skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think a distinction needs to be made between actual process and codified process. The former always exists, and the only question is whether it is working or not. The latter is endemic to large organizations with disaffected and mediocre management and employees, which is what Netflix is actively fighting against.

However the tone of this piece and the original Netflix manifesto does not acknowledge this distinction. I think this shows a bias that is driven by product-oriented software engineers and creatives. "If the product is great then who cares how we got there?" Well that's certainly a valid viewpoint, however it shortchanges great management. Great management is not done by simply hiring the best people and turning them loose on a project. That works in a startup where everyone knows each other and so any two people can notify each other of relevant issues. It doesn't work in larger organizations where individuals have a much narrower slice of responsibility and thus lower visibility on the whole actual process going on.

I've worked with some people who take a process-oriented approach and were very talented at getting the best work out of their employees. For these people it's no more about rigid codified processes than it is about a relentless focus on product. Instead, the goal is to understand at a high level what all the various stakeholders are doing, where their individual bottlenecks are, and determining a process that maximizes everyone's productivity. People like this are incredibly valuable, because let's face it, management is much harder than programming to do well because you are not a domain expert in anything, instead you have to figure out how to help all the different domain experts operate efficiently.

I realize none of this is news to the folks at Netflix, but I think the way the manifesto is written de-emphasizes these facts to the point that the inexperienced or low-level programmer may miss the forest for the trees, which incidentally is exactly what the problem with bad actual process is.
Dean Kamen – Don’t Tell Me It’s Impossible
A little trick from FLOSS Podcast's session with John Resig: instead of serving jQuery from your domain, use the Google hosted one: http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.j... - you get to benefit from Google's CDN, and there's a fair chance it's already cached in the user's browser.
It seems like there's a different between "content originating from urbandictionary.com" and "urban slang." The latter phrase has an understood (read: charged) meaning which predates urbandictionary.com
But GPUs do have an internal memory hierarchy; there is a local cache with much faster access times than global memory.

Personally, I agree with the parent. Aside from the obvious solution of integrating a GPU-like accelerator on the chip, the multicore trend in general purpose CPUs has more, simpler cores. I agree with your overall characterization of what CPUs are good at versus what GPUs are good at, but I still see some convergence.
Cost: Extremely high

Benefit: Non-tech savy users can check out my tech business

Are IE6 users the kind of people that will buy your product, utilize your social media, read your content? If they haven't upgraded to something better yet and it's FREE to replace and has been for years, what are the odds that they will pay for your service.

Quality of eyeballs matters more than quantity of eyeballs, and I would say that the people running IE6 are rarely the target market for tech businesses.
I voted this up immediately after reading the title.
Great success story on bootstrapping your business, and a big congrats because it's very a difficult road and will surely challenge your nerves and sanity. :)

If your app has only been for sale for ~1 month, I encourage you to be very conservative with your spending — the AppStore is extremely volatile. While the momentum is in your favor with the Top Charts, I suggest you keep your eyes focused on improving the iPhone app and pushing updates. The other mobile markets aren't mature enough yet to approach aggressively, and sales on the AppStore could fall as quickly as they came.
Haha, sure: http://teamapart.com/signup/hackernews2
Great to see Jay, who's been there since the very beginning of iPhone development, get some press here. From its humble beginnings when it was battling Installer for jailbreak directory king, it's cool to see how far Cydia (literally an apple eating moth) has come.
The Soviets banned books and imprisoned dissident authors. The icon's graphic design romanticizes Soviet imagery, and in the context of 'free' books.

That's a different level of values-incongruity than using cavemen as a minority-group stand-in for laughs.

Also, I don't expect cavemen to be a threat in my lifetime, but censorship in the service of a new utopian program is an everpresent danger. Rehabilitating Soviet symbols to mean something cool and related to free expression obscures an important lesson from the 20th century.
Sorry. I submitted it because of the tutorial, not the (patently) weak Emacs bashing... Maybe I should have changed the title. Also, it's by the same guy who wrote the excellent "Understanding Git" (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=531517) tutorial.
Out of curiosity, what else is involved in HFT besides tech?
No need to use class 'levels', as nested <li>'s shows in regards to padding.
Could someone list them here?
I agree with your main point, but how does school censoring oppress minorities?
While fraud and false entitlement are the obvious problems and motivation for criminality, what really bothered me was the potential for 'swatting', as exemplified by the 'I'm a terrorist, shoot on sight' gag; I'm surprised the DM editors left this in. (Swatting is a term for extremely anti-social phone phreakers to call down heavily armed law enforcement on an entirely innocent party for lulz).

Consider that it's not so unusual for a contractual applicant (eg a new hire) to hand over their ID to a trusted person so they can make a photocopy for their records. It would be easy to arrange a deliberate switcheroo or other unauthorized modification. But good luck, as the holder of a card, trying to explain to the anti-terrorist squad why your ID card is screaming a warning to them after a police officer scans your ID after falling for some pretext (a 'noise complaint from a neighbor', for example).

Obviously, this is more likely to be the stuff of professional espionage rather than casual trollery - but my point is that it would be relatively easy to implement, while positively Kakfaesque for the victim, thanks to bureau- and securocratic faith in technology. The first time I applied for a driving license in the US (as a recent arrival from Europe) I was astonished to learn that there was an arrest warrant out for me - or more accurately, someone with my name and birthdate - in Georgia, and it took me several minutes to convince the DMV person that I had only arrived in the USA 72 hours previously.
What a crock. Not being a dick to people let them sit in their stupid comfortable IE6 for the last 8 years blissfully unaware that they were holding back advancements that would make their lives better. If I try to run new software on Windows 95, it will slap me in the face and tell me to slag off. The same should hold true for the web.

You go ahead and spend time delivering content to IE6 Toby, but I'm going to hop on the bandwagon that was far too late in coming and continue to tell these people to slag off until they upgrade.
Yeah. Except that he specifically mentioned Wiktionary as the source, and even if UD was the dictionary in question: why do you think they decided to name it "Urban Dictionary"? I'm sure that it was just completely coincidental that they picked 'urban' for a site built around defining slang terms.
Something still does not smell right about this.

Phil Schiller:
"Apple did not censor the content in this developer’s application and Apple did not reject this developer’s application for including references to common swear words."

Phil Crosby:
"They provided screenshots of the words 'shit' and 'fuck' showing up in our dictionary's search results."

I'm sorry, this is a strong suggestion that without these types of words, the app would be approved.

If you don't call that censorship, then call it "chilling effect", but the outcome is the same.

And the other thing that doesn't ring true is the following oddity.

Phil Schiller:
"...anyone can easily see that Apple has previously approved other dictionary applications in the App Store that include all of the 'swear' words..."

Then why did Apple reject the app for these swear words?

(And why is 'swear' in inverted commas?)

[edit: formatting]
Because what you call 'granularity' is intentional inconsistency.

Apple is making a fairly strict policy decision (open internet == 17+). But with separated parental controls for safari and youtube, they're are exempting themselves from the downsides of this policy (equivocating Safari with apps that actually do contain vulgar, suggestive and/or violent content).

If they were at least willing to eat their own dog food, one could argue that Apple doesn't feel their policy is too strict. That they don't demonstrates that even they can see that the classification system doesn't quite work.
He says that Apple could lock down the tablet like it does the iPhone, only allowing Apple approved apps. And that would ruin computing. Well, I wouldnt buy an Apple tablet. Someone else will sell me a computer. Maybe it wont be as stylish, but it will run what I want. It aint so, that whatever Apple wants, the rest of us will gladly accept.
Well, I would be surprised if that embarrassing circumstance wasn't denied, disregarding if it was true or not!

If the code didn't ship in Windows, it would have been easy to verify. I didn't see anything in the media about it then, which would have been the time to deny it.

But you know how it is, big advertisers never get a fair treatment in the media. :-)

Edit: re "giving up too much"... Apple had its back against the wall at the time.
Did Chrome for Linux fonts just get 10x better?
Or is it just me?
I'm impressed. I installed it to disk on a VM and with Firefox 3.5.2 installed it was only using 75MB.
I agree with you, I actually have a G1 and love it, the problem that I see is that if this behavior is tolerated by Apple, then other carriers / handset makers / marketplace maintainers could start to adopt a similar mindset.

Google has thankfully thrown their weight behind a free marketplace.
Wasn't this found to be intentional? http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=1235
Twitter fail: Why we need more Twitters
I wish it showed what it looked like. Picking up my phone and dialing a URL is too much work.
The Secret Code Of Apple’s App Rejection Process Laid Bare
In the same sense that Bing 'killed' Google, and HTML 5 is going to 'kill' Flash, and Firefox 'killed' IE, then yes - Apple is going to kill computing.
Fails to mention (to me) the most interesting aspect of this kind of work: the complexity and scale of these machines is such that although we may not develop more efficient algorithms for intractable problems in the traditional sense, they may become tractable when computed with DNA.
How about commenting without cursing?

If you can't comment about the Ninjawords Dictionary without cursing then your opinion on Parental Controls is inherently flawed.

The Parental Controls aren't there for you. They are there for me. I don't want to fill my headspace with negativity.
Obesity, Land Use, Transportation and Healthcare Reform
I think it works roughly as: if its a different business entity, then unless ownership in the previous entity is converted over in some fashion, YC has no equity stake in the new business
All owners of steel hulled boats (including me) are terrified of this process. The combination of a bad paint job on the inside of the hull and a faulty electrical system that leads current through the hull means that a dropped coin will make its way right through the boat in less than 24 hours leaving a nice round hole the size of the coin. If it's under the waterline your boat will be gone in an hour or two. I've seen it happen.
The tone is overly-bombastic, but there's the seed of a good idea in here. Getting the a consistent look in FF3 and IE6 is Sisyphean; making a IE6-only layout much easier.

The author recommends dropping the whole "one app, one look" conceit and shuffling the dinosaurs to a dinosaur pen, with a simpler layout and the same content (you have been separating content and presentation, right?).
JavaScript Wolfenstein 3D Engine
Gruber consistently sides with Apple. He is, in essence, a fanboy. There are exceptions, and he's not a moron, so when there's community uproar and obvious stupidity he will say so. But his reporting is heavily pro-apple overall.
Do the numbers. If you think the money you save in development costs is greater than the cost of pissing off or alienating IE6 users than go for it.

Just hope your competitors are as picky about their customers as you...
Thanks, the use of a red * is normally used to denote a required field on signup.

Your list of required fields and the order missing fields are displayed are not identical.

Username can't be blank.
Last name can't be blank.
Password can't be blank.
Email can't be blank.
First name can't be blank
Honestly, I don't know, and anyone who claims to know is selling you something.

Your question is the question in parallel computing right now. And it effects all sizes and scales, from processor architecture (look at the different architectures of an Intel Quad Core, Cell, GPUs and upcoming Larabee and Fusion) to supercomputers (BlueGene style thousands of slow cores with fast interconnect, RoadRunner style of typical multicore processors with Cells as accelerators, Nvidia's giant GPU box, or just lots of SMPs). We don't know what the future will look, which makes this an interesting time to be in the field. People at all levels are experimenting with different architectures. We don't know what will win, if any one thing will win, and when we'll know.

With that said, I don't think APIs at the processor level will settle down until the hardware does. My understanding of OpenCL is to have a programming model that would work on architectures as different as GPUs, Cell and Larrabee, and that this will supplant Cuda. That sounds like a great idea, but lots of great ideas haven't worked in practice before.

I think it's going to be several at least several years of experimentation before the hardware settles down. My own belief (that is, opinion not based on experimental data) is that we'll end up with a heterogeneous chip with lots of simple cores for parallelism, a small number of sophisticated cores for sequential computation, all part of an integrated memory hierarchy.
Gape in Awe at these Super Fast Robot Hands
Pigs Fly As Facebook And Google Work Together On An Android App
I'm starting to sound like a broken record:

Serve your mobile version to IE6 users.
Yup! I didn't renew my AT&T contract in favor of Google Voice. Whenever I find an ~iTouch/Android (Zii EGG!) portable that does what I want over WiFi I'll happily avoid larcenous SMS fees.

I'd say that's a good threat to AT&T.
Don't worry, I'll feel better tomorrow. And thanks for the sympathy, it's just that it took a long time (much too long) find this one.

Last time I had to look this hard at least I was satisfied with being able to file a bug report with the php folks. This time I can only blame myself.
I agree. It seems that apps that display unfiltered internet content should just inherit whatever setting the user has applied to safari. That way it's at least consistent.
Test your idea with only one person
there is one on the front page. lower right.
There is definitely some bombast there. I've been fed up with folks displacing their frustrations onto users instead of getting creative and practical with the issue.

I've been in this game a long, long time and I saw (and, admittedly, took part in) the "insult and block" approach with Netscape 4. Looking back, it was immature, cocky and lazy. I hate seeing people repeat the same childish mistakes. Instead, we can build an economic model to decide how to classify each user agent for each property we control and act accordingly. It's not emotional or dogmatic - just practical.

To paraphrase a reply to a comment on my site:

I think my approach helps bring innovation while continuing to support the people stuck on less modern user agents.

Reclassifying IE6 into the category of feed readers, screen readers, and printers is a perfectly viable solution.

Oppose that to the childish antics behind blocking content based on user agent.

In each case, you get to provide interesting experience design for modern user agents, but only by reclassifying IE6 for content support do you also retain (some portion of) the IE6 audience.
'Malicious attack' by hackers targets Facebook and Twitter
Common focus is one thing; changes should be driven by a concrete external goal that is shared by all parties. You don't push code because it's Thursday, you push code because it's got new feature X that matters to client Y.

A culture of humility is also important; Ops/IT people build walls of process when developers chew them out for mistakes, which only gets worse when a chunk of those mistakes (but not all) end up falling on the developers. At most shops, when there's a problem, this is the general flow of things:

1. The software got updated on the site, and now customers can't access anything, but everything looks to be running.

2. Sales/Management/CS scream to fix the problem.

3. Ops blames Dev, and Dev blames Ops.

4. After the problem is fixed, Ops adds new process to make sure this problem doesn't happen again.

When, in my perfect world (and at both places I work, for the most part), it goes like this:

1. The software got updated on the site, and now customers can't access anything, but everything looks to be running.

2. Sales/Management/CS scream to fix the problem.

3. Dev and Ops both say, "We might have screwed up, let's dig deeper...", find the problem and fix it.

4. Whoever found and fixed the problem gets a beer.

This can't work unless you've got a company culture of "fix the problem, reward the fixer", rather than the prevailing culture of, "nail the responsible party to a tree."

Finally, getting out of the ivory towers is also really important. Dev people need to realize that their mistakes cause serious grief for the Ops guys, and the Ops people need to realize that making life harder for the developers through over-regulation (not having local admin, etc) causes equal pain. Mutual respect, which comes from working together, is important.
Rakudo Star: a "useful release of Perl 6" planned for April 2010
Although they do a press-fit test, what about the outside dimensions? What about material quality? The purpose of geometric tolerancing a design is so that when you assemble all the pieces together with varying tolerances, you have a good chance that it will all fit together.

I've worked with machines with stepper motors in the past and they can get out of alignment.

Don't get me wrong. I think the whole maker movement is really cool. I'm just saying that manufacturing a quality product is not easy.

I'm even thinking about buying one, however, if I bought a kit and the pieces didn't fit together very well, that would be frustrating.
VERY cool! I've seen this before, but this is the best version yet.
Thanks Retric. I agree, I think we should be more specific on which fields are required. We'll also fix the ordering of the errors.
half the team that built this was Stephen Hood, who was product manager for delicious at yahoo.
It appears that this is only part 1 of the interview. I'll keep a lookout for part 2. Very interesting read.
I have to say I really like this, very pleasantly lightweight. When you have a tutorial, you might want to make clear that minimizing does the role of controlling whats maximized rather than whats visible. What are the synchronization etc constraints on collaborative simulataneous white board or notepad editing?
Well this effectively makes the parental controls useless. I don't want my kids to watch porn on their phones, but I do want them to have dictionaries.

It seems that Apple is treating parental controls as way to check a checkbox in a feature list, instead of as something that can actually be used.
Does Verizon do GSM?
That's exactly right. Mr Schiller's reply is one of the least intelligent things I have ever heard anyone say.

There's a brilliant episode in The Life of Brian that makes fun of people who are unable to take into account the purpose and context in which words are used:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm2BsjACkuI
WiFi isn't as useful as people think but not having any text charges because you're using the regular data plan is great.
Yeah, the primary reason I stopped gaming as I reached adulthood (I was a huge RPG and other tabletop games fan as a kid) was that the games simply took too much time. Settlers wraps up in about 90 minutes, while still providing a reasonable amount of time for strategy and development. It's a very well-balanced and quick to play game. And the rules are simple enough to cover in about 10-15 minutes.
No, and they're notorious for crippling phone OS's.
Swearing is only negative because of your own perception. To a lot people they're just words, strong words, but not necessarily negative as you seem to imply.
Thanks Carter!

I agree the minimize, maximize and close buttons are a little confusing. We plan on making another pass on the layout code soon.
On the subject of boats - I hope you'll have the time and momentum to write more about the process of buying and living on a boat as an internet entrepreneur...
What’s Your Best IT Blunder Story? There’s $50 In It For The Best One.
Well-produced video, worth the wait.
Read the article you linked carefully... No where in it does it say that this behavior is intended or by design.

Bott (an admitted MS lackey), explains why in his opinion it won't stop RTM from shipping, or even delay it in the slightest.... and I fully agree.

The bug simply isn't priority 0. No one has Windows Update disabled these days, and this issue, as Bott well describes, won't manifest itself in any of the default configurations/options.

He admits it's incorrect behavior, but works out the logic why it's not the end of the world and correctly explains that the sky is NOT falling on Windows 7, contrary to popular belief :)
If they haven't upgraded to something better yet and it's FREE to replace and has been for years, what are the odds that they will pay for your service.

Seeing as the majority of IE6 users are in the enterprise market... I'd say the odds are pretty good.
But won't locking down the browser mean that you can't access the bus schedule, or their online school books, or whatever other good things there might be on the internet? Sort of a blunt weapon, no? It's like saying that because your eyes may see bad stuff, we will force them to wear eye patches...
Cool, thanks. Looking forward to it.
What is the cost of serving them a plain jane experience, as you do with a printer or feed reader? If you can model your audience and quantify the impact (in other words, prove your theory) for your audience, why BLOCK THEM? Just give them the content, minus the design. Spend the same amount of time you spend on your print.css file.

Anything more restrictive than that is not about income, as you suggest - it's about dogma.
The company for which I work is currently in a situation where we make most of our money from SBIRs. Any suggestions for breaking out of that cycle?
You link to a sane, rational tech journo who took the time to test the issue and consider his results? No sensationalism? No foaming at the mouth, running in circles panic? I must have slipped into the Twilight Zone. Cue the funky music and the thing on the wing.
A Functional Blog In Clojure 
Caveat: This was a weekend project, and I am by no means an expert in clojure (or compojure).

Also, I'm be curious to know how it runs in IE. And pardon the pun...