skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tomato has a better UI. DD-WRT maybe has a few extra features (that you'll never use)

Go with tomato, its bandwidth monitoring options are awexome
Probably what happens when no one's in charge and the legal, backwards compatibility, etc. teams have veto power over the UX people.

See also: (re: windows vista shutdown UI)

http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-c...
And my point is that historical research generally involves picking through lots of bits of archival material, weighing each bit's validity, and constructing a balanced historical narrative. The title of the piece made me expect that, and when I found that it only looked at one specific article, I was somewhat disappointed.

Instead it ended up a breathless piece with an "the internet changes everything" when in fact, it doesn't. Before the internet, newspapers were available in libraries on microfilm. It took more effort, but the same information was available.
It Turns Out That Google Even Has A Competitive Advantage In Scanning Books
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It is getting more difficult everyday finding Anti-Swine Flu masks. Try here. Looking for a Swine Flu mask? They are available right here.
Alan Kay had a talk in which he claimed there were three ways of reasoning: kinesthetic, visual and symbolic. Presumably mapping the problem on to the various existing bits of hardware in the brain.

If this is true multiple lecture streams would seem best. I've never understood why all universities think they have to have their own lecturers and courses. Mostly the lecturer just cribs the notes from someone else's and completes the process by reading them aloud to a bored or empty room.
UC Berkeley uses goats, too:
http://oep.berkeley.edu/programs/fire_mitigation/index.html
Mind if I ask which Pipe that was?
The best way to design an error message is to figure out why you need it in the first place, and eliminate that "need" (i.e. you don't display any message). If the proverbial house isn't burning down, the user doesn't need to know. Most messages can be non-modal, tucked away in a conspicuous spot but not immediately stopping whatever the user is doing. Even those can often close themselves, not requiring acknowledgment, ever.

Somewhere along the line, people forgot that computers are supposed to be tools, and decided it was okay to put up with constant interruptions to their work. I swear, using Windows is like raising a small, needy child.
A lot of people have the wrong idea about anecdotal evidence. There's the people who thinks it substitutes for proof... but there's also the people who think it's worthless.

Both are wrong.

A universal claim can be disproven with a single counterexample. A nearly universal claim like "Almost all gender role is social" can be disproven with nearly a single counterexample. (Or, if you want to get technical, rendered so improbably as to no longer be worth considering.)

I don't need to convince myself. I never bought into the transparently-false idea in the first place. Having kids just made it more transparently false.

Don't buy into the "anecdotes aren't data" line so hard that you go around living life with your eyes closed. That's no more rational than ignoring science entirely.
Logicly: a logic gate simulator
Focus on being efficient rather than quick. Charging off in the wrong direction will slow you down. Paralyzing yourself by over-complicating decisions will slow you down. Move forward at a steady rate and you will get things done faster.

Of course, there is an element of experience and practice. To mitigate this, select good tools and learn them well. You should not need to consult php.net because you should have an editor that provides inline help. You should not frequently need Google because you should have a smattering of algorithms and idioms that can be re-applied. (For example, a large class of text validation and processing problems can be solved trivially with regular expressions.) "Recipe" style books can assist in developing go-to approaches for common classes of problems. Knowing the important bits of the standard library will help you avoid writing unnecessary code.

Last, but not least, avoid writing code that you don't need right now. This can be big stuff like features you haven't thought through very well. Or it can be small stuff. For example, there's an unfortunate tendency for people trying to do object-oriented programming to define getters and setters for everything. There's no reason to do this (in fact, there are plenty of reasons to not do this, but that's for another discussion) and these little wastes of time start to add up fast.
I'd be interested in what the content of that course he mentions (to strengthen spatial ability) is like. It'd be interesting to see if it helps even those who are gifted in the area.

It seems like spacial ability also gives one somewhat of an advantage on IQ tests, since these seem to be disproportionately focused on spacial transformation questions.
I used a C interpreter called EiC in 1998 and didn't like it much. However, this project looks way better, since it allows you evaluate C expressions and statements, and not just top-level definitions.

C makes of an awful interactive language. S-Lang looks like a cleaned up C, but still, nothing that comes close to a full expression language with good introspection and reflection capabilities to make a repl sing.
Can someone please provide more detail than the Yahoo page as to what this is about? Is there any more info on the web about this group or previous gatherings?
FWIW, I switch from django-rest-interface to django-piston. The models are very similar, but I think piston is a little cleaner. It also seems to be a little more actively developed (at least, according to the source histories).
The "social media firehose": http://pipes.yahoo.com/update_maker/social_media_fire_hose . It's usually listed in the popular listings in the top-3 as "Update Maker", a sub-pipe now, but was my first pipe.

The pipe times out pretty much most of the time these days. Sigh - another indication of Y!'s platform commitment.
No one has any anecdote which disproves "all gender role is social". For example, parents saying they didn't treat their opposite-gender kids different is useless. They did treat the kids different: different names, different clothes, and many other things. What they really mean is they didn't treat the kids different in any relevant way. But how do they know that? Now they are making a philosophical and non-evidence-based claim. Hardly a courter example.
A lot of people don't trust Yahoo because they willingly and actively collaborate on governments' attempts at oppression, censorship, and privacy invasion.

I think you'll need to provide references on this assertion. I'm not saying it isn't true...but, do a "lot of people" really feel that way about Yahoo? I may have missed the nerd bulletin that went out saying I'm not supposed to trust them. All the people I know at Yahoo are good folks (likewise all the people I know at Google).

That's not to say there aren't troubling events in both companies histories...but I'm not really thinking people actively mistrust Yahoo. Or do they?
We all* know about bars/clubs/etc. that went from being THE place on X night to closing up in a matter of three or four years. The local paper (Cleveland) featured an interview with a club owner who was closing up a location that, only three years earlier, was a favorite spot of LeBron James and was packed several nights a week. Instead of complaining about his change in fortune, he proposed that this is the natural cycle of the club scene. As places get more popular, they become less exclusive and convey less social status on their patrons. So, those people with the most social status are courted elsewhere, and the masses again follow. The cycle repeats.

Freakonomics noted that baby names are usually introduced by wealthier folks and later adopted by poorer people. At that point, they are shunned by the wealthy.

Is there a reason that social networking sites should not exhibit similar patterns? Quite a few articles have been written about how the cool kids went to FB first. Are we simply witnessing the expected?

* Even if you hate going to these places, you probably are still aware of them.
I was confused for a moment and thought that this was about the DejaVu fonts project discontinuing development. The DejaVu fonts are very complete and cover much of the characters Unicode standard.
There is absolutely scads of research showing that boys and girls are different from day 1. Boy and girl infants react differently to the same stimuli in controlled experiments. I'm not doing your research for you, though; look it up.
I loved The Lives of Others, enjoy photography and the smell of skunks, and toy with technology as well. Am I going to wake up as a curly-haired artist some day? That'd be interesting.

All that aside, this is a great article and I Want You to Want Me looks awesome — technically and conceptually. Maybe it'll come to the browser some time.
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Nah, it's not just Microsoft, it's the accepted and assumed by default idiotic behavior of windows software. My friends' Logitech mouse driver greets him every morning, it politely asks him if he wishes to "Download the latest incoming messages from Logitech", to what he replies "No, thank you". Every goddamn morning.
The following five programs are some of my favorite staples to install on a fresh copy of Windows XP:

1) Notepad++

My favorite free, open source text editor. Gets the job done.

2) Mozilla Sunbird

Sunbird helps me keep track of what I have to do with calendar and to-do list features. Open source!

3) Google Picasa

Whether on Linux or Windows, I have yet to find a photo organizer and image manipulator that is as easy-to-use and feature-packed as Picasa.

4) 7-Zip

When it comes to [un]compression I like this one because it can do 7Z, ZIP, RAR, and GZ. Also open source!

5) KeePass

Great way of keeping track of hundreds of silly passwords and software serial numbers. Open source!
So tell me, how do we make Windows 7 better? Do we make decisions for our users and then complaints for not offering options? Where is the medium here, and how is such a thing even remotely close to a reason why Windows 7 is not the answer? You answer this dialog once after you first install, and you never see it again if you use recommended settings. So what's so confusing about that?
PETA On The Google Goats: Let Them Eat Grass (But They Need Perks)
Don't make me think.
A commercial solution to the IRS's problem? Existing tax preparation software takes past returns into account and just asks the user to enter new information. How would Mint's system be better (aside from having access to your banking history)? The third-party intervention (and profit) doesn't go away.
Something that Google's first employee said recently stuck with me: "I would say the single most important thing an engineer can do to be effective is to pick the right problem to work on." Alas, he had no idea how to do that (or rather, he obviously had a very good idea how to do it, but was unable to put it into words), but the quote resonates a lot with my experience. I've wasted so much time on projects that in retrospect weren't really all that important - I coded them quickly, and learned quite a bit that came in handy later, but the problems themselves were basically non-problems.
I measure my production time in days, not hours, so any tips on just how to "code quicker"?

Code less.

That isn't being flippant. Code you don't write is code you don't have to debug. It is code you don't have to integrate with your other functions. It is code you don't have to refactor. It is code that requires no maintenance.

I got the first version of my application up, running, and out the door in 8 days at a "normal work week" rate. I'm not a particularly good programmer, I just cut the feature set for 1.0 to the bone. Since then it has been three years now of iterations on the existing codebase that typically add a just a few hundred lines at a time.

I also rely -- heavily -- on libraries and frameworks that do stuff better than I could, and on Google for code references whenever I'm doing something which is new to me. (It took me probably 3 years until I could write Swing apps without a browser open. By that standard you'd think I'd be able to do it for Rails by now... but not quite, unless it is a pretty basic app.)
It's much easier in India too. Basically, if you are a salaried person, You just attach the copy of the taxes that the company has paid on your behalf (after deducting it every month from your salary) with an one-page form and submit it.

After coming to US, I was perplexed to see the complexity of the tax filing, which was incongruent to every other system I've encountered. Getting a driving license and a work permit were so much easier in comparison.
Does it first convert the page to valid xhtml and then perform the xpath or does it rely on the website to be well-marked?
Those zany MIT geeks! :) Sure they have their own website that details all the pranks:

http://hacks.mit.edu/

I think the cop car, complete with donuts, on the dome is still one of the best:

http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1994/cp_car/
My stats prof used to take about "Type 3 errors." Type 1 and 2 errors are part of a basic stats course. Type 3 = "solving the wrong problem."
Note to others: Just up vote if you will attend too.
You still consult Google and the language reference, but much less frequently. Generally, if you want to get feature release time down to hours instead of days, you'll need to have the "core" of the language in memory. That usually includes language syntax, string methods, data structures API, whatever basic IO library you're using (files/database/network), and various other simple utilities. You'll know when you see them, because you see them repeatedly.

The other point that I haven't seen brought up here is to have a clear goal in mind. Know what you're building, because you can't build it otherwise. Unfortunately, this is often kinda tough if you're developing a new product, because your initial ideas for what makes a good product are almost always wrong, and you tend to discover that as you start implementing. So I've found it helps to think of your code as temporary: I know what I'm building this iteration, and I'll just go code it up and see how it works, but it's assumed that I'll have to throw it away anyway and build something better next iteration.
> So tell me, how do we make Windows 7 better?

We? Do you work for Microsoft?

> Do we make decisions for our users and then complaints for not offering options?

That depends on what kind of decision is being made. Whenever you offer a choice it needs to be clear what tradeoff is being made. Why would anyone not want the recommended option? A better dialog would read something like this?

Do you want Windows to automatically download driver software for your devices? This works most of the time, but can cause problems with a few less popular devices.

__ Yes (recommended)
__ No, I don't trust you idiots at Microsoft. I want to manage my drivers manually.

Do you want Windows to download realistic icons for your devices? Realistic icons look better, but use more disk space and RAM, and can have a negative impact on performance.

__ Yes, I'm all about the eye candy.
__ No, I have the need for speed.
When Lawrence Summers resigned I was highly disappointed about the entire incident, as it seems no one can question, with good intentions, generally accepted facts about gender equality in the interest of the truth, rather than what might be the socially acceptable answer. I was glad to find an article that posits some alternative hypotheses and simply acknowledges that the answers are not so simple as they might seem, and that discusses the issue from a neutral, non-activist viewpoint. I read Pinker's article in The New Republic, but this one talks about the issue more than about the discussion itself.

One thing I kept expecting the talk to mention as I was reading was the importance of outliers. While I agree that comparisons of fundamental ability between the sexes, as opposed to factors such as motivation, is probably flawed, I think it might make the argument more immune to activist criticism to point out that there are always outliers in either group. Just because men may be, on average, more inclined to build large businesses, for example, does not mean that each man is more inclined to build large businesses than every woman — the curves overlap. Of course, the different shape of the distributions are important, as Baumeister pointed out (the male curves tend to be bimodal in certain cases whereas the female ones might be more normal). But there are always outliers, and so there will probably always be certain woman who are better at any given thing than most men; even though there may be more men than woman who are 'really good'. The entire talk discusses generalities and statistical tendencies, I know, but might easily be confused by less sophisticated readers as talking about individuals, which seems to be the common criticism of such talk.
"Chances are they (a) used something familiar to them and (b) most of the code came from existing libraries, APIs, etc."

That's almost always true, but perhaps that's the lesson right there. People (other than development snobs) don't care what you used to build it or whether you had prior experience in the field, but they do care that you can get something to them quickly that satisfies their needs. So maybe the takeaway is a.) learn some useful libraries, and learn them well and b.) use what's familiar to you.
I actually cut you some slack and upgraded the point to "Almost all gender role is social." To disprove "All gender role is social", it technically suffices to show only one example of a gender role that could not possibly be social. I actually cite many (as I consider each child I know a separate data point). It should also be pointed out that it's non-trivial, which is why I shared it in the first place; even very knowledgeable non-parents (such as I was) can be surprised by the reality.

I thought I might be overstretching with that bit about not buying into the "line", but maybe not. Logic 101, universals can be disproven with a single counterexample. Logic 301 or so, very-nearly-universals can be rendered implausibly unlikely with just a few counterexamples with little regard to distribution. That only works on very-nearly-universals, but it's perfectly sound. (I'm not out to show that gender is 100% biological, only that 100% social is an absurdity.) Anecdotes may not be "data", but there are logically-legitimate uses they can be put to.
Just because they wrote a patent application to scan books this way does not mean they actually do it this way.
I definitely believe it could be true. I don't think the music story would be out of character for Einstein.

One of my academic advisors was Professor Robert Borkenstein (he invented the breathalyzer, among other things.) Before he got into academia, he had worked as a police captain and forensics advisor to various organizations, including the International Association of Chiefs of Police. I was visiting Borkenstein's office once, long after he became a Professor Emeritus, and I commented on some artwork he had on the wall. I was really just making small-talk out of nervousness, and I hadn't really even looked at the drawings beyond a quick glance. Borkenstein perked up and asked me to really examine the drawings, and tell him what I thought about them. They were just sketches and doodles, mostly...nothing elaborate. I was going to just say they were 'nice" out of courtesy, when I realized a few of them were signed...by Albert Einstein.

It turned out that Borkenstein had worked as a guard for Einstein and some of the other scientists involved in the US nuclear efforts when he was younger. He wasn't supposed to interact with any of them, he was just there to help insure their protection. One day, Bob was so curious about the mechanics of something they were discussing that he forgot his place and asked a question. Einstein apparently spent quite a bit of time explaining the confusing concept, and became fond of Bob and his curiosity. He recognized that Bob had a very inventive mind and apparently wanted to encourage it, so whenever Bob worked a shift, Einstein would chat with him. Einstein had drawn most of the sketches on the wall to explain various concepts, although some of them were just absent-minded sketches. He let Bob keep them when the protection detail ended.

The sketches meant a great deal to Bob, and I think he had kept them somewhere in his office for his entire career. I also think the sketches (and personal attention from Einstein) helped provide some of the impetus for Bob's inventing career. Unfortunately, I don't recall all of the details Bob gave when telling his story about the Einstein discussions, but I remember that he was very reverential, awed that Einstein had taken the time to discuss important things with a guard. I think Einstein was genuinely fascinated with how other people view the world...and they say a new perspective is worth XXX IQ points, right?
See: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/05/cato-institute-crashed...
Go Waterloo! Go Warriors (http://www.athletics.uwaterloo.ca/)!
Anecdotal evidence inbound.

I know I am a very visual thinker. When given a box of parts I can visualize how they fit together in my head. I can take things apart and put them together different ways without actually touching them.

It took me a long time that not everyone thinks that way; and it was the source of a lot of frustration for me that people wouldn't get what I was saying.

I don't know if it makes visual thinking a geek gene, but it certainly does help in reasoning about problems. You can treat a lot of software as a set of mechanical problems versus abstract ideas. If you can flip a picture of something around in your head, it makes it easy to see if something will work or not; you know immediately if the parts won't fit.
MN Supreme Court OKs breathalyzer source code requests
So aesthetics of any kind are foreign to you? Or just in relation to programming? Are you equally eager to sit down on a pile of bricks as on an Aeron?
Like what, exactly? I'm not trying to be a dick, I just really can't think of anything. All the stuff my Mac does automatically seems to be standard OS stuff that I really don't need to deal with personally each and every time. Like connecting to a wireless network without giving me a giant, sticky notification that it's done so.
To me it's a "serious security vulnerability" only in the sense that if they were that lackadaisical with their password storage, where else have they made poor decisions with regards to security?

I think you'll agree that security is not a single thing you do, but a series of things that makes getting at sensitive data more difficult. To store all passwords as plaintext (including passwords for administrators, I would assume) surely must be considered a serious oversight at the least.

I feel as though maybe we're missing some nuance in your position on this.
It isn't lending when you are giving the money away.