept in mind during discussion of things like the bailout.
I thought about this and I think I see where your failing to draw a line. Censorship is about stifiling someones rights - whereas copyright is a "casual enforcement" of someones right to keep control of their own works. It isnt really censorship because what right does anyone have to profit from a piece of work except the original creator?
I think you're mostly right. The shelf life of a computer now is a lot higher than it used to be. I built my XP Machine in 2003. It's had some replacements/upgrades during that time...HDD, DVD Burner, more RAM, etc. it's still the same cpu/board and it's still humming along just fine, meeting all my needs.

Unless you're into the latest gaming, I don't see any major reason to shorten the current PC lifespan.

Even with Macs, had they not switched to Intel processors, I'd probably still have my old G4 PowerBook.
uh, if the chances for succeeding were above 50% (of course depends on your definition for success), then banks would fund startups... it's way lower. being an investor in a few venture firms, i have seen the results, and the vast majority of startups in which they invest fail.
You mean something like that doesn't exist yet? Wasn't that the selling point of that recently hyped cheap camera whose name I completely forgot?
The past couple of weeks have really been a lesson in FUD. I have politically active family members on both sides of the line, and its amazing to hear how different every policy sounds from each of them.
I especially liked pg's statement "But it was connecting to other people that got everyone else: that's what made even grandmas and 14 year old girls want computers."

The power of point-to-point cannot be overestimated. Indeed it had great impact in getting people to sign up for Internet access and connect a computer to the Internet in the first place. I discovered online interaction in 1992, when I attended a conference about homeschooling in Washington state and saw a demonstration of the Prodigy online service there. I made sure to connect a modem to my computer (remember dial-up?) and soon entered into interesting conversations with people all over the country about a common topic of interest. None of the content I was reading was produced by professionals--it was all parents talking to other parents. My online interaction completely displaced TV from my life, and soon greatly reduced the number of postal letters I sent to friends, because I could reach most of my best friends online anyway.

Sometime a while later in the 1990s, I saw an analysis in an industry magazine about whether the main application of the Internet would be broadcasting of professionally produced content or point-to-point communication. That analysis pointed out that at that time the revenues of the Baby Bell companies were MANY times greater than the revenues of all the movie and TV production companies. Point-to-point is where the revenue streams are. Broadcasting doesn't draw in as much money, because it doesn't appeal to as many audience members in as many ways.

My use of television now consists just about entirely of watching the local TV news and one network news program broadcast to my home with my children. We don't watch any dramas, and only occasionally watch Saturday Night Live's opening segment. (We don't subscribe to cable and live in an area with an unwatchable digital signal, so we resort to just one analog broadcast signal at the moment.) TV is expendable in our house. Internet-connected computer use is indispensable.
I wonder why this isn't happening faster.

I mean, I'm not a big YouTube fan: I normally get linked there to metalworking/machining videos but once there I stay for a long time. YouTube is really sticky. This kind of stuff is candy for me and linked with well targeted ads, the provider can make money. I know that if I'm watching some guy in a basement show how he built a CNC lathe, I wouldn't mind even really obvious product placement or a short 10-15 second commercial about machining before the video starts.

There are many, many talented people out there who could be making their own videos and profiting from it. Is the problem just lack of sponsorship or a good advertising model?

There has to be business opportunity here. Maybe a site that video artists can go to with samples of their work looking to be matched with suitable sponsors.
Gears and Native Client are likely just for this.

http://code.google.com/contests/nativeclient-security/
Couldn't agree more! :-)
This is pretty close to reality in the form of the Eye-Fi: www.eye.fi. The sd card automatically uploads pictures/video over wifi to your computer and/or certain social networking sites.
All TV has lost is utter dominance - much like MS windows lost its utter dominance with the adoption of Linux and the rise of OSX (but they are still #1 by a lot).

Both TV and Microsoft lost. They just aren't quite dead yet - it takes time for giants to fall.
I'm not sure how you can assert that there is _zero_ doubt as to the pirate bay being used mostly to violate copyright. It would be a breach of journalistic integrity to state that "everyone knows that the pirate bay is only for getting copyrighted content illegally," or any statement similar to that.

As such, the story states: "As for The Pirate Bay, the argument might be made that nearly all of its popular downloads are in fact illegal." The story continues by commenting that there is "somewhat shockingly...[no] sort of survey of site content." I fail to see how this is an insult to your intelligence, rather than simply unbiased reporting.
This is very interesting. Thank you for the link!
At their logo, what are these gears doing? Blocking each other?
Cringely's subscription-based mortgage refinancing startup
Part of the problem is that the professor does not want just any invention, he wants us to "change the world". We have to find a major problem in the world, and invent something to deal with it.

His standards seem to be very arbitrary as to what qualifies. Does anyone here knows of a major problem in the world ( other than obvious ones like generically unclean water )? Finding these through web searches is difficult to say the least :-)
I think a large part of the problem is that the content is increasingly crap!

My TV watching is basically Food Network, Ovation TV (artist & musician documentaries) some History channel, a bit of Discovery channel (Mythbusters & Dirty Jobs), Cartoon Network adult swim and movies. I haven't watched broadcast TV in almost a decade and I don't get the local satellite feed. My local news comes from the radio during my commute.

Fox, ABC, NBC, etc. simply don't exist for me. CNN I have watched exactly ONCE in the last year: I heard that a plane landed in the Hudson river and I rushed home to watch it on TV then got disgusted by the usual crappy CNN coverage and switched it off.

A local bar could have an open mike night streamed online and I would watch that (with the bar's name prominently displayed in the background) over just about anything on TV. And when I got tired of watching I could go to the bar :-)
Personally, I would love to invent something for space, but I doubt that it would fly in my class.

We are focusing on energy production, but so many people are working in this area that there are very few low hanging fruit left.
77 Inspirational Typography | AntsMagazine
Hire HN: Designer for simple dating site
Hey HN,

I'm looking for a designer to help shape a small dating website I'm working on.

You should be knowledgeable in Python/Ruby/Perl/PHP/SQL/LISP/C/C#/.NET/CSS/HMTL/JS/Ajax and have at least 5 years experience with each. But really, CSS/HTML/JS/Ajax is fine too.

If you're interested, I'd like to see some of your past work.

You're more than welcome to reach me at kyro@kyrobeshay.com / kyro at irc.freenode.net #startups / kyrobeshay on AIM.

Thanks.
The "bug" of finding each picture six times turns into a wonderful Andy Warhol-like feature. Each picture claims more of one's attention this way. I say leave it!
Mark Hurd's Moment
Wow, both a journalist and lawyer were too stupid to figure out how the tax code works? This really isn't rocket science.

Every time journalists and newspapers whine and carry on about going out of business... they need this quoted to them. The problem with taking advice from stupid people is you can't use it -- you have to check everything yourself instead of trusting the information. Which essentially renders any newspaper written by reporters like this utterly useless.
The article spends two grafs on the "question" (the prosecution asserts [em. original] that...) of whether The Pirate Bay mostly traffics in unlawful content, at one point pulling out a statistic that claims the opposite is true and pointedly noting that the statistic hadn't been refuted.

If you want to make the argument that it's a shoddy prosecution, fine. That wasn't my read of the story. My read was, "maybe The Pirate Bay is used legitimately as often as it is abused for copyright violation". If I'm expected to believe that's even "maybe" true, I'm a bit offended.
In fact, the only person to present such evidence was defendant Peter Sunde, who claimed that a survey of his own showed that 80 percent of the 1,000 .torrent files he examined appeared to point toward material that was legal to distribute. </quote>

Do you know a source that provides different data?
Anyone else notice the wsj editorial pages taking a hard swing right in the last few months/years?

They've always been the most conservative major newspaper editorial wise, but it seems like in the last few months I've seen quite a bit more of this totally mindless junk, just general hit pieces with basically no evidence or support.

Shame, the rest of the paper is so good, and the republicans could use some well thought out spokesmen right now.
I like the "new media" angle here --- a professional ABC newsroom ran this batshit crazy story, and the blogomosphere caught and corrected it. Death of the republic predicted, film at 11.
How insensitive! I have 5 years of experience with Python/Ruby/Perl/PHP/SQL/LISP/C/C#/.NET/CSS/HMTL/JS/Ajax, but now I feel totally over-qualified for this gig.
Well, I think the thing that is "good" (vs. just new or hip, which is certainly part of it) about Twitter is that it combines the self-centeredness of blogging with the laziness of a 140 character limit. Now one can broadcast oneself to the uninterested masses without even having to come up with anything to say. I think it's crap, but I also think that as long as people are starved for attention it's crap that isn't going away.

That said, Shaq is amusing: http://twitter.com/THE_REAL_SHAQ
I read: author wanted to make his website pretty, but IE was making it hard, especially since he was developing on a Mac which made it harder to test, so author dropped support for IE. Author then explains less than 10% of his users use IE, anyway, so it doesn't really matter. Sparks browser war.

While I admit, IE really blows, and I hate developing for it, it's really not that bad. It's manageable if you test on it often, which author failed to do. Is it hard to make a 9 cell table to get rounded corners? Or how about learning "hasLayout" which fixes virtually every IE6+ css rendering bug?