skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who keeps all that stuff. A few months ago I went back through some old chat logs to find the first time that I chatted with my best friend, and it was a lot of fun to relive that part of my life.

I think people don't realize that the volume of digital artifacts we're creating is going to be staggering when we look back at them a century from now. That's one of the reasons I like to check in places. I imagine what it would have been like if my grandfather had traveled the world with Foursquare in the 1930s -- maybe I'd be able to visit the pubs where he drank in Copenhagen, or the port he arrived at when he met my grandmother in Glasgow.

My life might not be that exciting, but I'm definitely leaving a trail behind. My grandchildren will wonder why I checked in so much at the Palo Alto Creamery. :)
I suspect the second method is just an example of how you could make an asynchronous operation that performs a subtracting of two numbers, after a method (CountEveryBitByHand) is completed.

To keep it simple they should have left out the second method.

Unless I'm incredibly wrong!
> surely there's a moral imperative not to spill the company beans.

Surely. And yet, you can't build something like Silicon Valley by erring on the side of not spilling the company beans. You can only do it by sharing information, which is also a moral imperative.

Fortunately, I've generally steered clear of that conflict myself, largely by having the good fortune to work for Silicon Valley companies that absorbed that ethic of openness. I've sometimes experienced that conflict, and in those cases I've usually kept mum about things that could have helped our competitors. Some of those things I still haven't talked about to this day, because keeping my word is very important to me. But I respect the decisions of other people who've chosen the opposite; I understand their reasoning, and it makes sense.
PS3 ToS to force you to waive your rights to a class action against Sony [pdf]
Erica Davis - Executive People on the Move
The landscape tablet landscape
Normal People will Never Understand Domain Names, Name Servers, or DNS
Erica Davis - People in the News
We run non-trivial, large, unmodified .NET 4 C# ASP.NET MVC web apps (compiled on Windows) on Mac Mini Servers on OS X with Mono and Apache. Never had a single problem. It's almost creepy how well it works.
NIX 64-bit kernel is available
it's not a theoretical price hike in two years - Netflix just raised the prices on 9/1/2011. Prices have jumped significantly over the past two years. My costs have gone up over 50%!
The first instruction set I learned was Z80 (Osborne 1), followed by 6502 (Atari 800). I think Atari and Commodore 8-bits may have been more popular than the Apple II, if only because they were available for purchase at more locations.
You can use C# everywhere, but in practice it just seems like a huge effort to avoid learning a new language to me.

I have nothing against the language (writing C# is half of my day job), but all of these bridges are second-class citizens and built and maintained at the mercy of third parties just to interface with your target platform. Apple will never release updates for MonoMac or MonoTouch. Google isn't going to release C# Android SDKs or documentation. Mono for Linux always trails the Windows version and has significant community resistance, and Microsoft isn't going to integrate and maintain these bridges.

You're also always losing something in the translation too, be it idiomatic style of the target API or C#, or being totally cut off from new native features, or severely restricting what community support or documentation is available to you. Any way you cut it, it's a second class experience. Worse, some of the bridges aren't free. You get to pay $400 for the privilege of not learning a little bit of Java or ObjC to get MonoTouch for Android or iOS.

C# is good, but it's not so good that I refuse to learn other tools.
So sad. When are we curing cancer again? :(
Languages are just tools. What one person can write in Erlang or raw C, someone else can write that in JS or QBasic. What matters is what your code does. Having working on projects ranging from large ERP systems to audio DSP to video startup to joke sites like cakesy.com and iwannamarry.com, I can say that what matters most is how much you enjoy working on the project. That's it. If the twitter-feed-importing-app makes you happy and your users happy, don't feel bad that you're not contributing to OpenSSH.
3 Ways FeeFighters Disrupted #TCDisrupt
The Intelligent Investor: Why John Bogle Is Upbeat About Stocks
I think search is very different from browsing. Browsing is appropriate at different times than search. Some people (independently of whether they are power users or not) like browsing more than search or search more than browsing.

There are many cases in which it makes sense to support those two modes†.

I launch all my apps using Spotlight but I hardly ever search for music in iTunes. In my music library I rely (nearly) solely on browsing, using search doesn’t do anything for me. (Maybe that’s because I have a very limited number of apps and I know all their names but I have so many more songs and I often don’t even know the title I want to play, just the general direction I want to go?)

—

† And some in which it doesn’t really, e.g. web search.
I ditched the DVD subscription, because I used it so rarely that it was actually better (cost and selection-wise) to go to a rental shop again.
Jesus that was sad.
I strongly dislike Jira. Everything about it is unwieldy. It's like a car with a top speed of 30mph, with a lever for each and every moving part of the car. Too many pieces of it are customizable, and all of the things which can be customized must be customized for anything to work. The amount of effort it takes to use Jira is almost enough to write your own issue tracker.

Also, a fresh JIRA install with no issues, projects, or anything has a memory footprint of over 0.6GB.

I don't know why people use it, but people do. My guess is that all the effort it requires provides a simulacrum of control and productivity.
http://giffconstable.com/2011/07/12-tips-for-customer-develo...

"make sure that you're learning, not selling!"
Codecs are complicated and mathy and optimized for speed. So you might find a line of code that says something like:

val = SHOW_UBITS(re, gb, bits) - (1 << exp_order) + (switch_bits + 1) << rice_order);

and you just don't have a clue what it really means (I don't--even though I can easily read the line of code) because the answer is buried in the details of the codec design.

But trust me--if you go through a complicated spec and implement it yourself, you'll end up with a lot of similar stuff as this guy did, with his mighty-fine-looking piece of work.
Not really a problem. All the software was rigorously tested using emulators running on mainframes. The Guidance computers were truly bizarre things. They used core memories for program storage, but to save weight only the 1 bits were expressed with cores. The 0 bits had none. If you recompiled a program and even one bit changed, the memory had to be re-manufactured. Therefore, lots of testing.
I get what you're saying, but want to remind you that this kind of math is a skill just like juggling or swallowing swords. Just because some folks train more in web applications, ORM, crazy legacy file formats, whatever, does not automatically make them less of a software engineer.

I also quite often draw the distinction between "programmers" and "software engineers", with "computer scientists" sometimes being their own category, and sometimes a subset of the first two.
i implemented these on a site a while back after an opera user requested it, because apparently opera has a keyboard shortcut or something to automatically go to the next/previous pages that use these tags.

what i found was that opera started doing a pre-fetch on them as soon as i added the tags, so every time an opera user would visit the site, they would fetch two pages. i had to remove the tags to cut down on the resource usage.
Ask HN: Am I flagged by HN moderator?
Fogscreek's post and mine are submitted at about the same time:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3001173
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3001182

I've gained 8 votes, and they have 5. They are 22 on the front page, I am 51 on the second page. My post was on the front page for about 30 minutes, until it suddenly disappeared.

I am wondering if I've done anything wrong, and if next time I can avoid getting moderated (if I was indeed flagged).

I believe I am trying to contribute to the community on good faith. So I would appreciate it if somebody can let me know if there are topics or rhetorics I should avoid.
The trouble is, the current standardisation processes are far too slow to be practically useful, while the breakneck pace of experimental feature development is too fast to keep up, so there is no useful definition of "a little" in your suggestion that we can use for planning new web projects and making decisions about which technologies we will rely on.

If you're starting a new web project today, you look at what technologies the browsers you're targeting already support with unmodified syntax. (I'd argue that that development model's a poor fit for the web, but that's a different question.)

On Windows systems, the kerning is very odd in a lot of fonts since they moved to the new rendering engine a while back. The spacing following a capital T is usually way too tight, and in some fonts there are a few other examples as well. This can render pages completely illegible at typical body text sizes.

That is an artifact of ClearType subpixel positioning. Firefox 7 or 8 onwards (I don't remember which) turn subpixel positioning off for several commonly-used fonts, listed in gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.force_gdi_classic_for_families.

Also, take a Windows 7 computer with a few Adobe professional OpenType fonts installed locally -- probably some that come with Creative Suite would do -- and just try selecting those fonts using CSS in recent versions of Firefox.

I have a feeling you're choosing the font incorrectly. Note that with DirectWrite, any weight modifiers ("semibold", "black", "light") aren't part of the font name any more. Instead you need to specify weight using the font-weight property. So instead of saying Arial Black as you would normally, you need to say Arial with weight 900: http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/971376-firefox-displays-my...

This is not a bug, though -- this is correct behaviour.

Most currently available web fonts also seem to look terrible (poorly hinted, terrible aliasing) on Windows XP in Firefox, but since they don't look great in other browsers either and they look better in Firefox on Windows 7, I'm inclined to point the finger more at Windows XP than Firefox in that case.

That's because most downloadable fonts aren't hinted for ClearType. DirectWrite with its subpixel positioning can cope much better with unhinted fonts.
Innovating Developer Culture At Foursquare & Etsy
No they are absolutely abysmal. Stay away for your own sanity.

My FINAL experience with JIRA + Fisheye + Greenhopper + Crucible nearly made me cry. This is on an 8 core Xeon, 12Gb RAM, 15k SAS RAID and Ubuntu 10.04LTS and Sun hotspot VM.

Random failures, null pointer exceptions all over the place that took us out for a couple of days, incredible memory usage, 8xCPUs jammed at 100% due to race conditions, Fisheye only barely just about works in Google Chrome because it's so slow, useless paid support, horridly slow and inconsistent UI, MyISAM tables causing relation failures (!!!!), don't even talk to me about their plugin management - it's a crock of shit.

I couldn't recommend it at all. It's worse than Visual Source Safe.

That's as a JIRA admin. As a JIRA user, I get people saying "can we have Trac back please".

If anyone at Atlassian is listening, please sort your product out. It's not fit for purpose.
Facebook gives devs easy access to Heroku cloud
"Everyone else thought they were really too young to cope with adult responsibilities"

If you word it like this, the emphasis of 'really' is moved to 'too young' but the sentence's meaning is the same, right?
The argument that non-competes increases hiring is like saying debt slavery increases credit. Probably true but society pays for it in the end.

That said instead of outlawing the practice the law should demand sevetance based on salary for each month of non-compete.
Even 50% is probably enough to quench interest for it in junior positions.
farkas! If you read this: you can solve all the real problems I have with JIRA by making all but the most commonly-used pieces of its UI be harder to find. You can find out which pieces to hide with user testing.
Case-Mate May Have Leaked the iPhone 5 Design
Facebook and Heroku
Heroku Breaks Through with Facebook Cloud Integration
it looks nice for me ... may be because my monitor is big ?
It's strange (interesting?) how an online presence preserves a person beyond death. When someone passes on, their Facebook wall becomes both a snapshot of what they were last doing and an impromptu digital memorial as people leave their condolences. Somber, but thought-provoking.
The trouble with saving all your chats is the sheer volume! I used to keep all my text messages, and log all my IM conversations. Until I realized I had 2,000 text messages on my phone, mostly worthless out of context, and megabytes and megabytes of IM chats. Unless you triage your conversations regularly, logging everything just results in a gigantic mess you will never revisit due to the stunning volume of your archives.
Keynote #2 (Build 2011)
it also happened to my previous submission for getfaceoff.com.
Though I liked the blog post, I think that the conclusion is a bit facile. The analogy that comes to mind is "going to the store to buy a new PC and coming home with a new keyboard instead for your existing one".

Sometimes you don't appreciate what you have (with minor modifications) until you take the journey.
The movie companies are just shooting themselves in the foot. If I can't find it on Netflix or download a copy for a reasonable price (I'd pay a couple bucks to download a movie and have permanent copy...), I'll torrent it. Their loss.
Jira and/or Confluence are _not_ popular in the enterprise. They are the tool for the small scrappy startup, and end up in the enterprise because hackers, or team-leaders need a tool and just go buy it (Jira and Confluence both cost less than $10,000 - which requires almost no purchase authority in a company)

I _LOVE_ Jira - I find it to be the greatest extensible issue tracker out there, and, after extensively using both it, and Remedy (a tool which costs on the order of $800,000 to do an enterprise install, and another $100,000/year to support, and is therefore popular in the enterprise) - I can say with some authority it outperforms Remedy in almost every category.

There is zero doubt in my mind that if someone is looking for a flexible issue tracker, that Jira has to be final-3 consideration in any down selection.

Ask me anything about Jira - I live, eat, and breath the product.
Nice idea and nice website... thanks... actually i didn't know staff like that exists for kids ... thanks !
From an employee's or an employer's point of view? A non-compete makes complete sense from an employer's point of view for an employee filling a critical function. If you're running a business and hire a CTO, having them sign a non-compete makes sense, since it limits their options and makes it harder to jump ship. A confidentiality agreement does not provide the same limitations -- it doesn't prevent the employee from quitting and getting a new job.

Note: I'm purposefully NOT discussing whether or not it is ethically correct, or if it's the right thing to do, or if it will create a more motivated employee, or anything of the sort.

Also, I understand that employers can't give that justification or the agreement would be ruled invalid. But as you said, what other point is there that's not served equally well by other means?
On that one, the lack of foot rests looks very uncomfortable.

My old ones were somewhat like this: http://www.officechairsforless.com/Square-Bar-Stool-ES25VS3....

Except sturdier, unpadded, and slightly tilted forward. They were also slightly pyramidal, resulting in a somewhat narrow seat but making the stool very stable.

P.S. Just found these: http://www.worthingtondirect.com/tables/solid_oak_stool_by_g... . The 30" one is probably closest functionally - I think one just has to slide off the seat to be standing up.
Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook's First Female Engineer
Stamen is looking for a developer
Good to see you back at it! And nicely said.
Make it that non-competes are enforced only if the employer is willing to pay the employee's lost wages & benefits in full until the expiry date. If the employer does not want to enforce it, then they don't have to pay.

A confidentiality agreement is completely separate from this.
I wouldn't underestimate Netflix. Their business model and viability has been doubted by Wall Street and others for years (see http://www.usatoday.com/money/media/2004-10-17-netflix-dvd-w... and http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2007/12/27/will-apple-...) but the company has always been very clever with their product strategy and partnerships.

As for the drop in subscriber numbers, it's understandable that people don't like price hikes, but losing less-profitable DVD customers may not be a bad thing in the long run. Postage and regional distribution centers are a drag on the company. Reducing those costs frees up funds for content distribution deals.
Conoce los Tipos de Entrevistas de Empleo y Cual es su Fin
Code Snippets: HTAccess, PHP, WordPress, jQuery, HTML, CSS
A study on the acquisition of attentional skills and expertise in StarCraft 2
Facebook and Heroku: an easy way to get started
Version Numbers Don't Matter (to users)
Cisco adopts smear campaign against Juniper as new marketing tool
The problem is, economics is a group activity. While many people were irresponsible, the effects of their irresponsibility have been felt throughout the economy. And some (banks) were definitely more irresponsible than others (homeowners), by virtue of the amount of power they wielded.
It's still pretty low-density though; using something like four square meters of space per person is ridiculous.
Zero to Best-Seller in 4 Hours
Netflix uses Amazon for scale. This is a problem. As much as burst architectures have theoretical advantages, the costs just don't add up beyond a certain size. I cannot believe that Netflix isn't at the point where they'd be better off owning their own servers

I would guess they believe the capitol to be gained through continued growth (or the capitol to be saved in a decline) eclipses the added cost of relying on Amazon.

In other words, owning your own servers is good for a stable market. They probably believe their market is still too volatile to depend on their own servers.
No, I'm trying to argue that 1) the definition that the US uses was chosen precisely because it isn't relative and can be used to judge of the "War on Poverty" has been won, 2) that being better off materially is only one aspect of being poor; shelter and health are two other factors, and 3) choosing a purely material, absolute definition, doesn't make sense since if you go back in time then everyone was poor. And I refuse to say that Louis XIV was poor simply because he didn't have air conditioning.

While someone who has to decide between food and rent money, despite having a plasma TV bought two years ago, before losing a job due to protracted illness, is poor.

There's a simple resolution to this - what do you define as poor? How many people in the US do you consider are poor? Are people now significantly less poor than they were in 1970, and how do you measure that?

Since you don't like the baseline of Wikipedia, I point you to the US Census Department at http://www.census.gov/hhes/povmeas/publications/orshansky.ht... (next two paragraphs)

Orshansky accurately described her poverty thresholds as a "relatively absolute" measure of poverty(60), inasmuch as they were developed from calculations that made use of the consumption patterns (at a particular point in time) of the U.S. population as a whole. (In the dichotomy between relative and absolute definitions of poverty, one of the essential characteristics of a purely "absolute" definition of poverty is that it is derived without any reference to the consumption patterns or income levels of the population as a whole.(61)) However, while Orshansky's poverty thresholds were not a purely absolute measure, they were also quite clearly not a purely relative measure, such as the 50-percent-of-median-income measure proposed by Britain's Peter Townsend in 1962 and (in the United States) by Victor Fuchs in 1965.(62)

The relativity is that the definitions assume that 1/3rd of income goes to food, which was the case in the 1950s. That is less now, while housing and transportation/energy costs are higher.

So okay, yes, there's some relativity in the definition, but it isn't by far a relative definition.
"We"? I'm not working on it. Are you?
Netflix uses Amazon for scale. This is a problem. As much as burst architectures have theoretical advantages, the costs just don't add up beyond a certain size. I cannot believe that Netflix isn't at the point where they'd be better off owning their own servers

I'm guessing that Netflix has probably spent a few minutes more than you analyzing their infrastructure costs. Sure they could have made a mistake and are being less efficient by using Amazon over their own data centers but I have a hard time believing that the mistake is as obvious as you seem to think.
Great post, very insightful. I had not really noticed serivces like FB and Twitter had moved the logout button the way they have until you pointed this out. It is quite a clever idea, as your post suggests sites that offer a service or product require the user to be logged in to get a personalised experience. Users are less likely to logout if they cannot see it as an option.
My problem with wordpress is it has grown to become a defacto base for far too many kinds of sites. Its great as a blogging tool, provided you dont need to dig to deep on the code side (or need it to scale). I also find keeping track of the "hook" infrastructure to be far more painful than it needs to be.
Flight of Fantasy: For Vacation, Some Fliers Play Airline
I've been involved in my company in seven different versions of Jira, and have installed it personally, at other companies, and my own server, and for test purpose no less than 50 times.

The hardware we have installed Jira ranged from a 1 Gigabyte VM with 8 Gigabytes of Hard disk, up to a 2 CPU Dual core server.

90% of the time with mySql as the backend, 10% of the time with HSQL

Operating System has been whatever the LTS variant of Ubuntu, or the more up to date version of RHEL (or CentOS as the case might be)

JRE has always been the most recent version from Sun.
We only use fisheye and Crucible internal to our company, but that accounts for 60% of my experience.

In the last four years (and 10 or so versions) - I've never had a random failure or null pointer cause a failure. It's been the most reliable software package I've ever used.

Interesting that we have two completely polar opposite experiences.
> I want to eliminate dependencies completely and go back to a simpler time

Exactly. I just want to do pure html/js/css and edit in vim or emacs. For my personal and/or blog I don't want (or need) a db to power it. Just a simple static site (i'm actually in the process of putting together a very simple static site generator that will allow you to stick components like headers, footers etc that won't require any coding for the user)
Mark Zuckerberg wants to delay Facebook IPO