skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
... and to a degree, I imagine they can make things worse if they create the impression that this is a Serious Thing That Requires Careful Preparation.

One of the biggest personal-project (hate the name "side project" for some reason) killers I've encountered is simple fear: of failure, of not being good enough, etc.

I try (but don't always succeed) to keep the thought that it's OK if my projects end up sucking, if they don't take the world by storm, if my interfaces aren't general enough and my algorithms inefficient. I still try to do the best job I can, simply for reasons of personal pride, but there's tons of stuff that doesn't actually matter all that much, and a lot more that can be fixed up after the fact. Just getting something is hugely important when you're operating without the sort of support network you have in a job.
Well put but insulting to television which, at its best, is well beyond the quality of the kinds of writing he refers to.
Yep. I can attribute a lot of my progress as a designer/developer coming from switching to working at home (and for myself). I can safely say that by removing the daily updates on silly things cats did the night before, I picked up a good three to four hours of work per week.
A $56,856 pay cut x 4 years would be $210,424. That is quite an investment for the small chance that the startup will have an exit big enough to make the equity worthwhile.
Wouldn't Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart be obvious counterexamples?
The job description varies by product and company; products at different stages of development and growth within the same company demand different things of their PMs.

Fundamentally, the PM's the one who gets the product shipped, whatever that entails. If the product is shipped, the PM makes it a success, including shipping followup features or products.

I've heard a few general descriptions, from "does anything except write code" (not true in many circumstances) to "mini-CEO" (implies greater degree of authority than often present). The best one that's stuck is "captain of a pirate ship"; you have to figure out where the ship is going, influencing without authority.

On a general level, rough job scope can be in the "design and plan" categories through to execution, driving everything forward, getting approvals and making sure all the edge cases are covered (both in the product and overall, e.g. legal approvals, trademark searches, etc) - plus measuring success, and making sure those metrics are defined and measurable in the first place. Listening to customers, or organizing user studies before launch, and incorporating feedback at every turn.

You sit in the middle of the product vision, and while engineers might want to make decisions that seem like good ideas from a technical standpoint, you are the guardian of the context which makes them into great ideas (or not).

Similarly, feeding back technical issues and restrictions into the UX design process, and providing those intuitive leaps when you realise if the design goes like this, and the technical architecture like that, the whole thing can be done in a tenth of the time to 99% of the effectiveness.
>>There are people like me who want to have fun discussing shows with his friends/family while they're watching it. Not 6+ months later.

Correction: there are people like you who feel ENTITLED to consume every piece of entertainment and will jump through whatever hoops necessary to do so. Because at the end of the day that's what it comes down to: entitlement.
Exactly. That's what Make is still used.
Can you provide a concrete example of a problem GNU make's secondary expansion feature cannot solve?
Why are they doing it in the first place? It's a good reason to dump such ISP IMHO.
Steve Jobs in a TV report about Apple Computers (1985)
>GNU autotools

Autoconf is similarly an abomination that should be put out of our misery. The syntax is so opaque that 99% of people copy-and-paste the configuration file into their project, leading to 10 minute ./configure runs that check for 200 things the project doesn't use in addition to the one that it does.

Not to mention that 99% of what it's checking for is OBE: A simple check for whether you're trying to build on a modern Linux, one of 2-3 Windows build flavors, or OS X, is sufficient to set the 5-10 typical flags most projects need.

Look at LuaJIT's build process, for example. It builds practically everywhere and digs into OS internals, and yet doesn't need anything complicated to build.

I agree that Make should be retired, and yet I'm typically the "Makefile expert" where ever I work. I've worked with a lot of smart people, and most don't know anything other than the basics of Make. I have to suspect that most people who are defending Make haven't had to REALLY use it to do anything complex, because when you do, it sucks.
Honestly, things like this make me avoid using github just because of the amount of drama involved.
By open sourcing projects you are effectively saying that this code is free to use however you feel fit. Yes they should have fully attributed their source. Yes, they should have sent a pull request for their fixes. But is it really that big a deal?
Whoa, your terminal playback thing is pretty neat. Did you use GNU Screen to record the session?
R.I.P. abuse team member
This is where regular company or team-wide meetups are worthwhile. GitHub do this semi-annually I think, I know Engine Yard do it with their remote support staff, and the company I work with does a monthly hack day.

Distractions can be overcome if you're willing to work on them. I find with daily standups, it's pretty hard to hide from a lack of progress, but if you don't have these then teaming up with a few colleagues to keep each other accountable is one option.

I stay away from TV, movies, etc during work hours, but I do tend to prepare proper meals in my lunch hour, rather than just grabbing whatever junk I can find. It's a good way to combat the extra weight you can gain when you start working from home too.
Heh. What about the original Russian ones? I still have several.

Or, say, about the ones translated into Russian from English (and other languages)? They were very useful for my studies of computer science.
Sadly, in a lot of places (e.g. Brooklyn, NY), this is not an option. The ISPs don't compete.
This was my first thought. The amount of money we waste on these types of criminals (the non-violent drug offenders) is simply horrible to stomach.
I regret that I have only one upvote to give this post.
Hasn't Windows tracert always used TCP?
This is the first time I see moderation adding to the title instead of subtracting or replacing it. But in the way it is titled now, they made it look like I meant to submit the latest post and haven't put the permalink by mistake.
Yes, this is something I have thought through, though I may have been lucky/unlucky with my pick of projects. But generally speaking, installs I have installed based on GNU autotools, seems to install with less fuzz than those with C-Make. So, that, and the fact that there is full free documentation of GNU Autotools, even books out there, have made my personal choice easy.

For me the overall factor is the ease for any of my users, installing something I have written.
Some tools (e.g. IDA) will just completely corrupt their database trying to relocate to a base different from the one in the image. It also makes for random looking crash reports.

Not as much of a problem if you have debug data.
There should be a disclaimer here that, if you are involved with a shitty job that involves customer service, hating it and not doing a good job will almost certainly make it worse, because most people actually like being helpful. Helping someone out and noticeably making their day better is one of the most surefire ways to make yourself feel better, even if you currently have a job you absolutely detest.

Unfortunately, there are also a lot of jobs that really suck where you have absolutely no interaction with any customers or anyone whom you are indirectly helping. In this case, how much better you feel after doing your job properly depends largely on how shitty the job is. If your manager takes all the credit for everything you do, because, well, it's a shitty job, then doing your job well really won't make anything better at all.

Of course, in all cases, you should be trying to find a job that isn't shitty so you can stop hating 40 hours of your week. Maybe not your dream job, but at least one you don't absolutely hate.
I have been screaming at YouTube for being crap, especially lately. Five seconds of a video would play, then I'd get like a thirty-second pause -- with NO pre-load. I thought this was Google being even cheaper than they have been (doing away with total pre-loads) but now I find out it's been TWC! My god! They should be fined into non-existence.
The service is built, but does not work, unless you already have a cable subscription, even in the US.

There's no way, to the best of my knowledge to legally watch Game of Thrones, besides buying it on DVD/Blu-Ray or actually subscribing to HBO (and using that subscription to watch it on-line).
The Meaning of 'su'
>>>Roses literally grow in shit ... but only if they eat it.

That is the best thing I have ever read.
Then they should be sued.. ?
'Drake' for that use was on here too, not too long ago. http://blog.factual.com/introducing-drake-a-kind-of-make-for...
Touche (pretend it's got an accent) ... and somehow I suspect we wouldn't have to drag your capabilities out of you during an interview. You felt strongly enough to write a short essay, but the line that caught my eye is "self-teaching the 90% they didn't teach me in class". That's exactly why I look for side projects - because most of us use them (in part) as a means to learn something we think might be of value. And we aren't always right, but sometimes learning what's not worthwhile is also worthwhile.

So when do you graduate? Where do you want to live when you're done with college? What kind of position do you want? So how about zero years of experience for someone that's proven to be intellectually curious? What do you want your life to look like in ten years? You've piqued my interest ... care to talk?
Wow, this is extremely cool. I thought the article was a little fluffy but the end really made me think:

"What's frustrating is that all these companies in the Valley, they're ideas for the 1 or 10 percent," Collison said. "You have startups like Uber or Taskrabbit, that's like, ‘Oh, here's something to help you find a driver or find someone to clean your house.' Are they solving real problems?"

The San Quentin inmates "were talking about urban obesity, or PTSD", Collison said. "It's a completely different perspective. We actually really need that."

That couldn't be more true. There might be an excess of startups, but there are too few solving really important problems. It might take the viewpoint of someone who has been through very hard times to understand what we should really be working on. It's not another GMail replacement app (although that's cool too), it's actually changing the physical world we live in.
Interesting approach. This strikes me as kind of like the classic "put the constant on the left" advice in C/C++ that, no matter how many people agree it's a good idea, no one ever does because the cognitive effort of understanding it is high enough to diminish the correctness benefit.

In other words, you know you're just gonna end up with this in your code after a few months:

kittyBreeds = ["Himalayan",
,"Bengal",
"Siamese",
"Cornish Rex",
,"Manx"]

and not only is it now even worse for changing lines (correcting it and adding another will be -1+3 instead of just -1+2, the optimal +1 a distant memory), but it's just plain a mess and probably people don't know why they need to do it.
I am not sure how new this functionality is. Based off the changelog tcptraceroute has been a shell wrapper since 2007.

2007-07-19 Dmitry Butskoy <Dmitry@Butskoy.name> - 2.0.6

* Add tcptraceroute(8) shell wrapper

2007-07-16 Dmitry Butskoy <Dmitry@Butskoy.name> - 2.0.5

* New implementation of tcp method ("-T"), using
half-open technique. The old implementation module
renamed to "tcpconn" ("-M tcpconn").
I'm in San Diego. TWC is the only game in town, unless you want dialup.
http://cacoo.com/
On Linux you could try using the Fast Reversible Debugger (https://github.com/fred-dbg/fred) for its memory-accurate record/replay feature. Full disclosure: I was a contributor on that project at one point.
Yeah, you just have to be extra careful, otherwise off with your head :)
Hosting .NET code in node.js applications using OWIN
I wait for the DVDs. I'm not a believer in piracy.

My issue is that if I could subscribe to just HBO, I would. It's the other 200 channels of DishTV's slops that I don't want coming into my house.
Net neutrality is a myth :(
I have this same problem with Comcast. I'm going to try this.
This might be a bit petty, but I find the frequent bold-text rather visually unpleasant and distracting.
Given the smorgasbord of obfuscation nonsense in Skype release binaries, I would not be at all surprised if the snake oil wouldn't play nice with ASLR.
I suspect Google makes more money from showing you ads than they would save on servers/bandwidth/etc by being skimpy.
There's a few different ways to go about things, but every app has some kind of domain. If you're the first, then you can define how it works. :)

Mike Amundsen's terribly named but amazingly well written 'Building Hypermedia APIs in HTML5 and Node' is a really thorough examination of this topic.
This is akin to saying that you should not be using libc, on account of there being many newer, more suitable libraries for string manipulation, I/O, and so on.

There's a clear downside to having dependencies on relatively obscure, cutting-edge technologies that may not necessarily work or be available elsewhere. And since build systems usually don't really need to be fancy, as much as they need to work, being conservative in this area usually doesn't hurt.
Can TWC get in trouble for this? Isn't this a classic case of anti-competitive practices? And I wonder if Comcast does the same thing for Netflix...
No, it's not petty. I found I almost had a headache by the time I finished the article. If the blog makes money from those sponsor links on the side, I think she'll profit a lot more without the frequent boldface.
That's what resources that have form-style affordances offer. See, for example, Collection+JSON.
I personally avoid cable ISPs precisely because of this kind of junk. Other option is DSL (Verizon), but it's unfortunately 3 Mbit/sec max in many cases. If you are lucky you get 7 or even 15, but it's not common (only if you are very close to the Verizon station). Some rare places have fiber optics, but it seems they stopped expanding it. In general the situation in US is horrible - I still don't understand why there is no competition. Are there any artificial barriers?
Concurrency is a statement about a duration of time. Parallelism is a statement about a moment in time.

During a one second window, did both of the tasks execute? If yes, then they are concurrent. If no, then they are not concurrent.

Was there any moment in time when both tasks executing simultaneously? If yes, then they executed in parallel. If no, then they did not execute in parallel.

From this, it's easy to see that if something is parallel, it must also be concurrent - in order for two tasks to execute during the same moment in time, they must also both have executed during a window of time.

Concurrency without parallelism happens on machines with a single core. Processes and threads must time-share the only core. Frequently, some of these processes will have multiple threads, so the threads need to synchronize with each other, even though they don't execute at the same time.

The definitions of concurrency and parallelism have nothing to do with determinism, so I don't know why others have brought it up. Concurrency and parallelism implies non-deterministic interleavings of threads and processes, but whether or not the result is deterministic is up to how we program.
Can anyone explain what these IPs refer to? YouTube CDNs? Some commercial service?
I've built these kinds of things before: http://words.steveklabnik.com/i-invented-hypermedia-apis-by-...
That reminds me of an interview with John Cleese where he said something along the lines of "I don't laugh as much as I used to. As I get older, I find that I'm coming across fewer and fewer novel jokes, novelty (to the listener) being a critical part of making things funny."

Getting old means you've seen lots of things. If all those things have created a consistent mental model, it's much easier to ignore the one, new outlier that contradicts the rest.
Digging I found the form you have to print out and mail in:

http://pages.ebay.com/policies/arbitrate-optout.html

Though it says "For new eBay users, the Opt-Out Notice must be postmarked no later than 30 days after the date you accept the eBay User Agreement for the first time. It's your responsibility to mail the Opt-Out Notice by the applicable deadline."

Also: http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/user-agreement.html#arbi...
It's funny, I actually spent a couple hours this evening troubleshooting this problem. I don't think those IPs are complete, but it's a start.

For those with tomato firmware:
Administration -> Scripts -> Firewall

iptables -I FORWARD -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 173.194.55.0/24 -j REJECT

iptables -I FORWARD -s 192.168.1.0/24 -d 206.111.0.0/16 -j REJECT
My view is that if you focus on the things you like in your job, they become resources that you can build on. Not necessarily for a promotion in the job; not even in order to enjoy that job, but as building blocks of what is meaningful to you. A resource; an asset.

There was a conversation on reddit about this, with people expressing hopelessness about bad jobs - even saying that to find any worth in them was pathetic. This onion story was brought up, with people agreeing with it: http://www.theonion.com/articles/man-ashamed-of-own-joy-upon... I really think the attitude in that story, of hopelessness, is a terrible approach, and that the problem with it is it sees that world as fixed, with no unknowns, no progress or change possible, that everything you see is everything there is - that what you see of the world is the world.

I think it's simply mistaken; in reality, we see only a tiny part of the world, and all else - good, bad, neutral - is unknown to us. Looking out for and noticing what is good in ones opinion is a resource one can build on; a stepping stone to other things that are good. Often, things that did not exist in our world-view previously.
This seems like wishful thinking, though: most of the attempts of media companies to take on "disruptive" technologies end up looking fairly ridiculous.
Toosell blog | DIY a Bicycle LED Light for Yourself
Indeed. I hope that ruby itself starts following the semantic versioning [0] that is so popular with ruby developers. Now that they have a "clean slate" with a 2.0.0 release, they could!

[0] http://semver.org/
I like the unspoken challenge ... and it's one worthy of life-hacker! If you don't like your job, find a way to turn it into something better. (If you can't, then find something else to do)
I'm not involved but I wanted to see what discussion might come of it. I see where the fluent-cassandra guys are coming from but I also agree with your point. I'm new to open source and I personally didn't know people took this stuff as seriously as the fluent-cassandra devs do. I always figured if you contribute back you are one of the few who do things the right way.

When the Datastax guys dumped their code the way they did though, it uppped the drama factor a bit.
Im in Sd also, Mission Valley. Only cable here is Comcast. They must be doing the same crap I think because a lot times the.Hd videos on youtube .wont work unless I wait ten minutes for them to buffer
Ah sorry, I should have said relatively new functionality. Also I should have mentioned that there are different traceroute implementations. I'll update my post.

Edit: updated the post.
My Visit to a Japanese High School (2008)
Given how big an ISP Time Warner is, wouldn't the CDN and/or Google eventually notice the slow responses from their end and start playing a game of cat-and-mouse rotating IP addresses in and out of service as proxies?
Well that and the lives destroyed.
If you want to know about a particular IP allocation, whois will help you out

$ whois 173.194.55.0

I won't include the whole output, but here is the link of the allocation: http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-173-194-0-0-1

Basically, this listed IP block is part of a much larger allocation for Google. I don't know exactly what type of google service is hosted from it, but it isn't a commercial CDN.
Dwarf fortress is difficult for two reasons
1: Unintuitive interface. It takes some time just to learn how to do basic things and find the information you need.
2: Complexity. Once you know every possible command you can give you need to figure out what to do.

It's hard to get into but immensely rewarding and satisfying once you do, with some amazingly detailed epic stories coming to life.
No, the difference is that the Windows version defaults to ICMP, while the Linux one to UDP.
I just want to inform you that GNU make indeed is very good for c projects as it can read the dependency files made by gcc (and clang), so you get very small very readable makefiles, that takes care of tracking the dependencies for you. http://wiki.osdev.org/Makefile
> in this case, the RAII wrapper should provide a member function which can execute the underlying close call early and expose the failure, for users who may be interested in guaranteed reliability.

Indeed; this is a useful technique. However, it means that you now have a close() method which you have to call on every exit path, because if you miss a path, that's a path which could have an exception thrown from a destructor. And that basically means you're not doing RAII anymore.

So yes, RAII is intrinsically incompatible with this kind of reliability.
I think route9's firewalk did this back when I had dial up.
They are youtube CDN servers, for example:

> nslookup o-o---preferred---sn-mv-p5qe---v17---lscache1.c.youtube.com/

> Name:	o-o.preferred.sn-mv-p5qe.v17.lscache1.c.youtube.com

> Address: 206.111.9.12
Should I use a game engine such as Impact for my HTML5 canvas game?
I'm afraid I may limited to the way the game engine is implemented and that I won't have as much freedom as if I was starting from scratch with canvas.
"Winners quit fast, quit often and quit without guilt" - Seth Godin
Noticed this from TWC somewhat recently as well when I realized that I was taking out my phone to watch YouTube videos more frequently (on 3G/4G). Now, I just keep my computers on a VPN as much as possible and there's a number of sites that just feel faster.
Is there any evidence TW is throttling versus these CDN servers you're being routed to simply being slow or overloaded?

I've noticed a change in YouTube buffering on FiOS the past few weeks as well. Other commenters here see it on Comcast. That may point to YouTube leaning more heavily on a CDN that can't handle the traffic (or some hop along the network to that CDN) rather than throttling by any one ISP.
Being able to dump the ISP would require a marketplace of ISPs to choose from. However, in the US, regulatory capture has prevented such a marketplace from forming.
The article fails to mention the existing JSON Schema and JSON Hyper-Schema standards that he is advocating: http://json-schema.org/

Both are currently used by Google's public APIs to auto-generate clients. Ruby/Python clients load the schema docs at runtime and do method_missing magic, Java/.NET clients generate static typed libraries periodically.
rbenv is definitely better than rvm, but if you use the same ruby version between all your projects, a single version of ruby installed through homebrew is a much better way to go.