skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(this comment is aimed at you, but it's sort of pertinent to the article also)

You simply can't rip out a UI convention like that. Think about how many browsers there are. Virtually all of them use the back button and an URL bar. Say you made a browser without those, with an innovative new navigation system. Think it'll catch on? Extremely unlikely.

When you take out one of the oldest conventions in the book, people are going to use it for five seconds, 95% of them will decide they hate it, and will simply use what they're used to.

Consider iTunes 10. iTunes 10, released only a week or so ago, changed the UI in a minor way. Somewhat minor, anyway. Here's a screenshot: http://cl.ly/2OWb

Now, this looks a little different to your average Mac OS X app. Judging by my twitter feed, about 80% of my followers changed the window controls back to the old style (http://cl.ly/2ODf) as soon as the option became available.

They did this despite the fact that it makes sense. Having the controls vertically saves space and provides an extra thirty pixels (or so) to view their music.

Making sense doesn't matter in even rather minor UI changes like that. Like the old adage, a frog put in boiling water will jump straight out, but a frog being boiled will never notice.

Consistency is key when it comes to UI conventions, and it's _extremely_ hard to change the tide. The only way to do it is if other leading people do it also.

For example, Opera started using tabs on top at about the same time as Chrome did (don't quote me on that, I'm trying to make a point). Then Safari tried it, and now Firefox 4 has tabs on top as well. The only way to facilitate change is to not be alone in making it.

Furthermore! "Some sort of bookmark/search/wiki replacement navigation system needs to be developed." Do you have any ideas as to how to implement that? (I'd honestly love to hear them, I'm not trying to bee too much of a sanctimonious dick. ;))
I actually agree that the Zune HD is a worthy competitor, at least from a hardware and UX perspective. In many ways, Apple plays it safe from a design perspective with the iPod touch, and Microsoft actually went out on a limb and bet on the Metro UI paradigm. It wasn't a complete win, but I personally like many aspects of it, and am looking forward to seeing if Windows Phone 7 can successfully translate that into a useful phone experience.
It's not missing - the word "reasonably" covers it with "reasonable" meaning fair, average, not excessive.
That's odd. I'm with Sprint. On a legacy plan from 2002. I get unlimited data for $10/month. They've never screwed me over, AFAIK.

And, yes all this for $300. The choice you've made is to presumably pay $500 or more for the phone, and then maybe marginally cheaper monthly fees. Although I'd argue that my monthly fees are quite likely cheaper than yours, although its in a plan you can no longer get. But Sprint still grandfathered contracted customers with it.

And last time I checked, all of the major cell phone carriers allow you to buy the phone w/o a contract. So feel free to spend the $500 for a phone. No one is stopping you.
There are a lot of trades that don't happen on exchanges.
And certainly your day-to-day work would involve answering questions about those data structures and algorithms in real time, with your future career depending on it, without external references.
why not just colocate your own asterisk box?
Are people having success with hiring based on problems like this? I've seen it at Dropbox, Facebook, Bump, Quora (and many others). While I agree that it would remove the chaff from the job submission pipeline, does it fill it with enough quality candidates to make it worthwhile? I know in at least one case where I played with a problem that the "easy" solution was not appropriate at large scale and it wasn't worth the time to spend the time researching the problem space for an optimal solution.

Anybody else have experiences either positive or negative on the hiring from (candidate or employer)?
Apple iOS4.1 Breaks Linux’s iPhone & iPod Touch Support?
There is insufficient data to answer this question.

Perhaps the jet is flying on the other side of cloud cover, on the other side of a mountain range, or inside a canyon. What elevation is the observer? What is the velocity of the observer to the light reflected from the jet and what is the velocity of the observer to the sound coming from the jet? What is the temperature of the air or medium that the light and sound are travelling in. How do we know it is the jet making noise?

This kind of poorly thought out question that makes me want to quit software development, which is full of users with requests like this.
Could have happened in England, too. Just look at how big the 2 pence pieces are. There are almost the same shape as 2 Euro coins.
Those are all based on the marshmallow experiment. Is there anything beyond that?
Why the hell would you download toy story 3 as an flv?
Great point. Each pair will usually find the right balance of pairing time and breaks, but using the Pomodoro technique (http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/) is probably a good place to start.

I don't think the uncomfortable aspects of pairing are unique to pairing as much as they are compressed in a much shorter space. No snarky emails during code reviews or awkward hallway conversations. It's all right there, in real time.

I _really_ love hacking on code alone, but every pairing session I've had has been memorable and the code has most certainly been superior to what I would have done solo.
Germans-argentina-shows-no-respect-ap/
Broadband duopoly leaves ISPs competing on speed, not price
what needs to go away is this notion of nationality, bestowed by the coincidence of birth.
"If I take your car, without permission, it is stealing it. Very obviously you have been deprived of your car."

Should we change the term "identity theft". Technically, it's not theft at all and nothing has been taken from you.

If I have a website that shares your credit card numbers online (I'm not using the cards, just giving out the numbers), would you call this theft? Nothing has been physically taken from you.

"Now here is the question: when I copy your song, am I depriving you of anything? All the electronic devices are using resources paid for by third parties. You can still sell your song just fine, my act of copying has in no way prevented you from selling the song to other people. I may or may not have bought the song, so it is questionable if I am even depriving you of money you otherwise would have made (assuming no-fee copying, e.g. torrenting)."

I find that most people that don't want to call copyright infringement theft do so because they don't feel what they are doing is wrong (and want to make it seem like it's fine). It's not theft, it's counterfeiting.

It would actually be better for the content owner if it was theft, because digital goods rely on the perception of value. If everyone can get your software for free, it drives the perceived value (and the actual value) to $0.
I got burned by this on Heroku recently as well but to a much lesser extent $$$-wise. My app typically runs on 1 dyno because it's basically not supported anymore. At some point I must have been messing around in the interface and accidently bumped my dynos. Oops.

I personally think they should have a "WTF your load is like zero, you normally have X dynos, but you're using Y dynos for no real reason... dumbass" alert email... I certainly would have appreciated it!
If I paid the exorbitant Harvard tuition and they made me study a romance novel I'd be pissed too. The Wire isn't pulp. It's the television equivalent of literature. The writing is really that good.
Their marketing didn't exist.

That's part of what I think Microsoft didn't get right. I remember one Zune commercial (featuring Mims - This Is Why I'm Hot). There was a whole field of Zunes, and the first one started playing the song, then a few more, then all of them. They didn't make it clear that the first one was sharing the song with the others. I use Windows PCs, have an XBox 360, and up until recently I had a Windows Mobile Phone. Microsoft failed to get me to want a Zune the way Apple fans want an iPod.
Makefiles are an acceptable barrier to entry. I've lost a lot of hair trying to figure out how to build huge Java projects that the developers just built inside their five-major-versions-old IDE. ("Oh, just build it by clicking the 'export to WAR' button and then copy the file to each production server." No.)

Considering how trivial it is to write an ant file to do the same thing, it's appalling that the IDEs don't just do this by default. How can you write a good application if you don't even know how to compile it?

But the biggest problem with Emacs is the "project management" functionality. Pick up many modern editors, and you can, with one command, point to a directory and have a project tree, a "jump to file", etc, all built for you.

Emacs does this too: http://github.com/jrockway/eproject.

Of course, Emacs' version is a lot more flexible. The user can hook it, so he gets a fresh project REPL the first time he visits a new project. Or, he can hook the eproject-after-save hook, and commit the changes to a "backup" git branch, so that he never has to worry about not being able to undo.

The idea behind Emacs is that it can do things that nobody else has ever done before, and it continually lives up to this expectation.

(Also, "this is too hard for beginners". OK. Then how did I learn Emacs?)
Well, count me as a programmer type that enjoys the feature and is having a hard time figuring out what there is to hate about it.
I Should be clear, i am now using Android and I am very happy with it. the ability to sideload gave me Swype beta which is not afforded through the android market.

If the service provider chooses to block sideloading on android, then they diminish the quality of the device. if the device has disabled sideloading by design by Apple, then it is also diminished in quality, to claim that restrictions made by one are preferable to the other just doesn't make any sense to me.

Apple surely had a great effect on the quality of manufactured devices as well as the range of offering, but i doubt that they had much of an effect on the openness of said devices.

If i understand the article, then the gist of it is that the quality of Android is stymied by service providers, that is true, but it is also true that you can compare apples to apples here, that is, which network provides me the best android experience, and that is a competitive advantage, there is no such option for the Iphone.

Put simply, let the service provider who offers the best most open and reliable experience win. Somehow there is this idea gaining audience, that the Android's "openess" is actually detrimental to it advancement, i just dont see how that can be true on the long run.

Right now, because we are stuck with oligopoly of cellular providers, there is little choice, this will not change until more service providers enter this field.

The statement above "Apple is going to exert the power to control the carriers. Apple is about the only company that can, or will, exert this kind of power" is naive.

Apple has no such power, quite the contrary, it is locked to a single US service provider that doesn't give their clients the best quality of service, consumers that are on AT&T that dont have the iphone dont seem to flock en mass to get one, and consumers on other networks, dont seem to migrate en mass to AT&T just to get it, so the market for Iphone in the US is increasingly limited.

A game of chicken of sorts, we will see who blinks first. The service providers limit access to device hardware in their stores the same manner that apple limits access to software on its online store, it is the practice rather then the practitioner that is at fault here.
Terrible idea. Should do a class on "The World According to Jim" or "How I Met Your Mother" instead. ;)

Actually, it's very cool; I love the Wire. However, I am a little surprised it's not the Harvard English department touting a course on The Sopranos...
Rude? I'm not sure I follow you.

My point is that the opposite of having preferences is just consuming everything. It is just as "weird" as having very distinct preferences.

I also think it is rude to call someone weird but maybe I am alone in this.
You have to connect to someone to download stuff. The protocol doesn't change that.
Can you elaborate on the difference between a system and an application programmer?
Scala: for the actors thingie, dsl abilities and general power. Fits great in my mind for stable (ha) and fast backend server stuff. Afterwards i'll check clojure.
Background: I already know Java, and am a Ruby convert.
the eu is very much like a single country in some respects.

> different cultures have different values and often don't want to live under the same set of laws.

different regions of america have different cultures and values, and yet you wouldn't question the status of the us.

> If you're oppressed under one countries set of laws at least you always have the option of leaving.

actually, no. it is precisely because of this offensive notion of citizenship that people are NOT free to leave the country they find themselves in.
Did you give them an extra tip?
See also: http://www.slate.com/id/2245788/
The price for the High Quality doesn't make much sense either even with tons of data points. According to Yelp the most expensive dispensary in SF is Divinity Tree, and I think their onces are $360. Considering that basically everywhere else in the state should be cheaper than this I don't see how the average could possibly be 360.
Calling them "kids these days" would be tipping his hand a little too much.
I see lots of assertions to this effect. Is it really true?

One point that no one seems to consider is that frustrating interview processes are a big contributor to smaller applicant pools; that is, a would-be good employee has applied a couple places, been filtered out by false negatives, and is thus disincentivized from even continuing to look for a better programming job.

Personally, I don't like my current job but am growing frustrated with job hunting. I'm very close to just looking for a bartending job to go along with the part-time valet work that I picked up between jobs, and then maybe doing hobby programming in my spare time for pleasure and profit. I'm serious here: ridiculous interview processes are making the quality of the programmer pool worse by nudging programmers out of it altogether.

Why is it so unreasonable to bring people in on an intern-like trial basis?
I've had many monitor configurations over the years, including a three monitor setup that included a 30" cinima display. To be honest, it was more distracting than it was worth. I'd go to the coffee shop with just my laptop and come back with tons of stuff done.

A single laptop screen (or single medium-sized desktop monitor) means you only have one place to focus. With two monitors, I always ended up having "distractions" like twitter, email, RSS, etc. there to pull me away.

I love my current 15" macbook pro but I also loved my 13" macbook pro when travelling. Depending on how much you travel, I'd go with either of those and no monitor and get into immersive environments instead of nailing yourself to a desk.
Best Small Cities for Business
I think that'd actually be a great idea. The new button thingies can make any URL easily human-readable, but then if you click inside the new URL bar it converts to text that you can copy/paste.

I'd use it.
The best developer I've ever worked with was a freelancer named Alex in Belarus who worked for $8/hour. I hired him back in 2007 to write a CMS for a heavy data-driven site in PHP. The client needed to be able to upload multi-sheet Excel spreadsheets with formulas, and have the results of the formulas be written into the appropriate tables in the database. Alex did it in about 3 business days, and the code he wrote was hands down the cleanest object-oriented PHP I have ever seen. The only bad part about working with someone in Belarus is payment. It costs about $40 for a wire transfer, and you can't send it directly to Belarus without the recipient having to fill out government paperwork detailing where the money came from. We ended up sending wire transfers in Euros to a bank in Latvia.
Why shouldn't universities study TV shows?

Lets make an analogy with books. Most books are, in the end, "just meant to entertain", but it would be ridiculous to argue that universities shouldn't study them. Why? Well, some books go beyond just entertainment into a further realm: commentary on the human situation, raising and questioning of philosophic questions, etc.

I think that the Wire fits into the same mold as an excellent book. Saying that it's just to entertain misses the bigger goals that it's trying to accomplish. It has brilliant script writing and direction, and it really raises questions into the areas that it portrays (the drug war, corruption in legal areas, etc) that I had never considered before.

(And yes, you should watch it. :) )
The most obvious two that could have killer iPod Touch-like products are Palm and Google (Android):

1. Palm's in trouble with just its phone. It seems like they have to figure out their webOS phones first before launching something like this.

2. Google's problem is the same issue they ran into with the Nexus One. Google doesn't do retail. It doesn't like retail. An Android phone can easily be sold by the Carriers. Gladly. An Android media player, however, needs to be sold in retail. And that means offering things like a store, or agreements, and telephone support, returns, etc.

Apple, on the other hand, understands retail and does it well (see Apple Stores and website), as well as already have a killer phone on the market.
From the article in that thread:

In fact, sucrose — even “natural” cane sugar — is 50% fructose once it is digested and absorbed. While this is 20% less than the fructose content of HFCS 55, food manufacturers need to use less (about 20% less) HFCS 55 to get the same sweetness, so it’s a wash as far as fructose content.
Inline Pictures And Video Are A Part Of What Twitter Is Announcing Tonight
I've seen telnet listed as a skill too.
+1
Thanks for the feedback. I will put together some instructions on the blog and link to it when I'm done.
You're deriding the course based on medium, not message. Perhaps we also shouldn't use a 'common' language like English and revert to being taught in Latin.

Additionally, If you'd actually seen The Wire you probably would not be arguing against this course. The Wire isn't just any piece of entertainment, it's the result of David Simon's years of observations as a journalist in Baltimore, a thesis covering his observations of how institutions fail individuals, in particular the black urban poor in Baltimore.

While The Wire may be fictional, it's quite pointed in its messages, and as the author says, it weaves together many connected threads into a unified whole in a way many academic texts lack.

Lastly, it doesn't just tell you what's going on in a dry, disconnected tone like an academic text. It makes you truly grok and indeed FEEL what's going on. In my view, that definitely elevates this course.
Opera has had tabs above the address bar for as long as I've been a user. It makes it much more clear that the address bar and controls are actually associated with the tab, not the application. A key feature of this choice is that the search box and address bar will switch contents when you switch tabs, and if you switch back you will see what you had originally typed.
Not sure just how far I want to get into this, because most of my points are admittedly indefensible and most of it just stems from a long hatred of smoking.

I was anti-beer for a very, very long time as well (until virtually six months ago), though coffee has always been my vice.

I'm Irish, and I'm fairly young (approaching twenty soon, which puts me very far in the minority on these matters. ;))

Mostly, I simply don't see the point. I understand the need to socialise and the like, and the need for friends. However, I think that if I make friends when I'm in a different state of mind to my ordinary, day-to-day thinking, then are they really my friends?

Furthermore, I don't like having a crutch. I don't think anybody truly needs to get drunk/high/drink a pot of coffee in the morning to get them through the day. If you do, you've probably made some bad decisions and you should think long and hard about where you're going in life.

I also simply hate the stoner mentality. Why the hell would you want to just coast through life? I mean, make something of yourself! Make your parents proud!

I know, however, that I'm painting a large number of people with the same brush here. I know that many of the people who smoke weed sometimes aren't stoners. I have almost no problems with people who smoke weed every once in a while, just as I don't have problems with people who go to the pub sometimes or with people who drink the odd coffee. I do sincerely have problems with people who smoke pot every other night, or every time they hang out with people, or every time they get even a little stressed. (Medical marijuana doesn't count, though, provided naturally that it's actually necessary. I'm not going to judge people when they're in huge amounts of pain.)

The thing is, though, that past this little speech, I can barely defend my arguments. It's not that I just don't get it (though that's definitely a factor), it's also that I simply have an irrational hatred of smoking.

Go easy on me in your rebuttal, I'm only meek. :)
But the 1 is unreadable and opaque. At least Amazon tells you the full product name in the URL.

(But incidentally, you can remove this part and the URL still works.)
People should stop looking for silver bullets that are a) "web scale" (intentionally in quotation marks) and b) super secure/durable/consistent/whatever. It's all trade offs. MongoDB makes sense for some data but not others. Its weaknesses are its strengths and vice versa. Same goes for SQL databases.

We use MongoDB for storing tons and tons of analytics data for which we don't care if some stuff occasionally gets lost in a server crash. The data really fits MongoDB well and it would have been a nightmare if we were to use an SQL database for this. But for bank transactions we wouldn't even consider MongoDB.

The write lock might be a problem for some people. On the other hand MongoDB supports easy sharding, much easier than with SQL. Sharding allows us to scale horizontally which is a huge plus for our data.
Not everyone can get licenses to purchase from dispensaries, so a dispensary's price is not necessarily market price. Theres still a "black" market so to speak; of people who buy it illegally.
There's a big difference between the NASCAR app and Apple stock market app. It is exceedingly clear that the NASCAR app was bought by somebody outside of the phone chain (me, manufacturer, service provider) and forced on me. The Apple stock app is a goofy app the manufacturer put on to make sure the home screen wasn't empty.

Yes, it annoys me I have to have a folder of "stuff I don't care about" on my iPhone, but I know Apple and/or AT&T didn't put it there to pad their pockets at my expense and that makes all the difference.