skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think another reason of "overdocumenting" code is that you are working on something that has never been done before so you make extra sure that what you did makes sense by writing it out. I think that I am good at reading code but I still comment the how or what in some edge cases where the thing at hand is new to myself and/or to most of the people on the team.
Just about everything Zynga makes is a copy that overtakes the original.
He should have been fired. Work from home culture is not an excuse to screw off. It is an empowerment to do your best work in the location that best inspires that.

Often that isn't work. The problem here sounds managerial to me - that perhaps Yahoo's management can't tell good work from bad work so they fall back on vanity metrics like "butt time in seat."
The whole point is the why. Yes, they can occasionally get out of sync with the code, but that should get caught in code reviews. In 2 years you'll go back to look at the code and wonder why in the hell you're stripping out the 3rd byte of that array... and only the why will tell you. The code can tell you WHAT it is doing, but you have to infer why, unless there's a comment.
I don't know anything about the situation Yahoo, but it's quite possible that a small number of people exploiting a perk can make the other people feel resentment.
From Wiki

Having worked from home during the end of her pregnancy and giving birth to a boy, Marissa Mayer returned to work at Yahoo Headquarters where she has built a nursery next to her office suite. Shortly thereafter, she drew ire for issuing the ban on telecommuting
Get Your Hack on at TechStars
I see a lot of comments like this about telecommuting, where it's implied that telecommuting was the problem, when it may have just been a coincidence.

That said, maybe telecommuting was the problem here. But in any case, it bears some thinking about. There must be some people whose behavior would be better if they had to come into the office. Conversely, there must be some people who behave better if they get to work remotely. Not sure which category your guy falls into, but like you say, maybe people preferred him at a distance.
Yes but Microsoft activation can make than damn hard if they want to.
Free Courses From Great Universities
I'm pretty sure colors cannot be protected by copyright.
My 2 years old desktop CPU overclocked at 5GHz is faster than anything on the market, last two CPU generations can not reach such performance.

That's a fairly extreme overclock! I imagine you must be able to get some impressive results from a modern i7 with the right cooling though?

I remember when overclocking was a thing that anybody into PC gaming did for economical reasons, these days it hardly seems worth the effort of fiddling around in the bios menu.
Ask HN: Should I try to create something that already've been created?
Once in a while, I have good ideas. Normally, they arise from problems I encounter or from things that bother me.

Then, when I get these ideas, I feel impelled to create: I start doing researches on what technologies I'd have to use, which things I'd have to know to be able to start developing... In other words, what will be needed to turn that idea into reality.

...and then, I end up stumbling into a product that has exactly the same functions I had in mind; or, into a solution that pretty much suffices all my needs. And, then, I lose the will to develop my idea.

So, I'd like to know what are your thoughts about this. Should I avoid creating a product that is similar to something that already exists? Should I go ahead and develop it anyway, because my solution could end up being better than the existing?
Can that work in one direction? I have dozens of tabs open on my desktops, and I don't want to punish my phone with that.
Colorado Will Launch A $150M Venture Fund To Invest In Local Tech Startups
Show HN: CropUp, Sell your _______ on _______
Touche. :)
This is welcome news. At least they are listening to people these days.
There are any number of stimuli that could trigger thoughts about cheese. The smell of food, being hungry, a colour, another thought about a time in which you were hungry, something round, something wedge shaped....

The fact that humans are so bad at picking random numbers and so often pick 7 does not seem so unusual if we are based on patterns. Actually, that is the sort of emergent phenomenon that seems rather obvious to me.
Sorry, I was mistaken--the sign column is placed between the fold column and the line numbers.
How Startups Can Minimize Their Chance of Failure
There was a very expensive stock-trade mistake when someone issued a sell order, typing 'b' instead of 'm' for 'million'. Market dropped a significant fraction in seconds.
What are the penalties for a false DMCA claim?
let me guess, the next one you're going to report is microsoft, or google?
Deploying PHP Apps to Heroku
I posted this above, but my thought is that it should not be a limitation of the technology that determines what is an isn't usable. We should give developers the freedom to make their own choices regarding UX.

I find the anchor tag a limitation, whereas an href attribute allows for much more freedom without resorting to using Javascript. Well, in theory; in practice you would need a shim for older browsers.
Also, do they need a whole paper to say that the Worker ID is the same userid used in different parts of Amazon?
This combined with the stunner shades-of-the-month club will make me the coolest sysadmin ever.
I have been using windows 8 on my MacBook and frankly, I hate the work flow. I can, however, see how a tablet form factor would suit the os nicely. For most things I use windows for(visual studio, ssms, file manipulation and some occasional web dev) the context switch DRIVES ME BANANAS! I often start new processes with cmd + r and it seems win 8 doesn't like my timing because half the time I get a run dialog and the other half I get the metro screen of reduced productivity.

Some other complaints about win 8- the metro apps all seem to take FOREVER to launch. You get this giant c64esque splash screen for 10-15 seconds. Feels confining to me. The task switching needs improvement. Wish I could see a screen of all my running apps and click the one I need. Anyone that can provide advice would be owed a beer.
I just bought a Lumia 620 and the tiles system is just that good. I do miss the possibility of Android (widgets and number of apps) but I really really dig where Microsoft is going lately. Metro looks great, their last products (Bing, Office, Internet Explorer, Surface...) do too. I'm waiting for their new Xbox announcement but I really feel like they're getting back into the game.

I'll still be a bit skeptical on the Windows 8 until I try it myself. But as we always say, better skip a version every two windows.

EDIT: I almost forgot what they did with the kinnect those past years.
I think the issue until a couple of years ago is that compute densities weren't there, and broadband wasn't pervasive.

Now you can deliver a decent desktop through a VMWare VM-centric solution or a Citrix/Microsoft Server computer solution.

The use cases work out like this: Stationary workers get PCs reimaged with a locked down OS...PCs get replaced by thin clients over time; Mobile workers either get laptops with remote access clients or tablets. The mobile folks love it, because they aren't tied down to some horrific work-issued laptop.

The big remaining problem is Microsoft licensing. Unless you have an EA, the licensing is both obtuse and expensive. Lots of big enterprises are rolling out thousands of VDI desktops -- 2011/2012 was the point where the financial case started to make sense.
I did this a while back, and everything I tried was a series of horrible hacks to get it sorted. With Windows whilst it maintains a lock on the process so you can't do anything nice like replace it, but you can actually just rename it to 'someapplication.old' then deal with it on relaunch. Made me miss Sparkle very much.
Inspecting Rails 4 using Ruby 2.0
I think it's actually worse than that: people who write tests after code just write their tests to "verify" that the code is doing what the code is doing.

So, the code provides a list of numbers 1, 2, 5. Non-TDD would code a test that verifies the list is indeed 1, 2, 5.

However, the business wanted the list in reverse order: 5, 2, 1. TDD would force the developer to state this up-front. A non-TDD developer is more reluctant to change the code, since "it passes the test!"

I've done this, although I like to think I'm quite happy to rewrite something if it's not good enough (or just wrong).
Some day I'm going to write a blog post about this, but I think comments are like commentary on a chess game. Sure, I can read Nf6, but I want to know so much more. Like chess, computer code leaves a lot unsaid. Perhaps I did it this way for performance implications, or an edge case off in some other file, or to work around a bug in a 3rd-party library, or for the sake of pattern x, or . . .

As a mediocre chess player, I can read the notation for two chess games and appreciate a lot, but I doubt I could tell the difference between a game played by players rated 1800 and one by 2400s. Programming seems the same way: you write comments so that other engineers don't have to be 2400s to understand the hidden implications.
Microsoft is full of talented developers, why have they not added all those things that make people switch to a UNIX system yet?
Well, that's an overarching why. But why you're doing this one specific thing on this line, which might look wrong or overly complex or just bizarre... you need to comment those.

// foo library throws an extra two bytes at the front of the
// array, even though that isn't up to spec, so we have to
// strip them out here.
I speculate to what extent this is a deliberate feature.

You are forced to keep proprietary resources (data, code, etc.) in "the cloud". Which is precisely what many businesses want. They don't want information floating around on individual machines, potentially un-backed-up and inaccessible to the business.

Replacing the occasional machine with a bad SSD is a minor inconvenience, by comparison.

See it from the business's perspective, not the individual's.

P.S. Yes, there is a contrary fear of relying on a third party for storage and security (and continued accessibility). But... Google doesn't have that concern WRT deploying this to their own workforce. And... giving it too much consideration doesn't sell their own services (Google Apps, Drive, etc.). And I still don't think Google really wants to be in the hardware business as a primary product and revenue stream.

Oh, and... have your own "cloud", to whatever degree. Google can sell that, too. (It has already, to various agencies of the U.S. Federal government.)
The only thing that is not completely generic imo is the color scheme FlatUI picked, which is similar to the scheme on LayerVault. But it's not exactly the same (I checked, everything is quite close though). Don't think something like that warrants an action like this at all.
Solving world hunger & How to use NSError in my iPhone App?
I am gonna go against the grain here and agree with Marissa. A situation where you have a couple of people that are remote (while everyone else is in the office) creates all kinds of issues.

For instance, at a meeting 20 people have to wait for that one guy to get on the phone. Or now you have to pass the Klingon mic around so that the remote worker would hear properly. And god help you, if the remote folks are in a different time zone - now 90% of the people in the office get inconvenienced because someone is 3 hours ahead of us.

We have this very situation at work and it's very unhealthy and annoying. I've come to conclusion that on large teams it's either everyone is remote or no one is.

Hanselman (http://www.hanselman.com) has a good series on working remotely and making it work - he outlines the problems and how to solve them. At least he is trying - other folks simply do not.
Lightweight and straightforward - I like it. Looks great on my iphone, but there seems to be a bug where whenever I check off an item, it moves the next item to the top and checks it as well.
brew install qrencode

http://fukuchi.org/works/qrencode/index.html.en
I almost fully agree with you, however there are also very important "micro comment" cases. IME this comes when implementing algorithms from papers. For example, when looking at some formula in a paper, and looking at a python implementation of it that uses numpy, there may not be an obvious 1:1 mapping. Numpy has some very powerful operations, so commenting each line with how that statement maps back to the algorithm makes revisiting or others' visits much easier to comprehend.

Another case is the "reminder note"... e.g. "This function also sets up the next step..." (I know, side effects and whatnot, but sometimes you're stuck with other people's libraries).
It's basically this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5331891 which is unconstructive.
I think this overuse of italics is almost as annoying as the post with every other word bold from a few days ago.
Honestly, an article a day about "hallelujah, Windows is back"—Good job on the covert social marketing Microsoft.
In a system that can learn to recognize new patterns, learn to recognize new patterns of patterns, and can associate new patterns with already known patterns, how is memory unexplained?
Hey! http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/32267022219/flat-interface...

"We certainly didn’t invent the flat style"

whaaat? why you attack designmodo in this case????
Yes, I stopped obeying the speed limit, but at what point did someone contact me and tell me I'll be fined if I don't stop obeying the speed limit? Surely it would only take a few weeks at the most to actually make me obey the speed limit once I were threatened with a huge fine.

Do you think that makes sense?
The safety of TDD comes from having a test suite that you trust. Given that suite, you can safely refactor the code. If you can refactor safely, you can improve the design safely. If you can improve the design, you can stop the inevitable slowdown that comes from making a mess.

What is the risk of _not_ doing TDD? The risk is that slowdown. We've all experienced it. What is the cost of TDD? You'd like to say that it takes time; but since the risk is a slowdown, the net is positive no matter how you look at it.

That's the irony of all these complaints. They assume, and sometimes they simply state, that TDD slows you down. And yet, the primary effect of TDD is to speed you up, and speed you up a lot.

Some folks suggest that it's a short-term slowdown for a long-term speedup. But in my experience the short-term is measured in minutes. Yes, it might take you a few extra minutes to write that test first; but by the end of the day you've refactored and cleaned the code so much that you've gone much faster _that day_ than you would have without TDD.
Deming is both prevalent and respected. He acheived demi-god status in Japan, there are several channels of business shows dedicated to his work, and everyone, but everyone who writes a business book says the same as you...

He is like a hermit buying drinks at the bar while people talk:

- it is so sad that hermit is tucked away in his cave,

- ignored by everyone,

- no ice in mine thank you W.E.,

- Shame really
> "For academic researchers: worker IDs may have to be treated as personally identifiable information. For example, publishing worker IDs online in public data sets may be a violation of worker privacy, and counter to the requirements of the researcher’s institutional review board."

This is why we created http://SocialSci.com for use by academic researchers: We have better control over PII outside the Amazon ecosystem, and access to more data we can take our own steps to protect or de-identify, enabling higher quality data collection.

In general academic research done on Mechanical Turk has a ton of issues, from response quality to verifiability of responses. Frankly people have no incentive to remain authentic across surveys, and we've seen cases of people just taking on identities or just faking answers, which isn't reliably detectable. The only way we've been able to overcome this is by tracking users' response consistency over time, and keeping them anonymous in the process. It's proved to be a much more reliable method, and at this point based on our experience we can't recommend MTurk for valid academic research.
Sublime Text Git Gutter (the original)
"When" too. Nice to know whether the weirdness was added last week or last decade. I've left old obtuse comments in place just as proof that the function, as written, was there for the last 14 years (which sometimes explained a lot).
Sweet! Subjectively, the page does load faster. I'm now loading Facebook over SPDY over IPv6 and feeling a bit futuristic :)
Eh, they're just logos. They're pretty different.

Ignoring the colour (red on white VS white on blue) and the distressing of the Debian logo vs the cleanness of the designmodo logo there's the opening of the spiral - Debian curve starts at 6 o clock, while designmodo starts at 4:30 or 5 o clock. And the inside of the Debian loop goes further.
Takedown notice was also (briefly) in that site too http://imgur.com/a/u0ez8
I've been using something roughly the same as this for a few months. Surprisingly handy, especially since you can use it to send URLs to just about any device.
I find this comment very interesting, because the first thing I did when moving to a mac was ditch terminal.app for iTerm2. Coming from putty, terminal.app was terrible to try and use.

Arcane commands to move between tabs/windows, command keys going to the window and not the terminal (such as pageup, pagedown, home, end), limited configurability and a middle button paste in an ecosystem without middle buttons... all kept me from seeing terminal.app as more than just something to be immediately replaced.

Your experience is obviously different than mine, but I ditched terminal.app as soon as I learned about iTerm2.
Github discussion - https://github.com/github/dmca/commit/735e17614cca63102b8414...
I came here to post that I felt there must be some legal reason for the change. I don't remember MS being this responsive to press about their licensing.
It's not about the flat UI trend. If you look at Layervault, their design is really unique and top notch. Flat UI-framework is heavily inspired by Layervault's design. There's no doubt about it. Same roundings, paddings, pastel color scheme, etc. They look visually extremely similar.

LayerVault is obviously pissed that a design similar to their unique design will be used by amateur Bootstrappers all over the web.
Yes. Create your solution, if it's better than what exists. But if the existing solution is mature, yours must not only have better ideas, but it must also be mature and functional if you hope for others to use it. To create a product, not just an experiment, takes complete commitment. But almost every product you can think of is a better version of something that already existed, or a version better suited to a particular use.
From the title, I really wanted to read this article, please could you link it. cheers
Are you serious?

I wrote an x86 NT utility back in 1996 on NT4 (with no service packs). It still executes and works perfectly on an x64 Windows 8 machine.

That's a mere 17 years ago.

There are two APIs now. The old one isn't going away either.
Nice. I've built a web app that pushes a mobile provisioning profile to iOS devices with your wifi ssid & password - lets people easily jump on your wifi

Works with Redlaser only as most QR code readers open web links in a viewport instead of pushing out to safari.

http://www.getonmywifi.com
Nope, I think this is just a legal compliance issue.
These were people who had negotiated full time work at home for various reasons (probably as a condition of employment). They aren't really exploiting a perk.

Further I would never lead based upon reducing resentment -- I remember one workplace where a non-contributor became infuriated that technical discussions happened in group email, demanding that HR step in and stop it. They resented that the people who knew the most had the floor the longest, and demanded that the process happen in a roundtable meeting room format where everyone can show that they were a part of it.
"And yet, he was getting his work done on those days off, so no one fired him."

He may very well have been a poor worker, but it strikes me as odd how superficial our idea of a good worker is. Productivity being equal (at home or work), what does it matter if he seems to be having it easy? The illusion of looking busy still carries a lot of weight apparently.
> Just because I also use iOS and OS X doesn't make me blind

No, but dismissing games because they're multiplatform does. Just because you have open source friends, doesn't mean you're not racist.

(Maybe you meant that you'd play them on your Mac and if they were designed for Android, then you're not interested because good touch controls rarely translate to good mouse controls. That's perfectly reasonable: The lead platform is usually the best place to play and not all developers put the effort into making good ports. But if you actually cared, you would have asked if these games have good mouse controls instead of being dismissive.)
You got tired of manually managing CFLAGS, so you moved to... Gentoo? Home of "hope you didn't want to view a GIF in Firefox, because you forgot to build it with that USE flag"?
There really should be more penalties for this.
I worked on the Cluster project as a software developer for many years, at the University of Sussex in Brighton. My first job. And it blew up. Great first job. I was watching live with hundreds of engineers and scientists at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. There was silence. All we could hear were birds singing, coming over the satellite link. Quite an experience. Amazingly, the Cluster project got up and running with replacement hardware a few years later, and I was back on the job.
Anyone got a clone of flat-ui?
And then I plug it into my 24" monitor and put the laptop on a stand. Bzzzt. Mind fuck. Motor cortex confused. "fluid" operations when the laptop was on my lap suddenly difficult, even painful with my deltoid injury. The keyboard is under my hands, the laptop screen in fact too far to touch without doing sit-ups.

Windows 8 is a broken frankenstein. It fundamentally does not work for anything other than a laptop-on-your-lap. The rest of us are impeded, annoyed or even physically injured by it.

Apple nailed it. Here's your tablet OS. Here's your laptop/desktop OS. Result: my house now has more Apple devices than all the Windows devices I've ever owned.
Original Version of Apple's "Think Different" Ad Campaign