skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I might be wrong (search turns up nothing), I have seen this before though and thought it came from here (since this is usually where I find my quality reading material).

No need to get all downvotey, I wish I had the authors abilities.
Incorrect. It makes up 50% of the SALES of an unclearly defined MARKET and term TABLET.
Also, this reaction by Seth Godin some time ago to this guy's project: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/10/what-youre-u...
When I got my first managerial role in a software organization, my boss told me to read The Goal. I was really turned off by the fake family narrative aspect. I skimmed it, trying to pick out the practical business parts. I was already aware of Agile and continuous improvement / Kaizen, and physical manufacturing had nothing to do with my job, so "Theory of Constraints" didn't speak to me much.

Also, the cover just reeks of business-book BS (http://www.amazon.com/*/dp/0884270610)

When I finished the book, my boss asked me what I thought. I told him I didn't like it, and he laughed and told me it was awful. I shut my mouth instead of asking me why he recommended the book in the first place.

That was my first introduction to management BS.

For OR, and manufacturing in general, and when the book was written in the early 1990s when these ideas were newer and we didn't have the Internet for disseminating information, The Goal and TOC were probably more valuable to the contemporary audience.
Replying to my own post. It still sucks for getting shit done.
Isn't the Project Gutenberg catalog available on the iBooks store? (Here in Austria it's the only thing on there. Thank's very much publishing cartels...)
It does look lengthy, at least. Depending on why I canceled, I might very well be inclined to skip it. Might be better if they split it over maybe 3 pages, so if someone didn't make it to the end at least Netflix get some feedback.
Working Through SICP, Need a Learning Partner
I'm working through SICP. For a bit of background, I have no formal comp sci training and my current role is more business-development-oriented at a software company. I taught myself C from a reference manual when I was 14, and I built games in Java in high school, but my skills have fallen off and I'd like to significantly improve them (I have a business degree, although I put myself through 2 years of the wrong type of engineering before I realized I should have done software and instead just finished off the business part of my double major)

I'm also keen on not just getting a fluffy self-education - I want to REALLY understand the underlying principles of computer science in a way that just picking up a book on Python would probably not provide.

My current plan is to work through SICP (I picked up a hard copy from the MIT Press book store in Cambridge), and then proceed on to Introduction To Algorithms and other subjects.

Is anyone interested in being a learning partner? It would be great to either have someone who's going through the same process or who has done it before and wouldn't mind sharing their worldly wisdom with a newcomer :-)

EDIT: I put together a wiki for notes / solutions to exercises... http://sicpgroup.pbworks.com/

I'd love ideas on how to structure a group for this to help everyone stay accountable.
Looks good, I've got few questions for you:

- Why put respond.js in the footer? (H5BP puts it up in the head with the call to Modernizr)

- Why self-close your meta and link tags if you're using HTML5?

- Why doesn't the image in the demo resize as you resize the window? (img { max-width: 100%; } fixes that)
Please save your clever one-liners for Reddit.
I know from personal experience spending my 10th and 11th grade years doing public online school that you can literally cheat your whole way through, not get caught, and come away learning nothing. Take it how you want it. And now I work at a startup, so im ok but I worry about all the other kids.
AWS, think 1 small instance (80$/m) for, say, 1000 users. Depending of course.
Would you consider Twisted's code to be Pythonic? It seems to have a heavy Java flavor to it, with loads of explicit interfaces.
Not just PHBs. In a crowded space, where users essentially choose you semi-randomly, charts like that provide the user with some self-justification ("I picked them because, err, they have more features!").

And anyway these kind of slides are always a bit of a sleight of hand. Every software system has some features others don't, just because, and those are the ones cherry picked for this kind of slide. It doesn't necessarily mean they are feverishly working on additional features.
Actually, I rather liked them... :)
To clarify:

HTML5+JS is only suitable as a replacement to the presentation portions of .NET (so WPF or WinForms), which are just a small portion of everything that .NET is. Think of .NET as being a Humvee and HTML5 and JS as a motorcycle, and developing your application as going to some remote location in Alaska -- while the motorcycle will look great, it will only get you so far, and you need something more for the rest of the road that can also carry a motorcycle if need be.

JS is a language that primarily lives in the browser and doesn't come with anything that would allow you to access much of the computer it is running on. We're talking about applications that will be executing natively here, so things like access to the file system are a must. You can of course try to use something that implements the CommonJS spec, like NodeJS, but are you honestly going to throw out the massive amount of libraries Microsoft created for doing IO, database connectivity, concurrency, networking, and a whole lot more, for something as minimalistic as an implementation of the CommonJS spec?

There are other problems on top of this. People say JavaScript is "fast", and it's true when compared to JavaScript a few years ago, but it is not true when compared to most .NET languages. Objects essentially being associative arrays in JavaScript means accessing a value that is deeply nested in a hierarchy of objects is slow. While even a problem now, it would get much much worse if you were to throw in the large number of libraries needed to make HTML5 and JS into a general application development framework. Stuff like: Com.Company.Project.Class.Member.Member.Method(); simply takes too much time in JavaScript. Same story for deep inheritance chains you often see in desktop apps.

Another problem: If your whole application is going to be in HTML5+JS, your whole application's source code is going to be public. You can try obfuscation, but I personally wouldn't put much faith into that approach.

.NET was built from the ground up as a whole application development framework -- it does this well. While HTML5+JS overlap with .NET in some areas, their scopes are still much smaller in comparison, and are therefore not suitable as complete replacements to .NET.
Learning and practicing mindfulness in the framework of a cognitive therapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT for short) has been the most useful approach that I have found so far. What it teaches you is that while you may not have complete control over your thoughts and feelings, you do have control over how you respond to them. A good starting place is the book "The Happiness Trap" by Dr. Russ Harris.
Where I live it's exactly the opposite, and most sockets or electrical wiring have not proper grounding support.
Hey, I get it and I think it's actually a neat project. But "from scratch" is an entirely meaningless phrase.
Weebly hiring a Spam Domination Engineer (apply to jobs@weebly.com)
I was under the impression that Delphi was written in Delphi.
I sometimes wonder how long would it take for the civilization to re-create the current level of technology, if all the material artifacts disappear one day: books, computers, robots, factories, even hammers. If all that remains is the current level of knowledge in the heads of 7bln people, how long would it take from the stone age to Core i7, heart transplants and Boeing 787s? And how much different the world would be if we had to re-create this from scratch without the legacy of previous technological generations?
Epic Games Hacked
I agree completely. A "feature" for a user should just be part of the experience, not some bolt-on, selling feature.
When I was new to python I did exactly what you said, and discovered the following facts:

1. Reading a library you are using, even if it's a standard library like smtplib is fun and makes you smarter and your code better.

2. Python is such a joy to read, unlike some other languages.

3. Some libraries (I'll mention smtplib again) are such a mess, and yet reasons 1 + 2 still make it easy for you to learn from them, while also learning what not to do.
1. Respond.js is not in the footer, it is inside the <head> tag. See here: https://github.com/thatcoolguy/gridless-boilerplate/blob/mas...
2. HTML5's syntax is not very strict, but I prefer closing void elements because I think it improves readability.
3. I chose not to add any responsive image style by default because of IE problems and Windows' rendering. I'm thinking of adding that soon.
This, been up for awhile I think.
Technology Expert Worries About Privacy Erosion And The State Of Democracy
Mac OS X Lion Has A Browser-Only Mode
Great advice. The problem with just blindly collecting emails is that you may be able to accumulate a bunch of emails passively. But by the time you release the product and email all those folks, the conversion rate of people reading your email, and caring will be dreadfully low.

On the other hand, if you have a conversation with them, and get their feedback, and make them feel like their ideas will help make the product better, more people will be interested in trying out your product. Sure, it's not as scalable, but you're gonna attract more quality users, and those users will be the same people who will go out and tell others about your product.

You get more validation, more feedback, and more ideas on what critical features to implement. Just getting email addresses is not as effective.
Minor nitpick - The Goal was first published in 1984.
"Maybe he didn't write the tests first"

Then he isn't doing TDD at all is he?

"Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle: first the developer writes a failing automated test case that defines a desired improvement or new function, then produces code to pass that test ..." [Wikipedia]

Using tests after you write your code, to test functionalty how it needs to be improved has been a common practice from the earliest days of sw dev. In other words, "the importance of tests" has never been in dispute. TDD is not so universally accepted.

Testing is beneficial, sure. But the claim that TDD ,sometimes evangelized as "not a testing method, it is a design method" (roll eyes), actually helps in "deeply understanding your problem domain" needs more validation.

Due Disclosure: I wrote the original blog post(EDIT: the blog post comparing the two Sudoku attempts not the OP for this HN discussion) . I personally think TDD is overhyped consultantware snake oil, but that is just my personal opinion. If it works for you, more power to you.
The idea of science itself would probably be more powerful than anything an individual could accomplish. Let a 1000 flowers bloom and all that.
The Baltic republics aren't doing bad, but they weren't conquered by the Soviet Union until WWII. I wonder if the parts of the former Soviet Union that it grabbed from Poland in WWII are doing better than the other parts of their respective countries now?
Things that are extremely, trivially easy to do:

1. Throw wads of money at something.

2. Pay off politicians.

3. Shmoozing.

4. I'm the sales and idea guy.

Things that are very hard to do:

1. Design a product that people find useful and are willing to use.

2. Design a product that people are willing to spend money on.

There's an enormous glut of VC backed companies filled with and powered by the easy trivial stuff. These folks tend not to respect engineering design and inventing skills, which they see as commodities they should be able to buy for a pittance. Then they complain that there is stiff competition for talent when designers don't choose to work for their useless startup.
Anyone else think it may be time to look seriously at learning Go?
God I love sweden, 100/100 dedicated for 16$/month (~100 SEK)
So, if the strategy can be extended indefinitely, what is the rational strategy?
A question I've had about this is where are the ready supplies of materials that could be used in the recreation? Could we spread across the hills and still find iron and copper deposits? Aren't these all played out by now? We would need to shift to another economic base from new materials I think rather than recreate what we had before, because that's gone.
Facebook Privacy Settings Not Holding True
I suspect that Facebook -- and its use -- will continue to change over the course of the next decade. Currently, it looks like the most promising technology for mass user interaction that has been developed.

StackOverflow is basically a high signal-to-noise ratio content farm. It sells the illusion of fame in exchange for generating content. There is no meaningful social aspect to it. I don't see any signs of it evolving over time, as it seems to exist for a very specific purpose.
Koening - The Right Way To Teach Sorting
Even worse, the seizures don't seem to be the result of ICE investigations so much as some industry (RIAA, MPAA, etc) person gives ICE a list of sites, ICE does some mild amount of confirmation, and then sends it off to a judge.

I remember that a number of the rap blogs taken down in the first round, were claiming that the artists themselves (or their PR people) sent the music to them. Now maybe the industry person that told ICE about that site "just didn't know" that the music was legal, but isn't that the point of investigations and due process?
Plenty validation can be found in whole communities - anything concerning Ruby for example lives and breathes test or behavior driven development.

Btw, Peter Norvig himself has good things to say on TDD[1]. So using him in an argument against TDD whilst he's using tests is kinda self defeating.

1. http://gigamonkeys.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/coders-unit-test...
I had the same thought. It'd be interesting to know what the form completion rates for this are.
Not that I consider myself top talent, but I work as a mobile app developer with experience in building scalable backend systems.

My current employer is a small shop even though I got offers from a lot of companies who were offering to pay more.
They enticed me by allowing me to work for lower pay so that I don't have to bust my ass every day.

I work a few hours a day and 8 hour days are rare. Telecommuting is also an option but I like to work at the office.

They also buy a bunch of ipads and android devices I can take home and play with.

This is much better for me than working at a different company at least 8 hours a day and specially in a startup environment where you have to work long hours to get a product out.
ahh, my bad on #1 - it's early :)

The source formatting kinda threw me off with the entire head being tabbed and the empty body, maybe add a little dummy HTML inside the body like the H5BP?
Here's a question I would have for you if I were considering a job at your place:

You want people who contribute to open source and are active on Github.
That is hard to do is one's job is taking up most of one's time, or
most of one's mental energy.

What steps do you take to ensure that if I'm working for you, I'll have
the time and energy to contribute to open source and be active on
Github?
English is the international language. Facebook in ten years won't be what it is now. Also, as I said, it would happen on whatever social platform is in power, which, in ten years, will probably ubiquitous to an extent that we cannot currently imagine.
Why everyone wants to be part of this technology race
Hear, hear! They were even kicking Native Americans off of reservations during the Kennedy Administration!
re: Perl Medic... Excellent book. What I learned there has served me very well with Perl, and also helped me with work on some crufty Python as well!

Also, yeah... I should take-back the TDD comment, or at least re-word it. I just get a little knee-jerky when I hear the word TDD mindlessly spouted out as a panacea. TDD works best when combined with other best-practices, and of course, learning how to write tests that help and don't become yet another ball of mud is an art in itself!
If it wasn't for Mint Linux standing on top of Ubuntu standing on top of Debian with Debian's apt-get repository, I probably would have switched to Mac.

Interestingly, most of my favorite desktop apps are written in C++ (Chrome, Firefox, OpenOffice, Lyx, Kivio, CodeBlocks, Inkscape, etc...).

Anyone, else notice a similar pattern?
For #1, use a Long-Term Support version every 3 years, and, if you like, install an individual software package with its own non-Canonical (ha, pun!) .deb, or a PPA, or just download a package from the publisher.

For #2, a thousand times amen. My project for today is re-partitioning my hard drives to make room for a Windows installation. Wifi-sharing doesn't work anymore (because someone decided that bridging wifi to ethernet adapters was a misfeature?), but still happily advertised in Network Manager.

Suspend and Hibernate don't work (even worse, they lock up the system), and the summer weather is too hot to keep the desktop running 24/7.

Apparently, desktop Linux only works if you want to version-lock on 2-to-5-year-old hardware and features that were designed for that hardware, that took 2-5 years to port to Linux and debug, all the while creeping through the minefield to avoid reressions in stability, functionality, and user experience.

If you can't use modern software, and you can't use the capabilities of modern or bargain hardware, than what's the point? It adds up to a hidden tax because you endure an ongoing lag against progress and wasting money on hardware you can't fully exploit. You may as well buy proprietary OS and software with all the money you can save by buying new-generation Windows-certified hardware, and money can earn by not spending 10 hours a week trying to fix you machine.

Fighting for freedom is noble, but it's a martyr's calling.
It's hard to be so in love with technology, while at the same time never getting to enjoy using it. It's sadomasochism.

This goes for the desktop. On the server, where we have hardware drivers with 10-year lifecyles, and top-to-bottom programmability and network-transparency, Linux is a dream.

I am planning to switch to Windows to get wifi and multimedia to work, and run Linux on a virtual machine inside it, treating the VM like a local low-latency headless Linode/EC2-style instance.
I disagree with the notion that "those who want it [Facebook] already have it..."

In fact, there are billions of users that don't have access to Facebook but would benefit greatly from it. Many of these potential users have 1/2G mobile phones, with little or no access to a PC. Much of what Facebook needs to do to achieve growth targets will be extending it's platform to these users by creating a consumable experience on such technically limited devices. That takes innovation.
Same for me- no ads. I thought it was a bug.
The iPhone feature-checklist steamroller
Why did you shorten the URL? http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5znUFwf...
Agreed. I also feel like that blog post was incomplete and not constructive enough. I think it's also important to highlight your core strengths and the extra features is icing on the cake kind of thing.
Good stuff, though there's a few outdated idioms:

Lists, or any iterable, can be reverse-sorted with reversed(sorted(my_list)). That'll give you an iterator, though you can call list() on the result if you need it.

"while True" should be used in-place of "while 1". Reads better.

In Python 2, xrange() is preferred over range() when looping - it won't create an in-memory list of integers, and behaves mostly the same as range but for a few edge cases. Python 3 renamed xrange() to range(), and removed the original range() function.
~$python -mtimeit "'a' + 'b' + 'c' + 'd'"

10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.026 usec per loop

~$python -mtimeit "''.join(('a','b','c','d'))"

10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.197 usec per loop
Care to elaborate on your dislike of Cassandra?
it only works with http right now, actually
Superfast online scanner from Bit Defender –Quick Online Scanner.
They should have fewer features, not less ... Grammar Nazi strikes!
I've been playing with it off and on for over a year now -- it's definitely worth learning -- it'll shape your perspectives, and as a more-and-more viable substitute for other compiled languages, it's really quite nice.
yes! there is a ticket for this in github
More like we help the neighbor down the street, while ignoring the shoddy wiring in our own house. We save the neighbor's house, while our own lights on fire and burns down.

There's no reason that we can't help others and ourselves at the same time.
I really hope not. If we really need Facebook to go to referendums we have some serious issue. I think what really is moving people is the nuclear referendum and water privatization. Only a minority really cares about protection laws.
yep, i never expected this much usage. this will be taken care of.
Try again with different hardware and your experience will, with very high probability, be nothing like that. I've installed Linux on seven or eight computers over the years, and I've never had a mouse or a wired NIC fail to work out of the box. I've never had a graphics card problem that couldn't be resolved with one or two hours of Google-and-try, Google-and-try, and the last time I had trouble setting up graphics was the first time I set up dual monitors, about six years ago. I work at a Linux shop where the desktop IT department will only touch Windows, and the group of people running Linux on their desktops and laptops is much, much larger than the "OMG I love it when stuff breaks" tinkerer crowd. Most of us don't enjoy being our own sysadmins, and if it was much trouble, we wouldn't bother.

Also it has to be said over and over again: setting up Windows from a generic install disk can be just as much of a nightmare as Linux. The reason Windows works so well for most people has nothing to do with Windows; it has to do with using essentially a special distribution of Windows put together by the company that assembled the hardware. They've located, tested, and installed the right drivers on the system, and they've put together a recovery/reinstall disk that has all those drivers. Try installing Windows without having the right drivers pre-selected for you and you can easily end up in the same hell as a Linux install gone bad, except with less help available online because it's not a common thing to attempt.

By the way, your handy thumb drive with four drivers on it -- why did you need that? And why did you have it? Why weren't you that well prepared for the Linux install? It doesn't seem like a fair comparison if you're comparing a Windows install where you knew exactly what drivers you needed and already had them on hand to a Linux install where you hadn't even Googled the right driver for your video card.
Twilio is just a nice place I work that happens to like what I made.
Tower Bridge bot killed by Twitter, replaced with marketing
Did the author 'mindlessly spout' TDD to be a panacea or did he write about 'combining best pratices' to become proficient?
Check out Mint Linux. It's built on top of Ubuntu but much better.
Go Martinique Go !!!

(mod me down if you want but I'm proud we are #3)