skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just this morning I literally wandered around Staples for an hour pondering this exact question. Staples might not be the prime place to look, but it was the best I had.

Anyway, my requirements were thus: it had to be reorganizable (e.g. your standard three clip binder), it had to be relatively small (I want to carry it around in a small messenger bag or even better my versipack) and it had to be amazingly simple (lined paper only, no calendar, no pockets, no special latches).

Long story short: every notebook I looked at was absolutely idiotic in some fashion or another. The reogranizable requirement limited me to like half a dozen. The simple limited me down to basically two: a standard 1/2" binder or one of these new fangled "rolla" notebooks, which are absolutely horribly designed. I ended up going with a simple 1/2" binder, a bunch of paper, and the hope that eventually someone will solve this problem acceptably so I can have a reorganizable notebook.

The main benefit of the 1/2" binder is it small: keep only what you need, but keep it with you as often as possible. Insight comes at odd times, and if you keep your goals in the binder they will get revisited often, solidifying them in your mind.

Hope that helps.
IIRC Apple even suggested in the rejection letter to Google that it would better be implemented as a web app, so the sensationalistic tone of the article seems a wee bit hyperbolic to me.
Continuing to write code, allows the profession itself to continue to be looked at as a commodity. It keeps people in jobs, and unfortunately keeps many creative thinkers out of the loop. As it is, only programmers can write code effectively enought to produce innovative web sites and therefore, web companies that reinvent the web as we know it, and produce masses of wealth. If we did not use code, not only could we be more efficient with producing these websites, becasue we would not be also producing even greater code errors, and via numerous different types of code that are all used for different things and are not designed to work well together, becasue the programmer wants to keep a monopoly on it, but all creative thinkers that have brilliant ideas on how to utilize software and the web to better the world, and the worlds of business and technology, will be also to contribute their ideas. The bottom line is that tyically, the most creative people are those whom are natural artists. But these artists arenot techies, and therefore cannot translate their creative ideas to the web or software without including the mind of a programmer. This goes for anyone with a great idea. If you have a great idea for software or the web, but then partner with a programmer to carryout your ideas. Make sure you stay on top of your game. Because just like when a story gets passed along through many people, when your idea gets translated into code from someone else, there is a lot of room for error and distortion. Just as it is when a programmer is forced to deal with numerous different programming languages just to express what they want to create. Errors occur. As youtube and digg have both cut out the middleman in video media and news, and allow the consumer to make the choice as to what they like, why not cut out the middle man(main stream media, or programming), and allow all creative people to build and create without code, but via a universal point and click type program? Let the creation come directly from the source. Until we the consumers, and the creative thinkers demand this, we will never stop writing code.
I enjoyed programming for J2ME, it only gets horrible when you try to support 1000s of devices, all with individual bugs.
You're right, apparently they've got roughly 50 such licensees now.

Apologies!
Thanks for the links, though the one I'm thinking of had them as three bullets points. Actually, it sounds like I may be thinking of a slide presentation, not an interview.
The article mentioned the energy gap. Energy gap is the only metric that matters for weight loss. Anything else is just a means to that end, and the wrong abstraction can lead to the wrong medium-term goals and short-term decision biases ("Should I do this right now or this?").
Autocomplete known_hosts:

complete -W "$(echo `cat ~/.ssh/known_hosts | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | sed -e s/,.*//g | uniq | grep -v "\["`;)" ssh
Nor can you come to the wrong conclusion at the end.
I have always thought that getting familiar with a command line is a good way to think of programming for people that are familiar with computers, but not with software development. If they can start with some basic things (moving one file from one folder to another) and then start to get the concept of chaining commands together via scripting (moving multiple files to multiple destinations depending on the name) they will get a grasp of the simple concepts because they will know what they want their output to be. This sort of learning can take place in a matter of days and then I would recommend going to a language with an interactive shell (ruby, python, etc...).

From there, I find that short exercises are helpful. If they enjoy math based problems, I cannot recommend project euler enough. Otherwise, if they can relate their programming work back to their specific fields(ie, writing up an analysis of unemployment data or digging into gene sequencing), they will see it in a different, more applicable light.

I am biased being in the industry, but anyone with a good working knowing of a LAMP stack (know how to set up all components with default settings, understands the basic of SQL queries, can write a cgi script to fetch data from the database) can get into an entry level job with enough intelligence.
True but you can listen to an audio book while driving. Also I don't know where but Free is available in PDF form legally free as well if you prefer that method.

Overall I found little surprising in this material but it cemented a lot of ideas, and was well worth the time. Of course it was time I would have been in the car anyway ;-)
I recently looked into using Flex to develop a Flash interface, and found it quite simple to get started... just beware of problems with asynchrony (that's what tripped me up the most).
I suggest dropping the project, since civ has cost humanity enough already - browser civ could cripple my productivity... just a few keystrokes away when already procrastinating. I both love and fear this project.
And now you get to give 20% of that money to the government!
This is a cool project idea. My first impression is that this feels like a natural fit for GWT. The ImageBundle mechanism would allow you to automatically build css sprites at compile-time -- and the logic for accessing the individual tiles from the sprites: (The gwt-canvas project is a small wrapper that would allow you to draw instances of the Image class to the canvas. http://code.google.com/p/gwt-canvas/ )

It would also make it easier to move larger chunks of the FreeCiv client into the browser in a manner that would be easier to refactor and maintain than Javascript - and while being compiled to be as small as possible.

Java, for all its faults, is strong in refactorability, which would be essential for keeping the code in sync with a moving target like the current C implementation.
Well, with this architecture it'd be a real surprise if it worked. It's a brave attempt, but it was a long shot from the beginning.

I wonder how it would work as a java applet. Might require a jre download, but it should be many orders of magnitude faster then javascript.
It does alter the content: when I buy a CD at Hastings and a CD at Wal-Mart, the Wal-Mart CD is identical except with the naughty words bleeped out.

This is a distinct case from Wal-Mart not selling, for instance, $100 models of the Enterprise-D or motion-sensitive lightsabers.
Well it might be more powerful but it has a lot quirks and little incompatibilities across browsers
It's a web app and thus no push to notification available to properly be a substitute for texting.

Myself, free over rides this nuance, though I don't think so for the majority?!?
Quake Live uses a plugin. It doesn't "run in the browser" like one might expect something to "run in a browser."
Good point. That reminds me of how Programming Languages/Compiler construction courses helped me understand
how high level programming languages worked.

And it is a good way to get started with problem solving.
Thanks for elaborating.
Does anyone here have experience with the concave mirror holographic display mentioned offhand in that video? Is something like that difficult and/or expensive to build?
My big problem with a legal pad was throwing it into my bag tended to destroy the top one or two pages.
I bind my own. It takes some time, but the result is a notebook that has the paper I want in it, that lays flat so I can use all of every page (I'm a lefty), and that I don't spend too much money on.

Moleskines are $$ for a pile of paper. A few minutes and an upholstery needle and I have graph paper, light-weight blank, and watercolor paper bound together just the way I like it.
Good programmers are creative thinkers.

"Middle men" are usually doing something of value otherwise there wouldn't be a need for them, and they wouldn't be around.

It's not because of a conspiracy that programmers are needed. You could use a "point and click type program", but they just don't work that well. And programming via a visual tool instead of writing code by tapping on a keyboard doesn't change the fact that you are programming.
> It's the same if you want to be a great pianist.

You and your upmodders are confusing two separate concepts.

Repetition is important to train muscle memory and motor coordination. The same is true for basketball and all sorts of other endeavors that require "mindless repetition". Note the key word, mindless.

This is NOT true of creative endeavors. You can't "make" yourself come up with good ideas on demand. You can force yourself to write, but it will probably be junk and a waste of time as you didn't have anything you were inspired to say, or an idea you needed to work out in your head.

Of course it's still an important skill to be able to focus on tedious parts in programming, as that's how you ship.
Personally I use an artists sketchbook with big pages, heavy paper and a thick cover. It's too heavy, but the contents are safe and the paper is of the right texture and unlined.

I generally pick them up at University bookstores where they tend to be cheap (~$10).
Founders should pay themselves whatever optimizes the long-term outcome for the company, since it is mainly through the company succeeding that they will make money. You need a certain amount to live on to be able to work well. But early on, when the company has no money, it is probably not a good idea to pay yourselves more than that minimum. Later you can pay yourselves more. But whatever you pay yourself, you're always doing it at the expense of the stock you hold. This is obvious before the company is profitable, because the only way to get money to pay salaries is by selling stock. But it is just as true after a company is profitable too. Any dollar you take out is a dollar the company can't spend on expansion.

I notice one person advocated paying oneself a salary from the beginning, because it "forces you to work harder." In my experience, the kind of people who make good founders are able to make themselves work hard without such tricks.
Can you do some kind of differential download and local move? Eg. when the user moves his mouse to the left 20 pixels and the world scrolls, then you only have to discard 20xheight pixels on the left and fetch 20xheight pixels from the server to bring in on the right and move over the entire canvas (or whatever) by 20 pixels, without calling setpixel() for each moved but unchanged pixel. Then add any other fluff such as a building exploding or whatever.
Anatomy of a Parasitic Computer (2002)
Those whitelines notebooks are a great hack on the traditional lined paper. I like the structure of lined paper but dislike how the drawn lines on the papers lines make it hard to see. Great find!
Credit Cards increase risk of failure for startups
The federation protocol (server to server) is over XMPP, not HTTP.
It's just not that simple.

Actually, most of my business comes from folks who started ITSPs because they saw Asterisk and went:

1. Asterisk
2. VoIP
3. ?!?!?!??
4. $$$ PROFIT $$$!

... and, well, that turns out not to be the case.
I wouldnt bet on a 3.5". However last year I found some old (like really old - 1992) 5.25" and that old P54C could still read them. In case you're interested there was simcity on them :)
I do not think those words mean what you think they mean.

Specifically, it's a press release about the purchase of a license. One of the parties mentioned as an owner of the patent portfolio, TPL, has claimed this before, so there's no real news here.

Chuck Moore has a page (http://www.colorforth.com/vTPL.htm) on the different opinions about ownership. It doesn't appear to have been recently updated to include a transfer of ownership. On the contrary, it indicates things are where they've been for a while: Chuck hasn't received any royalties on the portfolio and the ownership issue is a matter of legal wrangling.
Well if we're going to bring out the big guns, the plugins, this would be a different situation entirely. Besides, if a user can download a jre, why not just download the whole game in C?
You're saying programmers aren't creative people. I disagree--programmers, like good musicians, are intensely creative people with a remarkable degree of technical ability. "allow all creative people to build and create without code"? That's like saying "allow all creative people to play songs and paint beautiful landscapes without having to strum guitar strings or wave paintbrushes around". And as it turns out, that's possible--you can play other instruments, or draw with computer rendering tools, if you don't mind a slightly tone or a different "look", and still end up with good art. But good art is hard in and of itself.

Knowing how to express an idea in code is easy. It's easier as languages get more high-level but it's easy enough now. But knowing what ideas to express, and having ideas that are consistent enough, have the right tonality and the right balance and the right leanness to express, is the difficult part. Playing piano is about knowing what keys to hit, not how to hit the keys. Same with programming. If your fingers are too short, slow, and fat to play the piano, play trumpet. If the incidental parts of one programming language are difficult or useless to you, use another.
How I Learned To Quit The iPhone & Love Google Voice
I'll second that. Founders should pay themselves slightly above the minimum they need to get by. Piece of mind translates into the quality of your work (be it coding, selling or marketing). There are probably a few things that can negatively affect a company more than a founder who can't stop thinking about how he will make his rent/credit card payment.
sadly Assembla is left off the list, a personal favorite.
How I Learned To Quit The iPhone And Love Google Voice
I just use a plain old $1 graph-paper composition book for all my notes and such. I find them to be much more durable long-term than spiral bound notebooks, which inevitably seem to end up with the cover just barely hanging on.
What are some examples of Ruby libraries without Python equivalents?
The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof-Systems (pdf)
That was part of my point. Instead of trying to do in something that was not meant for it, consider an alternative way.
Speaking of annoying points discussions, the above is the sort of comment to which I'd give 10+ points, even if doing so cost me 100 points.
This is the same reason why people invest up to their last penny, just to watch all their money being lost. " I already gambled 100 dollars, f&*^% it, I may as well give this last 10 dollars, which my lunch for tomorrow, a shot". Then tomorrow you are more likely not to eat.
I think you could do both. Position 96x48px divs with css sprites over the canvas element to draw the images. I think this would be a performance win too, because browsers are already very good at drawing things like css sprites (although I don't know how well it combines with the canvas element).
> ...IE is used on office desktops, that is places people wouldn't use for playing games anyway.

Pull the other one!
With Launchpad's "Blueprints" and "Answers" project subpages, it looks like they just want to be different for its own sake. I think they should use the regular names for those subpages.
Does filling in an Excel worksheet count as programming? Many people do it every day without writing procedural code, but I would wager that it is.
I'm not sure you need a jre. If I were to guess I'd say no, but it's been awhile since I played with applets on computers who didn't have it installed.

But web games are better for a host of other reasons:

- compatibility between os-es

- compatibility between versions of the same OS (win 95 vs xp) - much greater lifetime

- no hassle with installs, play instantly and from anywhere

- easier to multiplay

- switch from "savegames" to a "profile".
If you're writing FORTRAN/COBOL style procedural code in high level languages, then (as the kids say) you're doing it wrong.

You tell the computer what you want it to do. The computer does it. You can tell it at as high or low a level as you want (within reason). The computer requires a precise formulation of what you want it to do before it can do anything. Can you see a way out of this?
Everyone has their opinion and that's cool.

For me I want the full experience on my netbook, laptop, desktop, mobile net device and etc... Not some hobbled experience because old business models are being protected(blatant anti-competitive actions)!
I got a A5 and A6 spiral hardback-bound notebook from Wilkos in the UK. Each with durable paper, 100 pages, about 70 pence (about 1 dollar).
I still use my 27 year old Sinclair ZX Spectrum now and again. Last year we used my CDTV as the living room CD player for 6 months as we didn't want to buy a new stereo or stereo speakers (my wife blew them).
I've found that "working harder" is more accurate than saying "working more productively". It's been my experience that many people get very excited about, say, rebuilding backends for incremental performance reasons (because they're good at it) rather than doing sales or marketing work (which isn't particularly fun). Of course, you can have the world's most perfect backend, but if you don't have users, you're in a tree/forest situation. It's the same 80 hours a week either way - but it's a more productive 80 hours if the founders are honest about what matters at this moment and what doesn't.

People enjoy working on the stuff they're good at. A lot of times success comes from working on the stuff that you're not good at. Rebuilding a backend sure can "feel" productive, but it often isn't the right decision for that moment. That's why I prefer to think of it as working "harder" - it's a useful shorthand for "don't neglect the stuff that sucks to work on". A need for revenue, based on a little higher cash burn, can often make the correct resource allocation decision more obvious.
In other words, compile the FreeCiv client for NaCl.
Speaking of openness, if there was a large open source game written in Flash (such as FreeCiv), the swfdec/gnash developers might be willing to invest the effort to be able to run it.
It appears they more or less stole the stuff from him, that's where the 'history' I referred to above came from.

I completely misinterpreted the press release, see above.
A somewhat related idea: Shouldn't it be possible to implement "canvas sprites" (no CSS involved) by downloading a large image, carving it on the client side, and drawing the sprites into a canvas?
Wal-Mart does not alter the recordings. They have no right to. Record companies that wish to sell their music at Wal-Mart choose to alter their recordings for that purpose.
agreed.

The title is misleading. Of course, just exercise, or just diet, is not going to get you very far. It has to be both together.
Can't speak for the parent, but from my experience, most developers think QA stinks because they have had to do it on the side. If you have to do it on the side, you usually don't have time to do it properly and write tests / scripts or do coding stuff in general, you are simply reduced to doing rote testing. Rote testing stinks.
Malaysian Government Wants Internet Filtering
You can ride a bike instead of running.
I'm telling you baby, you always double down on 11.
How is that anti-competitive? Apple has done absolutely nothing to prevent Palm from creating a a competing product to either iTunes or the iPod/iPhone. They have in fact given Palm a very strong incentive to do so instead of parasitically hijacking Apple's software.
It's good for games.

I can also see a use for keyboard shortcuts: Press lightly to delete a letter, a little harder a word, harder still a line, and really hard for a paragraph.

4 levels of modulation might be too much for accurate use, but three should be workable.
I agree that it's difficult to out-train a bad diet. But

1) Remember, we're counting the difference between what you need to eat and what you do eat. So although crazily irresponsible people doubtless are regularly eating 5000+ calorie diets, day in and day out, the amount they need to burn off to zero out would then be around 2000+ calories.

2) Impractical is not impossible. Even if you OVEREAT by 3000 calories per day, if you spent all day running and resting/drinking water from running, you could do it.

Exercise CAN make people thin. ;) I'm not saying that for a given someone, you couldn't eat enough to take yourself out of contention, but the answer to "Can exercise make you thin?" is "yes."

What I object to most in the article title is the implication that people are working hard, but somehow wasting their effort.

"Oh, the problem is that you've been getting up an hour early every morning to run and run and run, and have been undoing all of your hard work by eating Hardees Thickburgers 3 times a day!"

If you have the self-discipline to run regularly, you have the self-discipline necessary to complement it with the MINIMUM of dietary caution necessary to let it work for you.
It does not address the fact that when you convert 10 lbs of fat to muscle, you weigh the same but are ultimately in better shape.

This is a problem for a lot of people especially for men, who tend to build a lot of muscle as they exercise. Focusing on weight will mislead you and set yourself up for disappointment. A better solution is to take a front and side photo of yourself once a month to compare physical transformation.
I've been watching this situation closely, and I too am concerned about how a client/server protocol specification isn't being prioritized higher.

That said, does the Google Talk client in the sidebar of my GMail client speak XMPP? Of course not...it's a web app, and it needs to talk to a web server as an intermediary to a jabber server somewhere. I can log in using a desktop GUI jabber client to an actual XMPP listener if I want to, and that is what is important. I don't care one whit about the protocol that GMail Chat uses to talk to its back end. That's a private matter between Google and Google.

It's not the browser-server protocol that needs to be specified, but rather some other client-server protocol, without any assumption that the client is a browser.

It seems to me that the relationship between "the web" and Wave is entirely incidental, stemming from the fact that their reference client runs in a browser. One might well write a client in Cocoa or GTK, in which case an open specification for how Google's Wave client, written in GWT, communicates with its back end does us no good at all.

However, I'm willing to give it time. It feels like they've got bigger fish to fry at the moment, based on this thread:

http://groups.google.com/group/wave-protocol/browse_thread/t...