skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We tend to follow a more traditional (waterfall)
dev cycle, with patch releases roughly every 1-2 weeks and major
releases every 2 months.

If you release every two weeks, with a define-design-develop-deploy cycle in those weeks, then you may very well be doing agile development. In my current project we're employing Scrum (but I really don't think that matters; might as well name it Lean, Kanban, XP, RUP or whatever) and we're doing just that. It's working pretty darn well, I may add, primarily because of the near-continuous customer feedback.
It's an open protocol, and part of Google's stack will be released open source. So yes, eventually you'll be able to set up a private behind-the-firewall wave server and federate with the private behind-the-firewall servers at other companies (presumably including a robust email-to-wave bridge).
It landed. Empty.
I'm pretty sure Twitter is "guaranteed delivery", but thats just my naive user expectation.

Poking, while needing to be reliable is a 1:1 activity, so light on writes and easy to read, whereas broadcasting is difficult because of the wide variance in update frequency and number of followers from user to user.
I somewhat agree, but don't you think that as rural internet infrastructure improves this will become a moot point?
I suspect we are only talking about landlines on small local carriers.

Will these customers move to mobile devices or at least a cellular connections in the coming years?
Well put. I completely agree. This is something I've previously spent a good deal of time thinking about.
Why do you keep mentioning 5pmweb?
I don't like the tagline: "Events made interactive" from your about statement I think you want something like "Collaborative events"
"When was the last time you did something that inconvenienced 200 people?"
The Story of Pi
Acer announces multitouch notebook,the Aspire 5738PG
Customer Development is probably best for Enterprise level applications where you can speak with the head of a 100-person team and get an answer for everyone else.

For consumer applications, however, you can ask 1000 inidviduals and get a "No" while your product could still be helpful to 4 million others. For example when I ask my friends to switch from Yahoo Mail to Gmail they usually answer "What does Gmail do that Yahoo doesn't?" or "This is fine for me".

EDIT: What if Twitter followed a customer development model? They probably would not have written a single line of code.
The gap between XP and OS X is properly larger than the gap between XP and Windows 7.

I have seen how developers are treated on the IPhone, are Mac developers treated any better?
define(`SMART_HOST', `some.host.with.a.clean.ip')dnl
The founders Isaac and Jose were in Techstars with me this summer, and I highly recommend SendGrid. They've got an awesome plugin architecture too that's an immense time saver for things like adding and managing unsubscribe links.
I hate their stupid motto. In order for it to have meaning they have to define evil, what religious / ethical framework are they using? stupid stupid motto, stupid stupid journalists
In other news...boy cries "wolf"
I recently deployed XtraDB 1.0.4-8 with MySQL 5.1.39 -- I've seen speedups of upto 50% on some queries -- especially on 1M+ row updates.

Setup is easy. Here's what I did
1. download mysql 5.1.39 source tarball
2. download percona xtradb 1.0.4-8
3. extract mysql 5.1.39 tarball
4. delete contents of 'mysql-5.1.39/storage/innobase'
5. extract contents of xtradb tarball into 'mysql-5.1.39/storage/innobase'
6. compile mysql source with standard configure options
Another new law in Finland is that all new dwellings must have a bathroom that is suitably sized for the disabled (wheelchair friendly).

As seriously disabled people are reimbursed for alterations to their home (eg ramps, kitchen and bathroom alterations, lifts, etc) there is a massive expense to the country. As the population is aging, they have decided to make sure that all new dwellings are prepared for these modifications. Not such a big deal for a large house, but certainly so for a tiny apartment (which are common).

The overall aim is that all inhabitants should have the services they need, regardless of their financial or social status.

Broadband is just one of those things. Mind you, I can only get 256kbps at the summer cottage due to the distance from the exchange.
They also have a lot of earthquakes.

But then, Japan has lots of earthquakes and quite a bit of storms and rain and people still live there. There are also regular devastating hurricanes in the Caribbean and the south-east USA and people also still live there!
It was on the live video feed.
I think google can be a bad example when making design considerations, because they provide the simplest product on the internet: type in some words, get back a page of links. They don't need any design, they just need to pick the right links.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/15/colorado.boy.balloon/index....

"The boy was not inside the helium aircraft when it landed, CNN affiliate KMGH reported. A sibling saw the boy get into the craft Thursday morning. Officials were concerned that the boy may have fallen out of it, an undersheriff said."
It certainly doesn't sound like that's what he means. I expect "patch releases" means bug fixes and small tweaks.

In any case, the guy said they don't do agile. I am really loathe to try to go in and discover a way in which it could be interpreted as agile after the fact lest it feed into the whole consulting/book-selling/conference-organizing/koolaid circus that agile has already become.
Police are investigating whether the kid may have fallen out of said balloon.
The reports are very confusing on this breaking news story.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Runaway+helium+balloon+cras...
They're really not that different if you look at a wider perspective than just mobile phones. Microsoft's Xbox is as closed a system, if not even more so. Not so coincidentally, their Xbox is also far more robust and less bug prone than their PC counterpart. That's the nature of closed systems.

Apple are not interested in doing anything lackluster — from their perspective and according to their priorities, that is. It's just not in their nature to compromise with quality, hence you get a bunch of other compromises instead, all of which are well-known.
I know what you mean, and agree on that.
But LISP and FORTRAN are two different things as I see it.
LISP is a bridge between the lambda calculus and the actual machine.
FORTRAN is not a bridge between the machine and a fundamental theoretical construct like say the Turing machine. FORTRAN is just an attempt at abstraction away from the machine. You might say LISP is an implementation where FORTRAN is a construction.
My thoughts exactly. If you're iterating this fast, you're pretty much doing agile, whether you follow SCRUM/XP/etc or not. As I understand it, the various agile practices are simply there to enable these quick iterations.
How is forcing companies to give services away for free a good idea? What if most people decide that 1Mb is good enough and don't pay for anything? It seems like this is bad for the people who are willing to pay.

Where people live has a huge impact on the cost of providing internet service to them, so why shouldn't it matter where they live?
Raiders Achieve First Down
Closures are planned, indeed.

About immutability, it's really a hard call for me to do here. C is very much about in-place data modification (as far as I know). Working with immutable objects seems to be a very different approach.

What do you mean with "simplify the use of immutable data structures" ? Like a good support for const?

Thanks for the feedback, I'll definitely look deeper into Boo to steal.. huh get inspiration from it ;)
The article seems to contradict itself; Shark Tank gave them a $270K pre after they "walked away with $500K in investments" at the end of the Summer? Maybe they meant all investor owned equity is now 25%?

Notehall.com, one of 10 ventures chosen to participate in
the three-month summer program, walked away with about
$500,000 in investments.
...
Through the show, which aired Notehall.com's episode last
week, Mr. Conway landed the company an additional $90,000
after agreeing to give up a 25% equity stake
"It's just not in their nature to compromise with quality" points to the key distinction here. Apple is more open than most with output, but as closed as they reasonably can be with input. They are the gatekeepers for their ecosystem.
B&N has Amazon beat on shipping costs for Manhattan though. Unless Amazon brings down the cost, B&N will still be my choice. Be interesting to see how B&N responds - will they expand to other cities?
Incorrect and misleading headline. I'm all for bringing Google down a peg, but at least read the name of the regulations you think Google is in violation of first.
All I'm saying is, you run 26 miles then sprint the last 0.1 and tell me it's not intense.
how much popular appeal do you think it has beyond the erudite geek audience? that'd be great if this thing went really mainstream!
True, but you've gotta figure that "our datacenter was swallowed by a volcanic eruption" is at least a cooler excuse than "DFW is having weird power issues". If you must go dark, go dark in style! (And keep a good eye some off-site backups).
This is great! I'm so glad to see you guys launch something. The first step is the biggest.

I don't want to repeat what the others have said, but I've been playing around a little bit and off the top of my head:

- Separate dates and times into their own fields
- Only one date field for single day events
- Add Day of Week
- Use Date Mask MM/DD/YY
- Don't use military times. Don't show seconds.
- Map widget is too small to be useful.
- Instead of depending solely on text, add some data fields.
Some possibilities:
- Who's Attending
- Reviews of previous instances of this event
- Parking
- Public Transportation
- Dress Code
- Don't forget to bring...
- Wifi available?
(You get the idea)
- Sort/filter events by date, location, who's attending

More to follow...
Brian’s (Purely) Functional Brain in Haskell
Why is it so much less healthy for mobile phones than it is for consoles?

I mean, the difference is staggering: Apple gets cussed out daily because of how closed their iPhone app distribution system is — but nobody is wasting a single breath about Microsoft's Xbox equivalent.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's just because were used to one, and not the other.
interesting use of words Derek. Starting your company wasn't very hard just 'taking care of business', but isn't business normally considered work?

Having said that, when you are working on a product you love, it shouldn't feel like work. It's not a daily slog. You look forward to creating and getting the work out there (music, technology, cooking...).

Dictionary.com says work is 'Physical or mental effort or activity directed toward the production or accomplishment of something.'

Derek, you created a great business, and if I'm not mistaken, you actually learned how to program in the process of creating CDBaby. I'm sure there were challenges along the way, but you saw them as that. Challenges. Opportunities to get better. Opportunities to build something great.

But if you didn't have that passion to create, if you were doing it because you were told you needed to, or some other reason, I'm sure it would feel like work.

It's all in the perspective, and where a person finds there passion. Unfortunately for far too many people, they never find it.
What they said already: funky mime types. You'd set auto-refresh for the browser, then push out the next part.

Perl implementation: http://www.radzone.org/tutorials/animatep.html

O'Reilly notes on it from 1996: http://oreilly.com/openbook/cgi/ch06_06.html
A $90k for 25% stake seems to devaluate the initial $500k investments. Are initial investors usually ok with this type of devaluation, or are they just happy to see more funding since they don't want to put more money into it?
I think it's because Buell's motives and ideas are similar to the hacker culture. Instead of just being another name creating bikes, they 'hacked' the classic motorcycle and came up with radical new ideas to push themselves forward, like fuel in the frame. This makes the company more likely to be known and/or appreciated by the hacker community than, say, Kawasaki or Honda.

That's just my two cents tho.
I think it's a fair point to say that apathy is Windows 7's biggest competitor. I would never recommend somebody "upgrade" their home computer to Windows 7, I might recommend they buy a new computer with Windows 7. There is a school of though "if it aint broke don't fix it" which really does dominate.

ps. I do have a home machine - it runs Windows XP. My laptop (newer) does run Vista - I work on a bunch of terminal windows connected to a linux box (which has been up for 600 days).
Many of the rural exchanges are anything but innocent. Many of them work with free conference call and phone-porn companies and then hike their connection rates to absurd levels. They rely on the law to over-charge telecoms. This isn't to say they're all doing it, but there are a lot of them out minting free money from the telecoms.
This is a noble goal — letting the user and site publisher know what data is collected — however, I don't see what the benefit is to the ad providers or data collectors on the sites, other than that they might possibly be able to simplify their Javascript and reduce the load time in pages with that use their scripts.

Am I missing something? Unless consumers start demanding to know what information is collected about them, I don't think that the benefits jsHub has for ad providers are important, and that they won't implement a plugin until they're pushed by some other forces. In other words: the merit of technical innovation isn't enough for them to change their behavior, and they need a bigger incentive in order to consider using jsHub at all.
Awesome Ed. Please do add more.
Not exactly. The console market was already closed.

The mobile market was opening up. Windows Mobile, Palm, J2ME devices lead the way of openness by allowing users to install new application on their devices as they did on PC. This was quite step forward given the fact that service providers wanted to charge for everything.

And here we go, Apple with their cute bouncing pixels comes and tells us that we need to live in a world where only one organization can decide what application we can use. And while everybody argue about applications should have been approved or not, nobody is asking the right question "do we want a gate keeper or not?". This is a huge step backward in the software industry. But somehow, people think that innovation is about flying pixels and forget that the ecosystem around a product is as important as the product in itself.
I can't recall ever hearing about a volcano on Iceland threatening people, though.

The earthquakes are probably a bigger problem, since they affect a larger area don't all occur in specific locations. Design the building properly and even that shouldn't be a big problem.
I can't thank you enough for the detailed feedback!

I think right now we're going to focus on getting the design up to snuff, and then we'll probably hit a significant number of these shortly thereafter.
Pretty compelling case for it being a hoax: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/9ufex/a_6yearold_boy_is...

At least I really hope so.
>Marathon runners don't do an intense workout. It's an endurance sport and peak output is nowhere near what a sprinter does.

It's easy to say that from the couch.

Odds are overwhelming that both you, and 99% of the people commenting on this site are incapable of running a mile in under 5 minutes or even a single lap around a 400m track in 75 seconds. Top marathon runners average a higher speed than that for over 2 hours. Winners occasionally have a sub 4 minute mile within the race.
Adobe are still, to this day, incapable of producing a performant Flash runtime for Linux and Mac OS X — in spite of this having been a known issue for like a decade. Why on god's green earth would they suddenly produce a performant Flash runtime for the iPhone?

Even if Apple wants Flash on the iPhone, and that's not a certainty (or even likely if you ask me), but even if they do, they sure as hell are not going to settle for something as poor as what they've gotten for Mac OS X. Apple has standards, and in their view it's better to not have anything at all, than to have something that is bad.
Yes. The words "man-years" is key. This guy had balls.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfs1t-2rrOM

Video that continues passed those shots and goes to the largest star found to date (?) VV Cephei
> software engineer employee making over $1m

Employers don't have any incentive to pay an especially effective programmer at whatever his "market rate" actually is. They just need to pay enough to fill their position with someone skilled, and there's plenty of programmers who'll take the near-guarantee of $MaxSalary/yr and live happily. ("After you've got enough to settle down and buy hardware whenever you need it, what else do you need?") If you want to realize your full "fair market value" (which is just a convenient theoretical fiction anyway), you need to take matters into your own hands.

I also don't think there's a consistent 100x variation in overall productivity/output, but maybe something more like maximum productivity (and edited the grandparent post). If you have a super-productive employee it's going to be hard to "fully saturate the pipeline" since any one single project isn't going to constantly require that level of work, and you can't just have him hop project to project within the company since there's a learning curve each time.

I originally picked up the "programmer productivity varies a lot" meme from one of PG's essays, but have since seen it in industry: http://paulgraham.com/gh.html
This doesn't provide anything for free, it sets a floor on the minimum speed an ISP can offer.
No the Sharks usually only invest if they are getting a sizable percent of ownership so I think that's correct. They must have needed the money pretty badly.
What does it mean that a market is becoming more orthogonal? Is it that they are moving in different directions and that they are aimed at different kinds of consumers?
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Not a fix for the writing style, unfortunately.
I'm guessing it's a mistake in the article. End of Summer was not too long ago, so a company with about $500K in the bank should be worth more than $270K premoney.

I just thought of another explanation: Maybe the TV show only airs if a deal gets done, so the founder reasoned the publicity was worth a bad valuation?
Usefulportal.com (anyone find this useful)
You're talking two entirely separate ballparks. On the Mac, Apple has no ability to block products from release. Furthermore, the environment of OS X seems to be a positive reenforcement for developers, because I've seen more beautiful software here than I see anywhere else. Hell, I can't think off the top of my head if I've ever seen an elegant minimalist interface on another operating system. Closest I can think of is the Ribbon system on Microsoft Office, which they unfortunately ruined in the transition to OS X.
*from someone who pays them to advertise socks; per click.
Wave is an open protocol and third-party wave servers, which Google won't be able to search, will be peers in the wave network. So I don't see Google Wave giving any more access to raw communication than they have already.
Actually, logos are the harder of the pair. My simple attempt only gets around 90% success because some of the logo pieces have a group of white at the top and bottom. This makes it so the bottom piece of a logo and the top piece of the logo make good fits for the middle and bottom rows. Example from my solver: http://imgur.com/CQvcH.png

The photos take up the entire frame with various colors instead of one solid one, so it is not likely for any of them to end up with a mismatch like this.
Next week's news: new restrictions on amateur aviation rapidly pass the House and Senate in a bipartisan effort to Protect The Children (TM).
Google Online Bookstore Fuels eReader War
Much thanks, that really clarifies the situation, but it also inspires further questions.

So people purchasing shares were theoretically providing the investment funds to complete the toll road, and as a result of that risk, would have access to the profits of the toll road in proportion to their investment, correct?

So BrisConnections doesn't want to see the fund dissolved because it loses all the capital represented by the $.001 investors by virtue of still owing $2, and Thiess John Holland wanted to maintain the entity that owed them a contract for building part of the road?
Startup PM here. Article is pretty accurate. My responsibilities:

1. Act as scrum product owner: define features, fill backlogs etc. A little additional project management/release planning when needed. Keep scope creep under control.

2. Market research: talk to customers, investigate competitors, build pricing models, financial projections, etc.

3. Code a little when needed. Make prototypes and mockups. Analyze raw data from the production system and make statistical models. Test and validate when needed.

4. Strategic sales & marketing. Go after the big fish directly when sales gets over their head and the CEO is booked. Position the product and help sales figure out how to sell it.

5. Absolutely anything else that's going to further our strategic goals. Get the pizza. Find contractors for non-core development areas. Paint the walls of the office.

Shorter answer: whatever it takes.
too soon?
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b145/kinetickid/up.jpg
"When was the last time you heard about a software engineer employee making over $1m, let alone $10m?"

Exactly. employees don't make make over $1m, but plenty of founders who sold startups have.
Eclipse is a Blub IDE.

Edit: In case it wasn't obvious, I meant an IDE that you're just used to using, and that you think it's perfectly alright because you're not aware of better options.

I've got some anecdotal evidence to support this, so if you disagree, let's hear yours.

Have you really tried IDEA, and did you really not think it was better than Eclipse?
Apple Hints at Mac Counterattack on Windows 7
If this did actually happen, how would you rescue him?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldfell

5,300 had to be evacuated from the island of Heimaey due to an eruption in 1973.
Would it be good for my twitter client to do that?
as weird and sad/funny as this story is, i feel it is important to chime in to say it really does not belong on Hacker News. don't down-vote me into oblivion because it is somehow "wrong" of me to make this comment. i just want to keep HN from turning into CNN, otherwise, no point in coming to the site anymore. lots of other mediums for this type of thing.
The potential ability to install and maintain your own Wave server would presumably nullify a lot of the objections that would exist if it were only available in a Google-hosted form.
I think this speaks more to the low quality of these blacklists than to a problem at Amazon. Did anyone who noticed the offending site contact Amazon to have it removed, or are they simply content to keep adding more blocked IPs as the offender jumps from server to server on EC2?
Programming Languages Rank With A Rather Strange Way
It does everything I want now (for Scala). If their product is good enough (compared to Eclipse, Netbeans, and Emacs) then if I later decide I want the extra features, there's a chance I'll pay them.
Ok, fair enough, I removed the reference about the bytecode. I have been too long in the Adobe, Java, and Microsoft world and think that everything is bytecode.

Nice joke about the "Enterprise Web 2.0 Experts." Ironically, I was very involved in 2000 in the mobile space, before the "enterprise Web 2.0" stuff.
Seems natural as the Internet will become the primary communications network, replacing both the telephone and television networks.