skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you are making a 5-page website and you have effectively no code to write, the reason you can make an estimate cleanly is that it is no longer programming. At that point you are estimating how long the content will take to produce, get signoffs, graphics, etc, and those are quite estimable. The worst case you're looking at there is CSS incompatibilities. An iPhone app that is just layout out some UI elements and doing something very simple (or just pulling up existing webpages) will similarly mostly not be programming.

Of course if you remove most or all of the programming elements, the programming no longer screws your estimates up.

There's a whiff of No True Scotsman in my post here, so let me nail this down a bit more and say that in this case I see programming as requiring some sort of logic in it. Laying out a form for your iPhone app may occur in a programming tool and with another definition may even be part of the "programming", but for the purposes of this post I am not including that. And while having, say, a conditional panel that only appears when certain things is true is indeed programming, if your project is dominated by content and forms and just has a trace of logic, your exposure to the chaos of programming is limited and negligible. It's a continuum, of course, not a binary thing.
The Jelastic Spotlight: Javier Ortiz and Tutellus.com
it's not well explained, but i think it's about whether or not physical theories with "hidden variables" are possible.

the idea is that maybe the uncertainty of quantum mechanics is a result of us simply not understanding things right, and there's actually some deeper "reality" (a better theory that we don't have yet) without the uncertainty. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory

i thought this was already disproved (or it may be that hidden variable theories can only work if physics is non-local? which is something people don't like), but it's been years since i understood / tried to understand this, and it's horribly subtle, so i guess there's more detail than i ever knew...
Make sure you give RocketPants a look:

https://github.com/filtersquad/rocket_pants
Patently false.

There are several things misrepresented by that well-meaning graph, and if it leads you to believe that musicians make more money from Spotify and Last.fm than form Amazon and iTunes, that really should be corrected for, because that is absolutely not the case in my experience, and Zoe Keating's numbers seem to echo what I've seen in the field.

The info graphic cites, among other things, 'industry sources.' Zoe Keating, on the other hand, is a completely transparent actual industry source. Don't be surprised that artists exposing their revenue information make less than you think, be surprised that in 2012 people still buy the garbage statistics handed out by unnamed 'industry sources'
Could you elaborate? I guess many people here are not lawyers.
Zencoder works on hard, interesting problems. Hiring engineers - join us in SF.
ARM is cool, but you cannot give a kid ARM based computer, and expect it to program anything without setting up programming einvironment first. Do you expect this kid to cross compile on PC? Or maybe it should set up gcc on this device?

Maybe raspbery pi will change that, but for now the kid won't even know how to compile anything. The best bet is probably python, which isn't much better in "closeness to metal" than javascript.
Morningstar Farms does this as well.
This is one of the reasons I keep fake accounts, including on quora, FB and Twitter, to read the content.
Due to the fake name in the quora account, I don't have edit privileges, which is perfectly fine with me as it is at most a minor inconvenience at times.
This is about a year old. I hadn't seen it.

You can guess from the headline (because big developers/publishers destroy your soul and your projects).

The mini profiles of games and people are sweet.
And he's still correct. It's still simpler/faster when you are allowed to to just poke bytes in memory-mapped video ram ( see http://digitalerr0r.wordpress.com/2011/04/30/commodore-64-pr... for an example on the C64 ).

The HTML scaffolding and JS for even a 2D canvas blit is still longer to type, and is slow.
I hate this kind of bullshit. Please, US of A: remember there's are almost two hundred countries in the world besides you. In most of those countries Apple products are prohibitively expensive.

Please keep that in mind when some Apple fanboi publishes an article saying "Apple biggest seller of X". You are probably referring to just one market. As big as that market is, it's not the total of sales worldwide.

Thank you very much.

EDIT: stupid mistake.
Linux kernel to be more specific.

The Mac OS X/iOS kernel (xnu) doesn't share the address space with the user process, so many of those techniques (I haven't read the whole paper) do not apply.
Resultly, a Faster Way To Search The Web (Interview With The Founder)
If you have watched Carmack's previous keynote, he strongly believe in static typing and static analysis, not only features and performance.
Both emails are pretty lousy; the upshot is the same "punish everyone with bureaucracy for the transgressions of a few". The second email allows the sender to assure himself that he isn't sending a memo about the new cover sheets for the TPS reports so if you could just get with the program that'd be greaaaaat--but it's the same order and smart employees will see right through it.
Navideo: Cue (formerly Greplin) meets Enterprise
If that's the case then Google should indicate that in their emails instead of sending generic warning emails. Even specifying that it's a copyright violation will help instead of beating around the bush and causing anxiety.
One person, even Carmack, is no match for standards bodies like the W3C. Google itself is already trying to push different web technologies like Dart and WebM, but it's a very slow burn. I wouldn't say there is a lack of vision or new ideas.
Native Client Adoption by all browsers would be awesome for the gaming market and would also provide alternatives to Javascript, which many people would like i guess.
I see there is a lot of nostalgia in that post that I (and others like me) will probably never understand. But, I still don't see the point.

It's nice that we could buy and old machine and program something on it. But at the same time we could do it in Javascript, on the web with a very pretty interface. So why should we trade all the knowledge, the tools and the languages that we (well, people like you how tend to get all nostalgic over this topic) have built and and write something on an archaic system?

I never had such an old system, yet at the same time, I understand the constraints more or less, I now a bit of assembler, C and still question where this knowledge is really benefiting me. (Though I do find it very interesting!)

If I want to have a constraint environment, I could join a JavaScript 1k challenge and also work with artificial constraints (at the same time I could still enjoy the modern tools, environments and even graphics).

Maybe I just really don't see the point.

And to your last point, I think a better approach would be to show our children either PyGame or even modding tools for modern games. I just don't think a young child would really be that interested in the archaic inner workings of a slow machine, but could be really interested in making mods. I'm not saying there are no such children around (I'm sure there are), I'm just questioning the approach here.
While Google has terrible, terrible support outside of Enterprise Google Apps use, you bring up something foundational-

But remember the people generating publicity

We're hearing one side of the story, where the players know that the other side is limited in what they normally can or will say (e.g. talk bad about Apple or Google -- playing up being the victim -- and for legal and professionalism reasons they usually won't correct egregious lies).

I want Google to seriously put the hammer down on the Play store -- this is a good thing for everyone. The people who exploited it before, who are the enemy of people who want a healthy and vibrant system, will inevitably cry foul and protest their innocence.

That isn't to say that I know anything about whether these guys are in the right or wrong, but it is curious how one-sided they are about Google's communications. It's also worth noting that very frequent updates are also a mechanism to get your app in the "New" category again and again, and we have to assume that Google has the capacity to know that the update wasn't an actual update but instead was simply, for instance, a version number change.
It did. That's why it was the "Secound Reich", followed by the infamous third one ..
>"Just bought a raspberry pi, what you advise me to do?"

Blog.
"framed properly without the bullshit" -- adding to my list of interesting oxymorons.
Craigslist Survey Results: Users Want Privacy, Anonymity
I love the second email. I have found that short emails, especially from senior people can lead to a lot of "what does he/she actually mean"?

I worked for a company where the CEO loved sending off 1 sentence emails. Short, yes. To the point, yes, but it was incredible the amount of time that was spent trying to interpret the real message behind the message or even if there was one.

Without the nuances of body language, tone, expression, etc of a face to face conversation it is extremely easy to misinterpret an email. In general long emails are annoying but this is, to my mind an extremely important exception. The more detail, background, colour that you have about important emails, the better.
>We're there again: take 3 lines of JavaScript and you're drawing an image[...]

I think Carmack wasn't referring to how more abstractions could make his life easier. I've never had the time to dig deeply into id Software's sources (which get open sourced after a couple of years, in case someone didn't know), but what I've often heard him complain about were the abstractions themselves! This is basically about how we wrap a couple of layers around the drivers these days - drivers which have become increasingly complex.

See, abstractions are a good thing. General purpose abstractions might be a good thing for a lot of applications. For some, like graphics engines, they're not. Suppose you're working on a cutting edge 3D engine and you want to squeeze the last bit of performance from the machine. What you end up doing is talking to the graphics card as directly as possible, with the least amount of "layers of crap", as Carmack called them, inbetween you and the hardware.

General-purpose abstractions are loaded with stuff you don't necessarily need and come with quite a bit of overhead. Suppose you have 10 layers between you and the hardware, then everything you try to tell the hardware has to go through all those layers and possibly back to you. That's quite a drawback.

Since drivers have become rather complex themselves as GFX hardware has become more powerful in the last 2 decades you need quite a lot of code to talk to it properly.

The same thing goes for setting up the screen for rendering. Windows wants you to be quite verbose about what you're going to do (obviously). That's why you need 200 lines of code to do so.

The only way round that is using libraries that abstract those things away from you, but they do so at additional cost. Obviously it's possible to do the same thing in just one line of <insert your favourite language here> in the same way that it's possible to do the same thing in just a couple of lines of low level code as long as you have a library doing it for you.

However, as pointed out, in an AAA game engine, that's not what you want to do. There's a reason why the "highest common denominator" is usually D3D here. It's because D3D is still reasonably quick (although not as quick as OpenGL) and does enough things for you.
>"a good portion of domestic work is thankless and uninteresting"

>"we obviously don't mind being made fun of for our incompetence at things we don't want to do in the first place."

This reminds me of the "protective incompetence" that paul graham talks about in "How to Start a Startup" (http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html):

People who don't want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it. Paul Erdos was particularly good at this. By seeming unable even to cut a grapefruit in half (let alone go to the store and buy one), he forced other people to do such things for him, leaving all his time free for math. Erdos was an extreme case, but most husbands use the same trick to some degree.
Firefly: Arduino-based board for DIY space projects
There is also a (proposed) file API. http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/
Agree about first time parenting being more stressful/intensive. We used to joke that we were so tired from the weekend that we looked forward to going to work on Monday.
Hidden variables are disproved by violations of Bell's Inequality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test_experiments#A_typica... Basically, quantum systems are better (at certain statistical correlations) than any classical system could be. The only classical-ish explanation is transmitting information faster than light.
Ha, I was just thinking about this in a very similar way the other day.

Employee happiness is basically Good Will > Bullshit. Good Will is things like flexible working hours, office perks, interesting projects. Bullshit is anything that the employee percieves negatively.

Retention builds on this. It's Good Will + Compensation > Bullshit. Compensation here can be salary or benefits. Many employees can be unhappy (Good Will < Bullshit), but not quit because they need the money or whatever. But, at some point, the BS will outweigh even good compensation, and that's when employees quit.
Due to the city? Can you explain that?
Redstone Engine - The Tekkit Wiki
"you know what they call sleeping in the UK? Catching some zeds."

We do? Literally never heard that, not a single time.

As to the fact that it comes from snoring... am I the only one who thought it was obvious as soon as I read the title?
As a former wrestler, I have had very similar experiences. On days where I could drink water, I assessed no difference in my productivity between days that I fasted and days that I ate, except when my fasting lasted over three days. Even then, my decline in productivity in relation to the duration with my fasting was not very steep.

However, I found that my productivity is very strongly correlated with my hydration, and going an entire day without water showed immediate, significant, and negative effects. I strove to manage my time in such a way to get all my work done without needing to spend those days programming.
Eh, don't feel bad. If they're not denim or button down there's really no difference in kids' day-clothes vs. their pajamas. "Convention over configuration" I think we tend to call it in our industry :).
I have been witnessing the exact opposite over the last few months.
It seems weird that you start off with "I can't relate", and then your entire post has very little to do with the article at all. Did you read it? He didn't suggest men are incapable of being great parents, quite the opposite in fact.
Opera 12.50 is out, unprefixing stable CSS properties and enabling WebSockets
Economics used to be called political economics. Why Valve can't stay out of politics is because a lot of things worth doing are political in nature or related to politics. Politics is not a different sphere from everyday life.
In this case it means that the first result is actually about them, and it's content they control
Gout Software Development
I'm from the dreamers camp. I would love to use Sublime Text on a regular basis. But, it's core mentality of keeping things slim forces me to use PHP Storm.

Now, I do like PHP Storm, there are quite a few features that I find useful. Primary of which is the debugger.
NASA picks Boeing, Sierra Nevada, and SpaceX for Commercial Crew
Sam Harris offers “Lying” for free through Friday (.PDF)
Using WiFi to see through walls | ExtremeTech
I think Congress has yet again proved herself, that she does not give a damn about "Anna" and "his movement".

I must say with pravin bansal announcing that "lokpal will not even be present among topics to be picked up in the monsoon session" just after Anna quit his fast was a class act.

I guess , politicians are truly afraid of anything not even of people. I suggest Arvind Kejriwal should give up on the jaiprakash narayan's motto.
How To Get VIsitors / Traffic From BIadu Search Engine
ie non-local.
I'm curious: why exactly do your pages need jQuery and mootools for what's essentially a pretty but static HTML page? And more importantly, why aren't they compressed?

It's not that your pages are exactly slow, but you could probably push them way down with a few simple steps.
No, Python is what John should be teaching his son, not fucking JavaScript.
The real question is why do the British call it "public school" when it's not run by the public?

Sounds like they need better English education...
Interesting to learn that there's a communication method one can use to directly speak to a human at google and get a helpful same-day reply.

How do I, as someone outside of the music industry, gain access to that communication channel?
To: allhands@reynholmindustries.co.uk

From: douglas.reynholm@reynholmindustries.co.uk

Subject: Time & Management Communication

Hi everyone,

Over the last month, our employees have been concerned that our CEO spends about half his time drafting fiats from his office with the assistance of his executive staff.

One challenge has been how to fill these emails with as much management jargon as possible. Words like "collaboration", "visibility", "communication delays" and "productivity" probably aren't enough as when I'm either in the office or at home I find that these specific emails cause me to run out of filler words.

Consequently, we've decided to do something different and get more focus on this problem domain. If you're planning on doing any work, please put it aside for an hour and see if you can find any words we might have missed. As you can see, I've started to do this myself, starting with this email, having already found innovative uses for the words "focus", "problem domain" and "challenge".

Both the management team and I know that you've all been working super hard lately and this might be seen as a pain. I'm sorry for that. But, as we've learned from so many things expanding our business, management's time is valuable and we are just spending too much of it drafting these emails. Your lists of words are invaluable and will ultimately make life easier for everyone.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, even if you feel like we are total boneheads that's ok. After all, that's why we need your skills in expanding our vocabulary - an informed company is a great company!

Thanks gang,

Douglas
> The reasons that JavaScript sucks have been hashed to death in the past. If you are already disagreeing with me, then anything I say here won't change your mind, because you've already heard the arguments before and built up a repertoire of responses.

You're implying I'm closed-minded because I have an opinion. I would actually like to hear your reasons for saying JS is crap/silly.
Opus - open, royalty-free, IETF standard audio codec which outperforms HE-AAC
This is exciting to me because it seems to make the Everett "Many Worlds" view inevitable, because if A) the wave function exists (which this article seems to indicate) and B) if it never collapses spontaneously (and 50 years of research into this would seem to say no it does not), then necessarily one gets "many worlds", i.e., a large number of co-existing universes inhabiting an N-dimensional Hilbert Space, or, to put it differently, there are worlds in which Schrodinger's cat lives, and ones where it does not.

All very cool, but I still am not planning to sign up for the quantum suicide experiment to test for quantum immortality just yet. ;)
I find this balls if you ask me, the first one actually cuts out all the bullshit, the second one doesn't. I find the second email condescending and I would quite easily see through the crap of what they were trying to say.

Personally we have had those emails and after a day of people crying about it people just live with the new policy and get on with it.

I thought the whole point of the email was to cut through the bullshit, the second one had me looking through the dictionary working out what it meant.
Deactivation preserves data.

Deletion erases data.

People usually shut down profiles for privacy reasons, so deactivation will rarely be of any use to them; they are better off trying to manually delete their content, while they still have a semblance of write access in that regard.

Deactivation works in some instances on a hypothetical level, but people tend to leave a service, because they don't trust it, which leaves that option moot.
As someone looking to move to the Greenville area I was interested in this, as a programmer / technology enthusiast I'm confused as to why it's here...
Top API Worst Practices
there are three design patterns for tags in a table based db

http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/TagSchema
Here are my first thoughts on these (and, admittedly, I skimmed through the post)

- This argument is only valid on a surface level. It is extremely valuable to have experience in any field not necessarily because the details of doing business don't change but because the overall conceptual challenges in doing the work require making mistakes and learning from this. This crops up in system architecture, class design, etc. on a day to day basis for programmers.

- Clearly the author has not paid attention to the startup community. There are plenty of small companies and a thriving community of other programmers. If this is a good argument, then the same could be said of nearly any other field but athlete and rockstar.

- Only time will tell if it is truly effective to outsource programming. I think things seem to be shifting away from this, especially in the wake of massive job losses in the U.S. (no company wants to be seen as the one outsourcing)
- Project management is difficult but this is less important as products become easier to build and platforms and languages evolve to make things easier on developers.

- The minute he mentioned his job in an IT department I just didn't bother reading further. The author has clearly never worked in a startup or even modern programming environment (many people I know who work in larger companies get great perks and work in good office environments). His argument that developers don't have the equipment to do their jobs has been totally disproven by every company I've ever talked to. They all are most interested in providing their employees the best tools possible.

It sounds to me like the author has had particularly poor experiences and doesn't have a good grasp on the industry as a whole. However, the opposite might be said about me. I may have had good experiences that were out of the norm. Either way, programming is clearly becoming an important part of our economy and I think that fact lends to the belief that the quality of a job in the field will improve.

I have to say that his argument that accounting is a better profession made me laugh out loud. 3 of my friends who are recent graduates entering the accounting field work extremely long hours and are unhappy with their work (two work for big firms). One of them is thinking of going back to school and getting a computer science degree.
What’s a software architect?
they control

For now. I wouldn't trust many of those services (not yours specifically) not to suspend my profile for some dumb reason.