skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the type thing is important to the kinds of people who get a woody thinking about the maths that deal not in numbers.
Are those three players part of any band? Are there any albums out using this instrument yet? I'd love to hear more of it.
Ok I am not sure this would be very useful as it stands. I don't think many people need that kind of timer while having an internet connection. But you may be more succesful if you turn it into an iphone/blackberry/android app that does not need constant connectivity.

I will give you another idea which is tangentially related to what you are doing. There are timers that are used for people that bill for their time (e.g., consultants, lawyers, accountants, etc.) They are some pretty expensive ones that are used by top law firms and work very well. And there are a lot of cheaper ones that are aimed at startups and the like and are pretty terrible.

I am an attorney that just left one of the top firms in the nation to try to start my own practice. One of the biggest annoyances is that I cannot find a timer application that works as well as the one my law firm used. It should not be that difficult. But all the applications aimed at small businesses are pretty bad.

So I think if you aimed your timer for people that bill for their time, you might be succesful. But you have to make it good. You have to make it so it supports client- matter billing. Also make sure it can easily interact with standard accounting software. Also make sure it is easy to switch between tasks and create new tasks (this where most existing applications fail epically).

Basicly, if you can make a billing timer which is as good as Capre Diem but does not cost an arm and a leg, I think you may be very successful.
http://ditz.rubyforge.org/

A self-contained issue tracker. I switched from hand-hacked TODO lists to Ditz a few weeks ago, and haven't looked back. I'm able to organize my tasks as I would a codebase (components, releases, comments, et cetera). I saw an immediate and sustained increase in my productivity.

Its tight integration with git is a huge plus.
It's "Übermenschen", with sch, not ch.

As a German, I'm offended. They chose to use the word but they failed to make sure they got it right.

on the content: interesting observation.
What's that song they play? The beginning sounds really familiar but I can't place it.
rlwrap to fix the awful command line interface of sqlplus.
they started maybe a decade, maybe two decades, ahead of everybody else

A big assumption you seem to be making is that these kids will keep progressing at the current rate.

I actually think for most of these kids, they will hit a plateau and exhaustion point a lot sooner where they may dabble in stuff they did not when they were younger. There is NOTHING wrong with that and I have been through this path myself. But it's important to understand that the direction and rate of personal growth is not static. Some of these kids may dabble in drugs tomorrow; some of their stoned classmates may dabble with startups when they are older.
My initial reaction to this is that while I'm excited to see innovation in this space, this doesn't look so much like synthesis of something new, as much as aggregation of everything that already exist.

This isn't a single, new, interesting idea. It's more taking the old ideas and mashing them together.

It's like when you build an app without a single killer feature, and instead keep throwing in odds and ends.

I think it would be neater to focus on one or two of the new novel ideas here and really refine them.
It takes a while to get used to, but once you do, it reduces eye strain a lot. Especially if you sometimes get too absorbed in work and forget that it's getting darker and it's probably time to turn the light on.
Don't many mobile phones include stopwatch applications? I know my Sony Ericsson from 2004 had one.

Having neither an iPhone nor an Android phone, I do not know whether they include stopwatches, but I would be more likely to use a native application version than a mobile website.
I've used Trac and Fogbugz. My general feeling is 'too many fields to fill out'.

That being said, for anything more extensive than weekend hacks you _need_ bug tracking software or else things slip through the cracks. Developers who don't use bug tracking software rank right up there with developers who don't use version control in terms of stupidity.

On that note, I've been working on my first major project with another person (first time with a cofounder, it's weird but good). Version control and bug tracking feel entirely different when there's more than one person using the tool. There might be some sort of market for a 'just me' bug tracker that can migrate when the project grows beyond it's scope.
He means he doesn't take his allocation of days away from work but instead he sells those days back to the company.

Why is that good? Beats me. Unless he gets an above average holiday allowance it sounds terrible both for his long term health and for his productivity.
Trac. I like to keep things simple and it's nice how it ties in with SVN.

JIRA is way to "enterprisey"
Also you have an incentive to wear lighter, sexier clothes.
"Hero on the quest for truth" ay? thought you'd be more skeptical than cynical.

I'll bring my money to the table if all else fails, that has currency, and it's something that many software developers are solely only interested in: they'll bleed you dry, I've seen it for myself. You think I'm trying to exploit people? Wrong. A sense of ownership and shared success is what I though approaching this community could garner for my idea, if there were any takers.

You can take a horse to the water but you can't make it drink.

Over and out.
Its extreme ways by Moby: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8eV7suSA4k
I use redmine for my current projects and love it. Feature wise, it's about the same with other similar products, but the UI is beautiful and highly usable. Very good bug, issue and source control integration.
org-mode for Emacs (http://orgmode.org).

It's made a big difference to my life. I've finally got a reliable place to keep notes, a good way to schedule stuff, nice todo lists, a quick way of publishing stuff to HTML / PDF, all accessible (and customisable) in a highly efficient way from Emacs.
Somehow I doubt norwegians would have any of that white guilt.
There was once a skyscraper, decades ago, where people complained that the elevator was too slow. The workers complained to the managers, and the managers complained to the building's owners. The complaints grew in intensity. Finally, the landlord of the building knew they must act.

So they called in a research team to figure out what to do. And the research team measured everything - how many stops the elevators had to make, what speeds could be safely managed, the algorithm by which a press of a button sent an elevator to a particular floor. They also looked at sociological factors, such as what people did while they waited for the elevator to arrive.

After all this study, the research team made a recommendation - put in mirrors by the elevators. And the building's owner did. And all complaints about the slow speed of the elevator vanished. Because now people had something to do while they waited - they could look at themselves.

And this research had such an impact that it spread, so that nowadays most skyscrapers have mirrors near their elevators. The novelty has never worn off, even though, at this point, an entire generation of office workers have grown up with mirrors next to the elevators.
Argentina is cheaper and has the other side of those mountains ;) (Where I live right now)

If you look for a local job, perhaps Chile is a better option. But if you want low taxes for personal work and have foreign customers (web entrepreneur), Argentina beats Chile hands down. There's a system called Monotributo where tax is trivial and ridiculously low if your income is up to USD 52k/yr (very good money if you live outside Buenos Aires.)

Oh, and Argentina's system of immigration is one of the most welcoming. "Nearly a million permanent residency applications were filed from 2000 to 2008."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Argentina#Legal_...

My advice, stay out of the bigger cities and go to trendy small villages, cheaper and safe. Return flight tickets to Buenos Aires usually are around USD 130 from almost anywhere.

Also, it's better if you can travel a bit around until you find the best place in South America. In Argentina, 3G broadband costs about USD 45/mo (or less) and you can use it in many places until you settle.

EDIT: The USD 52k/yr afaik is for each of you, and the taxes and things you pay also can pay part of the private health insurance of your choice.
I'd guess he means not actually going on a holiday but "taking" your holiday in the form of additional pay instead.

It could be thought of as an indication that the employee in question is a dutiful little peon, which some bosses would probably like.

On the other hand, if someone tried to do this in Finland in July, when practically the whole country is on summer holiday and workplaces are very nearly totally empty, it might not work that well.
His point in this post is that you can do a great job at work but then enjoy your life outside of work.

Is doing a little coding outside of work mutually exclusive to enjoying your life? I feel like the article draws a false dichotomy that either you have a life and don't code at all outside of work or you spend all of your non-work time coding.
MVC isn't part of "the art of Unix". But probably neither are "service brokers", so I don't know what ESR is thinking here.
Bill to the government the ability to shut down the internet
A Web 2.0 Programmer's Guide To HealthCare IT
I'm writing a short compilation of essays(http://tinyurl.com/health20essays) which attempts to crystallize the currently changing HealthCare space and offers introduction to various aspects of this vertical for an information technology professional looking to familiarize himself/herself with this domain.

In this (http://www.tinyurl.com/health20book) survey I wanted to get early feedback if such a compilation will be useful, or if you are an expert in any of the area and would like to contribute an essay.
You could have anonymity without losing data. Assign everybody a random id. Do whatever data mining you need to, based on id number, to see how credible this person's opinion is.

I think this system can work ... if it's not abused. Intelligent analysis of the data will keep it from being abused.

You may actually be able to find inverse correlations among some of your more aggressive aspiring manipulators, where a down-vote from them actually ends up being a vote of support.

Let them do their worst. Statistics will out them, eventually.

As for the ethics of it. If the system is smart enough to avoid abuse, I think it has merit. When is ignorance ever the right answer? If there's data to be had as to whether you have, as an old boss of mine used to say "a leak in your payroll", why is it evil to attempt to determine that?
I haven't found anything even remotely simple enough. My ideal system would not require a server, would be usable entirely from the command line, and would require no more information other than a single text description of the bug.

The closest I've found is http://ditz.rubyforge.org/. I think there is justification for looking for a distributed solution.
Perhaps the announcement of the death of GeoCities was a tad premature?
Yes, the premium is much better, if nothing else, just being able to store any file type is worth that money, IMHO.
Layman's Guide to the Banach-Tarski Paradox
The answer is often by answering a higher level problem.

For instance, writing a script that copies data across 5 servers with no major issues in the way is boring, but writing a script that synchronizing data across an arbitrary number of servers can be hard, interesting, and more valuable. When it is done, just hand it to the admin to apply to those particular 5 servers.

Simple macros are often done by business power users instead of developers, but if it is something complicated then it is complicated and interesting.

As for porting an app, there is some work on automating that depending on what the source and destination platforms are. The proper choice of language can minimize the work in the first place, and then you can build (or buy) tools to help automate at least large portions of the automation.

Also, keep in mind there is a difference between knowingly hiring "bad programmers" and hiring "junior programmers." Bad programmers as the term seems to be used in this thread have no intention of improving, are good enough to get the job done eventually, but make no outside efforts. "Junior programmers" are often willing to do the boring stuff when they get started, but then they get better. You may have to deal with the fact they will want either promotion or to change companies in the near future, but in the meantime you get to benefit from the fact that they are constantly improving and using their own resources to do that.
Recently I've been having to do a lot of editing inside a Firefox text widget in order to update some Wiki documentation. The stupid mediawiki editor rebinds a lot of my emacs keys, which makes it really hard to for me to edit. I found this great firefox plugin called "It's all Text" that puts a little edit button at the bottom of every multi-line text input field in your browser. This button can be configured to shell out to Aquaemacs so I can do extensive edits there, and when I save it updates the browser's edit box. It's really made wiki editing a lot easier for me.
Ah, of course. Sorry, somehow I misunderstood what you wrote.
Seconding 1Password - a big game changer for me.
Your assumptions are wrong. Egotism makes a programmer weaker, not stronger. Those who consider themselves rockstars are, in my observation, never the best. And they're a pain to work with because they get defensive about ideas.

The great programmers I've known have also been the most fun to work with. It's a team sport.
It's what we do as passionate programmers who enjoy doing it. To 'the rest' it's just a job that ends every day at 5pm.

In other words, to the 'career programmer' automating something like the examples given is simply lowering your job security.
Pretend there was a type "numbers between 1 and 4." Then, when you try to cast a 5 to that type, it would fail. Types are just sets of possible instance values; that most languages limit them to reasoning only about the outermost features of the type (e.g. capacity of 1 vs N, mutability, signedness or realness) makes them orders of magnitude less useful than they could be.
The nice thing about music idea is that you can make variations. If this were on my daily commute I could easily see myself trying to best my previous days "performance". Maybe one day I could quickly run up the stairs playing a modest composition that leaves first time onlookers agasp.
So anyway, you can probably be a good programmer by not being interested in programming outside of work... but you probably won't be a great one. How many great authors claim they don't read books outside of their 9-5 workday?

For me, this sums it up. It seems really uncontroversial ... I don't see why some folks get so defensive about such a simple idea.
I evaluated cgiproxy at the beginning of this project, along with a variety of apache mods and other libraries. cgiproxy didn't work for most of the merchant sites that I checked. Was an oversight to ignore them thereafter though. Like you said, they've put a lot of time into special cases, and we can learn things from them.

Their primary goal is anonymous browsing. Ours is collaborative shopping, or more specifically, adding new functionality to existing sites. Our proxy lets us do amazing things with client state, image scraping, and more. A different tool for a different problem.
His superman reference to Nietzsche is totally wrong. Overmen weren't supposed to be super-duper great, productive people. He was making a really complex argument about human beings shedding their animal nature and antiquated morality to ascend into a new kind of intelligent being.

He doesn't make any kind of argument anyway -- pointing out that some leaders of companies are more effective than others does nothing to support the argument that complex forces are not at work.
It depends on what X and Y are. If they are something closely related to programming then it can be directly positive (as a personal example, I spend what I call free time working on a masters in math).

If it is something that makes you sound well rounded, then that can play well, at least to certain types of interviewers (one interviewee talking about writing fiction on the side, not directly related but it showed well rounded intellectual interests.)

On the other hand, if your answer involves watching tv, playing video games, or reading popular fiction, then it will probably not help (though reading may be a notch up from the other two) for most positions.
This instrument looks incredible and I kind of want one but it is clear that is has a sick learning curve. These guys were not even all that great playing the instruments. It sounded like they were missing notes and fumbling around at times. Hearing that composition produced by 3 identical instruments was pretty neat though.
what do you mean with baader meinhof count += 1 ?
For a SaaS tool maybe a free "lite" version for one user, and paid plans that unlock additional features for two or more users.

Does anybody do that now? I see Lighthouse allows 3 projects and 10 members free; I don't know if they hide any application functionality.
Trac internally, Lighthouse externally. The problem I have with ultra-simple bug tracking is that it is almost the "Hello World" of database-backed web app dev. If I just wanted Markdown-formatted issues with 3-level status and comments, I feel like I could have that in 3 hours of Rails dev.
I don't think we should treat this as a discussion of good coders and bad coders. "I wouldn't hire someone who ____" is a hiring filter. And ANY worthwhile hiring filter will be over-aggressive. So it's more a distinction between groups that contain close to 100% good coders vs groups that contain a much lower percentage.

The point of a hiring filter is to weed out bad coders, and hirers should realize that any filter you set that will weed out most/all bad coders will also weed out a LOT of good ones. So if someone says, "I wouldn't hire someone who ______", they're NOT necessarily saying, "All people who _____ are bad programmers".

Instead, the smart hirer is actually saying, "People who _____ are Group A and everyone else is Group B. Group B contains many great hires, but it's really difficult to distinguish good hires from bad ones, and Group A has almost no bad hires. Therefore I'm only hiring from Group A."
SQL isn't part of "the art of Unix", but I'm pretty sure this has more to do with ESR simply not knowing what he's talking about.
I'd strongly suggest not spending your money on a PR firm in the bootstrap stage. Better options are handling it yourself (great for establishing relationships with writers, bloggers, etc), or find an ambitious college student who's studying PR/Communications and wants to get into the field.

In my experience, bringing on a PR intern was exponentially better than hiring a firm. The interns are thrilled to have the opportunity to work on a real project, and they'll spend hours digging, searching, reaching out and just trying different things. Your PR firm is going to do the bare minimum to keep you on as a client for the next month.

Of course, if you have tens of thousands/mo to retain a top-tier PR firm, things will obviously change, but a 5-10k is not going to cover that.
This is a joke right? I hope so.
Although, to be fair, in this case I agree that it's not an appropriate question for an interview,

Why?

As an interviewer, I think it tells me a great deal. It certainly should not be the focus of the interview, but I want to know things like:
1. Will this candidate mesh well with the existing team?
2. Is this candidate going to take the initiative to learn useful things on their own?

It seems to speak quite well to those issues.
The "free electron" programmer
I maintain a C++ app. Making the GUI, implementing the button callbacks, and writing the settings save/restore logic is all easy and boring compared to the signal and image processing core. But I can't possibly automate this, and I would be very happy to let a decent but less passionate or experienced, day-job coder do the GUI code while I take care of the more challenging parts. Even if I had to take more time teaching him than I would be doing it myself, I'd do it! More enjoyable and useful in the long-term.
I abuse OmniFocus. Works great for a lone developer. Both with the desktop and on the go (with the iPhone app).
QuickSilver (http://www.blacktree.com/) -- Lets you do just about anything by just typing it on a Mac. For example, to email a document to a friend, I start typing the name of the document. It shows up, so I hit tab and type "email", hit tab, and type my friend's name and hit enter. That composes an email with the attachment and all I have to do is hit send.
NCSA HTTP was released at the end of '93. Apache was the first mainstream server to prefork a connection pool; it's not demand-forked. There wasn't much advantage to running NCSA standalone vs. out of inetd.

I believe Apache was '95; it came out when I was working at an ISP, and I graduated from high school in '94.
I bound Super to the Fn key on my Macbook in Emacs.
> Theft is a different crime that has been illegal pretty much for as long as there has been laws.

No, it hasn't. Copyright law was pretty much invented with the Statute of Anne which was passed in the UK in 1710. Before that some countries had printing monopolies, but no copyright.
Maybe the reason this guy is pissed off constantly is because he just doesn't like his work.
Clever idea! Now I want to hear about some of your other favorites.
gqlplus is pretty good too.
have you tried Fossil SCM. It's distributed version control/bug tracking etc in one.
Don't underestimate the effort required to write such a product. I use bugzilla as a server with Mylyn in eclipse and this is pretty great. Jira is probably going to be your biggest competition and they are pretty damn good.
It means I don't use all my allotted off time and I take part of it as pay at the end of the year. In other words, I am reliably in the office. This is considered important where I work and taking more time off than you are entitled to can be grounds for being fired. Promptness and being on time are also valued by the company I work for and deemed indicators of reliability -- are you there when they need to ask you to do something above and beyond your normal daily duties?

As for other remarks made here:

I mention it first in part because a coworker likely was recently fired in part because they were routinely late and, after strolling in the office late, would then mosey down to the cafeteria and grab a bite to eat. I don't know for a fact, but remarks that were made suggest to me that this employee generally failed to do the quantity and quality of work they were expected to do. I think the experience at my company is that tardiness and abuse of time off usually correlate to poor work performance.

I am not actually sacrificing my health by working the hours I do. My health has steadily improved in the three years I have had this job. I don't really understand the whole idea of "taking a vacation" and I never have. But that's probably something I can't adequately explain to most people.
After years of using Emacs, I only just discovered that incremental search works within the ordinary find-file (C-x C-f) function. Try it: C-x C-f, then C-r, and search for a piece of a filename you opened in the recent past. Try C-M-r, and it works with regexes, too.
Web 2.0 Programmer's Guide to HealthCare IT