skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's an interesting read, but I'm not sure "developers" is the right word. I can't say anything here was outside the realm of what a good front end developer should know, and if you're not a front end developer then you're probably not concerned with any of this anyways.

A developer should be the one spriting images and minimizing server requests, that's not a designers job. If they don't know how to handle photoshop then they need to learn. I would never hire a dev that could decipher a psd of a fw png.

Still a good set of information for beginners out there.
This is a good read about it: http://unicorn.bogomips.org/PHILOSOPHY.html
Culture fit is more generally whether your personality is a mesh with everyone else's personality. It's typically a blanket over everything non-coding in an interview.

For example..

Positives:

* Person is a go getter, gets things done, doesn't get blocked
* Person is meticulous, pays careful attention to detail
* Person is a good communicator, articulating explanations eloquently

Negatives:

* Person stumbles around an incorrect solution until hints are given
* Person jumps to conclusion without considering the bigger picture (or the edge cases)
* Person doesn't seem to get it, or at least can't explain himself/herself well

---------

And this can then be inferred from the technical "coding" question, or in more traditional companies they will ask direct questions (usually known as "behavioral" questions) that focus on just those personality traits.

To give a particular example, at Amazon the "culture fit" of a candidate is how well they adhere to the company's leadership principles:

http://www.amazon.com/Values-Careers-Homepage/b?ie=UTF8&...
Possibly, but as they present it, it makes it seems as if there was something inherent that would make it so much slower.
Why is burden of proof is not on me?

Because you're arguing that representatives of the government's executive branch should not be able to use force to defend themselves when threatened with force. That violates the golden rule, which, being core to many moralities, places the burden of proof on you.
I will build the OS and compiler in Sanskrit language. Sanskrit language is not only grammatically rich, but is also best candidate for computers.
That's why it's a job 'opening'. My point was that it doesn't get filled but people classify it as an opening, but if someone wanted a Harvard lawyer for $60k it wouldn't even get listed.
Why Silicon Valley Is the Next Detroit - James McQuivey - Voices - AllThingsD
"we will kill you if you decline to go to jail for doing aerial photography"

Where? What law? They're giving out the death penalty for misdemeanors now?
I'd like to figure out where the memory consumption is. I feel like we could do a better job reducing the cold start memory footprint.

I've done some stuff with routes, but I feel there are other wins we could get. The good news is we have `ObjectSpace.memsize_of_all`:

irb(main):001:0> require 'objspace'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> ObjectSpace.memsize_of_all(String)
=> 169318
irb(main):003:0> x = 'x' * 1024; nil
=> nil
irb(main):004:0> ObjectSpace.memsize_of_all(String)
=> 171817
irb(main):005:0>

What's cool is that in MRI we can get size of the instruction sequences too:

irb(main):005:0> ObjectSpace.memsize_of_all(RubyVM::InstructionSequence)
=> 1600800
irb(main):006:0> 100.times { |i| eval("def x_#{i}; end") }
=> 100
irb(main):007:0> ObjectSpace.memsize_of_all(RubyVM::InstructionSequence)
=> 1711904

Also we can see the delta between methods defined with eval vs define_method:

irb(main):011:0> ObjectSpace.memsize_of_all(RubyVM::InstructionSequence)
=> 1717984
irb(main):012:0> 100.times { |i| define_method("x_#{i}") { } }
=> 100
irb(main):013:0> ObjectSpace.memsize_of_all(RubyVM::InstructionSequence)
=> 1722416

:-)

EDIT: stop saying "cool" so much. :-/
I can't say I care much about having cellular networking in my MacBook but what I want to know is why they're still being sold with internal DVD drives and no hybrid SSD/HDD drive combination. Apple doesn't sell a laptop with a SSD large enough to fit my photos/video clips so my only option is a relatively slow HDD. They should be offering the best of both worlds by providing a combination of the two. Other PC manufacturers are doing this but not Apple. Somehow Apple seems to be fixated on display and battery technology and is failing to address storage issues and appear to be just waiting for SSD prices to fall. All I can say is it's not happening quickly enough...
Oh I don't doubt that the community would move quite quickly to support it, but it certainly wouldn't be without some bumps along the way!
You really should look at http://codehs.com

We don't force feed anything, and everything is motivated because it's fun. We teach problem solving through coding, but it's really simple at the beginning, so you don't get intimidated.

It's motivated by teaching you that programming a computer is like teaching a dog how to do tricks, which kids can identify with.

Seriously, actually try out CodeHS because it's not what you think it is. It's actually fun, and I bet you'd wish you learned it when you were a kid.

And if you don't want to try it out, that's fine. Just know that when people say we should teach kids to code, we don't mean symbol manipulation or boring math. It can be fun, and we're doing that.
Cool! You have "discovered what Stackoverflow users were doing," and where Stackoverflow stomped it out like a plague, you have made an offering for it. Good job!

I'm still amazed at Stackoverflow's failure to follow their own stated philosophy ("discover what your users are doing and enable it") in this particular area.
My apologies I thought you were linking to the same site. Didn't notice the "premier" subdomain.
Do you live in Detroit?

Serious question. I was just wondering.
Not trying to be snarky, but can someone who knows more about fighting game development explain their budget?

For comparison, Skullgirls' budget was around $1.7
million and, since Filia was complete at the time
of signing, that covered production of the last
seven characters.

Surely producing the game was a lot more work than just making the characters? As far as you can even break down the budget in retrospect at all, surely adding another character to an existing game doesn't costs anywhere close to entire_budget_of_game/num_of_existing_chars($1.7m/7=$242k, big-band is supposedly a from scratch character with a $200k budget, the partially complete Squigly is $150k)?

EDIT: also, what is "Hit-box Contracting"?
I tether my MacBook to my iPhone often and it would be a tough sell. ~$150 more on hardware plus another data plan? Even with data plan sharing its too much. You could say the same about the cellular iPad but the way these devices are used is just a lot different. Most of the MacBooks are just too big to use this way. You have to stop somewhere, take it out of a bag and sit it down. At that point is turning on tethering, activating a wifi cellular AP, or even plugging in a USB modem all that much of an extra burden? It's already not so practical. The iPad though can be carried outside of a bag and used standing or even walking. I would at least consider the cellular iPad but so far have not opted to get one for some of the same reasons. Turning on tethering isn't very hard and it works great. Both the iPad and MacBook are distant seconds for me in cellular data usage and would continue to be even with integrated cellular. The iPhone just covers my needs for that stuff. So my guess is Apple hasn't done it because there's just not a big enough market. I would be surprised if even 10% of MacBook owners use cellular data and of that 10% a lot are probably like me and content using tethering. That leaves a tiny fraction of a fraction to sell a cellular MacBook too. For Apple that's maybe even too niche.
0x10c is such an awesome concept. Shame the last activity on the blog was November.

You might also be interested in Core War, a game where you create assembly language programs and battle them with other programs.

corewar.co.uk
I don't need them to be machine specific. What I expected was that a password issued (and immediately used) for e.g. authenticating to Gmail's IMAP service is then disqualified authorisation for any other Google service.
You make a lot of assumptions about how kids have to be taught coding.

> I tried everything possible. Every other trick in the trade. Even tried to start with Python first and not C.

> They struggle to understand where or why should you use an if/else/switch statement, or a for/do/while loop. Its difficult for them to map solution patterns to a code pattern. Its not their fault. Its ours. Better luck trying to explain a kid why they are being asked to write a program find greatest of three numbers, find factorials, or sort numbers. To them it very clearly looks math in a different language. Its that boring math thing all over again.

There are so many other ways to introduce students to programming. This is the main part of the problem. So many people think this is how you have to teach programming. I am in full agreement that you need to teach problem solving, and you can do that with programming.

We start teaching with a simplified language called "karel"--where you have a dog who can only turn left, move, and put down and pick up tennis balls. That's it. There is no overhead of python or C or java. It's just a few commands and a dog. And there is no question on why you should do it.... people do this because it is immediately fun. Printing "hello world" for most people (especially younger kids) is not immediately fun.

Try our demo on the code.org page http://www.code.org/learn/codehs

I have started thousands of students in person with our karel the dog demo. Everyone can do it. Almost everyone finds it to be really fun. Because karel is a simplified language, it is all about problem solving. How do you get a dog to find the midpoint of his world when he cant store variables, but can only ask questions about the state and put down tennis balls?

I contend that you can teach problem solving to students through programming--but it is so crucial how you make that initial experience feel.

There is no

public static void main(String[] args)

to get started.

Try this out at http://codehs.com. We have schools using it all over the country, and young students can get if/else, and for/while.

> Beyond all this it needs to fun, which it very clearly isn't.

Find a student who didnt like programming, and have them try our karel the dog starter for 10 minutes. Let us know what they say. I bet they think it's fun.
I tether my macbook almost every weekday while commuting 45 minutes by train. It also comes in handy at places where the wifi isn't free like some airports or coffee shops for instance. Also the 4G speed where I life is just as fast as DSL (only option in my building), so if there weren't bandwidth caps I would gladly ditch DSL and go with 4G all the time.
If anyone hasn't seen this video from the Microsoft team analyzing how this went down, I highly suggest watching. I was on the edge of my seat!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...
Best advice received: be that rebel
Ignoring the fact that the original image [1] had banding issues (e.g. top left), and ignoring the fact that JPEG is a format which optimizes file size by taking advantage of the limitations of the human eye as well as typical properties of REAL photographs (ie NOT cartoons, and NOT images with largely the same tone {'orangy' in this case}), I think you have to agree that my result from the standalone JPEGMini app [3], is markedly better than your "lossy" example [2]

[1] https://dl.dropbox.com/u/139377/ThreePonies/00-ORIGINAL.jpg (1.8MB)

[2] https://dl.dropbox.com/u/139377/ThreePonies/01-YOUR-LOSSY.jp... (121kB)

[3] https://dl.dropbox.com/u/139377/ThreePonies/02-MY-LOSSY%28JP... (410kB)

Your lossy sample is brighter, has major artifacts around pointy hair bits, the sickle, etc. and in zoomed in mode, which is not how you should compare these things, there's a distinct lack of detail.

If you were to repeat the same comparison with a realistic photo, the differences between the original and the jpegmini version, there are some, but you have to look hard, would be even less noticeable.

Please note: JPEGMini does not allow me to set any parameters at all.

In short: a single drag/drop on my part reduced a file from 1.8MB to 410kB and differences are extremely minimal. Another win for jpegmini.
"Even in 2013, the atrocities committed by the US government are worse than those of nearly any criminal gang in the world."

I think you are greatly underestimating the criminal organizations of this world. Look into the Zetas cartel in Mexico, for example. Sure, American military strikes kill civilians, but we don't have a policy of targeting innocent civilians.
Kids view programming very similar to the way they see math. They find themselves manipulating things/symbols/stuff without understanding why, for what, or even why its even relevant to them.

Indeed if young people have that kind of mathematics education, then they are likely to find programming boring and off-putting. But some young people learn math as something to play with, all along asking themselves why the math "rules of the game" are the way they are. Such experiences in math help young people learn and enjoy programming at a younger age. It's all problem solving--that is, it's reaching a higher level in a game. For some people that is a lot of fun. I've seen this kind of educational progression in someone who first started learning serious programming in a C course

http://epgy.stanford.edu/courses/cs/

at about eighth grade age. It can be done.
I never really loved them until I started working on a massive Django project with Oracle. South doesn't support Oracle, and now I have to manually tweak tables every time I update a schema.

Since that happened, I fricking love South.
I just spend the day revamping our pricing page and worked out that roughly 90% of game servers are active for less than 20 hours a week.
You can see the bad in anyone... if that's what you choose to see. I have never been to Detroit or any of it's suburbs, but I don't necessarily believe that all of the white suburbanites are racist and 'bad'. Any more than I believe that the blacks in Detroit are 'bad'.

I really get the sense that this guy is just ranting. Which is not terribly helpful.
I feel exactly the same way (not with the high rep you have, but a decent rep that I worked hard to cultivate in the past).

I think there are a good number of us who feel this way.

It is frustrating for a company to say it wants to "discover what its users are doing and enable it", and then to see that company squash so many individual pieces of excellent content those users have created.
The first steps validation board for startups
Two things I love about my current office is the amount of natural light we get (odd for me since I usually don't like a ton of sunlight, but somehow it works) and the big enclosed interior spaces (it's probably 40-45 feet from floor to ceiling in places): http://www.google.com/about/jobs/locations/san-bruno/#media=...

If you can't change your office, have you thought about getting a "happy light" ? I have some friends who lived in former East Germany for a few years and their sleep and mood improved a lot when they bought one for ~$30 and spent 30 minutes reading in front of it each day.
Another thing I particularly like about threads comparing two or more different technologies/frameworks/languages is when someone says "X does Z badly, and here is why Y does Z better." Slant seems to not be able to facilitate this very well.
For those with a few hours of commute daily, it's a no-brainer.
I worry a little about this idea because I think it's a little limited in scope. The kind of scientific ventures that the founder described she had trouble getting funding for (summer undergraduate research) aren't exactly the best examples of the financial needs of most scientific research. Even relatively minor projects can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year (and often take longer to get results!). We don't see that sort of money on the already-popular Kickstarter very often, and it's an uphill battle to woo people as much much as one can on Kickstarter.

For very small, 3-month projects? Sure. Maybe. For projects at the same level of academic research? Not now, and it's gonna be tough for it to happen in the future.
The hit-box of a character is the area which a blow must land to count as a 'hit'. For various gameplay reasons, this typically isn't the same as the area the sprite takes up.

In all likelihood, it's going to be done by hand, with someone going over every frame of animation, defining the hitbox. Even if there was an automatic way to generate a hit-box, they would likely have to go through at least move by move to make sure there are no balance issues.
I like "number theory" as a favorite example of practical reasons to fund seemingly impractical and useless academic research. A quote from Hardy (who I think was a number theorist, but could be misremembering) that I like is:

"I have never done anything 'useful'. No discovery of mine has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world... Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathematical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow. I have just one chance of escaping a verdict of complete triviality, that I may be judged to have created something worth creating. And that I have created something is undeniable: the question is about its value."

And I can't find a quote, but I think I remember reading that he viewed his mathematical research as consistent with his pacifism, because nothing he developed could be used for military purposes.

Of course, now that we have computers...

But, given the different channels that research can become commercially viable, and given the long and uncertain time lags before new developments in research show up in GDP, a statistical analysis based on aggregate data is going to be absurdly difficult. And there are other reasons to expect that private companies will underspend (from a societal-benefit point of view) on research that has positive spillovers/externalities (really quickly: they're only going to want to spend to the extent that they directly benefit. If there are benefits that they can't profit from, as a society we'd want them to pay for the research anyway, but they'd be crazy to). So funding as much research as possible seems like a decent approach.

Incidentally, this is the first time I've seen someone claim that the US or Canada governments have massive research expenditures. Does anyone have a link for good numbers?
An OS X API that mentions cellular data.
> I'm a security officer in a hospital, and it's truly a thankless job

When my infant son was in the NICU, I wasn't allowed to stay overnight with him. I thanked every single security guard every single time I interacted with them.
What's the performance on <template>? This approach seems like it'd be slower than having templates precompiled on the server and already served as JavaScript.
They at least considered it at some point: http://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/14/photos-of-a-prototype-ma...
Hey mate, our mobile site could, ah, use a little work. We are using the same html as the primary site and just using media queries and hiding elements to make it at least bearable. Can't wait to have the time to do a proper job!
Magazine design principles applied to web design
If separation of duties is a concern, Django's templates (IMO) get it more right than anything else.

I remember, at one point, that I felt Django templates were limiting me, and started swapping them out piecemeal for Jinja, and my designers started to absolutely hate me. Not because they had to convert anything, I converted everything by hand, but just that the amount of syntax you can cram in there keeps everything less pure.

Since then, I realized I was trying to do too much in the template and started putting things where they belonged, and now, whenever I work with Jinja or Mako, it feels a little too much like editing Wordpress themes or something in PHP.

Long story short, I learned the hard way that if you're putting logic in the templates, you're probably doing something wrong, and I agree that it is not only a reasonable design, but a very good suggestion as well.
If people switch to Chromebooks or iPads, Office revenue will also suffer along with Windows.
And, since Unicorn forks as worker processes, so, 2 unicorn workers will use up double the memory of a typical Rails app.

Thanks to copy on write, the amount of memory needed for 2 processes is strictly less than 2. Just make sure to preload as much data as you can before you fork. And in many use cases memory slowly comes unstuck (change anything, and a whole page of data comes unshared) so it can make sense to kill workers every so often and let them refork with everything properly shared.
Merit goes down - Knocks out .edu Internet across Michigan
Are We in Danger of a Beer Monopoly?
What do you mean? On 10.8, I plug my iPhone in and it "just works".
Are you coding from these places?
What about all the countries that have reasonable data plan pricing? In some African countries cellular data is actually quite often the only thing resembling broadband because wired endpoints are just way too expensive.

I am not exaggerating when I say that north Americans are probably paying 2-3 times more than they ought to.
Of course the bubble will burst. It's what bubbles do.

That said, the idea that SF will plunge into Detroit levels of destitution is preposterous. Even if tech leaves the bay entirely and money flows entirely elsewhere, more people will rather live in CA then MI, on spec alone.

A flair for the dramatic indeed. I join my fellow commenter in calling this link-bait.

(And for practical critique: I 100% agree with your premise that the bubble will burst and the Valley will lose its hacker panache, relative to other locations. Beware the dramatism, because therein lies the rub.)
They are trying to get into the mobile game:

https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/web-apps/

However, these are strictly inferior to the desktop versions (for example, web Excel doesn't support array formulae)
No Guts, No Glory: Pitch at Startup Arena Singapore 2013
I guess I'm mostly going from my own experience. I have actually learned some cool stuff from library books (not in a while though), but it's mostly from the internet. The internet facilitates learning a wider variety of information without even leaving your house, allows you to download software/code, and also allows you to find communities where you can ask questions and get feedback on your progress.
Alternative to IDM
XKCD: ISO 8601 Dates
Why don't people use an USB data dongle instead of tethering their phones? Data only plans are cheaper and having it on an USB makes it portable across multiple devices. There are cellular data devices which act as mini-wifi radios as well. That frees up the USB slot and allows multiple devices to simultaneously share the same connection.
If you have the resource, just quit for six months. It will take six months to come out of it, but it's for the best. If working as a contractor is better, do that. Career growth is more money. Developers can take six months off and come back and get a raise. It doesn't get much better than that.
Oreo Separator Machine [video]
It makes writing portable code a pain; either you have to use different string types on different platforms or do a bunch of converting between utf-8 and utf-16. Many libraries support only narrow strings, so even in a Windows-only application you often end up having to convert between utf-8 and utf-16 quite a bit.