skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Need help classifying my software
I know it's a bad sign if you can't classify your software, but this is the situation that I'm in right now. The problem that I'm faced with is it's designed to address a broad scope of problems associated with developing software.

My goal was to produce an out of the box solution that would leverage my expertise in designing and building software development environments. I believe I have the right framework and the tools that I've implemented so far, does address a lot of the issues that I've encountered in my career.

The problem that I'm faced with now is trying to explain what it is that I'm offering. It can be interpreted as a bunch of things. Some may see it as an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tool. Some may see it as a collaboration tool. Some may just see it as a replacement for a software control management web interface like Gitweb.

I personally want to describe it as an out of the box software development environment solution, but I don't think this will make sense for a lot of people. Unless you have intimate knowledge with designing and implementing software development environments, this term will probably be as clear as mud.

I'm currently looking at positioning this as an enterprise framework, but I think this I may scare away some people. Plus I want to emphasize that it's much more.

I've just finished creating a video that is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3FJ10V1_c8 which I hope will provide a bit more insight.

Edit. Make sure you watch the video in HD and if possible, full screen to see the smaller details.

If you were me, how would you tackle the problem of explaining a product that is designed to address a fairly un-thought of subject like ones software development environment ecosystem.
> Like many other entrepreneurs I know, I'm also very sympathetic to the idea of not paying taxes until you have to.

Except that Geitner wasn't an "entrepreneur", he was supposedly a public servant.

The Treasury department includes the IRS. You remember them - they're in charge of enforcing "voluntary" compliance.

As to "it's too complicated", he's supposed to be smart guy. They even told him the rules AND he signed documents yearly acknowledging that he understood those rules AND he accepted money to pay these taxes.
You'll have to pay for the electricity though. I wonder how efficient the onboard generator is. There are losses for sending electricity through power lines, on the other hand gas is expensive due to taxes.

I would like to see numbers for KW/gallon for the onboard generator. Then we could compare generating your own electricity to power it, vs storing it from power lines (and don't forget losses in the battery, and self discharge).
I had a physics professor who used to drill into us during our labs that, "a number without an error estimate is meaningless." I didn't really get it at the time, and thought he was just being curmudgeonly.

Now I understand how important it is. What's the error in these tests? The standard deviation? What was done to limit the error?

It's great to see people putting numbers behind their claims, but let's get some real science back into computer science and do some serious data analysis.
A recent computer, a mattress to put on the floor, some books, and an efficient means of transportation.

Of course, I already have those things. What I covet is having enough money to fill my belly and my mind without having to work for it 40 hours a week for 40 years.
Google Privacy Opt Out Announced Via The Onion
I've never understood why broadcasters were against this for live television. The ads are rebroadcast along with the content, after all.

I guess theres the issue that they can't gather statistics on this audience, but still... Shouldn't this type of behavior (rebroadcasting) benefit the advertisers? It's mostly brand-related advertising, after all. And most of these brands exist outside the states...
Microsoft Word: Banned in the USA
Ways to gain traction in the consumer market...

1. Use copyrighted content that is highly sought after.
2. Buy traffic, make it look like ur site is exploding
3. With suspect growth sign partnerships w/copyright

Worked well for youtube though don't think they had to buy traffic 1 and 3 worked really well for them.

Note: not trying to be negative here, just reviewing/studying the rise of various start-ups. How they got to be successful!
That's just plain dishonesty. He should have mentioned the campus clearly on his resume. Dvorak screwed himself pretty badly. I wish Dvorak searched for the degree at UM University College rather than UM College Park.
SEO TAGG as well, it's "reported as an attack site" but it has been dead for years.
There is a big difference between majoring in Psych. while taking a lot of Math courses and being a major or specialist in Mathematics.

So on one hand employers should probably take your courses into account slightly on the other I agree with them.

Did you get a BA or BSc?
software development productivity tool? something generic to describe something that does a lot.
Yeah, I did a similar list a few weeks ago with just 6 items. A business should focus on only a few social sites where its preferred audience resides.
Officials seek access to phone and email data 1,381 times a day
I'm not sure that will stand for long:

http://crgslst.com/
Ask HN: 'Do what you want'... Does it really matter what you want?
This is perhaps the most stated advice, the fall back, in many instances, of giving some advice, the first thing that comes in mind when one asks as to what they should do. Do what you want most, what you have a passion for, absent of any consideration that most people, if not all people know not what their passion is.

My question is the simplest, and I hope you will engage in debating it. Does it matter at all what you decide to follow in the absence of any clear knowledge of what you want or what your passion is? Is there such a thing as passion and want when deciding how to spend your life and choosing your career, or is instead our path paved by circumstances and events, our passions formed by our experience rather than carved by our own controlled paving of the future?
I'm not sure how that would work. Would you be charged $10 each time an alarm is triggered and you get SMSed or phoned?
I'm tempted to write 'my son', he is after all 'material', but that's stretching it a bit, so I'll settle for a tenor saxophone.

The trick I think is not to covet the next thing that you haven't got but to be happy with that which you do have and to treat anything that comes your way over and beyond that as a pleasant surprise.
Sending info when a program crashes is one thing, and it doesn't particularly bother me. Sending usage data daily when no crash has occurred is an entirely different matter, and it does bother me.
How to hack a Sony Reader
" just posted this on the other thread, but UMUC is a Distance Learning (online) school."

So if I understand this correctly Mr.Kundra got his MS (IT) via correspondence? Or did he really have to attend classes and lectures and so on perhaps in a lower quality campus than what is generally understood by the unqualified "University of Maryland" phrase?

(This is an honest question. I have no dog in the fight. I am just trying to understand)
live link to the first picture - The Strength of Nations ( http://wbpaley.com/images/nations15_50pct.jpg )
Exactly the same way I have felt about both Scribd and Justin.tv.

Here is another "algorithm" to gain traction, last seen at Ning: 1) allow adult content - in their case adult oriented social networks 2) gain traction, 3) jettison the adult content to clean up your image.

At least this second algorithm has no legal issues, but third party copyrighted content, I have serious legal/ethical issues with.

I have never understood why Y Combinator never saw that as a problem.
You're a meanie.
Favorite topics: working memory; attention; instrumental conditioning; emotional regulation.
It breaks all their content agreements. Cable companies pay billions of dollars to carry content, why would they sit by while some website streams that content for free?
Unfortunately I think calling this will create an equal amount of questions.
Yeah. Christchurch, NZ is the place to be! :-)
I'll get some popcorn, sit back and watch.

This is going to be seriously interesting.
You are forgetting cable and satellite tv companies. They are going to be mad if you can stream their channels for free without paying the monthly fee.

Also the ads you see in california are different than the ads you see in texas.
Wow, my pros and cons lists didn't format well at all! Sorry about that, and sorry for the long post, but I appreciate the comments so far and any other thoughts anyone has.

Thanks!
"each extra -required- maths course" -- as in required by the school. This is also made clear in the linked paper: http://www.columbia.edu/~jg2394/papers/jobmarket.pdf
Apple To Offer $899 Tablet With OLED Screen?
That's cool, but kind of an orthogonal point.
Meta HN discussion: this problem often crops up when people are doing "rate my startup" type posts. They want to post an intro blurb for HN people, so they can't link to the website. Does this smell of a feature waiting to be added to HN, or is it people using it "wrong"?
Not sure how true it is - http://www.worldwidelearn.com/umuc/index.php & https://www.umuc.edu/leads/contact.shtml tells you about the quality of education.
"University of Maryland University College (UMUC) is the world's largest provider of online education, as well as one of the 11 degree-granting institutions in the University System of Maryland.

For over 50 years, UMUC has fulfilled its principal mission: to provide adult learners with access to high-quality education opportunities. Today, more than 70,000 men and women worldwide are pursuing their education and career goals at UMUC. Last year, UMUC had more than 97,000 enrollments in its online courses."

From the UMUC site.
There's a very good game theory problem in here somewhere. How many bots can be run before the advertisers get fed up and stop donating? Somebody needs to make a model to find what the optimal bot rate is that gets lots of rice donated without drawing the ire of the advertisers.
Esthetica Dental Labs
I will be expanding to the platform that Fizook.com already has to market dental lab work to dentists. It's the best of both world like a reverse ebay for the user. The dentist gets lab competing for their business and the dental labs get marketing and sales exposure all over the country. The code is done. I need 30K to buy into the partnership and run this spin-off for the dental world.
To be honest I'm not really sure what the fuss is about.

There is no personally identifying information (such as an ID, phone-number, account no etc) transmitted and it pales in comparison to what a phone company has access to, even before cross-referencing cell tower data with their own records.
Solving my own problem. Unfortunately though, after I've already solved it fot myself, I've been lax about polishing it for public release... Someday, maybe!
We seem to be in violent agreement. :)

Thousands of companies might use if it was open-sourced, but I rather think many of the serious users are competing with Google, or could be competing in the future. It being part of the secret sauce is exactly why there's no percentage.
You might find Gliffy (http://www.gliffy.com/) to be useful.

Or LucidChart (http://www.lucidchart.com/) might strike your fancy.
So what about the Bachelor's in Biology that he might not have, yet has claimed?
Meeting times are much more often moved farther into the future than closer to the present. Thus it's quite natural many people will see "forward [on the calendar]" and "back [further away from here and now]" as meaning the same thing in this context.

That is: it's easier to mentally toggle between calendar-orientation-metaphor and the receding-in-front-of-us-metaphor -- between which 'forward' and 'back' are not necessarily opposites -- than to toggle interpretation to the less-common situation where a meeting is moved earlier.

If you want to unambiguously declare a meeting is coming sooner, saying it's "moved up" currently works. In that case the traditional calendar- or even dayplanner- orientation predominates, whether it's moved up in days or hours.

(Online text may eventually change that: blogs and activity streams increasingly make down-the-past and up-the-future, with new items in some sense 'dropping in' from above the viewport. People who grow up on Twitter and its descendants may someday think of 'up' as further in the future.)
I like the uid idea or even having a unique passphrase in the subject of the email.

Granted, I'm thinking of monitoring systems on a much larger scale where even a single instance of spamming can keep the entire dev team up at night. I do not see this being a problem for the smaller targeted audience that you are going after that will initially only set up a handful of alarms.
It is disabled by default, you have to explicitly enable it when you first use the phone.
I found myself in the other camp - but equally bewildered at first. Can I ask you if you would have drawn the same inference for "the deadline has been moved forward"? That phrase invokes panic in me - does it make you feel calmer? I've very briefly searched for that phrase on Google (there are plenty of hits for news stories) and each usage I've found so far is in the "becoming earlier" sense.
Are you doing anything like transforming the links into affiliate links? If that doesn't violate Amazon or whoever's TOS, it would be a good way to monetize.
No, I have not noticed an extra delay by doubling up two discs in one envelope.

Usually the mail delivery between the local Netflix center and my address is overnight both ways, but occasionally it takes two days for an envelope I return to be processed. I've attributed that delay to the post office, however, and not to having two DVDs in the same envelope.
if you're trying to sell a product, isn't this what you want, though? the open door to talk more about your product?
It's not that they can't pull the information from the towers, it's that the information isn't very good. If you have a real GPS fix and you upload that fix to Google along with the tower, they can start building a very accurate map of where what towers/APs are where. Then when somebody comes along that doesn't have a GPS fix, they can get a better fix than they could otherwise.
"I see your point and I'd use it if I needed to flatter myself. But I'm sticking to the latter. And I'd be sure to mention the starting baseline as well. But I'm sticking to the latter."

Help yourself. Just don't use that type of language in any conversation with anyone else on the planet because you'll likely confuse the hell out of them (take note of the "wtf is this guy talking about" downvotes you've received on this thread)

It's not about flattery. It's about metrics that matter and revenue. Doubling your conversion rate pretty much doubles your revenue. That aside, the goal here is communication. I'd wager that if you said that you doubled your conversion rate, people would grok what it meant (1% to 2% or 5% to 10%-- either way, a big win because it'd double revenue and profit down the funnel). If you said you increased your conversion rate by 10%, I'd wager people would assume that meant something like 10% to 11%.
IMHO sending crash info still needs to be opt-in. There's also no reason to burn battery doing it - the iPhone collects these logs and will occasionally ask you if you'd like to send it to Apple, while you sync to your machine.

That is the right way to do it.
Also, Netflix doesn't have to make a customer wait, they can just send a movie from farther down in the customer's queue.
Ask HN: Who's Hiring? (take 2)
The original "Who's Hiring?" thread was one of the most active threads ever at HN, and I know it did a lot of good for a number of companies and individuals. I think we are due once again for such an opportunity to connect these people.

So, as LukeG put it "Are you hiring? Does your company (or your friend's) have openings? Let HN know!!! Let's get some good people good jobs."

Notes:

* I got my current job from the previous thread. It has been a pleasure.

* Original: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375410
You're saying that someone who talks about the percentage growth in their customers would be just as concerned about the percentage shrinkage of their non-customers? Unless you're Facebook or Coca-Cola, you probably don't assume that the majority of people in the world will at some point use your product. So it doesn't make sense to measure your shrinkage of non-marketshare.

The percentage change in users is the interesting number. If someone said "My conversions went up by 100 per week!" I would say "What percentage increase is that?" If someone said "My conversions went up five percentage points!" I would say "What percentage increase was that?" If they said "My conversions went up 20%," I would know what I wanted to know.
Real-time updates would be nice, but regardless, well done :)
Facebook Grew Twice As Fast As Twitter In July
So it's just a web based commit tracker? Unless there's a large number of menus/menu items not shown, there's nothing new, fanciful or in need of "categorization". If you call it anything but a "web based commit tracker" to people who work with code very day, it's not that they "don't get it"...it's that they're laughing at you when you leave the room.
"The deadline has been moved forward" makes me think the same as you - it's now earlier.
I was just thinking he is still coming up with interesting ideas, even if it is just commentary on an article by someone else.

The original article:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2008/tc200...
I agree that this should be discussed. One problem though is that it's not a problem in a normal web browser with a mouse, because it's really easy with a script or just a couple mouse clicks. It's just a problem with mobile browsers like the iPhone's.
To start, we are hiring at AboutUs in Portland, OR. We need more Rails hackers to help us scale outward and develop new aspects of our application.

We are a top 10 Rails site and get to deal with intriguing issues every day. Solving massive scaling challenges while pairing with people like Ward Cunningham (our CTO) is how we work - it could not be any more fun and engaging.

Check out our jobs page for the full run-down: http://www.aboutus.org/AboutUs.org/Jobs/Developer
Because it worked for Youtube and some others and it's the way to success and a sale. Just following what others have done - thank god for the DMCA!
Ask HN: Where do you work besides an office?
I just read a post on HN about working in libraries, which made me wonder where else people like to work. I'm going to be traveling soon so I'm looking for options.
I think the issue with $coffee-shop is not that someone will interrupt you directly (e.g. talk to you), but that a commotion in the background will interrupt you
I suspect their test group did not contain any members of the Aymara tribe, who metaphorically map time so that the past (which is known) is in front of them, and the future (which is unseeable) is behind them. See:

http://www.physorg.com/news69338070.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
Google is: http://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/index.html
I agree that it's a problem for the cable companies... But think of the NFL for instance: If NFL was going to look the other way in this matter, what repercussions would there be? Not like the carriers are going to stop carrying NFL content.
The 2 are very different.

Asperger's is no more of a strength than a borderline personality disorder.
No one's making the product I desire, so after years of searching and waiting I have decided to just make the darned thing myself.
It looks like peashootapp.com which looked like basecamphq.com...

http://peashootapp.com/
I was specific about live television. To be more clear, i meant live events like sports. When watching sports on TV, 95% (okay, completely made up figure) of the advertising is branding-related. Think Toyota, Chevy, McDonalds. Internet rebroadcasting would benefit these brands as long as the video isnt republished alongside objectionable content...
> it's that the information isn't very good.

Tower-based cell tracking (triangulation based) generally has the precision of several meters if not better. That's more than enough for building very accurate map. Though there's a chance Palm is not allowed to access this information without a warrant, which would explain why they are using alternative collection methods.
"I increased my conversion rate by 1%?"

It wouldn't be an increase of 1%. It would be an increase of one percentage point OR an increase of 100%.

This entire thread could be resolved by acknowledging the differences between percent and percentage points.
Some of that is humor. At some point, I imagine the front page will change. As far as I know, that's the only place where I (jokingly) comment in a conspiracy theory style.

But the reality is also that most CF patients are prisoners of the mental models used by medicine. Ex: Zithromax is very commonly prescribed as a prophylactic antibiotic and to control inflammation. It also competes with magnesium. So taking zithromax tends to make one magnesium deficient. Magnesium is an alkaline mineral. Thus magnesium deficiency leads to excess acidity, which leads to inflammation, which promotes infection, for which doctors then prescribe drugs like zithromax. It's a vicious cycle: Once you start taking zithromax, you tend to become dependent upon it because it worsens the underlying issues which cause the thing it is treating for. Most doctors seem to be completely unaware of stuff like that. I have never had a doctor tell me what nutritional supplements I needed to take or what foods I needed to eat to combat the side effects the drugs cause. Getting off the 8 or so prescription drugs I used to take has made me feel strongly that the solutions doctors prescribe -- and which most patients blindly and obediently follow to a T -- are part of the problem.

I wish the picture were prettier. But my CF specialist expressed zero interest in what I was doing to get myself well. His response to my improvement was to schedule me fewer appointments because other patients needed his help more. If anyone is going to get well using the information on the site, it will be a grass roots movement. Doing some kind of research on it when it is already helping people (me, my son, others with CF that contact my via email) looks to me like a huge waste of time -- kind of like a recent article about avoiding spending undue amounts of time writing your business plan.

Thanks for the feedback. I will make a mental note of it for future reference as the site gets improved. :-)
How to improve your note-taking
He has built the site, and people are building the news forum. It appears (or perhaps "it emerges") that what they are using the voting system for is close to his vision but not 100%. Of course he can still guide it, but the crowd works its ways.
Tell HN: Perseids: "Last Chance" for Best Meteor Viewing Tonight
headline should read:
Justin.tv Signs Deal With Fox, Gets Serious about Catering to the 64 People in the World Who Liveblog.
Probably true. But it is possible to stop Microsoft.
in san francisco

cafes:
sugar lump,
philz,
mission creek cafe,
coffee bar,
martha's

co-working spaces:
citizen space,
sfcube
I think I independently came up with the same idea to solve the distributed gfs master problem: use a separate bigtable/gfs1 cluster for master metadata for gfs2.

I'm glad that I'm not crazy :)
Yes, that pretty much sums it up, in a rather mercenary way (not that I'm judging negatively, just making an observation).
I had the same thing with accessories. It would be very useful if you could provide a button to remove an entry from the list and then all similar entries are automatically removed as well.
Yea microsoft is just trying to maintain their image of being cheap.