skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's business collaboration software. $10/month is absolutely nothing for company paying 5 people's salaries.
This is so true. My friend has been a games programmer for most of his life, where you have 16 milliseconds to do everything and it pays to be smart, use clever algorithms, etc. A while ago he took a break from the games industry (he was moving country a lot) and began working at a very large company producing software for the film industry.

It was less than six months before he got sick of the "if it takes a long time, don't optimise - stick up a progress bar" attitude and moved out of the country chasing a real programming job again...
4 Things Startups Should Learn from Moneyball
Mercedes-Benz of Cincinnati
And by the way, for the typical user, the performance difference between C++ and, say, C# won't be as pronounced (F# is another matter, though).

If you include memory usage in your performance comparison (which is very important for parallel programming), C++ is leagues ahead.
Sorry, we'll definitely be supporting other browsers in the future. We're a two-person team right now and haven't had the time to work out all the browser compatibility issues. Looking to hire a 3rd person - interested?
Except they fucked up the experience for those of us who wanted a desktop OS without stupid distractions and not a phone on our desktop.

Apple is not building your idea of a perfect experience. They're building what Jonathan Ive, Tim Cook and (formerly) Steve Jobs think is a perfect experience. They do not care what you think, and they don't want you mucking with it even after you've bought the hardware and the software.

I don't like this philosophy myself and haven't bought an Apple product in years because of it. I really wish I'd bought some Apple stock though.
This is one of the biggest differences I'm finding going from iOS to Android -- Apple slipped in the "enable notifications" the first time you run an app and I never thought twice about it.. like a lot of things I've used.

On the whole though I'm finding Android to be an interesting environment where I can hopefully get more things running how I would like.
TBPP2011: Looking Forward with Chris Sarette
Because when you're at a startup, your time is worth more than that.
I don't like the assumption that companies are against piracy in markets they do not sell in.

I sell software. If my payment processor doesn't accept payment from your country, I don't mind if you pirate the software instead. You are not "stealing" from me, since I cannot sell anything to you.

Perhaps, instead of assuming that all companies are run by MPAA-style hardliners, it would be better to email the company and ask them what their position is. They might even give you a free license.
How Safe is Your Medical Data? You Don't Want to Know...
Not just for nerds anymore
I tried 'Lionel' which took me to 'Lionel Rudaz'.
we've been using campfire forever (and I, for one, am super happy to see competition. will definitely be trying this out). we want the functionality of IRC, but we dont want to deal with setup, maintenance, security, etc.

its the standard SaaS argument: the base case might seem easy, but the details are going to drive you to the bottle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werther_effect

I've seen it myself. When I was in high school, one girl committed suicide and days later two others attempted suicide in the exact way she did. This is a normal behavior of a depressed human mind.

I'm not saying that everything is great at Foxconn. I'm saying that their employees are often happy to be employed at all, and sending money back to their families. I have friends who work on the Xbox hardware teams and have been to those factories. It's my understanding that the working conditions are clean and safe, but intense and fast-paced.

Sure, it's a shitty life overall, but Foxconn is easily on the nicer end of the Chinese factory spectrum. Relative perception really matters to influence suicides. As a result, I'd expect the suicide rate to be lower than among peers. If we beat up on Foxconn instead of on the Chinese government, then all we're teaching these businesses is "You can still treat your employees like shit, just avoid showing up in US newspapers".
Totally disagree. They are building what MOST people really DO want. Apple got it right a long time ago when they realized that people just want to get their email, browse the web, and view/manage their photos, videos, and music. Period.

That's all most people want to do. The Hacker News population does not represent "most people".

Still, under the hood there is plenty that you can customize and change if you are a programmer / power-user / etc.
OP has a point. Not a f*cing important point, but a point. UIs can and should be faster, Adobe and MS are slow to catch on with current user expectations, and splash screens are annoying relics of a bygone era of bloated desktop UIs.

Agreed.

But in the end, to me it's just one more instance of Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

I guess I just don't get the tone. Why the righteous indignation? This not Human Rights we're talking about, it's software.
I wouldn't mock it, actually, but others ("fanboys") do. Often.

You are right, emails are texts. Managing emails and contacts and calendars can go (and usually goes) well beyond text editing, though.
I signed up and tried grove a few weeks ago, I didn't really see the point. I then stumbled across some video tutorials for using hook.io to connect to an IRC server (#4,5 in the list of video tutorials) (http://blog.nodejitsu.com/hookio-video-tutorials) and immediately thought of grove.

It seems, to me, that they decided to use the tutorial, hook up web sockets (#9 in the tutorial list), add a nice interface, log all the events hook.io emits, and decided to charge way too much for it.

I could be missing something, but that was my initial impression.
The Fields of Study in Online Degrees
> The difference between a div class and a div id ... [is] the kind of brutal lessons that first timers slog through and few master (and that’s the simple stuff).

Really? Just think of the class as a surname and the id as a social security number - many people can have the same surname, and those that have the same one have something in common. Only one person can have a given SSN.

What's hard about it? Okay, one is denoted by '.' and the other by '#', but I'm not sure how something like that gets more complicated.

CSS and Javascript can be a pain overall, but in the end, if you need to know much more than the above, you should really just be learning to use the entire toolbox, not picking and choosing the tools that you think you want (which are oftentimes not the ones you really need).
Internal to a team, not for large-scale public servers. $10-20/mo to have everyone on your team have IRC without having to manage it, and with features rolled out over time (disconnected mode is nice, and search, and maybe bots) seems totally reasonable.
The ghosts of Facebook still roam Cambridge
I'm working on a site with functionality similar to convore. Discussion is centered around links in a manner similar to reddit or HN. Just finished an alpha test, you can register for the beta at http://b00st.com.
yes, that is meant by sales: travel, meetings, powerpoints, lunches, etc. etc. etc. I do not know, but would bet that Google "sold" Adwords program to some key publishers. It is a huge product and had a R&D budget.
The computers I use now are far more capable than the ones I used in 2005, in terms of CPU, RAM, disk space, GPU, and anything else that should affect an app's boot time. Today, Photoshop takes just as long to boot as it did in 2005. Yet the features I use today are almost identical to those I used in 2005, the only exception being the ability to import camera raw images. (And I'm sure that the binaries for importing camera raw images don't come anywhere close to accounting for all the bloat in that time.)

So, my computers have gotten better and better, while the demands I place on them have remained basically constant, yet boot time stays the same. The only thing I can think to blame is bloat.
I understand Leah's decision but a few months ago she mentioned Convore was alive and well. I was under the impression that it was here to stay. At least for awhile. Oh well.
Groupon Acquisitions All About Getting Past the One-Night Stand
API Security for Mobile & Cloud: A Best Practises WorkShop Hosted by Layer 7
I remember one password that I had committed to muscle memory. I burned my hand one day cooking, and had to have my hand bandaged up for a week (note to self: don't try grabbing the steel handle of a pan at 450°F without a mitt). I couldn't type my password from muscle memory with my hand bandaged. I even knew the phrase that it was based on, but after many tries, I couldn't reproduce the exact set of upper and lowercase letters and letter substitutions that I had used. I eventually had to give up and change out all of my passwords and SSH keys, because I just couldn't recover my own password without my muscle memory.
>> Other stuff, like Preview, I don't use often enough to care about the load time, and I would probably configure it to exit when the last window closed.

Under Lion, that is (sort of) what Preview and TextExit do. When you close all open documents in Preview and then switch away from the app, the app will terminate.
~~ WaTcH Man City vs FC Porto - zafar3536 Blog - www.GameInformer.com
It is indeed the lamest question ever.

The funny thing is that if you ask someone (as both interviewer and interviewee), "In 6 months, what will I love about working with you? And what will I hate about working with you?" you will get actually useful responses that approach the honest intent of the question.

(And by the way: My new boss once answered the latter question, "You won't hate anything about working with me!" -- and he turned out to be the biggest asshat ever. It's just one data point, but my conclusion is that anyone who thinks he does nothing annoying is to be avoided.)
With an SSD drive photoshop loads very fast. It only takes about 2 seconds.
Adele rolling in the deep mp3
Tough Agile Questions
I apologize for the last word of my reply. I'm not sure why it was truncated, it just said "Leave".
Python’s documentation at your fingertips
I'm the author of the blog post. As this is my first contribution to the Python community I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this.
I was once asked "What's the worst thing about you?". Fortunately I had prepared for it and said something about not being a confident presenter and then outlining how I was fixing that.

The only thing the interviewer learned was that I knew how to answer that question. However I learned that the interviewer was not someone I wanted to work for.

The downsides to asking that question far outweigh the benefits. An interviewer should be trying to give a good impression of themselves as well as finding out about the candidate and this question does the opposite.
For applications bottlenecked by memory performance, like most analytical databases, C++ will often be faster than a language like Java by an integer factor. When people assert Java is about as fast as C++ they are talking about CPU-bound tight loops and similar. It is difficult to make languages like Java approach the memory efficiency of C++, hence why C++ is significantly more performant for applications bottlenecked on the memory subsystem.

These days, more performance-sensitive codes are bottlenecked by memory performance than by CPU performance. The throughput of CPUs has grown faster than our ability to keep those CPUs fed from memory. In the supercomputing world this started to become evident years ago; memory benchmarks like STREAM became more closely correlated with real-world performance than CPU benchmarks like LINPACK for a great many algorithms. The resurgence of C++ is partly driven by this reality since it makes memory optimization relatively straightforward.
This is really neat.

One suggestion would be to have a visible and accessible
back button or search again button.

Since going back doesn't take you to the home screen, I need to refresh to get back to the search option
That isn't the choice here, though. The choice is between throwing up a big nonfunctional promotional screen or a nonfunctional version of the actual app.
As a hook.io dev, this was my initial impression as well. However, it is much more difficult to develop this kind of product than you have described here. For example, the hook.io webserver was unusable until just about a month ago.
Might be easier to use an sms api like twilio to alert you when the monitoring api shows a notable event. barring that there are mobile notification brokers out there, I think urban airship is one.
1How  To Make Money Online With Content Marketing
Grove looks really interesting.

The pricing strikes me as a bit odd though.

You're actually charging more per user for more users ($2 per user for 5 users; $2.50 per user for 50 users), rather than giving larger accounts a discount. I imagine the reason for it is the load it places on your infrastructure, but I've rarely seen that kind of price stacking work in the wild.
New Metro Style Windows 8 Logo - Fail or Win?
The WCMS he works on also has significant startup time, even beyond JVM warm-up. Ah well.
Ask HN: How do so many projects on Kickstarter have such professional videos?
It seems like almost every Kickstarter project has some incredibly professional-shot video clip. How is this possible? Sometimes they're asking for only a couple of thousand dollars, and it looks like the video cost more than that to produce.
> Some times I reopen a window of preview let's say just to close the whole program.

I do not understand what you are saying. Can you elaborate?
I wish all designers would read this regarding the size of body text:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/07/16-pixels-body-co...

It argues that body text should be at least 16 pixels in size.

Unfortunately 'normal' sized text isn't trendy. I hope one day it will be.
Intel Launching New Atom-Based Processors With Digital Wi-Fi
If you thought Intel's Atom processor line was dead, think again: the company is launching a new version of the silicon, code named Rosepoint. Don't be too quick to dismiss it, either, because it sounds like the new mobile processor could mean business.
When I was in middle school (MathCounts' age range), math came naturally to me, and I was a competitive kid. For that reason, Mathcounts was fun for me, and it helped that I consistently did well. If you've never been to a math competition, it's an interesting environment. It's one of the few places that I thought you could gain respect for "academic prowess". Imagine that, in America!

I think that the act of creating a space for an alternative way of thinking / being is a powerful one, and MathCounts does create that for math. I wonder if I would have done a math major in undergrad if it weren't for the combination of math competitions and advanced math classes from middle school through high school.

A lot of MathCounts alumni (who self-select to report their current activities) have gone on in fields science, math, technology, programming, and business. Was it b/c of MC? Maybe not. And it is true that math competition-style math is not "real math". Instead, it requires a lot of problem-solving skills, and to a lesser extent, a knowledge of tricks. Upper-level math requires a little bit of that kind of "sideways thinking", too.

To me, it is apparent that math contest-style problem-solving is a lot like hacking together software. You have math tricks (known hacks) and you synthesize different domains (algebra, geometry, trig; hardware, networks, storage, etc.) with a little problem-solving (or programming) to get to the answer (or final version of code). I also think that hacking software is a lot like doing research (http://www.elangocheran.com/blog/2012/02/essence-of-producti...), so using the transitive property... I can see how MathCounts can help foster the analytical skills and math skills that we need as a society.
Thanks for the suggestion! I added a "start over" button.
I was a UI designer at Homestead (and later Intuit) where we've had a drag-and-drop website editor for years. The problem we we eventually faced was not helping non-developers "develop" a website, but helping non-developers "design" a website. A website that looked professional (we catered to small businesses), readable (yellow text on red backgrounds is incredible difficult to read), and contained the information their users are looking for (like a phone number). Some users will get it and create great looking websites. Most will not, and that's where templates become really helpful, if not necessary.

There's an interesting irony you might face. Helping non-developers create and publish a website is an incredibly delightful experience for them. It's easy to forget the time years ago when we wrote our first line of code and it worked. It's incredibly satisfying and empowering. It's a great feeling to instill in your users. But that doesn't help them design better pages. In fact, it sometimes works against it. They'll add whacky text, images, and background colors because it's fun to play and create. The more power they have, the more they'll take advantage of it. For one-off personal web pages it won't be a big deal. But for creating serious websites, it might become a problem.

Good luck though! It's great seeing others innovating in this space!
I've been asked that one.

It's a tracer for one of two things: an interviewer who doesn't know what he or she is doing or an organization that's more interested in rejecting candidates than in hiring candidates.

In the typical small company, the hiring people are hiring somebody because they need a job done. This is true about a startup, but it's also true about a web design shop or a coffee shop. The sooner the person is hired, the sooner the job gets done -- this is really the preferable situation for the interviewee. If you're (1) able to do the job, and (2) really want the job, (3) act that way, and (4) interview at your level (most people don't) you'll probably get an offer at the end of the interview.

In big companies and, say, support positions in academic organizations, hiring is usually triggered by the addition of a line item to a budget. Unfortunately there isn't a very strong relationship between the addition of a line item and an actual need. It might take three years of haggling to add a line item after the need is identified, for instance. Jobs like this also get a large number of applications from people who are more interested in collecting dental and retirement benefits than they are in getting a salary or making a contribution.

As a result of those factors, that kind of organization has little urgency in the hiring process plus it has an extreme fear of taking on freeloaders -- or alternately, the people interviewing you could be freeloaders who are deathly afraid of hiring somebody who would hold them to account.

In the big picture, most hiring people don't know what they're doing and most interviewees interview a few steps below their level. If you can interview at your level, you're interviewing well above your level compared to your peers.
I got different results each time, not in the numbers, but in the rendering of the graph. Anyway for a permalink or somesuch that I can send to people? Otherwise rather nice! :D
Dear Instagram,

Make an Android app, please.

Sincerely,
Everyone that's been waiting since you said you were going to release one (in 2010) http://www.quora.com/Kevin-Systrom-Any-plans-for-an-Android-...
Nuclear Weapons on a Highway Near You
The Penny Arcade Report
2 reasons why you should start a startup (the Nigerian version)
Is that font Buttermilk by Jessica Hische?
> The only possible reason for not doing so is that you're using an editor that makes you type it every single time.

Here's some C:

for (int player_index = 0; player_index < players.length; player_index++) {
int rank = player_index + 1;
render_score(rank, players[player_index].name);
}

Blah. So much for the brain to parse!

for (int p = 0; p < players.length; p++) {
int rank = p + 1;
render_score(rank, players[p].name);
}

I find that much, much easier to parse in my head. The definition of p is available without any backtracking. The word "player" appears five fewer times, reducing confusion with the players array. This is a small case.

If this code were to start to grow, and the definition of p and its usages start to grow appart, it's trivial to replace.... but it's probably better for you to refactor.
> But (the editor is) such a small part of the actual task of working on software that I'm ok with a few tradeoffs

You have to understand Eclipse and the tools most people use it with evolved together for a long time. That creates this dependency between IDE and toolset - it's more or less impossible to be productive in Java without an IDE. There are, however, languages and technologies that didn't evolve together with IDEs and employ fairly easily hand-editable files instead of overly complicated things no human hand is supposed to touch.

Emacs' brilliance is in how it's built in itself and how one can shape it to its needs. For instance, it took me a couple minutes to configure mine to start with different fontsizes and screen layout in accordance to the size of the monitor I'm using. I cannot imagine the level of insanity I would have to go through to do it on Eclipse.
Yea I was thinking about making a permalink for it, but it's implemented entirely client-side so I don't think I have an easy way to do that. Feel free to fork it on github if you can figure it out: https://github.com/aaronpk/Github-Language-Graph
Chrome also caches the compiled JavaScript in the HTTP disk cache. The biggest performance wins are for large scripts used by many web sites (such as jQuery).
Very neat. How does this treat forks? Does it consider only the commits you make?
Salesforce.com: 'Cloud Computing Debate Is Over' For Public Sector
Salesforce.com: 'Cloud Computing Debate Is Over' For Public Sector
Are checksums provided over HTTPS anywhere? If not, then this doesn't help with MITM attacks.
Show HN: YouRHere, Chrome Plugin that Bookmarks Specific Lines Within Articles
Don't worry, you're not the only one.
tramp is the best feature of emacs. Really handy when I have to edit files on barebones systems that have only vi (not even vim) installed on them!
The correct answer is: "I am too kind to children and dogs."
> Present day development deals with chunks of code in different languages, all put in the same file. It just kills me to code Python+JS+HTML in a single file

That got me worried - you probably don't need to suffer this. What are you using this multilanguage file for? You shouldn't put lots of JS inside HTML and certainly not embed Python code inside it (nor the reverse).
Does this man have a cure for cancer?
It's useful for filtering companies. Last time I was looking for a job I had decided that stupid questions like this would be the end of my considering that company. Thankfully the place I'm at didn't ask stupid questions.
Connecting the Next Big Wave of Cloud Computing Infrastructure
Connecting the Next Big Wave of Cloud Computing Infrastructure
Unfortunately it counts all code on your account equally. Github has a nice API that returns byte-count per language for a repository: https://api.github.com/repos/aaronpk/Flickr-Archiver/languag... I was thinking about excluding forks, or showing them in a separate graph.
What browser are you using? In Chrome 19 dev, I'm not getting squiggly lines, I'm getting some sort of randomly dashed lines, which are very annoying.

If the underlines were less distracting, I think this would be really wonderful!