skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, it's not the only reason (being able to fork anyone's code, fix the bug, re-release and ask them to pull is a godsend), but I always dreaded visiting SourceForge.
I'll put in another plug for Robotics and Intelligent Machines @ Georgia Tech; that's where I am now.

http://robotics.gatech.edu/
Yes, but that doesn't give us much of an advantage. Most of the companies we sell to are monolithic organizations that are very set in their ways, despite knowing through-and-through that they have serious deficiencies in their workforce and that computer-based training simulations like ours are extremely effective. They cry to the heavens about their need for fundamentally better training, but it's hard to get them to adopt anything new or unfamiliar.

I imagine it is in some ways similar to the experience of B2B venders working at the mega-enterprize level, except in our case we're dealing with organizations that are almost universally resistant to computers themselves, in addition to the usual bureaucracy. Fascinating market, really fundamentally different than the other markets I've worked in, both in terms of development and business constraints.
The amount learned is not something which I would use to evaluate clients - some of the most valuable lessons are learned the hard way from really bad clients. A more meaningful related concept is how does a particular client lead you to additional projects.

The element which is missing is cash flow - it is touched on by several of the other elements but given that your business will fold if it runs out of cash it is really the most important metric of customer value. What matters most is how fast does the client put cash in your hand - if you can cover your needs for two months by working 150 hours in two weeks, then you have a lot of time to chase other work even if your effective rate is low and the size of the billing unimpressive. On the other hand, a huge project with a high rate of pay can kill you with lots of delays and slow payment if you wind up with no other work during a downtime.
That was my first thought as well. However, I like Hulu's viewing page, so I'm glad YouTube is taking after it (or seems to be, anyway). It's a much less distracting screen than the current YT page is, since all of the suggested videos and commends and whatnot are below the video, possibly even off-screen, instead off directly to the right of whatever you're trying to watch.
I am not invested into any lighting companies either. Maybe I should be, I am sure they stand to make a fortune on mandated fancy technologies. I am not sure why you think I advocate CFLs. I advocate letting people keep using incandescent bulbs, since they are the best residential lighting technology available, and will be for a long time. They are also very environmentally friendly, once you account for their use of only the simplest materials and manufacturing techniques. And you don't need to put up new factories.

LEDs are a very expensive technology. People in this thread are getting sticker shock from the $20 LED light bulb. I am shocked that they claim to sell it for this little. IMO they will quickly go bust. $20 is roughly the price of all those LEDs in quantity, unless I am guessing wrong about what they use, and they also need a powerful and compact control system to step down from 120 volts and control the LEDs, plus the liquid cooling tubes, plus all the manufacturing to get the LEDs and electronics in that package. Put this kind of technology in a flashlight, and it's going to be a $400 flashlight at retail very easily. And you don't get Moore's law to make it all cheap in a couple of years; these are power electronics, you can't just shrink them to 22nm.

All this, and the consumer state-of-the-art in white LEDs is a fairly nasty blue LED with a yellow phosphor to add some longer wavelengths and make it look kind of white. This is what Switch uses, and it's not a good light for homes. Even fancier and better stuff is on the way, but it's ridiculous to force people to go that kind of expense to get something which is still not as good as what they have. And don't get me started on the failure modes of LEDs - they don't burn out like light bulbs, but they grow dimmer and shift their color quite noticeably, and the electronics can start to buzz or flicker or, better yet, burn.
When I created a SF project some years ago, it required approval from some mysterious and unknown administrator. That process took a week, and during that time I didn't have access to the resources I needed (version control, mailing list, issue tracker, etc.) to get my project off the ground.

Things may have changed since, but I wouldn't know because I never came back.
I personally suspect that some of the confidence garnered on the word processor might have been because it was more of an appliance, and didn't have a persistant state? When powered on, it was set to work on a specific task already, everything to interact with to change functions or settings, would be reset if you pulled the plug, or switched it off.
Yeah, but his point is that something totally, completely new, like say, a direct brain interface, is going to be so radically different that he'll have a hard time becoming acquainted with it given his existing experience.

In my interactions with older relatives, the thing I find that they have the biggest problem with is that they don't try to explore how the computer behaves because the are afraid of breaking something.

So, personally, I think that Apple should advertise it's guest mode for OS X additionally as a "Learn New Things" mode where they very clearly explain that any changes they make are not going to be permanent and that by shutting off the computer, everything can go back to normal (maybe create a simulated web as well). Then there could be a series of tutorial on making significant, (normally) permanent changes to the computer's behavior.
We have this blog, but it's all domain-specific knowledge offered as a loss-leader for the benefit of our prospective customers: http://www.carldyke.com/newsletters-that-teach

We don't have any sort of outlet for our experiences as developers in this market / with this audience. If we ever start one, I'll be sure to post about it here on HN.
It's completely reasonable to generate SIMD code based on idiomatic uses of arrays, without requiring the programmer to use a special purpose vector notation. It's also reasonable to do this in a JIT.
>which I would hope would take the form of email backed by GMail,

That's exactly how their one-on-one messaging works. They have google talk but if you go to a user's profile, the message button is really an email button.
Out of curiosity, what is the excellent reference for Javascript.

When I was first learning it (4 years ago), I ran into a lot of trouble.

Python has Python.org and documentation in reams. C++ has cplusplus.com, C# has MSDN, PHP has php.net, and so on.

In comparison, W3 schools seems very poorly laid out and not very structured.
You're missing the point. This was not an opinion piece; it's just a description of what the author encountered while working in India.

Any opinion you attribute to the author is most likely something you are imagining based on your own opinions.
I think the ideal microwave would have 2 buttons: one for start and the other for switching between microwave and defrost. The start button would give you 30 second increments of time. What more do you need?
> SourceForge has a ton of projects still.

That may be true, but I suspect that many, if not most, new projects aren't created on SourceForge anymore.

Most statistics are lies, of course, but Github currently has 2M repositories (including forks), as compared to Sourceforge's 300K projects. Seeing as how SF is over ten years old and Github was launched in 2008, that says to me that Github's where the real action is now.
The shuttle mission, which was to provide a safe, reusable, cheap spaceflight platform, failed on two of the three goals. It was reusable, but not cheap, and not safe. We need a better LEO platform, not more shuttle missions.
I believe Google have honest reasons to limit invites right now. That's understandable.

From a public relations POV though it's very poorly handled. A better, fairer way would be to give each new member 1 or 2 invites, not hundreds or thousands, and ensure those invites work. I've sent invites out to friends and family a week ago and none are working, so they shrug and go back to Facebook - G+ has become last week's wonder.

Most annoying is the continual "invites open now!" posts popping up here and there - and you know that they won't work for you.

Technical issues or not Google could have and should have had a fair and transparent invite system in place.
whats the availability of this for open source? it would be fun to hack with
> You have no idea what those intermediary components were, who set them up, and if they were all decoding/reencoding correctly.

...That's kind of the point. There was someone being sloppy there.
I hate to make such a pointless comment, but that was pretty awesome.
I've heard that with some of these ATMs, if you enter an invalid PIN too many times, it'll kick you out and eat the card. I've never tried this, personally.
Sourceforge looks like one of those shady download sites that's either going to load up your computer with spyware, or one that will have the audacity to charge for "download access" for open-source software.

The design has gone from merely bad to worryingly ugly. The info screen shown in the example is the pinnacle of bad design, where it's all spaced out, no consideration for the content given at all, in an offensively generic style that fits in too well with every content spam site I've ever seen.

The sooner they just shut the site down, the better in my opinion. I actively despise it because of how every change they make seems to make it even less useful, more ugly, or more obnoxious to use.
Am I the only one seeing incredible slowdowns in this version when running screen? It’s really fast when you don’t run screen, but running, for example, ls in a moderately populated directory, through screen on iTerm is deadly slow.
Having worked at sf.net for a few years as github was gaining ascendancy, I would say that we thought about this a lot. And while a lot of the things that he says are true, they're symptoms of why sf.net lost, not the real reason.

The real reason why sf.net lost was much more fundamental than that. Really it was so fundamental that it was a business problem rather than a technology problem. As a company, management just wasn't that interested in competing, and therefore we didn't have the institutional ability to focus on competing with some of the things github did.

I am proud to say that it looks like sf.net finally has a fork button, though, and it also looks (from the outside) like there's some focus on delivering developer oriented features now on sf.net, so that's a positive thing.

The engineering and ops team that's over there is awesome and has great open source pedigrees, and has always been super interested in working on things that would make open source development better and easier, but really has been hampered from doing that for years by more basic business issues. I think things might finally be turning around for them, though.
How did the "artist" get the photos off the webcam?
It's not that Github's CSS is better, or their graphics are better, but that their design is better, and design encompasses everything, top to bottom. Most things on Github feel effortless, and even the tricky things are far from frustrating. This is evidence that they care, and that care shows in that the graphics and CSS are very well done.

Good design doesn't start with appearance, it ends with it.
That last point is my primary complaint about these systems. While yes, this is actually a quite reasonable series of warnings (the first four carry no penalties at all), it still bothers me that there is no real proof behind any of this. As far as I know, all the content owners have to say to the ISP is that such-and-such IP was uploading our content X, and then the warnings begin. There's no first- or third-party fact-checking (which, I admit, would be quite difficult with torrents anyway), it is, as you say, "hearsay." I'm not quite sure why, but the RIAA and other organizations now carry as much weight as our government regarding our internet access (can the state even shut down a customer's access at all? I have no idea, but if it can't, that's even worse).
My first thought was of Steve Case (AOL CEO), who said something similar in 1998-2000.

(1) http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1998/... (couldnt find an exact quote though)
Just remind myself that it's to be expected, entirely outside my control, and absolutely will pass. Don't panic.
You know as much as I hate these terms, I think nothing captures the undeniable yet intangible difference between SourceForge and GitHub as Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0.

For the younger members here I think it's hard to imagine just how freaking cool SourceForge was when it first came out. The idea of free, featureful project hosting was amazing. Back in the 90s, even if you had free hosting, there wasn't the selection of easy-to-install FOSS web software that we take for granted today. It's sort of like how cool Slashdot was in a world of Usenet and BBSes. Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo. It's easy to forget how impressive Web 1.0 was for its time.

GitHub by contast came out of the Web 2.0 era where we had solid CSS, solid JS/AJAX, solid web frameworks, and a lot of hard-earned knowledge of UX design, and perhaps more importantly the browser technology to support it. I think the article makes a good distinction between code hosting and project hosting, and no doubt that makes GitHub's job easier, but it's not the whole story. GitHub is the result of a holistic vision that goes from the metal up to the UI and design bits. In the early days of the web putting together a team to do something like that was well-nigh impossible. With the ubiquity of the web today, the new generation of web folks can much more easily pick up both the technical and design skills to create the kind of amazing UX experience that sets GitHub apart from SourceForge.
Well, it could have been worse. They could have shown \'
The company responsible seems to have responded in the comments:

"It was definitely a mistake on our part. The problem was not the encoding on our data feed, but the HTML document was sent with ISO-8859-1. The second we inserted the twitter text into the DOM, the browsers interpreted the UTF-8 string as ISO-8859-1. Our visualizations are hosted on other platforms, and in this case the server was not configured to send UTF-8 with text/html even though the HTML file was encoded as such. It was the only issue (albeit a pretty obvious one) during an otherwise flawless event. I apologize to President Obama, Speaker Boehner, and Jack Dorsey for the mistake. If the readers of the blog think it was stupid, imagine how we felt. dev environment != production environment. If we would have just included a <meta charset="utf-8"> in the HTML head, then this would not have occurred.

The big take away is don’t make assumptions about other platforms (especially when it comes to encoding), and always include charset meta tag." [emphasis mine]
I would personally blame Wordpress for substituting a common apostrophe ' as the left ‘ and right quote ’ respectfully. Same with quotation marks “ and ” instead of the traditional ".

There is an option to not use "Smart Quotes", but it seems to be enabled by default.
> Heaven forbid that they used the mailing list feature.

Or the bug tracker. Ulch!
"If you’ve already identified that your goal is not to work for soulless companies, you need to start working for startups."

This is a false choice. It assumes that most established companies have no "soul", but that most startups do. This is simply not true.

"Crucially, the biggest advantage of working lower down the spectrum is that mistakes don’t stick with you. In general, mistakes don’t typically stick with you, but the further up the spectrum you go, the tighter knit the community. Make a mistake at the bottom of the spectrum, and there’s enough people making mistakes that it’s unlikely your mistakes will give you a bad reputation. On the other hand, screw up a company with $41mm in funding, and those mistakes are more likely to follow you."

Obviously, there are good mistakes and bad mistakes, but in general, making career decisions based on where your mistakes will go unnoticed is a path to mediocrity, or worse.

Anyone interested in progressing as a professional should think twice about working at a company where major mistakes are of no consequence. It's hard to improve yourself if you're surrounded by incompetence, and if mistakes made out of ineptitude or negligence have no impact on your reputation, chances are you're not working on anything that matters.
Installing spyware on the computers at the apple store. This is a very one-sided and dishonest blogpost since they leave out a lot of information.

http://mashable.com/2011/07/07/secret-service-apple-store-ar...
In my experience, it Growl-s notifications like "new data received in tab 2" - of course, the color of the session label on the tab shows that, too.
Yes,

Even more, I've come to I feel like "the success of the Linux desktop" among government agencies or large corporations may not be even the success that free software can really benefit from.

If desktop Linux becomes a bare-bone usable thing along the joyless lines of well-written bureaucratic forms, it won't be a tool for empowering users.

It seems like free software advocates should be aiming instead to create software so people are excite to use it, in the spirit of Apple (despite Apple's hostility to free software). On the user-end of things, only programs of this quality I know are Firefox and Inkscape though I'm sure there are others. In any case, I think this is the only direction that will make free software really succeed on the level of promoting freedom.
Alternatively you could just print it out and mail it to yourself with a seal and never open it unless called for.
The Rodeo Queen in Seat 21E: Are middle seat fliers more interesting people?
˙sǝʎ 'os ʞuıɥʇ I
House subcommittee votes to slash NASA
Also interesting, the Unicode Nazi:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/unicode-nazi
Show HN: Compare your perception of female attractiveness to that of others
There are 50 or 60 million cable-TV connections in India at this point in time. The guys who set up the meters, splice the coaxial cables, make the connection to the house, etc., are very similar to these kids. They don't know what they're doing. They only know that if you do these things, you'll get the cable channel. And they've managed to [install] 60 million cable connections so far.

Not so different from many of us (like myself) who learned programming functionally. Very inspiring article, thanks.
I had that thought as I was writing the comment, which is why I added the word "current". But you're probably right to a large degree, and my only answer is that, to the extent that larger budgets don't decrease NASA'a fiscal discipline, the investment is better made there.
What bugs me is not the mis-encoding (though that's a fail), but that people "struggled to understand" it... surely everyone's seen apostrophes turn into these special characters on enough web pages over the past ten years to have recognized what's happening when it does.
[video] The Best and Worst of Django Core
This was a fun little project I did last weekend to familiarize myself with Google App Engine and jQuery.
As Facebook Goes, Tech Goes
Why Facebook is the only company that matters in tech.
> Out of curiosity, what is the excellent reference for Javascript.

I've always liked:

http://eloquentjavascript.net/

and

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference
In Australia that's only the case on public roads. You don't require a license or a second person in the car on private land (such as a farm). There's no legal block to someone teaching themselves the art of driving on private land without input from anyone else; they'll get their license as long as they pass their test.

Computers on the other hand don't have the potential to maim or kill people in the hands of a naive user. Mistakes are free of cost (well, apart from a few seconds of time). And even to use said search engine, not only must you have been able to navigate to it, you also have to have an idea of using a mouse and a keyboard. The Enter key is not necessarily obvious. Neither are the control or function keys. Should computer cases be engraved with instructions on every step of the way? Apple isn't going to like having to engrave what the option key does, just in the off chance an utter naive should choose to use one of their computers. I guess what I'm getting at here is: how low do you want the bar?
Ha! “McDonald set up roughly 100 Apple store computers to call his servers every minute.” Better get a real good attorney buddy, get your affairs in order, and give your cat to your mom, cause boy you are in a lot of trouble.
SF.net lost because the site is incredibly slow, it's usability is somewhere between "whatever" and "bend over", they keep moving things around for no apparent benefit and for quite a while the site assumed visitors weren't potential contributors.

I started hosting code there using CVS in 2000 and it has certainly improved since then, but I recently pushed a branch to GitHub and there's just no comparison.
7M ดูบอลออนไลน์ ดูบอลสดออนไลน์ 7M ดูบอลสด 7M TV ที่นี่
I've said it before, but I'd be really interested to see a requirement for getting chartered engineer status be to peer-review a certain number of patent applications. It might cut down on the number of frivolous patents a touch.
The author essentially didn't find Google+ very interesting because he didn't have anyone to follow yet. This is to be expected at any early age social network. Sure, it's a chicken-and-egg problem, but if any company in the world has the power to solve that it's Google.

At the end, he states that:

"This is Google's first big attempt at playing catch-up. The problem with catch-up is that you risk trying to solve problems that already have solutions. True innovation comes from identifying and solving the unsolved problems. At the moment, there, Google appears to have come up short."

My take on 'innovation' is that it's more than solving unsolved problems. Defining a new solution to a problem with an existing solution can also be innovation. This is what Google has historically been really good at.

Search existed years before Google, but Google search was innovative - it was (and is) a better solution than others on the market. Email was around even longer, but GMail arguably innovated that field. Chrome is only a few years old, but has gained a near 20% market share in an area that Microsoft has dominated for a decade.

The problem of mass transportation was 'solved' before airplanes came to be.

Google+ may not make it. Even if it ultimately fails, I think Facebook will come out the other side a better product. They have had very little motivation to improve their product for quite some time now because there was no serious competition. If nothing else, Google is good at forcing stagnant competitors into motion.
Alternative headline: Harj Taggar quoted in internet dating article.

¶s 17 & 35 (online), p. 39 & 42 (print).
someone tried to do a similar thing for cyanogenmod. He tried to pass it off a 'protecting' the project in some way.
The default text editor of one of my first servers was emacs. I had no idea how to exit, no idea how to access help, and no idea what program I was in! I called my nerdier brother and he figured it out and told me how to quit.
Where's your sense of humor!
From the Trenches of the Loudness Wars, A Broad Survey of Research
It's an amazing story and more than a parody - it's also a great example of and tribute to Hemingway's style.