skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked this article. I particularly liked the way the author attacked the problem by clearing his notions of what programming is and attempting to come at it from a new angle. I'll be interested to see what his group comes up with.

That said, I think that fundamentally the problem isn't with programming, it's with US. :) Human beings are imprecise, easily confused by complexity, unable to keep more than a couple of things in mind at a time, can't think well in dimensions beyond 3 (if that), unable to work easily with abstractions, etc. Yet we're giving instructions to computers which are (in their own way) many orders of magnitude better at those tasks.

Short of AI that's able to contextually understand what we're telling them to do, my intuition is that the situation is only going to improve incrementally.
Warp doesn't go beyond inserting linemarker records so that GCC can identify source(line) for subsequent error messages.
In the US, salaried employees aren't legally required to get paid overtime, only hourly employees. The whole point of being salaried is that you're being paid for a year of work, rather than by the hour, so your pay doesn't depend on hours worked.

Typically, full time developers are salaried.
The Toyota Acceleration issue ranks up there with the McDonald's Coffee lawsuit as one of the most doubly misunderstood corporate events in recent history.

Popular belief has there being an acceleration problem with Toyota cars. Slightly less popular is the correction that in fact it was all just senile old people and floor mats, nothing to do with the computers. Far less common is the correction that there were in fact technical problems with the cars.

Similarly popular belief has the McDonald's coffee lawsuit being absurd, because "everyone knows that coffee is hot and how much damage can it cause anyway?". Slightly less popular is the correction that the burns were in fact horrific and the coffee was stunningly hot, far hotter than industry standard. Far less common is the further correction that in fact McDonald's coffee was being served at an industry standard temperature, where "industry standard" is defined as how other companies also serve their coffee (Starbucks coffee is generally just as hot, and many companies serve hotter coffee than McDonald's was serving.) In fact, since the lawsuit, McDonald's hasn't reduced the temperature that they serve their coffee at. The only change that McDonald's has made since the lawsuit is adding warning labels, the coffee you buy there today can be just as hot as the coffee that burned Stella Liebeck... don't spill it on yourself!

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran...)
"Remember the discussion is about employers feeling entitled to owning employees time?"

No, that's actually not at all what this discussion is about. That's what OP's situation is about. My post made two points:

1) If a company is mismanaged or just plain taking advantage of you by requiring regular overtime, then leave such a company.

2) A company (not OP's company) who is well managed and does not require regular overtime, pay their wages on time etc, should be able to expect at least a little bit dedication from their employees. No you don't have to tattoo the product name on your chest, but it would suit you to help out your managers and colleagues in case of (rarely occurring) emergencies.
I dunno, maybe ask, every other developed country in the world?

Maybe after the US drops the "rah rah, we're the best fucking country in the world" bs and eats a slice of humble pie it will realize that providing healthcare to it's citizens isn't really a very difficult problem to solve.
Am I the only one surprised to read this line?

> More recently development on the product has stopped, or worse – fell behind.

Balsamiq looks to be going strong...at least I've not noticed anything wrong with it.
The "Do It for Denmark" Campaign
Got a Rob Hubbard / Populous I vibe to it. Not bad for a beginner. :)
Go watch 'capturing avatar'
The lighting in this engine looks amazing.

I'd love to see more detail on it. If you stuck a light source in your glass house, would you see convincing shadows?
This is actually pretty cool. Its fun to have someone on the piano overlay someone with vocals. Good idea!
"Guru's Lair: Sampler and Tour"
> h) For the avoidance of doubt, this [Commercial] Licensed Edition does not include access to the LiveCode engine source code found in the Community Edition. This Licensed Edition is not compatible with the terms of the GPL and such software may not be incorporated or utilized with this Licensed Edition.

So they've dual-licensed it. The Community Edition source on Github is all GPL with this exception: https://github.com/runrev/livecode/commit/51e3958082d9edd645...
I'd question this premise even in its watered-down form. Startups often face a "wall" where the initial hacked-together code simply fails to work, at all, because the accumulated technical debt makes it impossible to push out any new features without breaking something important.

A company full of experienced engineers that's paying attention and willing to humble themselves enough to work on a risky project where their competition is 22 could easily take advantage of that. Let the young, overworked kids prove out the market, and once there's demand for the product, come out with a competitor that does the same thing but doesn't fall over. If timed right and executed quickly, you can provide an alternative right when everybody is frustrated by the fail-whale.

Facebook arguably did this to MySpace/Friendster. The initial version may've been hacked together, but Zuckerburg worked very quickly to hire experienced engineers from Google and ensure that Facebook scaled smoothly, while their competition floundered around.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/10/5293414/sony-rediscovers-s...
> If the OP is being truthful, he designed the very product the entire startup is based on.

Hell yes I did. Entire UI. Coded it too. 45K, no benefits, nothing, just 1400/two weeks after taxes.
I have never looked at the source code to cpp.

But Warp is designed to be a drop-in replacement. It doesn't produce char-by-char exactly the same output as cpp, as the whitespace differs, and the decisions about when/where to produce linemarker records are different.

But the output is functionally identical (any differences are bugs in either Warp or cpp).
Or Adamantium
I have been looking at Intel XDK, I think it hits my pain points.

PhoneGap I'm not so sure about because people seem to be walking away from it and writing native applications instead because they were frustrated by performance. Now, I'm sure there's success story.
Well, doesn't New Hampshire have the Northeast Kingdom?
> The hardware is lustworthy

what part? I have a 1440x1080 ereader retailing at $170.
At $8.95 apiece, $1100 can buy you 122 mass-market paperbacks. I certainly hope that someone can bring that retail price down a fair chunk, or this tech is not going far.
A few examples of graphical programming languages are LabView, Scratch, and Lego Mindstorms (NXT). (I'm not advocating graphical programming, just providing examples.)

Edit: maybe graphical GUI editors such as in Xcode and Visual Studio could be considered tools for programming languages that are partially graphical and partially text based.
> No, we don't pay for it in taxes because we have lower tax rates than the US, and yes, our corporate tax rates are lower too

That doesn't follow at all. That could just as easily occur because your government skimps on other things. Do you have a ~$1 trillion/year military? Didn't think so.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, but _someone_ is paying for your health insurance, and its probably some split between taxpayers, doctors, pharmacies, medical research companies, etc.
Yes. 100% agree.
Very Well Said, but I would add...When it comes to Bipolar, not getting treatment and not getting medicated is extremely dangerous for everyone around you.

This mentality that its not a physical ailment literally has caused numerous suicides, spousal abuse, violent episodes, etc...

All completely avoidable if they were medicated and treated.

Thinking of mental disorders as fundamentally different leads people to fear seeking out treatment, which is the real problem.
I'm excited about these two working together, but this now reminds of when Zynga hired many industry titans.
What malice am I imputing?

One of the clones was amde without being aware of Threes!, other people are using the term "rip off", not me.
I'm thinking there will at least be lessons learned. That lesson may be that going parallel offers no benefit. Which sucks, in that we are hoping otherwise, but it is a possibility. Right?

That is, I am more asking as to what lessons have been learned. Not demanding that we know what progress was made. Since, as you point out, we may not have made any.

Which is to say, I should throw up a huge "I'm not trying to dissuade any of this effort." If I have been too negative in my comments here, I humbly apologize!
My suggestion: Look for a company that you can comfortably work the 9-5 and not have any issues with that.
Looks awesome, can't wait to try it out
Can you quantify how much memory you're saving per worker?
It'll speed up any language that uses a separate C preprocessor.

The same overall design could be used to implement many textual macro preprocessors, such as runoff, makefiles, etc.
How Emperor Alexander Militarized American Cyberspace
These b2b posts are really helpful, thanks!
New Disruptive Freelance Platform Comes Out of Stealth
They connect apps to crowds streamlining workflow and making freelancing more accessible
I bought two in the Firesale at a silly price (I think I paid less for both than a single 1st gen Nexus 7 at launch).

They make solid little almost-disposable portable web browsers.
>should be able to expect at least a little bit dedication from their employees

No they shouldn't. They should expect exactly what they pay for, me to show up and do my job and then leave. If you want me to be invested in the company, then I need a stake in the company. It isn't complicated.
I agree that in general situations are quite similar, however there are few differences:

1. PC never had a singular point of access to nearly all available applications. Play store makes it easy to download/install or distribute a new application making it instantly available to large amount of people.

2. It is fairly easy following a tutorial to create a new mobile app. This combined with 1 makes it easy even for relatively inexperienced people to make apps that reach wide audience.

3. Rigidity of mobile environment. On PC if something goes wrong you have a chance to figure it out and correct a problem. This is much harder on mobile, often times only thing you could do is complain to the developer.

4. No POSIX. On PC if you need an app to work across a wide array of software and hardware configurations POSIX got your back. Granted, this is a weaker point because it would work only on a limited set of operating systems that are POSIX compatible.

5. You can install almost any app from play store on nearly any android device. You can't install mac os app on windows.
I would guess that YC's stake in Dropbox would be much lower than 3% due to dilution from all the subsequent investment rounds.
Sure. I even spawn other threads as ghetto thread supervision.
I don't agree with this. Why not be able to have a startup succeed with 7.5 hour days?

For me, I can put in a day longer than that when I need to, in an extreme circumstance. But if it becomes often, I just can't be productive longer than that. I loses ability to focus, and start accumulating burn out. My throughput is greater at 7.5 hour days than 10 hour days.

Of course, if there's like a week leading up to a launch where you need to crunch, that's different. I've been there, and have been able to be super productive like that for a week. But it can't be sustained... I feel like I'm basically borrowing some productivity from the future, and that debt will catch up to me eventually.
I mean, I'm much more worried it's a datagrab.

Can you imagine how much Facebook would like a recording of your facial expressions while you have a private talk with your friends? Or when you look at ads?
This is what you get when a company/group/effort/community is lead by a "benevolent dictator" - someone with an absolutely pure vision of what they want their output to look like and the autonomy and strength to make it so no matter what.

I love this... I actually love that it probably pissed off Musk to no end the amount of attention the fires got and out of spite he went totally over the top and added ballistic plating to the bottom of the car as a super-constructive "fuck you" to everyone that bitched about it.

I am picturing this same thing happening at Chrysler or GM and I think 9 out of 10 CEOs would just let the whole non-issue blow over and go back to business - and the 1 CEO that would try and push for a ridiculous over-engineering solution like this would probably get shot down by the board.

That's why I like this, it's going way above and beyond because he can and because he believes in the vision he is selling so firmly that there is no wiggle room: "My cars are the best and goddamnit, I'm going to make them the best."

<standard disclaimers about personal viewpoints and preferences>

Just want to focus on the pursuit of perfection that I find so energizing - to put another way, if you had someone this passionate running each of the major airlines, I wonder what air travel would be like instead of the race-to-the-bottom experience it is now.
How to Reduce Product Development Risk – Reduce your idea to its core
The clever part of the strategy I was using in that demo was that all domains are expressed declaratively as datastructures. This meant that the glue language only needed to be very good at manipulating vectors and maps. You built up a structure that represented music, html, or whatever and then just labeled it as such. Interop between domains then becomes pretty simplistic data transformation from one domain's format to another. And given how constrained the glue language could be, you could build incredibly powerful tools that make that easy. You could literally template out the structure you want and just drag/drop things in, fix a few cases that we maybe get wrong and you're done - you've translated tweets into music.

We ended up abandoning that path for now as there are some aspects of functional programming that prove pretty hard to teach people about and seem largely incidental.
You are very humble.

No, usually talk is not worth much, but seeing what you have achieved so far without help increase the value of your talk, even if awesome talent for coding gfx not automagically = awesome talent for coding AI.
"Happy" by Pharrell Turned into a Sad Blues Song is Beautiful
This boy and girl turned "Happy" by Pharrell into a sad, minor blues song called "Not Happy" and it is truly worth listening to.
Thanks! The lighting is actually quite inaccurate, but to the average player it looks "ok" I think. There is a kind of faked scattering effect on the windows -- if a light is behind a window, it lights it up a bit. If you stuck a light in the glass house, you would see shadows but they would likely be cutoff by the screen space errors.
Wait some bugs are security issues and cant be patched unless a full upgrade is performed so no the discussion is how do we keep people protected when they cannot upgrade the phone. I apologize if I am missing something but it my understanding Android relies on the carriers to push the updates, correct?
Great line from the interview:

> WB: I can guarantee that you are wrong about where your code is spending most of its time if you haven't run a profiler on it.

Definitely a good thing for all programmers to think about!
There's a huge list of highly successful, productive people who are a credit to the projects they work on, who have or have had mental health issues in the past.

If I had the chance, for example, I wouldn't be at all "hesitant" to work with actors Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, or Johnnie Depp, despite all of them having well-documented mental health issues.

I'd also be very happy to work with Richard Branson (ADHD), or if he were alive today, Nikolai Tesla (OCD and anxiety).
My two cents is that this situation is more prolific than you might think.

My own theory is that most young engineers start out by valuing their own time -- but they find themselves in a situation like this. They then relegate themselves to working long hours to please management, and eventually they work inefficiently all the time and are OK with that.

They're too withdrawn/introverted to stand up to management or take the leap to find a new job.

Regardless, like many others said, time to quit. They're not a good fit for you and a "bugfix scoreboard" sounds absolutely vile.
Or even worse, the Wally-from-Dilbert strategy when a bug bounty was announced: "I'm gonna write me a new minivan this afternoon."
What's special is it's on enough devices with a high enough proximity density to make such anonymous ad-hoc locale-oriented communications feasible. A chicken-and-egg problem, solved.
How to measure the "Next Big Thing". I wrote a blog
Yes, the US healthcare system is broken. But its not as easy as you make it out to be. Look at our drug costs - they're way higher than anywhere else. Where's that money going? Largely to medical research companies. The US is, to some degree, subsidizing medical research for the rest of the world.

Now, there are a lot of places we could improve by looking to other countries. But even doing all of those things isn't going to make things as cheap here as they are everywhere else.
Seems like a reason to stick to ruby 2.0 and not upgrade to 2.1, no?
I know this is just a joke, and I'm probably going to get shouted down for being too serious, but if Chrome really lacks a way of setting your default tab, surely an extension that lets you choose any URL, including the wonderful HN, would be preferable...
This guy is completely wrong. Developing for BB10 is so easy. He's right in the sense that it's hard to find people with similar issues, but how is that BlackBerry's fault? Ignore his complaints and continue your plan to develop for BB10. It's a great OS and I love devving on it.
No, no, triple no. Wake up call here.

Some people are just extremely lucky (I'm guessing here. I hardly believe this happens).

Some people are technical geniuses, care little about the money, and end up having truckloads of them, being at the right moment with the right skill. Carmack his an example - read his writings, he's an amazingly humble person. Linus Torvalds, too, just to mention another person.

What about the rest of the billionaires?

We're talking about billions here, not just millions (!). The rest of the billionaires (must be) are A-type personalities who live for accumulating money and tearing the competition apart.

When you have such personality, and context, you never rest. Even when you're at rest; you're not on holiday, when you're on holiday. You need to be single minded and live almost single-dimensionally; being a psychopath is of great help. Steve Jobs is a perfect example.
Even if we take out the personality factor, we're talking about billions here - competition is extremely fierce.

As usual, of course, I don't mean that reality is black and white or "type-3" is every billionaire.

But it's important to have a clear understanding of how this works, to avoid daydreaming of being such a person (which by the way, I would never want to be).

This is a recurring theme in HN, and the usual agreed opinion is that after having a certain amount of money (upper middle class), there's very little gain in happiness by having more money.

And by the way, any middle class person has access to the best places on earth and best experiences out there.
Many new technologies are prohibitively expensive, but we have to start somewhere.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Congratulations for standing up and confronting the HOURS. Until it is time to sleep and no more. That is really an achievement. I went through it some times and man, does it hurt!

Yes, I also put a lot of my regaining health to God. And to my family. Thank you for your openness.

My name is Pedro, I am just an ordinary guy who has gone through depression and OCD and now leads what I may call an "ordinary life" as a university lecturer and who -thank God- is reasonably happy with this life. I am also open for support, I am a mathematician who happens to love music, philosophy and computers, in case anyone feels like chatting. This kind of suffering can be alleviated. But seek help, you need it.

If you are ill, that is what matters: reality. If anyone gets annoyed for it or dislikes you for it, it is THEIR problem. Stigma is about fear: their fear.

pfortuny@gmail.com

Let us help each other more.
A quick Google search indicates that it's used commonly in armored cars and military vehicles.

eg: http://www.alcoa.com/global/en/products/product.asp?prod_id=...
Square planets are the future
http://norvig.com/ngrams/ has a fancier spell-corrector and some more discussion.
> It was also one of the few services that would let you upload ePub books to your account through the website and then sync your library to your mobile device.

Google Books does this now
Kudos for making it right (I guess they could have just waited for it to blow over, instead of taking any action), but this is like asking for forgiveness rather than permission. Still not a good look for a company that wants to be a large part of my connected life.
Because of different #define's, Warp may take a very different path through header files than other preprocessors do. In fact, Warp doesn't have any predefined macros other than the ones required by the Standard. Hence, to use it with cpp or clang's preprocessor, it needs to be driven with a command that -D defines each macro.

There's a command (I forget at the moment what it is) that will tell cpp to list all its predefined macros. It's quite a few. You'll need to do that for clang to get an equivalent list, then drive Warp with that.

You'll be able to tell if it is taking the same path or not by using a diff on the outputs that ignores whitespace differences.

The reason Warp doesn't predefine all that stuff is because every install of gcc has a different list, and it's completely impractical to try and keep up with all that.
Facebook would have been pretty stupid to buy Oculus without the entire core team consenting to be acquired.
If this works out like I think it will, history will give plenty of credit to Palmer Luckey.
Meanwhile, today I get an email from Sony saying that their Reader store closed on March 20, and that it has ceded its customers to Kobo, which spawned from Canada's Chapters Indigo. [0]

While this tech may be notable, Sony continues to have a fatally misaligned device/content strategy.

[0] http://www.kobobooks.com/SonyMigrate
Thanks for the response; I'm definitely applying to the Data Engineers program. My engineering background has been more on-the-job than from formal coursework, so I was a bit subdued by list of engineering disciplines in the "Accepting Applicants From" section (though I now see "Scientific Research" as one of the fields, yay!). I really hope I can participate.

eggoa: Sorry for hijacking your reply-thread!
nice idea

this is one of those ideas where you kinda just assume it already exists
The Oculus Fairy Tale
TrueType fonts, at least, had the concept of "engine compensation" [0] during hinting. When specifying a relative distance to move points on the glyph outline, the hint program would classify the distance as "white", "black" or "grey" depending on whether it crossed over whitespace, ink, or a mix of the two. The interpreter could then round or tweak the distance slightly depending on the physical characteristics of the output media.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/fonts/ttrefman/RM02/Chap2.html#e...