skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In A Tight Economy, Outsourced Developers On oDesk  Work 100,000 Hours A Week
Yeah, but why go there? What's the upside of having a name that is extremely similar to an existing product, if not to confuse the consumer?

Why not just pick a new name now, before the hassles begin?
It's quite disturbing that Pronovost had to beg hospitals to adopt a free technique that could cut the average 100,000 deaths from hospital acquired infections down to ~30,000 overnight with nothing but telling your doctors to wash their hands.

This was adopted a long time ago in the UK and became cemented in place with the MRSA outbreaks. Visitors can actually be removed from the hospital if they're seen not using the alcohol based sanitizer.
Forgot the main selling point: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/12/local-advertising-boost...

We are GROWING RAPIDLY, and have a very effective business model.
Ah the same judge that ruled on Napster...

http://news.cnet.com/2009-1023-244045.html&st.ne.1002.ot...
"a truly enlightened man", IMO Jesus was that man (and more) - but I know what response that will get here.

The point is not that a great leader come forward but that we choose to follow and imitate the greatest goodness, wisdom, kindness, self-control and love that we encounter.
Ok, others have tried a little bit of the math, but this is a difficult form for that. So here is a very intuitive (i.e. hand-wavy) way to think about the type of relationships we are talking about.

Suppose you have a (finite) cloud of points in three dimensions. For example, a bunch of GPS measurements. Lets just imagine that they are roughly elliptical, stretched out like a football. For simplicity we'll subtract the mean from this, so our co-ordinates come from the middle of this cloud.

I can take this set of (x,y,z) points and and find the eigen (which means "characteristic") vectors and values for this set of points. The first eigenvector will point along the long axis of the "football" (right through the pointy bits) because this is the strongest, in some sense, single direction that is represented. It won't be perfectly aligned with a finite number of points...

The second and third eigenvectors will between them form a plane perpendicular to this. So essentially what you've done is found a co-ordinate system that is aligned with the data (modulo some details, this is essentially what a procedure called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) does.

Now that's the vectors, what about the values? The eigenvalues tell you the relative importance of each direction. If you stretch the "football" out, the first eigenvalue, which was associated with the first eigenvector pointing along the long axis, will be larger relative to the others. If you use a basketball, they'll all be the same magnitude.

Does that help?

The idea generalizes a lot from what I've told you, but there are a ton of places you can look up the details if you'd like.
The story of 'hacker' is not quite the same as the story of 'pirate'. I think that 'hacker' first meant someone who can hack things up, then some people did some hacks to crack systems; to crack a system you had to be resourceful, you had to be a hacker to be a cracker. These crackers made so much of a name for themselves that most people use 'hacker' to refer only to this subset of hackers.

On the other hand, the original pirates were thieves. We are currently seeing a resurgance of the use of 'pirate' to refer to a thief on the sea. So the word always referred to something negative.

So 'hacker' was a positive (or at least neutral) term, and it got its negative reputation by being associated with people who did bad things. 'Pirate' was negative, and some people tried to give other people a negative reputation by calling them that.

In summary, 'hacker' got its negative connotations from bad people, but 'pirate' is a negative word that is used to give a negative reputation to people.
Nice sentence structure. Bad Logic. Successful products usually DO fulfil a sense of entitlement for their consumers.

Some structures scale and others don't. Time wasted with a poorly structured system holds things back, just like Marxism did. Think of all those poor soviets with great ideas (for apps?) only for them to be rejected by central control.

I just want good stuff and in the long term, a locked-down system isn't going to deliver.
We (http://www.codesynthesis.com) are looking for C++ engineers in Cape Town, South Africa. We work on compilers, code generation, object persistence, and distributed systems. Drop me (boris@codesynthesis.com) a line if interested.
If I understand correctly, your product helps people keep track of what's going in the development of a project.

That may be even more susceptible to lying in surveys. First of all, people don't want to admit that they don't know things, especially things directly related to their job. I would have a hard time admitting I had no idea what was going on with a project I was working on [of course, I'm the only developer where I work, so that's not usually an issue ;)]. Also, those frustrated by not knowing what was going on are likely to exaggerate the impact of that lack of knowledge ("I couldn't do anything at all for 3 weeks!" or something like that).

This is a case where I think the best selling points may be testimonials from previous customers. Another thing you might consider is offering an audit service to evaluate how much time you think your product could save.

I'm not trying to discourage by any means, but surveys are hard to do right, so I'm just trying to suggest other options that you can use to supplement and strengthen the results of whatever survey you end up doing.

For me, my likelihood of doing a survey is [assuming I'm not unintentionally lying too much ;)] based more on the quality of the survey and how much I care about the product/process I am being surveyed about. I would be more than happy to take an interesting survey about Web.py (a Python web development framework).

The problem is most surveys are neither interesting nor about interesting things. If your survey involves rating statements Disagree Strongly, Disagree, Neither Agree Nor Disagree, Agree, Agree Strongly, you've already failed... epically. If your survey involves rating a long list of things on a scale of 1-10, you've failed epically. In fact, if your survey involves answering a long series of similar questions of ANY kind, you've failed epically. When I see a survey like that, I go into 5 mode (or 3 mode if it's 1-5). The answers are meaningless after about the 3rd question, and I'm not convinced that people can rate things at the granularity level of a 1-10 scale anyway. If you must have a scale, use 1-4. It's impossible to answer a middle meaningless answer and it's small enough that the answers may be accurate (what's really the difference between a 6 and a 7 or a 2 and a 3 on a 1-10 scale?).

Surveys should be dynamic and look like they were actually written by people, not machines. Ask questions in different ways. Ask open questions and give plenty of room to answer. Don't try to limit answers to an unreasonable set of options. Don't ask too many questions (I think about 20 should be considered the limit).
I'm sure this is unanswerable for (perfectly valid) IP reasons but I wonder what the differences between L4 and seL4 are? Is there a functionality difference in either direction?
Twitter: The beginning of the end?
One more tip, this one perhaps more focused on the sales side: find a manager in this big company who will lose his job unless he solves the problem your software purports to solve. This is doable, although you need to have a little inside information about the burning problems in the company or industry you want to sell to.

Alternatively, find a very senior person in that organization to work as your evangelist, someone who deeply cares about doing the organization doing The Right Thing, and who has the clout to ram things down other senior people's throats. Such people are rare, but might be your only way to get a foot in the door.
25 Great Thinkers Every College Student Should Read
Travelling faster than light may not be the only way of getting around though.
I'd love to see a non-commercial hobbyist license, either source or binary; that should let them commercialize it and let us play.
Honestly Linear Algebra is the next time you have to do a 'jump' in the regular sequence of math.

You hit algebra, new concepts, you have to jump a little. Same with calculus. Linear algebra is that next time.
Astonishing?

Soaring resource prices - he makes no mention of the currency explosion that led to inflated prices. Or that right now oil demand is back to 2005 levels. But in the long term his is obviously right because finite resources are finite. How's that an amazing prediction?

The environment as property. Is he talking about plain old private property? Or pollution regulations, or cap and trade? Those things were all on the table in 1996. And today Obama is still having a lot of trouble with even symbolic cap and trade.

The rebirth of the big city - Urbanization is not a new trend, and despite what happened to Detroit, it was never in recess, certainly not outside of America.

The devaluation of higher education - This simply has not come true at all. I hope the ivy league bubble bursts at someone point, but I think we're still decades away from that.

The celebrity economy. - Andy Warhol said it better.
Stormweight: Brainstorming Made Easy (useful tools review)
No, its a form of migration done when high on E.
Ask HN:  Which category in the app store has the highest median profit?
Any ideas?
That is why Windows 7 has a mostly-seemless Windows XP virtualization add-on.
If our language (I'm thinking English, I'd be interested to hear of variations) is for telling people where the ripe fruit is, how come we don't have specific [common] words for so-unripe-it-will-give-you-indigestion, not-quite-ripe, ripe-enough, still-needs-to-ripen and so-ripe-you-can't-pick-it - they'd be very useful in foraging situations?

I guess /auf Deutsch/ they'd all just be compound words?
Good points both. Thanks.

Sometimes, it's hard to let go of a name that you perceive as "perfect".
Two if you are a whisky aficionado: Water and malted barley.
I understand the desire to stop message storms, but in my 5 minute use case, I hit that and perceived it as a limitation and it makes it probably not usable for me, as I already have a good monitoring/notification/paging system that I was trying yours out as an additional notification vector. (That might place me squarely out of your target market, in which case you should ignore this feedback. :) )

Let's say I already have an existing monitoring service that sends emails on network events. I might decide to hook in your service and send my network faults there.

I get "port XX on switch YY link state down" and that gets routed through the system. One minute later I get "office of the CEO video conference network down" but pagerduty never sends that to my mobile device because I'm busy looking at the one port down alert.

Yes, I realize there's a technical solution to create multiple pagerduty trigger email addresses, but at a minimum, I'd encourage you to be more clear about that feature/limitation.

Overall comments: several UI elements were "not pretty" looking on IE7, and some of the call to action graphics "Create your first alert now" were bright yellow and rectangular yet not clickable. No deal-breakers, and I was certainly able to quickly get setup and trial alerts coming.
Scooters are banned from the freeways and they still sell. Not to people that want to drive them on the freeway, but to people that want to use them for their designed purpose.
You are rationalizing.

> The alternative would have been sitting through introduction to {programming, algorithms, self-harm} for years, getting bored, and probably just dropping out to go earn real money cutting code.

Ok, there it is. Attending class seems to cause you anxiety. This leads me to believe you have ADD. Maybe I'm just projecting.
Carrying it on your belt was the problem. And I still tease people that carry crackberries on their belts.
I think we might have the technology for cars to drive themselves in 15-20 especially if there is demand for it. However I just don't see a way to get from here to there. Even with a working system, what company could produce it and take on that kind of product liability?
Holy crap.

I don't know much about motorcycles, but some of those SR400 models are mindblowingly beautiful.

Well done.
Unless you are using it toward creating some kind of masterpiece work of art, introspection is highly overrated. I used to spend a lot of my time introspecting and while it is good once in awhile, too much of it will just make you stuck in your head and unable to enjoy yourself in social situations. I find meditation to be a lot more effective.
We're doing it, having built an enterprise web app. Our goal is to make it accessible enough that buyers can come to us and sign up without having to go through a cumbersome consultative selling process.

Pricing is kept as transparent as possible.

Does it work? Having launched very recently it's too early to call.

A couple of observations:

- Buyers aren't used to the self-service model. The need may be pressing in a few cases. But if you rely on buyers being desperate and seeking you out, you'll limit yourself. Good salespeople will identify the need before the buyer does.

- Direct sales are expensive. As long as we're doing them, their cost & the longish sales cycle must be accounted for in pricing.

Often it's the internal cost of switching (moving from legacy systems, retraining staff, etc.) rather than the price tag that discourages buyers. Old-style consultative selling can do an excellent job of working through those issues. This is especially pertinent for small companies that don't have in-house IT staff.
He says he is a democrat, but a reasonable interpretation of the article points towards the republican solution of taxing health care benefits. The problem is that both the industry and consumers are very insulated from price sensitivity, so costs shoot out of control and providers have little incentive to improve quality. People need to be paying for far more of their care out of pocket with cash. We need price wars between hospitals.
A lot of very smart people believed in the supernatural (especially before Darwin).

That doesn't mean that there is any credible evidence to support the existence of the supernatural, though.
WRT the "Eric Drexler's pixie dust" remark, what I meant was _not_ that molecular nanotechnology won't work and totally revolutionize materials science, structural engineering, and a bunch of other disciplines ... but in the context of the conversation we were having at the time, nanobots with quasi-magical powers have become the lazy SF writer's magic wand _du_ _jour_, sketched into fictional life with remarkable information processing and medicinal powers that go way beyond anything we're likely to see in the short term. Sort of like "electricity" or "vital force" in the fiction of the early 19th century.
TED Talk: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success
Grooveshark Launches Subscription VIP Service
This link from the article was more interesting to me: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_vs_Others
Why not try Squeak? It's a modern Smalltalk with a complete graphical interface, and learning it well will thoroughly warp your mind into the 100% object-oriented approach to computing. (A very useful warp. ;-)

It's freely available and runs on all major operating systems.

http://www.squeak.org/

And then if you get Peter Seibel's "Practical Common Lisp" book and learn Lisp, you'll be completely ruined for any "blub" language like Java or C++. But you'll be light-years ahead of the crowd...
The point is that a full scale disruption isn't necessary for an impact to be felt around the globe - tr.im is the prime example for that. It doesn't even have to be a malicious change.

It's more about the structure that has evolved - an inverse pyramid of communication vs. the traditional web. At the bottom we have services like Facebook and Twitter with a plethora of applications on top. This adds greater pressure for those foundational services to protect themselves and some have done a better job than other (i.e. Facebook vs. Twitter).
Songkick is hiring.

We're based in London, Ruby on Rails (but if you're good, we'll help you make the switch), great team, growing rapidly.

Currently looking for: Junior Dev, Application Dev, QA Lead.

Due to need to get these roles filled we're favouring EU-based candidates, but if you're elsewhere we will be hiring throughout the year so get in touch regardless. We do sponsor visas, and already have a very international team. No remote working, however.

See http://www.songkick.com/info/jobs
Separate bug tracker and request tracker? Do clients ever see either?
Do you use a separate bug tracker and request tracker? Do clients ever see either of them?
... with the most perfectly named package manager ever. Period.
"In order to transform our factory-era schools into a truly student-centric system fit for the 21st-century, the funds should be used to innovate disruptively."

In my ideal school the kid who turns in that sentence gets sent back to do a few more drafts.

"And the best way to do that is by implementing online learning – an approach that’s constantly improving in its ability to deliver personalized, high-quality learning experiences to students from all walks of life, regardless of geography, special needs, or socioeconomic background."

Personalized? I wonder. Constantly improving--that could be true but irrelevant.

America has a real bent for taking labor-intensive work and applying technology. This works beautifully for all sorts of work, but will not, I think, work well for instruction.
Signaling and Indian Higher Education
True, I fully sympathize with that.

But look at it this way, letting go of it now is going to save you a ton of trouble later, in the long term you'll be off cheaper and there is no chance of confusion.

Also if the other party is 'bigcorp, Inc' then you're setting yourself up for a legal fight at a time when you probably have better things to do.

EDIT: A name can not be 'perfect' if it is already taken, the domain name is not free or if somebody else already has a lien on it or is shipping something under that name.

I think you need to re-think your concept of the 'perfect' name :)
Disclaimer: Consult an IP lawyer or patent attorney

Scope typically applies to specific industries.

To the original poster, you do risk legal action - even if you have a registered trademark and they don't. They probably have a common law trademark (which does not need to be registered) that predates yours.
yes, that's very true too. So after costs, it might be a break even proposition(or not as much as it might seem anyway) on an album.
Firefox 3.0 on Ubuntu - search box on the results page is a little off:

http://www.finetuna.com/grqdxt
That would be pretty much ideal. If that happens, then the Pirate Party will have served its purpose.
Shooting the boss (and getting paid for it)
I have to agree - even if it's not trademarked, your going to get users confused between their app and yours. Find something unique and trademark that instead.
The solution is that they got small enough to pocket.
I'm planning on switching to Arch the next time I rebuild my machine.

I've been using Ubuntu for about 18 months now, but I've become disenchanted with certain things. After playing around with Arch in a virtual machine for a few weeks now, I'm really happy with how much I've learned about how things work, I've also been using KDE so the news about splitting into smaller packages has finally sealed the deal.

The documentation on their wiki is also another big plus.
For what it's worth, I signed up, and registered as a member (that costs £10). That's not only for the file-sharing aspects of things, but also some of their other declared aims:

• End the excessive surveillance, profiling, tracking and monitoring of innocent people by Government and big businesses.

• Ensure that everyone has real freedom of speech and real freedom to enjoy and participate in our shared culture.

I whole-heartedly support those goals and am disgusted by the fact that the "mainstream" parties don't even pay them lip service.
There isn't a whole lot of risk spreading in car insurance. They adjust rates heavily based on age and driving record. Most of the reckless adrenaline junkies are young, and have a history of collisions and moving violations, so it's fairly easy to identify them.
In my opinion, all it takes now, is the creation of a small number of killer-apps on clones platform to cement the fate of Twitter.

People have been saying this about Twitter since it only had ten users. It was a bit more believable back when Twitter was all-Fail Whale, all the time.

Now it just looks like a joke. If you want to predict that Twitter will suffer from competition you must at least name the competition. I see that you kept your list of names safely behind a link. That was a good choice, because the list makes the joke even funnier. (Skittr? Yonkly? Kwippy? Were these auto-generated? Has anyone actually heard of any of these things? My favorite example is the mighty "Dukudu" empire: "auctioned off on eBay, acquired by allesklar.de for EUR 43,208". Ooh, a whole EUR 43k! I'm sure the guys on Sand Hill Road are trembling with fear.)

(Not that I begrudge these projects their marketshare. I'm sure they're being run by fine people. I have a funny idea for a microblogging site myself, and I might even launch it with a hilariously silly name. But I'll try to resist the urge to have delusions of grandeur.)

Incidentally, how can a business simultaneously have no business model and be mortally threatened by a patent infringement suit? If the patent troll wins and is awarded a 12% royalty, do they have to accept 12% of the losses? ;)
I highly recommend you get .com .net .org .biz and .info for brand protection purposes.

.mobi and .tel are probably a waste of time. I would only recommend you register ccTLD's for the country you plan to launch in and/or the country you are based in. If you are a truely global (i.e. web based) type company, then just the first five are probably fine.

(disclaimer, I work for a domain registrar)
For those interested, I have enjoyed using Arch Linux on an old T23 Thinkpad with limited (512MB) memory. With one of the light-weight windows managers, it kept the machine nicely usable as a dev/fun environment.
Poverty Elevation and Cargo Cult
A market based fix for health care isn't really a "Republican solution". If, for instance, we had an "everyone pays for their own care out of pocket" system, and we had state or federal subsidies for those that couldn't afford their care, we'd have a market backed by government aid.

Like food stamps.
Period.Period.Period.BIG PERIOD.Ghost.Chomp.
But that's the question, isn't it? Could they attract more "mainstream" voters if their rhetoric were not based upon preaching to the choir?
Uh, sending a C&D to a shady application that uses their trademark in its name doesn't really spell "alienating their developer community." They are one of the most engaging API providers I've ever seen; they actually talk to people via their Twitter account, engage developers via the mailing list, etc.

And doesn't this joker think people have created Twitter clones? Identi.ca, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc. None of these have succeeded because they are in some degree crappier than Twitter. Plus, users matter. Why use something similar to Twitter if no one cares and there's no one to follow?

Ridiculous linkbait.