skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Coping with a lack of interest?
What's a code hungry developer to do when he's stuck working on projects he doesn't find interesting? My job has become really tedious lately working on things in which I have no personal interest. I work at a company that sometimes requires traveling to work at trade shows which is fun but also incredibly stressful, especially if we are behind and forced to work 95+ hours in a week before the show to get it done.

I've always loved programming and find it immensely fun and rewarding, but my current job has almost made me lose interest in programming itself. I've been considering leaving for a startup type deal (I'm fairly close to NY so the opportunity is there) but I haven't found anything cool yet. I love the idea of getting behind something I truly believe in, but I'm not sure a startup would be any less stressful than my current position. On the other hand, I consider myself fairly competent, but am only using a small fraction of my potential here.

Is there any real balance to it all that I should know about and do you have any tips on dealing with a lack of interest?

/throwaway to protect employment
27" Dell Monitors.
I've been thinking of a new recruitment model: guaranteed employment. Suppose a recruiting agency guaranteed their recruits, as in, "We'll pay their salary for the [six months | year | whatever]. If they are acceptable, at the end of that period, you pay us back double. If they don't work out, let us know ASAP and we'll eat the cost."

The incentives are all right here. The employers essentially get a year long job interview. Qualified candidates are basically guaranteed a job. And the recruiters are rewarded for successfully meeting their clients' needs, and punished if they get it wrong. The current situation rewards harassment and puffing up their candidates' resumes.
Odd. I've heard other reports that Chrome falls apart on high numbers of tabs (I'm not sure why that would be.)

There's a decent chance that most of those 200 tabs aren't loaded. If you flip through all of them once, how does it look?
Previous discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3944564
I hope SCTP[1] starts to take off soon as a transport for protocols like this, so they don't have to keep working around the limitations of TCP.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCTP
This is awesome! I was thinking about these same things for Java. Finally someone had the sense to break away from IDE hell, and do things in a flexible way with my editor.
that is true her day #1 post has a sad cheeseburger and the lasagna looking thing. I was hoping to see an amazing transition in the food quality.

But, that was just the first day and the school didn't change their entire lunch program in one day. In fact the article says that the food didn't actually change, they just changed the policy to allow students to go back for as many fruits and veggies as they like. (well technically they claim that was the policy all along, but nobody knew, but whatever)
FunnyJunk's lawyer isn't afraid of the Oatmeal
Charles Carreon seems to be less of an "Internet lawyer" and more of an relic, parading out his outdated work on the sex.com case. He seems to have succeeded in impressing the non-technical masses but has no actual expertise with regards to how the Internet works nowadays.
"kittydar is best at detecting upright cats that are facing forward "

Good luck with getting a cat to do that
Amazon Web Services recovers from partial outage
Man those mods like changing titles. I called this "A Comparison of Boston and Silicon Valley With More Depth", which I think is a better summary.
Under the hood of Python class definitions
Beautiful Job Description: Intrinsically Motivated Full Stack Product Hacker
Standing up is always going to be more comfortable for me. I never have a problem concentrating so never miss.
You can achieve faster reading rates with this sort of stuff by only reading one sentence from the middle of each paragraph, or reading the second and last sentence in the rare case that the middle sentence wasn't enough. The content is of such low density that it takes little more than that to decode the meaning and intent of the article.
I love the way you can drag and drop an image into a protip. Its a really nice user experience and also something I didn't know you could do technically.
Q: How Long Before VPNs Become Illegal?
A: No.

Doesn't flow too well here ;)
You can still aim when you sit down. You still have free hands, don't you?
Apple removes claim Macs are safer than PCs from website following months of negative headlines.
Ethiopia: Skype me, maybe? |
I only shop at places that get their paper from regular forests, not rain forests.
Following the previous story, they explicitly stated that OS installs didn't prevent returns

"Newegg's Computer Standard Return Policy does not exclude a computer from being accepted for return if an operating system is modified or installed."

It's one thing if they had a clear policy against installing Linux. I'd probably think twice about buying a new computer from them, but it's their call.

If that is their policy, however, then they need to make up their minds and be consistent in what they tell people.
I keep telling folks that invest in the stock market that they're playing a game...their game.

I find that gambling in stocks is more dangerous than playing the lottery once a week.

Some will argue with me and tell me that 'if you work hard and study the market, you will know how to play stocks' but my question to them is why are they reading this post?
After my initial switch from a single to dual monitors, I couldn't imagine ever going back to just one. Let alone a tiny laptop display. Shocked at how many single-laptop-and-not-much-else setups I saw in the examples given.
Here's a few US cases regarding the constitutional right to privacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_...

Several of them are even from the last ten years, since the Internet has indeed raised many questions.
Yes, and that's actually what they did here, even though they label them "consumer grade" connections.
I think that's a horrible invention pretty much designed to infect women with HIV
when you will discover the warm water, write a blog post and you will win the Pulitzer prize
I was going to say the same thing, you see a lot of them parked on the tarmac in Mojave with out of business livery or sometimes just painted white.

There have been stories of folks laundering money in the middle east where there are apparently a lot of 'cash' jobs that take US currency, still the cartoon picture of the pallets of cash was pretty hilarious. I wonder if you could trade a pallet of cash for a check from a Saudi Prince?

I am most fascinated by the tunnels though. At some point these guys will be able to plan long enough ahead that they can buy a tunnel boring machine and starting south of the border have it end up in like down town San Diego. Maybe they could fund one of those evacuated tunnel trains we read about here recently :-). Given the work on quad copters I'm still surprised that there aren't semi autonomous groups of quad-copter mules carrying cocaine in swarms from point A to point B.
At this point, I doubt it will help. Why? The cartels thrive in countries where you can essentially buy off any official.

When you legalize drugs, they aren't going to suddenly stop selling it. They will now have a legal business which will continue to fund their criminal empires. We most likely will see an increase in other crimes, like extortion and kidnapping.

Drugs are still illegal in the US and we don't really see the same kind of crime in our country because the police actually (for the most part) do their job.

If you really want to stop the violence, stop the corruption. I know the recreational drug users of HN don't really want to hear this..
On Bloomberg News, Gupta's time with Goldman Sachs was emphasized over his time at McKinsey. On NPR, they didn't even mention his role at McKinsey. On NYT (this article), they stress Gupta's time at McKinsey over his time at GS.

I wonder what kind of biases or vested interests (perhaps) we can infer from this. (Or perhaps I'm overthinking this)
The term "rock star programmer" is by now a symbol that people intuitively understand the meaning of. Essentially equivalent to the "creme de la creme" of programmers, but if we switched to using that term few would balk at the comparison to dairy production. I've described support staff coworkers as "total rock stars" before. Everybody gets what I mean when I say that.
I think Mr. Gupta's family was also quite hurt by this verdict.
What's VaaS?
On a related topic:

(US only) This won't be specific for programming, but there is a great program called Computers with Causes, that takes donations of used (functional or nonfunctional) computers and computer equipment. The program refurbishes the equipment and the computers go to schools, libraries, community centers, etc.

If you have any old equipment lying around, consider donating it:

http://www.computerswithcauses.org/

Having said that, it may be interesting if someone set up a program that facilitates donation directly to benefit underprivileged programmers.
But what if someone does #2 in the urinal?
These sort of arguments bug me. I won't repeat the great criticisms that have already been made. One of the types of things that he says that get me are completely unsupportable statements like:
" Apple products have historically retained their value quite well, in part due to third-party repair manuals, but also due to a number of very modular, very upgradeable designs."

Not only would he probably be unable to find any evidence for that as being a reason but it doesn't pass the common sense test. PCs are very upgradeable as well... I'd argue more so... so clearly that's not the reason that macs have better resale value.

In the end, he sounds like an old mechanic complaining that fuel injection is worse than carburetors because they're less tunable. The car industry has already gone this direction making it harder and harder for amateurs to tinker and fix their vehicles and yet cars today are safer, faster, and more reliable than cars 20 years ago.
I admit that I (in a way) root for those guys. If they can move around such quantities of physical illegal stuff then we can be sure we can move around any strings of bits we choose to.
~258 odd a year. I've got a reseller account with enom that brings the price down a bit, though it'd be far cheaper to use someone like godaddy.

I let a few expire a year when I've traded out domains, but most of these have been registered since '06. Inevitably, hopefully, will launch projects on them :)
There's a generalization of this problem where we consider the set of all lines between (a, 0) and (0, b) with

||(a, b)||_p = 1

as in the Lp norm; and ask, what curve is produced (as their boundary) ?

And the answer has the nice form: The set of points (x,y) which satisfy

||(x, y)||_q = 1

where q = p / (p+1) [which can be written as 1/q - 1/p = 1.]

This is written up as the solution to a puzzle here:

http://fridaypuzzl.es/?p=187

and if you love puzzles, try to forget what you just read, and here is the puzzle:

http://fridaypuzzl.es/?p=180
Engineering mosquitos to reject malaria
I think there is an implied, "they won't" in there somewhere I'm sure of it.
Show HN: Budgetable (It's better than Mint)
There is so much innovation that can and needs to be done in the online banking space, Mint hasn't innovated in years, so I decided to.

Some of my experiments...

http://budgetable.com
How Spain’s Problems Got Worse in Less Than a Week
VPN as a Service, I would assume.
Next time you see someone ask for it - simply reply with your request for a $M salary.

After all what does a rockstar get ?
Microsoft Expected to Introduce Tablet
US Open Golf live stream at The Olympic Club in San Francisco,
U.S. Open Golf Tournamen
Match schedules:
Date: June 14-17, 2012
Location: The Olympic Club in San Francisco, California
You can catch the latest in sports entertainment with full access to
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So watch and enjoy U.S. Open Golf Tournamen. Get HD quality Channel
and enjoy this game.
Building an S3 powered liveblog platform
I'm saying the oppposite. I have no reason to proxy twitter.js or other ads scripts on my site. If CF is taking the step to rewrite those to the same domain, then they also have to guard for respecting all the cache implications of that.
This post doesn't make much sense to me either. JavaScript encourages an object-oriented style, but with prototype-inheritance and flexible method binding (where `this` in a function is determined by the caller). CoffeeScript's features embrace both of these design choices and make them easier to use. Using the `class` keyword to set up a prototype chain is really nice, and `@` opens up whole new possibilities that would have been too syntactically heavy with the `this` keyword.

JS is object-oriented. If you really want to write functional code in JS, you're going to need persistent data structures, like Clojure (and presumably ClojureScript) provide. Otherwise you'll pay a high cost for constantly copying objects. Without persistent data structures you pretty much need to mutate properties to remain performant. And if you're mutating properties, object-oriented code is a good approach.

I don't understand why the author sees randomly assigning functions to anonymous objects as a superior approach to using prototypes.
Security Startups Focusing On Threats, Not Malware
Perhaps you didn't catch the fact that everything he wrote was a recruitment pitch?
It's funny how he couldn't do any of these things before while using social media. This is BS. I knew even before clicking the link exactly what it would say. Incredibly cliche. Someone should write an article - Moderation. How does it work?
My sarcasm meter is faulty. Are you being sarcastic, or genuinely serious?
Is there a place where I can read more about this? Like how to write code along these lines, and maybe how to understand why it works?
My Key Recruiter Indicators, based on my experiences in the US:

Good: Working with a founder of a company that's more than a few years old.

Bad: Talking to someone different each time a company contacts you.

Toxic: Talking to someone new each time, and them making you go through the same "getting to know you" interview questions each time.

Good: The recruiter sends you job opportunities that match what you've told them to look for, and what they send you gets progressively better with more feedback.

Bad: Repeatedly send you jobs that don't match your skills or interests.

Toxic: Send you jobs that don't even match your location requirements.

Good: Gives you "behind the scenes" details about postings - what skills are really required and what they're willing to train, what the work environment is like, etc.

Bad: Only knows what's on the job listing, and, if you match the requirements, will tell you whatever you need to hear to get you to agree to the interview.

Toxic: Won't even tell you the name of the company they're submitting you to.

Good: Talking openly with you about their "cut", or at least open to ideas for increasing your take-home pay. (US contracting example: how much will they increase your rate if you switch from W-2 to 1099?)

Bad: Asking you for your rate/salary range to begin with, and using your bottom-of-range number as the starting point to negotiate you down from.

Toxic: Negotiating you down on your rate repeatedly, practically at every step of the recruiting process.

What really sucks about working with recruiters is, an average-to-bad recruiter can still get you a good job. Since it's a numbers game for everyone involved, there's at least some incentive to put up with assholes, as long as there's a chance that they will find you something good.
I see no comments yet on one of the biggest factors underlying highly productive programming: choosing the part of a development at which you can most easily excel. Sometimes there are legitimate areas where you have expertise, but mostly it's the well-defined areas that have no external roadblocks. And the rough parts get left for everyone else!
Where can I buy a giant white board in the South Bay?
Does anyone know where I can purchase some giant whiteboards that are used in startup offices/schools? I've been to a few stores but no one seems to carry them in stock (only online).
Ah, you know me a little to well.......Working on it.
The ease of disassembling OLPCs is intentional
http://www.engadget.com/2008/02/03/5-year-olds-repair-olpc-l...
Yes, but not directly. They've built or are using a CDN in front of S3, just like CloudFront.
TCP connections take a lot of time to setup, and go through a ramp phase (slow start), especially on mobile where RTT is 200-1000ms. The theory is that by multiplexing multiple requests over the same connection, you'll get faster overall load time.

You can think of domain sharding as a workaround for the fact that HTTP does not allow true multiplexing. With SPDY, we can avoid that complexity and reuse the same connection.
I wonder if the "70% rule" still applies in 2 years, given that the buyer can't replace the battery anymore (or ask the local geek to do it for them).

In my experience (small computer store, doing such stuff on commission among other things), buying a second hand Mac and some add-ons (battery, disk, RAM) often went hand in hand...
How to add Image to Button with JavaFX 2
This is a tutorial about how to add image to button with JavaFX 2. As you can see from the image below, we will have 3 buttons with images. Two of them will have just only images, but one of them will have image and text.
While that would reduce violent crime, it would also sanction people using recreational drugs besides alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine. Many voters and politicians find it against their religious or moral beliefs to allow other people to do recreational drugs besides the ones they themselves are doing.
Indeed; and my post was never intended to belittle Joel himself. He has provided great value to the industry in both capacities. I'm mainly challenging the notion that if he truly hires only developers he considers to be rockstars, then why doesn't the company have a more compelling domain than bug tracking and PM?
JavaFX 2: Create Dialog with Stage
This is a tutorial about creating a new dialog with Stage. This will be a very short example, and as you can look below, this is how our little example will look in the end. As you can see there is a button, a when user click on that button I will create and open a new dialog, simple like that.
Eh, it very well might be the best answer. It's a "Have you stopped beating your grandmother?" kind of question. Perhaps the famous Zen non-answer "Mu" would be better, but "No" is about as close an English equivalent as you'll get.

Q: How long until they ban VPNs?

A: No. Just no.
Privacy as a Service sounds like a very plausible business model for the future (or even today).

edit: I forgot about this[1], so apparently it already exists!

[1]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57412225-281/this-internet...
The big tech companies I've worked for use VPN heavily for remote workers, so my first reaction was, "This could never happen."

But now that you mention it, I could see a situation where domestic VPN providers are forced to log user data (or be on the hook for copyright violations when the VPN is used by employees) and ISPs are strong-armed into blacklisting overseas VPN providers. That's actually kind of scary.
Ignore Your Performance Goals, Increase Your Performance
Giving up social media for 30 days (well except for using Facebook 5 times). That doesn't really sound like giving up social media at all.
Sony Xperia banks on smartphone market
A lot of those workspaces consist of a laptop (often 13inch macbook) on a desk.

Laptop screens, on desks, are at the wrong height for ergonomics - you shouldnt have to look down at the screen all day.

People should be using large dedicated monitors, which are at the right height, and dedicated input peripherals (e.g. keyboard+mouse). Ergonomic, and efficient.

A nice 27inch IPS display is now very cheap; I do not understand professional hackers working just off a laptop.
WEBINAR: Tricks and Tips for Awesome Meetings and Webinars, Every Time
Ask HN:  Recommendations on a simple static site generator?
My research group wants to put up a website. I'm the only person in the group who knows HTML, so this would fall on my lap, except I'm leaving soon, so they need something other people will be able to maintain. My thought was to use a static site generator that future students could then add pages too without necessarily needing to play with the templates. However, I have an awkward set of requirements.

1) The site must be static. There's no ruby/perl/php/python on the server.

2) The software must run well under Windows. Future students will need to be able to install the software under Windows on their own. The students will have a passing familiarity with the command line, but I'd prefer if they didn't need to deal with Windows PATH variable issues. Something with a dedicated Windows installer would be a definite plus.

3) The system must be relatively simple to run. Future students will have some programming experience, most likely Fortran or Python, so they're capable of handling some complexity. On the other hand, since this is a side project for them, it'd be nice if they didn't have to learn a new programming language.
What happens when you use an off-shore VPN that doesn't keep logs? TorrentFreak listed a bunch of them with their respective privacy policies: https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-ano...
>How is installing a new OS not a user action?

Who said it isn't? The issue is newegg said "no RMA for you because you installed an OS, we're not even going to look into the issue to see if it was related". Then they said "oh no, that rep just made a mistake, installing an OS is fine". But the reps doing RMAs clearly still don't know this policy, and still reject RMAs without even looking into them. I'm really not understanding why this very simple, easy to understand concept needs to be repeated over and over.
Best to say you don't know, than trying to BS your way through.
I went from dual 24" monitors to macbook air with one 24" to just the air and it's just a matter of getting used to it. The swiping to next desktop feature is awesome for this though, not sure if I could live without. I just notice that having one or two things to focus on is better for me than having 10 things open at the same time.
This is unfortunately true for most web articles and blog posts.

I tend to do this somewhat subconsciously when I start to realize the content is sparse.
People who have lived in big cities in the U.S. would strongly disagree with you. There are entire areas that are dangerous to walk in thanks to drug gangs. Legalize the stuff and dealers can't continue forcing out the competition with guns, since that competition will be the local supermarket.
the death of the 17" Macbook LapCrusher(tm)

Huh. I love my 17" MBP. In fact I bought my third one a year ago... and now I'm particularly glad I did. I'll have to see how many years I can get out of this one... 7 or 8, maybe.
I'd see the most value in a programmer who could combine simple ideas/algorithms for some practical, yet useful application. Not necessarily a 10x l33t haxor genius.
I think your initial target should be people who really dig independent artists and proactively try to support them. Where do you find these people? At local shows.

I'd hit up the end of local performances and pass out flyers. You may laugh but I've found flyers to be very effective if you nail the targeting.

That aside, I'd personally simplify your pricing screen. I've already decided to buy and then find that you want me to make all these decisions about how much I want to pay overall, how much I want to pay the artist etc.
I've got two working, external monitors sitting next to the laptop on which I'm typing this, but they're rarely turned on. I don't think it affects productivity much, either way.