skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Incidentally, this is one of the reasons that crunch time is a failed development methodology, as I’ve mentioned in past posts on this blog; developers get tired and start making stupid mistakes."

Totally. Strangely enough, Founders at Work (http://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Problem...) is chock full of startup founders extolling the virtues of overwork. Is this some survivorship bias or does overwork in startups really lead to shipping sooner and achieving product/market fit faster?

It's never been my experience that sustained overwork of software developers leads to actual, measurable productivity increases due to the "two steps forward, one step back" phenomenon. Yeah, you can ship a feature "sooner" but it'll be buggy and disappointing to the end users (probably causing them to hesitate to pay - are you really achieving product/market fit with a buggy product?)

We encourage every developer to find a sustainable pace (it's different for everyone) with the guidance that it's almost always less than 50 hours a week. Why is it that software companies think that overworking software developers is a net positive?
Ruby's big problem with concurrency is the mutability of everything. Ruby just loves mutable state, it is in its blood. Not even the constants are really constant, not even the classes make any promise about the future.

Embracing concurrency would mean to compromise there, in your code you have to acknowledge that there are variables you could reference, but you shouldn't, because they aren't threadsafe. This goes against the idea that ruby is this beautiful abstract garden where everything is possible.

This deep_dup and deep_freeze make it easy for the programmer to create safe objects, but they don't make it harder to use unsafe objects. I think this is why they haven't been accepted in Ruby yet, and perhaps will not be, they just solve a problem that Ruby does not want to go into, for the same reason Ruby won't have a memory model that takes concurrency into account.

In my opinion, the only way Ruby should only ever integrate threads into the language is by introducing a way to start a second thread that will execute either a string or a file. It could return an object that allows sending messages to this spawned thread. The message send method itself might itself perform deep_dup or deep_freeze on the objects it receives. (without needing to expose this deep_dup/deep_freeze method)

You might complain that evalling a string, or loading a file seems like an evil way of going about things, but this is the only way to introducing code into ruby that does not close over its scope.

An alternative to evalling would be to introduce non-closure blocks, but I think their existance might break the principle of least surprise.

edit: btw this idea of spawning a second thread that returns an object that can be used to send objects to another thread could already be implemented by using ruby's fork method and a handle to some shared memory or a pipe.

edit: is there something particularly untrue about what I'm saying? is it worth a downvote?
Couldn't agree more. Amazing intro and then the post hits a brick wall. I thought maybe the rest was cut off....
The direction Instagram is going is similar to what Facebook does already with what I'll call "endorsement advertising".

I've noticed ads where it says something like "your friend Dave likes Verizon", with a clear link to an ad. I then ask Dave if he recently "Liked" verizon and he says "No, but maybe a year ago or something for a contest". So they are selling our likes as endorsements to brands already.

Instagram wants to do this with photos, I expect. A photo of you driving a Prius might link to a Toyota brand page after you follow the Toyota instagram profile, for example.
Fewer Twitter prosecutions likely
That provision of the agreement wasn't the reason I quit, but it was a little rock in my shoe that never went away until I did.

If you add up the total number of people at Google who have complained about that rock, and the number of people who haven't but would if they were prompted, suddenly "too much trouble" looks a little different, IMHO.
Sorry. The damage has already been done, and we clearly hear your intentions, instagram. I deleted my account and don't plan on joining back.
Dell Acquires Data-Protection Provider Credant Technologies
More accurately, you have the option to tell them. In most cases somebody already told them on your behalf.
I never used strace even when doing C and sometimes C++ and still managed. Eclipse can't be beaten for Java, C/C++, PHP, Perl, Ruby and Python development.

EDIT: I just used "strace /usr/bin/java -jar myjar.jar" and saw what looks IO but I'm not familiar with strace output yet. It looks like a handy utility though. Can you give an example of something that you expected to see but didn't when you tried it?
Disqus says people with pseudonyms participate more

http://disqus.com/research/pseudonyms/
I suspect that part of what they do is look at your (likely very long) order history, and make the calculation that it's better to just reship rather than risk losing you as a customer. It's the benefit of having so much order activity over so much time - they know exactly how much a customer is worth to them. That's part of why this scam works - it trades on the existing goodwill / history of a longtime customer to get Amazon to do something un-economic.
> but you can't deduct losses or use them to offset other capital gains.

Not to mention: Underwater folks cannot sell if they can't afford to bring money to the table.

And now that everyone who short-sells will be receiving a 1099 (after Jan1) for forgiven debt, there's going to be another disincentive.

Fun times.
I don't want to be "that Haskell guy" but that's all I could read from this. Realistic multithreading and immutability are deeply tied. I'm very interested to see how far the MRI community can come to getting decent multithreading by implementing suggestions such as these... since my learned intuition is to just throw out mutability and plan in that, much simpler and more limited, sandbox.
It's a fun competition, but I had the exact same experience as oulipian. I co-created RAPT, which won "Most Fun", and we never received Dreamweaver, a Think Vitamin sponsorship, or "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja". However, we did receive a box containing t-shirts, Buckyballs, and Mozilla swag.
I just love his articles: reminds me of the good old days playing these great games.

Just a note, he writes:

"Overheating: Computers don’t much like to be hot and malfunction more frequently in those conditions..."

One of the reason there are way less spurious crashes of desktop / game apps than back in these days is that now most CPUs have built-in temp sensor that automatically reduce the speed in the case of any kind of CPU overheating.

So the piece of code they wrote performing computation and comparing to know good results that could find as much as 1% of broken systems (!!!) would probably not find anywhere near close that number nowadays: the CPU simply slows down if it overheats.

Not sure what happens when GPU overheat and if these too have now built-in protection and not sure if they were trying to detect faulty GPUs too.

Another common "symptom" was an aunt, uncle, friend of parents, calling and explaining that : "my computer works fine for a while then it doesn't work anymore"... And you'd go check their system, open it, and find a CPU full of dust (which TFA mentions).

Nowadays I don't get these calls anymore from those people : they're still using computers, but once their fans get clogged the system simply works at a slower speed and don't overheat anymore.
The other companies are in general legacy NASA contractors or partnerships of the same. They are probably stuck in there ways they are essentially offering the same technology that NASA paid them to develop all these years.
Assuming this is referring to founders. If you're an employee, you're the engineer making $100K in OP's comment.
Guide to media influence through rigging online polls
J, now there's a language! The C source is written in a J like style: a wall of ascii punctuation interspersed with single char identifiers.

It looks like a fantastically expressive language, but i fear the learning curve would be too steep for my time invested to pay off - others would have to spend the same time to learn it as well, negating any code sharing / reuse in my org (we don't use J).
Well, feel free to tell him why he's wrong on Twitter: https://twitter.com/reckless

I'd very much like to see how he responds.
Samsung: Exynos 4 processors are vulnerable to serious attack
I agree, it'd suck if you liked something a few items back and can't get back to it. I'll probably eventually have Backbone handle loading the items, so it can also manage history for that sake.
The grand prize winner also gets a GTX690 which is worth $1000.
He wants to build "something that I can build/do in few days/a week"!
http://www.mailvelope.com/ addresses some of these questions, minus private key storage, encryption of messages being composed. Still, it's a start.
Careful with that. That ignores inflation, which as a great man once said, is the most pernicious tax of all. Inflation is currently around ~1.8% per year. Money in a 1% CD is effectively losing 0.8% per year.

If you're happy with a $30k return on a $3m portfolio, you need to get a 2.8% return in today's inflation environment.
Another good comment that's buried near the bottom, written by one of the authors of the game, regarding the ownership of the code: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/12/18/10378...
Sorry for off-topic but why specifically Silicon Valley? While it has many historical technological centers and is often hyped, it's not the only possible place to open a technological startup.
I am happy with this apology. Everyone loves to hate on something, once one person starts hating others join in the mob mentality against someone or an entity continues until it gets to the point where the arguments have lost sight of what they were originally arguing about. What kind of apology were people expecting? An apology using animated GIF's and infographics?

Considering the photo quality of Instagram photos is extremely questionable, are people really upset that a photo of the nicoise salad they had could be used in an ad for for promotional purposes? Please. 99.9% of the photos on Instagram wouldn't be fit for advertising considering they're most shots of insecure teenagers taking photos in the mirror and the rest pictures of food.

Calm down.
> If I knew how to setup OpenVZ and create < 10ms latency VPNs across multiple datacenters, then I would be a lot better at ops than I am.

I've got the Nobel Committee for Physics on line 2 should you accomplish that trick for DCs more than 30 km (18.6 mi) distant.

Edit: Nevermind (misplaced decimal).
I believe you meant the first Starcraft. I'd also love for these games to be open-sourced, along with the first Diablo, though I'm pretty sure WC3 and SC are still making money for them.

Also, here's a blog post I wrote on how to get these games working on OSX 10.7+ using Windows builds and Wineskin (shameless plug) http://marzzbar.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/how-to-play-classic...
There is a great deal of both misunderstanding and ignorant Microsoft bashing in this comment.

First of all, you are mixing up two completely different concepts.

For character encoding on Windows:
For many functions in the Windows API there two versions of a function, one with an A (for ANSI) at the end and one with a W (for wide). This was added to make it easier to support Win32 on both Windows 95, which used 8-bit characters and codepages and Windows NT which was natively utf-16 unicode. At the time utf-16 was considered the best and most standard choice for supporting unicode. In most cases it is implemented as W function with an A function that is little more than a wrapper.

This has nothing to do with what Raymond is describing.

For the 64-32 bit stuff they ensured that all code would compile and work correctly with both 32/64 bit stuff and built two versions, one for ia32 and one for amd64. The kernel would have to be modified to support the amd64 architecture. This is exactly what Linux, OSX and other operating systems that support multiple architectures do. On top of this, because amd64 supports backwards compatibility, they also included an ia32 environment with it as well, but this is optional, so anything that ships with the OS cannot depend on it. I assume this is what OSX does too, the only difference is that with Windows the two versions ship as different SKAs, and MacOSX ships with both versions and installs the one that the computer originally shipped with.

Second, the number of system calls has nothing do with any of this at all.
LockWindowUpdate really isn't that unusual if you understand how painting works in Windows. The terminology behind it is weird and so is the fact that it's one window at a time, but it's not all that strange - it's an old enough primitive that you probably couldn't justify making it a per-window flag bit.
Why not? It's pretty clear non-developers have absolutely every idea how long and hard developers have to work to get "simple" features done. And developers totally can measure soft skills like marketing and such.

And in other news, those that can, do; those that can't, teach.
‘iPhone’ runs Android in Brazil
And we're sorting your price out as well (as well as everyone else who won). :)

Apologies again. We'll fix it.
Hmm... Not I was responsible for that one as well - but send me an email to p {at} mozilla {com} with your shipping address and t-shirt size and I'll get you a t-shirt.
Maybe off topic here, but there is a song that is popular out here in Texas that makes a useful observation (fame don't take away the pain, it just pays the bills): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBjxmJIRnS8
Well, that's super-paranoid. Amazon uses major name suppliers like UPS. So it's not their employee to sack. And I doubt UPS would allow Amazon to go around randomly accusing their employees of theft.
This is a great writeup and is completely on target for realistic deployments on AWS.

We're a big user of AWS (well, relative, but we run about $10K/month in costs through AWS), so I'd like to supplement this outstanding blog post:

* I cannot emphasize enough how awesome Amazon's cost cuts are. It is really nice to wake up in the morning and see that 40% of your costs are now going to drop 20% next month going forward. (Like: Recent S3 cost cuts). In Louisiana, we call this Lagniappe (A little something extra.) We don't plan for it, nor budget for it, so it is a nice surprise every time it happens.

* We've also completely abandoned EBS in favor of ephemeral storage except in two places: some NFS and MySQL slaves that function as snapshot/backup hosts only.

* If the data you are storing isn't super critical, consider Amazon S3's reduced redundancy storage. When you approach the 30-50TB level, it makes a difference in costs.

* RDS is still just a dream for us, since we still don't have a comfort level with performance.

* Elasticache has definitely been a winner and allowed us to replace our dedicated memcache instances.

* We're doing some initial testing with Route 53 (Amazon's DNS services) and so far so good, with great flexibility and a nice API into DNS.

* We're scared to death of AWS SNS - we currently use SendGrid and a long trusted existing server for email delivery. Twillo will is our first choice for an upcoming SMS alerting project.

* If you are doing anything with streaming or high bandwidth work, AWS bandwidth is VERY expensive. We've opted to go with unmetered ports on a cluster of bare metal boxes with 1000TB.com. That easily saves us $1000's a month in bandwidth costs, and if we need overflow or have an outage there we can spin up temporary instances on AWS to provide short term coverage.
It will be forgotten tomorrow.
I am not ignorant of the history. Please try to follow this reasoning:

1. Faced with a new character set which was larger than eight-bits (Unicode 16-bit) Microsoft said "hey let's make an all-new API" and set to work rewriting everything

2. Faced with a new character set which was larger than eight-bits (Unicode 32-bit), the Unix guys said "hey let's create a standard way to encode these characters and rewrite nothing.

You seem to be fixated on the difference between the new character sizes. Ignore the precise number of bits! The point is when making a change to adapt to a new system, do you rewrite everything and risk causing bugs everywhere, or do you do something clever which has far less risk and uses the same API?
Same thing as in "you were supposed to get a shirt but never got it"? If so - see above. Send me an email. We'll fix it.
Wouldn't the insider tips be illegal insider trading?
It depends on what you are trying to achieve: do you want to learn? do you want to raise your profile in the market? do you want to make money through the app?
A decade ago, I was eyeing up the "Lectra" (electric motorcycle) for work commuting. With the price of solar panels having halved their per-watt price in the same intervening decade, such a vehicle might make sense today.

Are there any current 100% electric motorcycles today?
That's pretty much what I came to post here, but way more eloquent than when I would've written it :)

Articles like this make me realize that what was the most boring subject in school 10 years ago, is now quickly becoming my favorite tool in the world. Gotta love mathematics.
And yet we spent around 3 trillion. You'd think that other 2 trillion could do some good too.

There have been several people in this thread suggest that the government has been largely responsible for their success so they should be happy to pay tons of taxes, and then given examples like roads and police as their reasoning. I really like having roads too. Guess what, roads and police are a tiny tiny portion of our current spending levels, so no I'm not happy to pay huge amounts of taxes (note i'm not in the top tax bracket and have no worries of my taxes going up further).

If we stopped spending absurd amounts of money on so many ridiculous things we'd probably have more people not complain about their taxes. On the other hand, if we stopped spending the absurd amounts of money, our current tax revenues would be more than enough.
My sister is an olympic level athlete, food as a reward becomes a problem for many of her competitors. Rewards help cement a habit though, personally I use music when I require extra motivation and don't when I don't need it. Maybe consider going to a req center and soak in a hot tub as a reward or a day off.
Its anecdotal and Im sure getting older influences my opinion.

Im also one of these people who thinks Facebook creates a lot of weak ties in replacement of fewer stronger ties between people. No idea if Im wrong or right but despite the many good things technology has brought I wonder if its subtly making many of us more lonely on an individual/cognitive level.

There are also a number of cultural/social changes that influence my opinion. Real integrated communities within America seem increasingly rare, there seems to be less trust in "strangers", little to no focus on the common good, increased focus on one's self - on top of it you could argue that we have less of a need for certain types of relationships due to modernization.
Hi, Stacy from CNNMoney here. We talked to all 50 project creators to get the shipping info -- it's all firsthand data. The beta was the "main" project the Kickstarter was intended to finance, and that's not finished yet. We included a link to Castle Story's dev diary in the profile (click the square) and made clear that it's in active development.
Really? NYC seems to have some great internet options. I get reliable unlimited 50Mbps down/20Mbps up, and many parts of the city can now get Verizon's 300Mbps down/65Mbps up service, if you're willing to pay extra for it (I wouldn't because it wouldn't speed up most activities and for those it would, my ISP is rarely the bottleneck).
Good question.

I found others i had to share code with weren't as interested as me about writing maintainable perl code - i got really fed up with a patch work of "write only" perl scripts performing useful functions in prod. From DB maintenance tasks to general housekeeping, to work-arounds for prod app issues that never got prioritised for strategic fixes.

I found in practice python code produced by most others was easier maintained: it seemed to more or less force people to write more readable and therefore, maintainable code.

I also viewed the fact that Python was one of the premier languages across so many problem domains (Systems, DB, GUI, Web, Large data, GPU, etc.) as being a sure fire payoff for any time invested in it.

In environments this size it's not any one persons actions dictate what becomes the status quo: different groups will have different agendas and therefore priorities and views. I guess i was lucky that everyone else was either willing to give Python a go, or was easily convinced.

FWIW over the past few years it's proven to be a good choice for us. There are still O'Reilly books float about, esp between the newcomers but there's no zealous "where's my camel book!" shouts anymore.
> I understand they need to monetize (god, it's taken HOW LONG!?!? Jesus!), but that doesn't excuse them from intellectual dishonesty.

I thought, "We run a business," was a blanket excuse for intellectual dishonesty in general.
Nobody has mentioned taxes yet.

I assume your "making 100K" is the salary. The pre-tax salary. Taxes will chop that pretty much in half. So if you save $40K/year, you get to live off of $10k in the second most expensive MSA in the US. Good luck.
As opposed to your theory of he should pay for the thing he wants and also be happy about paying for what everyone else wants?
"STFU. You don't know what you're talking about."

This is a complete mischaracterization of what I wrote. I wasn't being antagonistic. At least, it wasn't taken that way by the author of the article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4930618
I had a typo in there, it should be good to go now. Thanks for the heads up.
As a server engineer this sounds like the correct solution. As someone who runs some blogs, not so much.

If I want to put various formats of images on my blogger.com site (or other similar service) today, assuming some syntax was added to HTML to allow it, I can do that immediately. I don't have to wait N years for the people who run blogger.com to update their software.

This is a problem often run into between sys admins who run their own servers and the rest of use who don't. They forgot that the majority of users don't run their own servers.
10 msec * c = ~3000 km or ~1860 miles.

Of course light doesn't travel that fast through glass and there is latency at the hardware on either end. ;)
The marketplace is CodeCanyon.net and the plugins can be found at http://codecanyon.net/user/liviumirea/portfolio . They take a 50% cut, but it may be worth it considering the exposure I received without any marketing whatsoever.
Nope. Windows does not distinguish between a kernel APIs versus other APIs. They are all "The Win{32,64} API"
Naval Post-Grad Essay Opp ($500)
Sixth Annual Essay Competition
The Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security is pleased to announce its Annual Essay Competition. This competition strives to stimulate original thought on issues in Homeland Security and Homeland Defense.
Spilling the beans was exactly the point of his questioning.
Indeed. :) But something that I can partially build then resume at a later date works too. Not sure I can do the Instagram thing just yet!
This sets up a more perverse incentive structure than pretty much anything else that comes to mind.
You need to update the photo before you speak about SV..SV !== San Francisco