skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A floating phone number that can be handed to, say, 24-hour support staff, that will automatically direct incoming calls to the on-duty engineer.

The value is that when support staff has real phone numbers available to them, they tend to dial historically responsive individuals directly in order to get a problem resolved, thus creating a negative feedback loop -- if you ignore notifications and phone calls, you get called less by support staff in the future.

Having a floating number -- especially if we could get statistics on who answers and who always ignores them, and if the number could "call up the chain" automatically when nobody answers, would be a useful tool to solve this issue.

Of course, the preference is that human staff doesn't need to call anyone, but it still happens.
When in doubt, always remember that John C. Dvorak is a complete jackass.
That's still a borderline SmugLispWeenie point ( http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?SmugLispWeenie ).

If the point is "that program would have been easier for someone who knows lisp to write in lisp" then the reply is "but I was the person who bothered to write it and preferred to spend time getting a usable program than learning lisp", and it says more about the not-real-world-friendly nature of Lisp than about a deep similarity seen amongst large programs.

If the point is "lisp is a language in which you could write it more quickly" that's either unhelpful sideline commentary or smug taunting, depending on the intent.

If the point is "you could learn lisp and rework your understanding of your program into a lispy style and rewrite it in less time than just writing it in a language you know" - if that's true then there should be a lot more lisp programs around than there appear to be, which kind of suggests it's not true or that there's a sticking point which the saying doesn't account for that is preventing it being tested.
I doubt you'll make $1k, or even $100

How do you know if you haven't tried? What does it take to make it to $100?

The App Store solves a very nice problem for learning sales: every product is put on an equal footing on the App Store, unlike the wild, wild Internet.
Isolated ignorance is bad enough. Vocal ignorance (or laziness) is dangerous & irresponsible.

I guarantee a significant percentage of the US population will take this headline as fact, despite all efforts to refute it in the future.
"Little people" do not go to jail over not paying taxes. In rare cases, "little people" get audited and pay back taxes, interest, and (sometimes) penalties. To go to jail over taxes, you have to use illegal means to conceal your liability. Geithner didn't do that.
Deck is exclusive. From http://www.decknetwork.net/

> Only a single ad will be shown for each page viewed.

I hear it's a pretty sweet deal, though.
Tim O'Reilly agrees:

http://twitter.com/timoreilly/status/3270411756
Welcome to 1992...
Deep Belief Nets - NIPS
This is the bigger than Youtube, YC-mafia, etc. trying to put the nail in the IE6 coffin. IE6 is big in enterprises, and Microsoft has incredibly strong relationships with them. Plus office.com would actually be seen as an important productivity app to support, unlike apps like Youtube.

On a different note, I think their strategy of using Silverlight to enhance the experience, and degrading gracefully to cross-platform/browser HTML+CSS+JS when it's not available is brilliant.
It seems easy to use but also flexible enough. What are your plans for pricing?
Perf is only that high for BDB because it is in process. Tokyo tyrant has to communicate over the network layer.

Also, how often are any of these databases actually syncing? For TT, not at all until you terminate the process or call it manually.
Asperger's != introversion.
Please don't attack the messenger, even for a bad story.

Unless you have proof that Dvorak was purposely lying, slandering him doesn't make your case any better.

After all, if he screws this one up, he's going to have a very hard time getting respectability and credibility for future articles. That punishment is enough.
I find it interesting that you believed before the accusations were verified. Even Dvorak phrases his "report" as a question, as does ths submitter.

I can understand why you might wonder if Vivek Kundra is qualified after reading Dvoraks' blog. I did too, and I still haven't made up my mind, but I certainly didn't (and don't) believe Dvorak's repport just on his say so. Someone else asked "why don't you believe the White House instead of Dvorak?"

I thought the whole thing was not about belief but rather about verification of claims.
A couple of suggestions:

1. Have the lightbox title text be more readable. Right now it is white on whatever is on the page.

2. Have the call to action at the bottom of the page favor the sign up process. I would reuse the green button from the top of the page and leave the "learn more" link as text.

3. The email based integration feature is fairly meaningless on its own. It is redundant if it is covered 3 items down with "Alerts via phone call, SMS, and email" I would personally cull out the overlap and have just a few key features on the right. Really only put the stellar features that you offer.

4. To keep the logo more web 2.0 like the rest of your interface I would have the text framed in what looks like a pager but make the pager look 2.0ish.

Overall it looks as if this might be successful. I am not really in the market for it but I could see some smaller businesses jumping on board.
...but do you actually know people that have had to deal with the city of Washington DC's bureaucracy?

Yes. My customer went out of business when the city of Washington, D.C. would not pay its 7 figure 180 day late bill. Their biggest mistake? Letting one deadbeat customer get too big.
Mozilla Labs Test Pilot 0.1. The first massively scaled open usability lab
I'd argue the contrary. For an iPhone app to take off, marketing is first and foremost. Buzz is a key ingredient. There are many ways to create buzz, and that's what makes the platform so relevant to teaching some concepts.

At least for me, hands-on experience is a required complement to theoretical learning.
It looks very similar to the Basecamp and Campfire designs (ex: http://campfirenow.com/). However, both of those designs are fantastic, and I don't see too much of a problem with using them as design inspiration for a non-competitive company.
This is not the first time he "screwed up".
Checked it out; Deck is invite only but has contact info "for more information" -- it's exclusive, but that doesn't mean you can't poke them to see if you can get in. They probably have pretty strict design and traffic requirements, though, since they're high-end.
I think there have been similar opportunities at most times? There are always ways to try to make money off small applications.

Also, entering the app store costs more: you also need a Mac and at least an iPod.
The downmods are because of the url shorter (which is frowned on here), and because it's a joke (and jokes are rarely liked since they don't usually add anything).

He's lucky it's only -1, usually posts like that go much lower.
Then politely point out the times he did beforehand. Did he not do enough research and make a politically-charged article in the past? Then that's germane to the conversation. We'd like to hear about it.

But calling somebody a jackass is not.
Yeah, let's not forget this is the guy we're talking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAWDYaWAVQQ ("John Dvorak admits to baiting Mac users for hits")

Keep those clicks coming in!
Maybe... that wasn't in the list of reasons given. What if they had Miguel de Icaza and an existing C#/Mono -> android platform available?
I am sure iPhone does that too, because as a developer we get crash reports of our apps. However, I don't think that apple sends this information through internet, I think it does it when you sync your iPod/iPhone.
Any difference connecting through a local unix domain socket instead of localhost (to avoid TCP overhead?)
It takes more than one bad story to establish yourself as a complete jackass. Dvorak finished the necessary legwork for that designation years ago.
I was thinking about this the other day -- something like a Google Voice would work well for a support phone type of operation. I haven't done support in a long while, but last time I did, we would physically hand off a phone, which made for interesting times.

With either the newly oncall or the previously oncall being able to update the number, that handoff now becomes virtual.
Knowing a market is pretty intrinsic to marketing. It seems obvious now but iFart was genius in that lots of people found the concept funny enough to pay a dollar for. I know plenty of people who have bought it on a whim at parties.
I hear you, but Dvorak did publish a slander against Kundra based simply on his rudimentary queries. This is hardly good journalism.

from the article:
"But I was able to verify Kundra's degree with just a few phone calls in under two hours."

If your going to publish something so incendiary, you really must do your homework.
Have you considered having a plan where you actually pay "per alarm"? It would be appealing and you can still make easy money. I have in mind $10 per alarm or so.
Sorry to ask the obvious question, but who cares? IS Programs (even the top ones) aren't the most rigorous things in the world. Anyone who is in a CIO type position should probably have real world experience, professional degrees be damned. Why aren't we talking about that instead?
I think Netflix wants you to be inefficient though. The longer you keep the movies, the less postage they have to pay mailing them back and forth each month, making your account that much more profitable.
I've always thought that if you really wanted to learn politics, take a look at these vendors who deal with government agencies all day long.

They make the average nationally-known slippery politician look like amateur night.

It's simply a survival skill at that level. Bunch of guys from one party in charge? You're their guy: you know all the people they do, you contribute to the right causes, you feel their pain, you attend all the social functions they do, etc.

Next party come to power? Hey -- you're their guy: you know all the people they do, you contribute to the right causes, etc.

And then there's the hands-on politicking you have to do in order to get contracts and payments and such. The guys that do that have a special kind of magic that the rest of us can only hope to have.
Turns out Dvorak just made it all up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758840
Jeff is trying to get across is that before you devote an amount of effort towards something powered by user generated content, you should ask yourself a few questions.

Near the end of the post, he lists a set of questions you may want to ask yourself:

* What do you get out of the time and effort you've invested in this website? Personally? Professionally? Tangibly? Intangibly?

* Is your content attributed to you, or is it part of a communal pool?

* What rights do you have for the content you've contributed?

* Can your contributions be revoked, deleted, or permanently taken offline without your consent?

* Can you download or archive your contributions?

* Are you comfortable with the business model and goals of the website you're contributing to, and thus directly furthering?

That is probably the most important part of Jeffs post, and I think IT Goon missed that part
Space Colonies for Human Survival
Exactly.
Asperger's is not introversion.
Your service looks awesome, especially the "we'll keep nagging you until you f...ing respond" aspect. I've looked at a lot of similar services in the last few months (you have no idea how relevant your startup is to me at this time), and I definitely am interested.

One thing I'm wondering about is why you have no international calls. I would love to pay (a lot) more money if you could support international calls. Without that, the service is only half as useful, and I will sleep only half as good during the night. :-)
Sure thing. That's the way it looks here too.

So now he's got to live with this Charlie Foxtrot for the rest of his life. Digging down into the sewer with him and throwing it around some doesn't help anybody.
Food and drink at coffee shops is ridiculously overpriced. And some libraries allow outside food or drink, so you can just pack a sandwich and thermos with you.

Seriously, you're eating $3 slices of pound cake and drinking $4 coffees when for that amount of money you can have ham sandwiches for a week?
Agreed, the amount of work that would have to go into placing thousands of these tiny subways under the city to deliver to every building is insane, especially considering that they could flood or even a minor ground swell could dislodge the tracks causing a jam.

Sticking something like this underground just sounds stupid to me, especially when it would be impossible to have people actually go in to fix things. IMO this would either need to be built onto existing subway infrastructure where access to the system for repairs will be relatively easy . . . or do the cheap-easy way of just build it above ground.

I mean most large cities are getting expanding amounts of skyway (the enclosed walkways between buildings), once this gets to sufficient scale it would be no extra effort to attach pre-fabed tunnels to the bottom of the skyway networks. It's currently part of the Calgary by-law that all new buildings have to be connected to their skyway system.

The mass installation of new infrastructure is absurd considering the amount of work it requires below-ground, however above-ground would be exceptionally simple with a well developed skyway system. There's very little point of implementing this system without making it big, so until its exceptionally cheap per mile to install it will never happen, because our cities are simply way too big for a project like this if it's costly per mile.
Perhaps the takeaway here is that one of the top marketing blog commandments - Thou Shalt Post Something Every Day - is slavishly obeyed by so many that we are awash in trite content of little real value.

Arguably, this was the case long before blogs came along, as evidenced by a look at the magazine rack of any supermarket, but the internet has certainly exacerbated that. Indeed, the whole reason for sites like Metafilter or even HN is that they consistently perform dual functions of content discovery and crap filtration which are beyond the capability of most individual editors. Few are given the capacity to be both prolific and consistently profound.

tl;dr the more frequent your blog posts, the less impact they make.
The article neglects the networking aspects of getting an MBA. The connections you develop while getting an MBA is often described as the most valuable element. Paying a large sums is what is both right and wrong about an MBA. Networking is important, I am just not sure if it is worth a 200k tuition.

Maybe if you are also expanding your network while building your iPhone application to investors and fellow hackers, you might be indeed getting most of an MBA for $99.
The iTunes/iPhone asks your permission before sending crash reports. If the original article is true, then palm is potentially in for a backlash. This kind of information transmission should clearly be opt-in.
The odds of hitting red or black is 50/50, green doesn't factor into those odds. You're adding up the odds of red or black out of all possible outcomes, not just the outcome in a perfect world of just red or black.
Hmm, I don't think that's necessarily true. For new releases Netflix often doesn't have enough to go around and has to make people wait. I bet efficiency there is appreciated.
Very astute observation, sharpn. In business school they call it "top 2 boxes". When you ask a question like, "How likely are you to use this product..." with a 1-5 scale, you want 95% of your responses to be 4 or 5 (top two boxes).

The reason is that people are unwilling to criticize something as harshly, so the scale of approval on doing some market research really goes from 80% approval to 100% approval.

Kudos to you for figuring this out on your own.
Actually what says a lot is that integration with Java is pretty easy, and it's more powerful than Java. That means it's easy for the hordes of Java users to jump ship, without, say, facing a rewrite to Ocaml or Erlang or Visual Haskell ++. That's pretty important.
I've been there - it's even more stunning in person than it is in pictures. They film movie scenes in there all the time.
Innovative advice; do you know how the library staff felt about it? Did they know?

Also, I read your last sentence as "You should work out in the library," and imagined laying down under a cart full of large hardcover volumes, trying to grunt very quietly while pressing it. Just sayin'.
Dvorak was more than a messenger he was the creator & instigator...

Would you argue he's just "blogging" so fact-based reporting is optional?

Dvorak was pushing the limits of responsible journalism (similar to TechCrunch at times).

We agree on one thing: his credibility is taking a huge hit, rightfully so.
That's what I'm wondering. Degree, so what. I want to know: where's the beef?
The shocking thing to me was that

1) People trusted a random blogger over people getting paid full time to vet people. Understandably vetters miss things such as taxes (complicated) or illegal immigrant maids (hidden), but something as simple as a degree will get checked.

2) Dvorak didn't call all the campuses, there are multiple UMD campuses just like there are multiple Penn State campuses etc.

3) Dvorak trusted it based on the sole person he talked to. Does the school even have the obligation to tell a complete stranger these things? Did he try and find people who knew Dvorak in college? Did he find anyone but himself who thought to the contrary? Everyone has enemies, when you get thrust into public office they come out posting stuff against you, if you had skipped college someone would know.

4) Dvorak's question about teaching was trying to slide tense under the radar. He asked if Kundra was a professor. The person he talked to said no. That person was probably just an operator with a directory of proffessor RIGHT NOW. How did he know they looked at a list with every person who ever gave a lecture at UMD?
> every product is put on an equal footing on the App Store

This is not completely true since what Apple decides to promote in the "what's new", "what's hot", "staff favorites" etc spots makes a huge huge difference.
Google Testing Blog: Super Fast JS Testing
Worthless or not, they still shouldn't lie about receiving the degree.

EDIT: Do the downvotes imply that people here think it's OK to lie about credentials as long as you think that the credential you're lying about is worthless? Or what else are the downvotes expressing?
If you put ASP.NET in the same class as Sharepoint or OWA, you clearly haven't ever used it. Please spare us the closed-minded "zomg micro$oft sux0rz!" comments, I can go to Slashdot for that.
It is in response to the other massive thread saying to the contrary.
Hi, this is Andrew, one of the co-founders of PagerDuty.

That's an interesting idea. We've actually thought a bit about adding phone-based triggering to PagerDuty (via a 1-800 number + access code). The idea was to make PagerDuty useful to non-IT businesses like plumbers that also have the concept of out-of-hours on-call duty. From your comment, though, it sounds like this kind of feature would be pretty useful even in the IT world.
Flagged as inaccurate, the article has been factually proven wrong, get it off HN

http://gigaom.com/2009/08/12/dvorak-raises-doubts-about-us-c...
What would be the business sense in these restrictions?

I see the point with XP - Microsoft wants computers capable of using the latest and greatest to actually use the latest and greatest - but what's the point in the Windows 7 restrictions that the article mentioned?

Obviously, they see some sort of advantage, but I'm having a tough time seeing it.
Maybe I was just lucky (though not that lucky), but it should be pretty easy to make back that $100 even without any marketing.

My opinion is that if your app does something slightly useful and basically works, you should be able to make back that $100 easily. Ideally, you'll make more than that especially over the course of a year.
> If you don't use adblocking software, how do you find the ads useful?

I find them useful in that they keep the sites I use free. Sometimes something interesting comes around, most of the time it doesn't, but I always feel that I've helped keep a site free.
Having a small commute is great, but having no separation between your work and living spaces kind of sucks. I find that working out allows me to be more relaxed when I get back home. If I work from home, I tend not feel like I completed the work day.
But identifying a market correctly is a key business skill. I think apps like the ones you mention are pretty deplorable, but it's a sad fact that many people derive enormous amusement from fart jokes.
I just graduated from University, and I intuitively believed that taking more math would make me a smarter person. So although my major was Psych, I took courses in Analysis, Algebra, Discrete, and Number Theory. Of course, potential employers have neither seem to have given a fuck nor realized just how difficult Analysis was, but whatever-

I even implemented the thinking style I picked up in Analysis, such as the notion of a compact space [as it relates to social cohesion], while writing a paper on Aristotle's Politics in my sophomore year. I didn't use any math words at all, and instead drew a diagram to illustrate what I meant, and really enhanced my argument.

Anyway, bottom line: I took a shitload of math to make myself smarter and to enhance my nerd cred; nobody seems to care; maybe someone here will give a care; since I'm ultimately probably going to be self-employed anyway, perhaps my improved mental acumen will pay off financially, but as of yet it's unclear.
Yes. I can't conceive of any legitimate public interest in knowing the name of the accused.
Is this not a form of piracy?
I scream, you scream, we all scream for iGoogle social
The 100,000 number is for a performance benchmark over a LAN with grouped commits.
University of Maryland University College is not exactly the same as the University of Maryland. It's their adult continuing education program basically.
This would be more appropriately included in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=757843

Absent that context, it's just taking up page space. Please reconsider.
If you could instantaneously eliminate all "tax haven locales" ... you would in fact make the US somewhat better off

That's not at all clear to me.

It might be true that it would increase US government tax revenue, but

A. It's not clear that's true. There may be other reasons keeping businesses out of America (say, SarbOx for example).

B. It's not clear that increasing the revenue of the US government at the expense of the corporations (and their employees and their shareholders) is making us better off.
Oh gawd, not the Martingale again. (do not do this. The modern expression is "The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay liquid") At least arbitrage across bookies is reasonably safe. And I like the "marriage problem" concept.
Yes, I agree, the premise that Netflix wants you to return the DVDs as quickly as possible so that they can send it to someone else is wrong. At any given time, you're going to have N DVDs out, and Netflix doesn't have any reason to particularly care whether they're the same N DVDs each day or N different DVDs.

When I return two DVDs to Netflix on the same day, I usually send them in one envelope in the hopes that the mailing costs will be slightly lower. (I figure that if their costs are lower that helps keep the subscription price down.) I've wondered why Netflix doesn't try to combine the discs that they send, but perhaps the cost savings aren't enough to be worth the extra handling that would be required on their end.