skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So going through this I now know that the Department of Health and Human Services Invests in something called the “ACF Expanded Federal Parent Locator Service” which in turn has a project called “Effective Management of Human Capital/Information Technology/Resources” whose goal is to “Maintain FPLS Benefit-To-Cost Ratio greater than 75:1”. A goal that Michael Carleton, the CIO of that agency, considers met so far.

But I don’t know how much money was spent on that particular project or where that money actually went or what the individual goals were or why the CIO thinks those goals have been met thus far. So while I’m still willing to give Mr. Kundra and the Obama administration some leeway to do better in the future this doesn't impress me.

Right now it’s just some pretty Ajax wrapped around overall department info I could have already gotten in PDF format from the congressional budget office.
Boy, that's one pissed off fellow.
Wow, now that is an excellent sample essay. On how to NOT write one.
I like the way he reasons. Maybe the mint founder got scared of him and sold it out.

1) Fucking Wrong, and Irresponsible Conjecture & Hyperbole

2) Completely Fucking Wrong, and in fact Exactly the Opposite trend is going on, and finally

3) Wrong in most cases & crap advice for young entrepreneurs.
As a developer, the main problems with software patents are that 1) pretty much any combination of things you're doing could currently be patented by someone else, 2) it's impossible to tell if you're infringing something until you get sued, and 3) things that should be filtered out by the "obviousness" principle aren't, such that you're constantly in danger of stumbling onto a patent just by solving a problem.

A patent is a very, very, very sharp tool: it grants someone monopoly rights to that "invention" for 17 years (or 20, if it's international). Anything that most people could come up with inside 2 days, or even 2 weeks, of thinking about a problem shouldn't be patentable; that's ludicrous, and counts as "obvious" in my book. Things that are obvious combinations or extensions of existing inventions aren't supposed to be patentable.

So a lot of this software/business patent nonsense would go away if the patent office would apply a more ruthless standard of patent obviousness. Most software patents are things that at least 10% of the engineering population would come up with inside a week of trying to solve the same sort of problem; many of them are the sort of thing that 90% of engineers would come up with inside 4 hours. That doesn't apply to RSA, or to MP3, or to most algorithmic things, but it does apply to things like "method for holding online auction" or "method for allowing purchaser to assemble a shopping cart" or the other ludicrous sorts of things people patent.

So I totally agree, RSA should be patentable: it's a non-obvious invention, and if you're using RSA without their permission there's a 100% chance it's because you stole it/reverse engineered it. But most software patents are the sort of thing you accidentally stumble onto in the course of solving the same sets of problems, and patents were never intended to (and should not) preclude other people from solving those same problems. You can't patent the idea of holding an auction in meatspace, but suddenly because it involves software it's patentable? Etc. Most software patents are much closer to business process patents than to mechanical patents.

Personally, I'd settle for simple ruthless application of the obviousness principle. The USO PTO granted more than 40,000 software patents last year. If you only included things that were really novel, that a decent engineer wouldn't come up with on their own in a few days or weeks of thinking about a problem, and that you'd have a hard time accidentally infringing, I bet that number would be more like 500.

Keep in mind, there are plenty of other things that aren't patentable: story ideas, for example. So yes, you're going to draw an arbitrary line about what's patentable, but that's the job of congress and the patent office: to draw that line in the place it maximizes utility.Remember, there is no natural right to a patent in the US. Congress has the power to determine what's patentable and what's not, and is explicitly directed by the constitution to do so in a way that maximizes progress. The way it's done for software hinders progress right now.
This was hilarious. The only thing missing was "You have until 1:36 p.m. on October 4, 2009, to BUY NOW!" (But that would have required a little js.)

This is a great example of how not to blog:

- Challenge a blog post of a successful member of the community.
- Wait 2 weeks before responding to that blog post.
- Insult him as often as possible, in as many ways as you can.
- Swear like a sailor.
- Brag about swearing like a sailor.
- Co-opt images that have nothing to do with your point.
- Have no point.
- Make sure some of those images are vulgar.
- Use red letters.
- Use green letters.
- USE ALL CAPS.
- Swear some more.
- Argue with your only commenter. (That oughta generate more feedback :-)
- When all else fails, show your resume.
Well!! Did I just give a good product idea??
"""A recommendation engine for use in libraries to learn from reading habits of students(borrowers)and hence suggest next reads."""
Not sure how much money can it make though. :-)

Edit: Online book/movie selling/renting engines do that, but not sure of real world libraries doing that. Especially now , when the books are going "e". :-)
yes, but even harder are the entire set of problems where the data is extremely interrelated, like Facebook's is -- making it very difficult to shard effectively.
I thought it was tremendously entertaining, if a bit earthy. Kind of a financial Zed Shaw piece.
Many thanks wallflower, GavinB and cstross for the advice :-)

Edit: Oops, and xcombinator, just saw your comment!
> Again, I don't know much about pharmaceutical industry.

Not so fast. You made claims that depended on knowledge. You suggested policy.

And now it turns out that you knew that don't know what you're talking about....
The problem isn't with drupal, its with the concept of content management systems as a whole. Generally they just don't work for the needs of more than individuals. Once a site gets either minimally serious traffic (more than 5,000 UVs a day) OR more than person behind it, then any CMS involved will start to suck more and more as the UVs or people increase.
You should still be able to determine most of those by accent and by subtle differences in physical appearance. I imagine that would be easier if you were Japanese.
Conditions For Second Language Learning
In this Social networking era of web 2.0, I would suggest to look into the data security (Privacy data) and its impact of sharing your privacy data across social networks like facebook, twitter, orkut etc......
Actually, this is Photosynth (rather both use th same base tech.) In fact, city-wide synthing has been possible for some time now- the crux is matching up the photos fast enough, which has now been reduced to a day (for 1M photos). For the interested, fast (real-time) matching of video streams was also demoed at TechFest some year or so ago. I'm pretty sure there's a video about it somewhere, possibly at TechCrunch.
For building sites or for building apps? While Drupal can be used to build a great web site for a company (and often is!) Joomla's extensibility seems aimed more at rapid application development using a strong mvc framework.

If you don't mind relying on 3rd party contrib modules and external development roadmaps, you can build apps in Drupal, but if you just want a framework to build and deploy your own web apps Joomla is fully extensible in the OOP sense.

Also Joomla is classier than Drupal. :-P
put all todo-related e-mails in a seperate todo list - don't keep it in e-mail (whatever you use as a todo list) - and then archive that mail... and the rest: deligate..
In fact measuring productivity makes you even more motivated to put in more hours as you can (and often do) clearly see that the amount you derive from a business correlates to the hours you put into it.

I think it would be interesting if you described what your setup for measuring that was and, in rough terms, what your productivity was at various levels of labor per week.

Eric Ries had a phrase called "shadow belief": the unvoiced, unquestionable assumptions we make about the business world we're operating in. My day job had, for decades, a shadow belief about engineering productivity: namely, that it was a constant number per hour, and that therefore the number of kousuu (a unit of engineering production) produced could be computed as kousuu = constant * # engineers * # hours.

Then one day quite recently we sat down and said "Hey, we keep obsessive records of how many kousuu we produce. We keep obsessive records of how many hours each engineer works. Let's divide."

And we found that the constant changed. Some changes were not unanticipated: our best senior engineers were routinely more productive than our new company employees, OK, training period and whatnot. Some of the differences between expectations and results were so vast that I could not tell you them in good conscience.

Don't just say you're measuring. We did that, for decades. Measure. Then, act on it.

(I wish I could tell you what my day job found when actually started to measure. I think I can tell you this: there was audible skepticism and derision when we introduced a "temporary, experimental cost-cutting measure" obligating employees to leave at 5 PM two days a week. It was thought that, aside from the sheer un-Japaneseness of it all, it would throw schedules into disarray, necessitate extra crunching on the other days, and be widely ignored anyhow. That was months ago. On Friday, we received word that, on review of Actual Results, the experimental policy was henceforth merely Policy. 90% of the office was not there to read about the news, as the news arrived at 5:02.)
Understanding the code inside Tornado
Confessions of an IT pro: My biggest professional blunders
> Foreign policy is all about influencing what goes on beyond your own borders.

How about some specifics?

For example, what military action is acceptable and when?

Is there a conflict between this and the belief that one can't "impose democracy" from outside? (Obama, among others, says that he believes that.)
I think I have them both, in Russian, of course.

Also I think there's more than basic physics, it was the whole series.
I find nothing wrong with challenging a successful member of the blogging community. Just because the guy started blogging a few years ago and has a successful startup does not mean that everything he says is always right.

The other points are spot on though.
Big Boss 3 on Colors
I have shot myself in the foot on more than one occasion by failing to document a procedure or configuration I was sure I would remember.

Boy does that ever strike a nerve. Mainly in my own code.

I'll write a function with just a little bit of complexity, getting working perfectly, and build all kinds of stuff on top of it. Three months later I need to add something to it, but I don't understand what I wrote.

I'm the biggest stickler on variable naming and self-documenting code and yet, I still keep doing it to myself. Oh well, always room for improvement.
Check out goodreads.com.
This is an awesome challenge and I would love to see a list of what you would consider basic OOB functionality as provided by Drupal. If the CMS he builds in RoR in 2 days has checks for half the items on the list, his non-profit gets the $2K.

This also reminds me of the SXSW shootout this year, where none of the already built CMS's could meet the site requirements in less than 2 days, and Joomla was the only team that did it in less than 3. And that was just to construct a site with a pre-existing CMS, not build the entire CMS.
Maybe this should be added to the FAQ. There have been a lot of posts recently about this.
Maybe you should read this:

http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/upcoming-features and http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/faq and http://it.usaspending.gov/?q=content/faq-agencies

As it clearly mentions right next to the logo, the site is in beta.
Why Consumers Like New Products With a Familiar Ring
I've also found that those clients who want total control, often don't want to learn anything.

The time-and-materials approach makes so much more sense: Steady work for web dev firms, the work can be done by junior workers, the client gets a professional site and can focus on their business instead of messing around with HTML.
Do the British use the word "hiring" instead of renting?

"The people are poor, many of them out of work, often hiring a bunch of DVDs as a cheap way of passing the time."
".. but that is far from the truth."

Are you sure it's far from the truth?

It's probably hard to compare, but look at clerical job openings (something that requires no college degree) at a university or public agency office with those in the private sector.

Maybe comparable jobs aren't always 35% higher, but I think you'll find they are consistently higher
So, do you think setting a smaller max size on your EBS instances would have avoided this by spreading the traffic, so if you were using 1TB using 10 100GB ones instead and federating queries across them?
The Drupal people are working hard on Usability. Unfortunately, they put all this effort into future releases rather than releases that people are actually using on production sites.
This is something that is being rectified with the upcoming Drupal 7. This is a rather tough nut to crack because different database servers don't actually have compatible SQL syntax even among some basic queries. A lot has been done to improve this, including an API to declare database tables in a way which is SQL server neutral. And Drupal 7 will also have query builders to deal with differences in syntax among some of the more basic queries.
thanks for sharing the link.
This is a lame attempt to fill the void left by Zed's old persona.
As an aside, these are my favorite admissions essays:
http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/college/index....

Jos was a friend of some of my coworkers at Tellme (ex-WebTV folks).

Also, if you faint during workouts, EVER, you should read this: http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/family/jos/cardiac/index....
Not at all. They'd merely have to pay a "living wage".

Moreover, we have a lot of legal residents and citizens on "aid". Lots of them can do farm work. (Yes, I know how hard farm labor is. I've done it. Have you?)

As to child care, the ones who can't do farm labor can provide it. After all, we trust them with their kids, so surely we can tell some of them that their aid depends on them taking care of other people's kids. (Of course, we'd have to break the social workers hold on such activities. Welfare programs are pretty much designed for the providers.)

Farm labor costs are a very small fraction of total food costs.
Will it become a problem??? It already is:

http://www.google.co.in/search?q=the%20lost%20symbol%20rapid...
Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs by John Bowe, Marisa Bowe, and Sabin Streeter is a good, recent companion to Working. I liked both books.
Ouch to the OT one!

The worst one I did : With this product, the VP of product distributes product keys. I had recently had a HDD crash and reinstalled and had customer facing deadlines. He was not around and I needed to make some progress, so I fiddled the keycheck code and bypassed it. I finished my work and committed the whole workspace... including the hack... fortunately this was caught in QA.

Now, that is not the worst impact on my life... in my earlier years I made it too much a point to get my real opinion across.
Metacafe Help Center » Webmaster’s Tools
Yeah, there's already plenty of libraries and library-vendors that offer recommendations (Librarything, OCLC's Navigator). Even some open-source online library catalogs have rudimentary recommendations based on subject categories. Libraries likely don't offer recommendations based on a user's checkout history because of a long tradition of utmost privacy concerning a patron's information.

As a librarian though, I'm much more interested in tracking and understanding uses of scholarly journal articles. Most research in academic libraries occurs online, and the current vendors do little but index and provide a search engine.
The Dream Stack - Is This A Joke?
One thing bothers me about this whole WorkHard / WorkSmart / BeProductive meme: it focuses too much on "the competition".

I know my approach is heresy in these parts, but bear with me...

I understand that there's always some potential competition, but I choose to not pay much attention to it. The only thing I compete with is another version of myself in another universe. "What would that other Ed have done?"

And that's awfully hard to measure. I've tried all kinds of metrics to keep my projects going, but the only one I use now is how much progress I make each day on my most important task. Pretty subjective.

I have seen tons of good software and services and have done a lot of work deploying them. What invariably happens is that there is no solution for something the consumer wants, so that's what I write. I like to think, "If I had good competition, I would just go out and sell it for them. But since I'm writing something no one else has, I won't worry about competing with anyone but what I would have been."

This may sound a little silly, but it works for me. Provide something that no one else is providing and working harder or smarter than the competition suddenly doesn't mean so much. I just have to be a whole lot smarter and better than doing nothing at all.
It takes 10,000 hours of directed practice (directed practice means "working smarter") to become an expert at something. No amount of working smarter makes the 10,000 hours go away.

This claim is:

1) unevidenced

2) untestable

3) curiously specific (10,000, but not 9,000, nor 12,000, those being numbers less than and more than required, because the number required is 10,000)

4) claimed to be totally undeniable

5) claimed to accurately cover every field of human endeavor from cooking hamburgers to designing circuits to pole vaulting to understanding the intricacies of canon law
Sometimes, taking on someone like Jason or Graham or Spolsky just comes across like coattail-riding. It's not that it's wrong to challenge them; it's that the mere fact that you're standing up to them shouldn't be the value proposition of your post.
A beta test is supposed to show you functionality. Otherwise there would be no point (why give something to others to test if it lacks the lion share of the functionality). In fact, a Beta Test is designed to illicit user feedback about the program's functionality which is exactly what I gave.

I'm saying "if this is the promised functionality then it is insufficient"

Beyond that the upcoming features page doesn't address anything that I said. Under the "More Data" section they do just the opposite, they promise more of the same by saying " Agency CIOs will continue ranking their investments in the coming months" and "linking more investment data to awarded contracts"

(I didn't even address the FAQ pages because they're so vague that they basically don't say anything)

I was saying the assessment of the CIO in charge of a project and the fact that I can see what contract an investment is linked to is insufficient without knowing why the CIO approves and how much money is actually represented by each award contract.

One last point, the info I'm talking about is just "how much money was allocated to each project" That's not a functionality issue it's just another field in a database. Don't you think the CIOs who are doing these assessments needed the total money spent to do them? Couldn't they just have put the totals in the database while entering their assessment values in? Doesn't the fact that they didn't mean the actual totals are purposely being withheld?
I've had some experience using drupal and while it can be frustrating at times, my overall experience with it is pretty positivie. I've used it mainly to build websites for clients, these are the usual bread-and-butter variety sites for small businesses. So let me address some of his points.

>>> Drupal is Freaking Hard to Use and Has a High Learning Curve <<<

The author uses the "layperson" as the targeted audience yet the only alternative he offers is rails. Yeah, enter rails, a layperson would have to learn programming, database, deployment just to get a rails site up. Comparing this with the WYSIWYG interface of drupal, I'd say the latter is much much easier for the lay person.

in my experience of working with clients clients, most of them haven't found much trouble making minor edits to the site itself after I've set it up given them some instructions. For me this is godsend compared to 1, doing things the old way of giving them static pages and having them email me every single time they need a change or 2, using my custom cms-like solution which is buggy and hacked together.

For these simple CRUD type operations, drupal is simply the easiest way for the lay person to modify a pre-built website.

>>>>Drupal’s Design is Piss-Poor<<<<

Inheritance? Objects? Keep in mind that drupal was started back then in 2001 when PHP didn't have any real OOP capabilities and that heritage carried through. As for the issues with upgrades, most modules and templates..etc shows prominently what version they are compatible with and if you use the correct versions, it usually doesn't break.

>>>>consider hiring a Ruby on Rails developer<<<

There are so many useful things that are built out of the box for you in drupal, the taxonomy system, thousands of modules for all of the most common operations and a generally helpful and supportive community. Through modules, you can get internationalization for free, you get a free forum, a free user-groups, blogs..etc. You also get a pretty good degree of customization with the Views and CCK module for the edge cases. I really don't see how building it yourself from ground up can be a money saver for 95% of the common cases.

And why specifically rails? compared to other web frameworks like Django, does rails offer something that makes it especially scalable, easy to learn or especially suited to the CMS type application?

From what I know, the Django admin site, its apps system, better documentation and python's consistent syntax makes it easier to learn and more suited for CMS type applications. And if you use Pinax for the some of its out-of-box functionality, it makes life even easier.
Essays were originally instituted to give admissions staffs an excuse to keep out Jews and other minorities.

Whereas now they only use them to keep out whites and Asians?
It's not even a matter of SQL syntax. Oracle, for example, uses cursors implicitly and declaring a cursor just gives you a handle to it. In SQL Server, using a cursor is an expensive operation. So if you are trying to be database-neutral, do you use cursors or not? How does that affect the likelihood of deadlocking? Etc etc etc.

In practice if you try to be database agnostic you end up with something like SAP which runs like molasses in Winter equally on all databases...
Dave McClure is himself a "successful member of the community".

I have to say, to hear Jason Fried defended like he is at the moment on this thread (considering his propensity for viciously attacking other people, including start-ups, via the popular 37S blog) is very weird.
That kind of company is what we get when we hire a manager that knows only about management and nothing about whatever he or she is managing.
I use odesk.com. Its especially useful if you have a lot of smaller tasks since you can develop relationships with freelancers via the project mgmt tool that tracks their time and manages payment.