skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All marketers are liars. This includes evangelists which is just another fancy name for marketers without sales quotas.

I think people are being too hard on him because they are pro-Microsoft or pro-Google instead of pro-Me, pro-You, or pro-Don.

If you consider Don as a corporation himself, what makes this so different than if Dell switched to Linux because MS stopped subsidizing Windows, and Dell started extolling the virtues of Linux over Windows? None.

It is only because we are so ingrained into thinking that employees should be the thralls of their companies even after being fired while the company themselves have no qualms about treating their employees as a cost/benefit commodity. This is a double standard.
Video of Guy Steele at ICFP. Shows lisp and fortress code of data structure and algorithms than can be parallelized.
So the $100 Screenflow records screen at a rate of about 6.5 Mb/minute, 388Mb/hour or 4.6Gb for 12 hours. That's pretty good! There is no built-in way to replay at 10x speed, at least not without exporting. However, I can actually drag the slider along the timeline, so it's kind of manual playback. It works!

I have already discovered that I spend 14 minutes banging out my previous reply in this thread. No wonder I don't have any time!
There are good reasons for a lot of the restrictions he's talking about (and "virtual machine software" is not an adequate solution), but he highlights one restriction that has no place in a modern enterprise: email storage restrictions.

Email storage quotas are such an outrageous false economy that it's surprising that the people suggesting them aren't drummed out of the company. It is not hard to figure out how much 10-15 minutes of someone's time is worth; divide their fully loaded cost by the number of work hours in a year.

Compare:

1 minute of admin/office work @ 0.35
1 gigabyte of disk storage @ 0.07

Companies should be looking for ways to shove more gigabytes down people's throats, in the hope of getting a 30-50% chance of an extra minute's productivity.

[note: the math doesn't even work out at NetApp's $/g]
Palm Releases webOS 1.3.1, iTunes Media Sync Missing
> IMAP is well understood so I could also copy it off

It's probably a good idea to start those backups now with something like offlineimap. You don't want to wait until Google 'goes crazy' or your account is randomly suspended.
unless it makes them happier/sexier/kick ass etc.
It's also worth pointing out that only the likes of Google and Yahoo will even look at robots.txt.

Some other crawler may walk in there, then create pages that link your files, and then Google could link those pages, and it's game over.
Metaphor stolen from the movie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_There
I like surrealism, particularly Salvador Dali.
that depends on what kind of 'asian' they are.

I had a Taiwanese friend joking about this last week: He said a americanized asian girl will complain why you are not spending enough time and money with her. A fob-i chinese girl, even is she in maternity giving child birth will tell you: Oh... Don't woorry about the baby, just go to work and make sure you make the money/get promotion.... etc.

Sorry, don't downvote this, I know it is a crass overgeneralization but this is just a view of my chinese/taiwanese friend.

It seems that cultural upbringing has a huge role on how women see what the role of the man should be. And in some cultures, women demand less attention, which might make them a better fit for busy type of person.
It depends on your risk profile. For a bank, no. For an lolcatz photo site, sure.
Local Book Search: A new way forward for bookselling
Hey there, I've (re)learned to program over the course of the past year, listening to what your've said these are three books I think can help:

Start with Learn To Program 2nd edition as it will get you familiar with programming concepts. (I worked halfway through this book before I realized I understood most all of it) http://www.amazon.com/Learn-Program-Second-Facets-Ruby/dp/19...

Next I feel Beginning Ruby is a good place to get in depth with Ruby (I'm still getting into this book) http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Ruby-Novice-Professional-Sec...

Last is Simply Rails 2 which is one big long Rails tutorial and will take you through the process of building a Rails app (it took me about two weekends to work through and has given me rudimentary understand of Rails) http://www.amazon.com/Simply-Rails-2-Patrick-Lenz/dp/0980455...

In addition, as other people have recommended you should try small programming exercises when you have a chance. For further brain teasers, I recommend working through the exercises in http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

Well there's a specific lesson plan that I think is geared towards your business goals. I'm not sure what your time constraints are like but if you spend some uninterrupted time with these books you should be able to tackle them no problem.

Anyhow, good luck, I hope you find the time amongst everything else to dive into this material.

PS Programming is a lifelong project, give it time.
I hear you on the non-computer stuff. I don't want to wear a camera (eek), so it's back to manual entry.

About correlations - I can tell you that for me anything above 20 hours/week (on top of a day job) leads to burnout in under two weeks. After recovering I dialed it down to 18 hours and it was much, much better.
Perhaps set the quota params so no [internal] message can be more than ~10k or so? If everything is forced to be in shared folders, users stop being defaulting to email.
Take the median salary for a financial person, mark it up to fully loaded, and compare:

1 minute of productive time: $1.10
1 copy of a 500MB XLS file: $0.04

Seems to me, the financial people at your University understand computers better than your IT people.
I completely sympathize with this viewpoint. That said, I've been on the IT support side:

1. You have to support whatever is in use. Even users who say "you won't have to support me" end up needing support. This may be due to user error, or a host of other things like incompatibility with current network/firewall/computer policies. Best case, the new app doesn't work and the user ignores it, knowing it's unsupported. Common case, the use asks for help anyway "just this once". Possible case: the new app actually breaks something for other users (a quick example being generating abnormally high net traffic).

2. One big problem is the insistence on keeping all data in-house. This may or may not be more secure depending on a host of things. However, Joe Random user is not necessarily prepared to make the determination of "Is this company a reliable repository for my company's proprietary data?" (Yes, much of "proprietary" data isn't all that, but that's beside the point of this argument).

There are a number of companies that I would trust with sensitive information. Regardless, plenty of companies do banking via online portals, but reject putting other data in the hands of third parties.

3. Backups. This is a biggie. If I can't touch it, I can't be sure it's backed up.

But, man--I'm a corporate wage slave and these apps I have to use are like pulling teeth. I get that there are obstacles (see above)--but nobody seems to be doing anything to convince people/mitigate risk. And until the guy doing the purchasing can tell good design from bad, this isn't going to change.
I agree. I think the time is arbitrary, it is the communication itself that is important.

When I took a position with a small company way back when, I told them up front that I had a summer job working for my dad for 3 weeks each year. They were very accommodating.

This does not address the lack of time off for a vacation, but that is another post...
I'm pretty sure a hash, in the ruby context biz2hack has come across it, is best explained as a dictionary. It's an object that maps a set of keys to corresponding values. So you could have a hash that maps fruits to colors {:banana => 'yellow', :strawberry => 'red'} or people to occupations {'Steve Jobs' => 'CEO', 'Barack Obama' => 'President'}

http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Hash.html

Behind the scenes, ruby is using a hash function to implement the hash data structure, just like jacquesm says, but don't worry too much about that.

I jumped into rails development about a year and a half ago with minimal programming experience, so it's definitely doable. Good luck!
He's missing an opportunity here to be awesome.

You have a lot of people tweeting about your prize and leading people to your company. Isn't there some way you could reward these people for sending the free PR? A second prize that's smaller, but in "thanks"?

Instead, his idea was to write a blog about all these darn idiots tweeting about his company. Way to go.
Many companies offer intentionally small email quotas to encourage expiration of messages beyond the legal data retention requirements. Should you get sued, you don't want to reveal any more than absolutely required by law during discovery.
I think Dive into Python is a great book - but I wouldn't recommend it to biz2hack. At least - not yet. (How to Think like a computer scientist) is a better Python intro book - but if you've got a site in Ruby/Rails - start with that.

Completely Agree though on this: "change the code, save the file, execute the code, repeat"

Here's a first step for you - you've got a website somewhere - getting it running on your local machine. It might be worth installing something like VMWare Player and setting up a linux "virtual machine" - you can download pre-configured ones. (To translate - that basically means your windows computer can pretend to be a linux server - and that pretend server can run all of your programs - without changing anything on your own system)

Regardless of how you do it - let me repeat. Set it up locally and play with it. Change. Save. Test. Repeat.
Then they would simply remove the GPL code and push out an update. The GPL does not compel the release of source code - if they accidentally distribute a product that does not comply with the requirements of the included GPL software then they simply lose the right to distribute the GPL software at the copyright holder's discretion.
Pirate bay logo 'hijacked' by private company
A very good idea. Start growing an open source web platform.
Laughable is an understatement, OWA is so unbelievably bad...
How to Run a Successful Free Software Project
Conrad Barski's "Land of Lisp" presentation at Philly Lambda Users Group
Depends on what you're looking for in Gmail. Currently Gmail is the only way to have 'tags' supported. If you truly wanted a similar experience from your email, you'd need a backend that supported tags as well as a web frontend.

That said SquirrelMail, Horde and RoundCube are all open-source webmail apps off the top of my head. RoundCube being the AJAX-y Gmail-ish one.
Simon Marlow announces the GHC Bug Sweep to clean up GHC bugs
I just tried it and it doesn't seem to be working completely. For example, adsense ads are completely unblocked.
It has to do with where one is at in the
Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Indeed. I have a Rails app running with some fairly complex object relationships, along with several notifications that potentially need to be sent out if any one of the objects is updated.

Considering the how many entry points could trigger a notification, the controller would be an insane place to put these, even with a mixin. An observer seems a far better place for that type of message.
I guess you've never read anything by "Uncle" Bob Martin, a leading TDD proponent who has put forward the notion on several occasions that the only "professional" software developers are those using TDD (he has a lot of people who agree with him, too).

And yes, you're right, it's difficult to measure the usefulness of a design activity. But in order to make progress we must be able to do so. Otherwise everyone in the entire world will be doing TDD, most people will be doing it "wrong" and we'll be no better off, and possible worse off, than we are today. I stand by my statement. Any worthwhile development practice must have objectively measurable results, otherwise there's no way to tell if it's being used correctly or even if it has any value. Otherwise it becomes the software development version of a ouija board or a dowsing rod.
I'm seeing these video interviews more and more; I really wish people would start posting transcripts alongside them. I don't want to devote 30-, 45-, 60-, however-many minutes to watching a video that may or may not be useful.
Then they should just auto-delete messages older than the retention period.
If IT departments wanted to minimize work for themselves they would all outsource and use Google Apps. But then there would be vastly less work to do and as a result a smaller budget (since the money goes to Google instead).
Settlers isn't just last year, it's last century (1995). It did however spawn an entire new genre of boardgames with less emphasis on money and conquest, and more on game balance, allowing trailing players to catch up, and creating a variety of different strategies to win (TMTOWTDI).

I'm just back from the Dutch gaming convention, and picked up Powergrid and Pandemic - highly recommended. Other favorites are Race For The Galaxy and Agricola.
Respected developers begin fleeing from App Store platform
Great! Thanks for this, I was too lazy/busy to code it myself ;)
In my own personal opinion, the fact that Google have brought to the forefront the need for a new systems language is way more important than the exact feature set they have chosen to include. Even things like garbage collection and array bounds checking make life better.

One thing I find interesting is that I've seen several people claim that Go is all but useless until they implement generics. Java has only had generics for the last 5 years, C# had them after that, and the languages Go is intended to compete with still don't have them (well C++ has templates and I guess C has void *)!
there are text excerpts below the video
The real take-away here is how poorly suited MVC is to web applications.
My point was that I think RescueTime came here expecting feedback from peers, not customers.

As a customer, your feedback was totally appropriate. As a peer, their response was totally appropriate.

I think this misunderstanding is a result of HN's evolving audience, which used to be dominated by YC alums or people who knew YC alums, but is now less cohesive.
Foursquare Lets Others Play With Its API
What's to stop them from just hitting the "block" button on their phone?
Yeah, definitely interested. My email is in my profile.
The Basecamp outage / slowdown today
Whys Poignant Guide to Ruby is an excellent, gentle introduction to Ruby. If it fits your personality that is. Have a look and decide for yourself.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2236084/Whys-Poignant-Guide-to-Rub...

Remember that Rails is just a large Ruby program. The best way to understand Rails is to understand Ruby (plus MVC and other general software development theory that Rails uses). If you don't understand Ruby, you'll just be a copy/paste Rails programmer.
Depends on what you mean by 'walled off.' If Facebook/MySpace were both clients to a larger 'social network' network (think possibly USENET-style, or P2P-style), we wouldn't necessarily have youtube-esque comments showing up everywhere.

Social networks are mainly places for people socialize with friends. When people get onto youtube and start flaming people they are usually not directly flaming their friends (or at least not doing so from a username that their friends will recognize). Things like privacy settings, friend lists, etc are what help to regulate something like Facebook.

If there was a well-defined protocol for pulling/pushing just the information that was needed for a particular profile (say having all of my friends updates pushed to my account on whichever server it's being hosted), then it doesn't necessarily open up this decentralized social network to youtube-style garbage. For you to see the youtube-style garbage you would need to accept the troll onto your network. And even after they were exposed as a troll, you could banish them.
Looking out for one class of problem makes it easier to inject other classes of problems.

Or they could just give me root on my fucking mp3 player.
Nook e-reader on sale Nov. 30 in BNstores
Sesame Street's Five biggest controversies
"wavelength" is an intriguing term. I am wondering what you mean by this. Am I confusing it with "half-life"?
My wife and I love Carcassonne! One of it's big points is that we can play with only 2 players. Plus the infinite possible arrangements of the board means no two games are ever alike. :-)

The worst feeling in the world is when someone finagles a second hunter or hut onto an area/river you previously controlled. 'Course, that's one of my strategies...
I post them below my videos. I need to find a way to make it clearer.
Have you read Bob Martin's "TDD Triage"? It offers a lot more nuance than you might suggest: http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/10/08/tdd-triage

> Any worthwhile development practice must have objectively measurable results....

I thought you were asking for objectively measureable results in isolation. You'll still have terrible trouble trying to isolate a single variable (and good luck with a control group for a creative design activity!), but I suspect you can get decent results by measuring the cost of a change, the correctness of a change, and the amount of rework in a change when using TDD.
My hosting company is having trouble so my site may be down.
If it is, you can see the video here:
http://blip.tv/file/2855708

And the transcript here:
http://mixergy.etherpad.com/12
That's an interesting proposition. Let me shed some light on the process from what I've learned over the past year.

- Artists are all about distribution. For artists to want to effectively "sign" with you, you have to present them an avenue for distribution that is better than the current channels- Youtube, MySpace, Facebook, direct sales (Record labels and ITunes), and current music startups like us.

- For fans to want to be interested, there has to be a value proposition for them. Sure they want to be connected with artists, but there has to be something in it for them. We thought that by having millions of free streaming music would do it, but even then its STILL hard to get fans to commit.

So I don't know what you have in mind, but you have to keep your mind on distribution. And just a word of caution--if it involves anything revolving around distributing music, be prepared for lawsuits. :)
They should do something, but I expect auto-deleting old messages would be an even worse solution.
Not everything needs to converge to become a Free and Open, Turing-complete, net-neutral web machine. I don't need to surf the web on my TV; I have a laptop on my lap most of the time I'm watching TV. I want my TV to expose the TV interface, not the Turing Machine interface; that's why I bought it and not another laptop. There is room in the world fo both special-purpose and general-purpose machines, and the Internet is a utility they can both be built upon.
Is hitting the ground while skydiving ever survivable?
Slo-Mo Cricket Chirps Reveal Secret Serenades
http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/
If you enable striping (RAID0) for performance, how do you manage snapshots and backups? Seems like there would be consistency issues re-building the array from multiple snapshots.
> Gmail is a reasonable alternative to Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, but it doesn't compare to Microsoft Outlook

Gmail is pretty much the same, sans themes and offline access.
Startup legal issues / intellectual property
If the company thinks old email puts it in legal jeopardy, why should the mail be kept at all? I hear this excuse all the time, and "excuse" is exactly what I think it is.
Malcolm Gladwell's response to Steven Pinker's review of his new book
Maybe after I start a business I'll understand, but this seems kind of backwards.

"In reality, it’s been more like being a shepherd trying to herd a flock of ambivalent geese through an obstacle course."

Maybe that should be a cue to make your product or service more valuable and exciting, with fewer obstacles. If your customers don't love you yet, you need to do more for them.
Reconstructing Ancient Egyptian Tombs
There is a lot of people who think like you and lots of people are hard at work solving this problem. The space is quite crowded, but is still ripe for disruption. Good luck.
Why don't they just come clean and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused me?

Edit: Sorry, I know HN doesn't encourage one-liners and jokes, but I couldn't resist this one... I guess you had to be at Startup School to appreciate it.
Wow, I rarely take Farhad Manjoo's side, but this IT guy sounds like he simply wants to avoid doing his job.

He even ruins his excellent point – that sometimes the real enemy is the management who set ridiculous policies for IT to execute – by calling it insane for anyone to go over IT's head and complain to, say, the secretary of state in a meeting held precisely for such questions.
"Once again, we're really sorry for this. It was very painful to watch Basecamp be unavailable or slow for that long when we knew what we had to do to prevent this in the future. Please accept our apologies. Thanks for being a Basecamp customer."
yep, find passionate users, if not, redesign your product/service and try again.
The world’s species are slipping away
I can't get to it right now, must be getting hit hard.
http://74.125.155.132/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%...
On a personal level Don has been extremely helpful to me and several other startups in the Techstars program. At least in the circles I move in he's earned a lot of respect for being a Microsoft representative who was actually eager to talk to early-stage companies looking to do something on the platform.
A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries (the brick and mortar kind)