skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few of my personal pet peeves (note: every disgruntled user has their own, largely disjoint set):

1. The applet to inhibit screen sleeping went away. Without it, I often look up from working on a hard problem to discover that my screens have been blanked out.

2. Something GNOME-ish keeps grabbing my mouse, and won't let it go until I log in with SSH and start killall-ing anything with "gnome" in the process name. It happens once a day or so, I haven't been able to purposefully reproduce it, and it's really annoying.

3. The settings applet was neutered. It now looks like a cheap knockoff of MacOS's system settings, except somehow with even less functionality. It also seems like the GNOME developers simply forgot about it until about a month before the release, because many features that appear to be present are barely functional. For example, Appearance -> Theme only changes gtk3 themes, and most of the gtk2 themes don't have a gtk3 counterpart, so now about half of my apps don't look like the other half. Another example: the new settings applet stores network proxy settings somewhere weird now, so neither Firefox nor Chrome find my proxy settings any more.

4. About half of the GNOME configuration has moved to gconf to dconf, but there's no rhyme or reason as to which half. When I discovered the new settings applet, I tried to change stuff with gconf/dconf, except I have no idea how to figure out which applications use what settings storage backend.

5. A lot of applications don't have key bindings any more, or had them greatly reduced. GNOME 2 was pretty good about this, but many GNOME 3 applications are completely unusable without using the mouse.
You subtract the value of the red cards from the value of the black cards to fill in the blanks.

db.tt/xxJ9xx
ha, more like 10 years when you count the engineering degree and apprenticeships. Also, unless you really enjoy the work, it can be a very hard grind (as it was for me). The hours were not 9 to 5 (I was on call 24/7), and when I was a drilling foreman, I would sometimes be up nearly 3 days at a time trying to manage a team of not so friendly people who didn't necessarily care about the project at hand. Also, I just got lucky. There was really nothing extraordinary about what I did. I was never proud of what I was doing.
> For some reason the submitter used the mobile website link, which if you're on a desktop redirects to the homepage.

A little off-topic, but is anyone else irritated by the fact that many websites redirect you to their homepage when you access the desktop version of the site from a mobile device, and vice versa? I don't understand why you would ever implement this sort of behavior.
This went into Godwin territory really fast...
It's probably a reference to the Orson Scott Card series of books that started with Ender's Game. Ender's older brother Peter[0] was a sociopath/sadist who becomes an influential blogger (under pseudonyms) and eventually takes the position of Hegemon (something like a president-king of Earth).

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wiggin
Psychopaths exist for an evolutionary reason. The fact that the military essentially screens for them in order to make the most of the mounted 50 calibers suggests why. But they are less important now, and given the demographics of the prison population, it's clear why.

It's actually best not to treat such a thing. Just evict them from the gene pool via the justice system and the problem will solve itself.
Really interesting. This article is old and the commercialization of Starlite never took off, and the inventor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Ward is now dead. The family supposedly has the formula.

Egg test video is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxqFyDugqs4. That is seriously amazing, is there any other materials like this?

I think SpaceX could find use for this material.
You're right if nepotism is a requirement. But if we could suspend our cynicism long enough to consider available enterprise products (which is a tremendous strain admittedly for anyone who agrees with Paul Graham about "enterprise" computing) then as a comment below points out, CISCO sells Monitoring as a service and there are other vendors that provide this.
You can build successive abstractions using meta-programming.

All you're talking about is taking your abstraction and calling it a "tool".
Today's Daily Devotion - KINGS ARE COMING
Of course, Reddit would be only one of the channels he worked through. As long as you know you're working with stupid people, you can work on manipulating them. But maybe that's more of a Demosthenes thing.
This is a arguable subject. For me personally I prefer a company that took some risks with their presentation and failed, over one that had some human-bot-figure reading the corporate-lawyer approved cards. Sure, based on the narrative of that visitor the whole story comes across very negative, but then again I would find it utterly amusing to have some insult-comedian perform at a corporate event just to watch all the let-me-tweet-how-offended-i-am faces.
Someone needs to be fired. Preferably the Danish CEO of Dell.
Same with me. I'm working with cross platform technologies for 15 years now. Python,Java,Ruby,HTML and now Android.

I don't complain that I have to target different systems. I use this stuff because I want to target many different systems.

Take a closer look at all these devices in the article, and imagine for a moment that every single one of these would be as incompatible to one another as iOS is to Windows Phone.

That is: Imagine you had to write a complete new App for every single one of these devices. Android is a defragmentation tool.
Dexter is in no way a psychopath by the clinical definition. He is clearly pictured as very emphatic.
I don't use awesome myself so I don't know about it crashing, but it appears to be a base to build your own system from, in the sense that most of the functionality comes from extensions written in Lua.

Musca, my window manager of choice currently (though I am beginning to try out others too, just in case I'm missing something), is a very small WM with very few features, but a very simple way of extending it through scripting (in any language).

Musca itself is tiny: little under 4K lines of C (including whitespace and comments), the binary is about 190KB. It delegates its "menu" to dmenu. If you want anything else, you use external scripts or programs.
Google’s head of news: Newspapers are the new Yahoo
Science does get suppressed when its conclusions are considered politically incorrect or unfortunate. That's exactly why politically convienent and fortunate research is so suspicious--any dissenting research is automatically disqualified, so it has the appearance of truth when really it's just systemically one-sided.
Pageviews, Pageviews, Pageviews.

If I were to put my "suit-hat" on, I'd think like this:

"Most of the population that encounter this inconvenience will think 'oh, I navigated to the wrong version of the page, my mistake. Now, time to find the proper page'. They aren't going to realize that we could have implemented the logic to properly route the reader to the corresponding page on the other version, mobile or desktop. Furthermore, while I can't quantify how many people get pissed off and become resentful of the site for implementing this kind of behavior, I can quantify how many more pageviews we get from putting up this inconvenience (via logs). I can translate this increased pageview to increased ad revenue (simple multiplication). That means increased (at least superficial) profits! I better get a promotion next quarter!"

(I admit to employing excessive hyperbole, but I wouldn't be surprised if people actually thought like this)
seriously? i have not met these people in a while, speaking to a few women i know about this issue makes me think there is no real issue. No one has anything against women in IT, if women are not interested...let them to whatever it is they want to do? There are plenty of men not interested in IT as well...
The crazy part of this is it seems once he started spouting this crap, no-one from Dell pulled him off stage and did any damage control! So people say "let's not judge Dell," etc but we can judge their employees' lack of action.

If someone speaks like this at an event I'm running and I'm within earshot, I'm getting in their face, no matter how famous the speaker. I'd hope other organizers and chairs would act similarly.
>By the way, I'd extremely highly recommend "Ender's Game" (the first book). Besides being an utterly awesome book, I even got a friend who "hated" reading to try it, and even he liked it. I mean, it's that good.

I've read it.

(There was someone else who posted before you, but I'm replying here because I thought it would be good to clarify that.)

Thank you all for reminding me of that part of Ender's Game. It's been a while since I've read it. But for what it's worth I did think of that when I saw the reference. I just didn't know that was Peter's title once he ruled earth.
I love this so much. I am an American. I wish the American Republic was the same as the German Democracy. Such an idea will only take time to take shape.

I salute Germany and the Pirate Party for taking a such aggressive stance towards true democracy.
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Reducing bad signup emails with mailcheck.js
Great link, it helps put things in perspective.
> It seems to me that there is some underlying calculus that all these actors have made that issuing a bogus one has a better net effect that a real one.

This is the reason why I think non-apologies are a genuinely advantageous long-term strategy, especially for men in position of power. I don't believe it to be an entirely concious strategy resulting from some cold calculation but it seems common among leaders, from soccer team captains to presidents. Maybe some alpha/beta atavism.

That is not to say that it's optimal. Throwing a sincere apology every once in a while, especially when it's sincere, may work well.
You don't know much about children. I was a brat. I mean, I was the worst kid in every class, but I never destroyed toilet seats in uncontrollable day-long rages. The kid's a classic nutjob, and I'd give you 10-to-1 odds that he'll murder his first prostitute before he's 25.
Honestly to me that sounds like a sarcastic joke. Surely he can't be serious. Regardless, that kind of "comedy" is wholly inappropriate for a corporate event.
I think it's hard for anyone to tell the reason why he was fired. But 11 months is just suspicious. They didn't realize he wasn't a good fit sooner? Fire him sooner, or wait a month so he vests to do the right thing.

Sounds like they used a young guy to do their dirty work while they were small, and once they got funding and didn't need someone who had rights to such a large portion of equity in the future, brought on people who would take less.

Pretty sketchy.
The author gives a reasonable example of the usefulness of this skill.

My problem with these questions is when they come out of a box delivered by Cargo Cult Airlines. If you or your organization don't actually use these techniques in the normal course of the job, then don't ask these questions.

"I just want to see how you think." OK, fair enough. After I've answered, describe how I think, and compare and contrast that with how other candidates think. My bet is that most people who ask this question have no idea how anyone thinks, including themselves. Most people.

Column 7 of Programming Pearls (which can be read online, http://netlib.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/pearls/) is an interesting exploration of the actual use of this kind of exercise.

When you get a question about golf balls, don't just declare "Bogus." Consider who's asking it, and whether they seem to know what they're doing with the question.

The question is valuable to the candidate, and not just to identify lame companies. Face it, most people just don't know how to interview, and if you decide based on this, you're being a lazy interviewee. In rare cases, the question might even expose a company with a clue.

Be open.
I did not intend or claim to provide a full explanation, just explain one significant factor that is relevant to this topic.
Awesome post, thank you. Sometimes I wonder if we are devolving.
Quick guide to securing GRUB
I've done development in Eclipse off and on for a few years. Some Python (PyDev extensions), some Java (Android, school assignments, a desktop app). I haven't tried it all that recently, but one of my biggest complaints has been performance. I end up turning off a significant number of the features that people talk about for Eclipse, simply because they make the environment run too slowly. It's not as if I'm using underpowered machines either...
he removed that maybe you should too
What would be nice is if Apple pushed the boundaries of HDTV. One thing that's hard to deny, Apple has always been willing to push old technologies out the window without an apology. With the new iPad screen pushing beyond 1080p HD even on a 10" screen, it'd be nice to see a massive screen with a massive resolution to match. An 85" 4K TV screen with the content and delivery system Apple would be able to force might just make me buy whatever Apple required me to have.
Lightweight in the sense that Singool.js utilizes the features existing in Backbone.js without trying to add too much to it. What it does is provide more of a structure to your apps.
Not that I think AppleInsider is that reliable, but I would highly doubt it would be a patent / IP acquisition given the price being talked about is only around $100 million and the insane prices being paid for IP right now in tech. It would be far more likely to be a talent acquisition.
Wait, so is he a comedian MC'ing the event? If it's a roast or something, and he's poking at the fact that there's not a lot of women in tech:

The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy

As in, what are you guys doing to cause not a lot of women to be in IT. It's almost as if there's a quota!

If that's the case it's still terrible and tasteless, but at least sort of comprehendible. If he's serious and those are his actual beliefs, the situation is so far outside the range of reasonable corporate behavior, I don't know what to think. I'm just perplexed, really.
Are you sure it's "less organized help" they are advocating for, or is it "not forced help"? I find it to be the latter in almost all cases. People tend not to argue against charity, but rather "forced charity" (which is not something I would consider charity at all).
And in addition, countries like Greece couldn't deflate themselves out of their trade deficit because of the Euro; their only choice would have been to lower nominal wages somehow, which is pretty much impossible.
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit

Related: George Orwell's Politics and the English language. Taught me how to write, and thus greatly influenced the way I program as well.
It really sucks because this was not even a 1/3 of the points made in the discussion but the comments were getting deleted on an epic scale.
I actually think there are lots of cases where it is perfectly warranted.

It's a big world; if you are on the world stage, it is quite difficult not to offend somebody no matter what you do. There are experts in the fields of diplomacy and etiquette who devote their careers to getting this stuff right, and usually even then there is someone offended about efforts to be so "proper". ;-)

So, I think it is a perfectly valid apology if basically the only thing you regretted about your actions was that it made someone upset. Most people don't get off on pissing other people off, but they do want to live their life and go about their business. That apology is perfect for that context.

What's freaky is when it is used for cases where you'd think there'd be a lot more that someone ought to be sorry for. What's even freakier is when someone everyone pretends it is apologizing for more than it is.
1.) one with the minimum hardware you want to support (screen res, cpu, gpu).

2.) Min API level you want to support

3.) top spec phone with latest version (pref. a recent nexus)

That is for native platform apps, not Game ports.

From my experience, crucial to success is that you write your Apps according to the Android documentation, and not just "until they work on my device". Most "single device issues" happen because of this mistake.

Most of the issues developers have when they switch devices
Columna Soft Blog
He says he doesn't like the security industry, specifically AV companies. And he makes some compelling arguments against them.

Then when asked about his future, he says he plans to work for one!

WTF?!
The coolest thing I see this year!
The minimum possible number of parties is one.
But we should keep in mind that while Apple products are on the pricey side, they are firmly within the reach of the common man. Apple products seem to be deliberately positioned below the utmost premium of the price scale for each of their products (ex: you can find laptops with higher performance and a higher sticker price). Their strategy is definitely not "bigger, better, pricier, is better".

If we believe in the "common man stretching his arms" ethos, then the 85" TV screen is definitely out of the question. How many people can even fit a 85" TV into their living rooms? (count me in as one of them)
Lag is pretty bad :P
yes, funny@
- The font looks terrible on my screen. No subpixel hinting or what that fancy stuff is again. I see colours around the characters I think.

- The font is big and bold and the lines are long. Hard to read.

- The date is in that lunatic format where the date is not clear. Use DMY ordering or write out the month.

- Waterloo?

- The site could use some layout. I actually thought you were abusing Javascript for that because it looked so plain and so I enabled it to check (with no changes).

- The text has a lot of words, no visible structure and a lot of mentions of AWS which to me is not related to the headline. I gave it one quick scanning but could not really figure out what you are on about (the code parts are trivial) so I lost interest.

- Are you just trying to get referrers to Amazon? If so, make sure the links are actually visible.
Well, then you have to carefully vet every JITting assembly language. Microsoft in fact does this: the WinRT APIs run on .NET, which has an associated assembly language CIL (formerly MSIL) and JITting runtime, the CLR.

So, if you want a JIT via a typed assembly language you can compile down to CIL. Firefox could do this, but then they couldn't specialize their JIT to run JavaScript properly, which is the hard part anyways. V8 and Gecko are very cool engines, and compiling javascript to CIL wouldn't compete.
Bypass Proxy - Bypass websites filter with proxy
I've known two "great" FORTH programmers in the last 30 years. They were both very pragmatic individuals, good engineers who made good decisions and good products.

I've also known a number of FORTH enthusiasts. In general I've not been impressed with their efforts, or their insistence that FORTH is the Universal Language, and everyone not using it for everything is missing out big.

I think it'd be fun to hack on one of Moore's multiprocessor systems. But I don't think I'd want to program one for a living.
i agree completely.
Cue 'I will give my firstborn child' posts. This looks like a really fun project to work on. You have various ways of perfecting it and you know people on the internet are drooling over it.
Inflate Your App's Popularity...Until It Really Is Popular
I guess you haven't been following Alan Kay's latest research very closely - http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

We are so very far away from understanding the best approaches for writing software that solves problems.
isn't this is an overkill.. using node.js for running desktop apps
Red hat is a billion dollar company.
Epic! Keep it up!
Someone needs to explain to me in what parallel universe

(sudo[ifconfig["-a"]] | grep["-i", "loop"]) & FG

is more readable than

sudo ifconfig -a | grep -i loop &
Many top VCs explicitly prefer younger founders. Vinod Khosla doesn't back older founders, and Paul Graham stated he wouldn't accept any first-time founders older than 35. Both of these gentlemen are legends who are attractive to any entrepreneur.
He says he has no respect for the security industry and AV companies. He makes compellling arguments against them.

Then when asked about his future, he says he plans to work for an AV company!

WTF?!

He can see what's wrong, but he can't do what's right.

And that, my friends, is the problem.
This reminds me of when I first saw drop-box: Immediate recognition of the pain it will save me. I often hack up kludges that approximate this -- os.system calls that pipe to a file, then I read and parse the file. Good work.
The post specifically refers to the ageism of VCs, not consumers. I don't think any of the millions of people who bought Dyson products cared how hold he was when he invented his famous vacuums.
Yes she is.

You've clearly never read The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa In Theory And Practice, by Christopher Hitchens.

Mother Teresa was pure evil.

You should read up on how she intentionally tortured dying people by denying them basic pain killers. How she stipulated the use of dull needles. How she claimed pain was desirable because it was the kiss of Jesus. How she refused to properly treat people that were dying in agony, while her charity hoarded massive sums of money. The stories abound, Hitchens was kind enough to document it heavily, both in book and video documentary format.
This is clever language and UX IMHO. Does anyone know other apps that do similar things?
There's an old saying... never ascribe to malice what can be perfectly well explained by incompetence.
To add to this, modern TVs are very poorly executed, with high latency, terrible UIs, bad color faithfulness, the whole >60hz motion interpolation disaster, bad software integration, bad handling of specs like HDMI, a tendency to be cheap and break... I would love to see Apple do TVs right.
I'm excited that the goal is reached. One thought: I just saw your "We made it" blogpost via planet.clojure.in. May i suggest that you post it as an update on kickstarter?

I think most people on kickstarter expect and enjoy when the project author "celebrates" the reached goal with them. In addition the news about the 2nd demo is remarkable.

Btw any forecasts as to when the demo is going to go public?
>And while school-level mathematics ain't the same as research-level mathematics

School mathematics isn't even math, it's a bad joke. I recommend Lockhart's Lament[1],
I fully share his views. School 'math' destroyed every ounce of interest I had in math,
and now, as a CS student, I still have a hard time getting rid of this attitude towards
the subject even thought I know a lot better now.

[1]: https://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html
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