skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The key was "try". Xcode is far from being focused on "consumers" and they are trying hard to make a kick-ass IDE. It could be a different definition of "kick-ass" from yours, that's fine.

Anyway, I emphasize this again: it's not a question if the actual result is better or worse, it's a complex question because there are thousands of people to evaluate it. The question is why not to experiment more where you have more liberty to do so. It's hard to experiment with a toolbar in Excel because millions of non-computer-geek users are used to certain operations and want to preserve their productivity. But it's not hard to throw away toolbar in an IDE because nobody will pay you less because of it. (Especially if you are actually trying to do your best.)

Metro after Windows is that kind of experiment (but way more risky and rewarding, of course). But Visual Studio is not inspiring at all after all these years.

PS. For that matter, Xcode 4 is not radical enough too. We are still typing a lot of boring cruft (even with ever-smarter autocompletion). But it's a huge difference with Xcode 3 and other IDEs out there.
I think you mean

"No, others sources are available."
New Qualcomm chips aim to bring 1.3Gbps WiFi to one and all
And there are plenty of doctors that will do this.

I'm not making a value judgement, I'm just making an observation. The way I see it, the less drugs needed to keep me operational, the better. So I choose that kind of doctor. But other people like their drugs, and choose doctors that prescribe drugs.
Steam and the Mac App Store are good examples of how all of these different factors can work if applied right. Why can't these companies understand that I WANT TO PAY THEM. If you treat me like a criminal with a purchased copy of the game but I can get one without all the DRM from a torrent then it's really tempting to just go with the torrent. I don't pirate however there have been times that I felt so abused by the DRM that I can understand why people do.
The "article" confirms that Teslas can be bricked in exactly the way reported:

There is a fundamental problem when any rechargeable battery is discharged and then left to sit for months. Any boat owner understands that that's why you plug in a trickle charger when the craft is put into storage. The same should be done for any electric vehicle. However, to imply that the Tesla Roadster has a fundamental design flaw because of the nature of electrochemistry....

The rest is the lovely art of spin. It reads like a rebuttal of the bricking claims and vindication for Tesla, doesn't it? In every superficial aspect, that's what it is, but the substance doesn't match the form and tone. Welcome to PR.
That's rich! Especially after recently signing the National Defense Authorization Act: https://www.google.com/search?&q=Obama+Signs+the+Nationa...
Yeah -- a lot of places use ChemTracker
Like I said, I'm not trying to find out if you know a particular thing, I'm trying to figure out if you ever learn things that are deeper than the surface. So, if you don't know x86 calling conventions, fine. But if I ask several more questions in that domain, and you don't know any of them, then I check your resume and you having been writing C level code for years, I'm concerned.
Configuration Management Tools Still Fall Short
This protects your data from companies, not the government. Obama obviously feels it's perfectly acceptable to issue NSLs by the tens of thousands and demand Twitter hand over user data w/o a warrant. Somehow I doubt he feels individual privacy extends to privacy from the government's prying eyes and grasping claws.
Mine doesn't crash on Web projects, but can't work for a couple of hours on a Windows Phone 7 project without it going boom.

I think most of it works fine and dandy, but some parts can be quite sensitive.
Thought controlled wheel chair built by highschool students
I think it's just the old 'practice makes perfect'. It still takes me a couple of hours to write a ~300 word post, but the more I do it, the faster I get at it. Just keep on writing and you'll get a feel for when it's done 'enough'.
I love Github and its community, but it absolutely is not the first and last reason for my team to use Git. Our code is highly proprietary and Github is not the solution for us. I continue to use Github and agree about its vitality, but it isn't a one-size fit all for teams.
Most of us have heard these common criticisms a dozen times or more. Merely writing them, one after to another, so that you can stand back and gaze at the irony you've just fabricated is not insightful and it doesn't add to the discussion.

A single commenter could have succinctly identified that this is one of those rare occassions where the common wisdom of startups did not apply, and in fact practically spat in the face of it. We didn't need all the noise or attention seeking.
Due to past research it has become accepted fact that children learn languages faster. However there has been a lot of research lately that has shown this to be false. So sorry I don't believe this is simply a motivational tool (however even so, belief that you innately don't have a particular ability often leads to self-limiting behavior).

I agree though that a language learned at childhood more easily sticks with you than one learned later in life. This makes sense for a number of reasons. However this is a completely different topic than one's ability learn a language.

Just curious -- how many years did you spend immersed in Greek? In addition, speaking Greek 5-6 times a year is great. If you changed that to 0 times a year, I can assure you that your ability to speak it would dissipate.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128224.000-age-no-ex...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/06/050615060545.ht...
The problem is hackers reporting to suits, not non-technical people reporting to suits. There are very few software engineers that report up through Patrick, and those that are are usually in support roles for other positions (eg. quantitative finance) with significant domain knowledge of that other position. Or they report up through technical executives with their own P&L.

There're non-technical managers in other areas that manage engineers, but I don't think we've hired any since 2007, as we found it doesn't really work out that well.
To be honest I have no confidence in DNT. It relies on me trusting the very companies whose business it is to track users. I'm not their consumer so they have no incentive to treat me fairly or reasonably. In the last month we've seen how companies will do anything to get as much information about users as possible, even it means 'working around' obstacles. Even if DNT was law there would be no way to validate it was actually being adhered to, without examining every line of code in play. Even then someone will find a novel way (flash cookies etc). For the moment all I have is Firefox Addons like Ghostery, AdBlock, Better Privacy and regularly cleaning my cache/local storage/flash cookies. Even then it's an arms race.
Thing is, its not an issue - its a design decision (my mother would never guess that that button opens a new tab)
Still using a floppy disk to represent "save". Wondering when will this end...
Yes, but profitable businesses aren't necessarily big successes.
> ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid at /home SQLite3::BusyException: database is locked: select * from plans where published='T' order by created_at limit 6 file: statement.rb location: step line: 108

You shouldn't be using SQLite for a prod site, it doesn't handle concurrency well, if at all.

Edit: it also seems like you're using WEBrick as web server, again this is not meant for prod. There's plenty of literature on how to serve rails apps in prod. Look it up.

http://i.imgur.com/cVzAC.png
An Omnigraffle Stencil for Twitter Bootstrap 2
The worse thing is that Google lets ads like the "look younger" one buy time. They offer a sample to try for free, but if you don't return it they sign you up for a year's subscription for a $100 a month and you also get charged for the "free" sample. Simple ripoff.
Tesla bricked battery story may have a short circuit
Don't forget that that stack trace shouldn't be visible! In production you should show a standard 500 error w/o the stack trace. Now people can see your codez. Is the server running in development mode or something?
Microsoft stops providing XP security patches in April 2014. Any organization that wants to use XP after that will need to pay Microsoft to maintain support. Any organization that continues to use XP without support is irresponsible.
I don't buy this. In a job interview, both parties enter into a formal agreement: I will do this for you and you will in turn compensate me. We both agree on the terms and we both sign the dotted line. If either one of use does not hold his end of the bargain, then we part ways. But at least initially, we both trust each other to do as agreed. After everything's signed we have a reasonable expectation of what will happen in the following days/months. It's a tarnishment of our reputations (and in extremes, legal liability) to renege on our agreement.

Additionally in traditional employment there is the expectation that good performance will be rewarded, minimally with the privilege of keeping your job. At the very least, the employee's performance will be monitored, and things will happen in response to that performance, particularly if the performance is bad.

Compare that to crowsdsourcing, where it's completely at will, there is no agreement to deliver anything. As the article says, anyone can do whatever the hell they want whenever they want.

Why would anyone who has better options go the crowdsourcing way, where there is no expectation of anything, either formal or implied? There is also no expectation at all of performance even being monitored, much less exemplary performance being noted.

So what is the benefit for the for the "crowd" of crowdsourcing?

Being an easily replaceable cog in a giant machine is no step forward. This is even more retrograde than the factory era, where your widget output per minute was at least monitored and you got marginally small benefit from being the best cog in the wheel.

So no. I disagree. Anyone who can do anything nontrivial of value will not subject themselves to crowdsourcing. Even a new professional trying to break into any field will do better to seek out an opportunity that will get them the good kind of attention if there is above average performance. The Harvard grads in the mailroom are aiming to do exactly that. The benefit of the loss leader of accepting a shitty job is the chance to show off and wow superiors.

Crowdsourcing is built to anonymize workers and make them utterly and completely replaceable.
Would an in-house coffee waiter improve your team productivity? 
Imagine someone whose job it is to keep peoples coffee cups full, thereby removing the productivity destroying trips to the kitchen. Would this improve your team productivity?
> "After all, in order to keep being "the best and the brightest" they do need to pay rent (and have an occasional steak dinner)."

Plenty of people pay rent and eat well and aren't complicit in scams and get-rich-quick schemes. Plenty of people have jobs that pay well and don't pander to the lowest common denominator and reinforce ignorance...
I feel like I just leveled up in programming several times by completing level 3 :)
Oh here, let me try based on what I learned from the reddit/cp discussion that took place here, what, last week:

- slippery slopes don't exist, they're apparently some sort of imaginary fallacy

- If you argue that Tumblr shouldn't remove content at their own arbitrary discretion, that must mean you want people to have eating disorders and commit suicide. I will call you disgusting and imply that even having a discussion about censorship or suppression of content is akin to defending child porn, I mean, suicidal content.

On a less sarcastic note, I really do want to hear how people are going to tell me this isn't a slippery slope. "“that actively promotes or glorifies self-injury or self-harm.”". My [imaginary] Tumblr talks about how I deprive myself of sleep working long hours, use marijuana for stress relief and recreation and how I don't like to wear my helmet when I ride my motorcycle, better find a new blog (or whatever Tumblr is) platform.
It's a complex subject, certainly. One additional subtlety that's worth considering is that, while they may not have had warheads on the border all the time (although things were more lax in the 60s), war was unlikely to break out with absolutely no warning, and they could be stationed at the border if tensions rose, potentially days or weeks in advance of war breaking out. Whereas with airplanes, you can't launch your bombers days before you expect the enemy to cross the border.

However, probably the more pertinent point was that, even if the warheads would have been troubled by administrative confusion as you propose, they probably looked much more effective to the guys in charge of procuring items like this, where such problems often get abstracted away or simply forgotten about.
Still has a prefix dictionary. The benefit of the prefix dictionary over starting from scratch is extremely marginal (about a hundred bytes on the first request).

Still making claims comparing to HTTP without pipelining. After how long they still haven't even compared to pipelining (because Chrome doesn't do pipelining, is Firefox is banned at Google or something?)

Still has server push. Read the spec at how complicated this is, all to save one one-way trip.

Still hardcodes parts of HTTP into the protocol.

...gross.
It's not for their own good. It's for the good of the impressionable and emotionally unstable teenagers that would have found these communities and latched onto them as their negative impulses were validated.
Another day of "5-minute Google Hate Sessions"?
Google leaves webmasters the freedom to customize and place ads however they want. Physorg.com opted for the scumbag strategy of mixing ads and content, so it's 100% their fault.

Plus, the entire waxing lyrical about kids being fed ads for games is simply ignorant: he sees those ads because his advertising profile matches those interests, regardless of the page is looking at in this particular moment. A kid interested in dinosaurs might see ads for plastic dinosaurs or paid trips to natural history museums.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to learn Facebook has resumed his paid mud-slinging campaign, these days people are clutching at the smallest straws just to badmouth Google.
But what would you replace it with that is equally easy to recognize?
Apart from having a black background, they look nothing alike.
Apple Acquires Chomp; App Store Search And Discovery To Be Completely Revamped
>Many programmers prefer to use a graphical interface to their version control system instead of working through a command line.

to be honest git is my first true VCS (because I was used to working on my own and my VCS was Wuala sync that synced every changed document to the cloud + daily backups to another HDD). I have used the built in revision control system in Visual Studio but not extensively. When I started out with git I was looking for a GUI client because I assumed that it would be easier to use but now I much prefer the cli version of git and I assume this is true for most Linux (and possibly Mac users idk).
I would even go as far as to assume that this is true for most HN readers. Anyone care to comment?

Also git (even direct publishing to github) is built into PyCharm/RubyMine and there is also TortoiseGit for Windows (not sure about other OSs)

edit: I just realized this might be slightly OT but I still hope this wont be downvoted into oblivion as I'd love to hear some opinions
This really needs to clarify the wording on the 300 redirects...
Much more interesting is the fact that, during the few dozen nanoseconds the bomb spent exploding, it produced over 1% of the power output of the entire Sun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury#Nuclear_.22sting.22...
Great article and very insightful - thanks for adding it! It's amazing how complex the process is, and it'd be great to see some innovation in this space despite the high barrier to entry.
Regarding your link, the author lost me at:

"Git encourages micro-management, and git’s users end up loving this micro-management (and blog about it, and write books, and have conferences, and so on ad-nauseum). This is characteristic of the perversion that git promotes, focussing on details instead of getting work done."

What does the author know about how much work any of those people get done? But I'm glad he wrote that; it made me feel much better about writing the rest off as a rant.

Regarding sunk costs, that's true of pretty much any sufficiently complex tool or technology. You could make the same case with Emacs vs. vi, or pretty much any programming language, API, or framework.
It's an "Issue" in Google Code terms.
US Appeals Court: Forced Decryption Is Self-Incrimination
>>Maybe that's the natural talent?

It could partially be natural talent, however much of it is nurture. Carol Dweck has proven that the growth-mindset can be taught. Parents, friends, communities, media and school systems alike can promote "fixed" mindset thinking through various means, thus limiting learning from mistakes. It's incredible how much harm someone can do by steering someone off the growth-mindset path.
There are 6 responses your comment and not one has mentioned that both hg and bzr have full interoperability with git. I use github extensively with both bzr and hg, and haven't used git in a while. Your personal choice of SCM is entirely irrelevant to which web service you use.
I think he is right, and its cool in a way, but also there are problems.

I like odesk a lot because if I sift through enough 'jobs' I eventually find some actual specs. I can just start working on a prototype and usually after sending out two or three links to prototyped applications I can get a project.

The problem is that since I'm competing with everyone in the whole world who saw the spec and decided to try to get it, I can't charge US rates, and I now need to move to India in order to afford the cost of living.

Where this is going is that there will be so many developers, people will just post specs, and the developers will _have_ to submit prototypes, and whoever's prototype is selected wins, and everyone else just wasted their time.

And within not too many years we will have Watson-like computer programs competing on sites like odesk.

Actually, even without really sophisticated AI like Watson, you could probably just take the huge repository of applications available to one of the giant Indian outsourcing companies (from previous projects, yes technically would not be legal to use a lot of it but many clients won't care as long as it means they can solve their business problem cheaply) and apply some fairly standard (but contemporary) AI to searching/pattern matching it against specs, and then that becomes the prototype or even iteration one of actual product. Or even the final product.

The end game for this is technological unemployment for software developers.

I think that better technology and efficiency is very important, but we need to take a very hard look at wages-for-labor and the division between the worker class and investment/ownership class. The idea that class doesn't exist or that membership into the ownership class is actually merit-based is a myth.

http://www.theonion.com/video/more-american-workers-outsourc...
> I understand that it sounds creepy, but it's worth noting that advertising is what pays for all the free content you enjoy on the internet.

I found your statement bit cocky, but you may not see it the same way since you work "in the field".

And you are pretty much wrong. Large part of web is free. Wikipedia? Sure they ask for money and every year they come up with just enough, since people appreciate free content and asked are willing to donate. Heck, people even write free software that you can download from websites that are free of ads [Apache is the first thing came to my mind].

I am sure web would look different have Google not based its business model on advertising, etc, but I would never say that the internet fundamentals are based on paid advertise-displaying model. I don't believe Tim thought it will or should as well.
Win-win with Cocotron and Xcode 4.3 — code for Mac, build for Windows (Part 1)
In eighth grade I used adamantium (fictional indestructible alloy that covers Wolverine's bones/claws) in a report on metals for science class. I knew Wolverine and the comics were fictional but I assumed adamantium was real. I remember that I tried researching it (very very early Internet days, I mostly used the library) but couldn't find anything on the subject. For some reason, I decided to keep my comments on adamantium in my paper regardless and without citation. My Science teacher circled the word and wrote "EXCELLENT!!!" next to it so I didn't figure out my folly until years later. I think he assumed I was joking?
Whitehouse starting process to draft data privacy rules
Can I root my Google Glasses and add software that simulates the sunglasses in the John Carpenter classic 'They Live'?

(For example: http://peteashton.com/images/they-live-20100615-034749.jpg )
I might be an old fart (close to 20 years of Windows programming), but all I see is bloat. A compiler, a linker, a debugger. An editor with syntax highlighting, Ctrl-F and Ctrl-H. That's it, this is pretty much all that I ever use in VS. Even plausibly useful features like Intellisense and IDE macros end up being more of a hindrance than a help.

What am I missing? What is there in the remaining 80% of VS that I am not using that is of practical value? Serious question.
I remember reading the article on the crimean war photos. Still great: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-came-f...
Rails Went Off The Rails
I don't have my copy of "PeopleWare" to hand, but I think that is where I read this story ...

A company brought in an external consultant to look at how to improve productivity in the software and engineering sections of the company. After two weeks they reported back and recommended the hiring of a "coffee lady" - someone to bring around biscuits, fruit, sandwiches, and hot beverages. This would save the programmers and engineers from making "productivity-sapping visits to the kitchen, water cooler, etc."

The recommendation was implemented, and over the next few months productivity fell. At a loss, a further study was commissioned.

It was found that although time was taken to visit the kitchen and stand by the water cooler, and some of the time "wasted" was spent in talking about football, dates, and other non-work related topics, some of the time was spent explaining a problem, and having a colleague say "I had that problem last week/month/year, and here's how I solved it ..."

The benefits of sharing information far, far outweighed the apparent losses in efficiency. The best thing you can do is increase the interaction, without causing more loss of time at desk. Encourage people to visit the facilities at the same time, provide whiteboards and pens, provide a shared workstation, have doughnuts and sandwiches delivered at predictable times.

Increase the communication within and across teams.

Don't force them to stay at their desks.
It would cost $40k to replace the batteries, it would obviously not cost $40k to recharge a battery that had shut itself down for safety. I doubt every instance in the original post actually required a replacement, though it was implied.
Yet Tumblr still looks like crap on Android.
The op does not state whether the claim that replacing all cells will cost $40K! In many cars today... replacing the engine or any single major component(because of mechanical failure) would hardly cost $40K unless you are talking about super cars! So for people who want to drive cars that cost less than $100K, $40K is a big chunk of money!