skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eberhard nearly destroyed Tesla. Musk did what anyone who invested 70 million dollars would have done.

A perfect example of Eberhard's arrogance is the whole 2 speed transmission debacle. Eberhard absolutely insisted on having a 2 speed transmission to achieve the performance numbers that he advertised way too early, Magma warned them very early on that was a bad decision but he didn't listen. It almost cost them launching the production model at all (luckily Musk had the idea to launch with a temporary transmission which was upgraded later).

Notice the Model S uses a 1 speed transmission.

In my opinion, the only reason Eberhard was so insistent on the 2 speed transmission was because he DIDN'T have 70 million of his own money invested. Musk saved the company as far as I'm concerned.

Also, isn't it unreal how this company was paying the founder 200K a year with no revenues and a balance sheet that would make most start up founders sick to their stomachs?
In some ways I feel bad for the kid. A typical symptom of a third culture kid is lack of the feeling of "home" anywhere. This kid will be a TCK to the extreme.
Terry Gross Interview: Woody Allen On Life, Films And 'Whatever Works' [radio]
I think the principles apply, but the specific practice may have to change a bit. If you look at the five-part "cluster immune system" I normally use, only one part is dependent on a large user base, and that is incremental deploy. You can still use all the automated testing, sandbox, continuous integration and real-time alerting practices just as well.

I would suggest using something like Five Whys to figure out how different your situation really is, rather than assume you'll have a lot of problems due to a small user base:
http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/11/five-whys....

You might find that the smaller customer base is actually a big advantage, since it allows you personally get to know many more customers and therefore find it easier to find and debug problems in realtime. Just a thought.
I would argue that having every project ever in the same repo isn't a good thing to have even if Perforce can handle it.
Also, isn't it unreal how this company was paying the founder 200K a year with no revenue

This is par for the course for venture funded startups.

There's a whole class of people in Silicon Valley who make a career out of being the overpaid execs at startups after the first round or two of funding. They typically get paid more than they would ever make if they tried to get a position that matched their skill level at an established company like Apple or Yahoo!. After they do one, they have "Startup CTO" on their resume and then keep bouncing around from startup to startup. What they are doing is financially very low risk (they are making $150K-$200K a year), yet they usually take pride in their entrepreneurial spirit. I would wager that 9 times out of 10 they are hopeless and drive the companies they latch onto into the ground. Their existence is one of the lamer aspects of SV culture that rarely gets mentioned.

Note that the guy in the article was actually the founder, not one of the people I just described. It may or may not be unreasonable, but I certainly don't think it is uncommon for him to take the same salary as the other executives brought in from outside.
OK, I fixed "vain". Now you fix "artiface" :-)
I block ads I notice - a nice catch-22 for ad purveyors.
Facebook settles outstanding trademark suit
Think Computer and Facebook finally settle their dispute re: the trademarking of the Facebook name. After an article in Huffington Post (was top of HackerNews one day last week), Think now hiring: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/eng/1222791711.html
It would be awesome if someone could engineer houseplants like these, except on steroids, so they could handle larger loads more quickly.
But how long until it's fast enough?
The iPhone is a terrible platform for the vast, vast majority of developers. The process of getting on board, promotion, and success is a total black hole. First movers such as ngmoco and Tapulous have done well; people with better apps - for free - have failed. Maaaaaaaybe 3.0 makes it easier for niche plays to work; certainly, as far as I can tell, add-on payments aren't supported in Palm's marketplace. I do think the Apple folks are improving the platform. But they act like jerks.

Apple can fuck over iPhone devs, and they do. Frankly, it's what you would expect from them. An abuser doesn't stop beating when you confront him; he stops beating you when you leave.
I don't like programs that automatically pull in transactions from online banking, etc.

I made a spreadsheet (a google doc) with multiple tabs, so that each day I can log what I purchased, as well as track progress toward various financial goals.

This is all well and good, but I think the best solution is probably the simplest. Just figure out your budget and set up your online bill pay to send checks automatically.

Then on the first of the month, withdraw cash for your entire monthly discretionary spending -- food, gadgets, etc. If your ATM won't let you take out enough, have your bank increase the limit.

Then you can ration (or not) with each purchase. You won't need to carry around your atm/check card either, since you are using cash. And if you have any cash left at the end of the month, you have succeeded. If you had to withdraw more cash, you failed.
any system with a centralized server will be fairly easy to block/monitor.
Isn't making an NDA for a conference talk about publishing to the app store quite a big fat fuck you too?

Seriously, how much more of this Apple-flagellation are you peeps gonna accept?!?? (Yes _flagellation_.)
http://wiki.github.com/jwiegley/ledger
Check out pTerm from the app store. I supports tunneling and port forwarding.
Breakthrough: Particle Assembly Technique
This isn't about information. It's about experience. Just like you don't learn hacking by reading a book, you don't learn about homelessness until you put yourself in their shoes. Literally. The sad part is that the marginalized always become a statistic and that's in part why the problem persists.
It's not clear to me how you've decided that representative democracy makes the most sense. Do you judge societies solely by how powerful their militaries are? That would put China pretty close to the top. Do you judge them by how long they last? Then you're declaring victory far too early.

In my opinion, a rotating system based on popular support carries all the benefits of both aristocracy and democracy at the same time.

This would make so much more sense if you put quotation marks around "benefits" or changed the word to "drawbacks".
WordPress Plugin Developers Get The Shaft, Donations Are 0.1% Of All Downloads
Twitter Reschedules Maintenance Around #IranElection Controversy
no, most are :)
Chef Robot makes its video debut, nightmares forthcoming
Keyboard-driven Window Management in OS X
That wasn't a middle finger, it was fear.
People will accept it while the market exists.

The alternatives simply do not have the consumer mindshare that the iPhone does, which is unfortunate.
Honestly, if you are married for 7 years and have no kids yet there is something wrong with the relationship. Money, time, and other things are just excuses the real reason is something missing in the relationship.
This is a GREAT reply, and I really appreciate the very thoughtful comment that you wrote.

I completely agree that what I did was inappropriate given the fabric/culture of Hackernews, which is why I understand why it got killed.

My original thinking was that it would be cool if I could show the community that I had passionate users, because hey, everyone likes to work with folks who really cared and nurtured their users. =)
I have no objection to Apple running an official App Store with strict rules for compliance. I don't even mind that they take a cut of the profits.

However, I find it utterly reprehensible that Apple doesn't allow developers to distribute their applications on their own. iPhone owners should be able to install whatever they want on the device they purchased.
An maybe not. My SO has too keen a sense of smell for that to work around our house.
As unrelated as it may seem, I couldn't help myself from sharing this interview with you since it shattered so many preconceptions I held of who Woody Allen really was. . .the interview was so revealing and awe-inspiring that one could certainly make the case that he approaches his stories much like a hacker approaches his problems, by doing whatever works first and foremost.
Mogul Blogs: Promoting Young Entrepreneurs
There are billions of neurons but many more connections between them then are probably typical in the graphs they compute. Even complex road conditions or a set of links from a page probably rarely number more than 1K - the ballpark average number of connection per neuron.

Others are directly working on simulating brains. It's a hard problem.
Interesting tie-in, but I don't know what you're referencing. Source?
I don't see a future for winMo in that ecosystem.

Sure, WinMo sucks hard. But it's open, and that means you can do whatever you want. Android is probably the most logical successor, although T-Mobile would really like you to pretend that Android is closed.
It's called a lemon tree, and used to be a standard sight in just about every Australian backyard
Here's a good illustration of what happened:

http://twist.flaptor.com/?span=24&gram=nomaintenance%2C+...
Funny that twitter hasn't been blocked by Iran's government. I wonder if the popularity of twitter's API had any impact on that decision. Because of the API, it'd be almost impossible to completely block the service. There's no shortage of 3rd party URLs that display twitter feeds.
iPhone owners should be able to install whatever they want on the device they purchased.

Why? It's such an entrenched idea, but you don't get to rewrite paragraphs of books, or scenes in films, or suits in a pack of playing cards or the firmware in your alarm clock. The iPhone is sold as is, why should we expect to use it any differently?
"Their existence is one of the lamer aspects of SV culture that rarely gets mentioned."

On the contrary, I think that that's one of laymen's first assumptions about C-level positions at startups. I think that most people hear "tech startup" and still think "~2000 era dotcom, doing nothing but living on a cushion of imaginary or scammed cash." When I tell non tech people I work at a tech related startup, I am almost always given a look or a remark which requires me to say "oh ho ho, its not what you think! It's not like that!" almost a decade later.

(The other time I get that sort of look/remark is when I mention that it's also a video game company, but no ho ho, we don't make games where you endlessly decapitate hookers.)
Python is fantastic but Learning Python might be a bit steep for someone who's not familiar with programming at all.

Strangely, I think this youtube lecture series from Stanford is fantastic. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkMDCCdjyW8

It's java but the lecturer eases you into the most important concepts with an understanding of how to engineer readable, reusable code. So watch it free. Then buy Learning Python. If there is an equivalent python learning video on youtube, I haven't found it.
I think most (if not all) talks at WWDC are covered by NDA, and have been in recent memory. It's just Apple's style.
Want to Know more about Cisco telepresence
Hello! I recently heard of Cisco telepresence and wanted to know more about it. I did a Google search and found this nice vtc video by ivci. Does ivci offer installation services for Cisco telepresence too? Please let me know. Thanks!
it's all about making sacrifices
Joel, you need to check out Google Website Optimizer. It tells you when the change is proven. I'd love a 2 minute change to result in a 2%+ in conversion.
Homebank

http://homebank.free.fr/
"The content of sessions is under NDA, so I can’t tell you what it was about."

Without knowing the content, I'm reluctant to criticize the decision not to take questions since I remember one WWDC session where one developer (let's call him "dw") destroyed an AppleScript session with his Q&A ranting.
Or perhaps people really just don't care that much? You'd think if it was so terrible people would not develop for it. The fact it continues to grow and arguably flourish is a pretty good indication there's more good than bad.
My father-in-law who toiled in the valley for many a year told me: "all those projects I worked late nights and weekends on -- they're all in landfills now".

That said, he was able to cash out ok....
Is that why the song says "the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat"?
Maybe OS X 10.7 will ship with XMonad's tiling integrated into WindowServer :)
A novel approach, I like it.
There is a fundamental difference. It's not like rewriting parts of your book, but about preventing you from using your book as a monitor stand when you no longer want to read it.

The iPhone and iPod Touch are, unlike the average alarm clock, single purpose machines implemented on top of general purpose ones. I see many good reasons to want to change the firmware, use your own iPhone on your carrier and pay full price for unlocked units. If it's yours you should be allowed to do anything with it.
It has been blocked, but the users are using proxies..
iPhone owners should be able to install whatever they want on the device they purchased.

They can. It is the iPhone OS, which they do not own, that does not support this.
Ya Gotta Have (Real) Friends
Come on. Playing card companies don't spend money and time to restrict the "playing card platform." Alarm clocks don't even have firmware to restrict and alarm clock companies don't care one way or another if their users take them apart and mess with the circuit boards.

Apple, on the other hand, has worked pretty damn hard to restrict their customers from being able to install their own software. That is very much a "fuck you" direct from Steve Jobs.
Fair enough, he does have previous experience running an unprofitable business off of government money by appealing to morality.
http://texthog.com

I send it text messages when I spend money. much easier than writing it down or keeping receipts etc
My vote is also gnucash. Especially if you've had any sort of formal accounting training.
But they act like jerks.

With the exception of the session that is mentioned in this article, I'm going to have to disagree.

To counter with my own anecdote in here, I work on a few apps (mac and iphone) and every time I went down to a lab to talk to an engineer directly, I was able to get help and have my problem solved. Issues ranged from bugs in Apple's code (with 10.6, and will be fixed by release) to App Portal/App ID issues, to bugs in my own code.
Indeed. IIRC, even Stump the Experts was covered by NDA this year — and that definitely doesn't cover anything new.
That's a valid question.

I tend to take it as a given, considering that the iPhone is essentially a miniature computer and the past decade or so has thrived on customizable, hackable personal computers.

Apple has always wanted to assert extra control on the products they ship. With Mac's, they've controlled the hardware. Now they're trying to control the software. Imagine a version of OS X where every application had to be approved. Does that not strike you as horribly wrong? I wouldn't want to use an operating system with those restrictions, though I imagine the best response to such an OS would be to not purchase it.
Nokia N96: Best N Series Third Generation Mobile Phone
Perhaps this is a silly question, but what about using things like proxies?

Also, aren't there any hackers in Iran right now? If anybody is in need of an SSH tunnel out of the country, I'm sure that some of us HNers can help out (isn't this sortof what TOR is for?)

Is anybody here in Iran? Could you elaborate on what they're filtering an how?
It's not like rewriting parts of your book, but about preventing you from using your book as a monitor stand when you no longer want to read it.

Bad example. Apple does nothing to prevent you from using an iPhone as a monitor stand, doorstop, hammer, frisbee, or whatever else. The limitations that people complain about all have to do with the software, which like the contents of the book, you do not own.
http://daringfireball.net/2009/05/diary_of_an_app_store_revi...

This wouldn't have gotten the love it did if it didn't ring all-too-true to all-too-many people.
Firstly, I'm not declaring victory. I think forms of government evolve over time. I'm simply declaring an inflection point, a local maximum, around representative democracy. As a libertarian, I'd love to see more forms of government tried.

Secondly, the problem with talking about capability to lead is that it is highly subjective. Your idea of a great leader and mine will probably diverge. Multiply that times a million and there is no standard for great leaders. You're trying apply some scale of competence where in reality none exists, at least as far as the governed care.

The best answer for that is to have a pick at the best leader/administrator and then repeat and rinse. This time I think the guy is doing great and you think he sucks. Next time our roles reverse. Over time, this keeps the most people satisfied and convinced that we, in general, have good leaders. This is because the consent of the governed has been proven to be more important that objective competence. Lots of really smart people were highly unpopular and almost sparked revolts while lots of popular idiots advanced their cultures just fine for their time in office.

BTW, World War I is a great example of how the old aristocratic systems a) got the world into a war, and b) completely started breaking down once the people began finding their own voice.

Take a look at this from the point of view of a software team. Let's say there are five of us getting equal pay to perform a complex project over the next six months. We might decide that we need to have a project manager. How to select one? Do we give a test? Rank ourselves by intelligence? Ask for references?

Whatever our criteria, as the project changes, we're likely to have second thoughts. Gee, the guy who scored highly on intelligence really has no social skills! Or the great social guy can't manage complex dependencies. Or the project looked like this when we started but really ended up somewhere else.

This is natural and to be expected. If we preface our PM decision with "and we're going to vote once a month to keep or rotate the job" then we have a way to respond to new eventualities.

During the month, of course, our PM can make management decisions and do everything we would expect of an autocrat/manager. But as smart or as good as he might be, he still has to think about our feedback loop. When you rotate, you have the ability to be wrong, to adapt. Systems with feedback loops that adapt are much better than systems with a single selection criteria and no feedback loop.
Twitter Postpones "Critical" Maintenance
New Jersey Alimony Attorney
New Jersey Alimony Attorney
I was hoping they meant Eberhardt when I read the title of the article.
Ringing true doesn't make it true.

I’ve also learned that many of the problems aren’t intentional: many parts of Apple’s internal infrastructure are overloaded or extremely outdated, and they’re scrambling to keep up with their growth, often ineffectively.

One major surprise was when an Apple employee told me that the App Store reviewers are not outsourced: they’re all direct, full-time Apple employees. Many of them work nights and weekends to keep up with the extremely high submission volume, and they’re constantly expanding the staff to keep up with the submission growth.

Source? Why, the very same post that Gruber is quoting in this submission.
At work I sit about 10 desks away from users. But immediately next to me are programmers (both working with me and are not working with me). Most of my users talk more often and not terribly understanding of breaking a programmers "zone". So they are close enough for necessary feedback and interaction, but not too close. As a programmer, I find programmers are much more quiet and peaceful to work next to. :)
It doesn't have to be... at first. Prove it works and everyone will bust ass in a space race to design fast hardware.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. I mentioned the iPhone Dev Portal, and code-level issues having problems solved, not that the App Store was magically fixed with 5 minutes of talking to an engineer.
I really miss it. I thought I got more done personally. In the 90's I worked places where most programmers had a door. In the 00's almost no one where I work has a door anymore.
Apple, Inc., not its individual developers, treats iPhone developers horribly. As a rule, Apple shields itself with layer upon layer of corporate bureaucratic armor, and the value of WWDC is cutting through that nonsense. However, at the one session about the appstore submission process, Apple stonewalled developers.
And yet, don't iPhone USERS have the best user experience of any (mobile) platform?
I also tried pricing out dell studio 15" comparing it to my current macbook 15" pro (8 months old, not unibody, 2.4Ghz w/ 2GB of ram) and it costs $900 vs $1400 when I bought the macbook pro. It also has 4GB of ram, I couldn't get a 2GB option, the HD is bigger and getting a 1080p screen on it just costs $50 more.
I would love to implement a graph like this where each node used bayesian inference to act on messages received from connected vertices.

My gut says if you could get the system's state to settle to an equilibrium, it could react to changes in external signals in a probabilistic way and learn.

Instead I'm busy working on an iphone app...
HT to Jacob Gabrielson -

http://a-nickels-worth.blogspot.com/2008/05/ulrich-dreppers-...
We can always hope!
Paul Allen wrestles PaulAllen.org away from 'Paul Alien' filmmaker
Six survival strategies for technology consultants
just assume that everything minus the keynote is under nda no matter what it is, including the lunchtime sessions. always has been, will likely not change.
OpenOffice.org: Calc (spreadsheet)

I keep a running cashflow listing with a row for each day and columns for each of my major accounts. Plus totals and a moving average.

Along with that I track all of my incomings and outgoings, with monthly totals.

I update all of it about 3-4 times a month. I find it gives me all the information I need to keep on top of things. I can see how various accounts fluctuate over time, where the big expenses are, and it givens me enough info to plan the next few months ahead.
Frankly, it's what you would expect from them. An abuser doesn't stop beating when you confront him; he stops beating you when you leave.

I'm not an iPhone developer, nor have I ever developed anything for the Mac platform specifically. Based on the stories I've read online it does sound like Apple isn't handling their iPhone app store well, but I do take issue with the part of your comment I've quoted.

I'd like some examples about why you would expect to be treated poorly (or as you put it abused) by Apple. Is it only based on their track record with app developers? If so perhaps it's a problem rooted in the iPhone app process itself and not systemic to the whole company, as you imply. I would need more examples of Apple's abusive policies to understand your statement, for now though I'm not going to write off Apple as horrible corporation because some app developers cry foul (to which, according to the blogger's own admission, Apple attempts to promptly respond to and rectify).