skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reference counting is also not free by itself (ignoring its cycle problems). There's overhead to all the incrementing and decrementing. It can add up in modern systems that toss around objects willy-nilly. Reference counting also adds a ton of additional synchronization points in a multi-threaded scenario.
Being recruited in the USA
There is a lack of engineers everywhere, but finding talent is especially hard on the Bay Area.

I'm from Spain but I've been the last 3 months in San Francisco attending to some conferences and visiting some friends. At that time I was trying to start something but I changed my mind and I started looking for a job instead...
Predictions 2012: Big Data, Flash, Cloud and Facebook
PragPub Magazine - January 2012
I know it's cool to hate on walmart and all, but the people are nice to me, and my Mr. Coffee Keurig machine that I purchased from them appears to be the exact same model that's on Amazon, and I got it for less than Amazon. Go figure.

One thing I do not buy from Walmart, however, are fresh fruits, veggies and meats. Better quality comes from different sources.
If You Could Raise a Steve Jobs, Would You Want to?
Eclipse is a dog. If you compare vim to other text editors such as BBEdit, TextMate, Emacs, Gedit, Sublime Text 2, e, etc. then your argument falls flat on its face.
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp
The point is a good one though.
Yep. I have the point system and play now button as well. I was not sure what the expectation of a typical user will be. IF he wants to wait or be impatient to play or just leave and never come back if made to wait for a couple of minutes.
>If a vibrating membrane of skin in my head can react to it, then it is a wave traveling through air. Why wouldn't this hold for a microphone?

Microphones don't respond in the same way to the same frequencies that your eardrum does. They can generally only record a subset of the total audio spectrum. So they're unable to completely reproduce the sound that was created by the instrument. If the ultrasonic frequencies resonate with a frequency that you can hear, it can cause some odd things to happen if the mic isn't able to record the frequency directly.
Ethan Marcotte's book (http://www.abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design) is pretty good. Not too long, and yet goes over a lot of theory and examples on how to achieve a responsive design.
I think it ultimately boils down to management and how they view employees. If management views employees as another cog in the wheel, easily replaced as needed, then the "death marches" don't look so bad from their perspective. Work people as hard as possible for as long as possible--if they quit or leave, replace 'em. Conversely, if management views employees as long term stakeholders in the company and desire to keep talent around for a while, they build a corporate culture that pushes a good balance between work/life.

At first glance, in this case, you see a stark contrast between how two organizations view developers. Zynga --> cog, meet wheel. Atomic Object --> person, valued contributor.
Coda by Ray Bradbury
I don't mind previews longer than 140 or even bigger thumbnails. These is at least good display of valid information (a huge advantage over twitter), while +counters and strangers' opinions are pointless noise.

If they want to expose the number of +s why not line it up next to the [+1] button? Why take a full line just for one number? Likewise, the number of shares can be next to the share button.
SOPA, GoDaddy and the Bottom-Up Democracy (or Mob Rule) of the Web
Exactly. This data is somewhere between uninformative to downright deceptive if we're trying to get a handle on how many domains were actually moved to different registrars. As a proxy, dns servers seems somewhat poor to me.
Is there a listing or resource of companies that actually respects its employees' work-life balance? After this last death march of the past six months, I'm willing to sacrifice salary for a company that plans accordingly and is not constantly in firedrill/ASAP mode. The long hours no longer justify the "competitive salary."
Isn't there a real name policy on FB too?
"Smart TV" is 2012's Buzzword
Because Google favors G+ results in search, G+ is going to become a very powerful SEO tool and this is going to push publishers to become more and more invested in G+. Search is Google's advantage over Facebook and they are going to press this advantage to the max in order to take on Facebook.

I can't say I blame them but I do wonder if there are no real anti-trust issues here. How is this different than when MSFT used its OS dominance to promote its (late-to-the-party) browser? Google is basically using their own dominance in search to promote their (late-to-the-party) social network
In India too. There are people who validate your passport application and supporting docs for a small fee before you submit them to the officials.
Kind of inspiring. Maybe I'll tell more people about what I'm actually building when I'm on my laptop all night after work.
> We rely on Google for a lot ...

Some of us do go out of our way to avoid relying on them for "a lot". I know we're a small minority, but to people like me, it's worth the effort.
The economic incentive to violate the GPL
What LG's New OLED TV is Missing
What a $2.50 New York Times means to the future of Starbucks
Google can be a giant now but it isn't mean that it's invincible. Google isn't innovative since "Gmail", keeps making mistakes (buzz etc) and make people angry. Nowadays people aren't royal to the products and even "normal" users can change their habits (remember icq -> msn transformation)
I'm always surprised to find out that even great writers were skeptical of their masterpieces. I wonder if it is false humility, or genuine lack of self efficacy
Priceless just for the last paragraph.
Thanks Luke, but my use case doesn't involve searching on someone's name.
What Data? Alice In Clinical Trial Wonderland
Have you seen "Waiting for Superman"? Is what you saw in that documentary the same in Finland?
"It creeps me out, because I don't know why I'm encircled by all these people, and I don't really get what they're talking about most of the time"

The above line really shows the author doesn't get Google+. While I do have my own grievances about Google+, the author doesn't make valid claims and shouldn't be making any because the author has not understood it.
TitanFile solves the problem of secure file sharing and tracking (accountability) as the data is secured end-to-end, there is notification of receipt/download (who accessed the files, where from, at what time etc) and ability to set files as read-only (access only from the browser window over SSL connection) as well as verify identity of recipient before giving them access to the files (2 factor authentication) without requiring recipient to have a TitanFile account.

Dropbox kicks ass as "file system of the internet" but sharing files with people in a secure and private way with dropbox is a big pain.

With next release we will integrate with dropbox and Google Docs as well.

Disclaimer: I am from TitanFile
It's clear once you interact with it, roll all over it, and thoroughly investigate it - all behaviours that get in the way of doing what it SHOULD be doing: showing me the data.
isn't zynga hugely profitable? doesn't amazon have a reputation for treating their people like garbage?

business doesn't need to be sustainable. it just needs to be a short sprint to your cash exit.

if you find yourself sitting at your desk wondering "why is my boss doing this? it doesn't seem sustainable. maybe he just doesn't understand", stop and remember: your boss probably isn't stupid. he probably knows whatever he's doing isn't "sustainable", and he doesn't care.
Vi Hart is an absolutely awesome artist with incredibly enthusiastic and inspiring pedagogical math videos. This would seem a match made in heaven.

Also be sure to check out her hobby of building musical instruments out of paper and then playing them while they are on fire.
It's been pointed out that world -does- exist (just not as pervasively distributed as it was): people are using slow satellite connections, or low-powered devices where vi is the perfect fit. Regardless, whether vi was written "for a world which doesn't exist anymore", vi still works perfectly well in the world we live in, and a lot of people produce a lot of value with it, and enjoy using it. vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore; welcome vi to the world in which we live today.
What a bunch of link bait... The title is blowing the whole thing out of proportion. It should have been "My free Google service is messing up my free Google service"

The beauty of the internet is and always has been that if you don't like something its really way to switch to something else.
Sweet irony: Righthaven sued by company it used to sue others
English Pronunciation
"because my informal language gave trolls too much ammunition to make a distracting non-point."

Don't call people trolls just because they highlight a confusing statement of yours. Judging by the comments here (and on RWW), it was easy to interpret it "wrong" even with the context of the article.
Variables for Index Names in PHP arrays. Which way is right?
What Mac, iOS developers want from Apple in 2012
All of the above assumes parents are very well educated (and can properly monitor) about the needs of their vegetarian kids.

It seems to me that that kind of diet is not appropriate for the majority of the population.
Such practices are only likely to lead to burnout, lower quality work and high staff turnover. All these are counter-productive for a company, especially if they're relying upon a high level of intellectual performance from their employees.
I felt the same way as you. Then we had a client that refused to pay us a month and a half of payroll. Changes the tune of things. The quote for me from the video that solidified this was: 'when you hire a lawyer [to handle contracts] you switch from being a design amateur to a design professional'. Applies equally to programmers.

Having a solid contract doesn't mean that you can't trust people. They just make everything legally binding so that if trust deteriorates (and it will if you do this long enough) that you'll be covered.

Also don't let the title of the video deter you, it's a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek title.
Fb has also but the difference is :

* nobody told me "what is right"

* nobody forced me to give my real name.

* nobody kicked me or my friends out becauseof the some funny name or profile picture.
If you want to roll your own on Mac or Linux, try bitpocket. I'm not sure about the options for rsync and bash on Windows.

https://github.com/sickill/bitpocket
Yeah, multitouch is a wrong word here.
How is your comment worthwhile?
That's great news. Yahoo deserves better than the shitty luck they've had lately with their leadership. But critically, does he have any experience on the media and publishing end of things? Selling impressions is a lot different than what he was doing at Paypal.
PayPal has survived by having an early lead in a business with high barriers to entry, despite having abused their users and customers at every turn. The guy who oversaw that would not be my #1 pick to lead a flagging consumer internet company.
For comparison's sake, here's a simple LRU in Erlang: http://erlangquicktips.heroku.com/2008/10/05/an-erlang-lru-m...
yeah, I figured as much, but it still provides a barrier to having conversations at all, and hence reduces my engagement with the site.
Bring Back Boring Banks
Mess up "The Internet"? I don't think so. If you don't like Google, switch to Altavista.
“Scott’s primary focus will be on the core business"

I'm curious what he'll define as the core business...
I think you would find the same phenomenon in any creative endeavor, be it writing or composing or coding. A work on any medium is an imperfect representation of how it exists in our minds, and any creator with the degree of perfectionism required to produce a great work would surely be dissatisfied with the result of any attempt to bring it to fruition.

How many times have you finished a program but known it could be better, if only you had more time? A little optimization here, some refactoring there... The necessities of producing actual works prevent us from ever giving them the degree of polish we feel they deserve.
You're not seriously suggesting to give the management of a complex deployment into the hands of a person who can't program?

No. I'm suggesting giving the maintenance of the "code" portion of a deployment system to a developer, and having that developer craft it in such a way that a trained monkey can write a couple lines of metadata and have it deploy pretty much whatever you need. Which is how it worked for us in the past (and worked quite well).

I'm sorry but I think you misunderstood me; I was never talking about Puppet.
Wow, silence. So strange. Also strange about the visa. H1-B's were 'gone' this year (all were claimed fairly early), but they should have known that if they had looked into it at all. Unless you've had one before, the earliest you could start in the US is next November, but you have to be hired by April so they can apply on your behalf.
Chromed: Google Demotes Itself in Its Own Searches
> If you need a TV that will play nice with a computer you need to find one that was explicitly designed to do so.

Any suggestions?
Piracy (kopimism) is now an official religion in Sweden
Immigration is such a complicated issue – talented workers attempting to immigrate into the country, and bureaucracy getting in the way.
I don't know about "can't" but the reason why the studios won't innovate alternate business models is simple and is another example of the classic Innovator's Dilemma. The studios are huge companies embedded in other, even bigger companies, so there's a large amount of inertia. The MPAA is just the symptom of this. Go through the list Blank mentions: none, I repeat , none of those advances came from the industry itself, it was always some outside influence that the movie business resisted and then had to eventually deal with.

But the inertia of the studios is only part of the story. Large actor's unions, e.g. SAG, also oppose drastic changes, because they understand the current model and don't want it to be disrupted too much. This is similar to how teacher's unions are generally against efforts like the Khan Academy. Remember that many actors (e.g. Charlie Chaplin) in the 20s were against the introduction to sound to movies due to precisely the same kind of intellectual and business inertia.

One of my favorite quotes: "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
What I find the most sad is that someone will think this is a really good presentation technique and start using it, while clients will not know what hit them.

This is a really good example of all that can go wrong when HCI is done this way.
Bravo!

I wonder what the reduction in infrastructure costs is to deal with filtering out that spam.
I'm trying to ask "How do we know the buyer is not malicious? He buys a violin; disputes authenticity; destroys some stand in violin (keeping original); gets money back; sells original violin via different account; gets more money."

That's not something paypal can cope with, or is it?
Albany, NY Vicarious Visions, an Activision Studio

Come help make the next generation of video games!
We have openings for: Software Engineer, Tools Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Network Software Engineer

I'm a Software Engineer at Vicarious Visions and can attest it is a great place to work! My email is in my profile...
This sort of post is further evidence that whenever G+ adds some new feature or publishes new numbers a PR attack is imminent. Usually you can tell straight away by the hyperbolic headlines.
It's normal. It's the Hanselman Principle in effect:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ImAPhonyAreYou.aspx
If you like this, you may also be interested in reading Orwell's book review of C.S. Lewis, _That Hideous Strength_, which appeared well before the publication of _1984_. The review itself is titled "The Scientists Take Over" and may give some insight into the mindset of the day. A copy is here: http://www.lewisiana.nl/orwell/

The Lewis book itself is remarkably little-read (the traditional C. S. Lewis fan may not appreciate its atmosphere, I suppose) and will probably surprise most people who have preconceptions about the man's philosophy and what he was capable of writing. But I digress.
Twitter issued subpoena for anyone who has used a specified hashtag
Also this:

> ...contains multiple microphones to create a stereo image of the sounds it hears

led me to believe the device determined the direction of the sound source by measuring phase shifts in different microphones. Now that apparently this device doesn't do that, may I ask why not?
New Years Resolutions for Entrepreneurs
Hrm, if you watch the video, the tone definitely changes with the location of the hit -- as in, with the same radius from the microphone, a different note is produced depending on where a finger strikes the surface. Gestures are also included, as you say.

With regard to multitouch -- a) some gestures involve more than one point of contact, and b) there are some bits in the video where it looks like two fingers are striking a surface at the same time and making two tones/noises.
Marketing automation services are the rocket, but content is the fuel
Japanese government building defensive computer virus; Skynet incoming?
Yes.

But damn you, it's now stuck in my head, with half a day left at work. I blame you if my function signatures all start to rhyme.
Medical Transcription
I think being able to code things like Excel macros would be beneficial in a lot of typical office positions.

Also, a lot of uni's offer MIS and similar degrees. They are a business degree with a few technical classes designed to output technical managers. Business Intelligence and Information Security are the two tracks my university offered. Does yours have something similar?
It was a little surprising to see almost half a dozen startups either close to deadpool, or still in beta. The companies still in Beta make me scratch my head: why did you spend the money and resources debuting at Disrupt if you weren't ready to deploy? I know Disrupt can be a great place to meet new investors, but you build companies for consumers, not investors.
A lot of technology jobs revolve around solving problems. Maybe technical sales? technical writing?
They got other H1-B's easily before, but apparently this year they run out so fast!
Windows password recovery
: Wondershare - Click PC Care is the best pc tune up software which enables you tune up and fix computer tune up problems on your own with just click
How Pinterest Will Transform the Web in 2012
There's a lot to be said about condensing a project into a minimum set of requirements, delivering that, and then iterating, adding all the surplus, mite-be-cool features in the near future, and pivoting.

Six months is nice if you have the time, but what if you suddenly run out of it halfway through? What can you deliver? A broken mess or only a subset of the functionality?
10 Cats Hating Baths
Find a problem: Check

Think of a solution: Check

Take some calculated risks: Check

Bring your solution to customers in need: Check

Make money: Check

This is brilliant!
> Where does the mindset come from

Most importantly, it comes from thinking about why the current laws and conventions are justified. They are not simply there in reality. Why do we have them?

It is not about justifying piracy, it is saying we should not even have the laws in the first place that lead to the possibility of piracy.

You might reply that this is ridiculous: simply changing the name of an act does not remove the harm it does. But this is the core of the matter: with copying, that reply is basically false! (Piracy is in legal terms a malum prohibitum not a malum in se.)

Look at the underlying phenomena, prior to any legal construction. Copying is an abstract relation: there is no physical connection between an original and a copy. It no more harms someone to be copied than it harms the number 4 when you write it down. Since copying renders no harm, and in fact the opposite, it is very beneficial, and furthermore it is an abundance, why should we restrict it? (No moral argument for copyright/IP/etc. seems ever to have answered that.)

In practice it may possibly be that selling creative effort is difficult to do optimally without some structure like copyright etc. That is the contention of the standard economic view. But that gives only a very particular and limited justification. Such restrictions on copying are justified only insofar as they actually turn out to help us overall.

Which returns us the gist of the article: if those restrictions do not help much, or rather have comparable alternatives, the justification for their existence is gone.
The Product Hacking Ecosystem
after doing some ruby work recently which required reading a lot of undocumented code that could have used some major refactoring, i really began to appreciate java's verbosity. even the most poorly written java leaves behind tons of clues as to what is happening. with ruby, if there is no documentation and no tests, you're SOL.

that said, there are still tons of things about java that really get on my nerves...
Hakin9 First January 2012 Issue: SQL Injection
5 Companies Ripe For a Takedown in 2012
From the article: "Should the mantle of 'creator' lie with the program or the programmer?"

Strangely enough, this was the exact dilemma that Clarissa faced in in Episode 29 of Clarissa Explains it All, "Poetic Justice," in which she developed a program that generated poetry. When her program's poetry won the school's contest, she decided to publicly relinquish her award to her computer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Clarissa_Explains_It_Al...
Agreed. Unfortunately, this seems to be pretty common in online tech journalism.
My own experience:
We published a paper on another touch sensing technique last year which got featured in a short article for Technology Review. The author interviewed both of us and wrote a very good article.
Over the following days, a number of sites like Engadget picked up the story and apparently only used content from the TR article. IIRC not a single author reported additional details or even contacted us to confirm this story.

This preference of speed over accuracy leads to stuff like 'Wi-Fi Makes Trees Sick, Study Says' [1].

[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/211219/wifi_makes_trees_sick_...
Bright idea Hiker saved by flashlight app
Hash table implementations vulnerable to algorithmic complexity attacks
More or less same technique, presented at UIST in October 2011:

http://chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/TapSense
Chile showcases South America’s emerging talent in robotics and engineering
While it's true that Sony has messed up their opportunities with DRM and the like, I highly doubt that Sony realistically could do what Apple did, simply because competing record labels would never in their right mind license their music in this way to another competitor. iTunes on the other hand, was just another distribution channel to the record labels, and not a direct competitor.
This came up last time. I personally do not believe the claims that tons of corporations use IE6, at least in the western world.

http://www.ie6countdown.com/

1.4% usage in the UK. Either there aren't actually many corporations using IE6 there, or their employees don't actually use IE6 for anything except internal sites (in which case to the rest of the world, they don't exist as IE6 users).
Gadgets Review Information
Gadgets Review Information
Gadgets Review Information You need to multiply font collections on your smartphone Gadgets Review Information