skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sounds right to me from both me and my friends and we're just barely middle class joes. The UK average is noted to be around £16k (about $25k): http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/jun/18/planningyourwedd... .. Admittedly, most of ours involved taking our extended families to the US for a cheapo Vegas wedding rather than the wedding itself ;-)
Florida Keys Real Estate
Zulu includes the leap seconds. Zulu just comes from US Navy denoting it as Time Zone Z and all US Navy time zones are based on offset from UTC.
US pending home sales slide in September
IIRC, JetBrains will also be providing an Eclipse plugin (though turning it over to the community after initial dev).
My own wedding? Justice of the peace and dinner, less than $1k. The last three weddings I've been to have easily topped the $28k average. One was way over the top, the other two were "average" for the Bay Area. It depends on where you are, number of people, etc. The two aspects of wedding planning I was happy to avoid -- the overall cost and the bickering that comes up in the process.

Where did we use the extra $$? Property.
One step at a time will lessen the shock.
Thanks! Discounts usually range anywhere from 20% to 50%. Most tickets we get are not priced too high to begin with so we take at least $5 off. We're pretty flexible though and try to do whatever works best for the promoter.
It's not rational either to only necessarily netting his contribution in the positive.

Just ask yourself these two questions and you'll see what I mean.

Did Microsoft contribute in advancing certain areas of computing and speed up the adoption of Internet technologies?

Did Microsoft contribute in impeding certain areas of computing and slow down the adoption of Internet technologies?
You should spend some time with some serious, high-level astrology. I am not kidding. You will find that there have been brilliant defenses of it over the centuries, and it is full of various tidbits of ancient wisdom from the wisdom literatures that you may find quite profound.

It is, nevertheless, bullshit, because it can not be meaningfully mapped back to reality. Its predictions are bunk, the framework it offers you doesn't work when pulled into the real world, if taken truly seriously it decreases your ability to make accurate predictions about the world and the people in it. People had centuries to polish the turd, even to find painfully clever ways of including little tidbits of non-turd in the turd, but it's still a turd at its core.

The presence of a few good tidbits in a discipline proves nothing about it. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to define something totally false in every detail. The question to be asked is how much truth the discipline has, and how well it can not merely assert the truth, but demonstrate it in a non-self-referential manner. Pretty much every social science in the modern era fails this test miserably.

Ideas that sound profound are a commodity, truth is harder to come by.
In a competitive market, why is movie theater popcorn expensive?
You make it sound like your particular taste is superior. But minimalism is not the end-it-all. It's one of many possible styles.

What does it even mean that "most people have shitty taste"? I guess it's easy to agree with that on an emotional level because taste is so varied. There is always bound to be a large number of people that you don't agree with in taste. That is completely subjective though, those people will probably find your taste shitty.
A self motivation trick, posting those outlines? :)
You misunderstand. $1000/month is a pretty high salary in India even now. In the 90s, someone making the equivalent of that much would be considered upper class, not upper middle class. This has nothing to do with Macs or Ferraris.
I didn't mean to say that developing with what might be considered 'experimental' tech as inappropriate. I think that sometimes breaking away from 'best practices' and 'how we do things in this company' is exactly the kind of thing that can create significant savings.

I think there's a lot of entropy with tools and techniques on the tech industry generally, and more so in actual companies where cultures don't change as rapidly.
Great developer is relatively easy to identified. Three things: 1. get shit done, 2. good decisions on trade-offs (cost, performance, etc), 3. maintainable work.
Crew Ends Trek to Mars, Mock Mission Accomplished
The point is that if people send their mail encrypted it is encrypted both in transit and when it is stored on the mail server. So the third party can be anyone, and you don't need to specifically trust them.

Also this isn't that big of an obstacle you make it to be. We're not living in 1995 anymore. A lot of mail clients have plugins or even have built-in support for encryption.
Rio was tad expensive... but it was so light compared to a discman...
I view DST as a clever hack to solve an otherwise intractable coordination problem: getting everyone to shift their schedules to not waste all that extra morning daylight in the summer.

As for the proposal of permanent DST, I would like that personally but I think that too many people would have a problem with kids going to school in pitch darkness in the winter and whatnot.

The theoretical ideal would be that standard business hours continuously adjust so that they always start soon after dawn. That maximizes the amount of after-work sunlight, without sacrificing daytime sunlight. Despite the existence of people who prefer early morning daylight, I think that maximizes social efficiency.

Of course it's not (currently) practical to continuously adjust, so DST is a coarse approximation.

I do appreciate the ridiculousness of changing the clocks instead of changing our schedules. But I think it's impossible to coordinate the change in schedules. You'd have too many defectors and the whole thing would fall apart. Think about the massive interdependence: work schedules, daycare, trains, social activities, etc etc. It really has to happen all together en masse or it doesn't work.

Whether it's worth the hassle (and, yes, the real cost in lost productivity and sleep disruption) is of course still debatable but I think those declaring it pure insanity haven't fully thought it through.

PS: Interesting exception that proves the rule: Arizona opts out of DST because it gets so hot in the afternoon and evening that people actually prefer the early morning daylight.
1. The texture itself is the problem.
Poll: Devs, Have You Used oDesk or eLance?
I'm curious to see how many people have used (or attempted to use) these types of sites to find freelance/contract work.
Yes and they work well.
Yes, sometimes they work.
I've tried, but was unable to find a project that was worth my time.
No, I have never tried.
Ask HN: What is your development setup?
Just wondering what hardware fellow Hackers are using to write software. Laptop/desktop/monitors/etc.
I, for one, even bought a "real player gold" license. Ha!
Sadly, often time you'll have clients that use older version and you need to stay backward compatible for them.
MacBook Pro 13" 2009 C2D 2.66 4GB

Dell 24"

Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0
Just some website testing feedback I can't scroll the deals.html page while surfing on my iPad, the page is cut off, really bad when I'm browsing in landscape, almost half of the page is cut off, can't scroll down
Iphone 4s
Parent: My family couldn't afford a $1k+ mac in the 90s

Reply: Your family was making $1k/month? You were wealthy!

The logical flow here is the same as if I said, "I can't afford a Ferrari" and someone replied with "you can afford a Ferrari!?"
Upvoting because this is the only nice thing I've ever heard anyone say about Windows ME.

Also, I haven't had windows crash on me since Vista.
Of course, if you did write Java/C++ style curly brace code in Ruby, those of us who like Ruby would bring out the pitchforks.
Ivy league schools are effectively free for people who are not rich through financial aid. Not sure that was true in 60s/70s.
Apple gives most of its top execs $60M stock grants with vesting
Surely Microsoft innovated, in a less-than-spectacular way most of the times with things like direct3d, plug-n-play etc. They added tcp/ip stack to windows and created internet explorer, even brought the internet directly to the desktop initially. While they did use their monopoly to push their products thus eliminating rivals, they did not directly block competition. You could still install netscape and windows is still a very open platform. I 'm not going to defend MS monopoly tactics of course, or make a scientific account of microsoft's pros and cons, but Windows had competitors in the open market, and yet they prevailed, not always because they were the better system, but they were not significantly worse than others.

Compare that to the oft-praised Apple model: directly block competitors from making similar functionality instead of competing with them and lock people into their systems. Does that model not impede technology from advancing?
It made me think they were either bad at math or exaggerating.

If it's used in the context you're suggesting then it's a meaningless snippet of information as it doesn't reveal anything about the typical user experience.
Does this mean that Johnny Ive is considering leaving Apple?
ODesk worked great for me, stick with very straight forward / easy tasks, I was paying $3/hr for someone to do data mining. I ended up with a great excel doc with over 3000 related sites & email addresses, very useful to my startups initial launch
I think Zed has found a great place to call home as I just realized he's created his own brand with LxTHW. I can envision LxTHW having a bright future with a lot of great topics awaiting his "Programming, Motherfuckers" attitude and amazing productivity.

Has anyone taken his teaching his online course?
Did he help make computers affordable internationally?

I have a hard time seeing an argument for this. There was a large selection of alternative OS's in the 80's, and one of them would've gotten a dominant position without DOS/Windows, possibly, though not necessarily, giving us a dominant player that would've been far less aggressive about using illegal methods to undermine their competition.

Gates legacy is becoming more positive, but brushing the negative sides under a chair is revisionism.

EDIT: Charming, being downvoted instead of getting a counter-argument. I thought I was on Hacker News, not on Reddit.
I don't know that I'd call IE6 "revolutionary", but it was indeed an excellent browser for its time. As terrible as its standards support was compared to later browsers, it was exemplary for its time.

But it's impossible to ignore the way Microsoft reacted to winning the browser wars by shuttering the IE team and leaving web standards effectively adrift until Firefox came along and starting taking market share. Whether you call it reprehensible or want to call it a "good business decision" that just happened to be bad for consumers and the web, that will always be the legacy people remember about IE6.
William Adams potter
William Adams potter
William Adams was baptised in Tunstall, Staffordshire the son of a potter Born after the death of his fathe.
There is no porting to be done between 5 and 6.
I dont hate Gates. I hate windows because its so annoying.
Hating Bill Gates was never a particularly intelligent stance. He was a great businessman and technician, pushing a really lousy technology. That doesn't say anything about his value as a person, and his subsequent work (while I differ to some degree with the means) has been of tremendous worth to the world.

That his company produced a whole raft of wretched technologies is germane, but hardly dispositive.
But I think it's impossible to coordinate the change in schedules. You'd have too many defectors and the whole thing would fall apart.

I'd think that if all government agencies including schools switched their schedules at the DST point, most companies would quickly fall in line. And ideally lots of companies who currently have fixed hours would realize they don't actually need them.

At the very least, stop mucking with the changeover date every few years and breaking millions of software installations.
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So instead of a simple, uniform rule that () invokes a function, and no-() references the function, you add yet a third syntax?

This is not an improvement, it is an unnecessary complication.
No his point is valid. 50k gets you a very good lifestyle - enough for a good house, 3 very solid meals, a very good school and every opportunity to better your life going forward. I definitely did not experience any financial troubles growing up (and my family left the country later so that worked out well for us). But that doesn't correlate well with a good life in America - very different definitions of luxuries.
Thanks for the feedback. I've noticed this as well. For some reason the page doesnt render properly on mobile devices. Working on getting that fixed.
One of the good things is it is not using the PHP namespace, e.g. use Zend\Controller\Action\HelperBroker;
I was in the same boat. I graduated from a liberal arts college with a degree that no one has ever asked about. After lots of non-profit work after school I was tasked with 'updating the website' one day. Cut to 3 years and $100+ in library fines later and I've been the lead developer on Fortune 50 websites and now work for for a 'rent a Rails shop' company. Here's the advice:

Learn how to interview well. Knowing what github is, having actually launched a site, and wrangling some freelance work together puts you ahead of 90% of the people I worked with at my Big Co. job, you just need to be able to prove it and convince people of it. The competition for most positions consists of bored CS grads from Java schools who never learned how to use version control and for whom programming is just a job. You have passion it appears, and that can't be overrated.

I was willing to be aggressive with my first interview, noting that I would be able to accept a lower-than-market rate if they would do a salary review shortly after I started. Not everyone is in the position to do so, but I took a 'whatever it takes' attitude to get started, with the confidence in myself that once people saw how effective I could be, things would get better. Programming is as close to a meritocratic profession as exists, so get in a position to prove yourself.
Although this is an "ad" for wearing a seatbelt, I still watch it occasionally because it is so artistic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-8PBx7isoM
Ah, thank you. I suppose that is the amateur in amateur time historian ;)
The 'multi-decade' bit was just meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I was just implying that it took sooo much longer to complete the PhD in the US, as opposed to Commonwealth countries (UK, and to some extent, Australia, New Zealand). Giving up 7 years of my life is just too much to ask.

Also, when I mention about visa requirement, I mean the restriction on freely moving into a country and expecting to be able to work right away. Studying anywhere in the world is not much of a problem for me, visa-wise.
You still have a dot in there!

greetABunchOfPeople List<String> people
people do
_ sayHello println
hahaha - too late. Node.js for the win.
New Marketing Article: Best Options to Increase Your Video Traffic
Wow, this is a very clever idea. In a couple of months I will be starting my own company, too bad that I think I won't find anything similar to your product in Brazil for at least a couple of years.
No, I don't think the article is an attack on just one quote (and quite didn't say that). I agree with you about almost all your points - its just that in your original post, you basically said 'leave Jobs out of this', and I'm merely pointing out why Jobs is relevant to this discussion - because a part of the article discussed Steve's attack on Bill.

"Either way, why waste time worrying about something a dead man said? Jobs is maggot-food now. Gates is here with us."

While I usually don't care for the Gates vs. Jobs arguments that particular statement irked me, because its not just a slight against Gates, its an indirect attack on the field of philanthropy itself. And Jobs' words have the power to influence many.
That's persuasive. You might be right. It's a tough sell though: Come on everyone, time to start waking up earlier! Up and at 'em! Daylight's a-wastin'!

(Yeah, imagining that collective groan has brought me back from the brink of changing my mind! It could never happen without the clock-shift hack.)

I agree about not changing the changeover date; that seriously compounds the hassle of it. Any clock that auto-adjusts on the old schedule has to be manually adjusted 4 times per year!
Performance Tuning for Phusion Passenger
Are you kidding me?

He made computers affordable? Is that what you call a convicted monopolist, using anti-competitive tactics to drown out competition? Making things affordable?

He exploited market power and made, by and large, shitty products that at best people have tolerated because they felt they had no alternative. Having done that for two decades, he grew a conscious and started handing out all his ill-gotten gains.
Yeah, I think I wass. Thanks to you both for clearing that up.
like direct3d

You just brought up the horrible memories of computer gaming pre-directX/3d. What a mess it was.

Wonder if I have a floppy lying around with all my old custom autoexec.bat files? :)
I agree that premature anything is bad, especially in extreme form, however, your other point needs some elaboration.

Isn't simple code inherently more maintainable

Verbose, over-simplified code can also be unmaintainable because you lose track of the bigger picture.

The only really simple code is small projects, and code that was just written. In the longer run, as features are added, there is always complexity being added.

In that phase it becomes important to separate concerns, prevent accidental complexity, factor out repeated code, and so on. This can mean that some parts of the code have to make use of more powerful constructs of the programming language, and thus are less trivially "simple".

Also, opinions differ greatly on what is "simple code" and what is not. After all, all code is simple once you understand it.
Waiting for Amazon interview result
I've just done an on-site interviewing with Amazon last Friday for its hiring event.

The recruiter says it would takes 2-3 business days for the result. It's 5 days now.

Any idea how long does that take to get the result? Anyone in the same boat as me?
Yeah I'm wondering if he means, "if I paint it on right, my wall will end up smooth, as if I laminated it". If I ran my fingers over it now, the way it's currently painted, I would feel lots of little bumps.
Direct3d? Why not use OpenGL?

Plug-n-play? That's a standard?

Adding TCP/IP - thanks, Microsoft, for not embracing and extending that one.

Internet explorer? Gee, thanks Microsoft for abusing your monopolistic powers to knock out Netscape and start embracing and extending the HTML platform?

The best defence you can mount is that they prevailed because they weren't significantly worse than others. That in itself says a lot -- but I'd make the argument they prevailed because they used tactics that make it hard for others to compete (including illegal ones).
Hip Hop Videos : Children - V V Brown Ft. Chiddy Bang
Thanks for the reply, always nice to hear about liberal arts majors that have walked the road ahead of me. I think I need to improve on the confidence as I feel less sure of myself now than I did six months ago, something of a more you learn less you know scenario. I do have a ton of confidence in my abilities to get a job done however so maybe I should tap that part of my psyche during interviews.
You can distribute the encrypted version via BT and give the decryption key to the selected few to verify. This is no different from giving the unencrypted version to the selected few to verify.
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The security industry that cried wolf
how can anyone hate him? Are you F*cking kidding?

that man DESTROYED the desktop experience and OS evolution progress by using ILLEGAL business tactics to create an OS monopoly. Tactics like threatening computer vendors to ditch Linux otherwise they won't get "discounts" for MS Windows and won't be able to compete. You can only guess to what other practices he'd resorted behind the scenes.

than man tried to KILL alternatives including Linux (via proxy companies like SCO), in which he succeeded to certain extent - for example Linux still doesn't have open source graphics drivers of the same quality as Windows/OSX, which hinders its adoption on the desktop.

Furthermore, Gates invested lots of money into a corn ethanol production, an industry known to raise food prices and put people in poverty and misery.

Next, Gates works hard to reduce Earth's population by providing birth-control vaccines to 3rd world countries, and you can only guess how else.

F U.
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"switching to ME got rid of the issues."

That's the first time I've ever heard anyone say that.
Scala and Clojure both involve lots of new ways of thinking. This is why I like them. I suspect it is also a reason many hesitate to try or switch to them. People say you can use Scala as basically java with less boilerplate, but if you want to read other people's code, you need to understand a whole lot of new concepts. With Clojure there's no pretending you won't need to learn a bunch of new concepts. With Xtend however, the changes are limited enough that it can be a palatable first step for the hesitant.
If you come here on the Tier 4 student visa (as what most people do), you'd face the following restriction:

A student from outside of the EEA must not:
• engage in business; or
• engage in self-employment; or
• provide services as a professional sportsperson or entertainer; or
• pursue a career by filling a permanent full-time vacancy.

You can see that from page 71 here:
http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/documents/empl...

There used to be a Post Study Visa that gave you the freedom for two years post-study to goof off/work/incorporate/whatnot but unfortunately that had been cancelled last year (just the moment when I enrolled .. sigh). However, there's an entrepreneur visa that an aspiring startup might try to aim for. However, my question specifically pertains to the cases where it would be good to incorporate (say, after the business proves to be feasible).
Loren Brichter Has Left Twitter
Gates didn't lift his head up and decide to give to charity. Read some of his earlier interviews from the 90's - when asked what he would do with his wealth, he often stated that he would spend his 50's & 60's giving a large portion of it away. I was skeptical when I heard this back then - but the man has more than stayed true to his word.
It sounds like you're saying The JVM is the worst possible VM, except for the alternatives

My understanding is that it is state-of-the-art, and includes many innovations (unlike Java itself). Of course, state of the art does not mean perfect. There's still room to improve, which the JVM, CLR or some other VM might manage. But it seems over-the-top to bash the best in the world. It's like saying that, as a sprinter, Usain Bolt is quite bad.

The real tiger is never a match for a paper one, unless actual use is wanted. - Brooks
Grand Theft Auto V (GTA V) Will Be Huge