logicalmind

One way is to adopt iterative development practices that focus on customers actual needs and not just desires. The first system should evolve to meet any unmet needs of the customer. Rather than trying to build a bigger and better second system.

In summary: small, iterative releases with direct customer feedback on needs.

And thus, the Maybe monad was born.

I think your comment hits the nail on the head. I've worked with web apps for a long time and I quickly learned that all I was doing was writing software for some business process. This isn't the sexiest work or the most interesting, but it has never stopped me from doing interesting things.

For example, I try constantly make less work for myself. So much of the code we write is boilerplate so I have various tools that generate as much code as possible. I have written mini languages that specify the important parts and then generate all of the plumbing around it. I won't run out of interesting problems until I can generate an application by specifying the important parts (to the business) and generating everything.

Wasn't the earth considered flat when hell became a concept? How could it have a center?

A more natural way to achieve the same result would be to wrap the steak in kombu and allow it to rest in the fridge for a while. The Japanese use this technique for some fish preparations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kombu

"Chicago HN'ers should do a dinner sometime"

Sounds like a good idea to me. I cooked a 15lbs kobe beef brisket last weekend and had more meat than people to share it with.

You're right on about taste vs texture. Often times the tenderness/texture is inversely proportional to the flavor in steaks. Which is why you see many menus placing something like blue cheese on top of beef tenderloin.

However, the "freshness" of beef is in interesting topic. When a cow is slaughtered it is bled and hung in a cooler for about a week. At this point it is usually cut up into primal cuts or sub-primal cuts, sealed in cryovac and sent to the store. At wholesale clubs you can usually buy these whole sub-primals in cryovac. In a normal store the "butcher's" simply cut up the sub-primals into normal size and sell them. The people who work the meat counter in the typical store are simply meat cutters and no longer butchers in the true sense.

Some restaurants keep their meat in the cryovac for extended periods of time and they call this "aging" which is technically called "wet aging". And vastly inferior to dry aging. Dry aging is simply leaving a sub-primal in a temperature appropriate room for an extended period to allow bacteria to break down the meat and moisture to evaporate, thus increasing flavor.

Freshness in terms of beef really means "never frozen". If you freeze beef (or any protein really) then ice crystals form and cause damage to the cellular structure of the meat. This means that juices from the meat will simply exit the meat and never return, no matter how long your rest the meat after cooking.

Your instructions provide a perfectly reasonable way to cook a steak, but the theory on searing locking in juices has been proven false (see Good Eats or America's Test Kitchen). The purpose of searing steak is to invoke the Maillard Reaction which dramatically increases flavor:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction

One of the major benefits of F# is that it is .NET. This allows companies who already have investments in .NET (microsoft technologies) to explore a functional language in a realistic way. I think F# has a good chance of bringing functional programming to the mainstream.

From the article: "you've checked in for the tenth time and earned a free espresso drink."

Foursquare, and the users of foursquare, would love to see this but the businesses themselves would not. I worked for a targeted coupon agency and the kind of people who routinely visit and buy your product are exactly the kind of people you DO NOT want to give coupons to. These people are already loyal customers. Coupons are more effective if they target either new users (target starbucks customers to get a free coffee to visit our cafe instead) or increased consumption (if you buy a large coffee get a discount on buying our ice cream).

I have though about this for different reasons. Over time I get hard water buildup on my circulator and have to spend some time cleaning. Yeah, I could use distilled, but it's a pain. Not only that but over time the water evaporates, especially at higher temps and I have to keep refilling which drops the temp for a bit. I know there are "ping pong" balls you can place in the water to keep the surface area to a minimum. My current solution is to simply make a tin foil lid.

But if I could find another medium to use instead of water it would be nice.

Why stop there. You can get a high precision scale and pick up some sodium alginate (make caviar out of anything), some transglutaminase (meat glue), Tapioca maltodextrin to turn any fat into powder (bacon fat powder anyone?). The molecular gastronomy rabbit hole.

Thomas Keller has a different definition of disaster than most of us. He has a sous vide tank where the liquid is not water, it's butter! He sous vides lobster tails directly in the butter. No, I'm not kidding.

Another benefit of sous vide that I didn't see in the article is that the cooking of items in sealed bags causes them to retain their volatile compounds. You might say, what's that? Every item releases volatile compounds that give it smell/taste. When food is heated the molecules vibrate and volatile compounds are released into the air, gone forever. In sous vide, these compounds are retained. This leads to increased flavor. The side effect of this is that you need to be very careful about adding spices and herbs to your food. In sous vide, a little bit goes a long way.

Have you ever wondered why foods go together. Like tomatoes and basil. The trick is that they share some of the same volatile compounds. That is how many high-end restaurants know to put seemingly strange combination's of food together and it works. There are volatile compound databases available for many food items.

This document is more useful than any of the sous vide books on the market, and I have quite a few. There is also a wealth of sous vide information available on egullet forums.

The circulator pump has high/low so it really gets the water moving. I typically keep it on low since I use it in a large pot. I haven't noticed any real difference with compared to a hacked setup for typical proteins (poultry, beef, pork, etc). The only place you're really notice is where you want high precision, like the various degrees of egg cookery and some fish.

The real benefit is the ability to "set it and forget it", which matters for me when cooking items for 24/48 hours. That and the volume.

I have been doing sous vide for a while. I used similar hacked setups like you, but eventually got a deal on a polyscience thermal circulator (a restaurant went out of business) and have been using that for quite some time.

One of my other favorite kitchen gadgets is my induction burner. I could never go back to gas/electric.

One thing I'd like to know about is how google deals with declines in productivity. Undoubtedly, their hiring process gets them highly qualified individuals, at least initially. But over time, there has to be people who become lazy and take advantage of their good graces. And it would be expected that as people age they start a family and their work priorities may take a back seat.

Is there some kind of process, ala Jack Welch, where people are ranked and the bottom 10% are removed? How does google deal with under-performers?

If your barrier to entry is the cost to incorporate, how could you afford to create a job? Surely, in any state in the union the cost of even a minimum wage salary exceeds the cost to incorporate. That's not even considering the salary cost of skilled labor.

Some of the smartest people I know work, or have worked, for NASA. Some of the most cutting edge work is done in aeronautics for military aircraft. The Manhattan Project had its share of exceptionally smart people.

I think you're confusing exceptionally smart with exceptional business skills.

I'm all for simplifying the overhead on companies, but to translate that into creating jobs is a bit of a stretch. If you cut all of the taxes on an existing company they would not simply add jobs to their company. The only way jobs are added is if they're necessary. This usually means an increase in sales/revenue and the need for more resources.

To take a modern example, the recent recession caused companies to go on a spree of job cutting. This wasn't because of any change in tax or overhead. It was the result of lost revenue. Increased revenue causes job increases. Not the efficiencies of overhead.

The list of Oracle claimed firsts is here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Database#List_of_claimed...

I don't see them claiming to have invented relational databases. Do you have a reference for that claim?

This is probably too political to be on HN, but the analysis is very interesting. It makes me wonder whether speech writers take things this into account when writing the speech. It is interesting how Obama matches up with first-term Clinton.

If I understand this correctly, they will have live play-by-play audio at crunchgear.

"This is where all of our live content for today’s Apple event will live. To make things perfectly clear, Apple won’t let us film inside the event. However, CrunchGear and a special surprise guest will offer a full play by play. Feel free to turn on your headphones at work and listen to the news as it happens or watch us live complete with coverage from San Francisco before and after the event.

We will start streaming live at 12:30pm EST/9:30am PST and the event begins at 1pm EST/10am PST."

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/01/27/crunchgear-live-at-the-...

I worked at company where everyone in IT was called engineer/geek/nerd/hacker and everyone else was called a mortal. We even had mailing lists with these names. It always made me chuckle.

I think it goes back to the mappers/packers mindset. Mappers tend to think of the world as a solvable map, given enough information. This obsession with correctness is simply a way to help correct someone's map.

You might want to make sure they're safe for work. I would hate to pull a random image into my demo that was not appropriate...

The Aleph Numbers are the terms to describe the types of infinity to which you are referring:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number

I'm not so sure it is factually wrong. here is a reference.

http://www.progress.org/2003/energy22.htm

I'm not sure why you were downvoted (comment currently at 0). If you look at countries where gas is the most expensive you see smaller, more fuel efficient cars, and more use of public transport.

Granted, this is also because many of the cities in those countries are old and weren't designed for vehicles, leading to congestion problems. These areas usually have high densities of people as well.