skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"How often when you're sitting around on the sofa would you use your phone to surf the web when you could also go get your laptop? With my 4.5" last phone, the answer was never."

For me it's always even when I have the laptop within reach. Using a phone is just so much more convenient regardless how small it is. I only use my laptop when working nowadays.
Predictions For 2013 That Will Get Your Blog More Views
The recent five-part tutorial on Go that ran in Dr. Dobb's also has articles worth linking to: http://www.drdobbs.com/240008277
I'm (among other things) a Linux Java dev, and for what is worth from my anecdotal point of view, neither me nor anyone I know users OpenJDK. Both development and deployments happens with Oracle stuff.
> In programming, there are very few things that will still
> be the same in 20+ years and we have no idea what those
> things are.

For the most part we are walking toward local optima in programming languages with larger jumps rarely succeeding.

SRS is well designed for gradually changing bodies of knowledge. New cards are added and come up more often, older cards can be retired but they rarely come up anyway.
Hey there! I wouldn't mind helping out ;). Been doin' various kinds of front and backend web development for startups for about two years now.

My Skype handle is saiko-chriskun if you're still lookin'.
+1. For me a killer feature is that I easily create executables for lin/mac/win on my machine and don't have any dependencies at all (JVM for example).
Yup, tested in court: http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/carpool.asp

"Dickinson chose to fight the ticket by asserting in court that Arizona traffic laws don't define what a person is, so the child inside her womb justified her use of the lane.

Phoenix Municipal Court Judge Dennis Freeman used a "common sense" definition of the statutes governing use of HOV lanes in which an individual occupies a "separate and distinct" space in a vehicle. "The law is meant to fill empty space in a vehicle," Freeman said."
The fact that a decision process is noisy and imperfect doesn't mean that deliberately adding errors to it won't give worse results.

All it does is give you statistical noise, making it easier to bury your head in the sand.
Strange. I never connected the REST "Roy Fielding" with the libwww-perl "Roy Fielding". How odd.
The last lecture: Randy Pausch's last talk at CMU before his death of cancer
The advantage of QB, for my small software training company, is that there is no longer a learning curve and there is no future cost with it. Once you've paid for it, that's it. We're still running a QB 2008 package and it's fine. We paid something like $150 back then for it. It does the basics that a small ISV would need - credits and debits, invoicing.

When I look at Xero or Freshbooks or others, the recurring cost is just outrageous by comparison. The cheapest plans they offer are $240/year. When I look at what I get vs. the cost, it's just not worth it for my business. Over the past four years, I've invested $150 into Quickbooks. If I used Freskbooks, for ex, for four years, I'm looking at a $960 cost. I don't need features that they offer so it makes no sense for my business to pay that recurring cost (time tracking, iPad apps, etc). Of course, there are coupons/promotions that I might be able to take advantage of one time but regardless the recurring cost is too much. QB2008 was solid enough that I struggle to think, "What would it take for me to upgrade to the new version of QB?" I can't think of a killer feature, for my business, that's worth another $190 (the new price) let alone $240/year in perpetuity.
olsn, since you're the author of this tripe: did you even bother to ask why they wanted a loading screen, and why they wanted it longer? Never thought it'd be a good idea to include that in your blog? Or perhaps you're just more interested in a bit of a "oh clients are stupid hahaha" circlejerk.
Rocket Internet Preparing to Go Public
Related SO post/comment - Oh Yes You Can Use Regexes to Parse HTML! - http://stackoverflow.com/a/4234491/12195 (HN - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2741780)

This comment is from Tom Christiansen of Programming Perl / Perl Cookbook fame which includes the following caveat:

So while it certainly can be done (this posting serves as an existence proof of this incontrovertible fact), that doesn’t mean it should be.
I find it easy to believe that social networks aimed at children/adolescents are the equivalent of boy bands rather than record labels.
My adviser is rather lucky: he commutes to Technion via carpool, which puts a strong limit on the amount of time he can spend in the physical office everyday. Of course, he works plenty from home, but physical office-time limits things like committee drag and teaching load. And we get TA's here.
Agreed, but I was mainly focusing on the aforementioned domains in which C is the 'de facto' standard due to it's properties.

However I believe there are lots of applications written in C because that was either the 'language d'jour' back when they were written or that the author was very proficient in it, which could be rewritten in something like Go,Java,C# or even Python and similar without any perceptable loss of performance.

Looking at things where C dominates to this day and show no sign of weakening, I see operating-system level code (kernel, driver, userland<->kernel interface code), libraries for cpu intensive workloads (audio/video codecs, compression/decompression, low level game framework components etc) and of course cpu intensive applications (encoders, archivers, graphics manipulation software for 2d/3d etc), I guess I should squeeze in version control software here aswell :)

However, there exists a wide range of applications outside of these areas where I think C isn't particularly competitive these days as it's strengths are dwarfed by it's weaknesses.

That's not to say that there is anything wrong with writing such applications in C, particularly considering aspects such as proficiency and familiarity, if you know C very well and feel very comfortable programming in it then it's less likely you'd want to switch to something else for 'convenience'.
Sure, I agree with you that development, especially open source online based one is much closer to being merit based than anywhere else. However, the limiting factor is the number of people that are in a position to know about the world of software development, to actually be able to contribute -- that's where the numbers are off. You can't open a door that you don't know exists.

Also, from what I understand in the FLOSS world, the number of contributors that are women are once again a smaller fraction than the number of software developers in general.
Frequency analysis of human language shows that word usage follows a Power law distribution (Zipf's Law) which, for example, means that:

* the 75 most common words make up 40% of occurrences
* the 200 most common words make up 50% of occurrences
* the 524 most common words make up 60% of occurrences
* the 1257 most common words make up 70% of occurrences
* the 2925 most common words make up 80% of occurrences

Speculatively, similar frequency analyses of library calls in various codebases for a programming language may reveal a similar long-tail distribution. This would provide a list of high frequency library routines that would be worth memorising - with clearly diminishing returns as the vocabulary grows.

This kind of analysis would also point at important targets for optimisation, simplification and parallelisation as well as direct the efforts of library implementers for new languages.
I did not imply or say that 'XYZ' should get any benefits, nor categorized anyone, I'd simply answered your question why it might be a problem -- it is my fault for not quoting back the exact part of your post I was replying to. My point is that I think the optimal number of people in minorities 'XYZ' that might be more happy and productive working in software, and the overall net benefit to the world in terms of 'efficient allocation of labor' is a state where more 'XYZ' work in software development.
>If doing something makes some people behave like creeps, its generally the fault of the creeps.

That's not correct. If a woman/man comes naked in class, people WILL stare. And it's not their fault, nor is it "creepy", it's only natural.

In any case, this is not what we're dealing with here. Nothing creepy about noticing a website re-activated.
I had the same thing with my T61. It was due to the sense wire on the fan being crimped slightly between the keyboard and roll cage assembly. I managed to fix it with some wiggling of the wire without resorting to fan control software. I also took the entire thing to bits and replaced the heatsink goo with Arctic Silver.

I paid approx $150 for this T61.
I am in your exact same situation. What I am thinking to do is get a Macbook Air and spin up Amazon EC2 instances if I need more power. This way I only pay for what I use + I have a wide range of server instances I can use, from micro to xlarge (68GB RAM which costs ~$30 per hour).
I'm related to a few professors, and they largely carry massive chips on their shoulder about this. For example:

And for those of us whose research directly translates to the real world (e.g., in my case — persuasion, crisis communication, strategic communication), the so-called professionals look down their overpriced noses at us. That means that even if we did want to move back to the ‘real world’ — we have to basically apologize for our PhD, our time spent training them (Where do they think new professionals come from? Are they hatched?), and kiss their asses for handouts. So, basically until we write our book and ‘become’ a pundit or consultant later in our careers we’re stuck because Americans are scared of smart people.

is a great example of the genre. There's huge amounts of rank jealousy directed at classmates who took a look at the (readily available) evidence of what a PhD's career track looked like and decided against it.

(Amazingly, despite hearing terrible complaining about the stresses of tenure-track professors every time I meet my family, they always ask "So when are you going to grad school?")
I have to mention We Are Legion, a documentary about Anonymous.

Website

http://wearelegionthedocumentary.com/

Watch on Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_541KmGxGs
As a counterexample I think Microsoft conferences represent well diversity (from what I saw watching MIX and Build videos on channel9).
This is probably the result of their HR strategy (speakers are mostly Microsofties).
The reasons are related to anatomy of spinal column. In adults the spinal cord ends at lower level of second lumbar vertebra. The sheaths/coverings of spinal cord extend all the way down to cocyx. This creates a hollow tube filled only with cerebrospinal fluid from second lumbar vertebra down to end of spinal column. Most of the epidural anesthesia techniques and all of spinal anesthesia techniques use this space because there is no risk of damage to spinal cord. In epidural anesthesia, the catheter can only be advanced a few vertebra up and down from point of insertion. The regions on which surgery can be performed depend on reach of epidural catheter. So, with an epidural catheter in lumbar region, only lower limbs and lower abdomen can be anesthetized. With epidural cathetr in lower thoracic vertebra , approx. lower 2/3 of abdomen can be anesthetized. For chest surgeries you will need epidural catheter in mid thoracic vertebras. And so on. But the problem with thoracic epidural is risk of puncture of dural sheath and damage to spinal cord which will result in permanent paralysis of that area. Epidural anesthesia can be used for upper abdominal and chest surgeries but the risk will be more. Moreover, for extensive surgeries a lot more is needed just simple loss of sensation. for example, more granular control of heart rate, blood pressure, oxygenation etc ; all these manoeuvres are a lot easier in general anesthesia.
So for lower limbs to lower abdomen , spinal and epidural anesthesia are fine, even better compared to general anesthesia (especially in obstetrics). For the rest, depends on specific circumstances.
I have noted this and will respond appropriately
Are you saying that women are not smart enough to find out about open source, git or github which are a couple of google search away for anyone with interest in software development? I find this quite insulting for women. Or are you saying there's a white male conspiracy that prevents women from doing these couple of google search? Which is not insulting but pretty absurd.
You seem to assume that prejudice and discrimination are not reasons for lack if diversity in tech, rather than other factors. Affirmative action may be a blunt and ineffective solution to fight a lack of diversity caused by prejudice, but to be fair any discussion of its merits must recognize that it's purpose is remedy discrimination, not just to improve diversity in a population.

Yes, affirmative action makes a big assumption when it posits that a lack of diversity is caused by prejudice. But might that not be the case, that often a lack of diversity is caused by prejudice that can most easily be countered by a directly oppositional force? To be fair, it is this assumption that must be challenged when you challenge affirmative action.
while watching this I noticed that the kid in the "tech today live" video mentions his live stream being "usually at saturdays at four pm-." I was unable to make out the rest of what he says, it's around 12:35-12:45 if you would like to hear it yourself. I feel like _why referenced this in SPOOL/DESOLEE with "April the 18th from like four o clock to let's say twelve." April 18th of 2009 (the year this video was made) was a saturday and I'm assuming what I couldn't make out from "tech today live" was some variation of "to twelve." so, "saturday from like four o clock to twelve."

though, even I, am unable to buy into my own crazy theories. I might be insane! I tend to be terrible at these things too.

not quite related to this video, but something I found humorous was the picture he used in SPOOL/DESOLEE http://i.imgur.com/gJR6b.png not too sure but it looks like dogs racing.
>I haven't measured, but I'd guess that the language spec of Go is shorter than the specs of each of those other languages.

Doesn't matter, since you'll find huge large holes in libraries, tooling, ecosystem and maturity in Go which can be easily filled in Java+Scala/Clojure, and which nullify any "smaller spec" advantage.

For example there is not one mature and complete web framework in Go. Several for all of Java/Scala/Clojure. There is no good RBDMS support in Go. As good as it gets for the JVM languages. Etc...
This is the same as learning kung-fu moves by staring at pictures of them.
Yes, Google permeates most peoples online lives with the pervasive services. But at the moment the compromise between ease of use,free service with seeming integration beats the privacy.At least google is seemingly better with privacy than others.
PHP is a good example as it is very hard to remember all its functions, as it uses a mix of naming standards. (For example, the case-insensitive version of strcmp is strcasecmp, and the case-insensitive version of strstr is stristr)

Whenever I write PHP I look up a lot more methods than when I write Ruby, even though I have more experience in PHP (Ruby cheats, a little bit, by having multiple names for many methods, making a wild guess much more likely to be correct)
This sounds like great news for Rocket Internet, but having read the article I don't even have a cursory understanding of what they do. I think it would have been beneficial to include a sentence or two about what they do beyond "clone factory".

EDIT: This seems to be them: http://www.rocket-internet.de/
What can I say, I guess I am a karma whore after all. Couldn't face the risk of accumulating a lot of downvotes.
Since when is baldness a choice? Does Rogain work in 100% of the cases? Can any bald person afford it? I guess for chemo patients the choice is baldness or death? Or are you suggesting they can always buy a toupee or a hat and can wear it all the time? If that is admissible, then any female can always get a sex-change operation, right?

A Star Trek fan with a comment on Captain Picard: "Surely by the 24th century, they would have found a cure for male pattern baldness."

Gene Roddenberry replied, "No, by the 24th century, no one will care."

(Though I think Roddenberry at first did care.) This is the attitude zxcdw is taking. It doesn't matter if something is a choice or not, if it's irrelevant to the context under consideration then it's irrelevant. Long hair, baldness, gender, sexuality, race, all seem irrelevant under the context of tech jobs and conferences. If there is discrimination based on irrelevant details, that's a problem with who is doing the discriminating, and giving an artificial leg-up to the discriminatee is a less effective solution than finding a suitable punishment (fired, stern talking to, etc.) to the discriminator. I'm in favor of giving incentives for the behavior of not caring about these things instead of giving incentives to discriminatees to be over-sensitive.

Where I may be in disagreement with zxcdw (I don't know) is that I have no problem with discrimination on relevant details. If someone is dumb, I wouldn't want to hire them for any technical job. (Similarly I wish we'd get rid of minority grants and artificial leg-ups like effectively adding SAT points to a new university student applicant. RyanZAG's comment on this page could have replaced 'conferences' with 'universities' and 'speakers' with 'students' and still be a coherent argument.) If it just so happens that all humans are not equal (something I believe), there may indeed be clusters of people that have a high correlation with one relevant detail (such as fitness for a particular line of work) and another supposedly irrelevant detail (such as their gender or race or sexuality). One can notice such clusters but it would still be improper to start caring about the irrelevant details just as much as the relevant ones.

Edit: mgkimsal made a good comment above on how things such as gender and cultural background can be relevant to contexts like conference speakers, where one might otherwise assume them to be irrelevant.
My thesis is that since software and software development are continually growing in scope, popularity and influence on the world, having more people get involved across all kind of demographics will be an overall net benefit to the world.
This is a valid opinion, but you can't go back and try to correct for people who, given different circumstances, might have grown into software and development rather than nursing or language or economics or another science. You do that, and you are somehow discriminating against someone on the basis of physical characteristics and are absolutely in the wrong. The solution is to make sure entry is unbiased, access is available, and you kind of have to hope culture eventually shifts away from inhereted biogtry and bias and towards indifference. Because at the end of the day, the "programmers are nerds" and "nerds are white men" mentality is pervasive from a young age, and that paints a flawed picture from the get-go. But it is getting better. Nerd culture is becoming more accepted, and computers are getting more pervasive, so they become more accepted too. There was an introductory bias that initiated a cultural stance in a very deeply derogatory way, and it will take decades for society to right itself away from that bias as long as it isn't perpetuated. But I don't think you can force it, especially with nonsense like affirmative action. That just perpetuates the bias by painting certain groups as "unnatural" in a setting where they have to be artificially inserted.
Assuming you will use the laptop for two years before selling it for 50% of the original price, the server will cost extra 1200 eur (24x50) during that period, making the Air + server option more expensive. Also, it's much more comfortable to have everything running on localhost. No network lag issues, no dependency on fast internet connection, less hassle, etc. Not to mention very nice 2880*1800 display.
The Air is a somewhat paradoxical machine in that it is extremely portable and therefore perfect for travel, which is when you often lose the data connection and therefore need more power to run VMs! You, however, don't have that problem, if indeed you are most often working from home. In the case you describe, definitely go for the Air, or wait a few months to see if the Air gets a retina screen. I have an air, and it is difficult to consider going back to anything even slightly bulkier.
There seem to be two categories of workers: Software Engineers and everyone else. SWEs have the confidence to leave stability behind.

On the other hand, 90% of SWEs behave like all the SWE employees!
I'd prefer the Air or even the Pro (there's really not much difference in portability terms) and still work remotely. It's liberating to host everything on the cloud. You don't have to worry about your local setup failing, the VMs hogging resources and making your machine unusable (or destroying your battery).

Right now I'm using a Macbook Pro 2012 w/o the Retina. I do all my development on Linode servers, remotely. I get 6 hours of battery life and the machine is a pleasure to work on. I wouldn't go back to my old Windows laptop, where I used PuTTY to work.
Coming for the UK my worry is that you lose almost all manufacturing capability and shift to financial/services industries. Short term that probably works out really well financially, long term... possibly not so much.

In the UK, I find it a real effort to find anything made in the the UK on the high street (and few things even designed in the UK, ARM processors probably being the exception). Debt is one thing, the loss of manufacturing/and engineering capability I find more worrying.
You'd have much higher latency working on the remote VMs than on local VMs. You'd also be dependent on Internet connectivity and you'd have to rely on Hetzner's machines being available whenever you need to do your work. Shit does happen.
Behind the scenes of the Pirate Bay trial
That doesn't mean what she describes is not painfully true.
They're a global company that creates e-commerce startups in emerging economies. Not sure if 'startup' is really the right term here, but it's what they use. While they bill themselves as an accelerator, it's more that they ship in talent to emerging economies and try to become a big name in the e-commerce sector in those economies.

Seems to be working out for them, but I'm guessing the 'going public' is a way for the founders to cash out as quickly as possible in case it goes belly-up?
This does not belong on HN. Flagged.
I found this article really helpful when I realized all my work really revolved around my servers. I've got an iPad with a really nice Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and I love the fact that I can charge it overnight and use it all day (just like my cell phone). Of course, there are more limitations with my rig than you'd experience with a MacBook Air.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/swap-your-laptop-ipad-li...
In my office we have been giving all dev's 13" full spec air's for about 2 years. Need to process a big data set etc? Do it on our EC2 setup. It works better and people don't tend to have as much stuff on there machines.
I think the article's point was that Unicode characters U+2028 and U+2029 are illegal in JavaScript string literals.

Yet, the JSON specification (RFC 4627) officially allows them to exist in JSON string literals:

"All Unicode characters may be placed within the quotation marks except for the characters that must be escaped: quotation mark, reverse solidus, and the control characters (U+0000 through U+001F)."

So with U+2028 or U+2029 you can construct a valid JSON object that JavaScript can't parse.