skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been waiting for someone to implement the game from the movie Gotcha!. Looks like it's been done. Like sabat said, why didn't I have the guts to pursue it.
Sort Optimization (Part 2) with JDK 6 vs JDK 7
That's one big problem I see with performance based pay, even if an accurate personal metric were available. Time spent helping/mentoring others would have a negative impact on a senior programmers bottom line, even though a company generally wants to encourage this.
Diagram of the Principal High Buildings of the Old World
'Absolutely'. As the author notes usability and ease of use matter. They are the number one feature to the end user. There is one more and this is more for developers, wordpress database is made up of ten tables! Within these ten tables they have managed to slot in a multi-blog feature. This compares to over 50 for Drupal for example. As a developer, I can get into the internals of WP and make modifications fairly easily - in most cases there are plugins to assist as a starting point.

Overall WP has managed to carve a sexy niche in the hearts of users and developers even if the code is not so beautiful and sexy, not to mention the language!
You can go here to vote: http://crunchies2009.techcrunch.com/vote/
GOOD (http://good.is) is the only one currently. It's bi-monthly so it's easier to get a chance to read it. It's pretty good, but I bet just reading their website daily would be better.
"There are so many horrible programmers that you can be mediocre and be 10x more productive than the guy next to you. Thus you think you're in the 10x crew. But you really aren't. It's not because you're really that good. It's because the guy next to you is really that bad."

So someone who is 10x more productive then their coworker isn't actually 10x more productive because their coworker is so horrible? Isn't "10x more productive" an explicit measure of productivity relative to the guy(s) next to you?
> I really don't like clicking a link I don't know the real destination for.

Why not, when the source of the link is known? (As in this case--PG).
In my latest app, I've noticed that I get the greatest highs when I write one specific function, and then rewrite it to be generic enough to handle four different elements. Great fun.
Apple allegedly preparing devs for mystery demo in January
I thought the Peopleware claim was that some teams are 10x more productive than other teams. I could easily buy this, because it's very easy to generate more internal communication work than it produces, i.e. be negatively productive.

I'm not sure I buy it for individuals, except in the limiting case of someone completely not knowing what they're doing and having no idea where to start.

I guess it's also possible with the economist's definition of productivity ($$$/hour), since so many projects turn out to be commercial flops. But by that definition, startups and research are some of the least productive sectors of the economy, not the most.
While I agree with fast + time wasted = normal speed, in reality it is not the wasted time that plays the role. In most companies developers don't have a fixed 8 hour job and most of them work more than 8 hours a day on a routine basis. I have seen managers who valued the total time spent working more than the actual work accomplished. So a developer who works about 8 hours a day was ranked below someone who spent 10-12 hours a day working even though it was the former who was accomplishing more tasks.
One problem with this book is it doesn't teach good programming style. For example, the program in chapter 19 is 200 lines of code that doesn't use procedures anywhere -- it's all in one big lump of code.

This is bad, because when novice programmers try to modify the program, they will quickly find it becomes unmaintainable.
Of note, Ron Conway invested in YC (albeit somewhat indirectly) earlier in the year.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/16/y-combinator-gets-the-s...
Weird - I didn't see any registration required. Also, doesn't paywall infer payment required?

(I'm not questioning that it asked you for a login, it's just odd that it's requiring it for some people and not others.)
Practice will make you better, certainly, but different people learn at different speeds, and have different ceilings.

Potential is not necessarily proportional to practice. So, what he may be able to do in a year may take you twenty, or a week.

Practice isn't the only factor where ability is concerned.
Cool features will come later. The current version of the site is basically just a way to start building up traffic for the big idea.

But yeah it'll probably take 1-2 years to build up the content and traffic. But you gotta start somewhere, 10 people here, 10 people there, and before long, you are hitting millions of people a month.
I think he's comparing an EC2 small (we can tell because he says the memory is between 1GB and 2GB); it looks like the headings on the table are wrong.

I think he's comparing this to a Rackspace 1GB, which is actually cheaper than EC2's small instance; the more direct comparison is to the Rackspace 2GB.

You m1 large is $0.34 per hour, vs $0.06 per hour on the Rackspace machine in the blog (I believe). You only got twice as many request per second out of it, so on the requests per second per dollar metric (the real metric, I think), ec2 is lagging.
I don't think so. Life on Earth is so diverse already. Your best examples are animals that are close relatives already (birds and bats aren't all that far apart in evolutionary terms, and their common reptilian ancestors already had by and large the same skeletal structure). Also, aerodynamics seem dictate most of the body shape. Butterflies on the other hand solve the problem of flight in a very different way. The movement of worms and snakes doesn't look very similar at all, and the same is true for fish and jellyfish.

Really, the Na'vi are more similar to humans than humans look to most other species on Earth. You can't make a convergent evolution argument here unless you believe that intelligence somehow requires upright walking and a human-like face, down to the specifics of what facial expressions mean. I consider this highly implausible, even if it makes for a good movie.
Didn't EC2 sell the cloud on the idea of being able to burst? Isn't it better to be able to do that for short periods without having to fire up a new server, configure it, and pay for a whole hour?

Your point is very valid from the point of view of benchmarking, but in the real world, I see bursting as a massive advantage.

It feels like we need a better benchmark suite; like I/O test suites that can measure the burst rate and the sustained rate.
//But it does kind of suggest that apple is going out of their way to impede the quality of web-apps on the iphone rather than try to help it along

I guess Apple has an incentive in doing so. Improving web apps improves it for all phones. They lose their comparative advantage in doing so.
Slight nitpick: Infinite developer As will not solve the problem unless you assume that each developer can solve a finite part of the problem. If Developer A simply can't solve the problem none of them will help.
What have Open Source Developers done to Open Government?
From the article:

> someone who stares quietly into space for a few minutes

...and exactly here lies the problem. I've been fired from a job because according to an old retiree who never saw anyone programming before, "he spent his days scratching his beard and looking blankly at the screen". No mention about the job being done and the extra $1M my ideas saved. And certainly no apologies after they had to replace me by a whole external company.
Doesn't location data require GPS which takes time to acquire data and need satellite visibility? What happens if I bump in a basement?
Loving those animated explanations.
"Imagine if each page generates just one visitor each day"

Yes, just imagine that! While we're at it we could even imagine that each page generates 6 billion visitors a day. How bad would that be???

Looks like a flaw in Target's site. Not news. Not interesting. Not anything
Run your Code Online, 40+ Programming Languages
What's Not to Like?
I think the idea is to get away from the messy situation you see in TPC database benchmarks, where the environments are highly tweaked by the vendor just for that TPC test, and this bears no relation to the performance you actually get as a real world customer.

I think he's re-running the tests anyway where the vendor suggested a tweak; I would take a more hard-line approach (if it isn't what you ship, it's not what I'll test). If the vendor's customer support is responsive and suggests a reasonable tweak, I can see the need for a more nuanced approach!
http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.targe...
You haven't answered my previous questions, you may not have thought I was serious. I am. Very. Can you answer these?

What's 3/5 times 8/7 ?

What's 3/5 plus 8/7 ?

What's 23/9 - 7/4 ?

What is x if x^2-3x+2=0 and how did you get your answer?
If your CSS is minified and compressed, a reset is almost unnoticeably small. The YUI 3 reset stylesheet, for example, is 858 bytes uncompressed.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012341
> What if I want to be freer than the GPL? What if I want to release my next project with a BSD license so that even commercial users or people who want to keep part of their source private can use it?

I don't care if someone wants to use my code for commercial software. However, I don't want to give them a competitive advantage just because I wanted them to be more free. I still want to benefit from the changes they've made (if they make sense for me) in the same way they've benefited from my initial work! Now, if I have to pay for a copy of the software to get the changes (since the GPL allows for that sort of thing), so be it. I invited that by releasing my software under such a license.
How does Textpattern

http://textpattern.com/

compare as a CMS? I know at least one webmaster who vastly prefers Textpattern to WordPress, and the website I manage that is run on WordPress is far, far from being easy to use.
I've had the same experience here in Texas. I think that is normal - the more people you go through, the more formal the process tends to be.
I understand that an economist would say that exchanging intellectual property for money is the only way to measure productivity. It satisfies me about as much as measuring productivity by lines of code, and for much the same reason.

Is an architecture astronaut really more productive than a programmer just because there is some sort of perceived value within an "Enterprise Environment?" Is a programmer who switches jobs every few years--garnering a raise each time but needing a ramp-up period at each job--more productive than the one who values security more than money and stays in one place?

I don't think that when we use the phrase "programmer productivity" on HN we are talking about the same thing as an economist who talks about productivity.
There's a lot you can do with bigger screens. When their screens become touch screens, there's going to be so much you can do with them. Eventually all TVs are going to be computers with functional browsers, so you better start thinking about fluid design as one of your motivating factors.

Do this. Go to the Apple store and load up your website on one of those really high res iMacs and see how much real estate you have.
Does anyone know the user 'h34t' and/or how I can get a hold of him?
Can anyone put me in touch with this user? I wanted to follow up with him about a post he made here a couple of years ago. His profile doesn't contain any contact information, unfortunately.
How does a Music Browser differ from an Internet Browser then? Because I can open up my Internet Browser, type "http://zedshaw.com/ and listen to music created by Zed. (ok, I do then have to click the "Music" link but that's the website owners choice).

EDIT: Ok, this is a followup to a previous blog post here http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-12-21.html

What he describes there actual sounds kind of cool :)
USB Hourglass random number generator
Maybe plants evolved very late on this world, maybe from simple animals that became ever more stationary. Not having to move is an advantage: you can invest more in static defenses (like bark) if you don't have to carry them around. Sea shells are a real life example of something similar.

As for the link not being peer-to-peer, it might be as simple as the bigger/more complex nervous system dominating the other one.
You seem to have a very strict requirement for pride; I wasn't aware there was a "pitiful" tier. I feel like life would be pretty depressing if I needed to create something greater than me for the social good that had a purpose just to feel proud of my accomplishment. You can only save the whales once.

Anyway, as is the saying, "whatever gets you off". If I've managed to be particularly clever or efficient or solved a problem I haven't previously, I feel good about that. In 10 years doing this I've never collaborated on a project start to finish with other programmers but I imagine I'd feel good about that, too. I guess I just lack the ability to comprehend self-pity over a personal accomplishment.
Yes, this was a typo on my part and has been corrected. In the "Medium Instances" section it was an Amazon EC2 Small instance that was used which is in line with the 1024MB Rackspace Cloud Server and the Linode 1080 server instance.
Ask HN: What questions would you ask a potential co-founder?
I am thinking about beginning a search process for a technical/developer co-founder, and was wondering what the HN people would ask/look for in one-on-one interviews. What should I ask and also what should I convey to potential interviewees?
But the award is just a popularity contest. WordPress is merely the best blog platform. Blogs are the most common use case for a CMS. So more bloggers means more WordPress users means more votes. Doesn't have much to with how capable or useful it is for a general CMS.
China to require Internet domain name registration
I think we can all agree that these are special cases. In general, you don't go to jail until your family bails you out if you can't pay your car, house or credit card bill. or your business loan for that matter.
Analytics and retweeting?
EC2 scales across instances, it does not burst CPU resources in a single instance. You can't depend on the "burstable CPU" to be available when you need it. It's a highly unreliable form of compute time. You just have to pray and hope no one else is using the same resources on the same physical machine, or you're SOL.
You make good points. However... if we accept the economist's definition of productivity, then the article becomes a NOOP: We measure the marketplace, we discover that given a set of programmers with roughly the same conditions, there isn't a 10x disparity in output divided by hours worked, therefore no programmer is 10x more productive.

The only way there is something to discuss is when we presume there is another measure of programmer productivity and then ask why the marketplace is so inefficient that economic productivity does not correlate with programmer productivity.
Well, case in point:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012670

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012341

The lunk to items have the same title, but the URLs are different becuase of the extra, unnecessary parameters. The extra check would have prevented the duplication.

But if you put the onus on the submitter, it won't change. After all, two of the recent duplications were duplicates of items on the front page, not even obscure ones.

There's no penalty for people who don't bother. Automated checking goes a long way. The only way you'll get people to do the checking before they submit is if there's a penalty. Perhaps duplicated items should cause a loss of karma. Pretty draconian when we want good items. People might stop bothering.

Checking the title seems easy to implement, gain a lot, and then we can see if the problem/situation remains.

And I think this is a problem, because sometimes the discussion can get diluted across multiple submissions, leading to duplication, which is a waste of time and effort. As a hacker, I resent that.
I make no attempt to mask that I am a Rackspace employee and I even updated the post with a large disclaimer at the top just in case.

The fact of the matter is that the small instances from Linode and Media Temple could not perform the tests as conducted with their out of box configurations. I made no enhancements to any platform. Some helpful readers have pointed out some settings I can change that will allow the benchmarks to complete successfully so I am going to do a follow-up post with all of these "tweaks" implemented across all the providers. I am being as objective as possible here, don't let the fact that I work for Rackspace fog the air.

These tests are also very easy to duplicate on your own if you really want to test the data set and results.

-Chad
Methinks the walls were built by teh foreign armies of Rome.
The Economist,

http://www.economist.com/

because it has the best international news reporting in an English-language weekly. I recommend it to everyone. When I get each new issue, the first thing I read is the obituary at the very back of the editorial content. That is always amazingly well written, and frequently about very interesting people I have never heard of.

Skeptic,

http://www.skeptic.com/

to learn more about a skeptical approach to life. The included Junior Skeptic section is very good for children to read, and the magazine has very interesting book reviews (and, for that matter, advertisements for books), so I recommend Skeptic also.

Skeptical Inquirer,

http://www.csicop.org/si/

as another interesting magazine about a skeptical approach to life. I find Skeptic more informative and entertaining, on the whole, but I think Skeptical Inquirer has some editorial points of view that are more warranted than some of the points of view of the Skeptic editorial board.

After edit: I also very much like the Atlantic, but the call of the question is what I subscribe to, and the Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker and other worthwhile periodicals are available at the public library that I walk to almost daily. I read those there.
Doing a curl, parsing the return for the <title> field, then saving the string for comparison if the title field exists seems pretty safe. I'd be interested to see an exploit.

And as it stands, allowing the submission endangers us all, rather than writing something designed to be tolerant and preventing any such exploit.

Still, an interesting question.
The New Yorker: Has very interesting articles and criticism. I recommend it.

Chess Life: Am a USCF member, so I get it automatically.

Computer Music: The best articles on creating electronic music. I highly recommend it.
Math, Physics, and Chemistry are easy to objectively grade, so I'd accept that they tend to have higher grade quality (a notional metric of the correlation of grades to ability) than e.g. literature, drama, sociology, pottery, etc, where the grade quality correlates to the ability of the grader.

Physics classes don't prove a blanket statement regarding grade quality over all subjects, any more than Yao Ming proves that Chinese people tend to be seven feet tall, or the King of Sweden proves that Swedes tend to be kings.
I think you're jumping to conclusions. It's much more likely in my opinion that Apple simply isn't ready to unleash PastryKit yet. They want to ride their native application advantage while it lasts but they are realistic about where things are heading. The mobile application market is already big and it's going to become gigantic over the next few years. When the inevitable move towards cross platform, standards based, web apps happens Apple will be ready. They are not quite ready today. The big piece that's missing is integration of web apps into the App Store. When that happens I think you'll see PastryKit's future iterations being well supported by Apple. Right now it's just not a public project.
In pure financial terms, you're right. However, "people losing their homes" is perfectly accurate for some people. A home isn't just a house or an "out-of-the-money home purchase option", it's where you've put down roots and built up memories.

Some people made bad gambles, and are losing their "options." Others made bad decisions or were unlucky, and are losing their homes. Even if they're partially to blame, it's still a terrible situation.
Correct, I did not want to have any influence over the results of the "out of box" testing as many users on these platforms won't even know how to tweak the OS and Apache on a low level.

But as mentioned, I will be making some of the suggested tweaks to ALL of the platforms and rerunning the tests and posting a follow-up on that as well. I will make sure everything is as uniform as possible.

If there is anything specific I should be aware of please let me know, thanks!

-Chad
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012381
How language fanboys see each other's languages
Nothing is "absolutely safe" -- certainly, fossil fuels aren't. Conventional uranium reactors aren't. They're extremely safe, far beyond what I consider a reasonable cause for the fear that they're treated with, but they are not "absolutely" safe.

Frankly I'm not really sure what "absolutely safe" would even mean; even a hydroelectric dam could break, given an earthquake or intentional sabotage.

That's not a realistic criteria for any energy source; instead, we should be talking about managing and containing risks.
Maybe some of those cheap attachments like they have for the wii remotes, but instead turns your iPhone into a gun.
Zed is having an awfully hard time convincing people about this idea. He really needs to either just build it already or drop it. I mean, we get it. You want to build a music browser. We don't "get" your vision. Yes, ok, fine. Get on with it already. What are you waiting for? Time spent wanking about on your blog is time not spent writing code.
Isn't this pretty much laser tag, except using different technology (camera)?

So it's innovative, but only in the aspect of being able to do this on the iphone with the hardware it has.
That might make sense if they're talking about the mass of the entire fuel rod assemblies (which all become high-level waste, since we don't reprocess in the U.S., instead treating reactors as furnaces that simply "burn" Uranium). However, it seems suspiciously large if they're actually talking about the amount of U-235 that's fissioned off.
Rumor: Google in acquisition talks with Trulia
Interesting: this story is apparently of enough concern that when i serch for "Exercise Bike Clearance" I get mostly articles talking about Target spamming Google.
There is absolutely no reason for you to be this negative. If this was Joe Schmoe's random blog, I don't think you'd be making these kinds of statements.
Edge Magazine, one of very few videogame magazines worth reading.

Zone 5300, dutch magazine consisting of small-press comics and loosely related articles.

(oh, I don't actually subscribe to Edge, I just consistently buy it every month)
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1009387

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1011488
X-Forwarded-For HTTP Module For IIS7, Source Included
This is true, but only in the kinda trivial sense that lsof is just a pretty front end to the /proc filesystem. The same is true of pmap and netstat, but they remain useful tools nonetheless.