skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You decline to blame the tool because you made a mistake.

But the most important thing you need to know about tools is this: tools are not neutral. Every tool promotes working in certain ways, and discourages working in other ways. All programming tools can perform the same calculations; its their effect on the way we work (and the way we interact with the other humans we work with) that changes between them.

Excel IS an amazing tool, but it has many extremely serious faults which have been mentioned on this thread. Some of these can be solved by adopting specific working practices for making spreadsheets, but sometimes this is like trying to nail jelly to the ceiling -- the things that Excel makes easy are often the things that you want to 'ban' people from doing (things like forking a sheet without passing the changes back).

One enormous problem is that it's difficult to track progressive changes to the code (formulas or macros) in a spreadsheet. What you normally save is a binary blob which is impossible to diff.

Another one is that there is no straightforward way to apply the same code to different data. If you copy your sheet, you now have two versions of the code which can diverge. So people add more and more data to the same sheet, and add more and more ways of selecting the inputs you want, whereas a program in a conventional language is separate from its input and can be applied to any input.

A third problem is that while it's easy to call external code from Excel, running Excel as a library and calling it FROM external code is extremely complicated and arcane. (Just look at the number of questions on programming help sites asking how to do straightforward things with VSTO if you don't believe me.) So rather than make nice apps which interact with Excel, people make 'applications' inside Excel which are really just large, complicated spreadsheets with weird dependencies. Since Excel and VBA weren't really designed to do this a lot of these work very badly.

Some of these things can be fixed for the spreadsheet model, although for a mix of technical and commercial reasons they might not be able to be fixed within Microsoft Excel. However to appreciate why they need to be fixed, you have to understand that programmers don't use things like version control because they love bureaucracy and due process. (Most programmers HATE bureaucracy and due process, and almost all of them resented the overhead of version control and code review until they very quickly discovered how huge the payoff is when things go wrong.) Likewise, we don't use sophisticated languages and study theory because we want to 'author monuments to computer science'.

These things have huge, and immediate practical advantages. The programmers' task is to make people understand why they benefit if they do blame their tools, and start seeking better ones.
Kind of looks like they moved into an IKEA store.
This article isn't about taking LSD. It's about the exceptionally rare and exceptional practice of taking 500x the normal dosage of LSD.
It was researched by the military for interrogation purposes IIRC. I think they used human subjects for this so I doubt any lethal doses were given, and doubt even further that they would be published if so.
Surface Pro Can Run various Top Games
yes, see https://github.com/juliangruber/alrt.io

Patches are always welcome!
Negativity here, the pictures are horribly warped (possibly to capture more of the room in one shot) which gives a skewed perception of office sizes, and of course the people look staged. Could be actors, given the surreal-looking male/female distribution (or it's not a developer office). (not a sexist remark, just a comment on the poor male/female ratio in software development in general)
This is great news!

I've always loved Opera for its features, but really disliked the rendering engine.
This model of car centric city would be more and more common as man enters uninhabitable outdoor environments. so there would be benefit of starting to adapt to it right now with improving car indoor expirience like drive-ins and not making it harder with car prohibitions and taxing.
With personal cars you will have more degrees of freedom than with trains, busses etc.
Are open plan rooms norm for google?
"I can't fathom what taking a dose thousands of times a typically heavy dose would do to you."

Pretty sure there are limits to the subjective experience somewhere, and above them there won't be much difference.

Of course somewhere up there is the LD50 as well, but that's pretty huge for ergoloids AFAICT.
Yes, we've seen it before: I think every time a console flopped it took a company down with it (at least out of the console business). The same thing happened with synthesizers back in the day.

But I have doubts. Even if the PS4 / WiiU fail and Microsoft does "spend whatever it takes to keep the XBox relevant in the living room", will that be enough? Microsoft wasn't shy about spending money on Zune, Windows phones, or tablets -- but the Zune is gone, the Windows phones have low single-digit market penetration, and the latest tablets don't seem to be doing better (we'll see, but it's not looking good).

Reasons I'm doubtful about the future of the Xbox:

1. It's not competing against the PS4. It's competing against Steam boxes, Android consoles, phones, and tablets. Not direct competition, but competition for our attention.

2. Indie games were big in 2012, and 2013 is looking bigger. Microsoft's platforms (other than Windows) are looking less palatable, especially for newer studios. Larger studios still fail as often as they ever did, but they're not getting replaced. The AAA titles will keep coming, but they're competing with scrappy folk who license the Unity and Unreal engines for prices that are very friendly... until you want to release your game for the Xbox.

3. With every generation of consoles, it becomes more difficult and expensive to produce content that leverages the new technology. It was a long time before people figured out how to produce content that really made the PS3 look better than the PS2, although much of that was due to architectural decisions. It may be that the survival of the Xbox depends more on what the market looks like in 2015 rather than 2014 or 2013. What will Apple have released by 2015? How many indie studios will have edged the behemoths out of the industry?

4. New generations of consoles no longer provide additional media functions that consumers desire. Two generations ago you got a pretty fine CD player with your PS1, last generation you got a DVD player with your PS2, and this generation you can play Blu-Rays or stream content from Netflix/Hulu. What's left? We have a PS3, but much of its justification was as a way to play Blu-Rays, Netflix, and Hulu.

On a side note, every time I've stopped by Ground Kontrol (the local arcade) recently, it's been packed. Even with a cover charge, even when most people have work tomorrow, even when the machines cost 25¢ per play, the doorman was turning people away because the building was at its occupancy limit.
Hopefully they have more products too, just in case current trajectory crashes into some obstacle destabilizing it.
This is totally different. They're not re-writing their application from scratch, but replacing a core component with a popular, well tested and widely support one.
How to create slideshow with HTML5 and CSS
And Britain at 20% (was surprized myself!) http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-GB-monthly-201208-201301

Edit: my bad, the graph probably didn't refresh properly
The size of the strawman here is gargantuan. It is threatening to topple over all and destroy us all in an explosion of hay and burlap.

Google's architecture is not the same as a startups architecture. Just because there are a 1000 startups using 50 different database technologies means every startup uses them. Every startup developer is not blindly chasing every fad or new idea that exists. Basically the article is failing to see that the forest is made out of individual trees.

Premature optimization exists across any axis you can define, but when you need a service-oriented architecture you really fucking need it or your site is down, period.
10 Free and responsive WordPress themes for 2013
You've never programmed on your laptop? Your skills are so hard that you never need to write an email or read a document?
700mcg you mean?
As highlighted by my comment, it's middle and eastern Europe :

Ukraine 20% (36%), Slovakia 6% (13%), Poland 7% (12%), Czech Republic 5% (10%), Russia 14% (32%), Belarus 32% (45%), Kazachstan 32% (16%)

Also, Mobile browsers are not insignificant market: (whole) Europe 24% (50%)

Numbers from statcounter.com as of January 2013 (January 2010). I picked 2010 as it was about the time Chrome started it's push around here (I'm in Czech Republic at the moment) - ads in radio, tv, outdoors, on homepages of google.com, youtube.com; Opera was often blocked from accessing gmail, apps,; was deprived of features (by user-agent sniffing) google-wide. And FF was well established at the time, so it didn't carve much to the Opera's share.
perhaps it should have magnet links and torrent files like archive.org and an API to upload, .bib-s and RDF-s in the url bar for the likes of zotero.

http://arxiv.org/help/api/index
http://archive.org/about/faqs.php#Archive_BitTorrents
What flashes through my mind when I see this type of corporate fetish, even it being Google, is that the future is much more likely to be version of Brave New World than 1984.

We consume not because we're told to, but because we want to. We become vehicles in an economic equation.

Something is unnerving about the fact so many of us feel privileged to have the ability to dedicate our lives to what is essentially an organization to make money. I know it stikes odd to think that's the only purpose of Google (it seems not to be) but it certainly is for a significant portion of the corporatocracy.

Those two factors combined (variables in an economic equation and we have blind faith in corporations) can undermine the basis of a free society whose goals go beyond the enrichment of a handful of shareholders.
Indeed, the Dublin office is mostly sales (little or no eng) IIRC
I don't work at Google, but I've found that working from a different location in the office for some time helps me refocus during the day. So I sometimes just take my laptop, ssh to my desktop and go find a table/couch somewhere.

Also, multiple monitors are useful, but there are some programming tasks (like implementing an algorithm and writing some unit tests) where a laptop is fine.
Can someone explain why tech stuff in general is quite a bit more expensive in Australia comparatively?
Sure. Is that what they always do? I just sincerely want to know how they usually work there.
I've been thinking about how if you look at our culture as, well, a culture, then it's pretty sad how the places where most of us spend 8 hours a day are these miserable, depressing, stupidly ugly dungeons, with plastic fruit and noisy robots making battery-acid coffee. I imagine some future historian talking about the corporations of the second dark age to a horrified classroom. Then I have a cup of coffee and cheer up. Wouldn't mind working in this place.
i fixed it, the parsing regex should be more stable now
Tokyo Otaku Mode raises additional funds from three VC firms
I've heard that setting up shop is quite expensive in Australia due to a number of factors, and that the online prices is matched up to the retail price to avoid hurting profits.
I wonder how the piracy rate in Australia (for CS and more generally) compares with that in the US.

Anyone have any figures?
I noticed that Argos in the UK uses Opera as the browser or the touch screen interfaces, everything seems to render real nice on there, but Webkit does a far superior job in regards to standards.
Why is Opera moving to WebKit? Because it has to.
The big loss for the Web
I found the series of videos by David Nichols to be very informative of what current science actually understands about psychedelic drugs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ud3NkZGmI
You don't need custom repair functions, the default is undo-replay, but in some cases it helps performance to have custom repair functions. For example suppose you have a changeable list, and a changeable multiset (a set that also keeps a count for each element). Now you do thelist.tomultiset(). If the list changes, then the multiset has to change as well. If you applied their framework all the way down, this might be reasonably efficient. But with custom repair functions it can be more efficient: if an element in the list gets added, just increment the count of that element in the multiset. If an element gets deleted, decrement the count of that element in the multiset.
There is no excuse why downloadable content should cost more -- economies of scale, shipping costs, and differences in taxes and exchange rates are all irrelevant. Even in the case of physical goods, the disparity is often drastically more than can be accounted for by the above reasons. This comment sums it up quite well: http://news.cnet.com/8618-1001_3-57568633.html?assetTypeId=1...

There is a parliamentary committee currently looking into this disparity in pricing: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57568633-92/apple-microsoft...
Yeah, I dunno. Doesn't seem like a place where most people would sit down to concentrate at crunch hour. But I definitely don't need my dual big screens all the time. I think it's kinda terrible, these offices with people hunched down at their private workstations all the time, only getting up for meetings and lunch. I've had a lot of great experiences with sitting on a sofa with my tablet reading or planning something. Sometimes just because it's led to great conversations with the soft-skilled people.
Some species DO get extinguished.

Yeah, and I'm pointing out it's the ones with more hope for the future, rather than the ones that are obviously doomed in the very long run.

If we want web engine evolution happening somebody should build a BETTER than Webkit engine

Yes, and as already explained, this will become near-impossible if there is no standard, but just a bunch of webpages that need the renderer to do "whatever WebKit does".

A big factor in Operas decision was already that for mobile webpages, any renderer that isn't WebKit is already dead. Not that they thought their own engine sucked.

This is stopping evolution, not helping it.
Doesn't the fact that you actually found an answer that covers exactly what you're looking for indicate that SO didn't throw the baby out?
20% in the UK would surprise me too, but that graph shows Opera at 0.56%, and seemingly declining.
Yammer sucks, you are better off using free tools, like Bitrix24. If you need PM, I recommend Wrike or Basecamp.
These articles take the wrong perspective - it's not that Australia is much more expensive in tech matters, it's that the US is much more cheap. I don't know where the recent Australia-specific articles are coming from, but it's been like this since as long as I can remember - that the US is much more cheap than any other country I'm familiar with for tech stuff, including Australia, but also almost every other country.

For example in Europe, the same suite mentioned in the article costs USD 4552.14, or $200 more expensive even than Australia.
that is probably the case. Do a

opera:about

and look at the list of Third Party Software...
Not actors, a friend of mine (female) appears in one of the photos (that's how I got the link to the article). There're a lot of employees for EMEA user support.
Since its not stated anywhere that I could see, and I wanted to see its 'lightweightness'...minified it is 8.9k and gzipped it is 2.3k
I'm pretty sure they've some Site Reliability Engineers over there too.

edit: As a fact I've got a couple of recruiters offering that position in Dublin.
Since webkit is opensource and largely a collaborative effort, I think the monoculture will be a good thing

How does one follow from the other? Technical monopolies are good if they're opensourced? I couldn't disagree with this more strongly.
This is a bit of a grey area that we deliberately avoided with PDFTribute.net; it seems perfectly acceptable to aggregate and index metadata, just as long as you're not actually storing any data.
I love the colors, but I can't wrap my brain around captions like "our bench marks are enabling highest efficiency with ultimate creativity". A desperate, naive part of me likes to think they are satire..
> the UI [...] is TERRIBLE to use [...] while Sony's XMB is actually quite good

I beg to differ, as the NXE and the Guide are comparatively a joy to use, and while the Metro one has available real estate plagued by ads and feels lacking WRT what it could be (e.g pinned apps should stand front and center), it is enjoyable enough. There are a number of system-wide underused features, like global vibration settings, global racing games and fps mappings...

XMB could be great but pales in comparison due to poor choices, limited development, and is injecting crap I don't want call to actions like Singstar in my Games entries, while the settings area is a complete mess.

Pet peeves:

* It stings a little when I hit the PS button to look at the (missing) time while in game.

* It stings a lot when I have to manually toggle the DST setting

* I cringe every time I have to manage downloads on the PS3

* There's no way to have multiple profiles connected and save progress and trophies for coop games (the Halo series leverages that to great end)

All in all both have their shortcomings, but it really feels like the xBox acts as a modern platform/system whereas the PS3 acts like a PS2/Dreamcast era console.
Stop testing, break class size in half, increase teacher pay and double the number of teachers.

Suppose we do this. How will we know if it failed or succeeded?
The same thing happens in the UK. Napster for example charges more than 50% more for a download service in the UK, than in the USA. Completely ridiculous for an internet based download service.

I was going to subscribe until I learned this. Can't support business's gouging their clients.
Ha, you are right!

(It's a photo on the right, under the musical keyboard and on top of the 'blue waves' photo)

See the original: https://www.google.ie/search?q=trinity+library&um=1&...
That's not really a problem. Experimenting by forking the dominant rendering engine is much more convenient than experimenting by building your own rendering engine from scratch. If your fork has advantages, it's also easier for other people to use your work.
Companies voluntarily improving workplace conditions seems like a laudable achievement of free society.

In the epitaph of our civilization, maybe it'll say "but after all, you gotta give it to them: at least some of their corporations had offices that were actually sorta livable."
Welcome monoculture.

It's really amazing how Opera could keep up with the rest for so long, though.
Or you could just get a VPN for $10 and buy Photoshop online from the US website.
Gawker now exists as a network that posts articles designed to get that advertising revenue in, the whole Reddit witch-hunt a while back serves a point.

If you're learning Git from a Lifehacker post, you're not going to learn much.

Massive shame, it used to be a great site for productivity tools. Kotaku too, now that's reduced to the low hanging fruit of gaming news, and don't get me started on Gizmodo.
Voila, monopoly in action.

I have both a grudging respect and an intense dislike of Adobe for their complete ownership of the creative software space. It's kind of amazing, and it's the clearest example of a monopoly that I experience in my everyday life. Well done, I guess?
Your message reminds me of the famous joke of the Mexican fisherman and the investment banker...
http://financialmentor.com/true-wealth/the-parable-of-the-me...
Some of the corporate speak on there is horrific.
"We enable innovation" Ugh.

I'd probably shuffle off to a quiet, dimly lit corner somewhere with my headphones, and try to block out the intense primary colours and lack of sound insulation.

I must be getting old.
Except that Apple and Google are some of the main open source developers behind WebKit. Of course Opera has been outgunned.
Indeed it is -- GP only mentioned he didn't know any example of a large amount of code being thrown out, so I provided one.
Same here Squeryl does the job for now and it's production ready. Not eager to change now.
Its not only Aus.

Example: price of Creative Suite® 6 Design Standard is USD1,299 versus GBP1,227, despite the fact that the exchange rate is around 1.55.

For some stupid unknown reason, Adobe will usually charge the same unit price in GBP as they do in USD. They will quote "cost of operating" is higher in the UK, but 55% higher? Bullshit.
http://shoply.com offers the same aggregated marketplace for small brands and local businesses.
Recipe for a bad day: 'State-backed hackers are attacking your PC' [—Google]
Github does have per seat pricing (for their enterprise product, which is meant to be hosted locally): https://enterprise.github.com/pricing - it costs $21/seat/month. With their per repo pricing I'd imagine they are more likely to earn more revenue per user, since so many developers will end up having many old pet projects in private repos sitting there.
Thanks for the link, it's indeed a good read.
Grading Our Schools
Ryanair: Eircom must disclose IPs of bloggers accused of making defamatory posts
It depends where the cup of coffee comes from.

I love the fact that their work environment is not limited to their desk and meeting rooms. You can select the environment that works the best for you, and that stimulates the qualities you require for a specific task (or just pick the one you like the most).
Wonderful quote from slide 69: http://www.changemakrs.com/EdwardTufte/design-isn-t-crafting...

(website above requires login to see the quote, however you can also simply point the slidedeck to slide 69.)

I'm building and designing an app and this huge slidedeck has tripled my open tabs, many nice pointers, insights and resources--greatly recommend to go through it.
Looks like a department store. I can't see myself working there at all.
When you download a paper from JSTOR or ScienceDirect, it is quite easy for them to add various watermarks to the PDF, and they already do (mildly). It might make it harder to scale this concept if the provider can track down who initially downloaded the paper (and presumably shared it).
I think the reason its priced like that is its far more profitable than any other way. Developers like loads of repo's for their many side projects etc.

Just a note though, if you're a consulting company and cant afford $200 a month for the 125 repo's, you should be charging more.
I really do not get the big deal.

Just set up ssh on your own server and voilà... free unlimited repos.

sure you miss out on some tools. But what's more important... repo storage/usage/access/privacy or a pretty graph of your commits? Perhaps catting a ssh key to the end of a text file is a bit too much complexity for a company who claim to be selling themselves as expert software solutions developers.

And if you do want all that, it does exist and is available to install on your own host.

All for £20 a month. Not even hard to set up multisite replication etc.
I work in a factory. I wish my office looked like an IKEA store!
Are you allowed to do that? Or to put it another way, if you got raided by the BSA, would they have a problem with that?
I'd like to see some serious work done on Dillo ( http://www.dillo.org/ ), which is much faster than chrome on low-end boxes and could be really good for developing countries.
Dunno if that would work. Adobe (unlike Amazon) would require your credit card billing address to be in the US. Not sure if it has changed now, but a few years back i tried buying Adobe Lightroom from the US site and was unable to do so.

My workaround was to buy the retail box from Amazon, ship it to a friend in the US and have them email the license key to me.
A better analogy might be giving the machine a quick peek at it's debugger.