skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That conclusion is a weakly implied by the research (at least the way it was explained), which was based on "a computer model of how a crowd of people move across a confined space".

They did not clarify how it applied to car-traffic. For instance, people react very differently to minor collisions while walking versus driving. I'm just guessing here, but I would think the simulation does not account for complicated behavioral factors (e.g. some people, when cut off, may overrreact when hitting their brakes, thus causing more traffic behind them).
Ask HN: Google Search Omissions?
I've noticed gaps in the Google search results in recent weeks; data that I know exists on the net, but that is missing from Google search results. In one group of omissions, from searches targeting data archives that are (were?) resident at Google itself.

Has anyone else noticed search results omissions?
For me the fact that Yahoo never fully copy the adwords model its one of the biggest mysteries/failures on business history.
Why not try hashing on the result of some operation (xor would be bad because, well, you know) on the password and the challenge together, and not displaying the hash until the password and challenge are the same length?
Their logic is that it's easier to sell advertisers a single search advertising platform with 10% of the market than two competing advertising platforms with 5% of the market, especially when combined with the savings by avoiding the costs of duplicating each others search and advertising functionality.
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/misc.el...
When I was freelancing, I always told the client to take down the ad once I got the gig. Maybe some people are just sending out a resume with one hand and flagging the post with the other?
Compete with them! And I'm sure I wouldn't be alone in that.
How to build apps using Guardian data and tools available on the web.
If they simply stopped paying his invoices as the article states, then that means the consultant had already done work that he still hasn't been paid for. Regardless of who owns the copyright, if the company still hasn't paid him for those invoices, they have no claim whatsoever to those last few weeks of work, regardless of any contract.
Well, that's just sad, since Notepad loads the whole file into memory.

Have you tried Notepad++ or UltraEdit? Colorization, smart handling of large files, etc.?
It has absolutely nothing to do with continuations. You can always secure any HTTP request of any method:

example.com/flag?article=729801

example.com/item?id=729801&flag=true

example.com/article/729801/flag

etc, etc.

One word: sessions. You can roll out whatever ACL-scheme you want over sessions.
Of course it's not a good idea - but companies do run out of money. When they do, the relevant question isn't, how do we inflict further punishment; it's, how can we maximize the chances of people getting paid.

The developer could have just sued for the money owed him, without adding the incendiary copyright-infringement charge.

This was an example of a circular firing squad (well, to the extent you can have a circle with two people). It looks to me as though all hands played it badly.
New JDK 7 Feature: Support for Dynamically Typed Languages in the JVM
By that logic, any insurance would be a pyramid scheme.
I'm a developer and I can't even guess what the visualization "means" in under 10 seconds. I don't get the point of it much less see any practical utility for this...

Neat css trick, though!
Twitter Users: Private Beta Invites to Philtro-Filter Your Tweets
So is the X-axis mislabelled? Along the bottom it says "Number of elements being inserted" going from zero on the left to 2,000,000 on the right, but the title says "Time to insert 2,000,000 elements". Something's very wrong somewhere.
As would be any interest bearing account.
I like how one needs a British accent to get lines 3 and 6 to rhyme.
Next time, might I suggest linking to TED directly instead of the Daily Fail, which is pretty much guaranteed to distort whatever interesting finding or plan is being reported on.
utter rubbish, I had 3D webcams in '98.

That cnet hasn't seen them yet does not mean they didn't exist.

You can still download the software from various download sites, search for truetech webcam.
Digital Rosetta Stone hopes to keep information for 1000 years
Thanks for all of your feedback so far! I just posted a bit of explanation and a response on my blog: http://mattt.me/2009/07/chroma-hash-a-belated-introduction/
I think this is a good article, but most times companies do not even know they are incurring technical debt, and that is the first step before you can start working with technical debt in an intelligent way.
FTA:

Yahoo! and others downplayed Web searches because the money wasn't there. And Google officials don't have a clear timetable for turning a profit.

Famous last words.
We do. Our [internal] wiki article on technical debt explicitly covers examples, guidance on when to intentionally take on debt, how to document and measure it, different "grades" of it, and how to plan to retire it.

There are then per-application technical debt pages for specific details on our "portfolio" of debt. (We're also a fair bit larger than most startup dev teams, so having this level of formalism is more appropriate in our case than say just a whiteboard somewhere...)
Fleeing cold whiteness, I would sit alone--

Not in the sun--I feared his bronzing light,

But in his radiance back around me thrown

By fulgent mirrors tempering his might;

Thus bathing in a moon-bath not too bright,

My skin I tinted slow to ivory tone.
very cool. awesome Sam!
This is pretty well known already: in Kendo, students are taught to monitor our opponent and attack when he blinks. Likewise, you need to be aware of your own blink and be prepared to defend yourself when you do.
Just as being Jewish does not make you inferior to other people it also doesn't make you superior.

I don't feel very comfortable reading this article, I could easily imagine some party arguing the opposite.

Sure there are lots of jewish people that have accomplished lots, but then again there are also plenty of failures. Being jewish does not mean that you are more predisposed to being 'genius' material.

Work ethic and connections have as much or more to do with your accomplishments than your genes do. If your brain is halfway decent and you work hard you have a fair shot at thhe pot, being a little smarter may help (or it may hurt!), but it does not compute that being jewish is a factor.
Results of: 7 developers, working 24/7 for 90 days, 1 house (in Colombia)
Colombian entrepreneur Alex Torrenegra hired a small team of developers and for 90 days, they worked every waking moment, and except for one family weekend break, they did not leave the house. Food and other logistics was taken care of by another company. Here he tells how productive the experience was.
Weird, I was just trying to explain this to a manager yesterday, I need to go look for hidden microphones...

...I've tried in the past to explain this to others using retail "shrink" as an analogy. For those unfamiliar with the term, as I know it, the idea is that you assume a certain percentage of loss (in my experience, as shoplifting in a music store) and by writing that off, it allows you to focus your energies where they have more impact on profit. For example, placing the lowest-margin items in the most vulnerable parts of the store to deter theft of items where you really make money.

I'm glad someone took the time to write up a better explanation that I can now refer to.
And that's the way it is.

Gotta love the journalism history of the framework coming through :)
Stop following directions and start designing
Dr Tamami Nakano should monitor people playing Guitar Hero, and watch how infrequently they blink their eyes.
This article is about exactly as sensationalist as I've come to expect from Fox News.

Out of all of the (3) applications mentioned in the article, one's functionality has been duplicated for some time on another device (TomTom speed trap reporting), the other is completely and totally legal and useful in the state it works in (MMJ dispensary finders), and the third is just as "illegal" as using a pen and paper (or in fact, any other device with text editing capabilities) to count cards.

While the applications are interesting, the way that they've chosen to frame the story strikes me as inappropriate.
I think most people are unsure how to make the transition from having a good idea to forming a company around it. Many people here build stuff all the time but often times don't seem to believe in the idea enough to put money into it, yet also are unsure how to get money from others. My guess is that people just aren't sure how, in spite of PG's best efforts.

My other guess would be that many ideas are largely just modifications of things that already exist that a large company like facebook could easily replicate. Coming up with brand new ideas is not easy.
Ask HN: Web Charting Packages
Ok, the longest ongoing open project at work is finding a decent charting package. None of them solve all of our problems.

1) Scale - we have ALOT of data points, potentially 10's of millions. It would be nice if the package dealt with this in an intelligent manner.

2)Interactivity - We don't want just a flat image that isn't easy to interact with.

3)Looks professional

4) Chart Types

The solutions we've found are in four main categories: Java based, PHP based, Flex based, and Javascript based.

Java, PHP: We've found them to scale well, but look not as clean/professional as we like, and are not interactive. Most chart types. Ex, JFreeChart

Flex: Look nicer then the Java/PHP charts, do not scale as well, though they have excellent interactivity.

Javascript: Do not scale well, best interactivity, nicest looking charts. Much newer packages then other types, many still in development and do not have all the chart types we need. Ex, flot, visualize

What packages do you have experience with and why do you love/hate them? Would they fit the needs outlined above? Thanks!
my guess is for most people its fear of lack of skills..."how can I compete against others with thousands of programmers"
The thing that strikes me as odd, is that Apple doesn't do this. This problem and work-around were obvious to me the first time I got a voicemail. And Apple doesn't often make thoughtless mistakes like that.

It makes me wonder if AT&Ts voice mail system just isn't giving them enough information to match the records reliably.

(E.g. If the voice mail record doesn't distinguish between the origination number and the callback number, trying to match messages to missed calls would be inconsistent.)

It wouldn't have to be much; just enough margin for error to make the system a little unreliable. Because I can definitely see Apple opting for 'weird, but consistent' over 'inconsistent', even if it is only rarely inconsistent.
Wow, roofed cities and personal airships?

How could they miss the obviousness of the domes and flying cars we use today?
It strikes me that this reduces password cracking to a game of Mastermind.

Amusement aside, it also allows a cracking attempt to be done without running up against server authentication. Even if the same series of color patterns can occur for multiple passwords, the quantity of attempted server authentications is greatly reduced.
Twitter phishing scam exposed
I tell my clients that cutting corners is "an hour of savings today, 5 hours of cost tomorrow". I've worked on too many projects that raced to cram in features by a deadline, and ended up with a sloppy app that took forever to maintain and made developers miserable. Far better to take a measured pace and ensure that rapid development can happen in months 12-24, not just months 1-3. Especially in startups - startups are a marathon, not a sprint.

Of course, cutting corners isn't the only kind of code debt, and the author makes some good points. If you're spiking something or prototyping it, and intend to rewrite or throw away, technical debt might be a good tradeoff.

I also take issue with this:

Early on at IMVU, we incorporated in tons of open source projects. This was a huge win... The downside was that we had to combine dozens of projects whose internal architectures, coding styles, and general quality varied widely. It took us a long time to pay off all the debt that incurred – but it was worth it.

The more you can offload to open source libraries or third party APIs, the less your application has to do, and the less you have to maintain. If the library or API sucks, then sure - you're incurring technical debt. But if the library/API is good, or you can contribute to make it good, then it's a win all around.
Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun.
-- W.B. Yeats, poem introducing _Responsibilities_
Those are awesome, much nicer than the icons I was using before. Thanks!
I honestly think healthcare / health insurance is a major reason.

It's hard to be "ramen AND medical bills profitable" if you or one of your founders has an urgent medical issue when you're trying to bootstrap yourselves with no insurance.

The Obama administration should look at this issue and provide significantly reduced healthcare to bootstrapped startups.
Also, it needs to be taken into consideration that the group making the claim does have a working model of portions of a rat brain.
The best developer evangelism is just responding to bug reports and user questions. When I am standing in a pile of your CDs and DVDs worth a small fortune in licenses, do NOT treat me like a thief when I call for help 3AM in the morning. That goes to Adobe, IME.

The best support I got from a tool vendor:

3) Apple. I walked in as a newb with a $50 G3 iMac I bought from Craigslist. Haven't touched a mac before since the SE. Told the "geniuses" I am an Open Source developer and I need to setup a mac box so I can port our GPLed genome research software to the Mac. They took the box, put a new panther on it, xcode and gcc and gave me 3 ADC CDs, and a postit note on which my name and a password where scribbled for the ADC website. Much respect and love to the guys at the Apple shop in Clarendon Blvd, Arlington, VA.

2) FileMaker. I have been trying to connect it to a MySQL database to copy data overnight. ODBC worked with a higher-end version than what we had and I couldn't get a purchase order out on time. Called sales and asked them if they would bill my employer. No they said, but I can have the ODBC drivers and "enterprise" utilities for free.

1) LispWorks. I asked them if the "Professional" version supported DDE so I could script MS Office with it. Along with the answer, "yes", was a URL to the full version. This is not a "developer" tool, not an add-on, not a pluggin, it's their fucking FLAGSHIP application. WOW!

Above I said the best developer evangelism is responding to developers: yes, your developers are your best evangelists.
From what you say, I think that you could have experienced what it's known as "sleep paralysis", I remember reading about the subject when going over the same problem in my sleep. Maybe you should take a look on this matter, so you know exactly what you are dealing with, thus not being afraid of this condition.
Bartz On Bing Search Deal: “Everyone Wants A Real Alternative.” (Live Notes)
Technical Debt is a broken metaphor. It's almost right, which is why it resonates, but it's a bad mental model for the problem it tries to describe.

There are real negative consequence of applying a "broken mental model" -- you end up doing the wrong thing when you live by the model!

Why is technical debt a broken concept? Real Debt is incurred proportionally to the asset bought with it. In technical debt the debt is proportional to the trouble it causes, not the value delivered. Also, it implies that the only way to get rid of the debt is to make a big investment. In reality, you can just throw away code and the debt disappears. Not analogous with real debt!

It should've been called technical drag. Properties of drag that are appropriate to the metaphor:
- You get value based on the amount of input work, but it places a drag on the overall progress towards the goal (support load, architectural coupling).
- You can reduce the drag of an existing component by investing to refine it.
- New components typically add more drag than existing ones.
- Little bits of drag here and there add up to a big problem
- Removing unused functionality reduces associated drag without major investment

Thoughts?
Boost Your Productivity
Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal Imminent: Analysts Weigh In
If the company is operated in such a way that it promises to pay people and then doesn't, perhaps a more relevant question is, how do we keep more people from getting scammed into working for free.
I agree. IMO, Charlie Rose is probably the best all-around interviewer today and to be featured on his show at such a young age is quite an achievement.
Being a large company doesn't mean you can "easily replicate" things. The major reason startups can wiggle their way into a market and become a player is because large companies can't react in time to what an agile startup is doing in their space.
No flagging makes sense, I think what some of us would like is to comment (for questions/clarifications/etc).
I would love to know your formal approach (or as close to it as possible). I personally see technical debt as debt to be leverage but I lack the means to track it so that we are always aware of how much debt we have.
Heechee scrolls.
Model validation and multi-db will hopefully be in the 1.2 release. At which point I wonder how the Django ORM stacks up against SQLAlchemy.
You know you've made it when Charlie Rose interviews you, great job.
I'm asking myself what will search look like in 10 years ?
I think the MSFT vs GOOGLE battle is going to get ugly soon. So MSFT will license Yahoo Search Technology (?????), I'm not sure what that means , sounds like an exchange of $$$$.
Time, I need more time. (granted it doesn't stop me from starting startups, it stops me from starting MORE startups). I need closer to 60 hours in a day.
Sam, did you also get a life-time achievement award on your first birthday? some folks had to save humanity, a few times, before they could be on Charlie Rose :-P Congrats!
>> The other is that you can never have contempt of your users... which you're paid hundreds of dollars an hour to do.

In all fairness... those are clients then. Totally different situation.
This is a good article and it resonates with one of pg's essays in which he says that sometimes in building a project you worry about security later. I think it is also related to the early optimization error. You don't know what you are ultimately going to build until you get feedback from customers/users. So don't overengineer/optimize something that you aren't going to use/doesn't need it.
Why Websites Don't matter
I wonder why evolution hasn't made it possible to blink with each eye separately, so that no information is lost.
"However, there is one rule you shouldn't break... the 'three-second rule' for following distances; after the car ahead of you passes a point on the road, count to three."

Three seconds? I've heard of the two-second rule, which has an entry on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-second_rule

When did the extra second get added?
Do you know if this is the case in the United Kingtom?

Does anyone have any experience with this sort of thing in the UK?
I mostly agree with you, but I have one serious doubt remaining. If the company in question was so broke, how could they hire a new contractor instead of just paying the current one? That action leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I think perhaps the original developer had good reason to want more than just the money they owed him for his contract work. It looks to me like there were lies involved, at least somewhat.
Google Voice Mobile Available For Free on Cydia
Ask HN: Innovative Conferences / Classes / Training
I'm looking for fresh, innovative and inspiring conferences, classes, training, or similar stuff that I can put on my "training plan." I am a strange blend of systems administration with a heavy lean to technical client support in a higher education environment. I read a ton and learn on my own for the most part but have a bit of money to burn on going to cool conferences or other random stuff. Any suggestions?
I also take issue with this:

Early on at IMVU, we incorporated in tons of open source projects. This was a huge win... The downside was that we had to combine dozens of projects whose internal architectures, coding styles, and general quality varied widely. It took us a long time to pay off all the debt that incurred – but it was worth it.

I think that's more or less exactly the point he makes. Some external dependencies are good, some are dreadful. At some point, you need to address the bad ones.

I tell my clients that cutting corners is "an hour of savings today, 5 hours of cost tomorrow".

Re: cutting corners, it really depends what you mean by "cutting corners". There's a whole continuum of code quality from "omg this sucks I want to kill the person who wrote it" to "this is the most beautiful piece of code every designed by man. Anything short of the latter is effectively incurring debt. I don't think Eric Ries is advocating dirty, nasty coding. Instead, I'd say he's suggesting that you should be comfortable with not writing the best possible code, rather than always feel like you're not doing well enough.
Haha, yes, absolutely. I always like to have something to distract my hands. Rubber erasers are heaven for this.
Load Testing old Climbing Equipment
"As in many scalability decisions, we’d have been much better off investing in agility, so that we could change the architecture in response to actual customer demand, rather than trying to predict the future."

With a poor design, it can be more difficult to make changes to improve scalability. If you do not have abstractions and information hiding that allow you to switch out algorithms, libraries or systems for ones that scale better, you will need to rewrite a lot more code in order to to scale.

"Yet other agile principles suggest the opposite, as in YAGNI and DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork."

My concern with the premise of this article is that some might use it as a license for sloppy code. YAGNI and DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork can be accomplished with code that is concise and clearly expresses intent. In fact, you could argue that these principles demand such code. I've seen a lot of code with many lines that accomplish very little, and that kind of "technical debt" never pays off, in my experience.
I know, right? Every time I read something new about the human body, I'm struck with this thought like, "Wow, I'm really awesome and I never knew it."
Agree. In fact, I called it "viscosity" in an article a long time ago, and posited that the rate of increase of viscosity depends on languages, practices, etc:

http://inter-sections.net/2007/12/01/comparing-pieces-of-str...

"Technical drag" is a very good term for it, I agree.