skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may not address the underlying issues with ad-based revenue for websites but at least for performance, it does make a big difference. Adblocking extensions have been available on other platforms for a while now and they're one of the main reasons I use Firefox as my primary mobile browser (albeit on Android instead of iOS). I can install the same Adblock Plus/Edge/etc. as the desktop version and immediately my little 5" screen is less cluttered, sites load faster, and I use less of my metered data plan.

Mobile web browsing without an ad blocker is miserable compared to the same thing on desktop. At least on the desktop you've probably got 1920x1080 or 2560x1440 screens, more processing power, more RAM, and a connection that offers more than 5GB of data each month. With mobile it's unbearable.
A very good article, touching on many of the problems arising in workflows, also in the scientific field.

Interesting with the highlight of differences between "forward" and "backward" defined workflows (let data/tasks flow forward on success vs require some of the most downstream tasks or targets, and let the engine figure out upstream targets), as these have profound implications for how easy some workflow constructs are implemented. E.g. handling processes producing dynamic number of outputs is much easier in the forward defined one.
This is a bit left-ball:

Give yourself an online profile with screencasts of what you can do.

Then sell yourself internationally as a trainer. Not high level stuff, but stuff you're very solid in in English language. Sell yourself not to large companies, but vendors of large companies. Charge fairly. Collect lots of name cards and keep in contact with people, especially the trainees (that actually work for the larger companies, but also keep in contact with the vendors). In a few years time you could be able to secure a very senior position with a larger company, or have already made a good enough living as a travelling consultant not to care.

But get those videos up and find a hungry vendor, that's step #1.
Who decides what part of my "distinctiveness" and "cultural identity" is acceptable? You? The majority? Some higher authority?

This is a slippery slope...
See for yourself:
https://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#
it's one thing to present to an audience of a few partners and completely different thing to broadcast to the entire world
>> 1. Anyone who can get an add-in pasted corporate software security can also use a better tool outside Excel. In other words: think carefully about the customer.

> What other tools are available? A lot of technical people don't choose Excel, but come into situations where Excel has been relied upon historically and the non-technical people do not want to move away from it. So I could see such a plugin having value in these situations (non-technical people continue to use the spreadsheet as-is, while the programmer improves it via the plugin), which I would imagine are quite common (I have been in this situation before).

In my enviroment (slow finance, seen a few firms, second line hence the reviewing of many a workhorse). The IT-department is pretty Microsoft-captured. The quants are pretty much do-as-they-want (Java, .NET, VBA). Whatever they know and can get their hands on. Then the financials in accounting. Excel is king there and is pretty much the workhorse surrounding the customer, financial and management accounting systems. My main point here is that I have yet to find a firm where the use of tools is not historic, and where those totally different skillsets / user sets work together on tooling.

The use case you describe (non-technical people continue to use the spreadsheet as-is, while the programmer improves it via the plugin) fails for me (or rather: is an exceptional situation), since the big value of Excel is that the non-technical persons builds his own model. I know of one bank that has started working with teams with explicitly different skillsets (so IT, business and finance always in one team). In that case, tooling like this would rock.

>> Users don't buy plugins in larger businesses, etc.

>Fact or opinion?

I would say this is a fact. It's the theme that's pretty common that B2B-sales is a different park than B2C-sales. B2B-sales in larger firms goes via a sourcing department, that possibly has preferred suppliers, etc. So just being a cool tool, still gets you installed on 0 corporate pc's that are basicly in lockdown.
> separately managed relational dbs all over the place

On the BI side, this is overwhelmingly the outcome for large companies. The business units get silo'ed, they build their fiefdoms, a consolidation project gets kicked off and fails, rinse, repeat. Even if the consolidation succeeds, it takes extremely strong leadership to keep it from devolving right back to silos. The tech is not the cause of this problem, so I don't foresee it being the solution to it either.
Itunes connect is down
It would be like that if you were running these apps on an Xbox. But when you are running a PC, it doesn't make sense to brand them with Xbox branding unless they are services specifically related to the Xbox (e.g., Xbox Live account management or something). Otherwise it sounds like a weak attempt at cross-branding.
RubyIssue(s) - A curated list of ruby related issues collected from GitHub
Follow our #car_auction_in_Alaska
The Itanium processor, part 3: The Windows calling convention
Make Them Earn It [new post on hiring and fundraising]
> This depends entirely on what you're doing. Are you trying to study computation using some program as an example, or are you trying to accompilsh some real-world effect with that program?

I don't think Dijkstra was actually interested in producing programs that accomplished some real-world effect.

> That's certainly better than trying to focus on formal methods, when all they can accomplish is to move the informality.

Correct, and very insightful. (Roger Penrose made the same point in "The Emperor's New Mind - at some point, it all starts with an informal idea of what the program is supposed to do.)
I'd like to think I left the situation far better than I found it.

Tackled source control and issue tracking first since they were low hanging fruit. Next came basic (manual) backups. My background is not in putting together general office-wide IT solutions, so I did not feel qualified to recommend any specific package. After that, it was on to a sane build and deployment process that involved a dedicated build machine and included QA. After a long time I could start safely making code changes to clean the actual codebase up.

I think you'll see this a lot in manufacturing companies who sell physical hardware. The embedded software is a critical part of the product, yet it's not treated with much more care or seriousness than anything else on the BOM. Night and day difference between working at a company where software _is the product_ vs where software is just one of the many components that goes inside the product.
Few things make me as angry as hearing of people who unfairly talk themselves into a fashion show.
What's wrong with that CSS?
If you're using multithreaded code having the getters/setters can be very useful for debugging blocks.
There's also sslyze for comprehensive and fast scans, it can test just about any TLS service.

https://github.com/nabla-c0d3/sslyze
After reading the Quora post about getting into an event and playing ping-pong without paying I wasn't too impressed.

The rules would be more strictly enforced if more people tried breaking them or the pay-off from each breaking was bigger. He just found a few rules in which neither incentive to enforce was big enough. No big deal.

So the examples (a white guy attempted to cut a line and failed) are really weak, I'm sure there are bigger issues for minorities than this.
How do you figure? Pilot thinks "I think it's time to push the button." Autopilot doesn't push button. Pilot says "autopilot is broken. I need to override." Pilot pushes button early.

If the pilot thinks the button needs pushing, they're not going to wait til after the crash to see if the autopilot is working.
yep. Worse, apples staus page says that its up. sigh: https://developer.apple.com/system-status/
That sort of training would probably be a best practice and most efficient, but I think there are a vast number of companies--especially small ones--operating in an ad hoc manner. Even ones who pay lip service to certain methodologies will struggle to get them right. Rather than expect them to train you, do your best to observe the practices of the company, while learning what you can and work toward a contribution. Always carefully consider a problem before asking for help--and at that point don't be afraid to ask for help, but do so in a polite manner.

I am older than you, but came to programming late and consider myself a junior developer. I'm impressed from what I saw on your resume, especially for such a short period of time. Good luck.
It isn't AdWare...sheesh. It's a notification from a vendor you "trust" (I say trust because if you are using their OS, there is some measure of trust).
How about the EFF's https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-reques...? If you have specific items you think should be on the list, why don't you reach out to them and suggest it?
The Common Workflow Language https://common-workflow-language.github.io/ is an open source effort to create a common way of defining portable, reproducible computational workflows to address the needs of the science community, but could have broad application to business task automation as well.
I like the concept, when debugging some complex sheets that could come in handy - though having all the formulas in a windows might hinder understanding the layout of the sheet, especially if you are lazy and don't label all your cells (or just know enough about excel to be dangerous).

I thought it would be cool if formulas would pop into little syntax highlighted text edit areas when double clicked (or some other meta-click)

I think having a look at some more complex sheets would be good. (Ask for your company's accounting department I'm sure they have some Excel monsters lurking on desktops).
It's not that you have to. It's a social grace to not offend people. If you really want to, you are allowed to. But when society says to fuck off -- well, you got what you paid for.
Unfortunately it's not practical to do this for most people who have neighbours. I don't want to hear your classical music polluting my sound-space as much as I would some Techno or Heavy Rock at full volume (both of which are also more enjoyable at loud volumes).

And if you're listening in a car, then digital compression is the least of your audio problems.
Useless Liberal Arts Degrees Are Tech's Hot Ticket
1. How long ago was it that "retarded" was the socially acceptable term?

2. What is a "reverse" racist?
We have a POC running where we stream web hit data onto HDFS in near real time (several seconds of latency perhaps). There's no reason to think you couldn't do it with other streams of data as well.

edit: Not sure about Salesforce specifically, sorry if this is too far off topic.
I work on the Start menu. It's just a UWP XAML app with Models and ViewModels written in C++/Cx, as are most of the new Shell features and built-in apps--although some of the newer ones, like Maps and Xbox, are in XAML/C#/.Net Native. Even the UI frame of Edge is in XAML, and the new Office UWP apps are too. I encourage everyone here to give UWP apps a shot; we dogfooded the dev platform to ensure it was stable and fast, and XAML really is a pleasure to use. It's come a long way since WPF.
> Have people become so used to things "just working" in home they don't think of the technical differences between a couple devices and a couple hundred devices?

Until bitten by a problem, yes, that's exactly the thinking. In theory, a single AP can handle two thousand plus simultaneous connections. Most users have found this number, and don't think beyond it.

However, most APs don't have the memory to manage more than 40 or 50 keys for encrypted connections. Throw in shared bandwidth on this maxed out AP, and suddenly the (again theoretical) 1 Gb+ connection is down to less than 20 Mbps per user, or 1/5 that of a wired connection of ten years ago.

That's obviously not acceptable, so the best way to bring up the average bandwidth per user is to have fewer devices on each access point. And when each user is bringing 2-3 wifi capable devices with them everywhere they go...

The math is not very forgiving.
Is it really the customer's responsibility to technically guarantee that the licensing cannot be breached?

I can't technically guarantee that my system hasn't been duplicated (say, by the NSA), but that isn't my responsibility. I'm just not supposed to run two copies simultaneously.
I was asking myself the same question. Windows is by far not my primary OS, and I used to know what those variants were, but I don't remember anymore.
Here's a list of cards supported by ModemManager which works in conjunction with NetworkManager on Linux:

https://wiki.freedesktop.org/www/Software/ModemManager/SupportedDevices/

It doesn't explicitly call out 4G support so you will have to work backwards.

fyi: some laptop firmware, such as thinkpads, have a whitelist of supported WWAN cards. If you can't find a suitable internal card you can use a USB dongle without restriction.
Funny you mention Thinkcell. Thinkcell is exactly the only smallish-supplier package I have ever seen as an allowed plugin to Excel. It entered the firm I was then working via people coming from consultancies and wanting to make graphs only Thinkcell can build. Bloomberg is the only other plugin I have seen, and Bloomberg is on another level.

My point (while I wrote "don't buy" and "no overlap") of course being somewhat less strong. Even with "hardly ever buy" and "hardly any overlap", the sales of even a strong product is hard and needs thought up front. You can build this tool and build it well and then struggle hard on the B2B-sales.
How do you read that quote as a positive thing? The first half merely says it was successful in collecting data and the second half uses weasel words "could improve".

I've worked on projects in the past where we collected a ton of data like this, gave it to some poor graduate student or post-doc to do a bunch of data wanking with it, only to produce throw-away papers in bad journals because even. Though it was a huge amount of data it wasn't good data.
The Store need a root, too. Because the component has tree structure.
Agree, I take the opposite side of this argument as well, and the author is very biased toward a certain personality type. I love open office plans and I think they have intangible benefits that many people discount.

But, I'm tired of arguing against the hivemind on this one. So be it.
Please name and shame this vendor so that others may benefit from avoiding them.
No. Even past clients as long as they are not abusing us we will always respond. We try to respond the same day, but many times it is the next day regardless of who we are responding to. That is unless of course we are actively communicating about something that needs resolution.

Checking email a couple of times a day is not a big deal and responding than, worse case is usually 4-5 hour gap. If something is more urgent the phone is a better solution anyway. I will say that it is a balance though as some clients if you don't respond to an email in 15 minutes are picking up the phone and calling you wanting their answer immediately. So you have to set the boundaries with clients and make sure their expectations are reasonable and that you are not being unreasonable yourself.

Also one other point, when you are managing multiple clients, a quick email response that says you have received their email and will get back to them by EOD, or next day etc is all they really need. So it doesn't have to be a huge drawn out email. This helps when you are working on Client A and Client B sends an email.
I think "code without tests" is a fine example of technical debt or legacy code, but using it as the definition of either disregards the importance of everything other than tests that goes into making systems maintainable.

Tests are necessary but not sufficient. (Particularly, tests embody
I was expecting a blank page with the word "Yes." centered in large bold letters.
Do you think Tim Cook knows about this.
> Given that most startups are working on simple CRUD apps, where their most difficult problems usually stem from their own poor organizational skills (poor build procedures, badly configured servers, technical debt in the code) rather than a difficult problem domain it seems clear to me that availability would become more important to employers than capacity for work.

Yet these startups hire people as if they had very difficult problem domains to tackle, thus filtering for people who work better in the other environment you mentioned.
Every time I hear about an awesome "free trade agreement", I need to look no further than the disastrous NAFTA agreement:

"Such outcomes include a staggering $181 billion U.S. trade deficit with NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada and the related loss of 1 million net U.S. jobs under NAFTA, growing income inequality, displacement of more than one million Mexican campesino farmers and a doubling of desperate immigration from Mexico, and more than $360 million paid to corporations after "investor-state" tribunal attacks on, and rollbacks of, domestic public interest policies."

and

"For instance, we track the specific promises made by U.S. corporations like GE, Chrysler and Caterpillar to create specific numbers of American jobs if NAFTA was approved, and reveal government data showing that instead, they fired U.S. workers and moved operations to Mexico."

and

"The data also show how post-NAFTA trade and investment trends have contributed to middle-class pay cuts, which in turn contributed to growing income inequality;"

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lori-wallach/nafta-at-20-one-m...

This too was being touted as a great free trade agreement for the US and its economy and the exact opposite happened. I can only assume the outcome for the TPP will be similar.
This piece nails it down.
What music do you listen to? Because I have literally never found an album that does gapless. Does the free version not get gapless playback?
The IPad receptionist
WCPE in Wake Forest NC streams classical in Windows Media, MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats

http://theclassicalstation.org/listen.shtml

As classical fans themselves, they pay more attention to artists, composers, and performances. But there's still a limited amount of info they can announce.
Having litigated against adversaries who use the courts primarily to be a nuisance, with little or no regard to the actual strength or weakness of their claims, I've become convinced "loser pays costs and attorney's fees of prevailing party" is a better system than what we have in the U.S.
Show HN: A pastebin with line comment support
Hopefully they release that service pack before the upgrade-for-free period ends.
Breaking the Ice with Regular Expressions – Code School
Looks like cool product! I hope to be part of your cohort! ;)

Just a heads up- your signup/login forms are unencrypted.

It's fine for a demo, but if you're going to put it out there like this, you should really throw some SSL on there.
But the issue of personal productivity simply has to go away in the discussion for me to take it seriously.

And yet, nothing can possibly get done without someone doing it.

I see lots of insistence that without open offices people woild spemd so much more time on wrong things that the lost productivity is more than made up for by better focus. I also see no evidence for these claims.
I'll raise to $yearly-cost-of-domain-names
I kinda do. If you're so smart, why ain't you rich?
I wanted the line commenting feature of Github pull requests in a simple pastebin. But I couldn't find one with that feature. So I built my own.
Having, in the past, worked in a mandatory open office, and currently being on a remote team, this is right on target. The decision to have your employees work in an open office plan is not a decision of productivity.
If you say or do socially offensive things, don't be surprised if there are social repercussions for it. GitHub is not the government. They are free to ban whomever they want for saying anything GitHub objects to.

And yes, "retarded" is more offensive than random swearwords because it is a slur against a class of people.
Companies have found something to give their workers instead of raises
I always wondered, why websites don't deliver ads integrated? Why Google Analystics can't use server-side data? I don't want my user to load any unnecessary JavaScripts, if all data is already available in nginx logs. Why should my user issue additional HTTP requests to Google Ads, when I can issue those requests at server-side (and they'll work faster, because server interconnectivity usually is very good) and deliver the single complete web page to user, with all ads included. Images might load faster from different hosts now, because browsers might restrict connection count to the single host, but in HTTP/2 era single host with single connection will work faster, so loading ad images from website server will be faster too.

The only difference is how easy to integrate ads to your site. Adding <script> tag is certainly easier than tweaking server-side logic or setting up nginx module. But it doesn't matter for big sites, yet they employ the same technique, making their sites unnecessary slow, especially for low-bandwidth users.
Ha, that would be awesome!
There is well known problem with neural networks - they cannot explain reasoning behind their decision. In fact, there isn't any reasoing there.
to find someone to front the money for a lawsuit?

That is one of the problems, he who fronts the money expects to get the reward. Hence class actions where the lawyer who works on contingency gets millions and those wronged get a nickle.
Here Come the Eunicorns (Erlang Startups)