skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Craziest bat dare ever
Sound great for a non-technical company.

In the drier example they give, the GM is able to understand the initial symptoms, follow the chain of inference, and identify the root cause.

What about the case where the chain of problems involves highly technical ones that the GM is really in no position to answer?

Before you say that tech companies should be run by hackers, consider that even unfamiliarity with a sub-project can make an otherwise competent techie give retarded advice.
Sun's stock rising on reports of possible sale to IBM
Creating and launching an RIA for Salesforce AppExchange in two months flat
I've heard about this story alllll week - so why this is on the front page of HN now is a bit strange.

Forgive me for being a curmudgeon, but I would likely be voting this story down given the chance.
You can see what they index here: http://adioso.com/about?r=hf - which is growing.

(They're an Aussie startup).
Mysteries of the Region: Knowledge Dyamics In Silicon Valley
Hey thanks, TextWrangler looks much more promising than TextMate.
If you have access to trade journal type archives (IEEE, ACM, etc) you can find a lot of articles/studies on pair programming. Most of those that I've seen tend to be positive in their attitude toward pairing, though it's sometimes hard to tell if bias is at work there; also, many are in an academic setting environment rather than a corporate or startup/consulting environment, which may lead to some different results.

If you're a student, or know one, it's very probable that your school's library might have online access to some of these journals. If you want statistics, that might be a good place to start.
Don't be so sure you won't end up a libertarian if you keep your eyes open.

The injustices you've just discovered are the underlying sentiments that motivate most libertarians. The basic libertarian insight is that far from being new, these activities have been the fundamental business of government for millennia. In times like these, the curtain is pulled back a little bit farther than usual.
It depends entirely on what kind of person that 1400 student is.

Maybe I have a 1400 without studying. Or maybe I spent an hour a day every day for three years so that I could get that 1400. I have a friend who got a 2390 on the SATs, 800s in something like 6 SAT2s, all because she studied for them nonstop. If she hadn't studied, she wouldn't have that same score.

The insidious part is that we're taught that the difference between a 2390 and a 2400 is more than the difference between a 2380 and a 2390. Either you're "perfect", or you're not. That doesn't mean perfect people rise to the top. It means that "perfect" students are the ones who waste their lives studying to look better on paper, when in reality they're just wasting their time on something meaningless.
The title is a wee bit misleading - California, according to the survey, asked a number of CEO's "what is the best and worst places for jobs and business growth"

That's not the same as the worst state in which to start a business. It's not even coming from entrepreneurs, but from CEO's of established companies.

Here's a link to the referred article: http://www.chiefexecutive.net/ME2/Audiences/dirmod.asp?sid=&...
I thought that was all originally DEC Alpha IP.
So, they're only going after "webmasters", rather than the rest of us, who are purely passive consumers of information. That's an incredibly archaic thing for them to say, and it shows that they really don't get it.

There is no hard distinction between the people who make content online and the people who view it. If someone posts a comment on an Australian forum that links to Wikileaks, who gets fined? The person running the forum, who can't possibly police such things? The person who posted the link, who may be identified only by a username? Can Australia's policies deal with an indignant storm of linking to forbidden web sites? A thousand culprits, and not a webmaster to be found in the whole bunch!

The people writing the laws still think of the Internet as television 2.0, as a broadcast medium.
I don't agree with your position that AIG was in the right by paying bonuses.

If the executive in question can be bought so easily I don't think they'd stick around when they know they can make more money elsewhere. Case in point: NYT reported today that according to Andrew Cuomo 52 of the executives that were given bonuses have already left the company.

These people took the money and ran.
But as soon as they use this evidence against someone in court, their cover will be blown. And, if they can break the encryption but refuse to use it to convict anyone, it's still safe for criminals to use.
The article has this problem too. "An anonymous source says a friend of a friend said he knows someone that thinks..."

This reads as FUD they made up to sell ad views.
E is compatible with Textmate bundles, but it is not the same editor. For one thing, it's got serious stability problems. TextMate doesn't handle big files well, but it very rarely crashes.
I'm a bit lost - what does this provide above existing tools - e.g. MallocDebug+Shark on OSX or Valgrind/heap/leaks/etc on Linux?
That bugs me too. I wonder if I could hack the bundle to fix it...
The difference is that a laser applies nearly 100% of its energy to the target (the rest being lost to atmospheric effects). A bullet loses energy quickly as it travels through the atmosphere.

A laser also travels "at the speed of light," making targeting much simpler.

A laser also travels in a straight line. A bullet is affected by gravity and wind, all of deflect it from its path and must be accounted for.
Personally I think marketing is to blame but it's not the kind this article mentions. I've been wanting to buy something from Apple to replace my PPC powerbook G4 for a few years now but what I have works and unfortunately Apple's marketing department hasn't come up with anything I would rather have. Sometimes I've been tempted to get a "new" G4 just because with all the wear and tear my laptop's case is getting a little shabby.
New in GMail Labs: YouTube, Picasa, Flickr and Yelp previews
Or even better, a good language to replace them both.
Hmm... thanks, hadn't heard about this. Does DevHouse Pittsburgh have free beer and red bull?
I want to see a major MMO start offering modding tools that let indie developers make mods that people can play for some small sum of money -- say, somewhere between free and a dollar. I think it could really take off if the modding tools were flexible enough and the mods cool enough. Small profit margins, large audiences, and tiny marginal costs are where it's at.

Installing new games and learning how to play them is work. Making a game you already like be bigger and better could be a profitable business.
Any blog post on the companies yet?
It's always so cool seeing faces behind these different things!

(I mean, it's also cool seeing the various demos, obviously. But I like seeing the people who've made all this.)

EDIT: Also, after going through the gallery... DivvyShot trio, you guys make me smile.
That a 'bonus' is discretionary or conditional is the common usage -- but the condition set in these contracts, staying through certain dates (even if the recipients are not there now) was apparently met.

It also seems the case that in certain fields, 'bonus' is essentially a part of contractually or traditionally guaranteed compensation. They've stretched the term -- but that's become the new meaning, in that field, for years if not decades. So a lot of this hullabaloo is caused by terminological confusion.
Very clever, and it's probably true that "intelligent mistakes" are the keys to believable and (more importantly) to enjoyable gamer experience, especially in the domain of games where everything is known and completely predictable (such as in his example with billiards).

Fascinating stuff indeed.
Great article from Mick!

This also reminds how the folks from New World Computing (Heroes Of Might of Magic) were forced to dumb down the AI, so it's more interresting, challenging...
I'd need to double check the license agreement about whether compiling others distributed code for your personal use is kosher. However, if you pay the $100, you get the all-important signing key to put any app on you and your 99 best friends' Iphones.
I think there's a spirit of something else that many people associate with Windows and Microsoft, and it's not entrepreneurship.
Any chance of a quick outline of what the four steps are?
Save yourself the time and read the Ericson paper directly. Most of Outliers is based on it with anecdotes to pad it. Many of the newspaper articles about Outliers repeat the anecdotes in detail.

http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...
Is anyone else attending tomorrow?
Not many aggregates are truly equal to the sum of the parts.

I would argue that it's at closer to being proportional to some sort of weighted average, where the weights are activity based: a very active member has a much larger impact than an inactive member.

Of course, it's also very debatable whether community IQ is a good variable to maximize on. Civility & creativity both strike me as more important, once some basic intelligence threshold is exceeded.
"Fake Steve Conroy" fesses up: Twitter satire of Australian Communications Minister
Gmail is free. People still pay for hosted email. If you get locked out of gmail or they lose all your email, who are you going to call? Would you host mission critical email that millions of dollars hinge on on gmail?

Even if that's addressed, in a huge market, a tiny market share can still be huge. Opera has somewhere around 1% (non-mobile) browser market share, and they still have millions of customers.

If there are 10M voice services customers, 1% is 100k. If you can charge $10-30 per customer per month (https://apps.simulscribe.com/signup/register), you've still got a $12-36M/year business. For VCs this may be a zombie, but it's still a great small business (a la 37signals).
I don't think this qualifies as a garden path sentence because the reader doesn't "build an incorrect structure because the next word doesn't fit into that structure".

This is more an example of syntactic ambiguity where a sentence may be "reasonably interpreted in more than one way": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity

Interesting link, though. I didn't know the formal term for these types of sentences.
In the spirit of FSJ, intended in part to satirize Australian governmental attempts to increase internet censorship.

Some of the tweets:

"Apparently LOL means 'Laugh Out Loud' and not 'Lots Of Love'. Now I'm going to have to re-read all those internet comments about me."

"about to board my flight to Melbourne .. nabbed seat 1B! a person in a wheelchair was going to get it .. lucky IM CONROY! Trump card played!"

"When I Googled for information on how to circumvent surrogacy laws in Victoria, I bookmarked the results so we could ban the sites later."

"The filter is a community service; it's not just about removing content, we can also repair content. We can make it truthier."

"I don't think it's unreasonable to compare the National Filter Network to a cure for Super-AIDS; both of them protect children."

"Dear journalists; please do not continue to report on my enormous penis and ability to please the ladies. My personal life is off-limits."

"Today I received an I-Phone. The IT people tell me that it is biometrically activated, but no matter how much I lick it, it won't turn on."
the shim outputs a log of the memory allocation functions called (malloc,realloc,calloc,free) that can be replayed by the replayer program.

you can then replay the exact same allocation pattern against different allocators to determine which is best for you.

to my knowledge, the tools you mention do not provide similar functionality.
People say this sarcastically, but has anyone ever gone down this path intentionally, knowing they don't have a secret, but pretending they do?
Yes. And they seem to call him "Joz" = "Jobs" + "Woz"
I love Big Picture - it's a great example of a US newspaper taking advantage of the digital format - but I agree it belongs on Reddit.
96% get approved, of that 96%, 98% supposed get approved within a week.
Simulscribe has an 800 number and support you can talk to. For firms where this is a mission critical service I think Simulscribe will remain a viable. Google doesn't have the strongest brand for services to business. I would think Fedex/Kinko, UPS, or Intuit (and even IBM) would be more highly respected by many of firms currently relying on Simulscribe/Phonetag.
Generally maybe, and especially currently, but you ought to be able to find something if you look hard enough.
you are correct in what is happening "right now". But that is not what got AIG and many others into this mess.

AIG "insured" debts it did not have enough holdings to back up. I quote the word insured because, insurance is barely what it used to be.

Traditionally, government demanded insurers have low-risk holdings to back up a sizable percent of their outstanding obligations. The regulations that handled this have been dismantled over the years. Additionally, the "insurance" has been broadened to include other type of investment vehicles instead of traditional insurance. AIG got greedy and was able to do so because they and others lobbied hard to allow them to be greedy. This was a multi-decade process.
> Is this what you really think about finance?

All of finance, of course not, I was talking about the bad ones, the criminals.

> What we have now needs some tinkering, but it is immensely better.

You'll note, I was discussing tinkering. When I say our system has failed, I don't mean throw out the whole system and start over. I was specifically talking about tinkering with how large we allow the banks to get. Me thinks you're over reacting a bit and assuming I'm wanting to completely change the current system.
Fully patched OSX hacked within seconds of start of pen test contest
The "finally" in the ad at the top is very annoying. I've always been able to "share & syncronize hi-res photos among friends!".

Maybe divvyshot does it better, but there's no "finally" about it.
I don't see the connection between game cracking and grabbing lots of p2p traffic reliably.
...and if you commit fraud or take risks that hurt your company, do they still have to pay your bonus?
As opposed to what, the classic let's just do nothing, bury our head in the sand, and hope the market failure that just fucked us six ways from Sunday just fixes itself?

I was proposing a specific solution, limiting the size of the banks so we keep our current system but not allowing it to get too dependent on any one bank to eliminate single points of failure. Perhaps you missed that part.
I think that the IQ of a forum is not the average but actually the top and the bottom. The top people control the quality posts, and the bottom people make trouble.

The answer to your question depends on the goal. If the goal is to solve a problem then the IQ of the whole is actually the IQ of the top members, and NOT the average.

If the goal is competition (everyone wants attention, or wants to make the best posts) then it's more often the IQ of the lowest members.

But the average IQ of a large group is never a good measure because the good floats to the top (i.e. the top IQ's matter), and the bad clutters it (i.e. the bottom IQ's matter).
That's implicit in ftse's point, which is to raise the question of when censorship is moral.
What is it about LASERs that make them so useful in so many domains?
Y Combinator Demo Day Spring 2009
Right ok.... What I don't get is that it mentions profiling the advantage of TCMalloc, which is thread-cached malloc. Is this going to be realistic when the replayer is a single thread? (I could be missing something)
It's the classic "Paris Hilton at the Oscars" case.

That is, more people watch the oscars because Paris Hilton is there, even though she is not likely to win one.
Answer to the easy one:

Each prisioner agrees that if the two other prisioners have the same color of skullcap, that he (pardon my sexism) will switch his switch to indicate that he has the other color. Assuming a random distribution of colors, this will work three out of four times.
What's Next for Google (from 2005)
This is probably real (CPUs have tons of errata) but irrelevant. If an attacker is in the kernel you've already lost.
building walls around the immaturity of specific interpreters

That sounds like a good definition of scripting.

At least that's what it always feels like to me when for one reason or another I have to implement more than I really want to in an environment lacking a set of abstractions or tools necessary for an elegent solution.
"convict"? "evidence"? "criminals"?

We aren't dealing with a police agency, remember. We are dealing with a "national security" agency, and that phrase is an umbrella term that covers every type of shady business governments have engaged in since time immemorial. The NSA does not deal in "evidence" and "courts." It deals in "should we sic CIA assassins on this leader?" and "should we orchestrate a smear campaign against these nearly successful activists?" and other fun questions.
If they had developed a way for 12 animators to make a feature of that could compete with the features being made by 100-200 animators then sure

Aah, I think we have some wires crossed here - I'm not trying to make films to start out with, we're going to be building episodic content, basically webisodes to start with.

One of the inspirations has been, very roughly, the sitcom model. Artificially limiting your sets, characters and creating story week after week. Also, since a lot of things will be set up in advance, the pipeline changes considerably to something that Disney/Pixar or Dreamworks would do.

The cost of production for episodes after the initial artifact production is, for all intensive purposes, the cost of the animators + voice talent, so it is a scalable model in that sense.

Think about it like the TV show Frasier. They essentially used 4 sets, 5 main characters, several occasional characters, one fictional character and a slew of extras to create 6 seasons of content.

If you keep the voice talent inhouse (utilise people around you) then the numbers of employees required goes down and so does essentially your cost of production, which is the limiting factor really for why stuff doesn't get made for the web.

3D animation is a totally different beast to 2D (unless you go with a cutout style) in that it is essentially a form of puppetry with digital characters. If that makes sense?

The purpose of this thread was (for me) to get some intelligent feedback on the Zombie genre and a rough estimation if I'm in the right ballpark or not. The genre itself lends itself well to being something that can be produced with a small outlay in human capital which is why I'm investigating it.
Introducing CK12 Foundation: www.ck12.org. A non Profit that addresses this very problem. CK12 is working on Free and Open text books under Creative Common.
> The government is not in the business of meeting any objective goals.

That's an absurd statement. We don't send officials to congress without them running a campaign specifying their goals. You might not like the process, or trust the process, or think private companies (dictatorships) do it better, but don't say they have no goals. Every single one of them has goals for their districts/states and they get fired (not reelected) if they fail more than the public likes.

If government seems so inefficient and difficult to get things done, it's often because members of congress have conflicting goals so getting anything done is difficult. This isn't an accident, it's how the system is supposed to work.

> There is punishment for incompetence.

Usually, but as we're clearly seeing now government and business are so tightly interwoven in the modern world that execs knowingly abuse the government and do things that would be bad if they didn't know they'd be bailed out by their buddies in government who they paid to have elected.

> I suggest that firing the current crop of executives

Not going to happen and you know it.
It's not even 3 browsers. It's IE6 and IE7 or IE8... depending on which one you have installed on your machine. Which you can test anyways.

So really, it's a 250MB trial to test IE6. But not really test IE6. Just render images from IE6. Unacceptably slowly.

Sometimes it boggles my mind that software can be written this badly. I think this is a new low, even for Microsoft.
Solid state drives: performance becoming affordable (saga)
The hacker house has a new housemate (David from VentureBeat). We thought we'd give him a warm welcome by picking him up from the airport.

He paid us back by uploading a photo of us to the Demo Day event.
Goodbye To Glib Gurus And Their Gobbledegook
The hardest part of that is actually finding all the relevant historical data & getting it into a good form. Anyway, I'm not about to spend hours on picking a bracket, so I'll leave that to someone else.
I thought he was just happy that telephone companies will buy his speech to text service/technology, which will make him rich
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/18/y-combinator-demo-day-s...
So there is a price, but it's secret?

Sounds like the same scam as tipping to me. Get me there and I will pay/tip over the odds out of fear, guilt, social pressure. But I will try to avoid going as putting that hassle and discomfort on me doesn't make for a pleasant customer experience.
ETech: Nathan Eagle, "txteagle: Crowd-Sourcing on Mobile Phones in the Developing World"
I never said it was revolutionary. It's a feature that seems useful, is new to the iPhone, and will be a free upgrade. As a very happy iPhone owner (and yes I've had Sony Ericcsons, Motorolas, Nokias, HTCs, etc...) this upcoming feature (and the others) are something to look forward to.

If Sony Ericcson offered a software upgrade that did over the air sync of all my MobileMe data, that would be great, and I can't imagine saying "well I've been able to do that for ages with my iPhone" to a happy Sony Ericcson owner. Why does it have to be a battle?
ive always figured that online iq test were on average higher because they want you to buy the results. Id also doubt that over 5% have an iq of 140+
Would you not think someone owns the patent to such technology or it would be a software patent & thus a bit useless?
Exactly - this is #1 on Reddit's home page right now.
They don't make the presentations public. A reporter over the summer session took video, after being told not to, and won't be invited back.
I doubt the family is living in a $40/night motel because it's their first choice.
Terra Bite in Kirkland (about 5 blocks from Google) does this, too: http://www.terrabite.org/press.htm
Good, then let them leave and invest their (and their friends' money) as they see fit. Don't hand them my tax dollars so they can then leave and do as they see fit.

I sincerely doubt that the sum total of all burned down houses, deaths, auto accidents, and so on that are handled by AIG-backed companies is within two orders of magnitude of the bailout. So let AIG crumble, have the federal government handle the insurance payout to the insured as an emergency measure, and for the people who lost their policies, they can go to another insurance company.
I would be willing to bet that the student with the self-discipline necessary to study until he raises his grade by 600 points (a near impossibility) and the student who is bright enough to score a 1400 without studying are both better college prospects than the student that scored an 800, on average.

I agree that too much can be read into tests, but to say they are meaningless is to overstate the case.
You can now buy a contract-free 16GB iPhone for $699. But would you?