skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the harsh-but-honest comment category, I add:

After the few seconds I would spend looking at a site, I do not know what your service actually does. It is obviously something to do with making banner ads.

I do know that it has a silly name, which is a practice I find intensely annoying. Are you saying a big hello to some teenagers from the year 2000, selling radioactive yoghurt, or providing a dating service for the homosexual community?

I also know that your home page uses buzzwords like "platform" and spams me with things about Twitter and Facebook, which are practices I associate with marketroids who have nothing informative to say.

I noticed these things because your home page lacks any meaningful structure to guide a visitor through the basics: what you do, why they should be interested, and how they can take things further. There is no hierarchy or emphasis in the page elements. There is no useful indication of which elements do something useful when clicked. I overlooked several of the page elements initially, ironically due to banner blindness. I didn't get as far as finding the call to action on the bottom right until the third time I went back to look at your page while writing this.

Finally, I'm not sure who your market is. How many people are going to be interested in banner ads instead of using, say, Adwords, given that they would need something worth advertising yet presumably don't have either the basic graphic design skills necessary to create this sort of thing themselves or the business contacts to get it done for them?

Sorry to be so negative, but I don't think this is a serious venture yet. You need to develop a viable business plan, learn basic marketing principles, and then create a web site with much better usability based on those things (assuming you still think that your business plan has enough potential to pursue it further by that stage).
Nifty. Has anyone attempted a full ssh + term emu? Could probably get away with using ChromeOS then.
No, CS. But I think empathy is as important as coding ability when building products for other humans.
What about moving to China? (I'm serious.)

I moved to China a few weeks ago and was amazed how this place is an ideal place for startups/freelancers. First, the cost of living is extremely low AND you get a similar (if not better) quality of life than what you can get in the US. I live in Shenzhen, a very young city with a booming economy and the world's capital of electronics manufacturing. The population density here is much higher than even the largest US cities, which means: a lot of 24/7 restaurants, night clubs full everyday of the week / hour of the night, convenience stores around every corner, cheap taxis (3$US can get you far), etc. There are very few foreigners but it can be a nice thing at the same time because when you see a fellow westerner, you are tempted to socialize very quickly and most of them have interesting stories to tell. Ah, I was about to forget: Chinese girls love westerners.

China is also ideal for startups. The economy here is growing very fast and the domestic market is huge. The software industry here seems to be lagging behind the US by a couple years. This means that people knowledgeable about the western market have a significant edge because they are able to foresee the trends that are likely to take place in China. That's why there are so many Chinese clones of popular western websites.

I could go on and on... Get in touch with me if you'd like to ask some questions.

EDIT: Some pictures from my apartment http://www.flickr.com/photos/50425387@N06/
The 'Choose a banner,' 'Customize it,' etc. blurbs look more button-like than the big 'Start Now' button. I would at least make the 'Start Now' button border more defined and raised, and maybe change the afore mentioned blurbs so they don't make it difficult to tell what is and is not clickable.
I have a simple tool for autorefreshing a page on save too, albeit you need to add a script tag to the html you are editing which adds a comet connection behind the scenes. Works across browsers so you can have IE, firefox, and chrome all running in different windows and see them all refresh every time you save a change.

http://www.willwagner.com/autorefresh/
This isn't really much use to anyone but US tourists if it won't take in to account purchasing power parity...
IME, the presence of women has mostly been a signal that the workplace is healthy. For the most part, women won't put up with the same shit men will to get ahead.

Whenever someone says "women are bailing," I read "working conditions are poor."
Prague, Barcelona, Rio and Athens come to mind.
That's way cool. I should try this.

The other material on this site is also worth a look.
I think you can find a more effective domain name. How about something that includes 'banner' or 'ad' in the name, like polybanner.com?
Aimee Mullins and her 12 pairs of legs (or, prostethics as an advantage)
I don't know if I would want to risk the Chinese government blocking some vital net service I need for my business. My own site for example is blocked in China.
I'd say less than 1% of all programmers I've met/seen have been female. About 50% of the project managers I've known have been female. In about 90%+ of the cases where I've been in a meeting at work with programmers and a project manager, IF there were only 1 female in the room she was the project manager, not a programmer. So, extrapolating... assuming enough other males have experienced approximately the same thing in life, that could account for why they tend to expect any unknown new female they encounter in that situation to be, well, not a programmer, and very probably a manager or project assistant of some kind.

That said, yes, obviously there are female programmers, and yes it sucks if a man assumes a woman can't program solely because of a gender. But from my reading of the OA, I don't think that the particular female programmer in question was necessarily having that particular experience. Instead, she may have just been on the wrong side of statistics. Some of those men may literally have never encountered a female programmer before, period. So for them, it would be like, oh say, walking into a Great Clips to have your hair cut, and you sit down at the hair cutting chair and suddenly a man comes up and starts cutting hair. It would be shocking for me if that happened, at least initially, because based on my own experience 100% of hair cutters at the Great Clips franchise are women, no exceptions so far. But it wouldn't mean that I was discriminating against him, or oppressing or persecuting him in anyway.

Summary: She may have just found herself on the wrong side of statistics. Part of life, move on.

(note: Great Clips is a chain of hair cutting salons in the USA midwest)
My favorite book is "Economics in One Lesson". It's available free online and in print from major book sellers (see the top search results on the Google). This book does not represent mainstream economic thought, but that's a good thing given the track record of mainstream economists in the current crisis.
How easy is it for programmer from the U.S. to move to Montreal? Are there a fair amount of companies in the startup scene able and willing to support a visa?
Multitouch using water
This is a subject that I care about, as my wife is also a software developer and has felt out-of-place in a male-dominated field.

Two things struck me about the linked article.

1: It sounds like her Midwestern co-workers were just assholes, seriously. Having asshole co-workers is a problem for men and women alike. One key distinction is that men don't immediately relate abusive bevahior to gender. I am sure it often really is gender hostility, but sometimes the guy is just a jerk.

Basically: Dear women (and men) in IT. There are jerks out there and there always will be. Sometimes the only option is to get a new job. Sad, but true.

2: I find the idea of a "glass cliff" (i.e. an impossible project set up to make someone fail) really fascinating. It's a form of harassment I've never heard of before. Anyone have stories?
The report is apparently not online, though you can give them your email address here: http://www.ncwit.org/resources.thefacts.html
[Edit: actually it is, just click "no thanks"]

There's another article here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/06/ncwit-report-...

"The NCWIT report contends that 56% of women in technology companies leave their organizations at the mid-level point (10-20 years) in their careers, a costly loss of talent."

Maybe this is just Silicon Valley bias, but I have to wonder about who stays with the same organization for 10-20 years! I would expect most people to have worked at two or three companies by then. I wonder whether they addressed that?
That was sort of my point. If you're backtesting, then you are assuming that past prices do in fact have some sort of bearing on future prices. Besides, aren't there all sorts of problems with backtesting, one of which is survivor's bias?
The article also mentioned her manager suggesting that she play up her feminine side and not let the men think she was smarter than them. That's not being on the wrong side of statistics, that's being on the wrong side of a sexist asshole.
If you don't have any ideas of your own you should be happy to help others with their ideas until you get yours!
Because you can't use Facetime with your notebook's webcam.
Sorry, this might be a bit lame, but this picture immediately came to mind: http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/7176/jobsmedvedev.jpg

It says:
"Haha, signal lost!"
"Here you go, that way it's not"
The Great Firewall sucks but I use a VPN anyways. My connection is still very fast (for instance, I reached over 1000 kb/s on a torrent yesterday). That being said, although I don't morally agree with the firewall, it has contributed to the success of many popular Chinese websites (notably Facebook/Twitter clones).
It was increased to 20MB near the end of 2009.

Devs can get around this by downloading extra bits on first startup or heavily compressing big datasets and decompressing them on first startup. Only a handful do, but there are ways around it. It would be nice if it was just a warning instead of a strict rule.
One of the features I like most about GMail is the keyboard shortcuts. Anytime I can keep my hands on the keyboard rather than clicking is time saved. Safari's bookmark bar shortcuts plus GMails shortcuts really cut down on mouse switching for me.

With GMail as my first bookmark in the browser bar Control+1 and then C is all it takes to start a new message. And I like not having a dedicated bookmark for composing messages and another one for reading them.
Good point. But I'd say maybe. Not necessarily. Maybe he thought he was being helpful or practical. None of us was there so context and nuance are lost. Many programmers/engineers/geeks, especially when younger, tend to be defensive about being Smart (tm). For some, it's part of their personal sense of virility as a man. That may be what the manager was thinking about when he said that.

But agreed, sexism is bad.
Given the first letter of any technology and an English word, it's likely that there is a module / plugin / script / program with a name that combines the two.

For example, there are at least two "eproject" extensions for Emacs.
Should be "Surprisingly Quickly". Just saying.
Yes, see van der Linden's Deep C Secrets:

http://books.google.com/books?id=4vm2xK3yn34C&printsec=f...
I read that as 10-20 years since the beginning of their career (i.e., age 30-40 if it's their first career). Makes me wonder whether women are more likely to switch careers (though they say men trend to less risk-aversion), or more likely to take parental leave and not return. I agree that many years at a single tech company would be very surprising, even outside the valley.
Since we weren't there and don't know the person, all sorts of interpretations are plausible, including that the person telling the story got it right. Why do you choose to assume they got it wrong? Sounds like the just-world fallacy to me: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/06/07/the-just-world-fallac...
There's nothing special about Gmail here. If you have a half-decent mail client, just create a bookmark/shortcut to "mailto:" and your OS/browser will open a new compose window in your email client of choice.

This even works for me when typing it into Safari's address bar.
>GATES: The idea of how you run software development properly is not something you can capture in a few sentences. It's how you hire people, organize people, how you plan the spec, how you let it change, how you do the testing, how you get feedback from customers. IBM's only real software success had been with mainframes, where they were the only choice. Consequently IBM didn't develop those processes very well.

>PLAYBOY: Could that be happening to Microsoft now? In terms of corporate power, your company has been called the new IBM.

>GATES: I've thought about that, but I don't think so.

I'd like to hear his answer to that from 2000, 2005, and today. I feel like most people would agree Microsoft has fallen victim to a similar lack of bureaucratic vision.
Computer program that detects depression in bloggers' texts
It is instinct. At least for me. If I know how someone actually sounds I "hear" their voice as I read a quote by them.
Apple products sure are easy to use.
Go to http://www.gigayo.com/templates/ and magnify the font: the navigation sidebar will stack vertically over the content. This is because the LHS and RHS classes use "float: left" and "float: right". They should probably be cells in a table to guarantee side-by-side display. (All those stylish articles that say to never use tables are just blind dogma.)
And you get unlimited 4G. (With the download rates I get, I calculated it as about 1.3TB per month. Much more generous than AT&T's 250MB.)
What I use
Yea, it's a classic book in the same way Keynes' "General Theory" was, but I'm not sure I'd say that Austrian economics (such as Hazlett, Hayek, Mises, etc.) is a good way of understanding our modern system.

To get a good balance, I'd say to read something from Paul Krugman, Rob Reich, Greg Mankiw to understand left, center and rightist views on neo-Keynesian thought. For "Chicago School" / monetarist thought, Milton Friedman's "Capitalism & Freedom" is a good primer.

For a more scholarly view, "Money, Markets, and Sovereignty" is a great one for global-economic thought at the most macro level, and "Financial Innovation" (Molyneux) is awesome for showing where all of this came from - though only the first three chapters are accessible for someone who isn't comfortable with math.
I'm not sure if this is of interest to anyone here, but we've had a few usesthis articles in the past -- and I figure that even if nobody is interested in what I use, people can talk about their own systems instead.
In C++, methods are only dispatched by the type of the arguments. In, for example, Clojure's multimethods you can dispatch on pretty much anything: type of some or all arguments, their values, function of either (or both)... etc.

Quick example:

(defmulti foo #(* % 100))
(defmethod foo 0 [_] "passed in zero")
(defmethod foo 100 [_] "passed in one")
(defmethod foo 200 [_] "passed in two")
(defmethod foo :default [n] (str "passed in " n))
...
>>> (foo 2)
"passed in two"
>>> (foo 5)
"passed in 5"

(written off the top of my head, so excuse any mistakes..)

I'm only using a single argument here and I'm dispatching on a function of its value. I could just as easily dispatch on multiple arguments (or an arbitrary amount).
Russia promotes global currency at G20
Neither of us knows exactly what happened, that's true. My comments are based on direct experiences I've had in life, personally, over a large number of years, and from that I'm guessing as to what kinds of factors might be at play here, since we all live in approximately the same world.

I also often put a higher trust level in the findings from my own direct experience, than in what I read in an article on the web somewhere, where it's second-hand and possibly hearsay and probably had a lot of data and nuance filtered out or distorted along the path to being written up. I don't even know if the main woman talked about is even a real person, for example (probably, but who knows) whereas I know I'm real and not bullshitting, so...

Thanks for the link on Just World Fallacy! Yep, heard of that.
Personally, I think there's nothing wrong with polyamory. Whatever blows your skirt up. Biologically speaking, men wants to inseminate as much women as he can. I also accept the author's point about freedom and different kind of experience that monogamy cannot give. But then the author would also have to agree, that monogamy may have the depth that any non-monogamous relationshop lack, so it might be a trade off. Then medically speaking, monogamy is safer. Psychologically, there are also trade offs: it's usually difficult enough to get along with one person - I believe issues multiply when you have many. For example, I don't see anything particularly scary about having multiple wives (western culture thinks it's some sort of barbaric behavior), but if you look at it closely, you would understand why it only works in traditional societies like muslim: because they have mechanisms for holding it all together. Men there have obviously more authority and thus they hold the power of getting it all together. In the western world the task gets a lot more complicated because people are more independent and have more rights legally. One thing for sure, divorce cases with this model would be a legal hell.

Please note I have not made up my mind about the particular lifestyle so I'm totally neutral here. I'm not into any relationship right now, but when I think of it, I sometimes think about how would it be a monogamous ones and sometimes I feel more like I'd want to stick with some sort of polyamory.
@bombs mentioned ajax ssh from Slicehost

http://antony.lesuisse.org/software/ajaxterm/
What a beautiful and informative post. Thank you, sir.
You're most welcome. Good luck!
I've had like a $5 chair that kills my back (jabs into it) whenever I slouch against it for the past year. Every couple of weeks I think to myself: "I really should go buy a more comfortable chair" and then I reprimand myself because I feel like if I'm slouching I'm not working as hard as I could be. People have told me I'm masochistic, but I'm happy to see someone else who thinks I'm not being totally irrational.
You can skip the email request (click "No Thanks") and it starts the download for the "Women in IT: The Facts" report.

EDIT: Here's the pertinent section. They are saying they leave the field, not company, mid-career:

"In 2003, only one-third of women with a computer science bachelor’s degree were still employed in a science, engineering, or technical (SET) job two years after graduation.
According to a study by the Center for Work-Life Policy, 74 percent of women in technology report “loving their work,” yet these women leave their careers at a staggering rate: 56 percent of technical women leave at the “mid-level” point just when the loss of their talent is most costly to companies. This is more than double the quit rate for men. It is also higher than the quit rate for women in
science and engineering."
Only 2% of kindergarten teachers in the UK are male (1). Further, the overall number of male elementary school teachers in the UK has fallen significantly in the last 30 years (2) - men have been "bailing out of primary education" for decades.

Are the majority of cases due to bullying or being "forced" out of the role? I doubt it. It's more likely to be related to opportunities and different types of people gravitating to what sort of jobs suit them best. I suspect if women are crashing out of IT, it might be because it's not a particularly appealing or novel career anymore (back in the 90s it was portrayed as super high paid and "cool" - far more appealing than the very sexist financial industry at the time) and women have better opportunities to do other things than ever before (e.g. finance, management, legal) whereas males in IT are probably there because they picked it from the start as a calling rather than a career.

Update: As one of the respondents says, yes, let's make IT more inclusive. But let's not 1) assume IT is a special case, or 2) go OTT by doling out blame or restricting the largely innocent (i.e. "men" as a group) by redefining acceptable behavior to be a tiny gamut of unnatural neutrality and inoffensiveness.

1: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7838273.stm
2: http://www.askamum.co.uk/News/Search-Results/Current-news/Pr...
Using the Mint Menu in Ubuntu 10.04
I couldn't agree more. I've come across the need for this feature and wondered why it isn't available.

I hope it doesn't put the small guys out of business.

Gmail also needs a follow-up option. I don't know if its available elsewhere, but the ability to send an email and 'flag' it for follow up is helpful for some but not all emails.
I don't have data, I don't do research, I never read news regarding job/working environment in IT industry, however, I have a very strong feeling that you are correct sir

(I'm not joking nor trying to be sarcastic).

Most developers I've worked with don't have great personality and usually the women are the one who "break the ice", sharing their lunch ideas, vacation stories, etc while men are usually about video games and how .NET sucks, SVN sucks.

Maybe it's just my personal experience... but most developers I worked with tend to be more negative than their women counterparts.
I can only guess the author is still using twm. I know a professor and a sysadmin that do at my alma mater, or at least they did circa 2008.
Dicitonary attacks aren't exactly very high-tech...
An iPhone, drawn entirely with CSS3
Contrary to popular beliefs (that business people are assholes), there are plenty jerks that work as developers and they play quite good "politic" games in the office; they are smart individuals after all.
You shouldn't test for arguments with isinstance(). Better test for specific functionality. It's like FreeBSD developers being angry that people use tests like 'somecmd --version' in autoconf scripts and thus software not compiling even though required functionality was available.
Sorry, that didn't make much sense to me - in your first example, you can't say "foo is an int", because it's not, it's a pointer to an int. And in your last example, you can't say "foo[5] is an int", because it's not, it's a pointer to int.

In response to the original question, I think the answer is that

int *foo;

is a common way of writing it because that's the way the compiler resolves it. As mentioned elsewhere,

int* foo, bar;

is equivalent to

int *foo; int bar

so treating the star as part of the type can cause problems.

But I agree fully - it makes a lot more sense to me to consider the pointer star as a flag on the type, not a modifier to the name. Just one of the many warts on C and C++ that make me happy I have to use them so infrequently...

[Edit: formatting, stars were getting swallowed when put inline]
A cool weekend project would be to come up with software that takes an image and projects it like this so it could be cnc'd on a lexan board.
I'm with Steve Jobs (from back in the day):

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products.... I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success — I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products."