skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's hard to say. Saving the 512x512 FireFox logo, for example (with white background for fair comparison) at 99% quality JPEG from GIMP saves less than 5% space over PNG, and for images with even more solid white and simple gradients, PNG will beat high quality JPEG.

Even more importantly, frequency-domain compression is really not a very good alternative for most alpha channels for two main reasons.

First, most alpha channels are dominated by large regions of full transparency or full opacity. PNG thrives under those conditions. JPEG does OK.

Second, ring artifacts are a big problem for alpha channels. Whereas a ring artifact in a chroma channel will often be completely imperceptible to the viewer, a ring artifact on an alpha channel can turn transparent pixels opaque. Unless you correct the non-alpha channels to account for those artifacts on the alpha channel, you'll end up with noticeable black halos, even at relatively high quantization. That correction is difficult, and even if you do it well, the results are not stellar.

So while a hybrid format might work well, JPEG + alpha is not as simple as it sounds.
Right, things you post to your Facebook page, not ads you are actually buying from Facebook. You get to advertise for free by creating a page for your business and getting people to like it. It has a ton of value for your business, but you're not purchasing anything directly from Facebook.
So reading through that study it appears as though that the remote test group ("Team Solo"):

- was actually working in cubicles in the same room and could overhear each others conversations.

- used email and a very basic text-based chatroom built in 2002 as their primary means of communication, as well as the telephone. Doesn't sound like a sophisticated setup to me.

- did not use any screen sharing software or VOIP software like google hangouts or skype and no mention was made about version control software, wikis, project management software ala Asana or Basecamp, or any other of the modern tools we developers use today.

They mention that "Team Pair" benefited greatly from pair programming, which any remote worker (including myself) can tell you is more than just possible using the tools of today, but perhaps even better than hovering over someone's shoulder in the instances where the software allows you to take control of the other person's screen.

From the study:

"On Team Solo, by contrast, intrusions were both functional and
social in nature. Intrusions were longer and generally involved
movement – team members physically visited another team
member’s cubicle."

Again, their "remote" team is actually just a team in the same room but separated by cubicles. They state that the reason the interruptions were lengthier for Team Solo was because of the physical distance between the team members. In my experience, when team members are truly remote, the interruptions drop significantly in both length and frequency.

You have linked to a very old study that determined that working in an open-plan office is better than working in a cubicle-based office. You either didn't read the study, or are not understanding how this clearly does not apply to truly remote workers and the topic at hand.

The tools people have today to collaborate remotely are much better than they were in 2002, and getting better every year. Unless you can point to a recent study that actually compares truly remote workers using modern tools to co-located employees I'm going to go ahead and say that the evidence is weak at best.
We demo'd a surface at work, and these were my takeaways:

1) The UI is incredibly confusing. It, again, feels like it's just a windows machine with some goofy /thing/ bolted to the top of it. It reminds me of windows media center.

2) At least the one we got was really heavy. Heavier than a macbook air, which is a "real" computer.

3) We all-too-frequently seemed to get dumped back into a standard windows desktop with a startbutton and everything...which would be great, if it functioned that way. All I wanted to do was create a PPTP connection on the thing, but absolutely couldn't figure out how to make that happen.

--

I am fairly far from an apple fan, but the reason that the iPad has been so successful is that apple designed it from the beginning to be a new device with new UI paradigms.

Android did the same.

Microsoft, at least from the experience I got with surface, absolutely did not, which is sad, because they're easily poised to be able to dominate tablets.

The "holy shit" dream scenario that I have, and I think it's shared by a lot of tablet users, is a tablet as a detachable auxiliary monitor that I can dock applications into.

If I drag, for example, a browser window over to my surface monitor, that surface monitor should be able to get picked up and go with me, and then I should be able to dock that back into my desktop and go back to working there.
git bisect allowed me, as a user, to track down a rendering bug in WINE which I would have no idea where to start on otherwise. There were approx 1000 commits between the two parts and the reproduction was not terribly quick (start up game, get to certain view, verify). It even handled the fact that there were two apparently unrelated commits (by filenames and commit time) which contributed to the bug, and that some in some revisions the game wouldn't even start.

This is only one example, and I rarely have a need for git bisect in the code that I generally work on (since I can mostly keep it in my head, and regressions are rare). But in large projects it's extremely useful.
How does one acquire the connections to be called in as this type of engineer?
Jenkins setup for a JavaScript project
Frack me. Good point!

Edit: thinking about it. Isn't the poverty line relative to the cost of living? It may take a lot less money to feed and clothe a family in China than in the US.
A fair point. It's mainly just to help students and make money on the side (it's also my CS project). It aims to streamline the whole process of finding a student property rather than actually selling properties themselves (i.e. it links back to the estate agent websites in the end). Think of it as a property comparison service.

As such, I'm not particularly concerned about whether booms or busts are happening. I just want to know what would be the right choice in this present case for a student making some side money on a project.

Thanks for your input though =)
Not to mention hand rails, non-slip mats to stand on, chairs in the shower and other risk reduction strategies.
This is excellent news, very excited for these guys. I look forward to watching them grow. Truly an excellent product.
I got started with "Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A 28-Day Program" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0761159258/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...)

It's a very easy introduction to several kinds of meditation. The CD that comes with it are guided meditations of all the types she talks about in the book.
I can easily think that climbing in and out of a bathtub is way more risky (wrt. falling) than merely stepping under a shower. I believe people don't fall when they stand in the shower. They fall when they step out of it on moist surface. Sorry if I ruined your day. :)
China's air pollution hits dangerously high toxic levels
> Looking at the stats and what kills us, we spend a lot of time looking at the stuff that is actually going down versus the stuff that is increasing.

We need to be careful: maybe things that are going down are going down because of how much time we have spent looking at them.
Until the Day Now Known as Before Git TFS (aka Yesterday), this was my workflow for checking in code (I work on a Mac):

* get far enough along in my code that I want to check in, launch VMWare Fusion, start Windows, login to Windows and run security updates, connect card reader, login to the VPN, oops bad password, login to the VPN again, more security updates, launch Visual Studio, connect to TFS, launch project solution file, check out my project, find the local directory on Windows where the files are stored, copy files from Mac to Windows, check in the project. Cry a bit.

And THEN: a couple hours after Git integration was announced, we moved a project I was working on over to Git on Team Foundation Service.

My new workflow:

* Make a change in the code, commit, pull, push. From INSIDE Emacs on my Mac. If you didn't know any better, you'd think I was just pushing code to GitHub.

In short, I love you.
It's important to remember that causes of death are often also activities which carry utility and even outright life-saving capability.

Accidental poisoning, for example, is often due to exposure to cleaning chemicals and drugs which have massively reduced illnesses and deaths. Spending more to make them less accessible may actually be self-defeating, in that it could well cause more deaths than it prevents, by making it harder to get and use those things for their intended purpose.

Further, many of the more prominent killers in society have already been the subject of safety campaigns. Cars are massively safer today than they were in the 70s and earlier, as a direct result of safety research and societal effort. As returns on such efforts have been diminishing for some time, the next dollar of safety research or societal effort is quite likely to impact more net lives when directed at a "lesser" killer that hasn't been the subject of as much study.

One must keep those two considerations in mind, when making judgements about whether we're spending an undue amount of time and money on a given threat.

Simply looking at a stack-rank of 'killers' isn't enough.
We'll reach out to them.
It's not life. It's not just you. Others of us have been through this sort of thing.

The one thing I really want to kick you in the ass on is: get out of bed every fucking day, and you damn well spend time with your friends and family. It's the one thing I know of that can reliably make it feel better.

That's your life right there: friends and family. Your job will be gone someday, and you will achieve that degree someday. What's there for you right now is friends and family.

And if you ever want to talk, on Skype or instant-message or email, you damn well grab my contact info off my Hacker News profile. I've been through this before, over, under, around, through and after.

It's not easy, but it is simple. You just have to keep doing one positive thing after another, day after day. I promise.
Thank you. This is quite instructive.

What makes a great citation? The claim was that a book was published, and I showed the book. Another claim was that a resolution was passed and I showed the resolution. I thought I was doing well until I read chris's reply. :)

I will address chris's point that eugenics is not a theory recognized in psychiatry.

1. Forced sterilization of mental patients was done by social psychiatrists, to improve society by removing the genetic material of mentally feeble and insane.

Reference: Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880-1940. Ian Robert Dowbiggin. 245 pp. Cornell University Press, 1997.

http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/how-psychiatr...

http://www.amazon.com/Keeping-America-Sane-Psychiatry-1880-1...

2. The following paper offers historical case studies of "psychiatric genetics" and urges reflection on social psychiatry.

The Eugenic Legacy in Psychology and Psychiatry
by David Pilgrim
of Mental Health Policy, University of Central Lancashire, UK

http://isp.sagepub.com/content/54/3/272.abstract

3. What about "On human self-domestication, psychiatry, and eugenics" by Martin Brüne in Philos Ethics Humanit Med. 2007; 2: 21. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2082022/

Am I doing better?

I want to thank chris for challenging me to contribute higher quality content.
I've fallen in love with Knockout (http://knockoutjs.com) -- it's even simpler than this.

Completely abstracts away events and updating the DOM. It even tracks all the dependancies for you.
"Facebook is a platform that is interwoven with every part of the Internet"

That's just not relevant: As soon as FB charges for logins or for using their platform as a user mechanism for their site, there will be a mass exodus.

The reason it is so interwoven is because it is free, and in order to make your argument you have to explain how they can turn a profit from the ubiquity.
Yep. localhost:3000 is only the most obvious guess you could make, too. You could try redmine:3000 and see who that worked on, or 192.168.[enumerate all IPs], or the top 1,000 host names, or use a Javascript port scanner, or... yeah, lots of bad stuff. (I thought getting into that rabbit hole would make a long and convoluted post even longer. Suffice it to say the world is a grimmer and more dangerous place than we thought it was.)
Ditto here. I recognized Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Yahoo, and Amazon not because of the button designs themselves, but because of their colors.

Google has a very recognizable three-tone UI which extends beyond their buttons. Facebook, Pinterest, and Yahoo all have a unique shade of a particular color that they claim as branding (blue, red, and purple, respectively).

If anything this seems to speak to the importance of branding colors than button design.
luajit was the first implementation I've seen, but it's author Mike Pall said soemewhere that this was an old technique, or more like that it could've been known before. I remember reading aome lisp paper from th 90s where sifferent encoding techniques/boxings were mentioned, and one of them was it (I thnink).
I work in our office in Palo Alto and we have a small, 4 person office in Argentina. While I've worked with remote persons and teams in the past, a few changes to our office and their office has helped the working experience for both sides.

1) Both offices have a TV in the main office area with a web cam. We can see what they're up to, if someone is at their desk, etc. and they can do the same. This has been great for quick questions that are harder to explain over IRC and even for a simple waving good morning when I walk in.

2) We have a handful of "remote presence devices" in our office. This allows them or anyone else working remotely to attend meetings without having to ask someone to Skype in or conference call. Once again, it's the simple things like being able to wave or gesture to someone as they're rolling by. (Full disclosure, I work for a sister company of Suitable Technologies, who make the Beam).

3) Like others have mentioned, centralized, collaborative document control (Google Docs that are actually kept up and maintained), source control (GitHub with pull requests), and chat (IRC) help a lot.

4) A trip every 3 - 6 months from some of the Argentina team to the Palo Alto office. While technology has helped, there's still something to be said about being physically present.
Sometimes you hear things that instantly change your views on the world.

I have to say that this above post, in about 10 seconds of reading it, has completely changed my views on assessing risk.

The idea of quantifying risk by counting the number of mistakes you are away from catastrophic failure is an excellent way to visualize risk. It's a simple way to calculate risk, and an even easier way to teach my kids. Thank you.
After 5 years and 1 month, last week I finally launched my comic.

http://www.novemberwest.com/comic/

No traction. Lots of crickets chirping. Kind of what I expected, though.
Why not just use Angular?
They forgot a very important stat. Projects late: 100%

I backed 12 projects so far and every single one of them is late, some by as much as a year when the initial timeline was less than 6 months. I also haven't received a single thing of what I backed yet.

I like the whole Kickstarter idea but these delays and false promises will definitely make me think twice next time I want to back something. I wish people were held accountable more.
I get more work done at home. For me, when I am at work, I don't feel guilty to take a break and read a personal website, since I am "working" 100% of the time. However, when I am at home, I feel guilty when I go off-topic, because I know that I'm taking advantage of the situation.

Note: This may only be limited to "strict" corporate environments, like my current one.
I was about to respond to the GP with "Jared Diamond uses New Guineans in many of his examples because he spends an extraordinary amount of time with them. He's not trying to say they are unique."

But you're right, he's a native fetishist.
Of course people interested in increasing government control over the population love security checks and any excuse to increase them.
Couldn't be happier for Alex and his team. Big up Toronto startups!!
I think the biggest issue is that number is harder to track. It's pretty simple to automate these kind of numbers and the number you're talking about requires self reporting by the project team and at least one, if not more Kickstarter employees to wrangle the data/facilitate the reporting. Though at this point they probably have enough staff to handle that.
I use google drive myself. Is drop box better?
If you are Hardcore Apple Fan like me, check out these amazing iPhone holders
We've been using Knockout with pretty decent success so far at my company.

It's not a full-blown web framework, but that's part of the reason why we chose it instead of something like Angular.
Automate your life
FTC gets 744 new ideas on how to cut robocallers off at the knees
I've read the book and feel your brief is more accurate, but less useful. The shorter one is close enough and many more people will read and grok a short one.
The NYT headline is clearly link bait. If it had simply said "Some thoughts on everyday risks we underestimate" if would go nowhere.

That said there is a clear benefit and need to take a shower for many people as opposed to sleeping under a tree or crossing the street in the middle for which there is a work around.
'Stone-cold serial killers': Cats slaughter billions of animals in US every year
Really legit and clean site...did you build it yourself? Are you using a CMS?
I read it as an example of natural selection. The natives who attune themselves to a particular risk, are much less like to die, and more likely to pass along, this particular idea.
Omg this is so shortsides that I almost was not going to post.
2006 happened 7 years ago. Time flies.
Why not just build an editor that works off git? Then you could abstract it from the user and leverage all the existing ways of sharing text like github and bitbucket.

"But even as a developer it’s full of headaches." is also just plain not true.
+1 for MIPE
I've found that listening to Binaural Beats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats) helps me during meditation. Often its hard for me to focus on the breath for some reason but directing my attention to the tones of whatever "beats" I'm listening to seems to be easier. It may help that "7 Hz frequencies were found to enhance meditative focus..." (Sample size of 8 people so, you know; caveat emptor)

I use a nice Open Source utility called sbagen (http://uazu.net/sbagen/) which in addition to allowing you to define your own beats comes several pre-programmed beats.
"why is it so much more of a problem in the developed world"

Hierarchy of needs masking chemical depression, I'd imagine.
Samsung Ad with Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Bob Odenkirk makes fun of trademarks
I'm old, and I have seen predictions come and go over the years, but this is my prediction about Facebook, and I'm sticking to it: "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it."

If I had serious money, and if I thought that the time frame fits the Long Bets website

http://longbets.org/

time frames, I would put up this prediction (tightened up for specificity) there. But I actually think that Facebook fulfilling this prediction will be on as short a time frame as AOL's eventual collapse into irrelevance.

AFTER EDIT: A kind and thoughtful reply wrote,

Facebook has way better engineers than AOL did, though, and an extremely engineering-oriented culture.

That could be a strength, as you claim, but it could also be a weakness. A great many of my friends and one of my children are strong programmers, and some of those people have strong social skills too. But I would suggest that while Facebook beat MySpace early on by imposing a "house style" on each page, so that the users couldn't make their own pages off-puttingly ugly, Facebook has also muffed more than once meeting user expectations of how their social interactions will proceed in Facebook's mechanized environment, because Facebook engineers thought like engineers rather than like people building social networks. Facebook is not off-putting to me: I use it even way more than I use Hacker News. But I can't figure out any sound way for Facebook to monetize that will not become off-putting, and user exodus can happen very fast once people feel put off enough to leave. I will follow my friends where they go, even if I have both trust and like for Facebook myself.
Stop Wasting your Time attending Career Fairs
"Does anyone know what the actual physiological effects of cocaine delivered in a syrupy soda are?"

Exactly the same as caffeine, except for probably less likely to cause developmental problems if consumed by pregnant women.
Yeah, this wasn't Microsoft bashing. Just pointing out that, for whatever reason, the state of browsers during that period limited what could be done with static HTML and AJAX.
Royalty free music for your features and projects
My name is Juurian Chi and I'm a composer of many different styles of music. I'm now offering free use of any of my music, provided that credit is given (I need to pay my Rent soon as well, so I'm hoping that a little exposure will help to sell a few albums or attract a few donations). My music is freshly written and entirely original, so if you're looking for stock music that has not previously been used elsewhere, or wish to use tracks of differing moods but still retain a certain stylistic cohesiveness, all of my music is available under a Creative Commons license.
http://atodev3.com/royalty-free I'm always creating more music, so you can follow me on Twitter @JuurianChi and on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Juurian
If you are looking for custom work, you can contact me at: juurian@gmail.com
~Thank You :D
"...But I don't see a reason why, in 2013, given the tools we have, a developer has to be on-site at a desk every day, as the normal operating procedure..."

Tools change.

People don't.
I just interviewed with Venmo and although they declined to offer, I want to say that they were some of the brightest and most focused people I've had the pleasure of meeting. We discussed Touch a bit in the several rounds of interviews and all the members were clearly excited about it and loved to discuss technical details and design decisions that went into making Touch.

So congrats, Venmo team!
I've worked in the "war-room" style environment, it's okay as long as it's only for work, and not play, because when you have the "game-room" the "work-env" in the same place, productivity goes way way down. It's hard to work when you see your co-workers playing table tennis or foosball, especially at how loud foosball is or tennis is when they laugh etc. I'm not against these things, I just think that companies might consider spending a little more money on an office or atleast put their game-rooms in separate areas, and require a library policy in open-warroom offices.
I mechanically translate "qz.com" into "don't even look at it until I hit View->Page Style->No Style". It's still ugly, but at least the content isn't fighting for space with all of that other... what is all of that stuff, anyway?

I wonder if there's a way to make that stick for all pages on a domain. (Firefox)
How to sign your Ruby gems