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Every day, many thousands of open source contributions are made on GitHub by developers around the world. This data is publicly available through the API and—even more conveniently—on the GitHub Archive.... The one graph that is especially awesome in all sorts of surprising ways is the contributions heat map on every user's profile page.... This ends up being extremely motivating because it lets the developer see their progress in real time. With this in mind, it seemed like a good idea to provide a more complete set of global statistics summarizing the hacker personality of any GitHub user. So that's what I did. How much of an open source hacker are you? Github knows.
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On my site is a pointer to an interesting page by Jukka Korpela of Finland, called "Character histories: Notes on some ASCII code positions". It tells how various interesting characters (then new to many computer character sets of the time) came into membership in the ASCII set. Such research is difficult now, in an 8-bit byte, ASCII code, and soft-copy screen world, where typewriters, codes of different length, and computer word lengths have been pretty much forgotten. And their documentation is mostly in hardcopy libraries; not on the Web. This vignette came about because I started to wonder: If the curly braces exist in ASCII because of my efforts and examples, and/or If I had been first to put curly braces, via IBM's Stretch, into the internal character set of any computer. Bob Bemer is responsible for placing 11 different characters into ASCII. This is their story.
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In this series of posts I’ll explain why Haskell’s data types are called algebraic - without mentioning category theory or advanced math. The algebra you learned in high school starts with numbers (e.g. 1, 2, 3 …) and operators (e.g. addition and multiplication). The operators give you a way to combine numbers and make new numbers from them.... When you get a little older you are introduced to variables (e.g. x, y, z …) which can stand for numbers. Further still, and you learn about the laws that algebra obeys. Laws like 0+x=x [and] 1⋅x=x which hold for all values of x. There are other laws as well, which define properties of numbers or of operations. When mathematicans talk about algebra, they mean something more general than this. In the algebra of Haskell types, the objects are types.
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Camino, the OS X browser that famously does things "the Mac way," has been discontinued after ten years of development.... Recent Mac converts—even not-so-recent converts like me—have it easy when it comes to picking a Web browser. OS X comes preloaded with Safari, a perfectly fine modern browser, and Chrome, Firefox, and even Opera are a couple clicks away. All of the browsers are reasonably quick, well-supported, and look and act like Mac applications are supposed to look at act, but things weren't always this way; ten years ago, the Mac browser landscape was pretty bleak. You outlasted IE on the Mac, and for that we are thankful.
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We believe in one editor, the editor almighty, macros binding heaven and earth, of all functions, seen and unseen. We believe in one editor, which is emacs the only son of Richard Stallman eternally begotten from the Gnu... It is the Meta+< and the Meta+>.
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lol.  
Gryphons Are Awesome! Gryphons Are Awesome!
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Nothing exists in a vacuum, certainly not any of the products we review. The context of our subjects has a lot to do with what’s expressed in our reviews, even in the stark light of data. Scores alone are never enough, we juxtapose the latest widget to hit our bench against its most likely competition, against its predecessors, and against anything else that might make sense.... That’s no different here, but we could almost imagine foregoing the Pixel’s context and telling its tale absent its past, so disparate it seems from the Chromebooks that came before. But then we’d miss some of the most interesting bits. For developers, it's not yet a post-PC world. But is the Pixel the PC of the future?
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Continuous integration can be awesome. It can significantly improve quality on projects. But incorporating it into daily life for the entire team can be hard. It ultimately only works if everyone on a team is both aware of the state of the build, and is actively engaged in fixing it when it breaks. We built My CI to help team leads achieve both ends: generate awareness, while encouraging everyone to fix broken builds; hopefully while making things a little more fun along the way. What Is It? My CI is a service that you turn on from our desktop software to... turn a smart phone or tablet into a mini Siren of Shame. Did you break the build? Your phone will alert you (and everyone else).
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I believe screen reading software stands at a crossroads right now. At Google I/O 2013, Google showed some of the possibilities of the ChromeVox API. What they demonstrated showed some fundamental changes in the ways screen reader software interacts with Web browsers. In this post I will discuss how I see this as a fundamental shift. I’ll discuss both the risks and rewards that I see with this model. ChromeVox and a fundamental shift in the way screen reading web pages works.
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Currently I am working on the iLang LMS (Language Management System) as a web developer. This project is one of those that became stable, but was never really completed. Our customers are large educational companies, among them Kroton, which is the largest educational company in the world, and DeVry University, ranked 5th. In that scenario, the business requirements are always changing, so our project is an ever-evolving organism that never gets completed. A titan of an author who has written 35 articles and won 19 competitions on CodeProject.
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Perhaps you’ve read posts like Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names and Falsehoods programmers believe about time. Maybe you’ve also read Falsehoods programmers believe about geography. Addressing is a fertile ground for incorrect assumptions, because everyone’s used to dealing with addresses and 99% of the time they seem so simple. Below are some incorrect assumptions I’ve seen made, or made myself. Behind The Hot Water Pipes, Third Washroom Along, Victoria Station.
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I actually have three recent experiences with trying to deal with funky addresses.
For one, I went to Coachella, which is located at 81-800 Avenue 51, Indio, CA. My GPS did not allow me to enter a dash in the number.
I live on a street with three different names. To add insult to injury, the section of the street I live on has the same name as another street in my town. I have tried to place orders online, but they think I'm not in range because their system only knows about the other street by the same name. And most food delivery drivers have some sort of trouble finding me (one guy who delivered from a place less than a mile away took over an hour to deliver once).
Also, I have a private mailbox. Not a PO Box, but a PMB. This causes a bit of confusion (to be fair, the first I had heard of a PMB was when I got one). It's especially confusing, since my PMB resides at a business which also has a suite number.
Addresses can be a real PITA sometimes.
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AspDotNetDev wrote: (to be fair, the first I had heard of a PMB was when I got one)
So, one morning you got out of bed, had coffee, heard a knock on the door, and there stood a PMB claiming" Hi! I'm yours!" ?
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I was at a shop that helps you send packages. I noticed they had mailboxes and I needed one (assuming they were PO Boxes), and when I signed up the PMB concept was explained to me.
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"In a van down by the river"
"Avenue of the Americas"
"Broadway" is a contraction of "Broad Way" and I get depressed when I see "Broadway Road". I bet someone would make a "Penny Lane Street".
There are plenty of Spanish-named streets around here -- Calle Azteca , Via de Ventura , etc. When I lived in San Diego, I was on Caminito Alvarez, one company abbreviated it to Caminito Alvar, and I had to call them to change it to CMTO Alvarez. 
I worked for a cab company here in Phoenix and one of the other developers insisted that he could create a UI with textboxes for:
number , direction (N, S, E, W) , name , and type (st, ave, etc.) e.g. 123 E Main St
and it took some convincing to get him to see the light. The next developer never saw the light.
A few weeks ago I called the company to order a cab and it took some doing to convince the operator that my street doesn't have a direction. 
When accepting addresses, don't try to make it fit a pattern.
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Germany has leading-zero zip codes.
West Germany had five-digit zip codes, none starting with 0. East Germany had 4 digit zip codes. Solution? Stick a zero in front of the East German ones.
Related: Falsehoods programmers beleive about names[^]
The TL;DR is: Don't decompose further then necessary. For many applications, a multiline text field is good enough for address, as is a single "name" field.
This prevents some searches, though ("all ladies with first name Rose living on Rose street", "all our customers in odd numbered houses on We-Dig-A-Canal street"), which turns the thing into a really interesting problem: since you cannot compose reliably, you have to hold redundant data, or live with substandard searches.
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In the last couple of years, I've been adding the HTML/JS/CSS skillset to my stack of required skills and my talks and courses have reflected that change. To my readers who are deep in the XAML stack, this change seems to have come at somewhat a shock to many. I've even been accused by some of abandoning the Silverlight, WPF, Win8, WinPhone folks. This has caused me a lot of frustration because I don't believe that developers can or should only know one possible stack. To reach the full breadth of users, sometimes you need to be able to develop across the ecosystems. Are your skills still relevant? How do you keep up to date?
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My process is usually:
- See. See new stuff I like.
- Read. Read book(s) about new stuff.
- Make. Make something (utility, article, website) with new stuff.
- Employ. Use new stuff at job.
That last step doesn't always happen, but it's nice when it does. That's the crucial step to be sure I am proficient in the "new stuff". Also helps to keep me motivated.
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Some time ago, I compared NHibernate and Entity Framework. It was from a very technical point of view, and I think it is still up to date. Today, I want to talk about the current state of things, from a less technical stand. First, let me just say the obvious: NHibernate originated and is driven by the community, while Entity Framework is a Microsoft product. This makes all the difference in the world. To be ORM not to be? That is the query.
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Hi there! This webpage covers the space and time Big-O complexities of common algorithms used in Computer Science. When preparing for technical interviews in the past, I found myself spending hours crawling the internet putting together the best, average, and worst case complexities for search and sorting algorithms so that I wouldn't be stumped when asked about them. Know Thy Complexities!
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My research is focused on biomolecular NMR and, as such, often involves transferring resonance assignments from one multidimensional NMR spectrum to another. In theory this should be a simple task, but it can be extremely time consuming due to small variations in the sample used to acquire the data or in the way the data were acquired. The good news, however, is that it is possible to automate this process using an optimization.... The transfer of resonance assignments is different in that individual resonances are either matched with each other or not. The transformation from one set of data onto another is effectively discrete (more specifically, it is binary). This type of optimization is known as “binary integer programming.” Step 2: make sure optimization errors do not accidentally cause zombie apocolypse.
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The Start button is back. But that's just one of a very long list of changes you'll find in Windows 8.1, which will be available as a preview in a few weeks and will be released before the end of the year. Don't let the name or the price tag (free) fool you: this is a major update. Here's what's inside. The Start button is just the start of it.
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There’s a saying dating back to the early MS-DOS days: “Wait for the point release.” The implication was that the x.0 version of any new MS-DOS was sure to have problems (if you were around at the time, 2.0 and 3.0 certainly had some issues), and you should wait for the inevitable x.1 update before upgrading. That attitude later changed to “wait for the first Service Pack” when we moved to Windows 95 and NT, and while there have been occasions where things more or less worked as expected, there are still many users—and even more businesses—who hold off on upgrading to a new Microsoft OS until it’s been out in the wild for a while. What are you looking forward to in the next update to Windows 8?
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Microsoft is plugging its security intelligence systems into Azure so that service providers and local authorities can get near-realtime information on botnets and malware detected by Redmond. The new Windows Azure-based Cyber Threat Intelligence Program (C-TIP) was unveiled on Tuesday by Microsoft as an extension of its crime-busting Microsoft Active Response for Security (MARS) program. C-TIP will let ISPs and Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTS) get a direct link between their servers and Windows Azure to ingest near-realtime data on malware-infected computers tracked by Microsoft. MARS attacks... known botnets and infected systems every 30 seconds.
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