skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wrote this post before reading the parent; I've moved it to be a reply to the parent because it's clearly related.

I have some cognitive dissonance on this issue. I'm not sure what to conclude, so I'll just air it.

On the one hand, I would love to see people in the field who are both high-performing and high-functioning socially.

On the other hand, the degree to which undergraduates (and, by extension, probably front-line programmers in general) "live and breathe CS" seems to be a very good heuristic for their proficiency with the nitty technical details. By "live and breathe" CS, I am not talking about passion for traditionally geeky activities like video games, DND, and so on; I am referring to their penchant for work as entertainment (not that we don't all need a break from time to time). This seems to preclude being a social individual who happens to do CS some of the time.

On the third hand, lots of researchers I've met seem to be better rounded.
Chinese Poker suffers from the same flaw I perceive here, which is that how to set your hand is a rather simple algorithm. For the most part players fit into two tiers, those who get it and those who don't. Those who do will abuse the ones who don't, but if all 4 players are in the same tier it's just random who wins. Playing it with a 2-7 lowball hand in the middle adds a bit of complexity, but not enough to make the game really interesting.

Lowball is a thing of beauty. The amount of tools an expert 2-7 triple draw player has at their disposal is unparalleled.
This site doesn't load on Chrome 5.0.307.11 beta on x64 Linux with Adblock 1.3.30. All that loads are a search box and orange header/banner with the ITWorld logo on a grey gradient background.
I am trying to learn; currently reading how to think like a computer scientist on Green Tea Press.
Your Get Satisfaction widget brought up the feedback options for Get Satisfaction itself instead of for your app.
This "rant" is just a part of an effort by the author to catalog the behavior of strings in ruby 1.9. You can see the whole project here: http://github.com/candlerb/string19

The main (runnable) documentation file is here: http://github.com/candlerb/string19/blob/master/string19.rb
Yes. I can type faster on my iPod touch or my friend's iPhone then I can on his netbook that he uses in class.

With the iPhone (and likely iPad), you'll know what to expect from the device soon enough. With the netbook, I can never quite shake the "This isn't quite a computer, even if its pretending to be one" feeling and get used to the keys being 10% smaller.
Try Roger Ebert's one: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/atom.xml
The implication is that the programmer must know what is used internally, though, because things will go horribly wrong otherwise. That's a sign of a very leaky abstraction - if you need to know the format and behaviour of the underlying byte stream, you'd probably be better off using the byte stream directly, the abstraction is just introducing uncertainty where it should be isolating from such concerns.
I like it.. sign me up .. almost like vulcan "live long and prosper" .. we can be known as the adamites
I find it surprising, too.

In my experience, designers are slower than programmers. It depends on the product but usually it takes some time to tweak all Internet Explorer issues.

To hijack the thread a bit: designer's tools are horrible. Photoshop misleads you, and designs done from PSD are easy to be poorly implemented. On the other hand, CSS/XHTML slows your creativity down.

I find this is an enormous opportunity for profit.
Do or do not. There is no try. (I.e. weigh up your plans thoroughly, but once you decide to implement one, implement it properly.)

IMO, I'd have to find some pretty amazing books to justify dropping HN entirely.
> and, by extension, probably front-line programmers in general

> This seems to preclude being a social individual who happens to do CS some of the time.

The best programmers I know (and I tentatively include myself here; though Im really an engineer) are highly social work hard/play hard type people.
Multitaskers perform much worse on cognitive and memory tasks
Having given up porting a medium-sized Rails application to Ruby 1.9 just last week I though I'd share some of my experience. Ruby 1.9's String implementation is fine, but will require lots of changing to existing code. Rails 2.3.5 is definitely _not_ ready for Ruby 1.9 and UTF-8. For example some regexps in helpers are not encoding aware, rack 1.0.1 which is required by 2.3.5 doesn't play nicely with encodings and many more small and annoying problems (template encoding for example; the app I was porting mostly uses HAML which supports Ruby 1.9's string encodings in the latest versions; but no luck for the few erb templates)

All in all, this is a huge transition which will take a while to propagate through the hole Rails stack.
Moving the Needle - My next project lives or dies on my blog
Offtopic: badave, I used to work on MeeHive, which is similar to yourversion. I'm now off on my own building a tool to help me read more widely. Would you be interested in trying it out? My email's in my profile. I'd love to hear about what you think is missing in google reader, yourversion, etc.
Buffett's advice is surprisingly applicable. His fundamental views haven't changed all that much over time. And although a lot of his success has come from being a better estimator of odds, or having more information, a decent fraction comes from his attitude towards the odds, and his tendency to acquire information.

That's worth emulating.
Why wouldn't a netbook+ChromeOS win?

A netbook is more of the same, its what we already have. The iPad is something new and different.

And, I've never even seen a video of a device using ChromeOS. I can't seem to bring myself to have a positive opinion of a device that's been announced for 9-10 months without so much as a screenshot or picture of a device running it.

I've made this point before, but, its worth repeating: I don't even know what market Google is targeting with ChromeOS. I've looked into it, but, I honestly have no idea.

Why would I download software approved by Apple, when I can just use the browser for most things?

Better experience. Sure, if you never use native apps, you won't know what you're missing. But, having used them and then going back, its not quite the same. There's something slightly off about the scrolling, about how everything behaves when pressed, etc.
Very good point! Thanks.
http://www.opinbot.com/reviews/show/agdvcGluYm90chwLEhVyZXZp...
But do people seriously think that computers are a guy thing nowadays? The CS barbie looks just like a secretary or any other profession to me. All moms I know (and my daughter is in the barbie demographic) have computers, most have laptops or netbooks. They use them for e-mail, internet, they are on Twitter, facebook, play online games, etc.

Now, I have no idea how a CS barbie should look. I totally agree with the author of the presentation that it is a good thing that Mattel did not make the CS barbie extra dorky. However, as it is now, I don't think girls will make any connection with programming.
I lke mnmalism.
The problem is that so little is actually written about the average business owner.
that's been the most difficult part for me, actually -- finding fun problems that I could work on that aren't completely impossible. I spent a lot of time reading books on Python when I should have just been playing with code.
I am working on at least 10 different "startups" right now. People think it's too many. It's not focused. But I think the world moves slower than I do, so I work on lots of projects simultaneously. If I hit a wall on one project, I procrastinate with another one.

A lot of people dedicate themselves to one project, but I liken it to putting all one's eggs in one basket. It doesn't take much to build something quick and see if anyone is interested. If they aren't, move on to something else.

You never know when someone might come along who is the missing piece in one of your projects.
Thanks for the reply --

And I'm not trying to be difficult, but... I'm not convinced.

In your scenario, the 500 comments are already loaded for any user. The comments you have authored are a small dataset, not a check for each and every comment. (At least, I HOPE not.) Similarly for your friends comments... and whether or not you are a mod is a single check.

For the average thread and user, this really should be a handful of checks. Surely, there are some very active users with many friends for whom the checks could hit numbers in the 1000s. But that should be the edge case, shouldn't it?

Same thing for loading a listing. Pulling subscriptions and merging sounds like just DB query design. All the "same things as we do for comments" should be minimized as described above.

Rending a page is just that -- rendering... highly customized, yes. But customized on the previously discussed criteria, not a while new set of customizations.

And like you said, if you aren't logged in, none of this applies.

Which all begs two questions:
1) What percentage of users are logged in?
2) What percentage of page renders really fit the scenario you described above, with enough comments and related data points that the checks hit 4 digits?

If you come back and say 90% of your page renders needs 1000 data points, I'd certainly concede the point. But I'd be very surprised. (And highly suggest that new algorithms are needed.)

But I'm sincerely honest what those percentages are?
Why Apple has already won with the iPad
I'm sorry, girl geeks don't wear mini skirts?

She must know different geeks than I do.
Unit testing achievements
The one thing I see lacking in this, so far, is the ability to find like-minded friends. I'm not deep 'in the scene' of either development or design, though I have plenty of developer friends (with a smattering of designers), but it would be neat to connect with NEW people whose work I could appreciate.
I'd assume Kramer
Thanks should be fixed now.
You prove my point - Nokia is ALREADY engaged in patent suits against apple!

http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/22/nokia-sues-apple-says-iph...

Again, it's not Apple with the problem, it's the patent system.

All this energy directed at Apple being some exception and "evil" for defending their patents, when everybody else in the field does the same damn thing, is misdirected.
The Java and .NET infrastructures make that choice for you too. I guess I wasn't there when Java first got started, it's possible that there was a backlash[1] against this decision by the people who are using encodings that aren't subsets of unicode. I don't get to see many "enterprise" systems, but I get the impression those applications where it's important to use some kind of not-unicode are sufficiently rare that they're best served by specialty libraries. You can't make everyone happy with one solution, but if a simple solution works for 99%, then I'd call that a roaring success.

[1] a backlash other than the OMG-2-bytes-per-ASCII-character hysteria, which is irrelevant for these purposes, they could just as well have chosen UTF-8
That's like saying 10 years ago, no one is forcing you to use Windows.

But, no one was forcing you to use windows 10 years ago; I was using Mac OS 9 almost daily, in addition to Windows 2000.
Thank you. I appreciate your honesty.
To play devil's advocate:

Apple does own these patents. Why is it evil for them to enforce them?

If Android was a Microsoft project, would people still think this legal action was evil?

If the iPhone OS was "open source" and there were other means of selling apps other than the app store, would people still think this legal action was evil?

If Google (the "underdog" (?)) owned these patents through the purchase of Android and was suing Apple, would people think Google was evil? Or would it be a David vs. Goliath story? (goliath vs. goliath?)

If I make BLOOPT.com which does the same thing as loopt.com, is it evil for Sam Altman to sue me, when he gets his patent?
That is one of the biggest things I'm working on right now. I'm calling it "people you should know" and I'm antsy to release it as soon as possible.
In some form, yes, I agree. There's too much ego in what he does for it to be otherwise.
"Once my CS friends realized I wasn't a "true geek", I wasn't invited to most of their hangouts - D&D nights, sci-fi screenings, or gaming nights. Eventually, I just wasn't invited to anything at all. I was sad, but busied myself with extracurriculars."

I hate to be that guy, but seriously? I have never witnessed this kind of behavior before. In fact, from my experience at Cal, all of the student groups are absolutely desperate for anyone to join, let alone a girl! If you just walk across campus you will be aggressively flagged down and invited to all sorts of things. If you are on Facebook, you will be shamelessly spammed with invites to all sorts of events. I just can't picture someone getting shunned from even an IEEE meeting or hardcore hackathon because they are "not a true geek".

I'd like to think adults are more mature than kindergarten-level exclusion, fellow hackers most of all.

She then goes on to say that she bought vintage gaming t-shirts and worked on some video games and afterwards, all the geeks were "cool" with her again. I don't really know what I'm trying to say here other than this seems totally unbelievable.
This is exactly the same as OEM computers and Windows. Microsoft have such dominance in OSes that they can't object to manufacturers making their own deals to set default search engines in browsers. It's an anti-trust issue. OEM manufacturers get paid by Google, Yahoo, etc to set the default to them.

Google can't get into the Mobile space with a platform and then expect they can enforce that their platform maintains their dominance in search. It's not competitive, and I'm sure they were expecting this to happen.

Disclaimer: I work for Y! but not in search.
Fabulis vs Citibank in social media
A nice summary by UberVU measuring the impact of the story across social media outlets.
Indeed. There are lots of things about building a site that require Calendar Time to elapse to see results. SEO results, A/B results, AdWords performance, word-of-mouth spreading.

A lot of that stuff can happen in parallel with development on the site, but it's always nice to have a few other projects to work on to make that Calendar Time tick by a little faster.
This is something I realized about myself a long time ago. I've met several people (mostly women, for what it's worth) who swear they get more done when they multitask. I don't believe them.

I drew this on my whiteboard a long time ago to describe how I felt about it. http://www.flickr.com/photos/timothymorgan/62139938/
That's a great blog - it's really interesting to see what the code-o-sphere looks like to a newcomer!

I saw that you were having a little trouble dealing with some of the proper-noun Concepts thrown at you in Beginning Ruby, and that you weren't entirely sure where to go next in terms of finding exercises not already in the book.

As far as the Concepts go, it's probably best to approach them all as a bunch of different ways of solving the one main problem in programming: complexity[1]. When you're coding anything longer than ten lines, you're usually tackling a problem that's too big to fit into your head all at once. So, you need to break the problem into a bunch of little chunks. Coders do this by building abstractions.

All an abstraction is is the act of deciding you've got a problem ("I need a way to print the contents of the screen!"), solving that problem (by writing code that grabs whatever's being output to the screen, translates it into something the printer can deal with, and prints it), and then hiding that solution from anyone who has that problem. The key here is that you're hiding the solution, but you do expose an interface - a "print_document" function, say - that allows them to benefit from your hard work without having to think about it[2].

That's really what nearly every programming technique is all about: minimizing complexity. So when you see big scary words like Encapsulation and Polymorphism and Mix-Ins, just remember: they're almost certainly just different ways of minimizing the amount of stuff you have to think about at any point in time, and if they're any good at letting you do that, they're probably worth learning about.

Oh! And as far as finding fun exercises to work on goes: Try writing something that'll automate a chore in your daily life. Say, an automated grocery list, or a "books to read" list, or an apocalypse-detector that checks every five minutes to see if Google's down. You know what they say about the sky and the limit and all that :)

-

[1] “Managing complexity is the most important technical topic in software development. In my view, it’s so important that Software’s Primary Technical Imperative has to be managing complexity" - Steve McConnell, Code Complete

[2] "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them" - Alfred North Whitehead
It's a tribute to Android that this is possible.
States to fight dismal college completion rates
The Nook: The Real Man's Electronic Reader - Hilarious
I wasn't "blabbing" about something I got away with. I reached out to Jason because I mistakenly thought that he might be willing to help a guy in a tight spot. I've never been in a situation like this before. That was obviously a mistake.

Also, I've been careful to only reveal information about my friend that was already public. See Daniel's mixergy interview: http://mixergy.com/daniel-brusilovsky/

It's already known that Daniel received an iMac and who he received it from.
I don't know how you get over the fear of being last on everything. I'm working on 3 VERY VERY simple projects right now; calling the 'projects' is almost a stretch, and while I genuinely don't expect any of them to make much (if any) money, I'm trying to get through the 'start everything, complete nothing' mantra that I've apparently been plagued with since relocating to the DC area.

I honestly can't imagine a worse scenario for me, with the particular type of brain plague that I have, so I'd love to hear about them as they are completed (or even as they near completion.)

And sincerely, good luck on all fronts.
Cool. So it's kinda like TokBox but without the suck.

Gimme an API and a sense that you'll be around for a while and I'm in. Better still, give me the tools to set up my own server.

And charge me money for it.
opinbot - that's a funny site. I can't tell if the review of people's twitter feeds is real or satire.
I did indeed just take the link from her twitter.
Reviews are free, but I charge $ to be a product manager :)
No offense axod, but you have a big anti-tablet bias, and I think it undermines your objectivity, the point that you keep repeating your anecdotal evaluation of your immediate family members not being likely adopters as if they were the median. You seem to be reasoning from an n of 3 or 4 people.

I find it easy to see why Apple expects it to be popular. I may be wrong, but the (apparent) fact that lots of people are interested in buying an iPad suggests they can think of ways to use it, and seriously doubt that Apple would be investing lots of money in launching one without assuring themselves of likely demand first.

Me, I would rather not buy an iPad - even though it looks like a very good product, technically - because I am increasingly put off by Apple's aggressive vertical integration and business tactics (like this patent lawsuit). But however I feel about that, I can't deny their expertise in engineering and marketing. Even if I buy a competitor's product, the price and specifications will have been influenced by Apple's offering.

I feel like we (computer users) have already gone through this 'utility' barrier many times - did average consumers 'need' the mouse, the GUI, videogame consoles, color graphics, dedicated monitors (vs a TV adapter) etc.. etc.? Well, no, not as such, but it seems that people's desire for a technology often forms prior to the availability of tools that properly exploit it, even though their use cases may be inchoate.

I'll give you two examples of non-computer geeks who nevertheless have use cases for a tablet, with the understanding that these too are anecdotal.

One is down the street from me: the people who work at the 7-11 use an oldish Panasonic tablet computer for inventory management. they probably don't need multitouch and the software looks a bit primitive, but they seem well comfortable treating it as a digital clipboard that they can hold with one hand and operate with the other. Now, you don't need a degree to work at 7-11 or even to get your own store, just a willingness to work at a small 24-hour retail outlet. 7-11 is a mature franchise business so I don't imagine that they rolled out the use of tablets to their employees on a whim - more likely, such devices hit a sweet spot between usability and capability which proved beneficial for limiting the cost of inventory control.

Another area is for creatives in a studio. I work with audio and video for a living, and for some tasks using a mouse is royal pain in the ass. There is a thriving industry in hardware control surfaces for musicians, and many of them are repurposed by 3d animators, compositors, and other video professionals because the cost of dedicated hardware for the latter is stratospheric. A general purpose device with multitouch is already a winner in this market. Cheaper ones will sell like hotcakes.

Add enough of these market segments together, and you're looking at some real money.
Do we really need to see these 'This is why NYC is awesome for startups' posts every week?

I mean I'm getting sick of these and I live here. I can only imagine how non-New Yorkers feel about them.
I learned programming by hacking on other people’s code – manipulating it to fit my needs. Try to find an open source project you can mess with.

I can’t say for sure how much fun this’ll be for you: The next time you think to yourself, “I wish this thing worked like this” or “I wish this thing had this feature”, if it’s open source, just load up the code and start playing with it. Your problem might be easier to solve than you’d think.
Typhoons trigger earthquakes (Does good weather mean bigger earthquakes?)
Pain Killers Accelerate Hearing Loss With Age
And a head scratching mystery as to why AT&T would want to....
I'd consider the lack of that info a bug, unless you are expecting people to deduce that. ;)
Inane or Brilliant? Definitely Selling Well: a Hands Heater for iPhone
Tiny Chip Made of Paper Diagnoses Diseases and Costs Just a Penny
Excellent, thanks for pointing that out! I hadn't seen that.
"Hardly free of warts" doesn't even begin to cover the pain that's dealt with if you have to deal with these external encodings.

And, if you've got loads of data in an encoding that doesn't roundtrip, it's hardly an edge case.

Ruby's implementation is supposed to be such that if you want UTF-8 support and know that your (text) inputs and outputs are always going to be UTF-8, you never have to think anything differently than you did in Ruby 1.8. If it isn't working that way, then I think there's a bug.
"People say it takes 10′000 hours of practice to become an expert in something. That’s roughly ten years."

Assuming you work twenty hours a week, which is an assumption he should explicitly state, rather than stealing it (uncited) from Malcolm Gladwell.
Comcast upgrades iPhone app to allow mobile DVR programming
David Byrne had a recent piece about writing music to be heard in particular environments, which seems related: http://journal.davidbyrne.com/2010/02/021410-valentines-day....