skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many of the points in this excellent article made me think of the movie "The Siege."
Though the two points are reasons for someone to not share, the other reason could very well be that a person is an introvert by nature.

Another article linked by Rajesh (Marshall Goldsmith on Empowering Others) raises another possible reason: "one of the problems with smart people is their need to add a 'lot of value' to the other party." So, someone may think of sharing something but might think it is not ready yet and keep trying to increase the value of.
Google Announces An Android Event on January 5
SEO for 2010 EBook Launched
Are you intentionally misunderstanding? It's very clear what the person you're responding to meant. Of course the message is delivered in a way that begs attention. But the message is "leave us alone."
In my experience sharing helps me understand whether I am going in the right direction and avoid tunnel vision.
I think this observation is very true with respect to sharing with the internet at large. It's easy to dismiss some new (personal) discovery as unremarkable or obvious -- but, there are probably people out there who would find a write-up of that discovery interesting. This is probably especially true about more domain-specific bits of knowledge.

In that case, I don't think not sharing is an intentional choice to withhold or hoard information. The individual simply didn't realize there was any demand for that information. Or, perhaps there wasn't enough value in that information because anyone with an interest would make the same discovery on their own easily enough.

It doesn't mean that the same individual wouldn't share that info with someone who asked directly about the subject.
> This is how all products in all markets are developed.

Why are you saying that in such absolute terms? As if they were the defining features that govern the markets.

If that was really how it worked, what do you say to start-ups who make risky entrepreneurial bets on a daily basis?

The usefulness of something is not always readily obvious. It takes time to internalize, and often we just won't get it unless it's been thoroughly marketed to us, or suggested by friends and peers.

We can amply ridicule keyboard manufacturers for their lack of any real breakthroughs or innovation in recent years.

Finally, about what I'd like to see in keyboards:
1) I've a Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard ( http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/mshardware/images/... ) and I wish that instead of the 'zoom scrollbar' that's between the split, there was a mouse trackball.
2) The Compose and Alt Gr keys being standard in all keyboards. We live in the 21st century -- it's a globalized world. I want to be able to input foreign characters with ease (but as is, I've mapped my right alt to Alt Gr and right Ctrl to Compose - and I actually can input characters like this with much ease: áßðfghïœø¶æœ©®bññµçåéëþüíúóö¹²³€¹²³¤€’¥×÷¤€‘Á§ÐÄÅÉËÜÍÓÖÚ¦‘’ «» “”, etc.)
That is why most companies find it easier just to cross-license patents.
There are some interesting parallels between the CoF and the color wheel, the most obvious of which is that pitches opposite each other anywhere on the CoF are the most dissonant when juxtaposed against each other - similar to complimentary colors opposite each other on the color wheel. (Think orange and blue). Besides that invariant, the tones are permuted in the CoF a bit, which differentiates it from the standard 12-color wheel, which keeps neighboring tones together.

I wonder if one permuted the color wheel to be more like the CoF if it would make the basis of an interesting music visualizer, such that the harmonic relationships between tones correspond to the harmonic relationships to colors shown.

Here's an old visualizer that attempted something like this, but they didn't permute the color wheel in the manner I'm suggesting: http://www.musanim.com/mam/circle.html
Myspace does too: http://highscalability.com/myspace-architecture
Higher resolution retinal implants improve artificial vision for the blind
Any chance that you're storing snapshots of the results? Since HN polls apparently do not close, it might be interesting to watch things change over time.

Would it be possible to make a grid of all the polls and their results? Simply scaling images of the charts might suffice. I generally like to avoid browsing around whenever possible.
The second kind of reasoning is inline with PG's statement about hackers:

I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent.

From: Great Hackers, http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html
Your Gmail FaceBook Twitter Flicker Google Doc accounts hacked
I very much agree with this. I for myself think writing tests first or rather during development for well testable units as sweeping a number of small pebbles out of my way, so tripping due to trivial typos is less likely. Certainly, there might still be big rocks to encounter and I might still fall due to a large crack in the ground, but I certainly won't fall over due to small slippery pebbles.

In other words, I think TDD can be an amazing help at _implementing_ a solution after it was designed and planned and I think the ability to change code while the tests lower the probability of existing assumptions breaking unnoticed allows one to improve the existing design of a solution easily and significantly, while I also agree that designing and solving with tests only is awkward.

In case you want better examples where test driven development will fall flat on its face, take a look at the problem sets on http://uva.onlinejudge.org/ . You have 1-6 testcases in each problem, so there are enough test cases? :)
the ones who don't believe
See this "TIOBE Programming Community Index for December 2009": http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

It ranks the top 20 languages. Subtitle: "December Headline: All time highs for C#, Objective-C and ActionScript"
Suppose your code needs to interact with stored procedures in the database. How does a standard mocking approach in your code help you test the stored procedures?
I was in the same position a few years ago. My advice is to build as much as you can; open-source/your own projects, it doesn't matter. The main thing is that the stuff you build should be interesting to you. You will be more motivated if its stuff you enjoy and you will become a better programmer
It sure depends on the project type, I was talking about projects of HN people. For my site, for example, I have broken the signup process twice so I now have a couple of tests for it, unit + watin. But I won't bother with writing tests for, say, privacy settings.
Don't tell me that Islam calls for killing of infidels unless you're ready to admit that Christianity and Judaism do as well. The only reason you can say that with a straight face is that you don't know any Muslims well enough to know that Islam is only marginally different from any other mainstream religion. What you are revealing is a cultural/political/modernist bias that pretends an obscure belief is universal simply because it is foreign. You might as well paint half the population red, the other blue, and fight for the future of mankind. I prefer to recognize that people painted red or blue are still more similar than different.
the real metric is the cups of coffee to lines of code.
Even as a business lawyer, I can heartily recommend self-help resources, of which Nolo is a good example. They use highly qualified lawyers as authors to distill legal issues for use by lay people.

During the fever pitch reached in the bubble era, I bumped into a situation where a startup had raised $7M from so-called "accredited investors" by advertising the opportunity on the web. Large numbers of the investments were in the $5K range from, e.g., a small town in Texas, and it is clear that the investors were merely clicking through a screen by which they confirmed they were "accredited" without really being so.

By the way, the SEC does allow companies to use the web in certain restricted circumstances in connection with their offerings (the above case obviously did not comply with these restrictions) and, with the several thousand investors involved, stood a good chance of being characterized as an improper public offering of securities.
this is a pretty serious book about music and math http://www.musimathics.com/
Testing all of the ins and outs of possible DB behavior is out of scope for most software projects. You need to assume your driver works until proven otherwise.

As for testing interactions with the database, one approach that I've seen work is to have data in your test cases with which you build up database objects that you then interact with. If your classes all have appropriate helpers and appropriate ways of inserting reasonable defaults on fields not explicitly set in the testing code, this makes testing the expected database interactions fairly straightforward.
I am sorry, I didn't understand. What do you mean when you say that the text is "right-justified". AFAICT it is not.

If you seriously believe it's right justified, then patches are welcome :)
The Barometer of Hacker News Knowledge Half-life
Ad hominem is used all the time by very smart people.

Try getting a theoretician to look at a proof of a famous conjecture written by an unknown.
Ask HN: LLC to c-corp?
I'm about to form an LLC for my startup so we can sign our first contract with a client. Right now I am not leaning towards raising $. There is probably a 25% chance that I will seek funding in the near future. Does anyone know how much of a headache it would be to change from LLC to a c-corp in the future? Are you looking at hundreds or thousands more in lawyer fee for the change?
That's much more profitable than a single answer. Jeez :D
Can you please add (2008) to this? I clicked, hoping for a new PG article.
That's not quite fair though, the problem as he states it is to do this after you've written the program. So while yes, you could use the State Monad that might not be a trivial change to the code. Things might be even worse if the function was already written in another Monad, Monad Transformers can be just a little tricky. Unless of course you write everything in the State Monad just in case you ever have to do anything like that :)
Too bad it doesn't have a section on when and how to vote up/down. For example,

"V1:voting down because you have no sense of humor and the poster made a joke"

"V2:voting down because you nonspecifically disagree with the poster and don't actually have anything useful to say in response, in other words you downvote because you are angry at yourself."
Thanks for your feedback. What would be the fee you would be willing to pay?
Here's a very good example of sharing-while-teaching.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/774316/python-difflib-hig...

The answer points the way but requires comprehension of the already-illustrated points to successfully complete the solution.

If every programming question was answered like this there would be a lot more competent programmers out there.
I would like to take this opportunity to bring up downvoting. Doesn't downvoting have the same end effect as DH0 (or DH3)?

A downvote signals disapproval/discouragement, yet it requires no legitimate counterargument or reasoning for it.

I haven't seen people calling each other "fags" here, but it seems the downvote is simply the HN version of calling people "fags."
Still, the markup generator gives you CSS markup as well.
They used dropbox as an SCM? I guess that works, especially when you really only have 1 coder, but I can see it getting gross fast with multiple coders.

At least he mentioned GitHub.
>This is the lowest form of disagreement, and probably also the most common. We've all seen comments like this:

>u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!

>But it's important to realize that more articulate name-calling has just as little weight. A comment like

>The author is a self-important dilettante.

>is really nothing more than a pretentious version of "u r a fag."

I completely disagree. One is a direct verbal attack, the other can very possibly be a reasonable assertion. If it's followed by a fair explanation, all the better.
Try getting a theoretician to look at a proof of a famous conjecture written by an unknown.

That was an intentional ad hominem for humor/effect?
"ruby on rails" vs "django" has a much different take:

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=31&q=django%2...

I always wondered why Python consistently ranks higher than Ruby outside of the webapp sphere. Could it be the scientific/academic community's interest in Python's superior number crunching?
maybe just turn off downvoting all together?

if someone is breaking the rules, they can be flagged

if you disagree with someone don't vote them up.

This way the top comments will go to the top as usual, and interesting discussions with 100s of upvotes won't have 3 points
It seems wrong that there's no legal recourse against this sort of thing. If you're brought to court on something that has absolutely no legal standing, you should be able to sue for your legal fees.
Nezumi : iPhone app for Heroku
I'm overall sympathetic to the opinions in this article, but I think he's gone astray in the section "Complaint: TDD freezes the API too early". One of the ideas of TDD is that writing tests guides the API, rather than forcing you into an API. That is, if you write tests based on the actual business requirements, and write them first, that process will lead you to discover the best design of the API.

Note that for this to work, you have to be writing tests based on the real use requirements. Simple synthetic unit tests will not help you here, and may lead to exactly the problem the author is complaining about.
You should hope that your students surpass you, because that way there's someone who owes you a favor and knows something you should learn.
100% agreed, it's used the same way here.
If it's followed by a fair explanation, then it's no longer the same argument. I think his point is that if you just say "The author is a self-important dilettante," then that by itself is no different from "u r a fag!!!!!!!!!!"
A couple of years ago, I committed a test case called TestHowDatabasesWork because of a team argument about how Oracle handled concurrency and locking. It got a good laugh, but it also documented a few behaviors specific to the problem at hand.

There is a good possibility that in documenting what you saw working you failed to notice some important details of its optimistic locking policy.

If you're ever again faced with such questions about Oracle I highly recommend picking up an appropriate book by Tom Kyte. For a developer in particular I would recommend http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0072230657.
Network vulnerability assessments: Scan all, scan often
Kurumsalseo.com R10 lida fx15 pohudey zayiflama
True, but Deestan has the right idea. The number was random at the time of coding (presumably selected by the programmer using a fair dice roll), but is obviously not random at runtime. It's amusing that every answer in that SO thread completely missed the point.
wow, a long but pleasant read. thanks for sharing.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1013330
Python is well documented so Python users just go to http://docs.python.org/ . Don't know about Ruby, but I suspect you could make that argument about any language.
The author is a self-important dilettante.

...is designed to insult or discredit the author without any reference to the actual argument (or any objective facts.) If the goal is to move the discussion forward, how can this be "a reasonable assertion"?
A person's reputation has a strong quality signal associated with it.
The Limits of Cellular Data
'If I have seen further than others, it's because I am surrounded by dwarfs.' -- attributed to Murray Gell-Mann

(I generally prefer Newton's version, and I'll aspire to be so humble until my achievements better his.)
Yes I agree. Poor choices of words that have certain connotations. Wish I could edit it now because I think a lot of people are missing the point because of it.
Women play harder than men in online games, study finds
"He hasn't produced good work before, so there's a good chance it won't be worth my time to read his proof" is an imperfect way of allocating limited resources, not an ad hominem attack.
Medicare is more efficient than the overwhelming majority of private insurance companies.

Insurance companies would operate very differently if they could charge prices based on what their customers would cost them. It would also help if employer-provided health plans didn't have such huge tax advantages. And Medicare provides a different set of services.

It would be as if the government mandated that 1) instead of buying meals, you had to buy the right to eat at a restaurant--but the restaurant could not charge different people different amounts based on how hungry they were or what they liked to eat, and 2) companies could buy food for employees at a tax-advantaged rate. If that were the case, food would suck, and one could imagine free government-run cafeterias that provided cheaper, better service.

Social Security also has super-low overhead, less than most funds (although lower returns than many funds as well).

Their return is zero, minus administrative costs. When you invest money in a mutual fund, they buy stocks with it; they don't use it to pay off the previous investors, and spend the rest on their pet projects. That's illegal.

The federal government is actually better at pure administration than the majority of private companies, because they're constantly under the threat of getting the axe and have a mandate to do their job rather than take paychecks home.

I would like to meet some of these government employees who actually fear losing their jobs. Where did you find them?

The lower salaries don't hurt, either.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/private-vs-publ...

Government workers make vastly more than private sector workers.

If you're ideologically opposed to the existence of even a perfectly run Medicare and SS, of course, that's a different story...

It's clear from the data that I don't need to be.
I think still there is a fundamental difference between calling someone a "fag" vs. a "dilettante". Calling someone a "dilettante" isn't quite name-calling. And if the subject at hand has a history of being a sham, then I don't think it even warrants the effort to spend the time writing an explanation.
Markdown is different, though. Rather than trying to cram HTML into a yet another pseudo-programming syntax, it tries to generate HTML that matches common plaintext-formatting conventions. You might not guess Markdown-formatted text was written with a formal markup language in mind.

FWIW, there's a C implementation of Markdown called "discount" (http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/discount/) which is crazy fast, easy to embed, and has a couple nice extensions.

(Also, "SHPAML"? Gross.)
1) I agree. Unfortunately a unified human government is not in the near future, but having one whole country, especially one as well connected as the United States, secure itself can cut into the power of botnets or viruses. The US can also set an example, for other countries to adopt. (This is all assuming that distributing anti-viral software by the gov't can keep up with self-propagating viruses).

2) My point is that such a structure can be created for my proposal too. Simply letting the government contract out to multiple private corporations, or providing subsidies for antiviral software, is one way to prevent "big brother" from controlling computers.
I concur that speech can be a crime:

"…Whitney has been thoroughly discredited by later decisions. See Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494, at 507 (1951). These later decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."

-- wikipedia.
"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"
I think downvoting is supposed to be used to mark spam/offtopic etc - Things that don't add to the conversation or contribute anything interesting.

Using downvoting to disagree with the comment isn't the intention afaik.
Yikes! This might be an ill-defined problem in some cases -- optimization based on referential transparency in the original functions means that you may not really know how many times these functions were called. Either you have that problem, or the functions were already stateful.
Here's a short implementation (with explanation) in Scheme:

http://matt.might.net/articles/implementation-of-regular-exp...
I disagree. I see, and myself, do downvote comments that I disagree with, if it is a strong disagreement. I think there is also a post where pg says something similar: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=392347

I have found that comments of mine that get downvoted cause me to think about why.
this is about fret war, the randomly generated music thing, we've seen it before
Getting the ISO Week and Year
An ad hominem attack is a way of saving resources. Theoreticians use it to save time and effort.
While I agree with you, one has to realize that downvoting existed before flagging. At the time, it was used mostly for suppressing spam/trolls and egregiously rude people. Now we have flagging for that, although I still occasionally downvote stuff that is rude rather than flagging. Consider it like a minor flag. That said, I'd be fine if it went away and we just had upvotes and flags, but we've discussed this ad infinitum.
I strongly doubt it because it is a well-known phenomenon.

If you're a well-known mathematician then you'll get a constant stream of "solutions" to famous math problems that are a waste of time to read. Sure, it is possible that you'll find the great solution in that pile. It is more likely that you'll figure it out yourself in the time you save by not wading through that junk.

If you actually take the time to read and respond to the solutions it can get much worse. There are some well-known cranks who, once they get a sense that they have an audience, Will Not Stop Writing.

There are famous exceptions to the rule. Ramanujan being the best known. However they are famous because they are so exceptional.
I'd sort of expected it to be around the 2-3% level as it would be for a merchant account.

At 14% I might give it a go on a prototype, then rip it out and build my own the moment I saw the potential for high traffic volumes.

Edit: A sliding scale with a cap would be very attractive. I'd also be more willing to give a higher percentage for non-US/UK referrals because the long tail of smaller markets would be a pain to code up.
It may not be intended, but I'm pretty sure it's what it's used for. Plus intuitively, it's as if it is put there for that purpose, since there is also a "flag" action which seems more suited for marking spam/off-topic already.
Nokia Increases Scope of Patent Complaints to Include Most Apple Products
If you're implying that casual sex is a result of nihilism and self-loathing I simply don't get that. If anything, I see casual sex as an exploration of self and another form of communication and understanding.

And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar...