skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with most of the points of the article (finding a balance for testing, naming, writing readable code, etc.) I'm not a fan of the tone, though. I might consider myself a "rockstar" programmer, if not for the fact that it sounds incredibly douchey. At least I'm closer to that than a "workhorse". And yet I don't think I fall into the negative stereotypes he mentions... I guess that explains my reaction (not to mention the self-quoting of tweets).

My biggest problem with software development as a profession is that people don't think before they do it. I've found that a lot of people just hack away randomly with some code that approximates their idea of how it should work. It usually doesn't work, so they just change things aimlessly until it appears to. I can definitely understand this mentality, I've been there--it happens to me when I'm programming beyond my understanding. But I try very hard to recognize when this happens, and stop to think more. There's very little value in writing code that even the author doesn't understand. Accumulate enough of this code, and you get the typical horribly-designed patchwork mess that nobody can read, debug, or change.

To me, the ability to solve problems that you're not familiar with is paramount in importance for actual software engineering. If you're just building some CRUDdy business app that does nothing remotely complicated, OK. But bubble sorts and link shorteners? Come on, that stuff is simple. Maybe you never need to implement those specific examples, but as a placeholder for general problem-solving skill, it's a low bar.

Perhaps that's why the title refers to "software developer" rather than "software engineer". I don't really know. But I do wish there were more jobs that required real problem solving skills (and don't require a PhD...).
Same here (in firefox). Tried in Chrome and it works fine.
>And given that quote stuffing doesn't actually hurt anyone, it's not like stopping it is a high priority.

It does hurt people in some way. It increases the amount of data we need to handle. More storage space and more processing required.

And you've been a bit disingenuous in your article - there is a theory behind the "2.???" part. The theory is that slower participants are overwhelmed by the quote traffic and end up lagging, and are then taken advantage of. I don't personally believe it, and I'm sure 99% of these things are just feedback loops, but it is theoretically possible. The faster exchanges are cycling in say 20-30 micros these days, so any participant who can't match that rate will easily fall behind. Who knows, weaker participants may still be taking 1-2 millis to handle an update. So just before some known vol event, say an economic figure, you flood the exchange and lag the other participants by say 50 millis, then pick them off after the new information arrives.
> Of course, you still have to give two weeks notice if you want to exercise that at-willness for yourself!

That's a professional courtesy; it's almost never legally required.
To be honest, the value resides more in the idea and the fact that it's already online than in the code.

A basic implementation of this service would take less than 100 lines in any language commonly used on the web.
Wow, I had no idea how many of these exist(ed). Also, thanking my lucky star that I don't have to use any of them. Bad memories of LabView and HP Vee.
Would be interesting to hear from them on the rationale of why they chose Salt stack compared to puppet, chef or ansible. I figure they must have given it a good analysis since it seems to be a heavy part of what VisualOps/Madeiera is about.
this is an interesting way to look at the problem but in my reasonably informed opinion, flawed.

it seems like this is working backwards from the assumption that quote stuffing must be benign activity, and then trying to rationalize it with signal/noise theories about finding the fair price level.

it is totally inaccurate to say that there is more load on the sender than the general public, and also misses the mark on what the DOS theory alleges.

the exchange bears considerably more load than the sender of orders. the exchange must (1) ack the order, or reject if any flags are populated out-of-spec, (2) add the order to the order book, (3) check for potential matches based on price of order, if so, cross and update feeds, (4) if non-marketable, publish out to (a) depth-of-book feed, (b) SIP feed, etc.

the DOS theory is that excessive activity in a single partition can slow down the publishing of data in that symbol range, which would mess up the quoted price for the exchange in a symbol, which would affect orders priced on the exchange, or anyone using the price in a derived manner (at a dark pool etc).
Maybe it does to some people, but I use the term "Rockstar" to connotate:
- highly productive
- gets features shipped (avoid analysis paralysis)
- features rarely have bugs
- features rarely have to be refactored when we scale
- code is easily maintained by other engineers

If such a person were to also work 80+ hours a week, then they would just get that much more done. But I know plenty of people who meet the criteria without working long ours.

I think some people who aren't "rockstars" try to correct for it by working longer hours, but I don't think that's what it's meant to imply.

Most productive engineer I've ever worked with was "older", had a kid, and a family. Easily as productive as the rest of the team combined.
I've got to disagree with you on the last one. Personally, I'd rather work with a developer (and hire, should I ever end up in such a position) someone who writes code because it's what they love to do first and because it happens to pay the bills second. Profit motive is powerful, but I'd argue that doing what you love beats all else.

I read a study once that found greater financial incentives are correlated with lower quality of work (might have been productivity), but I can't seem to mumble the right google incantation to bring it up again. I'll post it here if I come across it.
Chinese writing does not encode sounds. It encodes meaning. If you write Chinese in pinyin, all you do is write down the sounds, not the meaning.

Said differently: why do we keep writing English like this, instead of using a phonetic alphabet? Same reason.
Lenovo ThinkPad and Edge battery recall
It is frustrating that the confusion around heartbleed and the OpenSSL free lists persists: http://blog.leafsr.com/2014/04/11/my-heart-is-ok-but-my-eyes...
Words have shifted a bit. In the strictest possible senses, "It's not possible to know for sure" is an agnostic position and the atheistic position would be either "I believe there is no god, whatever the evidence" or "I believe there is no god, here is the evidence". These strict uses sometimes confuse more typical uses, where "probably not, because I haven't seen sufficient evidence to make 'there is any sort of a god' more likely than other options" is called "atheist" and "shrug I dunno" falls under "agnostic".
This argument is entirely orthogonal to the argument I was making: That welfare systems can provide more freedom of choice than increased taxes takes away: The incremental "freedom" that a slight difference in taxation provides in the form of disposable income does not do much; the incremental freedom from having a lot of concerns pretty much taken away because the welfare system reduces the worst case impact substantially, on the other hand, is a big deal.

As I said in a response to someone else: Replace Norway with Denmark, or Sweden, or Germany, or France or any number of other European countries in my comment above, and the argument still stands.
maybe the design of the website is subpar/a little annoying, but the actual object, the camera is actually beautiful.

I think it's very well designed (aesthetically and functionally) -- with any camera, you're going to spend quite a bit of time looking down at the physical thing, tilted downwards in your hand, trying to see if you got a good shot (looking at the preview), I think the design is a pretty bold move towards better practical usability.
Agree somewhat. This is also quite common. I think what new person forgets (I'm guilty) when looking at "rubbish" code is the context in which it was written. Was this done at 3am the night before it shipped? Was team morale incredibly low and this was the only guy left to write this? Did he/she not know of a better way? Did this start as a simple block and slowly accreted over time? Was he/she going through a rough patch but didn't have the time to refactor it. We've all had off days and spent more than another day unpicking what we did. Heck I look at code I wrote 12 months ago and could quite often tear it apart. This kind of thing just happens in places. Discipline is key. It's hard, but sometimes there has to be a balance or things wouldn't get done.
Making tools that were expensive or difficult to use, inexpensive and easy to use, means that scientists and students can make use of them to discover and invent the things you suggest.
From DPreview: resolution is apparently 5 megapixels. So significantly better than 1080p (2mp) but less than 4k (8mp). So the resolution seems to scale fairly linearly with the "ray count".
I definitely see the appeal of a single binary, and maintaining Stash has made us want to tear our hair out, but, in the end, the hours lost there are fewer than the hours we would have gained if the developer of this project decided to help another one. The new features would save us much more time than time spent administrating it.
I think he's divorced now so it probably doesn't matter.
I liked the post but the quotes did come off as obnoxious. Still a good post though, so whatever.
Until Bubba get serious illness or want to study or already have college debt to pay. Jobs that do not require college degree will not pay the above and if you have college degree you got that debt.

So essentially, your Bubba inherited the above or is not exactly the norm e.g, he has business that does exceptionally well. Exceptionally well doing business is not the norm.
Cable Industry wants to kill the CableCARD
To clarify: I actually think that the article's main complaint (a large loan loss rate) may be ACCEPTABLE if it is made clear up-front.

Zidisha is not a place for lenders to make huge profits. It is a place for lenders to support others making a difference for themselves. If the loan default rate can be lowered enough that it is covered by lending rates, then it could ALSO be a place where the lenders' money can support others over-and-over through repeated loans (and even be withdrawn by the lender at some point) -- and that would be GREAT. But it is not necessary: what is necessary is clear and honest communication.
Sure but what if someone else is doing something in the market that perfectly lines up with the edge conditions for your place and cancel thresholds? Nothing is foolproof. If you are operating at a large enough scale this will end up happening a few times a day, especially when you have multiple agents interacting in ways that can't be predicted. A feedback loop can still happen between two unrelated traders running similar rules like "if I'm not the best offer, improve it by a tick".
Quick correction to the article: Gwynne Shotwell is not the President & CEO, she is the President & COO. It's very well known that Elon Musk is the CEO.
> If you are faster at handling this situation than your competition then you are going to beat them anyway so what's the benefit in slowing them down?

Suppose your fund has invested a lot in some hefty compute hardware but your trading strategies are on the weak side, whereas you know your competitors have better strategies but their computers are slower. Isn't it then in your interest to stuff the order feed and make everyone more dependent on computer power?
You know, except for the 'openssl' executable that builds, and a lot of people use.
> The worst 10% are actually doing worse now than 30 years ago.

But that is largely due to the fact that the bottom 10% are more likely to be new immigrants now than they were 30 years ago. If you correct for that, by only doing the comparison with the same pool of population (people who lived here 30 years ago or their descendants), the inequality is quite a bit smaller.
An older person can be a rockstar too ... it refers to your ability to crush code, not your ability to ingest red bull. Maybe the word has gotten a bit of negative connotation, along with brogrammer, but it's essentially a good thing at heart.
The FAQ suggests that the fact you use a complicated data format is a good thing and beneficial to security. I really doubt this is true.
Agreed. I wonder how they'll handle Pocket, which I love, but is also designed to get rid of both ads and pagination for free.
I'm not sure if you're a recruiter or work with bringing new talent into the team. But when you say "I use the term "Rockstar" to connotate", don't forget many might not interpret it that way.

You could be having the opposite effect by using that term in ads. My experience is anecdotal, myself and my peers, but I skip the rockstar/ninja/gurus ads pretty quickly unless the tech/description draws me back in.
Actually, i use Azure Media Streaming services.. (i'm BizSpark), but i suppose AWS has the same services, you just need to include a link, and the service will automaticly encode it into the correct format (don't specify the filetype).

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/media-services/

https://aws.amazon.com/digital-media/

https://www.google.be/search?q=encode+media+&oq=encode+media...
Why I Tell My Employees to Bring Their Kids to Work
Actually, less than four when they stopped selling XP. My point is, if they extended sales are they not obligated to extend support?

"Sales of Windows XP licenses to OEMs ceased on June 30, 2008, but continued for netbooks until October 2010."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP
I agree that passion is valuable, but expect me to be passionate about coding and solving problems, please don't expect me to be passionate about your company before I even fully understand who you are and what you're doing.
Sorry, but you probably won't get anything if none of your equity is vested yet. You need to check your employment agreement to see if there is an acceleration clause that accelerates the vesting of some/all of your equity in the event of an acquisition or other ownership transfer.

Otherwise, if you're lucky, you might get a job at the acquirer with a salary bump.
Could be used for notepad API or something public. That said, it seems that services like Parse and Firebox seem more robust and also have faster response times.
For some reason I just got the email about the recall today, I guess they imported some email addresses since the footer notes 'You were added to the system April 21, 2014.'.

If you have multiple batteries you can deinstall the program and run it again, since it caches the battery serial number (also after reboot).

-----

From the FAQ:

Q4. Do I have to return my defective battery?

Answer: No. However, by accepting a replacement battery you are committing to recycling your battery in an approved manner.

Q5. If my battery is recalled, how long will I have to wait for it?

Answer: Orders will typically be processed and shipped within 3 business days. Delivery times will vary based on country.
As cute a solution as that is, I think fold out screen is far more versatile.
The FAQ fails to point out the reason for this recall. What's wrong with my T410's battery?
A Close Look at Language Choices in GitHub's Statement
I built http://jsonblob.com for this purpose. It has an HTTP API as well as we nice GUI interface to edit your JSON. It's open sourced and really just a thin webapp on top of mongo, so it's easy to run your own.
Google Maps for the Roman Empire
Amazon does have an Amazon Elastic Transcoder, but it is rather pricey.
SpaceX hasn't confirmed it, however I would assume that that would be the case. Elon has stated in the past that the legs would provide pitch stability which was missing in the last attempt to relight the first stage. Without it the first stage likely would tumble and a relight would be impossible due to the propellant being centrifuged.

Here's a link which talks about it (about halfway through the article): http://www.space.com/23009-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-launch-tes...
I'll disagree with the last one. Whanever I hire for, I always look for "passion for the craft" - whether it's design, code, marketing, or whatever. A great question is "What's the last book or blog post you've read in your field that got you excited?" If people love what they do enough to explore it in their off-time, they'll (usually) be a cut above the rest... And they won't get bored/tired of their work as soon or as easily (assuming you can provide interesting work).
Raytrix has already been doing this: http://raytrix.de, however stereo-cams, time of flight, and structured light approaches are usually more effective. You can do everything you can do with a light-field array camera with 3+ lenses and some clever algorithms.
Codementor Session – Working with Twilio and TDD
> The better question is, "Should hotel taxes exist in the first place?"

That question has already been put to the local electorate, and they seem to be happy enough with the status quo. Taxing hotels is a way for a locale to generate revenue from tourism. In this case, New York has something visitors want, and it wants to charge them for it. I don't see anything wrong with this. If you don't want to pay New York's Hotel taxes, don't go there.
From one of their videos, they emphasize that the point is not necessarily refocusing still photos, but producing interactive still photo end-user experiences. That's a very intriguing idea to me.
What you call "choice" is empty of meaning or significant because you leave out the very relevant context in which that "choice" may be exercised. For example, it's dishonest to say a person with $20,000 in savings has the "choice" to pay cash or take a mortgage for a $200,000. Such "choice" is not real or meaningful, because it can't really be exercised. Likewise, it's dishonest to suggest that "choice" in America is not correlated strongly to income and wealth. The lower one's income and means, the fewer real, meaningful choices one has about a great many things--including medical care, food, housing, and basically everything else humans need to subsist.

I have lived in every income spectrum up through my current one--from severe poverty to relative affluence. One of the most important observations I've made is how little "freedom of choice" there is the further down the socioeconomic ladder one goes in this country. It's just an empty phrase most often spouted by people who have never known anything other than a life of upper-middle-class or better living.
is it just me or the website is slow? I have the latest MacBook Pro...
This can already be done using Linq in C++, which is range-based rather than iterator based:

auto q = LINQ(
from(z, boost::irange(1, std::numerical_limits<int>::max()))
from(x, boost::irange(1, z))
from(y, boost::irange(1, x))
where(x*x + y*y == z*z)
select(boost::fusion::make_vector(x, y, z))
);
for(auto&& x:q | linq::take(10)) std::cout << x << std::endl;

Hopefully, once we get ranges in the C++ standard library, we can add list comprehension to the language, perhaps something like this:

auto q = [
for (z, std::irange(1, std::numerical_limits<int>::max()))
for (x, std::irange(1, z))
for (y, std::irange(1, x))
if (x*x + y*y == z*z)
boost::fusion::make_vector(x, y, z)
];
for(auto&& x:q | std::take(10)) std::cout << x << std::endl;
WHO healthcare ratings were torn apart to no end because of poor methodology. Jeez, they used literacy rates and "income inequality" for some of their metrics on judging healthcare.

The WHO ratings were more about politics than healthcare.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB125608054324397621?mg=...

When you drill down into specifics, like survival rates for cancer, the US healthcare system is the best in the world, BAR NONE:

http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@epidemiologysurvei...
"This guy keeps quoting his own tweets - bgschiller" - callmeed
the UI I mean, not the bandwidth...
You are confusing lifestyle choices with lifestyle constraints.

Europe in general has a much less developed culture of going out for food. People will do it occasionally, but often prefer to prepare there own, even in a social setting. This is driven by culture, not but by money.
What's always wrong with LiPo batteries: under some condition the LiPo pack is damaged and it will start a fire or 'explode'.
It is lucky if you learn Mandarin Chinese, try Cantonese Chinese.

In Mandarin Chinese, there are 4 tones, as the article said, each tone can mean differently. In Cantonese Chinese, there are 9 tones.
I'm surprised that Lytro hasn't commissioned any photographs from any famous photographers to put on exhibit yet at say a MOMA or even something like the California Academy of Arts & Sciences. The reason being that most enthusiasts aren't very excited about bleeding edge technology, as already seen in the comments here. I'm sure the complaints would be worse in a photography forum. Most of them tend to go for tried and true devices. An art commission, possibly with some really large and nice digital photo frames for a gallery, should help mitigate this problem for Lytro and open people's eyes
The city of Mr. Andreessen, South Korea
Hate that you are getting downvoted, as I think this is actually a discussion that needs to happen. Many people will have a hard time distinguishing these technologies. Especially on paper.

My take is that this camera will have some major advantages in shutter speed and quickly taking successive pictures.

As an example, at my child's soccer practice, it is not uncommon to fire off about 5 shots in any 2 second interval. It is also not uncommon to have 4 of those shots be out of focus. Heck, all five.

This camera could solve that. The phone solution fails, as I can't take that many pictures that quickly.

Right?
>> The Lytro actually does what Google is simulating.

But wait a second. We're talking about the Google Camera lens blur function, right? That feature is only really simulating out of focus blur, which is not really the same as what Lytro does.

What Lytro does more akin to focus bracketing, isn't it?
I am sorry you had a bad experience with your PMs, but what does SharePoint have to do with creating categories that don't match anything in the product, or with deleting databases prematurely? Search in internal databases is a very hard problem because of lack of metadata, and in my experience it is not solved any better in source control systems than it is in SharePoint.

And, I have personally found SkyDrive Pro, or OneDrive for Business, or Groove, or SharePoint, or whatever MS wants to call it, very convenient and reliable compared to Google Drive (for which the desktop app tends to quit every hour and leave things un-synced, and which has far worse web viewers).
Isn't that sort of the point? It's true, because it's a disguised tautology.
> You should aim for simplicity and over the years I have learned that simplicity is far more easily attained by time spent working and refactoring than hours of pure thought and “brilliance”.

Yup. It was Rich Hickey's presentation "Simple Made Easy" that finally allowed me to put it into words. I got so frustrated about only having a 1 hour presentation to link people to, that I ended up writing some notes to be able to refer people to.

This is the money shot I think.

http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/how-complexity-affects-software/

This is also really relevant:

http://thecodelesscode.com/case/108
Managing a flock of web devs and telling them all they're doing it wrong would eat up time that could've been spent on the actual code. So it's not actually help.