skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This essay argues that as automation becomes better, people create artificial complexity to soak up the gains:

http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...
Problems With Precision and Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test
App burnout? Company estimates only 1000 smartphone apps have 50k users
But even now, you just stated the goal is selling a product, something the salesperson cannot provide on their own. And it's hardly the only means of funding the initial development. Selling promises about a future product isn't the only aspect of "ensuring I get a paycheck", at least not for very long. The sales/product delivery equation obviously balances back towards the 'doers' after that initial development phase or salespeople would be perpetually selling themselves out of a job.
Oh great! ;) So I can order a pizza to my GPS coordinates paid with bitcoin from my Android on the beach? That's cool!

Only problem with an anonymous order (hey, of course it should be anonymous!) is that people might want to take the drone instead of the pizza so maybe they will have to parachute the pizza from some altitude :) … oh I love this idea :)

… ok so maybe the drone would not operate 100% automated and the pilot would drop the pizza only some meters away from any person that might want to snatch the drone?
How Gambling Startups Can (and Should) Help Fix Problem Gambling
The proposed research is not focused on fMRI...
Do not treat loss as only the money lost. Lost customers are priceless and one can put a high price tag to that.

Also loss in productivity because their documentation was misleading.
At first I thought the Daily Mail was getting things wrong (as usual), but a quick Google search shows that they are actually not exaggerating in this instance.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/business/tax-breaks-from-o....

Basically, companies get a deduction for stock options based on when the options are exercised, not when they are given out (but record the options on their books at the value when given). Thus, options given out at low values (i.e., during the recession), generally result in a tax windfall to the company.

Surprisingly, this tax quirk survived the Great Recession and the fiscal crisis and is still on the books.
They don't really have a choice, do they? If you want to add features you can either: 1) make a new reserve word, possibly breaking existing code 2) reuse a reserve word in a new context.
LEAP do-it-yourself clone seems convincing
I think the historical perception bias you're talking about is why so many people dismissed Apple's attempt to enter the phone market as doomed from the start. Hence Ballmer's famous quip "I like our business model" when the iPhone came out.

Steve Job's analysis of the situation in the 90s was quite different. He put Apple's failure to capture the mass market back then to Apple leaving a price umbrella under which Windows could grow to dominate the market, and stated that Apple would make sure not to do that with what we now call iOS devices. I think Apple's strategy is to lower prices as required to maintain a viable market share, but keep them high enough to dominate in terms of profit share.

It may well turn out that the business model (licensed OS versus integrated hardware/software) doesn't actually matter all that much.
From the quotes in the article it looks like they're focussing on "uncivil online comments", "rudeness", "name-calling" and "pushing people’s emotional buttons, through derogatory comments". That gives a reasonable picture of their definition of troll, doesn't it? And I don't think it's an unreasonable one. I don't think there's much danger of conflating the above with civil, rational debate. Not sure what you're getting at.
I'm also an ex-C# dev, now doing Python, haven't looked back once.
Interesting - replace "rhino horn" with "cocaine" or "heroin"
and you have the editorial page of the Economist.

Supply and demand rule it seems.
Please don't let yourself get stereotyped
Honestly, all of those things are still secondary to actually developing. You can write great code without doing static analysis and profiling it. And with the most recent version, NuGet is included even in Express.

The biggest roadblocks to .NET development/adoption are not toolchain related IMO, they are platform related. If you want to bring up a farm of windows boxes, you're gonna pay.
I like how you stack the deck - when it's accounting, it's just the one staffer, but when it's sales, it's a whole team.

If you're large enough to have an accounting team, you're going to hurt if they disappear all at once.
Mobile VoIP: Client side call quality
http://collabshot.com/ is free, does the same thing and supports Linux, Mac and Windows.
McDonald's denies involvement in Burger King Twitter hack
Antidepressants, Tap Water, and Autism
These days, 'art' is an almost meaningless term, since it has to include this:

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/creed-work-no-233-p78388
Book Review: Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer
Finland, same country where the police raided a 9-year old's home at 8am to confiscate her Winnie the Pooh laptop.

One wonders if Finland even has anything like a prosecution service authority that decides whether the cost and public interest of justice in individual cases outweighs the benefits...
Why are men so foolish?
The Wii doesn't really sell games either. The attach rate for the console is poor in comparison to its competition. Even though the Wii sold 30% more units worldwide than the Xbox 360, they only sold 13% more games worldwide. In North America, the biggest market for console games, the total number of Wii games sold is roughly equal to the total number of Xbox 360 games sold.

Title sales for the Wii: http://www.vgchartz.com/platform/2/wii/
Title sales for the Xbox 360: http://www.vgchartz.com/platform/7/xbox-360/
Console sales for the Wii: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii#Sales
Console sales for the Xbox 360: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360#Reception_and_sales
n.b. that this is why time travel is a terrible idea.
Finally a post where you learn to do something. Thank you!
Dell’s Ubuntu based Developer laptop just got better
I've always thought of CL as a community/local site, meaning it is up to the community to really shape it. CL can provide guidance and tools, but it is still up to the community; for example, if your community actively uses the flagging feature to cut down on posts that make the site worse, those posts will decrease in occurrence. NYC has ~14M people, so it is just harder to create a community that agrees on what is and isn't appropriate.
Montreal transit takes legal shot at game designer
Cucumber and related "natural language tests" were supposed to do this - allow non-programmers to program tests.

Turns out everyone who writes a cucumber test is a programmer writing their own unit tests or a whole batch for everyone else.

I do think there is mileage in wufoo / VWO style webstie testing - record a series of macros and replay them each day against the site - let people know when something changes / does not work. ie a regular scheduled sign up with specific credit card then a cancellation - test that the whole sign up / email thing is still working.
Here is an example of a generic HTML doc that changes layout by changing only CSS: http://protonfish.com/csssatori/ It's been a few years since I wrote it and it was just a prototype, but it should be a good example of what you asked to see.

Separating content and layout takes a little effort to learn but I assure you it is possible and effective. In my opinion, grid-based layouts are table-based layouts with a coat of paint.
So what do you do to avoid this in the future? Do you stop doing surgery in the repl, or do you do the surgery with functions that check for cycles from now on?
Unless your supplier is a giant company where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, it's seldom wise to sue your supplier before you're ready to dump them.
One better choice that comes to mind:

void bar(int myArray[10+]);
Who feels less productive now than 30 years ago? We are so much more incredibly wealthy now, we just consume more now, instead satisifying basic needs and then sleeping 18 hours per day.

Plus some unequal distribution of wealth.
Happens to a lot of us. Great reason to always write tested cleanup scripts for this stuff instead of editing directly on the server. The only time I brought down my product last year was from a similar screwup, I was removing users by hand and somehow managed to end up with a 0 in my list of user ids, thus deleting the anonymous user, and causing havoc to my server, which took a long time to track down.
CloudAPp doesn't allow you to annotate the screenshots though.
Yeah! They should voluntarily pay more money to the government!
Great debugging story!

I guess the lesson is to have code that alerts you about comment loops without going into an infinite loop.

Also another lesson would be to figure out a way to have better clarity into which requests are causing a timeout on the server.
Amazing that such a large percentage of debugging involves determining exactly what you are debugging. The definition of the problem, many times, is the solution.

Might be a good time to mention Rubber Duck Debuggging. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
Are you saying you manually modify the database? Like, shifting around things by id instead of just making admin buttons next to posts?
Much appreciated, pg. I knew that the "10 minutes of downtime" would not occur (fair enough, this was not related to the server upgrade).
You had me at "fu". Bookmarked!

And, on a more serious note, pretty depressing.
It's nice to know that even the mightiest of us can still make mistakes. Thanks for being willing to admit mistakes so the rest of us can learn.
If I am correct, this is a law enforcement task, so it is again police work. I think there are better uses of drones for now, for which reason our company created some ethical guidelines: http://www.dobots.nl/ethical-policy. One of our statements is "Helping, not harming!". It is better to first develop technologies where we can help people, and consider them as victims, rather than searching for scenarios where we can identify perpetrators. The suggestion in the article is to destroy the vehicles of the poachers, but where does it stop... There are so many situations where we can help. People that drown at sea, early detection of forest fires, environmental monitoring, crowdsourcing journalism, etc.

PS: I am the PI of the Dutch http://www.fireswarm.nl project in which a group of companies and universities use drones to detect a fire as quick as possible.
I would totally give you kudos for piercing your scrotum a hundred times. From the people I know in the body modification community, genital modification can be a very spiritual experience.

Also, think of the crazy rush that you would get from the first piercing, when your body is changed forever, till the end of the hundred-piercing ritual. That would absolutely be something worth blogging about.
The grandfather paradox is the best solution to the halting problem.
Burger King hacked
Aperture Science Personality Core 01 - URL Lengthener
I use assertions to protect against things like this.

I liberally sprinkle my code with assertions (CS theory calls them pre-conditions and post-conditions, iirc) to crash early if the system is an invalid state.

One my pet peeves is that few programmers seem to love assertions like I do. Would love to see to comments on this.
Twitter suspended the account: https://twitter.com/burgerking
I'm not sure whether it's terrifying or relieving to realize that if all I dream of comes to pass and I achieve something akin to the legendary status of pg in the hacker community that I will still be susceptible to the inevitable facepalm moments that come with direct database access.

In any case I am thankful for the detailed explanation.
The Xbox360 is actually dramatically faster than the PS3 [1] where it really matters - the GPU.

Triangle Setup
Xbox 360 - 500 Million Triangles/sec
PS3 - 250 Million Triangles/sec

Pixel Shader Processing with 16 Filtered Texels Per Cycle (Pixel ALU x Clock)
Xbox 360 - 24.0 Billion Pixels/sec
PS3 - 16.0 Billion Pixels/sec

The only reason people think (to some extent correctly) that the PS3 is more powerful than Xbox360 is due to the PS3's cell processors. If you sum up the PS3's total FLOPS, the cell processors do give it a total advantage in FLOPS. But this is very misleading - obviously FLOPS are only useful if the architecture enables you to use them towards what you need.

Almost nobody used "cell processors" to potential initially, and for very good reason [2]. The bottom line is they were incredibly difficult to program for in any useful way to graphics. But more than that, they are limited in very specific ways [3]. They won't increase triangle throughput, and they don't directly increase pixel throughput.

In some extremely rare cases, some game engines found a way to use them for graphics (like Battlefield 3's Frostbite 2 engine towards the deferred lighting passes). But by the time engineers found a way to leverage this extremely complex architecture, it was already too late. If you actually look at most Xbox360 vs PS3 games side by side, the Xbox360 often looks much better.

In this case though (the next gen Xbox and Playstation) the situation is reversed: Sony's GPU is actually legitimately faster, and by a large margin. Not only that, but having a full 4GB of fast ram is a HUGE advantage to Sony. High performance 3D rendering is inherently a bandwidth hog, because everything on the screen must be pushed through the pipes every single frame. Having a fast 32MB cache doesn't really help you if you want to consistently and smoothly render more than 32MB of content on the screen. And moreover, just as the last generation PS3 had an overly complex architecture making it difficult to reach its full potential, it seems Xbox and Playstation are swapping roles here as well with this generation.

[1] http://forums.gametrailers.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=7947...

[2] http://www.videogamer.com/ps3/saints_row_2/news/two_or_three...

[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1355827/what-does-program...
it's a good job it's your site, this type of thing is often what gets someone fired in a company. Modifying (meddling!) the production system directly.
Ever wondered if your conversion rate is good enough?
Sometimes that's easier (albeit more dangerous, as we just saw).
They also say that "trolls take pleasure in bashing a story from every possible angle" and indicate that trolling involves leaving "negative comments", both of which could include pointing out an article's flaws, for example. Only later do they move on to these other definitions you mentioned.

Their definition of trolling appears to be a moving target throughout the article and this is why I feel they're conflating actual trolling with benign criticism.

In my experience, many people perceive all criticism to be rude and harsh. My definition of rude might be different to yours and what I consider to be straightforward criticism, someone else might consider to be a harsh rebuke!
Isn't that telling something about the objectivity of Finnish police forces mentioned in the article?
Not reflecting on Don who I don't know but I've always wondered if people who go out of their way in trying to appear to be humble are reacting to the disgust that they feel when others aren't appearing humble.

Stuff like this:

"I think it was a shock to my son to see how I was regarded at work. Of course, that didn’t mean he started respecting me at home but, hey, a man can dream."

and this:

"At my core, I’m just a tinkerer who got very lucky."

Edit: What I mean is that Don (appears) to be going out of his way to say "aw shucks I'm not special I got lucky" and "I'm well respected but my kid still gives me problems just like yours does". The bragging of the first sentence "shock to my son to see how I was regarded" is tempered by the 2nd sentence. (Same with the tinkerer/got very lucky in other words I'm no different then you are we are all equal but I got lucky so don't hate me..)
Remastered Doom Screenshot - Pinky Demon Blocks the Exit
This is a particularly endearing piece of "hacker news". It's so easy to relate to.
Are you sure that comment's name wasn't Phillip J Fry?
It's interesting to me that people who were just burned by Posterous would be OK with going to Tumblr. I like Tumblr a lot and have one myself, but it's still working out its monetization strategy:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2013/01/02/tumblr-...

> Money isn’t that pressing an issue–yet. Karp says Tumblr has banked “most of” the $125 million it has raised. But Tumblr spent an estimated $25 million on its operation last year and will likely have to shell out up to $40 million this year. In 2013 David Karp has a race on his hands: Can he break into the black before needing to hold his hand out again for investors?

The mobile tools for Tumblr are definitely a plus. But if you aren't blogging at a rate that requires you to have scheduling tools, then I wonder if it'd just be easier to set up a Jekyll powered blog. You lose the social-network effect of Tumblr (the reblogs and like), but from what I've seen, it's visual blogs that get reblogged/liked the most, because of how users interact (and see things) in their dashboard.
The kind of assertion he needed though, could only be ensured by the database, not application code (my impression).
One caveat to add about css animations. I learned last night that animations don't respect fractional pixel values, so if you want to move something very slowly, like moving an image 10px over 2 seconds, the animation will be very jerky, and you need to use canvas to get the desired effect.
You might look at 21st Century C: C Tips from the New School by Ben Klemens. It's very new (November 2012), and has some really nice stuff in it.

It's getting mixed reviews, but I really found it useful (even if I, like others, disagree with some of his tips). It's particularly good at sorting out what you can do in C99 and C11.

[edit: He has a really useful section on sorting out the different meanings of "static" in C, though I don't recall this being one of them.]
"We'll do it live!"
Thank you for the honest explanation. This is not so easy especially for a famous person.
Forget the Placebo Effect: It’s the ‘Care Effect’ That Matters
A tiny cheap Wifi router that runs Linux and Python
Integrating with Zapier and CallTrackingMetrics
Your conspiracy theory kind of falls flat on its face, since former employees have in fact spoken publicly on this.

What you can gather doesn't seem to be very useful either since the quoted number is correct. It's the number of employees reported by Opera to the authorities. But maybe in your conspiracy, Opera manipulates those numbers to lie to the authorities for some unknown, sinister reason?

How is the current management different from the previous management? Didn't the previous management fire anyone? Oh, they did? And they made up some BS reason to justify it?

Do you know what the reason is stated to be this time around, or did you just assume that they are firing random people to strike fear in people's hearts?

My Gawd.

Edit: Regarding people living in fear, here's one of the former employees speaking out:

"The process, from Opera’s side, was done, IMO, very professionally and the severance package we were offered was voluntary as well as substantial."
Disclaimer: Hindsight is 20/20, and stuff.

If reverting code didn't fix it, reverting server didn't fix it, incorrect data is the most likely culprit(I am not claiming this should have outright occurred to you; just thinking out loud). I take it you introduced non terminating recursion by making a thread its own parent, and you made the change on disk.

But this analysis is the last thing that comes to mind when you already have introduced 2 new variables the same day - new code, new server. And an old, recurring variable(GCing too much) is in play as well.
Do your demos mirror those of Leap Motion on purpose? Your device is also very similar to theirs..

One amazing difference is that you have Linux drivers :-)

Any chance of those working with Leap? Or, any chances of getting hands on your kit?
I think I get what you're hinting at.

Ok, so this is Hacker News, it's in the name, and most of us are aware that HN is also a research/hobby project. It's not made to be an rock-stable enterprise system doing bank transactions or what not, so I think what pg did was prefectly excusable. People make mistakes. Nobody will die without HN for a day or two, and it won't affect the site's popularity one bit.
Direct link if you prefer to avoid the tabloid: https://thepiratebay.se/blog/227

Also be aware that this is a misleading hoax (or worse). They had a "kopimi" sign on the page forever. "kopimi (copyme), symbol showing that you want to be copied."

Here is the last copy in archive.org http://web.archive.org/web/20130128163826/http://thepirateba... . See the icon and its link at the very bottom.

Please do not give misleading hype like this any further coverage.

edit: I swear, the icon was not on the live page a minute ago.
Are you happy with tech news?
I'm not. It feels like nothing but funding, drama, and shallow analysis.

I just started a new blog (techlobes.wordpress.com) that tries to think hard about the business questions in technology.

Would love to get your thoughts on...

1) What you would like to see differently in tech news.

2) Where you go when you want to read substantial pieces about business predictions of tech companies.

2) What you think of my first post.
So it is not actually out of fear for the current management, then? It's just a general fear of speaking of one's former employer if one was let go?

If so, why even mention Opera specifically then?
That's not better. It's more confusing to see a symbol that's normally an operator than it is to see a keyword.
There's also import2: http://www.import2.com/tumblr
UW-Don-Tracker: crowdsourced efficient partying
Exactly my idea! Please, feel free to come up with other humane use case scenarios, because it is regretfully very easy for people to come up with ones for the police, border patrol, the army, drugs crime fighting, etc. etc. Technologies like this are inevitable, but it is essential that we reach a critical mass early with respect to the positive side of technology. To create nuclear reactors and engines, before we create the bombs.
I would say it's the "everyday" part that is the main cause of that problem - if it weren't for the 24 hour news cycle model, journalists wouldn't be trying to grab attention with hyperbole as much.

This is one of the reasons why I prefer magazines like Scientific American and New Scientist - because they come out once per month/week this is less of an issue, and the main articles are not so much about breaking news.
It would be interesting to follow these people and their beliefs over time. I know that in the face of hostility, my first instinct is to defend my point of view. But later, after I've cooled down, I am able to consider both sides of the argument more rationally. It's at this time--later--that my beliefs will evolve.
The "More" button at the bottom is still not clickable sometimes. Get a "Unknown or expired link." message.
I appreciate (if not love) the fact that you bugfix and server-change yourself.

True hacker spirit.
Losing a good accountant is unlikely to have an impact on revenue. Losing a good account manager is very likely to have an impact on revenue.
Just tried it now. Still compiles/runs without errors.
Whoa, what an unfortunate coincidence. This whole bug would be so much easier to find, if it weren't for the new server.
I've always thought that the ease with which I picked up prefix notation had to do with the amount of time I spent using HP RPN calculators as a teenager. Postfix and prefix are not that different.

But RPN calculators are harder to find these days, I think.