skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Deadlines are not artificial. If you screw around long enough, various real world things happen, such as your competition leaving you in the dust, your product becoming irrelevant, customers not caring any more whether the problem is fixed because they've gone to a competitor. There are engineering realities, such as it won't be fixed until it's fixed. But there are business realities, too.

A formative moment for me was when I was the software manager for a company, and we had two clients with emergencies going on at the same time. The reality was, we couldn't really fix both problems at the same time. I went in to the president's office, and told her that we couldn't fix both problems right now, and I needed her to decide which client was going to suffer. She yelled at me, told me to get the hell out of her office, and figure out a solution that doesn't force either client to be the loser. I fumed and left, she obviously didn't understand the reality. But once I finished pouting, I realized there was a way I could implement a temporary fix for one real quick, and then work on the other...

There are business realities, and there are engineering realities. A business needs to manage both to deliver something awesome, or get overtaken by somebody else that will.
> In what possible way did this impact the "average investor" (whoever that is)?

The average investor, of which there are millions, can't react quickly to market changes. They're in a mutual fund or another similar investment that moves glacially if at all to market changes, and that's generally a good thing (on the premise that buy & hold is a good thing).

So there really is an average investor. And he really can't exploit fast market changes.

> It seems to show a pretty stable market to me.

Yes, but if this scenario is true, it represents an exploitation of a weakness in market information (some people have information that others don't), so it's an undermining of the premise of an efficient market.
65% more iPads sold and 7% more iPhones sold than in last year’s FQ2. Mac sales remain stable, while the rest of the PC market continues to shrink.
I also know many Blizzard customers who appreciate that about them because they know the quality won't be abysmal because they rushed to meet a deadline - deadlines and granular communication of roadmaps are less important to them than the quality of their IP.
Right now, we're focused on the B2B market. That is, our target market include sports teams and organizations. So we're working with several high schools, colleges, and now an NFL team! We've also got good traction with training camps and big box retail gyms.

We looked at the consumer-driven apps, and realized that we would rather work with coaches and players or trainers and clients. So for individuals, we may go there, but it's not in immediate strategy.

What are your thoughts?
Apple rarely competes on price. Their business model(s) for the last decade has shown that at least (Tim Cook may be different). But they tend not to be fans of low margin markets.
I love the traits of the company he wants to build. Wish him best of luck.
They are less different than you might think. There are a lot of custom software products developed to run stuff inside of the rocket. That software is developed to a deadline.
There is nothing mission critical or 'enterprise' about Tesla/Fermi cards. You can crash them and lock up your whole machine. Even if you can reboot the OS the card may not respond and the rebooted OS won't see it, we sometimes have to physically shut the machine down to reset the Nvidia card. Nvidia is still a gaming company at heart and it's going to take a while for them to adjust to providing equipment that is meant to be reliable and not just fast.
Nanoc Project Structure
This was something I participated in New Jersey as well.
>Honestly, I feel like people got so angry about SimCity to deflect their own responsibility for the purchasing decision they made.

Honestly, I even agree with that partly. But note that I didn't buy the game. I still feel that this is wrong behaviour from EA/Maxis.
Official Apple press release: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/04/23Apple-Reports-Seco...

65% more iPads sold and 7% more iPhones sold than in last year’s FQ2. Mac sales remain stable, while the rest of the PC market continues to shrink.

Profit margin decreases as Apple offers cheaper tablets (iPad mini) and phones (iPhone 4 & 4S). Profit margin on Macs is also lower because of retina screens, but Mac sales represent only a small part of Apple's income, it’s not significant on the whole.
This is turning into a Monty Python skit.
Interesting historical point is this is the same rumored valuation for PowerSet back in 2008. Doesn't speak highly on valuation increasing for NLP.
Introduction to AVX2 optimizations in x264
That doesn't really add up if he's saying it was originally from Github and he doesn't know the source. I still think you should find some original art, which it looks like you are.
> I was of the opinion that an individual hacker would still be classified as an average investor.

Reasonable people may differ, but to me, someone who shorts the market, then hacks AP and plants a false story, is not an average investor. :)
That implies it will be possible with version 2. It won't.
It feels like Apple is now on the defensive by announcing a buyback initiative and a higher dividend. They realized their growth peaked from insane highs and they have no new product to give it another boost in the short term. Very smart move.

However, I will say that they really need a killer new product by 2015, which is when their stock buyback initiative ends. Repurposing the iOS in various form factors such as the iPhone, iPod, and iPad has run its course.
one cluster a few years ago had arcade game names.

Pacman, bladerunner, alien storm etc.

Another was names of metal bands.
Anthrax, slayer, metallica etc.

Naming servers is the best :)
“The Mac user interface was a 10-year monopoly,” says Jobs. “Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late ’80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits. They made obscene profits for several years. And their products became mediocre. And then their monopoly ended with Windows 95. They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens.”
Not completely sure about this. After all, they did release the iPad mini, and before that, several variations of cheap iPods like the nano and shuffle.
Automating infrastructure and treating it like code is a similar shift in mindset to embracing test driven development for the first time.

It appears daunting, but once you get over the hump you can't imagine how you ever survived without it.

If you have a mythical quiet Friday afternoon install Vagrant and try and replicate your manual setup steps for a new server and share it with your development team.

Even just having the steps required to set up a development environment represented in re-usable versioned code is worthwhile.

Next time a new hire starts that afternoon repays itself when they have a fully working dev environment ready in less then an hour.

Going from that, to doing this stuff in production is a lot of work, but you get similar pay offs at every step as long as you're willing to invest a little time.
Managing Big Data - Imgur
Subsidized plans are common enough in Europe as far as I'm aware. It's just that you've also generally had the option of buying the iPhone outright.

Fwiw I think the 'cheap iPhone' option has been the iPod touch.
Which is going to lead to Apple having to make a tough choice. Reduce margins but increase growth in countries that sell mostly unsubsidized phones or maintain margins and live with slower growth. Should be interesting to watch.

iPad sales growth is still amazing though.
Exploits that would 'need' to know the version are scripted. They spew the attempt anyway. If it works it works, if it doesn't the script moves on.

You don't really get anything by disabling the server from reporting it's version. On the other hand, it doesn't take any time to do it.

But don't think you gained anything by disabling it.
How Remix Culture is Changing Marketing
They sell a lot of older iPhone models which eats their profits, while they're still quite expensive to manufacture. Making a cheap model to replace those would increase their profits and increase total sales volume.
I think you're missing a key part of citing (at least for me), paraphrasing. When discussing sentiment or similar without quoting, you wouldn't know what to search for. It makes sense to give a page number to review and get more information on the source, without that you wouldn't know where to look. You'd have to read the entire source.

For text, only section in your "less-granular searching" would work, and not necessarily particularly well. Page number would often be more granular, and that's what's needed for paraphrasing - exactly where to find what you're discussing - but not exactly what it said.
I think it's because their iphone 4S was so good that most people weren't willing to "upgrade". It's getting hard to justify buying a new phone every year considering the great advancements made to them in the past few years.
Bad normal approximation
That's a nice sentiment, but I don't see how you can apply it to any situation that involves estimating a project for a client, based on client's requirements.

I wish the article actually addressed the problem of estimating the time/effort for the whole project. What I'm dying to learn is what one is supposed to do when the client says "I need a system that does X, Y and Z. How long do you think it will take you and how much would you charge for it?"

One thing I'm sure you can't do is say "I don't know, because making accurate long-term estimates is fundamentally impossible. But hey, I know we're going to do a great job, so why don't you just trust us?"
> If I would be the attacker I would probably do a SELECT hostname FROM scanresults WHERE webserver == vulnerable-version

you would suck.

1. write exploit

2. send exploit

3. a) it worked - pwned b) didn't work - safe against this exploit

btw have you heard of security patches?

> I don't see how this applies to server information disclosure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_by_design
What do you mean by "they really need a killer new product"?

They're the most profitable company in the world. What pressure are they under?
If you already have a Synology box, what do you get with BS versus using Synology's own CloudStation? I've looked into BS, but I guess I'm not getting what I gain running it on my DS410.
Bitcoin URL scheme whitelisted in HTML5
Dividends and share buybacks are not defensive moves.
Rockets often need a lot of custom software.
JPL also operates at CMM Level 5 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model) - unlike the vast majority of software companies I know.
Can I ask that you not make up these kinds of headlines? The market didn't "crash," temporarily or otherwise, unless every instance of putting on the brakes at a traffic light counts as a crash.
Hadoop and the Data Warehouse: When to Use Which
Brain Science Could Be the Next Big Leap
I don't typically approve of in-group preferential treatment as discussed in the article. I've come across it most in dealing with various minority/ethnic groups where it seems to be okay to admit to it. A colleague of mine who is Greek was once talking to me about various restaurants and shops he goes to because the owners are Greek and give him a discount. He saw nothing wrong with it. I've heard similar comments from other colleagues who were Indian, Jewish, etc.

I couldn't imagine going to a restaurant and getting a discount because the owner and I are both white. Even typing this out and thinking about someone telling me they would give me preferential treatment because I'm white makes me uncomfortable.

All that said, how is in-group preferential treatment any different than familial preferential treatment. The article mentioned giving away free tickets as an example. Is it wrong to give your brother some concert tickets you have because you should be equally inclined to give them to a perfect stranger? Okay, how about a third cousin whom you never but you know would like the tickets? Is giving that third cousin the tickets that much different than giving them to a neighbor?
My spouse did her EE master's thesis on 3D integration. Trust me, the technology is definitely not close by.
Why? How is the government going to shut down what is basically a private decentralized p2p network? There isn't any central server they can take out and the traffic over the network would look like any other encrypted traffic.

If they gained access to the sync group with full permissions they could destroy it and get IP addresses, etc. And the format itself might not lend itself to all the needs of a political activist group. But I don't see how the cute cat theory holds any water here.
The real news is that their margins seems to have shrunk dramatically from 48% to 38% and profit is down 18% from the year ago quarter.

Looks like they're facing pressure and are dropping prices to maintain sales.
I want to know how many chips the single largest buyer bought of that 5M
I've seen dramatic speedups reducing an array from ~10mb to ~1mb. The problem was that the algorithm did multiple passes over the array, and each pass it would pull in blocks from main memory, only to evict them later on before they could be reused.

It depends a lot on the workload, but you'll see dramatic performance differences well before you fill up main memory.
> They're the most profitable company in the world. What pressure are they under?

The pressure is probably focused on remaining the most profitable company in the world.
Apple to launch largest stock repurchasing plan in history
Good resources on programming language design?
For Apple it is. “We acknowledge that our growth rate has slowed,” Tim Cook.
The comparison with cyclists isn't completely apt, though. I can't really think of an empirical benefit for human-driven cars over computer-driven (assuming there's a manual mode that can be activated outside the cities and off freeways), but governments have incentives to encourage cycling (smaller parking footprint (municipal government spends less on parking spaces), less wear on the road (lowers maintenance costs), health benefits for the riders (lower public health costs), less fuel usage (improves energy independence), etc.). I'll not make an argument about whether those factors outweigh the inconvenience of motorists dodging cyclists on the road, but I don't think there are any analogous reasons it might be a good idea to allow human-driven cars on the road with autonomous cars.
I think he's predicting a Microsoft-like fate, where the indisputable de-facto of a market segment eventually stagnates and then is disrupted.
their profit is irrelevant. public companies are always under pressure to increase growth.
Im in BC Canada, and am not a lawyer, but if they arent paying you, they have violated not only your contract, but basic employment law.

I would get out of there asap. You are essentially providing them financial credit (unwillingly). When a debtor doesnt pay, typically you cut off the credit or increase the interest.
China Mobile (703 million subscribers) doesn't carry the iPhone (yet), India, T-Mobile, etc. lots of room to grow.
Rand Paul: I don’t care if a drone kills a liquor store robber with $50 in cash
If people are interested in YC numbers (and individual companies) compared to the 150+ other accelerators around the world, check out Seed-DB. (http://www.seed-db.com)

YC startups have raise >$1billion in funding, approximately half of the >$2billion raised by all startups from accelerators. And this is only the reported (or self-reported) funding numbers from Crunchbase, so the total is actually higher than that.
I liken this to the ultimate digital version of "Ill bet you a dollar you can't guess what number I am thinking of"
An introduction to Google Analytics for ecommerce
You know, maybe Google is the best thing that happened to Apple if you think about. If the iPhone owned the world it would make Apple very lazy which over the long run would be terrible.
I wonder how true this is. The older a tech is, the cheaper it is to build and easier to refine.
I always give a range with my estimates. The range is due to risks like current unknowns, probability of bugs due to interaction with other components, additional work that will possibly need to be done, documentation complexity, technical debt in related pieces etc.

Sometimes those can be rather extreme so my estimates have been "one month, plus/minus three months". If four months is acceptable then everyone is happy and as progress is made the range narrows. If time is tight then the discussion turns to reducing the range which puts everyone on the same page.
Oh Happy Day! Now all our family members can once again share many many gigabytes of family photos and movies. (I have so missed FolderShare!)
I agree. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't share buybacks exactly what you'd do if you believed your stock was undervalued?
Do iPhone 4/4S sales actually result in significantly lower profits for Apple? Those devices are sold at $200 off or $100 off the price of an iPhone 5, and I would imagine the cost of manufacturing the older devices must have dropped significantly by now. (the iPhone 4 is going on 3 years old at this point!)

Also, one would expect a drop in sales of the '4S' (or '3GS') model when the "completely redesigned" iPhone 5 (or iPhone 4) is announced, relative to sales of the iPhone 4 when the 4S was released, or sales of the iPhone 3G when the 3GS was released. The release of the iPhone 5 makes the 4S look especially old, while the release of the 4S didn't really do that for the 4.
The Perils of Overengineering
Notably: this is exactly what the investor set expected when the mini was announced. Remember all the hand-wringing about why Apple's stock price dropped? The investors were right -- the market wanted cheaper hardware that Apple couldn't make as much money on. And, of course, Apple was right to give it to them.
Immense pressure. I can think of no other company that has the amount of pressure of Apple to follow up their iPhone/iTouch/iPad cash cow.
Crunchbase says Wavii only has five employees and only took ~$2MM in funding. So, I would bet it's more than $100K total. The funding is all listed as a 2010-07 seed round. I expect they raised more than that. But, given their acquisition price and business model it sounds like things worked on well for them and at least the founders were well vested. Or, did you mean actual cash excluding any GOOG options/RSUs?

My understanding is that a 4 year lock-in for non-execs (techies) is a standard requirement by Google during acquisitions. I've heard of some people negotiating it down to 3. But, almost everyone I know got 4.
Solar Energy Prices: This Is What A Disruptive Technology Looks Like
We hear you! We're updating everything right now.
nic try but..

Cook+Ive+Schiller,Cue,etc. >>> Ballmer.
"Essential", of course, being left up to interpretation again.
Pressure 1) Their stock price has gone from a high of just over 700 to a recent low of just under 400. Stock is a form of compensation to employees. They don't need explosive growth but they must stop the bleeding to get their employees better compensation.

Pressure 2) They're seeing increased competition and they will not remain an dominant player if they don't continue to innovate.
Technical people should have their own EULA
Yeah, why do people keep solving the problems they have rather than the problems you wish they had? Bastards.
Sure, humans suck at estimating. But I think without addressing the purpose(s) of estimating it's easy to rat hole. I think that at the very least we have the following.

1. Estimating work helps determine if the schedule needs to expand or a feature needs to be cut. Sometimes it helps determine a need for more headcount but beware the mythical man month.

2. The process of estimating also unearths project risk. How risky is a particular item? Well, humans also suck at estimating risk so it's hard to say. But at least the risks are stated openly and everyone knows about them.

3. Estimating makes many assumptions explicit. Or at the very least, they're often implied as "large tasks". This may or may not be the same as #2.

I'm not about to make any claims about magical methodologies that will work for every team everywhere and I don't have any Agile training to sell anyone but I think those two goals are worthy ones. And I don't think the actual estimates matter so much as the act of estimating and talking through the assumptions.

In my own experience the problem with estimates isn't that people are bad at making them but that people are too afraid of getting them wrong. Or too afraid to show someone else that they're unsure of anything because we're all supposed to be "experts", right? Unfortunately those are seen as individual weaknesses instead of group strengths. So people game their estimates and cover insecurity with bravado and then we have articles like this. Harrumph.
The iPad Mini didn't exist last year, and that's surely a lower margin product. I also have no doubt that margins are tighter than they used to be on their MacBook Pro line now they've switched to Retina screens and all-SSD. But both of these are likely to be less of an issue as the tech gets cheaper, so it might not be quite as dramatic as it seems at first glance. That said, they are surely facing tougher smartphone competition than ever now.
To be clear: this is great news for anyone who isn't an Apple shareholder. If you're a fan of the hardware, it's getting cheaper! If you like the other brands, iOS's margins are shrinking and competition is working! It's a win-win all around. The kind of profit's Apple's been making over the last half decade really aren't a good thing, even for Apple. They can barely spend it, and that money could be driving growth elsewhere.
thank you very much. I was looking for an OSS-version of this great outliner tool.
Hybrid Apps for Windows & Mac OSX (html 5 desktop apps)
Asterix characters: asterix, obelix, panoramix, ...

Planets/Roman deities: venus, ceres, apollo, jupiter, ...

Greek letters: alpha, gamma, zheta, ...

First names of famous scientists: albert, marie, alexander, ...
I second the Stanford iOS class - a new one just finished in March, so it's very up to date: https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/coding-together-developin...
Because the market they created is now saturated, with Apple dominating the profits.
Actually responding to the various types of bad behavior is essential to running a web forum. In fact it's probably the single most important thing one has to do. And I call out this type whenever I see it, whether it has to do with YC or not.
The issue is that they don't have a big moat like Google, Facebook and Amazon do. Competitors are nipping at their heels(the big decline in margin from a year ago shows it) and one bad iteration of their products is enough to turn the tide against them.
I love everything about this. This is like a dark encrypted p2p network. Looking forward to setting up family music sharing folders.
4 year lock-in only applies to non-execs? What is it for execs?

With this, an engineer at a startup has a worse deal?
Mac sales are critical in that they are also development machines used internally as well as their "partners" who create and sell apps for the platform. Apple will never abandon the Mac platform even if it looses them money.
Yup.

Fail2Ban
ModSecurity (for whatever web server, including Nginx)
And the OWASP rules for ModSecurity.
You don't have to convince me it is good. In my entire career I have never seen a company that manages even 50% of their servers this way. It has always been a situation of engineering 'being too busy cutting wood to make better saws'.
Software Predicts Which Companies Are an Easy Sell