skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Behind almost every buzzword is a useful concept. "Technical debt" is not one of the exceptions.

I have found this useful to keep in mind as I step a bit into the business world. For instance, "solution" and "value proposition" both mean something very important; the fact that many people sling these words around with wild abandon doesn't excuse you from needing to know what they mean. It's the same with "technical debt" and even things like "use case".
Audio Tech Brief - Connecting To The Cloud With F5 BIG-IP And VMWare VMotion
Good stuff, but there is something a lot of people don't consider (and the author didn't here either). Most "benchmarks" people use to judge Linux are based on experience with Windows, yet almost no one ever judges Windows based on Linux. Linux makes much more of an effort to meet Windows benchmarks than vice versa.

Linux is (mostly) secure by design. How does Windows stack up?

Linux has a powerful command line interface which can do almost anything that can physically be done on a Linux system.

Linux comes equipped with programming support (I think a C compiler should be considered a standard part of ANY system).

Linux (generally) has resizable dialog boxes. The Windows environment variables dialog box is downright evil.

Linux allows for a great deal more system and desktop customization.

If you get used to running Linux, you can pretty much dual-boot or straight up change your OS on a whim (especially given the available of Gnome and KDE). Also, you have something to change to. If you decide you get sick of Windows, it's a much bigger deal to change OS. Windows to Linux is nothing like Ubuntu to Arch.

Installing and running a development/test web server on a Linux machine is almost trivial.

I would say in general where Linux excels, it excels far more than Windows does where Windows excels. Windows may be a little better in some areas, but where Linux is better, it's so many lightyears ahead that Windows isn't even in view anymore (think virus protection for example).
His heading is "Messes are not Acceptable"; my question is, acceptable to whom? Based on the priorities I get from my customers (/bosses), messes damn well are acceptable, and if they don't give me the time to fix them, what am I supposed to do about it?

Yes, I do endeavor not to make them in the first place but even after years of experience nobody can completely avoid them.
I'd love to hear what they are doing to monitor their system. They didn't mention that. 3 out of 15 drives failures to loose a volume seems quite likely at that scale.

I'd like to know what levels of warnings and alarms they use with which system, e.g. nagios, etc.
Ok, given my login name, I feel like I have to comment on this article.

Also, here is a video of this in action.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qEhyQfbImY
'Scrappy' is a great description. I also like the imagery 'Scrappy smart' brings to mind.
yeah i thought about that, but i dont want to spam my twitter followers. plus it just makes me look like a tool =)
That's only the Rouleaux bit. The article details a bit that produces sharp (vs. rounded) squares.
lol. yeah american lazyness is definitely unmatched at this point. maybe give Russia 25 more years =)
Bah, it's got that thing where I click a link and it picks a link further up the page.

Also, it uses 40% more memory than before and I can't be bothered putting back v9.64. Darn!
> technical debt is the stuff you couldn't have avoided if you wanted to, because you didn't know then what you know now.

I've always understood it as just the opposite: the circumstances don't permit doing it right, so you do it badly knowing it'll cause problems, and the costs grow the longer you leave it unresolved. Debt is a metaphor for choosing to sacrifice your future self's resources, not just making mistaeks (even if they have the same result).
Ouch! You seem to have fallen in love with laziness.

>You are leaving a job you like, with no idea of what to do next.

>You are leaving a job you like, inspired by vacation.

Thats you being lazy.
Here's some useful marketing intelligence:

http://www.food.gov.uk/healthiereating/advertisingtochildren...

Probably best to target the merely overweight than the hopelessly obese. In which case Russia (or perhaps more urgently my native England) actually looks like a fair bet!
Heh... I know a guy who thinks he's too dumb to program in anything except Lisp (ALGOL syntax is hard! It's like math! :-)
Perhaps assigning them to the gifted group actually undermined their future performance. A couple of possible mechanisms: (1) they adopted the dreaded 'fixed mindset' and no longer challenged themselves as much; (2) they decided despite teacher and parental pressure, they'd rather be with the general population -- so threw the second test a little, as an assertion of personal sovereignty.
actually step 1 for him wasn't even starting the forum, he bought it from someone else.
Rounded corners.. giving problems to engineers for 100+ years. :)
Me too. That's the way the term is commonly used.

But if I understand this author correctly, that's not what the term originally meant.
The supposed lithium shortage has always been a red herring used by oil supporters. The theory goes something like this "if we rely too much on electric vehicles and hybrids we will switch from reliance on oil exporting countries to reliance on lithium exporting countries, which will be just as bad or even worse." Then the oil supporter starts drawing a scary picture of evil socialist Bolivia which is poised to take over the US economy with its vast lithium deposits.

Of course this ignores a couple of things -- (i) lithium is not that rare, and is not only found in Bolivia and most importantly (ii) lithium is not used up or destroyed in batteries. It can be recycled. So it is very unlikely that we will get into the situation of progressively using up all the lithium supply and having a lithium crisis and so on.
In case you're wondering, the "turbo" feature is a caching proxy run by Opera. Turn it on and everything besides SSL goes through them.

Of course, they don't tell you this anywhere. This is what you get when you enable the feature: http://www.opera.com/portal/turbo/

I haven't been able to find anything more forthcoming on their site, not even in fine print. In fact, their marketing material quite blatantly skirts the issue.

The privacy policy linked from their main site (http://www.opera.com/privacy/) has a section called "Privacy in the Opera Web browser" which goes into specific features, including some that are new to Opera 10, but nothing at all about "turbo". It does say this though:

"The Opera user’s Web usage is not tracked".

Except when it is.

I don't know what standards you hold Opera to, but any half respectable company would be rubbing your face in disclaimers before enabling a feature like this and I've seen a few crucified for not doing so.
I think you won me over. I'm not a journalist, but I do work as a web analyst for a conglomerate of local newspapers. Not having access to real financials, I've always convinced myself that there had to be a definitive reason behind the decline of print newspapers, apart from the growth of the internet. But the collapse does seem to be a complex cause. If I may ask, what are your expectations for the newspaper industry in the next 5 years?
Excellent Wireframing Resources
Not only that, but coding is an inherently messy business. Even if you are Uber-Coder. That's just the nature of the job.

You can choose languages and platforms that match the problem domain to the point of minimizing this, but it never goes away. And the longer code sits, the more "cruft" builds up on it. Once again, you can minimize this, but it never goes away.

I think once you learn good coding practices and start groking how easy that makes things, you start getting this bad attitude towards everybody else. Those other stupid programmers, you think, If they were only as smart as I am most of these problems would go away.

Later on you figure out that some of these guys are actually smarter than you, read all the books, could do and teach this stuff in their sleep, and know that their code needs work. At that point you're just beginning to become a true professional.
Desperate much? Now I feel guilty that I didn't download IE8. 8 families starved because of my neglect. Curse you Microsoft!
I love to read this sort of stuff, because it's my life's goal to show him how wrong he is.
I can see some entrepreneurial passenger paying for wireless, and then sharing it out to his neighbors for a profit!
Unfortunately one of your problems is reliance on Microsoft Products and specific hardware even when you were switched to Linux, such as Office/Outlook and products such as the Dell Docking Station and Multi Function Printers who doesn't support any *nix, and Cisco VPN (look in to vpnc). That's like comparing using Windows and trying to get KOffice and Cygwin working on Windows and benchmarking so.

You pick a platform, and start using the tools associated natively with it.

Linux isn't a good suite for everyone, and definitely not in this case.
Good. Now how about Chrome for Mac?

Back when Chrome was first announced, it seemed better than Safari (3.x at the time). But the more time passes, the more Safari is catching up, and soon all of the features that make Chrome special will have been absorbed into it (and other browsers, probably).
I used to be like this, but I have recently warmed to this idea. foo.bar( baz ) is a little "verbose looking", but when you generalize to arbitrary expressions:

foo.bar( baz => quux, gorch => 42 );

it starts looking a lot nicer. The foo.bar(baz) is really the outlier, and for the sake of consistency, you might as well add a space.

(That said, sometimes I don't, and I would never "care" one way or the other. If you are writing good code, where the spaces are is of little importance.)
Insider's Guide to Tech-Job Hunting
It's not pedantry, it's a protest against a stupid, ill-defined marketing neologism. The use of the word "organic" to mean "pertaining to living beings" dates back to the 18th century, and attempts to label a tiny subset of organic material as "organic" are a recent invention which really bugs me, as much as it would bug me if people started referring to a small subset of food as "edible food" for marketing purposes.
The only conclusion I can draw is that you didn't read my comment, because if you had you wouldn't try to counter my argument by circuitously agreeing with me. I am sure your friend was very productive with Access and Excel, and I'm sure they used advanced cryptographic protocols, solved tricky problems involving communications timing, handled cross-platform compatibility issues, programmed efficient inner rendering loops, etc.

I'm talking about "general purpose software," which encompasses a huge volume of space. Rare is the person who can competently address the wide variety of problems found in the world of software. Excel and Access, in my view, are perfect examples of paring down the acceptable problem space to something reasonable and making tools for people to solve those specific problems naturally. You can't write a 3d engine in excel, but that's okay, because the tool is not for that.

But this argument breaks down when you try to take it to a general-purpose software kit, which has to handle anything and everything. In this wide, unshielded world of hard problems you have to have the most capable and powerful tools available. Deliberately limiting tools in this environment is like saying, "Our river pilots have lots of experience handling barges, so it'd be counter productive to train them on oceangoing vessels, we'll just build bigger, sturdier barges for ocean travel." Yes, sailing on the open ocean requires more powerful and complex tools, but you appreciate those tools when the ocean gets rough.
The command line really is hard to make up for, without a lot of hassle, that is. When I'm running windows it's the thing I miss the most.

Other than that, it sucks that Firefox is not nearly as polished under Linux as it is under Windows. Same goes for adobe's flash player.
The whole point of GCD is that it is a central entity that knows how much work the entire system is doing on each individual processor core, and can adjust the number of threads accordingly.

Does your Erlang example take into account the overall work the entire OS is doing on each individual processor core, adjusting the number of threads as the amount of overall work changes — or does it just take the Erlang-program's own work into account?
Only 13% of Wikipedia Contributors Are Women, Study Says
VC Raises $1.1 Billion for 'Green' and 'IT' Startups
I wonder about the single point of failure posed by the power supplies. One failed box is not a big deal (since I assume the data is replicated over several). But, what if they get a bad batch of supplies and see a relatively high failure rate? I wonder how high a power supply failure rate they can handle.

The need to stagger the power on of the two supplies poses a problem. What if power to a data center is lost? When power is restored, all box will try to start, blowing all fuses. Granted, this is a catastrophic event, so its frequency should be very low. But, this also seems like an area that could be automated.
Those protocols took off (HTTP/Email/etc). The network effect came into play.

XMPP never really took off (Big surprise). Using it for new, unconnected systems, is idiocy IMHO. There are probably more XMPP extension specifications than there are people using XMPP.

I agree, launching new protocols is hard. You need leverage and a network effect to get it going. I do get where you're coming from. I just think that anyone who has the choice on what protocol to use for something, and picks XMPP, is mad.

Even if it has to interface to legacy systems they could use a bridge.
1) have an idea 2) have an idea 3) work on it WHILE still holding your job 4) quit job only when you're ready to ramp up the project

You're in for a big surprise if you think you're going to get more freedom while running your own business.

A key part of running your own business is being able to accept feedback. Notice that instead of giving you an idea most people are telling you that you might be making a mistake.

Reconsider this decision. By all means start your own business but come up with an idea and develop it a little before you quit your job.
Your resources are pretty old, the "crisis" of car/cadr is just not there with modern, updated lisp implementations like PLT Scheme.

PLT Scheme is competitive in every way with Python and Ruby, I don't know why people keep ignoring it.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/No_True_Scots...
Funny how they didn't think to include a contribution ratio, just a contributors ratio.

That would be just as interesting, if not more interesting.
Nice headline, but not really an accurate portrayal of what really happened. Definitely a "marketing" story more that sounds a lot nicer to tell and hear than the nitty gritty that actually went on. If you look at the stats of the forum they get very little traffic (relatively), and the forum itself is pretty barren.

Therefore, I highly highly doubt that the majority of the revenue is coming from the community itself. Rather, it sounds like the forum is a legitimizing component that is essentially a front for the money making schemes behind the back.

This happens a lot with affiliate and domain sites.

You have some lucrative affiliate relationships that you can hardcore SEM against, however you need a site that looks good if the advertisers ever check you out. So what they do is usually purchase a respectable site, has the air of a community, looks good, etc. And then they have this shadow site that runs off the same domain that they arbitrage against with pages that are super ad/affiliate heavy and make tons of money.

Combining a legit domain/site with an SEM shadow site is also useful for making sure your AdWord rates stay lower. If your domain has more authority and natural SEO traffic/PR then it seems like Google won't charge you as much to get higher SEM listings.

It's actually a "simple" model and can be EXTREMELY lucrative. However, it doesn't really add much value to the world, and they can go out of business in an instant if the CPC rates change in any direction.
Andreessen Horowitz picking up a chunk of Skype
How to use Tracker to manage Agile projects
Are you bored with http://openphotovr.org and its time to find a new project?

You did a really good job on it. Maybe you can create a business around it?
In tough times, cocaine dealers have to turn to cold-calling
Wow, 90% seems like a lot... although I can't seem to find a source for that. According to an answer on Amazon's askville [1], the total ended up being ~1.7% around Oct 2006.

At one time, the life cycles of the companies might have aligned (as Skype was taking off, and Paypal was plateauing) to show ridiculous numbers like that. Still, it seems hardly justifiable to pay billions to buy a company just because they use your service for checking out.

http://askville.amazon.com/users-Paypal-Skype/AnswerViewer.d...
The ex gets access half of the founder's equity, but a good incorporation (or shareholder's?) contract will allow the other partners to buy out the wife's shares before she can actually become a "partner" in the company.
In terms of using "them", the HXT documentation made it pretty clear for me. (I put "them" in quotes because things like Arrows and Monads are really adjectives, not nouns. When used as nouns, people generally understand what you mean, but this confused me for a long time and I try not to confuse other people. Consider it my version of a "Monad tutorial". :)

In terms of theory, I found the "Applicative Programming with Effects" paper and the "Typeclassopedia" very helpful.

http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~ross/papers/Applicative.html

http://haskell.org/sitewiki/images/8/85/TMR-Issue13.pdf

I started doing a real implementation of these data structures in Perl this week. (I say "real" because people have "added Monads to Perl" before, but they didn't really add Monads, they just added a "programmable semicolon".) Anyway, in doing so, I saw in great detail the relationships between the various types (specifically "liftM2 ($)" and "<*>"), and tried to generalize things as much as possible. The result was something like Arrows, and that helped me understand the "why" in addition to the "how". Writing test cases was also helpful to me; using these esoteric stuctures in "real code" helped me build up the intuition needed to advance farther.

Anyway, it took me three readings of the Applicative Programming with Effects paper to get Applicative Functors, and after that, Arrows were pretty easy. So I recommend that paper, and lots of poking around in ghci.

To bring this back on topic, yeah, it would be hard to teach this stuff to Joe Average. But a language that allows it is still important to develop. (I also learned firsthand that language design decisions to make it difficult to implement certain features. Implementing the equivalent of "instance Monoid b => Monoid (a -> b)" is almost impossible to do cleanly, due to the polymorphism of "mempty"; it's defined in Haskell as "mempty _ = mempty", and in Perl, we discard the type information before we have a chance to pick the "second" mempty.)
> [The two tests] are phenomenally accurate at predicting full-scale intelligence scores.

Citation needed.
Syntax does define the language. It's very difficult to write macros for an ALGOL-style language. It's possible but very difficult. Some people are put off by Common Lisp's LOOP macro or the FORMAT function and will try and avoid using the more complex features of them. Those are small examples of how the syntax encourages, or discourages, the use of language features.

Hell, I even hate doing any complex shell scripting because I can never remember the difference between [ ] and [[ ]] and ( ) when using conditionals.
33% of New Readers view Snow Leopard Article via Windows
I am accustomed to something like the GNU style for method calls, which is
foo.bar (baz)
One of the things about Ruby that drives me nuts is that I can't always do this any more because of the complex lexical rules; in particular foo[4] and foo [4] mean different things.
Has anyone been having trouble with mixpanel?

Since yesterday I've been trying to investigate it for analytics for a new app I'm building. I follow their _dead_ simple examples and I never get any data logged. I'm not sure if it's something I'm doing or if the service is having trouble.
So there's this idea that Asperger's is hereditary...
It is chapter 1 of a handbook. As you'll see here, chapter two by the same fellow is also available.

http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~sbuss/ResearchWeb/HandbookProofThe...
This is hardly surprising. I don't know of anyone previously setting out to make "fake DNA evidence", but the synthesis of arbitrary DNA strands has been possible for a while, and is a common technique in molecular biology labs. The application to making fake forensic evidence is obvious, if unethical.

This makes DNA evidence comparable to other forms of forensics: generally dependable, but subject to tampering given enough motivation and resources. It's inconvenient to lose the "silver bullet", but it never was: law enforcement has had to deal with cases where people have placed blood, hairs, etc. on crime scenes before.

The trick now will be to get juries to treat DNA evidence with the proper amounts of weight and skepticism. Especially since I bet this will show up on CSI within the year...
Yojimbo 2.0 Released
Building a better lock for multithreaded ObjC code
Maybe this woman doesn't feel like a programmer. I find I can sense other developers when I meet them.
However, I've personally seen a project where the aim was essentially to let non-programmers program, and the result was horrendously messy.

So what? The goal of turning every user into a programmer is perfectly reasonable. Almost all users of the early systems and computers were also programmers. Even today, business users make use of Excel/Access and some macros to do some programming (even though it can be seen as basic).

Don't you remember a time when operating systems came with programming languages and compilers and actively promoted them to the user?

Oh, and HyperCard. There was another great example of "user's" programming. I've also seen some hideously ugly GIMP script-fu scripts but they worked and did the job of the "user" that wrote them.

In the end, the distinction between a user and a programmer is artificially created by software that doesn't view anybody else as smart enough to enter the monastary of the programmer.
This headline is sensationalist. There are some problems, obviously, but if it were really that bad, then there would be a whole bunch more. I upgraded from 10.5 and CS4, and have not run into a single issue. I tried everything that the users report in this thread as crashing Photoshop, and it's stable for me. Not one crash.

One user reported that on a clean install with CS4, everything went smoothly. That, to me, says some people have stuff running that is causing problems.

I had issues with system stability after the upgrade. Lot's of beachballing. Turned out to be a kernel extension that I was using in Leopard. Hardly surprising that a rogue kernel extension can make your system unstable. After removing it, SL has been rock solid.
The forum site does not have that revenue, the product sold to the members of the forum does.

The original title is a lot better.
> Of course, they don't tell you this anywhere.

I wonder where you got the knowledge from then...

Perhaps you learned it from the help that comes with Opera:

> "The technology behind Opera Turbo is a proxy server with server-side compression of Web pages. A compression rate of up to 80% can be achieved, in part by reducing the quality of images. If you want to view an image uncompressed, right-click on the image, and select "Reload Image in Full Quality"."
Cause no one likes me :(