skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There actually a lot of low latency stuff being done in Java now. Using the Azul Zing JVM and tricks like the Disruptor you can do some amazing stuff.
Measuring mercury levels: Nano-velcro detects water-borne toxic metals
Another good idea is to cut out every scheduled appointment that you possibly can. You'll be amazed the difference this makes. People love to put things on your calendar: things like "lunch a week from Tuesday." But for anyone in the occupation of creating things, it's hell to end up in a calendared life that's completely interrupt driven. What if you end up in the middle of some really good work on Tuesday? Why is it your flow that gets broken and not your appointments, no matter the priorities? My advice is to challenge these appointments; make them fight for survival.

For the lunch example, I tell people that I'd love to do it, so please text me the morning of and I'll let you know if I can make it. That answer is (1) more realistic, and (2) more flexible.

You can do this for meetings, too. Rather than immediately setting up a "2pm brainstorming session," tell them that you'll email over your thoughts and ideas sometime tomorrow.

I really don't understand how scheduling fixed-time appointments became the natural order. Challenge that assumption and you'll be amazed at how it impacts life for the better.
We have a new kitchenaid dishwasher with a fairly simple control panel (8 buttons). We already had to have the mainboard replaced by the manufacturer. Unless your dishwasher is really old, even if it appears simple, it almost certainly is not.
Via Lotus, IBM did release an office suite. I had a version for OS/2. Ami Pro was actually an excellent word processor for its day. The layout features were vastly superior to the Word of the day IIRC.
You expect import imports names which have actually been declared somewhere. Names which you can find and look at the definition. This library essentially hijacks the import process to allow you to import any name, each name is then actually a wrapper on a system to run shell commands. Definitely a hack, but a cool and useful looking hack.
Am I misunderstanding something or is the animation in the video clip at around 3:00 wrong? There it looks as if a single frame is exposed to all three colors sequentially, while really the color disk should be rotating in a way that ensures that a frame always represents the same color while moving?
Here's another great tip:

Only do your standups 4 days a week. That way you get a weekly reminder of what you miss when you don't do daily standups and a weekly reminder of what you're giving up to do them.

I really think that it helps keep things moving faster on the 4 days that we do the standups. Our workplace has no-standup Mondays and work-from-home Fridays (with a telephone standup). I recommend both practices.
Hey! We’re hugoroy, michielbdejong and me. Please ask any questions you have.

And join our IRC channel #tosdr on freenode and our mailing list https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/tosdr if you want to participate.
Essay: The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan
You could use it against the patent troll's masters (eg. Mosaid)
Hey Michael,

I absolutely agree that the "slowing down" and tea ritual in front of the stand-up can potential be dangerous for speed and terseness if you aren't conscious about keeping the meeting to the point.

I can understand how it might sound controversial in the blog post. That said it worked great for us to have it in place as a buffer before the actual meeting. I've seen teams that were very disciplined in being prepared that didn't need an explicit buffer for getting into the moment or being on time before the meeting. Our "Stand-Ups" definitely got more focused and fluent since we have it in place. Definitely sounds counter-intuitive :)

Thanks for sharing your experience!
Can your partner get the hang of your Google doc? How about your mum? Por Favor is about making things easy for everyone. Your partner types in 'pick up some eggs when you go to the shop' and chooses you as the recipient. When you get to the shop, your phone buzzes to remind you (using geofencing).

It is another communication channel, but it's one that's reserved only for the most important people, and only when they need something. If you get a message on it, you know it needs acting on, right now.
This tool hijacks the import mechanism by directly writing to Python's look-up tables. After all, when you do

from sh import git

there's no module 'sh' invoked in the normal sense. Instead, the library generates a wrapper for the shell command 'git' on the fly. While that kind of monkey patching may be neat, it's also a bit brittle and a potential security issue.
Two strategies for writing better code
Yeah I was just about to lay down the same comment - this is just stupid. If I wrote an article called "all css images!" and it was just a base64 encoded image, would that get even a single upvote?
Was it just rumour that Nokia (presumably Navteq) were going to be suppling maps to the Kindle Fire? Is that underpinning the new API?
The World Debt Clock (interactive chart)
But it looks horrible, there's a lot of dithering.
The UK Legalizes Eugenics (three parent in-vitro fertilization)
rank (n) * 8: formal verification of technology of rank n
A focus on testing is not the same as a focus on quality. Also, if your test criterion is "doesn't crash" then a lot of slowness, resource leaks etc, may be, and probably are, acceptable to you.
Banned iPhone 5 promo
Impressive accomplishment, but perhaps the title should read: "How two men made an FPS mod to support 1,800+ multiplayers in their spare time".
They're not really optimised for lossless, but I think they both do pretty well on stuff that doesn't change from frame to frame, effectively using the same technique you've used to encode only the diffs. It would be interesting to compare.
Coroutines are not the same thing as green threads, which the author seems to half acknowledge but then really screws up the terminology for the rest of the article. Green threads are things that can be implemented using coroutines, or they can be implemented without coroutines.

Python generators are coroutines, a specific kind of coroutine. And you don't see anyone calling them brittle or buggy.

The author's real complaint here is that the traditional shared-memory-plus-locks model of concurrent programming is hard, and that's absolutely true. I don't see how using a cooperative scheduler makes writing correct programs any easier or harder.
Square Closes $200M Series D
That's right, we are adding it. Thanks for the feedback!
The animation is incorrect: The color wheel has the colors "moving" up and the film moving down. When a red frame enters from the top, it should be projected as red for all three of its appearances on the screen.
This is a trade off I guess. The issue is that "the market" is wowed by new features more than they are by rock solid software. This is because you don't tend to notice these niggles until you have been using it for a while.

A brand new smartphone or a fresh install of Windows always feels like a well oiled machine for the first day or so.

Would you rather be using a modern OS like OS X , Win 8 , Ubuntu 12.04 or would you rather have a rock solid version of Win 95?
Thanks for the feedback. To answer some of your points:

I think our goal is to one day drive our own traffic to an artist's music. Have people coming to the site and clicking around to find stuff. But in the near term, we can't promise we'll drive any of our own traffic to the artist, so we're relying on the artist to spread it.

The other thing people have seemed to love is the concept of real-time stats similar to Google analytics. When an artist posts a new release, there's that "moment of truth" where they blast it out to their fans and then wait for a reaction. But it's hard to really get insights into what's happening. Who is listening right now? Where did they come from (referrer)? Where are they located geographically?

And then eventually being able to do cool things with all that data to follow up with the right fans with the right message at the right time.

We're also aiming to take a lot of things other sites have done (ie, charging money for a download) and making is simpler for the artist to manage. We'll deposit money directly into an artist's stripe account, for example, rather than holding it until they hit a threshold.

And we've gone back and forth about offering a free tier dozens of times. Our current solution is to allow anyone to sign up and get their hands on the software for free, but then they have to pay before they can publish a track. Among other things, we're hoping this cuts down on the risk of DMCA violations we have to worry about :)

Screenshots coming soon!
I initially tried something along these lines. However even with small animations, you end up with files that while small on disk, consume a large amount of memory after they've been decompressed, resulting in browsers refusing to load them.
Your Smartphone, Your Wallet: What You Need to Know
Yeah, mine literally just has a dial that is only used to turn it on and off. No buttons, switches, anything. You just turn the dial like 0.2cm and it turns on. I can't imagine being OK with wasting time washing dishes by hand.
With all the talk about linux desktops recently, I think one of reasons for lack of adoption is right here. In the business world, excel reigns supreme, and there isn't a viable linux equivalent. Give me excel for linux and I could be rid of windows for good.
Apple Stock Hits $699
I've been leasing books for 3 decades from the library and still do the same thing with my Kindle from both the local library or the Amazon Prime lending library. I've probably "bought" only one or two of the 60 or 70 or so books I've ever read on my Kindle.
This article has succeeded in convincing me that both ways are equally bad.
I might be alone in this, but I absolutely hate landing pages like this. Your copy is absolutely correct: it IS a bait and switch.

I was ready to pay for the app to try it out, and now I can't give you money? I understand the data you could gain from this is valuable, but is it really worth it? I'm not going to throw my email address to you for an app I'm mildy interested in trying, especially after that.
iOS's built in MapKit provides a reverse geocoding lookup API. It used to abstract away the Google geocoding API, but I'm not sure if iOS6 still relies on Google for that, I haven't looked into it.

The basic gist of it: Init a CLLocation object with a lat/long (probably pulled from the device GPS or a map dropped pin) and then call CLGeocoder's reverseGeocodeLocationInitialize and it'll return a CLPlacemark, which contains the approximate address.

To just find nearby cities from a lat/long though, you probably don't need to reverse lookup the address, it's probably easier to use something like MaxMind's free database which would give you the lat/long of cities, host it either locally on the device (a subset, obv) or on your server and then just use math to put some coordinate min/max bounds on your query to find city names nearby.
Geeks are from Mars, wonks are from Venus
Title should be Amazon re-enters the maps game. Remember A9 maps and Amazon street-view
If you turn off dithering, the colors might be less "accurate" but it should compress better. Color accuracy doesn't seem to matter so much in this application so it should be acceptable.
I don't think the OP is being serious. Wash dishes by hand? Call me optimistic but, I kind of thought we perfected the craft of producing dishwashers.
Would be great to see some articles on their technical approach, I assume they have used techniques to reach those scales based upon the fact the average pair of players are too far away from each other to be visible
Do you think that "music" is a keyword that people normally use when searching for music? It sounds like a rhetorical question, but I'd argue that it's actually not that important.

We're planning on having really SEO-friendly link structure:

mvsic.co/artist-name/track-name/

But the majority of search rankings are determined by off-site factors, like how many inbound links a site has. We're definitely hoping to rank well for branded search times (ie, someone looking for a particular artist or song) but we know it'll take awhile before that traffic becomes meaningful to the artist, so we're not advertising it yet.
It looks perfect in Firefox and Chrome and IE and locally, for me. The slightest of banding on the tab, now I come to look for it. I guess you're using a browser that doesn't render animated GIFs very well.
> Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter.

All that says is "we're not pressing charges."

You've added nothing to the discussion!
If it works for them then they're doing "Agile" perfectly. The point is optimizing value and that's individual to every team/company.

Ironically, this dogma is what the founders of Agile were trying to avoid.
They are meant to be examples of failures which are extremely rare and would be unacceptable to consumers. Sorry, I realize they are quite unimaginative :P

My response to your comment is the same as the previous one:

>My argument is not that consumer products should be perfect; it is that when consumers see deficiencies in them which could reasonably be fixed, they have every right to complain. In fact, they should complain because it will help make things better.
Sorry you feel that way :( Awesome that you were willing to give us a try though, thanks!

As for the data, it really is worth it for me. I don't have an iOS dev license, or know anything about mobile development particularly. If I'm going to dedicate weeks of my life to this, there needs to be at least enough interest for us to break even, or it's not worth it.
I love this idea. It seems to relate to the idea of enabling yourselves to fail fast and often. I'm adding this to my tool box for when a need arises. Thanks!
Well, his example code demonstrating the "bug" is definitely broken. But not because of any flaw in coroutines, rather in his understanding of them.

session = sessions.get_session(cookie);
if(!session)
session = sessions.create_session(user_id);

Concurrent access to a global sessions object is obviously unsafe, even in a coroutine environment where "You know [the above methods] don’t yield to the scheduler." I'm not sure that anyone advocating for coroutines over async APIs is arguing that coroutines somehow magically absolve the programmer from considering race conditions. Only that coroutines, used idiomatically, remove classes of bugs _like this one_. And that snippet is not idiomatic.

One "coroutine way" of handling concurrent access to shared data is by piping requests to it through a synchronization point. For example, in pseudo-Go, it may look like

// public, synchronous API method
func (s *Sessions) GetSession(cookie string) Session {
// return s.dataStructure[cookie] // bad, obviously
responseChannel := make(chan Session)
s.requests <- getSessionRequest{cookie, responseChannel}
return <-responseChannel
}

func (s *Sessions) loop() {
for {
select {
. . .
case req := <-s.requests:
req.responseChannel <- s.dataStructure[req.cookie]
. . .
}
}
}

(Another way is explicit locking, of course.)
The acceptance of terms (clicking Agree on the previous page), can store a value in a session variable, or post a parameter to the site in question, which could then safely determine whether the user is authorized to see the content.
Please take a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacls

Hopefully it will help if you're ever in a situation where you need to make bulk changes to file and directory permissions.
Currently, a GSM Galaxy Nexus. Previously, an iPhone 4. Various oddball WebOS and the like phones scattered over the past few years.
removing them matters...
My impression is the Microsoft of the 90s has little to do with the Microsoft of today in terms of QA, testing, and security. This impression is "secondhand" (I have never worked for Microsoft). Reforms were made, so if you information comes from the 90s it may be time to update it.
Arguably feelings are just genetic programming in the first place. After-all, the fact that billions of men like breasts has little to do with culture.
Hey Guys, Completley off topic but I really like your product. One thing I think you can improve on your home page is you have a-lot of images but none of them are clickable to maximize/get more details. Think you could make your homepage more interactive check out the simple.com homepage for an idea of what I mean. Hope you find this feedback helpful. :)
The Facebook integration is deeper than only publishing to newsfeeds: it reads and writes to the Open Graph which allow data mining for movies recommendations.
As a past practitioner of Big Freaking Enterprise Apps who has seen the sausage get made, and also as someone who has shot his own foot off with telephony APIs, this does not cause me any doubt whatsoever. Here's a fairly straightforward implementation:

String[] availableActions = ["raw SQL for read last payment date" , "raw SQL for read current balance", ...]

String sqlToExecute = availableActions[toNumber(dataFromCaller)];

return new SQLStatement(sqlToExecute, bindParams).execute(); #Hah I am imune to SQL injections because I used bind parameters; I am the awesome

I mean, clearly I've given you the ability to crash this method already, right? (You can cause ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException, trivially.)

There's all sorts of fun available if six months later a different team updates the utility method that actually defines availableActions to, e.g., add in SQL which is only used by sysadmins, through the web interface.
I can just about guarantee you they're abusing lensing to make it viable. (Not that that's a bad thing, WoW is the same way.)

More impressive is the fact that the server can support 1,800 concurrent gaming-grade low latency clients regardless of lensing. That's really hard to do. These guys should be getting paid to implement low-latency protocols and servers.
Nice interface. It will replace allocine in my habits
Would be perfect with tv shows and public profile page.
> I don’t worry about how long things take or even bother considering how long they should take

I could not help but laugh at this comment, coming from the "writer" of http://www.scalingphpbook.com/. With no significant updates or communications in months, despite promises made to the many Beta access customers, this comment made me literally laugh out loud.

Yeah Steve, we can tell.
Use Google Analytics To Improve Your Site Design and User Experience
Yep it's legal, we're working with film distributors.
Whitelisting works better than blacklisting, I think. You can accidentally make a whitelist too permissive, but at least you can correct it after the fact. A blacklist might never be restrictive enough, and you will end up fighting a losing battle. So a function “sanitize :: Tainted a → Filter a b → b” is acceptable as long as individual filters are secure.
I just got rid of mine and went back to a dumb phone.

I didn't like being connected all the time, it wasn't healthy for me.
We will have perfected it when you can again expect them to last 20 years without failure and at failure there is a diagnostic code that tells which reasonably priced part needs to be replaced.[1]

They are probably optimized now, but not for the consumer's benefit.

Also, people's thoughts on dishwashers vary hugely with the number of people in the household. When I am alone I never use a dishwasher. When in a household of four, always.

EOM

[1] As near as I can tell from family experience, the difference in reliability between the high end brands and the normal brands is that the repair parts are more expensive on the high end.
I've got an iphone 4 and two dumb phones, a Nokia C1 and some cruddy samsung thing. I by far prefer the latter two because the batteries last a week, they phone, they sms and they run twitter. You get over the shiny stuff very quickly.
2007 is still pretty recent considering the lifespan of 1.1. http://www.w3.org/Protocols/History.html
Hey :)

thanks a lot for the recommendation. Definitely very helpful feedback. We're currently retinafying the public pages and the app itself, landing page overhaul is coming.

Communicating about the look and feel of our product is a thing that we definitely can do better on and I also observe many other technical-founder teams not spending enough time on. Probably because you see your product every day and know it inside out.

Thanks for the heads-up and the simple.com example!
"There's no other site where I can talk and keep up with my grandparents, my college roommate, and my girlfriend simultaneously." Why would anyone want to do this? It is feasible to display 20 or more TV channels simultaneously, but you wouldn't be "watching" any of them, you'd looking at them at best. I'll be charitable and assume you meant something like "using the same mechanism" but even that is barely less deranged as an advantage except for those so slow on the uptake that they can only memorise one way of doing things.
I prefer Pages to Word, and my requirements are far more extreme than most people's. Pages even seamlessly handles Word's change tracking (i.e. you can load a Word doc with change tracking going, make changes, and they will flow back to Word or to other Pages users seamlessly). All this and Pages doesn't waste gobs of screen real estate on "ribbons" and other useless crap.

Word obviously supports Microsoft automation stuff that's unique to its own ecosystem, but aside from that and index generation, Pages is actually ahead of Word. (Not "light years", but heck it's a word-processor.)
The more into technology I get, the more I'm amazed that anything works in the first place.
Office is significantly lower than $499 or even $199 for PC's under their normal business licensing arrangements. Less than $50 for most larger businesses.
> You can just never buy it again and choose something else instead.

... assuming you have the money to do so. How would your advice apply to an individual interested in purchasing an automobile?
I think you're missing the point. The idea is to provide incremental knowledge about the validity of the address, both to the user and to the service. user@existing.dns will validate but user@exsiting.dns won't. There is real value in providing that feedback immediately, rather than forcing the user to realize after waiting for an email that will never arrive that they made a trivial mistake.

To be clear, I agree with you 100% that there is no substitute for sending a confirmation email and requiring the user to click-through if you're looking for full confirmation of mailbox validity. My point is that there are simple steps to be taken along that path which complement the confirmation email.
And it's not just with computers.

I have a Sony Bravia TV and with every update its "UI" got slower and slower, until I disabled updates. I know it's got a lot of cool features in it, but I just wanted a simple TV.
Why Bootstrapping Is Better than an Accelerator Program
I ran across Open Radar (http://www.openradar.me) the other day. It doesn't file the bug with Apple for you but it does provide the open database.
The and-httpd server has a $2,000 "security guarantee"
Not true! I respond to emails almost immediately, sent out an email two mondays ago, and have updated the GitHub repository every single day for the last 10 days. If you have beef with me, email me, but don't slander me. And, if you're unhappy, email me for a refund. Jeez.

BTW- I just checked my email to make sure I didn't miss something from you. I personally emailed you when you bought my book, thanking you. You never contacted me. Why would you air your dirty laundry here first?