skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As somebody that does alpine skiing and is a great fan of the sport, I feel I should elaborate on that analogy. You see the coach was talking about practice. And yes in practice you should be pushing yourself and risking a fall.

There is a tradeoff between speed and risk in slalom. The faster you go the more likely it is to fall or miss a gate. But skill goes into it too. A more skilled skier will be able to go faster without making any mistakes. And how do you get skills? Well you practice. That's why you should practice at speeds that tend to cause you to fall. Because as you keep falling your skills at that speed increase and eventually you will fall less and less until you stop falling and you are able to ski reliably at the higher speed. If you practice at comfortable speeds, you will not gain the skills to deal with higher speeds. But all of this is true because it is training and in training the cost of a fall is more or less nothing (again we are talking about slalom here, not downhill where one fall can easily kill you).

Of course when you start racing things get different. One fall or missed gate usually disqualifies you from a race. Also, a single race includes two runs down the hill. Thus, one could race brilliantly for most of the day and fall in the end of the second run and become disqualified. A world cup run involves many races around the world, wherein each skiier earns points for each race and the points are added up in the end of the year to determine the gold medalist.

So an elite skier can afford to ski relatively safe in order to get consistent results over the many races. What you actually see in slalom is that many of the top skiers do not ski as fast as they are capable during the year. They want to control their risk. It is the younger and less known skiers that try to ski as fast as they can, because they figure if they play it safe they will probably finish behind the experienced guys, but if they risk it all they might get first place and make a name for themselves.

So the lesson of embracing risk works only during practice and not always during the race.

What life or business lessons one can gain from this? I don't know I just felt like talking about skiing. But hey I have one, maybe if you are a startup founder you should be like a young and inexperienced skiier and risk it all, because if you play it safe you will always get beaten by a big company playing it safe.
Intel 4004 schematics published as Creative Commons
I had been wondering what the uptake of OpenID (or OAuth) logins would be given the amount of friction removed by the various providers' login offerings. It's not surprising that the majority of logins are coming through Facebook, just through sheer volume of users on that site. There's also the benefit of posting status updates as you publish a blog post on TypePad: http://everything.typepad.com/blog/2009/08/happy-together-ty...

As we move beyond Web 2.0, I think this ability to [relatively] seamlessly connect disparate sites will become second nature to web users. It's possible that in a couple of years people will bristle at the need to create a new username and password for a site they want to use.
This is not an improvement that we will see in the matter of months, or probably even a few years. I suspect that we'll see very marginal incremental improvements, followed by a large spike in productivity / efficiency. It would make sense that EMR's, like the Internet, and PC's before it, will be adopted collectively as a generation.

I've personally been involved in a reasonably large deployment of a high-profile EMR system. In my case, we're talking about introducing networked software systems to an entire workforce. Doctors. Nurses. Residents. Receptionists. These aren't even people in the corporate business world, where computer / internet skills are considered vital skills. We're talking about starting from the ground up, "This is how you log into your computer". Even once they've been trained, it's not the same as having staff full of tech-savvy employees, who intuitively know how they can make software work for them.

EMR's have a long way to go as well. many of the packages out pretty much just duplicate the functionality of paper records as pages of forms. The only difference is that the info is displayed it on a screen. Additionally, Presumably in an attempt to lock up a young market, there doesn't seem to be a lot of horizontal integration going on yet. This too will change, I think, as the market demands more as they become more widely adopted.

On a side note, you have no idea how old-school many med-school programs are. I was really surprised at how much technical innovation there is in the engineering of medical devices, but not in medical practice.
Most people choose the wrong time periods for thinking about work/life balance. The usual discussion is about achieving a balance every day or every week. That just dilutes and compromises both your work and the remainder of your life. A startup is a chance to balance out your work and life over many decades. If you can work, say, five times as effectively as other people (which is hard), and if you can get paid for that, you have the possibility to compress your working life into 9 years instead of 45 years--that will give you an extra 36 years with no work commitments at all, free to travel and choose your own interests. Balance in this form can make up for a lot of all-nighters during the startup.
I think it's a mistake to specify 'IT department'.

Just as IT departments often don't have usability as a primary concern, the corporation itself often doesn't have technical fitness as a concern. To them, almost all technology decisions are dominated by the concern of corporate risk.

They want industry-standards, because it keeps cog replacement costs down. They want you to use their gear to minimize data security concerns. They want to shut down youtube, lest they appear to be not enforcing the harassment policy. They force IE6 because they're trying to meet return projections on bad investments from years ago. They provide a standardized environment so they can shuffle cogs more easily. Etc.

Even if the average user always chose the best available tool, even if they were security-conscious, studiously making regular backups and vigilantly updating their software - corporate concerns would still regularly trump their desire to have X.

Just pick an IT guy and ask him how much say he has in what software he has to use all day.
You're wrong, by using the GPL you agree to abide by it and this means giving the source in case of redistribution of the binary, plane and simple. Many companies have been sued and forced to give the source, look it up.
You're wrong, by using the GPL you agree to abide by it and this means giving the source in case of redistribution of the binary, plain and simple. Many companies have been sued and forced to give the source, look it up.
I'm sure they could bang that out in an afternoon. A weekend, at most.

</sarcasm>

I really wish people would actually read the MapReduce paper before trying to talk about what it is.
Your first example is right: writing to disk can be a view. A model, however, is the canonical representation of your data. In Rails, the database and in-memory stores, together, make up the model, and are inseperable, as they are both considered to be canonical—if one is changed, that change should be considered canonical and replicated through both. To put it another way, all canonical stores of the data should be bijections.

Generally, then, a view is any other representation than the canonical one, of some useful subset of your data. E-mail messages, files, and web pages are all views, as they are all transformations of your model that make it non-canonical (i.e., if a client edits the email, the change should not propagate back to the canonical form.)

Finally, the controller is an arbiter that creates the various views, but, more importantly, is responsible for deciding what data in a modified view (e.g. A POSTed response to a form) should be merged back into the canonical store, and what data should be considered to be in error and discarded.
That was my expectation, yes. Well said, thanks. :)
Is the solution to avoid hiring education majors for education jobs, preferring instead people with degrees relevant to the subject?

One aspect of academia and academic training is that it is not built primarily to produce teachers, but instead to produce researchers. Johns Hopkins started this trend back in the 1800s, turning professors from teachers into researchers. All other major educational institutions largely followed suit. Because academia is engaged in self-reproduction, they no longer really instruct anyone in teaching (as most of us find out when dealing with grossly incompetent TAs in discussion section), instead their graduate and masters students learn to be researchers.

Maybe the trouble with schools is that they don't train people engaged in disciplines how to teach their discipline, instead relying on people specifically schooled in 'education' in the abstract to teach whatever course administrators deem necessary.
Excel computing in the cloud. Good/Bad idea?
Ordinarily.
Computational Topology
"If you can work, say, five times as effectively as other people (which is hard),"

It is hard because, it is hard to find something that will make you work at very high levels of efficiency for extended periods of time.
Copyright Time Bomb Set to Disrupt Music, Publishing Industries
What do you think got him 'downsized'?
This is a bit inflammatory...

IT departments are trying to maximize aggregate efficiency across the organization (which includes themselves). While it might marginally increase productivity of office staff if they're allowed to choose whatever mail client they're used to, it is going to require a considerable investment in IT staff to support it.

Please keep in mind that an office full of programmers is absolutely not the norm. While programmers and engineers might hate the evil IT department, most offices wouldn't be able to exist without their mean policies.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944002
I don't see his examples as the death of URLs at all. The underlying technologies will continue to rely on URLs, not to mention the legion of systems and standards with the URI as a backbone. I see this as the URI being shoved further down the stack. The more we can abstract above the URI, the easier it will be for everyday people to get to what they point to.
> Imagine you come upon someone banging in screws ...
> You say to them "why aren't you using the drill ...
> And the guy responds "This is a quick job. ...
> The real reason why he's not using the drill is,
> quite obviously, he doesn't know how!

Your point is well taken, and your anecdote/metaphor is evocative. However, for the sake of completeness, I offer some information.

In some professional theatres the ones responsible for constructing the scenery sometimes, in some cases often, hammer in screws. It's faster and sufficiently reliable, and when it comes time to dismantle they simple unscrew with a power tool.

It's faster because using a power screwdriver often requires drilling a pilot hole first, whereas hammering it in, doesn't.

These are seasoned professionals. They know the tools, they've experimented with different techniques, they've evolved the best way of working for the circumstances.

Don't assume you're right, just because you think ...

> ... quite obviously, he doesn't know how!

Sometimes the other guy who does this all the time actually does know better than you.
The inclusion of the App Store as an exhibit doesn't seem relevant. URLs are artifacts of the web. The App Store is for the purchase of native applications. Yes, it's not an open platform, but things have been this way in the mobile space for a long time, and it has nothing to do with the web or URLs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Runtime_Environment_for_...
Debtor-friendly bankruptcy system is better for innovation
Easy, switch to twitter and logless instant messaging for primary communication. I bet productivity would go up anyway.

Edit: I obviously meant a twitter-like internal service.
If you have a new product though, it can be tough if there isn't a market yet. Its tough coming up with something truly new, but that's when I've been most excited. After that, listening is very important. Everything we have done with our new iterations has been customer driven.

I still envy Apple, even though this is mostly good advice. They are very feature forward, but their nitch asks for it, so maybe that can be seen as the "customer asking for it".
Technically, you're right. But in both cases he's carefully choosing his words to make his employer's product sound better.

It's patronising because it implies:

* that I'm not capable of noticing any drawbacks of the product, which he conveniently didn't mention, and

* that I would ever give any serious consideration to a spokesman's supposed opinions of his own company's product.

I would have much more respect for somebody who came out and praised the competition and acknowledged what they got right instead of what they got wrong. It would show much more confidence in his/her own product.
One thing that will be limiting your motivation is how much you actually like coding if you truly do like it I'm sure you can be competent as to what is happening on your rails site in your time frame but if you absolutely loath programming the goal may be a hard one to reach.

For ruby you probably could do well starting off with Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/ and maybe buy pragprog's ruby book, programming ruby, or the ruby way and move up from there

Just remember to try and change the code yourself, you have to interact more than read the books
Except for folders...
Cray supercomputer Jaguar claims title as world's fastest
Pinker's review: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/books/review/Pinker-t.html
Residency 'carrot' lures rich investors
I agree that it looks pretty bad, but for the sake of playing Devil's, er, Don's Advocate: maybe he was feeling down from being unexpectedly let go from MSFT, and is now having a rebound where everything about his new job looks extra rosy? Just saying there's a human/personal element at play here too.
The key words in your comment are "chance" and "possibility". If it really was just a simple matter of when you're putting in the time, plenty more people would do the 9 years of intense work for 36 years of freedom later on. Thing is, for lots of people a year or two of very intense work on a startup yields nothing but the learning experience of running a company.
I'd heard of Goodreads before, but was already using LibraryThing.com by then. Now I'll have to take a second look at goodreads and see what's new.

Incidentally, does anybody know if there's an easy way to transfer books between those two sites?
I wasn't suggesting Dive into Python to him, he's trying to learn Ruby. I was just drawing upon an example. The VMWare approach, setting up a virtual linux box so that he can configure apache and ruby, might be a little much for a biz2hack, as you put it.
Slamming Amazon over sales tax collection fight with states
You forgot the third goal: the IT department wants to create a lot of work for itself that appears to be useful but doesn't directly increase productivity.
No Hope for the Verizon iPhone
"Is the solution to avoid hiring education majors for education jobs, preferring instead people with degrees relevant to the subject?"

(Note: the response below is regarding primary and secondary schools.)

Perhaps: but school districts and teachers unions generally require education degrees, and frequently education M.A.s, for teachers. Alternately, some districts effectively make the M.A. required for salary reasons; in Seattle public schools, for example, the M.A. leads to a $6 – 10K/year pay jump. You'd be a fool not to get one, even if the degree is useless.

Consequently, even if you took some enterprising principal who decided education degrees were useless, the pay structure and district policy would probably prevent that person from doing away with them.
Space, Shift Space here
If it's exactly the same file, mailservers (at least some) are clever enough not to store it for each instance. New features in ZFS are also, apparently, clever enough not to store two files in two places. But yes, shared volumes or Google Docs is probably the way to go.
I have been asking Google to remove Goodreads landing pages from search results on searches I run, as I find out that those pages are simply fakes for SEO. That has completely turned me off to actually using Goodreads, which was originally recommended to me by a good friend. A company has to be pretty nasty to get me to disregard a word-of-mouth recommendation by a friend.
Technology can fix this! It was never the users problem to begin with...

MAX_ATTACH = 50 * 1024 #50 kb

def minimize_size(msg):
if size(msg['attachment']) > MAX_ATTACH:
upload attachment to s3 like storage
insert link into email body
return msg

It obviously needs fleshed out (I bet it ends up around 20 lines of python after everything is said and done). But seriously, the fact that your users would ever even need to think about this is just wrong.
All those questionable examples and not one mention of search engines? I'd argue that search engines are a much much bigger threat to URLs than all of the author's examples combined. (You don't need to know a URL if you can just search for the site name!) But it's also a counter-example: search engines haven't killed the URL yet, so I doubt any of those other examples will.
You think a good strategy for companies concerned about legal discoverability of their internal information is for them to put it on Twitter?
Movie Gallery From Chunky Sluts
"I sent a copy of this to Katie with a note asking how we missed out on this guy, because he's exactly the kind of coin-operated true believer we need around here."

LOL
HN's title seems to be misleading; one main point of the linked article is that changing the incentives around teaching will lead to changes in how teachers are taught (second paragraph after the big chart), which would seem to imply the author does indeed consider that part of the problem.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about math education and one of the problems I have with it is that it is very, very incestuous. Teachers who barely know what is taught in high school, and certainly nothing beyond it, then go on to teach other teachers, without mathematicians safely sealed off from the process so as not to interfere with the latest theory of the day on how to teach a math one hundred years divorced from actual mathematicians. Getting more people with actual degrees in relevant fields involved in the process could have profound second-order effects in an educational curriculum that feels stale because it is stale. Education sealed off every avenue that new blood could come in decades ago, and every year it just gets worse. Often in the name of fixing education... which never happens because at this point the educational establishment is pretty clueless about the situation they are in, so how do we expect them to fix it?
Raising Money
I think most artists simply want to know the easiest quickest way to make money for themselves doing what they enjoy doing (the smart ones anyway).
Fans just want a powerful escape.

The only middlemen that even have a right to exist at this point are the ones that can demonstrate an ability to make these two wants come into fruition repeatedly and powerfully

Sellaband is a step in the right direction but the social entropy of it inherently neglects certain artists over other etc. Which leads to the same problems artists have always had - defining themselves as unique, valuable and "special" in the minds of people willing to talk about them positively and throw money.
- Look at him, what he's doing, it's very dangerous, he isn't in control of what he's doing at all: he's doing what he can, not what he wants. He'll end up broken (), that's not how one's supposed to do...

() probable missing word here
Can Ethics Be Taught [in Business Schools]?
This is handled by date-based expiration, so policies I have seen say that "the company policy is 60 days after which email is automatically deleted". There is no reason to have a quota for this purpose.
I got to say "Who?" 48 times.
This does a great job refuting one of Pinker's fact based counter examples. It in no way refutes the core thesis of Pinker's review, that Gladwell is full shit.
What do Sailor's beliefs about an unrelated issue have to do with his analysis of NFL draft positions and performance? Gladwell's retort would have been better without that.
To what extent is your startup run by your subconscious?
If you have various tasks to do and your brain shuts down on a certain subset, then essentially your subconscious is telling you not to work on that subset and to focus on something else.

So, to what extent is your startup run by your subconscious?
I didn't like the implied ad hominems much 8/ Respect for Gladwell--;
C++ Smackdown
I think the problem of where to put them stems from having applications as an MVC 'stack', as jrockway said in a sibling thread. Assuming that there is only one input/output point in a web-app is not very realistic. It seems that these applications might fit better in a hexagonal architecture[1], but Rails doesn't really support apps like that, so you have to cram mailers in where you can.

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HexagonalArchitecture
I am one of the unfortunate people that have to use Outlook Web Access at work. Unless you use IE, you lose a lot of features.

Since I use firefox, I find that even Hotmail is better than OWA.
Gladwell seems to rely on ad-homenim. Calling Pinker an IQ "fundamentalist" is a bit over the top, too, especially in light of Pinker's moderate writings that point to the relevance of both environment and heredity.
I agree. I forget who told me this, but the US Patent and Trademark Office in DC hires engineers for their engineering disciplines' patent examiner FTE slots. The argument goes that it's easier to take an engineer and give them a smattering of law education than it is to take a lawyer and give them a smattering of engineering education and expect them to understand the utility of a new engineering application or detect whether or not it is novel because they don't understand the technology enough to see what's similar to it.

However, as the article demonstrates, a piece-wise comparison of A/B where A is what you've trained for and B is being an educator, A wins for pay in just about every field. B is always a step down in pretty much whatever metric you look at, aside from developing future generations. Simple game theory proves that B is only going to be populated by low-tier individuals who don't have much in the way of other options or those few gems in which the 'developing future generations' is an outsized factor in their decision-making.
I was absolutely shocked when Pinker's writing revealed that Gladwell in his book referred to an "igon value" (instead of eigenvalue, which I learned about in the second week of my Linear Algebra class.)

How the hell does someone lecturing us on social sciences have little-to-no math background?
This is a very interesting comparison of how to do research well with how to do research poorly, with the journalist coming out better than the academic.

After edit: I'll have to check a Pinker book reference after I return from PZ Myers's debate this evening to give a more focused example of what Pinker can miss while doing research.
Evernote raises $10 million investment