skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think Cisco was a particularly important part of this article. It just happened to have interesting statistics.

The "doctor-doctor" thing was over the top, though. If that's true, anyone who has ever written a line of Perl should win the Nobel Prize :P
Just out of interest with #1 - what's to stop an immigrant from simply "buying" themselves a visa by hiring 4 people at minimum wage for 9 months? Even if you didn't make a cent of revenue, you could do still that for ~60K right? Doesn't seem like a lot to obtain US citizenship.
Making things, aka being an engineer, is an art and a craft that takes time to master. Even if you work in software, there are no quick routes to riches. Zuckerberg may have been young when he hit it big, but he had been programming for a long time. I can't imagine that physical engineering takes less time to master (but hey, I don't really know.)

My point is "traditional product-making firms" probably fail to offer fast-track positions because there is no fast track to being good at traditional product making.
You're probably talking about the Okinawa Diet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okinawa_diet). It contains 25% of the average Japanese intake of sugar and 75% of the average Japanese intake of grains in general. It is very low calorie.

To get the long lifespan, low obesity, and low heart disease of an Okinawan you'd have to truly live like an Okinawan... eating exactly the kinds of foods they eat and having little stress, similar sleep habits, and similar genetic dispositions. People have not been successful in replicating the approach elsewhere.

The approach I described is the way to eat to stoke your metabolism and keep your blood sugar low. It's good for fat loss, muscle building, high energy levels, and general good health. There's more to it than I described (such as eating 5 or more times a day), but those are the basics.
I administer Moodle for a private college (~1500 clients) and find that it works very well; one free / open source package gives us web-enabled classes (of course I also spend a lot of time training and supporting the instructors to make this a success).

What shortcomings have you found in Moodle and other FOSS offerings? Maybe improvements and support to one of those is a good business model.

If you do start coding from the ground up, I recommend targeting private schools where you might find less bureaucracy/resistance.
This is a pretty good idea - I may end up just rolling my own like you have; that way I only have myself to blame if I don't like it =D
The financial mess sort of reminds me of the space shuttle disasters.

I remember thinking after the Columbia tore apart that space travel would be finished. How could we possibly risk more people in space after such a horrendous event? And that happened twice. There were lots of smart people working on those projects, doing lots of complicated work that few could understand. Did it affect millions of people? Other than emotionally, no. Were there immoral people working for NASA? Probably.

My point is that it took about 3 years after the Challenger disaster, and another 3 years after the Columbia disaster to get things moving again. Many changes were implemented. But rockets still flew.

The science didn't get any easier, and neither did the math. Rocket science and materials science are still chalk-full of tough, unpredictable problems, but that doesn't scare people away from being employed in those industries.

I-banking needs some sweeping changes. Perhaps the compensation will change as a result. At the end of the day though, financial engineering is still needed, and intelligent ethical leaders will be more in demand than ever.
Couple nitpicks i have:

- Re: #1, Strict categorization isn't always possible. You would have to deal with overlapping contacts (What if you work with someone who's also your friend/family member?). This makes it much less straightforward to handle and requires a much more complicated UI (How would you represent someone in both groups?)

- It seems to focus completely on the web interface. A large majority of twitters traffic comes from its API. This means that if the author wanted to, he could make a client to do everything he wanted.
I agree and think this is especially relevant for sites and apps that target tech-savvy users - as a group they will most likely already be using a browser other than IE and even if they do will be more likely to understand the reason for lack of total cross browser compatibility. If this became a trend it would begin to do one of two things - either cause Microsoft to consider adopting web standards compliance or cause users to adopt alternate browsers. Both options should be equally as welcome in the web development field and help to reduce the time wasted on needless hacks and workarounds to accommodate one product.
Did you get a bank account in the US? If so, how?
Love it. Please oh please oh please oh please let more web devs do this.
My roommate bought an eeepc after his old laptop died suddenly. He only really used it for the internet anyway, so a cheap netbook is a quick fix until he has the time and money to pick out a bigger/better machine.

As for myself, I think the netbook+desktop combo could be pretty cool. I've been using my MacBook as my primary device for a year, and I have found that it isn't really comfortable for serious use and is too bulky for computing on the go.
Indeed. Building frameworks for other people just doesn't sound like any fun at all. We also rolled our own thing in house, and every once in a while we start thinking thoughts about polishing it up and releasing it to the world.

But the amount of polish that you need to turn an in-house thing into an open source project is just immense. And worse, by the time you have it flexible enough to handle every possible use case, you've bloated it out to the point where it's no fun to use anymore. Pick pretty much any off the shelf ORM to see the end result of that path.
Desktop Linux is unstable.

Nonsense.

[joe@delilah installer]$ uptime
17:21:39 up 16 days, 9:17, 9 users, load average: 0.40, 0.26, 0.24

And that was a reboot because I had to run Windows for something. I'd gone probably two months without rebooting before that.

Linux, desktop or otherwise, is stable as hell. I stay logged in for months at a time without even thinking about it.

While it doesn't crash often, it does sometimes, and I feel that one crash is too many.

I've seen Mac OS X crash more often in the past two years (the time since a good friend started having a Mac laptop around me enough that I'd have an opportunity to see it crash) than I've seen Linux crash, and I don't even own a Mac (while I have at least one Linux system running every waking moment). In my experience Mac OS X is an order of magnitude less stable than Linux. It would have to be for me to have seen a dozen crashes over two years from a system that I see working for maybe a few hours every week on average, vs. my Linux boxes that I see running 80 or 100 hours every week. And, it's a well-maintained Mac, serviced by Google's Tech Stop.

Multiple displays are wonky.

This one I'll concur on...sort of. It was pretty bad until a couple of years ago. And, it's still bad on some hardware. But, on the best supported video cards, it works very well and without hassle. You do have to be careful about hardware...but Linux probably has more supported hardware these days than Mac OS X or Windows Vista (though very new stuff often doesn't have good drivers yet).

Flash still doesn't work properly.

I haven't had problems with Flash in years. There is the problem of running Flash on a 64 bit install of Linux...but if you use a 32 bit Firefox build, Flash works fine (I'm running on a 64 bit system, and I have no complaints about Flash). This is an issue of the vendor not providing a working 64 bit build--nothing to do with Linux. And there are easy workarounds.

I'm not downmodding, I just don't think your arguments are accurate. The cohesive UI argument is pretty much the only thing I will actually completely concur on. But, the cost of getting a cohesive UI is to give up a cohesive and sane command line (using Mac OS X on the command line makes me very angry, and I have a dozen terminals open at all times, so I would be very angry indeed working on a Mac all the time), not to mention all the other third party tools you have to give up to retain cohesiveness...I just don't see how that's a good trade.
Good question!

I asked my best friend - which is American - to do it using her personal info, so she created a bank account specially for it, and she applied for EIN, for the taxes.

I am from Egypt, and Paypal is not even enabled for Egyptians, so it could be impossible for me to do it, without the help of "someone American".
Maybe post the idea on Mark Cuban's open source funding page - see what he thinks.
I have a low end 9" eee from best buy. I use it as my test server, comes with its own console! I'm switching to linux containers for test servers, but having totally separate iron makes resource measurement easier (possible).
SwellJoe, I wasn't trying to knock Linux. I was just talking about my experiences regarding why I made the switch. It's great to hear that your experience has been more positive. I'm happy that you've found your groove in Linux, and I've found my groove in OS X.
Thanks for info! For the same reason (PayPal for businesses is not available in Russia), I have a reseller contract with a company that accepts payments, including PayPal.
> I don't know how things are in Australia, but we can't identify criminals and the like without actually checking.

Interesting viewpoint. Would you have a problem with having your photograph and fingerprints taken whenever you boarded a domestic flight? I'm sure they'd catch plenty of criminals that way too.
Flock Ditching Firefox, Moving To Google Chrome
Hollywood 4.0 Blog: LittleShoot Coming Soon to a Browser Near You
Artificial flagella move nanorobotics one tiny spin forward
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=flat+earth&l=1
Cortado Corporate Server for iPhone Coming Soon
I'd love to hear your opinion on immigration and the intra-national tech community, but LotR is way off topic.
Scientists make HIV strain that can infect monkeys
I think that Godaddy offers a service for international merchants who want to sell online. I am not sure if their service is reliable or not, but it's expensive anyway.

If you know someone American who trust you so much and vice versa, then you can do the same I did.
Believe me, I never met that friend in real life, because I never been in America!
"The best way to understand Beijing's size is to visualize what Manhattan might be like without the Hudson and East Rivers. Beijing just keeps going. Manhattan is almost 23 square miles. Beijing is more than 150!... Given the size, you can probably imagine the traffic. It's like Los Angeles without interstates, at rush hour, in the rain. It's impossible to get anywhere quickly. I was warned before my trip that traffic would be worse than anything I'd ever seen, and it was. One evening, it took our crew nearly two hours to go about eight miles... Had the Olympics been held last August, the air quality in Beijing would have been in violation of the World Health Organization standard every single day..."

http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/news/story?id=3453777
What Does CNI Cal Nutrasciences Have To Offer...
I think there is a difference between the engineers making the products and the people marketing and managing the companies. I acknowledge that it is not likely that the engineer will add huge value without substantial time to master his field, but I do feel that a bright creative business person could add substantial value. Unfortunately, I feel that they are lured away by the finance riches, so we never are able to see their impact.
I would not recommend this if you want your product to hit the average user - IE has the biggest market share (still :(). But of course, for Instpaper it's perfectly right to do so since the market is power-users and they mostly us FF (as the author notes).
Actually, the idea that most bugs are produced by faulty modules, and that such faulty modules don't produce fewer bugs as a result of efforts to fix them (and so are best thrown out), is one of the few interesting results produced by experimental studies of software development. So I don't think it should be dismissed so cavalierly.

I don't have time to track down the original sources on this, but I do remember that one of the places I read about it is in Robert Glass' Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, which is worth reading because it's (a) well-grounded in the research literature, yet (b) not stupendously boring.

It's worth noting that the findings in question have to do with rewriting faulty modules and not to do with rewriting entire systems (which is a quite different matter). But this is also what the OP was talking about, so I think this evidence, for what it's worth, supports her claim.
I've been testing them for use in my company and now that there are ones with virtually full size keyboards we'll probably start deploying them in some places.

I mean, obviously not to the finance department but to those people who only do mild word processing. The benefit is (a) they're cheaper, (b) users like them because of the portability and (c) the limited options makes it harder for users to screw them up by installing stuff they shouldn't (though they still can).
It varies with the emphasis (front page or not) etc., here is some of the latest information I could find on super surges (some people reported over a million viewers):

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/06/12/yahoo...

Here's someone saying that dramatic swings can happen inside 60 seconds:

http://omniti.com/seeds/dissecting-todays-internet-traffic-s...
The ironic thing is that Internet Explorer + HTML Applications (HTAs) is a much, much better desktop platform than a web browser. In fact, it’s probably one of the best client side platforms for Windows. You can extend it with any ActiveX control (including the .NET framework) and code it with almost any language (including, apparently, Haskell - http://www.haskell.org/haskellscript/). Some time ago I decided to start building all of my organization’s internal apps using HTAs + jQuery. It’s the bees knees (for Windows). It still accounts for most of my profanity usage when having to build actual websites.
Apple contributes a decent amount back to open source. WebKit, launchd, mach, etc. See http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/ http://developer.apple.com/opensource/index.html and http://www.macosforge.org/ for a bunch their code.
Obama releases secret Bush anti-terror memos
Is Flock going to dump Mozilla for Chrome?
http://helpuu.com/, check it out.
Forgot to say, there is already a boom of Westerners coming here to visit or settle in the last few years. There are hostels everywhere for u$d 12/day and most have free wifi, speak English, and have double rooms around u$d 40/day (usually with private bathroom and shower.)

HI network: http://www.hostels.org.ar/?l=en
The website seems to be down, are there any mirrors available?
The article title seems to be linkbait, the interviewer explicitly mentions that correlation isn't causation
"your bandwidth bill is going to be sky high"

I was thinking about monthly traffic here and how expensive these services turn out to be (based on my memory of conversations in the past) but for these surges plus "normal" web pages this doesn't seem like as big of a deal as I made it out to be.

Say that "it" happens and you get a million viewers in one day. Say you have a few pictures and assets that adds up to 200K and we're just dealing with one view (like a blog entry or article).

On AppEngine, it looks like this adds up to $20 for 1 million downloads of 200K and if you host static stuff off S3 (to essentially eliminate any worry at all about the 500 requests/second initial limit while still having "no server maintenance") it will be $34.

And then everyone forgets you. :-)
it's not about code ownership or problems with who is or is not allowed to touch the schema. the problems come from things like even numbering the migrations, keeping track of dependencies between migrations and the order they need to be applied in, possibly needing to rollback certain migrations, etc.
I despise websites that do this because I have to use IE7 at work. This is probably the second fastest way for me to banish your website from memory besides being spam.

Everyone on here talks about making the sign-up process as easy as possible, and requiring someone to download and install an entirely new application is about as complex and uninviting as one can get. Us "technical" people are still people, and the more you annoy me with the signup process the less likely I am to complete it. Even starting up a new browser and copying your URL is a nuisance.

Secondly, I've never really had a Safari/FF->IE7 bug that didn't take about 30 minutes of Googling or simply making a sneaky workaround. There might be some cursing in between but it simply has to get done otherwise it's ignoring a big audience.

Edit to Clarify: I am in full support of dropping IE6 as most of you have noted, seeing as how the user base has dropped and the majority of people with IE6 have been "auto-updated" to IE7.
Here is a bluetooth bracelet with headset profile so it can show caller ID and accept/reject a phonecall with the button:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/26/lcd-bluetooth-vibrating-b...

I've been wondering if it could be paired to a Linux box with BlueZ Utils and get any old script to pretend to be an incoming call and vibrate the bracelet and show a message,,,
Hello, selection bias! There are books that make you dumber than not having reported reading any books at all? How about, there are books and music that correlate with being underprivileged, and being the likely product of a crappy school system?
Yes, but it's not usually one bug. A bug here and a bug there and pretty soon you're talking about real money. IE7 isn't so bad but I'm seriously contemplating dropping support for IE6 very soon.
Agreed - the distinction is between (1) the code is simply buggy and (2) the code is full of bugs because the design is wrong/inadequate.

I've realised over time that fixing a bug in a decent design is a lot of the value (of software). A single line of bugfix can be worth reams of new code. It's why banks are still running COBOL mainframes.
One of the most striking things to me about my two three-year stays in Taiwan (in the '80s and around the turn of the last century) is how much more entrepreneurial I became just by living there. The Taiwanese have a proverb, "Better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of a buffalo," and they strongly value being business owners rather than employees of large organizations. In the 1980s, the development pattern of Taiwan and Korea, otherwise rather comparable countries, was quite different because most Taiwanese worked in small, family-owned enterprises while most Koreans worked in giant industrial conglomerates.

Today, Taiwan's economy is HAMMERED by the worldwide recession, but I think the response will be to find more ways to do more entrepreneurial business formation, and Taiwan will be all right. China is in serious danger of unrest, by contrast,

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/02/27/business/AS-China-...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/4862517...

unless some economic transformation happens so that urban college graduates and rural migrant workers can find more employment soon.
The netbook is almost smaller than the size of a hardback book. You can literally grab it and your keys and head off to the coffee shop. The performance is that of a 5-yr old notebook (900mhz Celeron) but it's mostly about looks than crunching graphics/video editing. I have the Asus EEE 8G.
Wouldn't this mean a lot of extra, cross-platform development of the "Flock enhanced" features? Wouldn't they have to re-develop all of these features for each platform's GUI toolkit, instead of just a single XUL codebase?

Nevermind the regression of features that Firefox has which Chrome doesn't. Seems like a lot of work to me.

Most likely Techcrunch just up to it's usual ways: authoritative headlines with mysterious, anonymous sources. Oh, and with this nugget thrown in at the end: Flock hasn’t yet returned a request for comment on this story.
The 'fixes' aka hacks aren't that difficult.

The problem is it makes everything so brittle and people tend to do things the shitty route just to support IE.

Maybe it was the last changes to fix IE6...but I actually looked up browser percentages and considered dropping support.
im looking for the blue screen of death in one of these concepts
I estimate that supporting IE6 has added more than 30% of the interface development costs to the complex projects I have worked on that use a combination of sophisticated CSS and JS to get the job done. This is a HUGE cost for start-ups and for clients to swallow, once the true cost is explained to them.

Just supporting the way various sub-versions of IE6 inconsistently handle cookies is a nightmare, and in many cases lead to unsolvable issues. This costed a client of mine real $$$$ to discover, and less than 20% of their audience used IE6. Less than 15 people actually complained about the issue.

IE 7 isn't quite as bad, but it still adds a measure of time to front-end development efforts. I would estimate it in the range of 10-20%, depending on how complex the interface is.

On two recent projects, we dropped IE6 support, with virtually no push-back from a general-use audience. IE6 is almost 8 years old. Most people don't keep their cars that long, and can understand that an old crusty browser is not going to perform as well.

The only place where I would be hesitant to drop IE6 support is on marketing sites (where you need to entice someone to a call-to-action within the first 30sec-1min) and on e-commerce sites, where every dollar counts.
Microsoft Kumo: Doomed
Yeah, but then you're stuck with the property taxes until you can find another buyer.
I read the slides, and while I get how this was tricky to pull off, I don't get how it's valuable. The reason implementations of techniques like this aren't already published is that there are easier ways to do a two-stage exploit on both OS X and Win32, without touching the filesystem.
IE + hacks, with respect to technical debt, is like one of those credit cards that offer 0% interest and free miles for the first 6 months after which it switches to a non-premium card with a 37% APR.
I can tell you with some authority that if you're targeting corporate users, about 2/3 of the traffic is internet explorer. Worse is that about 40% of that IE traffic is IE6.
> How easy it is to live there without knowing Spanish

Impossible, because if you move somewhere foreign, you're going to learn the language unconsciously within 6 months. People who have only lived in the US don't know this. It almost takes no effort. The human brain is good at this sort of thing.
My own Linux uptime anecdote: ~14 months on my thinkpad T43 (daily use, with sleep/resume).

I noticed how long it had been after 4 or 5 months and decided to consciously avoid updating the kernel etc. It finally just crashed one day. Going multi-year on a Linux server is pretty common of course.
Cool. This was sorta what I was thinking of. Too bad it doesn't have two or three small buttons. That could be useful for a lot of stuff. And, it doesn't look nearly as tacky as the version I had imagined. The review misses the point that "time" could be the default state when there's no pending action or alert.
Well, that made for some surreal reading.

There is no major grocery chain in the city, and only two movie theaters

I grew up in a town of 2000 people and we had 2 chain grocery stores. I'm guessing a walmart would be robbed blind, especially with an explicit corporate no-kill policy.