skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How large is your display, what's preferable for development?
I'm in the search for my next laptop. I've always had a 15" laptop and find it quite productive, but am considering a 14" for portability reasons. I don't watch movies or play games, I code, all day...

I've always wanted to be part of the three monitor club, but due to moving around I've never had the opportunity.

Bottom line, what monitor size would you recommend for productive coding?

For bonus points, if you have multiple monitors or a really large one, do you really find it more productive? or distracting?
You've got to be kidding. The iPhone has attracted hoards of new consumers to Apple who were not previously "loyal Apple fans, who love[d] and trust[ed] Apple". Apparently many normal people feel that they saw a major change for the better after this power redistribution.
I think people forget that before the Apple AppStore there really were very few apps for phones.

really? i've owned a palm treo and nokia e71 that both had hundreds of applications available that i could just download and install right from the device's web browser. no market, no restrictions.
Verizon is eventually going to kill themselves with all this VCAST crap. It cost them the iPhone. Now it's going to alienate Google. No one wants it. It gets them nowhere.
Wouldn't it be cool if you didn't have to deal with doctors anymore?
Lessons Learned From StartupBootcamp 2010
Contextual Sharing (and the new social network that figures it out) will kill Facebook.

I'm convinced that contextual sharing is the next evolution of social networks, and I don't think FB is in a position to pivot towards it.

Contextual sharing is the idea that in real life you have multiple, often separate social circles (work pals, college roommates, siblings, friends, grandparents, frat brothers, etc.), and that social networking 1.0 (i.e. facebook/twitter) doesn't account for this very well. You really want to share stuff only with specific groups, but this is hard to do on existing sites.

This leads to all sorts of real pain points, many of which are becoming unbearable for some users: i.e. you don't want your boss seeing photos of you drinking, or you don't want your grandmother to see that racy link you just posted, so you suspend your FB account.

Even though Facebook has a crude groups feature, this doesn't come close to addressing the fundamentally flawed orientation of the network: one, big pot of 100 to 1000 casual acquaintances, as opposed to dozens of partitioned ~2 to 10-person real social circles.

This idea has been exploding, recently:

- Google Me (Google's soon-to-be-released last shot at social) is almost certainly going to be based around this concept of contextual sharing (as Google UX engineer @padday's recent slide show indicated)

- Diaspora (the OSS project from NYU students that raised $200k this spring) announced on their blog that contextual sharing is their #1 interface priority

- Frid.ge (YC '10) is built around this idea

- College Only (funded by Peter Thiel) is a solution to the problem just for one context (college friends)

- Groupme.com (betaworks) is an SMS-only approach

And ALL of this projects came to life within the past 3 to 6 months!

Next-generation social networks will mirror our offline social experience more closely by shifting the focus from a giant network of "friends" to private, micro-networks that mimic real friend groups.

I think this change is significant enough that Facebook will be unable to pivot without alienating their huge user base.

Also, one of Facebook's main competitive advantages has been the fact that it is a network good with high switching costs (e.g. in order for a new site to be as good as facebook, you need to convince all of your 800 friends to sign up for the new site too).

If the future of social networking really is contextual sharing, though, this barrier becomes much lower (if it continues to exist at all), because if you really just want to share with your 'real' friends, then convincing these small groups whom you know really well (your best buds, or your roommates, or your sibilings, or whatever) to try out a new site is actually pretty trivial.

Thoughts?

Full-disclosure: I'm thinking of building a contextual sharing tool of my own, because I think it's so damn exciting. Would love your feedback.
NI LEWIS, if you're in front of a terminal

Nice. Now I know how I can read blogs at work.

(They try to block the regular Internet ones, but I doubt they even considered trying to censor the Bloomberg terminals!)
Outside.in's hyperlocal news API refreshed
Pdb: Using the Python debugger in Django (A mini tutorial)
Apple is enormously popular in Japan - I wonder if his temper might affect sales.
He meant the first - be wary of a false negative.

He didn't explain, but the reasoning is that an embedded developer can work for years on projects that dont' have a screen, so there's nothing to print to.

I once found myself in a similar situation. After 2 years of working on an embedded C project (without a screen), I needed to print something. I found out to my horror that I didn't know how to do it - I'd only had experience with C++ before getting this job, so I only knew cout/cin. And even after 2 years of work on pretty hard embedded code in C, not having screen meant that printing had never come up.

Similarly, many embedded programmers who program in C++ have no experience with the Standard Library, Templates, and sometimes even the "new" keyword, since these are things you often don't use in embedded systems. You can get a false negative if you assume that anyone who doesn't know how to use the Standard Library after 6 years of C++ experience is obviously a bad programmer.
+1 from me. It appears that not many among the HN crowd are willing to accept this, and I'm curious why this matter needs to be overanalyzed, in true geek fashion.
An interesting personal observation to that controversial study: When I drink a regular hfcs-sweetened cola, it really has no noticable affect on my hunger level, on my fullness level, nothing. On the other hand when I drink one of the can sugar varieties, it actually does sate some hunger. Further, the cane sugar varieties make me feel full after drinking one.

I am not unique in this observation... but it is still anecdotal, take it as you will.
//the consumer didn't see much of a change, or saw a regression

The consumers did see a change. The phones beacame usable (pleasure to use) from being unusable (pain to use).
Dell Releases Open Source Code for Streak
And I have experienced the exact opposite when entering US. The agents have always been friendly and courteous. I wonder if it has to do with what airport you enter the country from. All of my international flights end up going through ATL.
Amazon and Facebook both come to mind when I think of scale and massive parallelism. Microsoft as well, but it doesn't get as much attention.
>at least Goldman doesn't screw with people's mind.

???

That's a pretty sizeable portion of their business.
I just got done interviewing for an SRE position, and while there were a few small "trivia" questions, most of it was about general Linux userland tools, and were mostly used as a lead-in to having me solve some sort of practical, real world problem. For the few cases where I didn't know the answer, the interviewer just moved on to the next portion. It seemed rather balanced IMO.
Quid Emerges From YouNoodle, Delves Into Data on Private Firms
You either didn't read my post or you're deliberately being obtuse to make your point - there was a huge difference between smartphones and featurephones.

What you're describe is the featurephone app model, which Apple made more user and developer friendly and brought to the smartphone arena.

I used to have a blackberry (and yes, I had both apps and games on it) and when I bought the original iPhone, I had to jailbreak it in order to be able to do the same things I could do before. That's a regression.
I think it is a great post, and having been through the process, it is absolutely accurate for me and speaks volumes. The fact that there are exceptions to the rule only reinforces the rule.
Nothing is absolute, except for the predictable reaction of the people who will attack anything they can come up with a counter example for, usually involving Apple or Google (or some other one in a billion type exceptions).
Well, the US is richer (PPP adjusted) than nearly every single one one of those countries (the sole exceptions being Norway and a couple of city states). In the one case where I've seen good data (US vs Sweden), the disparity gets even bigger if you compare Swedes to Swedish Americans.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/03/super-economy-in-o...

So maybe the US is doing something right after all.
I was interested in implementing something similar for a web directory that would enable tracking offline phone conversions via Twilio. I was going to use click-to-call, however, click-to-call requires paying for both the inbound and outbound portion of the call. Is there a way to have one inbound number forward to a different number dynamically (depending on a phone number variable)?
t-mobile also carried the first android phone (g1) and worked with google to launch the nexus one on google's terms (selling it from google's website in subsidized and unlocked versions). they are about to launch the g2, a new android phone that carries a vanilla version of android that will presumably be easy to root and reflash.

t-mobile has visual voicemail and billing apps for android. i think they're the only carrier to "get" this whole android thing.
Interesting sort-of-related article:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/08/the-large-display-p...
Show HN: My Weekend Fun Project - Pure-CSS Emoticons
i think it's like this....
interpretation 1.. we select a random FAMILY from the set of all families with two children.one of the children happens to be a boy. {BB, BG, GB} are possibilities. P(BB) = 1/3

interpretation 2.. we select a random CHILD from the set of all families with two children. one of the children happens to be a boy. in this case we have the following possible combinations [B1B2, G1B3, B4G2]. we know it's a boy, so what's the probability that B1 or B2 was selected? 1/4+1/4 = 1/2.
Llanfair.... is a famous (for very small values of famous) welsh railway station with the longest name in the world. People go there to take pictures of the sign.

However having a name longer than a tweet is likely to limit your fame in the internet age!
Startup Lessons from Dharmesh Shah
Maybe the reason Gen Y appears to be nakedly narcissistic is because their teachers (even MBA professors!) will let them ramble on about themselves, "at length", apparently without so much as a simple verbal stompdown.

This is how the conversation should go:

student: "I'm an MBA student. I like to play tennis in my free time..."

professor: "I don't give a fuck about tennis. Lets get down to business. Why are you here?"
I currently have two 22.6" monitors and a 15" laptop. I read a study once that found that dual monitors increased productivity over a single large monitor. Also, I believe that this effect increased with monitor size up to about 24", then declined, especially after 30".

EDIT: Here was the article I was referring to: http://lifehacker.com/367391/do-larger-monitors-make-you-mor...
> In July, a group of farmers removed the safeties from their shotgun triggers and surrounded a trailer in which a suspected house robber was hiding while they waited for the county’s last, lone squad car to arrive.

Hah, that's certainly something you wouldn't see in Canada (and I say this as a Canadian). Go Team America?! :)
From the resume writer's perspective, the problem is that you have no idea what standard the interviewer uses, so you pretty much have to use the standards of your peers.

For example, I have programmed a little in many, many languages, and consider myself reasonably good in Python and C++. I know plenty of people who are less experienced than me who would write that they are "experts" in C++/Python, and would list those languages I wouldn't think to list 'cause I only know them a little.

So what should I write on my resume? I'm trying to compete with these people, after all.
I've used Patriot, OCZ, and Intel's SSDs. I would recommend Intel over the others. In my experience, the Intel drives are faster, higher quality, and have much better support.

You might want to wait until the 25nm SLC SSD's hit market, which, if I had to hazard a guess, will probably happen in January. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/16/intel_lyndonville/
Facebook's Zuckerberg Still Cavalier About Privacy in Magazine Profile
Actually, he's blonde for the same reason that a lot of male ankle protagonists are: because, as an asian teenager, dying one's hair blonde and showing up starkly against a sea of black hair marks you as rebellious--and thus, in Japan especially where "the nail that stands up gets hammered down", gets you treated with a bit more disdain by both peers and elders. For younger kids who feel out of place for all the regular reasons of childhood and pubescence, a naturally blonde-haired character feels like someone they could identify with.
I'm not even prepared to agree that HFCS is evil. Just that there are reasons to differentiate it from sucrose, and sugar is essentially synonymous with sucrose. "Corn sucrose" is clearly not accurate, and "corn sugar" means essentially that.

(Also, prefacing a comment with "look," is superfluous)
Hadoop hits the mainstream
And worse, go to war with each other. It happened back in 1812 you know...
Currently working with two monitors and but I definitely need a third one. At any point in time, I have at least four different browsers open, two or three adobe apps, a few text editors, communications windows, terminals and so on.

I feel I am more productive, because it's all about viewing space. If I have to alt-tab, or exposé between windows back and forth, that's a time waste.

If you're going for maximum productivity, I don't think you can really achieve it on a laptop, unless you're in and out of the office on a daily basis. I'd say if you're looking to get the most work done, use multiple monitors.
More monitors are more productive. Larger screens (only if good resolution, etc.) are also more productive. All monitors should typically be within peripheral vision, otherwise notifications coming up might not be noticed.

Consider a real keyboard and mouse. Consider synergy: http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

If you are looking at a macbook/macbook pro - also consider glossy vs. matte screen (glare can be an issue).

Finally, if you're really trying to be productive, consider other visual and audible distractions, flow interruptions, taking breaks during work to increase mental stamina, length of time spent at work.
The answer to your rhetorical questions is politically powerful public employee unions. Only a small minority of the members of the union got laid off, so they'd have to be okay with making the sacrifice to keep those people employed. They could fill those jobs at significantly lower salaries, but that factor never enters the equation.
Exactly.

They've also said that their high false negative rate is why they clear out their records every couple of years. If you got rejected a couple years ago you can apply again and they won't be looking at your previous attempt's performance.
Consulting clients don't give a shit about your time, they care about what you get done. Having your bum on a seat isn't worth $1 an hour, let alone $200. What is worth something is the work you deliver. That work is only loosely related to the time you spend "looking like you're working". Personally, I find that regular breaks help me focus better and be more productive, and my extensive net activities help me get the help I need when I need it, which also makes me more productive.

If you want to measure bum-on-seat-time instead, hire minimum wage workers.
Puma Grit Cat, Puma Shoes Online, Puma Trainers
I think the answer is "Business/Enterprise"

Facebook is a brilliant consumer web company, but they never looked at enterprise market. Enterprise market is bigger (but less sexy) than consumer market. So it is possible to build a new technology powerhouse from enterprise revenue and eventually beat Facebook for the next generation of talent.
Pfft. Smartphones used to be more open because they were the Lexus LSA that gets customers excited about buying their $20k Toyta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect#As_a_business_model). Anything was acceptable because they were not seen as a primary market to optimize.

Enter the iPhone, the first smartphone to achieve mass market. The iPhone requires a premium data plan. The iPhone requires an additional data plan to tether only on AT&T. AT&T may have gotten veto power over certain apps in the AppStore. They certainly had input on the maximum file limits over cellular. You see that Apple has considerable power, and that AT&T still has power, but what you don't see is that the consumer has more power in this equation than in the Android formula. Android users can't even install a vanilla OS or their own updates half of the time.

Overall the consumer may have less power than in previous smartphone systems, but to lament this is to assume that the carriers would allow a previous smartphone system to become as dominant as the iPhone without imposing restrictions similar to the state of Android.
I just needed to unwind this weekend, so I developed a new jQuery plugin / stylesheet that creates emoticons on any webpage in pure CSS (using a bunch of CSS3 properties). The benefits of this approach are described in the post here.

On a side note, I emailed Faruk Ateş (who wrote this post entitled "Pure CSS Icons: Make The Madness Stop" [1]) to see what he thought, and he said it was a pretty solid implementation.

One of the things that Faruk (and skatey on IRC) brought up is that one of the age-old annoyances with inline emoticon replacement in bodies of text (prevalent in forums) is that they break the line-height of the text. I had to make the choice for this plugin to either keep the text the right size (and thus the emoticon a little larger than line-height), or make the actual text smaller so that the emoticon is exactly line-height. I chose the former, but upon further reflection, I'll probably change to the latter in the next release.

[1] http://farukat.es/journal/2010/08/469-pure-css-icons-make-ma...

EDIT: BTW, here is a direct link to the live demo: http://www.alfajango.com/blog/jquery-css-emoticons-plugin/jq...
Mae'n ddrwg gennyf am y camddeall. Yr wyf yn sefyll gywiro.
Helvetica Joins the Web Font Revolution
Most places auto-deposit into a financial account of your choice if you like. Payroll has some historical legislative accidents tied to it, so it's a little slow to change.
I watched the movie "Babies" recently. It follows a kid from birth to about 18 months in each of SF, Tokyo, Mongolia, and Namibia.

The biggest surprise me was how self-sufficient the Mongolian and Namibian kids were. They'd play with other kids or just do their own thing.

By contrast, the SF and Tokoy kids were always with a parent. One scene in particular struck me - the SF kid was peeling a banana. Instead of tossing it, she held the peel like a piece of refuse until her mom dutifully took it. Perhaps the kid was a neat freak, but compared to the Mongolian and Namibian kids, it seemed like her parent put her at the center of her world and catered to her every whim. When you've got a caretaker entertaining you, taking you places, cleaning you, feeding you, and changing their lives significantly to suit you, how do you not become entitled?
Either Roosvelt?
This is what we call political point-scoring. I am trying to get a point across on a particular subject (power/control) and you're trying to muddle up the conversation by talking about something else completely.
I never could understand the logic of Americans who demand public services like police, fire, hospitals, roads, traffic lights, internet, water, sewage, parks, etc., and then turn right around and vote leaders out of office the second they whisper the words "raise" and "taxes" in the same sentence. Where does everyone think the money will come from?

Of course it's always more complicated than that, but this country strikes me as one that demands to have its cake and eat it too. It's too bad that it could take a slide into "third world" status (whatever that might be) before the masses realize how entitled and illogical they often seem to act.
Apple claims this is a made up story:

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100914/qotd-the-ninja-t...
You would probably have gotten the shakes even if you had hit back. It's quite common, as is evacuating the bladder, etc., after high-stress encounters, even for people who can anticipate having to have those encounters (police, etc.).
I got actual paper checks when I was contracting, when I've worked for small startups that hadn't set up a direct deposit system for payroll, and when I worked at Dairy Queen in high school.
... or maybe that you did something right in the past.

By that meter then Nokia is doing things right too.
My theory is that carrier exclusivity was the price they paid for maintaining complete control of the OS. This seems to make more sense in the UK, where O2 was the exclusive carrier to begin with, until it was given to the other carriers later on.

It was a bargaining chip.
And model selection came down from dozens to two. You can have it in any color, as long as it's either black or white.
I'm going to give what is probably a very contrarian view here: scientific studies show that Caucasian features allow for a higher standard deviation than Asian features. (That is to say, both Asian and Caucasian test groups think two randomly-sampled Asians look more similar than two randomly-sampled Caucasians.)

When you have 10 or 20 characters, and want them to be recognizable at a glance (for brand ownership), even when appearing completely out-of-context alongside characters of similar ages and styles from other series, and even when drawn minimally and potentially badly by a subcontracted art studio--it's logical to make them whatever race has the widest "visual range." It's also logical, for the same reasons, to give them technicolor hair.
I think you're missing the context. He's referencing his friend who says he wants to accomplish X, but does Y instead. It's not that Y < X; it's that the guy truly does want to do X but just can't help doing Y instead.
As for the monitors themselves, it's much much less about the size and more about the pixels. My primary monitor is a 1920x1200 and I love it. I have three other 'smaller' (in terms of pixels) and I honestly think the fourth one is more of a distraction than a help. I do frequently use the other three all at the same time (code on one, database tools on another, and browser for running/debugging the web pages I'm working on on the third).

My iMac display is an insane 2560x1440 (or something close to it) and I still am badly in need of a second monitor. But I feel that with that many pixels, just one additional monitor would be optimal. Particularly if it were that same size (not that I'm going to shell out the $1000 for that any time soon when the 1920x1080 monitors are so cheap now).
Metaconginiton or as the author calls it, "thinking about thinking" sounds like intelligence to me

It's usually used to refer to something more akin to self-awareness than raw horsepower. Noticing that you didn't understand a paragraph that you just read is something that some people have to learn later in life than others, for example. It may have to do with intelligence, but also probably motivation and cognitive skills.

Edit: fixed typo I may have -> It may have
The more recent Roosevelt HAD to grow the government--they were the only demanders during the Great Recession.

He also stuck us with Social Security and Medicare, which are the main drivers behind the intergenerational debt we're facing now.

So, I mean, big government isn't always the best.
Conker? Why I hardly...

The expression is 'Divide and conquer'.