skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you're heavily in debt, you would stay. I know - I'm in a job that's not quite as bad as that, but it's far from rewarding, and extremely political, with other people taking the praise and few willing to do what's needed.

I would quit, but I have to work off my debt first.

The environment is not doing me good - I'm slacking off (like here at HN), working worse and feeling tired and burned out even when doing little actual work.
'Rock'-star? That's not rock.
PayPal's Matching Challenge
That's a dangerous path to go down; if we abandon factual standards or arguing issues on the legal merits, then what's left is basically just marketing. And there will always be someone who can afford better marketing.

It's like torture; one can't torture on behalf of the 'good guys' and say it's for a higher purpose, because acceptance of torture as a legitimate means of inquiry is exactly the sort of thing that divides good government from bad (this, of course, assumes one is opposed to the practice in the first place).
I'd also add that their billing software can't keep things straight. I've had a couple of servers that I spun up for a demo at a meetup, that somehow ended up with the same name, this prevented me from deleting them, and tells me that their control panel has concurrency issues, since you shouldn't be able to create two servers with the same name.

I didn't notice the issue until 2 months later (I thought I had successfully deleted the servers) because all of the sudden I received huge bill that contained over 1100 hours of usage for each instance, for that month alone. WTF? Turns out their software failed to bill me the previous month so I didn't notice any change.

Their response to my ticket about not being able to delete servers was to tell me the steps that I had to take to fix it (renaming the servers). I really wish when you had a ticket for stuff like that they'd actually act on it instead of just telling you how to fix stuff and expecting you to do it yourself.
Not too many other HNers who went to Akron U I see.
Thanks for that example, it's been mentioned several times that the Flash technology isn't the only cause of the CPU being pegged but the code that banner developers are writing as well and now I've got a good sample to share.

98% CPU usage when the tab is active.
I've got an iMac, 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GM RAM

When the tab is active the CPU usage for Firefox is at 98%, when it isn't the active tab it goes down to 12%, that is interesting. I wonder if Flash stops on inactive tabs currently. I know you can program for that functionality but is it in there by default now?
Basically, I don't care. Flash is awful in Linux. I can't even use it in Chrome really, I have it disabled and only use it in Firefox. It's shocking how little I actually miss. I don't see how the blocking game is going to be that much different than what it is now with AdBlock... it blocks all sorts of ads right now, it's hardly limited to flash ads.

Not to mention the author can't read.

"As of today, there are significant performance and battery life gains to be had by disabling Flash Player on Mac OS X"

is the exact opposite of

"Currently it sucks, but I also don’t care about the future"

It says that there are gains by DISABLING flash... and yes, I'll keep my fingers in my ears if it keeps pushing HTML5 and related technologies forward. I hate flash. It is a daily annoyance.
I'm trying to wrap my head around your comment. How would one self-promote without coming off as arrogant or obnoxious? (And I'm not asking this snarkily; I'm genuinely curious.)
It's done by using the :target selector. Targeted images are lightboxed. There is a link in the lightbox that resets the target to dismiss the lightbox. Crudely:

css:
a.lb:target {display:block; text-align:center;}
a.lb {display:none;}

html:
<a href="#img">show image</a>
<a class="lb" href="#" id="img"><img src="image.jpg"></a>
Google is, imho, perfectly within its rights to provide an email service that doesn't allow you to download your contacts easily, or doesn't allow it for certain services, or whatever. What I don't appreciate is the hypocritical Monday-morning-quarterbacking of how a very different service chooses to protect its users data.
Fair point. Once I've imported my gmail contacts into Facebook though, I then should be able to import them out of Facebook by that logic?
I studied in a Kendriya Vidyalaya (Government run centralized schools), and it's been my impression that the CBSE board in geared towards problem solving rather than rote learning.

Recently they introduced a new type of question in their exams, which are called High Order Thinking questions. They tend to test the knowledge and problem solving skills of an individual.

But yes, most of the state boards, do put much more emphasis on rote learning
The Most Sustainable Competitive Advantage
> Say you are talking about the function to build the user interface, can you stop defining that, go back and define the callback, then continue defining the gui builder function?

That's how lisp folks worked. I don't see why that technique wouldn't work in bare python as well.

Static type systems can make that difficult. How many frameworks impose analogous constraints?
Correct. Theoretically the Tarsnap client-server protocol could be used to synthesize a mountable filesystem, but that would add hard latency requirements -- one of the great advantages of Tarsnap's transactional archive-creation is that it can tolerate high latency and even requests failing with little impact.
Why can't you just get them from Gmail?
Far be it from me to defend Java - I don't use it much, and indeed, I'm an ASF member myself - but I'm not sure it's quite that simple. The C programming language for instance, is not exactly a hotbed of "cool new language features", and yet it's still very much used, even for new projects. Redis, for instance, just to grab one that comes to mind.
I guess its the next logical step. If the pop singer doesn't write their own song, doesn't sing their own song live, and doesn't understand the lyrics; you might as well just use a hologram.

I never realized how frightening a life sized version of an anime character is. Still, its an interesting phenomenon.
MaRS releases Open source legal documents for Canadian entrepreneurs
Indeed!

You can work around it with a trampoline (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_call#Through_trampolining), which is what I did with cfa-js. (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6600185/cfa/cfademo.html)
Good point. True.

If you're going to do real CPS programming in JavaScript, you'll want to use a trampoline or a timer mechanism to reset the stack.

But, in most cases, you do a little computation and then block waiting for an event.

When the continuation gets invoked by the event-handling loop, the stack is reset.
You point out yourself that "a big part of her motivation is wanting to help people in need."

That's a common motivation for being a doctor. A common motivation for being a programmer is obsessive enjoyment in programming, or fanatical pride in one's work. It was a slightly more complicated analogy than it may have seemed at first, and I certainly agree that programmers shouldn't be expected to work overtime--but some choose do, for reasons I find difficult to criticize.

As you yourself say, "I work late because I want to". So I think we're agreed on that point.

Unrelatedly, it's a head trip to meet someone familiar with the only thing I used to find when I googled my name. Thanks for that :)
But only because by his point of view, the present is effectively the future he looked forward to. I've always felt it's both an interesting and bold position for a writer of sci-fi to take.
Sencha Touch RC1 Released
The PayPal vs. merchant account calculator was cute and well designed, except that you can't enter your own values for average transaction size and monthly volume.
I just significantly improved caching to further reduce the necessity of hitting Hacker News. This should fix a lot of performance issues as well as blank pages.

As for duplicates, I have tried to make that much less likely by putting the status closer to the update query. There are lot of hits per second, which causes that. (Queries take around 0.005s to perform; if 2 hits within that time period, then it could update the cache twice (or more)).
> So, when I finally did post, it got one upvote, and quickly disappeared. My disappointment was significant.

We've all been there, trust me. This is actually a good way to tell if your app is needed. Float a small working version around HN and other sites, if there is little-to-no feedback then you know the market does not really need this app.

I know it sucks when you've invested countless hours into this thing, but getting no feedback is actually valuable feedback.
The body contains a container div enclosing an empty header and empty footer. That's more bare-bones than some people will want.

There is value in a template that correctly uses nav, section, article and aside. You stand a better chance of making reusable CSS starting from such a template.
Beer Lubricated the Rise of Civilization, Study Suggests
Thanks!
Our strategy is to publish as many articles as possible and then wait and see which ones will be stars. And it works.
But we think advertising could be optimize.
Rob Pike: Notes on Programming in C
I just modified the way the queries run; duplicates should be MUCH less common now.
One of the reasons I like having stand-up meetings every morning with my team is that it gives each developer an opportunity to talk up their recent accomplishments, and to receive praise (however transitory) from the rest of the team for them. Having something awesome to report in standup is a good motivator, and getting instant feedback helps drive home the relevance and value of those contributions.
Why don't people just bid the reserve price on the spot market, and never lose the bid?

Because you will lose the bid if a disaster occurs. A lot of reserved instances have been purchased for disaster-recovery purposes but aren't actively being used; those are instead being sold as spot instances. If a disaster occurs, the supply of spot instances will drop dramatically.
Anyone from Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar? I would love to organize a meetup here.
17% may leave their job, but I'm sure many more simply stay put without truly being engaged, all the while collecting a paycheck.

Recognition arbitrage, employees claiming credit for the work of others, by corporate-climber types is probably to blame in many cases. From my experience, credit usually goes to whoever delivers the results or the news first. Smart corporate climbers will go to great lengths to be the first to take credit for new ideas or inventions within a company, and they will work hard to maintain a high profile.

I've tried to do a modest amount of self-promotion to stay visible within my companies after a few very bad experiences early in my career. Just as importantly, I try to go out of my way to call out another person's accomplishments whenever I get an opportunity.

A company that fails to recognize valuable people isn't likely to succeed. When self-aggrandizing people are promoted faster than the get-it-done types, I take it as a red flag that management has no clue how things are actually done within the company. Companies who instead go out of their way to recognize valuable team members and promote those who work hard will end up with competent and motivated management. Now if only I had identified this pattern earlier in my career I could have avoided some train-wreck companies.
Yea, if by "facts" you mean cherry-picked situations without showing the other side's benefits.

Try these facts out as well:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/iap-walmart.html

Quote: "For families with incomes less than $10,000 annually, a super center makes a 30 percent difference in what they can buy. "The marginal utility on the poor is greater," he noted."
> Of course, pictures like this are more profound for what you don’t see: country borders.

Except, some country borders are phenomenally obvious from space - those that separate totalitarian / communist countries from free market / democratic countries.

Look at the border between Israel and Syria.

Look at the border between North Korea and South Korea.

Look at older pictures of the border between East Germany and West Germany.

Capitalism lets people grow, innovate, and develop. Authoritarian governments stifle that.

Thus, in pictures from space, capitalist countries are well lit (if at night), or covered in crops (during the day), and countries with large governments are dark (at night) and barren (during the day).
I think the term 'generalist' here is a bit unknown.

If you're a developer working on web-based software, you are known as the web-developer guy (specialist).

If you're a developer working on transactional, security, concurrency, you are known as the back-end guy (specialist).

If you're a developer working on business-app, you are known as the enterprise developer (specialist).

If you're working on product-based company developing virtualization, you're specializing.

Developer who work at Google, while they might not used the varieties of framework out there, are specializing in Algorithms, Data Structure, Concurrency, and Large Scale development.

If you're looking for work as an internal business-app developer writing JEE components, your recruiter might not want to accept Algorithm geniuses who used to work at Google.

A Rails guy will look down on someone who has 7 years of Java experience whom tries to escape Java at the same time but wouldn't say something bad about his work experiences (not burning bridges).

These days people shaped their mind and view pretty quick.
It's handrolled. Matt's themes are designed by Nicolò Volpato: http://ma.tt/2010/06/new-summer-design/

After each redesign, he releases his previous theme in the wordpress.org themes directory: http://ma.tt/themes/
Your data persistence and retrieval strategy is much much more important for scalability than language choice. Rails application servers are trivially horizontally scalable. Obviously raw performance matters if you're doing a lot of heavy data crunching, and even then it's easy to spot-optimize things unless all your code is truly performance critical.
Even on a 1024x600 netbook?
Combine this with a nice functional language like F# and you're ready to do some serious processing.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/satnam_singh/archive/2010/10/14/f-bl...
People buy things for all kinds of reasons that aren't discussed in the article.

Convenience!

For me this is a prime motivator. I have sufficient demands on my time that added expense of owning a car is worth the 20 minutes it would take to access the closest virtu-car, and the 90 minutes I save every day driving in stead of busing.

I have enough space in my house for cold storage and a freezer. This means I can buy food in bulk and don't have to go to store as often.

Security!

Landlords kick tenants out out now and then. Rents can go up all of a sudden. My family rented for a long time when I was a kid, and we got booted out of several houses when the landlord decided not to renew to lease for one reason or another; wanted to give the house to a relative, wanted a pile more rent, et. cet.

Agency!

For some people home improvement and 'puttering around the house' is a big source of pleasure and recreation. Many people express themselves with the work of their hands, and owning tools and infrastructure to build things and so forth is important too them.

Finally, NRP's planet money has a great blog about the issue of buying vs. renting housing:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/11/05/131105373/the-frid...

tl;dr: this is about way more than money. It's about personal value choices
The difference is that Flash is produced solely by Adobe. Their rendering technology is closed source and produced by a single team of developers. No one can contribute to their performance except them. There are many browser developers working on their technologies, and Webkit is one of the largest currently. It's an open source project that any good developer can contribute to. Mozilla is the same. This means that if one browser is doing really power intensive animations, you can either switch to another or contribute to the performance of your browser by writing better animation code and submitting a patch.

We're a long way off from web ads being as animation intensive as the latest 3D games. Browser rendering technology can reach the point where the animations that we're used to seeing these days can be optimized quite well, especially if the graphics card is involved. Real strides in the power of HTML5 animation has only reached an awesome level in the past year or so. Next year things will be even better, and it will take advertisers a lot longer to move on from Flash.

As for ad blockers, they have been blocking non-flash content for years now. Google ads are HTML and javascript based, and they are blocked just fine. Same with popups: all javascript. Most advertisers are not going to spend a hell of a lot of time trying to get around ad blockers, since they work with mass distribution and an awful lot of punters don't care about downloading and using an ad blocker. The only sites that try really hard to make you see or click on an ad are usually scams anyway.
That's a great talk, thanks for sharing. It seems like clean separation between a JavaScript client app and a server-side data/controller layer is the way forward.

But I'll still content that web development as a whole is broken, because web dev is a teetering mile-high tower of abstractions and when something leaks, it tends to trickle all the way down and stink up the whole stack.
And how much does the non-upgrade copy of Windows cost? I suppose kids could download an unregistered copy and use that for 90 days or whatever the period is, but that may not be enough to last the school year. No doubt schools won't encourage kids to use unlicensed software that they "borrowed" from somewhere.
Should researchers share their "code-in-progress" online?
if you're about to a make a third business mistake, then why not stop it before you do?
I had the exact same thought.

"Because this device can scan a human in a few seconds, the X-ray beam is very intense. Any glitch in power at any point in the hardware (or more importantly in software) that stops the device could cause an intense radiation dose to a single spot on the skin."
"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson#Visionary_influe...
I hear a common theme that I've seen among tech folks (and probably a theme that I subscribed to early in my career).

If Jim "made it happen", he has actually earned some of that praise. As a good manager, his very next step should be to transmit and amplify that praise so that Bob also can bask in it, but also to educate/remind Susan that Jim has an entire team that is delivering behind the scenes. It's quite effective to accomplish both of those in one communication (when praise is in email form), by forwarding on to Bob, cc'ing Susan, adding his own praise and reminding Susan (in the clear) that Bob is the one who actually did the programming.

I don't believe that there's some natural conservation of credit/recognition. By sharing as above, Jim doesn't reduce his standing in Susan's eyes, because from her point of view, it's still Jim that "made it happen" and he's being gracious in recognizing his team. Bob now sees the praise that he's earned, may realize that Jim probably added some value along the way, and even if Bob is hardcore "only coding matters", at least Jim has set the record straight.

When done even halfway well, I don't think that pattern results in employees leaving over recognition.
I guess The Archies were ahead of their time.
I pulled that number from my cubemate, who's picking up a used Camry (relatively recent, '07-'08)... because apparently you can't get married unless you own a car.

$1K is payment + maint + insurance + gas. Hell, I've gone over my parents' finances and that's roughly in line with how much they shell out for their cars (note: Mazdas and Toyotas, nothing fancy). Around where I grew up, unless you're driving a junker, $1K a month is pretty easy to hit (last I checked, my parents with their perfect driving record are doing ~$250 on insurance alone).
Sell it to me. What do you have to offer that say, Counsyl doesn't?

Direct to consumer sales are dead/dying at the hands of the FDA.
Gene patents look like they're getting legally thornier. So, what's your angle?

How do you avoid a war to the realm of being a commodity?
http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html #22
then
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=429477 (Ask HN: What can't you do in Excel?)
then
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=897701 (Ask HN: who will buy PG's startup idea #22?)

I would love to work in this. In Lisp.
The HTML5 boilerplate doesn't get in my way - it includes some commonly needed stuff like jQuery, a CSS reset, etc. I can use it as the base for anything, not just a blog with a tree menu and a particular layout. (I'd also disagree with your use of the aside tag for archive navigation)
I'm in the US and abroad means anything outside USA, including Canada and Mexico.
Tell HN: links in submissions
Inevitably people post on HN with some non-clickable link which then someone goes and makes a clickable link in the comments. Why don't you all install the greasemonkey script "Text to Link" which can be found http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/7122
They might be dumb enough, but I'd wager all the money in my wallet that they don't they have any boomers.
Thanks! Contacting the embassies is a great point. Once I decided on my first destination, I'll start figuring out how to get a work visa there.

Were you already in the country when you applied for the work visa?
Apps for Development: World Bank App Competition
I flew a few days ago and opted out of the body scanner. The pat down was definitely very thorough and a little uncomfortable, but I could tell the TSA officer administering it was just as uncomfortable as I was. It held up the line for about 5 minutes because they didn't let anyone through while I was being searched. I never felt intimidated and will continue to opt out, so if that was their intention, they failed.
This. I have left jobs because "recognition" meant decent raises and praise, and then being assigned to rewrite shitty applications without the opportunity to redesign them.

Now, to be fair, I probably had enough clout (and they probably had enough sense) to make noise and get myself reassigned, but at that point I started looking elsewhere, and found something new to try. But I didn't start looking until I perceived my needs being neglected.
TDD is Kanban for Code
Yeah, that comment didn't make a lot of sense to me. If we have to launch a missile to prove to the PLA that our deterrent is still in place, um, we have bigger problems than I thought. EDIT: To say nothing of the Taiwanese.
* VB.Net
+ Pros: Concise, MVC, easy to teach, useful macro maker.
- Cons: Costly microsoft royalties, single platform, imperative, single-framework, all-around slow.

* Python
+ Pros:
Concise, extensible, object oriented, package/class/method hierarchy, multi-platform, lots of frame-works, lots of scientific contexts, HUGE community (at this point really), scripted (quick to see changes)
- Cons:
Odd syntax (no more odd than VB really), scripted (teaching compilation step may be a requirement), requires C for high-performance fragments, v2 vs v3 package hangover.

I struggled to find real faults with Python, but I also struggled to find real positives with VB.Net.

From a pure $$$ play, you might be able to convince the administration to dump VB and go Python. Admitted, MS educational discounts are incredible.
All Google is saying is if you don't allow us to do it, we won't allow you. So if FB wants to "protect its users data" then they should too. End of story. They didn't really do anything more other than news sites picking up the story and running headlines with it.