skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What got me in the adult world was "4.0 syndrome". (Well, my actual GPA wasn't 4.0, but close.) Not that I was used to getting great grades and had a rude awakening, because school was a lot more intellectually challenging than 95+ percent of what I encountered in the real world, but that school led me to believe the world was more meritocratic, fair, and straight-forward than it actually is.

For example, some teachers were better than others-- I actually lucked out and had mostly good ones-- but I never had a teacher who went out of his way to be unfair. But I've had more than one manager who was outright scummy. School doesn't prepare you for this, because while there are demanding teachers, unfair or corrupt ones (while they exist) are extraordinarily rare.

Also, in college, you have career coherence. The work that is put in front of you is designed to teach you the basic concepts, so you'll usually learn something from it. The rare cases where this isn't the case are when you have outright incompetent professors. Either way, though, if you do the work you will usually get the knowledge and credibility that you need for your career. Useless, unappreciated busy-work is quite rare in college, but it's common in the work world.

To get anything close to 100% career coherence at work, you have to actively manage your career. If you just do what your manager tells you to do, you're probably looking at 25%, which means you get 1 year of real progress per 4 of work.

In the real world, the deadlines aren't well-tested. They might be unrealistic or make no sense. The work isn't designed to teach you things, and if you graduate past the work you're being assigned and are ready to move on, that comes down more to social skills than anything else. In school, you can skip grades. In work, you actually need social engineering (or frequent job changes) to progress faster than the slow players for whom the typical track is designed.

"4.0 Syndrome" is seen heavily in startups and investment banking analyst programs, because there's a crop of 22-year-olds every year who will meet every "deadline" no matter how ridiculous. They haven't learned that many real-world "deadlines" are just made up times that are often impossible to meet. (In school, they're also "made up times", but there are a large number of people facing the same deadlines, and they'll generally moved if they're really unreasonable.)

It's also a dangerous trait to have, because it can lead you to over-perform at work, which in most office cultures is more dangerous than underperforming because (a) you become a target for adversity, and (b) you lose social polish if you overwork yourself, and social success is more important than raw "performance".
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2008/7/27/162751/063

I don't know if he ever finished.
Canada Goose Mountaineer
We will see. It's only anecdotal, but I have quite a few friends and family members who have grudgingly switched from BB to Androids and iPhones, and even after a year or more they still hate the on-screen keyboard. I used to tell them to give it time, that they would adapt, but it has not happened and doesn't seem as though it will. If the BB10 with a physical keyboard is any good, these people won't hesitate to switch back.

I guess the question is, how many people out there feel the same way?
Most important takeaway from this for me is that you can get designer themes for Bootstrap, similar to how you can get themes for Wordpress:

https://wrapbootstrap.com/
I'm in Victoria - my class (all programmers) are about evenly split between Android and Blackberry, with one or two iPhones. Before midterm die-off last year, when 1/3 of our class dropped out, there were more Blackberries. In my household, which consists of 3 Uvic varsity athletes and me, the nerd, there's a 50/50 split between Blackberry and iPhone. I'm a Blackberry user myself, and me and the others who have them are pretty darn loyal. I don't need 24/7 web access. All I need is email and the ability to text without wanting to die of irritation.
@jsthrowaway2, your analysis just doesn't take into account how that conversation evolved. We were discussing different issues in multiple subthreads all at the same time. In the subthread you mention, the fellow was initially coming across defending @sabdfl's assessments. He clarified that, and that subthread ended, and the others with the salient points continued.

I challenge you to find any argument that he made, salient or otherwise, that I failed to respond to in that thread.
It's possible that it's there for precisely this reason. I've also filled out a few mock applications and get stumped on this one too.
Leaflet example with WFS-T
Also check out bootswatch.com
It must be weird having everything you say picked apart -- it's like being the Pope or Alan Greenspan.

Interesting with Greenspan we ended up with sort of a reaction to the previous tea-leaves reading by Bernanke -- he's vastly more transparent and communicates really boring things.
Let me address the claim of factual errors.

I pulled my estimate of the effort put into the classification from the second paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classification_of_finite_simple.... Do you have a better source that I should have used? If so, then cite it and update Wikipedia.

I pulled my estimate of the effort for the Linux kernel from https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/560928-counting-contri... and then extrapolating from the fact that if 1316 had patches for one major kernel release, that over all versions we probably had thousands of developers contributing code but probably not tens of thousands.

The facts that I presented are the best that I have available.

On the overall question of the comparison, I did not choose what should be compared, I merely compared them by the most convenient criteria that I could and came to the opposite conclusion from the previous poster.
I've assumed it means cases like you were faced with some bureaucratic wall that was an impediment to getting things done, and you figured a way around them. It doesn't necessarily imply unethical behavior, though I'm sure if the example someone gave was of illegal or unethical behavior that would be important information for the questioner to consider. Sometimes this sort of practice is called social engineering, knowing how to work the system, or being street smart. It could even refer to starting a grass roots campaign to get a bad law changed. To succeed in business you need to be able to solve difficult non-technical problems as well as technical. Rather than based on logic, the answer may be based on insights into human behavior, loopholes, or just understanding practical matters of dealing with red tape. This question gives the person an opportunity to discuss cases where they did so successfully.
Washington Post Style Guide Now Includes “Startup” as A Word
What looks the most like traditional mathematics in computing is the η-conversion in the lambda calculus.

The η-conversion is any operation on expressions that yields an equivalent expression, on the condition that it is not just a rename, because that would amount to an α-conversion. It is also called mathematical derivation or what other people incorrectly call mathematical "proof".

Without denying the merits of being proficient at showing that expressions are equivalent through η-conversion, we can easily see that quite a few mathematicians only use this method to show that the one meaningless and useless expression is equivalent to another not more meaningful one.
I was pleased and surprised to find concise descriptions of several approaches to 'persuasion' on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_persuasion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument
> In the subthread you mention, the fellow was initially coming across defending @sabdfl's assessments.

...in your analysis, which was demonstrably wrong. I, and probably many other people who read his opening shot, (correctly) interpreted it as disagreeing with the way Mark phrased his arguments. The hint is where he says that Mark didn't choose his words carefully, which you interpreted as meaning "I agree and I would have phrased the exact same thing differently!", which is just asinine. You interpreted his remarks the way you wanted to, which wasn't entirely square with reality.

Again, I don't care how the conversation evolved, because the guy persisted far longer than I would have (and I give him extreme credit for doing so). The standard argument style seems to be "straw man, straw man, straw man, you and I have nothing to discuss". It is to his credit that he continued and was able to reach an amicable conclusion, but I think the majority of people would roll their eyes and just disengage you at that point. It took him several back-and-forths just to get you to stop badgering him for Mark Shuttleworth's words, for Christ's sake.

Let's forget the entire rest of the conversation and let's focus on this:

A: FOSS people are McCarthyists. And the idealism impedes forward motion in an indirect way.

B: Hey, you know, he's right that the balance between idealism and pragmatism is a bit too far one way. Here's some thoughts about that. Why don't we discuss it?

C: I'm sorry to see that you agree that we're McCarthyists.

I'd disengage you at C. He persisted, and kudos to him. That's what I'm having an issue with. You already tried building a straw man with me, claiming that I was being disingenuous by editing the conversation, implying that I've introduced falsehoods and manipulated the truth; I did not edit the conversation, but I did selectively quote the portions that I would like to discuss. Selective quotation is not editing.
OK, but you don't actually know the Q-factor of this design, nor how durable it actually is. You're guessing based on not a lot of information.

Although I am also skeptical of new mechanical designs on something as evolved as bicycles, it seems like a good idea and one worth pursuing. Why declare it a failure before the first review!
Or maybe you should stop trying so hard to meet people and make friends and just be
Most real people don't live lives structured around the pursuit of some driving passion

Correct. Those are the people that Thoreau was talking about.
I think what explains it is this, Blackberry's were perfect for the business person on the go -- constant access to needed email. But they never really offered anything for the non-business user. Then iPhones and Androids came in and did offer things the average non-business user wanted. So people started buying these better smartphones, but now nobody wanted to carry two big smartphones around. Then everybody realized that those phones could do the corporate exchange server thing as well as the blackberries and they simply dropped the extra phone.
Student of Applied Mathematics - Economics here. I took a class with Oded Galor, the primary proponent of Unified growth theory [1], a single model that describes the transition from the Maltusian trap [2] to an era of rapid growth, and finally a transition to a sustained growth regime. According to this economic growth model, the United States has already reached the sustained growth regime - meaning that we can expect continued growth of, say, 1-2% for eternity.

Economic growth is NOT faster than exponential in a sustained growth steady-state. Do some googling for long-term economic forecasts, and you will find much research that supports low single-percent growth for the 21st century [3]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_growth_theory

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_trap

[3] http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2012/11/economic-o...
Nothing at all. But I can't think of any other community where we'd get into a discussion of the build process of a lightsaber, can you? I love participating in such a geeky crowd, even though I was never a big Star Wars guy myself.
Go to the university.
Maybe just pass the JSON object in as a string to the label? I personally don't think I'd mind reading "{'paymentAmount': 50, 'productColor': 'red'}". I haven't used Google Analytics for event tracking yet, though, so not sure what the UI around Labels is like.
I hate on screen keyboards so much. I would love a good smart phone with a slide out keyboard.
The myth of the well-rounded scientist
I like to skim the titles as well up to a certain point. It's always nice to know what's going and on and to try and learn new things. Makes for a good conversation starter if anything. If I miss a few days it's no big deal though. I won't try to go back and read all the content. I like content recommended to me to an extent. The upvoting and downvoting kind of takes care of that but I'm sure I miss some good articles.
I don't have any particular problem with it.

I do think that with Microsoft's deep pockets, they could afford better writers and actors.
Why the world is running out of helium
I clicked through thinking this would be about balance, spacing, typography, information heirachy and colour. An understanding of these basics will give you a much better starting point than css3, background textures and webfonts. There's a damn good article on this somewhere if anybody knows the place...
Search would have to rely on a local storage option. More reason why email as a service on a centralized server shared by multiple interests without assured user security zones independent of the server has fundamental limitations.
there might be something "on the other side" but there's no reason to believe that it has a 3+1 signature or is anything like the space we know at all.
I can do a hell of a lot more parsing the HTML...
The author does link to a full book along those lines: http://designforhackers.com/
In politics, it's very common to use phrasing like "he didn't chose his words wisely, but I agree with his point." as code for: "I'm diplomatically saying I agree with what he did". I see that the fellow didn't mean it that way, and there was probably a language barrier going on too (I suspect, but don't know for sure, that his native language isn't English), and he was furthermore frustrated with the 140 character format.

Regarding the latter of which, BTW, I was giving him advice on how he might fix his 140 char problem in another parallel thread. We were having two other parallel threads too, on the "salient points" you mention. Look at the time stamps on the dents if you want to confirm all that. All of it happened together. The Internet is a wonderful thing: you can have efficient conversations in parallel in semi-synchronous time. You're analogy treats the whole thing like I stonewalled him on that one issue while refusing to reply on any other issue. The timestamps and threads just don't support your claim there.

I again point out that I didn't resort to name calling and I wasn't disrespectful, and I apologized when I realized that he truly believed he'd already made the statement I was asking him to make. You compare me to @sabdfl above; note that @sabdfl name-called, was disrespectful, and it's not the first time he's done that, either.

Meanwhile, I don't think it's reasonable to ask someone to always respond to everyone on the Internet who comment at them, and I believe it's completely reasonable to filter away people for all sorts of reasons. It seemed that this fellow might have been doing standing up for @sabdfl's outrageous claims. I discussed that fact with him on on thread to get a sense of whether or not he was, while I was nevertheless still responding to his other points another. I admit I got close at one point to shutting down at one point. But, I still read his next clarification and we came to an understanding.

This is an example of people who disagree but are still communicating well and sorting something out. This is an example of useful discourse. I realize you see it as exactly the opposite. I just think you're wrong about that, I'm sorry. I encourage others here to read the whole thread over on identi.ca and decide for themselves which of us is right.

I'm about to to go to bed, and I'm sure I won't have time to respond to you further here, as the odds I'll remember to check this site again -- which I don't normally read -- is pretty low. You can email me if you want to discuss it further.
st_simplify() is your friend.

http://postgis.org/docs/ST_Simplify.html
Absolutely agree. I'm currently in the process of producing a thematic map as part of a set of data visualisations[1]. TopoJSON is proving to be an absolute godsend. It's allowed us to reduce ~100MB+ geoJSON down to ~1MB and the shared arc's means we can include multiple levels of boundaries without duplicating the data needed to be sent over the network.

There's still some issues we're having. SVG rendering performance isn't fast or consistent across browsers for 3000+ polygons and although TopoJSON shares arcs between common boundaries the rendered polygons don't. Also the large differences in the size of boundaries we're dealing with means the map needs to be zoom-able. Delivering higher detail boundaries dynamically is tough problem to solve. Ideally you could request a bounding box from a TopoJSON based server, and it would deliver a delta of higher detailed points precomputed from Visvalingam’s algorithm[2].

I found the default quantization level to be much too blocky. For anyone working with TopoJSON I'd recommend you first raise the quantization level while looking at your smallest features until they're no longer blocky, then use the inbuilt simplification to bring the file size down to manageable.

[1]: http://www.bts.nsw.gov.au/BTS-Visual
[2]: http://bost.ocks.org/mike/simplify/ (explained at the bottom)
From his FB page[1]:

Most of this activity takes place in the ski resort of Les Arcs, where I own an apartment and spend most of the winter.

On average they take about 10 hours to really do it properly, some are a little unfinished, if my feet get cold or hurt too much.

The setting out is done using handheld orienteering compass and distance determination using pace counting or measuring tape. Curves are either judged or arcs of circle using a clothes line attached to an anchor at the centre

Designs are chosen from the world of geometry or "crop circles". Some are named eg Mandelbrot set, Koch curve, Sierpinski triangle are 3 of my favorites.

[1]: https://www.facebook.com/snowart8848?sk=info
It's generally not possible to do anything "revolutionary" without encountering some very severe obstacles. The status-quo guards itself.
Nice try, anal-probing aliens, but you can't fool me. I'm onto you.
"I am a programmer. I am not a designer."

Then perhaps you shouldn't be giving design advice.

"I am a designer. I am not a programmer. Here's how to build a half-decent web application in half an hour. First, download PHP..."

All due respect but the author knows just enough "design" to be dangerous, so to speak. Bootstrap is well-designed (dull, but well-designed), and the author's redesign is more of an "un-designing". Arbitrarily adding fonts, colors, and background images take a perfectly usable layout and make it look like something straight out of 2002.

(Do people still use "pimp" as a verb non-ironically?)

[Edit] A note of clarification: I mean no disrespect to anyone doing web design, whether their job title starts with a capital-D or not. I just wouldn't recommend that most of them dole out advice about it.
Nice article, but what's going on with the screenshots on that page? They are greater than 1MB, 02-fonts.png is +5MB and still loading.
But that's not a pro-BlackBerry argument. There are Android phones with keyboards. Maybe they're terrible keyboards compared to a BB (I don't know), but an Android OEM could make an Android phone with an amazing keyboard if they wanted. That's not something exclusive to BlackBerries.
First of all, the study finds a little above 20% of computer software engineers are woman. To me (being from the Netherlands), that sounds rather high. I would guess here in the Netherlands at most around 10% of computer software engineers would be woman, though this guess is just based on personal experience...

Second, 2 points strike me as weird:

-- "Is she really a B!@h? Some women in male dominated industries may feel that they have to be over-assertive in order to portray themselves as authoritative figures in the work place. If you are bothered by a female engineer who is outspoken it is important not to dismiss her as some derogatory name, but instead address her ideas with constructive feedback."

If a woman (or man for that matter) acts as a btch, I wouldn't feel obliged to act constructive towards this person. Actually, I would want to avoid working with such a person altogether, if possible. I wouldn't want to act differently towards men as I would to woman in such situations.

-- "Flexible hours without judgment. Women in tech should not be punished for wanting a good work/life balance. Female engineers who leave work “early” to pick up their children from school notice the stares as they are leaving the office and are 100% cognizant of the perceived perceptions. Just know that they are doing their best and must compensate by getting to the office earlier or working at home late at night. Just because their hours can be more flexible doesn’t mean women aren’t working as hard."

And again, I feel man and woman should be regarded equal in this. Men might get even weirder stares if they leave work early because they have to get their kids from schools. Emancipation of woman in the workplace should be a 2-way street. Men in tech should not be punished for wanting a good work/life balance either.
Exactly, I used to think and practice like the OP did. You find that all your friends start transitioning into couple things and you are a workaholic who doesn't have any interests outside of work. Sure, that is fun and it will be exciting to spend all your time solving the nth problem in your work BUT life is not just that. Life is experiencing everything, yeah all that yada yada about doing it in moderation holds obviously but still. You can't just live your entire life, hope to be interesting to a wide range of people encounter adventures if you isolate yourself and not do any of this!
Usually, it's done well after the creator(s) are dead, and with the blessing of their estate.

I just don't see that happening with software.
The Haskell Cheatsheet
Not sure if this is strictly programming-related, but: Eschewing traditional career-track employment in favor of joining a startup can be damaging, and frequently does not break even with respect to the amount of money and influence you would gain working in a more traditional position.
> APL basically started as math notation turned into a programming language.

The same is also true of Lisp. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)

Interesting that a number of languages around this time started as mathematical notations, which someone then realized could be machine-evaluated.
You can't tell me one and even larger one of these isn't going to cause some Q factor issues. This (the Truvativ) is designed for gravity riders though, where pure pedaling efficiency and fluidity is not at value. Same goes for durability not being as much of an issue. This needs to take rock blows, not miles of wear. I read this product as for commuters and people who put in a lot of miles around town:

http://mtobikes.com/wp-content/truvativ-hammerschmidt-detail...

And yes, the durability is entirely speculative, but, especially coming from a new company (as opposed to HammerSchmidt, which was 100 or so years old when SRAM, of which Truvativ is a brand bought them), I'd have serious doubts they'll put a top quality product out at the start.
Reminds me of Reddit
And, in terms of understanding a 1975 comment with 2012 language comparisons, I challenge you to do better.

How about simply: The web is broken, Windows is almost as bad, Unix is getting awfully long in the tooth, and Javascript is braindead.