skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Extrinsic motivation takes the form of external incentives to do something, such as the promise of money. In actuality, though, it seems that these incentives actually demotivate people from performing the task, because it kills their intrinsic motivation, their innate desire to do that task (such as a true interest in the work).

So, instead of an innate desire to take on the task, the person now has an artificially incentivized desire, which results in lower motivation, since the motivation doesn't come from their own innate desire to do the work, but rather from the money.

"At least 70 studies have found that rewards tend to undermine interest in the task (or behavior) itself; this is one of the most thoroughly replicated findings in the field of social psychology." http://www.alfiekohn.org/managing/cbdmamam.htm — and see also Alfie Kohn's book Punished By Rewards.
I'm curious as to what others think of this.

I've been using the same technique to test a market and have been struggling to figure out how shady this is. One on hand, it does feel like we're deceiving people, on the other hand, what we're doing is actually benficial to consumers. If they signed up, that means they want what it is that you're trying to build and they're letting you know it.
Thanks! Wasn't planning on it, but maybe in the future.
If byte and octet become synonymous, what do we call the smallest addressable unit of memory?
Angel Investors Do Make Money. Data Shows 2.5X Returns Overall
I love the simplicity of the app.
This 2010 Game Developer's Conference lecture by Chris Hecker is a good introduction to the concerns imo: http://chrishecker.com/Achievements_Considered_Harmful%3F
There are very few patches of the sky where if you look you won't see (very many) stellar objects or galaxies. Astronomers know about them--they're great for calibration of instruments.

That said, Hubble took a many-day exposure of one of these ultra-deep regions, and this is what it saw:

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/tours/tour-hudf/
Ahh, that's clever. Overall I just don't want to tell people what variable names to use, even if they are obscure. At the very least the end developer can use the variable names for everything else other than NaN.
I think Apple is the new Microsoft.
Probably, the places that actually care about the difference will continue to use "byte", even though no one else will understand.

When I worked in embedded, whenever people were working on non-8-bit processors, they used the words "byte", "word", and "double word" in this way.
I wouldn't - x86 does not have 8bit words...
I might not be in their path yet :-) I don't want to get hit by someone rolling through a right on red because they thought the shiny circles were a reflection from a sign across the street or what-not. Depth perception in the dark is greatly aided by knowing what you're looking at, and lights are especially tricky to identify and locate when there's water on the road, lots of illuminated signage around, etc.

I still worry that a driver is going to see my obviously spinning wheels and not understand what they're looking at. I want my reflection in the dark to immediately suggest a cyclist, not a set of mysterious floating lights, since depth perception is aided by knowing what you're looking at. A car can travel a long distance in the time it takes to go from "WTF is that spinny thing in my field of vision?" to "Oh, a cyclist in the right lane." (It doesn't help that I'm in Texas, where cyclists are still an oddity to many drivers.) I'm considering putting some reflective tape on my helmet -- I wonder if that would help.
> it does a good job syncing my iPhone or my old iPod

And I think that's a big plus over a lot of Apple's other software offerings. iTunes is usually the last thing to still work with old software and hardware. If it was a typical Apple app, it'd require 10.8.2 and would reject icky old armv6 devices.

> As for the reason the iTunes store is a web page, I'm sure that's so they can totally restyle it without having to push software updates.

It seems to have its limits — the new layout in iOS6 has not appeared on iOS5 at the same time.
1. What consulting? I don't do consulting.

2. Are you privy to hard facts about my customer base like "it's all programmers with poor time management skills"? Or how big a global population that might be? If so, that's very valuable data for me… please share!

3. How much do you think Harvest, Toggl, Freshbooks, etc., make off selling their "sexy quick fixes"?

(I believe you might be the only person ever to suggest that time tracking applications are a sexy quick fix.)

Please, if you're going to a debate, bring a coherent argument to the table, with facts, instead of changing goal posts from "Nobody could make $5,000" to "Of course people could make $30,000 -- off idiots" etc. etc. etc. I'm sure you feel righteous and like you are making great points, but you've got no evidence or solid reasoning to back them up other than "Only stupid people would pay for a professional tool, ergo, only stupid people would pay for a professional tool."
> The automatic updates that decide to install Safari & Quicktime

that used to (they've stopped pushing Safari very* fast)
The game is about programming a spaceship in a fictional CPU's assembly language. I don't think they have to worry about what non-programmers think of the name.
When they stop making the bumper stickers.
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
~ Sir Francis Bacon
You could also use 'ls -lh | sort -h'.
Where do you think the post office makes most of its money? It's basically a spam operation that subsidizes a useful service.
You are looking at the problem wrong. Instead of putting these hacks into your code you should use some sort of bundler (component/browserify/script/etc..) to prepare your code for the client. That way you leave it up to the user to determine how they want to package the stuff versus making assumptions about it.
I think this is broadly true, but there are niche areas, such as frequent flier miles, where extrinsic motivation works for brand loyalty. Several years ago (before 9/11) United did a really terrible job of managing customer expectations during a job slowdown by pilots. I really, really hated United during that time. I probably would never have flown them again if I didn't already have over 200k miles on my account.
U.S. Ambassador Terry Kramer on keeping the Internet pure
I'm not sure what you mean by "personal." I think what you meant to say is that the reasons for their preference are unknown. Yes, obviously. But it seemed to me telling that while Romney presents himself as a businessman who can solve our problems with growth, rather than a politician, the real growth experts have more of an affinity for his opponent.

If Romney actually was what he tries to seem, he'd be more popular in the Valley. That's what makes this poll significant. The leaders of the startup community don't have the natural affinity they'd have for him if they believed his claims. Which in turn is fairly good evidence they're false.
Disclaimer: I'm not a gamer or games programmer. But it seems to me that "good" graphics are not just about beauty, but style and personality. For example, South Park animation is crude but instantly recognizable as South Park. There would be no point in converting it to Pixar-level quality except as a joke.
We've seen the same problem with some of our promoted posts and we get a lot of foreign language comments on our posts that sound really spammy.

One clue is we usually get a message from someone who say's "we sent 5 likes to your post, please like our page back" or something to that effect. I'm guessing these are "like" harvesters who hope that spamming other people's posts with likes, they will in return get some likes back to their client's posts.
More to the point, it also shows that an "easy" change isn't so easy. In the course of solving this "easy" change, the author added six new items to his personal to-do list.

As edw519 has said, a one line code change takes six days to implement.
Really responsive design and the frameless grid
That warning seems like a nasty hack anyway, if the compiler can't inline a local when running safety checks.

It is super scary that the compiler appears to be using a different constant from printf for its format checker, that shows it probably isn't using a pattern supplied by printf.
I really feel that if you don't feel you're learning from those around you, you need to find a new gig or environment for yourself.

I'm lucky to be in a situation where I'm surrounded by smarter programmers. I'm learning tons and the effects have been very noticeable. Some "better" programmers can be hard to deal with but if you have patience and a willingness to learn you will benefit greatly.
Using Regular Expressions To Match Twitter Users And Hashtags
Ideally a parser should respect locale, and use a sane format (not commas) for multiple numbers in a list.

Even better if the _ separator used by programming languages were a supported locale LC=C_FOR_HUMANS :-)
The interesting bit in the original experiment seemed to be the kids who'd say they'll wait for 15mins, but then succumb to the temptation of the marshmallow in front of them and eat it while waiting. Any rational (inductive) bit ought may be expected to be completed before the wait started.

PS: Will be good if such article writers link to the paper, or at least the abstract.
That sure makes it sound like IE6 was a pariah project. It's the sort of thing that makes people go out of their way to say "I had no part in the making of that monster".

Hmm. More Bozo Loop material.
But lsd makes you see things that aren't even there.
Uh,

Stack Exchange gets people to post on there by letting its content out on the creative commons license (or whatever equivalent). IE, the posts don't belong to Stack Exchange any more than they belong to Arstechnica. They are doing what the license was intended to let them do. It is simply a matter of which presentation of the material do we like best.
That's an example of a case where you had no intrinsic motivation. It makes sense for extrinsic motivations like flyer miles to work there.
Gruber's Çingleton keynote (2011)
> I don't think the revolution is over though. There is a lot of money to be made in entertainment, but it is true that trying to make it mathematically or through statistical analysis is in peril. Actual game designers, folks who can conceive out of whole cloth a fun and entertaining gaming experience, will come out on top.

Like there are auteurs like Kevin Williamson and Aaron Sorkin in Hollywood, so there are true renaissance men and women in game creation.

Zach Gage.

"Gage is an indie game designer — the Bon Iver to Rovio’s Katy Perry, the artisanal free-range heirloom-turkey breeder to Zynga’s factory farm. He works out of his apartment and has long hair and a perpetually in-progress beard. He works on games mostly by himself, collaborating occasionally with friends, and sometimes he drops into immersive research sessions that can last for weeks. One recent session was intended to figure out why people like playing word games, a genre Gage has always hated. (He thinks it’s cheating to build a game on top of a system that already exists, like words or numbers.)

So he spent two weeks playing Bookworm, Words With Friends and Wurdle, during which he decided that the genre suffered from a serious lack of strategy — aside from Scrabble, he says, most of those games are just dressed-up word searches.

The result of this was SpellTower, Gage’s newest and most successful game, which allows users to create towers by building words from letters in adjacent boxes. In its first two months, he says, it earned him enough money to live off for two years." [1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/magazine/angry-birds-farmv...
AFAIK programming is only one aspect of the game, hopefully it will have a more mainstream audience too.
I wonder if it works for customers, but not for employees?

Where broadly "customer" is "you're trying to persuade them to [X]", and "employee" is defined as "additionally, you're in a position of power over them".
where are the words "taking advantage" which you quote appearing in anything that I have written?

Are you serious? They're right there in the second paragraph!
You can check yourself if a value is NaN

// NaN typeof is ... number
typeof value === 'number' && value != value

btw, the original isNaN() doesn't check if a value is NaN, it checks if a value is coercible to a number

> isNaN("hello world")
true
If you read the Sherlock Holmes stories you'll notice that he receives several mail deliveries each day.
"There are niche areas, such as frequent flier miles, where extrinsic motivation works for brand loyalty"

While I agree with what you're saying, I think this is a bad example because frequent flier miles work more as a barrier to switching, rather than a classical extrinsic motivator. (You overpay every time you buy a ticket, and you don't get your money back if you switch airlines.)
I think I may have spotted an XSS vulnerability also, but I wasn't sure.
I didn't equate his post to that, I'm saying that that's the path we're on with much of this.

I'd rather bootstrap revenues by iterating on my product.
On point #2 I think it's still too early to say whether the handheld market has been upended at all. Yes you see a ton of people on the subway playing with their phones, but that may well be an example of the gaming market growing to include more gamers, not that traditional console gamers abandoning their dedicated handhelds. Consider that for September software sales for the 3DS were up 89% YOY. It launched poorly, but it also launched at an unprecedented high price.

The market is changing but I'm not sure if traditional handhelds are being hurt by the new iOS market.
I think there are two different things you can aim for in improving your skills.

One is learning "uber-programming" and the other learning excellent software engineering. The uber-programmer is using super-sophisticated algorithms and crazy efficient stuff with syntax or just crazy stuff. The excellent software engineer is working to make the complicated stuff look as simple as possible and be maintainable by the least sophisticated programmer possible.

The great thing is that in any given project, you can probably find an opportunity to improve your skill in one of these two categories.

When I've worked with subpar developers, it gave me a chance to do the uber-stuff they couldn't/wouldn't do. But writing code that solved problems "in a way even Bob can understand" is actually an interesting challenge even if it's different than database tuning or whatever.
I wonder if people bitched about mail ruining their life back then the way I feel about my email albatross today. "Cricket! Ten more letters to reply to! Summon the scribe."
Your argument seems to apply to every book in existence, yet books sell. Why is that? Perhaps because the books are in fact worthwhile, but the particular book you buy is more a function of marketing than merit. And this applies to entertainment, groceries, etc. It is the "microphone effect".
Err, Einstein's static universe did not preclude the death of stars via exhaustion of their fuel. So, the entire universe would "heat up" to a uniform distribution (i.e. evolve according to the heat equation), with the future local heat being everywhere equal to the mean local heat at present. And, in general, the universe is overwhelmingly empty and cold.

I'm not sure what the mean energy of the universe is, or what the minimal energy required to coax an electron to jump around and create visible light is, but it could well be that the values are such that an entire universe homogeneously set to the mean local energy of our current universe would be nowhere energetic enough to cause the birth of (naked-human-eye-visible) photons. (note: it would also be important to know the relative amounts of energy dedicated to mass and motion)

In other words, given a perhaps dubious mixing of temporally diverse understandings of physics, the relevant homogeneously energetic universe would likely be nowhere energetic enough to cause light. Thus, perhaps we should be more surprised that everywhere we look isn't dark?
512 byte blocks for ls is specified by POSIX. That would probably be a painful change now.
i think coaster (hub) brakes are much more common in the usa than elsewhere (i didn't know of them until i used one in the states).
"Its not easy being number 1, but someone's gotta do it."

No offense, but that's kind of a cheesy slogan. Which also reminds me of this:

http://manwithasoundrecorder.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/you...
Isn't that what Postmates is? And Kozmo back in the 90s?
Generally, if you have to automatically survive a broken connection, you may feel an intense sense of duplicating TCP. If you have to make decisions about bandwidth utilization it gets even more redundant.
Excellent article. The first part reminds me of the fragmentation and stupid decisions made for the Android ecosystem. More importantly, however, it really explains a lot about what happened _since_ the death of Symbian with Moblin and Meego as well as Nokia in general.

Quite a sad story, IMO, but unfortunately one they seem doomed to repeat with Elop "running" things. On the verge of what could have been the first GNU/Linux smartphone (N9) to take real market share, he killed both Moblin and Meego. It's amazing they still released the N9 and yet still switched to Windows.

Elop absolutely deserves a place next to ex-Sun's ex-CEO Schwartz as two of the worst CEO's tech or not in history.

tl;dr: Nokia is dying itself, slowly being killed by Elop. In two years or less, we'll probably get Nokia's postmortem, and it'll be a sad story for all.
I'm actually nostalgic for Microsoft. They only wanted my money rather than selling me as a commodity.
Speaking as a developer, I'd be pissed off if you weren't upfront with me regarding this situation, even if I was the one who "won" the job. I would spread word of your misdeed far and wide to all my developer friends as well.
Can gamification be considered a reward in the same context?

It's not money or physical reward, but a 'badge' or an 'achievement'. It's automatically having the system give attention and recognition to people who do something the system likes, instead of having that recognition parseled out by manually by moderators and admins.
Privacy on facebook: Like a changing room with a 1 way mirror, behind which there are cameras, and a live-stream to the interwebs. No one would ever strip naked in the middle of public. But the illusion of privacy, is a feint. [1] Absolutely brilliant, Jedi mind trick.

______

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feint | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kizeme
Complex logic circuit made from bacterial genes
Your last two sentences got interesting. Amy may be a great programmer with a great product, but her income was predicated from writing copy and marketing for that product (and I further note that some people, like the Rich Dad guy, skip the product stuff and just write copy to sell fluff).

Maybe I could make a product like freckle, but as you famously constantly argue, I don't make money writing software, the money comes from selling it, and all "selling" entails.
There will always be a monkey banging the drum for fantastical soft solutions, and then there are rocket scientists who will deliver the hard solution.

Would that you could see over the horizon.
The flowlang mailing list has discussed these points in some detail; he definitely has loops.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/flowlang
So what I'm hearing is that you basically made this up.

>It's possible to write language like that into a license for use

It's possible to write anything into the license. An MP3 license agreement could say that you have to eat a pound of chalk every time you play the song. That doesn't make it legally enforceable.

Your hypothetical "bankruptcy clause" seems like it fits in this same category. Why would a judge ever agree that this is enforceable when it's so pointless and arbitrary?
Fortress, a programming language funded by DARPA and developed by Sun, aimed at solving this very issue by parallelizing core operations. For example, 'for' loops in the language are parallel operations that do not guarantee linear iteration. Unfortunately, development wound down this summer due to incompatibility with VM type systems.

I'm surprised that the author did not mention join lists in his discussion of parallelizable functional program structure. A join list is either empty, a single element, or contains two join lists. In a normal list, you recur on a list that is only one smaller. In a join list, each recursion passes half of the list to a new processor.

The switch to easy parallelization will require data structures that do not guarantee linear iteration but gain scalability "for free." In my experience, this is easy to add to lisp dialects, but difficult to implement and use in imperative languages.
That is indeed a very good question. Other than waiting, it's one I have no answer to. The best technology doesn't always win as we all know. I remember being extremely excited about Moblin, a little puzzled when it switched to Meego, and downright disappointed as it slowly fizzled away, one paper cut at a time by a company with no leadership.

I was in total shock when they killed it. I think most people would be too if they just saw someone (in this case Nokia) commit suicide right in front of them.
When I saw the title, I originally thought of:

http://marshmallowchallenge.com/Welcome.html

I think the above is a more interesting challenge. Particularly because there is a magical point where the kids or even adults realize that they just have to start playing with the spaghetti - can't just stare at it.
I don't find a single one of these "reasons" even remotely compelling as cause not to do business with Amazon. Were I to run Amazon tomorrow, I would change not one of these policies.
Could you please post a link of where you heard of this story? I would love to learn what became of it.
I am just curious but what changed after the iPhone? It seems like there were a couple of app stores (e.g. GetJar) before the iPhone, but I don't know if they differed before the iPhone or if they were basically a less popular earlier version. Did carriers have to approve apps that went into the store or did they have to approve the store as a whole?
The technique you describe here is not the same as honesty. Example: "This product is not for uncreative people who think you have to work 60 he's a week at a desk to retire at 70." is a subtle appeal to snobbery/wishful thinking that makes them want to prove they are creative get-aheaders, and they can "prove" that buy joining your customer base.