skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Phew maybe you're right I admit I just saw a comment on the opera desktop team blog and haven't tested it myself. However browser benchmarks are tricky - people can get quite different results on different machines...
Digression: I felt this comment of yours sounded much more natural than the Russian translation you posted on your blog, even though you're a native Russian speaker. And people still ask me why I prefer to make complex arguments in English!
> "The company has sold stock to investors with the sole purpose of increasing the value of the stock."

I know they're not popular, or exciting like a stock value swing, but dividends still exist, right?
Agreed. We've just started working with Canon 5D 1080p h264 video files in Premiere. Even on a new Core i7 machine, with RAID 0 disks, Premiere just doesn't work very smoothly with h264 video (we convert it to Cineform Aspect HD as an intermediate). MPEG2 by comparison, is lighting fast.

If you go back to when HDV was new, people were bitching about how slow MPEG2 was compared to DV (since it wasn't all I frames). That's just the way progress works.
Engineering Food With Aromas That Make Us Feel Full
Startup tour: Get your groove on at quarter-billion-dollar Groupon
Not to mention, our current months almost match up to the moon's phases.
OP's title is a little too abridged for me. "Code fast" could mean too many different things. Many programmers whose code I maintain look like they adhered to the school of "Don't think, code fast."

I would prefer: "Code something small fast."

What's "something small"? It could be a just the core of what you propose with no features or embellishments. It could be a subset of the problem at hand. It could be one case of a general problem. It could even be a guess.

The point is that if it's small enough, you can code it fast and test it right away. If it's just right, you can build upon it. If not, you can quickly amend it and retest.

Many huge applications have started out as a tiny core with less than 50 lines of code, probably written by one person in less than an hour. I suspect that's the idea OP was getting at.
> Ning Proves Ning Proves That...

I see no meta-proof here.
I started learning it about 6 months ago, and was in Hungary from July - September. The language immersion helped me a lot....no one speaks English in Magyarorszag :).
(I used to work in the Search Quality division at Google.)

Security by obscurity is a bad analogy here. The problem is that Google's algorithms are not mathematically perfect, in the sense of cryptography. Instead, they merely statistically tend to find good results. You can't find bugs just by looking at source code. You have to statistically analyze the effects of any proposed changes.
Apache's Hadoop (http://hadoop.apache.org/) has open-sourced implementations of those tools.
"Fuel input per gigawatt output: 250 tons raw uranium?"

Come on, Wired. 250 tons is a quantity, and gigawatt is a rate. Is it supposed to be a gigawatt times the lifetime of the plant?
I think you're right that as you learn about something, you feel invested and find more interest in it. I also think that as you learn about one thing you may find other areas or topics that you can learn about - so "what you love" may actually be a moving target.
It was written by Jonathan Rosenberg, who's a Senior Vice President for Product Management, and on the top management committee at Google. That doesn't quite meet my personal description of an "open source zealot", though he's clearly quite passionate about it.
IBM Preps for Cloud Computing War vs. Google, Microsoft in 2010
Thanks for the link, that helps put the post into a bit more context.

That said, I think the author's point is still wrong. As a community, we have to understand that these open systems are an enabler of progress, some of which will undoubtedly be proprietary. Part of openness is understanding that you're not locking people into using this stuff, and they're not locked in to how they use it.

I don't see it as hypocritical that a business can talk about being open and how critical it is to give back, while still keeping trade secrets to pay the bills.

I recently saw the CEO of the Economist group speak about journalism, and one thing he said (paraphrasing) was that the best defense of journalistic impartiality in the modern age is to turn a healthy (and diversified) profit. The subtext was that you can then risk offending any given party by doing good reporting without the appearance of favoritism, and without having a corporate (or nonprofit) master to please.

In the same sense I think that the best defense of free software is to allow companies to use it on their own terms, and give back when they can/will. The most useful open source projects are used (and likely abused) ad-nauseum, and trying to limit any company, even one that preaches hypocritically about open source is a recipe for them to tell the community to shove it and go hand money to <insert big vendor here>.

While it's fairly easy to preach the open-source gospel to fellow programmers and nerds that appreciate the value of this stuff, it's business people and non-tech-literates that oftentimes allow the checks to be signed, and the open source community needs to look to them like a group of enablers, not inflexible idealogues.
Django Multiple Database Support Merged
Well I guess it's got you some attention :) I would have invested a marketing budget like that in supporting some low cost events with smart participants. I've not been involved in much in the North of England but I hear there are some great BarCamps and OpenCoffee meetups.

So is it just the two of you that will be making the funding decisions? That's where committees can do most damage.
I can attest that this language is very hard to learn. It is an incredibly fun language and very VERY descriptive. The hardest part is actually speaking the language itself, since we're not used to using some of the extra sounds that Navajo uses.

Also, single words literally translate into English phrases or sentences.

The language hasn't done much for me these past few years, until I started learning Chinese. It is freaky how similar the languages sound. And I don't mean linguistically, of course. Learning Chinese is thankfully easier for me since I can replicate the phonetics without trouble.
I'm amazed that the Pirahã language isn't listed. From what I've read it is at least as hard as any language there, in large part because the Pirahã tribe don't have any cultural concept of numbers, distant past, fixed color names and a whole slew of other concepts that are usually considered essential for a functioning language. Added to that is the difficulty in forming the basic sounds of the language. It is tonal and can be whistled or hummed, dropping consonants and vowels completely and using only tonal changes to convey meaning.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1009942
When I was a junior programmer, I wanted to maximize productivity which I defined as output / input.

As I gained experience, I wanted to maximize output only, figuring that input would naturally minimize itself as I got more proficient.

Now I only worry about 2 things:

1. maximizing output of the top item on my list
2. making sure the right item is at the top of my list

This seems to be working much better than any other approach I have ever taken. When I make the most progress on the most important item, things like project management, efficiency, and time management suddenly seem much less important.
Lose It or Lose It: Why, How, and How Much
Making Of ‘Gratuitous Space Battles’
What I was getting at was that increased speed in coding has nonlinear effects n your time-to-solution and that students should code sooner --- before they have the solution in hand --- rather than waiting until they think they know the right answer.

Coding for classes should be done quickly and exploratively. But because students either can't code fast or won't code before they have the whole solution mapped out, this (measurably better) solution technique is unavailable to them.
I'm not crawling, but that is pretty interesting looking. I'll bookmark it and take a look at it for later for sure - thanks!
I've only seen one place in iTunes where I've been asked to register, and that has a very obvious "Never Register" button. I don't even remember seeing any sort of MobileMe registration, much less use it. I'd say it's signicantly better than the experiences I've had with other PC vendors, and I think others would agree. One (possibly 2) places where Apple asks for registration as opposed to how many in a typical PC? 4? 6?

I'm not going to argue about installing iTunes on Windows, but it's not relevant to comparing the out-of-the-box experiences, is it?
I am hungarian and I met several people in Hungary coming from all over the world, who somehow fell in love with the country or the language and did learn the language quite well.

So it can definitely be done (as with any other language), although you need strong motivation and a bit love of the language. But I think there are not many people in the world who has the motivation for learning an obscure language that is only spoken in one Eastern European country.
Everybody's different.
There was a period of several months where seemingly every article about the app store included comments that the gold rush was over, piracy was rampant, it was impossible to rise above the noise, etc.

Why would they all point out the difficulty in getting attention, unless there was a real phenomenon wherein people expected that it would be easy?

And how else can we interpret implicit assumptions that it would be easy (or at least easier than in other markets) or that the rewards would be great (or at least greater than in other markets)?
Right on. And stop assuming that the work habits you feel match your personality and goals are fully generalizable.
That is quite impressive. But it's an obvious outlier. I'd be interested in the median monthly revenue for a single application, not an entire company. Anybody have any numbers on that (or care to speculate)?
Well, the story is a combination of typical archetypes retold with pretty pictures. That much I cannot argue about. And I think that what you are really saying by "the plot sucked" is "it's too archetype driven". I'm basing this on:

>I personally found the warmed over "Stupid White Man penetrates exotic closed society and rises to be leader of it, seducing the native woman" plot tiresome, repetitive and tedious

Sure the characters ranged from a bit 2-d (the Col.) to well fleshed out (Neytiri (watch it again if you don't believe me)) and the acting ranged from "will probably win an award it was so good" Saldana to "thanks for showing up and picking up your paycheck" Weaver. But that's nothing different than you'll find in almost every movie -- the principles are fleshed out and the supporting cast is flat.

Why can't we have more 'smart' movies like Erin Brockovich/Schindler's List/Fight Club/District 9/Oldboy/etc. (archetypes of David vs. Goliath, Greed and Bullies) or The Incredibly True Story of Two Teenagers In Love/Léon/American Beauty/Mississippi Masala/South Pacific/Moulin Rouge/West Side Story etc. (Forbidden Love) or Lawrence of Arabia/Dune/Hunt for Red October/etc. (Lovable Turncoat)... you ask? And I'd counter that all of those are as archetype driven as any other well known flick (archetype stories provided in parens).

You see where I'm going with this. Even if you don't agree with all my movie choices as being "good" or "smart" you'll at least have to agree that most movies that are at least reasonably well known are pretty much based on a dissection or aggregation of common archetypes. How many times has Romeo and Juliet been retold almost verbatim? And by and large the audience enjoys these things and says "oh the plot was so good" when really, they are just a rehash of old story ideas. We even group movies into archetype driven categories "love story", "ghost story", "suspense", etc.

So yes, I was being "cute" with my notional art-house flick. But if you want to find something not driven by archetypes, where the artists consciously try to avoid those things, you have to go there, or to France or Italy perhaps. Here, http://www.imdb.com/chart/top this is the top 250 movies on IMDB not by dollars but by rating. How many of these are "smart" movies meaning "not a rehash of archetypes"? Very few if any.

It's pretty simple really, if you don't want your intelligence to be insulted (meaning you don't want an archetype driven story), you end up with a movie about a vapid cowgirl/model with giant thumbs or a movie director that can't focus on making movies because he's too busy with all his mistresses (which is actually just a retelling of the "guy with too many girlfriends archetype"). And given that non-archetype driven movies are typically poorly rated and attended by the open public, either you are particularly "smart" or those movies tend to suck.
> If the algorithm was open it would be trivial to create sites with artificially high rankings

I don't necessarily think this is true. Sites that have high page rank, do so because other sites of high value link to them.

Even if Google open sourced their search engine, spam sites would still have a hard time getting high quality inbound links. The reputable and high ranking sites wouldn't have any increased incentive to link to low quality spam sites.
I keep a sandbox for myself open at all times, particularly when I'm working on a large project. I whip out a solution for a micro case, test it, refine it, then implement it. I hate it when people check in their not quite fully-baked solutions, and let QA test their proof-of-concept for them.
Spoken like a young creative (at a startup? in the valley?) who is only responsible to himself. Once you need to work as part of a team, time management becomes important because you have to manage the interruptions + coordination with other people who depend on each other to be productive.

Yes, however, time management and team coordination do add overhead. Teams, however are much more scaleable that individuals. In addition, they are also fault tolerant.

Put in hacker terms... a great programmer is an superfast solid state drive, whereas a team is a raid 6 array with a bunch of disks that are slower and of varying speeds.

Overall, the solid state disk might individually perform better (and possibly be cheaper), but generally most people tend to agree the RAID array is a better way to go if you can afford it.
Since the programme is open to anyone from anywhere we are attempting to raise the profile of the programme outside of the region - and social media etc is the obvious approach with limited resources and time.

In addition to a number of local events I have also attended around 10 different events across the UK and overseas over the last 3 weeks to raise the profile of the programme.

Your point is well made re BarCamps and OpenCoffee and it is my intention after the first programme to spend more facetime with interested participants - local suggestions would be welcome.

The selection process will include a variety of individuals including local VCs and entrepreneurs with "real world" experience.
Pretty much. I think it's a genetic thing with our species to always want more. Grass is greener etc.
I disagree, part of the value of time tracking is that you can illustrate the many distractions you have during a day and consciously block off time to get into flow. Obviously this doesn't apply if you set your own priorities and objectives, but often (in organizations bigger than 1) your priorities are set or impacted by someone else's contribution.
I upvoted the story not because I agree with it, but because it explains a very successful open sourcing strategy that I wish more people understood.

In general people are willing to spend a certain amount on a solution. Therefore if you can things that make the complement to what you make money on cheaper, that increases how much you can charge for your piece of the solution. Open sourcing is a way to make those pieces cheaper.

Google does this. They give away tools and knowledge about how to make websites. They give away analytics and an A/B testing platform and educate people about how that makes it easier to produce good websites. This makes building good websites cheaper, and therefore increases how much people are willing to spend to advertise those websites.

This isn't a new strategy. In the late 90s when Oracle and IBM got into open source, this was their strategy. Oracle wanted to get people to stop paying for Sun hardware so Oracle could negotiate higher prices. (I know more than a few people who were surprised to find that licenses for Oracle on Linux are higher than they are on Sun.) IBM was looking to reduce the price for complements to IBM websphere, and was looking for opportunities to avoid having customers pay the Microsoft tax.

If you run a company and wish to strategically open source something, you should think in the same terms. What is the complement to what you are charging for, and how can you make that cheaper?
Considering the scale and dynamics of that game, an entire floor is a necessity.
I think at this point so much of Blizzard's revenue is tied to World of Warcraft that they have the ability to throw whatever resources are needed at it.
Can a single bottle of soda decimate your company? Absolutely.
Massive, massive spoiler alerts!!

If you haven't seen the film and want to see the film and don't want to know every detail before-hand, don't read this thread. It (the thread) has taught me to avoid HN when there's a new film around.

Most likely this comment will sink to the bottom and not serve its purpose of protecting the casual browser (person, not application), but for as long as it stays at or near the top, it may save a few people.

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I have to say, I completely hate this too. You'll be reading through a post and BAM,"lol, WHY DON'T YOU SUBSCRIBE TO MY MAILING LIST". 9 times out of 10, I'm going to hit command+w and move on to whatever is in the next tab rather than trying to close whatever is blocking my view of their content.

I really don't understand how this can be an effective advertising for whatever service they are pushing. Basically, they're saying: My content isn't good enough to get you to subscribe or follow me with a simple link at the end of the article, so don't even bother reading the rest of it because you'll only be disappointed.
Is as vapid a retelling of "guy with too many girlfriends" as any other. It simply creates an easily escapable artificial conflict that's better told in the form of a summer teen comedy.

Can't make a movie? Get less drama in your life. Situation movie solved.

It wasn't improved any when they added another 1/2 to it.
I agree... personally I think you should not be allowed to code unless you can type somewhere around 60-70 wpm. It is only with extreme mental effort that I can watch someone hunt-and-peck out 5 lines of code fiddling with their mouse and looking for the "n" key or the ";".

There should be a minimal period of time between when the code appears in your head and you see it expressed on a screen. If you can't type that fast, write it down, if you can't write it down, use a voice recorder.

I'm serious, if you only type 20 wpm, you are like an soccer player who can't run. Sure, running isn't the objective of soccer, but it sure as hell is an important skill to be proficient.
Yes, money will make a certain character swallow their pride/morals: a prostitute. Anybody with self-respect will have other reasons for taking a job. My old manager said "Nobody every quit over money". Well, he managed high-end Engineers, but you get the idea.
It's not the ranking algorithm specifically that's a secret; it's the code that used to detect sites that work together to artificially raise page rank of another site by linking to it. The whole Page Rank algorithm is predicated on the idea that human website owners and contributors do a better job at assessing the value of a website and they express this by linking to the website. When links are created for other reasons they reduce the effectiveness of Page Rank, and when they are created specifically to bias Page Rank they do the most damage to the algorithm's results.

Keeping the algorithm secret, and in particular the tweaks that eliminate links which aren't expressing "I judge this to be a good site", keep Page Rank useful.
Yahoo was the company that opensourced hadoop, not google.
Absolutely. I've worked in several contracted roles within online marketing and I've heard some awful advice from self-proclaimed SEO gurus about how to achieve a high rank for keywords on Google. A lot of what achiving high ranks is about is common sense and as Google improves their algorithm fewer tricks work. Anything past a simple competitive analysis, keyphrase analysis and a backlink analysis on you and your competitors is overkill.

The quality of SEO analysts out there is so poor that I believe you could release the source code to Google's entire search engine and people would still get things wrong or believe in ways to get around what I assume is an extremely complex set of mathematically-oriented algorithms. It's a classic example of the blind following the blind, and those that typically have followers are those that are popular for performing SEO work on huge companies that would never actually need it (e.g. Coca Cola).
I just assumed... why would they do that?
I deploy everything with git. With branches and tags, that also lets me deploy different states of a given project to different servers (development, staging, production). Rolling back or switching between tags is easy (migrations aside).
I find myself disagreeing on two fronts here:

First, in the context of CS1, in my experience, the assignments just aren't long enough that speed writing code matters. 20-50 lines of C just isn't that much typing.

Second, in the world of real work, the hard problems rarely boil down to how fast you can get the thoughts out of your head, through the keyboard, and into the computer. I often spend hours or even days pouring over existing code and in the end change a single line of code. If I just started typing right away, I might fix the immediate problem faster, but there's a strong chance I'd end up with a larger diff that makes the code base worse and possibly introduces new bugs and corner cases.

I may be misinterpreting the author; perhaps by "code" he is referring to the full analysis, design, and implementation process, in which case I suppose it is inarguable that a good developer should do this fast (or faster than a poor developer). To a degree he seems to be saying, "start prototyping right away", which is also valuable at times. But still, in either case, what seems odd is the idea that CS1 students ought to already have the skills of an experienced developer. Of course they don't; they're beginning students and the job of the teacher is to guide them to these skills. Perhaps what would be truly helpful here is suggestions of how to improve the curriculum or pedagogy to help students gain these abilities more quickly.
And what is wrong with commoditizing the complement? Google's working hard to make operating systems free and we'll probably see Microsoft working hard to open up search engines. End result: both operating systems and search engines will be open and the consumer benefits.
Jobless MBAs Seek Solace in Support Groups
I don't think many people really are doing jobs they don't like. When you genuinely don't like the work, you quit. Even people who are making a primarily economic decision simply do not stay in jobs they hate.

I've yet to hear someone say they hate their job and then discover that they actually dislike the work itself.
Rather, what they hate are corporate pressures, co-workers and other external forces that impede their ability to do their job.

When people feel they have control over those factors, they minimize them. When they don't, it creates the stress that leads to 'I hate my job'.
its a backtype plugin used by hundreds of blogs