skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The greatest achievements in the world have come from a gathering of bright and passionate people, discussing and vetting their ideas together.

Nonsense. Any equal number of "greatest" achievements have come from a individuals working persistently in solitude, in humble settings.
I have also found Sublime Text 3 to be much faster at common tasks than Sublime Text 2. It is going to be well worth the upgrade.
VBSDCON 2013
PHP was built by a guy who didn't even know he was building a programming language. He's quite honest about this.

PHP is like Perl blended with C and a whole lot of confusion.

Frameworks have made it "better" like ketchup improves the quality of prison food, but it's still terrible on the whole.
Three 20-somethings hack Wall Street...
Apple target of Senate hearing on offshore taxes
>If it is in fact possible to have such bugs, as it is with shared mutable memory, then I expect to see tools for finding such bugs.

Well with the actor model, it is less likely since you're supposed to be passing immutable messages around and you're not coordinating threads around locked resources.
This is one structural similarity, although metal backed currencies were often restamped or debased in order to increase/decrease the amount of money flowing through the economy.

The main structural difference between bitcoin and metal backed currencies is bitcoin's lack of intrinsic value. If I have gold coins, and inflation begins to set in or if the currency suddenly becomes worthless, I can still melt down my coins and sell the gold even if the face value of the coins is zero. If Bitcoin's use as a currency is diminished or restricted, the wallet sitting on my computer has no intrinsic value to support it.
Indexing in Cassandra talk (video)
Counter-arguments: I take it as axiomatic that if someone says our times are different from all the rest of history, they are wrong. I can't imagine that our need for unambiguous syntax is going to decline, since our programs are still going to need to be precise in a way that is not well-served by natural language. I think your whole argument is hand-wavy and, in my opinion, naïve.
Google's wet dream is Linux kernel under BSD license.
Gotta love that skirt on the bulb robot.
"Sinatra for iOS dev" would literally be the answer to my dreams. I have a license for RubyMotion but havent had time to play with it. This looks very promising!
Thanks for your wisdom Phil.
they wanted to be able to leave their desktop logged in, move to their laptop, and not have the conversation pop up there

Did someone outside the XMPP-bubble really request that?

Why would you possibly want to not see the entire conversation when switching between multiple devices?

the problem is that it's vastly complicated and therefore nobody ever implemented it.

That's what I mean by over-engineered. As a matter of fact no single jabber client or server (that I know of) supports multi-device sync, not even without crypto. I.e. 13 years after its inception jabber (the "platform") still lacks fundamental functionality. Despite tens of thousands of lines of specification and lots of energy spent on absurdities like "transports".
Who forced them? I can't find it on wikipedia, in a google search or microsoft's site all I found was

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Open_Specification_Pr...

I even checked the references, the MS page adds nothing to wikipedia's info in this matter

http://www.microsoft.com/openspecifications/en/us/programs/o...
Are you implying they have tried (with xmpp-extensions)?

But yes, they are evil.
Under the 'More' menu at the top of your G+ stream, there is a 'Stream layout' widget that lets you switch from multi to single column.

Somewhat hidden, but at least it's there.
This is a great topic, the idea that contemporary computer systems are not atomically understandable or model-able. And it's a topic that's almost entirely absent from computer science discourse.

We passed the point quite a while back where "applied CS" -- what it's like to build and maintain scalable systems in the real world -- looks a lot more like anthropology than like mathematics.

We have tools like sampling profilers, loggers that do stateful packet inspection on a small percentage of traffic, and sophisticated A/B testing frameworks that reason about user populations rather than individuals. But I think we could probably build a whole 'nother generation of these tools by thinking about this problem of understanding complex systems from some new perspectives. I nominate anthropology as a discipline that has many years under its belt wrestling with the impossibility of complete description. (And wrestling with other tough issues, sometimes not well, but that's another conversation.)

I'm not talking about the kind of "anthropology" work that companies like Intel have done for a long time, which are firmly in the social sciences tradition and are really user studies. (Though that work is valuable.) I'm talking about porting ideas such as "thick description" to our technical toolkit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thick_description
Tutorials as a band-aid
From what I've read, at least part of the problem is that the SQL standards are very murky and/or contradictory on the definiton of UPSERT-like functionality. And since Pg likes to be standards compliant they have focused on other areas of functionality.
Spammer asks us to remove his spam due to bad Google ranking
There's no reason that has to be insecure (depending on your definition of "secure"). There's also no reason the user shouldn't be allowed to make that choice for himself.
Quad-core Android phone keeps cool with water pipe
Campaign Monitor has a pretty great table[1] describing what's supported where.

[1] http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/
Russia's biggest epayment company, Webmoney accepting bitcoin
Hope you guys enjoy my blog post! Love to hear your thoughts.
I stumbled upon this presentation while trying to better understand the Cassandra data model and composite columns, and it really helped me.

Here are the slides: http://www.slideshare.net/edanuff/indexing-in-cassandra

It's also mentioned in this blog post: http://www.datastax.com/dev/blog/introduction-to-composite-c...
I use 'break out method object' from "Working Effectively with Legacy Code" in these situations:

1. Create a new class for the computation
2. Define a method on that class to do the new work.
3. Copy the body of the old method over, and change variable references to instance variables.
4. Give it an initialize method that takes arguments to set the instance variables used in step 3.
5. Make the old method delegate to the new class and method.

Now, at least, it's isolated into once place, and you can use your other refactoring tricks without affecting global state, like extract method.

I'm not sure if this is the _best_ example, but I wrote about this a few years ago, in Ruby: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2011-09-06-the-secret-to-...
Of course it's logically inconsistent, but this is the real world and trade-offs like these are made. Same with Lithium batteries, although there have been several confirmed cases of such batteries catching fire in flight they are still allowed. It's just not feasible to ban cell phones and laptops.

Likewise, airlines have a "clean cockpit" policy disallowing small talk during landings. Do they monitor the CVRs and fine pilots who break this rule? I don't think so. Will some pilots find the rule exessive and make exceptions? Maybe. But the rule still has an effect, and is in place because of previous accidents where distracted pilots have been a contributing factor.

While I think this rule about electronic devices might be too stringent, and that it will eventually change, I don't think the airlines have overblown it. Pilots will handle instrument failures gracefully in 99.99% of all cases, and then there's the fatal accident where some stupid malfunction caused the pilot to screw up (AF447, and many others before). Because they know this is a "numbers game", they try to minimize potential problems, even though they may not be able to eliminate them altogether.
I'm at home, also getting this certification warning
> Making a universal email message have bespoke instructions for a specific mail provider. Call me old fashioned but I don't like that.

Its all using open standard formats, and the specific schemas are open standards or proposed for standardization (and Google has said that its schema support may change if the schemas change in the standardization process.) Other providers could use it as well. This is how progress happens in open systems. The alternative is either abandoning the open system for new functionality, or just never getting new functionality at all. And its not the provider that is key here, but the client (the fact that for many gmail users the supplier of both the mail service and the mail client is the same makes it easy to confuse the issue.)

> Also, I dare say, not so useful for the many of us accessing gmail via Mac devices' mail clients.

Yes, features in the Gmail client that aren't included in other clients aren't useful to people using the other clients. I'm not sure why this is noteworthy.
Ok then if you don't mind what did you experience and what plugins did you use? I'm curious because there may be a common thread. Right now I only use it on Mac or Windows. I've rarely used it on Linux.
My current company uses extensively .NET and I have almost a decade of experience working with it at my last employer, where I was also responsible for choosing and buying such products.

In my last employer (government), we didn't choose .NET, microsoft won the contracts. In the last update when I still worked there, we spent 250k USD to update our programmers VS to 2010 + windows 7. (I wonder if they will now update again). SQL Server prices are similar to oracle's with similar features.

In my startup (not a startup anymore) I had to spend 40k just to get the environment needed for a project (involving telephony) the only reason we had to use .NET was because the hardware manufacturer only provided driver+tooling for windows and some components were exclusively for .NET. Because we mostly use linux and macs, we also had to buy windows licenses. In my country, a Windows 8 license cost almost 2x the minimum wage.

We happened to have a discussion if we should give up or not a specific product because of the microsoft taxation on our business. The only reason we decided to keep using .NET is the cheap labor and the lack of hardware suppliers willing to provide us drivers and tools for linux.

So yes, microsoft damages not only startups, but companies in general.
In both cases the essence is the exchange of money in return for feigned affection.
Three ideas that haven't come up yet:

- Most realistic: Work with your Bay Area startup from your home country. I don't know specifics about Indian nationals, but many people work remotely with a team in the US, and then travel to the US on visa waiver (often up to 90 days) or tourist visa (up to 6 months) to sync with the team. You will likely be a foreign contractor, and the startup will pay salary to your Indian bank account. You will likely not owe income tax to the US because the service is technically performed overseas, but you'll have to pay tax to India.

- Invite your team to work overseas together: Stripe prototyped the service in Buenos Aires. Buffer traveled to Hong Kong and Israel. We spent our first months in Thailand. Going overseas for a limited period of time can be a great way to bootstrap at a lower cost. Especially if your startup is very early stage (we are too).

- Open a business entity in home country, and make it a liaison office or subsidiary (or whatever requires the least amount of logistics) of your Bay Area startup.

I'm not a lawyer. But I'm bootstrapping from Seoul for some time and have seen multiple teams that work across locations. Good luck!
This is precisely why our slow boil in the pot of American Fascism is so troubling. The frog is all but cooked, and it is none the wiser, even one minute to midnight...

Advocates of liberty and privacy are constantly savaged by the media, meanwhile the erosion of personal rights continue unhindered. I sincerely hope we begin to act before it is too late.
This looks awesome, but it's a shame it's only available as an extension.

Do you have any plans to provide a web app?

EDIT: I installed the extension but I can't get it to work. I typed in a number and got no suggestions, then a few minutes later I got an alert that the extension had crashed.
That's true for SMTP, and that's what I'm referring to. Am I wrong?

You are making the same mistake other posters were making, confusing two different definitions of "plain text". The one we're talking about is ASCII versus some binary obfuscated format (such as MS Word). Both can be encrypted and made equally as secure. Plain text formats are much more amenable to grepping, grokking and manipulation; they make locking out competing implementations harder. See "Keep Knowledge in Plain Text": http://pragmatictips.com/20

In addition, most arguments about "space savings" are rendered moot by compression (which usually works better on plain text), the fact that binary formats in practice almost always take up more space for the same content (even when uncompressed), and most importantly, storage and bandwidth have rendered the size argument totally irrelevant.
I used to be quite awkward and reserved. Then I realized that I spend most of my life solving problems. This is just another problem. I can solve this.

The biggest thing - confidence. Just like your 80-year-old grandparent that's scared to touch a computer because they might break it, I was scared in social interactions because people might not like me. There's a lot of people out there and most are a lot more awkward and tolerant of awkwardness than you think. Just don't spill water on the keyboard or download a virus and you probably won't break it. Once you internalize that, you'll get the confidence to fiddle and experiment.

The other biggest thing - discomfort. Focus on avoiding the other person's fears/discomfort and work hard to squash your own.

Also, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.
One advantage of TDD is that encourages your code to be more easily testable. Which tends to encourage you to develop properly modular code. Code that can only be tested indirectly through integration testing (spinning up huge unwieldy hunks of context that are required for the individual sub-component to work properly) is not very modular.

Modular code tends to have fewer dependencies and tends to produce fewer side effects. All of these things make for code which is generally easier to maintain and modify, easier to understand, easier to debug, and easier to reuse. All of which tend to lead to higher code quality naturally.

A high level of unit test coverage also gives you other benefits, of course, but I thought I'd highlight these side benefits because they are perhaps the most important.
Each of which only only mattered to the world at large because many others proceeded to spread and implement those achievements.
It's a lot harder though. The larger hats breaks up the silhouette quite a bit. At least you can still identify based on posture, which is done pretty well.
Thank you. I've been putting off upgrading for fear that it is a huge rabbit hole. It sounds like this is not the case, so I'm planning on giving it a shot this weekend.
>when you select a file in the project browser it now opens up a temporary tab

Any way to have binary files like say, images, show up in the project browser without previewing their contents when you click on them, in this version?
To be removed in 3..2..
He's not refuting the existence of race, he's exposing the flaws in trying to treat it like a scientific fact that can be reliably observed.

Race exists like assholes or douchebags exist. Most people can agree that they exist, but there is no reliable, rigorous, objective way to make hard determinations about whether a given person is that.

That makes it very sketchy to try to find scientifically valid correlations with other attributes like intelligence (which we all know is itself impossible to pin down.)
Build a robot, win a robot
Geez that's still a problem? They really need to change that.
I have something like seven tabs in each version of Sublime Text.

Can anyone recommend a good way to migrate your projects and tab session to the newer version? I think I have two versions of ST2 as well.
I'm not trying to picky or anything, but what tasks did actually become faster? I'm only asking because my current ST2 (build 2220) is blazingly fast. Fuzzy search seems instant. Files open and preview instantly, even large binary ones. And there is no interface lag, even on a retina. The only thing that I can recall waiting on is using the package manager.
Good to see the fix! I've been using it for a few days.
Except in a discussion such as this one, where we're explicitly talking about Google locking out competitors by replacing plain (ASCII) text protocols with proprietary binary ones.
Good point. I've come across quite a few Berlin based startups that are actually incorporated in the UK e.g. Soundcloud. Someone said to me that one of the reasons for this is share capital requirements. You only need £100 to incorporate an ltd in the UK whereas in Germany it's apparently in the thousands.
Oh thanks a bunch for the clarification
>Perl actually happens to be impossible to parse

Not actually true otherwise no Perl code could be run at all :)

A more accurate description would be - Perl cannot be parsed unambiguously without runtime information.

For more detailed|interesting discussion about that Perlmonks post see this HN submission from 3 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=761103
I've seen some screwed up Rails and Django projects, but the severity of the damage is never, ever, as bad as a bespoke PHP application. It's not even in the same league.

Remember, both PHP and JavaScript were serious tar-pits ten years ago.

JavaScript has made enormous strides in that time, the cultural shift is unbelievable. People went from writing absolutely terrible client-side code, to using frameworks (Moo, Scriptaculous at first, later jQuery, RequireJS) to using it server-side for serious applications. It's gone from complete anarchy to highly civilized. There's some things JavaScript does very well now, and in an elegant way mostly free of quirky tradition and/or obnoxious anachronisms.

Meanwhile PHP has only degraded. It's improved, technically, but the community is now hyper-fragmented. Best practices are routinely ignored. Frameworks don't inter-operate even on the most basic level. There's no leadership. There's opposition to even the most obvious improvements to PHP, like deprecating components that are doing nothing but holding PHP back. Killing off `mysql_query`, for example, is absolutely imperative, but it's going to be a bitter fight.
Presumably that's why it's tagged NSFW.
Can someone put in layman's terms the patent and how it was being applied in this case? They say in the article it was an "old cell phone patent being applied to the internet" but don't explain how/what. thx
Apple to open new store on Union Square
I think this depends purely on the type of people who work at your job. I now work at home and have done for 2 years, but still meet up with colleagues from my previous job occasionally, and they still talk to me and we discuss life/software/beer etc.

The company I work for now has meetups 2-3 times a year, and whilst the people are generally nice enough, I wouldn't really consider keeping in touch if I left. I doubt they would bother either.

I also have a group of friends from my childhood around and we hang out alot. I consider this extremely important and make specific efforts to organise activities and nights out so we don't lose touch. People really don't put enough effort into friendships to stay in touch. They often treat friends as disposable when it comes to their careers which is sad.

Friends > cash, every time.
Good lord that is awesome, thanks

guess now all I have to do is find some friends
I'm figuring this stuff out. I'm on the "adult rec league" stage.

These shiny textfields and the illusion of pseudonymity, even when you use your real name, make it easy to write and sound really snarky and mean and I'm sorry if I came off that way.

I think what I'm trying to say is, you sound unhappy, dude. Trying to up my empathy, in your context maybe you do just need work-mates. I convinced a friend to quit his job for precisely the same reason: after a few months of working out of coffee shops and being alone all the time I was starting to go nutty.

It's just the lead-in to your decision sounds so… morose, and we're all capable individuals here who should find ways to not be morose. I don't know, maybe I mis-read your tone.
I work at a .NET shop right now and they have multiple major components written in WPF. I've seen WPF listed as a req in several local job listings. So, now you at least know of someone "doing" WPF.

One of my longer-term goals is to move us to a stack that's entirely Mono-compatible, but that will take a while. The whole company runs on WPF.
Then what does Microhaus get in return? Basically, how are you planning on keeping this thing afloat?
But it was the primary, endorsed way for several years. WinForms was deprecated, and WPF was the new thing you were supposed to use.
I posted about it 2 months back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5388095
Even if you buy a cheap plane ticket from Ryanair, you’re allowed to complain if only one of the two engines work.
CrunchBang is great and can be summed up in a few words:
Tidy, clean, works.

End of. :)
If you want to spread philosophy XYZ in the business world, you have to prove that it can make money. The reason we originally shifted from 60 hour weeks to 40 hour weeks was nothing moralistic, it was because Ford found that 40 hour weeks were more profitable than 60 hour weeks.

Now as a rule, programmers generally are good at execution but tend to execute on problems no one cares about. The #1 cause of startup failure is not failure to execute-it's good execution on a problem that nobody cares about.

That's why non-technical VPs earn so much. It's because the skill of picking great problems and managing people is massively valuable. If it weren't, then all the companies that emphasized market over technology would go bankrupt, and companies that emphasized technology over market would succeed.

Now, someone who can understand what people want and understand what's possible with technology is significantly more valuable than someone with either individual skill. That's because they can combine what's valuable and what's just become possible. This is a rare combination-Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are two people who've executed this really well.

My personal plan is to learn this combination of skills and drive technology that's both extremely valuable and at the very edge of what's possible. We'll see how far I get.