skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>It appears to me that this article is trying a little bit too hard to paper over the poor UI performance of Android compared to iOS or WP7, and making up excuses for less than optimal drawing performance.

I'm surprised that many people are still bashing UI responsiveness/performance. I've held and played with many devices (including, but not limited to, iphone 3 and 4) and I can't really say what's bothering so many people. For me, every android device that I've used in the last 2 years feels fast and responsive. I'll just go out and say that it's a non-issue for mainstream user.
Nice links thanks. Would you agree that there is at least a similarity in purpose between Currying in functional languages and fluent interfaces? It seems to me that techniques and ideas from partial application and currying are useful in the design and implementation of fluent interfaces.
Must be tough to find time to get your work done if you're constantly a slave to fixing other people's "shitty" code without being asked.

I've got a few half-baked ruby gems sitting on github, so maybe Ted can rewrite those and then call me an idiot. After that, come reinstall the sink I put in the kitchen and call me retarded.
> DisplayPort currently supports the data rates necessary for 300dpi displays

The problem isn't (and has not been in quite a long time) the content of the computer box, it's OS support for high-DPI screens and the price of screen hardware (IBM used to sell 204 dpi computer screens, 22.2" with a 3840×2400 resolution, you had to feed it with 4 DVI channels but it worked — for 2D anyway, the first generation shipped with a quad-gpu Matrox G200 MMS)
Do I think enterprise software as it is today can be disrupted? Yes, I do. But do I think the enterprise software vendors and developers are clueless? No, absolutely not. Many of them have adopted agile processes and are as fast as any other developer. If you want to disrupt enterprise software, you need to disrupt the sales channel, like what Salesforce and SuccessFactors did.

Go on, I am very interested :)
Works fine on my year-old Desire HD, even with hardware acceleration not supported yet on the ICS ROM. It's all very smooth. Hell, even 2.3 runs great.
Intel, Google don't support Android Port to PC
Fear over plan for Facebook casino that could lure children into online gambling
I'm certainly not keen on Ted's anger at Hubot. But I think he's generally correct that it is far over-engineered for what it does (as is most up-and-coming web software today). These problems HAVE been solved before!
Pencil vs Camera. By ben heinne.
Other way around: about:mozilla displayed a blue screen in old versions of IE.
Halo 4
When 'product people' are good, they're what makes the product a success. When they're note good, they're worse than useless. My impression is that it's not an aptitude you can learn from books. Being good at product design takes an ability to see the whole picture while also taking details seriously.
You don't have to distract from the current project at hand though. You would do this maybe once a year. A credit would simply appear in their account, and you send them an email saying something like "Thank you for supporting open source! We have taken in more money than our operating expenses require, so we're giving back to the community that gives to community software. You have $X.XX in your account to donate to any currently open project. This amount was based on how much you donated over the past N months"

That would keep them coming back, and I don't think it would confuse them. I mean, people don't get confused when they get their checks from the utility company or REI. If anything I think your demographic (people who donate to fund open source software) would understand.
"by the time you hit 35 you better have a plan".

This should go for everyone, not just tech workers. We only get so many years on this planet, and assuming you make it to 35 and are reasonably healthy, you've likely got a lot more years ahead of you (another 40ish?).

You've had some education about life, work, money, etc. You've got no more excuses by 35. Have a plan. Have a backup plan. Understand what you'll need to do to execute on that plan.

For tech workers, this may be going in to consulting, doing a startup (two of the more popular ones), but it also may be moving around to different companies to keep tech skills cutting edge (or demanding that from current employers). Not everyone will be accommodating to your plan, but you have to execute. If current employers won't support you, find new employers.

There's probably many reasons people leave standard tech/dev work by that age - employers wanting cheaper/younger workers is the most popular reason/excuse, and there's probably some truth to that. But I moved out of that because much of it was boring. Some of the work was still interesting (data sizes, algorithms, etc) but the day to day realities of 'corporate life' grew tiresome. Never saying never - I won't rule out "corporate job" again - in fact, there's always some interesting companies popping up that need my skills/labor, and one day I may join one again. But my mindset is totally different about how I would approach a "job" again, and that mindset probably puts off many would-be employers anyway (making finding one both harder and easier at the same time).

So... what's your plan (those of you 35 or older)?
I'm afraid I have absolutely no knowledge of these. I'm more of a high-level self-taught app dev, things that happen under the hood go far above my head most of the time :)
I agree with some of his points, with others not so much.

I have myself to blame by following a link with such a title.
This kind of writing is too pretentious for my taste. Everyone wants to have their own blub programmer blog entry. I do not like that attitude, from the beginning the author puts himself in a position of almost absolute knowledge, entitling him to point out other people's defects almost as facts.

I would much prefer an exposure of a practical example in reasonable detail so we all can clearly see such problem instead of the usual "the [insert adjective] programmer often does this mistake".
Django Chartit: Library to create charts from Django models.
The interesting thing at least for me is that I find myself going full circle. Started coding on the c64 and Amiga then moved up the level of abstraction to java, ruby, javascript and now moving down to harder problems in javascript, c, c++. I figure since Moore's law is pretty close to dead, the cost payed for abstractions will start making older closer to the metal languages come back in fashion increasing the need for more "hard" knowledge in the next decade or so.
Are there any lossless video formats in common use? One is unlikely to be introduced if not, so you might need a lot more than one pixel/bit.

But at the same time, you don't need to limit to black-and-white. Even just black/white/red/green/blue/purple/yellow/turquoise would be four times as much bandwidth, and I would be very surprised if even lossy video couldn't reliably distingish up to 64 colours.

I don't think many people currently have 22.5M/s download speeds anyway, so it's probably not a big deal.
Where I worked before I went back into academia, the title "Project Manager" referred to someone whose main job was running interference between engineers and upper management. She was always coming up with answers to questions about how long things would take, etc. so I wouldn't have to and prompting me for various answers that upper management actually cares about. Definitely helped me get things done.

That place was emphatically not Silicon Valley, though, so it makes perfect sense to me that the two positions share little more than a title and not coding.
I started with Haskell because it forces you to write programs in a functional way. If you're interested, Learn You a Haskell for Great Good (http://learnyouahaskell.com/) is an excellent introduction.
> OS given a powerful enough phone, the goal has been met, with one (critical!) exception

Two exceptions: Audio latency. It is impossible to write certain classes of table applications for Android right now, because no priority was given to having a low-latency audio subsystem. Its at least as big a mess as display acceleration.
Getting a laugh at the expense of other people's hard work is poor form where I'm from.
Prefix your destructive commands with echo. Variant: for find, run it once with -print, then once it looks okay replace with -delete .
I would go even further than you and say "have a plan by 25" myself. Why dick around and be a fool for longer than is absolutely necessary? :)

I am all for learning by making painful mistakes, but one should cut the failure iteration cycle as short as possible. Learn the lesson by scraping your knees, not by breaking your legs, is my analogy.

This is good reading for those who, like me, are in their mid-20s: http://tynan.com/youngpeople

I look at my age peers and I am flabbergasted that they seem to spend all their free time on fashion, computer games, going to clubs, Facebook, etc.

I spend basically all my free time reading, engaging in self-improvement activities, and plotting for my eventual world domination (heh).

Sorry for ranting, but this is a topic that is close to my heart :)
Microsoft Research applying spam-fighting techniques to attack HIV
Last Weeks Best
Detecting Kinship from a Pair of Images
I love IT, and I love being a code monkey and staying a working programmer with my various startup projects, but let's face it: although well-paid, the world treats programmers like crap. Long hours, working weekends, staying on call, impossible deadlines, complex and ever-shifting technologies, and high-stress deployments. It's no wonder that the people at hot-shot firms all look like they're in their 20s.

Some folks just get caught up in, well, life. They have kids, a house, and grow a life and hobbies. That means that they are no longer staying current, and their heart just isn't really in it any more. After you've kicked ass and conquered the world with code a dozen or so times, you've gained weight, you're missing out on the rest of life, and there are just a dozen more impossible missions ahead of you. It never ends. I'd throw out some kind of pithy remark like "work at a sustainable pace" but the sad truth is that a "sustainable pace" for a 23-year-old is not the same as it is for a 40-year-old. Not even close.

I like the model I've seen of moving great programmers into lead roles (with PM-type duties) and then "uber lead" roles, which also include some program-management duties. That way you keep your technical talent close. It's easier to teach a programmer business than it is to teach a businessperson programming. This idea that we move good programmers out simply because they start acting much more like middle-aged people than college students is hurting the industry. In my mind, the MBAs are much more expendable than some guy who has just spent 15 years of his life learning our business systems inside-out.
Somewhat agreed. It can be laggy, but on mine it rarely is (but it does happen). However, it's never consistently choppy when scrolling.

So... laggy sometimes, but still smooth scrolling.

Every Android device I've tried (just tried a couple tablets at a Best Buy this week) have been consistently laggy (response times to swipes) and choppy scrolling.
Ryanair now presents you with a Recaptcha every time you search for a flight
The fact that Google's employees are young does not say anything or imply anything about the half life of a computer programmer. It's just one data point. Here are reasons why it is skewed:

* Fast-growing companies at large scale do enormous amounts of college recruiting. That's because the quality of the pool is much higher than the pool of out-of-work programmers... not because young people are smarter or better programmers but simply because the candidate pool includes a cross-section of skills, whereas the candidate pool of out-of-work programmers is biased to programmers who can't find work.

See also: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FindingGreatDeveloper...

Thus, the average age at Facebook is younger than Google, at Google it's younger than Microsoft, and Microsoft is younger than IBM. It's just a question of when the biggest growth spurt occurred in hiring.

* Nobody was working as a software developer 30 years ago. Well, of course, not nobody, but this field has grown like CRAZY. Everybody knows that, but they don't think of the implications. Even if every software developer who started work in 1980 was still working today as a software developer, they would only constitute a small fraction of the current workforce because the number of software developers in 1980 was miniscule. And you would expect them to be working in relatively mature companies simply because those were the companies that were around when they got their jobs.

Bottom line--this "mystery of the disappearing tech worker" is a good bit more imaginary than real and is probably mostly explained by the kinds of people you're hanging around with, not a real social phenomena.

See also: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=computer+software+appli... (If anyone can figure out how to get older data than Wolfram Alpha displays, I'd appreciate it)
I have a plan ... It's quite simple - I only work at jobs doing what I truly love. I am motivated and do my best work and my employer reaps the benefits too. Being almost through my second half-life, this has served me well for almost thirty years.
Money comes and go...but everyday passion is priceless...
Don't worry about your old days...tomorrow is right now...
'Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish': The best Steve Jobs quotes
I don't disagree, and wish I'd had a better plan in place by 25, but culturally in the US, we've had a generation or two that have taken longer to grow up. Kids living with parents until late 20s, harder job market, etc. 25 is great, but for some reason culturally we still accept 25 year olds being flakes.

So.. there's still some acceptable excuses for flitting away your 20s (not really acceptable to me, but I'm not in charge!) but by 35 there's just no good excuse to not have a life plan in place.
Iwant to buy apple ipod
iwant to buy apple ipod
outhern Living 1982 Annual Recipes Hardcover Publisher Oxmoor House December 1984 ISBN 10
Microsoft As The Firefox Savior?
I disagree. It doesn't mater how much credibility the author has, if subjective matters are presented as facts because the author puts himself in a position of unquestionable knowledge, a reader may very well argue that this is pretentious and has zero value.

Know, for many people, the author has enough credibility to write like this because they know his work. If you're one of those persons then you should read and take the author's word. But it still pretentious. Just because someone 'has the' to be pretentious doesn't mean that he/she won't be.

But most importantly, why would you care about those opposing this article?
Like him or not, Clarkson is a marketing genius
Thanks for the history of Fenway house, I didn't know it. (I was EC, of 80s vintage. Ashdown in the 90s.)

> it got overrun with non-frat members living there

Presumably because they couldn't fill the beds and needed the money?
last year ff started to make changes that are becoming visible only now. they lost a lot of users, but are getting better all the time. i've been using chrome exclusively for the past year and now i've got both chrome and ff open.

i guess the biggest feature ff now lacks compared to chrome is the silent autoupdater. it can be optional, just stop asking me for admin rights every time it wants to update.
McAfee claims that iOS is safer than Android.
I recall making many plans (5-year, 10-year, 15-year) when I first graduated. It's funny looking back at some of my original plans to see how things varied so much.

The key is to stay flexible, always be willing to learn and set your priorities. Try to put yourself in positions where good things can happen. The path you take will likely vary greatly from what you envisioned, but if you achieve what is most important to you, then you have succeeded. There are many definitions of success, so be sure to measure your accomplishments based on your own definition.
Trunk Club is on the list and that's a personalized clothing site for men. It's probably the youngest of all the clothing sites on the list, which makes sense since it's the first one to successfully tap the men-only demographic.
"I spend basically all my free time reading, engaging in self-improvement activities, and plotting for my eventual world domination (heh)."

While withdrawing and plumbing the depths is an important and valuable experience in itself, it's worth keeping in mind to that all of the reading, self improvement, and self education receive their greatest value from taking that knowledge and living.

A fun evening is an end in itself sometimes. Though, not always! It's about balance.
Startup mania, oh how I hate thee
No, it is an opportunity to highlight that there are people in this world who are unreasonably irrational, and who feel they should have a right to force their (borderline crazy) views on others.
Four consecutive hours? Is this without snags in your code?
> already very important SPDY-enabled sites live on the Internet

Certainly Google's sites qualify as important, but are any other major sites using it? Chrome doesn't seem to setup SPDY sessions for anything I visit regularly other than Google sites.
Response time to email reveals your close friends
Funnel Plots and Publication Bias
No, but Wine trading appears to be giving back more in return than the investment costs compared to Diamonds. At least according to your story. I can't imagine it's that difficult, but according to your story I might be wrong.

A friend made a wine trading site btw. and tells me it's a lucrative business. Collecting the data was the hardest part he told. I wonder if there isn't a an authority where you can obtain the data instead of manually collecting it from auctions et cetera.
From the article:

There is still a limit to how much the GPU can do. A recent interesting example of this is tablets built with Tegra 2 -- that GPU can touch every pixel of a 1024x800 screen about 2.5 times at 60fps. Now consider the Android 3.0 tablet home screen where you are switching to the all apps list: you need to draw the background (1x all pixels), then the layer of shortcuts and widgets (let’s be nice and say this is .5x all pixels), then the black background of all apps (1x all pixels), and the icons and labels of all apps (.5x all pixels). We’ve already blown our per-pixel budget, and we haven’t even composited the separate windows to the final display yet.

I find this bizarre. Are all of these drawing operations using alpha blending (using translucency)? If so: is that strictly necessary for the entire area of all of them?

If they aren't using blending, why on earth do they have so much overdraw? The GPU could reduce that to touching each pixel exactly once by using the Z buffer and drawing in front-to-back order.
Is BSD the new GPL?
Gout cure
It is our mission to help people suffering from Gout find relief.
Fuck the joy of programming.

Are you fucking kidding me? Motivation isn't something you can just ignore. If you aren't motivated to work, you will eventually either stop working or hate your job. (Why would you keep doing something you don't want to do?)

Maybe if you're working with good people and getting paid well it'll be ok, but in that case you're relying on the people around you to motivate you. You will be less productive and less happy for 40 hours a week than people who honestly love the work itself.
The very same thing is happening in Britain, where many local universities have admissions and recruitment officers actually based in non-EU countries, particularly in China where the value of a British degree is played up heavily. Students from outside the EU can pay up to five times more tuition than those from within. Some universities (Nottingham springs to mind [1]) even have campuses in Asia and the Middle East, and fly lecturers and professors out, so the students don't even have to move to Britain to study.

I don't know if it affects admissions - whether you've got more chance of getting into the college if you're a high fee-paying foreign student. But it has to be a factor, when these institutions are struggling so much.

[1]: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/about/campuses/chinacampus.aspx
"Lytro's light field is a bullshit product that very few photographers and even fewer consumers will actually give a shit about."

You're underestimating how the technology can be used to simplify the process of taking an image for the average consumer. With the right marketing and UX Lytro could sell their camera as one that 'just works'.

No one wants to bother focusing an image. Everyone is disappointed when a photo comes out blurry. Yeah sure they could invest time into learning how to take better pictures but for a lot of people who just want nice pictures of their friends when they're on holiday/at a club/out for dinner, they don't want to waste their time doing that.

A camera where focusing an image is abstracted away so that the consumer doesn't have to think about it would be a huge step forward. (Think post-shot auto-focus with optional tweaking for when the camera doesn't get it right). Combine this with features already available such as automatic red-eye reduction and the barrier to entry for taking decent quality pictures is much lower. A lot of people would buy that camera.
That is only partially true, I know of websites that have got themselves unblocked by doing exactly this. But honestly I don't want to discuss that with somebody starting his/her post with "Lol".
For the love of Notch, why on Earth do people continue to write full-fledged applications in shell?! Shell may be Turing-complete, but it has crappy syntax, just about NO data structures, and you have to fork and exec a process just to check whether a string contains a substring or something simple like that that a proper programming language could do without even any system calls!
You can use "the UNIX way" and have one process per plugin. Simply create two FIFOs per plugin and have a long-running process connected to those two FIFOs.
You're 100% right.
For more information on this issue: http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3434
I was going to say that bash has a lot of features making it easier to write safe scripts without the kind of workarounds you see in autoconf scripts, but this bot doesn't appear to use them, even obvious things like [[. bash is still a pretty good default.
Imunitet i čajevi – zdravlje bez gripa, prehlada i viroza (3)
Fair enough. :-) At least with developers, the progress can be more tangible and visible.