skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why not use Clojure or another JMV language and get the same ecosystem at similar or less characters?

(map (juxt :name :address) people)
Looks pretty sweet, especially for IM, but doesn't have Email which is important, at least for my usecase. Thanks for sharing it!
This is awesome .. also ironic that on the #4 and #6 stories on HN right now are these:

*This Bird Can Stay in Flight for Six Months Straight*

and

*Aerospace Company Develops Drone That Can Fly Continuously For 5 Years*
I think you're using "wealth" to mean "assets" which I don't think is a useful number for any of these comparisons. In the example you give where a person has a house which declined in value and some student loans, they do have a negative net worth but they are also worse off than the person with 0 assets and 0 debts.

Having the house that they need to make payments on means that not only do they have 0 or negative net worth, they also have strict cash flow requirements which the person with 0 assets and 0 debts does not have.
One of the points that always seems to be lost in these criticisms and rebuttals and debates is that Gladwell spawns conversion. And that's a very good thing. Nothing should be taken as sacrosanct on either side. It's good to prod and examine these issues and bring more views to the table. Hopefully that leads to more questions... not dogma.
This article is only touching on a small portion of why government IT is terrible.

People like to blame contractors but I think a large part of the problem is that the federal employees who are responsible for these big projects are rarely held accountable for failure. In fact, the lack of accountability for federal employees is why so much work was farmed out to contractors in the first place.

Then there's the fact that a lot of the decisions in government IT are made by people who have little understanding of how successful software gets built. People don't understand the importance of defining the scope of the project properly. Or you get people that change requirements willy nilly. Or you find people that are just trying to protect their little fiefdom so you end up with wasteful duplication of effort or withholding of vital information.

The Ars article indirectly touches on the fiefdom issue. When you have dysfunctional IT departments or applications, often times instead of fixing the dysfunction, someone just creates their own little separate IT effort to get around it. So the VIP's might get something functional while the peons get classic ASP & Access.

What I find very interesting about the Healthcare.gov problem is that this may be the first time that a major federal IT project failure has major political consequences for elected officials. If Healthcare.gov ends up being a crash and burn failure, it could result in Republicans gaining enough power in the next election to overturn the whole ACA.
If anyone's in the market for a new computer, keep in mind that the new version of the Yoga is about to be released, it's going to have a retina quality IPS panel instead of an HD+. Also the old ones have been on the outlet for as low as $500 recently, so you can save quite a bit of money if you don't get it at Best Buy.
For Silicon Valley novels, blurring fiction and non-fiction
A few years back, when web2.0 was the buzz word and RSS-based mashups were all the rage, I believe a few websites tried offering this service.

I don't remember the names of these services now but IIRC, input.io (or something like that) was one of them. The site is dead now - didn't get any traction or funding and shut down. A couple of desktop based clients also happened but fizzled out for the same reasons.

Looks like they were quite ahead of their time. :)
I do not read Chinese fluently, but I do follow news from China pretty closely (I lived in China for a couple of years) and I am not denying that top-members of the party are taking advantage of their position (Wen Jiabao as an example). Although I agree with you that we do not know it for sure due to the lack of transparency, the corruption problem in China is similar to the problem we have in other countries like in Brazil, where I live. And in both countries there always the forces "for" and "against" working to put things under the rug or investigate and prosecute, most of the time for political gain (Bo Xilai as one example, and here in Brazil we have other similar cases too).

In Russia it seems that it's a different problem altogether, that is, a mob were able to literally seize part of the country, including the president's cabinet. In Brazil and in China we can say (sometimes cynically) that all politicians are corrupt, but there are opposite forces at play, but to me it seems like in Russia the damage is really catastrophic. (granted that I do not follow Russian politics, so I am not completely sure)

(EDIT: Thanks for sharing the link btw, spot-on criticism from SCMP)
We already have gospel that readers (good ones, not just below-average ones) don't have comprehension of but still believe as faith. Do we really need more?
no straw men in sight. that's your choice: efficiency, equality, liberty...pick how you want to trade them off. if you think liberty is the only value that matters, that's a (questionable) values choice. if you think liberty always leads to efficiency, that's a questionable (IMHO clearly wrong) analysis.
Seems to be down all of a sudden. DoS?
Yeah, no email. I use mutt for that :)

Sure thing!
I once worked with a founder who would always pull that kind of garbage: "I wrote [simple software with no dependencies or integration requirements] in [N] days! Why is it taking you guys [M] months to write [complex software relying on several 1st and 3rd party libraries, a component that needs to work within a large, old legacy system]?

Good on the develop manager!
Holy smokes! Popurls! That brings me back. Congrats on the exit. That was a really nice product. (And probably still is.) I haven't used in years, but it was my go to for a long time.
The family sharing on Xbone would have been only a time limited demo, nothing of the sort what Steam introduced a few weeks ago.
Just another way IE is a monster ;)

I believe Microsoft isn't following the same spec that every other browser is using.
I think Chabris should "calm down" as soon as Gladwell starts publishing his works under the "science fiction" genre.
This is a logical offer for them to make. Many of their customers will have unlocked phones, so they aren't in a position to force those customers to use overpriced international data plans (e.g. AT&T's $120 for 800MB/mo). The competition is the cheap nano-SIM card in the airport vending machine.
The Obscure Phonetic Alphabet
You're right, there's some hand waving. The point is that most people draw ridiculously flat graphs, and if you work backwards to find an income/savings rate that makes the wealth graph, it's not pretty.
I would love to see someone compete with Amazon, but who on Earth can? I think most of their strength comes from their ridiculously good infrastructure; both technological and the $14bn they just spent on new warehouses.

Who the heck can compete with that? The only one in a position to (that I can think of) is Walmart, and I don't think their track record is very good thus far.

Although I can't find the source, I remember Amazon being referred to as the "world's largest charity" or some-such, because Bezos could give a heck about short term profits, and always push for the long-term gain. They're slowly taking over the world @.@.

Apologies. Just musing.
well, imagination can run pretty wild - instead of Hellfire one can just arm them with a good 50KWt solid state laser - no resupply necessary:

http://www.photonics.com/Article.aspx?AID=52628

"The device cut through a 15-mm-thick steel girder at a range of 1000 m, shot down several diving target unmanned aerial vehicles at a range of 2 km flying more than 50 m/s, and engaged an 82-mm-diameter steel ball representing a mortar round and traveling approximately 50 m/s. "
Please excuse me as I may be misunderstanding, but doesn't popurl just show a news summary?

It would seem to me the case of flipboard is quite different, instead of driving traffic it actively decreases it.
Ah, I didn't realize this was done as a manual process back then. I assumed the engineers were working on an automated system to do the segment tuning for them, and that system was the new "feature" that Mr. Gates thought the engineers were wasting too much time on. Feel free to re-read my above comment with "segment tuning" replaced by "some other feature." Thanks for the correction.
The argument actually was that the extreme area offered by Europe and Asia being situated along a large e-w oriented latitude offered both a wide variety of domesticated plant species as well as a greater area to grow them. So a crop domesticated in W Europe could much more easily be traded as there are more markets and arable land.

Africa, oriented N-S has a huge variation in climates from the Med in the North through the Serengheti, the sahel, the savannah, tropical rainforests, the veldt, and etc. A lot more micro-climates that make transferring crops to a different area problematic. There were some other reasons but this was the basis of his geographical argument.
I disagree that "government projects" are uniformly terribly executed between industries.

I can't vouch for the American case, but New Zealand has a similar history of disastrous government-run IT projects - from a terrible teacher payroll system[1] to a police information system[2]. The IT community hear is desperately trying to stop the same mistake with a massive tax system overhaul[3].

Nevertheless, civil infrastructure projects appear to be very well executed. Recent major roading engineering projects like the Victoria motorway tunnel in Auckland were completed on time and under budget, for example. There has been an active discussion in this country about why the IT industry, in particular as manifested as major systems projects executed by foreign software companies, are such consistent clusterfucks.

It's a big discussion and I won't go into many of the points raised here, but the issues is, IMHO, very much a "software industry" one, and not a "government" one.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novopay
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INCIS
3. http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/industries/9261063/Row-deepe...
"The kinds of people who read books in America seem to have no problem with my writing. But I am clearly a bee in the bonnet of some of the kinds of people who review books in America."

That's a nice example of the sort of false dichotomy that infuriates Gladwell's critics.
I'm in the broadcast business on the IT side. You're aware that commercials on television are a multi-billion dollar industry right? In a medium (at least on the broadcast side) where little direct conversion measurement can take place?

My prime example: Superbowl Ads. Extremely expensive, measuring response is a fool's errand, but the ads are the most expensive ads you can purchase all year.

So yes, you want attention that brings value. But that's an extremely fuzzy concept in most industries where you're selling someone else's attention.
You might get more of a response if you talk about what kind of domain the work would be in. "Enterprise" isn't exactly specific.
That only applies to people who have iOS devices, so it still leaves a whole swatch of people out of the equation.
Ok here' some other contractor news, Serco in the UK under fraud investigation home of their corporate offices, one of the exchange contingency contracts given at the last minute as well as Equifax...

http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/government-gives-cont...

http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2013/07/obama-administration-...
Any idea why the street cars were scrapped?
Here in the UK most government contracts just go to the big enterprise shops (think Accenture, IBM, Logica, Cap Gemini, ATOS etc) who manage to negotiate fairly hefty long term deals and charge a healthy commission for taking them on and running them for years.

This is why you run into legacy codebases that are 10-20 years old and will keep on going.
> Yet PS3 requires you to have PSN+ to download in the background [...]

This isn't true, either. Background downloading predates PlayStation Plus and everyone has had access to it since its launch. You might be thinking of automatic downloads, but that's not true either as of PS3 system software update 4.50, released last week.[1]

> [...] and to save games to the cloud. Both things you can do without Gold on Xbox.

Xbox support seems to indicate[2] cloud storage requires an Xbox LIVE Gold membership. Has that changed recently (so the support article is out of date)? I couldn't find any update notes indicating that it had.

[1]: http://us.playstation.com/support/systemupdates/ps3/

[2]: http://support.xbox.com/en-US/games/game-saves-in-cloud/clou...
That's what balloons are for: http://www.google.com/loon/
I did, but I think he greatly underexaggerates the importance of getting your name out there. If you deliberately hide yourself from a huge portion of your potential audience, those people will never know that you exist. I don't have a relationship with his site because I'll never have seen them in the first place.

And although it's just one data point, I've personally started visiting iMore because I came to recognize their content through Flipboard, found it interesting, and wanted more.

Maybe I'd glance past 100 TPM articles on Flipboard and never read them, in which case TPM isn't out the traffic. Or maybe I'd start skimming those articles because I've started to associate their icon with interesting content and convert into a regular view. The odds of that happening are admittedly low, but the odds of that happening if their content isn't available on my news consumption platform of choice is approximately zero.

But ultimately it's TPM's call. If they want to restrict it, then I completely defend their right to do so. I just don't think it's a good business idea.
The net cost of windows for an OEM is probably lower than $100. It is often offset by all the trial software and things.
This is a weak, patronizing response.

"I was simply saying that all writing about social science need not be presented with the formality and precision of the academic world. There is a place for storytelling, in all of its messiness."

Chabris didn't say that Gladwell was informal or merely imprecise. He said he cited studies that have been proven wrong in the service of a story.

In other words, Gladwell did not merely present a scientific conclusion in an informal, lightly supported manner. He presented false conclusions as if they were true, invoking the authority of "science", because it told a better story.

That is an abuse of science and very worthy of scientists being a little "uncalm" about it.
Some fundamental business reading for startups
Maybe if you're living in a vacuum or it's your first time on HN, but I think most readers here would automatically jump to the conclusion that he uncovered a bug. What we need on HN is LESS editing of link titles, in my opinion.
You could do the same with an RSS feeder which could take you to their site, and thus you contribute.

Its you choice. You can help a content provider you clearly value on some level, or actively choose not to. No cost you you either way.

I think "I don't care" sums it up well.
I think this was a great article, it touches on the transformation that is going on in the news economy.

It does cost money to report on things, and people who spend their time thinking about the issues and summarizing them or coralling them together. And historically those people were paid by the fees from Classified Ads [1].

What was interesting in the 'old school' was that the classifieds of the newspaper that had the most readers did best, and so they could charge the most for them, and subscribers and circulation became the variable you maximized to make your paper successful. But in the 'new school' there is no single paper, there is the web, and it has voices from all over and all of the ad revenue is going to places like Craigslist and Google so the support cost of serious news is 'gone' or its entirely subscriber based.

TPM is 100% correct in that it gets no benefit from Flipboard (or Feedly, or whatever) in showing its story if it never sees the reader.

People are willing to pay for editorial, the New York times, the Economist, and others have shown that. But how do you create their scale or markets these days? Can you even make a 'lean startup' type organization based on editorial content? That will be an interesting question for the current generation of entrepreneurs, and a vital question to Journalism/English majors everywhere.

[1] http://www.mediabistro.com/mediajobsdaily/mediamemo-google-d...
Not sure about that. Netbooks didn’t really work. This seems similar to netbooks. Many of those also didn’t have Windows but at least some sort of explicit desktop UI. This is a mobile UI on a desktop device. Not sure how to square that.
Do you have a list of technologies/projects that are your "Yes, we want that, but not right now." list? How do you decide when to flip their do-it-now bit?
This bothered me more than anything else in the response. Just because your book is popular does not mean it is not misleading.
Loved your thoughtful responses!
A TV Production Van in Your Browser
I disagree. Lack of transparency is to the benefit of the companies, and they prefer to keep it that way. You are not going to get an honest answer from a company on a touchy subject unless it's already in their marketing/press releases. Usually customer inquiries are handled by powerless and uninformed employees who are not in the loop, and have no power to accurately answer difficult questions. This goes for negative customer experiences, as well as things like working conditions. Companies know that an individual voice is weak and the masses have trouble congregating. At the same time companies often have large marketing budgets to push either what they want people to believe or distractions.

There is also the matter of time. Companies have plenty of time and a unified goal to sell their products all day long. Meanwhile consumers have to split their attention between dozens of different and pressing tasks. Becoming a one-man consumer watchdog group is a job in and of itself. I think it's unrealistic to expect or rely on a majority of consumers becoming experts on all the products they purchase, as well supply chain logistics and day-to-day geopolitical rumblings.

Even if consumers are willfully ignorant, it still does not excuse abuses or poor practices. Your second paragraph is akin to the philosophical tree falling in a forest, "If a Chinese factory worker is abused and nobody cares, is he really being abused?". Of course he is, and consumer ignorance still does not make it alright for the company to exploit the worker.
pg's whole thesis for lisp was that it reduces the increasing time of modifying larger codebases to o(log n) rather than o(n^k) or o(n) (n being size of codebase)
I don't think lack of accountability is what pushed the work out to contractors. And if that is the case, does that mean the accountability "stick" got pushed out to the contractors. I think work got pushed out to contractors from a desire to out-source and because contractors, for various reasons, generally do a much better job of staying abreast of best practices than the government employees. And I say this as someone who has worked on both sides of the fence.

I agree that requirements are a big issue. In addition to the requirements issues you mention, there is the problem with the "business line owners" attempting to unnecessarily dictate implementation details, poorly defining the functional requirements in the first place and ignoring interfacing systems.
Great series! This is my first year as a CTO and I can relate to most of their stories already. It is hard to move away from your comfortable technical zone and have to start to worry more about the non-tech side of the business. A big challenge are the soft skills... once you become CTO you have to deal with a lot more people than with computers. The technical side is a huge challenge as well, but these are fun issues to deal with, although some do keep me awake at night :)

I'm learning a lot reading these interviews, so a big THANKS to the author!
You realize that Flipboard is basically an RSS reader that looks pretty, right? The underlying site is a tap away if you want access to the original, untruncated article.
"at least they've been compelled to pick up a book, read it, synthesize it and draw their own conclusions"

I suspect it's much more common that readers believe they have received a reasonable review of the topic. Gladwell's critics are saying that he presents his work as such, but it is not. There's the problem.
> what's it called when you come up with an explanation of something to fit the facts the way you want them?

That sounds like motivated reasoning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning
Yet a Ruby-Throated Hummingbird can fly 450 miles (20 hours) nonstop over water when migrating, which I've always found amazing.

http://www.worldofhummingbirds.com/migration.php
> It'd take a pretty awesome GitHub mac app to really sell me on GitHub's appeal to the general public. Even I find that, since I'm working with an app like Hammer for static sites, it breaks my workflow to have to go into the Terminal and type Git commands.

I think GitHub is moving in that direction. We're not talking about the general public here -- we're talking about people who can write HTML. There's not a big stretch from that to working on a static site via the GitHub website (you can create/edit/delete files online now).

For a single-person project, the GitHub for Mac app is probably easy enough for at least some non-devs to figure out. I've got some of my non-dev friends to use it for sharing statistical analysis code. It's not perfect but it's doable.

With that said, I definitely see where you're coming from now.
What a ridiculous thing to post. Most of these billionaires have epic mining or extraction concessions from the government of Russia, concessions that are the result of political favoritism and crony and nepotism. Many are former KGB who leveraged their political positions to profit off the chaos and rise of the greatest KGB opportunist of all-time: Putin.

These are the exact sort of people you should be attacking if you at all believe in a free-market and capitalist meritocracy.
Ask HN: If DNS & ISPs shut down, how would a mesh prioritize traffic?
Net neutrality is easy to say when there's bandwidth for demand. What about when there's not?

Are there existing proposals or protocols?

A ratio or currency are the first thoughts that pop into my mind.

What are your thoughts?
Great interview. Now can we get an interview series with founders/business owners and ask them what business problems/pains they wish someone could solve for them? :)
popurls brings you to the content on their site though, so it's kind of apples and oranges.

and your mobile shiz is funked up.
Show HN: Billboard Top 25 for Mashup Songs
If you're talking license costs, I don't think Windows costs OEMs anything after the crapware is factored in.
Skip to the last 2 paragraphs of this article. The rest is filler.
I've read his books as well and definitely feel like I've been lied to. I almost feel like he was playing on stereotypes and I fell for it. Of course things aren't as simple as he presents them in outliers, but man did I fall for it at first.
Facebook Removing Option To Be Unsearchable By Name