skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All the other "Charlie Foxtrots" (btw, wtf?) that he's perpetrated up until now, he doesn't have to live with those? How many inflammatory fuckups does a person get to commit before its fair game to point out that they're a jackass?
From my impression, Dvorak was simply raising the questions, which based on the (incomplete) facts he found, seems perfectly valid to ask about someone in such a high position.

Now that the question has been answered about his degrees, great; let's move on.
There are a few problems with the phone handoff idea, though. One of the problems is there's no safety net: if the guy who has the phone doesn't pick up for some reason, the alert can't auto-escalate. That might be fixable with something like Google Voice, but I don't think they give you a way to manually escalate an alert if you know you can't handle it in time. In both cases, you probably have to manually roll over the number when someone new comes on-call, instead of having the system do that automatically from an on-call schedule.

We've actually been anxiously waiting to try out Google Voice up here. Unfortunately, they haven't yet extended their coverage to include Canada.
Introducing the New Inspiredlog - Nonstop Visual Inspiration
Charlie Foxtrot is phonetic speak for CF which is sometimes used to mean cluster fuck.
seriously? Boston would be one of the more difficult cities to connect. Boston is old, has a very established infrastructure, and a pretty expansive underground infrastructure already. I would say doing this in a place like Minneapolis might be easier because its newer (more documented, less underground infrastructure) of course then you have weather problems.
Artificially Intelligent Bargain Hunters
I believe that's for you to answer, since you're the one calling him one.

What's your number? Three? Four?

Guy might end up losing his job and being a mockery the rest of his life and all you've got to offer is to pile on? What is this, kindergarten?
The article states that it is covered in the privacy policy.
You can check out the world of micro-ISVs (indie software developers). It's been tough in the last 5 years or so, because everyone has their own web site and are trying to reach a wide consumer audience. Just browse the spectrum of questions on http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz.

You are correct about the cost of the Mac and iPhone. But a lot of students I meet already have a MacBook.
I'm not sure if you are saying that copyrights have been expiring, or if you mean that copyrights aren't expiring now but will eventually.

If the former, you have my curiosity... Could you describe a case in which a copyright's term could have expired in the past decade? As I understand it, the Sonny Bono Copyright Act extended all copyright terms by twenty years, and that was eleven years ago.
This is why professional journalists actually pick up the phone and call people before publishing accusations about them. And this is also why bloggers and "online columnists" are often not considered real journalists.
I blanket-block all ads. I get advertised to enough when I leave my house (billboards, etc).
A(nother) Electronic Voting Machine Hacking Technique
I'd also recommend University Campuses for this kind of thing. As well as the campus library, many buildings have private study rooms
The demographic of the accused is information I'd want to know.

While I'm sympathetic to the motives of those who want to suppress the race, nationality, or immigration status of the accused, this suppression itself inflames xenophobic sentiment in the long term ("we're victims of an anti-racist liberal media conspiracy!").

If some particularly strong riot-bait happened (e.g. the LAPD chase and beating of Rodney King), then I'd favor suppression if possible.
And if you're in Boston the BPL in Copley Square has a similarly beautiful and useful room. And despite now living thousands of miles away I still see fit to always carry my BPL card. It's been on me for over twenty years at this point and features my childhood-era signature. Can't let go. :)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/inzenity/2594029543/
Netflix notoriously throttles heavy users. Their largest expense is postage. I'm sure their calculus is more complex, but if they had to pick an extreme, i'd wager that they'd pick the guy who has had the same 3 discs sitting on his table for the last month.
I don't see why. He's not distributing them, he's not getting any money, and he's not showing them in public.

It is illegal in the US, both because it "circumvents" the copy protection, and because he's making a copy of a movie he doesn't own. So it's copyright infringement, but not piracy.
What happens if someone tries to run two Martingale systems (of opposite colors) at the same time?
It sounds like I'm essentially going to be crippled for life if I don't attend this seminar.
Agreed. The fact is he did a pretty good job with the DC.gov websites according to just about everyone involved. They're the most data rich and accessible complex government site I've ever seen. e.g. http://data.octo.dc.gov/

Visual design aside, DC may well have the best website of any city or state in the country.
If Office is that important to your work, why aren't you buying a quality system?
"Accurate" isn't a boolean. You seem to be pushing this false dichotomy where either we have nigh-omniscience about the climate and can do geoengineering, or we know nothing about the climate and can't be justified in reducing CO2 emissions. That's wrong-headed in multiple ways.

Suppose we have 10% credence that SO2 injections will cause catastrophic side effects on the long-term human habitability of the earth. (Rephrased: we have 90% credence that SO2 injections will not cause a catastrophic side effect). In this case it would be absolutely reckless to do SO2 injections, because 10% of catastrophic is too high of an expected risk. That's a risk profile on the same order of magnitude as Russian roulette.

But if we only have 10% credence that continued, unrestricted net CO2 emissions will cause catastrophic side effects on the long-term human habitability of the earth, it would be absolutely reckless to continue doing so, for the exact same reason.

The fact that we don't have an exceptionally accurate model of climate is the exact reason that we should err on the side of caution. We have an accurate model of a single aspect of climate--the greenhouse effect--and can make some rough projections otherwise, but the climate is inherently a chaotic system, which makes any exact predictions (for instance, any predictions with the necessary confidence required to do geoengineering) impossible. So we're never even going to reach 90% confidence that geoengineering is safe. My personal estimate is around 90% confidence that continued carbon emissions are unsafe, but I am pretty damn sure that confidence level is above 50%.
SoftLayer offers SSD options on their monthly dedicated servers, in particular 32 & 64GB "Intel SLC SSD" drives.
Oh it used to happen. It was called kozmo.com, and it was wonderful. Once constructed, a network of tubes will be vastly cheaper to operate than an army of bike messengers. I'm looking forward to this.
True, but the contest idea builds a community and hopefully increases the number of subscribers. It certainly builds loyalty with existing subscribers. I think it's a good idea.
Mexico vs USA live stream online - August 12, 2009
One amusing incident was when he took Microsoft to task for creating a "System Idle Process" that uses up all his available CPU time. That's about the time I stopped reading his column.

There are many other examples: http://www.google.com/search?q=john+dvorak+idiot or
http://www.google.com/search?q=john+dvorak+moron
times only across the mysql_stmt_execute() call

I hope this means timing many, many calls and then timing the loop overhead, subtracting, and dividing by the number of calls made. Clocks just aren't good enough to time individual calls.
Interesting... I noticed a couple years ago that if I put the DVD in the return envelope backwards (and the bar code couldn't be seen thru the little window) it took longer to mark those movies as returned (I'd get the email at 3, 4, 5 PM instead of 7 or 8 AM) and it often led to an extra day of waiting. I now take care to always have them in the right.

You haven't noticed any extra delay by doubling them up?
"Sure, we all know that, but the trick is what to write for an audience that may have close to no knowledge of how computers work."

Maybe, but such writting also helps ensure that the audience never learns how computers work.
We support lots of different short URLs for lots of different domains, the arrow is just one of the fun ones. ( See http://tinyarro.ws )

The people who sign up for personalized domains can use whatever domain they want and we'll help them track down a good tiny one if they need.
Do your phonecalls and SMS'es work outside the US?
How old is too old to start a company, or create and market a killer app?
I've heard many times that "You're never too old," but it's often obscured by frequently hearing about teenagers and college kids making a fortune with their start-ups (started coding when they were 9, etc.). What about people who've past these stages in their life? Any motivating success stories?
I agree. Working at home also gives you the opportunity to use a full size keyboard, use multiple (or large) monitors, and more. And you save tons on the price of coffee (and can often have even better coffee once you learn how).

This works best if you can have a separate room as your office, however.
Ask HN: How did you get your product idea?
I was just wondering how did you stumble upon the idea for your product? Was it born out of a problem, or?

I'm opening a software firm with two of my friends and was just wondering. I'd really appreciate your feedback, thanks!
Most casino table games have a betting cap, so you can't run martingale on them anyway.
An Apple TV Ad Points To A Mac Tablet?
I largely agree. I went for a Math rather than a CS degree myself. With that said, you will be required to learn a lot of math in a decent CS course and an interested student can pick up on the rest themselves relatively easily.
It actually makes more sense to me that they would announce a tablet in Sept. and then deliver it early next year. If this device really does include 3G, as we all assume it does, it would have to go through the FCC process like the iPhone, which would mean they would have to announce it before it hit the FCC to avoid any leaks.

Here's hoping Sept. 15th brings a MacBook Touch
I wonder what his stats and graphs will look like on the site I started: http://feedfliks.com
ColorSuckr: Create color schemes based on photos
Will the Chevy Volt really get 230 mpg?
Ask HN: Ruby or Python for a Startup?
Howdee fellow hackers,

I'm currently in the process of assembling a development team for my newly born venture, and would like to raise a question: if you were in my shoes, which would you pick as the "base" language for the team: Python or Ruby?

A little bit of background to fundament that (seemingly naive) question:

- The only techie on the company today is myself. I'm familiar with both languages and have no preference of one over the other at all

- The products we'll be working on are not just web based: although there will be one or two web sites (which can be handled with either django or rails), most of the code will be on services (e.g. interfacing with bluetooth, gps and other hardware devices, background jobs, etc). I'm not mentioning C since I'm leaning to those scripting languages due to better testability, less code, etc)

- I'm aware that python currently has a better support for such things (ruby's bluetooth libs, for instance, are quite half-baked so far). Although my general feeling is that Ruby (now backed up as being 'the scape pod' for Java) will probably evolve rather quickly from this moment on (yes? no?)

- It is equally hard to find experienced programmers on any of those two languages around here (actually the only experienced ones you can find here work in php). The learning curves are quite similar too, IMO

If possible, I'd like to hear opinions on those matters.

Thanks in advance! :-)
Dvorak called the University of Maryland, College Park and they said they had no record of him receiving a degree at there, which is what everyone things of when they read University of Maryland. NextGov confirmed he has an MS at UMUC, which might have a shared history with UMD, but only UMD is allowed to be known as the University of Maryland.

This is so obviously a non-story, or at least not worth more than a short, transparency inspired blog post. Of all Dvoraks bonehead stories, this one takes the cake.

Still, I'd like to see Kundra's bio updated to reflect the actual university he received that degree from. I would never say I received an MS from the University of Texas, when in fact I received one from some other UT system school, and certainly wouldn't phrase it that way on my .gov bio page.
The pricing page is here: http://www.pagerduty.com/plans

It is linked off of the FAQ, from the question "How much are you planning to charge for PagerDuty?". We didn't make any links to the pricing page off the main page because we want as many people to try the product out while we are in beta.
We support two-way (i.e. we send you a message on an alarm, and you send back a message telling us to suppress, resolve, or escalate the incident) SMSing to most of the world. Unfortunately, we can only do phone calls to the US and Canada right now. We're looking at adding international phone calls in the near future, though.
SMS works internationally. Phone calls only work for US/Canada currently. We plan to expand that internationally as well.
Mine (http://agilezen.com/) was born out of the having to deal with over-complicated project management tools that were bloated with features that I didn't want to use but still had to pay for. Feeling the pain myself helped me recognize the need in the market.
(repost from other thread)

Dvorak called the University of Maryland, College Park and they said they had no record of him receiving a degree at there, which is what everyone things of when they read University of Maryland. NextGov confirmed he has an MS at UMUC, which might have a shared history with UMD, but only UMD is allowed to be known as the University of Maryland.

This is so obviously a non-story, or at least not worth more than a short, transparency inspired blog post. Of all Dvoraks bonehead stories, this one takes the cake.

Still, I'd like to see Kundra's bio updated to reflect the actual university he received that degree from. I would never say I received an MS from the University of Texas, when in fact I received one from some other UT system school, and certainly wouldn't phrase it that way on my .gov bio page.
I know several people that only really made it big when they were in their 50's. I think for the most part those are relatively conservative businesses, not billion dollar affair from 'winner takes all' bets, but simply identifying a niche, building a product and then selling the hell out of it. (and with not billions I mean earning several million annually before taxes, which I think is pretty good by any standard).

The businesses that you start when you're 20-30, 30-40 or 40-50 in many ways reflect the amount of energy and the knowledge that you've gathered over the years.
You actually get a plug in the article itself. Cool site by the way. IIRC, it was made in one of those quick-sprint exercises, no?
I think the post-Civil-War version of sharecropping was also "completely voluntary"; sharecroppers could, and did, leave for the cities. Due to institutionalized racism, they didn't have access to the kinds of government farm support that kept their landlords solvent enough to keep from having to sell them the land. (This is a problem that still exists in the US.)

Or maybe you mean "completely volunteer", in the sense that nobody is getting paid. But it seems to me that a lot of people receive something of value from their participation in these sites, even if it's not financial in nature.
This looks really neat but it's not a runner for us as it's a 3rd party hosted solution.

Do you have any plans for a packaged version which companies can host themselves?
The operative word was "should"
Ooh, that looks awesome. Anybody have any similar suggestions for D.C./Arlington? I'm moving there soon, and while I'm still unemployed, I may as well find a gorgeous place to hang out and work on job apps and programming projects.
Why Auckland, New Zealand is a great place for startups
John C. Dvorak has been on my list of "journalists who not to take totally seriously" for a long time.
It's sort of bizarre that he picks out Wikia as a negative example. The communities on Wikia can and do take their content somewhere else, including the entire edit history, attributions, and all. Original contributors retain copyright, and everything is clearly licensed under free licenses that permit the community to take it elsewhere (and commercially exploit it if they want; this is not a right that is reserved to Wikia). You can download the regularly-made content dumps easily; you don't need a special scraping tool. And finally, the software is open-source, so you can put a downloaded dump into a MediaWiki install in an afternoon.

How much of that can be said of your Stack Overflow contributions?
What is the difference between a good product and a good company?
Welcome to arc. I'm just now starting to drink the kool-aid myself.
In any case it is fair to raise those questions. Government should be ready answer to public scrutiny. If there are good answers for them: Good.
I wrote a bulletin board in 1984 on a Commodore Vic20. It had public and private rooms (message areas), private mail and an online game, all in 9.6K of BASIC. Users could start their own rooms and make them public or private. I ran it on the Vic for six months then rewrote it in Turbo Pascal and ran it for eighteen months on an XT clone with 384K (I couldn't afford the full 640) and one floppy. There was no hard drive. The board was very popular. Each user spent an average of 70 minutes on it.
This is a great tool. I really like the idea of parsing the email address for what type of alarm to use. That makes this straight-forward while at the same time making it incredibly easy to integrate with any existing alarming system.

The reply via SMS feature is excellent and something that I always want in any monitoring system.

I'm curious about the security around the email alerts, can anyone send to the specific trigger-alarm@mysite.pagerduty.com or can you add at least a 'FROM:' check?

You probably have this on your road-map, but if a ticketing/worklog system could be integrated with this, you could add an incredible amount of value for folks working on the problem in real time.
Yep, thanks for the feedback. We will definitely add international calling soon.
We'll be looking at many ways to cut networking overhead over the coming weeks, including socket communication (though I don't know if MySQL supports this).
Free (open source) beer
Social Sites That Every Business Needs a Presence on
No, not exactly quick-sprint :-)
The library staff definitely knew about it. I felt bad originally for booking private study rooms for work, and not "private study"; I was vigorously assured that I shouldn't feel guilty for doing so.

Two things to realize:

(1) The library staff is a lot more nervous about the library being empty than they are about it being full. Something about busy libraries being the reason they get paid.

(2) If libraries have headache clientele, it's the homeless. I had no idea what a mess that situation was until I started going to the library every day.
I agree. Pokemon cards and MTG cards and Yu-Gi-Oh cards involve not just collecting cards, but also a game and a competition. You can do something with the cards beyond just collecting them.

Baseball cards have stats on them. I'm sure that was useful pre-Internet, but now I can get all that data online in seconds.
You're slicing hairs here, was this really necessary?
Huh? University College is exactly as much a part of the University of Maryland as College Park.

The complaint is that his bio doesn't specify which campus he attended? This really matters?
I asked a similar question recently. There have been many nice discussions about this topic. This search reveals some:

http://www.google.com/search?q=product+idea+site:http://news...

Ideas are cheap, development easy, so why aren't we ...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=733804

Ask HN: I want to build/sell a product. Steps?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=571884

Your 'Big Idea' Sucks
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737717

Start with a Problem, Not an Idea
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=661440

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=439302
Ask HN: I have three good ideas. Help me choose idea ...
Just recently disabled AdBlockPlus on a few sites that changed their implementation to combat ad blockers, and was so put off at how over the top the ads have become that I've decided to stop going to about half those sites.
If you care enough about library maturity to mention it in your question, and Python has the more mature libraries for your application, then you don't have a real question. Use Python.

Any Python developer can write solid Ruby within 3-4 days. Any Ruby developer can write solid Python within 3-4 days.
Interesting -- I'd like to talk to you about it in more detail, if you have a moment. I'd shoot you an e-mail, but none is listed!
Some libraries have coffee shops, some allow coffee in covered mugs. This varies from city to city (and occasionally branch to branch), of course.
Wasn't he one of the 'journalists' who bought into the SCO vs Linux thing?

One way to not risk your job and reputation is to be very careful prior to publishing lies about people in widely circulated publications.
Hello ook. Just shoot me an email at alex [at] pagerduty.com, and we can work something out.
I work for a defense contractor, so I have some experience here. There are at least two obstacles to making good looking software/sites paid for by the government:

1. Nobody wants to pay for "Looks pretty." You have a list of requirements to satisfy. Each feature costs a certain amount of money. If it comes down to a feature or a pretty UI, it's going to be pretty hard to justify to someone that you spend money making it look good when it otherwise works perfectly well.

2. "Looks pretty" is a testable requirement. Sure, you can have focus groups say what they like (but that costs money, see #1), and you can have requirements like "no functionality shall be more than 2 mouse clicks away from the main screen"--but then you get a screen with 300 buttons on it. There are heuristics you can use to do good design, sure--but there's very few ways to create general, testable requirements that reflect good design.

3. Sometimes there's the problem that the entity paying for the software is not the entity using the software. To clarify: this situation is usually the case, it's just that sometimes the people with the money care about the users, and sometimes they don't or have their own agenda.
Yeah, it's hard to figure out from that article how the study was done. Unless it's a true randomized study where people were randomly assigned to take either more or less math, it's hard to know how much of that is self selection.
I disagree, I like the logo.
Big Prizes and Accolades Await You With The 2009 iRule. Do You? Contest
50 sites is a few to many for my tastes but this is a pretty nice collection of sites that can have an impact
Blue Box Group acquires Rails Boxcar
Great suggestions, thanks for the feedback.
The fact that this is even a story is pretty distressing. As far as I can tell, the guy's gotten good results, which is much more than I can say for plenty of "qualified" people in Washington.