skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why should it be about selfishness? It could be about different things, like changing fashions for disciplining children.

I get the impression that children were much better-behaved in the old days, when they knew acting up would get them belted.
If something is hard to build, it's probably going to be more scarce. That would tend to make the thing more valuable. Your point is good, but "no relation whatsoever" seems a bit too strong.
Are you suggesting that everyone in the US has their pick of jobs right now? Do you really think with how desperate times are people wouldn't be willing to work in a nice air conditioned factory for $8/hr? And how about the supervisor positions, the industrial engineer positions, the HR positions, etc etc that are paid above that wage. "No one will do the jobs" just seems like FUD. I've never seen any proof of it. I don't know where the basis for the argument comes from. It almost seems... classist?
Computer Simulation Shows BP Spill After 1 Year (Video)
A friend of mine started getting involved in the competitive Starcraft scene, and I noticed this tendency while watching him play. I think that any given player's APM is non-trivially influenced by the numerical "pissing contest" effect; every time I see a video like this it makes me want to see someone get really skilled while maintaining a reasonable APM and mop the floor with everyone else, just to show that it's a silly measurement.

EDIT: Full disclosure; I have played Starcraft since it came out in 1996, I possess a so-called "reasonable APM," and my spamming friend with an APM in the triple-digits could wreck me probably without even looking at the screen. I will never forget watching my entire fully-upgraded army somehow crumble impotently against a small, carefully-controlled contingent of foot soldiers at the perimeter of his base.

"ur micro is terrible dude, lol"

When did I hit the button that turned my guys into papier-mâché?!
Of course they are. Every few weeks, I make an effort to un-follow a few people on twitter. Either because they post too much or because their posts aren't particularly interesting to me
2008 and 2010 both have it, as well as a lot of other easy ways to navigate,
Were you making the ice in a freezer that was in the same room as your "air conditioner"?
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover#1932_campaign), there are statements attributed to FDR accusing Hoover of reckless spending and criticizing him for spending too much and putting too many people on the dole. There are a lot of statements attributed to Bush about humble foreign policy, limited government and deregulation, and statements attributed to Obama about how forcing people to buy insurance is a bad thing.

In general, I assume that a politicians views agree with what he does rather than the lies he tells to get elected.
http://bettersoftwareprocess.com/

I always wanted a site like this to discuss software process things without the hardcore evangelists using buzzwords. It didn't take too long to throw this up so it wasn't a massive waste but I actually thought it would start growing once I shared it with my developer/agile network. Not much interest, apparently. I'll probably have to kill it soon so it doesn't sit there mocking me.
> What kitchen sink was thrown in C++?

What wasn't?

- Procedural programming

- Structures and enumerations

- Overloading of functions, including operators

- Classes, object-oriented programming and run-time polymorphism

- Generic programming, templates, compile-time polymorphism and metaprogramming

- Text-based macros

- Hacks and, from C++0x, built-in language support for in-line functions

- Exceptions

- Low-level memory access

By my count, every one of those things interacts with almost every other one in some way. Often, there are deep connections, such as the RAII idiom, that are fundamental to using C++ effectively but not obvious to someone with a good general programming background but no expertise in C++ specifically.

The real problem, though, is that C++ isn't really very good at any of those things in isolation. There are much better approaches to all of them, and there are tools available that take those approaches. They just don't fit together to form a coherent whole, where features are either orthogonal or blended together cleanly. It used to be the case that C++ offered a more powerful overall tool than most other languages because of the diversity of its features, but today's languages have had the benefit of decades more experience and hindsight to draw on. The very diversity that used to be a compelling reason to use C++ has now become the most compelling reason not to, IMHO.
You know, I kinda like that Lisp-style C++ formatting...
a player's APM isn't directly related to their skill, but all the Korean professionals are quite fast (300 and above). there are so many things going on in the game, you really do need that much speed to play professionally and compete
Unsuccessful on the desktop, qnx for instance is a microkernel and is quite successful. On the desktop there's a lot of inertia, you need apps (which is a chicken and egg thing). As wmf said, you see a lot of poor unix on top of the kernel so there isn't even a compelling reason to use it.
I felt this way until I tried it. The rationalization, which I agree with as well, is that spamming in the early game and keeping up a steady rhythm "warms you up" in a way that makes it easier to maintain that speed when you really need it for micro-intensive portions of the game. So I don't believe it's really a pissing contest for very many players. (Although it's a poor metric.)

Also worth considering is that high APM is an unnatural requirement imposed by some limitations particular to SC:BW -- no automining, huge armies but a control group size limit, queued units consume minerals immediately (thus queueing is suboptimal.) In other RTSes without limitations like this, it's much more practical to have a lower APM. For example, in WC3, which has less units on the field at once and less base management, some players have been successful at a near-pro level with only around 60 APM. In SC2, with automining and large control groups, it seems like the best current players are frequently only between 100-150.
If people are getting what they want with x amount of effort, why do more? I've not read about massive waves of F's in university classes, so I assume they're not flunking out. Law and Med schools seem filled, we're swimming with STEM grad students (more than industry and academia can easily absorb) and I keep reading that other fields have 100 or more applicants for every opening.

There may be problems with the system, but I doubt it's that students aren't doing enough work. Grades too high? Courses too easy? Maybe. Maybe, too, students are just better trained in pre-college? Or, maybe they're just smarter?

Most people are skilled at getting by, and knowing what it takes to do so.
Well, if this guy is going trailing parens, I'm going to start, too. I thought someone old beardy lisp guy would jump out and shoot me if I did, but he seems to be doing fine.
Isn't the price of a magazine more a filter of intent than something to cover costs? That's why if you cancel your subscription they'll offer to renew you at a fraction of the advertised price.
I think this one is awesome. I hate the teeny tiny pictures in Amazon - it does not compare to seeing books in the store. The downside is I don't really know what to search for. I like to go to a certain section (literature, programming, etc) and browse.
These articles emerge like cicadas every few years, especially during temporary economic downturns. The definition of the 'American Dream' is nebulous enough that you can always, for the purpose of the story, define it as what today's kids won't have as easy as their parents.
It's because Richard Gabriel was right.

Monolithic kernels are good enough, perform well enough and are available right now with a large enough body of software.

Being Unix-ish is a great thing as it allows you to be creative with the implementation while presenting a familiar API to the applications. Netscape ran on about 30 different platforms (27 of them more or less identical under the hood because they were Unix ports).

I see a bright future for microkernel and other architectures that can provide a unix-like appearence to programs, but only after we get rid of Windows.
Jim Sterne on Measuring Your Social Media Marketing Campaign
"Spam" is done as part of warming-up during pre-game chat and during approximately the first 10s of most builds.

These players aren't spamming. They're selecting individual unit abilities within multiple control groups and switching off the membership of said groups in real-time.

That documentary clip is somewhat misleading. Some very strategic top-level Starcraft players with excellent micro-control can have as low as 200-250 APM. Some macro-oriented players such as Bisu ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Taek-Yong ) have ~420 APM.

Though APM is a datum which has grown during the evolution of the game, Flash ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Young-Ho ) ,the current highest ranked Starcraft player in the world, only has "average" APM for a pro gamer.

At the pro level, success is less about "action volume" and more about which actions one chooses to take.
Start-up Job Advertisement Mad-Libs
I envy you. I have a cousin living the same city 45 minutes away, and my parents live in another country that is a 3 hour drive away.

We moved here because of my job, which I love, but while raising our two children, I sorely miss the support structure that an expanded family provides. I also grew up in a similar situation, little to no family living in the same city, but my parents had many, many friends in the neighbourhood within walking distance. They might as well have been family.

Now, where I am now, I find it hard to relate to my neighbours (maybe it's me, maybe it's them, I don't know). I don't think I'll ever be able to integrate into the community like my parents did, and we don't have family nearby that we can rely upon on a moments notice.

Would I trade my current job for somewhere closer to family? That's a difficulty choice to make for me, as there's too many unknowns. I wish it were an easy one.
Fascinating! I never thought about using spamming as a "warm up" for late-game encounters which actually require triple-digit APMs to play at full effectiveness. Thanks for this post.
How throwing them the noodle, without getting close enough to endanger yourself? Or can't they climb the noodle?

Edit: Having read the article--a noodle probably won't help somebody who's past aquatic distress and has started drowning.
Or at least a more typical subject. The very fact that this person has a college education with no debt puts him at a steep advantage compared to most Americans his age.

Another way to read this article is that someone with this kind of advantage is still unable to attain their definition of success, therefore people that do not have this advantage are even worse off. Meaning, that this person needs to either become an adult and take any job he can get while redefining their definition or stop complaining.

Not that I agree with that point, there are plenty of people without this advantage that are very successful, but I suspect that this article is meant to be comforting to the many other privileged readers of the NY times.
As the world of programming grows, I think it's natural that programmers become more specialized. I think the value provided by sophisticated, complex tools (the language and core API) is worth the additional complexity. I don't think you can avoid complexity by sticking with simple tools - you simply offload the complexity into the application code and end up in the same situation where in order for new programmers to understand the code, they have to have extensive knowledge of the application codebase.

It may even be that concentrating the complexity in the language allows programmers to more easily switch between projects and get up to speed on new projects since they're already familiar with the language complexity and thus have less application-specific complexity to learn.
I don't see your point here. Encouraging waste because a resource doesn't have scarcity seems a bit strange. Perhaps it can be piped to areas that have scarcity? Many rivers etc are dammed to provide municipal water; so oversupply might encourage some muncipalities to un-dam water and let it flow naturally again, which is an env++.

Most importantly, it's good to be in the habit of conserving water, recycling and such because when you move into areas of scarcity, you don't have to force-change your habits and suffer quickly, but instead act responsibly all the way through.

I note your handle is 'capitalist' - being responsible isn't hippy anti-capitalism. Saving a few bucks here and there by using less subsidized water might mean that people will stop expecting subsidy, and instead want the money redirected elsewhere...

and everyone is still richer.

EDIT: i don't disagree that subsidies distort markets, but it's tangental to the parent post.
I'm really conflicted on this topic: I do agree there is much value to be had from asking at least one question per conference... but what would happen if all attendees had the same attitude.

Aside from massive lines to the microphone, the main concern is that really important/pressing questions might be lost because more eager beavers got up to the mic to ask their token 'must as at least one' question first.
People, not surprisingly, choose immediate over delayed gratification. Faced with lower prices today vs. eroded tax base at some point in the future... Pretty simple choice, which is why Wal-Mart is as big as it is. And if you ask people to pay for a nebulous benefits that might go to others, they won't pay.

It's also why medium-end stereo stores died, why most computers are plastic pieces of crap and I can't get a belt that doesn't delaminate in a few months.
It's not implemented in beta 1, but Firefox 4 will also have tabs extend to the top of the screen when maximized. See http://bugzil.la/572480 by Alex Faaborg (Principal Designer on the Firefox UX team) for details.
> According to this video, you need to be over 300 APM to be competitive.

> That means in 60 seconds, you need to accomplish over 300 things.

These are totally different. Although a pro SC player accomplishes a lot more than a beginner, I'm pretty sure there's no one out there that's actually doing 300 different things a minute - they are just pressing buttons 300 times. Most of it is switching between hotkeys to check if units are complete, ordering units to slightly different positions, etc. There's a lot of spamming going on too (like mashing the first hotkey for no good reason) to keep the APM rate high.
To get autocomplete in Firefox, go to about:config, search for "autofill" and set browser.urlbar.autofill to "true".
See http://groups.google.com/group/fakeapp/browse_thread/thread/... for the workaround that got SSL working for me.

(Basically the app currently fails quietly if the SSL certificate doesn't validate, rather than prompting for action.)
A "timeout" (or as my mother would call it "GO TO YOUR ROOM RIGHT NOW!") works as punishment for mysterious reasons. You'd think that the kid would be happy alone in his room with all those toys, but seeing an angry parent and then being left alone to think for a while seems to be reasonably painful.

I don't think the name "timeout" is good, though. It makes it sound too much like part of a game.

I agree, though, that the "timeout" shouldn't be the worst threat in a parent's disciplinary arsenal. Spankings should be given out rarely and threatened far more often.
I see what you are saying. I would rather do a daily sync of any changed files as the deltas would be small and then maybe have the option to do a full restore by getting a disk couriered to me if I'm in a hurry or fetching it online if I don't mind downloading files for a week or two.

What I want to avoid is to have to bother about backups in the normal case. I just want to set it up properly as a daily cron job and mostly forget about it. Putting physical disks in the mail or safety deposit boxes is too much trouble. The server I want to backup isn't even usually physically next to me.

This problem is only growing as people get better cameras and start shooting a bunch of video and stills that take up a bunch of space. An interesting solution would be a mix of this online service plus a NAS appliance to put on the home network that does fast filesharing and automatic backups locally and to the online service. When a disk in the appliance fails you call the guys and they send you a replacement drive with the data already in it.
For Dota/Heroes of Newerth an apm of 100 is plenty enough!
So long and fare well to the IDE
For those that wish to learn more about the Korean pro Starcraft scene, I urge you to watch the English YouTube commentaries at SC2GG ( http://starcraft.homelinux.org/VODTracker/#v ).
In other news: Prince was seen shouting at children who were standing on his lawn.
As was stated in a different comment, the spamming is probably more to keep the player warm than to raise their APM.
What is the future of Lean?
Agreed, I worked in .Net and Java for a few years, decided I wanted to get back to PHP, started up an open source project, started talking about it and mastering the language in my free time. Now I work a PHP job that I love and I like to think having a couple thousand lines of example code out in the wild gave me an edge.
I think tying language design to IDE design is absolutely brilliant. Languages are just a tool, IDEs are just a tool, we're missing brilliant opportunities if we neglect to design them synergistically.
Having lived for a semester at Vista Way, I think Disney World's College Program is as close to a living in a company town as you can get nowadays in the US. They completely control two municipalities, and provide the jobs, the bank, the housing, the food, the fire department, the EMS, the phone company, and the transportation services.

The Foxconn facilities in China might be a contender as well, but I don't know enough to say.
I'm curious too. One thing that strikes me as unusual (and perhaps others can lend some sort of insight here) is that I have been working with PCs on a daily basis, often for excessive lengths of time (12-16 hours a day or more) for about 24 years now.

At no time during any of these years have I ever encountered symptoms of RSI, or required any special breaks. I have terrible posture and I don't go to any lengths to protect myself against RSI, either. I've wondered if perhaps moving in a more digitally-inclined direction has somehow led to us being more conditioned to deal with these repetitive movements, or if I'm just lucky (or, more scary to think about, destined for some sort of horrible crippling onset of RSI at some point soon)?
Me: Prince is still making music?
First the default limited storage for apps. WebOS had the same problem up until about 6 months ago. That's just poor design and planning.

Then the choice of where to install apps being left to developers.

Last, the choice to expose a method for shuffling apps around. Sure it's nice to have because of the default limited space for apps. However the correct solution isn't to burden users with this low-level crap, but to fix the design so this kind of thing is unnecessary.

If they insist on supporting a removable SD card then they should install apps wherever there is room, perhaps notifying the user that if they remove the SD card then they will no longer be able to run apps installed to it.

It seems like a small thing, but these kinds of hacks pile up on each other and soon your left with a Windows-esque system where users are burdened with system maintenance crap instead of the device being more like an appliance that they can just use.

If a user goes to install an app and the device says there's no room when they have a 16GB SD card, most would just throw up their hands and think that it's broken, not that they should contact the developer of the app to request that they enable installation to SD cards, or that they should change the install location or whatever.
Ask HN: My company is hiring. Which job boards have the best hackers?
Hiring is a pain - posting to the wrong job boards can mean thousands of resumes of the worst type. I've tried the StackOverflow, 37signals, and Techcrunch boards before with varying levels of success.<p>Of course, I understand that the best of the best don't ever visit job boards - they get jobs handed to them via referrals. Which job boards would you visit if you needed a job?
I installed Ultimate Droid Froyo on my Motorola Droid, and I saw an enormous speed improvement over 2.1, so I think there will be a pretty significant difference.
This, coupled with the FileAPI, could be used for upload compression.

Am I incorrect in thinking that currently, outside of a Flash uploader, there is no way to compress uploads? That even if the server accepts gzip there is no compression of files sent up?
I didn't know that. That sounds like the way it should work and would alleviate my concerns. I'm not against knobs for knowledgable users in general.
I get where you are headed, but you should probably think about the ice as "fuel." The cost (in terms of heat/energy) of freezing the ice can be spent during times when you are not in the room and/or not using the "air conditioner."

Actually there are commercial HVAC systems that use ice as a coolant - the water is frozen at night when electricity demands are lower and then is used to cool the building during the day.
Chances are you are one of the lucky ones, though it doesn't mean that your luck will not end at some point (your body can compensate for a long time, but when it can't anymore, symptoms can appear rather quickly).

This book has been useful to me:

http://www.amazon.com/Carpal-Syndrome-Therapy-Computer-Profe...

And in it they mention that some people do all the wrong things and never seem to get RSI. Better not to count on luck, though. I now wish I had taken preventive measures much earlier. I have my first physical therapy appointment next week...
Interestingly enough, his "parenthesis-stacked" C code looks just like Python, which I find a pleasure to read.

There's one difference, though: conventional Python is indented four, not two, spaces. In fact, the main aspect of his "normal" C code that makes it more readable (to me, at least) is his use of four spaces for indentation.

Personally I think the biggest barrier to Lisp readability is too little indentation (two spaces is typical). Looking at his reformatted Lisp, the way I identified the nesting level of his highlighted line was not by looking at trailing parens but by looking at the indentation, which was much wider (and therefore clearer) than standard Lisp.
How to open a wine bottle with a shoe
Dice is a well known job board for technical people.
I could put in my own, wannabe lisper words, but I think pg explains it well:

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

And yes, I actually wish I had more time to spend learning Lisp and using it for web development as well. See my blog (http://ifelipe.net) for what it's worth---though it's on a bit of a hiatus.
Yep, absolutely. But in reality there aren't that many brilliant developers who can do both with skill and you are lucky if you can find them AND convince them to join you.

To attract those, you're going to have to have a big offer (both remuneration and the nature of the startup) to attract these folks.

Another school of thought is find back-end devs that can do some ops (although yes, it's ideal to have that as a separate position if possible) and front-end devs who can also do UI design and usability. You will need these two hats too.
If I weren't addicted to Starcraft myself, I would be linking to the "How to lose time and money" discussion.

Maybe it's more relevant for me because I'm addicted and not competitive.