skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Today we do increasingly frequently.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU#Applications

Especially on the Mac, since the vast majority of new Apple machines come with CUDA-capable NVIDIA cards now and developers can expect them.

Even so, the article was referring to the fact that you can pack that kind of power in a desktop now, regardless of whether or not the average consumer tends to take advantage of it.
As somebody from that culture, I think that's way too simplistic. Like all other things, there are good sides and bad sides.

Good things:

- Pre-vetted as you say, so there's some due diligence done.

- It's easier(in some aspects) if your partner belongs to the same community(religion, sect, whatever)

- Longevity. In such cultures, marriage is held sacred, and people put up with lots of strain to keep the thread going. This is good for kids, if not for the individuals.

Bad things:

- Parental pressure: Though there's no compulsion, there's immense psychological pressure from relatives/peers/friends. In my culture, the girls bear the brunt, although the tide is slowly changing. It gets worse when your parents are financially or socially backwards.

- It's very difficult to find somebody aligned to your interests/tastes - essentially a lottery.

- You get very little time to socialize and understand each other. This is changing a bit, but still the socializing starts after you're engaged, which is basically pointless IMHO. The go/no-go decision is usually a snap decision. That sucks.

I'd write more, but hey this is hacker news..
A) It depends on your dynamic. I've found that with people I don't know that I tend to switch very frequently (10 minutes) whereas with my long time pairing partner we can go much longer (60 - 90 minutes) without switching.

B) Yes! It is definitely more taxing. That's why there is the idea of the "Eight Hour Burn." Pairing takes it out of you.

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?EightHourBurn
Stunningly bad advice; I'm told that most often the ending is ugly as you note.

Your alternative of simply asking for a raise sounds like the best approach ... but of course these situations are seldom about money....
Generally as a programmer working in a non-software/tech area you're treated as, at best, semi-skilled labour. Sure you can program but that's nothing compared to the complexity of mechanical engineering/microbiology/whatever.

You tend to be treated as necessary but undesirable. Someone that I, your engineer/doctor/professor boss who is far smarter than you, will have to waste time telling what to do. All so you can go do the fancy typing necessary to make the software do what I say.

In terms of respect level its not uncommon for non-programmers to lump programmers in with book keepers, compliance officers and other necessary but undesirable people.

It would probably be different if you were both a biologist/trader/chemical engineer AND a programmer. That would be entirely different than just being a programmer working within the domain.
How does it work with PayPal? Do I send the data like with any other provider and paypal will authorize it? or does the user still have to be redirected to them?
I'm 35 and nostalgia was involved. So... I think I'm going to go be depressed somewhere now. :)
Cinch: ruby microframework for creating IRC bots
It might be trivial for you to backup your computer, but it isn't for most people, and most people don't do it. And, beyond the risk of data loss, people now also have to worry about identity theft and other financial loss if they do the wrong thing on their computer. (Keeping in mind here that for most people, browser == computer.)
75% of startups? Really? Where'd you get this number?
You don't give human metabolism enough credit, as though you don't think that our bodies respond to different amounts of energy intake/usage. The main problem with the calories in = calories out myth is that they are assumed to be independent variables when they are self-evidently not. When you work out more, your body demands more energy by stimulating appetite. When you eat less than your body needs, you get cold and hungry.

The other problem is that it overlooks the role of insulin in weight gain. Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage, this has been known for 50 years or more. Eating foods that stimulate insulin secretion are going to cause you to put on pounds - that's the job of insulin! If every type of calorie we consume contributes the exact same effect on the body, why do marathoners (or any other athelete for that matter) carb-load before challenges? Why not fat-load because everyone knows that fat has twice as many calories per gram?

My main point is that not all types of calories cause the same types of effects. Cutting calories below expenditures does not lead to long term weight loss, it leads to hunger.
I sorta fancy myself as a do-it-all. I do the design, write the backend, sell it to the client, do the testing, receive the feedback etc. I think it comes from the fact that I've been doing all of this for almost two decades now. I have spent three times more time fiddling in Paint Shop Pro than professional graphic artists in Photoshop. I may not be able to make designs as pretty as 280North but that doesn't stop me from giving it my best.

I've also spent more time and energy configuring Apache and various *nix apps than most sysadmins. But I don't feel comfortable blogging about "Top 5 Unix commands you must know" because I always feel there are 100 others who know more than me so I'll let them blog on these topics. I'll blog about what I'm good at or my own experiences. Which brings me back to the do-it-all topic - if it needs to be done, I want to learn how to do it and do it well. I delegate and outsource when I have resources available but if not, I just do whatever needs to be done. Heinlein's quote seems pretty appropriate here:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
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Archos Tablet has Android Market Capability, Sort Of
Doesn't it seem mean-spirited for a well known individual to jump to a conclusion in a public forum that a person suffers from mental illness due to their behavior, all descriptions of which likely only comes from blogs and newspapers?

And no, this is not a jab at the media. Not sure if you've ever been the subject of media coverage, but I can tell you from personal experience that it's enlightening to discover how little of reality is represented in the news. It's just a fact of life.
I'm in High School and I remember creating websites using FrontPage (and notepad of course). We even used FrontPage in elementary school, so I think most younger HN'ers might remember what it is.
To be honest, I've met programmers who don't understand these issues as well as the author does. It's refreshing to see a non-techie who goes out of their way to understand these things.
Thanks for reminding me we need to decimate all the horrific dating sites out there. Who's in?
I don't know why you wouldn't assume that stupidity is roughly as common as intelligence. By definition, 50% of the population is below the median.
OMG, this makes me want to cry.
Honor in simple terms
Not enough black backgrounds, red bold text OR animated flames :(
We are indeed trying to see where to focus and get some very early feedback. That being said, a big chunk of the code is already done :) The private beta should launch in the next following weeks.

I would say our service operates at a lower level of abstraction than the services you mentioned. Our ultimate goal is to make it simple to integrate with any payment processor.
Browse this list of HN contractors/developers and see how many did not list PHP. I think it's safe to guess around 75% have it. https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlD_6iEb8Ed9dGs3clV...
I've worked in enterprise software dev and testing, a big financial corp, on a small bioinformatic data export contract project, and now in a bioinformatics group in a pure research setting where the focus is on the science and not on programming except as a support to the science.

I strongly believe that deep tech skills with extensive domain specific knowledge is the most valuable combo in all those environments. If you can quickly soak up domain specific knowledge as even an average developer, you're going to be well respected and thought of. I'm not great at this part, but do well simply by having reasonable communication skills - it's flat out amazing how many tech folks fail based on bad people skills.

Honestly though, I think expectations are so low, so often that people are completely willing to put up with really low quality results if they can simply pay bottom dollar for coders. This ties in with organization culture in any of those environments - it will far and away be the dominant factor in your ability to be successful programming. If the culture is restrictive or narrow-minded, you'll struggle.

Maybe Zed is trying to drive home that there is lot of headcount floating around in tech companies with a job title that would lead you to think they were doing a bunch of development, but they amount to magic TPF report generators. The other option, and one that I love stumbling into, is that there are some tremendously smart people in those fields he mentions who have taught themselves to code to do cool hacking in the field. I find that as an "officially credentialed" CS type, many of these people have picked up a significant amount of what I spent more than a few years in formal education pursuing.
Anyone who's into this stuff should read "Shaping Things."
Chomsky on Haiti
This article is clearly just paranoia, this time over poorly rendered youtube video, of all things.

It doesn't really matter if cruise missile is in container or not. If it's for sale, bad or good guys would be happy to buy it without container and use it anyway.

As you can see from this very video, these missiles require satellite guidance system. Surely small counties don't have access to those and large countries have capabilities to suppress them as needed.
Impressive, but doesn't pass a smell check. US GDP was $13.84 trillion. It seems extremely far-fetched that copyright restrictions account for more than a third of our nation's economic output.
I have never heard of a marriage starting from this, apart form in the movies.
Google "Rasmus Lerdorf". Look at some of his presentations & posts (which btw are impressively ego-free, compared to the usual output of web mini-celebs which achieved a lot less). He's far from being stupid or lazy, but like any good developer knows that thinking of yourself as stupid and acting lazy are virtues that force you to build simple stuff that works.
The instructions omit a critical piece of information: not only do arrows move and mouse actions edit, but spacebar jumps. So you don't have to put arrows or dots in every pit so you can get out, as I thought for quite a while.
Odd that they're missing the WePad (http://www.wepad.mobi/en), which seems like one of the more serious contenders to me. Maybe I'm just being taken in by the hype, but they seem to have quite an impressive product on display.
I like this concept, I really do, but I'm wondering if it's a sort of idealized utopia. Are there any societies that take care of their most desperate members without that being a government function?

Almost all of the industrialized nation have some sort of safety net and/or universal health care. On the other side of the spectrum you get countries like Somalia, where they, you know, do let people die.
I used to work in bioinformatics and got paid less and worked with worse engineers on more tedious problems than when I worked at a pure tech company. I don't know if I was respected. It was one of the few jobs where the level of Asperger's syndrome increased as one went up the management chain. I don't think my boss, a PhD/MD, really ever remembered my name or what I was supposed to be working on, or that it registered that I was a human being. I'm not sure if he considered himself a human being. Mostly it sucked.

When I was very young I made the website for an alternative newspaper (like the Village Voice) and they thought I was a cool whiz kid. The kinda hot and MILFy single mom secretary always came onto me at the company drinking outings. Maybe that's what Zed means?
> Of course, Scott Adams has been at this for years and having to come up with a new joke each day for that length of time would be rather challenging.

Definitely the case. This comedy degradation happened to Garfield and Peanuts as well, and it hit Peanuts especially hard because, well, it's Schultz. He was doing genius work in the 1950s-1960s, refining a lot of the medium traits we now take for granted.

Both Garfield and Dilbert were a lot weirder in their early years, had larger casts, and more diverse settings. In one of the early Dilbert plotlines, he discovers dinosaurs hiding in his home after a computer model tells him they can't all be gone. Not exactly genius, but better than anything Adams is making now.

The decline of Peanuts was especially sad. Schultz was a trouper and did the work until he physically and mentally couldn't anymore, and the decline showed painfully. Buying the huge Fantagraphics collection might be beyond your budget, but if you get a chance to flip through it by all means do so.

The foregoing illustrates why The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes were ended early. It also illustrates just how resistant to change newspaper readers are: The reason strips are allowed to sit and fester for decades when TV shows are off the air in a few seasons is due entirely to the fact papers will lose circulation if they cut the wrong strip.
We perfectly understand your concern. Our way to deal with it is that we try to use payment gateways' built-in recurring billing as much as possible in order to make it easy for our customers to move off our platform. We also offer the possibility to export any data that you own.
Your "not specific to a domain" part scares me. I currently work with two extremely talented people with completely different backgrounds - one is a top-notch, get it done engineer, the other a smart startup minded person who has a MBA (don't worry, I tease him mercilessly).

I specifically picked these two from my personal network based on the skills I needed for my current effort. The top-notch engineer could work with minimal spec and teach herself tech as needed for web apps (I had her move from Java/J2ee to RoR and completely assumed she'd crank it out, result=homerun), the MBA guy had real tech skills but possesses a real (and non-slimy) way of interacting with our users that engenders trust and commitment (and people in our environment are now recovering from a period of plain dislike for working with our group).

Neither would have made sense if I was building a team to write graphics drivers.

I guess the answer is something I alluded to - personal network.
Call to improve browser caching
Is it just me, or is this kind of argument completely vacuous? If it didn't bring world peace, it must not be a force for good.

The last 30 or 40 years, or perhaps all the decades since World War 2, technology (including the internet) has empowered individuals at an unprecedented scale. Numerous individuals, or small groups of founders, have created companies, products, NGOs like never before. But, it has also empowered individuals more inclined towards terrorism, crime and other rude behaviors. It goes hand in hand. You cannot empower individuals and not expect some of them to do bad things.

If the definition of a Good Thing is achieving world peace, then nothing that empowers individuals will ever be a Good Thing.
-That is actually American Typewriter
-Fair enough
-Perhaps, though it is one of the app's more productive functionality
-What would you suggest it do?
-Doesn't seem like too much of a hassle. Some titles are really long and scaling the size would create very small fonts.
-Does it hurt?

Fair enough, removed pricing and will post source code up on github. You made a substantial argument Zev. I was just hoping to make a bit as a fund-raiser for this event in school, but perhaps I'll leave that to some future game :)
Funny thing. When you google your username the first result is the php function.
This is a wonderful book!
You don't need to really grok Haskell to grok monads. It's just that that's where they're most useful...

If you cared to hear my explanation, I'd tell you. (it involves a burrito...)
When programmers say "possible," they mean before the heat death of the universe.

I said possible, but I never agreed to that schedule!
This reminds me of the Intuit/Mint exchanges, pre-acquisition.

"What you say!??! You can't be more popular then we!! We demand that you prove this to us."
RIM takes aim at consumer market with BlackBerry OS 6
I would suggest a follow-up email. I always remember the answer to a question, or realize a bug in some whiteboarded code, etc. It's also polite to thank them for their time...interviewing someone took time out of their day. I typically do it within 1-2 weeks and try to work in something that likely would be memorable from the interview (not a "remember me, I was the guy whose battery died" and more "since that blunder of my laptop dying during the interview, I've started carrying a spare battery!"). There's no feeling of obligation for them to respond, but puts you back in the forefront of their mind, shares some more of your personality and can lead to a follow-up interview/discussion.

That being said, I've only had one interview not result in a job offer of some sort (I've had some offers for contract work where I didn't get the full-time offer I consider successes) and I'm confident that had I been local and done an in-person interview I would have done much better (was my first remote/on the phone interview, and I imagine it must have been painful for the interviewer). When interviewing people, if they were good, I'm elated to see the follow-up. If they weren't, I dread it since it means I really need to start writing up rejection responses. What's the worst that'll happen, not getting the job?
> These days there just isn't something like that out there.

If I could find some time to fix up Shoes and then Hackety, there would be. It's hard when you can't get the library you're building on to compile...
"The Little Schemer"?
You could describe programming that way too, though the "within a tolerance" would probably have to be about input coverage rather than output/behavior.
Hmm. This is rather difficult. I'm under a lot of pressure from my parents to move out of the house and support myself. However, I have no experience doing anything else. I've applied to many jobs which require no skill, but have had no luck. Not really sure what to do... I don't dispute that building a portfolio, going to college and getting a degree would be a good idea, but I'm just trying to solve a difficult situation.
It still showed up for me just now ;)
I wish you could paint faster. I dont like clicking all over. I also wish you could chat.
When I got to the scroll up part of the post, I stopped reading...

Looks very nice at a glance, but fails its usability tests. ;)
10 Minute -vi- Tutorial -- Basic Server Knowledge
This article really hits the mark. I wish more companies would adopt a pair programming discipline. My experience with it has been largely positive. It takes some getting used to, at first, especially getting down a good system for reading code aloud and directing each other's attention to a particular location in the code.

After a while, it feels pretty natural. And productive. Also, there's less burnout, more useful socialization. We've also gone the Nerf gun/slackline/juggling balls route for taking quick breaks between chunks of features. After the first person you seriously pair program with, it becomes easier in general. You're free to find your own similes.

It's easier to flow. See http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?MentalStateCalledFlow and http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?MyMindKeepsWandering
Do you have two large monitors? I find OS X so poorly adapted to my 30" + 27" Monitor, that I frequently find myself just using my 17" MacBook Pro - it's not as much real estate, but the large monitor is so clumsy, that, except in very specific tasks where I need to have multiple windows going simultaneously so I can see tasks happening at the same time, I get very little extra value, and sometimes _lose_ productivity from having to move my mouse Waaaay over to the first screen from something that might be (literally) feet away.

It's a little better with two 24" monitors.
I "remembered" (thanks to delicious) - fluxus http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/ but it's not really helpful for beginners.
It looks very nice, but I'm wondering if it has support for paypal subscriptions?

There are a glut of payment gateway API services, but very few of them support good subscription-based processing.
How did the 88x31 buttons ever come to be? Those things were all the rage, especially on designer's sites. Where did the size originate?
good luck, you'll need it! I remember that feeling since I typed in all of that code that I was a master of it, so I inherently started adding stuff into it, which made me go look up how to add stuff into it, pretty simple learning process. Not to mention "debugging" typos.
Plentyoffish needs to hire a designer. Assuming the number he claims is true, how many users is he loosing because of the site layout?

I might sound like a snob, but I have a hard time taking a site designed like this seriously, I don't care how many users or traffic he claims to have.

As far as dating site designs go, OkCupid looks great.
Match than demands that we enter into a confidential agreement where we show them how we are able to generate more relationships and dates than they do, and how we got so much bigger along with a lot of other things they want to know

Would anyone in their right minds consider this?
There are outstanding questions about the usability of a panel-hosted menu on much larger screens, where the window and the menu could be very far apart.

Fitt's Law means that, in the relevant respect, the edge of the screen is always closer to your mouse than just about anything else.
Eric Schmidt: Enduring Lessons of a Quirky IPO
Actually, a reasonable article. Particularly the followup with a juror who was a Network Engineer (Chilton). I like the following statement:

"Chilton, however, said Childs' supervisors at the Department of Technology were also to blame. He said they "did everything wrong that they possibly could," citing "ineffective management and no formalized policies and procedures" for dealing with employees in such situations."

As one who manages a fairly large team of Network Engineers, I find it hard to believe how painfully absent the city's management must have been to let things go as far as they did. Clearly the city wasn't using two-factor authentication, vaulted enable passwords, or nightly backed up configs (Rancid or role your own) - all of which are pretty bog standard network-manager checklists.
Acquisition opportunity?
Unfortunately for you, dating sites really suffer from power laws. A dating site with 2x people is 4x as effective
There's a huge difference between actual pragmatism and shooting yourself in the foot in the name of pragmatism.

No, you shouldn't build your program out of some overengineered metahyperpolymorphic Proton and Electron base classes in the name of "elegance". But the problem with PHP is that it goes completely to the other extreme: it has no internal consistency and little foresight. Simplicity is a great desideratum, but it shouldn't come at the expense of sense.