skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
They're not entirely mythical. I was this person for Viaweb, and YC has funded several founders who are both hackers and designers.
I like to joke that this is a business that funnels money from customers to Google Adwords, while I take a small cut for actually delivering the product. But even if that turns out to be the case, it's not so bad. I have few costs other than support staff and marketing.
Springy. http://www.springyarchiver.com/

An archiver for OS X that actually works the way you expect, by opening a window to let you look inside and selectively extract from archives, rather than just spurting files all over the place unbidden like the built in one and all the other replacement ones seem to do.

For some reason it took me ages to find this when I switched to mac. Drove me mad.
Reasonable article, this is fairly well known as an issue, but definitely does good to bring it up again since a lot of places just don't get it.

Also goes without saying that the companies looking for this person also will typically be requiring mastery of cross-platform application design simultaneously targeting most every known desktop and mobile operating system; a long, specific list of diverse technologies at very particular version numbers; they should be willing to relocate at their own cost, with remote work and telecommuting unacceptable; and of course they should be willing to work for less than market rate for a practitioner of even one of the skills they are supposed to be masters of, which should be no problem since there is a low cost of living in the obscure one horse town they will be moving to but which features lots of outdoor activities and family values as long as you don't mind the rampant small town corruption, house break ins, ATV, copper wire and catalytic converter theft, weekly stabbings over a girl, and pandemic meth addiction.
Given my personal experience I have to warn people away from HTTP Client. It is bug-ridden and broken. Many of the UI elements break in weird ways during normal use. I had to quit and re-run the application many times just to bring it back to a usable state (only to have it break again immediately).

Spend your money on Rested instead. I don't quite understand the OP's assertion that "RESTed is a little bit more complex than HTTP Client." Considering Rested actually works I'd consider it a lot more simple than HTTP Client.

Edit: To be clear, I am in no way connected with the author of Rested. I'm just a very satisfied customer.
But this is a common theme with people who label software as bad. It's possible the problem is something other than the software being used, but since they only see the problem while using said software then obviously the problem is the software itself.
Invoke dynamic means less of a need for C-Extensions, which is probably one of the largest sources of pain for JRuby compatibility. The JVM is better at running plain old ruby code now, so there's less need to go outside of it with C or Java.
Indeed, but it also has some factors in common through different pathways - I grow nervous when I read of the ultranationalist riots permitted by the Party, because it seems like the kind of thing that would itself to the leaders deciding to enter 'a short, victorious war'. (Defending the Middle Kingdom, defending the Revolution; rather similar.)
http://www.eclipsecolorthemes.org/ can do this.
This is just a lot of nitpicking, parroting of common wisdom, plus uninformed opinions and misapplication of use cases.

To complain about SimpleHTTPServer is not for use as production public web server is ridiculous. That was never its intended used and most people understand this. Not every HTTP server is a public web server however. It is very convenient to fire up one as a test server and to get around some of the browser security constraint on the file:// scheme. It is also useful for a lot of light weight internal integration and configuration UI. To deploy SimpleHTTPServer for production web server is not a correct use. But neither is deploying a heavy weight HTTP server like Apache for testing or light weight integration appropriate.

I agree JSON is preferable to pickle in most situations. But you have to understand the history context. Pickle was the standard way to serialize object well before JSON is popularized. Serialization is an important topic in general and you will find many other computer language provides similar facility. Also JSON only address a subset of the serialization problem.

The array module is used not only for performance. It also support tight packing of data. If you have a million integer, array pack them tight as 1 million x 4 bytes. To store them into a list will have a much larger memory footprint because the are stored as 1 million individual objects plus the data structure of the list. I happen to have written a proprietary database engine in Python where memory, disk and I/O footprint matter hugely. Go easy on berating it because there are use cases you are not aware of.

It is sad that the author do not understand namedtuple but choose to mock it. I studied the code extensively and emulated it in a my application. To appreciate namedtuple, think about what is the alternative to this implementation? Try to write your own that serve the same function. Yes you can more easily and the code more readable by doing it with __setattr__ and __getattr__. The only problem every time you access an attribute you get hit with a big overhead. The use of exec is not a hack but a deliberated decision to provide attribute access at a speed comparable to standard attribute access. I agree with the author, "do not do this at home". Leave the heavy lifting to the experts unless you really known Python inside out like namedtuple's author Raymond Hettinger.
The combination I use -- light green (#88FF88) on dark blue (#000060) -- is very easy to focus on. In particular, having roughly the same amount of blue in the foreground and background makes blue, which is the color most subject to chromatic aberration, irrelevant for focusing.
Agreed. If you're not paying for a service, it's a bad plan to build around it. Ad revenue funded companies are a dark place to end up in.
Just a thought...why can't you generate the initial seed using the system time and then use that to generate random numbers? Won't this be random enough?
The article says they raised 700M. Even if costs them 100M to build a data center, they can't use 1/7th of the money they raised, to build one? How exactly are they spending that much money?
First Earth-sized planets spotted
Disclaimer: I have no clue what I am talking about

What if gravity is an emergent result from the compression of matter? The greater the compression, the greater the density and gravity?
Call and Oates: The Hall and Oates Hotline
Iraq War Recollections: Stories From Those Within
I find these statements amusing...

As it happens, neither is ext3 an obsolete filesystem (I have many machines using it just fine, thank you, with no intention to migrate to less tested filesystems just because they're "new"), nor "data=ordered" has significant performance problems.

More amusing than this just the fact that the filesystem is a bottleneck for a web browser... an application that should be network and CPU bound...
> A few months back, I went to a demo at Parc of the Xerox Star (I first saw
> the Star in '81 at NCC). It was real interesting to be reminded that
> hardware has improved a few orders of magnitude in the last 17 years, but
> software mabey hasn't improved very much. So what can we do to get back on
> track for the next decade or two? In 20 years will software be 40 years
> behind hardware? Or will software be dramatically better than it is now.

I often find this sad, especially when thinking about software and systems that died on the vine in the past few decades. I remember fast, efficient systems running on processors of a few hundred megahertz, using 5400RPM disks, and a fraction of a GB of RAM. Why do the same tasks I was performing then take just as long or longer on systems with orders of magnitude more computational power?
Jumping jacks was an example I used because it is completely out there, but most people will find it an insane request and their brain will snap out of it. Generally becoming helpful at that point.

I've always given direct orders to anyone that I saw. Either by pointing at them, or by naming something they are wearing.
This is a pretty amazing series of recollections about the war. Thought it might benefit us all to see the point of view of those in the middle.
I was thinking about this survey, I think as is, it tells you who, of those willing and able to take the survey, care enough to tell you about their editor colors.

I am a green-on-black kind of guy, having to do with my VT terminal nostalgia, and I care enough to tell you that. But, I would be surprised if the color-caring folk are a representative sample of all color-preference folk.
Its the reason I went from the dark side to the light side. I use it everywhere now, terminal, etc. Terminal uses the dark solarized theme though.
Not trying to be snarky but maybe the founders shouldn't have taken so much off the table in the last funding round.
ADAuthFTW - Simple Active Directory authentication for NodeJS
Am I the only person that actually thinks that charger cable (assuming its the same size) is a bit suspiciuos? It's like Samsung is either being lazy at this point, or is trying to goad Apple on to attack them.

I have to side with Apple on the shape of the charger issue. Especially since there are plenty of shapes they could have used, some of them standardized, like mini/microUSB...

By the way, the clenching feature was two bumps at the ends of the charger that, I think are used for holding the charger in place.

A question of course is, "should this be patentable". I'm not arguing that right now, and haven't thought about it enough to have a position, but it is awkwardly similar, and when there are already a fair amount of already-existing standards they could have chosen, they went with an Apple-specific one. ... that's all I'm saying.
If Terminal.app feels like plastic scissors, you can try iterm2. It beats the crap out of Terminal in terms of configurability.

https://github.com/gnachman/iTerm2

http://iterm2.com/
I dunno, we're looking for that guy who will send 200 emails a day promoting the damn thing.
I refuse to become a slave to "share" buttons.
Or just use curl. httpclient is just a wrapper for curl.
BEST WEB DESIGNING COMPANY
I don't know honestly, but the reason why I believe I jumped into action was because honestly I am a good and caring person and I will always attempt to help anyone that I can help.

I am unfortunately very much a push over in that regard as well, even-though I've been bitten multiple times I still continue to lend money to people that need it, I still continue to take my time out of my day to help them move, but most of the time I know that they wouldn't give me the time of day.

I just know that eventually it will pay off. I could have continued driving along without stopping, but I would have hated myself for it.
I had to screencap the video (their play button covers the video when paused). The QRReader app on iPhone wasn't fast enough to scan it during the video.
jruby-openssl has worked fine for me for several years. Making outgoing SSL connections was one of the primary functions of the last app I worked on.
First Round Capital Holiday Video 2011 - Rebecca Black Parody
I think the real beauty of Solarized is how it works equally well in light and dark mode. Also, how it is explicitly not trying to be as high contrast as possible. I don't think I have ever used any color scheme as consistently as Solarized.
Hey - I'm the reporter who wrote this story.

I wrote the headline to make it clear that this was coming from a single source. I am not an expert in hosting or infrastructure.

That being said, there is an interesting discussion going on over at Betabeat. To quote on comment = "At one side is platform as a service or managed platforms on top of EC2 -- Heroku, EngineYard (which Groupon appears to use), etc. These are easy to set up, and have lower overhead for small or medium organizations. They have the highest per-unit cost, but for rapidly growing or small organizations, can be worth it."

I think its fair to say Groupon is a large company and past the point of its most rapid growth. To me that fits with the idea that they are looking to make a transition but have not accomplished it yet, whether that change is moving to EC2 or building their own data center.
If a person asks for boiling water, then yes, McDonald's may sell such a product without culpability.

But the debate over how hot coffee should be is a different discussion. I'm curious though, what is the proper temperature of coffee? I for one don't drink it so I have no idea.
I'm coming a little late to this discussion, but I do think that as much as startups want "desingineers", the hiring process makes it very unlikely that they will ever get one.

I remember reading Scott Adams's advice on how to get into the top 1% (well, reallu the top .0..1%). One way is to be incredibly good at one thing - like Roger Federer. The other way is to keep combining interesting and related things until you're there - ie., someone in the top 10% at coding, design, sales, biology, and construction.

Here's the thing - recently, we've been discussing the willingness of companies trying to hire to accept "false negatives" because the impact of a bad hire is so detrimental to a team. But I think a lot of "false negatives" may be coders who do pretty well in the interview but not quite well enough to get past the filter. The interview process almost never gets at their other skills. So the company fails to hire someone with exceptional domain experience and good design skills because he or she struggled a bit finding cycles in a linked list.

There are solutions for people like this. One is to be a founder - get an idea, start coding and designing, create an initial app, and see what kind of traction you can get. The other is very similar - you'll managed to get hired somewhere eventually, and you can start proposing projects. Eventually, you'll get to run with one, and you can be entrepreneurial about it (well less upside but at least you'll have a salary).

It's much easier to do this on your own or once you're established with a company. It's tough to get this across in an interview process.
Have a Baby; Start a Business?
hmm...this idea seems to have been brought up in a comment as well http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=2755#comment-31646
Entrepreneurs that are engineers and don't have a designer as a cofounder have no choice but to become desingineers.

Generalists are considered to be mediocre (jack of all trades, master of none). I don't know why though - maybe it's because many developers calling themselves specialists in a domain are doing the same thing for 5-10 years in a row and it's scary when other people take a different path.
Mozilla and Google Sign New Agreement for Default Search in Firefox
You might be surprised; I know Alexa isn't exactly an infallible oracle, but they list groupon.com as averaging between the 200th and 400th most visited site globally, and 53rd in the US. "ranking.com", whoever they are, says between 150 and 75. I'd feel confident saying they're at least in the top 500, and that requires a fair bit of horsepower. Now, they could probably solve a lot of their problems with smarter engineering before building a data center, but they certainly have traffic.
it is mentioned that the project relies on netlib, I assume this takes care of the JNI part
37signals doesn’t like you sorting stuff. Are you just remaking a spreadsheet?
I like that it combines the "postbin" with logging more specifically tuned to Twilio connectivity in the style of the twilio debugger.
This Quora thread might be an interesting starting point if you're looking for freelancers:

- http://www.quora.com/Who-are-the-best-web-designers-under-25...

Strolling through Dribble might also give you some inspiration:

- http://dribbble.com/

The UX world gathers on blogs like:

- http://uxbooth.com

- http://konigi.com

- http://usabilitypost.com

- http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com

- http://johnnyholland.org

Some of them might offer job postings as well.
Are ideas really worth a dime a dozen? I disagree.
The first spider.io physical hackday: bar-building
After matz announced he was hired by Heroku I spoke with him on how he plans to hire developers. He doesn't want one company to have all the MRI developers, so the best way to create a new paid MRI committer is to hire one specifically to do so.
I understand what you're saying but feel we're comparing different things. Yes, in an interview saying the thing you quoted would obviously be a red flag, and something I would never say. I understand the need in interviews to impress using your problem solving skills.
However, I believe that in your day to day job as a programmer, that quote is more appropriate - that you understand how particular data structures should be used rather than it's inner workings.
In this case, if we assume that the reason you're being interviewed is so you can do well at the day to day stuff, then my quote makes more sense.

I get you though; you want someone who can solve many new problems but it highly unreasonable to put a programmer in an unrealistic situation like an interview and expect them to perform just as well as they would on the job.
Unfortunately I have no answer on how to improve the interview process but it still bothers me that a better way hasn't been found.
Why don't they use EC2 instead of building a data center? That way there's no big up-front cost.
Except for ammunition to the endless legions of kneejerk anti-Apple fandroids, what is the point of this article? It is essentially content-free, the limited claim being that Apple, who are infringed upon in many areas, is suing people who rip off its case designs as well as Samsung who ripped of the design of the iPad wholesale.

The patent system exists, Apple are using it correctly. Companies like Samsung should quit whining and stop copying.
I'm not sure which exact bug was the culprit here, but this is a list of related to responsiveness problems caused by the "places" database: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=69150...

Some notable ones that were fixed recently include http://bugzil.la/690354 and http://bugzil.la/686025
A decent starter list, but definitely not complete (for me at least). I'd add the following

* TotalFinder (makes the OS X finder not terrible anymore, tabs, etc)

* HandsOff/LittleSnitch (oh, you're just using the built-in firewall? that's cute.)

* Transmit (everything you could ever want in an FTP app)

* CommandQ (W and Q are way too close together)

* Mou (free alternative to Byword)

* Evernote (note-taking that syncs absolutely everywhere)

* Alfred (modern day Quicksilver)

* Growl (notify me of all the things!)

* AppCleaner (good for finding the random left-behind files)

* ClipMenu (clipboard history and saved text snippets all in one)

* f.lux (less eyestrain for marathon coding sessions)

* GasMask (easy hosts file changing)

* GrabBox (automatically saves screenshots to my DropBox public folder and copies the URL to my clipboard? YES PLEASE. replaces the need for CloudApp, etc.)

* Sublime Text 2 (cross-platform and modern TextMate/BBEdit/Vim all rolled into one amazing editor)

* SourceTree (good and free Git/hg front-end)

* Witch (finally a better Cmd-Tab)

* Moom (window tiling and profiles galore)

* Hyperdock (dock previews and drag-to-edge window resizing)

* Prey (stolen goods tracking)

* Textual (IRC)

* Adium (chats)

In terms of my actual command-line environment:

* iTerm2

* Homebrew

* (way too many individual commands to list here)

Also Chrome/FF extensions can get you some really great paid native app replacements, like RestConsole (no more need for Http Clients).
Designers Behind Facebook Timeline: Keys To Creating A UI With Soul
Your insistence on seemingly conflating "Rest of the world" with "The US" is fascinating.
How to invalidate your startup idea
The first HTML5 radiology viewer approved by the FDA
NASA’s Kepler Spacecraft Discovers 2 Earth-Size Planets
Another vote for AKS. Our cryptography lecturer skimmed over the Fermat and Miller-Rabin tests, then just said "AKS is better" and left it at that.. I believe the best approach is to do a few iterations of a non-deterministic test to quickly rule out some numbers and then start on a deterministic one. Wikipedia's description of the algorithm still looks pretty simple and being deterministic makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

The documentation and download links for Plan at http://plan.dpk.org.uk seem to be broken so i'm not sure if this has bigints.
Streamlining Airport Security
Personally I think it was a cool hack, makes me wonder if there is an operations infrastructure idea in there somewhere. Tweet out to all your servers "hey get the latest update now." :-)
So you're trying to protect the pigs?
cool project. are you aware (or have considered) of similar projects for the RDP (rdesktop) protocol ?
Just a tip: try background without completely black or white backgrounds. something like very dark gray or beige feels way better and also seems to work better with a lot of colors and looking at the screen all day long.
It is unfortunate that two completely different concepts both happen to use the word "class" in their name. A related example is "return". People coming from a background in, say, C++ or Java will naturally have preconceptions about what these words mean, and will almost inevitably start by trying to apply them in Haskell world where they don't work.

It is particularly unfortunate because, with the wisdom of hindsight, I think classes as used in C++ and Java have been responsible for many problems over the years. This is fundamentally because they take two very common, very useful ideas -- modular design (separation of interface and implementation) and compound data types (struct/record/variant/etc.) -- and try to use a single tool to implement both at the same time.

Unfortunately, that creates all kinds of presumptions about how you write your functions, where the emphasis is always on one object being paramount or one data type controlling everything. For practical programming tasks, it may be more useful to model a situation using a set of related types to hold the data and a set of algorithms defined in terms of one or more of those data types (or more generally collections of one or more such types) to manipulate that data.

It's probably not an exaggeration to say that almost all of the most common modelling problems with C++/Java style OOP -- the "diamond pattern" with multiple inheritance, for example -- are due at least in part to this unwarranted emphasis on this/self/whatever you want to call it. Much of the rest is due to over-use of inheritance, which again has an underlying subclass-or-subtype ambiguity in what it represents -- and which again is perhaps emphasized by the whole one-object-to-rule-the-world philosophy even when what OOP would call containment or aggregation is a clearer way to model the situation.

Languages such as Haskell have never had this history of conflating modular design with structuring data, nor the resulting false friend of emphasizing one object/value/whatever in any given modelling context. IME, this is the big conceptual leap that is sometimes hard for those with a strongly everything-is-an-object background to make, though it's perhaps a little easier these days for anyone who has used C++ templates or Java generics. Once you make the jump, type classes and algebraic data types make a lot more sense.
Clicked link. Saw Flash Block. Realized this is almost 2012. Clicked back.

Nothing of value was missed.