skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exactly. If I'm looking for stuff to do for the sheer hell of it, I've got loads of ideas of my own. I don't need to jump into an "oohhh please pick me, pick me!" arena to find interesting things to do.
Actually, 6 years and about 3 months.
It's indeed been a roller-coaster.

2/10 morning - He's going to step down.

2/10 evening - He's not stepping down.

2/11 morning - He's really stepping down.

Hopefully the rest of the ride will be less bumpy and more pleasant.
TGrep with HTML/JS UI.
It seems like the Arabic Al-Jazeera is more like the Fox News of the Arab world, while English Al-Jazeera is trying really hard to be more like BBC World.
Microsoft has not "bought" Nokia, it's just merely a cooperation between the two companies...don't see the hazzle about all this really
From HN guidlines

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

Your account is 178days old.
Health.

If I program 9-5, go home, eat, program more, program some more, and then go to sleep, I get fat. Fast. My social anxiety mounts. Fast.

I need at least 1-1.5 hours a day of gym time, .5-1 hours cooking time, some social time squeezed in there somewhere. I do have side projects - but I don't have kids, and I don't have another hobby - what if I enjoyed woodworking, painting, writing, or music? Devote a decent amount of time to that, to your health, and to a 9-5 job, and squeezing a meaningful programming project in there starts to get difficult.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that when you wire up a car battery to someone's genitals, that IS evil. That's not an unfortunate necessity. And its not a screwup.

We learned about this after ousting Saddam Hussein, and were forced into all sorts of brutalities that indeed would not work well in the US or Britain.

What did History ever do to you that compelled you to slander and malign it so?
Splits nokia in two? What a load of crap! Nokia is currently split into four, or five, or ten, or worse. When you consider the platforms, the hardware streams, ovi, qt -- it's a total mess of competing agendas.

I've been in the belly of the beast, and aside from having a very nice sauna, it's really ugly in there. There's total paralysis, as evidenced by the lack of competitive produts. OPK was fond of saying how nokia needed to reinvent itself, but he lacked the willpower to make any meaningful changes.

When I was there we used to say "it's hard to fire a Finn." Now some heads are finally rolling. Shaking it up like this is their only chance.
NYT: Hospitals Shift Smoking Bans to Smoker Ban
Wow. It still blows my mind to walk into grocery stores and see Facebook gift cards on sale. A few startups that I have been involved with always talked about how great that would be but could never execute on it.
Technology and the Internet play a vital role in pretty much everything these days. What will HN cover next - a Tea Party rally, if it was announced on Twitter?
Not everyone in their 40s have children. And some of those who do have seen them off to college.
The article says he doesn't understand how someone can code at their job, then not code when they go home.

Here's how: even if you are very excited about programming, you can realize that there are other things in the world besides being a workaholic perfectionist who stares at a computer screen 16 hours a day. Things like spending time with your significant other, enjoying nature, exercising, concerts, volunteering, etc. I love coding and trying to improve, but have you ever just got tired of looking at a computer screen?
Gimp + Inkscape, just the basics.
Another example of nonviolent action leading to real political change.

Now if the U.S. government gets on the ball, they will redirect some substantial portion of the Egyptian ~$2 billion military aid and announce we will help build science and technical schools, universities, and hospitals.

Thanks to those of you who have been hosting and continue to host Tor bridges in support of emerging democracies:

https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en
Isn't this kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy type situation.

Older workers aren't relevant because the younger generation won't listen to them.

The younger generation won't listen to older workers because older workers aren't relevant.

I work with two older guys and its great. They've got all of the domain knowledge and I can just bounce ideas off of them. They can tell me 'we don't really need that', 'that won't work because xyz' or 'we already tried that and it didn't work because xyz'. It has saved me a ton of pain multiple times.

The big deal is the domain knowledge however.
Most companies just aren't willing to pay enough to keep domain expert software engineers around.
Wait a minute. Does this mean stores are not supposed to ask to see ID like a license to be sure it's your credit card?
In some ways you are right but as a Nokia employee you should know Nokia's put a decent amount of effort into embracing an "open" philosophy. In fact, the make up and goals of MeeGo are not all that different from Android (Open source OS run by a consortium of companies working to be the defacto standard on all kinds of devices). This marketing push towards openness goes all the way back to the decision to open source Symbian.

So for them to now do a 180 and embrace a proprietary operating system from Microsoft flies in the face of everything they'd been selling to their developers
Back in November 2009 I was on vacation in San Francisco and decided to drop by the Google campus in Mountain View to visit some friends.

Of all the things they showed me there, Mondrian (of which Rietveld is a fork of) impressed me the most. More so than dinosaur skeletons, space ships, 3D Google Earth terminals, or free amazing meals.

I was working in a startup at the time and we did not do code review at all. After seeing the Google workflow and having their build processes explained to me in detail, I was trying to set up code review before commits at the startup too. I hoped to improve code quality with this. Unfortunately the tools we tried were terrible and so it never took off.

To this day, not getting the necessary processes in place remains one of the biggest regrets of working there. Now I work at another place where we don't do that either. Too bad.
Let's say you are reading a historical account of a woman knifing her baby to save something else of value. As you are reading, you come to realize that the mother was panicked and not thinking clearly, because you realize there was another way.

I've read the same script before. The way this move was presented to the employees had bad results. I doubt the bad parts were really necessary.

It's a complicated situation. I doubt there was a binary choice whether or not to knife the baby.
Http://webc.arnibel.be/auth/htmledit/htmledit.fr.php?pwd=%2F&file=index.html
nokia is a private company and is answerable to only its shareholders...there might be a backlash in Finland but any company that has to take or does take business decisions based on political/nationalistic considerations will find it hard to be competitive in the global economy
Look no further than the "2 dozen mini cupcakes for $25, normally $50, half off!!!"

It's happening all the time, perhaps from Groupon's suggestion, perhaps from the merchants' own machinations.
Am I missing something? Where is the price of $3.99 derived from? Cost of creating the spider script? Labor cost of creating the BT seed? This article say nothing about this.
The only time I've seen this many people gathered in one place in the US... is back when Chicago used to do a single, large fireworks display.

I don't know whether that's a good or bad thing.
It's time to Retire the Spreadsheet
Twitter's Ben Cherry's response to Hashbangs (or hash-bashing)
I have to give it to these guys (I work on a competitor product). Even though this is a simple idea and possibly something of trivial implementation, it's clear, honest, and just plain nice. My hat is off to them for keeping their customers happy - very well done.
So, you've ruled out humanity as potential clients.
Fair enough: I was thinking more about C than C++ there. I guess that for at least some libraries an FFI + a C to C++ glue layer might work.

Now that I think of it, I'm happy with a C + high-level language future, and C++ programmers should pick up one or both of them.
yep, it is almost and exact match. Don't forget who bought the patents after SGI went http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/01/16/sgi_transfers_3d_gra...
This is my favorite description of enlightenment ever, taken from http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/002883.html

Here's a section from The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, describing what Mubarak's security services did after Ayman al-Zawahiri attempted to assassinate Mubarak in 1995:

To deal with Zawahiri, Egyptian intelligence agents devised a fiendish plan. They lured a thirteen year-old boy named Ahmed into an apartment with the promise of juice and videos. Ahmed was the son of Mohammed Sharraf, a well-known Egyptian fundamentalist and a senior member of [Zawahiri's organization] al-Jihad. The boy was drugged and sodomized; when he awakened, he was confronted with photographs of the homosexual activity and threatened with the prospect of having them shown to his father. For the child, the consequences of such a disclosure were overwhelming. "It could even be that the father would kill him," a source close to Zawahiri admitted.

After this the Egyptian agents got the first boy to lure in a second, whom they also drugged and raped. Then they got the two to spy on Zawahiri in an attempt to kill him. Then Zawahiri caught the two boys spying. And then he had them both shot.

I guess enlightenment means raping children now. Are you enlightened too?
Better Mocking in Your Ruby Tests
It does work. More than you think.

The companies that are successful in outsourcing are not looking to get high quality software done cheap. They're looking for someone to take the burden of the whole process of developing software from the ground up from their basic (but vast and hairy) requirements.

This means, having a system in place to make sure every requirement that was specified was tracked and accounted for from some functional specification document right through the final UI pages and test cases.
It means having a system in place so that when QA discovers that requirement 4.3.1 doesn't have any test cases specified, they know exactly who was in charge of that and how it slipped through.

Boring and insipid? Yes. That's exactly why they're successful.

The successful outsourcing companies excel at this type of thing. That's why it's important that they get ISO certified and CMM Level-whatever.
Those achievements are not there to fool customers into thinking it will result in better software. It's there to tell the customer that we have a process and mechanism in place for dealing with your complex requirements.

All the offshoring failures come from doing a quick calculation of your developer's time vs the time of a developer in India and then thinking you're saving money by offloading the work.
Dude, i feel you. I'm from Malaysia myself. How is the startup scene in Indonesia. For 250 million population, you could do your own startup there. Hit me up on fretwiz at gmail dot com. Maybe we could do talk or come up with something.
Bringing JUSTICE to the PATRIOT Act
I use Fireworks. I find it so much easier for doing web design/photo editing/anything than Photoshop.
If these people spend all this energy and all this time, all over the right to initiate a war they'll lose with huge casualties with Israel, and close the hugely profitable Suez channel to US ships, then I have neither sympathy or enthusiasm for them. They'll just be Iran #2. If they don't make trouble in those two areas, the US won't care a bit.
No option for "I know the basics, and don't immediately see the need to learn more?"
It's not a scientific claim; it's impossible to provide a scientific evidence about any sociological claim.

However, I believe my claim is not without evidence; there's plenty of evidence for it. You just have to be a part of the culture.

You do have to interpret it charitably, though. If you interpret it as "Every single Arab person has this ideology", then of course it's a false claim.

It's not too different from the claim that "Egyptians are fed up with Mubarak". I can assure you there are Egyptians who were against this revolution. For that matter, normal, educated Egyptians; not police thugs or businessmen. Maybe 10 million people marched to the street, but Egypt has way more population than just 10 million.

Going by your logic, one would dismiss the claim that "Egyptians are fed up with Mubarak" as non-scientific.

(Edit: I said you're not making sense because it doesn't make sense to use the word "scientific" when talking about this issue).

If you reject my claim about the existence of an "Arab brotherhood" spirit, then you're making a much more substantial claim than I am: you're claiming Arabs don't care about each other.

Your claim is the one that lacks evidence.
Oh, indeed. My point was that the rest of the kernel (VFS, device drivers, etc.) was already fairly well prepared for MP when ARM multicore came into the picture.
> I think it borders on exploitation there are a lot of young individuals with wonder-lust that see a name like Reddit and will put in significant hours just for the possibility of maybe getting hired.

First, it's not exploitation. It can't be. It could only be exploitation if reddit were somehow planning to benefit from their implementations--e.g., if it would actually deploy one in production.

Second, I think you're making a false assumption that "young individual with wonder-lust" putting in "significant hours" on a task like this is time wasted. I've spent far more time writing IRC bots just for the fun of it, but was that time wasted? Of course not. I learned new skills, gained new knowledge, and was able to approach the real world of software development with the confidence of having actually implemented my own project end-to-end.

Though I think the two projects differ substantially in their difficulty, either project would benefit implementor in itself even apart from any prospects of getting hired.
I find 'You suck at Photoshop' amusing and educational.

http://www.mydamnchannel.com/You_Suck_at_Photoshop/Season_1/...
Actually, no. From the post:

"Frontend challenge
We want you to build a reddit clone entirely in HTML, Javascript, and CSS. It will maintain its state entirely client-side (HTML5 localstorage, cookies, whatever), and it's fine for it to be single-user. In fact, we want to leave as much of this challenge open to interpretation as possible."
I have thought about making video tutorials on how to use Photoshop to create practical design elements. Ie, how to make a button or how to design a header. Something every programmer making their own webapp could use that doesn't really require much Photoshop knowledge.

Would there be any interest?
I believe most people use laptops that they hook up to larger screens when at their desks.
The Photoshop basics get me around for casual UI mocking -- layers, blending options, gradients, free transforms -- but I haven't mastered the shapes or pen tool in PS.

Illustrator is where I head for scalable vector stuff (duh). Despite having seen some crazy, crazy awesome wizardry with the Photoshop pen tool, in AI the pen tool is much more manageable and powerful IMHO, especially in conjunction with the all-powerful Pathfinder.
They are (claiming so).

In the press conferences, they stressed that they're going to contribute to WP7 ecosystem (by bringing OVI maps, and their expertise with developing for range hw range, or something along those lines).
Everything You Wanted to Know About Dinosaur Sex (but were afraid to ask)
And they forgot Sendo

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/06/microsofts_masterpla...

And some would say Danger as well (e.g., Danger employees). But at least Danger was bought and paid for, and not just screwed.
I think you might have missed the purpose of the link - it wasn't about the TechCrunch story, it was about the commenter who claimed that a GroupOn sales rep had advised him to rise his regular prices before submitting a GroupOn deal that would offer money off, to maintain his profit margins.
It was my understanding that with phones, the bulk of the time is spent in testing the radio hardware to bring it up to compliance. That's why there is such a large delay between reference implementations and actual hardware. Software-wise, you're right, porting Android is only slightly less trivial than porting WP7
Articles like this make me cry. Use a real database for god's sake (hint: it's free and the logo is an elephant).

Spoon-feeding trivial queries to MySQL is just wrong on so many levels.
Yes, this is a desperation play. Ideally, they'd have made this decision 2 years ago, and already be shipping their first few WP7 phones.
Nokia Microsoft is like Yahoo Bing – Nokia’s days as innovator are over
I can't comment about middle America banking, but this was definitely NOT the case in Silicon Valley. People who became programmers were extremely bright and a very diverse lot. A significant number were accomplished musicians. A lot from mathematics and engineering. I even worked with a guy who dropped out of physics because programming was personally more rewarding than being yet another post-doc at Fermi Lab. My associates didnt learn CS, they invented it. (OK a bit of hyperbole there, but that was what the times were like.)
Azure is Microsofts cloud-computing platform, think you must mean something else?
A failing harddrive is a hardware problem.
>> other than not being philosophically opposed to meaningless tests?

> Just because you assume something is meaningless doesn't mean it is.

For the record, I meant philosophically opposed to tests the tested believes to be meaningless - which is the only useful definition.

Your explanations push the hypothetical case far, far away from the test presented initially. It sounds less like the equivalent of cleaning bathrooms and more like actual work. I will end the discussion now.
If you are concerned about injustice in the world, you can't make a more just world by committing your own injustices. No two people agree on how bad an injustice is

Your second statement is at war with your first. Clearly, people can compare injustices, or else there would be no such thing as "more just". They don't have to be able to assign scores to injustices, they just have to reason that an injustice they can't choose can be replaced by one they can choose. That's pretty much how justice works.

Your example was also shit. While it is common to escalate injustice as a game strategy, that's neither a hard rule nor how it's usually done. In my experience, pardons are far more common, and are in fact closer to theoretical optima. Eventually, someone breaks the cycle (pretty unjust, right?), and the injustices in the world dramatically reduce. And then there's all the undervaluations of injustice you ignored - the traditional justification for secrecy.
If use the J2SE code (which is GPL with classpath exception) you can't run the TCK. Without passing the TCK you can't call it Java, and you don't get the patent license. See here: http://skife.org/java/jcp/2010/12/07/the-tck-trap.html

If you use the J2ME code, presumably you can get the TCK for mobile use (and associated patent protection), but the license doesn't include the classpath exception.
Sleazy sales people are not uncommon when you have a sales process with incentives that encourage that kind of behavior. All the horror stories of car dealers, Yelp, and commission based retail can be attributed to "one sleazy salesperson", but that person doesn't operate in a vacuum.
Only most of them.
Even retail stores are somewhat limited in their ability to do this (not that some don't do it anyway).

As stated, it would seem to run counter to FTC section 233:

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/guides/decptprc.htm
WP7 has over 8000 apps already.
For web design, I find myself using Illustrator for rough mockups since it's much better at Photoshop at text editing and rapidly mocking stuff up (and making quick copies of everything for side by side comparison).
Voted "I know the basics but want to learn more", but a more accurate answer would be "I know the basics and that's all I need to know, and all I want to know".
India's steam-powered toy boats
I think perhaps the best way to answer how to stay mentally active with the question, posed to me, that got it through my own head.

Start by asking yourself this question:

Why do you think that time seems to speed up as we get older?

Now stop, and really think about that question. Don't skip ahead. Think of some possible reasons. It's a phenomenon that we all experience. What's the cause?

When we are preschool age, time seems to last forever. As we get older, the years start rolling by more quickly and I've been told by more than one person in their 70's that it never slows down, it only speeds up.

Why?

The answer is actually that we've 'been there, done that'.

When we are young, EVERYTHING is new. When we are experiencing something new, time seems to slow down, especially because we are enjoying it and taking in so much.

As we get older, our brains start to filter out what we have seen before. You know that feeling when you drive home and don't remember driving home or anything along the way? Boom. There you go. Your brain just ignored the trip.

Have you ever gone on a three day trip to some new place and felt like your were gone for two months? It's only three days, right?

Well, what you effectively do when you experience new things, you slow things down again. Your mind stays active, and here's the kicker...your brain actually figures out better, more efficient ways to move information around the synapses in your grey matter. No, that's not 'mumbo jumbo'. The reverse is also true, which is why once someone experiences depression, they are always susceptible to it. The brain learns the path to certain behavior.

This is why confidence mantras work. Want to make your mind more powerful every year from here on?

Try new things.
It's not a scientific claim

On that we agree. But its also not an empirical claim: it is something that exists outside the realm of evidence.

it's impossible to provide a scientific evidence about any sociological claim.

Do the sociologists know that?

If you reject my claim about the existence of an "Arab brotherhood" spirit, then you're making a much more substantial claim than I am: you're claiming Arabs don't care about each other.

No, you are very confused. You are the one making a claim. You are the one failing to provide any evidence for it. I'm not claiming that no such spirit exists: I'm pointing out that your claim is garbage because there is literally no evidence behind it. I don't have to prove anything because I'm not making a claim. All I have to do is show that your claim has zero evidence behind it.
The end of the last ten years of Nokia's downhill: a quiet disappearance into a puff of irrelevance.
FYI, this is a link to a comment, not to the story.

It can sometimes take 20+ seconds to load the comments, so here it is for anyone who is having trouble:

"when groupon called me and wanted to run a http://socialprintshop.com deal, their sales rep basically told me to double the price of my product for a month to make things work for me giving a 50% off deal. Living Social did the exact same thing, as did another deal site that reached out to me. Living social only required me to lower the price for 1 week after the deal ended."

-- benjaminlotan