skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a developer, you either work or you communicate. Try multitasking and your productivity drops. This is not an opinion, but a hard truth that our minds are not meant for multitasking.

Secondly, if someone interrupts you during a highly focused session of coding, there is no way you would reach same session immediately after interruption.

Think of it as Inturruptability Quotient for every task. It can be roughly defined as ratio of time required to reach same state as before to the time required to finish the job.
There are some tasks like writing documentation or editing a proposal, where you can reach similar state of mind as you were before interruption fairly quickly.

However for tasks like programming, designing a db or simply thinking abut a hard problem can take even hours to reach the same level. Inturruptability Quotient is sufficiently high here, maybe more than 1 sometimes. Do you even realize how much grave damage it does to productivity.
Why is there only one Elon Musk?
Browser wars here to stay - who will win?
Phusion Passenger is an application server that supports Python (WSGI) and Ruby (Rack). It does not wrap around Nginx and Apache, it integrates into Nginx and Apache. From a user's point of view, it behaves like an Apache/Nginx module, i.e.:

1. You configure it through the web server.

2. Everything you need is started along with the web server, and shut down along with the web server. You don't need to start any external components and hook them into the web server. Compared to many other alternatives, this reduces the amount of moving parts and makes administration easier.

Technically, it runs a lot of stuff outside the web server's address space for stability reasons. All your actual apps do not run inside the web server, but in their own processes. It uses a lot of Unix technologies under the hood to make things stable and robust, though it hides all that from the user. The philosophy is that software should Just Work(tm) and that everything should be as easy as possible for the user, even if that means Phusion Passenger's own authors have to write tons of code to make it so.

Here are some of the things it does for your web app:

- It manages your processes: starts them when needed, shuts them down when not needed, restarts them when any crashed. This way you don't have to setup process supervision systems like Monit, God, Daemontools, etc for your apps.

- It manages your sockets in a smart way. It buffers requests and responses in order to protect you from slow clients and other network issues.

- It provides easy security by running your apps as the right user, so that you don't have to setup su/sudo scripts.

- It manages your resources. It limits the number of processes to prevent your system from running out of memory. It can automatically adjust the number of processes based on traffic, so that an app is only active when it's actually being used.
Agreed that copycatting and lame ideas are to be discouraged, but the author makes one fatal error in my mind: consumers and venture capitalists have the benefit of "portfolio" thinking. Entrepreneurs have all their eggs in one basket, and a finite amount of time to make things happen. So while being totally zany might indeed be good for the whole, I can pretty much guarantee that it will be terrible for 99% of the entrepreneurs.
How to fix the e-reading ecosystem
Programmatically Create & Title Tabs Within The Mac OS X Terminal.app
There is no transition required. When send an amount of bitcoins to another address you specify how much of a transaction fee you are willing to pay to the miner who solves the block of transactions your transaction will be included in. Any given miner can prefer to solve transaction blocks with higher fees. Eventually it will get to the point that if you don't include a transaction fee your transaction will just be ignored and not included in the block chain. At the moment it will probably be included anyway because of the inherent reward for creating a valid transaction block.
Of course. Not my point though.

midnightsine is pulling his numbers from limit orders posted on MTGox. I'm saying that's not an accurate measure of what it would take to send Bitcoin to 0.
Something like a Lisp macro but including user (i.e. developer) interaction?

On seconds thoughts - that sounds a bit too much like a Visual Studio wizard/template.
Yes, but what happens to apps which depend on this piece of code? Suddenly the signatures change and you affect everyone with a change which should be completely transparent for them.
Well, I'd say that calling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- along with a major recession to rival that of the Great Depression -- within a 6 month time window was a pretty good prediction. The other predictions that I can recall were related to that: the collapse of consumer credit availability, investment money being driven to treasurys despite the US predicament, problems with municipal bonds. He also warned about PIIGS pretty early, and that the measures that were being taken would only result in kicking the can while increasing the pain. But perhaps that's more of a stopped clock kind of prediction.

As I said, I haven't followed him much lately, and he admits that he gets an F in terms of predictions for 2012: http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=215356

Regarding the freshness of his views: his post was written to his current audience (he runs a forum for investors). I don't think he had any idea this would end up on HN, if he even knows what HN is!
Lots of NYTimes articles on HN lately. While I think most of the topics are worthy of the front page, it really sucks when you hit their "10 articles a month" pay wall. Wish posters would look for alternative, free versions of some of these stories (I'm aware that might not always be possible).
The problem I see is that sometimes the person who interviews you is not going to be your direct boss. Meaning the interviewer is irrelevant. If you are sure this is your direct boss I believe asking these questions is valid.
"glibertarian" and implying immaturity are a good start, but you missed references to roads and Somalia if you want to hit all the anti-libertarian straw men.
>You need to have multiple (powerful) machines for this

Oh really? For simple http 'hello world' comparision (where you are interested in relative numbers, not absolute ones) bechmark?

All you need is one old and slow laptop (with test contenders) and one modern and mighty (with test script). The only thing you have to be sure about is the test script can generate more load than test contenders can handle. Even if the old laptop isn't slow enough you can just add some predictable and stable load to cpu/disks/network/whatever is a bottleneck for them - you may use tools that are available for that or even quick & dirty hacks like one-liner 'while(1) {do some math}' that effectively make your 2-cores CPU 1-core while running with high system priority.
Lee Kun-hee: Samsung, CEO
I completely glossed over that part, thanks for pointing it out.

I don't think he's completely wrong in his assertion. My feeling is that he is aiming that sentence at developers who have a tendency to over-think. I've seen developers (including myself) sit and think and research and think and research and not really do anything.

In those situations, just putting your fingers on the keyboard and writing anything will be an improvement.
Writerrific - a HTML5 webapp that allows you to write Markdown anywhere
Should be pretty obvious... they have hellowallet references in the page source.
Why don't you just post the link to Go 1.1 beta 1 vs Java/JVM rather than speculating?

http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te...
Gentoo Linux to the rescue.
Decreasing phone brightness doesn't save that much battery power
Can you give an example of any 'true "real-time"' projects implementing any aspect of HTTP? I think this ship has sailed.
Thanks for all the hard work - glad to see that Windows support is almost ready. I'll give that a try.
As mentioned in a comment on the article, I think the standardized testing is the real issue here. Students are being taught to memorize for the test. They're not actually learning though.
I see them in print newspapers and magazines to provide more information or sources.
Salesforce.com and Rackspace gear up for mobile developers
Also, they are hotlinking to some images you are hosting.

You can have fun with this by changing the image to something "not ideal".
Linus Torvalds has a Chromebook Pixel and he has written a few posts about it and running Linux on it. Here is the latest post atm and perhaps the summary: https://plus.google.com/u/0/102150693225130002912/posts/AVDr...
I've always had a kind of feeling that there is an upper bound on the rate at which a human can articulate an (original) idea/program/function in explicit enough terms for a computer to then run it.

Even to do this in the first place will always require a bare minimum understanding of the language of logic; basic control flow statements, variables and so on.

This is why I feel things like Bret Victor's idea of the 'MathKiller' (which as I understand the idea, is his general term for a hypothetical universally-intuitive computing environment which can model anything) are goals which we can only ever approach asymptotically - there will always be some uncharted waters where the only option available to those who want to explore further is simply to straight up write some code.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that I feel improving the sophistication of the programming languages we use or changing the core paradigms upon which they are based will not help the situation; improving the sophistication of the tools we use to write them with will.
Am I the only one who sees no clothes on this article?

I mean, it seems that the person who wrote it spends a lot of time thinking about programming and much less time programming; that's where he ends up with meta-ideas that are interesting but also mostly wrong.

Languages are substantially different. You don't (and can't) understand every concept under the hood to drive the thing. You can't add and substract features, they're interdependent.
We are sentenced to permanent cognitive stretching
The ‘MacGyvers’” of the Business World
You get a very clean starting point, allowing you to note the exact software a server is dependant on. It's more secure to only have the bare minimum software installed.
The u64q link you posted is still using Go 1.0.3, you can see some 1.1 beta 1 results here: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te...
I won't miss it. Last time my wife and I moved, we simply declined to transfer our cable subscription to our new address. TV over the internet is an idea whose time has come, there's no stopping it now. The big TV companies will have to choose whether to adapt or die. They will fight it tooth-and-nail because it costs them money, but they will adapt.
I wouldn't peg Denninger as a libertarian. He supports the federal reserve and is fine with fiat currency. I would consider him more a monetarist than libertarian/Austrian (in fact, he specifically disavows the Austrian view of money). He's a blowhard that thinks he literally knows everything. I stopped following him when I challenged his understanding of the history of fiat currency and he promptly banned me from his forums. He does not tolerate anyone questioning him.

EDIT: As a side note, it's kinda funny to watch how touchy he is about the Tea Party concept. He gets angry and claims that he first came up with the idea. He resents Santelli for being the one to popularize the movement on CNBC. Denninger doesn't seem to get the idea that people have been using the tea party term to fight political waste since the original tea party itself. Yet he persists and occasionally (when I still followed him) fires off blog posts essentially saying "but I was first!!"
The price is relevant to merchants though. It's much more appetizing looking at $2B in bitcoins than $200M. Price increases drive adoption, which drives it's value, which drives price increases. That's what we are seeing now, though not in rational proportions. Price stability is likely to affect consumer behavior, though unclear how much.
Spelling Bee kids will have to know definitions
When did he "call" Fannie Mae? Let's judge the prediction.

When did he start warning about Italy, Spain, and Greece? What were his warnings? Wasn't the disparity between the economies of Greece and of Germany one of the original structural concerns about the Euro from the jump? Either way, let's see if he started warning about "PIIGS" before or after Michael Lewis wrote about Greece.
IRS cracking down on free food provided to Silicon Valley employees
Another DDOS on github?
I know of two more Go heavy start-ups and one large company that also use tip.
Thanks! And thanks for the others that posted as well of course :)
This looks good from the perspective of a customer. This also looks good from the perspective of the rare successful monkey team (survivor bias.)

But for an average monkey before the startup experiment this looks rather bad. Unfortunately this is just the monkey you are.
How about whenever you try to take money out? How can you get money out without it coming to an account that is associated with you? Can't the coins be tracked from the illicit purchase to this point?

I'm not clear on the process at all!
The real question is: does an indelible record of transactions actually make it difficult to perform illegal activity? I can see arguments either way, but this will ultimately the interesting question.

On the surface, it seems like it would be easy to send coins and disbursement instructions to a big pool somewhere. Then someone watching the network sees a node that eats and emits coins, but doesn't make it obvious which source/destination were involved in one transaction. (Similarly, your bank sees a check to your credit card company each month, but doesn't know or care what exactly you bought on that credit card.)

Even without a "dark pool", I don't think the block chain verification requires each transaction counterparty pair to be identified. Imagine you print out a bitcoin and give it to someone in person. This reduces the value of the coin, since you could have made multiple copies and the first copy wins when spent on the real network. But people performing illegal activities already pay a lot for the risk, so this would be nothing new.

Anyway, I mostly stopped reading the linked article when I looked at the banner at the top of the page.
Abusing MySQL’s type coercion to bypass WAFs
Why did you start following him to begin with? I'm asking because I'm genuinely interested, not because I'm going to try to make a point.
Does Aereo stream advertisements as well as the program or do they store it and let you fast forward? If they stream ads, shouldn't this work in the networks' favor?
'He says all you do is run some existing art through "a little bit of filtering"'

I didn't say that, at least not about the chiptune music. I said "He [Baio] was fully aware that he needed to pay license fees in order to distribute his versions, even though they were radically transformed and reinterpreted."

I am aware that the music was a re-performance in a different medium, not just filtering of source material. I happened not to like it. I don't see why my personal aesthetic judgments should upset anyone. If I'm not getting chiptune then it's my loss; I'll keep listening, and maybe one day it will click for me. When I first picked up Joyce's Ulysses I thought it was gibberish; now I think it's a great work of art. When I hear people claiming that Ulysses is gibberish, I don't get mad, I just smile.
There's support for contracts for many popular languages, just not built-in into languages' core.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_by_contract#Languages_w...
The paradox of choice - why more is less http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ELAkV2fC-I
Summly didn't even develop their own application, never mind technology.
We're living in a world were less than 10% of people work in food production.

So while bitcoin is a good thing in itself, it can't replace in near future traditional currencies.
This is, or appears to be, a collaborative text editor, of which there are many available, and a fairly basic one at that. And not a google docs replacement. Am I missing something?
Data all the Query: Composition and Abstraction of Datomic Queries
I like them for sharing URLs on IRC. If they're too long, they can be hard to select in text clients like Irssi or WeeChat.
Because seemed to have good insight, initially, into the 2008 crash. Remember, it was a time of panic and official stories. He seemed to understand the underlying issues. He did have some grasp on it, but after I began to understand things a bit better, he started to just come off as a one note tune that was out of tune.
We went backwards when we went to the web in terms of development tools. It was necessary but RAD (Delphi, Visual Basic, yes that VB) were far ahead of where we are now today in the ability to put basic pieces together to make an application. I've not used visual studio in a long time, but I would hope they retained their core philosophy of reuse.
That's a fascinating variant of the Uncanny Valley principle that I hadn't considered before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)
LinkedIn is cheating the users
When you apply for a job on or via LinkedIn you can see how many that applied or clicked the link before you. You can then make a judgement call, is it worth applying when 50 already did? But LinkedIn trick us. The click/apply counter doesn't match the clicks. They want to keep the clicks down so people get trick to think they have a better chans to get the job then they really have. In thet way more people apply and LinkedIn ears more revenue.
All of this talk of how Bitcoin sucks, it's fundamentally flawed and how some other technology would be so much better sounds a lot like programmers talking about PHP and how it sucks, it's fundamentally flawed and how some other technology would be so much better.

Facebook and a lot of other sites have made a hell of a lot of money off of PHP. It works well enough, it's adopted and it gets the job done. Go be successful with your perfect system and then come back and tell everyone how much the other system sucks.
I wonder what percentage of the worlds billionaires are over 50? Over that age the ability to assimilate and do "new stuff" drops of considerably I should think, along with drive and determination as well.

As the article suggests hopefully some of the Zuckerburgs and co will help remedy this.
Check out the lightweight ServiceStack postgres ORM for light-weight usage, consider it more on par featurwise with Linq2SQL: http://nuget.org/packages/ServiceStack.OrmLite.PostgreSQL

Edit: just noticed someone posted this below. Sorry.
BitCoin reminds me so much of the early days of the internet; the ingenius technology, the promise, the hype, the misconceptions, the rampant ill-informed speculation. And of course the few neat things it could actually do, with a promise of so much more to come.

And perhaps, the dot-com style bust at the end that puts things back in perspective and paves the way for real growth and adoption...
> the wireless provider reached out remotely to reprogram an air card

It's almost like people don't their own bought property after sale. The person who thought he owned the device after buying it basically got fooled - it was only rented for an unlimited time.

Going from there to an warrant-less tracking is easy. If Verizon permit the reprogramming and tracking of "their" device, then its legally allowed. They might need to add something to the 35 pages EULA, in case some states dislike warrant-less tracking of the person using the device, but it can be phrased as "improving the experience".
Stronger static typing could help with that a bit. After all, if you have powerful types the auto-complete could help more.

Also, if you have relatively easy types and building blocks, there are only a few functions of that type that are also simple.
I think the author did address this but you raise an interesting analogy. I remember Carl Sagan made a point in Cosmos that the natural sciences lost millenia of progress thanks to the dominance of Platonic thought and mysticism over empiricle research and observation. I do not think it will take millenia to see it, but perhaps in a few decades we will see the present circumstances of program language application in a similar light.
Companies are in the business of software now whether or not their direct business is making/selling software. Its worth it -most of the time- to have a technical expert on retainer much like they would a maintenance person for any other skilled task they have in times of need.

If we're working in a computer age of technology you can either fight it and fall behind, try to do things, doing them wrong, and fall behind, or suck it up and hire professionals for doing jobs a professional should do.

Sorry for the mini-rant. I'm working for a small company right now as "the software guy" because everyone else here doesn't care about keeping things efficient. I don't blame them, they have their jobs to do and dealing with software sides of things for 2 hours every day isn't ideal nor appealing. But when you have a software expert on staff and you refuse to take his recommendations don't come crying to him when your half-baked workaround backfired.

Maybe the point I'm aiming to make is developing database systems that are full featured yet still usable by people who can't mentally wrangle data and storage is a lost cause. I know we aim to empower users with their data but at times things become too vast and too important for a person without formal experience in large databases to "get their hands dirty" at the risk of blowing everything up.
The article is fundamentally flawed as the author measures the 110/220VAC side instead of the current on the 5V rail - the used power meter has 1.5% of tolerance, as well as that the switch power supply's RF noise is capable of corrupting the power meter's calibration!
Very cool technology! I really appreciate your decision to allow us to just give it a try without having to set up an account or log in.
If you think this is limited to non-technical users, think again. Upon request for the zone file of some domain, some IT department of major telco sent me a screenshot of their windows-based DNS maintenance tool...
Think that's irrelevant, to be honest. The point he's making (I think) is that some people involved in the tech world have started and will continue to narrow their focus to tedious detail. Sometimes reminding yourself of the macro view is helpful. Just a thought
To be a better UI/UX designer, go to a foreign country, rent a car, and drive.
When I read something about crushing skulls with monkey paws, I knew he was way off. A mandrill would be more likely to bite you!
To be fair, the benchmarks game pages most people look at still show Go 1.0.3, and won't be updated until Go 1.1 final.
Just try to click on "Apply on website" and see if the counter changes. http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=5243091&...
This is straight up ageism. When I am 50 I will have 15 more years of knowledge and experience under my belt - and will be just as excited and determined as I am now.
So the problem with bitcoins is that it can be harder to evade taxes and buy illegal stuff? I don't know how it is in USA, but where I live it would be very useful feature of currency. However I remain unconvinced even of the arguments that it could be traced.
Back in the early 90's I was doing medical research and they used Access and/or Excel in almost every study I was involved in. The amount of time spent cleaning up the data before it could be used was insane. I tried to get them to use a real database but it is hard to teach old dogs new tricks. Sounds like things have not changed in over 20 years.