skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure that the 1000 really will make sure the software is well tested, etc. Given that I haven't seen things on that scale, but the scales I have seen, the non-superstars don't seem to get why they should do any of that work or how to do it effectively. Maybe 5 rockstars and 30 very much above average. 1000 average won't get anything done and won't know what they have done.
> You mean bookmarks? Add a scroll %, assuming they're not nice enough to use anchor tags / IDs meaningfully, and you're golden.

Bookmarks in books work okay. You move them. Book marks in browsers don't. You have to remove the old one, add the new one, and the overall process is too cumbersome to be useful for the application I mentioned.
Yeah, that's what I thought too. I asked him straight out if he wanted me out (I tried to quit), but he said he wanted me around and that I could still gain experience from being part of the team.

I was not receiving pay prior to the disagreement, but was promised equity. The percentage was never discussed as that truly was not why I wanted to be in this. We have been friends for a few years and I don't think he wants this to affect our friendship.
Not the majority of his listeners but some hard to measure fraction of those who read his slides online without the context of the talk that he gave.

Yeah, it's definitely not a good set of slides unconnected to the talk. He even admits that.
Tablets are a fad
Not exactly white hat, but these are 'services' I currently know of that are generating income for their owners, perhaps it may inspire some ideas to create something legitimate:

* Running a bitcoin mining pool and accepting donations/small transaction fee

* Running an actual bitcoin bank

* Creating a meetup type app for bitcoin traders, would be very useful for Canadians and other non-US citizens where purchasing bitcoins is difficult

* ForEx software for bitcoins. The fluctuations in price seem to be as random as real currency anyway, ForEx software and training is a very profitable industry.

* Renting out or building bitcoin PC rigs with the latest GPU processing power

* Bitcoin analytics, providing latest stats on potential bitcoin mining profit margins given the cost of electricity, video card hardware costs, and current trading price.
Seems like a good way to communicate emergency stuff. Maybe not good. Maybe just available.
What's the point of producing (checking in)? I'm not sure. Good karma for the benefits of consuming?

But consuming, yes there is a gain. You can use the "explore" feature to see what's a good place for [X] in your radius.

Doesn't just limit to your neighborhood though. I used it when traveling in Bangkok to verify local suggestions to which bars/clubs are good. Or when you're in Vegas, you can see which hotel's club is going off. If a place has 4 check-ins vs 5 vs 12 vs 20, then you can extrapolate that the "20" place is poppin'.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/01/31/samsung-galaxy-tab-sa...

But during the company’s quarterly earnings call on Friday, a Samsung executive revealed those figures don’t represent actual sales to consumers. Instead, they are the number of Galaxy Tab devices that Samsung has shipped to wireless companies and retailers around the world since product’s formal introduction in late September.
A moody moon turns its face - mysteries on Helene
is it even possible to not be running the latest version of chrome? who's still running chrome 10?

and despite a lack of official support, there aren't any huge changes between these versions so things will probably still work fine. it just means they aren't testing for it.
Really? I know at least in Australia and the UK (only places I've filed tax returns so only places I can speak with any degree of confidence) that becoming a professional accountant requires:

- 3-4 years (at least) of university
- industry accreditation if you want to work for yourself
- a minimum number of hours every year spent maintaining that accreditation
- trawling through government budget and tax amendments every year to know the impact for all or your clients
- knowing the legal intricacies of each country/state/county you operate in to ensure you're doing the best job for you clients, and keeping abreast of any changes to those.

There's no way I'd trade being a programmer for having to stomach that burden. And most accountants I know are on a lower rate than most devs I know, unless they're working for a big 4 consultancy.
Did you read what I wrote? I mentioned Google Maps as one of the two places I found AJAX useful.

The applications on my mom's PC do have much better UI standardization than the web does. Microsoft releases UI guidelines. alt-f4 does the same thing in every application I've used, and the menu structure is roughly the same too. Apple is even better.
It's not surprising to read on a site devoted to hackers that 5 is better than 1000. Everyone wants to believe they're special. But if all companies followed this mindset, there'd be many people here out of work.

That said, I don't think either side is the ideal. I'm also a big believer that brilliant people make a huge difference. But what you want is an structure that allows those five brilliant people to oversee a sea of average workers. Like a factory; some things just work better when you can plug any warm body into the position.

But it takes 5 brilliant people to design that system...
normal zen koan: http://www.ashidakim.com/zenkoans/zenindex.html

to understand the humor in some of these broken koans, you kind of have to understand the purpose/structure of the regular koans.
Yes, dropping support for IE 7 is fine. But the recently weird-ified FF release schedule is going to make this new Google Apps policy have strange results.

FF 4 was released 3 months ago. It's just now looking confidence-inspiring enough that I'm considering upgrading to it on my Mac this week. But now Google is going to drop support for it when FF 6 is released in a couple of months???

Another issue: if I'm not mistaken, the fact that Ubuntu releases stick with a particular browser version, means that the LTS releases (and 10.04 in particular) will stay with a version of FF long after Google Apps has stopped supporting it.

Both of these strike me as serious problems. Perhaps the Google Apps people have not really thought through the ramifications of this policy?
There's an "edit" option as well.

As to the auto-updating bookmarks, would it resolve the issue if I made an extension to do that for you? I can see the use, honestly, and I like it. (seriously, I'm offering, and I'd probably use it myself. It'd be an interesting project. Even if it doesn't resolve the issue - we might just fundamentally disagree here, I'm OK with that.)

But why should that be part of the browser, when modern browsers allow you to do damn near anything by simply leveraging it? Why should we rely on browser makers to tell us what's possible, when we can do it ourselves, because of the changes in the past 15 years?
Nice writeup, I've been meaning to give tmux a shot and after reading this I think I'm finally going to :)

selfish suggestion: How about adding the tmux dotfiles to your github repo?
Well, as far as I remember lists (which are used like hash tables, as they associate variables with names, see http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-lang.html#List-objec...), implement indexing as an O(n) operation. Only after they reach a certain size are they converted to a hash table.

Everything is pass by value with some cases being marked as 'safe', i. e. if you know beforehand the variable won't be changed it's not copied to save time.

The reason for this is that the project was designed by people who were primarily statisticians, and the most glaring performance problems were later fixed by hacks and 'special cases'.

Disclaimer: Most of this I know second hand from a coworker who's an author of many R packages. I worked with R's interface to C and it wasn't a pleasant experience.
Haskell’s evaluation isn’t magic
Does anyone have statistics regarding browser usage in the wild?
So why are Uber fares higher than taxis on a typical day?
"Also, his case examples are not coding related. "

Nor are they even correct. In fact they can easily be made to prove the opposite of what he claims.

Only someone completely ignorant of soccer/football would claim that this year's FC Barcelona lineup is one of the greatest ever because of their team-based approach - their best player is Lionel Messi, who at 23 is already being considered as one of the greatest players to ever play the game, right up there with Pele, Maradona, etc. He's so much better than not just the average, but even the closest competitor in the Spanish league. Cristiano Ronaldo leads in statistical categories like most goals scored but it's from beating up on weaker teams and he routinely chokes in big games, whereas Messi plays even better, like when he dribbled past half of the Real Madrid team in the Champions League semifinal to score the winning goal. You could've benched Ronaldo and it wouldn't have mattered - benching Messi would've dragged the match back down to more equal terms.
Software is a creative endeavor. As in most creative endeavors there are dis-economies of scale in the form of communications and management overhead, differences of opinion and perspective, etc. What group writes a better novel, a group of 5 or a committee of a 1,000? The same thing applies to software. Generally speaking the smallest group that can get the work done will do the better job. More so if the smaller group is on average more talented.

How do you ensure the average talent of a group of 1,000 people? It's a hard problem. How do you do so for a group of 5 people? That's an easy problem.
Thank you so much! I love you Google.
I'm glad. Thank you for taking the time to read and understand. Hacker News is starting to go down the decline that hit reddit 2 years ago, where people don't bother to try to understand different viewpoints, and just downvote anything they don't agree with. It's nice to see good people still on here...
It's interesting to me that the author is writing an article with a slant against the modern "winner-take-all" economy and has chosen as an example, computer programming and technology. i.e. one of the best illustrations for the basic rationale behind "winner-take-all" structures.

In my opinion, programming provides such a tremendous amount of leverage that a super-star developer can have an impact that greatly eclipses a super-star financial analyst or basketball player. In my experience, one great developer multiplies not only her own efforts but also the efforts of all the developers around her, by being knowledgeable about technologies, algorithms and system architecture and being able to quickly steer the team in a productive direction.

So yes, Facebook is 100% correct in trying to get those 5 developers, because one brilliant idea can affect millions of people and might be something that was put together in a weekend.
The taxi strike is described at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/cityinsider/detail?entry...

"From noon to 2 p.m. on Tuesday, taxi drivers are being urged to park their cabs to protest the practice of charging drivers 5 percent of every credit card transaction, the consideration of an electronic tracking system and an idea to put more taxis on the street."
They get limo drivers to pick you up in a lincoln town car.
Sounds to me like a service that "archives" your github projects on to S3 and "activates it" back to github would be of particular interest.
I never even noticed that there was a search box until reading this.
they have slow update paths because they can get away with slow update paths. if web developers stop catering to lazy IT departments, maybe they won't be so slow anymore.
Here's the link to the article that was published on Progressive Radio Network. http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/health-headlines/2011...
Sure, this one does: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gaia-gps-lite-offline-topo/id...

I am mostly just running house ads now, but Mopub is great for being able to promote sales and mix in back-fill ads too.

It's nice that it's all open source too.
>competitive auction process

Do you have an example here for the rest of us? I. e. companies not on the scale of Heroku and Dropbox?

>Boutique firms

Any examples? And how would they know the market better than the company founder?
Why would you drop prices when there is no competition? Makes no sense. Basic supply and demand.
I agree with you, and I can't argue with the numbers and data. But, still I wonder what is classified as 'productive' work and 'productivity', because I (and many others I talk to) don't see it. My thoughts are indeed anecdotes, and being a data person, I won't tell someone to take it as it is.

However, I need to better understand what this data means. I know how to aggregate data points in ways to create the results that I want to create. What else is hidden in that data?
Sorry, that's just wrong. Stable means stable, be it server or desktop. Testing and Unstable are aptly named by Debian, and that's where you should expect issues to arise.
Autism ascribed to parents talent for system-oriented thinking
Man robbed bank for $1 just to get health care
"Alternative" approaches are measurably more effective than drugs or surgery
I suppose you know about http://www.google.com/ncr ? It works some of the time.

Some of the time it doesn't, e.g. now when Google has custom logos I'll get a search term in Dutch (I'm in The Netherlands) when I click on it, even though I'm using google.com in English when doing so.
I'd suspect that rsync's security advantage is more related to their obscurity than their superiority. My personal site has not been compromised by LulzSec or Anonymous, for instance, but that's simply because I haven't attracted the attention. I'm sure my Wordpress, FTP or hosting passwords could be discovered by some attack.
It's bizarre that they're trying to spin this as pro-taxi-driver. I can't tell if they really believe taxi drivers would be happy with them for doing this, or if they're just cynically positioning themselves as "for the people" to erode public support for the union (or score PR points from public disdain for the union, I guess).
It's not not an issue just because it doesn't apply to you.

If you want to understand where I am coming from then this is why I think it's an issue

http://000fff.org/slaves-of-the-feed-this-is-not-the-realtim...
A couple of useful resources related to the Heroku Dyno:

http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/how-much-memory-does-a-...

http://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-isolation
I think silo formation is pretty much "how business operates" when it's not forced to be super efficient. It benefits certain types of middle management (who are interested in fiefdom building), and allows for "metrics" so that "workforce improvement" can be sold upwards to incompetent or distracted upper management.

Generalists are also hard to hire and manage (it takes another generalist to detect bullshit... and there's always the tendency for the manager to hire folks less talented than him/her self).

I say this from years as a specialist (software) now doing more generalist work... the only thing I don't like is that I get less stuff done on any given angle, but I do get to look at (and own) the whole picture now.
because then everyone would be sentenced to death, and that is ridiculous.
I think we can be confident that Google will "Do the right thing" - they aren't blindly following a "Drop Support for versionX when versionCurrent = versionX+2"

I'm reasonably certain by that by "Two Major Versions" they are referring to "Versions that alter how the platform interacts with the Web." - So, as long as FF 5 and FF 6 behave reasonably similarly, they'll be treated as the same major version, and Google will support FF4 and FF5/6.

Or, it may be the case, after some review, that FF4/FF5/FF6 will all be treated as the same major version, and official support on August, 2011 will be for FF3.6 and FF4/5/6. Time will tell.
Minecraft Python Scripts
>I could go on for long, I appreciate the intent, but all you need to know is that Microsoft gave up on using C# everywhere because it's damn too slow.

As a data point, a friend of mine works for Microsoft on one of the Blend products. He's using C# for at least some of his work.
List of Javascript Libraries or Tools?
A little over a week ago, someone posted a link to a list of javascript tools/modules/libraries that were most popular. Me being new to javascript wanted to save this list, but now cannot find it. Additionally, are there any other types of lists or sites that rank popularity of javascript libraries?
Why would you want to force the user to read the page first?, if a user is specifically searching for something, why first read the page.
It's not true that "you may not own the copyright to changes you make ... because the court may rule it a derivative work." You may not be able to distribute those changes without violating someone else's copyright, but that doesn't affect the fact that you own the copyright to your own work.

Consider what would happen in your FanFic case if Sony tried to incorporate the kid's changes into EverQuest. The kid could sue them for infringement.
If someone prefers to search Google without personalization, add "&pws=0" (the "pws" stands for "personalized web search")

"Append a cryptic query param" is a terrible user interface, and it's a little silly to suggest this as a solution. Make it an option real people can discover and use.

when it launched

Just curious, why add this qualification? Is it significantly different now?

the impact was on the order of one search result above the fold for one in five search results.

That statistic needs a little clarifying. Query terms frequency follows a power law distribution, doesn't it? So if you're counting each individual term, the fact that 1 in 20 have altered results could very easily still mean a majority of actual searches are altered. And depending on how you calculated the 'one search result above the fold' number, it could very easily still mean that when a page is altered, it's altered significantly.

More interesting would be knowing these stats for just the fat head of the query term distribution.
Because I've seen plenty of people try that (myself included) and it's rarely worked as planned. If you've got an interesting idea that you genuinely I think being tied up doing something else for 8 hours a day is just an excuse. You can either fit it in to your down time, or quit completely and be truly motivated to get it done.

Instead I opted to have a long weekend every week, and spend my days doing something I enjoyed for people I liked for an amount of money that let me live a still very comfortable lifestyle in what is reportedly one of the most expensive cities in the world. I've still got a tonne of time to do interesting work, and a family that is happy I'm not coming home complaining about "the office".
To me it seems Microsoft needs to take a leaf from Google's book and incorporate the automagical browser updating. IE, sadly, has always controlled the browser market because if comes prepackaged and most users are novice and oblivious to updating and system requirements. Sure people will say they are copying Google, but in doing this, they might finally be able to keep up with web standards as they are released instead of supporting new standards 2 years after everyone else does creating this entire version fiasco to begin with.
They are pretty open about the fact most fares are around 2x that of a normal taxi.
The killer feature of codeplane is cheap shared private git repositories. If you are the only person using your git repo, there is no reason you wouldn't store your remote on some random webhost (you can do this at http://nearlyfreespeech.net for essentially free).

If you want to collaborate with this setup, you would need to create a system-level account for every collaborator on your VPS (ugly) or install something like gitolite (https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite).

The downside to gitolite is then you are running your own VPS, i.e. are responsible for security, updates, config, etc. It seems codeplane takes care of all the nonsense for you so you can get on with your real project.

As someone who had to set up gitolite because of this exact need, I can attest to the need for a service like codeplane.
Maybe some companies prefer 100 mediocre employees working together in perfect harmony over just a few superstars.

The problem this article doesn't address is that it is REALLY HARD to get 100 programmers (or workers in any profession really) to work in perfect harmony towards a goal. The underlying problem is that engineering doesn't scale well. If you already have 10,000 engineers, hiring another 10,000 will not make you twice as productive, but hiring a handful of very good programmers might.

I do agree however that some talent acquisitions are more outrageous than others.

As a startup I'd prefer having 100 mediocre programmers instead of only one superstar, but it is harder to get 100 mediocre people to work in perfect harmony than to pay a superstar millions of dollars. More people introduce more overhead and are likely not to work together in perfect harmony. One person works
In his postscript the author explains that he wasn't trying to criticize design patterns, but was rather trying to promote this other concept; which, supposedly, is little known in CS circles because of the similar names...

His summary: "We need to take a fresh look at Christopher Alexander."

That's all well and good, and as far as I know the concept of pattern languages could be very useful; I wouldn't know, I've never heard of it till today, and in fact still have no idea what it's about. Which brings me to my point, which is to wonder why the author chose to waste an entire 5 minute and 13 slide presentation (5 of which were dedicated just to bashing design patterns) to making the point that "we need to take a fresh look at Christopher Alexander," instead of, say, spending more time introducing Alexander's ideas and presenting ways they could be useful in our domain.

I will conclude by pointing out another pet peeve of mine, which is sensationalist titles only tangentially related to the content. Design pattern, most certainly, ARE. What they are NOT is pattern languages, which is a similar sounding but entirely different concept.

</ grumpy geezer mode>
great demo at democamp in toronto!
'Raw Talent' isn't the kind of distinction one can simply bestow upon oneself.
AGI and the Emerging Peer-to-Peer Economy
> I think we can be confident that Google will "Do the right thing"'

Well, hopefully. But they've officially announced the dropping of support, so I have to wonder.

> I'm reasonably certain by that by "Two Major Versions" they are referring to "Versions that alter how the platform interacts with the Web."

That might be. But that makes me wonder about FF. Apparently the changes from 3.5 to 3.6 are more significant than those from 4 to 6. What's the deal with that?
The top ten paid apps in App Store currently are:

1. Spider-Man Total Mayhem HD (3D ACT)

2. Ultimate Mortal Combat 3 for iPad (3D Fighting)

3. Splashtop Remote Desktop for iPad (Remote Desktop)

4. Angry Bird Rio HD

5. Pages

6. Angry Bird HD

7. Words with Friends HD

8. GarageBand

9. Gangstar: Miami Vindication HD (3D ACT)

10. Real Racing 2 HD (3D Racing)

Only 4,6,7 fit your discription and for now the Chrome Store port of Angry Bird performs rather poorly on a duo core Atom system. And the facebook version of Scrabble doesn't compare to the iPad version.

I think your experience is not very typical.
A web browser isn't akin to plumbing, rather it would be closer to a fixture. And I do understand why folks would want to update their fixtures often.
SOYEZ VISIBLE SUR INTERNET