skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's this one: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Productivity-20.aspx

where a guy boosts his line count by writing a program convert loops into goto spaghetti (pretty much like the generated assembly, right?).

But has anyone here actually been evaluated in this way? I've never heard about it first hand - it almost seems like an urban legend.
Sometimes there can be legitimate reasons for slipping past the due date.

Even if there aren't any legit reasons, countering an unethical move with another unethical move is definitely still unethical in my book.
So, if (or, perhaps, when) all the people with liberal arts degrees go back to Javaschool and emerge in a couple of years with M.S. degrees in CS, is your company going to hire them all?

Or are you just jerking them around?

We've been down this road before. In the 1990s, everyone flocked to "CS" school to get in on all the sweet, sweet jobs of the future. Was the aftermath of that fun for anyone?

It is often read, on HN, that it isn't enough to just go through the motions of getting a technical degree. You need other qualities to succeed. The person with all the right qualities is rare. True enough. But does this mean that only those rare people with the right qualities deserve to live outside of poverty, or the imminent risk of poverty?

My father has a degree in political science. Fortunately, the economy wasn't broken in the 1960s, so he was able to get a white-collar job, buy a house, and have kids, like most other people with "basic" college degrees in the 1960s. Back then it was even expected that you could have a decent life with a mere high school diploma, or that GED you mention.

That doesn't work so well anymore. Is that a good thing? Be careful what you wish for. We are well on our way to building a society in which you can't have a middle-class lifestyle as, say, an insurance underwriter or medical records clerk without a college degree in a technical or professional field, or maybe an M.S. degree. I think that's a bad idea. Many people have more education than they need, and an increasing number of people have more education than they want (considering that they have to go into debt for it, up front). Forcing unwilling people to struggle through advanced degrees tends to produce a lot of stress and pain, water down the advanced degrees, dilute the pool of degree holders, and waste absolutely enormous amounts of time.

Oh, and it produces unnecessary barriers to entry. We could require all hotel administrators to hold an advanced degree in hotel administration. How does that sound to the AirBnB folks?

And all it does is buy time. In the end, jobs are as much about the demand for labor as the quality of the supply. Ph.D.s can be unemployed too. Highly trained semiconductor engineers can be unemployed. Automotive engineers are probably not doing so well right now.

Shadenfreude has an evil reputation for a reason. Please try to resist the temptation.
I've always eaten reasonably well (comes from having grown up on a subsistence farm), so I have never radically changed my own diet, but I have a few (untested) thoughts:

1. Get some food culture. It is easier to make good decisions when they are made in a larger context than "nachos bad vs. carrots good". Learn something about: where food comes from, diet and health (particularly in America: I'm assuming you're American), traditional food cultures, basics of cooking. For me this has meant reading the likes of Fast Food Nation and Michael Pollan, learning to cook some French, Italian and Asian dishes, lots of cookbooks, Alice Waters, Julia Child and other chefs, reading about diet/health studies like The China Study and the Nurses' Health Study, getting myself out to the local farmer's market, but those are by no means the only options.

2. Practice what I like to call "meta-discipline". It is hard to control yourself when you're at home with some junk food. It is easy to control yourself when you're shopping at the grocery store. So don't buy junk and don't have it at home. Before you go shopping, be thoughtful about what you want to buy/eat, make a shopping list, and stick to it. (Usually I think of this in the context of work: it is easy to goof off at home. It is easy to walk to the library. It is hard not to work when you're at the library with a stack of math books.)

3. The biggest improvement to my diet has come from cooking more. Mostly, this happened because I moved from a big city with a bunch of awesome restaurants to a little town with no good ones. I wish I had enacted the change sooner.

Good luck.
I like it! That reminds me of the "Dear $CandidateName$," PFO letter I got after a job interview...
Personally I eat as much junk food as I want, with one exception: don't eat junk food when you're hungry. One piece of chocolate isn't bad but if you are hungry it's more likely that you'll want to eat a whole bar. Just make sure that you always have an alternative for when you're hungry (fruits for example).
If you can't show something's not cultural, have you shown anything aside from supporting/fighting prejudice with prejudice?

You can do a reasonably good job of showing (or at least suggesting) that something is biological rather than cultural if you show that (a) it exists in all or almost all human cultures and (b) it makes sense for human minds to be designed that way, ie. it's sensible from an evolutionary point of view.

If I understand correctly, Sex At Dawn is arguing that something (full-on no-holds-barred human polyamory) is natural despite the fact that (a) it is practiced in almost no cultures and (b) it doesn't make a lot of evolutionary sense.

Oh, and (c) it's not consistent with a helluva lot of other instincts we have, like the powerful sexual jealousy instinct. I suppose they'd claim that's just cultural.
Here http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_intro.asp

Tell her also to learn css to complete the trinity.
Okay, then you've done the equivalent of 20 minutes of jogging better. You know what I mean.
It flies at 60,000 feet and has to be incredibly light. I can't see much armament being strapped to it.

You'd use this for observation, and other drones to fly in at lower level and carry out missions.
The only thing better than writing code is deleting it.
Prepare your fridge like a subway's counter: many ingredients ready to be inserted into the meal.

A lot of foods that are 'junky' are at one end of a spectrum of foods, too. Nachos, as per your examples, for instance, can be over-salted round chips with 'cheese' poured over them, or they can be orders of magnitude healthier.

If you've money, then you can easily find this out by switching the shops you eat in, but if you're not going out, then as has been suggested, buy things which have only one ingredient(which makes them -the- ingredients). Fresh or Canned, doesn't matter. Construct, rather than 'cheese'+chip nachos, real cheese(try two or three different kinds of cheese, too), a bit of meat (red meat or poultry..I would not suggest fish nachos) shredded lettuce, onions, etc, etc, etc. Those nachos are rather good for you. Still nachos, likely much more delicious, likely better for you.

The ingredients to that can be prepared in large quantities,and used in many other things. Nachos can easily become tacos or burritos, and if you add some loaf bread and leave some meats out, sandwiches.
Your first goal in setting up this business is to resist the terrible, perhaps irresistable temptation to use this name.
Sure - my point was that it's beneficial to you and the client to have one insulating layer in regards to accounts.

Ideally, you'd want this to be your accounts person.
If they understand how to use memcached, but they can't do:

SELECT col1, col2 FROM mytable;

.. then something is seriously wrong with the world.
Nah, that's unethical, but...

It could be useful to do this internally. I'm just starting up a business by myself, and I was thinking of making a list of all the roles I need to fill, as a reminder to not just code.

It's easy to put on different hats when reacting to external crises, or events, but I don't want to forget about internal initiatives. E.g. proactive sys-adminning, creating marketing plans, etc.
Condé Nast Hopes to Wean Itself From Ad Revenue
Six million strikes me as an insanely high amount to go after. Not at all a reasonable suit.
Three words you need to remember at Starbucks:

"Tall coffee, please"

Tastes better than any of their espresso drinks, too (though that's not difficult.)
Sorry, but what’s so special about a mass produced electronic organ? It’s not like he gutted a pipe organ from the 14th century.

Making of with information about the organ he used: http://www.linusakesson.net/chipophone/making.php
Cloud password-cracking tool requires only 20 minutes to crack passwords.
Why does this nonsensical reply have 2 points ?
You make some very good points on the cost/benefit issues of this kind of strategy, and I'd be interested to explore them.

Although the incendiary language makes it hard to discuss substance.

Is everyone in accounts departments pressuring others to pay?
Are you not 'getting what you want' if you're not paid on time?

Or are you entirely justified to follow up a late payment in both of these circumstances?
“If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent'"
- Edsger Dijkstra
In Trader’s Cocoa Binge, Fear for Chocolate Prices
The best thing about an apparently automated system is that when they call you to complain you're not undermining any relationships by saying "yeah... our system does that. So have you paid yet? Why not?"
The problem isn't multitasking, it's a biological substrate that isn't really very good at it. We have awesomely parallel brains but our narrow input bandwidth and lack of multiplexing is becoming increasingly a bottleneck.
Yes, but in the non-ideal case, the client is still being deceived.

The general question is: do we have the right to deceive people "for their own good"? I say no.
"I speak Japanese fairly well, which makes me employable, but nine out of ten people with this degree have no useful proficiency in any Asian language (heritage speakers excepted)."

You have lived in Japan for at least a couple of years. You might get to know the history of Japan and some of the language in college, but living there is why you can speak it fluently (and know the customs).
If by superior then you mean much smarter, luckier and older -- then yes. I believe that many of them are.
I work at night, from 11pm to 6am, so i go to bed at about 8am.

Should i vote "before 10:00pm" or "after 4:00am"? :-)
10 Steps for Creating High Ranking Blog Posts
As a doc, glad to see some people in the community thinking right about this. This is overall pretty good advice. I would add the best snacks are nuts and cheese, or other high-fat, high-protein, low carbohydrate foods.

I like the idea of a chart widget.

I would avoid most bread, including flat breads and crackers. The occasional tortilla for a wrap is ok. I would definitely avoid rice, pasta, and potatoes. If you eat sushi, consider sashimi.

Don't ask your spouse to provide the negative feedback, ambivalent co-workers might be best.
You can use a package Martin-Kumm's is the easiest or you can use pgf/TikZ http://sourceforge.net/projects/pgf/ and creative from prmitives. Personally, I wrote some macro's to get what I wanted. I simplify mine as much as possible and use a very light grey vertical grid for background. Whatever you do don't spoil a good write-up with anything Excel!

The pgf/TikZ package is the best graphics package I have used. Just the fact that it exists is a monument to TeX, Knuth and Lamport.
> In my opinion the main problem that EU regulations brought to Europe is exactly that it's now much easier for big companies to push through new laws which are good only for the mentioned big companies and which then get applied by all the members.

Any specific examples of this?
Your cravings are a signal from your body that something is wrong. You need to address the cause (whatever it is) and not the effect (the cravings).

Unfortunately, the cause may be difficult to determine.

Fortunately, there is a great hack that probably addresses the cause: fruit. Lots of fruit. Always raw. Preferably on an empty stomach. Not too much variety.

Fruit is loaded with just about every nutrient your body wants, many of them difficult to get any other way. Chances are that if you're not eating enough fruit, your body needs nutrition and these needs manifest themselves in your cravings.

It works for me. I've been eating lots of fruit for years, and the only time I crave junk food is when I haven't eaten enough fruit earlier in the day. For long coding sessions, I always keep plenty of the hacker's perfect snack, bananas, on hand: the almost perfect food, self-contained, needs no refrigeration or preparation.

[Written while munching on some delicious fresh sweet watermelon. No junk food could compare to this.]
The error that shows up on the page actually has stack trace written on top of it.
IBM | Apple | Google | Microsoft
This is the modern equivalent of yelling at kids to get off of your lawn.
Software patents often harm the really big companies too, due to the existence of patent trolling companies which exist for no other reason than to horde patents and sue big companies.
It's easier not to feel obliged to vigorously defend "Tony" or your "automated email system" when the client claims the money has been transferred over and complains about being harassed. It's amazing how complex and restrictive your impersonal internal systems can become when it comes to preventing you from switching client's access to a service back on whilst you're waiting for payment too.

On the other hand, it's harder to use a glib "it's just procedure, I'm sure you always were going to pay" to smooth things over when the passive-aggressive payment demand that's got the client riled is signed with your name, CEO.
Well, there's certainly a lot of "bloated" code. I'm using quotation marks because I'm coming from a point of view where 'lean and mean' is golden - I like beautiful code iff the implementation of the pretty abstractions is equally beautiful.

Also, the language is so huge, that it's practically impossible to learn all of it in any reasonably short amount of time. Most people learn to use the features they need, and skip the rest entirely. That has led to a lot of controversy about the language (see the weekly rants about C++, and some that popped up last week, they're pretty funny).

I've also found that proper design is indeed a more demanding task in C++ than C. I think that's reasonable, with all the features at work, you need to be sure you're not using a cannon to kill mosquitoes. Also, I got this colleague who has said the same thing written in the article about references and pointers. That didn't feel like a joke to me. :(

But the idea of Unix++? Man, I blew orange juice all over my desk. I can't help but think it might be true. :-D
That would be their end as a troll, b/c vandalizing open source projects is way beyond troll-ness, it's evil.
> Have a drink about 30 - 60 mins after you have eaten, not during a meal. This ... allows food to be digested more efficiently before the digestive enzymes get diluted by a drink

I hear this claim a lot and it always sounds simplistic. The most reliable refutation a quick google turned up was:

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/digestion/AN01776/

from a gastroenterologist at the Mayo Clinic. I quote:

"There's no concern that water will dilute the digestive juices or interfere with digestion. In fact, drinking water during or after a meal can actually improve digestion. Water and other liquids help break down the food in your stomach and keep your digestive system on track."

Food stays in your stomach as long as 5 hours. Water must get absorbed/passed on much more quickly. (I couldn't find numbers.) I imagine your stomach is pretty smart about maintaining a proper environment for digestion.
If you treat the source code history as an essential artifact of the development process, and a piece of the product's history (which it is), then it is complete foolishness to switch systems without bringing the history over.
"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss other people."
Intel plans to deliberately limit Sandy Bridge overclocking
Just quit the business after 20 years writing embedded C code, but it remains an avocation. Now I teach high-school math.
You don't have to lie to your clients in order to decouple the billing role from individual people. In my company we have a "billing@company.com" alias. Invoices go into a database and are mailed out to customers from that alias. Our billing system logs when the invoice was sent (and re-sent, if necessary). Incoming mail to that alias gets routed to the people responsible for dealing with invoices. Notices of overdue payment can come from the same alias (however we prefer to handle such matters personally and more directly).

If you are a one-man shop, go ahead and create the role alias and then delegate when you grow.
Finitism, Physics, Cellular Automata: The Universe as Logic
Just so you know... we put a Turtlescript DSL into Hackety Hack: http://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/blob/master/sample...
Spending egregiously on fresh fruit, vegetables, and bread of the highest quality. As soon as I had a little money as a grad student, I decided to allocate an unlimited budget to spend on these particular items.

If you have unlimited budget to spend on fruit, you will find amazing blueberries, mangoes, etc. Or vine-grown tomatoes with sea salt and italian mozzarella. These healthy foods became for me such a great source of pleasure that they effectively crowded out junk food.

Counterintuitively, even with an unlimited budget, it's really hard to spend very much on these items, because there's a limit on how much you can eat. But the feeling of being supposed to spend egregiously made a big difference for me.
I reported to a manager that attempted to measure our productivity fixing bugs by comparing the lines of code before and after the fix. Most fixes reduced the lines of code, so our numbers were usually either negative or close to zero. A couple weeks later the manager interrogated the team as to why we were so unproductive.

Another fun experiment is to measure developers using lines of code, and then switch to unit test coverage. For some reason, the code always seems to shrink.

Counting lines of code for maintenance work is a little like evaluating your mechanic based on the weight difference of your car before and after he fixes it.
What the octopus is revealing about the nature of intelligence
Heh, I know these polls are far from scientific, but saying "I'd like to confirm..." is like asking for poll results to be skewed...
Thoughts about Rails from a Django guy
The easiest rule of thumb is to only eat from the outside edges of the grocery. All of the food that has limited shelf life is there for easy egress and all of the long lasting processed stuff is on the interior.
I have been involved with Construction for over twenty years. We recently had a Project with over 22,000 activities. Needless to say it became unmanageable and no-one used it. Real construction is similar in many ways with the development of software. One of the problems is reporting progress, in most cases is like trying to measure microns with a yardstick, the granularity and accuracy of the measuring instrument is not there.

On the above Project (a high-rise Tower) we came up with a graphic that had little squares representing activities. The graphic looked similar to the Tower:

---------
| | | | |
---------
| | | | |
---------

Using color, green for done and white for not done, you could have a snap of progress at a glance. You set them side by side and you can see weekly Progress.

I have been trying to refine the idea and make a start-up out of it:)

(You can think of software as a Tower as well!)
Good advice on drinking water only after about 30 minutes after the meal. A useful side effect of this optimized digestion process is significantly reduced burping! :-)

Also don't eat anything at least 3-4 hours before you sleep. This creates a period of extended fasting while you sleep, which helps with weight loss.
Your friend doesn't have the temperament for standing alone with his own ideas and trying to make them work. This is not a criticism, just an observation. You're seeing that yourself right now. Wish him well, stay friends, but if you're motivated in a different direction, follow that direction.

If you get this demotivated about one setback, perhaps you don't quite have the temperament either. You'll need to make sure you've got the stomach for this path before you spend too much more time in that road.

This may not be the time for you to do your startup idea right now, for a whole host of reasons. Don't take it as a sign that something is wrong with you, but that you're simply not ready.

Take a few deep breaths...
Angel vs VC
Unless you order a plain old coffee, everything else is 300+ calories.
I switched to cooking or preparing all of my meals, and it has been a big help against eating junk food for me. I think one reason is that there are two checks for eating junk food; one, I have to decide to buy it at the store and, two, decide to eat it from the kitchen once I have it.

Other things I've done which you might find useful:

- replace soda with water: I drank a lot of soda in my teens and early college, but this was one of the easier things to change

- have a sugar replacement such as fresh fruit available: if I eat something low in sugar (or maybe carbs in general?), particularly in the evening, then I get cravings for sugar. Eating fruit or toast seems to help this.

- go to the grocery store only after eating. I'm not sure if this is a myth or real, but I do it in hopes that my immediate hunger won't drive my shopping decisions.

- get enough sleep. Without enough sleep, my resolve is weakened by the afternoon, and I will want to snack rather than work.
Moving often has a hefty cost, and not just financially.
While I agree with most of the sentiments here, what degree would we recommend to kids who are smart but not particularly mathematically inclined?
Agreed. I did quite a bit of Swing development a few years ago.

There is also Griffon (http://griffon.codehaus.org/) that is a MVC (Rails like) framework for Swing apps that uses Groovy. I haven't used it, but from what I have seen, it does make it easier to work with Swing.

I had not heard of swixml. Thanks for the pointer.
I'm not buying it. The patent involved is substantial; the blinking cursor is not. They could have implemented a blinking cursor without XOR. However, if their entire graphics strategy was essentially a duplicate of this patent, then that would be a problem.

I really, really don't like software patents, but solving this problem (flicker in animation) in 1978 may be one of the cases that would be worth it. Link to patent courtesy of pvg http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1545347
That's always been possible - you can just enter the network password in Wireshark and watch everybody's traffic on a PSK network. You just have to capture the initial key negotiation traffic for a particular client.

WPA(2) largely just made it more difficult to brute force network passwords (vs WEP) but did nothing for privacy of the users. Unless you're using certificates for authentication, everything you do is visible to anyone else who has the password.

It's a shame, because it would have been very easy to address by just using Diffie Hellman when determining the session key.
What is wrong with milk ? .
Fat, sugar, and salt. The former head of the fda has been writing about how we are biologically predisposed to get even hungrier and crave more when we eat something with fat sugar and salt together. That's why applebees can serve a 1500 calorie appetizer that they know will make you even hungrier.
So you can make vegetables and fruits a crazy craving by following the same logic.