skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doesn't really surprise me. I've worked at banks where typewriters were still in use, for filling out certain infrequently-used forms and preparing titles and deeds.

It costs a significant amount of time and money to construct an electronic form and integrate it into the existing automated workflow; if the users only see a form a few times a year, and it changes every year, you might be talking about several thousand dollars per use to computerize that form. There's no way that's cost effective, and it's cheaper and more efficient just to keep a typewriter around.

It's a basic diminishing-returns proposition. In a forms-heavy environment (which I'd imagine a police department is), you get great ROI automating the most commonly-used forms. Then you can breakeven or get some ROI on most of the rest of them. But in almost every situation there's always going to be one or two forms that just aren't worth automating. In some places that means just hand-filling them, but in others that means a typewriter.

A typewriter is a totally acceptable solution to the problem in some cases. It's a bit silly that some people freak out so badly when they see them; if you see a typewriter in a workplace that also has a modern electronic-forms system with automated workflow and everything else, chances are somebody did the analysis and realized that it just doesn't make sense to get rid of the typewriter for the sake of getting rid of the typewriter.
Meta is Murder
Was about to say ETH Zürich too.

Not sure they have an all English program though.
"Micro-outsourcing" daily tasks isn't everyone's cup of tea but there are absolutely huge gains to be had if done carefully. Not just for technical and business tasks, but personal ones as well (cleaning, cooking, errands, etc...).

I find it really difficult to maintain focus when switching contexts from one task to another so for me it's really valuable to be able to fire off a brief email to hand off stuff that doesn't require my direct attention.
Interesting way of hiring!

I don't think there was any point in listing the demographic observations he did, the sample is way too small for anyone to try to draw conclusions.
This is definitely interesting. One thing to reemphasize (which the blog post says, but it cannot be overeemphasized) is that the sample size is so small as to make any results highly suspect.

The other thing I found interesting was this one:
>MCSE or other Microsoft certification

This makes sense. Getting an MCSE is a major investment in time and money in Microsoft technologies. Those people rarely also invest a lot of time learning nix as well (definitely some exceptions). I would not be surprised if many of those candidates simply moved on to other opportunities after finding out how tied to nix technoligies this particular job was going to be. Even if they were that person that had *nix skills in addition to their MCSE they probably found out they could make more money somewhere else that put more value on the certification itself.
Points 1 and 2 seem well taken. I'd like to hear more about the story behind point 3, though.

> Last year, we pooled our money with Sunlight Foundation and other groups and forked over $17,000 for the bulk feed of the Code of Federal Regulations. Well, the product is defective and we want our money back.

In what way was the "product" "defective"? What was the product and who supplied it? If it's the case of them asking for the CFR, and they're upset because the CFR incorporates standards by reference, that doesn't seem like grounds to go asking for a refund; that's pretty common knowledge (because of how much it sucks).

They need to balance their legitimate concerns with not sounding petulant about $17k -- small beans in the world of government.
There will always be garbage in. you're algorithms have to overcome this for the most part. Some things have to be manually dealt with and some things could be manually dealt with, but it's impossible to manually verify tens of millions of local listings.
I honestly think that the only possible reason for this has to be either ignorance or religion. If you demonize one section of science far enough, you're probably self-indoctrinated to believe that all science is bad. Consider someone who believes that climate change is not happening and that the entire scientific community is in on this giant scam. Once you extend a conspiracy theory to such a large level, the only way you can rationalize your beliefs is to demonize the entire population of practicing scientists because they have to be "in on it." Of course, were you to then be asked if science has been a good thing, you'll answer in the negative, even though you would never survive without air conditioning, processed food, and your precious Range Rover.
If they want to succeed they really need to work on their customer support. I had hoped that they would get some of the Rackspace people involved when it went from Mosso to "The Rackspace Cloud", but that doesn't seem to be the case.

We have had almost 0 good customer support experiences (there was ONE time where our problem was resolved within a few minutes) with them over probably 20 contacts in 2009 alone.
It's possible that they were referring to the Search APIs for internal use, which I would assume could be called "all-important".
The show was more informative (and more interesting imo) when they were still heavily developing the site. I would imagine now that the codebase is in maitenance mode, and as a result there is just less to talk about on the podcast, regarding the development of the site. I still listen to it weekly, even though i dont find the podcast as "nutritious" as it once was.
Not necessarily, I finally dumped my hotmail account when it told me it doesn't support Chrome.

I believe brand familiarity would carry a lot of people into using a different browser. Google did huge things by implementing the Firefox download links. If you go to google.com and you get prompted "Runs best with Chrome" and you get a slightly delayed service, people will switch. If they slowed the service down until its still faster than MSN, Ask and Yahoo, but slower than google's supposed to be, you'd be able to force many people over to the browser of your choosing for speed.

Also Bing doesn't work particularly well. It also complains at me because I'm using Chrome.
Cats Do Control Humans, Study Finds
This article isn't filled with as much detail as I had hoped. It is a photo-essay and doesn't really cover much in the way of the gadgets he invented and used.
And this is how terrible it looks like in Opera on Linux: http://imgur.com/o1unT.png
It would be useful to know where he advertised for the job.
It looks like it still needs a lot of work. As a quick test I looked for Sports Bars in London (via their categories) and it returned an Antique Shop in Westerham. I then tried editing the record to remove irrelevant categories and got a server error.
I was about to post almost exactly this to the link's comments, but they wanted me to sign up first, perhaps to confirm my identity. Irony much?
Using this? http://twitter.com/#search?q=danielbmarkham

Maybe it's a database replication issue -- although I've been on for several days now.
Sometimes I just want to scream: Stop having 3-hour discussions about what to name the product and just build the product!
He only had 30 apply, of those maybe a couple were women. That's far too small a sample size to draw any real conclusions.
So I take it that you haven't heard of Asterisk for Skype? You can already do some of those things (at least those that don't require rewriting your CLI)
I love how this news is at least a week or so old. Nice job, Techcrunch.
Right -- only actual, focused work. I track it manually with an app called OfficeTime.
Interactive & Handdrawing Style Wireframe
Review my startup: ShopTalk
http://shoptalkapp.com

ShopTalk is team-centered chat software for companies.

It's based on the founders' experiences working at an organization that deployed IRC company-wide, including for use by non-technical departments.

ShopTalk attempts to retain the elements of IRC that we found to be very successful, like team- and topic-centered meeting rooms, always-on communication, searchable histories, automated entities (aka bots), etc. At the same
time, we wanted to change/extend the IRC model to address limitations we encountered, like true user-level authentication and group support, fine-grained room permissions, LDAP/AD integration, web-based SaaS model instead of installed client/server, general usability issues, and more...

The current state of the project is an early beta--it's currently a simple, but usable, subset of the target product.

At some point in the future, when we're ready to come out of beta, we intend to charge per-user monthly fees to companies, and offer a free trial period of some duration. It's not an ad-based or freemium product, and we're not targeting giant-social-network-scale adoption. More "Enterprise 2.0", if you can stomach the buzzwordiness (hey, it's cliche, but succinct).

The geek angle: the backend is a combination of python and erlang, using myraid libraries that the founding team has put together over the course of working together for several years.

As long time HN readers and occasional commenters, we'd (jamwt, dowski, mrshoe) value and appreciate any feedback or advice the community has to offer.

Thanks for checking it out!
I think it's great! Yet another tool for quickly answering that age old question: "Is reading this worth my time?"
No Safari link? Given that Chrome is WebKit, you'd think they'd throw a little love back.
"Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows)"

:)
I highly suggest you read the GPL one more time. If you're hosting a web app that rotates images for people, that random library is running on (effectively) your server. You're distributing the end, not the means. The GPL does not restrict you in this regard. If, however, you wanted to package up your app ('Run your own image-rotation service!') and distribute it to folks, you have to release it under a GPL-compatible license.

http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification), making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well.

To “convey” a work means any kind of propagation that enables other parties to make or receive copies. Mere interaction with a user through a computer network, with no transfer of a copy, is not conveying.

The GPL (v3, at least) restricts conveying.

GPL v2 states the following:

2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

So long as you do not distribute your modified copy, there is no need to abide by the conditions following that section.
Clickable link: http://shoptalkapp.com
Building a Bigger, Greener Data Bunker
Not if it takes you away from a task that requires your specific attention.

Anyway, this kind of delegation doubles as practice for managing larger teams and companies. You need to get used to not doing every little thing.
Sure. I just don't think it would have been all that much different if Zed had licensed Mongrel with the GPL to start with. It would still have been a mostly unmentioned piece of software atop many other unmentioned GPL-licensed software startups still use. My point is that if you're looking for proper recognition of your work, licensing it the GPL is not a totally effective path to take, in all practicality. Or rather, it's not the /only/ thing you need to do. Actually, it's surprising how many business-y people I know have no idea about what the GPL really is and how BSD/MIT etc differ from it.

If the goal is to be properly /financially/ recognized, i.e., make money from it, have a restrictive commercial license, like it's been done on all kinds of other software for the past 20 years or so, 'open source' or not.

I understand Zed's motivation, I just think having it GPL is a futile effort to prevent other people from abusing his work, coz even tho there's "quite a lot" of decent people out there, there are also "quite a lot" of people who simply. don't. give. a. shit.

fwiw, all the code I write is either BSD-licensed or Python-licensed. Let's just be real.
Has it been mentioned whether the client is ie/js/css or Silverlight anywhere?

Either way it'll be a substantial push for installation/upgrade of that tech.
"Just tell me it’s not Google," Ballmer reportedly said according to court documents (for a case surrounding another Google ex-Microsoft hire). When Lucovsky said it was Google, Ballmer allegedly picked up a chair and threw it across the room.

What he apparently said next, will live on forever in Internet history.

"Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google."

Anyone else remember the old TNT made-for-TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley? This kind of melodrama always reminds me of it.
Maybe it's much simpler than that. When people hear the word scientist, they think "men in white lab coats". If that's what they think scientists are, then all the responses make some sort of sense.

The depressing thing is that people who believe in conspiracy theories are generally reasonably smart people, who have nuanced opinions on a lot of topics, and are often well educated. In order to believe in a conspiracy theory you have to have at least a passing understanding of whatever accepted truth it is you don't believe in. That puts those people leagues ahead of the ignorant-and-proud-of-it.
I don't think they are specific to TT/TC, but are just good practices in general; I have been burned by corrupted Berkeley DB databases so many times that I now refuse to use it for any project where persistence actually matters. The one variable that TT adds to the equation is that your application code may not be local to the system running the DB, so it is easy to forget that if you don't sync your data no one else will.
I looked up "the population bomb"[1] and it seems to be another Malthusian crisis book. The funny thing is that you criticize scientists for this. Ehrlich is an entomologist. The Wikipedia article states that demographers and a large section of the scientific community widely panned the book. Honestly, if you get your view of the scientific community from Neil Cavuto on Fox News, you're kidding yourself into believing that you're actually getting science.

Similarly, pick up any recent scientific publication on climatology. Now, notice that there are no slogans. Instead, there are peer reviewed studies which present hypothesis, experiments, and conclusions. True science is not "political," and if you believe it is then you are simply the byproduct of the media. Scientists themselves say that the media doesn't cover science well -- so perhaps you shouldn't judge scientific opinions based on it?

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb
I understand your sentiment, but I also really like trying to think of cool names...
One of the biggest advantages of Google's pure hosted play was that the backend is immune to piracy. Once MSFT opens this door, it can't be shut. MSFT has always had a love/hate relationship with piracy, fully knowing that they can use it to gain market share and struggle to monetize it later. To me, this move indicates they're willing to accept a little piracy in order to entrench the market.
Here's something Jefferson and geeky. He came up with the term 'catenary' as in a catenary curve. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis (located in the Jefferson National Expansion Park) is a catenary and you can see its equation in the visitor center at the base.
> the costs of a typical IT setup

Excellent point: typewriters do not BSOD, are entirely impervious to malware, and demand only ribbon replacement plus occasional oiling (vs. the Wintel upgrade racket.)
Not to mention the fact that at least one of the criticisms in the article is a total strawman. Joel never said that unit testing is absurd; he said that 100% coverage (and to a slightly lesser extent, unit testing of criteria where tests can not be sufficiently automated (like GUI layouts)) are a waste of time, and that resources could be allocated much more efficiently.
UK opposition party force vote on NASA hacker Gary McKinnon's extradition case
Please review my startup - Flooha
Google Eases The Switch From Lotus Notes To Google Apps
Ay, you're perfectly right, I can identify myself with that too. Also, if I cannot find myself in what I have to do today, I simply won't do it, no matter what I believe or tell others about what I'm going to do, thats a hard learned experience and there seems to be nothing I can do against not not doing stuff that bores me.

If you're an architect you need to do these kinds of things, you will just not be happy doing something else, no matter what's best for someone else or what others tell you is best for you.

What helped me was to set me goals to achieve one thing after the other as well as an exit time. At that time I'm looking forward to simply do something else (as an example - while currently being employed and having all the luxury I could imagine (big pay, nice collegues, nice boss), I still need the perspective that I'm out of all that after 2 years of full work - otherwise I'd suffer from boredom).
Processing wood to create paper uses water. Recycling paper uses water. Growing the trees in the first place uses water. Paper bags are not reused more than plastic ones so they end up in landfills, where they take forever and a day to breakdown (paper decomposes very, very slowly in an anaerobic environment -- you can date the layers of landfills by taking a core sample and just looking for dates on the 20-50 year-old paper scraps that come up in the sample.) Paper bags are heavier and bulkier than an equivalent capacity of plastic bags so it takes much more energy to deliver them from the production facility to the end-user.

The only downsides to plastic bags are the fact that they are mostly produced from a small amount of fossil fuel (until bioplastic versions get cheaper) and that they are lightweight and therefore tend to blow around and get captured in unsightly places like trees when they are improperly disposed.
As do I; which is probably why I have yet to scream.
That worked...one more non-spam follower for you!
Well at least he didn't leave for Twitter like everyone else has been, I'm sure that would have caused Eric Schmidt to pull a Ballmer.
Not to suggest that people are evangelical about using IE6 but wouldn't your example make the case that users would rather switch services than change browsers? Anything to reduce IE6 usage is good news to web developers though.
A1 Helical Piering, LLC
A1 HELICAL PIERING, LLC - Offering superior performance in the installation of helical pier systems for Foundation stabilization, New foundations, Retaining wall supports and boardwalk support all at a more economical price than the competition.
It's a great first step to hiring. But I'm surprised that he didn't have any university graduates pass--the problem itself is a freshman-level bozo test used to apply the concept of a stack. The rest (log in to ssh and install a CGI script) is a set of useful skills that any competent programmer could (hopefully) teach themselves within the timespan of the problem.

If you only have 3 out of 30 candidates pass the bozo test, that limits your choices when it comes to testing them on having any real talent.
I am still waiting for an example of anyone who:

A) has anything at all to fear from the GPL, and

B) isn't a (would-be) parasite. See this as an example: http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=610764
I prefer verify, mostly because with a very common First-Initial-Plus-Common-Last-Name@gmail I get an insane number of idiots typing in my email address somewhere. (I really don't know if people think it's theirs, or if they just don't want to enter an address.)

A verify gives me a chance to cut off the pseudo-spam before it gets started.
WARNING: this link crashed my mac safari 4.

Also before crashing it said the demo needs FF 3.5. So the title is wrong about supporting safari?
masturbating.

technically: masturbating to masturbating to masturbating to a discussion about masturbating.
For example to send forgotten password ;)

If user enters a real email - he will get a new password in that case. If not... well, it's his problem.
I don't think he addressed THE main issue from what I can see: utility. I pay $2 for a single bus ride because it has high utility to me (going somewhere is important), and similarly I have paid $5+ for iPhone apps that I thought I would use regularly and would provide a good benefit to my life.

His game, like most iPhone games, provides low utility. It would at best be a 2-minute distraction while I wait for the bus. In other words, it provides a minimal utility that I can live without. This drastically lowers what I'm willing to pay.
I'm surprised no one tried to root the box.
It works correctly in safari 3.2.3 on my machine. However, safari does show the "Needs firefox 3.5" message.
Learning The Art Of Listening
That's just to answer emails though.
Lamson is, however, GPL rather than AGPL. I checked after reading the post. Seems odd given the content of the post.
Did the Ars rewrite add anything to the Pew Report besides some thin speculation and ambiguous wording? No wonder scientists don't like journalists.
Agree on all points. Including OpenID.
What makes Zed so special that he should "get something out of" his freely released software — while the developers of all the other parts of the system that are required for everything to work, don't?

A list of all the developers whose free software contributions are necessary for a website to be used would not be short. It would be absolutely ginormous.
If you think you are correctly estimating how long the script will take to write, and your estimate is "less time than writing an email," you should look into managing programmers in a large, clumsy corporation.
Comic Sans is everywhere on the web already - it was part of Microsoft’s Core fonts for the Web package and as such made it onto every Windows system, most Mac systems and any linux system user that wants to grab it from Sourceforge:

http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/
No offence intended, I'm ex-infantry myself.

But yeah, good enough for the time being, until something more practical can be implemented. Sucks that not being perfect means people die, but you will never win a chess match if you try not to lose a single piece.
I don't think this sort of topic qualifies as Hacker News.
> The hardware has caught up, it's the telecoms that have not.

That statement is absolutely true. We have the technology. What we do not have is the belief/permission of those holding various monopolies (or effective ones) that opening up their networks / copyrights / business models will really provide them with a greater economic gain.
I believe it's a myth that "most" IE6 are corporate environments. The diagrams about IE6 work day-weekend fluctuation wasn't that big.

I expect at least half of the active IE6 users to be users of the category "installed Win XP and doesn't care about updates or browsers". At least I know some people like this.
This is already the case with the integration between Microsoft Office and Sharepoint today: you can edit files directly from Sharepoint.