28 karma · joined July 16, 2010
You can also define your own rules in a subset of Python (by wrapping other rules including genrule()), so adding new languages should be simple enough.
By a conservative estimate, profit per seat per year would be large hundreds to small thousands of euros.
- it costs very real money to produce, and
- it costs very real money to be served and to remain online.
These costs may be covered by ads, by subscriptions, by sponsors, taxes, voluntary contribution or anything else, but the they still need to be paid for.
[edit: fixed formatting]
Second, maybe you should find a different job - or at least change something about your current job. Remote work is not the best option for everyone - and it can be even worse if you work from home. Or maybe there's something wrong with your project, the technologies you use or the people you work with. Changing any of these might improve your situation. Start experimenting - you don't necessarily have to quit your job right now. Try working from different places (coworking space, university library, coffee shop, your friend's couch, ...). Speak with your manager about other projects, learning and growth opportunities and other things you might do that you would enjoy. And if this is something you can't bring up with your current manager, start looking for a new manager.
I was in a similar situation several years ago. I worked remotely (from home) for a small startup-like* company and in the end, I had to use the pomodoro technique and similar tricks every day just to make myself spend time really working. Even though I liked my team as people and we had a great CTO, it wasn't that great on the engineering side. Using ASP.net WebForms and Visual Studio 2008 (no management support for an upgrade) didn't help either. Neither did the fact that there was no product or customers to care about and relate with.
In the end, I felt really burned out and kept trying things just to keep working - working from the company office helped a bit, but it was really noisy there. Similar for my university lab (I was a student at that time), but it wasn't a long term solution. In the end, I got an internship at a research team at Google and started enjoying work again almost immediately. I even stayed there as a full-timer and I've never looked back. Even after four years I still look forward to going to work every single day because of the awesome people I work with and all the exciting projects we work on. There are annoying things like open-space offices, but the people and the projects more than compensate for it.
I've changed a lot of things at once to be 100% sure what made the biggest difference for me, but my bet is still on the people on the team and projects (no more asp.net and business plans changing every week). But I believe that even the change of work environment played its role.
* When I joined, the company existed for at least five years. But otherwise, it was very much like a startup - we had a product in development, but there were almost no customers and even the vision changed a lot - during one fruitful week, we went from an app generator to a social network for some demographic group, a government information system and back to apps. I guess it changed with the article the CEO read during lunch on a particular day. Interestingly, the management always convinced our investor to give us more money - maybe they held a child of the investor hostage or something like that.
The hospital rooms could have special "charging" spots on the floor/build into the furniture or just a hole in the wall. The patients would charge their devices simply by placing them on the charging spot/shelf. Now there are no potentially dangerous cables or plugs, and all charging can be done without devices leaving the patients' reach, reducing the risk of theft at the same time.
There's already an international standard for wireless charging. The only problem is that it works only with a couple of the current phones, and it's not very likely to appear in low-cost low-end devices that the patients of the mental hospitals most likely to use. But if it ever gets a wider adoption, this would solve a lot of problems...
Which, by the way, is the only type of repair the other laptop manufacturers ever offered to me.
It looks to me like there are some Linux users who don't mind buying games (and do not mind paying premium for that), but the majority is not interested in buying games at all, regardless of the price.
Moreover, my own experience with buying games is that (digital distribution aside) it was practically impossible to get Linux versions of games (well, at least in Czech rep., where I used to live). And if there was a Linux version at all, using it meant buying a box with the Windows version and the patching it. So, even though I use Linux for work, I used to play games almost exclusively in Windows (and then on XBox, which made things even easier).
The original site seems to be down at the moment, but fortunately, someone put it on Flickr.
Take a simple example in the lines of "I've seen {0} {1} {2}".format("John", "eat", "an apple") ...and try localizing this message into e.g. German.
I have a feeling that printf-style is one of the reasons, why the texts in localized versions of some programs are as bad as they are.
And since you're writing a graph library, there definitely should be a detailed commentary on the implementation of the graph (e.g. representation of the graph structure, memory complexity of the representation, and time complexity of common operations). Once you start working with larger graphs, using the correct representation and algorithms for your task makes a huge difference and it is something that must not be hidden from the users.
Edit: using the symmetries described in the same Wikipedia article, the size of the database could be reduced significantly to roughly 5*10^9, which is quite manageable.
I'd be very interested to see what an algorithm that solves any valid sudoku puzzle looks like. (apart from pathologic solutions like querying a database of all valid 9x9 sudoku combinations).
I was interested if they had any problems with selling tickets via an iPhone app using the browser for paymentsm not the in app purchase API. But obviously they did not, as the app was approved.
Though, I'm not sure if you can get e-mail from these, and making the users enter their e-mail after login would degrade the user experience.
We have a project that started wih CVS, then moved to SVN and now runs on Hg, and we have the complete commit log (including commits from the CVS and SVN days) in the current repository.
Publishing scripts for the complete workflow starting with the raw data and printing the table with the results in the end would be the best. But I've seen academics working in a way that is completely orhogonal to this - copying & pasting data to Excel or Matlab (or even re-typing them) and doing the analysis by hand in the GUI... I don't have any doubts they would be able to learn how to write the script, but I'm very sure they would put up heavy resistance to do so.