skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More likely: the ridiculously steep, unsustainable price competition drives most smaller players out of the market, remaining companies take advantage of reduced competition to raise prices back to a relatively sustainable level.
Does google have a way to down-vote results?

Yes - click the X to the right of the link.
Best blog post I've read here in a while.
I don't think it's Apple that is restricting this, since Yahoo! email accounts are pushed to the device just fine. I still don't know what pros their are for Google to not support it though. It seems like bad business.
This is how the law works, yeah, but don't you think it's broken?
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Multiple versions of the same application? Is the market large enough for 3GS exclusive titles? I hope to see continued support for 2/3G.
Then on Tuesday, Tapulous found out that the new version of its app needed to be submitted by Friday in order to be approved and available on 3.0 launch day.

That's wonderful, meanwhile an app I've worked on is at two weeks and counting (closer to a month if you count a pointless rejection) waiting for a simple bug fix to be approved.
UK PhD's are not as intensive or valuable as American PhD's. The lack of a qualifier and the relatively lax criteria on which a PhD is awarded are two reasons for this.
Got a source for that? I'm pretty sure that the institution I went to you (hint: it's got more Nobel Prizes than yours) would disagree.
"He also said the subcontractor, Accenture, was playing a limited role and was well-qualified for the work."

And I'm well-qualified for doing brain surgery.

Like most enterprise debacles, this is NOT a technology problem. It's a management problem. Or lack thereof.

(Honestly fellow hackers, is there anything easier than payroll? That's what we used to give the new guys.)
What sort of mindmap do you use?
Interesting, they note that the university has 60,000 employees. I'll leave the jaw dropping math to you.
I find it also striking how long he's been like that. He's truly an icon.
But they divorced after they left the company. And the company survived.
I'd say the law (not lawyers) was at fault as well, or even mostly. A legal system can't rely on the honesty or ethics of claimants and defendants to function correctly almost by definition.
You think payroll is a large enterprise is easy? Not a chance. They are dealing with multiple union contracts, salaried employees with various scales and benefits, students, etc. The legacy application is probably full of undocumented special cases that are necessary to get correct results, and have to be tediously reverse engineered.

For another example, see the (in)famous C3 project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Comprehensive_Compensa...

That said, I'm sure you're correct that there was some serious management failures on this project.
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An I.T. solution for this shouldn't cost more than it would for human beings to walk around with a checkbook and a pencil.
How much good the psychologist actually does in the hiring process is very iffy. Many theories of personality testing have no validation at all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/books/review/10SATELL.html

http://www.skepdic.com/myersb.html

http://forums.randi.org/archive/index.php/t-42351.html

The risk for someone who desires to be hired is that a bogus test may screen out an eager job-seeker. And the risk for the employer is that an unvalidated test may select less competent and less motivated employees than other hiring processes.
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A trial court's job is to determine facts: did infringement occur? An appellate court has some power to get into some of the interesting policy issues you bring up. Maybe that will happen in this case, or maybe not.
Why make people do math? It's $500 per employee assuming the $30m figure in the headline (which doesn't actually appear in the article). They spent $28m on another system they never used, and are about to spend $12m on the second attempt, making it $40m in total, or $666 per employee.

Either way, holy cow.
I've always wondered how Grooveshark got away with it. Most online media distributors like Hulu and Pandora just lock out countries like Australia and the UK. I'm amazed it lasted this long!
You mean the fact that we fund public schools with local property taxes, right?

In Minnesota, schools are funded with general state taxation on a per-enrollment basis. But that doesn't keep the government-run schools from being remarkably ineffective.
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I'm curious where the OP got the $30 million from, it sounds like it's a lot more than that unless some of these numbers overlap (it's tough to tell).

A first attempt to replace it with Lawson Software was scrapped in 2006 after years of work and a cost of $28.4 million.

The system's top budget official, Tom Anderes, told the Board of Regents this month that planning for the project alone is now expected to cost $12 million.
The same way as saying any number of times something is false doesn't make it so.

This discussion lacks a price list for all parts. Until then, it's my common sense against yours.

Or better: my biases against your biases.
http://freemind.sourceforge.net

I'm using .9RC4 right now, it's great. The only problem is that the flash exporter doesn't seem to be working with Firefox 3.5RC1, but that's a Firefox bug so who knows when it'll get fixed. It worked fine until this week, and it still works in Safari and every other browser :-/

If you want to see an example map check out http://www.alexkrupp.com/earth.html

The only caveat is that some of the default appearance preferences are a little wonky in the .9 release. I'd recommend turning on full antialiasing, and checking the box that says "Edges start from one point at root node." (And turning off the text editing box at the bottom unless you are going to use it.)
Did they win the lottery or was their success calculated?
There are statutory damages for infringement of works protected by a federally registered copyright. The reason the statute is written that way is to make trials more efficient, so that once infringement (and registration of the copyright) are proven, the trial court doesn't have to do nit-picky fact-finding about how big the economic damages are from the proven infringement.
I can't help but think there's a big market for new, low-cost, web-based software in old, boring markets that are ignored, like accounting, payroll and CRM.

I'm not saying payroll is easy, but the guys who are building payroll systems aren't facing a lot of competition, because the field is so dull.
The legacy application is probably full of undocumented special cases that are necessary to get correct results, and have to be tediously reverse engineered.

I think you hit the nail on the head right there. There is always some oddball case where workers X and Y get paid double time when there is a full moon on the third Tuesday of March in a leap year.
Happened to me earlier today :)
"You think payroll is a large enterprise is easy?"

Compared to any other enterprise app, absolutely! The easiest, by far.

"They are dealing with multiple union contracts, salaried employees with various scales and benefits, students, etc"

Oh, you mean you have to do math? It's not like they're launching a rocket. Oh wait, that doesn't cost $30M either. Sorry.

"...have to be tediously reverse engineered..."

Or "tediously" analyzed and defined. Either way, it's what we do. Digital blocking and tackling. Relatively easy; that is, unless you don't know what you're doing and got the gig because your senior partner threatened the trustees by withholding audit approval.

We hackers don't profess to be experts at accounting. Why do accountants insist on being experts at building software?
The lawyers have a ethical and moral duty as lawyers and human beings to do the right thing.

That's not exactly how a lawyer's professional responsibility is defined. But anyway, as a producer of original writings that have been infringed more than once, I'm glad there are lawyers who work to uphold the copyright laws.
At first I thought it was an outrageous cost for a payroll system, but according to the article, the UW system has 60,000 employees over 27 campuses. For those 60k employees, getting paid is a VERY IMPORTANT deal... there can't be any mistakes in this scale. (A single tiny mistake will propegate it self 60000 times and that won't be fun to fix).

Plus their last system lasted ~35 years (since 1975), so I am guessing their planning a equally long lasting system.
Woman illegally downloads 24 songs, fined to tune of $1.9 million
As soon as I hear the words "software" and "Accenture" alarm bells start going off in my head.

Accenture's model for software development is to get first-year consultants who've had 6 weeks' worth of online training in Java to "architect" the system, then send the implementation to big, cheap teams of pretty talented coders in India. Unfortunately, no matter how talented the coder, building to a specification put together by somebody who doesn't know what they're doing always results in terrible, broken systems.

Having worked at companies where they've implemented systems, and seen first-hand the minimal levels of real IT experience they require from the consultants they get to architect software, any mention of Accenture and IT makes me run screaming away.
"There is always some oddball case where workers X and Y get paid double time when there is a full moon on the third Tuesday of March in a leap year."

And that's a tough case to program?
Listen, just completely off topic, but something has been bothering me for a long time.

What the hell is going on with the light-gray-on-white formats everywhere? When did this start? And why? Who is responsible for this? Every single book, repeat, EVERY SINGLE BOOK, going back 100s of years, uses black [1] text on white or cream paper. There's no light gray in the world of books. This is a consensus formed by centuries of production and consumption.

Now, it's easy for me to go CSS -> Disable Styles -> All Styles, and so get readable text, but the average person is just left to suffer. It's not an isolated problem. It's like every website is doing this lately. What's going on?

[1] Really, dark purple.
I know what you're saying, but I just don't see how someone can purposefully ruin someone's life for nothing more than a claimed "professional duty" and a fat paycheck. There are many clients out there, they chose to take the case. Ultimately the client (RIAA) is to blame, but in my mind they are accessories. This is probably why I'm not a lawyer.
That seems a really charitable guess, given the levels of incompetence that seem to surround every other aspect of this project.
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I know of a Smalltalk system reputed to have similar capabilities, developed by a Chicago area community college for only $4 million. (I've heard that both systems go beyond just payroll, and are like complete ERP systems for college/university organizations, and can keep track of payments due to them from the government based on resource utilization, which is also integrated with registrar functions.)

This is what the big consulting houses do. They convince the board that it's rocket science, but that they're just the very smart, credible, impressive looking people to do it for you. But they are motivated to inflate the price.
Ask NH: Performance metrics on Yahoo's YUI Javascript library?
Does anyone have performance metrics on Yahoo's YUI Javascript library?
I was wondering if that affects only my results or everyones?
Getting more done in lean times
Don't forget their business model. Pay the first year consultants $50K but bill them out at $125 per hour.
I know it is a big city, and yes, I must be naive, but I am actually pretty floored by the number of homicides that occurred each year.
When you are young, you have more time, more tolerance for risk, more imagination.
Here you go:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=40...
I think most of you might have overlooked the fact that this was created by the NYTimes... the publications need more of this stuff. It is so fricken cool.

Investing in Interactivity is a great solution to survive.
What % of people that have downloaded a song without paying would have paid for that song?
In case you are really, really curious:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520422

So he does forensics, as it were.
Not to mention electrical, mechanical or chemical engineers, scientists, editors, diplomats, or anyone else who requires a large and deep pool of specialized knowledge.
TJX Hacker Was Awash in Cash; His Penniless Coder Faces Prison
To be fair, Accenture don't profess to be experts at accounting either: they're generalist consultants.

Interestingly, Accenture (then Anderson, DeLany & Co.) apparently built the first computerized payroll system in the US, back in 1953:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture#History
And the $12m is just for the initial planning stage, no actual implementation, so the final cost will be much higher. But you get to amortize it over ~35 years.
Sanj,

First, it sounds like you're doing a hell of a job and your boy sounds really cool and bright. I hope my kids are getting into business and entrepreneurship that early. Second, some people don't have any social skills - I wouldn't sweat it. I mean, I guess you already know that, but seriously - don't sweat it. You sound like an awesome dude, and best wishes to you and yours. Nevermind the occasional knucklehead, there's quite a few of them but they don't know better usually.
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Those systems already exist.

The problem is the people in charge of acquiring the system go with someone like Accenture because it is low risk for them, and people associate spending more money with a better product.
If it is that easy, why don't you and others just create an open source project for this matter and submit the result to university. I am sure they will glad to have it for free.
There's another thing that may be going on here as well. I usually go to a forum to ask advice on a hard problem. In the act of laying out all the steps I've taken and describing the problem, I generally begin to imagine the replies I may get. You know how it is, people usually ask if you've tried this or that. Any number of 'obvious' solutions are suggested. In an effort to head off those comments I usually end up thinking of an 'obvious' solution I hadn't tried yet, and that generally solves the problem. Failing that, explaining why it can't be this or that issue in the post leads me to think of other possibilities that it COULD be. Nine times out of ten I don't finish the post.
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"...apparently built the first computerized payroll system in the US, back in 1953..."

...and it will be ready next Tuesday.
A very lightweight and simple way of improving retention is to re-expose yourself to the ideas. If you're reminded of a book, go flip through it again and read whatever bit strikes you at the moment. Just enough to satiate your interest, but not so much that you feel like you have to re-read the whole thing again. I like this because it's purely interest-driven. The books that plant the most seeds in your mind will draw you back the most, and consequently get the most re-read, and the get the most retention.

Just as you can remember the words to a song better when you hear the tune, you'll find that just reading a few pages of a book can reactiviate your recollection of the rest of the contents, you find that you remember much more than you thought you did. Another nice thing is that by re-exposing yourself to things you read before, you can connect them to things that you've read or ideas you've had since then. Connections that you couldn't have made the first time start forming. This, too, helps retention. It also feels good.

Not all books are great for this. Pop science books, as entertaining and informative as they can be, can frequently be summarized on a napkin without much loss. They tend to have one big idea and lots of details. The ones that work best are books packed with ideas, the ones that you finish on first reading knowing that you haven't fully wrapped your head around.

Incidentally, all of the books on Kay's list that I have read happen to be of this kind. I think that bodes well for the rest.
This is a map of homicides. A map of muggings or some other crime may show a different trend in the park.
Unfortunately, we have to remember that no one knows the answer to this question for sure, not even PG. If you do go to college, just to give yourself some time and "life experience," I would suggest that you seriously consider leaving after a year or less. And really, part of that "life experience" might just be learning firsthand that college isn't all that it's cracked up to be.
No, I'm pretty sure people don't. In general, I think the attitude is to avoid parks at night. I would imagine that it's hard for police to maintain visibility that well when there's all kinds of bushes and trees in the way, not that much ambient light, and a lot of ground for them to cover.

I have also heard that Central Park has improved tremendously in the past decade.
Interesting that this person was doing some of this while working at Morgan Stanley. It seems that there would be much richer pickings at a Wall Street bank than at TJX.

Also, Watt is now "prohibited from using a computer". Is that possible? How do the feds define "computer"?
Palm responds to Apple iTunes threat
I've worked in the field of enterprise software; unfortunately, programming can be the least of your tasks. It is not a programming issue. A project manager has a lot of constituents (university employees) to satisfy. Lots of fiefdoms. It's more like a Zoo Keeper - an enterprise especially one like a university can be a complex ecoystem with its own predators - you can be in all-day meetings, dealing with the virtual ecosystem of vested interests, departments, groups who all want a say in how the software works. Pissing off someone inadvertently could cripple your project.

As anyone who has tried to get the registrar to do X in Y time and has been referred to Z to get P's signature and so on, universities can operate on their time schedules and march to the beat of their own drummer.

And, remember, a fair number of employees at a university who have been working there for 15 years and are used to doing things their old way might be passive-aggressive or hostile to the idea of something making a process more efficient.
As far as I can tell, Watt didn't make any money off the scheme.
Justificationism doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page, what more do I need to say :) I know, inductive reasoning does. My point is just that regardless of what other challenges to Popper are out there, Kuhns' is possibly the most well known.

As far as details on how Kuhn challenges Popper, I'd recommend you read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to find out--specifically chapter 8 where he addresses falsification and chapter 12 where he mentions Popper by name. Popper is also mentioned in the postscript.
I hope there is a very hot place in hell for whomever came up with the idea of "slideshows" for web content.
This is why I love Hacker News. Where else could I expect tp see this sort of debate in the course of casual browsing?

(well, maybe Metafilter, but I'd have to pony up $5 to leave a comment)
My dad started a company after age 55 that was sort of interesting. He was VP at a Canadian subsidiary of a 50 year old American construction company that had been run into the ground by 20 something lawyers/entrepreneurs/whizkids. When the parent company entered chapter 11, he and a couple of the other employees at the Canadian subsidiary got a loan from the bank, got access to the construction equipment of the bankrupt company, and took over the government contracts that were the bread and butter of the now bankrupt company. He made a significant amount of money in the four years before the parent company managed to exit chapter 11. The twenty something lawyers/entrepreneurs probably moved on to fleecing other investors.
Compared to any other enterprise app, absolutely! The easiest, by far.

I don't know if I'd go that far, but of the 30 or so subsystems we sell our customers, I'd put it in the easiest 5 or so.

Here are some factors that make it easy:

1) The underlying domain model is well understood and has been for decades. Employee works for you. You pay them wages and benefits, set aside taxes, and mark that you did so. Periodically you export your records to show people. Changes in the overall procedure practically never happen. Changes at the data level happen all the freaking time but, hey, computers tolerate data changing pretty well.

2) The users of the system are all experts. They should be, using the payroll system is their job. They have a high tolerance for complicated workflows and will never push a button just to see what it does.

3) Performance demands on a payroll system would be rounding error on any other system in the enterprise. Even with 60k employees you have, hmm, a few dozen payroll clerks, if that? Changes take weeks to propagate anyhow, so if a report isn't quite up-to-the-nanosecond you don't have to sweat it.

4) I am not speaking about my employers or my employers' customers: many enterprises do not want fantastic payroll systems. If it has a little black magic involved and some sharp edges, that suits the payroll clerks perfectly fine. After all, that means there will always need to be payroll clerks who know about those little usage niggles.
What's interesting is that we've come to see a high murder rate in big cities as natural and expected. It wasn't always like this. (And yes, I know it was even worse at one time.)
To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, another school dealing with the same legacy issues:

"The inadequacy of these systems is resulting in operational inefficiencies that impact people at every level of this institution. It is difficult for faculty and staff to perform even the most basic functions, such as hiring, purchasing, tracking and managing multiple budgets, and making accurate budget projections.

The systems lack basic tools and functionality to help staff do their work, such as controls to prevent over-spending, visibility into pending financial transactions, or ability to do financial reporting at the unit or department level. The systems do not collect the level and detail of data required to meet the UW’s growing information needs.

As a result, staff must engage in “daily heroics” just to keep business operations running and get the information they need to do their jobs. They must make extraordinary efforts to perform basic job duties, employing numerous manual workarounds and engaging in other cumbersome and time-consuming processes that take away from higher-level work.

To compensate for missing functionality, departments and units across the University have created hundreds of shadow systems at considerable cost and effort. These shadow systems represent a significant security risk to the University, and maintaining them is costly and inefficient."

http://www.washington.edu/provost/oim/roadmap/report/replace...