skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Beside efficient communication and faster execution, the approach also helps break the lethargic monotony a one man show has to face, be it as a freelancer or an employee in a distributed team. One month 'off' is also a great way to say thanks to everyone for their endless hours and bang-head-against-wall solo session.

Before my time, IBM regularly held a WebSphere Services Technical Conference (WSTC) in Las Vegas and annually flew in a big portion of the team for a week to learn about the hottest features. I am sure my colleagues learned a lot, but the stories I am told these days about those days also go beyond and usually start with someone getting lost on The Strip at 3am.

It probably doesn't have to be that expensive though. I would assume that renting a house wouldn't take away too much from the experience and benefits but would be significantly cheaper (we had a house which could easily fit up to eight people at the ocean, 60km away from Venice in Italy for 500EUR/week). When the team is right, doing simple stuff such as cooking together can be quite fun and bonding.

A related approach: Designer Stefan Sagmeister gives up some of his retirement years and instead takes a one year 'creative break' every seven years. Here's his TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_time...
Global Variables in Android Apps
I think we might see a stylus from Apple at some point in the future. They are unsexy and probably not generally something you want to construct your whole UI around. But they are clearly useful in some cases.

It’s just that, as with the missing arrow keys (also clearly sometimes useful) on the original Macintosh, Apple doesn’t want anyone to get into bad habits. You can call that paternalism but that’s just how Apple rolls :)
They sell differently priced plans for datacards and phones? That would make sense.

Here they sell just data plans. Whether you use dedicated modem or have the plan on your voice SIM, it is your problem. Some operators allow to share the data quota among multiple SIMs, so you can have both. Because the price is same, so there is nothing to cannibalize.
The biggest thing I took from this article was in reading the comments: the site auto-refreshes!!! People are typing in a comment and BAM the site reloads and they lose their comment. Talk about a shitty design decision....
Honestly, I am dumbfounded at all the money and publicity that is getting thrown at Diaspora when they haven't really accomplished anything yet.

I don't think OneSocialWeb will succeed, either. What will likely happen is Facebook will adjust their course or a slightly different Facebook clone will come out with sensible customer-focused privacy policies (like Mint or Wesabe had) and ways to get your data out if you want to leave.
They didn't "steal it". They made their own.
Alot that I've seen (especially the more complex or 3-D ones) use Unity. Maybe it's not 30% of the market, but I've seen that little Unity cube load up more often lately.
What everyone seems to be ignoring is that Yahoo was seriously damaged goods when she was hired to run it.

What do you think it takes to retain a CEO with a successful record (AutoCad) for a gig that's likely to be a failure and very possibly the last good job they'll get?
I haven't read too much on the technical side of things about this yet, but TechCrunch's quick rundown sounds a lot like what I was arguing Wave had the potential to become when it launched a year ago.

If you stepped back from Wave and stopped looking at it as fancified email and instead as an extensible platform for arbitrary data, it seemed blindingly obvious to me that the next step would be to build it out into a full fledged social networking service. The fact that both projects are built on top of XMPP definitely strikes me as interesting, as well.

I've always been a little dumbfounded that the part of Wave everybody talked about was the collaborative text editing type stuff in the I/O demo, when if you read any deeper, it should have been clear that that stuff was just a UX tech demo and that the important part was the underlying technology. OneSocialWeb sounds a lot like somebody is building a similar technology specifically in the direction I thought Wave would go.
The overuse of the "freedom" argument reeks of GWB.
This is a flat lie. I can tell you from firsthand experience that Oracle changed quite a number of things at Sun without understanding what they were or what the ramifications could -- and in fact turned out to -- be. This ranges from buying incompatible kit for servers because they didn't know and didn't ask, to shutting off services and causing all kinds of problems, to rolling software that was in a testing queue to production and wondering why other deployments were held back dealing with the sudden incompatibilities.

Oracle may have some inspiring qualities but good communication, management involvement "in the trenches", and solid corporate infrastructure are not among them.

Ellison is right about one thing in that Sun's sales and marketing completely destroyed many decent products. Their executive team took care of the rest.
I somehow doubt the end of all-you-can-eat mobile data plans is inevitable. I think mobile plans will go the same way cable and dsl plans in the home have gone. All you can eat with ever increasing bandwidth.

Do you have some information I'm unaware of that would change that trend?
Not if you're paid in your home country in your home currency. This is how consulting firms do it.
I believe it's the new default.
As a single proprietor/founder/programmer, I've heard this "worse-case" question far too many times:

"What happens if you get hit by a bus?"

I have no good answer, but I have lots of bad answers:

"Can't happen. There are no buses where I live."

"I work out. The bus will get damaged."

"If I don't log in 3 days in a row, the server will automatically ftp all the source code to you."

"No problem. I have Blue Cross."

"No problem. All the code is self-documented."

"I guess I won't care anymore."
The only part of your post that I disagree with is that the bill has 20% good ideas.

If the federal government really wanted to discourage excessive risk-taking in the financial marketplace, why doesn't it allow people who make bad bets to lose money? The market offers free financial "regulation" called "losses".

Instead, the feds bailed out bondholders of large financial institutions at a rate of 100 cents on the dollar. They bailed out counterparties who took out insurance contracts from insolvent firms. They bailed out the unions that killed the very companies they worked for. They gave $billions in handouts to homeowners who bought a house that they couldn't afford.

And what happens to the prudent people who didn't make bad bets? They get to pay taxes to bail out the imprudent people. Thrift is punished and recklessness is rewarded.

Then after the fact the feds pass some anti-capitalist bill that they can trumpet in the press that does more harm than good. The feds micromanage the economy in an attempt to prevent the effects of the incentives created by their own past actions.

It's all highly irrational.
Absolutely. I'm actually kind of surprised at how relatively inept Google is in the social networking field. They have Orkut, but it's pretty much a flop in the US. I mention it in another comment, but they have pretty much the perfect platform in Wave for building a serious distributed social network, but instead bill it as being a glorified email replacement. And Buzz? Is it even worth talking about?
I think it's more about promoting ubiquitous access to the internet more than promoting android. Promoting android is a means to and end not the end itself.
I went through a phase I tried installing everything under the sun and looked around quite a bit (the packages directly from adobe, different apt packages, random bash scripts I found online..) so I actually don't remember what I tested and didn't.

What I have _at the moment_ and doesn't work that well, I got through the 'flashplugin-nonfree' package which if I understand is the 'preferred' way to install flash on ubuntu 64.
What I said in comments on the other story (http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1344138):

"When I last thought about it, I became convinced that we don't need an single implementation, we need standards for multiple implementations to interact. Stuff like RSS, OpenId, OAuth, etc. It's a lot less glamorous to work to these, and to try to push them forward, but it's a lot more useful."
Houston? You're damn lucky if you end up in Houston! More likely you're in Ames, Iowa or Ft. Wayne, Indiana.
I'm running adobe's FP 10.0.45.2. When you hit a site that requires flash the first time, firefox prompts you to install the plugin, and it gives you three options: the adobe player, and two other oss versions. I chose the adobe player.

Based on your query, I went back and tried to see if I could stress it out. I tried this site from a simple google search for 'flash demo' http://www.playpuzzlequestgalactrix.com/ and it works fine for me...no issues. This one, however: http://ecodazoo.com/ is pretty intense, and it does flicker for me. Normally, I don't visit sites like that which are all flash intensive, thus my comment that I rarely ever see an issue with FP on Ubuntu x64...but indeed, it is not perfect.
How'd it work out?
Woops, looks like they moved only the appearance over. The hover-snippet thing is is still visible only to logged in users. Sorry, hadn't tested it out first!
Documents. We provide a Skype plugin for recording calls and our customers get them transcribed by us. The transcripts are in Word, PDF and ODT formats.
Consulting is far more brutal. Out Monday, back Friday, every week, unless you're between projects. On the upside, you do get weekends off. On the downside, you'll spend all weekend either sleeping or doing chores.

I did get to go to some cool places as a consultant, but the truth is, airports, taxis, meeting rooms and hotels are the same everywhere in the world. Having great colleagues is a must, there are some good times to be had. But you can't live like that for more than a few years without going crazy.

One competitor company of ours would enter a new territory by renting a nice house in that country and a few people from other offices would all go live there. Like MTV's The Real World. They would be the nucleus and the rest of the office would be made up of traveling consultants and local hires.
Facebook being used to collect demographic info from email addresses
Depends on the country. Hong Kong is happy to have me for a month at a time without levying any taxes. In the US, not so much.
Why 'Contact Us' forms are not effective
Building Better Software Through Non Functional Requirements
Typical oil rig work is 6 weeks on, 4-6 weeks off, as in, actually off, there's no office you have to show up to. So that kind of lifestyle can work pretty well, you can look after the kids or do DIY or just relax full-time between stints.

$700 is pretty cheap... Go look at what business-class flights cost on Expedia.
We are letting people in slowly for the trial version of our tool to provide good support. I would suggest you to sign up here (http://www.architexa.com/) and we will get back to you. Thanks for showing interest in our product.
A funny experiment in street preaching and the crowd's reaction:

http://kcimprov.com/?p=mission02
Straight html and server side code (mmorpgs, strategy games and zombie infections). Javascript (sudoku, crosswords), and some java applets.
Wordpress mass infection continues to spread....
The funny thing here is that Neelie Kroes was the Commissioner for Competition and the one who slapped Microsoft. Guess what! She is now the Commissioner for Digital Agenda.
Your current proposal is two trips per year. My idea was 6,or 4 extra trips. If it's $700/pp and you have 5 people, that's $3500/trip. So, my recommendation adds an extra $14K to your yearly budget.

However, staying some place for a week vs. a month should cut the hotel bills and food/meal/bar bills by 75%. You reference $200/day for food/bar. Two month-long trips is 60 days of this expense. 6 week-long trips is 42 days of this expense, or an 18 days savings, or a $3600 net savings. Factor that against the $14K increased flight cost and you're adding $10K/year, or $830/month increase. Based on the way you presented the finance details, this still doesn't seem like a big factor, and could potentially remove a lot of stress from employees personal lives if they don't have to be gone for month-long stretches. Of course, if your employees LIKE a big break from their family, then this may not add any value for them :)
I stopped editing Wikipedia when I realized the majority of my time was taken up by doing things that should have been automated by software.

What are some examples?
Yeah, I'm also used to adding a comma after the last item (in C, C++, Python).

One of the problems is that this is an error in Javascript, but only in IE. Which means code will work fine while you develop, but when it comes time to test, it will suddenly stop working.

The good thing about this way is that it's also very easy for humans to spot the error. Bottom line, catching the error while you code is always better than catching it after you compile. Also, this method has the advantage of working in all the languages I work in.
I have a Palm Pixi Plus on Verizon and can turn it into a wifi router by launching a built in app. It works absolutely flawlessly.

Verizon has recently made this feature free for webOS devices (ie. Pre/Pixi Plus).
I agree with this definition of beautiful. The title sounds like yet another opportunity for everyone to display how humble they are. If I heard someone say that at work, it would make me wonder if they're too lazy to try harder.

On the other hand, "make sure that there's as little code as absolutely necessary" is absolutely my prime directive as a programmer.
Carol Bartz is really good at shutting stuff down, doesn't even bother selling it.

Geocities, the publisher network, maven networks (only a year after they bought it for $160M) the list is long.

She's the worst CEO Yahoo! has had and instead of rewarding her they should throw her out and bring in someone with a vision on how to turn the tide.

If that doesn't happen yahoo will continue it's long and slow decomposition.

She joined in January '09, and since then the company has been on a steady slide down from the #1 visited website to now the #4 position. That's still huge, but it is clear that Yahoo! is coasting on momentum alone.
That may be true in some countries, but not all. When I was based in Canada, working on projects in the States, and paid in Canadian dollars, if I spent more than a certain amount of time in the US (I think it was 180 days), I was liable for taxes in the US. Due to the Canada/US tax treaty, I was not taxed twice, but I had to show that I had payed taxes in Canada equal or greater than what I owed in the States (not hard).
A free trip to Canada.
That's a good one. The first thing I noticed was "it's all about motion": sliding to unlock, launchpad icons zooming into view, swipe-to-scroll, a keyboard popping up, a pin dropping onto a map, the screen rotating to the right orientation, turning a page...

And, in another layer, the people are all in motion in some way: some just their hands, a child's feet, someone on a bike, someone on public transportation, the implied motion of being out at a coffee shop, or just sitting out on your front steps.
Encodings are fundamentally hard in our current code environment. If your language doesn't make you explicitly think about encodings, you are writing bad code. Period. Full stop. If your language does make you think about encodings and you just make it go away with compiler incantations or just bumbling about until the problems seems to go away, sort of, as long as you don't poke them too hard, you are writing bad code. Period. Full stop. If your language has no support at all for encodings, may God have mercy on your soul.

That said, "convert everything to your native Unicode format at the edges and reconvert it back out at the edges" is at least a tolerable answer. You still lose things, but it puts you ahead of most programs. But few environments make even that really easy, because it turns out to be difficult to identify all the edges; sure, your web framework may emit and send unicode (and then again it may not...), but did you read files off your disk in the correct encoding? Does your database correctly handle encoding? Does all the other code that ever inputs or outputs anything handle Unicode correctly? Do you ever store something in a system that is really just for storing binary blobs, and forget about the encoding?

It's hard, it's tedious, and from what I've seen it's even harder and more tedious than it has to be because so little of the system is usually built to make it work right, because the people creating all your libraries were either ignorant or perhaps even contemptuous of the issues.

I have often thought about what change I would make in 1970 if I could to fix a lot of modern code. Eliminating the null-delimited buffer is definitely number one, but explaining that there is no such thing as a "string" without an encoding label would be number two. Anywhere I see a "string" in the input or output specification for a function I just cringe.
It's funny because the desktop syncing is probably the worst part of the ecosystem. They didn't even attempt to make it work on Linux (fine, its a niche, but they also actively made it more difficult for open source software to work with newer models) and iTunes for Windows is one of the crappiest pieces of software on Windows, and that's saying something.
so most of your revenue comes from the "Art you should know" app, listed on cubeofm.com ? or do you have products not listed there?
Government Moves recovery.gov to the Cloud to Save Money
This looks awesome! I thought about doing something like this and approaching individual salons in the area to start getting some traction but I never actually started building anything. If I had, I imagined it being pretty much exactly what you've got there, so good on ya! I personally like the layout, I was easily able to find my way around the admin, and I recognize a few jQuery libraries in there that I've worked with before.

With that being said, I'd move the Notes textbox to the confirmation page, I think having it on the event selection page just floating there in the middle is kind of confusing.

I like it, and I wish you luck. As for traction, you might spend some time looking around at websites for different salons and see who their web developers are, than approach those developers directly. My daughter's ballet teacher's website was created by a web dev shop that specializes in dance websites, I'm sure there are shops out there that have a large client base of salons and such, so once you sell it to them they can sell it to their clients who already trust them.
nor do I, but that doesn't change the rules of the network effect when most people do.
You're hooked: Gokaldas, Foxconn & who really makes all your stuff
Is it $500 better?

Compare a Macbook Pro to another laptop that is $500 cheaper. I'd argue there is $500 worth of value there. Is there $500 worth of value for the iPad over the Macbook Pro? I can think of a lot of things to do with $500 that would be better for me than buying an iPad.
Unless you also hit the CongressCritters who make these laws with those things ... and will they notice a $10 fee??? ... you're not likely to get anywhere with that approach. Very few of them care about the little people.

And upsetting one or more CongressCritters could be very bad for a lot of countries.
Why Does Adobe Care So Much About Flash?
Is there a business model I'm missing?
I love my notepads. I collect them then go back a few years later and see what I was thinking. Sure I can do that on the computer, and I do using things like google docs, but I love paper and scribbling.
Code is ugly or beautiful based on what you're used to seeing. This is the reason for the endless style debates: the way you're used to working just looks better to you.

Whenever I find a new way of working which has actual benefits, I just use it until it looks better to me.

In this case, it looks like there are real benefits to the comma-first method, so I plan on getting used to it.

P.S. By the way, the things you're talking about (clear, accurate algorithms) are not the things the author is talking about. He's talking about style, you're talking about substance. In your example, changing the style to C++ style brackets instead of K&R wouldn't make your point any less valid.
Site seems down to me.
Better exception handling in Java 7 : Multicatch and final rethrow
I would not pay business class flights and actually in Bangkok we stayed two per room. I remain a cheap guy :)
Thanks, that looks very nice.

I feel a bit stupid now. But I'm also wondering how I've managed to remain completely ignorant of this alternative for deploying apps to the iPhone, when I try to follow this stuff pretty closely...

I think the extended soap opera about App Store riches, unfair refusals, Section 3.3.1, etc. has managed to eclipse this deployment possibility. It's a shame, really. Everyone (incl. Apple) might be better off if the issue were less polarised.
"The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge." - Einstein
youporn.com has implemented HTML5 video. Flash is dead.
The Council consists of the heads of government of the member nations, so it’s not really undemocratic. Appointments are also not unheard of in democracies, as are indirectly elected officials. (E.g. the German chancellor is not elected directly but by the German parliament.)

It’s true, though, that the indirections pile up and remove the officials farther from the voters. That’s generally not a good thing. (I don’t think, however, that every official should be directly elected. Indirectly elected officials are sometimes a good idea.) I don’t think it’s necessary that the president of the Comission be directly elected, but that the parliament should be given that power. That would immediately make it much more powerful and, yes, make the EU quite a bit more democratic.
Similar age and interest? You can't discriminate based on age or interest - that's illegal
Hugo Chavez announces the sinking of a gas rig on Twitter
You may have a point on 4 trips per year being better than 2 trips. Two weeks will certainly be more interesting, but I'm afraid that the amount of productivity may not be quite as high. If the trip is too exciting, it will drop productivity, but if people have time to get used their surrounding, they will settle down and start working.
Given they're top names within their industry, they might have staff checking the search results quite frequently to ensure that competitors aren't showing ads against their names. Something like this then gets flagged up as something for the boss to see.

Given his target market, I think this was a great way to get an interview.
Yes, and now try this:

import Debug.Trace

qsort [] = []
qsort (x:xs) = trace "(Called)" qsort (filter (< x) xs) ++ [x] ++ qsort (filter (>= x) xs)

Prelude> qsort $! [1..100]

Problem is, both of these "cute implementations" would be unusable in practice. It's hard to find beautiful code in 'real world' problems.