skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’d suggest that this cruft is among the most insidious forms of technical debt in that it’s held in place by a lack of understanding and fear to modify the program, rooted in superstition rather than reason.

"insidious", "technical debt", "lack of understanding", "fear to modify": agreed!

"rooted in superstition rather than reason": disagree...

My primary reason for not breaking it has always been lack of time. There were many times I encountered something I would have loved to have rewritten, but it would have thrown the rest of my schedule off. If I have 27 open tickets, 3 bosses, and 9 customers breathing down my neck, the last thing I need is some clusterfuck I broke and can't put back together fast enough. That's a mistake you only make once.
Correct. On the flipside, just because you finish college, doesn't mean your startup will magically succeed either. It's more the fact that you can finish something that you can make have value for yourself. Too often we think we need to rush out and leave college for good, as if at 19, the opportunity to do a startup will disappear in 3 years.
Flax engine: GWT event bus implementation
It's the technical name for a solid indication. I've never heard it used in common parlance but that's how it's referred to in e.g. the USDOT Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices.
From the article:

"The Google AdWord Keyword Tool doesn’t show you how many people search Google for this term each month. It shows you how many AdWords ad impressions are available. And that includes Google’s search partners, content partners, and the entire AdSense content network."
The off-the-books economy of Spain, Italy and Greece is amazingly large in both the private and goverment sectors. Your really have to live there to appreciate its size.
And what about the web sites which essentially do the same? Geo IP....
Also, iPads can go up to Baseline 3.1, 1024x768, IIRC.
I am one of those victims. Not only paid $550 and another 8hrs of my life trying to deal with it in the court unsuccessfully. All for not coming to a complete stop before taking the right turn. Live and learn :)
Half Life in Software Engineers?
What good is an engineer who cannot apply what he learnt. The lack of application leads only to degradation of knowledge learned by force. 7 out of 10 engineers i know of cant even expand the acronym BNF/EBNF,let alone explain it, Many take some time to realize and explain how do you test a bit.<p>I was reading this article, http://education.internet.com/articles/self-taught-vs-formal-developer-training-whats-the-difference/ - just sharing it :)
It's a great post. They enumerate a dozen headaches you have to deal with and edge cases you must account for if you want video on mobile devices.

Or, you know, you could use our free one-click video transcoding service.

We need more "use our service because we save you from doing complicated X, Y, Z yourself" posts.
Actually this is not Node.js's fault, you could easily create your own templating library that suits your purpose. Node is not an all in one solution.
He lives that way by choice. He could make more money than he's making, by charging for more of his products. Though it sounds like he's about to begin having an overnight success any day now, since he seems to have started making products for sale on a more regular basis, and he seems to have become pretty good at what he does. He's smarter than me, it took me a good ten years to reach that point, and he's only ~five years into his chosen profession as a game maker.

I currently live on about $40k/year, but I've had years where I lived on credit cards for months at a time (I don't recommend it; too much stress; but I had the house with mortgage and everything and thought all that stuff was important; I know better now, and could squeak by on $15k/year if I was willing to live like the regular folks and park in one place for the whole year). In the past decade, my best years tax return showed income of $85k and my worst showed income of about $8k, with most years being closer to the low than the high. I've been on a very steady upward trajectory for the past four years (with the first year running Virtualmin being the $8k year, where I lived mostly off of savings from the $85k year, which was the year previous).

My definition of "pretty good living" is that you get to do the things that matter to you and you don't go hungry or go without medical care, and don't have to think much about money. My definition of "pretty good living" does not necessarily include a McMansion in the suburbs, an SUV and a sports car and a motorcycle in the three car garage, 52" television in the "media room", etc. I know plenty of those guys, and I'm way happier than they are. You can make more money working for others, in the short term (and sometimes even in the long term, though I suspect my net worth will cross those guys by a dramatic margin sometime within the next five to seven years).
Creating a GUID or UUID in Objective-C
Spaniard here (full disclaimer).

@carlos reasoning seems to be supported by the fact Spain's productivity is going up after all the low skilled workers in construction were sacked.

Some of the comments of the FT are highly interesting.
The city, meanwhile, has to pay the contractor for the red-light system, the salaries of police and transportation officials who monitor the program, and a Superior Court fee to benefit court reporters

I'm guessing they assign one officer from each police station whose jurisdiction includes a camera to review the images (they weed out images of police cars, firetrucks, and ambulances). These officers are probably the ones who go to court if you choose to fight the ticket. At $50k/year, and assuming two cameras per jurisdiction, you're looking at $1.6 million in salary alone over a two year period.
FreeType has enabled the bytecode interpreter; those patents have all expired.

http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

Unless you are talking about a different set of patents.
U.S. government bombs Guam with frozen mice to kill snakes
The 'Old Spice' campaign is an example of what you describe.
Lullaby Language
Try to look at it this way:
You're a user and your resume/suspend on your laptop doesn't work, you file a bug report and are mad it wasn't fixed ASAP.
If I was a sysadmin and there was a bug in Ubuntu that would crash apache every 3 nights, I would file a bug report and be mad if it wasn't fixed ASAP.
If I was a designer and I found the colors on the screen where totally off, I would file a bug report and be mad if it wasn't fixed ASAP.

I hope you see the point.

Everybody's problem is 'critical', but you just have to accept it doesn't work that way. Everything depends on context, but please think a moment about this: resources are limited, time is precious and getting 'fed up with things' rarely helps. Want to change things? Feel free to look at other issues and see if you find a solution, if you do, fix it and be part of the people who change stuff for the better.
And don't even think of stopping on yellow -- that earned
me a horn blast and finger as they zoomed around me when I
first moved here.

I avoid responding favorably to threats. If they want to break the law, that is between the cops and them. Also, I try to avoid braking suddenly. If I am stopping at a soon-to-be red light, my tailgaters are aware of it.

Change starts with one person.
Firstly I'd think seriously about mechanical_fish's advice - if you are still depressed get help, and this relationship you are about to enter into, whether as a friend or lover is not going to help, relationships have highs and lows, and people who are already feeling low can get influenced by that - so try and get on top of that problem first.

Next problem you are asking about is should I try my luck or just be friends with this girl. I've never been in your position (not an introvert) but I have seen literally dozens of people in your position. Being friends with someone you secretly fancy does not work. She will get a boyfriend, you will get upset. She will stand you up as friends going to dinner, you will get upset etc etc etc. In my opinion you have to make a move, and if it works then great. If it doesn't then that doesn't necessarily ruin your chances of being friends. I've certainly seen people have lasting friendships after rejecting one party for a relationship - as long as both parties know the score. I have a very good friend who is in your exact situation - for the 10th time in about 10 years - every single "friendship" has ended in disaster because he has never manned up and told them how he feels.

So that last part of your puzzle is how to ask her out. I'd imagine 99% of people on the planet struggle with asking someone out, especially someone they know. The best way is to man up and just ask her out (maybe have a drink first, but not 10). On your way out from the bar after your cycle trip ask her if she'd like to catch a movie sometime, or a meal, or one do one of your mutual interests. Be fairly direct to ensure there is no confusion over the reason. Hard to do I know, but it works the best, and despite all the teen movies you may have seen she is not going to run around telling everyone awful things. The worst she is likely to say is no, or no I have a boyfriend etc. And of course the best she is likely to say is yes :-)

Good luck, it really isn't that difficult, most men and most women are generally keen on meeting a significant other and don't mind being asked out.
If they can't provide the support we need with their limited resources (someone mentioned on Reddit they had only 6 people on their platform team), they should at least let us pay $250/yr for a "premium developer" account, and have that enable us access to a developer helpline or something.
Sony and Sony Ericsson are not the same company. Believe me, I've worked for the latter.
I don't understand technology behind app approval, code review, etc. But, would this happen in the iOS app store? Given their more stringent approval process?
Google link to bypass paywall:

http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&....
It's almost if like the brain works a little like a neural network :)
In Portland Oregon they are now reducing the yellow times in order to increase red light camera revenue. Somebody needs to put a stop to this madness before too many people die.
Ask HN: Has Putty right mouse button paste put you in trouble?
It happened to me again. Pasted in the console lots of garbage because of just pressing right mouse button expecting the context menu to open instead.
At least this time was not in a production machine...

Does it happens to you?
I think the author means "target audience size" or "nr of potential customers" instead of "market size". A market size is usually expressed in money.

For many startups --as they often operate on new markets-- the size of the "target audience" is probably more interesting. In the markets the 'size' (in money) is also quite hard to measure. But in developed markets the 'size' is probably more interesting.
The line in the diagram connects the lamp to both switches. You can't say it's the common system with parts omitted for simplicity. It has a part included that only exists in the Carter system.

Mansr is right and you are wrong.
Interesting, so...

ORDER BY (CPC * CTR);

versus

ORDER BY (CTR);

yeah, i know they're not using SQL
I'm curious as to why this has been downvoted so much?

It seems clear to me that if iOS device sales haven't already outsold Mac OS X computers, they will shortly, both in terms of both dollars and # of units.

It also seems pretty clear, and insiders everywhere seem to agree, that the paradigms introduced in iOS will (and already have, see multitouch) trickle into what is now known as Mac OS X.

Apparently, there are some people who strongly disagree, so what's your viewpoint?
True. Given a goal of shooting a probe out of the Solar System at the highest possible speed with conventional rockets, we could do a little better. Nothing to bring travel time down below the hundred thousand year mark, though.
Not that I can remember. But I always put a '#' before I paste just to be sure of what I m pasting especially on production.
If they care about safety, they need to lengthen the yellow lights rather than make them illegally short. http://blog.motorists.org/6-cities-that-were-caught-shorteni... just lists 6 cities that have illegally short lights, but I've seen enough in Long Beach to know it happens more often than reported.
Thanks :)

I read about Threadless. Though not a technology company, I was impressed but their story.
Which sounds pretty damn shifty, but if I were selling a traffic monitoring system I'd probably try to get some profit sharing in the contract.
> more cameras would only compound the losses

There's volume efficiencies to consider. Typically the vendor processes the images, mails citations, maintains equipment, provides court testimoney does everything except sign citations (which in most jurisdictions must be done by a sworn peace officer).
CPC * CTR = RPM, and that's what AdSense optimizes for. In effect it's brilliant in it's simplicity as it combines both advertisers wishes (CPC) and consumer's wishes (CTR).
Facebook Passes Yahoo To Become The Second Largest Video Site In The U.S.
From a UK point of view - I left University in 2001. I finished paying off my student loan this month. And this is strictly because I have a very well paying job (I believe that you do not start paying off the loan until you earn >£18k per annum).
The job I have has nothing to do with my degree (getting a First in Multimedia Design and Virtual Reality didn't count for a lot 10 months after those 767's got flown into the towers).
However, I do believe, had I chosen to do a degree that was actually useful, I may have felt that higher education was the only way.
As it is, I could have got a job at 18, arrived where I am now at 26 instead of 31 and then got my company to put me through a degree at their expense.
Not done much research, but if there was an option to study a large amount of entrepreneurialism at degree level, then this would really float my (and a lot of other peoples) boat.
I should mention that while it's GTD at the core, it includes productivity features never before seen in Gmail...

1) instantly see emails when you reply to catch up on recent discussions
2) label-emails-as-you-send-them, so you can add tracking labels to the emails you send
3) right click any contact/label to see recent conversations

... and a few more besides, all customizable :)

For anyone worried about security - as I would be - it does not require any Gmail username/password as it works within the browser; and all XHR requests are there to see (and the source is openable, although it's minified).
Great article, and hits everything I usually say to people asking this question. Now I can just post a link to this post every time someone asks this question on HN. Meta-meta-meta posting. :)
Ask HN: I need a gadget, looking for recommendations.
I have never really been an early adopter of new technology. A combination of lack of interest and not having the disposable cash, I suppose.

However I have to start organizing my life, something I have never really done. I find myself having 'oh yeah have to take care of this soon' thoughts, or wishing I could see the calendar on my computer when I am not at my computer, etc etc.

I have an ancient cell phone that I would consider replacing, but I am not going to shell out for a voice+data plan (though if I can get an unlimited data plan in VT with no voice, I would do that), but I don't need to replace the phone.

I think an ipod touch could be general enough, but something open would be preferred (all other things being equal).

I have not kept up on the mobile world enough to make an informed decision. Hoping someone has an opinion, thanks.
To further the original analogy, you can think of FB users or non-paying dating site users as "inventory". It sounds a bit dehumanizing, but it doesn't have to be: in traditional business you have to manage and maintain your inventory properly as well. E.g., frozen food has to be kept frozen, planes have to be serviced regularly, etc. Maintaining your inventory has a cost, but you need to bear it because that's part of what you're selling. When running a site like FB, you have acquisition costs for your inventory (things you do to get your users to sign up for your site) and maintenance costs for your inventory (things you do to keep your users using your site).

So making sure your users happy is an important part of your business because otherwise you're mismanaging your inventory. But you're free to decide that some of your inventory is too expensive to maintain vs. the value you and your customers derive from it, and it doesn't make sense to carry it anymore.
I agree with you, somewhat, but I will play devil's advocate and point out that for the first half of the Internet age, search was considered "very difficult to monetize". So much so, that all the major players started building portals and other BS to make their search more monetizable. This shift left a huge gaping hole for Google to fill, because there were almost no pure search engines left! Digg has gone down a similar path...building up and out to try to send tentacles out into more monetizable spaces, rather than having a focus on their value to their users. reddit remains extremely valuable to its users.

I don't know how they'll monetize it, but I can't help but think that whenever someone does figure out how to monetize a community of that size, it will be pretty serious cash.
I don't think that you _have_ to do anything. However, I could see this being extremely useful if you're a runner. I think it will come down to pricing.
What would be a wrong reason to study science?
Mike left for 2-3 months before, and traffic only increased.
Uh oh, someone might figure out what 'sine laude' means on my brother's resume!
It can but Apple doesn't recommend that size for "mobile" use. You can see all the Apple recommendations here: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/technotes/tn2010/imag...
Why Qwiki Won't Disrupt
This is the first time I haven't found a human-readable summary anywhere of the new features and major changes of the upcoming Ubuntu version. They used to have this but now their release pages just point to a list of ~250 blueprints which doesn't constitute a "human-readable summary".

Can someone help, please?
Alternatively, use languages that aren't PHP and actually have standards and have a designed API rather than something organically grown into a disgusting mess.

That said, I used PHP for years and am very familiar with how annoying the lack of standardization is. I took the opposite approach from you, I just used a text editor and hit php.net/$foo until I had the parameter orders burned into my head.
I read the post and realized how many of the points are rendered moot in the Indian education system :C, these two make me really really sad.

Meet as many smart people as possible: If you are not in the top notch schools you don't get to see a lot of them. And even when you make it into the best ones chances are that half of the class is not that intellectually simulating. I mean they are great at there course work, sure, but don't really want to think of anything else.

Study Subjects that are new and challenging: Indian colleges do not follow the choice based credit system. It's the college's way or the high way. Although there are 2-3 subjects per semester you absolutely love, the rest offset the fun by loading you with things you are not interested in.

Another point, most of the engineering students in India do not want to be an engineer. They want to get into a good MBA program.
An extreme initial offer manipulates the "anchoring and adjustment heuristic" defined at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring
My only worry with this takeaway is that it leads to an assumption that you don't have to fully read to get the gestalt. The active process of reading - each and every effort - builds the associative networks. To me that's what is so pernicious about the most popular platforms of the internet today. Because information is a click away, the immediacy masquerades as depth. Blogs, tweets, comments, and updates just feed the perception of being educated. By contrast, essays and books require a significant effort to digest. The effort is meaningful in building the pathways. That's why education is stressful. We're working to re-orient our heads. Walking up a mountain may just start out as one foot in front of another. 3,000 feet later we really appreciate and understand the height we've climbed.
Working with the city government of LA (long ago) opened my eyes to how rampant bribes, kickbacks and the rest of corruption we associate with small third-world countries is in the USA.

The main difference being it's kept to a higher level (top gov officials and the rich/corporations) here in the land of the free.
why is it that people believe that they have a right to use services provided by another entity? What happened to having a right to refuse to do business with others?
For what is worth, suspend/resume works on my laptop with Ubuntu 10.04 (a Dell Inspiron 1525) and it was completely broken in Debian testing.
Facebook Instant
I should have mentioned i know its not a crime to take a picture in a public spot. Just saying doing stuff like that is not cool.
I don't know where it's leading, or if it's even leading anywhere. For some people, gaining power over others is an end unto itself, not a means leading to some other end.
first time i wished i had facebook in a while
Chrome latest version :)
More like "random enough." Quantum fluctuations are not necessarily random. We just don't have the technology to understand the forces and processes which influence their fluctuations. Randomness is a human concept I don't believe truly exists in nature.
To elaborate on your point, I also think it's awesome that the wraith of forgotten memory forms a rich 3-dimensional idea.
The students have to write an 2-3 page essay and risk losing 40 points out of 100 points on the exams.

Don't you mean they can gain up to 40 of 100 total available points? I do hope Academia hasn't adapted 'innocent until proven guilty' to mean 'knowledgeable until proven ignorant.' If that's how your professor presents it, he's doing the class a disservice.
I don't think he meant it as a threat -- he was genuinely annoyed at my blatant disregard for local customs.

And don't think the cops will make any effort to correct this. Just yesterday I sat looking at a green light and watched a cop ignore two people go through a full red light. I guess he knows there is no way the charge would be upheld. A green light is purely just advisory in Boston, be sure to look both ways also.
I can't imagine using autocomplete or even an IDE. I remember when I first started I was writing C++ on Windows in Visual C++. My learning only accelerated once I moved off Windows and stopped using autocomplete. Once I started working on Linux and in vim, I didn't even consider looking back.

I like to think I'm a minimalist when it comes to my tools, so obviously my experiences and insights are very different from someone working in an IDE. I prefer the command line to a gui any day.
This is kinda a big issue in SW florida at the moment. The big picture showcases a lot of these empty homes in the area, but some of the cities in the area continue to sell development permits to developers, who continue to build more empty houses, which sort of ruins the landscape. Why do developers continue to build when there are so many empty homes? Who knows, maybe people are really vain and want to buy a house/condo which wasn't foreclosed on, or maybe the houses/condos are just built in a bad spot. In any case, a hot topic in the south.