skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
by giving them freedom. in my experience, what makes a job suck isn't that the problem lacks "excitement", but that you aren't given the freedom to do a good job. you can take pride in work for even simple tasks, if you own them. on the other hand, you can be in the most exciting field in the world, but have a crappy boss and a shit life.

and almost any technical job can become complex enough to be intellectually interesting, if you have the freedom to use tools to automate the boring bits. what kills is being forced to do tedious rote work because you are restricted in your process. working on a production line is boring; building a production line is fascinating. the line between the two is clear in factory, but not in software development.

"exciting" is for non-technical marketing people with an attention span of 2 seconds before they see the next shiny object. absorbing, empowering work hasn't got much to do with excitement. it's about expressing and developing something of your own. it doesn't have to be different, or exciting, or ground-breaking. it just has to be yours, to develop in the way you see fit, to meet the requirements you are given.

i didn't know this when i started; i imagine selling "exciting" work will get you people with little experience. but i'm wiser now.
'Hot migrating' from SVN to mercurial, and why we choosed HG over GIT.
I'm not sure using time is an accurate measurement of the speed of looping here since there is the cost of starting up the interpreter, but fun nonetheless to see.
yes, random bits flipped on good input. yes, i run anything that can help me and covers the problem. nowadays, 32 and 64 bit are what i write code for. oh, the days of 16bit ints on win3.11 for workgroups are gone. :-)

llvm is an excellent tool, hats off, and thanks.
I'm not sure if the Chromebook would be successful even back then. I remember the appeal of the Eee was its really low price, and thus consumers were willing to compromise. In this case, I'm not so sure. The Chromebook costs close to what a normal budget laptop would cost and is a lot less functional.
According to this article, Microsoft are sitting on a $50bn (!) pile of cash, $42bn of which is located ouside the US:

http://blogs.forbes.com/ericsavitz/2011/05/10/microsoft-with...

They could do nearly six Skype-sized deals, just using cash (without issuing bonds or using stock!) Incredible. They could probably buy SAP, but their cash pile would be gone, plus they would have to give up a significant amount of stock as well. Doubt Ballmer would be willing to risk this.

I've heard elsewhere that Apple is sitting on a ~$35bn cash pile. One wonders when the US Government will declare some sort of 'tax holiday' or window during which these companies can repatriate all this cash.
How apple stock is manipulated
NaturalMotion Endorphin 2.7 – 3D editing software
NaturalMotion Endorphin 2.7 is very power tool for 3D editing. NaturalMotion Endorphin 2.7 use for creating movies, games, videos and many other purposes.
The Internet - the ability to publish anything, worldwide, instantly.

Google - the ability to search the whole of human knowledge (ok, a close approximation thereof) before you even finish typing the query.

Cellular data - the ability to access the above from nearly anywhere anytime (as I find this thread and publish this response from an iPad while a passenger in a car moving 80MPH, and it's no big deal).
That doesn't really make it a hoax though: yes, everybody gave up after a while, but like OP, it may well just be social pressure. All polyphasic sleep accounts I read ended up with something along the lines of "its too hard to fit social events around such a strict schedule". If you're awake during the night when nobody else is and you have to nap when everybody else is awake, and you CANNOT miss a nap, then of course people are eventually going to cave in and go back to a more normal schedule so that they mesh with their friends schedules better.

I think to make the ubermann cycle work, you need 1) to have a job that allows such a schedule 2) not have kids 3) have a bunch of your friends do it too so that your schedule isn't too different from the people you interact with the most.

IMHO, its unlikely that people will will meet all three of those points though. The "solution" would perhaps be a less severe and strict schedule. For example, I tried a 28-hour day schedule (the one from xkcd.. am I crazy trying a sleep cycle I saw in a comic?) and it worked really well: stay up 20 hours then sleep for 8, repeat. Monday to thursday fit around my uni schedule (at the time) perfectly, Friday (which I had off) through Sunday I was basically awake at night and asleep during the day. I ended up with 6 28 hour days. Worked really well! ...until the day I had an appointment in the middle of my "I'm supposed to be asleep" time on a Friday, got knocked off course and didn't bother going back to it.
I very much agree. Having something that could drop into our existing directory system is exactly what I was thinking; the standalone Windows PC is what needs to be retired.
D. J. Bernstein: United Airlines sucks (2007)
The link.

This is so fundamental that it's easy to forget but the hyperlink is truly the most fundamental component of the net.

The beauty of the link is how it tells us that all knowledge is interconnected and that we all are part of the same whole.
to be fair - business and schools of the strongholds of windows. if anyone got more than a small piece of that pie, that would put a dent in MS
I just replaced a 2008 Macbook with a 2010 Macbook Pro. Just took a couple of hours.
jquery is a great counter-example. Every version is significantly faster than the previous one, AND adds features.
scienceblogs had a great piece on this: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/01/in_which_my_words_...

quoting:

What is most pernicious about the conspiracy-mongering stories being spread about DCA is that it builds false hope. People with cancer hear about this drug, and they think there's an amazing cure out there that's being withheld from them because of the greed of big pharma.
There appears to be a lot of government involvement in the US mortgage market (e.g. providing guarantees for mortgage backed securities). We don't have anything like that in the UK.
Probably in response to the crime wave of book snatchings, not to mention library burglaries.

Just the other week, I was sitting on the subway reading Tolstoy, when some kid snatched it out of my hands and raced out the door.
Emotional hijacking and strategic irrationality
Did the advice apply to just your child or did it also include parental sleep habit advice?
Well, this comment just comes across as sour grapes to me. You could be criticising any memory managed programming language. Old timers have been complaining about the kids not knowing about assembly, registers, punch cards, valves, etc since computers were invented.

As for "incompetent design" - I don't know what you are on about. I think that Rails 3 is a frigging triumph of elegant, modular design. There are very many gems in the ruby ecosystem that I believe any unbiased person would say demonstrate exemplary design. In fact, I would say that the average rubyist is much more concerned with good design than, say, your average java dev. The whole reason I switched to ruby was because of the beauty of the language. And what is beauty but good design applied?

Of course there are always exceptions but on the whole I think this comment is quite unfair.
if anyone is interested more in the authors background - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159784
Takedown is one of the best hacker movies that came out.
Having a hierarchy of friends may be in your interest but it is certainly not in the interests of the people hosting the social network. They need the social graph to be single level either to make mining the data easier or to get to expose your information to as wide an audience as possible.
You realize you're $20 away from having a cell connection for your laptop, right? That's how much it will cost you to walk into your nearest mobile phone shop and buy a prepaid USB dongle. And it will come topped up with a month's worth of data.

You can data by the month for $15 whenever you need it and (depending on your network) get the added bonus of having unlimited access to every paid wifi hotspot in the world for that month.

Definitely worth keeping one of those in the laptop bag for the times when you can't find a good coffee shop or an AP named "Linksys".
Some of us will only move when Chromebooks are being used to develop the software that powers a Chromebook, otherwise we'll disregard them as toys.
This looks like an affiliate link. If it is, couldn't you have disclosed it?
How many programs are there that depend on SIGNED overflow wrapping around to negative? I can't think of very many - the only places I've seen potential signed overflow that wasn't a bug was when people were checking for overflow.

In those cases, just use unsigned math to do the checks.
Yea, mod_perl isn't the same thing as writing your application in C, but anyway, my point was in reference to the parents comment:

"I would never ever release a new version of anything that is significantly slower than the previous one. It's simply a bug in my view."

I was trying to get across that we give some up performance for convenience now and again and it's fine to do so. I worked on the BBC iPlayer API which was written on mod_perl, by the way.
I keep on pointing this out. Compare the two groups:

- Sony a big company with big company HR bureaucracy
- The worldwide interest group re: Hacking

Sony might have one or several groups within the company involved with a given project. The population interested in hacking a popular Sony project is not only very large, but constitutes a frictionless global meritocracy interacting via the Internet.

Conclusion? When it comes to big companies vs. the hacker communities, it's asymmetrical warfare, and the big companies are the underdogs. Big companies are outnumbered and outclassed.

However, instead of behaving like the outclassed guerillas they are, they keep acting like they're the empire, and keep getting bloodied in losing fights. All it takes is a few minutes of thought to realize that DRM is the worst possible tactical position they could possibly take. Companies that do this are deluded.

But here's the real kicker: It is possible for companies to use the principles of asymmetrical warfare and win fights. You have to pick your battles based on sound economic principles. You have to pick your battles, such that the huge numerical and training advantages of the adversary are moot.

I know how to do this.

EDIT: Here's a hint. Take a look at your bug tracker. Imagine that it only has reports where the bugs are hard or impossible to reproduce. Imagine that the consequences of the bug are separated by several weeks time from the probable causes. Imagine that there are tens of thousands of such reports. Imagine that the reports only constitute a small fraction of actual occurrences.

It is quite possible to put parties trying to crack your system in exactly this position. If you make it easy to "crack" your program, and instead put all of your effort towards clandestine detection, then there is no incentive for people to fully crack your system, such that they can find the detection mechanisms. Separate the consequences of detection from the actual detection by a time span of several weeks. Use detection to protect value-add and up-sell revenue which is inherently dependent on server-side implementation.

Use honeypots. Your "easily cracked" version 1 becomes a kind of honeypot for detection, which protects your real revenue stream. Present a hack-y feeling loophole that lets people acquire your value-add content for a sizable discount from full-price.

Remember, you're fighting an asymmetrical conflict. Be sneaky. Don't even let your opponent know she's even in a contest if you can help it. Fool them into thinking they've "won."
Who's an Angel, Super Angel, or a Micro-VC? Investor Nomenclature by @ManuKumar
Unlock Your Door with iPhone and Nexus S Using Lockitron [video]
I've done it on my unjailbroken iPhone. iTunes has a built-in way of doing it.
Hannukah – Following the Jewish Tradition
Moriah Galleries has been devoted to the preservation through acquisitions of these ritual and ceremonial objects from all over the world.
Maybe email marketing isn't the right choice? I know personally I never purchase products emailed to me, if I spend 3 seconds scanning the email you're lucky. Granted I may not be your target audience.
They don't have to scale infinitely, only a handful of news sites serve more than 20m pages/day.

As for not overwhelming users or moderators, that was part of my secret sauce. :)
A lovely interview with Gabe Newell, touching on their hiring processes, and studio management: http://www.develop-online.net/features/1192/Gabe-Newell-on-V...

I think what it comes down to, is if you're Valve, you get to have your cake and eat it too. You get to hire the best, and they're all increbibly motivated to make the things you're making.

"I think it’s obvious, everybody here could get a job in ten minutes. People like [someone walks into the door, it’s Jay Stelly, holding two coffees], people like Jay! Who brings me coffee.

Jay is the most senior engineer at the company [laughs]. And he saw that I didn’t have coffee! There are probably at least five publishers he could call and get a $30 million project in an hour if he wanted to.

The reason he’s here isn’t because he has no other option, he’s here because he can work with the best people we have. It’s here at Valve where his talent can make the biggest impact and he doesn’t have to waste time rolling his eyes at stupid things the marketing and management teams are doing."
'Trek' tricorder could win $10 million
Ever try not exposing yourself to light at night? That's any light - overhead lights, computer screens, lamp poles. Your body produces melatonin based on that kind of input, and anything with significant blue light in it apparently stops you from producing it.
You're not including maintenance in that price and OS/software upgrades.
I think the reason Google is trying this rental approach is because it's a way to angle in to a market with relatively little room. They think they might have an advantage in the laptop-as-a-service category, more so then in the low-end-laptop category. That would have been different in 2008.

BTW, I don't think it's smart comparing chromebook prices to amazon bargain bin prices. These aren't the same market segments. Laptop rentals for home and small business is a substantial existing market. A quick look at the deals going now shows prices generally ranging from $15-$45 per week. These are not particularly high end machines.

http://www.radio-rentals.com.au/products/Computer---Office/N...

http://www.mrrental.com.au/For-Rent/Catalogue/Computers-Offi...
I'd agree with getting professional help for the simple reason is that they probably have greater experience and know a wide range of tricks and techniques you can try and when to try them. Books can be a one size fits all approach that is more of a recipe approach so it is difficult to judge what advice to follow and more especially if the first few ideas fail to generate any results. Also having someone around who is not also sleep-deprived (hopefully) and so thinking clearly is only a good thing.
I've been a Rails dev for 5 years. I'm frequently considering leaving for another framework because of one thing: bootstrap time. Starting a test or server on my dev machine takes 20-30 seconds. Particularly with tests, this is a huge problem for doing proper TDD, particularly when you are trying to use tests to track down a bug. In that 20-30 seconds, I often console myself that we no longer need to print punch cards and wait a whole day, but that's little consolation when node.js starts up in under a second.

There are hacks and fixes to this like spork, but none of this should be necessary. The performance issues are not debated in the open enough. I don't understand how those startup times are acceptable to anyone, but I rarely get responses when I ask questions about it.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5738443/why-is-rails-boot...

UPDATE: I have the latest top of the line Macbook Air - 2.13 Ghz Core 2 Duo with SSD.

I have other issues with Rails, but this is the only potential deal breaker. (I tend toward functional clarity instead of "human" readability in the magic debate, while most "Rubyists" would rather pollute the namespace (e.g. metawhere) and create 100 line method_missing calls to make one command slightly prettier aesthetically. And Cucumber - ugh what a ridiculous contraption that is.)
Efficient Privacy-Preserving Biometric Identification
There's no need to go through these steps if you're compiling the code yourself. If you want to override a library function like malloc, just define a function called malloc. Then make sure that the linker sees your function before the library function. For example, here I override pthread_create: https://github.com/scotts/streamflow/blob/master/override.c#...

Note that I also figure out, at runtime, how to call the real version of pthread_create using the dlsym interface. I make sure that my pthread_create is the first one in the call chain by putting that object file before -lpthread when I link.

The LD_PRELOAD method is for when you are not compiling the code yourself. That is, the function you want to hijack is in a binary, and you can't re-compile that binary. Then you compile a shared library with your function, and use LD_PRELOAD to force the runtime linker to load your library first.
This is very welcome.

ARM has tended to be somewhat difficult to port to - vendors have multiple versions of the instruction set out there depending on device size/power requirements, with different floating point units (NEON, VFP) etc.

The result is we end up with situations like OpenEmbedded supporting multiple kernel trees in it's build engine just to take care of the wide range of hardware it supports.

Hopefully this will make the situation somewhat better.
Game Hack Day NYC
Electric companies, ISPs and browser vendors have competition. When Facebook is a dependency, it becomes one without easy alternatives.
Infographic: How load times affects shopping behavior
What is Joshua Schachter's affiliation with Honestly? Has he made any comments regarding this mess?
Innovation Takes Real Effort, Even For Startups
Why America Needs Immigrants
If Microsoft made a "Chromebook" but with some Windows lite OS and Office included, it could cost a lot more, you can be sure of that.
I hear what you are saying about exceptions, but you also have to live in reality. Look at danielparks benchmarks in this thread; rails3 under 1.9.2 is faster than rails2 under 1.8.7.

Its easy enough to spout platitudes like "don't use exceptions for flow control", except remember two basic facts about the commit that I linked:

1. It was using exceptions for flow control as an optimization
2. That optimization was indeed faster on 1.9.2

On top of that, when the rails team was notified about how bad this "optimization" was in 1.8.7, they immediately fixed it.

I just don't see how any of this fits into "don't give a shit about performance".
I can sign contracts with electric companies and pay for SLAs from ISPs.

If browser vendors simpy start disabling browsers, we have much bigger problems.

Facebook's interest is in policing apps, and acquiring/crushing/copying the relevant ones.
> the overwhelming majority of AAA games have fairly predictable sales curves with a peak window measured in weeks or, in some cases, days

Yep, big games are horrendously front-loaded and with very short legs (you can see that if you follow sales threads at e.g. Neogaf).

This is why DRMs which technically "fail" (they fall in, say, 2 weeks) have performed admirably, and as asked/required: for two weeks, where 90% of the game's sales happen, pirated games were not competition.

This is why I can only shake my head in disbelief when people claim DRMs fail as a DRM finally gets cracked 1 month after a game release: as far as publishers are concerned, a DRM which lasted 4~5 weeks has performed way beyond the call of duty, and you can be sure their next game will be using the same breed of DRM.
> On top of that the ruby ecosystem also seems to attract a certain class of programmers who simply don't know how their magic ruby code translates to CPU, I/O and memory operations.

Isn't the entire goal of computer science to abstract away complexity?
Deletion at most places is just a flipped bit.
> Why does your site have user accounts?

We will use registered users to help us moderate our content. We also want to work, eventually, on creating a network of trust. By the way, user accounts are optional, not required to create spots or comment about them.

> It seems like it's combining different audiences at once...

The fundamental difference between our service and tumblr, yelp, etc, is that our main content (the spots) must be anonymous. We don't want to know who is the author of a spot. Anonymity is the core of what we do because what matters to us is only what people think.

So far, about 50% of the spots are goldspots, and the other 50% evenly divided between blackspots and lovespots. The fact that goldspots are dominating makes us happy.

> why does Read More reload the page?

Read More takes you the the page of the specific spot.

> They might not care whether you think it meets your standard of good taste?

Common sense is common (pun intended). If a spot doesn't look "publishable" to us at Spottiness, the probability that it will look the same to the majority is high.

Thanks for taking the time to look at our site!
Some context:

Gaah. Guys, this whole ARM thing is a f-cking pain in the ass
https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/3/17/492

Let ARM rot in the mainline. I really don't care anymore.
https://lwn.net/Articles/441384/

It'll be interesting to see what direction this goes. Considering also the forks for the Android kernel and the different directions ARM development wants to go compared to Intel.
>exception handling is universally slow.

Except that exception handling is so fast in 1.9.2 that it made this change a performance optimization in 1.9.2. Look lower in this topic for benchmarks showing that Rails 3 is faster in 1.9.2 than rails2 is under 1.8.7.

>performance-wise it almost certainly will always be slower

Except, it wasn't slower in the Ruby that most people running Rails 3 should be running (1.9.2).

I also point out, again, that they immediately fixed this problem when someone pointed out how slow it was in 1.8.7.
Take a look at http://davidseah.com/ The productivity tools section has a cornucopia of printable task lists, calendars, etc. designed to make you more productive.
This is my main gripe with Facebook, the lack of proper entity modeling.

Use Facebook and your only option is to consider somebody a "friend" entity.

Modeling relationships with only a friend entity is pretty poor, IMHO.
So how about a hypothetical architecture that instead of using two's complement, stores negative numbers with a negative flag bit for some reason? Would MAX_INT+1 still be negative on such an architecture?

"We all know that in practice" type assumptions are exactly what make code difficult to port and/or maintain and developers should really stay away from them. Or at least, if you really want to make such assumptions (for example, for performance reasons), make sure that that (1) you know exactly what you're doing and (b) test for their validity at compile time or runtime and provide fallback code that always does the "right" thing.