skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think Stack Exchange has a much better chance of going mainstream, but by going through the side entrance, not through the front door. Some of the SE sites will fail (a handful already have), but others will be successful in their niche. By keeping the focus small in each community, they're making much more useful sites. I think a lot of people will end up using SE sites without really knowing or caring that they're at an SE site.

Disclosure: As a Stack Overflow moderator, I'm quite biased.
When I lived in Colonia Roma (not wealthy but higher than average Mexico City income), I knew all my neighbors and I'm a typical programmer introvert. The air conditioning and heating situation was the same.

Knowing your neighbors has less to do with air conditioning and more to do with personal motorcar ownership. None of my neighbors owned cars.

Of course, really wealthy neighborhoods in Mexico have tall concrete walls with broken glass embedded in the top around every house. That keeps the neighbors from getting too friendly.
Would it be so if you did it eight times in a summer? At random shopping malls in different states?
a chronic thinker

This!

Much better than a "chronic procrastinator". Thank you for the word! :-)
Would be incredible if a PyGame type community can be built, for the Rubyists out there, around this tool. Kudos to this initiative!
Personally, when considering the number of ex-Bell Labs employees there, I had hopes that Google would pick up the rights to Plan 9 and continue it. Plus, Google has the deep pockets needed to ensure proper device driver support for modern hardware.
Google+ doesn't export contact data either! It only produces contact information for people already in your Google address book. How has Google earned this "Holier than thou" attitude?
I'm sure someone could, but why would they want to?

A rectangular form factor for display has been the standard for decades. All applications, save for some desktop widgets, are shaped accordingly.

Putting rectangular designs on this would waste lots of space at the corners, and I don't see a ton of developers jumping to go support a triangular display for their UIs.
Actors / Extras - Post FREE ads : FrogAds
Vera Wang summer 2011
I think the problem here is that not all employers will challenge you. In my mind, the key to finding enjoyment in your work if it's not challenging is to challenge yourself. Unless your job is oppressive to self direction there is nothing stopping you or anyone else from creating or doing something that is positive for the business and challenging for you. As a few examples you could find ways to optimize a system that is inefficient (it doesn't even need to be at the software level), analyze information about your customers, find ways to save money, research ways to get new clients, etc. A side benefit to challenging yourself is that you will find it quite rewarding. I can highly recommend Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book on "flow" in regards to the phenomenon around it.

I think what I'm trying to say is by challenging yourself to be more than what it is your employer expects out of you results in a net win for both you and your company.
Right, Stack Overflow itself can never be mainstream by definition, but cletus is talking about the (slightly) larger Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites that SO is a part of.
It is not necessary for one tool to lose in order for another tool to win.

Plenty of people outside Silicon Valley use Quora. If you aren't seeing them, that's a sign that you aren't paying sufficient attention, or that you don't follow many people outside Silicon Valley.
I also have to wonder how much of this perceived lack of hard work is because of changes in the social contract between workers and employees. As late as the '70s, there was an implicit contract between employers and employees. Employees work hard, and in return, employers take care of them.

Starting with the '80s and continuing through today, that contract (outside of a select few firms) has been thoroughly eroded. We are no longer workers, we are human resources. It doesn't matter how many years of service we have, the next senior management shuffle can mean the abrupt end of our employment with that firm. These changes mean that there is no payoff in being loyal to an employer. Given that, its no wonder that others see Millenials as being shiftless and disloyal. What's the reward for hard work in a corporate environment, when the continued existence of your job is more dependent on the vagaries of senior management politics than your performance?
You're perfectly right.

I was thinking about leaving Italy too, that's why I'm trying to amass as much knowledge about software development as I possibily can.

And no, the rest of the world isn't any better.
What is true, though, is that in Italy they are pulling your leg (for lack of a better translation of 'prendere per il culo') AND they are no longer afraid of telling you they are doing it. And it's getting worse everyday.

But hey, we're being led by a bunch of old clowns, of which Berlusconi is only an example. We can't expect things to be just fine.
Bottle has been around for a while and is great. But is there something new or about to reach proverbial "1.0" status?

For those interested in single-file frameworks, there is also Mojolicious in Perl and Fat-Free in PHP.
Why it's important to understand a programmer's work
I came here to say that one of the exceptions would be architecture and construction, or any undertaking where redoing later is way more expensive than foreseeing now.

Science is the art of collecting data and factoring out subjectivity as much as possible. So, ideally, "doing" is the only thing (non-theoretical) science should be doing.

As for software construction, I don't think it's controversial to say that the "head-first" methodology is dangerous.
I already feel rather uncomfortable about all the information apps can gather about me without me ever having to do anything. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it be very easy to restrict that, and only let my friends have access to <i>my</i> personal data? I added my friends, I don't mind them having access to my data, including my email address. But apps my friends use are a very different matter.
You didnt look at the article, did you?
I see a lot of comments about how Quora is only providing value or attracting users in the valley and while I hate anecdotal premises that are used as support for arguments, I live in the midwest and over three quarters of my friends use Quora on a daily basis.

I don't see it as a direct competitor to Facebook or Stackoverflow, but instead as filling a niche unto itself. I can't speak to the value it adds for all subject matter categories, but for the ones that I am most interested in (startup entrepreneurship, technology, mathematics) it has some incredibly thought-provoking questions and answers.

The biggest value that I get from Quora is not when I am looking for a specific answer, but the serendipity of scrolling through my favorite topics to find questions that I wouldn't have thought to ask.

If Quora died, it would be a sad day for the world's intellectual curious.
The disqus comments on the page are entirely correct: it should come standard with python (or something like it). I've used it a few times and it's just elegant and would match "batteries included" perfectly.
I'm probably stating the obvious, but to me it looks very awkward to write over the diagonal crease caused by the binding.
I'm torn about this. India is a much more pluralistic society, and Pakistan is a failed state. But one of the points made early on in the article makes it seem as if the Partition was entirely Pakistan's idea, and the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people who died were all innocent Hindus being slaughtered at the hands of murderous Muslims. "But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history." Which is far from the reality; it was a clusterfuck all around, and communal violence was the rule of the day on both sides of the partition line.

It wasn't just Muslims in the 30s who called for two separate states. Many Hindus did too. It's true, the most prominent Hindu in the struggle (Gandhi) wanted a single state and tried to (in theory, at least) accommodate the large Muslim minority. For those efforts he was assassinated by a religious extremist.

Of course, you hear religious extremist and you might assume it was some Muslim who thought Gandhi was too effective a voice for unity. To the contrary, it was a Hindu nationalist who thought Gandhi was a sellout to the Muslims.

This strain of Hindu nationalism that endorses the use of violence has appeared again and again. As recently as 2002 a riot occurred in which a Hindu mob murdered around a thousand Muslims.

All this isn't to say the Muslims on the subcontinent are all paragons of virtue and liberalism. They aren't. But the story the author tells is just a pleasant story, meant to appeal to the baser instincts of Wall Street Journal readers. Maybe more than that, it's a story meant to appeal to India's own self conception, where it's as pure as snow and it's those dastardly Pakistanis who've made everything terrible.
The question is not about APIs for apps; the issue is that a user cannot readily export their complete social graph from Facebook--specifically, in a way that allows them to rebuild it elsewhere in its entirety. It's trivial to easily provide that capability in a way that wouldn't expose it to apps. And obviously Facebook doesn't have an issue with sharing the data, because it's available through things like Yahoo email. However, nothing exists to make it easy for a user to retrieve it. And when something like a third-party browser extension provides the capability, Facebook seems to intentionally break it.

It seems the only reason for this is because Facebook wants to make it hard for users to leave, unless you know of some other explanation?
We have been doing this for a little while now at http://www.15seconds.me/. It's a little bit simpler than what Partsie is doing in that we only allow an "up" or "down" vote.

The viewer ratings below the video here: http://www.15seconds.me/404211799 can be used to scrub through the video and get to the parts that the audience enjoyed the most. We only allow people to vote on the videos at the time they are broadcast though.

Great to see others are thinking along the same lines that we are. I believe that there is a big need to attach as much rich meta data as possible to videos.
It's absolutely not a luxury in the south. You can stand up and walk around with the humidity, but you'll need a steady stream of fresh clothes if you sit to do anything without AC.
Has anyone found a list of the badges available?
https://github.com/bracki/showoff is what you want; maybe it's possible to move the theme to showoff?
EMPs produced by nukes were in the news circa 1986. One producer of laptops computers, Grid Systems IIRC, advertised their computers as "EMP resistant" or some such and consequently suitable for use by defense personnel.
You didn't look at the parent, did you?
I was once a heavy quora user. Here's what drove me away (I do still use it but I no longer 'hang out' there): the overwhelming pretentiousness and self-righteousness of many within the very early core userbase who, because I was in that early group, dominate my feed (don't know if they dominate for others...). You can only read so many "what does it feel like to be dumb" or "if i went to Harvard how should I respond to 'where did you go to school?' without offending the asker?" without rolling your eyes and writing the entire thing off as a circle-jerk for the self-appointed hipster elite. These people suck and unfortunately quora has rewarded them with upvotes and therefore influence. Otherwise I think the site is great and useful for very niche/obscure questions that google cannot answer well.
Those pages load very slowly for me, but I like the idea.

It might be experiencing unusual load. Let's use a CDN instead. http://kivy.org.nyud.net/
"Don't check boxes for words you know you've seen before, but whose meaning you aren't exactly sure of."

This is a bewildering instruction to me, since I've learned most of my vocabulary through reading, and rarely look up the definition of a word, instead learning its meaning through repeated exposures to its use in context.

Take for example "garron" -- like many of us I've been reading GRRM lately, so I've seen the word used some 78 times in the past few months, and I'm sure I've encountered the word a few dozen times before. I know it's a slightly undesirable horse of some kind. Likely this means it's a gelding or a small pony-ish horse. Do I need to have looked up and remembered the three specific submeanings of the word, or that it's a specific breed of horse from Galloway to be able to say I am "exactly sure of" the word?

I don't think that's how language works, but it's how this test seems to want it to work. My score of 35,300 is suspect on multiple levels.
Even if Plan 9 and 9front go nowhere, the ideas have already crept into other operating systems and userland tools. Linux has had 'mount --bind' for a while, and has last year introduced in-kernel support for 9P2000 (for mounting Plan 9 resources). bash and gawk have some weak support for interacting with the network via the filesystem. wmii actually speaks 9P2000 and uses it for scripting.
Yes and no.

Do we not use many of the concepts?

* boolean algebra / simplification of terms?

* vectors, matrices, tensors (er, strings, arrays, objects)

* functions? functions of functions?

* set theory?

* graph theory?

* "closure" of operations (e.g. - what are the limits / bounds of this operation / function? Can I encode every character / code-point in this output representation? -- no? prepare to get hacked, then)
Paul Erdös: N is a Number
This could be nice for remote pair programming without having to do screen sharing.

For instance, the person on the non-typing end could see the edit stream over their iPad.
With any firing, there is the official reason and the real reason. Short of gross misconduct on the part of the employee, they are often quite different.

From your description, there is a good chance that your firing was at least in part due to the organizational and staffing practices at the company (your technical skills may have played some role - but are unlikely to have been the sole reason and may not have even been the primary reason). High turnover is often symptomatic of incompetence in the hiring process, poor management techniques or a poor workplace environment.

On the flip side, corporations will often be concerned with employees who "are just passing through." There's a lot of risk potential in employing a person who is actively seeking another job - particularly if they appear to be dissatisfied and use the term "hacker" and has high level access to financial software.

As for your professional self-esteem, that's all in your head not in the external world. Some things just have to be learned the hard way, and the ability to recognize which sort of organizations are a good fit - and which sorts are not - can be one of those. Certain personality types survive in corporations and banks, and other types don't. Neither group has a monopoly on technical skill or personal character.

Only you can choose to cowboy up and pursue your long term goals, which are ambitious, or not.

Good luck.
Nobody in the circles I talk in has ever mentioned Quora. Ever. Google+ has come up about 50 times a day since last week, so I don't think it's quite that it's replaced Quora.
They should implement a data download request. "X is asking to download the personal information and posts your shared with him, do you want to allow it? Yes/No".
It's a decent position to be in - perhaps not if you have dreams of mass market grandeur, but otherwise, Quora is a success.
Does Apple license its UI textures for use in things like this? (I'm thinking of the gray background texture from the iPad when you hit ESC to view the slide list).
I'm pretty sure that LGPL3 requires that the user be able to replace the library with a modified version of the library.

Since that's not possible on Android that I know of (because of the packaging), I don't see how Android distribution can comply with the LGPL3 license?
40 Beautiful Harry Potter Art and Illustration Tributes
I've had serious problems with the flow for things like signing in and password recovery. I signed in with Twitter - I think - now when I go back, they're asking for an email? No idea which I used and I can't find any emails from Quora, so my account is lost. I've never had such a problem with any other site.
Yep, this can already be done using Scheme (Racket or Guile) and Geiser.

But it's still very cool to have that in Emacs Lisp. And it will be "natively" here when Emacs Lisp is replaced by Guile 8-).
What does it take to change a status? http://wherethefuckisthis.com/wtf_main/view/687/ has apparently been identified, but it's still listed as "Not yet located".
I haven't, and the only badge I've got on my account is the Google one. (And it isn't even bronze yet, so I don't know why others haven't shown up.)
Tristan worked for free for a really short period of time. He now makes a salary and has significant equity in the company (like all other full time employees at foursquare).
Twitter Registers Over 200 Million Accounts
Plan 9 was the first system to use UTF-8 and a /proc filesystem such as the one used in Linux.
>Even in parts of southern Europe that get pretty hot

Mediterranean climate - dry heat, nothing like the American South.
Isn't this true of basically any post (the author expressing his belief)?
Issues with Poorly Done Backlink Building
List of webapp needs from Internet users (includes demographics)
Sometimes I go out of my way to make Karma real for individuals who push negative energy into the universe. I was out of work for longer than I wanted last year, and I found exactly zero recruiters who treated me like a human being. I was treated as a number. You can't blame them, because of supply and demand meet power corrupts. What goes around comes around.
Bizarre - I swear I did not click on any advert.
The IRC channel (#cat-v on freenode) has been extra helpful and responsive. I've now got 9front mostly up and running on qemu and my T60, thanks to devs fixing drivers on the fly while I passed along screenshots of error messages. I've been interested in hacking on Plan 9 for a while but have had little luck getting it to boot before 9front (even 9atom).

A couple of years down the road, it would be delightfully perverse to end up with Plan 9 running in the server room and Linux/OSX on the devs' desktops. Maybe unlikely, but fun to consider.
As a counterpoint, I just hired a personal assistant in Seattle. I had 140 resume submissions in four days. You can read about my takeaways on G+: https://plus.google.com/112885659993091300749/posts/L4bzKXxC...

In brief, though, there is a significant disparity in the US job markets. I'm not sure how it's going to get sorted.
This is a nice idea, but unfortunately in many cases getting the information and power you require to solve the problems is blocked by seniority. You have to keep in mind, outside of development many many industries are still essentially seniority not performance based. For instance, if I work in HR and there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we are recruiting, it's not as simple as whip up a prototype, in many cases you'll actually need for someone (ie: a superior) to be fired in order to really affect change. It's not easy to address important inefficiencies within the company without pointing out that someone is fucking up their job.

As for the inefficiencies you CAN fix, this seems like a standard part of any job (and life to be honest). If you see problems in your job that you actually can and know how to improve and you aren't improving them, that's an entirely different issue.
There are session sharing packages for emacs, like rudel - http://emacswiki.org/emacs/Rudel

However, on machines that are emacsless (at least, without having to ssh somewhere), yeah, this could definitely be nice.
And that's exactly what I'm working on right now. It won't quite be an etherpad because doing constant diff is not a trivial thing... but bi-directional "live" editing session over the web will be possible.

I am a couple of weeks away from having something.
As a relative newb, who got his first real experience with AS3 (flash games), I've put some serious thought into this issue. I've seen that job chart come up a number of times, and it's true that python is bigger now. But clicking on relative gives a startlingly opposite picture:

http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=python%2C+ruby&l=&...

For now, since I've gotten a programming job (yay!) at an iOS shop, I've gotta work on Obj. C. But when the time comes to really get good at a higher level language, it's hard to say which way I'll go.
> Does [Google's] work not go upstream?

A lot of it doesn't, actually. Many of the Android patches are pretty intrusive, and wouldn't necessarily be suitable for integration into the mainline kernel -- for instance, the Android permissions model depends on a bunch of these kernel patches.
Well, to put things into perspective, a couple of years back I asked a pakistani cab driver if this 'anti India' sentiment is prevalent in Pakistan and he gave an unequivocal yes. He belongs to the free-thinking tribe. What I've said here is based on his anecdotes and that's why I said it's hearsay.

"Second, among those who aren't educated nearly well enough, I imagine that the preoccupation with day-to-day survival is far more important to them than the hatred that they are told they should feel toward a remote enemy" - For a majority of such people, day to dy survival is nothing but breathing and showing hatred towards India. How else does militancy grow and survive ? India is right next door to Pakistan, nothing remote about that.
"> "some animosity towards Muslims"

Selective memory here."

You can believe whatever you want to believe, and nothing I can say will probably change your mind, because that's the world view that was drilled into you since birth. But let me give you some more examples:

- One of the most popular shrines in my state (Rajasthan) is a Muslim shrine, that of Khwaja Sahib in Ajmer. And yet the vast majority of the visitors there are Hindu, who come to seek the blessings of a long-departed Muslim saint.

- My father was born in a tiny village. There is only 1 place of worship: the shrine of a Muslim saint. Half the village is Hindu; the other half is Muslim. But both pray in that same 1-room shrine (not at the same time, though), in their own ways. The Muslims place a "chadar" (thin fabric sheets); the Hindus burn incense and place flowers.

- In the town where my father grew up, the biggest temple and the biggest mosque share a common building wall (they are back-to-back).

And finally: every Pakistani I've met who visited India for a length of time, came away impressed at how open and free the society was. Take that for what it's worth.

As for the Bollywood actors: Bollywood is a popularity contest (unlike athletics, which is objective). It is the people who decide who's a "popular" actor, and not the actor himself. So your comparison with African-American athletes is specious.
Non-natives who have studied English intently may well score higher than natives on a strictly vocab test like this.
The article mentions the destruction that's caused by EMP. One of the foremost sources of EMP is a nuclear explosion, I don't think there are any conventional explosives that can 'turn on' an EMP.
Visited this from today's most popular mobile presentation device, the iPad, and what I assume is the first slide might as well have been a single static JPEG.

I see from comments here the template requires keyboard control. Too bad it can't be controlled with gestures.