skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if the type of work you are doing has anything to do with it. Web projects are typically mostly about UX design, architecture, security, and scalability. Very few of these tasks are "unsolved" -- you can do pretty much anything you want to on the Web with some code reuse and good architecture. Therefore, the knowledge sharing of pair programming might work here, since the main goal of a web development project is to have everybody on the same page in terms of best practices, architecture, etc.

Now, if you're writing novel code, new algorithms, working with big data, or writing performance or security critical software, then I can see how the heads-down approach might be more effective. For these projects, maybe understanding the whole system is less critical than, say, programming your component to be 100% optimized.
I have just started transferring my domains to dnsimple. I love how they configured my google apps with one click.
My OS comes with anti-virus built-in. Don't download useless shit from the Internet.
But that's great. Google is going for enterprise market, freeing the small business niche to whatever competitors would spring up. If I wanted to open a start-up, I'd be delighted I just had a 800-pound gorilla move out and open the space for the rest to compete and try to have a part of immense success Google has. How often you see a giant company just come out and say "please, come in, take part of my market, I don't need it anymore"?
Techpocalypse by Anomaly Labs
Any contractual obligation, any transaction, is implicitly backed by the threat of violence. If you believe free enterprise can be more effective than government assistance, you believe "coerced charity" is better.

You got anything better than platitudes?
I switched to Badger about a year ago. I think I switched when they "launched" via HN and haven't had any reason to switch. I'm not the heavy user most on HN are, but everything works, its easy, and I don't get annoying sales (spam) emails.
>Saying "no" to tablet support was, in light of Microsoft's experience with tablets, the right thing to do.

The point is that the failure of MS to bring a viable tablet to market cannot be painted as any single exec's fault over Ballmer. I was responding to the article's accusation of Ballmer's frustration at being told no (fair or not, I can't say). The bottom line is that the buck stopped with Ballmer, and if he was frustrated at being told "no", then even if "no" was the correct business decision at the time, the reason it was is the fault of Ballmer.
The Oatmeal does a good job breaking this whole thing down -- http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
The theremin was also invented in the 20th century, so the "only instrument" claim is false.
For me it's about establishing momentum.

1. Practice TDD: Start out by just writing a test. Then you'll want to write the implementation.

2. Set yourself up for the next coding session when you're wrapping up. Leave a line of code unfinished (dangling =), or leave yourself an empty method/function/block that's just waiting to be filled in.
imgur already has this feature
This is flat out idiotic.

1. The influenza vaccine is a vaccine. Putting "vaccine" in scare quotes is either ignorant or utterly disingenuous. Or, more likely, both.

2. Even 50% efficacy is sufficient to dramatically reduce both the incidence and mortality of the disease.

3. The number of people who develop influenza because they got sneezed on in line waiting to get their vaccination is insignificant compared to the number of people who won't get sick because people get vaccinated.
To answer my own question. I see now that it isn't saying that I am currently using a free trial, the button is to upgrade and get the free trial.

This is important though. DO NOT TRY THE FREE TRIAL UNLESS YOU PLAN ON STICKING WITH IT.

After yesterday, even if you have a legacy free account, you give up that privilege if you try the free 30 days. See here:

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6...
Give yourself more hours today
Recently at my company we had an internal discussion about pairing after a colleague wrote a similar post espousing all the virtues of pairing. Pairing was something we as a group had once been zealot like in our belief in its value and would we would pair on everything we did. It was clear however from the discussion that most of us had moved on from this view as far too simplistic and dare I say naive.

Looking back at over 7+ years of pairing I still believe there is wide range of value to the practice and it has made me a much better developer but like anything its value varies greatly depending on your context. I've also come to realise there times when it can be wasteful and even destructive.

Innovation is one very good example where I believe there both needs to finely balanced tension between time to work alone and collaborate together. Take a look at the studies around problem solving by groups vs individuals as to why. Similarly, pairing can also have positive and negative effects on learning and varies greatly depending on an individual's learning styles.

The funnest thing came at the end of our discussion. Having collectively realised the folly of our pair programming crusade over all these years one of the group looked back to see what one of its biggest champions Kent Beck had to say on the subject in his book Extreme Programming Explained. Categorically he said that you shouldn't pair all the time.
How sound works on Google’s Project Glass
Don't forget the lizard people, the UN, and Big Pharma.
Hacker with brain cancer hacks the closed source report
50% efficacy in an individual could still have a dramatic effect on the overall infection rate. The purpose of getting vaccinated is not to protect you, it is to protect the community. If each of the people with whom you come in contact has their likelihood of being infected reduced by 50%, your chance of being infected may be reduced by much more than that.

I don't know what the relationship is between vaccination efficacy and infection rate in this specific case, but on its own a low-ish individual efficacy does not mean a vaccine isn't worth using.
If you have a half decent UI you shouldn't need to read through documentation to make a basic change like that.
Google to deploy tracking system and UAVs in Africa to protect wildlife
YourMechanic (YC W12) is hiring Full Stack Engineers
Metro North does my commuting for me, and it doesn't cost me $50,000.
You could get that kind of efficiency, or get closer to it anyway, if you just cut people a check. It turns out that's more effective at combating poverty than most social programs anyway. But it's politically impossible.
Is it the 1% being magnanimous?

The class warfare rhetoric is B.S.
> Now, for a while I was driving a lowly car without auto-dimming... mirrors. Being sensitive to light, I was cursing every second car behind me.

In my experience every car without an auto-dimming rearview has a manual-dimming one. You flip the toggle at the bottom that tilts the mirror so that a second, less reflective mirror situated behind the main one is now angled for proper use. Obviously you don't have this on the sideviews, though.
Do the people whose lives are saved care?
Easy there, killer. This isn't some feel-good bullshit about maybe hurting someone's feelings; it's about the atmosphere we want our community to have.

We're all social creatures. Super negative comments bring everybody down, not just whoever they're directed at-- and it's easy to be both honest and pleasant to read.
Well, actually, it turns out that there is much less evidence for the Linguistic Relativity hypothesis than we initially thought:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Present_s...

It turns out language does color perception, but not as profoundly as we estimated, and not in all ways.

In any case, even if it did profoundly color perception, who is to say that it does more so than other experiences? Like learning about anthropology or philosophy, or having a life changing event, or taking up art, or doing shrooms? I don't think we know.

A bilingual myself, I've always supported people learning a second language, for some vague impression that it made you a better person. Now I'm not so sure. When most people learn a second language, they don't learn enough to be immersed into a new culture altogether, or to start thinking in that language. Is this really a profound experience? The cost/benefit ratio seems a little skewed. I don't really blame people who know English by birth for not trying to learn another language.
Facebook Now Auto-Generates Documentation From Code
That's right, REAL gamers only want ascii characters and play games that have development trees that stretch 10-30 years back!

Oh wait, you meant something else, didn't you?

Get off my lawn, kid!

(I own a Wii and a bunch of games for it, it's much nicer to play with the family, although Dwarf Fortress with my son sometimes happens.)
I use NameTerrific after I saw them here, they're pretty great. They have DNS snippets you can include in your configuration, they accept BitCoin (not that I use it, but still), and their home page actually shows you a list of your domains! None of the other registrars I tried does this (any more).
What we need is a virtual secretary: someone who will triage all our calls, and only ping us if something urgent comes through. Maybe two levels of pings, one for urgent, the other for important. Everything else just gets silently noted for later attention. Simple concept, but the implementation has a number of sticky wickets. How, for example, can software evaluate the importance of a phone call from my wife, who may be calling to tell me that our child is headed to the hospital, or that her mom called to thank us for a lovely Christmas gift?
I agree, and I have been a developer for much longer. Coders block? Never experienced it.

Creating the solution to a problem via code is easy, finding the correct design/implementation is much harder. I tend to write code first, refactor later.
The difference is that a person can opt-out of a transaction or contract in free enterprise. Don't sign the contract, and there's no threat of violence, implicit or otherwise.

On the other hand, there's no way for a person to opt-out of government coercion.
These don't look like finger tips, at all. To me they are little nuns with wifi signals or directional arrows. I would find it difficult for someone to guess "fingers" on the first try when asked what they look like.
if I wagered a guess, I'd say 90% (maybe higher...??) of HN users are relatively regular reddit users as well
Ask HN: Obtain a domain from a squatter by trademarking
I have hit upon a great domain which is being squatted upon at the moment. Everything except the '.com' domain is available. Thank goodness, I don't need the '.com' now (I am based in Canada, so will use '.ca' for now) but I will need it in the future. I don't want to grow my business and then get extorted. How about trademarking in the mean time, and then forcing the squatter out of the domain. Is this a good strategy?
I disagree. I find it a valid observation of the other side of this situation. And, personally, I did not sign up on HN in order to pat Larry Page on the back.

(However generous and necessary his action was. The other side of this situation is that public society could not manage this basic -- and ultimately, even self-serving, keeping incidents of flu and associated loss of not just well-being but also productivity, for those who view things in dollars and cents -- service for itself.

(See? If it hadn't been for all those ear infections in my infancy, perhaps I could write a coherent sentence. ;-) )

As I reflect upon this, I imagine Page might well be one of the first to agree with this. Perhaps precisely why he made the donation.

So, there too, this story invites the conversation. Why did Page do this? Is there an underlying circumstance perhaps worthy of discussion? I'd say, yes.

P.S. Just to note: I did not vote you down. I'm interested in the conversation this engenders, not in karma/ranking. :-) I don't mean to sound as if I'm bashing you (in case I nonetheless come across this way); I'm interested in perspectives on whether society, through its government, should be capable of and indeed executing such a program for itself.

For my part, I don't think the shots should be forced upon people. (Which has been a problem, at times.) But I think a good, balanced, and truly informative campaign on the topic of vaccinations should be executed, and that for those in hardship, at the least, low or no cost access to vaccinations should be offered. It doesn't just serve them; it serves us all. (Although I'm of somewhat mixed view of the merit of flu vaccinations for the wholesale population, myself.)
USB mass storage bootloader for the Stellaris Launchpad
First, there's a continuum here, with perpetual motion and crystals on one end, and "bacteria cause ulcers" on the other. We aren't required to toss out all judgment just because some bits of the line may be true. I myself have some beliefs that I would currently put around "bacteria cause ulcers" on the line, but that doesn't mean I have to believe in crystal healing.

Second, this is not a scientific forum. It's an educational one. It is not particularly obligated to give equal airing to any ideas. The ones in the "bacteria cause cancer" area can make for very interesting talks, especially if the presenter passes the test mentioned in the article (secure enough to acknowledge doubts), but if they choose to close the door on those so they can avoid crystal healing, that's a fine and valid choice.
Quora's technology examined
I think this is a recommendation for a specific type of team working on a specific type of problem. I don't think Braintree is recommending you do this on your team -- this just how they do it on their team, and it seems to work for them.

For instance, I can see startup / smaller projects embracing this philosophy more simply because you probably have more members of your team who cross-cut components in terms of expertise and responsibility. In those instances, sometimes I want to know what's going on in other components (mainly because these components are, well, small). In larger companies, this would probably be less effective, since people are more specialized.

However, I think that the second point -- "Pairing accelerates new developers like a rocket" -- can and should be applied to all organizations. This is the biggest complaint I hear about internships -- too often, companies simply throw junior developers into the pool to swim because they're "not worth" devoting 2-3 days of "real" developer time to get the intern up to speed. Often times, the startup cost of learning the development process, learning the build, learning the framework, learning the test suite, etc., can slow down new employee onboarding by weeks.
Hey, don't go knocking CP+B. Their work for Domino's is top-notch, and their Volkswagen campaign remains some of my favorite advertising period. Meanwhile, while they've had the few early misfires for Microsoft, their work promoting Windows 7 was damn good, and they've done a lot for the Surface considering they don't have a whole lot to work with.

And the Groupon ads were hilarious. Terrible ads, and they should have expected the horrible PR they received, but they were among my favorite Superbowl advertisements to actually watch. More advertisers should be willing to risk PR flack in the service of making something memorable – CP+B's ratio of wins to losses is enormous, which is why they keep landing huge clients.

As for the "accept their creative without input", yeah, advertisers love to find clients willing to give them free range, because clients are often very good at fucking up smart ideas. They don't insist on that contract, though: Groupon's blog mentions that they "gave them a shot at pitching us concepts, and they came up with an idea we couldn’t resist blowing millions of dollars on." [https://blog.groupon.com/cities/groupon-super-bowl-ads/]
Blackberry Bans Weak Passwords To Protect Consumers From Hackers
New Star Trek Into Darkness Teaser
This is good. I wish it had an easier way to get to the direct image link (Right now I have to click the link then right-click the image and then copy image URL).
The only mental gymnastic present here is your repeated attempt to create some kind of equivalence between intangible concepts and physical objects by using words like "property" and "stealing". In reality, the concept of property only has meaning with respect to rival goods, and it's impossible to "steal" conceptual content from people without performing lobotomies on them.

Your property rights extend to allowing you to assert exclusive physical ownership over the items that you have created or acquired through voluntary trade. Note that the concept of voluntary trade implies that making a living by taking advantage of speculative commercial opportunities is necessarily excluded from the scope of your rights: your ability to make a profit through trade is definitionally contingent on other people's willingness to do business with you. The commercial viability of your work is necessarily other people's "property".

When the work you're doing produces physical goods that you intend for sale, the distinction between your property rights in the goods themselves and your access to the commercial opportunities present for selling those goods may be blurred, since both are invoked via the physical object itself. But the distinction is still present: no one is obligated to purchase your widgets, but neither may anyone deprive you of those widgets without your consent.

But in the realm of pure ideas, which are intangible and non-rival, the distinction is much clearer: it's physically impossible for someone to steal your ideas. The best they can do is make their own separate copies of those ideas; they can't deprive you the product of your work itself. By making their own copies, all they're depriving you of is the opportunity to sell the idea to them. But, as we saw above, that opportunity was never yours in the first place; it was always contingent on their consent rather than yours.

Attempting to use positive law to create artificial "property rights" in purely conceptual "goods" is akin to a farmer lobbying for laws which punish people for keeping their own vegetable gardens. You're attempting to re-engineer the circumstances of other people's lives in order to force them to be your customers. The reality is that "intellectual property" policies violates other people's real rights in order to mitigate the risks of speculators, so I think it's safe to say that by advocating such a policy, you've already abandoned any pretense of "social responsibility".
Announcing Codecademy Projects
SEC Action Taken Against Netflix Over Facebook Post
What also bothered me is the notion that consensus determines what's good science. (If we all agree to something, then it must be true!)
I think the point he/she is trying to make is that it only became as "real" as it is now after the coverage on news sites yesterday. Then everybody decided to jump on the anti-Microsoft sentiment and share their own supposedly funny #DroidRage's.
I read HN because it motivates me to be a more well-rounded and self motivated person. I like reading about all these successful people. I also read it because I'm not a CS person (I have an ECE background), and I like applying CS-domain ideas to ECE applications, like VHDL and embedded design.
What's wrong with power steering? Feel like I'd be sore after an hour of driving without it.
Of course you can-- you can move somewhere else. But you'll be likely to find that places without "government coercion", i.e. government, are not as much nicer as you had imagined.

Many millions of people are materially dependent on individual corporations, with no meaningful ability to opt out. Not really seeing the difference here.
> a military which does not use bureaucracy loses wars to ones that do.

You couldn't be more wrong about this. The decentralized Vietnamese beat the (by-then) bureaucratic US.

The US army during WWII was defined by its ability to delegate to the lowest possible level of the officer hierarchy and this was one of the major reasons it was able to beat the rigid and highly-centralized Nazis.

The Confederacy came within a stones throw of winning the Civil War, which would have been the equivalent of two guys in their garage taking down one of the worlds largest Corporations. They lost because of the overwhelming differences in resources, but their agility and ability to promote talent allowed them to run circles around the North for the first two years.

Winfield Scott and Hernando Cortes both won in Mexico because they distanced themselves from their respective governments. They were allowed complete freedom from bureaucracy because they went out of communication range of the politicians.

Sun Tzu actually made a name for himself by beating a major neighboring kingdom with a tiny, but agile force.

I could keep going...
The hammock was never the same after fogus fell-out.
How about a brogrammer or brogrammer-backlash story? Or an "I hate MBAs" one?
TEDx talks aren't science, they're popularization. Whereas investigating new and untried ideas scientifically is important, promulgating them to laymen isn't.

When Galileo made his discoveries he didn't start handing out pamphlets in the city square, he worked to persuade other astronomers first.

It isn't as if scientific discourse is off limits to non-professionals. Many journals are free, and you can probably get most at a good public library. But if you find journals to be too hard to read, then you don't know enough about the field to usefully have an opinion on heterodox viewpoints in it.
Given that all their modern shows have about the same idea:
Politicking, Gossip, Backstabbing and Drunken Whining

Top Chef was sort of an exception on their network, which is sad. (Though it isn't exceptionally grounded in what an executive chef does. Where's the gripping examination of the price-list to determine what to buy from the greengrocer? Where's checking the walk in with the Sous to see what needs to go on special today?)

I can picture the show and imagine how bad it is. Their show is "Startups" in the same way that The Real Housewives is about a housewife. It's meant to be a show for people who love nerds ala the big bang theory.
Reread my last paragraph -- you misunderstand my position (phrased for maximal irony). I care very much if my students or (hypothetical) employees misuse terminology. But the best way by far to communicate that a value changed from 10% to 12% is to say "xyz changed from 10% to 12%." I hope that the next step in the conversation is not a discussion of whether that means that the value changed by 20% or by 2%, but whether the change is important and measured precisely...

but I am a little worried that you call them z-tests instead of t-tests (even when using Gaussian critical values) (and, to belabor the point, I try to call them "Gaussian" critical values because "Normal" may be interpreted ambiguously by a non-technical reader, but I can usually tell whether someone I'm talking to means "normal" in a technical or vague sense).

:)
Always high "projector" headlights have been common for a decade[1]. They use a flap to block the top half of the beam, creating a strong line below which the headlights are always full power. When a car with these headlights goes over a bump or is on a strong incline, other drivers are exposed to the full high beams. The height of the line is also adjustable, and it is often adjusted to always be too high.

[1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlamp#Projector_.28polyellip...]
I do work on writing novel code, that is multithreaded, and sensitive to performance. Maybe that is better suited to solo development. That's a separate issue from personality. Some people seem to thrive with more collaborative forms of development, some wither. I'm struck by that distinction every time there is an HN discussion of pair programming.