skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look, I used to love Buffett. Read the Warren Buffett way, read this old yellow book he wrote in the 70's about value investing. Studied him. Modeled him.

What 'old yellow book' is that? As far as I know, Buffett hasn't written a book. You might be thinking of The Intelligent Investor; he's written the introduction for an edition of that one.

Regarding your larger point: I don't think anyone claims that the entire recession was due to the fact that loans were made or homes were bought. The recession was due to the prices at which these activities took place. It's not hypocritical to say that, for example, GE was overpriced at $30, but it's cheap at $10.

And I would take issue with the idea that the current crisis is due to anything 'selfish'. It's centered on a highly subsidized market, which was designed to give people homes, not make the government rich. The fact that this well-meaning behavior backfired so dramatically is only obvious in hindsight, or to anybody who reads much history at all.
True but it works even for small teams. Once you are more than 3 people in the team it makes a lot of sense to use Agile methodologies.
The Stephon Marbury Bank Rescue Model
I bet they wouldn't let a Wal-Mart in Detroit. See Chicago.
Thin, Flexible Solar Panels Revealed
Dial H for Happiness: How Neuroengineering May Change Your Brain
They are saying that: "actually hosted in Asia as well as Africa."!

If they hosted it in Sinai, then "actually" it stills in Asia, not Africa! Sinai is the only part in Egypt that belongs to Asia... I am from Egypt and I know it.
Thanks - my point is that delegating the responsibility of user interaction to the people who develop IDE's and text editors is a mistake. I should make that explicit to avoid any confusion.

I'd be interested to hear about the programming specific also. I'm still solidifying those ideas in an essay separately from the conversation-story, but I'm curious about the feasibility of a clarification-loop, or in general, a system where "code" is ambiguous, with the "compiler" making educated guesses and drawing attention to places of high uncertainty.
"You separate the business from the development. You need a product guy, interested in features that will move the product fwd. He is called the product owner. He keeps a file (an excel works best) - a product backlog - with all the features, called user stories. They are organized by priority. 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."

"break them into atomic tasks": I didn't think this sort of hyper-specialization would work in a fast-paced environment. It seems to treat developers as just English-to-C++ translators.

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. The latter style will naturally result in the evolution of automated systems such as regressions, quantitative user feedback, beta progam etc to ensure that the work got done and quality is maintained.

One should have some structure and avoid reinventing the wheel, but I'm skeptical of detailed recipes like this.
Shunning Advances Through the Instinct to Equality
Not trolling. I'm 100% serious.
Meh. You're probably right; being able to simply compile a Mach-O binary and load it over the network is more convenient than, say, proxying system calls or basic blocks like Mosdef.
And I would take issue with the idea that the current crisis is due to anything 'selfish'.

Sounds like the claim of someone working in finance. If you're referring to CRA then just follow the money and you will see CRA accounted for little over a third of all subprime loans. AND, anyone in finance should know it wasn't just the subprime deals that went down. The entire mortgage market went down. CRA being the culprit is a long-shot at best, but please elaborate if I've got you wrong.

With regard to the well-meaning behavior, well, it wasn't just well-meaning behavior just like it wasn't just CRA. There was plenty of selfishness. People on the street couldn't get enough paper for packaging securities. The money on the commission for selling this was huge. You're crazy if you think anyone on the street will turn down an easy way to make money.
The "but" seems to imply that he nonetheless thinks that intelligence is effecting taste. I don't know. I've been shocked by some relatively intelligent people with atrocious taste in things, but it wouldn't be a shocker if the idiots really did like "Lil Wayne" because they're idiots. I mean, jesus fucking christ:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owwSHg1fivM
In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue
Love minis. I've had a g4 (gave it away), an intel, about to order another.
Well, my startup is a web platform company. As an example, one of our customers was, as you say, getting applications turned around in 6 months start to finish. Within 2 months after buying our product, one person at the company built 3 applications in 2 months by himself. That was a nationwide car insurance company. I'm sure you've seen their commercials on TV.

Another example. A major car company in the u.s. had a legacy system built on an old mainframe. This system managed peer reviews for different manufacturing plants. The customer migrated this entire system in one month -- including going through the learning curve.

Another example, I myself built a system to help a local small business manage their entire business online /and/ expand their business model to include an additional revenue stream. Total time, start to finish, including requirements gathering, design, and construction: 150 hours.

So yes, it does run quite contrary to what most people believe about application development. It's a paradigm shift and it's real.
Raising the prices and offering little new. Thanks Apple!
Many days of reading here:

http://market-ticker.denninger.net
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Most of what you see in the msm (CNBC, Cramer, newspapers) is either uninformed opinion at best, or deliberate lies.

By the way, Japan's lost decade is now two decades, note the current stock market level and recent 12% drop in GDP. Although to visit there, you would never know, it is an awesome country and everything seems perfectly fine on the surface.
The laptop (MB, MBP) market is where it's at for Apple.
When all the developers are the founders your approach will work. If you have a different dev team it is very very difficult to make your team so dedicated as you are. I think we have such a team but still having a system to put all the user stories on the same page and see how the team is moving helps a lot. If you reduce Agile to hyper specialization you loose a lot. It helped us a lot by:
- defining what Done means
- setting goals so we can release something new every 2 weeks
- measuring our activity: what doesn't get measured doesn't get managed
etc

And it is not about telling people how to do things. They decide how to do it, how long it takes etc... So I think you either got that wrong or I explained it badly!
And I'm pretty sure that the U.S. has signed a treaty (treaties?) making torture illegal, so the administration's behavior is illegal in addition to being immoral. The Bush administration gave absurd definitions of torture to try to classify the torture they were engaged in as not-torture, but I do not think anyone outside of the Bush administration, or knee-jerk partisans, take their definitions seriously.
Paul,
I have a question!

What is the programming language that Gmail was coded with?

Thanks.
March 21st is Developer Day
Are there benefits to paying students for good performance in school?
Worldwide PC shipments are expected to drop 12% this year
Eating Well on a Downsized Food Budget
Intel Introduces Atom Chips for New Devices
Happy Square Root Day, math geeks
I was in downtown Detroit on Saturday night, and I felt safe and had a good time, though I was near the "reinvigorated neighborhood around Wayne State" referenced in the article. There are lots of cool places in downtown Detroit. Good restaurants, art, theater, music, it's all there. In the summer there are some great outdoor music festivals.

But one of the interesting things about Detroit is that you're never far from urban decay. Even nice houses, or the revitalized part of Woodward, is at most 2 or 3 blocks from abandoned buildings and boarded-up houses.
My experience with SCRUM is that is sort of works for large organizations, but it's not a magic bullet.

It's best use is as a conduit for the introduction of sane development practices like unit tests, systems tests, and continuous integration.

I remain very skeptical of SCRUM for small organizations.
So dual displays for the mini?
So, why haven't we seen them? Is it, perhaps, because they are simply not popular at all? Or are they popular but unknown to us?

This list by itself, with no analysis, is a bit bare.
You make a good point, which is that there might have been a discount offered or some other incentive, and the rescheduling might have been entirely voluntary on the part of the patrons. I'm not going to pass final judgment, since I clearly don't know the full story.

My observation is that many hotels aren't so kind about this sort of thing. I was once on the receiving end (sort of) of a similar situation, in Juneau, AK. It's a small city with a short tourism window, so it tends to be packed in the summer. Some rich piece of shit called up one of the major hotels and asked for half of it so he could throw a party. Patrons were booted, regardless of reservations. I wasn't in that hotel, so I wasn't directly booted, but it affected the entire city, because it was impossible to get a hotel due to all the displaced people. My girlfriend and I ended up staying in a "historic" ex-brothel hotel in a room right over a nightclub.
Recursive factorial computed entirely with anonymous functions in Python:

>>> (lambda n: (lambda f, n: f(f, n))(
... lambda f, n: n*f(f, n-1) if n > 0 else 1,n)
... )(10)
3628800

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/481692/can-a-lambda-funct...
Once again the premium you pay for the better models is totally ridiculous. I don't mind paying for quality, but I'm sorry, the difference between a 320GB vs 120GB HDD and 2GB vs 1GB RAM is not worth €200! In fact, I can buy the bigger HDD and RAM for about half that at retail, never mind the difference between the larger and smaller configurations.

I've been playing with the idea of getting a Mac Mini to replace my current media PC which can't handle HD video, but it looks like I'll still need to open it up if I want a decent spec.
You're right, I apologize. It wasn't written by him. It's called "Value Investing Made Easy" and is /about/ him, but not written by him. can't see when it was written. I checked it out from the library years ago and it was totally worn out, so my impression may not match the copyright.

here's a link:
http://www.amazon.com/Value-Investing-Made-Easy-Investment/d...

Google Book: http://books.google.com/books?id=pIbGHfeURUEC&printsec=f...

I would disagree with your comments though. I would say this crisis is about overvaluing assets, irrational exuberance fueled by greed, and improper lending practices by individuals and businesses that can easily pass the buck to someone in another country.
JSONRequest: two-way data exchange with any JSON data server
Does anyone here know anything about whether PyQT is planning on also switching to LGPL? On their license page, they say:

"Like Qt itself, PyQt is provided under a number of licenses depending on how it is going to be used. In fact, we try and follow Trolltech's licensing model as closely as we can."

So I'm assuming that they're planning on switching. Is anyone here on their mailing lists and/or have any other inside information of that sort about whether they're planning on switching?
Khosla Ventures Goes Retro for New Blood
Am I missing something here? According to the article, the prices have fallen or remained the same, and Apple has upgraded all the hardware.
Most of them have more space.
My thoughts exactly. And I've been a mac user for 22 years (since I was six).

I was hoping to see something new from the iMac line. Anything. A second display. Upgradeable hard drive. Consumer grade Raid 1 (y'know, like you'd see on a $1500 DELL tower.)

Very little to see here. And a high end iMac makes no sense. At that rate, you're almost buying their quad-core tower.

(But I suppose at the very high end, people don't buy Mac Pros as often as they do Mac Books, because they're usable for very long periods of time.)
What's the ideal number of friends?
Apple Quietly Bumps 15" MacBook Pro Speed, 256GB SSD Option, and New Keyboard
Learning from slums
> proxying system calls

Locally calculating what needs to be on the remote stack then transferring it all across the network to a tiny 'syscall server' is very nice conceptually but turns out to have huge flaws in practice.

The commercial implementation of this idea which you might be thinking of was completely replaced years ago by an executable that still executes individual system calls, but it accepts an XDR marshalled RPC protocol instead of raw bytes to place on the stack.

This executable is statically compiled (well it has no library dependencies to begin with) and installed into memory with a very crude implementation of userland exec :)
Already posted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501410 :)
$99 Roku Box Gets Amazon Video on Demand
With all due respect, what did you really expect from him? He ran on a platform of supporting the bailout and expanding the role and scope of the federal government.
I worked with Ken Schwaber while at my last startup. I'd be happy to offer insights, but not in a public forum.

It's also very interesting to see SCRUM being given credit for "quadrupled revenue in 2007" at PK: http://bit.ly/RsRNm

In reality, pretty much all of that revenue (~70% increase) was due to a single very, very big deal with HCA: http://bit.ly/Rtq7i

That particular deal was based on a project that I identified, prototyped, developed, installed, refined and then went on the road to sell.

I can categorically say that it had very little to do with SCRUM and much more to do with a tremendous (and very small!) team of three that I had the privilege of working with who helped in identifying a fallow market, building a great product, and marketing it well.
1650 Not Charging Problem
By chance, I was looking at Mac Minis in the UK online Store this morning (GMT), and the price of the lesser-spec'ed unit was £391. Now the price of the new lesser-spec'ed unit is £499.
The iMac form factor has its own advantages which offset the extra power of the low-end Mac Pro.
In Afghanistan, The Idea of Women's Rights Starts to Take Hold
How My Company Beats the Bigger Guys
To me, the big win is the new TimeCapsule:

* MobileMe 'back to Mac' integration
* 802.11n
* guest Wi-Fi feature
* dual-band Wi-Fi
* 500GB TimeCapsule
* Wi-Fi printer hub
= $299

Sold.
It's a good thing the economist runs its purchasing power against burgers and not Apple hardware! Although that would be interesting for its own reasons.
That's kind of like saying "I went to Afghanistan and I didn't get my head cut off."

Adobe has horrible installers which break frequently. Just google for "CS3 install problem" and you'll see what I mean.
I'm not so sure giving up on a city would work so well unless you leveled it, ripped out the entire infrastructure and planted a lot of flowers.

At any rate, abandoning and ripping down historic architecture and craftsmanship is a terrible waste. Especially if you're just going to replace it with cardboard buildings and fancy facades. I think we'd be better off throwing the money at a group of un-corruptible, "really smart" people. There is a real opportunity to experiment with urban planning, development, and social programs to see if there is any way to turn it around.

If I had my way, I'd just build a wall around the city and turn it into a prison. Imagine how much wealth you could create making reality tv shows "from within the wall."
"Once again the premium you pay for the better models is totally ridiculous."

Yes, ridiculous for you to pay the premium. But a great opportunity for you if you need a top-tier Mac and know how to upgrade RAM & HD -- which is the only way I buy mine.

From the company's standpoint, it makes sense: lower entry-level price; higher profit margin for items sold to those with more $ than tech-savvy. ::Keeps the company profit margins high while giving the self-upgraders a nice break.
That's for you to decide, based on your other values.

Some people value adventure and risk-taking in order to bring about new rewards and feel proud of them. They accept the risks which could shorten their life.

Other people want to live a long time and see a lot of things. They would not be risk-takers and thus would be happier with a longer life.

Does this make sense?
Latency Map of all the major backbones
"nethack.alt.org has patched the initial seed calculation, but as nethacker Adeon has demonstrated, it's still feasible to figure out the game's seed by observing random effects."

To me the article reads as though this is more than just an issue with poor seeding. If you can figure out the initial seed by observing events then the PRNG itself needs to be replaced.

The article suggests reseeding the PRNG after x random numbers have been generated and to me that sounds like a fairly good solution. It has certainly be the basis of other PRNGs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortuna_(PRNG)
Thanks, TechCrunch, for this thorough analysis:

Not too much else to say — I don’t have one, so I can’t test it out. Anybody care to let us know how it works? It should be live as of this posting.

Worth every ad dollar :P
Why It’s Worth Fixing HTTP Authentication (and How to Do It)
What I meant is that the SCRUM inventors are telling you in great detail how to run the technical side of a software business. Not that it's telling the developer how to implement something.
I would assume they aren't - QT is owned by Nokia so they can afford to give QT away for free just for market share. Riverbank computing (makers of PyQT) is a one man band with bills to pay (it is availabel under the GPL).
But if they don't then someone is going to start a community project to produce the swig wrappers themselves.
Another story that shows it isn't the idea, it's the execution. As they say in the article, it was tough to get any funding in Finland at the time, but that's probably faint consolation now. Who knows what might have happened if they had actually released it and kept working on it in their spare time.
For HN visitors, I think one of the most interesting questions is what this says about Apple's business/marketing model:

?Does the lack of fanfare for these releases mean that something more worthy of fanfare is planned relatively soon? In recent months iMacs have been in top 3 sales positions on Apple's home page. And for me, the $1500 price on a 24" iMac is a great break on something I need for a instructional machine.

Could they really just be saving a few bucks and some labor by omitting fanfare? ...or are they focusing on some MacAir / netbook / iPhone extravaganza in next few months?
Not true. They give some principles and you have to decide how to use them. The same with GTD: you can use a pen and paper or an iPhone. How you do it depends on you.
My guess is that they wouldn't. Too difficult to automate easily, as it requires actually reading something on the site, grabbing the bookmarklet, etc.

In my experience a lot of these types of submissions are highly automated. Break the automation even slightly and the junk submissions drop significantly.
Having said that - perhaps Nokia might buy Riverbank to keep pyqt going, or Riverbank might feel they can support themselves on consulting/support contracts with a larger installed base of an LGPL pyqt?
Unfortunately a lot of users are already adopting alternate browsers, but it doesn't reduce the pain of web development until IE6 becomes a negligible part of the market. What could help more than anything is if Microsoft took a stronger stance on forcing users to upgrade from IE6 to IE7. Once IE6 drops below perhaps 5-10% of the market it becomes ignorable. But for IE as a whole to become negligible - I wish I could but I don't see that day any time soon.
Great to hear a new Scrum convert and the difference it can make in a team! (startup or otherwise)

Couple of notes from an old Agile guy:

1) The Product Owner goes away with a startup. Everybody is representing the business. The P.O. idea was always an oversimplification anyway. In reality you have to adapt. (This is true of all of this)

2) You don't have to plan every task. Some teams do, some teams don't. Stories are hunks of business value that you can deliver inside a sprint. Tasks are what you do to make stories happen. If you can grab a story and deliver it, tested and approved, without decomposing your story into tasks? Good for you. I say go for it. But it's a team decision. Some folks are just more detail-oriented than I am. All I care about is getting the value to the customers.

3) It's a framework, not a methodology. Scrum is a PM framework around Agile principles. It doesn't tell you how to do things, simply the process for keeping track of your team's to-do list and executing on that list. It's all goodness and wondefulness, sure. But it's not the end of world hunger. Just some nice rituals to keep the team on-track.

4) The most important part of Scrum, or of agile for that matter, is to adapt. It's okay to totally screw-up. What I want to see is a team that is constantly improving their ability to deliver value. Whatever you read in a book or see in a seminar, you have to own and adapt it for your use. I've found that many folks get the idea of "process is evil" and then start to use cookie-cutter processes for their agile teams. Ouch. All of those rituals like stand-ups, showcases, retros and such? They're there because over time we believe that most software development teams will adapt to use some form of them. So start with them for a few cycles, then change it up.

5) Because of all of this, there is no conflict between Agile principles and startups. In fact, every startup I've seen that was successful was in some fashion agile. Startups are about providing perceived value to the customer quickly. Agile is about providing value to the Product Owner quickly. Unless you screw it up, it's the same difference.

If you haven't looked into it, I'd give some agile concepts a look-see. Even when I sole-developing I use a backlog, sprint, "done", etc. Not because I'm a fan, but because it is just the best way of working.
I'd like to hear more about your agile experiences, if you like. My email is in my profile.
Further, it's unclear to me why I should care.
I'd argue that Jobs is more of a "Randian hero", by far, since it seems that Apple refuses to release hacks, only good and solid code, products, etc. It also has infinitely better customer service than Microsoft, which can be seen on Consumerist.com as well as just interacting with the company.

I also get the feeling that Gates falls more to the altruistic side of things.
Apple's new Macs patch one weak spot, not another
True: it is framework not a methodology.My mistake.
A valid point. Out of curiosity, what environment do you develop for that uses IE6/7 and has latency constraints? Is it a network performance problem, or just the parse speed of the library?
Readability: bookmarklet that strips away irrelevant content