skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"According to Rose, “there is a temptation that you want to throw as many developers as possible at a problem.” As Digg was built on top of PHP, the company would hire too many developers that specialized in this language. Then, however, Rose noted, “you end up with lots of PHP developers, but at some point, PHP isn’t a problem anymore and you are stuck with all of those developers.” At that point, said Rose, you end up having to hire a lot of developers that can do other things and don’t know what to do with the old developers."
-------------------------------

OK - so don't hire employees, but contract with contractors. Seems a pretty simple problem, yet few companies I talk to want to go down that route.

"We're looking for someone who's in it for the long haul" or "we value loyalty" are some reasons I've heard from companies that won't consider contractors.

In some situations, that's probably fine. In many other cases - fast tech-driven startup-type stuff - contracting probably makes more sense for precisely this reason. The company's needs can change quickly, and having a lot of staff that don't know X but only Y is a competitive problem.

"But smart people can learn X too!" Well, yes, to a point, but probably not as well as the people at your competition may already know it. And who says all those smart people really want to learn X? If you're really switching from Y to X, some Y devs may resent that, because Y can handle the workload too. They may not put all the effort in to learning X, because they see it as a fad, or a dangerous pivot that is doomed to failure, etc.

"Smart people can learn new tech X too!" is condescendingly treating devs as interchangeable parts while damning with some praise ("but they're smart!")

"If your developers are either incapable of pivoting to a new language or flat out refuse to, then they are terrible developers."

You've just done 3 years of Rails development, fighting all those version bugs, pulling all the late nighters, getting every rock solid and scaling out to the moon. Yay! Launched, everything's great, and you're rocking it. Then your board of directors signs a deal with MS for Bing tie-in, and MS invests some money in your company, but you have to pivot to ASP.NET/C#. In 3 months.

Do you refuse? YOU TERRIBLE DEVELOPER!

What's that? You'd rather keep doing Rails, so much so that you'll quit your job and move somewhere else to get a chance to keep working on Rails projects? That describes most of the Rails devs I know, and I wouldn't say they're "terribly developers" at all. Well, a couple aren't great... :)
They do not injecting it, it's just a small downloader

Oh I am so going to tweet that.
It's beautiful. After many decades of Silicon Valley turning from orchards and trees into strip malls and office parks, it looks like Steve wanted to take a little slice of the Valley and turn it back. The building itself takes up a very small part of the land.
"keep in mind that Eliezer Yudowsky is but a human (though a very smart one), yet he did got out of the box"

Not quite sure what this means. Any references?
Raise your rate if you're reusing a lot of code. You deserve to be compensated for it. Bottom line, the final price should be as much as they're willing to pay.

If you can't raise your rate enough (what do you mean $550/hour!), don't bill hourly.
I think it's some kind of watch.
Hi I'm James. The one who did the plugin. It isn't fully finished yet, it was something I did in my spare time. But I wanted to get it up asap so I could hear people's feedback. Thanks for your inputs so far.
I don't understand what all this pseudo-innovation in scroll bar technology is accomplishing. I first saw it in google wave, which drastically changed the way that scroll bars behaved, and the way I had to interact with them. More recently, I've upgraded Ubuntu and now Unity has funky, unintuitive scroll bars. What is the holy grail of scroll bar usability, and is this getting us any closer? I'm not really feeling the advantages.

Edit: as per slig's comment, a lot of tools in google's latest design refresh are using terrible scroll bars, too.
IEDM: SuVolta transistor operates down to 0.4-V
Startup SuVolta Inc. has announced that its novel transistor technology, dubbed PowerShrink, operates down to 0.425-V, approximately 300-mV below conventional processes. PowerShrink is based on a deeply depleted channel (DDC) transistor manufactured in epitixially grown doped silicon on the surface of a conventional bulk CMOS wafer.
Eugen - Don't mean to hijack this thread but I'm curious if you wouldn't mind talking about how your http://www.webanalyticsblueprint.com/ project went. I had thought of doing instructional videos in a different space and am curious. Thanks.
Depends on where (geographically) you want to work. If you are thinking of moving across country, a UC school would look a lot better than the local school. If you want to work locally, then the local school will be fine. It may even be more helpful as there will be a larger local alumni network to tap into. Using myself as an example, I went to a small liberal arts school practically nobody outside the mid-atlanic has heard of. Not exactly know for computer science either, in fact I think they only formed the major a about 2 or 3 years before I graduated(which was 2001!). On the other hand it is well thought of locally and I had a job offer well before I graduated. My first supervisor went this school. One of the owners of the company I currently work for went there as well.
I have been using Eclipse since at least 8 years. This year an employer insisted that I use Intellij. It took me around three weeks to get used to it. I never want to switch back to Eclipse. It just runs so much smoother
As long as you're signed out you can still watch the video and not really unsubscribe.
Correct translation, correct statement, same laws.

The article describes a case of a Chinese company that registered the iPad trademark long before Apple used it. Apple bought it from this company, except for use in mainland China. Now, Apple is selling iPads under the name iPad in mainland China, so it's infringing on this Chinese company's trademark.
I will try this out, thanks.
Even if the company folds, the name 'iPad' had already been registered before Apple decided to use it, and the more 'iPad's' Apple sells in China, the more they will have to pay up eventually.
"for fast tech-driven startup-type stuff - contracting probably makes more sense".

On the contrary, actually.
Not the main point but if the if-else pattern gets tedious why is there no switch in Python?
Michael Specter on the Placebo Effect
Funny, but sound on a 404 page? That could get annoying fast.
You've hit the nail on the head though - "educated". Perhaps unfair, but I find it hard to believe that people making guesses on these items could be genuinely educated regarding the issues surrounding them.

I completely include myself in this category - what do I know about the logistic changes needed to change manufacturing for some of these devices, or market demand etc. I can speculate regarding the technology, but even then it's just speculation based on a totally superficial understanding. It's so easy to ignore things like FDA approval, production scale up, resource shortages etc.
I don't think it's a sense of entitlement in this case.

Why shouldn't people be upset when they would gladly pay to keep a service alive, but the silly creators decided not to let their customers pay out of some misguided hope for megariches?

This isn't about getting something for free. It's about the way you feel when somebody you love makes the same criminally idiotic mistake, over & over -- no matter what you do or say or how you try to help -- and ends up really hurting themselves AND others.

Like the whole Xmarks fiasco. The guy was totally against the idea of asking his customers to pay, and he had huge costs, so he announced he was going to shut it down.

Then his users revolted to such a degree that he finally decided to accept payments. And his customers paid up.

Result: Xmarks is still alive & appears to be thriving.

It would have simply fallen off the face of the earth, forever, if not for its devoted users getting angry enough to act.
Right, but Ruby has its own baggage of design problems, like the lack of namespaces, which are a core idea in Python. I don't argue that one is better than the other, I just see a lot of similarities.
Galaxy Nexus December 9th Date Confirmed
Regular users have no way to reliably identify the software producer's website. Advising them to "just google it" is likely to end up with them clicking a scammy AdWords link where paying $40 to download some freeware counts as getting off lightly.
Mozilla's problem with NaCl is that Mozilla believes in open access to the web for everyone, while NaCl at the moment is tied to particular hardware architectures. The two seem to be fundamentally incompatible.

If PNaCl ever happens, that might change the situation, maybe.

As far as legacy code, emscripten unlocks it as well. Not with the performance of NaCl (and unlikely to get there), but it has the benefit of running cross-browser right now and not forcing people onto particular hardware platforms.

And copying "valuable IP" out of an emscripten-compiled program is just as easy as copying it out of a binary, of course.
Congratulations Twilio!
It's probably hard to successfully argue against vagueness like 'most' and 'excessive', but Charity Navigator pulls together lots of information:

http://www.charitynavigator.org

My takeaway is that there are plenty of large charities that spend more than 90% of their revenues on their mission and plenty that don't. For me, the big ones that do 90% makes it hard to feel great about a smaller charity that only hits 70% (but then I am a crank that dislikes solicitation).
Can you add some screenshots on the metrics we get as devs?
Would you care to explain or elaborate?
Keeping the Home Safe
You realize that this is nothing like CoffeeScript, except in compiling to JavaScript? The point of CoffeeScript is to iron out the kinks in JavaScript--it's basically JavaScript polished up in slightly different clothes.

This language, on the other hand, is completely different from JavaScript. Writing functional, reactive code is entirely dissimilar from writing idiomatic JavaScript. This isn't an attempt to make JavaScript easier to write--it's an attempt to bring an entirely different paradigm to the web.

Not only is the language completely different from JavaScript, but it also brings a new way of interacting with the DOM. Reactive programming can be used to model interfaces very neatly; it is probably a better way to interact with a web page than the DOM.

I suspect people used to OOP languages will (at least at first) find this one harder to use that JavaScript. On the other hand, the sort of people who are already using Haskell and the like will enjoy it. Also, a functional language like this tends to have more concise code and fewer opportunities for error--mutation is at the heart of a large number of bugs; limiting it removes most of these bugs.

Finally, just because JavaScript is already easy doesn't mean it couldn't be improved. In my experience, I tend to solve problems faster in Haskell than JavaScript; bringing that sort of programming to the web could make me a more productive web developer.
When it comes for Windows software I only use 2 types,
Open source software downloaded from the projects website directly or fully paid up commercial software.

I never install anything from ad banners
Scam emails will likely exploit your email client, your browser or your technical/it sec inability - neither of which is solved by windows alone. Education is the definite answer, not switching platforms.
Yeah, for example, Android Google devs do not take patches from other devs, and do not open Android til "its ready".
Other devs, mainly CM do not submit patches (its useless) and it takes a long time to support devices because you need a lot of proprietary code that needs to be available, or specs,that also needs to be available.

So yeah, but no, you definitely can lock stuff in with "open source", no problem with that.
"I'm not sure every programmer should read Elements - maybe, but its a little abstract these days."

I don't understand the "these days". Does Geometry decay? Or logic? What is the half-life of a Pythagoras' right-triangle theorem?
It's not Manager Quarterly confirming biases it's real world "coders" who are often completely unqualified as well as the many businesses out ther who encourage this because they can't seem to understand what the role is or what would qualify someone to do it well.

Developers, in general, get a lot of flak from "bosses" because of how convenient it is to (as one friend of mine put it) "hide from the work". That isn't to say there isn't incredibly important stuff programming needs to be doing, just that there are more people not doing it than there are doing it well and it's the makers who often suffer for it, or worse are blamed for poor team performance.

Basically, until that reality changes I'd expect to see a lot more people slogging on "coder"s.
One can only applaud this. You do wonder sometimes why companies spent so few $$ on relaxing office buildings. Looking into nature increases productivity and well-being; also there are a lot of findings on how to organize work floors for optimal collaboration etc. Most companies are just not interested. Doesn't make sense to me (except for short-term profits).
Welcome to HN Georgiy.

Here's the deal: That still doesn't mean it's not crapware.

You mention the difficulty of funding your download site (built almost exclusively on supplying other people's free content). I can't imagine what the bandwidth costs must be on a site like that. I'm sure there are plenty of other visitors on HN that are familiar with this issue and are daily encountering similar ethical decisions about how best to fund their business.

There are many ways of resolving difficult ethical decisions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_ethics One useful technique is to ask yourself: If everyone behaved in this manner, what kind of world would result?

So let's imagine such a world:

* Want to view a .pdf on the web? ... receive and run an executable downloader from an unrelated party.

* Want to watch a video on YouTube? ... receive and run an executable downloader from an unrelated party.

* Want to install an application? ... receive and run an executable downloader from an unrelated party.

Do you see the problem here?

(Maybe you don't, but most everyone else on HN will and I'm doubtful that you're even reading the responses. But if you are still interested I'm sure we can politely explain it further for you.)
Oh man, this is good news. We lived in Puerto Rico for five years, and a year after we came back to Indiana, one of our son's classmates died of dengue. It was nearly under control in the 70's, but "nearly under control" just means you can stop paying for control measures - so it's come back with a vengeance in the past decade or so.

Nasty stuff. Acts just like a bad flu, and in a bad case they hospitalize you - mostly for dehydration; it's a viral disease so there's not much specific they can do. Then, after you're better, if you're not lucky, you're home from the hospital a day or two, suddenly don't feel so well, and fifteen minutes later you're dead of shock. Just like my son's friend. He was 11.
Hyperbolic Rogue
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That seems to imply they do need one human-generated positive match, though.
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COND, man, COND.
Developers offered 80 percent cut of Windows Store app sales
By "taking over the world", I meant establishing a Bostromian Singleton[1]. I didn't want to predict anything more, and certainly not anything resembling a human dictatorship.

I'm also not sure you could really limit your AI's reach. If for instance you give it a limited goal, like solving the Riemann Hypothesis, it could transform the solar system into a giant computer, killing off humanity along the way, just to solve the freaking mathematical problem.

Assuming you could limit the reach of your AI, you'd probably need to have a working Friendliness Theory to do that. At that point, I suggest you save the world instead.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singleton_%28global_governance%...
In this case, a switch statement wouldn't help because you're dealing with a bunch of boolean functions rather than a single value. If you were using something like typeof and switched on the type, a switch statement would make more sense. However, even that would be pretty tedious for code like this, I think.

In general though, I have no idea why Python doesn't have a switch or case statement of some sort.
Why are we messing with things I already knew?

You're the website, you deliver me content, I decide what to do with it. Don't take really long ways around to force me to do things your way, use semantic HTML and CSS, use the default scroll bars, let me pick a user-agent that makes scroll-bars the way I want. I don't want to use OSX Lion scroll bars because I think mac's are lame, but now I have no choice.
The powerful placebo effect: fact or fiction?
I suspect that letting people do their own thing when it comes to placing content on the web is based on two historical features of Microsoft.

The first is that because many Microsoft employees were strongly engaged with computers, there were many early adopters of the internet and more importantly the web (Microsoft.com registered in 1991). I suspect that the anything goes culture of the wild west days of the web persists to some degree within the organization.

The second historical factor is that there were a lot of employees with fuck you money during the early days of Microsoft's web presence and Microsoft management didn't waste resources forcing developers to heel to the sacred ideas of branding experts.

If you dig around Microsoft, you will find lots of standard tools - e.g. MSDN has a fairly consistent graphic presentation when it comes to technical documentation - it just looks nothing like Channel9. However, these differences, while not ideal for consumers, are pretty much irrelevant when it comes to supporting developers.

Yes the bitmap code snippets are embarrassing but not in a Facebook security hole kind of way. Any developer doing .NET programming isn't going to be greatly slowed down by typing in the code rather than copying and pasting from the MSDN page.
I wrote about this, actually: http://alexisohanian.com/how-reddit-became-reddit-the-smalle...

spoiler: It's not just because of the logo
Although I don't know if it's fair to tar them all with the same brush, I find it ironic that a Chinese company would cry foul on trademarks.
Actually it's just checking the types at runtime, nothing much 'static' about it. This is pretty much the antithesis of duck typing, in fact. I could see it being useful, but I could also see it leading to confusion for people who expect Python's usual duck-typing behaviour when they pass their own types into a function.

Whoops you subclassed from a type for which this function has a multimethod defined? Gonna do something different.

On the other hand, in non-trivial programs there _are_ certainly occasions when you need to check the type, so using an elegant method like this isn't a bad compromise.
Right now, I'm trying to strike a balance between making info available to devs and respecting user's privacy. The site gets the emails and IP addresses of people who get apps but doesn't reveal those to the dev.

The only "metric" that's available is the number of codes that have been used.

I've thought about making an opt-in so developers can contact users later. This way you could get people's permission to follow them up with questions on the app. How does that sound?
Trade mark, not copyright.
Your is more usable, I can scroll with my mouse wheel, but I cannot click on the scroll bar's empty area and "jump" down a section.
dredmorbius did a good job answering, but I'll put it in my words too.

My post spoke not about the existence of porn stars then, but our awareness of them today.

Their notability may be great in their lifetimes, but does not stand the test of time. Scientists, on the other hand, may not attain notability in their lifetimes, but their stature stands the test of time. At least in the case of some great ones.
Meta Tag Copywriting Guidelines
SANS AppSec 2012 Conference
Branded Vs. Non Branded Searches
Edit: you're right, I'm not clear. An experiment was made, in which Eliezer and some other person talked during 2 hours on IRC. Eliezer played the AI, and the other played the Guardian. The AI is supposed to convince the Guardian to "let it out" by the end of those 2 hours. No word play or such, the Gardian has to make a concious decision for the AI to win. The result is to be acknowledged publicly by PGP signed e-mail by the losing party. Eliezer won twice, over people who publicly stated that there was no way an AI would convinced them. Even though they could just say no, they didn't, and later sent the e-mail acknowledging they let the AI out.

Relevant links:

http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment
It's just a desperate company approaching bankruptcy doing what they can to stay alive.
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I suspect that the C# from which asp.net generated the javascript is far closer to your standards.
My wife is a landscape architect. I think she likes Apple even more, now.
Mythbusters experiment goes awry, sends cannonball through two houses
I think you're getting distracted by the simplistic implementation presented here. multimethods are plenty powerful outside of static types - see CLOS, Clojure.

That said multimethods are a halfway step to predicate dispatch (this is mentioned in the article comments). With predicate dispatch you can get efficient dispatch on any interesting predicate - not just types - for example even?, odd?, structural matching, etc.

I think dynamic languages could benefit a lot from predicate dispatch.
The custom scrollbar is actually meant for scrollable div layers. (e.g. logs for chat-based applications). I needed a way to get rid of the thick native scrollbar skin for a javascript-dev project to match the overall design. Hence, why I came up with it.
I strongly disagree with the following part: "but everyone does it and it's something that's been an accepted way to monitize software development".

Here's why:

- bundling such software with any product kills trust in one single fire; why would I allow such a software to make it into my environment? What if there are additional hidden things inside the code which steal data from my system and send it to a third party or to the maker of the app? What if it steals my credit card info or if it uploads confidential data somewhere?

- it's a "no go" for people in corporate environments - if it has anything bundled with it (optional or not), it's not installed on any system inside the company, no further questions asked

- it doesn't matter if you offer a "paid" version without these things in it, how can I know you haven't added some other "extras" which steal data?

- if you choose to bundle software with your apps, you have some kind of issues with your business model

- bundling such software always exposes the user to all kinds of exploits, hacks and trojans

As for "optimizing" the experience of the persons on the receiving end of this crappy wrapper which shoves adware / malware / trojans down the people's throats, it's like saying we screw you over, but we intend to make it look GOOD and actually make you like it.

CNET and download.com should really be blocked at company level, along with all the security policies. They live in 2005-2006, not at the end of 2011. I doubt the guys running CNET are capable of coming up with any business model which doesn't involve making money off the software of other individuals.