skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're a programmer making $100K/year. If you're confident that a new whatever will demonstrably increase your value to the company, spend $1K/year on the new whatever and make the case later that you are more valuable and should be paid more.

And, yes, this doesn't take into account that the company might not want to support your idiosyncratic hardware choices.
Ah, interesting - never considered paying for one of those...
Those few seconds of delay between performing actions can mean the difference between keeping focus on your work, and getting annoyed and distracted. I simply can't understand why anyone wouldn't want to give their developers at least a fast CPU, plenty of RAM, and an SSD.
I thought no vanity URL's had something to do with their privacy policy:

> If you choose not to have search engines index your profile, your profile itself won't appear in Google search results. However: * Your profile will still remain visible to anyone with your profile URL.

From: http://www.google.com/support/profiles/bin/static.py?hl=en&#...

If we all had vanity URL's that spelled out our name, our private profiles could be accessed by just guessing the URL.

Now your private profile is only visible to those that know your specific URL and Googleplus ID.

I also think vanity URL's, name changes, name squatting and celebrity verification is too much manual work for Google's liking.
slightly related but, I also find it funny that most of the time we are running none of these..

$type echo
echo is a shell builtin
Lolz, totally forgot about whois!!

Interestingly I searched for the numbers as I'd use them along with a substring of my username and didn't find them. Did you really Google or were you using the term generically? I tried both Google and Bing.

Well done now you can destroy my HN karma (no not really).
It's so spammers don't use it to get a bunch of @gmail addresses to spam (with personal info to boot!).
In theory, every issuer will eventually default. Question is whether it is going to happen within the next 1, 5, 10 or 100 years.

What I'd like to know is at least what is their estimated probability of default and the time horizon of this forecast e.g. "There's a X% chance that Greece will default within the next Y months."

The CDS-implied probability of default (PD), as of July 8th, is roughly 41% within the next 12 months, 66% within the next 2 years, 93% within the next 5 and 100% within the next 10 years.

So yeah, they're very likely to default soon(ish).
>They are copyrighted of course.

Who owns it, then?

>However, if you repurpose someone's work in a way that is completely different from the intended (Andy Baio's case wasn't different enough, btw), you may claim copyright.

Sure, but that wasn't done for any of the picture he didn't choose.
Why Silicon Valley can be bad for emerging market startups
Travel can be very expensive. It can also be very cheap. It might be nicer to fly from point A to B but odds are there is a cheaper bus ticket available. A 4 star hotel is very nice to stay at but a 0 star hostel will often cost you less than $15 a day. Working in a bar will easily cover that, your food(buying cheap from local sources and cooking for yourself), and allow you to save for your next bus/boat ticket or where absolutely needed a short haul flight.
More about which browsers support this, its origins, and the specs: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1834077/which-browsers-su...
I could live with sun+java but oracle+java? no thanks... it can be technically perfect, i really don't care...

> But if you considering building anything today on PHP (when you have sooooooooo fucking many better platforms) you are incompetent and plain stupid, because it will be a big technical debpt for the whole project.

I think we have a bunch of stupids like facebook and mailchimp... Php or any other programming language is a tool, a proven one. So if you can do some amazing things go for it.

"You use X then you are an idiot. Y is for masters !" approach is childish and proves that you can only use Y technology.
Float: The ‘Netflix of Reading’ Brought To You By The ‘YouTube of Documents’
Sure, but what's the chance you hit a good dev ?
Please hire a professional designer to redesign your website as soon as possible and ditch this ThemeForest theme. I see it everywhere now and it looks forced.

For the record, I used the exact same theme when I launched my product, but quickly ditched it.
Microsoft struggles to get Hyper-V drivers in Linux kernel
It was recently reported that Microsoft is now one of the top corporate contributors to the Linux kernel. But the reason for Redmond's recent flurry of contributions lies in the fact that its two-year-old project to get Hyper-V drivers into the Linux kernel has taken longer than expected. The drivers are still in the kernel staging tree, and Microsoft has to finish the items on a to-do list before Hyper-V drivers can move out of the staging area. When asked why it's taken so long, Linux project leader Greg Kroah-Hartman says the issue was simply that "changes were not being submitted that frequently."
Interesting thought, but I don't agree. Maybe I'm selfish but never once have I thought about the author when I'm buying a book. Nor have I heard or read anything from anyone saying "You know what, I'm not going to get that book at the library. I'm going to pay for it so the author is fairly compensated."
In the end it's all relative to your expectations. For example let's take 2 different people; "A" and "B".

"A" has rich parents (few hundred million). "A" has rich friends. "A" enjoys expensive past-times. "A" currently lives off around $1,000,000 per year (mortgage, food, entertainment, etc.). Most of "A"'s associates have a similar lifestyle. If "A" loses all of his money and is forced to take a job at $150,000 a year then he'll be absolutely miserable. He'll feel poor because all his friends and associates have so much more, and because he's become accustomed to a way of life he can no longer afford.

Now person "B" has a blue collar job, no savings, and makes $50,000 per year. "B"'s parents are not rich, but were always able to put food on the table. "B"'s friends and associates all live fairly similar lifestyles. If "B" is suddenly handed a magical supervisor role that pays $150,000 a year he'll feel absolutely rich. He'll have more money than any of his current associates. He has more money than he even knows what to do with.

Both "A" and "B" now make the same amount of money, but "B" is happier than "A" and it has everything to do with expectations, and since they have the same amount of money, then money must not be a direct factor.

You can keep taking this further until you hit a point where there's not enough money to cover bare necessities. This means that every single $ you make above the bare minimum to live a healthy life is unnecessary if you manage your expectations. For many of us it's easier to make more money than manage our expectations though. If you're barely scraping by on a $100,000 salary, maybe it's time to step back and examine your expectations and priorities.
I've got an awesome designer lined up to do a complete redesign/re-brand when I have the time/money to see it through.

Having said that, I've had a lot of compliments on the theme, and for $20, I've got no complaints :)
Sounds cool, I'll check that out
Weak passwords leaves Facebook, Twitter users ripe for being hacked
33% of FB users have never changed password.
Safer Investment?  IBM vs Oracle
Regardless of the 'inevitability of copyright' (which is disputable, but not relevant here), not every single thing must have copyright. There are still exceptions, and this might well be one of them.

While IANAL, attributing the copyright to the camera owner seems like attributing copyright over the color patterns of a flower to the guy who watered it. Just because there was human intervention somewhere in the process doesn't mean it's an human creation, especially if there was no intent of creating it.
Learn the MVVM pattern and knockout.js quickly with in-browser coding exercises
I think a lot of people would disagree with that statement. If you are committing that frequently then there are probably instances where you are checking in half written code that does not even compile. If you are using DVCS chances are your commits are still only stored on your local machine and just as susceptible to loss. If you are using something centralized or pushing your changes you are potentially going to disrupt the rest of the team unless you are working on a private branch. In that case, it seems as if version control is being used as a backup system where a substantial number of revisions cannot even be built. I think that is poor use of version control. It becomes difficult (at least for me) to analyze past changes (maybe months after the fact) when some of the versions are half-baked ideas that I committed for safety before going out to lunch.

I think there are two requirements here: 1) redundancy of work in progress and 2) change control management. I want my work in progress to be relatively safe from failures, I want it to be automatic and I want to be able to choose which changes are worthy of their own revision number in version control. Personally, when committing work in progress I want my revisions to represent a logical stopping point and not necessarily dictated by how much time has elapsed since the last commit.
hahahahahaha I just realized I wrote "bread and better"
Ultra high res displays are extremely expensive - 4K monitors are over $10k. Apple will democratize them by having a better manufacturing process to make them a few hundred or less. Plus, i would bet Apple can bake in resolution independence into OSX far quicker than Redmond will.
2queue
verb \ˈkyü\
queued queu·ing or queue·ing
Definition of QUEUE
transitive verb
: to arrange or form in a queue (see 1queue)

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/queue

Commonly heard used in the phrase "Queue up".

Besides, verbing weirds language. ;)
Agreed. Symfony2 is an excellent base for this reason--Fabien Potencier and friends are, as far as I'm concerned, the guys to look at for writing clear, maintainable, excellent PHP code.
You're assuming "working your tail off" has something to do with becoming rich. I've seen little evidence to that effect and a great deal that contradicts is.

No one worked harder then the miners and few died poorer.
From what I've heard, travel costs are shockingly cheaper once you get out of the US.
You see, that's my point, as soon as you have to cut the costs of other parts of your life you've clearly started doing something which requires large amount of money...
I spoke with a Google sys admin a few months ago. He said he had a MacBook and a Lenovo Thinkpad with Ubuntu. It was in the news a while ago, that they only use Mac or Ubuntu. Any Windows OS has to have some type of signoff from management.
From the other side, as founders, when did you switch everybody over from using their personal laptops to company laptops? A funding event? Certain size of the team?
Evolutionary explanation for the origin of aging: we age because the world changes.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/we-age-because-th...

And the fundamental mechanisms of aging got their start in single celled life, very early on.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/02/aubrey-de-grey-5....

None of which is a good reason for suffering aging when we could do something about it: it's just the mechanistic explanation for what is.
Not sure if paragraph length distribution is correlated to anything interesting but the discussion with JL in the comments is entertaining.
Supreme Court continues to trim back on Federal Circuit's patent-friendly ways
So I shouldn't buy a new MacBook Air for the fun of it? I guess the answer is no for PHP programming :)
Nice article. I have myself lived in Latin America and China for about 12 years now, however I prefer to stay at the same place for some years, to make it become "normal" life.

And while I agree with many of the articles points, I completely disagree with #16. The "easy going" may look charming and smart on the surface, but when reality suddenly shows up (illness, accident, any sort of emergency, etc) then its suddenly not so charming anymore.

I believe a big reason for the "easy going" attitude lays in the available Social Capital in a given society. In societies with low Social Capital, its often no use to be "less easy going" and work hard, since careers are not build by knowledge or good work, but by "Guanxi" and Amigos (because Social Capital is low these relationships become more important than actual professional knowledge). I am pretty sure that, having a real choice, most people would opt for the "less easy going" way, where products and services, houses and medical care are available and reliable.
A few points I got from this:

- Possessions do own you. I have made an effort in the past year to minimize my stuff. One of my long term goals is to be able to shrink the majority of my life into a travel-able size. It allows me to cherish the essentials and not bloat the rest of my life.

- Money does allow for happiness, just to a certain extent. Money opens up many opportunities and comforts. It also adds security. If my car gets totalled tomorrow, I know that I have enough money saved up to be able to handle it, rather than suddenly be put in a dire situation that could jeopardize my job.

- Major goals are important, but not everything. People work towards things, its natural of humanity. Everyone sets goals and works towards them (or sometimes waits for them) and it is a strong driving force in our lives. But sacrificing your happiness now for the sake of those goals is counterproductive. You need to enjoy the time used to achieve that goal. You shouldn't look back on the year(s) taken to get to the point and see a lot of unhappiness and pain, enjoy some of the time instead.

- In regards to the internet/tv posts, I would say that the biggest thing anyone can do is read. The Internet provides an incredibly accessible portal of information and using it to learn new things (and an incredibly breadth of things) is a tool everyone should use and abuse.

... Just my random thoughts after reading the post.
STI makes a great product, and I have no doubt that they have contributed greatly to various utilities operating effectiveness, there is one glaring thing the article got just plain wrong.

STI is not responsible for changing the speed of information updates -- the 4 second update loop in power is a combination of 1. old sensors and communications technology having a slow poll cycle and 2. state estimation software running that often. This software is stil present and used in operatons.

In the past few years, various grants from the stimulus packages have finally allowed utilities to update infrastructure very rapidly, putting new high resolution sensors on the grid. These generate a lot more data than traditional SCADA systems, both in volume and in measurement types. All this data must be managed -- this is what the STI software package does well: it presents a lot of data in a way that makes sense to the users.
The comparison with the Great Depression in connections with bank runs is not a good one. Yes, there may have been one or the other bank run bank in those days, but the main feature of the Great Depression was rampant unemployment - more or less exactly what Greece is already experiencing.

Greece must exit the Euro to avoid prolonged Great Depression-style unemployment.

So this becomes a short vs. medium term tradeoff. Introducing a new currency will most likely be chaotic, but in the medium term it allows Greece the flexibility to restart the internal economy. Without introducing a new currency, the short term chaos can be avoided at the cost of a very prolonged downturn that is destructive for the country's prospects and may lead to political chaos in the medium-to-long term.
Almost all modern browsers (including IE which invented it) support DEFER.

The two most popular browsers support ASYNC going back to versions from September 2010, Chrome 11+ and Firefox 3.6+
SecureCRT has some really nice features. I spend a lot of time in terminal sessions and never liked Putty.
Still better than finding a good Haskell dev.
I had to buy myself a couple of SSDs. When building your project takes 2-3 hours of time, every improvement really matters.

Our management just tells us to go context switch onto something else, there's always lots of thrilling email answering and documenting to do. At other times you can switch to fixing bugs or working on another feature, even though I personally cannot stand continuous context switching as it decreases the quality of my work.
Robin Wauters from Tech Crunch
It's not quite the same, but there is http://gplus.to/ - though you have to add yourself to it.
Read data directly from BASE64 encoded string without decoding it all
It's easier said than done -- whatever Eclipse is doing in the background, it also has to update the interface to reflect the latest results, which means synchronization with the UI thread.

Also, a big project is hard to optimize, especially when threads are involved; so whatever shortcuts you take to make it work at first does come back to hunt you in a big way and you can't fix it easily.

For example people are telling me that Eclipse should run fine, but on my laptop it freezes a lot, even for small projects; while IntelliJ IDEA works flawlessly. So I'm not sure what the problem is, but it does something on my box that it shouldn't -- and throwing more money on hardware (instead of searching for a better alternative) just seems like the wrong approach to me.
i don't get while people are being snide about code that does more and so has more lines. a small amount of code is very nice and elegant, but if it doesn't do what people need then it's pointless.
ideally, you should have an entire test environment with every level of hardware that your product could run on... that should be entirely separate from your dev/coding machine. That should be much easier to justify to management too.
I worked for a huge company in their IT dept. We tried to convince our management to upgrade all the development machines using some of the arguments already mentioned in this thread. They did not want to believe that a hardware refresh would actually improve productivity ("show us the ROI"). A couple of us decided to build a tool to gather some metrics on how long it took to build and deploy our app on localhost (if you're interested see http://lopb.org). We then compared results before and after a simple RAM upgrade on a few machines. We were able to show hard numbers to support the claim that better, faster hardware would save time waiting for build & deploy to complete.

Although building in less time did lead to happier developers, it did not lead to more features getting built in the given time frame. We did eventually all get RAM upgrades at least, but the development process and technology stack we were using were the real time sucks that we could not fix with better hardware.
Deepwater Horizon oil stayed beneath the waves
Depends how your travels looks like, you can travel living in luxury hotels, spend most of the time with people from your country either by the hotel swimming pool or guided tours or in the museums - or you can be less savy and go a bit "guerilla" with your travels: go a bit off from the typical tourists' paths, see the real local culture (not the one from museums) and real local people - this should be enough to "open up your mind" for different cultures (of course living abroad adds more of that but you can get some essence even if you stay somewhere for only a couple of days.
Where in Japan are you located? I'm in Tokushima.
I don't believe it is fair to compare it with marketing. Most tech guys could learn much of it if they needed to but like me they find marketing to be dirty and scummy.

Unfortunately things don't get sold on their technical merits...
Pretty much this. Call me an elitist or a backwards conservative[1] for this, but there is absolutely no way a GUI will ever be faster and more productive than using the CLI for pretty much all tasks I can currently think off (that don't inherently require a GUI, like Graphic Design etc).

Mind you though, I'm not saying that a GUI is unproductive or bad in any way. Just that it's almost always less efficient if you know what you're doing.

[1] Just for the record, I'm on GNU/Linux since about a year now. At first I was like "wtf CLI" myself. Then I slowly learned to appreciate it. So I'm not someone who's been using CLI since the dawn of Unix and is waving his cane at the kids on his lawn.
Tweaking the Linux scheduler for “background” jobs
I didn't mean to say I had a strong opinion about who was more innovative or whatever. It's just a clever use of language to flip the usual narrative (Android is a cheaper, "open" version of iOS) against them.
There is an unofficial HN jobs board at http://jobs.usethesource.com/ you might be interested in looking over.
"The history of health care spending in the US is consistent with the hypothesis that we view health care as a luxury good, one on which we spend more of our wealth as that wealth grows."

Not sure I agree with the wording here. You could just as easily say that increasing wealth leads to increasing life expectancy and increased obesity which leads to higher expenditures. I certainly don't view healthcare as a luxury good on which I chose to spend more.
I'm curious how this would specifically affect startups, VC investment as an asset class, etc. All the uncertainty in the short term would be bad for financings I think, but in the long run would it affect VC LPs being willing to meet capital calls? Would it affect the M&A market (sometimes financed by debt, but not so much anymore) or IPO market?
"purchasing Android as a strategic response to the success of iOS"

Please don't make things up here. Google bought Android in 2005 [1]. The iPhone was announced in 2007 [2].

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2005/tc200...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
with using someting like headjs, you have some pros :

- you don't have to put tons of <script> tag on your template. just pass the parameters to headjs*

- you can load js files and "after" run some function and this function hasn't have to be in another js file or document.ready(). you can do this operations any time after full page load.

* Ok, i know : one should compress and merge javascript files..
You can do this in straight shell, with polymorphism. See http://onestepback.org/articles/poly/sp-shell.html.

And see http://onestepback.org/articles/poly/index.html for the same example in many, many other languages.
More precisely, "result |= x ^ y" will change result to be nonzero, not "true".

For example, if x = 0b0101 and y = 0b0011, x ^ y = 0b0110. If result was previously 0b0011 from a previous test, then after "result |= 0b0110" result will be 0b0111.

Of course, in many programming languages (including Java and Python), a value of zero is interpreted as false and anything else is true.
The problem is once enough geeks accept that software patents can only hurt them, then the days of software patents are numbered. Instead, geeks tend to fall into the Ayn Rand/Joe The Plumber school of thought and will defend the most asinine patent in the world. This benefits the capital owning class as the peons are doing all their propaganda work for them.
WTF? Array functions as something GOOD about PHP? It doesn't have a slicing syntax for crying out loud!
The controller of family computer from Nintendo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Famicom_controllers.jpg
Google's HTML5 slide template