skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While stuck with the dreaded neighbor "hey, you're a computer guy" support visit It was a real eyeopener about the ux of crapware laden toolbar filled ie9 win 7 experience. No wonder some people just hate computers.

What struck me the most was how she gets her email. FIOS set her up with their webmail, so she clicks on the bookmark, it shows a progress bar for 5 seconds while i assume it's pulling your customer info. Once that clears they showed a full page interstitial about some verizon product and i think lacked any skip button.

Once that cleared they showed what amounted to an old school portal - about a third was verizon info/support/ok apps, but then the rest was filled with some crap news feed inserts a few product upsell teasers, and i think a third party ad or two.

Ok click on email, normal login page, open email app. So this thing has a Verizon top banner that's huge, like 25% or 30% of her screen that is framed and never scrolls off. It takes two clicks just to make it show her inbox instead of a blank content area.

The app wasn't terrible, just maybe circa 2002 or so with only a few of the controls disguising themselves as the background. Usable enough as long as you don't mind the actual mail/composer only getting about 25% of the screen real estate. The kicker was the timeout - "for her protection" it kills her idle session after somewhere around 10-20 minutes at which point it pops up a modal dialog about being logged out, then pops it up again after you hit ok. Then it's back to stage 1 (5 second progress bar) and the experience begins anew including the interstitial and submitting you email credentials again.

I know telcos do some of the worst software engineering on earth, but jesus. No wonder some people consider the web as shitty and just want to get whatever task they need to use it for over with.

And no, I didn't really do much to improve it aside from exiling the toolbars and some shittier than average bestbuy run at login crap ware. I feel shitty about not making it at least not terrible, but that's hours to set things up right + a few hours of instruction + then the support calls come :/ And then the neighbor she told the story to calls.

It sucks that things like geeksquad are so shitty and are prone to upselling crap and exploiting technophobes. And I assume the it pro flier sector is at least as bad on average. Because if you're a novice and don't have a relative that's ok you're basically stuck.

And yet I made her swear twice that she won't tell any of her friends that I helped her.

[1] Ok, yeah, I guess I got a bit off topic there. But fios portal webmail is shitty.
Someone needs to put together a Spotify playlist of these 60 songs.
It's not being brave, it's being responsible for your own actions.

If you didn't use a throwaway, I'm sure you'd also do a much better job at making your comment a little more eloquent instead of just aggressive and angry.

Posting with a throwaway shows me that you probably don't even 100% believe what you just said.
You wouldn't want a reduced memory footprint, better security, improved filesystem, faster boot times, updates that don't require a reboot, etc. etc.?
> When I was working for a large internet company, we got a lot of work done in meetings and lots of PM's were respected.

How did you get work done in meetings? By definition, meetings are stopping work to communicate; the most work-efficient approach is to optimize away the need for meetings as much as possible.
Text messages without the Internet or cell service
You're confusing the declaration of independence, a fluff document, with the Constitution, a legal document. Fluffy language aside, in the Anglo-American tradition, rights derive from legal documents (or precedents), and the right to habeas corpus or a jury trial derives from the Constitution and is circumscribed the the territorial jurisdiction of the Constitution.
If you call them 'scripting language' and accept that, then the idea of a 'scripting language' is useless.

Ada is the implementation language of all kinds of real-time software. It's not a scripting language at all.

C++ is also not a scripting language. Games for example have their core written in C++ and might have an added scripting language.

That a language is used in a domain, does not make it its 'scripting language'.
Look, if you want to have a discussion with a reasonable person who's going to try to follow your arguments and retort them under the exact same level of rigid discourse that you are using, maybe you should try someone other than me.

But yes, presto magico. I am outwitting your narrow-minded mathematics.
Jobs' harsh criticism reminded me instantly of the 2003 email from Bill Gates trashing Windows Movie Maker, the Microsoft.com website, etc. [1]

It also reminded me of presentations I've given that have "gotten out of hand". I've found it's nearly impossible to direct a meeting like that--smart, intense people will not be led along the carefully crafted golden path you lay out for their time.

In Tim Adams' shoes, you may find yourself frustrated answering interruptive questions that are answered clearly in your deck, spec document, etc. After much experience with this, I've found that if you can give a sensible answer to the question, and after the answer is accepted, just say "... and that's in the document on page X", people are generally pleased with that. If they point out a loophole, gap, etc. in your design, "we will call that out" or "we'll add that immediately" can get you moving along again.

The "did you read the entire deck" question was funny. (Could that possibly work?? :-P)

[1] http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-...
Auto play == not good.

Also, the sarcastic voice over sounds more Channel 4 than BBC.
Oh interesting. Well that blows that theory out of the water.
How much experiance do you have in programming, for claiming that?
According to a recent study, 4 hours a day of focused work was the best way to maintain long-term creativity and focus.

http://www.newser.com/story/117942/why-successful-people-wor...
Async in C# and F#: Asynchronous gotchas in C#
Engineer? Want to disrupt the Telecom industry?
SendHub (YC W12) is looking for Javascript, iOS and Android engineers.

About us:
We’re making it faster and simpler for professionals to communicate.

Founded to help educators reach students and parents in under resourced communities, we’re taking on the Telecom giants. Hate your phone carrier? Us too. Telecommunications is a duopoly dominated industry, which has systematically suppressed competition over its 150 year history, in order to keep prices unfairly high. We’re going to change this, starting with business phone service.

SendHub has over 100k customers across the US in business, politics, faith groups, sports, education and many more; making hundreds of thousands of calls and sending millions of texts each month.

The Role:
You’ll be involved in every part of the software life cycle from specs discussion to implementation to testing and releasing. You’ll work on challenging problems that require deep knowledge of the tech stack and work with fun technologies such as VoIP and Bluetooth.

Our Philosophy:
We believe in building a wonderful product and taking care of our people. We understand the importance of personal growth so you’ll get autonomy, recognition and regular feedback. We move quickly. Working in short iteration cycles, we release our apps to market at least once a week. We expect a lot of each other but we wouldn't want it any other way.

Benefits:
Health, dental, meals and we don’t track vacation days.

We're based in downtown Menlo Park, CA (very close to the caltrain station). If you're interested, please drop us a line: jobs [at] sendhub [dot] com.
I just began blogging myself, and it really helps me take a step back and realize / think about what I learn on a day to day basis.
Similarly, a rather sad thing about the magazine publishing industry (especially fashion) still is that many workers are unpaid (except, perhaps, expenses) interns for years at a time fighting to get a tiny number of paid jobs. We even see the intern thing in our own tech industry: http://techcitynews.com/2013/04/08/were-hiring-join-our-team...

I think this article goes a way to answer why young people dominate the games development industry, but not really why they tend to be white or male, if that's true.
Please alert Hari Seldon.
Are there specific packages that you would currently need, but aren't there (yet), or is it a more general concern about the relative package scarcity and unforseen changes to / future needs of your code?
If I recall correctly, it system requirements are actually lower than Windows 7's as well. Way to go against the grain.

But that said, Windows 8's improvements are pretty much all under the hood: they're not user-facing. It's no wonder people don't see them, because the improvements are not designed to be seen. Unfortunately, that also means they can't really be marketed except in very niche scenarios.
I as well quit the industry because of this. While I never had it that bad (I knew I couldn't be productive after 8-9 hours so I just left at the time) nor was I ever 'attacked' for it, I can imagine I may have been overlooked on raises/promotions for it.

But there is one good thing I would say about the industry. You LEARN ALOT. C/C++/AI/Shaders/Animation and the intrinsics of low-level hardware, all in a days work. Compared to most folks I know that didn't spend time in the industry, their only experience with those topics was a semester in University.

Just yesterday there was a topic here in HN about python/ruby being slow, and while going down to C was suggested, I find appalling that most of the replies to those were 'it is hard to find a decent C programmer' or 'most of the ruby/python devs don't know C'. I can honestly say I this isn't an issue for me and for most I know that I worked in the industry. Heck my previous job had me writing nginx C modules and C++ cross platform (iOS/Android/Mac/Windows/Linux) download/caching/audio code.
Some of the work that continuum have done on blaze [1] look to be tackling the problem of streaming in python too. In fact some of the ideas in this library come directly from haskell and one of the main developers is Stephen Diehl, who posted the very popular "what I wish I knew about haskell" slides recently.

Looks like a match made in heaven :-)

[1] http://blaze.pydata.org/
My mom still has no problem using QuickBooks and doing all the required web stuff at work with a Pentium 4 and 512mb ram. She literally just bought a new desktop because quickbooks requires it.

In an office environment, she really doesn't need more.
That sounds like a new version.

McCarthy says in his 1960 paper about Lisp just in the first paragraph of the introduction:

> A programming system called LISP (for LISt Processor) has been developed for the IBM 704 computer by the Artificial Intelligence group at M.I.T. The system was designed to facilitate experiments with a proposed system called the Advice Taker, whereby a machine could be instructed to handle declarative as well as imperative sentences and could exhibit ``common sense'' in carrying out its instructions. The original proposal [1] for the Advice Taker was made in November 1958. The main requirement was a programming system for manipulating expressions representing formalized declarative and imperative sentences so that the Advice Taker system could make deductions.

So it was developed by an AI group for an AI software (Advice Taker).
No, not at all. And many rightly recognize that "best" is an absurd term to apply to a country.

What people will say is, "This country is the best for me" or "We're not perfect, but I love it" or "We have our ups and downs, but I'm proud to be here." Often people will say, "My country is the best" in the same way they say, "My wife is the best."

When I came to the US I was shocked at how many people openly, earnestly, unconditionally claim America is the best, the greatest, #1, etc. "On any objective scale, especially morally, America is the unqualified best." It's crazy.
Nice simple toolset. It's nice to see a script that knows what it is and does that well. Great name for the tool as well.
I thought that was just cats, not really dogs. My dogs look me in the eyes all the time.
Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer: the usual webGL browser compatibility stuff. Also, looks better on Canary b/c they fixed an antialiasing bug.
Apple's senior execs dominate top 5 best-paid
I think you misunderstand scripting here. Scripting languages are interpreted, and can be quite a bit simpler to implement and code in than compiled languages.

Ada, C++, et al., are compiled languages.
Crowd-sourced Music Video
The more consistently you do it, the easier it becomes, like almost everything in life. I blogged daily for 5 months, now maybe once a week. It's harder to write posts now than it was when I was blogging daily.
100% antivirus miss viruses in password protected RAR archives
I sympathize.

However, I think the most successful WordPress plugins are free, because most WordPress sites belong to dabblers. They are already paying for hosting; in their view, software should be free.

As leverage however, having a successful WordPress plugin can get your name out there, build up a ton of links to your URL, and get you contract gigs. People are making this work. I doubt you're going to make any money from the plugin alone however for the reasons you mentioned.
++[>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<-]>.++++++.

It would be nice if there was a url parameter to auto-populate the source code and run it. Generated the above with http://goo.gl/aD67C
Held by who? Held by the citizens of the sovereign states, not every human.
Keeping 25% of the created currency seems dubious.
I'm asking for a specific example of a natural monopoly that isn't the result of infrastructure

... social networking?
Very cool. It would be super useful if you could disable fuzzy matching, disable confirmations, and return proper exit codes like a standard CLI utility.
How to write css
Yes, of course they do. It's a two-way street as well, reducing the humanity of the interviewers at the same time as it scars the interviewees. There's also a very bad feedback effect that's driving those who don't do well in such an environment out of the profession (or at least an entire job class) and reinforces their inevitability as the chosen way from those who do.

I so notice the difference in interviewing from when I entered the software profession til now. The code quality isn't any better even if various groups think they've purchased hiring infallibility at the cost of their souls.
>> but you know what device we'll still be using for most of our interactions? It will be a PC, simply because it's easier to enter data with a real keyboard than any other interface.

Real keyboards are nearly gone from the smartphone space. Several people I have spoken to assert that keyboards will also be gone from the workplace in a few years.

I have some ideas on how to enhance a real keyboard to make it more productive and ergonomic. My key motivation behind these comes from I myself wanting such a thing. However, I have been having mixed feelings about pursuing these due to mixed feedback from friends, primarily because they think keyboards/PCs are going away, or that getting external funding in this space would be nearly impossible.

Do you have any advice on whether this area is worth pursuing or not? Are PCs and real keyboards going to go away, or there are here to stay as OP says?
I'm a software engineering student about to start an internship(Paid, 4 months) at a major game studio.

I am considering applying for a job once I complete the internship if everything goes well.

I would like to see if the studio where I will work has a decent workflow. If not I would be willing to tough it out as a generalist programmer while trying to apply to other jobs that interest me in another industry. The idea is to have decently impressive job on my resume and to have fun at work.

Do you think this is a reasonable idea?
Ada is not a scripting language at all.

Ada is used as the implementation language of many real-time applications in several domains.
> My personal theory...

"The Real Reason No One's Buying PCs Anymore: They've Gotten Too Good" — http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/04/12/why_pc_sa...
One Beeeelion Dollars
That's when our lives went South... :D
I love these kind of projects! Keep up the "point"-less work! :)
Or a grooveshark playlist.
As one of the major contributors to FCEUX, I feel that the author is misrepresenting the code quality of FCEUX. To be fair, I'd say the code would rate about 1.5 or maybe 1 on said scale.
Show HN: Read Your Lulu Reviews
Why accelerate? Top tips from mentors and graduates
Literate Blogging With Org Mode and Octopress
Go behind Facebook's "Nearby" rebranding
Same here. Started out on an Apple IIe in the 4th grade (around 10 yrs old), "graduated" to a Commodore Plus/4 then a 64 and then Amiga. From there it was Unix on a Sun sparcstation and the rest is history (for me anyways).
The OP seems to be aware of this. He's stating it would have been better to just state his 10 points rather than hide behind sarcasm. (I agree.)
I could also get hit by a piece of space junk falling on my head.

What is more likely, as the article points out, is that I'll read a lot of reports that distorts the actual risks of various types of events, and change my behaviour in ways that negatively affect me.
RAID vs Drive Rebuilds – Part 2
> Amazingly, this is reproducible

I have sobbed to so many shitty movies, that I have lost count.
I don't think Windows is done because there's always going to be a market for cheap(er) laptops and desktops. My girlfriend is a teacher. She can't afford a Mac. She doesn't want a Chromebook because she spends time in locations with no internet connection. She'll be buying a Windows machine for THOSE reasons.

Someone could absolutely disrupt Microsoft in the low-price market (and who knows, Chromebook might get there) but we're not going to see everyone switch to Macs just because the new Windows isn't great.
You say it like it is essential that we scale to lots of programmers up front.

The problem is that there is an organizational barrier. It is easy to have teams of under 8 programmers. It is doable to scale teams of 20+ programmers. But if you're between those numbers, small team dynamics fall apart horribly, and large team organization leaves you with less productivity than the small team.

For a small company, the cost jump from 8 to 20 programmers is pretty significant. Therefore it is worth considering the strategy of getting the most out of your existing programmers and not trying to cross that chasm. If you succeed, you eventually will have to face the scaling problem. But success tends to take care of itself.
Thanks! Can't wait to try it.
Are geeksquad that bad? My dad uses them (although he's very far from being a technophobe - despite spending a lot of time missing MS-DOS) and has had nothing but a good experience as far as I know.
Hi HN, I am working on debugging/log analysis service for developers that is designed to plug into continuous integration and act as the first filter for incoming crash/exception logs.

My submission never made it to HN front-page, but I would love any feedback on it. It's at www.bisect.cc. Thanks.

(Jaime, your service is really the kind of functionality that is missing from dev toolbox. Great job at solving real-world problems!)
We try to be aligned with the OpenStack APIs as much as possible. The thing is that even these APIs tend to change frequently. If you have a working application of your own, you'll find that the changes needed are minimal. Our goal is to be 100% and out-of-the-box compatible.

Two notes:

1. Synnefo supports advanced operations e.g. dropbox-like syncing, so we use custom extensions for that,

2. We have a full-fledged python client library and associated command line client for everybody to use, see http://www.synnefo.org/docs/kamaki/latest/index.html
No one is concerned to write something that will come back to you in a negative way?
Not everybody who could sing should sing in public.
Would help to say (video) in the title, that said its a pretty content free piece on tele-presense robotics with the hook of a young man who used one during post marrow transplant isolation to communicate with the outside world. As bandwidth improves these will improve. Having seen the difference between using a 720P web cam essentially as the remote view sensor and three 1080p cameras fused into a wrap around 180 degree view, the latter is clearly a more "immersive" experience but also a much higher bandwidth challenge.

Nice plug for Anybots too, the featured robot of the piece.
Tenacity And Persistence Pays Off
Not really. That kind of environment leads to a lot of prejudiced thinking. You see it happen in the rest of tech, too: people who have the screws twisted on them, willingly or not, cope one way or another... and most people cope by reinforcing their self-esteem with delusions of superiority.

That's one reason why we have religious wars over operating systems and programming languages and tool sets that you don't see in other engineering cultures. (And also why more relaxed companies focus more on the mantra of "right tool for the job".) Since I don't touch gamedev with an eleven-foot-pole, it's not clear to me how much of a cost has been incurred by this.

And it's this exact kind of thing which lets unexamined biases manifest in the hiring process, leading to an overpopulation of white males.
The ideal I was referring to is the character of the defendant, not their actions.
Missouri School Trains Teachers To Carry Guns
Very true; coding some COBOL in the background right now...
Just as a short note: Sure, you are not wrong. I tried to mention that viewpoint with my PS - i sure don't condemn the whole USA.

One could argue about specifics. I agree more with your subjective part - i like many american movies and series, but i would disagree with the high standards of individual rights (that was maybe true in the period after the communist-hunt and before 9/11, though) and the true democracy (for one, a true democracy in a literal meaning, according to my education, is a direct one, and the usa has many issues with its democracy like the needed money for becoming a successful candidate to qualify as a true democracy in the strictes sense, even if we count a non-direct one as such).

> (As a Dutch person I believe The Netherlands is the greatest country of the world)

Why would you do that? For real now. It is highly unlikely that exactly the country one comes from is the greatest, bestestest, whatever, in total or only in any way.
My personal private repos are missing, but some private repo's I've clone show.
Perfect would have been to have my servers responding better to this stress. But hey.. we're learning to make it better next time.

Thank you for your kind words!
A good guide, but not an answer to all. Software Engineers are humans, and everyone of them are different. So, if you want to work with Software Engineers well, get to know them first.
That's because you're inside of the UK, where the BBC is funded by the government. Non-UK viewers are served ads.

http://i.imgur.com/KHV6Mvf.png
Objective C?
To add a few high profile apps, Python is the scripting language of LibreOffice, Virtualbox and ArcGIS, among many others.
I'd like to see a Brainfuck Hackathon!