skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've solved my burnout problems slightly differently. I too made the conscious choice to stop pressuring myself into performing above and beyond what I was able to deliver and decided that my programming work was hence forth strictly going to be done as a hobby. I stopped working in IT completely because it simply was too stressful and no fun at all anymore.

I decided that it was time for a very radical change. So I deliberately went and looked for a profession I would otherwise never even have considered. A friend of mine invited me to a book binding workshop. The old fashioned kind that is. Before that I have never ever done anything with my hands. I was utterly convinced I didn't have this sort of thing in me at all, but I gave it a try anyway because this was exactly the kind of radical change I was looking for. I fell in love with it immediately and have never looked back again. It turned out to be such a wonderful and fulfilling job. No more stress, no more over-ambition. Instead I get to learn a fascinating profession and I go home every day feeling utterly and completely satisfied.

I do still write code, but strictly in my spare time and strictly those projects I know I will enjoy doing. This ensures that it will always remain as much fun as it was when I first started out.
Arch’s Dirty Little Not-So-Secret
Why isn't weighting for volume appropriate? Sure, fewer than 54% of sites may support HTML5 video. But who cares if those sites aren't where most of the videos are?

You're trying to claim that your handpicked list of sites which deliberately avoids sites that have publicly stated support for the iPad is a better methodology? Who's looking to score one for the home team now?

I'd take this seriously if you found any 3rd party support for your 90% claim.

And yes, I do actually use an iPad for almost all my web video watching. I don't use anything else at home. It works fine for almost all of the video I come across while browsing - in fact it seems more like 80% the other way.
Feynman's description of his curiousity and eagerness to experiment most of all reminds me of Steve Wozniak describing his early years!
If a company pays for a promoted hashtag, do people just start using it, or does Twitter need to.seed the hashtag with lots of related tweets first?
On popular exceptions that break RDBMS
Aside from teaching big O notation, I would be skeptical of grading for performance. Teaching people that the performance code they write to solve a toy problem matters might lead them to go into industry and then perform microoptimizations on code to solve performance problems when they are virtually universally caused by the interaction of many moving parts.

If you're doing web apps, application code is close to the last place I'd reasonably expect there to be severe performance issues. You're far, far more likely to either blow something architecturally ("We call a foreign API in the request/response cycle.") or flub settings where simple best practices produce repeatable results ("It is 2011 -- do you know where your gzip is?")
Actually, "fast on small n" does matter. Many real-world qsort() implementations have an insertion sort in the inner loop (e.g. for sorting chunks of 8 elements) - and while the number of elements is small, this routine is called often enough that it matters.

That said, some abstraction is useful too.
Updates also work very well over the WiFi network - no need to use your low-bandwidth data plan.

If you don't have a computer, you're unlikely to have a wifi router.
An item that is not in the list of 7 and of vital importance to open source projects is the "ease of forking".

I've spoken to a couple different Open Source app maintainers who have basically said: GitHub made our community of contributors better by making it so easy to fork smaller portions of the codebase.

Where before they would basically just take abuse about issue/features (Why don't you support Markdown instead of direct HTML entry in your CMS, or whatever). Now they can just say "fork off" and have whoever complains maintain a separate codebase with their custom additions.
> So they purposefully broke the spec (looks like compatibility WAS compromised, wasn't it) by having a USB connector but not allowing all USB ports to charge it.

I'm fairly sure there is no requirement that your device is able to charge from every USB port. It is still 'in spec' because the cable is used to sync data. It only breaks spec when it knows that the hardware can take it (via apple drivers).
> still doesn't understand how to fullscreen programs

You're working off of two definitions of maximize though. It's not that OSX "doesn't understand" how to make an app run at fullscreen. It's just a design decision to only maximize to the document's dimensions. I'm not saying that I agree with that decision, but saying that OS X "doesn't understand how to fullscreen programs," is implying that Apple is attempting to make the function work like it does on Windows, but fails at it.
> Why do you dismiss this as dogma and not practical for real world use?

I didn't, but the article does explicitly dismiss Agile "silliness", where one of the basic priorities is achieving working software.

> Our industry is plagued by bug ridden, crappy software.

Yes, it is. However, while I am as keen as the next guy to improve the quality of software, I also take the pragmatic view that you have to ship something before the quality is even relevant.

In particular, my personal experience has been that on real projects, there is a heavy price to pay for using anti-idiomatic techniques when it comes to maintenance time. Likewise, I have found that there is a heavy price to pay for using complicated APIs where simpler ones can do the job.

That means any benefits from techniques such as those advocated in the article must outweigh those costs before use of the techniques is justified. If a technique helps to prevent programmer errors that were otherwise likely, then that is a benefit to project quality that has some value. However, techniques that are theoretically neat but only remove classes of programmer error that were unlikely anyway are not inherently valuable, and once you're talking about real world projects with more open problem spaces, trying to check everything conceivable at compile time sounds a lot like one of those theoretically neat examples to me.

(As an aside, I aim similar criticism at various other trendy techniques in our field. I'm just as happy taking potshots at certain popular Agile techniques, such as prioritising unit testing everything even if it means compromising a sound modular design so the tests can have access to the internals of each module. Unit tests can be useful, but that corruption in the design comes with a price tag that has to be justified.)

> Please be a part of the solution, and not the problem.

It is interesting that when faced with a critic who does not accept theoretically sound/academically neat techniques as inherently superior to existing real world techniques, some people will assume that the critic is ignorant and/or lazy. Why is that?
Cloud Business News Roundup: February 28 - March 6, 2011
The political writing is going into a book, so I don't post it to the blog. That just leaves occasional side projects like the DNS stuff.
Wow! Nice to meet you. I wish my work was as interesting as yours.
git revert did not do the same thing as svn revert, that was the first major issue I had and I put git on the shelf because of it. Only in the past year or so have I started using a DCVS. For the most part I was definitely a subversion fan boy ;-)
Interesting tool. I recently got my Rails 2.3 app running in 1.9.2. This utility wouldn't quite cut it though because most of my effort was devoted to getting remarkable_rails working just so I could get my specs to run.

After all that effort, I found out I'm better off sticking with REE. While my specs all did pass, they took 3 - 4 times longer to run in 1.9.2. I ran experiments on that for about a day, not believing the results because I've been told repeatedly that 1.9.2 is unequivocally faster. Alas, that is not the case. So, that's my "excuse" for not running 1.9.2.
Online: Rangers vs St Mirren Live Stream HD
Yea, I do think that being written in Python was a big thing. It would be for me, if I were in their place. :)
True, but isn't Git the initial game changer?
Lunch with Zed Shaw? Hell yes! Emailed.
My question is, when will they force other clients to begin to use the Quickbar/#Dickbar? Or do you think this is just testing the waters?

P.S. I wouldn't mind them having it there if it wasn't so much darker and more distracting than the rest of the interface. I know it's supposed to catch your attention, but still.
No, they should not. Unless performance was one of the assignment requirements.

Performance is rarely on the most important requirement in software development.

If you don't believe me, watch Prof. Leiserson make this point.

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...
hey do not want to cede any niche of the market that they have managed to gain.

Gruber and others have claimed that Apple is unusual in being willing to develop new products at the expense of old products. I think this might be true.

That's that only logical explanation for maintaining this extra complexity by a company that is otherwise brilliant at simplifying the user experience.

In fact, Apple have a track record of poor UX with complex network services. I'll guess that they have always intended for the Ipad to be a stand-alone device, but haven't ironed out the problems with their cloud storage.
I think the "red flag" is that I'm over 40. I get screened by HR because I don't have a comp sci degree, and then I end up interviewing with 20 something rails hipsters that just feel uncomforable around an old dot-commer.

The perl community is much much better, which I'm going back to. The rails community has little tolerance for differences. Don't believe me? look at the "about us" in any rails shop, if they have pictures, what do you see? http://thoughtbot.com/about/
Normally, my (favorite) CS professor would weigh code clarity more strongly than performance. However, he would sometimes put up assignments that focused almost entirely on the performance, in which he obviously changed the grading weights.
I highly recommend Brian's visualization -- another way to see the identity is to imagine e^ix as a spiral that gets tighter and tighter as you compound more frequently (e represents infinite compounding).

This formula has so many cool interpretations, yet is often explained by resorting to Taylor series (which is like comparing the equations molecule-by-molecule instead of seeing the big picture).
"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." - Arthur C. Clarke
They could be considered clever tricks because the Java type system does not seem very well suited to expressing such higher-level invariants. These excercises are interesting, but smarter solutions are not magically guaranteed to perform better in the real world.

As for denotational semantics, you should either explain your point fully or this is nothing more than a trivial condescendig remark.

[edited for grammar]
This isn't about DMCA notice. I'm not android developer but user and I don't like Trojan stay on official market for entire week until it went to public. That means if original author didn't cared this will stay on market forever.
You're playing with fire. Monopolies that form naturally also perish naturally (and quickly). Consider Rockefeller & Standard Oil. They got 90% of the market and bought the trains so as to force their competition to pay 200% more in shipping. But by the time the government antitrust case started, Standard Oil's market share had naturally fallen to ~60%.

On the other hand, if you solve the problem with regulation, then the regulated body has a powerful tool for maintaining their monopoly: forcing their regulation onto their startup competitors. For example VOIP got saddled with regulation for local 911 calling and easy government wiretapping. Internet radio has to pay some of the worst rates possible under the agreement content producers made with radio stations -- I think this is largely due to gov involvement in radio.
Interesting point. But WiFi networks are available in coffee shops, etc. And I think the main point of simplification I would be looking for is not that I won't have a computer as well, but I don't want my devices to be dependent on that computer.
Cleaning services in st louise don't want to target barbers in Houston. Not everyone is selling a web app.

Agreed about "engaged" status though
Hotels have wifi routers, coffee shops have wifi routers, libraries have wifi routers, airports have wifi routers, conference rooms have wifi routers - even the park area I'm visiting with my kid has open wifi access.

Heck, when I have jailbroken my iPhone with jailbreakme a couple of months ago; I was drinking coffee in a coffee shop that had wifi; and I had no laptop and no wifi router with me ;)

Suggesting that Apple requires iOS to sync with the PC for any reason other than keeping customers locked in iTunes is silly.
Windows, which is by itself in the ~90% range, is not and has never been a closed ecosystem. You can easily install any piece of software you find anywhere. MS is even falling over themselves to give you free developer tools.
But this optimisation is applied many times: it is the leaf case of such qsort algorithms. So it affects the constant scaling factor at all ns, not just for small ns.
this hacker helps me alot. i would recommend him. his email is superhackerx@gmail.com
No. Stuff like this only comes with experience and it's more important to teach students about the fundamental and overarching themes of computer science than to pester them with optimization issues.
well, then startups must change the way SEO is done at a startup, they must do something that big companies can't or won't do .... i.e: link to their competition http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/07/07/startups-linking-to-your...
The Mayerinator - Search Google While Listening to Marissa Mayer Laugh at You
If this doesn't get me that job at Google I don't know what will :).
If you're looking, email me. I make software for banks.
History of Jazz app demos iPad's interactive potential
The primary reason I have not purchased the iPad is iTunes (the software). It is an abomination on Windows as others have noted and most puzzling is so badly designed that most common consumers make several basic mistakes wile trying to figure it out.
For a company that has "intuitive in their DNA", I find it very strange that a piece of Garbage like iTunes is the crucial bridge between PC and the "Post-PC" products. Something is very wrong somewhere.
Not trusting developers is kind of a problematic approach when your platform's key strategic asset is a vast library of third party applications. Apple's own iOS software is great, but the playing field for Android and Windows Phone 7 seems a lot more level without developers on Apple's side.
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

I'm not being caustic with the simple search, a few of those have excellent resources and discussions. You can also research the top recruiting firms in NYC / London who specialize only in Quant dev related roles. Top-3 financial firms require an Extremely high level of math, PHd. (for Senior roles), no job hopping, a target school (very rarely State schools), etc.

http://www.wilmott.com/messageview.cfm?catid=16&threadid...

(A kind of cruddy tone, but informative): http://news.efinancialcareers.co.uk/Guest_ITEM/newsItemId-26...

http://www.amazon.com/Heard-Street-Quantitative-Questions-In...

Edit: My own Boolean's recruiting for entry-level Quant Developers. Very specific criteria. CS Degree (no EE / Math programmers), Target schools, (but, "top" state schools allowed), NO Masters / PHD (an argument over too much specializing or saturation of education, meaning, the fund wanted to teach the hire).

They would relocate / sponsor from anywhere in the world. Only very specific schools from out of country (like India, the The Indian Institute of Technology was the only school to look at).

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub | inurl:in) (BS | BA | “B.A.” | “B.S.” | Bachelor) (2006 | 2007 | 2008) SQL (java | vb | "c++") (logic | algorithm | multithread | concurren* | "multi-thread") (Princeton | Yale | Harvard | Columbia | Cornell | Stanford | "Carnegie Mellon" | Rutgers | Amherst | Brown | Penn | Pennsylvania | MIT | “m.i.t.” | Duke | Northwestern | Tufts | "New York University" | NYU | Dartmouth | “cooper union” | bucknell) (-PHD -“P.H.D.” -“p.h.d”)

(BS OR BA OR “B.A.” OR “B.S.” OR Bachelor) AND (“computer science” OR “CS” OR “C.S”) AND SQL AND (java OR vb OR "c++") AND (logic OR algorithm OR multithread* OR concurren* OR "multi-thread") AND NOT (PHD OR “P.H.D.” OR “p.h.d”)

site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub | inurl:in) (BS | BA | “B.A.” | “B.S.” | Bachelor) (2006 | 2007 | 2008) SQL (java | vb | "c++") (logic | algorithm | multithread* | concurren* | "multi-thread") "greater new york" -PHD -“P.H.D.” -“p.h.d”
site:linkedin.com (inurl:pub | inurl:in) (BS | BA | “B.A.” | “B.S.” | Bachelor) (2006 | 2007 | 2008) SQL (java | vb | "c++") (logic | algorithm | multithread* | concurren* | "multi-thread*") (M-PHD -“P.H.D.” -“p.h.d”
> These are not clever tricks, they are the mathematical foundation of our profession.

Perhaps, but many of the best real world programming tools have a theoretically sound base but sufficient abstraction that the programmer does not need to concern himself with it.

> Why do you assume the types fail to model the domain intuitively?

Well, using six classes/interfaces and an enumeration just to describe a 3x3 array is one clue.

The horrific complexity of the proposed BoardLike interface is another.

And I would argue that the very existence of the Position enumeration is a third, betraying an underlying complexity that isn't shown in the interface here but is almost certainly present throughout the underlying implementation.

> Have you ever heard of denotational semantics?

I have! I have! Can I be clever too now, please?
The ACM contest has it right: specify the size of the input and the running time available. The program must be able to run an input up to that size in the given runtime. That's it: no more, no less.

At Harvey Mudd College, we have a class based on the ACM which works similarly, though with relaxed runtime constraints: 42 minutes per problem. In practice, you rarely need more than a few seconds, but the 42 minute cutoff (combined with large problem sizes) is a great way to prevent people from using brute-force approaches when there's a smarter option available.
I kind of believe slowness in test runs vs 1.8MRI or REE depends on bytecode compiling (though i have not proof of this).
rails and rspec include a massive amount of code that gets loaded/compiled, and that is done every time you run the tests without giving time to YARV to express itself in the faster paths, so this difference is more noticeable.
I can install on those Windows / Mac machines whatever I want, from whatever source I want; and to build stuff for them I don't have to suffer that $99 registration process and I'm also free to use whatever tools I want, as I don't have Apple's EULA to worry about.

That 90% of the population you're talking about really is using "personal computers". The iPad is just a "rented" piece of hardware, which you can use only in ways that pass Apple's approval. That's pretty far from "personal" to me.
Religions would only be impacted by intelligent life. Bacteria and even higher animals would not do anything.
How about: load all 63,792 valid games into a relational database and automagically get pure functions along with an algebra for function composition. Simple, clean, straightforward. Denotational semantics. Is that cheating?
I've been working on a prject last year which involved a few developers using Windows.
It was a nightmare. Myself using Linux, i had no problem.
But git on Windows..
It'd definitely behind other VCS.
While that may indicate the excellence of the project, it may also indicate a lack of imagination, on your part.
I'd say link bait title, but the whole article follows it.

The sites described don't use SEO as a marketing strategy. They used SEO as a business model. Marketing is about getting people aware of your business. What's discussed in the article is getting customers to accidentally use you.
Weighting for volume isn't appropriate because if I started up html5videosofmybackyard.com and placed 5 second clips in 10 bitrates each of the last 3 years of my backyard 24/7 the web wouldn't have magically become 25% less dependent on flash overnight.

I get it though. You really, really like your iPad. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you really, really like your MacBook Pro as well. It's cool, they are both nice gadgets. I am sure Apple appreciates your efforts as far as discounting any criticisms of the platform as invalid.

The lesson here is probably "don't ask questions you don't want the answers to".
Solusi-printer » Blog Archive » Software Resetter Epson Stylus Photo 1390
Contrasting Haskell & Erlang in peer-to-peer protocol implementation
tastybites, I wish I could upvote your small edit 1000 times
There is this russian proverb that goes: бедность не порок, нищета порок.
Mozilla Web Application Project Debuts
Two million is a number of minutes.
Ask HN: What about taking Hackathons online?
Living in a rural area I've never been to a hackathon or startup weekend. I realize those benefit massively from hackers being in one physical space with other fellow hackers, but I'm thinking about ways to take a hackathon online without losing too much momentum. Having seen Minecraft's notch stream entire coding sessions live I wonder if this could be a viable solution. I looked into it, there are good ways to stream a desktop (or parts of it) via justin.tv, even on linux systems.

Let's say we create a website that embends the desktops of all participants and their projects in a grid thus transporting some of this "woah, they're doing something, i should too" feeling. With regard to projects there are many possible ways to do it. One idea would be to make it a nonprofit hackathon where organizations could apply and teams
or individual hackers could pick what they'd like (similar to random hacks of kindness), or just let startups do their own things.

But first I'd like to know if the online hackathon idea is even remotely interesting. Would you share (parts of) your desktop live for such an event? Do you think it's possible to create a momentum this way?
YES. My Data Structures and Algorithms class was graded by benchmark (ECS 60, Sean Davis, UC Davis). Being graded this way was one of the most valuable collegiate experiences I've had (I'm a fourth year on the way out).

Sean gives his students two "challenge programs" a quarter. The first program is usually ultimately a matter of picking/optimizing the right data structure. We do graph algorithms by the 2nd half and so the later challenge problem is inevitably some graph algorithm.

The challenges are close to real world problems. For ex., our 2nd challenge program was to determine the maximum # of donations Obama could receive at any one time given a capacitance graph of his website's network topology (I took the class around the '08 election). We had to design, implement, and test everything by ourselves.

I don't agree with the naysayers who suggest that grading this way doesn't teach the really important software engineering tasks. You really had to feel out the problem domain in order to get the best optimization, and it the book answer wasn't always the best answer. Optimization is about a lot more than simply picking the right data structure or algorithm.

Partnering with the crazy russian genius with an 8086 instruction set in his head that quarter made me the C programmer I am today.

TL;DR Grading by benchmark makes students better programmers.
Yes, the best way to do that is by using tracking script in websites.