skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I used to be just like this, (and still am in some ways) where I am most productive at night. I enjoy the peace and quiet when no one is around to bother you. During the day there are endless distractions but at night that all goes away. As I said, I used to be like this, now I have a baby and being a night owl is no longer an option. I have been progressively migrating towards starting my day at 7am, and I have to admit, I enjoy it. Yeah I've had some great late night hacking sessions, but being able to start working early and be done by 5 or 6 is very nice.

I find it much easier to separate work from home life when I start my day with work, as opposed to spending all day knowing that at some point I will in fact have to get to work. I've found that having things hang over my head like that really messes with my motivations, I prefer to take the approach of work or don't work, but nothing in between.

I also work from home, which is not only complicated by the fact that I have a baby at home, but also that my office is sitting off in a corner in the living room. The best solution I have found is to find a way to isolate yourself and convince your mind that you are in the same mode as if you were working late at night without anyone around. I have a nice pair of headphones that block out most noise, and I purchased standing paper room dividers so I can 'shut' my door and focus on work.

So while I've had a lot of fun being a night owl hacker, I find I live a more balanced productive life getting work done first and early. As they say, business before pleasure, with a personal corollary of don't combine the two.
This is similar to a short survey I ran the other day: I wanted some stats about how many people used wedding gift registries, so I put an ad on Facebook (targeted at married females in NZ) that said "Answer 4 questions about your wedding and be in to win $50".

70% of people who clicked did the survey, which is a really high "conversion" rate -- I suspect the $50 prize draw really helps. I spent about $0.25 per click, so all up 200 survey results cost me about $120.
Imagine Bump as the fastest way to transfer money within friends or somebody...

e.x: Hey buddy you should give me 10 bucks from yesterday!

Oh yes! let's bump.
Court upholds i4i's Microsoft case;Issues injuction against MS Office
Someone ought to notify the Koreans they're now part of Europe then.
never hurts to ask :)
I wish they'd optimize for vertical space instead of eye candy. Most applications use way too much vertically stacked menubars, toolbars, bookmarks bars etc..., nibbling away precious display space from the document.
From the article:

If you're a n00b, you'll look at experienced code and say it's impenetrable, undisciplined crap written by someone who never learned the essentials of modern software engineering. If you're a veteran, you'll look at n00b code and say it's over-commented, ornamental fluff that an intern could have written in a single night of heavy drinking.

I have never seen this so succinctly expressed before.
You might need 250 tons to get enough mass to get the power up to a gigawatt. While you are correct that the units are inconsistent, in a reactor you can't independently adjust power and fissile mass. (Or more accurately, you can lower the power output by a given mass, but you can't easily increase it.)
Didn't Jesus said "ask and you'll receive"... or maybe Bouddha... or Santa Claus... don't remember...

I did the same thing when I was at 666 and got 1 upvote then deleted the thread.
However, there would be a record of the entire thing in Amazon's system, not to mention that a huge audience of potential Mechanical Turk workers would see the offer - it seems likely that at least one would be suspicious and try to notify an authority.
Except perhaps the ad-hoc (non-rigorous) studies that have been done before asking people why they turk. Someone mentioned last years submission of such a study further up the thread.

Of course you may be being philosophical about it. In which case, no we have no real way of knowing if they even think.
Contenture is No More
A problem is that there are rooms of people turking together. They'd probably all submit the same translation, for example.
Indians speak English.
I remember listening to a talk by ex-CERN director Carlo Rubbia pushing accelerator-driven Th reactors sometime in the early 90s.

It's not new. Maybe it's the Betamax of nuclear technology... ;-)
plaintiff's website: http://www.i4i.com/

"Custom editing xml files." Microsoft is barred from selling versions of word that can open and edit .docx or .xml files.
They are lying, however:

http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=33
http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=34
http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=35
Full disclosure: I took this guy's class in college.

I don't think that wanting to symbolically "ban" a word, and writing a book about its effects on our culture, are mutually exclusive.
Seriously?

If a deal fails because I made "bad" breakfast choice, I don't want anything to do with that person. Imagine working daily with somebody like that.
It was an exceptionally simple and bright idea - pay to opt out of seeing ads on participating sites - and it is really sad to see them shutting down.

"Without any large publishers, the economics just don't work."
WARNING, SPOILER BELOW.

His description omits one very Silicon Valley-like aspect to the series - this season closed with the principals jumping ship to form their own tiny firm, much like a startup. I found it very inspiring, you don't see a lot of small businesses or their origins depicted on TV.

The only other example I can think of from this year was when Michael Scott left his job on The Office. I was rooting for them to succeed and even relating to a lot of their hurdles, but then they got acquired by their old company and it was nothing more than a minor plot point for the season.
Now republish the same article on an Apple blog and see what John Gruber thinks of it.
In your last image "Comparison of Firefox 4.0 and Firefox 3.5" – the screenshot of 3.5 has a bookmarks bar and multiple tabs, while the grab from 4.0 has not.

You are making it look like 4.0 gives way more room to browse, when the change is marginal.
This is good. We need more of these things to happen so that we can get some power behind the anti-software-patent lobby. Software patents have to become too dangerous to keep around, and that happens by things like this; right now, Microsoft and others use patents to lord over Linux and make vague threats about litigation. This is an important part of Microsoft's strategy, so software patents are important to them. But if more awesome things like making it illegal to sell Word and therefore Office happen, it'll be too dangerous to keep software patents around, MS will call up their cronies in Congress, and software patents will be out of commission in a year or less.

I hope all the patent trolls of the world open the floodgates on Microsoft, Apple, and the other behemoths in the computer industry so that we can finally put the issue to rest.
I don't think the problem exists as you describe it. If you're a 50 year old programmer, and go to interview with the same enthusiasm for discussing the projects you're working on and your problem-solving approaches as someone twenty five years younger than you, I expect you'll get the job on the basis of your experience.

You may get asked, "so you never thought about management?". But you can rehearse a response to that. It's like the one about when you've been in a difficult situation. Example, "In a way I was managing" - you worked on this project, planned it this way, made these decisions. Or you could describe aspects you liked about the pace or type of work you were doing. Talk about the problems that would have been easier if you had been leading strategy, and about the mechanisms you instead had to use to influence strategy, and the reason why the tradeoff worked for you better than if you'd been managing. Use the question as an opportunity to highlight particular technical skills that you brought to the team and mention the rule of comparative advantage.

A great thing about IT is that the tools are so cheap now that anyone who wants to prove themselves can run a home project at virtually no cost to demonstrate their strengths.
Integrating Google Javascript Compiler in Visual Studio
Yup , that was my point on the "doc-comments where appropriate". Overall design of the system can/should be expressed with a good,well-written README.txt. I know UML is "supposed" to solve that problem but not for me.
On windows. It makes a lot of sense to specify an OS in these cases.
Soon-to-Be Open Secret (Males in College Admission)
A Look Back on the App Economy of Facebook in 2009
She is my sister. Pervert... :D
A quick point... Excel is a dangerous weapon because the vast majority of people, office drones included, don't know how to use it.

Really what it all comes down to is positioning yourself in a position where you aren't easily replaceable is really the "secret" to rising up on the corporate ladder. Networking and having good visibility into the company's overall workings and being a rockstar Excel jockey are really just two sides of the same coin.

From what I've seen, to rise above middle management you need both. A deep working knowledge of your tools and a good grasp of the big picture and all its moving pieces.

Also as other posters have mentioned some of the details in the story are suspect. Ordering supplies and lunch in IBD? Doesn't he have analysts to boss around and endless pitchbooks to compile?
Winner winner, chicken dinner ...
> Seriously?

No, not according to the first six words of the post.
I bet he's a fan of Apple's model of openness, right?
> nonlinear effects

Can you explain this? If you are a slow programmer and just did exactly the same as the fast programmer, just slower, how can that be a nonlinear slowdown?
The Yahoo news item is rather trite. Is there a link to a better story with more information about the patent that was infringed upon?

Edit: Nevermind, someone else already posted a better link. I propose that the item link should be updated though.
Time to stop looking for hate blame why accept all people
Truth life fact of God
Pay people for a DDOS?
Anyone know of specific researchers or a company actually working on #2? Is there a 510(k) pending for such a device?
My favorite as well. Reminds me of an evil genius in-training from Captain Horrible's Sing Along Blog or something.
yes, and we are network agnostic so a user on wifi will match a user on the cellular network.
In this particular instance it was literal infringement meaning Microsoft literally copied i4i's patented technology.

First of all, i4i is not a patent troll, they are a document management company that actively deploys the technology on which they have a patent. One notable case of such is that they used it to overhaul the USPTO's own internal database.

Microsoft came to i4i and contracted them to help them move Word over to an XML format. They then tried to strong arm i4i into some licensing agreement which they did not accept so Microsoft just decided to willfully infringe. This means they decided they would just ignore the patent and use i4i's patented technology anyway without paying them. Essentially, they stole i4i's work when they refused to sell on Microsoft's terms.

More of the backstory in this article: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/i4i-says-micro...
I can't wait for this to be true. Future, get here faster!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15161403

Anecdotally, walking through the hallways of some of the top flight MBA programs you def notice the above-average height (for both genders).
Angels are becoming the dominant force in consumer Internet venture capital
Modern behavior of early humans found half-million years earlier than thought
Reactor Drawings Make Nuclear History Beautiful
I don't understand how much of anything dealing with XML can fall within the "non-obviousness" requirement of a patent. Who fills these juries for the trial? From the view of the general public I think the majority of things dealing with computers would be considered "non-obvious, and would therefore be worthless. Why aren't these decisions being made by professional peers?
Naively, you take N cpu-seconds to handle one request (say N=0.01).

That means you can't handle more than 1/N requests/second before you start to slow down all requests.

So if you don't have a bound of 1/N requests/second on your server, you'll have a latency increase if the connection rate goes above that. At some pt that latency increase will be problematic.

It's also may be worse than the naive assessment above, since resources required to process one request might be flat but might go up as total #conns goes up (you'll hit a wall if your memory usage is enough to get into swap, you may be ok with an O(1) lookup from socket->connection state tho).

A decision by the server to refuse a TCP connect when it's at a configured limit (or dynamically determined limit) can be detected by a load balancer more easily than the latency on what might be varied requests.

Realworld example: people like to set MaxClients on apache, and for good reasons.
All I ever wanted from Firefox 4.0 is the user interface latency (or rather, lack thereof) of Chromium and the process-per-tab / process-per-plugin model. The latter would probably help a lot with the former.

The screenshot mockups don't tell.
Very interesting topic we don't see much. I'm probably in the minority, but I'd like to share what has worked best for me.

90% of the business I have ever conducted over a meal has been at breakfast. By lunch time, I'm too busy and dinner is usually reserved for family. But breakfast is perfect. You get people when they're fresh and before they're sidetracked. I prefer to have private meetings first thing in the morning and have also regularly gone to Chamber of Commerce, tech groups, vendor presentations, even Toastmaster breakfasts. They're always early enough for most people and work out great if you want to network or sell and still have a day job. And they never run over because everyone has somewhere to go.

And guess what I've eaten at every single one of them?

Nothing.

Business breakfasts are about business, not breakfast. You can do three things with your mouth at breakfast (talk, eat, or both) and two of them are bad. I spend most of my day at my terminal, so the business breakfast is my big chance to talk, listen, and learn. And food just gets in the way.

OP shares the hidden meanings behind your possible food choices, but the unhidden meaning is always bad: you can't talk while you're chewing, almost every choice is time bomb for an accident, and IMHO, food just slows you down in the morning.

So I let the others eat while I talk (and listen). I accomplish twice as much as anyone else at these breakfasts.

I just have a cup of coffee that I may or may not drink. (You may look like you're wasting food if you don't eat it all, but nobody cares how much of your coffee you drink). If I'm really hungry in the morning, I'll grab something before going to the breakfast, but I'm more likely to wait until afterward.

Jimmy Carter took this idea to the extreme by never eating dinner at dinners. He was too busy networking and conducting business while everyone else was eating. I've never gone that far, but his strategy works perfectly for the business breakfast.
Hey, that's just like Opera!

Again.
So did you actually give the $50 prize to anyone?
http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2007-09-03/
do you know of a way to set certain UI elements to load on every launch so that i don't have to type in 'set guioptions' every time i launch the browser?
Yes, that's right, except for the important part. I'm sure the percentages are off, but here's the basic idea:

To correctly form simple German sentences you need to learn 90% of the non-vocabulary elements of the language. To get to mastery, you have to learn the other 10%.

To correctly form simple English sentences you need to learn 10% of the non-vocabulary elements of the language. To get to mastery, you have to learn the other 90%.
OLPC v3 concept: $75 flexible tablet
I'll believe it when I see it...

I think there is a market for a net-tablet (for lack of a better name), but I don't trust the OLPC people to deliver it. And definitely not for $75.
And please don’t worry your pretty little minds about things like Google’s search or ad algorithms or the specific details of how its data centers work

Secrecy about search and ad algorithms are understandable - opening both would negatively impact their end-users. Regarding the the structure of their data centers, this charge is just plain false. Google is significantly more open about the structure of their computation than I would have ever imagined them to be, see:

http://friendfeed.com/paul/944f24c4/great-systems-presentati...

and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=949301
They were sued by a company that uses Clippy in their screenshot?!? http://www.i4i.com/x4o.htm
Maybe part of the MT task was to register on HN and up-vote the post?
Yeah, I have a lot of "there has to be a better way to do this" thoughts . . .

One of the aspects of software development I'm really interested in is finding drills and ideas that more rapidly build the intuitive response you can trust. The tools of the craft, so to speak.

There is some type of balance to be found in this space, some combination of declarative knowledge (memorization and simple application of different programming languages) and procedural knowledge (experience building up the greater piece of software from that low-level mix).

Thanks for the crufty test idea - nicely sums up what I'm talking about.
He probably doesn't like hypocrisy.

Your assertion is also an ad hominem. You can have a person that likes Google and its products and that hates this "open" letter. You can also have a person that hates Google because of its displayed hypocrisy from times to times and still likes Apple ... it's perfectly acceptable.

Not everyone is for "openness" and not everyone should be. Surely some economic, business or social models work better that way, but there's no way to tell if its the "be all / end all" since most models crack when it comes to scaling.

And Google is displaying some hypocritical behavior here since the crown jewels that actually generate money are closed. That isn't bad (they are a business after all) ... but confusing and damaging users is not the reason, and sending signals like that is just dishonest.

(although I've experienced working in a corporate setting before ... that man may actually be honest ... sniffing the company's values like cocaine is actually quite common :)
you can listen with your mouth full
I refute Yegge thusly: Which code would you rather maintain?
Is that actually illegal?
He's been a pretty outspoken critic of Apple app store policies
This is very true, the junior levels are all about being an 'excel monkey'.
Senator Feinstein introduces bill to prevent solar plant in CA desert
The rest of the post doesn't reflect that.
This is a classic forum shopping case brought by a Canadian company against an international company headquartered in Seattle, with neither company having any connection whatever with the venue (Eastern District of Texas) other than that MS Word happens to be sold there.

This particular district is famous for being wildly receptive to patent claims and is therefore used routinely by patent trolls searching for large verdicts and, indeed, a $240M verdict (plus add-on items totaling $50M), plus a permanent injunction, is a pretty big prize for "custom XML" technology that constitutes a very minor part of Word's functionality.

Not that there isn't a form of justice in Microsoft being bitten by patent abuses when it has benefited for years from patent abuses that it has heaped upon others.
Well, one's reach should exceed one's grasp, I suppose. I thought the original OLPC was pretty unlikely too, but they got half-way there, plus we now have a wide range of cheap netbooks available. This is imagined for 2012; with all the buzz this year over flexible screens and circuitry, that doesn't seem so far-fetched.
Was wondering why it was such a big changeset, then realized a good chunk of that is fixtures for tests.
Concrete5 CMS - How To Quickly Set up a Basic Concrete5 Template
Reverse Engineering the Twelve Days of Christmas
Summary: Anything but oatmeal will queer the deal. This is the same kind of petty bullshit that made me drop out of being a business major--there's no substance, just some arbitrary set of social signaling cues designed by and for insecure people who care what impression their choice in breakfast food will have on other people. Ugh.

While I'm sympathetic to edw's idea (don't eat at all), I don't think I'd go to a business breakfast unless I unusually had to. I'm not fit to socialize with people I don't live with that early.
I did a benchmark with Opera 10.50 alpha Chrome 4 dev and Safari 4. While the numbers not the same, Opera is still faster than Chrome and Safari. I didn't try webkit nightly because chrome dev outforms webkit nightly in my previous tests.

You can check it yourself.
The Taiwanese view Taiwan as the "true China" and dream of the day the Communists are out of power so they can go home. The Chinese view Taiwan as a rebel breakaway province and would very much like it "back". That's what Hero is about - any amount of sacrifice and slaughter is worth it to "reunify" China.
I prefer this rant: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2009/02/17/wanted-layout-s...

CSS still has the advantage over tables of better separating content from presentation. A big problem with CSS is it's still awkward to deal with layout, so it's somewhat understandable some people just prefer to give up and use tables.
Only if you do not know CSS or do not know the capabilities of modern browsers. But in this case you should be not writing HTML or CSS at all.
Surely Yegge would tell you that he would rather maintain the concise code with sparse comments. That's the whole point of the post.
Previous discussion on this, with more details http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=757504
Yet again, the title of reposts needs to be dated. I was bittersweet hopeful this was one of the final 3 posts he has promised us since May.
At the same time legitimate software patents can help to protect small software studios and startups. It is a double edged sword.
"Rather trite" is rather trite.
Also, Opera is of course the malware writer's choice du jour because it's tighter than a pigeon's chuff.

Quite funny seeing the recent Firefox menu button being a complete rip off of the leaked Opera 10.5 build.
what he said^^^.