skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>There's something going on in the "pan selling industry" which results in very little "race for the bottom price" type competition - there are clearly many individual companies importing pans from China, but the "well known retail price" of those pans is ~$30 no matter which retailer you buy it from (within reason - at least within enough reason that all the $30 price-point retailers are still in business).

That's what I'm saying -- they don't compete with each other. There isn't enough competition that anyone decides to try to improve their market share by lowering prices, because it's just Bed, Bath & Beyond and Sears and such like "competing" with each other in any given local area, and not enough people buy housewares over the internet to move the needle against those guys.

>I think part of it is the audience - the "pan buying demographic" is probably a lot earlier in it's uptake of globalised web based purchasing than the demographic who's buying Arduinos and RasberryPis.

More than that, electronics are purchased in bulk by corporate purchasing departments. If you're buying 25 new devices every two years you may not be such a big fish that you qualify for a volume discount, but you're certainly spending enough money to justify a significant amount of comparison shopping, which means a high price elasticity of demand and an immediate market share advantage for retailers who engage in price competition.

>But like I said - I suspect it's "experienced companies" who are not exactly colluding or price-fixing, but who all know that it's better for _all_ of them to keep pans priced at ~$30 and have everybody make margins of almost $29 per sale, rather than end up trying to compete on price at $5/pan knowing that the total market for pans won't increase just 'cause the prices drop 85%.

The phrase you're looking for is "conscious parallelism." You get de facto collusion without communication by means of everyone adopting the strategy that they not be the first to engage in price competition. It works only so long as you have sufficiently few competitors that all of them religiously follow the strategy -- because having a third of the market with 5X the margins is more profitable than having the whole market at 1/5th the margins. The problem comes when you have more competitors, in which case someone decides they would rather have half of the market at 1/5th the margins than 1/15th of the market at 5X the margins, and believes (perhaps correctly) that they will be the one to survive a price war. This has basically been Walmart's business model for probably the majority of the products they sell, and Amazon et al are now doing the same thing even more aggressively on the internet.
> there is a karma threshold

Is there a list of karma thresholds somewhere? I haven't found any up-to-date ones anywhere.
The best time to submit is subject to the goals of the poster, not simply when they are ready to share the thought. If that's your goal, then great.
It may just be a side effect of minifying the code.
Maybe he is posting from another country, you never know how expensive another persons bits are! ;)
The Patent For The Portable Computer Is Going To Expire
Test driving SASS and HAML
PM usually means "post meridian", far more often than it means "prime minister". You have to work out what an abbreviation means in context.

It can mean "project manager" (as georgemcbay said) or "product manager" (which is different from project manager, but they sometimes look similar from the perspective of a programmer). It's pretty clear from context that one of these was more likely than "prime minister".
Thirteen Patterns Of Programmer Interviews (2007)
Rounding will happen eventually, but it's a slow change. Initially I'd expect everything to be in the old units but labelled metric.

As an example, here in New Zealand most bars sell beer in 500ml glasses, but the one I go to sells 568 ml glasses. The same happened when I was in the UK and the milk had to be sold in metric quantities.

You don't need to force people to change their thinking, but if you start labelling things in metric it will change over the generations.
Regarding your JRuby vs CRuby comparison - of course, you can as well write slow code in asm vs fast code in QBasic.
I've noticed people doing that (on days where I check new frequently), so I've been curious if that's addressed. It's good to know that it is. :)

The annoying thing about that tactic is that there's plausible deniability for the perpetrator to nonadmins. Well, unless someone is using a Python scraper, anyways.
I have ls aliased to 'ls -F -H --color=yes --group-directories-first', so no.

('/bin/ls *' is just as fast with '--color=yes' for me btw)
It's more-or-less impossible to prove that any kind of take-home assignment was actually done by the student himself/herself.

This is why a large proportion of a degree should be based on in-class work where the student is physically present.

Also, when these people graduate without understanding the subjects they cheated on, won't they be too incompetent to hold down the jobs their degrees are supposed to enable?
> As a simple example, in bash if you use tab completion and there are multiple options, pressing tab again just reminds you that there are multiple options accompanied by a passive aggressive beep

This should fix it in bash:
bind '"\t":menu-complete'
Even better:

http://fly.aa.com/klout/api/reward/

A JSON dump of all the rewards codes.
Good point. I know how reluctant financial organizations are when they have to actually spend some of their own money to upgrade something.
Nice. Thought I am glad I do my main work in C# where all of this can be easily achieved with LINQ without any need for additional libraries http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/101-LINQ-Samples-3fb9811b
What return? The interest rates available these days are appalling.

Cripes, tell me you don't keep money in a savings account or CDs. Keep it with your investment manager. The large banks cater to the mass affluent - which includes any software developer who's worked at market for a few years and has saved their money. You put your money with them, you make sure they understand your appetite for risk, and they go to work.

I'm sure there's investment managers out there that are better than the ones at large banks, if you have that much to invest. But for the rest of us, a large organization is the way to go. They have the resources to attract good quality talent and access to the information they need to make good investment decisions. You will do so much better than 0.9% over 120 months, it's not even funny.

FDIC doesn't cover much money, I might add, and it only covers money in those might-as-well-be-zero-interest accounts where you shouldn't be keeping money in the first place.
A while back I put together a doodad to collect and plot this sort of data over reddit (both as a whole and at a subreddit level), see http://reddalyzr.com/#/all The banner is there as I built it as a demo/dogfooding app.

Right now it only has a few days worth of data in it as the database backing it got blown up earlier this week.
The html, css, and javascript are compressed. Compressing the files would reduce propagation delay making happier users. Also the slightly reduced bandwidth requirement probably saves google a pretty dime when you consider the number of requests they have.
C# 2.0/ECMA-334 4th edition [1] is specified on 553 pages - Microsoft did not submit later versions. The underlying virtual machine, the common type system, the assembly language and so on are specified in ECMA-335 6th edition [2] on 574 pages supplemented with 161,593 lines of XML (plus 155 lines DTD) specifying the base class library.

TR/84 [3] provides tools to generate documentation in various formats from the mentioned XML file. The included output as PDF sums up to 5,868 pages.

Finally there is TR/89 [4] describing some more generic types on 67 pages.

[1] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

[2] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

[3] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/techreports/E...

[4] http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/techreports/E...
And exceptions, or any other way to better handle error conditions, rather than that "if hell".
Are garbage collection pauses really a concern? You're still running atop a multitasking operating system with all kinds of pauses.
Yeah, I remember the same deal in the 80's. In Middle School out teachers made a point to tell us that the US had switched to the Metric system, and taught us all about metric units, etc. And, as you say, road signs often had both units, car speedometers had both, etc.

And then it just stopped. No notice, no noise, no nothing. Everybody just stopped talking about it, the road-signs went back to all Imperial measurements, car speedometers dropped km/h readouts. As far as I can tell, the only real legacy of metrification in the US is that anybody who does much tinkering with mechanical "stuff" that might involve bits that are imported, needs a toolbox loaded with both Metric and SAE sized tools. To be honest, I always half figured the whole Metric movement was arranged by Craftsman, Mac and Snap-On in order to double the volume of tools they sold.
Well it's one opinion directly related to the parent comment's hypothetical question.

No I do not have a double blind controlled study on the opinion of black history month, but I thought Freeman's comment was obviously relevant and interesting.

I cited him and not others because this is the clip I had seen and remembered.
Pessoa created his own worlds. Reminds me of Henry Darger. Check out IN THE REALMS OF THE UNREAL if you haven't seen it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSzzirIP0No.
Suppose a traveller lands in another country and tries to check his GMail on the hostel's computer. This trips GMail's security, and requires mobile verification. He doesn't have a SIM card with a local data plan, so he doesn't get the alert and can't verify the request.

The beauty of 2-factor auth as currently implemented is it doesn't need network access from your authenticating device to function.
Backstory here: freegeoip.net has an hourly per-IP limit, so we distributed the load by doing the geolocation from client browsers. This borked freegeoip after many hours of Twitter/Ars Technica'ing.

It was a good thing Github got its storage servers back up; we're now running a local clone of freegeoip, as freegeoip.net smolders.

To freegeoip.net! May it rise again soon.
No language with a nondeterministic memory management will ever be able to be an alternative of C++.
Appreciate it, this will keep me busy :)
(N.B. for returning visitors: The sooner you force-refresh, the sooner freegeoip.net rises again.)
Perpetual Futility: A short history of the search for perpetual motion
I blew a friends mind when he mentioned wanting to have a rainwater tank that contained some number of gallons. I immediately said how much it would weigh and what the dimensions of the tank would be, and consequently how it would be too large for the area he intended.

It drives me nuts trying to follow recipes written by Americans as the measurement units are entirely random between weight and volumes. Sometimes it makes sense due to packing - eg flour is more accurate by weight than volume. But often the worst one is used.
You should be optimizing for value produced per programmer-hour spent. If an open-source solution lets you do this better, then go with it; if it doesn't, then don't.

Note that "value" may be different for different situations.

* If you're writing code for a bootstrapped one-person startup, i.e. this is a software product, website, or service that you're going to sell, then you would probably measure value as expected profit.

* If you're writing code as part of your job, you should probably be trying to maximize the things that the software's supervisor(s) / user(s) want the software to do. This is usually (but not always) aligned with expected future profit/revenue for the business.

* If the project is a learning experience to improve your own understanding and capabilities, then you should seek out unfamiliar technologies and interesting problems, and not worry so much about polishing the rough edges.
Also take note of the main page, The Museum of Unworkable Devices, for tons of more information.

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/unwork.htm
Entsorgung
Entsorgung , Entsorgung wien
ENTSORGUNG , Favoriten Umzug – Wir helfen Ihnen und führen Ihre Entsorgung sauber und ordentlich durch! Wir sind Ihr starker, kompetenter und sicherer Partner, wenn es um Entsorgung geht! Unser Betrieb ist ein Entsorgungsfachbetrieb nach der Entsorgungsfachbetriebsverordnung (EfbV).
Thanks; I've run across his stuff tangentially a few times but not seen that film.

You might like Gormenghast: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gormenghast_(series)

Wyndham Lewis's novels, especially the Human Comedy that he wrote at the end of his life, are something I've always been meaning to get to. It's hard to tell if they're meaningful or impenetrable.
This must be what it is like for non-programmers to read programming topic blogs that champion knowledge of programming language minutiae and have distain for the use of Excel. If only the non-programmers, non-designers, non-marketing, non-us people would just wake up to the fallacies of the way they view the world.

He is a public transportation planner, whose job involves thinking about real cities, with real city-sized problems, and even wrote a book about it. I wonder, with the number of real city simulation software packages, if the jab at SimCity is just a good inside joke.
GoodGuide[1] falls in this niche.

The iOS app works well: just pick up a product and scan the barcode.

1. http://www.goodguide.com
Good point about urls from the article's comment thread.
That definitely things that mostly people missed.

For filters and option, I was thinking the same. A bit doubt about why I need that, until you share your thought.

I'll update here soon regarding this features.
I'd say that you chose a poor example as Logitech's customer service (in Europe at least) is second to none. They will send you replacements for free very easily, while asking only minimal proofs (usually your serial number is enough). I know plenty of people who got their mouse or keyboard replaced in a few days after contacting customer service, without being asked to send the defective one.
Agree - came to post that last paragraph too.

Succinct and clear - unlike the rest if the article which I guess he had to write before understanding enough to write the last para
In bash, you can use 'C-M-e' to expand just like the shell.
Are there any old-schoolers around here who remember IBM's OS/2 and how it could have changed the PC world completely

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2

Its design was supposedly far better than NT

(it initially came on 50 5.25" disks, that was "fun" to install)

I think UPS was the largest user/developer.

You know the company Parallels that made Virtuozzo (and OpenVZ) - well it was initially formed to make virtual environments to run OS/2.
See I don't know about that. Maybe exceptions was one of the features that was good to be left out. I think maybe the comma ok idiom forces the programmer to more actively check for errors and recover from them, and there is no need to do things like RIIA. Maybe also the code is clearer to read, because you can see "if not ok then do_this()" and know that this is error checking/recovery code, instead of looking up the call stack to see where the exception that was thrown in one place is being handled.
I doubt that shoe salesmanship skills become obsolete anywhere near as fast as web development skills.
Declarative Data Visualization library
Re: the last paragraph ("The lesson to be..."). Is it really the lesson you can learn? Doesn't this friend of yours know this? Didn't he actively try to persevere, to see how he works and what makes him stop and what could possibly keep him going?

To me it sounds more like description of a problem (i.e. just restating it). "A person starts many things but drops them before finishing. In other words, that person lacks perseverance."

A lesson to me would be something like... a) when you feel your passion for something going up, do X, b) when you have just started doing something new, do Y to ensure you don't drop it tomorrow, etc.

Have you perhaps seen these kinds of 'solutions' or approaches? (not just restating the essence of the problem, but actually attempting to solve it from the standpoint of the person _with_ the problem :) I think more than a couple people could benefit from this :)
When I had a some class with Prolog, we copied some code from the lecture notes. The problem was that it wouldn't run, even though we had looked over it dozens of times and it was syntactically correct. Turns out that there was a string that was enclosed in quotes, but a different kind of quotation mark than what Prolog was using for strings. So the string was not syntax highlighted, and we noticed that if we deleted the quotes and typed in the quotes manually with the keyboard, those quotes had a font that was a little bit different.

I think the problem was that he had written it on a Mac, and we were using Windows/Linux.
It might be stupid in most aspects, but many of the cells do have windows.

In many areas of the developed world it's actually illegal to rent out a room without a window.
Oh I didn't mean as a matter of compatibility, although compatibility is (mostly) achievable and they share a syntactic and structural origin.

I just think that their names, common syntax and saying things like 'C++ is a [sort of] superset of C' make people unfamiliar with them think that they are more related than they are. That's why I brought up Python and Ruby - two languages that are different in syntax and many details but in the same conceptual space, whereas C and C++ look more similar, sound like almost the same thing but are, conceptually, on different planets.
Do you think the Phone division is working differently to the rest of the organisation? Windows Phone 7+ really wowed me. Its a great product.
Simple Website Monitoring using Clojure
Off topic:
The <div id="content"> has a fixed width, a left:50% and a margin-left:50%, making it difficult to read on smaller screens. In my case, that is my screen divided in half. It is also difficult to adjust with dev tools (I sometimes have to do this for readability).

( The post is something I'm very interested in, but I haven't had time to read it yet :P )
Employers are forbidden from collecting any information about the employees outside of expertise.
I have a terrible suspicion that they will, and that is a partial reason for some things that are wrong in the world...

Particularly when the said jobs are in politics, government, quangos.
Everyone I have talked with about DST has had opinion, that the time to be chosen as base time used around year is the summer time. I would also change daylight at summer from 5am to 8pm, but i would also rather have in winter daylight at 16pm than 8am
"imagine if corporations really felt pressure to be better, because if not a news story would be aggregated into a evilness database that might convince many many consumers to choose their competitor over them as a result."

I'm curious as to whether consistent consumer buying pressure actually makes a difference. We see companies making changes based on PR spikes relatively often, but it's less immediately apparent [to me, I don't have any data on this] whether a persistent negative image affects how they behave. Perhaps if there was data to go along with poorer sales, but you can't really corellate a lookup into a database on business practices or political activity with a lost sale either (ie X people looking up Product Y doesn't mean X less sales).

This is looking at the situation with an eye to changing behaviour though, not simply putting bad operators out of business (or more likely just reducing profits) because there will always be bad operators.
In the time since that comment was written (just under 5 years), Linux replaced most graphics drivers with ones based on in-kernel modesetting and the DRI2 interface. This was done without breaking applications. So, the assertion that changing the video driver model would be disruptive is kind of disproven by reality. I guess Linux has a liberal bias.

That's not to say that NT doesn't have benefits. Linux is still catching up with implementing some features that Windows has had for some time (and multiple GPU support is actually a great example of that), but so far there's no real evidence that these disparities are because of architectural differences.

Really, a worthwhile comparative analysis requires someone who has a deep understanding of the kernels they're comparing. I'm pretty familiar with Linux but know almost nothing about NT, so I'm a bad choice. But "Take the recent Linux arguments about the HardLocks code that is giving Linux trouble with multi-processor granularity"? That's not someone who knows Linux, otherwise they'd be using words that I recognise. "You call BSD a kernel, it technically is a set of APIs"? That's not someone who knows BSD either. This isn't an in-depth analysis of benefits that one kernel has over another. It's a handwavy justification of some NT design decisions without any reasoned comparison to Linux design decisions in the same area.

I'd love to read an in-depth comparison of the benefits of NT over Linux. This isn't it. Is there one?
I agree with csense points, also, it would be nice to specify how long links will be kept in your site: since you planned this as archive it would make sense to put a limit (let's say, one month) and then give access to links posted "one day ago", "n days ago", "n weeks ago" etc.
I'm not entirely sure I understand your example.
You have a class A, with a member of type B
You want B to have a method which takes an object of type A as a parameter.

I do not see why static typing causes difficulty with this. The only gymnastics I have seen in C/C++ do accomplish this is forward declarations. These are not needed because of the type system, but rather because C/C++ requires things to be defined before they are used. For example, java does not have this requirement.

Also, I believe that Go has something simmilar to duck typing, and its a static type system.
I have a single gripe with how Java handles enums.

They would be safer to work with if it was invalid to write a switch statement with a missing case and no default. I see a lot of code like:

switch (foo) {
case Bar: ...
case Baz: ...
default: throw new IllegalArgumentException();
}
As per the rules I often flag things that are "off topic", especially things that violate the would-it-be-on-TV-news guideline. TBH, I think a downvote would be better than flagging for that but.. guidelines.
Both arguments are not sound though, and as a result demonstrably irrelevant. The title of the thread and the argument in the GP is based on features present in ZSH but not Bash and the benefits there of.

The OP's first argument is: for all operating systems Bash exists. Which, while also untrue is and unrelated to whether ZSH has features or improvements that Bash does not. OP's second argument is: all ZSH users also program in D...., which I won't even bother with.

For what it is worth, I use both Bash and ZSH. Their usage and knowledge there of is not mutually exclusive. The only issue I've encountered with using ZSH is that most build scripts expect to be ran from Bash and will run into issues when that is not the case sometimes, so I open Bash before running the command if I happen to be in ZSH at the time.

If I based my tool choices on popularity instead of their appropriateness for the problem domain my work flow would look much different as well.
I know just about nothing about klout. How "high" is 55?

I just signed up hoping I has >55, but I am only 54, maybe adding some other random accounts social media accounts will nudge my score higher.