skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to maintain PABXs for small businesses. Pre-VoIP PABXs are expensive, inflexible and expansion often traumatic. Enterprisey VoIP systems from major vendors are over-priced and they get you on the extras. I recommend hosted VoIP for those who don't want to administer their own phone system and in-house VoIP for those who want a bit more control. FreeSwitch is very good solution as well. Don't get any POTS lines, use the money you save to get a fatter IP pipe into your office. Most VoIP handsets are fine, I don't think CISCO being worth the premium.
Brad Pitt's Foundation Unveils Floating Home That Rises Up (and Away) in Floods
The average SnR on bills on OpenCongress is terrible. Most bills require expertise to really analyze; the people with expertise and the will to apply it are already chiming in on bills. I don't want to sound apathetic, but I'm not convinced about the wonderful powers of public peer review on legislation.

Roger Ebert's blog is amazing, and one of the reasons is that he generates amazingly thoughtful comments. He even managed to do a debate on creationism, in the context of Ben Stein's movie! Here's what happens when he does something overtly political. Note the comments.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/10/the_anger_of_the_fes...

(Something to notice: 1200+ comments later, and he is still responding to comments. The guy is a machine.)
Probably has to do with typekit (http://typekit.com/). I'm using the beta of typekit because it seemed like a neat way of using @font-face, but I guess it's more beta than I expected. What browser are you using?
Just move on.

Regardless of how fantastic your idea is, the fact remains that there are millions of people out there with what they believe are fantastic ideas -- most of which aren't. For someone to distinguish between fantastic and non-fantastic ideas takes a significant investment in time, and no sane person is going to make that investment given the negligible odds of a payoff.

Or, put into economist-talk: The friction of investment discovery is too high.

This presupposes, of course, that you don't have any special advantages which will lead an investor to think that your idea is more likely than average to be a good one. If Jeff Bezos says "hey, I have a great idea for a business", people will listen -- but most of us don't have that sort of credibility.
Look at www.freeswitch.org - much improved over Asterisk.
What about for a mostly Mac-based small business?

RingCentral looks good, but seems heavily Windows-centric.
Virtual world disputes heading for real courtrooms
it's a defective house boat.
Yeah. And honestly, I think the person selling me the plan lied to me about the 400 minute plan being mandatory. (This is why I'm happy to see Amazon killing retail stores -- retail employees suck.)
Both logical weaknesses are common among arguments, and people here have a penchant for pointing them out.

I'd rather they point it out than let poor arguments pass for lack of language to describe it. Maybe we need new synonyms. Says something about the state of logical strength of many popular articles, doesn't it?
Many people also click the "go" button after typing a URL into the address bar of a browser.
You see those a lot because they're two of the easiest forms of illogic to spot.
Any look back to last year has to include the "Team Cyprus" video http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/10/team-cyprus-move-to-und...

<quote>Team Cyprus: Alcohol + Bad Judgement + Really Poor Timing</quote>

Edit: Note I don't agree with the quote. I think it was funny how "some" thought that people that earned money honestly, went to have fun was in Bad Judgement.
Education isn't supposed to improve IQ related skills. Test designers take great pains to make up questions that should be largely universal and almost entirely unaffected by amount of education.
The idea is not as crazy as it sounds. Javascript is a fairly decent language with many functional programming features (it's the html DOM that is messy and inconsistent across browsers). Additionally, languages like Ruby are known for their slowness (though they can make up for it in macro-optimization at the design level) so server-side javascript may be performance competitive. Especially so if the advances in open source JS compilers like V8 and tracemonkey make their way server-side.
AT&T to Allow Skype Programs on iPhones
Is that really true?

With many web services, if I have to see an ad for it, then my perception of it actually goes down somewhat. If it was that good, would I need to see an ad for it?

See Mozy vs Dropbox, for instance.
Microsoft Zune service coming to a Mac near you?
Okay, that is quite interesting and I'm all for say, improving design to make people happier when they are using a product. I like being happy.

But I don't think this addresses what I see the real shortcoming of using focus groups at all - an over-reliance on the first impressions. A good example for this is drinks. If you go into Starbucks and get a premixed drink (say, their Strawberry Creme), it tastes good for the first few sips. By the time you are getting down to the bottom of the cup you realise it is disgustingly sweet. I think what happens in that situation is that they try all these formulations on some people, but it is just a fleeting taste that they are comparing.

The real question for me is not how people feel about your product on the first try (as long as they don't hate it!). The question is how they feel after after they have used it for a while. It is difficult to see how measuring microsmiles gets you any traction on such a problem.
screenshots: http://www.iphonefreak.com/2009/03/gv-mobile-google-voice-ip...
This whole article is a straw man. While differences between intelligence of races are debatable, the way the article goes about it is contentious and extremely one sided.

A much more important argument is whether intelligence is immutable or not. What this article doesn’t do is look at the general intelligence factor – the correct way to measure intelligence. Attacking IQ is just a straw man – IQ isn’t the best measure of intelligence, the g-factor is. IQ tests are subject to boosting (i.e. increased performance by training).

The evidence that intelligence is innate is significant and mounting. The general intelligence factor is found in several studies to be immutable. It is possible to see the effects of the general intelligence factor by looking at fMRI when a person does a test. Intelligence has much more to do with physiology than anyone would like to admit.

It is sad that a lot of people would rather turn science into pseudo science than to acknowledge the fact. These views are subject to a very good book called “The blank slate: modern denial of human nature” (by Steven Pinker).

PS: James Flynn does not have any formal training in psychometrics. He is a political scientist and noted left wing New Zealand political activist. He is also author of “How to Defend Humane Ideals: Substitutes for Objectivity”.

I do not know why his views are continuously brought up when there are 100s of guys in the field that is better educated than him. It is unfortunate that when science and politics collides it is science that loses.
You probably have ADHD, try untimed tests like the Mega or Titan test.
I'm not looking for investment I'm looking to give it to someone else to work on and in return ask for equity.
The point is that ads conveyed status and authenticity at some point in the past, and fail to do so today. Explain how it doesn't fit.
Some related resources:

IQ is history-correlative
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

IQ determines life success and more
http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/courses/intellig...

Faster evolution means more ethnic differences
http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_4.html#haidt

IQ and all other traits are heritable
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0142003344
Damn. I won't be in the area until October 13th.
I actually wrote a significant program in NeWS. I ran screaming back to X. PostScript is a good page description language. It's a horrifyingly bad user interface implementation language.
Could be that women go for smarter men. So evolution has done its part over the years and weeded out the low IQ genes, hehe.
More recently, there was a writeup about me in the New Yorker. Just before publication, I got a similar call from a "fact-checker". The checking was detailed, and (as for jwecker) focused on hard-to-verify matters. I asked the fact-checker about the process, and she said that the job had gotten much easier, since they could now check most facts using the web.

Think of how difficult the New Yorker's fact checking was before the web! The process of fact-checking goes back to the early days of the New Yorker under editor Harold Ross. James Thurber wrote (in "The Years With Ross") of "Ross's later intense dedication to precision. He studied the New York Telephone Company's system of verifying names and numbers in its directories ... He found out about the Saturday Evening Post's checking department, which he said consisted of seven women who checked in turn every fact, name, and date. ... His checking department became famous, in the trade, for a precision that sometimes leaned over backward. ... Ross's checkers once informed Mencken that he couldn't have eaten dinner at a certain European restaurant he had mentioned in one of his New Yorker articles, because there wasn't any restaurant at the address he had given. Mencken brought home a menu with him to prove that he was right, but he was pleased rather than annoyed. 'Ross has the most astute goons of any editor in the country,' he said."
Just to give you one datapoint: I played forumwarz episodes 1 and 2 pretty much like an addicted fiend when they initially came out. But I am not sure if I have been to the site in between and since (if you made an episode 3 in the interim, I don't know about it). If your TOS allows it, perhaps you could notify your users when new episodes come out? I'd personally enjoy episodes with a much longer story arc--I think that would keep your users more active and for longer--but I realize that is easier said than done.

Finally, I just want to let you know that I have always been pretty impressed by the online chat functionality that you implemented for the INICIT game.
There's a good reason most Ruby and Python projects don't rely heavily on system calls: portability. If you care at all about portability, it's just easier to not hit the system calls directly, otherwise you'll have to detect host OS and make sure you're using the system calls properly.

If threads are "out", then pre-fork is way out. Just look at the history of the Apache project. I realize this all happened before the RoR era, but Apache used to use a pre-fork MPM almost exclusively. In more recent years it has added the threaded MPM and the async MPM. They have also put in the work I mentioned above to achieve cross-platform compatibility.

I'm just using Apache as an example here; I'm not suggesting that we should all use Apache. It's just funny to me to see a post that basically says, "All the stuff we've been doing for the last 5 years is out. We should be doing the same stuff they were doing 15 years ago, but in Ruby this time around instead of C."

Maybe software trends are like music trends? Everything from 5 years ago is lame, but the stuff from 20 years ago is super groovy, man.
You're still tied to an AT&T voice plan unless you don't intend on receiving calls.

Applications still aren't allowed to run in the background so you'd need to have your iPhone on with the Skype app running to receive calls.
Benefit of hindsight or not, but I think predicting that the number of web sites would actually decrease is showing a total lack of common sense. If I were a shareholder, I'd want someone else at the helm.
Thanks, I'll drop you a line about this tomorrow.
The way the article is titled (emphasizing that it was Brad Pitt's foundation) almost makes me think that they expected the foundation to fail. "Oh, an actor's foundation. What good could they do?". Or they were being sensationalist (anything with 'Brad Pitt' is highly clickable surely).
We use Onebox as well. Simple to manage, forwards to our cell phones when we're not home. But it's not like we're getting lots of calls yet, so I can't speak to how it scales.
And try and convince a programmer that it's possible that their program's memory can be wrong.

They understand in theory but refuse to code for the possibility. Especialy when you get into HPC and there are clusters of 50-60 machines with 4Gb each, the chance of not having corrupt memory is almost 0.
Parallelism /= Concurrency
Coming in from NC, taking sometime off from work.
I havn't been thinking about charging but these are not bad ideas.
What I hate most about this article is that they stress the "always". It is impossible that unittesting is faster and better in every possible software for every possible hardware in every possible situation in this universe and time, just plain impossible.

Certainly, it will make you faster in a lot of cases (and a lot of regular buiseness-programming is among these cases) but there are certainly cases where it is wrong. Think of a code emitter in a compiler, or handcrafted assembler for some micro controller, or especially a problem where you just know the solution, and it is simple. In these cases, it just is faster to just hack down the solution.
MBA vs Startup: Which should I choose?
It's true, and I missed the part in the post about call volume. Onebox doesn't do much for you if your real problem is getting phones on 20 people's desks to make outbound calls with. But it did totally solve our inbound call problem.
Counter example: nginx, which uses fork(), and seems to smoke Apache while offering features like binary reloading without dropping connections (not sure if Apache supports this but I seem to remember no - please correct me if I'm wrong).

Portability is not always necessary - when talking about fork() and friends you're talking about trade offs.

When I'm only ever deploying to Unix environments, I accept the lack of portability in exchange for features I value.
I'd like to talk to you more about your experience maintaining phone systems, but your contact info isn't in your profile :) Mind dropping me an email? nixme at stillhope dotcom. Thanks!
To be fair, I recently started a text based game (nothing but html, JS and a few minor icons - no flash) at the beginning of last month and I'm making reasonable money purely from ads - a single ad, in an unobtrusive place.

I haven't even introduced the premium features yet - people get very addicted to these games and are happy to pay for UI enhancements. Hell, I've ever had multiple people contribute designs, graphics and JS to the site wanting nothing in return.

It's been running less than a month in beta and has had 0 public advertising (this being the very first time) and has 150 active players purely from word-of-mouth. Admittedly its not making any worthwhile money currently despite me putting hours and hours of work into it but its been great fun and a great learning experience so its worth it never the less - so long as it breaks even I'm happy. - http://islandor.com
There is one problem with this theory and it is that the US only issues patents that are valid for the US. China issues patents for China, Japan for Japan, etc. Thus, the Chinese are not really beholden to American IP owners in their own country unless they give those American IP owners Chinese patents.

So I am not sure how the US will benefit from issuing more patents.

(disclosure -- I am a real life patent attorney but nothing I write on hn is legal advice).
Well, from this and another post, you seem to be concerned mainly with overlap between similar laws -- a natural result of a large and fragmented legal code. Why not prune it instead of scrapping it? Refactor instead of rewrite? Insert jwz quote.
Supposedly Adderall stunts creativity. In this respect it makes you dumber. So it is unreasonable to say these drugs make you smarter.
I concur, there's nothing wrong with gradual progress of course. On the other hand, about your second point, there are a number of such models. The geocentric view of the universe got deprecated with Galilei's discovery of the Jupiter's moons. More recently, I could mention the Bohr model (electrons traveling in circular orbit around the nucleus). It was widely considered as correct at the time and it was in accordance with experimental observations. However, the Bohr model wasn't improved (although many scientists tried to save it with extensions of some kind or other), it was completely dropped as it is simply wrong. It can be disproven by a number of different experiments.

Wikipedia actually has a great collection of superseded scientific theories: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theories
-> http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=863294
Not sure if a cname will help you in that case after all the server needs to spit out the right certificate, and the 'reverse' has be working too.
That's not really a counter example. nginx does indeed fork off child processes, but it uses async I/O in each child process. It doesn't use the traditional pre-fork process-per-connection model that Apache's pre-fork MPM uses or that Unicorn is using.
I agree the idea of making yourself perform better for a test is ludicrous. These are performance enhancers for something that doesn't matter. If you are self-motivated and driven like Einstein, or like a startup founder, you will have the motivation and focus that Adderal provides. Rather than taking drugs to make ourselves fit into an unideal model of education, why not just modify the education system so that students learn what they want? Yea it would be a major overhaul, but we're going in the wrong direction here.
I just tested it against Safari 4 on Snow Leopard on my old 2Ghz Core Duo MacBook, and it smokes Safari in SunSpider and V8's tests (the latter unsurprising as Google obviously deems their tests important performance points). I didn't do Dromeo.

I'm thinking about switching to it for day to day use.
Ah, thank you. I never saw those.
I'm not familiar with the MRI source, but in most collectors, I'd think that switching from marking the object directly to using a separate mark map should be pretty trivial (like an afternoon's work). You'd still have to copy the pages for the mark map as soon as you GC in the child process, but that's only 3% of your total heap size.
The rare event here is that a million pounds were made and how the person did it, not that the person who did it is a certain age. A 50 year old making a million pounds in the same way would be just as much of an interesting story. "The media" likes to present youthful success as an exception (perhaps because, as we all know, the youth of today are lazy do-nothings who need hair cuts and should get off my lawn), when it's just as much of an exception, at these levels of success, at nearly all age groups. You don't see stories with headlines like "50 year old computer geek makes £1m with online game", it would just be "online game makes £1m" or would mention the person's name rather than hiding their identity behind an anonymous age. It's semi-presented as though the young don't deserve success, or shouldn't be able to do something interesting because they don't have as much experience as people at some other random cut-off age, when really that has nothing to do with it at all. It's sensationalistic.

Although, I admit that complaining about sensationalism in journalism isn't very interesting in itself. Maybe I'm too young to buck the trend and complain about something, and seek change, in an interesting fashion.
What Does It Take To Be A Successful Clickbank Affiliate
nginx relies heavily on system calls at the expense of portability.
I assumed that due to Google's special access to the iPhone, the app was a little more far-reaching than the screnshots that are a sibling to you seem to show. That's also what Apple's announcement implied to me.
Foursquare Coming to London This Week
They seem to be branching out quickly to new IM clients (facebook and gChat recently, I've noticed) and expanding their staff (current intro box says they're up to 90).

Has anyone worked with their API/do they have one? It'd be a useful thing to develop with a single source's API and be able to utilize all these different communications options in a single system.
Jakob Kaplan-Moss thought it’d be an interesting exercise to port Ryan’s code to Python: http://jacobian.org/writing/python-is-unix/
> If bloggers want to be treated like real, grown-up journalists then they have to start living by the same rules that these journalists live by.

Let's see what an actual journalist says about all this. http://www.buzzmachine.com/2009/10/05/ftc-regulates-our-spee...

> when you take a payment for what you say then you are obligated to disclose this fact.

Oh really? Or rather, nope, wrong again.

As Jarvis points out "The FTC also concedes that it treats critics at publications differently less stringently than bloggers. Don’t they realize that people on travel and gadget and food publications get freebies all the time. I’ve long believed that ethics alone should compel them to disclose. But the FTC doesn’t."

Jarvis is an interesting guy. He's started publications that became large. He's "committed journalism" across a wide range. He's currently a journalism professor among other things. In short, he's actually a "real, grown-up journalist."
Each country has it's own patent rules.
In India all American pharmaceutical patents are void.
This is so that we can make cheaper variants which our population cam afford.
Only when I need to translate something.
Luckily, at this point, much can be done simply through the FCC, where Obama has appointed some important Net Neutrality supporters. Law/principle needs to be enshrined in law in the next four/eight years, but some important groundwork will likely be laid.

I miss Al Gore in the Senate though. Another jump-starting, "High Speed Computing Act of 1991" is just what we need right now.
Start-Ups Aim to Transform Visits to the Doctor
If we want to talk about media, then a door-to-door salesman isn't quite the right analogy. I think the closest analogy would be the Pennysaver or those throwaway used car classifieds that you find at supermarkets. But the point is that is now everywhere.

All online advertising has become the Pennysaver. And that's significant.

Jason L Baptiste brings up a good point though: there are still places where premium ads may make sense. Email lists like Thrillist, etc. are a bright spot.

But even then, paid placement can hurt instead of help. If I'm a nightclub venue and Thrillist could have covered my venue as a legitimate story, I would prefer that 10 times out of 10 over having to pay for placement, which invariably still signals that I need to advertise. (Undercurrent: Only low-status businesses need to advertise.)
I'll probably attend.
Servers With Cellphone Chips? Yep, Here They Come
Coming in from NYC
Usability Testing Demystified
So someone that is more focused can be reasonably defined as a 'smarter' or 'more intelligent' person?

Somehow I don't really think this fits the majority view of what 'smarter' means, and when writing articles like this the majority view of the meaning of a word is what really matters (at least majority of your audience).
NASA to bomb the Moon on Friday morning, watch from Earth
Honestly I do not think any of these drugs really work. Notice how the article does not cite any studies showing these drugs work on people that are not suffering any mental disorders.

I remember in college there were some people that thought they could take a pill to make them smarter but from my perception those people started out dumb and stayed dumb after they took their pills.

I am sure that if someone has ADD they may benefit from drugs that are prescribed to treat that but I doubt there would be a benefit otherwise.

So no, they should not be treated like steroids. The main problem with steroids is that they work.