skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I always had this policy when I was teaching college classes.

Obviously, the rule didn't apply to personal problems (grade worries, student (or family) illness), but if I got a generic question about an assignment in email, I'd ask the student to repost it in the online forum for the class.

It worked very well -- it's a rare assignment question that only one student is wondering about (whether they actually ask or not). It cut down on the number of emails I had to answer, saved time for the other students (they were supposed to check the forum before asking questions), and gave me a central location to check when I was prepping/improving the course for the next semester (rather than being buried in the Satanic depths of my email box, all of the questions and clarifications for that particular course were collected in one spot).
> I'm not trying to be a smart ass. I would really like to know what you think Rovio should have done. Hopefully with your advise I'll know what to do if I ever have such a huge success.

Yes you are trying to be a smart ass. But you're wielding sarcasm like a 5 year old with a chainsaw.

I already outlined what they should have done; not flood the market with sub-standard crap until everyone's sick of them. Pretty obvious if you're not blinded by greed.
There's more to a project than being a commiter. Shaw promoted Fossil, and people (a lot of people have heard of Shaw) looked into Fossil and started using it because of him. In that same thread you'll see someone else on the list spoke up as being one of those people.

That quote you gave is a reaction to the dismissive attitude that non-commiters are somehow second-class citizens; which you've just expressed. It's a bad way of thinking about people.
The article suggests that solar panels could be an "existential threat" to power companies. For those of you who are familiar with the math of solar panels, how realistic is that prediction? How much of a normal home's energy needs could be supplied by solar panels, assuming the panels covered the entire surface area of the roof? How much is the ROI on solar panels likely to improve in the foreseeable future? (I've heard estimates of 5-8% annual return for 2014.)
Makes sense. For the record, I don't know much about the issue at hand, was specifically talking about one-word contributions (which I encourage on my project).
Radical Islam will always hate and try and kill. That is not going to stop even if everyone realizes that statement is true.
Definitely but I'm pretty sure the maker of Box2D has no problem finding jobs. Would you really give money if you were Rovio? How much? Genuine question. Would you do the same for every author of free software you were using? I'm guessing that would be thousands of people.
Re: the first point. I agree that large changes should always be broken down into individually testable pieces, however I don't agree that they can always be broken down into individually shippable pieces. This is definitely true of large refactor projects, where a simple change (like upgrading a third party library) will unavoidably trigger thousands of changes throughout the codebase. I find it easier as a reviewer to look through a bunch of TODO comments that outline what needs to be done, and then each subsequent review addresses a manageable amount of the TODOs. I really see no other way since we can't ship two copies of, say, jQuery to customers.

I totally agree with you that the architectural changes should be agreed upon in advance, with direct conversations happening and whiteboards if necessary. I tried to make it clear in the post that architecture design should happen before any coding begins, but the gap I noticed was that even with full agreement on a schema or even down to the function level, there are still important details to work out before writing logic and UI on top of it, and that requires special attention from reviewers.

Just to play devil's advocate though, if you avoid face-to-face design sessions and do everything through code reviews, you will be forced to explain your thinking in text, and the whole conversation will remain as a record for future developers getting familiar with the code who may be confused about why things were done a particular way. The code review paper trail is immensely helpful to understanding a large codebase - reading through sparse meeting notes is never as good.
In short, you painstakingly build a network over time. Eventually you get to the point where good companies find you. There's no definitive way to do this and that's what makes running a successful consulting company difficult. In my experiences, all of the consultants that I know (including myself) who are going strong, sort of fell into consulting after working a long time in their industries. If you are young, I would suggest working for a company in your industry first and gain experience/contacts before setting out to be an independent consultant.
Android Studio Hits V1.0 RC
Color me impressed, because the political agenda that's being advanced is gender equality in technology, which to me seems pretty worthy.
All that sleek looking industrial design...and then...that. :)
What if it's encoded with absolute values, not relative?
>Because Apple was founded in 1976 and I'm guessing they aren't going anywhere. Google was founded in 1998 and I don't think they're going anywhere.

I'd bet everything I have that you'll be wrong. Look at any list of "top companies" over decades or centuries, and you'll see that, almost exclusively, they eventually disappear, via bad business, takeovers, whatever. There are so many massive, "successful" companies that you've probably never heard of because they no longer exist.

That said, not sure why people are ragging on Rovio so badly. These guys absolutely crushed it.
Frontend: Angular, JQuery, Bootstrap

Backend: PHP (Laravel)

DB: MySQL

Queing: AWS SQS

Configuration Management: Ansible

Logging: Splunk
What a problem to have, right?

I think it boils down to, they're a company that is very good at making games. From a casual outside observer's point of view, they seemed to think they could jump straight into being very good at animation and merchandising. They made, what, 30 or 40 games before angry birds was a hit? They didn't seem to have the same level of commitment to 30 or 40 iterations of animation, or merchandising.

It's fine to expand into new markets, companies do it all the time. You probably don't want to bet the farm on something you're not very very good at though, unless it's threatening your survival. Western union moving from the telegraph to money transfer is a pretty iconic example.

Compare to Mojang (survivor bias warning...) they're still pretty small. I haven't played it, but Scrolls is supposed to be really fun. Haven't heard anything bad about Cobalt either. I was very excited for x10k or whatever the space programming game was. They did a ton of merchandising, but they didn't do it in house (as far as i can tell). They took the check from lego and let the big toy maker do their thing.

Do what you think is best, but even if there's some non-game thing that makes sense, ask yourself if you really want to go head to head with Hasbro or Pixar. Really understand what you're getting yourself into.
I have to give NASA a little credit for launching to 3,604 miles. No “manned” mission has gone anywhere near that far since the 70s.

I would have expected them to start an infinite series of baby steps, “We went suborbital!” “We went almost as high as the ISS!”
I wouldn't go nearly that far.

Russia doesn't even maintain the slightest veneer of democracy or civic empowerment, and China doesn't really have the capacity to enforce complete compliance from its massive population yet.
Nasa’s Orion spaceship makes splashdown
Top Reasons Why Industry Experts Use Ember.js
The inverse may be true however. If you skip out 1 hour early every day but still accomplish a lot in your opinion, the company may feel that if you had stayed that one extra hour each day, over a week's time you billed them for a full day that they never received.

They may argue you could have accomplished the task 1 day early, saving them $X, etc.

I agree with your value proposition -- but I feel it's difficult to pull off in reality. I feel a lot more comfortable with billing Time and Materials rates, so basically if I skip out early one day, they aren't being billed for it, and the project goes on at it's pace.
We did, but a lot of users (and apparently several carriers) wanted a messaging platform for SMS/MMS that wasn't tied into Google's messaging platform so they made this (which is basically just the SMS/MMS part).

I can definitely see how multiple apps that are so similar would be annoying or seemingly redundant. Still, the whole point of the Android platform has always seemed (to me) to be flexibility and options even if it's at the expense of simplicity or streamlining. iOS seems to address the market on the other side of that demand and is biased toward simplicity and streamlining at the expense of flexibility. I guess it's one way to differentiate on the software side if nothing else.
Quite the opposite for me. Fahrenheit makes no sense to me, it always sounds absurdly hot.
When a company I worked for tried Joyent for hosting, I found it strange that Joyent's own package manager didn't offer the latest stable version--in fact, their confusingly named plans at that time came installed with a few different then-old versions as default options. That read to me like a lack of support or investment in Node as a technology.
>I already outlined what they should have done

And what sort of authority are you? How many multi-hundred-million-dollar companies have you run that you make it sound so easy and obvious?
You're right. In Germany you'll need to do the math with 1.40 at least.
> I get not wanting unsolicited input from "do-gooders,"

I don't get it. Node is an open-source project that accepts unsolicited input in general...is there some objection to "doing good"?
Very good points! I wholeheartedly agree with the idea of being conscious of your brain rewiring itself. It's a very strange feeling. Another time when I've felt it, though, is when I experimented using only my left hand for a month (including for writing homework assignments, etc.) It was very slow-going at first, but I found myself approaching things in a novel way... it's really weird to try to explain.
The Drive/Sheets/Docs/Etc. split is old news at this point. That happened awhile ago. I believe the split was a good choice though. It is the difference of Microsoft Works and the individual products of Office. It allows someone who only needs to read content, like I'm sure most phone users are, to have an app for that purpose and it allows Google to iterate on the individual apps on different cycles. This means more frequent and rapid updates for the individual apps, but it can also mean fewer updates for the user if they don't have the full suite installed.
How tough would it be to learn R, then get hired at someplace that uses SAS or Matlab or something, and try to learn that? It sounds like R isn't used quite as much as other options
We could say that the community wants to "move fast and break things", and (they feel that?) Joyent doesn't.
I started with #1 and #4. In particular, http://www.authenticjobs.com/ is a great place to find quality first-time leads.

To get jobs there, I use this formula:

1. Make sure you're only applying to jobs you're really interested in.

2. Write an introduction email that explains your interest in a personal tone. Nothing stodgy, nothing cookie-cutter.

3. Try to be one of the first ones to apply - postings get flooded with applications (most of them crappy), so it doesn't hurt to be in first. This means you may need to check the job board multiple times per day.

Beyond job boards: Nothing beats word-of-mouth referrals. Become to "go to" person for your clients and watch the leads roll in.

(edit: formatting)
If they aren't just syntactic sugar - how to you think regenerator works? Show me a generator and I show you perfectly fine, synchronous (though verbose) ES5 code doing the exact same thing.
Well, it is a good thing they wrote it in such a high-performance language then...
Android motorcycle helmet open for pre-order
Arduino Yun. Create your first connected light in 15 minutes #iot
Fantastic article. The company I work for is trying to solve this exact problem with the tool that we're building (http://getbilly.co/ - not ready yet but launching soon) - trying to get freelancers and businesses to value their time more and charge what they're worth.
Even if this didn't make sense in California (it might), it makes huge sense in Hawaii -- power is $0.30-0.50/KWh, and they're starting to look at higher charges for grid-connected solar users (connection fees), and lower purchase prices for power.

If I could handle peak and steady state loads off-grid there, I'd be very tempted. I was assuming water pumping storage, or scheduling loads, and a diesel or propane generator for extreme peaks (running tools), but this might work too.
> one-word non-functional changes

What about typos in docs? Contextually it seems reasonable to accept changes of a single word which may cause confusion on operational grounds.

Is a gendered word really different? Operationally, it would appear differentiating between pronouns might be required in documentation if some readers of the docs are offended by the masculine use. One could certainly argue that with excessive profanity.

I would note here that I probably wouldn't care if someone put 'she' in a document to represent a user entity, but that's a simply an observation of my own biases, not a rational to ignore another's.
You realize that's the weakest argument in the world? "Only CEOs of hundred million dollar companies are allowed to weigh in."

I'm not forcing you to read my opinion, if you don't like it, move on.
Really - I am not so sure... my brother in CA tells me after installing solar panels on his home his bill from the power company went from 3 digits to $4 per month. He isn't really a back-to-nature Californian either...
What are the advantages/disadvantages of using a BSD jail instead of these other options?
Up to 12G is okay, in a proper body position. Mercury routinely came in at 8G, and those guys were usually trying to control the thing semi-manually, since the automatic systems weren't that good. These days the monkey in the can won't need to do much. The Mercury suborbitals came in at a nice 11-12G.

The difference between Orion and Soyuz is a question of speed; the EFT profile was supposed to simulate a "deep space" reentry, which is faster and steeper than a low-earth-orbit rentry.

You can see the difference in the Apollo program, using the same capsule but with different flight profiles:

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-368/s2ch5.htm - Table 2

Apollo 7 and 9 come in at 3.3G-ish, and the rest 6.5-7G-ish.

If it's actually 8G, that does seem a bit high; but Orion's actually a pretty huge thing, and denser than Apollo, so I guess that makes sense. And they only let the best trained very healthiest multiple-phD government employees ride the thing, so I don't think it's a big deal.
Although "more performance" doesn't mean much, the short answer is: maybe, yes.

They want to keep up to date with v8 better. Newer v8 could outperform older v8. node's is pretty old (2012) apparently.
It isn't that. Really it's Fedor and Mikeal pushing it a lot, not the strongloop guys. The other core devs are behind it, too, except a couple from Joyent. It really has nothing to do with corporate power struggles (that's more what Joyent's advisory board is about, frankly)... it has to do with developers getting really frustrated at the stalled pace of development on the Joyent branch. The real objective is to get rapid release cycles, pull in updates on V8, better separation of core modules, and new features for better numerical computing, etc. Oh, and new logo proposals are going wild at the moment.
I haven't seen an employer offer "credits"; however I've had no trouble expensing an Uber or Lyft ride.
> The friction escalated with the arrival of Vidra, who is said to have complained to Foer that the magazine was boring and that he couldn’t bring himself to read past the first 500 words of an article. According to witnesses, Vidra did little to hide his disrespect for TNR’s tradition of long-form storytelling and rigorous, if occasionally dense, intellectual and political analysis--to say nothing of his lack of interest in the magazine’s distinguished history--at an all-hands meeting in early October.

Why run a magazine if you're not even interested in the type of journalism it produces?
BPG (Better Portable Graphics) Is a New Image Format by Fabrice Bellard
Yeah. It's like learning how to ride a bike - the first few times you've practiced, you consciously have to think of all the different details. Putting your foot on the pedal, keeping the steering wheel straight, pushing your foot down.. But, as you continue, you stop consciously thinking about an increasing amount of details, until you get to the point where you can drive a bike and talk with someone at the same time, easy peasy.
Desiring a reasonably normal material life is not unreasonable.

Amen. It's kind of amazing what academics put up with.

Take relocation. I'm 31 and while I'm at the top in terms of talent, I've made some mistakes and I'm probably only upper-middle in terms of tech career success, and I would simply not take a job, with a cross-country move, that didn't offer a full relocation package. Yet academics who are at much higher quantiles of success in their industry (just to have a TT job is 85th or higher, these days) are happy just to have a salary, because their low self-confidence ("impostor syndrome") is used against them to the point where they think it's egregious just to ask for basically decent treatment.
By any measure? This web-site indicates no significant decline in MySQL usage:

http://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend
It's pretty similar the whole way through, so if you found the early stuff boring, you'll probably feel the same way at the end.

That said, if you're much older than the first time you gave it a try, you might consider trying again. I've found that some boring books were actually fascinating when I tried again years later. My tastes have changed considerably over the years, even within science fiction.
Right, I'm well aware that he agrees with me. His posted ended with 'How is that plagiarizing?', a statement that he already knew the answer to (the answer being no). I was continuing the thought. And agreeing with him.
>and "business" in the 1400's isn't really relevant or meaningful in 2014

So I guess you'll be saying the same thing about Google and Apple in a few hundred years, rendering your argument moot?

"Not going anywhere" means still here.
Your second to last paragraph is a great way to word a conversation I'm about to have. Thanks!
This was from last year, I don't know if things are still this way there.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-solar-boom-so-su...
> the rendering engine for content that contains JavaScript

Right. So, a browser. You just proved my point. Apple allows exactly one browser on iOS. Theirs.
Maybe we need 200 Amps from the power company for peak demand (frozen pizza + ball game + blender) but don't really pull much most of the time. Batteries limit not peak but total draw over the day. Hm.
Securely erasing flash memory is surprisingly hard.

>Whole-disk wiping techniques faired only slightly better with SSD media. In the most extreme case, one unnamed SSD model still stored 1 percent of its 1 GB of data even after 20 sequential overwrite passes on the entire device.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/21/flash_drive_erasing_...

I wonder how hard it is on SD drives.

Meanwhile this forum claims the NSA mandates physical destruction
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-5521
There's a right way to do it. It's not the obvious way. Berating people for coming to terms with that isn't helpful.

It's not their fault that C++ only really supports std::string out of the box. What are the alternatives?

1. const std::string & : what if I have a vector<char>?

2. const char * : what if it's not null terminated?

3. const char * and size_t : Better, but what if I have a deque<char>?

4. const char * start, const char * stop : Better because you can write algorithms around this, but still, doesn't help with deque<char>?

5. template on START_ITER and STOP_ITER : The best we have now if you need an extremely general solution. But I hope writing your implementation in headers is fine.

6. home grown type : a very popular choice, but http://xkcd.com/927/

7. boost::string_ref : maybe the best choice, as it can be created from 1-4 (and most 6's), but still doesn't work with deque<char>.

...so give the rookie a break. But I'll support any comment in a code review about not accepting std::string by reference or by value in an interface.
The relevant question in the linked video starts at around 11:12
Boulder Planning Board approves Google campus plan
Not disagreeing with you, but I would add, "Small established companies" can charge these rates. No one is going to pay some unknown person/company $200/hr without an established track record.
Ron Wyden introduces bill to ban FBI 'backdoors' in tech products
There's a launch video on the NASA YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEuOpxOrA_0
Good points.

"We should have had a SaturnV-level replacement the day the Shuttle was retired."

I think, in part, the historical reason involves the following [1]:

The reality is that we need something other than the threat to national security to polarize us towards a common goal. That's what happened during the Space Race. The Soviets launched Sputnik 1, and that lit the fuse on a world-altering journey.

In the US, this brought about the creation of NASA. NASA's budget soared to nearly 5% of the total federal budget during that time. This "money no consequence" era resulted in a drive by the government to inject capital into the education system by funding the National Defense Education Act. This was designed to address the fact that more engineers and mathematicians were needed to advance science forward.

Fast-forward, and NASA is probably at 0.5% of the federal budget now, if that. The Space Race ended, and funding levels couldn't be sustained, largely due to the fact that the threat to national security had faded. The enthusiasm faded, along with the funding; the need for Saturn V-level lift capability simply could not be convincingly sold to the public.

I've mentioned this before, but at this time, it often feels like there is an under-current feeling of, "Where are we heading, as a nation?" I know this is anecdotal, but today, I was asking colleagues if they watched this morning's launch, and the only response I received was, "What launch?"

I don't have all of the answers. Part of the answer is that our finest hour is when we innovate, when we explore, when we dream. Part of the answer is that it will take a change in attitudes towards science in general, and space exploration in specific. I think Neil deGrasse Tyson summed it best:

"Right now, NASA's annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that — a penny on a dollar — we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow."

(I hope InclinedPlane chimes in. His/her knowledge on space-related topics exceeds mine, from what I've read in associated comments. Raising the bat signal...)

[1] I feel that I need to caveat that I'm speaking as an American here, although I believe that I am "a citizen of the world" in my world-view. I get excited about all launches, regardless of space program or country of origin. I realize that this is a global forum.