skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It really doesn't have to be dogma, stuff like this can really help building a habit especially if you use it every day.

Yes, but in modern times, the habit of navigating with arrow keys is a more transferable habit to develop. Assuming we use more than one program in our work.

And almost no programs retain the archaic i/j/k/m navigation scheme -- not surprising, since those are letter keys and most modern programs don't require the operator to switch modes in order to move the cursor -- and why should they? A modern keyboard has dedicated keys for that purpose.

> I read most of your book about sailing (most I think, you're in the Mediterranean,) ...

Thanks -- well, I did have to sail the remaining half distance around the world from there. :)

The above refers to my free world sail book: http://arachnoid.com/sailbook
Why does "sudo -k" still exist, when it has obvious risks and is superseded by "sudo -K".

Why does 'sudo -k' not check to see if a timestamp exists, and avoid creating one if it doesn't yet exist?
Cool advice, I'm gonna try tossing my Model M in the dishwasher this weekend.

Also I totally get your Model M love, I think it'll always be my preferred keyboard. What a great piece of hardware.
I would think that without thrusters that it would be unable to dock with the ISS.

According to http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/005/status.html

SpaceX says one thruster pod is working, and two are "preferred" to deploy solar arrays. Four thruster pods are on the Dragon spacecraft.

"We are working to bring up the other two in order to plan the next series of burns to get to station," a SpaceX spokesperson says.

And at 11:40 EST:

"Thruster pod 3 tank pressure trending positive. Preparing to deploy solar arrays," Musk just tweeted.

At least two thruster pods are needed to deploy the power-generating solar arrays, which stretch 54 feet tip-to-tip.

So it's looking positive that they'll recover from this.
Good managers will not have a fetish for making decisions, but will, instead, ask you questions that reveal the motivation for their concern about a given technical solution, such as, "I've been told that we need to do X, and that Y solution does X, how does your solution handle the X requirement?" Where X could be a business requirement or a need that some other team in the company has.

A good boss will bring his concerns forward and give you the opportunity to address them, and if you tell him this is a better solution for the X issue, then he'll trust you to do it and give you approval.

If it turns out that your solution was worse for X, then when he has to be more careful in the future, he can remind you that X didn't get met last time and that is why he's not sure about this time. You then have to prove it or shape up.

It's all about building trust-- with GOOD bosses.

The problem is, good bosses are maybe %30. To many of them are simply people who were promoted to management because they are ambitious and good at playing politics and in a lot of companies their incompetence (eg: knowing nothing about software despite managing programmers) is seen as an advantage (that was the case at Amazon where my boss had trouble operating excel and his background was in criminal justice.)

Hell, I once worked for an educational software company that higher ex-kindergarten teachers to manage programmers. They knew nothing, but they had been trained that "young ones" (eg us 20-30 year old artists and programmers) were not to be trusted.... we even got scolded once for stepping out of the office to have a conversation! It was a company run like a kindergarten class!

Trying to explain technology in both of these examples to profoundly technology illiterate people was taken as "back talking". What they heard from some cousin (or once, I kid you not "bill gate's investment group might make an investment, so we need to get rid of our linux mail and file server and replace it with windows") .... was always more compelling than what their employees, who actually knew the situation, would tell them.

I think their incompetence fed a need to put their foot down.

In both cases the team collapsed as all the talent walked out the door.
Reducers look interesting! The linked blog post by Rich hickey is an interesting read: http://clojure.com/blog/2012/05/08/reducers-a-library-and-mo...
>ARENT LOGGING INTO THE VPN

Honestly, I have worked remotely at places where very few services required the VPN to function

But if the VPN is actually necessary for work, then that makes sense.
$ git statis
error. Did you mean status? Y/n

You'd get the best of both worlds.
I ended up making my own package (which I stole from sphinx) and including it so I can keep all of my style separate and pick and choose what other stuff I use - like minted for example.

I've found it a bit of a mixed bag though - setting up minted in one of me .el files and some of it's styling in my .sty file. Not sure if I'm really doing it right, but the output looks OK for now and I assume it will be much easier to tweak it in future.
How to Write a Blockbuster Video Game, All Four Scripts of It: Video
If the deck is to be believed, it's not the garbage collector or the heap that's causing the performance loss, it's that APIs and algorithms they enable are allocation-heavy compared to other "faster" languages.

Heap allocations are expensive even in non-GC languages.
The technical boss can be even worse.

There are a hundred technical decisions that need to be made. A non-technical boss who trusts his best experts can farm that out to the entire team. A technical boss will often try to use their own judgement... but there is too much for one person to micromanage, so they end up failing.
I don't do use hjkl out of concerns about optimality, personally. I do it because I find moving my hand back and forth from the home row to the arrow keys is hard on my wrists, and I get tired sooner. I've found that coding is a lot less hard on my hands since I started using the traditional vim way of doing things, but YMMV of course.
That's the right way to explain it Yes.
I can see the point only so far as disabling the keys temporarily in order to force yourself to learn and use some of the more powerful key combinations.

But, I had to deal with hjkl on dumb terminals either without arrows, or with arrows that didn't work. I always hated it. The arrow keys I find very obvious, simple and effective.
Being entertained is not a moral right.

If someone wants to charge you a thousand bucks to watch the movie they've created it is their right to do so.
Choosing a winning color palette
I think the most important aspect in remote working is not only whether the company believes in a result oriented culture or not. What gets ignored, is that a lot of knowledge is embedded in the culture. Like a random conversation in the hallway or how someone reacts to a crisis. What remote workers also miss is the level of energy and the optimism/pessimism that is going around.

Without high fidelity feedback, a remote worker may be totally mislead about certain issues, including his or her own performance. Hence the onus is always on the remote worker to stay in deep contact with her or his peers. And companies that allow remote working should also make this explicit.

Will be interesting to read how 37signals works around these issues.
But as Drew points out in his post, moving by by word (w,b and e) and by character search (f,F,t,T) is much faster the arrow keys or h,j,k,l.

The article isn't about not using h,j,k,l completely but encouraging people to use those other keys for movement.
> But a comment that essentially boils down to "vim is archaic" in a post about vim usage habits is totally ridiculous ...

And entirely topical. Young programmers who read such posts may not realize how many more efficient options are now available. Speaking about vim as though it's an obvious choice in 2013 would be like insisting that everyone code in Fortran in 2013.
BOSTON - Full Time, Onsite Product Manager and Ruby Developer
Riparian Data is a Boston-based startup spun out of SoftArtisans, a 15 year-old software company. In a nutshell, we create friendlier, faster, and cheaper versions of popular enterprise software. We're currently working on Gander, a mobile-friendly mail app for the modern enterprise. We also built Timberwolf, an open-source application for Exchange mail analysis.

We're currently running a METEOR stack on top of Node.js, with straight Ruby for services on the back end. This is all supported by a Mongo database.

At Riparian, we welcome all manner of ideas, beliefs, hobbies, diets, and toaster oven preferences. Most of us work from around 10-6, some of us work from 9-5 or 8-4. We like Agile, though we've been to Niagara. Some of us have our own offices, some of us share offices, some of us work in the open office. There are no hammocks, but there is a nap room. Attending conferences and taking classes is encouraged. Amassing new skills is encouraged. Voicing your opinion is encouraged.

Interested in Meteor, maybe interested in meeting us? Come meet us at the Boston Meteor Meetup: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/13d1d6e832598d38 on Wednesday, April 3.

Questions? Email me: hr at ripariandata.com
Is there any reason you can't ctrl-c out of man pages?
Mobify - Tons of positions!

We're a company based in Vancouver, and we're looking to fill a number of roles. Most important to us is to get a product manager for the Platform team - someone who can lead our team of developers in creating fantastic products, and someone who knows how to successfully execute at making our products successful. We are ramping up on two big projects right now and we are looking for the right person who can help us make sure they are a huge hit.

We're looking for people who are passionate about the mobile web. At Mobify, you can either work on the Platform team working on developer tools in Backbone.js, Coffeescript, Node.js, Django, and more. Or you can work on our Customer Success team, creating amazing mobile, tablet, and responsive builds for big name e-commerce and publishers such as Starbucks, Lululemon, etc.

If you are interested, check out www.mobifycareers.com to learn more!
Because this is an experiment for the company in question, they've been very clear that I'm not allowed to use their name at all. Thus, I can't confirm or deny (I won't spoil it here) ;)
Why Google built the pricey, powerful Chromebook Pixel
Working from home is great
The conditional threading macros are nice. I've been using them from clojure.core.incubator for a while as -?> and -?>>. Anyone know why the name change?
When Art is versioned
We don't deal with flash. We curse the foolish website developer and route its domain to /dev/null. Using VIM.
The clock is ticking for Yahoo telecommuters to buy pants
Accelerate or Die Hard
I never found the keymap cheat sheets useful. It tells me what happens if I press a certain key, but what I need is the reverse. Tell we what key to press if I want X to happen.

When using a cheat sheet like that I waste a lot of time scouring the image looking for text relating to the type of operation I want. I'd rather have a list of options grouped by operation type.
One reason is slavery. You don't have as much incentive to industrialize when labor is dirt-cheap.
I don't think it did. What's the name of the guy who created django? I know the only reason I know of DHH and not django-guy is that DHH spent years dishonestly promoting rails/trashing java.
First of all, in Firefox (and I believe in Chrome too) there is a distinction between "addons" (such as adblock plus) and "plugins" (such as flash). The main difference being that plugins are DLLs containing native code, and thus have all the privileges the browser has. In comparison, addons are mostly JavaScript, and run inside the browser with somewhat limited access to the rest of the system.
Sure. And don't get me wrong--I use them! (Though I will admit that also use that touchy-pointy thing that's bolted on below my spacebar for getting around too, which I never did on Windows or Linux.) But when I need to move character-by-character, for me, it makes way more logical sense to use the things with the left, right, up, and down marks on them because that's what they're there for. hjkl doesn't make sense to me, so I don't use it.

(Something like HJUK--or even just WASD--would make more sense to me, but I don't care enough to start remapping all the live-long day.)
DHH is leaning toward looking obsessed with this, at this point. But, I think Yahoo, no matter the reason for original attempt has received so much negative press that this will in the long run end up costing them.
It's not a given that GC is slower than manual memory management. See, for example, this work:

http://people.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/gcvsmalloc.pdf

In a copy collector the GC time is proportional to the amount of live memory -- garbage is free. In FP-style programs (lots of short-lived allocations) GC can be essentially free.

The other main source of slowdown is to do with boxing and type checks. Accessing all data in a naive implementation of a dynamically typed language involves at least one type check and typically one pointer indirection to unbox the data. This can kill performance relative to the unboxed and unchecked equivalent. Consider, e.g., floating point operations -- they run in 1 cycle. If you add type check (2-3 cycles perhaps) and pointer indirection (10 cycles if it's in the cache) you can see how massive slowdowns easily arise.

Modern JS VMs will remove most of this cost. I doubt Python and Ruby do.

Basically, I would say it really depends on the interactions between the program and the language implementation.
How much does it matter if you know my username? As long as you don't know my password right?
I would be interested in this if it weren't for the foul language. This speaks volumes about the author's attitude.

If you're annoyed with something, have they even tried bringing it up with Heroku's support team? If so, have they tried shipping this tool that doesn't make the maintainer look like an arrogant troglodite?
You can tongue punch my fart box, Heroku fucking console!
Fair point, yeah it's internal with them, I hadn't thought of that.

Put it this way - they've bought Nuke three times, and they made it originally!
SEEKING WORK - Remote or Based in England - Cambridge/Norfolk/Suffolk.

Skills:

* Wordpress
* Javascript frameworks canjs/backbone/general MVC
* HTML 5/CSS 3
* PHP full stack development but I don't have a speciality in a framework.
* .NET C# 3.0 MVC

Front end development preferred.

Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/heathnewmedia
Email: cjheath@gmail.com
London, UK - Smarkets

Smarkets is disrupting the global betting industry by offering a modern betting exchange with significantly lower transaction fees than the competition. We're a well-funded company with a small, agile development team.

Our office near Old Street in London is shared with other exciting startups and has a pool table, foosball table, and fully stocked fridge.

We're heavily driven by user-focused design and a focus on technology and engineering as a first class discipline.

We write our software in Python and Erlang, and rely heavily on asynchronous programming techniques and REST. We build on a modern, open-source software stack which includes Linux, Vagrant, Flask, Eventlet, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, Graphite, Chef, and Git.

We make extensive use of version control, configuration management, and automated testing, which lets us deploy code to production several times a day.

https://smarkets.com/about/jobs/engineering
The other stuff you mentioned at least has upsides. Moving your hand over to the arrow keys does nothing that hjkl doesn't, and it's slower. There is literally no upside.
Shameless self plug:

If you're interested in keeping up with clojure news,
I recently started a clojure newsletter where we cover this sort of thing: http://defnewsletter.com
I also learned to type with my index fingers on F and J (I think it's quite standard, given the typing classes I took and the little nibs on my keyboard), and I've always been fine with HJKL. What's the problem you have with it, exactly? It sounds like you're saying you'd prefer jkl;, but I don't think that would be better; moving to the left seems perhaps least common to me.
In what way is your message to him helpful?
For moving directly vertical:

:nnoremap k gk

:nnoremap j gj

These move up/down one character, even if it is the same line wrapped over. Really beneficial for things like LaTeX editing.
Dallas TX, Part Time, Art Director. CardDrop.com

Geez I do not have a fancy description of what we are looking for but if you live around Dallas area, make web/mobile apps look beautiful and meaningful, and have been aching to work for an early stage startup, give us a shout (email in profile) and will love to talk to you about our ambitious projects @carddrop.
I'm also on Fios and have 75 down package I just got it. It was so bad I couldn't even watch youtube videos 720 or 1080. Pausing them did nothing. I installed a script called YousableTubeFix for Chrome and now I download at 60-70. I don't know what the problem was but having 75 down and not being able to watch a video was the most frustrating thing in the world. Finally did some research and someone with fios recommended this.
Ask HN: Fair compensation for billable person?
Trying to arrive at a fair comp for someone at a consulting firm, based on their billable work.

Simple is better than complicated so I'm thinking the 'fair' equation is:

$ Billable work +
20% (benefits, etc..)
20% (administrative support, sales)
20% (firm profit)

Salary * 1.6 = Billable charges.
So someone who bills out $240k yr. - fair salary is $150k.

Please share examples from the real world.. thanks,
Has Lockeed Martin Solved the Energy Problem?
That message is generated by the __repr__() method, so it could get inadvertently triggered if it just exited automatically.
They always cost money. I've been on a couple of boards and it is always advised that board members carry personal insurance against it as well. These suits often name board members and officers personally, in addition to the company. So whether or not it would prevail the incentive is to not have them start.
Yes, sorry for not being clearer. I'm basing the "there hasn't been a release since 2011" comment off of the Rubinius homepage, where the last numbered release is 1.2.4.

The Rubinius 2.0 preview release came out in June 2011: http://rubini.us/2011/06/07/inside-rubinius-20-preview/
Mobify - Tons of positions!

We're a company based in Vancouver, and we're looking to fill a number of roles. Most important to us is to get a product manager for the Platform team - someone who can lead our team of developers in creating fantastic products, and someone who knows how to successfully execute at making our products successful. We are ramping up on two big projects right now and we are looking for the right person who can help us make sure they are a huge hit.

We're looking for people who are passionate about the mobile web. At Mobify, you can either work on the Platform team working on developer tools in for optimizing performance of responsive sites, creating javascript libraries to make creating these sites easier/faster, and GUI tools on top of these products. We do a lot of Backbone.js, Coffeescript, Node.js, Django, and more. Or you can work on our Customer Success team, creating amazing mobile, tablet, and responsive builds for big name e-commerce and publishers such as Starbucks, Lululemon, etc.

If you are interested, check out www.mobifycareers.com to learn more!
California’s Payroll Project Debacle: Another $50 Million Up in Smoke
Stop attacking a strawman! Nobody's arguing that remote workers are the one stumbling block between Yahoo and mountains of glory.

There's a bigger issue here than just the ability to work from home. It's about freedom, not taking any steps backwards and globalization.

An employer should empower its employees to do the best work they can. Taking away certain freedoms will hinder this.

Remote working is a pretty solvable problem. What's it say that a technology company refuses to take this on? That they've given up and retreated from it? Does this have bigger implications on the industry at large? What about other industries?

Yahoo! has several offices. If you are working with someone in a different office, what does it matter to you if they are in their office or a coffee shop or their bedroom? What if they are in a different timezone? Is Yahoo going to increase their travel budget to get the benefits of collocating? Would stockholders like this?
I use Java in the browser. The way you use your computer is not the same other people may use theirs.

We have a web based VPN tool that has to use Java.
There's a whole continuum of stuff between Python/Ruby/JS and C, like Go, OCaml, and Rust. There's still a lot of refinement that could be done, though.
s/callous/callus/ # damn brain-fart

Things like this really make me wish I could edit HN posts without a time limit.
According to my Civ 5 game they could.
It doesn't imply that. But I think the idea that programming language research always entails esoteric new, from scatch, languages with no tools is even more depressing. There has been a lot of research over thr last 5 decades and every year more of that research gets put to use. It wasn't that long ago that a cross platform language that gets dynamically compiled to native code and supports efficient garbage collection would be considered science fiction.

Progress is ongongoing but it's evolutionary not revolutionary - and that is a good thing.
Cognitive Electronics (http://www.cognitive-electronics.com), looking for full time employees at our office in downtown Boston (near South Station).

If you like building stuff and want to be part of a small team that is poised to shake up the way that real time data analytics happens, come and join us!

We are looking to fill a number of roles but in particular we are looking for a skilled compiler person to develop customized backends for LLVM and GCC that will run on our real time data appliance.

jobs -at- cognitive-electronics -dot- com
I remember the first time I heard the word "hackathon" was in the context of OpenBSD. The folks that worked on that were geographically distributed throughout the world, and approximately once per year they'd meet in a hotel in Canada and have their one chance to work collaboratively in person instead of over email. It sounded cool.

I don't remember when I first heard the Bay Area usage of the word "hackathon", but it sounded decidedly less cool.
Web pages suck
Ask HN: Where should I look for business insurance?
There are some good sites for comparing health insurance and auto insurance plans for consumers. Are there any good comparison sites (or just good providers) for small business insurance? (Not health insurance, just general insurance for equipment and lawsuits and whatnot.) Thanks!
How to drive traffic to your portfolio (and maybe get a dribbble invite too)
Someone actually posting notes with slides! It's a miracle!
using '/' (search) comes to mind. Drew also did an episode cover some more ideas and touches on relative number moving. http://vimcasts.org/episodes/long-range-line-duplication/
Perhaps you'd care to share some of them and their advantages with the younger and older coders who've never come across them?

Otherwise - in a slightly less nice way than last time - get lost.
I was hoping someone would trash the idea of hjkl, which I personally don't like. So first I was disappointed to read yet again about not using the arrows.

Then when I read the rest of the post, it definitely makes sense. I do use w, b quite frequently, and I don't use f, but I've found the vim-seek[1] plugin recently, and it seems to make more sense to use. It matches two rather than one character, which makes it much more precise.

I think the bottom line is to move around to the right place and that going one character at a time is less efficient. Not so much whether this movement is via hjkl or the arrow keys.

[1]https://github.com/goldfeld/vim-seek