skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is that even a thing? Smart Notifications? It should be. There are apps like Brizzly to help you tune out some of the noise from Facebook and/or Twitter but it does nothing for notifications. Wouldn't it be great if someone (someone else, of course i won't do it haha) made an app that intercepted those notifications and made them smart and gave you more control over them. Or maybe someone could just develop the technology and sell it to these companies. I'm sure they could do it themselves but if they're not on it yet why not make they're lives easier?

Maybe it could work by giving these services like Facebook an email address like you@SmartNotifications.com and then they filter them and send them to your real inbox in a smart way. And for SMS maybe use something like Twilio or AmazonSNS and give the Facebook type app a unique number that directs all notifications to the SmartNotifications app then it filters them for you and forwards them in a smart way to your mobile device. Now, for app notifications I'm not sure how that would work as I can't think of a way for a third party to intercept that type of thing so maybe you'd just have to turn notifications off on your phone and rely on SmartNotification email and SMS alerts.

But the article makes a good point about all these websites having a vested interest in annoying you. Surely google and Facebook could implement this and I find it hard to believe that they haven't done it because they just haven't gotten around to it. It would make sense that they would want to avoid this feature so that kind of rules out hoping to build this sort of thing and selling it to them. We're left with circumventing the system and doing it without their approval potentially making anyone who does this an enemy to web apps and a friend to the users. Unfortunately the apps will probably have more power and make it difficult to operate. But we can all still dream.
Hollywood's Next Great Business Model: Praying That Stars Die
Don't worry about fixing the startup ecosystem, just build your startup
Thanks! I wanted to request that too.
There are a bunch of really expensive, really useful, 3rd party libraries for financial modeling that are written in C++.

A great many languages have support for calling external code, but debugging the interaction tends to be more trouble than it is worth.
I'm of two minds about consistency vs banks. On the one hand, yes, in the CAP sense, "consistency" is atomic consistency, and banks allow a form of eventual consistency. On the other hand, I'm not sure if the NoSQL sense of eventual consistency is strong enough for what banks need; how do NoSQL eventual-consistency models deal with conflicts that affect other tables? For instance, a quick Google shows that MongoDB offers "programmatic merge" - but would that also allow you to say "when merging my spouse's ATM transaction with mine in our checking account, also remove the spurious transaction in the bank's cash-on-hand account"?

Maybe I'm thinking too close to the metal; to get eventual consistency at a higher level, you still need atomic consistency at a lower level - even Paxos uses two-phase commit under the covers.

As for the partitioning, what "isn't wrong" is:

- He says the CAP theorem is historically irrelevant to relational databases, which is wrong, and that they have been "adapted" to provide high availability, which is kinda wrong, and then:

- He confuses "partition" in the "partition my database" sense (scale my database across multiple tables or nodes) with "partition" in the original CAP sense (do not permanently explode if a node goes offline), so he isn't even wrong - any multi-server database allows partitioning, by definition.

Also, I think you're misunderstanding that item on the wiki page; it sounds like Postgres-XC IS globally consistent, but that it can't yet support some important forms of consistency like UNIQUE constraints across nodes (you can only have a unique constraint within the same node). All nodes would see the duplicate rows, though, so it is globally consistent.
Nagarro Showcases Cloud Enablement at Cloud Connect 2012
Nagarro Showcases Cloud Enablement at Cloud Connect 2012
Smoking hookahs at IIT. No, it's not what you think.
Pandora receives embarrassing PrivacyScore rating for sharing user data
عمر سليمان يعلن ترشحه لانتخابات الرئاسة رسميا
I remember one of the versions of PhotoShop (perhaps it was CS2) no longer loaded fonts at startup and the launch speed improved. But then the first time you select the font drop-down you had to wait around 5 seconds.

So I guess the launch was faster but waiting for the fonts to load was annoying when I was in the middle of working. During the app startup I'm probably spacing out for a few seconds while the app launches.

I see similar things in other apps. One that comes to mind at the moment is Eclipse where there are certain menu items when you drag over them the app freezes for a second. I always curse myself when I accidentally roll over one of those.

Particular parts of the app that require a lot of disk access may have a bit of a performance hit and so it makes sense to lazy load them, but it is a trade-off and sometimes I'd rather just wait a few moments at launch instead of getting killed by a thousand cuts while working.
Why do you let your client talk to you like that?
yessirr, credited at the bottom of the page :)
> Microsoft, through the Mono project, has been aggressive about patents.

Can you please point out something that backs this statement? Not to dismiss the fact that Microsoft uses patents offensively, because they do, but specifically related to, or in the context of, the Mono project.
I've been really impressed with Evil. It's trivial to extend with new keybindings, the code looks very clean, and it even supports text objects.
Alan,

Thanks for your comment. I guess we have to invest some more time into our website. But concerning your point about the UI that needs improvement: Do you mean the website UI or the builder UI seen in one of our videos? And did you check the site on a mobile device or on a desktop? (cause or mobile site is not really existent yet...)

We will definitely keep up and if you subscribed for beta we will inform you about important updates.

Marco
GovDelivery Chosen as Cloud Computing Supplier for UKGov G-Cloud Initiative
GovDelivery Chosen as Cloud Computing Supplier for UK Government G-Cloud Initiative
there's jquery libs for bookmark and history manipulation, you've seen this, it is the url path like stuff after a # in a url... javascript basically can sniff that, like anchor tag bookmarks. sort of a hack for sure! but very common, eg: twitter.
"More often then not, when you put "robust" tools into the hands of people who don't know what to do, what you end up with is just ugly."

I find this to be true with a lot of developers. They know how to code so they have a "robust" tool set but have no idea how to lay out a page and end up with something functional but ugly.

I very much agree that everyone could benefit from learning more core concepts like spacing and complimentary colors.

Knowing how to code has never meant that you know how to build a good webpage.
Is this supposed to be interactive? Because it's not, on Firefox 7.0.1 (doesn't respond to [Y]es [N]o.
There are some fuzzy matching plugins for 404 handling, like Apache's mod_speling (note the missing l).
FWIW, a friend mentioned that disabling sync over wifi solved at least one major crashing issue.

Link to tweet: https://twitter.com/#!/mmartel/status/169145796107833345
Is the Indian e-commerce market feeding frenzy a greater fools phenomenon?
Here's the secret to answering "What is your biggest weakness?" I've used it several times with great success. Are you ready for it?

.

.

.

Tell the interviewer what your biggest weakness is. Be honest with yourself, and then be honest with them. I don't mean that you should blurt out, "I stay up all night watching Gossip Girl reruns," (unless that affects your productivity at work in a non-trivial way), but do an honest assessment of yourself, decide what your biggest work-related weakness is, and tell them.

If you end up working with them, they're going to find out what it is anyway, and if they're aware that you're aware of it, they can help you overcome it. If you just grin and say something like "I work too hard" or "I'm too much of a perfectionist," you've only succeeded in wasting yourthe interviewer's (and your) time.
Splash screens aren't there for the vanity of the development team - they provide immediate visual feedback to the user that the application is loading any necessary libraries.

I'm also at Adobe and my team recently performed a ground-up re-write of our application. Minimizing start-up time was a high priority item and we did as much as we could to reduce it, but file importers/exporters, codecs, and some plug-ins need to be validated and loaded at some point - would you rather have these costs as one-time, up-front fees or scattered throughout the application as a thousand tiny cuts every time you open some menu command or function that requires these libraries?

But even so, professional desktop applications are not the same as lightweight mobile apps which tend to perform a limited set of tasks through a specific workflow. To compare the two is unfair and and bit clueless. And he brings up OS startup time, as if it doesn't take a LONG time for my Android or iOS devices to boot up - and they have less excuses as the hardware is pretty standard and fixed unlike my desktop machines.

I think his rant about wasted time is valid, but misguided. There's more time wasted navigating non-intuitive interfaces or poorly laid-out common controls. There a lot more time wasted when an application you rely on to do your job doesn't offer the functionality or freedom of workflow to accomplish what you need.
Debian Project announces a patent policy
Similar news - Sony doubled the price of her album's within hours of her death announcement. They later apologized though - http://www.nme.com/news/whitney-houston/62045
For more on death and disability and "right to die" issues, here's a great post by Bad Cripple.

http://badcripple.blogspot.com/2012/02/mainstream-media-disc...
Any plans to get Solaris/SunOS support in the future?
the question probes self-awareness. I certainly want the people I work with to be self-aware, and be interested in continuous growth.

FWIW my answers are built-in to my resume: < http://careers.stackoverflow.com/dustingetz >
Not sure I agree that non-publicly-routable addresses are a hack. The ability to run your own DNS server and having a firewall are pretty elegant components of most networks.

That being said, it very well maybe time to find a better alternative :).
Can you clarify what you mean "Interview at your level?"
According to the article, Jobs' solution was to organize Apple around making great products. This is enough to make Christensen himself call them "freaks".

Caring first about great products makes you a freak? Something seems deeply wrong with that. (Edit: this was unclear. I agree that "freak" is accurate in the sense that this is rare. My point is that it says something staggering about our economy that it should be so rare.)

If Apple are the only ones who do this, I would sooner call everybody else the freaks.
I put up a fix. Does it work now?
Next step: assignation markets [http://www.outpost-of-freedom.com/jimbellap.htm]
Awesome interface. Very cool.
Valve: We'll Make Hardware If We Have To
you're right, there is a place for "sales" in most every company at some point in their lifecycle. In the post I was more discussing engines of growth relative to early stage startups.
I think this was made up; just to prove a point.
"Sorry, we didn't know you would be so pissed off about it"
Past the first plan, the pricing is all $2.50 per user. I like to think of the first plan as the "startup" plan so we made it cheaper. We do offer discounts per user past 50 users.
LOIC DDoS Attack Tool Goes Mobile to Android
Mozilla has trademark rights over the Firefox name and logo, and they license the logo's image file under a proprietary copyright license. It has nothing to do with patents, so the new policy does not affect that issue at all.
Book Genome Project analyzes marriage rates with Vampires and Werewolves
Various ways to get randomness wrong
Any client that talked to me like that better be paying serious bucks. Like "early retirement" amounts of cash. Sometimes programmers need a push and need to be motivated, but unless this was paraphrased for dramatic effect, I found the tone very insulting.
Wouldn't a publicly stated policy of willful ignorance negate any defense of willful infringement?

If I make a point of not looking at speed limits signs, and pt a bumper sticker on my car saying "I don't read speed limits", would it be reasonable to expect the nice police officer to not write me a ticket?
Once you add indentation, and know the simple rule that args line up vertically (unless they're so short that you'd rather leave them), the following is pretty easy to read:

(/ (+ (- b)
(sqrt (- (* b b)
(* 4 a c))))
(* 2 a))

It tells me:

* there's a quotient of 2 things

* the first thing is a sum of -b and a sqrt

* the second thing is a product

and so on. Pretty nice. Of course, mathematical notation is more terse.
abarth's reply below indicates that V8 does cache something. I should have poked into things more before replying.
"Lying in interviews"
> And your story suggests you were STILL trying to remediate it on your own, despite them sending you bills including fees for being late... I hope this is not the case.

I was led to believe the issue was resolved for a significant period of time. After I started receiving letter again recently, I went to H&R Block. They filled out a bunch of forms for me to mail, which I have done. I am willing to do anything to resolve this. I'm nearly ready to just pay what they say I owe, about $2k, out of pocket to make it stop. I do not know what else I could be doing to resolve this. Fortunately my main source of income is not freelancing, because there's no way I'd survive an audit. And experiences like this make me not want to do it at all, at least in the USA. I'm not sure how it is elsewhere.
Where did you get the idea that that was my assumption?

My feet are just fine, btw. :-)
"I realized that I don’t think I’ve ever actually been asked the question in a real job interview. I know that if an interviewer did ask me, my opinion of him would drop considerably."

I feel like this person has not been through enough job interviews. This question is standard fare, so you better be prepared for it.

Also, it doesn't really matter if your opinion of them drops--they're interviewing you. Just take on the questions as they come and knock em out the box.
My god this is so frustrating. I work in information security, and there are a lot of events I need to know about the very minute they happen. So I have my email client notify me in the only way it knows how: popup notifications. Now these on their own are fine, I love them. I can glance at the subject and the sender and know if I need to respond. If I'm busy, it disappears after a few seconds.

But damn if it doesn't grab the focus of my screen while it's there. There are a lot of times I'm looking at a piece of paper while typing an email or report, not looking at the screen. If I've gotten a new email since I started typing, everything I typed in the meantime has been triggering shortcuts on the email notification. Some of them have been deleted because I was typing when it popped up, some people have gotten part of my typing as an email response.

Lack of attention on my part? Sure. Lack of foresight on Novell's part? You bet your ass.
I think I'm a good developer then I read a post like this and think, "It would take me a week just to fully understand the problem. He's unhappy with an implementation -if not perfect- in a day?"
mindblink,

Thanks for your link. I checked it out and I learned some interesting thinks.

Marco
Philosophers use evidence all the time in support of their arguments, especially when they are making empirical claims (as you are: you are claiming that the costs of government outweigh the benefits when it comes to the provision of public goods). If you choose to not use evidence, then it is important to be far more careful and charitable than you have been. E.g., in your "simple argument" you only consider examples at the extreme (million -x benefit or 1% ROI). These are straw men -- you don't in fact deal with any kind of realistic example.

For your reasoning to have been good and fair, you would have had to consider the scenario that puts your position in the worst possible light and then show that it still holds. Imagine a dam that costs $100 but provides $10,000 of benefit to 20 users. Imagine, further, that all 20 users are competing with each other for status and customers, they are all roughly equally wealthy, and that paying for the dam will be a significant expense for most of them. Even though the dam could be built by any five of the users, any user who doesn't pay will gain a comparative advantage over the others. The libertarian might propose that they collectively participate in a contract. But why should anyone agree to participate in this contract, if they know that the dam will be built irrespective of their participation, and if they will get an advantage over others by not participating? No doubt the hold-outs will claim that they can't afford to pay for it, or that they don't want it -- but this is just a negotiating strategy.

Sure, setting up a government to deal with the provision of a single collective good is extremely inefficient. The issue is that there are many thousands of such public goods (and services). The empirical argument, here, is that on balance the inefficiency is worth it.

It does not appear, from your essay, that you have carefully and sympathetically examined the relevant counter-positions. If you haven't already looked at it carefully, I would recommend http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-rider/

It is interesting that free market fundamentalists seem to have trouble deciding whether their argument is an empirical or a philosophical/moral/ideological one. They will claim that libertarianism is the answer because government-based collective action is always less efficient (an empirical claim). When evidence is provided that this need not always be true, they switch to an argument of "freedom" and natural rights. When this argument is shown wanting, they then revert to their efficiency-related arguments. This flip-flop frequently works to fool many, it seems.
Columns do not work on the web.
Oh, I would love it if Apple went open source.

However, if I was running Apple, I would consider applying applying a fairly substantial amount of money into avoiding GPL3. This appears to be exactly what Apple are doing (I don't think their support of clang after gcc went GPL3 is a coincidence, maybe I'm wrong).
Computing 10,000x More Efficiently (slides)
> between a repo you created and one you cloned

Forked, you mean.
I was a bit shocked to see numbers like this: http://i.imgur.com/2ayTD.png

But then I realized there are a ton of libraries included in some of those repos, so for languages or platforms where it's common to include 3rd party libraries in the tree (obj-c is a big one, appengine too and i hit both :), you'll get all that stuff counted by the github API too.

Nice little tool though, good work :)
I ask this question of interviewees. I do it knowing exactly what most of the comments in a story like this will be. Indeed, I ask it because it seems to elicit the sort of typical response.

It is actually a perfect testing question of attitude: Does the candidate get a sneer? Do they answer with attitude, or with zero creativity or interest? "I work too hard. I care too much."

Awesome, they've weeded themselves out as no hires. I thank sites like Reddit and HN for engendering such a sense of attitude among so many that it allows you to filter them early in the process: No need to get to the technical questions if you can't answer a simple question of a professional peer.

It is not a difficult question. Further, people who say that it's to "test for self-awareness" don't get the point of it. You can actually ask almost anything of an interviewee and discern knowledge about how they think, how they reason, and how they communicate. This is just such a question, with loads of information delivered by the response. Because when I'm interviewing we're looking for someone to work closely with us -- minus the attitude -- for hopefully years. If we just want to ask technical questions we'd hire a consulting company.
“Design a two-dimensional cellular automata such that we can create a self-replicating pattern.” I’m a smart guy, maybe not as smart as John von Neumann, but smart enough to come up with a 500 by 500 pattern in a 29-state automaton that works.

Hm, what about "light goes on if a light is on in a neighboring cell"? Not the most interesting, but it does self-replicate, if at least one light is on in generation zero.
Actually given the image you want to sculpt the rest of the work is 'knocking away the parts that don't belong'. This often takes most of the time in the overall process. There is also the matter of mounting the piece. This can take from zero (for free standing pieces) time to significant amount of time depending on the problem(s) involved. Overall I'd have to say that after 30+ years, doing the work takes more time than thinking up the idea. It's hard to be exact since it depends on hard to quantify things like how you come up with your ideas---many of mine were dreamed up while doing things like kiln watch (someone has to be around when you are burning the wax out of molds for casting bronze). Or when you are just sitting around with other sculptors and bullshitting. Something gets said that leads to an idea etc. Given the way the mind works, it would be hard to say that the thinking process starts 'NOW' and ends 'HERE' leading to time to pick up carving tool etc. Since I long ago came from the art department side of campus, I highly recommend taking some of these courses not just to get those non-major credits, but to give yourself other boxes to think in when you have to think outside the box. Must stop now, beginning to babble :)
Let me ask you guys a questions, the people who say that Hackathons are great.

Why 24 hours? I find that I need to clear my mind after four or five hours of technical work. If I do that, I get a lot more done.

And my projects come in 4-5 hour chunks of code writing and debugging and everything else that goes into the development process. A bit, but actually very little, requires or even benefits from face to face talking with people. The level of concentration required is blown by just one conversation.

Why not other structures for collaborative development?

I like taking one-hour walks with people I'm working with. Lots reason this works really well.

Demos are good too -- for sure. I could see a meetup where people got together to do one-on-one demos of projects they're currently working on.

I suspect that's what people are really doing btw at hackathons. :-)

If you go back and look at my piece and read the first sentence, you might get an idea of how I approached this.

It was just a blog post, btw, not a manifesto!

People here are reading way too much into it.