skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
QWERTY is deeply, gut-wrenchingly broken. (Kind of like British electric outlets, or Christian death metal.)

However, just switching keyboard layouts doesn't fix things. I once switched to Colemak for a couple of months. My hands felt better, and typing on my own machine was way more comfortable. But every other keyboard I interacted with made me look like a dude twice my age with some kind of senility disorder.

To really get the benefits of a better layout, you have to not switch, but rather add a new keyboard fluency, while maintaining QWERTY proficiency. That made the cost-benefit equation very different for me... and I went crawling back to my old abusive partner, QWERTY.
Like I said, I'm not following this very closely, so thank you for the tip that $650M is not accurate. Doing a Google search, the first article I found confirmed the $93M figure. And it was from Fox News of all places. So I'm not sure if the $650M thing is right-wing spin so much as confusion.

In any event, I still think that's 100x the actual value of the web site work. The site strikes me as the kind of thing a decent consulting company could execute for just shy of $1M.

My point earlier, though, still stands. It's surprising to me that the "best" firm at navigating our regulatory maze is Canadian. A credit to them, I suppose.
That. Do you honestly enjoy writing PHP? Likely no. Nobody cares
I like the statistics of the different writings he writes at the end, however I would have liked a comparision of the different layouts while writing different programming languages (C, Ruby, JavaScript, etc).

I've seen two problems with alternative keyboard layouts: a) they are not done for programming (keys ~|!<>_-/"' are oddly laid out) or they are not made for international languages (Spanish in my case, for which ñ,á,é,í,ó,ú are difficult to find. Or worse yet (in case of Dvorak) when using an "international" version, the programming-related keys are horribly placed.
Is there a reason that in 2009, Microsoft thought it was t necessary to make it convenient to watch YouTube videos or view PDF files? As far as I recall PDF and YouTube have been pervasive for years proceeding 2009.
Learning basic Thai is quite simple - you cover the basic food items, numbers and common touristy words. Things get difficult when you decide to read/write.
Right, but literally 10 seconds of Googling reveals that it is in a few different places.
> If you have the inside scoop on why they closed off the repo, by all means share with the rest of us.

I do not.

I agree with you that disabling the issues due to abuse makes sense.
How can that number be true if food stamp benefits net roughly $200, and earned income tax credit is $487 for a single person? Both numbers go up significantly if children are involved.
The MBA is being transformed, for better and for worse
Disgusting reaction is a result of biased childhood. It asdociates w gang and guns. Herr it is safe
"But it is not possible for the firm to say "We sacked Bob because he sexually assaulted one of our staff"."

Why not? The event in question happened in a public setting, while her boss was acting in something of an official capacity (it was a work related event). To me, that demands a public acknowledgement and treatment of what happened.
> There are LTS releases for a reason.

Yes, and the reason is servers. On a computer you use, you generally want the new functionality (like, for example, the ability to read and write to a nexus 4).

I've upgraded ubuntu a few times, including once from LTS to LTS. It ranged from unpleasant to awful ("why has everything been uninstalled?") each time.
thanks, this is perfect.
While not exactly what you're looking for, on Android I've had a good experience with the MessagEase keyboard. The key idea is to have fewer, bigger buttons, and use swiping motions within those to distinguish other characters. Even after getting used to predictive typing, I quickly came to prefer the MessagEase keyboard, in part because I tend to type weird characters, which are much more bother with the regular keyboard. With all the times I would have to correct swype, I might be as fast or faster with MessagEase. Oh, it also has cursor movement built in.
Don't short change yourself, it sounds like you already have some fairly significant programming experience (assuming that's Ming's intro to web dev course and something with Professor Ramsey in there).

> the shortest path from the position I am in to a job as a software developer

Shortest path: apply straight to your first programming job or internship. There are many outfits out there that will take developers with no industry experience who have some practical programming ability.

IMO, the best way to get better is to work alongside the best team you can.

Specifically, if you're interested in web development in Boston:

- ThoughtBot's apprenticeship http://www.apprentice.io/

- TripAdvisor's internship or web engineering program http://www.tripadvisor.com/careers/webprogram

- Boston Startup Job Fair http://bostonstartupjobfair.com/

--or just apply to various jobs or internships at companies you know have good programmers.

Worst case, you learn some things during your interviews and get to see the offices of some tech companies. Best case, you get a position and get to learn some stuff.

If you're willing to throw down a few months' time and money, various dev bootcamp programs can practically guarantee you a developer position (and your courses sound like you would have a big head start). There are a couple in Boston, but more established ones in NYC and SF.

If you'd like some help filling in the gaps for interviews or choosing places to apply to shoot me an email: my HN username at gmail. Went through the same process last year.
Well I will give it a try and see how it goes.
Nice learning hack.
Good point. About 15 years ago I had the beginnings of RSI, and discovered the immense benefit of just getting up and walking around every now and then (good for the eyes, too). Also there are a few wrist/forearm massages that helped, basically I just squeezed wherever it felt necessary.

I also changed my typing style to use my arms to slide my wrists around the keyboard a little rather than overextending fingers, and I rotated my hands inward about 30 degrees (maybe less, never measured it). I still keep about 60-ish WPM with this method, even at 42 years old.

Anyway, I like the Workman layout a lot, especially that the common move for index fingers is down, and the common moves for middle and ring are up. Great thinking!
That site is so performance-oriented it took me 2 minutes to find the link to the book.
Think of it this way: typing is a distraction from thinking, and minimizing it is a good thing. When I type much slower than I think, make mistakes or otherwise have to think about the keyboard, it pulls me out of flow.
... So your backstop is the exact thing you are casting a vote of no confidence against?
Yes, that sounds reasonable.

Another commenter mentions going on a bookmarking spree when investigating a specific topic. Helping classify and process the results of those sprees seems like it would be helpful.

IMO a lot of other uses of traditional bookmarks range from pointless (I can instead easily type/auto-complete my favourite domains) to better served by specialist apps (news aggregator sites + caching read it later apps being a great example).
Or learn QWERTY with your hands placed diagonally.

I never learned how to type "properly", i.e. "home-row" typing: my hands rest naturally somewhere between the middle and upper row at maybe 30° angles from the vertical, and some keys I strike with either hand depending on the word (e.g. t/y g/h b/n).

Yet I type faster than most people I know, and have had no RSI issues due to typing almost daily for 22 years. (I have had RSI issues due to using (gripping) a mouse; replacing the mouse with a trackball / no mouse eliminated this.)

This "nontraditional" method of typing leaves my wrists straighter and reduces repetitive motion, to which I credit my fortunate freedom from RSI.

The downside is that I am unable to use so-called "ergonomic" split keyboards, as my fingers are trained to work both sides of the keyboard.

(And I say "ergonomic" in quotes, because while most "ergonomic" keyboards, such as the Kinesis, are designed to reduce movement, my personal experience is that ergonomics is all about making more varied movement.)
An interesting read whenever the topic of keyboard layouts comes up: http://reason.com/archives/1996/06/01/typing-errors

Summary of that article:
The 'QWERTY was developed to slow down the typist' story is a lie. There is no serious evidence that Dvorak is a 'better' layout. If you were starting from scratch, there would probably be no advantage choosing one over the other, except that QWERTY is the standard. Retraining is a waste of time.

One of the key quotes:

> The study design directly paralleled the decision that a real firm or a real government agency might face: Is it worthwhile to retrain its present typists? If Strong's study is correct, it is not efficient for current typists to switch to Dvorak. The study also implied that the eventual typing speed would be greater with QWERTY than with Dvorak, although this conclusion was not emphasized.

I have no reason to believe that the Workman layout offers any other advantages.
I'd love to hear more about this. Have you written about it in a blog post or somewhere?
Huh, that's pretty interesting. I have a bit of trouble getting out of swype mode (in my head) to use it, though.
At my desk, I use a Dvorak keyboard. However, I often need to rip my laptop away from my desk for meetings, emergencies, etc. When I'm typing on the laptop, I use Qwerty. It's not a problem at all. I don't need to think about it; my hands just do the right thing depending upon where I'm typing.
Inspired me to finally look up why it's called District of Columbia.

http://askville.amazon.com/Washington-DC-called-District-Col...
As a keyboard layout aficionado, I appreciate the thinking that went into this keyboard layout.

I've been a fulltime dvorak user for over 10 years. I also tried Colemak but found that many motions felt awkward while using it.

Anyways, I thought I'd give this one a try just for the hell of it. And... so far I am quite pleasantly surprised. I fully memorized the layout in about half an hour. It feels comfortable to type on, just like Dvorak does.

Typed up this comment with the Workman-P layout, and seriously considering switching to it now...
I know nothing about it.
Sure darpa was looking into it (Robots) IE - http://www.gizmag.com/sewingrobot/22900/

It is some fucked up shit though, millions of the really really poor will lose their jobs and contrary to many of the lefts opinions these workers won't be able to then go to school and eat cake they will just get even poorer.

We are heading for an awesome future or a horrific one. Not sure which yet.
I also changed my typing style to use my arms to slide my wrists around the keyboard a little rather than overextending fingers, and I rotated my hands inward about 30 degrees

Yes, this. I've been typing this way my entire computing life (22 years) and have yet to develop symptoms of RSI from typing. (Note: I have developed RSI symptoms from mousing -- and relieved them by using a trackball.)
The Business End of ObamaCare
Ah... That's why I should read the entire article.

Bring on the Christmas.
The Heist 1 year anniversary
These names, of course, could only be used for VM hosts.
China's Cram School from Hell
>QWERTY was supposedly designed for typewriters to solve a very specific problem–to keep the types from jamming against each other. The most frequently used keys were placed apart from each other to prevent them from jamming. This results in a non-ergonomic layout. However, there are alternatives.

Nope: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-li...
In addition: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/the-li...
Cute and memorable (for me anyway) without overly personifying them. Perfect.
Free for only turkish citizens or for everyone?
>QWERTY is deeply, gut-wrenchingly broken.

Source?
I think that sentence is fine, although, if you look at my comment history, you might see that I'm prone to long ones myself. ;)
Level Money Wants To Be Mint For Millennials
I suspect that wages and wage expectations are always relative to a cohort of one's peers. I'm doubt that any developer, anywhere in the world, takes into account the average income of textile workers in their expectations of what they should be making. They compare their earnings to those of other developers.
In the big picture of the mess of the ACA from the bill writing to passage by way of reconciliation, push back of the states, twisted supreme court logic, the president deciding illegally what parts of the law to implement, and now this states' and federal IT debacle, I find someone getting dollar figure wrong as to how much the website frontend cost to be of no consequence.

Your attempt to silence debate by shaming those you disagree with has been noted.
I personally use elements of the periodic table.
Just re-read your comment and you're right, you didn't make a false dichotomy. But it is easy for a moron (like me) to take your comment and turn it into false dichotomy. Sorry about that.

I will say, though, that I really don't like assigning percentages because I think they fit the situation poorly.

In my opinion, the company should have done two discreet things: fire the guy and address why he was fired (see my comment to other responder for why they should address the firing). Assigning percentages to these to represent their respective importance is not very useful; they are both past the threshold of Very Important. Therefore, they should both get done.
http://developmentseed.org/blog/new-healthcare-gov-is-open-a...
...your point being?
There's a difference between "doesn't help" and "not a perfect solution". Secure readers eliminate the ability for non-savvy criminals to drop a keystroke logger in the terminal.
I did the same thing! And I'm embarrassingly slower at qwerty now.

The best part for me was when I first started having dvorak reflexes on a qwerty keyboard.
Very easily...if people don't have access to those services.

Illegal immigrants, homeless with no ID.
I'm sure that works very well for you, but you don't sound like the introverted kind of person that this article was aimed at. Preparing to find new people and talk to them does sound weird when you say it out loud. For people like me, though, just meeting new people is the pinnacle of weird. I need to get myself ready for it or I'll never pull it off.
I can go into the strengths and weaknesses of each (I'm kind of a packrat...) but you haven't said anything about yourself or what you're looking for. If you really don't know what you're looking for you should just do what the majority of people here would tell you to do and get CLRS. It's not an accident that these are popular textbooks or that CLRS is the most popular.

(I didn't really mean to recommend Sedgwick's stuff. As I said, I just think it's not bad.)
Characters from Firefly, for my home network. All short and memorable.
Don't this:

> The aggregate effect of free money is what will determine the outcome.

And this:

> Not what exceptional individuals might achieve with it, but what a lazy drunkard would achieve with it matters)

Contradict each other? The "aggregate effect" = "lazy drunkards" + the effect of "exceptional individuals" + the effect of everyone else. So it really isn't the lazy drunkards that matter; it's the overall effect that does. If, on average, it improves society then isn't that a win?

Very often, when talking about basic incomes and similar programs, people seem to say things like "twice as many people will take advantage of the system and be lazy." To me, that's not a sufficient criticism: it all depends on the percentages. If a program increases the percentage of bottom feeders from 1% to 2%, say, but also doubles the quality of life of everyone else, that would be a huge win to me. Obviously, the numbers I chose in my example are probably unrealistic, which just further illustrates how important it is to actually determine what the numbers are/will be.
> Getting rid of drugs to deal with this problem would be the same as building more houses to eliminate homelessness.

This is an excellent thought experiment. I think everyone would be basically on board with the idea that if there were suddenly more houses (for free), that would be a good thing. It would be a huge benefit to people renting or buying housing, but I agree with you that the cost of housing is unlikely to drop to zero no matter how much suddenly appears.

So, in the analogy, do we think homeless people are being priced out of the market, or do we think they're homeless for other reasons?
At the risk of sounding like an insufferable hippy, it is absolutely ridiculous that hemp has been banned. Even if you consider pot to be harmful, it is stupidly obvious that hemp is harmless.

On another note, the headline of the article gives the wrong impression: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_White_Plume

On yet another note: hemp has been largely surpassed by other products and isn't really a big cash crop even in countries were it has remained legal. It may make a comeback with a nontraditional demographic, much like PBR, but that remains to be seen.
I didn't know growing industrial hemp was also outlawed in the US.
Walkthrough (Part I)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TsL0DO-c1E#t=0m15s
Quick ready to go Tornado Template
This company does that.

https://www.infer.com/

You can read an article about the same
http://gigaom.com/2013/09/02/what-will-crm-look-like-in-2015...
One thing that struck me is that this layout is immediately intuitive. Unlike Dvorak and of course QWERTY or any other popular layout, I can already picture myself typing in it (of course I learned on QWERTY, so I wasn't in-tune with key familiarity before that).

I can't explain why exactly, but this layout just makes sense. Can't wait to try this out.
Depending on what type of Android device you get, you might deal with similar issues. I'm looking at you, HTC.
There there are significant profits to be made as a factory owner, why don't more people start factories? Wouldn't this increase competition for labor, increasing wages?
Sirenidae: A suborder distinct from other salamanders
Mars Polar Ice Sample Return (1976-1978) - Wired Science
Very, very true.

> when you work for people who don't understand how software can change the way that their business operates (who tend to not be technical).

This is rather frustrating for me. I love automating labor, and making things more efficient. But people won't trust a computer to do repetitive work as much as they'd trust a person who is more prone to errors. Plus they don't seem to understand how it impacts their finances. If you pay me $5K to automate very labor intensive tasks and processes that take 2-3 people to do, then you are making money. Even if workers are paid minimum wage, the business is going to start making money on the investment after the first month. Without the extra set of issues that employees bring in.

I also want to add that it is a bit frustrating when you are told to work on a code base that is in an obvious need of a cleanup and targeted refactor. You spend more time fixing issues that writing code. And must somehow explain why progress is not being made, because new features are still waiting to be incorporated. Its also a rather boring.
Technically it is regulated, not banned. Of course you could say the same of cocaine...
I was expecting a slow rollover like an odometer typically displays. All the demos have very fast numbers flying by and I don't know when I would find that useful.
I realized [my fingers] were moving too much laterally [...] Just ask yourself, how often do you type ‘the’, ‘these’, ‘them’, ‘when’, and ‘where’, etc. on a day-to-day basis?

All of these words are typed in Dvorak without any lateral finger movement, and only two letters outside the home eight.

'ls' is, however, awkward to type. That's why I alias it with 'd'; problem solved.

It is much more efficient to ride the momentum of a single arm or wrist stroke and type a combo rather than just one key.

This is not my experience:

An example of this is the word OPERATION. If you were to type this in Dvorak, you could type it as o-pe-r-a-t-io-n where each grouping is a hand stroke–a total of 7 hand strokes.

The letters 'pe' are the slowest typed for me when typing 'operation'. I strongly prefer alternation, as the finger on the opposite hand can be lined up on the upcoming key just as the current key is being typed. Having to move the hand around for keys that are on one side slows things down.
Wifi Pineapple Mark V introduced
Those Chinese in abject rural poverty seem to be quite content there from what I could gather from friends and relatives that went to rural China (I stayed in the larger cities, so I'm clarifying that I haven't had first hand experiences with rural rural Chinese, only from those that moved to the city).

Most Chinese in the city (some which you may judge as living in abject poverty), are actually pretty happy with their situation. Even the homeless people seem more content than over here in Germany (I've talked to quite some of them over some baijiu at the corner of the street).

Please stop painting China a some kind of post-communist hellhole where people are starving on the streets whilst toiling away in backstreet sweatshops. You're not doing the country any justice, and you should really visit it someday.s
this is crazy! It's not even that much of a premium! $12/day on weekends? I'd pay that just to get away from the horrible service I've gotten from the rental car industry, much less drive an Audi A4. (I'm not really all that car-crazy).
In the 6-7 countries I've been to outside the USA, nope.
I think the aggressiveness depends on the particular location. In the last year I've rented cars in Richmond, BC and Honolulu, and in both locations they were super laid-back about little dings and scrapes, even one scrape that I knew damn well that I put in it while wedging myself into a tiny spot in a parking garage.

I came right out and told them about it when I returned the car, they looked at it and said "No biggie. We'll let you know if it's going to cost anything to repair." Then I spent the next four days worrying they were going to charge my credit card $300 to fix a tiny scrape, but they called me on the fourth day and said that they weren't going to charge me a cent.
codeschool is not a great place to learn how to code if you can already code. The courses don't really have any depth.
I don't know if it's right to say we can feel each other's pain. I am not really that shy but definitely not the kind would go up and spark a new conversation every 2 minute with people.

I guess what I disagree with is the notion that "you have to talk to people when you are at a conference or at a meetup."

That's one thing called social pressure. It seems like a norm to get out there and make another friend and make him your twitter follower. That's a reason why people who are not comfortable with public speaking (or comfortable with making friends at larger social place) are even more paranoid.

I really dislike that. I want to tell people: mind your own business and you will bump into interesting people and topics that you can contribute to. You will.

I almost always don't talk to people at a talk because I always feeline my work is less "important" or less poblish / amazing than what other people are doing. That's something I can't get away from.

And it is rather awkward for people randomly approach to people too.

But I think asking questions at a conference/meetup is a great place to start. That's a nice thing to do.