skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> More autonomy for programmers means more high-quality work is done, which generates higher returns already but also means that programmers improve.

I disagree. The self-motivated path may be "more productive" for that one person, but it does nothing to guarantee returns or value for the larger organization.

Any employee should leave a company if they believe that their executive team is consistently shown to be inept.
School courses will do nothing if people don't have access to programmable computers. And they don't have - Windows doesn't ship with Visual Studio, OSX and Linux are irrelevant, iOS and Android don't come with SDK CDs and demos.

Now, of course, you know that these tools exist, and I know too. But most people don't and to them programming simply doesn't exist. Teaching these people quicksort in school won't be of much help.
Best thing about IE10? "Automatically install updates" is an option, checked by default.
I say "bah-humbug" to job security. That means that you just don't know or care about your craft. If you were really "1337" job security would be the last thing on you mind. You would actually be running the show and working on amazing products/solutions.

I'm a senior developer and I teach my methods to my colleagues all the time. It doesn't hurt me, but helps the team and the cause immensely. It makes going to work much more enjoyable when everyone is on the same page and pushing each other.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1765109

But son, as soon as someone puts their hands on you, they've crossed a line. Fuck them up. It's the only thing these vicious freaks understand. They're wild animals. They make violence on you, you need to show them that you're the stronger, bigger animal. When someone attacks you maliciously for no reason, you need to impose your will on them.

Even if you lose, lose swinging. They respect it. Be a tough fight.

This "talk it out" shit doesn't work... it's been the dogma for the last 30-50 years, it assumes the nobility of human nature will win out. It doesn't. It's nonsense. It just simply doesn't work.
There are a lot of visual programming environments that are used in the creative industries, environments such as MAX/MSP, Pure Data, Houdini (CGI / FX) or NI Reaktor...

When I look at a complex Reaktor instrument (for instance Razor[1]), the entire paradigm seems to hit a wall at a certain point. The networks driving these instruments are an intricate mess and their visual representation can actually make it harder to grasp them in their entirety.

[1] http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/synth...
I agree that people who want outright autonomy will need to go off and start their own companies, but right now, typical employment terms for software engineers are outright bad in comparison to what they could be:

* mediocre compensation, especially considering the horrific costs of living in the places with the strongest economies.

* low autonomy, respect, and opportunity for advancement due to a scope-of-work defined to commoditize rather than grow engineering talent.

* low job security or transfer opportunity, which is the main reason for working for a large organization.

I believe that this arrangement exists because most software engineers lack the skills to negotiate for better terms.

Realistically, we need to improve organizational and independent employment at the same time. Market dynamics will corrupt one if the other is bad. Fixing one while giving up on the other is not a workable strategy.
My preference on an American keyboard is still curly braces, probably because of my typing style.

In order to type { }, I hit the shift key with my right pinkie finger, which shifts my entire hand over and allows me to hit the brackets with precision with my middle or ring finger. When I type [ ], I use my middle and ring fingers but without anchoring my hand to the right shift key, and I often hit the wrong character.

This is why I always found it awkward to program in Objective-C due to their extensive use of square brackets, whereas Java or PHP (or other C-like languages) come a lot more naturally (curly braces are more often used than square ones).
JPEGmini better preserves color information, but it doesn't seem to be that much better.
I really like the /r/learnprogramming subreddit -- You can ask anything relevant to programming and you'll get earnest answers with minimal trolling (the mods do a great job there).
People should be educated enough to know what they can expect from a computer - by learning coding they would get a deeper view into those things - not everyone would become a professional coder. And even then, every good professional create even more jobs - you can't do everything by yourself even if you know how too.
Also it is for greater good - I think it is a step to happier society with more decent life.
I'm also a Fleming and I HATE our keyboard. For example languages with $ signs for variables are horrible with it. $ needs AltGr and is all the way to the right. Thus requiring you to leave the home row completely. (Not even getting into how moronic the placements of (){}[] are.)

Switched to QWERTY, not looking back.
I sometimes wonder why languages use sequences like "->". This is clearly meant to represent an arrow, so why has noone ever taken the time to make sure an arrow character is defined, make sure it's possible to type it in most keyboard maps and use it in programming languages.

It can't be because physical keyboards wouldn't have the key, because my keyboard doesn't display a # symbol, but that is widely used.

I can only guess that the character sets and "what characters are easy to type into a computer" became standardised early on, and no individual language has been able to push such a change (Early in development a language has few users, thus no influence; Later in development, the language has been using "->" itself for a while, so it's less easy to change).

Also, proper languages like lisp use parentheses (), not curly braces. :p
Going gluten-free just because? Here’s what you need to know
Curiously, that's more-less exactly how Ender from Orson Scott Card's "Ender Game" approached the topic.
I agree. The benefit of using Go is that it's fast to write and has good concurrency features. To give you an idea of the size, there are 7,329 lines of Go code in Railgun (including comments) and a 6,602 line test suite.

In the process we've committed various things back to Go itself and at some point I'll write a blog on the whole experience, but one thing that made a big difference was to write a memory recycler so that for commonly created things (in our case []byte buffers) we don't force the garbage collector to keep reaping memory that we then go back and ask for.

The concurrency through communication is trivial to work with once you get the hang of it and being able to write completely sequential code means that it's easy to grok what your own program is doing.

We've hit some deficiencies in the standard library (around HTTP handling) but it's been fairly smooth. And, as the article says, we swapped native crypto for OpenSSL for speed.

The Go tool chain is very nice. Stuff like go fmt, go tool pprof, go vet, go build make working with it smooth.

PS We're hiring.
s/put the user in control of that/give it to google instead/
Just ignore comments you don't like or down vote them. By engaging you create more "irrelevant text".
Injecting Life-Saving Oxygen Into a Vein
I like Go, but that bothered me too.

From my personal point of view I'm happy they used it though, because it means more people tinkering with and improving the language.
Moshi Monsters must use some very realistic monster fur rendering if it's heavier than Far cry 3 ;)
OK, I'm going to go off-topic and sound like a crank...but is the font-size for Google's blogs kept at 13px because:

1) To keep consistency across every service (search, analytics, maps, etc)

2) Because it's what users like, according to in-house studies

3) Because...why change it?

Not all the Google blogs use Arial (http://chrome.blogspot.com/ uses Open Sans). I'm not trying to be completely snarky here...If it is indeed a best practice, then that's good to know. The width of the Google blogs do conform to showing 80-or-so characters a line, though at 16px, the characters-per-line is about 70, which isn't bad either.

(yes, I know HN is at 13px too...but a discussion board with variable length of text and a higher value in being able to see more entries at once is different than the narrative paragraph form)
it is one thing write programs in english , i have a french keyboard , typing english is fine , the problem is all the non word stuff that are not directly visible on my keyboard like {}[]|\] and so on. You kind of get used to it but frankly i dream of a language with non of these characters, just words. typing def/end doesnt bother me. By the way , that's kind of why i love coffee-script so much.

myObject =
param1 : foo
param2 : bar
param3 : baz

foo bar,baz,boom

my god it is a relief on a non english keyboard... on the mac i get the @attr without using alt-right , that is neat.
What most schools don't teach
Not just Chrome: It's pretty terrible on older Firefoxes too. Firefox 16 here, and while it's not as bad as Chrome, its not very great either.
This is WAN optimization, right? This is already being done but usually for (VPN) connections to other branches of a company.
The content of the article was great, but I had to remove the font-family style from the body tag with Firebug due to the way Firefox was handling aliasing on the font.

Aside from that minor nitpick, I learned something new and valuable, so it's worth reading if you don't already know about git rebase.
Determining Whether Client-side MVC is for You
No, there is a noticeable difference.

JPEGMini diff shows less color fringing (fewer "colored" pixels) and it also appears to better preserve edges and outlines.
Suits vs Devs: Launch Day
From my personal experiences, having a quality roommate (not in same bed) forces me to adopt a normal sleep schedule. I don't want my activities to wake my roommate up and turn his day bad, so I sleep shortly after my roommate goes to bed. But when I live alone, I procrastinate my sleep, I would rather watch videos than go to bed, it wouldn't disturb anyone anyways, and the chances of having an abnormal sleep schedule becomes the norm.

Perhaps there is some psychological/social aspects to sleeping and what you and I have described falls into this aspect.
If it's "based" on anything, the idea behind releasing the source code for software is that you can avoid screwing over your users with binary releases. In the worst case they'll be able to maintain the software themselves if you keel over or cop out.

Money exchange is not a support contract, and street vendors are not legally required to give refunds if you aren't satisfied, as long as they did accurately advertise the product they're selling (an edible orange, or a runnable binary). Many do, since it's arguably in their best interest to have a good reputation, but it isn't out of the goodness of their hearts. That's simply not how a for-profit business works. And if the street vendor decides (like this article's focus) to not provide long-term support for his oranges, that's well within his rights and you'd be a fool to depend on such support if the oranges mean a lot to you.
Maybe I'm not the most knowledgeable guy here, but I really don't see what you're getting at. The per-pixel diffs look nearly the same. I downloaded the "hipnshoot.zip" and yes the photos look identical. But then I fired up gimp and re-compressed the high quality photo to reduce the size even more than the "jpegmini" version, and I can't tell the difference. Here are the file sizes:

-rw-r--r-- 1 tim users 4930482 Dec 1 21:22 hipnshoot.jpg

-rw-r--r-- 1 tim users 1310430 Feb 26 08:27 hipnshoot_gimp.jpg

-rw-r--r-- 1 tim users 1352882 Dec 3 09:16 hipnshoot_mini.jpg

I put them here: http://www.rareventure.com/jpegmini/

"hipnshoot_mini.jpg" is the "jpegmini" version and "hipnshoot_gimp.jpg" is the one I compressed with plain old gimp.
Ask HN: Is there a HN Chrome extension that does this?
I'm looking for a Chrome extension that will show if a page I'm looking at online has been submitted to Hacker News. I'd like to be able to click on the notification and be taken to the HN submission/comments page to read the comments.

Is there anything like this?
I came in here to say just use Vim, the fact that the author thinks it might not be productive shows he didn't really put too much effort into learning it.

Then I read the footer about the note to vim suggesters, and I'm just saying this anyway.
I think that's a good analogy; it's rsync with versioning. Very cool.
Music sales show first rise since 1999
Basics: http://www.codecademy.com/tracks/web & http://learn.shayhowe.com/html-css/ (Though I am sure you already knew that, but still...)

Advanced: http://cssdeck.com/codecasts & http://thecodeplayer.com/ (Do awesome stuff with CSS3!)

Finally: http://learn.shayhowe.com/advanced-html-css/
> School courses will do nothing if people don't have
> access to programmable computers

I was taught to program exactly in this way: in the classroom, without access to computers—our school did not have any.

When I finally had access to a computer and a real programming language (not some pseudo code) I just needed the syntax to write my programs in.

The tricky part is not to teach kids the syntax of language X, it's to teach them to operate abstract structures, and that is much much harder.
[Show HN] Nanotate - Gain super speed with intuitive hotkeys
Today I'm introducing Nanotate, the app that grants you super speed snap, annotation and uploading to imgur.

All with intuitive hotkeys.

http://alvinlai.com/nanotate/

While apps like Skitch exist, they've become bloated over time and none of them have the hotkeys that let me be as effective as I can be. Yea, I save time by minimizing the use of the mouse/trackpad, so if you're a hotkey fanatic like me, chances are you'd love Nanotate.

I've made several highly web-service specific Mac screen capture tools (Freshlog for Basecamp, Screendocs etc) over the years but they all lacked the ability to annotate.

Two weekends ago I was inspired to finally learn Quartz 2D, then spent the course of the next week drawing custom controls, authentication with imgur, implementing license key generation and Mac App Store integration.

Over time, I intend use what I've learnt with Nanotate to add annotation capabilities to my other web service-specific screen capture apps.

Today, Nanotate launches on the Mac App Store, 50% off the first week:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nanotate/id601942194?mt=12

Here are some promo codes:

XYFYTTNE737M
NM7YR7NEJPH9
T44LETPJ4PN3

If you missed the promo codes, you can download a free trial from:

http://alvinlai.com/nanotate/

Let me know what you think!
Honestly, how is this a fair argument at all?

And also, to make it more complete let's add in Safari. Released (as a beta) in 2003, with its first Windows version in 2007. The Windows version's last (read: no more releases after this) release was Safari 5.[1]

Are we to take Apple seriously since they only support iOS and OSX?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)
Beware of Internet Phonies
http://www.sublimetext.com/eula

Except for when you buy software with a license. Then that's the contract.
Yeah ... speaking of "social spam" does anyone else get a "make new friends on Google+" page about 10% of the times you try to go to plus.google.com ? The persistent annoyance of that page was a major reason I went back to Facebook from G+, and now just use it as a Skype replacement.
I write software in English, sure, but my keyboard layout needs to be Danish in order for me to write emails, etc. in Danish. Having to swap keyboard layouts would mean I'd be confused constantly.

On a Danish Mac keyboard the curly braces are written by holding down Alt + Shift + 8. Not exactly an easy combination to hit.

> Most programmers often write their programs in english anyway

I'm not so sure about that. There are tons of places where English proficiency is really low, even among programmers.
Smalltalk uses [] for blocks, and somehow it just looks jagged and unpleasant to read, to me: [[[]]] doesn't nest nicely like ((())) or {{{}}}. I don't propose this as an explanation of anything; but I'm glad it isn't [].
This might explain why new parents look 5 years older after 1 year of having their first child (in my admittedly anecdotal sample, including myself)
Did not hear anything about that... can you share more info?
No Silver Bullet. But.
Have you ever heard the term "straw man argument?"
Ignoring the specific number of cups for a moment, I like your discussion of dosage making something medicine or poison.

In medicine we say that drugs have a "therapeutic index". That is, there is some window in which the medication is more helpful than harmful. On the low side, there is just no effect. On the high side, toxicities dominate.
> Minority Report interfaces also will never become mass consumer adopted because of this.

it's actually been built, by the same guy that designed the thing for the movie, but many express reservations: http://oblong.com/

There's also kinect and leap in this space in the "stuff I can buy today" column. So I wouldn't discount this as "never" quite yet.
Not modal, not dismissable, not necessarily working depending on browser.

That's not an alternative to alert, that's just one more notification popup thing out of a billion or two.
Perhaps part of the reason Microsoft hasn't switched to a faster release cycle is a fear that the quicker they iterate IE the quicker it will be replaced by other browsers. They need a certain baseline for their own internet solutions, but until those solutions are mature enough, and the market is ready to pay for them, they don't have a strong enough motivation to improve IE.
Parallel Processing Using the Map Reduce Programming Model
I appreciate that people will run XP/IE6 like an application environment rather than an OS for people to use, but by the time the new service pack hits it'll be coming up to 2014, when Microsoft officially ends support for XP, meaning those that run XP are on their own.

It's been far too long now, and even Microsoft want it dead and buried. When April 2014 hits I expect Microsoft to halt all support, and then I'd not be shocked to see XP targeted by virus makers in order to kill it off for good. Companies won't want to pay for their applications to be ported, but if the choice is to port or have their systems wiped out then I think they'll be left with no choice.
It could be tough to get some tech gig within such a short time, that too for that much amount.
I can think of only the following options.
- Try to contact any training institutes near you where you could quickly give PHP lessons.
- Try subletting your place and get some cash in hand.
- At the same time, try to find some online work.
- Find some part time work - non-tech related or even manual work.

Wish you good luck
What does the term "mini-seizure" mean?
Stretchy battery that works at 3X size
I disagree. The self-motivated path may be "more productive" for that one person, but it does nothing to guarantee returns or value for the larger organization.

I don't think you've been in software for very long. Most software is terrible. Code and software quality are serious issues. Unmanaged complexity costs companies millions of dollars. This is a direct result of the low average competence of software engineers, which follows from their inability to get good projects on which they would improve.

If engineers had better working terms, there would be a much larger number of decent software engineers out there, and the productivity of the software industry would improve massively.

Any employee should leave a company if they believe that their executive team is consistently shown to be inept.

Bad idea. 95 percent of companies have executive teams that are either incompetent or malignant. If you have a bad immediate manager, leaving is a good idea. Leaving a company because it has worthless executives is not, because that's the norm. You'll just end up job hopping in the search for something incredibly rare. Better is to assume that most executives are harmful and minimize your career exposure to their incompetence and malice.
Text editors are complex projects, especially when they're very extensible. As a result code cruft builds up and minor design mistakes become increasingly more painful to work around. So once the creators realize they want to take the editor in a specific direction (e.g. better syntax highlighting, better API hooks, better code completion, whatever) the only realistic route is to make a clean break from the previous version, refactor the architecture as needed and go from there.

This seems to be exactly what's happening with Sublime Text 3. So I'm sticking to ST2 until 3 reaches the point where all my packages work reliably. If that means I have to wait half a year or so that's fine with me. And if this clean break with ST2 paves the road for great versions 4, 5, 6 down the road then all the better.

For me the bottom line is that switching editors really sucks, so I'm far more concerned with the long term future of ST than I am with any individual release or package.
Just because someone's homeless doesn't mean they've given up all dignity, and aren't offended by unfair treatment. I think you might be surprised what a lot of indigent folks would refuse because it was an inequitable transaction.
You'll have to create an audience draw for it as well. Say, promise them the site won't be overrun by endless discussions about which Aeron chair is the best to sit on a treadmill.

Then when you have the audience who were drawn in by the high signal focus on a topic of expertise, sucker punch them by closing down all such questions and cite some lame excuse of following the charter of purity. In the name of site quality they'll say.
IE 10 does automatic updates now independent from the OS update cycle.
I'm not convinced it can be done right, because alphabets are inherently superior to ideograms. Making a small set of symbols capable of representing language is one of humanity's greatest inventions.

It's good to have an editor (like vi, following TECO) that takes advantage of the fact that this set of symbols is literally at the user's fingertips.
Yes, I felt pleased and vindicated when I read that book years later. But he didn't actually have to go that far. You only need to cause enough pain to your opponent that they start to think twice.
I have an issue with folks being able to own one with less vetting and registration requirements than you need to own/operate a car.

I have to prove I can safely operate a car to drive one.
I always thought rsync detected block moves and that's what made it a worthy PhD thesis.
Forcing all kids to go to school and forcing all kids to learn are two different things.

As you know, daycare (and, say, crime and accident prevention), training, and cultural/national upbringing are different things, and they work differently, often with contradicting goals and methodologies. Currently we tend to treat "education" as a one thing, but in isn't.

I am all for all kids going to school (unless one can provide a better education), otherwise there would be a disaster of crime and poverty, much alike the one during the industrial revolution. However, what happens inside is extremely far from things which "make sense" both for them, and the society.
Chrome's Windows font rendering rears it's ugly head again. While the fault here is entirely with Chrome I still don't understand how so many people (and even some high profile projects/organizations) choose to use those web fonts which are unreadable in Chrome.
Food for thought on digital news consumption
http://i.imgur.com/XcqHLyE.png

Was about to post the same complaint :)
Curiously for me it's garbage in Firefox 19 and normal (except kind of gray-on-gray) in Opera 12 and Chrome 25.