skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes - that game was called Sabotage. You could play it with keyboard, joystick, or paddle, but paddles were the best way to win.

I remember that you lost points if you just fired indiscriminately, as well.

Here's a vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbHW66AbzHA
Citation missing, but I've read a paper that claimed rather convincingly that you need a certain mindset both to be good at programming and to enjoy programming (unsurprisingly, this comes hand in hand).

It's not really problem solving, it's rather a specific kind of structured thinking. It's the attention to detail and the will to think through every aspect of an issue, to find a complete solution. That's also a useful skill outside of software or even engineering (I'd imagine law isn't all that different in that regard), but apparently it's really critical for software engineering. At the same time it's not necessarily linked to general intelligence or problem solving ability or creative thinking, it's just a particular way of approaching problems.

Said lost article had tests showing that only a small fraction of the population thinks this way, something below 10%.

Of course this isn't proven, but it matches with my personal experience. This always makes me very skeptical of things like end user programming, or programming as a mass profession. People without the skill can create programs, in particular in environments, but the results are usually quite fragile and expensive to maintain. "Real" programmers can usually create much greater value at lower cost, so there really isn't much of a point in employing lots of "not really" programmers.
Tiny HDMI streaming 'stick'
A Thing or Two About Twins
Quite a grilling from the nice lady. As usual her facts were shaky, and this might be an important time to adopt more mainstream arguments. We're familiar with the nuances, but often miss the important points.

1) These laws will not prevent IP infringement. They might not even reduce it. They will definitely not increase profits.

2) These laws will hinder domestic innovation in software, but will not stop innovation - it will just happen elsewhere (probably China).

3) Enforcement of these laws is extrajudicial. If someone does not like something on a site, they can claim IP infringement and have the site removed without a trial. That isn't even prudent, never-mind upholding the ideals of Americans.

SOPA and PIPA won't help Hollywood, will cripple Silicon Valley, and will create a means of silencing unwanted speech. I can't see how anyone who understands the reality of the situation could support them. You might as well legislate sunny days and outlaw umbrellas.

I'm glad that you spoke for all of us in such a public manner. It takes nerve and resolve to stand in front of that camera.
Probably much harder with random mic placement.

You could run an initial calibration on the system by having the user tap a large number of points within the touch area and noting the relative phase, amplitude, and frequency content received by each mic for each location.
I fail to see how a site that hides downvotes from users with lower karma isn't furthering a hivemind.
Hopefully we'll be able to automate CRUD app development in the near future and eliminate the time developers waste building such apps.
I think he means copy of functionality. I doubt Bill Joy ever copied actual code.
Also its really important to know how float works in javascript. because 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3 in Javascript.

I don't know why "application developer" == "Don't have to know how the thing I'm using works"

Quite frankly I can never get away from knowing how the thing I'm using works. My greatest wish is that in 2050 we will create a computer language that has no performance penalties and all the JITers/vms/compilers are invisible to me. Until then I'm forced to learn all the inner workings of my languages if I want them to run reasonably.
Machanics are not asked to recite from memory how to install a cruise control. The fact that programmers are is just to make us feel bad so we accept low pay.

They need us so badly that they grasp at anything to show us we dont deserve to be paid. Its economics.
Farming "Just manual labor"?

Common, have you ever tried to plant something?

THAT is difficult!

Any profession could become a mass profession.
Nope. Flag it and move on.
There used to be flyers all around San Francisco advertising "Dan: Man with Van" with tearoff phone number tabs. I don't think I've seen one in a looong time, though.
Anywhere where he intended business model has been stated?
This is called 'type tagging' or just 'tagging'; needless to say, Lisp and Smalltalk and other interpreted language implementations have been doing it for decades now, and at one time there was direct hardware support for it in some architectures.
I had no idea this visa existed. Thankyou.
Speculation at places like Goldman Sachs isn't just about having better future-predicting power, though. It's also about sitting on buckets of money such that you have a lot of risk tolerance. Then people pay you to take their risk, and you win on the average (in terms of profit) and they also win on the average (in terms of reduced risk).

Starbucks, being as big as they are, may simply have felt that they were big and well-informed enough that the risk of self-insurance made more sense for them... a decision which is easy enough to snipe at ex post facto, but may still have made more sense.
I think you mean "short." If you ask for a "small," they will probably offer you a tall (for the same reason that somebody requesting a Big Mac at Burger King will be offered a Whopper instead).
I don't like talking about my job because it's so esoteric from most people's perspectives. I think a lot of people at least have some small idea about what programming is about. I'm a digital ASIC designer. Next to nobody you randomly meet has any clue what that is about.

It actually sucks in a lot of ways because talking about work is an ice breaker, even for people that don't like talking about their work. For me, somebody asking about my work just adds another relational barrier.
Anyone who's interested in helping out, do get in touch.

What's your contact info?

I'm working on something related for project management and task planning (though it's more in sync with the premise of the original article and to a lesser extent with ccLoop) called TeamWork.io http://teamwork.io/

You can reach me through the contact form at that site, or via http://banrai.com/contact.html
Some of ifttt's Dropbox actions involve doing things like saving an image to your Dropbox, which would be hard with read-only access...
Are you going to show targeted ads that you sell or just a stream from Adsense or another provider? If you are selling your own targeted ads what market are you in?
Brilliant! As soon as I read the name "Sabotage" I knew it was correct. Thanks for the clip. I had just a monochrome green monitor and didn't realize it also had such striking color.
They should have less bitter coffee while they're at it so people aren't so bitter.
Extreme UX. MIT age "suit" that puts you in the body of a 75-year-old
I set that as my default search for my browser.

The main winning feature - they respect the + operator. I can string together a bunch of technical terms, and know that all of them will appear in my results. No doubts.

When google started going all fuzzy on me and returning things that sorta matched what I was looking for, I tried ddg and was happy to get exact matches.

I guess google is trying to satisfy the 80%, but I am in the 20% way too often.
Eh? The movie was about lab rats that became intelligent, wasn't it?
From what I've read, Github uses Mustache also. Logic-less templates are nice. It keeps code out of the views.
They probably are when they are inlined like this, else, how would you know the length?
It's actually 3 years of work experience per university year. For most countries outside the US that's still at least 9-12 years of work experience.

When people ask me what the downsides of dropping out of college were, this one is the most important.
My solution was far worse than this one... :)
Also keep the following in mind. You don't need to use Singletons in Python. The following code smells in Python.

log.getLogger()

use a module instead.
>a friend of mine optimized some javascript, reduced the file size, and this ultimately saved his company over $200,000 a year in bandwidth.

Is this a real-life example or a hypothetical situation? Hard to imagine this to be realistic unless this is one of the top 100 sites in the world.
Too bad it's US only. I'd love to have something email me about whenever something happens regarding my credit (for free would be best).
It's a real bummer to see perfectly capable companies with enough traction taking funding.
Pardon?

The code is right there in the article -- in this case, for this specific kind of string, at the C level, they very clearly are null-terminated strings.

No, you don't get to see that at the Ruby level, it's all nicely abstracted away, but that is exactly what is happening inside the VM.
Perhaps this is why this annual cost increase is still the smallest yet, and why they're also limiting the price increase in stores even more?
Planet Money did a story that talks about fuel speculation in the airline industry: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/09/30/140954343/the-frid... (The fuel speculation part is 8 minutes in.)
Should Long-Time Truckers Get Freight Broker Training?
In our constant effort to have a better quality of living, we tend to capitalize on any skills that we have in order to stretch our limits and maximize our gains. Learning new skills that are pretty much in line with those that we currently have but has totally different function yet offers a very big potential for upward progress is always a wise decision. For those who have been working on trucking business and have a vast experience on the field, undergoing a freight broker training could be the next viable decision in order to take your business one step forward.
Why are so sure that merely restarting the crashing process and retrying the operation will make it work correctly the second time?

Did I missing something in your explanation?
We've got a co-sponsor here in Missouri too, the governor's brother, no less. Out with the old, I say.
How to find, influence and convert more prospects into customers
Yes, I find it very frustrating too. My response would probably be "The compromise was the DMCA. Usually when I make a compromise I try to stick by it."

Nice interview!
Right! The 68k supported type tagging by having 24 bit addresses on a 32 bit machine. I'm not sure if allowing tagging was intentional when Motorola designed the 68k, but Mac OS did store flags in the upper bits of a pointer at some stage.
> A reasonable alternative strategy would be to just run the business as if the price of coffee was destined to be flat, and then place counterveiling speculative bets. The point of those bets, however, isn't to speculate it's precisely to try to eliminate the need to speculate.

The point of speculating is to eliminate the need to speculate? What the hell? This doesn't make a bit of sense.

What Starbucks did was place a bet that coffee prices would go up. Unfortunately for them, they bet wrong. That's the risk no matter how they bet, though. If they'd bet on flat prices (no lock-in) or declining prices (the other side of the bet they actually made), the price could have gone up and they could have lost money. That's why it's called speculation. Someone speculates that the price will go one direction, and they make a bet to that effect with someone else.
You mean I could put my library of software on an SD card and convince the Apple computer that it was reading from a floppy drive?

Wow.
Wow, I just used my iPhone to stream a game over AirPlay to an Airport Express jacked into my //e. Incredible.

Before this I had to download programs through Chris Yerga's ftdi/gameport/twitter client setup. http://atomsandelectrons.com/blog/2010/04/apple-t/
These are real concerns but they just aren't the common case in sales. In the common case, selling someone $50,000 of licenses is a $50,000 win for the company.

Moreover, most sales account managers are intrinsically motivated to set things up for the 20x sale, because they're likely to own the account when the 20x home run comes in.

Most sales teams have spiffs set up to account for the "real estate agent" problem where short-term deal flow trumps revenue maximization.

I agree that managing a direct sales team is a hard problem, but in terms of designing an incentive comp plan, it's hard to argue that it isn't easier than doing incentive comp for developers.
I don't want to speak for John, but this is my answer to the same question: "Sales isn't rocket science, it just takes someone who is comfortable talking to people...and when you're selling something you believe in, that's really easy to do."
Unfortunately I think the author is just speculating.
Well I dunno how they could possibly be null terminated if you can stick a null in any old string:

>> "hello\0world".length
=> 11
Writing good python has been more of a challenge for me lately. The more C#/Java I write, the harder it is for me forget dependency injection, factories, etc and just feel the freedom Python provides.
It's an achievement when you have better presence then the reporter!
Fighting and rage and the peace movement
Envolve's (YCS11) first year: surviving arson attacks and a 7.0 earthquake
Great performance! For the amount of time they gave you to speak, you hit most of the main points (and notably, using specific examples we've seen lately).

It's too bad she didn't open the window for you to stick a jab out at the film/music industry - but you pretty much covered it [politely] by saying it's up to them to innovate.

We all know the speed at which updated encryptions techniques are created and then cracked. Thus, the film/music industry should not be looking to secure their work (i.e. Blu-ray), but should instead explore and create new models for distribution.

"Invent."
@dustindiaz I'm curious about the usecase for Matador. Its mentioned in the docs that it uses Express. I use Express pretty heavily and it seems that most of the things made available via Matador is already available in Express. Why should I consider stacking Matador on top of a framework that already works pretty well?
Alexis, you did great. Cool, calm, collected, and sharp. You did a great job advocating what most of us here understand and champion.

But here is the problem I see with this whole SOPA debate...

I didn't see anything that would help my Uncle Art understand what this is all about in his language and why he should care.

This is what he sees:

- There is a bill in congress.
- It's to stop people from stealing other peoples' stuff.
- There are strong opinions on both sides.
- The old companies I love (movies, etc.) support it.
- The Chamber of Commerce (mother, apple pie) supports it.
- This young guy was very articulate; I like him.
- I don't understand the Constitutional argument.
- He says this new stuff wouldn't have happened. So what?
- What is reddit?
- I thought Facebook was for kids.
- Who is Louie CK? I really don't understand what he did.
- Why is the internet so afraid of ethical behavior?

There is another comment in this thread by squeee which is the first one I read that my Uncle Art would understand, something like, "If someone shoplifts in your store, this bill allows the government to shut down your store." I could just picture my uncle raising holy hell if that ever happened.

I read the comments in this thread before I watched the video (like I usually do), so I was waiting for Alexis to say something like squeee said. Something that would get the great mass of those who don't understand the argument to take notice and take action.

Alexis, keep up the good fight. And find a way to get our aunts, uncles, and grandparents to "get it". I believe that will be the turning point of the battle.
That phrasing isn't very precise, but I presume they mean to use setTimeout and pass a timeout of 0 [0]. That link has some discussion of this use and suggests using window.postMessage instead, at least on "modern browsers", for a suitable definition of modern.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/window.setTimeout
Just in case anyone else is wondering, the video won't load if Ghostery is running. Incredibly lame.
So this is why I think the Rasberry Pi folks are waaaaaay under estimating their potential. This is exactly the kind of thing where a small processor with WiFi and HDMI and poof you've got a TV add-on.

An alternative version of this same gadget is a 'picture frame' type device where the your Picasa, Flickr, G+, or Facebook feed acts like a screen saver on your TV.

This 'class' of gizmo retails for $99. If you can build all the hardware for $35 you're done. (that is 42% gross margins while offering distribution channels 40 pts) It works like this, you buy them for $35, you sell them to the distributors for $60, they sell them for the MSRP of $99 and get $40 on every one sold, or if they want to put them on sale $10, $20, or $30 on each one sold. If you divide your gross into 1/3 for R&D, 1/3 marketing, and 1/3 for re-investing into the company, you get $14M for engineering, $14M for marketing/sales, and $14M in cash flow to offset tooling/depreciation/rent/etc. For every million units you sell.

Note its important to offer the distributors an attractive margin since they have a zillion things competing for their space, and at 40% they are strongly motivated to move your product. Six million units a year is not an unreasonable estimate (in my opinion of course) so that is a 360M$/yr business.
I don't use Foursquare, but I think the OP is wrong anyway. Foursquare is a game, people see it as a game, go places, get badges, rack up the check ins, get their stats up. It's like real life RPG crack in a way. From watching others use Foursquare, that's the lure in it that I see. The article completely missed that point.
I wish coding were viewed as not just a profession, but a necessary skill to be literate in today's world. It seems impossible to me that our society can keep up with the pace and breadth of information that our digital-systems create.

And I don't mean that everyone should be able to understand assembly. I'd almost be happy if the average person can understand what makes a comma-delimited file parsable by Excel. Seriously...try asking someone who is not in the computing field about that.
I was curious, so I benchmarked this with Ruby MRI. join('') beat reduce(:+) even on two strings, but is twice as fast only on four or more strings.

$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2010-01-10 patchlevel 249) [universal-darwin11.0]
$ ruby benchmark.rb
user system total real
add 2 0.390000 0.000000 0.390000 ( 0.385910)
join 2 0.300000 0.000000 0.300000 ( 0.305812)

add 3 0.530000 0.000000 0.530000 ( 0.527388)
join 3 0.320000 0.010000 0.330000 ( 0.329390)

add 4 0.720000 0.000000 0.720000 ( 0.720500)
join 4 0.350000 0.000000 0.350000 ( 0.353237)

Code: https://gist.github.com/1562617
The sponsors are credit card companies, who generally give pretty decent sums - $50-$100 - for successful referrals.
Defeat facial recognition
This article is completely wrong. If Starbucks has hedged, they aren't "losing" money on the price of coffee going up or down; their hedge pays out inversely with the change in operating costs due to coffee price fluctuations.

Another way to illustrate this is to note that the cost part of the equation is the same regardless of what happened to coffee prices in the last year: assuming they hedged, they'd probably raise prices by the same amount had coffee been up or flat for the year, too.

Another important flaw is that costs do not determine prices in this way. See this legendary Quora thread for details: http://www.quora.com/Why-is-iced-coffee-more-expensive-than-...

Yet another problem is that even if costs did determine their pricing, Starbucks' big costs are real estate and labor. The markup on beans and hot water alone is staggeringly high.
This analogy is as bad as people who say that piracy is the same as stealing from a shop - in your story, the content producer does get paid for that product, it's Bob the store owner who loses money. You think shops can turn around to their suppliers and say "hey, a few things got stolen so we'd like a refund for them"?
> For example, if I'm paid 10% on my first $300k in new business, 15% on $300-499, 25% on 500+, I'm doing everything I can to hit $500k, right?

Why would you do that if the 25% is only on the 500+ stuff? It's not like those $2k at 25% ($500) are going to be very significant compared to the 300k@10 ($30000) and the 200k@15 ($30000 as well).
We'll have to, there is no other way. The demand side of our field is industrial scale. The supply side is arts and crafts. Something will have to give.

MDA, Software factories, etc., are imho the way to go, but unfortunately, there is strong resistance in the current generation to "ceremonial" architectures and methodologies (which are /unfortunately/ a requirement for that to happen, in my opinion).
Thanks revorad.
None of those things became obsolete, they just moved to cheaper labor pools.

> What would make coding obsolete?

Nothing except full blown AI.
Heap Spraying Demystified | Corelan Team
and yet I still think a $200,000 deal requires more work and yields more profit for the company than a $5,000 deal, and thus I should be rewarded for that additional effort.

Interesting. I wrote a particularly tricky piece of code today. It required much more effort on my part than some simple code I wrote last week, so I need to be rewarded for that additional effort. Oh wait, I am rewarded with a salary for doing what I was hired to do - solve problems writing code.

What FogCreek is saying is that it should be the same thing in sales. You're hired to do sales. It doesn't matter if it's $10 or a million dollar deal, that's your job. Why should it be any different than any other salary person?

Another interesting thing to me is when sales people talk about all their great sales, but seem to forget that someone created the product they are selling. If thought about in that manner each sale should cause the entire company to get paid. In fact, that's exactly what pays the salaries of everyone who works there.
How Rick Santorum Is Making His "Google Problem" Worse
Your Problem Isn't Motivation - Peter Bregman
Python for the Enterprise: Holy Grail or Flying Circus?
Why?
Maybe they just need some cash to actually draw a basic salary (you know, to pay the bills)... Or maybe they need more resources to build even better things.
Yea I suggest cooperation with engineering before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3148143

Also consider equity or profit sharing in the company too.
Level-up life: how gaming can enhance your reality
It is a prime example of sunk cost (and the sunk cost fallacy), but it doesn't explain why they're only raising prices now, rather than back in October when they locked in the agreement. The linked-to WSJ article explains that Starbucks will be paying 'more than their competitors' for coffee, but they're still not paying 'more for coffee' than they expected to. That's the nature of a forward purchase agreement.
The length is stored in a flag.

include/ruby/ruby.h:

#define RSTRING_EMBED_LEN(str) \
(long)((RBASIC(str)->flags >> RSTRING_EMBED_LEN_SHIFT) & \
(RSTRING_EMBED_LEN_MASK >> RSTRING_EMBED_LEN_SHIFT))

#define RSTRING_LEN(str) \
(!(RBASIC(str)->flags & RSTRING_NOEMBED) ? \
RSTRING_EMBED_LEN(str) : \
RSTRING(str)->as.heap.len)
Two questions on seed loans for start-ups
We're at the stage of putting together our financial projections and preparing to pitch for loans from a few potential investors. We're thinking something in the range of 10k-20k, to take us through the next 6-8 months of building up to open beta and starting to bring in some revenue.
What kind of email service do you feel is lacking at the moment? What would you like to do over the email that you can't right now?