skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This! Linked lists / trees are great in applicable use cases, I think the author or the article just being an attention whore... to be fair I haven't actually needed to use binary trees or linked lists in ages...
Based on the disruptor paper (http://disruptor.googlecode.com/files/Disruptor-1.0.pdf) linked lists make poor queues also. Ring buffers backed by arrays are much better.
Just a bogus claim by a troll. Nothing to see here move on.
If you worked on the editorial team, it was a death spiral for you even if the rest of Tumblr went on to a big exit. (And off-topic, but: I bet those folks who used to work on the editorial team are cheesed they got canned right before the big payday.)

I have no knowledge of Tumblr's internal workings, but I would bet if you talked to the folks who used to be on that editorial team they'd have stories of their own budget being squeezed in trivial ways before the layoff. Laying people off is hard, managers don't like to do it, so they almost always look for other ways to save money before biting the bullet and canning people. And when management decides that a particular division isn't critical to the overall business, it's typical for the bean-counters to be unleashed on that division to look for "economies" that other divisions more beloved by management don't have to bear.
In a way, it's also no different from displaying comments based on how many people like it....
Thank you for being the adult in this thread. +1
This is akin to saying "Don't use text! Binary data is always more efficient!" Or "Never use uncompressed data storage!"

The reality is linked lists are a tool. They can be used well or they can be used poorly. Just because there are disadvantages doesn't mean they should never be used.

Very link-baity article.
I think he would say he hasn't failed at his ventures because he's so tirelessly engaged with his users.
Yeah, I worked at a small company where someone was taking boxes of snacks home. It's quite noticeable and managers can't keep up with that, nor can they really guard it.
Another Group Chat?
Yahoo! Ireland used to have free fruits, at least around 2006/2007.

I'm with you about the sodas. They are free at my work (with a loose rule of one per employee per day) and I always say to my fellow colleagues that it's terrible, sugar sugar sugar.
I'm very comfortable using CakePHP. I've built many apps using knockout.js on top of it, extensively used jQuery and AJAX throughout and have used both MySQL and MongoDB to drive the data.

For someone like me who is confident in their abilities of another MVC framework, how much of a learning curve is involved transitioning over to ROR (or any other MVC for that matter)? Has anyone switched from say Django, CakePHP or MVC4 over to Rails, or vice versa?
> Even Microsoft isn't going to go around writing HR nonsense about the occasional soda taken home.

Well, if they're spending millions on it in general then many employees taking 1 or 2 home every day is actually probably a much greater financial 'burden' on them than a handful of employees taking entire flats every now and then.

And you also don't tend to put up signs like that unless your goal is to change everyone's behaviour.
Best article on the issue yet. Listening to McCain deliver his "speech" during the hearing was particularly painful. He is such a failed has-been that he needs to just shut up.

I'm glad Apple is skirting taxes, wherever it can. Tax competition is a good thing.
I understand what you're saying, I simply disagree with you. Typography is the most important design decision that a content site makes. Leaving something that fundamental to the browser simply strikes me as an exceedingly poor choice.

(One minor point — type is much more than just font-family, as your second paragraph seems to assume.)
This is so weird that it has to work. My first reaction was that it was dumb and no-one would do it, but this is exactly the first reaction to most things that turned out to be success. I definitely wish you all the best.
Plus I see you are focused on Europe, which is probably place where good cuisine is highly valued.
Does anyone else skip links like Quora simply because they don't want to setup an account to have to read a simple text blurb?
You spoke my mind. Especially the CPU usage bit, I can't wait for Apple to pull the iOS-style multitasking into OS X.
Apparently they do this because they do their own QA/testing. It's pretty sad that they are charging users $50/year and then charging developers $10,000+ for patches. Isn't the subscription supposed to pay for the infrastructure? I can understand MS wanting to protect their baby, but the walls on the garden are so high they keep light out.

Valve wasn't having any of that pay per update deal and that's why TF2 on the 360 hasn't had anywhere near the number of updates as on PC.

MS has done a lot to hurt not just indie developers, but first party (Bungie) developers as well. Remember that ordeal with MS forcing them to release Halo 3 before it was ready and then the whole team threatened to quit?

It's sad that they've taken a digital distribution system like Xbox Live and turned it into a cash cow on both ends. They're stifling not only innovation, but regular development processes, with their blind profiteering.
This. I had the exact same idea (although locally oriented) about a year ago, but then I found out that all places that serve food commercially in the Netherlands require that someone on the staff is in possession of a "Social Hygiene Diploma"[1] and the health services would shut down basically anyone who attempted to do this.

I hope you guys do well, I think there's a lot of social value in this concept. Food can bring people together in special ways.

[1] http://www.sho-horeca.nl/cursussen/spoedcursus-sociale-hygie...
Steve Jobs emails that show how to win a negotiation
What kind of resources are you using currently on Heroku?

Is infrastructure a noteworthy portion of your spending? (10-20%+?)

Either way, cool concept, I'd definitely consider using it.
Without wishing to flame, it's based on 12 years of professional experience working in the games industry. I could lend reason to AI, however I stand by my comment with regards to rendering and physics.
The deeper problem is companies change. You can't have the same organization, culture, environment at 10, 100, 1000. You really can't. Laws change. The CEO no longer has time to talk to everyone. Structure must be applied or company becomes unmanageable mess.

The lesson is you will loose waves of talent at certain transition points. This can't be helped (other than by not growing). Leaders need to be aware and plan for this.
Soda is symbolic for free perks. Free water, free tea, free snacks, free cabs, free dinner, etc.
More: "Linked lists are much, much slower than you think they are and should not be used in performance-sensitive code." That fact isn't remotely obvious to most hackers, and simply brushing it aside as an area where linked lists are "wrong" is missing important details.
Agreed. Lip reading via the camera would be much nicer to use (although probably an order of magnitude more difficult). :)
Just a terrible article.

"Arial and Helvetica are the default font stack for most browsers and for most of the websites. That's bad, really really bad. Arial and Helvetica suck on web and for paragraphs of text - they are quiet *(sic)* unreadable (as compared to many other typefaces created specifically for web). And Helvetica looks ugly without proper kerning and Arial is just an ugly bastard son of Helvetica."

This is wildly ignorant linkbait. Whether or not Arial is a rip-off of Helvetica or not is irrelevant to his argument. They're both excellent body fonts, and the versions on your computer have had countless man hours spent on hinting them perfectly for the screen.

"Helvetica Neue was recreated for web."

Nope. It was created in 1983, as a more consistent type family. [1]

Okay, this bit is brilliant in it's ignorance:

**"So Why do People Use Them?"**
"Prevalent reason is ignorance. People just don't care/know about design - let alone typography."

This is jaw-droppingly misinformed. They're beautifully neutral typefaces that work very well across tons of different situations. There's a reason that font-family: 'sans-serif' defaults to Arial and Helvetica. To suggest that someone building a website doesn't make a conscious decision about one of the most important choices in their design is highly unlikely

"Second reason, which makes most sense, is availability[1]. Arial is available almost everywhere (~99% Macs and Windows machines have it)."

Now this is the one spot-on point. This has classically been a very, very good reason to use one of the canonical web-safe fonts.

"Safe bet and cross-platform compatibility - Arial was created in image of Helvetica. They are very much same in terms of x-height and other measurements. So they are the safest thing to do! Different x-height can break your layout! It's easy to work with defaults no matter how bad they are."

I suppose that's dependant on your design, but it shouldn't be so reliant on x-height as to actually break it. If you're using a custom font, you should really make sure you have a web-safe font in your font stack, and that your site works well with it.

"They like it. (Gulp!) Well however much I'd like to say "to each; his own" - still there are good things from mad. Justin Bieber can never be compared to Tony Bennett - he is just not that good technically no matter what poplar taste is. Arial is shit and Helvetica hardly works as good on web."

Well, I suppose there's no accounting for taste.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Neue_Helvetica_.28198...
I'm honestly quite surprised given how important independent games have been for iOS and Android.

I was honestly expecting both players to provide app stores where developers could submit applications, whether games or not, possibly giving them an advantage over the other platform by having more apps, better development tools, etc.
They really should be taxed in the US, too. They are compensation.

The IRS has a guideline that says (not exact words) "if it's too petty to keep track of, like someone using the Xerox machine for personal use, don't worry about it." Free cans of soda probably fall in that petty category.
While I might generally agree that the interview process is asinine and a rat race, I actually use some of those formal methods and algorithms in my day-to-day work--and I'm not even a computer scientist, nor do I have a CS degree.

I'll bet things are different in the startup world, but I've encountered several instances where having a very crude understanding of time complexity served me well. Hashing has been an especially powerful tool in my work, where the size of the data I work with really highlights the difference between an O(n) operation and an O(1) operation.

I would consider the interviewer asking questions about algorithms to be a sort of Fizz Buzz for the more technical positions. Perhaps it is misapplied to be asking technicalities of algorithm questions to people that will be doing more design-oriented work, just as it may be inappropriate to ask your sales force applicants to write programs during their interviews.

That said, most of the interviews I've conducted would not have been able to discriminate well the qualities that I believe make a great programmer. A focus on code longevity, discipline in conducting code review, dedication in writing unit tests, and how they search for information they don't know the answer to are important qualities that a technical interview will largely be unable to see.
This comment probably isn't helping with our Google 'Did you mean?' problem ;)
Data People
Cartoon Disaster Aid
It's a long jump from "This has all the hassles of traditional physical distribution and then some new hassles you just invented" to "You should just let us pirate this."

When people talk about wanting to revolutionize distribution, they mean take advantage of all the efficiency and convenience technology enables. Some would just like to pirate everything, but not everyone. No one means they want to find ways to tweak traditional distribution models to make them even worse.
Disney’s Aireal: A tactile feedback device to enhance the gaming experience
Why is Rails not fully supporting writing evented code out out the box
After Node.js came out, it was the one thing that popularized evented programming. But, ruby does have EventMachine which supports writing evented code.

The requirements for supporting eventing in rails are:

1. Evented server (thin, rainbows) which runs a reactor
2. Fibers (Ruby 1.9.3) in order to make writing evented code easier, else we could have used threads.
3. All gems evented (example mysql2).

Nodejs showed the obvious benefits of evented programming. So why is the rails community adopting eventmachine? I think one of the reasons rails is not fully portable to eventmachine is because of the dependency on underlying gems which may not be evented. But does anyone know if there is a plan to make a move in that direction?

It is not like Rails cannot do what Nodejs does, but Nodejs started out by enforcing evented programming on all the library makers, so by default any dependency that you add to package.json in node, you know that it will be evented and will work with nodejs out of the box.
This is awesome ! What are your plans about expanding abroad ?
I knew people at MSFT who would take dozens of cans the free soda and beverage fridges to fuel their at-home weekend parties.

This was over ten years ago now, I have no idea what the state of soda smuggling is today.
So, exist a list of wich structures are better for the main use cases? ie, a simple "cheat list" or something like that? Because the norm, I think, for the naive developer is use the main one offered by the language (ie: in python, list, dicts).
Looks pretty nice, I just miss a 'cursor:pointer' in the 'contact the host' button.
My understanding was that many of the claims of threshold effects at least partially stemmed from the imprecision of many tests, even at the 1.5-2 sigma levels.

Would you be able to send me some more info? Email's in my profile.
I'm almost certain my tests I did a few years ago were valid, when attempting to push, pop and sort array vs linked list. Would be nice if there were so numbers, examples, etc.
Kinect for Windows
I wonder what the fraction of such people is, in an average company.

I've encountered people before whose feeling is "if there's no written rule against it, I'm entitled to do it." Is the best solution to the "soda problem" just to fire those people and be done with it? I'm sure they take liberties with more than just sodas.
The Importance of Setting Goals
That's quite ridiculous; iOS style multitasking is severely crippled.

XNU does multitasking fine already; there's no need to screw it up. If you're sick of Safari's memory and CPU usage, just switch to a different browser, but to say something as absurd as wanting task-switching on a desktop OS just for the sake of CPU cycles is short-sighted and a prime reason for the fall of productivity and change for the sake of change.
I worked at a large consulting firm that went public a while back. As part of that process, they took away the candy bowls from the front office. Fast forward a few years after going public, benefits are cut to the bone. Vacation has been slashed in half.

Cutting costs (especially silly ones) is often a sucker's way to profitability. When people cut costs, they like to think they're being analytical. They often end up ignoring some indirect costs. A better model would include the expected cost in efficiency and human resources via departures and low morale.
That's why you use a growth factor, say doubling the backing array when you need to grow. That makes the amortized cost of adding an item constant.

The only case where a LL may be preferable are when you care about performance of inserting/deleting in the middle of a list.
They're bad in the same way arrays are bad and "should never be used": appends often require reallocating the entire array, and are thus O(n) (although the reallocs are usually better on average.)
When the EU region was announced[1] last month they weren't Safe Harbor compliant (yet). Has that changed?

[1] https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/4/24/europe-region (near the bottom).
Back in the original dot-com bubble, I worked at a place that, when it was time to flame out, flamed out so fast that management didn't even have time to empty out the break room.

I think seeking to understand the financial state of a company is smart for both employees and consultants, but the assumption that "upgraded beverage selection" unequivocally equates to "doing well" is naive.

Frankly, in my experience, a young company adding a bunch of perks is just as likely to be living beyond its means as it is to be doing very well financially, but that doesn't really matter. As a consultant, you don't mitigate the risk of not getting paid by asking about the soft drink selection or looking at the lunch menu. You mitigate risk by diversifying your client base, negotiating favorable payment terms and watching receivables like a hawk. All things you should be doing anyway regardless of the client or the state of the client's break room.
The alloy he used is essentially identical to that used for dental implants (Ti6Al4V ELI, where the ELI means very low purity limits on iron, C & O interstitials). Interesting that you bring up the coolant -- using tungsten carbide water cooled burs (bog standard dental stuff), this titanium alloy cuts very easily. By contrast, chrome cobalt (the stuff we make partial denture frameworks from), is harder than hell.
It can be cost effective if there is currently no way to fully monetize the full productivity of the team, and the company is trying to survive without lay-offs.

The only issue is that if you have a valuable workforce that has the option to leave instead of desperately needing the job, you need everyone's buy-in, or at least full understanding of the circumstances.

Apparently that hasn't been done, which is incredibly stupid, especially in such a relatively small company, but not uncommon.

A simple alternative would be to let one programmer go, and start hiring again when business picks up. However, once you go down that road, it's a lot harder to rebuild the team again. With that as the alternative, it shouldn't be too hard to sell, at least not in the short term.
> We do not want to have a society where an elite, educated aristocracy rules over an uneducated serf class.

True, the serf class needs to be educated.

[edit]

...and I guess an uneducated aristocracy as well.

Grouping people by age during their developmental years is a great way to stunt some people and leaves others hopelessly behind.

[/edit]
> Leaving something that fundamental to the browser simply strikes me as an exceedingly poor choice.

...But that's the point of the WWW. You don't know what resolution or browser or OS the user has. You don't know if they even have a screen.

I know I lost this argument sometime in 2004, but it'd be nice if people stopped trying to control where everything goes.
DRM can't be implemented in FOSS because the ability to modify the software (and use the modified version) makes it possible to circumvent DRM restrictions (eg, insert some code to save the content after it is decoded).

DRM always implies restricting user control over their own computers.
"This is just semantics,"

Yes, it is. That entire paragraph was... less than useful.

"Yes, Haskell supports dynamic typing."

Yes, it does, but not with any of the features you've discussed. It supports it with Data.Dynamic. Type holes are still as I described; they are not a way to escape the type system or make it compile something that does not have some sort of concrete type, they are a way of asking the compiler what type it thinks goes somewhere. Here, the first hit for "ghc type holes": http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/GHC/TypeHoles

"This is the purpose of a hole: it has similar semantics to undefined, in that evaluating it is an error (you can replace all holes with undefined, and vice versa, and nothing has changed: you may even say undefined is just a really crappy, useless hole!) But it's special in that when GHC encounters a hole during compilation it will tell you what type needs to be there in place of the hole, for the type-checker to be OK with the definition."

This is not dynamic typing. It may superficially look like it if you just gloss over the definition, but if you really understand it that's not what it is. There is still some sort of concrete answer (concrete to the type system, for which constraints aren't that big a deal).

I return fire: I suspect you don't understand how Haskell type inference works, since you're making false claims about these features.
I think that's a factor of people being assholes. I've worked in places large and small, public and private sectors.

There's always an idiot who will do something that ruins things for others. In one case I was exposed to, it was an attorney making north of $150k stealing change from people's desks, and trying to frame the cleaning crew. In another, it was a person taking advantage of time & attendance rules. In another, it was a guy pilfering silverware from the lunchroom.
Site looks to be down at the moment.

Here is the same article:
http://mises.org/daily/6435/A-Virtual-Weimar-Hyperinflation-...
Differentiation and it’s role in Competitive Advantage
Nintendo is also working hard to court indie developers. That crowdfunding spoof was to attract attention to their developer portal.

(well, family-friendly indies at least. Don't expect to see Hotline Miami on WiiU any time soon)
I'm convinced he makes what is at the very least an articulated argument for the first (but never specifically attempts the second) - although I'm forced to use capstone statements here. He specifically says:

> There is no unified Google that is “good” or “evil”. There is just an organizational clusterfuck that is unable to decide what it thinks is truly the best way to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”5. Is that by forcing web authors into a social network in order to improve directory results? Is that by dipping a toe into the music business? Is that by abandoning standards like RSS and XMPP/Jabber? I don’t think so.

and

> Google is not “evil”. Google is too big to be evil. At its worst, Google is banal.
You might want to take a look at the graph (scroll down a little) in this article that is linked in the blog post:

http://kjellkod.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/why-you-should-neve...

It's not just growing the collection (it does read and insert), but it may be a bit surprising.
this broke on me multiple times.
Did it get you contacts that benefitted you at a later stage?
I switched from Django to Cake to ROR.
There isn't much difference structurally, as all of them are after all MVC architecture, but there are little subtle things which bring about the difference in feel and usability.
Cake is heavily inspired from Rails but it doesn't focus much on command line as Rails does. For any common command you have which will add files, there is a command to in Rails to bring about that change and generate ALL THE RECOMMENDED files at once. These include test files, migrations, css, js, helpers etc. This makes life much much easier.
Plus, ruby feels much pleasant when compared to PHP and thus, you won't regret switching to here. It'll take 2 days to be able to create a workable app. Although you'll find a new concept in Coffee script (Which is basically using ruby syntax for JavaScript), but you can easily switch back to JS if you want by removing the extension.
Come over to the dark side, you'll love it.
In that case, do it. That's exactly what I did to learn Ruby. I came from php and have never looked back. I suggest using Rails on top of Ruby.
Care to respond to this complaint?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5751928