skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Both!

It's important you don't just say you're a person, because you'll piss off some random person who doesn't understand you need to outsource some part of a project you don't know how to do (who is angered you personally didn't do it).
Why your startup needs to use College2Startup
All of a sudden, Ruby's optional parentheses seem elegant
Open source Arduino pulse sensor looking for funding
Safari's history editing is really powerful. Perhaps the confusion arises because this functionality isn't obviously available from the History tab (you have to "Show All History" and edit from there).
I am being downvoted above but isn't travel expensive? It has to be simply because of the fuel costs involved.

In my eyes, 8 years of constant travel would be expensive. Compare that to 8 years of working on the same spot.
Ask HN: ne1 else remember when we had to waste tons of paper on MapQuest?
I wonder how bad was GoogleMaps's impact on them...
XBOX 720 To Have "Avatar Movie" Like Graphics
Good questions to ask when being interviewed:

- What is your standard developer hardware configuration?

- How often is it refreshed?

You get bad answers to those questions and it's a definite warning sign (IMHO).

If you're working for a cash-strapped startup (possibly bootstrapped), you may want to negotiate a deal whereby you supply your own hardware (in exchange for higher salary and/or stock/option grants) if they're only in a position to provide substandard hardware.

One side note: what constitutes good hardware depends on what you're doing. If all you're doing is writing PHP/Python/Ruby in vim/emacs and running a local Apache/nginx and possibly a MySQL server then it almost doesn't matter what hardware you have... apart from the monitor.

But if you're compiling huge C++ (or even Java) projects then you probably want good I/O (possibly an SSD, preferably in RAID1 config for redundancy), lots of RAM and a good CPU.

As one data point: I have a 6 core machine with 12GB of RAM and 2 24" monitors (some opt for 1 30") plus a Macbook Pro 15" with SSD. You can refresh your hardware every 18 months if you want to (but most don't unless they have a pressing need; I know some people with 4-5 year old workstations because those are fine for what they do).
To any development manager who wishes they could offer better hardware within their budget: If you haven't already done this, buy an SSD for every workstation. Nowadays, you can get 128GB for $200 or less.

Do that, and make sure the system has 4GB+ RAM, and 2 monitors at high resolution, and your hardware will feel brand new to the guys on your team.

I did this a couple years ago as one of my first acts after being promoted, and it worked great. I paid a bit more to get the drives that came with an upgrade kit (that is, an enclosure and imaging software). Gave them to each dev to take care of themselves.

I didn't have to wait on and work with the bureaucratic IT department, and a dozen SSDs was cheap enough I could put it on my card without needing CFO approval.

You don't need "The Best" hardware. In fact, it reminds me of the saying that "People buy horsepower, but they drive torque."

What matters to developers isn't how many FLOPs you can do, but how quickly can you load your VMs and start Eclipse and grep your local filesystem.
The Wal-Mart model is what you get when profit margins are collapsing towards zero. There isn't the surplus sloshing around to support more than a few big players in the market, skilled staff, or worthy but unpopular products.
Y'know, I'd rather spend my life in prison than die. If you're going to pick between a and b and choose the one you feel is better for you, you might as well do the same and ask death row inmates if they would prefer to be imprisoned for life instead. I won't be surprised some of them would say yes to that.
Thanks for the great example of a physical MVP.
Why do they annoy you? They are both pretty awesome and have a great UI as well.
Depends on what you are developing. If your tests and compile times take 5 or 10 minutes, you are losing tons of productivity.
Well if my idea comes to fruition the automatic car service would only need parking for "overflow" cars when not in use. Some percentage of the system would always be in use so the cars would only not be in use when they were being repaired/upgraded/whatever.
I have lived in the UK and tv there is just as bad as anywhere else (I particularly remember gardening shows ad nauseum). If you think your life is infinitely enriched by tv, wait till you get out there (and garden for example).
You may or may not be correct about the fact that there was prior art in the case of the Apple suit. That however does not refute my key point which is that time and time again discussions include endless statements about how obvious something is, not a discussion about how obvious it was then.

As for your statements about the USPTO that is just a rant. It doesn't contribute anything to a real discussion.
Indeed, git commit is not pioneering. But git ls-tree ... | xargs git show ... | sed ... | xargs git add may be.

To innovate, to push the envelope you need to put pieces together. Until somebody invents and popularizes a way to compose [1] GUI widgets as easily as CLI programs via something like a pipe operator, CLI remains the only composable toolkit. We have, as of yet, no interconnectable GUI replacement for find, grep, xargs, sed etc.

Today's GUI widgets are individual nodes. Connected with sneakernet at best -- that's Copy+Paste for ya. No matter how great each node is, there is very little cooperation, little synergy effect. What we need is like the Internet -- live, vibrant network with rich interconnects, and ease to create new ones with few clicks. Only CLI is there today.

Rest assured the day of GUI will come, people are working on it all the time. But we arent' there yet, at least not when it comes to pushing the envelope.

----

[1] from user's perspective, not just programmer's
I don't know about the more technical debt stuff, sure if you go off and use all the parts of the language any old way it will let you make a mess but there is no reason you can't apply some of the same practices that something like rails enforces on you.
How did the UK beat the US to a Startup Visa? And how do you get one?
This was on HN already 9 months ago http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=eww...
Or as simple as

<script defer async src="blah"></script>

for purists

<script defer="defer" async="async" src="blah"></script>
How do you go about fetching and gpg decrypting an email on an untrusted machine?
I agree with you, but I'm pretty sure the death penalty is a shining example of sort of topic to avoid on HN. (I wish there were a way of flagging entire branches of an otherwise topical discussion.)
>but choosing your phone number as a password will always be a poor decision

Always? OK, I've reset my HN password to [one of] my phone number. So you can log in as me now?

No of course you can't. You don't even know how many digits it is, did I include + for an international number, did I use brackets, hyphens, dots (comme une gars Francais)? How will you connect my online ID with my phone number¹?

Once you have my password what are you going to do? Right flames and lose me karma? I can just start a new account if needs be, nothing lost really.

For many accounts a phone number is probably a good enough password IMO. For accounts that handle money? No way. For email accounts that receive reset passwords? Not a chance. For posting drivel on tech chat forums ... it'll be fine!

--

¹ If you can I'd prefer you didn't print it.
I think you have posted this in the wrong place. It has nothing to do with the point of this thread.
They should stick them in a tiny room next to a smelly bathroom. That'll separate the men and women from the boys and girls!
>Or better yet, an option to delete individual items.

Wrench menu -> History.
Click on [Edit Items...]
Select the ones you want to delete
Click on [Remove Selected Items]
Oil sands,mw4 xetra
MCW Energy Group is a Canadian holding company with two principal portfolio companies, a fuel distributor based in Southern California, and a break-through oil sand recovery venture with operations in Utah.
What language(s) do you work in?
Why is there a noticeable delay? With a proper index, even slow hardware should be able to deal with histories with millions of items in...
While I definitely take the side of the GUI in principle, when I think about the abominations that have been coming out of Microsoft... Not to mention the newest version of Skype...

Whatever happened to a simple text menu, organized logically and hierarchically, where you pretty much know where anything will be? And simple dialog boxes, instead of ribbon-bar-palettes that show and hide different things depending on the width of your screen?

A man page requires me to read the whole thing before I'm confident of what option I'm looking for, because it's presented as an unstructured list of parameters. A menu bar is hierarchical, and I should (theoretically) be able to find what I'm looking for quicker -- and I know if an option is disabled before trying it, and a dialog box asks me whatever else the program needs to know.

Unfortunately, Microsoft and others are abandoning the tried-and-true principles of interface design. I refuse to use anything after Word 2003, but Google Docs is generally even easier.
That's from constructing all of the factories involved...
It was posted almost two years ago. While duplicate posts can be an issue, having well-written, useful content show up twice in two years doesn't seem excessive to me.

There was some helpful Q&A in that old discussion though, so it's good that you linked to it.
I empathize with you, the developer. I still want the best machine money can buy.

But I have also been on the other side. Let me give you a simple question to ponder: assuming an engineering team of 50, and the cost of 2% to upgrade machines, would you rather upgrade everyone, or hire one more developer? As the manager, I can tell you that everyone is asking for an extra headcount: "we need a full-time person to handle builds", "Tom could really use an extra hand with the XYZ module". Etc.

It happens to cost the same: hire an extra developer, or upgrade. So, as a manager, you handle the trade-off. Life is all about trade-offs, not absolute. I'd love to have a faster machine. I'd love to have more engineers. I can't have both.
Should'a, Could'a, Would'a
I would love to have mainframe quality virtualisation on my desktop. I expect it will come one day soon.
Does this have a use? I thought I might be able to type in docs.g.co, etc. but that doesn't work.
Could your mom do that?
Couldn't the same point be made about cinema, though? Specially in the early years of the medium, it's easy to say that movies must be entertaining to watch. And yet we got fantastic works of art in cinema.
It's probably easier for smaller companies to make hardware refreshes but in big corporations there's the whole issue of "standardised desktops" and so on to get around.

Getting a new machine isn't just a case of plonking a new one on your desk, I'd imagine a lot of red tape goes on in the background
Groupon

"Groupon 1.0 started on a WordPress blog"

http://www.tomloverro.com/2010/08/19/groupon-1-0-started-on-...
Nike ShoesA Nike Dunks
What about mocking frameworks?
Simply not true.

When I first started traveling for long durations, I quickly realized that my biggest expense was keeping my life in the USA alive. Once I ditched the apartment/car payment, I found that I could live substantially cheaper on the road than I could back home.

As an example, living and climbing on the beach in Thailand, I could pay for my monthly rent/food/beer expenses with a single day of billable work. I had a laptop along for exactly that purpose, and as a result I ended up padding out the savings quite a bit by living in a tin shack on the beach.

You think travel is expensive because vacations are expensive and that's your only experience with travelling. A week in Hawaii costs about $10k for your family all in, so naturally it must cost me ~$500k a year on the road, right? I'll leave it to you to do the math on what you actually end up spending when you're paying local rates for accommodation and travel in 3rd world countries, but the answer you're working toward is $500-$1000/month.
Antisocial Networking, it could save your life.
Don't trust me at all but I've read about Microsoft's machines (probably here on HN) and as I recall they have really top-end hardware.

I think Google has a lot of MacBooks but I don't know where I get that from.
I'm finding more and more apps and services started out with key parts of the eventual back end initially being processed manually.
In my ideal world, there would be a method for "exposing" command-line arguments that a window manager could use to automatically generate an initial window, preferences pane, buttons, etc.

As a programmer, I'd love to simply create a nested array of options that the OS would automatically turn into a tabbed preferences panel, depending on data types and their groups.

I suppose it's too much to ask for...
> possibly an SSD, preferably in RAID1 config for redundancy

Since the code should be in a source control system, I don't see the point of this. RAID5 (increased redundancy and throughput) maybe, but even then you're increasing the chances of failure (the RAID hardware itself can fail) and you're not gaining much (if any) in the way of IOPS, which will be your biggest issue.
Ha ha! Brilliant. An incredibly suitable domain name for such and insane monster!
Piracy and Business Models
My company proactively offered to upgrade hardware for whoever needs it. Even bought a huge monitor for everyone, which I didn't need and doesn't fit on my desk.

But a $99 software license I asked for 4 months ago that will make me more productive every day, I'm still waiting for it.

One time I was at a large company that gave all developers ridiculously fast and powerful machines. By far the highest specs I'd ever used. But the machine crawled because of all the million background processes IT put on there, and the crappy tools in our software chain.

Software is so much more important than hardware.
I would have assumed that he would have used OCR to conver the scans into text, which would be reflowable.
iTunes is an abomination anyway, but the buttons at least look like buttons. Not so with sparrow, they are just darkish inset shapes. (Much like the Mac App Store, which, even though it's made by Apple, should not be used as an example for good UI, ever. IMO.)

Nothing against the left category bar, but why not use a standard widget? Think Mail or iTunes. Also, selecting an item from a vertical list on the left and changing content horizontally on the right feels strange to me.
that is truly awesome.
I'll just leave this here for you then:
http://www.amazon.com/Vagabonding-Uncommon-Guide-Long-Term-T...
Option one, banks will join in the rescue effort and the ECB will allow for a temp default of greece. Ewald Nowotny hinted this today.

Option two, "Eurobonds" will be issued. This will allow Germany to lend money for Greece at a very low interest. (costs Germany a lot of money as their national interest will be increased, last resort)

Option three, some of the debt will be dropped and reissued as longer ten year loans releasing the choke hold. Paul Achleitner from allianz hinted.

Option four, EFSF will buy Greek bonds.

Unemployment rates went down in Greece from 16,2% to 15,8% last month. Which hints their economy is growing a bit. There's talk of a banking tax, which let banks pay a small % to help build a buffer for these situations.
I'm personally more worried about the United States then the euro zone.
HN Review: My startup Qlobe - Window Shopping on Your Phone
Hey no problem with sharing your own as far as I'm concerened. Looks like a great MVP and I'll be interested to see how your own feedback leads the direction of any future features you have planned.

What tools, frameworks, languages did you use?
I don't know, but for me, "intuitive" and "a couple weeks of getting used to" are not the same thing...

"More efficient after a couple weeks of getting used to", that could convince me...
Unix V5, OpenBSD, Plan 9, FreeBSD, and GNU implementations of echo.c
A/B Test using our homegrown open-source Ruby gem
PHP is what I've started with and after many projects in Python and Java I still come back to it whenever I need to get stuff done. I mean look at the array functions (http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.array.php)! Some consider this bad design, but I love this about PHP.
I would really like feedback on the landing page, market opportunity for this application, and how useful this would actually be. Any other feedback is most welcome as well, Thanks!
Doesn't look like you can do polymorphism with it, which would be the real utility of this. Objects are globally named, etc.

But looks fun!
>I doubt I could be convinced that a mouse is sentient

Having met plenty of humans and plenty of mice, there are definitely members of the former who are less sentient than members of the latter.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say exactly, but we should not be judging the sentience of creatures by the degree of ignorance we have. How would you react to a proof that the yeast on top of your fridge is indeed sentient?
Nice work.
What language, platform, framework did you use?
He did not want a slide show. He wanted the files moved. And why do it by hand when it can be automated? As he said, different tasks, different tools.
Thanks for this, completely missed it... :)
Exactly. There are tradeoffs to be made when making any architectural decision. PHP may not be the right choice for someone, but it might for someone else in a different situation that values the characteristics you highlighted. However, it is ultimately a potential hire's choice what they want to grow their experience in.
You make a good point and it comes down to the parallel between the people who have money and the people who don't. For those who already have money, they view it as a standard, something they're used to and believe that their happiness comes from something else. For those who don't, not being able to pay a bill, having a good car to get back and forth to work, or being able to treat your kids to a movie and ice cream can significantly impact your happiness. Everyone says that money has nothing to do with it, but you're right, it does. Perhaps from a cosmic "we are floating in space" point of view, but in a human, "we run on money" view, there's significant happiness found in having money.

That being said, I think the concept of money and having or not having it is a great topic for debate. It's one of those things that most would love to detest, but in reality, they realize they only way they're going to be able to detest it (short of being homeless) is to make money. It sucks, it's dehumanizing, and it shouldn't be that way, but it is.
You make a good point and it comes down to the parallel between the people who have money and the people who don't. For those who already have money, they view it as a standard, something they're used to and believe that their happiness comes from something else. For those who don't, not being able to pay a bill, having a good car to get back and forth to work, or being able to treat your kids to a movie and ice cream can significantly impact your happiness. Everyone says that money has nothing to do with it, but you're right, it does. Perhaps from a cosmic "we are floating in space" point of view it doesn't, but in a human, "we run on money" view, there's significant happiness found in actually having money.

That being said, I think the concept of money and having or not having it is a great topic for debate. It's one of those things that most would love to detest, but in reality, they realize they only way they're going to be able to detest it (short of being homeless) is to make money. It sucks, it's dehumanizing, and it shouldn't be that way, but it is.
What A Chat Bot Taught Me About Being Human
I once had to watch a startup skimp on dev hardware, only to splurge on 'launch' parties and (no kidding) billboards...

The founder, a marketing major, had a hard time explaining things to their investor once the inevitable end was clear.

I'd ask the question: why wouldn't a company trust the developers' specs for adequate hardware?
Things you should know when interviewing for a programming job
Square, really simple device with no extra features.
If the productivity gains outweigh the cost is it still obvious?
It's not about source code backup. It's about a developer not losing half a day when an SSD dies. With RAID1, at least in theory, when one dies you should be able to replace it and keep going.
There's more to "in shape" than strong.

You're right. Strength is just what got me started. I play a lot of pick up basketball, surf, snowboard, hike, etc... When it comes to just regular running, 5k is about my limit since it bores me so much :)

The life as a gift thing I totally agree. I've wasted a lot of time as a youngster, and only in my 30s have I realized it. My wife is always telling me I'm too hard on myself (and really who isn't?), but there is so much more I want to accomplish. I really do feel like time is running out, and the squeeze only gets worse when trying to plan for a family.
At least it's not ColdFusion... I'm convinced some websites out there use fake .cfm file extensions as a joke. No way they're actually using ColdFusion!
PVS-Studio blog at LiveJournal (C/C++, 64-bit, OpenMP)
Definitely a no-brainer. Always buy the best machine you can get.

I'm surprised that most developers don't take the same approach to tools. If you're using Eclipse or (god forbid) a text editor to write code, spend a minute and tally up all those 5-second chunks of your life you've spent this year looking up the names of variables, objects, whatever, and running into runtime errors from typos. Multiply by $$$/hour and see what you could have spent on a decent IDE.

JetBrains makes IDEs for pretty much every language out there by now, and any one of them will pay for itself in about four days.
I can definitely relate to the cynicism, thanks for the extensive response. The speed of progress even within small teams is pitiful. Moving away from ancient tools, especially when they were written by the company itself, is incredibly painful and slow, wasting days of engineering time every months.

Reminds me of my company where we spend hundreds of hour maintaining the service's docs as Word docs files checked into a proprietary source control system, instead of relying on a wiki or anything else easily editable on the fly. God forbid someone makes a modification to the document you were editing before you submit, you'll be copying and pasting between the two docs for ever.
You don't need bash features to do this either. I wrote shoop (http://shoop.sourceforge.net/) a decade ago.

<http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/ten_years_of_free_softwa...;
FWIW, a couple of minutes googling found 3 seemingly-valid phone numbers for you.