skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're just overreacting. The first link is really more about labor issues, and one employer being very generous to their employees. The second was about a 17 year-old. That's not general advice for all programmers. Honestly, my advice to someone 17yo who knows how to program would be similar! That's just age talking to youth, and sure maybe some of the commenters went off topic but I can't blame them. I would tell any 17yo to broaden their horizons too, because getting well rounded at 17 is going to be more valuable in the long run. The advice in that thread wasn't all "go exercise", that appears to be only one comment. Certainly not a "new wave".
announced-but-unshipped (like raspberry pi)

What's unshipped - the A model? I got my first B model over a month ago and the second a few weeks ago. My guess is that Raspberry Pi has shipped more units than half of the devices in that article.
No; because C is a fine implementation language. It's low-level enough to be efficient without a lot of moving parts, there's very little magic.

For me, Armstrong got interested in the idea of building reliable systems, went off and did a PhD on the topic, and then created a prototype implementation of the concepts developed therein in Prolog - a declarative language essentially built around combinatorial search with pruning. In other words, he's a fine high-level thinker, and a very competent wielder of Prolog; but I believe I've read elsewhere that it was Mike Williams who rewrote the VM interpreter in C, and all the low-level imperative stuff like GC.
Quality improvement through TDD
Not always true either. I spent some time in the military in South Africa during the bush war. I can without a doubt say that I've never felt closer to another male as I did then.

However, 23 years later and I only have contact details for one of the 8, and even though he and I are friends on Facebook we never exchange more than the annual "happy birthday". Back then all 8 of us were in the same hole. Today we have different lives, with little (if anything) in common. Anything we have left for each other belongs to another time, and place.

A softball team is going to provide far more rewarding and, importantly, long-lasting friendships than "shared struggle and purpose".
> They care about saving money and saving time, in that order.

I don't think this is true. For most businesses saving time is more important than saving money, but with a big caveat. Your service needs to actually save me time, not save me time "once I change my business processes and learn how to use your service." So if your service can save time right out of the box, businesses are not only more likely to pay for it, but they'll also probably pay more.

Of course, a necessary precondition is whatever your selling needs to solve a problem businesses believe they have. So if you're not solving a problem businesses believe they have, even if you're giving it away, few businesses will use it.

The flip side is if you're solving a problem businesses believe to be important, companies are more willing to invest a lot of time if they believe the end state will be substantially better than where they are now.
Which they broke with the Penny Arcade no-ad Kickstarter earlier this week.
Clearly for worse, considering that the lock reason is (in boldface): "it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site".

A question asking for pros/cons of storing images in a database (vs. links to files) is not too subjective in my book. It's a typical programmer question.
The answers and questions were both on topic and related to the sites purpose connecting common programming problems with great programming answers.
The Manifold Blunders of Xaml–Part 1: Version and Platform Hell
I love Vancouver and would hate cars if I lived there too. On ever visit we get a hotel a bit out, but still accessible to the sky train and have enjoyed the transit immensely.

What made you leave, out of curiosity. I've told my wife many times that I'd love it if we moved there (we live in the Seattle area). She's a PT and worried about getting paid less there because of the health care system. (I know they get paid well, and tried pointing this out - I've looked it up)
Online censorship: Monitoring the monitors
Looking back at my own SO account (5000 karma earned well over a year or two ago) which I've let idle, I noticed questions that have been closed as off-topic continue to earn karma -- indicating the mods are off on the soul of the place :P
> Yeah? Does that say something I'm not aware of?

It says you're not a monomaniac who cares only about appropriate intellectual pursuits, like computer science, mathematics, or physics.
Methinks "How To Win Friends and Influence People" hasn't made it to your reading list.
The original post by Dalton mentions freemium services such as Github and Dropbox as examples, so following a similar model and charging for certain features might allow for network effects to happen (although those examples aren't nearly as dependent on that).
You make friends the same way you meet someone to date - by doing something.

You will not make friends sitting at home. You will not make friends at a bar full of people.

Join a club or sports team. I've met most of my adult friends through ski club trips and sailing teams. Or join a volunteer organization, or attend local meetups, or take a photography/art class.

It is difficult to make friends at work, but not impossible. You have to find common ground outside of work, because no one wants to hang out with people where the only topic of conversation is work. I surf with one guy from my office and ski with a few others.

The friendship is not from the activity - the activity could be solo (like surfing). The friendship comes from the 3 hour car ride up to the mountain you share BSing about stuff. Or hanging out in a bar after racing sailboats with the rest of the crew. Or looking at the surf forecast in the office all day hoping its good that evening.

Somehow the conversation grows from 'what mountains do you like to ski' to 'man I'm having X, Y, Z problems in my life'. That doesn't always happen, but I've probably met 15 people over the last 2 years that I regularly do things with outside of work and I'm actually friends with 3 or 4 of them.
I have a question regarding this brain scanning and uploading idea:

Won't Heisenberg's principle make this impossible?
CED Program Director Dhruv Patel On North Carolina’s Startup Scene
Trends in the Public Technology Market
The only thing I found weird about the article was the developers product development decisions based on a single female MIT student as opposed to talking to lots of people who are the target for a product like this, especially since he plans on putting it in SoMa and targeting the tech crowd which is largely male. This isn't sexism, it's just knowing the audience.

For example, the pull out bed in this apartment seems far more practical than a Murphy bed that really only works if you make your bed properly so it's not subject to the perils of gravity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juWaO5TJS00

The other decision was the move to a tub style shower. The only people I know that that really take baths are women. Why? Because they fit in tubs comfortably. I can't think of any men who habitually take baths but know many women that do. Tub-size is probably a big contributing factor as to why.

TBH, if someone is living in apartment like this, they value practicality over everything else. If that is the case, a bathroom space optimized for cleaning and maintenance is more ideal, such as the bathroom in this micro-apt, where the toilet, sink area and shower all share the same tiled floor
http://life.nationalpost.com/2011/12/21/micro-living-canadas...

Anyways, really shortsighted product management in my view given the location and target market. If I were a single woman, SoMa is not a neighborhood I would live in. There is not enough foot-traffic and decent lighting at night to feel really safe.
Before getting into how to have an intervention, let's look at why:

0) It's totally possible to be super committed and working really hard hard in your startup. It's up to you to realize that a lot of your effort likely isn't getting you a productive return. Do work in batches.

1) Your technology exists to serve you, not the other way around.

2) The world and universe will not stop functioning without you.

3) There are very few problems in life that can't wait 1-2, if not 4 hours.

4) You are not always wired in, you are always distracted. It's why you're tired, unfocused, likely unproductive.

5) Your goal is to learn to get some space so you can see the world with your eyes instead of through a screen. It makes you balanced and produce better software. Life is for living. Keyboard time is rarely living.

How:

1) Turn off everything. Go for a walk. Read a book. Notice that no one is as important as they've hallucinated.

2) Breathe. Anything you miss will be forwarded to you or on your twitter feed anyways.

3) Block everything in your hosts file and only use your smartphone to access it. Every single site that isn't productive. Hacker News should be at the top of it, including Google news or anything else that takes your time.

4) Turn off all notifications. No one is the center of the universe. My phone has no IM, VM, Email, SMS, or APP notifications turned on. I run a consulting business while I'm on call. Nothing has ever imploded. Some might be allowed to make a quiet ticking noise, or use the haptic feedback.

5) The post about meditation is really good. Learn to take many thoughts down to one, and one down to none.
We also wiped out rinderpest. It was a cattle disease, but it means a lot from an agricultural perspective.
What happened to the stereoscopic gaming revolution?
I love the internet, so dearly. I understand your point although I think it's less about picking battles and more forcing a cut off point - it's obviously counter productive, but more obsessive behaviour.
Sure. You can like a rich guy independent of his money. But if his money is the basis for the friendship it's not really a friendship, IMO.
How Will The Web Monetize In 2020?
The internet running out of space is a red herring. The concern is a dilution of focus of Stack Overflow.

I see you have the same bad habit I do, which is to hit 'Reply' and start typing after having read the first third of a comment.
Below is some background reading on whole brain emulation from the Future of Humanity Insititute. It isn't hard to come to a better understanding of the present state of research and plausible future goals than is demonstrated by the author of this piece.

http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/Reports/2008-3.pdf

"As this review shows, WBE on the neuronal/synaptic level requires relatively modest increases in microscopy resolution, a less trivial development of automation for scanning and image processing, a research push at the problem of inferring functional properties of neurons and synapses, and relatively business‐as‐usual development of computational neuroscience models and computer hardware.

"This assumes that this is the appropriate level of description of the brain, and that we find ways of accurately simulating the subsystems that occurs on this level. Conversely, pursuing this research agenda will also help detect whether there are low‐level effects that have significant influence on higher level systems, requiring an increase in simulation and scanning resolution.

"There do not appear to exist any obstacles to attempting to emulate an invertebrate organism today. We are still largely ignorant of the networks that make up the brains of even modestly complex organisms. Obtaining detailed anatomical information of a small brain appears entirely feasible and useful to neuroscience, and would be a critical first step towards WBE. Such a project would serve as both a proof of concept and test bed for further development.

"If WBE is pursued successfully, at present it looks like the need for raw computing power for real‐time simulation and funding for building large‐scale automated scanning/processing facilities are the factors most likely to hold back large‐scale simulations."

---

And some further, easier background reading:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/06/mind-uploading-at...

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2009/02/the-age-of-artifi...
That seems to be the consensus here. I disagree with it. A clear invitation to discussion would be "What would you do?" not "What are the pros/cons?". There are plenty of valuable programming questions I can think of that can possibly devolve to some level of discussion. Banning all such questions greatly degrades the site and makes me not want to ask any questions there. If I ask "What is the function parameter in this particular language that I use to do this particular thing?" there could still be differing opinions and so the question could be locked.
Cheddar for iOS: to-do lists and markdown wherever you go
I, for one, am happy with StackOverflow's moderation.
I had the same issues for a long time. Here are some things that worked for me:
- Young children! They will tire you out to the point that you will actually sleep.
- Doing what you like for a day job. Makes a big difference.
- No screens for an hour or even two hours before you go to bed. Consider not watching TV. I haven't seriously watched TV for years and am much happier for it.
- Get obsessed with something outlandish or random. I am building telescopes and gaze in to the depths of space. Gives me some perspective on life on the small blue marble we're on.
I'm pretty certain the question is trolling, but...

It's because sitting in front of a computer coding all day, everyday makes a person fat and boring. And nobody else wants to hang around people who are fat and boring.

It may not be obvious that coding all the time makes a person fat and boring, so the "get out and do stuff" responses are warnings to let people know that there's more to life than writing code.
Throw out your smartphone. Buy a real phone, one you can only call people and receive calls with, as well as SMS.

It could change your life, believe me.
Roaches and rats would never have spread as far as they have without humans carrying them along.
My car has a hot pink mustache—and it just might disrupt the taxi business
Your hard-line stance is a little bit too far IMHO. That inanimate matter programming is all about manipulating also has no notion of objects or object orientation... or (for the most part) methods, fields, functions, procedures, arrays, modules, encapsulation, interfaces, garbage collection, databases ... and so on and so on. All that abstraction exists to make programming easier for humans to grok, and for teams to deliver some "useful work".

To borrow from Robin Milner, who worked on ML: "Types are the leaven of computer programming; they make it digestible." All that abstraction makes programming more digestible, or more palatable. Functional programming is just some more abstraction to make it more digestible. To say that it's a redefinition of programming is just a distraction, since programming has already been redefined.

Also, you're right that CS isn't programming, and viewed in a certain light one could argue CS is basically just a branch of math. But on the other hand, programming without CS really wouldn't be that useful. It's just not a helpful distinction to make in this way.
that weird font on the frontpage tweets
I like the idea of no notifications, this also ties into to having a good routine. Rather than checking and allowing noise to intrude.
Your reaction is understandable but wrong. It's a ugly, horrific block of code that you copy/paste and never think of or see again. The package manager itself makes the installation and management of 3rd party packages incredibly easy. It's super impressive really.

Naturally people ask if the 3rd package manager will become an official feature but that opens up a new can of worms.
The challenge is switch off completely takes a few days and I can rarely do it in a few hours. So for a few hours of downtime, the best hack I found is to talk to other folks about something totally different. On a recent trip I had no phone, no computer etc. and felt totally relaxed after the 3rd day.
I actually have some experience with this on a very small scale. To raise the pH of my 30 gallon reef tank, I add a tiny amount of a product that is mostly NaHCO and Na2CO3.

Still, it is complex and scary, and I have had better success by increasing flow and surface agitation for better oxygen exchange. Just like I would prefer to have less CO2 in our atmosphere.
Interesting! I wasn't sure if anything like this had been done. I guess it shows that there's nothing good that can come from change here.
I think this basic idea is flawed - social networks can be profitable because social networks have been profitable. The vast majority of social networks have not been profitable because the vast majority of startups never reach profitability!

Perhaps a better question (and a more interesting debate) is whether a social network can ever keep up with users and their changing tastes. Myspace was once dominant, but Facebook quickly destroyed it. Digg was once dominant, but Reddit supplanted it. Looking back at the history of the web, there seems to be a point where social networks either fall out of relevance (or muck up a good thing).

Not sure what the answer is to that question...If you look at Myspace, you could argue they died because they failed to change. If you look at Digg, you could just as easily argue that they died because they changed. So, I'd argue that social networks need to stay half a step ahead of their users' tastes to stay profitable. I'm not sure that's possible, so social networks need to diversify (likely away from pure social networking) to stay profitable.
It wasn't comic sans. It was Calibri. I changed it to Helvetica now.
>An underlying premise of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange is that there’s tremendous amounts of knowledge tied up in “ordinary” people, and given an easy way to show it off and a little incentive they can make this knowledge available and help as many people as possible.

That is the underlying premise of free market economics and small-government conservatism, too. Go read some Thomas Sowell, a lot of his books discuss the issue, especially A Conflict of Values and, in more detail, Knowledge and Decisions.
It's critical. I don't allow my senses to be bombarded by interruption. Interruption is the enemy of productivity, after all.

I do have regular processes and routines to check those notifications, or obviously check them when I'm expecting an intermittent reply.

The funny thing with being a younger entrepreneur is you put up with all sorts of this BS either leading you to an early burn out, or start figuring out there's a whole world out there to enjoy as much as startups.

I simply stopped looking at workaholics with personal lives in shambles as role-models. I look for the uber successful that are successful in all areas of their lives.
The end goal is to be more productive and to ship something. Given most software development is hidden from the end user, most times its immaterial what its written on.
Housing is orthogonal to the problem. The issues at hand for kids growing up in the projects are social network effects.
How do cockroaches and rats cope with Antarctica?
I think the main problem is that we live in an increasingly secular society, but nothing has actually replaced church. And the people who are still at church, at least at many churches, are right-wing nutjobs.
Versions of Android that support SPDY also support SNI.
It's obvious it was a bug introduced somewhere, (actually seemed like something was commented out for testing purposes and was forgotten about to me, maybe that's just because I'm forgetful though) but I'd have hoped there are a few tests that are run before an update is made live which would include something like this.

Props for the speedy fix though.
A while back, I came across this advice below (which could touch a nerve with some of you - because you may reject what it implicitly is saying - that you need to put yourself out there - be willing to be rejected):

"It takes relationships to make relationships. And, in general, to make relationships, you have to allow vulnerability. Vulnerability is the difference between a conversation that starts, "How about this weather we're having?" and a conversation that starts, "Oh my God, let me tell you about how I just fell in a puddle in front of a group of nuns." The former is so boring that it makes listeners want to crawl under a table; the latter creates a spark and a list of follow-up questions. These are two extreme examples, but generally, the more of yourself you put out there, the more others will have to connect with.

As for your list of "nevers": they may feel big to you, but in the scheme of things, they get a shrug. Each of us is on an individual and separately-terrifying trajectory. Ultimately, you are not behind. Self-discovery is vital at any age. A lot of people couple up, get married, and have kids without ever having to look inward. Those are often the people who cave later in life. Get that introspection out of the way now, and you'll set yourself up well for the future — angst-Tumblr or no...

Pursue activities you are passionate about: passion is an attractive quality, and others will pick up on it...

Friendships will be made when your attention is elsewhere."

http://www.nerve.com/advice/miss-information/miss-informatio...
It's not about pride in your work, it's about the reality of your client. Options normally intend to cover aspects and requirements of the work that the client didn't even think of. Options can allow you to create a solution better than the local maxima that you would find within the confines of your client's understanding of his needs.
Google analytics API. We use it, have been for a few months and its excellent.
Another vote for The Annotated Turing. Really does a great job of shedding light on a rather esoteric paper.
Also, the majority wins, so if two voted to close as a dup and three voted for off topic the. It gets closed as OT.
I use my calendar as a to-do list. Works for me. Block out time to do tasks - not just meetings. That way it forces me to bucket time for stuff to get done.
If you consider this, what you've just said is "I think it's daft for Larry not to like the way lisp looks considering some people don't like the way perl looks."

I don't like the way python looks. Does that mean it would be daft for Guido to ever criticise another language's aesthetics? :)
Use whatever language/framework is best for you. That could well be PHP, and if you only know PHP well, it probably is.

Yes, PHP is objectively a bad language. The PHP ecosystem is poor, development is stagnant, the syntax is ugly. Whatever the future of the web may be, it's certainly not PHP.

But...you know PHP. Presumably you know what it's good at (and what it's not so good at). You also know your project. Think you could code it faster and easier in PHP than anything else? Yes? Awesome, knock yourself out. As a bonus, a ton of other developers also know PHP, so you'll probably be able to hire coders easily.

(On the other hand, as a coder, I like to keep my skills current, and that means learning new technologies from time to time. Yes, PHP is currently dominant, despite what you may hear on HN, but it's not the future. I jumped from the PHP ship a long time ago, and I have never regretted it for a split second. Are you going to learn a new tech stack eventually? If so, why not now? If not, then when?)
Says the American! Still waiting for Season 4 here in England
go get a job you dont care about & get drunk in the evenings instead of thinking about customers/metrics/analytics.

or take a trip/pilgrimage to somewhere spiritual for guidance.. preferably in the next 7 days.