skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hehe, don't get me started :) How about:

- naming conventions

- globals (or, better yet, scope in general)

- 'objects' (I use the term lightly)

And a host of other things.

They could do a lot better still, but as long as nobody comes along and starts to make serious inroads into their user base I doubt this will change much.

What is surprising is not how much is broken, but how far they made it with so much stuff as broken as it is.

I've always thought that if python would have used braces, dropped the whitespace bullshit and came with a ready to go plug-in for apache with a similar ease of deployment that it would have kicked PHPs ass long ago.
That doesn't guarantee that "each" is actually the right "each".
Yum, you do have some excellent beer.
"Code it right in the first place."

Isn't this advice better applied to the developers of PHP, in this case?
I usually like Gruber, but he shouldn't blame iSuppli for the way fanboys complain about profit margins.

I've never seen iSuppli do anything except take products apart and look at what parts are inside. They're simply providing a service to investment analysts and competitors.
Don't aim for 100%. Aim for 120%, then throw the worst 6th away. Basically the same as the advice for runners: aim past the finish line.
Even in a startup, the core system shouldn't fall over itself every night - you owe your customers better than that.

But of curse it will fail more often than the product of an established company.
The social proof of having this in the NYTimes is worth a lot more than the SEO value of hosting it yourself.
I bought one of those in 2007 when they were new, and it was not exactly smooth sailing. It most certainly was not a 'Linux Apple.' Nothing short of alchemic transmutation is going to make a Dell into any kind of Apple.
Goes to show... you never really know. The decision taken out
of the context of the lawsuit looks poor but maybe weighed
by the lawsuit (could it have taken down the company?) may
not look so poor.
Because if not enough other people use it, everybody assumes you have Windows and programs/writes accordingly, and you find yourself forced to do things like use web applications that only work on IE 6.

No man is an island.
"... You see this often when engineers meet. If the group is new, and haven't established a status hierarchy already, they will quickly start throwing jargon around at each other, to show who is more knowledgeable and try to make others look stupid. ..."

Great observation. Mean girls and Queen-bee behaviour in engineers ~ http://www.amazon.com/Queen-Bees-Wannabes-Boyfriends-Realiti...

"... But there is an upside to it. ..."

In the natural world, "status hierarchy" is used to protect the integrity of groups at the expense of pions. So there is upside. You see it in Bees for example: ~ http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/sci-tech/researchers-unr...

"... I think it is necessary to emphasize that this extends to professional domain knowledge. It is absolutely unacceptable to put anyone down because of their religion, sex orientation, skin color, or body shape. ..."

It's naive to think telling people "they are full of shit" won't have repercussions. If opinion is disregarded with such emotion it will have negative impacts on the team and team members. Queen bees use "homovanillyl alcohol" (HVA) to chemically interfere and suppress worker drones. Maybe in human teams, status is enforced through social pressure?

"... Evolution has provided queen bees with a chemical that selectively blocks aversive learning but leaves reward learning intact ..."

Now that's an idea worth exploring. How to knock down potentially inefficient ideas more efficiently?
I think you missed the point. You're trying to scare me rather than explain what actual events that actually transpired you actually think are actually wrong.

I'm just asking you to not be vague and presumptive when making a moral argument.
I'm confused by question 1. I assume by saying "cross compile the language in C" you mean "the compiler for language X generates C code." If so, the answer is easy: to leverage the heavily used, portable and well optimized machine-code generators that exist for C.
I've never had an iPhone and recently bought an Eris. This article helps to explain what happened when I showed it to a co-worker who is a long-time iPhone user: he kept fumbling around, and I kept saying "Hit the home icon" or "Hit the back icon."

I couldn't understand why he didn't pick up on this quicker, and he probably thought the phone had a terrible UI. Since every review of every Android phone revolves around the "How does it compare to the iPhone?" question, this article should be required reading for reviewers before they get a Droid phone to play with.
It's not just a bug with an associated patch. It's a language misfeature, in a 15 year old language. You can very probably fix it without breaking existing code.
"... It should only require that kind of intervention once (per type of incident)... points to a more fundamental problem. ..."

That's a better way to phrase it. I'd agree with that.
yeah most techie guys tend to say this. Fashion people(especially women) love it.

The site was actually designed by the alpha users. I had them give me ideas of what to do, and then I'd show them 3-4 mockups, and they'd vote for the best looking one. Went through 5 major redesigns until we hit the current version(which they all loved).

To tell the truth, I'm not really a huge fan of it either, but it was a quick hack job to get something out ASAP. My philosophy is that the sooner you start, the sooner you grow. Wasting an extra 1-2 months on a perfect design makes no sense when you have no users.

I'm actually already working on a redesign. Should be a little bit more mainstream. Don't get me wrong, it'll still have the fashion feel...but it'll look a lot more refined.

BTW I don't know why you are being downvoted, since I fully agree with you.
Check out the photo on this story from 2006, and compare it with the one from The Atlantic.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/business/yourmoney/31speye...

Two photos taken seconds apart, but used in very different circumstances.
At least it seems faster to learn and faster to code.
I think they just simply overlooked it.

And since a probable fix without breaking stuff is likely a patch would be all it takes (and a note in the changelog, for the unlikely case that someone did depend on it, not that they'll read the changelog ;) ).

Octal not being the popular thing it once was I doubt it would matter much.

I think more people are 'bitten' by this totally unexpected behaviour of leading 0's suddenly doing wildly interesting things to numbers (what?? there are more numberbases than just decimal???) than there are that expect illegal characters in octal numbers to throw errors.
Factor: Factor and a little C
* Python: C, but also Java and C#
* Ruby: C, but also Java

Do you mean there are different implementations in other languages?

* Jython: Java
* Cpython: C

?
* Jython: Java
Naturally, the couch-potato YouTubers will appreciate the features, but assuming that the Apple Tablet "just works" and does what it needs to do with minimal frustration, I don't see why the idea would be so far fetched.
I agree with a hero being "dangerous" but I would say you
should be looking at the manager as the problem, not the
employee. If one employee is doing all the work it is
because the manager or his manager is letting it happen.
Electric saw detects fingers so it knows when to stop
Hmm, this is technically true, but life does provide some actual very close to ideal arbitrages.

For example, back in the day, I used to buy and sell a popular collectible card game on eBay. Right when eBay came out, there was a massive arbitrage on buying cards from people and selling them online, because there were huge geographic price discrepancies. There was no risk in buying a card for .50 and selling it for $8, etc.

Eventually, the market corrected itself and prices stabilized, but for a while, there was a lot of money to be made if you just knew the right cards to buy.

Another example of this sort of temporal arbitrage is sports betting right before the country was networked well. It used to be if you had a guy on the coasts and in various major metropoli, you could place bets on games with varying handicaps, and always win.

The famous poker player Howard Lederer made a lot of money this way.
Here is a great description of how Alan Kay and friends wrote the Squeak (Smalltalk) VM using another (Apple) Smalltalk:

http://ftp.squeak.org/docs/OOPSLA.Squeak.html

Also consider that a bunch of languages (most?) consist of a kernel (or other VM) written in something native (like C) surrounded by a bunch of libraries written in the language itself. Off the top of my head: python, java, clojure, most schemes, etc. are like this.

For ridiculous exercises in bootstrapping minimalism, check out Ian Piumarta's work on Cola:

http://piumarta.com/software/cola/

http://piumarta.com/software/cola/objmodel2.pdf

http://piumarta.com/software/cola/colas-whitepaper.pdf
It's very overblown, I got a Nexus One and the complaints on the forums were there before the phone was even out. Granted there are some specific serious issues that need to be taken care of with support (of which none I've seen on the forums), but the majority of problems and complaints can be easily solved by simply reading. While I agree and think google should have good customer service all around, in my experience the nexus one works just as it should and are many videos from google detailing its features.
HTC is supposed to handle hardware warranty related issues and your network provider deals with network problems.
Ask HN: Does your lawyer attend your Board meetings?
Our attorney is offering to come for free (it's standard for the firm to offer that for startups). Would love to hear if other companies have their attorney attend. If so, is it helpful?
Execrate and excrete are not homophones. But yes, that is a good Wikipedia article.
Sorry, no, I meant that the compiler for language X is written in C.

Some languages have generated another language as the intermediate; RatFor to Fortran http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfor and C++ to C for the first generation of C++ are the two I remember.

In my experience, this is a horrible thing to do because it is extremely difficult to find and fix the root cause for errors that turn up when compiling the intermediate language (e.g. Fortran or C).
Often high priced unlocked phones are sold when there is a new flagship high end phone. This is uncommon in the states because of subsidized pricing and contractual lock-in, but if you buy an unlocked nexus one and go contract free you can sell your phone in a year to get the new unlocked nexus two.
Not sure 'Hemingway hacks' is really a great model to follow given that they include 'shooting yourself in the face. with a shotgun'.
750 Words
There were a number of people at the time who thought Red Octane were out of their fucking minds because of Konami's patents. What's worse than having to pay damages after the fact is the risk of an injunction at the moment after you've gone to manufacturing but before you can sell-through at retail.
It's not going to happen in 2010, but open source will eventually become a big player on the desktop/laptop/corneal implant/whatever people are using as their primary computer by then.

Why?

-Computing is stagnating so open source has an easier time keeping up with proprietary software than it used to. Gone are the days when your 18 month old 486 was hopelessly obsolete, or when there was a greatly enhanced version of (whatever) every year. Even Apple didn't exactly stun us with its latest OS upgrade.

-Computers are becoming cheaper so the price of the OS is becoming a larger fraction of the cost. The Windows 95 license on the first computer I bought for myself was a small fraction of the $2100 price tag. It's not as small of a fraction of the price of a $500 lower-middle end computer in 2010, especially when the middle class that can afford to waste $20-50, or whatever the Windows Tax is these days, is shrinking.

But - that doesn't necessarily mean LINUX on the whatevertop. Android or something that we haven't heard of yet may end up ovetaking it.

Anyway, Linux is pretty much ready. If somebody with some money and clout gets behind it, it'll become big. Who can say when/if that will happen?
BTW I don't know why you are being downvoted, since I fully agree with you.

Maybe just because my comment was off topic.

I was pretty sure that the site was yours (the OP), so I thought I'd give you some feedback. Good luck.
I agree with Alex here, but the reality is that companies LOVE heroes. I see it happen over, and over again (and usually with the same people). The manager asks the hero how long something will take, he underestimates the task, failing to account for testing, other inevitable issues, other priorites, etc. Manager loves the answer.

There will be inevitable issues, and things come up in limited testing, but the hero will work stupid hours on little sleep producing crap quality, just to get SOMETHING going, even though it's a strict subset of what was promised. Since SOMETHING is going, and the hero casually notes that it took them heroic effort... he gets a "spot award" or some other trinket.

Manager got the answer they wanted, the customer got SOMETHING, and the hero got his trinket. Everyone wins.

And it will cause headaches and issues untold for many months down the road.

Meanwhile, the non-hero estimates conservatively, management hates the answer, the customer gets a well (or at least less fragile) something later and hates that, and our non-hero gets the stink-eye.

A manager told me long ago that customers don't want it right; the want it broken and quickly. That way they have something to bitch about. From a producer's standpoint, they can then bring out the hero to fix what should never have made it out to begin with, sometimes charge for it, and look like they're "responsive". And the customer can feel all smug that they made the vendor/producer do their little dance.
PHP appeals to the people that don't really understand programming, so I doubt making the language better in a programming-language-designer way is going to convert users. The next language that's as popular as PHP will be "easier" in some way that's appealing to average users.

Perl was there first; you could "require 'cgi-lib.pl'" and start writing a web application.

Then PHP made that even easier, by making HTML pages valid programs. (You could add code "later"; your scripts didn't have to live in cgi-bin isolated from plain HTML files.)

The average users jumped ship from Perl to PHP pretty quickly, despite Perl having more features, more modules, a better runtime, etc. They wanted to know as little about programming as possible, and PHP got them there. Inexperienced programmers want to micro-optimize for things like deployment or runtime speed, and PHP gives them that.

The next Popular Language will make one of those things even easier.

(Ruby on Rails almost did this, but it went overboard with the advanced programming language concepts, and is now a small niche again. It alienated the experienced programmers, who went with Merb, and the inexperienced programmers, who couldn't wrap their head around concepts like exceptions and just stuck with PHP, which lets you ignore errors if you prefix the line with an @ sign.)

Anyway, what I'm getting at is, "just leave the PHP users alone". Those that want something better will find it. Those that don't, won't.
Thanks for pointing this out. I recall reading Rand's work years ago and thinking there appeared to be some element of "cosmic justice" leaking into her allegedly rational world. Perhaps the name Comet eludes directly to this, as it certain fits into Rand's heavy-handed and often clumsy way of story-telling.
I chuckled at the subtle unspoken complaint about the required semicolons.
My experience is that Heroes are problems because they're a) bottlenecks b) single points of failure. Using them as a crutch exacerbates both problems. However, having the most productive person on the team do as much as they can do is an easy trap to fall into. When one person is working on a totally different level from everyone else, it's probably in their interest to leave and find a different group that they're more peer-ish with. However, Heroes tend to become Heroes by being the self-sacrificing type, so they're not as likely to do so.

This also reminds me of Comparative Advantage[1] from basic economic theory. If you have to people X and Y and two tasks A and B, and X is better than Y and both A and B, should X do A and B for himself? Turns out no. X should only do the task they're more better at, and trade Y for the other; more gets produced, and there's a ratio of exchange such that X and Y both end up with more A and B than they would have otherwise (see [1] for rigorous definitions and simple maths). It's the same situation, you should be taking work away from the Hero so they can focus on what they're awesome at, rather than giving them more work.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
If you're thinking of getting this phone, it's brilliant. Granted I'm biased since I already purchased one, but I don't think you'll be disappointed. Best android phone on the market right now (possibly best phone overall).
It's easier to compile to a (restricted subset of) C and let other compilers worry about code generation than to try to do the whole stack yourself. C, in particular, works passably as a "portable assembler". If you already compile to bytecode, for example, you could include the VM as a library and transliterate the bytecode to C.
Indeed -- that's where Perl still fits into my day-to-day toolbox. It's exactly in those 5-50-liners with a little logic that I want a language with an overabundance of syntactic shortcuts. Shell is the exact opposite of that.
> It makes the claim implicitly that catastrophes only happen to people that deserve them

Ah, no. It is a novel. You seem to be confusing fiction with fact.
Its quite possible a kid leaving college not only fails at the startup, but fails at networking and building contacts, and also fails at learning anything at all.
One thing that struck me as weird was-- after the spiel about the site being private (between 'you and you'), it asks you to sign in via facebook.
A rough assessment - needs some more thought:

Exactly. This advice might apply more to a creative process, where original thought counts above all else. I imagine being truly creative is an exhausting activity, knowing several professional artists (oil paint). You're basically holding a large set of options simultaneously in your head and try to make unique connections between them. The value is not in how many iterations of connections you go through, but coming up with something unique at all.

Development strikes me more similar to solving cross-word puzzles, or playing mine-sweeper, where activity is more guided, focused along a smaller set of options, with lots of trial and error in the process: it's sort of "focused play"/ experimentation. Here it seems more valuable IMHO to keep on going once you're in the flow. You're not looking for that one special connection, that will make your day, but are solving many little problems that aggregate over time.

I could imagine science-based development work to be creatively exhausting as well, where you're trying to prove some theorem etc. Hemingway's advice might apply itself nicely in this case.

I'd like to see more blog posts on how to solve different types of problems. E.g. I know that walking away from a hard problem after you're exhausted works out well (the subconscious keeps on working on it), or as Hemingway proposes, walking away right before you become exhausted.

My two cents.
How to get the spark back (from an electronic musician)
Presumably just for the authentication aspect, but it'd be good if they clarified.
Methinks that point is far more debatable than you are making it out to be...
By the way, I went and read the George Bray review that you posted. It seemed a little odd. For one thing, Bray places great emphasis on a first-law-of-thermodynamics argument which as far as I can tell is just a big red herring. (Obviously nobody is questioning the first law of thermodynamics; equally obviously, thermodynamics doesn't ipso facto explain obesity; so what's the point? It's not clear.)

So I dug around a bit and found Taubes' rebuttal, which strikes me as more or less devastating:

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/wp-content/uploads/2008/0...
Microsoft does basically all the same things but doesn't provide me with any upside like Google & Apple. The Xbox/Zune are locked down walled gardens like the iPhone. Microsoft has had a history with DRM-ed audio files just like Apple. Windows is commercial software with an EULA/TOS attached to it just like OSX. If Bing gets a subpoena for user information they'll comply because it's the law. Personally I don't feel like Google, Apple or Microsoft have ever invaded my privacy. So yeah, all things being equal of course I'm going with the company that does provide me a better product/service.
This article was inspired by a heated discussion on irc.freenode.net #startups about whether not supporting IE and even Firefox is a viable strategy for an early-stage startup.

Here's how I see it: your software doesn't "not support IE". Your software "doesn't support IE today". You have the rest of your life to rectify this if it matters to you.

Other things may, for the moment, be higher on the priority list. That is OK. For example, if your are getting 10 visits a day, and your software does not support any printer but the default one, a non-trivial percentage of your ten visitors a day will be much happier with you if you fix that. However, for the moment, you'll have better business results if you work on your SEO to get to 100 visits a day, and tell anyone who complains that you're sorry and that a fix is in the pipeline.

My software really didn't support any printer but the default one, for about two months in summer of 2006. I am probably the only person alive who remembers this, because customers have more important things to do with their lives than remember and remark upon software that didn't meet their needs.

My friends who strongly advise against launching "half-functional" software like this say "But but but you'll poison your brand image with everybody who gets bitten by it!" First, if you actually manage to establish a brand image to poison you're far ahead of the game. Second, it isn't "half-functional", it is "fully functional for the set of functionality implemented right now". The people who just print to their default printer don't perceive it as damaged. Similarly, IE support should almost certainly be on your roadmap, but if it doesn't work today that doesn't mean your Firefox users will curse your name.
More parallels of today's USA to 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged