skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think Germany is the only country that has developed regional Wikipedias (at least Bavaria, Palatinate and Northern Germany).

Different varieties of English could do that, but English tends to center on an American/Commonwealth divide with only the two prestige dialects everyone else sees as the only 'valid' ones.
Best website ever - nostalgia
Why can't all restaurants' websites be this good? Made me smile : we've come so far !
This is less of a estimating issue and more of a "our startup only has 6 months of runway so don't fuck up" situation. Again, prioritization is far more important.
I still ended up with an 8 GB page file after a few days of regular usage (nothing too hard like VMs or anything - just your typical Xcode dev workflow, including opening up Photoshop once or twice to export graphics).

This is on a MBP with 8 GB RAM.

I never had any memory-related performance issues in Lion, (maybe because I have an SSD), but I always end up with a big pagefile of stale data.
That is hard to say and it would be a book worthy to explain what could come next.

All I know is that it is unsustainable.

The complexity is simply too high and it's not getting better. One of the reasons I think why you see the fail fast movement be so successful.

Once you accept that failure is part of the process, once you abandon the "zero mistake" policy that many large organizations instill internally and externally you will begin to approach projects differently.

The truth is that "zero mistake" organizations make as many mistakes as everyone else, they just have the financial strength to ignore them as long as economy of scale works in their favor.

I could write forever about projects that went wrong not because the developers where bad but because the premise that fuels product development is broken.

I blame primarily business schools and large parts of academia for this. But it could extend all the way into the way the stock market is structured.

If you buy my premise that post-industrial is different than industrial age. That project definition is primary and time is secondary today. Then it does put some doubt at least in me about whether the stock markets focus on growth and Q's is sustainable.

Nature seems to be doing a good job as pacing various processes. It takes nine months to give birth to a child. One cell at a time. But the process is ongoing.
Nature is the ultimate continues deployment strategy.
That actually doesn't fix the problem as far as registrars are concerned, because the fees only apply if you get refunds above a threshold of 10% of the domains registered. That puts registrars in a uniquely advantageous position for tasting because they register so many domains.

Here's a strategy a registrar could use. For a given 10 minute period, you take the number of domains actually bought by customers, and call that X. Then you multiply that by 10% and call that Y. Now, you take all of the domain searches for unregistered domains that have come through you within that 10 minute period, and run them through a machine learning algorithm that ranks them by the likelihood that they will be purchased. You take the top Y of that list, and taste only those. Now you are guaranteed not to exceed the threshold where you start getting charged for deleted domains.

I am not sure how this strategy would work if the end registrant gets a refund. It may be that that ends up adding to the registrars own tally of refunds, but it would be trivial to tweak the above strategy to decrease Y to adjust for customer refunds, with a controllable amount of uncertainty which can be optimized to maximize the profitability of the strategy over the long run.
> For those who, like me, use desktop Linux full time, [...] is a huge win.

Well I don't know... For the sake of attracting more users, Linux usage tends to become more and more Windows-like. Best illustration is the dropping of network transparency in Wayland because "most people don't care".

I suspect that there is going to be more and more concessions like this.
I wonder whats going on with the IT executives/CIOs of Knight at this point . They must be hanging by a thread?
If you like this, you may be interested in these comparisons of the US and Germany.

http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2011/united...

http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2011/german...

http://www.heritage.org/index/country/unitedstates

http://www.heritage.org/index/country/germany
> A heuristic like "only make 1000 trades a minute" could have saved Knight $400 million!

A heuristic like that would not allow Knight to function. Knight is an electronic market-maker (one of the biggest) and is probably making markets in thousands of symbols and likely updates those quotes several times a second. Their normal quoting rate is on the order of millions of messages/minute and in volatile times may spike 10x or more and still be within 'normal' limits.
See http://dsp.rice.edu/cscamera for an almost practical single pixel camera.
August 2012 Web Server Survey
Maybe it was a way to get people to ration food over winter?
I am currently working in Saudi Arabia (here, fasting is a national rule, however I eat because I'm a Indian and non-Muslim) as a programmer, and I've noticed one funny thing - people just become nocturnal. They eat and work in the night and sleep during the day. This is simply the normal routine reversed. Fasting has minimal effects on them, its not fasting, just the time in which they eat is changed! They work shorter during the day and do the hard work in the night.
"Trading Glitch" = a very good excuse for very bad trades. I'm not implying this happened, but if I was an analyst at Knight Capital and we just lost $440 million, I'd blame it on a "trading glitch".
On my team at Blizzard we really did have "good off" time, in that it was dedicated to playing games. Any games: mobile games, the latest Call of Duty, classic Nintendo games on the 50" TV behind the bar in the break room, pool, volleyball. It amounted to more like 4% time than 20% time, but still, there was no expectation of people coming up with new products as a result of it. I do wonder of it was seen as an additional motivator to ensure people were getting their work completed on time and without needing to stay late working overtime... But I think it was probably just what it seemed like: a fun perk.
Actually, that is a valid tactic, if you are having trouble getting your hardware to gain mindshare.

For this, though... Well, it's already over 3x its initial goal and shows no signs of slowing. They absolutely made the right decision to charge for the devkits. At least, to the plebs, like me.

Higher level developers (i.e. famous names) probably will get a kit or 2 for free still. If Carmack wasn't already part of it, he'd be one of the names I'd expect to get a free kit.
Really curious how this crowd-funding thing will go for you guys, could even make a case study! ;) I definitely like the product already.
(Disclaimer: I'm a militant atheist now) I think I would find stopping five times a day for prayer to be a bit of a distraction, though I imagine the short bursts of meditation would be good for my concentration overall.

I tended to gain weight during Ramadan, but that's probably because my family made a big deal of every iftar, inviting extended family members, eating out and having big greasy Pakistani meals almost every night. I'm somewhat convinced that the type of food in my family would go towards explaining the early 60s life expectancy. Thankfully I married Japanese so I'm hoping that cancels it out!

I found fasting to be generally easy, even in quite long days in Saudi Arabia. Rather than hunger it was more the habit of snacking as a reaction to it that catches you out. The main tactic we had for dealing with it was (as much as possible) sleeping during the day and working at night, though I imagine you'd need a very understanding employer (or sufficient litigation) to pull that off as a full-time dev.
Election Staff loses unencrypted personal info on 2.4 million voters
In my experience Linux mouse acceleration is actually more customisable than in Windows; X11 has several related options that can be added to your xorg.conf or changed without restarting X with xinput.

http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/PointerAccel... has a good rundown of all the options, perhaps the most important being
the "Acceleration Profile", which can be set to -1 to disable acceleration.

As for firmware related acceleration, I've not ran into any - but I can certainly imagine this being something easier to manage under Windows, considering practically all "gaming" mice are aimed at Windows users.
I'm from OZ, and to be honest, I need the canned laughter when watching US comedy - because the humor is not obvious (eg. Will and Grace- canned laughter when a dog walks across the screen ... Ahh, Americans find that funny... Ok)
Now British humor? I get that without canned laughter.
LEFT in Chicago? Are we being hunted?
I love it.

Looks like someone's HFT system backfired. I'm looking forward to the Nanex analysis of this one.

Nanex on the 2010/5/6 'Flash Crash':

http://www.nanex.net/FlashCrashFinal/FlashCrashAnalysis_Theo...
Nobody mentioned that Moore's first law isn't just about the number of transistors doubling. It's about the number in the chip that's cheaper per transistor.

Also there's Moore's second law about the cost of fabs rising exponentially at about the same rate. If GDP growth doesn't accelerate dramatically, we won't be able to afford fabs any longer in a few decades.
I'd say it's not the compositing/effects, it's the spacing and general layout. KDE apps tend to look quite cluttered and claustrophobic, at least when I compare them to e.g. OS X and some better GNOME apps. A bit more whitespace wouldn't hurt, you can't fix that with gradients and transparency.
Can you get a patent on being a patent troll?
In the SEO realm, the majors (google/yahoo/bing) prefer microdata:

http://schema.org/

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

(However, given lack of browser support, microformats are still key for mobile).
what number of you consider as a cutoff?
Four huge benefits to Google's single-pixel solution
The fact that it was popular doesn't mean it was good. Bloodletting was an extremely popular practice too, but it's now a consensus that's it's harmful except in very specific situations.
I don't think this game will use 3 GBs of RAM. If that's the case it doesn't matter that much.
Only thing holding me back from upgrading is the complete lack of wanting to hex edit my ATI kext again.. heck it might not even be compatbile with ML.

Hackintoshes :/
I love your verbing of "borg".
The problem with Mac OS, that it's always had with every 3rd party built-in library, is that the OpenGL they use is extremely outdated.

Source: Current version on newest OS X if you don't want to support Legacy OS X is 3.2, Legacy OS X is 2.1 https://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/capabilit...

Most recent OpenGL is 4.2. http://www.opengl.org/

Most OS X coders, till the recent OS X release have been using 2.1 which was released in 2006 which is when OpenGL was inferior to DirectX in every way.
Mattel casts NASA Curiosity rover die with new Hot Wheels toy
The 'Does HFT add value?' question gets flogged to death every time one of these articles gets posted.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3894302

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3852341

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828538
Unused memory is wasted memory. As a user, you shouldn't care about memory usage if there's plenty available.

It's far more interesting to see what happens in a low-memory situation.
What Are The Real Reasons Behind Instagram's Surge in Popularity?
Did you not know corporations are psychopaths? It's true.

http://compenetration.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/corporation-l...
Lol ... its okay. Time yourself and cut it down to 2.5 hours tommorrow.

Tiny steps are okay as long as you make a lot of them ...
There is still a limit on lens size that is very hard to work around.. i think that by scanning, a camera like this could function as a pinhole lens, but the effective lens size would only be the size of the single pixel.
I'm slightly skeptical of their benchmarks -- the fact they're using 300fps numbers is a red flag. No one runs games at that speed. What's the comparison for a game running at 30 - 60fps? My hunch is that D3D has a tiny fixed per-frame cost that becomes irrelevant when frames take 10x longer to render.
Fasting is good for your immune system as it stimulates phagocytosis. Here's a paper on Ramadan fasting:

http://www.ayubmed.edu.pk/JAMC/PAST/21-4/Latifynia.pdf

An amusing book on complete fasting by vintage american novelist Upton Sinclair here:

http://archive.org/details/fastingcure00sinciala

Personally, I fast regularly up to two weeks at a time, both for weight control and because I believe in it's overall long term health benefits.
I don't see any obvious advantages of NoSQL in most enterprise apps. Although it's such a fuzzy term these days.
Second that.

Nanex has done some great work. To date, afaik, they're the only ones to try and figure out the Facebook IPO trainwreck from the technical side. And it's a doozy.

http://www.nanex.net/aqck/3099.html
OpenStack Community Manager Compares Open Cloud Innovation to Linux
Likewise! Funny how some time we're so focused on "what's next" that we forget what was there, not that long ago.
seinfeld is a really good example for this. a hilarious show; someone watching the dubbed german version would never understand what's funny about it...
> I'm looking forward to the Nanex analysis of this one

Already posted:

http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/3522.html
Most of the errors in estimating time when programmers do estimations is the assumption that requirements are final. The requirements are never final, and never will be.
As for firmware related acceleration, I've not ran into any - but I can certainly imagine this being something easier to manage under Windows, considering practically all "gaming" mice are aimed at Windows users.

It's a feature of some mice. If it can't be disabled, it's a misfeature for gaming. Curiously some gaming mice are sold with acceleration that can't be disabled: http://www.saunalahti.fi/~cse/temp/mice.html
Why is admitting you have buggy trading software better than admitting you have traders who made bad trades?
At this point we're curious about it too. Still a long way to go. I promise I'll do a blog post with the things we've learned.
On Pref, from http://piaw.blogspot.com/2010/05/promotion-systems-redux.htm... :
“In any case, I think it’s very healthy for Google to have an internal discussion about this. But do I expect the system to change? No. The super-star rule I referred to in that previous post would prevent that. I did have a discussion with a VP about this. He told me that when he first joined Google, he tried to change the promotion criteria to better formally recognize leadership, mentoring, and the importance of spreading knowledge (technical or otherwise) throughout the organization. The result? A bunch of very senior engineers (who had all benefited under the current regime, and were understandably worried about their career prospects under a different system) shouted him down.”
How would you suggest solving this problem?
This recent thread might be of some help
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4316967
I would venture to estimate many of the fake account have few friends but many thousands of likes to products and services. These are not users you want to include in your advertising campaign, but inevitably do.
I would venture to estimate many of the fake accounts have few friends but many thousands of likes to products and services. These are not users you want to include in your advertising campaign, but inevitably do.
I got bit by the same thing with VMware. You must be on Fusion 4 for Mountain Lion. Sucks because I had no plans on upgrading.
Thanks! I'm really excited about all the feedback we have been getting so far. Both from people who gives us insight on how our crowd funding campaign can be improved and on how they would use such an app.
on the other hand, it's a good story to tell your grand kids one day...
Read half of it. 70% applies to France vs US as well.
I promptly quizzed him on which states 5 American cities were in, all larger than Zurich.

Who cares about states in a foreign country? In this context the size of the city or state is not of any interest.
I love the simplicity of this site. The site is very precise and easy to use.
Given that there was suspicious activity in ~150 names of ~45 minutes "trading glitch" is much more plausible than "bad analysis".
I worked at Google for four years, so I think I can speak with a bit more authority than the 'matter of month'ers you criticize, when I say:

Yes, some of the criticisms, especially those by outsiders with clear agendas, are overblown. That said, a lot of them are very real. Most of the Google employees who openly criticize the company were there for a lot more than 'months' (and I'm pretty sure I know who you're targeting with that epithet.)

I would say that one can build a somewhat realistic picture of the environment inside the company from the postings of ex-employees on HN. It's a lagging indicator, obviously. But the complaints aren't made up.

As for 20% time itself: it's always been somewhere between fiction and fact, in the sense that, in practice, you had to be very assertive or have a very supportive manager to use it, and you were generally cutting into your performance review scores by not using that time on your main project. My understanding now is that it's more or less officially dead, but that postdates my tenure at the company, so I can't confirm it.
I think there's a big difference between designing an application using threads and using an existing thread-based API or system, like the article describes. If you write your own application-specific threads you can pick and choose from any concurrent design pattern you want. Using pre-existing multithreaded systems typically forces the programmer to use specific policies to interact with the system.
Because of Piracy Dead Trigger is now free for iOS
Dead Trigger is available for download free of charge on the Apple App Store.
> the gaming division of Microsoft seems to be genuinely innovative and doing some really great stuff with interfaces

Just to provide some context:
The whole EMG research presented in the article has been conducted by T. Scott Saponas (et al.) at Microsoft Research - not the gaming division. And they conducted academic research, not product development.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/ssaponas/
A couple of good sites for this, that list not just the source website, but the actual courses themselves:

http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses

http://www.class-central.com/
Wow, you can almost see the bug happening as you read this. Amazing stuff.
Funny you should say that. Exactly my experience. Just left a comment on Adam's blog, but let me add it here as well.

I turned off Dashboard where I had a couple of unused widgets active running in the background (used Dashboardkiller app from MacUpdate) because I haven't used any of those widgets in months. Suddenly all of my mysterious memory/paging issues on Lion disappeared. Swap and page-outs decreased significantly. Machine is running like the first fresh install. Give it a try.

Edit: I'm running Lion 10.7.4
Although people did bloodletting because they thought it was good for you.
That's not really the opposite experience. Bad cooling on a piece of mobile hardware isn't nvidia's fault.

I'm glad for your sake that you haven't hit any driver bugs though.
Most modern operating systems try write the contents of the physical memory to the page file at the first good opportunity (well before it's needed) in order to save time when the page is actually paged out, so it's perfectly normal to have a page file that is at least as large as your physical memory.
> Let’s just say fasting isn’t one of them. All of my co-workers; I have worked with past and present have been extremely understanding and respectful of the [month-long] fast. Also as a by-product of this kindness they have coined the term: "Ramadan code".

If I were an employer, after reading this...
I'd like to see how it works on the third image from the top, with the gas station sign, etc.

It is fairly straightforward to detect a billboard in a random nature scene; look for straight lines and intersections of them. Most (all?) billboards are also horizontal.

It is quite another thing to detect billboards in an urban setting.
I'm seeing the exact opposite, but for a different reason. On Lion I could put my MBP to sleep and only lose about 5-10% of the battery over 8 hours. Now on ML I lose ~40%, with nothing running. I turned off location services today to see if that's the culprit.

As for actual on-battery use - yes, the battery life is noticeably improved over Lion.
I've never really tried to understand Dashboard from the O/S side, but it seems like it's almost installing a separate WebKit process for each widget.

Edit: I'm on Mountain Lion, and Dashboard is still a memory hog. I just disable it now.
While Valve is certainly in a position to know this, it's worth keeping in mind that they do have a horse in this race. For other legitimate reasons, Valve wants to move away from Windows as a platform, and that requires that people be convinced of the viability of the alternatives, which in turn hinges on whether or not OpenGL is competitive with DirectX.

That doesn't mean they're wrong about OpenGL being faster than DirectX, and even if they are wrong, it doesn't mean they're being intentionally misleading. But it's important to keep our eye on the priors.
> Strangely, I usually put on more weight during Ramandan.

If you are starving, your metabolism slows down to conserve energy. I assume you eat heavy meals(high carb? sugar? oil?) when you break your fast(dinner? before morning prayers?). Slow metabolism, coupled with high calory intake when your body doesn't need it(if you go to bed after a heavy meal, what would your body use the calories for?) would be the reason for the weight gain.
you had me until w3schools ... see http://w3fools.com/
One thing to consider about the relationship between value and control is that value is not a constant. Project A may be worth 70 million if it is finished in time for partners C and D to do their portion before dates X-Y, and only 30 million or less after that time period. Time often plays a strong role in the value of a product, and the more time impacts produced value, the more control is valued.
Congrats!! It has been a long time coming.
FTA, which took the words right out of my mouth:

I have no compunction in getting tethering for free, either from wired Play Store apps, or the root-only hotspot apps. You are simply circumventing a system that charges you twice for the same service. It’s no different than sending an IM instead of an expensive SMS.

Tethering charges are nothing more than a naked cash grab. And phone companies wonder why they're hated...

5 gig is 5 gig, regardless of the device consuming it.
I'm really looking forward to doing some more product videos and see what people think. I believe OneSec is one of these things that it's hard to explain but that you instantly grasp once you see it in action.
The top answer to this question on Quora is the best I've seen. http://www.quora.com/Engineering-Management/Why-are-software...

What really surprises me is that everyone accepts that there have to be estimates. While estimates are useful in many scenarios, most of the estimates I see developers giving add no value and are a waste of time. I've been working with teams now for the last 2 years who don't do estimates, and they are the highest performing teams I've ever worked with and the rest of the business have the highest trust in IT I've seen.