skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While the founder might not be a techie, if a new business in a traditional field could get a leg up on the establishment by the adoption of emerging, appropriate technology, that might be worth considering.

Woz was the techie. Steve Jobs wasn't. Yet Jobs, while only a co-founder, turned out to be the, uhm, core of the long-term Apple success.

(Afterthought: Is it even possible to start a business these days and hope to compete without substantially embracing some emerging technology?)
New Online Advertising Model
Neither OS X nor Windows has been free of remote code execution vulnerabilities.

Neither OS X nor Windows has any current published unpatched remote code execution vulnerabilities.

Nothing in the architecture of OS X or Windows prevents remote code execution vulnerabilities.

About the best thing you can say for OS X with respect to this problem is the fact that most of the "interesting" services are disabled by default, which did not used to be the case on Windows. I don't disagree that this was a win, but it was hardly an architectural difference.
True, but decoupling services via HTTP just makes the fault lines more explicit. I imagine more of these services (like many of the current webhooks stuff Jeff Lindsay is putting out) will be opensource and easily adapted to virtual appliances / dedicated hosting. That way you can choose exactly when hosted vs hosting it yourself makes more sense.
Subpoenas and search warrants as security threats
This may come off as corny but - who is more expert than real internet users?

- I suggest that by being an "expert" (whatever that means) you would have too much 'domain knowledge' to know what would work best from the average internet user.

- sounds like the biased sample fallacy http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/biased-sample.html

- I think best idea would be for a/b split testing perhaps using the 'army' to configure your different tests..
Rational businesses also have to decide what work to outsource and what work to do internally. If there was a reliable provider of this service, I think many businesses would outsource it.
It is interesting but not inexplicable. For instance take a scenario where one driver sloooowly passes another on a two lane road. This effectively clotheslines the road and causes anyone who would drive faster yet to pile up behind the two cars--maybe even apply their brakes.

Again, consider a sudden lane change that cuts off someone who's already in the lane being entered.

Yet again, consider that most on-ramps are essentially a reduction of available lanes.

Any time one car slows down for any reason, inertia kicks in--they do not immediately return to speed.

In this case, small variations in speed mean that some drivers eventually catch up to others. Then they slow down a bit which reduces the space behind them. The problem is that the road is nearing peak capacity and has little tolerance for deviations.
The boycotting of the Dixie Chicks was more ridiculous, in my opinion... By a couple of orders of magnitude.
Yea. The article seems more to the effect of "Your political opinions are stupid, therefore your actions to express those opinions are stupid as well" and venturing into "your opinions are so stupid that you don't have a right to express them" territory.
Well outside my field, but I believe this is a reasonably well-established problem in text processing/NLP, known as "Sentiment Analysis" -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis

My very brief google scholar search on that key phrase turned up a whole lot of results that look like they may provide fairly concrete algorithms and techniques for doing what you describe.
Uh huh. How so, exactly?
That was a design decision, actually. One that gets mixed reception. We're considering changing it.
Thanks, glad you like!

The camera had to be positioned in the middle of a table of girls at that show, so any talking came through as loud as I did unfortunately. You couldn't hear them at all from on stage though, and people are going to be talking -- or rather yelling to each other over the music! -- at a bar on a Saturday night :)
Not in the original conversation, but it's referenced a few times in the post.

Unsexy is my snap judgement as to why it's not being pursued... If there's a better reason why, I'm open to being educated.
An SOW is a statement of work. An MSA is a master agreement. Together, they're your contract.

If your BATNA is "lose house, live in box", the bill rate discussion is academic. Steadily raise your rate with new clients. Many consultants will advise you to build a steady pipeline and then raise your rates until you're turning away enough work to be 50+(Nx10)% utilized.

You can quote prices in fixed project dollar amounts (or by the milestone), and then cap your hours in an SOW. If you're working with procurements departments, it doesn't matter, since they're doing the math automatically. But don't offer up a $/hour amount.

I have less development consulting experience than many of the other commenters here do, but what I'd probaby do with regards to bugfix support is:

* Have a formal acceptance process, at the end of which the customer is responsible for signing off on the deliverable. Most large projects I've worked on are QA'd by the customer as well as the vendor.

* Have an escalation ladder for bugs, from cosmetic to data-loss, and have SLA time frames for free fixes on anything other than "cosmetic".

* Offer an up-front retainer contract for rapid (=better than SLA) bugfixes, changes, or feature requests, pointing out that if the customer does not opt for the retainer, feature additions and subsequent revisions will be full-on new projects subject to whatever your current rate and scheduling terms are.

Something I've learned in the past 4 years: scheduling risk is something many customers will pay to mitigate.
Either way, both sides are just tossing words around. This is the norm for political debate, even if no actual debate is happening. It's called free speech. They're allowed to make as large a deal out of it as they want to, even if it's a stupid decision and entirely out of proportion.
It's hard for me to believe that push technology is going to revolutionize the internet. Why? Because it didn't happen last time (or the time before that).

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_(dotcom):

The PointCast Network used push technology, which
was a hot concept at the time, and received enormous
press coverage when it launched in beta form on
February 13, 1996.

Since the early days of the web, people have recognized that the pull model has serious limitations. Unfortunately, pushing data to users has never been compelling enough to spark anything that qualifies as a revolution. People really want data to be pushed to them if that data is intended specifically for them (e.g. email and IM), but not if it's general weather and news data.

I do love Cuban's honesty, though:

Would NY Times online readers pay $1 a month to be
guaranteed that they get their news first, before
anyone else? I dont know.

Most people would claim to be able to predict the future in order to make their point. He doesn't.

EDIT: I should add that his idea that "Huge databases can talk to huge databases and exchange data more efficiently" is cool and makes much more sense than pushing data to users. We're actually working on something along those lines right now...
How long until stories about the potential for danger from harnessing tidal power. Not serious problems such as coastal development impacting with the ecology on the coast. But far fetched worries such as how harnessing the ocean's power will result in global changes to the temperature of the ocean or dramatically affect plate tectonics by reducing currents.

New technologies always have a news cycle that goes from celebratory to fear-mongering within a matter of weeks.
I'd amend #2 to say that the supply of oil is effectively infinite as a result of substitutes. We will never extract the last drop of oil because it will be too expensive to do - and as it gets more expensive, the incentives for alternatives rises (as has been the case for every form of historical fuel source - it's probably a good thing for us and whales that we don't depend on whale blubber for light anymore).
It would surprise me if there was any scientific evidence of this kind. This would be incredibly difficult to measure, control for other variables, arrange for a sizable sample, etc.
I can't help but applauded how the third chart is manipulated to show trends that don't really exist by hiding the post 92 oil numbers in the US. Not only does it make the trend look worse, but it also let's them use fishy numbers for reaming oil in the US without raising alarm bells. Failing to adjust for inflation and starting at 1930 is also well played.

http://zfacts.com/p/318.html
There's no ninja in the second ad. He's there in the first, but we all know that you can't see ninjas.
They do indeed have a lower cost of living, roughly 1/5 of an Americans, and almost 1/8th of a British person.

When Indians all expect to have 13000BTU air conditioners in their houses, all expect to have luxury SUV's, high-speed broadband with $2,000 laptops and $4,000 desktops and maybe a few cheaper ones for the kids (if they don't play video games) and maybe a few games consoles (because all kids play some sort of video games), and don't forget the $600 cell phones with $3000 contracts . . .

Of course their cost of living is cheaper, people there actually walk to their work. I've never seen a person in economic problems walk to their work in a western country, despite it saving them almost two hours wages a day.
I'll agree with that in some sense; they have a better opportunity to fully apply whatever creativity they have. However, when creative people aren't fully utilized at work, they tend to shift that creativity into hobbies. Creativity doesn't always pay well, many people are very creative in very unprofitable ways. It's the lucky few who's talent and job cross paths in a way that pays off financially for them.
Absolutely and I agree. I don't usually post ambiguous quotes but the grandparent reminded me of that quote which I liked.

I'd also say banning whole foods is somewhat analogous to people who are 'banning' non-organic products by shopping at whole foods in the first place. They are speaking with their dollars about a position they are against (genetically engineered products). If Whole Foods the company has a culture/leadership which is against health care reform, people are certainly free and rational to ban Whole Foods if they feel strongly about the issue.
I'm not sure I see the connection between AOL implemented in a screensaver and a new design idiom for web applications.
7 Tips to get Stackoverflow reputation.
This has often been a hesitation of mine when being asked to do freelance projects. Before I took a web programming job, I had no formal training or experience so I always felt like I couldn't ask for high hourly rates because I wasn't confident enough in my work. After landing a job and doing it for a living, I still felt like I couldn't charge much because I would compare it to my salary which was a FAR cry from anything close to $50+ an hour. Because of the inhibitions, I've always just stuck with friends, friends of friends and family members when doing projects.

Now that I'm unemployed, I really think I need to reevaluate what my work is worth and start asking for a decent rate when projects come my way. The comments in this thread are definitely telling me I'm selling myself short - both in freelance projects and in what I fought through to earn what I earned at my last job.

Enjoying this thread. :)
"Constant velocity" applies to lane changes, as well. I hate when people are going 70mph and slow down to the 55mph of the car in front of them, THEN change lanes. No, change lanes as you're coming up on them so that you maintain a constant velocity.

Related to this is the need to "stay right". Especially in CA, some of my fastest travel happens in the far right lanes because people think of lanes as a "speed" rather than a "function", and so the right lanes are empty while the left lanes are crowded and slow.

The number one lane is not the "fast" lane, it's a "passing" lane. Guess what? The number two lane is a passing lane, too. If you're not passing anyone, you should be on the far right side of the road.
In the second one the chick's about to go fetch some coffees.
Sure, point taken. I just wanted to emphasize the first ;)
Many of us probably don't remember these early days of the web, but a lot of companies were founded (and acquired) because they were going to be part of the impending "push technology" revolution.

PointCast is just the poster child for that movement which never really made any big waves.
There is a difference:

1. Demonstrating in front of the store and forwarding boycott emails targets consumers, trying to get enough pressure aimed at the Whole Foods founder to get him to recant or shut up and stop contributing to the debate based on his own principles.

2. Making noise at a "town hall" meeting (laughable misuse of the term for Presidential stumping for a Federal program) is just an attempt to make sure the President knows that there are many people who disagree with the idea, more directly addressing the figurehead for the whole policy.

Obama is in a position to directly affect policy; the founder of Whole Foods is only in a position to foster debate.
The thing to recognize about Twitter is that they are blatantly incompetent at everything related to their core business.

It's actually 140 bytes, not characters, except when it isn't: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/brow...

Even after fixing their db/cache/queue infrastructure to not fall over in normal use, they still can't handle a DoS attack at all! They peer exclusively with the highest-latency and least-connected Tier1: NTT/Verio (incidentally, so do fellow idiots OpenDNS).

The business side is in fantasyland, as shown in the documents leaked to TechCrunch. Evan Williams has no idea what he's doing -- Blogger was pure dumb luck, it had already effectively died when it was bought and resurrected by Google.

I don't know how Alex Payne keeps himself sane in that kindergarten.
Because there was a larger portion of the population that agreed with it.

Not to mention that in this case, we're talking about the CEO of a company that has built itself on an image. Not only that, the company targets a certain demographic, and the majority of that demographic (at least on the surface) believes in government healthcare. For the CEO to come out and say something like this, it's almost an expected response.

The Dixie Chicks on the other hand have a wider audience, and prior to them actually saying it, I wouldn't have necessarily expected such a response from the general public or their fans. Not only that it was all over in the media with lots of 'media personalities' jumping on the 'trash the Dixie Chicks for ratings' bandwagon.
If your job is to find bugs, you're not a developer. You're a tester. I personally don't know a lot of people who have a deep and driving internal fire to be a tester, but, okay, fine, they may exist. They weren't the people you described, though: your example was people who weren't motivated, were given an incentive and became motivated, and then went back to being unmotivated after the incentive was taken away. How does that prove your point?

And again, I never argued that people are rational about money, I'm just pointing out that the particular behavior the op talked about was irrational. If you're getting defensive because I'm pointing that out, and you agree that it's irrational, then I don't know what the argument's about.

The fact that studies exist doesn't make their conclusions (or your interpretation of their conclusions) true. The specific studies you brought up in your articles all sounded like they had pretty big flaws, given they were applied to 5 year olds and college kids in contrived situations. If I got a stupid ribbon just for drawing a picture, I'd feel embarrassed and patronized, and of course I wouldn't want to do it again for the same person. That doesn't prove that humans have a weird quirk that responds poorly to external motivators, it just proves they have understandable emotional responses to weird situations. Real life, otoh, provides ample evidence that people respond productively to external motivators all the time.

As for not having a conversation anymore, were we ever? You keep throwing Teh Studies at me, ignoring the reasons I gave for why I don't think they're valid and dinging me for pointing to one that wasn't perfectly applicable to the original situation (even though I was only using it as an example of disagreement with the studies you had brought up, some of which themselves weren't perfectly applicable, either). If you want to pretend like you're the dignified salon member adhering to the rules of civilized discourse, that's fine, but I don't think it's accurate.
Maybe the idea was just before its time. In the era of the lightweight REST API I think there is a much greater chance of success.
Do we have an ETA on this link?
microsoft sucks at photoshop
> The average person isn't likely to have the opportunity to write an editoral for the Wall Street Journal

The average person isn't likely to write as well as that article was written.

> a small minority of anti-reform fanatics have made sure that it is impossible to have an actual dialog in town hall meetings.

Those things are just marketing events, anyway. The "debate" is going to happen elsewhere.

> Debate would be great, but where is it going to happen?

. . . the same place it always happens: where it isn't televised. It happens in online discussions like this, and it happens in discussions amongst friends, families, and co-workers.

> At the end of the day, people want to feel that they're being heard. And if they believe a boycott is the best option they have to get their opinion out, then we should support their right to do so.

I support that right, even when I think it's being poorly used.
Bankrupt doesn't mean there is no money left. The receivers generally get first call on any remaining assets (otherwise who would be a receiver?).

The trustees are likely to be a large commercial law+accounting firm - they are a common target for lawsuits, since it's the only way for other lower ranked creditors to get any money back

Then there is the wholly unfounded suggestion that they might receive some lucrative business from another operating system vendor (through a couple of middlemen) to keep this whole circus going.
I worked for Pointcast :)

The data was specifically for the individual, you could customize the data you were pushed using the client. It wasn't just a screensaver.

That wikipedia pages misses a lot of the fun back then. Dave Dorman was a really bad choice of CEO, he didn't even have a computer and his first priority seemed to be picking the type of Walnut to have his personal carpenter make his desk from.

Ah, the good old days of spending $80m...
The British government is a disaster at efficiency, the French system is outright appalling and has one of the best health care systems in the world. By this progression, if the US had universal health care you would pay a penny and live forever.
What I meant by "experts" is people who could look at your site and give it a quick lookover according to their specialty. Web software engineers might look at a site and see code that doesn't validate, or AJAX that could be optimized a bit; UI designers might suggest that you reorder some of the buttons on your page for better ease of use, etc.
Very cool! It must have been fun to watch that all play out first hand. I was in High School still, unfortunately. I was definitely a PointCast user, though. Although it didn't turn out to be revolutionary, I certainly found it useful.
The Pirate Bay Returns With Guns Blazing
This was the focus of a short video a group of college students made a few years ago, "A Meditation On the Speed Limit."

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5366552067462745475
You still need to go through the same provisioning process to run dev code on an iPod Touch.
I discovered something new today with vhosts.

I clicked your link to feedback army from your dashnine page, and it took me to AtD:

http://www.feedbackarmy.com./

(Thought you might like to know - click the link!)
It hurts Ikea about as much as people looking in the window of Porsche/Rolls-Royce/Bentley showrooms harms those companies.

So Ikea is seen as the aspirational symbol of western luxury by people in a country with a billion people and the fastest growing economy - tough problem to have!
To see energy in context solely as Peak Oil is myopic. There is more energy in the Marcellus Shale Gas (http://geology.com/articles/marcellus-shale.shtml) than oil in Saudi Arabia - and this is energy that no one thought economical to extract or even knew was there until the last 2-3 years when new extraction technologies matured. But that's not the extent of it, there are massive deposits being discovered across the US and Canada and there are believed to be significant deposits in China, India, Europe and Africa.

Check out this presentation out that Paul Kedrosky linked to: http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/08/the_grand_energ.ht.... But just look at the prices of oil and natural gas and see how they've dramatically separated. Heck, even with oil, they only recently discovered the massive Tupi field off the coast of Brazil - with an estimated 5-8 billion barrels of oil (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Alternative-energy-powerhouse-...)
How LinkedIn's founder got started
No offense was meant though I see how you could take it that way. The difference lies in what type system we're talking about. You're talking about powerful type systems, I'm talking about most type systems.

The kinds of mistakes a Java'ish type system prevents you from making are fairly trivial; we're not talking about Haskell here where type system can actually encode most of the biz rules. The home brew system being bolted onto Ruby here is not a powerful type system, it only prevents trivial mistakes that are easily avoided by most who like and use dynamic languages to begin with.

Static type advocates are always telling us about all the mistakes their type systems prevent, and then go on to describe scenario after scenario that we just don't actually run into. They're solving problems that really just aren't problems for us. They seem to really believe you can't write a correct program without such a system, but experience tells me otherwise because I do it all the time.

I'm not against static typing, I'm against thinking it's the only approach that works; it isn't. When I said you're not ready to be using a dynamic language I wasn't implying they're better, only that your mindset wasn't ready, it's a different style of programming and you can't do it thinking about types all the time. If a type system seems important to someone, they shouldn't be using a dynamic language in the first place and trying to fix it.

There are things I do in Smalltalk that I simply wouldn't or couldn't attempt in C# and I have to adjust my programming style when switching between the two. However, there are things I do in C# that I don't do in Smalltalk like overloading that take advantage of the type system more.

Overall, I find the Smalltalk experience superior for me because of things like real meta-classes and #doesNotUnderstand: and the superior development environment that simply let me get more work done with less and simpler code and a runtime system that frees me from the compile/run/debug cycle.
Is there an option for "actually charges people money" if we happen to use AJAX?
Sparkle seems pretty good to me compared to the Windows world where apps either don't self-update at all or each app has its own updater daemon. Perhaps a single Sparkle daemon would be better, but it's hardly terrible as it is now.