skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought the section titles "Driven engineers seeking teammate.", "Engaging Workplace", etc were links to blog posts or something. The images overpower that content anyway.

I typically come to these pages wondering what stack you're using, what positions are open, what your company does, and what it's like to work there. Ideally (for me) they'd be answered in that order.
Spectrum Made Me
I think in eBay's case there is nothing stopping them from making their website more user friendly. The reason their apps are is because they had to build it mostly from crash (from a ui perspective anyway) so why not tkae that opportunity. It seems that loads are people are using their website effectively, so why change it? Changing it might only piss off long time users anyway.
None of the cons of website actually need to be cons, they dont need to be slow, they dont need to have unsuitable UI's for mobile, and they dont need to break when they go offline.

We have done a bad job up until now of realising users expectations that the web should have a great / simple ui and work offline, we just need to improve, much in the same way as the slow transition from desktop apps to web apps has been going, I think its inevitable that we will build most of our technology for the web
Software Designers - The People Behind the Code
When the iPhone SDK was released, I got serious about learning Objective-C and Xcode. It was a slow painful process, but now I strongly prefer writing native apps to doing front end web development. The Cocoa and Cocoa Touch frameworks are really great, and Objective-C has really been improving as a language. Xcode... yea it still sucks but things like provisioning profiles have gotten far more manageable since the early days.

What you are missing out by not building native apps is an environment that is designed to really help you create great apps for users. Even with the crazy rate web technologies have been developing, a lot of it still feels like a bunch of hacks compared to native app development, which feels much more natural to me.
I don't know if it's any simpler, but I tend to do:

git init .
git remote add origin git://github.com/eentzel/dotfiles.git
git checkout -t origin master
I had time to look some of this up. Those numbers are pretty spun. Here's the list of the biggest spenders at Open Secrets: http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?showYear=2011&i...

The bottom of the list (#20) is at $12M. I don't know where $5 would put you but it's no doubt in the long tail; it doesn't even register.
That's compared to the previous quarter, not the same time last year. Web usage is cyclical.
Good post. The only winner takes all markets I know of are ones where there is a high fixed cost with staying in the market and you have a chunky side of the market to deal with.

HD-DVD vs BluRay - chunky (content producers), expensive to keep producing players if no one is buying them.
I just use a bash script that I add a line to symlink each config to the correct location. I really like this as I know exactly what's happening.
I don't want to have a separate app for every web site I currently use. Drilling down through a hierarchy of apps or flipping through page and page of apps versus starting to type the url? Doesn't seem like an upgrade.

Maybe UIs will start acting more like a browser and let me find apps easily. Maybe browsers will just present apps with all the same power apps have. Maybe it doesn't matter.
7 Tips for Women in the Tech Industry
When I hear people say "plumbing" it seems to mean not data conversion but the internal workings of a system, especially anything infrastructurey. So "meat grinding" seems more specific. But I like it because it's appropriately disdainful. Who wants to grind meat all day?

Dostoevsky said that if you want to drive a man insane all you need to do is sentence him to hard labor moving a pile of dirt from one side of a prison yard to another – and then back again.
I just saw hcatlin's presentation on the future of Sass at RailsConf and he mentioned that large codebases (>50k lines) could take over 30s (think he said sometimes up to 2 minutes). One of his key points was that, since Sass is partially aimed at non-technical designers, it needed to be both faster and more accessible.
Towards that end, (and for keeping certain sensitive things from repos...) I made this:

https://github.com/sophacles/dotfuse

It is a fuse filesystem that allows for modularization of some "single file" style dotfiles. Combined with git branche or modules (or both) it can get a lot of this (i hope). Warning though, it is still a bit of a toy, and I haven't played with it for a while, but I'm open to suggestions and pull requests!

As for dry with sourceable stuff, like bash/zsh configs, you can just keep the environment specific stuff in a separate repo, and use git modules, that is if your environ specific stuff needs to be confidential (or some of it) and kept in separate private repos.
This has expressed the ideas in my head far better than I could. When I first started to work with Rails in many projects I just dumped all of the gems I wanted to use in my Gemfile. I quickly learned that a simple bundle update could fuck my shit up pretty badly by having gems change APIs, remove features or both.

Since then I always specify the exact versions of my gems or in cases where the gem authors are known to be comptent use the "~>" operator. I find it to be stupid though much like the article states, why are newer versions making my life harder when they are supposed to be better?
Oracle technical expert struggles in Android trial, Andy Rubin begins testimony
I personally think it's better to break backwards compatibility if you're removing or changing something that was bad in the first place. Otherwise, there is no need, and thus it never breaks. Much like in the case of your list of non breaking programs.
The thing I notice most about the DrChrono site is they still don't have an answer for getting competitors to share data.

No biggie, no one has answered that question yet. Well, actually, we do know the answer: universal healthcare (aka "single payer"), where the players aren't competitors.

I designed, implemented, and supported a handful of regional healthcare exchanges. Five exchanges, 80 hospitals, plus misc guarantors, scripts, ambulance services, lab orders & results, etc. So I have some experience.

What I learned is this:

Every single player thinks our medical records are THEIR records, to use, abuse, and monetize at will.

Last time I checked, DrChrono has expanded their product offering (billing, scheduling, etc), which makes them more of a physicians practice management (much needed!).

I believe this is a recognition that truly portable medical records is a LONG WAY OFF in the USA. It's a political problem, not a technical problem.

(That DrChrono seems to be reality-based pleased me.)
It took about 12 floppy disks. :)

Java is about four times that size (for a minimal distribution) nowadays.
It is a few weeks for people with novice-to-moderate knowledge of programming, web-dev, javascript and a sprinkling of Unix.

Most people without this background are starting from scratch, and if they have no determination, are soon lost.
A quick Lua version:

do
local mt = {
__index = function(t, k)
t[k] = tree()
return t[k]
end
}

function tree()
return setmetatable({}, mt)
end
end

t = tree()
t.foo.bar = 'foobar'
Just want to say, I was there at Philly Startup Weekend, and these guys were awesome. Was incredible seeing what they wanted to do. Congrats guys, you were inspiring!
One thing jumped out that I hadn't really considered before: They [apps] aren't indexed by Google

If apps really do "kill" websites, or make a significant dent in them, this could be bad news for Google's business model, as well as anyone else who relies on adsense income.
AddThis Browser Tools
Dunno if you've had that fix go live yet, but it's still unusable. The actual little scroll tracker (what's the name for that thing?) isn't discernible from the background. When you scroll up and down, the bar turns white and the cursor is white. I'd send a ss, but I don't see anyone else complaining so it's probably a me problem. Might be because I'm on Linux.
I just got my ridiculously named teenager mail address to 25gb skydrive, alas, I'm not going to use it because I can't ever send files with that name to anybody. Registered a new account, it forced me to give out my ZIP code, and bam, only 7 GB, I was thinking that offer would be available for all customers before launch. Well, I'm already. pretty happy with my paid dropbox account, and Microsoft's out a potentially paying customer.
I use homesick (which is written in Ruby) and I think I agree with you. I like the premise of having the repo in a subdirectory and symlinking the files in - I don't like to have the whole homedir in git - I only want certain things in the repo in the first place, not everything. Seems like the rest could be done in a shell script for maximum portability.
And for just searching for things.
http://owncloud.org/
> I personally think it's better to break backwards compatibility if you're removing or changing something that was bad in the first place.

This is the false dichotomy that I want to dispel. You can remove/change bad things while maintaining backwards compatibility in most cases! It just takes a little bit of extra glue code!
Indeed, and Q4 (Christmas) is the peak for web advertising and most e-commerce. Even companies killing it year-over-year can show Q4->Q1 sags.
Estimation is difficult because we compare apple with oranges. One thing is to perform a task another one is to freeze the intelligence that allows us to perform the task. It involves foreseeing edge cases which might not be present in a particular application of the logic.

On the other hand once its coded, it's way faster (because the logic was abstracted) and it is flawless (it always yields the same result).
Back up!

For how long, I don’t know… wish me luck!
A recent study of the brains of elderly mice, for
instance, found 117 genes that were expressed
differently in the brains of animals that began a
program of running, compared with those that
remained sedentary

That's really interesting. I thought exercise just made me healthier now. I didn't know it actually might be altering my genes.

If this result applies to humans, then my exercising will also benefit my descendents!
I disagree that passwords are a browser con, especially given the number of people who leave their phones lying around or let friends use them. If the app deals with anything sensitive (and email can certainly be one of those) it should require a password every time.

Imagine if someone found your phone with email logged in. They would immediately be able to scan through your email for registration confirmation emails, go to that site and reset the password giving them complete access. If one of those accounts was for a site which saved cc details and had something the thief wanted (or could sell), they can drain your card with out setting off any fraud warnings, because you wanted to convenience of not having to type your password every time.
I was thinking something similar when I was browsing the other day. We've made such advancements in technology, but I bet that the average time it takes to load a web page hasn't much improved.

I guess it's natural that we want to push boundaries, but maybe Gopher wasn't such a bad idea? :)
Also, don't forget the step through debugger. It's such a time saver to be able to set a couple of break points and then when they are hit you can hover your mouse over different variables and see a tool tip that shows the contents of that variable.
Close enough, http://getfreecloud.com/ gives you 6 gigs.
I think he forgot to take into account the mobile version of websites, which can be just as simple as native apps, and almost as fast (since they don't have to do much anyway).
How to get the most out of your Android device
> Still, over 10 painful nights, it all came together.
> What a rush.

This. This is exactly why I'll spend 10 painful nights. For that moment of exhilaration. It's almost like a masochistic adrenaline rush.
Do you mean "awkward to scroll" from a performance perspective or from a not-being-able-to-see-the-scrollbar perspective?
Bingo there's a good one in English.

A good example in Arabic would be قرن, which can mean 'horns' or 'century', and (as far as i know, not an expert) doesn't have any related origin.

I imagine if you were writing machine translation software you could pretty easily figure it out statistically from nearby words, but it adds another level of challenge to learning the script.

As an aside; if anyone has any interest in learning the _script_ used by Arabic/Persian, 'The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It' by Awde and Samano is awesome, and you can burn through it with all the exercises in a few dozen hours total. The book makes no attempt at teaching the language, but it's a nice leg-up before you hit the real books, which seem to all do an abbreviated job of teaching the script.
I disagree. The circles represent people. The metaphor is skillfully used in conjunction with the words.

You don't want to dig deeper on this - fine. I get it. But there is a symbolism being successfully manipulated here and just because you don't like it does not mean it isn't "done well". It just means you don't like it.
You're right, I had a bug in my code.

fmt --width=14 <gettysburg.txt

The copy of the Gettysburg address I grabbed off Wikipedia has "mdashes" in it (unicode characters). That messes up my wrapping too because fmt counts them as two bytes even though they are one character.

diff y z
101,104c101,103
< us—that
< from these
< honored dead
< we take
---
> us-that from
> these honored
> dead we take

(the others were not material).
I don't think Phonegap has native push notifications?
Updating the Heap profiler documentation would be super-helpful since it looks like it changed a version ago.

Otherwise, thanks to the team for the improvements that I've been seeing lately!
I use the dircombine perl script that has been used by Joey Hess since his first SVN home directory article was written. You can also look at the fixups scripts that uses dircombine to setup everything. It's simple and to the point.

http://git.kitenet.net/?p=joey/home.git;a=blob_plain;f=bin/d...
My guess is that by "the appropriate break point for a line" the author means the break point that makes the result look the best, not just chopping at 13 characters. In order to match what a human would be able to do easily, you'd need to implement something like what tex does (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_wrap#Minimum_raggedness).
Facebook's valuation is based on potential, as opposed to any real metrics. It has a staggering number of active users and frightening amounts of data about them. The bet is that they find a way to capitalize on it.

I'm not bullish on facebook by any stretch of the imagination, and their P/E is ridiculous, but it's also the wrong metric to be looking at when deciding whether it's a good investment.
Hakin9 Magazine Exploiting Software April Issue
And then you have something like the iTunes Connect app, where you constantly have to re-enter your long password on a small touchscreen keyboard. I've basically stopped using the app because of it.
GREE: Inside The Life Of 35-Year-Old Self-Made Billionaire Yoshikazu Tanaka
What's Wrong with Java Threads?
Well, not really, because what if ubuntu packages rely on version X, and you need version Y.
The problem is this begins to break down when you want to do more complicated things, A small gripe that still illustrates the point:

> be as fast as typing "| bill 10.00" where "bill" takes an email address on standard input.

What happens then when "bill" takes and email address on stdin but I need it to take an amount on stdin and an email address on the command line. This is the sort of thing that unix starts to break down on, you spend far too much time trying to munge the data into the delicate format that various programs expect it on.

Secondly you say:
> No matter how productive -- HOW PRODUCTIVE! - you are at writing a script to bill a user ten dollars, you can never -- NEVER! -- be as fast as typing "| bill 10.00" where "bill" takes an email address on standard input. That Unix program does not exist.

But have little evidence to back that up, and with a little inspection it seems that that holds very little grounds against something such as "bill(10.00, email)" as one would do in a modern environment.

If you want to know why you are being downvoted, it's because you have remarkable claims (10000x improvement is very remarkable) with little to zero evidence to back those claims up.
Click highlights with CSS transitions
Firebug is pretty close, but you're right.
Beer Slinger Droid
Yes, get skills. But you don't necessarily need to get "hard skills" from a college major. Often, education that stresses the "hard skills" tends to undervalue the "soft skills" like reading and writing which, in my opinion, are more important.

"Hard skills" can often only be developed through experience, or, as the article notes, through alternate education paths, or, as this community stresses, through independent online learning. Since this is so, why major in a "hard skill?"

You have your entire life to learn hard skills. You can do it in the summer. You can do it in your spare time. You can do it while working at Starbucks. You can do it one class a semester at a time. But you don't have your whole life to sit around a table and discuss Vergil. I say, major in something "useless."
As a smart guy once said "Logic can get you from A to B. Imagination can get you anywhere"

I think that sums up your post.
Nice writeup.. one thing I'd add is that usually when companies are given 100 P/E type valuations, it's because everyone's assuming they have lots of growth in front of them. FB is already a dominant player that pretty much _everyone_ in developed countries is either using or has decided not to use. Is there really a scenario in which one sees the usage doubling or tripling down the road? It seems like you'd need to believe that to support a 100 P/E and ~20x sales kind of valuation. 30B or so seems like a much more viable level.
I hope apps don't kill websites for the same reason I'm glad people don't build flash microsites anymore.

The number one reason I prefer the web is that it's extensible! If there's a web app I don't like, I can write a userscript to modify it to my needs. The web has a standard API (HTML/JS/CSS) and a means for extension so I'm free to make the web suit me. This freedom is something that I miss when I'm using a mobile device and I hope it never goes away.
I spent a year developing a website for an industrial supply company. (in it's many iterations). You are right about the low margin and the fragmented market. It can be a tough sell to the mom and pop stores that are trying to compete with Grainger or Northern Tool in the same marketplace.

I think the biggest problem with Amazon is it's hands-off approach to selling products. The reason why there hasn't been any innovation in this sector is because of the interconnected relationships between managers of firms needing products and the salesmen that sell the product. More often than not, the firms have no idea what they actually need, and the sales people have the knowledge to deliver exactly the part they require.

I think that unless Amazon has a very large, and more importantly knowledgeable staff, what you will find here is a lost leader. The only thing that I see amazon bringing to the table is their warehousing.
A simple and straight to the point thought. Nothing wrong about it for sure. After all, how long can you be creative and bold if you ain't got enough to "feed your family"?
Yeah, I was kind of surprised the article didn't cite Year-over-Year growth, but I don't think the other ones I saw did either.
I completely agree. Facebook is providing a platform in a market that has always been extremely volatile, and are using their position to make questionable decisions. It will back-fire eventually.

Personally, I can't honestly see facebook being nearly as central in 5 years time, if it exists at all. Some hot new thing will come along and do sharing better and everyone will jump all at once.
I think a lot of people don't realize that Canonical is working on another important part of free software: appealing to the majority of users. With limited resources and time it's good to have different players focusing on different things.
Did you know the meaning of the words that you translated from writings to "words"? I mean, I could read korean letters and words if I know the alphabet (somewhat) but I dont know what it means anyways.
Congrats! Having worked with the founders, I can attest to them being "data geeks". I am a big fan of RentHop NYC and also cant wait till they expand to other markets like SF =)
I've been using justone's dfm (dotfile manager) script[1]. The only requirement is PERL 5.8, which is just about everywhere, I think. Seems good enough so far, but I'm not sure how I'll integrate Oh-My-Zsh 2.0[2] yet. Maybe someone can compare it to homesick or do a PERL port...

[1] https://github.com/justone/dotfiles
[2] https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/oh-my-zsh
In the end - don't we need to see on the effectiveness of the system as time progresses? That seems to be one of RentHops big wins -> clean data develops allows for better algorithmic learning?
NCTech4Good (on developers vs. users)
Just use textmate. Lots of us love vim.
I'm the primary author of Sass. Hampton came up with the original idea, but he hasn't worked directly on the language in years.
One word to shame all men
Does this apply to iTerm as well?
What you major in isn't that important. This community needs to break out of the "choose a major for the job you want" shell. That same line of thinking is partly to blame for this whole mess anyway, since college departments can't possibly keep up with changing job markets. College students should learn skills, and their major is simply one way to do that.
It's about Instagram, and there are people still mulling the "billion dollar" figure about Instagram getting acquired by FB.
In case you're wondering like me, SPDY is planed for the next 1.3 version according to their trac milestone http://trac.nginx.org/nginx/milestone/1.3.0
WordPress was an abandoned open source project called B2, before it was forked and became the juggernaut it is today.
It baffles me that people who seem to pay careful attention to the appearance of their websites are so careless with their fonts:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3mi5ecf8xguccl4/20120424-025233-ni...

The allure of web fonts becomes stronger and stronger as availability and implementations improve, but people need to be careful: there are very few choises that work well everywhere.
If cubiq is right it doesn't check for my old version. It's pretty much a vanilla install on OSX.
Agreed. Do we want to punish those who aren't savvy and well-connected?
My home machine has a hard drive??
Apple charged with infringing on touch patent
GitHub ❤ ~/  - a guide to dotfiles on GitHub
From the perspective of the 2000 bubble though, that's exactly what people thought. Pre-crash people thought everything needed to go online, post-crash people thought you couldn't succeed unless you were 'clicks and bricks' but really just bricks was better. Now we're looking at some over-valuations in social companies that will probably burst but people won't be reevaluating whether you can really have a business on the internet or not. And yes the 2000 bubble had a big impact on the careers that kids choose.
Just a thank you for writing a positive, easy to follow overview with links to more in-depth information. I love when people boil down experience and serve it without a side dish of attitude.
Not sure what my settings are now, but I used to keep swap off on my Windows machine (especially while playing games, since swapping kills gaming performance).