skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To an extent this is a reasonable way to put it, but in all honesty, there's much more to software engineers than whether their programming muse is satisfied or not.

For example, I'm happy whenever I can make users happy. Even if I'm just writing a data loader script, if the script is fast, gets the users' data loaded correctly, I'm happy and fulfilled.

Put in a situation, where I'm unable to make users happy, maybe through clashing with company objectives like making money on a badly written contract, or bad design, I'm miserable.

Deprived of feedback from users, or stuck writing designs, I'm miserable.

If you are always miserable after 9 months, you need to have a deep think about what sort of jobs you are applying for, or whether pursuing the work at all is worth it. There are decent companies out there, that are customer focussed, and that use new technologies and development methods that stress individual creativity. Go find them.
On the contrary. _why is an idea more than a man. On a certain level I'd say he closed up shop to make the character a shared memory rather than an individual.
That's not actually correct.

Answers came from the Taiwan version of Answers, which was itself a clone of Naver in Korea.

Ask Yahoo was unrelated. And still appears to be there.
I was literally just looking into this yesterday because I've been lazy and haven't set up a good deployment process. I found this article http://lethain.com/entry/2008/nov/04/deploying-django-with-f...

I'm wondering what the best practices are and since I have so many people around me who use Capistrano I'm thinking about just going with that. Any words of advice?
Ah, I see. That's why it interests me, too.
I went to it and it redirected me to almost a blank page telling me that I have to enable javascript. Okay - fine. <click close button>

I don't know you and I don't know your site. I'm not enabling javascript just to see if I want to see if I want to learn more.
Using YUI 2 on the DuckDuckGo Search Engine
Croatia actually sounds nice. Fairly warm in the right parts of it, and I found it to be pleasant the week I spent there.
I just got a 25.5" 1900 x 1200 screen for 280$. (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001LYPNFQ/ref=oss_product) So, I don't think there is much money to be saved by getting a screen much smaller than that.

IMO, the real question is using widescreens appropriate for a dual monitor setup. My work setup is two 4:3 aspect ratio monitors which I think works much better than two widescreen monitors because it reduces the time it takes to move the mouse. For text editing I suspect three 4:3 ratio monitors is more useful, despite providing a similar number of pixels as two widescreen monitors, based on how maximizing windows operates and the pain of trying to split a window across two screens.

However, when working with images, having a large unbroken screen is extreamly useful. So a 2560 x 1600+ monitor paired with a lower resolution scratch space seems to work better than two evenly sized monitors.
i think i speak on behalf of many here: WHAT... THE... FUK?!?

that's like trojan buying a porno studio, sure they're in a related field but where the heck is the synergy?
Yeah not necessarily rare (my mistake) but just if any of your peers feel the same way about it- It does seem kind of silly, but I guess its similar to assuming someone with a degree in CS has one in Maths as well? Who knows...
Mixergy often has highly actionable information based on the interviews that Andrew does. If you find interviews that are relevant to your industry/product/vertical, they can be really helpful.
So Intel/AMD should acquire Adobe then? :)
LastPass. The best password manager I have ever used.
I know there are way more devs than designers here but adding a little unique typography to your web app can't hurt.

Between this and Typekit I can't wait to see new web typography take off.
I meant that I hope by the time that I graduate that the general startup atmosphere around Sydney and/or Australia has improved.

One of the most common sentiments from the founders I've had the chance to talk to was that they said Australia isn't (even close to) the optimal place for a startup but they decided to stay here anyway for family/lifestyle/... reasons.
Has anyone used git-flow with an existing repo? It seems like existing branches could just be renamed from "myfeature" to "feature/myfeature", etc. but I wonder if others have been down this road and have run into issues.
Foursquare: entertainment for users, spam for non-users. As a non-user, they provide an easy means to identify and remove people from my social networks who are willing to spam me.

Seriously, apps that send messages to non-users by default are annoying. If I cared about where you've been, I can join Foursquare on my own, I shouldn't be required to block every new app that comes along, it should be opt-in.
At times this sounds a lot like an old Williams shoot'em-up arcade game, like Defender for example.
If this is indeed true then there is an ironic aspect to it. The continued non-existence of a German state until 1871 – here presented as the reason for the lack of effectiveness of copyright law in the German states – is one of the canonical reasons why the German states were lagging behind in their economic development. (It’s hard to be all that successful when your company has to ship its product through half a dozen states [+] – all with customs and different laws – just to get it from Cologne to Munich.)

It’s certainly nice to see attempts at explaining why Germany caught up with and to some extent even overtook England. I don’t think that the canonical explanations (which to me always seem to include a lot of handwaving) are very convincing.

[+] Map: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/Deu...
We don't use git-flow because we don't have any problems managing our code.
This article is fluff, it says nothing beyond "submit to app directories", which is an unsustainable and small source of traffic.

Getting 1000 visitors is trivially easy. Write a single blog post, social bookmark it, do some very simple linkbuilding and in a month you'll have those 1000 visitors.
If you don't like that, I can do a media buy and get you 1000 visitors for about $2 right now. They probably won't convert, though.

If you want to scale up and get traffic though, manually submitting to directories brings very low ROI on your time. You'll have to do some serious SEO/content, quality PR, or build out a large PPC campaign.

An article about how to get the first 1000 signups would be much more useful.
Email Yak Offers Web Based Email API
I often prefer to take 0% advance if I'm busy, in exchange for more flexibility on the deadline.
So, this is my site. Yep.

I forgot to turn debug off. Yep. And i'm using sqlite3 to accept email addresses. Yep.

I can assure you the quality of the ACTUAL project is far better :-)

I have a working prototype and am working my ass off to get something scalable up and running asap. keep checking back for details!
Job app for mobile developers
I develop in master sometimes, but only check in small edits that are pushed immediately.

If my edits grow to the point that I need to write tests or push to staging, I just checkout a feature branch before committing.
You open windows in mediterranean countries and buildings are made for heat.And the extreme heat is around about 2 months. Winters are pretty mild, fall and autmnn are much more enjoyable.

It's about the time you spend outside, I find I recharge a lot faster in warm climates. Maybe it's the sunshine, maybe people's attitudes...
Incidentally, Larry Page used the exact same argument back in 2007:

My theory is that, if you look in your own programming, your DNA, it’s about 600 Megabytes compressed… so it’s smaller than any modern operating system. Smaller than Linux, or Windows, or anything like that, your whole operating system. That includes booting up your brain, right, by definition. And so, your program algorithms probably aren’t that complicated, it’s probably more about the overall computation. That’s my guess.

(http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/googles-larry-page-at-t...)
They said this when Yelp added checkins too. I'll believe it when I see it.

(Foursquare user #657)
You can also use the module pattern[1] to isolate code from tampering or conflicts:

(function($, window, undefined) {
$(document).ready({
// etc.
});
}(jQuery, window);

[1] http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2007/06/12/module-pattern/
The bad guy here was not meant to be the employer, though I can see where you'd get that impression. It's a statement against the lack of control that is inherent to most work environments, and a brief waxing on the effect that has on a person's ability to build great stuff.

I'm not a lazy person. I enjoy working, and I have at least a little bit to show for it. So the email was an exploration of why this ceases to be the case when I've spent a certain amount of time working for someone other than myself. The only feasible conclusion that I've come to is what I wrote.

Ideally not so much an excuse as a reason.
What path are they using to spam you? I've never seen foursquare spam.
It's probably too late to do it this semester but certainly consider it for next year! The fact you're reading Hacker News automatically places you in the top 5 to 10 places in the course and in fact this year the class didn't get more than 40 students so there wasn't a great deal of fighting for your life. I'd also suggest you drop in on the lectures even if not enrolled - the guest presenters are really well known and offer incredibly valuable knowledge.

If you want send me an email (-> see profile) - it's difficult to find these entrepreneurial types at Sydney Uni =]
The stats, character classes, etc. are strange. There is no reason why a game should appear so complicated and require so much assumed knowledge.

Moreover, there seems to be way too much stuff to collect. And if keeping the right stuff is important, it's not at all clear what the tradeoffs are.

The quests tend to be rather similar and are not much fun.

There's also too much grinding.

BTW, I also find RTS games to be strange... sure they are a natural progression beyond games like chess, but they are not as fundamental as chess. There's too much to learn and it's not obvious why people would find them fun.
Hi Scott, unfortunately we do use Wicket (from apache.org) in conjunction with javascript for some of the GUI. So basically it is a requirement that we decided on quite early while developing. We will make sure the "no javascript"is more descriptive. Thanks for trying.
but it does bring a machine to its knees compared to the Microsoft Security Essentials product
I didn't submit it :-)
Isn't the iPad/iPhone RAM integrated into the CPU/SoC package? Not quite as easy to increase the size of that while maintaining the same power consumption.
It spams feeds. So you end up with a lot of checkins inside of Twitter, FB, etc. Depending on how linked the person's accounts are.
Yea, I should have mentioned that this is only the case in landscape. I don't bother trying with portrait, it's definitely too cramped as you say.
…can't hurt.

– until your type hoster is not reachable and things render funny, or if you waited for the font don't render at all. (Or you host them yourself (if legal) and your clients need to download them.)

– until you use Molengo from Google's font directory and find out the dots on the lowercase 'i' character render too far to the left on iPhones and iPads. (Why‽ What kind of stupid bug is that?)

– until you find out that some linux variants are set up with ghastly font renderers and your type looks relatively shabby for those clients.
How to get elements by class
There are many problems with password management software if you want to use it away from your computer, like portability, security and so on.

You do have a great (and secure) password management software/hardware, your brain. Of course memorizing all those passwords is a pain and using a single password is not safe.

What I usually do is hash a password based on where I want to login using static information.

Example, you want to login on gmail: First o grab the name of the service ("gmail"), then you grab the company who did the service ("google") and then you add a salt you memorized ("kitten"). This will get you "gmailgooglekitten", then numberfy it (eg: all vowels to numbers): "gm41lg00gl3k1tt3n", reverse it: "n3tt1k3lg00gl14mg".

There you have it, a "universal pass" that is different for every login. You only need to memorize the steps and the salt (if you use it), and those are always the same.

Ps: You can use this system together with the usual password management software. :)
No, we are located in Hamburg, Germany. But we got our TRUSTe approval for the US market today (logo to follow) - so our data privacy policy should meet US standards.
I have to disagree. I found the list of app directories helpful and submitted to a few that I hadn't done before.

In the past I've found submitting to them to be very helpful and I've gotten over a dozen secondary blog posts from getting accepted and promoted on killerstartups.com.
PS3 finally moddable via USB dongle
Conscious Automatism
There was a story on Hacker News about this a while back, but here's something I found through a quick search.

Best age for childbearing remains 20-35 - Delaying risks heartbreak, say experts
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/30737.php
This piece struck me as very insightful. Not as advice per se, but as a window into the motivations of Creators. This part in particular: "Creation is a deeply personal and rewarding activity, which means that your Work should also be deeply personal and rewarding."

I think if you talk to founders who have left companies several years out from the company's inception, the loss of that sense of engagement and "ownership" in the creative sense is a major driver of departures. Some may stay for the financial aspects of "ownership", but once things devolve into board meetings and committees, the spark is gone.
Yes, you can create a new branch from any tag (or indeed any commit).
That might be excusable once (not really), but the problem is they do it every 3 months. Seriously, stay away from this stuff.
Typo ('am'):

I am a Virginia Tech Hokie, and I know am coming to Longhorn Country where I am sure the tailgating is top notch, but I have seen some of the best.
This passage really puzzles me:

As a gesture to invoke the Undo command, shaking a handheld device the size of an iPhone is clever and workable. Shaking a much larger device like the iPad is awkward at best

My iPad has an undo button on the keyboard (and even a redo one) and shaking it produces no result. Either our two iPads are different, which I don't think, or that's just a statement that the author did not bother to verify.
I do hope there will be some Justin.tv feeds for those of us stuck @home? Man, I wish I had an anybot now so I can ship it to these conferences and attend it from my laptop.
Yes.

_Your muse can only be treated as the secretary of a subcommittee for so long before she decides to pack up and look for employment elsewhere. If you aren’t able to own the product and be creative, then you aren’t able to do your work, and if you’re not doing your work then you’re negating a very real part of your personality, which is no good for anyone. No good for you and certainly no good for your employer._

That is why I quit my jobs… and consulting, period, in the end. I couldn't stand to watch people wreck my work. My heart couldn't get excited about such a compromise. And sure, I could have spent a decade learning how to really work a committee -- but to what end, exactly?
The "Traction" podcasts by Gabriel Weinberg are very good.

http://tractionbook.com/

They have real discussions of what people did to get their business going.
Maybe, but I'm not sold yet. Yeah Facebook has 500 million plus users, so even if there's a 1% conversion rate they'll have the same or more users than Foursquare. That's huge, especially because Facebook has a much more diverse audience than Foursquare.

But...I can't help but think about Buzz. Gmail had those 170 million users. Sure Twitter was around, but how could Buzz fail when there was this huge existing audience to use it? But today I don't use Buzz at all, and Twitter around a dozen times a day.

Facebook Places has potential, but it's way too early to think Foursquare will be "crushed"
It's not hard (not claiming it's sensible, but still). Do gitk --all, walk back to the tag, right click and create a new branch. This is even possible if there was no tag (just a recognizable revision), or if you want to create a tag retroactively.
I trust the people who care already know about distcc on Linux and Incredibuild on Windows, but I thought I'd mention them just in case.
Why?why?why?why?why?why?
why?why?why?
They're leapfrogging to a niche market of going from hardware to security on the Windows platform. What's the gain in getting into an specific platform's flaws (antivirus) and development environment? That's the corner of the platform itself, not to mention the scope of the OS industry.

If they want to do software, they should develop a OS, maybe for Atom or some kind of mobile platform or otherwise.

Antivirus is back and to the left.
Hey, thanks for posting this.

I didn't put a link to the new release yet because I'm actually still throwing together the _massive_ update to the website and builds. Fela (the Ruby Summer of Code intern) was burning the midnight oil last night, we didn't finish the builds until this morning.

Expect more news later! As always, you can follow @hacketyhack on twitter to get the latest.

Happy Whyday everybody!
You seem to imply that there is no option between those two extremes.

However, what about a nice goodbye message, handing over the running sites to some predecessor(s)?
Is McAfee really worthier than Sun? If IBM took a deal with Sun at that high, the Sun would have moved around the earth and Oracle doesn't stand a chance to slur the OS community!
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1614085
If you are using git-flow, this should probably be done in a hotfix branch, so that when you are done, finishing your hotfix merges directly to master and develop. Without a hotfix you would have to manually merge master back into develop.
Thanks nick. That link is actually broken for some reason at the moment, I'm upgrading the site.

Also, please update your links everyone, I have http://hackety-hack.com now.
Tegra 2 Arrives in Smartphones This Year, Thanks to LG
Finally, at least one manufacturer considered putting Tegra 2 in their phones.
I'm definitely biased as a MS employee, but I can't underscore enough MSE as an Antivirus solution - it's the least annoying AV on the market and has the least perf impact on your system. Literally, you install it and it only bothers you when it absolutely has to.
It's totally true: Foursquare, Gowalla, etc. appeal most directly to a young tech-savvy market. Basically, SF.

Companies like AngiesList and Groupon serve a broader market and are not based in SF area. So, they get less attention. But, these are bringing in far more revenue and will likely last longer.
Jacques, I really enjoy your writing, but you do realize you're talking about cult worship on HN… and you're not even talking about the cult worship of PG? :)

_why was unique. And he was a gentle, sensitive soul. And now, for all intents and purposes, he's gone. I didn't hassle him; you didn't hassle him; and yet because of the hassling, he left.

WhyDay is not about _why, it's about how people feel about _why. Those of us who didn't care what his real name is, only that he cared to share his humor and code with us.

FTR… I met _why at the first RailsConf, and I asked him to sign my t-shirt. He seemed completely flabbergasted that I'd want him to "ruin" it. I had to repeatedly confirm that I really, really wanted him to draw on it. He was so shy about it. After I talked him into signing it, he spent 10 minutes drawing one of his famous ducks on my back. It tickled like hell. I still wear the t-shirt.

What a guy. I miss him.
And "unhappy at work" isn't the same as "diagnosed as depressed by a professional". I have a feeling that the author wasn't using the word in the clinical sense.
How DNA evidence creates victims of chance
SlowitUp - Modern pop slowed by 800% becomes ambient
"The longest was 12 months at [Redacted], and that was only because I wanted my options to vest. I handed them my resignation on my 366th day."

This made me livid. I don't hire engineers with the intention of firing them the day before they vest, why would it be ethical to wait until the day after your cliff to quit?

[EDIT] Let me clarify. This individual seems to have decided months before that they would quit the day after their vesting cliff. Everyone here thinks that's ethical and appropriate?

I'm not questioning whether it's legal, of course it's legal. It's just not very honorable. A vesting cliff exists so that both parties -- employer and employee -- can have a chance to get to know each other before stock is granted and make sure that they're making the right decision.
This is absurd.
Cameron Diaz could wreck your PC, McAfee warns
Gmail blacklisted by Spamhaus
25 useful resource for mobile enthusiasts
In February, this same publication declared, "Google's Buzz Puts Facebook, Twitter On Notice": http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2359017,00.asp

I'm detecting a pattern.
Wasn't it Picasa's project before Google acquired them?
Prowling the Network for a Rogue Wireless Access Point
Rarely do our heroes owe us anything. Greatness requires a higher standard than simply being debt-free.
Cliff vesting is deferred compensation. Your concern about an ethical paradox is invalid.
It just appears to be a fancy-pants way of creating branches for you. Plenty of projects (e.g. Git itself) use a similar development model without using git-flow.
The Health Benefits of Coenzyme Q10
Shaking my iPad side to side quite vigorously does bring up an "Undo Typing" dialog box.

I would never do this though - you seem to have to do it pretty quickly, much easier to just hit the "undo" button.
That's what I'd expect. They're only still in the early market penetration stage of the Ruby market; it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to complicate their product offering. (Particularly when App Engine is available for Python/Java.)
Your employment agreements set up the economic incentives for working at your company. If the agreement is 1 year cliff to vest and the employee took advantage of that why would you get mad? You got a years worth of work out of that person and in exchange that person got his/her stock. Sounds like a fair deal to me.

On the other hand, firing an engineer right before he/she vests is unethical because you are getting almost a years worth of work without having to pay out the stock. Also it is a pretty good way to get sued by said employee.
The question was rhetorical :) But thanks.
As you say yourself, RTS games are a natural progression of simpler strategy games. Yes, they're more complicated, but isn't that exactly the kind of progression you'd expect?

Or, to rephrase, exactly how do you see games progressing within a genre if not by adding at least some complexity?
This is very good information, but there is a danger in just sucking up as much information as possible. Study hacks blogged about a very interesting study some time ago (http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/01/06/the-grandmaster-in-the...) in which it was found that time spend studying chess was only weakly correlated with how good you where - if you merely put in the hours, you could learn to become pretty good at chess, but the grandmasters didn't just study more or harder, they studied in a different way.

Rather than simply memorizing chess games, they read old games and tried to predict what the next move would be - which the intermediate players didn't do (or at least not very much).

So if you want to be a business grandmaster, you may have to read the businessbooks in an entirely different way from what everybody else does.