skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well... I code in C because I am working on embedded systems, where power and clock cycles are very precious.
> They appear to be using modern x264. This does outperform most (all?) commercial H.264 encoders to the degree they claim, so their claims can have merit.

Yes, but it also means they're not entitled to call it a "patent pending" method.
User Input & Web Forms: Ten Commandments
I think that was the point.

We're still in the early days of taking full advantage of basic internet technologies, at a whole population/full economy scale. Smartphones and tablets are still a novelty. Major media industries like TV, Cinema and big publishing are still locked up in business models that are becoming painfully outmoded, and have barely begun the painful process of reform that the music industry is only now emerging from.

If simple technologies like basic web apps that have been around for well over a decade are still enabling revolutionary businesses that would previously have been impossible, how can anyone claim that innovation is dead?
In France, we were taught Logo when I was 9/10 (back in 85) on Thomson computers (French equivalent of Sinclair ZX Spectrum) at school.
http://regards.sur.sciences.free.fr/ordis/logo/logo.htm
I got stuck into programming since then !
It always seemed to me that StackExchange's own http://programmers.stackexchange.com was intended for this very concept. From the FAQ:

What about subjective questions?

Subjective questions are allowed, but subjective does not mean “anything goes”. Please keep it professional at all times. If this is a question you'd be uncomfortable discussing with your colleagues in a work environment, it's probably not appropriate here, either.

For example, here is a question re: CSS pre-processors that seems pretty subjective: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/181536/are-th...
Virtualenv's bin/activate is Doing It Wrong
" Upgrading to HRD will solve your issue. M/S is deprecated and there is a clear and straightforward path to migrating to HRD."

Can anyone explain why this is not possible for them?

Wonderful Google support apart, there are a lot of alternatives out there.
What exactly is a "valuable programmer"? It's about as vague a notion as being "well versed in computers".

Edit : essentially, you just re-defined bar without providing any real context.

Taken a step further (and perhaps in a different job market), someone might say "oh, well being a valuable programmer isn't the same as being a Rockstar programmer..."

The key lies in the word "valuable", which is completely situational and vague, whereas "programmer" is not.
Ah, that's a problem. Thanks for letting us know about that.
I hate VBA as much as the next person here, quite certainly even more. However, comparing VBA and Javascript:

- To be really productive Javascript requires knowledge of HTML/CSS

- Both have their quircks

- For the things people do in their day jobs Excel/VBA is a better match

- You can do some mathematical stuff easier, it has matrix multiplication and a generally usable solver
Comment from the WontFix mark:

"M/S is deprecated and there is a clear and straightforward path to migrating to HRD."

M/S was deprecated April 4, 2012, so it has been some time since the notice has been out there. High replication data store has been available for over 2 years now. Whether or not less than a year is too short a deprecation period is another issue.
List Building - How To Write And Schedule Your Messages
Every browser vendor has their own benchmarks (Google has Octane, Mozilla has Kraken, MS has plenty of smaller ones on their IE test drive site). Apparently those are the things each vendor optimises for which shows in the results (Chrome is fastest in Octane, Firefox is fastest in Kraken, etc.). It's not so much that Chrome is slow at graphics or IE is slow doing computational stuff, it's more that each test's performance depends a little on the intricacies and internal workings of the browser it was written for (and runs best). Or maybe vice-cersa, i.e. the test was written and the browser adapted to run it fast.

For the penguins I noticed a few graphics glitches on IE 10, though, namely that penguins sliding in from the bottom or right are not rendered completely immediately, so you get only half a penguin until it redraws completely. In other sites IE tends to skip frames to keep up with rendering sometimes (although that was on an old Intel graphics chip, so might not have been that comparable).
What makes you think they're not blocking other phrases?
> The crazy thing is--when using Chrome I was not even prompted about whether or not I wanted to download--it just started saving to disk.

So change your security settings. With default settings, Chrome always prompts for authorization before downloading an executable.

But I agree this is incredibly sleazy behavior on their part.
Why would anyone put anything production critical on Google these days, knowing that they provide 0 support across most of their business?
I have a quad-core, 8GB machine at work and a dual-core 4GB machine at home. Both are running Win7 64-bit. How much more do I need?

I have noticed slowdown in Firefox's UI on both machines. More important than number of tabs, is CPU usage. For example my HTML5 heavy trading platform often causes the single-threaded Firefox UI to freeze and slowdown on both machines, while I have never noticed Chrome freezing when this site is open.

On the other hand, Chrome's UI runs smooth as butter until either open tabs or other programs bring memory usage to over 90% Physical Memory in the task manger. Recent builds hit that wall a lot quicker than it did a year or so ago.
>A framework that tries to be all things to all people generally sucks for everybody.

Right, I agree. I like a framework that tries to be a generic web framework for most people who want to write a typical web application in Python. That seems adequately specific to me. I don't consider that "opinionated design", it's simply identifying a market.

"Opinionated design" is an excuse to make interopability and cross-compatibility difficult. There are, generally speaking, few good reasons to do this. Things that are totally out of scope obviously shouldn't be integrated, but if you feel the need to bundle a certain type of library with your framework, shouldn't it be sensible that someone might want to tweak that someday, or replace it with another library that does the same thing in a different way? Opinionated design is about copping out of that logic and putting a smooth sheen on it, it's saying "OK, we understand this is a reasonable, in-scope requirement, but we're opinionated and cool, like Steve Jobs, so we're just going to say you have to use this library or you're SOL. Remember, we are cool like Apple, and that's why we can tell you off in this fashion". Not "only projects that implement this prudent, adaptive, and objectively important-for-our-use-case protocol will work", but "only this library" or "only this way".

Projects that don't suffer from scope creep or far-fetched, irrelevant integration aren't called "opinionated design", they're simply called "well-managed". It doesn't come from having an opinion and telling everyone else to shove it. It comes from having goals and the discipline, reason, and structure in place to stick to them.
I think the important part is that the reverse-proxy should buffer the request, but I can't find anything about wether or not the Heroku router does this.
Practical Reduceron (Haskell + FPGA)
Crowdsourcing an Icon using 99designs and Bitvisitor
Nudist Dating- Online Dating For Naturists
Innovation is, and rightly should be, followed by a phase of enjoying its benefits. We are enjoying the fruits of the Internet. Its opened up more options and improved quality of life. My own life has changed drastically since I was introduced to computers twelve years ago. Today I work across continents - not a choice I had in the 90s. My mother can video chat with my nephew and niece everyday. My grandmother can see places across the world in vivid detail without leaving her chair. I can get away by being less knowledgeable. The much reviled 140 characters is a symptom of us enjoying the benefits.

What's the fascination with flying cars? Why is it a poster child of 'innovation'? Innovation is bursty, uncontrolled and usually cross disciplinary. Innovation just happens. For true innovation, pay attention to the Nobel prizes in science, to cutting edge research in science and not just industry. Its also weird to put up known checkpoints like 'flying-cars' to measure innovation.

Does anyone else find it strange that the title is 'idea machine' but content is tangible innovation that reaches the masses?

From the article:
>>"Mr Jones says that, from 1985 to 1997 alone, the typical “age at first innovation” rose by about one year."
Hmmm .... we are in 2013. Why curate and quote a period from 1985 to 1997??
Seriously, why don't macs have touch-screens yet?

Ubuntu is going all touchy, Windows 8 (although confused) is touch-enabled, the new ChromeBook Pixel looks very touch-centric; It seems that Apple are really falling behind the eight-ball on something they purportedly pioneered.

I can only assume they'll release their new OS (OSXI, OSX.I, X.I.OS, etc.) fairly soon as OSX in it's current form is about as touch friendly as Windows 7 or KDE.
Seems to happen on HRD as well.
Apologies if "absolute trainwreck" came off as harsh or unspecific. My specific, actionable feedback is:

Check how your site looks in multiple common browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome...) while you develop it.

Check how your site looks on screen sizes smaller than your own, by resizing the browser window.

If it looks fine to you, then maybe the problem is on my end. But there is definitely a problem on my end, as I assume you did not intend for the "Why CodeHS?" text to overrun on top of the photo of the classroom.
Great! Congratulations!
I can't agree with this article. It is very thoughtful, and looks very thoroughly to verify (or refute) a very specific thesis. However, it is manifestly causal-ly false to assert that pure scientific advances do not affect the real economy. Where would we be, economically, without silicon chips and laser beams? In a very different place.
Remember that Google began with academic research in mining data from the web. Google created billions of dollars of value and thousands of jobs around the globe. That certainly contributed to economic growth.
You seem quick to dismiss his review. While the branding of "snake oil" may be an overly strong term, it might not be incorrect: the evidence I've seen thus far (as a user admittedly unfamiliar with the subject) does seem to point to profit off open-source work. But if we were always so quick to give the benefit of the doubt while ridiculing investigations as you did, the thievery would be out of control. I will say that this situation seems like we could take a lesson from Mr. Musk though, and make statements instead of accusations. I'll be interested to see how this turns out.
So Vim it is.
That's not quite true, Apple offloads some of its static assets to Amazon, MS's (Azure-based) & Akamai CDNs. There's as yet no evidence that Apple's cloud-based software (like iCloud) runs off anything but their own datacentres.
> You don't learn a language for the sake of learning a language. You learn a language in order to accomplish something.

Yes, and if what you want to accomplish is to be well-versed in modern technologies including the common variety, you will be familiar with Windows, OSX, Java and a few other things. Not because these represent the pinnacle of technical sophistication, but because clients and/or employers will expect you to be familiar with them.

> So what is that "something" that you want to accomplish?

The OP is a student, asking what technologies he needs to be familiar with in order to be functional in modern computer technology. That's what he wants to accomplish.
Google: Our 'freedom of expression' should trump "right to be forgotten"
No, what you have just described is the epitome of increased productivity and therefore increased GDP. In fact, productivity gains are the primary contributor to rising standards of living (higher GDP per capita).

Take self-driving cars. Sure, one might fixate on the fact that car manufacturers will lay off workers and that cab/truck drivers will lose their jobs. But that's a very narrow way of viewing things. If self-driving cars save 20 minutes in each American's day (commute, going out, filling up the tank), we're looking at more than 11,900 human years saved each day, just in the US. This figure doesn't even include the fact that when you are in the car you can do work or read while the car is driving itself. And we haven't even looked at: 1) health benefits from lower air pollution, 2) cheaper and more efficient transport of goods everywhere (lower costs for every type of good), 3) more efficient allocation of real-estate (no parking garages in the middle of the city), and 4) numerous other effects I am probably leaving out.
Quick tip for anyone making a system with high load and daily or hourly quotas: When an account is created, assign a random start time (e.g. 05:43 for daily quotas or minute 12 for hourly) to measure that account's quotas against. Then you can avoid this issue of the system getting a huge spike in load when everyone's quota refreshes at the same time.
Perfect situation for applying Hanlon's razor - I see no reason to assume anything other than just a (really stupid) spam rule bug which is deleting messages when it should be filing them as spam.

Never attribute to malice ... you know the rest.
Man Who Left PC in a Hole in the Wall to Teach Slum kids Wins $1mn Prize
Vendor-prefixed CSS Property Overview
OS X already hides the ~/Library folder, it's not far-fetched to think they might hide everything but the Photos, Documents, etc. folders.

I wouldn't say iOS is a terrible product, just that it's terrible for someone that knows how to use a computer. Apple is trying to get users that don't know what they are doing at the expense of the experience for users that do. I know I shall never buy another Apple computer if the trend continues.
Rockstart Accelerator announces 2013 class
Speaking as someone who is currently taking his first programming lessons in school at the moment, this seems great. What I really need though, is great tutorials in the languages I'm using.

Codecademy and Khan both do a great job, but neither has any/proper support for Processing or Java, which is what the courses at my university revolves around (there's a bit of drawing on Khan, but in no way enough to make me anything close to comfortable with the language).

In short, what really prevents me from speeding up my learning is content. The will is there, and I believe it is for a lot of other people as well.

(btw, yes, i can look up double arrys on processing.org but trust me, it can very difficult to implement their content when it does not relate to your own project. That's why guides are so good. This is not good: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/getStarted/intro/defi...)
Multiple comments mentioned that this occurs in HRD as well.
Back then I had a paid me.com account - just for syncing the OS X keychain and preferences between my Macs.

Ironically with iCloud they removed that one feature that made the whole service worthwhile for me.
Doubling Down: How Blackjack Is Different From Startups
OH NO WHATEVER SHALL WE DO NOW???
Well, the bug report doesn't really invite quick attention. Simply reporting your observations is not enough: you should position yourself as a competent customer, by explaining what you have done to ensure the problem isn't on your side. Mention the code hasn't changed, that you have no database cleanup cronjobs or similar running that could be interfering, etc.

My first instinct when I see a report like this is: he probably has some cronjob running he forgot about; perhaps one whose performance decreased with O(n^2).

By which I'm not saying that Google is right in not replying for days, but by which I am saying that as a customer, there are easy ways to get attention beyond shouting and threatening. Show it's an interesting problem and you're bound to get some techie's attention.
A valuable programmer, in this context, is someone who seeks to get paid by a company to write code and would have a significant (as far as individual employees go) net-positive influence on that company's financials.
For those interested in doing monitoring outside of the process itself, we run this command every minute via cron

ps -o rss,pid= -U username | sort -k 1 -nr | head -2 | awk -F: '{FS=" ";if ($1>limit*1000) print $2}' limit=`jot -r 1 144 192` | xargs kill -QUIT

It will gracefully kill 2 most memory-consuming unicorn workers above random range of 144-192MB of memory. It proved to be extremely efficient and simple solution to our needs.
Youtube version:

http://youtu.be/d7kJdFGH-WI
Thanks for posting that, I hadn't seen that thread... Best pg response ever :-)
They might also think about bombing the US because they don't want an "atheist capitalist state" to have nuclear power. This kind of non-argument can go both ways.
There is certainly a perceived lack of software engineers. (And, I think, a perception that coding is the most important thing a software engineer does. I'd question both of these perceptions.)
Just a minor nitpick but I believe it should be "disclosure" instead of "disclaimer" at the end of the article. Interesting read nonetheless.
Use Yahoo Mojito. Same MVC code on both server and client.
One issue is training and test environment. Easy to set up a VPS and play with it, but the larger system you probably have to learn on the job, as apprentice.
What skills/resources do you suggest to improve for "my app runs on linux" developer - towards "I know linux" in the level you seek for?
I consider him panicking more than shouting and threatening. I couldn't imagine having that kind of treatment as a vps customer else I'll be moving out asap.
because we're paying customers? my bill is peanuts, but i know there are many big customers, e.g. Khan Academy. and also they have Premier Support which is $500/mo.
You're probably not drinking enough water.
Is Chase bank good for startup
I am incorporating LLC firm in USA from offshore. Since my business is start up, I'll have very minimum in my account.

I need business checking, online banking to wire money international destination, debit or credit card.

I heard bank in US is complex rule and lot of hidden fees e.e. monthly etc.

Currently, I am like to go with Chase. Is Chase good for offshore startup?
> I mean, the biggest change is print not being a statement anymore?

The reasons to upgrade to Python 3 are both numerous and serious. If the only hit on your code base is to change "print this" to "print(this)", by all means upgrade. And most conversions are automated -- just run a script named "2to3":

http://docs.python.org/2/library/2to3.html

Asking why one would want to move from Python 2 to Python 3 is like asking how much a boat costs -- if you have to ask, you can't afford the consequences. Here are some of the reasons:

http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3

A quote: "At the time of writing (July 4, 2010), the final 2.7 release is out, with a statement of extended support for this end-of-life release. The 2.x branch will see no new major releases after that. 3.x is under active development and has already seen stable releases, such as the recent 3.2. This means that all recent standard library improvements, for example, are only available in Python 3.x."

A more complete list of the changes:

http://docs.python.org/3/whatsnew/3.0.html

Bottom line -- if you don't migrate to Python 3, over time the corner you're painting yourself into will become smaller and smaller.
You mention improvements such as lower air pollution. We don't measure that in GDP today. That's kind of my point. If we internalize externalities, then all of the effects I am talking about will also contribute to GDP.

But the way we measure GDP today, it looks like growth is slowing. Indeed, some people, even in this community, feel we are working too many hours for little reason. If we are to make truth of that, and work less with more meaningful things, then that too would decrease GDP. But it would presumably increase well-being.

So what I propose is that we start measuring external costs, add them to the price of goods (so the price better reflects the real cost), and we won't need to fill every space with advertising to keep up consumption.

If you want to read more about these ideas, and others perhaps more radical, I can recommend this book of all my heart: http://sacred-economics.com/

Edit: Perhaps the self driving cars were my weakest example. In my mind, the most clear example is that of the free software movement. It's just a massive gain for everybody, built collaboratively. And it took off just as Bill Gates became the world's richest man off software. In a free software economy, that kind of market capture is radically different.
http://www.lpi.org/linux-certifications/programs
Why you should wait for the Samsung Galaxy S4 | Mobile - CNET News
> Fans donated $78,000 to breast-cancer research in the name of the game, which put it second behind Super Smash Bros. Melee. Normally, that would have eliminated Skullgirls from Evo

Raise tens of thousands of dollars for charity = get kicked out of conventions? I have no idea how Evo works, but I assume I must be reading that wrong...
Beautiful and informative. Great job.
Those who think taxes are high in the states have simply never lived outside of the states.
> Apple makes Xcode freely available, Microsoft has Express editions of their products, and Google makes their Android tools available for download.

They do so because their engineers are paid with the money they get from another products.

Developers working on XCode are paid by Apple's margins. Android SDK developers by the licenses Google gets to have their applications on the handsets. Express developers get paid by the amount of Windows and Office installations out there.

Not so easy for the pour souls trying to live just on selling compiler tools.

> Plus, everything else can be had for free. Graphics library? Sound code? Physics engines? Go to Github.

And enjoy the pain of using rote code left behind by developers that lost interest.
Yep. We (Khan Academy) have a lot riding on App Engine, and they are supportive when we run into issues with the platform.
It's not really clear to me what "handle better" would be, which is why I asked if Python did anything, as your post suggested it hides some ugliness of Unicode (a claim like this I am always skeptical of, although reading PEP393 it seems kind of clever in that "why don't more libraries do this" kind of way).

I suppose one form of "handle better" would be to always normalize all the time, but then, there are those times when you want payload to be bit-identical after a round-trip. I suspect it's just rooted in Unicode sucking (even if it sucks less than the encodings it replaced); it's funny how Unicode is supposed to make things simpler, but carries its own baggage and complexity and nonsense to worry about. Every time I read about these details in Unicode it seems to suck more than I remembered the last time.
Pascal (and then Delphi) was the first non-interpreted programming language I learned and I used it for a few years for pretty much everything - party because it provided a sane wrapper to the Win32 API, but mainly because it was a lot of fun to program with.

Compared to pretty much any GUI/code-behind editor the Delphi concept is an absolute joy to use. Sadly it's been a long time since the components have been updated (it's still pretty much a Win32 clone from what I can tell and today the Lazarus component palette feels extremely outdated). I just wish the Xcode folks would have taken a few more pages from Delphi's playbook.

It's nice to see this environment lives on in Free Pascal/Lazarus.

I sometimes think the Pascal idea could be rediscovered some day, maybe with a syntax addition or two.