skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Essentially I think, my question is, is the experience on a MBP so much better, that it's worth having to learn the MacOS platform?

Shortly, yes. Mac as a platform (hw & sw) is really solid and beautiful, letting you to focus on your work, instead of configuring your machine. I used various Linux distros (Redhat, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu) as my primaly OS from 1998 to 2006, until switched to Mac with no previous experience. It took few months before it felt like home, but after that I have never considered to swithing back.

Your Linux skills will be in great use on server side.

> Do I easily get all the software I'll need (svn, git, django, python, vim)?

No problem. You can have even apt-get. Check out these:

http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ &
http://www.macports.org/

PS. As a FOSS advocate, in my wildest dream the FOSS community will some day come up with something as elegant as OS X, but unfortunately it's hard to see that happening.
Stack Overflow is probably getting 90% of their page views through Google SERPs. That means nearly every request is a single answers page from a non-logged in user. Stack Overflow could write out static HTML files for 90% of their traffic. That would let them scale to >500M page views on one server.

Digg on the other hand is generating highly dynamic pages on a per-user basis for a lot of their traffic. That's inherently more resource intensive.

That said, Digg clearly wasted a ton of money on servers. They pretty much had to. The only way to spend $40 million is to over hire and over build your datacenter.
Official statement from the company, Layne Christensen: http://www.laynechristensen.com/rescue.html
Worse than being verbose, Java is limited. It doesn't have the barely insulated connection to the bare metal of the machine that C/C++ has (allowing you to do damn near anything if you code it well enough) because Java is designed to be "safe". But on the other hand it doesn't have any of the more sophisticated programming techniques like first class functions (and thus higher order functions, etc.) The result is a language which requires cumbersome patterns (often inexpertly applied) just to get any regular work done. Stuff that in more sophisticated languages could be refactored down to elegant systems.
I agree except for the part about typedef'ing pointers. If you never typecast a pointer, then you can't ever have compile time and run time encapsulation (better than C++ gives with "private"!) through opaque pointers...
It's good advice not to bad mouth employers. Many people read too many Dilbert comics and don't appreciate management. The joke's on them.

This comes-off as a gossip story--womanly. Okay, I read it. You probably spent a lot of time at the water cooler?

As general advice, you'll go farther if you see things from management's perspective, otherwise, you sound like a brotherhood loving ignorant blue collar worker who wants to get chummy with his brothers.
"...Florian Loitsch's Scheme2Js compiler"

No, Florian Loitsch isn't a human translator for hire - he wrote a compiler.
Using variation pages causes SEO and site problems when the test ends unless you manage your 301s properly, and the marginal load for the redirect to B artificially biases test results. Also, I did a bit of an eye popper demo at a company I just consulted with: deploying an AB test live on my site took two minutes twenty six seconds while slowing my typing speed to explain every step, while the company reports their experiments with GWO require 15 minutes at a minimum. That gives the typical engineer 12 reasons not to AB test.
set radius to n where n>0, click render, set radius to 0, click render.

Doesn't unblur.
> I know plenty of people that use JVM languages and very few of them that wouldn't avoid using pure java if at all possible simultaneously.

Probably true of Scala/Groovy, but definitely not for JRuby or Clojure. Only ~32% of Clojure developers even know Java, according to the recent community survey.
LibreOffice Beta 2 (Office Fork off Oracle) launches
Odd to be reminded of Transmeta and Linus working there.. that's 8 years ago already?
Just a curiosity: I wonder if there was a sentence to read my mother over the phone when the iPhone came out which would have made her understand what it is. I doubt it, yet Apple is considered the masters of this field.

In other words, I think the Google Car thing is an unusual and extreme example. Most tech products, including smart phones and including almost every web app I use, don't have a "killer sentence" which will make everyone understand why it's good.
Yes, but the benchmark is not "how fast does V8 translate scheme to JS", it's "how fast does V8 run benchmarks in javascript that where translated from scheme some time ago".
Atleast that's how i understand it.
In C, you can't ever let yourself forget whether you have a pointer or an integer

A C compiler will generally keep you from forgetting that just fine.
Yes, its amazing how many people confuse 'making a profit' with 'working for free and not losing money'.
Hi Patrick, glad to hear that! Curious what you think about client-side A/B testing products in general (Optimizely being just one of them) vs. server-side products (like A/Bingo). Do you face pain points with A/Bingo that might be solved with a client-side javascript based solution?
Seriously? Rather you than me. They're hardly going to advertise having a crappy company culture. ("You'll be reporting directly to two different managers with opposing objectives, but don't worry, we provide a generous mental health package!") That's for you to work out by reading up on the company and when you go to the interview. Plus, you're claiming a false dichotomy. I doubt great culture and great tech challenges are negatively correlated.

Besides, the "next 10 years of your life" argument is a strawman. If you don't want to be working on the same, hard micro-problem forever, pick a smaller company, where your work will vary wildly. Sure, not all of it is going to be solving super hardcore problems, but I'd want evidence in the job description that there are interesting challenges ahead.
Why is he limiting his scope to people with only three years experience? There can only be one reason.- cost. This kind of mistitled post has been around for years. "I can't get good developers" should read "I can't get good cheap developers". To put it politely, its misinformation and I am surprised at the ranking it got here on HN.
They are also looking for DBAs if your skills lean that way.
Cmd+Tab doesn't switch to the most recently visited window. With Cmd+Tab and Shift+Cmd+Tab, you have to remember if your last move was forward or backward. I keep forgetting that. Unfortunately it's something I do hundereds of times each day. The other issue I have with OS X usability is how to quickly maximize a window.
I think this is eventually going to change. The new UIs are touchscreen pads, netbook editions etc. that just don't scale to the traditional desktop user interface.

The next thing is that people get used to more modal, one-at-a-time multitasking systems like Android and then some variant of a netbook UI really hits off, eventually on desktop as well.
I bet slow JM has cost FireFox a pretty significant number of users over the last couple of years. Even the much smaller gap between nitro & v8 is noticeable at times.
the sad part is that this is a common feature with most other languages

yep. I was hoping they would add closures before I graduate but it doesn't look like it.
If you are hiring a developer who has been working professionally for 3 years and is applying for a junior position you should not be surprised that they don't know sql.
During the Obama campaign

Whoaa why isn't there a crazy big testimonial screaming that on the homepage?

[EDIT: Sorry I misunderstood as you having used optimizely for the campaign, but it sounds like you probably thought of the idea as a result of your frustration.]

I can understand customers getting frustrated for having to wait. But, that's probably what will make them jump to conclusions. I don't know how much you want to get into advocating "best practices", but it would probably be good to ask the user to set their minimum number of visitors beforehand.

The "is this working correctly?" question sounds like a very good practical issue you picked up during your beta testing.
You've made the mistake of thinking that turning on javascript gives you a better user experience. On most websites, it degrades the experience. On those where I see no worthwhile improvement, I don't enable it. It's a judgement call.

Very few websites give you a substantial improvement in user experience by enabling javascript.
This seems to fall victim to the classic "if we only get X tiny % of some big market worth Y, then..." fallacy. The real question is how strong their product offering is and what a realistic estimate of their popularity would be.
Aside from the novelty value, I never really did see a point to the Air.
Some Styrofoam and an Exacto knife could probably replicate a close approximation. Might not be very durable though.
I would like to see an A/B test where A is no test and B is a traditional A/B test. ;-)

My guess is, similar tests favor the "non-test" or quicker result/load, though I bet it would take A LOT of views to irk this out. Google always talk about these test on shades of blue, I imagine those tests are similar in the number of runs they require (hint: a lot).
For me it's the opposite, I had a white macbook and the casing cracked and the hdd failed (along with an iPhone with 3G that didn't work - powercord that frayed and headphones that died). The X200 on the other hand has a much higher quality keyboard and seems to be a higher quality than all my past Apple products. After being locked into paying for 3G for two years and not having the phone work with it I will not be buying Apple ever again as they have personally cost me hundreds and hundreds and don't support their products in the slightest. That's to say nothing of how Ubuntu decimates the horrible package management on OSX and is light-years ahead in many other areas.
No, I don't want to do that for the next 10 years, but I want to know that they expect me to do it. Maybe not for the next 10 years, but a least initially. And if I don't like this I can decide to pass on the opportunity.

Even with good environment and culture you still have to do the work. Every day. For the next few years. So, I think it would be a good idea to know if you like to do what they want you to do.
You'll forgive me if I listen to a combination of common sense, and the guy who said "I say this as a visually impaired developer with several blind friends and family" instead of the guy with a vested interest.
its off the topic but i read expertsexchange as expert sex change
Here is a comment on HN discussing stating that the British Empire was "more evil than the Third Reich":

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1775336

While I'm not sure that I agree with this statement I do have to admit that the negative aspects of Imperial rule aren't exactly widely communicated here in the UK.

Britain wasn't exactly squeamish about using some fairly brutal tactics - the use of concentration camps during the Second Boer War being one of the better known examples.
I recently increased my rate to €80/h (~$113). I lose some customers that way, but I don't think I've hit the glass ceiling yet. Saying that, I'm trying to get out of the contracting game.
That's true, but machine-generated code can be pretty nutty, depending on what exactly the Scheme2JS compiler does. It's legitimate JS code, but it might not be representative of what JS-written-in-JS looks like.
Sure, a speed comparison between Raphael and Highcharts only makes sense if you test them for one specific purpose: in your case, making charts. I understand Raphael is a general purpose graphics library, but it also has charting plugins built on top (http://g.raphaeljs.com/).
To clarify, you can use mappiness outside the UK, and you will be beeped and get access to the feedback charts...

...but you do have to manually convert the times you don't want to be beeped to the UK time zone, and we don't guarantee to use your data in our research.

In retrospect I regret that we didn't launch with explicit support for the US/Canada at least -- but we do plan to add more countries in future.
I'm not sure sharing code is such a great idea. If you use the other guy's code, you might be replicating the other guy's mistakes. And having the code available encourages that.

It would be better to describe your methods, so someone else can implement it in their preferred tools. If they still replicate your results, that strikes me as being much stronger than just rerunning the same, possibly buggy, code.

I mean, if you're working with monkeys, other scientists can't reuse your monkey. They have to follow the procedures you describe on their own animals.

Another issue is that the code might not be very useful to other labs as-is. The code might be for unique, custom-made hardware, or an unusual configuration of equipment, or in an unusual language.
Pretty hostile response. If you're angry, then the post arethuza made is a fine example of a response.

The parent to your post didn't propose going about establishing them, he was just pointing out the advantages.

Whatever the side effects may have turned out to be,
the British empire certainly did not set out to
"empower ordinary individuals who will create new
and unforeseen technologies out of old ones."

Good intentions have a poor record in politics and public policy, and are probably a weak place to start to make a point.
"<!-- You can't get in the club by looking at the source code --> "

nicely done.
Great Circle Mapper - shortest distance between 2 points on Earth
There's a filter happening here and it's systematic of large companies. Job advertisements are usually managed by HR departments rather than directly by managers themselves.

Managers just tell HR they need X,Y and Z to meet the their needs and HR pad out the description with stuff they vaguely understand.
They don't have to advertise a crappy culture, it will just manifest itself as bullshitting.

> pick a smaller company, where your work will vary wildly

Exactly!
Cookies suck for that sort of thing because they are sent over the wire with every request.
How To Upgrade Kubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) To 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)
I've gotten so used to the later kinds of job postings that I didn't really know how to react when I applied for the former job posting.

I sort of locked up and thought for about 10 minutes before I just mailed off my resume and a link to some stuff I've done without a really good letter.

I guess the author of this blog post is right: it was a rare job posting and I discovered I didn't know how to react.
Well, to be honest I think in some future time people will find it so strange that there was a time when decisions about critical aspects of a country where in the hands of people who were only experts at making people like them.
Yahoo User Interface Patterns
I've gotten a tiny taste of what would be possible since soft-launching Newsley's search engine for financial news [1]. We're only getting 400-500 page views a day, but being able to see what people are researching and looking for in financial news has been quite interesting.

Today, for instance, we saw a surge of interest in people looking for news regarding "Geotech Boyles Bros" one of the companies involved in the Chilean mine rescue.[2]

I'm looking forward to seeing what other information people start researching. We're going to have to look at our privacy policy very closely. I really admire what Gabriel has done at DDG [3] and if we keep growing like we have been, we hope to do something similar. It's just the right thing to do.

[1] occasionally working, case sensitive alpha version here: http://Newsley.com/search

[2] http://newsley.com/k/Company/geotec-boyles-bros/70053/

[3] http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html
this one is cool
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=auk-CPT
I can add that the Mac API needs a little bit of polishing now. I just went back to develop a Mac application (for internal use) after developing on the iPhone, and certain things are not that intuitive or easy to use as on the iPhone. Is not really a big difference, but Mac API could use a little more consistency learned from the iPhone API.
What if the analysis were to be done based on where the people came from rather than modern geographical borders? I felt it a bit odd that the analysis was done by overlaying modern geographic boundaries on historical technology, considering how many modern countries owe their technological progress to other countries in older times. (e.g. America <- Britain/France/Spain <- Europe <- Middle East + Asia + Rome <- Ancient Greece). I think its less about who had what technology when, more about who inherited that technology.
Hmm, well.

I would consider the first job posting another version of a) a bad job posting and b) the modern form of "bullshit"

I agree with the rest of what he is saying, but I think the first example was poor and derailed the point.

How would I have done the advert? Try:

We're an unannounced YC company, but you may have heard of us (millions have). We're profitable, and we're looking to hire a smart all-around programmer as our first hire. Depending on the task, we program in Ruby (on Rails), Javascript (a lot of this), PHP, Python, Objective-C (iPhone), and Java (Android). Flexibility is a plus.

We like pragmatic people who get things done. We're looking for someone relaxed and with the ability to think about the product as a whole and their impact on it.

You don't have to be world class at everything, but you should be willing to get your hands dirty with everything from database design to javascript to system administration to customer support and customer development.

We're profitable, have hundreds of thousands of users and a rapidly expanding user base. We are a relaxed company run by programmers, so no corporate nonsense.

You will be the first employee of a small successful startup; with a paycheck and equity. It you are interested and live in Silicon Valley, send email about yourself to recycledthrowaway@gmail.com.

There, bullshit removed. Clean, simple, descriptive.

The problem with the original is that the company is not announced, so any "exciting" description is just bullshit and unhelpful. The job ad in this case is there to say what they want and what roughly they are offering, it is to filter out some basic candidates. And at that point you can turn on the charm when it makes more sense to the potential employee

Never try to sound cool in a job ad.. it backfires. Go for friendly but offhand professionalism :)
Aiming too low? Try SIAI - http://singinst.org/
Well,

One scheme would involve a system to merge multiple email and Facebook accounts into a single meta-view.

I'll be making an announcement when the time is right...
Have a T61. Very solid. Wonderful keyboard. But...horrible LCD. Now most laptop screens aren't very good (MBPs being a notable exception), but this is bad enough that it's almost unbearable if you're used to a desktop LCD or decent laptop screen. And, unfortunately, poor screen quality seems to be a Thinkpad family trait.
Two mice means two cursors, this would require window managers and the UI libraries on on of them to be largely rewritten. As they have been, for the mobile space.

Multitouch in desktop OSes has been tacked on as a layer over the traditional cursor-oriented APIs, which is why it feels that way when you use it.
A job posting from Apple a couple of months ago metioned a "revolutionary feature" that will "truly amaze everyone": http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/07/29/apple_seeks_en...

I really wonder what this feature could be.
In general, I feel server side is far superior for developers and client side with a WYSIWYG UI is a fabulous option for other stakeholders. I could talk on this subject for a while but my plane is about to take off. Suffice it to say you can't match power, flexibility, and speed of server side with client side testing. You can move away from just twiddling text to actually redoing workflows or business logic.

I didn't write ABingo with a pain point included, but for Appointment Reminder it will be helpful to do AB testing in non-Rails marketing pages, too. I wouldn't append too much effort optimizing your solution for the needs of people who have written AB test frameworks though.
True, but i see that this is a valid testcase.
For example GWT generates JS out of Java, so it might be useful to also benchmark machinegenerated JS.
Maybe off topic but I LOL at doublespeak like "$1,000 minimum donation", and the cognitive dissonance that lies at its foundation. I can just see the whole story behind it: the idealists who preach the 'software should be FREE!' mantra, the myopic hatred against software companies who (gasp) charge money for their software, the realization (after trying to make worth while software themselves) that it actually costs money to, you know, live and pay expenses, and the grasping for straws that is "let's call it a 'minimum donation, then we're not actually charging for it".

Not to pick on these guys, I don't know them and for all I know they're the outlier, it's just such a cliche that it's becoming an indicator of a team that has much to learn about how the software business works.
For identity, why not use OpenId?

It really seems like Facebook itself offers any more services as such than the regular web does. It just packages them more nicely - that isn't to say the packaging important, it's clearly very important.
I go even further and am of the opinion that data provenance is the overarching issue. Any series of results should be able to be re-generated quickly (as measured in scientist-time not computer-time) based solely on meta-data provided–and this is the key point–as part of the results themselves. A few simple guiding principles could go a long way toward achieving this goal.

1. In the absence of a well defined standard, it’s the individual scientist’s/consortium’s responsibility to define and actively use an organized meta-data standard.
2. If it’s not open source it’s not science.
3. A snapshot of the source code used to generate results should be given/pointed to when the results are presented.
4. Minimizing reproduction time is an integral part of science.
5. Principles 1-4 should be be demanded, by funding agencies, program heads, and research advisors.
Design Patterns between Free Software and Permaculture
Those packages are rather different from a given scientist's code for a given paper. These are big, mature projects, probably multi-lab or department-wide, long-term efforts, to develop a shared foundation for work in a given field.

The code actually corresponding to a given paper is likely to be a small amount that builds on packages such as those above, or products like Matlab, whatever. There could be code to implement an experiment, and Matlab code to analyze the data.
He's picking a particular point in time, and saying that this was important, not that it's a 500 year window that shifts continuously.
It's not only the culture what is important for me, but what are my strengths, what am I good at? If I do what I am good at that can be the win-win situation. I am not especially good at the frontend work they described. I mean I could do the job, but it is not my strength. I am better at creating algorithms, and I am also more enthusiastic about that kind of work. Also they mentioned lots of dynamic languages. I am better at a job where I can go deep into problems preferably using only one or two languages. And I better like let's say Scala than all those dynamic languages. I am also a speed-optimization enthusisast: at speed all those mentioned languages suck. Company culture is important, but by far not the only important thing.