skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Any article stating one trait as being most important for anything is probably being hyperbolically reductive, but in this case it's particularly painful because "judgement" is absolutely meaningless. Every single thing every person does requires judgement, and if you don't have it you'll probably get hit by a bus before you have a chance to get a job.

What this article is really arguing against are early-adopter developers who chase every new fad for its own sake and prioritize their own amusement over the best solution at hand. But this says about how good the developer is, only how good their actual contribution to your company will be relative to their potential. A shit developer can do their best but it still won't measure up to a great developer's trend-chasing effort.

Now even assuming some base level of competence, there are many different mindsets and personalities that lend themselves to different types of programming. I could go on and on about specific skills but we're mostly programmers here so I'll just hint at it: debugging skills, low-level skills, architecture skills, analyst (business requirements) skills, hci skills, modeling skills, clairvoyance, luck. All of these things have varying degrees of importance depending on the job and team at hand, and some combination of them will make someone the best developer for some specific job.

But if you find my answer too wishy-washy and you want specifics about what makes a great developer I'll boil it down to two things. First, to achieve competence as a developer, one needs have the tenacity and logical thinking to debug any issue no matter how arcane. Second, to achieve greatness one needs to be able to comprehend the entire problem space in such a way as to account for many more factors than an average developer let alone a non-technical person could ever hold in their head at once, and have the ability to translate those constraints into a system which is at once easier to understand and more elegant than the vast majority of competing solutions.
Microsoft isn't abandoning the mobile war anytime soon. Too many things depend on it: in particular, its burgeoning media business that grew out of XBox Live (which is successful for a lot more than just games these days). Microsoft recognizes that, to preserve the its position in what people once called "the war for the living room," it needs to fight for the territory outside the living room.

Windows Phone may or may not have a shot in hell, and things don't look good in the short term. But finding success somewhere in mobile is a strategic imperative for the company.

Doing that through a hardware acquisition seems strange. And to Ben's point, this is a particularly weird "Why buy the cow?" scenario, given the preexisting partnership that served roughly the same purpose.

We'll see what Microsoft is thinking, but I'm scratching my head. Consumers are fickle, to your point, but en masse, they're also creatures of convenience. Android and/or iOS seem like mighty convenient platforms right now, from a consumer's POV.
MySQL can easily scale to well beyond the "500 users" unless each of those users puts an especially heavy burden on the data store. The scenario at hand is synchronizing recipes and that is not a heavy burden.

Further, with a high-performance web framework, foregoing resilience (not recommended, but just for argument's sake) a single web-application instance should be able to handle a much larger number of users as well.

But all of this isn't really relevant to the point made by the OP. He's just using these fictional data points as an illustration. Although I am personally in favor of using examples that are more representative of reality, I think we can mostly ignore the fictional data points to appreciate his point.
http://www.linqpad.net/WhyLINQBeatsSQL.aspx
Why Sorted Array Are Processed Faster Than Unsorted Array?
Who are you to decide what's best for Syrian and Lybian people, in all seriousness?
> Why was -- in this contrived scenario -- Jack's solution a "maintenance nightmare"? Just because.

> The result was a combination of Google Protocol Buffers, node.js, and Cassandra. Elegant, scalable, and totally unmaintainable.

If I can venture a guess, Jack went ahead (without asking further questions, as opposed to Dianne) and took what was very hot at that time.

2 years ago, Node.js was extremely hot, in a sense that it was the new thing that somehow combined the hot javascript and made something easier. I remember my collegate excitedly talking about the amazing serverside javascript.

I don't know about Google Protocol Buffers and Cassandra but I assume they were what the author had in mind as 'very-hot-but-not-widely-used-yet', and most technology that fits such description generally falls into 'not-reliably-stable' and 'not-many-resources-yet' category.

Think how you would do Java EE without help of Javadoc.
What are you referring to with audio there? The current trend for colour vinyl pressings of music made on laptops?
Remind me: which company has just been sold for peanuts after trying the WP strategy?
And everyone thought XBox would be a consistent failure whereas the series ending up pioneering a lot of network service stuff and being well considered now.
Congrats! What a shame that you're off to the states :(
(Smiles) Ah, memories of high school in 1985: writing an Apple II program to find the odds of landing on each Monopoly property, a bit surprised that (IIRC) the orange & green blocks were visited with unusual frequency.

Was thinking of a similar analysis last week when playing a simplified "kids'" version of Monopoly.
Surely the Apple Store would set up the new phone with his existing Apple ID, though? Even if they didn't, most people only have one e-mail address (that they know of?) and so will be forced into using the same account again whether they like it or not.
I have to applaud anybody who can just take an arbitrary hour of their life and earn $31.25.

Most people I know earn about half of that (after taxes), and only during work hours. Outside of work hours, we get nothing. Sure, I could freelance or get a second job (which I neither want nor need), but there is no option with a one-hour granularity.

If I decide to build a Hackintosh, there is no other equivalent thing I could be doing that gives me $1000. It goes off my free time. I don't loose money, but I do loose free time in which I could be doing other nice things instead. Of course, maybe it's a fun experience, so it's not even a waste of time.
I say again: good luck with that.

You're going to have lots of fun losing 25% of your customers (more or less depending on regional IE usage), many of them companies with oodles of cash. Heck, here IE usage is 14% while Firefox is 31% and Chrome 47%, according to StatCounter. Not as bad as the US, but still a huge piece of the pie.

Sure, it makes technical sense - IE sucks (well IE 9 and 10 are much better, but still).

It makes NEGATIVE NINE THOUSAND business sense - you've got to be crazy to refuse to support IE 8+.
WP is perfectly capable of going away by its own feet, nobody needs to help.
Olympic and X Games Skiers Seek to Crowdfund Mobile App
I think the author has the order wrong. Consider:

SELECT WEEKDAY(created_at) wkday, COUNT(1)
FROM orders
GROUP BY wkday

The above query works fine, thus GROUP BY, ORDER BY, and HAVING are all aware of SELECT.
Thank you for the kind words, as a foreigner I try hard to fit in! :)

I've been around here since 2001 and from what I've read, the blairites were the ones responsible for big changes at the BBC in particular. The topic had been raised and policies had been half-heartedly implemented before, but they were finally enshrined after Blair came to power.

Same goes for the Scottish influence in civil service and ministerial appointments, as far as I understand, although it could be argued that it's just balancing out the Tories' penchant for English-English personalities (probably because they hardly elected anyone out of Scotland since the Thatcher years).

(btw, sorry if this sounds anti-Labour; as a proto-Bennite, I probably resent the careerist attitude of most NewLabourites more than I should -- Benn fought hard to get rid of his titles, and now we're supposed to be led by Lord Prezza... -- and their horrible treatment of Gordon Brown is still too fresh).
That's not exactly correct. Amazon, for example, is free to use whatever location services they want, since they use an Android-based system that uses no part of the Google ecosystem.

So if you want Google Play and everything else Google in your device, you have to take Google's location services, too. That may not be unreasonable.
Does this still apply for an early stage startup, in particular for early employees trying to value stock options, or would you use something else?
I wonder if it's the last present Ballmer left to whoever succeeds him, or the last spat.
Yeah, I agree with you: 'just because' .. the author of the article doesn't know anything about protocol buffers, node.js and Cassandra. Probably because those things are 'too new' and 'not proven' technologies - to him.

But if I had to take over a project from someone, to maintain it, I'd MUCH RATHER have it be done using those technologies than MySQL and Sinatra. Yikes!

I recently had to make a bid on a project that would give the users the ability to share their works, produced in an embedded environment, with their communities - a "Cloud" for the users. I designed the system architecture of the embedded system to be as self-maintainable as possible, and as simple as possible. Since its an embedded OS environment that the users would be using, instead of writing code I integrated such tools as git, and designed a system topology that would allow the user to be shielded from all the git hassle, while still getting a push-button experience.

I lost the gig to someone who decided that it would be better to re-invent "topography ordering" (his words) in a custom MySQL+PHP application, and when I was given an opportunity to challenge his design, I said "great, you're going to re-invent Git, poorly".

He spent the rest of the day "pissed that you compared his project to .. GitHub", which is what he thought I meant when I said "git". Nope, I said "git", I mean "git" - not 'github'. He actually didn't know how to use git.

Either way, off they go .. re-inventing the DAG with MySQL+PHP in an embedded environment, when they could've just wrapped the feature in a git script ... yikes++!

So this article just demonstrates to me that there are a lot of blow-hards out there who just don't get why its so important to apply the NIH principle to themselves, not just others ..
"quickly write amazingly elegant code and manage complexity"

No... the number one trait of a great developer is to reduce complexity in systems to a maintainable and cost efficient state.

Any developer that introduces complexity such as introducing tech stacks that no one else on the team comprehends is not "great" no matter how elegant their code. They are a liability to the employer.

Unless, of course, that developer is self employed and is developing a solution for themselves. But that isn't what the article was about.
This news may sound exciting/disappointing to the developed countries, but it is certainly extremely disappointing for people in third-world countries, especially India.

It is not at all hyperbole to say 'Nokia played a key role in India's mobile penetration'. They sell affordable, reliable and rigid phones for rough use in rural places of India. And I think it's true for most other countries like Africa. On the other hand Microsoft mostly makes premium software and hardware. I don't know any affordable tool(w.r.t developing countries) from Microsoft. This may put Microsoft in a better position in terms of smartphone. But in other terms this may be a step towards 'diminishing power of poor people'.
Personally, as a dev, I push myself a little with each new project. I've been using Sinatra for all my web projects, with this latest one I took the jump to Rails. Otherwise the project fell squarely within my realm of knowledge, as a previous project showed me how the Facebook API works.

The time before that I tried to incorporate good OO style.

Next time I think I want to incorporate testing. Or maybe I won't feel that the next one is the right time to incorporate it, and instead I'll pick up a new Javascript library.

As devs, we have a remarkable ability to shape a project by choosing which technologies to use. So long as we exercise good judgment, we can learn new things on the job and not have to bet the farm.

As for MySQL / PostgreSQL, that decision probably didn't matter all that much for the given problem. Abstracted over with Sequel, they're pretty much interchangeable until you get to heavy, industrial-scale use. A lot of people can go an entire career without needing to figure out the use case for each.
> So after these revelations of a foreign government spying, the idea is to trust email to the national government?

I changed your statement. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to trust the local government over a foreign country's government. Of course, you could see this as a sign as "all governments are rotten".
I love the way you choose your niche. There is a very large number of niches to be had by combining two or more things you know well and that have paying markets.
I do not disagree with you. It is all relative and the most important thing is to know what your core business is. Using a car analogy, car salesmen and engineers both need to have technical knowledge of the cars they work with. One focuses on selling cars and the other making the cars. I think too often start-ups are not too clear on their core business. Engineers know the cars better than the salesmen but does that make engineers better equipped to sell cars?
Though many people think it still hasn't earned back the $20-odd billion investment that's been put into it, which makes it a failure by many definitions.
"God Bless You, Mr Rosewater" is one of the most underrated books of all time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Bless_You,_Mr._Rosewater

Of course, "Sirens of Titan" is the other great one.
EDIT: What I wrote here is entirely wrong. I misread the use of 'sorted', and that colored my interpretation of the paragraph. My apologies.

"Well, this is due to something called as Branch Prediction. Branch Prediction is a strategy used in processors to decide if the branch would be taken or not."

Emphatically false. Python's sort is based on timsort. Timsort makes the observation that most real-world lists are partially sorted; either forward or reverse. This can help sorting go faster. The observed timing difference is nearly all to do with that, and not with branch prediction.

Consider the Shell sort. It's O(n*n) for an unsorted list and O(n) for a sorted list. Again, nothing to do with branch prediction and everything to do with how well the data fits the algorithm's expectations.
It seems that this article doesn't really separate between user concerns (having the latest google apps) and developper concerns (access to latest APIs).

From what I understand, this means developpers will be able to rely on android "services" being updated more often and more consistently available.

However, what about things like using new UI components ? For this, you still need the latest OS version, right ? If that's the case, then maybe this would mean users caring even LESS about updating their OS, and thus an even worst situation.

i suppose Google thought about it, so there's probably something false in my statement, could anyone confirm ?
Shapeless 2.0.0 M1 generic programming library for Scala released
Why the hate? I too used to make my own prints, not at home since we didn't have the equipment or a spare room that could be darken, but at school.

I still have lots of paper from that time -- certainly useless by now.

I think this is kind of cool though; the big difference with a real film camera is that you get to do it picture by picture.

On a film camera you have to expose a whole roll of film, then process it, then go back and see what shot you want to develop (which is not easy if you only have the film; I used to order small prints to help me choose which pictures I wanted to print myself).

With this, you can go ahead and print the picture you just took.

Will the quality be a little crappy? Probably. But it's a toy! What's wrong with toys? Would you complain that your kid's toy car doesn't have a real gas-powered engine?
Speaking through my hat here, having read nothing about the deal. But is this the hiring of the new CEO? Sort of like Apple buying NeXT to bring back Jobs?
Why does this obnoxious website hide my scroll bar? I've absolutely no idea how long the article is without it.
Congratulations as all have said, and also some excitement, as this seems like a well-matched pair of services. I am very optimistic for the outcome of this acquisition/collaboration. Best of luck to all involved!
Warm congrats!
Great news for Lanyrd and Eventbrite, hope they can use the Lanyrd team to fix their horrendous platform! So much potential.
It took me like a year to really understand how everything works and come to this version (it was 4 years ago). I really learned C/C++ (and some assembly) with doing this, so I wasn't really good at C++ before (and if you take a look at the code, you'll see that it's not really pretty).

(Sorry for my english, I'm french)
Ah, I see. Well, the broad strokes are definitely applicable and if you can find substitutes for the gems that I use (in particular, a background worker system, automatic state machine semantics for models, and a way to keep an audit trail) then the code examples will probably be at least understandable and sort of useful.
I don't think it's right to count Windows Phone separately from Microsoft's previous mobile phone offerings. Even if it was a major change from before, it was still part of the lineage.

If you count it that way, Microsoft has been in the mobile phone OS business for well over a decade and they still have essentially no traction. They had traction back when the smartphone market was tiny, but they didn't expand with the market once Apple and Google blew it open.

If Google were still struggling to get traction with their search engine in 2010, I think it would be quite fair to say that Yahoo or whoever had won and maybe they should give it up.
> Why was -- in this contrived scenario -- Jack's solution a "maintenance nightmare"? Just because.

Because apparently the author didn't have the necessary skills to maintain it. Cassandra isn't easy to master, especially if you only have cheapo developers who are reluctant to switch to PostgreSQL from MySQL.

But yes, it's a highly opinionated, narrow-minded piece.
Bitcoin in India: Drivers and Barriers to Adoption
Interesting that you say selling things isn't skilled work - when you need to know how to get payments, where to list, how best to list, how to deal with purchasers, what the best way to take payment is, figuring out shipping and packaging. These things are skills, and once you know them, sure, it's easy... but you still had to learn those skills.

While I think it's less time overall to resell than build, for sure, I also think you're stacking the deck by handwaving away the time and skills involved in reselling.
Imagining the iWatch
I've not tried to, but Android surfaces an option to disable Play Services.
Thanks, I started already playing around with Facebook ads a while ago and I really do like it but I noticed that some of the users do create accounts they don't interact too much with the site or visit just one page. Of course this could be also a problem with the site and not the traffic. Since the tests I did a while ago I have improved the site a lot and I will start soon testing this more heavily again.
I built a computer last spring with Windows 7, and needed drivers for video, USB and audio. Video worked, but was slow in games until I installed the official drivers. Needed the sound drivers for the front panel jacks to work, and the USB drivers for the front panel USB ports, the USB 3.0 port, and the "fast-charging" function of the mainboard to work.

It was easier than setting up OS X, but not by far.
Lucky you. Investment banking compliance software here. IE8 and little else every-'king-were...

If I ever win the lottery I'm taking out full page ads in the national newspapers asking the general public if they know how stupidly out of date certain banks are internally and asking it it fills them with confidence or not!
Thanks for checking out Shyahi.

The name is Hindi translation for Ink. Sorry for the bug, we just rolled out some updates and it should be fixed now. Let me know if you still face some issues.
Etymology of Foo
I tend to switch back and forth between Vim and Emacs and am curious. What causes the hate in your relationship with Vim?
A major difference there is that the Xbox was a success in the market.
Here's a problem for you, fellow algorithmists: http://projecteuler.net/problem=84
I dropped my Nexus 4 from the window ledge, it bounced off the arm of a leather couch, and hit the carpeted floor. The screen broke near the bottom (so the phone is still somewhat usable). Compare that to the Lumia 920, which is classic Nokia quality. I dropped that without a case down a flight of tile stairs, and it only slightly scratched the plastic on the back of the phone.

I've linked (months ago) Youtube videos of people trying to destroy a Lumia 920. One man used the screen to pound a nail into a piece of wood, tossed it across a parking lot, drove over it with his car, and only got it to break when he threw it screen-first into a concrete wall. It's still a smartphone with the downsides of a giant piece of glass, but it's got the benefit of a solid and shock-absorbing chunk of plastic surrounding it. You can't get it wet, but you don't have to worry about it falling.

The Nokias might be thicker and bulkier than an iPhone, but an iPhone needs a thick and heavy case. The Lumia doesn't.
Carnegie Robotics -- Pittsburgh, PA -- Local -- Full Time -- US persons only

We are a 3 year-old spin-out of Carnegie Mellon and have 25 employees. Most employees are seasoned hardware and software engineers and we push hard. Some of our work is related to landmine/IED detection robots, other work is related to smart sensors (cameras, lasers and various combinations). We have both research projects in a variety of robotic sensor areas as well as production efforts underway.

One of our sensors was recently selected to be the sensor head for the upcoming DARPA Robotics Challenge (http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/darpa-...)

We are hiring for the following roles, each includes a brief description of the work you would be doing:

Junior Mechanical Engineer
- Mentored by our senior mechanical engineers
- Lots of CAD work (SolidWorks) and designing everything from rugged housings to drivetrains to test fixtures.
- Lots of 3 axis and 5 axis machined part design. Some weldment and sheet metal parts design.
- Assist with testing of mechanical components

Embedded Software (junior or senior)
- Work on low level control loops for hardware
- Perception & planning logic
- We have software on everything from Atmel microcontrollers to Atom based computers to rugged i7 computers to GPUs to FPGAs

FPGA Programmer
- Accelerate our smart sensor development efforts
- Bring new stereo and computer vision algorithms to FPGAs inside our existing and upcoming products

System Electrical Engineer
- Design control, data, & power infrastructure inside our large payloads and platforms
- Design test rigs and breadboards for products under development and for production acceptance testing

Please contact my username @carnegierobotics.com
Only a few sales from this post thus far today. I have gotten a few inquiries about consulting but I haven't had any available bandwidth to take them on. The mailing list stands right now at a little over 300.

There's a signup button at the bottom of the sales landing page, but you're right it should definitely be on the blog post too. I'll fix that shortly.