skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Feature flags are usually just a poor-man's way to separate development (changing) and live (stable) code branches. They have explosive complexity (2^n combinations need to be tested). They require you to contort your code unnaturally to minimize the number of conditionals.
Don't you think you'd be better off posting that "I've run the clock out" paragraph as it's own thing? It seems important enough to be it's own post.

Thank you for all your articles. I've learned a lot from them over the years and consider them really first class. Hell, my printout of the Joel Test is one of the three things taped to my desk (The other two being Merlin Mann's 5 Inbox-zero words and "Your Company's App" by Eric Burke)
I studied classical but was interested in guitar noodling a la Steve Vai. I played some of his stuff live around 17. I studied under a student of Segovia (or a student of, I can't really remember) and "learned faster than anyone he knew." My parents drove me 500 miles round trip for lessons. I don't have any of that stuff but could send you my punk-doo wap band's ep if you really want to hear it. It's pretty rough around the edges but we had a lot of fun.
It's interesting though because Microsoft would have to lose probably hundreds of these cases before they would be in support of removing software patents given the amount that they have.
It's the same sort of idea as the old Whole Earth Catalog. Give people access to information, resources, and enabling technology. Empower people to do it themselves.
They find it amusing, and they do not mind. If you look at the comments of the user, they authorize their own identification if we can do so.
Dude, what are you smoking? The only person for whom Kanye's brand may be tainted is George Bush, who probably secretly thinks Kanye is hilarious. You seem to be severely out of touch with contemporary culture and reality.
The "home sewing" comparison is false because you pay for the non-exclusive use of a pattern and the materials to produce your own clothing. People who pirate music aren't paying for any use license and aren't creating their own music.
The problem with that was threads with a 1 karma parent and a 100 karma reply end up at the bottom. With karma displayed, it's easier to spot important posts.
How old is h264? When will the patents expire?
IGroups: Apple's New iPhone Social App in Development
Are you serious? Please tell both of those stories.
B.F. Skinner still holds on to a dualist framework.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AepqpTtKbwo (3:00m)

In this video you can see him still using internal and external seperate. Behaviorism to him means the direction of causality is external to internal and it contrasts it to the notion of free-will, where the direction is internal to external. He doesn't completely reject the notion of the metaphysical, just the importance of it, otherwise there would be no black box in his black-box experimental science. Behaviorism gets pretty boring when you can't study thoughts or ideas.

Non-dualism posits that what we associate with the mind does exist, and it exists in the same manner or plane of existence as everything else. Basically, a thought or idea or emotion physically exists in the same sense that a rock, river, or black hole does. Studying the brain and neurons is the study of thoughts and ideas. Evidence in neuroscience heavily supports non-dualism, and there is a lot of awesome information you can read. I submitted a John Searle video from the IBM Cognitive Computing lecture series, it didn't get picked up but a link is here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3295448672203577230...
Can you please elaborate? (Either of you.) Thanks!
"stab SVN/CVS in the back"???

I'm not sure why you're borrowing an assassination metaphor to describe someone's shift in technology choices. Technology aren't people.
I create adventure. I leave slain dragons in my wake. I build monuments, plant flags, discover wonders, and lead armies.

I sing duets, dance tangos, and play concertos.

I cook banquets. I wheel, make deals, and strike bargains. I purchase fruit in large quantities. I partake and imbibe. I articulate, expound, and drive home the point. I maintain a strong moral fiber and act with integrity.

I forge trails and bushwhack through jungles. When I am not walking, I am running. I sail and drive and fly and ride and crawl.

I write encyclopaedias. I learn, study, forecast, ponder, and calculate. I know the answer.
It looks like easy to game HN
Well, if you have a well defined protocol / interface for your component, and you have a runtime versioning mechanism (something as simple differently named DLLs will do if you're at the C level), then you ought to be able to do both: put the new code in a separate branch, but still switch in the old code at runtime.

An advantage of keeping an old code in its own branch is that it's less likely to become incompatible through random changes. In particular, I'm thinking of bug compatibility: there may be bugs you wish to fix in the new code, but you don't want to fix in the older code because of third-party dependencies.
That's just life in technology as the tools improve.

1) Stop manually backing up versions, that's error-prone. Use RCS!

2) Stop using RCS, it doesn't scale. Use CVS!

3) Stop using CVS, it's too complicated. Use SVN!

4) Stop using SVN, it makes it hard to merge branches. Use Hg/GIT!

... And someday, we'll be saying
5) Stop using Hg/GIT. They ________. Use _______!

Same thing for hardware, and languages, and frameworks... and just about everything.
shrug
Dreamy I know, but you'd hope that a coalition would form to defend HTC from this, unless they rather be next:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...
Thanks for your posts!

I've learned more about programming (as in doing so) than at my university. And it helped me recognize the patterns you dissected when on my first job -- made it much easier to quit.
My girlfriend and I never come less than 3 times each per fuck. Multiples are the best. If we are masturbating we can we can each come about 10 times in less than an hour. Go figure.
Elevation of Privilege (EoP): Microsoft's IT security card game
I think this is relevant to this (sometimes justified) accomplishment boasting here.

"A truly rich man is someone whose children runs into their arms even when they're empty"

"My daughter one time said... We were leaving church, like a church party. We were driving home, in the car.
And she didn't want to go home. She was like 3 or 4 at the time. I don't want to go to Mommy's house. I don't want go to Mia's house.

OK, we'll go to Daddy's house. OK.

We pulled into our house and she started freaking out crying. Why? She thought my house was the office.

And that's when I realized I needed to start pulling back.

To step it up, be a baller at home"

- Josh James, founder of Omniture

From video originally posted by adammichaelc (I highly recommend the entire 1-hr video for inspiration and a kick-in-the-seat-of-your-pants)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1164815
Once upon a time I designed a versioning system for an object graph. It was for an application framework that was meant to be designed in an IDE, and didn't have source code, per se (it did have little snippets of code). But designing it around graph deltas, rather than versions, was always the right thing to do: that much was self-evident.

Even as I use svn today, I turn almost all my work into patches. For every bug I fix and every feature iteration, it gets turned into a patch. That way it's usually pretty easy if I have to apply it to an older branch for a hotfix or whatnot.
So does this mean anything? Or is this what they would say even if they were really hoping to settle?
When I was younger I played a cello solo of Cavalleria Rusticana Intermezzo. It was almost 4 minutes in length and filled, at most, half a music sheet (~8 bars). Graphically the music wasn't complex, but it was all the little details (soft, loud, fast, slow, extremely long holds) that made it interesting. Just looking at it you wouldn't be able to make sense of it. Only through playing it would the timing and pattern emerge.
I think this may not be a "fair" example (are any). There have been severe criticisms of Mugabe for a number of things including cronyism.

A lot of the media reports I read in Britain suggested much of the land didn't in fact become common land, but actually was handed over to Mugabe supporters, particularly ex-paramilitaries.

While I'm not going to dispute that commercial farming by a smaller number of individuals was more productive, it may not be entirely fair to attribute this to a tragedy of the commons.
I phrased it like that because the individual share varies by country and the article is about HTML5 video and Theora which is a cross browser issue. I have never heard anyone use that kind of phrase before, even though I think they should for any discussion of browser standards support. Especially now the IE-Firefox duo are being challenged in the US by Safari and worldwide by Chrome, and doubly-especially in Europe.

This is important in the case of say Russia in which the top four browsers are Opera with 32.8%, Firefox with 30.8%, IE with 28.43% and Chrome with 5.71% (data from http://gs.statcounter.com/)

Just looking at the Firefox stats here and ignoring Opera would be highly misleading regarding viability of Theora in this market which is near 70% (assuming up-to-date browsers).
From the sounds of this report, cases hinge on how personable the main lawyer seems to be.
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Writeup of Confoo which took place in Montreal, Quebec from March 8th to 10th. The writeup includes slidecasts, presentation decks and links for more information.
I have occasionally been bothered by the scores of my own comments and the comments of others as they relate to mine. I would feel attacked or spited or somehow otherwise wronged if I saw my own witty scribbling voted down while someone else's similarly witty (and, might I add, less-awesome-because-I-didn't-write-it) comment voted up or untainted by a down vote.

This bothered me and sometimes I'd get disappointed in the community's apparent unwillingness to appreciate my obvious total superiority in all matters of opinion. Sometimes I'd stop commenting for awhile - after all, they don't deserve my great and valuable insights!

Eventually, probably in the shower, I began to realize that I was an idiot. It's stupid to get bent out of shape when people don't agree with your every word or understand your every joke. After reading over some of my lower rated comments, it also became clear that most of the time they actually sucked. :) I decided to make a conscious effort to watch myself for that kind of thinking and to curb it before it dominated my mood the rest of the day. It has influenced me deeply in ways that extend far beyond this site.

I'm now a chang(ed/ing) man. I'd be lying if the occasional down vote didn't still irritate me now and then, but I've successfully trained myself to use the comment scores as a reminder that we're not all the same and that it is a valuable and important thing to internalize. I try to learn from it.

If you want to hide the scores - more power to you. It's no skin off my back and it doesn't affect my enjoyment of the site in the least. You don't have to feel guilty about doing it. I would just ask that you consider putting some real time into trying to figure out why the scores bother you and decide, once a reason is identified, if it's something worth changing your mind over or not. Perhaps it isn't. No big deal. We all see the world slightly differently.
Indeed. It's a very common pattern to "has a" something that does some role, and then provide varying implementations. Image::PNG, Image::JPEG; Logger::File, Logger::Syslog, Logger::Database, Logger::Email, etc.

This may give you millions of combinations, but since the various parts that don't need to interact can't interact, this isn't really a problem. OOP is nice when used by people that know OOP.
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You wouldn't agree there that some fields are more scientific than others? Is physics not more of a science than mechanical engineering? Is linguistics not more of a science than english? Is logic\mathematical analysis not more of a science than philosophy?

Abstracted fields are useful because they can be practical and an application of knowledge. That doesn't make them natural science. I say this not as a "buff" but as someone whose primary in university was cognitive science and has done their fair share of hooking people up to EEGs.
I hope so.

I have no A-levels and no prior college education (due to being on the street at that point).

The risk I think I have is that if I find myself out of work then no matter how good I am I won't find a job in a world where HR systems have check boxes to filter candidates. If "has degree" is a pre-req on a position then currently I won't even have my CV considered.

The MSc is the highest level thing I could attain with no pre-requisites save for experience. It is, for me, an insurance policy for what is now a career (a job is what I had when I was doing manual labour).

I have two goals for the degree: 1) Reduce risk of unemployment. 2) Increase chance of employment by a company that works on interesting things (I want to be the dumbest guy in the room so that I can learn even more).

What's been interesting is reading recent posts on HN and elsewhere about how dire education is and questioning its value. Yet for me it may be a life-saver and at GBP 7k is a bargain if it just keeps me employed. Only by reducing my risk and creating a buffer and fall-back am I going to be able to be free of the fear of failing... or so I believe currently.

Anyhow, the MSc after more than a decade of experience... I'm pleased by how much I do know, and have loved discovering the gaps in my knowledge. I especially love set theory, graph databases, semi-structured data, and the data structures, storage and algorithms for these things. As insurance goes, I'm not sure anything else could've also given me so much satisfaction to do and yet also is so universally recognised.
These don't look like they were taken at the same time of the year, at least with respect to whatever rainy seasons apply. The first image has what appear to be blue lakes, while the second doesn't. The contrast in the first image seems to be lower than the contrast in the second; this makes the second's green areas seem more verdant, while its dry areas (including those lakes) seem more dry.

It certainly isn't a convincing visualization of what it purports to describe, to me at least.
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The sort value is a function of karma and age (so newer comments are higher up to start with).
Playstation Move TV Ad Diggs at Wii and Project Natal
I've read this thread half-way trough :)
+1 for the last from a fellow countryman :) (who knows only his mother tongue and English!)
Did Mugabe stop the rain from falling, or turn up the volume of the sun shine? It seems a bit of a leap, to be frank; my guess is that those lake beds are dry for much if not most of the year, and only fill up during or after a rainy season.
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Sold my web app for 5 figures as a sophomore in college.
This shows a particular farm. Is it representative?
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Where do we draw the line? If the only way for you to get a loan was to sign over the right to have your family abducted and held for ransom, would that be OK? Why is that not OK, but having the car honk at your neighbors all night is?
I have to call sweeping false generalization. I can think ten local companies that meet that same criterion without even trying, and "local" for me is not Silicon Valley, either.

Maybe some Americans try for the homerun and no Europeans do (I can't judge), but even in America by company-count, which I accept as a reasonable proxy of number-of-people-starting-companies, the "home runs" attempters are the outliers. And of course the VCs are interested in the home runs, that's the VC business model!
Yes, with a bit of exaggeration. My friend is not a laureate, but was a key part of the organization that shared the peace Nobel about 15 years ago. He went along to help pick it up. He received a personal memento, a small medallion. He tells a good story of talking to a small dapper Norwegian man at the reception and finally asking him what he did. "I'm the King", was the response.

They went out celebrating afterwards (edit: not the King!) and he lost his memento. I like to imagine him calling the bar the next day and asking if any Nobel prizes had been handed in.

"Did you find it? Great. What? Chemistry - no, sorry, that's not it. Peace."

I worked as a treelopper for a while, and was cutting down the waste in the trailer. I was moving my feet around on the stack with the saw idling at arms'length. The Stihl 076 was idling too fast and caught on something, lurched forwards, cut through the steel trailer and bounced into my forehead, all in an instant.

Lots of blood, 15 stitches, but it turns out skulls are hard enough. Now I have a faint Harry Potter-style scar.

I've done some actual cool stuff too, not just surviving an accident, but I think the thing I am most proud of is self-diagnosing myself with depression later in life and learning to manage it. I wish I had worked it out earlier, but at least I'm still around and self-aware.
I'm very interested in reading about the accomplishments of others, especially when they're particularly unique -- and I was happy to share my own.

I don't want my contribution to this interesting discussion to be read as "me me me", so I've removed it.
Ask HN: What can you do with a "feature" for other's products?
There are several features for products that I've "developed" (thought of, prototyped, elicited initial response from customers). The problem is, they don't stand alone, and can only be viable if attached to an existing product:

Some are "virtual" - one such feature, can only be effectively implemented if you have an index of the web (e.g. if you are google, bing, or ddg)

Yet another one, is an improvement for physical doors (like the one in the entrance to your home).

The common theme to these ideas is that while that feature might be worth while for customers and producers alike, it is not sufficient to start a new business with.

What can one do with such ideas, except patent and try to market them to the most probably beneficiary?
This is interesting in a very narrow niche. But even being a Python fanboy I'm more likely to bring JS into the server than Python into the browser. It just makes huge piles of sense.
I'm gonna brag about my co-founder @fanjiewang. This is what I filled out on our YC apps.

* Co-starred in the film Air Hockey (2005), which was played at the opening ceremony of 2006 Air Hockey World Tournament hosted in Las Vegas (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2390531/).

* Faculty upper year scholarship for University of Waterloo Computer Engineering '04 (for ranking 1st).

* Finished 1st place in Sir Isaac Newton National Physics Competition '03.

* Finished 1st place in American Computer Science League Competition '02.

* Finished 1st place in Pascal National Mathematics Competition '00.

* Broke the record for the fastest goal scored (3.57 s) in a group qualifier for the U17 World Cup while playing for the Chinese national soccer team '99.

He has done quite a bit of stage work and he sings as well. Apart from being a really smart and talented guy he can work harder than anybody I know.
Moreover, the first comment on that page points out that the self-threading needle is ill-suited for typical sewing because the eye is so big. And the side-threading needle in the article seems to have an even larger eye.
Wikipedia says that:
"[Opera has] 20–25% market share in Russia, 25-30% Ukraine, and 5–9% in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic"

A bit more than 0.2
I'm sure you've already thought of this, but it seems like now that you have input of OCR sheet music, you should strongly consider output of OCR sheet music.

Allow your player to set the metronome, then capture what they play on Etude. Output a sheet music transcript that they can tweak, replay, and publish in a marketplace of free music. People can transcribe public domain music, share original compositions, or (tricky part maybe) cover licensed music.
I'd be lying if the occasional down vote didn't still irritate me now and then, but I've successfully trained myself to use the comment scores as a reminder that we're not all the same and that it is a valuable and important thing to internalize. I try to learn from it.

Upvoted to show agreement with this idea that comment scores can teach each commenter about how the commenter fits into a diverse community. Not necessarily every true comment will be upvoted for helpfulness, and not necessarily every funny comment will amuse other participants, but every comment obtains a score, and the person posting comments can learn in the aggregate from each and every score. Ups and downs come in life, and so upvotes and downvotes are attached to comments. But every human being has opportunity to learn every day.
I disagree. Both Open Source Beer and the Open Source Restaurant have 'code', recipes, or plans for building them:

Open Source Beer Recipe: http://www.opensourcebeerproject.com/2007/07/15/open-source-...

Open Source Restaurant: "[a] restaurant that is completely made of, and only serves food based on the original instructables all the members on instructables.com have made or will make." Members of Instructables.com typically post step by step plans of what they've made. http://www.instructables.com/group/instructables-restaurant/

The Open Source Washer project is a misnomer until they release the step by step plans for building it.
Off-topic but damn that is one adorable puppy - I think maybe it's time to give puppy blogging a try, I'd sure subscribe.
Then, I asked if it was anti-competitive for companies to act in accordance with their own interests instead of aiding competitors, to which you say yes.

No you didn't. The question you asked was, and I quote: "You're saying it's anti-competitive for companies to act in accordance with their own interests rather than go out of their way to support their competitors?" Note you used supporting, a passive role, rather than aiding, which is active. To state the obvious: your mistake was assuming that the process of synonymy strictly preserves meaning, which isn't the case.
Also, Eric Ries himself says his "Lean Startup" methodology is adapted from the widely-adopted "Lean Manufacturing" methodology, which in turn is based on Toyota's TPS:

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

http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/12/what-is-lean-ab...

The fact that it is based on Toyota should be a clue that the "Lean" methodologies are not about size, but about efficiency. "Lean is centered around preserving value with less work"

There are people using "Lean" as a new buzzword for small.