skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was my first thought as well. But I guess it depends on how often they need to update things. It might be quite nice to be able to deploy design tweaks in an hour rather than 30.

But if this was a one off or very infrequent then I think you're probably right. Just leaving it running over a weekend might have been better. But then they wouldn't have got to play with the shiny new tools :)
> will have an annoying song playing in the background -- exactly with the intent of driving some people away

I never realized that these were attempts to drive people away. I always saw them as hilarious. I would just mute the page if it was too annoying.
DejaVu Sans Mono for me. It looks great and it's freely available for all platforms I use.
Or perhaps they have already been where we are and have moved past it realizing there's a better way to live.

This one does not seem to fit the story as portrayed. Lets put aside the fact that "a better way to live" is likely be highly subjective and assume that they choose to live in tune with nature despite the ability to develop advanced technology.

As long as they remembered this fact, that they deliberated put aside technology, they would have behaved differently towards the humans. They wouldn't have needed the marine to show them how to blind the clearing machines, they would have already known. They surely would have at least debated pulling out the old tech when their soul tree was threatened even if they finally chose not to. And they likely would have approached the humans to try to teach them their ways and show them they were "better", or if they wanted to be isolated they would have had the knowledge to be more effective in driving the humans away which they didn't even seem to try to do until the humans attacked them.

Of course you could assume they forgot, but that seems implausible. A technological civilization that choose to abandon their technology should have little problem making sure that the message of deliberately eschewing technology and why would be passed down. If they didn't their descendants would be likely to start the cycle all over again a few generations. Also, their soul tree would be likely to hold this knowledge if no other method was passed (as I mentioned in a different post, the limits of the trees information storage and transmission are never made explicit, but it seems very likely it would have that particilar piece...)
It is because true productivity is very hard to identify, specially when you factor in quality, mainteinability, efficiency and timeliness. That is why managers should be as qualified as the people they manage.

Programmers do some thinking & some typing, the more you do of one, the less you do of the other. (don't remember the original author)

The lazy engineer is the best engineer.. If not for lazy people we would still be living in caves
Yeah, the headline is a poor analogy for an otherwise well-written and useful atricle.
Dr. Greg Wilson (editor of the Beautiful Code book that spawned Beautiful Architecture later) is working on a new book that talks about exactly this kind of thing.

http://pyre.third-bit.com/blog/archives/2910.html

Basically, he says that professional understanding of software is still in the lore stage where we gossip about what works and doesn't rather than empirical studies based on evidence.

About this specific number though (the programmers are X times more productive) that's often repeated:

To date, these studies have mostly been confined to academia. Most professional developers are vaguely aware of some of the results, but often get the details wrong. For example, hundreds of books, blog posts, and presentations claim that the best programmers are forty times better than the worst—or fifteen, or a hundred, or some other number. Almost none of the people repeating that claim realize that it originally came from a very small study (twelve people) run for a very short time (one afternoon) in an era of batch processing and punch cards.
Amazons own SQS service has a simple solution to this problem. When you get an item from the queue it is temporarily hidden then once you've processed it successfully you explicitly delete the item from the queue. If the item is not deleted within the set timeout period then it goes back into the queue ready for another worker to have a go at. I assume RabbitMQ has something similar.

Actually I'm not sure why they used RanbitMQ rather than SQS for this task. SQS seems to me to be a perfect fit and there's no extra effort involved to set it up.
Being super-productive isn't always wise for the black belt coder. In the traditional world of commercial programming if you solve the problem in a couple of hours and then just spend the rest of the day fooling around, reading scholarpedia or working on your own pet projects managers often don't look upon this kind of behavior favourably - they think you're not being productive, when in fact the opposite is the case.

From having spent most of my adult life in the world of software development I've noticed that it's the programmers who make a lot of noise, huff and puff, and spend all day battering a keyboard looking stressed that tend to get pay rises and eventually promotions into managerial positions. This is really just down to the limitations of human psychology. If you look like you're working hard you must be being more productive than someone who did the job without fuss, then went out to get a sandwich.
Avatar: Does sustainability have to be static?
Inc and Fast Company at the moment. They are usually a mixed bag of good and not so good. For the price though ($12/year) they're tough to beat for decent on-the-go reading.
I agree that sites.google.com needs to appear differently. It actually took me a minute to realize that article wasn't on a google blog (I'm reading on my phone). Feature request here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=996374
Not necessarily. There's plenty of horrible, horrible code that doesn't get changed because it currently works, and it would be too much of a hassle to try and de-tangle it. There's also really awesome code that gets replaced because the requirements have changed and it needs to do something completely different.
Too bad their phones don't (yet) have a reputation for quality construction.
I think at non slow speeds, most people have about the same stopping distance.

This is because the faster you are going the harder you typically press on the brake.

Very very few times will you need an emergency stop and max out your brakes.

Most of the time you do gentle braking, and a slightly harder braking at greater speeds.

The net result is that typical (not minimum) braking distances do not change much with speed.
You'd use SystemTap for kernel-level tracing and breakpoint debugging on Linux. Check the wiki for a bunch of useful pre-cut tap files.

Linux does indeed have a port of dtrace, but it's not legal due to Sun's license.
doesn't seem like that's possible in OS X due to no /proc natively. I'm going to see if I can do it with MacFUSE & procfs..
It's science fiction, but (the better) half of Stephen Baxter's Coalescent (http://www.amazon.com/Coalescent-Stephen-Baxter/dp/034545785...) is set in 4th c. Britain. Nothing else has given me that sense of being there when the wavefront of the empire receded.
The only problem I have with this idea: why didn't I think of it?
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9xmn8/what_we_a...
$300 is accessible to "hobbyist" researchers (hackers) - this is the main point of this story - and hackers will crack DRM.
Apple, Amazon And Google's Simple Success
Understanding Haskell Monads - a great read
@neurotech1 : Thanks for the BioEra link. Hadn't heard of it.

Have you run into any development tools that will allow you to send threshold triggers quickly enough to a web browser rendering engine?? (like BioExplorer does with their Flash gateway)
Exposed (or nearly) nerves for communication. I imagine that they lead to a lobe in the brain that's able to both generate and process mind-to-mind communication. Maybe something like our temporal lobes and Broca's area which handle hearing and language processing.

If this type of appendage evolved early enough, then all of the descendants with a common ancestry could maintain a common communication link. This would have had to evolve very early to be shared between both plants and animals, but I suppose it's conceivable if you can imagine plants with a nervous system. Another possibility is that there is a strong mechanism for genetic transfer between different species and kingdoms (maybe very flexible retroviruses or unseen genetic engineering), but then you might expect to see more shared features between plants and animals.

The part that I didn't understand why why the Na'vi would always be the "masters" in the link with the other animals (it seemed more peer-to-peer in the link with the trees).
Unexpected Problems for Quantum Money (arXiv blog)
I don't know what you found through Google, but it was a bad description of the research cited in Peopleware. For a start the research they discuss was done in the 1980s, not the 1960s, and the methodology of their study was quite carefully done.

Read http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_8 for a much better overview of what Peopleware actually says. Of more interest than the productivity differences measured is the discussion of what factors were part of those productivity differences. Once you've read that, you may find the result much more believable. (There is a lot of detail in the book that is left out of the summary, but that's in the nature of what summaries are.)
15 Ways to Leverage Off Page SEO for Your Search Engine Rankings
Four words: Smoke on the Water.

More often, though, I get a Bach Fugue - they can last for days. If I'm really serious about removing an "earworm" I recite poetry, ad I've specifically memorised a few poems for that purpose. It was one of my earliest "Mind Hacks".
In the interest of empathizing with the other side, here's what this sounds like if you're pro-life: "As I understand it, there were Africans who were going to die in Africa anyhow. The difference being that now we might get some use out of them. Its not like we went to Africa for the slaves, they're just a by-product of the resource exploitation."
Stream Processing in Clojure
Well especially with the example of Twitter, it started as a small little internal tool inside the company. It was a small project that engineers were just doing in their spare time. So that's one example. Facebook too from what I've read. Facebook was just a little stalking like tool Mark created with his friends for Harvard kids. I'm sure when they started they never saw a real scope outside of that. Both of these small projects grew into large projects, because of their success. What I'm trying to say is that you typically can't set out to create just a small project.

The nterface story was definitely just the next level of luck based co-founders. Although, we really did meet by chance. I probably should have gone into more detail that I did in fact hire Dave and Jason to design/program a small project that I was working on. I contracted them out rather than chose them to be my co-founders. It then evolved into something more.

What I'm stressing more in the article is that luck plays a huge role for first time entrepreneurs: smaller network, less experience, can only find people with similar experience, etc.
Extending JavaScript Objects and Classes
Selenium: web app tester. Record/playback tests in Firefox, dumps Python code.
Thats the first thing that came to my mind when I read it as well. DTrace (and strace to a lesser extent) are the first things which come to mind whenever you've got to debug anything or atleast get a clue about whats going on in a runaway process.
I really enjoy IEEE Spectrum, although it's not worth the price of professional membership to me now that I'm losing my student status. It's pretty deeply technical, but not way off into academic land, and it gives me a great read on where the EE industry is at. Things like crazy new semiconductor technologies or batteries that will enable whole new categories of electronics show up in Spectrum all the time. The future of technology is notoriously hard to predict, but Spectrum at least provides an overview of what might be coming.

The best part? It's available online: http://spectrum.ieee.org/
The Selenium plugin/system looks really nice. I just about wrote my own (the Python part, anyway), but then found this. :-)
Cooliris | What Is Cooliris
I♥cabbages: Circumventing Kindle For PC DRM (updated)
There's also Joshua Bloch's (the author of Java's collections framework and "Effective Java") talk "How design a good API and Why It Matters":

http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/effective-api-design
Amazon's Kindle has copyright protection hacked
Adobe - Adobe Flash Player
Warning: lsof can cause a kernel panic in OSX. I haven't tested it since leopard, but if you loop lsof continuously you'll hit it. There's some kind of race condition.
I agree. Labels better capture how Python works, because the assignmest statement causes another variable to point to the same object instead of copying the object, e.g.:

>>> a = [1,2]
>>> b = a
>>> a[0]='h'
>>> b
['h', 2]
i might be proud at first, but then i would be sad to think that others have failed so terribly and with so little guidance or wisdom. i would be saddened by my pitiful pride at a product so limited by its single creator.

my proudest moments are when i'm collaborating with such flow that no one knows exactly where each idea came from, and at the end we have a powerful, awesome product that none of us could have built alone, that is seemingly greater than the sum of its contributors. i can understand it, i can see some of my contributions, and yet it is greater than me. add some social good and purpose and then i'd feel me some good pride.
so you won't have to pay the people?
it's not really surprising that he is on their radar, 4chan is pretty much synonymous with the underbelly of the internet + they are a pretty big site by traffic alone(Top 750 website)
I couldn't agree more, and will tell you that we're already there. I'm working on a project right now with an exceedingly complex JSON API. There isn't a day that goes by that I wish I could have gone back in time and had the team use XML instead.
Apple is terrified of iphone web-apps being as good as native apps
Last week we all had a very interesting investigation ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=997508 ) of how apple seems to have come up with a css/js/html5 framework called pastryKit to make really good "native-looking" web-apps on the iphone before they ever started with the whole app store idea. Some of us, like myself went and looked at it ( http://help.apple.com/iphone/3/mobile/ ) and then pulled it down and put it up on github so we can take a look at what they are doing and learn how we too could do some of the same css transforms, transitions and "flick" scrolling like they do in their code.

Well, it looks like Apple is scared to death of that idea. They want to make sure that the web-app experience on the iphone (except for their own help system) remains crippled and seemingly second class when you compare it to one of their native apps (even though their own help system shows the it is possible for it to be just as good). It looks like they went straight to gitHub and forced them to take it down. Here's the email I got from them. Bummer!!

I'm writing to inform you that we have received a takedown notice from Apple regarding your repo, PastryKit. We have made the repo and all forks private so that they are no longer publicly accessible. If we do not receive a counter-notice from you within 10-14 days the repo will be deleted.

I would like to encourage you to read up on the DMCA takedown procedure and your rights here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act

Tekkub
GitHub Tech Support
http://support.github.com/
Join us on IRC: #github on freenode.net
Discussion group: github@googlegroups.com
I wrote a crappy Python script one afternoon about eight years ago to address a client requirement discovered very close to implementation time. I think it's still running in a production environment -- at least I was told so as of a couple years ago. Was it great code? Nope. It split one file into four based on a particular column's value in a CSV.
Strange but true: James Kellaris, one of my marketing professors from college, is the guy who coined the term "earworm" - it's his primary research topic: http://www.business.uc.edu/earworms
Apple Asking App Developers to Prepare for Large Screens?
How a new technology disrupted the US newspaper industry - in 1845
Two swiss knives for me then. One in the right pocket, the other in the left. ;)

Gonna write about strace in one of the next articles. And possibly also about dtrace in another article.
Aviation expert Clive Irving: what went right with AA plane crash in Jamaica
I'm about done with people comparing benchmarks on burstable CPU environments like Rackspace Cloud or Slicehost with a fixed CPU environment like EC2. Over the ridiculously short period of your benchmark, the burstable environment will almost always be faster. Over the long term, not so much. Please compare apples to apples.
The client was slow in delivering the data and we needed it within 48 hours, with the possibility of generating the output multiple times to discover any errors or other issues.
Don't subscribe to any magazines anymore. No time to read them.

But Wired still sends me free copies, which usually sit unread next to the couch until I take a flight somewhere and need reading material. I also get two alumni magazines which serve the same purpose.

Used to subscribe to Archaeology, Fine Cooking, Scientific American, Discover.
This is the reality of many projects. We got the full dataset around 48 hours before the output was needed. See my comment above too.
Not completely sure what you're asking for, here, but Command Line Fu might be in the ball park:

http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse
The Honest $10,000 Spam
I throw out about 50% of all code written for A/B tests within, typically, a week or two. If it weren't for all the business value added by it, I guess I would suck as a programmer.
From what I've seen, most successful businesses outside of the dot com space are started by 2 or more people who left one company to do another venture after working together for years.

Think of all the network hardware manufacturers that former Cisco employees have spawned, for example.

There's nothing "lucky" about it.
Non Constant Speed of light
We uploaded the generated files to S3 at the end of each individual job. We could have used AMQP's 'ack' for each message, but it turned out not to be necessary.
Full disclosure:
Judging by this man's twitter (@ckeck), he seems to be employed by Rackspace. That may or may not have something to do with the tests he ran and the settings he chose. (There are an awful lot of "Test failed" entries under competitor columns, hmm...)
I graduated from the Magnet program in 2000.
Apple Hints Tablet for 2010? "Larger screen devices"
Maven gets partially absorbed by modern JVM languages …
The absorption of Maven by JRuby and Groovy is an impressive demonstration how the Java platform grows and how good ideas and concepts are adapted and evolved.
If I slam on my brakes for an emergency (animal in road, accident ahead, etc.), I can stop from 60mph in approximately 110-120 feet. That's not that far from a magically appearing brick wall.

At 60mph, you'll cover the whole of that distance in approximately 1.25 seconds.

Assuming even a few tenths of a second to notice that I'm stopping, and a few more tenths to realize that I'm stopping FAST, and those "large distances" start to look quite reasonable. Particularly if your car can't brake like a sports car, or if your mind sometimes drifts.
Moral considerations aside, if life on another planet had evolved with an interconnected signal network then writing or complex artifice might not yield any particular advantage.

As for how that could happen to begin with, perhaps a high magnetic flux from the nearby gas giant would favor the development of sensory organs for that medium. Birds are sensitive to the earth's comparatively weak magnetic field (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7268/full/nature0...) and there are several varieties of fish that can generate electricity inside their bodies and use it to communicate (http://www.livescience.com/animals/060602_electric_fish.html). That aspect didn't seem far-fetched to me.

I was more perplexed by the morphology of some animals - for example I wasn't clear on the benefit of 4 front legs, 4 eyes, and gill-type breathing...but it didn't interfere with my enjoyment of the film, which I'm looking forward to seeing again, probably several times. 'see' being the operative word...people complain about the crudity of the dialog, but the win for me is that you could watch it without knowing a word of English and still 'get' the story - which is far easier said than done.
It's a crap shoot. Just like starting a business is. I was the technical-guy (CTO)/co-founder with a "business" partner (CEO) many years ago. All went well for the first few years, but as we grew he was unable to move from the entrepreneurial role and let the organization grow. His micromanagement doomed an attempted expansion into a larger market and the company floundered because of it.

Getting a company off the ground takes very different skills than what is necessary for growing a management team and developing real business strategies. It’s kind of a catch-22 - you need the entrepreneur to get started, but once you get there he or she may not be the right person to get you to the next level.
funny how http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=33 and http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=34 have the same color background (even the dot on the wall by the upper right hand corner is the same) but the signs they are holding are across the world from each other...
This is a great piece of information, thanks. I always wonder at the shifting X, and am often perplexed that programmers who will take almost NOTHING for granted accept this as gospel truth without any corroborating sources.
You don't have to use lsof for that. Just find the pid of the process that has it open, then cd /proc/<pid>/fd and then ls -l

lsof doesn't really do anything for you if you know the pid already. (But it's great if you don't know the pid.)

Then, look through the list for your file, and copy the file descriptor just like in the article.
Criminal Escapes Prison, Taunts Police via Facebook
Now there is a game which is very close to one I was thinking of myself. There is going to be a lot of this stuff coming, people running around on the streets in their augmented reality world shooting dragons...
> The pragmatic and well educated Communist Party leaders

Well, you can hardly call first generation of communist revolutionists educated. Most of them know shit about economy or industry. However, the generation after open & reform can be called pragmatic & educated
EC2 isn't bad. Under Rails, I use Rio to store a lot of remotely fetched images (it's one line to fetch a remote image in Rio), HTTParty to handle some JSONP, and EC2 bandwidth is free when using Heroku. Nice setup, the only disadvantage is that Heroku's file systems are read-only, so you have to write temporarily to /tmp, and then again to EC2.
4chan clearly means a lot to him, god knows why

Forgive me if I presume too much, but it sounds to me like you've never had a wildly successful project of your own.
eWeek / Had to lie about my corporate title but its been covering business and technology well for decades http://eweek.com

Design News / the best engineering magazine I read - mechanical, product engineering focus / http://designnews.com (free, I qualified)

Technology Review / let my subscription lapse but excellent MIT-written periodical on technology in the labs