skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before You Make That Big Decision...
Digging into Technology's Past
With respect, I think this is the same innovation that occurs in every industry and it's silly to bemoan the increasing complexity of the web.

In transportation:

It used to be that everyone could buy a horse and build a buggy and get around. Then cars came along and it got a lot more complicated and expensive to build a vehicle that was state-of-the-art, but tinkerers could still do it.

Now there are only a few big players who are capable of innovating and building the best and newest vehicles.

Now that I think about it though, there is still space for tinkerers and inventors in the automobile space. But You can't expect those automobiles to compete with those made by, e.g., Toyota.

In the same way, it's still possible to write a spider without a javascript renderer. It just won't be able to compete with Google.

One last point: the state of the web is based on the collective decisions of all internet users. Ultimately, people building things on the web decided more often than not that ajax-ifying things benefited their users.

If users had wanted a web client that would spider the web and shop for them, they would have latched onto it during the time of great innovation that you think is now gone. But they didn't. The things that users wanted are the things we see today, assuming that there isn't some horrible inefficiency in the feedback loop between web-builders and their users.
Ah yes, someone definitely posted it before me. I did read the entire thread, by the way; I just missed that link at the end of the long post.
If anyone has a skeleton the first action is to announce it yourself so that MA assholes do not get any power..
And how many of those are active?
Japan's Supercomputer 'K' Is World's Most Powerful
Arrington sounds like a real treat.
The (anecdotal) issue seems to be lots of Americans not working intelligently. There's a lot of proverbial paper-pushing going on, and I have seen quite a lot of it. But, proportionally there's not equal value being created.

Provocatively, I think it has to do with the culture of cheaters that we've created. I noticed it back in the early 90s, in college. There were many more people trying to game the system than taking an intellectually honest approach to curiosity and learning. And, it feels like it's spilled over into the corporate world. There seems to be a surplus of people trying to act like they're working or creating extra work for others - it's an image culture. I truly believe the managers who are always looking for fires to put out mean well. But, the rush that they feel from hammering away at the all-night proposal and the following 70-hour workweek is just that, a rush. But, it's one of those memes that catches, because the image of the 'hard-worker' generally gets one raise. And, the boss tends to hire like themselves. But, I don't see real data correlation.

I piss off a lot of people with my lackadaisical attitude at work, yes. But, I'm of the mind of focusing on the small little bits that provide the largest gains. I could care less about 80% of the other work, and I usually let it slide, because, in my mind it's better to go for the paradigm shifts, not worry about Bob's 1 PM status meeting.
Two years ago: 'There really isn't much of a "smartphone" market'. See the difference?
Yes, the experience last week raised a few red flags for me. I thought I knew him and his working style, but I guess I was wrong.

Thanks for the feedback.
Uber drops fares for SF Taxi strike
I would blame poor/lazy devs inappropriately using JS rather than the evolution of the browser for this. For the average web page, it's unnecessary 90% of the time to require JavaScript for any core functionality ( not so much with web applications ). I have a hard time understanding why people do this as it's often much easier to test and develop when you're layering on JS unobtrusively.
Apple Planning Black MacBook Air, Report
Survey: 52% of consumers are overwhelmed by daily deal emails
An Exercise In Fear: Why We Care About A Bunch Of 15 Year Old Retards
He can't show where you are wrong because you aren't. You aren't because your argument consists of an anecdote of a personal experience.
First offense hackers must spend exactly 36 hours in a room with a monitor (outside the room?) which is shadowing a really bad outsourcing intern attempting to write a ruby implementation of filtering a log file, except they really suck and a 3 line code turns into over 7000. He is also played a commentary of the person trying to figure out how to filter this particular piece of text, performance woes, etc.

The hacker would be screaming "just use [^\)] omg what are you doing" but to no avail, the screams would fall on deaf ears.

At the end of the 36 hrs they are asked to spend 15 minutes to fix the problem in the code and just get it working and be released or spend another 36 hrs. This will ensure the person paid attention. Also they cannot rewrite it. just fix it damnit.
HP's TouchPad: Dead on Arrival
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/FYIFV
In reality, the FBI spends more resources on anti-terrorism (per incident) than anything else.
My problem with Dropbox was when I had to share a repo with someone. How to do that? I created a shared folder. And then it becomes really hard to manage all this stuff. For 1-person usage, Dropbox works really great.
Depends on where you work. Banks and financial institutions have notoriously slow upgrade paths in IT.
Chunky Monkey: Minecraft multiplayer server written in Go
This is excellent news. I think those who don't really understand the importance of upgrading will finally see the light when a company like Google encourages, nay, forces it. This is a great day, especially for app developers.
Good question, I have at least 12 of about 20 friends who have installed the application, tried it once and said "not for me."

edit(typo)
It depends on the difficulty and complexity of the problem that the person is hired to solve. I wouldn't want an 'average' engineer designing a multi-billion dollar company's backup infrastructure if by average we mean someone who doesn't bother to learn a lot about their field.
"If you were launching a technology or developing a product, would you rather have five great engineers rather than 1,000 average engineers?"

The 5, in a heart-beat. If you were painting a mural on the ceiling of a large structure that you want to be admired for generations to come- do you hire 5 brilliant painters or 1000 average painters? Even happily ignoring the exponential communication overhead that diminishes returns significantly as he does in the original article, there are leaps of imagination that a small brilliant team are more likely to make than any-sized average team.

Edit: Also, his case examples are not coding related. Obviously a non-software-technologist not knowing or understanding the unique background behind the comments in the context of software development and, particularly, software startups. 100x productivity is of course a generalization and has received valid criticism, but examples from sports and trading are irrelevant.
I thought of that as well, but the reach of the idea goes a long way past DSLs. It definitely applies to programming language construction in general and to almost anything you can do with computers.

Find the right abstractions that gives you the right amount of details while at the same time give you the tools to scale your reasoning about a problem, and you can move mountains. Find the wrong balance, and you will end up with a cluttery hell that is impossible to maintain or a blunt tool that doesn't do anything well.
There are a lot of hacker types, myself and many friends included, for which "why not" is the reason we learn most of the things we do.

It's partly linked to intellectual curiosity, and on the other hand partly linked to how we procrastinate/stave off boredom: learning random things.
Just my two cents: I think the ideal functionality of tablets is relatively obvious. It's "how I use my laptop when I'm not in work mode". "Work mode" is when I'm at my desk and creating documents, spreadsheets and writing code. Non-work mode is when I'm on the couch, watching television and I want some electronic entertainment for 3-4 minutes while the television displays advertisements. I'm in non-work mode while at a coffee shop too. What I do there is email, instant messaging and web surfing. My assertion is that tablets just replace the non-work activities on your laptop. At least that's how it's played out for me. In the past I've watching flash videos and read news on my laptop. Now that I have an iPad I just do all the entertainment stuff there.
I'd take 5 rockstars supported by 1000 average devs. You need the rockstars to do some of the heavy algorithmic / visionary lifting and the 1000 people to make sure that the software is well tested, well documented, very well polished, etc. And also, you need the 5 rockstars to support the 1000 average devs by getting them past hurdles, etc. And you need a little bit of management in between to ensure the average guys aren't dissapointed by the salary differences, and the rockstars aren't frustrated by how long it takes to polish.

At Facebook it's probably worth it to get those few rockstars so they can make a drastic impact on the average guys. It's probably even worth it to give them $4 million a piece.
I don't mind that it's trivial if it saves me from doing some tedious stuff, but after reading the code it's unusable the way it's written right now.

Some of the things that need to change are:

1) DOM selectors must be defined by user, not the plugin itself.

2) Needs to actually work on more than just Webkit based browsers.

3) Don't use $(document).ready() in the plugin, find another way or design the API differently.
I read this article and cringed. After 30+ years of building software products and organizations I am 100% with Zuckerberg on this. A really great engineer or designer is far more valuable than dozens of average ones.

Of course, an organization must have the culture to support such super-stars.

Which is where the focus of our discussions and energy should be as leaders. Not on the super-stars, but creating the atmosphere in which super-stars can excel.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2675668
What kind of resources are allocated to each dyno? Could you, say, run a Solr server from a worker dyno? What about some other custom service that uses a lot of memory? Are they hard or soft limits? This sounds really cool, but it doesn't really tell you much about what this is suited for; especially given how easy it is to devour memory in Ruby.
Actually the bigger event around it was the Black Friday in 1992: The Bank of England was hoping/pretending that the pound would stay strong against the FRG Mark, whereas Soros lent a massive amount of pound to other people. When the pound finally devalued, he could fulfill the lendings (at the cheaper pound price). The Swedish currency took similar damage.

Basically, governments trying to stabilize their currency are in danger of losses whenever they meet someone with even deeper pockets. In contrast, the Japanese government could out-trade Soros in the crash in 1987 and Soros had to pocket substantial losses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_policy_of_Sweden#1992
These are just registered accounts. Everyone has a few million these days :) It'd be interesting to know:

1. How many are duplicates.

2. How many are active.

3. How many are truly active, i.e. are not kept just because one is too lazy to deactivate it.
I think the criticism here on GoF is misdirected.

As far as I'm concerned, GoF is (or at least should be treated as) a taxonomy, not a cookbook.

The fact that people use it as a cookbook is not necessarily the fault of the authors.
> helped out on the sales side ... more minor role

These comments make me think that the company already has revenues of some kind and also that you're not the only two people working there. Is that the case?
Trick question, right? The difference is that the smartphone market was well-established with models from Symbian, Palm, Windows and BlackBerry. Oh, and that two years ago nobody said "there isn't a smartphone market".
I echo the comments others have made about the wide range of improvements offered by modern browsers. But even putting that aside, the rendering capabilities you refer to make a bigger difference to web users than you might think.

You say "I don't think having more pixel-perfect control or slightly faster JavaScript makes the web any better." But--no disrespect--you probably only feel that way because you're already benefitting from the huge amounts of effort invested in supporting multiple, incompatible browsers. The web looks OK for you now because, without you noticing it, web developers have slaved to make it look OK for your unique combination of OS and browser.

It may seem like that's just a cost we web developers have to bear, with little effect on you. But that's not so. The fact that we have to spend time supporting old browsers increases the cost of everything that's created on the web. And when innovation is more expensive, it happens more slowly. The costs imposed on our industry by older browsers do effect ordinary web users, because those costs translate into a slower pace of innovation.
One interesting morsel of info also came to light. ICBC; the BC crown corporation that issues drivers licenses has come forward and offered its photos database and facial recognition technology to the Vancouver Police. Allowing them to ID the people in these 1 million photos if they have a BC drivers license or BC ID. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/06...

As someone who lives in BC, I like the idea of getting these vandals, but it is also a little scary to have a tool like this. One of the first cases I've ever heard of.
Comparing the rosters of two professional basketball teams is not comparing superstars to average players. It's comparing superstars to superstars.

The situation in programming is more akin to comparing the Miami Heat's roster to that of a mediocre college team.
I haven't, but I'm not looking at what he says.

I'm looking at what appears to be the author of these slides, taking a very strong point about something about which he demonstrates little knowledge. No, the GoF stuff isn't the same as what (it seems like) Alexander is saying. That doesn't make it wrong, and it doesn't mean this author isn't misrepresenting the GoF in the linked work.

The GoF, are not the Design Pattern Police, demanding that you tack Strategy and Command and Memento objects everywhere. It's observational material based on seeing many people reinvent essentially the same wheel over and over again.
Interviews have a high but unknown false-negative rate. Don't take it personally, and don't treat this like a video game or college admissions process. If you take a few years working somewhere else, that's perfectly fine. Maybe you'll discover something or somewhere else that's even better than what you imagine Google to be like.
I definitely understand the cabbies' concerns about prices, but this is huge for Uber. As the cabbies seek to shorten the gap between taxi prices and Uber prices and shut down for an entire day, Uber swoops in with a huge customer acquisition push. This won't be the death of the cabs, but I'll love to see how Uber makes out on the deal.
>Their near-monopoly is on good industrial and UI design.

I'm not convinced that this is an absolute bad thing, because this isn't a problem with Apple. It's a problem with their competitors. Like you mentioned earlier in the post, Apple is pretty much the only smartphone and tablet manufacturer that considers UI and UX as the absolute most important part of the device. For the most part, there isn't that much of a learning curve for using their devices. They just work.

Is this something that Google, MS, or any other competitor can do? Absolutely. MS made some pretty significant moves in that direction with Windows 7 Mobile. Google has added many features in Android that I would love to see in iOS.

Google seems focused more in innovative features, which means that Android will probably always stay ahead of iOS in terms of OS features. Unfortunately, Google's drive to get it out first may hurt them in terms of UX, because Apple will take the core concept, refine the hell out of it, and then add it to iOS only when it is as polished as the rest of their features.
A big part of usability is not sitting around waiting for entire pages to reload every time you interact with them. AJAX has done great things for users by minimizing this delay. You wouldn't like Google Maps as much if you had to click an arrow and wait for a page refresh for the map to move, like MapQuest circa 2003.

Yes, the proliferation of web apps has created a diversity of user interface paradigms. Some would say this is a good thing, however, since the web has spurred all kinds of new UI philosophies, and the fact that JavaScript and HTML isn't compiled allows people to examine and re-work others' code, so good ideas spread very quickly. I for one don't intend on waiting for the HTML5 group to invent every new <input type=""> that I could conceivably need, and then wait some more for browser vendors to implement them all consistently. With JavaScript, you can currently build and deploy just about any kind of 2D client-side interaction imaginable.

In short, the vast majority of users on the internet probably have a different idea of usability than yours, and the numbers tell the rest of that story. You only need to look at the gross casserole of UI paradigms within the applications installed on your mom's PC to see how much users really care about UI standardization.
Although I have never failed a work term myself (and so cannot speak from direct experience), some of my friends have. It definitely has a major impact when searching for co-op positions. Since this is your first work term, I think it would be especially hard. You don't have the high-level courses to back up your credentials (although you are probably very bright), so future employers would look at your past co-op job performances. In most of my coop interviews, the emphasis is placed on prior job performance than on marks.

Down the road, if you decide to apply to some top-tier companies, remember that you may be tied for 1st place with another student and the failed work term will put him/her over you. I can't stress the importance of not having a failed work term. The truth is that co-op employers have heard students bullshit a lot, so even if you speak the truth, they will assume that you could not handle the rigors of your first work placement.

If I were in your position, I would try my best for 2 weeks to resolve the situation at work by talking to the appropriate people. If that doesn't work, I would take things into my own hands and work on what interests me at work. A caveat: If your employer gives you stuff to work on that you don't like, but that was clearly on the job description, you should do it.
Most consumers don't care about negative liberty, they care about positive liberty.

You want people to have more freedom? Build a better phone than an iPhone with a more convenient platform to get software and media with better support, better stores to buy them in, etc.
Does this mean if I'm running Google Chrome 10 I won't work with Google Apps?

I notice there is a lack of effective major version numbering in Google. When does Google stop supporting it's own browser?

It'd also be interesting to see what they intend to do about mobile browsers. How long will an old OpenWave XHTML browser be supported? How long will an Android 1.5 browser?
How is this superior to jplayer (http://www.jplayer.org/) ? Jplayer is implemented in HTML5, but has a fall-back flash implementation for backwards compatibility, and like this is open-source (GPL/MIT).
Agreed. The GoF's stuff is descriptive, not prescriptive. You'll always get the occasional zealots going "no no, you must slather your code in Servants and Visitors", but...they're not the GoF, and who cares what they say?
Would you please be so kind and explain in some more detail what you mean? Thank you!
Filtrete Touchscreen WiFi-Enabled Programmable Thermostat
You're essentially saying we should halt all progress in web design because it will make some programming things harder for you as an individual.

That's not what the web is and that is not the web environment that I want.
That's what my friends and I did. I had a couple of check-ins and thought, "what's the point of this?"
If you're like me you bought 1-2 daily deals early on, and then never went back to using Groupon or daily deal sites. Do they publish any financial information on repeat purchases? I haven't been able to find it...
Man mines for gold and diamonds in cracks of Manhattan sidewalks
I used to scoff at the idea of the super-developer who is orders of magnitude more productive than anyone else. Mostly it was me protecting my own self-esteem.

Then I met one and actually had to re-assess my ability as a developer, not just as to how good I am now but how good I'm _ever going to be_. I've now come to terms with my fate.

While I will put a lot of hard work into being as technically thorough, well-read and well-practiced as I possibly can, I no longer compare myself to these ultra-productive developers who can walk into a dev team and pick up more domain knowledge than I did in a year in a couple of months.
I've "learned" Objective-C, but I would not call it easy. Moreover, it's not just the language, but the entire toolchain: neither XCode nor Cocoa are intuitive to new developers, whether they have experience in other platforms or not. IMHO, it fails the first half of "easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible".

Personally, I've gone the HTML5 route, both to leverage what I already know, and to maximize compatibility with as many platforms as possible. Though I can't do everything Cocoa can do, I can still do quite a lot, while still paying deep attention to the little touches of user experience. I don't blame Flash/Flex devs for wanting to do the same with their existing skills; time will tell how those toolsets fare in practice regarding UX and performance.
Hm. In spirit, what you're doing seems fine (as you are quoting the same price either way). However, when it actually comes down to giving them an invoice with inflated hours, that is completely unethical. Definitely a tough one. The unfortunate thing about billing for extra hours is that it makes you seem slow. It does sound like you've had enough experience to know how long a job will take so perhaps you could give quotes for the entire project without an hourly rate.
Ask HN: Do you waste food? Try Food Tracker.
I have an idea and wanted to get feedback from Hacker News readers:

Food Tracker is a web and mobile application that keeps track of food in your fridge and pantry. Whether it's veggies or milk, Food Tracker intelligently creates meal plans, monitors expiration dates, and makes shopping and recipe suggestions based on the ingredients you have (and not what you don't have).

Interested to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
The gap between exceptional developers and average developers was proven in some planned experiments, as described in Peopleware.

This article, on the other hand, contains lots of philosophy, imagining and wishful thinkings - but not an ounce of proof.

The only fact is about analysts - not developers. The financial field does not make a good comparison - random chance plays a much bigger role in wall-street than in software development.

I recall reading in "Random Walk Down Wall-Street" that it has been shown that even the best managed funds don't do better than well-diversified random stock selection. Taking the high impact of chance in the investment sector into account, if someone was a star analyst at one place, it is likely that he'll perform worse at his next assignment due to regression to mean.