skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
even with internal include guards, just the time to read through (and skip) the whole files for later inclusions can become dominant in cpp processing time (i.e. it's mostly waiting on I/O reading the same headers many times over). That's why Lakos advises external include guards for large systems.
The Pomodoro Technique(TM) is essentially the same, but waltzing in 25/5 time. A longer interval makes more sense to me too, though. Maybe 45/15 or 50/10; either way, it helps block out distractions - "No, self, I committed to working on this for another fourteen minutes."

I wrote an Emacs work / rest timer (http://github.com/silentbicycle/zwiebel) for that sort of thing, if anybody's interested. (I hooked it up to an XOSD (http://ignavus.net/software.html)-based alert.)
This does make the battle for talent look pretty dramatic, doesn't it?
I wonder what he thinks of .NET and Mono right now.
a) Really? What alternate vms were encouraged? Java itself was free.

b, c) Agreed, it's a rapidly failing ship.

d) Why should Oracle care how much a competitor has spent on developing a replacement for Oracles technology?
Contextual Information & Intelligence
Opinion Essay – Your Thoughts and Ideas
The writing of an opinion essay is an excellent method for many students to express their opinions on a particular issue. This however, is done through the use of factual evidence which will back your opinion. Knowing how to write it will enable you to receive good grades.
I'd like to see an iOS app to do this check.
You can do that on top of this.
yes, and that's using the Pimpl idiom to decouple things can improve build times. If your whole codebase rebuilds everytime a header is touched, then your headers are probably not correctly organized. Having minimal headers (using forwards decls as much as possible) is vital to keeping rebuild times down.
And all the videos are from near-straight-on. Because this type of projection (onto a flat, semitransparent screen) gets skewed when at an angle.
> Once a month is pretty mild.

Yes but I think that drinking 'to blackout' > 'binge'. Intuitively one would think that if you can't remember things that happened the night before, then you could easily be damaging some memory systems in the long term as well.
Google's base salary is so low compared to other companies... they had to do this eventually.
There's no reason they can't give larger raises to the higher performers. Just that the base would be 10%.
Mold Inspection | Mold Testing
The early days (I remember you!) were pretty rough, yeah. Since they switched everything to Solaris, though, it's all been seemingly rock-solid. Only thing is that I really don't use that big lifetime VPS I have with them (still use the shared-hosting account for some static file stuff and side projects though), because I hate adminning Solaris... :(
No, the netbook is usually maximized (ubuntu netbook remix), but back when I had a PowerBook duo, the end of the 030era, I was running windows about 400px wide on a 640 px screen. Screens have gotten bigger, but for desktops, vie generally been at about 1/2 the screen, and laptops at 1/2-2/3 or so. I've gotten into some epic... Discussions of fluid layouts and how just because my browser was reporting lots a pixels, the layout wasn't getting them.
Works ok for me on iPad iOS 4.
I've been trying this with http://focusboosterapp.com/ . It's pretty solid.
I guess I'm the outlier, but I think this page is trying too hard. It turns me off because it seems fake, sugary sweet, attempting to be cute for the sake of being cute. The bios barely say anything of value about the people; they're idealized descriptions of what the perfect person for each job would be. I do think it's nice visually, but the length of the page annoys me.
The Android vs. iOS marketshare race is one in which iOS is hobbled because of iOS's exclusivity. When the iPhone 4 hits Verizon next year, $199 Android phones will take a massive hit in demand and they will quickly be dropped in price to spur demand.

Apple has dropped it's prices to compete before. It'll be really interesting if Apple drops the price of the iPhone below the top of the line Android phones.
I loved reading this in Do More Faster but I preferred the original chapter title: "Usage is like oxygen for ideas." If you enjoyed this post, the book is full of similar goodness. This was the best though :) Nice job, photomatt!
Implement a ranking system and standardized tests. Count lines of code and apply it as a bonus multiplier. Make sure to only measure things directly assigned to a person, while ignoring 'off-the-book' things like bringing new hires up to speed, code review, etc. Devote a large portion of the bonus to a 'face-time in meetings' metric. Put everyone on an artificial bell-curve measuring whim in exquisite detail.

20% of staff-time should be taken off anti-pagerank gaming efforts and redirected at anti-bonus-metric gaming.
I guess so. But maybe the use of the standard library could be allowed
Let me tell you a story about my 17" unibody MacBook Pro. It's nearly 2 years old now. I used this thing constantly, I use it about 12 hours a day, every day, and carry it around in my backpack every single day. Most weekends, too, even.

Thanks to the glass screen, the screen as as good as it was on day one - and it's the best I've ever had in terms of brightness and clarity. When the screen gets dirty, I scrub it furiously with a napkin. Glass - it doesn't scratch! The alu body is as tight as on day 1. You'd have to look very closely to see any scratches at all - it basically looks brand new.

The battery lasted until 2 days ago, providing around 6 hours real life usage (on a 17" laptop!). Now it's down to 60% capacity at 500 charge cycles - and guess what, Apple is replacing it free under AppleCare warranty.

Nothing shakes. Nothing rattles. The unibody is just as solid as it was new. As is the keyboard and the track pad.

It's blazingly fast too thanks to an SSD I put in the optical drive spot (though that was a little harder than it should have been).

At the end of the day, this is just fantastic quality and it ends up being not only better but also cheaper than any crap quality laptop simply because I can use it for 2 years. Maybe even longer, who knows?
Am using FF4.0b6 with FlashBlock 1.5.14.2 and it correctly fell back to standard html.
Ask HN: Can we get an clear definition of bureaucracy and its implications?
I often hear this word tossed around and I know people seem to universally agree that it is bad but I can't decipher exactly what they mean by it from anywhere on HN.

Also in a theoretically perfect company how do you manage getting things done / ship without any kind of process while having a way for people to grow and advance in a company and still not bog it down with "political" "bureaucracy"?
Nothing in that article says high performers won't be able to receive additional compensation. So this way low performers are happy, and if high performers receive a normal year end bonus or pay raise then they'll be doubly happy.

Of course, if they don't, then you're absolutely right.
Four Lessons Learned From An Excursion Into Solo Web Programming
Stallman has his ideals, which is fine. However, if Java was never open sourced, he would not be in favor of it. OpenOffice was largely written in C++ because they didn't want to use Java because it wasn't open. Imagine how much more work could have been accomplished if they started with Java. Not that Java is a great, or even pretty, language. It's just a lot easier to work with than C++. Someday, we'll be able to move up another level of abstraction and writing software will again become easier.

My point about Stallman was that he would keep developers in the "stone ages" rather than be practical.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Use_of_Java
> we can’t run a linear manufacturing process forever.

If only we were running a linear manufacturing process. The market punishes companies that don't post exponential growth in the form of seemingly linear quarter-over-quarter growth.

This is a great way to present the problem to non-hackers, if you haven't seen it: http://www.storyofstuff.com/
"The only PC laptop that were not crap in my experience were lenovo, but surprise, those were expensive as well"

It's a mystery! At least it seems a mystery to many people here. Correlation between price and quality - who'd have thought!
Going for a bike ride works well for me. I know the roads around my house & office quite well, so I can be on semi-autopilot, riding with just enough focus on my surroundings that my backbrain can still mull over a problem. Or, I can ride hard and grind out a stressful afternoon. Either way, it's a good time for inspiration to strike. (Weightlifting is great, too.)

My office is big on darts, but that doesn't get the blood flowing in the same way as ping pong or cycling. :)
Indication of inflation on its way?
http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/JSPA2.pdf

Sections 5B through 5F look relevant.
Sure. Every category has enthusiasts, some more than others.

But even people who are really into espresso machines don't know that much about it's components. Part of this is because computer components can be quantified relatively easily. Part of it is because even moderate PC users probably have more vested in than espresso enthusiasts.

Another part is vestigial deriving from the history of computers similarly to cars. Cars and computers started out under resourced and hard to use. Because they were so useful people used them anyway. But, you had to know quite a bit about them to answer your questions and make a good choice (can it run my software?) and to fix them when they inevitably failed.

Enthusiasts might know where the engine was developed, when and by who, but most people don't. Lots of people know that a VW uses the same parts as a Seat and that the golf is roughly the same car as the ibiza, just more expensive.

People still buy VWs, Mercedes, Toyota, etc. Very few people say the Audi a3 is a great car, just replace the transmition and door handles. T
Completely Agree.
Ask HN: Learning ops?
I need a crash course in ops. What should I be doing?

Under normal circumstances I'm a Hacker News regular, mostly posting about algorithms or languages. Now I need to know about actual machines.

I've worked at very large scale before, designing reliable systems that work across colos, and so on. It's just that this was in a BigCo, so someone else was buying and managing all the machines. Now I'm in a much smaller organization, but with a substantial need for scalability, and I've been tasked with helping to create a new system from scratch.

Unfortunately the last time I dealt with a company's physical server hardware was in the 90s, when it was a row of tower PCs in a very hot closet. Words like "2U" are mystical and strange to me. Help me understand your modern world.

P.S. Cloud service providers are not a possibility.
Clearly the better reference was not Jabba the Hutt, but the maw of the Sarlacc.
Curation as a Metaphor to Live By
I was going to post that here too. What a great quote.
OpenOffice might not be the best example since it's older than Java: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Open_Office#History
Rent a house carlisle
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Sure beats Apple's page

http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/

As well as Tapulous' (which I thought was pretty good until now)

http://tapulous.com/team/
But other than both halves of his argument being incorrect, I can see why parent's comments get upvoted and mine down.
I like the concept and I personally use variations of it. However, I find that 30/30 is not only the wrong ratio (1:1) but also the lengths don't work too well for certain types of activities. c.f. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
But everyone of them who does would have proved they have the skill to get hired in the industry we all hold so dear.

Getting a job is what they are after right?
Give Us Our Data, Facebook
Longtime Java dev here, I'd say taking Java, and the JVM, and creating a NEW set of libraries would be awesome.

As you said the Java libraries are total crap. Sun was for a while hell-bent on throwing out everything that's good while putting in a lot of badly designed ugly classes. And some things, like AWT and Swing, were just crap from the very start.

A fresh start would be awesome. The main thing that's currently good about Java is the JVM, and Eclipse. Ruby is infinitely more elegant but the dynamic typing and lack of IDE support kills it for me.
What are the odds that my vote changes the outcome of an election?
Counting the lines of code an engineer has written is a terrible road to go down. I can write 500 lines of good code, or I can abstract it into a 5,000 line heap of unmaintainable garbage.
Pretty sad to see such ridiculous cliches, even photographed like some cheap sitcom.
> it's worth mentioning that there is an executable that you can use for Windows machines to easily switch to Colemak without installing it on the box. I carry it around on a thumbdrive, place it on a network share, and keep it in my Dropbox. I can always get to it. So 80-90% of the time I can use Colemak, and I am reasonably fast at qwerty.

Can you link to a copy of this executable? Is it just an AutoHotkey script?
Sometimes you should enjoy a beautiful thing without fussing about the amount of data in it.

I am amazed nobody commented on the Photos, beautiful compositions.
I'm really not sure how I feel about this. I've been churning it over and over in my mind since I heard about this via the grapevine whilst in my favourite bar tonight. The only thing I've left with thinking is this: for better or worse, Node is the most successful CommonJS platform available today. Server-side JS should thrive, but I'm not sure Node is the thing to do it.

Node, to me, feels like it's the thing that JavaScript the language should be on the client-side; JavaScript on the server-side is beholden to the slow pace of the client-side and is not developing the things it needs, at the pace it needs.

I can't help but feel that JavaScript is the wrong match for this. Maybe Clojure is better. Maybe something else is. I just can't ignore this gut feeling that thing isn't write with this picture.
That was the point ;)
I Love Money | Business Mastery Club with Travis Greenlee
Don't people typically ask for 30% when they change jobs?
Android is based on Harmony...

http://apache-harmony.blogspot.com/2007/11/google-android-ap...

... for better or worse.
Uh, Android uses Harmony (or a subset thereof). I think that's a rather important detail to understanding what's happening here.
I've typed Dvorak for a couple years, and have been quite happy with it. I'm curious about Colemak, though. Dvorak is pretty established as the alternative English-language keyboard layout - It's not hard to set up on Windows, Unix, or (I'm guessing) OS X. Is Colemak? While I'm convinced that Dvorak is significantly better than Qwerty, if you're the stubborn sort that would use a different keyboard layout for English (spoiler alert: I am), I suspect there's diminishing returns after that. Still, I'm really curious about Colemak (what was the rationale?) - I just don't know anybody who uses it.

My strategy of "heavily customized Emacs / Dvorak on my computers, standard Qwerty / vi otherwise" has been a good compromise over the years, incidentally.

Also, I work with Swedish hackers who remind me that Qwerty is only "standard" so far across the ocean. These things only make sense in a local context.
Nice. Now if you want a 10% raise this year, it's easy to say, "everyone at Google got one..."
Yup. I find the 'our-whole-office-is-staffed-by-fun-people-who-love-(office-admin|client-management|sales|.+)' trope really grating. These are people going to an office to do their jobs. Maybe they're good at their jobs, and maybe it's a nice place to work, but it's not summer camp, it's not a four-year liberal arts college, and it's not a heist movie in which a crack team of experts come together for one last big score. It's a software company. Get a grip.
I tend to feel the same way when I see bios end in a cutesy fact. It's quite cliche now.
I really enjoy dvorak and I'm glad I switched but I can't say that the difference is enough to justify the pain of switching. It took me a long time to get used to dvorak. The first few weeks were very unproductive and it took me many months before it felt natural and I was faster than before. But I find it really comfortable since about 80% of the letters I type are on the home row. The benefits of dvorak are less when you're programming because there's a lot more punctuation and dvorak is mainly optimized for English words.

I'm not sure of the relationship between dvorak and repetitive stress injuries. Your fingers travel a lot less with dvorak, so they are doing less work. But I'm not sure if it makes any real difference.
Seems like a desperation move. Can you imagine the exciting, dynamic Google of 5 years ago thinking ""Uh.. give them slightly more money?" was a great solution to this problem?
+1 for em-dash usage :-D
With presumably 23,000 people getting that email, unless the person (if only one did) was not careful at all, I don't think they could be discovered. (I'm not sure that anyone would really care either)
+1 because I think that this is an important question.

It seems that the intent of this method is to increase productivity. In saying this, nothing kills productivity more than deadline tension. Having to constantly look over at the time would no doubt have this effect.
Bingo. Fred should link to this in his post today.

And furthermore, Fred's points of when it makes sense to have participation rights are dead-on and exceptionally well articulated.
For real entrepreneurs, the type of people Google needs to retain, a 10% raise is meaningless. I will say it's a nice PR stunt.
Man takes computer in for repair. Cost: $20 million
I thought that went the other way: you need a patent license to author and/or run the TCK. You can create a Java compatible VM (many have) but you can't run the "official" compatibility test without Sun's, now Oracle's permission, and there is some concern (at least at Apache) that you cannot easily create a "cleanroom" implementation of that TCK. (Although I think that latter concern is more social than legal--if I remember correctly conventional wisdom said that there were too may Sun folks already involved with Java projects at Apache to have any reasonable expectation that a cleanroom would remain clean.)
depends on who is lobbying better.
Geckoboard - Your Business in Realtime
I wonder if it'd be helpful to have a daily mindfulness meditation practice on the same timing schedule used for work.

ie, if you work for 25 minutes ala pomodoro, then in the morning or evening do a 25 minute sitting. If you do 42 minutes of work, do a 42 minute per sitting.

It'd be one more thing every day to help train yourself into focusing during the work periods.
It took me a minute to remember where this was, but I always thought this was a great "team" page: http://www.tamtam.nl/people.aspx

Most of the individuals have a looping video if you click on them. Gives you a better idea on personality, yet doesn't take anything away from the experience.
Yeah, it's a portable keyboard layout in autohotkey. Here's the link (you can get to it from colemak.com):

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pkl/files/Standalone%20Layou...
I think the page is gorgeous, and as jjcm put it, very engaging. I understand where a few are coming from with the "tries too hard" objection but isn't "doesn't try hard enough" a greater offense? At least these guys give us something to talk about. I guess I'm just so tired of the characteristic uninspired About Us that I find this refreshing, if a little cutesy.

Also, anyone notice The Assistant's copy of Founders at Work?
Your information is quite out of date.
"The company also began testing a mathematical formula to try to predict which employees are most likely to leave, based on factors like employee reviews."

Does anyone have more information on this?
I don't think it's a translation thing: I think this was written in English by a native German-speaker, who applied German comma-use habits to English. I'm American, but I spent many of my early years in Germany and attended German schools through the fifth grade. After that my family moved back to the states and I finished my education here. To this day, I still have to make a conscious effort not to over-use commas. After I finish a first draft, a big part of my first editing pass is cutting out extraneous commas. I instantly recognized the comma overuse in the bios page because it's how I'm naturally inclined to write.
Why the hell is recursion considered cheating?
This is why smokers have a huge advantage. They go out for a smoke break every hour. Doing _nothing_ but smoking.

I will try this, sans the smoking, starting now. Goodbye.
Build For Jack & Jill, Not Larry & Sergey
The Case For Software As A Service
I've been on a telecommuting project for the past several months or so. At some point we realized that we weren't really functioning as cohesively as possible, and the solution ended up being in finding a group chat tool. The author here uses Campfire, but we went with Hipchat (http://www.hipchat.com/). It certainly helped us with the sense of being isolated from the team.

Now as to dealing with being in my apartment for what can be huge swaths of time...
Because the JCP process that Sun agreed to says they are obligated to. Obviously they can renege, but Apache is pointing out that if they do, the JCP is a sham, in which Apache will refuse to participate.
So on the other hand, by emailing someone, you are granting them the right to download your contact information to a third party application who will then ... email you that you should join ... Facebook?
The page shouts "fakers" to me. Yeah it looks nice and all, but that says more to me about the photographer than it does about the company. Anyone can hire a good photographer.

I don't feel like I understand anything about these people...and that's kind of the point of an about us page.
The home page crashed my iOS Safari, but the about page did not.
An analysis of mail.ru (public company that owns facebook, zynga, etc stock)
If you are performing well at a company as big as Google, you get 10% raise easily every fiscal year. "easily" as in the company is doing well. (It's a common sense that companies are less likely to give raises if the company is not making much money) If you happen to be asking for a raise, you are either working for a wrong company or not performing well compared to your peers.
Why so cynic?

Personally, I think it's great to see a major company recognize that salaries do matter.

I dislike this common attitude in IT to think that money doesn't matter since we're working on cool stuff and can play the Wii on lunch breaks.
I wouldn't want a company full of entrepreneurs unless N < 10
Off the top of my head, it's when you can't act unilaterally.
"We have the right" should probably be "We want the right" From what I know, in the US at least, a warranty void sticker for example is legally valid.
Mine's an HP Envy 17. I don't typically like HP's notebooks, but this one was too tasty to pass by. I priced out just about everything out there for a new mobile dev workstation, including custom builds, and this one rang all the right bells.

http://bit.ly/d4oj8G
See my reply to nikster on this thread. :)