skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly, being a desingineer sucks at times.

The advantages of the "desingineer" is that you cut out a lot of red tape and inefficiencies in the early stages. You can implement things much much faster if you know both front/back and how they come together. IMO, this is crucially important in the MVP/early stages of a startup where you don't have a lot of resources and need to move quickly.

The downside to this (and what I'm slowly figuring out), is that there are limits. It involves a lot of context switching. Someone else mentioned it but it's true... you only have so many hours a day and it's insanely hard trying to become proficient at design, ui/ux, and programming.

What ends up happening is that you "feel" like you're mediocre at everything, and when your startup is growing that feeling SUCKS. I would much rather have a small team where we each specialize (with some overlap of course) in what we can be excellent at.
Well, it's not every day that GitHub releases a product that competes directly with my young startup. Thankfully, it's still very DIY, which is the opposite of what my customer development has told me is important. So a sigh of relief from me.
I think the article sort of gave a better reasoning for the madness of Kim Jong Il. Basically he became ruler because he was so ruthless. His father selected the craziest out of the bunch.
I would really love color correction for the browser content area to be (ab)used to fix this. Everything else is themeable, but websites in their glorious variety can't really handle less radical forms of restyling.
FWIW, I also find black backgrounds straining. I usually have to hit dark sites with readability to read them comfortably. Perhaps it's a matter of what your eyes are used to?
Duke Nukem, unhappy marriages, and the Anna Karenina principle
don't forget db admin! My first startup job I spent more time writing queries than anything else.
I agree with jsavimbi. If you're able to hire specialists, then do it. But, if you're looking to get multiple roles out of the same person, you should be willing to take the pros and cons.

Also, if you're in the situation where you have to hire generalists instead of specialists, you are likely a small business, rather than a high growth startup. If you have a war chest and are looking to scale, it's a mistake not to hire specialists -- you as the business owner should be able to tie everything together, not an employee.
I think you'd surprise yourself :) you could easily peak 250 without much issue, and could sustain 125 without too much of a problem.
"5 years at County General" for a MD, with a clean record, is a pretty decent guarantee that your candidate is in the ballpark."

Scary but true: There are plenty of experienced doctors who couldn't pass a medical Fizzbuzz. My supervisor at my last teaching hospital, who has been treating patients for at least five years, failed the Fizzbuzz question I asked him. ("What's that other class of antibiotics you can't give patients with penicillin allergies?", if you're wondering.)

(There's also a few stories of people faking medical licenses and working as doctors for years before anyone noticed [1], but those are probably too rare to worry about.)

1: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/hamburg-falsche-kinderae..., couldn't find an English language link, sorry.
I probably shouldn't have replied and dragged it out, and I apologise for my tone but you seem to be almost wilfully missing the point.

There are problems where a linked list is theoretically better suited than an array. Your test is a problem where they are theoretically evenly matched. The interesting question is: do the benefits of native code etc, that you get when using an array outweigh the costs that you incur for using a non-optimal data structure for a given problem? To answer this you would need to come up with a situation where a list should be faster if the array and list were both native or both higher level ruby implementations. Then compare the actual running times to see what impact native code vs ruby code has.

All your test shows is that in a problem where neither data structure has an advantage in complexity, i.e. they both perform in O(n), the one backed by native code is faster. My assertion is that is a pretty boring thing to discover and "we", or most people, would guess that anyway.
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The article's author seems to be using the term "back end" to refer to an administrative area of the site where you log in to make changes.
Historically most people had "adult" responsibilities much earlier than they do today. At 13 or 14 many people were done with formal schooling and either working at farming, learning a trade or "seeking their fortune." They didn't have time to sit around wondering about the meaning of it all.
Curious, did Eddings's reply to you actually help steer you towards authorhood or did your life take a different journey?
On a related note, I was astonished how many different states water (H20) can be in.

Many more than just solid, liquid, gas.

.

See http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html

My ice goes up to ice-eleven (XI) ?
There's some Hubot forks to allow it to work over IRC or XMPP.
> "MySQL is slow as molasses in January, use MongoDB/Cassandra/Distributed MapReduce in Erlang!". How does it help?

But that's entirely unlike what I wrote (although apparently that's how many people going through the thread read it). I was not advocating a different language/system whatever. I was pointing to an article saying "Existing Ruby implementations tend to randomly crash because of a very specific design flaw -- here's why that happens, and a possible, though not easy, way to determine if your crashes are a result of this design flaw". Given the info originally provided, it's hard to provide a more relevant link.

Personally, I don't care about Ruby, which is why I have no intention of submitting that link; and even if I did, based on the responses here, I suspect it would be downvoted as "badmouthing Ruby", rather than actually discussed. But I don't really care either way.

I was just surprised because while I have been downvoted before, it was never so harshly and without any discussion, especially since (if anyone actually followed the link they would have realized) it's possibly extremely relevant.
I understand that most of the performance boost comes from the the invokedynamic optimization, not from anything special inside JRuby.

So, does this mean we can expect the same goodness for other dynamic JVM languages? Clojure maybe?
It's just as bad on Rubinius and just as bad on JRuby. I think this has more to do with tree-walking (and using a data structure that intensively requires that) than simply MRI overhead.
You're right. I am still referring to that particular part of your blog post:

>> So that’s the only case I can think of where Python
>> completely throws away the value of a lambda function.
My partner does: UI/UX design, HTML and JavaScript and a dash of backend. I do: backend, architecture, algorithms, sysadmin work and HTML + JavaScript when necessary.

It works really well. We also continuously try to expand to the others territory.
What about Incanter? It seems like a perfect opportunity to gather two languages trying to do the same thing into a single JVM-focused project.
I've found it useful as a basis for handling HTTP requests in a test framework I'm working on. Not for testing HTTP, mind you, just as an adjunct for other tests. The 'one header line per packet' responses are a little idiosyncratic though!
I suppose it's a bit of a lost battle in the web space, but I find it weird when the jobs are broken into "programmer/engineer", who does implementation, and "designer", who does UI/frontend stuff. In other areas of engineering, a lot of things other than the final aesthetics, or even just the UI, are called "design"; when you "design" a power plant, that's not purely implementation, but is heavily tied to the engineering. Surely any nontrivial webapp also has that kind of design as well, something more like product design? And it seems like you do want engineers who are also able to do that.
Apple to open R&D center in Israel
I think it's a good point that
White and other bright colors on black.
Solar Cell Producing More Electrons In Photocurrent Than Solar Photons
I thought the word was "devigner".

What are some good books/resources for a code dude to learn som design and UX? I feel lost with this stuff....
I've had plenty of taxi drivers who could barely drive, let alone find any given address in their city. And as for doctors, see my answer to potatolicious above - I've seen some terrifyingly incompetent ones who really should have been screened out with a fizzbuzz level question.
I disagree. A black background on a backlit screen is less eyestrain for the same reason that a white background on printed paper is. In both cases, the significant information is on while the background is off.

Reading black on white from a backlit screen is akin to reading the wattage information from a glowing lightbulb. It hurts.
whatever you design in Photoshop typically looks 10-30% different in the browser when converted to HTML

HTML isn't the culprit here. Any design done in a static medium is going to change when actually implemented on a device, for a platform. But it could just as easily be Flash as HTML. Good designers understand and account for the target medium (flexible sizes, variable fonts etc).

Also I reject your initial hypothesis. With a knowledgeable designer's design I can get a pixel perfect HTML implementation. If your design changes 30% just in the implementation then your designer doesn't understand the medium very well.
4 General Methods You Can Use To Detect Phishing Attacks
Nuance acquires a new company : vlingo
Unfortunately this is clearly not the case. There actions are clearly harming both competitors (Samsung, etc) and consumers (through less consumer choice in the tablet market).
Apple as the Don Quixote of patents
Exactly. Add OPS, Marketing, Sales, Accounting, Purchasing... and you got a bootstrapping founder.
Polar Charts with matplotlib
This post shows how to make a polar chart with python.
Count me in as well. Perhaps we should set up a group on meetup.com or somewhere similar to get things organized?
Here's one we did this year: http://monsters.partizan.com/
Let us hear some noise - Fancy stuff with the HTML5 audio api
(take 6 ambrose-bonnaire-sergeant)
You need some external source of light somewhere behind your monitor to prevent your pupils from dilating (bias lighting). Adjust screen luminosity so that the screen isn't your reference light source.
I'm going to guess it failed because it had 20 years of "kiwifruit" and increased American-audience-awareness that it was a fruit going against it. Otherwise I'd be all for it, though I must ask: why "Zespri"?
The most minimalist blog platform is having your .txt file online and then append to it via bash.
I don't think they can add much crumple zone up there - that area has to be strong enough to hold people's luggage.

(On another note, I'm a very nervous flyer, and I put my seatbelt on as soon as I sit down, and don't take it off unless I'm using the restroom, or until we're at the gate. Hurray, paranoia!)
> Boss: Jerry in accounting complains about his tickets too much. I'm going over there to give him a piece of my mind.
Me: Don't give him too big a piece. You need all you can get.

Your boss may have been an idiot, but all this quote shows is you being a jerk.
> In my experience dark backgrounds with light text are more tiring on the eyes in long coding sessions.

I completely disagree; my eyes tire looking at a light screen much more quickly. Sometimes I'll invert the colors late at night just to make things easier to read.

(Come to think of it, thanks for reminding me that I need to figure out how to get xcalib working with my external monitor, not just the laptop screen...)
I suspect it has something to do with when you started using computers. In the VT-100 and MS-DOS days, you pretty much got light text on a dark background. So when GUI environments came along, dark text on a light background became the new cool thing. That's my story, so I grew to like a light background.

I'm guessing that the majority of coders today started out on Windows. Notepad is dark on light, so that became associated with the "common" user. The first peek under the hood would have been Windows command line or Linux. I could see that a dark background would feel more 'tech'.
I wouldn't devalue graphic design as the parent did. There's room for a lot of improvement in the graphic design — what's often derisively called "just the way it looks" — of most digital products. Graphic/visual designers were somewhat restrained by low resolutions and slow GPUs. Evolving display technology will give rise to better graphic design both in the web and other digital products.

Good interface designers should definitely know the basics of the technologies used to implement their creations, in the same way industrial designers are expected to have some understanding of materials and manufacturing processes. It's often said that designers thrive on constraints: a designer does his best work when he knows the limitations of his tools, and works with their limitations and defects to create something useful instead of pursuing some impossible level of perfection. Designers, too, have to ship, and they ship best when they know what's behind the facade.
I don't generally ask about linked lists, but I will say that if you can't reason about them, it's a pretty big red flag. They're an extremely simple data structure.

With that said, a lot of startups (and web apps in general) are effectively consumer CRUD apps w/ nice images and transitions. Perf generally isn't important until scale becomes an issue (and until then you're main perf bottlenekck is some DB and/or network code that someone who cared about perf wrote).

So I agree. It makes sense to use effectively a domain specific language/framework like RoR when you're in that domain. And linked lists may not be applicable. But I'd still be weary of hiring people for whom reasoning about them is off-limits.
I think you are right, I suspect that is a drive to invent things and a passion for technology, that is at least how it works for me:

web design as a kid + DT at school + always inventing things -> Industrial Design at uni -> interest in developing product from both the user facing side and technology behind it.
> Just a matter of trying to break the cycle of violence.

What "cycle of violence"? Hasn't North Korea been run brutally by the same family for 50+ years? That is what needs to be broken, and it's far more likely to come to an end in a violent/tragic downfall than in a peaceful handover of power to his son.
You're probably also not making two salaries' worth for doing two roles worth of work. But I know, you guys don't go into startups for the money, right.
You have to be kidding me: "penio"? It sounds like a foreign name for penis. Even the logo looks phallic. Come on.

Companies spend a fortune checking names. This site is in English and has a single letter difference.
Rate my start-up: RFID for Jewelry (plenty of traction)
bedatadriven: R native code is usually slow and always memory hungry. Nonetheless, running R on Google AppEngine is very tempting. Could you give us some idea how the memory usage looks like using Renjin when compared to any other R distribution? Here is example how to measure memory:

http://heuristically.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/r-memory-usage...
Proof, an HTML5 iPad app for scotch tasting
Looking at that project page is there a reason you went for an interpreter rather than compiling to JVM byte code directly? Obviously it's a little harder if you're targeting JVMs <v7 as you don't have invokeDynamic to play with, but most of that work will be common to an interpreter or compiler. On the project I'm working on we haven't even implemented an interpreter, the REPL simply compiles to class files that are then loaded to evaluate them.
They should make a deal like twitter did early on with NTT or another telecom company for equity in exchange for data centers.
China wasn't a growing economic powerhouse in 1950. In fact, it didn't have much of an economy, period. They've made too much progress, established too many economic links, gained too much international influence to throw it away on a stupid war that, even in "victory", would be a loss.

They don't even have an idealogical interest -- we throw around the word "communist", but North Korea's modern ideologies are so far removed from Chinese communism that it's practically apples and oranges.

And the Cold War is long over, nobody's out to "eradicate" or even "contain" communism. US-Chinese relations are strained, but not hostile, and they know we wouldn't be looking to cross the Yalu.
I don't know that it's so hard to believe that someone could get past a base desire for revenge and take a more thoughtful approach? Especially considering that the author seems to be a religious person (he talks about praying daily, his mother wanting him to become a minister, etc.), I think it's completely possible that he could suppress a desire for vengeance and instead express forgiveness.
This is obviously a flawed analogy, since you don't need to be a doctor to locate the ear on a human body.
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I've been working for startups a long time (over ten years) and I have only met one person that I would consider a great designer and developer. I don't think it is because others aren't capable but rather aren't interested or forced to. This type of person is definitely a rare breed which is good. I think a lot of people say they would like to fall into this position but in reality probably not so much.

Please keep in mind that I have met quite a few people that dabble in everything but a true professional at both is quite rare.
I agree, but this is a necessary drawback in my opinion. Kickstarter has a good reputation in terms of the quality of the projects and this is mainly due to the review process. As you say, the downside is that some projects don't make it in spite of their potential.

The same is true for Apple's App Store. Their review process has received a lot of criticism, but the advantage of Apple's filtering process has proven itself when compared to the Android Marketplace.
As a counterpoint, I would encourage you to absorb things that are utterly useless, such as poetry. One must remember that not everything needs a practical function to justify itself. "Enriching the human spirit" sounds handwavey, but it's a very real and important idea.
I've done that in the past, and it has made no difference. Even in a fully lit room (without reflections on the screens, etc), dark backgrounds are not as comfortable as light backgrounds.

[EDIT] TO clarify a bit more - I use 2x 24" monitors at the recommended distance (arms length). This means that for better or worse, most of my field of view will be taken up by the monitors, and so most of the light that hits my eyes will always be from my monitors.
DHS looking to bolster drone security surveillance system
Discovr Hits 1.5M Downloads, Launches Movie Discovery App
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really, people downvote me because I find a web service helpful?
Boss: Sam pushed a bug into production last week. How do we prevent that from ever happening again?
Me: Don't let anyone do anything.
Boss: No, I'm serious.
Me: So am I.

So classic. But it's true, you could try to work with the Boss a little more. Maybe say, "it's impossible to prevent that from ever happening again, but there might be some things we can do to reduce the frequency of that happening." Then you can talk about things like (assuming that if your boss it that bad that maybe these things aren't happening) code reviews, automated testing, etc.
To be clear, a true black background is awful, I agree. Some sites think things like white/yellow on #000000 is a good idea, and it's just a terrible readability disaster. But the "DarkSlateGray" background of gnome2 is entirely different, IMHO. Give it a shot for a few days and see what you think.
Didn't Intel buy Digital for $700M? And what's left of that.
Apple licensed Xerox's tech. For a song because Xerox didn't know what it was worth.
It's almost the same as something called http://jottit.com from a million years ago. I think it's another exercise in futility.

I find the "penio" name and the phallus-like logo fascinating and intringuing, though.
> On the other hand, you could be myopic and under-corrected - and so suffer more when the pupils are relaxed (similar to the Night Myopia effect).

Can you expand on this? Would myopic individuals be more likely to prefer dark text on light background?
Don't forget to give the main character a sidekick. Maybe a dog?
So... I feel like Apple has come full circle.

I find myself wishing for a Hooters waitress to come running down the aisle of the next Apple PR event and hurl a sledgehammer through the presentation.
That sounds like a reasonable approach.
I find the reason it's hard to do both on the same project is that the engineer by definition knows the internals of the system. It's hard to un-know that and see things afresh from the user perspective. Thus one tends to create UIs that are intuitive to someone who already has a mental model of how the system works, but seem convoluted and arbitrary to everybody else.
There are some people that have both but it is extremely rare as the author points out. Being a hack or OK in design and development is not the same, many people can do that. I think he is pointing out the very small circle of extremely gifted individuals who can legitimately do both on a professional level.

As in any profession there will always be some extraordinary individuals that are heads and toes above the rest.
My boss walked in carrying a duck.

I said "where'd you get the pig?"

He said, "it's not a pig -- it's a duck."

I said, "I was talking to the duck."
I agree. Especially since all the proposed ones he linked to were horible. For a word to be accepted it has to flow and none of those do.
> if Ruby 1.9 smokes Python

A big IF? :-)

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...
Sony sued over PSN "can't sue us" clause
It's not weird for a teenager to not want to admit to childhood. It is when a middle aged person won't.
I think there are plenty of frivolous cases.

When I looked at the details of thee hot coffee case the claim seemed even more absurd.

The physical damage was worse than I expected but that doesn't make her less responsible.
Been using the Dark scheme on Komodo Edit. Its easier on the eyes and is a big factor especially if you sit in front of your monitor most of the day (or night).

See here - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/498698/white-light-vs-bla...
Clearly Apple isn't dumb and won't sue where there is no chance of "victory" (defined in a business sense, not always meaning "victory in court"). And indeed: they got a injunction (albeit an ephemeral one) in Germany over the design of the Galaxy Tab 10.1. So in fact they were right, and so are you. There was enough of a case to make this advantageous to pursue.

That doesn't change the fact that this is terribly hurtful to the consumer, the market, and (I can only hope) Apple's public perception. It's just awful, sorry.
Even more than the macro factors, the 1950s Chinese state was a revolutionary state bent on the worldwide spread of communism.

In the late 1970s, Deng Xiaopeng killed off the last group of leaders trying to keep that sentiment alive (the Gang of Four) and since then they've been all pragmatism, all the time. Any talk of communism is window-dressing, their regime is ideologically committed to doing what's practical.

So even aside from the cost-benefit, they have no ideological incentive to throw their lot in with the North Korean gov't. As I said upthread, the reason they give them aid right now is because a refugee crisis in Manchuria would be inconvenient. Pragmatism.
FMyBoss
Underpaid programmers - Vent it out here :-)