skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-livecdent/...

Lies that's not a man in a mariachi costume! I demand to see the real picture!
Innovation: The lessons of Microsoft Bob
YC posting of own blog posts OK?
Is posting links to one's own blog posts on YC considered OK or frowned upon? It looks like it is OK but I'm new here so wanted to get feedback on the issue.
When I wrote this post about "Finding Joy in Combinators" it got a fair bit of link and upmod love:

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2008-11-1...

I'd say there's some passion and curiosity about concatenative languages. (Summary for those too busy to read it: concatenative languages are direct implementations of combinatorial logic).
It's considered OK if the blog posts are relevant.

Submitting only your own material to HN and/or submitting every single blog post tends to make you look a tad bit lame, so I would recommend that submit a good mixture of submissions.

There are a couple of posters here (and I won't name them) that ONLY seem to submit links to their own site. I have personally developed an ignore filter for those people, meaning that any time I see their name attached to something I just devalue and ignore it.
The Top Twitter Client is Still the Web
sivers is top of most lists
Linking to such a thing is a bad idea:
i) people can accidentally click on it
ii) you might be contributing to its Page Rank
iii) The fact that it's linked from HN, gives it certain credibility.

can you please consider making it text, instead of hrefed?
@brk - That makes sense. It's what I would have done anyway.
I was about to post the same link. I would rather read that guy's excellent and concise article than buy this couple's book or sift through their entire blog for details.
I've used thinkingphones.com at my last 2 startups. They seem to have a good mix of price/value and will work with you.

VoIP has it's downfalls, the quality of the call is a factor of your bandwidth, and you can still get some echo or noise issues from time to time, but offers you the most flexibility and portability.

My other recommendation would be to get a toll-free number of your own that you control, and set that up yourself for call forwarding to your main number. This way, if you have issues with whatever provider you choose, you have some ability to re-route your incoming calls through another carrier without being beholden to whichever company is providing your phone service.
This is why social security scares me.
Google's IPO 5 Years Later
It's likely to go against the flow of the language. While I don't agree with all the design trade-offs in Python, there's a lot to be said for having a clear idea of what style(s) fit the language (what's "Pythonic") and sticking with it. Python code stubbornly written as if it were Haskell is often inefficient and hard to read. Writing idiomatic code that works with the strengths of the language at hand is a better idea. When/if somebody else works with your code, it's unlikely they will have exactly the same background as you, though they will probably know the language you wrote the project in.

(I'm assuming it's not in a language like OCaml or Oz that can comfortably fit both styles.)
Since the original GPL and the new LGPL bindings use a different technique, I doubt he could have sold it to Nokia. Nokia likely had a different method in mind, or had some sort of technical reason for wanting to use the existing code.

Also, I don't think that having your exit strategy be getting bought by the tool-providing company that your code depends on is a good one. They could just as easily use your work as a template for their own, and obsolete your product in the process. I think that it would be too risky.
Ralph Osterhout - Invention Is the Mother of Creativity.
Is this the most Cash ever given out by an Online Casino to US players?
Scrum forces the client to decide which features are most important. It bribes them with the idea they can have some things next week to avoid a death march 6 months from now.
This helps to create useful products without wasting time building useless things.

As long as the most important 80% works chances are the project will be considered useful even if it does not do everything. Which is important but it requires a skilled team to execute well over time.
Matt Walker - Secrets of the Sleeping Brain : The Psychology of Sleep.
So you can replace advertisements for art that takes you to a web site where you can buy their art? Hijacking ad space on the client side side-steps all the legal issues I've seen with this happening at the ISP level. What is interesting to me is that the people who download this plugin are self selecting themselves to the artists as people that like/enjoy art.

Who is going to be the first to make the "organic" web browser that uses this same thing to replace existing ads with relevant organic only labels?
The goal was apparently not to "cut their food budget" or save money at all, but merely to challenge themselves. From http://onedollardietproject.wordpress.com/2008/09/01/it-star...

"When we first started talking about doing this, we didn’t really have an agenda, or any developed sense of why we wanted to do it. It just seemed like an interesting challenge; one that would force us to see things differently."

Perhaps the Social Justice discussed on Wikipedia is different from a social justice class. After all they say they're social justice teachers.

For instance this (http://www.gonzaga.edu/Academics/Diversity/Academics/Social-...) description of a social justice class sounds a lot more about raising awareness of social issues than a "LITERALLY beyond-communist ideology". Another example -> http://www.fatimahs.org/pdf/Teacher%20Syllabi/Sister%20Lisa/... So it would seem unclear what exactly they mean. I'd imagine that term is quite overloaded.

"The reason that $1-per-day eating is tied up with this is that social justice folks want to redistribute ALL resources, across the entire planet."

Perhaps actually reading what they have to say, beyond the line where they mention social justice and the 3 line description of what that means in Wikipedia, before jumping to conclusions, losing your head, and seeing "LITERALLY beyond-communist" bogeymen everywhere would have been a far more constructive use of your time?
And it's incomplete too - although it's an amusing idea, it's obvious the author stopped as soon as it got difficult.
The problem is that twenty somethings don't vote and silver hairs do.

I was watching footage from the town hall meetings around the country for the health care reform and noticed only one person without gray hair there and she was still old.
Am I missing the point of this, or is all he saying is 'it's easier for people to understand if you do a quick doodle of what you mean'.

Is this rocket science?
2 words: baby boom
I have to ask: how often do these formal buzzword project management techniques find their way into the real world? I've not been doing this long, but it seems to me that the folks who set deliverables either don't use these methodologies, or use an unnamed amalgamation. Am I wrong?
Doesn't accept "ø" which is actually a real world letter that happens to be found in my name. Useless.

A plea to developers: If you are going to do filtering and sanitizing on your input, at least make sure you get it right.
I came to HN because the articles were interesting and USEFUL. If I wanted digg or reddit or slashdot, then I'd go to those sites. Totally agree, this doesn't belong here.
This deserves more attention than it's gotten - very cool stuff.
http://www.datasf.org/
Cloudera Announces Hadoop World: NYC 2009
Top Web 2.0 Blogs
So how do you solve the problem the parent mentioned? What stops an extremist organisation from suing to get the identity (legally), accidentally slip it and let others smash his windows? It's not a theoretical point of view, this happened in many times and many countries.

Anonymous insults and defamation don't have nearly as much power as the scenario above.

I live in a country where a government meeting transcripts were leaked, and on their way passed through a regular joe. He got detained, his computer confiscated, and most scary, two years after the incident I still couldn't find the transcripts online. The incident was widely publicized - but the files were still gone. (I'm from Romania btw, an ex-communist country. You'd think we'd know better.)

And more to the point, wikileaks would be impossible.
Can't default on student loans. It'll get pulled out of any paychecks.
My.

"It is generally thought of as a world which affords individuals and groups fair treatment and an impartial share of the benefits of society" sounds like a really radical goal...

...almost as nefarious as "to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."
Or...you could just learn to use Powerpoint well. Does anyone think Steve Jobs would be more effective if he stood up there with a yellow notepad?

The idea that "talking to the screen" is inherent in using Powerpoint just seems a little silly to me.
> You should never have to ask to link something on the internet!

It is considered good form to ask before linking if there is the possibility that you generate a ton of traffic to someone's personal server. It may not be configured with high load in mind, or it may have a small bandwidth quota.
Pimco Says Dollar to Weaken as Reserve Status Erodes
Knowing everything you know now. Would you not do your homework, participate in extracurricular activities, play sports, learn to play the piano, apply and attend a good college? If not then what? Do you feel you wasted your time doing those things?
Yes, used properly. He's showing ways that information can be misrepresented when using colorscales IMproperly. Also he's showing that there is no such thing as "the one true colorscale".
How The Pirate Bay Will Be Legalized
I actually enjoy - I guess to each his own, my reason for liking might be the same reason for your not liking (brevity)... but I think he cuts the fat most of the time.

the only thing that makes me weary about this technique is that salesman use it known as the four square...

http://www.edmunds.com/advice/finance/articles/47277/article...

but if its used in a genuine way, Im sure it helps.
All I see is "increase your window size please".
I think you'd be surprised at how many funded startups are using scrum, as well as some large tech companies, at least in the valley.
How should I negotiate for equity in a company?
I've been recruited to be the sole developer on a service based start up (phone based tech support). I'd be making the back end of their website and integrating it with a ticket system. This will probably end up with me having a heavy hand in work flow and other aspects of how the company runs. We've discussed hiring me at my hourly rate, but they've mentioned they don't have an income yet, and asked if I can take it easy on my estimates. I'm not worried about getting paid down the line, but I would like to negotiate for a piece of the company as I think I have more to offer than just being a programmer for hire.

As I see it. I've got a couple of bargaining chips. 1) I've got a good amount of acknowledged experience and knowledge in both fields (theirs and mine). 2) They would like more work out of me then they have ability to pay for. 3) I've got a heck of a lot more knowledge in leveraging mediums such as twitter, and blogs. 4) I would love to spend more time on the company then just coding a back end.

I'm also not sure exactly what I'm asking for and what's reasonable to ask for. I'd rather make money monthly from the business then when they might sell it down the line, but I don't even know if that's a smart. I could alternatively build the system and lease it to them, but then they have less incentive to work with me and I wouldn't have nearly as much of a stake.

I've never worked with a company where this seemed like a viable option, so I've never had a chance to negotiate. Any tips on how I should go about this and what I might ask for?
Use log_duration in postgresql.conf to log long queries, explain ANALYZE them to find out what they're doing. Sometimes a full table sequential scan is faster than using an index -- e.g. if the index would (according to gathered statistics data) hit 90% of the table anyway.

There are also various other gathered statistics you can look at, e.g. cache hits, index hits etc.
That kind of thing doesn't happen much here. Try reddit. :-)
You can use the reply link right below a comment so you don't have to refer to someone's nick and the discussion will remain threaded.
From the visualization, it looks like it runs search queries on the name given, then categorizes the words it finds into the colours/categories you see in the bar.
I emailed a small online vendor that their creditcard field was being cached like this, and I was told it was a 'browser feature' that I had to turn off. It almost makes me regret making my purchases there.
I know what an ash grapheme is, but I'm also lazy when it comes to Unicode. Thanks for looking that up for me but I can no longer edit my post.
It sounds like you've thought this through pretty well. I would just have a frank discussion with them about it; making sure to mention the bargaining chips you've mentioned here.

If I ran a company and the tech guy thought it was a good enough idea that he wanted some equity in exchange for a somewhat smaller salary, I'd probably be pretty happy that I had someone working with me who saw the value in what we were doing.
I can give you some tips for colleges and universities. Some of it varies based on what you're trying to sell.

1. Go to the dean or department head. If it's administrative software, go to the dean of admissions or matriculation.

2. Often times, approval hoops will vary based on the price of what you're selling. Smaller accounts can be approved at the college/department level. Larger stuff may have to be approved by the board. Even larger items may have to go all the way to the district (even if its a 1-school district).

3. Get ready for a painfully slow sales cycle. You're essentially working with a government entity. The person who actually wants your goods has to submit a purchase request to their higher ups. If approved, that gets turned into a purchase order (PO) by accounting. You often have to treat the PO like cash as many colleges aren't going to even look at your invoice until your product is delivered and installed.
There's probably a 20% chance that someone along the way will be on vacation or off for the quarter ... a document always sits on someone's desk for a week waiting for a signature.

Here's some bonus, inside baseball tips ... free to you!

4. Go after community colleges. There are over 100 of them in California alone. Granted, CA's economy sucks right now, but they still buy stuff.

5. If you do your research, you can find the schools that received various state and federal grants. Some of these grants are HUGE ... as in "how do we spend all this money?" huge. If you've got something that could remotely help them meet their grant goals, go after them. Usually the college will setup small departments just for the grant and you can call and ask for them.

6. Hit up people (especially the grant people) in early June. Most schools end their fiscal year on June 30. You have to understand, if they have surplus cash in a budget somewhere, they want to spend it. When we did edu software, we literally had schools call us on June 20 and say "We want your $8K product be we need it approved and delivered by the end of the month. Can you do it?"

Hope that helps
aka sneakernet 2.0
If by being modeled you are asking whether objects are used in C++ as in Java/C#, then I would say yes, maybe even more so. Of course in C++ there is a possibility to use it as a "C with some more stuff" language, and unfortunately it is used as such regularly. But well designed C++ code involves object usage quite similar to Java/C#. Also in C++, RAII is used for managing transient resources, and this probably introduce extra objects which in Java would not be created.

For example: Creating a temporary file and after some work deleting it would be done using try & finally sections in idiomatic Java, but in C++ an object would be used where the constructor contains the file creation and the destructor contains the deletion. This way the file lifetime is tied strictly to the object lifetime, which would be destroyed automatically when the code block is left.

However, the fact that object allocation on the heap is slow is mitigated by having the ability to create objects on the stack, which is probably even faster than Java or C#. And they are also managed automatically, so stack objects are always preferred if they are suitable.

While I think it is an apple-to-apple comparison, it is a microbenchmark, and as such probably irrelevant in most of the real-world cases.
The PySide FAQ says:
Nokia’s initial research into Python bindings for Qt involved speaking with Riverbank Computing, the makers of PyQt. We had several discussions with them to see if it was possible to use PyQt to achieve our goals. Unfortunately, a common agreement could not be found, so in the end we decided to proceed with PySide.

It sounds like Nokia wanted to make a deal first. Maybe Riverbank underestimated Nokia's willingness to throw sheer manpower at working around them, or perhaps Riverbank thought that reimplementing the APIs through "cleanroom" reverse engineering would be more difficult than it turned out to be.
Internet 'immune system' could block viruses
I'm Writing a Book
"How old is this skank? 40 something? She's a psychotic, lying, whoring, still going to clubs at her age, skank."

I think that is pretty concretely claiming that she "slept around." If there is a factual basis for the claim, the blogger should be cleared of all charges. If not, a libel or defamation case seems appropriate, just as if these claims were made in the New York Times or on CNN.
> Scrum forces the client to decide which features are most important

Aaaaah, I think it's fair to say that Scrum forces the client to declare which features are most urgent and that in the ideal project the client aligns urgency and importance. However, just like real life, it is difficult to align these two orthogonal concepts.

Sometimes things become urgent because they are tantalizingly easy to do.

Sometimes things become urgent because someone important thinks they are important.

Sometimes things become urgent because the client is personally invested in them.

I agree that "as long as the most important 80% works chances are the project will be considered useful even if it does not do everything," but I am cautious about assuming that just because you ask the client to name the most important features ona sprint-by-sprint basis that you will agree in hindsight that the most important 80% of a product got done.
Agile methodologies have made their way into many startups and established companies. When I was working at Comcast large portions of the software engineering groups was starting to sync on a product cycle.

That being said - I've not seen much consistency across implementations. It generally breaks down to some sort of product backlog which is worked on in small chunks on some cycle (months, weeks, two-weeks whatever...). This is a pretty basic change to the normal waterfall cycle and easy to implement, and works well for many teams.

The rest of the Agile/Scrum/pick your particular method is left to the project/product/SE manager and you really have to find what works for your team, and I'm not sure makes that big of a difference in the end.
Depends. I might not be able to see all colors, but I still appreciate their thoughtful use.

Make colors support your design, but do not rely on them. And please take the more common forms of color blindness into account.
If this product can replace roofing boards (usually plywood), would that mean no more need for shingles either? A close join with good caulking seems to me a reasonable roofing material. Other similar uses seem to exist in places where plywood is traditionally used but rots away relatively quikly. Could this also be used in lieu of pressboard for cheap furnishings?

My big question tho is how much energy does this process use? Is it energy efficient enough to offset the wood/glue/manufacturing of plywood stuff?
Dead Enterprise Tools
ING Direct (USA) uses Scrum and has for years. They are very happy with the results.
Is Social Media a Fad? (YouTube)
Just installed it--I was curious to see how they handled the image sizing. As an artist, nothing bugs me more than other people's lack of consideration for the aspect ratio of the original art.

I'm happy to say that nothing was stretched or otherwise mangled in order to fit in the ad space. Looks like they use a little cropping, but that's about it.
It depends entirely on where you are. Some projects are a completely chaotic mess, of course. Some have a methodology, perhaps cobbled from bits and pieces of conventional wisdom, but they don't give it a name. Some explicitly declare a methodology and pay attention to its rules, more or less. Some, alas, become religious devotees of a methodology, train a police force to enforce the rules, and go into full blown cargo cult mode.

But all real-world instantiations of methodologies are, in some sense, "amalgamations". For one thing, none of them are complete. As both the article and Raganwald point out, Scrum is far from a complete description of what you need to do to organize a successful project, just as using Lisp and Emacs aren't sufficient conditions for producing great software.
In order to get people to do this, you'd have to advertise a traditional way anyway. If I'm going to do that, why wouldn't I just advertise my own product? I'd get a better increase in revenue that way than indirectly advertising for all of my competitors. (Unless you're the App-store, but you're not, and they're not going to do it)
This has nothing whatsoever to do with HN but it is awesome.
Ask HN: Share your simple, time consuming bugs
I love debugging. It is an art: crudely so when we litter our code with desperate, sometimes vulgar trace statements; elegantly so when we employ careful step-through debugging.

Sometimes though, the bugs get the upper hand for longer than any of us would like to admit.

I think it would be possibly helpful and probably interesting to everyone, to see what kind of bugs have made HN readers believe that their machine acted out of disdain for the programmer attempting to assert control.
Zopa acts here as a credit agency: they evaluate the borrower's creditworthiness but the lenders keeps the credit risk. What is their incentive to do this assessment thoroughly, and how are they going to get their credibility?

The idea of cutting overhead costs is good though, like you see with online banks.
Credit unions (not for profit) can be another solution to avoid banks. It is very popular in Ireland for instance.
ILike's $20m Valuation - Platform Dependency has a Cost
I liked the article, but agree that the suggestion that Cell networks can be run like Wi-Fi isn't feasible. The amount of signal loss through a barrier increases with frequency, so 2.4GHz signals die out more quickly than, say 700MHz. To be a bit anthropomorphic, radio waves don't see the thickness of an obstacle in terms of inches or meters, they see them in terms of wavelengths, which are inversely proportional to frequency. So opening up high power, low(er) frequency wireless equipment to everyone would most likely be a disaster.

On the other hand, the current practice of just handing over chunks of scarce resources to anti-competitive firms _is_ broken, so the author is correct that change would be beneficial.