skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What to do about a boring job ?
I am stuck in a job which I don't find very interesting (but I cannot switch).

I am working on a side project (about an hour a day) but still need to spend the whole day at the job.

Any advice on how to deal with it during the day ? Anybody been in that situation before ?

EDIT 1: The workload isn't much and even though I try to read up on the news and stay current, I still have to be at the workplace for 8 hours to keep up appearances.

EDIT 2: I am a software engineer. I cannot switch because of personal reasons (which will probably change next year allowing me to explore a little more). The other reason is I am not learning anything new. It's all stuff I have worked on before (at a much larger scale in a startup): the management team here thinks they are doing something that'll change the world but it's more because of their inexperience than anything else.

I do have my side-project which provides an outlet but it doesn't discount the fact that I spend 9 hours a day at something that doesn't get me anywhere.

EDIT 3: I did some HN searching and I find myself in a similar situation as :

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1246200

I worked for an awesome team a couple of years ago on a great product. I was just out of school and it was a huge project which I thoroughly enjoyed, being the major player. Now I am working in a more crony-based organization where the things we are doing are way behind what I worked on before.

I was expecting progress, instead I find my judgement being overruled by less experienced people who haven't shipped any products. Anyhow, thanks for all the advice. I guess it's all about making lemonade out of lemons.
It's missing a ton of the functionality from the FF version where Chrome doesn't offer comparable APIs.
A Møøse once bit my sister ...
I don't know what the probability of "drug addicted transients" moving into a foreclosed suburban house is, but I do know that people aren't going to be strongly incentivized to keep up maintenance on a house they will be vacating soon.
Skewed Wealth Distribution and the Roots of the Economic Crisis
Dot Shot: Sinkhole in Guatemala City
Nice post, up until "I think it's the Boomer Generation Problem".

Boomer here who got his first credit card at age 27, never bought a house without at least 20% down, never had a car payment, and never failed to pay a bill on time. Just like most people I know, regardless of age.

This is not a matter of age or generation, but of character.

No need to ruin a great post with a silly conclusion.
Maths now proves that giraffes can swim
Great, I'm glad I'm not the only one that likes the idea! Interoperability to other languages is definitely on my list for the future, and a kind of ladder-server, too, where you submit your tribe and it enters into a perpetual tournament and gets ranked.
Yeah, Ballmer's not the most pleasant person, and it's easy and fun to hate Microsoft, but they've consistently made a LOT of money for 25+ straight years now. Jobs record is much spottier over that time frame, to say the least. Granted, Ballmer didn't take over till 2001 or whenever, but still, that Gassee article was myopic at best.
It's at 72.18.130.89, but that won't get you far -- they seem to be running Apache multiheaded and haven't bothered with a default site for requests coming in by IP only.

I'm not seeing DNS for hackermonthly.com on my home ADSL2 connection (via Be Broadband), but my colo box (hosted by Bytemark) is resolving it fine. As I'm in the UK, this is definitely not Rogers in Canada -- it's some kind of DNS screw-up.

NB: It resolved okay via Be about 10 hours ago (10am BST) when I grabbed a copy this morning. I suspect something's come adrift since then.
Wow, this is very similar to the game idea I describe in Techzing 40 – AppIgnite Revealed: http://techzinglive.com/?p=194.
We need a new term for anaesthetic acupuncture which distinguishes it from the much broader benefits claimed by acupuncture advocates.

Anaesthetic acupuncture is physiologically plausible and supported by experiment. But any headline about it gets generalized to "acupuncture works" which is misleading.
Imagine I decided to move into a foreclosed home and live there rent free until the banks could legally force me out? What is that called? It's stealing. Every month these people live in these houses they are stealing from the banks. Yes, the banks are at fault for creating the opportunity to get robbed but that doesn't justify the actions of these squatters.

Would you say that a rapist is justified in raping someone because they acted in a sexually lewd manner?

The "they had it coming" argument just doesn't hold water.
Moving From Strategic Planning to Story Telling
so basically anything ever recorded with or near something on the grid has detectable background noise?

Looking at the math I don't see how they could make any sensible conclusions about a 4 minute sample of audio. That's only 160 data points and if the variations are in as small a range as you propose...
Agreed, curator's note needs editing, and jwz's last name is also misspelled on the TOC (p3 - "JAWINSKI" instead of 'Z[...]'), though he's credited correctly on the inside jacket (p2). You could update the pdf, I suppose.

I'm happy to share the proofreading/editing burden with ekpyrotic or do a pass before or after ekpyrotic does, if that would be helpful (http://rdela.com has an email link at the bottom).
That is true but I am presuming you have some ties to Utah (being Ute fan and all) thus I presumed that you live in the US which doesn't remove the fact that you could still flirting with some big consequences.

The other problem is that saying you aren't responsible for user submitted content doesn't mean you won't be targeted or be held liable in court.
I always answer with the salary I want to be paid for the job. Let them know up front where I expect the salary to be.
Even if banks and courts did have the manpower to evict these people faster, the deeper problem, as you pointed out, is this backwards logic and gross rationalizing.

To try to address this, I think a campaign of linking fiscal responsibility to patriotism might be helpful. I suspect that many of these people would identify with being patriotic. Each mortgage payment these people make or at least each step these people take to work with the bank is a step in the right direction for our country. The actions of these people will inevitably hurt the rest of us in the long run.
The sad thing: the ads were coming anyway. If you build a popular platform like the iPad, the advertisers will find a way to get ads on it, whether it's with Flash or not.

But by banning Flash, Apple is pushing advertisers to HTML/Javascript, which ruins the experience for those marginal, blissful few who use Flash blockers on other platforms. Really, you couldn't have asked for a better indicator, short of a mandatory <lowvaluecontent> tag. :)
Well because I don't want to have to worry about trusting the html coming from the editor. I probably will have to go the converter route sigh.
Maybe it's my web-dev background, but Android reminds me a lot of that. When designing a web-app, styling it using CSS is such a fundamental part of it, that it shouldn't be considered a different activity. No one would seriously put up a webapp that relied on the browser's native rendering of lists, input boxes etc.

With the iPhone you do get a lot of that polish for free, whereas with Android the basics won't get you as far. How much more difficult is it? Depends, it's somewhere between an iPhone and a webapp. IIRC, I probably dedicated about 1 week on my last project to this kind of work, which was around 10 weeks.

Another thing to consider is how much of that polish is simply due to timing - many iPhone apps have been out there much longer and until it's recent stellar rise, Android was seen as a second-rate platform with far fewer resources devoted to it (for example, the Facebook apps).
I'd certainly be interested in playing this, especially online. I'm envisioning a system where you upload your genome, and the system automatically puts it in battles against a random selection of others. Some sort of ranking algorithm is used to create a leaderboard. You can also choose to watch a battle between any two or more genomes you like. To avoid gaming the scoreboard that would probably need to not count towards their score, or only once a day or something.

>As a side note, it seems to me that (unless cells can be aware of their comrades' positions) global position needs to be availible in order to build walls, which is damn cool.

I don't think so. All global position tells you is "how far away are the boundaries of the map?" Unless there's something I'm missing, you can get everything else just by keeping track of "offset from where I started".

As another side note, restricting messages to integers seems pointless, since arbitrary information can be uniquely encoded as an integer given enough ingenuity. It's a problem that would get solved once and then just irritates people instead of actually constraining solutions. (I assume python integers are only bounded by available memory space.)

Limiting them to n-bit integers, where n = 4 or 8 for example, would be more pointful, but again I think it would probably only make a particular behaviour harder to implement, not significantly limit the set of behaviours that are possible to implement.
I feel bad for the developers because 1) iPad apps take a lot longer to developer than iPhone apps and they put a lot of time/money into it, 2) the app doesn't break anything in the developers agreement, 3) Apple approved their past 3 updates, and 4) I really don't understand the rejection reason.
I was a FreeBSD brat myself - If I had to use Linux I always chose Slackware.

I've been using OS X for the past 3 years.
There should be a command that does kill and works its way up to -9.
I just noticed that your git repo hasn't been updated since late 2009–are their updates to this project that just haven't been posted yet? Perrrrhaps with additional comments that might make it easier if one wanted to contribute?

> ladder-server, too, where you submit your tribe and it
> enters into a perpetual tournament and gets ranked

That would be too cool. I'd love to see this happen. I wonder what kind of market there is for something like this.

EDIT: I'm going to be looking through the code more today, though right now I am going through finals at college. I don't want to promise anything, but this is something I could see myself contributing to, if you'd want (though now might not be the time so early in the process). Shoot me an email (in profile), if you'd like to be in touch.
It is a tough choice, especially when you're pre-VC... since at that point you have a few hundred thousand, and you want to build a solid small team while keeping your runway long.

Once you've raised a Series A round, though, then you should be going for quality over quantity and paying people what they want (within reason). Since at that point it still is about runway but you probably have significantly more cash to play with (a couple of million dollars). I don't think being too cheap at that point makes a lot of sense. It is interesting that pg and a lot of YC startups are taught to be cheap, but there's a fine line between cheapness and efficient use of capital.
I'd really like to see a video of this game in action.
I think corporations confuse self interest "short term financial maxima," just as individuals confuse happiness with pleasure.
I just upgraded my main personal desktop from slack 12.1 (lagged behind recently :) to slack 13.1. Though an upgrade from anything older than slack 13.0 is unsupported, it worked pretty well :)

Now I'll have to upgrade my slack 13.0 work desktop, will be a breeze...

By the way installing applications properly from source is very easy now with "makepkg" : simply do

./configure && make && mkdir PKG \
&& make install DESTDIR=./PKG && \
cd PKG && sudo makepkg ../myapp-version-arch-rev.txz \
sudo installpkg ../myapp-version-arch-rev.txz
Because Taiwanese Media has been translated "James Bond" as 007 since Sean Connery era. For people grew up in Taiwan and Hong Kong, 007 is the right translation.
Just download the repo and run it.
I thought it had something to do with "Going Galt".
From the comments: "I was speaking as a developer, not a consumer. As a consumer the Android marketplace might be great. As a developer Google doesn’t even allow Australian Developers to sell paid apps, so yes, it ain’t no alternative"
Many HPC servers are CPU-bound.
CS5 may have been responsible for poorly constructed Wired app
MyFrame looks awfully similar to PhotoFramePlus (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photoframeplus/id365563397?mt...), an app I read about just this morning and was considering purchasing. Now I'm wondering if PFP is next up on the chopping block (although it's not so "widgety" as MyFrame is).

What happens when Apple kills an app that you've purchased? Does it get removed from your iPad the next time you sync (a la Amazon.com and the "1984" fiasco)? If it does get removed, do you get a refund?
The article says that it has 8mb of cache per core, shared by four hardware threads.
Anyone could equally write their own version of Flash; the standard is freely available.
The Epistemic Closure Principle
Hmmm... I wonder if we could build a bayesian filter for ad blocking rather than deal with explicit blacklists?
I am interested in this game simply to learn python. It's always the projects that inspire and excite you in which you make the greatest gains.
This "article" is garbage and is full of errors; if you're interested in this topic read the slides instead. http://download.intel.com/pressroom/archive/reference/ISC_20...
Are these episodes available online somewhere? Does PBS put them up?
I see a ridiculous amount of fixed-width webpages, which would imply that using even fairly simple, standard components in a fluid way is far more difficult than many developers are interested in doing. Many, not all by any means.

Ask an average phone user if they think of the UI as a webpage. Given that nearly all are menu / button based, not links-in-content based, I'd imagine nearly all will say "no". The expectations differ, so their perceptions of the same app differ.

Ultimately, which do you want: ubiquitous Android, or geek-only Android? And guess which the average users (and thus hardware makers) want. The push will be to make it ubiquitous, thus successful apps must compete with the iPhone directly in usability and "feel", or people will always feel they've got a second-rate device / application, which is degrading to the whole ecosystem.

(for clarification: different devices on the hardware don't bother me for programming - use them or don't, it's your app. The many screen sizes however imply fluid layouts, or huge amounts of fixed + minor fluidity... and clearly nobody wants to make those if they've got careful design (see: webpages). In time with a good library or ten, this could definitely change, as would more focus on design for Android apps. But until that happens, it's fairly damaging to highly-polished apps, which tend to make money more effectively.)
Judging by http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2008/03/the-next-s... I'd say the probability is nonzero. And I'm pretty sure the owners described in the article will perform some critical maintenance like making sure vermin don't infest the house and fixing leaks because no one, not even a renter, wants to live in a place water rains down on them in their living room or where they have to dodge raccoons.

Again, there are degrees of maintenance. They won't be incentivized to put in a new deck or repaint the whole house, but a lot of the value destruction associated with foreclosure has to do with simpler things: animals taking residence, water damage, thieves stealing the wiring/plumbing and ruining the walls in the process, etc.
The code I have in github is pretty much identical to what I describe in the article.

Documentation is nonexistent, sorry for that. That was the first thing that came to mind when I saw that this hit the front page, should have thought of that earlier.

I'll go through and comment it though, this resonance has given me a big boost in motivation.
To me this is the crux of the problem. People try and paste stuff from Word. It happens. All my clients need/want to do this. Whatever you think about this philosophically, a decent WYSIWYG editor HAS to be able to:

- receive Word HTML pasted into it
- output valid XHTML

The only editor I know of that can achieve this is XStandard. We use it, and we hate it. It is a browser plug-in, so needs to be installed per machine, plays havoc with Windows if you try and install it without Admin rights, crashes Mac browsers, doesn't really work properly in Linux and is generally a nightmare to support. BUT, it can receive a paste from Word and produce relatively sane, valid XHTML.

Anyone that can write a Javascript-based editor that can achieve these two requirements will be rich...
Animated TreeMaps
I have always answered truthfully, but have not been shy about expecting a reasonable jump up from my current salary. If I'm making 80K then I might put that down and once we get to the salary negotiation part say "the range I am looking for is $90k to 100" or something. I know they say that you should never say a number first but I've never gotten away with that. But actually it has worked out well for me. The key is not to talk about it with them until you get to the END and they've decided to make an offer. Any employer who thinks they can hire you just what you made before is an idiot anyways.
Yep. We had the same problem. I had to use a different Internet connection to download it.

(I assumed it's not actually a phishing website based on the comments posted here by users I respect.)
Learn a new language. Or express a desire to become a manager.
Good idea actually, I'll make one and include it with the next post. It is really quite fun to watch. In the mean time, just pull it from github and give it a spin.
Awesome.. I am surprised how professional it looks!! It's VERY professional.
W00w00 on Heap Overflows (1999)
Larrabee is that you?
WordPress adds "Like" and "Reblog" functionality to all WordPress.com blogs
Criticizing Slackware for lack of modernity would be like criticizing a well-maintained 1957 Chevy for not having power windows or satellite radio. You don't run Slackware to escape from the complexity or configurability of Linux; you run Slackware to embrace those things.

A very good analogy for this distro. It is slightly misleading, though, since new technology regularly makes its way into Slack. The problem most people will find isn't the lack of "modernity" in terms of new versions of software and support for features like encrypted root filesystems and modern kernels. If anything I think it's the lack of larger resources [edit: in the way of amount of distro devs, packaged software, software 'polish'] provided by other distros that make Slack daunting.

Also, i'd say there is even less complexity and configurability in Slack than most other distros. Each distro brings its own method for dealing with common tasks central to any operating system. Typically these include management of the configuration and operation of local services, network services, and taking care of the heavy lifting of installing complex interlinked applications and libraries. What Slack does is strip all that away. You become the manager of your operating system, not an obscure software tool. What's really beneficial is the experience you gain in working with open source software at such an intimate level. Everyone who wants to really know Linux well should try out LFS once, but then use Slack day to day.
Would you consider an event that would include non-technical people as well? I think it might be interesting for sales people, marketing and so on to get more of an idea what working at a start-up would be like.
It would be a good way to do that, I'm sure. I actually learned some of my early programming on a programming game called AT-Bots, where you had to write some kind of assembler-like code.
I have dreamt about this for years. I want to rent out a big warehouse and get a bunch of artists and programmers together to create/play a game like this. And then everyone just watches (like a movie) at the end.

I would WAY rather do this than go to a movie or play videogames. I mean think of all the programming you would learn and get good at. After playing video games I just feel tired and my fingers hurt.

Let me know if anyone wants to help me organize something like this.
* Or, more directly: it's immmoral for businesses to violate contracts too.*

I applaud you for this statement, but GP is correct that many do not share this belief.
Question: Is it better/more secure than xmarks?
This is very interesting, but (as a developer) doesn't seem appealing.

Apparently you live in San Francisco for a year, working on projects for another American city. You visit the city for a month to meet people and figure out what it is that you're actually doing, and then you go back to SF in some kind of mentoring camp with other Fellows, and implement the idea.

I have a bad feeling about the requirements management problem. It's known to be much better to be working onsite with your users, because communication between users and developers is critical. How is this addressed?

Another big sticking point is the salary. $35k, and I'll be living in San Francisco? It seems like a good web developer -- the kind you are trying to recruit, right? -- would be paid a LOT more, even at a startup (where they might have more impact, too). So it just doesn't feel right.
Even if servers are I/O bound, this setup is almost like crunching 50 machines into one; applications will have lower latency access to data stored on larger memory.
I used to play a programming game, probably should have mentioned that in the article. It was called AT-Bots, and was a lot of fun. Never quite got my head around corewars though.
This is a pretty amazing opportunity for anyone that wants to help fix cities. $35k stipend + travel + health and a chance at writing code that has meaning and helps fix a real problem. Will be interesting to see the kind of things that get built (and if the bureaucracy is beaten!)

More info on the program here: http://codeforamerica.org/become-a-fellow/
A zillion years ago (in development years) when MS's .Net platform was new, there was a platform called Terrarium [1] that was a bit like this. One key difference was that there was not an explicit means of communication between bots, so developers figured out a way to semaphore messages by way of simple movement behavior.

As I searched for a link, I discovered that there's a newer version out just 2 years ago. [2]

[1] http://www.devhood.com/tutorials/tutorial_details.aspx?tutor...

[2] http://terrarium2.codeplex.com/
From Utah, but live in 20879 now.

I appreciate your feedback. I could make the site similar to http://maps.huge.info/zip.htm (submit a zip to see what I mean).

But break down reports by the US postal zip + 4. The user would see that a "plus 4" area has several reports in the last 2 months, but would not see report details, address, etc.

A link would invite police or public officials to see the details of the reports. I won't bore you with the how to of verifying if someone is police or not.

I think knowing that a certain zip + 4 area has a ton of reports is enough to inform people that the area has problems.
Seeking an Objective Test for Attention Disorder