skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started working from home about five months ago. I lived alone. It took a couple of months for the social isolation to take effect, but it was severe. I didn't realize at the time how much of my drive at work came from collaboration, both cooperative and competitive. I like the joy of achieving things as part of a team, and I like the challenge of trying to be the best. (Yeah, that's not always great for team dynamics.) With nothing to prove and no one to help or to help me, my productivity tanked.

Three things really turned it around. First was moving in with a roommate. It provides some of the community at home that I used to get from the office. Second was doing volunteer work. In a way it's a huge waste of time, but the feeling of accomplishment is irreplaceable. (Lot of women there too... just saying.) Third is releasing code, parts of my project, as open source libraries. Never mind that nobody uses or even looks at it--just the concept of making code public drives me to raise the quality bar, to keep it modular, and to get parts finished. Instead of toiling away in preparation for one huge launch date, each module becomes a mini launch.

The conclusion I take from my experience is that telecommuting will foster communities, not scatter them. There will be less demand for one-bedroom apartments and more for houses to be split by roommates. We'll see more involvement in community activities and OSS.
> I often wonder if the mild alcoholism of my youth (drinking to blackout roughly once every month, starting at age 16)

Is that really only mild? I must be extra-super-special-crazy-lite.
linkified: http://dropjobs.com
Stress, It Does a Body Good
Yes. And "must do" qualifies as a gratuitious adjective in this case.

Consider Things to do when launching a new website as a revision.
I use this work pattern when I'm doing particularly distasteful work, and it generally works well.

The only thing I'd advise is that if you're in a state of flow (in which the passage of time just disappears and your focus zeroes in completely), don't worry about maintaining a rigid time schedule.

Every so often, when I'm writing, I forget to check the clock and then it is 3 hours later and I realize that I've missed a meal. I wouldn't trade those times for very many things.
Java's standard library is one of its worst features. A fork could just throw this crap away and it wouldn't be too far off.

But honestly, people don't use Java because they want a good programming language. They use it because they're already using Java. That will be a problem for both Java 7 and any future fork.
I'm not sure that's such an unpopular opinion. And if it is, I'd ask the naysayers to entertain the thought that the definition of a 'monopoly' might be different in the digital age (as so very many other mutable concepts are).
That was back when flash was new and exotic, right? Every music player on the market is flash-based now, and so are many computers. Samsung's Wikipedia page says that Apple accounts for about 2% of their sales.
Session Initiation Protocol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol

SIP is the IETF's answer to the ITU's H.323. It's very similar in design to HTTP and most major enterprise telephony infrastructure providers have been migrating to it at some non-trivial pace. Of course, the big problem with SIP is your SIP and my SIP aren't always the same. This is becoming less of a problem as more folks deploy it, but if you look at how Cisco bastadized the SIP implementation on the line side of their IP PBX, you'll know what I mean: lots of proprietary extensions to make the various line-side features working.
Because nobody wants to be the next Rails.
Umm... $0.00?

It costs nothing to become an Apple Developer. It costs $100 to be an iPhone developer, or $100 for their Mac developer program. Both of which give you previews of OS updates and the ability to sell your software in their stores. Otherwise, you don't have to pay anything.
People who know my previous comments might think I sound like a broken record -- but, this is the exact reason why I love having a table tennis table at the office. It's the perfect distraction to coding that focuses on pure reflexes and hand-eye coordination.

After a game of ping pong, my mind is usually cleared and can tackle the next problem. Lots of +1's to the idea of zoning your brain out of the problem area for a while to get your subconscious working.
From the article: American military chiefs have been left dumbstruck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast U.S.S. Kitty Hawk - a 1,000ft supercarrier with 4,500 personnel on board.
. . . It also led to tense diplomatic exchanges, with shaken American diplomats demanding to know why the submarine was "shadowing" the U.S. fleet while Beijing pleaded ignorance and dismissed the affair as coincidence.
Analysts believe Beijing was sending a message to America and the West demonstrating its rapidly-growing military capability to threaten foreign powers which try to interfere in its "backyard".

If this incident is similar, I would expect the US military not to admit it.
That's a great article, and I agree with most of it (e.g., that a balanced binary tree should be the default set/map data structure in programming languages; unfortunately it seems only C++ gets that right), but its reference to FNV as a good hash function is anachronistic.

For a more modern and much faster hash, see http://sites.google.com/site/murmurhash/ . Murmurhash3 is an order of magnitude faster than FNV: http://code.google.com/p/smhasher/wiki/MurmurHash3 .
Looks like an electromagnetic field. I wonder why they didn't make that connection.
Tron Trailer: Geek it On
Wikipedia seems to say that Sony buys more than Apple

The table on the Samsung page lists companies by fracton of Samsung's total sales, not just flash memory. Nor, for that matter, does Apple only buy flash memory from Samsung.
This reminds me the Pomodoro Technique. http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

I bought a pomodoro iphone app and tried it for about a week or so, alas 25 mins was just too short for me.

I generally find 45/20 to be about right balance for me. I now use Vitamin-R (Mac App) to track time/goals.
Definitely worth a try. I am concerned about my discipline to come back to work after playing a game for 30 mins. May be playing TT would be better idea, since I feel playing physical games refreshes me more that video games.
Ugh ____ has 95% of the music player market.

Fill in the blank.
Can't help wondering if CodingHorror.com posted this because they were running out of material.
The article intimates at the answer to why alcohol withdrawal can be more difficult and dangerous than hard drugs. Recall the part where they explain how cocaine and heroin and speed only work on one neurotransmitter principally, whereas alcohol works on a large number (dopamine, seratonin, GABA, norepinephrine, etc)—scalpel vs. hand grenade.

So in withdrawing from cocaine or heroin or nicotine you can prescribe someone a drug that works on the relevant receptors, blocking or even reversing the effect of the drug. For example, I recall that buproprion is prescribed to treat nicotine addiction because it blocks nicotine's effect on norepinephrine receptors. The strategy with heroin or cocaine withdrawal might be similar, targeting the opioid or dopamine receptors respectively.

Contrast this with the wider effects of alcohol, influencing half a dozen or more neurotransmitters. There's no easy strategy to target the chemical dependencies your brain has built up because there're too many.

So while heroin and cocaine are more immediately addictive than alcohol, withdrawal from alcoholism (once it has developed) can be just as dangerous and sometimes more so.
I just know that Stallman is doing an "I told you so" dance right about now.
Untrue, if you care you know. Cars for car enthusiasts. Espresso machines for espresso enthusiasts. Apple is targeting the lowest common denominator with their tiers. But it works because their vertical approach works better than what you get with Windows anyhow.
Well... It certainly doesn't look like J2ME has a bright future. Keeping it alive under present terms may be enough. The OpenJDK and Apache licenses protect against patent trolling by Oracle or IBM, so, that threat is not significant. The only problem would be the risk of deviating from current "safe" versions into Larry's patentland.
Personally I'm not too concerned. It seems like Oracle wants to continue in good faith.
Maybe people use Java because they want a solid cross-platform VM
Once a month is pretty mild. Depending on the society, is only a little beyond what's normal. From my experience, an average college student in Ireland might expect to binge drink twice a week, on Thursdays and Saturdays; on Thursdays with your fellow students because it's the last night of the week before a lot of people go home for the weekend (it's a small country), and on Saturday with your friends at home.

I say average, because what we'd want to call alcoholism would go further than what's normal in the society; it would need to be drinking to excess to escape your life, and ending up with other problems, like being kicked out of places, waking up in strange places (possibly with strange people), not remembering the details of the night before until you piece it all together out of fragmentary memories, passing out in parties, pubs, clubs etc. These are a couple of stages beyond mere "binge drinking".
Actually the new Nook is not an e-ink display, it's a 1024x600 LCD, and it does come with a web browser.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371521,00.asp
http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/26/nook-color-first-hands-on...
What's the best way to normalize product names? Specifically, I would like to be able to take a recipe and get all the ingredients in that recipe. The ingredients are going to be written by humans so I need the ability to understand that ingredient and map it to something normalized that I know how to deal with.

Thanks
I am not exactly sure why my post warrants a downvote.
To start with, the author says he switched to Colemak keyboard layout. Interesting, but about as useless as Dvorak. Unless you get everyone to switch to it, you will be disabled whenever you switch to someone else's computer, a kiosk, etc. Why bother?

He mentions having switched to biphasic sleep. If he said- I don't use electricity at night and just go to bed and wake up with the light, then if he got up during the dark hours, that's fine. But scheduling it and forcing your body into a strange deprived sleep pattern is bad for you. Napoleon slept ~4 hrs a night. He was successful for a time, well- except for attempting and failing to conquer the world. Poor decisions may not have been made with more sleep.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_sleep

So, that leads us up to the 30/30 work cycle. This actually doesn't sounds that bad. But, it is totally not something that would work in a professional setting. When you are in the middle of an important meeting with the board, or working on getting a product feature out that day, you can't walk out of the meeting or walk out on your team to go play video games. I take time out periodically for a walk, but seriously- grow up.
I'm currently using Concentrate (http://getconcentrating.com), and I love it. Checking out Vitamin-R tonight! Thanks for the suggestion! :-)
I did an hour-on/hour-off cycle when I was in school studying for exams each semester, and it was great. Working for an hour meant that I could nail a solid two concepts, and then go do something else for an hour, and then come back and spend an hour on some practice problems that used those concepts. I remember initially trying a shorter 30-30 cycle, but when a problem takes 20 minutes to do (by design) subbing out at 30 didn't really get much done.

I also found it let me work much longer. I'd get to the library at 10am, work one-on/one-off until 11pm or so, go home and watch a bit of TV, and repeat - for three weeks straight, only interrupted by days when I had actual exams, on which I'd do about four hours off after the exam and get back to work.
> Interesting, but about as useless as Dvorak. Unless you get everyone to switch to it, you will be disabled whenever you switch to someone else's computer, a kiosk, etc.

Not true. I learned Dvorak a few years ago, and I can still sit at a Qwerty keyboard and type reasonably fast. It's really not that difficult to go back and forth.
I think I'm lost on the joke; nobody wants to be the next overhyped (and polarizing) framework that is beloved by a large niche of programmers and launches a new segment of the industry?

Care to clue me in? (being honest; maybe I missed some news recently)
I use a similar pattern, but instead of 30/30, I do 75/30, here are the reasons,
1. I need at least 5 to 10 mins to pick up what's left.
2. Work without distraction never happen(people talk to you, have to open the door for someone, answer the office phone etc). If that happens, I need another 5 mins just to remember I was doing.
3. My productivity picks up after the initial 20mins, and it lasts about 45 to 60 mins.
4. A few things could happen after 75mins of coding a) feature done or bug fixed - checkin code, git push. done take a break b) encounter a problem, internet searching - stop and take a 30 mins break, helps a lot. c) starting checking facebook, hacker news, email etc - stop and take a break. d) feature is not done, and I have not encountered a problem - this is the only time I might not take a break, but every time I didnt, I found myself ended up checking email and facebook a lot :)

30/30 sounds great, for me, 75/30 give me enough time to finish a feature or fix a bug.
4.
(I am not speaking on behalf heroku)

I am not really sure why New Relic is so expensive. Sorry for being coy with my question.
DEBUGGING RUBY - Engine Yard
I agree that the flash market has changed a lot in the past two years, but no mobile gadget maker can compete with Apple as a reliable consumer of flash memory. Even the newcomers who are using the flash to build SSDs probably have to deal with the fact that Apple's deal with Samsung was made first, and sales to Apple went a long way towards funding the fabs that enable Samsung to now sell flash to so many other companies, too.
Thanks, that's a good point!
Just for reference, before the torches and pitchforks come out against Oracle, Apache has butted heads with Sun over essentially the same issue: http://www.apache.org/jcp/sunopenletter.html
State of circuit lower bounds now slightly less humiliating
The concept is excellent, but the ratio doesn't work for me.

I prefer 42/18.

42 because it is the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe, and Everything:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27s...

and 18, because it is the Gematria for the word "life":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chai_%28symbol%29

If I'm going to adopt a system, my inner nerd insists upon increasing efficiency by using components with multiple purposes.
My latest project has been live with paying customers for months. I have never thought about, let alone tested, performance.
I'm surprised too, but to be frank almost looks to me like some strings were cut in the puppet-mastery of MS executive management, and in the relative power vacuum, more engineering-focused personnel are doing what they think is best for the tech.
Ad agencies are a good example. They put together a cheesy game as part of a campaign, and need to hit the ground running. Relative to development, creative, and everything else that goes into a campaign, $1,500/mo is a steal.
You need to add this to the description. When I read this I get the impression that you asking for recon info basically!
Chakra: New Javascript engine for IE9
If you're flexible about the second 30, I find this works really well with working from home, because the second 30 can be typical personal chores. Wake up, work for a bit, then make coffee. Work some more, then eat breakfast. Work some more, then have a shower. Work some more, go for a walk. Etc, etc. Sometimes 5-10 minute breaks, sometimes an hour or more.
I'm really happy that people are following WebMachine's example in providing a framework that guides you in how to do http from a high level, instead of just providing access to the low level guts. Looking forward to seeing how Clothesline evolves.
Ask.com: The End of an Era for Search
That's a pretty fair question. In my opinion, the only reason to go with ASP.NET anything is if you already know C# (or any other .Net language).

Otherwise, Rails, Django, Flask, Cake, etc are going to be significantly easier to get up to speed with, have better communities, have less murky IP situations and are generally going to be less expensive to develop for and to hire developers for.

There are advantages to the CLR world - Tooling is top notch (Mono's tools are lacking right now but seem to be improving quickly), there is a reasonable amount of documentation, even though some of it is of questionable quality. C# performs well, both on Mono and .Net. There are many libraries available (although the quality of the libraries can sometimes be lacking). Many of the higher quality libraries are closed-source commercial libraries. Some of the worst ones are also closed-source commercial packages, so it pays to do research prior to purchasing anything.

The community has been warming to open source - in my opinion this is largely due to the efforts of Miguel de Icaza and everyone working on the Mono Project. (As an aside, if you don't like asp but you do like C#, you should consider checking out and contributing to Manos de Mono, a Mono based web framework which is still in its infancy - https://github.com/jacksonh/manos .)

Microsoft is, and always will be a for-profit company that makes money from selling its software. It has a vested interest in creating platform lock-in, but developers don't have to stick to the Microsoft way of doing things if they choose not to, thanks to the strength of Mono today. Either way, Microsoft is pretty up-front about what the cost of doing business is with them; and they have proven to be pretty consistent with their pricing.

Politics and profits aside, C# is an enjoyable language to use. I haven't spent time with F# yet, but I understand it's quite enjoyable as well. The C# team has done an excellent job of paying attention to programming trends and adopting techniques from other languages. The transition from 1.1 to 2.0 was kind of clunky, but since then they've shown a great deal of good taste in what they've implemented as well as how it's been implemented. Of course, the downside is that C# is a large and complex language. I think the most recent "C# in Nutshell" book is well over a thousand pages.

I have production code deployed in Python, PHP and Clojure, but I'm currently migrating back to .Net for my personal projects. C# developers get an excellent cross-platform deployment story thanks to Mono (MonoTouch, MonoDroid, MonoMac). Honestly, I think Mono runs on pretty much everything from PC, Mac & Linux to WP7, iPhone and Android; as well as game consoles, embedded hardware, etc.

Additionally, many of the new to .Net technologies coming out of Microsoft right now such as F#, C# 5's async framework, MVC3 and Entity Framework 4 are very compelling. Microsoft is kind of a dorky company, but in my opinion they are producing pretty good software right now.
How to make a wedding flash photo gallery with music
This tutorial will show you how to make a wedding flash photo gallery with musi so that you can easily make your personalized wedding flash photo galleries from your beautiful wedding pictures and romantic wedding songs. It is so easy that the process need no flash skills at all. I bet you'll be agree with me if you see the flash photo gallery.
That is a fair point, though I don't think the "task centric" approch can be held accountable for the issues with the design of the windows control panel. This is probably because control panels are not about "tasks" but settings and so it is a terrible paradigm for that.
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/05/an-evolved-view-of-the-parti...
Doing financial or other KPI modeling can be really illuminating. At minimum, it can help you verify your assumptions about market size and opportunity.

For instance, check out this great article from the founders of snaptalent:

http://jamiequint.com/lesson-one-know-your-market

"I think we are going to pass on SnapTalent. I like the guy and the concept, but the model we put together just doesn’t play out the way we would like it to. I’ve attached it here, and you can see that if we assume $5k cost per hire, we get to a very reasonable $2.50 eCPM. But I don’t believe $5K is the right number. I believe it is somewhere between $75 (what Craigslist charges) and, say, $2K. At the high end, that leads to an eCPM of $1 which is not going to get over the bar of most publishers. As the low end, the eCPM and the CPC converge....way bad ;) I’m sure we screwed something up and you are going to make a ton on this deal, and I thank you for giving us time to look at it, but it is not going to work for us right now."
Fighting Bullying With Babies
I spent a good part of my teenage week-ends at a dump in France with my brother and our friends recuperating small engines and moped parts, hacking them back together, creating strange 2 or 3 wheel novel vehicles. Every time we see each other, we have the best time remembering those memories. We all have all in one way or another kept doing the same thing at work with other types of technologies.

All this to say that this manifesto goes for companies too of course!! and that it's not owned by ifixit.com, but should be yours too if you care about waste and overconsumption.
If I had to guess, I'd guess and hope most YC founders desperately want to work at big companies, but only if it's their own company ;)

(It's not that they don't want to work for other big companies, just not quite as desperately.)
I have the Sony Vaio Z (2.4ghz Core 2 Duo) and I can get about 6 hours with moderate usage with Wi-Fi (no flash), and about 8 hours using Ethernet.

Also, I got it on sale for $500 almost two years ago. :-]
They never seem to consider the cost of the rules, only the cost of not having them.

The problem is big companies have cost/overhead regardless. You can engineer for super-efficient (no duplication) and you end up with a ton of red tape.

You can engineer for no rules and you (probably) will end up with duplication, difficulty in keeping to corporate-wide strategic goals, etc.

Bottom line: big companies are inefficient beasts. But successful ones have profits that negate the inefficiencies and allow them to work on the type of projects and solve the type of problems a startup can't.
I've found 50-10 works well for me for housework. In that case, 10 minutes on the internet is fine, because the other 50 are spent offline.
I switched to Colemak, and I am also forced to use qwerty on a lot of keyboards. Colemak is very similar to qwerty, so its not that big a switch. Mostly the r/s location is the biggest issue.

Besides that, 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 when I can't.

The reason I switched (like the OP, if you read it again) was to reduce RSI pain/fatique. It's worked wonders for me in that respect. I'm not that much faster, so speed's not a major incentive to switch, IMO.
Ditto. Though I'd narrow "cross platform" to non-Microsoft. No hate for MS, but I don't see deploying Windows servers and associated licensing costs any more likely for me than buying Oracle licenses.

So yeah, as a small Ruby shop that was looking at JRuby as a stepping stone to a robust VM, this concerns me.